Reflections From the Past
Do It Again - 2005
In today’s service we are looking at the benefit available, the nourishment available to our spirits, through living more intentionally in the so called routine moments of our lives and in playing the role of author or designer of the moments that we put into our lives and elevate to the status of regular or repeat moments, moments we can call rituals.
And I’m reminded of how important it is for us to be good designers, good authors of the regular behaviors that we introduce into our lives. I remember hearing some time ago about a baseball player who had a ritual that he designed and introduced into his life and religiously observed; a ritual of never stepping on the white lines that marked the baselines on both sides of the field. As he ran onto the field of play he would make sure that his stride always made it possible for him to avoid stepping on the line. As time went on this ritual grew to require that he also not step on the line while the ball was in play. Because he played third base, this became a ritual that required a considerable amount of talent. And as the story goes, the ritual continued to grow so that not only did it require that he not step on the baseline but also that he turn a circle in the air as he crossed the baseline. So as he ran onto the field to start each inning he would jump across the baseline and as he did he would turn a full circle in the air. He also observed this requirement to rotate as he crossed the line when he was going after a foul ball. Supposedly he came to be quite adept at all of this but eventually the ever increasing demands of his ritual made it impossible for him to perform his job as a ball player.
There is for sure a line between what is ritual and what is obsessive. In the case of this ball player what was perhaps in the beginning a mildly superstitiously motivated ritual soon became a performance limiting
obsession.
Our lives are made up of many repeat items and today I invite you to join me as we look at how we can be selective at what is granted the special status of “rerun behavior” or ritual and how we can mine from these moments great treasure, how we can find God within them. This is Journeys Community, a place where we share a desire to explore our spirituality individually and in community with others. Welcome.
I’ve shared with you before something about the small southern town, Auburn, Alabama, that I grew up in. If ever there was a real live movie set typifying in every detail a small tightly knit college community, it has to be Auburn.
Auburn is one of those towns that exist only because there is a college, a university there. It is truly a college town. I can still remember years ago how when the college was on break, between terms, how the traffic lights either would be placed on the yellow blink mode or turned off all together.
The university rules in Auburn. Everyone there is caught up in college life. The president of the university and the football coach, not in that particular order, are the most influential, powerful and important members of the community. The mayor, and other elected officials, well, they are big time second fiddle to the university leaders.
On Monday night last week Auburn capped a story book football season by winning the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. Cadillac Williams, and Escalade Brown, Auburn’s two star running backs, led their team to an unprecedented thirteen win season. And back in Auburn at the main crossroad where the college and town meet, at the corner of College Street and Magnolia Avenue, at a place named after the drug store that sits on that corner, Toomer’s Drug, thousands of university and towns people, all citizens of what is called the loveliest village on the plains, gathered to once again, this time with special feeling, participate in a regular ritual that follows all of Auburn’s football victories and that is the rolling of Toomer’s Corner.
The annual budget for the city of Auburn includes a line item called “Toomer’s Corner Clean Up”. And all who attend to the necessities of fiscal planning and responsibility for Auburn’s city government sincerely hope that no funds remain from this line item at year’s end. No one could ever get elected mayor of Auburn running on a platform of curtailing the activities and resulting expenditures associated with what happens at Toomer’s Corner after football victories.
Following each Auburn football victory Toomer’s Corner and the trees surrounding it, gets rolled in more toilet paper than one can imagine might be present in all of central Alabama.
Instead of the Bible belt one might well imagine that this area of Alabama could be called the constipation belt owing to all the toilet paper that is obviously available on winning fall Saturdays.
I’ve been privileged to be present at some of these Toomer’s Corner rituals and I have experienced first hand the warmth and joy that is available through embracing with strong intention something that is far from new, something that is familiar, visiting with deliberate focus, looking once again, each time more closely, more closely even that the last time, at all of the richness of a moment being lived both anew and again.
Today’s service is inviting us to look at the familiar times, both routine and special moments, of our lives, times that qualify as routines and rituals and to see them as sources for fulfillment and meaning. Times like this, the routine, the ritual moments of our lives, offer the possibility of encountering newness within the familiar. They offer us the warmth of remembering experientially.
All of us have rituals and routines in our lives. Like other animals we are creatures of habit. We gravitate toward the familiar and many of the moments that make up our days are repeats, reruns, times and settings relived over and over again. Just like the players at Clemson touch the rock as they run onto the field of play each Saturday, we also touch the rocks of our daily lives. Rocks, seemingly mundane as well as those that are seen as more significant; rocks like meals, and other familiar acts of self-care; rocks like study and practice, all kinds of skill acquisition that fosters our growth and further understanding of all of the equipment that came onboard with our life gift; rocks like that referred to in today’s reading, washing dishes; all kinds of rocks all with the potential to be made special by our determination to be present in the moment; moments none-the-less special, in fact owning a specialness by virtue of their frequent familiarity; made special by our being able to be fully alive and fully grateful in each of these familiar repetitive times that comprise a major part of our daily lives.
Moments repeated, moments revisited with new awareness; old moments, new awareness, offer us opportunity for a measure of the goodness that the gift of life holds for us. God is here also.
Many of these moments are natural, even unconscious. They are the things that we do because on some important level, we need to do them. We eat, we clean, we breathe. And the message for today, the suggestion for consideration today is that we can make these moments, even the natural, necessary, unconscious moments, we can make them richer and make them bearers of goodness and meaning in our lives.
There’s a twist tie around my tooth brush. A phone in my house is turned facing the wall instead of being positioned as it is designed. A magnet with an important message that Valerie gave me this Christmas is next to my gear shifter in my car. And there are other alterations, signs and markings on items used in routine daily activities. All of them catch my attention and remind me to be present, fully alive, fully grateful in these routine moments.
And the message today also is that we can intentionally add to the repetitive moments, the rituals in our lives. We can create rituals, repetitive moments and by so doing we can bring greater richness into our lives.
We can introduce habits into our lives and we can monitor what gets the status of habit in our lives and strive to make sure that only the deserving behaviors are granted such high status.
We can put healthy, enriching routines into our lives. We can learn new things by visiting them in practice regularly. We can learn to paint, to play an instrument, to speak another language. We can author and claim rituals that are growth promoting. Unlike the ball player these are rituals that can make us better people, rituals that can help us get better acquainted with all that we have on board. And these rituals can grow and ask more and more of us and unlike the ball player they can compliment other aspects, other responsibilities we have and can make us better in all the venues in which we live our lives.
We can introduce new and better ways to care for ourselves, to honor our bodies. We can take that long bath, that relaxing shower; engage in exercise, meditation, prayer; get that massage and we can make all of these things incredibly special by granting them the status of ritual, of being among our conscious routines.
We can add these intentional positive repetitive moments to our lives on whatever schedule of regularity makes sensse, daily, weekly, seasonally, annually and as we do we can draw from the seemingly mundane as well as from the special and we also can be creative in the process.
When Lynn died, John and Michael were seven and three. Before she got sick and before she was diagnosed with an incurable illness, if you had asked me to think of a misfortune, a tragedy that would be so awful that I would be completely devastated; if you had asked me to imagine the one thing that I would most fear, it would have been the prospect of Lynn dying before me and the prospect of her dying while our children were so young and so much in need of her was unimaginably horrible.
Looking back on that awful time, a time when all I knew to do was put one foot in front of the other, looking back on that time and trying to identify how I made it through, finding God, Finding Peace by turning to the resource of rituals, using, reinforcing existing rituals and creating new ones was one of the ways we made it through that terribly challenging storm.
The first year following her death we began what was to become an annual summertime ritual, cousins week on the farm. For ten years, until a critical mass of cousins could no longer be assembled owing to summer time demands that come with growing older, John’s and Mike’s cousins from all over came to the farm for a week of family fun and festivity. There was movie marathon day, and all kinds of other special times. There were T shirts saying I’M PROUD TO BE A COUSIN and caps that read COUSIN’S WEEK. There were contests and games and on the last day there was what became the famous and crowning moment of cousin’s week, the wild man contest. Cousins competed to see how wild and crazy each could be for five minutes. Funny how children can hear over and over, “Don’t be so wild.” But when invited to be wild strain at something that you’d think would come naturally given all of the times they are admonished not to.
I know what it is like to be lonely; I know what it is like to feel unloved. I know what it is like to be depressed. I know something about chronic pain and how exhausting daily pain can be.
And I have found through my personal experience with all of these challenges, I have found God, Peace in daily rituals. And one of the rituals that serve me so well, that puts real salve on the emotional and physical pain I have known is a daily ritual of intentionally before going to bed each night, extending some deliberate act of kindness and love to another. This ritual of gift love, daily gift love, of thinking outside the box of my concerns and offering something that is pure gift to another is a ritual of great value to me. And in that sense it is never pure gift to the other. It is ever and always gift to me too.
The routine and rituals of our lives define in large measure the wealth of our lives. And the good news is that we can all be immensely wealthy. We can enrich and add to the routine and ritual parts of our lives. We can live more consciously in those moments seen as mundane and we can add ritual and special moments to our lives and claim membership in shared rituals all around us. On behalf of the Auburn community I extend to all of you an invitation to participate in the Toomer’s Corner ritual. I do realize the practicality of your participation in this particular ritual. Aside from the travel involved, predicting when the team will win is far from a science.
But there are blessed and happy moments, repetitive moments all around us and you and I are well-equipped to both participate in them and to also be authors of such moments.
And one more thing, I’ve discovered that this richness is available to us regardless of our circumstances. We don’t necessarily have to be in the presence of others to savor repetitive moments. I live in many ways now in an unfamiliar circumstance, that of living alone and I am discovering that living alone doesn’t have to pose a barrier to accessing the benefit inherent in repetitive moments.
So how about it? What about your wealth? Want more richness and meaning, then visit more fully in the repetitive and regular moments of your life and add to them through designing special repeat moments.
Remember the Lloyd Douglas book, “Magnificent Obsession”. Isn’t that what our daily rituals that heal us and ground us, isn’t that what they are, magnificent obsessions. Magnificent obsessions that warm us and do pure good to us.
Every parent has heard from his or her child, the words that like so much of what we learn from children are sage advice, “Do it again. Do it again.”
