Why Do I Need To Practice?

"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

What Is Spirituality?

"Untitled"  (©  Erik Walker Wikstrom  2015)

I have often been asked what is meant by the word, "spirituality."  It's a word that's thrown around a lot, yet one which those doing the throwing seem to assume is clear to everyone.  This might be true, if it weren't also true that there are almost as many different understandings as there are people talking about it.  As an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister serving several congregations over the past two decades, I've had more than a few people ask me what I think it means.

I have an answer.

In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau described his experiment of living alone in a 10' x 15' single-room cabin in the woods around Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts with this words:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life ..."

In this he seems to me to be saying that there are two ways of living -- life and not-life.  Remember, this is the man who also said, "The mass of [humanity] lead lives of quiet desperation."  You can imagine, then, which way he thinks most of us live, and why he, "wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life."

Thoreau was not the first person to observe this dichotomy between life and not-life.  Buddhists have long said that most people live in samsara.  This is sometimes called the state of "delusion," or "restlessness."  It's what the Buddha was pointing to when he said that "life is suffering."  Yet Buddhism also teaches that there is a way to be free from samsara, to live in nirvana, which is to say, to really and truly live.  Life and not-life.

Christians talk about being "dead in sin" and "alive in the spirit (or "in Christ")."  It's the same distinction -- life and not life.  Nearly every one of the world's great religions, and most schools of psychology, agree on this point.   Regardless of the words used, though, the idea is the same -- there's a way of living our lives in such a way that we are really, truly, fully alive, and there's a way of living in which we're not.  And most of us, most of the time, are living in that second way.  In the book of Deuteronomy (30:19) God is remembered as having said, "I have set before you life and death ... choose life."

Which brings me back to "spirituality."  As I understand it, "spirituality" has to do with learning how to live in that real, fully engaged, awake, mindful, rich, deep, marrow-sucking way.  You can certainly use traditional religious language if you wish, but there's really no need to.  Spirituality is about living life and not not-life.


Pax tecum,

RevWik

Welcome!

A friend and colleague, the Rev. Kathleen McTigue, wrote words for New Year's Day that are certainly apropos for the New Year's Day on the calendar yet, really, for any day when we find ourselves at some new beginning:

The first of January is another day dawning, the sun rising as the sun always rises, the earth moving in its rhythms, with or without a certain as the day of new beginning, separating the old from the new.  So it is:  everything is the same, bound into its history as we ourselves are bound. 

Yet we also stand at a threshold, the new year something truly new, still unformed, leaving a stunning power in our hands: 

What shall we do with this great gift of Time, this year? 

Let us begin by remembering that whatever justice, whatever peace and wholeness might bloom in our world this year, we are the hearts and minds, the hands and feet, the embodiment of all the best visions of our people.  

The year can be new ground for the seeds of our dreams.  Let us take the step forward, together, onto new ground, planting our dreams well, faithfully, and in joy.

"What shall we do with this great gift of Time, this year?"  I love that question, and I've actually come to think of it as two questions.  The first is asking us what we're going to do with the gift of Time that is the year to come.  The other asks what we plan to do with the gift of time this year.  Both are very important questions, and the somewhat subtle distinction between them seems like fertile ground to explore.

One of the things I'm doing with the gift of Time at what feels like a new beginning for me is (re)launching Pathways of Spirit, an at-a-distance Spiritual Direction practice.  In coming posts I'll say more about what I think "spiritual direction" is (and is not), what "spirituality" is, and why we'd have to "practice" any of this.  For now, in this first post, let me just say that these questions of what we are going to do with the gift of this coming year's worth of time, and what we're planning on doing with the gift of time this year, are just the kinds of questions we might explore together.

That brings me to another line from Kathleen's piece that stands out for me:  "Let us take the step forward, together."  While it is true that no one can walk the path of our lives for us -- only you or I can walk our particular path -- it is also true that we can walk with one another, walk near enough to one another that we can offer each other companionship.  The Spirit, however you may understand that term, travels many pathways.  I offer my companionship as you find yours.

Pax tecum,

RevWik