A More Humane Spirituality of Both-And

Many years ago I picked up this print while on a yoga retreat.  It reads:

Woman remembering to trust the universe.

At the time I bought it, I remember being drawn to the words and the drawing, even though I did not entirely understanding them.

I still revisit this print often- particularly as of late.

I am magnetically drawn to these words: "remembering" and "trust-" yet sometimes they feel impossible.



It makes me wonder if remembering and trusting might be valid (and difficult) spiritual practices- spiritual practices that may underlie faith.

In the 14th and early 15th century there lived an English Christian mystic named Julian of Norwich who lived as an anchoress (a sort of female religious hermit).  She lived in a cell attached to a church that was surrounded by the plague, poverty and famine of medieval Europe, and one of this woman's most famous quotations is:

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

I often think about Julian's words, and the historical context of Julian's words, during times of duress. 

Times when remembering, trusting and faith feel ridiculously challenging. 

I think to myself, "if this woman could do it during the black plague, then surly I can do it during one U.S. election cycle!"

But to be honest, it can be hard.

Like recently with my mother's latest  (unexpected) cancer surgery, and both of my kids being sick with the flu, and a tragedy at work.   During times like these I can easily feel overwhelmed and lose my center, and remembering, trusting and faith can feel like moons away.

In years past, when I noticed the distance I had traveled from my center I might react by spiritually strong-arming myself. 

I would purposefully push myself into contact with my faith in god and spiritual values in order to find some perspective.  And I realize now, it had a sort of aggression to it.

By moving so quickly to what some might call the universal (god), and in so doing almost dismissing the particular (me and my day to day life), I, at a minimum, engaged with myself  harshly and unmercifully, but probably more squarely inhumanely.

This is not a judgment.

I was raised culturally with a lot of that 'ol New England pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality that most surely has influenced my spiritual life- and then some.

Yet, understanding the causes and conditions for an unhelpful response doesn't make it okay.

Lately I've been intrigued by spiritual writings that seem to hold both the universal and the particular with the same sense of awe and tenderness, and I'm beginning to wonder if this compassionate approach (or method) may be a more humane path toward remembering, trusting and, ultimately, faith.

In Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh's 2008 book Breath: You are Alive! he writes about what he calls the "two dimensions of reality" which are identified as: the historical dimension and the ultimate dimension.

He writes:

We live in history. In this dimension, there are birth and death, a beginning and an end, being and nonbeing, high and low, success and failure.  We are used to dwelling in this dimension... But the two dimensions belong to each other.  You cannot take the historical dimension out of the ultimate dimension, or the ultimate dimension out of the historical dimension. It is like the wave and the water.  You cannot take the wave out of the water, nor the water out of the wave.

In the past when I would try to nearly force myself into a space of god (the "ultimate" dimension) it was like I was trying to pry the wave out of the water.

In another text, Not Always So by Buddhist teacher and author Shunryu Suzuki, the same idea is represented, but in slightly different language.  He writes:

That is our spirit when we say, 'We pray that the Dharma wheel and the material wheel go smoothly forever'...If we are too involved in the idea of time or taking care of the material world, we will lose our way.

I know I can very easily lose my way when I can only see the narrow worldly pain (or material wheel) that is directly in front of me. 

Yet, swinging the pendulum all the way to over to what is godly or universal (or the Dharma wheel), as if to invalidate or evaporate what is particular, is not helpful (or compassionate) either. 

No, I think it has to be both-and.

A path toward a faith that is remembering and trusting would include the universal and the particular, the historical and the ultimate, the material and the Dharma.

Going forward, I pray that you and I meet ourselves with awe and tenderness, remembering and trusting both the wave and the water.

May it be so.

Finding God in a Blog

I didn't know how far I had drifted from god until recently when I was reading a series of blogs by Omid Safi, author and Duke University’s Director of Islamic Studies Center.

In an online column for the NPR Radio Show On Being called "Calling on God as a Friend," Mr. Safi wrote:

I wanted to share some insights on what befriending God looks like by sharing a few pearls from the lovely friend of God, Abu‘l-Hasan Kharaqani, who passed on to the eternal realm in 1033...

Kharaqani was a simple and humble man who came from a very modest background. He was not a scholar, nor did he possess perfect command of Arabic. He called on to God in his mother tongue, Persian. It was his friendship with God that sustained him. Kharaqani said:

“Sustenance of the friends of God is through friendship with God.”

He experienced much sorrow in his life, including having his children pass away, but it was the friendship with God that brought him joy. He described this joy as one that was more precious than any and all acts of ritual worship.

Many have tried to describe the spiritual path through a thousand and one metaphors. These friends of God simply said that the path is to be “at ease with God.”

For Kharaqani, this friendship was a mutual seeking. God is seeking us as we are seeking us. God yearns to befriend us as we seek God. Kharaqani talks about a dream he had one night:

One night I saw God Almighty in a dream.
I said to God:
“It’s been sixty years that I have spent
in the hope of being your friend,
of desiring you.”

God Almighty answered me:
“You’ve been seeking me for sixty years?
I’ve spent an eternity
to eternity
befriending you.”  

One of the stories from Kharaqani gives an indication of the loving, tender, even humorous friendship that he shared with God. This is possible for all of us, if we walk on the path of befriending God.

Reading (and re-reading) Mr. Safi's blog I was reminded how little time I have been spending in contemplation with god.  To be honest, I've been darn near neglectful.

A month ago I posted a blog entitled "Wholesome & Unwholesome Habits" about my newfound, unbalanced fixation with national news and politics.  It would seem this unwholesome habit has become more than just a precipitator of dis-ease; it also appears to have taken away from my time spent cultivating awareness of god.

But since for me religion and the life of the spirit is a joyful place of refuge--not a desert of shame and guilt--my main question is: how did I wander so far from home? And, how did I not see it?

Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh writes and talks about something called "Mindfulness Bells" which is the practice of stopping (whatever you are doing in the moment), breathing and anchoring yourself in the present moment.

A Mindfulness Bell could be an actual chiming of a bell that rings every hour on the hour- as it does in the monastic communities of Thich Nhat Hanh like Plum Village in France and Blue Cliff Monastery in New York.

But it can also be a metaphor.

As is described on the Plum Village website:

When we hear one of these mindfulness bells ring, we stop all of our conversations and whatever we are doing and bring our awareness to our breathing. The ringing bell has called out to us:

Listen, listen,
this wonderful sound brings me back to
my true home.

By stopping to breathe and restore our calm and our peace, we become free, our work becomes more enjoyable and the friend in front of us becomes more real...We can use the ringing of our telephone, the local church bells, the cry of a baby, or even the sound of fire engines and ambulances as our bells of mindfulness. With just three conscious breaths we can release the tensions in our body and mind and return to a cool and clear state of being.

Reading Mr. Safi's column was like a "mindfulness bell" for me because it prompted a wonderful pause to bring me back to my true home.

As a Unitarian Universalist I feel extremely fortunate that I am not limited to the narrow (but splendid) scope of UU thinkers and writers in my journey of faith and god. 

As part of what's called Our Living Tradition in Unitarian Universalism there are these three (of Six) Sources:

 

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
• Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
• Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life.

What this means in practical terms is, for me, I can rather innocuously begin to read a blog by a Muslim scholar, and then suddenly be lifted out of a place of spiritual neglect and deprivation.

A moment that Christian writer Anne Lamott might call "Grace...Eventually."

In another recent column called "Prayer of the Heart" Mr. Safi writes:

What is this presence?

It is not so much presence of God.

God is always present.

It is we humans who are absent from our own heart.

Presence means to have the fullness of who we are with us...

We are, too often, scattered.

We speak about being scatterbrained. The truth of the matter is that the scatteredness is much more systematic. We are scattered at every level: body, soul, mind, spirit.

We do this to ourselves...

To pray with the heart, to have presence in the heart, is a remedy.

It is a healing, an un-scattering.

Presence is simply to have our heart be where our feet are.

This starts with a mindfulness, with an awareness of the breath.

When we monitor our breath, simply observe the breath enter into the heart, and emerge from the heart, our breathing slows down.

The heart rate slows down.

Here is where we become whole: our body, our breath, our spirit become One.

When we become one, The One is Here with us.

Here and Now.

In that moment, in this breath, we are healed, and whole.

And what a prayer there is in this breath.

What Presence.

God has always been present, waiting for us.

We ourselves become present, meeting God.

This is the Prayer of the Heart.

This is the Eternal Now (waqt), where Muhammad is to have said:

“I have an Eternal Now with my Loving Lord.”

This is the reason why mystics are Children of the Moment.

Exquisite.

After reading these two posts (and several of his others), I felt returned to my breath, my meditation practice, and my daily spiritual readings with a renewed devotion and remembrance (as in re-membering) of my sense of self in god as a perfect cosmic wholeness.

May you too encounter your own Mindfulness Bells today that may bring you back to your true home.

 

 

Kindred Spirits: Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

 and I wake in the night at the least sound

 in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

 I go and lie down where the wood drake

 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

 I come into the peace of wild things

 who do not tax their lives with forethought

 of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

 And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time

 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


I love this poem.

And I love that there is another human-being walking the planet right now, in this case a writer named Wendell Berry, who is thinking these same thoughts, feeling these same feelings and doing these same doings- even if they were born of another place (Kentucky) and time (1968).

In the same year, 1968, Mr. Berry, who has been described as a Christian pacifist, made the following statement at the University of Kentucky regarding the War in Vietnam.

We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to 'win the hearts and minds of the people' by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the 'truth' of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. . . . I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.

It is startling and unnerving how deeply these words still resonate today, nearly 50 years later...

  

Poetry 110: The Invitation

The Invitation.

 

Please,

enter the circle,

and make room for others.

 

Every one of us

is invited to this moment.

Every

single

one of us.

 

Believe it or not,

there is room for us all.

So relax.

Step in

and exhale.

God smiles on all of us,

with the invitation

to be awake and alive.

Please accept it.

This space is yours

by divine right.

So touch the earth.

Just as Siddartha did

under the Bodhi tree, or

Jesus at the

Sermon on the Mount.

The offering is yours,

so take your portion with pleasure,

(but leave a share for your neighbor.)

Don't panic-

there is enough

to go around.

You

are

welcome. 

 

-Me

Spiritual Democracy: A Cultural Philosophy

I once heard an Evangelical Christian pastor with dreadlocks say on an NPR show: mixing church and state is like combining horse manure and ice cream.  It may not do damage to the manure, but it's sure gonna mess up the ice cream. 

And the truth is, I don't actually know if this person was saying religion was the ice cream or the manure...probably doesn't matter. It still makes a point. 

I've been thinking a lot about this topic in the past year though, especially in the context of U.S. news reports such as these:

1.)“In high school basketball games 400 miles apart, spirited rivalry gave way to racial strife when some students chanted 'Trump' as an epithet directed at Latino students...

'During the course of that game, a group of Andrean students produced signs and images of presidential candidate Donald Trump and began to chant 'Build that wall,' at the Bishop Noll team and fans, who are heavily Hispanic,' the Catholic Dioceses of Gary, which oversees both schools, said in a statement.”  CNN 3/1/16

2.) “The voices behind racist chants that disturbed black and Latina high school girls soccer players came from Wisconsin schoolchildren, officials revealed.

A friendly soccer match between the girls at Beloit Memorial and Elkhorn High School quickly turned into an ugly, racist mess on Thursday, as three elementary school girls yelled, 'Donald Trump, build that wall!' at the players of color on the field, Jason Tadlock, a district administrator for Elkhorn Area School District, told the Daily News.” New York Daily News 4/11/16

3.)“ROYAL OAK, Mich. — A viral video of middle school students at a Michigan school shouting 'build the wall' during a lunch hour Wednesday has sparked outrage across social media, leading some to demand that school district officials take action.”  USA Today 11/10/16

4.)“Election-related taunts of Hispanic students in Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s hometown of Columbus have prompted school administrators to call for civility and respect.

Those taunts have included chants of 'build that wall!' that made some students uncomfortable.”  IndyStar 11/12/16

And just this week:

5.)“Canton students and families have begun emailing Hartford's Classical Magnet School to express their regrets and support after a group of Canton High School students taunted Classical's basketball players with 'Trump' chants, which some found racially motivated, during a high-stakes varsity game this week.” Hartford Courant 3/2/17

Reading about these acts of bigotry by children left me aghast and scared.

As someone born in 1977 (13 years after the signing of 1964 Civil Rights Act) these events reminded me of images and stories I'd only seen second-hand of white teenage boys and girls spitting on, pushing, and yelling at African American boys and girls (including elementary school children) after the Supreme Court passed the Brown vs. Board of Education case to allow for racial integration in schools and beyond.

What vexed me further, beyond the report of bigotry itself, was that if you read a little further into most of these news articles, you would read something about the apparent dichotomy between "free speech" and "hate speech"- a debate I am beginning to loathe as it appears to be the only narrow response anyone can think to have.

Do not misunderstand me.  I believe the law (or government) absolutely has a central place in these growing number of incidents of bigotry just as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was a necessary step for desegregation.

I also believe that religion may have a pertinent role here too; by either reinforcing civility through both the compassionate teachings of prophets in your own religion (e.g. love your neighbor as yourself in Christianity, the five precepts of Buddhism, or the acts of charity in Islam), and acknowledging the inhumanity of excluding a group of people from the protection of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights based on their religion.

However, I also want to definitively get to the root of why there is a growing number in the first place? AND, how are we as a community going to address it?

I have a hunch, it may have to do with culture.

Culture is something that has always fascinated me since my early undergraduate days as a Sociology Major.

According to Wikipedia, culture:

can be defined in numerous ways. In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is 'that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.' Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, 'Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.' The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is 'the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.'

Circling back to these new reports of children engaging in bigotry, unlike the law or government which says you can't do something because it is illegal, or religion which says you can't do something because it is a sin, culture asks you to consider your actions within the larger social and historical context- culture is transactional and acknowledges that no single individual and no single idea exists in a vacuum.

So what can be scary about culture?

Consider Rolfe from The Sound of Music.

If you haven't seen this movie or musical in a while, Rolfe is the 17 year-old blonde-haired blue-eyed German boy who starts out as a smitten teenager in love with the eldest Von Trapp daughter, Liesl.

However, by the end of the musical, sweet, wholesome Rolfe has transformed into a Nazi solider loyal to Hitler himself.

I'll tell you, growing up watching The Sound of Music every year on the television, the character of Rolfe terrified me.  I didn't understand how:
a.) someone's behaviors could change in such a dramatic way, and
b.) a society would permit behaviors that harmed others.

Now, my simplified answer to both would be: culture.

Off stage, the scary version of how powerful culture can be if it is unattended to, could be the 1983 case of Cheryl Araujo in which a woman was gang-raped by 4 men in a public bar in Massachusetts and nobody intervened to stop it.  Her story was later told in the 1988 Jodie Foster movie The Accused.

There may be an upside to culture too though.  And that may be a cultural philosophy of spiritual democracy.

What would this look like?

Many years ago I volunteered with an organization that was engaging communities in a project called Community Conversations on Race.  The details of the project I'll write about at another time, but what I'm remembering most about that time right now is, oddly, the T-Shirt they gifted me as a thank you on my last day.

Nobody's Born A Bigot.

Nobody.

Okay, if that is true (and to be clear, I believe that it is), then what happened to Rolfe? What happened to those elementary school girls at the soccer game?

They learned bigotry (discriminatory thoughts and behaviors) from our larger culture which begs the question: how do we as a community address cultural bigotry without merely relying upon The Ten Commandments and/or The U.S. Constitution?

A spiritual democracy.

A spiritual democracy would be closer to what I believe Bono, the lead singer of U2 is talking about when he repeatedly says in interviews that "America is not just a country, it is an idea."

It would be more like a planetary version (yes, I dream big!) of my 7 year-old son's award winning character education program in his public school that is day in and day out teaching, modeling and reinforcing what they call "character ideals" that form the "foundation of the school culture."

(See, there's that word again: culture.)

A spiritual democracy would be more like a cultural philosophy; similar in nature to the impact of the 19th century transformative philosophy of transcendentalism.

By using culture as the container for a healthy democracy, as opposed to strictly manure or ice cream (I mean government or religion), then you would not need court houses or temples to be present at every single high school football field  in order for civility, decency and dare I say compassion to reign. 

If culture is transactional, as opposed to merely top-down, then this model of pro-social behavior would be more truly "of the people, by the people and for the people."

Therefore, a cultural philosophy of spiritual democracy, in addition to humane laws and religious moral codes, may actually increase our national and global possibility that democracy will be upheld over time.

May it be so.

A Time for Stillness & Quiet

For the last 14 months, amid the noise, disappointment and clamor of the U.S. Presidential Election, my mother has been treated intensively for Stage 3 Breast Cancer.

It has felt like a parallel process.

The course of treatment included 4 surgeries, 7 months of (more than one) chemotherapy infusions, 6 weeks of daily radiation treatment, and 8 months of physical therapy- the cancer treatment that is...

Two weeks ago, on the same day my husband was having surgery,  my mother told me her doctors are recommending another surgery for her.

I was speechless.

Since that announcement, I've been thinking about the poem by 20th century Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

that is called "Keeping Quiet." It goes like this:

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Exquisite, no?

It reminds me of the essence of author Pico Iyer's writings and essays about stillness and quiet-

which I seem to be needing lately because I've scoured the internet and his blog (http://picoiyerjourneys.com/) for articles and interviews on these very same topics.

But now, I feel like I need to put all of my reading (on the internet or otherwise) away.

I once heard an acoustic ecologist named Gordon Hempton, founder of an organization called The One Square Inch of Silence say:

Quiet can be quieting.

I couldn't agree more. 

So this weekend, serendipitously, I am scheduled to attend an all-day mindfulness meditation retreat at The Center for Mindfulness, and the timing couldn't be more perfect.

If stillness and quiet are what I am craving, then eight silent hours turned inward--without electronics, CNN or even conversation--is exactly what the doctor ordered.

In an interview with Krista Tippett on NPR on the topic of his book The Art of Stillness, the also well-known travel writer Mr. Iyer had said,

I noticed when I began travelling a lot 30 years ago, I would talk about going to Cuba or going to Tibet, and people's eyes would light up with excitement. And nowadays, I notice that people's eyes light up most in excitement when I talk about going nowhere or going offline.  And I think a lot of us have the sense that we're living at the speed of light, at a pace determined by machines [and politics]. And we've lost the ability to live at the speed of life.

I have found this to be true as well when I tell others I am going on retreat.

It's like people know that our current pace in the modern western world is not sustainable, yet up till now, we have not learned the necessary strategies and capabilities to set the appropriate limits in order to thrive in it.

Mr. Iyer offered up his own solution to this dilemma in a 2009 The New York Times article called "The Joy of Less" about his minimalist life outside of Kyoto, Japan.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

 

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started.

 

While I agree with Mr. Iyer himself who says: I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people, I have found it deeply validating to read through his ideas and personal a-ha moments about material and spiritual stillness and quiet, in order to clarify my own need to follow Pablo Neruda's recommendation that we all take time to keep still while we count up to twelve.

 

May you find your own stillness and quiet in the coming days too.