(This is a refreshed earlier blog post)
“Eat the butter,” a friend joked when I posted a photo of sweet, buttery cookies that I’m “giving up” for Lent this year. She pointed to a news story in which Pope Francis recommended that we consider giving up indifference to others this year. I appreciated her wisdom, and that brief exchange made me want to delve deeper into the mechanics of Lent and other religious practices – Ramadan, Yom Kippur – that offer opportunities to pray, repent, fast, and do good works or give alms. Because of the universality of this practice, I’m removing Lent’s religious coverings to get a better look at the biophysics and metaphysics of these four exhortations. Pray In my part of the world, it’s early spring, and all sorts of agitations are afoot. The weather is changeable, windy, and wet; it can be hot one moment and very cold the next; the light is bright against black shadows. Baby lambs, children, teenagers and adults alike experience growing pains. In the university where I worked the students are in the “grind” part of the semester: the gloss of starting has worn off, and the fruits of their work are still months away. This season goes so much more smoothly when I add a daily session of quiet and meditation. While an ideal diet of quiet could be a half hour in the morning and another in the evening, I’m convinced that even five minutes a day is a good start. The benefit of sitting quietly, focusing on my breath or on a positive thought, is that it gives me a chance to come back to center in the midst of all the external agitation and change. Blood pressure drops, breath can deepen. A prayer of gratitude generally arises from that quiet. Repent To repent means to rethink something, and to try to do better. When I repent, I let my mind jump out of the track of an old habit and give it a chance to start a better habit. One year I tried to cure myself of unconsciously using (and throwing “away”) single-use plastics. Later, I wanted to get back to using public transportation. Baby steps work best for me, so I jumped on the light rail every Friday, and brought my mug with me to coffee shops. Fast Like many others, I have a sneaky part in my brain that sees Lent as a chance to lose weight. Lent is not about losing weight, but in a funny way, it could be. Think about how it used to be before planes flew produce around the world all year long. In the Northern hemisphere Lent is the season in which our larder of last fall’s potatoes and apples grows thin – we’ve been eating roots and heavier foods all winter and treating ourselves with sweets (Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day) as a spark of brightness in the long night. But now the ground is giving forth lettuces and young dandelion leaves, a tonic of sweet and bitter greens that fortify our livers. So the period of Lent has corresponded with eating less. But the call to fast is also the call to sacrifice something and to take that energy and pour it into the next practice, which is giving generously. Energetically, these two practices are both sides of the one coin; less for me, that I may give more to you. So I am abstaining from what I call luxury foods, and also not eating until I am actually hungry. This clarifies my relationship with food (I’m one of those emotional eaters) and frees up my energy for the next practice. Do good works/Give alms I hope I’ve established that quitting something without giving to others is not the point of the Lenten or Ramadan or Yom Kippur practice. It’s not just about me – it’s about having a loving heart and helping to create stronger social ties that heal our world. When we intend to do good, at least in my experience, the opportunities come thick and fast. This year I contributed to World Central Kitchen which brought hot meals to flooded and war-torn areas. I supported an artist-friend's book and worked for a community fundraiser. Lent is also a great time to write encouraging letters to others. There’s no shortage of opportunity. Forty-ish days Finally, this is a season with a beginning and an end. We are human; we need discrete practices that approach and recede. This chance comes every year; this year I strive to do my best, and accept that it will be imperfect. Six weeks is a good length of time to practice new habits, and maybe my new habits will stick around even longer. But give yourself a fighting chance at this—it’s not enough to just decide what to do on Ash Wednesday and then hope for the best. Track the progress. Find a small notebook and give a sheet to each of your practices. Ignore the failures—take failure out of the equation. Instead, every time you have a success, make a tick mark. See how many marks you can amass in the next forty days. Build the good habits, and allow openness and the curiosity to see what other thoughts arise about yourself, about creating a better world. And be prepared for joy to arise -- not at the end, but all the way through. Yes it’s a dry spring in California. Nonetheless plant and vegetable and tree roots inch along, lengthening as they reach for water and warmth. That word ‘lengthen’ shares a root with the Festival of ‘Lent,’ also occurring now.
The Catholic season of Lent is about removing distractions, sending our own attention and energy inward and downward, a forty-or-so day meditation before we flower into action. Indeed, a radical action is one expressed from our root. I attended a gathering of about four hundred souls last weekend, a mix of farmers and urbanites, natives and immigrants, scientists, writers, artists, meditators, gardeners, and activists — we filled up a whole school in the town of Point Reyes Station. At the conference, called Mapping a New Geography of Hope, we listened to really thoughtful people getting at the root of things. The planet is heating up. People are acting badly. Others do healing and reparation of wrongs done to our forests, cultures, and oceans, and still others create necessary visions and plans for a good life on a healthy planet with sustainable, balanced systems. Which gave me the questions to ponder: · What do I love too much to lose? · What will I do to protect what I love? · What does the Earth ask of us? With my own talents, what are my responsibilities? · What can be gathered from our ancestors, and from local ancestors (for me Silicon Valley and the Bay Area), that will help us heal our land and water? · How am I letting my attention and body be colonized by corporate interests? · Why are rhinos, bears, monkeys and sharks being slaughtered to extinction for increased sexual potency? · How can I, in a nation that uses 30 times the resources of other nations, calm my own consumer desires? · How can I shape the next chapter of the Silicon Valley / Bay Area story? In January I went to a silent retreat for the first time.
There I sat on a cushion on a mat, facing another soul in a room of about sixty, feeling my poor, overstretched knees go numb yet again. How did I get to this wretchedly uncomfortable place? Before coming I could MAYBE meditate for 20 minutes, a few times a week, and had always felt positive that more than a day of silence would be intolerable. We had been kind of tricked into it, you see. My mother had met a teacher of zen koans in New Mexico, and now he was offering a winter retreat in Santa Rosa. I explored his web site and I'm pretty sure that nowhere on the site were the words, “You will sit thirty minutes, walk fifteen, sit for thirty more, walk fifteen, sit for thirty more, walk for ten, and then have breakfast. Then start the whole thing over from breakfast to lunch, from lunch to dinner, etc.” Had they been there, even a hint, I probably would not have signed up. But here we were. The first two days were hard, hard, I’m not going to lie. My brain was not used to being held to a schedule and screamed at me all night long with crazy rhymes and bits of music and chatter. But then it got better. By the fifth day I felt stable, spacious, and integrated, the way I used to feel before adolescence. All through the week I noticed the sounds of silence: 6 a.m., many people in a dark library lit by candles. We've all had a sip of green tea and, here and there, stomachs growl. The shaft of morning light lengthening as it finds its way down the wall. A barefoot teacher walking very, very slowly across the carpet and bowing to students. The collective silence of people eating, eyes downcast to preserve everyone’s privacy. In this space, I discover the miracle of how extraordinary simple food tastes when you are not busy chatting about something to someone. The warm silence when a morning fills with bird calls, and then they all cease. The peace of one's tiny room upstairs, very different from the meditation hall. Students pondering a koan late at night by the fireplace. Space to hear the cracking and snapping of a lit log. Within that mysterious palace of silence, my spine grew and my senses sharpened. Gladness grew in my heart. Was it that simple? We carry our breath wherever we go. One morning I walked through the garden. Across an expanse of brown twigs, the tangy coral of crab apple blossoms shouted out to me. ![]() This is the outside of Oakland's amazing Cathedral of Christ the Light. When I wandered inside and meditated for a little while, I remembered how my own spiritual pilgrimage began. My early childhood Sunday mornings were spent reading the funnies while the grown-ups padded around in robes, drinking coffee, perhaps cleaning the aquarium or getting sun in the garden. The only intimations of religion I remember were from television: Sidney Poitier visiting some stubborn nuns and building their church, and Sally Field as the disarming Flying Nun. Then, around age ten, I detoured one day from walking home from school (my house key on a string around my neck) and headed instead to old grey St. Bridget's a block away. They didn't lock their doors then. I slipped inside and sat down in a pew, awed and excited. My solitary experience that day was of sweet silence, light through colored windows, the faint smell of sweat and incense. I asked my father that night if I could be a Catholic. Dad, embracing Unitarian and Humanist fellowships after a Jewish and Christian Scientist childhood, managed to hide his surprise. "You can be baptized anything you want," he said firmly. "Once you are eighteen." Suddenly, becoming baptized seemed tremendously important to me. Dad showed me a book called "The Church Down the Street." "Look at all these religions you can choose from," he said, leafing through the chapters. Baptist. Jew. Muslim. Buddhist. "I recommend you study them before you make up your mind." My work was cut out for me. Over the next seven years, I attended a session of Catholic summer camp and two years of Jewish summer camp; six months of Wednesday night youth group at my Mormon friend's church; yoga and meditation classes at the stuffy top-floor studio of the Iyengar Yoga Institute; zen meditation at Green Gulch; informal but thorough lessons in Wicca and Tarot reading from friends; services and summer family camp with Unitarians, and some quiet time sitting with Friends. Oh, and a ten week course in Episcopalian history. As I turned eighteen, I had the usual mix of blustery bravado and intense shyness, idealism and cynicism. I was living with a boyfriend by then, waitressing, writing poetry. Dad mentioned that he was worried about me-- so many young people were flocking to the Hare Krishnas, to Jim Jones, to Reverend Sun Moon. "No way, Dad," I said. I had already proven to myself that, with my freethinking ideas, I did not fit in anywhere. The previous summer, I had baptized myself by a splashing snow-melt stream in the high Tuolomne Meadows. The bright sun was nearly swallowed in vast blue sky, and the banks of the stream were a riot of Indian paintbrush and purple lupine. ![]() Did you receive holiday cards this year? Are they still around? If you haven’t tossed them yet, here's a meditation exercise that I recently gleaned from a friend's back issue of Spirituality and Health Magazine.* Up until this year, I’ve put cards up on a mantel, or on a large ribbon, and then at the end of the Hanukkah, Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year season, it was a little sad to just toss those pretty cards into the recycle bin. Sometimes I cut out new gift tags from the fronts. But what I am about to share goes beyond recycling. Save those cards in a basket or bowl. Then, in January, after all the bustle has calmed down and your routines are back, find a few minutes to deliberately put your hand in the bowl and draw out a few cards. Look at just the first one. Spend time really seeing the front, examining the artwork, enjoying the colors and all the careful work that the artist put into it. Then read the printed greeting. Now, if the sender wrote something in it, read what he or she said, and concentrate on the signature. Close your eyes for a few moments and picture that person, maybe that family, in your mind’s eye. Send affection and wishes for their peace and health in the New Year. Thank them, in your thoughts, for sending you the card. When the meditation feels complete, you can release the card (feel free to save some for bookmarks or gift tags). With luck, you might be dipping into your cards a little at a time through the next couple of months. I can scarcely overstate the powerful effect of this meditation. During my first handful of cards, I remembered far-flung loved ones, carefully read their news, pondered the ancient stories portrayed on the card fronts, and even wrote an overdue letter in response. I was also inspired, by one, to visit the UNICEF site and purchase my cards for next season. Even more, as I read the cards I felt my heart growing larger, lighter, and warmer. Closing my eyes over the last card, I felt briefly connected to a larger, energizing galaxy of goodwill. I love how The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin talks about maximizing your happiness. Happiness is an inside job, right? Sometimes a wonderful event just flits right by and is swallowed up again—but we, and only we, have the power to make it something more. We can anticipate an event or a treat, we can participate in it, and then we can remember it, perhaps retell it. Multiple joys from one event! This holiday card meditation is a way to turn bits of ephemeral paper and glitter into active happiness. It keeps our little lights shining through the next wintry months. *"Praying My Greeting Cards" by Sister Karen Zielinski, OSF, in Nov-Dec 2010. ![]() I am packing up my woolly long-sleeved things and getting ready to head down the Pacific Coast to take a five day workshop around spiritual practices. See this photo? That’s what I’ll be looking at, unless Divine Humor sends fog and rain instead. I’m trying not to interfere with life’s grand unfolding by inserting expectations about how it will be. Still, I am giddy with excitement. A retreat! And not a silent retreat, and not a retreat where I have to sit much longer than an hour. My desperate needs to move and talk would make me a lousy Trappist. Why this now? I think I am hoping to bring something home in my pocket. I want to bring home a more solid prayer-and-meditation practice. When I worked in a corporate environment the regular hours lent themselves better to a daily practice. But in grad school, writing another book and attending meetings upon meetings, Monday looks nothing like Tuesday. Last week is different from this week, and in several weeks the schedule will change again. In this environment, attaching practices to a specific hour is a misguided venture. I take heart from swaying grasses on the sides of a swift river. The stems bend to wind and water and it doesn't matter; their roots hold firm. I know by now that I like to split the practice itself into two parts. The rhythm two parts is both restful and productive. There’s the beginning of the day, where the essential action is to connect to my power source. It doesn’t have to be fancy. But I do have to be willing and active about it. The second part might be called, “How did I do?” In remembering the day I get a chance to relive all the good parts--that's double the joy! And I can ask for help around the not-so-good. Without this afternoon/evening part, I’m on permanent forward thrust without a rudder. And would it hurt to add a couple of sun salutations every day? Maybe a stronger, more solid yet easily portable practice will emerge from this workshop, maybe it won't. At least I've spent some time thinking about my intention for going, and later this evening, if I remember to remember, I'll get to relive that little piece of joy. |
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