Seasons, Disciplines, and Changes of Lent

I seem to make a habit of coming back to this blog around the beginning of Lent each year. As long as I’ve been blogging, I seem to fall away during the holidays and come back during late February, early March. In past spring posts, I’ve shared my excitement for literary journalism, blogging/God-language, and Lenten practice itself.

It’s funny to re-read that last post, my Lent post for 2011, because without realizing it, the practices I’ve taken on this year are the same ones that I put in that post: daily writing and daily prayer. Last year I failed miserably at them—I’d given up within a week. This year, however, the practices of prayer and writing are starting to stick. I’ve kept up both consistently so far. (Yes, I know it’s only been a week—but at least I’m off to a good start, eh?)

Not that I feel that earns me any spiritual brownie points. My friend Tyler makes an excellent point about our tendency to make this season all about us—our personal sins and our own willpower to resist them. Lenten disciplines can easily fall into that trap. But this year I’m experiencing these disciplines more as guides through a confusing wilderness.

Transition times take hold of me in different ways. Last Lent was near the beginning of a crazy and wonderful year—I was planning a wedding to my wonderful partner and stepping up my involvement in a worship website. In the flurry of action that spring, and through the following year, I fled from all sorts of discipline.

This year my life is still in flux—maybe even more so. Drew and I are settling into marriage; the website, sadly, is no longer active. And I’m applying to graduate school and embarking on a new part of my career. This may be our last spring in Claremont.

In this time of transition, I find myself clinging to disciplines. The Daily Office and my journal are lifelines for me, consistent even as everything else changes. I’m discovering new depth in the psalms and prayers. And I’m remembering how to write without a filter or censor again.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I have to rediscover this every year. Maybe we need a time to re-commit. Lent has traditionally been a time for new Christians to learn about the faith and prepare themselves for baptism at the Easter Vigil. But these days in many churches, even those with no new members in this season, at the Vigil the whole congregation renews their baptismal vows. We re-commit to the faith we came into many years ago.

One of the things I love about worship and liturgy—which is drawing me to study it in more detail in the future—is its relationship to the cyclical nature of time. The year turns, and the colors shift: blue to white to green to purple to red. The seasons change inside the church walls just as they do outside.

This gives me hope. If my prayer, or my writing, or my editing isn’t working now, maybe the changing seasons will bring those practices back to life again. We re-commit to faith as winter turns to spring, and we hope for what will happen as the wheel turns round again. 

Why I Write

Inspired by the question posed by the National Day on Writing

I write because I don’t know what I think until I’ve put it into words, and sometimes there’s no one around to say it to.

I write for the same reason that I need long walks and home cooked meals—my body needs it, so does my soul.

I write because it gets me out of my brain and into my body.

I write because I overhear conversations on the street or listen to anecdotes my friends tell me and my first response is “Wouldn’t that make a good story?”

I write because I can’t take photographs.

I write because I can’t tell lies.

I write because I am really bad at thinking on the fly. In writing I have time to come up with the perfect rebuttal, hours after the argument is over (the argument in which I said nothing, just stood and opened and closed my mouth like a fish).

I write because metaphors are miraculous. In that last sentence I added a fish even though, as far as we know, fish can’t argue.

I write because I love em dashes and colons and rolling repetitive rhythms. Oh, and alliteration.

I write because I think better with a pen in my hand.

I write to retell the good old stories. You know the ones I’m talking about— coming of age tales, heroic quests, love stories, testimonies of faith, death and rebirth. They may have been told thousands of times already across human history, but they are so big—so true—that they don’t fit into one retelling, or even a hundred retellings. There is still room for me in these old stories.

I write because telling stories, naming the world, is what makes us human.

I write because despite our best efforts, this is still a sexist, racist, unequal and indifferent world. And maybe if I can tell a story about one moment, real or imagined, where people manage to break free of that for a moment and live in compassion—maybe that changes things.

I write because placing myself in a character’s shoes reminds me that everyone in my life has a backstory I may not know.

I write to discover things I don’t know until I see them on the page.

I write to remember.

 *     *    *

Why I am a Writer, or why I call myself a Writer, is a different question than why I write. I used to write because I liked to read. Nerdy dreamy girls in books—Emily of New Moon, Vicky Austin, Harriet the Spy—ended up writers. And so did the women and men whose pictures I saw on the back jacket flap. I used to write because I loved stories and I hadn’t yet learned to fear what people thought of them.

Why do I still call myself a writer? I’m not sure. Today I’m more of an editor and occasional blogger. But I still introduce myself with that loaded word.

At a craft talk once a writer said—I can’t remember who—that real writers love sentences. I thought when I heard that, I do love sentences—the millions of ways they can look and sound. So maybe I am a real writer.

I also love to revise—to carefully dissect each sentence and stitch it back together to see if each phrase and word and consonant is saying what I wanted it to say. Many people say this is one of the worst parts of the writing process. So maybe if I love the hard things, I am a real writer.

I am a writer because I named myself a writer, almost six years ago, and I’ve been trying to live into that call ever since.

I write because I am a writer, and I don’t know what that means, but this is the only way I know to find out.

Confession

‎"Sacraments are our road maps home. God may not need them, but we do, and while they cannot make something happen, at least they make sure that we are in the right place if it should." Barbara Brown Taylor (via Clayfire)

Confession is a sacrament, isn't it? And writing can be confession. The blank page my listener. Holy One, may this be the right place tonight...

Lenten Disciplines: Giving Up vs Taking On

Happy Shrove Tuesday, everyone! At home we always celebrate Shrove Tuesday, the day before the season of Lent begins, with a pancake supper. In the medieval church, pancakes were a way to use up all the rich foods, like butter, milk, and eggs, that would be restricted or forbidden during Lent. I’m pretty sure, however, that medieval Shrove Tuesday pancakes didn’t contain quite as many chocolate chips as the ones I just made for Drew. :) Now I’m sluggish and full and not entirely ready for Lent to start.

So here’s my question. What are you giving up for Lent? Or should I ask, what discipline are you taking on?

More often in recent years, I’ve heard people champion this idea of adding something to your spiritual practice during Lent, instead of the traditional taking something away. I get that giving things up can turn into a self-help competition, a spiritually sanctioned crash diet. Taking on a discipline can give you a chance to try something new.

Usually, though, I’ve pushed back against that. I have a tendency to add and add and add things to my life. I’ll stack up disciplines and commitments until I’m buried under them. And when I get too busy to keep a particular promise I’ve made to myself, I’ll let it slide—one by one ‘til I’ve broken them all.

Whether we end up adding or subtracting, the question is, why do we fast during Lent in the first place? Why did the early church trade tasty pancakes for sparse meatless meals? As I understand it, the tradition of fasting is supposed to remind us of our need for God. When we give things up, things that we love and depend on, we stop leaning on the things we think we need, and learn again how to lean on God. We make space for God, in a way, by clearing out part of our inward-focused lives.

Which is all to say that I’m ignoring my own advice this year, and taking on instead of giving up. For a variety of reasons—I can’t find it in my heart to fast from Facebook anymore, though I have the past few years. But that was before large chunks of my income came from writing & editing online. Networks like Facebook aren’t quite the optional luxury they used to be.

I’ve also been inspired by other suggested spiritual practices that I’ve read. Kristin Berkey-Abbott has a list of creative practices that I love—her suggestions extend past the traditional artsy ideas to the everyday creative acts that I love: baking bread, taking photographs, planting a garden. She also suggests keeping a spiritual journal, which is funnily enough one of the few writing forms I haven’t tried. This Lent, this spiritual journal is the thing I’m taking on.

I am also going to try to pray the Daily Office each day. I’ve explored this form of prayer off and on over the past year, as I’ve been trying to understand more about the Anglican tradition that raised me. (You can get a good sense of this form of daily prayer at the Mission of St. Clare's website, or as always the trusty Book of Common Prayer Online.) Some of it’s familiar; after all, the Evening Prayer service forms the backbone of Holden Evening Prayer which is near to my heart. I like it because when you take a good look, it’s mostly poetry (in the form of scripture, psalms and prayers) and because it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. And the simplicity makes it easier to keep up with, and minimize slipping.

Mostly, I suppose, I want to listen. I have been flying in all different directions this year, muddling through an unscripted life, trying things at random to see if perhaps this might be what I’m called to do. If I try and take time to listen for God each day—well, maybe that is making space for God, no matter whether I am adding to or taking away from my daily routine.

The forty days of Lent are supposed to parallel the time Jesus spent in the wilderness. He entered as a fairly standard disciple of John the Baptist who’d just been hollered at by a supernatural voice—and he left as a teacher and a healer and someone who spent a lot of time on mountaintops listening for God. I wonder sometimes what he learned in the wilderness, in the parts of the story that the Bible skips over. I wonder what I will learn these forty days.

Giving Up

(This morning I thought there were enough Valentine's Day posts out there, I didn't need to add to them. And then this song, dear to my heart, came up on shuffle and I couldn't resist...)

what if we stop having a ball?
what if the paint chips from the wall?
what if there's always cups in the sink?
and what if i'm not who you think 
i am?

I am terrible at making choices. Anything bigger than what to eat for dinner takes me a long time to decide. I held off declaring an English major for several semesters even though I'd taken more lit classes than anything else. But what if I decided later I'd be better off in music? Or French? Or religion? I'd go through these same questions for apartments, for jobs. The scariest thing about choosing is that it shuts out other possibilities. And I can picture those possibilities so clearly. I'm a writer; I have an excellent and well-practiced imagination. I am the master of the what if.

what if i fall further than you?
what if you dream of somebody new?
what if i never let you win
or chase you with a rolling pin—
well? what if i do?

For so long I was afraid the "What if"s would all come crashing in on my relationship, never more so than when I moved to Claremont. Because Drew would figure out what I'm like, in my most unguarded moments.

But maybe that's one of the benefits of dating a process theologian, or at least my process theologian. He never expects me to stay static, or to know any absolute answers. Instead he'd ask, do you want to be with me— as who you are, today? And I'd always answer yes. Yes to our vigorous debates over theology, literature, the relative merits of Buffy vs Angel. Yes to the spontaneous fro-yo dates he'd take me on. Yes to the gentle sound of his voice as he talked me down from being nervous, from being afraid.

what if our baby comes home after nine?
what if your eyes close before mine?

And we started talking forever, and it started getting scarier. We started talking marriage, which means entangled finances and someday children and years and years of cups in the sink and the absolute impossibility that I'd be able to make choices without changing his life, and my own.

But it's not like I'd be able to avoid those choices anyway. What was I going to do, tell myself "what if" stories but never act on them, for fear I'd make other stories disappear? Too late for that anyway. I'd already changed Drew's life, and he'd changed mine. For the better.

what if you lose yourself sometimes?
then i'll be the one to find you
safe in my heart

So a couple of months ago, when Drew knelt down on a snowy night, I said Yes for good. Yes for the person I was that night, and for the person I am today, and for all the people I'll be in the future. Because I like the possibilities that are branching off this love. Love with eyes open, love that doesn't pretend to be the only option, or even the only good option— love that is a choice.

'cos i am giving up on making passes
and i am giving up on half-empty glasses
and i am giving up on greener grasses
i am giving up
for you

November Wrap-Up

Well, it's the last day of my November blogging experiment. Didn't live up to the goal, of course... I only got 13 out of 30 posts finished. But I've always been of the mindset that even a failed writing challenge makes me into a better writer somehow. The question is how. What did I set out to do this month? Where did I fail, and where did I succeed?

First the more obvious ones, the tasks I tried and failed at:

I didn't post every day. This one was HARD. At least in NaNo you could make a frenzied last push and make up for what you'd missed out on. But there's no way to get back a lost day when each post is stamped with a date. Too many days this month where acedia took over, that grey listless feeling where being productive or creative seems totally out of reach.

I didn't find a good blogging time/rhythm, which makes me sad. I mostly ended up writing at the end of the day just before bed, which more often than not just makes for sleepy, sloppy writing.

I had trouble with the line between personal and public. I'm not sure this necessarily falls in the "failures" section, but I do know it's something I struggled with. Even this post feels a little odd, unpolished, confessional. My favorite blogs blend personal stories with commentary on the world. But it's so easy for blogs to turn into diaries, or self-absorbed rants that have little to no relevance outside the blogger's own head. Where's the line between personal essay (my form for a good blog post) and just personal chitchat? As I was trying to get things posted by any means necessary (and inspiration be damned!) I flirted with this line a lot.

OK, that's enough of what I tried to do. What about the things I actually accomplished?

I've posted a LOT. I've posted more this month than the rest of the year combined. By the time this post is finished, I'll have written over 5000 words... only a tenth of what my novelling buddies came up with, but still a significant chunk of original prose.

I wrote some good posts! Some faves include giving thanks last weekend, remembering the process and adventure of writing my novel and starting my new life, and grieving my dad's job loss. I also had fun with photo posts, including the image of CST fall and of course, Drew's trademark excitement over a pile of books.

I've come up with more ideas for posts. Song lyrics, movie reviews... I started to see story ideas and creative connections in everything, even mundane tasks at work. The trick, of course, is to find the angle or the act of creation in each of these everyday moments. Which is hard to do at 11pm at night. But having extra topics to talk about never hurts.

I stopped taking myself too seriously. Which is such a relief. Just being able to sit down and say, I'm just going to post a picture or a video, and then head to bed, without feeling like I had to write the Great American Blog Post every time, seriously made it easier. And I know well enough that just by showing up to the writing space, I'm doing something right.

I didn't give up. Sure I didn't make it to 30 days, or even 15 days. There were several long strings of days where I didn't write anything at all. But I could have let those gaps stretch out longer, figure I wasn't cut out for the blogging project, let my goals fade away. I didn't. I'm still here. And I plan to continue this regular blogging for a while to come.

Only first I need some sleep. Night, all!

Fall in the "City of Trees..." and cacti

Yesterday I gave thanks for the fact that it's been at least a little bit fall-like here, after weeks of seemingly summery weather. It's tricky to locate myself in time when the seasons don't seem to be changing around me. Especially for fall, which more than any of the other seasons seems to be all about change. Fall is a transition season; always has been. First day of the new "school year," for one, but also the shifting from summer into winter. Spring is a destination of its own - we spend the winter waiting for its first day, that first flower or first warm morning - but fall is a moving target.

And yet we got here eventually. I've been especially waiting for the trees to change color around here. Not all of them are palm trees here, of course. In fact, Claremont's nickname is the "City of Trees." That made me laugh when I heard it, since I grew up in Boise, which was actually named for its handful of trees that grew oasis-like by the river. It never seemed quite an accurate nickname for Boise, since it felt pretty much like a desert itself. And Claremont doesn't even have a river.

What it does have, however, is people who picture small-town New England in their heads, and are willing to import trees to get it to look that way. So I don't know what it's like outside town boundaries, but here in Claremont, at least, you can see signs of fall.

I tried, with my limited photographic eye, to document a few of those signs. Check out the CST chapel and the Village streets as they change color!