Little Portion

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Clothesline Theology

Posted by Jim Thornber on June 1, 2011
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The following is an excerpt from my book Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes, which is available now.  The book recounts my thoughts during the four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. 

A few years ago, my wife and I visited a church to determine if I wanted to become their new pastor. We drove to the church early on that warm, October morning, full of hope and expectation. When we walked into the small fellowship hall, it was obvious we were the visiting pastors, for new, younger faces are easy to spot in this small, elderly congregation. As we passed through the fellowship hall on our way to the sanctuary, one lady gave us a short glance, quickly scanned Barbara up and down, and walked by us without saying a word. Little did we know we had just committed a cardinal sin in this small church: we were not appropriately attired.

We didn’t mean to be under dressed; it just happened. Yes, we were fully covered, but not in their eyes. You see, my wife made the horrible mistake of wearing a pretty black dress that did not fully cover her knees. That didn’t bother me — I kinda like her knees. But it obviously bothered this woman. A lot. Furthermore, I chose to wear a suit and a silk pullover shirt but no tie. Strike two. The odds were stacked against us and we hadn’t even introduced ourselves. It was going to be a long day.

When I look back on it, I see that Barbara and I had a different definition of holiness than the saints of this small congregation. Without knowing our hearts, some pre-judged us as Christians based on nothing more than what we were wearing.

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Why Me?

Posted by Jim Thornber on January 4, 2011
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Publishing, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage. This is an excerpt from my book Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship.

I must realize that my ability, even my desire, to commune with God starts with God. He speaks, I exist. He pursues, I respond. He dies, I live.  He desires me, I open to Him.

But I cannot help but wonder: Why me? What in me does He desire? What does He want? My talents? My charm? My abilities?

Yes and no. All and none. When He calls to me, He calls to ALL of me. He wants me before His gracious throne with my sins and my sacrifice; my talents and my inabilities; my joys and my misgivings; my love, hope, emotions, feelings, doubts, concerns, questions and understanding. When God died for us on the Cross, He died for the whole of us.

My desire to come before the throne of God comes from His desire to have me there. My love for Him springs from His love for me. So, all that I am and can do originates from Him, which leaves me only boasting in Him who is kind, righteous, just, and loving (Jer. 9:23-24).

It is a sad and humiliating thing to see yourself before God and realize you have nothing good to offer Him. It is a joyous and wonderful thing to see Him take your offering of yourself and turn it into a gift which praises Him. It is then that you truly learn that all things are possible with God.

Worship as Service

Posted by Jim Thornber on November 22, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Publishing, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage. This is an excerpt from my book Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship.

We had just entered the chapel for the noontime prayer called the Angelus when John Michael said, “Jim, go ring the Angelus bell.” Great, I thought, another chance to be obedient in a tradition I disagreed with. But John Michael asked me to do it, and when you’ve taken a three-year vow of obedience, it is a little difficult to say “No.”

The Angelus is a short devotion at noon honoring the Incarnation. It involves three repetitions of the Hail Mary and is prayed in conjunction with the ringing of a bell. So, even though I was sure I was that didn’t want to do it, but at the same time not quite sure how to get out of it, I walked out of the chapel and down the little path that led to the bell.

Having arrived at the bell, the full impact of the quandary I was in began to take hold. The Angelus is a prayer followed by one bell, followed by another prayer and another bell, a third prayer and a final bell. Now, since I couldn’t hear the prayer in the chapel, I had to recite the prayer with the community in order to ring the bell at the proper time. After the first ringing of the bell, the prayer goes like this:

“The Angel of the Lord declared to Mary: And she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of
our death. Amen.”

BONG!

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord: Be it done unto me according to Thy word. Hail Mary….”

BONG!

“And the Word was made Flesh: And dwelt among us. Hail Mary. . . .”

BONG!

Now, the tricky part was saying the prayer along with the community so that I didn’t ring the bell while they were still reciting the prayer, nor wait too long so that they sat in silence waiting for me to ring the bell before they started the next phrase. Having sat through many an Angelus, I knew this was a tricky thing to do. Although I had theological issues with the prayer, I still didn’t want to mess it up. Continue Reading

Telling Yourself The Truth

Posted by Jim Thornber on October 11, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Publishing, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity, founded by singer/songwriter John Michael Talbot. This is an excerpt from my book Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship. It is about my four years with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity.

When you consider yourself a “cool” Southern California kid, you think you can handle anything that comes your way. Move to Arkansas and join a monastery? No problem. Become the world’s only Assemblies of God monk and try to get the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world to accept you? Piece of cake. Joyfully anticipate taking a three-year vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, and even invite your mom to fly out from California to witness the experience? Right up my alley.

Until I noticed a little bump on my upper lip.

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We Could Not Exhaust Our Common Jesus

Posted by Jim Thornber on October 4, 2010
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For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister AND a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. This is an excerpt from my book  Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship , which  recounts some of the the lessons I learned as a minister/monk.

During my four years at the Little Portion monastery in Eureka Springs, AR, I was usually the only non-Catholic at the community.  Because of this, I was often the “go to” person when non-Catholic guests arrived. Since the community is located about ten miles from Eureka Springs, AR (a vibrant tourist destination that is the home of the Great Passion Play), and 60 miles southwest of Branson, MO, we would often have visitors who were either fans of John Michael, or curious about our community, or both. If these visitors happened to be non-Catholics, then the call usually went out, “Find Brother Jim.” Besides John Michael, I was the only one at the community who was bi-lingual; I spoke both Protestant and Catholic.

One day, two couples showed up at the community, one Baptist and the other Mennonite. I was in the library when one of the sisters came in and said, “Brother Jim, some Baptist people are here.” By this time, I had been at the community long enough to know what questions they might ask, and they did not disappoint me.

The two couples were sitting in the dinning commons when I walked in and introduced myself. After a few niceties, one of the men cut to the chase and said, “Aren’t Catholics mostly work-oriented? I mean, don’t they believe that they are saved through works?”

I said, “Have you ever asked a Catholic what they did to ‘get saved’?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, let’s ask one. We’ll ask the first person who comes into the room. How does that sound?”

They thought that was a good idea.

About one minute later, Sister Betsy walked into the dinning commons. Sister Betsy is from Cut Off, Louisiana, which is WAY down in the bayou. (This is not pertinent to the story, but she is the only person I know from there, so I wanted to include it.) I called her over and said,

“Sister Betsy, what did you do to get saved?”

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My Monastic Encounter With Sex

Posted by Jim Thornber on September 23, 2010
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For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister AND a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. This is an excerpt from my book  Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship , which  recounts some of the the lessons I learned as a minister/monk.

When you receive Christ as Savior at thirteen and get serious about God, it is natural to start making decisions that run counter to those in your peer group. Sex was one of those decisions.

Naturally, I had plenty of opportunities to have sex, but three things that kept me from doing so. One, I believed in God’s Word, and it said sex before marriage was a “no-no” (“No-no” is a literal translation of a Hebrew word that means, “Please don’t do that, because the years of resulting pain will be WAY BEYOND any momentary pleasure.”). Two, I didn’t want the possibility of a little Jimmy running around, however cute he may be. And three, if I was going to engage in what my dad called “amateur night,” I wasn’t going to do it with someone who would be spreading stories about my talents (or lack thereof) around town. I’d wait until I was married.

Does that mean I didn’t think about sex while I was a monk at the Little Portion? Nope. Thought about quite a bit. (What? You were expecting a different answer? Hey, I was a monk, not an angel).

Fortunately, I found the sexual tension in our blended community to be blessedly low, which is a significant advantage to those of us to have taken a vow of chastity. We had no television reception, no internet access, and didn’t watch R-rated movies. The Little Portion is not inundated with the media’s fixation on sex, the men and women dressed modestly, and a man didn’t travel in a car alone with a woman (unless they were married. To each other.). That relieves a lot of pressure.

But even in a monastic community, the temptation and the opportunity to have sex remained.  This is how it happened to me.

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Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes

Posted by Jim Thornber on September 2, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Publishing, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 7 Comments

My book, Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship, is finally available. I’ve been blogging excerpts of it for a year now, but the wait is over.

The book chronicles the time I joined the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage in Eureka Springs, AR, where for four years I was the world’s only Assemblies of God minister who was also a monk. It was there I found it necessary to remove the comfortable, religious misconceptions of who I thought I was (and who I thought God wanted me to be) and put on the clothes of Christ to find true relationship.

I believe this book will be an encouragement to those who think and live outside the “normal” box of contemporary Christianity. It will help you see God cannot be categorized and above all else, His agenda is not to make us like our denomination, but to make us like Christ.

If you would like to purchase a copy, you can click here. You can see some of my archived blogs if you desire to get a peek into the book.

Blessings,

Jim

A Community of Two

Posted by Jim Thornber on July 1, 2010
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For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage. This is an excerpt from   my book, Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship.

After I left the Little Portion, many people have asked me why I went there in the first place. Shortly after leaving, my typical answer was, “God wanted to make me a holy man in His sight.” This is true, but that is also God’s agenda in every person’s life.

After Barbara and I started dating and I began seriously thinking about marrying her, I started to see another reason for my time at the community—God wanted to work on certain areas of my life so they would not be a burden to my future wife. The Lord wanted to rid me of as much of my selfishness as possible, because if He was going to entrust me with His daughter, I needed to be in the right spiritual shape in order to treat her as God intended. My time at the Little Portion helped me do that, and it was a girlfriend from high school who showed me that I’d changed.

One time I returned to California on vacation and visited some college friends in San Jose. While I was there, I called my high school girlfriend because I was in the area and I’d never met her husband. We had remained friends since high school and I was looking forward to seeing her. Since this was the first time she saw me in my brown monastic habit, her opening line after a hug and a kiss was, “Well, you’re not hard to spot in a crowd!” As she got ready to leave, she told me she could see a change in me. “I no longer feel like an object in your eyes,” she said.

Okay guys, admit it. When you were (are?) eighteen years old, you have trouble looking at girls in any other manner. Paul may have told Timothy to treat every woman as a sister, but that wasn’t our first choice!

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Wrestling with Faith and God

Posted by Jim Thornber on February 9, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Worship. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

For four years I was an Assemblies of God monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. This is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes. The chapter is called When God Alone Is Enough (Isolation).

There were times at the monastery when I felt so alone I could hardly express it. I would often go to the chapel, find a dark corner to sit in, pull my hood over my head and mutter over and over, “It’s just You and me, Jesus. Just You and me.” I felt so very lonely, isolated, and separated from all that was familiar.

These were also times of questioning God–big, loud, bodacious, tear-filled questions that seemed to bounce off the ceiling of the chapel and slap me in the face. “Are You still with me? Did I miss Your will? Whose idea was this monk’s life, anyway? Does anybody care? Will I always feel so alone and without a friend? Do You hear me?” If you are interested, the answers to those questions were: yes, no, mine (I think), yes, sometimes, and always.

There will come a time in your life, if it hasn’t already, that you will sense all you have in the universe is God, and then you’ll wonder if even He is big enough to deliver you from your pain and the soul-wrenching questions no human being can answer. Continue Reading

Changed by Worship

Posted by Jim Thornber on October 8, 2009
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Worship. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 6 Comments

For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage. This is an excerpt from an unpublished book I’ve written called Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes.

upper roomPerhaps it is just me, but I don’t think the believers in Acts 2 were very surprised when the wind blew and shook the upper room when the disciples gathered for prayer and worship.  Jesus said, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matt. 18:20). Would you really expect God to enter a room and not make just a little bit of noise? When God arrives, change is in the air.

When I was a monk, we gathered in the chapel at the Little Portion with an expectancy that we would meet with God. The physical acts of worship — kneeling, standing, raising our hands, making the sign of the cross — are designed to involve the whole person in a spiritual act of worship. We cannot separate the spiritual from the physical. Any truly spiritual act will find an expression through our bodies, whether that be in raising our hands as we sing of God’s glory, or stretching out our hands to serve those less fortunate.

You may think it very spiritual to be a monk or a nun who spends most of their days in prayer and contemplation of God. But I know of no monastic tradition, even those who spend up to 19 hours a day alone with God, where no work is done. Please do not get the impression that you’d be more spiritual if you didn’t have a job to go to and all that was required of you was to sit in a comfortable chair and worship God while heavenly music played in the background. Continue Reading