A New Normal

This month I'm inviting us to "unpack" a New Year's reading by the Rev. Kathleen McTigue:

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.

Last week we looked at the first paragraph, noting how often the advent of something startlingly new for us bumps up against the experience of business-as-usual in those around us.  Today I want to take up the next part of Kathleen's reflections:

[W]e also stand at a threshold, the new year something truly new, still unformed, leaving a stunning power in our hands: 

It is important for us to recognize and honor the fact -- and it is a fact -- that when we go through a truly transformation experience like the birth of a child or the death of a parent, for instance, something really has changed.  To those around us who were not, are not, as intimately involved in may want to go back to "normal," may urge us to do so to, yet it's okay for us to affirm that there is no going back to "normal."  Perhaps more accurately, for us there is no going back to that old "normal;" there is, as it's often called, a "new normal."  When I'm talking with grieving family member after the death of a loved one I'll often stick my arm out, palm up, and tell them to expect to feel as though the world has "turned upside down."  I'll turn my hand over, palm down now, by way of illustration.  "It's also important to realize and prepare yourself to accept that the world will never turn right-side-up again.  This upside-down world will become your "new normal"."

The same is true of more easily recognized as "positive" transformations.  Our lives have changed.  Despite being "just another day" in some respects, this "new day" is new.

It's also worth noting that this is true on a much smaller scale with each and every moment of each and every day.  Yes, when I go home this evening after work, my dogs will start running around, barking for their dinner.  And after I feed them they'll start charging for the door and their walk.  It's happened a thousand times before.  And yet, at the same time, this particular running, barking, and charging has never happened before.  If I am awake, if I am aware of my life -- rather than just sleeping through the assumptions of it -- then I will notice that this moment has never come before, and will never come again.

What helps you to savor the uniqueness of this particular iteration of something that's part of the normal course of things?  How have you been able to acclimate yourself to a "new normal"?

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