My 3 minute speech

Today was the service at my Congregation on "Our Spiritual Traditions"  where I was the Worship Associate and gave a 3 minute "pastoral thought."  It went well.  I shared my favorite spiritual practice, riding my bike to my exercise class, as described on this blog.  I've worked on it on and off over the last few weeks and it wrote itself pretty easily.  It really helped yesterday reading it to housemate and getting her comments and having her ask what makes it a spiritual practice, which led to an interesting conversation and improved the speech.  But then last night I reviewed my notes from talking to Darrel (the minister) about the service and realized he wanted me to talk about my spiritual quest, and I wasn't really doing that.  So this morning I woke up and rewrote my speech.  It only took about 15 minutes.  So now I had two speeches, one describing my spiritual journey the last 4 years, and the other describing my favorite spiritual practice.  I chatted with Darrel again, and got the feeling I should focus on my spiritual journey more than a practice.  But he didn't see the essays, and I think this was a case where one was a lot better than the other.  I saw my friend Colleen and asked her to read them and tell me which she liked better, and she said definitely the biking one.  So I went with that and it went well.   I think the other would have fallen flat.  It's hard to tell your whole story in 3 minutes.  The biking essay was more of a vignette, more entertaining, kind of different, and well suited to a 3 minute speech.  

I had trouble last night coming up with opening and closing words.  I just don't have much material, having not spent much of my adult life reading poetry and spiritual works.  It took me hours to come up with something, reading through some poetry books.  The opening words were serious but I liked them, I don't know if anyone else did.  The closing was a lighthearted prayer to a leisure god.  That went over well.

Darrel had a lot of good thoughts in his sermon.  He suggests that a spiritual journey can two components, a solitary one and a communal one.  The solitary ones are the practices you do on your own, and the journey that you are on.  The communal one is helped by being a part of our congregation and sharing in a spiritual journey together and getting sustenance from each other.  He also described his favorite practice which is to light a candle in the morning and tell himself that he is not going to live a fear-based life but a loving-based one.  I'm paraphrasing and probably mis-quoting several hours later.  He said when he does this, it really affects how he views the events of the day.  I really like that.  Another thing he talked about was peak experiences and how those aren't really spiritual practices.  An example might be the megachurch experiences which are often more entertainment than spiritual.  That's an interesting thought.  I still think my grand canyon experience was spiritual though it was probably also a peak experience.