Improvisation & Spiritual Disciplines

If you have already flipped through the pages of this pamphlet and read the section headings, you have come across some old-fashioned and perhaps ominous terms. Each potential discipline certainly seemed unappealing to me at an earlier stage of my li... Read more

If you have already flipped through the pages of this pamphlet and read the section headings, you have come across some old-fashioned and perhaps ominous terms. Each potential discipline certainly seemed unappealing to me at an earlier stage of my life. Wouldn't adherence to methods block the free flow of the spirit? How could I employ such techniques without becoming more self-righteous? When I attended my first meeting for worship, just before my college studies got under way, I was relieved to find a form of worship which seemed more natural to me than the Protestant church services of my childhood. What pre-selected hymns and prayers had shown me was that my own spiritual calendar and the liturgical one seldom coincided, What Quaker meetings disclosed was that the spirit indeed blows where it wishes.2 Now, more than twenty years later, I still find the openness of unprogrammed worship extremely precious. What unfolds seems to this former musician to be an improvisation on a God-given theme. For that matter, one's entire spiritual journey could be described as an improvisatory duet with the Inner Guide. Less