Council for Health and Human Service Ministries

Word and Deed: Thoughts on Faith-Based Leadership

A Banquet of Sacraments - Four Measures of Pleasure to Satisfy Your Soul

During this season of Lent, does the sacrifice(s) you have made provide you with the soul food that you hunger for? In this time of transformation and rejuvenation, if your intention is to go deeper spiritually in order to experience a greater sense of wholeness, perhaps a simple little book entitled Morning Sun on a White Piano will help get you there. If you relish quiet time for reflection, merciful moments, and gentle reminders that God is still speaking, add this little gem to your life to enrich this sacred season.

Morning Sun on a White Piano - Simple Pleasures & the Sacramental Life was written by Dr. Robin R. Meyers, senior minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City and professor of speech and rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. Here is a taste from the banquet of sacraments that Dr. Meyers has prepared:

The Lost Art of Conversation: In the recovery of a sacramental life of simple pleasures, the first order of business is to cut the cord on the television set--that cultural IV bottle that drips its anxiety and terror into the sanctity of sacred space and keeps us all drugged with impossible images of the unattainable life...Resolve to talk more and be entertained less.

Music and the Measured Life: The simple sacramental life craves music the way it craves food--cooked slowly and served in courses. It anticipates the flavor of a familiar verse, a remembered melody that never fails to satisfy...Find the musical sound you love and, like a suitor, go to it often. The next time you go to hear live music, consider that time before the concert, when the musicians are tuning up, to be very much like the work of the soul. It is all a noisy, cranky cacophony until joined in the service of harmony.

Eating Books: The Feast of Imagination: No matter what our age, we ought never to stop eating books, for books are the feast of the imagination. Unlike the visual arts, books leave us humanely in charge of that process by which images move from type to flesh...As a prerequisite to empathy, imagination makes kindness possible by allowing us to inhabit the skins we weren't born in. Lack of imagination, on the other hand, makes the inflicting of pain, in all its forms, possible. Never are we more honest about cruelty, prejudice, or abuse than when we begin, "You can not imagine how it feels..."

Parenting: Big Gods and Little Gods: If you have children, consider parenthood a high and holy art, until death parts you from their constant gaze...The Little gods watch our every move; they soak up whatever bliss or vinegar is available in the house. Either it makes them weightless or it makes them sour...Ours is not yet a world fit for children. To make it so, we will have to reconstruct the meaning of the "good life." For children, life is good when there's more light in the house than darkness. After all, what the Little gods want is for the Big gods to be happy, and to give them just a little more time.

Shirley Nelson

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