pat loughery

Random notes on things I am taking away from Emergent Convention 05:

I really enjoy Tony Jones’ new book, The Sacred Way. It’s essentially an overview of ancient spiritual practices told simply, easily and is a book I don’t have to have my highlighter handy for. I value that. I finished the first half in the airports and on the airplanes on the way home. I only wish Tony would have described icons a bit better; I think that section is weaker than the others.

From Rachelle’s We Speak Art workshop, I feel unleashed to begin creating a prayer book for/from our people. Piggybacking on Pagitt’s book which talks about how his church uses prayers/rites/creeds as an interactive community shaper. I am noticing more and more these days how much I value and use written prayers in my walk. We’ll begin to introduce creeds and ancient prayers in our community and see how it goes. I’m also going to find a spot on some website or another to collect these prayers and make it a groupblog kind of thing.

I’m learning more and more about my own voice and my calling. Dave Paisley and I talked a bit about why we blog. Seeing the differences in calls & contexts between the work I do and the work that Rachelle does, or that Jen does, that helps a lot.

I REALLY love Tribe-LA’s CD. I find myself chanting the last song (Yahweh), and the song about reflecting as the moon reflects the son/sun.

I realize that the crisis point I blogged about (and really want to delete, but that would bother me more) was a mini-“dark night of the soul”. I made this connection while reading Tony’s book, but I can’t find where now.

I am looking for a spiritual director now.

I am very intrigued by Mars Hill Grad School’s new M. Div program.

I still need to go back and fill in the blanks a bit, blog the things that happened before Thursday.