Can you fall in love this summer?
Our winters are long here in West Michigan. Even when we are not buried in several feet of snow with a layer of ice, there's still the "lake effect" cloud cover which means our days of annual sunlight are only slightly better than Seattle. Now that the sun has finally come out, it has taken me a few weeks to get used to it. I wanted the sun desperately, but my winter-sick body didn't know how to take in the goodness of the light.
In the 63rd Psalm the author pines,
My soul thirsts for you in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Here in West Michigan we might say,
My soul yearns for you in a dark and cold land where there is no sunlight.
So, for us, summer ends up being an especially dreamy, fantastical set of months in which we put a lot of hope. If it's not travel, it's long weekends, patios and grills, trips to the beach, lingering with friends and family, sunsets after 9pm, and then fireflies. Summers are a good time to fall in love.
The question is how. The intent of the Summer Retreat 2018 is to create time and space for us to consider the advantages of summer for falling in love with God.
It seems that every year Protestants engage Advent and Lent with more and more intentionality. But what about Ordinary Time, the other 34 of our 52 weeks of each year? In American culture, summer, a long stretch of Ordinary Time, it's something of a holy season. I recently recorded a conversation with Chuck DeGroat, professor of pastoral care, counseling, and Christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary.
Chuck and I discussed how much of spiritual practice is about learning to be aware and present to yourself, to others, and God. Isn't this what we long for in a good summer, to be present, alive, awake? As we continued to talk, the parameters of a "spirituality of summer" began to emerge. In summer we tend to be more present. We seek rest and opportunities to be playful. We find ways to disrupt our habits of busyness, to slow ourselves and to enjoy the good life.
How then can we gracefully add intentionality to our summer practices to make ourselves especially available to the Holy Spirit that we might fall in love with God, to rest in the transformative love of Jesus? This Summer Retreat 2018 will offer you time and space as well as some helpful vocabulary to further consider the advantages of summer for spiritual formation.
I invite you to the Summer Retreat 2018. In this Introduction Part One, we prepare for the retreat by praying through a section of C.S. Lewis' great sermon, "The Weight of Glory."
My conversation with Chuck DeGroat, Introduction Part Two will be available in a week. The subsequent four episodes moving through August will be spiritual conversations with small groups of pastors and friends to discuss prayers of the heart, mind, soul, and strength. As we fall in love, we learn more about our personal, unique mode of love but then we will also want to stretch beyond ourselves and learn new ways to love. As we learn new ways to love, our hearts will be expanded and we will become, in the language of Chuck's book, Wholehearted (which is a highly recommended summer read)!
