Tag Archives: faith

Charlotte Joko Beck and Disappointment

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Disappointment is a recurrent feature of our lives. Some people handle it well while others are just devastated, not able to cope with the misfortune, perceived or otherwise, that has come their way. But Charlotte Joko Beck sees disappointment as an opportunity:

When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it’s the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we’re alert. This gift is always present in anyone’s life, that moment when ‘It’s not the way I want it.”

I’ve seen people face the disappointment and then with sheer will power and brute force face the disappointing circumstances and get what they want, only to later learn that it was not the best thing for them or for others. Yes, there is a time to confront the disappointment but Beck’s point was that there are definitely times when the disappointment needs to be embraced as a learning opportunity.

One of the greatest causes of disappointment is failure and it can be one of the most horrifying experiences of our life. But failure also often has something to teach us. E. L. Mayo put it like this, “Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.” When in the throes of failure, our heart torn asunder with the disappointment of having our dreams crushed, if we can manage to pause for a moment, and exercise “mindfulness”, we can often find an intelligence present in the moment that will teach us something we would not have learned otherwise.

 

“Unaccomodated Man”–The Absence that we Are

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King Lear gave up his kingdom, became estranged from his family, became very disconsolate, lost his eyesight and even  his mind,  and suddenly found himself out on the heath, pelted by a pitiless storm and retreating to a hovel where he lamented,  “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare forked animal…” Shakespeare saw clearly that man was other than he takes himself to be, that the trappings of his life merely cover up his internal nakedness. He realized and repeatedly emphasized the absence that we are.

And, when we get to the point in life where we entertain this spiritual impoverishment and experience the loss of our “kingdom”, the trappings of our ego-bound life that we have always taken to be of such great importance suddenly appear to amount to nothing. And when we get “naked”…as King Lear did literally after the above quote…we can discover meaning in our life and meaning for all of these trappings which until now have been merely “accomodations.” At this point many, if not all, of these “accomodations” can still be ours but they will not be the core of our identity any longer. We will have them. They will no longer have us.

Listen to what Thomas Merton said about this subject in his book, Seeds of Contemplation:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself in glory to make myself perceptible…as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface….But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structures of pleasures and ambitions have no foundation. I am my own mistake…..The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.

Shakespeare, Merton and other great spiritual luminaries recognized that entertaining this “absence that we are” is an essential task in life and is a spiritual enterprise. They recognized that only when we embrace our emptiness, not just cognitively but emotionally, can we find the fullness of our Source. This is what Jesus had in mind when he said that to find our life we must lose it, we must lose the ego investments in ephemeral things in order to embrace the Essential. And, this also often means “losing” our religion as we have to forgo the ego-ridden, “letter of the law”, approach to spirituality and this often feels like we are losing our faith. Sometimes we have to lose our faith to find it.

 

Paean to God’s Little Children

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Last year I substitute taught in public schools with young children ages 5-8. I have noted here before how deeply moved I was by the experience, learning anew how precious and beautiful they are. These children were so very alive, not yet having been deadened by the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too”…most of them anyway. (There were some who, sadly, had been deadened and it was horrible to see. Their “life” had been taken from them already, their spiritual vitality missing or depleted.)

The “life” present in these children, though, really galvanized the spiritual reawakening I have experienced the past few years. My “inner child” was stirred deeply by the innocence, vulnerability, neediness, and love of these children. And, I might add, these children loved me too which should be the highlight of my resume henceforth for there is no accomplishment of which I am more proud.

This experience made me often think of these words of Jesus regarding children, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (Luke 18:16-17)” Jesus recognized in the children of his day the same qualities I noted in my classes last year, seeing that they trusted openly from the depths of their heart, not having learned to do otherwise. He was telling us that he wanted us to trust Him, our Source, just like these children were trusting. The trust that he had in mind was not a rational experience as much as one of the heart, not something that was carefully thought out, the conclusion of a research project of sorts. This trust was just a spontaneous flow from the depths of the heart.

And most of us have a hard time getting this “flow” underway as the “research project” method of faith that we were inculcated with is hard to shake. It sure has been for me and still is at it is an ongoing process. Getting the flow to going is a matter of being willing to peel off the layers of our social self, that contrivance of the ego, and get down to the core of who we are, to our “be-ing” itself. And, when we “be” we are going to have to entertain at some point the “Be-ing One” (as in Yahweh’s ‘I am that I am’) in some fashion, though our conception of the experience might be different; for, conceptions are culturally determined where as Being (the “Being One)” lies beyond the realm of conceptions and is, by the way, That which ultimately unites us all.

These thoughts were inspired by Richard Rohr again who continues to almost daily steal my ideas and never gives me credit for them! Damn him!

PEACE OF MIND IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS

“Beginner’s mind” is actually someone who’s not in their mind at all! They are people who can immediately experience the naked moment apart from filtering it through any mental categories. Such women and men are capable of simple presence to what is right in front of them without “thinking” about it too much. This must be what Jesus means by little children already being in the kingdom of God (Matthew 18:3-4). They don’t think much, they just experience the moment—good and bad. That teaching alone should have told us that Christianity was not supposed to be about believing doctrines and moralities. Children do not believe theologies or strive for moral certitudes. They respond vulnerably and openly to what is offered them moment by moment. This is pure presence, and is frankly much more demanding than securing ourselves with our judgments.

Presence cannot be easily defined. Presence can only be experienced. But I know this: True presence to someone or something allows them or it to change me and influence me—before I try to change them or it!

Beginner’s mind is pure presence to each moment before I label it, critique it, categorize it, exclude it, or judge it up or down. That is a whole new way of thinking and living. It is the only mind that has the power to actually reform religion.

Adapted from Beginner’s Mind (CD, DVD, MP3)

The Daily Meditations for 2013 are now available
in Fr. Richard’s new book Yes, And . . . .

Rumi Points Us to the Real!

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This beautiful poem by Rumi illustrates what I see as a central message of Jesus. In my own words, Jesus’ ministry can be summed up with, “Hey, you guys and gals, you got it all wrong! You are taking for real that which is only temporary.” This was most clearly emphasized when he said in Matthew 6, “ Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. Earlier Plato had noted the same phenomena with his myth a man being chained in a cave in which he could only see the shadows of the world that was going on behind him outside the cave’s opening. He naturally took the shadows to be the real thing. I think it was C. S. Lewis who described this as “the sin of misplaced concreteness,” taking the ephemeral to be the real. Here, Rumi presents the notion with customary eloquence:

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.The cave wants nothing to do
with the sun. This is dumb, the self-
defeating way we’ve been. A gold mine
is calling us into its temple. Instead,
we bend and keep picking up rocks
from the ground. Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source!
The origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give. The bite of scolding
makes ecstasy more familiar. But
look, fish, you’re already in the ocean:
just swimming there makes you friends
with glory. What are these grudges about?
You are Benjamin. Joseph has put a gold cup
in your grain sack and accused you of being
a thief. Now he draws you aside and says,
“You are my brother. I am a prayer. You’re
the amen.” We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here. This is the prayer
of each: You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud. You honor
my soul. You bring rivers from the
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.
The wine you offer takes me out of myself
into the self we share. Doing that is religion.

 

Do We Dare Let Go of Guilt?

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Huffington Post offers a very insightful article about dealing with guilt and escaping its clutches. (Huff Po =— http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/dealing-with-guilt-iyanla-vanzant_n_3472594.html)

How do we let go of any emotion that has tyrannized us such as guilt has. Sure, I accept the notion of the forgiveness of God offered in the story of Jesus, for example. But that comes to us first as a rational, conceptual “idea” and does not necessarily burrow into the depths of the heart where the “real” guilt abides; for the “real” guilt is in the affective domain which controls how we use our rational mind. Thus, our guilt can make us “guilty” believers of any stripe which will always make us so fanatical and legalistic that people who come across us will want to put up the “sign of the cross” when we approach and run away. For, guilt-ridden faith offers no “human” quality and therefore has no “godly” quality to it. It is just an “idea” devoid of any experience; or, better yet, it is an “idea” devoid of any Spirit, as in the “letter of the law killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.”

Guilt so often is so intrinsic to our being that we can’t fathom living without it. Letting it go would make us feel like a duck out of water or a fish on dry land. It would be scary and even fatal in a sense in that our ego would definitely be threatened by the loss of this core element which allows it to cohere. My dear friend, brother, spiritual mentor, and soul mate, Bill Shakespeare said it so eloquently, noting in Hamlet that we would prefer to “cling to those ills that we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” Our guilt is so comforting because it is the only thing that we have ever known. And, we are validated daily for living in this guilt as it is guilt (and shame) that binds our world together in the dog-and-pony show that the Hindus’ call Maya and fundamentalist American Christians call, “Well, it’s just the way things are.” And many faiths depend on guilt as without guilt attendance of their churches, synagogues, and mosques might decline, worship palaces fall into disrepair, clergy go underpaid or unemployed, and its constituents left with the challenge of dealing with Reality…which always requires faith in a Beyond which I often label our Source. And, I am of course referring to a transcendent deity who is, paradoxically, immanent; and the appreciation of this powerful truth requires ability and a willingness to hold contradictory notions in the mind at the same time. In other words, this notion “ain’t makin’ no sense” to many people and it never will!

But, there is always “method to our madness,” individually and collectively. The best we can ever do is muddle through and believe fervently that there is a “wisdom that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Last two quotes from “Bill”)

 

Plucked by a Tulip????

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It was a lovely, cool spring morning in 1990 and I had just been married about 9 months. I was in our front yard and was greeted by a bounty of lovely tulip blossoms. I bent down to pluck one and as I did so, the notion fluttered through my mind, “Am I plucking or being plucked?” That was such a random, silly thought that just “happened” but it immediately caught my eye even before I knew about “mindfulness.” And it is no coincidence that this event happened shortly after my first and only marriage, each of us being in our mid thirties.

This was the beginning of the end for my rigid, “lost in the head”, concrete thinking though it would take another two decades and more for the process to get to the point where the “flow” of life would begin to take place in my heart. The boundary ambiguity noted in that observation flourished over those decades and I increasingly have become more adept at drawing less of a distinction between “me and thee.” Now I do draw distinctions; and failure to do so would be a serious problem for we do live in the “real” world where distinctions and ego-functioning is required. But I’m not trapped in the paradigm of “I’m over here” and “you are out there”; I’m more able to see my world, human and natural, in more inclusive terms.

Now, I must point out that “I” was plucking the damn tulip! But in so doing the beauty of the moment was toying with my heart, bringing to my mind and heart the notion of “being plucked.” There is such magnificent beauty in the world but we can’t see, and feel, this beauty unless we are able to let go of the rigid ego-identification which our culture always mandates. But the ego identification is so insidious that we can’t even see it without having already somehow escaped its clutches. This is relevant to an old philosophical bromide that I came across decades ago, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it” ; or, “Asking someone to see his ‘self’ is like asking a fish to see water.” Or, even better yet, one of my Indian blog-o-sphere friends offered, “Someone who has fallen into a vat of marmalade can’t see anything but marmalade.” I liked his observation because it was new to me and registered dissonant at first, thus communicating to me effectively as I quickly mulled it over.

This drawing of distinction between “me and thee” is intrinsically a spiritual process. And I’m not even address “Spiritual” here though it is very relevant. I’m referring to “spiritual” as a human enterprise in the depths of the heart, a willingness to look inside which is an enterprise that our culture discourages. And if we deign to venture “there”, we will eventually end up wrestling with “God” in the realm of the “Spiritual.”

Southern Baptists and “The Wisdom of Humility”

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Terry Mattingly reported re a recent discussion with leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention re decline in baptisms, reflecting a decline in “conversions.” I here provide a link to this article so you can see how the SBC is attempting to explain this decline. (http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/jun/14/terry-mattingly-baptists-with-fewer-baptisms/)

But, having been a Baptist myself, I have an opinion which I shared weeks ago after a newspaper article reported about a new demographic category, the “nones”, people who now selected “none” when asked about which religion they are affiliated with. (https://literarylew.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/an-open-letter-to-the-clergy-re-the-nones/)
I feel that Baptists err in that they adhere rigidly to the “letter of the law” even while preaching against this very thing. But by taking the Bible literally, they fail to see the nuances of the Scripture and fail to appreciate the layers of meaning that it offers. They fail in exercise of hermeneutic discipline.

I here would like to share a paragraph by a professor of religion in San Antonio, Glenn Hughes:

…there are those who try to hold on their sense of the divine by tenaciously attaching themselves to religion in a quite uncritical manner—in a closed-minded manner that renders the world of everyday responsibilities, and the awareness of historical complexities, more bearable though massive psychological reliance on intense, unexamined feelings evoked by religious symbols, rituals, and texts. Thus is forged an attitude of intransigent certainty that one is in possession of the sole and absolute truth about divinity. And thus the full complexity of the challenges of existential self-making and of responsibility for history is sidestepped, to some degree, by ignoring the problematic fact of the transcendence of divine transcendence—that is, its profound mysteriousness and its unavailability to direct or substantive human understanding—that the former child’s sense of the nearness of the divine absolute becomes transformed into an inflexible, dogmatic, and (as we all know) sometimes murderous conviction that the intense feelings evoked by one’s own religious tradition are infallible guides to absolute, exclusive religious truth.  (A More Beautiful Question:  The Spiritual in Poetry and Art)

If the Gospel is to be meaningful, it must be refracted through a heart in which meaning is present. By that, I mean a heart that is “petal open” and full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare’s term) not one that’s keeping human frailty at bay with rigid, compensatory certainty. In other words, a heart that is humble. And, as T. S. Eliot noted, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. And humility is endless.”

Being “Right” is a Pyrrhic Victory

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I’ve had a life-long battle with “being right.” It is certainly not unrelated to having been born and bred in “right-wing” social, political, and religious culture in the deep South of the United States where “rules” predominate. And it is always “rules” that makes one “right,” or allows him to think that he is. I think very early on I had a heart like most people but then I was offered a bargain, “Hey, you forgo that tumult in your heart where emotion and reason are doing battle, give in to reason and let it reign, and you will have the consolation of being ‘right.”’ So I spent the first two decades of my life assiduously striving to live according to the rules, failing to see just how closely this life-style approximated that of the Pharisees who Jesus upbraided so often. Since then, the “ruled” life has slowly given way to the burgeoning power of emotion, a process that received a boost in my mid-thirties when I discovered poetry. Now, nearly three decades later there is some indication that this warfare is getting closer to resolution as emotion and intellect are working much more in tandem than ever before. Now instead of using my intellect to rigidly carve up the world…and myself…I use this gift to seek common ground with others believing that there is a Unity that underlies this world of multiplicity.

And having those two dimensions of the heart working in tandem should be our goal. When “flesh and mind are delivered from mistrust” (Auden), we are witnessing something akin to the Spirit of God being present though the “Spirit of God” certainly needs more discussion than I choose to give it now. Reason, without the balance of emotion (or heart) is just an effort to stay in control, to tyrannize one’s own self and simultaneously try to tyrannize those around him. Therefore, Goethe was astute when he noted, “They call it Reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

Now occasionally the old demon of “being right” will surface again. Recently it teased me briefly and then I took the bait slipped into the “being right” mode. It was a veritable black hole for a while until I managed to right myself and escape its clutches. For, there is no end to “being right”. We have the Taliban as one example of this but we have similar expressions of the same dark force present in our own country. And, yes it got me recently. It will always be a temptation for it is so wonderful to “know” that you are right and to “set someone straight.”

I offered a snippet of Auden’s observation about this matter earlier. Now I will share the context:

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

 

The Courage to Be

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To be is to be vulnerable. To be is to live life on the edge, outside the comfort zone of those “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) Theologian Paul Tillich wrote a marvelous book on this subject entitled, “The Courage to Be” in which he related this matter to Jahweh’s Old Testament declaration, “I am that I am” or “I am the Being One.” And it does take courage to venture into “be-ing” in our life and not merely living it on automatic pilot.

T. S. Eliot described this vulnerability as “an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.” Life is so fragile and we know this in the depth of our hearts but are mercifully spared too much awareness of this vulnerability. Eliot noted, “Human kind cannot bear too much reality.” And it is good that we know that we can’t and know how to find “fig leaves” to hide this nakedness most of the time. But it is so important to know that the “fig leaf” is there and to take it off occasionally and find that God will meet us there.

Some Subtleties about Prayer

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In January when the Republican Party was still reeling from their unexpected loss to President Obama two months earlier, there was a lot of noise about ousting Senator John Boehner as Speaker of the House. But, according to a story in the Washington Post last week, several members of the House prayed the night before a critical vote on the issue and were “led” to spare Mr. Boehner. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-republicans-have-broken-into-fighting-factions/2013/06/03/7533e606-b8ff-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_story_3.html)

Now, I’m always in favor of prayer in any circumstances, being it even ceremonial or perfunctory. I feel that any prayer is a venture to a field of reference outside of ourselves and is good. However, I am always given pause with public prayer, or public reports of prayer, and how “the Lord’ answered the prayers. For, I feel that often prayer is merely a request to get from On High what we want for our own selfish purposes. We pray intently and fervently for what we already want for motives which are often base; and then occasionally when we get a prayer answered we take great pleasure, announcing that “God intervened” through our humble petitions. Well, don’t forget that there is the phenomenon of a “blind pig finding a walnut every now and then.”

Sure, we should pray for what we need, we should make “our petitions known to God” but I think it is really important to remember that prayer can be an exercise in self-indulgence. To many Christians, or believers of any cut, view God as some concretely existing “Teddy Bear in the Sky” who waits for our beck and call, ready to give us exactly what we want, failing to recognize that many people at the same time might be praying with equal fervency for just the opposite. Some, of course do recognize this, but take comfort in the pious observation, “Yes, but then we are right with the Lord and so the Lord will listen to us”, implying that those who look differently on the issue are not “right with the Lord.” The implicit assumption belies an arrogance that makes me suspect that the prayer never gets beyond the halo of the pray-er.

I think at some point in our spiritual life we need to get beyond the point of seeing God at our beck and call, ready to “smite” those who disagree with us, ready to bring about our own purposes which, upon honest scrutiny, could often be seen as merely childish and selfish whims. At some point we need to get to the point where we sincerely conclude our prayers with, “Thy will be done,” and recognize that His will might be different than our own

Now, let me be honest. I’m holding forth about a group of conservative politicians with whom I certainly have a bone to pick. And, I think there is a degree of validity to my argument. However, I must admit that all of this discourse is merely revealing of what I recall my prayer life being about through most of my life. It has been really hard to “get over myself” and the process is not complete yet! We need to follow the advice of T. S. Eliot who noted that we must “Purify our motive in the Ground of our beseeching.”