onehouse

Deadlines, sacred work, and carbonation.

I'm up to my eyeballs in content duties for the new issue of the magazine. I can't pay attention to much except what is in front of me. It's tiring but it's not really hard. We're doing an issue on small and I get to read and think about amazing things from art to justice to silliness on a daily business. This is where work is prayer and prayer is work. Chittister talked this week about how the monks time for prayers were different than ours in a pre-electricity environment - how they chose to avoid the mundane and "filled their souls with the sacred." I feel that's what's happening here too -especially when it's silly which I heard someone refer to as "carbonated holiness". Tiny bubbles in the sacramental wine.

What is real.

Several months ago, I was chatting with some folks that I knew from a different life. I asked them if they were doing any continued thinking or reading on things that we used to talk about - theology, philosophy, history, etc. One fellow turned to me and said, "I don't talk about ideas any more. I want to talk about what is real. If it is real, then I am there."

This is a lovely sentiment and probably born of too much time spent with bottoms in meeting room chairs and too little time using hands and feet attached to those bottoms. However, this pursuit of the real as if it is separated from ideas is very close to the "Let's just pray about it." conversation ender that I grew up with. I am glad that one of the contemplative values is study. It is considered real and anyone who studies formally or informally knows that study is also real work.

We deceive ourselves when we think that we live outside of the world of ideas. I have heard the least engaged people, those who would not be considered studious quickly reflect back ideas that are  deeply entrenched in their own Western mythology.  They believe that they are "real" and of the moment when the ideas behind their thoughts have been worming their way into their consciousness for hundreds of years. For some reason they believe they are acting out of some kind of independent thinking and that they came to a particular perspective all by themselves. Or worse, they are convinced that their viewpoint is THE God ordained one held by all people at all times.

It is more than evident to those who wisely engage study that experience is a necessary handshake with many things cerebral but to toss one side of these into the corner like winner take all combatants in a boxing ring is sheer silliness.

Engaging study, wrestling with ideas, is not about finding the one right direction or the one right perspective. In fact, more often than not we find ourselves face to face with having to shed pieces of what we thought were ourselves -- things we thought were so right fall by the way aside as we are given a wider view.

The hard work of conversion includes study. It is part of paying attention to open up your heart and mind to a book, a conversation, a film, a piece of music, a perspective that you may not have considered. If God is speaking into the world as we claim, if we are at times as dull as we know we are, we hold much of what we think and see loosely. We wait to be changed. We do not mistake being entrenched as the only expression of faithfulness.

I have heard many leaders say that people do not wish to wrestle with hard things and they would rather appeal to what people want to hear for their daily lives. And so light-hearted tips on parenting, money management, and self-esteem replace thinking deeply about the world. And when we respond to a chaotic world with simplistic cliches or react to suffering and issues of justice with an immature stamping of feet, leaders are surprised that they have encouraged childish behavior. We are shown the mountain and continually pout while staring at the summit. We want someone else to do the work for us and do not want to "take ourselves in hand".

What is real? Only God knows. We are always staring at edges while hurtling through infinite space at thousands of miles an hour. We are what we are, each with our own limits in vision, mind and heart. But surely it is real to try our best as many before and after us to understand our own limits, to seek wisdom, to apply our hearts to understanding and to not mistake being real for ignoring the complexities of the world around us.

Proper work.

"How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I think serenity is not something you just find in the world, like a plum tree, holding up it’s petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly, looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No!

The swan, for all it’s pomp, his robes of glass and petals, wants only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

-Mary Oliver  ( Yes! No!   from White Pine )

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.

Overwork and acedia

Chris Eerdman has an interesting post about his Revolt Against Modernity's Ethic of "Herculean Labor". I have come face to face with my own limits over the past five years and now happily jettison the culture's myth that "I can be or have anything I want" if "I just dream" or "believe that I am special". I have found much more peace in settling into a reality that does not need to be propped up by constant adrenaline. (It's also interesting to note that this myth was deeply embedded in my church experience just with a little "with Jesus" tacked on the end.)

Chris also wisely replies to someone in the comments who claims that a work imbalance is generational. I have never found this. I have bumped into people of all ages who believe they can conquer all through the might of their own will. He brings up the word acedia or sloth, which in its essence means "a lack of care".

This is no antidote to an unhealthy view of work. The "chill out dude" school of life can be an excuse for a thinly disguised hedonsim - a pursuit of pleasure with no thought of the other, the other being just someone we need to be by our side and not someone to be truly present with. I often wonder why the people I meet that have lives dedicated to their own comfort are so tired and bored and embedded in fatigue.

Studying and engaging in contemplative practices has helped me to adjust my view of what leisure and work can be to soul and mind and body. For me, hard work is now something that must be interrupted by moments of intentional silence and stillness. And rest should be something that restores instead of distracts from the needs of body and soul. Someone asked me "What is one of the differences, besides the removal of ads, between the way you view the old Beyond and its new version?" And I laughed saying, "We're committed to doing less, doing it slower, and paying more attention."

In today's commentary on the Rule, Chittister reminds us:

It is a lesson to be relearned in a modern age perhaps. There is nothing more important in our own list of important things to do in life than to stop at regular times, in regular ways to remember what life is really about, where it came from, why we have it, what we are to do with it and for whom we are to live it. No matter how tired we are or how busy we are or how impossible we think it is to do it, Benedictine spirituality says, Stop. Now. A spiritual life without a regular prayer life and an integrated community consciousness is pure illusion.
 

 

Hurray!

My job, my beautiful, strange, easy, hard, wonderful job is to be the Editor-in-Chieftess and publisher of a no-ads arts and culture magazine called Beyond as many of you know.

This week, we are launching our second no-ads issue with the theme, Possible Worlds. If you haven't subscribed, let me just say...okay, I won't say because it's hard to push your own projects - let my mother just say, "Oh, you really should subscribe."

You can go on over the Beyond blog and see the preview of the cover. If any of you are from the Calgary area, you can also catch me giving a reading tomorrow night (May 3) and launching the magazine at a really fun gallery in downtown Calgary on Thursday night (May 5). Check the Beyond blog for more details.

Such papery goodness...

Clear out the clutter...

I received a review copy of Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places the other day (love the title taken from a Hopkins poem). I can't work throughthis book right now. I realized the other day, that I'm scattering books around the house again. And water glasses. So far I'm not scattering papers and clothes but those two things usually show I need some more focus.

A quick "Hi, how are you?" to Peterson's book had my eyes fall on this. I've been foraging around the nature of work for months now. It took me a decade to shed some Type A tendencies but now I often myself unfocused and a bit blurry without my old "wrap-your-fingers-around-the-neck" way of getting things accomplished. Sabbath, is a good way of maintaining the balance between the joy and necessity of work. I like how Peterson captures that listening to God is is not about getting another piece of information or finding another bit of the cosmic puzzle. This reminds me of that X-files episode where the priest asks Scully if she is afraid that God is not speaking and she replies, "I am afraid that God is speaking but no one is listening."

If there is no Sabbath -- no regular and commanded, not-working, not talking -- we soon become totally absorbed in what we are doing and saying, and God's work is either forgotten or marginalized. When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easiest to develop god pretensions. Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives. We lose God-conciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection. We lose the capacity to sing "This is my Father's world" and end up chirping little self-centered ditties about what we are doing and feeling.

...if we are going to live appropriately in the creation we must keep the Sabbath. We must stop running around long enough to see what he has done and is doing. We must shut up long enough to hear what he has said and is saying. All our ancestors agree that without silence and stillness, there is no spirituality, no God-attentive, God-responsive life.

***

Sabbath-instructed Christians can begin by reimagining, restructuring, and restoring the Lord's Day as a day that cultivates not-doing, not-saying -- freeing the people around us to do nothing on the Lord's Day.

***
If we are serious about living well in God's creation, we can start by clearing out the clutter of Sundays, and then engage in corporate ways t do nothing, to say nothing: "In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strenght" (Isa. 30:15). Cultivate solitude. Cultivate silence. There is nothing novel here; this counsel is at the center of the counsel of those who have led us into an obedient and faithful life of mission and prayer for twenty centuries now. I have nothing new to say on the subject; but I am convinced that it is critical to say it again: to say it urgently, to say it in Jesus' name backed by Moses' authority: keep sabbath -- attend to creation...adore the Creator.

If we are not to simply contribute a religious dimension to the the disintegration of our world, join company with the mobs who are desecrating the creation with their hurry and hype in frenzy and noise, we must attend to what we have been given and the One who gives it to us. One large step in the renewal of the creation today, this field upon which the resurrection Christ plays with such exuberance, is to not take the next step, stand where we are, listen to our Lord: attend...adore.

Tower of Babel

Nouwen writes about hauling rocks at the monastery in Genesee Diary:

Sometimes our ambitions got out of hand and we tried to move unmovable rocks. There is a fine distinction between building a church and building a new tower of Babel. I think that there is a permanent temptation to forget the difference.