MAY YOUR SOUL HAVE REST!

A friend and I have been together on a journey to slow down; our bodies have been telling us they need less busy-ness.  With our jobs as "chief purchasing officers" and "head chauffeurs" for our families, not to mention our positions as "chief cooks and bottle washers" we can be busy, busy, busy about many things -- many necessary things.  We are behaving like Martha in the Christian Scriptures, and our souls are really "Mary", and know what are primary needs are, in our depths.

Our souls have been letting us know that we are not grounded as we want to be.  Our conversations have turned to how we need not only to have a daily "quiet time" where we pay attention to God's presence, in order to be grounded in our day, but also to incorporate rest into our day.  I don't mean by that, a nap, although sometimes that's what's needed.  This "rest" is like a "rest" in musical notation.  In music there's sound, melody and rhythm and perhaps several parts, and then there's a rest -- where one voice goes still.  It adds to the beauty of the music, and it allows what goes before to reverberate.  It also allows the mind to get ready to absorb what comes next.  It's that "rest" that I find I need in my day. 

 Soon after a recent conversation I came across some reading that mentioned the "cell" of monastic life.  "A monk's room is called a cell.  The word "cell" is not to imply a prison cell.  The monk may enter and exit the cell at will.   Rather, the monk's cell is a place of refuge."  from A Journey into Lay Monasticism 

I would add, that when I practice enough "going to my cell" i.e. my daily quiet time of prayer and meditation, and also staying home as needed and not filling my day with more busy-ness than is required, that the "cell" gradually becomes an interior space within me that I can go to at any time.  Quiet time and prioritizing so that I am not too busy, is the practice that gives me an "interior watchfulness".  The exterior "cell" is the outward sign of the interior reality that I am desiring and practicing.

A pithy observation that makes this same point:  "Just as fish die if they stay too long out of the water, so the monks who loiter outside their cell or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace.  So, like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside, we will lose our interior watchfulness."  St. Anthony (St. Anthony was one of the early Christian men who went to live in the desert in order to give themselves wholly to God)

 And another piece of wisdom from the Desert Fathers:  "A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked for a word.  The old man said to him, "Go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything".

 We might quibble about "everything", but the point made is that it is with God and in silence with God that we find our grounding and our perspective that makes everything else fall into place.

HOW WILL YOUR SOUL FIND REST TODAY?

  

 

WHAT GOD ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

In that same NPR story, the women had experienced people saying well-meaning but terribly hurtful things, as had many of the people who posted comments on the site afterwards.

When I hear what some Christians say to others, especially to someone in difficult circumstances, I often cringe.  

God is a name, a placeholder, for that phenomenon of love and grace and truth and beauty:  if your God is not those, then we believe in something different.

From Gross to Grace

I go to the kitchen to pull some meat off chicken bones for dinner. NOT one of my favorite tasks! The chicken is cold, there's little bits of bone and skin that you have to be careful to get off the chicken, and I am not a detail person. But, I am a good cook, and I like to eat -- aand who likes to find little grainy bits of chicken bones or pieces of cartilage in a chicken dish? So, I dutifully go about my So I dutifully set about my task.

But first, I am moved to open the windows. It's cold in the house from the night, and the gorgeous day is begging me to enjoy it. I open these great casement windows that you crank open, and I let the warmth, the sunshine, and the sound of birds and breeze pour in.

I go back and get my chicken out, not looking forward to this distasteful task. I take the lid off my blue Le Creuset French oven --- a little bit of pleasure, grace, right there, good cookware -- and wow! The two chicken quarters I boiled yesterday gave off a thick layer of wonderful clear gelatinous protein base for soup. I expected watery broth, but there is none of that. Only this rich, nutritious stuff. Now I am a little more excited. The presence of that good stuff makes the work of pulling chicken off bones a bit more palatable. Now I am off to a start, thinking about what I am going to do with this glorious gelatinous goodness to serve my family a nutritious meal. Will it be simple chicken soup, or tortilla soup? Or is there something new I can think of? My family does not always find "new" to be an occasion of grace, so maybe not this time.

I get down to the nitty gritty of the chicken, separating the good from what I now think of as great. I hear the birds and the breeze, I feel the warmth and see the sun, and there I have heaven in my kitchen. God's bounty outdoors and indoors, all for me just to enjoy -- just for the paltry price of some chicken-picking.

GRACE.

UPDATE ON STIR-CRAZY GRACE

I need to tackle the name of this blog again.  It started when I was overseas but I never really wrote about cooking and grace in Lagos, Nigeria! (see earlier post on this subject)

There are a couple of things about me that I love.  I love to cook and bake, and I see Grace everywhere. 

I am an incorrigible baker and a compulsive cook.  I could spend days reading recipes, writing changes to recipes, trying recipes -- my biggest problem is who to feed?   I have got a question for my Creator:  why make me want to cook constantly and only give me a family of 3?  Maybe there's someone I am supposed to be cooking for and just haven't met my match yet.

So, you could think that Stir Crazy is about me stirring up some bread dough, or some cinnamon rolls, or a pot of soup -- all of which I have done just these past few days.

But Stir Crazy to me is a riff on being in this world but not of this world.  I have always felt like I didn't quite belong here, or at least, that I was tuned in a little differently.  Don't we all feel this way, if we get right down to it? 

Stir-crazy conjures up a cabin in the woods in the winter, cold outside, and you're getting a little gritchy with your family.  And stir-crazy is what I feel sometimes, not gritchy with the neighbors or family so much as needing to grow, needing to breathe bigger, needing to love bigger -- needing to let the love and the me that is inside me get outside me.  How to let my heart be fed and grow and share it?  How to share the me that is inside with the world that is outside?  How to be the person I was made to be?  How to be my highest self?  How to be the woman God made me?

It's not so much discomfort here; it's about the stirring up that spurs me to growth, that pushes me.  Life is constant exodus, and it's that stirring within me that propels me to that.  And that stirring means I can never be completely "at rest".  It's a "crazy" but a good crazy -- it's grace stirring me.

Not only is there grace stirring in me; it's in every one of us.  We have to be still enough -- still the external stirring up that is done to us from the outside so much -- to sense that grace. 

There is grace in each of us, and grace in every bit of this world.  It's grace that made the world and keeps the world.  It is "given"; that's what grace is.  Grace is all the beauty around us; the laughter of children, the cycle of life and death and life; grace is beauty and love and truth.  It is in the beauty, but it is in the seemingly ugly too.  At the bottom of the ugly is always the opportunity for grace to be made visible.  It depends on your vision.  You have to claim grace to see grace.

So, Stir-Crazy Grace!

ATHEIST AWARENESS

I am always fascinated by stories of faith or the apparent lack of faith.

NPR recently ran a series on how people are losing religion, and coping without it.   It things agot me thinking.  

One is that underlying  the story is a confusion of terms:  faith is not the same thing as religion.  Atheists have a certain kind of faith:  they have faith in the proposition that there is nothing beyond human beings; that human beings represent the highest pinnacle of power.  This is as unproven as the hypothesis that there is a power greater than human beings themselves in this world and thus is a tenet of faith.  Not an original thought with me, but so obvious to me.

Islamic thinkers in the Middle Ages solved the problem of the definition of God simply.  Averroes stated that God is “that than which there is nothing greater”.   On this definition of what the word "God" means at root, it seems we could all agree.  That's because truth is truth, no matter what you call it!  Christianity calls this God; the atheist calls this man, this "that than which there is nothing greater".  Maybe we could start a more effective discussion from the first point, of agreement,  instead of from the second one, which is where people just start polarizing. 

My second observation is that religion is a set of practices that link us to this “that than which nothing is greater”.  “Linking back” is the Latin meaning of “re” and “ligio”.  In the absence of practices of religion, the atheist “must forge one’s own path” as the atheist does not have comforting rituals or prayers.  The NPR story one day was about how atheists have managed to find some comfort in the absence of traditional God-centered rituals. 

NPR in this story made itself the link between the atheists; the stories provided communication between the atheists, it “linked” them to each other,  and the story itself included two main characters, each of whom found that forming community based on their needs and beliefs was what helped them to cope with the death of a loved one. 

So the story shows two women creating community based on belief in man as the greatest being, and NPR disseminated their coping strategies and the beliefs that grew out of their original beliefs and questioning.  Sounds like the women are working out their "religion" - practices that link them to their beliefs, and that NPR functioned somewhat like "church" linking the atheists and their way of practicing, acting on their beliefs, to each other.  The story promulgated information to and for atheists with the result that they can be strengthened to work out how to live with and in their belief system and to act out of it in forming their world. 

Sounds like "church" to me!  And that is a good thing.  The Christian God is nothing if not "community", right?  I mean, the Trinity is three persons right there.

What is interesting here is that believers and non-believers would come to the same solution: reach out to others.  Turn grief and difficulty into something good for someone else.  What is true, is true, whether you believe it as the result of being steeped in the story of the transformation of the crucifixion/resurrection cycle, the transformation stories of other religions, or whether you come to it through your own experience of what works.

Lest it seems I am criticizing, rather than observing, let me add that I do not object to the NPR story, and while I have different language about God, I think thoughtful atheists might be on to something.  The atheists in the story acted in congruence with Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). 

Would that we would all do the same!

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

If the Christians can't get it across -- to ourselves much less to others -- that God is in action and community, He is the Living God, then who can fault the atheists who do get it, painfully and slowly and largely one by one constructing their path,  that we are called in this way?

CONTROL OR CREATION?

I am hungry as if I am pregnant. So hungry I can hardly believe it, and I need to eat every two hours or so. My last menstrual cycle was 2 1/2 years ago! I couldn't be pregnant could I? At 50 years old? It can happen.

My first reaction is to feel like a wayward teenager. What business does a 50 year old have getting pregnant? I'd be 72 before the child got out of college! And getting out of college is no guarantee that a person is completely ready to be on their own. They still need their moms and dads.

And next, what about the higher likelihood that a child born to a 50 year old mom would not even be capable of college? The rate for birth defects and Down's Syndrome is huge for mothers in their late 30's and early 40's. What would it be for a 50 year old?

I was mortified thinking about all the people who know my age and who view life from a more Protestant, American, "I am in control of my destiny" and I don't let anything happen that I don't want -- point of view. I realize I have plenty of those people in my life.  Perhaps because I share this view at least on some level.

However, what I really think is that even at 50, to be able to participate in creation at this most amazing, crucial level, is a huge gift! Sure, it's a responsibility, but I think, even when 20 and 30 somethings have children, our culture views their responsibility as much greater than it has to be. I believe in a loving God and I believe that we all have the ability to deal with whatever comes our way. Even the 30 somthings don't have all the responsibility that their world, this world, would heap on them.

The single most valuable piece of wisdom I received when I had my son was that I was not 100% responsible for him. Neither were my husband and I together, 100% responsible. There are events and circumstances in this world that we can not only not foresee, but certainly cannot manage to avoid. We cannot manage well enough to make everything all right for our children. Nor do I believe we are supposed to. I believe my role as a parent is to respect the dignity of my child's personhood. I am not to control his actions, beyond a certain level of teaching and training, I am not to sweep obstacles or consequences out of his way. I believe that when I parent in this way, I create an atmosphere in which my son has the opportunity to become aware of his qualities, strengths, characteristics, the good and the bad, . This is where his strength of character and self-esteem will come from. Not from having a good life, not from having material things, not even from having a young and energetic mother.

I hope that I am around for my child, or children, well into grandparenthood. I welcome any chance at creating and loving a family. I welcome and am honored by the opportunity to co-create with the God of the universe, this universe and the people within it. God creates with wild abandon. Looking out my window I see trees and vines and grass and sunflowers -- yes, sunflowers even in the drought! -- I see agapanthus and iron plant, palms and oak trees, kumquat trees.  I see God as continually creating our ever expanding universe, giving us an image of himself as infinite love and creation. I would be honored to have another chance to participate in that awesome, wild, fruitful creation.


P.S. I WAS NOT PREGNANT - probably just menopausal hormone surges!