Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

June 2009

Last month in this column I invited you to try a simple exercise. Find a time when you have no special obligations awaiting you – or make the time – and spend it simply sitting. We fill our lives with such busyness that we find it hard to take time for ourselves simply to be. If we can just be present with ourselves with no agenda, no monkey mind planning the rest of our day, we begin to have a true sense of our own presence in this world, a presence defined not by our roles or expectations made of us. Just simple being, being that is good, that is enough.

My goal was to suggest a way, if you don’t have one already, of beginning a spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is just a vehicle to help us get in touch with the deepest and most important things in our lives. These are things we learn, not through books or lectures but through experience, experience that concentrates our mind and senses in a different way. There are many ancient disciplines that you can pursue in this way, and if one of them speaks to you I invite you to follow it. But this is one small way that you could begin along that path.

And here’s something else to try: Just walk. Again, most of our own locomotion is done with an end in mind. We’re trying to get somewhere to accomplish something. That’s fine, but if that’s the only reason we walk we can miss a lot. Try walking without an end in mind. It could be on a sidewalk in your neighborhood, along your favorite hiking path, or in your backyard. Don’t fret over the path or whether your pace is aerobic. The point is simply to be present, to focus your attention on the here and now.

I suggested last month that in sitting we attend to our first Unitarian Universalist principle, affirming our own inherent worth and dignity and by doing so helping ourselves to see the worth and dignity of others. In walking, it seems to me, we attend to our seventh principle, respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. We locate ourselves as part of the blooming, buzzing world around us – a world that requires nothing of us, that simply is. By walking without judgment amid such beauty and complexity we understand ourselves to be part of its ebb and flow; it and us, good, enough.