Are you a doomscroller? It refers to that addictive continuum of social media and online news, which hooks you in with clickbait to read of the horrors that have happened, are happening, and might happen.
Somewhere in our mental storehouse there’s a place for "hopescrolling," and I've been wondering if that might revive the practice of memorizing Scripture, "Your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path."
Here's a good starting verse. I've changed the pronoun to make it a first person plural personal prayer:
"May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace as we trust in him, so that we may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." (Romans 15:13)
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Lord God, whose power is the power of love in pursuit of justice, we pray for our broken world.
Forgive us when we close our ears and eyes to the relentless deluge of heart-breaking news and endless analysis, of facts and figures, of graphic images of human suffering and human cruelty.
Give us inner strength to overcome compassion fatigue, so that we never stop caring; renew in us the power of conscience to recognise and to name injustice and cruelty; give us words to pray, and words to say that make for peace and reconciliation, in a world divided into enemies and allies and everyone claiming they are right and everyone else is wrong.
God of Love, Mercy and Justice, we follow the crucified and risen Jesus, the one called the Prince of Peace. Help us today to kneel at the cross and look again at the cost of forgiveness and the price of reconciliation; then help us to stand at the empty tomb and hear the words of life, “He is not here – he is risen!”
So may we in our daily lives be peacemakers, bridge-builders, life-givers, couriers and carriers of the love of God, light shining in the shadows of fear and sadness, ambassadors of Christ whose message is spoken in acts of grace and words of healing and forgiveness.
God of grace, use us, each one of us, in your ministry of compassion for the broken; equip us, each one of us, with the gift of a forgiving spirit and a passion for reconciliation.
Strengthen us, each one of us, to speak the truth in love, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you, our God
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, throughout all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:20-21
Each one of us is a work in progress, and it is God who is at work. In ways we can never fully understand, we are being transformed by the inner working of God in our mind and hearts, and in our inward and outward lives. That’s also true of each Christian community – in even the smallest faithful and faith-filled church, God can do immeasurably more than our boldest prayers! Remember God is able, and God is at work, within us and amongst us, in ways we don’t always perceive.
The Works
Do not be afraid, little flock,
for it is God’s good pleasure
to give you the entire realm.
—Luke 12.32
We ask for favors,
for this little victory, that little narrow escape,
and so often that’s not what we receive—
because God gives us something else,
something greater: the whole thing,
the entire realm of God’s grace.
We get this huge glorious planet,
the crashing seas and the rumbling mountains,
we get frogs and koalas and puffins,
and moon and stars and a sun that never forsakes us.
God gives us gravity that holds us, and color,
and food, and wind, and rivers.
We get the whole human family,
all our beauty and strangeness and woundedness,
our music and dancing and wild inventions.
We’re given forgiveness and belonging and hope,
a world mostly unrecognized where we are loved
and blessed and made whole, however broken we are.
We receive grace, hidden in every thing,
whether pleasant or painful.
We get God’s steady presence, closer than our own nerves,
breathing with us, hurting with us, rising with us.
It is God’s joy to give us the whole works.
Even in trying times, it’s OK. Do not be afraid.
We’ve been given more than we need.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
I heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto Me and rest;
Lay down, O weary one, lay down your head upon my breast.”
I came to Jesus as I was, weary, worn, and sad;
I found in Him a resting place, and He has made me glad.
In the past five years which began with the Covid pandemic, the world has become less safe, and it seems humanity has become less humane. There’s a world-weariness of soul and a heaviness of heart. Christians have always turned at such times to Jesus for assurance, strength, and resilience. In the noise of social media and 24/7 news, we turn to the risen Lord and hear again the invitation, “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Jesus is not offering an escape from the reality of a broken world – but a place to refresh, renew, and go again.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
It’s not overwhelming joy or unrestrained happiness
Awhile ago, there was this poem "Relief" on the Writers Almanac. It made me stop and consider how truly underappreciated the sense of relief can be. The finishing up of a big project, a hard conversation had, the lost pet returning home, the lump that is nothing serious, getting the house cleaned, coming out ahead in our fiscal year at church. It's not overwhelming joy, or unrestrained happiness; it's somehow bigger and yet softer, all at the same time. Something that makes you appreciate more the wonderfulness of our ordinary lives.
Relief
We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth—
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.
Kay Ryan
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Jesus said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and the greatest commandment.”
Matthew 22:37
Sometimes we ask a question because we genuinely want to know; other times a question can be a mental swerve, a way of avoiding the truth that stands in our way. This was Jesus’ reply to a trick question about which is the greatest commandment. Jesus’ answer was like a well-timed rugby tackle, leaving no room for maneuver. The first priority of the heart, the magnetic North of the soul, the first focus of the mind, is to love God with all that we are. To love God completely, and serve God first and foremost, is to give God first claim on our worship and obedience.
Jesus said: “And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Matthew 22:39
Second only to our love and obedience to God, is our love and service to our neighbor. The parable of the Good Samaritan is all the argument a Christian should ever need to be alert, responsive and compassionate to those we meet on the way who could do with our help. But if we need even more convincing, then Jesus’ astonishing self-revelation in the need of our neighbor is likewise like a well-timed tackle that isn’t fooled by the swerve: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matt.25:40)
Jesus said: “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Matthew 22:40
God demands no more than is contained in these two commandments. But the unpacking of them in lives of loving obedience to God and compassionate service to others is the work of a lifetime. “He has shown you, every one of you, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah distilled into that one verse all the commands of the Law and the Prophets for holiness and justice. Jesus concentrated all that teaching down into matters of the heart devoted in love to God, the soul centered in worship, the mind focused on obedience, and the neighbor loved and safe in our presence.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Stranger
Wanting to vindicate himself,
he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
—Luke 10.29
God is universally kind,
even, Jesus says, to the ungrateful and the wicked.
God asks us to love our neighbors.
Wanting to protect ourselves, we ask:
Who are our neighbors?
Meaning, of course: Who aren’t?
In Jesus’ parable the neighbor is the stranger, the outsider.
The Hebrew Bible says in one verse to love your neighbor—
and 36 times—36 times— it says to love the stranger.
Because you yourselves are strangers, not insiders.
Don’t look for “something to love” in one who is different.
Love them.
Love is not latching on to what we have in common,
or making us alike in some way,
but honoring one who is different.
Allowing them to stay different.
Honoring their being, not their condition.
Seeing God’s image in one who is unlike you.
Because they are God’s,
who is infinite,
and whose image in us is therefore of infinite variety,
and who loves us
who are so different from God,
who is “one of us,”
and also not.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation__________________
At every Eucharist we memorialize the gift that Jesus made of his death. The Eucharist is a far-reaching mystery with multiple depths and levels of meaning. We don’t ever fully grasp it. But we’re in good company: When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper the apostles also didn’t really understand what he was doing, as is witnessed by Peter’s protests when Jesus tries to wash their feet. Peter’s protests show clearly that he did not comprehend what Jesus meant in this Eucharistic gesture. And so, Jesus’ words to Peter and the apostles are “Later, you will understand.”
When I had my first communion, I had a childlike understanding of communion and the Table. Numerous degrees and theologies many years later, I know now that what I understood about the Eucharist as a child was correct; but I also know that years of receiving Christ’s real presence and Christ’s sacrifice for us has taught me that we find ourselves immersed in an ineffable mystery. Let’s come to the Table this Sunday, seeking to understand more fully the fullness of this gift of Jesus.
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation
Prayer is a place
“I go there all the time,” one woman said recently in a conversation about prayer. She went on to speak of prayer as an interior space she entered easily and often—a ready refuge from the rushing world. She had things to say about talking with God, but what struck me was how, for her, prayer was more to be entered into than undertaken. Once you’re there, you’re there: what you do may vary: you can sit and listen. You can begin or continue a conversation. You dwell in or linger over or review the day or recite words that heal or remind. You can cherish those you’re given to love. You can bring in your anxieties and lay them down. You can practice the presence of God.
You can go there in the very midst of things, standing, as Yeats put it, “on the pavement grey,” when suddenly, waiting for a traffic light to let you walk, a door of awareness opens and for a moment you realize God is with you, and has been, “bidden or unbidden.” And you know yourself to be surrounded by grace like ambient light. The suddenness of such prayer moments, and the startling way it is sometimes possible to drop into a place of prayer, makes it seem almost effortless.
Yet it is also true that prayer is a spiritual practice, a discipline, a way of life to be learned and deepened, and even a kind of skill. Though I am convinced that even the most rudimentary prayers are heard, I am also grateful for what can be learned from the ancient prayers of the Psalmist and the beautiful legacy of written prayers in liturgies and in The Book of Common Prayer and in the poetry of prayerful people whose words give structure and shape to that inner space where I go to meet God. The learning happens as life presents particular challenges that drive me back to the place of prayer with new concerns or confusions or needs. There, each time, I may learn something about being comforted, waiting for clarity to emerge from the dissipating fog of confusion, receiving guidance, or sometimes practicing the patience of unknowing. Sometimes I take a book with me. Often, though, the learning is simply about letting go—not controlling or managing or imposing expectations, waiting and watching and witnessing.
That kind of patience is hard these days when the news is full of urgencies: bombs are dropped and children die while news anchors parse opinions. Other children, closer to home, navigate complicated schedules and electronic distractions that seem to threaten the sanctity of those quiet spaces they will need in days to come. The world is “too much with us,” but requires whatever attention we can afford to give it—our time, our money, our imaginations, our skills, our presence. Into all those circumstances—into clinics and schoolrooms and hospital wards and homeless shelters and board meetings and committees—we carry with us–within us–a place where a small flame burns and a fountain flows and divine companionship is at hand. On days when all we are able to do is pause at the threshold and look into that place, even that glimpse may leave us reassured that at some level, against all apparent odds, “all manner of thing shall be well.”
Marilyn McEntyre
Grace and peace,
Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation