The Uncommon Journey Podcast: Recent Episodes
Joel Skinner
Insights, conversations, and practices for the journey of faith, designed for a circle of trusted friends to process together.
Jesus was a practical guy, and his practical approach to spirituality seems to easily lost in the midst of contemporary theological and theoretical debates. This episode invites you to take a very practical approach to your spiritual life by asking the question, "What should I do?" And rather than take the 'just try harder' approach, we can become wise and skillful at choosing the kinds of active practices - real life stuff - that will teach us how to trust and partner with God in the everyday mess of life.
This season we are discussing three main areas of Christian practice. First stop: Contemplative Practice- what is it and why does it matter? What's the difference between meditation and contemplation? Who was Guigo II and why should you care? Is there still a case to be made for regular bible reading and prayer?
I hope this little talk inspires you to try some new/old ways of connecting with and receiving from God. For more reading, check out Guigo's book "The Ladder of Monks". For daily guided contemplative practices, check out the "Pray as You Go" app, or their website.
Many of us with evangelical "roots" were handed a belief system called Christianity, and much of that system has been called into question in recent years. The current crisis of faith that many are experiencing could rightly be called a crisis of the failure of belief systems to deliver the promises found and hoped for in the gospels. It has also created a crisis of identity - what does it mean to be a Jesus follower, a Christian, a believer, etc?
This next season of episodes will explore practices, rather than beliefs, as the sphere in which we "work out our faith." The challenge is that so few of us emerging from the evangelical milieu have a comprehensive picture of what constitutes Christian practice and why. So let's explore that!
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I wish I heard more people talk about the spiritual life in such plain language! Evelyn, in her final chapter of the book "The Spiritual Life" addresses some of the biggest and most common challenges presented to those pursuing the spiritual life (at least in the early stages) in the shortest chapter of her book. I offer a brief summary of each, and a practice at the end that I think wraps things up nicely :)
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In this episode we are looking at the active life - all the things we do in a day - and asking, "How can we cooperate with God in the middle of all this?" What does my mundane life have to do with divine reality? Is spirituality simply seeking contemplative experiences and disregarding everything in between? Evelyn Underhill's book "The Spiritual Life" helps us address the need to learn how to live in cooperation with God as we do all that we do, and gives us (through St. John of the Cross) a simple test we can use to know if we are cooperating with God.
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In this episode, I attempt to get as practical as possible when talking about connecting with God. What is the difference between doing religious or spiritual activities in a way that connects us to God versus doing them in a way that disconnects us. The Pharisees (as recorded in the gospels) are an interesting study in how one can try really hard but end up on the wrong path. I am willing to be that many of us have tried things in the past, but struggled with feeling like we were successful. But there is a way to practice that actually ushers us into the Kingdom of God, and it might not be what you think.
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Thursday Gatherings: https://community-circles.circle.so/c/gatherings/thursday-gathering-a4df98
Let's think about what we mean when we talk about connecting with God. In this episode I am using Evelyn Underhill's second talk in a series of four on the Spiritual Life to help us, and I think her description is prescient for the situation we find ourselves in today. I hope this discussion is thoughtful and challenging, and I hope you can discuss your thoughts with others. We will be having an in-person discussion around these ideas on August 25 - see the event page if you're interested in joining that conversation.
Evelyn Underhill's Book on Amazon
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In this season, we will be using Evelyn Underhill's book "The Spiritual Life" as a guide for provoking us to think bigger about Christian spirituality. As always, we will try to bring a very practical approach while dealing with such big ideas. In this episode, we ask the question, "What is the spiritual life?" In other words, how did Jesus (and the many great spiritual teachers within our tradition) see the project of connecting with God, and how do they encourage us to see it and approach it?
For a reference to the practice I describe at the end of the podcast, see Francis de Sales' "Introduction to the Devout Life", Part 2, ch. 2, 10, and 11. Here's a link to a free pdf of his book.
This is my attempt at wrapping things up by tying the concepts together from the last 5 episodes! I hope you have enjoyed this series, and that it has in some way enlarged and excited your vision for life within that plane of existence Jesus called the Kingdom.
If we are hoping to get a sense of what Jesus means when he uses the phrase "The Kingdom of God," we might not find a better word than freedom. It essentially means freedom from coercion and control, and freedom to be whatever and whoever we truly are. But controlling and dictatorial pressures exert their influence on us in a variety of ways, both from within and without. This means that becoming free will require different processes depending on the source of our bondage. In this teaching, Jesus invites a group of excited people to join in the freedom of the Kingdom, but when he tells them what it will like they turn into an angry mob set on killing him. What did they miss? Why could they not join him?
What is it that makes human relationship possible and sustainable? Jesus' vision of the Kingdom of God gives us a way to understand how relationship can work within the larger picture of God's sustaining relationship through he power of forgiveness. In this episode we will explore the Matthew 18 parable of forgiveness and what it says about our own practice of receiving and giving forgiveness as followers of Jesus in this way.
For those who've heard the Bible preached, terms like "the Kingdom of God" can easily sound like purely religious ideas that have no bearing in the real world. But what if "the Kingdom" means something far bigger than "this religion"? In this episode, we will explore the Kingdom as a metaphor Jesus uses for reality itself - and how we can enter into that reality.
Practice for reflection and surrender:
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Who do I need to forgive?
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Where do I need to trust?
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What can I do to serve?
Today we are examining the invitation of the Kingdom as an invitation into oneness. This may sound esoteric, but oneness (or its absence) is played out on every level of existence and daily life, and has major consequences for how we live. Our invitation into the Kingdom of God is for us to learn to live in the reality of oneness with God, and for it to bring us into oneness with each other. This is ultimately the beautiful, ongoing process of the reconciling of all things.
For our practice:
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your name. Amen.
This episode kicks of a series of explorations around Jesus' great metaphor of the Kingdom of God. What is he talking about and how are we to understand and respond to it? Today we examine some first century context, as well as the implications for every person who comes into contact with Jesus' invitation.
The parables of Jesus are some of the most contentious and enigmatic of all his sayings, but they were his method of choice for teaching about what he called "the Kingdom of the Heavens." In these two parables, we are not given much in terms of answers. Instead, we are invited to ask better questions as we stretch our imaginations to see what Jesus saw.
When we bring the issue of "surrender to God" front and center, it brings up some very interesting reactions - many for good reason. At some point, we will all probably ask the question, "Is all this surrender really worth it?" This episode is (hopefully) a conversation starter using Psalm 103 as a launching point for considering where we are headed and what it is worth. At the end I offer a question for discussion and a practice.
This is a brief meditation on surrender, offering some images to hopefully help us embrace surrender as the best way to live with God. At the end, I offer a suggestion for a simple practice of living in surrender, borrowed from St. Francis de Sales book, "Philothea" (Introduction to the Devout Life).
Let's take a few minutes to pull together the pieces from the last four episodes and land at one question we can ask ourselves, leading to one concrete action we can take:
Question:
Can you identify one survival behavior in yourself, and identify how you would practice surrendering it to God when you notice it? (Important: what are you saying "yes" to?)
Practice: The Welcoming Prayer, Father Thomas Keating
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today
because I know it's for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and God's action within. Amen.
Practicing surrender by saying "no" to self only makes sense if we have something to say "yes" to. Thankfully, God has promised to faithfully be there to receive our "yes", even as we're learning to recognize it. This week's topic and discussion focus on the experience of saying yes to God- how we must consistently make that choice, and how over time our trust grows through experiencing God's faithfulness. Over the course of the week, reflect on these questions as you search out what ways God is inviting you to say yes to the invitation.
- Do you find yourself trying the "just say no" or "just ignore the desire" method? Does it work for you?
- Have you noticed God's movements in your soul? Reflect on those experiences- what were they like? (Spend time thinking about the "big" ones as well as the "little" ones).
- What is the Kingdom of God, and what is it worth to you? Try to come up with your own way of saying what the Kingdom is. What is it's value to you?
- Reflect on your experience of prayer. Why have you prayed in the past, or why do you pray now? What "successes" or challenges have you faced regarding prayer?
The tools of survival we know are familiar (explored in episode 2), but the tools Jesus offers for a life of sufficiency are counter-intuitive. What path is offered to us to walk out of survival? What are the habits of mind, body, and spirit that build a life of well-being in every season? That's what this session is about.
This week we will look at several categories of common tools and methods we use in survival mode. These tools aren't necessarily bad in themselves, but they provide unfulfilling and oftentimes misleading substitutes for what God offers through the life of faith.
In this first session we will define survival and contrast it with the life the Jesus invites his followers into.
What are the consequences of a reality based on a relational God who has made relational beings? This chat discusses three relational environments every person interacts with, and how they affect each other.
In this second part of our exploration of what it means to be human, we look at relationship and communication as essential elements of humanity. We also take the analogy of the divine dance and apply it to how humans can dance with God.
Starting from Genesis 1:26, Dan and I try to unpack the significance of being made in God's "image and likeness".
Exploring further into the mystery of God, Dan and I discuss "relationship", "love", and "unity" as they relate to the Trinity. We also explore the age-old metaphor of perichoresis, the divine dance, and what it shows us about the nature of God.
I have invited my friend Dan Lanning to join me for a 6-part series as we discuss some "new fundamentals" that are not really new. In this talk we play with the mysterious nature of God as both Trinity and One.
For many Jesus-followers, the spiritual life has been romanticized as a life filled with emotional ecstasy (if you do it right). But is that the teaching and the history that has come to us over the centuries? Are the emotions the deepest and truest part of our selves, or is there something more central to being a spiritual human?
The grace of being, which gives the freedom from having to justify ourselves, leads to a grace of doing. This is where we get to actively work with God for good. But most of this work is not what we think it is...
Grace is not just unmerited favor. It is the energy of God working on our behalf to help us in the good we want to do. But how do we access it, and can we grow in it?
Salvation means being rescued or delivered, but what does that look like today? We can learn to recognize the effects of salvation as we learn to do our part, working it out in the challenges of everyday living.
In this episode, we explore the nature of Jesus' invitation to live in a new reality, which he called the Kingdom of God. How do we practically live in this spiritual reality, being affected by it and letting it affect our physical life? What are some guiding priorities and habits that keep us on this journey into the reality of God?