God Requires That We Not Stop Trying - Bayard Rustin

 

Reimagining Confession as Noticing - Winston Charles in Shalem

The contemplative tradition brings an alternative, transformative experience of confession; reimagining confession as an integral part of our journey into wholeness.

Confession has all too often been understood within a dynamic of payment due, penance to be done, and conditional forgiveness.

The contemplative tradition brings an alternative, transformative experience of confession; reimagining confession as an integral part of our journey into wholeness. Key to confession as part of the journey of spiritual transformation is noticing. 

Sometimes that happens by being hit over the head with a ton of bricks.

But more often, it happens by noticing in the stillness how once again we have acted out of those old inadequate behavioral patterns; ones that are more interested in feeding the little, needy ego than in re-forming the ego into a strong and healthy center, marked by compassion and courage, integral to the spiritual heart.

This concept of confession is not reserved solely for the confessional booth or Sunday’s general confession or any other specific time.  Rather, it is always present as we live through our days. With clear and courageous eyes, we notice how we fall short and where we are called to go—an ongoing examen that leads us forward.

The full article is available here

Teresa of Avila: A Mystic for Our Times - Mirabai Starr at Shalem Institute

What can Teresa of Avila offer us five hundred years after her death?

Teresa of Avila models the living balance between action and contemplation, serving others and developing an interior life, engaging in passionate human relationships and surrendering to the divine mystery. She was an ecstatic mystic and skillful administrator, a fool of God and an insightful psychotherapist, a penitent when she needed to be and an epicurean when she could be.

Teresa of Avila was fully, deeply, unapologetically herself. If she had written a letter to which her correspondent had not replied, she did not hesitate to write again, demanding, “Why haven’t you answered my letter? Don’t you love me? Do you have any idea of the pain your silence is causing me?”

Nor was she reluctant to talk back to God. In the midst of harrowing external trials, Teresa’s first response was to withdraw to a quiet place and go within. There, she would confront her Beloved: “What’s going on here, Lord?” One day, the divine voice answered, “This is how I treat my friends.” To which Teresa responded, “Well, then, no wonder you have so few!”

She was keenly discriminating about spiritual phenomena. When her nuns prayed so fervently they gave themselves nosebleeds, she would send them to bed with a sweet cup of tea and a soft blanket and forbid them from entering the chapel for a few days.

“God save us from sour-faced saints!” she would say about the self-important clerics who felt it was their job to uphold orthodoxy while never having held the Holy One in their arms and rocked him all through the night, as she regularly did.

The full article is available here