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