where the eating and the remembering are one

This past Mother’s Day, Sarah and I were having coffee with Mom and Dad and my Auntie Laurel and Uncle Don, and somewhere along the way they got talking about what life was like during their childhoods.  “There were no supermarkets,” said Uncle Don.  Their memories grew more and more elaborate as they recalled early-morning milk deliveries, fresh baked bread from the bakery, old propane tanks along the house, tabs at the corner store, woodstoves and glass pop bottles.

Remembering is a key part of what it means to be human.  We could almost say that our memories are essential to who we know ourselves to be.  We reminisce over the little moments, and we pay homage to the big events like where we’ve lived, who we’ve known—who we’ve loved.  When we take the time to savour these memories, we find ourselves being drawn to see our lives as a story and as a journey.  We learn how we came to be living here and now.  Good remembering can teach us who we are.

Now there’s a difference between a simple reminder and these sort of active, full-bodied acts of remembering.  Being reminded is, I would like to think, a thing that happens to us—something outside tweaks our brains to recollect a fact or appointment.  “Dance Lessons @ 6:45”,  “Pick up the kids @ 3:00”, “Get lettuce on the way home.”  That sort of thing.  Reminding might lead to remembering, but it is not in and of itself of the same quality.

Remembering involves action.  We retell the stories.  We re-enact the moments.  We draw others into the memory.  “Remember when the van broke down with the wedding dress inside?”  We allow the meaning of an event or a person to saturate our minds, our hearts, and our imaginations.  It gets inside us.  We become changed.

If remembering is so essential to human life, it is therefore essential to the Christian life.  The people of God are called to be a remembering people.  We are a people who are being changed and made anew through the love of Him whose life has invaded our lives: Jesus Christ.  “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.”  (John 1:14 The Message).  When we immerse ourselves in the story of Scripture we find that God is often teaching us that we must learn how to remember well if we are to stay in stride with all that is going on in this Father-created, Christ-redeemed, Spirit-blessed world.  Take these stones, build this altar, make a memorial, eat this meal.  This kind of remembering involves real people: hands and shoulders which carry altar stones, feet to walk across riverbeds, voices raised in adoration, eyes lifted, words spoken, legacy passed on.  Biblically speaking, remembering is an embodied thing.  There’s more going on here than just the firing off of electrons in our brains.  Our whole selves are present in active remembrance.

The Church is to be a remembering people.  She is a community of memory and of hope.  The Bible draws our attention both to our pasts in gratitude, and to the future glory in anticipation and expectation.  We live out our remembering in the present: in the already and not yet of the Christ's Kingdom.  All of this is bound together, sharpened, clarified, and exalted when we gather together the worshipping, praying, witnessing community to the most poignant act of remembrance:  the sharing of a meal.

Alexander Schmemann, one of our best writer-poet-pastors on the subject, gets us pointed in the right direction:  In Genesis we find that man is created hungry.  God provides for him trees and fruit, a garden, of which to eat.  God gives the world to man to become his food.  In eating, man takes the world into himself and it becomes sustenance to the flesh and blood of man.  The world is transformed into life.

In the Bible the food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. . . . All that exists is God’s fit to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make manes life communion with God.  It is divine love made food, made life for man.  God blesses everything He creates, and in biblical language, that means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation:  “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”^[1]

          So we come to the table, a place of family and sharing together.  We come to eat.  We take food into ourselves and it nourishes us and is transformed into life.  Only here, we find that Christ has offered himself as food for us.  He becomes the Life which will nourish and sustain and transform us:  “Take and eat.  This is my body.  This is my blood.  Do this in remembrance of me.” 

          As Stanley Grenz so right puts it: "We not only announce the truth we also mysteriously participate in this grand event."^[2]  We retell the "old, old story", we respond to his gift of himself to be our food--our nourishment, our sustenance--our life.  He invites us to the table, to join with the family for the meal.  

          And so we come: eating, remembering, and living.

   “Let me go over with you again exactly what goes on in the Lord's Supper and why it is so centrally important. I received my instructions from the Master himself and passed them on to you. The Master, Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, took bread. Having given thanks, he broke it and said, 

   This is my body, broken for you. 
      Do this to remember me.
   After supper, he did the same thing with the cup: 
      This cup is my blood, my new covenant with you. 
      Each time you drink this cup, remember me.

   What you must solemnly realize is that every time you eat this bread and every time you drink this cup, you reenact in your words and actions the death of the Master. You will be drawn back to this meal again and again until the Master returns. You must never let familiarity breed contempt.”

1 Corinthians 11:23-26 The Message

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^[1]Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963), 25.

^[2] Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Broadman & Holman, 1994), 522.

becoming pastoral

This week I wrote an article for Eston College’s “Life Express!” news and blog website.  I’m glad I did.  I’ve found that through writing I’m able to better process and reflect on what’s going on in my life. 

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Click the picture below to read: “Becoming Pastoral”

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Last week I also had the opportunity to sit down with a few people and hear their stories.  It’s an honour to be invited to walk alongside you, and I don’t take the role lightly!  It’s also been very encouraging to see how many of you are growing and able to articulate how you see God at work in your faith and your life.  As a pastor, that’s a great comfort… it shows me that you’re learning to be attentive to the ways God moves—recognizing the nuance and beauty with which He weaves our life stories together.  It’s my prayer for all of us that we continue to learn how to pay attention.  Often this means slowing down.  In this day and age we’ve become experts at filling our time, at staying busy, at always being connected.  Sometimes we can even adopt a strange sort of guilt when it comes to taking time for ourselves, for rest. That’s not quite right!  It’s also the reason I don’t carry a cell phone.


But part of maturing in our faith means cutting through that busyness (even busyness for God or for ministry) and finding rest and learning to listen to God’s voice in stillness.  My hope is, at some point, to teach on spiritual disciplines: one of which is solitude. 


So let’s be faithful to the good work, that God calls us to…but let’s not become so consumed that we are incapable of also taking the time for stillness and rest.

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly." 

 - Matthew 11:28-30 The Message (MSG)

Easter Life

Though the holiday itself has passed my mind has been filled this week with Easter. We're in a season of newness (at least we're supposed to be--it is spring after all!); this has really struck home for Sarah and I as we entered into this week: a new job, a new office, a new world of thoughts and questions and possibility. I'm typing this out to you from the Pastor's Office, wondering at how I came to be sitting here: thankful for the opportunity and gift it is, and also, to be honest, somewhat anxious at all the responsibility and expectation that comes along for the ride.  Transitions are like that: even the good ones, the best sought ones, bring both excitement and nervousness, joy and apprehension.  Such is change.  Such is newness.


And such is Easter.


I've been preparing my first real message as a pastor for Sunday morning: focusing again on the significance of Easter Life, and integrating some of my hopes and dreams for us as a Church.  John 20 is also about transition, and it brings these two places of startling contrast together: the fear and despair of Mary and disciples is embraced and dissolved in the encounter with the Risen Lord.  They had believed this was transition without tomorrow: hope lost, death victorious.  Yet not so.  The Saturday Dark gives way to Sunday Glory.  Newness, life, renewal spring forth--spring forth with and in and through Jesus and his Resurrection.  


This changes how we approach life, rewrites the rules on how we interpret pain and suffering.  Christ invites us live as whole, renewed, redeemed people.  His people.  We don't always.  We still suffer and sway between fear and joy--but we're not without hope.  Easter Life means finding that hope in the midst of grief; life in the midst of death: knowing Christ and the power of his Resurrection (Phil 3:10).


This song has captured this for me today as I write and pray for you.
Be blessed, my friends.


Nikolas

houston, we’ve found a topic!

Feeling a little bit better this morning--I've had a sore throat for the last couple of days (typical for Christmastime, I suppose!)  Earl Grey seems to be helping!  Of course, being able to rest at home now that I've finished work for the year doesn't hurt either!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to decide on a topic to teach for our church’s adult Sunday school.  Keith Eichel asked if I’d be interested in taking some of the sessions, so I was given the month of January, and plenty of room in terms of topics and style.  For a long time I was pretty sure I was going to do something on Christian spiritual disciplines.  I started working on it back in October or November and had had a few pages written up.  But plans change.  Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline describes twelve practices through which we connect with God and one another in the Christian life: meditation, prayer, fasting and study are the Inward Disciplines.  Simplicity, solitude, submission and service make up the outward disciplines.  Confession, worship, guidance and celebration are corporate disciplines—practices which we participate in together as the body of Christ.  With only four sessions to speak, I couldn’t possibly do them all justice.  I thought of pairing some together, or simply picking four, but it simply wasn’t working.  It's an excellent book, and would make a really good small group study.  Maybe some other time.

Thankfully, there was something else in store.

I was working on study as a discipline, and then reading in the broader sense.  How do we nurture our minds?  Do we know how to do this?  How do we read well?  How important is that to cultivating a wholistic and healthy faith?  That sent me into Fee & Stuart’s book, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, a text from my freshmen class, Biblical Foundations I.  Within a few pages of reading I knew I needed to focus here: on how to read the Bible well.

So I’ve been working a lot on that, and really enjoying it.  I wrote the first session and I’m just in the middle of editing the second.  The third and fourth are still to be determined.  But it’s a good start, and I’m thankful to have settled on something.  For me that’s usually the hardest part.

Merry Christmas, dear reader!

mystery

It’s another reason why I love reading Eugene Peterson…

Having finished my Lewis papers and Regent reading, I’ve returned to a book by Eugene Peterson which I received as a Christmas gift last year from Mom and Dad.  It’s called Practicing Resurrection, the fifth and final book in Peterson’s series on Spiritual Theology.  If you’ve ever been to our Tuesday night hangouts with our Young Adults group, you’ll have probably heard me mention Eugene before.  He’s an incredibly down to earth man, and as a writer he’s entertaining, humorous and deep.

Here’s a snippet from Practicing Resurrection on the mystery:

Verb six: God made known.  “With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will” (Eph. 1:8-9).

We are not in the dark.  We are in on what God des.  We are not intended to be kept in a state of ignorance, asking no questions.  We are not children “to be seen and not heard.”

But—and this catches our attention—what God makes known to us is “the mystery of his will.” … ‘Mystery’ here does not refer to things kept in secret, classified information that is not accessible to people without proper clearance.  ‘Mystery’ here refers to something more like the inside story of the way God does things that bring us into the story.  This is a kind of knowledge that cannot be gained by gathering up information or picking up clues. …The way in which God makes known the mystery is ‘with all wisdom and insight.’  That is, the knowledge that God gives us comes in the form of wisdom and insight.  God does not dump information on us.  He does not ‘home school’ us in mathematics and biology.  ‘Wisdom and insight’ are knowledge lived out.

We have far too little experience of this in American [and, I would add, Canadian] schools.  Education majors in dates and figures, explanation and definitions, how things work… None of this is without usefulness.  But it has little to do with becoming a mature person, with growing up. We know a thing, a truth, a person only in relationship.  There is a great deal of impersonal knowledge available.  There is no impersonal wisdom.

We truly know something only by entering it, knowing from the inside, lovingly embracing it.  That is what wisdom is: truth assimilated and digested (Peterson, Practice Resurrection, 64-65).

Sometimes I think we make matters of faith and God so abstract—so unrelated to everyday life.  Yet Eugene helps us to keep it grounded in everyday language: in fact, the most ordinary language there is—that of relationships, family, real people, real life, real God.

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References:

Eugene Peterson.  Practice Resurrection: a conversation in growing up in Christ.  Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010.

the whole sweep

One of biggest changes that college wrought in me was a new perspective on my faith.  There’s this phrase C.S. Lewis uses where he thinks of our imaginations being “baptized”, that is that our faculties—our hearts, minds, spirits, what have you—are enlarged in order to better experience or understand or take in that which we were before unaware of.  My imagination was enlarged in an attempt to grapple (not fully understand mind you, but to witness and acknowledge) the vastness of God: his transcendence, his immanence, his humanity in Christ, his mystery in Spirit.  That was day 1: Theology I, actually.  And it was onward and upward from there. 

I mentioned once before that I’ve been reading Luci Shaw’s Breath for the Bones.  At one point she’s talking about journal-keeping, and how when we re-read our journals it’s like taking a helicopter ride back over a landscape where before we had only walked or hiked.  At the time we saw only the particulars, the individual ups and downs of the experience.  In reflective hindsight we see the whole scope of the thing, be it a year or a decade; and we can get a sense of the lay of the land, so to speak.  Spiritually this can be really helpful, for so often in the day to day we miss out on the overall theme.  We can’t see the forest through the trees.

This idea of looking at life by the small blips or by the vast panorama can come into play in how we read the Bible.  I know for myself, one of the things which Eston encouraged in me was to read whole books in one sitting.  I seldom actually did this, but the value was not lost on me: in reading the whole of say, Ephesians, or John, we can see how the whole thing works.  Now we might not dissect and analyse the thing as we’re doing so…and that’s perfectly alright!  For that tendency to study the text should not, I think, come before first reading the text: hearing it as a Story.  Getting into the lives of the characters, seeing how they went about working out their relationships to God…how God was working out making himself known to them.  We let the text work on us.

I like how Eugene Peterson puts it in his introduction to 1 & 2 Samuel in The Message: 

The biblical way is not so much to present us with a moral code and tell us “Live up to this”; nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, “Think like this and you will live well.”  The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, “Live into this.  This is what it looks like to be human; this is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings.”  We do violence to the biblical revelation when we “use” it for what we can get out of it or what we think will provide color and spice to our otherwise bland lives.  That results in a kind of “boutique spirituality”—God as decoration, God as enhancement.  The Samuel narrative will not allow that.  In the reading, as we submit our lives to what we read, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but to see our stories in God’s.  God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

Such reading will necessarily be a prayerful reading—a God-listening, God-answering reading.

I love that.  And I feel drawn back into that world that I discovered in those years at Eston.  For they encouraged us in that same way…not to see God as an object to be studied, but as the Subject within whom we find love and forgiveness and wholeness again.

So, I’m on a mission to read in wholes.  And what I love is that this requires imagination-living.  Not that we’re making things up!  But we need our imaginations baptized if we’re to be able to see our day to day lives, and our day to day reading of Scripture as part of something bigger.

This morning I happened upon a video which is what first enticed me to write some of these thoughts down:

N.T.Wright "The whole sweep of Scripture" from Rodica on Vimeo.

Favourite line:  “Frequently and thoroughly!”

So may you see whatever is on your plate today as a part of the bigger story of your life.  May you know that no matter how difficult things might seem, that there is One who knows you, who feels your pain, and wants to guide you through it.  And may you read not with the intention of mining out some small particular for personal pleasure, but may you find yourself immersed in God’s goodness as you are “swept along” by the Story.

new old hymns

   Received an unexpected gift today at work.  Rendy pulled out an album of Fernando Ortega’s music and said we could have it or pass it on to someone who might be interested in it.  I thought the name sounded familiar but couldn’t place it.  So I surfed over to his website and stumbled upon his blog.  He was reflecting on song-writing, and also on the lack of thoughtful literary artistry that seems commonplace in congregational worship music. 

   His conclusion was what really stood out to me:

I didn’t set out to write a didactic blog. I’m writing to myself. Be specific when you write songs about God. Avoid cliché. Avoid convenience. Avoid an obsession with the consumer. Avoid the temptation to make commercial success your central goal. Write with intelligence, employing all the craft, skill, and experience with which God has endowed you. (Fernando Ortega, “Come Down, O Divine Love”, http://www.fernandoortega.com/fernandoortega/blog/blog)

   His advice could be for any artist, not just the hymn writer.  There is a common attitude today (or perhaps it has been with us for centuries) that we create for a consumer.  What will people like?  What will sell?  Those are legitimate questions, but I don’t think they should be the bottom line.  If we begin to think of money or success as an end in and of itself (an attractive one, to be sure), then I wonder if we miss the bigger picture?  To tend towards the cliché, the consumer, the commercial success at the expense of intelligence, skill, craft, mind and imagination is indeed a grievous thing.  How much more so when the Art is intended as worship?

   I was also reminded of my friend, Koko, whom I wrote about earlier.  Koko is now an urban missionary in Victoria, where one of his projects is writing hymns to go along with liturgy at his Anglican church, The Table.  I think Koko embodies the attitude that Ortega is getting at in his blog.  I wonder what the world would be like if more people avoided writing the cliché for commercial success and focused instead on bringing all of themselves into their art, seeking to point others toward beauty and truth.  I wonder if we’d be able to feel the difference in the music they’d create?  I think so.  I think it’d be really cool.

reading slowly

   I’ve been getting into Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation of the Bible.  We were reading the Beatitudes last night.  There’s so much hope here; each sentence is a tasty morsel worth savouring slowly.  I find that certain beatitudes stand out to me, speaking to me about where I am in my life. 

You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope.
With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
 
  You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you.
Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
 
  You're blessed when you're content with just who you are—no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought. 

  You're blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for God.
He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat. 

  You're blessed when you care.
At the moment of being 'care-full,' you find yourselves cared for.
 
  You're blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. 

  You're blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight.
That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's family. 

  You're blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution.
The persecution drives you even deeper into God's kingdom.

The Message (Matthew 5:1-10)

   There are these moments that come when I find myself really wrestling with what direction I’m heading, and I’m wondering, “God, what’s happening here?  Where is this going?”  There’s this struggle that I think a lot of us face all too often where a barrage of questioning and wondering and guilt and worry gets stirred up inside of us.  Inside of me.  I have a choice in that moment: I can succumb to that overwhelming, pressing deluge or I can surrender myself to the care of my God. 

   And if I do that, if I surrender myself to Him, He takes that ugly mixture of pain and stress and anger and fear and he begins to work on me until suddenly I don’t see the storm anymore.  That’s where I find myself in the beatitudes: in the 6th one, where my inside world—my mind and heart—are put right.  And then I can start to see the bigger picture: the ways in which God is so deeply at work in my life and in our world.

   And I know that I have been blessed.

24 finds me

This year marks the first birthday I’ve been home for in Dryden since 2004.  Sarah and I went out to the East Indian and Greek restaurant for supper and then headed over to Mom and Dad’s for cake in the evening.  Mom outdid herself with a homemade black forest cake—the best I’ve ever tasted!  It was a great day.

I think I was maybe fifteen or sixteen when I first heard Switchfoot’s The Beautiful Letdown.  My friend Matt shared the rock album with us on our way out to Eston for a Sr. High Encounter Weekend. 

Switchfoot– “24”

At the end of that album is a little song called “24”.  At the time, I didn’t care too much for it.  Yet it has become one of those songs that has slowly grown on me over time.

When Sarah turned 24 in November she made a point of sitting down to listen to it again.  So last week I did the same.  The words now ring with a deeper resonance than that which I knew only as a teenager.  The lyrics kept rolling around in my mind in the days rolling up to the 6th.  So where has 24 found me? 

Strangely contended, perhaps.  Mostly at peace, I think.  And hopeful.  It’s been almost a year since we moved back to Dryden, and that was a pretty tumultuous time for us: really trying to find where God wanted us—what made sense for us after our season in Eston was over.  Even once we made that choice to come back there was still the question of where we would work, and what life would look like now.

The number one thing that I have learned, and am still learning, is that the Lord is faithful.  He is trustworthy.  Even when it feels so difficult.  I’m still learning to listen, to remember actually how he continues to provide.  But he often returning me to the truth that He will provide, that he knows, that things are okay.

I’m glad to find myself here.

being and doing

Had these thoughts brewing for awhile…

   Life is about who we are, not just about what we do.  And who we are, though heavily made up of what we do, is also more than just the sum total of what we manage to accomplish with ourselves. 

   What I do speaks to who I am.  My job fulfills an aspect of who I am: it fulfills a healthy desire and need to work.  Work for my food, work for the sustenance and provision of my family.   That is what I am given for my work: monetary allotment which is intended to relate to the value, quality and difficulty of the work. 

   And yet work is much more than that.  There is something good in and of work itself.  It has intrinsic value, whatever the vocation or location, regardless of pay or not.  We are designed to work.  We find this in the Genesis accounts where God gives Adam and Eve the task of tending to Eden, to naming the animals, for exercising healthy dominion over the land and its creatures.  There is good work set before us.  It fulfills us in some fashion.  It should.

   Yet we so often sever work as not speaking to our being.  We lop off the what we do from the who we are—or we dangerously enmesh the two: we are only what we do or accomplish.  The first disintegrates our lives, fragmenting our experience into compartments.  The second sees no distinction at all: it is these people who, should they lose their jobs entirely border on suicidal tendencies.  “There’s nothing left to live for.  That job was all I had.  It was who I was.”  Both extremes, I think, can be dangerous.

   Instead of thinking of who we are and what we do, the being and the doing, as distinct parts of ourselves we need to see them as part of the process of understanding who we are as whole people.  I act out of who I am, and what I do also shapes who I will become.  An illustration that might help us here is that of an upward moving spiral.  Are being impacts our doing, and our doing speaks to our being, yet there is also progression: we are moving forward, growing older, changing, learning.

   In our Spiritual Theology class at College, Lauren introduced us to Parker Palmer and the idea that “we live our way into a new way of thinking, we don’t think our way into a new way of living.” 

   Living is both: it’s the doing and the being.  It’s finding that they are not distinct aspects of myself, but part of a whole.  Biblically we find that the doing and being are wound together in one another.  This where we often have trouble with the Book of James: we see so much of it as doing, seemingly apart from the being: from the work of Christ in our lives who has saved us.  But James is not advocating for salvation by works: his point is that because of the work done in our hearts, because of how we’ve been changed—live it!  If you’re not living it then you haven’t seemingly changed.  It should make a difference.

   Jesus transforms lives.  He transforms the living: both the being and the doing.  Who we are and what we are about.  He reminds me that I am more than one or the other, and more than both.  In light of Him, who I am and what I do with myself take on fresh meanings.  And that, I think, is where joy lies.

sowin’, drummin’, prayin’

Oh man, my wife is an avid reader!  Nicole lent her eight books last weekend and she’s already read three!  What I love about how she reads is that she doesn’t just devour books, she really enjoys them.  She’ll often curl up on the couch with a blanket and disappear.  I wish I had the same appetite as she does, but I’ve found lately that the book really needs to grip me if I’m going to invest my time in it.  Hopefully it’s just a phase—there are so many books out there now, and I want to read all the best ones!

     I’ll have to read four C.S. Lewis books for my Regent class this summer, too, so hopefully that’ll be good incentive to get back into more fiction.

     Giving drum lessons every week has encouraged me to spend more time drumming myself.  I find that I can easily become stuck in a rut, so I like to find sources of inspiration to make me try something new or show me something I’ve never thought of on my own. 

I really enjoy watching Mike Johnston’s drumming lessons on youtube.  Not only is he hilarious, but he’s a really good educator.  I learned this beat last night while Sarah was on the phone with her parents:

    This week has seen another adjustment in my work schedule.  Our sowing days now start at 7:30.  I’ve been disciplining myself to get up for 6:15 or so, that way I’m not rushed to get ready and Sarah and I can spend some time together before I head off to the nursery.  We’ve returned to a morning tradition we started while living in Eston together which is doing morning devotions together.  It’s so good to have that at the start of the day.  We’ve been working through the Morning Prayer in the Celtic Daily Prayer book of the Northumbrian monastic community.  You can actually read through the same daily morning, midday and evening prayers on the Northumbria community’s website.  I highly recommend it for anyone interested in cultivating a daily routine in prayer.

    It looks as though I am finally getting over this dry cough.  Looking forward to good night’s sleep.  I’ll leave you with a sample from today’s meditation.  I’m off to bed!  Good night!

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As the rain hides the stars,
as the autumn mist hides the hills,
happenings of my lot
hide the shining of Thy face from me.
Yet, if I may hold Thy hand
in the darkness,
it is enough;
since I know that,
though I may stumble in my going,
Thou dost not fall.
Alistair Maclean

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knowing rhythm

     It takes effort to acknowledge rhythm: both our need for it, and how it already is at work in our lives.  We rise, we eat and shower, we speak and are silent, we work and play, we retire for the evening.  Finding rhythm is not so much about creating rhythm as it is about recognizing that which is already present and knowing it for the first time.  As drummers we seek to bring out the inherent rhythm of a song, not to impose our own patterns upon it.  There is already something at work here, behind the scenes, which calls us to attention.

So how do we start?
How do we attune to those latent rhythms within and around us? 

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   I think the first step is in realizing what is directly before us.  I found a reflection by the Monks of New Skete, an Eastern Orthodox monastic community in Cambridge, New York, which I think really relates to this idea:

Planting yourself squarely in the present moment is a condition for being truly alive and happy. . . .Take time to notice.  A freshly brewed cup of coffee that we savor in silence, an invigorating shower that rinses away the past night’s sleep – these are but two examples of daily rites that have the power to lift our spirits and carry us forward through the day.  What counts in these routines is our awareness of them.  We can go through such moments on automatic, or we can discipline ourselves to pay attention to them with a spirit of openness and gratitude.  Keep track of yourself today and see if this is not true: Life feels so different to the one who takes time to notice it. (Rise Up, 55)

   Noticing.  Paying attention.  Being present.  This will take some getting used to!

   Far too often when we hear the words ‘daily rhythm’ or ‘habits’ our minds automatically think of strict adherence to a system of rules, like a boarding school which regulates every spare moment of its students’ lives.  Unfortunately, that image is sometimes the reality.  We can overdo finding rhythms in such a way that we forget the purpose behind having such rhythms in the first place.  And what is that purpose?  To cultivate an inner life which is regularly watered and fed, like a garden, where routine care and work is necessary to keep its world alive.  If our inner lives still feel like a cacophonous zoo in our blustering to achieve a regularly paced routine then perhaps the routine is itself too rigorous or overly detailed.  If finding rhythm is just another check box on a to-do list, we’ve already missed the point.  This is not another thing we do: this is an attitude that we live out of.

We need to start small.  Baby steps.

In his reflections on the Psalms, Eugene Peterson draws our attention to the rhythm of language: words and silence.  What we learn from the poetry of the Psalms has much to say about our prayers and our lives.  We need to slow down:

You cannot speed-read a poem.  Poetry cannot be hurried.  We must slow our minds (and, in prayer, our lives) to the pace of the poet’s breathing, phrases separated by pauses. . . . Poetry requires equal time be given to sounds and silences.  In all language silence is as important as sound.  But more often than not we are merely impatient with the silence.  Mobs of words run out of our mouths, non-stop, trampling the grassy and sacred silence.  We stop only when breathless.  Why do we talk so much?  Why do we talk so fast?  Hurry is a form of violence practised on time.  But time is sacred.  The purpose of language is not to murder to the silence but to enter it, cautiously and reverently. (Answering God, 60-61)

   One of my first lessons in drumming with a band—finding the rhythm within the music—was not to fill space haphazardly.  I can still hear the instruction, “Less is more.”  We need to give room to the pockets of silence between sound.  Likewise, we need to be attentive to the moments of rhythm and renewal in our lives, instead of always rushing and seeking to fill our days pell-mell. 

   Less is more.  In drumming less (less hurried, less busy and less sporadic) I found that the beats that are played have greater resonance.  There is space for the skin to reverberate the sound.  The parallels to life are abundant: by learning to slow down and take the time we can discover great purpose in the opportunities before us—even the seemingly menial ones.  The daily routine, so easily dismissed, now come alive with meaning.  This is far from legalistic rule-setting.  This is life!   

   Whatever the specific regularities demanded upon us by our lives or work schedules there are still the general or universal rhythms which nearly all of us find ourselves in.  The basics of life: sleeping, waking, rising, eating, bathing, clothing, working, playing, praying.  

   By choosing to observe these ordinary rites we better prepare ourselves to live: to engage one another, ourselves and our God.  As we slow down and attune ourselves to those daily routines we move from finding rhythm to knowing it.

   Be well this weekend,

Nikolas

Related Posts: 
Finding Rhythm, Truth & Stories, Daring to Rejuvenate, Lessons from the Orchestral Hall  

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References:

Rise Up with a Listening Heart, The Monks of New Skete. New York, N.Y.: Yorkville Press, 2005.

 

 

Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, Eugene Peterson. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.

author spotlight: john eldredge + way of the wild heart

Way of the Wild Heart is being
is bring re-released this spring as
Fathered by God.

To all the men out there,

Got a book recommendation for you.  I'm just finishing Way of the Wild Heart by John Eldredge. He's tackling a vital question: "How do we become men?"  It's not a book on pop psychology or child development.  It's a map.  A map of the masculine journey, its initiations, its struggles, the core questions we have as men, and the assurance that God wants to and is fathering us.

Here's a brief excerpt:

A boy has a lot to learn in his journey to become a man, and he becomes a man only through the active intervention of his father and the fellowship of men.  It cannot happen any other way.  To become a man--and to know that he has become a man--a boy must have a guide, a father . . . You see, what we have now is a world of uninitiated men.  Partial men. . . .  The passing on of masculinity was never completed, if it was begun at all. . . .That's why most of us are Unfinished Men. . . .

Masculine initiation is a journey, a process, a quest really, a story that unfolds over time.   

can you hear the gardener?

Part of our class on Spiritual Theology includes periodic mini-retreats. Lauren Miller will have us examine a particular spiritual discipline or practice and then have us participate in it together. This week's class we were discussing how metaphors are a way in which meaning is communicated oftentimes in a better way than if the thing was blatantly said. We were given twenty minutes to each write metaphors of our own and then share them with the class. We were told to write with the following question in mind, "What would you want to say to your classmates about themselves and the time that you've shared together?"

A metaphor written as part of a class discussion and reflection in Spiritual Theology with Lauren Miller, Autumn 2008:

My dear ones,

I can hear the muffled footsteps of the Gardener, treading the worn path to our small grove. Listen. Can you hear him? Some of us can. This is not one of his regular visits to our shelter. He has come to rework the garden again. Before he comes…let me remind you... Let us remember when we each came and how we’ve grown together.

I was but a young sapling, you see.

Brought from strange lands in the east, planted carefully in a shaded spot by the stream. Many of you were there. And some of you had yet to come and be planted. We were each being brought…some in wheelbarrows, some as seeds…but each planted with care and purpose in the space which would best suit us to grow as the Gardner desired.

The stream was cool and deep, and many thoughts and ideas it brought to our minds, calling us to live deeper and grow stronger…to learn from the past. The elms and oaks around us taught us how to drink. How to taste. How to dig our roots deeper into the soil to find the nutrients. It was a hard task to learn…but we managed soon enough and the father and mother trees were very patient. They taught us to open our leaves and feed on the warmth of the Son. By light and water we were made…we feasted together on the goodness of the Gardner’s provision.

In time we grew stronger…some of us have been in the garden for a couple years now. Growing and drinking and eating. The gardner has been ever-loving in his care. He comes to tend us…to ensure our health…to gather the fruit of our labour. Sometimes we hear him coming to prune, and the oak tree reminds us that this is part of growing up. As hard as we try to hide them, the Gardner always finds the dead branches. He removes them in love and takes them away from us.

It has been good, hasn’t it? The wisdom of the older trees, the companionship of our peers, the joy and seeing younger saplings be planted beside us? It is so good. And yet…it does not last forever. It was never meant to. You see, the Gardner knows how to grow us best…and though some of us have grown together for many years now…the time will come when he will come and take us away.

He is, after all, the Gardner.

Some of us will be taken away together. For myself, I seem to have gotten all tangled up with a young willow wand and it seems the two of us will have to be transplanted together. Some of you have branches spread across to other trees in other gardens…I think he will transplant you to the same place as well…when the time comes.

Ah… he has arrived. It is springtime. Well my friends, it is time to go. Thank you for the memories…for helping me learn to drink and eat…for growing along with me for these past four years. I love you all. Farewell…my friends… until we meet again in the greater garden where all trees reside. The Great Garden, which extends beyond all rivers and all meadows, forever...at the end of all things.

The Scarlet Monk