The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.
When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.
As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.
The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.
A Lesson in Compassion
He arrived before anyone else, puppy like and eager, impatient for the hall to open. He was socially inept, and seems to have some rather different brain wiring to most of us. He was loud; raucous even. His proclamations were heard by everyone, including the people in the next hall, and usually irrelevant, ‘over the top’, and sometimes disconnected from anything that seemed to be happening.
They let him come into the party. Yes, there were wry comments, groans and occasional eye rolls, but he was welcomed. People let him raid their food. They made sure he had plenty of Coke to drink, going out of their way to ask if he needed more. They steered him away from the alcohol, tolerated his occasional fiddling with the TV, and were remarkably patient when they (repeatedly!) needed to ask him to lower his own exuberant volume. They managed to enjoy themselves and attend to the business of the evening, despite his oddball, embarrassing, and inane comments and interruptions.
Differently abled people can be a challenge to any gathering. I’m terrible at small talk. Small talk with a person who is somehow having a different conversation to the one I’m in, makes me cringe. I want to run and hide. They expose all my inadequacies! So I was greatly impressed by what I saw the other night. They smoothly worked and celebrated around him without embarrassment, and with startling compassion. Indeed, they not only celebrated around him, they celebrated with him. The dutiful, stilted, and unwilling compassion I have sometimes seen, and offered, in church, was absent.
We were, coincidentally, in a church building. But this was not a church gathering. It was an election after-party, held by a group of passionate young people who had stood as candidates for the upper and lower houses in South Australia. Some of them had forgone employment, and even given up jobs, to work full time for months on the project. They had been misunderstood, slandered and ridiculed. Many of the established political players had dismissed them with contempt.
There was understandable schadenfreude as the size of the anti Labor swing became clear. Scorn was heaped upon some of the platitudes and rationalisations offered by the party commentators, and by candidates who were interviewed as they were losing their seats. The cheers and laughter must have mightily irritated the people counting in the polling booth on the other side of the church complex!
I did my usual introvert thing in a crowd, which is to sit on the periphery and watch and listen. What an amazing group to see in a church hall... The girl with the amazing full arm tattoos, drinking Smirnoff from the bottle... A candidate doing Wilfred impersonations at the window... The intense geek bending my wife’s ear about some arcane aspect of political theory... Pizza boxes all over the place... A widescreen TV tuned to the ABC, a blaring radio with Matt and Dave on 891, and people clustered round a wireless laptop connected to the Electoral Commission website... Beer lubricated heady calculations by intellects way sharper than mine, about who was winning in what seat, and game predictions about the outcome... Idealism still untempered by reality and, sometimes, ideas I found ethically repugnant.
And in the middle of it all, that bull in the china shop, full of noise and excitement... He was tolerated, and even welcomed, without piety or stilted compassion. There was a lesson here for any church. I wish I could do as well.
Andrew Prior
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