Reclaiming sacred spaces

Where did those sacred spaces?

As a child I remember complaining to my mum or dad that I was bored and had nothing to do, as if to think they would drop everything and create an exciting activity or take us somewhere to do something.. I reflect back and I remember days when the whole family was at home, they were called Saturdays, sacred days of rest. Dad would be outside pottering in the shed or around the garden, mum would be pottering around the house maybe doing the laundry or preparing food in the kitchen and my brother and sister and I would get on each others nerves. I know for me I would wind up my brother and sister for nothing more but entertainment. It’s amazing how impatient I used to be with boredom. Now in my adult years I long to reclaim those sacred Saturdays, those carefree days of rest I had little to no appreciation for as a child.

So what happened? Where did all those Saturdays go? When was the point in my life when I auctioned off my sacred spaces and replaced them with busyness, with always doing something? What could have possessed me to do such a thing? Even as I write now I find I am struggling to find a space where I am not interrupted.

I wonder, as we develop into young adults and our vision grows to take on the world, whether we even stop to consider the sacrifices we might make in order to peruse the various things that capture our hearts and minds. All I can do is speak from my own experience and admit that my passion for the mission of Jesus is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it is a motivating factor for my call to ministry and a curse because I constantly find myself in places where my time is consumed with all the things I’m passionate about. I had sacrifices my spaces.

One of the primary causes for my loss of space in my life was my inability to associate myself with the word ‘no’. Not only did I allow myself to feel the guilt trip of even wanting to say no to someone else, I couldn’t even say no to myself.

By my second year at college I was on so many committees and had aligned myself with so many causes on top of being a full time student, part time student minister and a part time Kmart worker while balancing a relationship with my fiancée in another state, I had pretty much lost myself. It was our second year of formation for ministry and a local minister was invited to present to the class. He said these wise words which I’ll never forget, ‘Never should on yourself and never should on anyone else.’ That wise old minister was Mark Bulter. He was talking to us about self care and giving permission for us to release ourselves from those things that clog up the spaces in our lives.

From that time on I began to gauge each movement or ministry I was giving myself too by asking myself whether it was life giving or not. If something was life giving for me I would give myself to it knowing that in turn it was giving to me. However when things began to suck the life out of me I knew it was time to revisit the ‘should’ theory and let go of that which was not life giving for the sake of my own being. At the recent Magarey lectures there was a particular comment that came from both presenters that has stayed with me. It was more of a ‘heads up’ comment for me than anything, ‘be aware of the self that I inflict upon others’. If I am not caring for myself who am I then inflicting upon those I am called into pastoral ministry with? Whenever I ‘should’ something upon myself I also ‘should’ upon others

Space to be

The evangelist who wrote the Gospel we call Matthew records a couple of exciting events in chapter 14. Slotted in there between the feeding of 5000 and walking on water is a couple of verses that if we are not careful can so easily look past. Jesus sends his disciples away in a boat and works at getting rid of the crowd so he can have the space to himself that he originally intended to have. A solitary space for prayer and reflection. I remember reflecting on this passage with the elders of the church recently, and expressing to them my longing for the spaces and the desire to send the crowds away just for a moment to create that space I need to have. It was a stark reminder of the fact that old habits die hard and it is a real discipline to claim the spaces to be.

When I was 20 years old, right at that time in my life when I was ready to launch and take on the world; in my pursuit for wanting to really ‘do’ something with my life I signed up for this new program being piloted by OMB called the Discipleship Development Program. There was part of me that was looking for meaning in what I was to do with my life and part of me just searching for me.

As I participated in the program, myself with 6 others my age journeyed with different leaders and ministers through a year of formation and preparation. Towards the official end of the program we ended up in the strange land we knew very little about called Vanuatu. Even though I spent 9 weeks immersed in the culture I don’t think I really appreciated what this experience was doing for the formation of my being until I went back as a leader of the DDP in my final year at college.

While the language of Bislema wasn’t too difficult to pick up there was another foreign language that took me a while to understand. It was a language that was very attractive to me and I began to learn how to speak it, but because it was so foreign to my context of living I struggle everyday to relearn it. It was the language of ‘being’. There is a saying in Vanuatu. When someone passes you by and the ask you how you are or what you are up to today a common response is, ‘stap nomo’. The literal translation of this attractive Bislema saying is, ‘I’m just stopping, or being today and nothing else.’

We tend to need to qualify our existence with responses that indicate how busy we are in our culture today. We define ourselves as human ‘doings’ rather than human ‘beings’ as if there is shame in not being busy with something. Sometimes we elaborate or make something up just to sound impressive, particularly when it comes to sharing stories about our ministry (one colleague confessed this to me the other day). Why have we sub-consciously deemed it socially inappropriate to stand in conversation with a group of other ministers and respond to the question, ‘what have you been doing with your church?’ with, ‘we’re being with God’. There is no shame embodying all aspects of the nature of Jesus in ministry, including those of self care as shown in Matthew 14 where Jesus took time to be with by himself and spend time with God.

While in Vanuatu the most prominent passage of scripture I began to dwell with and continue to do so is from Psalm 46. As Eugene Peterson translates it, “Be still, step out of the traffic and know that I am God.” This have become a crucial passage of scripture for me to dwell on as a reality check. More and more as I am getting to know my new congregation I hear the groans of busy people not being able to find the time to tune into God, or any space of being for that matter. I met with a couple over coffee the other day and one of them began lamenting the fact that they have no space in their life at all for anything other than work. As I found myself offering counsel on how to create those spaces I realized I could not unless I too had created those spaces in my own life journey so that I had spaces of re-creation not only to speak into the lives of others but to speak into my own life.

Re-creating spaces

At the age of 19 I engaged a spiritual director for the first time. I wasn’t really too sure why I was seeing a spiritual director except for the fact that I was going through a tough time, searching for meaning and vocational direction and it was recommended to me. It took me a little while to warm to the idea of meeting regularly with a spiritual director but once it was established there was no way I would be without it. Spiritual direction helped me discern my call for ministry and as a consequence relocating my life to the CCTC campus for 4 years. It didn’t take me long to secure spiritual direction for my formation journey through college and my continual formation as a minister out of college. It is a discipline that is not only helpful for listening to that voice within, that voice of vocation, that suppressed voice not often heard yet is screaming out for you to listen to the life your inner self wants to live but is not living; it is also a discipline in helping me identify the spaces I need for the re-creation of my soul.

Once I had built a relationship with my last spiritual director we began to learn together what the appropriate trigger questions were to ask me to discover whether I was giving way to my re-creating spaces or not. For some reason these are the spaces we relinquish far too often for ‘more important things’, yet are the spaces we need the most for our being. Ever session I would have with my spiritual director would begin with these questions which once unpacked would burrow down deep into my being where my soul was encountering God all over again, being refreshed, renewed, recreated. This begs me to ask the question, ‘why would I compromise those re-creating spaces for anything?’

Together we discovered there were at least three questions that needed to be asked; ‘Have you spent time staring into your fish tank?’, ‘Have to spent time sitting on your surfboard?’, ‘Have you spent time in the garden?’ We discovered the three spaces where my soul encounters and re-creates with God. As you may be able to discover from the questions, the three solitary spaces I enjoy the most and have the ability to create on a regular basis are my hobby in keeping fish in aquariums (it’s serious but relaxing business), surfing, and gardening. If I hadn’t made time for any of these spaces in the time between spiritual direction questions then there was something wrong with my being and believe me I knew it, the self within me would groan in agony that it hadn’t being cared for. So my spiritual director and I would spend time discovering and exploring the blocks that are preventing my soul from re-creating and making my spirit groan. In the times of spiritual groaning I remember naming some disturbing images that described how that which was within me was feeling and while helpful the reality was not good.

Why am I like this? Why do I allow my spirit to be caged and suppressed? Ministry isn’t supposed to be like this! So I made more of an effort to create the spaces I needed and met with my spiritual director more regularly for a time until we had worked through the groaning of my spirit so that it was celebrating life again.

A final thought

A book that I read in college and am reading again now is called ‘Let your life speak – listening for the voice of vocation’ by Parker J. Palmer. It is easily in my top 5 books of all time because it has helped me so much with listening to the voice within. Parker reflects on a poem in the opening pages saying that it helps open his eyes the fact that, “the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me.”[1] That is a sad reality that Palmer goes on to explore is such helpful ways. I particularly find it sad that too many of us are not living the lives we are called to live both in our ministry vocation and life in general. We find ourselves living in ways we never set out to live, in ways purely to please the expectations of others and not true to the call God has placed on our hearts.

Palmer, who has journeyed through the valley of doubt and depression, writes, “self-care is never a selfish act – it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others.” [2] It’s after re-reading of a pearl of wisdom such as this that I say to myself, ‘if I don’t look after the greatest gift I have to offer I have nothing to offer anyone at all.’ More importantly I would have nothing to offer my beautiful wife who in many ways is the person I am most accountable to for my own self care and waits so patiently at times as well as supporting me to put in place the disciplines that help me become the best of that which I am called to be – Mark.

Those sacred spaces we reminisce about once having and dream of one day having again don’t have to be figments of imaginations. In fact we have a responsibility to our selves and duty of care to others in our life to reclaim those spaces with no apologies so that we can continue to re-create and renew that which is within us and be the people God has called us to be.

Shalom
Mark Riessen

Published by Churches of Christ ministry work group for 'Shaping for Ministry'

[1] ‘Let Your life Speak’, Parker J. Palmer, Jossey-Bass 2000, p2
[2] ‘Let Your life Speak’, Parker J. Palmer, Jossey-Bass 2000, p30