The Unlikely Spiritual Practice of Wonder & Delight

If you haven’t yet had a chance, I’d suggest starting here with these essays before jumping into this week’s Field Notes so that what follows will make a bit more sense to you:

1. 🎉 Announcing our new series: Unlikely Spiritual Practices: This one is for the Quiet Time Drop-Outs

2. We are not trying to become worthy of grace; we are learning to live as though grace is already true: Unlikely Spiritual Practices Part 2 (Practices named: Deconstruction + Staying Open to God)

3. Today!

Hi friends,

I’ve been thinking of how best to structure this series so that it doesn’t inadvertently turn into another laundry list of “To-Do” things that leave us feeling inadequate. After all, too many of us have spent far too much time feeling like failures because of our challenges/questions/exhaustion with traditional spiritual practices. After all, we won’t find a good pathway to spiritual flourishing by simply updating shame tactics with cool new language or branding while keeping the same spirit of performance and earning in place. That was a big reason why I started us off last week by setting the table for this series as a relaxed one, hopefully establishing the heart behind what we’re doing here and why.

In that same hope, I’ve decided that rather than simply list out a bunch of practices for you to work on or treat as a measuring stick, I’ve decided to offer any specific practices I share with you as simple offerings or starting points under a larger idea that you can expand yourself. That way, there is a lot of room for you to integrate the approach without a lot of heavy-handedness about the method, if that makes sense.

So for instance, today I want to talk about the beautiful and unlikely spiritual practices of Wonder and Delight. I’ve got a few ideas for how that shows up in my own life but by talking more broadly about the invitation of wonder and delight, I hope that my few ideas only spark your own and that you will feel free to explore your own - likely already in place! - unlikely spiritual practices for how you experience wonder and delight in your own life.

The Secret Field Notes Podcast Episode 52 is up and waiting for you to listen to either through your web browser or through your preferred podcast listening app.

(Yes, that was a ringing telephone - landline! - in the background halfway through. I am nothing if not professional. 😐)

LISTEN

This week, we’ll cover the following

• Seriously?

• In praise of inefficient practices

• Despair is never just personal

• Jesus the Poet

• The First Step: Before the Wonder and Delight

• A Few Starting Points

• And our Reflection Questions

So let’s get started!

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” Abraham Joshua Heschel