The experience of life calls us forth—if we are open to the experience, if we experience the experi-ence, if we don’t close ourselves off from it, deny it, hide. How alive are we willing to be in the time left for living? How alive are we willing to be on terms not our own? Everything waits for our go-ahead, for our signal, for us to get on board and get with the program. The program requires us to engage the Mystery.
We have to engage the Mystery to find meaning, and we cannot live—that is, we cannot be truly alive—without meaning. Meaning is the difference between biological life, 98.6 and breathing, being up-right and intact and drinking a beer with all our vital signs in place, and being alive in the deepest, fullest, truest sense of the term. When we fall in love, for instance, our lives have meaning that they didn’t have before we fell in love. We have to fall in love with the Mystery. All of our falling in love is falling in love with the Mystery, we just think it’s the honey or the hunk that we are in love with. The honey or the hunk is what the Mystery uses to get our attention. But, we trump the Mystery and think it’s the honey or the hunk. We are the Mystery’s mystery. The Mystery is trying to wake us up, to speak to us. We have to work toward the Mystery as the Mystery works toward us. We meet in the heart of ourselves.
We work toward the Mystery, engage the Mystery, through metaphor, symbol, and image. It takes sitting with these things to see what they have to show us, to say to us. We live too fast to listen. Our lives are too noisy to see. There is no place, no time, to sit (or walk, or stand) with solitude and understand. So, we have to create a space. And listen, in order to hear. And look, in order to see. And follow our curiosity wherever it takes us.
We cannot wake up without a regular place for silence and solitude in our lives. We have to step back from the noise and speed with which life is lived and be present with the awareness that is always present with us, but lost amid the distractions and diversions of our lives. We have to be quiet and open in order to see, hear, and understand. Where do you wait for awareness to envelop you? How often do you go there? How long do you stay?
Another way to engage the Mystery is by bringing the immediacy of our present experience into the conversation. When we do that, we look into the mirror of ourselves. We cannot talk about the here-and-now without talking about our engagement with, our reaction to, the here-and-now. We cannot say anything about this moment that isn’t more about us than about the moment. When we talk about our-selves, we risk being seen. When we risk being seen, we risk seeing. It’s better to talk about the weather, or baseball, or those people over there.
We cannot collude with one another in the care and tending of denial. We have to be as awake as we can be in each moment, in every conversation. Our obligation is to see, and hear, and understand and to help each other see, hear, understand. That’s mostly what therapists do for us, and we can do as much for one another, simply by seeing, hearing, understanding each other. Those who see us (and hear us and understand us) see things in us, about us, that we don’t see ourselves. There is nothing like being seen and heard to enable, to force, us to see, hear.
So, if we hang with people who are as arrested in their development as we are in ours, and talk about other people, or the weather, or baseball, there is no movement, no stirring, no awakening. There is nothing like talking about other people to keep us from talking about ourselves and waking up. Unless we begin to talk about talking about other people. Unless we see that in talking about other people we are talking about ourselves—about the aspects of ourselves we cannot allow ourselves to see in ourselves, and so we see it, and talk about it, in those people over there. Once we begin to see, we see ourselves eve-rywhere. In seeing ourselves, we approach the Mystery.
In talking about anything, everything, we are talking about our reaction to that thing. We are talk-ing about ourselves. What does our reaction have to say about us? Our reaction to anything—to the weather, baseball, or those people over there? What’s the history of that reaction to that thing? Where does it come from? When did it begin? What was going on in our lives when that reaction was born? Why that reaction and not some other reaction instead? Everything is a mirror to those willing to see. We see ourselves everywhere we look. When we wake up, we wake up to our experience and our response to our experience, and the Mystery that is meeting us in our experience, calling us through our experience, to reconnect us with ourselves.
We are always hearing, “Don’t take it personally.” Wrong advice. Take it personally. That’s the ticket to waking up and being connected with the Mystery and with ourselves. Take it personally and in-quire about it, listen to it, receive the gift it is trying to give us. We cannot treat our experience imperson-ally. We have to make the impersonal personal in order for it to transport us into the unifying whole of existence. It is the Personal Psyche that connects us with the Collective Psyche. When we take something “personally,” that is the beginning. Great! Take everything “personally,” and ask of it the pertinent ques-tions: “What is your history?” “Where do you come from?” “What is your origin?” “Why here, now?” “What is your meaning for me, your gift to me?” “In what ways can you help me move beyond where I am?” “In what ways are you pointing out to me the places I am stuck?” “Where do we go from here?” “How can you help me find the way?” “What do you have to say to me? To show me?” “What am I not see-ing, refusing to see, by seeing only my hurt feelings, the insult, the betrayal, and not inquiring as to their origin?” When we wake up, we wake up in, and to, our experience and in, and to, our response to our ex-perience. We are as close to the experience of God, to experience of the Mystery, as we are to the experi-ence of our own life.
Things happen to us for better and for worse all our lives long. And we experience them and re-spond to them in ways that result in outcomes that are better or worse. We can make a bad thing better and a good thing worse, or a good thing better and a bad thing worse, by the way we react to it. And, if we don’t have the time, or take the time, to process—to become conscious of—the thing that happened and our response to it, we become stuck to it, unconsciously, forever. And, stuck to the thing, we become stuck in our lives, and function inadequately in the world.
Some things are so bad they take a lifetime to process, to become conscious of. We have to tell the story of the bad thing happening and our response to it again and again in order to hear it, finally, our-selves. Until we can see something, we can’t do anything about it.
People who flounder, who make one bad choice, one poor judgment, after another, who reel and crash about in their lives are stuck to something that happened, maybe to everything that has ever hap-pened, to them, and flail about trying to lose it, but only pick up more things in the process, and are, if they could be seen in their unconscious reality, a big wad of unprocessed experiences waddling through experience, getting larger with each step.
And, if we gather in small groups to tut-tut about the poor unconscious souls who stumble sleep-walking through their lives, we miss the mirror they are, and do not see ourselves in the life they live out before us. “We have met the other and he, or she, is us.” We all live under the spell cast by our previous experience and our response to it. We break the spell by waking up to it. And “(waking) up is so very hard to do.”
But, that is all there is to it. And, we begin the process by waking up to ourselves and how it is with us. We don’t get there, of course, by thinking, but by imagining—not directly, but indirectly—through the medium of images, metaphors and symbols. These are the things which awaken us to the depths, open our eyes to how things are, and also are, and transport us to the Mystery of Being. Things come to life for us as we sit with the image, the metaphor, the symbol and become aware of what is opening to us just on the other side. Through the image we catch a glimpse of truth. As we move toward truth, things change.
We live with so many images, metaphors, symbols—they flash at us from everywhere, but they are shallow, trite, and give us the impression of having seen it all before. We see them, but they don’t catch our eye, don’t move us. When was the last time we were moved by anything? Our role is to be moved, stirred. If we aren’t being moved, we are dead. We have to place ourselves in the position of being moved. If we won’t do that, whom are we kidding, talking about life?
Metaphors, symbols and images are everywhere. Anything, everything, serves to connect those with eyes that see to the divine, to the Mystery, to the Holy Wonder at the heart of LIFE. Eyes that see, you see, are the catch. Here’s the rule for developing eyes that see. Notice what moves you and follow it. No-tice what catches your eye and look closer. Seeing hinges on being curious about what catches our eye. Curiosity excites the imagination, deepens inquiry, expands awareness. That’s the way of life.
The dead are not curious about anything. That’s deader than dead. That’s being dead beyond the hope of resurrection, awakening, beyond the reach of life. That’s being Quite Dead. Once we are Quite Dead, it is all over for us, and we are just waiting for the undertaker to make it official, but the date on the death certificate will be off by scores of years.
The Quite Dead have closed themselves off from the Urge to Life. The Urge to Life has to be cham-pioned, sponsored, promoted, subsidized, patronized, nurtured, cultivated, encouraged, tended. This is stewardship at its best. We have to be good stewards of the Urge to Life that comes wrapped in little baby bodies at birth. Look, though, at what we do. By the time our children are five or six, or earlier, they have lost their voice, their curiosity, and are living as extensions of the culture, well on their way to being Quite Dead.
The life that the culture is calling us to live is different from the life the Mystery is calling us to live. Whose idea of life will we serve? Whose side are we on? That’s the question that hangs in the air, waiting to be answered. Everything waits for our go-ahead, for our signal, for us to get on board and get with the program.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
01/25/09, There is nothing in it for us. I knew you weren't going to like that.
I’m not here to tell you how to get what you want from God while you are alive, and how to get to heaven when you die. This is not the church of your experience. I like to make that clear up front, so if you stumbled in here hoping for the formula for pleasing God and being rewarded for your effort, you can leave in time to get to one of the places where that hope might be realized. We have a different agenda here. Here, we are about waking up and doing what is ours to do whether we want to or not, whether it pays off handsomely or not, every day for the rest of our lives.
How’s that for drudgery and boredom? Where can you beat that for complete absence of curb ap-peal? There better be some fine selling point here, or this will be the last time I’m likely to see any of you. Why would any of us sign up for this kind of undertaking unless there is something really good in it for us? Here’s the bad news. There is nothing in it for us beyond living the life that is our life to life.
Everything but this comes with a selling point, with what’s in it for us, with what we are going to get out of it. Heaven, you know. Fame, fortune and glory. Not this. All we get out of living the life we are called to live is living the life we are called to live. Why would we do it? Only one reason. We know that’s where the life is to be found. How do we know that? By having looked everywhere else for it.
We have to be at the end of our rope. We have to have tried the lights and action of Gay Paree, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. We have to know the emptiness of all that purports to be life, before we have what it takes to sign on for life with what is life. If you aren’t here because you know you have to be here, I’m not going to have anything to say to you to keep you here. But, if you are looking for life and are willing to do what it takes to be alive, because you know that’s the experience that life is all about, I hope I have something to say that you can hear.
It starts with this. Here is the formula for being increasingly awake, aware, and alive: Curiosity, Clarity, Courage, Commitment. We have to be curious about life, clear about how things are and what needs to be done about it—about what is important. We have to have the courage to act upon what we know. And we have commit ourselves to action, to doing what needs to be done. That’s it. The action will produce a shift in how things are, and we will have to repeat the process, ad infinitum, until we die, and maybe beyond. That’s the plan for the rest of your life.
The kink in the process is our propensity for denial. James Hollis says the primary form of pathology is denial. Everything that is wrong about the world, and life, and our lives is grounded in, and flows from, denial. From pretending that things are not what they are. From pretending that we are not pretending. From fooling ourselves. From shooting ourselves in the foot. From telling ourselves what we want to hear.
There is a second reason for slipping over into denial, for telling ourselves we don’t really need to live the life we are called to live. The first reason, as above, is that it isn’t attractive. The distractions and diversions of Gay Paree, etc., are more delightful. So we run through the gamut of the world’s fine attractions and find them to be as empty as they are. The second reason for not living the life that is ours to live is that it’s nothing short of terrifying to do so. Fear keeps us out of that ring. We long for the safety and stability of the comfortable and familiar. We long for mother’s reassuring presence.
Who wouldn’t? The Mother protects all the children, and whether our real, actual, mothers did a good job at that is not the question. We all yearn to be protected, to be taken care of, throughout our lives. And growing up is the hardest thing to do. Spiritual formation and development are just terms for the maturation of the soul, spirit, self. The spiritual journey, task, path, quest is to grow up and be who we are, to live the life we are called to live. But, we are stuck between what we do want (desire) and what we don’t want (fear). And, the question is, do we have what it takes to boldly do what must be done—again and again for the rest of our lives?
We are as miserable as we are because we will not square up with how it is with us, and let it be, because it is. We will not see, and hear, and understand. We will not be clear about how things are and what needs to be done about it. The old prophet was not the first, or the last, to observe our propensity to say, “Do not tell us what is right! Speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about (the way things are and what needs to be done about it)!” (cf. Isaiah 30:9-11).
Squaring up to our lives, to what our lives have been and what they are and what they might be—to where we have been and what has happened and what we have done and what has been done to us—and saying something on the order of, “Okay, now what?” and looking for the next step, the next best step, and taking it, is my idea of what the idea is, of what we are here to do, of what I’m here to help you with (you have to admit that was quite a sentence). We are here to wake up, to discover and take up the business of living the life we are called to live.
Waking up is not an intellectual, rational, process. We do not wake up by listening to a lecture, reading a book, having it explained to us, and placing our feet in the black footprints all the way to enlightenment. No one can tell us how to find our life and live it. That is our work all the way. That is the Grail search—for the life that is ours to live—and the trail of the White Rabbit. The nature of this work is imaginative, intuitive, to the core.
The path to our heart winds through our imagination. “Path” and “heart” are figments of our imagination. Our imagination carries us to where we need to be. This is why our spiritual practice has to be supplemented with a creative practice. Sitting, or walking, for instance, can create an openness to experience, but then, we have to have something to stir the imagination so that we might experience our experience in a different way than we normally do. It is not enough to be quiet and receptive. We have to learn to see with the eye of imagination in order to apprehend what we cannot begin to comprehend.
While no one can wake us up, we need assistance with waking up, paying attention, seeing, hearing, understanding, coming to terms with how things are and knowing what the next step is. We cannot do this alone. We cannot wake ourselves up. And, we cannot do it in the next five minutes, or at a time and place that is convenient for us. It takes discipline and dedication to the task, a spiritual and a creative practice, and a community of the right kind of people to have a chance.
Given that, the process is simple: Wake up. Pay attention. See. Hear. Understand. Then, take the next step, and repeat from the beginning. That’s the formula for the rest of your life. Wake up! See what is important! Do what needs to be done! Offer what you have to give! This is not hard. What’s hard is com-ing to terms with the fact that this is not how we want things to be, it is not how we wish things were, it is not what we have in mind.
We cannot be made to grow up before our time, but we can postpone growing up indefinitely. We can delay growing up in the service of the next great promise of deliverance, or in submission to the next great fear of the unknown, the uncertain. In order to be alive, to take up the life that we are called to live, we have to stare down the beast (of fear) and the apparition (of delight), and boldly go where few have ventured.
Living the life we are called to live is no romp through spring meadows to “fame, fortune and glory,” and the life of our dreams. What we get is what we get. The way things are is the way things are. After the work is done, and the next step is taken, and the effort is made, and the dust settles, what we have is what we have. And, the next step is waiting to be taken. But, we are not stepping toward the realization of our dreams for ourselves and having it all line up the way it is supposed to be. We are living the life we are called to live, and the boon from that life does not accrue to our account. The boon is for the whole. The good of a person’s life is measured by the good that person’s life brings to life in other lives, in the degree to which the world is a better place because of the life she, he, lived. But she, he, may have precious little to show for the effort she, he, made. And, we think, “It isn’t supposed to be this way!”
There is no “spozed to,” no “supposed to be.” No static Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, with no problems of any kind, ever. That’s the happy fantasy of the infantile ego eager to trade life for being mothered and call that Really Living. Being alive asks more of us.
Being alive brings with it the realization that there is no steady-state. We cannot arrange to have things as we want them to be, as we wish they were, and if we could, we would change our minds and want things to be some other way instead. There is no strategy for having it made, for living happily ever after. So, we do what we can imagine doing with what we have to work with and let that be that. It’s already changing, and before long, we’ll have to live with that. So, we are always adapting, adjusting, accepting. The work does not stop: Curiosity, Clarity, Courage, Commitment to action. World without end. Amen.
How’s that for drudgery and boredom? Where can you beat that for complete absence of curb ap-peal? There better be some fine selling point here, or this will be the last time I’m likely to see any of you. Why would any of us sign up for this kind of undertaking unless there is something really good in it for us? Here’s the bad news. There is nothing in it for us beyond living the life that is our life to life.
Everything but this comes with a selling point, with what’s in it for us, with what we are going to get out of it. Heaven, you know. Fame, fortune and glory. Not this. All we get out of living the life we are called to live is living the life we are called to live. Why would we do it? Only one reason. We know that’s where the life is to be found. How do we know that? By having looked everywhere else for it.
We have to be at the end of our rope. We have to have tried the lights and action of Gay Paree, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. We have to know the emptiness of all that purports to be life, before we have what it takes to sign on for life with what is life. If you aren’t here because you know you have to be here, I’m not going to have anything to say to you to keep you here. But, if you are looking for life and are willing to do what it takes to be alive, because you know that’s the experience that life is all about, I hope I have something to say that you can hear.
It starts with this. Here is the formula for being increasingly awake, aware, and alive: Curiosity, Clarity, Courage, Commitment. We have to be curious about life, clear about how things are and what needs to be done about it—about what is important. We have to have the courage to act upon what we know. And we have commit ourselves to action, to doing what needs to be done. That’s it. The action will produce a shift in how things are, and we will have to repeat the process, ad infinitum, until we die, and maybe beyond. That’s the plan for the rest of your life.
The kink in the process is our propensity for denial. James Hollis says the primary form of pathology is denial. Everything that is wrong about the world, and life, and our lives is grounded in, and flows from, denial. From pretending that things are not what they are. From pretending that we are not pretending. From fooling ourselves. From shooting ourselves in the foot. From telling ourselves what we want to hear.
There is a second reason for slipping over into denial, for telling ourselves we don’t really need to live the life we are called to live. The first reason, as above, is that it isn’t attractive. The distractions and diversions of Gay Paree, etc., are more delightful. So we run through the gamut of the world’s fine attractions and find them to be as empty as they are. The second reason for not living the life that is ours to live is that it’s nothing short of terrifying to do so. Fear keeps us out of that ring. We long for the safety and stability of the comfortable and familiar. We long for mother’s reassuring presence.
Who wouldn’t? The Mother protects all the children, and whether our real, actual, mothers did a good job at that is not the question. We all yearn to be protected, to be taken care of, throughout our lives. And growing up is the hardest thing to do. Spiritual formation and development are just terms for the maturation of the soul, spirit, self. The spiritual journey, task, path, quest is to grow up and be who we are, to live the life we are called to live. But, we are stuck between what we do want (desire) and what we don’t want (fear). And, the question is, do we have what it takes to boldly do what must be done—again and again for the rest of our lives?
We are as miserable as we are because we will not square up with how it is with us, and let it be, because it is. We will not see, and hear, and understand. We will not be clear about how things are and what needs to be done about it. The old prophet was not the first, or the last, to observe our propensity to say, “Do not tell us what is right! Speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about (the way things are and what needs to be done about it)!” (cf. Isaiah 30:9-11).
Squaring up to our lives, to what our lives have been and what they are and what they might be—to where we have been and what has happened and what we have done and what has been done to us—and saying something on the order of, “Okay, now what?” and looking for the next step, the next best step, and taking it, is my idea of what the idea is, of what we are here to do, of what I’m here to help you with (you have to admit that was quite a sentence). We are here to wake up, to discover and take up the business of living the life we are called to live.
Waking up is not an intellectual, rational, process. We do not wake up by listening to a lecture, reading a book, having it explained to us, and placing our feet in the black footprints all the way to enlightenment. No one can tell us how to find our life and live it. That is our work all the way. That is the Grail search—for the life that is ours to live—and the trail of the White Rabbit. The nature of this work is imaginative, intuitive, to the core.
The path to our heart winds through our imagination. “Path” and “heart” are figments of our imagination. Our imagination carries us to where we need to be. This is why our spiritual practice has to be supplemented with a creative practice. Sitting, or walking, for instance, can create an openness to experience, but then, we have to have something to stir the imagination so that we might experience our experience in a different way than we normally do. It is not enough to be quiet and receptive. We have to learn to see with the eye of imagination in order to apprehend what we cannot begin to comprehend.
While no one can wake us up, we need assistance with waking up, paying attention, seeing, hearing, understanding, coming to terms with how things are and knowing what the next step is. We cannot do this alone. We cannot wake ourselves up. And, we cannot do it in the next five minutes, or at a time and place that is convenient for us. It takes discipline and dedication to the task, a spiritual and a creative practice, and a community of the right kind of people to have a chance.
Given that, the process is simple: Wake up. Pay attention. See. Hear. Understand. Then, take the next step, and repeat from the beginning. That’s the formula for the rest of your life. Wake up! See what is important! Do what needs to be done! Offer what you have to give! This is not hard. What’s hard is com-ing to terms with the fact that this is not how we want things to be, it is not how we wish things were, it is not what we have in mind.
We cannot be made to grow up before our time, but we can postpone growing up indefinitely. We can delay growing up in the service of the next great promise of deliverance, or in submission to the next great fear of the unknown, the uncertain. In order to be alive, to take up the life that we are called to live, we have to stare down the beast (of fear) and the apparition (of delight), and boldly go where few have ventured.
Living the life we are called to live is no romp through spring meadows to “fame, fortune and glory,” and the life of our dreams. What we get is what we get. The way things are is the way things are. After the work is done, and the next step is taken, and the effort is made, and the dust settles, what we have is what we have. And, the next step is waiting to be taken. But, we are not stepping toward the realization of our dreams for ourselves and having it all line up the way it is supposed to be. We are living the life we are called to live, and the boon from that life does not accrue to our account. The boon is for the whole. The good of a person’s life is measured by the good that person’s life brings to life in other lives, in the degree to which the world is a better place because of the life she, he, lived. But she, he, may have precious little to show for the effort she, he, made. And, we think, “It isn’t supposed to be this way!”
There is no “spozed to,” no “supposed to be.” No static Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, with no problems of any kind, ever. That’s the happy fantasy of the infantile ego eager to trade life for being mothered and call that Really Living. Being alive asks more of us.
Being alive brings with it the realization that there is no steady-state. We cannot arrange to have things as we want them to be, as we wish they were, and if we could, we would change our minds and want things to be some other way instead. There is no strategy for having it made, for living happily ever after. So, we do what we can imagine doing with what we have to work with and let that be that. It’s already changing, and before long, we’ll have to live with that. So, we are always adapting, adjusting, accepting. The work does not stop: Curiosity, Clarity, Courage, Commitment to action. World without end. Amen.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
01/18/09--The Failure of God.
The God problem can be thought of as the-way-to-think-about-God-problem. The problem is that we know what we are supposed to think about God, but we cannot think about God the way God has always been thought of, yet, we don’t know how else to think about God. It seems to us that our only recourse is to ditch the whole idea of God and make our way alone.
We certainly cannot think about God the way orthodox Christianity has always thought about God: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, In light inaccessible hid from our eyes, Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, Almighty, victorious, thy Great Name we praise!” The God we have been told is God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni-present, Omni-everything, Almighty, All Powerful, All-everything, ruling over nature and history, setting the stars in the heavens and the planets on their course, causing nations to rise and fall, arranging and ordering the events of our lives over the generations and throughout the ages, down to the touchdowns we score and the parking spaces we find. Praise God! Amen!
This view of God comes to the forefront in the miracle stories in the Bible. The stories of Jesus calming storms, exorcising demons, curing the blind, the sick, the deaf and the lame, feeding the five thousand and raising the dead all stand as proof that his authority comes directly from God. God has placed the divine seal of approval on Jesus, and everyone should therefore, listen to him. However, these signs of the power of God working through Jesus actually point to the Achilles’ heel of God.
All of the reports of God’s almighty power expose the truth of God’s weakness, fragility, impotence and vulnerability. In spite of the mighty displays of signs and wonders, nothing changes. For all of the stories of the absolute control of the Absolute through the scope of the Bible, there are other stories there of God’s failure and abject inability to have things go God’s way. The power of God is trumped, again and again, by the greater power of the people’s disbelief and lack of faith and refusal to cooperate with God—to the everlasting chagrin of God.
It is an easy thing to recount the places in the Bible where the power and authority of God are negated by the power of the people to not see, not hear, not understand, and not care about God. Adam and Eve are sent out of Eden because God cannot secure their faithful alignment with the design of creation. The world is destroyed with a flood because God cannot win the hearts of the people. Israel is abandoned to Babylon for the same reason. It appears that God can only threaten people with death and destruction if they do not “turn and obey,” or promise them rewards and pleasures if they do.
Jesus can raise the biologically dead, but cannot raise the spiritually dead. He can restore sight to the physically blind, hearing to the physically deaf, but he cannot do anything with those who are spiritually blind and deaf. Jesus can exorcise evil spirits and demons, but he cannot exorcise the spirit of disbelief, the demon of faithless living. Examples abound: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…” “A prophet is without honor in his own country.” The story of the rich young man.
“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” “Where is your faith?” Jesus stands at the door and knocks. The coup de grace comes with the realization that if God cannot forgive our refusal, our failure, to believe in Jesus and sends us to hell in punishment for our sin, then the power of sin is greater than the power of God. Hell represents the complete failure of God. And we cannot avoid the conclusion that, for all the pomp and show and beating of the drums, God is powerless, helpless, fragile, vulnerable, and dependent upon the protection, cooperation and compassion of human intermediaries—like a baby in a manger, a man on a cross.
The idea that we are in this together with God—the idea that God is in this together with us—in an interdependent, mutually beneficial relationship, for better or worse, from this time forth and forevermore, to death and beyond, is much more in-keeping with our best guess about the structure of the inner world than the idea of God as a spiritual being apart—The “Wholly Other”—who tries to get us to be as God wants us to be or else, as Revelation and other portions of the Bible depict spiritual reality. God as the “still, small voice,” as the “impulse to good,” as the creative muse, as the ever-present possibility of grace that must be birthed, and nurtured, and brought forth into being through our way with ourselves, each other, and the world is much more akin to our experience of God than God as the master and commander of the universe, the wheeler and dealer of all that is, the Lord of nature and history and the ruler of nations and individual lives.
Thinking of God as an idea, an urge, an impulse that can be nipped in the bud—as an endless supply of direction, and comfort, and encouragement that can be disrupted and lost in our anxiety and fear of the unknown—as a constant presence calling forth the best we have to offer—as the silent source of all those wonderful old values that have always served as the heart of all that is human—suggests that God is the weakest force in the universe. And, the most persistent.
We keep putting God aside looking for God. Ignoring God, waiting on God. Dismissing God because God is not the God we have in mind. And God will not go away. God keeps cycling back around, saying, “Can you hear me now?” God’s dwelling place is with the people. Not because the lichens wouldn’t be better company, but because the people have the capacity to know God, to love God, to be at-one with God. The people and God are one, or will be once the people let their ideas of God go, and allow themselves to be shocked and amazed, disappointed, astonished, confounded, and change their thinking about God.
In embracing God’s helplessness and vulnerability and becoming God’s protectors, God’s equals, God’s friends, and allowing God to be Wholly Other than we want God to be, we make an astounding discovery. The inner world is more than a match for the outer world. In casting our lot with the ineffable, the numinous, the voice, the urge, which, like Yossarian’s friend Orr, keeps coming back, and keeps whispering, keeps enticing us to leave behind the familiar routines and the comfortable surroundings of home, of our neighborhood, of how we have always done things, and thought about things, and believed things to be, and step without a map into the unknown wilderness, trusting that we will find a way, following a white rabbit, of all things, looking for the Holy Grail, when, Boom! as John Madden would say, we find that we have all that we need to deal with whatever comes our way.
Joseph Campbell would say, “It took the Cyclops to bring out the hero in Ulysses.” But, the hero was there all along, hoping to meet a Cyclops. Hoping Ulysses would be heroic before he needed to be a hero, and leave home, and trust himself, and more than himself, in the service of something he couldn’t begin to name. Here is the wonder, the miracle, the magic! In allowing God to be just as weak and impotent as God is—in allowing God to be nothing more than a white rabbit or a quiet whisper in the night—in trusting ourselves for no reason to the wisdom of the inner world, we find ourselves on an adventure that no one could imagine or believe. And, discover the invincibility and unassailability and Omnipotence of God, and meet God as the “ever-present help in time of trouble,” and become those who can “do all things through (the one) who strengthens us.” It’s all quite ironic, paradoxical, and contradictory, but true to the resilient nature of the Psyche.
Once we embrace God in God’s helplessness and take on the task of being God’s nurturers, on being the Mother of God, the mid-wives, the deliverer’s of God, so to speak, the door is open to making connection with images of the Psyche suggested by depth psychology. And, our work becomes that of integrating, aligning, the inner world with the outer world. This is the spiritual task, journey, path, quest: to bring forth what is within and express it in appropriate ways within the context and circumstances of our lives—to live increasingly in one world, not two—to bring the two worlds together, and live with integrity and authenticity as we express the truth of the inner world within the context and circumstances of life in the outer world.
This is not just idealistic, new age touchy feely sweetness and light fluff. This is Barack Obama taking the oath of office on Tuesday because for centuries there has been an intolerable disconnect between the inner world’s demand for harmony, and truth, and right living and peace and the outer world’s worship of the status quo and its disinclination to change the power structure or make uncomfortable those whose comfort restricted the lives of the masses. Truth will stand up. The inner world will not be denied. It will be exhibited in all levels of historical time. This is the essence of the Promised Land—inner becoming outer! And, we are its agency. We are truth’s envoys. We are the servants of the inner world’s urge toward integrity and authenticity. We are mid-wives birthing the truth of God into the world.
The Ancient Ones didn’t see God any clearer than the rest of us. They weren’t closer to God just because they lived a long time ago. God did not do things differently in those days. They could only see of God what their view of the world allowed them to see of God. We all fit God into our structure of reality, into how we understand things to be. We don’t get the benefit of knowing God as God is, but understand God as we are able.
The Ancient Ones could not see God through the lens of depth psychology. They could only see God through the lens of nature and history, and ascribed to God the qualities of power and control they imagined God to have. Our view of history suggests neither power nor control. We understand the forces of nature to follow their own “laws,” with no overseer to intervene or rearrange. And we know there is no rescue coming in the nick of time, and that we have to pay careful attention to all aspects of every situation, and bring the best we have to bear upon every moment, because we are God’s deliverers and what we do or fail to do impacts life for generations to come.
We certainly cannot think about God the way orthodox Christianity has always thought about God: “Immortal, invisible, God only wise, In light inaccessible hid from our eyes, Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, Almighty, victorious, thy Great Name we praise!” The God we have been told is God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni-present, Omni-everything, Almighty, All Powerful, All-everything, ruling over nature and history, setting the stars in the heavens and the planets on their course, causing nations to rise and fall, arranging and ordering the events of our lives over the generations and throughout the ages, down to the touchdowns we score and the parking spaces we find. Praise God! Amen!
This view of God comes to the forefront in the miracle stories in the Bible. The stories of Jesus calming storms, exorcising demons, curing the blind, the sick, the deaf and the lame, feeding the five thousand and raising the dead all stand as proof that his authority comes directly from God. God has placed the divine seal of approval on Jesus, and everyone should therefore, listen to him. However, these signs of the power of God working through Jesus actually point to the Achilles’ heel of God.
All of the reports of God’s almighty power expose the truth of God’s weakness, fragility, impotence and vulnerability. In spite of the mighty displays of signs and wonders, nothing changes. For all of the stories of the absolute control of the Absolute through the scope of the Bible, there are other stories there of God’s failure and abject inability to have things go God’s way. The power of God is trumped, again and again, by the greater power of the people’s disbelief and lack of faith and refusal to cooperate with God—to the everlasting chagrin of God.
It is an easy thing to recount the places in the Bible where the power and authority of God are negated by the power of the people to not see, not hear, not understand, and not care about God. Adam and Eve are sent out of Eden because God cannot secure their faithful alignment with the design of creation. The world is destroyed with a flood because God cannot win the hearts of the people. Israel is abandoned to Babylon for the same reason. It appears that God can only threaten people with death and destruction if they do not “turn and obey,” or promise them rewards and pleasures if they do.
Jesus can raise the biologically dead, but cannot raise the spiritually dead. He can restore sight to the physically blind, hearing to the physically deaf, but he cannot do anything with those who are spiritually blind and deaf. Jesus can exorcise evil spirits and demons, but he cannot exorcise the spirit of disbelief, the demon of faithless living. Examples abound: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…” “A prophet is without honor in his own country.” The story of the rich young man.
“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” “Where is your faith?” Jesus stands at the door and knocks. The coup de grace comes with the realization that if God cannot forgive our refusal, our failure, to believe in Jesus and sends us to hell in punishment for our sin, then the power of sin is greater than the power of God. Hell represents the complete failure of God. And we cannot avoid the conclusion that, for all the pomp and show and beating of the drums, God is powerless, helpless, fragile, vulnerable, and dependent upon the protection, cooperation and compassion of human intermediaries—like a baby in a manger, a man on a cross.
The idea that we are in this together with God—the idea that God is in this together with us—in an interdependent, mutually beneficial relationship, for better or worse, from this time forth and forevermore, to death and beyond, is much more in-keeping with our best guess about the structure of the inner world than the idea of God as a spiritual being apart—The “Wholly Other”—who tries to get us to be as God wants us to be or else, as Revelation and other portions of the Bible depict spiritual reality. God as the “still, small voice,” as the “impulse to good,” as the creative muse, as the ever-present possibility of grace that must be birthed, and nurtured, and brought forth into being through our way with ourselves, each other, and the world is much more akin to our experience of God than God as the master and commander of the universe, the wheeler and dealer of all that is, the Lord of nature and history and the ruler of nations and individual lives.
Thinking of God as an idea, an urge, an impulse that can be nipped in the bud—as an endless supply of direction, and comfort, and encouragement that can be disrupted and lost in our anxiety and fear of the unknown—as a constant presence calling forth the best we have to offer—as the silent source of all those wonderful old values that have always served as the heart of all that is human—suggests that God is the weakest force in the universe. And, the most persistent.
We keep putting God aside looking for God. Ignoring God, waiting on God. Dismissing God because God is not the God we have in mind. And God will not go away. God keeps cycling back around, saying, “Can you hear me now?” God’s dwelling place is with the people. Not because the lichens wouldn’t be better company, but because the people have the capacity to know God, to love God, to be at-one with God. The people and God are one, or will be once the people let their ideas of God go, and allow themselves to be shocked and amazed, disappointed, astonished, confounded, and change their thinking about God.
In embracing God’s helplessness and vulnerability and becoming God’s protectors, God’s equals, God’s friends, and allowing God to be Wholly Other than we want God to be, we make an astounding discovery. The inner world is more than a match for the outer world. In casting our lot with the ineffable, the numinous, the voice, the urge, which, like Yossarian’s friend Orr, keeps coming back, and keeps whispering, keeps enticing us to leave behind the familiar routines and the comfortable surroundings of home, of our neighborhood, of how we have always done things, and thought about things, and believed things to be, and step without a map into the unknown wilderness, trusting that we will find a way, following a white rabbit, of all things, looking for the Holy Grail, when, Boom! as John Madden would say, we find that we have all that we need to deal with whatever comes our way.
Joseph Campbell would say, “It took the Cyclops to bring out the hero in Ulysses.” But, the hero was there all along, hoping to meet a Cyclops. Hoping Ulysses would be heroic before he needed to be a hero, and leave home, and trust himself, and more than himself, in the service of something he couldn’t begin to name. Here is the wonder, the miracle, the magic! In allowing God to be just as weak and impotent as God is—in allowing God to be nothing more than a white rabbit or a quiet whisper in the night—in trusting ourselves for no reason to the wisdom of the inner world, we find ourselves on an adventure that no one could imagine or believe. And, discover the invincibility and unassailability and Omnipotence of God, and meet God as the “ever-present help in time of trouble,” and become those who can “do all things through (the one) who strengthens us.” It’s all quite ironic, paradoxical, and contradictory, but true to the resilient nature of the Psyche.
Once we embrace God in God’s helplessness and take on the task of being God’s nurturers, on being the Mother of God, the mid-wives, the deliverer’s of God, so to speak, the door is open to making connection with images of the Psyche suggested by depth psychology. And, our work becomes that of integrating, aligning, the inner world with the outer world. This is the spiritual task, journey, path, quest: to bring forth what is within and express it in appropriate ways within the context and circumstances of our lives—to live increasingly in one world, not two—to bring the two worlds together, and live with integrity and authenticity as we express the truth of the inner world within the context and circumstances of life in the outer world.
This is not just idealistic, new age touchy feely sweetness and light fluff. This is Barack Obama taking the oath of office on Tuesday because for centuries there has been an intolerable disconnect between the inner world’s demand for harmony, and truth, and right living and peace and the outer world’s worship of the status quo and its disinclination to change the power structure or make uncomfortable those whose comfort restricted the lives of the masses. Truth will stand up. The inner world will not be denied. It will be exhibited in all levels of historical time. This is the essence of the Promised Land—inner becoming outer! And, we are its agency. We are truth’s envoys. We are the servants of the inner world’s urge toward integrity and authenticity. We are mid-wives birthing the truth of God into the world.
The Ancient Ones didn’t see God any clearer than the rest of us. They weren’t closer to God just because they lived a long time ago. God did not do things differently in those days. They could only see of God what their view of the world allowed them to see of God. We all fit God into our structure of reality, into how we understand things to be. We don’t get the benefit of knowing God as God is, but understand God as we are able.
The Ancient Ones could not see God through the lens of depth psychology. They could only see God through the lens of nature and history, and ascribed to God the qualities of power and control they imagined God to have. Our view of history suggests neither power nor control. We understand the forces of nature to follow their own “laws,” with no overseer to intervene or rearrange. And we know there is no rescue coming in the nick of time, and that we have to pay careful attention to all aspects of every situation, and bring the best we have to bear upon every moment, because we are God’s deliverers and what we do or fail to do impacts life for generations to come.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
01/11/09--If we want to wake up, we only have to look in the mirror!
Why do we think there is more to it than seeing, hearing, understanding and re-sponding as needed to “the situation as it arises”? Why do we think there is more to it than offering behavior appropriate to the occasion?
In the church of our experience, people carefully toed the line, every line, all lines, because they were told that if someone saw them stepping over a line, by drinking alcohol, say, he or she might get the wrong idea and be led astray and not know that they were only drinking a little alcohol very infrequently, and take it as proof that it is okay for him, or her, to drink a lot of alcohol all of the time and be lost for all eternity, which would not bode well for us, the source of his, or her, temptation and fall. What the church of our ex-perience didn’t tell us is that wrong ideas might appear anywhere, at any time, and there is no way we can live such a narrowly defined and tightly structured life—that we can live so by the book—that no one will never get the wrong idea about us.
Wrong ideas are the easiest things to have and the hardest things to keep from hav-ing, certainly the hardest things to keep others from having about us. We have to trust all of us, ourselves, one another, and every other person on the planet, to wake up even though we are covered over by, and immersed in, our wrong ideas, with them dangling from our clothing and swinging from our appendages and birthing their children in our pockets and in their nests fashioned in our hair. We have to wake up in the midst of our wrong ideas.
We have to be able to wake up anywhere, even in the grip of wrong ideas. We do that by thinking about our thinking. “What are we thinking?” We have to ask ourselves that about everything we think. “What makes us think that?” “Why do we think what we think and not something else instead?” And, when we come upon someone who thinks dif-ferently than we do we have to examine what makes it easy for them to think the way they think and what makes it easy for us to think the way we think. And, we have to see every experience as an opportunity, an invitation, really, to think about our thinking and wonder about our ideas—to develop eyes that see, ears that hear, hearts that understand.
We have to see our experience as saying more about us than about the world of our experience. The world is a mirror reflecting our ideas and values and perceptions and per-spective back to us. The rule is simple: Look in the mirror! What mirror? All the mirrors! Every single thing that happens and our response to it. Everything is a mirror, reflecting us back to ourselves. We wake up by seeing ourselves everywhere we look, in everything we see.
It is as though we are living the dream, and have to interpret the dream in the act of dreaming it, in the moment of living it. Messages from the dream world are difficult to de-cipher and more difficult to remember. We have to be particularly attuned to the experi-ence of the dream to have a chance. The same thing goes for our lived experience. We really have to be particularly attuned to every experience. Our waking life is as alive and as likely to show us ourselves as our sleeping life, but we sleep through it, unseeing, un-knowing. So, we have to pay attention to everything to have a chance. What are our lives saying to us, about us? We can never take anything for granted, look past anything. The in-visible world is always breaking into, and through, the physical world to those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts that understand.
In order to catch the invisible world in the act of breaking into the physical world of normal, apparent reality, we have to be awake to the truth of our own experience, to what is happening, and how we are responding to what is happening, and what we wish were happening instead. We have to observe ourselves in the act of living our lives, just as we would observe ourselves in the act of being a part of a dream experience. What do we understand about ourselves when we see ourselves responding as we do to our lives as we do?
What is being asked of us? What is being offered to us? In order to respond freely to the circumstances of our lives in receiving what is being offered and in offering what we have to give, we have to live out of a quiet center. A quiet center is essential for seeing, hearing, understanding and responding to “the situation as it arises” with behavior that is appropriate to the occasion. Listening for what needs to be said, for what needs to be done, is different from thinking we know what needs to be said and done. The purpose of “peace and serenity” is to live well in—to deal well with—the press of life. How to quieten the center is the question. Spiritual practice is the answer. We have to have a practice that connects us with the center and distances “the world,” that separates us just enough from “the world” to provide perspective and “working room.”
A spiritual practice is something we do without trying. It can be anything we do without trying. Sitting works unless we are trying to sit. Quilting works unless we are try-ing to quilt. Walking works unless we are trying to walk. In my tennis days, hitting balls against a backboard was a spiritual practice because I wasn’t trying to effect a particular outcome. I could lose myself in the rhythm of hitting the ball, distance myself from the noise in my life, and simply be present in the moment without trying to wrestle the mo-ment into submission to my will for the moment. Carrying the quiet over into the rest of our lives, allowing the practice to insulate us from the noise of our lives, is one of the bene-fits of a practice engaged in over time. When life gets loud, we can mentally shift to the backboard and the tennis ball, provide ourselves with listening room, and respond to the moment out of our distance from the moment. We have to separate in order to be con-nected.
The work of spiritual development is the work of maturity and grace. It is the work of growing up, and that is the work of awareness, the work of knowing what’s what, and what’s being asked of us, and what is called for—what constitutes behavior appropriate to the occasion. It is the work of seeing, hearing and understanding, which includes thinking and acting and being. Right seeing, right hearing, right understanding, right doing, right being. And it all hinges on our creating a quiet center from which to perceive and be aware of our lives and what we think needs to happen.
Our hunches guide us, our guesses, our sense of what needs to be, our intuition, our instinct. It’s how we know a bad place is a bad place before we know why we think that, or a good place is a good place. Cognition is felt before it is conscious. We have to know what we know before we know how we know it, or what makes us feel what we feel.
The work is to be as awake as we can be to the present experience of our lives. To wake up, we have to be conscious of our experience, of what is happening and what needs to happen, and what we have to offer to “the situation as it arises. That’s it. Our life’s work is waking up. Nobody can do it for us, or tell us how to do it.
How it ought to be done, how to live, what to do when—we do not know these things by learning the rules, or laws, or formulas, or recipes, or strategies for having it made. No one can tell us these things. We cannot be taught how to live. We learn to live by living with our eyes open to the impact of our experience, and listening beyond words to what is striving to come into being through us in the world. We have to listen into our life experience, as we might listen into a dream experience, in order to see more than meets the eye, and hear what is being said to us by our reactions to our lives.
Life is not handed to us. We have to go in search of it, we have to open ourselves to it, we have to get out of its way and allow it to come forth in us, and through us into the world. We can have our ideas for life which have nothing to do with being alive in the way that only we can be alive. The question is, “Whose side are we on?” Are we “with us,” with our lives, with the life that is trying to come forth in us, in our life, or “against us”? How do we know? The quiet center, the spiritual practice, and awareness, awareness, awareness. When we are aware, what are we aware of? What we need to be aware of is the life that is calling us, the life that is waiting to be born in us—and what is keeping us from hearing and heeding that call.
How do we experience our experience? What do we extrapolate from it, extract, em-phasize, glean? From everything that happens to us, we choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore. We emphasize one thing at the expense of all the others. We choose what disturbs us. We choose what to say about what happens to us. What governs our choices? In the course of living our lives, we adopt a certain posture in relation to the things that happen to us, and in relation to the people we live with. Why that posture and not some other posture instead?
What are the things that are always happening to us? What are we always doing in response to the things that are always happening? What are we always talking ourselves out of, or into? What themes keep running through our lives? What keeps the perspective in place that keeps seeing the same things over and over, that keeps the themes in place, and ignores other, equally valid, possibilities?
We make of it what we will, but what positions us, what makes it easy for us, to make of it what we do? What stimulates our thinking, our living? We have to find what calls us beyond where we have been, away from where we are, and invites us to consider our lives from different points of view. We cannot live as they live in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and in the Vatican, and on Capital Hill—unconscious and unaware. What are the forces and the counter-forces at work in our responding to life as we do? Who can listen to us as we talk about these things? Where do we go to carry out the work of waking up, growing up? Why don’t we mold ourselves into the kind of place this can happen? Is there a better idea of what to do with the rest of our lives?
In the church of our experience, people carefully toed the line, every line, all lines, because they were told that if someone saw them stepping over a line, by drinking alcohol, say, he or she might get the wrong idea and be led astray and not know that they were only drinking a little alcohol very infrequently, and take it as proof that it is okay for him, or her, to drink a lot of alcohol all of the time and be lost for all eternity, which would not bode well for us, the source of his, or her, temptation and fall. What the church of our ex-perience didn’t tell us is that wrong ideas might appear anywhere, at any time, and there is no way we can live such a narrowly defined and tightly structured life—that we can live so by the book—that no one will never get the wrong idea about us.
Wrong ideas are the easiest things to have and the hardest things to keep from hav-ing, certainly the hardest things to keep others from having about us. We have to trust all of us, ourselves, one another, and every other person on the planet, to wake up even though we are covered over by, and immersed in, our wrong ideas, with them dangling from our clothing and swinging from our appendages and birthing their children in our pockets and in their nests fashioned in our hair. We have to wake up in the midst of our wrong ideas.
We have to be able to wake up anywhere, even in the grip of wrong ideas. We do that by thinking about our thinking. “What are we thinking?” We have to ask ourselves that about everything we think. “What makes us think that?” “Why do we think what we think and not something else instead?” And, when we come upon someone who thinks dif-ferently than we do we have to examine what makes it easy for them to think the way they think and what makes it easy for us to think the way we think. And, we have to see every experience as an opportunity, an invitation, really, to think about our thinking and wonder about our ideas—to develop eyes that see, ears that hear, hearts that understand.
We have to see our experience as saying more about us than about the world of our experience. The world is a mirror reflecting our ideas and values and perceptions and per-spective back to us. The rule is simple: Look in the mirror! What mirror? All the mirrors! Every single thing that happens and our response to it. Everything is a mirror, reflecting us back to ourselves. We wake up by seeing ourselves everywhere we look, in everything we see.
It is as though we are living the dream, and have to interpret the dream in the act of dreaming it, in the moment of living it. Messages from the dream world are difficult to de-cipher and more difficult to remember. We have to be particularly attuned to the experi-ence of the dream to have a chance. The same thing goes for our lived experience. We really have to be particularly attuned to every experience. Our waking life is as alive and as likely to show us ourselves as our sleeping life, but we sleep through it, unseeing, un-knowing. So, we have to pay attention to everything to have a chance. What are our lives saying to us, about us? We can never take anything for granted, look past anything. The in-visible world is always breaking into, and through, the physical world to those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts that understand.
In order to catch the invisible world in the act of breaking into the physical world of normal, apparent reality, we have to be awake to the truth of our own experience, to what is happening, and how we are responding to what is happening, and what we wish were happening instead. We have to observe ourselves in the act of living our lives, just as we would observe ourselves in the act of being a part of a dream experience. What do we understand about ourselves when we see ourselves responding as we do to our lives as we do?
What is being asked of us? What is being offered to us? In order to respond freely to the circumstances of our lives in receiving what is being offered and in offering what we have to give, we have to live out of a quiet center. A quiet center is essential for seeing, hearing, understanding and responding to “the situation as it arises” with behavior that is appropriate to the occasion. Listening for what needs to be said, for what needs to be done, is different from thinking we know what needs to be said and done. The purpose of “peace and serenity” is to live well in—to deal well with—the press of life. How to quieten the center is the question. Spiritual practice is the answer. We have to have a practice that connects us with the center and distances “the world,” that separates us just enough from “the world” to provide perspective and “working room.”
A spiritual practice is something we do without trying. It can be anything we do without trying. Sitting works unless we are trying to sit. Quilting works unless we are try-ing to quilt. Walking works unless we are trying to walk. In my tennis days, hitting balls against a backboard was a spiritual practice because I wasn’t trying to effect a particular outcome. I could lose myself in the rhythm of hitting the ball, distance myself from the noise in my life, and simply be present in the moment without trying to wrestle the mo-ment into submission to my will for the moment. Carrying the quiet over into the rest of our lives, allowing the practice to insulate us from the noise of our lives, is one of the bene-fits of a practice engaged in over time. When life gets loud, we can mentally shift to the backboard and the tennis ball, provide ourselves with listening room, and respond to the moment out of our distance from the moment. We have to separate in order to be con-nected.
The work of spiritual development is the work of maturity and grace. It is the work of growing up, and that is the work of awareness, the work of knowing what’s what, and what’s being asked of us, and what is called for—what constitutes behavior appropriate to the occasion. It is the work of seeing, hearing and understanding, which includes thinking and acting and being. Right seeing, right hearing, right understanding, right doing, right being. And it all hinges on our creating a quiet center from which to perceive and be aware of our lives and what we think needs to happen.
Our hunches guide us, our guesses, our sense of what needs to be, our intuition, our instinct. It’s how we know a bad place is a bad place before we know why we think that, or a good place is a good place. Cognition is felt before it is conscious. We have to know what we know before we know how we know it, or what makes us feel what we feel.
The work is to be as awake as we can be to the present experience of our lives. To wake up, we have to be conscious of our experience, of what is happening and what needs to happen, and what we have to offer to “the situation as it arises. That’s it. Our life’s work is waking up. Nobody can do it for us, or tell us how to do it.
How it ought to be done, how to live, what to do when—we do not know these things by learning the rules, or laws, or formulas, or recipes, or strategies for having it made. No one can tell us these things. We cannot be taught how to live. We learn to live by living with our eyes open to the impact of our experience, and listening beyond words to what is striving to come into being through us in the world. We have to listen into our life experience, as we might listen into a dream experience, in order to see more than meets the eye, and hear what is being said to us by our reactions to our lives.
Life is not handed to us. We have to go in search of it, we have to open ourselves to it, we have to get out of its way and allow it to come forth in us, and through us into the world. We can have our ideas for life which have nothing to do with being alive in the way that only we can be alive. The question is, “Whose side are we on?” Are we “with us,” with our lives, with the life that is trying to come forth in us, in our life, or “against us”? How do we know? The quiet center, the spiritual practice, and awareness, awareness, awareness. When we are aware, what are we aware of? What we need to be aware of is the life that is calling us, the life that is waiting to be born in us—and what is keeping us from hearing and heeding that call.
How do we experience our experience? What do we extrapolate from it, extract, em-phasize, glean? From everything that happens to us, we choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore. We emphasize one thing at the expense of all the others. We choose what disturbs us. We choose what to say about what happens to us. What governs our choices? In the course of living our lives, we adopt a certain posture in relation to the things that happen to us, and in relation to the people we live with. Why that posture and not some other posture instead?
What are the things that are always happening to us? What are we always doing in response to the things that are always happening? What are we always talking ourselves out of, or into? What themes keep running through our lives? What keeps the perspective in place that keeps seeing the same things over and over, that keeps the themes in place, and ignores other, equally valid, possibilities?
We make of it what we will, but what positions us, what makes it easy for us, to make of it what we do? What stimulates our thinking, our living? We have to find what calls us beyond where we have been, away from where we are, and invites us to consider our lives from different points of view. We cannot live as they live in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and in the Vatican, and on Capital Hill—unconscious and unaware. What are the forces and the counter-forces at work in our responding to life as we do? Who can listen to us as we talk about these things? Where do we go to carry out the work of waking up, growing up? Why don’t we mold ourselves into the kind of place this can happen? Is there a better idea of what to do with the rest of our lives?
Sunday, January 04, 2009
01/04/09--We find our way to what is important one bad guess at a time.
Think of God and God’s will as what is important. It is important to know and to do what is im-portant, ah, but, who is to say? How shall we decide? Is anything more controversial and hotly debated than what is important? People go to war and get divorces over what is important. Churches split. Chil-dren leave home. Friends quit speaking. If anything is true of human beings worldwide it is that we have the wrong ideas of what is important. But, whose idea of what is important shall we adopt instead?
We all think we know what is important, but who knows who knows? How do we know who is right? Shall we take a vote? Majority rule? Or, go with consensus, and allow the whiniest, most narrow-minded “No” block the way of the rest? Who determines what is important? Who gets to say whose idea of God is God and what God’s will is?
We each decide for ourselves. We say. We are the ones. How do we know? We don’t know. We guess our way along. And allow each outcome to become a corrective, a guide, for the next guess. So, that over time, with our eyes open, we know more about what is important than we knew at the start. But, we never know all there is to know, and we can be wrong at any point along the way.
Our lives are an amalgamation of choices and responses to choices. We live in light of something, we live toward something. We choose what is important and serve that with our lives. Over time, some things stand out as being more worthy of our allegiance, our loyalty, our lives, than other things. Time fashions values. Time shapes our estimation of worth. Time shows us what is important. We live toward what has proven to be worthy of us. We are participants in the evolution of the idea of what matters. That idea is refined through the experience of the species over time.
The Code of Hammurabi, the Sermon on the Mount, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, etc. could not have happened before their time. They are products of our evolving sense of what is good and true. The “Plan” that pulls us forward is our estimation of what has “worked,” and is “working,” to pro-duce that which we are proud of, which fills us, completes us, produces a resounding, “Yes!” within us. As we align ourselves with that, serve that, achieve that, we produce more of what has shown itself to be of value, and the world benefits in ways we perceive to be good, and the “Plan” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Which is to say that there is no Plan. It’s a mess out there. Anything can happen at any time. Noth-ing has to be what it is. And, yet, everything that happens produces in us a sense of “yes” or “no.” Every-thing that happens, and has happened, creates a “wealth of wisdom,” a pool, an ocean, really, of experi-ence, which shows some things to be better than others. Everything that happens shifts us toward certain thoughts, behaviors, outcomes, and values, and away from others. We “figure it out as we go,” and de-velop a sense of direction that is self-correcting and self-validating. We know, as Joseph Campbell says, “when we are on the beam, and when we are off of it.”
“It won’t work.” “This isn’t working.” That’s all we need to know. We find what works by know-ing what doesn’t work. We find the way by knowing what is not the way. If we don’t know whether some-thing will work, we only have to give it a spin, take it around the block a time or two. Everything becomes clear with time, even to those seeped in denial. It is only a matter of time. All it takes is time. Everyone wakes up in due time. If we all lived long enough, we all would be wise.
We learn from living—and the species learns from living over long stretches of time—what living is “all about.” We learn what works, and what does not work. We learn what is good, and what is bad. We learn how to behave. We learn what to value. Living leans us toward living in certain ways, and toward people who live in those ways. The “Plan” that is being worked out in our lives is toward the good of all things. We are learning to live toward the good. And, the “Plan” is simply the realization of what has proven to be important in the experience of the species over time.
Whose idea of God is God? What is God’s will? What is important? The more awake we are, the more we see eye-to-eye about the things that matter. The more we get it. The more we agree about what is to be gotten. There are many paths, but the journey is to the table at the center of the room. And, we get there by walking the path we deem to be important. Doing what we think is important with awareness is the only way to get to what is important. Knowing what is working and what isn’t working leads us to the center. If we want to find the path, we only have to be sensitive to the difference between what works and what doesn’t work.
Our task is to know what is important and to do it. That is the Great Work. Everything else will fall into place around it. Or, as Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all that you need will be yours as well” (or, words to that effect). We cannot live well with our mind on for-tune and glory.
Life is all we have to work with, our life, our lives. We are the matrix, the medium, the milieu of our own becoming. We bring ourselves forth as a blessing, not to ourselves, but to the world. As we strive to bless ourselves, we curse the world. The March 22, 2003 edition of “The Christian Century,” contained an interview with Bernard McGinn. In that interview he said, “Meister Eckhart and some other 13th-centuary mystics had the notion of living ‘without a why.’ ‘Living without a why’ means that you don’t ask, ‘What’s in it for me?’, or ‘Why am I doing this?’ You just do the good spontaneously, the way that God acts. God doesn’t act because of the why or for any interest of his (sic) own.”
Knowing what is important entails listening to all the voices claiming to know what is important and waiting for what is important to become manifest, made plain. We wait always for the white rabbit to appear. Nothing is more important than knowing what is important, and being right about it. What we think is important can get in the way of what’s important. Everything hinges on our being right when we make the call, but we don’t have to be right. Getting it wrong is a step on the way to getting it right. One thing leads to another. If we go with what we think is important, it will lead us to what is important. We can begin with anything because everything is equidistant from what is important, and everything will lead us there, if we let it, if we walk the path with our eyes open.
When we think we know what is important, we have to live in its service until it becomes apparent that we were wrong. We must not change direction too quickly or stay the course too long. “Pace and tim-ing, kid. Pace and timing.” So, we live toward what is important to us, and see where that takes us. If writ-ing is important, we write. If sailing is important, we sail. Whatever is important to us, we do that thing, those things. And, don’t worry about it. Particularly, don’t worry about anything coming of it. What comes of it will be a clearer idea of what is important, and we work it out over time.
Growing up means working it out. There is the I Want and the I Don’t Want, the I Should and the I shouldn’t, the I Must and the I Must Not, the I Can and the I Can’t, the I Have To and the I Don’t Have To, the I Will and the I Will Not, and we have to work it out. We have to take all the conflicts of interests into account and decide what will actually be done. This is the proper role of Ego in our lives. Ego is the I who listens, evaluates, considers, chooses, decides: “This is what we are going to do now.” Ego deter-mines what is important, and changes its mind with experience and time.
Growing up is about the maturation of the Ego, about the development of wisdom and understand-ing within the Ego. A fully matured Ego would be completely integrated with the Shadow, and would de-cide what to do now—what is important now—after taking everything about the Psyche and the circum-stances of its living into account. That is the spiritual task, journey, path, quest. It is not about abandon-ing, rejecting, jettisoning the Ego and submitting to someone else’s rule over us, doing what some guru tells us to do, obeying someone else’s idea of what is important, following the dictates of some other Ego. It is about growing up, working it out within ourselves, and doing what we would do within the context and circumstances and relationships of our lives, deciding for ourselves what is important and living to see if we are right.
It isn’t the Ego that is the source of our problems, but the infantile Ego, the Ego that hasn’t grown up and does not assume its proper role of arbitrator and negotiator, of seer, and hearer, and understander. The infantile Ego identifies itself with some aspect of the Psyche—the I Want (Freud’s ID, for example, or the I Must (Freud’s Super Ego)—and serves those interests at the expense of all other considerations. That’s a problem. The Ego’s task—the spiritual task—is to grow itself up, to wake itself up, to live the con-tradictions at play within the Psyche and within the circumstances of its, of our, life, to bear the pain and live within the tension of competing interests, to take it all into account and to decide what is important and what we are going to do here and now.
We can wake ourselves up or, if we live long enough, our life will do it for us. We can always opt for dying in denial. It’s certainly easier to be dead than alive. Waking up is waking up to the moment, to “the situation as it arises,” and what needs to be done there, what needs to happen there, what is impor-tant there, and what we have to offer to assist the doing, serve the happening. There is no great realization, no sudden understanding of esoteric secrets, no initiation into the wonders and glories of spiritual reality. There is just seeing what needs to be done and doing it. Just knowing what is important and living in light of it. Very boring. And absolutely essential to the work of being human—to the work of becoming true human beings.
We all think we know what is important, but who knows who knows? How do we know who is right? Shall we take a vote? Majority rule? Or, go with consensus, and allow the whiniest, most narrow-minded “No” block the way of the rest? Who determines what is important? Who gets to say whose idea of God is God and what God’s will is?
We each decide for ourselves. We say. We are the ones. How do we know? We don’t know. We guess our way along. And allow each outcome to become a corrective, a guide, for the next guess. So, that over time, with our eyes open, we know more about what is important than we knew at the start. But, we never know all there is to know, and we can be wrong at any point along the way.
Our lives are an amalgamation of choices and responses to choices. We live in light of something, we live toward something. We choose what is important and serve that with our lives. Over time, some things stand out as being more worthy of our allegiance, our loyalty, our lives, than other things. Time fashions values. Time shapes our estimation of worth. Time shows us what is important. We live toward what has proven to be worthy of us. We are participants in the evolution of the idea of what matters. That idea is refined through the experience of the species over time.
The Code of Hammurabi, the Sermon on the Mount, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, etc. could not have happened before their time. They are products of our evolving sense of what is good and true. The “Plan” that pulls us forward is our estimation of what has “worked,” and is “working,” to pro-duce that which we are proud of, which fills us, completes us, produces a resounding, “Yes!” within us. As we align ourselves with that, serve that, achieve that, we produce more of what has shown itself to be of value, and the world benefits in ways we perceive to be good, and the “Plan” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Which is to say that there is no Plan. It’s a mess out there. Anything can happen at any time. Noth-ing has to be what it is. And, yet, everything that happens produces in us a sense of “yes” or “no.” Every-thing that happens, and has happened, creates a “wealth of wisdom,” a pool, an ocean, really, of experi-ence, which shows some things to be better than others. Everything that happens shifts us toward certain thoughts, behaviors, outcomes, and values, and away from others. We “figure it out as we go,” and de-velop a sense of direction that is self-correcting and self-validating. We know, as Joseph Campbell says, “when we are on the beam, and when we are off of it.”
“It won’t work.” “This isn’t working.” That’s all we need to know. We find what works by know-ing what doesn’t work. We find the way by knowing what is not the way. If we don’t know whether some-thing will work, we only have to give it a spin, take it around the block a time or two. Everything becomes clear with time, even to those seeped in denial. It is only a matter of time. All it takes is time. Everyone wakes up in due time. If we all lived long enough, we all would be wise.
We learn from living—and the species learns from living over long stretches of time—what living is “all about.” We learn what works, and what does not work. We learn what is good, and what is bad. We learn how to behave. We learn what to value. Living leans us toward living in certain ways, and toward people who live in those ways. The “Plan” that is being worked out in our lives is toward the good of all things. We are learning to live toward the good. And, the “Plan” is simply the realization of what has proven to be important in the experience of the species over time.
Whose idea of God is God? What is God’s will? What is important? The more awake we are, the more we see eye-to-eye about the things that matter. The more we get it. The more we agree about what is to be gotten. There are many paths, but the journey is to the table at the center of the room. And, we get there by walking the path we deem to be important. Doing what we think is important with awareness is the only way to get to what is important. Knowing what is working and what isn’t working leads us to the center. If we want to find the path, we only have to be sensitive to the difference between what works and what doesn’t work.
Our task is to know what is important and to do it. That is the Great Work. Everything else will fall into place around it. Or, as Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all that you need will be yours as well” (or, words to that effect). We cannot live well with our mind on for-tune and glory.
Life is all we have to work with, our life, our lives. We are the matrix, the medium, the milieu of our own becoming. We bring ourselves forth as a blessing, not to ourselves, but to the world. As we strive to bless ourselves, we curse the world. The March 22, 2003 edition of “The Christian Century,” contained an interview with Bernard McGinn. In that interview he said, “Meister Eckhart and some other 13th-centuary mystics had the notion of living ‘without a why.’ ‘Living without a why’ means that you don’t ask, ‘What’s in it for me?’, or ‘Why am I doing this?’ You just do the good spontaneously, the way that God acts. God doesn’t act because of the why or for any interest of his (sic) own.”
Knowing what is important entails listening to all the voices claiming to know what is important and waiting for what is important to become manifest, made plain. We wait always for the white rabbit to appear. Nothing is more important than knowing what is important, and being right about it. What we think is important can get in the way of what’s important. Everything hinges on our being right when we make the call, but we don’t have to be right. Getting it wrong is a step on the way to getting it right. One thing leads to another. If we go with what we think is important, it will lead us to what is important. We can begin with anything because everything is equidistant from what is important, and everything will lead us there, if we let it, if we walk the path with our eyes open.
When we think we know what is important, we have to live in its service until it becomes apparent that we were wrong. We must not change direction too quickly or stay the course too long. “Pace and tim-ing, kid. Pace and timing.” So, we live toward what is important to us, and see where that takes us. If writ-ing is important, we write. If sailing is important, we sail. Whatever is important to us, we do that thing, those things. And, don’t worry about it. Particularly, don’t worry about anything coming of it. What comes of it will be a clearer idea of what is important, and we work it out over time.
Growing up means working it out. There is the I Want and the I Don’t Want, the I Should and the I shouldn’t, the I Must and the I Must Not, the I Can and the I Can’t, the I Have To and the I Don’t Have To, the I Will and the I Will Not, and we have to work it out. We have to take all the conflicts of interests into account and decide what will actually be done. This is the proper role of Ego in our lives. Ego is the I who listens, evaluates, considers, chooses, decides: “This is what we are going to do now.” Ego deter-mines what is important, and changes its mind with experience and time.
Growing up is about the maturation of the Ego, about the development of wisdom and understand-ing within the Ego. A fully matured Ego would be completely integrated with the Shadow, and would de-cide what to do now—what is important now—after taking everything about the Psyche and the circum-stances of its living into account. That is the spiritual task, journey, path, quest. It is not about abandon-ing, rejecting, jettisoning the Ego and submitting to someone else’s rule over us, doing what some guru tells us to do, obeying someone else’s idea of what is important, following the dictates of some other Ego. It is about growing up, working it out within ourselves, and doing what we would do within the context and circumstances and relationships of our lives, deciding for ourselves what is important and living to see if we are right.
It isn’t the Ego that is the source of our problems, but the infantile Ego, the Ego that hasn’t grown up and does not assume its proper role of arbitrator and negotiator, of seer, and hearer, and understander. The infantile Ego identifies itself with some aspect of the Psyche—the I Want (Freud’s ID, for example, or the I Must (Freud’s Super Ego)—and serves those interests at the expense of all other considerations. That’s a problem. The Ego’s task—the spiritual task—is to grow itself up, to wake itself up, to live the con-tradictions at play within the Psyche and within the circumstances of its, of our, life, to bear the pain and live within the tension of competing interests, to take it all into account and to decide what is important and what we are going to do here and now.
We can wake ourselves up or, if we live long enough, our life will do it for us. We can always opt for dying in denial. It’s certainly easier to be dead than alive. Waking up is waking up to the moment, to “the situation as it arises,” and what needs to be done there, what needs to happen there, what is impor-tant there, and what we have to offer to assist the doing, serve the happening. There is no great realization, no sudden understanding of esoteric secrets, no initiation into the wonders and glories of spiritual reality. There is just seeing what needs to be done and doing it. Just knowing what is important and living in light of it. Very boring. And absolutely essential to the work of being human—to the work of becoming true human beings.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
12/30/08--The Structure of Spiritual Reality, Part III
62) What are we trying to make happen? What can happen? What needs to happen? What is happening? How can we assist what is happening in the direction of what needs to happen?
63) In any situation, 10,000 futures are possible. How we live reduces the likelihood of some possibilities and increases the likelihood of others.
64) One things doing is another things undoing. One things ordered grace is another things traumatic disruption. Dinner for the lion is not something the antelope would bless.
65) Live without worrying about succeeding or failing, gaining or losing. Let come what’s coming and let go what’s going. Enjoy what is to be enjoyed. Grieve what is to be grieved. Do what needs to be done. Come to terms with how things are. Let your life be your life. Your options your options. Your choices your choices. Your futures your futures.
66) Cleverness knows how to manipulate means to achieve its ends. Simplicity observes what is happening, perceives what is trying to happen, and assists what needs to happen. Offering the right help in the right way at the right time is the essence of wisdom. You can’t be wiser than that.
67) Cleverness does this so that will happen. Simplicity does this so this will happen, because this needs to happen, whether that happens or not.
68) What is done is what can be done, which is not the same as what has always been done. It takes the vision of a sage to see what can be done in any situation in order to do the work of redemption and transformation and bring the new into existence out of the old.
69) In remaining below, the sage receives what the situation has to offer and brings for the baby struggling to be born.
70) In any moment, the sage simply offers what the moment needs out of what she, what he, has to give.
71) The sage does not calculate, strategize, manipulate, control. The sage observes what is happening, asks what needs to happen, and how she, how he, might assist what needs to happen. You wouldn’t want a sage running your business, or hire one as a CEO.
72) We have to know what we are trying to do and whether it can actually be done, and whether it really needs to be done.
73) Of what does life consist? Where is life to be found? What brings us to life, makes us alive? What do we need in order to be alive? What’s with all this other stuff in our lives?
74) Some things are clearly better than others. Every living thing prefers one thing over another. The lion’s life is the antelope’s death. There is no happy state in which everyone has exactly what is needed at no one’s expense. But, compassion keeps things reasonably tolerable much of the time.
75) Compassion lets things be, and lets things become what they might be, and says, “No!” to what should not be.
76) To see what needs to be done and to do it. To be right about what is important to serve it. That’s all there is to it. Anything else is just talk.
77) Fighting is forcing. The resistance can come from without or from within. Don’t let your principles keep you from doing what is important, what needs to be done!
78) We want more than we can have, more than we have any business having, and cannot adjust ourselves to living within the limits of our lives, within what our situation in life allows. “Our reach must exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” “You’ll never keep them on the farm once they’ve seen gay Paree!”
79) The meaning of life is to be alive in the time and place of our living. What does it mean to be alive in the time and place of our living? Answer that question correctly and you have it made.
80) What is our life asking of us? What does the moment require? At times, our life is at odds with the moment. The flow is not always smooth. Disruption and chaos are also part of how things are. We take it all into account, and do what needs to be done. Are we right about what needs to be done? Time will tell. We may be wrong. Maybe something else needs to be done. We may blow it. Life is like that. We can blow it.
81) Sometimes, we are punished for doing it the way we do it. Sometimes, there is a price to be paid for doing it our way. And a price to be paid for not doing it our way. Whose way is going to be the way for us? Whose way is going to be the way we do it? Who is going to live our life? If not us, who?
82) Trusting the inner knowing and letting things have their own mind is the essential act of faith. If you are going to believe in anything, believe in the power of things to become what they need to be, particularly when assisted by those who do nothing to force their will on the way things are, but constantly look for what needs to happen and help it come forth in the right kind of way.
83) What is to be gained by being favored? What is to be lost by being not-favored?
84) People are not afraid of dying either because life has no value and they do not care if they live or die, or because they know what is truly important and are willing to sacrifice their lives in the service of that good.
85) You have to carve wood the way you carve wood, not the way someone else carves would. We have to live our lives the way we would live our lives, not the way we think our lives ought to be lived—not the way we think someone else would live our lives, or have us live them. We see the photo WE see, not the photo someone else sees.
86) With nothing to live for, there is no reason to live. Therefore, finding value in life is the foundation of life. The spiritual quest is the search for what is important, for what counts, matters, makes a difference in our lives, if no one else’s.
87) How much can we put up with and still be us? Where do we draw the line? I don’t know how much time you think you have left to live, but how much of it are you willing to spend being not-you, doing what is not-you, associating with those who are not your kind of people? Where and how and how often are you drawing lines, saying “No,” giving yourself to the things that have your name on them?
88) We have to know when who we are is running afoul of who we must (pretend to) be. We have to play parts, assume roles, do what must be done, AND we have to be true to ourselves. We have to be who we are. We have to know when something is a role, a part, and not-us, and we have to compensate ourselves for all of our not-me roles by stepping out of the part as often as possible and giving ourselves to the things that are us all the way.
89) Who knows why? Why this and not that? It doesn’t matter why. We have to step into the What and deal with the way things are regardless of why they are that way, or of why we have to deal with it, or of why we have to live with all that we have to live with, or of why this and not that… What is required, here and now? What is being asked of us? What needs to be done? What next? What now? It is enough that we answer these questions without being lost in the questions that cannot be answered. Choosing the right questions to answer is the path of wisdom and life even before we answer them.
90) Creating intentional communities of practice—where we practice “the things that make for peace,” the things that enable us to have what it takes to do what needs to be done, the things that enable us to live the life that is ours to live within the context and circumstances of our lives—is the work of the church. The work of the church is creating the atmosphere, the environment, the space, the place, in which the real work of the church—being alive in the time and place of our living—might be done.
91) We begin the process of bringing ourselves to life by finding the things that bring us to life. Where are we most alive? How often do we do the things that bring us to life? What prevents us from doing those things more often? How do we experience the difference between death and life? What are the inhibitions, the blocks, to life? In what ways do we resist being alive—doing the things that bring us to life? Where do our pleasures lie? How often do we engage in the things that please us? How conscious are we of being pleased when we are being pleased? How often do we deliberately give ourselves the gift of life, the pleasure of being alive?
63) In any situation, 10,000 futures are possible. How we live reduces the likelihood of some possibilities and increases the likelihood of others.
64) One things doing is another things undoing. One things ordered grace is another things traumatic disruption. Dinner for the lion is not something the antelope would bless.
65) Live without worrying about succeeding or failing, gaining or losing. Let come what’s coming and let go what’s going. Enjoy what is to be enjoyed. Grieve what is to be grieved. Do what needs to be done. Come to terms with how things are. Let your life be your life. Your options your options. Your choices your choices. Your futures your futures.
66) Cleverness knows how to manipulate means to achieve its ends. Simplicity observes what is happening, perceives what is trying to happen, and assists what needs to happen. Offering the right help in the right way at the right time is the essence of wisdom. You can’t be wiser than that.
67) Cleverness does this so that will happen. Simplicity does this so this will happen, because this needs to happen, whether that happens or not.
68) What is done is what can be done, which is not the same as what has always been done. It takes the vision of a sage to see what can be done in any situation in order to do the work of redemption and transformation and bring the new into existence out of the old.
69) In remaining below, the sage receives what the situation has to offer and brings for the baby struggling to be born.
70) In any moment, the sage simply offers what the moment needs out of what she, what he, has to give.
71) The sage does not calculate, strategize, manipulate, control. The sage observes what is happening, asks what needs to happen, and how she, how he, might assist what needs to happen. You wouldn’t want a sage running your business, or hire one as a CEO.
72) We have to know what we are trying to do and whether it can actually be done, and whether it really needs to be done.
73) Of what does life consist? Where is life to be found? What brings us to life, makes us alive? What do we need in order to be alive? What’s with all this other stuff in our lives?
74) Some things are clearly better than others. Every living thing prefers one thing over another. The lion’s life is the antelope’s death. There is no happy state in which everyone has exactly what is needed at no one’s expense. But, compassion keeps things reasonably tolerable much of the time.
75) Compassion lets things be, and lets things become what they might be, and says, “No!” to what should not be.
76) To see what needs to be done and to do it. To be right about what is important to serve it. That’s all there is to it. Anything else is just talk.
77) Fighting is forcing. The resistance can come from without or from within. Don’t let your principles keep you from doing what is important, what needs to be done!
78) We want more than we can have, more than we have any business having, and cannot adjust ourselves to living within the limits of our lives, within what our situation in life allows. “Our reach must exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” “You’ll never keep them on the farm once they’ve seen gay Paree!”
79) The meaning of life is to be alive in the time and place of our living. What does it mean to be alive in the time and place of our living? Answer that question correctly and you have it made.
80) What is our life asking of us? What does the moment require? At times, our life is at odds with the moment. The flow is not always smooth. Disruption and chaos are also part of how things are. We take it all into account, and do what needs to be done. Are we right about what needs to be done? Time will tell. We may be wrong. Maybe something else needs to be done. We may blow it. Life is like that. We can blow it.
81) Sometimes, we are punished for doing it the way we do it. Sometimes, there is a price to be paid for doing it our way. And a price to be paid for not doing it our way. Whose way is going to be the way for us? Whose way is going to be the way we do it? Who is going to live our life? If not us, who?
82) Trusting the inner knowing and letting things have their own mind is the essential act of faith. If you are going to believe in anything, believe in the power of things to become what they need to be, particularly when assisted by those who do nothing to force their will on the way things are, but constantly look for what needs to happen and help it come forth in the right kind of way.
83) What is to be gained by being favored? What is to be lost by being not-favored?
84) People are not afraid of dying either because life has no value and they do not care if they live or die, or because they know what is truly important and are willing to sacrifice their lives in the service of that good.
85) You have to carve wood the way you carve wood, not the way someone else carves would. We have to live our lives the way we would live our lives, not the way we think our lives ought to be lived—not the way we think someone else would live our lives, or have us live them. We see the photo WE see, not the photo someone else sees.
86) With nothing to live for, there is no reason to live. Therefore, finding value in life is the foundation of life. The spiritual quest is the search for what is important, for what counts, matters, makes a difference in our lives, if no one else’s.
87) How much can we put up with and still be us? Where do we draw the line? I don’t know how much time you think you have left to live, but how much of it are you willing to spend being not-you, doing what is not-you, associating with those who are not your kind of people? Where and how and how often are you drawing lines, saying “No,” giving yourself to the things that have your name on them?
88) We have to know when who we are is running afoul of who we must (pretend to) be. We have to play parts, assume roles, do what must be done, AND we have to be true to ourselves. We have to be who we are. We have to know when something is a role, a part, and not-us, and we have to compensate ourselves for all of our not-me roles by stepping out of the part as often as possible and giving ourselves to the things that are us all the way.
89) Who knows why? Why this and not that? It doesn’t matter why. We have to step into the What and deal with the way things are regardless of why they are that way, or of why we have to deal with it, or of why we have to live with all that we have to live with, or of why this and not that… What is required, here and now? What is being asked of us? What needs to be done? What next? What now? It is enough that we answer these questions without being lost in the questions that cannot be answered. Choosing the right questions to answer is the path of wisdom and life even before we answer them.
90) Creating intentional communities of practice—where we practice “the things that make for peace,” the things that enable us to have what it takes to do what needs to be done, the things that enable us to live the life that is ours to live within the context and circumstances of our lives—is the work of the church. The work of the church is creating the atmosphere, the environment, the space, the place, in which the real work of the church—being alive in the time and place of our living—might be done.
91) We begin the process of bringing ourselves to life by finding the things that bring us to life. Where are we most alive? How often do we do the things that bring us to life? What prevents us from doing those things more often? How do we experience the difference between death and life? What are the inhibitions, the blocks, to life? In what ways do we resist being alive—doing the things that bring us to life? Where do our pleasures lie? How often do we engage in the things that please us? How conscious are we of being pleased when we are being pleased? How often do we deliberately give ourselves the gift of life, the pleasure of being alive?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
12/21/08--Life is the teacher, living is the lesson.
We don’t understand things by having them explained to us. Understand? We don’t see things by having them pointed out to us. See? We don’t hear things by having someone tell us things. Hear that? We live our way into getting all that can be gotten. There are no shortcuts to being alive. It takes as long as it takes for each one of us. And not one of us can get another of us there before the time of our arrival. And the time of our arrival is the time it takes us to process our experience in order to see, hear, and understand that experience. The closest we can come to something like a shortcut to understanding is offered by those who help us think through what we are experi-encing by asking questions for reflection and clarification along the way. But, even so, seeing, hearing and under-standing is our own work, and no one can do it for us. Maybe we get it, and maybe we don’t.
The trick is to not worry about it, to not try to “get” more than we “get” at any point in our lives—not to dwell on what we get and don’t get, on how much we get and how much is left to get. All of it is left to get. What ever we think we get, we’ll have to get it again, and again. Get it?
Where we are is just where we are. And, what we see, hear, and understand at that point is what we see, here, and understand at that point. We need slack. We need, “Yes!” We need to know that we are just fine exactly as we are. It all begins with being where we are, who we are, why we are, what we are, how we are, when we are. If we can sit with that, and relax, we can move beyond that into who else we are. But, we can’t get to who else we are by being commanded to go there. The rule is no pushing, no forcing, just being as awake, as aware, as we are.
We need an atmosphere in which we can be as awake and as aware as we are and find our way to our-selves, in which we can be who we are and become who else we are capable of being, who else we are built to be. The call is to ourselves and beyond ourselves, into all we might become. And we need a place in which we can hear, and heed, the call to be who we are and who else we are. We need a place in which to find our way to ourselves and the life that is always working to be born in us, and through us into the world.
A stream follows its path, but we are “worried and distracted (diverted, blocked, overwhelmed, dismayed, held back, stopped cold) by many things.” Or, so it seems. Streams are too. Streams have to keep coming back to the task at hand just as we do. It's all a part of the path. Nothing is wasted in the experience of life. This doesn't mean everything is necessary. Everything certainly isn't good. But, it is all a part of the production of our lives. Our chal-lenge is to fold it all into the experience of us, and we need help with that effort. We cannot do it alone. Perspective is the work of many eyes. Saving perspective is the work of many healthy, healing, loving, eyes. We come together with the right kind of people to find the way in and around, over and through the things in our path. But, the way is there and is to be found by eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand.
Our difficulties stem from the problems we make of our difficulties. From willing what cannot be willed. The trick is to “roll with the punches” and “go with the flow,” and understand what “the flow” is and exactly how to “go” with it. The ideal is the relationship between the stream and the stream bed. The stream makes the stream bed, the stream bed restricts, limits, contains the stream. Who is in charge? Who is in control? Who is Boss? Stream or stream bed? The questions are senseless. The stream and the stream bed are one thing. They are not opposi-tional, adversarial. We and our lives are one thing. The sooner we understand that and live in oneness with our lives—as the stream lives in oneness with the stream bed—the better things are for everyone, for all “sentient be-ings” everywhere.
We live in oneness with our lives by opening ourselves to the reality of things as they are and deciding what we are going to do with it, about it. How are we going to deal with it? How are we going to be in relationship with it? Given the givens of our lives, what does it take to be alive? What does it mean to be alive? How do we know? What is life for us, what is death? We have to know these things. This is essential knowing. How do we find our way through death to life? How do we bring ourselves to life in the time left for living? How much time do we think we have to spend on things that are not life for us?
There is the work of life and there is the work that enables the work of life, the work that pays the bills we incur in doing the work of life. Occasionally the two are the same, but not often. What is the work of life for us, and what do we need to help us with that work? What are the tools that enable the work of life? What assists, what in-hibits, what enables, what prevents that work? What is it that we do in bringing life forth? What are we doing when we come to life? How much of that can we do as we are doing the work that pays the bills?
The focus is on living the life that brings us to life. Life is the guide. Yet, it is also the pain and the agony. We pay a price to be alive. It is easier to take the course of least resistance, to leave the way, step aside from the path and say, “Talk to us no more of the Holy One of Israel”—that is, of the life that is our life to live.
Israel wanted to be like the nations, you know. And, as was the story in the Garden of Eden, forsook, the life that was its life to live in favor of the life it had it mind for itself. That’s exactly the temptation Jesus rejected time after time. “Not my will, but Thine be done!” Whose will? How do we understand the “Thine” here? “Thy will be done.” We hear it all the time. Who is the “Thy” here? How do we think of the “Thy”? How do we conceptualize the “Thy”?
We’ve always thought of the “Thy” as God, the Creator and Sustainer of all that is. The Man Upstairs. How different would it be if we thought instead of the “thy” as the life that is trying to live itself through us? The life that is calling itself forth in us? “Thy will, not mine, be done,” then means that we place ourselves in the service of our life, and live to see, and hear, and understand what implications that has for us and the way we live.
Our life calls itself forth. I wanted a typewriter when I was in the 10th grade, which is when I learned to type. My life isn’t writing best sellers. Or even moderate sellers. My life is writing, forming art with words. And writing is an aspect, an extension, of seeing, hearing, understanding. My life is seeing, hearing, understanding—asking, seeking, knocking—wondering, probing, inquiring… And fooling around.
Fooling around brings things to light, to life, in a way that serious pursuit could never do. When we fool around, we aren’t doing anything in particular and are open to everything in general, and our life is leading us to the next discovery, the next realization, without itself having a blueprint that it is following. It doesn’t say, “Okay, he got that, now in order for him to get the next step in sequence, we’re going to have to get him to …” The steps aren’t in sequence. The next step isn’t the next step on the list of steps. It’s just the next step, the next thing to come along. Arbitrarily. Randomly. Capriciously. Reach in a hat and pull out a blue marble. That’s the next marble. But it becomes meaningful when we fold it into the life we have lived up to that point, and we incorporate it in the series of steps that lead us to us. But no one is leading, no one is following, Our life is just calling itself forth.
The moral here is: Listen to your life and follow where it leads, go where it takes you, no matter what. All our lives will not have the same outcome. Yoda was a highly advanced spiritual being at one with the Force and he lived in a hole in the ground. Luke Skywalker was a highly advanced spiritual being at one with the Force and he lived in a royal palace. We don’t know how it will turn out for us, but our eyes can’t be on the outcome. Where we live, hole or palace, cannot be important to us. What is important is that we follow our lives as they lead us along. We listen, we discern, we follow, and we stay out of the way, we cooperate, we buy a typewriter. But not to be a famous writer. Just to write.
Our dreams for our lives get in the way of our lives. Yet, they can also be the way our life gets our attention and calls us forward. No one goes seeking a nightmare, or lives in the service of the Desolating Sacrilege. Our dream can be our life’s dream for us, not our dream for our life. When the two are the same, it is beautiful. May we always dream of knowing what is important, what needs to be done, and doing it.
Our lives will probably not be what we wish they were. Will not be what we have in mind. And, they will be fulfilling, completing, satisfying. And, they will ask hard things of us. We will wish they were more fun, easier, more enjoyable. But, we would not be able to walk away from them without paying with our zest, vitality, joy, exuber-ance, enthusiasm, spirit. We cannot part with our lives and feel anything like being alive, no matter how much of the high life we are living, no matter how often we say, “Ain’t this the life though, Flo?”
Once we realize that things are not right with us as they are, we take up the search for life, of coming to life in our lives. How do we shift over into life? How is that handled on stage and in the movies, in novels, in biogra-phies? In interviews of artists, writers, and poets and people who “find themselves” in later (or earlier) life? What is that process? What is involved in the movement of life among the living? How would we research the question, “What does it mean to ‘be alive’?” Do it. Research the question. Become an expert. And apply what you learn to the living of your life.
Who are the most alive people you know? Interview them. Ask them if they are consciously, intentionally, alive or naturally, accidentally, so. Ask them if there was a time in their life when they “woke up,” or were awak-ened by the circumstances of their lives, and began to live deliberately, with awareness. Ask them what they would recommend to people who wanted to come alive in their lives. Ask them all the pertinent questions you can think of. Tell them you will call them up if you think of something else to ask. Invite them to call you up if they think of something else to say. We are learning to align ourselves with our lives, with the lives that are waiting to be born in us, to come to life in us, and bless the world. The blessing is the world’s. Not ours. Our lives are out gift to the world. And we are here to see that the gift is delivered.
The trick is to not worry about it, to not try to “get” more than we “get” at any point in our lives—not to dwell on what we get and don’t get, on how much we get and how much is left to get. All of it is left to get. What ever we think we get, we’ll have to get it again, and again. Get it?
Where we are is just where we are. And, what we see, hear, and understand at that point is what we see, here, and understand at that point. We need slack. We need, “Yes!” We need to know that we are just fine exactly as we are. It all begins with being where we are, who we are, why we are, what we are, how we are, when we are. If we can sit with that, and relax, we can move beyond that into who else we are. But, we can’t get to who else we are by being commanded to go there. The rule is no pushing, no forcing, just being as awake, as aware, as we are.
We need an atmosphere in which we can be as awake and as aware as we are and find our way to our-selves, in which we can be who we are and become who else we are capable of being, who else we are built to be. The call is to ourselves and beyond ourselves, into all we might become. And we need a place in which we can hear, and heed, the call to be who we are and who else we are. We need a place in which to find our way to ourselves and the life that is always working to be born in us, and through us into the world.
A stream follows its path, but we are “worried and distracted (diverted, blocked, overwhelmed, dismayed, held back, stopped cold) by many things.” Or, so it seems. Streams are too. Streams have to keep coming back to the task at hand just as we do. It's all a part of the path. Nothing is wasted in the experience of life. This doesn't mean everything is necessary. Everything certainly isn't good. But, it is all a part of the production of our lives. Our chal-lenge is to fold it all into the experience of us, and we need help with that effort. We cannot do it alone. Perspective is the work of many eyes. Saving perspective is the work of many healthy, healing, loving, eyes. We come together with the right kind of people to find the way in and around, over and through the things in our path. But, the way is there and is to be found by eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand.
Our difficulties stem from the problems we make of our difficulties. From willing what cannot be willed. The trick is to “roll with the punches” and “go with the flow,” and understand what “the flow” is and exactly how to “go” with it. The ideal is the relationship between the stream and the stream bed. The stream makes the stream bed, the stream bed restricts, limits, contains the stream. Who is in charge? Who is in control? Who is Boss? Stream or stream bed? The questions are senseless. The stream and the stream bed are one thing. They are not opposi-tional, adversarial. We and our lives are one thing. The sooner we understand that and live in oneness with our lives—as the stream lives in oneness with the stream bed—the better things are for everyone, for all “sentient be-ings” everywhere.
We live in oneness with our lives by opening ourselves to the reality of things as they are and deciding what we are going to do with it, about it. How are we going to deal with it? How are we going to be in relationship with it? Given the givens of our lives, what does it take to be alive? What does it mean to be alive? How do we know? What is life for us, what is death? We have to know these things. This is essential knowing. How do we find our way through death to life? How do we bring ourselves to life in the time left for living? How much time do we think we have to spend on things that are not life for us?
There is the work of life and there is the work that enables the work of life, the work that pays the bills we incur in doing the work of life. Occasionally the two are the same, but not often. What is the work of life for us, and what do we need to help us with that work? What are the tools that enable the work of life? What assists, what in-hibits, what enables, what prevents that work? What is it that we do in bringing life forth? What are we doing when we come to life? How much of that can we do as we are doing the work that pays the bills?
The focus is on living the life that brings us to life. Life is the guide. Yet, it is also the pain and the agony. We pay a price to be alive. It is easier to take the course of least resistance, to leave the way, step aside from the path and say, “Talk to us no more of the Holy One of Israel”—that is, of the life that is our life to live.
Israel wanted to be like the nations, you know. And, as was the story in the Garden of Eden, forsook, the life that was its life to live in favor of the life it had it mind for itself. That’s exactly the temptation Jesus rejected time after time. “Not my will, but Thine be done!” Whose will? How do we understand the “Thine” here? “Thy will be done.” We hear it all the time. Who is the “Thy” here? How do we think of the “Thy”? How do we conceptualize the “Thy”?
We’ve always thought of the “Thy” as God, the Creator and Sustainer of all that is. The Man Upstairs. How different would it be if we thought instead of the “thy” as the life that is trying to live itself through us? The life that is calling itself forth in us? “Thy will, not mine, be done,” then means that we place ourselves in the service of our life, and live to see, and hear, and understand what implications that has for us and the way we live.
Our life calls itself forth. I wanted a typewriter when I was in the 10th grade, which is when I learned to type. My life isn’t writing best sellers. Or even moderate sellers. My life is writing, forming art with words. And writing is an aspect, an extension, of seeing, hearing, understanding. My life is seeing, hearing, understanding—asking, seeking, knocking—wondering, probing, inquiring… And fooling around.
Fooling around brings things to light, to life, in a way that serious pursuit could never do. When we fool around, we aren’t doing anything in particular and are open to everything in general, and our life is leading us to the next discovery, the next realization, without itself having a blueprint that it is following. It doesn’t say, “Okay, he got that, now in order for him to get the next step in sequence, we’re going to have to get him to …” The steps aren’t in sequence. The next step isn’t the next step on the list of steps. It’s just the next step, the next thing to come along. Arbitrarily. Randomly. Capriciously. Reach in a hat and pull out a blue marble. That’s the next marble. But it becomes meaningful when we fold it into the life we have lived up to that point, and we incorporate it in the series of steps that lead us to us. But no one is leading, no one is following, Our life is just calling itself forth.
The moral here is: Listen to your life and follow where it leads, go where it takes you, no matter what. All our lives will not have the same outcome. Yoda was a highly advanced spiritual being at one with the Force and he lived in a hole in the ground. Luke Skywalker was a highly advanced spiritual being at one with the Force and he lived in a royal palace. We don’t know how it will turn out for us, but our eyes can’t be on the outcome. Where we live, hole or palace, cannot be important to us. What is important is that we follow our lives as they lead us along. We listen, we discern, we follow, and we stay out of the way, we cooperate, we buy a typewriter. But not to be a famous writer. Just to write.
Our dreams for our lives get in the way of our lives. Yet, they can also be the way our life gets our attention and calls us forward. No one goes seeking a nightmare, or lives in the service of the Desolating Sacrilege. Our dream can be our life’s dream for us, not our dream for our life. When the two are the same, it is beautiful. May we always dream of knowing what is important, what needs to be done, and doing it.
Our lives will probably not be what we wish they were. Will not be what we have in mind. And, they will be fulfilling, completing, satisfying. And, they will ask hard things of us. We will wish they were more fun, easier, more enjoyable. But, we would not be able to walk away from them without paying with our zest, vitality, joy, exuber-ance, enthusiasm, spirit. We cannot part with our lives and feel anything like being alive, no matter how much of the high life we are living, no matter how often we say, “Ain’t this the life though, Flo?”
Once we realize that things are not right with us as they are, we take up the search for life, of coming to life in our lives. How do we shift over into life? How is that handled on stage and in the movies, in novels, in biogra-phies? In interviews of artists, writers, and poets and people who “find themselves” in later (or earlier) life? What is that process? What is involved in the movement of life among the living? How would we research the question, “What does it mean to ‘be alive’?” Do it. Research the question. Become an expert. And apply what you learn to the living of your life.
Who are the most alive people you know? Interview them. Ask them if they are consciously, intentionally, alive or naturally, accidentally, so. Ask them if there was a time in their life when they “woke up,” or were awak-ened by the circumstances of their lives, and began to live deliberately, with awareness. Ask them what they would recommend to people who wanted to come alive in their lives. Ask them all the pertinent questions you can think of. Tell them you will call them up if you think of something else to ask. Invite them to call you up if they think of something else to say. We are learning to align ourselves with our lives, with the lives that are waiting to be born in us, to come to life in us, and bless the world. The blessing is the world’s. Not ours. Our lives are out gift to the world. And we are here to see that the gift is delivered.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
12/14/08, Metaphor is everywhere.
The Christian Life is not a better life than the Jewish Life, or the Buddhist Life, or the Atheistic Life, or the Human Life, or any Life lived open to and aware of the moment of its living and of what is being asked of us, offered to us, by the moment. Christian eyes don’t see any better than any other eyes. Christian ears don’t hear any better than any other ears. Christian hearts don’t understand better than any other hearts. Christianity is a perspective, not an advantage. And, like all perspectives, it is continuing to be enlarged and expanded, deepened, transformed.
The Christ is the Anointed One who comes to announce the time of our visitation, to proclaim the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand. Well. Look around. Here it is. Do you see it? Are you participating in its coming into the world through the quality of your interaction with the world in the moment of your living? Are you transforming the moment by how you see the moment, how you live in the moment? If so, then you are the Christ, receiving the grace of the moment, gracing the moment and passing it on. The Jew who does that is also the Christ. And the Buddhist. And the Atheist. And the Human. We are all the Christ without doctrines to divide us, but with eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to understand to unite us, connect us, grace us, and make us all one. We are made one by the metaphors which wake us up and bring us to life in the time of our living.
The Promised Land, the Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, Heaven in all its glory, and the Holy Grail are all the same thing: the idea of life as it ought to be. Life as it is is clearly NOT how it ought to be, and so we seek the Elysian Fields, Nirvana, Paradise. But wait! We had Paradise, remember? The Garden of Eden. It wasn’t so hot, remember? We figured a way to make it better, to improve on Paradise. Or, so the story goes. It’s a great story. Nails us to the wall. Isn’t that how it is with us, though? So much for Paradise. You can’t give us anything we can’t wish were different.
How long was it before the Promised Land fell apart, disintegrated in the hands of the people? The Kingdom of God never got off the ground. Of course, it did get off the ground by being placed by Jesus in the realm of the metaphorical, figurative, symbolic, and allegorical (“My kingdom is not of this world,” “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you”), which is exactly where it belongs. It and the Promised Land, and the New Jerusalem, and Heaven in all its glory. It’s all right there with the Holy Grail. Metaphor all the way.
The metaphor pulls us forward, away from all that is familiar, comfortable and routine and safe, into the wilderness (another metaphor—they are everywhere), into the unknown. The prophet knows, and calls us to be open to “The voice of one crying, “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord!” The wilderness is always the place where God is found, and the place where God sends us. In our search for the Promised Land, the Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, and the Holy Grail, we are, as Abraham was, propelled away from “our father’s house” into the trackless void.
What we seek is found outside the camp. Outside the gate. Outside the box. The Promised Land is out there. Beyond the borders. We are always on the way to the Land of Promise, never arriving. The Kingdom of God is always coming, always breaking into our lives, always breeching the barriers we erect against it, opening our eyes (and ears, and hearts) with its glimpse of grace, mercy and peace (like the Holy Grail with its vision of how life could be) and then it’s gone, and we are left to wonder what response to make, here, inside the box, inside the gate, inside the camp. And the response is obvious. “Go from your father’s house!” and take up the trail of the spirit which is like the wind, blowing where it will. But, we hold back, afraid of the possibilities, as well we should be.
And, yet, the call is to step, trusting, if afraid, into that dark night. The call is to take a chance on life, and on God. We have to trust ourselves to life and see where it takes us. Our expectations of the life we have in mind for ourselves—our hopes and our dreams—keep us from participating in the realization of the dream of God for us. We have to step into the wilderness and see what happens.
Ah, but, that is the hardest thing—to not-know what we are doing, where we are going, to live without a map and a time-table. But, growing up (And, I can’t think of a better term for the spiritual quest. It’s all about our maturity, our coming of age, our developing discernment, our seeing, hearing and understanding, finally, what it is all about, what is being asked of us, what is important, what needs to happen, and what we have to offer to the situation “as it arises” in the moment of our living)—growing up means going away. It means leaving our father’s house, and striking out, on our own through the deserted wastelands. If we don’t go away physically, as in moving across the country, we have to go away emotionally, as in having our own life, separate from the life everyone thinks we ought to have. Separation is the prerequisite for a life of our own. We spend our lives learning that we can be separate without falling apart, learning that we really can’t be together until we can be separate.
Enmeshment means we don’t have a life of our own. It means our life is intertwined with other lives, with our mother’s life, for instance, or our daughter’s. Our father’s life or our son’s. You get the idea. We don’t know where we stop and they start. It’s all one big, not so happy, life. We wander around clutching each other in a large co-dependent huddle, lost in the fear of ever having to be who we are, hoping we never have to have a thought of our own.
What would “our own life” be? We cannot figure it out by thinking about it. We have to live to find our way to our own life, and live it—the life that is our life to live—within the context and circumstances of our lives. To what extent are we living our life, the life with our name on it? To what extent are the things we find ourselves doing the things would do if we were in charge of our lives? If we aren’t in charge of our lives, who is?
It all hangs by such a thin thread. The future turns on a dime. On less than a dime. On nothing at all. In trying to find our lives, we lose them. We force our way at the wrong time. We give way at the wrong time. It is such a fine balance. We make pivotal decisions without paying attention, without knowing what we are doing, without a second thought, or a first one. We say, “No,” or “Yes,” without thinking, and life as it could have been never has a chance. If we had only known the time of our visitation and the choices we had to choose from!
Of course, the opposite is true as well. Life has a chance as easily, as off-handedly, as absent-mindedly, as it is nipped in the bud. We make a choice lightly, say, “Yes,” or “No,” on a whim, and everything opens up before us, and we find ourselves on THE way, without knowing how we got there or why we should be so lucky. We can think too hard, ponder too much, about the ought-to-be-ness of things. At times we just have to trust our luck and take our chances. “He who hesitates is lost,” you know. And, other times, we have to listen carefully and know what is being asked of us. “Look before you leap,” you know.
But who can be so smart? Who can know the things that make for peace, and for life? Who can be so finely tuned to what is being asked of us that we know how to respond, how to offer what is needed, what to do? We live at the mercy of “time and chance,” and take our chances all the time, whether we know it or not. And yet, there is the possibility of “the third eye,” the eye that sees, the ear that hears, the heart that understands—the possibility of perceptivity beyond the range of “reasonable and normal.” We can know without knowing how we know. We can intuit the moments upon which the future hangs. It takes being attentive, awake, aware on a level and to a degree that is not ours to command. It takes not missing anything, particularly the obvious. And it takes time to develop the knack of knowing what can and what cannot be known. It takes time to grow up, to see, and hear, and understand. We have to take the time, and we have to know what we are about, and what is going on.
It all hangs by a thread and turns on a dime. So I recommend not worrying about it. Jesus and the Buddha had something similar to say. Regretting not having done better keeps us from doing better in the time spent regretting not having done better, which gives us something else to regret, and snowballs to oblivion. We did what we could with the information available to us and here we are. Now what? Given where we have been and how we got here, and what we have to work with here and now, what's the next step? Where we are going is more important than where we have been, so we have to shake it off and think about where we go from here, now.
Begin where you are. Start with what you have. Living differently, I mean. Living. How would the Messiah live? Live that way. Don’t wait for the Messiah to come winging in on clouds of glory to institute The Way for all humankind. Do the next thing the way the Messiah would do it, here, now. Don’t wait for social transformation. Don’t even wait for your own personal transformation. Don’t wait for someone to make it easy for you by telling you what to do, as though they know. Just take the next step the way the Messiah would take it. And, if you don’t have any idea as to what that would be, make up something Messiah-like, and go with it. Your best guess will do.
And, if you can’t even begin to guess, no problem. Just do it the way you would do it. Find what you take to be your own life, and live it. How would YOU live? What would YOU do, given a choice? What kind of Messiah would YOU be, doing it like YOU think it ought to be done? Would you indulge yourself and grow fat on the pleasures of life? Live excessively? Without a care in the world? Make messes for someone else to clean up? Drive fast? Eat sweets? Refuse to exercise? Lie around? Belch and ring for the valet? Fine. Just do the next thing the way YOU think it ought to be done, and change it as needed. Never mind the Messiah. Start with you and your way. You are close enough to the Messiah to do. Take a chance on life, on yourself, on God. Everything waits, hoping you will.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
12/07/08 -- We're on our own, and we are not alone
Churches want to grow by increasing the number of people who think like the people in churches think, not by changing the way the people in churches think. Churches think of growth and growing in terms of numbers, not in terms of shifting perspective, deepening understanding, broadening horizons, enlarging hearts, or thinking differently. How differently can the people think and still be "the church"? That depends on how they think about being "the church." See?
How we think about something has to change if we are to grow on the level where growth-as-transformation occurs. We think “outside the box” by getting outside the box. By asking scandalous questions, by saying outrageous things, by being heretical, and by changing our own minds about the things we think there, outside the box.
No one has the corner on “right thinking.” No one knows how we should think, how we are supposed to think, what we can and cannot think. But, we can’t think this way and be the church. Churches can’t change the way they think because one of the things they think is that the way they think is the only way to think. Churches clutch their doctrines and catechisms proclaiming, “This isn’t how we see things—this is how things ARE!” No one who thinks that way can be talked into thinking differently.
We change the way the church thinks by changing the way we think, and letting that be that. Insofar as we are the church, we are changing the way the church thinks as we change the way we think. Even if we could change the way THE church thinks, by the time the process was complete, we would have changed the way we thought when the process started, and would have to start all over to get THE church caught up. We can only think the way we think and let the outcome be the outcome.
Changing the way we think changes the way we live (and, of course, vice versa), changes the way we assess what is important, the way we determine what to do, and transforms our lives. We can’t do that kind of thing in a willy-nilly sort of way, just because it’s Tuesday morning and someone thinks we should. Before we can change the way we think, the way we think has to come up against it. Against what, you ask. The end of the line. We have to be dangling at the end of the rope before we can change our mind about what’s important. And, even then, we resist. Better to die, we say, than to change the way we think.
Changing the way we think is like dying. And, not changing the way we think is like dying. To die or not to die is not the question. What form will our dying take is the question. There is the death that leads to death and the death that leads to life. How would you like to die is the question, and the church, which likes to avoid questions, doesn’t know it is answering the question by refusing to answer the question.
It’s like this: The things I have to say can only be heard by those who can hear them. I don’t say them to be heard. I say them because they are the things I have to say. I have to say them. They are not mine to say or not say. I don’t have them and can say them or not. I must say them. I am compelled to say them. I HAVE TO say them. Whether anyone hears them or not. Even if when they hear them they respond with, “Why don’t you go fly a kite?”
This isn’t to say I just blurt things out without filtering them through silence, conversation, and reflection. It takes a while to know what I have to say and to say it and to gauge whether it was, or is, worth saying. And all of that is part of the experience of participation in the right kind of community. But, the point here is the saying is not conditional upon the hearing. If we only said what could be heard, we would say only the things that have always been said, which is what keeps the church in business.
The thing about hearing, seeing, and understanding is that once you begin to get it, you can’t give it away. You have to live with having it and being unable to do anything with it beyond implementing it in your own life. You get it, you live it. That’s that. The benefit, such as it is, is living well, living with integrity and authenticity. There is no advantage to you or to anyone else to your living well. You just live well, with integrity and authenticity. And the whole world is blessed, you included, but in a way that it doesn’t know it’s blessed. You, of course, recognize that you are blessed, because you get it, and getting it means that you get not being able to do anything with it, except live well, and you know what a blessing and a joy living well is for itself alone. It’s like flying a kite. You don’t fly a kite to accomplish anything thereby. You fly a kite to fly a kite. Not to do anything with it. So, you are already flying a kite when they tell you to go fly a kite.
This is the crucial point where the matter of changing the way we think is concerned. I can't give you anything. You can't give me anything. We can't give anyone else anything. What do we pay a preacher (teacher, guru, advisor, spiritual director, guide) for? They are paid to say "I can't give you anything.” Not giving you anything means giving you everything you need, like their trust in your ability to find your way, their confidence that you have what you need, their reassuring, caring, presence when it seems impossibly difficult, their questions for clarification and understanding, and an environment in which you can sound out your ideas about the way for you, and gain greater clarity than you could ever achieve on your own, and know that while you are on your own, you are not alone. This is the stuff life is made of.
We are on our own, but we are not alone. We are not alone in the work of being alive. Being alive has nothing to do with the realization of our dreams and desires, with our goals and ambition. It has to do only with being alive in the moment we are living and living their with integrity and authenticity. Waking up, enlightenment, realization, satori, and the like are not about getting, having, owning, possessing, acquiring, amassing, avoiding. They are not about pleasure and prosperity and wealth and power and control. They are not about fortune and glory. They are about being alive, here and now, genuinely being ourselves in the time and place, context and circumstances of our living.
The path we hear so much about is not a way from here to there but a way from here to here. We don't GO anywhere. We don't go ANYWHERE. We just wake up to where we are. See it for what it is. Understand how things are and what is being asked of us, and let it be as it is, how it is, where it is, when it is, why it is, because it is, with equanimity, peace, and acceptance, and do what needs to be done there as only we can do it. That's where the path leads. To doing what needs to be done, offering what we have to give as only we can give it, and doing it with the right spirit, in the right frame of mind. This is Christ-like-ness. Buddha-hood. The way of the True Human Being. Zen living. Life in the fullest, deepest, richest sense of the word.
We are on our own, and we are not alone. The assistance we get is assistance with bringing life to life, with bringing ourselves to life. It has nothing to do with our dreams and desires, unless our dreams and desires are about coming to life, being alive wherever and whenever and however we are. Joseph Campbell says, “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off of it.” There is That Which Knows. We are not alone, but listening, know something of what That Which Knows knows. It isn’t what we have in mind.
What we get from God is not what we want. We want “fortune and glory kid, fortune and glory.” We get life (“as a prize of war”). We get to be alive in the time and place of our living. We want a different time and place, a better time and place. Who can be alive in this old time and place? How come other people get the good times and places? How come we get stuck with these old times and places and this old God? Oh, for a God that is God the way we want God to be! “Won’t you rend the heavens and come down!” “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”
We throw God away in the search for God the way we want God to be. We run past the treasure in search of the treasure. We throw life away in the effort to have life as we want life to be. We spend our time coming up with explanations for life being the way it is (sin, you know). We spend our time devising formulas for making life into the way we want life to be (mortification, repentance, penitence, obedience and faithfulness, you know). We spend our time not-living and then we die. We have to take a chance on life.
Faith has no content. It is attitude, orientation, perspective—an orientation toward life. Faith is about trusting ourselves to our lives. We are on our own AND we are not alone! The heart, the ground, of life is cognition, awareness, knowing, comprehending, getting it and being okay with it, and responding to it out of what it is asking of us with what we have to offer. What is “it”? “It” is That Which Knows. It is the unnamable drift, or urge, or inclination toward “the good,” toward “what needs to happen now,” toward whatever is being asked for in “the situation as it arises.” What are we trying to do with the situation, achieve in it, accomplish in it? Where does that desire come from? That’s “it”! That’s what in charge of our lives, directing us to life, bringing life to life within us and in the moment of our living.
The formula for successful living is simple: Be aware of the situation and what is being asked of us, and offer to it what we have to give. To do this, we have to take up the practice, work the program. The terms are interchangeable. The practice, the program, is developing eyes that see, ears that hear and a heart that understands. The program, the practice, involves looking, listening, inquiring, asking, seeking knocking, paying attention, being awake, aware, alive. The practice, the program is being curious, heretical, experimenting, exploring, investigating, relishing the freedom to fail, to look stupid, to not know. But, this is not a practice to take up alone.
We are on our own, you know, but we are not alone, and we must not be any more alone than we have to be. The practice, the program, is taken up, conducted, within the company of those who themselves are taking up the practice, working the program. We call this “the community of faith” because it is a community of those who trust themselves to their lives. It is a community of those who know we cannot trust ourselves to find the way alone because, while we are capable of self-direction (following the urge to the good), we are also capable of self-deception (thinking the urge we are following is to the good). We all know by this point in our lives that shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best. No, telling ourselves what we want to hear is what we do best. No, fooling ourselves is what we do best. No, wanting what we have no business having is what we do best. You don’t want to leave it up to us to know which of the inner voices to follow.
The church is a part of the conversation and the atmosphere in which the conversation takes place. We talk over our sense of the next step with those who are the church, the community of faith, with us, and together we find the way. Together we help one another in the work of clarification, which reduces the risk of being wrong about the next step, but does not eliminate it. “All synods and councils,” you know, “may err, and many (Nay! All!) have erred.” We can always be wrong about what we think is right. And, so, the constant need to see, and hear, and understand, and change the way we think! Amen! May it be so!
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