Scots Church Adelaide - Uniting Church in Australia

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.

Living the Life

Life is a messy circle. We are forever tethered to the biological in which we live and upon which we depend.  It shapes our hopes and fears, and limits our reaching into the transcendence we sense so close to us.

Life confronts us with pain, injustice and absurdity.  There are times when it seems there is nothing beyond the muck and senselessness. Then there are days when something intangible touches us.  Beyond our biology, more profound than our all too common wish fulfillment, and not merely germinated and fuelled by the terror of our death, there is more.  Joy, beauty, mystery, oneness, hope, love… all these are real.  Carried and mediated by the raw atoms of our body, they are not caused by them.

We are not able merely to contemplate these. They are found and proved by the act of living.  As much as we make sense of life, and seek to be open to the transcendent, we must also live life.

In the messy overlap of thinking and doing, acting and reflecting, learning and forgetting which forms life, this section of our website focuses mostly on the doing and being.  And then, of course, we will return to think and make sense of it all.