Texts: Psalm 103:1-5, 13-18; Mark 10:17-26
Speaker: Chris Walker
I want to talk about choosing less as a spiritual practice.
I wanted to start with a personal story, and a poem by Wendell Berry. But there’s not enough time, and I respect the limits of your attention. So no story, no poem, I’m going to plow right in.
All I’ll say is that for decades I had a sense that the life I was living was not anywhere close to the life I was called to live, and I felt like I was trapped. Over time, I came to understand that a couple of things were contributing to the disconnect in my life:
1. Losing sight of who I am—the person I’m called to be in the world and for the world; and
2. The paralysis caused by too many demands on my time and attention.
Does that resonate at all? I’m guessing the second part might—too many demands on our time and attention?
The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csziksentmihalyi once wrote that the mental distress peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish, and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.
And 150 years before, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” In the 1840s, Thoreau was paying attention to what was going on around his home in Concord, Massachusetts. He wrote about his neighbors for whom farms, houses, chores, barns, flocks, oWice, just seemed like endless forms of penance.
“How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, pasture, mowing, and wood-lot. . . . Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might see with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.”
That was in an agrarian, pre-industrial, pre-digital time and place. What would Thoreau say about us, today?
In response to the quiet desperation that *he* saw, Thoreau had one word of advice. One word. “Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.”
It’s really hard to stay on target in life when your environment is so full of dust and smoke and junk that you can’t see see the target, or worse yet, when you forget what the target even looks like. And for me at least, I think the root cause of that disconnect is that I forget my limits. In this human life, there’s only so much I can be, and do, and attend to. There are only 24 hours in a day, we have to sleep (some), each of us will eventually run out of time here on Earth, and we can only hold so much in our attention at one time. It’s a fact of life. Limits are inherent in the human experience.
Our lives are essentially the sum of how we use our time and what we pay attention to. In a sense, time and attention *are* our lives. So how we use our time and attention matters tremendously for the quality of our lives and what we can accomplish. But we need choose wisely, because we are limited.
Not according to our culture. According to our culture, there are no limits. Not on time, and increasingly, not on attention. There can’t be. Our techno-industrial, market capitalist society depends on expansion and growth—more output, more consumption. The system only works if we keep giving more time, more attention to the system—or, to use a term I prefer, to the Machine. So it’s push, push, push toward a More that never has a destination . . . it’s just . . . more. Our culture won’t accept limits; it’s either “You must give more” or “You deserve more” depending on which message benefits the Machine. Our culture says, “There are no limits . . . impossible . . . all things are possible . . . we’re all gods.”
We are NOT gods, we are limited humans. We’re not meant to be gods. We are God’s. GOD’S.
Which gets me to our Gospel. This story shows up in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In all three stories, the man who approaches Jesus is rich. In Matthew he’s also young, and in Luke he’s some sort of ruler, so in some process of scriptural arithmetic we often call this the story of the rich young ruler.
Jesus’ message to this man is hard, like a lot of Jesus’ messages. It’s a very familiar theme—the path to God is narrow and diWicult, and it involves letting go of attachments to embrace what is essential. That’s a really hard message, particularly for a young person who sees the fullness of adult life ahead and is eager to claim it. It’s also a hard message for (and here I’m quoting Thoreau again) “that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.” Like Thoreau, Jesus’ message can be interpreted as, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” “Put it all aside and follow me.” It’s a stark challenge to be radically focused on what’s essential in our limited lives, and to put aside that which gets in the way.
And . . . since I was asked to speak today about spiritual practices, I feel compelled to point out that Jesus’ challenge to the rich man might be the ultimate spiritual practices— radical generosity and self-denial. The spiritual practices I am going to talk about are embarrassingly puny in comparison. But I’m far from perfection in matters of generosity and self-denial, so I am not going to preach to you practices where I’m woefully deficient. I am deficient, but I try, and I trust in the grace and love and mercy of the God with whom all things are possible.
All right . . . what *is* a spiritual practice, anyway? For me at least, spiritual practice is just a way of bringing myself back, intentionally and regularly, again and again, to who and whose I am. It’s a way of gradually dissolving those barriers to living authentically and faithfully. As I said earlier, the root of these barriers seems to be that we forget our limitations. We keep reaching for more than we are and more than we can be and do and . . . manage. So one antidote is to choose less, so we can practice being human, which which is, by definition, limited.
What might the practice of limitedness look like for you? Only you can say. I won’t presume to. Our lives are so full, and so varied. For you, limitedness as a spiritual practice might mean spending less. Or speaking less and listening more. Or fasting—eating less.
Or reclaiming your time and attention by spending less time staring at screens. There are lots of good ways to embrace limitedness as a spiritual practice. For this morning, I’m going to focus on two spiritual practices that are meaningful to me, and those are the practice of silence and regular prayer.
The practice of silence reconnects me with who I am. Regular prayer reconnects me with whose I am.
If ancient practices appeal to you—these are ancient. They are as old as the Desert Fathers and Mothers—the prototypes of Christian monasticism–who rejected Roman culture in the 300s and headed for the sticks to live in solitude and prayer. If you’re looking for practices that are relevant to now, there’s a lot of contemporary buzz today about monastic spirituality. And if you’re looking for a way to defy the Machine, these practices are tactics for the Resistance.
Let’s start with the practice of silence. Less noise—externally maybe, but what I’m really talking about here is the practice of quieting down internally. Some practice of interior silence, or stillness. It might be a formal practice like meditation, maybe not. I practice it most often at 6 AM with a good cup of coWee, sitting on a porch or in front of a window, watching and listening to the dawn. Maybe it’s just taking a walk, or sitting in your backyard, or slumping in a chair while your toddler is napping . . . just some way to let your soul catch up with your mind and your body, so you can remind yourself, “Oh . . . this is me. Who am I again? How am I doing at me, anyway?” And to wait, patiently, for an answer.
In today’s world, silence is an endangered species. [Show smartphone.] This is the delivery system of choice for the forces trying to mold us for the convenience of the Machine that wants MORE from us. If you are getting called and beeped and buzzed constantly, and if you’re constantly tempted to check your email and texts and social media feeds and breaking news, and if you’re slipping in to play Candy Crush or to watch goofy videos when you’re bored, you will never experience interior stillness. And that’s tragic.
Practicing interior silence is a way of coming back to ourselves and remembering who we are. Practicing prayer is a way of coming back to God and remembering whose we are.
There’s a lot out there about what prayer is, in its different varieties. I won’t presume to tell you how to pray. As far as the spiritual practice of prayer, I’m not referring to a particular mode of prayer so much as the practice of praying regularly, maybe once a day, maybe more. Maybe formal prayer, maybe informal. If you’re interested in a guide for regular daily prayer, I’ll be around in the library during cookie time this morning with a variety of books that might interest you. But again—prayer need not be formal. Prayer can be simply a matter of deep attention. Loving awareness is a form of prayer. Paying attention and loving. That’s prayer. It’s everything, actually. The French mystic Simone Weil wrote, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
To sum up, the practices of stillness and regular prayer are practices of choosing less—less noise, less mental clutter, saying NO to the Machine that keeps pushing MORE— so we can tap into the grace of what’s essential, reminding ourselves of who we are and whose we are, and finding stability and strength and focus in that.
Now you might think, “Wait, that doesn’t sound like choosing less. That’s just adding more things to do. I don’t have time for that.” Maybe you don’t. Maybe you hardly have time to brush your teeth. I understand. Maintaining spriritual practice was really hard when I was an environmental lawyer. I wasn’t full-on with my practices every day. I’m still not. Stillness and prayer aren’t necessarily things to fit in a calendar. They’re states of mind and heart that can be tapped into anytime. But as practices, they require intention and attention. And you might find that the fruit of these practices is a new sense of clarity about what’s essential, and with God’s grace, you might possibly discover areas of your life where maybe you have some agency and choice to get better aligned with your target in life. Don’t settle for a life of quiet desperation. God doesn’t call you to life without granting the means to accomplish it, in God’s good time. God isn’t cruel. God is compassion and love.
And that’s all I have to say about that. I’ll be around during Cookie Sunday if you want to talk about these spiritual practices, or about the struggles of faithful living in a busy, stressful life, or about the challenges and hazards of digital tech and maybe dumping your smartphone and moving to a dumbphone. Or for those of you on Zoom, or those who may see this on the web, my email address is chris@walkercabinfarm.com. I’d love to hear from you.
May you have clearer eyes to see the field you were meant to labor in. May you remember who you are and whose you are. May you be present, joyful, free of all anxiety, and faithful to God’s will, which is love.