best practices

I’m writing this post at the dreaded three o’clock hour, when some combination of low blood sugar and high humidity conspire to slow me down.  My mind dulls and my eyelids droop as fingers sleepily push the next word through the keys.  This is the time of day when I realize that I’ve done a lot since six a.m.  And this is the time of year when I realize that I’ve done a lot since April.  It’s a good tired.

This week’s question is informed by the present moment.  I have different practices that help balance me during days or seasons of busyness.  Many of them are incredibly simple.  Just now, for example, a cold glass of iced water in a quiet room is all I really need.  Yet several days of the week it is the morning trip to the gym.  And most nights it is the move away from screen time to something more contemplative before bed.  None of these practices are particularly religious, unless the intentional search for balance is religious.

So I wonder what simple practices sustain you.  Beyond the expected things we might say in church (e.g. prayer, meditation, study of sacred texts), what ordinary things nourish you?  How do you regularly restore yourself?  Cookie break?  Walk on the beach?  Jazz playing with the windows open?  Or the obvious three o’clock nap?

The life religious doesn’t happen only on Sundays, nor it is made only of rites and relics.  According to my own theology, the sacred we seek is much closer than that.  Can we find it in the simple nourishments of the day?  I’d love to read your answers.  With a yawn.  And with aloha,

J

cycles and seasons

Two nights ago I woke from a disturbing dream.  It is a dream that I have had on and off since 1992, the year my father died.  In it, he walked back into the room, very naturally, and we were having a wonderful time until I realized how long it had been and became angry with him.  In the way of dreams, I understood more than I said and I felt more than was shown.  Dad was sad and silent.  We both knew that he couldn’t help it.

I woke from a restless sleep.  Alone in the dark.  A grown man now, but every bit his little boy.

I am aware that there are any number of reasons for the dream this week.  It is a new season in my own life, a time of incredible sweetness as I begin my ministry at Circular Church in Charleston.  My mother visited last week and, as always, left me with the blessing of her words about how proud she was and how proud my father would be.  I wish he could be a part of this, and so my dreams return him to me, where I love him and lament his absence all over again.

Another reason to dream of my father is that it is baseball season.  I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago how vividly I remember going to games with him, digging the peanuts out of his shirt pocket while we leaned forward in our seats to watch the players on the field.  Earlier this month, I took my son to his first game in Charleston and felt the tradition being passed as he crawled from his seat onto my lap and whispered questions about the batter.  Just to underscore the theme, I’m also reading Chad Harbach’s delightful book, The Art of Fielding, which, as Gregory Cowles writes, “makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in [a] slow, precious, and altogether excellent first novel.”*

So the bitter and the sweet mix together in this new season, calling to mind memories, dreams, and reflections (to crib from Jung).  Yet they also call to mind a favorite poem from Linda Pastan.  In “Baseball” she observes the beauty of the game and draws on its spare elegance:

When you tried to tell me baseball was a metaphor

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season–
I didn’t believe you.

It’s just a way of passing
the time, I said.

And you said: that’s it.
Yes.

It begs the question of how we each pass the time in remembrance.  Traditionally, we remember our dear ones at special times (the holidays, perhaps All Souls, or their birthdays, perhaps).  But in my experience, as a chaplain, pastor, and, most importantly, a son, grief moves in cycles and seasons of its own.  It makes sense to me that I feel its pangs during baseball season.  Others, I think, remember at different times for different reasons.  And it stretches, too; far past the old five stages we learned about to ebb and flow throughout the years.  Sure, we grieve less acutely over time, but we never fully stop.  Because, I think, our love never fully stops.  We carry it with us always, from one season to the next.

So this week’s question is:  Whom do you remember and celebrate?  And what cycles, seasons, or life events bring them back?  Do they visit in dreams?  In poems?  In prayers?  Or someplace you least expect it?  Like the walk to a minor league ballpark on a hot summer evening.

I look forward to reading your responses.  With aloha,

J

*Gregory Howles, “Big League Anxiety on the Baseball Diamond,” The New York Times, September 9, 2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/books/review/the-art-of-fielding-by-chad-harbach-book-review.html

*Linda Pastan (reference forthcoming – need to check my study shelf)

american voices

This Fourth of July I find myself reflecting on American literature.  Summoning all of my discipline, I thought that perhaps I would mention a single volume I recently reread.  Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a wallop of a book for its boyish sense of adventure, its peek into life on the Mississippi, and its portrait of our nation’s glaring contradictions.  In the Oxford World Classics edition, Professor Emory Elliott sums it up nicely:

Astonishing in its power to provoke and challenge, Huckleberry Finn evokes a range of contradictory responses to the social and cultural situation of America, past and present: the hopes and disappointments; the confidence and dread; the humour and the violence; the great expectations, bitter frustrations, and resulting anger; the dreams and desires of millions of young Americans and new immigrants of every generation since the signing of the Constitution.*

As I reread the book, I listened again to the story of American racism and cruelty alongside that of the freedom to dissent and shove off.  In the friendship between Huck and Jim, Twain captured all that is possible and problematic about a country founded on the principle that everyone is created equal and simultaneously built by the forced labor of people of color.  The book is full of yearning infused with a deeply American lament. Of course, since it’s Twain, it never holds the seriousness for too long before it returns to the skewer of satire.

So today I am reflecting on the long list of American voices that have influenced me.  I’m thinking of literary voices, everyone from Herman Melville to Mary Oliver, from James Baldwin to Leslie Marmon Silko.  But I’m also wondering what you, dear friends, call to mind when you think about American voices.  As we celebrate our nation this week, what uniquely American voices have meant the most to you?  And why?

I can’t wait to read your responses as we celebrate who we are and where we’ve come from.

With aloha,

J

*Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), vii.