Tag Archives: sabbath

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The Internet Kills Community! Except When It Doesn’t

First, a big welcome to those of you who’ve made your way here thanks to the Fellowship of Prayer! Come on in and stay awhile. This blog is named after the Blue Room in our house, which is the arts and crafts space we set up in what used to be our dining room. We are well stocked with everything you need for your stay: glitter glue, play-doh, googley-eyes and more.

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Two articles crossed my screen recently about the Internet and its effect on community. First:

Whenever Two or More Are Gathered… Online — Sojourners

My editor passed along this link in response to some of stuff I wrote in Sabbath in the Suburbs about my experience taking a tech Sabbath each weekend. The article describes a very vibrant, supportive community that formed via Facebook in the wake of a friend’s death in Iraq.

I noted that there was a physical dimension to the community—it did not take place solely online; in fact the author actually moved so she could live closer to several community members. Certainly there are online communities that get along and get deep without ever meeting face to face… but most of the ones I’ve been a part of are either physical friendships that are kindled and stoked online, or online friendships that deepen to the point that people want to meet face to face. Examples of the former include my group of friends from Rice, who have had an e-mail list for going on 20 years now. Examples of the latter include the RevGalBlogPals and the Young Clergy Women, both of whom have annual conferences now.

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Second is this article about digital Sabbath that my mother sent me:

We Don’t Need a Digital Sabbath; We Need More Time — Atlantic

The blurb summarizing the article says, What if our technology isn’t the problem? A look at “Digital Sabbaths” and the dangers of holding our gadgets responsible.

But the article isn’t really about that. I thought from that description that the article would pooh-pooh tech sabbaths, but in fact it’s a fairly good synopsis of the ins and outs of them. Here is the vital bit:

When we make a Sabbath and push back against the many claims on our time, we are, in some ways, rebelling against this speed-up and the intrusion of work and labor into our domestic sphere…

It’s for all these reasons that a Sabbath, digital or otherwise, can be reinvigorating. When we take a day away from our tools and create a day entirely under our own control, we create that “palace in time” where we can meet our friends and family and, finally, connect.

If one concedes the point that a Sabbath for restorative reasons need not proscribe technology, it may seem pointless to argue against the digital sabbath. What’s the harm?

The reason is that if we allow ourselves to blame the technology for distracting us from our children or connecting with our communities, then the solution is simply to put away the technology. We absolve ourselves of the need to create social, political, and, sure, technological structures that allow us to have the kinds of relationships we want with the people around us. We need to realize that at the core of our desire for a Sabbath isn’t a need to escape the blinking screens of our electronic world, but the ways that work and other obligations have intruded upon our lives and our relationships.

I think that’s a little facile, and this issue of “blaming the technology” is strange. Yes, putting away the phones and iPads isn’t enough to make a radical change in one’s life and world. But I’m almost willing to say that radical change is impossible without putting them away now and then.

I think about this from an incarnational point of view, which comes from my faith tradition: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Technology, by and large, connects us with people across the miles (which is valuable) but it distracts us from the physical world immediately around us. Setting aside these gadgets is the first step to reconnecting with the real fleshy people right there with us.

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Friday Link Love

The Cult of Collaboration — Fernando Gros

Just jokin'. Sort of.

…We often need to collaborate in order to solve really big problems. And, as humans, we also need to work alongside other people to satisfy more basic emotional desires for community and belonging.

But, the hard slog of creating, innovating and thinking is something we largely do alone.

That’s something I totally agree with. And, it worries me that in many parts of society, including schools, we are not encouraging people to develop the skills required to work alone, for extended periods of time, on complex problems.

Add in the fact that smartphones mean that we need never be alone again, and this is an issue worth thinking about. Alone. Or together.

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Religion for Atheists — Alain de Botton

We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this. We need to build a similar awareness into secular structures.
Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity.

The above link is to an FAQ about Botton’s TED talk on Atheism 2.0, which is outstanding and available here.

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Pomodoro Technique

If you’re not familiar with the pomodoro technique for time management, it’s incredibly simple and very effective. I wrote Sabbath in the Suburbs primarily using techniques like this one.

Poke around the website to learn more about it, though for heaven’s sake, I don’t know why you’d need a $26 book to understand it, let alone the tomato-shaped timer, although it is cute.

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And along the lines of time management:

The Biggest Myth in Time Management — Harvard Business Review

In a nutshell: That we can get it all done. (Comments are interesting, trying to diagnose “Brad’s” problem in the article.)

I think this simple realization has profound spiritual implications, way beyond simple time management. But then again, I would think that, I just wrote a book about Sabbath…

Have a good weekend. It’s a long weekend for us, what with teacher work days on Monday and Tuesday. We have our congregation’s annual meeting on Sunday, after which the kids and I head to Johnstown, Pennsylvania for a short visit with Robert’s grandmother.

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In Which I Have My Kids Inoculated

We gave the girls ice skating lessons for Christmas. We have a rec center near our house that offers them pretty inexpensively. It’s also low-key. No future Olympians there, just kids having fun and getting fit.

I chose the time carefully—9:35 on Saturday morning. That’s early enough that it doesn’t break up the day, but late enough that our Saturday can begin without alarm clocks and hurry.

I had some mixed feelings about scheduling something on Saturday, which is more often than not our Sabbath day. But I relented, because a) it’s only six weeks, b) it’s something they really wanted to do, and c) there are times we have Sabbath on Sunday, so often there won’t be a conflict.

Their first Saturday, they had a great time. I watched them fall, and smile, and get up, again and again. It’s hard work, ice skating. But they were bubbly with excitement when it was over, and couldn’t wait to go back the next week.

The next week was this past Saturday. Robert and I got up in our quiet slowness and made our way downstairs, where the girls were already with James, making a boat out of the chairs in our family room. Caroline had cut an anchor out of black construction paper and was tying it to one of the armrests with embroidery floss.

We reminded them of the ice skating, and they cheered at being able to go again. And then… they kept playing. “Can we have breakfast on the boat?” Sure.

We kept reminding them of the lessons: “You do want to go, right?” And they kept saying, “Yeah, we do. Of course we do.”

Back to the boat.

We eventually got them dressed and shod and jacketed and out the door with one rec center membership card but not the other. Which is pretty good for us.

And they were glad to go, but a little reluctant to leave the boat.

I realized: Sabbath has seeped into them. They have grown to need it. Love it.

Excellent.

A friend of mine moved away from here because she was fed up by what she called the “Fairfaxedness.” If you live in Fairfax County, you know what I’m talking about, although the Fairfaxedness is far and wide. There’s so much about living here that is great. But sometimes it feels like we’re experiencing an epidemic, if you will, of schedules and practices and enrichment and your-turn-to-bring-the-snack.

But maybe our year of Sabbath-taking inoculated them against the Fairfaxedness, just a little bit. Not that we won’t all catch a fever every now and then. But that day of rest and play helped build up some antibodies. I do believe it did.

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Today’s Sabbath-ish Thought

Actually, since I’m working on the book, I am having more than one Sabbath-ish thought per day. Why, some days I have as many as 3.5 Sabbath-ish thoughts!

My friend Marci posted a link on FB to an NPR story about Joan Didion’s latest book, Blue Nights, in which she writes about the death of her daughter. (I reviewed The Year of Magical Thinking some time back.)

Marci was startled into awareness by this quote in the story:

Didion writes that in theory, these mementos should bring back the moment, but in fact, they only make clear how inadequately she appreciated the moment back when it happened.

I am certain that, had I heard the story, it would have been the money quote for me as well.

Part of my impulse to explore Sabbath is to try and cheat time, in a sense—to slow it down to the speed of savoring, just one day a week, by not having to be anywhere, do anything, prove myself, develop skills, inculcate kids, bring order to chaos. Sabbath has been an exercise in mindfulness and awareness—the kind of mindfulness Didion grieves the lack of as she beholds touchstone objects from the past. My Memory Project, too, has been a way of capturing on paper the essence of these days.

I was thinking about all this today, as James played on a church playground with Margaret while Caroline rehearsed with her children’s choir inside. The world was washed with gold as the sun receded, and I knew that in a week, this hour of the day would be blue-black and cold.

I found myself watching them with love, recording the scene as fully as I could, just as an exercise. One of the things that drives me, in parenthood and life, is not wanting to have the experience Didion describes, a wistful, heartbreaking “I missed it.”

But I realized today, I will have that experience; indeed, there is no way not to. Every day is full of golden moments. You simply cannot hold on to them all. You can’t even hold on to a fraction of them. They are too numerous, growing in number constantly. And they are simultaneously too precious to record in our memory banks adequately, and too quotidian to register as something to remember.

When loss comes to us, we will never feel we have appreciated the moment enough. That’s what grief is.

Didion’s experience is not a call to intentionality for the rest of us, although I am a big believer in intentionality. Rather, what she describes is an inevitable by-product of love and death. There is no remedy for what she describes in her book, no amount of intentionality or mindfulness that will keep us from the same fate.

I found this amazingly freeing.

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Are We Teaching Our Kids to be Dysfunctional about Time?

Prison Countdown Clock. Because it's not too soon to start that Christmas shopping.

The book writing is coming along, which means I’ve got Sabbath on the brain all the time. (Too bad I haven’t taken one in a couple of weeks. Oops.)

I’m finding that the book is really not about Sabbath. It is about Time: how we understand it, measure it, spend it. Time is a great leveler because we all have a finite amount of it. Even the CEO of a Fortune 500 company cannot cheat death (though admittedly, top-notch health care doesn’t hurt).

So here’s something I’ve been kicking around about time, and I don’t have an answer. I’ve always heard that with kids, it’s beneficial to give them some warning when it’s time to transition from one activity to the next—especially if the first activity is something fun that they aren’t going to want to stop doing. Parenting experts advocate a countdown, e.g. “five minutes and then we need to leave the playground,” or “we leave for the bus in ten minutes.”

We are practitioners of this method, mainly because it makes life easier: more warning means fewer tantrums because they wanted to go down the slide One! More! Time!, and fewer frantic searches for shoes when we need to walk out the door. But we also do it because it respects our children as people. I don’t like being yanked around without warning and wouldn’t like it if it were done to me.

On the other hand, I wonder whether there is a downside, in the sense of making the awareness of time a little too prominent a feature of our kids’ lives. Childhood is great kairos time (holy time, time outside of time) in a lot of ways. Kids get what it means to be immersed in an activity, enjoying it for its own sake, not worrying about the clock. Does the warning system take them outside of this immersiveness and condition them to be aware of time in ways that aren’t helpful? And is there a cost to them in terms of their development or their enjoyment of childhood?

What do you think?

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Thursday Link Love

Oh my goodness, link love on Thursday! Why not. Emerson said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I learned that from a Nike commercial.

What a week, folks. I’ve been blasting through the book as best I can, and still hope to get it done by Thanksgiving. But here are a few things I enjoyed during my many coffee breaks:

Can Do (Maira Kalman)

I love Maira Kalman. I have her illustrated Strunk and White and it makes me happy. This piece is not new, but new to me. A hymn to America’s inventiveness.

“Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message.”

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Behind Door Number Three (Peter Rollins)

Connecting Occupy Wall Street and our tendency to settle for the status quo.

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What Happened to Downtime? (Scott Belsky)

Soon enough, planes, trains, subways, and, yes, showers will offer the option of staying connected. Knowing that we cannot rely on spaces that force us to unplug to survive much longer, we must be proactive in creating these spaces for ourselves. And when we have a precious opportunity to NOT be connected, we should develop the capacity to use it and protect it.

I love his suggestion to “Protect the state of no-intent.”


Articles like this challenge and convict me… and also affirm that it’s a fiercely important thing to be practicing Sabbath keeping. And writing about it. Hat tip to Ruth for this one.

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Friday Link Love

Tonight we celebrate Robert’s birthday with a trip to the Arlington Drafthouse to see this guy:

Wyatt Cenac

We’re pretty psyched.

In the meantime, here are some links to keep you busy:

Don’t Give Up: The Inspirational Letters Project

The eternal truth of a lot of creative work: 3% of the time you are on fire, and 97% of the time is a messy slog. The key: persist, despite all the difficulties…

These are letters from animators at Pixar and elsewhere to an aspiring animator… the response prompted him to start a spinoff called the Inspirational Letters Project. As you would expect, they are visually interesting.

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King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King denied the ontological divinity of Jesus, didn’t think heaven/hell were literal places, saw the Bible as myth, rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus (beginning at the age of 13), rejected original sin, and more. In other words, a liberal theologian.

On that topic, I’m sympathetic with James McGrath, who laments that many of the “new atheists” are putting forth criticisms of Christianity and the Bible as if they are new and original, when in fact many theologians have been saying similar stuff for centuries, including MLK, it would seem. (I also note that the comments on McGrath’s post are largely substantive and respectful. Kudos to him.)

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Don’t Just Do Something: Stand There

 

Numerous writers, artists, poets and musicians have testified to the virtues of such idleness in their own creative lives. It was when he was completely alone, Mozart wrote in a letter, “say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when [he] could not sleep,” that his ideas flowed best and most abundantly…

Such testimony is not just plain good sense; it is good science too. In a recent article in Discover magazine, the journalist Stephen Johnson reported on a conversation with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. The cognitive part of our brain works very fast, Damasio explained. “So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names in just a few hundredths of a second.” But the emotional part of our brains works very differently, and there is precious little evidence that this is going to change. Tasks that have to do with empathy and imagination, with slow-growing qualities like love and fidelity and ethics, will continue to develop in their own sweet time.

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Kurt Andersen: Our Politics Are Sick

I love Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360; it’s one of my favorite podcasts. “Creativity, pop culture and the arts”: what’s not to love?

He nails this metaphor in my opinion:

The American body politic suffers from autoimmune disorders.

It’s a metaphor, but it’s not a joke. I’ve read a lot about autoimmune diseases — the literal, medical kinds, also disconcertingly on the rise — because several members of my family have them. At some point, our bodies’ own immune systems went nuts, mistaking healthy pieces of our anatomies — a pancreas, a thyroid, a joint — for foreign tissue, dangerous enemies within, and proceeded to attack and try to destroy them. It’s as close to tragedy as biology gets.

Which is pretty much exactly what’s been happening the last decade in our politics. The Truthers decided the U.S. government was behind 9/11. Others decided our black president is definitely foreign-born and Muslim. Tea Party Republicans are convinced his administration is crypto-socialist and/or proto-fascist. The anti-Shariah people are terrified of the nonexistent threat of Islamic law infecting American jurisprudence. It’s now considered reasonable to regard organs and limbs of the federal government — the E.P.A., the education department, the Federal Reserve — as tumors that must be removed. Taxation itself is now considered a parasitic pathogen rather than a crucial part of our social organism.

Brill.

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The Procrastination Flowchart

I resemble that.

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And finally, Steve Job’s 2005 Commencement Speech to Stanford. Wise and touching. I wish him well.

 

 

 

 

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Friday Link Love

Just a few this week:

Shakespeare in Celebrity Voices (youtube)

This has been making the rounds—impressionist Jim Meskimen does Clarence’s speech from Richard III with a few dozen voices. It’s just fun.

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Tinkering in the Studio

Neat picture of Buckminster Fuller, and some fun thoughts from the Improvised Life folks on tinkering, which has been a Sabbath activity for our family this year.

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Ten Mindful Ways to Use Social Media

Good list. One example:

5. Experience now, share later.
It’s common to snap a picture with your phone and upload it to Facebook or email it to a friend. This overlaps the experience of being in a moment and sharing it. It also minimizes intimacy, since your entire audience joins your date or gathering in real time. Just as we aim to reduce our internal monologues to be present, we can do the same with our digital narration.

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America Avoids Vacation

Some 25 percent of Americans and 31 percent of low-wage earners get no vacation at all anymore, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

and yet:

Performance increases after a vacation, with reaction times going up 40 percent. Vacations cure burnout, the last stage of chronic stress and something very difficult to shake. Burned-out employees are a major liability to effective performance.

She also argues that many people avoid a truly restorative vacation (as opposed to a go-go-go one) because of the emotional upheaval and examination that can occur when we stop and spend time with our crazy selves. She gets dinged in the comments for this, with people saying “I don’t take vacation because I don’t have the option to do so, it’s not some bogus woo-woo spiritual thing!” I think both can be true—many people don’t receive vacation benefits, and others receive them but don’t feel like they can take them. But I also think there’s a lot of numbing going on.

What’s your experience? Do you receive vacation benefits? Do you use them all? If not, why not?

Have a good weekend everyone!

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Were You Hurried as a Kid?

I put this query on Google+ but thought I’d put it here too.

As most of you know, I’m writing a book about our family’s weekly Sabbath practice and how that works in the midst of a very busy life involving two careers, three kids and their various activities, etc. Part of our interest in Sabbath is to help our kids not have a completely go-go-go childhood. Yet even with this practice and intention, I feel like I’m regularly shooing my kids out the door to get somewhere.

In contrast, I’ve been thinking about my own childhood — there were four of us kids, and we were involved in all kinds of activities, but looking back, I never remember feeling rushed. But nor was I late to stuff. So I wonder, am I just not remembering the hurry and the scheduling? Or did my mother cultivate a more relaxed attitude than I feel like I do? :-)

And here’s what I want to know from others: did you feel rushed, or busy, as a kid? Do you have memories of being hurried and/or overprogrammed? If so, what was that like? And if you can’t recall those experiences, do you think that’s a function of memory, or were things really different back then? Or both?

Feel free to e-mail me directly if you’d rather not comment here: maryannmcdana (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Monday Miscellany

Long-form blogging just ain’t gonna happen this week, so here are some random tidbits as I head into some busyness:

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On Thursday I leave with Caroline, Margaret and my mother (a Unitarian who doesn’t mind Jesus) for the Wild Goose Festival. I’m excited that the girls’ first camping experience will be a girl-power affair—Robert will have a boys’ weekend with James. They’re thinking about a train museum in Pennsylvania, plus Cars2. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed at the logistics.

I haven’t camped in at least a decade, our equipment is scattered all over our house and in variable states of repair, and whereas *I* would be happy relying solely on food vendors for sustenance, I don’t think that’s going to cut it for our somewhat pickier children. So: campstove and simple meals.

That said, Woo! Wild Goose! Woodstock for Jesus hippies! I can’t wait.

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Remember when I wrote that Caroline was a dedicated swimmer but not likely to break into the top tier of swimmers? Ahem. She won a blue ribbon at her first-ever “A” meet on Saturday, in breast stroke, which she’d DQ’d  just a week earlier at time trials. She is elated. It was funny the way it happened—she was in the middle of the pack time-wise, but every other girl in her age group DQd. It’s a very hard stroke to get right, apparently. This is SO Caroline, who is not the speediest, but is persistent, and she works hard to make her strokes clean and precise.

Kinda reminds me of her mama, who continues to do C25K yet is still tortoise-like.

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The commitment to Sabbath continues, though its look and feel have really changed over the months. It’s gotten easier and harder. It’s become more and more essential for my sanity, and there are also more and more things tugging at it, trying to make it not happen. One of my twitter followers was kind enough to tweet this page, which is a listing of all of the Sabbath-related posts I’ve written over the months. I need to get back to that. I’m writing about Sabbath all the time but a lot of it is still rough notes.

My manuscript for The Sabbath Year is due in October, and because of Chalice’s long publishing cycle, it won’t be published until Fall 2012. In the meantime, this blog is the place to be for sneak peeks and updates.

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We’re starting a new sermon series at church called “Postcards from the Bible.” We will look at different significant places in the Bible—archetypes, such as garden, valley, mountaintop, city, beach—and explore what they represent for us spiritually. This approach appeals to the English major in me: we talk all the time about the plot, characters and themes of Bible stories, why not setting? Besides, it’s a way of traveling without leaving the sanctuary.

In addition to being a fun series, and one that builds on some earlier work I’ve done in print, the series is a way of addressing the travel bug that has invaded my life once again. But the bug is not appeased by this series; I’ve started dreaming of a trip to Cuba in January with members of this presbytery and Iona over the summer with Robert and the kids. We’ll see.

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Things are busy on the writing front. In addition to writing several articles for the new Feasting on the Gospels series, I’m also writing the liturgy for the Sunday worship services at Montreat Conference Center. It’s been fun to get messages from friends saying, “I was at Montreat this weekend and we used your stuff in worship!” And I’ve got articles coming soon on Religion Dispatches and catapult magazine.

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I also recorded a video for Bruce Reyes-Chow’s We Are PC(USA) project. I will let you know when that project kicks off. It was fun and frustrating, a stretching experience, to be sure. As a recovering perfectionist, I had an ideal look in my head, and what came out is far from it. But it’s a start. I can now add video to my grab bag of tricks.

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What’s keeping you busy and hopefully bringing you some joy?