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“New Year – New Practice”
Today’s sermon – “New Year – New Practice” is the first in a series of three on beginning the New Year well. Today we consider maintaining order as a spiritual practice. On the 16th we’ll touch on managing our sacred time and the 23rd ,the benefits of spiritual practice.
A few years ago People Magazine published an article entitled “Dead Ahead,” which mentioned a clock that kept track of how much time the wearer had left to live. You programmed in your gender & age and the clock calculated an average life span of 75 years for men & 80 for women.
By that measure my clock would read about 9,125 days left to live. I’m not sure
I’d want that clock staring at me on a daily basis! Then again, tomorrow any of
us could be swept away by a tsunami or hit by a bus.
You may have many more than 9,000 days ahead – or you might have only just a few left on your clock. But either way the holiday of New Years that we have just experienced makes us at least momentarily aware of the passage of time and throws into sharper relief the fact that we are gathered at the threshold of the rest of our lives.
It’s one of the special features of New Years that it invites us to contemplate change. The semi-serious result of that ball dropping in Times Square at midnight is that, for many celebrants, New Year’s resolutions begin – some people start diets, others determine to watch less TV or exercise more. I’m wondering how many of you have made one. (hands?)
Many people, though, after failing year after year, stay away from resolutions figuring that beginning the New Year with a broken promise to oneself is an unfavorable start. But there is one resolution that was shared with me recently that I got a kick out of – which also has the potential to be successful - this person said: “I have resolved to live in my own little world, because at least they know me here.”
I joke – but only partially - our own little world is, in fact where each of us lives – and it deserves our focused attention from time to time.
All religions teach that if we could master this little moment which we call now, in our own immediate world then we master eternity.
One invocation in our hymnal says:
Look to this day! For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence:
The agony and bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of beauty;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well-lived, makes every yesterday
A dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.
But look to your today, you may be privately thinking, and you won’t find any of those glorious things – growth, beauty or action. You’re just winding down from the holiday – you’re going to go home and have a sandwich, hang out and watch some TV, maybe take a few decorations down.
But this is where the spiritual masters will tell you that you’re wrong. When Thoreau said we should learn to live deliberately I’m sure he was referring to our own little immediate world – or, to swing the other way - when US Army recruiters say we should be the best we can be - that includes polishing our boots.
Our own little world is no
less important for being ours or “little.” It follows that how effective we are
in our own little world has a significant bearing on how well we are able to
interact with the world at large. So what better way to begin the New Year than
with an assessment – an energy audit of our own little world?
Now if you are an organized person by nature this sermon may seem to have less
to say to you. But the process of assessment, intentional growth and personal
discipline addressed here applies not just to organizing but to any process of
spiritual growth. The principles remain the same.
That said, one book that received high priority on my sabbatical reading list was It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys by Marilyn Paul. (For me the sabbatical was similar to New Years for resolutions.)
My moderate organization skills are very challenged by the fact that I have an intense (and wonderful) job, an active family and work spaces both here and at home. Today I am really preaching from out of my own learning curve. I want to be better organized than I am, and in terms of that quest I found Paul’s book excellent, offering both practical and theoretical advice on how to become a more organized person. Paul says that mastering the wisdom of things in a consumer society can be as powerful as mastering a martial art. Her book is the source of many of the concepts presented here, and I recommend it to you highly.
Paul’s approach to organizational skills is founded on the premise that, because it is the whole person who creates disorder, the whole person must be engaged to develop the cure. Paul’s ideas go deeper than a New Year’s resolution to put things in their place. People who are disorganized spend hours looking for lost keys, they miss appointments, tend to be late and experience stress from all of these behaviors. The word ‘dysfunction,’ does not mean not functional. It means functioning, but functioning in pain. Poorly organized people will feel happier, healthier and in better relation to the world when they are not painfully losing things and running late.
Paul rejects the idea that it is possible for someone who is poorly organized to just pull themselves together – to just create a plan and “do it.” She says you can’t force yourself to change just by bossing yourself around because becoming organized as a way of being isn’t about achieving “surface neatness or compulsive timeliness.”
Genuine transformation comes from a deep-seated motivation to change and grow. For those who are not naturally organized, becoming more orderly begins with confronting the pain they are experiencing. Transformation will require developing more presence of mind, becoming more aware of one’s habitual behaviors, and listening more carefully to one’s inner voice.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that we can find higher consciousness by addressing ourselves to the small things of everyday life with intentionality. And that is one reason it is relevant to speak to this issue from the pulpit today. You may not think about it this way, but for most people a desire to lead a more ordered life is but one expression of a larger spiritual quest to become more self-aware and to align one’s behavior in life more closely with one’s ideals.
Of course, no change is easy: no change is made without inconvenience, especially ones from the worse to the better. So often we want to make positive changes but, with long, established unconscious habits working against us, we just can’t get out of our own way. Every intentional change - even one as seemingly as insignificant as becoming more organized, requires a deepening self-awareness. This kind of transformation is a spiritual process.
Paul suggests that successful and lasting change must actually engage four levels of self: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Most personal change efforts fail, she says, when they only involve one or two levels.
But what, you may ask; does spirituality have to do with my personal mess and chaos? Anyone who habitually creates a mess is hasn’t learned to bring care and awareness to the details of life, and isn’t skillful in their relationship to the things, the stuff in their lives. I’d like to share just one portion of advice from Marilyn Paul, and perhaps you can glimpse from this something of the spirituality of being organized.
When you keep things that means you have to deal with them physically. We own things, but to some degree, they control us because we have to make decisions about them. Paul says that material excess can induce a kind of stupor, as if we have eaten too much. Part of learning to be present is defining our priorities in relationship to things and then sticking with them. Paul encourages those who suffer from disorganization at home or in the office to make decisions and become clutter warriors.
Clutter is a sign of decisions put off. Every little decision you postpone today you still have to deal with tomorrow. In effect, unmade decisions trash your future. So, if your end tables are covered with novels you’ve already read, then decide what to do with them – and do it. She asks, where would the elastic bands go if they weren’t left on the counter? Decide. How about the mail? Or the old skis in the garage? Decide and put them away.
Paul goes further though than suggesting that you put things away when you finish using them. She says there should be an alive place for everything. She means when things are in place they should be there for a purpose, whether that purpose be functional, aesthetic or sentimental. If this is the case, then in your space over time your true treasures will emerge. Over time, your own little world will fill with things that have special meaning for you.
There is a spiritual poverty to clutter. We keep things in order to keep our options open – some day you may want to reread that novel, or use your ancient skates or the clothes that don’t fit right now – but the reality is that keeping all your options alive can deaden and impoverish your life. It leaves you unable to the find things you need and frazzled from searching. Annie Dillard once said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our years.” If your cluttered environment is meager in meaning, Paul says, you’ll experience that meagerness in your soul. It’s important to realize that every time you let go of things and activities you don’t really need, you create space for a new future. There is a richness to living more lightly and deliberately and in loving and caring for what you own. Less can be more – a lot more.
It does pay to sweat the small stuff. There is an old proverb that says “the devil’s in the details” that implies that ignoring life’s details might cause failure. That’s true, but not the whole story, for it is equally true and more germane spiritually to say, “God is in the details.” Mindful organizing itself can be as valuable a spiritual practice as meditation. And the fruit of that practice, of learning one’s limits, of living with less, can be a more inviting environment with clearer space which will enhance your energy. Marilyn Paul said of her own life, “When I let go of some of my disorganization, my life quieted down. At first I thought I was bored, then I realized that I was calm.”
The Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen once said the spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it. As we clear up the surface messiness of our own little worlds, we should not be surprised to discover that we become more able to enter the genuine, alive messiness of life at large more freely.
I’d like to close this morning with the passage I read earlier, slightly adapted – a resolution, of sorts, for 2005:
Look to the details of this day! For they are life, the very life of life.
In their brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence:
The agony and bliss of growth,
The glory of small actions,
The splendor of beauty;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well-lived, makes every yesterday
A dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to the details of this day.