dennis martin papp

Stop to Contemplate • Give Me Clarity

In his book, Ruthless Trust, Brennan Manning speaks of a man named John Kavanaugh who sought clarity about what to do with his life.

As part of his search, he volunteered to work for three months at "The House of the Dying" in Calcutta, India, a place founded by Mother Teresa. The very first morning he was there, Kavanaugh met Mother Teresa. She asked him, “What can I do for you?” He paused to think and then asked that she pray for him. “What do you want me to pray for?” she wondered. “Pray," he said, "that I have clarity.” Her abrupt response took him aback. “No," she told him, "I will not do that.” When he asked why not, she told him, “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.” When Mr. Kavanaugh observed that she seemed to have the kind of clarity he wanted, she laughed out loud and told him, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”

Weekend Reading: The Lost Art of Discipline

Originally Posted: Thursday, October 17, 2013

Church and Culture Blog by James Empory White

A recent business article caught my attention.  It was titled “The Lost Art of Discipline.”  In it, former tech executive Steve Tobak lamented the lack of discipline people have toward their work.  Few people today sacrifice what they have to in order to get a job done.

Tobak rightly notes that one of the problems is the explosion of distractions, the “archenemies of discipline.”  With CEO’s getting in online debates and ranking Senators playing iPhone games during committee hearings, it seems no one is immune.

“Even highly focused overachievers like me,” says Tobak, “sit down to work only to find that, a few tweets, texts, and emails later, half the day is gone and the work is a long way away from getting done.”

So forget our focus on drug addiction.  “Today, you can add texting, tweeting, posting, blogging, emailing, gaming, shopping, eating, and of course, porn, to that ever-growing list of addictive activities.  To make matters worse, it appears that the threshold for human susceptibility to these addictions is getting lower all the time.”

Tobak’s conclusion rings true:  “Discipline, will power, work ethic – call it what you want, it’s why we do what we have to do instead of what we want to do.”

This isn’t simply important for the workplace.

It’s the heart of spiritual life.

Historian Mark Noll has designated the founding of the Monastic Rule of St. Benedict (ca. 480-ca. 550) as one of the great “turning points” in Christian history.  Noll even goes so far as to say that the “rise of monasticism was, after Christ’s commission to his disciples, the most important – and in many ways the most beneficial – institutional event in the history of Christianity.”

Penned at the beginning of the sixth century, St. Benedict wished to write a “rule” that would help guide monks to holiness.  By “rule,” he intended a guide for optimal spiritual formation.  Thomas Moore writes that “Every thoughtful person, no matter what his or her lifestyle may be, has a rule;” meaning a pattern or model for living.

I need a rule.  Something that will take the scattered, frantic activities of my life and carve out space and time for God to dwell, the two of us to connect, and from that to have the deepest parts of who I am formed in Christ.

I need a rule that will reach into the numbing routines of my life, what the French often refer to as “metro, boulot, dodo” – “metro, work, sleep” – and create channels through which spiritual life can flow.

The key is discipline.

This is what a “rule” is – a collected, organized set of practices we determine to follow in order to tend to our spirits and shepherd our souls.  We need structure and discipline for our spiritual lives every bit as much as we do for every other area of life.

Whatever our “rule” may be, it can, and should, be natural to our personality and developed in light of our season of life – but it must be created.  If we know that we would be profoundly served by reading, praying, and spending time with a soul friend, then we must work toward establishing the patterns of life that allow it.

Easy?

Of course not.

The natural flow of my life is away from discipline. If disciplines come at all, I have found that they must be cultivated.

There are many protests to the demands of living under a rule, but when I think of the challenges of such a life, I am reminded of Evelyn Underhill’s quip that it is a peculiarity of the great spiritual personality that “he or she constantly does in the teeth of circumstances what other people say cannot be done.”

But the practices themselves are not the issue at hand.  The goal is to seek the face of God in such a way that Christ is formed in us.   By themselves the spiritual disciplines can do nothing, Richard Foster wisely reminds us, “they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”

But that is a very important place to come to.  Christ formed in us is what will allow us to bring Christ to the world.  So let’s not lose the art of discipline.  Otherwise we will have nothing to offer the world that it does not already have.

And it needs so much more than what it now has.

James Emery White

 

  

Sources

  

“The Lost Art of Discipline,” Steve Tobak, October 10, 2013, FOXBusiness, read online.

 

James Emery White, Serious Times (InterVarsity Press).

 

Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity.

 

Thomas Moore in The Rule of St. Benedict, Edited by Timothy Fry.

 

Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life.

 

Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline.

Fall Garden • Ruth Hayley Barton

Sunday | Worth Reading

Sundays I post clippings worth reading.
What I post is not my wholesale endorsement of an author or their perspective.
Sometimes I'll agree, but not always.
Too many people don't think, they just rearrange their prejudices.
I like to learn from a variety of sources, not just the ones that reinforce my thinking.

         • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •  

I was sent this reading last week. 

It was timely. 

My primary Sacred Pathway is naturalist
        (our current study on Sundays).

The naturalist connects with God in all seasons...
         in life and in death.

This is a great example of the naturalist pathway...

 

In fall
the garden is spent
having given its all.

Cucumber vines lie exhausted on the ground
Tomato plants list to one side
Cornstalks stand dignified and empty
Sunflower faces droop earthward,
shades of their former selves.

All that has not been claimed lies moldering in the dirt—

a bruised tomato, a forsaken pepper…

a misshapen pumpkin,  a trampled stalk of beans.

What came from the earth is returning
to the place from whence it came.

There is an intimacy here,

in the fall garden,

gazing at living things in their demise.

I want to avert my eyes, avoid this tender grief.
Is this life or is this death? I cannot tell.

Ah, but there is beauty here

amid all this death and dying.

To have given one’s self fully
at least once
that is the thing.

To have spent oneself in an explosion of color

to have offered one’s body for food,

one’s very soul for nourishment…

It is an unseemly generosity,
beauty of another kind.

In fall
the garden says, “This is my life, given for you.”
And we are fed.

Digital Detox Revisited

Weekend | Worth Reading

Let me (Dennis) set the stage before sharing this weekend's worthy read.

This week I was out of reach...really.

I went with Nate and friends to the island at the tip of Door County. As we trekked up the peninsula, my digital umbilical cord was slowly severed...

First no 3G, just Edge.

Then no Edge, just an O.

Then my phone became an overpriced paper-weight. No texts, no tweets, no instagram updates, no Facebook, no Fantasy teams...no calls from my wife, my work, my world.

Nothing.

I wished I had called Kim one more time.

I turned it off. 

The cord was completely cut.

Two days of no rings, pings or dings.

As I came back in this direction, I wanted to leave it off.

I knew I would hit a point where the texts would start pinging like a pinball machine (and they did). 

A couple completely cut-off days made this post by James Emery White all that much more meaningful to me.

______________________________

 

Always On, Never With  | James Emery White

Originally posted: Thursday, August 2, 2012

I recently tweeted an article from the Los Angeles Times about the number of “distracted walking” injuries quadrupling over the last seven years.

In case you aren’t aware, “distracted walking” refers to those landing in emergency rooms thanks to injuries incurred while “walking and texting, tweeting, playing video games, talking on the phone, or listening to music on headphones.”

This isn’t the only fallout from a culture that is “always on.”

For one thing, it’s made us impatient.

Do you remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds – yes, seconds! – for a computer to respond to a click on a website? Now, we aren’t willing to wait even 400 milliseconds.  According to Google engineers, that “barely perceptible delay” actually “causes people to search less.” In fact, 250 milliseconds slower or faster are what separate competing websites.

More significantly, it’s ending conversation. Not communication, mind you, but conversation.

 Which means the end of authentic community.

Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., has spent the last decade and a half studying how our “always on” lives have changed who we are.

Her conclusion?

“We are tempted to think that our little ‘sips’ of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation,” she writes. “But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places…But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation. Connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another.”

The end result?

Loneliness.

 As Stephen Marche writes, “We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.”

The solution begins, of course, in the home. The family is the foundational unit of community and relationship. It’s where conversation (and as a result, community) is both taught and nurtured. It’s where real, personal interaction should happen most frequently and most deeply.

As a pastor, I’ve long recommended a weekly “Family Day” or “Family Night” where the schedule is cleared for the family to be together. Such times will never just “happen.” They must be created.

Now I tend to be more specific.

When you sit down for that family meal, no texting. 

When you get in the van to drive somewhere for that family outing, no videos.

When you’re taking that walk together as a family in the park, no tweeting.

When you’re sitting next to them on the bench watching that soccer game, no checking e-mail.

When you are watching that football game as a family, no Facebook.

When you are doing anything together as a family, no iPods, iPads, or iPhones.

Why?

It’s simple.

If you’re always “on,” you can never be “with.”

James Emery White

 

Sources

“Number of 'distracted walking' injuries quadruple in 7 years,” Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2012. Read online.

“For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait,” Steve Lohr, The New York Times, February 29, 2012. Read online.

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

“The Flight from Conversation,” Sherry Turkle, The New York Times, Sunday, April 21, 2012. Read online.

“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Stephen Marche, The Atlantic, May 2012. Read online.

Weekend Read--Adultery by the Numbers

Weekend | Worth Reading

Sunday mornings I post a clipping I read that I found challenging, thought-provoking and potentially life-changing. It's worth reading. A post is not my wholesale endorsement of an author or their perspective. Sometimes I'll agree, but I like to learn from a variety of sources, not just the ones that reinforce my thinking.

______________________________

 

I found this infographic a while back and tucked it into Evernote.

It's a harsh splash of reality. Very sad.

Unfortunately, I've stood in front of couples on their wedding day listening to them lovingly swear their exclusivity to one another, only to later learn of one, the other, or both wandered away from their sacred vow.

Once you've read through this, would you double down on your promise to stay true to your spouse? Don't cheat! Don't do it to your spouse, his or her parents, your parents, your kids, your God, yourself or your reputation.