NOTE: I am going to take a brief break from posting in this blog. My plan is to begin posting again on Thursday, October 5, 2017. Watch this space!
I was the speaker at our church's adult forum this past Sunday. My topic was Spirituality 101. During the forum we wrestled with the meaning of spirituality and also explored the ways to engage with spiritual practices. We barely touched the surface, but I am grateful to be part of a community where questions like these are part of an ongoing conversation.
I suggested to the group that the essence of spirituality is the way you experience connection to the sacred aspect of life, the spirit of life. You might connect
To your own inner, creative core.
To other people.
To nature.
To God and to the faith we profess.
Or you may connect to any combination of the above. And your spiritual connection may change throughout your lifetime.
Thomas Hart, a spiritual writer and family therapist, suggests that where the action of our life is, God is present and active with us.
That means God is in the car pool with us when we take kids to school or at the kitchen sink when we wash dishes or when we collapse into a chair hoping to read a few pages in a good book before a nap overcomes us. It also means God is with us in the challenges, the big ones --caretaking an elderly loved one, facing a health crisis in ourselves, losing a job, becoming an empty nester, wondering what the purpose of our life is now that we no longer can do what we have always done. The list goes on.
The key question is: How is God moving in my life right now? How and when do I feel and know the presence of God?
These are spiritual questions.
So much more I could say and perhaps I will as time goes on, but I want to close todays's post by quoting Anthony de Mello's take on spiritual practices.
Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?
As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning?
Then what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?
To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.
An Invitation
What would it look like to live more spiritually right now? I would love to know.
"What should I write about today?" I often have a number of ideas or possibilities when I sit down the day before I publish one of my posts. That was not the case this time, however, but I trusted that my morning meditation time or walk would bear some fruit.
I opened my Bible and read the reading assigned by the Brian McLaren's We Make the Road By Walking.
Look at the birds of the air;
they neither sow nor reap
nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly
Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to
your span of life." (Matthew 6: 26-27)
I sat with the familiar scripture and with the accompanying devotional material, and then I turned to the other book I am reading, Ripening Time, Inside Stories for Aging with Grace by Sherry Ruth Anderson. I read a section in which the author describes how she reaches out to touch her husband when he stops snoring during the night to see if he is still alive. And he does the same to her. She writes,
Death has begun to feel like a continual murmur,
an intimate consultation I do with the end point
that is coming. It's not something I talk about, but
a kind of certainty is here now, making the time
distinctly different from my middle age. p. 97
I had just finished reading those words when Bruce called up the stairs to me, saying there was an EMT vehicle and three police cars in front of our next door neighbor's house. I joined him outside, and we knew the news was not good when the EMT people left the house and the police stayed.
Our neighbor, a man of our age, had died. Apparently a heart attack.
Later we delivered fruit and rolls for the gathered grieving family. We held our neighbor who is in that stunned, shocked place. She briefly told us the story she will repeat many times about finding him on the kitchen floor when she got up in the morning.
I ache for her.
This could be me. This could be you.
Eventually, I returned to the garret and finished reading the chapter in the Anderson book. She ends the chapter with these words:
It's so important to contact the depth in ourselves
while we still can, find our connection with the
universal ground. p. 103
One never knows.
An Invitation
What will you do today to live more openly, more compassionately, more authentically? I would love to know.
I prefer silence to noise.
That's not unusual for someone who considers herself a modern-day contemplative.
I love my morning meditation time before most of the world is awake. I sit in the garret and pray and write and read and breathe and gradually enter the days. I do that against a background of silence.
But I must say I enjoy the presence of some noise in my life these days.
Our neighborhood seems to have come alive with the noise of children playing. I often hear people commiserating that children don't play outside anymore. Well, that is not the case on our block. During the hours between the end of the school day and bedtime, groups of kids call to each other, as they race down the sidewalk on bikes and scooters. Some of the older kids stand on both sides of the street and toss a football or baseball back and forth. I hear, "Red Light, Green Light" or "Red Rover, Red Rover send Tommy right over." Yes, kids still play those games.
Sometimes I hear the sound of the newest resident on the block. Fiona was born in July, and occasionally I hear her crying. Instead of being bothered by her demands to be fed or changed or held, I love knowing there is new life present. A little girl who will one day join the sidewalk party.
The other night I heard cheers coming from a crowd. Most likely it was from a football game at the local high school or one of the colleges in our area. The wind carried the sound right through our windows, and I hoped the home team was winning.
Much to my surprise, Sunday morning I even welcome the noise of happy chatting in the sanctuary before church starts. My desire has always been to sit quietly in meditation before the service's opening hymn, but I love how welcoming we are to each other and how eager we are to see and check in with one another.
Other sounds certainly are not as pleasurable: barking dogs who have been left outside unattended for long stretches, firetruck, ambulance or police sirens, signaling a crisis of some kind, or even the sound of garbage trucks rumbling through the alley. For the moment my concentration may be broken. Oh well. That's the way life is in an urban neighborhood.
Don't get me wrong, I will always treasure the quiet moments, the measured rhythm of stillness, but as I age, I think I am more able to listen and appreciate the sounds of happy activity. The sounds of love, of connection, of life.
An Invitation
How about you? What are the sounds in your life? What are the sounds that enhance your life? I would love to know.
"Take care of yourself today," my Dad often says at the end of our brief morning conversation.
My first thought is how he has taken such good care of our family over the years and how he continues to do so. For example, I know he prays for us and keeps us all in his heart.
Now, of course, we need to care for him in some ways, although he is still quite independent, even at age 94. For example, this past weekend we took him to my mother's grave in Lakewood Cemetery. That is something he can no longer do on his own, along with driving at night or beyond his loop of life. The list of ways he needs our care is small so far, and we are grateful for his good health and active mind.
I wonder, when he reminds me to take good care of myself, what that means for me right now. I almost immediately think about what I am NOT doing to take good care of myself, like exercising. And then I feel guilty, of course.
But there are other ways I do take care of myself, beginning with my morning meditation time. This time grounds me and alerts me to the movement of God in my life. This time opens me to the ways I am meant to move and be in the world and how I am to care for others. If I miss a morning or two of this self-care, I begin to feel wobbly and unsure and critical of myself and others.
Making sure I have writing time, perhaps not every day, but most days, is another way I take care of myself these days. Writing is one of the ways I show up in the world, one of the tools God has given me to live as the person I was created to be.
Perhaps that's what "taking care of yourself" means: living from your essence, doing the work God created you to do. When I think of it this way, it doesn't feel so self-absorbed, but actually directs me to live wholeheartedly. For myself, but also for and with others.
I feel cared for when my father tells me to have a good day and to take care of myself, and better equipped to live those good words in all I do and all I am.
An Invitation
What does "take good care of yourself" mean to you? I would love to know.
For many children school starts today, and, oh, does that bring back memories.
I loved school--both as a student and later as a teacher--and am grateful I was able to learn without great struggles and had parents who supported my love of learning. How thankful I am our children thrived in school settings. That is true now for our grandchildren, too. Obviously, that is not always the case.
(Note: I can't believe I wore a suit and nylons on my move-in day at St Olaf! That was 1966, and oh, how the times were different then!)
Today seems like a good day to celebrate all we have learned (Thank you, teachers!), all we have managed to survive, and the twists and turns, directions and dimensions of our lives. So much of our life has been in school.
Today is also a good day, to think about what you are learning, what you are studying now. There so many excellent opportunities for those of us in the 3rd Chapter of our lives,for colleges and universities and community education programs are everywhere. Plus, there are online offerings. I salivate at all the possibilities, making it hard to pick and choose. I have signed up for a couple classes at The Loft Literary Center and this week will attend the first fall monthly writing session at Wisdom Ways.
At the same time I am conducting my own independent studies. Soon I will present an adult forum at church called Spirituality 101 and in the process I am reading and studying and sorting and processing. This summer I created a course for myself about writing essays and also spiritual memoir as a path for restructuring the book I am writing.
And then there is the learning that comes with this stage of life. I have never been 69 years before and this time of life has great potential for learning. Inner learning. Inner growth.
I am reading an excellent book by Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ripening Time, Inside Stories for Aging with Grace. She says,
I propose that, since we do not know what reaches and
dimensions of our humanity are possible as we age, we
engage the question. All the questions--whatever we can
discover about how we can grow old consciously. We
already know too much about what diminishes--hearing,
eyesight, short-term memory, speed of recall and
calculation, and so on. That is not so interesting. But
to consider what grows, what develops, what ripens--that,
I propose, is interesting indeed.
We can each start a new school year today. The School of Conscious Aging. Get out your notebooks and pack a lunch. Happy first day of school!
An Invitation
What first day of school memories do you have? Are you still in school? Actually or metaphorically? I would love to know.
