"Bookending" Your Day

margaret's musings on.....Bookending Your Day

As any American knows, bookends hold things together and keep them from falling apart: In this case, books. So when I talk about bookending your day, I am trying to find ways to keep the day held together. Even with our best efforts, the day can surely unravel, but here is my recommendation.

Begin the day with a prayer of surrender. Give up running the day before you start. My own practice has been to face the morning sun with a chalice in hand, first greeting the day with thanksgiving and recognizing God deliberately decided that we we have another day on this earth. What we decide to do with it is up to us. I then offer it back to Him. I tip my chalice over and offer to pour out my agendas as best I can, then hold the glass up , asking Him to fill it as He will. Sometimes I ask for certain things to fill it but submit my asking back to Him.

David said, "My voice You shall hear in the morning, O LORD; In the morning I will direct it to YOU, and I will look up." (Psalm 5: 3) Jean-Pierre de Caussade says "There is no spiritual path more secure than that of giving yourself entirely to God." (The Joy of Full Surrender) I am sure that is true. However, I am a very long way from full surrender. Do you remember singing, "All to Jesus I surrender.....all to Him I freely give" ? It was an aspiration, never attained, but sought. Mary replied to the angel, "let it be with me according to your word" (Luke 1:38)

I recommend the other end of the day, before retiring, be "bookended" with a list or a prayer of gratitude. Stop and recognize the provision that has been made throughout the day. Look for God's fingerprints on your life. Note the twists and turns of the day, any surprises that came, good or bad, any kind word or touch that came your way. Look for the tangible provisions of food, clothing, shelter that were blessings of the day.

Gratitude brings a perspective of fullness and abundance. We really need this stance of heart because as affluent as we are, America is plagued with an attitude of scarcity. I read a book several years ago titled "Affluenza" which is written on the premise of our culture metaphorically displaying the symptoms of affluenza, the "flu": congested, running a temperature, achy, upset stomach, feeling weak. The practice of daily gratitude, simple as it sounds, is a great antidote to affluenza. If you are struggling for the words, you might just open to the Psalms and pray along with David.

He was masterful at his words of gratitude.

The important part is establishing practices that keep our "books from falling off the shelf", practices that hold our lives together in the midst of so much pressure and stress. Let me "bookend" this musing with a couple lines from Watchman Nee in Table in the Wilderness...The January 11th reading is from Habakkuk 3:18: "Yet I will rejoice in the lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." He says you may give yourself to God and then find everything going badly wrong. But we have to persist. "Then day by day let us go on giving to Him, not finding fault with His methods, but accepting His handling of us with praise and expectation."

Wanting, Longing, and Yearning

I have been doing a lot of reading lately on attachment theories. even going back to Harry Harlow's experiments with rhesus monkeys. He constructed a wire "mother" with a face (but no eyes or features) and a nipple through which monkeys could be fed and a terry cloth "mother" with a face with eyes and a nipple that delivered milk also. The eight infant monkeys clung to the cloth mother 16 to 18 hours a day, even though she gave zero nurturing responses. It makes me think of a practicum I did in graduate school spending time with children in foster care. There were some little boys I visited every week in a beautiful brick home hosted by a set of loving foster parents. Each week when I would be alone with the boys, they would seize the opportunity to beg me to find a way to get them back with their mother. The boys had been discovered in a home with a mom totally out of it on crack, feces everywhere inside the house and out. This was a non-responsive "terry cloth mother", but they yearned and longed for her. She was indeed , as I call it, "home base".

Disruption of attachment, a nice anesthetic label, for a broken relationship, has profound consequences in our lives. Death, overworking, betrayal. Hmmm. There are many ways to disrupt attachment. Our yearning, however, for something to cling to is indelibly imprinted on our souls. It is the source of much if not all, addiction. I know a lot firsthand about disruption of attachment. The dark night of the soul was for me on November 15, 1959, when my mother was finally set free from the prison cancer had created for her body. My home base slipped out to sea, like the ball in Tom Hanks life when he was alone on the island. One of my friends who lost his mother at 12, slipped into his mother's chest of drawers the night of her death, and found a nightgown that he took and hid in his bed in a desperate attempt to hold on to something. I wish I had had the presence of mind to think of that.

Then comes the big dilemma: shall I attach again? Shall I risk being hurt again. To love is to lose (sometimes, many times). Do I want to go through it again? But if I don't, what will I do with the wants, the longings, and the yearnings. How will I live with their silent screams? The hunger of the soul becomes ravenous, unbearable, like trying to hold your breath. My grandmother told me the story of going away to boarding school when she was 12 and being so homesick, she literally wanted to die, so she would hold a pillow over her mouth as long as she could, until finally she would have to take a breath. Is it better to live without connection and passion than living with the pain and fear of loss? Dan Allender refers to this as the "complex web or desire and defense, of longing and contempt" (The Wounded Heart).

Wretched people that we are! Who will save us from such a pit? Enter God. Go ahead. Taste and see that the Lord is good. We are always moving toward or away from. If you are standing still, you are moving "away from". Disruption of attachment yields all these mixed signals inside:" you want, you need, move closer", but the other side is saying, "No, please don't take me there, I don't want to hurt again." People on the outside are recipients of these push-pull messages. "Now you see me. Now you don't." They can be caught in a game of hide and seek that they didn't sign up for. Connect. Disconnect. Crazy-making!! Irwin Kula, in his book, Yearnings, applauds the great Biblical characters when he says,"there isn't a single character who understood beforehand the outcome of any journey he or she underwent. What makes these characters so special is not that they are somehow superhuman, wiser, or more evolved. It's that they don't scale down their dreams to the size of their fears. They are masters of the dance between uncertainty and certainty."

Jesus says "Come. Move toward." Sounds good. But oops, sounds painful. Dare I trust again? What is all this talk about a "personal relationship with Jesus"? Relationship you say?

This subject always leads me back to C.S. Lewis' statement: "Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to not one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket safe, dark, motionless, airless it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbation of love is Hell. I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than the self-invented and self-protective lovelessness."

Oh, God. We need your healing of our shattered hearts. We do not have the courage to try again. So we come to you, asking you to give us the faith, the courage, the sheer ability to love, to connect, not just a little here and there, but fully with abandon. We repent of contriving our myriad ways of self-protection, of making our own provisions. We repent for bowing to the god of fear and even being afraid to taste and see if you are really trustworthy. We need, we want, we desire, and we can't stop. Please meet us in that place, provide a bridge for us to walk across....to YOU. And then, as our hearts are healed, provide the planks in the bridge for us to walk across to meet our fellow human beings, our mates, our children.