I’m taking a course at CMU. It’s been a great experience. Two of the main reasons that it has been so good is that it’s a graduate level course with only 11 students and that it’s about spiritual formation. What this means is that as we discuss what spiritual formation is and how we can understand and facilitate this in our lives. Through this we are getting to know each other quite well. With each week I enjoy the different perspectives and people more. People share their lives, hopes, and even a few fears. What has happened in this class reminds me of what one of the authors we are reading says about language and words. If you’ve read my blog in the past you probably know that I love words, love to find out what I’m thinking as I write, love to create something new and different with words.
Peterson writes:
“There is an enormous communications industry in the world that is stamping out words like buttons….Implicit in the enormous communications industry is an enormous lie – that if we improve communications we will improve life. It has not happened and it will not happen. Often when we find out what a person “has to say”, we like them less, not more.” HA! I laughed when I read that…because I could instantly see the truth of it…we have all seen it.
He writes further: ” Words used as mere communication are debased words. The gift of words is for communion: a part of my self enters a part of your self. This requires the risk of revelation, the courage of involvement. At the center of communion there is sacrifice. Working at the center, we don’t use words to give something but to give up a piece of ourselves. Communion is not as much interested in using words to define meaning as to deepen mystery, to enter into the ambiguities, push past the safely known into the risky unknown.”
And when this happens things seem to breathe more deeply. This morning as my kids were getting ready for school we were all using a lot of communication…except for Graeme…he was all about communion. It took me a while to hear him as he was using a lot of ‘tude in his communion. Sorting out the ‘tude from the message can be a little tricky at times. How do we respect our children, listen for the pieces of themselves that they are offering and at the same time teach them to respect those around them with tone and choice of words. It’s easy to shut someone down or out when they are very, very, very, grumpy.
But Peterson says something about this as well: “We who are made in the “image” of God have, as a consequence, imag-ination. Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we see reality whole, in context. “What imagination does with reality is the reality we live by”" and tag to this another quote from him, “In every visit, every meeting I attend, every appointment I keep, I have been anticipated. The risen Christ got there ahead of me. The risen Christ is in that room already. What is he doing? What is is he saying? What is going on?”
When I think to use my image-ination, when I look for Christ in my home, my kids, my vocation as a mother, suddenly I breathe easier (as one of my classmates shared in class last night)…I remind myself that Christ was in my children’s dreams as they slept, he was there as they opened their sleepy eyes in the morning, as they interact with me in the business of the morning. When I pay attention to this, energy flows in a new direction, new things are created, communion occurs…even if someone calls me mean or expresses disgust at the meal I have prepared (sometimes this is me hahaha).
Peterson, and many others, have said that faith is dead unless it lives within the grittiness of live, in the dailyness of life…when I take all this head knowledge that I’m learning from the course, and allow it to come to life in the realness of a Thursday morning before school…it transforms life…a new present is created, a new future is created. When something is practiced it goes from head to heart to action to communion. Cool.

























At Falcon Lake there are some jumping cliffs…and you can jump from any height up to about 8 m. There is a rope swing at one spot. Our kids looooove going to this place. It’s in a bay and often sheltered from the wind. They’ll play on the rocks and paddle about in the water for a looong time. It’s very pretty with the rugged cliff walls and the jack pines…a great place to anchor your boat and relax for a while. Every year the kids get a little bit braver. This year they’ve been jumping from the rope jumping spot without lifejackets. Ali did this once last year together with her dad…this year the older two are jumping from here with glee. Jordan’s content with the lower jumps for now. The jump is between 4 and 5 meters I think…high enough to make my stomach do a flip when I jump…which I haven’t for a very long time…and I’m oh so fine with that.









Kids amaze me. How they can come up with something creative and entertaining to do in almost any situation. Too bad the ideas don’t always fit with the circumstances (ie. tag in the china shop). Over the past few weekends at the cottage they have devised several ‘games’. Here you see them working together to put a potato chip on a fishing line (no worries, there was no hook). And then the fun began…fishing for siblings:




