Spirituality meets pavement

Of all the spiritualities Rolheiser talks about, it is the spirituality of sexuality that has stuck with me most. Through it, I have seen how I can refocus my madness, my eros, into a life giving laser, by offering my relationship with my wife as a true sacrament. Through it I can truly embrace every one, by focusing all my sexual energy on her, I am in a real way focusing it on God. By becoming one with her, I am in a real way becoming one with the cosmos. Crazy stuff! I also like how when I’m not becoming one, when I am feeling acutely the isolation of sleeping alone, even when she’s beside me, I stand in solidarity with the poor and the lonely, the cast offs, and Jesus himself. Though not in the same chapter, Rolheiser talks about taking into oneself the tensions of mystery. I like that.

My spiritual rule would step up my discipline in the contemplative arena. Especially since its fall and I have given up mowing my labyrinth, I need now more than ever to engage in the contemplative. I have greatly enjoyed praying the hours. I need to discipline myself to get back into it. I have always like meditation and contemplation, it fits my personality, but I have been greatly challenged by action. Our forays into social justice have been exciting. I wrote a bit about my environmental goals for blog action day, and I am excited to see where the projects our ministerial have started in the school will go. I also would like to help out a the soup kitchen again regularly.

I always have had a dream of having a coffee-shop while being a spiritual director. I’m not sure God’s dreamt it the same way that I have, but it is interesting that in many ways I’m already doing it. The coffeehouse we’ve started with high school kids has given me many opportunities to interact with them about their spiritual formation. My great goal for taking my masters in Spiritual Formation and Leadership is to learn how to lead people from zero to mystic. What I have already learned is that there is indeed great hope to change people, the church, and the world, and that Hope resides in me as I change myself.