Devotions

I got nailed by the whinies—that emotional state of isolation sung to the castrati tones of I think Neil Sedaka perfectly expressing my adolescent hormonal yearning, “I’m jist a lonely boy; lonely and blue. I’m all alone, with nothin’ to do” and moping to any of my friends who had time to listen between meetings. The spiritual life of a suburban monk ain’t easy, y’ know. So when the panic abated the question was ‘Now where the hell did that come from?’ considering I’m current with my meds. The psychiatrist and I had a great time last year looking up all the mental health symptoms in the DSM IV naming manual—depression, ptsd, seasonal affective bullshit—and, ‘I’ll bet with a dash of bipolarity thrown in’ he offered, brightening as he added it to the insurance form. But I’m at least aware of all of that—and even more, which, natch, I ain’t offering up publicly. I’m not very often caught off guard by my own craziness. But there you go; life is full of surprises.

Our friends Oil Spill Tracy and better half Wonderful Nancy gave us a book by Kathleen Norris for Christmas: Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life. I read the first half eagerly, and then laid it aside. Because I was in the midst of whining; and just didn’t. . .feel like reading it anymore.

That’s a funny line, if you know anything about acedia, which is a sort of state of spiritual torpor, also known as the ‘noonday demon’. Let’s say, a listlessness of the soul after lunch. It’s the writer facing a blank page and doing anything in his power to avoid starting; ditto, maybe, for the mother of children looking at the chaos of the house. It has also to do with, say, blowing off—by distractions or simple sloth or even unknowingly—those practices that keep us in touch with whatever hopefully divine spirit with whom we keep in touch.

The noonday demon of acedia is a new discovery for me. Being a sturm und drang kind of fellow myself, I’m more familiar with ecstasy and the dark night of the soul spiritual extremes; I’m also familiar with the dry deserts of prayer—that’s got it’s own drama, too. But lethargy? Spiritual boredom? Sloth also shows up, but it ain’t the whole thing. So, natch, I had to put the book down and consider weighty matters existentially—the yawn of ennui and that nagging little interior voice pointing out that ‘you haven’t created a sermon in how many weeks now, Larry’. That’s not to say I haven’t preached; I’ve taken already written sermons and reworked them a tad. If they’re good they’re good, and if not, don’t repeat ’em, and if they don’t fit the moment ignore ’em. I can rework one in less than two hours, thus saving, say, another 7 hours in wording the thing beyond the probably double that time of wrestling with the texts themselves. Besides, who can become bored with Mozart in the pulpit, as it in all humility were?

I’ve been preaching since I’ve been about fifteen though not natch in those days regularly (‘it’s Youth Sunday, let’s get Keene’, etc). I loved the process of trying to understand the texts then trying to describe it in real life and then getting in front of people to do it. It was the next best thing to sex; and since I wasn’t getting any sex, I really looked forward to the opportunities. Once completing seminary I went of course to preaching weekly, so that no sooner have you shaken the last hand after today’s service than you start thinking about next week’s sermon, though I eventually made a rule of not looking at Sunday’s text until Tuesday ’cause I had to decompress from the sermon just finished. In any case, for the rest of the week I lived my life in the context of those texts, hearing them in in between times and arguing with them and wondering how things will play in Des Moines, as it were. Toss in, say, some funerals and weddings and Lent and Advent and bible studies and you catch the sense: you could say I was livin’ in the word.

Y’know, that’s really the best thing there is to being a pastor: you are forced to live in the word. Whatever else goes on in the blessed insanity of the church, your life is lived located in the texts, whether you’re tryin’ to proclaim ’em or the born-againers are spitting ’em back at you. This is your life day in and day out. This is how you earn your living, it’s what you get paid to do. The career itself is as blessedly insane as the church, but at least you get this: you get to dwell in the house of the Lord all life long, as Psalm 23 has it, which ain’t no small matter.

In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamozov there is an ancient and spiritually famous monk/guru, Father Zossima, sage of the monastery who is about to die and so calls all the other younger monkettes to impart his wisdom about monastic life. He tells them (in my memory) that living in the cloister is not a sign of spiritual strength, but of weakness because the monks are comforted day in and day out with participation in the word of God. Those beyond the walls must make do with a sparse diet of maybe only once a week because they are busy feeding their families. So, as he says, humility is in order.

Yeah. We spiritual weaklings gotta be doin’ that, living in prayer and devotions every day, ’cause we need that word to keep us going. I’ve known for years that one of the ‘blessings’ of depression et al is that it pushes me into this word for at least comfort when not actual survival; in the worst of times, just enough for today; even with the meds. ‘Man’ it is said, does not live by chemicals alone, be they chewed, swallowed, smoked and/or injected.

I’ve learned that I am not a daily devotion kind of guy, if that means setting aside a special and personal time every day to read some assigned (or not) scripture and, say, meditate on some other guy’s comments about it. I’ve tried and tried to do that because that’s what all my prayer heroes have said needs to be done. But my deeper being doesn’t seem to be able to function on that cycle; if I were a woman my periods would probably be something like five and a half weeks, then 7 weeks, then three weeks, then back to five. Besides, giving me a scripture to read for only a day before moving on to something else is like yanking a kid away from the table before he’s even had a chance to taste the food. I’m a slow eater at this meal: I need time to taste it and savor it and listen to it; time to experience it as the days play out; to chew over it twenty ways from Sunday.

Which cleverly brings me back to preaching, because that has been the foundation of my devotional life throughout the years. It’s a discipline forced on me by the nature of the work—indeed my calling, a la St.Paul ‘woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel’. I earn my way in life by doin’ this, and it ain’t all peaches and cream, bubba. The reason we preachers wear those robes is because we are so otherwise completely exposed in the pulpit—including shoveling out those turds that are too embarrassing even to retain in the files. You gotta preach in good times and bad; when you don’t believe it and when you’re bubbling over with it. You gotta preach whether they stand up to cheer or stand up to walk out or simply lean back to sleep. You gotta preach when you are awed by their faithfulness and when you despise them for their sin. You gotta preach when they are dying and when they are living. You gotta preach when you have too much to say; and when you have nothing to say, you have to preach it anyway. You gotta be wrestling with the texts to hear what they say and thinkin’ about how to say it when your kid’s in the hospital (or jail), or your wife’s ridin’ your ass, or you’re havin’ your own midlife crisis. All of us preachers live under the oppression of next Sunday’s sermon; we gather for text study mostly to draw courage; we do not share sermons among us, as that is really too personal. That’s why I declared Monday off-limits for text reading; it was a sabbath from preaching as it were. It’s hard fuckin’ work if you’re doin’ it right.

But it also is for me the cycle of prayer. I’ll read the bible from time to time depending on necessity or whim, but I pray the Sunday texts. I’m like one of Father Zossima’s monks: preaching is the cloister in which I dwell. It is the prayer life that nourishes my spirit—‘yea though I whine and moan, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.’ So long as I dwell in the house of the Lord’s preaching.

Now, the noonday demon is a sneaky bastard I’ve discovered. He shows up as well in unintentionality, as it were. As it came to pass, I had apparently spent too many weeks without creating a new sermon; there were good reasons for this, though not ruling out sloth. There’s a difference between preaching a sermon and praying a sermon. As I said, I can easily preach a sermon already created (by myself); it’s much harder to wrestle that sermon into creation, ’cause, you know, you’re wrestling with God and everybody. But of course: the preaching’s an art; the wrestling is the prayer. The wrestling is the presence. See, I’m one of the luckier ones who get paid to pray (God, the lobbyist).

But if I go too long without wrestling to birth a new creation I become like a lover who no longer touches. I begin my Neil Sedaka whine of loneliness, which, natch, can’t be addressed chemically however they label it because it’s a spiritual matter. And so with a mustered resolve step forth in the knowledge the rats, I gotta do that wrestlin’ to stay alive.

“Bye and bye” it is said of the waiter, “God caught his eye.”

Larry