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)

what I learned from Johnny Reid

I’ve found that if I ever need to be prompted to write or respond or reflect on some topic or issue I really only need to turn on the radio for an hour or so.  Perhaps somewhat old-hat—yet I found myself tuning in quite often last summer as I’d walk our greenhouses to check on the crops.  A bit of music can help the day go by.

This isn’t a song, but an interview I heard yesterday on “Q” on CBC Radio.  I do like this show; I find the host, Jian Ghomeshi, very easy to listen to and the range of personalities and ideas from authors, actors, musicians, philosophers and more make for an interesting variety.  Yesterday however, I was really encouraged by this simple, heart-felt interview with Canadian “country/soul crooner” Johnny Reid.

I was particularly struck by how Reid talks about the impact his wife and children have on how he goes about living day to day.  As Jian says in the interview, Reid brings this “perspective”, this “outlook”: and I think in the context of this blog, can help us to ponder the intersection of faith and life quite well.

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.  Have a great weekend!

Johnny Reid on Q with Jian Ghomeshi:

Essay: “On Myth & Life”, Paper 1 for Tolkien & Lewis Class

As promised, I’ve been able to upload one of my recent essays to the blog—a little later than I’d hoped, but better than never!

Click here to read “On Myth & Life”. 

The following is my first essay for “Lewis & Tolkien: The Making of Myth”, my spring class I’m currently taking with the Mythgard Institute.  Our assignment was to note what we believed to be the most important or significant point of comparison or contrast between C.S. Lewis’ and J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary theories: that is, how they understood the nature of fantasy literature.
  
This is a bit of a workout for a three page paper.  The idea was not so much to come to a definitive conclusion, but to wrestle with the issues, paying close, careful attention to the text and walking alongside the reader to discover together that which you desired to teach through the essay.  The emphasis here is on an inductive reading of the texts.

I chose to focus on the ways myths or fairy-stories orient us to perceive truth, reality, or life in new ways.  In a sense, it’s my bachelor thesis condensed to three pages!  The introduction starts off a bit slow, and I purposefully rerouted some of the best statements from each of the paragraphs to serve better in the conclusion.

So happy reading!  And as always you are more than welcome to leave any questions or comments you might have.

Christmastime in the city

Christmas has come and gone once again, though as we plan a trip to Winnipeg this weekend to see Sarah’s family it feels as though we’re heading into an extended edition of the holidays.  Sarah has had to return to work for a couple of days this week, but with Tyler, Nicole and Olivia still down it still feels like we’re on Christmas vacation.

This year was a bit of a return to tradition for the Cain side of the family.  Christmas Eve at Auntie Laurel and Uncle Don’s and Christmas Day at Mom and Dad’s.  Good times and good food!  Nicole, Tyler and Olivia arrived soon after and we had a larger family gathering complete with Uncle Don songs, more gift-giving, more food and even dancing!  Yep, that’s right.

Some Christmas Photos VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Two and a half years since its completion, I was finally able to print off a finished copy of my undergrad thesis for Mom and Dad.  I thought it’d make a good surprise gift at the end of the morning.  Though the manuscript was officially ‘done’, I’d gone through it again last October and then again in January when I experienced I really frustrating set-back.  I’d accidently created two different copies without realizing it, and had on some days been editing one version and on another day editing the second.  Sometimes in March, I think it was, I bit the bullet and read through both copies again to try and decide which sections of which version was the final.  Thankfully, I had noticed my mistake early enough and I ended up merging the two without much difficulty.  Still, you can imagine the headache.

Afterwards I was able to finally pull in my title page and table of contents and save the whole thing as a .pdf.  It’s such a good feeling to get it totally done and have a copy printed off.  I wanted mom and Dad to have the first one (I have an older one that I printed when still at the college), as they played such a huge part in me even being able to go to school.

If you’ve been following my blog you’ve probably heard me mention my favourite authors from time to time.  When it comes to the Christian life, Eugene Peterson is my favourite.  He’s down-to-earth and grandfatherly, and his writing is rich, meaningful, and pastoral and imaginative.  For Eugene, it’s all about how everything is liveable, nothing in our Christian faith is meant to be abstract, general, propositional or removed from day to day life.  It’s all personal.  All relational.  All participatory.  Last Christmas I received Practice Resurrection, which I’ve blogged about before. This year I was blessed with three more books of his five-piece series on spiritual theology. Each book is a “conversation” on a different topic related to living.  So now I’m reading Eat this Book, a conversation about spiritual reading.  I think I’ll be able to use it with my Sunday school lessons in January.

It was great to see Olivia again, and to visit with Tyler and Nicole—who we introduced to the thrilling epic farming board game, Agricola.  As we purchased sheep, built clay huts and harvested our grain, Olivia would lean over to me, her Dad’s iPhone in hand with her favourite kids game, and show me how to colour Christmas trees and listen to Tinkerbell stories.  She was pretty interested in all the little wooden pieces for the game, so we let her set up a farm of her own—though all she really wanted to do was collect more wood and assign everyone coloured bowls: “Blue for Dad and orange for Nikolas and green for Sarah and yellow for Mom!” 

We’ve made New Year’s Eve plans with the three of them once we’re all back in Winnipeg—and hopefully we’ll be able to see Mike and Steph, too!

Until next time, happy reading, and hoping you’ve all had a very Merry Christmas!

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!

simple

As we were getting ready for bed last night we got talking about how much stuff we have.  We’re reminded of this regularly since our main storage area also has the laundry and a shower in it—so you see these things that you don’t really use very often.  Some of it is definitely important like our winter clothes, my drum cases, and some bins of old papers and/or toys from our childhoods.  Sometimes it feels like the wall of storage is encroaching on the rest of the room!  If we were in a bigger place we’d probably have it tucked away somewhere else.  But in the same breath, we’d also have bought more stuff to fill a larger home!  Endless cycle!

One of the things I love about Sarah is that she’s so good at deciding what is important to keep and what she’ll never really use again.  She goes through her clothes on a regular basis and what she doesn’t think she’ll use anymore she gives away.  When I was a kid and a teenager Mom would do the same with me: sit me down and we’d go through the old cupboard.  Cleanse things out.  Make room for what we actually need for today.

I’m thinking of looking at spiritual disciplines as a series for Sunday school in January.  I’ve been wanting to do something with Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline for some time now, but I’m still not sure this is the best outlet.  The chapters in Celebration are already so well arranged that I think any one of them would be hard to present in a 45-minute segment.  Also Foster highlights 12 disciplines…and I have room for maybe 4-5!  So I’d have to pick some and skip others.  Part me of just wants to hand copies of the book out: “Here.  Read this through and then come back and we’ll talk about it when you’re done.”  I wonder how’d that go over?

The Christian Discipline of simplicity is an inward reorientation which, in turn, transforms the way we go about living life.  Inward to outward, always both.  What begins inside of us will permeate our outward experiences.  Out of the heart the mouth speaks, so I’ve heard. Here’s Foster:

Contemporary culture lacks the inward reality and outward lifestyle of simplicity.  We must live in the modern world, and we are affected by its fractured and fragmented state.  We are trapped in a maze of competing attachments.  One moment we make decisions on the basis of sound reason and the next moment out of fear of what others think of us. We have no unity or focus around which our lives are oriented. …

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic.  We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. … We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are warn out.  The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality.  It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. . . .We should take exception to the modern psychosis that defines people by how much they can produce or what they earn.” (Foster, Celebration of Discipline, 80-81).

Foster paints it pretty bleak, and I’m not saying that everyone is sucked into this 100%.  But it’s hard not to think of real experiences when I read this.  Especially the stuff about mass media.  It’s one of the reasons why Apple drives me nuts.  They redesign their iPods so quickly that once you buy one it’s not long before you feel that they missed out, and then you feel the need to upgrade sooner than you would really need to.  It’s the same now with Amazon’s Kindle e-book readers.  I’m sure the same thing goes for cellphones, but I don’t really know.

Simplicity.  I’d rather ignore all the rubbish of having the newest and the fastest and get my inner life straightened out first. Out of that I know I can be a better husband, a better employee, a better son, a better drummer, a better person.  The fundamental reorientation of the heart and mind, when set aright by God, can really transform our attitudes and the way we go about living day-to-day.  I’m far from this.  But Foster helps to point us in the right direction.  I’m glad for voices like his that can cut through the system and get us thinking again.

If you’re still reading this than kudos to you!  Way longer than I intended for first thing Saturday morning!  Have a great weekend.

december comes

It’s been so long lately between writing these posts, and I’m not too happy about it!

Here’s a little update on what’s been happening with us, dear reader…

November and December have been filled with memories of work and family (though hopefully not indefinitely in that order!)  Sarah’s family came down for her birthday weekend in November.  It’s always a lot of fun when we all get together.  On that Sunday Auntie Laurel and Uncle Don came over too and we had a birthday party for Sarah.  I was able to find her a record player that she’d had her eye on for awhile.  Now named “Ruby”, she has only a few vinyls to play, but she’s a very happy contribution to our cozy little home.  Sarah was very excited.

Snow hasn’t flown as early as last year, considering how this was November 30, 2010:

No snow days for us this year, sadly.

We’ve been trying to set aside time in the weekends together.  A little Christmas shopping here and there.  Our warm reading by the stove.  Last Saturday we decided to try something different for breakfast: crepes!  And it was a grand success.

Crepe Time VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

 

So that’s about all that’s new with us.  I’m also working on lessons for our Church’s adult Sunday school classes for January.  I’ve got four or five Sundays to prepare for…and I’m still undecided on topics (though, as usual, I have like 2 or 3 options and just need to settle on something!)  We’re staying home for Christmas this year, and thinking of heading to Winnipeg for New Year’s.  I’m just looking forward to time off!

Thanks for reading.  Stay warm, reader.

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One last album: some pics of us at Bear Narrows at the end of autumn.

Bear Narrows VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

visual poems

When Sarah and I were at Regent this summer we had the opportunity to eat lunch with some students taking full-time studies.  Among the students we met was a man named Theran, currently working on his MCS.  As I was perusing Regent’s YouTube channel ‘underthegreenroof’, I found this video, a student video project for a class on John.  As it turns out, it was one of Theran’s class projects—a visual poem, a marriage of literary and visual media evoking metaphor.  I touched base with him and said that I wanted to share his poem on my blog.  He agreed.  So here it is, and I hope you enjoy it:

Hands from Theran Knighton-Fitt on Vimeo.

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Here was his description of the project:

This was the creative project for a class on the book of John in the New Testament "John: the Life of God to the World" In the Summer Term of 2011 at Regent College in Vancouver Canada. The class was taught by Rikk E. Watts. Of the various project options I chose the one that included an academic paper and a creative project.

For my paper I looked at the idea of how water is used in John as a polyvalent symbol and how it interacts with other symbols - specifically wine and blood.

Here is the first paragraph of the paper

“In this paper I will show that John’s unique use of polyvalent symbolism effectively communicates Christ’s mysterious, all-encompassing invitation to partake of his life. I will argue that Johannine symbolism invites us into a higher story, a mystery that normal words cannot express. I will show specifically that the nature of John’s symbolic use of water shifts throughout his gospel in such a way that it becomes more inclusive and invitational as it progresses. I will also outline how the all-encompassing invitation in his water symbolism plays itself out: as its meaning shifts, as it interacts with other symbols, as it speaks to Jewish tradition, and, ultimately what the invitation means for us as we are included into the life of Christ. In Christ all things hold together and in John’s water motif we see God bringing together many things in Christ.”

As you can imagine not everything was able to be included into this visual poem that tries to express these themes. Also, being art, it takes on its own identity too and as such it is not just the video demonstration of the academic paper. However the themes all intersect and my choice to do a creative project instead of a longer paper was specifically related to the idea that I believe John's use of symbolism and imagery more effectively communicates truth than mere academic argument. So to do justice to John, one needs to think and communicate creatively…

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This is one of the reasons why I find Regent’s programs so intriguing—they allow for creative projects such as these to work alongside paper-writing to create moments of reflection on faith and life. 

Be well, my friends.

Nik

Click the banner below to head over to watch Theran’s other visual poem:
“And the Whole Realm of Nature’s Mine”.

picking up where we left off

It’s a beautiful idea, especially between friends.

I was struck by the reality of this during the weekend while Sarah and I travelled to Regina and were part of Anna and Daniel’s wedding.  The first person I saw as we arrived at St. Mary’s for the wedding rehearsal was Sean.  Here’s a friend who I’ve RAed in my second year, who I RAed a dorm with in my third year, who I shared an office with in my fifth year.  A good friend, a man I’ve had some great conversations with, and some great bouts of laughter too.  And it was so good to return to that.  To find that the relationship is right there, ready to be ‘dusted off’ in a sense, and started afresh again.

Now, obviously, this does not always happen with friends.  I remember a friend of my once saying that you can only really have 10 or so close friends.  Friends who you pour into, and who pour into you.  I’m not sure if that’s true, but I have definitely seen friendships drift apart.  Perhaps your first reaction to this, like me, is to get worried and try to work hard to keep that friendship enriched.  Yet sometimes, I think it’s natural—perhaps even right—that we drift apart.  Life changes, and so do we.

That’s what is so interesting about picking up again.  Even though life can change—sometimes drastically—there are those people, albeit, unfortunately for some, a rare few, who regardless of the gradual, natural drifting can easily become companions again.  There are those kindred spirits who, after that first hug and hello, slip back again into the camaraderie they once knew.  And that is something to never take for granted.

So here’s to those friends who we saw this weekend: may you be blessed, just as you have blessed me.  Our time together is sometimes too short.  So let’s savour every moment, and sop up the last bit of gravy with a good piece of bread.

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.

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.

finding rhythm

Just recently I began giving drum lessons to a new friend of mine from church. I felt honoured by his request—I’m an intermediate drummer, not an advanced professional.  But he reinforced to me that he wanted me to teach him, not someone else.  It was humbling. Opportunities where we are asked to pass on knowledge or skill or wisdom should, I think, humble us.  And remind us that we are growing and learning and getting older: that we do have something to pass on.

On our first lesson together I asked him what he wanted to achieve through these lessons.  We swapped ideas, set some goals, shared stories and then got to work.  Though he’d had some previous informal training, he repeated that he wanted to “start at the beginning, as though I know nothing.” So that’s what we did.

One of the most basic and important concepts for beginner drummers (especially exuberant ones) is the ability to count and play a steady beat continuously over several minutes.  It’s one thing to hammer out a basic rock beat for four bars.  It’s something else entirely to play that same beat for three minutes without deviating the tempo.  So that’s where we began: I’d set a tempo and we’d play through a basic beat for a minute.  Then I’d set another tempo and we’d do it again.  Slowly we began to build up the muscle memory, to fine-tune the movement, to gain a sense of steady rhythm.

A lot of drummers want to get up there and solo.  To them playing drums is about flashy stick spins and flailing limbs.  It’s entertaining and exciting to be sure (and usually incredibly loud!) but is seldom in and of itself a song.  It may serve to get the crowd going during a show, or spotlight the drummer, but it is seldom applied appropriately to music—to the stuff of the band itself.  Soloing is done by oneself; a band implies giving of oneself for the betterment of the group.  It can be fun to drum solo, but the adrenaline wears off after a few moments.  Playing in a band brings a deeper sense of joy, we begin to find pockets where our flourishes are not done outside the larger whole, but contribute to the beauty of all.  In short, learning the slow, steady rhythm can bring about a deeper, more long-term sort of passion…better than the 1-minute solo.

Rhythm.  It’s the drummer’s job to keep the band on track, not to show off.  Out of that steady, regular rhythm the rest of the band is allowed to shine: the guitar, the bass, the keyboard, the vocals, whoever!  Out of that rhythm comes life.  And good drummers can play the rhythm with soul.  The sticking is no longer a series of mathematical figures or hand patterns but a groove.  And from there, from that place of regularity, comes the freedom and maturity to be able to make the song come truly alive.

I say all of that to say this: just as finding a rhythm is key to the true fulfillment of a drummer and the musicians as a whole, so to is finding a daily rhythm to our inner lives so that we might better live in community with others.  At first this may feel boring, as I’m sure it does to the novice drummer.  We’d rather be playing fills: soloing.  Yet a life that is only fills feels devoid of order, of healthy structure.  And a life of soloing is, well, hard to be around.  None of us was meant to live in utter isolation for all time.  And though solitude is itself a valid discipline, most of us are engaged regularly with family, friends, co-workers, fellow students, whomever.  There is a band on stage with us.  And what we do, how we choose to order ourselves will surely effect those closest to us.  By incorporating daily rhythms we can better give ourselves to one another.

Over time, as familiarity is gained, our attitude shifts from begrudging the repetition to appreciating its daily regularity.  Setting the rhythm and keeping at it is the hardest part, especially as we first begin to structure our lives to it.  It can feel constricting, we’d rather be ‘doing nothing’ with our time; or we say it feels ‘pointless’ simply because we can not yet see immediate results (the unfortunate by-product of our instantly satisfied culture) Yet reward does come.  The garden of the inner life needs regular work: tilling, watering, weeding, fertilizing and so on, before we begin to see the fruit of our labour. 

And that’s what seems so contradictory here: that we need to find rhythm, structure, in order to find freedom.  A good drum solo can only be played by a drummer who knows something about playing the regular everyday beats.  For out of rhythm comes to ability to groove, to solo, to react spontaneously at the right moment, to find the freedom.  Daily rhythm does not bind us from life, it opens us up to the fullness of life.

Be well,

Nikolas

sweeping is the life for me

So I’ve returned to the tree nursery for sowing and greenhouse cleaning.  It’s been good so far, though I’ve missing the extra time I’d had each day to write.

Like I said work started up again last week.  We’re sowing right now at the tree nursery.  This means filling our 31 greenhouses with styroblocks each with hundreds of trees.  I’m not sure how many seedlings we grow in a year, but for some reason 9 million comes to mind.  I could be wrong.  It’s a lot anyway.  And each of the styroblocks has to get placed by hand onto a conveyor belt at the front of the sow line.  We call it being ‘on the pez’ because it’s like working a giant pez dispenser. 

Last Tuesday I was working the pez and Carp, the nursery manager, wandered by just to check up on things.  Out the blue he asked how much he was paying me.  So I told him.  And he said he wanted to make it a dollar more.  I couldn’t wait to get home to tell Sarah.

That Saturday Sarah went to a watercolour class at the art gallery.  Painting is a passion of hers, though she rarely finds the time to do it.  They were learning how to paint birch trees using two different styles.  The class was three hours long and every bit worth it.  You could tell that it had been really good for her to have the chance to do something she loves and to be taught some new techniques.  I’m very proud of her.

So it’s become a tradition to watch American Idol now with Mom and Dad each week.  We have our favourite contestants already—though it’s Steven Tyler who steals the show.  He’s hilarious!  You never know what he’s going to do next!  We also just finished the first season of The Mentalist.  At first I didn’t know if I was going to like it, but it really grew on me and now I can’t wait to see season two.  Sarah even had a dream with Patrick Jane in it! (She also had a dream where she was on a cruise ship with the entire cast of Grey’s Anatomy, but that’s another story!)

Work has been about sweeping.  All day sweeping.  We’re cleaning out the greenhouses so we can sow into them.  It’s solitary labour, which I like, but it’s repetitive.  “Piddily,” Mom would say.  Whenever I feel sore or overwhelmed I have to imagine faraway foggy London rooftops where Dick van Dyke is smiling down on me!

To wrap things up, here’s a few things that I’m excited for:

moll-sacs, phiz-gigs, and a parson's nose!

So on Sunday we were asked to help out with the youth group's progressive supper on Friday.  Basically what happens is the youth split into teams of 5-6 and go to different houses where they'll have one course of a four to five course meal.  We chose to make homemade tortilla chips and sweet and spicy chicken wings for an appetizer--and it turned out pretty good!

What is it with teenagers and them stepping off of the front mat to take off their shoes on the kitchen floor?  I don't get it.

Anyway, I had started reading The Hobbit out loud to Sarah while she was sick at home a few weeks ago, but we hadn't gotten to it in a few days.  So in between groups we'd sit down in the living room by the electric stove and follow poor ol' Bilbo Baggins down to Gollum's lake for the riddle game!

Half way through we got a call from Scott and Beckie who were making pasta as the main course at their place.  Scott and I determined--as two very hungry men--that it was in everyone's best interest to join forces with our food for a second supper later that night.  We ended with a formidable little feast by about 9:00: pasta, wings, chips, pumpkin pie and cool whip, vanilla ice cream and sundae toppings--awesome!  


Then we played this hilarious game called Slang Teasers, where you are given a real slang word and have to try and come up with meaning for it while guessing the real definition.  Sorta like Balderdash.  Did you know that a "parson's nose" (which is not "the ability to sniff out trouble") is the the rump of a chicken?  Who knew!

This morning we slept in, it's finally sunny out here after our treacherous, frozen and blizzard-like yesterday.  Sarah is attending a watercolour class this morning at the art gallery.  I'm really glad that she has the chance to paint again.

Have a great weekend!

PS: How cool is this guy?

truth and stories

“What a good movie!  If only it had been a true story…”

Have you ever had this thought?  You’ve just invested two hours in a gripping tale.  It’s got you.  You’re fully engaged in the characters’ struggles and decisions.  You can sense the rising tension.  You know something is about to happen—some unexpected turn or revelation.  The music begins to raise to its crescendo.  And then… then…  the moment is revealed.  Everything falls into proper order.  Resolution arrives.  All is as it should be.  It was so good!  …If only it had been true.

Up. Disney/Pixar 2009

Sarah and I were asked last summer to give leadership to our church’s young adults group—something that we had wanted to be involved in since leaving Eston last April.  Every second week a group of about three to twelve nestles into our living room and we spend the evening sharing our lives, exploring God’s Word, and praying together.   We’ve been discussing prayer, and how biblically we see individuals praying through their situations: be it anger and sin, doubt or sadness, fear and death.  Though our tendency is bury our experiences within, we have been intentionally attempting to bring what we are going through to God in prayer—allowing him to orient us to perceive our lives anew.  Last week the topic was Praying our Tears, and the first question of the study was “What was the last movie that made you cry?  Why?”  Among the movies mentioned were August Rush, Big Fish, Secretariat, Lion King and Finding Neverland.

There is a certain magic to stories, especially the good ones.  They are meant for far more than distraction.  Yes, they are entertainment.  Yet the best stories do more than just entertain—they touch the core of who we are.  They have an ability to teach us and delight us: to tell us something about life.  If we’re willing to listen.

lessons from the orchestral hall

My first time at a symphony was to hear the music of The Lord of the Rings films by Howard Shore.  Needless to say, it was a truly epic experience.  I had never been to anything of that sort before: the size of the concert hall, the enormity of the orchestra and choirs, that caliber of raw talent and professionalism and passion for music, all the guests dressed in their best (and not a few dressed as Hobbits and Black Riders!)  made for a truly memorable experience.

So when we saw that the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra was coming to Dryden we jumped at the opportunity.  Knowingly it would not be the same experience as the LOTR, but we were excited to hear the music and for the opportunity to see some quality entertainment of that variety in our town.  We made it an early Valentine's Day date.

As we entered the auditorium and began making our way to our seats the musicians had already taken the stage.  One could hear short snippets of sound, quiet tuning, the testing of bow on string.  A gentle air of anticipation was about them.  And it was contagious.  After a brief introduction the lights were dimmed and a hush fell upon us.  An air of ceremony.  The concertmaster, Thomas Cosbey, emerged, violin in hand, and took his place at the head of orchestra.  With a simple gesture of his hand he signaled the cue to tune.  There came a rush of slowly building sound. It felt surreal and strange: that those sounds were actually coming from those instruments.  We're so used to hearing music that is removed from actual musicians, especially orchestral music which is so often now only in our lives as the background ambiance in our films.

After the tuning the concertmaster takes his seat as first chair and the hush descends again.  Then the Maestro enters.  We applaud and the orchestra stands to honour him.  He moves to the stand and shakes hands with the concertmaster.  He greets the audience with a smile and a bow.  Then he turns and faces the orchestra.

And the music begins.