ANCIENT DISCIPLINES IN A NEW AGE

Ihave no memory of life without God and I believe this is because of my mother’s singing. I remember – and it must be one of my earliest memories – being rocked in her arms as she sang. My mother has a beautiful voice and she loves to sing. The “Old Rugged Cross” and “In the Garden” were two of her favourites. I think I’ve known their words and melodies, and about the God who inspired them, my entire life thanks to her singing.

I remembered this when I read Don E. Saliers’ essay “Singing Our Lives.” He writes, “Where people sing of God, an embodied theology – a way of living and thinking about life in relationship to God – is formed and expressed. Through this practice music lends its power to all the other practices that shape and express who we are.”

Embodying theology, deepening practice

It was out of a desire to explore and deepen the practices that shape and express who I am as a believer in Christ that I came across Saliers’ essay. I encountered it in a seminary course when my professor delivered a lecture drawing on the book Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (see sidebar on page 35).

All of this captured my imagination and made me hunger for more. “Life is sacred. Life is a gift from God,” said Dr. Wendy Porter. “All aspects of our day-to-day living belong to our practices of faith.”

Practices are simply a way of applying our faith to our living. But this particular book “spawned practically an entire discipline in itself of people – pastoral theologians, academics – who are contributing to this discussion of practices of faith,” according to Porter.

I was intrigued. I’ve long recognized that faith is about more than simply a set of ideas or doctrines to which we give intellectual assent, that it must also shape how we live. But as a person who likes rules and boundaries – because they help make life simple and clear – I’ve sometimes wondered if the way I live my faith, which seems to lack such rules with its emphasis on the grace of God, is “Christian enough.” Was I missing something?

So I bought the book and began reading and meditating on the 12 specific historic Christian practices it highlights. “What does it mean to me, right here, right now, to deepen my practice in this area?” became the question that occupied my thoughts day after day, week after week.

The answers changed my practices and changed me.

Welcoming strangers

One of my first areas of challenge came in the practice of hospitality. I learned, for example, through reading the chapter by Ana Maria Pineda that Christian hospitality focuses on welcoming the stranger. I’ve not been good at that and haven’t tried to be any better.

I am an introvert. Strangers make me shy. It’s hard for me to reach out to people I don’t know. I have neighbours I’ve lived beside for years with whom I regularly exchange pleasantries, even small gifts at Christmas, and to whom I’ve sent the occasional meal when I learned they were struggling. But we’ve never visited in each other’s homes. I’ve defaulted to what’s easy and comfortable, and been content with allowing things to remain as they are.

“Just as the human need for hospitality is a constant, so it seems is the human fear of the stranger,” writes Pineda. But “In the traditions shaped by the Bible, offering hospitality is a moral imperative.”

As I thought about hospitality, and about what it means to welcome strangers, it occurred to me that I am surrounded by strangers as I ride the train and subway three days each week during my 90-minute commute into Toronto. In my desire to productively use that time, I’d been cocooning – earbuds in as I listened to podcasts, or head down looking at my phone as I scrolled through headlines, articles or Scripture.

“Could hospitality be as much a matter of welcoming strangers into my heart as into my home?” I wondered. Could I start to be more welcoming and cultivate a willingness to share my time by simply keeping my head up, with eyes and ears open during those commutes?

I decided to try, leaving my phone tucked out of sight. Almost immediately I had a series of brief and seemingly inconsequential encounters with people unknown to me. There was the sniffling, middle-aged woman on the train who clearly needed a tissue, so I offered one; the young man struggling with a suitcase and several bags at the bottom of the subway stairs who obviously needed a helping hand; and the woman who slipped and tumbled at the bottom of a staircase on the way into the subway station. When I helped her up, she brushed herself off, embarrassed. She assured me she was fine, but thanked me for checking.

It’s likely in the grand scheme of things none of these encounters will really count for much, but I’m certain none would have happened at all had my eyes and ears been closed to the strangers around me. Emerging from the confines of a cocoon, I’ve learned, takes effort and time, and for me a little bit of courage.

Practising this is strengthening my stranger-welcoming wings, making it all a little easier. As I write this I’m looking forward to having a young man come to our home for dinner. We’ve met only once, and briefly, but he told me he was new to this country and I sensed he was missing the feeling of home. I’m welcoming him into mine.

Speaking of home

Just reading the words “Household Economics,” another chapter title in Practicing Our Faith, conjured up memories of my Grade 7/8 home economics teacher Miss Precious. (Yes, that was really her name.) With her beehive hairdo, pince-nez glasses and stern face, she was unforgettable.

I was one of her favourites. I knew how to cook simple things and sew, and by my parents’ strong example and good teaching I had already absorbed a lesson or two about managing limited resources.

I confess I felt just the teensiest bit smug thinking about this topic. This is one area of Christian practice in which the lessons of my lifetime have come a little easier.

But the household that writer Sharon Daloz Parks writes about is much bigger than just what goes on within the four walls of someone’s

Practising this is strengthening my stranger-welcoming wings, making it all a little easier.

private abode. She does begin there, noting that “Our households are anchoring places where, over time, we craft the practices by which we prosper or fail to prosper.”

She doesn’t end there. Rather Parks points out that every one of us is a member of a “planetary commons.” In other words we all share a communal household – planet Earth – and also have a duty to manage the resources of this much, much larger household to the benefit and well-being of all its inhabitants.

The next step

Suddenly I realized I had no reason to feel self-satisfied. I’ve been to the developing world. I’ve travelled its deeply rutted roads and seen its hungry children. I’ve visited its hospitals and schools, and wrestled with the inequities between the lives of people there and our living standards here.

I’ve learned about injustice because I’ve seen it firsthand. I know it exists, and I know that unless I’m actively taking even small steps in my life to counteract it, then I am by default contributing to it.

If my personal household is flourishing, but our planetary household is not, I still have work to do.

At the outset of my experiment, I had a conversation with the editor of Practicing Our Faith Dorothy C. Bass in which she encouraged me. “I find it very helpful to get people to think about where they are already practising,” she said. “Every Christian is probably already doing these practices in one way or another. It just might be a little bit. It might be pathetic.”

That word pathetic resonated and reassured me. In the process of practising – no matter how poorly – I learned there is value simply in being hyperaware, thinking deliberately and daily about how I practise my faith.

So it went with each of the practices. I would read, and think, and pray and practise. And while all of my practising never made perfect, it did bring about change. My faith practices are deepening in ways that feel significant to me.

When I arrived at the end of my practising project, it seemed ironically appropriate that I would conclude my musings on 12 – out of possibly hundreds or even thousands – of Christian practices by reflecting on the importance of singing my faith. Truth be told, I’ve inherited more of my father’s gift of “making a joyful noise unto the Lord,” than my mother’s ear, pitch and tone, but it was in my mother’s singing of her faith that the seeds of my relationship with God were planted. So when my own three children came along, I sang to each of them, often from our church’s hymnbook, to expose them to a broader range of the music of our faith than my limited repertoire would allow.

And recently, when our church was seeking to dispose of the old hymnbooks that had for decades graced our pews and guided our congregation’s worship, I asked for three. Because, God willing, someday I will pass them on to my children, and they will practise too. /FT