Creativity

Today’s Word: Doxology

Steve · July 23, 2013 · 4 Comments

The other night, Sue and I were sitting on the deck at the very end of the day as the light was fading and darkness was just creeping in. The crickets and the frogs were doing their thing incredibly loud, a crescendo of spindly legs and balloon-throated amphibians, a symphony of sound that rose and fell every 30 seconds or so, as if led by an invisible, knowing, baton-wielding hand. But whose?

“The whole of creation comes from God, goes back to God and is in God,” Paul Coutinho writes in his newest book, An Ignatian Pathway. “Creation finds its identity in God and the interconnectedness of all life.”

Ignatius once described the trinity as a three-note chord. And so I wonder, listening to the crickets and frogs, how many individual notes are sounding tonight, all of them resonating with the pure tone of the trinity ringing throughout the universe?

Praise God from whom all music flows. Praise God all singers and players here below. Praise God above the heavenly strains of sound and silence. Glory be to the composer, and to the singer, and to the conductor, one God forever and ever. Amen.

Ask yourself in silence: What do I hear when I take the time to be silent and listen? How does music connect me to God?

A call for guest bloggers: Writing as a true spiritual discipline

Steve · May 11, 2013 · 3 Comments

“When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you set in place...SJG photo.

“Writing,” Henri Nouwen wrote, “can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories. Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write.”

So…I’m embarrassed to see that I’ve not posted anything here since December 29. Ach! I have no real excuses, other than a busy work schedule, a couple of graduate classes (I’m completing a graduate certificate in Spiritual Direction at Aquinas Institute of Theology here in St. Louis…) and, oh yeah, I’m about to become a grandpa for the first time! (Although, admittedly, I had very little to do with that last one and I can’t blame him or her for my blog-crastination. Watch for a photo soon!

I’m planning a regular (hopefully weekly) summer series of short blogs, the theme of which I’m still considering and mulling over. In the meantime, I thought I’d give some of you a chance to share your writing on this site. (And I know from hearing from some of you that there are some very good writers out there among my subscribers).
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On the Road: A house built on solid rock

Steve · September 17, 2011 · 7 Comments

The next in an occasional series of travelogue/photo essays on seeing and experiencing intersections of faith, history and culture — on seeing new and old communities of faith.

butte — Outside Sedona. Photo by Steve Givens

Sue and I just returned from a week in Sedona, Arizona, celebrating our 31^st anniversary surrounded by some of God’s very best handiwork. Located in Arizona’s high desert country under the southwestern rim of the Colorado Plateau, Sedona is situated at the mouth of spectacular Oak Creek Canyon and surrounded by massive red-rock formations. It was a glorious week of rest and walking the area’s myriad hiking trails that drew us right up to the bases of the rock formations with names like Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte and Boynton Canyon.

But located between Sedona and the Village of Oak Creek is one of the region’s manmade (and woman-designed!) wonders: The Chapel of the Holy Cross. We had been through here once before when the kids were…well…kids. We had stopped at the chapel then, too, but this time we had more time to savor the beauty of the chapel and its setting, and even experience a beautifully simple Taize ecumenical prayer service.

Although operated by the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix and St. John Vianney Parish of Sedona (our parish home for the week), the church is open to all and is not an operating Catholic church. The story behind its design and creation is the story of one artist’s vision, a nagging dream and her desire to find the spirit of Christ in her art.

chapel1 — Chapel of the Holy Cross. Photo by Steve Givens

Want to hear a good story? Listen to your elders…

Steve · May 31, 2011 · 4 Comments

IMG_8437_2 — Daytona Beach, photo by Steve Givens, June 2011

Out on the beach today, I saw an old guy sitting in a wheelchair, staring out at the surging ocean. The waves off Daytona Beach were crashing loudly just 50 feet out, but by the time they reached the wheels of his chair they were just harmless bubbles and foam. He sat there for some time, and I wondered what was going through his mind.

Likely, he was wondering how it has all come to this – sitting in a chair and staring at the ocean instead of plunging headlong into the oncoming waves. Perhaps he had been a championship swimmer or a surfer dude in the 1950s. Perhaps he stormed a beach in France and can never shake those gruesome memories. No doubt he saw the hard, fit bodies of the young men and women running and playing around him and remembered his own halcyon days of summer. But I’ll never know what he was thinking because I didn’t ask him. I just saw him as “an old guy in a wheelchair.”

The Spirit of a Piece of Land: Nearer My God to Thee

Steve · October 31, 2010 · 2 Comments

Sue and I own a sloping patch of land in central Missouri where we have a small, 50-year-old weekend cabin on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, a sprawling, man-made, spider of a body of water, created by the damming of the Osage River back in 1931 and dotted now with houses and jet skis. But it’s a nice quiet getaway, especially this time of year, when the crowds and most of the loud boats have disappeared for the season. It’s our favorite time of year.

The dam created one of the Midwest’s favorite (and most beautiful!) summer playgrounds, but it no doubt took with it the history and culture of those who lived here before, and I do think of that often. What exactly was right here on our little plot before the dam I cannot say. Maybe just a shady corner of a majestic and ancient forest akin to that which still exists as you move in all directions away from the lake, but perhaps more. Maybe someone’s home, someone’s church, someone’s grave.

And before then? Before the coming of the white man? Perhaps where I sit right now typing on my laptop a young tough-skinned Osage Indian crouched in his very first hunt, his bow drawn and his eyes locked on a 16-point buck making its way gingerly through the trees to drink from a sliver of a stream.

The point is this: We don’t really own the land. We are given the blessing of calling bits and pieces of it “home” for a while, but it belongs to the creator and to the lives of all who have touched it and worked it and walked it over the years.