Category Archives: spirit

logs & specs (& yoga)

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Two weeks ago, I bought new glasses (!).  After a five-year hiatus from the world of fashion specs, I was eager to try something funky–wearing contacts on a daily basis means that your glasses can be a little wild.  Enjoying my new eye wear extensively, I wore them to a yoga class last week.

Yoga is not particularly conducive to glasses-wearing–the upside down, bending, hanging the head, lying down–it’s not dangerous for spectacles, but it’s surely not as friendly as, say, reading.  I quickly realized: looking at the details of the world around you (which is, one might argue, the point of glasses) is NOT the point of yoga.

So, I took my glasses off.

What a change in perspective–no longer being able to see the little specks in other peoples’ eyes, I had to face the logs in my own “eyes.”  Without having others’ twisty bodies to judge (their form, their wobbliness, their breathing), I had to pay attention to my own.  My classmates dimmed in my view and I was forced to notice anew the stretched, achy, wobbly parts of myself–physically and spiritually.

My new yoga studio has opened up the world of yoga practice to me in a way I’d never understood it before: thinking of yoga (paying attention to your breathing and your body) as a sort of abstract (academically-speaking) or microcosm of your entire life.  “Are you rushing from pose to pose?” my yogi asks; “Are you trying to ignore the transitions in your own life?”  Is it very very hard to calm your mind or to still your breath today at yoga class?  Are you, perhaps, running yourself ragged at work or home, or ignoring the need your body has for a bit of rest?  Some days in class, your body is strong and balanced and you can take on more difficult postures for longer periods of time–and some days, you are just struggling to stay vertical (or horizontal!) for a few breaths.  Yoga practice allows you the chance to be gentle and patient and compassionate to your own body and your own mind, that hopefully, out in your life, you can start to take steps toward compassion and gentleness toward yourself and others.

Yesterday in yoga class, I had my contacts back in, and I remember who was able to do all the advanced positions and who wasn’t–but I was one of the latter, and I wonder if perhaps wearing my glasses to yoga more often might be a way of removing the log so often lodged in my eye.

holy week

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this week brings ordination to the priesthood for two of my dearest friends, a ZTA soul-sister, and my husband.  Last night, Kara Slade was ordained in Oxford, NC. The sermon from the service can be found here: so, so good.  (like many parts of the evening, it made me cry)

Lord willing, on Saturday, Jordan Hylden will be ordained in Fargo, ND…

God Keeps His Promises (full stop).

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A homily on Genesis 16:1-16

Sarai’s getting old.  She’s getting worried.  God has just made a promise to Abram, but there’s got to be some kind of work-around.  In chapter 15 of Genesis, God makes a covenant, promising that Abram’s descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.  As chapter 16 opens, Sarai seems to realize that there’s no way that she herself is going to be able to produce an heir, and she’s trying to help God save face.  She wants to save God the embarrassment if it turns out he can’t make good on his promise due to obvious biological restrictions.

I often try to hedge my bets with God.  I pray safe, small, could-just-be-coincidence prayers.  I dutifully go about my day at “medium”–not stepping out too far in faith, lest I get embarrassed because I wasn’t listening to God, or lest God get embarrassed because I’m trusting him too much.

The Bible is full of examples of people–the history of the church is full of examples!–who want to help God along, to provide needed assistance in his great plan, or to let him out of his promises altogether.

Indeed, God does call us to action, to trust, and faith, and personal relationship.  But we aren’t to make God out to be a child–he isn’t in need of our help to figure out how to make his plans real or help clean up messes.  We are the children.  We are the ones who can never quite understand the whole picture.  God does not need us to excuse him from his promises, he desires our trust that his promises are the only thing upon which we can depend.

God desires our obedience.  We don’t have to worry about how to get somewhere or how to make God’s dream come true.  God is big enough to keep the promises he makes, and we only need to learn how to listen quietly, and to believe that God keeps his promises to us.  There is no easy way to learn to listen and to be quiet–no short cut of prayers to engage or practices to enact.  As God offers his promises to us, we are invited to respond with the hard, disciplined work of faithfulness.

Let us seek after God–not interested in sinning boldly, but in living faithfully–knowing, as we’re shown in Scripture, that when we fail, the almighty God will weave our missteps and doubts back toward his purposes.

Grey’s Anatomy & Jesus

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I’ve found my true calling: recognizing (“rationalizing”?) the echoes and underpinnings of the Christian message in popular television.  It’s a difficult job–watching lots of television and searching as for a needle in a haystack to find something true to affirm–but it’s the calling I’ve been given.  (tongue-in-cheek, my friends)

But seriously: in this year’s season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, a main character realizes that she and her ex-husband/companion/lover (that is, they got divorced in order to keep their love alive…) have mutually exclusive life goals, and that she must end the relationship.  The nugget of wisdom I heard in all this mess was this woman telling her not-husband, as he tried to convince her that their relationship didn’t have to end over the difference they suffered, “It’s already happened.”  He’d had a desire to adopt a child, and while it was only a desire, it was one that he dwelt on and dreamt of, all the while, not telling her.  It didn’t work out, and he didn’t try to adopt the boy, but the not-wife knew that the damage had already been done.  The irreversible change in their relationship had already happened, though he hadn’t made any physical, procedural, or preparatory moves toward this life change.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.'” (Matthew 5:27-28)

In our relationships, how much damage is done by both the fleeting thoughts and the thought-patterns that we allow to seep into our heads?  I’m aware that just by saying out loud to everyone who asks, “this move has been bewilderingly easy and wonderful!”  I’m teaching myself to believe it’s true (of course, it helps when, as in my case, it happens to be true!).  Hearing yourself, or someone else, say the same positive thing again and again makes it seep into your head and heart, and you begin to believe it–because it’s true (a lot of life is which details we choose to underline).

However, if we aren’t active about the sorts of things we habitually say and think, we easily slip into negative habits and thought patterns, looking at others with contempt, focusing on our exhaustion (as we complain to everyone how tired and achy and over-worked we are). Or, in the case of our favorite Grey’s Anatomy characters, our minds run away with us and our plans, knowing that at some point the new life we’ve created in our heads will come crashing down when reality–that is, trying to life out this dream-life–sets in.

There are times and places for honest discussion about those things in life which are challenging, and perhaps even suffocating for us, but being aware of our mental tape loops  can allow us to create new, powerful, more truthful thought-and-speaking patterns about our lives.

With (spoiler alert!) Yang & Hunt on GA, Christina Yang knows that Owen Hunt’s foray into fatherhood through adoption in his mind has already planted the growing seed of desire which will turn to resentment; “it’s already happened”–our thoughts count.

“work/life balance” versus energy-giving/energy-sapping

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In the last few months, I’ve start to run into articles challenging this pervasive idea of a “work/life balance.”  The work/life balance idea is that our lives generally don’t fit into neat 9-to-5 boxes anymore, and with the growth of families where both parents work, the lines between our home lives and work lives continue to become more blurry.  We’re supposed to divide up the hours of the day or the week, and commit some to the “work” column and others to the “life” column–maybe bloggers work mornings, take the afternoons off to be with their children, and then work a few evenings a week.  For me, putting parts of days or weeks into “work” and “life” baskets creates pressure to be ALL WORK or ALL LIFE at particular moments and inevitably, bits of the other try to sneak in.

Enter Lifehacker’s “When (and If) You Should Ever Work for Free,” and ABlogAboutLove.com’s “I Don’t Believe in Work/Life Balance, I Believe In Managing Energy.”

Managing energy and looking at the sorts of things that bring you joy provides a different set of categories for evaluating your life.  I’ve heard people talk about their lives as a wheel, too–with God at the center, and all the rest of your activity (or non-activity!) expanding from that one central place.  I wonder if this “managing energy” method–though I’m not sure what I think about this “limited energy” idea (as described in ablogaboutlove.com’s article)–might be helpful to get on the path toward getting God to the true center, touchstone, and energy source.  I’ll be that if God is the true energy source, our energy wouldn’t be so limited…