RESOLUTIONS AND PRAYERS (01/01/07)
Notes from Geranium Farms
By the Rev. Barbara Crafton
Today the gym will be full of people. My guess is that it will stay that way until the end of the week and then it will get back to normal.
Most of them will disappear: they will catch colds, or have two early meetings in a row, or just not be in the mood. Or they will get on the scale and not see the subtraction they want to see and get discouraged. Or they will miss a few days and mess up the perfection of their compliance with their resolution about exercise in the New Year, and then they will say to themselves Oh, what's the use? and that will be that.
As a service, then, a few words of unsolicited advice:
1. Don't try to keep your resolution all by yourself. Stop thinking of it in terms of willpower. In fact, consider not thinking of it as a resolution at all: think of it as a prayer. You are not alone--no one on earth is alone. God is with us, and can do things we can't do. Just ask God for the help you need, in a childish way that may feel pretty foolish to you in the beginning -- do it anyway. Try approaching it for a time as if you trusted God more than you really do -- you have nothing to lose by doing this, and you may find God more trustworthy than you imagined.
2. Don't expect or demand perfection of yourself. Think instead of developing a habit, laying down layer after layer of the behavior you want to see in yourself. People build habit from the bottom up, layer by layer -- not from the top down.
3. Don't be harsh with yourself when you fail. Everybody fails. If you are mean to yourself about it, you will hurt your own feelings, and then you will run in self defense to the very behavior you're trying to change, as a source of quick comfort. You have no right and no reason to love yourself any less than God loves you. Failure is a chance to let God help us.
3. Don't start big and shrink. Start small and grow. Don't set too ambitious an agenda at first--set a small one. Otherwise you'll give up when you fail to meet your enormous goal. Instead, make a small change and allow it to cement itself into the routine of your life.
4. When you break your stride, don't try to make it up. Just get back on the horse. Don't spend two hours at the gym on Tuesday because you didn't spend on hour there on Monday. Just go in and do your hour. Don't fast all day today because you ate an entire cake yesterday. Just get back on your plan. Every day is a new day.
Blessings on you in 2007. May your New Year's prayers bear the fruit you need, and may you become, more and more, the person God had in mind in forming you.
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Check out two NewYork opportunities to study with Barbara Crafton this term: at General Theological Seminary's Center for Christian Spirituality on Tuesday evenings beginning January 30th, and at St.Bart's on Sunday evenings in February and March, beginning February 4th. Visit http://www.geraniumfarm.org/ and click on "news and events".
More from Barbara Crafton (2/01/07)
THREE PILLARS: THE ZEN OF BEN
I sneak into my office at 4:30 am, so as not to awaken Ben the Cat, who considers himself invited to sit on my lap when I'm trying to write. He has programmed himself to respond, even in his sleep, to the sound of keystrokes, and soon he appears. He stares fixedly at my lap and gathers himself for a leap; as always, I am in awe of a creature who can jump vertically, straight up to a place three times as high as he is.
That's a good pair of back legs you've got there, I tell him, and he gives me a contented quack in return. Ben is the only one of our cats who speaks no English, although he seems to understand it well enough. It's a little odd, since he rehearses all the time, stringing his meows together into diphthongs and consonant pairs: he has mastered "ng" and "ny" and "er" and "oh" and "oer" and a bunch of others I can't recall. But he does it like an opera singer, working toward the proper sound; Ben seems not to have made the connection between this oral activity and conversation. For that, he still just quacks. Not that the others are exactly Laurence Olivier; like most animals, cats speak English telepathically. When they do it at all.
Since he is a member of my household, I feel responsible for Ben's spiritual formation. Ben's religious devotions in the morning are the same as the ones we use in the evening: he sits on my lap while I say the Daily Office in English, and then we do a bilingual recitation of the Three Pillars of Right Behavior for a Good Cat:
What are the three pillars of right behavior?
The first pillar is: meow just a little bit.
The second pillar is: no jumping on the girl cats.
The third pillar is: no eating plants.
These are the three pillars of right behavior.
I have complete confidence in the power of this oral recitation to change Ben's life. I think that he will hear me saying them every day and will become accustomed to the words -- already he quacks a response at each semicolon! And then I think that the words will seep into his cat brain and that, in time, he will come to embody their truth.
Of course, I also think professional wrestling is real.
But really: is it not possible that a cat can learn to pray? That anyone can? That training ourselves with our bodies and our voices and our thoughts changes our spirits, over time? That's how change and growth happens in every other part of life, from learning to speak French to increasing the amount of weight we can bench press. Why would our spirits be different?
After our morning recitation of the Three Pillars, I bury my face in Ben's beautiful black fur and purr with him a little. My love for him grows each day: my delight in his silliness, his beauty, his open longing for a cuddle. Prayer changes us, I think as I feel his softness against my face, all of us, matter what kind of prayer it is. And no matter who we are.
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Memories of Christmas
San Joachin- Barbara Crafton's thoughts on the split of the Diocese of San Joachin from the Episcopal Church
Counting Prayer How you can develop the will to end world poverty.
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Copyright © 2007 Barbara Crafton - http://www.geraniumfarm.org/
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