Embodied Spirituality

The church is empty except for me, and it isn't really empty at all.

It's early in the morning, and the only light comes from a single candle and the gray wash of dawn through a stained-glass window I can't quite make out yet... just shapes, blues and reds waiting for the sun to give them back their color. I've lit the incense. I watch it catch, watch the first curl of smoke lift off the incense and hang in the cold air like it's deciding whether to stay. Then it rises. It always rises.

I kneel because my body needs to say something my mind hasn't found words for yet.

This is not a metaphor I reach for on Sundays to make a sermon land. This is Thursday. This is every day I can manage it. This is how I have learned, slowly and imperfectly, to notice God. Not in the dramatic and the sudden, but in the old, worn grooves that Christians have been walking for two thousand years.

I am a pastor. I am also, on my knees at 6:40 a.m. with smoke in my eyes. Just a man trying to pay attention to the inner working of the Spirit who shows up in embodied practices.

What the Smoke Knows

There is a reason the Psalmist prayed, "Let my prayer be set before you like incense." He didn't ask for his prayer to be understood like incense, or felt like incense. He asked for it to rise like incense.

Visibly, physically, out of his control the moment it left him.

That's the thing about smoke: you can't aim it. You light it and let it go, and it finds its own way toward the ceiling, toward the light, toward whatever is beyond the light.

I've come to believe the Spirit meets me less often in the striving and more often in the surrendering. The incense doesn't work harder to rise. It simply obeys what it is. Some mornings that's the whole sermon I preach to myself before I've said a word to anyone else: stop striving, start rising.

The Rhythm That Holds Me

I confess: I did not always trust rhythm... There was a season, early in ministry, when I suspected liturgy of being a costume... words other people had already prayed, worn smooth by centuries of other mouths, standing in for something I should be generating fresh myself. I wanted spontaneity to prove sincerity.

What I've learned since is nearly the opposite. On the days my heart is dry (and pastors have more of those days than we're comfortable admitting) it is precisely the fixed prayer, the appointed psalm, the same Kyrie Eleison I said yesterday and will say tomorrow, that carries me when I have nothing to carry myself with. The rhythm doesn't ask me to feel something before I begin. It only asks me to show up, the way the tide doesn't need the shore's permission to come in. I have prayed words I didn't mean yet and found, somewhere in the second or third repetition, that I meant them after all.

The Spirit was already present in the sentence; I just had to catch up to it.

This is what the daily office gives me that improvisation never could: a structure sturdy enough to hold my grief, my numbness, my joy, my distraction (all of it!) without requiring any of them to be resolved first.

Stone, Light, and the Ache of Beauty

I have stood in cathedrals that made me feel physically small in the most healing way I know. There is a kind of beauty: vaulted ceilings, light falling through glass that took a craftsman's whole life, silence held inside stone walls thick enough to outlast empires... that does something to me a well-argued point never has. It doesn't persuade me God is real. It reminds me. There's a difference.

C.S. Lewis wrote about longing for a country we've never visited, a beauty that always seems to be coming from somewhere just past the horizon. That's what vast architecture does to me. It's not that the building contains the transcendent, but it gestures, the way a cupped hand gestures at the ocean it can't hold. Standing beneath a soaring ceiling, I feel the ache of worldliness in the oldest sense... not the sinful kind, but the sense of being a small creature inside something enormous and good, built by people who believed their labor toward beauty was itself a form of worship. I think it was.

Borrowed Voices, Ancient Fire

And then there are the saints. Not stained-glass figures to me, but companions. I read Ignatius of Loyola not for historical interest but because he has already walked the terrain I'm walking, already learned to discern consolation from desolation, and he left a trail. I read Teresa of Avila's descriptions of the soul as a castle with many rooms and feel, still, like she is describing my own interior with more precision than I could manage myself. I read John of the Cross on the dark night and stop pretending my own dry seasons are failures of faith; he tells me they might be the very place God is doing the deepest work, precisely where I can feel God least.

These voices don't replace Scripture. They apprentice me to it. When I read them, I am reminded that I am not the first person to kneel in the dark and ask whether anyone is listening, and I will not be the last. The Spirit has been teaching the church to pray for a very long time, and I would be a fool to insist on learning everything from scratch.

Rising Still

Back in the church, the sun has found the window now. The blues and reds have come alive on the floor. The incense has burned down to almost nothing, just a thread of smoke still finding its way up.

I don't always feel God in these moments. Feeling was never the point. What I've found, instead, is presence; a steady, ancient, communal way of turning my attention toward the God who has always been nearer than my noticing. The rhythm holds me when my heart won't. The beauty reminds me when my mind forgets. The saints walk beside me when I feel most alone.

The smoke still rises.

So, somehow, do I.