Gift From the Sea

I hear the thunder booming in the distance as I sit in the back garden reading a book during another blessed Sabbath afternoon. I hope the boys get up from their nap in time for Judah to search out his Easter basket and chocolate bunnies before the rain comes… or before they all melt in the hot afternoon sun!

I am currently reading a short book that Lydia Plett lent me on Good Friday, Selections from Gift From the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. One of my favourite things in life is picking up a book and opening to the first page to discover someone who has written, much better than I ever could have, the thoughts and ideas regarding life’s lessons that I have garnered over my own life and the importance and values I yearn to pass on to others because I find them so helpful. This book is one of those and I would recommend it to any woman I call friend. It is refreshing.

A comment on my last blog entry remarked on how the pace of life in Canada is so fast. I am very passionate about the topic of how we choose to spend our time in this day and age, and Lindberg seems to echo similar sentiments in her first few chapters:

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity. We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen.

Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill a vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place.

It is difficult today to leave one’s friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. 14-15

Solitude… Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day. To many women, such a program seems quite out of reach. They have no extra income to spend on a vacation for themselves, no time left over from household drudgery, no energy after the daily cooking and cleaning for even an hour of creative solitude.

Is this then only an economic problem? I do not think so. By and large, mothers and housewives are the vacationless class. But if women were convinced that a day off or an hour of solitude was a reasonable ambition, they would find a way of attaining it. 19

(personal note: I just read in a church minutes document the axiom, “People always do what is most important to them at any particular time.” This statement was made in reference to creating core values for a group of people, but I reckon it is no less true for individuals determining how they spend the minutes and hours, weeks and months of their lives. How are our minutes indicative of what we hold to be most important?)

Lindbergh goes on,

How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. If one sets aside time for a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement, or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices [solitude] – like a secret vice! 19-20

I made the same statement in my paper on Sabbath Keeping, that even in the church we have succumbed to the world’s core value that to be busy is to be: important, useful, valuable, successful, holy (!) Richard Foster, in his book Freedom of Simplicity calls us instead to not “just do something, stand there!” Just BE! Enjoy the blessings and graces of our Lord who does not require anything of us to be called children of God. It is not us who “do”, but Him alone. Nothing we “do” can garner anymore favour with the Almighty. Can we not then simply rest in that scandalous gift and spend the day “doing” nothing? After all, God led by example in this matter at the beginning of time, who are we to think we are so important that we cannot take time to rest and simply enjoy all that is Good?!

Could it be that by doing nothing we could be making the most counter-cultural Kingdom witness?