NASHVILLE,
Tenn. (UMNS)-The Rev. Don Shockley smiles when planes get delayed, when
doctors are running behind for appointments and when it takes a long
time to get a cup of coffee.Twenty-five years ago, as a young
student pastor, he found that waiting in public places gave him an
opportunity to stop and listen for God’s voice.
"Increasingly, I
think that faithful decision of my annual conference to make me pastor
of a church when I was beginning my sophomore year in college has set up
a kind of dynamic that has gone throughout my life and is still very
much present," he says.
In order to write his sermons he found he
needed to leave his residence hall early on Sunday mornings and go to a
nearby coffee shop to try and separate his academic life from his
pastoral role.
Doing this made him aware of the "deeper dimension
of ordinary moments." In that coffee shop and later in other public
places, his thoughts "issued in a burst of almost
stream-of-consciousness writing.
"I’ve written on all kinds of
things, whatever was at hand; whether it was a grocery sack or a napkin
or a placemat," he says. "I began to put these things into a drawer. And
eventually I had a drawer full."
That drawer full of prayers is now a book, The Notebook of an Urban Pilgrim: Private Prayers in Public Places.
In the introduction, Shockley admits some people may find his method of praying "curious."
That is okay with him. "To be curious is to pay attention," he explains.
"I
was surprised how very often in public environments I would hear
something that seemed to speak to what I was thinking about," he says. He started to realize the opportunity to wait was turning into a practice of prayer.
Shockley
says his traditional understanding of "praying with your eyes closed
and asking God for things" started to change when he was in college.
"I
began to realize that there is a kind of spirituality or kind of
praying that involves listening rather than speaking," he says. "This
really came home to me when I read a book called The Listening Heart
by David Steindl-Rast. He said in that book, ‘If I listen deeply to the
message of any given moment, I shall tap the very source of meaning and
realize the unfolding meaning of my life.’"
Shockley’s mediations
have been written in airplanes, on trains, in a variety of waiting
rooms, in museums and, he says, "at least on one occasion while watching
a baseball game."
In sharing these prayers, he hopes others are
encouraged "to stop what they are doing sometimes and just go on a
30-minute vacation in their mind."
"I think that every now and
then a person should say, ‘What am I thinking about and why?’ Very often
we will find that we are in a stew about some rather trivial matters
when you get right down to it."
Shockley, who is now retired,
served as a university chaplain at Birmingham-Southern College,
University of Redlands, and Emory University before becoming campus
ministry director for the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and
Ministry. His work gave him many opportunities to travel and speak in
public. He has also been asked many times to read some of his "private
prayers" in public places.
"The very fact that people respond so
strongly when they hear the things that I have written suggests that
they could do this, too," he says.
Also in the introduction of his book he points out that many of the prayers are infused with humor.
"I
am not a poet, and I make no claim to wisdom," he writes. "But I do
have a capacity for delight and I hope that, as much as anything else,
is what comes through in these pages."