Feeling Good

Humans like to feel good. This basic drive causes us to make money, spend money, develop friendships, marry, have children, listen to music, create art, and a myriad of other activities that bring satisfaction.

In this fallen world, the craving to feel good also leads us down some very destructive alleys which initially feel good and ultimately feel horribly bad. This in turn creates a vicious cycle in which we choose increasingly more dangerous alleys in search of, you guessed it, feeling better about how the last thing we reached for didn't make us feel better.

I'm not trying to be simplistic, I've just been made startlingly aware of how many times during the day my mood spikes and plummets, and what I choose to do about it. Food, my spouse's approval, shopping for something new are all my drugs of choice. Sometimes, not often enough, I just live in the moment and thank God that He knows what He's doing. Of course I ask for help too, but no matter how good I feel in one moment, the hunger to feel good again is always lurking around the corner.

Realizing our motivations, and telling ourselves the truth about them., and perhaps confiding in someone else is tremendously healing in and of itself. It even can make us feel better about why we did what we did to make ourselves feel good.

Being able to withstand emotional pain is a skill reserved for maturity, but none of us ever escape the need to have positive feelings. The next time you find yourself feeling bad and reaching for a cure, allow yourself the full weight of the emotion. Don't do anything, just experience it. I feel a little like a LaMaze instructor here, but feeling pain is not the end of the world, it just feels like it.

What kinds of things do you reach for to feel better? How has emotional pain helped you to mature? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Writing Uphill

Writing is easy. Well, at least that sentence was.

But I've never felt as uphill as I do now, writing the play that is to be performed for the first time this spring by my drama class. I've been studying form, structure, plot, inciting incidents, curtain lines, and length guidelines. Writing, editing, and rewriting.

So to clear my head, I went out for a mild jog with my daughter. It was the equivalent of what the bunny hill is to the skier. But exhilarating nonetheless, heart pounding, and skin tingling. Perhaps I'm a little out of shape??? And right in the middle of our walk, unexpectedly, it came. The climax of the event. My dog pulled herself off the leash and ran up to a very tall fence where a very vicious looking lab was heads up almost over the fence.

Then, my heart pounded faster. My perspiration rate accelerated. We reprimanded, we grabbed her leash again and walked on. And finally, without further incident, we resumed our walk.

And that's the experience I want our audience to have.

So, it's back to the keys...I'm gonna make you sweat!!!

Reading Cahill is Like Watching a Movie!

 How The Irish Saved Civilization

In cinematic-like prose Thomas Cahill presents images of history breathtaking, absorbing, and sometimes disturbing. While culling from a wide variety of sources, and presenting it in a way that tempts the literary palette for more, this work spans the history of more than a millennium to tell the story of the link from ancient Greece to the twentieth century. 

I suppose being Irish aids my fascination with the subject matter, and being a contemplative type Christian doesn’t hurt either. Still, Cahill’s description of life in the early centuries provides illumination into what have been termed the Dark Ages for more reasons than one. The reader feels as if he had sat by an ancient fireside, complete with smells and sounds. 

It remains to be seen what we will do with this illumination. I’d love to read Cahill’s thoughts on modern culture. 

Seldom have I read a contemporary work of this magnitude and complexity, with such ability to engage. Happily, it is one of five in a series titled Hinges of History. I’ll be going back for more!

Finding Our Way Illuminates

A Review of:

Finding Our Way Again

by Brian McLaren

Like the aging actor, fumbling lines he has long ago committed to memory, America’s sense of faith seems to have forgotten the lines. We’re in danger of being lost in a watered down soup that could only be described as postchristendom.

Brian McLaren sounds a warning that is at once heartening comfort food for the wandering spiritual traveler, and a gentle wakeup call for sleeping souls.

Finding our way is about integrating ancient liturgical practices of the Catholic and Anglican tradition with the individualized spontaneity of Protestantism. The broken marriage between Catholics and the Reformers has divided the church for centuries and produced a spiritual disorientation that McLaren believes can be made whole by a return to practices that have only been preserved in certain denominations. Far from a book about reviving dead ritual, the book sparkles with meaningful suggestions about transforming each day into a new worshipful experience with God. 

One fly in the ointment for the average Christian is McLaren’s inclusion of Islam as one of the three Abrahamic religions. While he doesn’t develop this idea, it stands out as an odd grouping to a westerner. 

Questions at the end of each chapter provide opportunity to interact with the book. 

I received  a copy of the book from Thomas Nelson Publishers through the booksneeze program in return for my honest opinion.

Winter Pruning

 

"They say you should prune your roses as if they belonged to your enemy" writes author Maggie Dawn. I think I did. I had let the back rose go for two years so it certainly had it coming, but the fury of my pruning frenzy was also unleashed on the unsuspecting front bushes who had had their haircut every year since I planted them. Perhaps I let the back one go because it wasn't as visible. Ah, so shortsighted of me, or perhaps just lazy. But now, the little bare nubs bear witness that pruning has been done. 

My backyard cleansing led to a personal pruning that included thoughts I had let fester and almost rot in the back of my mind. The putrifying leaves under the old branches of the bush were a mirror image of the things I'd kept in my mind that really were just not fresh and healthy. If you must know, there were whispers like, "The young people no longer need me." and "The world is going downhell, (oops, that is 'downhill'-so Freudian of me) and I cannot be a part of the solution." It spread to my closet, where I threw out everything I didn't really like, or had to force myself to wear. There was a considerable amount of clothing. But now, when I stand in my closet, I only see things I want to wear, and even if the choices are fewer, they are attractive. I've been able to keep up with the washing as well, as there is now less to wash. 

Nature tells us to prune, if we will listen to her. Every year leaves fall from trees no matter what. The bare branches make it easier to take stock of what is essential. Stuff can be so cluttery, and we hang on to it so psychotically, as if it is a part of our souls. Or perhaps as if when the stuff is gone, our souls will be seen, bare and exposed to the world, like my naked roses, out in front of God and everybody. 

Painful at first, pruning is cathartic, cleansing, and promotes new growth. The discarding of the old makes way for the new. What have you pruned lately?

Book on Prayer Ignites

In Constant Prayer

By Robert Benson

This book is to the Christian’s prayer life what gasoline is to fire. In humble yet inspiring terms, Robert Benson carefully crafts a vision of perpetual communication with God among the Christian community. Benson outlines the history of repetitive prayers from such sources as the Common Book of Prayer, The Daily Office Book and others.  Once a time-honored tradition, the saying of daily prayers is now so uncommon that it is virtually unknown.

He estimates it takes a little over ten minutes to read and say morning prayers.  That amount of prayer should not be too much to ask of any believer, he insists. Yet Benson describes his own prayer life in frank and conversational admissions of an own ongoing experience of both awe and failure before God.  Though Catholic readers may not feel he has covered the subject exactly in their tradition, Protestants may feel he goes to far in urging a proscribed liturgy.

Personally, I found the balance refreshing. After spending years as a Protestant making up my own prayers, I see the value of falling back on the wisdom of the ancients. Instead of being a dull book on the obligation of prayer, which I must admit I half expected, I found it ignited my passion to pray.  I plan on sharing this around to get feedback from my friends and family, and then re-reading it again soon.

I have received a complimentary copy of In Constant Prayer from the publisher in return for my honest opinion of the book.

Stranger Than Fiction : a review

The power of words is certainly underestimated by the childish ditty we were taught: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." I've never broken a bone, or been struck by a stick or stone (that I can remember) but there are many words that resonate with at least a small amount of rancor, if not low-lying disappointment, inside my psyche.

Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson, already a strange pairing, exist in a fantasy/horror scenario where a writer's actual words narrate and eventually become real life. Ferrell 's IRS auditor character, Harold Crick, wakes up  in a verbal voodoo-like state created by the words of Thompson's somewhat unstable writer character Karen Eiffel.

As the story progresses, it seems inevitable that Crick will be killed off by Eiffel's story. After shrugging off his shrink's diagnosis of Schizophrenia, Harold turns to literary critic Jules Hilbert-heavy on cynicism, short on compassion-played by Dustin Hoffman, who concedes it inevitable and somehow fitting for the literary world that Harold should die, as he considers Eiffel's almost completed manuscript the masterpiece of the decade.

Were it not for the down to earth warmth of Queen Latifah's character as Eiffel's writer's assistent, and free-spirited bohemian baker Maggie Gyhyllenhall, Crick's love interest, the story would wither on the vine.  The detached manner in which Crick lives his life gives little room for sympathy, until he begins to take Hoffman's advice in light of his imminent death,  to "live the life you want to live".

That is perhaps the thesis of the movie, the takeaway phrase. 

What are we all waiting for anyway? Our death, while perhaps not imminent, is inevitable. Are we living the life we really want to live? When will we begin?

The truth of our lives is, after all, usually stranger and far more absorbing than fiction.