Christine Sine,
executive director, liturgist and chief gardener of
Mustard Seeds Associates and her blog
Godspace is a one
of the innovators of the contemporary Christian contemplative tradition.
In this delightful book which is aptly named Return to our senses:
Re-imagining how we pray, Christine challenges our perception of how
and why we pray. Christine argues that though there is great value in
verbal prayers, there is more to praying than using our cognitive
“senses.” To her, our sense of sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste
are also means to praying. Christine is not advocating a New Age (or Old
Age) spirituality but a return to appreciate the works of our Creator
God by using all our senses which he has created to connect with him. To
do that, Christine introduces us to some ancient Christian prayer
practices that use one or more of our senses as means to prayers.
Christine notes that
This is the
question that I think is at the heart of the gospels and that is the
premise for this book. Prayer is not about trying to get God to listen
to us. Nor is it about trying to make God spend more time with us.
Prayer is about sharpening our awareness of the God who is already in us
and around us, present in every moment and every activity of the day.
Waking up to, living in to and sharing the love of God is the heart of
prayer (4).
In other words,
prayers is relating to God in our mundane everyday life. It involves us
being aware of our breathing (or the way we breathe), having sacred
spaces, listening, seeing with “new” eyes and walking with our legs and
our fingers! This book is a potpourri of Christian prayer practices,
quotations and poetry from various sources, and also a collection of her
own poems and prayers which are inspiring and edifying. Christine
repeatedly emphasized that prayer is meeting God in the ordinary. I like
the illustration she shared about making Chinese tea (not Japanese)
using Chinese teapot and tea leaves,
Like teapots, we're each unique, fragile vessels created to contain one
essence, that of our Creator. Over time the flavor of God intensifies in
our lives as the Spirit seeps into our pores and transforms our nature,
making us more like the Creator in whose image we are formed. Like the
tea leaves, we are also unique, each variety requiring a different
processing and brewing technique that results in the perfect cup of tea.
When we first encounter the Risen Christ, a cleansing is in order. Like
leaves rolled tightly into little balls and dried by the edge of the
road, we've collected dust, dirt, and contaminants that alter our
flavor…
As
Jesus' life is poured out on the cross, his life, love, and sacrifice
infuse our lives, cleansing us of the filth that clings so closely in
every wrinkle and crevice of our withered lives.
Like
the
tightly rolled leaves, we expand, allowing God’s Spirit to reach more
and
more of our being.
Rinsed in Christ, we are now ready to be used by God… When another type
of tea is used in the pot, the flavor is corrupted. So it is with our
lives, when we permit the flavor of God to mix with greed, nationalism,
lust, and a whole host of other gods. When this happens the tea poured
out tastes “off”. Something is wrong (71).
This book is a
rich resource for various Christian practices in praying with our senses
and it is wonderful and surprising to discover the varieties of forms
and practices of praying that other Christians use. Not all the
practices mentioned are ancient. Christine also includes Facebook,
blogging and ‘praying on the go’ to use in our modern busy connected
lifestyles. Prayer is not just building an exclusive relationship
between God and us but should translate into action and love for others.
The last four chapters of this book move into advocacy of some sort of
creation care.
This is a good
book for an overview of contemplative prayers in the post modern or
post-postmodern culture. It also has suggestions as how to practice
these prayers and I recommend it for reading and practice during this
Advent season.
