Reverie Saves the Day

I am sitting with my back against an old white oak, taking in the scenery with a pile of unopened mail on my lap. This is unusual behavior, since my daily trips to and from the mailbox are typically brisk enough to be aerobic. There are always clothes to wash and weeds to pull. There are always messages to answer and good deeds to do. As often as I say I believe in the primacy of being over doing, my actions call me out. If a person's Higher Power can be described as whatever she spends most of her time thinking about, relying on, and giving the most energy to, then the name of mine is Getting Things Done. Even when I remember to add "Nothing" to the list, it always ends up at the bottom—the one thing I never get around to.

Over the years I’ve met with groups of people engaged in strenuous, meaningful work. Many were pastors. Others were health care workers, hospice chaplains, and community organizers. Some were working parents of young children or caregivers for their own parents. More than a few served in two or three of these roles at the same time. When we got together, the purpose of our meeting (whether announced or implied) was to strengthen the spiritual muscles we needed to keep doing our jobs.

In most settings, this kind of bodybuilding involved a catalog of spiritual exercises both old and new. Centering prayer, journaling, and Lectio Divina were on the list, along with mindful walking, hatha yoga, positive affirmations, and spiritual direction. Established practices like these were all strengthening in one way or another, not least because they brought lone rangers into community with other practitioners. Focused effort fueled bursts of energy. New habits produced new insights. But it did not take long to discover the problem.

I could be wrong about this, since the first thing that stood out about these people was their willingness to give themselves away on a daily basis. The second thing was hiding behind fake greenery, trying not to call attention to itself, though its muffled bleat was impossible to ignore. I recognized the sound because I had made it myself, caught in the bramble thicket of not having done enough. It was the sound of human beings stuck in their own purposefulness.

Giving people like that more do to wasn't going to change anything, even if we called it spiritual purpose. Neither was colluding with them in their desire to be more purposeful than they already were. I needed a trick question that would free a deeper desire.

My first few tries went nowhere. How do you spend your time off? (What time off?) What’s your reward for working so hard? What would you miss if you didn’t do it? (You make it sound like I have a choice.) Then I found one that worked like a can opener. What pastime gives you life that you never take time to do?

It was a written assignment, not a spoken one, on the assumption that folks might want some privacy to answer a question like that, but when I asked who wanted to share, hands went up all over the room. The first two people started with demurrals.

“I know there isn’t anything particularly spiritual about this, but…”

“This probably isn’t what you were looking for, but…”

What followed was so fresh and unconstrained that there were no more qualms. The answers poured forth—so particular to each person’s life, so perfectly useless in the best kind of way—that I can no longer remember what sorts of things were said. All I remember are the lit faces of those who said them, lighting up other faces all around the room. By the time the last person had finished, we were late for lunch, but no one cared.

There was no follow-up assignment. No one was required to “do” anything with their answer or find a way to put it to work. It was enough to have remembered the way of life and taken some time to revel in it.

Someone mentioned the word “reverie” to me last week—a word I hadn’t heard in ages. It doesn't show up in English translations of the Bible, so there has never been any reason to find out what it meant in ancient Hebrew or Greek. It never came up in my seminary education, which suggests it has no theological usefulness. Best of all, it has never been mentioned to me as a spiritual practice, which means I have no idea how I am supposed to do it or what benefit it is supposed to yield.

With all of that ignorance in my pocket, I am latching onto the word as the name for what I am doing when I am not doing anything purposeful. Reverie lets me sit on the flat stone in the river where all I do is watch the river run. It washes over me when I pass the small graveyard in the woods where generations of dear animals lie. It is always available at the base of the old white oak, which has never once asked me to get up and go do something useful.

As my vision softens and my mind drifts, even the biggest thought weighs so little that a breeze takes it away, making room to notice how many colors of green there are in the trees that were bare bones just weeks ago. My father would have loved sitting here with me. How long has he been gone? There are no clocks in the heart. For a moment I can hear mine beating in my ears before the sound of an airplane takes over and I wonder who is up there, looking out the windows so far above my head.

There’s a reason why people speak of being “lost in reverie,” but there’s no word for what is found there, though a lot of people have tried. Gaston Bachelard, whose books include The Poetics of Reverie, said, “Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.”

I’d say more about that, but then I’d be messing with your reverie. Maybe it's enough to give you a word for what you're doing when you're doing nothing but feeling the rush of plenty into your soul. Everything else is extra.