TENDING THE FLAME OF FAITH WITH THE MONK AND THE MUTT

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2020 was a challenging year, to say the least. I know I am not alone in my experience of spiritual drought during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to gather in person for worship and sensing the isolation of social distancing, we were forced to interact with friends and family through screens and cameras. Not only was it emotionally exhausting and mentally melancholic, but it was also spiritually strenuous.

On the spectrum of piety, you won’t find me on either end. Consistent spiritual practices are not often in my wheelhouse. I am not the best at always remembering to pray before meals, in the morning, or at night. Nor do I read the Bible devotionally every day, like I probably should. Doing it all on my own has never proved especially effective. Instead, my communities compel my participation in the transcendent tempos of a healthy spiritual life.

Because community has been essential to my spiritual and emotional well-being, I knew I needed to attend a residential seminary. Sadly, due to the pandemic, these plans had gone awry. I had hoped to move to the East Coast to attend Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS). However, since PTS went entirely online for the 2020-21 school year, I found myself enrolled at Wartburg Theological Seminary (WTS), taking classes online, as many students were during that school year, to fulfill some ordination requirements.

I was in a required half-credit “Spiritual Practices” course, and my professor, the Rev. Dr. Craig Nessan, began each class session with some question like, “How is your soul amid pandemic?” My soul was almost always feeling less than ideal during these Wednesday class periods. One day, he asked about the spiritual practices we were engaging in to support our spiritual lives. Upon hearing this, I realized that I basically had been doing nothing.

During the previous four years, Wartburg College (same name, different institution) was my home. For most of my time there, we had five worship events a week, and I usually attended them all. With the initial panic and lockdown in mid-March, on top of being sent home from my senior year, the following months had very few opportunities for in-person worship. Online worship was not my favorite five years ago, and I remain less than enthusiastic when I am unable to attend in person today.

WTS has weekday chapel services, which they stream online. I did not often zoom in because I couldn’t quite get over how different it felt. My spiritual life was dry. My flame of faith was probably only a little more than a few remaining embers. I had such little routine, so few habits. I needed something to ground me. So, I looked around my bedroom/office and spotted two books.

The first was Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. (1) Authored and edited by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro, I had only heard of Claiborne. At the suggestion of one of my former professors, the Rev. Dr. Kyle Schenkewitz, I had read Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. However, Common Prayer, filled with prayers, readings, and liturgies, had been used by one of my pastoral and academic mentors, Rev. Dr. Kyle Fever, years earlier, when I worked with him at a summer high school theology and leadership institute. With a liturgy for each day of the year, this book would serve as the framework of my new prayer routine.

The second was A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. (2) I believe I scavenged this gem of a book when a former professor was retiring and clearing out his office. Before diving into these devotional contemplations, I knew very little of Thomas Merton. However, through his journal entries, Merton would invite me into his way of seeing the world. The musings of Merton would provide me with devotional writings to be the meat sandwiched between the slices of bread supplied by Claiborne’s daily liturgies.

By this point in my life, I had discerned the call to ordained ministry and was entrenched in the ordination process with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Indeed, I was then, and remain now, deeply rooted within the Lutheran Christian tradition, and yet still “boldly open to insights from other religious and secular traditions.” (3) Shane Claiborne describes himself as a sort of “spiritual mutt,” having influences from the Methodist, Catholic, Pentecostal, and Quaker traditions. (4) An outspoken and vigorous activist, Claiborne has founded or been instrumental in organizations and movements such as The Simple Way, Red-Letter Christians, the New Monastic movement, and RAWtools. Thomas Merton, on the other hand, was a faithful Roman Catholic. More specifically, Merton was a mystic and Trappist monk, a member of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. He spent over half his life cloistered at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani outside of Bardstown, Kentucky. He is probably one of the most well-known and prolific American Catholic writers and theologians of the 20th century, authoring over 60 books, including his bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain.

Devotions, as many can attest, are often hit or miss. I could have picked up more “Lutheran” devotional material, such as Luther Seminary’s “God Pause” or the ELCA’s “Christ in our Home.” However, I felt I was already getting plenty of Lutheranism from my schoolwork at Wartburg Seminary. Some theological reflection from other Christian traditions might do me some good. So, I chose to spend time with Merton the monk and Claiborne the mutt.

It was sort of ironic. What you might expect to get from each of these authors was often flipped. Merton brought reflections of theological and mystical action inspired by a cloistered life of work and prayer. Claiborne, on the other hand, whose work has mainly been in Christian activism, brought the liturgical rhythms needed to sustain any action. The mixture of these two people, and their written works, wedded the richness of mysticism with the practice of action.

So, every night, after getting ready for bed, I lie there with both books on my bedside table. Each liturgy from Common Prayer begins with “O Lord, let my soul rise up to meet you as the day rises to meet the sun.” However, I did my devotions at the end of the day. So, I adapted these starting words to “O Lord, I come to you as another day comes to a close.” Each day from Common Prayer brought not only prayers and scripture, but also wise words from and about sinners and saints from the past.

There was a serene comfort that came each night with these words. Of course, while I was coming to God, God had already drawn near to me. Ironically, when I find myself in times of spiritual distress, when faith and trust seem lacking in the face of a broken world, I lean on and run to things other than God. I know I am not alone in this experience. So, this spiritual discipline was an attempt to drink deeply from traditions not my own. Intentionally taking steps into the darkness, these two books served as lamps to guide my way, with God at my side.

During this spiritually bleak time, I remembered a quote I had heard a few years before—from where I have no idea. “The fastest way to the light is not chasing the day to the west. Rather, it is turning east and sprinting into the darkness of the night. For dawn lies in that direction.” The shadows already surrounded me. Running west as the light faded was not working. I needed to turn around and wander deeper into the dark night. There, the rhythms and readings of Merton and Claiborne continually reminded me of God’s presence, even, and maybe especially, when I couldn’t see it.

As time went on, those lonely embers grew brighter as these theological writers added kindling to my faith fire. Learning from these two ecumenically distinct individuals further prepared me for my time at the ecumenically diverse Princeton Theological Seminary. It opened me up even more to learn from my spiritual siblings of various Christian traditions. The diversity of our rich theological traditions is a gift of God, from which we can learn so much. While not as intense a practice as long periods of devout silence or as demanding as fasting, my simple reading of these unique liturgies and journal entries was enough to comfort my soul and help reorient my view of prayer. I learned to listen more and talk less, for the Holy Spirit speaks to us in ways we don’t often recognize. In the end, I am incredibly grateful for Merton the monk and Claiborne the mutt for helping me through a time in my life when hope was nowhere to be found, and my spiritual life was as dry as a desert.

I leave you, dear reader, with an example of the liturgy from Claiborne and writing from Merton from July 24. (5) May they stir within you, as they did me.

(Claiborne) O Lord, I come to you as another day comes to a close.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
Listen to these words from Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer: “The power of a fully lived life or a truly learned mind is not a power to be sight or contrived. It comes only as we let go of what we possess and find ourselves possessed by a truth greater than our own.”

(Merton) I am reading Karl Rahner’s essays on grace—at least those available in translation, and I do not have time to struggle with the German. They seem clear and obvious. I sometimes wonder why Rahner is considered so dangerous. Perhaps because he is too clear and not involved in the technical mambo jumbo that makes others unreadable. In a word: a readable theologian is dangerous. How true it is that the great obligation of the Christian, especially now, is to prove himself a disciple of Christ by hating no one, that is to say, by condemning no one, rejecting no one. And how true that the impatience that fumes at others and damns them (especially whole classes, races, nations) is a sign of the weakness that is still unliberated, still not tracked by the Blood of Christ, and is still a stranger to the Cross.

(Claiborne) Lord God, our hands are open to you. Our ears are listening to you. Our eyes are watching you. Our hearts are trying to beat with yours. Live in us and love clothes through us today. Amen.

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1) Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010).

2) Jonathan Montaldo, ed., A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2004).

3) “Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities,”

Intersections 49, Article 8 (2019).

4) Mark Tooley, “Christian Pacifist Shane Claiborne,” Juicy Ecumenism, The Institute on Religion & Democracy, May 19, 2020.

5) See Claiborne, Wilson-Hartgrove, and Okoro, Common Prayer, 370; Montaldo, A Year with Thomas Merton, 214.