Something New
This month, try something new that you’ve never tried before! This can be something big or something small, but it should be something that is new to you. Here are some ideas:
- Try a new kind of food, especially a new fruit or vegetable.
- Learn how to say some words in a new language.
- Make a new friend or sit with a new person at the lunch table.
- Play a sport you’ve never played before.
- Listen to a different kind of music, or music from another part of the world.
- Learn about how children live in other cultures. There are many organizations that will match people up with pen pals in other countries. (Kids, ask your parents for help with this!)
- Learn the names of your mailman, grocery clerk, school crossing guard, or others who help you every day. You might even give them a thank you card to show them you appreciate them.
Wishing for Something New
Many people make resolutions for the New Year of things that they plan to do differently. And many people break those resolutions before the week is out because they didn’t really want to make those changes to begin with. So it helps to start with a resolution that you DO want, not that you think you SHOULD want.
What is one thing that you really, really hope is part of your year to come? Write it down and put it in a jacket pocket. Now you have the year to figure out how to make your wish come true.
In The Waiting Time
I really do not like waiting. I will put something back on a shelf rather than wait in a long check-out line. I will shop online, choose a different restaurant, come back later, or change my plans altogether to avoid a line.
I hate waiting for a bus too. Why stand and wait when I can start walking now? Usually, the bus passes me as I am chugging along down the street. It does not phase me. At least I didn’t wait, I tell myself. A funny logic, I know.
I remember as a child waiting for special days, like birthdays and Christmas, and feeling as though time was moving as slow as molasses. As a teenager, I would count down days until I could visit out-of-town friends or go to summer camp: month after next, week after next, day after the day after tomorrow. It felt like time crawled until finally it was … today! And somehow, the long-awaited day had arrived.
I am waiting now like I have never waited in my life. Expecting the child that I have carried for the past nine months to come into the world, I cannot make this magical event happen on my timeline. I cannot just set off walking. I cannot make a different choice or come back later.
My spouse and I have waited, counting months and weeks and days, watching my body change, following our baby’s development step by step: organs and fingernails and eyelashes. We have moved from flutters to kicks to rolls, reveling in bulges that are feet and elbows, imagining what they might look like on the outside.
The leaves are changing here in New England and falling, one by one, covering the ground, shuffling under my feet as I walk, slowly now, talking to the baby: We are ready for you. Come ahead. The days grow shorter and the ground grows colder, prepping for dormancy, for a winter of waiting. Our waiting time is now. We wait for life to emerge.
Enjoy the wait, they say. While it’s still just the two of you. While you and baby are one. Pregnancy is to be savored, they say. Well, mine has been complicated, often hard to savor, and at this point I am rather uncomfortable. But there is wisdom in their words.
And so I am practicing something that does not come naturally: enjoying the wait. I am practicing savoring each day, each moment that my babe and I are joined in this most intimate way that will never be again. I am practicing breathing deeply, being present, watching the leaves fall, waiting for our lives to change irrevocably, for our hearts to be transformed in ways we cannot imagine. Waiting becomes the practice itself.
We are over a month from the beginning of Advent, yet I have never understood the season as well as I do now: patience and reflection. Calmly, quietly preparing body, heart, and soul for the miracle that will be.
Being and Doing, Work and Spiritual Practice
Last week I attended an interesting conference called Wisdom 2.0, about the convergence of technology and spirituality. To say it was interesting is an understatement: For this Midwesterner, listening to folks from the tech industry was fascinating, and the collection of spiritual teachers and industry leaders was artful. (You can watch what happened at Wisdom2summit.com.)
We heard from the folks who started up or lead massively successful technological companies—Google, Twitter, some new ones I hadn’t heard of—talk about how spirituality, and particularly mindfulness meditation, yoga, and service projects are part of their corporate environments. I was inspired.
I was also a little disoriented, and a little uneasy. With all of the talk of spiritual path, of wisdom, there was no talk at all about spiritual community. While we understood that some of the spiritual speakers came out of, and indeed dedicated their lives to, sustaining spiritual community, the talks seemed to suggest that wisdom was something attained by individuals who were devoted to meditation. The only spiritual community lifted up, in fact, was the workplace. Apparently on the job meditation and yoga cuts down on absenteeism and lifts productivity, while also providing health benefits for practitioners.
Pardon me if I don’t think workplaces really qualify as spiritual community. I say this as someone whose own workplace is a church, where I am a minister. Even this church does not qualify as spiritual community for me or the rest of the staff, though our work is spiritual in nature, and involves creating spiritual community for others. Every minister and religious professional knows that we must, ultimately, find somewhere else to ground ourselves and be able to embody the full mess we are, rather than believing our church is there to fulfill our needs. I’m not saying that being with the people in my church is not joyful, rewarding, deeply nurturing. But it’s not where I show up with all of my own stuff to work out. To believe otherwise is a recipe for misery for all of us.
And it’s not that spiritual communities don’t also need to raise money, either. We may be non-profits but we do need to be sustainable. So it’s not as if the concept of bringing in money is dirty or evil or wrong. I’m just a zealot for clear missions, and I think that the mission of for-profit companies is to succeed financially and the mission of congregations is to minister to a broken world. When congregations become centrally focused on raising money, they are not true to mission. And when corporations become centrally focused on the spiritual practice of their employees—well, I don’t think they ever really will.
When I realized that the workplace was being touted as the place to meditate and do spiritual practice, and when I kept hearing business leaders exclaim how this time was good for profits and the bottom line, part of me was afraid. As I write this blog, I’m waiting for some help from an airline which has let me down yet again with bad service. This airline used to be a different company—one dedicated to amazing customer service and care. After a hostile takeover, those same employees who used to do contortions to please the customers must look us in the eye and say there’s nothing they can do to help us. With or without hostile takeovers, I fear this could happen to any company as management discovers anew what actually helps the bottom line, and decides that it’s not spiritual practice after all. Far better to be part of a community which doesn’t care if you are a vice president or a mailroom clerk; they know you only as someone with a compelling spiritual practice. Far better, I believe, to belong to a spiritual community with the sole mission of being a spiritual community.
I loved the conference and learned a great deal. And I suspect I’ll go back next year. Next year, though, I’ll be more intentional and proactive about sorting through the folks present to find others who, like me, are interested in developing spiritual community with the bottom line of spiritual awakening, service, and joy.
High Resolve
“Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in fair weather or in foul, in good times or in tempests, in the days when the darkness and the foe are nameless or familiar, I may not forget that to which my life is committed.” ~ Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman
Carnival has passed. Mardi Gras is over for another year. We are now well into Lent. In the coastal south, even faith communities that do not celebrate Lent, the time of reflection and repentance before the celebration of sacrifice and resurrection, become attuned to the lenten rituals their Christian neighbors.
In her article Lenten Disciplines, Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger wrote:
While Lent does not have the same meaning in a Unitarian Universalist setting that it does in an orthodox Christian context, it is not meaningless. Each and everyone of us is called (by God, the Spirit, our Higher Power, our Better Nature) to be our very best self, a self we often fall short of, sometimes even intentionally. “Giving up something for Lent” does not have to mean that we sacrifice something we love and enjoy (like chocolate, for example) but can be a healthy spiritual discipline leading to our betterment, to our reaching closer to that wholeness we all seek.
Whether or not you religiously observe the season of Lent, as Unitarian Universalists we are always called to a healthy spiritual discipline that heals the brokenness of our lives and our world.
In this time of contemplation, we are invited to re-center ourselves and our spiritual communities. We are invited to ask:
What’s in our heart?
What’s our vision, our passion?
What brings us joy?
Where are our strongest relationships?
What promises do we keep?
How are we called to nurture and heal our world?
“In the days when the darkness and the foe are nameless or familiar,” may we be mindful of our moments of High Resolve that we may not forget that to which our lives are committed.
Blessed be, beloveds.
Paying Attention Again
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. . . .Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” Henry David Thoreau
Last June, I posted about paying attention, and I am writing about it again today. Have you heard the sayings that psychotherapists and ministers share what they need to hear and to learn? I know that when I am awake and paying attention life is better. I am more alive. Often, I send my consciousness into the future. I worry about my to do list or think about what we might do next year. Sometimes I let my mind be so busy that I forget to eat. I might drop things or have small accidents. My husband and daughter like to tease me about the time that I spilled coffee on our kitchen ceiling! When I do pay attention to this very moment, I am more present and more alive. With awareness, I can make conscious choices and feel more peaceful.
In my congregation on Sunday, we each meditated with a small river stone. I asked folks to really observe the stone, to see its colors, and to feel its textures and its weight. I asked them to truly pay attention to the small and simple stone. Then I asked them to allow the stone to share its wisdom or to send them a message. I asked them to remember that the stone is part of the holiness of the universe, part of the interdependent web of existence just as we are.
Then I asked them to call a word or phrase from the stone into the room. Here is what they said:
Slow down
Hope
Worn by water
Balance
Peace
Rest
Energy
Friend
Faith
Lasting
Exquisite
Smooth and easy
Solid
Antiquity
Character
Warm
Refuge
Just right
From slowing down and paying attention to a simple object, people became aware of beauty and strength. Through that focus, some of them noticed what they needed in their own lives. There is nothing magical in this. It is simply slowing down and paying attention.
May you be awake and aware in your life.
Love & Grief: Two Sides of the Same Coin
One night as the on-call hospital chaplain, I witnessed the end of three marriages, each representing over 50 years of love and struggle, as death claimed the husbands. The depth of grief of each wife haunted me for days. Was this the price of great love? Such great pain? This is what I have to look forward to after years of joy with my beloved?
I found myself restlessly meditating, pacing and praying, trying to unpack the promise of pain. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized that grief and love are two sides of the same coin – AND this is not cause for despair.
Life is about spending that coin. Loving with all my heart, grieving what is lost along the way, and loving more.
I learned to find gifts in sorrow, learning in the bad times. Hope.
I do not grieve what I do not love. Great grief is a sign of great love – and great love is a gift beyond compare. When my parents die, if they die before I do, I will mourn deeply, painfully, for years. Just the thought of not being able to call my mom and dad is enough for tears to spring to my eyes some days. But I have stood with children who do not mourn the loss of their parents, who mourn more for the lack of love they felt as a child than for the grief of their parents’ death. So I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that love is the gift. I would far rather mourn the loss of a great love, than have no love to grieve.
This really is hope for me. Not that loss is inevitable, no – but that if I love with all my being, the grief will be sharp and deep and clean. The pain will be intense and there will ever be an ache – but an ache of life well loved, not the ache of regrets nor of despair. I look to the beautiful and the sweet, because it will always lift me towards hope. The price of love is steep, but it is nothing compared to the life sucking numbness of not loving, not caring, not trying.
The great deception is that there is safety – that we can protect ourselves or our loved ones from harm. The truth is that life is mystery, change is constant, control is a figment of the human imagination. When I can be present to the truth that nothing is promised – all life is gift, then despair has a harder time getting a grip in my psyche. Each involuntary and thoughtless breath is amazing, is unearned and unearnable. Grace, by another name.
Years ago, I read the words of Anne Lamott, “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” “Ah,” said my soul. “Yes!” My source of hope lies in that mystery. I trust the universe to be endlessly creative, to be rife with paradox, to seek generativity. Life will! In the most inconceivable places and times and situations, life insists most creatively and assertively. And death will too. Two sides of the same coin, much like love and grief.
And so, I live holding all that I love lightly and tightly.
Lightly enough that it may take its own path, tightly enough that it never doubts my love.
It is a spiritual practice.
It is a daily struggle.
It is a daily joy.
Voting as Spiritual Practice, as a Neighborly Act…
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~ Wendell Berry ~
On this eve of a national election, so many conversations begin with “well, depending on who wins the election, …” In our representative democracy, a lot does depend on who wins elections.
Because of how the presidential election is decided, via the electoral college, it can feel as if your vote doesn’t count, especially if you tend to vote the opposite slate from the majority of voters in your state. I have heard more than a few people wonder out loud if they will even vote this year “since their vote won’t count anyway.”
What is imperative to remember during these bouts of feeling disenfranchised is that your local votes also change the world. It matters who sits on the city council seat, who becomes judge, whether that change to the city charter or the state constitution becomes law. It matters in daily life to real people.
Detention policies, educational opportunities, the right to marry – all of this is decided by voting at the local level. The roots of change have always been local. So read up about the local issues. Discuss them with your peers. And then vote, if you can, my friends. Think of it as a spiritual practice: Read, Reflect, Act.
Our votes matter very much to our neighbors and our selves. May this weekend be a time of spiritual practice for you as you prepare to vote for the sake of your local community next week.
Violence Begets Violence
I’m sure you’ve heard the aphorism, that violence never solves anything. It is a good line, one I have previously used myself. In the
long view it even has some truth to it… violence often does lead to more and more complicated problems over time.
The problem with it is that in the short view (and most human beings live in the short view) it is demonstrably untrue. Violence can seem, for awhile, to have solved some problems rather neatly. Violence, be it the violence of a mob in Cairo or a planned strike under the cover of a mob in Benghazi… violence can seem a viable solution to a problem, even an attractive one. Why attractive? Because somehow we continue with the myth that killing people creates some kind of finality, some kind of closure, in a visceral denial that we are all interconnected and interdependent.
And yet, I’ve come to realize that there is a deeper truth about violence, one that, in my experience, comes as close to an absolute truth of anything I have ever encountered… and that is this. Violence begets more violence. When one violence is perpetrated, it created a continuing cycle that creates more and different forms of violence, spreading out in a wave from the initial point.
In fact, I wonder if there really are very many new initial points of violence, and if rather our reality is made up of a continuing harmonic of violence stretching back to the dawn of human time.
I also want to clarify what I mean by violence, for I am talking about far more than physical violence. I might strike you, which is an act of physical violence. In reaction to my striking you, you might go home and be emotionally violent to a spouse. That spouse might then tell a child that the God they learned about in Sunday School must be dead for such things to happen, perpetrating an act of religious violence on the child’s growing faith… And on, and on, and on.
We all live in these cycles and waves of many different forms of violence each and every day of our lives. It is a spiritual practice to intentionally seek to interrupt these waves of violence when they come our way. It is a spiritual practice to notice the wave, the form of violence that is perpetrated upon you, and respond with loving kindness. It is a spiritual practice to transform that violence within your spirit.
As one person doing this, the wave will likely crash around you and flow on… but as one of millions? Perhaps we can, one day, break the cycle of violence that has plagued humanity since the dawn of our awareness. Perhaps we can break the cycle in which, in this small part of this ongoing wave of violence, an Israeli-American committed an act of religious violence upon the Islamic faith, and then many enraged by that act committed these acts of physical violence upon Americans, leading us now to political calculations around another act of military violence upon Muslims.
Without such millions of people seeking to intentionally interrupt the waves of violence of all forms, we are stuck forever battered by the surf.
Yours in faith,
Rev. David
Run for Your Life!
I have always been fairly athletic, and I enjoy playing a good game that gets my blood pumping. But I loathe exercise. I’ll run all day long if I’m on a court or a playing field, but ask me to run to get or stay in shape and I’ll kindly decline. I’ve tried several times in my life to become a runner, hoping to experience that “runner’s high” that I’ve heard so much about. In fact, when the running craze first hit the East Coast in the early ’70’s, I was among the first to buy a pair of bright blue Nike’s with the yellow swoosh on the side and take to the roads. I lasted about three weeks before pain and boredom overcame me. Two to three weeks seemed to be my limit every time I tried to get on the running bandwagon.
Then early this summer my daughter called and told me she had started the “Couch to 5k” program, and that I should try it too. I was skeptical, but she was persistent. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Right,” I replied. “Like pulling fingernails is fun.” Eventually, she wore me down and I decided I’d give it a try. “C25k” (as we in the know call it) is an interval training program that starts off with lots of walking and a little running. By the end of nine weeks, you’re not walking at all, and you’re running the full 3+ miles.
I’m proud to say that I have stuck with the program and am now a “C25k” graduate, and that I’ve kept up my running since completing the program. My daughter and I have started looking for a 5K race we can enter together to celebrate our accomplishment.
But the truth is that I still find running really boring. I run a 3 mile loop around town that keeps me mostly on residential streets and a couple of busier roads. I was told that running on pavement is easier on your joints and muscles than running on the concrete sidewalks. So, when it’s not too narrow or busy, I opt to run in the road (always facing oncoming traffic as I was taught in grade school). I watch the oncoming cars carefully, to be sure that they see me and keep a safe distance. When a car gives me a wide berth, I usually give a little wave to acknowledge the driver’s awareness and kindness.
Lately, I’ve developed this little interchange between drivers and me into a kind of spiritual practice. For the past several runs, I’ve begun to say a small prayer or blessing for each passing motorist. As I wave, I say “May you know peace” or “Know that you’re loved.” I wish health, happiness, peace, love, passion, success, and joy to the occupants of the cars that pass me by. For those drivers who either aren’t watching or don’t care to give me some space, I pray for their attentiveness, their alertness, and their foresight as I hop up onto the curb.
In offering these small blessings to strangers who pass me by, I find that I, too, am blessed. As I pray for these things for others, I am reminded of the joy, peace, love, passion and successes I find in my own life. I experience the blessings of good health, of the air that I breathe in, of the incredible machine my body is. I notice the gifts of the sky, the trees, the wind and the sun.
May you know peace today. May you know that you are loved. May you feel joy. And may you find, in some small way, the opportunity to wish that for others as you go about your day.
Love,
Peter
