Tuning a piano and Christian Spirituality

Every church I have ever been in has a crazy amount of pianos. For some reason when someone no longer wants their piano they give it to a church. Churches feel bad tossing this piano and so there it sits in a room, hopeful to be used.  

Every now and again the church will hire a piano tuner to come in and tune each piano. What is interesting about this process is that the tuner, tunes each piano to their standard as opposed to tuning one piano then adjust the other pianos to match the one adjusted piano. 

This the spiritual life of the Christian. We are tune our lives to Jesus. This is why the spiritual practices and disciplines are needed for us. These are the ways we tap into the notes of Jesus and tune our lives. We pray so we can listen. We study scripture so we can sound like Jesus. We fast so we can feel like Jesus. When we practice the disciplines we are tuning our lives to Jesus. 

Perhaps the great irony is that when we tune our lives to Jesus then we also get in tune with others, but when we tune our lives to others we are not always in tune with Jesus. 

Christian spirituality is like an apple ripening

Merton once asked, "how does an apple rippen?" His answer to his own question - "it just sits in the sun."

American myths promote that if you are not growing then you must be dying. If you are not working then you are lazy. If you are not moving then you must be dead. I suppose this is where Christianity differs from the American myths. 

There is little we can do to mature. That sometimes being still does not mean you are dead. If we are not growing larger that does not mean we are dead, it could mean we are maturing. 

This is where our churches are failing. We are convinced of the American myth more than we are of the Spiritual Truth that Merton so plainly points out. 

In order to mature, we need to sit in the sun and trust that the sun will do what that sun (son) does.

A net full of fish and the fear of the other

There is a story in the Bible where several of the disciples are fishing and they come up short. They are instructed by a man on the beach to put the net on the right side of the boat and when they do the net is full of fish. The man on the shore is Jesus and the number of fish are over 150. 

The meaning of the number of fish has been debated for as long as this story has been told. Why the number is very specific - 153 - and it seems like it should mean something. Some have said that it is the number of fish types known at that time. Others have used this number as some sort of "code" that reveals a secret message. I have no idea what the number means. What I am most interested in is the note that the net did not break.

Religion has a history of setting boundaries up to define who is in and who is out. There is an underlying fear that if we let just anyone "in" that the line between in and out will be blurry and perhaps the whole thing will come undone. We see this when someone in Christianity talks about universal salvation. Some fear universal salvation because if anyone "gets in" then that means that all that I know to be true (there are saved people and unsaved people) is undone.

When I read about the net being so full and overflowing but not breaking, leads me to believe that all the fear that I have about what happens when the boundaries break, or the anxiety that I have when my social structures are broken down, or the worry that I have when I consider what would happen if I really let everyone come to the table, are all a matter of my lack of faith. 

When our borders are removed it may not mean that our nets will break. Having faith is trusting that the net is strong enough to support everyone.