What’s your position on advice? What counts as advice? Do you find yourself peddling your life experience from time to time? Often? Rarely?
I’ve been thinking about this since this past fall. I got home from my trip, brain freshly scrubbed. I wanted everyone to know about my experience. How could I be true to myself and not talk about it?
And then my inner voice shot back, but you should feel that way about Jesus.
This year, my oldest girl turns twelve and my youngest girl turns 6. Two will never be twice as old as Five again. Five, at six, is no longer a baby.
When I was growing up, my siblings and I spent a lot of time outside. We had a swing set that we swung so hard on, the whole structure would rock. There were mums, irises, and day lilies along the back of the house, and steps leading from our back door that were, in my memory, big and wide and perfect for sitting on. As an older kid, I claimed a corner of the yard and planted flowers in front of a beautiful stand of ferns.
I loved the smell of the clean laundry on our clothesline. I was fascinated by the iridescent wings of the Japanese beetles that clung to the clothes and the crisp, starchy feeling of the laundry as it came off the line. For the many sunny days when the clothes dried uninterrupted, there was also the rush of adrenaline from pulling down clothes as the first drops of a rainstorm began to fall.
The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, by Ronald Rolheiser, was the second of two books I read while going through RCIA this year.
RCIA is Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. It’s part of the process of joining the Catholic Church. I didn’t start the class intending the join the Catholic Church.
A friend from the retreat asked me if I’d been able to keep up my meditation practice while we were in Tobago.
The answer is yes, and no.
The first week, I read the fantastic Breathing Underwater. One of Rohr’s observations was that when you find positive practices for your life, you should find that you need less of them over time to get the benefit, not more.
For a while now, it had felt that the law of level of diminishing returns was starting to apply to my meditation, yet I was afraid to scale back and lose ground. In the weeks before our trip, I’d gone from an hour and a half to 2 hours a day down to about 1 – 1.5 hours. I’d been keeping up with an hour plus a day since we’d been on vacation, but was trying to figure out how Rohr’s idea applied to my practice.
