Loose Change, Too

God, Finding God, and the Search for God

2012-01-29T12:09:00.003-05:00

The first thing that has to go is God. This is to say our idea of God, but with us there is no separation. To our way of thinking, our idea of God IS God, so God has to go. God is not a fact. God is the supreme value, the value before which all other values pale and recede. God is the Prime Necessity at the heart of being, and this Prime Necessity which we call God is indistinguishable from who we are called to be.

Joseph Campbell has said, “This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the one you are capable of becoming.” Before you leap to call this heresy, consider:

Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” “Yes, well,” you say, “Jesus was the Son of God.” To which I would say, “Jesus never called himself the “Son of God.” He always referred to himself as the “Son of Man,” a phrase that easily lends itself to the translation: “a human being.” Stay with me here. In John, Jesus prays, “That they (that is, his followers) might be one even as we are one, thou in me and I in thee.” And the command, which somehow didn’t make the top ten, that God gives the people in the Old Testament is “You must be holy as I am Holy!” And, again, "You must be perfect as I am perfect." In other words, "You must be as I am!" In the New Testament, Paul declares, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Clearly, the position that we must become the God we worship is not foreign to Biblical theology.

The call of God, then, is the call to become who we are, to be ourselves—our Self—the Self we are capable of being. The spiritual journey is the hero’s journey, the spiritual quest is the search for the Promised Land and for the Holy Grail. It is described by T.S. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

The face of God is a mirror reflecting those who behold the face of God. Thou Art That. Amen! Ain't it so!

Sermon at South Mecklenburg Presbyterian Church

2011-08-07T15:45:00.001-04:00

Luke 9:23-25 – Then he said to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world but lose or forfeit themselves?”

Homer, in The Odyssey, has Odysseus say: "I will stay with it and endure through suffering hardship / and once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces, then I will swim."

A sermon should help you with your life and help you with your relationship with God. These are not two things. These are one thing. Jacob Bronowski said, “If you want to know the truth, you have to live in certain ways.” He meant you have to live truthfully. You can’t know the truth if you are kidding yourself about wanting to know the truth, if you aren’t willing to look the truth straight in the eye. If, in the words of Col. Nathan P. Jessup in the movie A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth,” you’ll never know the truth.

We cannot say we are seeking the truth when we are seeking only to confirm our convictions, whether those convictions pertain to the superiority of the Arian race or to the superiority of orthodox Christian dogma. If we live in the service of truth, we have to be open to what our explorations uncover, to what our experience shows us to be true, no matter what our preferences might be. We have to stand apart from our assumptions and prejudices—our prejudgments—in order to know the truth. We have to take the blinders off and live in ways that are truthful—in ways that do not deny or hide from any aspect of truth—if we want to know the truth.

The Bronowski principle applies to knowing God. If we want to know God, we have to live in certain ways. If we want to know God, we have to live a godly life, but. This does not mean what you think it means.

You think a godly life is morally pure. Not so. Jesus was called a glutton and a wine bibber, and a son of Satan. Jesus was accused of blasphemy, heresy and sedition. Jesus was out of accord with every Book of Order of his day. Jesus was as far from the traditional understanding of moral purity as a person could be. The scribes and Pharisees, on the other hand, were morally pure to the core—as to keeping the Law they were perfect—and they knew nothing of God.

A godly life has nothing to do with moral purity. A godly life has everything to do with living so aligned with the life that is truly our life to live, with the life that needs us to live it because only we can live it—so intent on doing what truly needs to be done in the situation as it arises—that God couldn’t live it any better than we are living it, couldn’t do it any better than we are doing it. When we live like that—living the life that is our life to live and doing what truly needs to be done in the situation as it arises—we say along with Jesus, “The Father and I are one.” We are one with the Father when we are one with the life that is our life to live.

When a sermon helps you live the life that is your life to live, it helps you with your relationship with God. When it helps you with your relationship with God, it helps you with the life that is your life to live. Our life flows from our relationship with God, our relationship with God flows from our life. The two things are one. But, there is a problem.

The problem is that the life that is our life to live is not the life we have in mind for ourselves. This was Adam’s and Eve’s problem, and it is our problem. We suffer from a conflict of interest at the core. There is the life we are built for—the life that needs us to live it—and there is the life we want to live, the life we dream of living, the life we wish were our life to live. Which life will it be? Whose side are we on?

This is a tough one, this whose side are we on question, but if we get it right, it’s smooth sailing all the way. It’s a hard one to get right because we think we know what we are doing. We think we know best. We think we have our true interest at heart. All of this in complete denial of the evidence to the contrary, which establishes without the slightest doubt that fooling ourselves is what we do best, no, telling ourselves what we want to hear is what we do best, no, letting ourselves off the hook is what we do best, no, shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best... If anything is clear about us it is that we do not have our own best interest at heart but we are sure that we do. It is hard for us to give that up, to hand that over, to say, along with Jesus, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” This is the hardest thing. We need help with it. And that’s exactly what we get, the help we need, if we have what it takes to take what is offered.

Carl Jung says, “In every one of us there is another whom we do not know.” I call this other within our “Invisible Twin.” Our Invisible Twin knows who we are and who we are to be, what the life is that is our life to live, and what kind of help we need to live it—and is there to offer it, but. We want nothing to do with this invisible other. We want what we want and not what we ought to want. This is my definition of sin, by the way, wanting what we want and not what we ought to want. I have another definition of sin that means the same thing: Sin is being wrong about what’s important. We think the wrong things are important. It takes a lot of living to get all of this straight. We are stubborn to a fault, and are sure that what we want IS important, so it takes a while.

And all the while, our Invisible Twin knows what’s what—what we ought to want, what’s truly important, what we ought to be doing with our lives. But, we’ll have none of it. We know what we want and we will have it or else. This makes the transition from the life that we want to live to the life that is truly ours to live like dying. It is a terrible thing to get to the point of saying along with Jesus, “Thy will, not mine be done.” We have to be at the end of our rope to say that, to hit bottom. We have to die to say that—not literally, but metaphorically. It is a handing over of ourselves, of all that we have thought was important. It is a surrender, a recognition that we aren’t all that smart after all and need help with our lives. It is at this point that our Invisible Twin provides us with exactly the help we need.

Who is this Invisible Twin? You could call him Jesus, the Son of God, the Christ within. Or you could call her Mary, the Mother of God. Or you could call this Twin the Holy Spirit that blows where it will. Or you could call our Twin, as Jesus did, “the Father.” Our Twin is as close to God as we can get, and is as much of God as we may be able to know. Our Invisible Twin stands ready to help us with all that we need to live the life that is our life to live, to do what needs to be done in serving what is truly important in each situation as it arises, all our life long. “In each of us there is another, whom we do not know.” And it is our responsibility to know her, to know him, to know what she knows, to know what he knows, and with her help, with his help, to find the life that is truly our life to live and live it.

Now, the life that is our life to live may have nothing to do with what we do to pay the bills. We may pay the bills with one life and live the life that is truly our life to live with another life. We pay the bills with our day job and do the work that is truly ours to do on the side, after hours, as we are able. We have to work it out, when to do what. Working it out involves integrating the opposites, reconciling the contradictions, managing our responsibilities, coming to terms with how things are and how they also are... This is not easy. This is the Hero’s Journey, the Spiritual Quest—not a soft stroll through the flowers of spring.

All of the epic hero stories are about this very thing. They are about us, the life that is our life to live, and the life we wish were ours to live. We stand between two lives, which do we choose? Whose side are we on? The struggle here is with ourselves. This is Jesus in the wilderness struggling with which life he is going to live, and again in Gethsemane, same struggle. Which life is it going to be? Joseph Campbell said, “It took the Cyclops to bring out the hero in Ulysses.” The Cyclops has many manifestations. Deciding which life we are going to live in the moment of our living is one manifestation of the Cyclops in our life. Struggling to live the life that is our life to live within the terms and conditions of our life is another manifestation of the Cyclops. We have no reason to expect it to be easy. Luke Skywalker against the Dark Side, Harry Potter against Voldemort, Frodo against Sauron, and you against all that is not easy about your life. This is how things are. Do not let it get you down.

You have all you need to do what needs to be done in each situation as it arises. You have an Invisible Twin who is quite able to help you in the work that is yours to do. You can rely upon her, upon him, entirely. Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.” And he said, “I will not abandon you or leave you desolate.” Jesus came to connect us with the life that is our life to live by living out before us the life that was his life to live, trusting us to get the idea. True life, abundant life, is found in living the life that needs us to live it, the life that we are built to live, born to live—the life that only we can live. Our work, the Hero’s Journey and the Spiritual Quest—all these are the same thing—is to find our life and live it. No other life will do.

Jesus does not offer us abundant life so that we can go our merry way doing the things that are important to us. Those who would be his disciples must pick up their cross daily and follow him—and their cross is the burden of living the life that is their life to live, not some other, better, brighter, shinier life. Our cross is bringing forth the life that needs us to live it within the terms and conditions of life as it is. The cross is a metaphor for how difficult it is to integrate the opposites and reconcile the contradictions and work it all out. The help that we get from the invisible world does not make things easy—it enables us to do what is hard.

Your parents divorce, or your job is outsourced to India, or the lab report confirms a malignancy. Makes you want to quit. Makes you want to take off your glove and slam it into the dust and say, “If you don’t stop hitting me these hard ground balls, I’m done with this game!” Look, this is heroic stuff that we are doing. Frodo felt the same way we feel. So did Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker and Jesus. But, when we put on the uniform, and pick up the glove, and step onto the field, we have to expect hard ground balls, and be ready for one right after another. When we get out of bed each morning and step into our lives, we have to expect it to not be easy. This is hero’s work we are doing. Of course, it will not be easy!

James Hollis says that his experience playing tackle on his high school football team taught him that no matter how badly he got run over by the opposing lineman on the last play, he had to get up and get ready for the next play. This is how our life is. This is the way things are. It isn’t fair and it isn’t fun much of the time, but this is it—we have to live the life that needs us to live it within this context and these circumstances. And do it every day for the rest of our lives. The good news is that we have all we need to do it IF we will believe that we do, and trust it to be so, and act like it is.

Joseph Campbell says, “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.” That’s all we need to know. When we are living the life that needs us to live it, we are on the beam. When we are doing what truly needs us to do it in each situation as it arises, we are on the beam. When we are on the beam we find what we need to live the life that only we can live. We may not find more than we need, but we will find what we need. This is the lesson of the manna in the wilderness, and of Jesus’ promise, “I will not leave you desolate.” It does not apply to us when we live any old way we want, only when we step on the beam and say from the heart, “Thy will, not mine, be done,” and live to align ourselves with what our Invisible Twin knows is the path with our name on it.

If you are going to believe in anything, believe in the beam, in the life that needs you to live it, in the path with your name on it, and in the “invisible means of support” that is always with us to assist us along the way. Trust that you will have all you need as you work to find your life and live it—to stay on the beam. Your life may not be easy, but the world will be transformed by your work, and your life will be interesting and meaningful all the way—which would never have been the case if you had lolled poolside the whole time, ordering fruit smoothies.

2011-07-28T09:56:00.001-04:00

Ground Rules for A

Community of Innocence

Communities of Innocence are innocent in the sense that they have no interest, investment, or stake in their members—they do not seek to exploit us in any way. The community simply receives us well, listens to us attentively, asks us questions that enable us to say what we have to say, and tells us what it has learned through its experience that may be helpful in our situation. That's it. What we do with all of this is up to us. Progress along the path cannot be hurried. We proceed at our own pace, in our own time, waking up as we are able. The community of innocence does not try to hurry us along, but accompanies us kindly, with compassion, having nothing to gain and nothing to lose. We speak to hear what we have to say, not to tell others what they need to hear. We find the way together by listening one another to the truth of our lives.

Parker Palmer says, “There are ‘two key Quaker convictions’ upon which this approach is based: Our guidance comes not from external authority but from our Inner Teacher; and we need community to help us clarify and amplify the Inner Teacher’s voice. And Rumi says, “If you are not here with us in good faith, you are doing terrible damage.”

The Confidentiality Rule:

Everything Said Here Stays Here. Everything said here one week stays here that week. We won’t ask anyone to update us on something she, or he, has talked about in the past. If anyone wants to say more about something she, or he, said in a previous conversation, she, or he, can be trusted to do that without inquiry from others. And no one will take the reserve of the group as an indication of a lack of interest or concern.

The Don’t Fix-it Rule:

No Fixing

No Saving

No Advising

No Setting Anyone Straight

No Confronting

No Correcting

No Converting

No Condemning

No Excommunicating

No Telling Another What We Think He, or She, Needs To Hear

The Pass On Anything

At Any Time Rule:

No one has to say anything ever. You can pass on anything at any time. “I think I’ll pass on that,” is always an appropriate response.

The Comfort Rule:

The comfort rule always applies. Live to be appropriately comfortable at all times.

Good Advice 0001

2011-05-04T16:24:00.007-04:00

Be aware of what you throw away. Notice every time you dismiss something that catches your eye, or reject something that appears to be useless or repulsive. Every variety of light is the perfect light for some subject. The work of photography is finding the subject that is suited for the light we have to work with. Everything has a hidden side. Your task is to find the blessing.

Photography is about going back to the good places, looking again at what you have seen a hundred times already. Don't think you have seen anything worth seeing just because you've looked it over once or twice. Anything worth seeing once is worth looking at again. Go look. See what happens. It's your arrogance that lets you get by with thinking you know what you will see and it won't be much. Allow yourself to be fooled. Again and again.

What we see is a function of how we look, of what we look at, of what we look for, of the filters we place between ourselves and what's there, before us, waiting to be seen. We have to be receptive to receive what is being offered to us.

2011-03-28T07:45:00.000-04:00

Life Comes Around

by Jim Dollar

Life is always coming along, coming around, winking at us, flirting with us, asking us if we want to hang out with it for a while.

Is this thing really life or just another pretty face? It's hard to know up front. We have to hang out with it for a while.

Or we can turn it down and go back to reading our book. If it's life, it will come back around in time.

The trouble with putting life off is that we get out of the practice of being alive and settle into being mostly dead. It’s easier to stay dead that way.

Once we get used to being dead, we don't notice life when it walks right up and plants a big, juicy, wet one right on our kisser.

We don't want to get used to being dead. We always want to be looking for life, waiting for life, ready for life, wondering what's taking so long.

While we wait for life to come around, we have to practice being alive, doing the things that are life for us, that have a charge to them.

We have to keep some charged things lying about so we can take them up and practice being alive. Cameras are charged for me. I take photos.

Ideas are charged for me. I write things down. Cooking is charged. I stir something up. Outside is charged. I take a walk. I practice being alive, waiting for life.

I want to stay sharp, keep my edge, ready to tag along with life when it comes around, winking, blowing kisses, saying, "How 'bout me, honey?”

Another Sermon at Milton Presbyterian Church

2011-03-27T13:47:00.001-04:00

We want the Water of Life so that we might do what we want to do: live the life we have in mind. The gift of water is connected with the gift of life. Water for the life we are to live comes forth from that life as we live it. This is the message of the water from the rock. We will find what we need when we live in the service of what has need of us, but we may never have more than we need. This is the message of the manna in the wilderness. Within this life, there is that life. Within that one, this one. We pull that one into this one, live this one on the basis of that one—find what we need to live this one in our association with that one, like water from the rock.

To drink the water Jesus offers we have to become who Jesus was. Jesus does not quench our thirst so that we can go our merry way about the things that are important to us. Those who would be his disciples must pick up their cross daily and follow him—and their cross is the burden of bringing forth their, our, Gift, our Genius, our destiny. Our cross is the price we pay to serve the Gift, the Genius, that is ours to serve—the price we pay to live the life that is ours to live within the here and now of our lives.

All of the epic hero stories are about us, the Gift, and our life. We struggle to bring forth our Gift, our Genius, within the context and circumstances of our life the way Ulysses struggled with the Cyclops. But, we avoid the struggle by putting our service to the Gift on hold until our ducks are in a row, money is in the bank, the kids are out of college, the world is receptive. The truth is that we have no intention of serving the Gift. We have bigger fish to fry. We have our wishes, wants, desires, ambitions, interests, inclinations, etc. to serve.

I talk about serving the Gift with no profit in mind and someone else talks about the Law of Attraction with nothing but profit in mind. Who has the audience? Whoever promises profit profits. Profit at any price is the rule of life. If a profit can be made, a profit will be made. The Gift has to be profitable for us to be interested, it has to benefit us in some immediate, substantial way. There is a problem here.

The problem is that the Gift is NOT profitable! But. We cannot buy with all our profits what the Gift will give you: Meaning. Life. We cannot purchase meaning, life with all of the money we dream of having. The wealth we long for is meaningless. The woman at the well longed for the water of life. The water of life is the service of the Gift, bringing forth the Genius that is ours to give to the world.

The hero goes off on his/her journey, experiences all the trials of heroship, returns with the boon, the Gift, and cannot give it away. Nobody wants it. Jesus stands weeping over Jerusalem: “How often I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks, but you would not.” This is the real trial, serving the Gift when no one is interested in what you have to offer. Nobody buys your books, listens, cares. It's just another trial. Another test. You, we, are here to serve the Gift, to bring it forth, to trust ourselves to it no matter what. In the stories of the hero, the boon, the treasure, must always be retrieved from the lair of dragons. To give the Gift we must face the dragons named, So What? Who Cares? Why Try? All of the trials the hero faces test the hero's faith in the Gift and strengthen her/his resolve to serve the Gift no matter what.

Four synonymous terms for "Gift" are "Genius," "Work," "Life," and "Destiny." Our Gift is our Genius is our Work is our Life is our Destiny. The world around us has no conception of Gift, Genius, Work, Life, Destiny. Wealth, Prosperity, Profit, Money are the things it understands.We are not here to convert the world, to wake the world up. We are here to be awake, to be alive, to do our work. The rest is distraction.

Making disciples of all nations is clearly NOT what Jesus was about. The disciples always subvert the work of the master. True disciples BECOME the master, live out of their own authority, don't say, "The Master said..." but say what they have to say. We say what we have to say, do what we have to do, and let it stand or fall. We aren't here to establish our work, but to do it and let it go. But if it doesn't last it doesn't mean anything, right? Wrong. The doing is meaningful. We do what is meaningful to us, what is life for us.

The Gift we bring forth is our Self. The boon we offer to the world is us. Joseph Campbell said, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” Our living brings the world to life. The Gift we give to the world is not something they can put on a shelf and bow to daily. It is the realization of their own Gift to bring out.

All we can be is awake, aware, alive. There is nothing beyond that to know, or do, or have, or be. Being awake wakes others up of they can be awakened. That's it. To think we have to be recognized, worshiped, adored fails the test. It's another trial. We only have to be awake, aware, alive, here and now. Our work may be a service to humankind, but we are not here to serve humankind. We are here to wake up, to be aware and alive.

The work is realization, awareness, waking up, and it comes about through a specific, particular, focus, expression, endeavor. Something we do. We are here to wake ourselves up through something we do. The something we do is our work but the real work is waking up.

Our common task is this: Claim the Gift, open it, share it with the world, and don’t be upset or surprised when they don’t receive it. Your place is to live the Gift in the world, to share the Gift with the world, to bless the world with the Gift. And, if they don’t choose to be blessed, so be it. Your place is not to be recognized, rewarded, accorded places of honor and held in high esteem.

We have to protect the Gift, guard the Gift, defend the Gift, serve the Gift, do right by the Gift at all costs, in all times and places. We cannot take the Gift for granted, ignore it, treat it poorly. We must honor the Gift by serving the Gift in each moment of life.

Truth does not exist in the abstract but in the minute particulars of our lives. It is the truth of how things are and also are. The truth of how things need to be. The truth of what is important. The truth of what can be done. The truth of what needs to be done. The truth of who we are being asked to be by the nature and circumstances of our lives, by the here and now of existence, to make things more like they ought to be, need to be, than they are.

We will always have what we need to do what needs to be done, but. We will not always want to do it. Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane is our prayer in every place: “Thy will, not mine be done.” We grow up against our will. Amen! May it be so!

Preached to the Milton Presbyterian Church, Milton, NC

2011-03-14T06:47:00.001-04:00

There are themes that run through all I say. One theme is this: I’m here to connect you with God and with your lives. These are not two things. This is one thing. As I connect you with God, I connect you with your life. As I connect you with your life, I connect you with God. God and your life are one thing. You can’t have one without the other. Your life is an expression of God. As you live the life that is your life to live, God becomes visible, is made known.

One of the problems with the church of our experience is that it has disconnected God from our lives. It has told us, taught us, to believe in God apart from our lives. Our lives are “down here,” with us, all own doing, and God is “up there,” “the man upstairs,” you know. Well. There is no man. There are no stairs. God is in our lives, in the life that is our life to live. God comes wrapped up in the life that is truly our life to live. If we want to know God, we have to live in certain ways. We cannot live any way we please. We cannot live any old old life we settle for. We must live the life that is ours, the life that we are called to live. When we embrace that life, our life, we embrace God. This is one theme.

Another theme is that I’m here to tell you to Wake UP! Grow UP! Square Yourself Up With Your Life As It Is And As It Must Be! This is the deep work that is ours to do. We must do it because there is no one but us to do it. The work is difficult—it is so difficult it is called the Hero’s Journey—because we don’t want to do it. We do not want our life as it is or as it must be. We want a different better life. We have ideas, aspirations, dreams, goals, ambitions, and neither life as it is nor life as it must be compliments what we have in mind. Which is why I’m here to tell you to Wake UP! Grow UP! Square Yourself Up With Your Life As It Is And As It Must Be!

Your life as it is is the context and circumstances within which you live. You live in Milton, North Carolina. You do not live in Charlotte or New York or London or Paris. Your life here is different than it would be if you lived somewhere else. You have different choices. Different options. Different opportunities. You were born when and where you were born. Your parents were your parents. All the facts that have governed your life are your facts to square yourself up with. They are different from each others’ facts, from my facts, but we all have the same work to do of squaring ourselves up with the facts that we have had to work with, deal with, all our lives long. We never complete that work. It is always to be done.

These facts of our lives, the time and place of our living, our choices and opportunities, etc. are our fate. They are the things we were born into. The things we cannot help, like the color of our hair or the size of our footprint, or how fast we can run the hundred yard, or now the hundred meter, dash. And we have to square ourselves up with them because they are what they are, and together they form the context and circumstances of our lives.

Now, within that context and those circumstances—within the fate that is ours—we are called to live out our life as it must be. This is our destiny. Our destiny is who we are called to become. Our destiny is what we are capable of doing with our fate, with the facts that determine so much of our life. They don’t determine all of our life, unless we let them, unless we cave into the facts and give into our fate and surrender hopelessly to the context and circumstances of our living in a “Who cares? Why try? What difference does it make?” kind of way.

I am here to remind you that God is with us within the context and circumstances of our lives, within the fate that defines our living, the facts that limit our lives, to enable and assist us in embracing and serving our destiny and becoming who we are capable of being within the limits and boundaries of our lives. And here we are back to the first theme, connecting with God and connecting with our lives and becoming who we are asked to be within the context and circumstances of our life. This is our work. And we are not alone in that work. God is with us in that work to do the work.

This is the thing. God is with us to do the work. God is not with us so that we might live any way we choose, so that we can fritter away our time in trivial pursuits, in entertaining pastimes—so that we can hang out at the mall or take trips and cruses until we die. God is with us for the specific purpose of doing the work of becoming who we are, bringing forth the gifts and the genius that are ours to bring forth in blessing the world. Which is exactly what Abraham’s journey to the Land of Promise is all about.

This is the hero’s journey, the hero’s task. Abraham leaves home in search of home. He leaves his physical home in search of the home of his spirit, his soul. He is in search of where he belongs, in search of what he belongs to. Where we belong—what we belong to—is the Promised Land, which is also the Kingdom of God, which is The New Jerusalem, which is where we and God are as one. This does not exist in some far off future, but is right here and right now when we take up the search for the gift we have been given, for the life we are called to live, for the work that is ours to do, for where we belong, for what we belong to. To take up this search is to, in Jesus’ words, “have life and have it abundantly.” It is to live the life we are called to live, bringing ourselves—the self we are created to be—and God forth into the world of normal, apparent reality.

Quitting

2011-02-22T03:08:00.002-05:00

We like to quit when things get hard and the fun runs out and we run aground and look around and see no reason for going on. He called her from a hotel phone to ask how she was doing and all. “Why hell no I didn’t walk all the way from Salinas! I got on a plane and into a cab, guitar and all. I sang my way here just like I said I would.” “That’s nice,” she said, “But it won’t do you no good, cause you’re still drinking. You had one before you called. Some people quit the wrong things, but I quit the right one. I wish you well and love you, too, but we’re always leaving something and I left you when you ran out of chances and I ran out of rebounds. And now you’re in a hotel and I’m in a home with a son in the backyard and a daughter due in May, and I hope they grow up to always get themselves walked outta there when it’s time to go and don’t look back wondering how happy they might have been if they’d stayed through one more night of being treated like you treated me.” “I should’ve had another one,” he said. “You should’ve squared yourself up to how it is and known what’s what and that is you can’t get things back like you wish they were. Let it go and go on with it, with wherever it’s going and what happens next. Whatever that is, I hope it’s good for you, but it won’t be me because I had enough when I said I had and walked away.” “Have enough when you say you have and walk away. Could be a song in there,” he said. “If anybody could write it, you could,” she said before wishing him well forever again for the last time.

Five

2011-02-20T20:17:00.001-05:00

Put everything on the table and consider the table. Find the center of all the contradictions, reconcile the contraries, integrate the opposites by regarding everything with compassion and allowing what needs to happen to become apparent over time. Right action cannot be hurried, but flows naturally from right seeing, right hearing, right understanding.

The flow of The Way, of Life, is this: Right Seeing, Right Hearing, Right Understanding, Right Knowing, Right Doing, Right Being.

We bring compassion to life in offsetting the ruthlessness of life, in compensating for the way nature works and giving mercy, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, justice and peace a place in the world. We are yang to the world’s yin. Together, we produce and serve Tao, and all is one.

Four

2011-02-11T17:19:00.001-05:00

That which can be known is both open and closed. The surest fact is shrouded in mystery. Everything is a doorway into the unknown and unknowable. We look and think we see, we look again and see we do not see. We swim in an ocean without shore or floor, trusting ourselves to the waves and relishing the wonder of more than we can know, see, or say.

Facts are to truth as words are to music.

Three

2011-02-10T17:04:00.000-05:00

Maintaining right relationship between our “reach” and our “grasp” keeps us vitally stabilized between how things are and how things need to be. In each situation there are forces encouraging and opposing movement and growth, transformation and alteration. What needs to happen here, now? It takes listening to know, and then only time will tell if we heard correctly and heeded well.

Two

2011-02-04T14:46:00.002-05:00

More work is done in silence, with silence, than in 10,000 lecture halls and instructional centers.

Life is lived in the space between mutually exclusive opposites. The opposites are without and within. The psyche is at odds with itself. Nothing is one way only. Good and Evil are a perspective shift from becoming the other. We live within the tension of extremes, and in bearing the pain create new possibilities born of the anguish of immobilization. Truth is contradictory. The way things are is counterbalanced by the way things also are, and the two together produce a third, unimaginable, unpredictable, miracle child called The Way, which is found by those who have what it takes to live on the boundary between yin and yang, waiting for the darkness to produce the light necessary to see.

Truth is symmetrical. The polarities of existence are basic to existence. Consciousness integrates the opposites by bringing them together and requiring each to acknowledge the other and seeing where it goes from there. Complimentary opposites are not the essence of contradiction, but of life.

Permission to be is the primary gift. It recognizes the interplay of all that is—of that which is true and that which is also true—and seeks, not eradication but integration, synchronization, harmony, wholeness, completion.

There is how things are (yin) and how things also are (yang), and that is how things are (Tao). Yin plus yang equals Tao.

We live on the boundary between yin and yang, embracing contraries, integrating opposites, reconciling contradictions, serving/producing Tao.

When we do not serve/produce Tao, there is the way things are and there is the way we wish things were, the way we want things to be. When we serve the way we want things to be, we produce a world that is not conducive to life.

The Last One

2011-01-31T19:05:00.001-05:00

I don’t know what to do with The Last Sunday. So, I’m going to do what I’ve been doing on all the previous Sundays and trust you to take what you want and leave the rest behind.

Nothing is more important than finding and serving your own destiny. Destiny? Did somebody say Destiny? That’s too restrictive! Too limiting! We want to be free to do what we want when we want for as long as we want and then do something else we want. Destiny locks us too much into a life not of our own choosing. But that’s how it is with destiny. We do not choose our destiny, our destiny chooses us like the wand chooses the wizard. It is a radical, subversive, thing to seek and serve our destiny.

Destiny? Oh well, whatever. How 'bout those Packers? Those Steelers? Let's go bowling, Dude. Destiny doesn’t have a chance with us. Our eyes are on other things.

The right of the people to seek and serve their own destiny shall not be infringed! Where has that ever been decreed? We can’t have people serving their own destiny. It would wreck the economy. Tell them to go shopping. Forget their destiny. They should buy whatever makes them happy.

What does happy have to do with it? In returning the ring to the fires of Mount Doom, Frodo is not happy. In serving the Force and resisting the powers of the Dark Side, Luke is not happy. In sitting beneath the Bodhi Tree and refusing the pleasures of the world, the Buddha is not happy. In taking the path with his name on it to Gethsemane and Golgotha, Jesus is not happy. What makes us happy is not the guide to life. Life asks hard things of us.

What sacrifices are we willing to make for the sake of The Beam, the path, the way with our name on it, the life that is our life to live? Sacrifices? Did someone say Sacrifices? We are not interested in sacrifices. We just want to know how to get things to go our way.

Our life is trying, dying, to get our attention. We walk on, unseeing, seeking ends that are pleasing to us. What do we know? Only what we like and don’t like, want and don’t want. That’s no help when it comes to living the life that is ours to live. Who would want to do that? But we are not exactly left in the lurch. There is That Which Knows what is life for us and what is not, That Which Keeps Calling Our Name: Over here! This way! But we walk on. We create our own lonely lurch by walking on.

We aren't here to get things to go our way. What do we know? We are here to go the way that is The Way, the path, the beam, for us. The good news is that it is never too late to start living the life that calls our name, that is our life to live. It is never too late to embrace our destiny. The most important question at any point in our life is "Now what?" What needs to be done here and now? What calls our name here, now?

Our destiny is not some grand conclusion, some glorious achievement. Our destiny is bringing forth who we are in the mundane moments of our lives. Our destiny expresses itself, comes forth, in our response to each situation as it arises, in who we show ourselves to be in each moment. We become who we are in listening to what calls our name in each situation, each moment, as it unfolds before us, and offering our gifts there as needed. Each moment, each situation, offers us another opportunity to align ourselves with our destiny and become who we are, then and there, here and now.

Do you have it in you to be who you are, where you are, when you are, how you are? Not who you would like to be. Not who you wish you were. Who you are. Become who you are! Can you? Can you do it? Can you hand yourself over to yourself? Can you trust yourself to your own sense of direction no matter where the trail goes? Alexis Carrel says we cannot remake ourselves without suffering, for we are both the marble and the sculptor. We are entirely up to us, but every moment calls us forth anew.

Is it a white rabbit, or a red herring, or a wild goose? It takes going to know. We will learn a lot no matter what we follow. We don't know where we are going, what we are doing. Fooling ourselves is what we do best. Are we going or not? Anyone can stay home, safe in the comfortable routines and familiar patterns of life. It's a fool who leaves home searching for home. Are you coming or not? Our life wants to know. Is dying to know.

It is all up to us and those who help us

2011-01-23T15:58:00.001-05:00

Well, let’s see… I’ll leave you with what? Hmm… I think, each other. Can’t beat that. I’ll leave you with all of you. That’s all you need. Whoever, okay, whomever, pinned the piece in the handout about the candles this morning did a wonderful job condensing these monologues in to one short statement. You are up to you, and you, and you… Each of you brings forth who you are in the company of those who receive you well and, in so doing, encourage you and sustain you in the work—and in the joy—of being you.

You bring yourself forth in the service of that which is truly important to you. This company encourages you in that work, in the work of knowing and doing what is truly important to you. One thing leads to another, you know, and as you do this important thing, you find yourself led into the next important thing, and before long, you have built—created—a life of true value by doing the things that are important to you. Our work is to craft a life of worth and value by the way we live—by living in the service of things that are important to us—by living on The Beam, the path, the way with our name on it.

We do not find what is important to us, what we truly care about, by thinking about it. We “take up” a lot of things along the lines of “I think I’ll take up oil painting, or golf, or bird watching,” but it’s an idle pastime that we are taking up. Our heart isn’t in it. We are just hanging out with oil painting, or golf, or bird watching, in the absence of something worth our time. I “took up” the alto saxophone once. That lasted until I encountered sharps and flats. I didn’t care that much about alto saxophones.

However, the camera, writing, and walking in the woods have been essentially important to me over time. I care about these things, and go to a good bit of trouble and expense to serve them, and have crafted a life of worth and value (to me) around them. This doesn’t mean that my life is valuable and worthy in an absolute sense, only in a relative sense, as it relates to me. But if I am—if my life is—to have a chance of being worthy and valuable to you, my life and I have to be worthy and valuable to me. I owe it to me to live a life that I hold to be worthy and valuable. If I try to live a life that you, or Those Who Know Best, would hold to be worthy and valuable, I might hate myself and my life even if you, or they, loved it.

And so, the question: What is important to you that no one told you ought to be important? If the only things that are important to you are the things other people have told you ought to be important, then what is important to you is listening to, and pleasing, other people.

Here we come upon the importance of the right kind of company in helping us determine what is worthy and valuable, and live our lives in light of what is truly important to us. Those Who Know Best and Those Who Must Be Pleased are not the right kind of company. The right kind of company is a community of innocence with nothing at stake in our choice of what is important, other than it not be harmful to us or others.

“What are you doing that is truly valuable to you?” A community of innocence asks questions like that. “What are you doing that your soul loves?” These are the questions that put us on the right track, on the beam, on the path, the way, with our name on it. A community of innocence is good for helping us find the way to The Way by asking the right questions and being interested in our replies.

We don't know where value comes from—or values, for that matter—why some things are important to us and not other things. But we cannot deny that we ascribe value to things. What are the things of high value to us? How often do we do the things of high value? Why don't we spend more time doing those things? Why do we spend so much time doing things we don't like, things of low value to us, and so little time doing things we do like, things of high value? Here's what you can do for me, call it a going away present: Do more of the things with high value for you and less of the things with low, or no, value.

Of the free-time you have left for living, how much of it will you spend doing what you like and how much doing what you don't like? Our life's value to us is the degree to which we spend our time doing the things that are important to us, that have value for us. It comes down to clarity and courage. Being clear about what is important to us and being courageous enough to live in its service.

There is a price to be paid for doing what is important to us, and a price to be paid for not doing what is important to us. Which price to pay? What price are we willing to pay to do what is important to us? Our call to make is what price we are going to pay to live, to be alive, in the time left for living. These folks here with you will help you make that call by caring about you in the right kind of way and listening you to the truth of what matters most to you and encouraging you to do it. I leave you all in good company.

One

2011-01-21T20:26:00.002-05:00

What we see is the surface of the unseen.

What we see are metaphors for the mystery. In pointing out the facts, discovering the operating principles, and giving names to all we know, we congratulate ourselves for our knowledge but are splashing in tidal pools oblivious to the great sea of mystery that remains unexplored and waiting for us to swim in its waves.

The truth is always more than can be told. We can pursue truth but we cannot pen truth in and say, “Here it is! This is it!” After we’ve understood all that can be understood, there is still more to understand.

We have to be deliberate in the use of metaphors as a way of saying what cannot be said. Words are an indirect medium in the work to express truth. Music is more direct, and art, and nature.

Start with the Day Job

2011-01-18T15:04:00.001-05:00

The first step is to find something you CAN do to support yourself financially, on, or close to, a level at which you are comfortable, that will cause you the least amount of personal turmoil, stress, anguish and pain.

Keep in mind that, while it would be ideal if the work you get paid to do also “feeds your soul,” it may be a better choice for you to find work that feeds your body and provides you with the wherewithal to do what it takes to feed your soul after hours and on weekends.

Of course, there are many voices that will tell you that you should “do what you love” and trust that it will provide you with enough money to live on. My take on this is to say that UNTIL YOU KNOW WHAT YOU LOVE enough to make every sacrifice to serve, you would be wise to “find something you CAN do…”

At all times, you have to keep remembering that we have to look for those things which nurture our souls, which “feed” us, “enthuse” us, and fill us with “spirit,” with a passion, and a zeal, and a zest for living. These are the things which attract us, which interest us, which have the power to energize us and provide “life” for us, which motivate us, mobilize us, bring us to life and make us glad we are alive. We don’t often know what they are by thinking about them, but if we are awake, we recognize them when they come along, like white rabbits, nodding to us, winking at us, calling our name.

Fundamentals

2011-01-17T21:31:00.001-05:00

It comes down to eyes that see, ears that hear and a heart that understands, which we develop over time by looking, listening, inquiring—by seeing that we don’t see, perceiving that we haven’t heard, understanding that we don’t have a clue.

The six aspects of life and the process for the unfolding of the way are right seeing, right hearing, right understanding, right knowing, right doing, right being.

Hope is not what we have, it is what we do. Of course, the situation is hopeless. Situations always are. Hope does not live “out there” but “in here.” and we cannot find hope we can only exhibit hope, by being those who are not afraid to live in the situation as it arises, offering there what we have to give, and seeing where it goes.

The one who understands must understand that most people do not care to understand. The understanding one must also understand that her, that his, role is to be a doorstop that keeps open the possibility of understanding for those who are sure they know all they need to know.

The Path to the Path

2011-01-16T16:07:00.001-05:00

Well. Two thousand down and three to go. Sundays, that is. But it doesn’t mean that because we are down to the final three they are going to be special, like I’ve been saving the best for last. I haven’t been holding out on you. I’ve given you what I’ve had all along. Those of you who have been here all along could say it as well as I can. Here it comes again!

There is you and there is the beam, the path with your name on it, the way that is The Way for you. Everything depends upon you getting on the beam and staying there. We are all here to help you find the beam, the path, The Way and stay on it. We help connect you with the life that is uniquely, individually, your life to live, and then get out of your way. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that you don’t help us help you. You have ideas about the life you want to live, about the life you wish were yours. It’s the Garden of Eden all over again, where there is our life and the life we wish were our life. The solution to the Garden of Eden is the Garden of Gethsemane: “Thy will, not mine, be done,” where the “Thy” is the life that is our life to live, the work that is our work to do. Moving from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane is the spiritual journey. It’s also growing up. Squaring ourselves up to how things are, reconciling ourselves with what is true and what is also true, and taking up the work that is ours to do in living the life that is ours to live, never mind how we wish things were. And we are here to help one another do that work, live that life.

We do that by being a community of innocence. The work of being us, of being who we are, is solitary work. No one can do it for us. The kind of community we need is composed of individuals being themselves. We are here to remind one another that we find the way by getting out of our own way, by opening ourselves to possibilities we would never consider, and following the white rabbit to places we would never go on our own.

The crucial realization is that our life as we are living it isn't working. This could result in suicide, addiction or depression. Or in our waking up to the work that is ours to do. We go one way or the other bases upon our recognition that we aren’t here to have what we want, but to serve what wants us. That is not clear to all of us or to any of us at all times. It is all quite iffy and hangs by a thread. There are no guarantees that we will take up the work that is ours to do and serve the soul that is waiting to come forth into the world.

It is all up to us, but. We are upheld, encouraged and sustained for our work by the communities of innocence which nurture us, knowingly, along the way. Communities of innocence help us with the work of seeing and saying how things are, bearing the impact and imagining fitting responses. The life we live is always a compromise with the facts of life. How alive can we be within the context and circumstances of our lives? It is up to us to work it out, to be as alive as we can be within the context and circumstances of our lives. This is the work of being human. There is nothing more to being human than living aligned with ourselves in light of all that is true in responding appropriately to the time and place of our living.

Helping us to engage reality and respond appropriately in light of all that is true about us is the work of communities of innocence. Communities of innocence help us take into account all that can be taken into account in deciding what to do about how things are. Being conscious of everything pulls the contradictions, the conflicts, the discrepancies, the discordances, into view for us to integrate. On one hand, this. On the other hand, that. Ambivalence and contraries are the matrix of life, the sea in which we all swim.

Consciousness, awareness, is the healing balm that takes all opposites into account and undertakes the work of reconciliation, integration, oneness. To be conscious is to do, to be engaged in, the work of reconciliation, integration. The work of squaring ourselves up to how things are and how they also are.

Consciousness is awareness of all that is true in any moment, and of what needs to be done about it, with it, for the good of all concerned. Consciousness is not a spiritual trick for getting what we want. What we want is the first thing that has to go in the work of consciousness. Nothing blocks awareness like having an agenda. Wanting something keeps us from seeing everything. Being afraid of something keeps us from seeing everything. Nothing blocks awareness like being afraid of what might happen. To be afraid is to have an agenda. Something at stake. Something to gain, something to lose. We have to live as those with nothing at stake, nothing to gain, nothing to lose, in serving the true good of the whole with the life that is ours to live. Ah, but what’s in it for us? We get to be fully alive in the service of our life!

Communities of Innocence

2011-01-09T20:07:00.001-05:00

As those of you know who have been here for a while, Rumi said, “If you are not here with us in good faith, you are doing terrible damage.” This means, in part, that you have to care about us, and if you can’t do that, you have to at least live with us in ways that are caring. You have to act like you care about us whether you do or not. And we have to do the same for you. It doesn’t mean that we will pay your car payment or your house note for you, or you for us. But it does mean that we all can count on being cared for here. That we can be seen, listened to, heard, understood and helped to live our lives. Caring is automatic here. That is a part of our commitment to each other—to be with the other in good faith.

Now, look around. Spot the people you do not care for automatically. Work to care for those people, to treat those people caringly. It is part of your covenant with them to be with them here in good faith. We cannot be casual or flip about, or disinterested in, caring for one another. We are upheld and sustained, encouraged and called forth into our lives by the presence of those who love us. We must not dismiss the power of our love in the lives of others, or dismiss the power of their love in our lives.

We have to live in ways that make the world as good a place as possible. Everything hinges on our ability to let things be what they are and do what can be done about it, with it. We are to live in ways that make the world better by the way we live in it. We do that as we care about one another here, in this place, and do what is right by one another.

We all know what is right as it pertains to us. We know when something is right for us and when it is wrong. We know when we are mistreated and when we are honored, respected, cared for. We have no problem nailing what is right and what is not right about the way we are treated. We have to become those who recognize what is right and not right as it pertains to others—and care about them in their situation as we would care about ourselves. And, we have to know when to do what is right by them even at our own expense. We have to know when to stand up for ourselves and when to stand down, when to stand aside, for the sake of others. This is an essential part of the work of growing up, knowing when to stand up for ourselves and when to stand aside for others. This is not something we can get from books or lectures, discussions, resolutions or keeping the rules. We have to trust our own judgment here, our own instinct and intuition and sense of what needs to be done, when, where and how.

But this is frightening, terrifying, painful. Trusting ourselves is not what we do best. Living with uncertainty, insecurity, not-knowing is not what we do best. Running, hiding, denying, pretending, faking it for the sake of safety and security is what we do best. But, if we are not here in good faith, we are doing terrible damage.

We want to run from the moment of uncertainty, of indecision—to hide in comfortable patterns and traditions, to not face what is to be faced, not do what needs to be done. When to do what??? That's what we want to know! We yearn for consistency, constancy, regularity, dependability, predictability. Laws! Rules! Same Old Same Old! The church of our experience! The Tea Party Doctrine! The most difficult truth of life is: Sometimes it's like this and sometimes it's like that. Sometimes we do it this way, sometimes that way. This is more truth than we can handle.

We want to numb the pain of being alive, of bringing ourselves forth, of birthing ourselves anew in each moment, situation, as it arises. Refusing to live, refusing to pay the price of being alive, saves us from the pain of life but we're just hanging out until we die. The pain we would avoid is the birth pangs of our own becoming, which we assist as we step forth into this mess to do what can be done here, now.

We help one another to do the work that is ours to do, squaring up to how things are, doing what we can about it, in each moment, situation. Our work in helping each other do the work that is ours to do is providing communities of innocence for the work that we all must do alone.

Communities of innocence are disinterested in the sense that they have no interest, nothing at stake, in us or the outcomes of our living. Communities of innocence are the source of grace, mercy, and peace in our lives in that they aren't trying to manipulate outcomes. Communities of innocence exist to help us see how things are and help us think our way through what is to be done about it, and do it. And communities of innocence stand at the opposite extreme from the inflammatory rhetoric that castigates and demonizes and puts itself forward as THE way of seeing, thinking, believing, doing, being which is polarizing the world into camps of Good and Evil and creating an atmosphere in which everyone is suspect who is out of line with the Party Line. That would be the Tea Party Line.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said this about the Tucson shootings: "When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

We have to oppose inflammatory rhetoric at every point and become aware of the degree to which it impacts our lives. Here follows a prayer of confession that Salem Presbytery recommended to the congregations in the Presbytery on January 9, 2008 in approving the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Task Force Report. It becomes increasingly meaningful and appropriate day by day as a watchword for communities of innocence and the work of becoming true human beings:

We acknowledge and confess that we have failed to create an environment that is compassionate, just, and tolerant of the differences which exist among us. We have not learned to oppose what we consider to be evil without becoming evil in our opposition to evil. We too easily “become what we hate” in using violence to confront violence, in allowing our rhetoric to determine our actions, and in using all means necessary in the service of ends we declare to be good. We have closed our eyes to our responsibility to care for those who are belligerent, obnoxious, and inflammatory. We have allowed the anger in others to cultivate anger in ourselves. And, we have failed to create an environment in which our children might live peacefully with the children of those who see things differently than we do. In all of this, we are deeply ashamed, and commit ourselves to the construction of a future in which intolerance is unacceptable and “justice for all” is an abiding reality. We pledge ourselves to the work of making life together truly good on all levels for all people. Amen! May it be so!

My Credo, Part VII

2011-01-02T15:01:00.001-05:00

Our primary obligation is to our soul. This is fundamental. We are here to serve our soul, not by imposing upon it the practices and standards of religion, but by listening to it and living in sync with its purposes. We serve our soul by exhibiting the values of soul in our lives, by consciously, intentionally, aligning ourselves with its interests and bringing soul to life within the here and now of our living.

Our soul is the interface, the point of contact, of connection, with the invisible world. It stands as a threshold between ourselves and what has always been thought of as God. Soul is the carrier of life that is life, the vitality and the values that form the heart, the core of life. Soul is the vehicle of life and guides us to life. In establishing and maintaining right relationship with soul, we come alive in the truest sense, and live the life that is ours to live.

We collaborate with soul in producing a life that serves the values of soul within the limits and possibilities of physical existence. But when we hit a hard place we think of quitting. We give up too easily, quit too soon. Soul has dealt with restrictions and hardships we cannot imagine, and waits to help us find ways of facing up to and dealing with all that comes our way—in ways that are commensurate with the values of soul.

Within any circumstance, we can serve the values of soul, we can bring to life there what can be brought to life there. In any situation, we can give soul a shot at coming forth, being alive. When it seems to be hopeless, futile, pointless to go on we have to realize it is only our ends that are blocked, our desires that are frustrated. Soul lives for different purposes and calls us to serve those purposes in every situation as it unfolds. Our place is to learn to see life from soul’s point of view.

Our task, our calling, is to bring soul to life within the terms and conditions of life. In each one of us there is a soul that is more or less alive. In some of us soul is mostly dead or completely gone. We have to live in ways that retrieve soul, revive soul, wake soul up, bring our soul to life!

We are here to serve and protect our soul, which is the heart of life and guides us to life. We are best equipped to do that within what I think of as communities of innocence. Innocence is at once vulnerable and invincible. Communities of innocence don’t know any better than to do what is theirs to do in service to soul, and trust that the out come will be what it needs to be—and in that innocent trust there is power to transform, to save, the world.

Communities of innocence have no agenda, no strategy, no purpose beyond supporting the individual work of connecting with, and serving, soul. Communities of innocence help us find our way to our soul and then get out of our way. Communities of innocence have no stake in the outcomes of our lives beyond assisting us in living in sync, aligned, integrated with soul.

Communities of innocence are safe places in the surest sense of the word. Chance the Gardener, or "Chauncey Gardner," the Peter Sellers character in Being There, is an example of safety and security at the heart of innocence. Jesus, the Buddha and the Dali Lama are other examples of safety and security at the heart of innocence.

We build communities of innocence with those people who are safe places for us to be, who do not condemn, convert, advise, direct, exhort, rebuke, chide, ridicule, lecture, etc., but who do indeed challenge us, confront us, question our assumptions, and call us beyond ourselves to a depth and breadth of being we could not manage on our own. The best of the 12-step groups, and the church as it ought to be, rank for me as communities of innocence. Circles of Trust and the Clearness Committee are two places we work to create communities of innocence within this Gathering of Sojourners. It is a work that is worthy of the best effort we can put forth. Essential to that work is “good faith” on the part of each of us. Living together in good faith is the foundation of communities of innocence.

The heart of the kind of community that is necessary for the development of individuals who are serving their soul, living lives aligned with the Way, and bringing forth their gifts in ways that save the world is, what Rumi calls, “good faith.” He says, “If you are not here with us in good faith, you are doing terrible damage.” Good faith is the key to our life together. When we live together in good faith we create the communities of innocence that are necessary for the development of right relationship with our soul.

“Good faith” describes our commitment to, our covenant with, each other to do right by one another, to be with one another in ways that are good for the other, to offer the right kind of help in the right kind of way, and to help others help us by doing what is ours to do and not being too needy or too dependent ourselves. It also recognizes the old truism that “good fences make good neighbors,” and carefully observes the Old Testament commandment (One that did not make, but should have, the Top Ten): “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark!” We do not do violence to our neighbors’ boundaries by offering the wrong kind of help in the wrong kind of way, and we trust our neighbors to do right by us as much as they trust us to do right by them.

Let There Be Light!

2010-12-19T15:26:00.001-05:00

My paraphrase of Deuteronomy 30:11-14 reads, Surely, what is asked of us is not too hard for us, nor is it too far away. The light is not in heaven, that we should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may see it and walk in it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that we should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that it might illumine our way?’ No, the light is very near to us; it is in our heart and soul that we might be the light we long for.

The hitch is that we don’t want to be the light we long for. We want to talk about the light as though we are 2,000 years away from it. When Moses came down from the mountain the people requested that he veil his face because he radiated the light of God and it was too much for them to look at. We want distance between us and the light. Yet, at the same time, we speak longingly of the light, and burn advent candles, and talk of epiphany as though we would like nothing better than to be visited by the light, but. We don’t want to have anything to do with the light.

The Gospel readings put us in our place. They start out comfortably enough, with the light being far off, “in the beginning,” when “the life was the light of all people,” as though we might see it from a distance and be comforted in the darkness, knowing we are not alone. We like it even better when John has Jesus say, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” But Matthew does us no favors. He quotes Jesus as slamming us against the wall with, “YOU are the light of the world,” and “Let YOUR light shine before others that they see (how you are living) and glorify (the Source of light by bringing forth their own light)!”

The light, remember, is the life that was in the beginning and lives in us waiting to come to life through us as we get out of the way and let our light shine, and live the life that is life, that is the life that waits to be lived. We are the light we seek but generate darkness by living lives that reflect our idea of how life ought to be, and we do not easily set our idea for our life aside in order to live the life that is truly our life to live. We are afraid that life will not be what we want it to be, even though it will be more than we can ask, or seek, or imagine. We are afraid.

Mary Oliver highlights our dilemma in her poem “Lightning.” (In the thunder storm) it was hard to tell fear from excitement; how sensual the lightning’s poured stroke! and still, what a fire and a risk! As always the body wants to hide, wants to flow toward it—strives to balance while fear shouts, excitement shouts, back and forth—each bolt a burning river tearing like escape through the dark field of the other.

The light that is the life of all people terrifies us and thrills us with its possibilities. We work out a compromise and talk about the light as though it lived in Jesus but not in us. We can be safe that way in the lives we construct for ourselves. We comfort ourselves with talk of 2,000 year old light and douse the flame that flickers faintly within us all, erecting mercury-vapor lamps to hold back the darkness we also fear—creating little islands of artificial light by living inauthentic lives in the service of plastic and superficiality, while life dies unlived within.

Rumi calls us out: “Darkness is your cradle…” “To thee light by darkness is made known…” The darkness that brings forth our light is not-knowing what to do and waiting there in that dark place, trusting the spark of realization, of awareness, of light—trusting the epiphany of perception and understanding—to guide us in the way of life that we might offer what is ours to give to the moment as it unfolds, to the situation as it arises. This is letting our light so shine before others that they see how we are living and glorify the Source of light by bringing forth their own light.

Of course, we are afraid, and seek to disappear our fear by making up rules to live by so that we don’t have to wonder what to do and run the risk of making mistakes, of being wrong. But “darkness is our cradle,” and we have to trust ourselves. We have to trust the light that lives within, the life that stirs within, and wait, listening, looking, for what needs to be said, for what needs to be done, in responding appropriately and offering what is called for out of the gifts we have to give to each moment of our living.

The moment is the adventure. We must not shrink back, afraid, resorting to the same old same old tried and true formulas for living that are the purview of the dead and dying. The light that is the life of all people is the creative source of ingenuity and genius that splits the darkness like a thunderbolt and shines like the sun bursting forth in the night to draw all people to the brightness of its rising to send them forth into their own lives to live there in bold new ways that light up the world. Amen! May it be so with us all!

My Credo, Part VI

2010-12-12T15:34:00.001-05:00

The Doctrine of the Two Ways—the Right Way and the Wrong Way—has been the central religious view in the Near East and the West for thousands of years, and is a popular religious outlook today. Nay! It goes beyond being popular! It is the predominant religious outlook today. We are seeped in the Doctrine of the Two Ways. We believe deeply that the way we believe (and think and do) is the Right Way to believe (and think and do) and that all other ways of believing (and thinking and doing) are the Wrong Way to believe (and think and do).

It gets worse. We believe that if we believe Right Beliefs we will go to heaven when we die, and that if we believe Wrong Beliefs we will go “as straight to hell as a Martin to its gourd” (You have to have lived in the rural south for a while to understand the metaphor and know that the Martin in question is a Purple Martin and its gourd is a dried gourd that has had a hole cut in it and is hanging with a dozen or so other gourds for nesting places for Purple Martins). The idea of heaven as a reward for Right Belief and hell as a punishment for Wrong Belief is the fundamental religious curse that people carry with them for life and with which they infect all who come their way.

Because we cannot risk being wrong and going to hell, we cannot question what we have received as Right Belief, and have to believe what has been believed unquestioned through the ages. In so doing, we create a hell on earth populated by the walking dead, empty-eyed and soulless, talking of Eternal Life as compensation for the life they are not living and never have lived, thanks to the Doctrine of the Two Ways.

Darkness and Light, Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Truth and Error, the Way of Life and the Way of Death, etc. are set out before us, and the wise among us choose well and the foolish, or evil, among us choose poorly. Believers are urged to pray, therefore, that they will choose well in order to be ushered into the Kingdom of Goodness and Light with the accolade: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

There is, of course, a different way of looking at things—if you dare!

Good, at some point, goes over into evil. Evil, at some point, goes over into good. Not only that, but from some point of view, good IS evil and evil IS good (Floods, for example, that destroy homes and lives and livelihoods also fertilize the land to produce the crops that feed the people. Are floods good or evil? Both!). And, as the old saying goes, “There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn’t behoove any of us to talk about the rest of us.” Absolute Good and Absolute Evil are theoretical concepts without precedent in the lived experience of human beings. Given the truth of the relative nature of the options comprising the Two Ways, we can’t long avoid the realization that it is not as simple as we have been led to believe.

Think not of living a morally pure and upright life and deserving heaven when we die. Think instead of living aligned with the Way and living the life that is our destiny, our life to live—of being properly engaged with inner and outer reality and offering what is needed out of what is ours to give to each situation as it unfolds. It is not a matter of matching our behavior up to some ancient standard or code but of responding appropriately to the moment in each moment of our lives, doing what is needed there never mind what our parents or preachers declare ought to be done.

And if we are wrong about what needs to be done? Shake it off! Get up! Get ready! Get back in the game! The next moment is on the way! The beauty of The Doctrine of More Than Two Ways is that getting it wrong is just a step on the way to getting it right. The meandering of the river is no threat to the sea. The roots of tomorrow’s Right are grounded in yesterday’s Wrong. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from your successes. Learn from everything. Living is the lesson and life is the teacher. We have a lifetime in which to learn what being alive is all about. Wake up! Pay attention! Be alert! Take a chance and another one after that! There is life to be lived! We are not dead yet and we must not live as though we are! Do not die before you are dead! Live with all that is within you for as long as life is possible no mater what! Amen! May it be so!

My Credo, Part V

2010-12-05T17:22:00.001-05:00

Here is the formula: “There is the way things are. And there is the way things also are. And that’s the way things are.” This is symbolized neatly in the yin/yang of Taoism (Or Zen—Buddhism mingled with Taoism to become Zen, and I don’t know the historical moment yin/yang came into being). Yin is the way things are. Yang is the way things also are. And the circle containing them is the way things are. Reality, you might say, is one in its duality, in its polarity.

William Blake puts it beautifully: “Without Contraries, is no progression” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). This means our work is “working it out.” We are always and forever “working it out.” We are always and forever needing to counter-balance, to compensate, to counteract our excesses and deficiencies. We go too far in one direction and have to be reeled in, called back, by the forces contained in the opposite direction. This is “finding the center” or “walking the straight and narrow.” We live on the boundary between yin and yang. We have to be “rounded out” by the opposition in order to “square ourselves with” that which is true and that which is also true. We find our way forward in a conversation with “the Contraries” within and without. We must be careful to not allow the opposites to cancel each other out, but to open each other, and ourselves, up to worlds, to possibilities, we could not imagine or enter on our own.

This opening is enabled by conversation with the opposites, among the opposites, between the opposites. Conversation enlarges, deepens, transforms, unites. Conversation is the way to the Way, individually and collectively. The kind of community that is required for living properly aligned with Inner and Outer Reality, centered, in synch, and on the Path, is a community of opposites, of polarities, where all persons take each other seriously, treat each other with the deepest respect, honor each other’s perspective, and allow conversation with one another to expand, deepen, and enlarge one’s own sense of how things are and what needs to be done in response. In this kind of community there is no one way of seeing, thinking, believing and doing. There is no sense of “our way” being the Right Way and “their way” being the Wrong Way. The right kind of community is not “one big happy family” in firm agreement about what to think, feel, believe and do. It is one that values contrary views and finds the way to the Way by taking all pertinent perspectives into account and allowing them to inform and guide the development of each participant in the community, but in the end, each participant is responsible for determining and doing what she, what he, thinks needs to be done in each situation as it arises.

DVD Announcement

2010-11-28T19:46:00.002-05:00

This DVD is a collection of 265 photos with music from two Greensboro musicians, Betsy Bevan (piano) and Will Ridenour (Kora, or African Harp), and audio reflections from me on photography and life. Sells for $25 through PayPal at my web site: www.jimdollarphotography.com under "Numinous Landscape DVD" in the menu.

My Credo, Part IV

2010-11-28T17:45:00.000-05:00

Mind? Self? Soul/Psyche? These terms represent the interface between the Spiritual Realm and the material universe. They are our pathway for tuning into spiritual reality and translating that reality into physical existence. Self, with a capital “S,” is synonymous with Christ to my way of thinking. In saying “Jesus was the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One),” we are saying Jesus was “a chip off the old block,” so to speak, that he was the visible expression of Divine grace, mercy, peace—evidence of the purposeful Mystery of existence—within the confines of tangible reality, and that he exhibited the right way of doing things in the physical universe. We do the same things when we become the Self we are called to be. The Self is the Christ, spiritual reality becoming apparent through us within the time and place of our living. Spiritual reality, you might say, is “born” through us into the world of physical existence. We all are the Mother of God.

When we live aligned with the Self we are called to be, we are “on the beam,” “on track,” “on course,” “on the Path,” in synch with “the purposeful Mystery of existence.” Then, we are one with the Way, and exhibit the truth at the heart of things within the context and circumstances of our life. Of course, this is not easy. It is very tricky because we not only have to be aligned with the Way, but we also have to take into account How Things Are And Also Are on every level of existence.

All the worlds come together in us. We have to be reconciled with, we have to “square up to,” the requirements of life in the world AND the requirements of life at the heart of things. We have to come to terms with the terms and conditions of life in the world of physical reality AND we have to come to terms with our own emotional and psychological reality AND we have to be aligned with, live in sync with, what has always been called “the Way of God,” which is also the Way that is uniquely our Way, the Way with our name on it—our destiny. We have to accommodate ourselves to both Inner and Outer Reality—to physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual reality. This is where things get interesting and become meaningful. This is what we live for, whether we know it or not.

There are no formulas, or recipe, or rules, or laws governing how we are to strike the necessary balance, how we are to integrate all of the contradictory forces at work within and without. So, we have to pay attention, be alert, awake, and aware. We engage and express the purposeful Mystery of existence in each moment as we work to do what is needed in the situation as it arises. We cannot plan this out beforehand. We live into the Mystery. We live the Mystery, as we assist in the coming forth, in the emergence, of what is called for in each moment. The work to do this brings us to life and is LIFE in the deepest, richest, sense of the word. May we all live so fully and so well!

My Credo, Part III

2010-11-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

Did someone say “destiny”? No? Thank goodness! That would have been too much of a coincidence. I was just thinking about destiny. Destiny is not the same as fate. Our fate consists of the givens present in our life situation—the time and place of our living, our genetic make-up, who our parents were, what is available for us to work with, “how things are with us.” Our fate is also what becomes of us, what happens to us—what we are left with—if we reject, deny, or ignore our destiny. We either embrace and serve our destiny, or we succumb to our fate. There is no third option.

Our destiny is what/who we are called to become within the time and place, the context and circumstances, of our living. Destiny is what we do with our fate, what we construct with the materials that are available for us to work with, who we show ourselves to be through the process of living our life. We are called to a particular destiny in exhibiting the gifts that are, the genius that is, uniquely ours within the circumstances of life, which are generally the same for a large number of our contemporaries, though our destinies are quite different.

You can think of destiny as “God’s will for our lives,” or “the way of God for us.” When we live aligned with “the Way of God,” we are also aligned with “the Way” that exists for us individually, personally, and live to bring ourselves forth as we bring what has always been thought of as God forth into the world of normal, concrete, apparent reality.

Here’s the problem: Our heart's true desire is to be one with its destiny but. We have eyes for other things. The work of maturity is connecting with our heart. This is dying to our idea of what is important and aligning ourselves with heart’s idea, with soul’s idea, of what is important. “Thy will, not mine, be done!” “Those who would be my disciple must pick up their cross daily and follow me.” Our cross is the difference between our soul’s idea of what is important and our idea of what is important.

The heart knows its true joy/love, its destiny, and it is our place to align ourselves with the drift of heart/soul toward its sense of where it belongs and what it needs to be about. This is going with the flow in the deepest, truest sense of the term. And in that undertaking, Jesus is the "first born of all creation," leading the way with his “come follow me!”

The work of that which has always been called salvation, that is being aligned with that which is our true destiny, our true life, is the work of maturity, of growing up, of connecting with our heart and living, at last, aligned with our calling, and living the life that is truly our life to live. Our life's work is awakening to our heart's true joy--its love for and affiliation with its true destiny--and letting that become our life. We are here to help you do the work that is yours to do, on living the life that is yours to live. Everything here is predicated on your doing the work that is yours to do, on living the life that is yours to live. If you aren't doing that, or if you aren’t interested in doing that, you won’t likely find much here that you can relate to.

My Credo, Part II

2010-11-07T17:51:00.001-05:00

God? God is the purposeful Mystery of existence. Any attempt to state what the purpose is, or what the Mystery is, is to say what cannot be said. We cannot talk knowledgeably about more than we can know, and we cannot know what we cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, weigh, measure, count, quantify, compute, calculate, etc. We can sense the Mystery, intuit it, perceive it, but we cannot define or explain it. But, we can trust it. We can believe in it.

We can believe in the purposeful Mystery of existence and trust ourselves to it, and see what comes of it. We only have to open ourselves to the experience of our lives to see the drift, the movement, that has brought us to this moment. Our lives are moving us along. Life is movement toward something, toward some good. Our lives are moving us toward something. We cannot deny the movement of our life, the drift that our life has taken, often without our awareness, sometimes against our will, usually without our knowing assistance.

God is the purposeful Mystery at work in the movement of life toward some good. God is the highest possible good, the highest order of good, the best there is. Our values find their essence in God. God is inseparable from “the Will of God” or “the Way of God,” which is also “the Way of Life,” or simply, “the Way.” This is also called “Tao.” I believe “the Way (or Will) of God” for us is particular, individual, unique for each of us and it is generally the same for all of us. Generally, we can use such words as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity, goodness, grace, mercy, peace, etc.” to describe the demeanor of someone who is in, or on, “the Way.” Particularly, the person who exhibited those general values would also be aligned with her or his own personal destiny, or way of being in the world, and would live out of a “Thy will, not mine, be done” orientation.

Four Poems

2010-10-22T12:35:00.000-04:00

Madonna and Child

She walked past the plate glass window

next to where I sat with my friend Bill

in a booth in the worst hamburger joint on the eastern seaboard,

eating a dripping grease burger

covered with melted Velveeta cheese of all things

with fries fresh from a year in the freezer.

She was twelve months pregnant, going on thirteen.

It had to have been her first pregnancy

as young as she was

and as jauntily as she carried herself

down the walk and through the door,

wearing a red spandex top

and navy blue spandex tights,

bringing forth who and how she was

for all to see,

honor, marvel at, rejoice in, worship.

The wonder of the vision

was equal in every way

to the one that stunned the angels

who announced the Messiah’s birth.

And as redemptive.

She redeemed the day, the week, the year, my life,

all of life, forever, throughout all eternity.

And I carry her memory in my heart

to relish and adore

Mary, the mother of God,

ordering a grease burger and

making all things remarkably good

by her presence with us

in the ordinariness of our lives.

What’s It Going To Take?

Once we figure it out,

what are we going to do with it?

What’s Enlightenment going to do for us,

that’s what I’m asking.

The test is not in the knowing,

but in the doing,

in the living.

We have to look at our lives

and live them.

What’s it going to take

to enable us to do that?

What do we need

to step into our lives

every morning,

and live them

all the way back to bed at night?

Live them

the way they ought to be lived,

I’m talking.

Live them

like we mean it, I mean.

What’s it going to take

to live like we mean it?

Good Families

Good families don’t pretend to be good families

Don’t strive to do it like it’s supposed to be done,

Don’t have anything to hide,

Or don’t hide what they have to hide,

But live with everything in full view,

Available to be seen and said,

Laughed at, or yelled at, and talked about,

Brought up for review and revision,

Capable of being modified, altered, improved, changed.

Good families can be changed.

They are honest and vulnerable that way.

Bad families are fragile, brittle,

Incapable of self-assessment or self-correction,

They remain stuck, unchanging, forever.

Good Luck

There are people

who want to argue with me

about the possibility of luck.

No kidding.

“There is no such thing as luck!” they say,

when I wish them, “Good Luck!”

“It’s strictly a matter of Providence.”

When I say, “Aren’t we lucky

that God is so Providential?”

they say, “It has nothing to do with luck!”

Clearly, one of us

is missing something,

somewhere.

My Credo, Part I

2010-10-10T20:43:00.000-04:00

Primal peoples believed the visible world was grounded upon the invisible world. So do I. I believe the spiritual world is more real than the material world, and that the spiritual realm (You could call it the Kingdom of God, but you wouldn’t know any more about it than if you called it the Spiritual Realm) exists alongside (over, under, around and through) the physical universe, and has autonomous, independent existence, as the fourth, or fifth, or however many there might be, dimension of reality. As the primal peoples would say, “It always is.” The Spiritual Realm is eternal, unending, constantly present. I can’t say much more about the Spiritual Realm, other than that it is the source of life, not in the biological sense (We can be living biologically, upright, intact, able to take nourishment with vital signs working normally without being alive at all), but in the every-other-way sense, in the deepest, fullest, richest sense. When we are connected with the Spiritual Realm, we are alive in the fullest sense of the term, and when we are connected with the things that bring us to life, we are connected with the Spiritual Realm.

A Poem About Cats

2010-10-04T07:35:00.002-04:00

Say what you will about cats, they know what their business is. A cat is never uncertain or confused about its business. A cat knows what its business is and is always, I mean always, going about its business. I watched a cat lying under the front bumper of a car parked at the curb in Stonington, Maine. After some time had passed, it moved under the rear bumper of the car in front of the one it had been lying under. Changed scenery. The cat knew its business and was not to be deterred. Cats are like that.

Maybe it’s napping, and maybe it’s stalking a bird or a grasshopper, or waiting on dinner to come from the can to the bowl. Whatever it is, the cat knows what it is and stays centered in it, focused on it. “Big deal,” you say. “What’s a cat’s business? A cat’s business has no impact on the way the world turns!” That kind of comment works on human beings. You can shame us out of doing our business. “Photography? What does photography have to do with anything? Photography doesn’t feed the hungry, serve the poor, or establish world peace! Jesus didn’t own a camera! What do you mean taking pictures when there is real work to be done?” That would keep me from carrying a camera, but not a cat. A cat wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of acknowledging the validity of your assertions. A cat would steadfastly maintain its concentration on the business at hand.

Now hold that thought while I relate a dream reported by a member of a 12-Step program. “I dreamed I was cranking a mimeograph machine,” she said. “Turning out page after page of the same thing. I woke up enlightened. It isn’t that my judgment is bad. It’s that I’m using the wrong machine!” The irony, of course, is that using the wrong machine is bad judgment. If we exercise good judgment in the wrong way, it’s the same thing as bad judgment! It isn’t enough to have good judgment, we have to execute it in the right way, which means we have to believe in it, trust it, listen to it and let it direct our lives—even when it doesn’t appear to be working.

That’s asking too much. We aren’t cats. We have too much at stake in our lives to allow ourselves to follow a course that doesn’t work. But, here the cat comes back into the picture. What does it mean for something to work? A cat is centered and focused on what is important to the cat. A cat would call that working. A cat is at peace with itself, at one with itself. It has no pretentions, puts on no airs, assumes no postures. A cat never tries to be a dog, or even another cat. It lives in perfect harmony with itself, with perfect integrity of being. A cat would call that working.

But we have different ideas of success. Success is money, in our book, money in the bank. Plenty of it. We don’t get paid to be who we are. We get paid to be who we are not. We do not get paid to do what we like to do. We get paid to do what we don’t like to do. The most successful people we know are the people who haven’t done anything they wanted to do all their lives long. The most successful people we know don’t have a clue about what their business is. They have been disconnected for so long from the business that is truly theirs that they think their business is what they do for a living, what they get paid to do, what no one would do if they didn’t get paid to do it. You couldn’t pay a cat to do anything that wasn’t it’s business.

No one tries to take a cat’s business away from the cat and give the cat some other business. Everyone tries to do that with us. Everybody tries to tell us what our business ought to be. We have so many people telling us what our business ought to be, or paying us to do things that aren’t our business, that we have no idea what our business is, and no idea of how to know.

A cat knows its business. We don’t know ours, or, we don’t trust ourselves to know ours. This gets us to the crux, as they say, of the matter. This is our first order of business, sorting out what our business is. What are we chasing? What are we after? What are we about with our lives? Whatever it is, is it our idea or something someone else has handed to us? We have to sit with the questions and see where they lead. No one can tell you what your business is, but if you don’t trust yourself to know what it is, you are at the mercy of everyone with a guilt trip to give away or a sales pitch to make. Who knows better than a cat what its business is? Who knows better than you what your business is? But, we don’t know. We don’t trust ourselves to know. What do we need, to know?

The work that saves the world is becoming who you are.

2010-09-19T20:07:00.001-04:00

It is the work of the individual to save the world. We do that, we save the world, by being individuals, by being who we are, and also are, in the world. We pull this off by being true to ourselves, squared up with who we are and who we also are, squared up with our life, with the way things are, with how it is both inside and outside. The work of squaring ourselves up to how it is with us, internally and externally, is the work that brings us forth as individuals and saves the world. This is not easy.

The work of reconciliation, integration, assimilation, individuation, alignment, becoming who we are, doing what is ours to do in each situation as it arises is trumped by many things, and fear and desire are high on the list. The story of the Garden of Eden is the story of turning aside from The Way that is good for the sake of what is also good. Genesis 3:6 reads, “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” What is good cancels out what is good.

The good is the enemy of the good. What is the good of the good we call good, of the good we serve? Takes meditative distance to know. To live "from the center" is to live with "meditative distance." It requires focus and concentration to be centered in this here, this now. The farther from the center we live, the greater the attraction to, and influence of, "glass beads and silver mirrors," and other things that catch our eye.

Joseph Campbell was on his college track team and later in life could not attend a track meet without becoming "uncomfortably involved" in the action. We lose the center, the meditative distance, when snared by things we care about. AA doesn't meet in bars, or across the street from bars, or around the corner from bars. There is no immunity. We are not off limits to the "pull of the forbidden fruit." Our work is always at the point of being forgotten and forsaken in favor of all that is “good and pleasing.”

And not only are we distracted by what is attractive and pleasing, but we also have more than we can handle just dealing with the day-to-day ebbs and flows of our life. We build a home in the country long before the subdivision is an idea in some developer's mind, or before the freeway appears on some Department of Transportation design table. No one saw it coming. This is how life is. Life comes out of nowhere to stun and demolish and leave us wondering how in the world we will gather ourselves and respond to THIS.

It takes meditative distance to gather ourselves and face what must be faced. To rise to the occasion. To square ourselves up with the way things are, and do what we can with what we have to work with in responding to THIS. It is not easy, but it is essential that we do the work of offering what is needed to the time and place of our living, day in and day out, for the rest of our lives.

What is being asked of us in each moment, in each situation as it arises? How are we being asked to rise to this occasion, here and now? Ah, but. The objection. The resistance. The very idea! We don't WANT to rise to this, or any, occasion! We want what we want the way we want it when we want it for as long as we want it! And what we want has nothing to do with rising to some occasion! Grr! Snarl! Stomp and Shout (and Pout)!

Our life is asking us to grow up, to square ourselves up with our life, with how it is with us within and without, and we don't want to do it. We don’t want to wake up, grow up, square up, stand up, and do what needs to be done. We want life to bend to our will, to do what we want. We want to be told how to have what we want. We do not want to be told to hand over what we want for the sake of some way that is not our way.

The world is a wasteland that waits for us to understand how things are and reconcile ourselves to it, square ourselves with it. The world is a wasteland waiting for us to hand over what we want for the sake of The Way that is not our idea of any way, much less The Way. Everyone—every thing—suffers in this standoff.

The hero's place, the hero’s role, is not to be the hero with ticker tape parades and fireworks and celebrations long into the night, but to get up each day and rise to the occasion, the occasion she, he, does not want to rise to. THAT is the heroic task. It is never more difficult than doing what is asked of us each day, living in each moment to bring forth the gifts that are ours to give, the genius that is ours to share, in ways that meet the needs of the moment in the way that only we can. But this isn’t the whole of it.

Here’s the rest of the story. The world does not want what we have to offer. That’s the way the world treats its heroes. Jesus is crucified by those he would have gathered under his wings as a hen gathers her chicks. Pay attention here. This is about you. The world does not want us to be who we are, offering what we have to give.

If we are going to become who we are (and who we also are) we have to stand apart from the collective wisdom telling us to not be who we are. But, to do that, to stand apart from the collective is to be seen as Narcissistic, self-indulgent, anti-social. Well. Will we be individuals or not? We will be accused of belonging to "the cult of individuality." Are we going to be individuals or not? The collective will pull all stops in trying to block our development as individuals. Yet, that development is the collective's only hope. Ironic. Paradoxical. And how it is. Square yourself up to it and get yourself going!

Truth as Polarity

2010-09-12T15:12:00.001-04:00

Hermes is the messenger of the Gods in the Greek Pantheon, the master of eloquence, interpretation, translation, explanation, right seeing and saying. It is from the word “Hermes” that we get “hermeneutics,” the art of interpreting Biblical texts. I stand before you in the spirit of Hermes to interpret the texts and make plain the truth. It’s what you pay me to do. And, it’s worth noting that the Roman name of Hermes is Mercury, which is also known as Quicksilver, something that shifts, moves, changes quickly, such as the interpretation, understanding, of truth. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Look quickly if you want to see it. It is on the way to becoming something else, perhaps its opposite.

This is the nature of truth. It is not static, but dynamic, changing, shape-shifting, evolving, emerging, unfolding, becoming. And you, we, have to be as quick as it is if we would keep up and know in this moment what is trying to be known here, now. “You don’t keep new wine in old wineskins,” says Jesus, because new wine is still fermenting and will burst the old wineskins that have lost their elasticity and cannot expand to incorporate the new ways of understanding the world, life, ourselves. “It’s a new world, Golda,” says Tevya, and we have to be ready to receive well the world that is changing before our eyes. I don’t think Jesus would have said it in those words, but that’s what he said. This is his theme, the point that he makes over and over. “The way you have thought is not the way to think! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

The Sermon on the Mount, the text in chapters 5, 6 and 7 in the Gospel of Matthew, is Jesus’ vision of what is required to live in the physical, visible, world as envoys, representatives, of the invisible world. Note carefully that it is not warfare that Jesus envisions. The Sermon on the Mount is not the book of Revelation or the message of John the Baptist. It is diametrically opposed to both. It begins with the Beatitudes.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit…Blessed are those who mourn…Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…Blessed are the merciful…Blessed are the pure in heart…Blessed are the peacemakers…Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake…Blessed are you all, right now, exactly as you are!” These words from the man John the Baptist predicted would come “with his winnowing fork in his hand, and clear the threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Jesus’ behavior is so not what John expected that John is reported by Luke (7:18ff) to have sent his disciples to Jesus to inquire, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” What John looked for was not to be delivered in that age, and will not be delivered in some future age. It will not be as we think it will be. This is the nature of truth, which is like quicksilver, turning, changing, becoming more than we ever imagined, something other than we would ever guess.

The nature of truth is reflected in the polarities that define existence: This is the way things are, and this is the way things also are. But which way IS it REALLY?, we ask. Both ways. At the same time. Here’s an example. You know the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus espouses the Golden Rule (which was not original with Jesus by a long stretch): “In everything, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” You think that’s clear don’t you? Well, square these two texts with the parable about the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1-13). Sometimes we love our neighbor as we love ourselves and sometimes we say, “Who made me your caretaker?” (cf. Luke 12:14). Sometimes, we do it this way, and sometimes, we do it that way. And, how do we know when to do what? We take our chances, don’t you know?

The polarities are evident throughout the Sermon on the Mount. After the Beatitudes, which stand in opposition to the apocalyptic expectations of Jesus’ day, Jesus says, “Don’t think I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets! I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17), then he spends the rest of the Sermon on the Mount setting aside the popular thinking about the Law and the Prophets. “You have heard it said,” he says time and again, “but I say unto you!” (For instance, “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ But I say unto you, ‘Do not resist an evildoer, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you to take your coat, give your cloak as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.’”)

All of which is to say that the truth is expanded, enlarged, deepened by that which is also true, and that we who want things spelled out and made plain have to understand the nature of truth and the task of hermeneutics, interpretation, explanation. We are dealing with quicksilver here, as slippery a substance as there is in the entire collection of substances. Truth will not be nailed down, codified, defined, locked up, walled in, roped, tied and branded. Truth is this AND that. Sometimes it’s like this, and sometimes it’s like that. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” Which way IS it? Both ways at the same time. And we live within the polarities, between the opposites, laughing at the very idea of saying how it is really without saying how it also is really. And, if we strive for consistency and constancy and one way only-ness (the RIGHT way, of course), we only show that we don’t have a clue.

I call these things poems

2010-09-11T20:32:00.000-04:00

What’s Important

by Jim Dollar

Anything can sound good

to those who aren’t clear

about what’s important.

We can follow the

bright lights down

winding trails

into the deep woods

and wake up wishing

for a hypnotist

to tell us we’re a duck

and feed us corn

out of his hand

so we can be happy

a bit longer

and not have to worry

about what matters

like where we are going

and what we mean

by going there.

Whisper softly to us.

we pray.

Tell us you are God,

or know God,

or talked to God

once on the phone,

and have the latest word

about what we must do

to be pain free

and unburdened

by the weight

of our lives.

The Young Girls

by Jim Dollar

What became of them, do you think,

all those young girls

with dreams

and straight A’s on every

spelling test?

How many were divorced

with children,

diagnosed with breast cancer,

disposed to develop a taste for the

night life

with nothing to show for it

but a fat diamond

or two

and a regular place on the

society pages?

We passed each other notes

in homeroom

and walked away

to do what we could

with our lives

without appreciating the

importance

of good company,

or honoring the

innocence

we were glad to

leave behind.

Wolves

by Jim Dollar

Wolves are just what they are.

Hungry or not they do what wolves do.

You would never mistake a wolf for a milk cow, say

Or a pizza delivery person.

A pizza delivery person

Could be a wolf in sheep’s clothing,

But not a wolf.

A wolf would not parade around in sheep’s clothing,

Baaing and munching grass,

Wondering when to make its move.

Red Toenails

by Jim Dollar

I love bright red polished toenails,

and deep maroon ones.

I love it that a woman

would take the time to paint her toenails.

What could the purpose possibly be?

I love the senseless pursuit of beauty in all forms.

Don’t you?

We Know

by Jim Dollar

We act like we know

exactly what it would take.

This job,

that spouse,

that area of town,

this neighborhood,

this car,

these friends,

those clubs…

It is as though

life is a big house

in the country

and we are interior designers.

We are sure we can get it right,

finally,

with different furniture,

new paint,

this wall taken out

and a new bathroom

up stairs.

Fog

by Jim Dollar

If we are driving in heavy fog,

we acquiesce to the fog.

We do not dictate to the fog.

We do not drive like we want to,

fog or no fog.

We do not impose our will on the fog.

We do not say, “Damn the fog! Full speed ahead!”

Here’s one for you:

We are driving in heavy fog.

Lectio Divina

2010-08-29T14:53:00.001-04:00

The sleeper in the Mandala Program offering is Lectio Divina. “Divine Reading.” “Holy Reading.” Ho-Hum. Sounds too much like Bible Study. But, read the blurb: “When Lectio Divina is practiced faithfully, it leads to a deeper knowledge of the Divine, ourselves and the world. It also helps us ‘stay on the beam.’” What more could you ask? What more do you need?

Lectio Divina is a projective device like the Animal Projection Exercise. Don’t tell me you haven’t done the Animal Projection Exercise. Where have you been? We’ve only done it about 278 times in the last seven years (We will be starting our 8^th year here on November 16). We can’t track you down, bang on your door, insist that you do what’s good for you. As close as we come to that is what I’m doing here with the Lectio Divina. It is a projective device that opens you to you (If you want to check out the Animal Projection Exercise, look up the April 12, 2010 podcast or printed monologue on my blog site: http://outlandspress.blogspot.com/).

Projective devices (like dreams) are important because we cannot see ourselves directly, only indirectly, obliquely, askance, out of the corner of our eye. It’s like trying to see a particular star in the night sky. You don’t look directly at it, but off a bit to the side, and there it is. If you look at it, it’s gone. That’s you looking for yourself. Lectio Divina is a tool for looking at yourself sideways.

The folks teaching the class (Helen Wolff and Joyce McKenzie) are going to use scripture passages, not because they are magical, but because they are useful. The most useful thing about them is that they stir up stuff in us. Questions, curiosity, resistance. Resistance is great because it exposes our stuck places. We resist things that “push our buttons.” Mention the Deep South to me and I get all bristly and snarly. Resistance. You pushed one of my buttons.

Our buttons are complexes, like an apartment complex, which consist of a multitude of experiences, ideas, memories which coalesce around an event, or a series of events that is/are/was/were “too hot,” or too traumatic, or too raw and ugly for us to reasonably process at the time. It was a bad time, and we survived it by not looking too closely at the badness of the times. But it remains alive for us, and we still don’t want to look at it. Well, guess what. Spiritual growth requires us to unstick the stuck places by squaring up to them, remembering them, thinking about them, working with them. I do that with you—you play the part of a community of therapists for me—by talking about the Deep South from time to time. Saying the words forces me to face the memories and feel the feelings and come to terms with the badness of the times. We do that over and over until our reactivity diminishes and disappears and that particular word is no longer a button.

So you read a scripture passage. A button is pushed. And you face up to it. What is stirred up? What memories come to life? Or, you read a scripture passage, and certain words or terms catch your attention. You pay attention to what catches your attention and wonder about it, creating a train, or a trail, of associations, and seeing where it leads you, what it brings to mind for you. In all of this, you develop an intense curiosity about your response to the text and go in your mind where your response takes you. This is woolgathering, or taking a walkabout, at its best, and it is a form of meditation, of prayer, that will, over time, lead you to you and to more than you, to more than words can say, more than meets the eye, to the experience of Transcendent Reality we call Divine, or Holy, or God.

Sounds crazy. Sounds wo-oo, wo-oo. Sounds weird. We prefer our religion to be rational, logical, reasonable, left-brained and nicely limited to what words can say and eyes can see. Well, look, listen, then. You come here whining to me about spiritual growth and development and I hand you Lectio Divina, and you say, “Don’t you have a catechism around here somewhere, or a book of doctrine? Something we can argue with, and debate, and dismiss because of its obvious defects and deficiencies? We don’t actually want spiritual growth and development, we just want a really rousing intellectual dispute to get the juices flowing.”

My goodness, I do believe it is the church of your experience that you are looking for! Strange isn’t it, how what we run from is what we seek? Well, now, THAT’S food for thought! Lectio Divina at our service! We start with our resistance to Lectio Divina as a spiritual exercise using scripture and see where it takes us, paying attention to all that stirs within us and where that takes us, and before you know it we are into spiritual growth and development whether we want to be or not.

This is the wonder of spiritual growth. EVERYTHING is a springboard to realization, awareness, enlightenment, understanding, comprehension, seeing, hearing, understanding, knowing, doing, being. Everything is a mirror reflecting us to ourselves (A mirror is the best projective device. We project ourselves onto a mirror and are reflected back by it, and see ourselves thereby). We have to stand before the mirror until we see ourselves. Whenever something stirs something within, whenever there is a response, a reaction, either Yes! or No! the rule is to Stop! Look! Listen! What stirred what? We have to listen carefully and see the signs, and read them. Where do our motives come from? Our values? What directs our actions? This is called getting to the heart of the matter, or squaring up to ourselves and how it is with us, or seeing things as they are. Once we square up to who we are and how it is with us, we can take a peek at what needs to be done and what we have that might be helpful. At that point, we are on our way!

The Work of Reconciliation

2010-08-22T17:36:00.001-04:00

If your dog vomits on your carpet, what do you do? Do you bail on your dog? Do you say, “You did it! You clean it up!”? No, you go get the clothes pin, and the rubber gloves, and the pail of water, and the paper towels and the Lysol spray, and you get to work. You don’t wait to feel like it. You don’t wait to be in the mood to do it. You don’t wait to want to. You don’t wait to like cleaning up dog vomit. You get to work. What you feel like doing doesn’t enter into the equation. What you want is irrelevant. What you like doesn’t matter. You get up and do what needs to be done.

Now, your life is like the dog throwing up on the carpet. Be clear about that, and go live your life. Your life is a big hairy dog throwing up in your car, or on you. Take a deep breath and do what needs to be done. Without wanting to or liking it. We think it is inauthentic, hypocritical, to do what we don’t want to do. We think we aren’t being true to ourselves if we do what we don’t like doing. It’s being immature, infantile, terminally juvenile to think we don’t have to do what we don’t like. Alcoholics Anonymous has a term for what is needed: “Fake it until you make it.” “Oh, we can’t fake anything,” we squall. “That’s inauthentic!” So we don’t force ourselves to do what is right, what is necessary, what is needed, what is called for, when we don’t want to. No two-year-old does either.

AA has a term for inauthenticity: “White Knuckling It.” You white knuckle-it when you pretend you don’t want the drink you crave. The difference between faking it until we make it and white-knuckling it is the difference between authenticity and hypocrisy. Faking it until we make it is meeting the situation as it arises. White-knuckling it is kidding ourselves. Faking it until we make it is offering what we have to give to what needs to be done. White-knuckling it is pretending to have what we don't have. White-knuckling it pretends to want what it doesn't want. Faking it until we make it knows it has nothing to do with what we want.

We live to serve our likes and wants instead of living to serve our life. It's the old rule of life: We cannot serve two masters. "Choose this day whom you will serve!" Will we do what we want to do or what needs to be done in each situation as it arises? When the dog throws up on the stairs, are you going to kick the dog? Why punish your life when it has needs that interfere with your wants?

Everything waits for us to reconcile ourselves to the fundamental contradiction of having to live in a world that is not the way we wish it were, that is not the way we would like for it to be, that is not the world we want to live in. We have to face squarely the distance between the world we wish were ours and the world in which we live, feel the contradiction, and live it. We can imagine a world that is better in a thousand ways than the world we live in, and we have to reconcile ourselves to living in the world we live in. We keep not wanting to live in the world we live in. This is the fundamental contradiction. We say NO to what we cannot say no to! We have no choice but to say YES to the world we live in, but we cannot bring ourselves to say yes to this world as it is! We have to reconcile ourselves with being here and now in this world just as it is. We have to grow up.

Growing up means coming to terms with the fact that things are not the way we wish they were. Our only problem is that things are not what we wish they were. If things were the way we wish they were, we would have no problems. There would be no problems. Things are not going to be what we wish they were. We have to reconcile ourselves to that truth, square ourselves up with it, and live anyway, nevertheless, even so.

We accommodate ourselves to the world by understanding, by coming to terms with: "This is the way it is and this is what we can do about it, and that’s that." But we don't WANT the world to be the way it is! We want to have what we cannot have. We want to do more about it than we can do, than can be done! This is the contradiction. Our task, the spiritual task, is to face what must be faced, square up to what must be squared up to, and make the best of it, doing what can be done here and now with what we have to work with. This is all the spiritual masters of every age have done—they have recognized that this is the way things are, and this is what can be done about it, and that's that.

We have to rein in our wants run amok, our emotional reactions bouncing off the walls, and get what we need to clean up the dog's vomit. But. The work of reconciliation cannot be forced upon us. We will not have it! We want the secret to turning the world into what we want it to be, so we throw ourselves after The Prayer of Jabez and The Law of Attraction and hope soon to receive the world as we wish it to be all wrapped up and delivered to our door. And until that happy day, we will compensate ourselves with wealth, prosperity and privilege. Wealth, prosperity, and privilege are our hedge against the awful realities we don't want to face and deal with. We say: “Ignore the dog! Pay someone else to clean up the vomit!” Paying someone else to clean up the vomit is our idea of changing the world to suit ourselves, our way of not growing up.

Bad religion is also our way of not growing up. Being spiritual is what we do to get the Big Guy on our side, gaining the advantage, having an edge, getting a leg up. God becomes our ace in the hole, and religion becomes a gimmick, a good luck charm, warding off evil and guaranteeing our way in the world. We will not grow up, face what must be faced, and do what needs to be done.

Yet, we avoid the true spiritual task—growing up, facing what must be faced, reconciling ourselves to the way things are, and doing what is ours to do—at our own expense. When we refuse the spiritual task of growing up, we remain eternally immature, and the culture we create to care for us is a curse upon all. We only have to open our eyes and look around to see that it is so.

Don't Lose Heart!

2010-08-15T13:22:00.001-04:00

It matters how you live your life! Don’t lose heart! That’s the first rule of life. The problem is that heart is the easiest thing to lose, and the hardest thing to find. Our role in your life is to help you find heart and not lose it. There is a catch here. You have to help us help you.

Rumi says it well: “If you are not here with us in good faith, you are doing terrible damage.” The worst damage is to yourself. Good faith is essential. You have to live your life in good faith. It is the primary requirement for life that truly is life. You have to keep faith with yourself. In order to be here with us in good faith and in order to keep faith with yourself, your heart has to be in it. You have to care about what you are doing. It has to have value for you. The way to heart is the way of heart. If your heart isn’t in finding what has heart for you, we can’t help you. The search for heart cannot be some idle pastime until something better comes along. It can’t be some lark, some stroll in the park. You can’t be just hanging out with us for a while and be helped. If you are not here with us in good faith, we can’t help you. If you don’t care about you, about the life that is yours to live, we can’t help you.

We cannot do your caring for you. If you don’t care about you to the point of doing whatever it takes to ground yourself in what has heart for you and live out of your heart in all that you do, we can’t do much for you. It comes down to the fundamental realization: You are up to you. It is all up to you.

This is a turning point in our understanding of how life works. We save ourselves. We have, of course, heard all our lives that Christ saves us by dying in our place and appeasing God the Father Almighty who is bent on sending us to everlasting hell because of our sins that have offended him greatly. I’m changing that. I’m saying that you can say Christ saves us, but he saves us by dying in the service of what was truly important and thereby demonstrating to us that the way of salvation is a sacrificial death to all that we thought was important in order that we might live on the basis of what we are coming to understand is truly important. Sin, in my view, is being wrong about what is important. Life is being right about what is important. The progress of the spiritual journey is moving from being wrong about what is important to being right about what is important. And we do not hand over easily what we thought was important. It is like death.

No one can decide what is important to us for us. No one can tell us what is important and make it so. No one can live our life for us. At some point, we have to wake up in our lives just as they are, likely at the bottom of some wall, in some gutter, with some failed hope, or dream, or expectation, and, for some reason beyond our capacity to understand or explain—call it grace—we look ourselves in the eye, stand on our own feet, square ourselves up to how it is with us, and commit ourselves to living what remains of our life as well as anyone living, or dead, or yet to be born could live what remains of our life. At that point, we decide that it matters how we live our life and put our heart into living what remains of our life as well as our life can be lived. It is at that point that we can help you.

We help you with encouragement, understanding, compassionate presence, and by reminding you of the grounding belief, conviction, that it matters how we live our lives, and of the sacrifices that are necessary in order to live that life. Life is sacrificial. We have to make the sacrifices required to reconcile ourselves with, to square ourselves up to, the way things are, how it is with us, what we have to work with, what our choices, options, possibilities, restrictions and limits are. We have to make the sacrifices necessary to square ourselves up with how it is.

Necessary sacrifice always has to do with handing over how we wish things were, with how we would like things to be. We have to hand over, sacrifice, how we wish and want things to be, the life we wish were ours, in the service of the life that is actually our life to live. This is the spiritual task. It is called growing up. In making the necessary sacrifices, we grow up. Growing up consists of three things, lightening up, listening up, and squaring up.

Lightening up means letting go of the things that are killing us to hold on to. Listening up means listening to all that is being said to us by the events and circumstances, our physical symptoms, and the people in our lives. Squaring up means coming to terms with the life that has been our life up to this point, with the tools, the resources, the options, choices, and possibilities that are ours to work with, and with the life that may yet be ours to live from this point on. We start over again with the grounding belief that it matters how we live our lives.

It is ironic that we lose heart at the bottom of some wall, in some gutter, where our dreams have been disappointed, our plans have been laid waste, our hopes and expectations have been dashed, and nothing remains of the world we wished would be our world. And, yet, we also find heart at the bottom of that same wall, in that same gutter, when we square ourselves up to how things are, stand on our feet, embrace the life that is yet our life to live and live it, committing ourselves to the life that can yet be, no matter how far it is from the life we wish could be, anyway, nevertheless, even so!

Collaborating with Psyche

2010-08-08T14:28:00.001-04:00

We collaborate with soul/psyche to produce the life that is truly our life to live, to realize our destiny within the context of our living that fate has dealt us. It is a partnership all the way. The path is one of negotiation and compromise, and neither side, neither world—conscious and unconscious, physical and spiritual, soma and psyche, external and internal—can dismiss the other side, world, or insist on running the show to the exclusion or submission of the other side, world. We all drive the boat together on its path through the sea, which means that conversation and cooperation are essential components of our life together.

How do we converse, cooperate, with the internal, invisible, spiritual, world? Have you ever heard of prayer, perhaps? The foundational characteristic of prayer is openness. We are open to what needs to be said, to what we have to say. How is it with you right now? To be open to how it is with you, to be receptive, to be aware, accepting, attentive—to realize how it is with you to the point of being able to spell it out, to articulate it from the depths—is one aspect of prayer. And where does this happen in our experience? In the therapist’s office, not in church. In church you get formulas. You get clichés. You get exactly what you got last week, and the week before. You get “every head bowed and every eye closed.” You don’t get honesty, authenticity, genuineness, realness. Nobody says how it is when they pray in church. If you seek a place to be open to the core, you don’t go to church. That’s something that has to change. We are working to change it.

Another aspect of openness is respect for that which opens to us. We are not alone. This is the fundamental spiritual proposition. If we are all alone, what’s the point of being here? We are here to address spiritual reality and our physical relationship to it, with it. The visible world is grounded on the invisible world. That’s the central premise of spiritual development. If you take that away, what is there to develop? If the world that can be seen, and touched, tasted, smelled, dissected, labeled, weighed, measured, fenced in and sold off is the only world, what are we doing here? If there is no invisible world, we are wasting our time talking about spirituality. If the physical world is the only world, there is no spirituality. There are only chemicals and brain cells. No invisible world. No spiritual reality. And I have nothing for you, but. If there is more to life, to our lives, than meets the eye—and if intuition and creativity and whatever is at work in what we experience as grace, providence and synchronicity reflects a connection with that “more”—then we might present ourselves to the reality of the invisible world, prayerfully open to that which opens to us.

The posture, the attitude, the orientation of openness—to that which is within us, how it is with us, and to that which is beyond us, which is more than we can ask, or think, or imagine—is the key to conversation and cooperation with the invisible world. In order to see more than meets the eye, we have to look beyond what meets the eye, and be comfortable with the postulate that the physical world is not the only world. In order to see, hear and understand, we have to look, listen, ask, seek, and knock—and wait to see, and hear, what happens and where that leads.

In order to collaborate with the soul/psyche and cooperate with the invisible world in the life that is our joint life to live, in the destiny that is our joint work to realize and fulfill within the context and circumstances that define our living, we have to take up the practice of engaging the mystery of the invisible world with imagination and openness. “Practice” means regular and recurring. We sit. We articulate how it is with us as deeply and as clearly as we are capable of perceiving how it is with us. And we listen, look, for what might be heard, seen.

Here is where imagination comes to play. What spontaneous images, scenes appear to you? Take note of them, become interested in them. This is where prayer as I am proposing it differs from Buddhist or Transcendental Meditation. In meditation you are taught to dismiss the images that appear and return to your mantra as an “image clearing device.” In prayer as I propose it, you follow the image. You engage the image in dialogue. You say something on the order of, “What are you doing here, now? Why you? Why now? What do you have to say to me, to show me? What do you have to teach me, tell me, about what I’m doing or what I need to be doing?” Interview the image. See where the image leads you. Become curious, inquisitive, imaginative. Explore what the image brings to mind. This is engaging the invisible world and being open to what it might have to say to you.

Of course, this flies in the face of everything the world of normal, apparent, left-brained, rational, logical reality stands for, but. Are you going to open yourself to the possibility of the reality of the invisible, spiritual world? The world that is the ground, the source, of art and music, creativity, intuition, grace, providence, synchronicity? Are you going to experiment with your life as the proving ground of the reality of the invisible world? Are you going to start with the proposition that there is more to living than meets the eye, that there is a particular life with our name on it, a character that is ours to develop, a destiny that is ours to fulfill, which comes to us from beyond us, from beyond our rational, logical ability to make up and make real? Are you going to get to work seeing if there is anything to what I’ve been talking to you about for the last seven years? What do you have to lose?

The Quest is for Our Life

2010-08-01T16:12:00.002-04:00

The spiritual quest is the search for that which brings us to life, for the ground of our life, our existence, for that which is meaningful to us. We spend our lives looking for life. Life lies all about us and we are not alive, not vibrantly alive, not enthusiastically alive, not involved in our life, not invested in our lives. We are hanging out. Going through the motions, without much in the way of a reason to get out of bed, without any sense of why we are here.

What are we here for? That’s the quest. We aren’t looking for our assignment, for some obligation that is laid upon us by someone else. We are looking for what brings us to life, and is life. We are here to be alive, yet, to be alive our lives have to revolve around something. What draws us toward it, into it, and serves as the source and goal of our lives? That’s the search that fuels the journey. And, every journey begins, of course, where we are.

We begin with what we care about. We care about the wrong things of course, but the wrong things can lead us to the right things if we let them, if we care about the wrong things in the right way: with our eyes open. We have to care about what we care about and see where that takes us. Nascar, baseball, fishing, photography… It doesn’t matter. The problem with what we care about is not what we care about, but that we don’t care about it deeply enough, and we don’t care about it with awareness. CARE about what you care about! Get into it! See where it leads!

It will lead you to something else to care about. Care about it! Who knows why we care about what we care about. It is enough to know what we care about and to care about it, to see what happens. Carl Jung suggests that we not limit our understanding of libido to sexual energy but think of it as the energy of life, as enthusiasm for some aspect of life, and follow that energy where it goes. This experience with life energy, with being moved by something, to something, was called the Holy Spirit by previous ages. We have to become aware of the energy of life, noticing those places, ideas, people, events that are charged with energy for us, that we care about.

We are to move toward those things, those people, that attract us, that are charged with energy for us, spending time with them, incorporating them into our life. But here, as in all spiritual matters, things are not what they appear to be, and we cannot take even life energy at face value. We have to always get to the heart of the matter, looking past the surface to what else is there.

We have to decide how to read and how to direct life energy. Energy for sailing may have nothing to do with buying a sail boat or taking lessons. What is the charged idea of sailing, for example, asking of us? We have to sit with it imaginatively to know. Imagination and curiosity and patience are essential tools in the work of soul, of finding and doing the work, the life, that is ours to do, to live.

Our holy obligation is to care about what we care about for as long as we care about it and then care about something else. We will always care about some things, but not all things. People are always trying to talk us out of what we care about and into what they care about. We are here to care about what we care about, to follow our enthusiasm for some aspects of life throughout our lives, as it evolves, shifts, transforms and leads us a merry chase. No matter what they say.

What do you do that you care about that nobody notices, knows, or cares if you do or not? What do you care about that nobody wants you to do or care about? If you have never had a life to call your own, never done a thing you wanted to do just because you wanted to do it, what are you waiting for? How much of your life do you live because other people expect it of you? How much of it do you live no matter what anyone thinks? Whose permission do you need to do the things you do, to live the life you live? Whose disapproval do you fear? Whose life are you living? Who is guiding your ship on its path on the sea? If you are not at the helm, who is?

We don't have to worry about destinations and outcomes and what we are going to do with our lives. We only need to know the right road when we see it and walk it. The right road will take us where we need to be. We can trust ourselves to the rightness of the right road, knowing no more than that. We know the road is right the way we know anything is right. A cup of coffee, a walk in the woods, watching the sun rise and set... You wouldn’t trust anyone else to choose your deserts for you, why think anyone else will know the right road for you? You know what is right for you and what is wrong, what is life for you and what is death, and whether the road you are on is IT.

We aren't here to get anything out of it, to gain the advantage, to have our way. We are here to find the right road, the beam, to stay on the right track. We know the right road, the right track, the beam when we see it but. We can be led astray by 10,000 self-serving things. The rule is always: Stay on the beam! The "force" is the power of the beam, the right track, road, path. In it, on it, we have all we need. Off it, we are lost and on our own. We want to live the way we want to live AND have the "force" be with us, paving our way, smoothing our path. Our way is not THE way, our path is not THE path. We don't want to do what our life requires. We want splendor, privilege, smooth and easy. We have to be on THE way, THE path! And, the quickest way to THE way is walking the path we are on with our eyes open to what is happening and our hearts open to what is calling our name.

Helping You With Your Life

2010-07-25T17:24:00.001-04:00

We are here to help you live your life. The catch is that you have to be living your life. In order to help you with your life, we would have to connect you with your life and then help you live it. This is a problem because to connect you with your life, we have to, ahem, sorry, disconnect you from the life you are living, from the life you want to be living, from the life you wish you were living, from life as you have always thought life should be. We have to take all of that away from you and give you YOUR life. It’s a problem because you will not cooperate with the procedure of removing your idea of life from you and replacing it with THE LIFE THAT IS YOUR LIFE TO LIVE. Because you will mount such resistance to the very idea of taking from you your idea of how your life ought to be and giving you in its place YOUR LIFE, we have adopted a wise and fail-proof strategy. We will wait.

Unless you are incredibly hardheaded, you will not be able to long escape or deny the conclusion that you don’t know what you are doing and that you cannot create the life you wish you could live. Eventually, you will wake up at the bottom of some wall and realize that you cannot arrange things like you want them to be. This is the Transformational Conclusion. It is the threshold to the life we are called to live, built to live, designed to live, made to live. In the Bible, this life is referred to as “the Land of Promise,” and “the Kingdom of God.” It is where things are what they are fully capable of being in service to, in alignment with, in light of what we might call “True Value.” Your ideal life is who you are capable of being, what you are capable of doing, in accordance with True Value.

This is what we are here to help you do, who we are here to help you be, but. You have to help us help you. You need us. We need you. It takes all of us to live lives aligned with True Value. Individually, we have a sense of it. We all have a built in sense of direction, a sense of value, but. It takes us all to validate, affirm, question, explore, examine, what each of us thinks is the right direction and of true value. The ground of the life that is OUR LIFE is conversation that opens us to alternatives, options and possibilities we would never think to consider on our own.

At this point comes into play the genius of the Presbyterian way of doing things. There are two elements of the Presbyterian way that are invaluable in helping us with the work of finding our own way. They are: 1) The sanctity of the individual’s conscience, and 2) The foundational awareness that all of us are smarter than any one of us (And the “all of us” includes not only those of us who are present in any moment in our life, but those who have gone before us, the “saints in light,” who are with us in the writings and traditions that are commonly recognized as “wise” across all writings and all traditions).

These two points of contrast, contradiction and tension form the poles within which Presbyterians live and enable life to be lived around them. We relax the tension in favor of either pole to the detriment of us all. This means that no group can tell any individual what to do, and no individual can decide for herself, for himself, alone, apart from the consultative presence of the group, what she, or he, will do. This is the conundrum of life aligned with True Value. We have to work out the particulars of how it is done in every here-and-now of our lives. Where does the line lie between me and all of you, between each of you and all of us? Tricky. And, we have to always be engaged in the eternal process of working it out in the specific context and circumstances of our lives. That is the work that enables us to live the life that is OUR LIFE to live, the work that we are here to help you do.

The core of this work is conversation. It is talking with each other about the things that are important to us, the things that matter to us, the things that have value to us. We evaluate the values we serve by talking about them in the right kind of company. Together we examine the validity of what we think is valid. This is the communion that is the foundation of our life, the covenant that is at the heart of our life together. We come together to ask, and seek, and knock, to see, and hear and understand. And what do we seek? What do we see when we see, hear when we hear, understand when we understand? What is of True Value. What is worthy of us. And what we are asked to do, who and how we are asked to be that would exhibit, express, True Value in the here and now of our living.

All of this depends upon you living in ways that are important to you, have value to you, matter to you. You have to live in ways that you care about if you care about living in ways that are aligned with True Value. This underscores the central significance of the sanctity of the individual conscience. You have to say what is important to you if you are to have a chance of ever seeing and saying what is truly important. You start with what is important to you and change your mind over the course of your life, through your experience of being alive, so as to better align yourself with what is truly important, to live in sync with the heart of True Value. To do that, you have to be, or begin, living a life that you care about, doing things that matter, that are important, to you. You cannot fade out, cancel yourself out, and allow Those Who Know Best (Truman Capote) to direct your living, telling you what to do or what you should care about. You have to care about what you care about and let that lead you into what to care about. You have to live your life with your eyes open to what is happening and your heart open to the path with your name on it, and let that take you to the life that is truly yours to live. Amen! May it be so!

Being who we are in this here, this now

2010-07-18T13:22:00.000-04:00

You cannot find your life, the life that is your life to live, by thinking about it. You cannot approach the task reasonably, rationally, logically, intellectually. You can’t find the path by reading books, listening to lectures, taking courses, seeking audiences with the wise masters and the swami gurus. There is only one way to The Way. You have to live your life with your eyes open to what is happening and with your heart open to The Way.

No one knows beforehand which way is The Way. We have talked before of the dilemma: “Is it a White Rabbit, or a Red Herring, or a Wild Goose?” We don’t know. We cannot know without giving chase. Maybe the chase takes us to the path with our name on it. Maybe it takes us away from the path with our name on it. Maybe going away from the path with our name on it is what we need to get to the path with our name on it. It takes going to know. If we find that we are on The Path, great. Then we only have to stay on The Path. If we find we are off The Path, great. Then we only have to get on The Path.

The work to get on The Path and the work to stay on The Path is the same work. It is the work of seeing, hearing, understanding and deciding in the moment of our living what must be done to be who we are here and now. Our motive is not to serve our advantage, not to gain the edge, not to improve our market share or turn a handsome profit, but to be who we are here and now. The most we can do for one another is to live our own lives—facing what must be faced and doing what must be done to be who we are here/now.

Recognizing that, we are here to help you do that. “We” (Those of us in this gathering of sojourners) are here to help “you” (individuals comprising the “we”) live your life, that is, the life that is truly yours to live—to find the path, the way, the beam, the life, with your name on it. And, in order to do what “we” are here to do, we can’t be getting in “your” way and giving you more stuff to do than is helpful and necessary.

The church as we have known it piles program stuff on top of program stuff upon its members so as, it appears to me, to justify existence and prove that it is doing something. But “doing something” is not to be confused with being helpful. The Mandala program, which you will be hearing more about in the next few weeks, is a good approach in that it is a time-limited offering and no one is expected to participate beyond her or his own personal interest level. Where education in the church is concerned, there is no graduated series of steps to mark progress in spiritual development. There are no graduate degrees in spirituality, or spiritual acumen. Yoda is always also Hans Solo, and the only difference between Yoda and Hans Solo is that Yoda knows there is an identity between them that Hans Solo does not recognize. So don’t think of the church as the place where you go to learn what you need to know. It is the place that sustains and supports and encourages you as you learn what you need to know.

Always the concern is to be helpful, and to be aware of what is helpful and what is not. How can we assist people in the living of their lives? The people we are here to help need to take the lead. Our children, for instance, will tell us what they need to be who they are if we listen to them. Here’s where you come in. You have to help us help you. We have to help the others help us. There is no programmatic substitute for doing our own work, the work of listening and looking for our own path, the work of living with integrity and authenticity. No one can do that for us.

To live with integrity and authenticity is the heroic task. To live with integrity and authenticity is to live aligned with that which is deepest, best and truest about us—to live the life that is our life to live. It is to align ourselves with who we are and live a life that serves our destiny. This is our work, the work we are here to do and the work we are here to help one another do.

In order to do it, to find the way that is our way, to find the path that is our path, to find the beam, the life with our name on it, we have to be alert to IT and to NOT IT. The catch here, of course, is that we cannot have 100% IT all of the time and we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with 100% NOT IT very much of the time. Too many of us are living lives that are NOT IT too much of the time.

It is hard to know IT or NOT IT initially. This is the problem of whether it is a White Rabbit, a Red Herring, or a Wild Goose. We don’t know at first. We have to live with it to know if it is IT or NOT IT. Once we know NOT IT we have to find the exits. But, there is a catch here as well: Exits themselves can be IT and NOT IT. Cocaine and alcohol addiction are NOT IT exits. Suicide is NOT IT. Addiction to mind-numbing religion is NOT IT. Perhaps your mother married your father to get away from her family. Perhaps that was not a smart move, NOT IT, as they say. Exits are not always the way out they appear to be.

There is another problem with exits. Exits that are IT can appear to be NOT IT because of what they ask of us, or because we are afraid. Fear keeps us in NOT IT long past leaving. To off-set fear, we need resources and courage. Jung says, “Only boldness can deliver us from fear,” but. That doesn’t mean that we hurl ourselves into everything we fear! Being afraid of something can be QUITE IT. Boldness that delivers us into NOT IT, is not the kind of boldness we need to associate with. We have to know when to be bold and when to be afraid. We have to live with our eyes open, seeing, hearing, understanding and knowing when to do what in order to be who we are here and now.

Running from one NOT IT to another is NOT IT, though we may pass through a string of NOT IT's on the way to IT, and IT is never 100% for long. IT generally always involves trade-offs—we give up this to get that—making IT appear to be NOT IT. Other times, we see IT so clearly that we will give up anything to have IT. If living in the mountains or the west, for instance, is IT, living there will off-set what we give up to live there.

So we have to practice knowing IT and NOT IT. Make lists. What's on your IT list? Your NOT IT list? You spend most of your time doing things on which list? Live so as to increase the amount of time you spend with things on your IT list. The NOT IT stuff will consume you if you don't draw lines.

Who helps you with IT? Who opposes, resists, prevents your drift toward IT? Who is on your side? With you? Against you? Whose side are YOU on? The catch here is that your own deep purpose is not YOUR purpose at all. Your purpose is to loll around the pool or maybe drive to the beach. Enter the problem. IT, that which is truly IT, is too often NOT IT for you. IT asks hard things of you. You don't cooperate with YOU. To live with integrity, we have to reconcile ourselves to our deeper SELF and cooperate with purposes that are not consciously created.

We have to cooperate with ends that are our true ends even though they aren't appealing to us at all. The beam is the beam whether we like it or not. How often do we resist, oppose, refuse that which is calling our name? “Not me, send Aaron!” we say. “Anywhere but Nineveh!” we say. “Let this cup pass from me!” we say. Whose side are we on? How do we get to be on OUR side? How do we align ourselves with the deep drift of our psyche, soul? Who is charting our path on the sea? The work of aligning ourselves with our SELF is the work of spiritual development, the work of life. Individuation, Jung called it. It is the work we are here to do and to help each other do.

This work is the hero’s task. The hero’s task is to live linked with the self we are called to be, aligned with our destiny. It is to be who we are, to do what is ours to do, and to live the life that is ours to live, here and now. This is why we are here—here in the sense of being alive in this world, and here in the sense of being gathered in this space with these people. This is the covenant that is the ground of our lives, to take up this work, this work of being who we are here and now. It is the work of seeing, hearing, understanding and deciding in the moment of our living what must be done to be who we are here and now and do it. It is the work of helping one another do this work.

A covenant is a binding agreement. The covenant that we make here in this place called “Covenant” is the covenant we make with ourselves and one another to do right by ourselves and one another. We covenant to be who we are, to live out our life as our life needs to be lived out, and to assist each other in doing that work. We covenant with ourselves and one another to be the right kind of company, offering the right kind of help in the right kind of way. We covenant with ourselves and one another to live in ways that are good for ourselves and for one another, to be who, and to do what, our life—the life that is truly our life to live—is asking us to do in each here and now. Together we work to be who we are individually, becoming who we are built to be, for the true good of all. Amen! May it be so!

Doing What Is Asked Of Us

2010-07-11T12:40:00.001-04:00

Everything comes down to and flows from doing the things our life asks us to do. When the baby needs to be fed, we feed the baby. When the baby’s diaper needs to be changed, we change the baby’s diaper. We don’t shortchange the baby. We care for the baby even when we don’t feel like it, when we aren’t in the mood for it, when we don’t want to. No parent worthy of the title ever told his or her new born, “Come back when you’re 25.”

We do the thing that needs doing. Jim McKenzie has said that the things we dread doing, put off, find excuses not to do (like mowing the lawn and unclogging the drain and preparing our income tax) take no more than a few hours at most to do. You would think we had been sentenced to ten years at hard labor the way we carry on about the things we don’t want to do but must be done.

I said last week, and liked the line so much I’m going to use it again this week, that we have within us what it takes to rise to every occasion, yet we are afraid we cannot rise to any occasion. We don’t want to rise to any occasion. We want to be left alone. We want life to ply us with blessings and leave us alone.

The single most important requirement for spiritual development is doing what our life asks us to do while being true to ourselves. It starts with the way we treat our children. Our children come into the world with all they need to be who they are. We don’t have to tell them anything about how to be who they are. We have a lot to tell them about how to square themselves up with the world while being who they are. But, in order to tell them what they need to know about that, we need to know what we are talking about. We need to be able to square ourselves up with the world while being who we are! But, we want to be able to get what we want from the world and for the world to leave us alone.

And we want to be spiritual, or say we do. My position on the matter is that we don’t want to be spiritual at all. We want a buffer between ourselves and the world. If the world won’t go away, we will. We will withdraw, shrink back, disengage. Spirituality is a great way of escaping the dreads and dreariness of life. We even call them “spiritual retreats.” We get to claim the highest of motives in checking out of our lives. Who could fault us for seeking spiritual enlightenment? Well, here’s an enlightening thought for you: The only value of spiritual development is in its enabling us to do what our life is asking us to do while being true to ourselves, and doing what we must do to be who we are. The only value of being spiritual is finding there the wherewithal to engage our lives—to step into our lives and live them exactly as they need to be lived, changing the baby’s diaper and helping our children and one another, square themselves up with their lives while being true to themselves, while being who they are.

This is the spiritual task, being who we are in the world as it is. This requires us to live in the tension between the life we live “in the world” in order to make a living and pay the bills and do what is being asked of us to meet the requirements of life “in the world,” while living the life that is truly our life to live, the life that exhibits and expresses who we are in the deepest, truest sense of the term. There are two lives to be lived here, the life with our name on it, our destiny, and the life the world requires of us, our fate. We live within the constraints of our fate, the givens and demands of physical reality, as we serve our destiny, becoming and expressing who and how we are as spiritual beings.

This is all there is to being spiritual—doing what our lives ask of us while being true to ourselves, while being who we are. Spirituality provides us with the inner resources to do what the external world asks of us, requires of us, demands of us. Without a vibrant spiritual foundation we have to make it through life on the strength of our own willpower alone. We are left with talking ourselves into doing what ought to be done, with “gutting it out,” with “suffering through.” This is the moral equivalent of AA’s “white-knuckling it,” and it gets us about as far.

We cannot will ourselves through life. This is were spirituality comes into play. Spirituality is the ground of life in the world, of our ability to do what our life asks of us. Here’s how it works. We have within all we need to rise to every occasion AND we don’t want to rise to any occasion. Both the ability and the resistance are spiritual realities. We consciously align ourselves with one while giving full credence to the validity of the other’s position. Of course we don’t want to rise to any occasion! Why would we? What’s in it for us? What are we going to get out of it? There is nothing there that would be better than lolling around the pool sipping something cold, or just lying in the shade and letting the world turn. Of course it is unfair and not right that we should have to change the baby! Who changes us?

Here we get to the heart of the matter of our resistance to doing what life asks of us. It is the infantile refusal to grow up. Yet the opposite infantile motive is also at work in us. We want to be independent and self-reliant. We want to live our own life. We don’t want anyone “changing us”! All of this is spiritually true. We are brim full of mixed motives. Ambivalence is our primary characteristic. We feel very strongly both ways about every important thing.

This “collision of contraries” is a fundamental experience of every conscious being and has always been projected outside of us as a cosmic conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, God and Satan. It is easier for us to conceive and describe the “out there” than the “in here,” but we are actually talking about the “in here” as though it is “out there.” The conflict is within, and we don’t know what to do about it.

What we do about it is step into it and say firmly what we are going to do while validating the opposing point of view. And, we find the strength for this in the inner allies and guides who gather to assist us in the work of becoming who we are. Now, these inner allies and guides are not at our disposal and will not help us live any old life. They assist us in the expression of, the living of, the life that is truly our life to live. We have to be “on the beam,” “on track,” “on the right path,” to avail ourselves of our inner resources, guidance and help. But, the wonder is that as we take up the challenge to become who we are within the constraints and givens of life “in the world,” we discover that we are not alone in this work. The work is to become who we are by doing what our lives are asking of us, while living to express what is deepest, truest and best about us, bringing the spiritual qualities, character, and aspects of ourselves to life in the physical world of normal, apparent, reality. Amen! May it be so!

Adjusting to Reality

2010-07-04T22:48:00.001-04:00

Our unending and primary task is adapting, adjusting, ourselves to reality. Life comes at us constantly, requiring response. Nothing is more important to our spiritual development than our willingness to meet life as it comes to us and deal as well as we possibly can with what each day delivers. It is the practical matter of day-to-day life in the world that leads us in the search for spiritual substance, meaning and purpose. Such is the essence of Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

“Born of water” is reference to the amniotic fluid of physical birth. Physical birth is necessary for spiritual birth. Physical reality is what spiritual reality uses to get our attention, to summons us to the critical matter of finding the spiritual wherewithal to bring ourselves to life in this world. Carl Jung said, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” There you are. There is no waking up without the shock of a reality that is contrary to our wants and wishes. The physical word shakes us awake. Then there is a chance that we will turn toward the spiritual foundation of life for our sustenance and strength and direction. Of course, we might choose to numb ourselves with a thousand addictions into the blissful stupor of everlasting sleep, but spiritual reality’s only hope is the painful jolt of the world’s “NO!”

The spiritual quest, journey, path begins with questions we have to ask and cannot answer—questions brought on by an encounter with some contradiction, or denial, of our happy way in the world. The world has a way of not going the way we want it to go, of forcing us to wake up, and grow up, against our will. This is the role of physical reality in our lives. It requires us to do what it takes to accommodate ourselves to that which is often troublesome, inconvenient, unenjoyable and not what we want to do. The question is will we do it.

It is our refusal to grow up and do what the situation requires of us, what reality demands, that leads to shrinking back from life, to “dying” in place. Every shrinking back is a form of death, a dying, a refusal to meet the challenge of life. We must step forward and engage our life in order to be fully alive! Joseph Campbell says, “It took the Cyclops to bring out the hero in Ulysses.” We don't know what we are made of until reality comes calling, and we have to deal with road blocks and detours to our idea of happily ever after.

Another way of thinking about reality is “the pain of life.” One of the tenants of Buddhism is “Life is suffering.” We must bear the pain of living and adjust ourselves to what is being asked of us, to what has to be done. Adjustment and accommodation are hidden, that is, unconscious, strengths we don't use because we don't want to adjust, we don’t want to accommodate! We want to live on our terms. We don't want life dictating the terms, handing out the conditions. We don't want to grow up.

We have to come to terms with our own inner resistance to coming to terms with life, our own refusal to grow up, acknowledge the extent to which we are blocking ourselves, and recognize how it is with us in order to take up the task of becoming who we need to be from the ground up. It is essential that we understand the dialectic at the heart of things. There is conflict, opposition, dichotomy, contradiction everywhere we look.

The basic incongruity is between the physical and the spiritual. This is often couched in divine and human terms, opposites at the basic level of awareness. The resolution, reconciliation, synthesis occurs when we look deeper into the opposition to the point of seeing that physical IS spiritual, spiritual IS physical, divine IS human, human IS divine. How this is so cannot be explained or defined or articulated, but that it is so can be sensed in a dew drop on a day lily or a white cloud in a clear blue sky. The numinous winks at us in a baby’s cry or a cat’s low purr. And then it is gone and we are stuck with only a wet diaper or a hungry pet. Perceptual shifts like these lead to the easy conclusion that reality is an optical illusion. Now it is one way, now another, but always both, yet never at the same time.

Contradiction and inconsistency are koans of every day life pulling us into the work of spiritual realization and growth. The cross is a beautiful metaphor for "the human condition." We are always at the cross(roads), choosing to stay or go, or caught between Thy will and mine being done. We have the capacity to arise to any occasion and we are afraid of every occasion. We want to regress to our mother’s arms and we want to progress by leaving home and finding our way in the world. The ground of life is conflict and opposition. Here, conscious awareness is the great mediator, reconciling the conflict that is everywhere Out There, that is everywhere In Here, that churns forever between the Out There and the In Here.

We consciously bring forth reconciliation, synthesis, integration and alignment by honoring the opposites and being with them in ways that allow us to see the one in the other. We see finally that “all of our dichotomies are false dichotomies,” and that all is one, though we cannot just clutch that as a talisman or repeat it as a happy mantra. We have to do the work of looking until we see, of listening until we hear, of asking, seeking, and knocking until we understand. Until we recognize the spiritual in the physical, the divine in the human, the wonder in it all, and making, in light of the deepest truth we are capable of realizing, a decision about what needs to be done here and now, and doing it. Amen, may it be so!

Doing What Is Helpful

2010-06-27T15:31:00.001-04:00

Spirituality, spiritual aliveness, has nothing to do with religion or dogma or belief or faith, but with bringing our soul/self to LIFE. When our doing flows not from our thinking about how things ought to be done, but from our being true to what is life to our soul, we're on track. We have to be able to tell death from life and have the courage to live toward life. The catch here of course is that life is always on the other side of death. There is death that leads to being dead and death that leads to being alive. We have to know the difference and die the right kind of death.

We like to invent structures and traditions to save us from dying by taking the burden of decision making away from us because we hate the agony of choosing when we don’t know what to do, or when we don’t want to do what we know needs to be done. But. Structures are death in disguise. Nothing is more deadly than being sure we know how things ought to be done.

The tendency is to not want to make mistakes when we are afraid of running out of money and time, but we have to make mistakes, learn from them and adjust our living accordingly. We have to know that we don’t know what we are doing, and do what seems to be the most helpful thing to do in the situation as it arises, whether it has ever been done that way or not.

The only kind of freedom that matters is the freedom to do what we think is truly helpful in the situation as it arises. Here is our mission: We are to find what we think would be helpful in each situation as it arises, and do it. That’s all there is to it. But, of course, there is a catch. The catch is that we have to do what we think would be helpful in good faith. It has to spring out of a sincere desire to be helpful to the situation—to offer to the situation what we truly think would be most helpful to the wholeness, the allness of the situation, to the good of the whole, regardless of its implications for us personally. This is a catch because the more we have at stake in the outcome of our actions, the more we stand to gain (or lose) by acting in a certain way, the less likely we are to exhibit good faith in our dealings with one another, or with the world as a whole.

Rumi said, “If you are not here with us in good faith, you are doing terrible damage.” This sentence captures the essence, the weight, and the shame of human history. We are most likely to live in good faith with one another when we have nothing to lose in the interchange. How many treaty’s did the US government make and break with Native American tribes? Need I say more? As soon as it becomes apparent that our agreements are not in what we perceive to be our best interest, our agreements go to the burning barrel. Burning barrels are 55-gallon steel drums in which people in the rural deep south burned their garbage during the 50’s and 60’s. It may still be going on, indicative of the absence of good faith, as is the practice of dumping appliances—freezers, stoves, kitchen sinks—in the woods, or leaving old cars, trucks, busses and tractors there to rust. The absence of good faith is evident everywhere you look if you look long enough, and often it doesn’t take very long.

The world had no choice but to trust that BP was doing its part. BP was not, and still is not, doing its part. BP did not act, and still is not acting, in good faith. We cannot make rules, regulations, laws or binding agreements so air-tight as to force anyone to act in good faith. How many loop-hole lawyers are there? That’s like asking how many tripod positions there are. There isn’t a big-enough number to say how many there are, that’s how many there are.

There are no loop-holes in good faith. There are no ways to get out of doing what would be truly helpful when we offer ourselves in good faith to one another. And there is nothing to make us offer ourselves in good faith to one another. It depends entirely upon our, you guessed it, good faith.

Our ability to act in good faith is really our ability to act unilaterally in good faith. And that is the condition that kills the likelihood of good faith having a long and happy life. The Native Americans acted in good faith. Think they would do it again, knowing what they know now? Remember the parable of the vineyard workers? The workers were hired at various times during the day and the ones who worked the longest were paid the same as those who worked the shortest. Think that vineyard owner could round up workers on the morning of the following day? Acting in good faith is the shortest-lived human endeavor in the history of human endeavors. “Fool me once, bad on you. Fool me twice, bad on me.” And yet, everything depends on our acting in good faith—acting unilaterally in good faith—in relationship with one another and all others. There are two chances of that happening, as they say, fat and slim. But. There is no hope of anything good ever coming of the whole human experiment if we do not, you and I, begin acting unilaterally in good faith with one another and all others, regardless of the outcome, and carrying that out through the rest of our lives.

Need I remind you of the cross hanging behind me on the sanctuary wall? That is the doorway into the world as it ought to be. Life is on the other side of death. We have to die to our ideas of how life ought to be lived if we are going to come to life and be alive. We don’t get there by waiting for BP, or the US government, or anybody else, to go first. We pick ourselves up and walk right through the doorway that is the cross (picking up each day, in each situation as it arises, the cross that is a threshold) by living with good faith in every situation, doing there what we think will be truly helpful in each moment as it unfolds.

We don’t have to know what will be helpful, we only have to offer what we think will be helpful. When we work at being helpful in good faith, the situation will reflect how helpful we are actually being, and we can adjust our efforts accordingly. We learn as we live, and what we learn is how to live in ways that are truly helpful in our relationships with one another and all others. This is the essential lesson, and it is what we are all here to learn. We learn it by living unilaterally in good faith, doing what we think will be helpful in each situation as it arises, every day, for the rest of our lives, no matter what. Who wants to go first?

Meaningful Living

2010-06-20T14:05:00.000-04:00

I think it was the Buddha who said, “I can’t tell you people anything!” That’s what everyone who knows, knows. They know they can’t tell anyone anything. No one can tell us how to live our lives or where to find meaning. We have to make our own way to the Grail. All anyone can tell us is, " Look! Listen!" It takes a lot of looking to be able to see, a lot of listening to be able to hear. There are no shortcuts to be found in the morass of explanations, recipes, formulas and instructions. There are no shortcuts to a meaningful life.

Our life is an experiment with meaning. We have to live so as to experience meaning! We have to explore what that might be! We have to ask! Seek! Knock! Take up the Quest! To live meaningfully does not mean being in possession of meaning (As if!). We cannot put meaning in a pen in the back yard and go pet it when we are feeling down and out. We don’t own meaning. We can only live in the service of meaning, be on the Quest for meaning, throughout our lives.

Meaning is not a steady state of being. Our lives are more or less meaningful at any point, but the movement of our life is toward meaning. We live toward meaning by doing what is meaningful. The Quest is for meaning. What can we do that has the most meaning for us here and now? Where is meaning to be found here and now? The meaning in life comes with doing what is meaningful, in doing what matters, what is important, to us. How much of that is in each day?

If you are going to know anything, know what is meaningful to you, here and now. If you are going to do anything, do what is meaningful to you, here, now. We have to start somewhere. Start with what is meaningful to you and follow it throughout your life. As it changes, change with it. Don't get stuck in doing what was meaningful twenty years ago. What is meaningful here, now? Do it!

What should we do? Whatever is meaningful. Follow meaning. Live meaningfully. If the most meaningful thing you do is bowling, bowl. See where that leads you. The most meaningful thing I do is walking around with a camera looking for a photograph. It is not attending meetings. Not even meetings about photography. It’s the old two door challenge. If you stand before two doors, one labeled “Photography,” the other labeled “Lecture About Photography,” which do you choose? “Bird Watching” or “Lecture About Bird Watching”? “Heaven” or “Lecture About Heaven”? “Meaning” or “Lecture About Meaning”?

A meaningful life consists of a trail of meaningful associations. If you are awash in the complete absence of meaning, think of the most meaningful thing you can do and follow the path of meaningful associations out of there. See where it takes you. One meaningful thing leads to another, but we have to be alert to the movement or we'll become lost amid the glass beads and silver mirrors.

Nothing is more often imitated, fabricated, faked or forged than meaning. Everything pretends to be meaningful. Look! Listen! Be aware! Oh, a word of warning: Living meaningfully, doing what has meaning for us, comes with a high price-tag. We have to hand over our comfortable routines.

Do we want to be comfortable or live meaningfully? Meaning is incompatible with comfort. The more comfortable we are, the less meaning there is in our lives. We try to arrange for meaning without sacrificing comfort. That's where the glass beads and silver mirrors come in. Entertainment. Diversion.

We cannot buy meaning directly. We can only spend our money living meaningfully. It costs a buck or two to walk around looking for photos. But, buying cameras and computers and the latest equipment and gadgets won’t do it. We have to walk around looking for photos. We have to get up before dawn and stay out after dark, and carry a tripod.

This gets us to more bad news: Meaning is work. Meaningful work is the heart of LIFE. We can't just surround ourselves with the tools of the trade. We have to do the work. Apart from the work, the tools of the trade become props. Carrying a camera doesn’t make us a photographer any more than wearing a hat and boots makes us a cowboy. Looking like a photographer or a cowboy isn’t meaningful. We have to do the work. That’s the path that leads to the Grail, that IS the Grail. It’s waiting. On us.

Conscious Living

2010-06-13T14:50:00.000-04:00

Here’s what I believe. Call it my credo. I worked it out wandering around in southern Utah, thinking about these things. Here’s point number one: I believe there is as much of God in you and in me as there was in Jesus. The difference is that Jesus was more conscious of that which was of God in him, and more dedicated to, and disciplined in, aligning himself with it. This gets us to point number two.

I have said this to you before, and will say it again. There are those of us who are on the beam, that is, on the right track, that is, aligned with our destiny, with who we are capable of being and becoming—built to be, you might say. We are living the lives that are our lives to live, that have our name on them. This is what orthodox Christianity would call “being centered in God’s will for our lives.” There are those of us who are there.

And, there are those of us who are off the beam, off track, trying to find something to stake our lives on, to believe in, something that holds meaning and purpose for us and a carries with it a sense that this is IT. So, there are those who are on the beam, and there are those who are off the beam. Those of us who are off the beam need to get on the beam, and those of us who are on the beam need to stay on the beam. That’s all there is to it but. It is very difficult to find the beam and it is even more difficult to stay on it. That was point number two.

Point number three is something I’ve also said before: The visible world is grounded in, founded upon, the invisible world. The invisible world is the world of the Unconscious, of Unconscious Reality. This is the source of meaning and purpose, and value, and it is our place to become conscious of it, we have to make the unconscious conscious, and live aligned with its sense of how life needs to be lived. This is the life that is right for us, the right life for us. And, this is what the incarnation is all about, God becoming flesh, unconscious becoming conscious, transcendence—because it transcends the world of normal apparent reality and is beyond all words and concepts— becoming imminent, reality becoming tangible, touchable, tasteable (“Taste and see that the Lord is good”), real! This is our work. We bring forth Unconscious Reality and make it actual, tangible, real, Physical Reality. That’s our place, our role.

We have to be aware of and attuned to the drift and tug of unconscious reality and give it tangible expression in the world of physical reality. In order to fulfill our role and live the life that is right for us, we have to learn to read the signs the Unconscious presents to us offering guidance and direction, hints and suggestions. More specifically, we have to develop our awareness of instinct and intuition, and learn to trust ourselves to our sense of what is being asked of us, of what needs to happen. It takes practice to enter into full partnership with Unconscious Reality, and the sooner we start, the more proficient we become.

Our role is that of managing the balance, the coordination, the integration of conscious and unconscious realities. We have to meet the requirements of life in both worlds, paying the bills, for instance, and making connections between flights, in the world of conscious, physical, reality, and living the life that is right for us, the life of heart and soul, the beam of unconscious, spiritual, reality.

The trick with beam walking is following the flow of energy, the trail of meaning, through the events and circumstances of our lives. While Yoda and Obi wan Kenobi waited on the young Jedi to come for instruction, they lived in ways that had meaning for them. The world doesn't necessarily want what we have to offer, so we wait, and while we wait, we do what is meaningful, interesting, to us. We don't try to package ourselves to be pleasing to the world: Do you like me now? Do you like me now? We live in ways that bring us to life and are interesting, enjoyable, meaningful and, yes, fun.

Motive, intention and attitude are everything. The two words that characterize “the right spirit,” or the right frame of mind, or the right orientation of consciousness to unconsciousness are humility and compassion. Consciousness is the partner of unconsciousness. The visible world is to be the concrete manifestation of how it is at the level of heart and soul but. We cannot create the kingdom of heaven the way we can land men on the moon. We don’t take the lead here. Five Year Plans do not apply here. It may take five years for the truth of that statement to sink in. We do not MAKE anything happen here. We wait, watch, ask, seek, knock. It's time we stopped directing and started listening. We do not run the show. It is not our show. It is not OUR life. We belong to our LIFE. We have to learn the language of unconsciousness and tend the invisible world like we would tend our lawn, or garden, or golf swing. This is called “prayerful living.” And everything hinges on humility and compassion.

And, if all of this is too complicated for you, here’s a simple prescription and the essence of my credo: There is always something that needs to be done that we need to do. Find it. Do it. Your life will take you where you need to be.

The False Kiva Story

2010-06-06T14:48:00.001-04:00

We can be thankful for Joe Valdez and Eddie Andreas. Here’s why. The False Kiva is a Class II culturally significant site in Canyonlands National Park. A Class II designation means the Park Service can’t decide what to do about it. It isn’t listed on any of the Park Service publications. It isn’t marked on any map. As far as the Park Service is concerned it doesn’t exist but. If you ask a Park Ranger or a Visitor Center worker for directions, they are required to tell you how to find it. This limits the number of people who make the trek, but it doesn’t stop them. Should they be stopped? I think so, but. That didn’t stop me.

I parked my car in the pullout about two hundred yards away from the trailhead “so as not to call attention to it,” said the Ranger who told me how to find the trail, donned my walking gear and headed out at about 2 PM on Friday, May 14, 2010. Following the trail was tricky because the path winds across sandstone slickrock from time to time, and you depend upon cairns, or stacks of sandstone, to guide you there. Since the Park Service doesn’t maintain the trail, cairns only exist where someone before you thought they would be handy, which occasionally leaves you lacking. And, one cairn is rarely enough. Standing at one, you have to be able to see the next one. I was trying to find my way down from such a slickrock ledge with no apparent exit in sight when a couple coming up from the False Kiva on their return trip, pointed out the path.

From there it was a matter of hunting and picking to stay on the trail which became increasingly narrow as it wound down and over cliff-side rubble to an alcove with a slight foothold up a six-foot wall to a second alcove containing the False Kiva. A Kiva is circle cut into or dug out of sandstone which the ancestral tribes covered with log beams and brush or animal skins to live in around a fire during the cold winter months. The center pole of the Kiva may have been set in hole symbolic of the navel of the earth, the center of the world, and the Kivas may have been oriented toward the rising of the sun.

The False Kiva is above ground, on the floor of the alcove, and consists of a circle of stacked stones about two feet high and 12 or 15 feet in diameter. No one knows what purpose it served in the life of the ancestral peoples, or how old it might be. A Park Service sign there asks that no digging be done and no artifacts be removed, and an ammo-like can contains a loose-leaf notebook with a collection of ballpoint pens and an invitation for visitors to leave behind name, address, and comments. I took what photos I could imagine taking (they are posted on the Flickr site) in the solitude of a holy place, and began the journey back to the car between 3:30 and 4 PM.

One of the photos I took, looking from the False Kiva across Green River Canyon, was of a thunderstorm developing, maybe 5 miles away. Thunderheads were all about as I made my way up and over the loose soil and rocks of the cliff-side to the stable path at the top of the descent. There I met a couple on their way down, we chatted for a moment and continued on our respective ways. About thirty minutes later I lost the trail.

Now, in my defense, I’ll say that in the desert, as much as anywhere else, and more-so than most places, it is an easy matter to lose the trail. For one thing, there is nothing to making a trail there. If you wander off to look at a flower or find a bathroom you make a trail in the thin top crust of the desert landscape. And if you come back by the same way, you make an even better trail. Trails are everywhere. For another thing, slickrock is everywhere. A trail that ends at a slab of slickrock may not be the same trail you pick up coming off the slab. The trail I picked up meandered for a while and ended at a juniper tree, which I reckoned, someone used as a bathroom and went back to the slickrock to find the real trail, which is what I did, but couldn’t find anything coming off the rock that looked like a trail. So, I went back to where I stepped off initially and walked around looking for the trail, making trails in the process. You see, I’m sure, where this is going. In circles.

It’s at this point in the story that you need to remember the thunderstorm that was building in Green River Canyon. It has become rather impressive by now, and is making time, coming right at me. It’s after 5. The sun sets around 8:20 but. The heavy cloud bank between the horizon and the sun, which shines intermittently through broken clouds, advances the disappearance of the sun to some time after 6. It won’t be night, but it won’t be encouraging either. Speaking of encouragement, rain begins to fall. I have a water repellant parker with me and by crawling beneath an overhanging ledge, I can cover most of my exposed side with the parker until the rain moves on. I do that three times while scrambling around looking for the real trail.

During those excursions I come upon a rocky outcropping that serves as a vantage point to the road, which I take to be about a half-mile away. I can make out cars easily enough, and human figures when they stop at a viewpoint to remark, no doubt, on the nasty looking weather coming their way, which, of course, puts it right over me. But the sun continues to break through from time to time. I consider my options and don’t like what I see.

My favorite way to not die is wet and cold. It’s going to be in the low forty’s in Moab tonight, which probably means the high thirty’s where I am. And the real thunderstorm is coming. That’s wet and cold in my book. So I throw it all into getting rescued. There is the couple I passed. They are behind me, if they don’t choose to spend the night in the False Kiva, which is what I would do, they may be a hope. There are the cars on the roadway. My other hope. And a single engine airplane is off in the distance. My third hope. My assets, in addition to the water repellant parker are a walking stick (Never go without a stick into the wilds), some white plastic grocery bags (for covering my camera in case of rain), a glass filter which I take off my camera and wad up a grocery bag which I hold between my palm and the filter to make a nice little reflector. Not as good as a mirror but effective. I blinded myself testing it out. And a whistle. It isn’t much of a whistle, but it’s the best I could buy at the outdoor store in Moab and it’s a whistle (Never go without a whistle into the wilds).

So, I start blowing the whistle, climb upon the rocky outcropping, tie a grocery bag onto the end of my walking stick and start waving it in the air at the road and the airplane with my right hand while I wiggle the reflector with my left. I figure, using the photographer’s way of reckoning—your fist at arms length represents about how far the sun moves in thirty minutes, a handy way of guessing how long before sunset if you are waiting to take a picture, thinking about a glass of wine—I have less than an hour before the sun sinks behind the cloud bank. The plane flies directly overhead while I’m reflecting and waving and whistling and shows no sign of having seen me. Cars pass on the road without slowing down. A white pickup pulls into the viewpoint and a person gets out. I ditch the whistle and start yelling, waving, reflecting. The person walks around for a couple of minutes, gets back in the truck and drives away. Well. Where am I better off? Standing on the rock, waving and reflecting in what is left of the sunlight, or using what’s left to find my way out of there? The truck drove off, the plane flew on and I have no confidence in being spotted from road or sky, though it was, I tell myself, an outstanding plan. I climb down and start looking for any way out, forget finding the trail.

Walking straight to the road is out of the question because the way is littered with gulches and ravines and canyons. I have to get up, out of the ravine I’m in, to the level of the desert. The one way up is a piece of slickrock sloping at about 35 degrees to a drop-off of about 50 feet. It isn’t just slickrock, but layers of sandstone, like the shingles on a roof a quarter of an inch thick. I can get up on it at one place that is about fifteen feet from the edge of the drop-off and about six feet above where I’m standing. I don’t like anything about that choice. I can climb up there maybe, and then what? Or I can wander around and hope to find my way back to the real trail. I want better options, but, as always, we don’t get to choose our choices. I’m about to resume my search for the trail when a voice from above, where else would you want one to come from, says, “What’s up, man?”

I look up and see two guys looking back at me. “I’m as lost as I can ever remember being,” I say. “You can’t imagine how good it is to see you two.” Joe Valdez, as it turns out, stands by as I climb up onto the slickrock. Eddie Andreas, smiles as Joe and I make our way up the sloping rock to him. We walk together as the sun slips behind the clouds to the road and their pickup. I climb in the back and they drive me two miles to where my car is parked.

“We saw you waving the flag from the road,” says Joe. “We didn’t know if you were lost or just saying hi. We heard you shouting, but couldn’t make out what you were saying.” They had driven up to a place they thought they could walk back to where they had seen me, and got close enough to hear my whistle, which I had started blowing again when I gave up the signaling, hoping that the couple behind me would hear it.

Well, there you are. What would have happened if they hadn’t showed up? We don’t know. Maybe desperation would have gotten me up on the slickrock, taking a chance at walking up and out. It’s all subject to speculation and conjecture. At the very least, I was saved from grief and misery, and very possibly from something much worse. So we can be thankful for Joe Valdez and Eddie Andreas. And we can reflect on a couple of things. For one thing, we need one another. It takes all of us. It’s all too easy to lose the way, to wander away from the trail, we cannot find the path alone. The way that is the real way is like the stone the builders reject. It is not the likeliest of ways and we need encouragement to choose it.

For another thing, we have to help people help us. We save ourselves in this sense. I got lost and I got found. We wave our white grocery bag and blow our whistle. We do what we can imagine doing, what we can think of to do. Alcoholics save themselves by going to AA, by helping people help them. We can’t just crawl under a rock ledge and hope to be rescued. We have to recognize when we cannot make it on our own and ask for help. We have to help people help us. Or, in the words of the Park Service motto: Your safety is your responsibility.

This story ends with the comments I left behind in the can in the False Kiva: The experience of this place, the trek and the arrival, is beyond words, like the numinous reality of which it speaks. All the ancestors gather in places like this, hoping for the arrival of pilgrims who understand that the visible world is grounded upon, and sustained by, the invisible world which is beyond words, but readily available to, and accessible by, eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand. May we who belong to both worlds join together in the service of compassion in the work that needs to be done for the good of all. Amen. May it be so.

And, yes. It was worth getting lost to be there.

Integrity, Integrity, Integrity

2010-05-09T15:14:00.001-04:00

Sometimes we have to lie there and catch our breath when whammed by life. Sometimes we have to get up and get ready for the next play. Sometimes we need to hear, "There, there, it'll be better in time," and sometimes, "Quit your bellyaching and get back in the game!"

Life keeps coming at us. We have to work recovery into bringing the best we have to offer to meet the next challenge. This is true multitasking, operating on different levels of living at the same time. We have to recover while meeting the demands of life. To do this, we have to know how we recover, what we need to assist recovery, and we have to be conscious of nurturing ourselves in sustaining ways.

Recovery includes feeling what we feel AND remembering the life that is still OUR life to live, and knowing we have what we need, what it takes. Recovery is finding our way back to ourselves and living out of our connection with who we are within the context and circumstances of our lives. Recovery is regaining our sense of integrity and living out of our sense of what is integral with who we are within the context and circumstances of our lives.

Those of us who are off track, either because we have been knocked off track, or because we have simply drifted away from what is integral, have to get back on track, those of us who are on track have to stay on track. That's all there is to it.

The three watchwords for doing this, for getting on track and staying there, are: Integrity, Integrity, Integrity. Integrity connects us with the core of who we are. When we live with integrity, we live with authenticity. What we say is important IS important and our lives reflect its value. Integrity is alignment with the values that are core values and are truly worthy of our allegiance and loyalty.

We know when we are at-one with ourselves, when we are living in ways that are integral with our core. This is integrity. We have to live out of our sense of what is right for us, of what is appropriate for us in the situation "as it arises." This is our truth. Truth is not static reality apart from us. We create truth as we form our lives with integrity, doing what is truth for us, living lives that are aligned with values that connect us to the core of who we are.

Truth is about how it is with us, within and without. It is who we are and what our situation in life is. We are to live in ways that relate the who to the what. Relating who we are to what our situation in life is, the who to the what, is the work of soul, the work of life. When we do it well, we have life and have it abundantly, we are alive in the deepest sense of the word. We are alive to the extent that we live with integrity—being who we are--within the circumstances of our lives.

There is only one path to LIFE: Living with integrity, living to be who we are, to express who we are, within the context and circumstances of our lives. One of the indicators of living with integrity, aligned with who we are, is the degree of spontaneity we exhibit in our lives. How free are we to live without thinking how we should live? That's the test that tells the tale!

The obsession with doing it right is the neurotic need to be pleasing. Who must be pleased? What would happen if they are not pleased? Who do we think is watching, observing, grading? Whose life is it? Who gets to say how we live our life? We cannot live with integrity, with spontaneity, AND be pleasing to our parents, our children, our spouses, our partners, our friends, or the Lord God Almighty.

We also cannot live with integrity and spontaneity if we are concerned about making a profit, about having something to show for having lived. Don't have to have anything to show for it! What would you do for itself alone, with no reward, recognition, fame, fortune, glory, attached? We have to have more of those things in our lives.

We can’t live with integrity and spontaneity when we are concerned about doing our duty. Doing our duty untracks us, gets us off the beam. Social duty, or Christian duty, are authoritative should’s distracting us from the inner voice calling us to live aligned with our own integrity.

No one can give us our mission, our destiny, our life. No one can tell us what the beam is for us. We find our own path. It's about the work, stupid! The work is never about the money. The work is IT. Finding and doing the work that is ours to do is life itself.

There is a beam with our name on it, a track our life is made to run on. Our task is to find the beam, the track, get on it, stay there. This is to live with integrity. We keep thinking there is more to it than living the life that is our life to live, doing the work that is ours to do. NOT!

We are to live our life, OUR life, not frantically seeking satisfaction, but focused on bringing forth what is ours to give, loving who we are. We lose the way looking for it. We set aside the best seeking something better. Sin is not knowing when we are well off, or what's important.

Why work when you don't have to, ask the masses who think it is about not working, who think it is about lolling around, sipping sodas. It's about The Work! We live to quit working, to get away from work, when life is found in doing the work—the true work that is ours to do. Getting this wrong is the essence of sin, you know.

Sin is missing the mark, missing the point, thinking the wrong things are important, not getting it. Just try to talk someone into getting it who doesn’t get it! Jesus couldn’t do it, neither can we! But, Jesus didn’t let that stop him. He led the Revolution anyway, even though no one got it at the time.

The Revolution is led by those who know what is truly important, who know what they need to do to live with integrity, and do it. The Revolution is led by those who live out of their own integrity and let nature take its course. Living like this, in the service of what is truly important, what counts, matters, makes a difference, is subversive, insurrectionist, seditionist in the fullest sense. And, we get there by listening to ourselves, aligning ourselves with core values, and living in ways that are integral with that which is deepest, best, and truest about us. Living in this way is living well, and it requires us to live lives that are slower, quieter, simpler, more reflective and aware than the lives the culture encourages. May it be so for us all!

Saying and Hearing the Right Word

2010-05-02T14:47:00.001-04:00

You pay me to say the right things. This doesn’t mean that I’m right about the things I say, just that you pay me to be right. I can be wrong, but you pay me to say the right things, in the right ways, at the right time, to the right people (that would be you). Now, the catch here, and this is going to sound like I’m writing myself a free pass, or asking you to write me a blank check—the catch is that the right word is, more often than not, the wrong word. The word that must be heard is the word that cannot be heard—because it is too painful, too burdensome, too far from what we want to be told, too hard, too true, or just not capable of being heard at this point in our life. We cannot hear what our life experience has not prepared us to hear. So, if you don’t like what you are hearing, it may not necessarily follow that I’m doing a bad job (Of course, that could very well be the case. I can’t offer you any old word. It has to be my best effort at offering the Right Word). It could also be that you aren’t doing a very good job of squaring up to the truth. Or, it could be that you cannot hear what I’m saying because you haven’t lived long enough to know what I’m talking about. How would we ever know whose fault it is if the right word isn’t heard?

There is a scriptural formula for determining whether the words of a prophet are true. This is set out in Jeremiah, who was saying one thing to the king and to Jerusalem, while the paid priests of the state were saying the opposite. Who was the false prophet? Who was the true prophet? Jeremiah declares, “When the words of the prophet come to pass, then it will be known that he was a true prophet.” Jesus said the same thing to those asking him to justify himself and his words: “Wisdom is vindicated by her children” (Luke 17:35). And, sometimes, it is by her grandchildren.

It takes a while for the validity of a word to be verified by our experience. By then, it is generally too late for us to benefit from it. It would certainly be too late for us to know whether I’m slacking off on my responsibility to say the right word or if you are slacking off on your responsibility to hear it. It is enough for us all to know what we are responsible for. I am here to say the right word. You are here to hear it.

The right word can only be heard by hearts that are at the point of being able to recognize the truth of what is said, but it is too easy for each of us to blame the other if nothing is heard. I could blame you for being “hard-hearted and stiff-necked.” And you could blame me for being ambiguous and incomprehensible. Or, as one dear soul once said, “Jim, why don’t you talk to us about things we can understand?”—which I took to mean, “Why don’t you tell us what we have always heard?” All of which is to say that we have our work cut out for us. I have to say the right word and you have to hear it, and neither of us can blame the other for being obstinate or obtuse.

This means we have to grant the other the benefit of the doubt, as we each endeavor to do our part in saying and hearing what needs to be said and heard. You have to trust me to be working to say the right word. I have to trust you to be working to hear it. The work we do together produces the word that needs to be heard. I need you doing your work in order to speak the right word as much as you need me doing my work in order to hear it. Your hearing enables my speaking, my speaking enables your hearing, and together we produce a dialectic which creates the truth.

This means I am not the authority on what constitutes “the right word.” No word is “right” in and of itself. Everything rides on how those who hear it work it out for themselves, work it into their lives. “Wisdom is vindicated by her children.” You don’t come here and take dictation in order to memorize it so you can repeat it as heard to yourself and others forever. You hear what is said and turn it over, work it into your own soil, make it your own. You may transform it completely.

We have changed the meaning of the words of the prophets and the apostles and of Jesus Christ God’s Only Son Our Lord himself! We say what their words mean to us. We make them ours. We would have to interpret their words to them because of the changes we have made in order to make their words intelligible to our generation. We make the right word right by the way we hear it, by the way we fit it to ourselves and ourselves to it. How do we all know the right word when we hear it? The first rule is: No quick dismissals! We have to sit with it for a while, walk around it, mull it over, reflect on it, wonder about it, let it do its work. I have to do that with the word I say to you. You have to do that with the word you hear me speak.

The right word is yeast in the dough, a seed in the earth, the stone that the builders reject. It is like the dragon hatching, like the new life aborning. It is a threat to all that we have heard before, to the old life based on the old words. The right word can be consoling, comforting, healing, renewing, and it can be a threat and a terror, so we must not dismiss it outright. We have to spend the right kind of time with the words we hear to know if they are right words. This is doing our part.

I’m talking here about the importance of meditation—not blanking out your mind, but focusing it, thinking about the word you hear and what feels wrong about it and what may be right about it. I’m talking about the importance of reflection. About the importance of prayer.

Prayer is primarily attitude, orientation, a certain quality of spirit, of soul. It is openness, and respect. It is honoring the otherness of the other, of the situation, of the word, in a way that brings the other, the situation, the word, in and makes the other, the situation, the word, welcome. Prayer is making all things welcome and offering them, spoken or barely perceived, to the numinous reality that is our home in a way that recognizes our home is with all things, so that nothing is shut out, shunned, banished, but received, heard, understood, honored, and made room for. This is one of those hard words that cannot possibly be right because it is so wrong. How can we welcome all things when some things are so obviously horrendous and atrocious? Well. What would it take to understand the atrocities in a way that allowed us to receive them well? We must not hurry here, but sit, thinking, prayerfully.

An Analogy

2010-04-25T13:23:00.001-04:00

Here’s an analogy for you: Let’s take Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Let’s say they are you. Both of them. Adam is the dull, boring, same old, same old you, and Eve is the vivacious, lively, looking for action you, and the two of you are stuck in the same body. When you work together, the Adam side of you tempers the Eve side of you and the Eve side of you pulls, pushes, the Adam side of you deeper into the possibilities of life, of YOUR life, the life that you are built, created, to live. Your Adam side is the contemplative, reflective, meditative side, and your Eve side is the experiential, explorative, inventive side. Both are quite necessary in making YOUR life work.

The snake and the forbidden fruit are your curiosity about, your interest in, your intrigue with ALL that life offers. You like YOUR, life, the life that is truly yours to live, but. There are all kinds of other lives out there, and you would like to try them out, just to see what it might be like. The lights and action of Gay Paree, for instance, present a compelling distraction, and what’s a little action going to hurt? So, you leave the way, turn aside from the path, follow your own idea of what life could be, and drift away from the life that is YOUR life to live. You could have been a teacher, perhaps, but business school promised more income, and your dad is a banker. You could have been a concert pianist, but architecture is art, too, and with job security. So, you drifted into a life, a world, really, that is not YOUR life. And you heard the door click shut behind you, but you didn’t think anything of it because you were taken by the sweet thing, or the handsome hunk, at your side and you were off on your great adventure together.

Well, you woke up about the time of your second divorce and remembered what you left behind, and thought that maybe there is more to it than this, and wondered how to find it. You looked around to discover that you were in a second garden. Call it Gethsemane. As you think about it, there was something in the first garden about an angel with a flaming sword guarding the way back into Eden. Symbolic talk, meaning that to get back to the beginning, you going to have to die, or feel like you are dying. Dying is what Gethsemane is all about. There is death in handing the reins of our life over to the “Thy” within. New birth, remember, is a dragon climbing out of the egg. Your new life eats your old life screaming alive. “Thy will, not mine, be done!”

Just who is the “Thy” here? Everything hangs on our getting this straight. It’s the way back to Eden, the way of death that is life, understanding what’s at stake in “Thy will, not mine, be done.” Who is in charge of our living? Where do we go for guidance and direction? How do we know, how do we decide, what to do? The tricky part of “Thy will, not mine, be done,” is that WE say what the “Thy” is saying! How do we know? You can see that there might be a bit of a conflict of interest here! How do we get ourselves out of the way to hear what the “Thy” wants done? THIS is exactly the Garden of Eden story! Adam/Eve (you), the snake/temptation (self-interest), and the “Thy.” The question is, whose side are you on? Let me make it clearer.

We stand between two worlds, physical and spiritual. We balance the demands, the needs, of two worlds. We live two lives. We have a life that the physical world gives to us and a life that the spiritual world, that our soul, gives to us. Two worlds, two lives. And we have to live both of them at the same time. Our spiritual life is not something we do with prayer and meditation or going to church. We don’t call time out and go be spiritual for a while. We have to be spiritual all the time, within the physical world. The spiritual life is the life soul insists that we live in the world, the life we are called to incarnate, bring forth, give birth to. How alert, aware, attentive are we to this life that soul is calling us to live? Our primary task is listening to psyche/soul and aligning ourselves with the life that needs to come forth through us into the world. Problem is, no one teaches us to do this.

Well, here goes: Our body is our most direct connection with psyche/soul. We have to learn to listen to our body, read its signals, know what it is saying, follow our body’s lead. Next in line, I would say, are dreams, fantasies, slips of the tongue, songs we hum absent-mindedly, and spontaneous responses to the experiences of life. Then, there is the encounter with the numinous, the white rabbits, the things that catch our eye, wink at us, stop us in our tracks, compel us to respond, or not. These experiences are all avenues into the inner world, windows into the way things are, or need to be, within. We have to be alert to, and tune into, the inner world in order to hear what the “Thy” is saying to us.

We have to become students of soul, our own soul, in order to know what we have to say to ourselves and how to live in response. Here's your homework assignment: Pick a day, or part of a day, an afternoon, THIS afternoon, perhaps, and don't know what to do. Do what you FEEL needs to be done. FEEL your way through the afternoon. FEELING what needs to be done next, now. Not thinking, FEELING! Stop thinking! FEEL! You know whether another cup of coffee is called for, or a trip to the toilet. You don't think those things, or plan them in advance. You feel them, and do what is called for in the moment of your living.

Spirituality is not about being told what to believe. It is strengthening our connection with psyche/soul through practice, practice, practice. We wouldn't think of learning to play the piano or tennis or bridge without practice. We don't learn to play the piano by listening to a lecture, or lots of lectures, about playing the piano. Practice! Practice! Practice! We don't learn to play the piano by reading a book, or lots of books, about playing the piano. Practice! Practice! Practice! We don't learn to play the piano by visiting places where pianos are played, or built. Practice! Practice! Practice! We don't learn to play the piano by watching someone play the piano, or by listening to piano concertos. Practice! Practice! Practice! We practice listening to the “Thy,” to psyche/soul, to do what needs doing! Then, we only have to find the courage to do it!

A 747 Leaves A Lot To Be Desired!

2010-04-18T13:35:00.001-04:00

We all know plenty of people, more than our fair share for sure, who think they can do a better job with our lives than we are doing. They are quick to step forward with timely pointers, suggestions, recommendations, cures, sometimes criticisms. It is all well intended, I’m sure, and designed to get us to stop doing what we are doing and start doing what they think we ought to be doing instead.

Once, in Amory, Mississippi, Gladys Drane, I’m sorry you didn’t know her, shook my hand after the Sunday service and said, “If I give you the money, would you get a hair cut?” By then, I had played the game for a while, and, without a pause, replied, “You could give me the money.” In every congregation there have been people who knew more about how my life ought to be lived than I did. They have offered to pay for my family’s membership in the country club and my dues in Rotary or the Lions Club. They have suggested that I had no business talking to them of Marcus Borg and of not telling them everything John Calvin said.

You have had similar experiences with those dedicated to your personal improvement. Those Who Know Best (Truman Capote’s phrase) are everywhere and are determined to make us into who they want us to be. We just won’t do as we are. And, of course, we have been bruised enough at that spot for it to be a very tender place in us all. We are quite sensitive to falling short, afraid we aren’t good enough, certain we should be doing more to deserve a place in the human family, and sure that we will soon be asked to leave the room. But really now. Just take a look around.

If you put us all on a table, and slowly circled it, taking stock, adding up our assets and liabilities, you would come to the conclusion that each of us leaves a lot to be desired. There is more that we don’t do than we do. Certainly more that we don’t do well than we do well. Many, perhaps most, of us have more reason to be ashamed and sorry than to be proud and brimming with confidence. But, before you go off on yourself, or give up completely and curl into a fetal position for the rest of your natural life, consider this:

A Boeing 747 leaves a lot to be desired. Wait! Did I hear someone say, “747?” What an amazing coincidence! For right here on the Communion Table is my very own scaled down model of a 747! What do you think about that! Yep. A 747 is one of my symbols that keeps me on track and helps me stay sane by reminding me that even a Boeing 747 on its best day leaves a lot to be desired.

Think about it. You can’t comb your hair with a 747. You can’t brush your teeth with one. You can’t mow the lawn with one. You can’t plow the garden with one. You can’t dig a hole with one. You can’t play tennis with one. You can’t drive it to the grocery store, and even if you could, you would never find a place to park. You get the idea. There is more you cannot do with a 747 than you can do with one. A 747 is like us in that it does not do all things well. But, it does what it does very well. So do we. We don’t disparage a 747 for not being more like a canoe or a garden hose, why do we berate ourselves for our deficiencies?

We are ashamed of ourselves for not being more of a Renaissance Woman or Man—a Jane, or James, Bond—who knows everything and does all things well. However, if we are going to denigrate and belittle ourselves for our insufficiencies, we should add our capacity to come up with sufficient ideals to the list. We are certainly insufficient in that regard. We have the wrong ideals. A person with no weakness, no defects, no blemishes, no gaps is more robot than human being. Give me someone who stumbles around a bit and can’t find the door or the light switch! Let me BE that person! What fun would there be in doing all things well? When would you ever laugh at yourself, or cry? It’s much better to be the way we are!

We all have our deficits but. We do some things really well. The work is to let our deficits stand without interfering with what we do well. We have to find our song, our gait, our niche, our beam and do what we do well, without dissing ourselves for what we don't do well at all. We are likely to be a disappointment to someone on some level, and to some people on all levels. A 747 has more things that it doesn’t do, cannot do, than it has that it does do. So do we. Our task is to do the things we do well and let that be that, without apology, embarrassment or shame. And, if someone gives us down the river because of something we can't do, we only need to tell them a 747 couldn't do it either.

The Animal Projection Exercise

2010-04-12T08:09:00.000-04:00

Working with a symbol is like working with a dream. It keeps opening to multiple levels of meaning. Follow it wherever it leads in your imagination. Our imagination is the key. We imagine, intuit, our way into knowledge. We do not reason our way there, but reason has its place. Imaginative thinking makes, deepens, expands the connections which our unconscious implies with the symbols in our dreams. For example, in a dream, our unconscious implies, suggests, that we are a ripe tomato. Imaginative thinking discloses in what ways we are a ripe tomato. We make the connections that were, before, absurd.

In working with our symbols—and they have to be OUR symbols! No one can give us our symbols. We are seized, gripped by them. And, in working with them, we have to get the right side of our brains into the action. The logical, rational, intellectual left side needs all the help it can get. The problem is the logical, rational, intellectual left side of our brain thinks it is all it needs and believes it is King of the World. The left side of our brain can't begin to answer the important questions on its own. We have to form a sacred partnership with the other side. Here is one way to do that:

If you were an animal, what particular animal would you be? What is the first animal that comes to mind? Bring that animal clearly into focus in your mind’s eye. For the remainder of this exercise, allow yourself to become the animal. The following questions are directed to you as the animal.

1. What kind of animal are you?

2. What is your name (the first name that comes to mind)?

3. What do you like best about being this animal?

4. What do you enjoy doing most as this animal?

5. Where do you like to spend your time?

6. What are your ambitions—what do you want for yourself?

7. What are your hopes and dreams about?

8. What are your greatest fears or concerns?

9. Upon what does your happiness depend?

10. What do you need most as this animal?

11. Where do you go to be nurtured and strengthened?

12. What motto do you live by?

13. What burdens do you carry?

14. What gift is yours to give the world?

15. What do you think of the other animals?

16. What do the other animals think of you?

17. What would you like to tell the other animals?

18. What do you think the other animals would like to tell you?

19. What strengths do you have as an animal that you could use in your life as a human being?

20. What message do you have for your human side?

As this exercise comes to a close, become yourself again and thank your animal for its presence and its place in your life. Your animal has a gift to offer you. Receive the gift from your animal, and present your animal with a gift in return. Promise your animal, if you mean to keep the promise, that you will invite her or him to visit you again in the near future. Say goodbye for now and return to this place of apparent, normal reality. What did your animal give you? What did you give your animal? Spend some time this week considering the gifts and what meaning they might have for you.

Ride The Dragon!

2010-04-04T13:25:00.000-04:00

We cannot live if we are afraid to die. This is the message of Easter. Jesus rose from the dead long before he died. Death couldn’t touch Jesus. He lived with nothing to lose. That’s the Easter story. Jesus’ entire life was Easter. Death could not keep him from living, from being fully alive.

Jesus was not afraid of dying and could therefore live exactly as he needed to live, in saying and doing the things that needed to be said and done in the society of his day. Once you are not afraid of death, there is no reason to hold anything back, and you can live straight from the heart with perfect integrity, with your words and actions exactly aligned with that which is integral to your heart and soul. Then, Easter is every day, and you are free to live the life that needs to be lived in each moment. Not even Caesar and the Legions of Rome can take that from you. Nothing can.

This is the key to understanding Easter. You rise from the dead the moment you decide you are going to live no matter what. I believe Jesus made this very decision in the aftermath of the death of John the Baptist. Jesus did not come forth until after John died. John’s death was the resurrection event of Jesus’ life. When John died, Jesus stepped forth from the tomb, in a manner of speaking. And he lived his life from that point on as one who was not afraid to die—as one who put everything on the line all the time. He climbed on his dragon and rode it fearlessly, as we must, if we are to ride our dragon at all.

Did I say dragon? What a coincidence. Look! Here on the Communion Table is a little dragon breaking out of its egg. This is my Happy Easter Egg. It is my symbol of what Easter is about. You’ve heard of Easter Eggs. New life, new birth, resurrection. Happy Easter! Well, here’s an Easter Egg for you. This boy, or is it a girl? This Momma will eat you alive if you are not careful! If you are afraid to die, you better not come close! New life is for those who are not afraid to die. We like the idea of new birth, of new life, but when the egg hatches, a dragon steps forth. The new life eats the old life alive. What do we think?

We think of new life on our terms, all tame and domesticated, with strolls in the park and sweet rolls in the coffee shop across the street. But new life is not just any life. It is not our old life only better. It is new in every way, particularly in what it requires of us. It requires us to live straight from the heart, with perfect integrity, so that our words and our actions are exactly aligned with that which is integral to our heart and soul. That’s new life for you. The old life was never anything like that!

The new life is the life that is the dragon. Living that life is riding the dragon. It’s riding the dragon because you can’t do it if you are afraid of anything, especially dying. You can’t live if you are afraid of dying. Why die not knowing? Not knowing what we could do if we lived holding nothing back? Why hold anything back? We are saving ourselves for what, exactly? We are waiting for what? What has to happen before we have what it takes to reveal ourselves, spring forth, see who we are and what we are capable of doing with the life that needs to be lived, that needs us to live it? What are we waiting for before we jump on the dragon and ride into the rest of our lives?

In order to be alive, we must live the life that needs to be lived, that needs us to live it. We cannot be alive and live any old life, lolling around the pool, snowboarding until the boredom sets in. Only the life that needs to be lived—that needs us to live it—will do. The life that needs to be lived is the dragon! Eating alive and screaming the life we would like to live, wish we could live, want to live.

The three temptations of the Buddha under the Bodhi-tree were desire, fear, and duty. You have to hold the line and stay with what is right for you, no matter what. STAY ON THE BEAM! STAY ON THE DRAGON! The Dragon is the Beam which is the Cross. RIDE THE DRAGON! STAY ON THE BEAM! CARRY YOUR CROSS! Live the life that needs to be lived! “Leave the dead to bury the dead!”, shouts Jesus from the back of his dragon, on his way to die, living a life death could not touch.

Why die having not lived? We owe it to ourselves to incubate the egg and hatch it and see if we have what it takes to ride the dragon throughout our lives. Why die not knowing what we are made of, what we are capable of, whether we have what it takes to do what needs to be done? It’s Easter! Death cannot touch those who are not afraid of dying! Why hold anything back? Ride the dragon!

We Grow Into The Unknown

2010-03-28T13:43:00.000-04:00

What I am about here is the orchestration of perception. I take the director’s baton and tap, tap, tap, bring into harmonious arrangement the squawking chaos of discordant perspectives by inviting you to speak your truth of the particular part you are to the receptive ear of the whole. Our voices unite us in the oneness of expression when, speaking, we are heard, respected, honored, well received and understood.

Each of you has your own way of seeing, your own way of apprehending and assessing reality. I am not about to talk you into seeing the way I see, into valuing what I value, into thinking the way I think, but. By saying what I see and think, I can force you into reacting to what I say, into thinking about what I say, into thinking for yourself about what I say—and if I can get you to think about your reaction, to dig into it, the exploration can be fruitful. You may well deepen, expand, enlarge your thinking just by thinking about your thinking. Or, you may just retrench yourself in your preferred pattern of thought. Oh well.

But the rule here is to dig where there is water, where there is emotional response to what you see and hear. Opposition is as valuable as agreement. What we are looking for is the emotional level of your response. The more stirred up you are, either positively or negatively, the better. Explore your reaction. What buttons am I pushing? Why are they hot for you? What memories come to mind in relation to that button being pushed? Talk to the reactive side of yourself. Interview her, him. See what she, what he, has to say. Spend time digging down to the heart of the matter. Poke around in the muck. See what is there. What ALL is there.

What I’m good for is waking you up to you, inviting you to meet yourself, your own thoughts and explore where they come from, where they lead. You have to do the work of figuring out why you are responding to me as you are. It isn’t a matter of getting me to be more like you want me to be, to say more of what you want me to say, but of examining your desire to change me. What’s up with that, as they say.

The same goes for your reaction to one another, to what the other is saying. What is going on? You have to do the work required to know. You have to trace things back to the source in order to find and face what is there. It isn’t enough to say, “Oh, I know what this is about,” and letting it go at that. Pretend you don’t know, or recognize that you don’t know all there is to know. Dig into what it is about. Sit with it. See what comes, what happens. What is being asked of you? What response do you need to make?

We are all blind to what we do not want to see, but. What needs to be seen is constantly coming at us in our physical and emotional reactions to our life experience, and in our dreams. Something is trying to get us to see what we do not want to see. We have to learn to look. This is our spiritual work, looking at what we do not want to see. This is the next piece of the puzzle, the next step in the journey. It has nothing to do with agreement or disagreement with what instigates the reaction. It has to do with following the reaction to its source and seeing what is there to deal with, or follow, or serve. What is there? We have to face the demon, to call it by name, and see what happens.

This is called knowing what is true and what is also true, or knowing how things are and how things also are. We do not know what we do not know, and so, we have to be wondering what else is there, what more there is to know. We grow into the unknown, into the unknown that we don’t know anything about, and into the unknown aspects of what we think we know very well, including ourselves.

We are an aspect of the mystery that we do not know. Life is not so much about getting what we want and arranging our lives like we want them to be, but about knowing who we are, who else we are, who all we are, by opening ourselves to what else is there. We open ourselves to the mystery and assist the unconscious, unknown, energies that are calling our name, beckoning us to take up our work of knowing and becoming who we are, doing the work that is ours to do, and aligning ourselves with the life that is ours to live. This is lived spirituality. It is not head stuff, thinking and believing certain ways. It is life stuff, living the life that is right for us, the life that we are created to live, by stepping into the mystery, into the unknown, trusting ourselves to it, singing our own song, and living the adventure that is our life. Amen! May it be so!

Carrying the Imago Dei to Term

2010-03-21T13:21:00.002-04:00

We have to do the work required to bring ourselves forth. There is nothing automatic or natural about the process of the “second birth.” It is brought on by the realization of dissatisfaction with the world as it is, of the emptiness and insufficiency of the wasteland that is our life. And if our life does not seem to be a wasteland, if we are breezing right along with everything as it should be and nothing more than the usual complaints about the weather and politicians to disrupt the flow, then there is no reason to question the framework within which we live, or the structure we have been told holds things in place.

It takes an encounter with unwanted reality to shock us into the realization that the way we have been told things are is not the way things are. Without that, things rock along in an acceptable kind of way, and we live out our days without raising our eyes to the possibilities or digging a well to the waters of life flowing beneath our feet.

We have to be awakened to the inability of our life to sustain itself with a diet of physical food and drink. A tree may get all it needs from the nutrients in soil, water, light and air, but it takes more than that for human beings. We have to be grounded, rooted, in a different medium. We depend upon a vibrant connection with life beyond life, beyond the physical, biological, necessities of life—a life that flows with meaning and purpose and the freedom to explore our interests and devote ourselves to the work of giving physical expression to our creative imagination.

We plant things and paint things and build things and draw things. We see how things could be and work to bring that forth in our lives, and that work brings us to life in a way that a proper diet and exercise could never produce. There is something about us, something within us, that needs to become actual, tangible, real, through us in the world. It is not enough to be born. We are born as carriers, as hosts, of a different sort of life requiring a different sort of birth, and we live our lives giving birth again and again to different manifestations of the creative spirit that dwells within.

It sometimes takes a jolt of reality to wake us up to the failure of the things that are supposed to be satisfying to satisfy, and to send us on the search of the things of lasting, one might say, “eternal,” value. We cannot buy the things that matter, but we can buy the tools to produce the things that matter, to do the things that matter. To do that, of course, we have to know, we have to find, the things that matter. Not the things that are supposed to matter. Not the things someone else tells us matter. But the things that matter because we know, we say, they matter. We find those things by taking up the practice of listening to our lives, of noticing our body’s response to our lives, in order to find what “clicks” with us, what resonates with us, and what does not.

Resonation is the key. Too often, we build our lives around the things we are supposed to do, or the things that are supposed to be fulfilling, when we experience dissonance, not resonance, in response to those things. When we ignore the disparity between how we are supposed to feel and how we actually feel we pay a price. We have to be alert to the sense of being out-of-alignment, out-of-sync, out-of-harmony, and move away from discord to accord in order to find the spiritual ground of our lives, the environment where our spirit thrives, and life takes on new meaning.

We are the point of contact between worlds, and our work is always to connect the worlds, to bring forth the inner, spiritual, world into the outer world of normal, apparent, reality. It used to be that the physical world was filled with messages and directives, signs and portents, from the unconscious. Then we came "of age." And now our task is finding our way back to the land we once knew by paying attention to instinct, being aware of intuition. Looking, listening. The process is to look, listen, see, hear, understand, know, do, be. If we get that down, we save the world.

We save the world by being the self we are called to be. The self we are called to be is the Image of God, the Imago Dei, the Christ within. The Imago Dei is a mustard seed, yeast in the dough, invisibly influential. Cast aside by the builders, transforming the world. You. Me. Us. This is the self within we are called to bring forth, to birth in our lives. We are mid-wives here to assist the birthing of the Imago Dei through us into the world. We are the Virgin bringing forth the Bebe Jesus. Our task is always to take the circumstances and conditions of life, of the moment, and imagine how to use them to bring forth the life within. In so doing, we come alive in the fullest possible sense of the word, and, yes, save the world!

It's A New World

2010-03-14T13:22:00.000-04:00

Paul couldn’t know what we know and think the way he thought. For one thing, his idea about the immediacy of Christ’s return in apocalyptic glory to institute the cosmic reign of the kingdom of God would go swiftly out of the window, and he would have to go back to the desert for another three years in order to come up with a newer way of understanding the implications of the life and death and resurrection appearances of Jesus. He would have to make sense of things in a different way. Which is exactly the work that is ours to do. We have to make sense of things in a way that is dramatically different from the way Paul and the apostles made sense of things. What they thought has not been borne out in our experience. We cannot think the way they thought.

This flashes us back to the Wednesday night program this past week. We watched part two in a series about the movement from Jesus to Christ, from the Jesus Movement to Christianity. The narrator mentioned that in the aftermath of the death of Jesus the tradition that had built up around the idea of the Messiah had to be reinterpreted. How many times throughout history have traditional assumptions and expectations had to be reinterpreted in light of events and experience that did not bear them out?

The end is always near. The world as we know it is always coming to an end. We are always having to rethink, re-imagine, re-work, the traditions to take into account the contradictions and incompatibilities between what we have been told and what we experience. We are always coming up against some reality that doesn't square with how we think things are, with how we wish things were, with how we want things to be. That's the end of that world. Poof. Gone.

How many worlds have come and gone? Ways of life, civilizations, ideas about how things are? When the parents divorce, the child's world goes. How many times have the traditions been reinterpreted, revised, to fit new realities, new worlds, incompatible with the old way of seeing? How many traditions, sacred truths, blessed convictions, have dissolved before the advance of a new way of seeing? Don't hold on too tightly to how you think things are! “It’s a new world, Golda!” And a newer one is on the way! Successful religions reinterpret their traditions in light of the new world that has dawned. Unsuccessful religions collapse when their cornerstone beliefs are not sustained by their life experience.

The work of religion is the work of squaring us up with the conditions of the world that greet us at birth. And, at some point in our lives, we have to return the favor and do the work of squaring our religion up with the changing conditions of life which no longer support the beliefs and constructs of our religion. Copernicus and Galileo and Darwin and Jung have given us a world the old religious assumptions don’t fit, and we have to re-think the traditions to take the new world into account, or else.

Always the question: What does this have to do with that? What does this world have to do with that one? What do those traditional ways of seeing and thinking have to do with this new way of seeing and thinking about the world in which we live? What do those stories, that system of beliefs, have to do with this turn of events, this reality?

The movement of soul, the spiritual journey, is always from bondage to freedom—from bondage to the old way of thinking, seeing, being—from bondage to the old traditions—to the freedom of new life, new vision, new ways of thinking, seeing, being. This is the message of Easter, Resurrection, and New Birth. The old has passed away, behold the new has come. And within a generation or less, this new will be old and will be replaced by a newer New, and we will have to move again from bondage to the old way of perceiving reality to the freedom of another new way of beholding the world and our place in it.

Ours is the task of reinterpreting, re-thinking, the old traditions, the old symbols. They are not automatically relevant, pertinent, meaningful. What does that say to this? We have to rework the traditions to make the connections, but, the work is not easy. Who wants to do the work of rethinking, reworking, the old symbols? Who wants to think, reflect, wonder, imagine, struggle to make new connections? Distractions are easier, diversions are more fun. Who has time to spend in the search for meaning and purpose when Wii waits? Wii will have to wait, because no one can re-work the symbols, the traditions, for us. Each of us must do the work for herself, himself. We cannot be told what there is to know, see, understand, perceive, grasp, get. Truth cannot be explained to us. We have to do the work. We have to find a symbol or image that moves us. Listen to it. Follow where it takes us, into the far reaches of a brand new world.

Integrity Is So The Point

2010-03-07T19:54:00.001-05:00

Integrity is the highest good. We live with integrity when we live so that outer reflects inner, so that Thou Art That, consciously, intentionally, and the unitive Oneness is apparent, real in our lives. Joseph Campbell says “We should become transparent to transcendence.” He means that we, that our lives, should be like panes of glass through which Transcendent Reality shines. We should live our lives so as to exhibit, express, bring forth, make plain the truth of the transcendent core, or heart, or soul of who we are. There is always more to us than meets the eye, and we are to live so as to bring that forth, giving it birth, bringing it to life in the world of normal, apparent, reality.

This is the work of Incarnation. When we align ourselves with our life, with the life we are called to live, the transcendent source of life shines through our living. We are “transparent to transcendence,” and God is known. This is how we are called to live. This is how Jesus lived: “The Father and I are one. When you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Or, as Paul says it, “It is no longer I who live, but (the) Christ who lives in me.” That’s it. And what prevents it? What gets in the way of that? Oh, everything. Our wishes, wants, desires, fears, ambitions… Our ideas of how our life should be lived. WE get in the way of that. And so, the work—the spiritual task, quest, journey, path—is to get out of the way!

Our life is not a long list of things to get done—to accomplish, achieve, acquire, amass—before we die, and it isn't a place to hang out until we die, it's where we bring forth who we are born, who we are called, to be. Joseph Campbell says, “Each of us has a track to find and follow.” Our life is our canvass and we are the masterpiece we produce by living it. But that is not something we think up and force into being. We don’t produce ourselves so much as align ourselves with ourselves. We acquiesce to the Self within—the Self we are called to be. WE become transparent to the Self within which transcends our idea of who we want to be. We surprise ourselves with who we are.

It isn't easy, being who we are, living the life that is ours to live. Better to be invisible, to go along to get along, to make no waves. The world blends us into its way of doing things. It's easier when we don't think, resist, react, but just go along like unconscious cows. Yet, to make no waves is to disappear beneath the water, to drown in the great corporate sea of unconsciousness that does what is supposed to be done without knowing what it is doing.

But, it's hard enough finding a parking place, remembering what we need at the grocery store. We have too much already on our minds. The life that is ours to live is on its own. We don't want to have to think about who we are and what is ours to do. Inner work is more than we can manage. And it is essential that we do it!

Inner work begins with paying attention to our body. Joseph Campbell says, “Your body is a vehicle of consciousness.” We are consciousness becoming conscious! We become conscious by becoming conscious of our body and its reaction to our experience. Our body’s reaction to external experience is a bridge to the inner world. When we become conscious of our body’s reaction to external experience, we can follow that reaction to its source in the inner world and become aware of what meets us there. Our experience of our experience transforms our lives. Inner world meets outer world. Who we are is incarnated in how we live.

This is much different from memorizing creeds and believing what we are told to believe out of a book of doctrine. What is within that needs to be brought forth, birthed, expressed, made known? How do we place ourselves in its service? Find who we are? Make ourselves transparent to transcendence? These are the questions which ground us in spiritual reality and save the world.

Our work is to find and live our own lives, to be who we are, who we are called to be, within the time and place of our living. Human beings in primal societies have always understood our true work as being that of maintaining alignment with soul, with the unconscious, invisible, spiritual world. As civilization developed, we set that understanding aside in order to serve our own ambitions, desires, and ideas of what was important. That hasn’t turned out so well, and our lives are empty, devoid of meaning, and our life is a wasteland. Now, we are at the point of finding our way back to listening to what the inner, spiritual, world has to say, and collaborating with it along the way.

How do we consciously make ourselves a partner with the unconscious, with the unknown, with what we don’t know? How do we attend, commune with, the inner voices? How do we honor the inner world and recognize it as a full partner in the work of finding our way along the way? The answers to these questions constitute the work of soul. It is the work of aligning ourselves with our lives, and waits for us to take it up and become who we are.

Unconscious Cows

2010-02-28T16:46:00.001-05:00

I place before you this morning three things: The First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me!” The central proclamation of first century Christians: “Jesus Christ is Lord!” And, Julie Strope. As we see how these three things are really One, as is the case with every triune configuration when perceived with hearts that understand, we will see what is ours to do in the time left to us.

The First Commandment admonishes all adherents: Do not do it as you see it being done about you! There were nothing but “other gods” in those days, and in these. And the First Commandment calls us away from the way our neighbors are doing things to consider for ourselves how things truly need to be done, so that we might do it.

The declaration “Jesus Christ is Lord” was only half of the formula for first century believers. The other half, always implied and sometimes stated, if only under one’s breath, was “And Caesar is NOT Lord!” In this way, the early church carried forward the Old Testament dharma: “Do not do it as you see it being done about you!”

And, of course, this leads us to Julie Strope. Of all the things you could think to say about Julie Strope, never would you say that she did anything the way it was being done around her. This is the single characteristic essential for the salvation of the world, and Julie has embodied it beautifully, and has lived before us as a wonderful example of how it is to be done.

Jesus stood before the Pharisees, looked them in the eye, and asked, “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” And he asked his disciples point blank, “Who do YOU say that I am?” It is the independent judgment of individual human beings that keeps things balanced and sane, that makes the world livable, that enables life. When we stop thinking for ourselves and stop making up our own minds about what is important and how we will live our lives, things take a quick turn for the worse, and we follow one another like unconscious cows down worn paths to the pasture and back to the barn without ever being alive and present in the life we are living.

Who could be alive and present in the life we are living? Who could stand it? Who could be awake and alive for life as it is being lived around us? It seems obvious that we have to make ourselves unconscious—that we have to put ourselves to sleep—just to make it through our days. DO NOT DO IT AS YOU SEE IT BEING DONE ABOUT YOU! This is the spiritual task, quest, path, journey: Bearing the pain of waking up and living our own lives!

Our work is deciding how to live our own lives in the time and place—within the context and circumstances—of our living. This is our spiritual work and our calling, to bring forth who we are within the hard and fast realities of physical existence. This is the work of incarnation, giving the spiritual “I am” physical, tangible, actual existence in the world of normal, apparent, reality. We cannot hand this responsibility over to some external authority, some culture, some group, some guru, some guide, and go where we are told to go and do what we are supposed to do. DO NOT DO IT AS YOU SEE IT BEING DONE ABOUT YOU!

Our life is all we have to work with. It is the only tool at our disposal in the task of bringing forth who we were born, and who we are called, and who we are built, to be. If we just follow the other cows to the pasture and back to the barn all our lives long we will live and die as an unconscious cow.

That will never be said of Julie Strope. May it never be said of any of us! May it be said of us that we made the decisions that were needed to be made in order to live our own life, and may the life we live as our own be the life that is ours to live, the life with our name on it. Amen! May it be so!

Stay On The Beam!

2010-02-21T13:12:00.001-05:00

The value of any religion is the degree to which it connects us with who we are and the life that is our life to live. The spiritual life is the life that is unique to us, the life we are called to incarnate, bring forth, give birth to within the physical world of normal, apparent, reality. The spiritual ground of our existence, is the truth of who we are which demands expression in the world of physical existence. We are to do what brings us forth! Religion that is helpful helps us find the path with our name on it, helps us find the way that leads to ourselves and the life that is ours to live. Religion that is not helpful conceals the way, blocks the path, tells us it knows best, cuts us off from ourselves and assimilates us into the norms and the corporate mind of the religion.

All religions have their rules to live by. Jesus speaks of those rules when he says, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees (& Mama Gurus)!" There are no black footprints! There is no blueprint! There are no shortcuts to the life that is your life to live! The only rule to live by is: STAY ON THE BEAM! Joseph Campbell says, “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.” The only thing to know is when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.

When are you "on the beam"? What gets you off of it? What pretends to be better than the beam? What competes with the beam? How are you going to live in the time left for living? What are you going to do with your life? What is LIFE for you? How much will you LIVE? How will you LIVE within the context and circumstances of your life? These are essential spiritual questions.

We don't need organized religion to help us answer these questions, to help us to stay on the beam, but we need the church as it ought to be! Those who help us look, listen, know, do!

I'm your Mama (Guru)! Listen to me when I say: “DON'T LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN TO YOU!” Learning to listen to yourself is the heart of the spiritual journey. Who helps you hear what you have to say? To whom do you talk in order to hear yourself speak? In order to speak the truth that must be said, heard, lived? That person is, those people are, the church for you. Your church is the people in your life who help you stay on the beam. That is the "soul" purpose of the church, keeping folks on the beam!

Spirituality is not about what you think or believe but what you do. How you live. How well you live aligned with the life that is your LIFE. You cannot do what someone else (the Mama Gurus) tells you to do. Your spiritual practice is living YOUR life! Our LIFE is our spiritual practice. We practice LIVING until we get it down. And practice it after we get it down because we love it, because it is life for us.

What constitutes LIFE for you? How does the way you are living assist the experience of LIFE? Prevent it? How must you change the way you live in order to LIVE? These are essential spiritual questions. What are you going to do to do what is yours to do? To do what has, is, LIFE for you? When will you take up the work of being who you are, of doing what is yours to do? What do you intend, what do you mean, with the life you are living? How closely aligned is your present life with the “beam,” with the life that is your life to live? These are essential spiritual questions. Who helps you ask and answer them?

Our lives are self-adjusting, self-directing, self-correcting internal guidance systems when we live them with time for observation, reflection, examination and exploration. We have to take the time to listen to our lives, to listen to ourselves speak about our lives, to find the images that reflect our lives and listen to them. We are generally unaware of the images and symbols that carry the meaning of our lives and can point us to that meaning when we allow it. But, we are all aware of our symptoms. Symptom must become image! We have to sit with our symptoms and allow the image to immerge and speak or move, to say what it has to say, to show us what it would have us see. This sounds crazy, but it isn’t crazy. It is spiritual. It is spiritual work to listen to our images, to hear what they have to say.

We have to avail ourselves of the guidance that is available to us if we would find our way to the beam, to the path, with our name on it, to the Holy Grail, to the life that is our life to live. This means listening to our body’s response to our experience and finding the images which interpret and express the meaning of that response so that we might commune with our intuition and instinct and STAY ON THE BEAM! Amen! May it be so!

Hey, wait a minute!

2010-02-14T16:58:00.000-05:00

There are two fundamental religious orientations. Every religion in the world falls into one or the other category of thought about God. The religion either says: “There is no God but the God we say is God!” Or it says: “There is more to God than we know of God.” Between the two orientations lies a world of difference.

Jews, Christians and Muslims opt for “There is no God but the God we say is God,” which makes for difficult going along the road together, and has led to all manner of persecutions and pogroms and jihads and religious wars and religious wars disguised as political wars over the years.

Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists and other perspectives of the east opt for “There is more to God than we know of God.” Adherents of each religion (And Buddhism claims not to be a religion but there are those prayer flags to consider, and those votive offerings to explain, and that entire pantheon of gods to take into account) may hold other religious perspectives in low esteem (Vietnamese Buddhists don’t use singing bowls to call them to meditation as Tibetan Buddhists do, and are somewhat smug about it), but they don’t have standing armies to protect themselves from one another, or to use in doing one another in.

The two views of God are the primary and essential point of theological demarcation. Everything hinges on the choice we make about God at the beginning. The paths that diverge at that point are very different all along the way. “There is no God but the God we say is God,” closes doors and demands conversion or eternal damnatkion, assimilation or excommunication, agreement or the designation of heretic or infidel. “There is more to God than we know of God” opens doors, invites inquiry and conversation, welcomes divergent views, and laughs at the idea that anyone or any group could ever know enough of God to wrap God up in a creed, or catechism, or book of confessions and brandish it about as though it were the last word, or even the next-to-last word.

So, guess where I stand in the matter. Where I stand in the matter makes it impossible for me to stand before you as the spokesperson for a denomination that knows what you should think about God and places me before you to tell you what that is. Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s a Hindu story. Not a Jewish story, or a Christian story, or a Muslim story. There is more to the elephant than we know of the elephant. But, as we share our perspectives, our life experience, we are enlarged, deepened, expanded, stretched, in our own understanding of the elephant, and grow in our understanding of things spiritual.

But the nature of this growth requires more of us than listening to a monologue once a week, or whenever the mood strikes you. A monologue is a skimming stone. We need a good conversation to take us beneath the surface. So, I’ve created a Beyond 920 Group to oversee the offerings of programs and courses that will open us to the world of spiritual development and that world to us. It’s the next phase of the 920 experience, and will use the atmosphere we have produced here to enable us to be more than we could ever be on our own. And this without compulsion or force or threat of excommunication! Stay tuned, more will be coming soon.

In the meantime, there is the matter of ourselves and our perspective to take into account. The greatest impediment to the development of our spiritual life is our understanding of life, what we think it means to be alive, what we do to feel alive. The way we live is the greatest determinant of the quality and depth of our spiritual life. If we want to grow spiritually, we have to change the way we live.

The spiritual life is not compatible with just any life. We cannot live just any old way and be spiritual. We have to acquiesce to the life that is ours to live but. We cannot hurry that move. Everything in its own time is the foundational spiritual law. We may have to wait awhile before we are ready for the spiritual life. We may have to try other lives on. See how they fit. Live them to their hollow, empty core.

No one can argue us out of our idea of where life is to be found. We have to find out for ourselves if we are right about it. Gay Paree, or its current equivalent, may be working for us. We cannot be spiritual before its time. We cannot live the spiritual life until we have given up on the other lives. The spiritual life waits for the shift in perspective required to see, hear, and understand—to know what is important and do it. Takes time. We have to be at the end of our rope, at the end of the line, before we can change our minds about what is important.

What's the hurry? If the life you are living is filled with meaning and enthusiasm and keeps you interested in what you are doing, live it! If we are in the middle of Gay Paree, eyes wide open, mouth agape, no one can talk us out of it. We have to see the emptiness before we can move on. Yet, in Gay Paree there must be those who talk of moving on, of what is beyond Gay Paree, even when there is none to listen, none to hear. We cannot wait until we have a receptive audience to say what is ours to say. The emperor gets by with no clothes forever when there is collusion.

Someone has to say, "Hey, wait a minute!" for the illusion to begin to fade. “Wal Mart isn't IT. Gay Paree is a sham. Glass beads and shiny plastic. See?” Wal Mart and Gay Paree ARE IT at some point for some of us. And at any point, there is always more to think and see than we are capable of thinking and seeing. We can only think what we are capable of thinking at any point in our lives, only see what we are able to see.

We shouldn't put too much at stake on how we think, see, at any point in our lives. We will turn a corner and think, see, things differently. There is more to God than we know of God. We begin the work of knowing more of God than we know of God, and of anything else—we take up the work of thinking and seeing beyond where we think and see—by seeing the discrepancies in what we think and see, and thinking about them.

Always the discrepancies, the discordances, the contradictions! They wake us up, pull us forward, move us beyond where we are. We have to see our seeing in order to see more than we see. We have to think about our thinking in order to think beyond where we are. Our thinking and our seeing will carry us to the heart of the life that is our life to live, to the path with our name on it, IF we see our seeing and think about our thinking.

Anything is possible with everything on the table, and everything must be always on the table. We must be always standing around the table, looking at what is on the table, talking about what is on the table, saying what we see, and what we also see and working to reconcile the discrepancies.

No matter what we think is so, we have to look for what else is so, for the truth beyond the truth we call truth, for the God beyond the God we say is God. When we think there is no truth beyond the truth we call truth, no God beyond the God we say is God, we are as good as dead. Are dead.

The right kind of company, and the church as it ought to be, is always saying, "Hey wait a minute! How does this square with that?", pointing out the discrepancies, forcing the work of life. The work that deepens us is the work of recognizing and reconciling ourselves with the contradictions at work in our lives. It takes us all to do that work. On our own, we are too shallow to splash. Too lazy to spot the contradictions or come to terms with them.

When we wake up, we wake up to the truth of contradiction and conflict, and to the work of squaring ourselves with how things are. Wholeness, becoming whole, integrity, is the work of recognition and reconciliation. We do not dissolve the tension between opposites but live consciously within it, maintaining it. We live the contradictions, doing one thing in its turn, in its time, with an eye always on the other thing, always honoring the opposition.

You have heard me say that I want to be the best (fill in the blank: father, husband, minister, etc) in all the world and I don't want to be a (fill in the blank) at all. Both sides of the equation are eternally true. Neither cancels out the other. I live in the tension between them constantly, consciously.

And I don’t think, “Oh, I must be a really bad person, a hypocrite, a liar, because I don’t REALLY want what I say I want! Or because I don’t know what I REALLY want!” I REALLY want opposite, mutually exclusive things! And I’m not wrong or bad for doing it! I just REALLY want mutually exclusive things! I “want to have my cake and eat it, too”! So do you.

The trend is to talk us out of our contradictions, to talk us into being one way only. As if! Denying the other side doesn't disappear it! It only makes us crazy, and symptomatic! The work is to be conscious of our contraries and to live them out as appropriately as possible. We need an environment which helps us do that. We have to square ourselves up to our opposing sides and work out their appropriate expression in our lives. Not easy, but very interesting! Where do we go to talk about the work of squaring ourselves up to our contradictions? Who helps us with it? The church as it needs to be! May that be who we are!

No Advanced Degrees in Spiritual Development!

2010-02-07T20:47:00.002-05:00

There are no graduate degrees in spiritual development. There is only you and the life that is yours to live. Live it! That’s it! Oh, but! That’s not what we want to hear! We want to talk about God so that we might understand the nature of the divine/human encounter and be prepared. We want to be informed about how things are on the spiritual plane. We want a steadily graduated series of lectures, with flow charts and definitions (but don’t call them doctrines and don’t use churchy language) to explain the intricacies of the invisible world. But, we don’t want to be told to DO anything!

We seek knowledge of the spiritual life to keep from living the life that is ours to live. But, that IS the spiritual life! Our LIFE is spiritual when it is lived aligned with our (that word again) destiny. When we reduce the spiritual problem to it’s simplest form it comes down to the matter of getting us together with our life, the life that is our life to live. Spirituality is a two part process. There is you and there is your life. Our spiritual work is getting us together with our life. It is not easy.

Our life comes in three manifestations. There is the life that is our life to live, our destiny. There is the life that we wish were our life to live. And there is the life we think we have to live. We have to work out the life we actually live from among these three possibilities. It is no wonder we put off the work that is ours to do: getting together with, living aligned with, the life that is our life to live! No wonder we seek knowledge, read books, sign up for retreats, take pilgrimages! Anything to put off the work required to ferret out the life that is our life to live and live it!

We seek the advanced degrees in spiritual development to keep us from doing what is ours to do: Living the life with our name on it. We drag it out, having to get ourselves square with life, putting the life we wish were our life to live aside, and aligning ourselves with the life that is ours to live. That’s the work. That’s all there is to it, but it’s too much for us. So, we demur. We defer. We put it off. We read another book. Sign up for another workshop. Go to another lecture. Take another pilgrimage. Anything to avoid doing what is ours to do. Anything to not have to worry about living the life that is ours to live.

No one can decide for us what is ours to do, or do for us what is ours to do. No one can relieve us of the burden that is ours, knowing and doing what is ours to do, but we seek relief! "Mama Guru! Tell us what to do!" And, of course, Mama Guru doesn't want to do what is his, hers, to do and is glad for the distraction we provide and happy to tell us what to do. Mama Guru’s are everywhere with advice and counsel. They will read your palms, or your tea leaves, or your stars, or your dreams and tell you what to do.

None of us does what is ours to do, and when someone does we call him, her, a bodhisattva or Christ or Buddha, for doing what is theirs to do, for living their life. Because we recognize the wonder of it, and are blessed by it, but we turn away from doing it ourselves. It’s too hard, too demanding, too risky, too much fraught with uncertainty and insecurity and instability. Who knows what might be asked of us, or might happen to us, or where we might wind up?! Of course, if you think about it, those are the ingredients of a Great Adventure. But, we don’t think about it. We look away. We look for Mama Guru.

Call me Mama Guru. Call me your Mama. And listen to me. It is not hard, really. What is really hard is to NOT be who we are, who we are called to be. How would it look, say, from your death bed, to think of the life you didn’t live because you wanted to be safe and secure, insulated, protected? Why don’t you see how much you can live of the life that is yours to live in the time left for living? Come on. How about it? I’ll tell you all you need to know.

The only knowledge required for spiritual development, growth, is the knowledge of what needs to be done and what of that is ours to do. Simple. Nothing to it. Being clear about the next step is all the clarity you will ever need. Knowing what to do next is all you need to know. Knowing what's important is all you need to know. Knowing what needs doing is all you need to know. You can save a lot of time for living the life that is yours to live in the time left for living by not worrying about all the advice from the experts. Stop reading. Start living. The knowledge that is required for spiritual growth has nothing to do with concepts and doctrines and beliefs and ideas. Know what to do now! Do it! That’s all there is to it!

We can miss the point of our lives all our lives long. We keep missing it denying that we are missing it because it's too painful to confess that we are missing it, have missed it. But don’t think you can’t go back and pick something of it up, of the life that is yours to live. You can! There is time yet left for living. See what you can do. In the church of our experience this is called sin (missing the point) and repentance (turning around). It is getting back on track. Getting back on track has nothing to do with doctrine or belief but with finding our way to the life that is ours to live and living it.

We have the rest of our lives to get together with the life that is our life to live, the one with our name on it. You know what that is called: The search for the holy grail. The holy grail is the life that is our life to live, the container of us, the vehicle of ourselves, the carrier of who we are, the shape of our self. It is who we are built, who we are called, to be.

And, how do we know who that is, who we are called to be? How do we know what life is the life that is ours to live? Glad you asked. We know when the potato salad is too salty and when the tea is not sweet enough. And we know when we are living the life that is our life to live, and when we are not. Joseph Campbell says, “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.” We only have to know what we know. That means we have to pay attention. We have to be quiet and listen.

The kind of listening that is required in the search for the holy grail is prayer. Prayer is not usually thought of as listening. We do anything BUT listen when we pray. We talk, talk, talk, hardly stopping to breathe. Confession, petition, intercession, praise and thanksgiving. Those constitute the five types of prayer. Nothing about listening anywhere. But, we have to listen for what we have to say. Then we have to listen to what we have to say. Then we have to listen for what else there is to say. Listening is the ground of prayer, the environment in which prayer is prayed.

Prayer is seeing, hearing, understanding. Prayer reveals all, exposes all. We can’t hide anything in prayer. Who do we think we are kidding? Prayer is not diplomacy, positioning, posturing, flattery, sweet talk, smooth talk, or adulation as though God is some powerful old fool. Prayer is the plain statement of all the truth we are capable of telling at every point in our lives. It is our way of hearing what we have to say. When we pray, we over-hear what we have to say and, holding nothing back, explore what else there is to say to the point of seeing all.

We pray ourselves to the point of seeing, hearing, and understanding, and, thus, knowing. We follow that up with doing and being. We live to become the person we know we need to be, living the life we know we need to live out of the awareness that is generated by prayerful listening to all we have to say. There you are. Seeing, hearing and understanding call for the realignment of ourselves with our lives. Seeing how things are, we know what to do about how things are.

And don’t even think about what’s in it for us. The what are we going to get out of it, out of living the life that is ours to live, is the deal killer. What do we think there is beyond having lived the life that is ours to live? The photograph is what I get out of photography! Life is what we get out of living! What more could there be? We spend our lives getting ourselves together with our lives. What we have to show for our effort is an interesting, meaningful life.

This is to say that no conditions apply. We do not negotiate or bargain our way to our destiny! No “If then therefore” clauses! We step into the rest of the time we have for living bent on living OUR life, the life with our name on it, no matter what! We hand ourselves over to our life and allow it to have its way with us. Anything is possible with everything on the table. So, everything is on the table. Nothing is off limits.

The butterfly has to escape the cocoon, has to escape the caterpillar, has to move beyond what got it to where it is, in order to be itself. We have to grow beyond what got us where we are if we hope to be who we are and live the lives that are our lives to live. Spiritual growth is a painful dying to what has gone before in order to live as fully as possible in the time left for living. May we do it with our eyes dancing and our arms spread wide!

Wanting

2010-01-24T13:52:00.002-05:00

I know what your problem is. Your problem is that you aren’t getting what you want. If you were getting what you want, you wouldn’t have any problems. Isn’t that right? The only thing wrong with you is that you don’t have enough people in your life handing you what you want. The only thing standing between you and complete happiness, to the point of gleeful squeals and jigs of joy, is knowing the secret to having what you want. Well, you have come to the right place this morning! I am here to fix you up for the rest of your life: STOP WANTING! Wanting is ruining your life! If you didn’t want anything, you would be deliriously delighted with how things are right now.

We have painstakingly established the fact that if you didn’t have anything to want you would be serenely enraptured and blissful to the core. The quickest way to that happy land is to stop wanting. Instant bliss. There. That takes care of that. I would ask you if there is anything else I can do for you while I’m in the mood and we’re all here, but there couldn’t possibly be. Once you’ve stopped wanting, there is nothing else to ask for, nothing more to have. Life is good. And religion is now of no use to you whatsoever.

People have traditionally used religion as a tool to pry what they want from God. We are told that if we give ten percent of our annual income after taxes, deductions, exemptions, exclusions and expenses to God, in return, God will give us everything we ask for. It’s a very good deal. Where are you going to beat it? Give to Get. And to hear those who are selling it tell it, it works every time.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this little detail, but those selling the Give to Get deal are always those who handle our ten percent on its way to God. They are the middle persons, overseeing the transmission of our withdrawals to their deposit in the heavenly coffers. I’m not suggesting that that would be any reason for them to lie about how well the idea Giving to Get actually works, but it does sound a bit like bribery, inducement, enticement, or “priming the well” as they say in the deep south. I’m only pointing out that religion’s primary function is to position us to get what we want from God, and that if we didn’t want anything, where would preachers be?

Or advertising agencies? Or manufacturing conglomerates? Or, well, Wall Street? We’ve started something here, haven’t we. This is revolutionary. Radical stuff. There is no end to the implications. It could transform life as we know it. End life as we know it. If we didn’t want anything, there wouldn’t be anything. Where would that leave us? Desire-less living wouldn’t offer us anything to live for. The Buddha put forth desire as the origin of suffering, but the blessed state of desire-less-ness isn’t all that pain-free considering the mess things would be in if we stopped wanting.

We can't not-want! Wanting is the ground of existence. The economy is based on wanting, and everything is based on the economy. If we stopped swapping money around the table there would be very little eating, or anything else going on. So, never mind about the bliss of not-wanting. The Yogis can sit not-wanting, but somebody has to fill their rice bowls. Has to want to. Has to want to care for those who want-not. Religion is safe, and I have a job. Thanks for your part in filling my rice bowl.

But. Wanting does get in the way. What a tree wants doesn't matter. With the proper amount of light, water and nutrients, a tree is going to be a tree. What we want matters most. Why live if we can't have what we want? What's the point if it isn’t getting what we want? What a tree wants doesn't matter. What we want is the only thing that does matter. A tree will thrive with the right amount of water, light and nutrients. Not us. We have to have what we want or why live? A tree never asks, “Why live?” Trees live wherever they can for as long as they can, glad to be alive. Not us. We have to have what we want or else.

You’ve heard me say that the only thing standing between us and God is us. The only thing standing between us and the way that is The Way is us. And the thing about us that is in our way is our wanting, willful, way. So, what to do? We can’t want and we can’t not-want. It’s a pickle. The only way to move forward when you are in a pickle—when you are caught between two mutually exclusive options—is to do one thing with your eye on the other. You must not forget that you are in a pickle, and you must not let being in a pickle incapacitate you, immobilize you, and keep you from doing what needs to be done. When you are in a pickle, you must BE in a pickle, consciously, intentionally, deliberately—maintaining the tension of the opposite poles and bearing the pain of not being able to do either because of the other AND DO ONE with an eye on the other one.

We have to want wanting to not want.

Here’s how it works: There is wanting, and there is knowledge of wanting, knowing that we are wanting. Spend more time knowing you are wanting than wanting unknowingly. Don't just want, know that you are wanting. Be interested in the wanting. What does wanting keep you from facing, doing, thinking about? How does wanting insulate you from the life that is waiting to be lived? What role does wanting play? How does wanting keep you from living? How does wanting enable you to live?

The role of wanting in enabling life and preventing life is the heart of the matter. It revolves around the question, “Whose side are we on?” Wanting, when it is aligned with life and exercised in the service of life that is the heart and soul of life, what life is all about, is, as it has been phrased in the church of our experience, “obedience to the will of God.” Wanting that is opposed to life and contrary to the heart and soul of life, of what life is all about, is, as has been phrased in the church of our experience, “disobedience unto sin.” We can want what is right for us and we can want what is wrong for us. So, alongside of the question, “Whose side are we on?”, we place the question, “What do we want and how does that serve life or oppose life?”

In order to answer these questions, we have to answer the other question, “Of what does LIFE consist?” We don’t spend enough time with this one. It’s taken away from us by the ad agencies and cultural trends. LIFE consists of the lights and action of Gay Paree, or whatever the current equivalent is. But we can’t trust the commercials or the culture with this one. It’s the biggie. No one can tell us of what our life consists. That is ours to divine on our own.

The spiritual journey, quest, task is knowing and doing what is life for us. The church as it ought to be would be equipped to help you know what you are here for, to discern what is yours to do, to find the path with your name on it and live the life that is your life to live. We are talking that word you hate destiny here. We can’t escape it. And trying to puts us nose to nose with the essential question, “Whose side are we on?”

Here, we cannot avoid thinking about what we want. We have to think about what we want in order to want what is right for us, in order to live the life that is ours to live. We are not free to live any way we choose, to do whatever strikes our fancy. We cannot live any way we choose and be at home with ourselves, at peace with who we are. We can choose to live in ways that are at cross purposes with our destiny.

We know when things are right and when they are not right. We know when we are working with ourselves, when we are working against ourselves. We know when what we want is serving ends worthy of us, is aligned with the life that is our life to live, and when it is not. We know when we are kidding ourselves. IF we think about it. We avoid the pain of realization by living too fast to listen. Immersing ourselves in the lights and action of Gay Paree, we numb ourselves against the knowledge of having taken a wrong turn, again. We run from emptiness and seek to find a meaningful life in the catalogs, at the resorts and on the showroom floors, while destiny waits.

The good news/bad news is truth does not go away. Truth taps us on our shoulder with symptoms and a nagging sense that things are not right somehow. Emptiness, boredom, restlessness, anxiety all suggest that Paree isn’t it, and it is only a matter of time until we wake up or die with a withered soul. On the other hand, an indication of living in the service of our destiny is passion for life. Passion, enthusiasm, zest, zeal suggest destiny in the making. We cannot be connected with our destiny without being passionate about it, but passion is only an indicator, not evidence, of alignment with our destiny. Lethargy, emptiness, ennui, on the other hand, are evidence of life unlived, of destiny not served. We can be passionate about that which is not destiny. So, we have to think about what we are wanting, and keep an eye on ourselves at all times. Because shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best.

The Invisible World

2010-01-17T21:48:00.000-05:00

If you are going to believe anything, believe there is more to you than meets the eye. If you are going to believe anything else, believe that there is more to everyone and everything than meets the eye. It all starts with the presumption of The More, The Invisible, The Unknown, The More. The fundamental spiritual assumption is that the visible world rests on the invisible world. If you aren’t willing to make that assumption, there is, for you, no such thing as spirituality. All that is real and true is material, physical, logical, rational, concrete, actual, tangible, measureable, weighable, countable, objective and verifiable. Spiritual is immaterial, “of the spirit,” beyond the physical senses, a world apart from the world of ordinary, apparent reality. So, if you think there is more to it all than meets the eye, you belong here. If you don’t, you’re welcome, of course, to stay, but why?

The work of the church as it ought to be is the work of connecting its members with the unknown, invisible, world, with The More than meets the eye. Faith is actually trust that the invisible world, The More, exists and can be approached, apprehended, intuited, experienced, expressed and incarnated within the visible world of ordinary, apparent, reality. This kind of trust, the willingness to trust ourselves to the truth of the invisible world, is the only kind of faith we need to have. Everything flows from there.

Spiritual reality has a physical dimension. Physical reality has a spiritual dimension. There is a point, on the boundary between yin and yang, between spiritual and physical, at which both are one. If you experience the purely physical at a sufficient depth of awareness and appreciation, a doorway opens, a threshold is crossed, and you are awash in the spiritual. And, on the other hand, if you meditate in the darkness to a sufficient depth of spiritual realization, you will have to give that sense of The More some manner of actual, tangible, concrete physical expression in your life. The one calls forth the other. Neither exists apart from the other. Both are functions of reality becoming real through our experience, through our conscious awareness. We see, say, sing the universe into being. Where would either world be without our awareness of both?

We are the bridge between worlds, connecting worlds, blessing worlds, and we, in turn, are graced and blessed by our association with each. Or, we have the potential of being so blessed. It’s realization depends upon our willing, conscious, participation in the process of bridging the worlds. This process requires us to represent the physical world to the spiritual, and the spiritual to the physical. We translate, interpret, and accommodate each world within and unto the other. For instance, we understand that each world comprehends time differently. In the physical world, time is linear and sequential in a way that can be scheduled and planned. In the spiritual world, time is pregnant with meaning and wonder but the when of birth is “in its own time,” and impossible to pinpoint beyond “in the fullness of time,” or, “when the time is right.”

We have to appreciate the differences between the world of spirit and the world of matter in order to bridge the worlds and represent one to the other. We can deepen our awareness of the differences between the worlds by looking at the research being done in the area of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. If we think of the right side of the brain as being the spiritual hemisphere, and the left side of the brain as being the physical hemisphere, we will have a metaphor for how the two worlds compare and relate to one another.

Critical to our relationship with each world, to our ability to bridge the worlds, is the realization that there is nothing in it for us. We, as a species, have the age-old idea that the spiritual world is ours to plunder and pillage to benefit our life in the physical world. We think that once we learn the secret of access, within the spiritual world lie the keys to the kingdom and that, by becoming spiritual, we will have the wisdom and insight necessary to manage our affairs in the physical world to our maximum advantage. Or, we have the other idea. We think that by subjecting ourselves to the power and control of the spiritual world, by being spiritual and pure, aloof, and unscathed by the sinful “world of the flesh,” we will be kept safe until the day of resurrection when we will rise with the saints in light and be accorded royal robes and high places in the kingdom of heaven, and enjoy eternal life there to our maximum advantage. Either way, it’s the same deal. We think the spiritual world exists for our enjoyment, benefit, and glory. The truth is that is not so.

We are the bridge between worlds, the boundary between yin and yang. As such, it is our place to collaborate and cooperate with each world for the good of both. We compensate for and counteract the deficiencies of the one with the strengths of the other and so make peace between the two. We live within both worlds for the sake of each and work for the reconciliation of one with the other. We do that by perceiving, engaging and incarnating spiritual reality within the world of physical reality. There is no advantage, no benefit, no immunity, no special treatment for those who take up the work of being citizens of both worlds. What we get for our trouble is an interesting and meaningful life.

Jesus was recognized by the centurion as the son of God. The disciples understood him to be the Anointed one of God. He was hailed as Messiah (Christ): The One Who Makes God Known. This is living as a citizen of both worlds, so that those who see us see the spiritual through the physical. Now, we only come close to this in our best moments on our best days, but we all have given the world a glimpse of grace, and mercy, and peace. We have shown what we are capable of. And, of course, we have shown what we are also capable of! We have been as petty as we have been gallant, as mean-spirited as we have been gracious, as snarly and rude as we have been kind and generous. We are, indeed, citizens of both worlds, exhibiting the qualities of each in a tangled mass that makes more for confusion than for fusion, more for chaos than for peace. Our work is cut out for us.

The work is that of becoming conscious of who we are and what is ours to do, and being intentional about doing it. That work involves us in learning all we can of the invisible world in order to be agents, envoys, of that world within the visible world of normal, apparent, reality. In this endeavor, research into the right hemisphere of the brain can help us access the spiritual world. Intuition, instinct, resonance, synchronicity, numinous awareness, dreams, symbols, Freudian slips, and the like are “thin places” where the invisible world can be apprehended if not studied. We become students of these things in order to know as much as we can know of the invisible and unknown.

Okay, whoa, time to stop. Time to say right out loud that no arena of human endeavor is more replete with charlatans, swindlers, imposters, liars, cheats, cranks, creeps and ne’er-do-wells than the invisible world. Here, we move into the area of metaphysics, cosmology, parapsychology, astrology, and la-la-everything. We’re swamped, stampeded, bowled-over and undone by the kooky hoards. We don’t have a chance. This is why Orthodoxy is so comforting. There, lines have been drawn between revealed truth and speculative thrill seeking. The church of our experience may not have been all that welcoming of new ideas, but at least there were standards in place and the people were all normal. We can’t get very far from that without reaching an edge we don’t want to step over. How can we talk about knowing the invisible and unknown world without risking the loss of all bearings and coming out, if we come out at all, wearing crystals and chewing peyote?

So, here’s the first rule: Don’t take anyone’s word for anything ever, including mine. I trust Carl Jung because of his training and his experience with the unconscious world of so many people over the course of his life. He put his theories forward as theories, not facts, and he doesn’t stand to gain anything personally from our allegiance or interest. But. He said no one knows what they don’t know. Bear that in mind. And don’t take anyone’s word for anything ever when they are talking about what cannot be seen, or known.

Here’s the second rule: Question everything (Also known as: “Let the buyer beware!”). This is an area of complete and total speculation. No one knows what is unknown! No one sees what is invisible! Do not believe anything you hear! Critique! Critique! Critique! But, here is where it gets interesting. The third rule is: Keep an open mind! Be interested, alert, awake! Wonder a lot! You will find yourself on paths you can’t begin to imagine, in places you could never predict, doing things you could not have foreseen. All because you know you can’t know what you don’t know, trust yourself to the unseen, unknown, invisible world, and allow yourself to be led without a map or a compass along the way. Amen! May it be so!

Rise to the Occasion!

2010-01-10T20:19:00.002-05:00

The movement to shift money from the big banks to credit unions and community banks is a beautiful example of how we don’t have to depend upon the government to solve the problems of bad financial management with regulations and stimulus packages. The people are savvy, and there are lots of ways to wage revolution. We have to understand that we are engaged in revolution and get with the program! Any program! Just pick a place and get to work!

The Peace and Justice Network of the Triad is a clearinghouse for information of all the local groups working the peace and justice side of the street. You’ll find their web site at www.peace-justice.net, and it won’t be long before you have more avenues for engaging in revolution than you can take on in one lifetime. It will be like selecting orange juice, or ice cream, at Harris Teeter. Too many choices, but solid evidence of how much is wrong with the way things are in the country and world, of how much needs to be done, and what people are doing in response to it. The time is always ripe for revolution!

Revolution is the work of consciousness. And it is a spiritual practice. There is nothing more counter-cultural, more subversive, than waking up, seeing, hearing and understanding—than taking on the work of squaring ourselves up with how things are and what needs to be done about it. This is the spiritual journey, task, quest: Asking What is happening? What needs to happen that is not happening? What response do we make to the situation as it arises, unfolds?

The moment is always barging into our lives to disrupt and decimate and disintegrate our cozy little world. What response do we make? As we form our response, we shape ourselves. This realization is crucial to our spiritual development. Our being flows from our doing. We are who we show ourselves to be in the responses we make to the moment of our living. What is the moment asking of us? How do we respond? There we are.

We stand naked before the world in the response we make to each moment of our living. Who we are is expressed in how we respond, how we live in response, to the moment of our living. We cannot bring forth in the moment anything that is not already within us. By bringing it forth, we make it visible, but we do not make it up. We cannot produce something that is not there to begin with, that is not within us, available to us.

If the lights go out, I have to call an electrician because I do not have what it takes to do more than flip the light switch. But, there is more within me than I know is within me, and I make amazing discoveries by getting out of my own way and allowing myself to show me what I am capable of in responding to the impact of the moment of my living. I shape myself in rising to the occasion presented by the moment. So do you. And, in this way, we become who we are over the course of our lives. We do not think our way to being who we are, we live our way there. The more consciously and thoughtfully we live, however, the more fully we become who we are.

The spiritual law at work here is this: Rise to the occasion! Be what is needed! In so doing, we will be bringing forth qualities and characteristics and abilities we don’t know we have. We have latent powers for transforming the world that languish because we will not use them, because we will not rise to the occasion, because we think we cannot do what needs to be done. We owe it to ourselves to find out what we can do and not decide without trying what we can and cannot do

We have to throw ourselves into the situation and see what we are capable of. We all suffer from an inaccurate assessment of our abilities, and with most of us, that comes out in not trying to do anything that pushes, stretches or challenges us in the least. “Oh, no,” we say, “I couldn’t do that!” And we don’t do anything, ever. We don’t think we can do anything, and don’t. We don’t know what we are capable of, and will never know if we do not begin to trust ourselves to rise to the occasion and find out, thereby, what we are made of.

So the questions: What is happening? What needs to happen that is not happening? What is the occasion that is presented by the moment as it is unfolding before us? What response shall we make in rising to the occasion? These questions throw us into the work of spiritual development which is the work of becoming conscious, the work of seeing, hearing, understanding, the work of knowing what needs to be done and doing it, the work of discovering who we are through the process of living our lives.

In this work, we square ourselves up with they way things are and also are within and without. We recognize the incompatibilities, the incongruities, the contradictions and contraries, and come to terms with them. This is true and that is also true so what response shall we make to them? What is being asked of us by the moment as it unfolds? What shall we do? What is the occasion to which we must rise?

Oh wait, don’t tell me, it’s overwhelming, right? We don’t know where to begin, right? Easy. Begin with the Peace and Justice Network of the Triad. Or join the Sierra Club. When Alan Watts asked Joseph Campbell what form his yoga took, Campbell replied, “I underline passages.” Underlining passages can be your form of revolution if you underline revolutionary passages with a revolutionary spirit! If you are overwhelmed, put that on the table along with everything else and DECIDE WHAT RESPONSE YOU WILL MAKE! Distracting yourself with addictions and diversions is not acceptable!

Consciousness stirs to life with the experience of the not-right-ness of things. Once we recognize that things are not right somehow, we can never go back to sleep. From that point on, we take up the work to square ourselves with the way things are and put things right. And our only tool in that work is consciousness, awareness.

To be conscious is to see, hear, understand, know—exactly how things are within and without. We do not hide or look away. We see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel, taste what we taste, smell what we smell, sense what we sense, intuit what we intuit—we take in all that is to be taken in with every receptor we have and bear it all consciously, knowingly, in its entirety. We do not close ourselves off from or deny any aspect of our experience. This is the way things are. This is what is happening. This is what we wish were happening instead. And this is what needs to happen in response to all of these considerations.

Once we see, once we hear, once we understand, once we know, we do. Action flows naturally from knowing how things are and what needs to happen in response to how things are. Seeing is doing! Seeing and doing are being! We are as we do! Our doing, our action, shapes our being, forms who we are! We become who we are in the act of responding to what is happening in the moment of our living. Our living elicits our being, our becoming, who we are, who we are capable of being in response to what in happening in our lives. We are made, you might say, by the occasions to which we arise.

If we lived a life in which nothing happened, there would be not much to us, which is what was true of us as a species for thousands of years. There was not much to us because not much happened in our lives. Not much different anyway, not much that hadn’t always happened, that didn’t always happen. Who we are is a reflection of what is happening in our lives and how we respond to it. We are what we do, how we live. By changing the way we respond, we change who we are, we become who we are capable of being. We expand, deepen, enlarge ourselves by doing what needs to be done in response to what is happening in our lives. This is the work of consciousness, of being conscious, of seeing, hearing, understanding. This is our spiritual practice.

Our spiritual practice is revolution. Transforming ourselves and our situation in life by seeing what needs to be done and doing it. By rising to the occasion and showing ourselves who we are. There is much that is wrong with the way things are in the country and world. What are we are doing in response to it? Pick a place. Get to work. Do what needs to be done, as true revolutionaries.