Election Discernment 2024: A Cruciform Politics, to Love our Neighbors with Your Vote?

Politics as considering others as better than myself?

I was invited to speak at a political rally in the summer of 2020. I didn't have anything original to say at that time. So I memorized a bit of Dr King's writing from his collection of sermons, Strength to Love. All I felt led to do was to repeat these words three times.

The saving of our world from pending doom will come not from the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority but through the creative maladjustment of the nonconforming minority.

So, I'm trying a new thing this election cycle. I promise. I'm much less engaged of FB this time around than I was four years ago. But I have to find creative ways to express my creative maladjustment.

We are all exhausted by this election season. So much of me doesn't want to bother with any of this any more. Yet I continue to find ample amounts of love within, love for you, for my neighbors, for our country, for my wife and children.

So I made this video yesterday as a demonstration of this love. I posted a short edit last night and have received some helpful feedback from friends who feel embattled. I am grateful to be able to offer a hopeful perspective. Maybe the full length vid might help you too.

You are likely pretty beat up by all the pain and polarization, the culture wars. I don't want anyone to put themselves further in harm's way.

Yet, if you have any ounce of hope and strength, I encourage you to charitably, lovingly talk with some of your friends and family about your vote. Please do what you can in the next few days to engage each other.
It doesn't matter if you end up agreeing about policies. It does matter that we try to learn, live, and love each other with greater intention.

With great respect and affection,

Josh

From Victims to Witnesses - Forum on Spiritual Direction No. 98

Moving from victims to witness….

In this episode six members of the School of Contemplative Listening respond to our conviction that spiritual direction can solve (almost) all the world's problems. This is an episode in our onrunning Forum on Spiritual Direction series.

As we propose contemplative listening at the vital intersection of contemplation and justice, we are getting into the deeper terrain of existence. There are many reasons to fall into despair today. But if quiet ourselves and listen, we find that help and healing are not too far away. This is a movement from being victims to becoming witnesses.

This conversation has previously been between Josh Banner and Cami Beecroft Mann. We excited for you to receive the witness from others who have been studying and practicing spiritual direction!

Subscribe to the Invitation podcast:
theinvitationcenter.org/subscribe

To learn about the School of Contemplative Listening:
theinvitationcenter.org/socl

To learn about the Invitation School of Prayer:
theinvitationcenter.org/school-of-prayer

Opening song - "Wrestle" by Kristi Hepp from the album, In Between the Gardens available at kristihepp.bandcamp.com/album/in-betw…n-the-gardens

Our Deep Need for Listening - Forum on Spiritual Direction w/ Cami Beecroft Mann No. 97

We all need help. We can all offer each other help. Cami has taught me so much about these things!

This episode is a conversation Josh had with SOCL co-director, Cami Beecroft Mann in 2021. We consider this episode a prequel to the Forum on Spiritual Direction where Josh and Cami discuss the conviction that spiritual direction can solve (almost) all the world’s problems.

Download our free prayer guide, 40 Ways to Spend Five Minutes with God: https://theinvitationcenter.org/40-ways

Subscribe to the Invitation podcast:
theinvitationcenter.org/subscribe

To learn about the Invitation School of Prayer:
theinvitationcenter.org/school-of-prayer

To learn about the School of Contemplative Listening:
theinvitationcenter.org/socl

Forum on Spiritual Direction Third Conversation w/ Cami Beercroft Mann Part II

Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems.

Can it?

This is the sedon part of our third conversation as Cami and I continue to unpack this question of spiritual direction. What is it? What’s it for? Is it really so vital? Why?

Cami and I engage in an extended contemplative conversation to discern and tease out the dignifying nature of spiritual direction. This is to say we talk about the practice of spiritual direction by practicing spiritual direction. While our society is one of oppression, pressing down upon and minimizing us, the contemplative space of spiritual direction provides a way for us to rediscover the enormity of each other, the profound dignity of each other.

Other avenues of engaging us in this practice:

We are currently registering for new cohorts of SOP & SOCL to begin at the end of the summer and early fall.
The School of Prayer, a nine-month study and practice of the rule of life.
The School of Contemplative Listening, a two-year certification in spiritual direction.

We are also registering for the August 9-10 Invitation Family Camp, a 24 hour, overnight experience for participants in the Invitation formation schools and friends of the Invitation.

TBA: The Failure Lab, a three-month study and and practice of confession and lamentation.

Partner with us: how can the Invitation serve you, your staff, organization, or community? We value your friendship, prayer, and financial support. One-time or recurring donations can be set up HERE at this link.

Peace of Christ to you!

Josh

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Forum on Spiritual Direction Third Conversation w/ Cami Beercroft Mann Part I

Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems.

Can it?

This is the first part of our third conversation as Cami and I continue to unpack this question of spiritual direction. What is it? What’s it for? Is it really so vital? Why?

Cami and I engage in an extended contemplative conversation to discern and tease out the dignifying nature of spiritual direction. This is to say we talk about the practice of spiritual direction by practicing spiritual direction. While our society is one of oppression, pressing down upon and minimizing us, the contemplative space of spiritual direction provides a way for us to rediscover the enormity of each other, the profound dignity of each other.

Other avenues of engaging us in this practice:

We are currently registering for new cohorts of SOP & SOCL to begin at the end of the summer and early fall.
The School of Prayer, a nine-month study and practice of the rule of life.
The School of Contemplative Listening, a two-year certification in spiritual direction.

We are also registering for the August 9-10 Invitation Family Camp, a 24 hour, overnight experience for participants in the Invitation formation schools and friends of the Invitation.

TBA: The Failure Lab, a three-month study and and practice of confession and lamentation.

Partner with us: how can the Invitation serve you, your staff, organization, or community? We value your friendship, prayer, and financial support. One-time or recurring donations can be set up HERE at this link.

Peace of Christ to you!

Josh

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"Humans Are Like Carrots" - Forum on Spiritual Direction w/ Cami Beercroft Mann No. 80

Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems.

Can it?

This is our second full conversation of the Forum on Spiritual Direction where we continue to discern the focus question for discernment, "Can Spiritual Direction Solve (Almost) All of Our Problems?"

Cami and I engage in an extended contemplative conversation to discern and tease out the dignifying nature of spiritual direction. This is to say we talk about the practice of spiritual direction by practicing spiritual direction. While our society is one of oppression, pressing down upon and minimizing us, the contemplative space of spiritual direction provides a way for us to rediscover the enormity of each other, the profound dignity of each other.

Carrots grow best in a loose, fluffy, well-draining soil. Gardeners call this “fertile sandy loam.” If planted in tightly compacted, rocky soil with clods and debris, carrots growth will not only be stunted. They will become twisted, distorted knots.

Human beings also need ample space, the comfort of love, patience, and kindness to flourish. Our society and sadly even the church at times are oppressive in ways that define our individual and collective experience of trauma, the arrested development of of spiritual, mental, and even physical health.

We believe that spiritual direction, careful, contemplative listening is the most effective way for humans to help each other discover and rediscover this kind of flourishing.

For those interested in an in-person retreat to further engage this question of spiritual direction, we are gathering people for a March 16-18 retreat here in West Michigan. Email Josh with your interest.

Other avenues of engaging us in this practice:

The School of Prayer, a nine-month study and practice of the rule of life.

The School of Contemplative Listening, a two-year certification in spiritual direction.

TBA: The Failure Lab, a three-month study and and practice of confession and lamentation.

Partner with us: how can the Invitation serve you, your staff, organization, or community? We value your friendship, prayer, and financial support. One-time or recurring donations can be set up HERE at this link.

Peace of Christ to you!

Josh

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"Composting Failure" - Forum on Spiritual Direction No. 79

Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems.

Can it?

This episode something of an experiment for the Forum on Spiritual Direction. As I have struggled to accept my own failures, I offer some of my weaknesses and questions with you as an opportunity to explore the focus question of this series: can spiritual direction solve (almost) all of the world's problems? This episode turns out to be a kind of audio essay with no specific final point, no definite idea. Mostly I am looking to share myself and to welcome you deeper into this conversation I’m having with Cami.

Over the holiday while home, I was prompted by the previous Forum discussion with Cami about the spirituality of our origins. So I take you on an audio walk around the Illinois farm where I was raised. I then share some further reflections while on retreat at St. Gregory's Abbey in Three Rivers Michigan.

I’m considering how deep listening to our failures is a necessary, essential a gift for the sake of our healing and growth. Failures can become compost!

Much Love to you!

Josh

**The picture I’ve used for this episode is from our family farm, taken the morning of January 3, 2023

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Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems - A Forum on SD Intro No. 78

Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems.

Can it?

This is the second half of our new series with Cami Mann, "The Forum on Spiritual Direction.’ In this session Cami beautifully invites us into her journey in and out and back into her Catholic faith practice. She shares some of her own trauma, and begins to map out the unique charism of her trauma informed practice of spiritual direction.

In the scope of this series, you are invited to engage at least two zoom conversations and to even attend an in-person retreat. Details on these events along with a working outline of the Forum can be found HERE.

Josh and Cami serve as the co-directors of the Invitation School of Contemplative Listening, a study and practice of spiritual direction at the vital intersection of contemplation and justice.

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‘Yes’ to Frailty

The Invitation Podcast has always consisted of guided prayers, meditations, and spiritual conversations. My interest has not been in teaching the ideas of formation but to invite listeners into the experiential, transformative reality of God.

This Forum series with Cami is proving to be the most substantial documentation I’ve offered to date of this sacred, contemplative space. I eagerly offer these things to you with an evangelical zeal that I thought I had forgotten. I’m jealous for you to get your heart and mind into this transformative reality too. Yet, I’m attempting to invite you to this space with patience and generosity. Genuine, thoughtful exchange is at a premium today. To engage you in these things in any way is precious and holy. The question is how to be enthusiastic, eager, even zealous to connect with you and yet, and yet….to not wear out my welcome, to not scare you away, to not impose myself upon you, to not create another set of “shoulds” for you to attain, another stage for you to perform on.

As I mention in this episode, I’m thinking about the podcast, this Forum especially, as a message in a bottle. If you are the one who has found my bottle, you will find scraps of paper stuffed inside that read:

Please, don’t “should” on yourself.

Please, notice my affection is for you to be you as you are, messy, disregulated, riddled with doubt.

Please, we are only as gentle with others as we are with ourselves.

I've been thinking about the intimate relationship between madness and genius. This spectrum is well researched in terms of our greatest artists and thinkers. To dream dreams, to hope with vision that is beyond our current conceptual realities requires one to be relatively unstable, flexible, even crazy. I immediately think of St Francis stripping naked and giving away all his earthly possessions. Do you recall any holy fools? Do you hold them at arms length with indifference? I have. Today, they are making more and more sense, a different kind of sense. Sixth grader Kadisha Hamed said, Mr. Banner, that doesn’t make sense” after I had read Robert Frost to her class. I replied so many years ago, “it doesn’t have to make sense in order to make sense.” Foolishness. Instability. Madness.

C.S. Lewis famously taught us that Jesus must either be Lord, liar, or lunatic. He cannot be all of those things. Last night in our School of Prayer cohort, one participant quoted Shane Claiborne that those following Jesus should like him “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” More madness, yet genius.

I definitely do not want here to recognize my own genius. I’m suggesting that being formed in Christ, to become like him, this requires of us a level of instability to see what he sees, to love what he loves, and to love how he loves. It’s the chicken and the egg. We need a particular kind of instability, a familiarity with our abundant weaknesses and failures, to live as confessional beings. The ancients called this “compunction,” when the ego is punctured, when all my modes of self-determination have been frayed, when I can no longer pull myself together and function as a socially acceptable, productive, consuming member of society. When my ego is punctured, when my self-determination is flattened and emptied, I have created more space for the Spirit to fill and move in and through me.

The cruciform irony is that my weakness is the greatest gift I have to offer you. In our nothingness we can find more ready access to everything of God. This will always come off as foolishness even to the religious establishment. I will say that the arena of spiritual direction, to spend an hour listening for the movements of the Holy Spirit in another person, to not teach, instruct, or fix that person, this madness is a wager on the genius of Christ revealed in others as they are without explanation or qualification.

I pray you will find a way to be uncouth today, to fall off your rocker. Oh that you will become unmoored and even dizzy in your freedom to love God, others, and even yourself in unnecessary, extravagant ways.

Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems - A Forum on SD Intro No. 77

Spiritual Direction Can Solve (almost) All of the World's Problems.

Can it?

1. This is the first part of two episodes introducing our new series, the Invitation "Forum on Spiritual Direction' where Cami Mann and Josh Banner invite you into a long conversation to consider the vital, healing need of contemplative listening especially today. In this forum Josh and Cami attempt to talk about spiritual direction through a practice of spiritual direction. That is to say, these are vulnerable, self-disclosive contemplative conversations where Josh and Cami attempt to listen and respond to the movements of the Holy Spirit in each other. They share their enthusiasm and insight, yet they also share their struggles, doubts, and fears.

You are invited to engage at least two zoom conversations and to even attend an in-person retreat. Details on these events along with a working outline of the Forum can be found HERE.

This part of the conversation is an honest, confessional exploration into the nature of what has become the Invitation Center in and through Josh, the founder and lead of the Invitation. In part two of this introduction, the focus turns to Cami's trauma-informed practice of direction and the story of how she came to her practice.

Josh and Cami serve as the co-directors of the Invitation School of Contemplative Listening, a study and practice of spiritual direction at the vital intersection of contemplation and justice.

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I stayed off the news and social media last week and hope to remain off through Thanksgiving at least. But I peeked today and saw that on the day after mid-term elections, the world continues under the heavy, oppressive weight of strife, infighting, polarization.

The only solution, the best solution is contemplative listening.

The warden of my facility still has not allowed volunteers back into the prison. It’s been almost three years since I’ve been able to practice contemplative listening with my incarcerated brothers. That intimate community and our shared practices had been my grounding space. Ironically, two days a month in the prison helped me stay sane. Without access to that holy communion, the School of Prayer and the School of Contemplative Listening have emerged to offer other spaces of sanity, grounding, healing, hope. Both the SOP and the SOCL are expressions of what I learned from my six years in the prison.

With this Forum on Spiritual Direction, I’m attempting to extend that holy, sacred space that began in the prison to you. I truly do believe that spiritual direction can solve (almost) all the world’s problems. I will dare to say that what Cami Mann and I are learning to see, what we are tasting, touching, practicing, and inviting you into—this is the most valuable, precious, healing, and therefore vital “meaning of life” conversation I can offer you.

Please understand there is nothing new here. It’s just taken me a long time, suffering, extensive successes and failures to better see the extent of Jesus’ life and teaching. The prison conversations had served as an incubator, ironically the prison as a greenhouse to nurture what has been emerging in me and the Invitation. Without access to the prison the SOP, SOCL, and especially Cami have served in lieu of the prison in this capacity. Cami is especially gifted as a midwife to help me and indeed all of us involved in the Invitation with this work of integration and discovery.

We are not claiming our own genius or to be unique messengers either. What we can offer you is a glimpse into how we are today, at this current time in our current place are learning to respond to the Holy Spirit in and through what we’ve learned from St Ignatius and Thomas Merton, Theresa of Avila and Howard Thurman, St John of the Cross and Fr Martin Laird, St Francis and James Cone, The desert Abbas and Ammas as well as Willie James Jennings (and more).

I encourage you to spend time with Ephesians 5:16 today: “Make most of your time for the days are evil.”

Eugene Peterson gives this passage more breadth in his Message translation:

I believe something like spiritual direction, contemplative, deep listening, a sharing of my depths with your depths, to linger in careful God conversation—this is how we make most of our time. This is what we were created for. This is how we heal and grow together.

I hope and pray you will not only pursue your own healing, but that you will become a wounded healer!

Love & Peace,

Josh