Listening as a Sacred Calling
April 8, 2010
the spirit of the place
January 19, 2010
As technology gets more mobile and your 3G or 4G network gets you “connected” from anywhere on the planet, social scientists are pointing toward the fact that other horizons seem to be disappearing. Nature and green space have dropped off the screen so-to-speak, because in our time-poor culture, we just don’t have time to go to the park or have a garden, because apparently we’d rather miracle-grow our farms in a game on Facebook. Nature is becoming invisible to the virtual eye, one might say. We walk down the street texting or e-mailing or chatting on the phone, and un-noticed is the silent creep of the natural world. Does this call into question the very argument of the erstwhile apostle Paul from Romans 1: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Do we no longer take time to notice?
I bring this up, because I think it has an immense bearing on what we call “spiritual formation”. When we speak of spiritual formation, we are talking about what forms us into the people we are becoming. Thus, in spiritual formation, we seek to have the Spirit of the Living God forming us unto Christlikeness, just as Jesus foretold us He would in John 16:13.
Yet a recent article in the Washington Post reported that: “According to a recent landmark study of viewing habits, adults spend an average of nearly three hours a day interacting with computer screens. Add TV viewing and you get a screen time of about 8 1/2 hours. “People are spending more time in media and especially screen media than anything else they’re doing in life,” says Bill Moult of Sequent Partners, one of two organizations that provided the study…But you don’t need numbers to know how absorbed we have become by screens and their mesmerizing qualities. In October [2009], two Northwest Airlines pilots who flew their jet 150 miles past their destination told investigators they were distracted by their laptop computers.”
The more time we spend with something the more it “forms” us, that’s basic spiritual formation 101. The more time with Jesus, the more like Him we become, however we also note that it is not just the content of material going into our brains (input) that forms us - things like scripture reading or memorization - but it is also how we are taking that information in that is just as critical. In spiritual formation studies, we note that the impact of content can suffer greatly if there is no contact - actually interacting relationally with Jesus directly via prayer and indirectly in community with others and our world.
Interviewed about what we are losing in the digital/virtual age, Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, observed that the difficulty is that we are losing something profoundly human: the capacity to connect deeply to our environments. He reminds us that landscape designers talk about bestowing on a garden its genius loci, or spirit of the place, that bubbles up into your consciousness if its presence is strong enough and the visitor meditative enough to receive it. Harrison says a garden truly reveals itself only when its own depths and those of the beholder flow together. But in our present age of rushing here-and-there, we languish in the poverty of both time and attention. Thus in an age of distraction, attention becomes a primary spiritual discipline, along with meditation, which he mentions.
Harrison claims that gardens and green space are keys to bringing us back from the virtual world to re-claim our humanity. In fact, in the initial chapters of Genesis there is a word-play in the Hebrew with regard to the Earth and the Man formed out of earth. In Hebrew, earth is ‘adamah and man is ‘ha-adam. The best translation may be ‘earth’ and ‘earthling’, and the earthling is placed in what?…a garden of delight. Thus, Professor Harrison goes on to say: “Gardens are the best place to begin this reeducation,” Without it, he fears that the prophecy of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Duino Elegies, will become so. “Earth, isn’t this what you want; invisibly to arise in us? Is it not your dream to be someday invisible? Earth! Invisible!”
Of course it is entirely possible that Paul nailed it in Romans: we, professing to be wise, became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for a virtual image flickering in HD…
- How do you connect best with God? Nature? Internet? Solitude? Community?
- Have you considered - as an earthling - how you are connected to this earth? I believe there is something significant that we are made of earth, yet the Spirit of the Living God indwells us…I like how Pierre Teilhard de Chardin turns our perspective on its head: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
- What would you say is the genius loci/spirit of the place in which you inhabit currently?
- Take time to connect with your local environment…meditate deeply on it and look for the bubbling presence of God to reveal the hidden Christ to you; journal your thoughts on this afterwards. Is God saying something to you?
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 3
December 19, 2008
Reflection … an antidote to hurry
Look at how the lilies grow (Matthew 6:28)
If you’re going to enjoy a painting you’ve got to set aside time. You must not expect that you can take a fleeting glance and reach a conclusion, any more than you can just look at a book’s dust cover …. When I’m filming, in between times when they’re setting up for the next work of art, I’ve got to sit somewhere and often I’ve been I’ve been parked in front of something that I would not have looked at twice. But forced to sit and contemplate it, I begin to warm up to it and it opens up to me …. It might never be something that we would choose as our first love, but it can speak to us. It’s that giving time, looking at art peacefully, that matters. Crowded, noisy museums are not conducive to this kind of looking. I forget who it was who said that the necessity for appreciating art is a chair — which I always have, you see, because I go round in a wheelchair. So I really look. (Sister Wendy Becket, nun and art critic, from an interview in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion)
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. (Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now)
Consider the following statements of Jesus taken from Matthew’s narrative of his life:
Look at how the birds don’t plant or harvest… (Matt. 6:26)
Look at how the lilies grow… (6:28)
The kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who planted seed… (13:24)
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed (13:31)
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast (13:33)
The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that someone discovers hidden in a field… (13:44)
The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl merchant on the lookout for choice pearls… (13:45)
The kingdom of heaven is like a fishing net… (13:47)
The kingdom of heaven is like a person who brings both new and old from the storehouse (13:52)
The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate… (20:1)
This generation is like a group of children playing a game in the public square… (Matt. 11:16)
Jesus, like all those around him, saw birds every day. He saw flowers, watched fishermen haul in nets, heard of people winning the lottery, knew of people who owned lots of property. But he had cultivated the practice of doing something that few people then (as now) almost never make room for: he considered the significance of what he experienced as it related to the work of God. Everybody saw birds and flowers, but Jesus saw how they reflected God’s provision. Every household was familiar with yeast and its qualities, but Jesus saw how it reflected the hidden, subversive and viral nature of God’s kingdom.
He regularly took the “brute facts” of his day and mined them for their divine significance. And in each case he paid attention to one feature of what he saw. We like to believe that we can notice many things at once (and we may even take a certain degree of pride in our ability to multi-task), but it’s a frustrating and inefficient way to go through life:
Despite our subjective feelings to the contrary, actually our brain can work on only one thing at a time. Rather than allowing us to efficiently do two things at the same time, multitasking actually results in inefficient shifts in our attention. In short, the brain is designed to work most efficiently when it works on a single task and for sustained rather than intermittent and alternating periods of time…. But despite neuroscientific evidence to the contrary, we are being made to feel that we must multitask in order to keep our head above the rising flood of daily demands. In essence, the brain has certain limits that we must accept. (Richard Restak, M.D., The New Brain)
Think of time as soil, attention as water, and quiet as sun. Allowing ourselves these three, we’ll naturally grow. Like Jesus (and many others who have lived wisely and courageously), we’ll notice what’s in front of us and be able to relate it to God’s work in this world.
But we’ll only notice if we slow way down and shut way up. Rituals like Sabbath-keeping (or creating mini-sabbaths throughout each day) give us that opportunity. So do reading and lingering over Scripture. We let our imagination “image” the scenes and then think about the significance of those scenes. (My friend Larry Bourgeois refers to this and other “slow-downs” as spiritual loitering.) But even staring at a painting, watching kids play, admiring a tree for several minutes or thinking about the food in front of you are invitations to reflect.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 2
December 17, 2008
Single-Mindedness … an antidote to schizophrenia
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. (James 4:1-8, NIV)
Jesus doesn’t’ mince words about what’s required to follow him. It is to “lose our lives.” For those who follow him there’s a clear expectation that we’ll follow his agenda. (Matthew 7:21) And when James blasts out the encouragement: “purify your hearts, you double-minded,” he’s reiterating the kind of attention and focus that undergird the Christian life. A “double-minded” person suffers from a type of schizophrenia, a rupture of the person. There’s a bi-polar quality to life, exhibitied by conflicting allegiances and multiple masters.
As Christians, however, we’re to turn our hearts fully toward God’s will in order to become single-minded. This is what’s meant by the call to “purify” ourselves. This may be the single most important base for discipleship. Jesus asks, “Are you in or out? Coming with me or staying behind. Make your choice and be aware of what the choice entails.”
Modern life, however, does anything but encourage single-mindedness. The multiplicity of distractions available to us in our time is nothing short of astonishing. If we are going to follow Jesus faithfully in this whacked out modern life, we have to find a way not just to turn down the volume, rise above all the nonsense and keep our eyes fixed on Christ.
There are two spiritual disciplines that seem especially appropriate for our day. They inoculate us against distraction and hurry. They’ve always been useful and a part of the lives of mature Christians, but because of the ethos of our culture, maybe we need to give them more attention than usual. The first of these is recollection., the subject of this post. The second, the subject of tomorrow’s post — if tomorrow should come — is reflection.
Recollection … an antidote to distraction
Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)
I wonder what Aldous Huxley would say if he were alive now in the 21st century. It seems almost quaint when he talks about the radio — this was written over 60 years ago — but if you understand it as “aural bombardment” in general, then there’s a takeaway for us:
The twentieth century is, among other things, that Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio [what would he say today!] is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow…. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions — news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where…the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears…to the ego’s central core of wish and desire…. All advertising has but one purpose — to prevent the will from ever achieving silence…. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving. (Aldous Huxley)
The Practice of Jesus
Read Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31 and Matthew 14:10-13 and it will become clear that Jesus took time for recollection, which literally means “collecting again” or “bringing to mind again.” Think of the imagery behind the word recollection. You have the picture of someone picking up pieces that have become scattered and putting them all in one place. This is what we do in recollection. We take the scattered elements of our selves and our days and put them back into a whole piece. We remind ourselves that we belong to the Lord, that he loves us, that one thing matters, that we’re here to receive and dole out love.
Recollection is the precursor for reflection. We first have to gather the scattered elements of our selves and life before we can think about them. It’s like doing archeology. You’re digging around and come across a bunch of pottery shards embedded in dirt. You carefully extricate them, clean them, and put them together on a table. Then you carefully examine them and figure out what goes together. Eventually you might get a pot. But there’s no examination until there’s some sort of collection. Re-collection starts when we stop. Re-collection sets the stage for reflection, but the two dance together. If we practice recollection at regular intervals through the day, we train ourselves to return to God. Those stopovers on our daily journey might revolve around fixed-hour prayer. They might involve two or three scheduled breaks in our day just to sit still, be quiet, and pray silently. Journaling might also help us. What you do specifically is almost inconsequential in comparison to simply doing something. The truly important thing is to act courageously and wisely by carving out moments to step off the path, silence the noise and listen for a moment with God to your life.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 1
December 16, 2008
Purity of heart is to will one thing. (Søren Kierkegaard)
[Your heavenly Father] will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern. (Matthew 6:33, NLT)
… a doubtful mind is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. People like that should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. They can’t make up their minds. They waver back and forth in everything they do. (James 1:6-8, NLT)
Don’t make room for the world, for your unbridled passions, or your laziness. Words aren’t enough to claim the kingdom of God. It takes strength and courage and violence. You must violently resist the tides of the world. Violently give up all that holds you back from God. Violently turn your will over to God to do his will alone. (François Fenelon)
Single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection are foundational for developing a mature, durable spiritual life. There is, in fact, no mature conversation with God and no deep understanding of his created order that occurs without them. They form the backdrop, context and the ground for our discipleship. In their absence we can only expect an abstract babbling about God, a kind of virtual experience of the divine based on the acquisition of religious information rather than direct experience of the Holy One. Without them we have the semblance of power, but certainly not the real deal. In short, we can’t afford to lose them.
But in fact we are losing them. Of course there has never been a crowd stampeding to God or rushing headlong to the practices that help us draw close to him. The majority has always been content to travel effortlessly along a broad and comfortable highway leading to an equally broad gate. Jesus was quick to point this out. (Matt. 7:13) But there will always be holdouts, people who want the less traveled and bumpier road despite the difficulties involved. We, like our ancestors, can still find that narrow road today. But whereas in the past the effort to find and walk it well took all our efforts, today it seems to take more than all. We look in our travel bag for the items of single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection only to find that the supply is low, that someone raided it in the middle of the night and left us in short supply. Welcome to modern life.
21 Observations on American Culture
March 4, 2008
• We’re flooded with noise and have little respect for silence.
• Our days are overly busy.
• We abuse our bodies with poor food and too much food.
• We abuse our bodies with too little sleep.
• We abuse our bodies with too little activity.
• We’ve surrendered to mindless, pernicious distraction.
• We’re over-eroticized by the marketing of sex.
• We value money over ethical behavior.
• We value individual rights over the community.
• We idolize youth and are afraid of death.
• We’re awash in possessions, having more than we either need or use.
• We’re can’t control our spending and are awash in debt.
• We’ve mistaken the vulgar for the beautiful.
• We’ve lost trust and have become litigious.
• We’ve mistaken information from wisdom.
• We’ve grown callous toward the very young and very old.
• We neglect our promises, especially when there’s a cost to us.
• We fear long-term commitments.
• We’re losing our ability to concentrate.
• We’re quick to take revenge, slow to forgive.
• We’re temporocentric, unwilling to remember the past or imagine the future.