Unintentional Monks, Part 2 (The Conclusion to a Very Long Series)

April 24, 2020 by Seth Haines

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack.

16. Unintentional Monks, Part 2

Yesterday, I shared a bit of a transition to a new waking practice. I’ve adopted a more formulated Rule of Life, a sort of monastic rhythm to the domestic lock-in of this pandemic. I’ve practiced bits and pieces of this rhythm for years, but never have I had to be so intentional.

What am I finding as I work this new Rule of Life, particularly with Amber? I’m waking even more to the coping mechanisms, habits, and hidden addictions of my life. (Carbs and SciFi and Twitter—Oh my!) I’m finding, too, that this Rule of Life makes me more aware of the moment-by-moment presence of Divine Love, even as I’m falling into old numbing patterns.

Today, though, I’ll draw this series to a close. I’ll have more things to say about living into the Benedictine Rule of Life, though it may be months (perhaps years) from now. I need some space, a little time to practice this sort of domestic monasticism. Until then, revisit yesterday’s post about my Rule of Life. Formulate your own. Invite your partner, your children into it. See if it doesn’t bring stability, mental clarity, and the fuel you need to make it through this pandemic wide awake.

The End (of the Pandemic Supplement to Waking)

If you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith, or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.

Unintentional Monks

April 23, 2020 by Seth Haines

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack.

15. Unintentional Monks

We’re weeks deep into this pandemic, which means we are weeks deep into a waking opportunity. Sent to our own cloisters (homes can be monasteries too, see), we’ve been presented with a sort of multiple-choice quiz.

Given a forced lock-in, it’s best to:

distract yourself with bad habits, coping mechanisms, and addictions;
adopt rhythms that allow you to connect with the Divine Love of God; or,
buy a cabin on 40 wooded, stockpile it with rice and beans, and wait for the second coming of some great Salvation.

You might not have considered the question in such explicit terms, but you feel the gravity of the choice. Don’t you? Haven’t you been confronted by your own pull to vice? Haven’t you seen the ways solitude exposes how asleep you can be?

This forced cloistering has led more than a few writers these days to examine the power of the monastic life. It’s led many of us to ask a simple question: What can we learn from the modern monks?

In his article, “We’re all Monks Now,” Gregory Hillis shares the wisdom of the Cistercian monks at Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani. He writes:

Michael Casagram, O.C.S.O., at Gethsemani said that perhaps Covid-19 is “a divinely disguised moment for human breakthrough.” Our society revolves around the notion that power and wealth give meaning to existence, that they allow us to take control of our lives. But, Father Casagram continued, “power and wealth create an illusion of meaning and purpose while undermining our spiritual destiny.” We think they give us some measure of control, but in reality they “close the door to grace.”

...

Yet our pursuit of meaning through power and wealth leaves us spiritually impoverished as we scurry about, consumed by the busyness of life.

Hillis pours a straight shot, offers no chaser. In the span of a few weeks, with the collective strokes of a few dozen gubernatorial pens, our illusions of power, wealth (actual or relative), and security evaporated. What was left? For many, there was nothing but our own naked, impoverished spirits.

The New Demon has put us on our heels, sent us retreating. It has made unintentional monks of us all. And here we are, poised on the edge of a decision. We can either adopt a new monkish rhythm of waking, one that leads us deeper into the intentional practices of faith, or we can wallow in the slavery of our coping mechanisms, bad habits, and addictions.

To be continued…

Join me tomorrow as I wrap up my Pandemic Supplement to The Book of Waking Up. And if you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith, or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.

Living a Rule of Life (or How to Escape the Dragons)

April 22, 2020 by Seth Haines

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack.

14. Living a Rule of Life (or How to Escape the Dragons)

Get out of your head.

The clarion call of the head honcho followed me yesterday. Then, another voice, this one my own:

There are dragons in your head.

Yesterday—a for swimming in existential internal chaos. In my head, there were dragons (or imps or vampires or whatever other synaptic monster my brain cooked up). I imagined lockdown timelines—two more weeks; two more months; two more years. I ran the American math—almost one million cases; over forty thousand deaths. I considered the conflagration of expectations—seniors who will not graduate; my eldes whose basketball career is evaporating before his eyes; you (and you and you) who’ve learned to use the word furlough instead of fired because the former feels more hopeful (though the latter may be the reality). Every corner of my noggin swimming in dark water and fire.

This sort of inner chaos could pull me into the old patterns of numbing, of drinking or eating or mindlessly scrolling the Twitter feed. (Don’t think I wasn’t tempted.) It could pull me into a narcotic sleep. And for a day or thirty, that might be easier. But is it any way to live?

This is where the Rule comes in. Remember the Rule? (I’ve been writing about it here and here.) Any good Rule of Life should break us out of our own inner darkness and incorporate us back into the story of true living. How? It orients us back to the age-old rhythms, rhythms that require getting out of our heads and into our bodies. Generally, those rhythms fall into four categories (according to St. Benny and his followers): prayer and meditation, work, study, and leisure.

This is not to say, of course, that living by a particular rule of life will necessarily quell the inner chaos. Some days will be worse than others, a plain fact of human existence. (See, e.g., David, Elijah, Peter, and every saint who trod this earthen sod.) But living by a rhythmic rule provides anchor points for our days, times to get out of our heads and practice actionable belief.

I’m still tinkering with my own Rule of Life, though in formulating it, I’ve come to see how I’ve lived by an implicit Rule for years. It’s different these days, though. Now, I have the opportunity to practice a more explicit Rule of Life in the lockdown community of my own family. But what does that look like? Such as my Rule is, I offer it to you (broken down by hour and example timeframe):

Hour 1: Morning Prayers with Amber; Meditation; Scripture (5:30-6:30)
Hour 2: Writing; Prepare for the day (6:30-7:30)
Hour 3-6: Work (exercise optional) (7:30-11:30)
Hour 7: Noonday Meditation; Lunch (communal if possible) (11:30-12:30)
Hours 8-11: Work (12:30-4:30)
Hour 12: Wind down work routine (4:30-5:30)
Hours 13-15: Family Time; Family prayers/meditation (exercise optional) (5:30-8:30)
Hours 16-17: Leisure with Amber; prepare for sleep (8:30-10:30)
Hours 18-24: Rest (10:30-5:30)

(If you need a resource to help lead you through the daily prayers, download the Magnificat app. It provides morning, evening, and nighttime prayers in addition to a daily meditation you can use at the noon hour.)

Use this rule as a template, if you like. Modify it. Tinker with it. Feel free to create your own, too. Whatever you do, though, create a rhythm of prayer and embodied faith. Take the time to break out of your own inner chaos and return to the central story that steels your soul’s legs. Create touchpoints of waking throughout your day in this pandemic age and see if it doesn’t provide something like stability.

To be continued…

Join me tomorrow (and for the foreseeable future) as I continue my Pandemic Supplement to The Book of Waking Up. And if you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.

Get Out of Your Pandemic Head; Get Into the Old Stories

April 21, 2020 by Seth Haines

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack.

13. Getting Out of Our Heads; Getting Into Practice

On another Zoom conference, this time with my publisher, the head honcho spoke of his own pandemic-age experience. “In this moment, I need the timeless stories of the healing Jesus more than ever,” he said, then added, “so do the people.”

Within hours, I was on the phone with a therapist. She’d been neck-deep her clients’ anxiety, human housefires who’d had COVID gasoline dumped in their brains. Everyone was on edge--financially, maritally, pornographically, alcoholically, whateverly. In the middle of all of it, she needed something familiar. She carried that need into Holy Week, but for whatever reason, her church uttered nary a word about the resurrection story of Jesus. Instead, they leaned into something more innovative, more creative. (These are her words, not mine.)

Over the weekend, I mulled the words of the publisher and therapist. When Monday rolled around, I sent an email to the head honcho, shared the conversation with the therapist, then wrote: “We need the thick stories that steel our souls. I need them, too.” Hours later, he sent his agreement and added a facet to the gem, which I paraphrase as follows:

It’s time to get out of our heads and into the timeless stories.

If ever we needed to get out of our heads and into (or embody) the timeless stories of the Scriptures, it’s in the middle of this God-awful pandemic. If ever there was a time to hope, pray, and believe in resurrection, it’s now.

And this brings me back to my more Benedictine friend, the one I wrote about Friday who created a rule of life anchored in prayer. I’ve considered his rule over the last several days, the ways he engages the age-old story no less than 3 times a day, the way he steeps himself in prayer, meditation, and spiritual reading. Doesn’t this kind of embodiment keep him awake to the Divine Love operating in the world around him? What’s more, doesn’t it allow him to be an instrument in the hands of Divine Love?

Embodiment, we need it more than ever in these monotonous lock-down days. So, I’ve set out to create my own rule of life, a way to be in touch with the ancient resurrection story. My hope: To get out of my head and into the story. How? Come back tomorrow when I’ll share a new personal rhythm for waking.

To be continued…

A Pandemic Rule of Life

April 17, 2020 by Seth Haines

After a brief hiatus to chart a course, I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. Special thanks today to Susanjen who signed up as a yearly $65 subscriber!

12. A Pandemic Rule of Life

I found the words were late coming yesterday, and not because I was suffering from writer’s block. By 7:00, I was on Zoom call with my publisher. Off by 8:00, I was on breakfast duty. By 8:30, I’d started the bread (we made our way through the backup loaf yesterday), and by 8:45, it was time to chop the legal wood. (Like you, I’m doing my best to scratch out a living in these uncertain times.)

This is how a day starts in the Great Quarantine, hard-charging by the 7:00 hour. It’s a new way of living, and it’s disrupted the rhythm I’d honed over so many years. Last week, I noticed how that rhythmic disruption threw me off-kilter. And so, I turned back. To what? We’ll get to that in a day or two. (None of us are in any hurry, see.)

Wednesday, I participated in yet another 7:00 Zoom conference. This one comprised a small group of professing Christians who’d gathered to study the Scriptures, pray, and share how (which is to say if) we’re finding any sort of lockdown balance. One—an intellectual who specializes in ethnography and racial disparity—shared his struggle for balance and attachment to God in everyday life. He’d fought anxiety and the bipolarity of artistic living years ago, and he’d adopted a sort of Benedictine rule of life. (For more on the Benedictine way, see the video below.) It was a rule meant to draw him into rhythmic connection with God—morning prayers, noonday prayers, and evening prayers. And because I knew a little about these modes of praying, I knew each prayer movement included passages from the Psalms and other Scriptures.

This rhythm, he said, gave him a central focal point for each movement of the day. And because he’d practiced this way of being for more than ten years, when the pandemic came calling, he was ready. He was centered. His affections were ordered, and even if he wandered off course, his rule drew him back to the center, to the Divine Love, to Christ. And though he didn’t say it, I suppose this rule has hardened him against those COVID-fueled addictions so many of us mainline like heroin.

We live in a day of communal disruption. We’re unable to join the Waking Community, sing the Waking Songs, and participate in the Waking Meal. Even still, our personal practices can become a sort of lifeline if we’ll reimagine the way we live. Imagine a more Benedictine way with me.

To be continued…

Staying Sober Through Personal Practices

April 15, 2020 by Seth Haines

11. Staying Sober Through Personal Practices

If you’re looking for some spiritually actualized guru who takes every moment, thought, and opportunity captive, turn away. My naked hypocrisy might be waiving in the wind.

In the waning hours of last week, I sensed the slow spread of familiar feelings. The first was an electric pulse, a jittery buzz somewhere just under the skin. It pushed and pushed and pushed from my trunk to my fingertips, toe tips, the crown of my head. So, I laced up my shoes, jogged a mile to burn off some of that anxiety. When I was finished I sat on our front-porch pew (doesn’t everyone have one of those?) and listened to the birds, the neighbor dogs, the yard-squirrel searching for nuts in the leaves.

Electricity spent, a Novocaine fog set in. This is the truest way I know to say it. And as the careless cardinal flittered from one branch to the next, I felt the numb truth filling every cell. I had fallen out of my waking practices.

As I write in The Book of Waking Up, there are certain collective practices, ways of staying connected and attached to the Divine Love as a community of people. In seasons of pain, panic, or chaos, we join the Waking Community, the people who hold each other in the Divine Love of God. We sing the Waking Song, that collective chorus that encourages one another to stay awake and sober. We participate in the Waking Meal, the Eucharist (communion, the Lord’s supper, whatever), the bread and wine that is our participation in the Divine Love. But here’s the pandemic rub: In this day of social distancing, corporate waking is a digital illusion.

(Opinion: Can Zoom carry the weight of corporate waking? No, I suspect.)

On the porch pew, I considered my personal waking practices. This new season might call for a deepening of those practices, I thought. After all, times of heightened panic call for heightened awareness, mindfulness, and connection to Divine Love. This is the only way to stay sober, to keep our affections ordered, particularly in a pandemic.

Life Examined:

In this new pandemic, have you pushed into your own Waking Practices, into meditation, prayer, and devotional reading? Or, are you carried by the chaos of the news cycle?
Carve out 15 minutes today to engage in some personal Waking Practices that connect you with the Divine Love. Do it at a time where you can create a consistent daily rhythm of the practice.

To be continued…

A Way Through the Chaos

April 14, 2020 by Seth Haines

10. A Way Through the Chaos

The howl of pandemic pain—you’ve no doubt felt it, too. The loss of a job, of short-term sanity, of a family member or acquaintance. The potential scarcity of income. The abuse of spouse, a live-in parent, a socially-distanced but awfully-connected boss. And even if it’s not any of these acute forms of pain, there’s still an existential chaos in the air. We are a people inhaling the toxic off-gassing of Nature’s anger.

Gabor Mate put it best: “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain.” And with this much pain in the air, is it any wonder we’re turning to the objects of our addiction, to entertainment, booze, boobs, baked goods, and Cadbury Eggs? Is it any wonder that some of our old vices have come like Walter White?

via GIPHY

Some of us answer that knocking more often than not. We invite anything that might distract us from the pain. (Or, as the spiritual writers say, we “attach” to things other than the Divine Love that heals every pain.) And though you’re no priest, here’s my confession: I’m prone to create those attachments, too.

In The Book of Waking Up, I spilled a great deal of ink on the notion of attaching to all the wrong things in an effort to mute the pain. I released that book approximately one month before the first wave of COVID-19 cases hit the United States, and to say that message was timely is an understatement. Who knew we’d enter a season of so much collective uncertainty, chaos, and grief? Who knew so many of our addictive tendencies would be exposed? And who knew I’d have such an opportunity to practice what I preach about ordering everything (including habits, coping mechanisms, and addictions) under the Divine Love that reorders a life?

I’m no clairvoyant.

So this week, I’m turning back into the practices I’ve outlined in The Book of Waking Up, practices that provide a foothold for resisting bad habits, coping mechanisms, and addictions. I might expand on them a little, too. I’ll show you how there’s no escape from the pain and chaos of the present moment, but there is a way to make it through. There is a way to filter the toxic air of the moment. There is a way to come out of this pandemic more stable than we entered it.

To be continued…

The Howl of Pandemic Pain

April 08, 2020 by Seth Haines

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. Special thanks today to Susanjen who signed up as a yearly $65 subscriber!

9. The Howl of Pandemic Pain

The dark days have set in, no matter what the sunshine outside might claim. These are the days that roll on and on, wind humming like cellos. No one touching. No hospitable gatherings at common tables. No eye-meets-eye, smile-meets-smile happy hours. The night creeps up, gives space for a moon swollen with sadness. Even dreams have become an exercise in interpreting grief.

Last night, at 8:00, the city of Fayetteville gathered outside their homes and howled like a mad pack of wolves. "What is the purpose?,” I asked Amber as we stepped outside. “You don’t need a purpose to howl,” she said. And so, we gathered on our front porch and joined the primal chorus. It was a moment of madness, but it sounded like connection. Something in the base of my brain released, too. An inkling? A pre-civilized notion?

Ah, I get it. We were made for collective song, collective lament.

The ache is more real than ever these days, though some will not give voice to it. Some pretend they’re not covered in the tar of grief and push deeper into Zoom meetings or Leadership Conferences or statistical analysis or whatever. Some push the howl back with the misuse of what I’ve called the Stuff of Earth, the things originally created by God to draw us into the Divine Love—work, wine, sex. Some use words like lines of coke: Just one more bump and we’ll be on the other side of all this hurt. No matter how we try to mute the pain, the ache is the ache.

On Monday, I wrote of the emotional pain, how it underlies the rise in addiction in this pandemic age. But before I move further into the nexus of the pandemic pain and the rise in addiction, bad habits, or compulsive behavior, allow me a brief intermission to review the data. Review with me.

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found nearly 72% of Americans claim their lives have been disrupted by the Coronavirus outbreak. More than 39% claim they’ve suffered some personal economic impact from this New Demon. (I’m among that demographic, as are many of you.) 45% of adults say the pandemic has affected their mental health, up from 32% in early March. Almost 20% claim the pandemic has had a “major impact” on their mental health. How do percentages translate to actual human impact? Consider the percentages in terms of individual experience and a truer picture forms:

235,440,000 of our children, spouses, parents, and friends have experienced life disruption,
127,530,000 working folks have suffered an economic impact,
147,150,000 members of your family claim their mental health has been impacted, and of those, 65,400,000 American souls say it’s had a major impact.

See? This pandemic isn’t just bringing physical death; it’s brought the hellfire of emotional pain with it. It’s buried a howl in all of us. We can let it out, or try to silence it. But howls are unwieldy things. They’ll come screaming out one way or another.

To Be Continued…

The Pandemic's Parasite (Here Comes the Pain Again)

April 06, 2020 by Seth Haines

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. Special thanks today to Sealy who signed up as a yearly $65 subscriber!

8. Sobriety is a Sucker’s Game in the Pandemic

“Sobriety doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Amber said this over morning coffee, and it was not meant as some declarative statement, some shifting-sand thought on remaining undrunk. Instead, it was a rhetorical outworking of justification, a shorthand for the more nuanced truth: “I don’t blame anyone who falls off the wagon during this pandemic.” I didn’t object. In fact, I nodded along. A good and proper pandemic changes the way you think about things.

Sobriety is a tall order these days, and I’ll stand by that statement until this season is in the history books. That written, I stand by the corollary truth: Sobriety (from any old vice) is a tall order worth contemplating, hard as it may be to stomach. Sobriety, after all, is a simple act of resistance these days.

The New Demon came to choke the life from us, and in that choking, a great number of us turned to the things of comfort. As I wrote last week, we’re ordering up all the old vices: liquor, love toys, and live-streams. These, though, are only the leading indicators that addiction is taking hold. We’ll see the lagging indicators months from now. As David Brooks, author of the now-prescient The Second Mountain, wrote last week,

“Every one-percentage-point increase in unemployment leads eventually to a 3.5 percent increase in opioid addiction, so the pandemic’s economic effects alone will exacerbate our drug and mental health problems down the road.”

Down the road. In other words, Baby you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Yes, a second pandemic is well on its way, and this one might be sneakier, the consequences more long-lasting. This next-wave pandemic is a pandemic of emotional pain, one born from the isolation, fear, and anxiety of this very dark season. The experts all agree: It’s coming. And as the reality sets in, we can either turn to comfort consumption, to the habits, addictions, and coping mechanisms that bring numb relief, or we can turn to some higher thing, perhaps to Divine Love.

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. In fact, let’s pause. Ask yourself, do you feel the next-wave pandemic setting in in your own life? Are you afraid, anxious, depressed, or isolated? Do you feel the emotional pain? If so, take a few minutes today and talk with a trusted friend. A spouse. A partner. A priest. A rabbi. Call a therapist. Get ahead of the hurt. If you don’t, you might find yourself sliding into those old lesser loves (booze, boobs, binging and purging). You might find the old addictions have come knocking.

To Be Continued…

The Vibes of Chaos: Booze and Netflix and Sex-Toys, Oh My!

April 02, 2020 by Seth Haines

I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. Special thanks today to PokeyDenver who signed up as a $7 monthly subscriber!

7. The Vibes of Chaos: Booze and Netflix and Sex-Toys, Oh My!

Comfort, pleasure, distraction from pain and chaos—this is the most natural of human impulses. And if ever the conditions were set for studying the effect of societal pain and chaos on our pleasure-seeking, pain-numbing noggins, it’s now. Welcome to the pandemic age.

Effect 1: Investing in Booze

Booze—it’s the original pain killer, the ultimate anesthesia, the tried and true method of fuzzing every feeling. (This is a truth I’ve experienced first hand, thank you very much; see, e.g. The Book of Waking Up and Coming Clean.) It should come as no surprise, then, that in the wake of the anxiety and panic producing pandemic, alcohol sales are solid. According to the New York Post,

“US sales of alcoholic beverages have risen 55 percent in the week ending March 21, according to Nielsen data. Hard alcohol, such as gin, tequila and premixed cocktails, is on the top of the pour list, and spirits have seen the highest increase with sales jumping 75 percent compared to the same period last year.

Allow me to remove any doubt: In a bear market, liquor runs with the bulls.

Effect 2: Streaming Surge

Tiger King—it’s the Netflix COVID phenomenon. (As of the writing of this post, I’ve not begun the series.) A trusted source (read: All of Twitter) informs me it’s the kind of absurdist, chaotic, surreal phenomenon that only makes sense in an absurdist, chaotic, surreal environment. And thanks in part to this modern expression of American insanity, Netflix broadband share is surging, perhaps beyond the internet’s capacity. In fact, in response to the usage spike caused by Netflix users, the company announced it would cut traffic by 25% in some places to relieve the pressure on internet infrastructure.

Effect 3: The Other Kind of Entertainment

The data on booze and entertainment streaming might prove the point, but consider the oldest, most primal sort of pleasure producing activity. Consider the Down and Dirty, the Big Nasty, the Old Roll in the Hay. A recent article reported a certain sex-toy manufacturer saw a 50 percent rise in sales since the COVID-19 outbreak. In a recent interview, Johanna Rief, head of sexual empowerment for sex-toy producer Womanizer, said,

“Of course, we didn’t anticipate a surge in sales due to coronavirus… We do know that time is an essential factor when it comes to sexuality and self-pleasure. With the prospect of long periods at home either alone or with your partner, people are exploring new ways to make the best of the time available.”

(This, of course, is to say nothing of porn consumption, which has also experienced a surge in the age of social distancing.)

Booze, entertainment, and sex—these were the things we consumed in mass quantities during the pandemic. These things and toilet paper, which might be the ultimate comfort purchase in a generally shitty age.

But why all this comfort consumption? Why stock up on booze and sex toys and rolls of Charmin? For that, let’s turn to the problem. Let’s turn to the pain.