In 2025 Annual Meeting, Mary Lou Hatcher guided us in worship. This is part 2 out of 3 of her notes from her worship offering. You can find part 1 here.
So, we move into the second part of this reflection, the discipline of Spiritual Practices.
It takes wisdom to hold reality well, with great love. Spiritual practices guide us with this. Spiritual practices counter another cultural myth, the call to endless DOING.
Practices which I and others have found useful include:
- spoken and sung prayers
- meditation aided by our body (whether that is quiet sitting, slow walking, running, yoga, or intentional breathing)
- time spent with the arts – music, poetry, visual works
- dreamwork
In an often-quoted poem Emily Dickenson wrote:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”….. sometimes Spirit’s truth comes directly and rationally, but sometimes it seems to sneak in - as a dream, or a growing intuition. It comes in slant.
Spiritual practices can have a direct immediate benefit of calming our overwhelm. They can also come at us slant: not through our rational minds, but through other ways of knowing.
For a long while I practiced Centering Prayer. I started it to calm my overly anxious and fretful mind. The practice is to sit quietly, with the intention to continually return to “just sitting” as opposed to drifting off into some plan, thought or feeling. To assist the mind, one chooses a word and use it as an anchor. Folks often choose a spiritually grounding word or phrase such as “holding Light” or “Christ have mercy.” but mine was more simple – it was “here” – as in “my intention is simply to be here, and when my mind wanders I will return to being ‘here.’”
I found it helpful. Then one day, after some years of this, while sitting quietly, something seemed to rise from the center of my chest, and spill over or out, and it was expressed in my mind as “here, you can have it all.” So the word’s meaning had flipped, through no conscious pathway.
It was a new stance, a new posture. With the invitation to linger there and notice how that felt – this posture of release and giving.
We might also want to remember this partial section of a Wendel Berry poem, used for our Worship Sharing during Annual Meeting from his book of Sabbath Poems entitled “This Day:”
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.„„,As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
—Wendell Berry, This Day
So spiritual practices can offer “simply” a very concrete counterweight to the overwhelm, a way to engage calm, which is an easier place from which to think. It is hard to think well when one is frantic. And spiritual disciplines can function sometimes quite indirectly, or unconsciously, assisting us to courageously awake to a new way of being; one that operates from a stance of Willingness and Trust
This brings us to the third healing modality: commitment to move in the world with kindness.
Mary Lou Hatcher’s reflection will conclude on Friday.
