"She could keep silence, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk" (23).
"She [Marilla] had intended to teach Anne the childish classic, 'Now I lay me down to sleep.' But she had, as I have told you, the glimmerings of a sense of humor--which is simply another name for a sense of the fitness of things. It suddenly occurred to her that that simple little prayer, sacred to white-robed childhood lisping at motherly knees, was entirely unsuited to this freckled witch of a girl who know and cared nothing about God's love, since she had never had it translated to her though the medium of human love" (64).
"Marilly permitted the 'chatter' until she found herself becoming too interested in it, whereupon she always promptly quenched Anne by a curt command to hold her tongue" (79).
"'Oh, but there's such a difference between saying a thing yourself and hearing other people say it,' wailed Anne" (84).
"'Saying one's prayers isn't exactly the same thing as praying,' said Anne meditatively" (95)
"'That child is hard to understand in some respects. But I believe she'll turn out all right yet. And there's one thing certain, no house will ever be dull that she's in'" (Marilla, 128).
"I've made up my mind to stay simply for the sake of getting better acquainted with that Anne-girl,' she [Miss Berry] said frankly. 'She amuses me, and at my time of life an amusing person is a rarity'" (196).
"'Marilla, isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with not mistakes in it yet?'" (Anne, 218).
"The pleasures and pains of life came to her [Anne] with trebled intensity. Marilla felt this and was vaguely troubled over it, realizing that the ups and downs of existence would probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate. Therefore Marilla conceived it to be her duty to drill Anne into a tranquil uniformity of disposition as impossible and alien to her as to a dancing sunbeam in on of the brook shallows" (220).
"But I don't see the use of meeting trouble halfway, do you, Marilla? I think it would be better just to enjoy Mr. Allan while we have him" (310).
"'I"m very glad you feel the same,' said Anne decidedly. 'It's so encouraging. I shan't worry so much over that after this. But I dare say there'll be other things to worry me. They keep coming up new all the time--things to perplex you, you know. You settle one question and there's another one right after. There are so many things to be thought over and decided when you're beginning to grow up. It keeps me busy all the time thinking them over and deciding what is right. It's a serious thing to grow up, isn't it, Marilla? But when I have such good friends as you and Matthew and Mrs. Allan and Miss Stacey I ought to grow up successfully" (312).
"'I don't know--I don't want to talk as much,' she said, denting her chin thoughtfully with her forefinger. 'It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures. I don't like to have them laughed at or wondered over" (315).
"She had a genius for friendship. Girl friends she had in plenty" (351).
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Friday, March 16, 2018
We Are Okay by Nina LaCour
"But on our side, perfectly positioned between Mabel's place and mine, it says OPEN. If this were a short story, it would mean something" (71).
"Since we'd met, we had a thing for our names' symmetry. An M followed by a vowel, then a consonant, then a vowel, then a consonant. We thought it was important. We thought it must have meant something" (78).
"'Are you the kind of person who seeks out grief? Or do you just like that book?'
'I don't know,' I told her. 'I don't think I'm that kind of person.'
'I don't either,' she said. 'But it was an interesting thing to say.'
I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Fount it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth is unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods...The truth was vast enough to drown in" (88).
"I stared at it. Drank my glass of water and filled it up again. I kept looking for a long time, but I couldn't think of a single thing it might mean" (89).
"Since we'd met, we had a thing for our names' symmetry. An M followed by a vowel, then a consonant, then a vowel, then a consonant. We thought it was important. We thought it must have meant something" (78).
"'Are you the kind of person who seeks out grief? Or do you just like that book?'
'I don't know,' I told her. 'I don't think I'm that kind of person.'
'I don't either,' she said. 'But it was an interesting thing to say.'
I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Fount it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth is unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods...The truth was vast enough to drown in" (88).
"I stared at it. Drank my glass of water and filled it up again. I kept looking for a long time, but I couldn't think of a single thing it might mean" (89).
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Chapter 7:
Our brain scanning experiments in healthy individuals offered reflections on the relationship between sleep and psychiatric illnesses. There is not major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. This is true of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, once known as manic depression. Psychiatry has long been aware of the coincidence between sleep disturbance and mental illness. However, a prevailing view in psychiatry has been that psychiatric illness caused sleep disruption, a one-way street of influence. Instead, we have demonstrated that otherwise healthy people can demonstrate a neurological pattern of brain activity similar to that observed in many of these psychiatric conditions simply by having their sleep disrupted or blocked. Indeed, many of the brain regions commonly impacted by mood psychiatric disorders are the same regions that are involved in sleep regulation and impacted by sleep loss. Further, many of the genes that show abnormalities in psychiatric illnesses are the same genes that help control sleep and our circadian rhythms. Had psychiatry go the causal direction wrong, and it was sleep disruption instigating mental illness, not the other way around? No. I believe that it is equally inaccurate and reductionist to suggest. Instead, I firmly believe that sleep loss and mental illness is best described as a two-way street of interaction, with the flow of traffic being stronger in one direction or the other, depending on the disorder. I'm not suggesting that all psychiatric conditions are caused by absent sleep. However, I am suggesting that sleep disruption remains a neglected factor contributing to the instigation and/or maintenance of numerous psychiatric illness, and has powerful diagnostic and therapeutic potential that we are yet to fully understand or make use of.
Later in Chapter 7:
"...The hippocampus, the information inbox of the brain that acquires new facts. There was lots of healthy learning activity in the hippocampus in the participants who had slept the night before. However, when we looked at this same brain structure in the sleep deprived participants, we could not find any significant learning activity whatsoever. It was as though sleep deprivation has shut down their memory inbox, and any new incoming information was simply being bounced. You don't even need the blunt force of a whole night of sleep deprivation. Simply disrupting the depth of an individual's NREM sleep with infrequent sounds, preventing deep sleep and keeping the brain in shallow sleep, without waking the individual up, will produce similar brain deficits and learning impairments."
Chapter 11:
"...the causes of the sleep problem must stand alone in order for you to be suffering from true insomnia. The two most common triggers of chronic insomnia are psychological. One: emotional concerns or worry, and two: emotional distress or anxiety. In this fast-paced information-overloaded modern world, one of the few times that we stop our persistent information consumption and inwardly reflect is when our heads hit the pillow. There is no worse time to consciously do this. Little wonder that sleep becomes nearly impossible to initiate or maintain, when the spinning cogs of our emotinal mind start turning, anxiously worrying about things we did today, things that we forgot to do, things that we must face in the coming days, and even those far in the future. That is no kind of invitation for beckoning the calm brain waves of sleep into your brain."
Chapter 13:
"It is clear that a tired, under slept brain is little more than a leaky memory sieve, in no state to receive, absorb, or efficiently retain an education. To persist in this way is to handicap our children with partial amnesia. Forcing youthful brains to become early birds will guarantee that they do not catch the worm, if the worm in question is knowledge or good grades. We are therefore creating a generation of disadvantaged children, hamstrung by privaiton of sleep. Later school start times are clearly and literally the smart choice. One of the most troubling trends emerging in this are of sleep and brain development concerns low-income families, a trend that has direct relevance to education. Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to be taken to school in a car, in part because their parents often have jobs in the service industry, demanding start times at or before 6am. Such children therefore rely on school buses for transit, and must wake up earlier than those taken to school by their parents. As a result, those already disadvantaged children become even more-so because they routinely obtain less sleep than children from more affluent families. The upshot is a vicious cycle that perpetuates from one generation to the next, a close-looped system that is very difficult to break out of."
Our brain scanning experiments in healthy individuals offered reflections on the relationship between sleep and psychiatric illnesses. There is not major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. This is true of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, once known as manic depression. Psychiatry has long been aware of the coincidence between sleep disturbance and mental illness. However, a prevailing view in psychiatry has been that psychiatric illness caused sleep disruption, a one-way street of influence. Instead, we have demonstrated that otherwise healthy people can demonstrate a neurological pattern of brain activity similar to that observed in many of these psychiatric conditions simply by having their sleep disrupted or blocked. Indeed, many of the brain regions commonly impacted by mood psychiatric disorders are the same regions that are involved in sleep regulation and impacted by sleep loss. Further, many of the genes that show abnormalities in psychiatric illnesses are the same genes that help control sleep and our circadian rhythms. Had psychiatry go the causal direction wrong, and it was sleep disruption instigating mental illness, not the other way around? No. I believe that it is equally inaccurate and reductionist to suggest. Instead, I firmly believe that sleep loss and mental illness is best described as a two-way street of interaction, with the flow of traffic being stronger in one direction or the other, depending on the disorder. I'm not suggesting that all psychiatric conditions are caused by absent sleep. However, I am suggesting that sleep disruption remains a neglected factor contributing to the instigation and/or maintenance of numerous psychiatric illness, and has powerful diagnostic and therapeutic potential that we are yet to fully understand or make use of.
Later in Chapter 7:
"...The hippocampus, the information inbox of the brain that acquires new facts. There was lots of healthy learning activity in the hippocampus in the participants who had slept the night before. However, when we looked at this same brain structure in the sleep deprived participants, we could not find any significant learning activity whatsoever. It was as though sleep deprivation has shut down their memory inbox, and any new incoming information was simply being bounced. You don't even need the blunt force of a whole night of sleep deprivation. Simply disrupting the depth of an individual's NREM sleep with infrequent sounds, preventing deep sleep and keeping the brain in shallow sleep, without waking the individual up, will produce similar brain deficits and learning impairments."
Chapter 11:
"...the causes of the sleep problem must stand alone in order for you to be suffering from true insomnia. The two most common triggers of chronic insomnia are psychological. One: emotional concerns or worry, and two: emotional distress or anxiety. In this fast-paced information-overloaded modern world, one of the few times that we stop our persistent information consumption and inwardly reflect is when our heads hit the pillow. There is no worse time to consciously do this. Little wonder that sleep becomes nearly impossible to initiate or maintain, when the spinning cogs of our emotinal mind start turning, anxiously worrying about things we did today, things that we forgot to do, things that we must face in the coming days, and even those far in the future. That is no kind of invitation for beckoning the calm brain waves of sleep into your brain."
Chapter 13:
"It is clear that a tired, under slept brain is little more than a leaky memory sieve, in no state to receive, absorb, or efficiently retain an education. To persist in this way is to handicap our children with partial amnesia. Forcing youthful brains to become early birds will guarantee that they do not catch the worm, if the worm in question is knowledge or good grades. We are therefore creating a generation of disadvantaged children, hamstrung by privaiton of sleep. Later school start times are clearly and literally the smart choice. One of the most troubling trends emerging in this are of sleep and brain development concerns low-income families, a trend that has direct relevance to education. Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to be taken to school in a car, in part because their parents often have jobs in the service industry, demanding start times at or before 6am. Such children therefore rely on school buses for transit, and must wake up earlier than those taken to school by their parents. As a result, those already disadvantaged children become even more-so because they routinely obtain less sleep than children from more affluent families. The upshot is a vicious cycle that perpetuates from one generation to the next, a close-looped system that is very difficult to break out of."
Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton
Introduction:
She describes becoming aware of a feeling of longing. She questions whether she should trust it (is it selfishness, sinful dissatisfaction?) but Jesus' words promising "life more abundantly" pose a valid invitation. It seems that seeking this path involves not more busyness and obligations, but "spiritual transformation [is]. . . a mystery: something outside the range of normal human activity and understanding that can be grasped only through divine revelation and brought about by divine activity" (12). "I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual formation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God" (12).
"When we are in touch with our deepest longings (instead of being completely distracted by their surface manifestations), a whole different set of choices opens up. Rather than being motivated by guilt or obligation--as in 'I really ought to have a quiet time" or "I really should pray more"--we are compelled to seek out ways of living that are congruent with our deepest desires" (13). Taking time to figure out what you really want, will help you get what you really want. Okay.
"The journey begins as we learn to pay attention to our desire in God's presence, allowing our desire to become the impetus for deepening our spiritual journey. This is the substance of the first chapter, and it is not to be taken lightly or skimmed over as a precursor to the disciplines themselves. If we skip this process, our work with the disciplines will be nothing more than another program entered into on the basis of external prodding or superficial motivators" (13).
"In Christian tradition, this structured arrangement of spiritual practices is referred to as 'a rule of life.' A rule of life is a way of ordering our life around the values, practices, and relationships that keep us open and available to God for the work of spiritual transformation that only God can bring about. Simply put, a rule of life provides structure and space for our growing" (14).
THE IMPORTANCE OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY--this quote which I will put in my prayer journal--"Our commitment to community and to spiritual friendship within that community is in itself a spiritual discipline that is of great significance to the spiritual life. Spiritual friendship is not primarily a social relationship that exists for the purpose of catching up over lunch or an occasional lunch or a golf outing. It is not primarily a collegial relationship focused on work matters or service projects. It is not a self-help relationship focused primarily on problem solving or accountability. It is not even primarily a Bible study group. Rather it is a relationship that is focused intentionally on our relationship with God as viewed through the lens of desire. With such a friend we share the deepest desires of our heart, so that we can support one another in arranging our lives in ways that are congruent with what our hearts want most. Together we reverence the ways God is meeting us in the context of the spiritual practices that help us to seek him" (16).
Chapter 1--Longing for More: An Invitation to Spiritual Transformation
That longing is a difficult thing to define, I grant that. But her descriptions seem a little self-helpy, Milennial-seeking-fulfillment-flavored to me. "'This is my best self This is who I want to be more and more, by God's grace. These are the moments I will remember on my deathbed and say, 'That was what I was meant for.' Then it ambushed me--my longing, that is. A prayer welled up from the depths of my being, a prayer so full of desire that it was barely articulate: 'O God, give me more moments like this--moments when I am fully present to you and to others in love. Moments when I am connected with what is purest and most authentic within me and able to respond to your presence in that place. I want to live my life in such a way that there is more of this!'" (21). All those things are good, and I'm long from them. But maybe I aspire to long for even more than that?
"When was the last time you felt it--your own longing, that is? Your longing for love, your longing for God, your longing to live your life as it is meant to be lived in God?" (22). She speaks of the fear of arousing longing, because "How will i live with desire that is awake and alive rather than asleep and repressed?" (23). Ah, the question this Enneagram 9 would rather not even ask. Like she says, "giving attention to desire feels like opening up Pandora's box. But it is even riskier to refuse to acknowledge what's real within us, because whether we acknowledge them or not, these dynamics are at work wielding a subterranean power over us. Their power only gets stronger the longer we repress them. How much safer it is for ourselves and everyone around us if we open our desires in Jesus' presence and allow him to help us sift through them" (25). Amen. Safer, but not easier at the start.
"Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you...There is a place within each one of us that is spiritual in nature, the place where God's Spirit witnesses with our spirit about our truest identity. Here God's Spirit dwells with our spirit, and here our truest desires make themselves known. From this place we cry out to God for deeper union with him and with others" (24). I don't know that I disagree with this, necessarily. Maybe I just rebel against the deep, mythical- seeming language? Truly, I guess my biggest issue is that it doesn't seem to have a Biblical basis, it just seems like her reasoning that got her here. But if I'm going to be diving into the depths and dredging up all this longing, and using it as the basis for my spiritual transformation, and doing it all based on who I truly am and who God truly is and the relationship between us, I'd rather base it on Scripture. I'd rather think of it as my New Self in Christ's righteousness being the truest thing about me, and that New Self is being empowered by the Spirit to be obedient, and Jesus said that obedience means loving God and loving others. I want all my longings and stuff to be centered on that.
"We long for God because he first longed for us. We reach for God because he first reached for us. Nothing in spiritual life originates with us. It all originates with God" (25).
"Jesus' interactions with the people he came into contact with during his life on earth make it clear that desire, and the willingness to name that desire in Christ's presence, is a catalytic element of the spiritual life" (27). Hmmm.
Chapter 2-- Solitude: A Place for Desire
Most of us are not very good at sitting with longing and desire--our own or someone else's. It feels tender. It feels vulnerable. It feels out of control (30).
"The longing for solitude is also the longing to find ourselves, to be in touch with what is most real within us, that which is more solid and enduring than what defines us externally. This is our soul, that place at the very center of our being that is known by God, that is grounded with God and is one with God.
"But it's tricky to get the soul to come out, as Parker Palmer so eloquently acknowledges [when she said earlier that the soul is like a wild animal--tough and resilient, but also shy and only able to be seen if one is silent]. We are not very safe for ourselves, because our internal experience involves continual critique and judgment, and the tender soul does not want to risk it" (32).
"One of the new challenges of our generation is the impact of technology on our spirituality. This warrants serious consideration. If we are not careful, technology has a way of compromising our ability to be present to ourselves, to God and to each other--all of which are fundamental elements of the spiritual life (34).
"No wonder we feel disconnected from God: we are rarely able to give him our full attention in solitude and silence" (35). "The other disciplines described in this book and elsewhere are a wonderful smorgasbord of spiritual sustenance, but we really can't engage any of them until solitude becomes a place of rest for us rather than another place for human striving and hard work" (37).
"One of the most important lessons I have learned over the past few years is how important it is to have time and space for what's real in my life--to celebrate the joys, grieve the losses, shed my tears, sit with the questions, feel my anger, attend to my loneliness. This 'being with what is' is not the same thing as problem solving or fixing, because not everything can be fixed or solved. Rather, it means allowing God to be with me in that place and waiting for him to do what is needed. In silence my soul waits for you and you alone, O God. From you alone comes my salvation.
"When we don't attend to our vulnerabilities and instead try to repress it all and keep soldiering on, we get weary from holding it in. Eventually it leaks out in ways that are damaging to us and to others.
"Another reason we are so tired is that we are always working hard to figure things out rather than learning how to cease striving, how to be with what is true in God's presence and let God be God in the most intimate places of our life--which is, in the end, the only thing that will change anything. We're busy trying to make stuff happen rather than waiting on God to make stuff happen" (41).
"What can you say now that represents the truth of your current experience with this most significant Christian discipline [of solitude]?
...The only time when I am not lonely and my longing for union is satisfied is when I am in solitude. In the world of people and things, I do sometimes experience moments that have a sense of completeness--moments of union with God and others and the world beyond--but most times these moments are fleeting and give only a taste of what my heart is longing for. The truth is, they often seem to exacerbate the longings that I now know will never be completely satisfied here on this earth. No matter how beautiful such moments are, they are often fraught with a painful awareness of human separateness even from those we love the most, and I am left trying to manage my unruly tendencies to cling and grasp, control and manipulate, fix and fill in order to numb the pain of that separateness....When I reengage my life in community with others and live from that place of union with God, there is indeed a peace that passes understanding and transcends the longing (43).
Chapter 3-- Scripture: Encountering God Through Lecto Divina
Reading for information vs transformation and the assertion that we should read the Bible like a love letter: "The study of Scripture is important, but if we stop there, we will eventually hit a wall spiritually. Information gathering may be exhilarating and even useful at times, bu in the end our soul know that there must be something more" (50).
Moving from head to heart: Allowing ourselves to pay attention at this level may feel a bit threatening at first, depending on how suspicious or out of touch we are with our feelings and internal dynamics. Robert Mulholland points out that in our culture there is generally little danger of neglecting the cognitive, rational, and analytic dynamics of our being, for these:
'are so hyper-developed in our culture and in our normal modes of learning...we must remember...loving God with all our heart and all of our soul precedes loving God with all of our mind'" (52).
She then goes on to laud the practice of reading short sections of Scripture and meditating on them, seeing how it resonates within, and avoiding reading huge chunks for information. I deny her seeming assertion that this is the only manner of approaching the Bible of value, but I do appreciate her point. She describes attentively noting her reaction to a command. "It's pretty subtle at first, but I stop and give myself a little space to notice that feeling and wonder about it" (53). She ends up getting to the heart of her resistance to the command to "love your enemies" and framing it in a context of wanting to be more like Christ, and "Now God and I are having a conversation that has some substance to it!" (53).
Yes and No
1. Yes
--applying Scripture is important
--applying requires
*focused time
*a self-knowledge that many today are desperately lacking
2. No
--no appreciation of reading all the larger portions for context guiding applications, and indeed guiding what the goal is. She mentions the goal of Christ-likeness, being transformed into a more loving person. Whatever the goal is, I want it to be dictated by Scripture, not a mix of Church tradition/cliche, and modern feel-goodness
--no mention of sin. Therefore, no mention of Christ as our atoning sacrifice who gives us his righteousness. Jesus was indeed a great example, but if only that, we are powerless to emulate the example.
To me, the problem in following commands is idolatry. I count myself fortunate that right now at church I'm re-learning that the basis for all sin is idolatry. To the point that I agree with Barton, I appreciate the reminder to read Scripture mindfully, and as Alan Kraft says, look for "the sin beneath this sin." To Barton's example, realizing that we are resistant to loving our enemies is a crucial first step. Sitting or dealing with that in God's presence is another important step that we often neglect. But I believe Scripture would guide us even beyond that-- to naming it the sin, identifying how it is idolatrous, confessing, and asking God for help!
As for lecto divina, I have very mixed opinions. I do appreciate Barton's statement, "Although Bible study is not a part of the lectio process itself, Bible study is an important supplement" (55).
Chapter 4-- Prayer: Deepening Our Intimacy with God
As one grows in maturity, they will enter "the experience of having our prayers go cold" (64), which "signals an invitation to deeper levels of intimacy that will move beyond communication, which primarily involves words and concepts, into communion, which is primarily beyond words" (65).
"In Christian tradition, there are several signs that indicate you are transitioning to a new phase int he life of prayer:
1. What you are doing isn't working, no matter how much effort you put into it. You find yourself asking, Is this all there is?
2. Your desire for God continues to be strong even though you have no desire for anything external--words, images, previous structures for prayer, including the Scriptures. While these things may still be present to some extent, you are not attracted to them anymore. Words fail. The hunger for intimacy--to just hang out with God--is all there is.
3. You find yourself enjoying being along, aware of God's presence without structured activity. In the deepest part of your being, you know that God alone can satisfy the longings of the human heart, and other things fade in importance. There is not attraction to thought, meditation or any other human activity or achievement. This last condition is most important, for it justifies the other two and indicates a readiness to leave words behind and remain with God alone in an act of love."
"In most cases, the reason we prefer to talk about prayer and read about prayer but don't actually pray has more to do with our ambivalence about intimacy than with anything else" (66).
Prayer Beyond Words: "the movement beyond words to an intimacy that requires no words"... like lovers making love, a mother nursing a baby, John leaning against Jesus at the last supper. "The Old Testament also refers repeatedly to a kind of knowing that comes in the absence of words or in the stillness of waiting. Be still before the Lord and wait. Be still and know that I am God. In silence my soul waits for you alone, oh God" (68).
"The soul returns to its most natural state in God. In returning and rest you will be saved" (69).
The Intimacy of Breathing:
"In the stillness we make yet another discovery: the Holy Spirit is the One who really knows how to pray. We discover that prayer is truest when it has passed beyond words into the realm where the Holy Spirit groans for us with utterances that are too deep for words (see Romans 8:26-27). The silence becomes a time when we listen for the prayer that the Holy Spirit is praying deep within us as he moves between the depths of our human experience and the divine will, interceding for us beyond words" (70).
"Words, when they do find their way to the surface from these depths carry with them a whole new power and meaning because they are forged in the caldron of our deepest longings for God" (70). And thus the "breath prayer" is born. "Usually our breath prayer will remain with us for quite some time, and we get to the point where is prays itself without our even having to think about it" (70).
Discovering Your Breath Prayer:
"You don't think your way into your breath prayer; you discover it by listening to your deepest longings and desires in God's presence" (71).
Prayer in Community:
"One of the most natural results of developing a vibrant personal prayer life is that we begin to notice a deep desire to enter meaningfully into prayer in community with others" (73).
One example is the Daily Office.
"Intercessory prayer is not primarily about believing we know what someone else needs and then trying to tell God what the answer is. It is not about wrestling some result from God. Intercessory prayer is more about recognizing that we do not know how to pray for others--or ourselves for that matter--but the Holy Spirit knows. Since we understand that the Holy Spirit is already interceding for us before the throne of grace, we can bring a name or a need, express it simply and in the silence experience our own groaning and Holy Spirit's groaning for that person. We can listen for the prayer that is already being prayed for that person before the throne of grace, and without struggling hard to put things into words, we can enter into God's caring love for that person and wait with them and for them in God's presence" (74).
All of Life As Prayer:
"Any approach to the spiritual life that sets up false or awkward distinctions between prayer and life, or prayer and the other disciplines, seems to unnaturally rip apart elements of life that belong together or to unneccesarily complicate something that is in its essence quite simple" (75).
Chapter 5-- Honoring the Body: Flesh-and-Blood Spirituality
Main Scripture example: Elijah in 1 Kings 19. "The angel even pointed out that if he did not care for his body, the journey into the presence of God would be too much for him" (79).
"Up to this point, I had been quite out of touch with any sense that my life in a body had anything to do with my spirituality. Intent on trying to be 'spiritual,' I had somehow relegated life in the body to some lesser category that warranted very little of my attention" (79). "I was becoming more aware that I am not merely a soul and spirit; I am an embodied human being, and my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)....the Scriptures indicate that it is possible to glorify God in our bodies rather than merely glorifying the body, which seemed to be the focus of the surrounding culture" (80).
"All the great themes of Scripture affirm the significance of the body as a place where the presence of God can be known and experienced. The incarnation itself--Christ's choice to take on flesh and inhabit a human body--forever elevates the experience of embodiment to the heights of spiritual significance" (81). Other examples: the sacrament of communion, the fact that our bodies will resurrect on the last day and we will dwell forever with God as embodied people.
Application: "The appreciation of life in the body includes embracing our maleness or our femaleness, and thus our sexuality, as a gift from God that helps reveal his true nature" (82).
Application: "For years now I have used a daily bike ride to a nearby retreat center as a way of connecting physical exercise with time for silence and prayer. This is as much a spiritual practice for me as sitting at home with my Bible open, because it connects every part of me with the One who created me" (84). "There are many creative ways to forge a life-giving connection between the spiritual life and our body; the key is our intent an our attention to the way in which God makes himself known in this most basic aspect of our existence" (85).
Listening to the Body:
"Our bodies have much to tell us if we could only figure out how to listen. In fact, oftentimes God speaks to us through our body. Most times, our body is the first to know if we are overcommitted, stressed, uneasy, or joyful, and when we need to attend to something that is causing us pain or disease" (85). "One area of my life where this has really proved to be true is my work and vocation. As I have worked to clarify my calling, I have learned to pay attention to my energy levels in response to different activities. If I experience a particular activity as being inordinately draining, I begin to consider very carefully how much of myself God wants me to give to that. On the other hand, if I feel particularly energized by a certain person or activity, I can pay attention to how God may be leading me to incorporate more of that into my life" (86).
Praying in the Body:
"As I sat on a tree trunk that had fallen across a stream, I prayed and felt myself rejuvenated by the beauty and the silence. I saw hundreds of tadpoles swimming around in a puddle that had formed in a rut--of all things!--and it reminded me that life can spring up anywhere, even in the dry and rutted places of my own life. I paid attention to how good it felt to be in my body, climbed a hill until my heart beat fast, got sweaty and lay down exhausted when I got back--full or a sense of the immensity and yet the nearness of God.
"If that's not prayer, I don't know what is!" (88).
Chapter 6-- Self-Examination: Bringing my Whole Self Before God
"There comes a time in the spiritual life when one of the major things God is up to is to lovingly help us see ourselves more clearly...one of the deepest longings of the human heart is to be known and loved unconditionally....The problem is that most of us aren't willing to take the risk of being seen so completely [as to truly be loved unconditionally]... All of us would prefer to have the experience of unconditional love without having to take the risk of letting someone know us that well!" (92).
"We need a practice that offers us a way of opening to the love of God in the places of our brokenness and sin--which is the only way true spiritual transformation ever takes place" (93).
(Of Psalm 139): "There is a paradox, of course, in the truth that I am inviting God to search me and know me when in fact he already has searched me and known me. This may point to the fact that the real issue in self-examination is not that I am inviting God to know me (since he already does) but that I am inviting God to help me know me" (94).
examen of consciousness-- a way to develop our capacities to recognize the presence of God, also called a daily review. A simple discipline that helps us to become more God conscious, it involves taking a few minutes at the end of each day to go back over the events of the day and invite God to show us where he was present with us and how we responded to his presence (95).
"How many people do you know who are effective at being themselves and letting God use that?" (98).
(Of Psalm 139): David's certainty that the person God created him to be is deeply good has become the bedrock of his identity; he is able to let the parts that are confusing even to himself come into the light of God's presence so that God can show him what is good and what is evil" (100).
"When we have come to a place of certainty in the steadfastness of God's love and are anchored by a sense of the basic goodness of our created self, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by inviting God to search us and know us to our very depths" (101).
examen of conscience--a way to see ourselves more clearly in light of God's presence. Involves 3 steps: seeing something that went wrong in behavior or action, which may provide us a glimpse of how the action has fallen short of Christ-lineness and/or how it has wounded others; being willing to name our failure for what is is and also to name what was going on inside us, seeking some understanding of the inner dynamics that caused the behavior, with God's guidance because often our sin patterns are unknown to us without God's revelation; and confession. (102)
purgation--the process by which God gradually strips us of more and more layers of our own sinfulness; obvious sins which even our culture eschews; other deliberate sins that may still be "normal" in our culture; then unconscious sins and omissions; and finally deep-seated attitudes and inner orientations out of which our behavior patterns flow (102-103).
"Confession is the endgame in the self-examination process" (103).
"Our culture promotes a profound sense of denial about the presence of sin in our lives and the ways our sins and negative patterns wound others. In our litigious milieu, even when something is our fault, we are encouraged not to admit it unless we can derive some benefit from that" (104).
Chapter 7-- Discernment: Recognizing and Responding to the Presence of God
"Discernment is first of all a habit, a way of seeing that eventually permeates our whole life" (111).
"Scripture also speaks of 'discernment of spirits' and encourages us to 'test the spirits to see whether they are from God' (1 Corinthians 12:10; 1 John 4:1). This aspect of discernment helps us to distinguish...the true from false, in the world 'out there' but also in the interior world of our thoughts and motives" (112).
"God's will for is is generally for us to pursue that which gives us life (John 10:10) and to turn us away from things that drain life from us and leave us debilitated" (113).
"'I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.' He says that the wisdom that enables us to choose life is not something that we will find 'out there' in heaven or across the ocean somewhere but that this knowledge is very near to us--in our mouths and in our hearts for us to notice and observe (Deuteronomy 30:19-20). In other words, it is a visceral, in-the-body experience" (114).
"The Scriptures are clear that discernment, when it is given, is always a gift" (116).
1--"To really open myself to knowing and doing the will of God requires trust that God's intentions toward me are deeply good. Discernment requires interior freedom, a state of wide-openness to God and the capacity to relinquish whatever might keep us from choosing God" (117).
2--"The second fundamental building block of the discernment process is the belief that love is our primary calling" (117).
3--"The third foundational building block is the belief that God does communicate with us through the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is given to help us know the demands of love in our situation" (118).
"The practice of discernment begins with a prayer for indifference. We generally think of indifference as a negative attitude characterized by apathy and not caring; in the realm of discernment, however, indifference is a very positive term that is rich in meaning. Here it means, 'I am indifferent to anything but God's will.'....Mary the mother of Jesus is one of the most compelling examples of utter indifference or 'given-overness' to the will of God...'Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word'....Until we have come to a place of indifference, any prayer for wisdom may well be something akin to a rigged election" (119-120).
"... our deepest orientation and desire, some essence of ourselves that God knew before we were even created in physical form. There are desires that are deep, true and fundamental to our being in Christ; these are the 'desire of your heart' that God promises to fulfill (Psalm 37:4), although often differently from how we might have envisioned. A profound life orientation is revealed in these deepest desires, and when we come in touch with them, we have found God's direction for our life. This usually also has something to do with our calling, the purpose for which God created us. This is that part of ourselves--a passion or burden that we carry that is uniquely ours--and it cannot be set aside lightly" (122).
"'Wants are mine; shoulds are somebody else's'" (123).
In the list of things used to aid in discernment, I note that:
--Asking the question "How does this fit into overall life calling?" doesn't help me discern my overall life calling.
--"Consolation and desolation" is a great catchphrase for that which brings freedom, wholeness, growth.
--Scripture is third on the list. Hmmm. I would hope that the best way for a Christian to decide on their overall life calling would be to follow the commands of Scripture. But that's not the point. This list is good. Others on the list: life of Christ, character and growth development, eternal perspective, and community.
Chapter 8-- Sabbath: Establishing Rhythms of Work and Rest
"'If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath--our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbaths for us'" (Wayne Muller, quoted on page 131).
"I know what it is like to rest for hours until I have energy to delight in something--good food, a good book, a leisurely walk, a long-awaited conversation with someone I love" (137).
"And the first order of things is that we are creatures and God is the Creator. God is the only one who is infinite. I am finite, which means that I live within the physical limits of time and space and bodily limits of strength and energy. There are limits to my capacities relationally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually" (137).
"First, the heart of Sabbath is that we cease our work so that we can rest and delight in God and God's good gifts...Second, it is important to establish a regular rhythm if at all possible....The third principle that has become foundational for me as I have lived this discipline is that Sabbath-keeping is not primarily a private, self-indulgent discipline" (139).
"[If we engage with Sabbath primarily as a private discipline] Our children will then not have the opportunity to experience sabbath time with the guidance of their parents, they will not learn how to rest and delight in God (and they so desperately need it)...The other thing that's lost to the next generation is experiencing the quality of our presence on the sabbath. I am different on the sabbath"(140).
"There have to be times that you let yourself feel what you feel, when you let the tears come rather than blinking them back because you don't have time to cry" (144).
Chapter 9-- A Rule of Life: Cultivating Rhythms for Spiritual Transformation
"Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We think that somehow we will fall into transformation by accident" (147).
"A rule of life seeks to respond to two questions: Who do I want to be? How do I want to live? Actually, it might be more accurate to say that a rule of life seeks to address the interplay between these two questions: How do I want to live so I can be who I want to be?" (147).
"One of the great temptations of the spiritual life is to believe that if I were in another season of life, I would be more spiritual. The truth is that spiritual transformation takes place as we embrace challenges and opportunities associated with each season of our life" (149).
"For those who are extroverted, the disciplines of solitude and silence will be more of a stretch, but it is a stretch toward wholeness. Introverts may feel that they don't need relationships in community, but nothing could be further from the truth. Without a balanced approach to spiritual disciplines, we run the risk of cultivating a one-sided spirituality that will disintegrate under pressure from the part of us we have left undeveloped" (149).
"The process of beginning to cultivate our own rhythm of spiritual practices begins with attending to our desire, noticing what words, phrases, and prayers seem to most consistently capture our sense of longing for God and for spiritual transformation we are experiencing in these days" (151).
"Early morning is a special time of day, when we are in a more rested and undefended state than we are at any other time" (154).
"It is impossible to overstate the importance of community in the spiritual transformation process. This is not the same thing as the Christian busyness that often accompanies church life; it is about quietly sharing the journey with others who are also drawn to deeper levels of spiritual transformation that enable them to discern and do God's will" (160).
Appendix A
"The purpose of journeying together in spiritual friendship and spiritual community...is to listen to one another's desire for God, to nurture that desire in each other and to support one another in seeking a way of life that is consistent with that desire" (169).
Appendix C
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Calhoun "for a more exhaustive list of spiritual disciplines"
How spiritual disciplines "are the main way we offer our bodies to God as a living sacrifice"
Sin and Negative Pattern---Corresponding Discipline
Gossip/sins of speech--Silence, self-examination
Anxiety and worry--breath prayer, Scripture reflection
Envy and competitiveness--solitude, self-examination
Discontent--attending to desire
Self-reliance--Silence, prayer, community
Avoidance patterns--Community, spiritual friendship
Over-busyness--Solitude, discernment, sabbath, rule of life
Anger and bitterness--Silence, self-examination, confession
Feelings of inadequacy--Examen of consciousness, self-knowledge and celebration
Guilt, shame--Solitude, confession, forgiveness
Lust--Attending to desire in God's presence
Restlessness and stress--Solitude, silence, breath prayer
Lethargy and/or laziness--Caring for the body, exercise
Lack of faith--Prayer, Scripture
Feelings of isolation--Examen of consciousness, community
Selfishness and self-centeredness--Prayer and worship in community
Lack of direction--Discernment, listening to the body
She describes becoming aware of a feeling of longing. She questions whether she should trust it (is it selfishness, sinful dissatisfaction?) but Jesus' words promising "life more abundantly" pose a valid invitation. It seems that seeking this path involves not more busyness and obligations, but "spiritual transformation [is]. . . a mystery: something outside the range of normal human activity and understanding that can be grasped only through divine revelation and brought about by divine activity" (12). "I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual formation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God" (12).
"When we are in touch with our deepest longings (instead of being completely distracted by their surface manifestations), a whole different set of choices opens up. Rather than being motivated by guilt or obligation--as in 'I really ought to have a quiet time" or "I really should pray more"--we are compelled to seek out ways of living that are congruent with our deepest desires" (13). Taking time to figure out what you really want, will help you get what you really want. Okay.
"The journey begins as we learn to pay attention to our desire in God's presence, allowing our desire to become the impetus for deepening our spiritual journey. This is the substance of the first chapter, and it is not to be taken lightly or skimmed over as a precursor to the disciplines themselves. If we skip this process, our work with the disciplines will be nothing more than another program entered into on the basis of external prodding or superficial motivators" (13).
"In Christian tradition, this structured arrangement of spiritual practices is referred to as 'a rule of life.' A rule of life is a way of ordering our life around the values, practices, and relationships that keep us open and available to God for the work of spiritual transformation that only God can bring about. Simply put, a rule of life provides structure and space for our growing" (14).
THE IMPORTANCE OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY--this quote which I will put in my prayer journal--"Our commitment to community and to spiritual friendship within that community is in itself a spiritual discipline that is of great significance to the spiritual life. Spiritual friendship is not primarily a social relationship that exists for the purpose of catching up over lunch or an occasional lunch or a golf outing. It is not primarily a collegial relationship focused on work matters or service projects. It is not a self-help relationship focused primarily on problem solving or accountability. It is not even primarily a Bible study group. Rather it is a relationship that is focused intentionally on our relationship with God as viewed through the lens of desire. With such a friend we share the deepest desires of our heart, so that we can support one another in arranging our lives in ways that are congruent with what our hearts want most. Together we reverence the ways God is meeting us in the context of the spiritual practices that help us to seek him" (16).
Chapter 1--Longing for More: An Invitation to Spiritual Transformation
That longing is a difficult thing to define, I grant that. But her descriptions seem a little self-helpy, Milennial-seeking-fulfillment-flavored to me. "'This is my best self This is who I want to be more and more, by God's grace. These are the moments I will remember on my deathbed and say, 'That was what I was meant for.' Then it ambushed me--my longing, that is. A prayer welled up from the depths of my being, a prayer so full of desire that it was barely articulate: 'O God, give me more moments like this--moments when I am fully present to you and to others in love. Moments when I am connected with what is purest and most authentic within me and able to respond to your presence in that place. I want to live my life in such a way that there is more of this!'" (21). All those things are good, and I'm long from them. But maybe I aspire to long for even more than that?
"When was the last time you felt it--your own longing, that is? Your longing for love, your longing for God, your longing to live your life as it is meant to be lived in God?" (22). She speaks of the fear of arousing longing, because "How will i live with desire that is awake and alive rather than asleep and repressed?" (23). Ah, the question this Enneagram 9 would rather not even ask. Like she says, "giving attention to desire feels like opening up Pandora's box. But it is even riskier to refuse to acknowledge what's real within us, because whether we acknowledge them or not, these dynamics are at work wielding a subterranean power over us. Their power only gets stronger the longer we repress them. How much safer it is for ourselves and everyone around us if we open our desires in Jesus' presence and allow him to help us sift through them" (25). Amen. Safer, but not easier at the start.
"Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you...There is a place within each one of us that is spiritual in nature, the place where God's Spirit witnesses with our spirit about our truest identity. Here God's Spirit dwells with our spirit, and here our truest desires make themselves known. From this place we cry out to God for deeper union with him and with others" (24). I don't know that I disagree with this, necessarily. Maybe I just rebel against the deep, mythical- seeming language? Truly, I guess my biggest issue is that it doesn't seem to have a Biblical basis, it just seems like her reasoning that got her here. But if I'm going to be diving into the depths and dredging up all this longing, and using it as the basis for my spiritual transformation, and doing it all based on who I truly am and who God truly is and the relationship between us, I'd rather base it on Scripture. I'd rather think of it as my New Self in Christ's righteousness being the truest thing about me, and that New Self is being empowered by the Spirit to be obedient, and Jesus said that obedience means loving God and loving others. I want all my longings and stuff to be centered on that.
"We long for God because he first longed for us. We reach for God because he first reached for us. Nothing in spiritual life originates with us. It all originates with God" (25).
"Jesus' interactions with the people he came into contact with during his life on earth make it clear that desire, and the willingness to name that desire in Christ's presence, is a catalytic element of the spiritual life" (27). Hmmm.
Chapter 2-- Solitude: A Place for Desire
Most of us are not very good at sitting with longing and desire--our own or someone else's. It feels tender. It feels vulnerable. It feels out of control (30).
"The longing for solitude is also the longing to find ourselves, to be in touch with what is most real within us, that which is more solid and enduring than what defines us externally. This is our soul, that place at the very center of our being that is known by God, that is grounded with God and is one with God.
"But it's tricky to get the soul to come out, as Parker Palmer so eloquently acknowledges [when she said earlier that the soul is like a wild animal--tough and resilient, but also shy and only able to be seen if one is silent]. We are not very safe for ourselves, because our internal experience involves continual critique and judgment, and the tender soul does not want to risk it" (32).
"One of the new challenges of our generation is the impact of technology on our spirituality. This warrants serious consideration. If we are not careful, technology has a way of compromising our ability to be present to ourselves, to God and to each other--all of which are fundamental elements of the spiritual life (34).
"No wonder we feel disconnected from God: we are rarely able to give him our full attention in solitude and silence" (35). "The other disciplines described in this book and elsewhere are a wonderful smorgasbord of spiritual sustenance, but we really can't engage any of them until solitude becomes a place of rest for us rather than another place for human striving and hard work" (37).
"One of the most important lessons I have learned over the past few years is how important it is to have time and space for what's real in my life--to celebrate the joys, grieve the losses, shed my tears, sit with the questions, feel my anger, attend to my loneliness. This 'being with what is' is not the same thing as problem solving or fixing, because not everything can be fixed or solved. Rather, it means allowing God to be with me in that place and waiting for him to do what is needed. In silence my soul waits for you and you alone, O God. From you alone comes my salvation.
"When we don't attend to our vulnerabilities and instead try to repress it all and keep soldiering on, we get weary from holding it in. Eventually it leaks out in ways that are damaging to us and to others.
"Another reason we are so tired is that we are always working hard to figure things out rather than learning how to cease striving, how to be with what is true in God's presence and let God be God in the most intimate places of our life--which is, in the end, the only thing that will change anything. We're busy trying to make stuff happen rather than waiting on God to make stuff happen" (41).
"What can you say now that represents the truth of your current experience with this most significant Christian discipline [of solitude]?
...The only time when I am not lonely and my longing for union is satisfied is when I am in solitude. In the world of people and things, I do sometimes experience moments that have a sense of completeness--moments of union with God and others and the world beyond--but most times these moments are fleeting and give only a taste of what my heart is longing for. The truth is, they often seem to exacerbate the longings that I now know will never be completely satisfied here on this earth. No matter how beautiful such moments are, they are often fraught with a painful awareness of human separateness even from those we love the most, and I am left trying to manage my unruly tendencies to cling and grasp, control and manipulate, fix and fill in order to numb the pain of that separateness....When I reengage my life in community with others and live from that place of union with God, there is indeed a peace that passes understanding and transcends the longing (43).
Chapter 3-- Scripture: Encountering God Through Lecto Divina
Reading for information vs transformation and the assertion that we should read the Bible like a love letter: "The study of Scripture is important, but if we stop there, we will eventually hit a wall spiritually. Information gathering may be exhilarating and even useful at times, bu in the end our soul know that there must be something more" (50).
Moving from head to heart: Allowing ourselves to pay attention at this level may feel a bit threatening at first, depending on how suspicious or out of touch we are with our feelings and internal dynamics. Robert Mulholland points out that in our culture there is generally little danger of neglecting the cognitive, rational, and analytic dynamics of our being, for these:
'are so hyper-developed in our culture and in our normal modes of learning...we must remember...loving God with all our heart and all of our soul precedes loving God with all of our mind'" (52).
She then goes on to laud the practice of reading short sections of Scripture and meditating on them, seeing how it resonates within, and avoiding reading huge chunks for information. I deny her seeming assertion that this is the only manner of approaching the Bible of value, but I do appreciate her point. She describes attentively noting her reaction to a command. "It's pretty subtle at first, but I stop and give myself a little space to notice that feeling and wonder about it" (53). She ends up getting to the heart of her resistance to the command to "love your enemies" and framing it in a context of wanting to be more like Christ, and "Now God and I are having a conversation that has some substance to it!" (53).
Yes and No
1. Yes
--applying Scripture is important
--applying requires
*focused time
*a self-knowledge that many today are desperately lacking
2. No
--no appreciation of reading all the larger portions for context guiding applications, and indeed guiding what the goal is. She mentions the goal of Christ-likeness, being transformed into a more loving person. Whatever the goal is, I want it to be dictated by Scripture, not a mix of Church tradition/cliche, and modern feel-goodness
--no mention of sin. Therefore, no mention of Christ as our atoning sacrifice who gives us his righteousness. Jesus was indeed a great example, but if only that, we are powerless to emulate the example.
To me, the problem in following commands is idolatry. I count myself fortunate that right now at church I'm re-learning that the basis for all sin is idolatry. To the point that I agree with Barton, I appreciate the reminder to read Scripture mindfully, and as Alan Kraft says, look for "the sin beneath this sin." To Barton's example, realizing that we are resistant to loving our enemies is a crucial first step. Sitting or dealing with that in God's presence is another important step that we often neglect. But I believe Scripture would guide us even beyond that-- to naming it the sin, identifying how it is idolatrous, confessing, and asking God for help!
As for lecto divina, I have very mixed opinions. I do appreciate Barton's statement, "Although Bible study is not a part of the lectio process itself, Bible study is an important supplement" (55).
Chapter 4-- Prayer: Deepening Our Intimacy with God
As one grows in maturity, they will enter "the experience of having our prayers go cold" (64), which "signals an invitation to deeper levels of intimacy that will move beyond communication, which primarily involves words and concepts, into communion, which is primarily beyond words" (65).
"In Christian tradition, there are several signs that indicate you are transitioning to a new phase int he life of prayer:
1. What you are doing isn't working, no matter how much effort you put into it. You find yourself asking, Is this all there is?
2. Your desire for God continues to be strong even though you have no desire for anything external--words, images, previous structures for prayer, including the Scriptures. While these things may still be present to some extent, you are not attracted to them anymore. Words fail. The hunger for intimacy--to just hang out with God--is all there is.
3. You find yourself enjoying being along, aware of God's presence without structured activity. In the deepest part of your being, you know that God alone can satisfy the longings of the human heart, and other things fade in importance. There is not attraction to thought, meditation or any other human activity or achievement. This last condition is most important, for it justifies the other two and indicates a readiness to leave words behind and remain with God alone in an act of love."
"In most cases, the reason we prefer to talk about prayer and read about prayer but don't actually pray has more to do with our ambivalence about intimacy than with anything else" (66).
Prayer Beyond Words: "the movement beyond words to an intimacy that requires no words"... like lovers making love, a mother nursing a baby, John leaning against Jesus at the last supper. "The Old Testament also refers repeatedly to a kind of knowing that comes in the absence of words or in the stillness of waiting. Be still before the Lord and wait. Be still and know that I am God. In silence my soul waits for you alone, oh God" (68).
"The soul returns to its most natural state in God. In returning and rest you will be saved" (69).
The Intimacy of Breathing:
"In the stillness we make yet another discovery: the Holy Spirit is the One who really knows how to pray. We discover that prayer is truest when it has passed beyond words into the realm where the Holy Spirit groans for us with utterances that are too deep for words (see Romans 8:26-27). The silence becomes a time when we listen for the prayer that the Holy Spirit is praying deep within us as he moves between the depths of our human experience and the divine will, interceding for us beyond words" (70).
"Words, when they do find their way to the surface from these depths carry with them a whole new power and meaning because they are forged in the caldron of our deepest longings for God" (70). And thus the "breath prayer" is born. "Usually our breath prayer will remain with us for quite some time, and we get to the point where is prays itself without our even having to think about it" (70).
Discovering Your Breath Prayer:
"You don't think your way into your breath prayer; you discover it by listening to your deepest longings and desires in God's presence" (71).
Prayer in Community:
"One of the most natural results of developing a vibrant personal prayer life is that we begin to notice a deep desire to enter meaningfully into prayer in community with others" (73).
One example is the Daily Office.
"Intercessory prayer is not primarily about believing we know what someone else needs and then trying to tell God what the answer is. It is not about wrestling some result from God. Intercessory prayer is more about recognizing that we do not know how to pray for others--or ourselves for that matter--but the Holy Spirit knows. Since we understand that the Holy Spirit is already interceding for us before the throne of grace, we can bring a name or a need, express it simply and in the silence experience our own groaning and Holy Spirit's groaning for that person. We can listen for the prayer that is already being prayed for that person before the throne of grace, and without struggling hard to put things into words, we can enter into God's caring love for that person and wait with them and for them in God's presence" (74).
All of Life As Prayer:
"Any approach to the spiritual life that sets up false or awkward distinctions between prayer and life, or prayer and the other disciplines, seems to unnaturally rip apart elements of life that belong together or to unneccesarily complicate something that is in its essence quite simple" (75).
Chapter 5-- Honoring the Body: Flesh-and-Blood Spirituality
Main Scripture example: Elijah in 1 Kings 19. "The angel even pointed out that if he did not care for his body, the journey into the presence of God would be too much for him" (79).
"Up to this point, I had been quite out of touch with any sense that my life in a body had anything to do with my spirituality. Intent on trying to be 'spiritual,' I had somehow relegated life in the body to some lesser category that warranted very little of my attention" (79). "I was becoming more aware that I am not merely a soul and spirit; I am an embodied human being, and my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)....the Scriptures indicate that it is possible to glorify God in our bodies rather than merely glorifying the body, which seemed to be the focus of the surrounding culture" (80).
"All the great themes of Scripture affirm the significance of the body as a place where the presence of God can be known and experienced. The incarnation itself--Christ's choice to take on flesh and inhabit a human body--forever elevates the experience of embodiment to the heights of spiritual significance" (81). Other examples: the sacrament of communion, the fact that our bodies will resurrect on the last day and we will dwell forever with God as embodied people.
Application: "The appreciation of life in the body includes embracing our maleness or our femaleness, and thus our sexuality, as a gift from God that helps reveal his true nature" (82).
Application: "For years now I have used a daily bike ride to a nearby retreat center as a way of connecting physical exercise with time for silence and prayer. This is as much a spiritual practice for me as sitting at home with my Bible open, because it connects every part of me with the One who created me" (84). "There are many creative ways to forge a life-giving connection between the spiritual life and our body; the key is our intent an our attention to the way in which God makes himself known in this most basic aspect of our existence" (85).
Listening to the Body:
"Our bodies have much to tell us if we could only figure out how to listen. In fact, oftentimes God speaks to us through our body. Most times, our body is the first to know if we are overcommitted, stressed, uneasy, or joyful, and when we need to attend to something that is causing us pain or disease" (85). "One area of my life where this has really proved to be true is my work and vocation. As I have worked to clarify my calling, I have learned to pay attention to my energy levels in response to different activities. If I experience a particular activity as being inordinately draining, I begin to consider very carefully how much of myself God wants me to give to that. On the other hand, if I feel particularly energized by a certain person or activity, I can pay attention to how God may be leading me to incorporate more of that into my life" (86).
Praying in the Body:
"As I sat on a tree trunk that had fallen across a stream, I prayed and felt myself rejuvenated by the beauty and the silence. I saw hundreds of tadpoles swimming around in a puddle that had formed in a rut--of all things!--and it reminded me that life can spring up anywhere, even in the dry and rutted places of my own life. I paid attention to how good it felt to be in my body, climbed a hill until my heart beat fast, got sweaty and lay down exhausted when I got back--full or a sense of the immensity and yet the nearness of God.
"If that's not prayer, I don't know what is!" (88).
Chapter 6-- Self-Examination: Bringing my Whole Self Before God
"There comes a time in the spiritual life when one of the major things God is up to is to lovingly help us see ourselves more clearly...one of the deepest longings of the human heart is to be known and loved unconditionally....The problem is that most of us aren't willing to take the risk of being seen so completely [as to truly be loved unconditionally]... All of us would prefer to have the experience of unconditional love without having to take the risk of letting someone know us that well!" (92).
"We need a practice that offers us a way of opening to the love of God in the places of our brokenness and sin--which is the only way true spiritual transformation ever takes place" (93).
(Of Psalm 139): "There is a paradox, of course, in the truth that I am inviting God to search me and know me when in fact he already has searched me and known me. This may point to the fact that the real issue in self-examination is not that I am inviting God to know me (since he already does) but that I am inviting God to help me know me" (94).
examen of consciousness-- a way to develop our capacities to recognize the presence of God, also called a daily review. A simple discipline that helps us to become more God conscious, it involves taking a few minutes at the end of each day to go back over the events of the day and invite God to show us where he was present with us and how we responded to his presence (95).
"How many people do you know who are effective at being themselves and letting God use that?" (98).
(Of Psalm 139): David's certainty that the person God created him to be is deeply good has become the bedrock of his identity; he is able to let the parts that are confusing even to himself come into the light of God's presence so that God can show him what is good and what is evil" (100).
"When we have come to a place of certainty in the steadfastness of God's love and are anchored by a sense of the basic goodness of our created self, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by inviting God to search us and know us to our very depths" (101).
examen of conscience--a way to see ourselves more clearly in light of God's presence. Involves 3 steps: seeing something that went wrong in behavior or action, which may provide us a glimpse of how the action has fallen short of Christ-lineness and/or how it has wounded others; being willing to name our failure for what is is and also to name what was going on inside us, seeking some understanding of the inner dynamics that caused the behavior, with God's guidance because often our sin patterns are unknown to us without God's revelation; and confession. (102)
purgation--the process by which God gradually strips us of more and more layers of our own sinfulness; obvious sins which even our culture eschews; other deliberate sins that may still be "normal" in our culture; then unconscious sins and omissions; and finally deep-seated attitudes and inner orientations out of which our behavior patterns flow (102-103).
"Confession is the endgame in the self-examination process" (103).
"Our culture promotes a profound sense of denial about the presence of sin in our lives and the ways our sins and negative patterns wound others. In our litigious milieu, even when something is our fault, we are encouraged not to admit it unless we can derive some benefit from that" (104).
Chapter 7-- Discernment: Recognizing and Responding to the Presence of God
"Discernment is first of all a habit, a way of seeing that eventually permeates our whole life" (111).
"Scripture also speaks of 'discernment of spirits' and encourages us to 'test the spirits to see whether they are from God' (1 Corinthians 12:10; 1 John 4:1). This aspect of discernment helps us to distinguish...the true from false, in the world 'out there' but also in the interior world of our thoughts and motives" (112).
"God's will for is is generally for us to pursue that which gives us life (John 10:10) and to turn us away from things that drain life from us and leave us debilitated" (113).
"'I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.' He says that the wisdom that enables us to choose life is not something that we will find 'out there' in heaven or across the ocean somewhere but that this knowledge is very near to us--in our mouths and in our hearts for us to notice and observe (Deuteronomy 30:19-20). In other words, it is a visceral, in-the-body experience" (114).
"The Scriptures are clear that discernment, when it is given, is always a gift" (116).
1--"To really open myself to knowing and doing the will of God requires trust that God's intentions toward me are deeply good. Discernment requires interior freedom, a state of wide-openness to God and the capacity to relinquish whatever might keep us from choosing God" (117).
2--"The second fundamental building block of the discernment process is the belief that love is our primary calling" (117).
3--"The third foundational building block is the belief that God does communicate with us through the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is given to help us know the demands of love in our situation" (118).
"The practice of discernment begins with a prayer for indifference. We generally think of indifference as a negative attitude characterized by apathy and not caring; in the realm of discernment, however, indifference is a very positive term that is rich in meaning. Here it means, 'I am indifferent to anything but God's will.'....Mary the mother of Jesus is one of the most compelling examples of utter indifference or 'given-overness' to the will of God...'Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word'....Until we have come to a place of indifference, any prayer for wisdom may well be something akin to a rigged election" (119-120).
"... our deepest orientation and desire, some essence of ourselves that God knew before we were even created in physical form. There are desires that are deep, true and fundamental to our being in Christ; these are the 'desire of your heart' that God promises to fulfill (Psalm 37:4), although often differently from how we might have envisioned. A profound life orientation is revealed in these deepest desires, and when we come in touch with them, we have found God's direction for our life. This usually also has something to do with our calling, the purpose for which God created us. This is that part of ourselves--a passion or burden that we carry that is uniquely ours--and it cannot be set aside lightly" (122).
"'Wants are mine; shoulds are somebody else's'" (123).
In the list of things used to aid in discernment, I note that:
--Asking the question "How does this fit into overall life calling?" doesn't help me discern my overall life calling.
--"Consolation and desolation" is a great catchphrase for that which brings freedom, wholeness, growth.
--Scripture is third on the list. Hmmm. I would hope that the best way for a Christian to decide on their overall life calling would be to follow the commands of Scripture. But that's not the point. This list is good. Others on the list: life of Christ, character and growth development, eternal perspective, and community.
Chapter 8-- Sabbath: Establishing Rhythms of Work and Rest
"'If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath--our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbaths for us'" (Wayne Muller, quoted on page 131).
"I know what it is like to rest for hours until I have energy to delight in something--good food, a good book, a leisurely walk, a long-awaited conversation with someone I love" (137).
"And the first order of things is that we are creatures and God is the Creator. God is the only one who is infinite. I am finite, which means that I live within the physical limits of time and space and bodily limits of strength and energy. There are limits to my capacities relationally, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually" (137).
"First, the heart of Sabbath is that we cease our work so that we can rest and delight in God and God's good gifts...Second, it is important to establish a regular rhythm if at all possible....The third principle that has become foundational for me as I have lived this discipline is that Sabbath-keeping is not primarily a private, self-indulgent discipline" (139).
"[If we engage with Sabbath primarily as a private discipline] Our children will then not have the opportunity to experience sabbath time with the guidance of their parents, they will not learn how to rest and delight in God (and they so desperately need it)...The other thing that's lost to the next generation is experiencing the quality of our presence on the sabbath. I am different on the sabbath"(140).
"There have to be times that you let yourself feel what you feel, when you let the tears come rather than blinking them back because you don't have time to cry" (144).
Chapter 9-- A Rule of Life: Cultivating Rhythms for Spiritual Transformation
"Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We think that somehow we will fall into transformation by accident" (147).
"A rule of life seeks to respond to two questions: Who do I want to be? How do I want to live? Actually, it might be more accurate to say that a rule of life seeks to address the interplay between these two questions: How do I want to live so I can be who I want to be?" (147).
"One of the great temptations of the spiritual life is to believe that if I were in another season of life, I would be more spiritual. The truth is that spiritual transformation takes place as we embrace challenges and opportunities associated with each season of our life" (149).
"For those who are extroverted, the disciplines of solitude and silence will be more of a stretch, but it is a stretch toward wholeness. Introverts may feel that they don't need relationships in community, but nothing could be further from the truth. Without a balanced approach to spiritual disciplines, we run the risk of cultivating a one-sided spirituality that will disintegrate under pressure from the part of us we have left undeveloped" (149).
"The process of beginning to cultivate our own rhythm of spiritual practices begins with attending to our desire, noticing what words, phrases, and prayers seem to most consistently capture our sense of longing for God and for spiritual transformation we are experiencing in these days" (151).
"Early morning is a special time of day, when we are in a more rested and undefended state than we are at any other time" (154).
"It is impossible to overstate the importance of community in the spiritual transformation process. This is not the same thing as the Christian busyness that often accompanies church life; it is about quietly sharing the journey with others who are also drawn to deeper levels of spiritual transformation that enable them to discern and do God's will" (160).
Appendix A
"The purpose of journeying together in spiritual friendship and spiritual community...is to listen to one another's desire for God, to nurture that desire in each other and to support one another in seeking a way of life that is consistent with that desire" (169).
Appendix C
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Calhoun "for a more exhaustive list of spiritual disciplines"
How spiritual disciplines "are the main way we offer our bodies to God as a living sacrifice"
Sin and Negative Pattern---Corresponding Discipline
Gossip/sins of speech--Silence, self-examination
Anxiety and worry--breath prayer, Scripture reflection
Envy and competitiveness--solitude, self-examination
Discontent--attending to desire
Self-reliance--Silence, prayer, community
Avoidance patterns--Community, spiritual friendship
Over-busyness--Solitude, discernment, sabbath, rule of life
Anger and bitterness--Silence, self-examination, confession
Feelings of inadequacy--Examen of consciousness, self-knowledge and celebration
Guilt, shame--Solitude, confession, forgiveness
Lust--Attending to desire in God's presence
Restlessness and stress--Solitude, silence, breath prayer
Lethargy and/or laziness--Caring for the body, exercise
Lack of faith--Prayer, Scripture
Feelings of isolation--Examen of consciousness, community
Selfishness and self-centeredness--Prayer and worship in community
Lack of direction--Discernment, listening to the body
Monday, January 29, 2018
Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I am just so compulsive when it comes tosaving hoarding quotes from books. I can't even pick out the ones from this one that are my "favorites," but whenever I want a refresh on what this book is all about, I can just re-read all my quotes and won't have to re-read the entire book. This was definitely a 5-star read for me. Has so much good perspective on the role of work in the lives of people, believers and unbelievers alike, its importance and its limitations.
"Because of the nature of God's creation, we need to work for our happiness. And because of God's intentions for our work--to contribute to the flourishing of the world--we have glimpses of what we could accomplish. But because of the fall of the human race, our work is also profoundly frustrating, never as fruitful as we want, and often a complete failure. This is why so many inhabit the extremes of idealism and cynicism--or even ricochet back and forth between those poles. Idealism says, 'Through my work I am going to change things, make a difference, accomplish something new, bring justice to the world.' Cynicism says, 'Nothing really changes. Don't get your hopes up. Do what it takes to make a living. Don't let yourself care too much. Get out of it whatever you can.' Genesis 3, verse 18 tell us not only that 'thorns and thistles' will come out of the ground but also that 'you will eat the plants of the field'" (89).
Ecclesiastes 2:22-23. "Grief and pain so great that he cannot rest: This is the experience of the person whose soul is resting wholly on the circumstances of their work. In this poignant picture, the author is consciously contrasting us with the God whose labor led to real rest, and unconsciously with the Savior who could even sleep through a storm" (98).
"Where one's identity in prior generations might come from being the son of so-and-so or living in a particular part of town or being a member of a church or club, today young people are seeking to define themselves by the status of their work. What wisdom, then, would the Bible give us in choosing our work? First, if we have the luxury of options, we would want to choose work that we can do well...Second, because the main purpose of work is to serve the world, we would want to choose work that benefits others...Third, if possible, we do not simply wish to benefit our family, benefit the human community, and benefit ourselves--we also want to benefit our field of work itself" (103-104).
"One of the reasons work is both fruitless and pointless is the powerful inclination of the human heart to make work, and its attendant benefits, the main basis of one's meaning and identity....it becomes a way to distinguish myself from my neighbor, to show the world and prove to myself that I'm special. It is a way to accumulate power and security, and to exercise control over my destiny" (109).
"They built the city to 'make a name for [them]selves' through their accomplishments--but if we lack a name, it means we don't know who we are. 'To make a name' in the language of the Bible is to construct an identity for ourselves. We either get our name--out defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness--from what God has done for us an in us (Revelation 2:17), or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves" (110).
Quote from Mere Christianity: "Now what I want you to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive--is competitive by its very nature....Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others" (112).
"There is a danger than you might merely be inspired by Esther's example....If you see Esther not as an example but as a pointer to Jesus, and if you see Jesus not as an example but as a Savior doing these things for you personally, then you will see how valuable you are to him" (121).
"If you see what Jesus Christ has done for you, losing the ultimate palace for you, then you will be able to start to serve God and your neighbor from your place in the palace" (124).
"Why do the Ten Commandments begin with a prohibition of idolatry? It is, Luther argued, because we never break the other commandments without breaking the first....if you lie or obscure inconvenient facts, it is because you have counted success as more important than obedience to God or the good of your 'neighbor' with whom you are negotiating. So beneath the sin of lying is the deeper, conditioning sin of idolatry...Idolatry has power over our actions because it has power over our hearts" (130).
...idols are not only the basis for personal sins and problems; they are also the basis for collective ones. When an individual makes and serves and idol, it creates psychological distortion and trouble; when a family, group, or country makes and serves and idol, it creates social and cultural trouble" (132).
"Modern societies turned away from the authorities of religion and tradition, and replaced them with the authorities of reason and individual freedom" (133).
"... while ancient cultures ostracized anyone who disbelieved in the gods, modern culture castigates anyone who is thought guilty of bigotry or appears to be an enemy of equality and individual freedom" (133-134).
"Keeping in mind that an idol is a good thing turned into an ultimate thing, then a corporate idol is an overemphasis and absolutizing of an admirable cultural trait" (134).
"The idols of modern culture have had a profound influence on the shape of our work today. In traditional societies people found their meaning and sense of value by submitting their interests and sacrificing their desires to serve higher causes like God, family, and other people. In modern societies there is often no higher cause than individual interests and desires" (139).
"Modern culture tells us there are no moral absolutes and everyone must choose his or her own standard for right and wrong, yet it then turns and says we must respect human rights and honor the freedom and dignity of every human being. 'But on what basis?' Nietzsche would ask. If there are no moral absolutes, then how can you arbitrarily declare that there are?....despite the fact that in Western society there is still a strong latent influence from traditional worldviews such as Christianity, along with much of the older modern optimism about science, progress, and human freedom, there has still been a pervasive shift called the 'postmodern turn'" (142).
"Heidegger, Docx, and others such as Jacques Ellul are saying that technology, uncertainty, and the market have become the idols of postmodern society. Because in postmodern society no one is sure or can agree about 'ends' or goals for the human race, we now have only 'means' or techniques. Since there is no longer any dominant vision of healthy human life or good human society, we are left with nothing but individual competition for personal success of power. If something can be done through technology, it will be done, because our technology has no higher ideals or moral values to guide it or limit it" (144).
"Many writers argue convincingly that the values of the market--consumerism and cost-benefit efficiencies--are not spreading into every part of life, even family life. This is because modern capitalism is no longer simply a useful instrument for the distribution of goods and services, but has become a near-absolute idol" (145).
"We are encouraged to create a persona through the brands we choose to purchase and the identity we are able to construct for ourselves online" (147).
"Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff observes that modern culture defines the happy life as a life that is 'going well'--full of experiential pleasure--while to the ancients, the happy life meant the life that is lived well, with character, courage, humility, love, and justice" (147).
"Christians agree that when we sell and market, we need to show potential customers that a product 'adds value' to their lives. That doesn't mean it can give them a life. But because Christians have a deeper understanding of human well-being, we will often find ourselves swimming against the very strong currents of the corporate idols of our culture" (148).
"'What hope is there for work? How can we put work right?' we may ask...Nothing will be perfectly right, as St Paul says, until the 'day of Christ' at the end of history....The Christian gospel decidedly furnishes us with the resources for more inspired, realistic, satisfying, and faithful work today. How? First, the gospel provides an alternative story line for our work; this is vital because all work is propelled by a worldview or a narrative account of what human life is all about and what will help us thrive. Second, the Christian faith gives us a new and rich conception of work as partnering with God in his love and care for the world. This biblical conception helps us appreciate all work, from the most simple to the most complex, by both believers and nonbelievers...Third, the gospel gives us a particularly sensitive new moral compass, through a host of sound ethical guidelines to help us make decisions, as well as wise counsel about human hearts. Finally, the gospel radically changes our motives for work and fills us with a new and durable inner power that will be with us through thick and thin" (149-156
"The term 'worldview,' from the German word Weltanschauung, means the comprehensive perspective from which we interpret all of reality. But a worldview is not merely a set of philosophical bullet points. It is essentially a master narrative, a fundamental story about (a) what human life in the world should be like, (b) what has knocked it off balance, and (c) what can be done to make it right. No one can really function in the world without some working answers to those big questions, and so, to provide those answers, we adopt a world-story, a narrative that explains things--a worldview" (156).
"The gospel, however, teaches, that the meaning of life is to love God and love our neighbor, and that the operating principle is servanthood" (158).
Quoting Al Wolters: "The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God's good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy as intrinsic to the creation itself...something in the good creation is identified as [the source] of evil" (160).
"For example, the movie Lost in Translation assumes that life is ultimately meaningless but affords some small comfort in friendship; the movie Babe inspires us that even a pig can be a sheepdog if he defies tradition and tries hard enough. I believe that Christians can appreciate either kind of story, if it is well told, because from a gospel perspective, both naive and cynical stories are partly true. Life in this fallen world is to a great degree meaningless, our aspirations are constantly being frustrated, and sometimes the respectable people are oppressive and bigoted. And yet there is a Good that will triumph over Evil in the end. From a Christian perspective the problem with both kinds of stories is that they tend to blame problems on things besides sin and identify salvation in things besides God--and therefore are ultimately too simplistic" (174-175).
"...it is a mistake to think that the Christian worldview is operating only when we are doing such overtly Christian activities. Instead, think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you "look" at everything else in the world...Christians in business will see profit as only one of several bottom lines, and they will work passionately for any kind of enterprise that serves the common good. The Christian writer can constantly be showing the destructiveness of making something besides God into the central thing, even without mentioning God directly" (181).
"The gay community has contributed hugely to the flourishing of New York City...Another group often noted for their commitment to moving to neighborhoods that have fallen into disrepair and rehabilitating them is the gay community...And, of course, we all know someone in our field who is not a Christian who seems to hold the best values and produce the most elegant product, beautiful dance piece, or trusted and well-organized team. If the Christian worldview is so unique, how do we account for this?" (186-187).
"We must ask how [the Christian's work] can be done distinctively and for his glory. As an extension of God's providential work, our labor has its orientation toward our neighbor, and we must ask how it can be don excellently and for his or her good. This latter motivation is available to everyone...[The] aspect of work-as-provision is the reason that much work that Christians do is not done, at least not in its visible form, any differently from the way non-Christians do it...In fact, an unbalanced emphasis on worldview has certain dangers. For example, it can lead us to privilege white-collar work over blue-collar work" (187).
So this biblical conception of work--as a vehicle for God's loving provision for the world--is essential. It counteracts the elitism and sectarianism that can creep into our approach to work when we grasp the distinctiveness of the Christian worldview (188).
Consider Isaiah 28, verses 24-29: 'When a famer plows for planting...when he has leveled the surface...does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in its plot, and spelt in its field? His God instructs him and teaches him the right way...Grain must be ground to make bread...all this also comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom.' This is remarkable. Isaiah tells us that anyone who becomes a skillful farmer, or who brings advancements in agriculture, is being taught by God (189).
"Every advancement in learning, every work of art, every innovation in healthcare or technology or management or governance, is simply God 'opening his book of creation and revealing his truth' to us" (190).
On Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1) and the pagan king in Abraham's day (Genesis 20:6-7): "These are indications of how God's Spirit functions both as a nonsaving ennobling force in the world and as a nonsaving restraining force in the world. This is not the Spirit working as a converting or a sanctifying agent. Rather he acts to give wisdom, courage, and insight and to restrain the effects of sin--even to those who would deny God's existence (191).
On Romans 1: "First, we must acknowledge that there is no neutrality in the world. Everyone who does not acknowledge Christ as Lord is operating out of a false view of ultimate reality, while to confess Christ as Lord is to be in line with ultimate reality. Everyone is operating from a worldview that either denies Christ or worships him. No one is objective or neutral; no one can avoid the question. At the same time, the doctrine of common grace means that despite all false worldviews, everyone grasps and to some degree acknowledges aspects of the biblical worldview: truths about God, creation, human nature, and our need for rescue (193)."
"Without an understanding of common grace, the world can be a pretty confusing place for a Christian. It would be natural for many Christians to identify with Antonio Salieri: He is bewildered and bitter that as a morally good person, his talent is modest, while Mozart (a morally despicable person, at least in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus) has been favored by God through the gift of his soaring talent. Beyond this blindness to his own sin, Salieri's problem was a failure to understand the reality of common grace. Grace gives out gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill according to his grace--that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across the human race like seed, in order to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world. By rights, sin should be making life on earth here much more unbearable than it is--and in fact, all of creation and culture should have fallen apart by now. The reason it is not worse is because of the gift of common grace....so many of the gifts of God has put in the world are given to nonbelievers. Mozart was a gift to us--whether he was a believer or not. So Christians are free to study the world of human culture in order to know more of God; for as creatures made in His image we can appreciate truth and wisdom wherever we find it.... Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means that unbelievers are never as messed up as their false worldview should make them. For in the Christian story, the antagonist is not non-Christians but the reality of sin, which (as the gospel tells us) lies within us as well as within them" (194-195).
"Why this disengagement with our culture? One reason is a 'thin' or legalistic view of sin, where sin is seen as a series of discrete acts of noncompliance with God's regulations. You pursue Christian growth largely by seeking environments where you are less likely to do these sinful actions or to encounter others who have done them. Sin can essentially be removed from your life through separation and discipline....The complex, organic nature of our sin will still be at work making idols out of good things in our lives--such as our moral goodness, financial security, family, doctrinal purity, or pride in our culture...But too much emphasis on wholesale withdrawal from culture increases the likelihood of slipping into other more 'respectable' idolatries. A theologically 'thick' view of sin, by contrast, sees it as a compulsive drive of the heart to produce idols. This view should lead neither to withdrawal nor to uncritical consumption, but rather to humble, critical engagement with culture" (197).
"Christians' disengagement from popular culture usually carries over into dualism at work. 'Dualism" is a term used to describe a separating all between the sacred and the secular. It is a direct result of a thin view of sin, common grace, and God's providential purposes" (199-200).
"The integration of faith and work is the opposite of dualism. We should be willing to be engaged with the cultural and vocational worlds of non-Christians. Our thick view of sin will remind us that even explicitly Christian work and culture will have some idolatrous discourse within it. Our thick view of common grace will remind us that even explicitly non-Christian work and culture will always have some witness to God's truth in it. Because Christians are never as good as their right beliefs should make them an non-Christians are never as bad as their wrong beliefs should make them, we will adopt a stance of critical enjoyment of human culture and its expressions in every field of work. We will learn to recognize the half-truths and resist the idols; and we will learn to recognize and celebrate the glimpses of justice, wisdom, truth, and beauty we find around us in all aspects of life" (201).
"Love, then, occupies a supreme place in the Christian imagination. As Jesus says, to be fully human boils down to loving God and loving our neighbor" (211).
"Christians must remain absolutely committed to an understanding of human rights based on the image of God" (215).
"According to the Bible, wisdom is more than just obeying God's ethical norms; it is knowing the right thing to do in the 80 percent of life's situations in which the moral rules don't provide the clear answer" (215).
"On wisdom, and how the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom (Ephesians 1:7). In Acts 15, in deciding whether Gentiles had to keep Jewish dietary laws: "They used their best thinking and reasoning, their knowledge and experience, and came up with a sound decision that they attributed to the Holy Spirit" (218).
"If we being to work as if we were serving the Lord, we will be free from both overwork and underwork" (220).
Psalm 130:4--"But with you there is forgiveness, therefore you are feared." "The more you experience God's mercy and forgiveness, the more the true fear of the Lord will increase in you" (221).
Romans 12:11--"Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord." zeal= a combination of diligence and urgency. "Keep your spiritual fervor" = "as to your spirit boiling."
"So we are asked to bring emotion, discipline, and urgency to the task of being living sacrifices in the lives we lead and the work we do. We are asked to live with passion (240).
"All of us are haunted by the work under the work--that need to prove and save ourselves, to gain a sense of worth and identity. But if we can experience gospel-rest in our hearts, if we can be free from the need to earn our salvation through our work, we will have a deep reservoir of refreshment that continually rejuvenates us, restores our perspective, and renews our passion" (242).
"To violate the rhythm of work and rest (in either direction) leads to chaos in our life and in the world around us. Sabbath is therefor a celebration of our design....God portrays Sabbath as a reenactment of emancipation from slavery. It reminds us how he delivered his people from a condition in which they were not human beings, but simply units of capacity in Pharaoh's brick production system. Anyone who cannot obey God's command to observe the Sabbath is a slave, even a self-imposed one...Sabbath is therefore a declaration of your freedom. It means you are not a slave--not to your culture's expectations, your family's hopes, your medical school's demands, not even to your own insecurities. It is important that you learn to speak this truth to yourself with a note of triumph--otherwise you will feel guilty for taking time off, or you will be unable to truly unplug" (244).
"We are also to think of Sabbath as an act of trust... To practice Sabbath is a disciplined and faithful way to remember that you are not the one who keeps the world turning, who provides for your family, or even the one who keeps your work projects moving forward" (245).
"Many people are doing the 'work under the work.' They are not merely doing the work that draws the salary--they are also working to chase away their sense of insignificance. But here in Jesus we find the 'rest under the rest,'... Without it, all other work will be unsatisfying" (247).
"Many people have asked if we plan to spin it off into its own independent nonprofit, and the answer is 'no.' Our goal has been to model our conviction that vocational life is essential to being fully human in a Biblical sense. Churches need to embrace the whole person--the married or single person, the healthy or ill person, the person at work and the person at home. Church-based faith and work ministry is important for two reasons: (1) work is often the crucible in which God shines a light on a person's idols and refines them in Christ-likeness, and (2) the church is touching the world at large through the faithful presence of its people in the workplace" (262).
I am just so compulsive when it comes to
"Because of the nature of God's creation, we need to work for our happiness. And because of God's intentions for our work--to contribute to the flourishing of the world--we have glimpses of what we could accomplish. But because of the fall of the human race, our work is also profoundly frustrating, never as fruitful as we want, and often a complete failure. This is why so many inhabit the extremes of idealism and cynicism--or even ricochet back and forth between those poles. Idealism says, 'Through my work I am going to change things, make a difference, accomplish something new, bring justice to the world.' Cynicism says, 'Nothing really changes. Don't get your hopes up. Do what it takes to make a living. Don't let yourself care too much. Get out of it whatever you can.' Genesis 3, verse 18 tell us not only that 'thorns and thistles' will come out of the ground but also that 'you will eat the plants of the field'" (89).
Ecclesiastes 2:22-23. "Grief and pain so great that he cannot rest: This is the experience of the person whose soul is resting wholly on the circumstances of their work. In this poignant picture, the author is consciously contrasting us with the God whose labor led to real rest, and unconsciously with the Savior who could even sleep through a storm" (98).
"Where one's identity in prior generations might come from being the son of so-and-so or living in a particular part of town or being a member of a church or club, today young people are seeking to define themselves by the status of their work. What wisdom, then, would the Bible give us in choosing our work? First, if we have the luxury of options, we would want to choose work that we can do well...Second, because the main purpose of work is to serve the world, we would want to choose work that benefits others...Third, if possible, we do not simply wish to benefit our family, benefit the human community, and benefit ourselves--we also want to benefit our field of work itself" (103-104).
"One of the reasons work is both fruitless and pointless is the powerful inclination of the human heart to make work, and its attendant benefits, the main basis of one's meaning and identity....it becomes a way to distinguish myself from my neighbor, to show the world and prove to myself that I'm special. It is a way to accumulate power and security, and to exercise control over my destiny" (109).
"They built the city to 'make a name for [them]selves' through their accomplishments--but if we lack a name, it means we don't know who we are. 'To make a name' in the language of the Bible is to construct an identity for ourselves. We either get our name--out defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness--from what God has done for us an in us (Revelation 2:17), or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves" (110).
Quote from Mere Christianity: "Now what I want you to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive--is competitive by its very nature....Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others" (112).
"There is a danger than you might merely be inspired by Esther's example....If you see Esther not as an example but as a pointer to Jesus, and if you see Jesus not as an example but as a Savior doing these things for you personally, then you will see how valuable you are to him" (121).
"If you see what Jesus Christ has done for you, losing the ultimate palace for you, then you will be able to start to serve God and your neighbor from your place in the palace" (124).
"Why do the Ten Commandments begin with a prohibition of idolatry? It is, Luther argued, because we never break the other commandments without breaking the first....if you lie or obscure inconvenient facts, it is because you have counted success as more important than obedience to God or the good of your 'neighbor' with whom you are negotiating. So beneath the sin of lying is the deeper, conditioning sin of idolatry...Idolatry has power over our actions because it has power over our hearts" (130).
...idols are not only the basis for personal sins and problems; they are also the basis for collective ones. When an individual makes and serves and idol, it creates psychological distortion and trouble; when a family, group, or country makes and serves and idol, it creates social and cultural trouble" (132).
"Modern societies turned away from the authorities of religion and tradition, and replaced them with the authorities of reason and individual freedom" (133).
"... while ancient cultures ostracized anyone who disbelieved in the gods, modern culture castigates anyone who is thought guilty of bigotry or appears to be an enemy of equality and individual freedom" (133-134).
"Keeping in mind that an idol is a good thing turned into an ultimate thing, then a corporate idol is an overemphasis and absolutizing of an admirable cultural trait" (134).
"The idols of modern culture have had a profound influence on the shape of our work today. In traditional societies people found their meaning and sense of value by submitting their interests and sacrificing their desires to serve higher causes like God, family, and other people. In modern societies there is often no higher cause than individual interests and desires" (139).
"Modern culture tells us there are no moral absolutes and everyone must choose his or her own standard for right and wrong, yet it then turns and says we must respect human rights and honor the freedom and dignity of every human being. 'But on what basis?' Nietzsche would ask. If there are no moral absolutes, then how can you arbitrarily declare that there are?....despite the fact that in Western society there is still a strong latent influence from traditional worldviews such as Christianity, along with much of the older modern optimism about science, progress, and human freedom, there has still been a pervasive shift called the 'postmodern turn'" (142).
"Heidegger, Docx, and others such as Jacques Ellul are saying that technology, uncertainty, and the market have become the idols of postmodern society. Because in postmodern society no one is sure or can agree about 'ends' or goals for the human race, we now have only 'means' or techniques. Since there is no longer any dominant vision of healthy human life or good human society, we are left with nothing but individual competition for personal success of power. If something can be done through technology, it will be done, because our technology has no higher ideals or moral values to guide it or limit it" (144).
"Many writers argue convincingly that the values of the market--consumerism and cost-benefit efficiencies--are not spreading into every part of life, even family life. This is because modern capitalism is no longer simply a useful instrument for the distribution of goods and services, but has become a near-absolute idol" (145).
"We are encouraged to create a persona through the brands we choose to purchase and the identity we are able to construct for ourselves online" (147).
"Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff observes that modern culture defines the happy life as a life that is 'going well'--full of experiential pleasure--while to the ancients, the happy life meant the life that is lived well, with character, courage, humility, love, and justice" (147).
"Christians agree that when we sell and market, we need to show potential customers that a product 'adds value' to their lives. That doesn't mean it can give them a life. But because Christians have a deeper understanding of human well-being, we will often find ourselves swimming against the very strong currents of the corporate idols of our culture" (148).
"'What hope is there for work? How can we put work right?' we may ask...Nothing will be perfectly right, as St Paul says, until the 'day of Christ' at the end of history....The Christian gospel decidedly furnishes us with the resources for more inspired, realistic, satisfying, and faithful work today. How? First, the gospel provides an alternative story line for our work; this is vital because all work is propelled by a worldview or a narrative account of what human life is all about and what will help us thrive. Second, the Christian faith gives us a new and rich conception of work as partnering with God in his love and care for the world. This biblical conception helps us appreciate all work, from the most simple to the most complex, by both believers and nonbelievers...Third, the gospel gives us a particularly sensitive new moral compass, through a host of sound ethical guidelines to help us make decisions, as well as wise counsel about human hearts. Finally, the gospel radically changes our motives for work and fills us with a new and durable inner power that will be with us through thick and thin" (149-156
"The term 'worldview,' from the German word Weltanschauung, means the comprehensive perspective from which we interpret all of reality. But a worldview is not merely a set of philosophical bullet points. It is essentially a master narrative, a fundamental story about (a) what human life in the world should be like, (b) what has knocked it off balance, and (c) what can be done to make it right. No one can really function in the world without some working answers to those big questions, and so, to provide those answers, we adopt a world-story, a narrative that explains things--a worldview" (156).
"The gospel, however, teaches, that the meaning of life is to love God and love our neighbor, and that the operating principle is servanthood" (158).
Quoting Al Wolters: "The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God's good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy as intrinsic to the creation itself...something in the good creation is identified as [the source] of evil" (160).
"For example, the movie Lost in Translation assumes that life is ultimately meaningless but affords some small comfort in friendship; the movie Babe inspires us that even a pig can be a sheepdog if he defies tradition and tries hard enough. I believe that Christians can appreciate either kind of story, if it is well told, because from a gospel perspective, both naive and cynical stories are partly true. Life in this fallen world is to a great degree meaningless, our aspirations are constantly being frustrated, and sometimes the respectable people are oppressive and bigoted. And yet there is a Good that will triumph over Evil in the end. From a Christian perspective the problem with both kinds of stories is that they tend to blame problems on things besides sin and identify salvation in things besides God--and therefore are ultimately too simplistic" (174-175).
"...it is a mistake to think that the Christian worldview is operating only when we are doing such overtly Christian activities. Instead, think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you "look" at everything else in the world...Christians in business will see profit as only one of several bottom lines, and they will work passionately for any kind of enterprise that serves the common good. The Christian writer can constantly be showing the destructiveness of making something besides God into the central thing, even without mentioning God directly" (181).
"The gay community has contributed hugely to the flourishing of New York City...Another group often noted for their commitment to moving to neighborhoods that have fallen into disrepair and rehabilitating them is the gay community...And, of course, we all know someone in our field who is not a Christian who seems to hold the best values and produce the most elegant product, beautiful dance piece, or trusted and well-organized team. If the Christian worldview is so unique, how do we account for this?" (186-187).
"We must ask how [the Christian's work] can be done distinctively and for his glory. As an extension of God's providential work, our labor has its orientation toward our neighbor, and we must ask how it can be don excellently and for his or her good. This latter motivation is available to everyone...[The] aspect of work-as-provision is the reason that much work that Christians do is not done, at least not in its visible form, any differently from the way non-Christians do it...In fact, an unbalanced emphasis on worldview has certain dangers. For example, it can lead us to privilege white-collar work over blue-collar work" (187).
So this biblical conception of work--as a vehicle for God's loving provision for the world--is essential. It counteracts the elitism and sectarianism that can creep into our approach to work when we grasp the distinctiveness of the Christian worldview (188).
Consider Isaiah 28, verses 24-29: 'When a famer plows for planting...when he has leveled the surface...does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in its plot, and spelt in its field? His God instructs him and teaches him the right way...Grain must be ground to make bread...all this also comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom.' This is remarkable. Isaiah tells us that anyone who becomes a skillful farmer, or who brings advancements in agriculture, is being taught by God (189).
"Every advancement in learning, every work of art, every innovation in healthcare or technology or management or governance, is simply God 'opening his book of creation and revealing his truth' to us" (190).
On Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1) and the pagan king in Abraham's day (Genesis 20:6-7): "These are indications of how God's Spirit functions both as a nonsaving ennobling force in the world and as a nonsaving restraining force in the world. This is not the Spirit working as a converting or a sanctifying agent. Rather he acts to give wisdom, courage, and insight and to restrain the effects of sin--even to those who would deny God's existence (191).
On Romans 1: "First, we must acknowledge that there is no neutrality in the world. Everyone who does not acknowledge Christ as Lord is operating out of a false view of ultimate reality, while to confess Christ as Lord is to be in line with ultimate reality. Everyone is operating from a worldview that either denies Christ or worships him. No one is objective or neutral; no one can avoid the question. At the same time, the doctrine of common grace means that despite all false worldviews, everyone grasps and to some degree acknowledges aspects of the biblical worldview: truths about God, creation, human nature, and our need for rescue (193)."
"Without an understanding of common grace, the world can be a pretty confusing place for a Christian. It would be natural for many Christians to identify with Antonio Salieri: He is bewildered and bitter that as a morally good person, his talent is modest, while Mozart (a morally despicable person, at least in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus) has been favored by God through the gift of his soaring talent. Beyond this blindness to his own sin, Salieri's problem was a failure to understand the reality of common grace. Grace gives out gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill according to his grace--that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across the human race like seed, in order to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world. By rights, sin should be making life on earth here much more unbearable than it is--and in fact, all of creation and culture should have fallen apart by now. The reason it is not worse is because of the gift of common grace....so many of the gifts of God has put in the world are given to nonbelievers. Mozart was a gift to us--whether he was a believer or not. So Christians are free to study the world of human culture in order to know more of God; for as creatures made in His image we can appreciate truth and wisdom wherever we find it.... Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means that unbelievers are never as messed up as their false worldview should make them. For in the Christian story, the antagonist is not non-Christians but the reality of sin, which (as the gospel tells us) lies within us as well as within them" (194-195).
"Why this disengagement with our culture? One reason is a 'thin' or legalistic view of sin, where sin is seen as a series of discrete acts of noncompliance with God's regulations. You pursue Christian growth largely by seeking environments where you are less likely to do these sinful actions or to encounter others who have done them. Sin can essentially be removed from your life through separation and discipline....The complex, organic nature of our sin will still be at work making idols out of good things in our lives--such as our moral goodness, financial security, family, doctrinal purity, or pride in our culture...But too much emphasis on wholesale withdrawal from culture increases the likelihood of slipping into other more 'respectable' idolatries. A theologically 'thick' view of sin, by contrast, sees it as a compulsive drive of the heart to produce idols. This view should lead neither to withdrawal nor to uncritical consumption, but rather to humble, critical engagement with culture" (197).
"Christians' disengagement from popular culture usually carries over into dualism at work. 'Dualism" is a term used to describe a separating all between the sacred and the secular. It is a direct result of a thin view of sin, common grace, and God's providential purposes" (199-200).
"The integration of faith and work is the opposite of dualism. We should be willing to be engaged with the cultural and vocational worlds of non-Christians. Our thick view of sin will remind us that even explicitly Christian work and culture will have some idolatrous discourse within it. Our thick view of common grace will remind us that even explicitly non-Christian work and culture will always have some witness to God's truth in it. Because Christians are never as good as their right beliefs should make them an non-Christians are never as bad as their wrong beliefs should make them, we will adopt a stance of critical enjoyment of human culture and its expressions in every field of work. We will learn to recognize the half-truths and resist the idols; and we will learn to recognize and celebrate the glimpses of justice, wisdom, truth, and beauty we find around us in all aspects of life" (201).
"Love, then, occupies a supreme place in the Christian imagination. As Jesus says, to be fully human boils down to loving God and loving our neighbor" (211).
"Christians must remain absolutely committed to an understanding of human rights based on the image of God" (215).
"According to the Bible, wisdom is more than just obeying God's ethical norms; it is knowing the right thing to do in the 80 percent of life's situations in which the moral rules don't provide the clear answer" (215).
"On wisdom, and how the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom (Ephesians 1:7). In Acts 15, in deciding whether Gentiles had to keep Jewish dietary laws: "They used their best thinking and reasoning, their knowledge and experience, and came up with a sound decision that they attributed to the Holy Spirit" (218).
"If we being to work as if we were serving the Lord, we will be free from both overwork and underwork" (220).
Psalm 130:4--"But with you there is forgiveness, therefore you are feared." "The more you experience God's mercy and forgiveness, the more the true fear of the Lord will increase in you" (221).
Romans 12:11--"Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord." zeal= a combination of diligence and urgency. "Keep your spiritual fervor" = "as to your spirit boiling."
"So we are asked to bring emotion, discipline, and urgency to the task of being living sacrifices in the lives we lead and the work we do. We are asked to live with passion (240).
"All of us are haunted by the work under the work--that need to prove and save ourselves, to gain a sense of worth and identity. But if we can experience gospel-rest in our hearts, if we can be free from the need to earn our salvation through our work, we will have a deep reservoir of refreshment that continually rejuvenates us, restores our perspective, and renews our passion" (242).
"To violate the rhythm of work and rest (in either direction) leads to chaos in our life and in the world around us. Sabbath is therefor a celebration of our design....God portrays Sabbath as a reenactment of emancipation from slavery. It reminds us how he delivered his people from a condition in which they were not human beings, but simply units of capacity in Pharaoh's brick production system. Anyone who cannot obey God's command to observe the Sabbath is a slave, even a self-imposed one...Sabbath is therefore a declaration of your freedom. It means you are not a slave--not to your culture's expectations, your family's hopes, your medical school's demands, not even to your own insecurities. It is important that you learn to speak this truth to yourself with a note of triumph--otherwise you will feel guilty for taking time off, or you will be unable to truly unplug" (244).
"We are also to think of Sabbath as an act of trust... To practice Sabbath is a disciplined and faithful way to remember that you are not the one who keeps the world turning, who provides for your family, or even the one who keeps your work projects moving forward" (245).
"Many people are doing the 'work under the work.' They are not merely doing the work that draws the salary--they are also working to chase away their sense of insignificance. But here in Jesus we find the 'rest under the rest,'... Without it, all other work will be unsatisfying" (247).
"Many people have asked if we plan to spin it off into its own independent nonprofit, and the answer is 'no.' Our goal has been to model our conviction that vocational life is essential to being fully human in a Biblical sense. Churches need to embrace the whole person--the married or single person, the healthy or ill person, the person at work and the person at home. Church-based faith and work ministry is important for two reasons: (1) work is often the crucible in which God shines a light on a person's idols and refines them in Christ-likeness, and (2) the church is touching the world at large through the faithful presence of its people in the workplace" (262).
The Technique of Rest by Anna C Brackett
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I had different expectations for this book. If you ask me, Brackett's subject is something different than "rest." Miriam-Webster defines it as "cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength," and I think Bracket's subject could better be described as "finding and maintaining sustainable balance" or something. But it was written in the 19th century so I'll try not to be so fussy. More importantly, she has some great things to say!
Chapter 1- Rest
She opens by describing the duties of a housewife, which are "multifarious and never-ending" (2). "The more humble and the more in earnest she grows, the more weary she gets, till she lives in a perpetual sense of not being able to draw one full breath. Many a woman will recognize the truth of these words, though it will seem to most men that they are exaggerated" (3). ((chuckle!))
"Peace and rest are the characteristics of the home. But it should not only be a peace which is a stifled war, and the Rest must come from the constant balance of complicated conditions, yielding at every side with a certain compensating movement, so that it shall yet be firm and supporting" (5). This is a goal we should have and for which we should fight! It is difficult, but women are suited to it, they are agile and can multi-task, and with more information & education on how to do it well ((this book)), "and she will free herself from the coils which render her breathing difficult, and find herself able to create a home without, in doing it, sacrificing herself. But in order to do this, she must work from within, outward; she must create within herself the strength which shall be equal to that pressing upon her from without. For it is only in a balance of forces that rest consists" (6). What we long for is the "harmony of demand and supply" (6) so that as the situation changes, we can change to suit it, like a sewing machine that can make the same sized stitches despite changes in tension. We do not long for rest as an "absolute do-nothingness" (6), like the woman whose epitaph ends "Oh nothing, sweet nothing forever!" because she was so exhausted. "It is doubtless true that Nirvana offers great attractions to many women, and that the preacher who would strive to lead them by picturing heaven as a place of continual activity is misdirecting his efforts" (8). ((Hah!)) Great insight on "the continual drudgery of dressing and undressing, which necessarily forms so large a part of the duties of every day, and which, whenever we become conscious of it, is so wearily tiresome" (9). ((So true. I'm tired now thinking about it.)) But that is what death is for. In life, as previously stated, the days are about balancing "the inside and the outside conditions of life" (9). She wisely points out that this can happen by one or the other must be turned up or down, "And this tuning cannot be done once for all, but must be a continual care" (9). Even giving something a name can give rest, as can creating creeds and laws and treaties-- but even these are being constantly amended. "the history of the world is only a story of perpetual revision in one region or another" (11). "Whether in large or in small affairs, there must be perpetual readjustment" (12).
"Where the harmony between the inner desire and the outside circumstances does not exist--in other words, where there is no rest--the question to be settled first of all is which of the two is to be changed... The thoughtless person goes blindly to work, changing the first condition that presents itself to view, though the fact that it does so present itself may be a mere accident" (13). "If you decide, after a careful review of all the outside circumstances, that they cannot be altered, then your task is to mould your own mind into harmony with these conditions" (14). This is a "perpetually active process" (15). Getting some time and distance between you and your problems helps: "Try in the freedom of your mind to withdraw from them by never so little a space, and the crossing and tangled lines will begin to weave into some kind of order" (15).
Then right after-- "Necessity--that is, God and His world, the whole of it--stands outside of you. Within you, you have the freedom which God has given. It is your business to reconcile that necessity and that freedom, since it is only in such reconciliation that Rest can be found. Find it!" (15).
"Over and over again, Rest consists simply in producing harmony between the individual and her surroundings or the conditions under which she has to live. This harmony must be created by herself, for when God created us in His own image He could not do otherwise than to make us active agents, and to ordain that if we wanted anything, we must get it for ourselves. You cannot teach the child by forcing facts upon him; so long as you do this, they remain foreign to him. It is only the knowledge that he himself takes in and assimilates till it becomes part of his being that goes towards his education. He himself must reach out actively for it or it can never become his. It is so with Rest" (16). Rest is all around us, we need to "reach out and take it" (20), and first we must realize that it is right there-- like fish realizing that the sea is right there.
"Resignation is not merely a passive state. It is an intensely active one in which the soul is standing on tiptoe 'with arms out-stretched and eager face ablaze.'...We are not Orientals, and Allah is not the name of our God. The freedom the Orient has never known and can never know if ours, but only for a great price, and that price, our own effort....You must have trust in Someone else than yourself, and a in a wiser Sight than your own. If you have not this trust, you must fight for it till you win it. Sometimes the people who claim to love God most, trust Him least" (21-23).
"It is the results which we have garnered that are of consequence to us, not the steps by which we attained them. It is what we are, not what we have done, or what any one else has done, that concerns us. If our lives have been worth anything, they have given us some degree of insight, which his only a sort of mental instinct telling us at once what to do under certain conditions" (26-27). "It seems possible that the gathered and assorted experiences of our lives here are to become the instincts of our live hereafter--the instincts with which we shall start on that new life" (28). "After all, every day which seems so long and so hard to us is only a part of the whole, and not a whole in itself; and many a trouble and vexation, many a thing hard to bear and difficult to manage, will lose much of its importance in our eyes if we can stop to remember that tit is only a part of a whole which we cannot see, and a component of a smaller whole--the life given to us" (31).
Chapter 2- Necessity
The duties of a woman are many, and her days are full of laborious tasks without breaks or variation. The more modern conveniences come along to help, the more there is to do. "We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares" (43). The work of keeping house is never ending, as soon as you finish in one area of focus, you realize another needs tending to. "We are always getting ready to live, and never having time enough to live" (42).
This is all so overwhelming. "To our own power of invention, therefore, we must turn if we would not be overcome" (45). Ideas:
--"increasing the elasticity of our income," by patching, finding new uses for old things instead of buying something new, and planning in order to buy things out of season when prices are lower. This can be exhausting, but "planning comes next to creating, and to create is essentially the part of woman" (48). "There would not have been so much pleasure in the Creation if it had not bee preceded by chaos. To overcome difficulty is pleasure, because it gives always a sense of power, than which there is nothing more agreeable" (49). So, in regards to income, we should aim to "overcome the necessity which confronts us, without own freedom of invention" (49).
--"To secure time for all we do, we must offset the rapidity of its flight by reducing as many of our actions as possible to automatism" (49). "The only wise way for us is to hand over as many little things as possible to the care of automatism, and to conquer monotony by bringing larger and more fruitful interests into our minds and the space left thus free" (66). Training ourselves to do this makes us move faster, and saves our mental energies for things that are more pleasant, and work is less "wearying" (50). "To have our thinking set free from the common, every-day affairs of daily life, is the very thing we are most earnestly striving towards" (51). She uses the example of learning to walk becoming automatic. "As long as the house is well organized, and the daily work running its habitual grooves, it runs itself, so to speak" (53). "What we learn for the sake of knowledge, we hold; what we learn for the sake of accomplishing some ulterior end, we forget as soon as that end has been gained" (59).
--Having a planner is a good way to use these facts to our benefit in accomplishing the goal of time efficiency. ((pp 59-64- I think she's talking about bullet journaling. NO, it's actually something called "The Standard Diary"-- still make them today. -https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/01/the-daily-planner-american-history/WncDRG5hq7B9m0w3cE5jkM/story.html- But Bullet Journalling is better.)) "It is largely the constant making of decisions that tires us" (64). ((YES!! See: The Power of Habit.)) "It can never be often enough repeated that it is the constant succession of little things and small anxieties that wear upon us, not the great things" (66). "It is always a positive gain of time to make our plans beforehand and in quiet, when we can see clearly. It is like taking directions from Philip sober instead of from Philip drunk, and that saves time and useless work" (67).
--Manage your home with detailed planning and anticipation. The importance of giving clear, detailed directions to servants, having the division of work written down and planned in advance is promoted. "The object for her ["the housekeeper"] is the quietness, order, and comfort of the house, and the servants are only a means to this end" (68). "If we are not the possessors of an instinct for order, we must create and diligently cultivate it" (70). "Go on, patiently putting and keeping outside things in order, and you will find that after awhile, you are beginning to gain a mental grip of the problems which beset you" (75). "You are not able to think clearly and logically in a room where everything is in confusion" (76).
--Keep your inner world at peace by keeping your body from expelling needless energy-- fidgeting, asking questions that have answers which don't concern you. She preaches maintaining inward order by first keeping the body still. "Learn to keep still, and you will feel the quieting influence all through your life" (77). "No one can tell how much of the beautiful serenity of the Quakers comes from the outward stillness and quiet of their worship" (78). "After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey will reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who 'fuss' continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use" (80). She describes how to walk up the stairs in a way that conserves energy. "Take care of yourself in such little ways as these. Try in every way to acquire a habit of quietness" (81).
--These things are ways to take care of yourself, to prevent draining of your "nerve force." She has much to say for prevention of this, and how to treat it if needed. "Help yourself out of the stores of aid which he has provided for you from the foundation of the world. And if you must have tonics, take those also from Him, in sunshine, pure air, exercise, regular hours, healthful food, and, above all perhaps, in sleep. Religiously avoid all others. It is vain hoping to restore nerve-power by the recourse to medicine" (82). "What you have done by a long series of drafts upon your nerve strength, whether necessary or not, can be made up only by a long series of efforts at patience and of will-power to keep yourself still and in the way of recovery" (83). At first this sounds like a rebuttal of medical treatment, which I will try to forgive since there was far less understanding of "maladies which imply or consist in loss of nerve-power, such as suppression gout, hysteria, neuralgia, insomnia, chorea, epilepsy, melancholia, and general loss of mental control" (82) when this book was published in 1892. I imagine that if Anna Brackett was still writing, she would tell us to take advantage of modern medicine. But I think the intention of this section is to avoid thinking of "tonics" (medicine) as panaceas, and to look to easy fixes. (Oh, there are pages and pages to be written about how this fits into mental health: medicine is good in many cases but is never the only aspect of a good treatment plan.)
She ends the chapter with the insight that all of this has been about how to "meet the demands of modern life, and conquer necessity" (86). She closes the chapter by saying we should consider what our main goal is. "Look carefully through all the claims pressing upon you in your complicated life, and decide once and for all what is the one really important and overmastering duty in it, and should be the one dominating aim. Then remember that if you succeed in that, the others, so multifarious, are really no more than the fringe of the garment... What that is for each woman, no other person can decide for her" (87).
Chapter 3- Freedom
What is it that you really, really want? You have the freedom to pursue it. "It is the old story; first make up your mind what you want to do with your life, and then decide the question of dress, as every other question, by that test" (108).
--Beware wanting what you don't have. "There are many things that perhaps you would like to do or like to have; first bear in mind the undoubted truth that there are perhaps only one or two things in the world which are not far more charming in desire than they are in possession" (93). "For pleasure lies in the pursuit, not the attainment" (94).
--Beware wanting what others think you should want. "The truth is that too much, not too little, is taken of the unthinking advice tossed at us every day, often forgotten by the giver" (99). Not that you should never get advice, "But the fact is that there is only one person who can decide a problem, because he is the only one knowing all the conditions, external and internal, and that is the person whose problem it is" (101).
--Don't think you have to read everything just because it's there! "Have always some reason for reading a magazine article or let it alone" (112). ("If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest" (113).
"There can be no work, whatever it may be, that is so exhausting as painful emotion; while on the other hand, mercifully, there is no tonic so upbuilding and renewing as joy, which sets into active exercise every constructive power of the body, and whose rush is like the leap of the books in spring from strong mountain-tops to the lowlands (117). "And there will always be restlessness and fatigue till peace is born of inner freedom" (118).
Chapter 4--Restlessness
Our tendency toward restlessness:
--"The human spirit is always asking after a place where it may stop and build abodes. But so long as it is human--which is the same thing as divine--it must be driven, in spite of its own will, by the impulse to move on to new homes. The fever of migration is contained within its very nature, and it can hope to escape it only for a time" (121).
--"In some places we might feel it a duty to inculcate the need of change and of faster progress, but in the modern American city is certainly not one of these, and there would seem little danger within its walls of laying too much emphasis on the beauty of respose" (124).
--On sleep:
--Talking about lying awake, frustrated, listening to the clock chime and counting down the hours til you have to get up again: "These things are your masters now, not your slaves, and the demon of sleeplessness...is upon you, insisting upon your working without, nay, against your will...The demonic power in you, however, is not demonic, but only a heavenly power perverted, just as all the faults of a child are only unregulated virtues. It is nothing but your own will which has become so strong that you are afraid of it. Do not complain, then, or hesitate to to use your will to keep yourself perfectly quiet at any rate. You can if you only think you can" (134). She suggests getting up and eating something warm. "While you are waiting for sleep to come to you, you will certainly be thinking, probably of the very things which you are most tired of considering; here too, you must use your will to determine the course of your thought, and if it persistently goes back to the avoided topic, you must just as persistently call it away and set it on another track. What that track shall be matters not much, but it must be one of your own choosing" (135). ((Love that. It's a great tip!!! Helped me already. But then the next sentence? "As it is by the will that you have sinned, so it is only by the road of the will that you can obtain remission of the penalties you have brought upon yourself." What?! Just no.))
--For sleeplessness, she suggests thinking through things with reason. "One thing you must not do, and that's... step into the domain of the emotions, and there is no sleep there" (138).
--"It is as much your duty to go to sleep as it is to eat your food" (140).
--"The conclusions formulated with so much pains in the night are seen with the first rays of the sun to be of no value in the day-world, and so gradually you learn to save yourself the labor of working them out" (142).
"In religion the influence which comes to the passive mind--made and held so by the active will--is called Grace, and it is that which will descend upon you in other domains if only you will let it come...The main trouble generally is that by your continual Restlessness you keep your soul in such a state that no influence can come to you from without" (146).
The restlessness of unused potential: "There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind....To see power is wasted is very hard. But really no power is ever wasted in the spiritual kingdom any more than in the material. It is only transmuted and correlated, so that there need never be mourning over a loss which does not exist, and the Restlessness of mourning will thus pass over into Rest" ( 147-149).
The need for focus: "Anything is restless which has not a purpose and hence it is that listlessness breeds Restlessness....How many of us are singing with overtones, and wondering why the life-dust is flying hither and thither, and why there is no rest in it? Suppose we were to sing only one pure tone, and see how quickly it would fall into order and symmetry" (152-153).
Chapter 5--Blue-rose Melancholy
The land of the Blue Rose is what I call the land of "should," or what some might call the land of "If only." "He who has once breathed the perfume of the blue flower has no more peace and quiet in his life, but is driven on and on, though his sore feet pain him, and he yearns to lay down his weary head to rest" (159). Or better, "[a woman who has breathed the blue flower] is always complaining gently that she cannot make her circles squares or her squares circles...She constructs an ideal world out of her own consciousness, and then feels injured because the world around her does not harmonize with it. And thus she falls a victim to the blue-rose melancholy" (161).
One thing that helps is "the tonic of regular work and enough or it, and the wholesome nervous shock which comes from contact with people entirely different from herself" (162-163).
"Only the flowing water is pure and sweet. Only the spinning top and the moving bicycle do not fall over. Rest is not round in irregular and purposeless motion, nor is it in stagnation; all real and firm rest is to be sought in harmonious action" (163). Figuring out how to do this takes practice, but just try! "Go on and make errors, and fall and get up again. Only go on! You will never learn to speak a foreign language if you are afraid of mistakes; so you will never do anything with your own life if you are discouraged by failure. You were made to fail over and over again, or you would never gain any strength. The harder time you have, the gladder you ought to be; for you are getting exercise and experience, and, then, God would never spend so much trouble in training you if you were not worth the effort" (164-165).
A side note: "A taste for the best literature is a blessed gift; if you have it not yet, strive towards it till you acquire it" (168).
"The problem before you is unchangeably and always, no what you 'would do if'--for that is the way the thought of the blue-rose melancholy runs--but what you will do on this particular gloomy day, in this particular room, with the particular people and things that are in it. You have got to play the game with the cards that have been dealt to you, and it is of no use for you to bewail your fate because you don't hold different ones. Look them over, arrange them, and play" (170).
I had different expectations for this book. If you ask me, Brackett's subject is something different than "rest." Miriam-Webster defines it as "cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength," and I think Bracket's subject could better be described as "finding and maintaining sustainable balance" or something. But it was written in the 19th century so I'll try not to be so fussy. More importantly, she has some great things to say!
Chapter 1- Rest
She opens by describing the duties of a housewife, which are "multifarious and never-ending" (2). "The more humble and the more in earnest she grows, the more weary she gets, till she lives in a perpetual sense of not being able to draw one full breath. Many a woman will recognize the truth of these words, though it will seem to most men that they are exaggerated" (3). ((chuckle!))
"Peace and rest are the characteristics of the home. But it should not only be a peace which is a stifled war, and the Rest must come from the constant balance of complicated conditions, yielding at every side with a certain compensating movement, so that it shall yet be firm and supporting" (5). This is a goal we should have and for which we should fight! It is difficult, but women are suited to it, they are agile and can multi-task, and with more information & education on how to do it well ((this book)), "and she will free herself from the coils which render her breathing difficult, and find herself able to create a home without, in doing it, sacrificing herself. But in order to do this, she must work from within, outward; she must create within herself the strength which shall be equal to that pressing upon her from without. For it is only in a balance of forces that rest consists" (6). What we long for is the "harmony of demand and supply" (6) so that as the situation changes, we can change to suit it, like a sewing machine that can make the same sized stitches despite changes in tension. We do not long for rest as an "absolute do-nothingness" (6), like the woman whose epitaph ends "Oh nothing, sweet nothing forever!" because she was so exhausted. "It is doubtless true that Nirvana offers great attractions to many women, and that the preacher who would strive to lead them by picturing heaven as a place of continual activity is misdirecting his efforts" (8). ((Hah!)) Great insight on "the continual drudgery of dressing and undressing, which necessarily forms so large a part of the duties of every day, and which, whenever we become conscious of it, is so wearily tiresome" (9). ((So true. I'm tired now thinking about it.)) But that is what death is for. In life, as previously stated, the days are about balancing "the inside and the outside conditions of life" (9). She wisely points out that this can happen by one or the other must be turned up or down, "And this tuning cannot be done once for all, but must be a continual care" (9). Even giving something a name can give rest, as can creating creeds and laws and treaties-- but even these are being constantly amended. "the history of the world is only a story of perpetual revision in one region or another" (11). "Whether in large or in small affairs, there must be perpetual readjustment" (12).
"Where the harmony between the inner desire and the outside circumstances does not exist--in other words, where there is no rest--the question to be settled first of all is which of the two is to be changed... The thoughtless person goes blindly to work, changing the first condition that presents itself to view, though the fact that it does so present itself may be a mere accident" (13). "If you decide, after a careful review of all the outside circumstances, that they cannot be altered, then your task is to mould your own mind into harmony with these conditions" (14). This is a "perpetually active process" (15). Getting some time and distance between you and your problems helps: "Try in the freedom of your mind to withdraw from them by never so little a space, and the crossing and tangled lines will begin to weave into some kind of order" (15).
Then right after-- "Necessity--that is, God and His world, the whole of it--stands outside of you. Within you, you have the freedom which God has given. It is your business to reconcile that necessity and that freedom, since it is only in such reconciliation that Rest can be found. Find it!" (15).
"Over and over again, Rest consists simply in producing harmony between the individual and her surroundings or the conditions under which she has to live. This harmony must be created by herself, for when God created us in His own image He could not do otherwise than to make us active agents, and to ordain that if we wanted anything, we must get it for ourselves. You cannot teach the child by forcing facts upon him; so long as you do this, they remain foreign to him. It is only the knowledge that he himself takes in and assimilates till it becomes part of his being that goes towards his education. He himself must reach out actively for it or it can never become his. It is so with Rest" (16). Rest is all around us, we need to "reach out and take it" (20), and first we must realize that it is right there-- like fish realizing that the sea is right there.
"Resignation is not merely a passive state. It is an intensely active one in which the soul is standing on tiptoe 'with arms out-stretched and eager face ablaze.'...We are not Orientals, and Allah is not the name of our God. The freedom the Orient has never known and can never know if ours, but only for a great price, and that price, our own effort....You must have trust in Someone else than yourself, and a in a wiser Sight than your own. If you have not this trust, you must fight for it till you win it. Sometimes the people who claim to love God most, trust Him least" (21-23).
"It is the results which we have garnered that are of consequence to us, not the steps by which we attained them. It is what we are, not what we have done, or what any one else has done, that concerns us. If our lives have been worth anything, they have given us some degree of insight, which his only a sort of mental instinct telling us at once what to do under certain conditions" (26-27). "It seems possible that the gathered and assorted experiences of our lives here are to become the instincts of our live hereafter--the instincts with which we shall start on that new life" (28). "After all, every day which seems so long and so hard to us is only a part of the whole, and not a whole in itself; and many a trouble and vexation, many a thing hard to bear and difficult to manage, will lose much of its importance in our eyes if we can stop to remember that tit is only a part of a whole which we cannot see, and a component of a smaller whole--the life given to us" (31).
Chapter 2- Necessity
The duties of a woman are many, and her days are full of laborious tasks without breaks or variation. The more modern conveniences come along to help, the more there is to do. "We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares" (43). The work of keeping house is never ending, as soon as you finish in one area of focus, you realize another needs tending to. "We are always getting ready to live, and never having time enough to live" (42).
This is all so overwhelming. "To our own power of invention, therefore, we must turn if we would not be overcome" (45). Ideas:
--"increasing the elasticity of our income," by patching, finding new uses for old things instead of buying something new, and planning in order to buy things out of season when prices are lower. This can be exhausting, but "planning comes next to creating, and to create is essentially the part of woman" (48). "There would not have been so much pleasure in the Creation if it had not bee preceded by chaos. To overcome difficulty is pleasure, because it gives always a sense of power, than which there is nothing more agreeable" (49). So, in regards to income, we should aim to "overcome the necessity which confronts us, without own freedom of invention" (49).
--"To secure time for all we do, we must offset the rapidity of its flight by reducing as many of our actions as possible to automatism" (49). "The only wise way for us is to hand over as many little things as possible to the care of automatism, and to conquer monotony by bringing larger and more fruitful interests into our minds and the space left thus free" (66). Training ourselves to do this makes us move faster, and saves our mental energies for things that are more pleasant, and work is less "wearying" (50). "To have our thinking set free from the common, every-day affairs of daily life, is the very thing we are most earnestly striving towards" (51). She uses the example of learning to walk becoming automatic. "As long as the house is well organized, and the daily work running its habitual grooves, it runs itself, so to speak" (53). "What we learn for the sake of knowledge, we hold; what we learn for the sake of accomplishing some ulterior end, we forget as soon as that end has been gained" (59).
--Having a planner is a good way to use these facts to our benefit in accomplishing the goal of time efficiency. ((pp 59-64- I think she's talking about bullet journaling. NO, it's actually something called "The Standard Diary"-- still make them today. -https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/01/the-daily-planner-american-history/WncDRG5hq7B9m0w3cE5jkM/story.html- But Bullet Journalling is better.)) "It is largely the constant making of decisions that tires us" (64). ((YES!! See: The Power of Habit.)) "It can never be often enough repeated that it is the constant succession of little things and small anxieties that wear upon us, not the great things" (66). "It is always a positive gain of time to make our plans beforehand and in quiet, when we can see clearly. It is like taking directions from Philip sober instead of from Philip drunk, and that saves time and useless work" (67).
--Manage your home with detailed planning and anticipation. The importance of giving clear, detailed directions to servants, having the division of work written down and planned in advance is promoted. "The object for her ["the housekeeper"] is the quietness, order, and comfort of the house, and the servants are only a means to this end" (68). "If we are not the possessors of an instinct for order, we must create and diligently cultivate it" (70). "Go on, patiently putting and keeping outside things in order, and you will find that after awhile, you are beginning to gain a mental grip of the problems which beset you" (75). "You are not able to think clearly and logically in a room where everything is in confusion" (76).
--Keep your inner world at peace by keeping your body from expelling needless energy-- fidgeting, asking questions that have answers which don't concern you. She preaches maintaining inward order by first keeping the body still. "Learn to keep still, and you will feel the quieting influence all through your life" (77). "No one can tell how much of the beautiful serenity of the Quakers comes from the outward stillness and quiet of their worship" (78). "After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey will reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who 'fuss' continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use" (80). She describes how to walk up the stairs in a way that conserves energy. "Take care of yourself in such little ways as these. Try in every way to acquire a habit of quietness" (81).
--These things are ways to take care of yourself, to prevent draining of your "nerve force." She has much to say for prevention of this, and how to treat it if needed. "Help yourself out of the stores of aid which he has provided for you from the foundation of the world. And if you must have tonics, take those also from Him, in sunshine, pure air, exercise, regular hours, healthful food, and, above all perhaps, in sleep. Religiously avoid all others. It is vain hoping to restore nerve-power by the recourse to medicine" (82). "What you have done by a long series of drafts upon your nerve strength, whether necessary or not, can be made up only by a long series of efforts at patience and of will-power to keep yourself still and in the way of recovery" (83). At first this sounds like a rebuttal of medical treatment, which I will try to forgive since there was far less understanding of "maladies which imply or consist in loss of nerve-power, such as suppression gout, hysteria, neuralgia, insomnia, chorea, epilepsy, melancholia, and general loss of mental control" (82) when this book was published in 1892. I imagine that if Anna Brackett was still writing, she would tell us to take advantage of modern medicine. But I think the intention of this section is to avoid thinking of "tonics" (medicine) as panaceas, and to look to easy fixes. (Oh, there are pages and pages to be written about how this fits into mental health: medicine is good in many cases but is never the only aspect of a good treatment plan.)
She ends the chapter with the insight that all of this has been about how to "meet the demands of modern life, and conquer necessity" (86). She closes the chapter by saying we should consider what our main goal is. "Look carefully through all the claims pressing upon you in your complicated life, and decide once and for all what is the one really important and overmastering duty in it, and should be the one dominating aim. Then remember that if you succeed in that, the others, so multifarious, are really no more than the fringe of the garment... What that is for each woman, no other person can decide for her" (87).
Chapter 3- Freedom
What is it that you really, really want? You have the freedom to pursue it. "It is the old story; first make up your mind what you want to do with your life, and then decide the question of dress, as every other question, by that test" (108).
--Beware wanting what you don't have. "There are many things that perhaps you would like to do or like to have; first bear in mind the undoubted truth that there are perhaps only one or two things in the world which are not far more charming in desire than they are in possession" (93). "For pleasure lies in the pursuit, not the attainment" (94).
--Beware wanting what others think you should want. "The truth is that too much, not too little, is taken of the unthinking advice tossed at us every day, often forgotten by the giver" (99). Not that you should never get advice, "But the fact is that there is only one person who can decide a problem, because he is the only one knowing all the conditions, external and internal, and that is the person whose problem it is" (101).
--Don't think you have to read everything just because it's there! "Have always some reason for reading a magazine article or let it alone" (112). ("If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest" (113).
"There can be no work, whatever it may be, that is so exhausting as painful emotion; while on the other hand, mercifully, there is no tonic so upbuilding and renewing as joy, which sets into active exercise every constructive power of the body, and whose rush is like the leap of the books in spring from strong mountain-tops to the lowlands (117). "And there will always be restlessness and fatigue till peace is born of inner freedom" (118).
Chapter 4--Restlessness
Our tendency toward restlessness:
--"The human spirit is always asking after a place where it may stop and build abodes. But so long as it is human--which is the same thing as divine--it must be driven, in spite of its own will, by the impulse to move on to new homes. The fever of migration is contained within its very nature, and it can hope to escape it only for a time" (121).
--"In some places we might feel it a duty to inculcate the need of change and of faster progress, but in the modern American city is certainly not one of these, and there would seem little danger within its walls of laying too much emphasis on the beauty of respose" (124).
--On sleep:
--Talking about lying awake, frustrated, listening to the clock chime and counting down the hours til you have to get up again: "These things are your masters now, not your slaves, and the demon of sleeplessness...is upon you, insisting upon your working without, nay, against your will...The demonic power in you, however, is not demonic, but only a heavenly power perverted, just as all the faults of a child are only unregulated virtues. It is nothing but your own will which has become so strong that you are afraid of it. Do not complain, then, or hesitate to to use your will to keep yourself perfectly quiet at any rate. You can if you only think you can" (134). She suggests getting up and eating something warm. "While you are waiting for sleep to come to you, you will certainly be thinking, probably of the very things which you are most tired of considering; here too, you must use your will to determine the course of your thought, and if it persistently goes back to the avoided topic, you must just as persistently call it away and set it on another track. What that track shall be matters not much, but it must be one of your own choosing" (135). ((Love that. It's a great tip!!! Helped me already. But then the next sentence? "As it is by the will that you have sinned, so it is only by the road of the will that you can obtain remission of the penalties you have brought upon yourself." What?! Just no.))
--For sleeplessness, she suggests thinking through things with reason. "One thing you must not do, and that's... step into the domain of the emotions, and there is no sleep there" (138).
--"It is as much your duty to go to sleep as it is to eat your food" (140).
--"The conclusions formulated with so much pains in the night are seen with the first rays of the sun to be of no value in the day-world, and so gradually you learn to save yourself the labor of working them out" (142).
"In religion the influence which comes to the passive mind--made and held so by the active will--is called Grace, and it is that which will descend upon you in other domains if only you will let it come...The main trouble generally is that by your continual Restlessness you keep your soul in such a state that no influence can come to you from without" (146).
The restlessness of unused potential: "There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind....To see power is wasted is very hard. But really no power is ever wasted in the spiritual kingdom any more than in the material. It is only transmuted and correlated, so that there need never be mourning over a loss which does not exist, and the Restlessness of mourning will thus pass over into Rest" ( 147-149).
The need for focus: "Anything is restless which has not a purpose and hence it is that listlessness breeds Restlessness....How many of us are singing with overtones, and wondering why the life-dust is flying hither and thither, and why there is no rest in it? Suppose we were to sing only one pure tone, and see how quickly it would fall into order and symmetry" (152-153).
Chapter 5--Blue-rose Melancholy
The land of the Blue Rose is what I call the land of "should," or what some might call the land of "If only." "He who has once breathed the perfume of the blue flower has no more peace and quiet in his life, but is driven on and on, though his sore feet pain him, and he yearns to lay down his weary head to rest" (159). Or better, "[a woman who has breathed the blue flower] is always complaining gently that she cannot make her circles squares or her squares circles...She constructs an ideal world out of her own consciousness, and then feels injured because the world around her does not harmonize with it. And thus she falls a victim to the blue-rose melancholy" (161).
One thing that helps is "the tonic of regular work and enough or it, and the wholesome nervous shock which comes from contact with people entirely different from herself" (162-163).
"Only the flowing water is pure and sweet. Only the spinning top and the moving bicycle do not fall over. Rest is not round in irregular and purposeless motion, nor is it in stagnation; all real and firm rest is to be sought in harmonious action" (163). Figuring out how to do this takes practice, but just try! "Go on and make errors, and fall and get up again. Only go on! You will never learn to speak a foreign language if you are afraid of mistakes; so you will never do anything with your own life if you are discouraged by failure. You were made to fail over and over again, or you would never gain any strength. The harder time you have, the gladder you ought to be; for you are getting exercise and experience, and, then, God would never spend so much trouble in training you if you were not worth the effort" (164-165).
A side note: "A taste for the best literature is a blessed gift; if you have it not yet, strive towards it till you acquire it" (168).
"The problem before you is unchangeably and always, no what you 'would do if'--for that is the way the thought of the blue-rose melancholy runs--but what you will do on this particular gloomy day, in this particular room, with the particular people and things that are in it. You have got to play the game with the cards that have been dealt to you, and it is of no use for you to bewail your fate because you don't hold different ones. Look them over, arrange them, and play" (170).
Monday, January 22, 2018
Deep Work by Cal Newport
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jeff Bottoms, who I mostly enjoyed. He seemed to be very interested in what he was saying, (which is the most important trait of a narrator, if you ask me,) but he got a bit too constantly-high-pitched about it at times I thought. 3.5 stars for the narration.
I love these kind of armchair-psychology, life-hack books. They are so interesting and generally helpful. This one was aimed at a particular kind of professional, but I think the applications apply to many, many areas--including my spiritual life!
"Deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate" (Introduction).
"Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not" (Chapter 2).
"As Gallagher summarizes, 'Who you are, what you think feel and do, what you love--is the sum of what you focus on'" (Chapter 3).
"Fredrickson's research shows what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. These simple choices can provide a reset button to your emotions. She provides the example of a couple fighting over inequitable splitting of household chores. Rather than choosing to focus on your partner's selfishness and sloth, she suggests, you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has been aired, which is the first step toward a solution to the problem, and to your improved mood. This seems like a simple exhortation to look on the bright side, but Fredrickson found that skillful use of these emotional "leverage points" can generate a significantly more positive outcome after negative events" (Chapter 3).
"Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spent enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. There is, however, a hidden, but equally important, benefit to cultivating rapt attention in your workday. Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives" (Chapter 3).
"Among many breakthroughs, Csikzentmihalyi's work with ESM [Experience Sampling Method] helped validate a theory he had been developing over the prededing decade: 'The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.' Csikzentmihalyi calls this mental state 'Flow,' a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title. At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed, and still do, that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less, and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikzentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong. 'Ironically,' he writes, 'jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because, like flow activities, they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed'" (Chapter 3).
"Decades of research stemming from Csikzentmihalyi's original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile" (Chapter 3).
"You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit. It's instead like a muscle that tires" (Chapter 4).
The 4 Disciples of the 4DX Framework:
1 Focus on the wildly important.
2 Act on the lead measures
3 Keep a compelling scorecard
4 Accountability
"If the internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment, that's fine. Schedule lots of long internet blocks. The key here isn't to avoid, or even to reduce the amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. One place where this strategy becomes particularly difficult outside work is when you're force to wait. For example, standing in line at a store. It's crucial in these situations that if you're in an offline block, you simply gird yourself for the temporary boredom, and fight through it, with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait, and be bored, has become a novel experience in modern life. But from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable" (Part II - Rule 2).
"...you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing, which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations. Won't a structured evening leave you exhausted, and not refreshed the next day at work? Bennett, to his credit, anticipated this complaint. As he argues, such worries misunderstand what energizes the human spirit. What? You say that full energy given to to those 16 hours will lessen the value of the business 8? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business 8. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity. They do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest, except in sleep. In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind to something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semi-conscious and unstructured web-surfing. To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist" (Rule 3).
"I worried when I first started setting a sender filter, that it would seem pretentious, as if my time was more valuable than that of my readers, and that it would upset people. But this fear wasn't realized. Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication, as they would like to enjoy this same right" (Rule 4).
" ...the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are under-developed. The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there's an expectation that every message requires a timely response, is absurdly unproductive" (Rule 4).
"A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance, and it's not a philosophical statement. It is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester" (Conclusion).
"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Roseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. In Part 1, I quoted write Winifred Gallagher, saying, 'I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.' I agree... and hopefully, now that you've finished this book, you agree too (Conclusion).
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jeff Bottoms, who I mostly enjoyed. He seemed to be very interested in what he was saying, (which is the most important trait of a narrator, if you ask me,) but he got a bit too constantly-high-pitched about it at times I thought. 3.5 stars for the narration.
I love these kind of armchair-psychology, life-hack books. They are so interesting and generally helpful. This one was aimed at a particular kind of professional, but I think the applications apply to many, many areas--including my spiritual life!
"Deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate" (Introduction).
"Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not" (Chapter 2).
"As Gallagher summarizes, 'Who you are, what you think feel and do, what you love--is the sum of what you focus on'" (Chapter 3).
"Fredrickson's research shows what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. These simple choices can provide a reset button to your emotions. She provides the example of a couple fighting over inequitable splitting of household chores. Rather than choosing to focus on your partner's selfishness and sloth, she suggests, you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has been aired, which is the first step toward a solution to the problem, and to your improved mood. This seems like a simple exhortation to look on the bright side, but Fredrickson found that skillful use of these emotional "leverage points" can generate a significantly more positive outcome after negative events" (Chapter 3).
"Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spent enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. There is, however, a hidden, but equally important, benefit to cultivating rapt attention in your workday. Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives" (Chapter 3).
"Among many breakthroughs, Csikzentmihalyi's work with ESM [Experience Sampling Method] helped validate a theory he had been developing over the prededing decade: 'The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.' Csikzentmihalyi calls this mental state 'Flow,' a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title. At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed, and still do, that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less, and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikzentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong. 'Ironically,' he writes, 'jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because, like flow activities, they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed'" (Chapter 3).
"Decades of research stemming from Csikzentmihalyi's original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile" (Chapter 3).
"You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit. It's instead like a muscle that tires" (Chapter 4).
The 4 Disciples of the 4DX Framework:
1 Focus on the wildly important.
2 Act on the lead measures
3 Keep a compelling scorecard
4 Accountability
"If the internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment, that's fine. Schedule lots of long internet blocks. The key here isn't to avoid, or even to reduce the amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. One place where this strategy becomes particularly difficult outside work is when you're force to wait. For example, standing in line at a store. It's crucial in these situations that if you're in an offline block, you simply gird yourself for the temporary boredom, and fight through it, with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait, and be bored, has become a novel experience in modern life. But from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable" (Part II - Rule 2).
"...you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing, which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations. Won't a structured evening leave you exhausted, and not refreshed the next day at work? Bennett, to his credit, anticipated this complaint. As he argues, such worries misunderstand what energizes the human spirit. What? You say that full energy given to to those 16 hours will lessen the value of the business 8? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business 8. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity. They do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest, except in sleep. In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind to something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semi-conscious and unstructured web-surfing. To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist" (Rule 3).
"I worried when I first started setting a sender filter, that it would seem pretentious, as if my time was more valuable than that of my readers, and that it would upset people. But this fear wasn't realized. Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication, as they would like to enjoy this same right" (Rule 4).
" ...the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are under-developed. The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there's an expectation that every message requires a timely response, is absurdly unproductive" (Rule 4).
"A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance, and it's not a philosophical statement. It is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester" (Conclusion).
"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Roseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. In Part 1, I quoted write Winifred Gallagher, saying, 'I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.' I agree... and hopefully, now that you've finished this book, you agree too (Conclusion).
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