I have just facilitated a retreat on transitions for a wonderful women’s group. One of the things I love about doing retreats is the atmosphere of longing for God that retreatants create. In this heavily scheduled day and age, a person who is willing to set aside a whole day for God is a person who is thirsty […]
Category: prayer
What Is Prayer?
Theologians and worshipers through the ages have come up with different ideas about what prayer is. That could have been a lovely thing, bringing more forms of prayer into the common domain and giving us more avenues to being close to God. But that’s not what happened. Unfortunately the old temptation to claim that there is a Right way and a Wrong […]
Be Careful What You Pray for…
On 12/5 I wrote about my new spiritual discipline of practicing gratitude and praying that my desire for things that aren’t simple would fade away, that those things would become undesirable to me. I also prayed that I would become more aware of God’s abundance in life. As many others do, I close my prayers by saying “amen” – let it be so. […]
Gratitude
Every Tuesday for the past 4 weeks, I have co-facilitated an Ignatian Prayer Experience at the Recovery Cafe in downtown Seattle. Women and men who are in various stages of recovery from alcoholism, drug use, homelessness, and mental health challenges meet to support each other in the hard work required to stay on the journey towards healthy mind and spirit. Every […]
Recipe for Upside-Down World
I turned to Matthew 19 to look at the story in which Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Then my Quaker seminary training reminded me to check the stories that came before and […]
Joyful Ineptitude
I’ve started taking piano lessions again, just like I did when I was a teenager. I played the piano for about three years back then, and then I quit because I wasn’t very good at it. You see, I’m pretty much tone deaf and I’m also rhythmically impaired. Now I’m playing the piano, not because I’m good at […]
The Jesus Prayer
I have found myself using a prayer a lot these days that I never thought I would ever use. I just didn’t like its theology. However, this year I have become much more involved in social justice activities and I am frequently filled with what I like to think of as righteous anger. Whereas anger […]
Susanne Kromberg's Musings 