Bishop Audrey Scanlan of the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania writes:
GOD 640 is a home-spun creation that invites one (me!) to pause on the hour, every hour between 5 AM and 8 PM, in the days of Lent and find God in my midst, and record it. (40 days of recording 16 incidents per day = 640.) Tom Brackett, the Mission Developer for Presiding Bishop Curry and an old colleague and friend of mine, calls it “Spirit Tracking.” I call it “God Spotting.”
I decided to do this as one of my Lenten practices to become more aware of God’s constant presence in our lives. I cringe when I hear prayers (some of them that come out of my own mouth) bidding God to come among us. Uh, isn’t God always here? It’s we who need to open our eyes. I also cringe when we (myself included) open a meeting with a prayer to get us out of the starting gate, and then move ahead with our business, sometimes in a fashion in which, if God were visible and standing in the corner, watching, we might not be so proud. I like the model of conducting meetings in which we pause in the middle for prayer (Our Standing Committee is doing that, now — it’s wonderful) or where one member of the meeting takes on the role of watching for the movement of the Spirit in the room and calling attention to it in the pauses of the meeting. God-spotting. Spirit-tracking. If you need to be convinced that God is omnipresent, return to Psalm 139 for some reassurance.
Matthew Townsend is a Halifax-based freelance journalist and volunteer advocate for survivors of sexual misconduct in Anglican settings. He served as editor of the Anglican Journal from 2019 to 2021 and communications missioner for the Anglican Diocese of Quebec from 2019 to 2022. He and his wife recently entered catechism class in the Orthodox Church in America.
