The precious gift of sleep...

After a full Lenten season - culminating in a genuinely powerful and challenging Holy Week and Easter celebration - I was ready for the precious gift of sleep. Early in ministry, we used to drive to my parents' home on the Monday after Easter for a break - but it was rarely restful - so I have come to embrace a discipline that makes more sense: the stay-cation. And the first part of this discipline involves sleep. Lots and lots of sleep. Man, does it heal what hurts...

I also hope to spend lots of time outside working on the yard - spring has sure come to the Berkshires after a hard winter - and there are flower beds to clear, rotten leaves to rake and plants to get into the ground. When I was a child, I HATED yard work - HATED it - and would find every and all excuses to avoid and/or subvert doing it. But now... it is sweet contemplation. What did St. Paul say? When I was a child... and all that?

And also practicing guitar riffs - another essential spiritual discipline for me. And not just so that I can learn new ways of expressing beauty in music, but also because practice reveals to me patterns of God's grace. I know this will sound stupid but when I was a young rock and roller I believed that the intricate and exhilarating guitar solos of Clapton, Hendrix, Garcia and all the rest were... gifts from God. Some of us were blessed with such gifts and others - like me - were more heavy-handed. I could carry my own as a modest bass player or rhythm guitarist but I would never be able to make my guitar gently weep.

There is some truth in that naive - if somewhat lazy - notion of God's gifts and rock and roll guitar playing: I will NEVER be Eric Clapton. But I had an epiphany one afternoon in San Anselmo - when I was practicing the pentatonic scale for the hundredth time that day - and discovered that while I would never be Clapton, I could play some of his riffs if I would simply practice. This wasn't totally mysterious - soul and feeling are beyond practice - but not hitting the right notes!

Curiously enough, Henri Nouwen has noted that "discipline in the spiritual life focuses on the practical side of spiritual formation and is the active companion of belief. Belief - trust, is giving yourheart over to God's existence and activity, and it precedes spiritual practice and formation but belief will be depened and strengthened by regual practice." (from a book edited by Christensen and Laird, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith.)

So away I go into a mini-retreat after the high holy days making sure that it is all saturated with the precious gift of sleep.