I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for The Rev. Dr. William Carl Thomas’ reflection on a balcony perspective, humility, and illuminating God’s love in the world
I recognize that I interact in the world on the dance floor while I interpret the world from the balcony. My contemplative practice uses the guiding values / spiritual principles that populate the part of me that observes and influences my behavior from the balcony with the part of me that is simulated by the what goes on around me and with me on the dance floor. One of my profound spiritual directors challenged me to be aware of the movement to and from head and heart. This became the foundation that nurtured the Benedictine presence in my spirituality that found companionship with virtues of Franciscan practice.
Learning to listen deeply to God and one another is often joyful, sometimes awkward, downright painful at times, but always the strength of my contemplative practice that brings the presence that reminds me that I am not alone even when I feel least lovable. A word that could sum up the previous somewhat complicated sentence is humility. Indeed, when writing my autoethnographic self-study in 2013 that became my doctoral thesis entitled Intrapersonal Intelligence Mediated By Self-Reflective Adaptive Practice That Manages Anxiety: Learning To Lead By Giving Space, I collated into Appendix H the Spiritual Principles and Guiding Wisdom from the time I entered seminary in 1986. The graphic that accompanies this brief essay reminds me prayers, hymns, scripture, and other meaningful thoughts that find root in this appendix and still speak to my being.
The graphic helps me bring my contemplative presence to my work and to my family as it not only reminds me of who I believe I am but challenges me to be more of who God created me to be. The energy this challenge stimulates is to not gain God’s favor, which I already have by God’s grace, but guides me to recall the moment when I found and began to live in the peace of the breath prayer God placed in me when I least expected it and needed it most: I have nothing to prove, only your holy invitations to offer. Humility allows me to find joy in the reality that I am good enough even as I struggle with an honest appraisal of my imperfection.
The core of the graphic is a sun that pushes against diminishment while offering illumination. I am sensitive to darkness and light as images that are easily full of cultural bias and the projection of power. I ring the sun with words by Cardinal John Henry Newman, “Stay with me: So as to shine as to be a light to others…The light, O Jesus, will be all from thee.” Not in my graphic but writ on my heart is his phrase, “the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do.” For me, the sun in the graphic pulsates with thirty years of the ingrained Collect for Mission by Bishop Charles Henry Brent and the recent discovery of The Prayer of Self-Dedication by Archbishop William Temple. Thus the writer David Brooks found fertile ground for me to claim that I am more who God has created me to be when I act as an illuminator and not a diminisher.
The center of the sun graphic has the points of four arrows that hopefully evoke a compass. An early learning from Stephen Covey about the Compass and the Clock is foundational. I can easily be drawn into the demands of events and things as represented by the clock but when I recall the image of the true guidance a compass offers, I find relationships with people to be most in harmony and balance with spiritual principles and leadership practices. Deep Church is an example of how I found a throwaway term and gave it meaning as a way of expressing my understanding of what it means to be with a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to share intimately the love of God. In the heart of the compass cross in the sun graphic are words that evoke the promise of what it means to live in relationship with God and one another. I think I now use these words as an illuminator’s clarion call: We belong to one another. Together, with God’s help, we can make one another stronger.
That slogan would be a fine way to end this brief reflection. However, God’s sense of humor found me once again while I was serving as priest in an eight-month interim position. Psalm 71, verse 18 as translated in the Book of Common Prayer, now lives on the opening graphic on my iPhone as well as in my heart: And now that I am old and gray-headed, O God, do not forsake me, till I make known your strength to this generation and your power to all who are to come. I would not have heard God speak if I had not been primed to listen by my contemplative practice. Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as thou shinest: so to shine as to be a light to others.
In the fall of 2018 The Rev. Dr. William Carl Thomas became a retired Episcopal Priest living in New Bern NC. Bill brings with 37 years ordained experience as a Coach and Sunday Supply Priest. Bill is a former member of the Interim Ministry Network Faculty. Meet Bill at WCTcoach.com.
