7 Things I Learned this Spring (2022)
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen.
These are the words of compline, the last prayer of the hours to close the day well and good.
I have come to see that the value and beauty of all kinds of closing rituals. At the end of each day, we bring our work, home, and bodies all to a gentle close. For our home, we make sure the washing machine is emptied but the dishwasher is filled and washing. We grind coffee beans, fill the reservoir, and set the automatic timer on the coffee maker. We lock doors and turn out lights. Sometimes, when something important is left undone, I jot it down on a post-it note for tomorrow’s attention.
This post is a sort of seasonal compline, a way of gently saying good night to a season and tucking life into God’s good care.
Here are my lessons from the spring that you might be able to use for yourself. Sometimes my lessons are random and don’t appear connected. This spring they seem like a daisy chain each one tied to the next.
1. Take a skosh more room if you need it.
Skosh is a cool word for just “a little bit” like smidge, sliver, jot, or pinch. But skosh fits so aptly when talking about room or time. Or maybe that is an old Levi’s add finding it’s way into my vocabulary. Anyway, it was what I needed, but I couldn’t spell it.
Until I learned skosh originated from “sukoshi” the Japanese word for small.
Sometimes we just need a skosh more time, room to breathe, or the perspective of our Maker. Now you know how to spell it.
2. Speaking of skosh, you can choose your slightly shifted appointment time on Zoom.
My intention is always for plenty of space around spiritual direction appointments for listening prayer. But sometimes a day stacks up a little tighter. Either for my directees or myself, I need to begin a Zoom appointment on the quarter hour.
Until recently, we communicated if one of us might be running late or needed to begin and end just a skosh early. It worked, but it involved a lot of emails and maybes and waiting. Then I learned you can manually choose any time you want to begin a Zoom session and communicate that right in the invitation.
It is almost too simple. Maybe I am the last to know. When booking the time, rather than choose from the hour or half-hour options that pop up, simply type in the time you honestly need and press enter. Viola!
I still hold time around sessions for the Holy Spirit to move and create. And I can also shift the appointment hour as the day calls for just a tiny bit as the light slanting across my stairs.
3. Take the stairs and make them part of your day.
Years ago, as a way of working my muscles as part of my day, I started taking the stairs in public buildings. When I could find them. I thought it was a sadness to have lost graceful central staircases in our modern architecture.
But for some reason, I was still trying to be efficient about my trips up and down the stairs at home. When the kids were little, we had a basket at the bottom of the stairs to corral for things that go upstairs and make fewer trips. We still do. But one day a few years ago, I realized I have been intentional about a walk or run or yoga class, but avoided the staircase in my home.
So I decided to flip the script and put climbing our staircase something to do as often as possible. As I took one of the girls’ bedrooms as my office and it is upstairs, my work was right under my feet. Whenever I caught myself beginning to sigh at a trip up or down the stairs, I turned it into a chance for well being.
I was counting on my new attitude giving my stronger muscles and climbing endurance, but I have found a few more benefits. Sometimes, that quick climb down and up the stairs offers me a moment of insight in my writing, my life, or my interior life. I have found tiny breakthroughs or next thoughts with that small trip on the stairs.
It is a version of what the French call l’esprit de l’escalier - “the wit of the staircase”. The wit of the staircase is that clever comeback you only think of after you have left down the staircase. I am not using it to zing anyone. We have enough of that in our world right now. But I am welcoming any wisdom and light as I love up and down the stairs.
And bonus, I notice the shafts of light shifting as the day wears on.
The Mojo in all his glory.
4. Practice small but don’t make your salvation small.
With all of this talk about small, we still need the largeness of the sky, the garden and our imagination.
If you have been around here awhile, you know I often talk about small ways of finding soulfulness in everyday life. It is a noticing way of life - paying attention to what catches the light in our eye, makes us laugh or cry, sit up straight or slump down, create or shut down. These are worth our attention because they are subtle clues to our inner workings and point us toward God at work within and around us.
This is true. But one April morning I heard a Voice I recognize as equally true. “Practice small but don’t make your salvation small. Don’t make Me small. Let me take up lots of room in you.”
There was more, “When you feel as though you need to walk into a room or around inside yourself or right up to me and honestly look around, know that you can do so in hope, trust, and the fullness of who you are. It won’t be flashy, powerful or efficient in the ways the measuring world thinks of filling up space. it will be strong, resilient, fiercely tender and risen with wounds.”
5. Practice resurrection.
This is a line from a Wendell Berry poem.
I found it when I was trying to let Easter linger longer than a day, get down into the soil of my life, under my fingernails.
Thankfully Eastertide is a whole season so there was time as there usually is with God’s pace of life. I discovered I had a lot to say about this idea of practicing resurrection and so it became a whole post. You can read about it here.
I’ve just recently discovered Stations of the Resurrection which I have yet to fully explore. Like the Stations of the Cross, the Via Lucis, Way of Light, tells a story of Christ’s life, this time in the events after He is risen from the dead. Spiritual Director and artist Scott Erikson has created a modern version.
I have only begun to live into a risen life, only caught Christ’s hem. But what a beautiful texture it has and there is still the whole robe that fills the temple?
The line of Berry’s poetry that caught my attention in realtions to practicing resurrection was “do something that won’t compute”. I realized I was trying to live that way with all of my small and slow noticing ways even as life is fast and furious and sometimes on fire. That led me to . . .
6. God is bad at the maths.
This rang true the moment I heard it in an interview of Archbishop Justin Welby by Kate Bowler on the podcast Everything Happens. Maybe it was because I was already pondering doing things that don’t compute from Wendell Berry’s poem about practicing resurrection, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front.
But the longer I thought about it, the more it rang true, a sure sign to linger and learn more. Welby mentioned in God’s economy 1>99 , 3 =1, and paying workers a full wage for less than a full day’s work. You might say a skosh of work.
I went on to consider other things that don’t add up. A few loaves and fish feeding thousands of people with leftovers filling more baskets than the original loaves. Or 40 years of travel that could have taken 11 days. Three years of ministry to save the world. Or any of these ways God works, bringing generosity out of scarcity, beauty from ashes, life out of death, way out of no way.
No matter how you calculate it, our God is about the long shot, the little, the least and the late. Grace is always the bigger number.
I guess what I am telling us is whatever you’re trying to add up, consider inefficiency for a whole lot and you’ll be doing God’s good math.
7. Lament is a gritty art that takes practice and imagination.
As if our last two years haven’t made us take stock of our losses around the world (Covid deaths and isolation, racial deaths and upheaval, Russia’s war in Ukraine), this spring we lost three people dear to us and gone too soon. And the last days of May ended with three mass shootings here in America.
It is simply too much to process well, so I am back to beginning small and hands on. If you are looking for ways to attend to your soul in the middle of plagues and war and injustice, try a few simple hands-on ways to practice the art of lament. You’ll discover how lament is different from despair.
Let’s end the same way we began, with the prayer of compline.