BY JANE RZEPKA, SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
In the sixth grade there was a boy in my class who had a steel plate in his skull and was always complaining how test answers could never get through to him. Our teacher would say, “Give me a break.”
In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that’s just my opinion.
—The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
You know what they say: Summertime is the time for dreaming, for slowing down to reflect. To be fair, they say that about winter, too, when we’re supposed to curl up with a cup of cocoa during those long evenings, thinking thoughts of life and death and what it’s all about. And wait. Don’t they also say that about autumn and spring? But still, for me, summer is the best time to crowbar those steel plates open.
In an old issue of Harper’s Magazine, Edwin Dobb said, “Again and again I drove to the edge of my existence and cocked my ears.”
That’s what I try to do.
It’s the lazy way to gain religious renewal. Not being prone to spiritual practice, I believe I’ve found the next best strategy—something, as the man says, to do with the edge of existence.
Something to do with transformation, or maybe, to be fair, not really transformation—I’m just shooting for a little improvement in the clarity-of-perspective department.
I get out of my element.
For instance, one year I lucked out. I got on a houseboat in the American Southwest with my family. We were miles and miles from anyone else, from a cell phone signal or Wi-Fi connection, or from any kind of landscape we had ever seen before. When we’d go ashore, we were ignoramuses amidst the tumbleweeds (at least we figured those things were tumbleweeds), the red sandstone (no good for climbing, it turned out), the lizards (should we pet them or run for our lives?), and the desert’s outrageous thorns (those little buddies have got to hurt). We were utter buffoons when it came to the boat itself, what with its propellers, kilomage, generator, anchors and choke. We were New Englanders at the edge of what we knew.
And what of spiritual intentionality—the cocked ear? No need out there—as I said, I was taking the lazy way. The beauty was bombastic. The isolation complete. My love for my family fierce. Wonder and awe immediately at hand. In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, David Douglas tells us, “the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values—silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude—able to be harvested by any traveler who visits.” You bet.
The steel plate slid open easily like elevator doors, no need for the crowbar. And in came all the secret thoughts that had been standing around so patiently—thoughts about groundedness and goodness, thoughts about what needs doing in spite of the vastness and the mystery, thoughts about thankfulness and what counts and what doesn’t.
I know, I know—the houseboat thing was a fluky circumstance, and life doesn’t often provide so grand a chance for renewal. But I stand by the general point. As the poet Denise Levertov put it, “If we are to survive the disasters that threaten, and survive our own struggle to make it new—a struggle I believe we have no choice but to commit ourselves to—we need tremendous transfusions of imaginative energy.”
Get it when and where you can, the kids and the terrible schedule and work and the price of things notwithstanding. Maybe you are ripe for a spiritual practice. Or a trip across the state. Or a new language, new playlist, or new poet. Maybe it’s time to stop with the poets and playlists and whatever else you can think of, join the “slow movement,” and create the gaps, the pauses, and the time for “lying down now and then and getting as still as you can.” Do whatever it takes to slide those steel plates open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts. For the real trouble in life happens when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823, U.S.
or
Phone: 617-948-6166; or for international callers, use 00-1-617-948-6166
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