Getting ready from the inside, by staying open to the voice and experience of one's child-self in communion with the ongoing unveiling of one's deep self, the work of the Holy Spirit within us.
And now, getting ready in such a way that the outside can slow down enough to allow the inside to catch up with it.
From a recent book of fictional essays (a new genre for me!), Canadian author Margaret Atwood's "Faster" reminds us that the rush of our outward lives can mean we run the risk of arriving and entering unencumbered by our very souls:
Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.
Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.[1]
Oh, this is the hardest of all! How do we slow down, so we can enter, body and soul? And all our poor kids, woken, yanked, snapped at, shoved into sleeves, socks, pantlegs, shoes, sometimes not fed, delivered in a mad rush to the threshold: how do we help them slow down? You can make yourself your work, we might say, and glibly enough under the circumstances. What does that mean to a 5 year old? And what if they only get 10 minutes to do it, because we all have a date with the communion rail, and it's approaching fast? Can any of us effectively self-construct or deconstruct as the case may be in 10-minute increments? I recently saw this title on an educational resource shelf: Teaching How to Learn in a What-to-Learn Culture. We need a companion title, don't we? Teaching How to Slow Down in a Gotta-Go Culture. The problem is, the whole church has been infected with gotta-go-ness.
Here, the poets help again. They do not always make the going easy. They prefer lingering. True, some are more accessible than others, but generally the reader needs to spend time with a poet, through repeated reading, before the word surfaces begin to open up and permit entrance. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found... But how long did the someone have to walk that field, learn its contours and its confines, before the treasure could make itself known? We who have had the privilege to work with parables singly in gold boxes and not clumped together three at a time in the lectionary know a bit about this taking time, this coming back, this waiting for meaning to open up in us. Poems require the lectio divina approach: they are not shopping lists or babysitting instructions. (But wouldn't it be fun to read either of these by a favorite poet?)
A Yorkshire poet resettled in the Pacific Northwest, David Whyte, writes the kind of poems that make slowing down a pleasure. He is also an extraordinary public speaker and reader of other people's poetry as well as his own, and apart from his collections of verse has published three wonderful books on living in our material world with heart, spirit, and a contemplative intentionality.[2] I have only heard him on tape, but Di Pagel, a big fan, has heard him speak in person on more than one occasion. One of his approaches to reciting poems is to go back and repeat, often, certain words or lines. The effect is a bit like listening in on a telegraph coming over the wire, a repeating pattern of sounds and vibrations that transmits urgency, or significance, until the meaning is transcribed in the listener's consciousness.
What I'd like to share with you now is a short poem of his that I like to use at the end of a first evening in an extended introduction, after a new circle of participants has been gathered in a full Godly Play session and been able to debrief it. Usually it is about this time in a training that I am beginning to arrive, and these words of Whyte's help me to rest in that arrival, to conjure chairos time out of a few moments' lapse in chronos time, and to prepare myself for the good words of the genres of religious language we will be experiencing the next day. It's titled "Loaves and Fishes":
This is not
the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.
Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.
People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.[3]
A resounding AMEN. This is like a glass of cool water. Thanks, Andy!
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