Remember the old “I Love Lucy” show where Lucy and Ricky’s best friends live just down the hall in the same apartment building? Remember how when the Ricardos moved to Connecticut, the Mertzes moved with them. (Oh you don't? You are young. Don't you have cable? You've never seen "Nick at Nite"? But, I digress.)
For most of my adult years, living in the city, I was always jealous of people who had their best friends as next door neighbors. Which is one of the reasons that I am so glad that Beth and I were called to San Clemente. I have great neighbors and a couple of my best friends are only a couple of blocks away. But I realize that this idyllic situation isn't normal and that it is even hard for us to have time to hang with the people who are best for our souls.
While the purpose of the posts in this series has been to encourage the “spiritual discipline of proximity”, or (hanging out with people for Christ’s sake), I have been weaving through them some perspectives on camps and retreats. Partly because I began this series of posts immediately after returning from a men’s retreat where I spoke on Showtime, but also because while there I was struck again that what most of the men most enjoyed was just spending time with each other. They ate long meals, they talked in small groups, they stayed up late at night, they hiked and played horsehoes, they sat around the fire reading the paper and talking sports, they just hung out. (Oh, they did listen to a speaker and sang together in worship, but that seemed mostly like grist for the conversational mill.)
And what I have learned along the way is that while the favorite place for most of us to hang out is at home (we all love our own bed, our favorite chair, etc.), it is exactly when we are in the warp and woof of home life that we spend the least amount of time with people developing the kinds of friendships where we share and explore our souls. Which is often what we do best “on retreats.”
This is why, oddly enough, we actually need “time away” to develop the abilities and even aptitudes for true deep fellowship. In other words, the spiritual discipline of hanging out is (oddly enough) hardest to practice “at home.” For so many of us, our homes are actually quite disconnected from each other. We don’t often live near our best friends. Our neighbors are those nearest to us, but our friends are often a long way away. Even those of us who are blessed to live in great smaller towns have a more difficult time even seeing the people whom we most benefit from hanging with every day.
At our church we have developed an entire midweek program and ethos around hanging out together one night a week called Big Wednesday. It’s kind of like a Wednesday evening retreat every week. We have programs for the kids and teenagers, classes of all kinds from exercise to Spanish lessons to parenting classes to Bible studies, we have a great contemplative worship service, but mostly we have pie. We encourage everyone in our church to come, have dinner, attend a class or worship service and then hang out and have pie.
For those who do, it is as if we have a brief moment of being the Ricardos and the Mertzes. We are neighbors hanging out together, having conversations around tables about the things in our lives or the lessons we have just learned that our forming our souls.
That is, if we take the time to stop running long enough to eat a piece of pie. Which is what I will address tomorrow.
