DRESS-UP

Sometimes we have to play dress-up. We have to pretend that we are more than we are. To fit into the social setting we find ourselves, we have to act a certain way. As children, we learn to fit it. We learn to deny parts of ourselves so that we can be accepted in the family, in the social group. It is an important social skill to play dress-up.

As adults, we also pay roles. Roles are the way we fit into jobs, into religious groups, into schools. We take on a function and then offer that function to the organization. If we are an administrative assistant, our role in the organization is to assist an administrator. Obviously we are more than that role, but the role is what we have to take in that setting. We dress for the role.

But, we also pay other roles. We are more than an administrative assistant.  We are the role we play in the office.  But we are also the role we play at home, or with our friends, or in the church, or in the PTA. We play dress-up here and there, trying to fit in and live the parts that others need us to live.

But there are other times when we must come from behind the cardboard cut-out and look in the mirror and see the deeper longings and needs that reside within us.  Our soul can't survive if it is swallowed in the clothes of other's expectations all the time. Our heart has to take off the mask and run free. Our spirit has to exercise it's muscles so that the truth of who we are doesn't get lost in all the trappings of playing roles.

So, I recommend that we organize our lives so that we have time to pray, or to mediate, or to rest with the deeper, quiet longings of the heart. I find that in centering prayer. I find it in walking. I find it in sitting on the deck, staring at the pond. Resting in the soul that was created by God, and which pleases God just as it is, provides me moments of peace. I hope you find your moments as well. 

ONE SQUARE INCH

I was hiking down the road--naked winter trees on one side, green pine on the other. The wind whispered through the pine needles. It stopped blowing and silence descended. My mind began to wonder about book someone gave me several years ago. "One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World" is one man's journey to discover places in the United States where there is no sounds that are not made by nature. Gordon Hempton, a sound recording specialist who lives near Olympic National Park travels from Washington State to Washington DC measuring the amount of noise created by human machines.  He believed that if he could find just one square inch of silence, it could grow to permeate a larger area the way noise spreads to swallow silence.

Fascinated as I was by the book, today I was thinking about how to find a square inch of silence in my own mind. Sometimes the noise gets out of hand. The voices of friends and family, of culture and media, of magazines and blogs swirls around in my head, sometimes chasing each other in circles. I just want to slow it down, to notice something that might sedate the sometimes cacophonous noise.

Today I found a couple of places where I discovered the demands of the voices was lost in silent wonder. The first was sitting early in the morning doing centering prayer. During the past 20 years I have taken time each day to quiet the noise by placing a stillness  in the midst of my mind. It is a discipline because the wordy world has a way of turning up the volume. But, patiently I keep creating a "nothing" space and resting a moment at a time in the square inch of silence.  I do this with the hope that that inch will grow and come to visit me in the mind's noise throughout the day so that from time to time, it's quiet enough to hear my soul sing.

And the other place it happened was as I walked through the park, I kept coming upon clusters of deer. I would round a bend and there seven deer were grazing.  I stopped to stare, transfixed in awe as they stared back. Then I would start walking again, the noise in my mind beginning again and suddenly off in a clearing were four deer staring at me.  My mind quieted in the sheer delight of the surprising life around me.  I saw thirty deer on that hike.

Most of the time my mind chases ideas and thoughts.  But I continue to seek one square inch of silence hoping that it will help modulate the volume and I can also hear my quiet thoughts.

PORTRAIT OF A SOUL

It was a few years ago now.  I gathered with my siblings in Kansas City to celebrate the life of our mother, Oma. She had died and we gathered from around the continent to give thanks for her life. Siblings, grandkids, friends. We were there sharing our connection with this one woman.

And we talked.  We talked, remembered, laughed and cried. We told stories of our mother. We shared our experiences, each with different stories of gifts and discipline, of confrontation and affection. Each story was a brush stroke on the canvas of our memories--a stroke bold and dark, delicate and light, soft and gentle, edged and tough. With each story more texture and dimension was added to the memory's portrait of my mother's soul.

When we tell the stories of the moments of our lives we create a portrait of our souls. The moments of our lives remembered are placed on a canvas of memory and we try to understand what it means to be us. With each story we shared at our mother's memorial service, we added to the meaning we were making of our mother's life with us.  As we heard friends talk and tell of her acts of kindness and her commitment to the "least of these" we filled in with color the sometimes faint images that childhood memories have.

It is in the human heart to seek meaning. We siblings each shared stories, painting fresh and complicated strokes on each other's canvases. As one spoke, the meaning of mother's life to the rest of us was shaded with more depth and character. When the story-telling and the memorial service was over, we all returned to our own homes with a portrait of our mother's soul more imprinted on our hearts. We each have our own understanding of our mother's meaning for our lives, and by sharing the stories of our lives with her, we enriched each other's portrait.

SOUL WORK

Soul work is more like life in the forest than your front lawn.

Soul work is slow and decaying, metabolizing the memories of old life so as to enrich the birthing and growing of new life.  As I walk thorugh the forest, old trees have fallen, rotting and fertilizing, absorbing into the soil. Leaves lay dying and decompsoing, creating humus for the seedlings of new roots to take hold.

My front lawn has the priviledge of being cleaned, racked and old decaying stuff carted off.  This is what some people would like to do with the past--get it away--forget it--so that they can bring in chemicals and change the landscape of the future.  While this may create green, manicured lawns, this is not the kind of life that creates soulful living.

Death and loss are a given in life.  The question isn't whether or not they will happen.  It is what we do with them when they happen.  I believe that the way for moving forward requires that we allow the memories to hang around to inform and shape us, nourishing the soul for the new self that is emerging to grow.  Tell stories about what is gone.  Let the words swirl and race across the heart like dried leaves before the autum wind.  Let the words dance and die, decomposing and nourishing your soul.  Too much clearing away the old and dying rather than letting it be absorbed into the soil of the future leaves the future without the rich soul food to hopes for tomorrow.

MUSIC IN THE DEAD OF WINTER

January 20--blistering cold.   Snow falling.  Trying to keep ahead of it.  The driveway scrapes under the blade of the snow shovel.  The whishing of the snow blowing off the shovel, back into my face. The scratching was accompanied by the background noise of interstate traffic a mile away.  Scratching, whishing, humming--scratching, whishing, humming.  

I stopped to breathe.  Leaning on the shovel, I heard it.  Music--singing over the drum beat of scratching, whishing, humming.  A robin--a lone singer who forgot to head south.  Singing its call, hoping for a reply.  And then in a tree near-by, an answer.  Another snow-bird enduring an Indiana winter.

I thought, “The dead of winter can be such a hard time.  The absence of green, the sun hiding for days, the snow carpeting the brown grass for days and weeks on end.  And we can be so driven to keep ahead of the overwhelming gray-white days of despair that we fail to stop and listen--deeply and quietly, to the song that whispers in our soul--the song that reminds us that life has beauty and loveliness.”  

I am grateful for shovels on which to lean and breath to breathe in and ears to hear a robin’s song--and for my own song that sings my own soul forward.