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inner space-outer space, cleaning up my praying space
Back from vacation Up North (f you seek a pleasant peninsula–look about you!). Spent all day yesterday cleaning up my home office, where my praying space is. In Mystically Wired I have a little section on making a physical space for prayer in your home or apartment and keeping that one spot clear for prayer. No paying bills or arguing with your wife in that space. A set apart place.
The sleep doctors use the same principle for treating insomnia. The bed, they say, should only be used for sleeping. No reading, watching television. This conditions the body to sleep in bed rather than lay awake. We are environmentally embedded beings, space-sensitive creatures.
So if you’ve got inoransia, try making and maintaining a place for your praying self to dwell.
Mine is a corner in my office at home. Got a nice chair from Ikea, an end table from my parents home, a little rug from Kashmir, a few candles, a picture of my honey, and my favorite icon, “Not Made with Human Hands“. Facing a window looking out at some nearby trees with four– count ‘em four–bird feeders attached to the window.
We forget that prayer is a bodily function. We pray with our praying brains in our praying bodies to a God who delights to inhabit human flesh.
You probably have what used to be called an “entertainment center” in your home. You have invested a chunk of change is this space. Now that it’s a multi-media center, you have to manage it. (Man, you should see the set up my son has. He gets a call on his mobile phone and it shows up on his television screen, which is connected to his computer network. I just sit there in stupified wonder, trying to imagine what it would be like to truly inhabit the New Millennium as he does.)
Certain kinds of praying–especially the ones that calm your over-active alarm system–take time. This time probably won’t come out of your work time, or your time to eat, dress, and perform essential acts of personal hygiene. It will come out of your media time.
To overcome inoransia, you may have to give your praying body a fighting chance. All that media is so powerful because it is perfectly adapted to your dopamine-reward system. Your brain is fine tuned to tune in–to see the flashing images, respond to the cascade of new sensory data. Media is reality on steroids.
Which is to say, if you’ve got money to maintain a media center, invest in a praying space to give your praying self a little room to move.
August 2nd, 2010 at 11:52 am
This is challenging. I was about to say, “So, I need more stuff to pray?” But then you threw down the exhortation to sacrifice some entertainment infrastructure for some prayer infrastructure, and that’s pretty hard to argue with without feeling like a sinner.
In a two-bedroom apartment we probably don’t have room for both a TV room and a prayer room. What’s really important to us?
January 27th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Hahaha! I’m reading this – months after it was written – thinking, “Yes, a praying space! I must do this in our small apartment… I wonder what my husband will say…” And then I scroll down to the comments, and there’s his comment, asking my same question: what IS important to us?
He said to me the other day, “You know, whenever I want to watch a tragedy [kara like romantic comedy, no deep movies, ever], I think to myself, ‘Kara and I really don’t get along very well.’ But when it comes to important stuff – God stuff – we are right in sync.”
Case in point.
Thanks for your blog, Ken. I doubt you intended it, but you provided some internet space for a romantic moment for me and my husband today.