Christianity Off the Matix By Diana V. Morgan During my childhood my parents considered Christian rituals like fish on Fridays or self-denial at Lent to be quaintly anachronistic. Friday evenings when I was 11 or 12, my mom, emboldened by a moonlit air, was more likely to turn up the radio and dance in her purple jumpsuit than to meditate or pray. She and my father were not given to spiritual selfdiscipline. They didn’t understand that Lent done right is not a restraint but a spiritual dance. Lent meant more to me once I began to practice yoga. Yoga is about doing poses, but it is also about how you live your life. As a yoga teacher I tell my students to live their yoga “off the mat.” Some practice breathing exercises in elevators and chant Om in the car. Lent provides an opportunity to practice Christianity off the mat; to take our church religion home for the entire month. We may be called to renunciation, to service to others, or to opening up a poem each morning. We live with our Christianity off the mat to make it our own. Lent takes place during the 40 days prior to Easter, representing the period toward the end of Jesus’ life when he retreated to the desert to pray and meditate. Jesus prepared himself for his final sacrifice with no food or companion other than the barren cliffs of the Judean Desert and the temptations of Satan. In the past I have fasted during Lent by avoiding meat. I want to suffer to a small degree the sting of Jesus’ sacrifice. I am likely to stop dead in my tracks when I encounter the aroma of a co-worker’s warm ham panini. During these few seconds of longing I know myself better - I sniff out my human desires and connect to Jesus’ torment or the joined sacrifice of other Christians during Lent. Hunger reminds me to refocus and connect with God. During the non-Lent part of the year, I snuggle up to my iPad under the bed covers and watch TV shows on Hulu, the online-TV service, until late at night. Last year for Lent I gave up watching Hulu. I was miserable. From Ash Wednesday to Easter my mind was like a dog on the scent of a rabbit. I thought about Hulu as soon as I woke up and when I went to bed. I calculated the number of days until the next installment of Modern Family—and sighed at missing the Dunphys family as if the characters themselves had kicked me out.
Lent 2013
Yoga has given me a better handle on Lent because it teaches me to still my mind. I quiet my mind through the practice of physical poses and through nonattachment to things like missing episodes of Modern Family. I also pray each morning. I sit in bed and try to come into a place of stillness. There are many techniques for achieving stillness such as meditating, walking or painting, but yoga and prayer work for me. The Anglican poet T.S. Eliot believed that yoga’s still point is also the place of Christian grace. “At the still point, there the dance is, …. Neither movement from nor towards Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. (Four Quartets) Union with God is a dance. The mind’s stillness is the dance floor. Lent provides the dance partner, the suffering Christ. In the still point, connection with God is the ecstasy. It is a fission of the soul—formed and directed by prayer. The discipline of prayer draws me into contact with the divine, like a contained nuclear explosion or like a dance with Christ. Taking your Christianity home with you during Lent isn’t easy. Saint Paul knew how tough it is to live Christianity off the mat. In the years following Jesus’ death, he wrote to Christian converts living among pagans in Rome. He told them they should avoid distracting influences, however attractive: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” ( Rom. 12:2) (continued next page)
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