onehouse

The Sacred

The sacred is not in the sky, the place of transcendent, abstract principle, but rather is based on this earth, in the ordinary dwelling places of our lives, in our gardens and kitchens and bedrooms. And it is no less present in our places of protest, the streets and public halls and institutions where we express our outrage at the reckless squandering of the life that is one. The sacred is fueled by eros, by desire. It is about passion. And compassion. And love. Always love. Love over and over and over again, love. Marilyn Sewell,  Cries of the Spirit via Inward/Outward

Breathe.

I've been battling some more pain issues just after my last dental pain disappeared. I'm supposed to be training to walk a half marathon in fall with friends and family but have only been out a few times. As anyone here who has chronic pain will tell you, you are never sure if the light at then end of the tunnel is another train coming to run you over. It is an up and down existence and you get tired of hearing yourself think about it and be frustrated with it. Like Kathleen Norris' Dakota wind, the constant questioning and dealing and fatigue begins to take on its own noise and as Norris said "You begin to wonder if you have a self."

So in the midst of this, I have been concentrating on breathing. I took a yoga class a few weeks ago as it suits my condition more than weights. When you are in pain, it is tempting to curl up in a ball. But muscles stiffen and shorten creating more problems. The core of yoga exercises is breathing. It is also one of the key elements of meditation and centering prayer.

I breathe terribly - shallow and out of the top of my body. This is like taking my vitamins when it comes to contemplative studies.

I have found the breathing instructions in Thich Nhat Hanh's  The Miracle of Mindfulness to be helpful. This is a simply written book that gives you the principles of attentiveness. listening, and breathing wtihout having to dive full force into another tradition. (I can learn from other traditions but figuring my way out of and around one big tradition inside of a giant world religion is enough for me. I don't expect to find anything different as far as power struggles, abuse, hypocrisy, and consumerism in another religion.I do find practices and points of connectedness that I can learn from.)

Pray-as-you-go also has a guided breathing meditation that can be downloaded. It is one of the better guided exercises. I find some of the online  meditations can get quite preachy or use so many "conscious-y" words that I start to giggle at the silliness of it all.

Wash and dry.

My head may be in the stars but the laundry still needs doing.

 

The goods of the monastery, that is, its tools, clothing or anything else, should be entrusted to members whom the prioress or abbot appoints and in whose manner of life they have confidence. The abbot or prioress will, as they see fit, issue to them the various articles to be cared for and collected after use. The prioress and abbot will maintain a list of these, so that when the members succeed one another in their assigned tasks, they may be aware of what they hand out and what they receive back.

Whoever fails to keep the things belonging to the monastery clean or treats them carelessly should be reproved. If they do not amend, let them be subjected to the discipline of the rule.

To those who think for a moment that the spiritual life is an excuse to ignore the things of the world, to go through time suspended above the mundane, to lurch from place to place with a balmy head and a saccharine smile on the face, let this chapter be fair warning. Benedictine spirituality is as much about good order, wise management and housecleaning as it is about the meditative and the immaterial dimensions of life. Benedictine spirituality sees the care of the earth, and the integration of prayer and work, body and soul, as essential parts of the journey to wholeness that answers the emptiness in each of us.


Chapter 32. The  Tools and Goods of the Monastery
The Rule of  Benedict: Insights for the  Ages by Joan Chittister

Feelin' like Buffy...

Last year I gave my niece and her family an extra carbon monoxide detector that I wasn't using. Most everything runs on gas here in Alberta and they live in an old house like I do. They mistakenly hung it high up on the ceiling and not on the floor. Last night, it went off. When the fire department arrived, the house had some of the highest carbon monoxide ratings the fire department had ever seen.

So I got a "you saved our lives" phone call this morning. I feel like Buffy...minus all the kicking and punching and vampires.

(Double check your smoke/carbon monoxide detector batteries for fall...)

Tidying Eden.

"When we sweep the street in front of a house in the dirtiest city in the country, we bring new order to the universe. We tidy the Garden of Eden. We make God's world new again."

— There Is a Season, Joan Chittister

Heavenly Day

This weekend the little Onehouse was filled with friends who came down to eat, drink and be merry with us. We patiently waited for pieces of sky to poke through this abnormally gray and snowy spring. We were rewarded on Easter with warm weather and sunshine. These ordinary days - walks in the park, BBQ's and evening fires, the coffee table filled with platters of food as the Oilers beat the Flames, easter egg hunts and Settler of Catan -  Patty Griffin sings about them, here,  on her latest CD:

Tomorrow may rain with sorrow
Here's a little time we can borrow
Forget all our troubles in these moments so few
All we've got right now, the only thing that
All we really have to do
Is have ourselves a heavenly day
Lay here and watch the trees sway
Oh, can't see no other way, no way, no way
Heavenly day, heavenly day, heavenly day.

More Dishes.

Wandering minds, like mine, tend to assume that there is always something else they could be doing with their time. We believe in time labeled and leveled, time as currency in units of quality time, me time, down time, waste of time, and on and on.

Some religious people will add that "redeem the time" onto every bit of their life creating a kind of unrealistic pressure to how each day goes by. If you combine this with the myth of how God needs us and poor little Jesus cannot get by without us, you invent a weird religious fervor, a kind of multi-tasking environment that is leaves us fearful of facing things like silence, meditation, or words like "centering". (I am convinced the whole multi-tasking thing was created by some part of the economic system that wanted to squeeze every last minute out of our day and ended up manufacturing people who love to proclaim "I'm a multi-tasker!" but don't know how to focus, listen, or pay attention and end up ruining more than they accomplish in the long run.)

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes." What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future--and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh

(Note: while typing this quote out I had to stop myself from hurrying and treating the typing as something to get out of the way. Ironic, don't ya' think? Not like rain on your wedding day. Or the free ride when you've already paid.I don't know if Alanis got that right...mind you, she has said that she was writing a song about irony devoid of ironic examples...see how my tiny mind wanders and wonders in even tinier circles as I stare into the depths of my own spinning tea cup.)

Is it possible that by being alive to the tasks in front of us we are practicing a kind of healthy detachment from deceptive "worlds of endless possiblities" and a healthy attachment to allowing God be God? He will take care of all the other things. He may want us only to be available to His presence. He does not need us rushing headlong to "help him" because as AW Tozer once wrote:

"To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself."

Only washing the dishes

I am finishing up the year end books, a project that takes all of my will and attempts at giving full attention to the ordinary. Every year I learn from the little rat's nest of frustration that builds inside of me when I must photocopy tiny bits of paper and stick numbers in ordered columns. This year I am trying to pay closer attention. This does not mean that I am wild and joyous. I am just as grumpy about this project but I am trying to listen to carefully to what this ordinary and necessary experience is saying. Henri Nouwen's raisins, stones and bread pans at Genesee. Brother Lawrence's shoes and floors. Thich Nhat Hanh's dishes:

While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, this might seem a little silly, why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that's precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I'm being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There's no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.

The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh

Perhaps the things that annoy us, the ordinary tasks, do not always require streamlining or removal from our lives. Of course,there are some things that can be traded - I am not a good folder of laundry for example. Labor can be shared. But if I keep chucking all the grains of sand outside of my shell, I'll continually be one less grumpy but pearl-less oyster.

Back to the paper trail.

My local and ordinary.

My friend took this photograph of me as we made our way to a morning coffee.
Taken last year but still part of life in the neighborhood.

Baby, it's cold...

We knew this was coming. On Friday I stocked up on groceries and DVD's. On Saturday I made a huge pot of vegetable stew and found all of my warm clothes to wear inside the house -  woolly socks, slippers, fleece pants, sweaters, and fleece jackets for over the sweaters. It usually doesn't snow a lot when it is this cold but now we have a heavy snowfall warning so I'm going out into -33 wind chill to take the first layer off the sidewalk.

All the best to those of you on the west coast who are not used to all this snow. I think Vancouverites must be expecting frogs and gnats after everything that has fallen from the sky in the last month.

Past thoughts on weather.