Living Fully Present.

I remember back in the day of Dungeons and Dragons that role play games were considered to be weird, and some would even go so far as to say they were demonic. It was a fringe of society that engaged in role play and spent their time huddled around a board or later on, around a glowing screen and keyboard in the dark.

But today most of us are guilty of being the 'weirdos', engaging in a virtual reality experience that sort of looks like real living. I see streams and streams of updates on my Facebook telling me about people's needs, wants and exploits in Farmville. Something like that is kind of a funny example of the larger issue at hand, innocent at the surface but it does smack of the same role play/fantasy type thing as D&D. I'm not hacking off on Farmville here or D&D though so stick with me...

I might sound a bit overly dramatic but I see a real epidemic in society right now. As much of a blessing as technology is it's really stabbing us in the backs. Machines are sapping us of our attention, energy, money and contentment. I'm not going to get all sci-fi or conspiracy on you here so don't worry but I do want to peel back a layer of this issue and toss out some ideas.

I love the idea of social networking, being someone who lives thousands of miles away from my long-time friends and my family. It's enabled me to forge some great relationships- some really deep, some quite shallow. But I admit that I do find myself checking in at the expense of my day to day relationships and living. My immediate relationships and my creativity have suffered as a result of just logging on too frequently, checking up on people, and entering a few pat words on what's up in Vickie-dom. I find that a lot of the world around me that I'm presented with has caused me to sometimes avoid reality.

I'm not living fully present.

And I have seen others who are really taking this to new and dangerous levels. I know people who cannot keep away from Facebook, IM, Twitter, etc. even in the same room with friends. Some of them are driven in the early hours of the morning just chatting and then suffering the consequences the next day when they've got to get up early and actually LIVE. And yet they complain about not having enough time. Their work is suffering, their relationships are suffering, and they aren't truly living life to the fullest.

Even before technology really broke through to our every-day, we could see the effects of not living fully present. Daydreaming, fantasizing, affairs, mid-life crises. I mean think about it- what causes one person to cheat on another? Yes, sometimes the relationship sucks. But ultimately it's because one person or both are not fully present in the relationship. Their heart is elsewhere. It's a matter of discontentment.

Not living fully present causes our most immediate relationships to decay because, obviously, they need time, work and effort to grow and strengthen. Not living fully present leads to an immediate sensation of community, relatedness, intimacy, but like any hard drug it causes us to feel the torturous after-effects of isolation and loneliness.

I know several people who are wanderers at heart, myself included. We love the feeling of change, of seeing new things, meeting new people, broadening our horizons so to speak. It's like having ADD of lifestyle. Sometimes we can find ourselves mentally in another place - ie. on the beach in California eating a burrito with no seagulls around. Sometimes it can be as severe to wish ourselves away, out of where we're placed - either by life or by God Himself. We short circuit our futures by living mentally elsewhere- not being fully present where and with whom we're situated. This can be in a city, with a partner, at a job, in a church, on a project. We allow ourselves to be robbed of the experience of the here and now- which is REAL, LEGIT, and STEEPED IN POTENTIAL- all for a few hours chatting to someone where we'd rather be. Or dreamily looking for a new home. Or just not investing ourselves fully because we spend too much time bitching and whining about the here and now.

I really hope some of my dear friends read this post because I'm concerned for your lives, your futures, and all that great stuff that is waiting for your attention in the here and now. Conquer this mountain, then let God lead you to the next. Be fully present. We need you.

A Public Service Announcement

Taken by my friend LondonMonk. I needed to hear that :0)

Table play tent - I so want one of these!!

Seriously! Do I have to have a kid to have one of these?

Shalom: Learning the unforced rhythms of grace

Today I was doing some reflection, meditation and praying when a somewhat odd thought occurred to me: the comparison of zen versus shalom. I recall that zen is a Buddhist principle that has sort of slipped into the mainstream, echoing thoughts of harmony, peace, and happiness. I'm guessing that I'm like most people (correct me if I'm wrong) in probably not really knowing the first thing about zen but being guilty of boiling it down to a set of steps one takes to reach perfection, perhaps confusing it with nirvana, the highest state of enlightenment. What I find interesting is that it's made its way into popular culture in new age philosophies and self help advice.

People are consistently looking for a way to achieve peace and harmony- to supersede their struggles and endure (if not overcome) suffering. It's common to all that is human- perhaps it's an essential component of our humanity. Yet the Buddhist idea of zen or nirvana takes the shape of working towards some high goal of perfection (going through cycles of karma to attain to it) and while my point isn't to argue philosophy, theology or religion here, I find it personally to be daunting and terrifying that I could never reach such a state in my own power. How utterly hopeless.

And yet, in the Judeo-Christian context we have a state known as Shalom. I've heard it interpreted so many different ways: peace, prosperity, wholeness. To be true it's probably an amalgumation of all those words- and how awesome does that sound?! And the 'good news' is that this personal freedom is not earned by one's own strength or perfection- it's a perfectly free gift.

As I thought about these two ideas, the words of Jesus came to me:

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-30)

You may not be all that informed on farming practices of the ancient middle east (or even of today), so you may not know what a yoke is. It's not the yellow thing in an egg; it's the wooden piece that holds two oxen together as they plow a field or haul a cart. In that culture the word was often used to symbolise the teachings of a rabbi - a philosophy, set of beliefs or interpretations that determined the way a person lived. Some people today live by the yoke of Oprah or Doctor Phil. Some by the teachings of the Buddha.

What Jesus was saying is, 'Take up my slant on things, my way of life. Follow me- my way is a way of peace and rest.' Jesus was promising shalom to his followers. Check out The Message paraphrase:

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me-- get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me-- watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.

Count me in! Life, rest, rhythm, grace, freedom and lightness. It just does my soul good thinking about it. I've been so wanting to find a rhythm in life, and who doesn't! So many people feel there isn't enough time for what they *really* want to do in life, pulled in 1000 directions. And if you go the route of most self-help guru's you gotta work your butt off at getting that kind of 'wholeness' you crave.

Perhaps I'm a simpleton after all, but I'll take Jesus up on his words and see if he delivers. And what really comforted me in reading that paraphrase was that he said he wouldn't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on us. How often does religion try to force a one-size-fits-all yoke on every single one of us? How does this make us struggle and stumble around and compare ourselves and judge one another? It's a fact-- I googled it-- yokes are even to this day tailor-made to fit the oxen that will wear it. The maker takes into account the size of the animal, the work that it'll be performing, and no doubt the animal's yoke changes with time and growth. So how can we force particulars on people who decide to take up Jesus' yoke? He's the one sharing that yoke with them, standing immediately beside them, teaching them to move forward in life and to achieve that shalom. He's the maker of the yoke they both share and he carries the brunt of its weight.

So while the idea of zen, nirvana and enlightenment may be applaudable on the one hand in that it encourages people to improve their lives and seek peace, it falls drastically short of the most necessary component in achieving wholeness and shalom: Christ.