Spiritual Autobiography

One of the assignments I have to do for this class is to write a short paper on my spiritual journey focusing on my earliest childhood memories.  Should make for a very interesting read:)  I came across some questions today that I think will be helpful as I think through my earliest memories and try to make sense of them.  I found them on this site:  http://spiritualdevelopmentcenter.org/ 

Here they are:

• What is your first name and age and where do you live?
• Does your name have a meaning or a story attached to it?
• As a child, what did your parents teach about religion? What did they teach about good and evil? How has your family’s religious background affected you?
• What scriptures or other books did your family regard as holy? How seriously were the teachings in them taken?
• How did you perceive God or the sacred when you were a child?
• Did your family observe any religious rituals? How were those rituals related to their beliefs?
• Have there been times when you felt the presence of the sacred outside your place of worship, when there were no priests, pastors, rabbis, or other teachers around? What was that experience like?
• How is your present religious affiliation or spiritual life similar to or different from your parents’? How did the change, if any, come about? Was it a long process or short? Easy or difficult?
• When have you experienced awe or wonder? Where were you, and what happened?
• Who are your saints, holy people, spiritual teachers?
• What are the important words and stories of the philosophies or religions that have shaped you?
• What holy days do you celebrate?
• Are your spiritual beliefs or values relevant to what you wear, what you do, who you are friends with?
• Has a belief in God, other deities, or a sense of something larger than yourself, shown itself in the ordinary, everyday events of your life?
• Do seemingly random events of your life seem to reveal interconnectedness?
• Call to mind the significant turning points in your life; what are they?
• What are the most significant decisions you have made?
• What are the most intense struggles and conflicts, successes and failures you have experienced?
• Have you ever felt or experienced a sense of being “called” to do something?
• How do you plan to live out your beliefs in the future?

Not exactly the typical questions you would answer to come up with your testimony.  Looking forward to the experience, digging a little deeper.  Maybe I'll be brave enough to post what I come up with;)

It's been a while.....

Well, I'm afraid that my dear husband just might have a heart attack when he sees that I've posted something on my blog again after a VERY long hiatus. But he's a blogging machine and I am most definitely not.

Since I last posted I have completed 2 introductory courses on chaplaincy. This fall I'm just starting on a class called "The Spiritual Formation of Children". I'm using one of my electives to take this class and I must admit that I'm intrigued by the topic. Spiritual formation is something that I've been reading about and experimenting with. A lot of the work Kevin and I have done on Emotionally Healthy Spirituality relates to spiritual disciplines. But interestingly I hadn't really made the connection between spiritual formation and children.

I had a bit of an 'aha' moment a couple of weeks ago, before I even started into this course. Kevin and I had decided that at the beginning of the school year that we would allow our oldest daughter to change her school night bed time to a half an hour later than last year. The stipulation we put on that change was that for the extra half hour each night that she needed to spend it in her room either reading, writing, or drawing. She is the kind of kid that would never spend any time alone if she could help it. She liked the idea of staying up later but was completely disgusted with the thought of having to spend that time alone. To be honest, before making this decision I really hadn't thought out why it was important for her to spend time alone. I can think of a hundred good reasons why I should have some alone time but it took a bit of thought for me to come up with some good reasons why she should learn how to be silent and how to enjoy solitude. We had quite the battle about this issue and in the end she chose to go to bed at her regular time rather than be alone for a half an hour.

The next day my text books for this course arrived and lo and behold as I flipped through the first one I came upon some thoughts about the spiritual discipline of solitude and how it relates to children. Interesting. I know that this course will provide the mother in me with all kinds of food for thought. Maybe I'll quit procrastinating and actually do some blogging about what I learn;)