Goodness Weekly 7.01.2024
“I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”-Walt Whitman
What’s Good
This past week our campus was bustling with the energy of children as we had three separate summer camps activating our facilities. Sunset Ridge Church hosted Sunset Camp in the evenings where children learned about belonging in community and created their own worship service, Sprouts School hosted their third week of summer day camp and learned about all types of big animals, and Creator Camp hosted local youth to learn how to use digital technology in creative ways. What a great summer so far!
A Look at July
Creator Camp (June 10- July 3)
July 4th - Campus Closed
Lunchtime Yoga Flow with NYX Wellness, Mon-Fri at 12pm, upstairs in Room 200 Sign up for your class here.
For weekly hours of One Another Coffee, Scott’s Pizza, and NYX Yoga, please feel free to check our calendar and follow us on Instagram for any updates.
Interested in more of what’s happening at Sunset Ridge Church? Please consider subscribing to Views from the Ridge.
Unhurried Delight
Message from Hunter Bates, Worship Band Leader, Sunset Ridge Church
When was the last time you found yourself enjoying a moment of unhurried delight? Maybe you were savoring the words of a good poem, lounging wordlessly with your significant other, or lingering after paying your dinner bill to continue a conversation with a friend. What happened when your self-awareness returned? Did you feel a nagging sense that there was somewhere more important you needed to be, something more important you needed to be doing?
In a recent episode of On Being, Krista Tippet interviewed poet Ross Gay about The Book of Delights, his collection of mini-essays on the ordinary joys that we can find everywhere if we slow down and pay attention. In one such essay, “Loitering is Delight,” Gay interrogates the concept of loitering and how our American culture has criminalized this behavior (particularly for nonwhite folk) because it is “unproductive” and “nonconsumptive.” We all feel pressure, both internally and externally, to hurry-hurry and extract as much as we can from the day. Clearly I’m not the only one wrestling with this. Just last week Mae wrote about the struggle to balance fun and productivity in the summer, and in October Jess wrote about hustle culture and the fruits of that lifestyle.
But our intrinsic value and quality of life are about more than what we produce and consume. In The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, Julia Cameron writes, “the quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” This kind of truth is, of course, easier to understand than to live by. We live in a fast-paced, technologically advanced world that is competing for more and more of our attention. Our responsibilities and stage of life also dictate the degree to which we are able to engage in unhurried delight—let’s just say “unhurried” would not be one of the top words I would use to describe my life with two toddlers.
The best tools I have learned for embodying this frame of mind are centering prayer (or meditation) and art. Centering prayer has the power to quiet the restless “monkey mind” and enables one to pay attention and be present. I will never forget my first experience with 20 minutes of centering prayer about 15 years ago at a church in Austin. When I emerged from the sanctuary, I noticed—as if for the first time!—the sparkle of the sunlight on the trees and the warmth of the evening air on my skin.This experience showed me just how disembodied and unmindful I can be when I am sleepwalking through life.
Art can also have a profound effect on redirecting our attention and cultivating mindfulness. The Whitman quote above is from one of my favorite poems, “Song of Myself.” Notice how Whitman beckons his soul by loafing, inviting, and being at ease. In my experience that is the best posture for communing with God and being awake to the world around us. As the worship band leader for Sunest Ridge Church’s 11 a.m. service, I am intentional about selecting songs that express this posture for the Open Space portion of our service, songs like “Be Still,” “Slow Me Down,” “Inner Room,” and “Not in a Hurry.” Check out this Open Space Spotify playlist to hear some of the songs we play in this vein.
Wherever you find yourself this summer, may you slow down and notice with delight the beauty and magic in the mundane.
Inhale:
May I find delight
Exhale:
in lounging wordlessly.
