I’ve been thinking, always a scary and somewhat dangerous enterprise, about doing a topical series of posts. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that a survey of spiritual disciplines or practices would be a useful place to start. If you actually undertake to study this subject, you will find that it can be quite involved, for spiritual disciplines have been practiced for thousands of years by Jews, and from the very beginning of the Church. You will also discover that in certain historical periods spiritual practices existed that we today would likely consider barbaric and crazy, particularly in the Middle Ages.

In more recent times, a number of the older practices have been dropped by most Christian brotherhoods, things from earlier times such as self-flagellation for instance, aren’t practiced in the Christian mainstream today.

Yet, many practices remain.

Depending on who you ask, there may be 14 or 15, or 25-30. Scholars place these in various categories such as Inward Disciplines and Out ward Disciplines, or as Disciplines of Abstinence and Disciplines of Engagement. For our purposes however, I’m going to let others worry about what to call them, how to place each one into a chart and to argue over what should and what should not be counted. Instead, I thought I’d pick an even dozen of the best-known classics such as prayer, meditation, silence, solitude, fasting and… well you get the idea. After that, I thought I’d cover another category of Spiritual Practices that are usually not included in the Classical lists, which I would call “Expressive” Spiritual Practices.

So, the plan is to run these “The Journey” on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and we’ll get our Journey started with Prayer on Monday, right here: See you then!