prayer

Boredom as discipline (a follow-up)

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

Last week I wrote a post about Manoush Zomorodi’s book, Bored and Brilliant and the value of letting our minds wander in as undistracted an environment as we can regularly manage. (Again: it’s a great book and you should read it.) Since that post was closing in on two thousand words I thought I had better stop writing and publish it, but I hadn’t actually yet run out of things it prompted me to think about. So, here are some further things I’ve been gnawing on.

This book actually meshes well — strange as this may seem — with something I read last month, Sara Hagerty’s Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World that Loves to be Noticed. Since I read Unseen I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to live a “hidden” life, especially in regard to Biblical language around being “hidden in God” or “hidden in Christ”. What does it mean to be hidden in God? How do we cultivate that private, inner life? I’ve been mulling this over with some of my friends (hi, Heather) via email. Hagerty’s whole thing is taking those moments of our days where our instincts are to distract ourselves, or bury our emotions, or vent to friends, and instead use them as prompts to turn toward God in prayer — particularly when we are angry, hurt, etc., but really (ideally) all of the time. It’s like being a tree — we see the trunk and the limbs above the ground, but in reality the great strength of the tree is in the root system, hidden from view. The inner life of relationship with God, hidden from others, is our root system, and it’s what our flourishing depends on.

How does that mesh with what Zomorodi is talking about it? I have no idea if she is religious or not, but that’s beside the point perhaps. What stands out to me in this context is not something from the book, but an anecdote she related in her interview on the Team Human podcast. Zomorodi takes her show on the road to college campuses, and one of the exercises she has students do is to take a piece of paper and write something down on it — just a thought, not necessarily anything weighty. But then their instruction is to tear the piece of paper up and never tell her, or anyone else, what was written on it. And she’s found that students are aghast, they find it really difficult to do, because we are so primed by our natural drive for connection with others and by the techno-social forces driving our world right now, that it seems completely bizarre to have a thought and not immediately share it. Zomorodi is concerned about privacy in the sense that we often think of — stopping websites from tracking our data, etc. — but also in terms of privacy of thought, being not only able but willing to keep things to ourselves, even to take pleasure in that. Is that a skill that is disappearing? It seems to me that maybe it is.

So here’s the intersection of hiddenness and boredom/stillness and the delight of not saying it all: the secret place of prayer. Our days are filled with all these little cracks of time — waiting in line, pausing between activities, settling down before bed, taking a tea break — and we so easily reach for things to fill them: to books, to our phones, to the internet perhaps above all. (Quick, internet! Amuse me!) Zomorodi reminds us that those cracks are where, if we surrender to “doing nothing”, our brains find their most creative space. Hagerty reminds us that those moments are where, if we surrender to “doing nothing”, our hearts find their rest in God. If we never allow ourselves to be bored, to be un-distracted, to be still — we lose not only those chances at productive creativity, but we lose those chances to reorient our souls, to go to the hidden places with the Lord. We lose our roots.

I have been trying to leave myself more cracks in my day… with varying levels of success. It seems to depend a lot on how well I’ve been sleeping, actually. If I’m overtired, all I want is the self-soothing ritual of a blog post (or a dozen) to read or a game of scrabble against the computer. But I am trying — to learn to do this, to discipline my mind, to learn to want to do this more than I want other things.

I feel like this post isn’t quite fully formed — well, my thoughts on this are still not quite fully formed. But I wanted to put it out there anyway, and invite you to mull with me. What does it mean to cultivate a hidden life? To hide yourself in God? What do you do with your cracks?

“… Only the Good”

/ Christine Pennylegion

Yesterday I was in the car and we passed by a church signboard that caught my eye. I wasn’t able to snap a picture, but this is what it said:

God, let me see only the good today.

In some respects, I get that sentiment. There’s often more good going on in the world than we are inclined to acknowledge or able to realise. And looking for the good is a valuable strategy for dealing with evil situations, as Mr. Rogers reminds us:

But I have to admit, I’m not wholly convinced. Not that we shouldn’t be looking for the good — there’s nothing wrong with that — but that we should be striving to see only the good. Refusing to see anything but the good is a profoundly inadequate response to the ills and evils of the world. Too often, seeing only the good means sweeping things under the rug, denying the reality of real problems, and working for a peace that has everything to do with not rocking the boat, and nothing to do with justice, righteousness, or mercy.

Last week I came across this article by Kendall Cox entitled “Everybody’s Business“, about sexual assault on campus and the phenomenon of cheap grace. It’s a fantastic read, and towards the end she points out that the Christian response to evil and suffering should be, first of all, lament:

When we are confronted with someone else’s suffering, our immediate inclination should be to “mourn with those who mourn” (Rm. 12:15, NIV) — not to question or moralize. I recall my Old Testament professor in seminary saying that when reality does not correspond to God’s truth, “we only move into God’s kingdom through lament.” In my limited experience in North America, Christians tend to avoid the work of mourning and lament, even though scripture gives us a substantial basis for doing so (e.g., through Lamentations and the Psalms of Lament). “Negativity” of various kinds is suppressed, ecclesially as well as socially. This is especially the case for women, in whom even the most righteous anger is seen as unattractive and unfeminine.

Lament also helps us see the judgment of God in a new way. I grew up in a denomination that only spoke of divine judgment as a terrible thing to be dreaded by the individual sinner. When I began reading scripture and theology for myself, I was surprised to find that throughout much of the Hebrew Bible, “judgment” is portrayed as a balm for the weary and oppressed. It just depends on which side you’re on really. God’s judgment is also God’s grace and blessing for the brokenhearted. It means: God sees. For many of us, this is actually an enormous relief.

A related reason to hold out space for lament is that Christians can move prematurely to “forgiveness,” which is often the most counterproductive term to introduce in cases of physical violence. We can have a dangerously platitudinous understanding of what it requires and how it should function in the life of faith. Advising forgiveness — or mercy, or grace — at the wrong moment can heap further injustice onto the wounded. It is scripturally unjustifiable to pass over truth-telling and mourning in favor of a cheap and underdeveloped sense of “letting it go.” “Forgiveness” may, on closer observation, function as a whitewashing of deeply problematic human responses to the pain of others. Victim-blaming and denial are closely related to cheap grace.

There are things happening in this world that should make us weep. There are things happening in this world that should make us angry. There are things happening in this world that we can never heal, that we can never confront, that we can never bring the love of God into, if we won’t look at them directly and see them for what they are.

“God, let me see only the good today” is a comfortable prayer. Seeing the good is nice. It makes us feel good — but, I wonder, at what cost? Maybe what we need aren’t comfortable prayers but brave ones: “God, let me see the world with your eyes today.”

Mute Sunday

/ Christine Pennylegion / 6 Comments

Sunday began shortly before six this morning, when Anselm bounded into our bedroom and announced that it was time to give me his mother’s day card. And then Perpetua wanted to give me her card, of course, because she wants to do whatever her big brother does, and then presents, and then we all rolled out of bed for the usual Sunday morning half-routine half-chaos that eventually sees us out the door on our way to church. It seems to have gotten lush and green around here overnight, and the fog this morning made our ten-minute drive enchanting. Perpetua sang “Jesus loves me” most of the way there (tunelessly, but with gusto) while Anselm anxiously corrected her on all the words she pronounced wrong. All in all, it was a pretty typical morning.

Except for this: I couldn’t speak. We went away this past week and I managed to leave my voice back at the beach. Well, I can whisper. Sort of. It’s more of a croak. In effect, I’m voiceless — which is a strange sort of thing to be when you’re driving to church. Our liturgy is pretty participatory: there’s a fair bit of moving around, and a lot of singing and praying and formal responses to things. And while losing my voice doesn’t affect my ability to sit, kneel, stand, or cross myself, it did pretty well limit my physical participation in the service to those things.

It feels strange to stand in a pew and just listen when everyone around you is singing. It feels strange to listen to the scripture readings without joining the rest of the congregation in the “thanks be to God!” afterwards. It feels strange to kneel to pray without being able to complete the congregational halves of the set versicles and responses.

But what surprised me about going to church without speaking was that it also felt beautiful. Not being able to sing or speak meant that I was able to listen in a new way, without hearing my own voice at the forefront. I could hear the rumble of a hundred-plus voices praying the Lord’s prayer together. I could hear the full force of the congregation’s voices soaring to “Tell Out, My Soul, the Greatness of the Lord!” And it reminded me of one of the beauties of corporate worship, which is precisely that it is corporate: it’s not just about me and God, but it’s about me, and you, and him, and her, and them, and us, and God. It’s about the whole family of believers. Not to mention the great cloud of witnesses and the angelic hosts! And on the days when I can’t sing or speak or pray out loud, it’s the songs and prayers of the great family that lift me up. Perhaps I should stand voiceless in church more often.