Why Unplug?

This week I am semi-uplugged. Teaching half days, every day. About spiritual practice. Using Ruth Haley Barton's book Sacred Rhythms.

Actually, teaching is probably not the best term. What I am doing is trying to make space for spiritual practices. Space in time and place, for a small group to experience what it is like to sit in solitude, read scripture using Lectio Divina, pray, develop a of rule of life, uncover life desires.

Today we looked at solitude. Many things resonated with me, but this surpassed them all— a quote from Barton...

Exhaustion sets in when we are too accessible too much of the time. A soul-numbing sadness comes when we realize that a certain quality of life and presence is slipping away as a result of too much "convenience." Breaks in the day that used to be small windows of replenishment for body and soul— like driving in a car, going for a walk, having lunch with a friend— are now filled with noise, interruption and multi-tasking. What feels like being available and accessible is really a boundaryless existence that offers no protection for those things that are most precious to us. (p.35)

Reading this, my soul said yes. And I decided to get back to my afternoon practice of outdoor solitude (something I committed to do for a year, and did, but have since let drift away). Having recently gone to Laity Lodge Retreat Center, where I discovered I really was exhausted in many ways, this invitation seems especially apt.

So. This afternoon, I shall take my cup of tea. Go where there are no outlets, no screens. And just be.


[btw, this post helps explain my comment on Are You Ready for Life Streaming?]


Quiet Waters at Laity Lodge photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Regarding the Coup (a short note to God)

Today, in my Secret Place, I drink You in through emerald ivy and hemlocks hanging still in the sun. Sitting here so satisfied, it strikes me that the confinement of adults and children— between work and school and supposed "leisure" activities that always occur indoors— has a sense of spiritual battle in it.

After all, if sitting with Your creation is a powerful way for us to experience You, then surely to keep us from it is a cool deceit, a spiritual coup meant to disable us.

As Krista Tippett says in Speaking of Faith, "We appreciate religious mystery and truth in words and as often, perhaps, beyond them: in the presence of beauty...in silence." She says we are "starved for silence".

Is that not disabling, to be starved of beauty and silence? "Silence embraced," she continues, "stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality..." (p.52)

It is true. This world, with its swinging hemlock branches and little squirrels' feet and moldering pine needles, fragrant, this silent world is pregnant with You. Waiting to give birth to something in us. And too often we let it be taken from us, without resistance.


Dogwood Against the Hemlocks picture, by L.L. Barkat.