Winging It

Last night my son barely remembered his orchestra concert. Still wearing his baseball uniform, he jumped from the couch, checked his schedule, and hurried off to change into his tux. "I forgot my music," he said on the way to the car, "but I'll just look on someone else's."

That sounded workable, but the other bass players apparently had the same plan. When the concert started, all four of them were lined up behind empty music stands.

What do you do in that situation? Slip out the back door? Stand slackhanded and stare? Go through the motions while only pretending to play? One boy made the safe choice, moving his bow back and forth while keeping it away from the strings.

My favorite musician chose to wing it. Smiling broadly, he started with the notes he knew and improvised the rest, boldly and at full volume.

I am not sure what the director thought, but I was proud as could be. Yes, my son forgot his music. But in a situation in which I might have felt sick to my stomach, he rose to the occasion with confidence, creativity, and poise. What's more, he enjoyed it. Attaboy, kid.

Bob

There's a vanity to candor...

An entreatment from playwright Richard Greenberg..."Be civil. Do not cherish your opinion over my feelings. There's a vanity to candor that isn't really worth it. Be kind."

The Beauty of Laughter

In Gilead, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Marilynne Robinson, Rev. John Ames describes a sighting of delight:

I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the

It seemed beautiful to me

sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

Sleeping for Lent

Joni here, reporting from the field.

I do not come from a Lenten tradition. As a Baptist, it was those Catholic folks across town that participated in such suspicious, potentially cultic rituals. Ashes on your forehead. Incense up your nose. Water sprinkled about. We advocated one good dunking that almost drowned you! Thankfully God saved me from myself and my ignorance.

I joined our daughter in observing Lent a few years back. Gave up sodas. She was grateful to have a companion in her sacrifice. I still feel guilty. While I have a soda here or there, I am not a big fan. The real sacrifice would have been chocolate. No need to mention that at the time. I was only a Lenten companion.

Bob mentioned that I took Lauren Winner's Books and Culture article on sleep seriously. Lauren stated that sleeping was a radically counter-cultural act for a follower of Christ. I approach each day as a possible 24 hours of production. Sleep is a subtraction from the equation. I take great pride in my productive capacity. Of course I am highly effective at 2:00 a.m. Isn't everyone? I feel a perverted sense of accomplishment when I am the last one in all my communication loops to send an email. If you stay up all night, then you get a jump on the next day...well...because...it IS the next day.

My Lenten practice this season has been a pledge to sleep. To admit that being human is an embodied experience that is enhanced by rest. To lay down my pride and say, "I will do that tomorrow. Enough for today. It is time to sleep." There are moments when this practice has been excruciating. Leaving the reading of a friend's manuscript until tomorrow. Saying no to that evening lecture in order to find my bed before midnight. Turning off this computer (OH NO!) at a pre-determined time. Interestingly, no one seems to love me less. No one is disappointed in me. No one questions my sanity. Nothing cataclysmic has occurred. The sun rises each day and sets each day.

There seems to be less yelling around our house. Amazing how patient I can be with two teenagers when I have a night's sleep under my belt. Curious how much more lucid I am in the work I do. The fog of my exhausted mind has strangely cleared. We have become reacquainted, my pillow and me. It is a lovely friendship. I am toying with the belief that God will allow me to take my pillow with me to Heaven.

Pride goeth before a fall. This includes falling over due to lack of sleep. You still have several days before Easter. Join me in taking up rest for your Lenten discipline. Then let the resurrection message spur you to embrace the gift of rest given by the God of love.

Joni

Sleep as a Spiritual Discipline

In a recent issue of Books and Culture, Lauren Winner offers a suggestion for Christians seeking to be countercultural. Get some sleep. She writes,

The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures, not the Creator. For it is God and God alone who "neither slumbers nor sleeps." Of course, the Creator has slept, another startling reminder of the radical humility he embraced in becoming incarnate. He took on a body that, like ours, was finite and contingent and needed sleep. To push ourselves to go without sleep is, in some sense, to deny our embodiment, to deny our fragile incarnations--and perhaps to deny the magnanimous poverty and self-emptying that went into his Incarnation.

Yesterday a room full of people laughed when Joni said her Lenten discipline was to get more sleep. They thought she was kidding, describing an indulgence rather than a discipline. But sleep is a discipline. It is a confession of finitude and humanity, an expression of faith in God's ability to manage the world without us for a few hours.

"Why are you sleeping?" the disciples asked Christ. It is not a sign of Christlikeness that people are more likely to ask me, "Why are you so tired?"

Sleep well.

Bob