Wakey wakey

It rained all night. Well, I can't say that for a definite fact because I was asleep for most of it, but I was awake at some kind of 4am time when my phone began this funny little chirping thing it's prone to do once a fortnight at 4am. Woke me up to the sounds of gentle falling. There's something womblike about rain in the night. I was a bit annoyed I was woken up in the middle of the night, however, because catching up on some sleep was about the number one priority of last night. But it was okay. The embrace of the rain kept me asleep until 12.30.

There's something enlivening about breaking your routine, no matter how good that routine is. Routines are terribly overrated. I guess I would prefer to call them disciplines, but even then there is always tendency for rigidity to enter in. The only way to stop the rigidity is to occasionally break the routine.

I have this ritual in the morning of centering prayer, morning pages and internet reading. It eases me into the day, gets the body firing. But like everything, when done day after day in the same fashion, it can become a chore and you start resenting the very sameness of what you're doing rather than entering into why it is that you do what you do. Today, I don't have time to do all of those things, nor really the inclination. The womblike enfolding has continued into my waking hours. I am content merely to eat, shower, and be dressed in time to watch my football team go around a ground in Launceston (a good day for an interstate game on the teev).

Indeed, I am content, this morning. And I haven't been able to say that much this week.

I am content to stay right where I am in this particular minute. There is a calmness and a surrender in the moments, this morning. A post-storm serenity that feels especially good after the fighting within myself, the expulsion of some long-held rage (it is understandable how the culture as a whole is so terribly fearful of itself, knowing the depths of rage many of us carry around inside us. It is a grace when God allows those rages to come forth behind closed doors in secret, against himself, where they can dash themselves out against rocks and spend their own fury and be whisked away into the air like harmless cotton wool. This is one of the reasons why the concept of a God consigning mere humans to an eternal hell is such anathema to me. What singular lack of vision to think that that would be the only way that God could possibly have to keep his own holiness intact (as if his holiness was so flimsy and threadbare that mere humans could ever threaten it in any way at all). If God hung on a cross to become some kind of universal sin sponge, then do we really think that the end of the story (or the beginning of the next chapter) would leave him undoing the good work he has already done? I don't think so.

I have had a few things clarified to me this week, about just how close creativity and spirituality and my own woundedness are, about the dangers of creativity - not within themselves, but the dangers to the deadened parts of my soul. This is why doing such beautiful things can be so threatening to me.

Breaking your routine can be enlivening, can bring things into sharper focus, can renew you for the next day. Breaking greater, deeper routines, ones forged as shields and defences, feels as dangerous as throwing myself off a cliff. But still, he calls us on.

Happy Saturday, bloggers :) Gotta run, football team starting. No shower for me. Still, blog post beats shower in the great rock paper scissors morning routine :)