For Meditation: In Every Tentation

From my morning reading, The Sermons of John Donne:

"In every tentation, and every tribulation, there is a a Catechisme, and Instruction; nay, there is a Canticle, a love-song, an Epithalamion, a mariage song of God, to our souls, wrapped up, if wee would open it, and read it, and learn that new tune, that musique of God."

Donne, Sermon Preached at Lincoln's Inn (58).

Commentary: With Christ in God by Shirley C. Hughson, OHC

For more than a decade, my spiritual life has been nurtured through association with several of our Episcopal religious orders.  I am a priest associate of the All Saints Sisters and of the Community of Saint Mary, and I have visited both communities regularly to share in the daily prayers, to make retreats, and to receive spiritual guidance.  These are not easy times for Anglican religious orders, and both communities live, in some ways, amid the signs of former grandeur, while also holding fast to our faithful God and pushing on in the simpler vocations He has given them today.   They operate fewer schools, hospitals and mission houses, but remain devoted to enriching the Church’s life through unceasing praise of God and sharing what they have learned about following Christ.

The Community of Saint Mary is blessed with an extensive library, a relic of the days when dozens of women were trained in the novitiate at a time.  On my last visit, after speaking with the mother superior about some spiritual challenges I was facing, she asked me if I had read any Father Hughson.  I had not, something she insisted must be remedied.  I departed with a copy of With Christ in God (among several other treasures from the shelves), and now can understand just why she was so enthusiastic. 

Commentary: Beloved Dust by Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel (2014)

A friend of mine, a lifelong Episcopalian, told me the other day that he’s never really understood what evangelicals are going on about when they talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus.  I muttered something to him about emotional and intellectual approaches to faith, but we both knew that was skirting the issue.  Having finished Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel’s Beloved Dust this week, I think I’ll just send him a copy and let the evangelicals explain it all in their own words—beautifully, simply and compellingly.

Goggin and Strobel are certainly from the evangelical mainstream.  Goggin is a pastor at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, probably America’s healthiest and influential megachurch, and Warren himself writes a ringing endorsement of a foreword.  Strobel teaches spiritual theology at Biola College in Los Angeles, one of evangelicalism’s strongest colleges.  They speak openly about the spiritual challenges they have experienced within the evangelical mainstream: duty-focused legalism, secret hypocrisy and shallow and trite devotionalism (not that evangelicals have any monopoly on these things).