The Vulnerability of Open Space

 And you find your soul, and greatness has a defender. . .

From “People Like Us,” by Robert Bly

I claim to want to find my soul, yet today

and tomorrow stretch before me with minimal agenda.

Instead of joy, I feel fear. The vulnerability of open space

is like being on a treeless plain exposed to enemies

who come to do battle. 

Is this more true than I realize?

Are the enemies my own fears and longings

kept at bay by my busyness?

Outward silence and solitude don’t mean

I’m alone and quiet. There is a cacophony within;

I feel like the Gerasene demoniac. Legion is my name.

I want to find my soul. I want to be well. Down deep,

beneath the inner noise, I know this is true.

You have made me for greatness, for largeness,

for fullness of joy. Free me from the noise within me.

Let me hear the song you sing to my soul.

Combatting Restlessness

 

Unfamiliar with Acedia? Even if you are, I expect you've suffered from it. It's not a medical condition! You can learn more about it, and how to counteract it in this week's video blog post.

Living With Intention

I have a magnet on my refrigerator with several statements that challenge me. I bought it at a time in my life when I was emotionally fragile. It encouraged me, and, a number of years later, continues to motivate me to take risks and grow.

 The very first statement on it is “Live with intention.” I’ve been thinking about that frequently, especially as life shifts yet again with the pandemic. Last year, when everything shut down, I committed to use the time as “Covid Retreat,” reflecting on what matters in my life, and what I really didn’t miss. Now, as more and more activities come back on line, the challenge for me is to be intentional about what I add back.

 I’m not alone in this. Just this week I had a parking lot conversation with a friend who was telling me all the meetings she had already attended this week (it was Tuesday) and the reason I was seeing her then was she was heading to another meeting. Yet she also talked about how much she and her husband had enjoyed last spring’s shutdown, where she could have unscheduled time guilt-free.

 Why do we have to feel guilty about having unscheduled time? I struggle with this too. And it’s why I’m particularly focused on that statement “Live with intention.” I don’t want to simply jump back into the fray of busyness because I can. Like falling in a rushing river, once I allow myself to get caught up in the flow of busyness, it’s hard to extract myself.

 To live with intention says to me that I need to be conscious about what I am doing and why I am doing it. I’m reading a book right now entitled, The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World. Though its focus is about our reliance (or maybe better said, our overreliance) on smartphones and the internet, it is causing me to think about overall balance in my life.

 At the end of the day, (in the literal sense) I want to be able to look back at how I spent my day and know what I did and why I did it. This is living with intention.

 How are you handling the increasing availability of pre-pandemic activities? Are you being intentional about what you resume? Maybe it’s a good time to consider what are the activities that truly matter to you and what is simply filler—not necessarily bad, but also not purposeful for your life and health.

 Thoreau said, “Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” Choosing to live with intention then, makes us truly rich.

It's Okay to Rest

Maybe we would be more inclined to rest if we viewed it as a spiritual discipline.

Welcome

Luke 19:1-6

“. . . come down at once. I must stay in your home today.”

Possessions and demands once occupied my life—

stuff to do, stuff to tend. Schedule and home

clutter weighed me down, wearied me.

Simplicity of home and heart now allows for spontaneity.

Lightness of spirit makes for hospitable space. I have room

for laughter, love, tears and koinonia—room for what is

most precious.

Welcome friends.

Welcome love.

Welcome life.

Welcome Christ.

Efficiency vs Presence

Normally we think of absence as the antonym of presence. I wonder, though, if efficiency is likewise an antonym for presence. It is difficult, if not impossible to be both efficient and fully present in the present moment.

This morning was quite foggy. As I drove into town, I began to notice spider web after spider web, orb webs strung between power lines. The fog made the lighting just right for viewing these normally invisible works of art and the drive became a treasure hunt as I admired each web.

To see them required that I become less efficient. I was still attentive to my driving, but instead of rushing along above the speed limit, I moved a little slower and savored the journey. I recalled a homily I heard several years ago when I was part of the Two-Year Academy for Spiritual Formation. It was about “marveling.” Marveling is paying attention, seeing the world around us with a sense of awe and wonder, even if what we are seeing is something as ordinary as a spider web.

What I discovered was that as I marveled at the webs, I began to see trees, flowers, and other things along my route with fresh eyes. Instead of thoughts about the day ahead, instead of worries about the future or past, I was fully aware of the present moment.

Such awareness is something I long to practice more regularly. I want to be one who appreciates the present, who can see with freshness even the ordinary things of life.

The Violence of Busyness

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

                                                                ---Thomas Merton

I come back to the quote time and again as a touchstone to remind me not to get caught up in the frenzy of busyness, which occurs as much in the church as it does in life outside the church.

If the Kingdom of God is characterized by peace and love, a church that gets carried away by our culture’s fast pace is a violent church, not a representation of the Kingdom of God.

When the church fails to model a rhythm of work and rest, service and Sabbath, community breaks down. Wayne Muller, in his book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives, says that our lack of rest and reflection means that when we solve problems, “we do so frantically, desperately, reactively, and badly. . . In the soil of a quick fix is the seed of a new problem, because our quiet wisdom is unavailable. . . When we are moving faster and faster, every encounter, every detail inflates in importance, everything seems more urgent than it really is, and we react with sloppy desperation.”

I have seen the destruction that happens when people try to do too much too fast. People are hurt, and as Muller says, the quick fix mentality breeds new, and often worse, problems. Living with a frantic urgency is not the way Jesus lived. Jesus looked at and listened to people. Even when he was beckoned to save the life of a child, he was so in tune with his inner wisdom that he could feel someone touch his robe for healing (Luke 8:40-56). He did not get in a hurry.

Wisdom does not come from consuming more knowledge and experiences. Wisdom is born and grows in silence, solitude and Sabbath. When we honor our need for rest, we allow God to be God for us. When we act as though we cannot rest, that we must be always involved in frantic activity, we say by our busyness that we do not trust God to act. And when we have, even implicitly, decided that we must act for God, it is only a small step to the violence that leads to decisions and actions that hurt instead of heal others.