Setting Spiritual Goals: 2013

Today, as the rest of the world plans to lose 10/20/30 pounds in 2013 and exercise more and eat better, let us think about our spiritual goals for 2013.

Some prompts to get you thinking about your spiritual goals for the coming year:


--It's Dec. 31, 2013, and you look back over the past year. What aspect of your spiritual life has brought you the most joy?  What practice has helped you feel closer to God?

--What new spiritual activities do you hope to try during 2013?

--What spiritual activities do you miss? Choose one that you miss the most or one that's easiest for you to do in your current life. How could you do this activity quarterly during 2013?

--It's Dec. 31, 2018. What's your biggest spiritual development since 2012? What's your biggest surprise?

--What small steps can you take that will shift your trajectory towards the life that God wants you to have?

--What are habits that you need to work on changing so that you're not undercutting your efforts?

The Feast Day of the Holy Family

Today is the Feast Day of the Holy Family.  A year ago, I created a photo essay with this post.

Here are some highlights from that post:

"It's interesting to take up this feast day after all these days where we've celebrated Mary, and her decision to be the Mother of Jesus.  It's a great counterpoint to remember that fathers have a role in the family too."

Here is a prayer I wrote for this day and posted last year:


Parent God, you know the many ways our families can fail us. Please remind us of the perfection in family that we are called to model. Please give us the strength and fortitude to create the family dynamics you would have us enjoy. Please give us the courage to minister to those who have not had good family experiences. And most of us, please give us the comfort of knowing that the restoration of creation is underway, with families that will be whole, not fractured, when all our members will be accounted for, when no one will go missing.

The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents

I first wrote this post last year.  A more reflective piece should be appearing soon at the Living Lutheran site, if it hasn't already posted.

In the meantime, here's last year's post:

Today we remember the slaughter of all the male children under the age of two in Bethlehem in the days after the birth of Jesus. Why were they killed? Because of Herod's feelings of inadequacy, because of his fear. Today we might say, "What an idiot that Herod was!" And yet, if you look around, you'll see that we haven't really grown that much as a people.


We are still likely to respond to our feelings of inadequacy with lethal force. Instead of saying, "How interesting," we say, "How stupid!" And then we go to great lengths to prove that we're right, and whatever is making us feel inadequate is wrong.

So often, in my adult life, I feel like I will never escape middle school. I remember middle school as a particular kind of hell, where the boundaries were always fluid. Kids who were acceptable one day were pariahs the next. Middle school bodies are always changing, and middle school children are under assault from their own hormones, from the changing expectations of adults, from their bodies that take up space differently each day, from an increased school work load, from the crisis that comes out of nowhere to undo all the hard work done.

Adult life can sometimes feel the same way. We fight to achieve equilibrium, only to find it all undone. Most of us don't have the power that Herod does, so our fight against powerlessness doesn't end in corpses. But it often results in a world of outcasts and lone victors.

Of course, the paragraphs above are not meant to downplay the physical deaths that can happen when the powerful lash out against the powerless. We live in a world where dictators can efficiently kill their country's population by the thousands or greater. There's never a good reason for genocide. Yet the twentieth century will be remembered for all the genocides that took place, the ones we knew about and the slaughters that we likely didn't.

On this day, we also remember the flight into Egypt, the Holy Family turned into refugees. We remember the Holy Family fleeing in Terror, with only the clothes on their backs. Today is a good day to pray for victims of terror everywhere, the ones that get away, the ones that are slaughtered.

Here's a prayer for the day, from Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime: "We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you , in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

The Feast Day of St. John

Today, we celebrate the life of the only one of the original 12 disciples die of natural causes in old age. Tradition tells us that John was first a disciple of John the Baptist, and then a disciple of Christ, the one who came to be known as the beloved disciple, the one tasked with looking after Mary, the mother of Jesus.


There is much debate over how much of the Bible was actually written by this disciple. If we had lived 80 years ago, we'd have firmly believed that the disciple wrote the Gospel of John, the letters of John, and the book of Revelation. Twentieth century scholars came to dispute this belief, and if you do scholarly comparison, you would have to conclude that the same author could not have written all of those books.

Regardless, most of us remember St. John as the disciple who spent a long life writing and preaching. He's the patron saint of authors, theologians, publishers, and editors. He's also the patron saint of painters.

Today, as many of us may be facing a bit of depression or cabin fever, perhaps we can celebrate the feast of St. John with a creative act. Write a poem about what it means to be the beloved disciple. Write a letter to your descendents to tell them what your faith has meant to you. Paint a picture--even if you can't do realistic art, you could have fun with colors as you depict the joy that Jesus brings to you.

Here's a prayer for the day, from Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime: "Shed upon your Church, O Lord, the brightness of your light, that we, being illumined by the teaching of your apostle and evangelist John, may walk in the light of your truth, that at length we may attain to the fullness of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, December 30, 2012:


First Reading: 1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26

Psalm: Psalm 148

Second Reading: Colossians 3:12-17

Gospel: Luke 2:41-52

How quickly the children grow up! Could this Jesus in Sunday's Gospel really be the same baby we just saw in the manger? Can this boy be the same Jesus we'll be meeting soon? We spend so little time with Jesus as a young boy that it's strange to get these glimpses.

Those of you who live around teenagers will probably find the Jesus in Sunday's Gospel familiar. He's so self-absorbed. He doesn't worry about his parents' feelings and anxieties. And yet, he's mostly obedient, mostly a good kid.

We think of Jesus as a special case. We tend to focus on his divine aspects and overlook the human ones. Yet any child arrives with his or her own agenda. In the end, most children are a bit of a mystery. We wonder where they get that quirky sense of humor, or those interests that are so unlike any others in the family. If we're honest, most of us have moments, maybe quite a lot of them, where we wish those children would just conform, just be the little people we wish they would be.

The relationship that Mary and Joseph had with Jesus was no different. We might protest, "But Mary and Joseph knew that he was special!" Every parent feels exactly the same way: this child is born for greatness. Yet in how many ways our children will break our hearts.

And it often starts with education. Notice that Jesus has ditched his parents to stay behind with teachers and scholars. He has his own business, and Mary has her wishes, and they will likely clash. Read Mark's Gospel (go ahead, it's short, it won't take you long), and you'll get a different view of Mary and her view of the mission of Jesus; she's not always happy, and in several places indicates that Jesus is embarrassing the family.

But in the end, this week's Gospel is also a story of nurture. God comes to be with us in human form, and not just grown-up, self-sufficient form. God becomes the most vulnerable of creatures, a baby, and thus becomes, the second-most vulnerable, a teenager. Those of you who struggle with a teenager may not find comfort from the Good Friday outcome of this story. But maybe you can find comfort from the fact that even Jesus could be a pain-inducing teenager.

And we all can find comfort from this chapter in the Christmas story. Hear the Good News again. God comes to be with us, in all of our brokenness. God loves us in spite of, because of our brokenness. God lives with and mingles in our human messiness. We might even say that God glories in our messiness, that out of our messiness salvation comes.

The Baby in the Manger: A Photo Essay

Finally, Christmas dawns, and we can complete our Nativity scenes!

Mary's Sonogram

This time of year often takes me back to the days of my sister's sonogram.  Not the routine holiday memory, I know.

I didn't actually see the sonogram in December of 2005, but we were in the area, and the whole family went out to dinner on the night that she had it.  I think the grandparents were allowed to be in the room during the sonogram too, if they promised to keep the gender a secret.

We travelled to the dinner after the sonogram with my parents.  It was just a few days before Christmas, so we had the Advent narrative ringing in our heads:  the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, her response.  I remember my father saying, "What if sonograms had been invented then?  What if Mary could have had a sonogram to see Jesus before he was born?"

That idea haunted my head for weeks, and I began to fashion it into a poem.  I worried that it might seem irreverent, disrespectful of both Mary and all parents.  But I think that some of the best poems feel dangerous in that way.

On Christmas Eve, my thoughts often return to Mary, that soon-to-be mother, and all parents.  My thoughts return to the wonder of life and how amazing it is that any newborns survive--we start out so fragile and tiny.

Here's my poem, appearing here for the first time:


Mary’s Sonogram


All children appear otherworldly in the womb,
a strange weather system come to disrupt
the world as we have known
it, to rain blessings on unsuspecting souls.

On a sonogram, all children resemble angelic messengers.
They appear in ghostly
shades of green and gray and black.
Complete with fingers and a cosmic
heartbeat, this great mystery, birthed
in passion, sweat and tears,
a bath of body fluids,
and nine months later, a baby
squeezes from the womb, blinking,
staggering us all with wonder.