October 16, 7:00pm (Kevin Westling)
Like Seinfeld, Trinity@7 is about nothing. We come here to dawdle in candlelight, be held in the music, and be cradled by verse and prose we might otherwise never read or listen to. We come to dawdle – to do nothing. Most of us, when we enter that door over there, have to spend several minutes, or even more, fighting through our learned resistance to dawdling.
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Good evening.
I want to talk about the art of dawdling.
You know,
like from tonight’s Centering Prayer:
Gracious God,
hold us this night and help us dawdle here;
teach us to breath,
teach us to bring our hearts low,
teach us the secret of letting our blood run slow.
If dawdling is not part of your spiritual practice,
you have something new to look forward to…
but it is painfully difficult at first.
Dawdling requires…
Wow, it requires so many things –
so many skills and aptitudes and ways of thinking.
It is like they say about smiling and frowning:
it takes so many facial muscles to do either one,
but it takes even more to frown.
We never think about it –
smiling and frowning just happen.
And yet behind each movement of the mouth,
each crinkling of the eyes,
each little wriggle of the nose,
there are multitudes of muscles
squeezing
and pushing
and pulling
and channeling blood-flow
and…
Whew, too much to think about
for an activity that requires no forethought at all.
But dawdling,
requires effort, and the reason it does
is that we have been trained not to dawdle.
We have been trained
and guilted
and shamed
into thinking we should never dawdle.
We should always be doing something.
We should always be productive.
We should always be working on something.
We should always be going somewhere,
setting goals and doing our work.
But here we are
at Trinity@7
which is nothing but dawdling.
Like Seinfeld, Trinity@7 is about nothing.
We come here to dawdle in candlelight,
be held in the music,
and be cradled by verse and prose
we might otherwise never read or listen to.
We come to dawdle –
to do nothing.
Most of us,
when we enter that door over there,
have to spend several minutes, or even more,
fighting through our learned resistance
to dawdling.
We come in,
sit down
and think.
We think and think and think.
It is okay for our body to sit
but our thoughts don’t want to stop and dawdle.
We have problems to problem-solve.
We have lists to compose.
We have unfinished business to worry about.
We have anxiety to catalogue.
We have little speeches of comeuppance
to make to people in our heads
even though we will never really tell them.
We have guilt and shame to resentments to strum
as if they were strings on a guitar.
When we first arrive
all that and more
comes rushing to the surface
and can make our heart speed up
instead of slow down,
and it can cause our toes to tap
and our legs to tremor
and our thoughts to buzz.
When we finally allow ourselves to dawdle
all of that disappears.
If you have ever come here,
rested in the moment
and broken free into a full-sized dawdle,
then you know what it feels like
to become fully present in the moment.
But it requires practice,
and it requires patience with our thinking apparatus,
and it requires exactly what is offered here
each Sunday evening.
So I want to point out
the obvious recipe for dawdling
that, though it is obvious,
we may not have conceptualize
because it is so simple.
Just think about what we have
and what we do here at .
First of all,
we have a place –
a place set-aside for dawdling.
You gotta have a place
if you’re going to be a good dawdler.
You need to have an accessible place
where you can go and sit,
or go and walk,
or go and just be
and where no one else is going to bother you.
Some place in your daily life
that is a safe and comfortable place
like we have here for .
It could be a room in your house,
a quiet spot in or near your work,
a place in the city…
some place, some designated place,
where you can dawdle for a few minutes.
The next thing we do here,
it provide a place with candle light.
Now most people are calmed by candlelight.
The amber darkness with the yellow glow
feels good to most people.
Your place needs to have atmosphere too.
It doesn’t have to be candlelight
but it does have to have that feeling upon entry
of immediate difference –
“Oh yeah, time to slow down and relax.”
So a place that feels safe,
that feels good,
that has atmosphere.
And then you need something like Krista in your place.
You could hire her to sit in your place all day
until you get there…
but she gets ansie,
and she’s not cheap.
While music is a good conductor of thoughts
it is not the only one.
A visual conductor such as an icon
or a flame
or a painting
can do the same thing for us:
a conductor is something outside of us
that gathers our busy thoughts
and collects them like a bouquet and then let them go.
Walking, as with a labyrinth,
or slow movement as with Tai Chi,
can be a conductor.
It doesn’t have to be motionless
nor does it have to be sound.
So in this place that feels good
and has an atmosphere of safety and quiet,
we need a conductor of thoughts
that gathers up the busy-ness of the mind
with which we enter it our space.
When you think about it,
we need quiet a bit in order to do nothing
and dawdle.
We need to slow down our breathing,
that is the key.
In fact,
we can dawdle in any moment,
anywhere,
if we can slow down our breathing
and regulate our bodies
with our breath.
But a dawdling place,
like what I have been describing,
helps us to slow down our breath,
which slows down our heart,
which in turns slows down our thoughts.
It is all very concrete and practical.
We tend to think of spirituality
as ephemeral and magical and strange
when actually it is very
practical,
concrete
and housed in the ordinary.
So dawdle –
do nothing
and allow yourself to catch up to the moment
and do nothing in it.
I can’t tell you how powerful and influential it is
to do nothing,
but I can invite you to dawdle.
Tonight, as we light candles,
I invite us to think about the least dawdling people we know – those who could really use a good dawdle,
and light a candle for them.
