POSTED on my new AUTHOR page on FB. From Chapter Two of Cairn-Space: Uncovering growth and nurturance from the routine practices of daily life has long been a reality passed on from generation to generation. It is responsible for the development of “tradition” in faith, philosophy, art, politics, and the sciences. It is how we learn what it is passed on. Repetition builds continuity. It is a neural thing. It also helps us open to greater things. Laws are fashioned by it, and organizations are developed because of it. Routine practices keep us moored to the safety of the dock of life. The notion of routine practice has its bearing on our individual daily lives. We live each day enacting patterns or habits that we have allowed ourselves to accept as meaningful. We go as far as to say that a day has been worthless because we have not checked off one of the habits we hold dear. But, are these habits all necessary? Are they all nourishing? Discernment would tell us, “No”. We get up everyday and have a cigarette with our coffee. The pattern, over years, weaves itself into the meaning of what we call “morning”. The need for the nicotine is wrapped around the need to repeat familiar events and we are hooked on a habit that we cannot shake. We watch the news before we go to bed. The pattern, over years, weaves itself into the meaning of what we call “bedtime”. The need for tantalizing headlines is wrapped around the need to repeat familiar events and we are hooked on a habit we cannot shake. We know these things are not healthy for us, but we have woven them into our expectations. We must develop patterns that feed us and strengthen us. We must look for the things we need as divine creatures and build them into habitual routine. This way (just like returning to the prayer practice when distracting thoughts arise) we can return to our core and avert building unhealthy routines. These habits entangle themselves in both our bio-chemical make-up and our cultural patterns of living. They can be at once a physical driving need and an emotional attachment. Habits and routines can ride the crest between the body and mind continuum. Prayer is needful. Silence is needful. Compassion is needful. Rest is needful. The practices we develop around these needful things should reflect nourishment, health, and wholeness. If we do not routinely make room for the needful things in life, they will not just happen upon us. We do this by wrapping them in the myelin sheaths of repetition. The same sort of practices should also be present in our lives together – as the body of Christ. Fashioning sacred space and filling it with the heart and essence of prayer is not a journey for the individual alone, it is a corporate practice as well. Having prayer space and prayer time is good for the one; it is also good for the many. In a day and age when people would like to lose any connection to a daily routine and be set free to experience one new event after another (at least in our own estimation), the need for a nourishing daily routine is great. Having a heart center and a routine visit to that heart center is vital to an emerging stability and health. It is something we can practice together and apart. It is something we can build into the positive associations of what it means to be the Body of Christ. Although people may verbally acknowledge that routine is not necessary or a healthy requirement in daily life, they do enact the need for routine on a daily basis. People often enact things they need even if they cannot make a verbal or cognitive assent to the importance of the task. They may not turn each day to the sacred routines of old – prayer and or liturgy, but they do turn to the routine of reading email, checking social media, and watching the news. We find comfort in routines. Unbeknownst to most, we crave routine and create it whether we know it or not. Routine finds a way in our lives until we are able to recognize and give voice to the need. It is a myelin sheath sort of thing. Routine is a cairn. Routine is a marker in time and space that helps us to know where we are, remember where we have been, and gain a sense of identity as we visit it again and again over time. Routine digs down deep below the structure of past, present, and future; into the reality of the eternal sense of NOW. Routine is a bridge that unites the dimensions of time and space. We transmit the signal from axon, to dendrite, through a neural pathway wrapped in fat. We pile the rocks – stone on stone – leaving a visible mark in space and time. Have we discerned the soundness of the stones? Why were they placed? What do they sign? Liturgy, tradition, and prayer are cairns. They help us gain perspective in landscape of life. They mark how far and how close we come and go as we journey. They are a gauge. And, by their nature they are seen as repeatable events. We do them over and over again, wrapping them in meaning and depth. We can do these things as individuals and as a corporate body. Today, however, tradition and routine have become suspect in Churches. At the same time the Church today is reeling from the need young believers have to find a tradition and routine to envelop them and hold them fast amid the dizzying changes of modern life. The youth wonder why there are not more secure markers that can help them find their way to God. They long for mentors to show them the stones they have piled and just what they mean. They want to know which things are moveable and which things must not be moved. They want to see islands of stillness among the dizzying advancements and excitements of the digital age. Having abolished as many routines as possible in the need to modernize, the Church has lost its connection to the ropes that moor her to the community of Jesus throughout the ages. They have toppled the rock piles that others used to view how far they had come and in which direction they should continue. They have dissolved the myelin sheaths that once gave meaning to the life of the believer. There is a phenomenon of neural pruning in the brain that occurs several times in our lives. Weak or unused neural pathways are removed via a neural wash. All of the pathways that have not developed a thick enough coating of myelin cannot withstand the wash. They are taken away; dissolved. I fear the Church has removed some of its own vital neural pathways. It has removed some habits and routines that give us meaning. In a very real sense, the removal of routine from our lives is a dismantling cairns on the landscape. Eventually, when you have removed all the cairns and leveled the landscape completely, you have literally taken away all visible means of navigation – with the exception of the heavens. Let’s face it, you can’t get anywhere that way. You need markers on earth to triangulate with the stars in the heavens. We must have something from which to gain our bearings. We are finally recognizing that the sparkling appeal of power-point and sound equipment may not provoke in us the same wisdom that emerges from silence and contemplation. We are beginning to question whether strategic plans and mortgages are necessary for enacting community. There is a deepening that comes in the absence of glitter. It is a deepening that our leaders have not learned how to teach us, but that we are sensing that we need. We have replaced one form of transmitted signal with another form of transmitted signal. Only the new signal may not be as healthy as the old. Are the neural pathways we accept as the neural pathways we accept as “Church” the proper pathways; or would discernment reveal another way. The variables of sacred routine, or the objects of routine may differ from person to person, denomination to denomination. But, there are some core values under the variables that must be addressed. These values are silence, stillness, integration of the senses (the way a solemn chant or hymn can move us to tears), yearning, community, hope, love, prayer, forgiveness, and resolution. People need the routine of being able to enter into sacred space to encounter God and become transformed; not simply to titillate the senses with novel ideas and the latest trend.
Posted on: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 22:00:27 +0000
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