Some rituals are spiritual. Some are silly. Some are inherited, and some are self-made.
Casper ter Kuile, author of The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices, walks us through how we create all sorts of meaningful, grounding rituals.
One of my rituals is writing a newsletter. I always try to make my “minister’s corner” both spiritual and practical, nourishing and challenging. It is the same way I rotate my sermon topics from prophetic to pastoral to practical and back. Working with a congregation that doesn’t use the lectionary (a three-year cycle of readings that lets you read the whole bible every three years) is challenging. I am afraid I’ll cherry-pick scripture.
Practical question number one: Do you have a favorite or least favorite passage of scripture that you’d like to hear from this pulpit? Let me know. Sometimes the more challenging ones (like women should be quiet in church) make the best sermons.
Second practical question: It is time for me to get calling on the disaffected among us. Those who either disappeared during Covid or just disappeared. Will you please let me know someone(s) you are missing? That would help me enormously.
Ritual concluded. But that doesn’t mean we can’t pay attention to rituals in our regular life.
As I said in my sermon on prayer, Pádraig Ó Tuama is a brilliant scholar on prayer. He helped invent land acknowledgements which are a marvelous form of prayer. Instead of writing that awful post card, “Having great time, wish I was here,” we say: we are here, now, here, now.
One of you said, last month, that I neglected to mention the best prayer of all, the Serenity Prayer. He is right. How could I not mention it in a sermon on prayer? Especially since there is a book about it by Reinhold Niebuhr’s daughter, Elizabeth Sifton. In it she demonstrates how it was written in response to the rise of Hitler. Ah. The book is called The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War and is a long, fruitful and exciting read. Here is the original Serenity Prayer in its entirety:
“God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make things right
If I surrender to His Will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever and ever in the next.
Amen.”
Ó Tuama also says we need prayer and reflection in the places “where God has disappeared but longing still has things to say.”
Kind of beautiful, right?
See you soon.
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Thank you Donna for your thoughts that are helpful& in tune with my findings. I will be away from Gvill till August & so will see you then. Blessed Be, Nurallah
Hi Donna, It would be a miracle if we could get back Doug Whalen and David Thaler. They “dropped out” on the onset of Covid and Bromleigh’s arrival never grabbed them. They are our best boyfriends, We have been in business with them uyingand fixing up houses. They love Vince and Andy. They are good friends with Larry, Sandy, Lisa and Steve. Doug brought his team in to paint the high reached areas in Seminar B. Dar loves Doug too. David is our dentist. ❤️🙏
A whole book on the serenity Prayer will probably belie what I was taught, which is that it was written in 1st person plural – hold the community responsible for the welfare of all of the persons in the community. Niebuhr, as I understand it, wrote this book when he was already in Nazi captivity… not sure about that. So, this is about holding self and others accountable for actions taken and actions deferred, as well as learning to understand we cannot control each other – only ourselves..