Space, spaciousness and other spatial things
Inner vacancy
Hey friends,
Today I have a few recollections for you, loosely connected by the words space and spaciousness.
As a high school youth minister, my schedule was nothing but spacious. Recess and lunch were peak ministry minutes, but save the odd mass or meeting, my days had a stench of the Michael Scott to them:
Ever the innovator, I connected a scheme - devious and dastardly - to maintain the facade of busyness and justify my ongoing employment. Namely, I would establish an empire of content creation, consisting of a weekly newsletter (with no less than 3 recurring segments) and an Ezra Klein style interview podcast with staff and student guests.
While my newsletter only attracted a moderate following, my podcast certainly succeeded in achieving meme status - for a while I could scarcely traverse a corridor without fielding a request for an appearance. This status only increased when the principal launched a competitor show, prompting widespread speculation (which I did nothing to discourage) that he was threatened by the astronomic popularity of my media empire.
Nowadays when I bump into old students around the traps and we indulge in a spot of reminiscing, it’s frequently the first thing they mention. Which is either a ringing endorsement of my content creation skills, or a damning indictment of the rest of my ‘ministry.’
My job these days is considerably less spacious, as the current state of my desk might attest to:
Even though the job of a high school English teacher is cramped, the odd pocket of space still opens up, and more than a few opportunities for playfulness.
Recently, confiding in my Year 12s my fear of becoming ‘unc’, I launched a plan - devious and dastardly - to stay cool and hip. Our lesson was, I told them, going to focus on improving essay contentions. But not anymore. Instead, we were going to contention-maxx, so well in fact that, come exam time, we’d be ready to mog the Victorian Curriculum & Assessment Authority.
A few days later, as part of a Year 11 unit on biographical writing, we looked at the art of the ‘profile piece.’ In a fit of masochism, I instructed them to write a piece profiling me. The cusp of Friday lunchtime is rarely a window of peak productivity, but they took to this task with what I can only describe as an evil level of diligence. Two excerpts:
“When Daniel Crowley meets you (and I can assure you he doesn’t want to), the first thing he will make you do is write an essay. As we follow him around the school, he hands out coursework like candy, letting students know the due date is yesterday.”
Mr Crowley walked around the school splashing into puddles, one hand holding a random drink and another holding 17 worksheets that are probably older than the school itself.
“Why are you following me?” he said, dropping his papers.
“Because I can!”
He sighed the sigh of a man who marks too many essays.
And, in an opening line I will fondly recall for the rest of my time on earth:
Tall, slender, and kind of huge - but not fat, just really tall.
Driving home this Monday, after another successful day of mogging and splashing into puddles, I listened to Padraig O Tuama’s appearance on Fr James Martin’s podcast. With signature eloquence and elegance, he spoke about his upbringing in a Charismatic Catholic community, and the conversion therapy and exorcisms he was subjected to in order to ‘cure’ his homosexuality. After a period of utter anguish and exhaustion in his 20s, he underwent a “spiritual conversion”, “a great letting go of fear” that helped him find his vocation as a poet:
I felt embraced by a spaciousness that was able to go beyond the question of definition, that had space for my rage and my doubt and my poetry and the line breaks that poetry requires… I felt like my curiosity, whatever intelligence I have, whatever pain I had, all of it could find an ease of expression.
I was particularly struck by the word he used to describe this experience: not healing, not closure, not acceptance. Spaciousness. Nothing needs to be resolved; we just need space to house all of our confusion.
In most catalogues of virtue, spaciousness is not named, let alone acclaimed. But it is, I think, a rather beautiful ambition to hold for one’s inner life: a sense of vacancy and hospitality, keeping a room made up for the unexpected visitor.
We are used to measuring ourselves through achievements and activities and accolades. But what might it look like to instead cultivate space? What might it open up?
I am reminded here of the wisdom of the Trappist monk Paul Quenon, which has becoming something of a creed for me of late:
Life is too plentiful to be limited by our narrow expectations. Wait and watch and it will show itself in many forms, as it did this morning when I awoke and the clouds took on colour and the birds crossed my sight.
In this openness I wait, and what emerges is a gift of the openness.
What happens when we abandon our narrow expectations, our aversion to surprise, our compulsion to judge and assess and appraise? Many things. Beauty and rage and love and doubt, fun and games and clouds and colour.
In this openness I wait. May I - may we all - be spacious!