my mom started getting up at five am, to give her extra time in the day for her. Only for her. She developed a ritual of prayer, scripture reading, journaling, and body movement that she did alone and in silence each morning until her death. When truly alone in the house, she added song to her routine.
I grew up in the American South but was born in the plain states, near the Yanktoni reservation in South Dakota. We visited our grandparents every summer, giving us a respite from the Memphis heat and providing us a small dive into the world of crop farming and small town rural life. Post retirement, my grandparents were leaning into being farmers and I learned a lot about how important things like soil quality and water access could be key for survival.
The thing is that the American South is fertile land and flush with water. I had never before considered what it was like for the LACK of water to be the problem. Floods and rising waters like creeks that washed out roads and bridges were the dangers around water at home. Well, that and the Cottonmouths, sneaky river snakes.
Now I live in the American Mountain West, and our relationship here with water is much different from both the agricultural plains or the river rich South. Here, fire can consume 150,000 acres in an afternoon and there isn’t enough water anywhere to put it out. On the edge of the Continental Divide, we are very conscious of water. We know that what falls on our western slope flows into the Pacific, and is “owned” by many communities along that route. Water that falls on our Eastern side feeds into the plains rivers and eventually reaches the Atlantic.
And so water reclamation is the name of the game. How can we capture and re-use water? How can we stop its use by the extraction industries? How can we close some of our water systems and not be so wasteful? How do we shift our relationship with water from one of commodification and control to one of respect and asset-based building?
As long as our stance is one of lack, we will choose poorly. Lack is blinding, and creates looping dark holes in our minds that fulfill all their own expectations. There are also dangers to being in a context of plenty without awareness, as this leads to complacency and an assumption of abundance when in fact, control is being seeped away. This very nearly happened recently in Memphis, TN, when the now canceled Byhalia Pipeline threatened the integrity of the Memphis Sands, a huge aquifer that supplies clean water to the region.
We don’t balance lack and plenty well. We tend to live wholly in one or the other. This isn’t a simple matter of whether one sees a glass with water in it as half full or half empty. This isn’t about pessimism or optimism, although their shadows of cynicism and naïveté do reflect this conflict between lack and plenty, this tension.
This week I am preparing for a Seminar Series I am doing on Scarcity & Abundance. And I’m wrestling with the various ways in which we smack right into both these things. The more subtle bits will make themselves known.
And so water again bubbles up. It’s fundamental, as we ourselves are mostly made of it, the planet is mostly water, and we require it to remain alive. And yet for much of our lives, many of us have never considered water -where it comes from, how it gets to us, where it all goes. We turn the tap and it flows. Usually. But even if you live in Flint, MI, or along one of the compromised fracking field routes, your toilet flushes and your laundry works. You can get water FREE at most restaurants. (Remember that one. It won’t last if we don’t change.)
One of the many ironies of this situation is that right now, very few of us actually drink enough water. I know I don’t and I even like water! (I’m told by many friends the reason they don’t drink enough water is that they hate the taste. I don’t get that. Even hard water is interesting.)
“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.” -Joni Mitchell
We bounce between lack and plenty, and it may be true that we often don’t realize it. I used to be a youth minister and had a special affinity for Middle Schoolers. One of my favorite games to play with them is something called “I Want, I Need, I Have” -swiped 100% in name, if not totally in content, from The Journey to Adulthood curriculum, a progressive Protestant course that attempts to equip young people with what they need to be functional adults.
This game invites a deep inventories not only of items but of attitudes. We catalogue belongings each young person may ‘own’ or have access to, what they don’t or can’t get, what they believe they need to be certain things or claim certain identities. The game invites an exploration of the balance between want and need, something I wish more adults had a handle on.
For all of our own human issues with this tension, and we have wrestled with lack and plenty for a great deal of our history, the last 100 years have had the added layer of mass media advertising. And that industry has been all about perverted images of both Lack and Plenty. Perhaps a piece of the whole conversation must include some deconstruction of messaging techniques themselves.
Fear is also deeply entwined with Lack and Plenty. I can hear blues notes behind me as I think on this, and am struck by how familiar a story it is, the embracing of the fear and then its alchemy into empowerment and fuel for action. And I wish I couldn’t, but I also hear the screeching riffs of angry mutterings as fear hardens hearts and closes borders.
We live in a time of Plenty. We have all we need, yet all we see around us is Lack. And Lack is there -a lack of justice, a dearth of compassion, an abyss of accountability. But within each of these struggles is also Plenty, for when they are based out of love, our actions are generative.
“I have come that you might have life more abundant.” -Jesus
I’m new to this blogging thing and thought I would use these first three posts to talk about the mind, body, and spirit. I find most Traditions tend to have an emphasis on one of these. To me all three have to be treated with respect and held in equal value. This third post is about my process for reaching my spirit and how I use it.
This will be the hardest post I’ve written yet. Its easier for me to talk about the mind and the body than the spirit. Part of that is how intertwined the three are. Part of this is that as I mentioned in the last two posts, I rely heavily on the mind and body to connect to my spirit. I will take this post to talk about how i individually practice my spirituality. In my next post I’ll talk about my spiritual expression in community and what the value of each are.
I find that it takes an honest reflection of the union between my mind and body to even reach my soul. This means for me to get the most out of a moment of deep spiritual connection, my body and mind both need to be aligned. This manifests for me as a focus on small rituals, things throughout a service or practice that are repeated. I use something like standing for song or prayer as a chance to put my mind and body to work together to accomplish an intentionally set goal. To stand slowly or sit with all my weight, even the whole way down. The key to this has been to keep these things simple and small so I'm not overtaxing my body or brain. Selecting something that keeps my mind and body together allows me to let them support each other so that they can both let go of some of the pressures they each bear. These little things help me to stay engaged and to come into a space of the spirit.
I should say that outside of my work with congregations, I rarely attend any type of spiritual gathering. My spiritual interaction is mostly done on my own and the most common way for me to formally engage my spirit is through a meditative prayer ritual. It changes slightly every time. But I often start by finding music. I’m not much of a musician and don’t find playing music to be as revelatory as some do. But music is important to help me find rhythm in my meditation and to change the way my mind is working as I enter the prayer time.
The next thing I do is pick a spot on the floor, usually in the middle of the space. For me the process of setting and unsetting the space is a major part of my practice. At this point I usually start the music and gather a candle and lighter and I may reduce the lighting in the room. From here, I like to do every step as slowly as possible. This helps me break myself of the racing thoughts of the modern world and slow my being down.
From the edge of the space I walk to a point I picked earlier. Once I'm there, I slowly sit down on that point and place the candle in front of me. I light the candle and maybe incense, and begin a simple seated meditation. When I feel im ready to pray, I either do some form of spoken prayer or more often do a movement prayer such as a sequence from my martial arts practice. Once this has run its course, I return to my seated meditation and slowly begin undoing all the set up I did. This time, trying to be even slower then when I set the space.
For me, trying to focus on ritual and responsiveness at the same time is what has helped to feed me in my individual spiritual life. Small things like this are the only ways that I’ve been able to choose the time and place to interact with my spirit. Small spiritual joys happen every day but these alone haven’t been enough to feed me completely, nor has the life of congregational christanity. This makeshift ritual is one of the ways I’ve found to feed myself spiritually.
There is a right way to interact with your spirit but your right way and my right way are different ways. Please don’t think this is some kind of prescription. This is what has worked for me. I so rarely run into any real conversation about individual spiritual expression that I wanted to share this thought and maybe spur a dialog.
Ian Pirkey
I’m new to this blogging thing and thought I would use these first three posts to talk about the mind, body, and spirit. I find most Traditions tend to have an emphasis on one of these. To me all three have to be treated with respect and held in equal value. This second post is about my process for the body and how I use it.
I mentioned my connection with the world of martial arts in my last post. This one will pull heavily from that experience as well because my journey around embodiment and my physical being has been so intertwined with my journey through martial arts.
The world of martial arts, especially the secular one, is driven by a connection to the physical. That much is probably obvious. What took me longer to figure out was realizing what the physical practice was doing for my soul. What was less obvious is the depth of the connection between meditation or physical discipline and my spirit. I found a connection between my spirit and the world of our aches and pains, of our urgings and our joy. Learning to read and trust my body has been the primary expression of this piece of my spiritual life.
My journey was spurred by an instructor I had who was dedicated to developing her students as people, not just as martial artists. She would talk a lot about how her body would tell her something was wrong long before her mind or soul could react to the world. She strove to teach us trust in ourselves and belief in our ability to change the world. This idea became a building block in my embodiment practice, and how I interacted with my own body.
It was in that gym with other fighters that I learned how to trust my body as I trust my mind and my spirit. There I learned how to read whether the impulse running through me was insight or vengeance.
It was in the heat of competition that I learned to rely on all the things I was taught, to rely on the things my body could do. But most importantly, I learned that my body could tell me things that my mind had no time or no information to address. I learned to rely on that intuition. I learned that my body is always communicating with me. Over time, I’ve started to learn the language of my body -the way it tells me I’m getting upset, the way it tells me I should be aware of someone because they might be trouble, or the way it tells me that someone is worth trusting in that moment when everything could change.
My experience ran counter to what so often in strict faith environments is the portrayal of the body: the enemy, the thing to deny in order to be holy. It is representative of sin and indulgence. But this is only one side of what the body is capable of. Without an understanding of what the place of the physical in the Holy is, we can never live life completely.
We are so often told that we need to shutdown the yearnings and whims of the body, that it can’t be trusted and that the best thing to do is to suffer in silence. Perhaps one may talk to the pastor.
In my experience of more relaxed faith communities, the narrative is different in many ways. It is often closer to a healthy relationship with embodiment. However, there is still a hovering cloud that keeps people away from the topics of sex, adiction, and intuition. It’s been my experience that this can lead to equally dangerous situations.
I believe that the most direct way that the Almighty or the Unknowable communicates with me is physically. Directly through my physical sense and perception. In my life, I have grown to rely on a physical intuition, that I feel is fed by both my mind and soul. It is an intuition honed and developed by my time in martial arts but applied everywhere. This intuition is almost entirely derived from a practice of monitoring my own physical state. As my body shifts and changes, I try my best to monitor myself and to look for things that I’ve learned are precursors to or warnings of trouble.
In fact, no healthy spiritual life can exist without addressing the questions of embodiment and what to do with these wonderfully imperfect vessels we are all moving through this life with. Yet in all my time walking with different faiths, this fear of any conversation about the body’s connection to the holly has been prevalent.
I can’t express the value that learning to interact with my intuition has added to my life. Just as with the internal voice I spoke about last week, this understanding has provided me with a feeling of clarity in the moments I’ve been most lost. This does not mean that this has always lead me to the best possible outcome or that I’ve always made good decisions.
There is something to the conservative warnings about the dangers of following impulse to destruction. The truth is that only by exploring can you know the difference between the trap of self indulgence and the freedom of self reliance. The lack of an understanding of this distinction is the biggest problem I see in people’s lives when things are out of whack with their physical being. People will stay in unhealthy situations or overindulge themselves when no one is looking. Avoiding these conversations about what it means to be a physical being in this world always leads to trouble.
The physical is an unavoidable piece of what it is to be a spiritual being. We need to talk about sex and talk about addictions and about our yearnings, our abuses as well our exultations. Without an understanding of these things I wasn’t able to find my spirit; it is the body that links me to my spirit. The intuition is simply the easiest way to reach the Holy and feel it speaking back. It’s been through the physical that I often begin to feel the joy of true spiritual connection.
Physicality is connected to our whole lives -ignoring that serves no one.
Ian Pirkey
I’m new to this blogging thing and thought I would use these first three posts to talk about the mind, body, and spirit. I find most Traditions tend to have an emphasis on one of these. To me all three have to be treated with respect and held in equal value. This first post is about my process for the mind and why I use it.
Throughout all of my transitions, I've had relationships that I deeply value with people from different worlds. The martial arts world has been one of the most important to me, and where I have many friends. It was in that world that I really experienced the influence of philosophy on people's daily lives and people's spiritual lives.
In my portion of the martial arts world, most of the influences came from a secular or even atheist perspective. In order to be authentic and maintain those relationships, I listened for the language of the philosophy around me. I learned how philosophy helped to hone and guide people who didn’t have an overt spiritual life. This was interesting to me so I continued to explore what philosophy had to offer. Interestingly I’ve found that philosophy gave me something totally different then it seemed to give the people around me.
Most importantly, I found a language in philosophy for the ‘mind’ portion of the mind-body-spirit trinity. This allowed me to speak with people in their language and allowed me access to a whole new set of wisdom that I never would have had if I hadn't explored what philosophy had to offer. These sources of wisdom have transformed how I interact with my mind, my body, and my spirit. Having this language gave me words and processes to talk about some of the wounds and traps of the mind that come up when untangling the mess of a spiritual transition.
The practice and application of philosophy is a messy and painful thing. It involves standing your ground in argument even when you’re not going to win. It means examining and re-examining the essential moral and spiritual questions of the world from the lens purely of the mind. This process didn't end with me getting answers the way I thought it would. Rather it taught me that every philosophy or way of living has its own set of problematic and down right wrong answers.
This isn't the lesson that most fear, the one that breeds contempt, arbitrary behavior or nihilism. Instead it taught me that when I heard talk of the indescribable or the incomprehensible, the great mysteries of life, these are actually questions the mind cannot answer. They are questions for the body and the spirit. I’ve argued till the sun came up about the nature of will or the existence of good and evil. None of these conversations came to any sort of meaningful conclusion that didn’t involve a great deal of faith and assumption. It's these relationships that have helped me figure out that the philosophy I’ve built for myself is just one lens through which I interpret and interact with the world. When I recognized that this way would never answer my questions alone, I was able to put it into my tool kit instead of making it my life. After all the time arguing, I had learned where my mind goes and how it likes to interact with the rest of my being.
More importantly, it helped me to know where my mind and logic can be applied to my life and where that simply won’t be enough to feed me. This shift has given me a consistent and reliable voice to the mind in my life. This has given me a place to check in, a lens to look at the things I’m doing and experiencing. This view will tell me if things are way out of whack. As long as I don't mistake that voice for the end-all be-all of my decision making and experience, then it can serve to free me up in moments of absolute chaos. I have a deeply held and explored “logical” voice for any situation, a voice that I can trust as an honest expression of one of the parts of my being, and this allows me to focus on how whatever is happening is affecting my body and spirit. This voice of the mind is part of a larger picture. Philosophy can be one of the rocks to building a fulfilling life alongside the physical and the spiritual beings in all of us.
Ian Pirkey
I grew up in the Episcopal Church. I was really involved as a teenager & young adult, became a lay professional in youth ministry & church finance, and was sponsored to attend seminary with the intention of being ordained an Episcopal priest. I loved the liturgy of the Sunday Eucharist, the weeknight Compline to close the day, the Morning Prayer to start. I brought many people to church, developed liturgies for youth communities to use, and worked with and for young people & children in many ways.
Within five years of my starting seminary, I had become an American Baptist Pastor and my entire church-based landscape had shifted. How that happened is an entirely different story. This is about an experience I had this Spring as Youth Ministry and Liturgy were juxtaposed, and my reactions to each. Unexpected feelings and longings were revealed, and my decision to be gone from that system altogether only strengthened.
The Easter Vigil is an ancient service, and one of my favorites. This service is held the Saturday evening or early Sunday morning of Easter weekend. It is the ‘first service of Easter’ and its liturgy, the readings and chants and songs and tradition are all beautiful. The liturgy begins with the stories of the Hebrew people, continues as the transition between Good Friday and Easter is marked, and concludes with the first Holy Communion (Lord’s Supper, Eucharist) of Easter. I have heard it said that some Episcopal liturgy, and this one especially, can transport you in time and space.
And while the Vigil that night was lovely, the sermon smart and the choir on point, I did not find it transcendent. I found I did not miss it in my life. It was a beautiful service, and I enjoyed myself. I knew and dearly love that evening’s presiding priest, as she’d been my supervisor at a youth ministry job many years ago. I knew many people in the congregation as well, and sat next to a couple at whose wedding I had preached. I even knew the Bishop a few rows behind me who’d been attempting to quietly attend a service he wasn’t expected to lead.
So familiar. Pleasant. And the evening did not stir melancholy, much less the grief I had expected. Nothing. I did not miss it at all, one tiny bit.
That was my recent run-in with liturgy, in which I went with trepidation, expecting desire and longing, and left glad to have been there but not eager to return.
So the other thing…
My friend is a former Mennonite who’s found himself the chaplain at an Episcopal Middle School. He needed at least one day that year of “Episcopal 101” and asked me to do it. I had 20+ years of Episcopal youth ministry. I’d sponsored scores of young people for baptism and confirmation, written Sunday school curricula, run camps and conferences for years. I knew this stuff. No problem.
I had a wonderful time. The three classes, 6th, 7th and 8th grades, were all very different. So varied were their responses and behavior, that I ended up doing three completely separate lesson plans. With the first group, we dove into symbol and expression and what it meant to be a thing. In the 7th grade class, we enacted a funeral. In the 8th grade class, we talked at length about action and faith and what it meant or didn’t mean to claim a thing. All three were tiny glimpses into what my life used to be like. And why I used to do nothing but nurture the lives of these young people.
This was the transportation through time and space. This was the ease-of-return I had thought I’d find in the liturgy but instead found here in the gathering of youth. This was the shocking feeling of loss when it was all over. As I asked which Episcopal Church certain kids attended, I found I knew the congregations. I could imagine what I know are accurate pictures of how Sunday morning goes, and what the next few years could look like. I know well the role the church could have for them, what good that community can bring.
Maybe it’s that anyone can pull off good liturgy with a solid team and training but not anyone can do youth ministry well. And perhaps I feel like I’ve left them, abandoned these youth to fend for themselves. They are so much of the reason why I stayed for so long in the Episcopal Church, and work with youth and children has always defined me in some way. And certainly the institutional church itself does not honor ministry with young people as it should. Funding is always terrible, staffing often problematic, and consistency a pipedream.
This is no longer my work. It is no longer my church. It is *not* what is before me to do. But walking away from it that morning shattered me. It brings me to tears to consider now.
What I’m left with is an overwhelming sense of both relief and loss. The relief comes from the knowledge that I truly feel no call to return to that work, that system. That work is for others to do or not do. And the loss? I’m not quite sure what to do with that other than what I always attempt to do with these times of grief, and the things that slip away.
Note them. Mark them. Honor them. Put them down. Give them to God.
Rev. Jessica Abell
