Basic Spiritual Disciplines?

Recently we had a sermon in church about your work ethic. That didn't mean your work ethic at work. It meant your work ethic in the church. Whether you contribute time and effort to the work of the church. Whether you work at being an asset rather than a liability. Using your gifts for the good of the congregation. You express your Christianity by doing all that stuff.

Fine.

But then we hit a snag. Basic spiritual disciplines for the individual member were described as: attending worship weekly, Bible study daily, and tithing the full 10% of your income.

After the service I asked the pastor, "Where is prayer in that?" I know that he personally believes in prayer, but while he agreed that prayer is important, he didn't try to explain why he hadn't included it in his list of basic spiritual disciplines. Maybe the congregation has given him reason to think they don't care about it. I don't know.

Let me put it this way. I have begun to reread The God We Never Knew by Marcus Borg, and so far he has written about two basic ways we can look at God. Either God is a King (remote male authority figure who dominates us so that we have to obey) or God is a Spirit (right-here compassionate figure who desires to have a loving relationship with each of us). Borg and I both prefer the idea of God as Spirit, remembering of course that there is no actual word or concept that can begin to describe God with any accuracy.

Borg concludes one chapter with this summary: God is real, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with God as we see God in Jesus, and this relationship can and will change your life. (This is page 51 in my copy.)

What I get out of it is this. The first statement is right on. The relationship is with God as shown by Jesus; it is not a relationship with Jesus himself. And I can testify about how it changes lives. So can many others.

How do we get this relationship? Again, here is Borg: "Prayer is attending to our relationship with God." (This is page 123.)

There are many types of prayer, and many books about prayer, enough to fill a library. In all of them we can open to a relationship with God. But nothing does it like contemplative or silent prayer. Centering prayer. Prayer of examen. Lectio divina done in combination with centering prayer. That last one is also an in-depth way to do some Bible study as well. Those are the applications of contemplative prayer that I am familiar with. I'm sure there are many others as well.

Worship, tithing, and Bible study are all good. I either do them now or have done them in the past. When I get my new life straightened out I may be doing all of them at once. Who knows? But they don't provide what prayer provides. The way to establish and nurture an intimate relationship with God is prayer. And to me anyway, that is the essential thing. There is no life worth living without such a relationship.

And so we need to pray.

That's all there is to it.