Monthly Archives: January 2022

Daily Riches: Expanding Your Bandwidth of Kindness (Richard Beck, Misoslav Volf)

Posted on by under hospitality, Insiders and Outsiders, Loving Well, neighbors & neighborhoods, Spiritual Disciplines, the ordinary


“The strangeness of strangers makes hospitality hard. As we’ve watched cable news and our social-media feeds, we’ve all witnessed our failures in extending hospitality to strangers, our unwillingness to welcome people into our nation, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, churches, homes, and hearts. The refugee family stopped at our borders. The homeless person sleeping on our streets. . . . And far too often, Christians have been the worst offenders, the very first to greet strangers with Keep Out signs. . . . Like the goats in Matthew 25, we refuse to welcome Jesus in disguise. . . . But hearts aren’t easily changed. You can’t change hearts with pep talks, protests, podcasts, Facebook rants, tweets, or a really good sermon. Hearts require spiritual formation through habits and practices that directly address the social and psychological dynamics at work . . . . Hospitality  demands  more  than  good  will and  good  intentions.  Emotions,  including  social emotions, are not easily changed. You can’t fix depression by telling someone, “Cheer up!” You can’t get someone to become less angry just by admonishing, “Calm down” or less anxious by saying, “Don’t worry, be happy!” . . . If you find some people irritating, annoying, or revolting, a demand that you should feel differently isn’t practical. . . . There are two big missing pieces in our efforts to welcome the stranger God. The first missing piece is that hospitality, before it can be anything else, begins as the emotional battle to widen the circle of our affections. Theologian Miroslav Volf calls this “the will to embrace.” [And a] second missing piece: that hospitality begins as a spiritual discipline, as a habit-forming practice aimed at expanding the bandwidth of our kindness and compassion. . . . When we think of ‘spiritual disciplines,’ we think of practices like prayer, silence, solitude, Bible reading, Sabbath, and fasting. . . . Through spiritual disciplines, we seek a deeper intimacy with God, . . . an encounter with the sacred and divine. While these spiritual disciplines move us toward God, they routinely fail to move us toward each other. This is the genius of the Little Way, lost spiritual discipline [of Thérèse of Lisieux,] a habit-forming practice that moves us  toward  each  other  so  that  our  affections for each other expand and widen. The Little Way is a spiritual  discipline  of  hospitality  and  welcome. . . . a habit-forming discipline that enables us to en-counter the God who comes to us in disguise . . . in coworkers, neighbors, refugees, the homeless, and the people in the line with us at the grocery store.” Richard Beck


Moving From Head to Heart


*How often are you frightened, annoyed, or repulsed by strange people?
*Have others sometimes judged you for seeming strange?
*What new habit could you begin to practice that could begin to break down your aversion to those who seem strange? . . . to train you in kindness and compassion?


Abba, expand my bandwidth for kindness when it’s hard.


For More: Stranger God: Meeting Jesus in Disguise by Richard Beck

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Thanks for reading my blog! Please extend my reach by reposting on your social media platforms. If you like these topics and this approach, you’ll like my book Wisdom From the Margins.

Life Skills (week one)**

Posted on by under Being and Doing, Class Notes, contemplative virtues

Typical Weekly Session

*The Welcome
“Welcome to our group! We’re meeting together in order to learn practices that will inform and form our lives. (“Life Skills”) Our group intention is to cultivate an atmosphere of safety, compassion, and respect for each individual’s unique experience and contribution.”

*The Prayer
“We know you are already present to us, O God, so we ask you to enable us to be equally present to you, to each other–and to ourselves. We consent to your work in us. As we learn new practices, may we be delivered from the ‘pace, power, and priorities’ (Villodas) of our world.” (60 seconds of silence)

*Managing Expectations
This is not a Bible study or a counseling session. Our time together is as much about “unlearning” as about learning. The approach may be unfamiliar at first, so give it some time. It works!

*Suggested Guidelines
–Come to the group with an expectation of learning something new and helpful.
–Keep your sharing at the “I” level–make it personal (what you think or feel), not preachy (what you think others should think or feel). 
–Please keep the focus on your own experience.
–Resolve to practice patience and exquisite tenderness toward others.
–Stick to the topic, and avoid controversial comments.
–Refrain from commenting on, correcting, advising, or offering solutions to the person who is sharing (No “fixing.”)
–Be sensitive to how many times you share, and for how long. We may have a large group at times. Let others have their turn.
–Hold what you hear in confidence. Help us keep this a safe space for everyone.
Specific to on-line meetings:
–Mute your microphone when you’re not sharing so as not to distract others.
–Please don’t make video or audio recordings of our meetings.
–Keep your background as non-distracting as possible.
–Mute your microphone when you’re not sharing (even if you’re home alone). 

A Spiritual Exercise for this Topic (Colliers)

This will be something different each time (most weeks).

Week One: orientation and introduction to “skills/practices”

“. . . everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.” Jesus in Mt. 7:24, 26

[oftentimes] ” . . . Buddhism presents itself as a way of life, and Christianity presents itself as a system of belief.” Brian McClaren

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Training means arranging life around those activities that enable us to do what we cannot do now, even by extreme effort. Significant human transformation always involves training, not just trying.” Dallas Willard

“You do not have to do these things–unless you want to know God. They work on you, not [God]. You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require it nor demand it.” Annie Dillard

For discussion:

*Do any of these quotations affect you (encourage, surprise, confuse, challenge, disturb)? Can you explain your response?
*Can you pick a quote that is important to you, and attempt to explain its main message to the group?
*What would you say about a life of faith and spiritual “practices” after this discussion?

To consider for later:

If you had to explain to someone what a Christian is, what would you say?
Did your answer mostly emphasize ideas and beliefs, or behaviors?
Is your experience of the life of faith more about “trying” or “training?” Does what you’re doing seem to be working?

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**These are notes for a Life Skills discussion that starts in the evening on Tuesday, February 1, 2022. If you think you may in interested in joining this weekly discussion, please contact me at wm_britton@mac.com, and I’ll send you a link. (The discussion will be based on the book Wisdom From the Margins.)

Daily Riches: Our Many “Fool’s Errands” (Charles Blow)

Posted on by under applause, approval addiction, Desolation's Gift, Embracing Losses and Limits, Self-care, Striving and drivenness, The Call to Change

“I have always suffered from a predisposition to depression. It was like the old friend, the constant companion, always a few paces behind or in front. There. I was never truly alone. It was always in the room, sitting on the edge of the bed, wanting to snuggle. . . . I appeared to be succeeding, inside I was drowning. . . . I felt that I was doing an amazing thing. People, including my family, told me that I was. But I never said the thing I thought I couldn’t say: that parenthood was too much for me to do on my own, that it was consuming me, that I sometimes felt trapped in it, that it sometimes felt like someone was sitting on my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. . . . I wasn’t healthy. I was lonely and alone. I drank too much. I lived my life like it was about to end. I was afraid to be alone with my pain, because in the quiet, it got loud. . . . Then, my brother’s death blew a hole in me and made me reconsider everything. What kind of life did I want to live? What kind of man—kind of person—did I want to be? Within a month, I changed everything. I stopped drinking. I learned to sit with myself, alone, and experience my emotions, and to deal with tough days, and even the exhilarating ones, head on. . . . And I have come to see things clearly again—things that seem so simple to me now, but that somehow I couldn’t see then: that life is a series of peaks and valleys, and it is a fool’s errand to try to flatten them out. That beauty is in the connections we make, to self, to family, to friends, to the earth. That we don’t judge the quality of a life by the volume at which we live it. That I deserve to be kind to myself.” Charles M. Blow


Moving From Head to Heart


*How do you measure whether you’re doing well? Is it your impact, a list of achievements, notoriety? Is your body telling you that something is wrong?
*Does your lived experience demonstrate that you also have learned Blow’s important, seemingly simple, but hard-earned lessons?
*Can you be alone? . . . accept daily peaks and valleys? . . . be kind to yourself? Are you making beautiful connections?


O God, save us from ourselves. Deliver us from all our “fool’s errands.”

For More: “Death Changed My Life” by Charles M. Blow

Thanks for reading my blog! Please extend my reach by reposting on your social media platforms. If you like these topics and this approach, you’ll like my book Wisdom From the Margins.

Daily Riches: Ghost Dancers Seeking Meaning (Patty Krawec, Patrick Wolfe)

Posted on by under Insiders and Outsiders, Social Justice, The Poor and Disenfranchised

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” James Baldwin

“Almost thirty years after the hanging of the Dakota, in December 1890, the US Cavalry opened fire on a camp of nearly three hundred Lakota ghost dancers near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. The fully armed US Cavalry came to one of these camps with a Hotchkiss gun, a cannon with a rotating barrel, and the intention of disarming the Lakota. One Lakota man refused to give up his rifle, and according to some witnesses, the rifle went off when he was grabbed by soldiers. The US Cavalry opened fire. At least 150 Lakota were killed and fifty wounded, including women and children. Because of a blizzard, it would be three days before the dead were buried. Twenty US soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor. . . . The Ghost Dancers were . . . seeking meaning. The people had experienced so much loss, it’s impossible to imagine how devastated they were. Centuries of genocide and sickness. Even if General Amherst wasn’t successful with his smallpox blankets, he was willing to try, and as a whole settlers were willing to exploit something they didn’t fully understand. There is no wilderness, Patrick Wolfe writes, only depopulated spaces. So the people danced. They danced to bring visions and bring about a vision: restore the land to its former existence and rid themselves of these white men who brought only hardship and grief. They danced and the government felt this to be a threat. An existential threat perhaps, people who weren’t properly grateful for everything that the Great White Father was doing for them. People who weren’t properly submissive or accepting or willing to assimilate and vanish so that settlers could just take the land and wouldn’t have to steal it. People who wouldn’t just die and needed to be killed.” Patty Krawec


Moving From the Head to the Heart


*When you think of North America before white settlers came, do you think of wilderness?
*Can you explain why U.S. Calvary members would have received the Medal of Honor for what they did at Wounded Knee?
*Can you imagine why the “ghost dancers” would have been seeking meaning for all that had happened to them and their people? What would you say was that meaning?

God in heaven, may we embrace both the beauty and terror of our history, wherever we live.

For More: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.

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Thanks for reading my blog. Please extend my reach by reposting on your social media platforms. If you like these topics and this approach, you’ll like my book Wisdom From the Margins.