Everyday rituals

During Travis's Maundy Thursday homily, he challenged us to consider what kinds of everyday ritual can we create or adapt to aid us in our spiritual growth. Karen Kelsey had previously mentioned her newly acquired habit of singing "I am gonna live so God can use me" while washing her hands.

Below is what came to mind for me - how about you? If you have something worth sharing, please consider writing a blog post about it.

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OK. Let’s see if I can do this without revealing my passwords that would give you comprehensive access to my email account and bank accounts! For the last few years I’ve followed the widely offered advice of creating passwords that are relatively long nonsense “passphrases,” using a key that means something to me and to me only. I tend to adapt arbitrary phrases that flit across my consciousness by taking the initial letters of the words and shaping them into a phrase. “Don’t forget to get milks and eggs” could become “Dftgmae” for instance. More recently, I’ve been creating passwords (and recycling them more than I ought) from resonant lines of poetry or unusually well-crafted song lyrics.

But over time I’ve begun to think that opting for a mundane phrase that is near to hand is a missed opportunity. The act of typing a password is akin to chanting a mantra – a semi-automatic act that hovers between conscious and subconscious thought, something you do quite often, perhaps even multiple times a day, that shapes your outlook and orientation toward the world. 

So here’s how you might use it to engage the spiritual realm: If I were to take the beautiful visionary insight of medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” that could be rendered as “asbwaamotsbw.” Most passwords also require a number and a symbol. Let’s add an exclamation point just to be really emphatic and then we can also add the author’s name (Julian of Norwich, abbreviated to JoN), and the date of her birth (1342). String it all together and you have “asbwaamotsbw!JoN1342.” That’s impossible to guess, very hard to hack, but not impossible to remember. That is, as long as you know the key.

This approach is admittedly aspirational – most of my passwords are currently derived from whimsical rather than cosmic ideas. But think of the possibilities of forcing yourself to onto a different plane, momentarily wrestling with a theological idea, centering yourself each time you log into an online account. With the right phrase, could this be considered a form of prayer? I’m no theologian, but I think so.

Let’s generate some more passwords.

“Batwhatfr4tsb”: Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisified

“Bs&ktiaG”: Be still and know that I am God

Or the big question of Easter, which is Jesus’s retort to Pontius Pilate: “Wdysia?”: Who do you say I am?

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Again, any thoughts on your everyday rituals can be sent this way - timwoodock [AT] speedpost.net - to be published in this space. (TW)