by Aaron Foster | Pastor | Family Ministry & Congregational Engagement
[This blog is a reflection on the third week in our Lenten guide, “The Art of Presence: Practices for the Time of Lent.” This guide encourages daily habits oriented toward core, spiritual practices—in this week’s case, the Art of Contemplation. If you’d like to receive these short, weekly guides, you can sign up for the weekly email by clicking here.]
I really don’t like to brag, but in second grade a story that I wrote (and illustrated, mind you) was chosen, along with several others from my small school, to be celebrated at a local university’s Young Authors Festival. If you appreciate great literature, you may have heard of it – I titled it, Peter’s Escape (ISBN Pending). It documented (if memory serves) the tale of a penguin, Peter, who escaped from the zoo to experience the freedom of life in Antarctica.
For a second-grader, this was a prestigious honor. It afforded me the opportunity to interact with peers about their writing, attend creative writing workshops with real authors, and—most coveted of all—a day out of school to attend the festival.
Shockingly, one thought from one of the workshops on effective writing has stuck with me since that day:
“Our senses are the keys to our hearts” – Unknown Author, c. 1999
The smell of a dutch apple pie sends me back to childhood holidays and fills me with warmth. The rhythmic sound of beeping instruments in a hospital room causes in me a tenuous mix of great joy and great pain.
Through our senses, we fully experience a moment. Through our senses, we are not just present in mind, or just in body, but in our fullness. Through our senses, therefore, we can experience a deeper understanding of a moment, a relationship, a story. Our senses may allow us to empathize more acutely with a friend who is hurting as we share in the physical pains of a distinct experience. Our hearts can be moved through our sight, taste, touch, smell, and hearing, in ways that aren’t possible otherwise.
Might our hearts be uniquely stirred, as well, through bringing our senses into our reading of scripture? How much more clearly can we see ourselves in Peter’s denial when we feel the stares of accusation? What does imagining the pungent, earthy smell of a stable or the sharp, metallic ringing of a nail being sunk into wood do for our understanding of the depth of God’s love?
Where we don’t have the ability to exercise our senses in this way, we do – each of us – inherently carry the gift of creativity. As we together practice inhabiting God’s Word through the discipline of contemplation, we apply that creativity through our imagination to more deeply experience the easily missed, yet formative, details in each story.
Only some of us may have a Young Authors Festival piece of literature in our portfolio, but all of us have the creativity to unlock our hearts more fully to God’s word.
The Practice: Using imagination as a way of engaging God’s Word beyond simply “studying” it.
The Point: Celebrating how God made us to meditate, that we might live in his story more fully.
The Purpose: How does contemplating scripture and imagining its stories help me more fully love the joy of God’s salvation?
Key Verse: Ezekiel 37:1–7