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Saturday, April 18, 2009

Soul music...

Any U2 fans out there? Check out this op ed article, written by U2's lead singer, Bono, in April 18's edition of the New York Times.

It's 2009.
Do You Know Where Your Soul Is?

Karen Barbour

I AM in Midtown Manhattan, where drivers still play their car horns as if they were musical instruments and shouting in restaurants is sport.

I am a long way from the warm breeze of voices I heard a week ago on Easter Sunday.

“Glorify your name,” the island women sang, as they swayed in a cut sandstone church. I was overwhelmed by a riot of color, an emotional swell that carried me to sea.

Christianity, it turns out, has a rhythm — and it crescendos this time of year. The rumba of Carnival gives way to the slow march of Lent, then to the staccato hymnals of the Easter parade. From revelry to reverie. After 40 days in the desert, sort of ...

Carnival — rock stars are good at that.

“Carne” is flesh; “Carne-val,” its goodbye party. I’ve been to many. Brazilians say they’ve done it longest; they certainly do it best. You can’t help but contract the fever. You’ve got no choice but to join the ravers as they swell up the streets bursting like the banks of a river in a flood of fun set to rhythm. This is a Joy that cannot be conjured. This is life force. This is the heart full and spilling over with gratitude. The choice is yours ...

It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up ... self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.

Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.

It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.

Last Sunday, the choirmaster was jumping out of his skin ... stormy then still, playful then tender, on the most upright of pianos and melodies. He sang his invocations in a beautiful oaken tenor with a freckle-faced boy at his side playing conga and tambourine as if it was a full drum kit. The parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.

I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”

Well, yes. It is us.

Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates ... the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. We used to say that all we wanted for the rest of the world was what we had for ourselves. Then we found out that if every living soul on the planet had a fridge and a house and an S.U.V., we would choke on our own exhaust.

Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us.

A few weeks ago I was in Washington when news arrived of proposed cuts to the president’s aid budget. People said that it was going to be hard to fulfill promises to those who live in dire circumstances such a long way away when there is so much hardship in the United States. And there is.

But I read recently that Americans are taking up public service in greater numbers because they are short on money to give. And, following a successful bipartisan Senate vote, word is that Congress will restore the money that had been cut from the aid budget — a refusal to abandon those who would pay such a high price for a crisis not of their making. In the roughest of times, people show who they are.

Your soul.

So much of the discussion today is about value, not values. Aid well spent can be an example of both, values and value for money. Providing AIDS medication to just under four million people, putting in place modest measures to improve maternal health, eradicating killer pests like malaria and rotoviruses — all these provide a leg up on the climb to self-sufficiency, all these can help us make friends in a world quick to enmity. It’s not alms, it’s investment. It’s not charity, it’s justice.

Strangely, as we file out of the small stone church into the cruel sun, I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way.

Not all soul music comes from the church.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Solitude

Here's a piece from The Chronicle Review, January 30, 2009, with a completely random photo I took at Valle Crucis Abbey in Wales - a place of solitude and a place associated with tradition. Deresiewicz discussion of solitude, technology, etc. a particularly appropriate article for consideration during the season of Lent. What are your thoughts on solitude?

The End of Solitude: As everyone seeks more and broader connectivity, the still, small voice speaks only in silence

by WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.

I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?

To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision quests, invite their trances, in desert or forest or cave. For the still, small voice speaks only in silence. Social life is a bustle of petty concerns, a jostle of quotidian interests, and religious institutions are no exception. You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you, and the divine word, their pretensions notwithstanding, demurs at descending on the monarch and the priest. Communal experience is the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm. (Egregious, for no man is a prophet in his own land. Tiresias was reviled before he was vindicated, Teresa interrogated before she was canonized.) Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism, a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom. The seer returns with new tablets or new dances, his face bright with the old truth.

Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. In Marilynne Robinson's interpretation, Calvinism created the modern self by focusing the soul inward, leaving it to encounter God, like a prophet of old, in "profound isolation." To her enumeration of Calvin, Marguerite de Navarre, and Milton as pioneering early-modern selves we can add Montaigne, Hamlet, and even Don Quixote. The last figure alerts us to reading's essential role in this transformation, the printing press serving an analogous function in the 16th and subsequent centuries to that of television and the Internet in our own. Reading, as Robinson puts it, "is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity." "The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass." With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.

But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Protestant solitude is still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical. The self was now encountered not in God but in Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: The poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability — if less for Rousseau and still less for Thoreau, the most famous solitary of all, then certainly for Wordsworth, Melville, Whitman, and many others. For Emerson, "the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society." The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling's "sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.

Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating. As a model of the self and its interactions, Hume's social sympathy gave way to Pater's thick wall of personality and Freud's narcissism — the sense that the soul, self-enclosed and inaccessible to others, can't choose but be alone. With exceptions, like Woolf, the modernists fought shy of friendship. Joyce and Proust disparaged it; D.H. Lawrence was wary of it; the modernist friendship pairs — Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — were altogether cooler than their Romantic counterparts. The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason.

The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people. The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity," where the essential relationship is only with oneself. (Just as there are few good friendships in modernism, so are there few good marriages.) Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticity is to look upon these visions without flinching; Trilling's exemplar here is Kurtz. Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a prophet of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of self — a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.

But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. "Reach out and touch someone." But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.

Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.

As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven't seen since high school, and wasn't all that friendly with even then) "is making coffee and staring off into space"? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.

But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their 30s and 40s, the real problem is that it has become completely natural for people in their teens and 20s. Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others. As long ago as 1952, Trilling wrote about "the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment." Now we have equipped ourselves with the means to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not mean that we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary. Remember my student, who couldn't even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.

There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation's experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.

I speak from experience. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn't have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.

So it is with the current generation's experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn't call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn't always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn't always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.

But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."

The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.

If they didn't, they would understand that solitude enables us to secure the integrity of the self as well as to explore it. Few have shown this more beautifully than Woolf. In the middle of Mrs. Dalloway, between her navigation of the streets and her orchestration of the party, between the urban jostle and the social bustle, Clarissa goes up, "like a nun withdrawing," to her attic room. Like a nun: She returns to a state that she herself thinks of as a kind of virginity. This does not mean she's a prude. Virginity is classically the outward sign of spiritual inviolability, of a self untouched by the world, a soul that has preserved its integrity by refusing to descend into the chaos and self-division of sexual and social relations. It is the mark of the saint and the monk, of Hippolytus and Antigone and Joan of Arc. Solitude is both the social image of that state and the means by which we can approximate it. And the supreme image in Mrs. Dalloway of the dignity of solitude itself is the old woman whom Clarissa catches sight of through her window. "Here was one room," she thinks, "there another." We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.

To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one's way beyond it. Solitude, Emerson said, "is to genius the stern friend." "He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions." One must protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus — especially, Emerson added, during youth. "God is alone," Thoreau said, "but the Devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion." The university was to be praised, Emerson believed, if only because it provided its charges with "a separate chamber and fire" — the physical space of solitude. Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal." We are back to the seer, seeking signposts for the future in splendid isolation.

Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." Teresa and Tiresias will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the drift of the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.

The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite. Thoreau knew that the "doubleness" that solitude cultivates, the ability to stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows, to say nothing of the offense implicit in avoiding their company. But then, he didn't worry overmuch about being genial. He didn't even like having to talk to people three times a day, at meals; one can only imagine what he would have made of text-messaging. We, however, have made of geniality — the weak smile, the polite interest, the fake invitation — a cardinal virtue. Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal. Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd." But Thoreau understood that securing one's self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.

William Deresiewicz writes essays and reviews for a variety of publications. He taught at Yale University from 1998 to 2008.


http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 21, Page B6

Monday, March 9, 2009

Eggs and things...


This past Sunday, the Rev. Dr. Harvey Guthrie told us a story about high, solid walls and fragile eggs. He was quoting the Japanese author Haruki Murakami who recently won the Jerusalem Prize given to writers whose work deals with freedom, society, politics, and government. The story Harvey told us about was published in Salon Magazine and is avaible to you online by clicking here. It is a worthwhile read and a good reminder from this celebrated author that we all possess a tangible, living soul.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

A bedtime story...


In the last year or so, Epiphany has introduced Catechesis of the Good Shepherd curriculum into our Sunday School program. Catechesis, as it is also called, is a wonderfully unique form of education and formation for children. If you are interested in more information, check out the website. The video below is a demonstration of the kind of approach to learning that is a hallmark of the Catechesis program. What you will see is actually a demonstration of a slightly different curriculum called Godly Play, but the same idea in terms of approach to learning. In fact, Godly Play is modeled after the Catechesis program. If nothing else, it makes a great bedtime story for kids of all ages. Enjoy!

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Temptations...

Here is the article mentioned today in the homily. I took it straight from beliefnet, a great website to check out when you have a moment. Enjoy!

Lent as Divine Therapy
Father Thomas Keating talks about Lent as a time to look at unconscious dynamics that keep us from a deep relationship with God.

Fr. Keating, a Trappist monk at St. Benedict's monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, is a co-founder of the centering prayer movement. He recently spoke to Beliefnet producer Anne A. Simpkinson about the contemplative dimensions of the Lenten season.

How can we make Lent a more contemplative time? And, if people are already practicing contemplative prayer, how can they deepen their practice?

Lent is meant to be a communal retreat for all Christians--at least those who observe Lent. The liturgy is an instruction in the mystical meaning of Lent as preparation for the Holy Week celebration of the mystery of redemption.

Redemption basically is about holistic health, if you want to translate it into modern parlance. What I suggest--based on the Christian tradition but not often preached--is that you can't enter into t

he fullness of the Pascal mystery of the redemption unless there is a radical transformation of motivation within you. So, on the first Sunday of Lent, you have Christ going into the desert and experiencing basic human instincts--security needs, power-control needs, and affection-esteem needs. The three temptations that [Christ faced in the desert] address each one of those issues.

If you accept the belief that baptism incorporates us in the mystical body of Christ, into the divine DNA, then you might say that the Holy Spirit is present in each of us, and thus we have the capacity for the fullness of redemption, of transformation.

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It's a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are. The church is hinting in the first Sunday of Lent that Lent is about temptation, or what we think is temptation. It's about the raw experience of human instincts, and how they unconsciously influence our conduct and decisions all our life long unless we keep working with them.

Lent is the time to expect temptation and [experience] afflictive emotions such as shame, humiliation, anger, greed, the time to look at how those instincts, which are developed in early childhood are frustrated--or gratified. See there's a hazard in self-exaltation if we get what we want, or depression if we don't get what we want. To work on those [emotions] during Lent, I think, is more effective than fasting or rituals.

With regard to prayers, I would suggest doing a little more meditation, add another half-hour period [of prayer], if that's possible. If it's not possible, be more alert to the false self and its [emotional] programs as they manifest in everyday life. This is a form of practicing the presence of God.

Do you think that giving up chocolate or meat or whatever is only a scratching of the surface of Lent?

Yes, but if you scratch the surface and find out there's something underneath, it's helpful that way. (Laughter) It seems to me that scratching the surface of the unconscious, allowing a few cracks to show, hastens the evacuation [of emotions tied to the false self], and is a good thing.

I imagine giving up chocolate would make us understand how powerless we are because of how hard it is to do. I think that's one of the benefits of something like that. If we can't give up chocolate for 40 days, how can we give up other things?

It's a good start. But the liturgy, or the church, whoever put that together in their mystical wisdom wasn't thinking about your taste buds. (Laughter) Lent is about more serious matters. The Church was thinking about how it feels to confront the emotional damage of a lifetime that is sitting unnoticed in your unconscious. Unless one does an extraordinary kind of deep psychotherapy, it might take five years on the couch [to uncover and work with such things]. But the practice of a non-conceptual meditation [centering prayer] initiates a process that may go on for a lifetime. Every Lent is an invitation to go deeper into that process.

Lent is--and I think the Eastern Orthodox Church would agree--a 40-day retreat that the church invites everybody to go through every year. If it is really well done, it would be comparable to an extended Vipassana (Buddhist meditation) retreat. It would have a transforming effect each time you did it.

It would be a real challenge to take on Lent this year because our lives are so pushed and pulled by so many external demands.

Perhaps more than ever today. [I think of] the intrusion of mass media. I don't know what that's going to do to people, what it's going to do to a generation without some balancing factor like Lent. Lent could become more and more crucial to spiritual practice. Even 10 days of retreat is barely enough to get in touch with oneself, and then you go back and you lose it in three or four days. That's why Contemplative Outreach started an immersion retreat, which lasts three weeks, and why we're considering retreats of greater length.

Illustration: Temptation of Christ, stained glass of JoKarl Huber in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Weil der Stadt, Germany; photograph by Rebecca Kennison, 1989

Remember that you are (star)dust...

Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori preached a wonderful and bi-lingual sermon on Ash Wednesday in San Jose, Costa Rica. Bishop Katharine was a scientist before becoming a priest in the church, and her sermons often contain beautiful images of creation, humankind and God, which come directly out of her work studying creation. She is a wonderful example of how science does not make God obsolete, but may instead inspire a deep love, appreciation, and awe for God in all of creation.

In her sermon from Ash Wednesday, Bishop Katharine describes humankind as dust hoping to be worthy of the image of God, and she reminds her listeners that the same dust the we are made of ultimately comes from the stars. She says, "Lent is our opportunity to bless this dust so that it can shine even brighter than the stars like the light of Christ...Our world needs this light resurrected from dust."

And, here is the link to the audio version of the sermon. Hope you can check it out!

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Compline

Here's some great information about Compline by Jamey Anderson...

At 7:30 p.m. on March 1, in place of the traditional Evensong on the first Sunday of the month, the Epiphany Schola will sing Compline: a meditative, ancient service that has been chanted and sung by Christians for 1,500 years, probably first by St. Benedict. If you haven’t been to a Compline service before, it may be useful to think of it as a “stripped-down” version of Evensong.

Evensong (sung Evening Prayer), an exclusively Anglican creation originating from the sixteenth century, is a combination of Compline with Vespers. If you’ve ever been to an Evensong and wished you could just sit back and relax into the music instead of standing up during the canticles, you might find what you’re looking for in Compline. There is much less of the “stand-up/sit-down” formalities in Compline. The church is dark, and in many cases, you may not even be able to see the singers. The emphasis is on quiet meditation and bringing the day to a peaceful close.

Episcopal musicians in the 1950s re-discovered Compline and brought it into the modern age, most notably in Seattle at St. Mark’s Cathedral. By the 1960’s, people would flock into the church, sit on the floor, or lie down on the pews. People even bring their own pillows to fully relax in the darkened room. You can hear examples of the service at www.complinechoir.org. The choral director Peter Hallock writes about the great interest in Compline that remains to this day:

“In the mid-and late 60’s, the service began to attract large numbers of young people, a phenomenon that, to a great extent, can only be accounted for by the search for new cultural values being promulgated by the younger generation of that time. Remains still exist that serve as reminders of a movement that, among other things, must be credited for the interpolation of Eastern religious thought and practice into our lives. The embracing of meditation, yoga, and martial arts such as Tai Chi are further examples.”

And the Seattle Weekly’s Best of 2008 issue cites Compline at St. Mark’s as the “Best Non-Alcoholic Happy Hour!”

“You just saw a guy with a briefcase and a girl with dreads and about 15 tattoos walk into a 77-year-old church together. ‘Huh?’ you might be thinking. But if it’s Sunday night at 9:30, you should walk in too, because it’s time for Compline at St. Mark’s on Capitol Hill. Wearing old sweats? So what?—you’ll probably be sitting on the floor, and no one cares what you wear here anyway. Just sit back and listen to the church’s 18-member choir party like it’s the year 509. They sing evening prayers the way monks have done ever since there were monks, and they do it beautifully. You’ve never felt this calm in your life, I promise you, no matter what your religious preferences.”

Here at Epiphany, our re-imagination will include singing the service with both men and women, rather than the exclusively male monk-style voices that are sometimes used. If any of this interests you or has raised your curiosity, circle the date in your calendar, bring your friends, and wear comfortable clothes: we’ll see you at Compline on March 1st!

Yawn, stretch, groan...

...Epiphany Epicenter is waking up after it's winter hibernation! I have taken a little break during Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, but now, for the Lenten Season, I will make regular blog postings part of my spiritual discipline.

On that note, what do you have planned for Lent? If you are looking for resources for prayer and study, I highly recommend these three:

Pray as you go
This website provides wonderful daily prayer, readings, and music in a very friendly format. I love this podcast! You can download from their website or from iTunes.

Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD)
ERD has some wonderful Lenten meditations you can have delivered to your inbox. ERD is an organization Epiphany has long supported and we have a great deal of enthusiasm for the important work they do. Click here to sign up for their Lenten meditations.

The National Catholic Reporter

This website has several different options for Lenten meditations delivered directly to your inbox, including Edward Hays, who is one of my favorites.

Have a wonderful Lent, everyone, and stay tuned!