It occurs to me…

Reading today from The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis published some seventy-eight years ago, he writes about the need for, and lack of, solitude.  “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy….”  He bemoans that “even where the planners fail and someone is left physically by himself, the wireless [that is, the 1941 “wireless”] has seen to it that he will be…never less alone than when alone.”

It occurs to me that solitude, silence, and privacy have become less valued (more avoided?) in the seventy-eight years following.  It also occurs to me that if he dropped in on us today, Lewis’ head might well explode.

From Heather Harvilesky, What If This Were Enough.  Bear with me, for this is a bit lengthy, but cutting it in pieces felt like a betrayal of its worth.

“We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities.  We are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering an enervated, anxious state over our value and popularity.  We are called to view our actions as important, with our without consecration by forces beyond our control.  We are called to plant these seeds in our world: to date to tell every living soul that they already matter, that their seemingly mundane lives are a slowly unfolding mystery, that their small choices and acts of generosity are vitally important.

Here is how you will start: You will recognize that you are not headed for some imaginary finish line, some state of ‘best’ness that will finally bring you peace.  You will see that you are as much of a miracle as Mozart was.  You will remember that bit of advice lurking inside one of Shirley Jackson’s dark novels: ‘Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.’  You will feel this and know it in your heart and pass this feeling along  to the people around you.  You will breathe inn this moment – this imperfect, uncertain, not-quite-right, heavenly moment.

You will say to yourself, ‘it is enough.’  And it will be.”

Amen!

Glow and Shimmer

From Heather Harvilesky’s essay, The Miracle of the Mundane:

“[W]e have to see that every human is divine.  We have to train ourselves to see that with our own eyes.  It will fuel us, once we see it.  The ordinary people around us, the angry ones and the indifferent ones, the good ones and the bad ones, will start to glow and shimmer.”

Sadly, it does take work to “see that every human is divine,” but the difficulty should not deter the effort.  Thus: “We have to train ourselves to see that with our own eyes.”  That the “glow and shimmer” is more apparent in some than others does not speak to the presence of the “glow and shimmer” so much as to my vision, my ability to see it.

From Heather Havrilesky, What If This Were Enough?”

“From the day we are born, the world tells us lies about who we are, how we should live, and what we should sacrifice to cross some imaginary finish line to success and happiness.”

And that is just her opening line in the introduction.  She continues:

“More than anything we have to imagine a different kind of life, a different way of living.  We have to reject the shiny, shallow future that will never come, and locate ourselves in the current, flawed moment.  Despite what we’ve been taught, we are neither eternally blessed nor eternally damned.  We are blessed and damned and everything in between.  Instead of toggling between victory and defeat, we have to learn to life in the middle, in the gray area, where a real life can unfold on its own time.  We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock.  We have to open our eyes and our hearts to each other.  We have to connect with what already is, who we already are, and what we already have.

We want too much.  We don’t need that much to be happy.  We can change ourselves…by returning to that simple truth repeatedly.  We have to imagine finally feeling satisfied.”

Well, that’s a lot to do in the next 220 pages!

Back to – never far from – the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:

The son’s return, I suppose like any renewal, occurs in several stages.  He had to leave, he take his journey into a far country.  v. 13  Then he had to spend it all, and begin to be in want.  v. 14  He had to hit bottom with the pigs, then come to himself, to have an awakening, an epiphany.  v. 15-17  Still, there was more required, he had to arise and go to his father.  v. 18

While all those steps, those stages, were necessary to the story, the last one is the most important, and perhaps the most difficult.  Absent the physical acts of getting up and starting on the road back, this is just a sad story of a guy who lost it all and realizes he has screwed up.

It occurs to me that while all the parts are needed to make the story, those things, the getting up and starting, then continuing on the road back, are the important parts, and the important parts of any life story.  The good news is that regardless of the story up to that point, the getting up and starting on the road back are always available.

“Seeing is the most arduous thing a human can undertake.  For it calls for a disciplined, alert mind, whereas most people would rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person and thing anew in present-moment freshness.”  Anthony DeMello

 It is, indeed, easy to see things as I expect them to be, easy for the “mental laziness” to take over and to see things as I have previously experienced them.  I expect the slow, grumpy waiter at the restaurant to be slow and grumpy the next time I am there.  I expect the 1-800 customer service person to be slow and incapable of helping me.  I mean, these expectations are reasonable, right!  Well, there is, of course, a notable exception here.  I expect others to see ME in “present-moment freshness,” to forget my transgressions and failures of last week, yesterday, ten minutes ago.

What goes around comes around.

From an On Being interview by Krista Tippett:

“The question isn’t whether we’re gonna have to do hard, awful things, because we are – and we all are.  The question is whether we have to do them alone.”  Kate Braestrup

That is, of course, the harsh reality of life.  In even the most charmed life there will be/are/have been “hard, awful things.”  In the midst of those “hard, awful things” there is this seeming tendency of the person on the receiving end to withdraw (to “do them alone”) and a tendency of the observer to let them, to avoid getting involved.  That said, it occurs to me that many triumphs in life occur when those tendencies are overcome by one person, then the other.  When one person is open and available to another, lives have the opportunity to blossom.

In Luke 3 we read of John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus.  He apparently spent a good bit of his time answering two questions – “Are you the Messiah?”  “What do we need to do to be prepared?”  The answer to the former question was, of course, “no.”  On the latter question John gives some practical advice: ““Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

This talk of preparing and sharing got me to thinking about two other questions that seem to be worthy of contemplation.

Who prepared the way for me?           For whom am I preparing the way?

I am reminded of the opening line in Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life:

“It’s not all about you.”

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”  Henry David Thoreau

Speaking literally, it is difficult to be awake at dawn, but the same is true figuratively.  I, like all humans, have this innate ability to block out, even intentionally ignore.  Or as Simon and Garfunkel put it, “a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”  The challenge, of course, is in the deciding what to hear.  I have old-fashioned wind up clocks in my office at home and at work that create the classic “tick/tock” as the pendulums swing back and forth.  Noisy as they are, I rarely hear the sound they generate though I notice others do as they enter the office.

It occurs to me that life is in large part a product of what, in Simon and Garfunkel terms, I hear and what I disregard, or in Thoreau’s terms, what I am awake to.

The same old new thing

C. S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters of how humans have both this love of change and permanence – we want the new yet value the old. He goes on to say that God “has contrived to satisfy both tastes together in this very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence we call Rhythm.” Thinking through that this morning that rings true.  Many mornings I watch the sun rise, and there is a sameness to it, yet the light, the color of the sky, the calling of the birds outside, they all coalesce to create a different morning each morning.   We have the seasons each year, and while each spring brings with it a sense of renewal, it is not the same as last year’s, nor will it be the same as next year’s.

I could, I guess, perceive each day as the same old thing, but of course, if I am paying attention, it is not.  The same old new thing — another fine example of the wonder of God’s creation.