personal development on Rituals

Is your job demanding more from you than ever before? Do you feel as if you’re working additional hours but rarely getting ahead? Is your mobile device leashing you to your job 24/7? Do you feel exhau...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding ways to rest and relax as part of a healthy, balanced life: I once read a book in which the author sa...

I am more or less ready to wash someone’s feet, but, like Peter, I discover I am not prepared to have my feet washed. I am willing to play like I am a servant and wash the feet of someone else. When I...

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spiri...

Even as we eagerly await your return, Lord Jesus, we must confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart, with our entire mind, nor with all of our strength. We have loved our rituals and our...

Former cultures, whatever their faults, understood the imperialistic nature of energy, especially of spiritual, erotic energy. For the most part, they feared energy, particularly sexual and religious ...

Like liturgy, the work of cleaning draws much of its meaning and value from repetition, from the fact that it is never completed, but only set aside until the next day. Both liturgy and what is euphem...

To experience the richness of life in God's kingdom, we must reorder our lives. We need to see through the shallow promises of our culture, and we need rhythms, signposts, and practices that reori...

When I am away from Liturgy for too long, I find I burn for it now, for the steadiness of the calendar, the words" that ring out in repetition, the heavy scented air. When I return each week, I a...

We can learn a thing or two about discipleship and the discipline required of a disciple from our fourth-century monastic brothers and sisters. Like them, we do basic, ordinary activities every day. W...

An understanding and living of Sabbath time can help support a sane and holy rhythm of life for us. With it, we are given an alternative to the culture’s growing movement between driven achievement an...

Christian spiritual discipline is a repeated bodily practice, done over and over again in dependence on the Holy Spirit and under the direction of Jesus and other wise teachers in his Way, to enable o...

As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allo...

Rest is a practice because the “work” of rest is rooted in the finished work of God.

If you are a pastor…this one’s for you. Sabbath. So many things have been written. Most of us have taught our people or preached about Sabbath, and underscored how busy people in our churches re...

The Spiritual Disciplines are things that we do. We must never lose sight of this fact. It is one thing to talk piously about 'the solitude of the heart,' but if that does not somehow work its...

There is so much more to sabbath than what we stop doing, but for the purposes of disciplining power, simply stopping matters a great deal.

The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don't have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual mental sta...

A spiritual discipline or practice is a way of creating some open and free space in which God can move an speak. For example, the discipline of solitude helps us spend time with God alone and so becom...

Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the r...

Years ago, during a vacation in New Hampshire, Jonathan and I climbed Mount Washington, which is notorious for erratic weather. It can change from sunny and warm to snowing in a few hours. The wind is...

What Eric Liddell Did Not Do Scottish athlete and missionary Eric Liddell, whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire , was a favorite to win the hundred-meter sprint in the 1924 Paris Olym...

Thus a Christian finds himself called to drab and lowly tasks, which seem less remarkable than monastic life, mortifications, and other distractions from our vocations. For him who heeds his vocation,...

We become what we repeatedly do.

Gracious God, for many of us, the notion of Sabbath-keeping is foreign. It suggests old-fashioned traditionalism or constrictive legalism. Yet, your example in Genesis 2, not to mention other portions...

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

In the simplest possible terms, the spiritual disciplines are a matter of taking appropriate measures.

Habits are the thought and emotional patterns engraved on our minds. These internal habit patterns play just as forceful a role as external influences on our actions – in fact, perhaps more so.

We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially bein...