I’ve been thinking about my childhood a lot recently and when I think about my childhood, I’m thinking about growing up in a community right on the edge of Cleveland.
When we moved there, it was a neighborhood being effected by white flight. A few black folks moved in and, as they did, the white folks started to move out and, as they did, more black folks moved in to the vacant houses freaking out more white folks. . . You get the picture. Within about a five year time period, the neighborhood went from one that was predominantly ethnic-Euro to a neighborhood that was predominantly African-American.
My Dad was a United Methodist minister and within that tradition the UM Bishop can move pastors where they believe the church needs pastors to be moved. When my Dad was assigned to Church of the Cross by the African-American Bishop, it was primarily a white church in this increasingly black neighborhood. My Dad was sent there to try and help integrate the church.
It was around 1973 and I was maybe four or five when we moved there. I don’t remember being conscious of race, yet. If I was, it was more of an issue of personal identification than racial identification. Within the neighborhood group of friends, there were two Davids. To us, it just made sense to identify them as “black David” and “white David.” Kids seem to find last names much more awkward and useless than identifying people based on how they look.
Along the way, I learned different things. Although there was lots of horrible history that was being made at that moment in time (Vietnam, Robert Kennedy, Kent State, Cambodia, Watergate, etc.), I remember hearing the most about Martin Luther. To us kids, he seemed like something that had happened a long time ago but it was still a fresh memory for the adults we knew. King became my first hero. Discussions about race, racial reconciliation and black history became a regular part of my education. We didn’t celebrate Martin Luther Kind Day, we celebrated Martin Luther King Week. There were special parties in the classrooms, special assemblies and I still remember the songs. I still can’t sing “Lift Evr’y Voice and Sing” without standing and the sense of singing something very, very important.
I got questions and had conversations that were amazingly frank and honest in retrospect. I remember walking home with one of my friends when he asked me, “Why did your people make my people slaves?” I remember being a candidate for the captain of the Safety Patrol and our deciding, in what felt a very common sense and practical way, that I really shouldn’t be the captain because it wouldn’t be right for a white kid to be the captain over the black kids. I remember becoming friends with a Vietnamese refugee kid, Chuc, and the stories he told me about shootings and bombs and how his being Asian did and didn’t mix in with the other kids. I remember the day I figured out that I’d reversed my understanding of “majority” and “minority” and how shocked I was. I just assumed that most of the people in the world were black. For us living it, this wasn’t an experience that was unusual or special in any way. This was just our neighborhood.
As I grew up, we moved around and my experiences changed. I had a more conscious understanding of what it meant to be white and - sometimes to my horror and sometimes to my relief – found out about the privileges that I received just for the fact that my skin was white. I found out how hard it can be to start up friendships with folks of different colors and the roles we sometimes play with and to each other. It took me a long time to figure out how to build relationships with white males. Although that’s changed some, the majority of my closest friends continue to be women, GLBT folks and people of color.
So, then there was this whole Barak Obama thing. Now, I can’t say that I’m as enthusiastic as some are about him – we’ll need to hold him accountable and he’s going to let us down on some points, too – but I have believed that he was one of the best two candidates.
On the night he won, I, like many other folks, cried. It felt like some kind of healing. It felt as though a curse had finally been broken and I found myself thinking about my old neighborhood, again. I thought of the faces, the names, what I learned in school. . . all of it. I’ve been thinking about it frequently ever since. Not analyzing it as much as realizing how incredibly lucky I was. That’s where hope began for me and where I learned that hope was something that also needed to be tempered with calculated risk and calculated caution. Hope is not something that just happens. Its something you make. That Tuesday night, as the horns outside honked, O-BA-MA was chanted, the fireworks were popping and flags were waved, I was reminded by that kind of wise hope once again.
The next Sunday, I preached in a church where people were talking about the election in the same way that some speak of miracles. I smiled and nodded, not quite willing to be sucked in to this; it didn’t feel like the right sense of risk and caution were there.
But then, for the final hymn, we sang “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” and this day it seemed extra important. I set down the hymnal and sang all the words from memory with only a few stumbles. Some of the stumbles came because I felt tears forming and my voice was choked off by that lump in my throat as I tried to sing, struggled to sing. I swallowed hard repeatedly and warbled through the end “. . . as we forever stand, true to our God true to our native land.”
At that moment, I let go to pure, unadulterated hope praying that maybe, please God maybe, we actually got something very right this time. At that moment, singing that history, I realized this was one of those very moments that many of those who had sung this song before had been singing for. I could hear this song, sung by the children – my friends and classmates - in the gym of Caledonia Elementary School in East Cleveland, Ohio, as an echo in my mind that was actually increasing in volume.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Peonies, peas and prayers
Every Wednesday afternoon, just around the corner from my apartment, is a wonderful little farmers market. Tomorrow will be the last time its open for the season. It’s one of the neat things about living in this neighborhood. There’s always live music of one kind or another, someone passing trying to get petition signatures for this cause or that, and some great tamales being grilled with a side of fresh vegetables that were just bought there that day. Kids are everywhere and families lounge on blankets in the park adjacent to the market. It’s like a neighborhood festival every week.
There’s a general pattern to my wanderings there. I’ll make my first loop through to see who has what, checking the various quality between the booths, and figuring out who seems to have the best prices. I buy on the second loop. I open up one of the free cloth bags that came from this conference or that (it makes it blindingly obvious that I’m involved with church stuff, I think) and start to fill it up; beans, berries, local cheese, wine, veggies, fresh roasted peanuts, fresh bread, fresh everything, really.
I always buy the flowers, last. I’d never really bought cut flowers for myself before this year but, well, I had this glass vase I never used and they looked so good on my dining room table. . . I don’t know what most of the flowers are called. I just look for some colors that I think will look good in my apartment and enjoy them until they fade.
I’m a city kid. Although my mom grew up on a small farm and we visited there when I was growing up, I can’t say that I really paid attention to much accept grasshoppers, playing on what seemed to be the world’s largest swing set and digging holes. The whole idea of foods and flowers growing seasonally wasn’t something that clicked. I ate what was put in front of me with the exception of peas (ew). I didn’t understand that I was eating in food that was “in season.” So, now I’m this grown up kid and, when I go to the grocery store, most of what I regularly purchase I have access to year round. Until this year, I’d functionally forgotten about the idea of there being particular seasons for flowers or food (because, um, its always the season for frozen pizza). There’s a difference between knowing something and really remembering it.
The days are getting shorter and the nights are colder, now. I find myself not wanting to get out of bed as quickly and just lie there longer. It changes the way I pray. In the summers, the prayers are all in the movements of yoga and the greeting of the sun and movement of the day. There’s a clear sense of that interactive, holy presence that flows, grows and births.
These mornings start slower. I put on my thick, terry cloth robe, and start the coffee. As it brews, I might make the bed (slowly) or put away the previous days dishes (slowly) then poor coffee into a cup, sit down and just think. My hand will caress the outside of the mug that’s almost to hot to touch. My eyes may close and I’ll say a prayer full of thanks or pleas or a little of both. Or, I might just sit there and think. God sits on the couch, reading the paper or something like that. I don’t feel prodded or pushed. God is, somehow, that plush, warm robe and that cup of coffee and that quiet.
We are a seasonal people. We’re affected by the fresh berries, the sunflowers, the later sunrises and the rainy, snowy muffling of all that stuff that falls from the sky and gives life to those fresh berries, sunflowers and cups of hot morning coffee. The writer of Ecclesiastes wrote about the largeness of it (“for everything there is a season”) and we’re all wrapped up in both the smallness and the largeness. We feast, we plant, we harvest, we lay fallow. . .
There’s a general pattern to my wanderings there. I’ll make my first loop through to see who has what, checking the various quality between the booths, and figuring out who seems to have the best prices. I buy on the second loop. I open up one of the free cloth bags that came from this conference or that (it makes it blindingly obvious that I’m involved with church stuff, I think) and start to fill it up; beans, berries, local cheese, wine, veggies, fresh roasted peanuts, fresh bread, fresh everything, really.
I always buy the flowers, last. I’d never really bought cut flowers for myself before this year but, well, I had this glass vase I never used and they looked so good on my dining room table. . . I don’t know what most of the flowers are called. I just look for some colors that I think will look good in my apartment and enjoy them until they fade.
I’m a city kid. Although my mom grew up on a small farm and we visited there when I was growing up, I can’t say that I really paid attention to much accept grasshoppers, playing on what seemed to be the world’s largest swing set and digging holes. The whole idea of foods and flowers growing seasonally wasn’t something that clicked. I ate what was put in front of me with the exception of peas (ew). I didn’t understand that I was eating in food that was “in season.” So, now I’m this grown up kid and, when I go to the grocery store, most of what I regularly purchase I have access to year round. Until this year, I’d functionally forgotten about the idea of there being particular seasons for flowers or food (because, um, its always the season for frozen pizza). There’s a difference between knowing something and really remembering it.
The days are getting shorter and the nights are colder, now. I find myself not wanting to get out of bed as quickly and just lie there longer. It changes the way I pray. In the summers, the prayers are all in the movements of yoga and the greeting of the sun and movement of the day. There’s a clear sense of that interactive, holy presence that flows, grows and births.
These mornings start slower. I put on my thick, terry cloth robe, and start the coffee. As it brews, I might make the bed (slowly) or put away the previous days dishes (slowly) then poor coffee into a cup, sit down and just think. My hand will caress the outside of the mug that’s almost to hot to touch. My eyes may close and I’ll say a prayer full of thanks or pleas or a little of both. Or, I might just sit there and think. God sits on the couch, reading the paper or something like that. I don’t feel prodded or pushed. God is, somehow, that plush, warm robe and that cup of coffee and that quiet.
We are a seasonal people. We’re affected by the fresh berries, the sunflowers, the later sunrises and the rainy, snowy muffling of all that stuff that falls from the sky and gives life to those fresh berries, sunflowers and cups of hot morning coffee. The writer of Ecclesiastes wrote about the largeness of it (“for everything there is a season”) and we’re all wrapped up in both the smallness and the largeness. We feast, we plant, we harvest, we lay fallow. . .
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
"Confession" or "The Spirituality of Debt"
I felt horrible. My wife and I had split, I’d moved to Chicago and I was trying to figure out how in the world I was going to start a new life. I really, really just wanted to feel better. Somewhere along the way, I was browsing around on the internet and looked at a sit of an organization I’d always wanted to give money to but hadn’t. At the bottom of the page, they had the option to give on line so, I did and it felt great. I looked up a couple of other organizations I’d wanted to give to and sent them some money, too. This also felt good. I was on to something.
Over the next several months, I found myself being very generous. I gave away more money, I paid for dinner with friends, I helped some folks I knew out with a little money here and there. . . Now, I was making good money but not as much as I should have to be this generous. I gave away a lot of what I earned and started putting a lot of my real expenses on credit cards.
Now, there were some things I’d planned on saving up for in my new place but, life is short, right? I went ahead and put most of those things on credit cards, too. In my head, I’d figured our some way that this all made sense. I was even able to rationalize how some of these things would actually save me money in the long run. It all made sense. . .
. . . strange, vacuous, illogical sense. I got myself in the same spot that lots of people have; I had debt that was too high compared to what I was bringing in. In addition to that, I had a few late payments and, yep, it just kind of got ridiculous.
It was over a one-week period that I really began to realize what I’d done to myself and I felt stupid. Yep, I was hurting, not doing my best thinking and trying to escape from some pretty severe inner turmoil but, at the moment I realized what I’d done to myself, some of those feelings came back again with a whole different kind of force and depth. I just remember adding up my debt over and over trying to figure out how I’d gotten myself in to this mess while, at the same time, knowing exactly how I’d done it. I’m still paying some of it off. Yep, I did it up good.
Now, this next part may, at first, sound dangerously close to blaming other people for my bad decisions. I know I could have made other choices and should have. If I would have just taken some of that money and had the courage and humility to invest in post-relationship therapy – the exact thing I recommended to people I was giving pastoral care after their divorces – I would have probably avoided this. I looked around for a path, found a bad one and started marching right down it.
There were, however, a whole lot of signs that advertised that path pretty clearly. I switched my growing debt from card to card because of the better options or features they gave (while putting the worst consequences in small print). I was feeling lonely and, in retrospect, I was swallowing the whole identity based advertising and fund raising angle hook, line and sinker (they do their jobs well). It gave me affirmation and a sense of belonging. There was a split in my consciousness about all of this. I understood that this is what advertising did but, somehow, I was blind to the fact that I was being effected by it. Looking back, it’s so clear. At the same time I was critiquing materialism and the marketing of shallow feel good spirituality, I was also deeply involved in it. I really don’t blame these financially based entities for my bad decisions but I do have to say that, maybe, they make it just a little bit too easy to make these bad decisions. The cheap grace I was seeking ended up also charging interest.
As I’ve read and heard the news over the last few weeks, I’m hearing about myself in many of the stories; people who made bad decisions and were somehow convinced that these decisions would have the best possible results. A lot of the stories we hear are about people who were clearly and obviously deceived and victimized but, for many of us, we were closer to co-conspirators. We participated in this madness all the while knowing that, even if it didn’t seem like a completely good idea, it felt like one. Somehow we knew that good things come to those who wait but some part of us said, “Why wait when we can feel good, now?”
In my own life, I somehow matched the loss of peace, certainty and love with indebtedness with the depth of my false idea of charity and ownership. To make a pledge or financial promise to an organization is one thing. To go in debt means that money that you could possibly share is given to credit organizations, instead. Purchasing something with a credit card means you might have another thing in some ways but you actually end up having less, in the long run.
There is another side of this though, too. Screwing this part of my life up was, in some ways, the best thing that could have happened to me. I’m certainly not suggesting anyone do this but recognizing this part of my life was messed up helped me take a more honest inventory of many parts of my life. Not only was I overspending, I was over working. After many sleepless nights lying in bed worrying, I started to realize how much of my time and energy was being used up worrying about things I could not control. I began to clearly see what stress did to my body. To some degree, by giving money away and paying for things, I was looking for an entry in to people’s lives. I clearly began to recognize how many things are worth waiting for. The confessional tone of my prayer life became less guilt ridden, less word based and more and more of an experience of just trying to sit in the presence of God. My preaching took a more personal turn. The pattern of looking at my life through the lens of rationalization began to fall apart.
Sometimes, those things that fall apart were not as well constructed as they should have been. Sometimes, when things fall apart, it gives you the chance to build something better.
Now, of course, I still mess up around this stuff once in awhile. That's normal. I'll have this or that impulse purchase or stretch my giving a little farther than I should but it feels a lot more like an OK occasional decision as opposed to the pattern of bad decisions I was stuck in before. Its a choice as opposed to a compulsion.
Life has only become better and the "better" part hasn’t cost me a dime.
Over the next several months, I found myself being very generous. I gave away more money, I paid for dinner with friends, I helped some folks I knew out with a little money here and there. . . Now, I was making good money but not as much as I should have to be this generous. I gave away a lot of what I earned and started putting a lot of my real expenses on credit cards.
Now, there were some things I’d planned on saving up for in my new place but, life is short, right? I went ahead and put most of those things on credit cards, too. In my head, I’d figured our some way that this all made sense. I was even able to rationalize how some of these things would actually save me money in the long run. It all made sense. . .
. . . strange, vacuous, illogical sense. I got myself in the same spot that lots of people have; I had debt that was too high compared to what I was bringing in. In addition to that, I had a few late payments and, yep, it just kind of got ridiculous.
It was over a one-week period that I really began to realize what I’d done to myself and I felt stupid. Yep, I was hurting, not doing my best thinking and trying to escape from some pretty severe inner turmoil but, at the moment I realized what I’d done to myself, some of those feelings came back again with a whole different kind of force and depth. I just remember adding up my debt over and over trying to figure out how I’d gotten myself in to this mess while, at the same time, knowing exactly how I’d done it. I’m still paying some of it off. Yep, I did it up good.
Now, this next part may, at first, sound dangerously close to blaming other people for my bad decisions. I know I could have made other choices and should have. If I would have just taken some of that money and had the courage and humility to invest in post-relationship therapy – the exact thing I recommended to people I was giving pastoral care after their divorces – I would have probably avoided this. I looked around for a path, found a bad one and started marching right down it.
There were, however, a whole lot of signs that advertised that path pretty clearly. I switched my growing debt from card to card because of the better options or features they gave (while putting the worst consequences in small print). I was feeling lonely and, in retrospect, I was swallowing the whole identity based advertising and fund raising angle hook, line and sinker (they do their jobs well). It gave me affirmation and a sense of belonging. There was a split in my consciousness about all of this. I understood that this is what advertising did but, somehow, I was blind to the fact that I was being effected by it. Looking back, it’s so clear. At the same time I was critiquing materialism and the marketing of shallow feel good spirituality, I was also deeply involved in it. I really don’t blame these financially based entities for my bad decisions but I do have to say that, maybe, they make it just a little bit too easy to make these bad decisions. The cheap grace I was seeking ended up also charging interest.
As I’ve read and heard the news over the last few weeks, I’m hearing about myself in many of the stories; people who made bad decisions and were somehow convinced that these decisions would have the best possible results. A lot of the stories we hear are about people who were clearly and obviously deceived and victimized but, for many of us, we were closer to co-conspirators. We participated in this madness all the while knowing that, even if it didn’t seem like a completely good idea, it felt like one. Somehow we knew that good things come to those who wait but some part of us said, “Why wait when we can feel good, now?”
In my own life, I somehow matched the loss of peace, certainty and love with indebtedness with the depth of my false idea of charity and ownership. To make a pledge or financial promise to an organization is one thing. To go in debt means that money that you could possibly share is given to credit organizations, instead. Purchasing something with a credit card means you might have another thing in some ways but you actually end up having less, in the long run.
There is another side of this though, too. Screwing this part of my life up was, in some ways, the best thing that could have happened to me. I’m certainly not suggesting anyone do this but recognizing this part of my life was messed up helped me take a more honest inventory of many parts of my life. Not only was I overspending, I was over working. After many sleepless nights lying in bed worrying, I started to realize how much of my time and energy was being used up worrying about things I could not control. I began to clearly see what stress did to my body. To some degree, by giving money away and paying for things, I was looking for an entry in to people’s lives. I clearly began to recognize how many things are worth waiting for. The confessional tone of my prayer life became less guilt ridden, less word based and more and more of an experience of just trying to sit in the presence of God. My preaching took a more personal turn. The pattern of looking at my life through the lens of rationalization began to fall apart.
Sometimes, those things that fall apart were not as well constructed as they should have been. Sometimes, when things fall apart, it gives you the chance to build something better.
Now, of course, I still mess up around this stuff once in awhile. That's normal. I'll have this or that impulse purchase or stretch my giving a little farther than I should but it feels a lot more like an OK occasional decision as opposed to the pattern of bad decisions I was stuck in before. Its a choice as opposed to a compulsion.
Life has only become better and the "better" part hasn’t cost me a dime.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Trying to pray. . .
So, I’m going try something different.
I had a personal, private blog for almost four years. It was something that a couple close friends suggested I do. At the time, I was still rather recently divorced and feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness while I was also trying to figure out how to live me life in a new place, around new people and in a new job. That blog was a place where I could rant and rave when I needed to; mourn when I needed to; try and figure out dating and relationships; sort out what may make my life better and more full. I very intentionally did everything I could to conceal my identity because, at the time, these weren’t thoughts and ideas I was willing or able to share with other people I knew. The anonymity of that site allowed me to explore aspects of my life that I just didn’t feel safe to explore other places.
However, some of the things I didn’t write about as much were my faith, spiritual practice, social justice commitments, vocation etc. In order to stay anonymous, I stayed vague but staying vague made it more difficult to work on some of those things through writing even though I began to realize how helpful a tool writing was for me.
So, I’m going to try to start a new blog. This one is going to mix all that I hadn’t written about before in with some of the same themes some of you may have read about before. It will still be a personal blog although, like the Facebook page some of you may have found this through, by its very nature there will be times the streams of the personal and the professional will cross. It will be an experiment and a little bit of a risk, too. If it works, great. It not, good enough. I’ll take it down. We’ll see how this goes. . .
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Part of the reason I’ve decided to do this is my prayer life has gone a bit off track. For the past 10 years or so, I did something called “Praying the Hours.” If you want to find out more about this, go ahead and check out this link: http://www.explorefaith.org/prayer/prayer/fixed/index.php . Essentially, this was a Benedictine practice that has regular breaks throughout the day for sitting, reading a few psalms, and praying. It has been a great practice for me until recently. Some of this, I’m sure, has to do with moving to Seattle, starting a new job and not establishing some sort of pace of living life, yet. What’s equally possible is that this form of prayer was more of a transitional one that worked for awhile. I think I need to try something different.
I have some glimpses of what that may look like but I’m not sure about anything, yet. I know that it needs to involve a different kind of attentiveness to mind, body, spirit and surroundings. In the past, taking pictures of where I was and seeing what caught my attention has helped quite a bit. I do yoga pretty regularly and think that this practice could be integrated for into my spiritual life but realistically its just stretching for me. I am trying to make more places for just sitting and thinking in my schedule by keeping my calendar a little less busy, delegating more and having chunks in my schedule that are intentionally left uncommitted. Part of this is also starting to mean having there be only 2/3 times in a day when I check my email or make phone calls. I really do like gadgets and love having the ability to have a phone, email access, a document creator and calendar all in my pocket but there’s obviously a down side, too.
I was reading an article titled “iPod Spirituality” in Presence (a magazine about spiritual direction - www.sdiworld.org ) by a guy named Chad Thralls. Its an even handed article about the intersections between spirituality and technology (including one of my favorites www.pray-as-you-go.org ). One of the challenges he lifts up is what the blogger Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention.” I soooo get this. The electronic connections I can have or, more importantly, might have at the moment something buzzes or beeps makes it more difficult to be connected right now. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent in front of the computer looking from my email accounts to my facebook page essentially waiting for a response while, at the same time, texting on my phone or talking on my phone while listening to music. Although I can do all these things more or less adequately at the same time, I don’t take enough time to do any of them well. I recognize that Attention Deficit Disorder is a real, psychobiological problem for some people but sometimes I wonder if the bigger problem isn’t the multiple distractive dis-order that has accumulated in our lives. Its like trying to work with a messy desk. The problem isn’t as much about what there is to be done as much as being overwhelmed by what could be done. So, you end up staring at the desk, feeling a little overwhelmed and distracted. I think this is part of the problem for me.
So, I’ve been trying to pray or, more accurately, trying to figure out how to pray. We’ll see how this goes but having this little bit of writing done for today is very good first step. . .
I had a personal, private blog for almost four years. It was something that a couple close friends suggested I do. At the time, I was still rather recently divorced and feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness while I was also trying to figure out how to live me life in a new place, around new people and in a new job. That blog was a place where I could rant and rave when I needed to; mourn when I needed to; try and figure out dating and relationships; sort out what may make my life better and more full. I very intentionally did everything I could to conceal my identity because, at the time, these weren’t thoughts and ideas I was willing or able to share with other people I knew. The anonymity of that site allowed me to explore aspects of my life that I just didn’t feel safe to explore other places.
However, some of the things I didn’t write about as much were my faith, spiritual practice, social justice commitments, vocation etc. In order to stay anonymous, I stayed vague but staying vague made it more difficult to work on some of those things through writing even though I began to realize how helpful a tool writing was for me.
So, I’m going to try to start a new blog. This one is going to mix all that I hadn’t written about before in with some of the same themes some of you may have read about before. It will still be a personal blog although, like the Facebook page some of you may have found this through, by its very nature there will be times the streams of the personal and the professional will cross. It will be an experiment and a little bit of a risk, too. If it works, great. It not, good enough. I’ll take it down. We’ll see how this goes. . .
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Part of the reason I’ve decided to do this is my prayer life has gone a bit off track. For the past 10 years or so, I did something called “Praying the Hours.” If you want to find out more about this, go ahead and check out this link: http://www.explorefaith.org/prayer/prayer/fixed/index.php . Essentially, this was a Benedictine practice that has regular breaks throughout the day for sitting, reading a few psalms, and praying. It has been a great practice for me until recently. Some of this, I’m sure, has to do with moving to Seattle, starting a new job and not establishing some sort of pace of living life, yet. What’s equally possible is that this form of prayer was more of a transitional one that worked for awhile. I think I need to try something different.
I have some glimpses of what that may look like but I’m not sure about anything, yet. I know that it needs to involve a different kind of attentiveness to mind, body, spirit and surroundings. In the past, taking pictures of where I was and seeing what caught my attention has helped quite a bit. I do yoga pretty regularly and think that this practice could be integrated for into my spiritual life but realistically its just stretching for me. I am trying to make more places for just sitting and thinking in my schedule by keeping my calendar a little less busy, delegating more and having chunks in my schedule that are intentionally left uncommitted. Part of this is also starting to mean having there be only 2/3 times in a day when I check my email or make phone calls. I really do like gadgets and love having the ability to have a phone, email access, a document creator and calendar all in my pocket but there’s obviously a down side, too.
I was reading an article titled “iPod Spirituality” in Presence (a magazine about spiritual direction - www.sdiworld.org ) by a guy named Chad Thralls. Its an even handed article about the intersections between spirituality and technology (including one of my favorites www.pray-as-you-go.org ). One of the challenges he lifts up is what the blogger Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention.” I soooo get this. The electronic connections I can have or, more importantly, might have at the moment something buzzes or beeps makes it more difficult to be connected right now. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent in front of the computer looking from my email accounts to my facebook page essentially waiting for a response while, at the same time, texting on my phone or talking on my phone while listening to music. Although I can do all these things more or less adequately at the same time, I don’t take enough time to do any of them well. I recognize that Attention Deficit Disorder is a real, psychobiological problem for some people but sometimes I wonder if the bigger problem isn’t the multiple distractive dis-order that has accumulated in our lives. Its like trying to work with a messy desk. The problem isn’t as much about what there is to be done as much as being overwhelmed by what could be done. So, you end up staring at the desk, feeling a little overwhelmed and distracted. I think this is part of the problem for me.
So, I’ve been trying to pray or, more accurately, trying to figure out how to pray. We’ll see how this goes but having this little bit of writing done for today is very good first step. . .
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