Why is it that I can never sleep when I want to?

[Sketch 1]
It’s our practice at Ilam Baptist to give visiting speakers $200 as reimbursement for their travel and the time they spend preparing and delivering their message. This last Sunday, I caught the speaker just before he left and gave him the cheque. He looked at it, dumbfounded and muttering that he’d never expected any money for his talk, and that he’d have to think very seriously about how to use it etc. I felt quite bad for causing him extra worry, but I was quite encouraged by his unselfconscious humility, especially since his message had been about limiting our consumption and using our resources for the good of others.

[Sketch 2]
Over the last couple of months I’ve been experimenting with making sourdough bread, a subtle art which I first became interested in when reading Ran Prieur’s site (he mostly writes about the impending collapse of civilization, but also about bread). I’ve discovered you have to use wholemeal flour for the starter as white ’strong’ flour turns into a nasty goop, inhospitable to wild yeasts (wildeyeest, as I like to think of them). For the actual dough, a combination of about half wholemeal (including the starter) and half ’strong’ (ie ‘high grade’; ‘high gluten’) white flour has yielded the best results thus far. I baked a loaf a couple of hours ago and it tastes pretty good. I should post a picture sometime.

[Sketch 3]
Last Friday night I went to hear Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, speaking on ‘The Two Halves of Life”. I hadn’t heard of Rohr before, but apparently he’s a pretty well-known author in contemplative spirituality - a few people from Ilam got all excited back in April when they heard he was coming to speak in Christchurch, and I didn’t want to miss out on something good!

The Friday evening seminar centred around the concept that there are two main stages in life - in the first stage, I learn self-control, and learns to follow laws (eg the law of the land, and the rules of a religion) because I have it on good authority that obeying those laws gives a better outcome than not.

Eventually, I have some kind of crisis experience, what Rohr calls a ‘precipitating event’: for many people, encountering death for the first time is their precipitating event, or it could be something less dramatic like moving to another city, encountering another culture etc. (this is the kind of event St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul”, when my worldview disappoints me, my logic fails, my conceptions of God and self are shattered).

Rohr argues that God has to lead me into a situation I can’t understand or fix, before I can begin to grow up emotionally and spiritually. One of the really interesting things he said on Friday was that “Faith is a journey into darkness, not into certitude”. This leads on to the second stage of life:

Learning to give up control. Getting out of God’s way so that he can act through you. Detachment from wanting things or answers. Those who’ve reached the second stage of life have made their peace with a God who’s just too big and mysterious to ever understand, and yet they’re not characterised by despair - because they’ve moved through it - but by gratitude. They’re the sort of people who you feel safe around; they’re willing to be wrong as long as they’re moving towards truth, and they value relationships over being right. Where people in the first half of life rely on violence (physical, verbal or whatever) to try to get others to agree with their views, those in the Second stage tend to attract questions.

The final major point of Rohr’s seminar was that everyone has to go through the first stage of life; you have to build up your conception of life, the universe and everything before that conception can be deconstructed. In the words of the current Dalai Lama, you have to learn the rules diligently so that you know how and when to break them.

[Sketch 3b]
Following Fr. Richard’s talk I became really interested in finding out about the various Franciscan orders. I’d like to read a biography of St. Francis someday, if I ever get to the end of the pile of books next to my bed. I found out that both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches have three Franciscan orders - friars, nuns and ’secular’ (ie lay members who can marry etc.) I don’t know that I could ever be certain enough of my plans to commit to something like the Franciscan rule, but I’d certainly like to assimilate some parts of it into my daily life.