Category Archive

Starting on October 1, I’ll be part of a group committed to doing the practices in the book 100 Ways to Keep Your Soul Alive, by Frederic Brussat. The book’s back cover describes it insipidly (“a care package for the soul”), but the brief readings and accompanying practices belie that glibness. We’ll do one per day.

If you want to join in, look for the Facebook group “100 Ways to Save Your Life.” For some reason having to do with maintaining the privacy of people’s posts, it’s a closed group, but if the moderator has set it up the way he intended to, you’ll be able to request entry.

I committed to three practices during Lent: something I wanted to give up, something I wanted to add, and giving to a justice-making organization.

I gave up Facebook. That was not difficult, except once or twice when I really wanted to post a link to some outrageous item. My forays back onto FB in the past few days are marked by greater caution. I look up what friends are doing (I missed that), but I’m not checking every half-hour, and I’m noticing the difference between sharing information and killing time.

I added daily drawing, except that I really didn’t. I drew on one-third to one-half of the days of Lent. A big shift from my usual once-a-week, which has itself been a big shift from my practically-never, but daily got difficult. Watching my resistance was interesting. A lesson: do things like this early in the day. (Maybe instead of posting to my blog, ahem?)

I knew I wanted to give to an anti-slavery/trafficking organization, so I did some research. It’s hard to know which groups are most effective until I am more involved in the issue.  For now, for my donation, I decided on Not For Sale because it focuses on building a grassroots movement and has a particular outreach to faith communities, so I can also see a path for me to get involved. I had heard its president on Forum a few months ago and was impressed; in fact, that program was one of the things that put this issue in the front of my concerns. Also, it is based here in the Bay Area, which makes other kinds of involvement possible. Their home page just flashed that their next global summit will be in Silicon Valley in October, and I’ve signed up.

Adopting a spiritual practice from a tradition not your own is always a delicate matter. Lent was a part of my growing up because so many of my neighbors, teachers, and friends were Catholic, but I’m not Christian myself and so I would not describe myself as “observing Lent.” Also, knowing my oh-so-American attraction to self-improvement, I’m aware of the subtle misuse of the practice: “Try this for forty days and your life will be changed!” As if it were a new, sure-fire, forty-day diet.

Nevertheless, Lent appeals to me because of its teaching that sacrifice and discipline are part of how we grow closer to the holy; because of its invitation to walk a little way with Jesus, who is one of my heroes, and its reference to his suffering and doubt, in other words his being genuinely human; because of its echoes of the forty years’ wandering of the Israelites and the story of Jonah, one of my favorites in the Bible. And because it is a sound and useful practice. So here are my three disciplines for this period:

(1) Go on a Facebook fast. No checking in for the next 40 days (or 46, since I don’t plan to excuse myself on Sundays). We are only a day into Lent and I’ve had the mindless impulse to see what’s happening on FB at least a dozen times. Can I make each of those moments of impulse and turning away from the impulse a meditation on the question: how do I want to spend the next half hour of this wild and precious life?

(2) Draw for ten minutes every day. Again, Sundays not excepted. This is about both discipline and discovering, again and again, per the name of this blog, the sacred in everything.

(3) Give to charity (or better, give to justice!). I was thinking of making this a daily practice, but I think I’m pushing my limits on daily practices already, so I’m just going to give, in one lump, to a cause that’s been speaking to my heart: the end of human trafficking. I’m still researching which organizations are most effective.

According to the Stanford Blood Center, I’m a gallon donor. But they’re just being nice. They mean I’ve had over eight appointments. I think only about three of them have ended with my giving an actual pint of usable blood. I’m on the verge of giving up, and it has me feeling really sad.

To me, donating blood has always been one of those no-brainer acts of mercy, like giving clothes you don’t need anymore to a clothes closet instead of throwing them in the trash. That pint of blood is the difference between death and life to the recipient, while to the donor it costs nothing but the mildest of pain and a couple of hours (including the time spent getting to and from the center and eating the re-energizing snack of cookies and juice). Also, when my dad was badly injured some years ago, he received about 40 units of blood. He barely survived; blood donors gave me my father, and I’ve felt ever since that I owe the world some blood. I hear from blood center staff that that’s a common motivation.

Still, it took me years to start donating even after that, because I’ve always been queasy about needles, and have even been assured by nurses that they would really rather not deal with people who are shaky about the whole thing. However, when I shared my ambivalence with a nurse at church, she urged me to try at a blood center (as opposed to a blood drive). Not long after that conversation, I got pregnant, and while that ruled out donating for several months, the many blood tests involved made me sanguine (heh) about needles. I figured, how much worse could donating be?

So a couple of years ago, I donated for the first time, and it was true: it isn’t really any tougher than a blood test. And I felt fantastic. I bounced out of there, absurdly pleased with the little bruise on my arm, determined to donate once every eight weeks for the rest of my life.

However, it hasn’t gone so well. More often than not, I leave without having donated much blood, if any. I flunk the hemoglobin test, or no one can find a good vein, or the flow is so slow that I can’t fill a pint in the allotted time, or all of the above. I’m stubborn. I take iron, I drink my eight cups of water a day for three days before giving, I tell them up front that with my veins, they’re going to need a small needle and their best blood-drawer. But I’m getting discouraged. In October, when the very expert nurse said time was up, she said, “Maybe this isn’t your ministry.” Damn the woman. She knew just the language that would reach me, and she said it with such compassion. I barely got out of there without crying.

I decided to give it one last try, so last week I went in again (deliberately on a different day of the week, to avoid the mind-reading nurse), having observed a strict regimen of three days’ iron supplements and having drunk enough herbal tea over the same three days to float the QEII. The finger stick turned up a sub-par hemoglobin level. Sometimes you just need to warm up your hands, so the nurse asked if I wanted to do that and try again; I did; the second level was worse. I took a consolation cookie and went to work.

I had said that that was the last try, but I’ve got to give it one more. This time I’m going to take iron every day (which, clearly, I ought to be doing for my own health anyway), drink my eight cups every day (ditto), warm my hands before the hemoglobin test, the works. But it still might not be enough. It might be that this is just not one of the ways for me to bless the world. I wish that it bothered me purely because I want to help people, and not because my ego can’t abide my failing at anything I set out to do.