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October 2, 2009 02:15:07
Posted By Pastor Ron Klok
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This summer I made an eight day silent, directed retreat. As a pastor I find I need to do this at least once a year. People wonder, what do you do for eight days? The answer is lots.
My rythym looked like this: wake up; take a leisurely shower; make my morning prayers (I used Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours, and would simply shape my short morning prayer around whatever words or phrases affected me); have breakfast; meet with my Spiritual Director (Directors help you pay attention and notice how God is present to you and guiding you during the retreat. Directors ask questions like, what's happening? What have your prayers been like? How might you need to prayer?); after direction I would spend some time in more focused prayer addressing some of the things raised during my direction, often writing my prayers in a journal; before lunch I would also do a bit of reading in the area of prayer and spirituality, but not too much; then I would have a bit of lunch; in the afternoon I went out for a long walk (2-3 hrs) through the river valley/Whitemud Creek ravine; shower on my return; read a part of the gospel of Mark; spent time in prayer; rested; had supper; in the evening I would again spend some time in more focused prayer/reflection and then end the evening with a prayer of examen, which is a review of the day. Before falling asleep I treated myself to one of John Updike's short stories.
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October 2, 2009 02:04:44
Posted By Pastor Ron Klok
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Many people share with me the details of nighttime dreams. But unfortunately, far too many of them dismiss the dreams as inconsequential. Dreams provide important information for us and often times send us messages we need to hear and pay attention to. Recently, I made an eight day silent retreat. On the first night God gave me a dream that set the agenda for the entire eight days. When people share their dreams with me, I ask them to give the dream a title (what was the dream about in other words?). I ask them about the basic emotion of the dream, was it frightening, comforting, challenging? I ask them what the particulars might represent or symbolize. Like we see time and again in the Bible, I believe that God uses dreams to communicate to us important information about ourselves, our life and our faith. Dreams are as much a part of our reality as anything else, and we do well to pay attention.
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September 9, 2009 02:30:03
Posted By Pastor Ron Klok
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I read history because history is who we are. I read literature because literature is who we are, too. Here are some thoughts on what I read this summer.
The Good Steward: The Earnest C. Manning Story, Brian Brennan.
For every year of the twenty five or so years that Earnest Manning served as the premier of Alberta, he would preach every Sunday evening on his radio program, Back To The Bible. The Good Steward is a delightful and enchanting read that takes you back to a time when religion was politics and politics was religion.
Brennan take us back to some very interesting moments in Alberta history: a preaching premier; the birth of ATB Financial out of the depression era “funny money” experiments; the beginning of Alberta’s relationship with American big-oil money (both Manning and John Howard Pew of Sun oil, the original investors, were devout Christians); and the story of Alberta’s rise out of poverty. What impressed me most about Manning is that he was no push over; he stood his ground, believed in what he was doing and did what he believed in. He served the province well.
Champlain’s Dream, David Hackett Fischer.
Fischer, an American professor of history in Massachusetts, has written a book that every Anglophone and Francophone Canadian ought to read. The story itself is nothing short of an absolutely engaging epic adventure, rising out of the post-Reformation European Wars of Religion to the birth and success of New France in the mid 1600s.
What was striking to me about the story is just how many set-backs Champlain must fight through in order to see his dream come true. It’s unbelievable. There are numerous political set-backs in France, there are merchant rivalries, matters of personal health, weather on the sea and weather in the new world, there is treason, challenging relations with the Natives, relations with his family, financial hurdles (one after another), wars and the threat of war, the loss of New France to the English, religious competition between Protestant and Catholic and Catholic and Catholic.
Champlain proved to be a larger than life leader, and in fact wrote an Essay On Leadership in 1632, an essay that includes such topics as morality and self-discipline ways of working with others, prudence and prevoyance, courage and resolve, humanity, honesty and humility.
Deeply disturbed by his own experience as a soldier in the Wars Of Religion in Europe, and gravely upset by his witness of how the Spaniards treated the natives in the South, Champlain set out to create a New France of tolerance, acceptance and harmony between people of diverse backgrounds---English and French, Protestant and Catholic, native and European. We tend to think that multi-culturalism is a new thing in Canada; its not. It is as old as New France itself. We need to be reminded of Champlain’s dream today.
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September 9, 2009 02:30:03
Posted By Pastor Ron Klok
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Updike’s writing in these stories is astounding: delicate, nuanced, evocative, full of truth and grace.
I’ll tell you about one story, The Walk With Elizanne. It’s a story about a man who meets a female classmate, now a woman in her late 60s, at a 50-year highschool reunion party. She thanks him for giving her her first kiss, after he walked her home, way back when they were teens. For the life of him the man can’t quite remember that walk and that kiss, but now, in his early seventies, he wants to. Laying in bed after the evening at the reunion he tries to put the pieces together in his memory, but can’t. It’s a story, of course, about mortality, a man, who tries with all his mental might to recall and pull back into his dying body the vitality that is leaving him. Updike, the brilliant writer he is, doesn’t explain what is going on; he just tells the story.
Oh, there is a surprise ending that I won’t tell you about.
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