Once Upon a time, in the land of Pradane, a young man set out to
discover his true calling. After many weeks of journeying,
Taran of Care Dalben found himself at the forge of Hevid
the Smith. Hevid was perhaps the greatest
Smith in all pradane, renowned far and wide for his skill and
craftsmanship. He was a barrel chested, leather
aproned man with scorched eyelashes, a sooty face and
burly shoulders, so used to the feel of sparks that he might
almost have been part of his forage.
Taran was eager to learn the noble art of sword making, and
the master Smith was willing enough to teach him.
Taran expected to be handed hammer and tongs and to be put
to work shaping one of the bars of steel at the forge, but
Heaven had no such intention. What start when the work is half
done? He snorted.
No, no my lad, you'll forge a sword from beginning to end.
And so Taran found himself gathering fuel for the furnace
all day long, feeding a roaring, flame tongued monster that could
never eat it's fill. Then came shoveling a mountain
of stones, smelting the metal they contained.
By the time Taran was allowed to touch a blade, his hands were
covered with more blisters than skin, his back ached, and his
ears rang with the constant clatter.
Eventually he left with a strong but plain sword in his scabbard
to continue his quest. Soon after, he found shelter
from a rainstorm in the home of an old woman whose long hair was
as white as the wool hanging from her belt.
A web of wrinkles covered her face, but for all her years she
gave no signs of frailty, for time had seasoned her, and her
Gray eyes were sharp and bright as a pair of new needles.
I am Dwivak Weaver woman, she said, and I can see you've need
of a new cloak. And so Taran found himself at
her loom, hoping weaving might prove easier than smithing
again. He expected to sit at the great
loom to watch the shuttle dance between the threads, but instead
Dwek led him to a chamber bursting with raw wool.
Tease out the thorns, pick out the cockle burrs, she commanded.
Comb it, card it carefully wander, or when your cloak is
done you'll feel it's made of thistles instead of wool.
Days of painstaking work followed, cleaning, spinning,
dying, until Taran's eyes were bleary and his fingers raw.
Only when he knew the feel of wool at every step, like the
back of his hand, was he allowed to approach the loom.
All things are done step by step and strand by strand, Dwivek
told him. In the end, Taran left the
weaver's cottage with a serviceable new cloak, but his
longing had not found a rest at the loom.
A few days later, Taran came upon an old man standing beside
a pair of wooden buckets on a yoke at the edge of a shallow
stream. Taran offered to carry his
buckets and soon found himself gasping under their weight.
Grinning, the man took the buckets back and briskly carried
them back to his shed, where he poured the mud into a great
wooden VAT. In the next room, Tarin saw
shelves holding jars and bowls of all kinds whose craftsmanship
made him catch his breath. If this is your work, he said.
I know you. You are Enlaw clay shaper,
Master Potter of the Free Comets.
The man nodded. If you've seen my work, it may
be that you indeed know me, for I am old at my craft and no
longer sure where the clay ends and Anlaw begins.
Anlaw agreed to teach Taran some of what he knew, and day after
day he sent him to dig clay from the stream bank, to learn its
weight and texture, to sift and mix and temper it until it
almost became a part of him. Before you learn the craft,
Anlaw explained, you must first learn the clay.
In our age of endless productivity and constant
motion, perhaps we've forgotten what these ancient Craftsman
knew, And so we mistake busyness for purpose, distraction for
engagement, and motion for life. But what if the masters were
right? What if the path to true
mastery, whether of craft or calling or simply being human,
begins not with doing more, but with learning to be still, with
learning to be present? What if our souls, like Taran's
hands, need to be trained in being present before they can
create anything worth keeping? Welcome to the Imagination
Redeemed podcast where we follow the great stories further up and
further in In Pursuit of the Life of Christ.
Welcome friends, back to the Imagination Redeemed podcast.
I'm Brian Brown, joined today by Sarah Howell, Matthew Clark and
Christina Brown. And we've just read this story
from Tar and Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander.
If you do not know the Prideane Chronicles run, Do not walk.
They're fantastic. And we want to get into this
challenge and we want to challenge ourselves to do it not
in a way that's simply on the one hand, telling us all things
we already know about the problem, or on the other hand,
simply saying try harder, stupid on the solution.
In our recent episode, we talked about Encanto and how Mirabelle
in that story pursued something that in the end was not herself
in her quest to find a self that was meaningful.
We want to kind of build on that conversation today and talk more
about the doing of that. If if the last episode was more
about the being of that, this is more about the doing of that.
I think it's safe to say all of us know what it is like to go
through a moment of life. This is probably not done with
one thing so much as 10, but with 10 things that are
constantly tugging at us. If only I can cross that
threshold, then I can fill in the blank.
Only that chronic pain would go away.
If only I could learn that scale.
If only I could have that object.
If only I could make that money. If only I could my my ship could
come in, in some sense or other. And if if that's not enough,
we've got the, the more immediate temptations, the next
task, the next distraction from the smartphone, whatever it
might be. Matthew, Christina, Sarah, let's
just start by sitting for a moment with that problem.
Then we'll get into more of what, what is that problem?
What are the things we're missing as far as where that
problem is coming from? And then we'll get into what do
we do about it? What do we make of it?
First, let's just talk about this problem.
What does it? What does it feel like?
I think for me it's being stuck between two polars where I
either feel like I'm under so many tasks.
I don't feel like I've started the day, I feel like the tasks
have started me. On the other hand, when I wake
up so exhausted that I can barely even begin a task and I
feel lethargic and almost under the weight and burden of the
tasks not started. So that's the the kind of the
the task driven sense of relating to the world.
You know, 1 meme that I've seen about that is basically that
being being an adult is just saying, but after this week,
things will calm down every week until you're dead.
So that's cheerful. What else?
How have you, how how Matthew, Christina, how have you guys
experienced this? Well I'm laughing that that you
use the example of an illustration from a meme because
it just kind of proves how much we are distracted by our
devices. For me, when I have so much
distracting me and so many tasks, but just so many things,
my mind is cluttered and I can't really tell one thing from the
next. And I'm constantly going back to
A to do list, constantly looking at the calendar, what's today
versus what's tomorrow versus what's next.
Oh, that's next week. Like I have to keep going back
to something that tells me, yeah, you got to do this today
or else this is going to happen or yeah, you better pay
attention to this because otherwise you're going to be
sorry when this thing comes and this deadline comes and you're
not ready or whatever it is. So honestly, I think that's when
I feel like ADHD can sort of like really kick in and I don't
know, up from down. So probably I would say that's
that's a big one for me is just a cluttered mind.
And then all they want to do is curl up and sleep because my
mind doesn't know what to do. It's like it's like a literal
response with my brain saying stop I need to process any rest.
Yeah, sometimes to me it feels like a, a, a kind of fatigue as
well, where there's there's so many things that need, that need
decisions that need to be considered and, and the decision
needs to be made about 10 things, 20 different things.
Just this month I was like, I have so many because I'm about
to go out of the country for a month.
I was like, there's so many things I need to get done before
I leave. And I wasn't able to sleep the
other night because I was thinking about all these things.
And then I just had to say, you know what, some of these things
are not going to get done. I've just got to be OK with
that. And so that's it's frustrating
and it's fatiguing I think as well.
I think that's a really good point.
I actually had to make that call this morning, like what needs to
be done versus what I want and, and sometimes what you want is
good, but it's not necessary. And so we're using those things
kind of yearning for them, but they're, they're adding to the
pressures of us not being able to be present.
So I think there's, there's that too for me, right?
Just that desire to sort of control and contribute in the
ways that I feel because I feel so cluttered everywhere else.
I'm just like, well, I need to, I need to contribute this way
because this is where I will feel like I have some agency,
right? And you realize, well, you know,
how much agency do we really have over our lives?
Turns out, not so much. I think another aspect too, kind
of playing off what you just said, is maybe you could call it
grief, like the grief of coming to terms with my limitations.
Yeah. Versus the thing I would, the
way I would like to see myself or the things I would like to
say like I can do all the, I can do all twenty of these things.
And then realizing actually, maybe like 4 is more realistic
and having to like kind of grief.
And like you're saying, they're not, it's not like these things
are bad. I shouldn't do them.
It's like all twenty of these things are awesome.
I, I would love to do all of them.
I want to hang out with all of these people.
I want to do all of these things, but I'm a limited
person. I can't, I just can't do
everything that I want to do or everything that is good.
Maybe that's part of being built for eternity as well, you know?
Yeah, between you, you Christina and Matthew, you have just,
you've touched on two things I want to get to.
One is the, the sort of more identity or kind of existential
component because we all, we all started with more kind of minute
to minute tactical things like, right, I just, I, I struggle to
live the next 5 minutes because the next 5 minutes are owned by
perceived necessity. And I think that's how we
experience a lot of it minute to minute.
And then underlying that, there's, there's something
deeper that I want to circle back to in a few minutes.
But I want to, I want to pull that thread that you just
touched on, Matthew. On some level we can, we can
kind of have mercy on ourselves a little bit, have grace with
ourselves because a lot of this is the world that we're born
into. I'm not qualified to judge the
universality of it in terms of, Oh yes, this is humans have
always done this. But I can say in our time, in
our place in 21st century America, in our case there,
there are unique things that make this hard.
There are reasons that we have particular difficulty being
still. We get trained out of the
ability to be still, the ability to be still with ourselves,
right? If if you've ever tried the
exercise of not touching your phone for one hour when you're
not doing something particular that would distract you from it,
you start to notice how often you instinctively reach for it.
If you just go into the middle of a a field or even a small
yard and just stare up at the sky and try to do absolutely
nothing, most people quickly realize how difficult that is.
I agree on that. And I think a distinction that
would be made is for that phone, right, Reaching for the phone
for me, it's not even reaching it for, you know, doom scrolling
for social media or anything. It's reaching for it because
like, I'm like, oh, yeah, I should look that thing up on the
Internet. Oh, yeah.
I really wanted to remember how to do this or like even
something so in my case, which is kind of ironic as a garden
tender, even something like, oh, yeah, I wanted to check on this.
Let me see what my resources and says about this thing.
And I want to like, reach for the phone.
Can you just go out and be? It's also just ingrained, like
our phone is our answer for a lot of things.
You know, even if we're thinking about someone we love because we
want to text them and tell them I love them.
Oh, but also that involves my phone.
I think what you're pointing to, Christina, is something I would
probably say we've had an ingrained habit of being
disembodied, and when you allow yourself to leave your physical
limitations, that doesn't mean that your capacities grow.
Through our devices, we are connected to a world that is
bigger than the one that our brains are capable of relating
to. No matter how cool the
networking tools or contacts app on my phone, I can't have a
meaningful relationship with 1000 people.
I can't carry the burden of all those people I need to reach out
to, as opposed to just the people I encounter physically on
a daily basis. I I can't carry the burdens of
the the news feed, right? All of the things, all the
disasters, tragedies, all the things I'm supposed to be sad
about, anxious about, outraged about, all of which come from
thousands of miles away. I'm constantly connected to all
of that. And you're right, Sarah, that's
fundamentally disembodied. Whatever the benefits are and
the benefits of any new technology, the benefits always
come first. We always notice the, oh, I
could do this now and I couldn't do that before.
And it's always the the downsides that we start to
notice later, after we have unwittingly submitted ourselves
to it for days, weeks, years, generations.
The image that I always go back to with that truth, Brian, is
the old tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun.
What I didn't realize about that story until very recently was
how Daedalus, his father, knew the risk of his invention, but
his son, who didn't make the invention, wasn't aware of how
the thing itself worked. And so I think I, I just think
about that often with invention and with the ways that we try to
make our lives convenient. How often do we see the
convenience? How often do we see the power it
gives us? Well, and we're, we're going to
do an episode later this year on theology of, of tradition and
how it's tied up in the idea of honoring your father and mother.
And, and, and that story is such a, such a perfect one because
it's always easy to see the, the faults, real or perceived of
your ancestors and your specific specifically your parents.
It's not always as easy to see when something we think is a
fault is actually a virtue or or has the two bound up in each
other. But I think it's sort of it's
almost creepy. Like how how difficult it is for
us to to lose our kind of 12 year old sneer at how backward
our parents are. Very few of us grow up to the
point where we don't have that instinctive curl of our lip when
we think of how much more enlightened we are than our
parents or our ancestors. And, and we can think about this
with smartphones or AI or any number of whatever the current
thing is, laugh at the people that are just old enough to be
hesitant about jumping into the deep end so quickly.
And I want to bring this back to, to Tarrant's story a little
bit because we see both elements of what we've talked about in
that story. You see first, the the desire to
not just kind of jump in with both feet, but the desire to the
desire to get busy quickly with the stuff that's way downstream,
the stuff you're not ready for. And frankly, a lot of what we
are busy with day-to-day probably falls into that
category. The stuff that we're not ready
for. Either we weren't emotionally
ready to carry that burden, or we didn't have the capacity to
be this busy or whatever it might be.
But there's also a one of the reasons that Tarrant jumps in so
excitedly and wants to skip straight to the end is because
fundamentally, he's not learning how to.
He's not looking to learn how to make a sword.
He's not looking to learn how to make a cloak.
He's not looking to learn how to make a piece of pottery.
He's looking to find himself. The entire book, and I
referenced this in the story, but it's the story of the entire
book, of which this is literally just two chapters.
He's trying to find himself. He's trying to figure out who he
is. And the book starts with Taran's
discontentment. He knows his name.
He has a good circle of friends and peers and mentors around him
who can tell him pretty definitively who they see him to
be what what character they've seen from him.
And he's been through enough to have seen a lot of it himself.
But he's not content I he. He wants to know something about
his Initially it's his parentage.
It kind of morphs into more of his inheritance.
Then it's the skills that he can learn.
He's trying to find who he is through the busyness, through
the effort to push into that next thing.
There is a leisurelessness about Taran that wants to kind of this
wanderlust. He wants to charge off to the
next thing. He's afraid to look himself in
the mirror. And I keep going back in this to
Joseph Peeper. We've a couple of us are are big
Peeper fans and and his his particularly his book leisure.
The basis of culture talks a lot about the relationship between
not laziness and hard work, which is often how we tend to
understand the two options, but the relationship between total
work, which can include actually both laziness and busyness, but
which involves seeking your identity in total work in,
busyness in. People recognizing your
accomplishments, whatever, whatever it might be, throwing
yourself all the way into it to the point where you've been
trained by these rhythms that you have accepted to the point
where you actually don't know how to be still anymore.
Really, what these processes, the the fabric making or the
sword making or or the pottery, these really are processes where
he's trying to find out who he is.
He's on a quest in these outer processes to really reach this
sort of inner reality, which actually I love that because
I've very much come to believe that creative processes really
do that. That as you enter into creative
processes that the arts have this incredible ability to draw
us into internal processes to. And the phrase that I've I've
thought of as the making makes us.
The making makes us as we make we're, we're on that, on that
journey and that is actually happening.
So it's interesting. I like that he chose that to
frame Taran's story, but then also thinking of it in terms of
what are the expectations that have been formed in us by living
in such a heavily mechanical technological culture.
I think we have machine expectations on ourselves that
that give us this sense of we ought to be able to figure out
these shortcuts. We ought to be able to get there
in some way that is actually unnatural to personhood.
That's not native to personhood. It might be native to mechanism,
but we're not we're not computers.
We're people and people are stories.
People are relational processes. People are in that Ephesians
thing about us being the the play of God, being the
masterpiece, this thing that is being shaped and crafted slowly
through participation in the life of God.
That's the kind of thing we are, which means we should have
different kinds of expectations for the way we would hope to
reach maturity or beauty or joy. And it made me think of a song I
wrote some years ago. It's on an album called
Beautiful Secret Life, and it was really inspired by Henry
Nowen. It's called No Shortcut to the
Heart. And one of the verses says all
these paintings line the showroom and they look out upon
the people and they speak of the many deaths it took to make a
masterpiece. Henry, Henry now And Henry told
me it takes time, more than a lifetime to learn how to come
home. We are each of us apprenticed as
the master draws the image out of us.
There is no shortcut to the heart.
And so like that song for me was kind of a way of making
something, making a song, because I was trying, I was on
that similar journey of trying to learn that about my own life
and about life in general. CS Lewis talks about the the
three major temptations, the the flesh, the devil and the world.
And as he warns some young adults about what the world has
to offer them, he basically argues that the desire to be
accepted into that in crowd in the world, if you don't work to
prevent that desire, they will control you.
They will run you that desire to be accepted and that can take
many different forms, especially when it comes to our work.
But what you've said, Matthew, prompts me to wonder whether or
not we have kind of bought hook, line and sinker into accepting
humanity as tools and as computers.
Yeah, yeah. Our imagination has been so
shaped by that. Yeah.
I mean, I mean so many of our metaphors for describing how our
brains work, our our computer metaphors or released machine
metaphors, right. Just need to process that for a
minute. Maybe I'm wired that way.
There's a good essay that I read once that oh, try to make sure
we put in the the show notes just listed all like dozens of
metaphors. We don't even think about about
how our brains take in information, how we develop an
identity, how it how they store information.
And none of it is how our brains actually work.
And it's not just that we have a, a limited hard drive in the
sense of capacity. It's also that the way that our
brains work is contextual and it's narrative driven.
And it's that we were, we were made to have a perhaps a bit of
a smaller number of things that are deeply intertwined with each
other so that they make sense. It's not just, oh, I need some
more storage folders. I'm overwhelmed.
We, we learn these things in through, through repetition and
layers and relationship. And and that's what these
masters are trying to do with with Taran.
They're saying, oh, you want to make a sword.
Oh, you want to make a cloak? Oh, you want to make a, a piece
of pottery. Great.
Start with the raw materials. Stop trying to skip three steps
ahead to I just want the end result.
You have to actually submit yourself to the raw material,
the physical object in their case.
But we can also think about it in terms of the the present
moment as opposed to the future moment, or the present task as
opposed to the thing I'd rather be doing, or or whatever it
might be. You have to submit yourself to
what's right in front of you and allow it to work on you.
This was a convicting example Lewis had in this essay.
It's called the inner ring. But he basically argues how
often do we fill our lives with thing after thing in his words,
because it is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday
afternoons, but to have them free because you don't matter,
that is much worse. And I think if you have a
scarcity view of the world, of your participation in it, you
either are doing or you're not doing, then you haven't been
accepted into the abundance of what creation is.
Because, Brian, what you said makes me automatically want to
jump out of my seat and say the raw materials are beautiful,
they are important, they are where you should start, that
they're lovely. And it's from the love of that
raw material that we, we can do great things because we're, as I
think Tolkien says, we're, we're diving in and exploring the
latent powers of that material and bringing them forth.
And as we reveal those latent powers, that's glorification to
the Lord because it's his work. And so ultimately it has to
start in that abundance. It has to start in some
acceptance. And if you dive really deep into
why we've been taken up into the world's categories of
computational productivity, I think you'll see that our
relentless work is fueled by what Lewis calls your longing to
enter, your anguish when you are excluded, and the kind of
pleasure you feel when you get in.
Whereas in John 10, Jesus says I am the great shepherd of the
Good Shepherd. Enter in, He says.
I know you. Those longings have been
fulfilled. And so out of abundance, I think
that's really what Sabbath is, is to revel and enjoy abundance,
and from that posture engage the work that God has given us on
this earth. I agree.
Yeah, I love you talked about the inner ring and the desire to
be on the inside. And he's like, that's a real
desire, but that is actually what we've been invited to by by
the Trinity. We've been invited inside.
We've been our telos. Our destiny is to be married
into the the Trinity and to share that life, to participate
in the divine nature. So just this week I was reading
Pope Benedict second part in the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy.
And one of the things he talked about was what this world is, is
this world is a space that God has created to be a habitat
where he has carefully crafted this whole world so that it is
conducive to foster us getting to know each other, us, and for
the two of us, for God and his, his creatures to, to learn who
each other is and, and to learn how to participate with one
another. He's like, that's what the world
is, that's what the whole cosmos is.
It's this meeting place that God has set up, but we need to be
like slowly acclimated to God because it's kind of a lot like
if we were just to be dropped right in front of his face, you
know, it'd be a bit much. So we've got to work our way up
to that. And he's made this world for
that reason and that purpose, which means that the net, the
materials themselves, the things he's made are these points of
contact. They are the ways that we enter
in these normal things. That's where the invitation is
situated. I like the way that peeper puts
it. He's talking about how when we
think of Sabbath, we tend to think of not doing things.
Just like when we tend to think about how busy we are, we tend
to think of, Oh yeah, they feel guilty because we're doing so
many things. Or we feel guilty because we are
not doing more things. Or we have some vague sense that
the the good life involves much less busyness than we are
currently at the mercy of, but don't really know how to carve
our way out of it. And people pushes back again
kind of against all that and echoes this idea that you
mentioned from Pope Benedict the 16th that Sabbath is the goal of
creation. It's what creation is for.
It's this place of delighting in God and relationship with God
and in what? And then a good, the good things
that God has made and the good things that God has given us.
And Peeper, writing before Pope Benedict the 16 said that says
there's there's no such thing as a feast that does not ultimately
derive its life from divine worship.
He points out this relationship between delight and worship.
It really makes you stop and think.
So what does this all look like in practice then?
Because it's just like Taran learned, it's not a matter of
skipping to the end. Oh, there's all this stuff that
I sort of feel bad about that I'm doing wrong and I want to do
it better. Let me flip that switch.
Give me the 10 step plan or give me the whatever.
And we ultimately can't say no to plenty of things that are not
our highest priority spiritually.
Floor still has to be swept. Kids still have to be driven
somewhere, these sorts of things.
And while yes, you can step back and look at the big picture of
all that and ask where your priorities lie and what things
you might want to rethink that, that's a very healthy thing to
do from time to time. What about the right now?
How shall we then live in, in light of all this?
Where do we start if we want to live a life that is more fully
present to getting our hands dirty with the mud of the raw
materials that God has put before us, and ultimately,
through that pushing toward a life that is more oriented
toward delight in the goodness of God than in the pressure and
stress and busyness that tends to overtake us?
When we talk about what it looks like, I think defining sort of
presence is kind of important. And I think about the word
quietude, and I don't think it's quite the same as silence.
I think we all crave silence in so many ways in this
distractible world, but I don't know that it's the same thing as
quiet. And I was reading Sarah
Clarkson's wonderful book Reclaiming Quiet, and she talks
about how even in a harried, hurried life there, there are
ways to sort of reclaim that quiet.
Sarah says that she's convinced that our capacity as humans to
be quiet actually will shape the entire way that we come to love
and trust the living God and to have a lively faith at all.
Because I'm going to actually read her quote here, she says.
I think that we in the modern world increasingly struggle to
hear the voice of God, and sometimes we forget to even
desire it because our minds and ears are so crammed with the
voices online of the Internet, headlines, social media, in news
feeds. But I believe our greatest loss
is spiritual, because our disquiet leads us to a certain
kind of life. It shapes the whole of the way
we interact with each other and the world around us.
Too often, though, we hear the word quiet as something negative
and abstract, a subtraction of activity or even a relationship
available only to the Mystics and Saints.
That's personally something I've thought about so much, Like,
well, Dang it, sometimes I just want to be a monk.
But she says too often we think of it as merely A discipline we
cannot manage, another hard thing that only the very holy or
the rigid can attain. But every Christian is called to
be a person capable of hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit, of
practicing God's presence in the midst of the everyday.
Quiet is not a special state reserved for introverts or
particularly pious people or the lonely.
Every Christian is called to cultivate an interior world, to
make mind and heart a space of expectant silence as we wait for
God to speak His Word into our darkness and to sing us back to
life. Classic Sarah, you got to stop
and meditate on it for a good while in honor of how good it
is. It's very true.
And I think, you know, but I think defining the quiet versus
the silence was important because, you know, she's writing
as a mother of four and, you know, the wife of a vicar and,
and, but I think and as a writer herself and, you know, we all
know we who pursue our artistic pursuits.
It's hard work, as Taryn Wanderer found out, and it
requires discipline and fortitude and all that.
But I think where where I wanted to sort of mention the what this
looks like was your question, Brian, was something that Sarah
said about what it means to have that space.
And she says, I don't think quiet is really about great
feats so much as it is about small faithfulness.
And that is a work available to every believer alive.
Yeah, there's something similar to that that's been helpful to
me. There are, there are sort of
macro things that you can do like if, if you've never tried
putting together a rule of life, Google that, that's, that's a
fairly easy way to just sort of take a step back and go, what
are, what are the top 235 priorities in my life ranked?
How is that aligned or misaligned with how I'm spending
my time? And, and what might I do
differently in response to this insight?
But even on a just a more micro level, a more minute to minute
level, Matthew and I, for example, both read a bit of
recent cognitive science and different people's insights on
how our brains actually work. And you know, one of the things
I've noticed is that multitasking is not a thing.
I know some of our listeners are proud multitaskers.
It's not a thing. You're multitasking is doing two
things half as well. Your brain is not capable of
actually giving anything remotely close to full attention
to more than one thing at once or one primary thing and some
secondary things. And if you are distracted from
one thing, it takes your brain a good 15 minutes to get back into
where it was. So there's no such thing as a 5
minute distraction. So one of the things that I've
done in response to this in, in, in my life is just to think a
bit more about what it looks like to be fully present to
those high priorities. And some of that is work.
Some of that is not remotely fun work.
But what does it look like to be fully present to it to in, in a
way that allows it to work on me the way the, the the clay and
the bristles work on Taran. But then turning from that to my
wife or my children. And, yeah, the phone's not at
the center of my attention or I'm not at the mercy of the next
thing when, you know, when my son asks me a question, am I
looking him in the eye, maybe getting down on my knees?
And there you have my full attention right now.
I that I got a long way to go on that one, terms of growth and
learning. But even even trying to do that
has pretty dramatically shaped the way I experienced reality.
It reminds me a little bit of the luck, the liquid luck potion
in one of the later Harry Potter books.
I think it's the 6th 1 where he just takes this potion and for
the next hour or something he just sort of at the mercy of his
his whim, but his whim is guided somehow.
I've had moments like that where, you know, it wasn't a
lick a luck potion, but it felt like the Holy Spirit.
It was just, oh, this is not what I was planning on.
This is not the busyness I was invested in, but this is the
thing that's been put before me. I'm going to pivot and be fully
present to it, especially when that thing is, is a person or
something of real intrinsic worth as opposed to something
that is of artificial value because it happened to be on my
schedule or something. So all kinds of ways we can go
wrong with that. We can turn into total flakes
who always abandoned their commitments and things like
that. But on on an anecdotal level,
that's been a real a real blessing to me more than once.
Yeah, I think that's where presents kind of like you were
saying, Brian, being present on your knees with your son, who
also happens to be my son. So I get what you're saying is,
is that faithfulness that that Sarah was referencing?
I think sometimes it's those great acts of faithfulness that
in those in those mundanities in the changing of your daughter's
diaper, Sarah, that give us that presence and allow us to be
quiet from all of those those schedule things and all the
things that we feel like. And that is just the
faithfulness that brings us that that sense of God's presence,
God's voice. I have recently been reading
Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines, and he makes a
a very large claim that the focal point of human existence
is the human body. Because Jesus Christ, God
Incarnate, is a human too. He has a body, just as we do.
And he spends the whole book unpacking what that claim, what
that argument means, to how then we should live.
And it, it's a fascinating argument.
And I think that has helped me even in the last couple of
weeks, like you've talked about Brian, kind of a refocusing,
having something tangible and literally of my senses, my body
be something that I continue to go back to and ask and listen to
where it is and what it needs. Has been a very intuitive and
practical way for me to slow myself down, to recognize when I
am in the clutter and the clatter of the mind, as
Christina was saying before, because it is so ingrained in my
habit. It is so often for me.
It is so normal for me to not consider my body, not consider
my limitations that just even stopping and listening to what
it might need at the moment. Drink a sit down where I'm
stiff, where I'm holding a lot of tension in that moment.
Those are all examples of bringing me back into the
moment, helping me notice who I am as a human being with a
physical body, and meeting Christ there because He has one
too, and He cares about that too.
Going back to my acceptance, He has accepted and loves that too.
That's my encouragement for how my life has changed even the
last couple of weeks, doing that as a practice.
Yeah. And if you talk to people at at
older than you at five year intervals, you'll hear
increasingly loud stories of how the body, it asserts itself in
those ways louder and louder as you get older.
And, and those are hard in their own ways, but they're also new
opportunities to have God's strength meet you in your
weakness more and more and more as you grow.
I was sitting with some guys the other day and one of them is in
a recovery situation and, and he made this comment, he said.
It's so frustrating to have to be deliberate about this.
It's so frustrating that I have to make plans to protect my
sobriety in his case, you know, and I feel like we're all in a
situation like that where I wish I didn't have to think about how
do I need to protect myself from my cell phone or how do I need
to protect myself from all this information barrage and the
tragedy barrage. It's like, but I do this.
That is the world I live in. And so that is one of the things
I think is like recognizing it's not going to fix itself.
So like, maybe I need to have to leave my phone in another room
at night so that I don't stay up scrolling, dim scrolling.
So all these like deliberate things.
That's one thing. Another thing I thought of is,
and this is I hate saying this, but I might have to actually ask
other people to help me. I might have to actually.
Yeah. Doesn't that suck?
You can't. Maybe you can't do it by
yourself. Maybe you actually somebody else
in your vicinity to like take something off of you and because
really that you maybe it's more than you ought to be doing.
Or maybe you need them to bring something into your space that
you can't reach, but they can. Maybe there's some way that you
actually need to ask for other people to enter into this
problem with you and help you bear it.
And then you mentioned the embodiment piece.
And one really practical thing is feeling so disconnected from
the body, but then realizing like this is something Jesus has
shown incredible honor for by by by a taking of up into the
Godhead, the human body. And this is where we're headed.
We're going to be embodied forever because that's what a
human is. And so even in little ways, and
maybe this sounds corny, but you know, like, boy, a hot shower
feels great, doesn't it? Maybe that's the affection of
God. Maybe you're actually
experiencing God's affection in your body.
Oh, I'm sitting on the porch and a little bit of breeze blows
across the hairs on my arm. Doesn't that feel good?
Maybe that's God's affection. Oh, this thing smells good or
tastes good or well, I sure am comforting, comfortable in my
bed. And I don't want to get out of
it this morning because it's so cozy.
Like all of these things, I think, are ways that God has
made a world where we actually can experience his goodness.
And those things are not excluded.
Those things count. Those things are part of him
telling us what he's like and what it's like to be with him.
Even those little things. That flower is pretty.
I'd like to pick it and put it on my table and look at it.
So I think just actually noticing that and, and giving it
credit or acknowledging what it or recognizing it.
The idea of recognition is another big idea in, in
Benedict's writing that he says we've forgotten who we are and
where we're from and who God is. And this world is a place where
we have a chance to say, wait a minute, I I think I know who you
are. I think I know where that came
from. That came from God.
And we're recognizing, we're remembering our origin and the
the love that spoke us into being so.
But those are those sound esoteric, but really they're
like little real things that are all over the place around us,
you know? It's perfect for piggybacking
off of exactly what Matthew said, which is and, and Sarah,
which is the embodiment and the recognition of what's around us.
It's a poem that's called Praying by Mary Oliver, and it's
very brief, but you'll see why it's so significant.
As I read it, this is what she says.
It doesn't have to be the blue iris.
It could be weeds in a vacant lot or a few small stones.
Just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate. This isn't a contest, but the
doorway into thanks and a silence in which another voice
may speak. Excellent, great choice.
OK, That is an absolutely perfect note to end on because I
know we have in some ways created more questions than
we've answered as far as the practicalities of this and
knowing this. Our next episode in a couple of
weeks, Matthew and I are going to sit down with Malcolm Gite
and talk about this. We're going to talk about
poetry. We're going to talk about pipe
smoking notably and extensively as not simply a hobby that
someone might take up, but as a kind of a case study in how to
learn to be fully present, how to be learned to be still as
well. Come check out our next episode
in a couple weeks on pipe smoking with Malcolm Geit.
We definitely recommend Sarah's book, Reclaiming Quiet Sarah
Clarkson, and we definitely recommend Joseph Peeper's books.
That's Pi EPER. Well, pretty much anything he's
written, but particularly leisure, the basis of culture.
So that's more of a sort of a theological meditation on the
nature of stillness and quiet and being fully present.
And Sarah's is more OK, and how do I actually carve this out?
Finally, you should all mark September 20th weekend on your
calendars because that's going to be the Anselm Society's fall
event. All of us are going to be there
for the great Middle Earth Feast.
We are going to have an artist's retreat.
We're going to have some workshops and retreats for
people who don't consider themselves artists but love
having the kinds of conversations we have on this
podcast. We are going to have all kinds
of more low key afternoon activities like going on hikes
with Anselm Society people, hanging out at some of the
coffee shops. We talk about all the time.
We're just having long conversations.
And in the evening on Saturday we will have one of our famous
pub nights where we will be doing stories, songs, poems and
food from Lord of the Rings all evening long.
We're going to have that up on our website.
If we don't, by the time this episode airs, it'll be up there
in seconds. And tickets for that will go on
sale soon. It's going to be a great chance
for Colorado Springs locals to have a great time together and
for those of you who are not local to Colorado Springs to
come and hang out with us. So September 20th weekend, mark
it on your calendars. Thank you for joining us,
Christina. Sarah, Matthew, thank you for
sharing your insights. We will see you listeners next
time when we talk to Malcolm Gite and I will see different
combinations of all of you and other future episodes.
The Imagination Redeemed podcast is a production of the Anselm
Society. It's easy to see this world as
disenchanted and to give up hope that there's more.
But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven,
to experience a joyful Sabbath and experience the world as a
place to meet God and live a bountiful life that participates
in the life of God. Like in the great stories, the
Ansam Society is a place where you can come in and experience
beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out
renewed, bringing that life to your vocation, home, and church.
Join us next time as we pursue a renaissance of the Christian
imagination together.