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Kirk Douglas, Me, and the Ascension of Christ

6/11/2018

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Image from Wikimedia Commons
In his 1988 memoir, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk Douglas revisits Paris some years after having been stationed there during the Second World War. Unable to recapture the feeling he’d had during those heady days, he realizes that what he is actually searching for is his 22-year-old self, who, obviously, isn't there to be found.
 
I had a similar experience the first time I revisited the Sterling Renaissance Festival after some years away. My first two years at that show – living in the woods, swimming in Lake Ontario, performing with extraordinarily talented colleagues – were in many ways idyllic, and I was eager to relive the feeling of freedom I had had there in the first blush of my youth.

It didn't happen. No matter how I tried to re-create the experience I remembered, it simply didn't feel the same. Then one morning as I walked from my tent to the showers, I heard a voice say very clearly in my head, "Why are you standing here looking up at the sky?"
 
I knew at once the story the voice in my head was alluding to.
 
Then (the disciples) gathered round (Jesus) and asked him, ‘Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’He said to them: ‘It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

​They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’  (Acts 1:6-11)

I had never really connected with this story. Centered on Jesus’s bodily ascension into heaven—an idea I have always struggled with—it had always left me unmoved. Likewise, the promise of Jesus’s bodily return is treated elsewhere in the New Testament, and is not the main point of this story. 

For me, the operative part of this passage is when the angels ask the disciples why they are standing around looking up at the sky. As long as they all  strain their eyes to catch sight of the bodily Jesus, they cannot look inward to find Christ in themselves, or outward to find Christ in others. Their preoccupation with the Jesus they have known makes them unable to "seek and serve Christ in all persons." (Book of Common Prayer) They were like Kirk Douglas and me, looking for their youthful selves rather than experiencing themselves and others as they are now. The disciples could not receive power through the Holy Spirit until they accepted that the physical Jesus was gone.

​Now, my wife gazes meaningfully up to the sky whenever she catches me waxing nostalgic about our children's early years. When I start reminiscing about cute things they said and did when they were little, she reminds me that my smart, talented, kind, athletic, funny, beautiful teenagers are right here with me, ready to be enjoyed in the present rather than mooned over in the past.

I'm also apt to gaze up at the sky for a glimpse of the things I used to be able to do before spinal stenosis. It's easy to get caught up in missing those things: playing the concertina, going to contradances, walking for pleasure, picking things up off the floor without losing my balance. Hell, I even miss my hair – and I lost that long before my spinal cord turned on me.
​
If I am ever to be able to engage the life I have, I know I need to let go of the life that is gone. Not that I think anything ever goes to waste unless we let it; all those experiences – all of everybody's experiences – make us who we are, and are never lost. But as long as we stand here looking up at the sky, straining for a glimpse of them, trying to recapture what is gone forever, we cannot be of any use to ourselves or others in the here and now.
 
 ​
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Praying for the Dead with the Anglican Rosary

4/21/2018

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That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” (Matthew 22:23-32)

This passage is at the heart of three Christian ideas. The first is the Communion of Saints-- the doctrine that whenever we pray together, especially at the Eucharist, we join our voices "with angels and archangels and… all the faithful of every generation."

Derived from this doctrine is the practice of invoking the intercession of saints. If everyone is alive to God, then there is no difference between your asking me to pray for you and asking, for example, St. Francis of Assisi to pray for you. St. Francis and I are equally alive in the sight of God.

Finally, there's the practice of praying for the souls of the dead. The belief that all are alive in the sight of God precludes the idea that once a person dies, it's all over. Both the above passage, and my overriding belief that God loves us and love, not death, always wins, persuade me that the old Catholic practice of praying for the dead makes perfect sense. Here, then, is one way to do it.

I have written elsewhere about the Anglican Rosary. The main thing that sets it apart from other chaplet prayers (prayers said on strings of beads variously configured) is that the beads have no fixed prayers associated with them. Rather, the person praying decides what to say on each of the different types of beads in the chaplet. This is how I use the Anglican Rosary to pray for the departed.

On the cross, I pray the Collect for Purity from the Book of Common Prayer: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

On the bead after the cross – called the Invitatory bead-- I pray the opening lines of the Daily Office, also from the Book of Common Prayer: Lord, open our lips, and our mouths shall proclaim your praise. O God, makes speed to save us; O Lord, make haste to help us. Glory to God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

On the four Cruciform beads, I pray a prayer from the Prayerbook Ministration at the Time of Death: Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant N. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.  Amen. May his soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.  Amen.
 
Finally, on each of the sets of seven small beads (known as "weeks") I pray one of the best-known of all prayers for the dead: Rest eternal grand him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him.

One other thing that sets the Anglican Rosary apart from other chaplets is that the chaplet doesn't end with the last bead in the circle; rather, one goes around the circle as often as one wishes, the ends by repeating the Invitatory and ending on the Cross. For the second Invitatory prayer, I use the Song of Simeon: Lord, you now have set your servant free, to go in peace as you have promised; for these eyes of mine have seen the Savior whom you have prepared for all the world to see: a Light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people Israel. Glory to God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

I conclude by repeating the Collect for Purity on the Cross.
 
If you have had an inclination to pray for the departed, and weren't sure how to get started, perhaps this little exercise will help.
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What Can I Do When I Can No Longer Do What I Once Could?

2/28/2018

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Me playing the tabla, before spinal stenosis
PictureMe, playing the concertina at a Renaissance festival, before spinal stenosis
I first knew for sure that I had a problem when I was using the elliptical exerciser. I had been keeping myself in shape with it for years, but it slowly, almost imperceptibly, became more difficult to use. When the reckoning finally came, my left foot would clench up like a fist after only a few minutes of exercise. Then things began to happen faster.
 
Within a short time, I could no longer play the piano, concertina or harmonium without pain, and could only type with my right hand. (I am using dictation software to write this article.) Centering Prayer became difficult because I could no longer sit still comfortably for any period of time. Cooking became a challenge as my left hand became less adept at holding vegetables while my right hand cut them. And while "any place is walking distance if you have the time" had always been a motto of mine, I soon found even walking taxing. Spinal stenosis – a condition in which the bones of the spine thicken, putting pressure on the spinal cord and causing weakness, loss of dexterity, and decreased range of motion on one side of the body – had left me unable to do a lot of the things which had previously given me joy.
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Me, playing the harmonium at a Renaissance festival, before spinal stenosis. The left hand pumps the bellows.
The problem had been a long time coming on; like the frog who boiled to death because the heat under the pan had been turned up so slowly that it hadn't noticed, I failed to register my increasing debility for at least a year before it became too severe to ignore. Besides, I somaticize my emotions a lot, so it was easy to assume that the muscle tension in my left arm, leg, hand, and shoulder were symptoms of stress.
 
I had surgery which, unfortunately, didn't work; in fact, I was worse after it than before. Everything from picking things up off the floor to putting on my pants became harder, so I did less, and between my physical inertness, and depression urging me to spend many hours sleeping on the couch, I managed to put on about 90 pounds. I went from being a person whose age people routinely guessed ten years low, to getting offered senior citizen discounts at a glance.
 
I developed an obsession with my "glory days," when I could do so many things I could no longer do, or do as well as I used to. At the same time, I would see friends 10 to 20 years older than me – I am 53 now – move around much more spryly than I could, and be beset with panic about ending up a miserable, contracted 65-year-old in a wheelchair. I was caught between mourning the past and dreading the future.
 
And the fatigue! Just walking eight tenths of a mile to church and back for Morning Prayer leaves me well-nigh exhausted, and if I follow that up with an aquacise  class at the gym, I’ll either need to take a nap or drag myself through the rest of the day  at 60% power. My left hand has become so maladroit that even tying my shoes makes me break a sweat.  Moving around in a crowded room has become an ordeal, as I strive not to use other people as a luge course from my seat to the bathroom or buffet. Even if it’s for something I love, like shape-note singing, if it’s going to involve a lot of people in close quarters, or there aren’t comfortable chairs, I may stay home. My world is contracting.
 
“Most people start the day with an unlimited amount of possibilities, and energy to do whatever they desire, especially young people,” wrote a blogger with Lupus. “The hardest thing I ever had to learn is to slow down, and not do everything. I fight this to this day. I hate feeling left out, having to choose to stay home, or to not get things done that I want to.”
  
I hate it, too, and the anxiety and weariness still trouble me during my weaker moments. I still fiercely miss making music with friends, cooking without dropping things all the time, and walking for pleasure, and I still dread those further losses that may be coming. But the good news is, I have begun, with the help of my wife and a lot of prayerful introspection, to emerge from that narrow space between the Scylla of the past and the dire Charybdis of the future. It sounds ridiculously obvious, but the secret is to focus on what I can do now.
 
I cannot play instruments that require the equal use of both hands, but I can play predominantly right-handed instruments like the Irish bodhran, the Basque string drum, the Indian karatals (tiny brass cymbals)—and thanks to some kind biomechanical engineers at Temple University, I now have a motorized harmonium that doesn’t require my left hand to pump the bellows. (I also found a one-handed accordion, with a keyboard on the right but no bass or chord buttons on the left.)
 
I cannot sit, erect and still, in meditation any longer, but I can pray Evening Prayer or Compline out of the Prayerbook, pray the Rosary once a week with the Morning Meditation group at church, and observe novenas when saints to whom I feel a connection come up in the calendar.
 
I cannot practice yoga or use the elliptical exerciser, but I can go to aquacise classes and walk to church for Morning Prayer.
 
It’s hard to slice and dice by hand, but it’s easy to use a Cuisinart and buy frozen chopped onions and pre-minced garlic. (Helpful hint: a hardboiled egg slicer can be used to slice mushrooms, too.)
 
All of these accommodations have been exercises in humility, of course; having to face loss of ability and accept help are potent medicine for a misplaced sense of self. The cooking accommodations have also shown me that many of the things I thought were quality-of-life choices—always using fresh garlic, rather than powdered or pre-minced, for instance—were actually ego-driven choices rooted in pride; whatever else I was, I wasn’t one of those sorry people who didn’t know what to do with fresh herbs. Now, I save physical discomfort by opening a bag of frozen chopped onions rather than chopping them fresh, and each time I do it, the ego discomfort is a little less.

Best of all, God seems to be validating my adjustments with a stream of successful and rewarding workshops, discussions, and other professional and volunteer opportunities; chances to use the training I received at the Shalem Institute, graduate school and seminary. It almost seemed as though every time I resigned myself to finding a new way of doing something, I get a phone call or email about some new project. It's enough to make you think you're doing something right.
 
Perhaps most excitingly, I got an email asking me to serve as a Formation Counselor for the Third Order of St. Francis--a religious order within the Episcopal Church whose members live a Franciscan life, with a Rule and under vows, but in the world rather than in community. I had plenty of reservations, and plenty of reasons to say "no".  Things like deadlines, files, email, and other things to be kept straight and organized can be daunting to me.  Moreover, as I read the handbook and other materials, I realized how much I had been bobbing along the surface of Third Order life in some ways.
 
When I was in formation, I took to heart what the formation letters said about how it was I, and not my family, who was becoming a Franciscan, and when my children were small – and until quite recently – I missed a lot of fellowship meetings because they were on Saturday mornings, which I considered family time. While the day-to-day business of keeping the rule was something I could still do, I fell out of touch with the larger order in some ways; the newsletters, the intercession list, and other ways of keeping my finger on the pulse sort of fell through the cracks. But I remembered what the Principles of the Order say about humility: "when asked to undertake work of which they feel unworthy or incapable they do not shrink from it on the grounds of humility, but confidently attempt it through the power that is made perfect in weakness."
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Harmonium with an electric motor to pump the bellows, courtesy of the Temple University Department of Biomechanical Engineering.
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You Can't Build a Tree

7/31/2017

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Mustard Tree
I have come to believe that one of the best reasons to read and listen to sacred texts many times over many years is that when we are ready, the texts spring into life and offer us the healing or insight we need

I have been anxious and on edge these past several weeks without understanding why. It had gotten so bad that my family was suffering because of it. Then, this past Sunday, I found myself becoming suddenly and inexplicably emotional, to the point of wiping away tears, during this portion of the Gospel reading:

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31-32)

​After the reading, I racked my brains in order to understand why this passage, which I have heard and read ever since I can remember, should have had such a powerful effect on me on this particular Sunday. I realized that I had recently begun a new per diem hospice chaplain job, and had just been contacted about interviewing for another. I still have not lost the weight I have put on since my spinal surgery, and have been frustrated with the painfully slow pace with which occupational and physical therapy yield tangible results, if they yield any. I'd been struggling to re-learn how to play the harmonium, re-establish my physical and spiritual exercise regimens, reclaim the weed-choked flowerbed and half a dozen other things. 

In a flash, I knew what had been making me so anxious: I have been trying to build a tree for myself, when what I needed to do was to plant a seed and trust God that it would grow. I could cultivate it to the best of my ability one day at a time, rather than trying to force it all into existence at once. Because the trees we build for ourselves may stand up, more or less, but they don't grow, they don't make good signs of the Kingdom, and they certainly aren't hospitable to those who perch around our lives.
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What We Want Most

3/11/2017

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"I have always wondered about the reasoning behind giving up your favorite thing for Lent," wrote a friend a few moments after I announced that I was staying off my personal Facebook page for Lent.

Well, a lot of people observe Lent, and for a lot of reasons. (I've even noticed a growing number of non-Christians observing it.) Some people do it as a way of bringing unruly desires under their conscious control, increasing their level of self-mastery and winning themselves a measure of personal freedom. Certainly when I was younger, and even more of a slave to my baser instincts than I am now, that was my goal. 

It's a little different now, however; at any rate, I frame it differently. 

A colleague of mine says that "we give up what we want most for what we want now." I genuinely want to read that book about Aristotle, but with a Christopher Moore vampire novel at hand, that's going to be a challenge unless I give up fiction for Lent. 

There's less to be gained by walking to church for morning meditation if I stayed up late the night before watching Netflix than if I'd gotten a good night's sleep and came in fresh. I genuinely want a fruitful meditation time, so I give up Netflix for Lent. 
​
Time spent on Facebook, while I enjoy it, is time not spent on musical and writing projects, so away Facebook goes for a while. That way, when Easter comes, I can meet it as something closer to my best self than I was forty days ago, having spent that season of preparation trading in what I want now for what I want most.
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Getting Over It

2/27/2017

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This afternoon in the supermarket, I caught sight of a display featuring some chip-and-dip snack food. The marketing goal seemed to be to give a more sophisticated air to the product, and the display's tagline read, "Life is short; use the good bowl."

I felt like I'd had the wind knocked out of me.

But I have to begin nearly twenty years back, during my mother's last illness.

Our family had a glass-fronted hutch in the living room, in which the "best" china and glassware were displayed. They were never used, because no occasion was ever festive or momentous enough to justify bringing them out of their glassed-in sarcophagus.

One day, my wife began removing the precious items from the hutch and marching them into the kitchen, placing them in the cupboards with the everyday dishes. After a couple of trips, my mother joined her, the two of them forming a little parade of crockery. "What am I waiting for?" my mother asked. "My next life?" We began putting the "best" things to their intended use that very evening.

I wasn't there when my mother died. I took my leave on a Friday afternoon for a weekend performing out of state. As I assured her that I would be back to see her on Monday, she appeared to have a rare lucid interval, her widened eyes intensely blue in her pale face as she shook her bald head, no longer able to speak but clearly saying "no." When I again promised to return on Monday, she took my right hand in hers, raised it to her lips, and kissed it.

I wonder how much of me understood that, knowing she would not survive the weekend, my mother was saying goodbye to me. Not too much, I hope; certainly not the parts closest to the surface. My capacity for self-deception is titanic, but I'd like to hope that I had no conscious awareness that I was seeing my mother alive for the last time, that I wasn't pushing the thought away because I didn't want to deal with it.

People die, and we think we get over it, but we never do. Grief goes into remission, perhaps for years, but some chance association can bring it roaring back at any time. Usually it's bittersweet, as when I see glimpses of my mom in my own two girls, and wish she could have met these children whom she would have loved so much. But sometimes it's like a blow, a shot to the gut that says, "The good dishes were ready, but you weren't."

​The people we love are forever with us, and there's no knowing when circumstances will throw the loss of them into stark relief.

Life is short; use the good bowl.


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Weaponized Compassion

2/22/2017

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 “Hate Has No Home Here” proclaims the popular yard sign. Now available in 29 states, the sign—red on one side and blue on the other--proclaims its message in languages including Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew. But as innocuous as the message itself is, I’ve heard it denounced on talk radio as “virtue signaling.” The yard sign, the safety pin, even driving a Prius are, the thinking goes, self-aggrandizing gestures meant to smear conservatives by proclaiming our own moral superiority. Expressions of human caring are now, apparently, political weapons.
 
What baffles me is why conservatives would give us so much power over them. By proclaiming the public expression of compassion a partisan weapon, conservatives are practically admitting that their own positions are morally flawed.
 
Which is not to say that say that taking a moral stand on an issue can ever be politically neutral. Shepard Fairey’s wonderful “We the People” posters, for example, while not explicitly partisan, are decidedly political statements in favor of inclusion and the embrace of diversity. But the administrators at a Maryland high school decided they were partisan anti-Trump statements, and made teachers remove them from their classrooms. And I wonder why people who want to be seen as good would loudly claim that expressions of diversity and inclusion are acts of aggression aimed at them. They are doing the weaponizing for us; they are like the mortally wounded eagle in the Aesop fable that, looking at the arrow that has pierced its chest, sees one of its own feathers. What a lot to give away.
 
So now that we know that compassion is a weapon, what do we do? Well, here are two things not to do:
 
  1. Objectify those to whom we show compassion. If we make people into a means to an end, we become oppressors and exploiters ourselves. Even if, at some level, we help the objects of our spurious charity, we do not see them—do not apprehend their uniqueness and intrinsic worth. We make tools of them, and do violence to our own souls.
  2. Use compassionate acts as a weapon against other people.  “For we do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”. (Eph 6:12)
 
Marianne Williamson described the devil as our human tendency to think without love. Pema Chödrön lays human ugliness at the doorstep of our need to defend the vulnerable “soft spot” at the core of our being. Traditional Christianity attributes “this present darkness” to “spiritual forces of evil.” But however we conceive of the source of wickedness, it must be against that source that our acts of love are weaponized.
 
When Jesus gave His life in sacrificial love, he wasn’t aiming that act as a weapon at His tormenters; rather, He prayed for their forgiveness. But Jesus’ supreme act of compassion was indeed a mighty weapon, as St. John Chrysostom tells us in his venerable Paschal Homily:
 
Let none fear death;
  for the death of the Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed death by undergoing death.
He has despoiled hell by descending into hell.
He vexed it even as it tasted of His flesh.
Isaiah foretold this when he cried:
Hell was filled with bitterness when it met Thee face to face below;
  filled with bitterness, for it was brought to nothing;
  filled with bitterness, for it was mocked;
  filled with bitterness, for it was overthrown;
  filled with bitterness, for it was put in chains.
Hell received a body, and encountered God. It received earth, and confronted heaven.
 
Every act of love and compassion, undertaken for its own sake, strikes at the heart of Hell. The weapons of kindness are forged for use, not against those whom we think unkind, but against the cosmic forces of darkness—the Thing in all of our heads and hearts that makes us hate.
 
Once more unto the breach.
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After the Election

11/9/2016

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“The Adversary took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ --Mt. 4:8-9

Jesus knew that was a bad deal. Apparently, four in five white evangelicals in America do not. They traded in the Gospel for earthly power. They took the bait that Jesus would not.
Jesus never said, “Go ye out and become ye top dogs; yea, rule ye the roost in my name.” In fact, Jesus promised us persecution. And I don’t think he meant the crèche being taken off the courthouse lawn. 

When the Emperor Constantine saw that the Gospel faith—a way of life that had grown by leaps and bounds in spite of being actually persecuted--was the only thing unifying his disintegrating empire, he made Christianity the official state religion of Rome. And even at the time, there were lots of brave men and women who knew what a terrible idea that was, and fled into the Sinai desert in order to have no part of it. They were the Desert Fathers and Mothers, known today for their radical hospitality to pilgrims and travelers, and for their rejection of political power.

​I’m not advocating flight into the desert (or Canada), or living as hermits, or founding monasteries. But I am urging that we, who remember that Evangelical Christianity brought us the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, the suffragists, child labor laws and most other progressive social movements in America before being hijacked by the Republican Party in the 1980s, need to regard ourselves as being in a desert exile of a different kind, far from the centers of worldly power.

“When they go low,” said Michelle Obama, “we go high.” When the powerful church attacks LGBTQ folks, the exiled church must welcome them. When the powerful church rejects refugees, the exiled church must embrace them. When the powerful church tries to silence women, the exiled church must make sure women continue to have a voice.

A dear friend of mine adopted four Mexican girls. This morning, the seven-year-old declared, “We need to open our home to everyone that Trump doesn't want. We can make the room. We will keep them all safe".
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Outward and Visible Signs

10/21/2016

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"I don't know whether you could tell, but there was a lot of tension here this morning."

​Um, yeah. I don't know what it was about, but the tension in the office of that South Philly body shop was obvious and discomfiting the morning I dropped off my car for repair. I couldn't get away from the awkward scene fast enough.

​"But when I went to get your keys," the receptionist continued, having phoned to tell me the work was done, "I saw the medal of St. Francis on your key ring, and it reminded me of what's really important, and it put everything into perspective. I just wanted to thank you for that."
This is why I like outward symbols of faith. Bearing in mind Jesus' warning against practicing your piety in front of people in order to be praised by them (Matthew 6:1), and eschewing ostentation for simplicity, I find that something like a medal or pendant can be a great conversation starter. People with questions or qualms might never know otherwise that you are someone they can approach. When someone asks, "What's that?", it's an opportunity for dialogue. 


This is why I wear my clerical collar to demonstrations; people need to see white clergy declaring publicly that black lives matter, full fair funding of schools matters, a living wage matters. Like the kids say: represent.
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Showing Up

10/20/2016

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I've been having a bear of a time getting my sorry butt to morning meditation at St. Martin's. It's a wonderful, diverse group, and I love the idea of starting the day with meditation. The reality, however, is that even when I'm not in the depths of my allergy season--which I am, and which makes me even more prone to drowsiness than usual--I spend much of the time just fighting off sleep. Which doesn't feel particularly "spiritual," whatever that is. 

​The lesson, of course, is that trying to stay awake is practice; showing up and exercising your will is practice; catching and correcting yourself over and over is practice. Half of the practice, at least, is just showing up.
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    Scott Robinson is an interfaith minister, musician, and spiritual director in Philadelphia. Hear his music at www.mandalaband.net.

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