The Spiritual Practice Of Living
Bob Dylan had just met his hero Woody Guthrie in a hospital. He was playing a song for him at his bedside when I noticed I had a missed call from my dad. And I did what any sensible person who lives in a permanent state of anxiety about their parents would do sitting in a cinema at the start of a two-hours-twenty-minutes film, I remained in my seat. I concealed my phone in my handbag. I texted my husband to ask if he would check in with them. I ate some of my hot nuts. And I waited.
As Pete Seeger was introducing Bob to his family and the New York folk scene, my husband replied. Your mum’s knee has gone, he said. She’s outside and your dad can’t get her in. He was heading round with one of our daughters. He would provide an update on the situation when he got there. I watched Joan Baez perform House of the Rising Sun at an open mic night. I drank my diet coke. And I thought about how I’d upgraded to MyOmniPass Premium for this.
Bob was frustrated because his label would only let him record covers. My mum had been carried in on a chair via the conservatory. She was in a lot of pain. An ambulance had been suggested but she was cross about that. She would never speak to anyone again if they called one.
Bob and Sylvie Russo were arguing about Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. The movie traced Davis’ escape from her domineering mother. Russo claimed that Davis left home to find herself. But Bob disagreed. Rather than finding herself, he said, she made herself into something else, “not something better, just something different”.
My mum couldn’t move but she was insisting she’d make it upstairs by bedtime. I picked up my hot nuts and my handbag and left. I hadn’t made it as far as Johnny Cash. Mr Tambourine Man was a few scenes away. I sat in the foyer until I had gathered enough strength. I decided caregiving was a spiritual practice. It was hard and it was underrated.
Last Sunday, I went to church. There were many things I’d been told at church and most of them were about my formation. There were behaviours I could implement to improve me. These were called spiritual disciplines, and I should practice them regularly. I should prioritise reading the Bible and spending time alone with God in prayer. I should also be a regular attender at worship and join a small group. And for decades, I followed these rules, and I felt no significant transformational shifts.
“Do you still come every week?” someone who had returned after a long absence asked me and I said “No,” because I average twice a month now and I rarely watch on catch-up and if I wake up tired or sad or need a boost from the spiritual practice of connecting with the natural world, I walk for miles instead. And I did not go to church the Sunday before because I was in Paris where I had been dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower and eaten a croque monsieur in Montmartre and strolled by the Seine, and at the time of the weekly pulpit announcements, I was above the clouds at 30,000 feet. There were blue skies up there and I sensed the divine and I reckoned I was exercising the spiritual practice of awe.
There were lists upon lists of spiritual disciplines on the Internet and there was a lot to fit in if I was going to make it to better. And for most of my life, I had laboured under the guilt of all the ones I’d never managed to do like journalling and fasting and meditating on scripture at 4.30am wrapped in a blanket and reciting the Lord’s Prayer whilst brushing my teeth and I’d never got into the habit of breaking into my day at noon to do the Daily Examen. I’d done the 5:2 once but it left me furious and pastorally unwilling and during covid, I’d memorised eight verses about armour but when the lockdowns ended, I had forgotten all of it.
And I wasn’t sure if anyone had really explained the point of these disciplines, how they were supposed to lead to a greater awareness of God’s presence. They weren’t a badge of honour or something we told people we did but didn’t. They were meant to be built into the rhythm of our everyday lives. They would give us a constant and pervasive sense of wellness no matter what. They would simultaneously ground us in our reality, yet offer us a glimpse of something better, something different.
When I thought about going to church as a spiritual practice, I didn’t think about the communal singing and the bowed heads and the sermon or use words like fellowship, I thought of the nursery rhyme. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the door and see all the people. I thought about the people and how my life bumped into theirs and the holiness of this shared humanity. And I mostly felt God at the tea and coffee when I talked to them and listened to how they were grieving or lonely or scared or troubled or during one of the medical emergencies when the doctors all emerged from the pews, and I wondered who the new young one was or when someone patted my shoulder in a silent message of solidarity. And when I went to church on Sunday, someone had written my name on their wrist because they wanted to speak to me.
Maybe I had my own set of spiritual practices and they were just not as we know them and they were less about self-denial and more about self-care but they worked for me and they were things like moving my body and being grateful for my cardiovascular system, and listening to music with meaningful lyrics, and writing which didn’t involve drawing or doodling but always involved regular self-examination and the odd confession, and reading widely, not just novels but the news, and photographing my surroundings, and retreating to my bedroom, and paying attention, and watering my plants, and chasing the unknown, and mourning the trees to the sound of chainsaws on a Monday morning following a storm.
And every day when I got up and rinsed out my cafetiere from the day before and prepared my morning coffee, I read a daily meditation as one of my spiritual practices, and I’d made a deal with myself to learn something from it and do something with it. There was one I’d kept in my inbox for future reference. It was about facing reality. It asked how we could awaken our deepest and most profound selves. “By praying and meditating? By more silence, solitude and sacraments?”. “Yes to all of the above,” it said, “but the most important way is to live and fully acknowledge our present reality”.
After I’d forced my mother to take some painkillers and made my father some fish and chips for his dinner and washed up their dishes and folded his vests from the tumble dryer, I left to drive home. But I didn’t go very far. I stopped in the next street, and I rang my sister and whilst eating my hot nuts in the dark, I engaged in the spiritual practice of decompressing. And I said the present reality is tough and I am doing none of this in my own strength.
“The toll that caregiving takes is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it shouldn’t be for any kind of heart. It will make a big heart shrink. It will make a small heart wither”1.
And today, instead of playing tennis on a beautiful, sunny Friday morning, I accompanied my dad to a hospital appointment. I helped him decide what to do about some experimental medication, something that might make his life easier but that came with side effects. I was his ears, his memory, his processor, his translator, his minder, he said. And it was hard, this spiritual practice of living. It was enough. It was also transformational.
“The greatest teacher of God’s presence in our life is our life,”2 said James Finley.
Bob Dylan probably wrote a song about that too.
This is beautiful. 💚