Simply Simon

Dinner time blues

As after-dinner conversations go, this one was not my best. One of my beloveds wanted to address some aspects of our family life that were a cause of discontent. High on the list—the long list —was our practice of family meals: “Why can’t we be normal?”

Apparently, ‘normal’ is the practice of allowing each person the freedom to take his or her dinner to wherever he or she wants to be, that is in front of the television, sitting at the computer screen, listening to the iPod, etc. I was told that ours is the ‘only’ family among those of school friends that clings to the quaint tradition of sitting down together at the same table: “It’s so gay!”

OK, so I probably didn’t react as sensitively as I should have. I might teach spirituality, but this was not one of my finer spiritual moments. Upon reflection, I have to own the fact that this conversation trespassed into some loaded territory for me. I have much invested—theologically, pastorally, personally—in the sacredness of the dinner table. I teach an entire unit on ‘table spirituality’; I’ve written articles about the sacredness of eating; I speak publicly about the Christian ministry of hospitality; I value my kitchen and view the cooking I do in it as a spiritual service.

All very well, I suppose. Though apparently, not every member of the family has imbibed the table’s profundity in the way I’d planned. Evidently, our daily ritual of ‘divine encounter’ is not feeling terribly divine.

Granted, if I’m honest, it doesn’t always feel that way to me either. Truthfully, our dinner table can sometimes be more an emotional hot spot than a haven of serenity and harmony. Too often, it’s the place where household tensions and conflicts, and each person’s weariness, are on graphic display. The sparks might fly, but not always the ones I’d hoped for. And then, of course, there are the moments when it all feels so routine and mundane that even I have trouble recalling its significance.

Regardless, this awkward interaction left me feeling despondent. I’d failed … or at least that’s how it felt. The intensity with which these protestations were expressed caught me off guard. After all these years, is our family mealtime really that easily dismissed, that insignificant … that negative?

As I’ve mulled this over in the last week or so, I’ve had to gently remind myself of many things, not the least of which is that the spiritual and the mundane do not always count each other out; that holiness and chaos don’t always inhabit alternative galaxies. In reality, claiming something as sacred does not render it extraordinary or eternally tranquil.

It’s a bit like the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper. How many times does it seem so routine as to be almost boring? Sometimes I ‘feel’ it; often I don’t. Is it any less significant to my spirituality? I don’t think so. There’s something about the routine practice of sitting down at the table together—hearing the same words, looking at the same people, praying the same prayers—that, over time, shapes who I am. What’s more, even upon Jesus’ institution of this sacred meal, his words and actions were followed immediately by a dispute and harsh words among those at the table. This idealized moment of community was anything but serene.

In retrospect, this after-dinner conversation, as difficult as it was to have, has highlighted two things—apparently contradictory—that I think are worth holding together.

First, the sanctity of our dinner table is too important to take for granted. Frankly, I’m not ready to become a ‘normal’ household yet. I’m holding on to the daily ritual of the dinner table. In my view, it’s too valuable to surrender—one of those practices whose worth you only fully know when it’s no longer there. Just yesterday, our newspaper highlighted another study documenting the importance of the family meal table to the psychological wellbeing of adolescents. For me, the challenge is to remain an attentive host, vigilant to the presence of God, sensitive to the needs of those seated, and always ready to nurture the sacred potential of our gathering.

Second, my overwrought expectations of the table can do with a good dose of humility. Not every meal will be an epiphany. Not every moment can be profound. The impact of our daily encounters across the table—the routine, the mundane, the tension, the cross words and funny stories—is cumulative, appreciated only in retrospect. Our spirituality is shaped as much in the shadows and tensions of family life as it is in serenity and laughter. So breathe deeply, I say to myself, and let the sacredness of life take care of itself.

Home for Christmas

Last Saturday on Radio National’s By Design, I listened to a lovely reflection on the post-war house by Australian regional artist Robyn Sweaney. As “homage to the art of the well-loved humble home,” Sweaney has painted a series of works depicting the facades of traditional homes in her rural town of northern NSW.

Akin to the more commonly recognized suburban art of Howard Arkley, Sweaney’s paintings provide a very domestic but true-to-life representation of home. They’re places we’ve grown up in and taken for granted, Sweaney says, yet they’ve shaped us in significant ways.

You can see some of Sweaney's work here, but in the spirit of the Christmas season here are three that I like:

Discernment in the Laundry

Sorting wash
(by Gunilla Norris)

Out of the hamper onto the floor,
the wash lies in a heap and I must sort
the dark clothes from the light, the delicate
from the ordinary before they are washed.

Categories—I think about how much
we use them. This is not that. This belongs.
This does not. We cannot do without sorting,
without categories, without definitions.
Even in this activity I know that without sorting
the colors could bleed in the wash.
They have to be separated according to kind.

In how many countless situations
have I named, separated, and judged
instead of celebrated.
In how many ways have I observed,
evaluated, sorted, and pulled away.
My preferences rule me.

Amidst this pile of wash I want to learn again
to participate and to be open to difference:
to celebrate the dark, to honor the light,
to bow to the delicate as well as the sturdy,
to appreciate texture and weight. To be
more equally with the various and the strange.

Soon the clothes will be drenched
in water and soap.
It will be in different time,
and sorting will no longer matter
in the midst of the wash cycle.
I need to learn this in life:
when to recognize, to name, and to sort—
and when to immerse, to soak, to tumble,
to be rinsed free of opinions.
Grant that I may as much as possible
honour You in all things.

Gunilla Norris, Being Home: A Book of Meditations, New York: Bell Tower, p 30-31.

Gardening and the soul

Yesterday’s task was to examine a masters thesis exploring gardening from a theological perspective. Though I can’t say I’m a convert to backyard toil, the student raised some interesting issues. Most intriguing was the proposition that gardening is a form of “theological praxis” and an act through which “inner windows of the soul” are opened, paving the way for an experience of ‘conversion’.

Following on nicely from this is a piece I read this morning in Books & Culture by Canadian theologian John G. Stackhouse. In a very helpful exploration of the nature of mission, Stackhouse writes:

What God rescues us to is the original agenda set out for us in Genesis 1, namely, to "fill the earth and subdue it." He planted a garden for us to tend and commanded our first parents to raise up generations of gardeners to fan out across the earth to till the rest of it. This is what it means to bear the image of God. We, too, are to improve the situation, to cultivate what we encounter, to make shalom in every sector of life.

He continues:

The Christian gospel therefore is not a narrowly spiritual one, but literally embraces everything, everywhere, at every moment. Every action that brings shalom—that preserves or enhances the flourishing of things, people, and relationships—is the primary will of God for humanity.

Practicing the Presence

In the spirit of the 17th century Carmelite, Brother Lawrence:

Doing the dishes

My life will always have dirty dishes.
If this sink can become
a place of contemplation,
let me learn constancy here.

I gaze through the window above the sink.
There I see the constancy of dawn,
the constancy of dusk,
the constancy of the seasons,
of the sun and moon,
and the rotation of the planets.

Your love is discerned by repetition.
Turn and return me to you love.
Let my fitful human constancy
be strengthened in the willing,
wheeling wonder of your stars.
______________________
Gunilla Norris, Being Home, New York: Bell Tower, 1991, p 65.

The contemplative at home

As I often do, I sat today in the domed reading room of the State Library. To me, it’s a place full of ‘presence’, and one where the act of reading feels more significant.

Not long after my arrival, a young man walked by and sat just metres away. With a closely shaved head, he was dressed in the distinctive orange garb of a Buddhist monk. He looked out of place at first, but after time I noticed he was not reading, writing or even gazing up at the architecture. In fact, for several hours he sat motionless, eyes closed, hands clasped loosely in his lap. He was meditating.

Though from a different religious tradition than my own, this young man was a contemplative in the traditional sense. His stillness—a well-rehearsed calm—was mesmerizing. In between my own activity, I watched him, partly intrigued, partly envious. As a natural introvert, there has always been something oddly attractive to me about a vocation like his.

Rudely, my aspirations were interrupted by the sound of my mobile phone. A text message from my daughter: time to meet her and my son at the train station. I quickly gathered my wits and belongings, glanced one final time at the motionless monk, and made my exit. The call to idyllic stillness would have to wait.

I have long thought that the disciplines of contemplation and the unrelenting demands of family life are the most awkward companions. How does one nurture the inner stillness of the Spirit while living amidst the ebb and flow of family commitments? Is such a thing desirable, or even possible?

In her most recent book Seasons of a Family’s Life, the Catholic theologian Wendy Wright argues that not only is it possible, it is vital. In the sequal to her earlier Sacred Dwelling, Wright explores the means through which we can do so. As a spouse, mother, and busy academic, Wright does not come at this challenge romantically. She does so with her spiritual feet planted firmly on the ground. Following the lead of early Christian writers like Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, Wright contends that contemplation is not a means of escaping the world, but a way of perceiving it, “a listening awareness that allows the Word to take root” where we are.

Wright describes the experience of the monastic (Christian or otherwise) as primarily vertical and one-on-one: "it implies a going apart, a renunciation of the life of intimacy with spouse and children, a relinquishment of property and the burdens of caretaking; it implies a certain marginality, a view from the critical distance that silence and solitude and spacious time allows."

In contrast, a spirituality of family life is intensely horizontal and has to be worked out in the in-betweeness of persons. In the end, it is much more about "the busyness of tending and providing, about the stewarding of property; it allows for very little of the distanced perspective that silence and solitude offer." The challenge of contemplative spirituality in the home is cultivating an awareness of God in the midst of the everyday, not away from it. "I have come to the conclusion,” Wright says, “that the fundamental art of the spiritual life is the art of paying attention."

Among the multiple things we need to pay attention to are these:

The sacred places of family life:
In every family, Wright says, there are those concrete places in which we’ve experienced ‘the more’ in our lives and relationships. Perhaps it’s a dining room table, an annual vacation spot, a grandparent’s farm, a backyard or a graveside. The possibilities are numerous and rich with formative moments.

In the big and little stories of our lives:
Stories frame, sustain and interpret our lives. The ‘big stories’ are provided by religious traditions or cultural heritage. The ‘little stories’ are those that we share in families—the ones told around the dinner table, over and over, and often exaggerated as time passes. Together, Wright says, the big and little stories provide meaning and coherence to our lives. And in them we may well hear God’s presence.

In the contrasting disciplines of availability and Sabbath rest:
The call of Christ is to surrender ourselves to the fact that family life is most fundamentally being present for and available to each other. It’s demanding, tiring and often costly. At the same time, the call of God is to a deep and periodic rest: a drawing of boundaries and a coming apart. Sounds great in theory, yet working out the balance is as challenging as it is important.

In the acts of welcoming and letting go:
Wright calls them the twin dynamics of family spirituality. Family life is a constant movement between these two and learning to discern which is the call of God in a particular moment is one of the most consistent challenges.

In dwelling:
If stability is a gift of parental care, then a spirituality of dwelling deserves more thought. Spirituality is not only about relinquishment and withdrawal, but living deeply into the places and tasks of our lives as they are. "If the spiritual life has often been imaged as journey, pilgrimage, or exile, a spirituality of family must balance this imagery with an attentive consideration of dwelling."

In the ministry of forgiveness:
Wright describes it as the central dynamic of a healthy family life, and yet one of the most costly in our daily interactions. Yet in the daily acts of forgiveness we experience both the pain and the liberation of the gospel.

There is so much more to this book than I’ve inferred here. As with her earlier book, it’s well worth reading. Wright’s gift to people like me—those who will never wear orange and rarely have time to sit motionless—is the reminder that the contemplative life is as much my calling as it is anyone else’s. It simply has to look different.

Sacred stories

This will be my third year teaching Living the Faith, a unit designed for first year students in theology. Central to the unit is the opportunity for participants to engage reflectively and intelligently with their own stories of faith.

Students' initial reactions to this are varied. Some are surprised, delighted, even relieved—pleased for an opportunity to reflect seriously on their journey thus far. Some are dismissive, thinking that ‘testimony time’ is simply too ‘mickey mouse’ for a serious student of theology. Still others are mystified, wondering how their own mundane experiences have any relevance to rigorous Christian thought.

In my view, personal stories of faith—and our critical dialogue with them—are a foundational component of vibrant theology. For this reason, I’m always on the look out for good examples of everyday story as theology; not simply theoretical arguments for the worth of narrative, but hands-on examples. For this reason, I was delighted to come across Diana Garland’s Sacred Stories of Ordinary Families: Living the Faith in Daily Life.

Garland, Dean of the School of Social Work at Baylor University, seeks to better understand the character of faith being lived out in ordinary Christian households. Based on extended interviews with 110 families across the United States—traditional, blended, single-parent, bi-racial, poor, working and middle class—Garland explores through their stories the nature of family identity, the expression of faith, indicators of resilience, spiritual practices and disciplines, and the experiences of God's presence in both ordinary and life-changing moments.

Garland's purpose is two-fold. Firstly, and perhaps most significantly, Garland wants to listen, to give voice to stories of ordinary families. Though routinely perceived by the tellers as unremarkable, Garland approaches these stories as rich repositories of truth and wisdom. Thankfully, she manages to avoid the trap of overlaying these stories with her own theological agenda or of speaking as the expert interpreter. Rather, she treats these stories—many of them very moving—with the respect and theological legitimacy they are due. Secondly, Garland wants to prompt the church to do likewise, to encourage congregations to value the multiple stories of everyday faith contained within them, and to find new ways of practicing this faith together.

As it happens, the book’s been out since 2003, but then it always takes me a while to catch up! Still, if you haven’t come across it, I commend it to you.

Change

Today was my children’s first day of school for 2006: a new year; a new home; a new school. They have fared exceptionally well with such a high rate of change, yet new beginnings are always costly. How we long for things to stay the same. But they don’t. Life has a way of moving the pieces, and sometimes replacing them altogether.

My own childhood was a remarkably stable one: one house; one church; one school. My adult life could not be more different. Life for my own children is one I would never have imagined. Honestly, sometimes I wish for them what I had. Other times I am determined to make it as different as I can. Regardless, stability remains a value I cherish; in my own experience, it’s a gift to character and well-being. But for my kids, stability has to look different to the brand I grew up with. I realize more and more that I am a stable point in their lives. At this stage, I am an anchor, a vital reference point when everything else is in flux. The routines that govern our days, the consistency of my love and presence, the certainty of the boundaries and safe guards I provide, all go toward sustaining a degree of stability that they need as much as I do.

The Psalmist often describes God as a rock and the certainty of God’s presence an anchor point in the midst of chaos: “He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.” Perhaps I can be a reflection of this for my own children. I hope so.

Garbage

Living on the twelfth floor, we have a hallway garbage shoot. As I drop my Glad bag of rubbish each day, I hear it fall. Gone. All too easy. This morning, though, the shoot was taped over: ‘blocked’ the sign said. I had to carry my deposit down to the ground floor and dump it in the communal bin out back. It was smelly, ugly and unpleasant. Garbage always is. It reminded me of a reflection I read just a week ago by poet Gunilla Norris:

The trash bin is overflowing under the sink. It’s time to feed the big outdoor garbage can again. How quickly it happens … how astonishing that every week my bins are full to the brim with the wastes of daily existence. Here I am dumping everything from carrot peelings to junk mail. What a mess I make!

I try to remember that You planned waste
as an essential part of life. It, too, is holy.
I want to keep in mind
the pine tree by the front door
and how it keeps dropping its numberless needles
—a tall and humble prayer.

I want to shed my waste with quiet reverence
like the pine. I want somehow to have a
conscience, a responsibility, for what it means
personally, socially, and ecologically to have
this much trash EVERY WEEK.
Help me to stop this hurry
to get my psychological and actual trash
out of sight and out of mind
and learn instead.

The task is a kind of surrender …
surrender to the knowledge that by being alive
and human I do make a human mess.
Let me surrender any fake and pristine sense
of not affecting my fellow beings
and my environments with my waste.
Let me own my part of the landfill …
the one outside of town with the bulldozer
and the psychological one we all share.

Keep me mindful of what I take
into my home, the items bought to substitute
for real living—the food and drink I consume
instead of examining my feelings.
Help me slowly to surrender all excess.

Gunilla Norris, Being Home: A Book of Meditations (New York: Bell Tower, 1991).

Bedtime

One of the gifts of this sabbatical is having the time and energy to lie on my son’s bed at night and talk. He loves it, and so do I. I do it back home too, sometimes, but I have to confess to being typically preoccupied. The body is present; the mind is elsewhere. The feeling is more obligation than privilege. “Good night” is the goal. Sometimes it’s still the same here, but more often it’s not.

Nathaniel reminds me so much of myself, in good ways and bad. Ask him about his day when you pick him up from school and his responses are monosyllabic: “Good … yep … nope … good.” But lay next to him in bed and his whole world opens up. It’s time for secrets, confessions, grievances and funny stories full of wandering details that feel like a mass of tangled string to me but make perfect sense to him. He asks questions too. He knows questions will make me stay longer. Most begin with the words, “When you were a boy, what was your favourite … ?” And then there are others, more complex; a fascinating glimpse inside his little head.

I’ve always been quite taken with Wendy Wright’s book Sacred Dwelling that I read for the first time back in 1994. I noticed last week at the bookstore that its been reprinted. I read it again. The new cover is atrocious (so I'll show you the old one) but the content remains the same. Wright takes us on a contemplative walk through a family home, allowing each room, with its pieces of furniture and precious objects, to illuminate the experience of being family and how, through that experience, we touch on the nature of church and kingdom. She writes out of her own Catholic faith. In doing so, she acknowledges the rich resource that this has provided for her and yet strains against the church’s historic inability to embrace the ordinary life of home as theologically significant. Perhaps this inability is tied to the fact that, historically, the home has been judged a feminine environment and therefore of less importance. The theologians and church leaders—overwhelmingly male—have been focussed on more 'profound' pursuits while their spouses are at home immersed in the domestic and temporal.

In this book and others, Wright—theologian, spouse and mother—challenges the ease with which the domestic is dismissed. She argues, or rather she gently persuades the reader to see the home as a unique environment in which the eternal is en-fleshed: " ... the idea that God is now truly present to us, woven into the fabric of our lives, present and waiting to be perceived and celebrated ... This intuition, dug from and constructed in the stuff of creation itself, is that God’s own life can somehow be touched here and now, in the faces, places, and events of our ordinary daily rounds.”

Time laying on the bed with Nathaniel is as good a reminder of this fact as anything else I do. I can’t claim it always feels sacred, but perhaps that’s the point. When life feels most ordinary, when all profound thoughts have been shelved for the day, and we lay back to share funny stories and ask simple questions, perhaps that’s when we let go and give God space to be present without expectation.

As Wright says so beautifully, “When there is time for a conversation over a pot of tea, to sit on the edge of a bed and share the small sorrows of the day, to stop and collect a cluster of dandelions, to marvel at the miracle of each other, there is time for wonder and time to watch for God.”
________________________
[Wright’s most recent book is Seasons of a Family's Life: Cultivating the Contemplative Spirit at Home published by Jossey-Bass. If anyone has read it, I would love to hear your response]