The Blessings of Movement

Today, the day after Christmas, I am enjoying a quiet day at home, not being and doing and moving around out in the world. This is extraordinarily rare for me. CNN anchor, Anderson Cooper, wrote in his autobiography, "Dispatches from the Edge," that he had heard that a new species of shark had been discovered.  It was a landmark find because this shark did not have to keep moving to live, it could be still and rest on the bottom of the sea for long periods of time.  Cooper said, "I find that hard to believe."  He had always associated himself with sharks, who could never be still or they would die.  I experienced this statement as bizarre at first read.  But only in the way that you discover a trait in someone else that resonates but is immediately rejected because you dare not believe it could be a reflection of your own life. After sitting with it for awhile (a couple of years) I have concluded that this might be one of the few things Cooper and I have in common. 

In my pastoral work I regularly visit with a sweet older woman who lives in a nursing home. Many years ago she suffered a massive stroke (or at least that is my best guess) and was left without the use of her legs and one arm as well as the inability to speak.  She is very bright and alert however and over the years I have been able to communicate with her fairly effectively by the inflections of the one word she retained, "bean."  For instance,"Beeaaan!" is hello, and "Beeeeaaaannn," is thank you, given the accompanying facial expressions.  Her condition is my worst fear, to live without consistent movement, to not come and go as I wish, to be constantly on the move.  The perfectionist in me partially drives this because I am always so far behind in meeting my own expectations.  It takes a lot of energy to live up to doing and being the person I either want to be or believe I can be; there's so much to do to fulfill this self-obligation.  

I have often wondered why I, and so many like me, feel better when we are out experiencing the world and are simple not content to just be still. It is easy to be critical, but what if I stopped being hyper-self-critical, and consider that having been made by God and in the image of God, that being in movement is one of the traits of God that resides in the very fabric of my being. Since there are clearly a whole lot of us who don't sit around and contemplate the world, but rather would experience it firsthand, it is possible we are meant to. 

In truth, there is an unrealized but very real and worthy benefit to having ants in one's pants (as my mother used to say) that deserves mention.  A simple trip to a high-end grocery creates a boundless feast for the senses; so many different foods from so many hands and places, so many combinations yet to be experienced or revisited.  I took a cheese-making class this year and discovered both the simplicity and the complexity of this process.  It boggles the mind to think that each product in a single store at a single moment has a history of how it came to be and a story about where it was produced.  And each of the hands that contributed to its being has a life of experiences and stories. A couple of hours in a bookseller can be wonderfully exhausting. I think of all the thousands of people who wrote, published and read the limitless titles, stacks upon stacks of them.  Consider the faces and hands of those who took the thousands of pictures that fill their pages, each capturing a particular context of this fascinating world we live in, together. To be out in the world, being among other people, most of them strangers, can be a complete meal for the hungry soul.  Consider the neighborhood coffee shop where I write occasionally. Usually there are at least three other people working there as well; privately, quietly and thoughtfully we play or work on our respective keyboards all the while sponging up each other's energy; silently acknowledging our shared humanity. By being in places beyond the boundaries of my own life, those familiar places where I spend most of my time, home, office, or car, I see a God in constant motion. A God who is not still but active, proactive not passive, eternally interactive and participating in the lives of the created who are in turn moved to keep creating.  

Acknowledging that there are mixed and muddied motives at work I turn from fight to flight as I embrace this gentle push to move beyond all that is safe and known, to be in the wider world, fully enmeshed in its boundless expressions of both the human and the divine. Each day I willingly venture into the deep mysteries of the commonplace and the possibilities of the unexpected and unknown that await encounter.

 

Time spent

Earlier this month the St. James bible study group hosted a morning out at Mt. Savior Monastery in Pine City, NY. Several hours were scheduled at the site and truthfully, I was experiencing some anxiety about what we might do to fill up those hours. I am constantly moving; the anticipation of being still for even a little while with nothing, in particular, planned tends to produce something akin to mild panic.  But its good to stretch oneself; to go into those uncomfortable places and visit for awhile I told myself.  

It was a bitterly cold morning, snow threatened. We gathered together, the six of us, and pulled our chairs into a circle. We began with prayers all around followed by a short Advent mediation from a book filled with choices, all appropriate to the season and our time together. Then we went our separate ways. We regrouped two more times for expressions of prayer and another meditation. Before I knew it, it was noon. We joined the monks in the chapel for chanted noontime prayers, completed our bookstore purchases and we were off to Panera's Bakery for lunch. The time had flown by in the still silence and snow.

The rock band, Creed, has a song on their most recent CD with the lyrics, "Time, you're no friend of mine." The plucking of the acoustic guitar roughly mimics the continual ticking away of time. Time is the undefeated enemy of the perfectionist. There simply isn't enough time to get things done the way they should be done.  What a difference it would make if time wasn't always pushing in on me!  Sometimes I even bargain with God:  "If you'll just give me a little more time to finish this I promise I won't waste it!"

So, feeling pressured to scratch out a little more time I had brought work with me to the monastery.  The pastor in me is too aware that Sunday's always a coming; it frames each day of the week.  Amazingly, even in the broken fragments of time between the meditations I had accomplished what I'd set out to do. The quiet solitude resting in the sticking snow was wonderfully magical and filled with the heaviness of God's presence. Time ticks away no matter where we are. Working there didn't stop the hands of the clock, but the time was strangely tangible and non-threatening. It was time personified; the old familiar enemy transformed into a creative companion. This form of time was not a force to work against but a pleasant wide open space with plenty of room to work in.

I did not spend my day in the perfect monastic posture. I never even made it down to the crypt to pray at the foot of the virgin. Despite or perhaps because of my inability to stop struggling with time, God opened the possibility that I might be a valued element of time and not simply a rogue element at its mercy; like deadwood bobbing around at the whim of the sea. This newly acquainted, old companion has come home with me. I hope it sticks around. I rather like time as friend of mine.

Broken Things

When a friend was told she was brave to bring her Spode dinner plate, filled with homemade cookies, to a church potluck she responded,  "Everything has a life.  I broke a plate last Christmas and I've already broken one this year. It's okay, everything has a life."  For my sister, with whom I am bound by the bonds of perfection, this was a big deal.

Our family Christmas tree sits in the corner of the living room which in the imagination of a 10 yr. old boy is the perfect hideout.  He even trimmed the lower branches to ease the way as he slide in on his belly.  I was in the back of the house when I heard the crash.  Shards of broken ornaments were visible among the unbreakable ones when we righted the tree.  My son was howling in his bedroom anticipating the impending doom.  After taking a moment to exhale and regroup, my husband and I calmly called him out and asked him to help redress the tree and clean up the broken pieces.  I explained that  for years the cats had been knocking over our trees by leaping up their trunks; if we spared their lives surely we could spare his.  As I helped him clean up I was relieved to discover that the broken ones were not really of great value to me, until I found the ballerina.  It was one of a matched set.  The cream colored porcelain  figures I had given to my daughter and her cousin when they were both taking ballet while I was in seminary.  I loved the shop I had bought them in and I loved that time in my life.  It was the most precious of all the ornaments I've collected over the years. Everything has a life, everything, I said to myself as I picked up the armless, headless ballerina. Out she went, to buried in some landfill somewhere for all of eternity with the bones from the last night's wings.   

The boundaries of this temporary life are pretty clear.  We live life, make life, save life, give life, take life, spare life, and negotiate life.  The stuff that surrounds us gives joy or misery, creates energy or uses it, prolongs life or ends it, enriches life or limits it, feeds us, entertains us, promotes healthy life or damages it, intrigues, threatens, teaches, thrills and challenges us.  But only for a little while.  At the end of the day, us and all the rest either perishes, corrodes, rots, gets lost, or breaks.

While this might seem a fatalistic perspective, it is actually freeing.  When people we love die, relationships we value come to an end, and things we treasure break we are reminded of the finite nature of all creation. Whether staggering or simply stinging, these painful moments give us pause to appreciate both the imperfect nature of life and the limited power and potential of our stuff.  We focus intensely on what endeared us to those people or bonds or things in the first place. They are rediscovered and deeply appreciated even as they are passing away, or falling apart, or fading from sight.  

The essence of this focused appreciation was captured by Christ in the meal he shared with those closest to him just before his arrest and execution.  "This is my body, broken for you."  For us to truly understand what we have been given, the gain, first we have to experience it as lost, broken, undone, dead and buried.  The gain is a window that looks out on all that is and ever has been.  A window that sees us and our place in the eternal flow of God's beloved creation. The gain is being seen not as perfect creatures, but broken, as Christ was broken. He, like us, was broken by being born, broken by breathing, giving, trying, losing and dying. The gift we have received is the renegotiation of expectations; the gift of a new starting point.  We start out grounded in temporal brokenness and move toward eternal wholeness, but never perfection.  Perfection doesn't belong to us, it belongs to God.       

 

Joyful Expectations

The epistle lesson for this Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, is from Paul's letter to the Philippians, 4:4-7.  The hallmark of this letter's popularity is its positive and upbeat message. A cursory read assumes an almost euphoric happiness. We perfectionist love an optimistic outlook. We're happiest when everyone else is happy.

However, when one considers Paul's circumstances, beaten, imprisoned, unpopular and untrusted, its hard to figure what he had to be so happy about.  That, of course, drives right to his point - he, personally, doesn't have a lot to be happy about.  Yet, without doubt he is overflowing with joy. What becomes clear is that this letter is not about happiness, its about joy. Happiness has little to nothing in common with joy; they are not interchangeable terms.  There is no theology of happiness.   Happiness is simply a measure of what we've been successful in controlling, while our level of unhappiness equates with how much we concede is beyond our reach.  The bottom line is that our happiness or unhappiness is not an appropriate benchmark for judging God's influence in the world around us.

There is, however, a theology of joy.  So this letter is not about Paul and how hard he is working on God's behalf, its about how God's will is being worked out by the people of God.  Its not about Paul's misfortunes, its about Paul's service to Christ in whatever form that has taken.  Nor is it about the people of Philippi and their problems or successes (or their happiness), its about God's faithfulness to them and how God's will is being worked out through them. It a letter about joy, the divine gift of joy.

[This is problematic for perfectionists.  What do you mean there's no theology of happiness? If its all about joy, which is God-centered, then that means its not all about happiness, which is me-centered.  Anything not me-centered equals out of my control - definitely problematic.]  

[Still,] We are moved by Paul's optimism - not because his words have any power to change whatever place we find ourselves in, but because his words free us to explore a different, more sophisticated frame of reference.  Paul's frame of reference, his joy, offers us a different way of being in the world. Paul offers us something beyond the simplistic, linear, logical state of being that typically frames our lives: Good things happen, we are happy; bad things happen, we are unhappy.  Day in, day out, its one or the other, its a good day, or its a bad day. For Paul, as this particular letter so clearly illustrates, the quality of our days has no bearing on the quality of the work of God in our lives. They are unrelated. And the only thing that really matters to Paul is how we respond to God's relentless pursuit of us and God's mercy in dealing with our infidelity.  Paul is not concerned  with how well things are going for us personally at this particular moment in time.  Instead, he invites us to observe and deeply appreciate what God is doing for the betterment of all of God's people; something beyond the fleeting particles of good fortune floating ever so precariously in our microcosms.

Joy, unlike happiness, can be found only outside of ourselves; we cannot create it because it is a divine gift.  Joy is the assurance that there exists something bigger and more powerful than we are; something that is watchful and careful and more than just a little helpful in the face of our helplessness. We can't find joy without running into God.  We can't be joyful without first having been touched by the divine.  So Philippians is a good place to find joy, to find God, in the midst of adversity, uncertainty, stress and conflict.  Joy is born into the world in a wasps nests of contention as surely as Jesus was born into this world under threat of death from his first breath.   Joy is both the human expectation and the divine expression of perfect love.  It has the power to set us free from our preoccupation with the pursuit of perfection that binds us to all that is unimportant and trivial in this life, which is why we both long for it and reject it.

God seeping in

The Christmas holidays are filled with land mines for this perfectionist in recovery.  I have this vague idea of what a perfectly decorated home/life looks like. And mine is not it.  Still, like the hungry addict it's everything I can do not to pick up the holiday edition of the Martha Stewart magazine.
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There is no other time of year when I have to remind myself so stringently that the saying, "You can have it all," isn't exactly a lie, but it isn't the whole truth either.  The truth is, no one, no woman, no man, can work full time, have a family, friends, a home, a hobby, a social life, get a good night's sleep - and have it be all that we expect or imagine it should be.  The truth is, most of the people I know have most, if not all, of these things in their lives; some juggle them better than others, but none of us have them to the extent we would like.  We spend quite a lot of mental energy reminding ourselves, that not one of those things will ever be done to perfection, nor need they be.  As long as there are children living at home, the house will never stay clean or neat.  As long as hobbies includes domestic and farm animals, there will be muddy boots, a steady supply of pooh, barf and hair, and outdoor chores in every imaginable weather condition.  As long as we are gainfully employed, we will not be able to do everything with our families we and they would like, though we feel no less obligated to try to be in two places at one time.

How is it we came to be in this perpetual catch-22?  How is it that the bar keeps getting raised higher and higher?  I suspect that the medium of advertising has had the greatest role in painting the perverse caricatures of human perfection that colors our subjectivity.  My first career was in advertising and marketing.  But after several years I simply couldn't find the high moral ground on which to keep creating the illusion that a particular product or service was somehow more valuable and necessary that it actually was. Not that they weren't all good things.  In fact the illusion to be created had little to do with the products and everything to do with how these things would enrich and/or simplify one's busy life.  Advertising is the weight-bearing wall for the "You can have it all," creed of 21st century life in America.

It is no mere coincidence that the decline of Western Christianity coincides perfectly with the growth of the advertising industry.  It is no coincidence that we, as a nation, as a culture, have never been so lonely, so exhausted or so frustrated while at the same time being so overly exposed to empty promises of cures for these conditions.  But in the spaces in between, in those places where our unhappiness doesn't quite overlap with the illusive promises of temporary relief, God seeps in.  There are other times of year that appear more conducive to focusing on that 'space in between,' such as the season of Lent. But in truth, there is no other time of year that we are as weary, as stressed, or as torn between things we need "to do." God is seeping in all over the place. God is in the realization that we don't need to have it all, or at least not all of the time and not all at the same time.  God is there when we begin to take things off the to do list, not because they're done, but because they are unnecessary distractions that keep us from enjoying the time and people that are dear to us.  God is there we add time for rest and for play to the list.  God is present to us as we acknowledge a certain level of resentment for this time of year; a hurried time that pushes us out of our normal routines, tests our financial discipline and reminds us, with a vengeance, of how far from perfect we really are. God's grace is all about freeing us from the crueler trappings of this joyful season.  We need not add God-seeking items to our to do list; it is God who stealthy pursues us, who finds us, who loves and adores us - and who seeps into our lives at every opportunity. God's primary work is to have us know that our lives our enriched and simplified not by adding to it the things we think are missing, but by pointing us toward a deep and abiding appreciation of what is already present and available.