Tag Archives: Gunilla Norris

Life Skills #15 – Cultvating Joy

Posted on by under Joy

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, more about members sharing their experience than a leader giving insights or principles. In being heard we are helped. We change, and others are usually helped too. (This model is tested and proven in 12 step groups. The approach may be unfamiliar at first, so give it some time. It works!)

Expectations regarding other Group Members
Members of the group will come from different regions, ethnicities, ages, and religious backgrounds. Additionally, everyone is on their own timetable and journey. Don’t assume everyone shares your faith or perspective or that you can speak for them.

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.
*If you feel judgmental or defensive when someone else shares, “turn to wonder.” For instance, “I wonder what she is feeling.”, “I wonder what my reaction teaches me about myself.”
*Stick to the topic. Avoid controversial comments.
*Refrain from commenting on, correcting, advising, or offering solutions to the person who is sharing. No ‘fixing.”, no “cross talk.” (Not even compliments.)
*Trust Silence. Treat silence as a member of the group. Times of silence slow down the group and give people time to reflect.
*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, even if you’re home alone!
–Please don’t make video or audio recordings of our meetings.
–Keep your background as non-distracting as possible.

Life Skills #15 – Cultivating Joy

WFTM, May 12, 17, July 1

“Joyful is the person who finds wisdom,
the one who gains understanding.”
Proverbs 3:13

(1) Priming the Pump on Cultivating Joy
*Pick something from below that touches you, and talk about why that is.

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.” Martin Buber

“The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.” Julian of Norwich

“Joy is the perception of beauty, unlike happiness, which is because of something. Joy is singing of the heart, a feeling of praise.” Dick Only

“I think the main reason we have so little joy is that we take ourselves too seriously.” Thomas Merton

“I’m old enough to know that the world can delight me, so my expectation is not of the world but of myself: Delight in the gift of life and be grateful.” Parker Palmer

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.”
Rabindranath Tagore

“From the deep well of silence, joy is constantly bubbling up and flowing out.Practice reveals that we are immersed in that joy.Practice also reveals what is blocking the flow.”
Gunilla Norris

(2) Digging Into Implications Around Cultivating Joy

*As a group, take these statements one at time. What is the point of each? What are the implications for the way you live?

“Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’” Psalm 126:2


“Joy is what makes life worth living, but for many joy seems hard to find. They complain that their lives are sorrowful and depressing. What then brings the joy we so much desire? Are some people just lucky, while others have run out of luck? Strange as it may sound, we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.” Henri Nouwen

“The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-aging moisturizer? You make someone worry about aging. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.” Matt Haig

“Enlightenment is not an escape from reality. There are joys and sorrows. When we cling to them, we suffer. We want the joys to always be there, and to avoid the sorrows altogether. But there will be both. Feel them, accept them, and let them go. Don’t get too attached to what has shown up in the present moment, remembering that there’s a new moment awaiting. Be happy. Be sad. It’s the nature of life and our feelings to cycle through many joys and sorrows. Press through them deeper still, and know that all is well in a way that never changes and is never diminished. At last, peace.” Jim Palmer

“One of the ways I’ve learned and am learning to press back comparison and enter into the joy God has for me and my house, is to lean into the gift he has given instead of the gift he hasn’t. He has given us time, space, and resources. That is the gift we have in the lack of the gift of children. It is not a better gift or a worse gift or a more sanctifying gift or a more difficult gift. It’s just another and different gift. And I want to receive it with joy. I don’t always. But I want to. These practices help me. Maybe they’ll help you, too.” Lore Ferguson Wilbert

“The only solution that God has to offer to all our problems is himself, is the fact that he is, that he is the kind of God that he is, a God who has a Word to utter, which he utters in an ecstasy of joy, an ecstasy of giving, which we call the Holy Spirit…. God has only the one thing to say, which is himself, he has only the one thing to give, which is himself. And he invites us to hear that Word, to treasure it in our hearts and find in it the source of all our bliss.” Simon Tugwell

Closing Prayers

“Grant us, we pray you, a heart wide open to all this joy and beauty, and save our souls from being so steeped in care or so darkened by passion that we pass heedless and unseeing when even the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with the glory of God.” Walter Rauschenbusch


“Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the
presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior,

through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority,

before all time and now and forever. Amen.” Jude :24-25

For Further Consideration (before our after our discussion)

“FEEL YOUR FEELINGS”

  1. Recognize. It takes a bit of effort to figure out what I’m feeling because the thoughts swirling around my brain are so vivid and powerful. When I feel my negative thoughts careening out of control, I’m learning to stop and try to discern the feelings that lie behind the thoughts. Most often those feelings are fear or sadness, but I also sometimes feel anger, hopelessness and frustration.
  2. Acknowledge. After recognizing the emotion, I sit with it for several breaths. I focus on my breathing and let myself feel whatever it is.
  3. Investigate. I try to identify where the emotion is located in my body, because this helps identify emotions the next time they happen. I also try to figure out what the emotion wants. Sometimes it wants to dominate my life. Sometimes it just wants to be acknowledged.
  4. Non-identify. When the feeling wants to dominate, it wants to be pervasive. It wants me to identify myself with that feeling. When I non-identify with the feeling, I might think about feelings as weather. They come and go. . . . Or I might focus on other feelings I’ve had that day – such as contentment, joy, happiness, or gratitude, no matter how fleeting – to demonstrate to my brain that this strong negative feeling is only a part of me, a part that needs to be acknowledged, but a part that does not define me.

If our ordinary, self-centered viewpoint is dominant, rocks and tree roots are undesirable. But if we change our point of view, then the very fact that there are rocks and tree roots makes the valley stream more beautiful and the sight of waves breaking upon them beyond description. When we perceive joy, anger, happiness and sorrow as enriching our lives, just as rocks and tree roots and water spray embellish nature, then we are able to accept whatever happens and live like flowing water, without clinging to anything.” Shundo Aoyama

Life Skills – Silence and Stillness (week 10)

Posted on by under approval addiction, Being and Doing, Busyness, Class Notes, Contemplative Prayer, contemplative virtues, Silence, Simplicity, Spiritual Formation

WFTM*: 1-8, 1-11, 2-25, 3-27, 3-29, 2-1, 3-7, 4-3


“Tremble and do not sin;
when you are on your beds,
search your hearts and be silent.”
Psalm 4:4 NIV

Introduction: What We Expect of God
And the word of the Lord came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”11 The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind [like the wind that withered the grain and brought the locusts in Ex. 20] tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake [like Saul’s deliverance from the Philistines in 1 Sam 14], but the Lord was not in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake came a fire [like Moses experienced at the burning bush], but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a [lit. “sheer silence.”] 13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 1 Kings 19:b–13 NLT


Observation: God did not make himself known in a dramatic or anticipated (previously experienced) manner, so as to say to Elijah, “Don’t limit me or what I can do with your expectations.” Perhaps we too still expect God to “appear” only in the spectacular.


*How do you expect God to come to you? Have you ruled that out? Have you been looking in the wrong places? (Selah.)

(1) Beginning the Conversation (Notice what “grabs” you.)
“When we can stand aside from the usual and perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen. . . . Silence brings us to back to basics, to our senses, to our selves.” Gunilla Norris


“Unless I am silent I shall not hear God, and until I hear [God] I shall not come to know [God]. Silence asks me to watch and wait and listen, to be like Mary in readiness to receive the Word. If I have any respect for God I shall try to find a time, however short, for silence. Without it I have not much hope of establishing that relationship with God . . . which is going to help me root the whole of my life in prayer.” Esther de Wall


[having compared contemplative prayer to water poured into a basin] “It takes time for the water to settle. Coming to interior stillness requires waiting. . . . In solitary silence we listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls us the beloved. God speaks to the deepest strata of our souls, into our self-hatred and shame, our narcissism, and takes us through the night into the daylight of His truth . . . .” Brennan Manning


Susan Cain’s book Quiet “ . . . focuses on introverts, making the case that they have a kind of intellectual advantage. And their edge stems largely from greater amounts of solitude, from the degree to which they’ve swapped motion for stillness, chatter for calm. They’ve carved out space for reflection that’s sustained and deep. This isn’t necessarily a matter of being unplugged, of ditching the hyper-connectedness of our digital lives. It’s a matter of ditching and silencing the crowd.” Frank Bruni


*Did some phrase or idea from above catch your attention? Why did it?
*How could you more effectively “ditch and silence” the crowd?


(2) “The Evangelical Problem” (Pay attention to your emotional response.)
“I believe silence is the most challenging, the most needed and the least experienced spiritual discipline among evangelical Christians today. It is much easier to talk about it and read about it than to actually become quiet. We are a very busy, wordy and heady faith tradition. Yet we are desperate to find ways to open ourselves to our God who is, in the end, beyond all of our human constructs and human agendas. With all of our emphasis on theology and Word, cognition and service–and as important as these are–we are starved for mystery, to know this God as one who is totally other and to experience reverence in his presence. We are starved for intimacy, to see and feel and know God in the very cells of our being. We are starved for rest, to know God beyond what we can do for him. We are starved for quiet, to hear the sound of sheer silence that is the presence of God himself.” Ruth Haley Barton


*What emotions arise as you hover over these words?
*What here seems particularly for you? . . . related to your story or experience?


(4) “The Human Problem” (Look for what applies to you.)
“It’s not enough to believe in silence, solitude and stillness. These things must be experienced and practiced, and practiced often enough to be routine, to create new habits. And so I come to a full stop. I sit quietly. I don’t petition God, give thanks, or meditate on some divine attribute. I don’t look out the window in wonder. Good things to do, but not first–not yet. Because unless I can first remember that it doesn’t depend on me, that I can’t do what needs to be done, then all is lost. And until I do this numerous times a day, every day, there’s a slim chance I’ll ever remember that. Everything argues against stopping–against remembering: the to-do list, the desire to be productive, the expectations of others, ego, habit. And therefore, ruthlessness is required in establishing this essential practice. I have the potential to be used by God in important ways–but I squander that by flitting from one thing to the next without stopping to ‘recollect’ myself. These are the most important moments of my day. Nothing else I do will be so informative–and formative. Nothing else will save me from myself. Nothing else will prepare me to attend to God and others, and to what’s going on with me. Would it be more important to take these moments to love my spouse, feed a homeless child, memorize Scripture, or engage in worship? No, for unless I first submit to utter inactivity–unless my activity flows from my practiced inactivity before God, I cannot trust that my activity will be anything but smoke and noise. No one needs my hurried self–the one that to me seems so indispensable–the one in such a rush to help. Something must be done, but first–only stopping will do.” William Britton


*Does naming this (what’s described above) a “human problem” seem fair? What would your diagnosis of yourself be in this regard, if you were to write it out?
*If you were going to work on experiencing silence and practicing stillness in the weeks to come, what would that look like? (What would the RX be for your diagnosis?)

CLOSING PRAYER

“Heavenly Father, you do not lead us all by the same path. Here in your presence, take our yearning to speak with you and what words we have, and make of them a prayer worthy of your love for us. Lord you’ve heard the cry of our hearts and seen our deepest needs. Before we leave this gathering, we want to ask you . . . to commit each person here into your loving hands. If you have us . . . if we have you, God, we will want for nothing. You alone suffice.”

*Each week’s quotes usually come from Wisdom From the Margins. This is the book we will use for this discussion. If you can, try to read one reading daily in the book (perhaps the reading for that calendar day). Sometimes specific readings are recommended. In that case, 2-16 refers to the reading in the book for February 16th, etc..


If this discussion sounds like something you might be interested in, please contact me for more details. (Bill at wm_britton@mac.com) Also, if you’re in a completely different time zone and you’re interested, please let me know, since a second gathering time, designed for people in the Eastern hemisphere may be possible.