Over the past few weeks at Belhelvie we’ve been thinking about how we encounter God in the ordinary things in life, and the different themes we’ve been looking at have come from a book by Barbara Taylor called ‘An Altar In The World’.
And the title of today’s chapter is ‘”The Practice of Walking the Earth”.
When we think of how we experience God in creation, we naturally go straight for the huge and the breathtaking – the staggering enormity of the sky at night, the vastness of even our own tiny planet.
The heavens are telling the glory of God, the Psalmist says. And I think he’s right. But if we’re paying attention, we don’t even need to look that far. The places we’re in hold their own wonders, if we can just learn to take the time to see them.
The thread on which I’m stringing these pearls of wisdom Sunday by Sunday is the central idea that we encounter God in our everyday lives to the degree that we learn to pay attention. That’s the core discipline of a Christian life, and for busy, fidgety folk like us it doesn’t come easily. We’d rather be getting on to the next thing. Getting there more quickly.
We focus so much on where we’re going next we don’t often slow down to enjoy where we are, and the irony is that in our modern world, with all its time saving devices, we seem to have less time to enjoy life than any previous generation.
Now and again I dip into the work of a guy called Wendell Berry, who’s a farmer in the United States, but also a poet. I think that’s a great combination! And Berry’s whole thing is about slowing down, taking time. Showing respect for nature and for the land.
He’s written a short poem called ‘How To Be A Poet’, and in the context of what I’m trying to say this morning, this stanza’s particularly relevant.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Don’t rush – he’s saying. Open yourself up to nature. Get away from your screens for a while. Put down the phone. Fill up your lungs with the fresh air. It’ll do your heart good. It might even do your soul good.
Now who has the time for that?
Well, we all do. It’s our time. Some of our choices in life are made for us, but not all of them. Is it utterly unreasonable to suggest that over the course of a week all of us should be able to find an hour or two to get out and stretch our legs and blow away the cobwebs – at least, those of us who aren’t stuck on a rig somewhere. And if you can’t find the time to do that, is it unreasonable to suggest that maybe you’re carrying too much responsibility just now and you need to find ways to shed some of it?
I read a fascinating article last week by a palliative care nurse who recorded the regrets of the people she was looking after, as they faced the last few weeks of their lives. I found these three particularly striking – “I wish I’d lived the life I wanted to live”. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” and “I wish I’d let myself be happier”.
Hear the words of the prophet Wendell Berry this morning. As much as you can - slow down. Simplify. Communicate. Savour. We weren’t made to be going at 100 miles an hour all the time, and if we try to, then we’ll miss life even as we live it.
Which brings me, in a roundabout kind of way, to walking.
Walking as a spiritual practice. How do you like that idea?
What happens when you walk places?
Lots of good things – not least the fact that you have to slow down, and you begin to notice things.
About a year ago I did a moonlight beach walk with some of the scouts and cubs. We started off at the Bridge of Don and walked all the way back up to Balmedie by a combination of Moonlight and torchlight.
And I remember having to practically jog along at the beginning to keep up with the boys they were so excited. But five miles in it was a different story! We had to encourage and cajole for the last mile or two and dangle the prospect of fish and chips in front of them to keep them going.
What did we learn? We learned that from here to the Bridge of Don in a car is a scoosh. But it’s quite a trek when you’re walking the same distance along a sandy beach. We got a sense of scale for this landscape we drive through and take for granted much of the time.
It was the same when some of us started cycling to Scouts on a Wednesday evening, and I know this is cycling, not walking, but the principle’s the same. Just 6 or 7 miles of a round trip by car. But when you’re putting in the miles yourself, you notice every hill, every pothole, every blind corner, every speeding motorist! And you notice what’s going on in the fields far more than when you’re zooming past in the car. You chat to one another and you take pleasure in the feeling you get after your body’s done some hard work.
When you slow down, you see more. You experience more. You talk more. You think more.
There’s an old joke about an American teenager who was always pestering his dad to borrow the car, even for short journeys. And one day his dad lost the rag at him and said “You kids! you don’t know what your feet are for!” and the boy said “Sure we do, dad! The right foot’s for the accelerator and the left foot’s for the brake”.
In our fast paced world, we’re in danger of thinking the same way, and among other thing, we need to thank the Scouts and Guides and Cubs and Brownies for what they do in encouraging our young people to get off their posteriors, away from the screens, and onto their feet in the different activities they do. Getting closer to creation, and by default, a little closer to the creator.
When folk think of spiritual practices, they often think of prayer, or reading the Bible and there’s no doubt that those are the foundation of the Christian life. But in our time there’s a welcome rediscovery of the truth that there are also lots of ways to encounter God in the simple practices of our everyday lives.
We all walk places – whether we’re walking the dog. or round to the shops, or to and from the school, or through the fields. Could we make that a spiritual practice? Could we take time to notice things and maybe pray about them as we go – with eyes open, of course!
Instead of always thinking about the destination, could we learn to savour the journey? Instead of seeing trees, could we notice their different kinds? Instead of hearing birds, could we learn to distinguish between them? Could these everyday wonders, feed our thankfulness towards God for the gift of creation if we gave them a little more attention?
There’s a story about a Native American Indian and his friend who were in downtown New York City, walking near Times Square in Manhattan.
It was lunchtime and the streets were filled with people. Cars were honking their horns, taxis were squealing around corners, sirens were wailing, and the sounds of the city were almost deafening. Suddenly, the Native American said, "I hear a cricket."
His friend said, "What? You must be crazy. You couldn't possibly hear a cricket in all of this noise!"
"No, I'm sure of it," the Native American said, "I heard a cricket."
"No way," said the friend.
The Native American listened carefully for a moment, and then walked across the street to a big cement pot where some shrubs were growing. He looked into the bushes, beneath the branches, and sure enough, he located a small cricket. His friend was utterly amazed.
"That's incredible," said his friend. "You must have super-human hearing!"
"No," said the Native American. "My ears are just the same as yours. It all depends on what you're listening for."
"That’s not true." said his friend. "I could never hear a cricket in all this noise."
"Yes you could” said his friend. "It all depends on what’s really important to you. Here, let me show you."
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a few coins, and dropped them discreetly onto the pavement. And despite the noise of the traffic, every head within twenty feet turned round to see who’d dropped some money.
"See what I mean?" said the Native American. "Most people can hear just fine. But they only hear what's important to them."
The heavens are telling the glory of God says the Psalmist. And so are the land and the sea, the trees and the animals, if we only have eyes to see them and ears to hear.
Showing posts with label Slowing Down. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slowing Down. Show all posts
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Sunday, 29 January 2012
Pay Attention! - Exodus 3:1-10
God is in the world, not just the church. And it’s there that God is waiting to be found.
That’s where we left things last week in this new sermon series which is loosely based on a book by Barbara Brown Taylor called “An Altar In The World”.
Taylor’s central argument is that we have placed too much expectation on this hour when we’re gathered for worship, and not enough expectation that God will meet us during the rest of the week.
We remembered Jacob last Sunday, that budding Patriarch, as he lay down in a patch of red earth in the middle of nowhere and had a vision of angels and ladders that changed his life. Nothing special about the place he laid his head down, nothing at all. What made it special was the encounter he had with God there.
And it’s the same for us. Most of our days are redolent with ordinariness – the work we have to do, the mundane tasks, the people we walk past in the corridor or in the shops, the routine functions of the day. Unpromising places to start looking for God, we might think. But nothing could be further from the truth because it’s in these very places that the spark of a spiritual life can begin to fan into flames.
The good news is that we don’t need to start doing a host of different things to encounter God in our ordinary world. We can find him just fine if we learn to do the same things with a different head on.
And the first practice we need to nurture – the one that underpins all the others, I think – is the practice of paying attention to the people, the places, the things around us. That involves slowing down, and spending time. In other words, it comes at a cost. It’s called PAYING attention. after all! But it’s an investment of our time that’s well worth making.
It’s no accident, I think, that when I asked folk last week to reflect on an occasion when they felt close to God, almost invariably those encounters happened when folk were slowing down and spending time.
They fell ill and were in hospital. Suddenly the merry-go-round of life ground to a halt; all the things they thought were non-negotiables became negotiable. The world didn’t stop spinning. For once they had time on their hands. Maybe too much time. And in that state of enforced slowed-down-ness, faced with illness as an uncomfortable reminder of their own mortality - thoughts of God came to the fore.
Or they were sitting with someone who was ill, or dying. Or a woman who was giving birth. Waiting. Because these things don’t happen to order. And in the long suspended hours in which all they could do was keep company with them and hold their hands and offer them whatever little comfort they could bring, somehow they knew that God was in the waiting with them. A palpable presence in the room.
Some were working, but found themselves taking time to be grateful for the graces that lay behind their work. I am fit enough to lift this heavy basket and walk outside in the fresh air to hang up these damp clothes. I am glad I have a machine that washes them for me. I have people I love and share my life with, whose clothes I am now suspending on this line. Today is a good drying day and I know that this wonderful fresh air, and this sunshine on my face will dry these clothes, and the smell of the outdoors will linger on them when I bring them back into the house and place them in the drawers and hang them in the wardrobes.
Some spoke about work, and others encountered God when they had time to spare. It was as they stepped aside from responsibility for a while and slowed down that they met God – in the hills, by the seaside, cantering through the countryside on horseback, walking along the clifftops.
For a spell, voluntarily or involuntarily, these folk all opted out of the game for a while – the game that says life is all about doing and achieving and amassing rather than being and attending and savouring.
They spent time. They paid attention to what was going on, around them and within them.
In our culture that doesn’t come naturally.
The little book “The Papalagi” published in 1920, is a fictional account of western industrial society from the point of view of a tribe of South Sea Islanders. The “papalagi” is their name for the white man whose life and activity they just can’t understand.
The chieftan, Tui-avi, describes the papalagi in this way:
“Assume the white man would like to go out into the sun, or travel in a canoe on the river, or love his girl; he mostly spoils his pleasure by fastening onto the thought: There is no time for me to be merry…. He names a thousand things that take his time, he squats grumbling and complaining about a job that he has no joy in. But then, if he suddenly sees that he does have time, that it’s there after all, or give him another time, then he gets no pleasure from it – he’s tired from work without joy. There are papalagi who claim they have never had time.. That’s why most of them run through life like a thrown stone.”
How much have we changed in a hundred years, I wonder? Not much. I’m guessing most of us recognise ourselves as papalagi to some degree. This is the culture we’ve learned. Perhaps it’s time we unlearned it.
If our stewardship of time leaves us little room to savour the experience of living, and makes us feel that we can’t afford to spend time with God, maybe we need to review our stewardship of time. Do you really want to go through life like a thrown stone?
No-one’s going to change that for you, but it can be changed. You have to make a conscious, counter-cultural choice to slow down and to spend time.
And lest you think this is self-help psychobabble, let me underscore that this is Biblical thinking.
I’ve never been a shepherd, but I’m guessing that like every job there would be busy times and quieter times.
The Bible is silent on the question of whether or not Moses had a sheepdog, but I think it’s safe to assume that the custody of the sheep and goats was down to him and his staff.
So to leave the flocks behind for a while; to leave that vantage point where you’ve been keeping a weather eye on the horizon for wild animals, and go and explore the strange sight of a bush that burns but doesn’t burn up, is no mean thing.
And on that choice, you could argue, not just Moses life, but the life of Israel and her god-daughter Christianity, hang.
Moses paid attention, slowed down, spent time.
If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been Moses – at least, not the Moses we know and love, who squared up to Pharaoh, and parted the Red Sea, and had to get a second set of stone tablets off God because he smashed the first lot when he came down the mountain and found the Israelites behaving like a group of drunken teenagers at a house party.
It was paying attention at this particular moment, that tilted the entire balance of his life.
He could have seen the bush and said – ‘Wow – that’s interesting! I must make a point of coming back tomorrow!" But the thing is, tomorrow never comes. And who knows if the bush will still be burning 24 hours from now?
Now is the day of salvation, says Paul. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” says the Psalmist. "Don't miss it" they're saying.
And we find exactly the same thing in the teaching of Jesus:
“Consider the lilies of the field” said Jesus. “Consider the birds of the air”. Consider - that's a word that discourages us from hurrying.
And on one occasion, Jesus said to his friend: “Martha, Martha – you are busy with many things. But only one thing is necessary”.
Slow down. Spend time. Pay Attention.
Ok Paul – but pay attention to what?
To whatever patch of red earth you happen to be standing on today, I guess – with all its contrasts and contradictions and potential and disappointment.
In the weeks ahead we’ll be thinking more about that. How we encounter God right where we are, through our bodies, our labour, our pain, our vocation, our rest, through friend and stranger, through words of blessing, through the beauty and wildness of the natural world.
All I want to do today is leave you with this seed of a thought. More often than not, it’s those who pay attention who discover God.
Did you notice in the reading of Moses’ story this morning that God doesn’t speak to him until he goes over to see the bush? It’s almost as if God waits ‘til Moses has decided to pay attention before he speaks to him.
Remember what I said last week? I have a strong notion that God is canny. He responds to those who seek him out.
Don’t get distracted from the task. Don’t get fooled into believing that other things are more important than this. What could be more important than learning to live in tune with the God who made you, who’s saving you, and who holds the name of your becoming?
Don’t miss him because you’re in a hurry.
Barbara Taylor offers us this reflection as we close.
I’ve never been presented with a burning bush, but I did see a garden turn golden once. I must have been sixteen, earning summer spending money by keeping a neighbours cats while she was away. The first time I let myself into the house the fleas leapt on my legs like airborne pirhana. Brushing them off as I opened catfood and cleaned litter pans, I finally fled through the back door with the bag of trash. I could hear the fleas inside flinging themselves against the plastic, so that it sounded as if a light rain were falling inside the bag.
I couldn’t wait to be shed of it, which was why I was in a hurry. On my way to the cans, I passed a small garden area off to the left that was not visible from the house. Glancing at it, I got the whole dose of loveliness at once – the high arch of trees above, the mossy flagstones beneath, the cement birdbath, the cushiony bushes, the white wrought-iron chair – all lit by stacked planes of sunlight that turned the whole scene golden. It was like a door to another world. I had to go through it. I knew that if I did, then I would become golden too.
But first I had to ditch the bag. The fleas popped against the plastic as I hurried to the big aluminium garbage cans near the garage. Stuffing the bag into one of them, I turned back toward the garden, fervent to explore what I had only glimpsed in passing. When I got there, the light had changed. All that was left was a little overgrown sitting spot that no-one had sat in for years. The smell of cat litter drifted from the direction of the garbage cans. The garden was no longer on fire.
I had noticed, but I did not turn aside. I had a bag full of fleas to attend to. While I made that my first priority, the fire moved on in search of someone who would stop what she was doing, take off her shoes and say: “Here I Am”.
May God grant us the wisdom and the strength to slow down, spend time. and pay attention – that we might find him, flaring up in our little worlds – for our souls’ good, and the sake of his kingdom.
Amen
That’s where we left things last week in this new sermon series which is loosely based on a book by Barbara Brown Taylor called “An Altar In The World”.
Taylor’s central argument is that we have placed too much expectation on this hour when we’re gathered for worship, and not enough expectation that God will meet us during the rest of the week.
We remembered Jacob last Sunday, that budding Patriarch, as he lay down in a patch of red earth in the middle of nowhere and had a vision of angels and ladders that changed his life. Nothing special about the place he laid his head down, nothing at all. What made it special was the encounter he had with God there.
And it’s the same for us. Most of our days are redolent with ordinariness – the work we have to do, the mundane tasks, the people we walk past in the corridor or in the shops, the routine functions of the day. Unpromising places to start looking for God, we might think. But nothing could be further from the truth because it’s in these very places that the spark of a spiritual life can begin to fan into flames.
The good news is that we don’t need to start doing a host of different things to encounter God in our ordinary world. We can find him just fine if we learn to do the same things with a different head on.
And the first practice we need to nurture – the one that underpins all the others, I think – is the practice of paying attention to the people, the places, the things around us. That involves slowing down, and spending time. In other words, it comes at a cost. It’s called PAYING attention. after all! But it’s an investment of our time that’s well worth making.
It’s no accident, I think, that when I asked folk last week to reflect on an occasion when they felt close to God, almost invariably those encounters happened when folk were slowing down and spending time.
They fell ill and were in hospital. Suddenly the merry-go-round of life ground to a halt; all the things they thought were non-negotiables became negotiable. The world didn’t stop spinning. For once they had time on their hands. Maybe too much time. And in that state of enforced slowed-down-ness, faced with illness as an uncomfortable reminder of their own mortality - thoughts of God came to the fore.
Or they were sitting with someone who was ill, or dying. Or a woman who was giving birth. Waiting. Because these things don’t happen to order. And in the long suspended hours in which all they could do was keep company with them and hold their hands and offer them whatever little comfort they could bring, somehow they knew that God was in the waiting with them. A palpable presence in the room.
Some were working, but found themselves taking time to be grateful for the graces that lay behind their work. I am fit enough to lift this heavy basket and walk outside in the fresh air to hang up these damp clothes. I am glad I have a machine that washes them for me. I have people I love and share my life with, whose clothes I am now suspending on this line. Today is a good drying day and I know that this wonderful fresh air, and this sunshine on my face will dry these clothes, and the smell of the outdoors will linger on them when I bring them back into the house and place them in the drawers and hang them in the wardrobes.
Some spoke about work, and others encountered God when they had time to spare. It was as they stepped aside from responsibility for a while and slowed down that they met God – in the hills, by the seaside, cantering through the countryside on horseback, walking along the clifftops.
For a spell, voluntarily or involuntarily, these folk all opted out of the game for a while – the game that says life is all about doing and achieving and amassing rather than being and attending and savouring.
They spent time. They paid attention to what was going on, around them and within them.
In our culture that doesn’t come naturally.
The little book “The Papalagi” published in 1920, is a fictional account of western industrial society from the point of view of a tribe of South Sea Islanders. The “papalagi” is their name for the white man whose life and activity they just can’t understand.
The chieftan, Tui-avi, describes the papalagi in this way:
“Assume the white man would like to go out into the sun, or travel in a canoe on the river, or love his girl; he mostly spoils his pleasure by fastening onto the thought: There is no time for me to be merry…. He names a thousand things that take his time, he squats grumbling and complaining about a job that he has no joy in. But then, if he suddenly sees that he does have time, that it’s there after all, or give him another time, then he gets no pleasure from it – he’s tired from work without joy. There are papalagi who claim they have never had time.. That’s why most of them run through life like a thrown stone.”
How much have we changed in a hundred years, I wonder? Not much. I’m guessing most of us recognise ourselves as papalagi to some degree. This is the culture we’ve learned. Perhaps it’s time we unlearned it.
If our stewardship of time leaves us little room to savour the experience of living, and makes us feel that we can’t afford to spend time with God, maybe we need to review our stewardship of time. Do you really want to go through life like a thrown stone?
No-one’s going to change that for you, but it can be changed. You have to make a conscious, counter-cultural choice to slow down and to spend time.
And lest you think this is self-help psychobabble, let me underscore that this is Biblical thinking.
I’ve never been a shepherd, but I’m guessing that like every job there would be busy times and quieter times.
The Bible is silent on the question of whether or not Moses had a sheepdog, but I think it’s safe to assume that the custody of the sheep and goats was down to him and his staff.
So to leave the flocks behind for a while; to leave that vantage point where you’ve been keeping a weather eye on the horizon for wild animals, and go and explore the strange sight of a bush that burns but doesn’t burn up, is no mean thing.
And on that choice, you could argue, not just Moses life, but the life of Israel and her god-daughter Christianity, hang.
Moses paid attention, slowed down, spent time.
If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been Moses – at least, not the Moses we know and love, who squared up to Pharaoh, and parted the Red Sea, and had to get a second set of stone tablets off God because he smashed the first lot when he came down the mountain and found the Israelites behaving like a group of drunken teenagers at a house party.
It was paying attention at this particular moment, that tilted the entire balance of his life.
He could have seen the bush and said – ‘Wow – that’s interesting! I must make a point of coming back tomorrow!" But the thing is, tomorrow never comes. And who knows if the bush will still be burning 24 hours from now?
Now is the day of salvation, says Paul. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” says the Psalmist. "Don't miss it" they're saying.
And we find exactly the same thing in the teaching of Jesus:
“Consider the lilies of the field” said Jesus. “Consider the birds of the air”. Consider - that's a word that discourages us from hurrying.
And on one occasion, Jesus said to his friend: “Martha, Martha – you are busy with many things. But only one thing is necessary”.
Slow down. Spend time. Pay Attention.
Ok Paul – but pay attention to what?
To whatever patch of red earth you happen to be standing on today, I guess – with all its contrasts and contradictions and potential and disappointment.
In the weeks ahead we’ll be thinking more about that. How we encounter God right where we are, through our bodies, our labour, our pain, our vocation, our rest, through friend and stranger, through words of blessing, through the beauty and wildness of the natural world.
All I want to do today is leave you with this seed of a thought. More often than not, it’s those who pay attention who discover God.
Did you notice in the reading of Moses’ story this morning that God doesn’t speak to him until he goes over to see the bush? It’s almost as if God waits ‘til Moses has decided to pay attention before he speaks to him.
Remember what I said last week? I have a strong notion that God is canny. He responds to those who seek him out.
Don’t get distracted from the task. Don’t get fooled into believing that other things are more important than this. What could be more important than learning to live in tune with the God who made you, who’s saving you, and who holds the name of your becoming?
Don’t miss him because you’re in a hurry.
Barbara Taylor offers us this reflection as we close.
I’ve never been presented with a burning bush, but I did see a garden turn golden once. I must have been sixteen, earning summer spending money by keeping a neighbours cats while she was away. The first time I let myself into the house the fleas leapt on my legs like airborne pirhana. Brushing them off as I opened catfood and cleaned litter pans, I finally fled through the back door with the bag of trash. I could hear the fleas inside flinging themselves against the plastic, so that it sounded as if a light rain were falling inside the bag.
I couldn’t wait to be shed of it, which was why I was in a hurry. On my way to the cans, I passed a small garden area off to the left that was not visible from the house. Glancing at it, I got the whole dose of loveliness at once – the high arch of trees above, the mossy flagstones beneath, the cement birdbath, the cushiony bushes, the white wrought-iron chair – all lit by stacked planes of sunlight that turned the whole scene golden. It was like a door to another world. I had to go through it. I knew that if I did, then I would become golden too.
But first I had to ditch the bag. The fleas popped against the plastic as I hurried to the big aluminium garbage cans near the garage. Stuffing the bag into one of them, I turned back toward the garden, fervent to explore what I had only glimpsed in passing. When I got there, the light had changed. All that was left was a little overgrown sitting spot that no-one had sat in for years. The smell of cat litter drifted from the direction of the garbage cans. The garden was no longer on fire.
I had noticed, but I did not turn aside. I had a bag full of fleas to attend to. While I made that my first priority, the fire moved on in search of someone who would stop what she was doing, take off her shoes and say: “Here I Am”.
May God grant us the wisdom and the strength to slow down, spend time. and pay attention – that we might find him, flaring up in our little worlds – for our souls’ good, and the sake of his kingdom.
Amen
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