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| "Pablo Casals, en visita a Buenos Aires, 1937" (Public Domain Image) |
If spirituality is about living life, then why do I need a "spiritual practice"? The Buddhist monk, poet, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh has said that cutting carrots in the kitchen, or washing the dishes after a meal can be a meditation. If that's true, why should I spend any time in meditation or prayer? Why should I journal or take time to meditatively walk a labyrinth?
Pablo Casals was by most estimates the greatest cellist of the 20th century, quite possible the greatest cellist of all time. He began, as most music students do, learning and then practicing scales. This is a fundamental part of a musician's training. Playing the scales over and over again -- at different rates of speed, in different keys -- helps to train your ear, and if you're a string player like Casals, helps to train your hands and fingers to find the right notes every time. I have heard that Casals practiced his scales for up to 2 hours a day.
Casals was 97 years old when he died, and throughout his life he continued to spend 2 hours a day practicing scales, even after he'd been recognized as the preeminent cellist of his or any other day. The year before he died he was asked in an interview why such an acclaimed master would bother with such a basic exercise. "I think," he said, "that I am beginning to see some progress." On the day he died he had already practiced his scales.
It is true that anything can be a tool to help you live life, as opposed to not-life, as I discussed on Friday. There's a wonderful book that was published in 1999 by Skinner House Books, Everyday Spiritual Practice: simple pathways for enriching your life. It contains 38 chapters, each written by someone who is describing a spiritual practice they engage with that speaks to them. There are chapters on silent retreats, sitting zen, fasting, and prayer, as you might imagine, but also martial arts, marriage, parenting, recycling, bicycling, and anti-racism work. In spite of these very different approaches to spiritual practice, one thing all of the authors agree on is that to truly make that shift from live not-life, as most of us do most of the time, to living life, full and abundant, we do need to practice. It doesn't come easily or naturally. We must work at it. Even Jesus is remembered as spending time in prayer; even the Buddha is remembered as meditating twice-daily throughout his entire life.
Later this year Skinner House Books will publish, Faithful Practices: everyday ways to feed your spirit. Like Everyday Spiritual Practice before it, this book pushes the boundaries of what can be considered a spiritual practice -- blowing bubbles, roller derby, making dioramas for action figures. Also like its predecessor, all of the authors who contributed a chapter recognize that these are things you could simply do, yet if you do them as an intentional practice, they can help you live a life that is deep and real.
You may already be doing a practice without even recognizing it as such.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
