The sleep doctors use the same principle for treating insomnia. The bed, they say, should only be used for sleeping.  No reading, watching television.  This conditions the body to sleep in bed rather than lay awake.  We are environmentally embedded beings, space-sensitive creatures.

So if you’ve got inoransia, try making and maintaining a place for your praying self to dwell.

Mine is a corner in my office at home.  Got a nice chair from Ikea, an end table from my parents home, a little rug from Kashmir, a few candles, a picture of my honey, and my favorite icon, “Not Made with Human Hands“.    Facing a window looking out at some nearby trees with four– count ‘em four–bird feeders attached to the window.

We forget that prayer is a bodily function.  We pray with our praying brains in our praying bodies to a God who delights to inhabit human flesh.

You probably have what used to be called an “entertainment center” in your home. You have invested a chunk of change is this space. Now that it’s a multi-media center, you have to manage it.  (Man, you should see the set up my son has.  He gets a call on his mobile phone and it shows up on his television screen, which is connected to his computer network.  I just sit there in stupified wonder, trying to imagine what it would be like to truly inhabit the New Millennium as he does.)

Certain kinds of praying–especially the ones that calm your over-active alarm system–take time.  This time probably won’t come out of your work time, or your time to eat, dress, and perform essential acts of personal hygiene.  It will come out of your media time.

To overcome inoransia, you may have to give your praying body a fighting chance.  All that media is so powerful because it is perfectly adapted to your dopamine-reward system. Your brain is fine tuned to tune in–to see the flashing images, respond to the cascade of new sensory data.  Media is reality on steroids.

Which is to say, if you’ve got money to maintain a media center, invest in a praying space to give your  praying self a little room to move.

Y’all, I heard it every day, many times over.  Server at the restaurant said “y’all” 4 times in 30 seconds. Favorite iteration, “How are all y’all doin’?”

Boom, it hit me: these people have a plural form of the word “you.”  We need to stop, drop, roll, and adopt this.  We need a Thomas Nelson “The Y’All Bible Translation.”

Because we often read the Bible falsely.  “Christ in you, the hope of glory” we read, hearing “Christ in you [singular you, as in me, myself, and I] the hope of glory.”  So that one of our contemporary worship songs makes it “Christ in me, Christ in me, Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

But the “you” is a plural you, y’all.  Christ in y’all, the hope of glory.  Christ in the gathered you, Christ in the communal you, Christ in the networked you, the hope of glory.

And this happens often when we read the Bible.  The “you” in English can be singular or plural.  But with our individualism lenses on, we almost always hear it as singular.

Can you imagine a more pernicious confusion?

Wonder why we have an I, me, my Christianity?  A consumer Christianity? A “What have you done for me lately?” Christianity? A church conceived of and engaged in as though it were a collection of individuals?

The South is a more communal culture for its use of “y’all.” And it’s no surprise that the South is also a more mystical culture. Because the mystical parts of the brain are the ones that connect the self to the beyond-the-self, as though the self in itself is perhaps the first hint of hell, and the self connected to the beyond-the-self is the first taste of heaven.

So pastors, when you’re reading the Bible or teaching from the Bible, get your bearings straight on the meaning of the yous.  When the you is plural, specify that it is. Adopt the y’all, y’all.  And see if it doesn’t change everything.

No, you don’t have to get off the grid to escape. Though the occasional day long (or longer) media fast, come to think of it, is a great idea.  I’m sure I’m less connected than you are, but here’s what I do to make a little more space for whatever it is that happens when I’m not checking email.  I’m working the art of sacred disconnection points through the day.  Training my brain to let me unplug from the digital machine.

1. No emails an hour before bedtime. Most of my anxiety producing communication happens through email.  You know the story–the tone, the freedom to speak one’s mind without regard for the emotions of the receiver, etc.  Train your brain, by repetition, over and over, until it’s habitual, not to check email an hour before bedtime.

2. Set up an electronic media free zone. A prayer chair in a prayer corner, perhaps.  A place you go to get off the the information highway.  Whatever you do in that chair, don’t have anything to do with anything that depends on binary code there.

3. Practice prayer at intervals through the day. Morning and night is an interval.  But the real  benefits come when you add a mid-day interruption–a pause in the action to duck in for a few minutes of prayer somewhere.  I use The Divine Hours, by Phyllis Tickle.  And yes, it feels at first like extracting a tooth–pulling yourself away from whatever it is that is occupying your thoughts.   But it gets easier with repetition and the act of pulling yourself away trains your brain to refocus.  And if your brain is not able to do that, my fellow pastor, you will be a sucker for any enslavement.

4. Practice a focusing prayer–like the Jesus Prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.”  First part on the inhale, second part on the exhale.  Over and over, meditatively, for oh, say, a minute or two–better yet five or ten.  Yes, your mind will rebel at first, running riot like a toddler past his nap time.  But every time it tries to focus on anything other than the prayer, you just gently and non-judgmentally turn your attention back to the words of the prayer.

Add these practices one at a time over time as you are able.  Pick one and insist on it with yourself.  Meaning, keep returning to it after forgetting until it’s habitual.  You know, habitual, like checking email when you’ve got a spare moment, or taking at peek at what’s happening on the Twitternet from your iPhone.

I know, it’s probably not called the Twitternet. But, hey! I’m a boomer, and at least I’m trying, so give me credit for that.

[What's a good book to help with this sort of thing,  you might ask?  Funny you should ask.]

After the game, Galarraga expressed his respect for Joyce as a first-rate umpire and let him off the hook with a simple and poignant, “Nobody’s perfect.”  Kind words from a man who had just pitched a perfect game ruined by an imperfect call.

And wise words. We depend on each other. Baseball players and umpires need each other.   As do husbands and wives, parents and children, co-workers, fellow citizens.  But nobody’s perfect.  We will let each other down. And when we do it’s the person let down who has the most power—to let the other off the hook, to turn the other cheek, to speak words of release, to let love overrule.

The next night, Tiger manager Jim Leyland sent Galarraga to home plate umpire Jim Joyce with the ceremonial line-up card.  Another classy move.  Tiger players stopped by before the game to pat Joyce on the arm and speak kind words.

When the game was over, Joyce said, “I don’t want to make it sappy and say it was love, but the support I got was just love.”

Just love.  Nothing but love.  In a game that is more than just a game, it’s good to know that love can overrule an errant ump’s call.

We humans don’t reveal our beauty in perfection. We reveal our beauty in love.

Thanks, Armando Galarraga, for something more beautiful than a perfect game.

An ancient take on the world around us might help.  Few people seem to notice that in the creation account of Genesis, chapter one, God blessed the sea creatures and the birds of the air—the very creatures affected by the British Petroleum oil spill—first.

Yes, before any other blessing had been uttered over this blessed planet, God blessed them first. “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth….God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.’ “ (Genesis 1: 20, 22-23, TNIV)

Anyone familiar with the Hebrew concept of blessing knows that any subsequent blessing cannot impinge on this first blessing.  The second blessing, of course, is ours: “God created human beings in his image…God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky” (Genesis 1: 27-28)

For better or worse, we are the dominant and dominating species on this planet. For better or worse, we rule.  Increasingly, the other creatures thrive, survive or suffer, in the space we allow them.

Our rule over the sea creatures and the flying birds in the Gulf of Mexico has missed the mark of our calling.  We were the ones chanting “Drill Baby Drill” when the price of oil started to rise.   We were the ones looking out for our own interests first, the blessed interests of the other creatures be damned.

Maybe it’s time for us to take a step back from the shrill voices of the culture war and consider the wisdom of the ages.  What does it mean that God blessed them first?

This is a function of our love affair with rationalism that goes all the way back to Descartes, the father of the modern era whose first principle was “I think, therefore I am.”  Whatever that great philosopher meant by that, it came to mean what we moderns tend to assume: that our thinking self is our deepest-truest self.

But the Spirit has been leading us out of that for the past hundred years or so (and long before that) when the winds of Pentecost began to blow again.

The mystics of old engaged different capacities of the brain for prayer.  Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits (the Jesus freaks of the Catholic Church), taught his followers to engage Scripture with the imagination: to place one’s self in the unfolding scene of a text to see what happens.

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing urged a wordless praying through the discipline of not paying attention to the normal mental chatter that runs like a gaggle of four year olds at a birthday party through Chucky Cheese.  Over time this practice quiets the part of the brain that enhances our perception of separteness from others and the world in which we are immersed, the world of which we are patently a part, but sometimes forget.  This wordless prayer leads to a sense of deep calm and connection.

Any new-to-us ways, of course, we distrust–the default setting of the brain set on survival mode.  It’s the reason we distrust strangers. It’s also the reason the Bible reminds that when we provide hospitality to strangers we may be entertaining angels unaware.

A blogger from Texas was put off by my use of the term “mystic” in the title of the book.  I know exactly why, and I’m sympathetic.  But he came up with a good solution: place a piece of tape over the word if it bothers you, but try some of the practices taught in the book, if you’re praying brain isn’t satisfied with it’s current praying.

There are new-to-you realms of prayer that engage capacities of your praying brain with which you’ve not yet learned to love the Lord.

It’s taken the whole church, not just your little familiar wing of the church, over the whole lifetime of the church, to explore these realms.

The wisdom is buried in plain sight in the Bible, covered over by our limited experience, which serves as a set of blinders.

And it’s buried deep in the history and experience of the church, about which most of us, myself included, know previous little.

The same might be said of our knowing God.  We know so little of Him, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus knew so little of their fellow traveler because “their eyes were holden.”

But isn’t that exciting? Whatever it is you know of God, it is such a small sliver.  There’s so much more to be known.  And so much more of you to be engaged in the knowing.

I’m shocked by my own prejudices, and how easily they latch onto my faith.

Like demons.

The book is largely the product of  a slow motion flip in my experience of prayer that began near the time of my father’s death in 1999.    My normal daily devotions had run completely out of steam.  In desperation, I turned to some new-to-me forms of praying, beginning with the use of–horrors!– a “prayer book.”

Enter my first prejudice.  Having grown up in and then out of the Episcopal church of the 1950’s, I knew that prayer books were part of an old time religion that I left behind for a flashy new spontaneous, charismatic, revivalist form of Christianity.  Prayer books were for people who didn’t have the Spirit to help them pray.

Finding a prayer book was another matter though.  The Daily Office that priests use is pretty hard to find.  So I was intrigued to discover The Divine Hours, a from of the daily office for the rest of us, compiled by Phyllis Tickle, then the religion editor of Publishers Weekly.

I probably picked up for possible purchase, then returned to its shelf, a copy of The Divine Hours at Borders (the original located here in Ann Arbor) on three or four separate visits.   Phyllis Tickle was an Episcopalian.  I had never heard of her.  Plus, she was a journalist.   None of this endeared the book to me.  Owing to my pre-judgments.  I couldn’t be that hard up.

Eventually, need got the better of me, and I bought a copy and started to use it. In time, I found myself slipping into a deep river of prayer that has been flowing since the time of Abraham.  The Divine Hours became for me a portal into a new way of praying.

Next up, a book on my father’s book shelf by Anthony Bloom, an Orthodox bishop, titled humbly, Beginning to Pray.   I was clearing out my father’s apartment after his death, sorting through his books.   Decided to keep this one, despite the fact I’d never heard of Anthony Bloom and didn’t expect an Orthodox bishop to make much of contribution to my praying.   More blinding prejudice

But reading this little gem, confirmed the validity of some strange happenings in my praying having to do with silence–happenings which might otherwise have evaporated unnoticed, where it not for Bloom’s deep wisdom.

In time, I stumbled into The Jesus Prayer, a staple of the Eastern Orthodox praying tradition.  A meditative, repetitive prayer that tripped all my Eastern Religion prejudice alerts.

Somewhere in there, I got interested in nature again.  Got turned on to the woods and birds and trees and such.  Started to experience and then to anticipate finding God winking at me through his creation. In ever so subtle ways, easy to ignore, like God himself.  This direction too  is suspect, because as we all know it’s a step toward pantheism.  New age stuff.  The  neo-pagan spirituality of environmental whackos and other suspect groups.

But something happens when you hit 50 or thereabouts, or it least it did in my case.   You grow a little less cautious.

You have the advantage by then of having to have faced a few of your religious prejudices.  You realize that religion, like any other human enterprise, is  a breeding ground for prejudice, in fact.  Yes, even your rarified and purified form of religion.

And you realize that behind the door of many a bias, God waits.  So you learn to distrust your unexamined first impressions, even the ones that have been hanging around you for decades.

One of my favorite lines from the gospels is “and their eyes were holden” (Luke 24: 16, KJV) in the account of the two on the road to Emmaus.  Jesus had slipped onto their path but they were not able to recognize him.  Their eyes were holden.  Held. Restrained. Bound.

By grief yes. But also, it is likely, by garden variety prejudice. The first eye-witnesses were women, hysterical women whose testimony wasn’t valid in most courts.

And so it has been and ever shall be.  We are, all of us, prejudiced against God.  He is is the ultimate Other, whom we distrust, like all the other others.  So we miss him in the poor, and in the stranger, and in each other, much of the time.

But John Wimber used to say, “You can’t get more of God if you’re not willing to eat from dirty spoons.”

That is to say, God will knock on the door of our prejudice–if only to rattle our cage.   Because it is a cage of our own constructing.

And this, my friends, is partly why so many of us who pride ourselves in being part of the awakened, the vibrant, the personal-relationship-with-Jesus gang, are dry as a bone inside and lurch from church to church like so many zombies looking for jolt.

Yes, dry as a very old piece of Melba Toast.

Dry as a throat in the middle of the night, goading us to get up and stumble into the bathroom for a cup of water.

It wasn’t the first time for any of the three. Moses was instructed to take his shoes off, standing before the burning bush.  God was manifesting his presence there.

Elijah met God at the mouth of a cave in a mountain.  A howling wind got his attention, then an earthquake, then a fire, than a period of intense silence. Finally a still small voice–the voice of God.

Jesus stood in a river, praying. Suddenly the a rift opened in the sky and a bird alighted on him, then a voice from the sky spoke to him. Some thought it thundered.

Neither Jesus, Moses, nor Elijah were pantheists.  They learned the lesson of Genesis, chapter one.  The earth is the Lord’s.  The greater and lesser lights are not deities to be worshiped.  The earth is a temple for his glory to inhabit, so God rested in his temple (not built by human hands) on the seventh day.

How far we have fallen from a spirit-infused understanding of the world around us!  How we have reduced nature to a depository of natural resources–a Super Wal-Mart in which we live and move and have our consumer being.

Sure, we may take a hike from time to time.  But most of our time “in nature” is driving through it with the windows up and the AC on, listening to a CD playing digitized music with a techno-beat.

Our expectation of meeting God in the outdoor cathedral is at an all time low, as if the experience of  Moses, Elijah, and Jesus inspired us only a little.

So we spend less time outdoors than ever, hunt and fish less than ever, go camping less than ever, visit our national parks less than ever.   We wonder less in the wilderness and wonder why believers seem to have more fun assailing each other for dangerous thinking than meeting God in the outdoor cathedral.

There are places a person can go to meet God.  Places.  One can go where the people of God are worshipping God and meet him there.  (A young man told me recently that since he was baptized a few weeks ago he finds himself “vibrating and shaking” off and on during worship.)

One can go into the outdoor cathedral to meet God there.  As Moses did. As Elijah did. As Saul of Tarsus did on the road to Damascus, the Risen Jesus outshining the noon day sun. As Peter did on the rooftop in Joppa, where the sky opened and a vision of creatures played out in nature-color.  As Jesus did, seeking “wild places” to meet with Abba, Father, World Creator.

The fact that this makes us nervous because some New Agers (who are often broken-hearted children of the church) enjoy nature’s charms and stumble into pantheism is irrelevant.

The man was a Hebrew, a man of YHWH. Versed in the commands of YHWH regarding worship–that he was to worship none other than YHWH, a jealous God.   So his talking to the moon wasn’t worship of the moon. But it was a prayer in which the moon was addressed. His rambling rap is memorialized in Psalm 148.

Surely you’ve heard or read this Psalm, maybe a thousand times.  Mostly, we skim-hear the Bible, like speed reading.  We wouldn’t say this because it doesn’t sound right but we think the man is doing something cute.  And it’s a cuteness we don’t feel inclined to imitate.    Do you want to be known as the man or the woman who talks to the moon when you pray? But there it is.  Every time we read this Psalm with even an ounce of participation, we become the man who talks to the moon when he prays.

As though we are to feel personally connected to the creation.  As though we are fellows with the creation.  Fellow created things before the Creator.

As though we are to be in creation, aware of creation and God simultaneously–and with reverence and wonder.

Is the creation valuable in itself because of it’s relationship to God?  Or is it of value simply as a function of its usefulness to us?

Let’s say you were digging around in the dirt somewhere in Israel.  You stumbled on the archeological find of the century: some artifact known to belong to Jesus of Nazareth.

How would you feel about that thing knowing it to be his?  Excited, thrilled, inspired, reverential.  All of these and more.

What if everything is that?  His.  Wouldn’t that, shouldn’t that, heighten our sensitivity?

You say, that would be exhausting.

Maybe.  But what if the Spirit fully intends to wake us up to this?

What if this is meant to be a staple of the joy of being human–and our dullness is a dullness to the joy of being human?

Is this part of what Paul meant when he referred to the weight of glory? As if we would stagger around like drunks if we could see the world as it is.

What I see in many souls who care passionately about the environment is something that leans in the direction of God. Something over which the Spirit hovers.  It grieves my heart when my fellow believers–and thankfully, it’s a small if vocal minority–seem to have a chip on their shoulder regarding these people.  Rather than seeing what the Father is doing in them, it seems that some of us prefer to judge them harshly–to treat them as the despised other that groups need to feel good about themselves.

But forget that. Let that remain a mere rabbit trail or hobby horse of mine.

Instead, imagine yourself being in the presence of the man who talked to the moon.  What did he see that we don’t see?  What did he feel that we don’t feel?  Why are we invited to inhabit these strange words of his?

Jesus said, “I only do what I see the Father doing.” By this I infer that it was his practice to look for what he saw the Father doing.  The devil of course was at work all around him, but Jesus didn’t go looking for that. It manifested like an unwanted interruption, and when it did, he dealt with it, but he was looking for something else–what the Father was doing. And he saw the Father doing things in and among those who were not supposed to be the site of much God activity beyond wrath and judgment.

He saw God at work among Samaritans, among women, among the unclean, among the sexually broken, among the left behind and disregarded.  He regarded God among them.

Many were bothered by what he saw the Father doing, but even more, they were bothered by those among whom he saw the Father doing it, whatever it was.

Over the past four years I believe that I’ve caught a glimpse of what the Father is doing among secular scientists who care about the environment.  Oh, I could find much to disagree with in the perspectives and prejudices and opinions of the same scientists, but that’s not what I feel that I’ve been directed to look for.

I see men and women who have reverence for the world of nature–who are humbled by nature.  Many of them don’t see it as a creation, but they often respond with more reverence than those who claim faith in a creator. If you were the creator which would you prefer: credit for the creation or care for it?

They are passionate these environmental scientists.  In many ways they are like evangelicals.  They are vexxed.  They are missional.  They are frustrated. They are invigorated.  They are curious.  They have an apocalyptic vision.  Above all they care.  Ask them a question, show a little interest, give ‘em an opening and their eyes light up as mine do when someone says, “What must I do to be saved?”

I’ve learned from them.  I admire what I see in them.

My perspective has shifted.

And I have found that this shift in my perspective has opened up real conversation from time to time about the things I care most deeply about: God, Jesus, the Bible, the work of the Holy Spirit.

I find honest curiosity about these things. Sincere questions.

Looking back on that origional directive, “Pay attention to what I am doing among liberals” I wonder what the director meant by “liberals.”  Political liberals?  Cultural liberals?  Theological liberals?  I don’t really know.

I think the director may have meant simply “the others.”  Those people who were distrusted by my people.

Since then, I’m bothered by the facile use by believers of these labels, conservative and liberal.

I’ve been accused by a few commenters on this blog of being “liberal.”  That makes me laugh.  Talk to my kids about that one.

I don’t even know how to respond to that particular, what, charge?

I’m still looking for what the Bible teaches about liberals and conservatives.  I can’t find a single word.

I’m wondering why these words mean so much to us who revere the Bible so highly.

Let us lay them down to sleep for a few years, these labels. They’ve been working so hard without a break, chasing after each other.

Why do we identify so closely with words such as these?

Why would we use words like these to describe ourselves as believers?

But I digress, late at night.

What is it in us that inclines to see what the devil is doing?

I think it may be something perverse in us.  Is it the devil in us looking for the devil in others?

Who then would it be in us looking for what the Father is doing in others?   Especially in “the others.”