Once Upon a time, in the land of Pradane, a young man set out to discover his true calling. After many weeks of journeying, Taran of Care Dalben found himself at the forge of Hevid the Smith. Hevid was perhaps the greatest Smith in all pradane, renowned far and wide for his skill and craftsmanship. He was a barrel chested, leather aproned man with scorched eyelashes, a sooty face and burly shoulders, so used to the feel of sparks that he might almost have been part of his forage.
Taran was eager to learn the noble art of sword making, and the master Smith was willing enough to teach him. Taran expected to be handed hammer and tongs and to be put to work shaping one of the bars of steel at the forge, but Heaven had no such intention. What start when the work is half done? He snorted. No, no my lad, you'll forge a sword from beginning to end. And so Taran found himself gathering fuel for the furnace all day long, feeding a roaring, flame tongued monster that could
never eat it's fill. Then came shoveling a mountain of stones, smelting the metal they contained. By the time Taran was allowed to touch a blade, his hands were covered with more blisters than skin, his back ached, and his ears rang with the constant clatter. Eventually he left with a strong but plain sword in his scabbard to continue his quest. Soon after, he found shelter from a rainstorm in the home of an old woman whose long hair was as white as the wool hanging from her belt.
A web of wrinkles covered her face, but for all her years she gave no signs of frailty, for time had seasoned her, and her Gray eyes were sharp and bright as a pair of new needles. I am Dwivak Weaver woman, she said, and I can see you've need of a new cloak. And so Taran found himself at her loom, hoping weaving might prove easier than smithing
again. He expected to sit at the great loom to watch the shuttle dance between the threads, but instead Dwek led him to a chamber bursting with raw wool. Tease out the thorns, pick out the cockle burrs, she commanded. Comb it, card it carefully wander, or when your cloak is done you'll feel it's made of thistles instead of wool. Days of painstaking work followed, cleaning, spinning, dying, until Taran's eyes were bleary and his fingers raw.
Only when he knew the feel of wool at every step, like the back of his hand, was he allowed to approach the loom. All things are done step by step and strand by strand, Dwivek told him. In the end, Taran left the weaver's cottage with a serviceable new cloak, but his longing had not found a rest at the loom. A few days later, Taran came upon an old man standing beside a pair of wooden buckets on a yoke at the edge of a shallow
stream. Taran offered to carry his buckets and soon found himself gasping under their weight. Grinning, the man took the buckets back and briskly carried them back to his shed, where he poured the mud into a great wooden VAT. In the next room, Tarin saw shelves holding jars and bowls of all kinds whose craftsmanship made him catch his breath. If this is your work, he said. I know you. You are Enlaw clay shaper, Master Potter of the Free Comets.
The man nodded. If you've seen my work, it may be that you indeed know me, for I am old at my craft and no longer sure where the clay ends and Anlaw begins. Anlaw agreed to teach Taran some of what he knew, and day after day he sent him to dig clay from the stream bank, to learn its weight and texture, to sift and mix and temper it until it almost became a part of him. Before you learn the craft, Anlaw explained, you must first learn the clay.
In our age of endless productivity and constant motion, perhaps we've forgotten what these ancient Craftsman knew, And so we mistake busyness for purpose, distraction for engagement, and motion for life. But what if the masters were right? What if the path to true mastery, whether of craft or calling or simply being human, begins not with doing more, but with learning to be still, with
learning to be present? What if our souls, like Taran's hands, need to be trained in being present before they can create anything worth keeping? Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast where we follow the great stories further up and further in In Pursuit of the Life of Christ. Welcome friends, back to the Imagination Redeemed podcast.
I'm Brian Brown, joined today by Sarah Howell, Matthew Clark and Christina Brown. And we've just read this story from Tar and Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander. If you do not know the Prideane Chronicles run, Do not walk. They're fantastic. And we want to get into this challenge and we want to challenge ourselves to do it not in a way that's simply on the one hand, telling us all things we already know about the problem, or on the other hand, simply saying try harder, stupid on the solution.
In our recent episode, we talked about Encanto and how Mirabelle in that story pursued something that in the end was not herself in her quest to find a self that was meaningful. We want to kind of build on that conversation today and talk more about the doing of that. If if the last episode was more about the being of that, this is more about the doing of that. I think it's safe to say all of us know what it is like to go
through a moment of life. This is probably not done with one thing so much as 10, but with 10 things that are constantly tugging at us. If only I can cross that threshold, then I can fill in the blank. Only that chronic pain would go away. If only I could learn that scale. If only I could have that object. If only I could make that money. If only I could my my ship could
come in, in some sense or other. And if if that's not enough, we've got the, the more immediate temptations, the next task, the next distraction from the smartphone, whatever it might be. Matthew, Christina, Sarah, let's just start by sitting for a moment with that problem. Then we'll get into more of what, what is that problem? What are the things we're missing as far as where that problem is coming from? And then we'll get into what do we do about it? What do we make of it?
First, let's just talk about this problem. What does it? What does it feel like? I think for me it's being stuck between two polars where I either feel like I'm under so many tasks. I don't feel like I've started the day, I feel like the tasks have started me. On the other hand, when I wake up so exhausted that I can barely even begin a task and I feel lethargic and almost under the weight and burden of the
tasks not started. So that's the the kind of the the task driven sense of relating to the world. You know, 1 meme that I've seen about that is basically that being being an adult is just saying, but after this week, things will calm down every week until you're dead. So that's cheerful. What else? How have you, how how Matthew, Christina, how have you guys
experienced this? Well I'm laughing that that you use the example of an illustration from a meme because it just kind of proves how much we are distracted by our devices. For me, when I have so much distracting me and so many tasks, but just so many things, my mind is cluttered and I can't really tell one thing from the next. And I'm constantly going back to A to do list, constantly looking at the calendar, what's today versus what's tomorrow versus what's next.
Oh, that's next week. Like I have to keep going back to something that tells me, yeah, you got to do this today or else this is going to happen or yeah, you better pay attention to this because otherwise you're going to be sorry when this thing comes and this deadline comes and you're not ready or whatever it is. So honestly, I think that's when I feel like ADHD can sort of like really kick in and I don't
know, up from down. So probably I would say that's that's a big one for me is just a cluttered mind. And then all they want to do is curl up and sleep because my mind doesn't know what to do. It's like it's like a literal response with my brain saying stop I need to process any rest.
Yeah, sometimes to me it feels like a, a, a kind of fatigue as well, where there's there's so many things that need, that need decisions that need to be considered and, and the decision needs to be made about 10 things, 20 different things. Just this month I was like, I have so many because I'm about to go out of the country for a month. I was like, there's so many things I need to get done before
I leave. And I wasn't able to sleep the other night because I was thinking about all these things. And then I just had to say, you know what, some of these things are not going to get done. I've just got to be OK with that. And so that's it's frustrating and it's fatiguing I think as well. I think that's a really good point. I actually had to make that call this morning, like what needs to be done versus what I want and, and sometimes what you want is
good, but it's not necessary. And so we're using those things kind of yearning for them, but they're, they're adding to the pressures of us not being able to be present. So I think there's, there's that too for me, right? Just that desire to sort of control and contribute in the ways that I feel because I feel so cluttered everywhere else. I'm just like, well, I need to, I need to contribute this way because this is where I will feel like I have some agency,
right? And you realize, well, you know, how much agency do we really have over our lives? Turns out, not so much. I think another aspect too, kind of playing off what you just said, is maybe you could call it grief, like the grief of coming to terms with my limitations. Yeah. Versus the thing I would, the way I would like to see myself or the things I would like to say like I can do all the, I can do all twenty of these things.
And then realizing actually, maybe like 4 is more realistic and having to like kind of grief. And like you're saying, they're not, it's not like these things are bad. I shouldn't do them. It's like all twenty of these things are awesome. I, I would love to do all of them. I want to hang out with all of these people. I want to do all of these things, but I'm a limited person. I can't, I just can't do everything that I want to do or everything that is good.
Maybe that's part of being built for eternity as well, you know? Yeah, between you, you Christina and Matthew, you have just, you've touched on two things I want to get to. One is the, the sort of more identity or kind of existential component because we all, we all started with more kind of minute to minute tactical things like, right, I just, I, I struggle to live the next 5 minutes because the next 5 minutes are owned by
perceived necessity. And I think that's how we experience a lot of it minute to minute. And then underlying that, there's, there's something deeper that I want to circle back to in a few minutes. But I want to, I want to pull that thread that you just touched on, Matthew. On some level we can, we can kind of have mercy on ourselves a little bit, have grace with ourselves because a lot of this is the world that we're born
into. I'm not qualified to judge the universality of it in terms of, Oh yes, this is humans have always done this. But I can say in our time, in our place in 21st century America, in our case there, there are unique things that make this hard. There are reasons that we have particular difficulty being still. We get trained out of the ability to be still, the ability to be still with ourselves,
right? If if you've ever tried the exercise of not touching your phone for one hour when you're not doing something particular that would distract you from it, you start to notice how often you instinctively reach for it. If you just go into the middle of a a field or even a small yard and just stare up at the sky and try to do absolutely nothing, most people quickly realize how difficult that is.
I agree on that. And I think a distinction that would be made is for that phone, right, Reaching for the phone for me, it's not even reaching it for, you know, doom scrolling for social media or anything. It's reaching for it because like, I'm like, oh, yeah, I should look that thing up on the Internet. Oh, yeah.
I really wanted to remember how to do this or like even something so in my case, which is kind of ironic as a garden tender, even something like, oh, yeah, I wanted to check on this. Let me see what my resources and says about this thing. And I want to like, reach for the phone. Can you just go out and be? It's also just ingrained, like our phone is our answer for a lot of things. You know, even if we're thinking about someone we love because we want to text them and tell them I love them.
Oh, but also that involves my phone. I think what you're pointing to, Christina, is something I would probably say we've had an ingrained habit of being disembodied, and when you allow yourself to leave your physical limitations, that doesn't mean that your capacities grow.
Through our devices, we are connected to a world that is bigger than the one that our brains are capable of relating to. No matter how cool the networking tools or contacts app on my phone, I can't have a meaningful relationship with 1000 people. I can't carry the burden of all those people I need to reach out to, as opposed to just the people I encounter physically on a daily basis. I I can't carry the burdens of
the the news feed, right? All of the things, all the disasters, tragedies, all the things I'm supposed to be sad about, anxious about, outraged about, all of which come from thousands of miles away. I'm constantly connected to all of that. And you're right, Sarah, that's fundamentally disembodied. Whatever the benefits are and the benefits of any new technology, the benefits always come first. We always notice the, oh, I could do this now and I couldn't do that before.
And it's always the the downsides that we start to notice later, after we have unwittingly submitted ourselves to it for days, weeks, years, generations. The image that I always go back to with that truth, Brian, is the old tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun. What I didn't realize about that story until very recently was how Daedalus, his father, knew the risk of his invention, but his son, who didn't make the invention, wasn't aware of how
the thing itself worked. And so I think I, I just think about that often with invention and with the ways that we try to make our lives convenient. How often do we see the convenience? How often do we see the power it gives us? Well, and we're, we're going to do an episode later this year on theology of, of tradition and how it's tied up in the idea of honoring your father and mother.
And, and, and that story is such a, such a perfect one because it's always easy to see the, the faults, real or perceived of your ancestors and your specific specifically your parents. It's not always as easy to see when something we think is a fault is actually a virtue or or has the two bound up in each other. But I think it's sort of it's almost creepy. Like how how difficult it is for us to to lose our kind of 12 year old sneer at how backward
our parents are. Very few of us grow up to the point where we don't have that instinctive curl of our lip when we think of how much more enlightened we are than our parents or our ancestors. And, and we can think about this with smartphones or AI or any number of whatever the current thing is, laugh at the people that are just old enough to be hesitant about jumping into the deep end so quickly.
And I want to bring this back to, to Tarrant's story a little bit because we see both elements of what we've talked about in that story. You see first, the the desire to not just kind of jump in with both feet, but the desire to the desire to get busy quickly with the stuff that's way downstream, the stuff you're not ready for. And frankly, a lot of what we are busy with day-to-day probably falls into that category. The stuff that we're not ready
for. Either we weren't emotionally ready to carry that burden, or we didn't have the capacity to be this busy or whatever it might be. But there's also a one of the reasons that Tarrant jumps in so excitedly and wants to skip straight to the end is because fundamentally, he's not learning how to. He's not looking to learn how to make a sword. He's not looking to learn how to make a cloak. He's not looking to learn how to make a piece of pottery.
He's looking to find himself. The entire book, and I referenced this in the story, but it's the story of the entire book, of which this is literally just two chapters. He's trying to find himself. He's trying to figure out who he is. And the book starts with Taran's discontentment. He knows his name. He has a good circle of friends and peers and mentors around him who can tell him pretty definitively who they see him to be what what character they've seen from him.
And he's been through enough to have seen a lot of it himself. But he's not content I he. He wants to know something about his Initially it's his parentage. It kind of morphs into more of his inheritance. Then it's the skills that he can learn. He's trying to find who he is through the busyness, through the effort to push into that next thing. There is a leisurelessness about Taran that wants to kind of this wanderlust. He wants to charge off to the
next thing. He's afraid to look himself in the mirror. And I keep going back in this to Joseph Peeper. We've a couple of us are are big Peeper fans and and his his particularly his book leisure.
The basis of culture talks a lot about the relationship between not laziness and hard work, which is often how we tend to understand the two options, but the relationship between total work, which can include actually both laziness and busyness, but which involves seeking your identity in total work in, busyness in. People recognizing your accomplishments, whatever, whatever it might be, throwing yourself all the way into it to the point where you've been
trained by these rhythms that you have accepted to the point where you actually don't know how to be still anymore. Really, what these processes, the the fabric making or the sword making or or the pottery, these really are processes where he's trying to find out who he is. He's on a quest in these outer processes to really reach this sort of inner reality, which actually I love that because I've very much come to believe that creative processes really
do that. That as you enter into creative processes that the arts have this incredible ability to draw us into internal processes to. And the phrase that I've I've thought of as the making makes us. The making makes us as we make we're, we're on that, on that journey and that is actually happening.
So it's interesting. I like that he chose that to frame Taran's story, but then also thinking of it in terms of what are the expectations that have been formed in us by living in such a heavily mechanical technological culture. I think we have machine expectations on ourselves that that give us this sense of we ought to be able to figure out these shortcuts. We ought to be able to get there in some way that is actually unnatural to personhood.
That's not native to personhood. It might be native to mechanism, but we're not we're not computers. We're people and people are stories. People are relational processes. People are in that Ephesians thing about us being the the play of God, being the masterpiece, this thing that is being shaped and crafted slowly through participation in the life of God. That's the kind of thing we are, which means we should have different kinds of expectations for the way we would hope to
reach maturity or beauty or joy. And it made me think of a song I wrote some years ago. It's on an album called Beautiful Secret Life, and it was really inspired by Henry Nowen. It's called No Shortcut to the Heart. And one of the verses says all these paintings line the showroom and they look out upon the people and they speak of the many deaths it took to make a masterpiece. Henry, Henry now And Henry told me it takes time, more than a lifetime to learn how to come
home. We are each of us apprenticed as the master draws the image out of us. There is no shortcut to the heart. And so like that song for me was kind of a way of making something, making a song, because I was trying, I was on that similar journey of trying to learn that about my own life and about life in general. CS Lewis talks about the the three major temptations, the the flesh, the devil and the world.
And as he warns some young adults about what the world has to offer them, he basically argues that the desire to be accepted into that in crowd in the world, if you don't work to prevent that desire, they will control you. They will run you that desire to be accepted and that can take many different forms, especially when it comes to our work.
But what you've said, Matthew, prompts me to wonder whether or not we have kind of bought hook, line and sinker into accepting humanity as tools and as computers. Yeah, yeah. Our imagination has been so shaped by that. Yeah. I mean, I mean so many of our metaphors for describing how our brains work, our our computer metaphors or released machine metaphors, right. Just need to process that for a minute. Maybe I'm wired that way.
There's a good essay that I read once that oh, try to make sure we put in the the show notes just listed all like dozens of metaphors. We don't even think about about how our brains take in information, how we develop an identity, how it how they store information. And none of it is how our brains actually work. And it's not just that we have a, a limited hard drive in the sense of capacity. It's also that the way that our brains work is contextual and it's narrative driven.
And it's that we were, we were made to have a perhaps a bit of a smaller number of things that are deeply intertwined with each other so that they make sense. It's not just, oh, I need some more storage folders. I'm overwhelmed. We, we learn these things in through, through repetition and layers and relationship. And and that's what these masters are trying to do with with Taran. They're saying, oh, you want to make a sword. Oh, you want to make a cloak? Oh, you want to make a, a piece
of pottery. Great. Start with the raw materials. Stop trying to skip three steps ahead to I just want the end result. You have to actually submit yourself to the raw material, the physical object in their case. But we can also think about it in terms of the the present moment as opposed to the future moment, or the present task as opposed to the thing I'd rather be doing, or or whatever it might be. You have to submit yourself to what's right in front of you and allow it to work on you.
This was a convicting example Lewis had in this essay. It's called the inner ring. But he basically argues how often do we fill our lives with thing after thing in his words, because it is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons, but to have them free because you don't matter,
that is much worse. And I think if you have a scarcity view of the world, of your participation in it, you either are doing or you're not doing, then you haven't been accepted into the abundance of what creation is. Because, Brian, what you said makes me automatically want to jump out of my seat and say the raw materials are beautiful, they are important, they are where you should start, that
they're lovely. And it's from the love of that raw material that we, we can do great things because we're, as I think Tolkien says, we're, we're diving in and exploring the latent powers of that material and bringing them forth. And as we reveal those latent powers, that's glorification to the Lord because it's his work. And so ultimately it has to start in that abundance. It has to start in some
acceptance. And if you dive really deep into why we've been taken up into the world's categories of computational productivity, I think you'll see that our relentless work is fueled by what Lewis calls your longing to enter, your anguish when you are excluded, and the kind of pleasure you feel when you get in. Whereas in John 10, Jesus says I am the great shepherd of the Good Shepherd. Enter in, He says. I know you. Those longings have been
fulfilled. And so out of abundance, I think that's really what Sabbath is, is to revel and enjoy abundance, and from that posture engage the work that God has given us on this earth. I agree. Yeah, I love you talked about the inner ring and the desire to be on the inside. And he's like, that's a real desire, but that is actually what we've been invited to by by the Trinity. We've been invited inside.
We've been our telos. Our destiny is to be married into the the Trinity and to share that life, to participate in the divine nature. So just this week I was reading Pope Benedict second part in the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy.
And one of the things he talked about was what this world is, is this world is a space that God has created to be a habitat where he has carefully crafted this whole world so that it is conducive to foster us getting to know each other, us, and for the two of us, for God and his, his creatures to, to learn who each other is and, and to learn how to participate with one another. He's like, that's what the world is, that's what the whole cosmos is.
It's this meeting place that God has set up, but we need to be like slowly acclimated to God because it's kind of a lot like if we were just to be dropped right in front of his face, you know, it'd be a bit much. So we've got to work our way up to that. And he's made this world for that reason and that purpose, which means that the net, the materials themselves, the things he's made are these points of contact. They are the ways that we enter
in these normal things. That's where the invitation is situated. I like the way that peeper puts it. He's talking about how when we think of Sabbath, we tend to think of not doing things. Just like when we tend to think about how busy we are, we tend to think of, Oh yeah, they feel guilty because we're doing so many things. Or we feel guilty because we are
not doing more things. Or we have some vague sense that the the good life involves much less busyness than we are currently at the mercy of, but don't really know how to carve our way out of it. And people pushes back again kind of against all that and echoes this idea that you mentioned from Pope Benedict the 16th that Sabbath is the goal of creation. It's what creation is for. It's this place of delighting in God and relationship with God
and in what? And then a good, the good things that God has made and the good things that God has given us. And Peeper, writing before Pope Benedict the 16 said that says there's there's no such thing as a feast that does not ultimately derive its life from divine worship. He points out this relationship between delight and worship. It really makes you stop and think. So what does this all look like in practice then? Because it's just like Taran learned, it's not a matter of
skipping to the end. Oh, there's all this stuff that I sort of feel bad about that I'm doing wrong and I want to do it better. Let me flip that switch. Give me the 10 step plan or give me the whatever. And we ultimately can't say no to plenty of things that are not our highest priority spiritually. Floor still has to be swept. Kids still have to be driven somewhere, these sorts of things.
And while yes, you can step back and look at the big picture of all that and ask where your priorities lie and what things you might want to rethink that, that's a very healthy thing to do from time to time. What about the right now? How shall we then live in, in light of all this?
Where do we start if we want to live a life that is more fully present to getting our hands dirty with the mud of the raw materials that God has put before us, and ultimately, through that pushing toward a life that is more oriented toward delight in the goodness of God than in the pressure and stress and busyness that tends to overtake us? When we talk about what it looks like, I think defining sort of
presence is kind of important. And I think about the word quietude, and I don't think it's quite the same as silence. I think we all crave silence in so many ways in this distractible world, but I don't know that it's the same thing as quiet. And I was reading Sarah Clarkson's wonderful book Reclaiming Quiet, and she talks about how even in a harried, hurried life there, there are ways to sort of reclaim that quiet.
Sarah says that she's convinced that our capacity as humans to be quiet actually will shape the entire way that we come to love and trust the living God and to have a lively faith at all. Because I'm going to actually read her quote here, she says. I think that we in the modern world increasingly struggle to hear the voice of God, and sometimes we forget to even desire it because our minds and ears are so crammed with the voices online of the Internet, headlines, social media, in news
feeds. But I believe our greatest loss is spiritual, because our disquiet leads us to a certain kind of life. It shapes the whole of the way we interact with each other and the world around us. Too often, though, we hear the word quiet as something negative and abstract, a subtraction of activity or even a relationship available only to the Mystics and Saints. That's personally something I've thought about so much, Like, well, Dang it, sometimes I just want to be a monk.
But she says too often we think of it as merely A discipline we cannot manage, another hard thing that only the very holy or the rigid can attain. But every Christian is called to be a person capable of hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit, of practicing God's presence in the midst of the everyday. Quiet is not a special state reserved for introverts or particularly pious people or the lonely.
Every Christian is called to cultivate an interior world, to make mind and heart a space of expectant silence as we wait for God to speak His Word into our darkness and to sing us back to life. Classic Sarah, you got to stop and meditate on it for a good while in honor of how good it is. It's very true.
And I think, you know, but I think defining the quiet versus the silence was important because, you know, she's writing as a mother of four and, you know, the wife of a vicar and, and, but I think and as a writer herself and, you know, we all know we who pursue our artistic pursuits. It's hard work, as Taryn Wanderer found out, and it requires discipline and fortitude and all that.
But I think where where I wanted to sort of mention the what this looks like was your question, Brian, was something that Sarah said about what it means to have that space. And she says, I don't think quiet is really about great feats so much as it is about small faithfulness. And that is a work available to every believer alive.
Yeah, there's something similar to that that's been helpful to me. There are, there are sort of macro things that you can do like if, if you've never tried putting together a rule of life, Google that, that's, that's a fairly easy way to just sort of take a step back and go, what are, what are the top 235 priorities in my life ranked? How is that aligned or misaligned with how I'm spending my time? And, and what might I do differently in response to this insight?
But even on a just a more micro level, a more minute to minute level, Matthew and I, for example, both read a bit of recent cognitive science and different people's insights on how our brains actually work. And you know, one of the things I've noticed is that multitasking is not a thing. I know some of our listeners are proud multitaskers. It's not a thing. You're multitasking is doing two
things half as well. Your brain is not capable of actually giving anything remotely close to full attention to more than one thing at once or one primary thing and some secondary things. And if you are distracted from one thing, it takes your brain a good 15 minutes to get back into where it was. So there's no such thing as a 5
minute distraction. So one of the things that I've done in response to this in, in, in my life is just to think a bit more about what it looks like to be fully present to those high priorities. And some of that is work. Some of that is not remotely fun work. But what does it look like to be fully present to it to in, in a way that allows it to work on me the way the, the the clay and the bristles work on Taran. But then turning from that to my
wife or my children. And, yeah, the phone's not at the center of my attention or I'm not at the mercy of the next thing when, you know, when my son asks me a question, am I looking him in the eye, maybe getting down on my knees? And there you have my full attention right now. I that I got a long way to go on that one, terms of growth and learning. But even even trying to do that has pretty dramatically shaped the way I experienced reality.
It reminds me a little bit of the luck, the liquid luck potion in one of the later Harry Potter books. I think it's the 6th 1 where he just takes this potion and for the next hour or something he just sort of at the mercy of his his whim, but his whim is guided somehow. I've had moments like that where, you know, it wasn't a lick a luck potion, but it felt like the Holy Spirit. It was just, oh, this is not what I was planning on.
This is not the busyness I was invested in, but this is the thing that's been put before me. I'm going to pivot and be fully present to it, especially when that thing is, is a person or something of real intrinsic worth as opposed to something that is of artificial value because it happened to be on my schedule or something. So all kinds of ways we can go wrong with that. We can turn into total flakes who always abandoned their commitments and things like
that. But on on an anecdotal level, that's been a real a real blessing to me more than once. Yeah, I think that's where presents kind of like you were saying, Brian, being present on your knees with your son, who also happens to be my son. So I get what you're saying is, is that faithfulness that that Sarah was referencing?
I think sometimes it's those great acts of faithfulness that in those in those mundanities in the changing of your daughter's diaper, Sarah, that give us that presence and allow us to be quiet from all of those those schedule things and all the things that we feel like. And that is just the faithfulness that brings us that that sense of God's presence,
God's voice. I have recently been reading Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines, and he makes a a very large claim that the focal point of human existence is the human body. Because Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, is a human too. He has a body, just as we do. And he spends the whole book unpacking what that claim, what that argument means, to how then we should live. And it, it's a fascinating argument.
And I think that has helped me even in the last couple of weeks, like you've talked about Brian, kind of a refocusing, having something tangible and literally of my senses, my body be something that I continue to go back to and ask and listen to where it is and what it needs. Has been a very intuitive and practical way for me to slow myself down, to recognize when I am in the clutter and the clatter of the mind, as Christina was saying before, because it is so ingrained in my
habit. It is so often for me. It is so normal for me to not consider my body, not consider my limitations that just even stopping and listening to what it might need at the moment. Drink a sit down where I'm stiff, where I'm holding a lot of tension in that moment. Those are all examples of bringing me back into the moment, helping me notice who I am as a human being with a physical body, and meeting Christ there because He has one too, and He cares about that too.
Going back to my acceptance, He has accepted and loves that too. That's my encouragement for how my life has changed even the last couple of weeks, doing that as a practice. Yeah. And if you talk to people at at older than you at five year intervals, you'll hear increasingly loud stories of how the body, it asserts itself in those ways louder and louder as you get older.
And, and those are hard in their own ways, but they're also new opportunities to have God's strength meet you in your weakness more and more and more as you grow. I was sitting with some guys the other day and one of them is in a recovery situation and, and he made this comment, he said. It's so frustrating to have to be deliberate about this.
It's so frustrating that I have to make plans to protect my sobriety in his case, you know, and I feel like we're all in a situation like that where I wish I didn't have to think about how do I need to protect myself from my cell phone or how do I need to protect myself from all this information barrage and the tragedy barrage. It's like, but I do this. That is the world I live in. And so that is one of the things I think is like recognizing it's not going to fix itself.
So like, maybe I need to have to leave my phone in another room at night so that I don't stay up scrolling, dim scrolling. So all these like deliberate things. That's one thing. Another thing I thought of is, and this is I hate saying this, but I might have to actually ask other people to help me. I might have to actually. Yeah. Doesn't that suck? You can't. Maybe you can't do it by
yourself. Maybe you actually somebody else in your vicinity to like take something off of you and because really that you maybe it's more than you ought to be doing. Or maybe you need them to bring something into your space that you can't reach, but they can. Maybe there's some way that you actually need to ask for other people to enter into this problem with you and help you bear it. And then you mentioned the embodiment piece.
And one really practical thing is feeling so disconnected from the body, but then realizing like this is something Jesus has shown incredible honor for by by by a taking of up into the Godhead, the human body. And this is where we're headed. We're going to be embodied forever because that's what a human is. And so even in little ways, and maybe this sounds corny, but you know, like, boy, a hot shower
feels great, doesn't it? Maybe that's the affection of God. Maybe you're actually experiencing God's affection in your body. Oh, I'm sitting on the porch and a little bit of breeze blows across the hairs on my arm. Doesn't that feel good? Maybe that's God's affection. Oh, this thing smells good or tastes good or well, I sure am comforting, comfortable in my bed. And I don't want to get out of it this morning because it's so cozy.
Like all of these things, I think, are ways that God has made a world where we actually can experience his goodness. And those things are not excluded. Those things count. Those things are part of him telling us what he's like and what it's like to be with him. Even those little things. That flower is pretty. I'd like to pick it and put it on my table and look at it. So I think just actually noticing that and, and giving it credit or acknowledging what it or recognizing it.
The idea of recognition is another big idea in, in Benedict's writing that he says we've forgotten who we are and where we're from and who God is. And this world is a place where we have a chance to say, wait a minute, I I think I know who you are. I think I know where that came from. That came from God. And we're recognizing, we're remembering our origin and the the love that spoke us into being so.
But those are those sound esoteric, but really they're like little real things that are all over the place around us, you know? It's perfect for piggybacking off of exactly what Matthew said, which is and, and Sarah, which is the embodiment and the recognition of what's around us. It's a poem that's called Praying by Mary Oliver, and it's very brief, but you'll see why it's so significant. As I read it, this is what she says. It doesn't have to be the blue iris.
It could be weeds in a vacant lot or a few small stones. Just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate. This isn't a contest, but the doorway into thanks and a silence in which another voice may speak. Excellent, great choice. OK, That is an absolutely perfect note to end on because I know we have in some ways created more questions than we've answered as far as the practicalities of this and
knowing this. Our next episode in a couple of weeks, Matthew and I are going to sit down with Malcolm Gite and talk about this. We're going to talk about poetry. We're going to talk about pipe smoking notably and extensively as not simply a hobby that someone might take up, but as a kind of a case study in how to learn to be fully present, how to be learned to be still as well. Come check out our next episode in a couple weeks on pipe smoking with Malcolm Geit.
We definitely recommend Sarah's book, Reclaiming Quiet Sarah Clarkson, and we definitely recommend Joseph Peeper's books. That's Pi EPER. Well, pretty much anything he's written, but particularly leisure, the basis of culture. So that's more of a sort of a theological meditation on the nature of stillness and quiet and being fully present. And Sarah's is more OK, and how do I actually carve this out?
Finally, you should all mark September 20th weekend on your calendars because that's going to be the Anselm Society's fall event. All of us are going to be there for the great Middle Earth Feast. We are going to have an artist's retreat. We're going to have some workshops and retreats for people who don't consider themselves artists but love having the kinds of conversations we have on this
podcast. We are going to have all kinds of more low key afternoon activities like going on hikes with Anselm Society people, hanging out at some of the coffee shops. We talk about all the time. We're just having long conversations. And in the evening on Saturday we will have one of our famous pub nights where we will be doing stories, songs, poems and food from Lord of the Rings all evening long. We're going to have that up on our website.
If we don't, by the time this episode airs, it'll be up there in seconds. And tickets for that will go on sale soon. It's going to be a great chance for Colorado Springs locals to have a great time together and for those of you who are not local to Colorado Springs to come and hang out with us. So September 20th weekend, mark it on your calendars. Thank you for joining us, Christina. Sarah, Matthew, thank you for
sharing your insights. We will see you listeners next time when we talk to Malcolm Gite and I will see different combinations of all of you and other future episodes. The Imagination Redeemed podcast is a production of the Anselm Society. It's easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope that there's more.
But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven, to experience a joyful Sabbath and experience the world as a place to meet God and live a bountiful life that participates in the life of God. Like in the great stories, the Ansam Society is a place where you can come in and experience beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom and go out renewed, bringing that life to your vocation, home, and church.
Join us next time as we pursue a renaissance of the Christian imagination together.