How To Stop Sleepwalking Through Life
“Wake up, O Soul! How long will you sleep?”
That line from St. Gertrude of Helfta rang in my head this past week each time I went for a walk. Walking is one of my favorite contemplative practices. Here in the Midwest, the earth is finally waking up. The land has exploded with color: yellow, red and orange tulips. Deep purple irises. Pale purple lilacs.
Day by day, nature is evolving before our very eyes, and we so often miss it. Wake up, O Soul!
My friend the filmmaker Marilyn Freeman uses that very line from the 13th century writings of St. Gertrude to introduce a spiritual practice she calls “Cinema Divina.” It is similar to the monastic prayer practice of “Lectio Divina,” the slow, meditative, repetitive reading of a spiritual text. In this case, the “text” is one of the beautiful short films Marilyn creates.
How Long Will You Sleep?
Marilyn’s film short “How Long Will You Sleep?” opens with a scene of dense fog hovering above a body of water. We listen to the gulls’ mournful calls. The camera then rests on the dark, mesmerizing eyes of a goat, later moves to a set of ghostlike laundry items fluttering on a clothes line.
We are invited to view the various scenes four times, each time watching for something that had perhaps previously escaped us. Each time we dig deeper for what each image might be saying to us.
The process reminds me of my daily walks. Though I walk the same paths, what I notice changes day to day. I might see pink blossoms where there were previously only buds. The odd architecture of a tree or the unusual topography of its bark might stop me in my tracks, even though I’ve passed that tree many times before.
Sleep-Walking Through Life
The Jesuit theologian Anthony de Mello once lamented that so many of us sleep-walk through life. He said we’re born asleep, live asleep, marry in our sleep, breed children in our sleep, and die in our sleep, without ever waking up. We never fully appreciate or understand “the beauty of this thing we call human existence.”
Four Steps For Remaining Awake
Fortunately, Marilyn Freeman offers a handy, four-step contemplative process to help us remain awake: read, reflect, respond, rest.
What is meant by “read?” It is to make a conscious effort to be observant. Ask, what is the world around us offering? This corresponds to the process of watching one of Marilyn’s Cinema Divina films during the first viewing.
Next, reflect on what is stirring within. What memories, thoughts, associations, insights, regrets, questions, prayers are coming to the forefront?
Then, respond. What is the invitation the world is offering to us? Is it to take action? To stop doing something? To look closer? To go deeper? Or let go of something?
Finally, rest. Rest perhaps in silence, but always in gratitude for the life we have.
There is a wealth of information about Cinema Divina on Marilyn’s website, www.marilynfreeman.com.
A Spring Poem for National Poetry Month
While you are savoring the spring season, do treat yourself to reading e.e. cummings’ unforgettable poem, “spring is like a perhaps hand.” (https://poets.org/poem/spring-perhaps-hand).
No doubt if you take a daily walk, you will experience, as the poet did, spring’s mysterious industries:
… arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here …
without breaking anything.”
In her Cinema Divina film short, Marilyn Freeman talks about the parts of nature and life that “inebriate” her. What inebriates you? How can we make this spring one where we stop sleep-walking and remain joyfully awake?
