a faith i can live with {guest post Sarah Moon}

Whip-smart and passionate, Sarah is one of my favorite people on the interwebs. She has endured more pain than many people twice her age, and I admire the way she keeps wrestling, listening, and speaking up.

Content Note: brief mentions of a suicide attempt/suicidal thoughts

Last year I got sick of Christianity.

I got sick of Jesus and heaven and God and the Bible and the whole deal.

Last year I was sick, and that didn't matter to my Christianity, so I got sick of Christianity.

Two years ago, my depression reached a point where it was so severe that I attempted suicide, and I spent nearly all of my time last year (and most of my time this year) struggling to mentally recover from that. My faith almost didn't recover. In fact, in a way my faith didn't survive that suicide attempt and the long period of depression, fear, shame, and self-hatred that followed.

My faith didn't help me through that period. It wasn't there. It meant nothing.

I'm looking over a post I wrote last year in which I wrestled with these feelings about my faith:

When you start asking questions, they give you Faith to cling to. I never really knew what that Faith was faith of. Faith that something magical happened on the cross that we don’t understand, I guess... 

...If our salvation has nothing to do with this world and with these bodies, than why did God come to this world? Why did God become a body?

I couldn't take this kind of faith seriously. This faith that was all about living forever (which was a horrifying concept for me while I was struggling with suicidal thoughts—living forever sounded like torture at the time) somewhere up there, but that never intersected with my life down here.

I couldn't live with a faith where my sick body didn't matter. I didn't want a faith where my chemically imbalanced brain and my self-injury scars and my exhaustion and my body memories from PTSD didn't matter.

It frustrated me to hear people tell stories about Jesus physically healing people and casting out demons, only to end these stories with “Jesus can heal you today, too...by healing your SOUL!”

That's what it always seemed to come back to—this idea that once God cared about bodies but now God only cares about forgiving souls.

My faith was intangible, and it couldn't survive when depression killed off all of my hope. That was tough—losing my faith. But I think it was a good thing.

It's given me space to explore a theology that starts with my body and with my experiences.

I've been thinking lately about a wonderful piece Alan Hooker wrote, My Body is My Bible, in which he asserts that our bodies can be the “text[s] from which [we] pray.” We don't have to start with the Bible to understand God and ourselves. We can start with our bodies.

What theological insight can I gain from my body and from my bodily experiences?

In my depression, I can meet with the suffering God who weeps and mourns and will not be comforted.

In touching my own self-injury scars, I can touch Jesus' side. I can stop doubting and believe.

In my pain and anger at the injustice that's happened to me and others, I can wrestle with God and demand something better.

In surviving and healing and beating death, I can find solidarity with the risen Christ, the surviving God.

My body is not just extra baggage that I have to carry around until I get to go to heaven. My experiences are not just tests and trials that I have to overcome so that my soul can someday be free. My body and the things that happen in it lead me to God. They are important, essential theological texts, as Alan Hooker puts it.

This is a faith I can live with, because this is a faith where my life matters.

Sarah Moon recently graduated from Oakland University with a degree in Women's and Gender Studies. When she's not reading feminist theology, playing the Legend of Zelda, spending time with her husband and her cats, or trying to figure out how to be a responsible adult, she blogs on Patheos at Sarah Over the Moon.

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the resurrection of the body {guest post Christina Tremill}

Oh, friends, savor these words. They are a gift and Christina a poet. I'm so honored to host her wisdom here today. 

When I turn eighteen and become a woman, my father begins aging backwards, becoming a child again.

I have memorized words from SAT flashcards, gleaned them from thick novels. When I finish studying, I learn one I do not want to know: glioblastoma, a cancer of the brain.

My father is a strong man. He stands six feet, seven inches, weighs nearly three hundred pounds. He loads tubas and drums into band trailers.

He falls for the first time on September 11th, 2001, the same day the towers do. As the firefighters rush into the rubble, my father lies on the bathroom linoleum for three hours, unable to get up. Later, he watches coverage on CNN for hours. “Think of all those people dying just like that,” he shakes his head. “Just think of it.”

I see the towers collapse again and again. They were strong. They were not supposed to fall, but they did.

When I was young, I read sentimental books about girls with terminal illnesses. “The cheesy death books,” my friends called them. The girls had leukemia or waited for heart or lung or kidney transplants. I imagined them dying gracefully. I imagined them wearing white dresses at their funerals, dying young and beautiful, pale and thin.

Dying is not beautiful. My father is a man, and he becomes a child again. He first sips morphine, then gulps it, always wanting more. Each week is a milestone in reverse: His legs forget how to walk, his mind forgets to remember. One week before he dies, I feed him orange sherbet with a spoon. As it pools in his mouth, I realize he has forgotten how to swallow.

My father dies in a hospital bed in our living room just after Thanksgiving. Four weeks later, the Word becomes flesh, and I cry. I am eighteen, a woman but a girl still. I have never made love or grown a child inside my body. Don’t do it, I pray to Jesus. It’s not worth it, all of this.

--


At twenty-five, I begin seminary with the youngest seminarians in the country.

We are young, and because we are young, we are beautiful. Because we are young, most of us are strong. The bodies God gave us, lo, they are very good. We do not give it a second thought.

We are in our twenties. Most of us have not seen death. Our young bodies awkwardly make love. They give birth to babies, most without complication. We talk about the goodness of the body with lips that do not stutter. We dance at parties with legs that do not shake. We kneel in worship with knees that do not creak. We write about incarnation and resurrection and God’s good creation, and we do it with hands that do not ache.

In seminary, we sing the goodness of the body. We write about creation and incarnation and resurrection. Over beers at the pub, we talk about church people and how they are so escapist, always thinking about heaven, always singing I’ll fly away, oh glory, never looking at God’s good creation here.

---


Sometime during college, my brother sheds his faith like baby teeth. He is interested in religion: zen koans, Daoist philosophy, Jewish midrash. But not faith, as we knew as children.

One day, our conversation drifts to what I am studying in seminary. After a semester, we are nearly through the Apostles’ Creed. “The resurrection of the body,” I say.

His eyes narrow. “You don’t believe that people will have bodies in the afterlife,” he says. “That doesn’t even make sense. The definition of a body is that it is mortal, that it breaks down and dies.”

I try to clarify. “Well, not Jesus,” I say. “He was resurrected with a human body.”

My brother shakes his head with skepticism. “That can’t be right.”

He was sixteen when he saw my father die in a bed in our living room. He knows what bodies can do.

---


I once heard that Episcopalians make the sign of the cross at this moment in the Creed: “the resurrection of the body.” Creation, virgin birth, crucifixion--on the right day, we can believe if we say the lines fast enough. But the resurrection of the body needs something else, something to push us over the hill. So what the Episcopalians do is cross themselves. Head, heart, shoulder, shoulder. 

Don’t do it, I said once to Jesus. I wanted to save him from the body. Not just death, but a thousand little indignities. Desire, waxing and waning at the wrong times. A cold that begins in your head and travels down into your chest. Wet beds and wet dreams. And, yes, from blood--the blood flowing from a skinned knee and a cross.

Sometimes I still want to save him. Sometimes I want to save us all from bodies that betray us: bodies that guzzle alcohol without being satisfied, bodies that will not conceive babies, bodies whose cells go rogue until we lose our hair and poison ourselves with the cure. Bodies that are raped or violated, bodies that are kept from pulpits because of their breasts and curves, bodies that cannot see, cannot walk, cannot hear.

Sometimes, I am breathless at the goodness of it all. The impossibly long eyelashes of a five-year-old. The rush of pleasure as you make love. The vibration of vocal cords that bring forth music. The feel of warm sand, the taste of good pasta, the sound of a mandolin played well.

But sometimes, I would have us float, weightless, above the world. I say it anyway: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” God, in his mercy, will not let us give them up. I cannot imagine these resurrection bodies, human and yet immortal, broken made whole.

So I take my hand and make the sign of the cross over my broken, beautiful body--head, heart, shoulder, shoulder. I push myself over the hill.

Christina Tremill is a seminary graduate on her way to becoming an irreverent Reverend. She enjoys good coffee, good books, and a good theme party. She lives in San Diego with her husband Josh and their cat, Rascal, who more than lives up to her name. She tries to write beautiful and write brave at her blog, A Holy Fool.

walking the question

"I needed to put my faith in my hands." He had learned that certain mental and spiritual problems could not be resolved intellectually; they needed to be worked out physically, with one's own body. Manual labor was the ancient monastic cure for many a spiritual ailment. "I see work as very incarnational. Jesus became flesh, muscle, sinew. He put his body where the question was. And then he walked the question."

I asked Dismas what he meant by the question.

"Human sin. Broken relationships. Loneliness. Take the most agonizing question of your life--that's the question Jesus came into and walked." Which seemed a good way to think about what drove men like Dismas and Anthony-Maria to become monks. An agonizing question for which there were no immediate answers, a yearning without apparent remedy.

That is, until a way avails itself to the seeker...The monastery anchored your spiritual life through life in the body: getting up at 3 A.M., packing cottonseed hulls into columns, putting the faith in your hands.

You put your body where the question is, then you walk the question.

{Fred Bahnson,  Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith}

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with all his might {guest post Natalie Hart}

I got to room with Natalie at the Renew and Refine retreat for writers in May and was particularly charmed by her Young Adult reworking of the stories of David and Saul. (And her red hair.) I love the example she paints for us here in creating more inclusive and participatory worship for ministers of all ages and abilities.

I'm walking a fine line in this post on embodied faith. It's about something I'm doing, but it's not about me, about the power of dance but not about my dancing. It's about the power of movement to set us free – set us free from the idea that we communicate with God only with words and from preconceived notions about who can serve.

Which sounds way too lofty for the kind of dancing I'm going to describe. Once a month, we wave ribbons on sticks in nowhere near perfect unison to accompany congregational singing. Most of us are not who you'd think of as dancers. Some of us you’d never see at the front of church, if not for this group.

M is a woman in her 30s who got me thinking about forming this group. On Palm Sunday, when we gathered at the back of the sanctuary with our fronds in the air, her face was so alive with joy at this chance to wave bits of greenery. Later I sat near her when another member danced. We laughed and sighed at the same parts and I knew she got dance. M has Down syndrome.

R is a woman in her 50s who boogies down every chance she gets, from Zumba at the Y to local band shows. She’s got a love of movement, a zest for life, and a gift for encouragement.

J, H, and Little J are siblings, 10, 7, and 2. H is a boy who mostly loves to whip the ribbons around. His big sister, J, was so inspired by our first dance that she made her own at-home ribbons on sticks. (I suspect H and J do at home what I wouldn't let them do at church -- sword-fight with the sticks.) The moment Little J saw the ribbons at home he grabbed one, waved it in front of him, and said a word that his parents interpreted as "church." Little J has also Down syndrome. He waves his ribbons with great zeal into impressive tangles to the side of the rest of the dancers.

L is 13. She's had 9 years of ballet and has the beautiful light hands and arms of a real ballerina. We’re a whole lot less formal than any other dance she’s done, but I’m glad she’s adding her gracefulness into the mix.

H.A. is my 12-year-old daughter who (like her mother before her) dances in the basement and takes classes that involve flexibility and movement, but not for more than two years running. She's got a security and freedom in performance that I only developed in my 20s.

M is an adult male who always wears some kind of sports jersey to church. He comes to every church event and always has a request during open mic prayer times, even though, due to a developmental disability, it's a struggle to make himself understood.

And then there's me, a woman in her mid-40s with a reasonable amount of training, who dances with complete abandon and spiritual conviction no matter how simple or complex the movement may be. It’s as worshipful to me to stand in the congregation and do children's worship actions to a song as it is for me to dance a challenging piece at the front of church. I've danced before audiences of hundreds within church and without, choreographed powerful group and solo numbers, embodied others' choreography, and led dance at three churches. After seven years of pastoral encouragement, I finally got to the point where I would just get up and dance to any song I had a dance to if we sang it during praise and worship, whether I was in my uniform or not. And if it was a dance I’d done with the kids, I’d get them up and we’d dance while the congregation sang. I've even "flowed" with an African-American dance comrade, which means that I got up with no pre-choreographed moves and let the Spirit guide what I did. At times, I’ve danced my private prayers. I am convinced that dance plays a similar role to that of the Holy Spirit, praying for us with groans that cannot be expressed in words (Rom. 8:26).

All that is to say that I've got serious dance cred. Even so, this group might be the best thing I've done.

Before anyone is tempted to think how nice it is that I’ve got a ministry to people with disabilities or a ministry to children, let me be clear: this group is not my ministry. It is our ministry. The purpose of this group is not to give the participants an activity. It’s a joyful and fun group, but I’m serious about our role.

WE are ministering TO the congregation.

So often in our churches, children and people with developmental disabilities are seen as "those who are ministered to," and not as "those who can minister." Dance and movement can bypass our varying verbal abilities, literacy levels, and intellectual capacities, and give a wide variety of people a way to serve.

This is a big deal for the dancers. They are contributing to the life of the church, up there in front, for everyone to see. But it's also a huge benefit to the congregation. Not only is our joy infectious, but they also get a little lesson about who can serve: everyone.

Even those who don’t necessarily have rhythm. Even those who have a hard time making themselves understood with words. And the fact that it's done with broad smiles and is accompanied by the crackle of bright and sparkly ribbons flying through the air makes it all the better.

Natalie Hart is a freelance writer/editor, children's worship coordinator, liturgical dancer, and wife to a rock-and-roll musician. She's probably got too many irons in the writing fire -- picture books for older adopted kids, a YA novel series retelling the story of David and Saul (what a friend calls her "Hebrew Percy Jackson stories") -- but that's how it goes sometimes. She blogs at NatalieHart.com and One Faith Many Faces. Or find her at @NatalieAHart on Twitter.

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do not go gentle into that good night

We celebrated his birthday wrapped in blankets on the porch, our breath hot and cheeks cool in the night. I told him about the stillness of that first dark morning, when we marveled at his bright gaze and impossibly thick baby thighs.

Four years later, he still leans in close for comfort. His hair is damp from the coughing, and I realize helpless new mama feelings fade but don't extinguish. When nights are dark and breathing labored, they haunt me still.

I hold him tighter, my lips against his cheek. His breath slows, and I listen for the grace of quiet as cars pass and the wind rustles the corn.

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faith with scars {guest post Bethany Paget}

Both tender and fierce, Bethany is a woman with a story. She's been through hell and lived to love another day, and I'm honored she's sharing a part of of herself here. Find more of her writing at Truth Be Told.

It all changed so suddenly: one major medical test, a phone call, and a diagnosis that now shapes the rest of my life.

The last four months had been a nightmare. I came home from Africa the end of June to a forced
resignation from a job that had become my identity, constant sickness, and dramatic weight loss, which caused all sorts of accusations and whispers.

Yes, I was stressed. But something was not right with my body. I was dropping things, stumbling when I walked, and forgetting mid-sentence what I was talking about. The times I wasn’t able to identify common object were scary, but I had spent the better part of my life being told that things were “in my head,” so why should this have been any different?

Still, every time a test came back negative, it was a let down to hear "Everything looks good" when things were not good at all.

On October 1, 2012 I had the MRI. Then I put it aside and focused on my tasks at hand: moving, single parenting, attempting to home school, and waiting tables at night.

***

Waiting for my doctor to call was excruciating. I was pretty sure I was going to die and started planning my own funeral as I waited.

He diagnosed me with Chiari Malformation, meaning that my skull is too small, squishing my brain. Surgery is the only treatment, so four months later doctors opened the back of my head and removed a portion of my skull and the lining of my brain over the cerebellum, replacing it with the fascia from the muscle in my right thigh. The back of my C1 was shaved and several ligaments in my neck were removed.

It was brutal. It still is.

***

The ugly part of being sick was the band-aid type responses I received:

“God is going to do something BIG with this.”

“Just keep waiting, God will provide.”

My faith up to that point depended on what others said about God and living a good girl life. I thought God wanted me to have clean language and a toned down image and to be blessing others daily, thinking nothing of myself or my needs because those would be met by others. (I would come to see, even in sickness, they might not be.) Laying on verses and prayerful platitudes had been second nature, but now I wanted to reply, “Do you have a direct line to God and His plans for my life?”

I was involved in a Sunday School class of much older adults who were beautiful and gracious. They prayed, paid my rent, my bills, came with me to appointments. But I wanted, no, I needed people to be with me more. To sit with me in bed while I writhed in pain.

As the body of Christ I believe we are to bear each others' wounds. My favorite quote is from Frederich Buechner:

“What is friendship, when all’s said and done, but the giving and taking of wounds?”

***

The way I relate to people is different now. I want to know them, to hear their hearts and pain and let them know that that they are seen the way I never felt while sick. When I was sick, I was afraid no one would be there for me, so I want others to know that I will. No matter what: if it means lying in bed while they cry or washing them in the shower after surgery, I’m there.

I removed myself from the church for a time as I heal. There is loneliness. I sometimes wonder, though, if this is a season that God has brought me into, where it is just Him and me, sorting out the mess that surrounded the shattering of the girl I thought I was to find the girl I really am.

It took brain surgery to discover what needed to shatter

***

I have no idea why my life took this turn, but it did. I had to wrestle it out with Him, and the place I came to was this: I needed to stop relying on what other people said about God and find Him for myself. The platitudes people spoke over me had to be wiped from my understanding of what it means to follow Christ through sickness.

I’ve had several intimate moments with God since where He showed me in the most unconventional ways that faith was always about letting go of other people's ideas to experience God on my own.

I live in this body that still hurts daily, but it is also overflowing with the very spirit of God. I wrestle with God, and I question a lot. When I am in the most pain I scream out, “Why?" and pray for the pain to lessen like I was taught, but it usually doesn’t.

I have two scars that remind me of the battle. Then I pull from that war cry in my spirit and remember that no warrior comes out of battle unscathed.

I am a believer with a chronic illness who takes pain medication daily. There are the physical aspects I cannot get away from, yet I know God is with me--at physical therapies, speech therapy, waiting for neurology consult--whispering in my ear, “I am still here. Baby girl I never left. I was the one who washed you in the shower. I was the one who sat with you in bed when you writhed in pain.”

I do not believe much of what I did before. I still believe in the resurrection, the cross, and Jesus as God in the flesh, but I had to gently leave behind my old desire to please God though doing, quoting, and trying.

What I found was something beautiful. I found Bethany. The Jesus centered Bethany.

She is exactly who I needed to find.



Bethany Paget seeks to flesh out the truth, bringing Christ’s love to those she meets, her own heart, and her seven-year-old daughter. She seeks to use her new found voice and bravery in powerful, gracious ways. Her God-given passion for writing and creating show her that healing comes in all forms. She writes about life, faith, messy things, healing, and wearing cardigans and scarves while drinking Earl Grey tea over at www.allthingstruthful.wordpress.com.

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from my head to my hands {guest post Heather Caliri}

The world needs more of the sort of quiet wisdom and practical kindness Heather shares with us here and on her blog, A Little Yes: Baby Steps to Big Adventures in Faith, Art, and Life. Pull up a chair. I'll pour the tea, and let's listen in together, shall we?

When my kids are angry at me, I have a religious experience

When they are angry with me, my children rage, wild-eyed. Or they are cold, whispering “Bad Mama, bad Mama,” their lips curling in a smile. Or they destroy something and drop it at my feet, in shards or shreds.

Jesus says to bless those who hate you. When my kids are angry, I wonder at Martin Luther King Jr. facing fire hoses, because when my sweet children are angry--my own flesh and blood--Lord forgive me, I have a hard time turning the other cheek.

I am no saint. No, indeed. I have whispered or yelled words I wish I could take back. I have lost control. I have not modeled the behavior I wished to see, and worse, I have said, figuratively, “raca” to my child, in more ways than I wish to remember.

Parenting isn’t the only time my anger has controlled me.

I remember ripping the towel bar out of the wall of my bathroom in frustration over a set of pre-calc problems. I still have the junior high yearbooks where I defaced faces of people who were unkind to me. In the same yearbooks, I defaced the pictures of people I was unkind to. Perhaps I was trying deface all the unkindness, but instead I just made everyone ugly.

I look more like a librarian than someone who struggles with anger, but when my children are angry, ugly angry at me, I can feel myself turning ugly as well, as though a nauseatingly hot wave is rising over the flood plain of my heart.

Here’s what I have discovered about parenting: that moment of ugliness is the time to work out my faith in fear and trembling. Instead of letting the anger rise up into my throat, I can breathe and choose differently.

And when I calm my voice and my hands, when I respond kindly even when my children are out of control, I see my heart change.

In other words, it gets easier.

Somehow, I am still shocked by this: that choosing to follow Jesus’ words in the most mundane of ways, while my children are in a tantrum, will bear fruit that feeds me throughout the day. The choice brings sweetness I can taste any time I am faced by my old, ugly emotions.

Because in the moment of choosing love instead of ugliness, I start seeing differently.

I see the frustration and hurt underneath my children’s actions. Little by little, I forgive them for being little, for being out of control, for responding to their emotions in the same way I am tempted to do.

And under my anger, I see my own desire to be respected and connected to my kids. I sense my own fear when they are out of control.

I see how much we need each other’s kindness, every moment. And finally, I see that the real change comes not in what I know about anger, or parenting, or myself.

No, change comes from choosing.

Faithfulness is not so much about intellectual assent to certain principles: “Blessed are the meek”, or “I will parent positively”, but a moment-by-moment obedience.

The intellectual work matters, sure: the parenting classes, books or Bible study. But when I am there in the room with my anger and my children, I must do more than just believe good ideas.

No, I must seize that moment to bless instead of curse. I must move my faith from my head to my hands. I must kneel down on the hard floor and hold out my arms, ready to be openhearted, whole, and unafraid.

Heather Caliri is a writer and mom from San Diego. Two years ago, she started saying little yeses to faith, art, and life. The results were life-changing. Get her free e-book, Dancing Back to Jesus: Post-pefectionist Faith in Five Easy Verbs on her blog, A Little Yes.

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fasting, my iPhone, and prayer {guest post Morgan Guyton}

Somehow Morgan sums up most everything I learned in centering prayer and meditation from a completely different angle, which is so fascinating to me. Plus, he's a really smart guy, and I'm pleased to share his words here with you.

I fast on Mondays. It's my day off from being a pastor. When it's really hot, really cold, or rainy, I drive into Washington D.C. and spend the day at the Catholic basilica, the huge cathedral with about two dozen statues of Mary and one giant angry Jesus in the front. When the weather is nice, I like to be outside so I walk around a nearby lake or visit a waterfall I recently discovered on a creek that runs into the Potomac River.

I started fasting because I'm a radically undisciplined person and I thought it would help me to "conquer the flesh." I eat whenever I feel the slightest hunger pangs. I drink more wine than I should when I'm at social gatherings where I feel awkward. I have never accomplished more than three or four items on my to-do list on a given workday, largely because I've got ADD out the wazoo. Sometimes I try to rationalize my ADD by saying that I do whatever the Spirit leads me to do. Being a writer, I feel compelled to write whenever I'm "inspired," which means that my responsibilities are constantly getting pushed aside.

In any case, my fasting hasn't seemed to do a damn thing for my discipline, even on Mondays. This is partly because I always have my iPhone with me, and when I have my iPhone, inevitably I look at Facebook and get sucked into the latest blogosphere drama even sitting in a sacred room like the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament at the basilica (isn't that disgusting?!). It's been a sort of internal debate with me. How can I carry technology around with me on my day of prayer? Well, it has my lectionary app. And my Hebrew Bible. About two years ago, I started praying in Hebrew. And for some reason, that's become my most meaningful spiritual practice.

I learned Hebrew in seminary, but I started praying in Hebrew after I gave myself a challenge. I wanted to blog my way through the longest, boring-est psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119, because I'd read Christians like Charles Spurgeon and Jonathan Edwards claim that it was amazingly beautiful and profound and so forth, and I wanted to see if they were just being pious and full of crap. So two autumns ago, I would read a different 8 verse section of Psalm 119 each Monday and then walk around the lake to chew on it. And much to my surprise, it was actually beautiful and profound when I started to look at the Hebrew text for verses that stood out to me.

The example that stands out the most is Psalm 119:113, which says seaphim saneti, v'torecha ahavti in Hebrew. Most English translations make the word seaphim into "double-minded": "I hate the double-minded but I love your law." But when I looked in my little iPhone Hebrew lexicon, I discovered that seaphim refers to "dividing" because a seaph is a branch. And that caused me to visualize in my head the periodic table of elements and every other chart of categories I'd had to memorize in science class, which made me think of the division of truth into binary either-ors that is the hallmark of modernity.

These four Hebrew words stated nothing less than the epistemological curse of human existence that had bedeviled Heidegger. Torah is truth in its seamless purity, while seaphim is the perpetual inadequacy of our interpretation: "I hate opinions/ideologies/categories/interpretations, but I love your law (in its mysterious, unconquerable transcendence)." My mind was completely blown. And I started to say these words to myself as I walked around the lake. Seaphim saneti, v'torecha ahavti. It became a prayer. And over the last two years, I've wandered through the psalms, looking up other short Hebrew phrases that have become my prayers also.

There's elohim hashivanu vahaer panecha vanivashea ("God, restore us, make your face shine, and we will be saved," Psalm 80:7). I was saying this on my trail by the lake a few weeks ago, and when I reached a clearing, the sun broke through the clouds, and I about fell over. Another is hatot nouri ufshai al tizkor, kahasdacha zakar li atah lemayan tuvacha adonai ("Remember me not according to the sins of my youth and my transgressions, but remember me according to your mercy and for the sake of your goodness, O Lord," Psalm 25:7). That one has become a prayer not just for God's forgiveness, but for God to re-member me and help me forget the habits and addictions that I think I can't escape.

Somehow praying short phrases in another language does something different to my body than talking to God in English. Because I have to memorize the phrases, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say as I say it. I'm noticing my breath, my footsteps, my hunger. My mind often wanders, and I'll start thinking about things that are completely unrelated that sabotage my prayer. But sometimes, particularly when I'm tired from walking and a little bit hungry from fasting, my mind empties, and I'm simply in the moment with God. For a neurotic, perpetually scatter-brained person like me, there's nothing more wonderful than those moments.

So I pray in Hebrew. And that's why I carry my iPhone with me even on my Sabbath day when I should be fasting from technology. To learn new Hebrew phrases for my prayers as they come up in the lectionary psalms. I know I'm weird. I also pray in Greek. When your mind is a constant train-wreck of words, I guess it works better to talk to God in languages that you don't really know.

Morgan Guyton is the associate pastor of Burke United Methodist Church in Burke, Virginia. His wife Cheryl is also pursuing ordination as a United Methodist minister. They have two sons, Matthew (7) and Isaiah (4). Morgan enjoys growing really hot peppers in his garden and canning homemade salsa. Morgan wrestles with many topics on his blog "Mercy Not Sacrifice," such as how to live out his Christian anarchist values in the suburgatory of Northern Virginia.

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