Wednesday, September 10, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Prayerfulness
We spent awhile talking together with several other spiritual directors yesterday afternoon. We shared our struggles and happiness from the last few weeks and talked through a book by Robert Wicks called Prayerfulness. Noticing that some scrupulous pray-ers lack human decency in many of their relationships, Wicks wondered why.
But he called us all out, including himself of course, for thinking we know more than we do about God and about prayer. “When we pass through the forests – the mystery of God – we are entering unfamiliar and often dark surroundings where only God can lead.” Just because we’re religious, we are not automatically “spiritually mindful.”
Knowing and confessing my own sin to God and others goes a long way toward making me spiritually mindful. As Brennan Manning says, “God has a single relentless stance toward us: he loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners.” I remember my high school girlfriend Nancy and create an acronym to remind me that God loves me, David the sinner.
N otice my sin
A cknowledge my sin
N ame my sin
C onfess my sin
Y es to God’s forgiveness
Blessed are you who are poor,
for the Kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
Jesus expects us to be hated, excluded and insulted when we preach this forgiveness. People can’t help but be self-righteous. “I’m better than you are,” the child sings and sings. And it’s not just children. We might not say it out loud, but judgment rings like a broken bell across the land. I don’t need no stinkin’ forgiveness. Jesus insists that we stop that foolishness and receive our blessing.
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!
Paul sounds as determined as Jesus to make us see ourselves as God sees us.
Now you must put them all away:
anger, fury, malice, slander,
and obscene language coming out of your mouths.
Stop lying to one another.
I yearn for a silent retreat somewhere, perhaps at a monastery nestled in the trees or deep in a valley, so that I can remember who I am, and who God is. Words go only so far. Time by myself, time spent in silence, prepares me again to be a child with Jesus. Robert Wicks reminds me that Jesus wants us to “become like little children.” That is to say, “First, there is a transparency and honesty that little children have that is not too common in most adults—even when it seems so. Secondly, there is a sensitivity to others that is touching and real.”
When I think of my own hard spiritual work and see others lagging behind, I am tempted to think highly of myself and less so of those others. The kind of child Jesus blesses and asks us to become does not do this comparing. We train our kids to give up this innocence very early in their lives, but we should not. Instead we need to learn from them. Be silent. Let my heart learn how to be a child again.
Anticipating Retreat
Take nothing to read,
No journal or pen,
Slow
D
O
W
N
To the point of no motion,
The absolute zero of the soul
Attentive
Patient
Prolonged
Listening
 And welcome whatever happens,
even if whatever feels like nothing.
 And forget what you thought
you knew – all of it.
 And welcome God,
as God wishes to be
with you. – Clarence Heller
 (Colossians 3, Psalm 145, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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