Journal prompts
The Borg article likely offers for some of us a challenge to our notions of “faith.”What do you make of this challenge? In what ways does his understanding of faith—which he argues is a more biblical understanding of the notion—make more sense of the Christian life and the Christian story?
Chittister suggests that part of our problem in contemporary culture may be that we’re more concerned with comfort than with depth.
The monastic vow of stability is intended to be a hedge against running away from one’s problems, but instead offering one a context to go deep to confront them. Chittister writes:
“It is easy to be even-tempered in private. It is easy to be virtuous alone. It is easy to be strong when untried. It is easy to win when there is nothing to endure. It is also easy to be superficial and self-centered and characterless.
It is also easy to run from what I may most need to confront in life if I am ever to be whole. Monastic stability is concerned more with depth than with comfort.”
Do Christians like us outside the monastery make any vows or commitments that are similar to the monastic vow of stability?
How do these commitments or promises function in ways that are similar? In short, how do these vows or promises help us nurture depth rather than merely comfort?
Read back over the long paragraph on p. 156 that begins with the sentence: “What enables a person to keep going back to the difficult parts of life is, inevitably, certitude in the faithfulness of God.” This paragraph suggests that what enables us to keep our promises and commitments is not our own strength, but our hope in “the gracious faithfulness of God.” How might such a view of promises and commitments change the way you think about making and keeping them?
Last Completed Projects
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