There’s a fantastic scene in the incredibly bad comedy movie “I Spy” where Owen Wilson picks up his spy camera and says something like “this is a spy camera? people want to say look how sleek and tiny this is, not lot how ginormous it is” Mobile technology is allowing us to carry almost everything with us, the ipod allows us to carry almost all of the music that we own in our pocket, the PDA allows us to carry entire books, laptops allow us to move our office from the desktop to the cafe and to the home and mobile phones allow us to carry our phone connections with us wherever we go.
Faith however has, by the Christian Church been seen as something that is only experienced within the walls of the Church, carrying around a Church with you could lead to serious back problems.
Sure, cell groups and bible study groups and camps exist, but once again they are too big to carry around with you, how do you carry 12 people with you? How do you carry a campsite with you?
Is the Trinitarian God of Father, Son, Holy Spirit too heavy for us to carry around with us?
Kenda Creasy Dean’s book “Godbearing Life” challenges us to think about how we create and allow for spiritual practices for young people to carry with them throughout their daily life. Books like “Soul Tending” and “Tune In, Chill Out” provide young people with tools to carry their faith, their spirtuality with them.
Spiritual practices allow our faith to be portable, allows God to reveal God’s self to us in ways that is out side the four walls of the sacred spaces of our churches. By providing people with the tools to engage with God in these “portable” ways we open people’s lives up to the revelation of a relational God who’s grace is found in music, writing, silence, noice, coffee, dinner, the bus, school, art, life and in nature reserves.
Recently I’ve been reading a book by Elizabeth Vercoe and Kerry Abramowski titled “The Grief Book.” The book is a bag of tricks, a book full of ideas, rituals, practices, stories, ideas, suggestions, excercises and anecdotes for young people to read through and put into practice that may assist them with recognising and dealing with grief.
This is a portable spirituality…
This is something that I can carry with me every day…
Article by: Darren Wright
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