So I've diarrised films seen and books read as per usual; I've also been finding the prayer app 'Pray As You Go' (available on a number of platforms) useful lately in order to build at least some minimal level of daily spiritual practice into a busy life (busy with work, family etc; occasional, very occasional, political activity; heck, even writing once in a while).
In a word, it presents you daily with a ten to fifteen minute programme of spiritual music (e.g. Taize, plainchant, sometimes the quieter end of the kind of 'contemporary Christian music' you'd hear on Premier or UCB), prayers/ reflections, and Bible readings (drawn from the Anglican lectionary; at least, I think so; I leave the technicalities of that sort of thing to the wife). If you're also a Christian, I commend it to you.
Incidentally (as we're encouraged to be at least minimally open about our spiritual predicaments and mental health 'journeys' these days): a few years ago - pre-Brexit pre-Trump but the war in Syria and North Korean nuclear tests were already 'things' - I found myself highly anxious about world events. Sleepless. Hypervigilant. I asked, through the Anglican church I was then attending, whether I could meet with a spiritual director. Some people, dimly aware of spiritual directors (like they're dimly aware that you can request virtually any book in print from your local public library through inter-library loans for just a few quid... but then, why would you? it's a life hack, you're welcome) think they're just for clergy; they're not; and I've long seen my own work (protecting my own secret identity here, but it's sort of at the interface between education and the caring professions) as a form of ministry.
The chap I met with was extremely helpful and, through talking and praying with me, helped to sort this out. He shared some of his own life experiences; he'd been away at boarding school at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he'd had to deal with that while still a teenager. Listening to me talk about what matters to me, what draws me (what calls to me, you might say; do make time for Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning if you haven't yet; in narrating how he survived some of the worst human experiences imaginable, he also discusses why you should attend to and not dismiss your own persistent daydreams), he suggested that I could at some future point 'read into' Franciscan spirituality as something which aligns well with the sense of an ecological perspective in Christianity, Christianity as 'an option for the poor' etc. This is something I still haven't fully unpacked, "and that's okay" (as we also like to say to one another in group therapy); it's a 'could' and not a 'should'. "Do or not do, there is no try" (Yoda); "sufficient unto the day" (Jesus), etc.
The punchline to this is that, towards the end of our half dozen or so times of meeting together, my spiritual director - who'd raised a family, had grandchildren, was retired after a career in industry; don't think that he was a hermit on a mountain top - said, casually, "of course, I'm somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan myself, politically." This was funny and, like all good jokes, lent a new perspective to the view: can we reach across what otherwise divides us? Can we put ourselves to one side in the service of others? We were talking just the other night around a campfire at Journeyman (which I attend, volunteer for, am part of; it's available to those of all faiths and none, but only to those who are or self-identity as male; there are good pragmatic and in no sense antifeminist reasons for that and perhaps that's a topic for another blog post; there's a lot of Jung in Journeyman's embodied understanding of the human journey) about mentoring we ourselves had both received and offered; that's what brought all this to mind, I think.
