A little liturgy last night; lots of laundry this morning. Kipp sang with grades K-4 at Advent service last night. Poor tyke. He was absolutey suffused with self-consciousness, moving very stiffly and concentrating sternly on his teacher, displaying his earnestness by tucking his chin to his chest, frowning, and exagerrating his underbite. The goofy kid. And then he would look over at us, at his parents and grandparents, struggle mightily not to grin from ear to ear with pleasure at our attentiveness, and fail completely. (I don’t suppose it helped that his father was making faces at him.) All of the other children just seemed either to be singing the hymn naturally or standing there dumbfounded. Why did only my child seem to be going through all the agonies and ecstasies of existence within the span of three verses? Is it just because I know him?
I felt last night, in the warmth of the church, a sense of relief and happiness about the educational choice we had made for Kipp. The Lutheran school might be small and materially disadvantaged, and I might have a few issues with the patriarchy, but Kipp will learn to have a sense of faith; he will learn to pray, to direct himself inwardly, toward God, for strength; and he will learn to know the beauty of Christianity--as I did, when I was a child.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t forget or reject or question, in the heat of the race to adulthood, nearly all of what I learned.
And so it may be with Kipp.
I even fell out of the habit of praying. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t perceive the lack, or wonder how to get back to the habit or the reason for the habit. I just didn’t know how and it couldn’t be forced.
I remember, specifically, two movies that filled me with a genuine longing for the seeming necessity and luxury of prayer: First Knight and Smilla’s Sense of Snow. In the former, King Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere always seemed to be prostrating themselves on the stone floors of churches and chapels. In the latter, Smilla barges into the apartment of an important witness, (the imperious Vanessa Redgrave, clad in white) who tells her, “At this time of the morning, I am usually in prayer.” She wasn't a nun or anything; just a regular citizen, so for some reason, this floored me. “What?!” She has a time for prayer?” (Not just time for prayer, but a time set aside for prayer.) All I seemed to have time for was spiritual torpor or acedia, which would manifest itself in the usual excesses of the modern age: shopping, eating, entertainment, vanity, worry, lack of discipline.
I never managed, then, to combat acedia with prayer. That would have been like trying to combat sloth by running a marathon; somehow a step missing. I would, instinctively, rouse myself and turn to care of my home or to experiments in the kitchen. Yet things still felt out of balance.
Balance. That over-used word. There’s not a magazine on the newstands that doesn’t blather on about balance, probably Maxim included, as if it were the key to all life’s problems and the secret to eternal happiness. All you have to do is eat right, soak in the tub, meditate, and buy these shoes. Then, presto! You will have balance!
Right.
One of the most intriguing things C.S. Lewis ever said--though I forget where he said it—was (and I paraphrase): “Screw balance. You’ve got to tip the scales overridingly towards God.”
When you do, maybe acedia flies off into the stratosphere. But how to manage such a feat? I'm reminded of those little weights we used in high school chemistry class--I think a lot of little weights, a lot of different components, tip the scales. It's no good just to plunk down one big weight; the scale still won't budge. You've got to use every weight in the set.
11:38:18 PM 
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