I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
SAR 12: Formed by Encounter
- I’m blessed to live in the country with lots of ‘real nature’ in easy reach. I spend most of my time with my family and with friends, ‘for real’, and very little in cyberspace. I use email, but write real letters to those who enjoy snail mail. I sing in a choir, and have a daughter who plays beautiful music on our piano. I’m trying to learn to play the recorder with younger kids (‘real’, but not necessarily ‘music’ yet!). I have a badly arthritic knee, which has recalled me to a deeper connection with my body – greater awareness and more self-care – through ‘real pain’. I spend time each week in conversation about the reality of our lived encounter with Christ. I learned to see more fully through a drawing class called (appropriately!) “Learning to See By Drawing”. I set up a little non-profit foundation to help me coordinate my giving with the realities I am drawn to invest real time and energy in. (I don’t want money to be a way of abstracting/distracting myself from real need, but to follow my real response to need.) I have more free time than many people I know, because I don’t have television. (We watch some DVD movies – maybe even too many – so the world of make-believe-life does get some of my attention.) Just learning to be quite content with the place, the means, the circumstances and limitations within which my life occurs has been a way of grounding myself in reality (no daydreaming about winning the lottery; no scrabbling for ways to stay young as I age; no romance novels!)
- We are created to correspond to the world we live in and to the people around us – with a hunger, or drive, to know and possess all that is real. We find ourselves in relationship to Reality – the properties of things awaken our senses and teach us the boundaries of our bodies; the self reflected in the gaze, touch, voice of others begins to know itself. B.F. Skinner did some horrific experiment with his child – isolating him in a box and thus damaging him severely; teens on a steady diet of popular music have difficulty enjoying a live classical concert; orphans who aren’t touched fail to thrive; kids disconnected from nature develop ‘nature deficit disorder’ (See: “Last Child in the Woods”, by Richard Louv) – there are many examples.
- The ‘positive image’ in art is that object which the artist renders – tree, vase, face…. The ‘negative space’ is the empty space framed around it, or between objects in a composition. This space also has shape, color value, texture. The artist thinks carefully about both aspects. For instance, a tiny person in the center of a huge, empty canvas of hills or drapery makes a much different statement from a close-up, frame-filling portrait. In life, we are, in a sense, artists composing a work of art from all the ‘materials’ at hand – our own being, the place we’re in, our duties and desires, all the Reality. Some of it is give – we can’t change it, but can respond creatively to it. (God works all things together for our good, and teaches us to do the same.) Some of it we must choose – you can’t make a work of art without making your first mark on that canvas, or paper. That assertion of your own authority – owning your own desire, or preference, or idea – can take real courage. I perceive the Mass as the ‘positive image’ of a Sabbath whose ‘negative space’ (setting, or context) is my whole Sabbath day. Within the Mass itself, you could think of the Liturgy of the Word as the space-within-which the Liturgy of the Eucharist is the ‘positive image’. Or, the Host (Himself!) is the ‘positive image’ and the Body (us!) is then the ‘negative space’ within which He is realized. There’s not one right answer, but the imagery suggests relationship, proportion, dynamic balance.
- Clutter in the physical environment might actually feel familiar and comforting, but in the extreme can reflect some disorder such as attachment to material goods, or fear of want, or avoidance of community life. Clutter can indicate something as simple as over-busy-ness, and thus be a call to slow down and be more aware of the core spaciousness that is becoming ‘cluttered’ by activity. Disorder in the environment causes tension for me – it seems to nag at me, or to be a sort of distracting noise. It is possible to get hyper-sensitive and focus too much on order, cleaning, perfection. (That’s why God gives us other people to live with, so we must learn to accept a balance here!) The Sabbath cultivates an interior ‘emptiness’ I like to call spaciousness, that helps me keep balanced and free within the ‘clutter’ of life and also attunes my desire to order, beauty, and peace.
- The child at play and the contemplative at prayer are both absorbed in the object of their attention, wholeheartedly engaged, unconscious of time passing, alert without feeling stressed, very much present to the moment and to companion(s).
- An ‘inhospitable’ heart doesn’t let people ‘in’. This person is with others, but not ‘present’ to them in a deeply inviting, or engaged way. The ‘hospitable’ heart welcomes a person ‘in’, ‘gives place’ to the being of another, is affected by him and not safely at arm’s length from him. The hospitable heart opens up a unity with another person, puts itself at some personal risk, encounters them as Reality and not as an abstraction.
- The ‘shape’ of my own emptiness involves my yearning to speak life-giving words and share my faith, to live in loving community, to teach, to tell stories that delight and also plant seeds of truth, to enjoy rich conversation, to give glory to God, to free captives. It is much more than my personality, my talents, or my dreams, because God has slowly revealed it to-and-through me by sometimes-painful withholding of the very things I desire – detaching me from the more superficial awareness of self as a collection of qualities, or characteristics. Prayer is the filling of this ‘emptiness’ with the grace, the shape, of His response to my being, my yearning, that makes it possible to bear it. Singing seems to me to unite that grace, that invisible fullness, with my own voice – speaking out into the world something of the joy and praise I feel at what He is accomplishing in me, and thus realizing it more fully Sabbath-keeping has helped clarify my human-being from my human-doing, by teaching me to stop and be acted upon by the Spirit.
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