AN ELYSIAN LIFE

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There are moments in mid summer, with senses fully engaged, with nature profligate, that my heart lifts to heaven, being right here and right now.    

Having just trod the trails around Walden Pond with my eldest daughter, I felt a kindred spirit with that guest of Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau, who said, “The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man some sort of Elysian Life.”

Elysium or the Elysian Fields was a glorious playing ground in the afterlife.  This special heaven, envisioned by the ancient Greeks, evolved through oral legend and was  mapped out specifically in poems and stories from Pindar to  Homer’s Odyssey. 

Pindar described it as a place with many shaded parks, where people could enjoy their favorite musical and athletic activities, without striving.  An Endless Summer.

Known to Homer, Elysium was located on the Islands of the Blessed, located at the far west of the end of the earth, those related to the gods or chosen by them, the heroic, and the righteous would live a happy and carefree life surrounded by nature, enjoying many of the things they enjoyed in their past life. No storms, bitter cold, or heavy toil.

Thoreau in Walden, pleads his case for simplicity and less striving for enjoying a bit of Elysium right where you are.  It is no coincidence that in the same passage he speaks of an Elysian life, he also points to the observation that  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them”.  

There are many who have said that he was an eccentric elitist, with a bachelor’s ability to philosophize and experiment.  But that would not be the whole story.  He knows that some that are reading his arguments are factory workers and those barely scraping by, and to these, he offers words of encouragement.

Rather his wrath, as it were, was saved for the middle and upper classes of Boston and Concord societies, who continue to need more and more luxuries and extravagances and in order to get them , have less and less time to enjoy the birds on the water in the early morning or the loveliness of the woods.  Essentially, he was the town prophet living on the outside of town, declaring the delusion of need. 

If possible, for perhaps a half hour or so even, you could step outside and walk or sit or notice.  You can be a master of industry in the morning. 

Quote for today: “I thank you God for this amazing day, the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.” – e.e. cummings

“Don’t Look at the Man Behind the Curtain”

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Do you remember in the Wizard of Oz when Toto yanks back the curtain exposing the scary and all-powerful wizard?  Instead of the daunting and difficult amorphous figure, he really is just a man- a little dotty and willing to help.      

In Jack Kornfield’s book, A Path With Heart, he tells a story of a father who is away from home when robbers come, set fire to the house, and take his young son away with them.  The father returns to the ashes of his house and believes his son has died there.  He grieves uncontrollably for many months.  The son manages to get free from his abductors and find his way home.  He knocks on the door and cries “Papa, Papa,” but the father refuses to open the door, thinking it is one of the neighborhood children taunting him.  Eventually the son goes away, never to return.  In this story, the father resists the truth that can bring him joy and freedom from his loss because he clings so much to what he thinks is the truth. 

Maybe we can’t quite accept a reality in our life or we have become so certain of what our particular snapshot of our reality looks like (usually pretty gruesome), and so create these curtains, these walls of resistance. And resistance comes in so many forms.  It could be a silent withdrawal, constantly being busy, ignoring or pretending not to understand, being critical, or making excuses.  It’s like a curtain that doesn’t let the light in.  It doesn’t allow for restoration, resurrection, growth, change.   

Afraid to pull back the curtain, consciously or unconsciously, we believe we are protecting ourselves from further pain or hurt. We resist change and letting go of the past.  Resistance is worn like armor against future harm.    

When in pain, we can easily live with illusions, “No one loves me.  No one cares.  I will never feel happy again.  I can’t do that.  I don’t know enough yet”, these are the sorcerers.

The beginning of healing begins when we but trust and release.   In order to see that fear is an illusion, we must be willing to risk.

You can and will be restored to a new life, regardless of the past.

 

Meditation for today: “I am entirely ready to have the chains that keep me bound be broken.  I am entirely ready for the walls I’ve built around myself to be torn down.  I am entirely ready to give up my need to control every situation.  I am entirely ready to let go of my resentments.  I am entirely ready to grow up”.- Macrina Wiederkehr

MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

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I’ve gone beyond caring about Democrat and Republican, about laying blame with one party and spouting phrases that in the end “signify nothing.”  Really I have; and it’s seems as a nation, as a world, there might be some sanity in this chosen, but not resigned, approach.  Election year notwithstanding. What is at risk with an aversion to identifying solely with any one belief system?   

It’s not that I’ve gotten complacent about matters of human injustice, environmental concerns, or the sadistic powers that lead to horrific crimes against humanity. 

It is more that I would prefer to plead the case of the adoption in our culture of (what may be classically deemed an Eastern culture school of thought), the middle way.  Incumbent upon us at this juncture of our nation and the world’s history is to find the in-between space between rapid dogma and the insipid and weak refusal to stand up for anything.  Herein lies change, herein lies greatness. 

From our ominpresent consumer perspective, this is a hard concept to sell. So instead what is being peddled year after year, is division, is separateness. What is continually wiped from our memory is the fact that we have been and are a pluralistic nation with many truths, just as the world in which we live has always been. Embracing a multiplicity of ideas can be daunting, and the “hegemonic imagination” (i.e., those in power) are continually thwarting any efforts by those who are attempting to undertake this task (consciously and unconsciously).

Added to this paradigm, much of our religious identity in the United States has stemmed from the Enlightenment conception of self. The main idea being that “each person is an independent unit that is an autonomous, self-determining ego”. Key, here, is the notion of autonomy. This has unleashed an unrestrained individualism in many of our private and public beliefs and practices that stress personal responsibility and despise any hint of or the reality of dependency.

Richard Niebuhr, along with other modern theologians, have cautioned against this tendency which focuses excessively on me, blindly on us, and divided from them. The underlying flaw in this logic is that it limits our sphere of responsibility to some degree, instead of widening the scope to humanity and the Universe. What emerges is that “I must find my center of valuation in myself, or in my nation, or in my science, etc. Good and evil in this view mean what is good for me and bad for me; or good and evil for my nation”, etc…but not that what is good in a more broad sense of looking toward sources of creativity or social solidarity.

For any ongoing process of transformation to take place, we need to put boundaries around our own needs or desires and make room for the legacies of others to penetrate our awareness. This means being able to sit in the discomfort of another’s painful story, a piece of our collective memory.

It takes conscious effort and continued discipline to form a nuanced and educated opinion.  It takes work and discipline to stay engaged in the complex issues that change and morph daily.
 
The commitment to these ideals will turn the tide of our daunting nation’s issues and not who wins any election, no matter what they try to tell/sell us.                

WAIT HERE: PATH CLEARING 101

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Just for now, just stop. Stop always making plans and planning makes.  Stop returning that last phone call, that first text, running through that thirty-seven item to-do list (yes, I’m counting) that never seems to get shorter. While everything is living and breathing and green, a jubilee of July, just for today, tomorrow, or at least for this moment: “die on purpose.”

You are going to sit right down and let the world go on without you, for a few minutes, a few hours, a day…or perhaps from a longer period of time in summer.  The world will continue on its axis.  If you just removed yourself, like my folks did when we were little, whisking us off to summer shacks peppered with family, with no telephone and no technology (what was that?), there would be no one to have to respond to.

Think about it. If you did die, those vital responsibilities and immediate obligations of yours would evaporate.  Either someone else will do them or they will simply expire by themselves, from lack of attention.  That urge to get up and fold the laundry, attend to the mail, all the things that will always be there may ease if you take a few moments to “die on purpose” to the rush of time while you are still living.  By “dying” now in this way, you actually become more alive now.  From the perspective of the eternal, where is the necessity about worrying about anything in an absolute way?

You free yourself to have time for the present.  This is what stopping can do.  There is nothing passive about it.  And when you do decide to go, go anywhere with anyone, it’s a different kind of going because you stopped.  You are given guidance.  Just watch this moment, no trying to control it, NO PLANNING. It’s a spiritual practice, dying on purpose.

So how are you feeling?  How is this being present to simply “being” instead continually “doing” feeling for you?  Can you feel the intermittent breeze of a warm summer’s evening? See the riot and blare of bright red and orange trumpet flowers cascading over the tool shed? What do you smell? Are you struggling or afraid? It’s all OK.

Practice for now: “Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.  Then, when you’re ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.” – Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are

ROOTS

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The mangrove tree blooms where it’s planted. 

Of course, one could say that all plants do that, but this unique species of tree thrives while saturated in salt water and poor soil. It has not only learned to tolerate the inhospitable environs between land and sea but put down roots. Literally. 

 Their large roots hold the trees above the briny water or the sandy soil while the base of the roots excrete the excess salt. 

Easily identifable in the Florida Everglades and the myriad esturaries that rise up through out the Southeastern United States with their radially spreading roots.

A Finger Pointing at the Moon

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I was thinking recently of a lively adult Bible class I taught a few years ago.  We used what is called in scholarly terms the “historical-metaphorical approach” to reading the text.  In other words, we tried to determine what, if any, were the historical events that certain passages were alluding to AND what did the stories mean as human interest stories, independent of historical actuality.  It was through this method that many students, who decades earlier had dismissed “believing” in the Bible, were excited and curious to learn more about a book that in many ways has helped to shape Western civilization as we know it.  

Yes, we wanted to be critical thinkers and discern fact from fiction, but we also wanted to see if the stories still resonate with us today.  Can we listen, as Marcus Borg asks, “seeking to hear what the text is saying to us and not simply absorbing the text into what we already think?” Most of us had, to some degree or another, grown to disregard much of what we read or heard in the Bible, and so it was challenging to look with fresh eyes, to what it might be pointing to for us and our relationship with ourselves, others, and God .

When we turned to the idea of metaphorically interpreting some of the passages, things new and different emerged for each of us.  Much of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are ripe with metaphor.  “Metaphor” means “to carry with” and it implies a gentle moving toward understanding.  Metaphor emphasizes seeing, not believing. 

Even if the whale didn’t swallow Jonah and spit him out several days later, even if that’s not factually true; it is profoundly true.  The story of Jonah is the human story of one who doggedly resists God’s urgings, who blatantly refuses to do God’s will, and the ensuing disastrous results from that self-centered approach.  It is a tale of transformation, forgiveness, and working in harmony with the universe instead of against it.

In Matthew 7, the Parable of the Speck and the Log, Jesus says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the log in your own eye?  How can you say, “Let me take the speck out of your eye when all the time there is a log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck in your brother’s eye.”  He is pointing out how we make judgments and criticize other’s for their faults while ignoring and not dealing with those in our own.  The sawdust and the log are not actual physical obstructions in our vision, but our spiritual vision. 

Buddhists employ the metaphor of  the finger pointing at the moon to describe the difference.  To guard against the mistake of thinking that being a Buddhist means believing literally in the Buddhist teachings, they say do not believe in the finger, but rather to what the finger is pointing.       

 The same can be said for the Bible.  It provides hundreds of  different lenses with which to see…

I DON’T KNOW

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Cultivating a stance of “I don’t know” creates an open heartedAll faiths, organized and organic, are getting you ready for a leap. Even well outside what most folks define as the constructs of religion, those seeking personal or spiritual growth must be willing to release what may be a long-held truth.

It’s being asked to surrender your ego. This is no easy feat.  The ego, bossy and brazen, demanding and full of expectations, is our fortress of defense mechanisms against the many-headed monster aka the sum of our fears.  And it’s a tenacious part of who we are.

Yet it’s helpful to understand that the ego is best understood as a “child king”, one who wields great power but has little in the way of wisdom or maturity. Lacking these vital tools, it does little to serve us in making the best decisions for ourselves, in terms of love and happiness, in the ways of growing into our best self.

That’s because, like any child, it only knows what it has been taught by influential others in its life. Most of our ego was developed during our formative years, and much of that was influenced by outside forces-our parents, family, and the environment in which we were raised. Unfortunately, this was also when we were least able to decide between helpful and harmful information, between truth and mere opinion.

To always want our way, to always need to be right, is born of the ego.  It is born of fear.  It blocks the Love that is Always there, already seeing us as worthy of love, as lovable. You move away that stone and the Life Force is there, God is present.

In my life, I have believed many things and some of them quite passionately. Most have proved themselves to be wrong. And those that may be right, does it make a difference to the quality of my relationships, to the healing of the planet’s ills? I dare say, no. In fact, my precious opinions have never made anyone happy, least of all me.

There is a bliss in knowing that I am not my opinions. There is a bliss in not knowing.

Why is it that all the wisdom traditions point to the humble and the lowly, the poor in spirit, that they are the ones that are closest to God?  It is because they are humble.They are honest and vulnerable.

Growing in the spiritual life is the opposite of an egoist venture.  It takes place not by acquisition of something new.  Growth is accomplished not by knowing things, by gathering more information, but by releasing our current defense postures.  It is only in the letting go of fear and our attachment to self-image, that the soil of our non-knowing can be a fertile one.  “I know” doesn’t get us anywhere but separate and lonely.  Non-knowing, giving up expectations in relationships, reaps a harvest of love and a simple peace.

We still get to choose what we believe,  we can still have discussion about our thoughts.  But we no longer feel compelled to defend our opinions so ardently.  We realize that we are not, in fact, our opinions.

Quote for the day: “Look at how many rigid stands I’ve taken in the past that now I see were mistaken.  So how is this new stand different?  When I take a stand against another child of God, I split my mind.  That doesn’t mean, never write a letter to the newspaper, or keep taking the car to an incompetent mechanic.  But it does mean, take no stand against that mechanic in my heart.” – Hugh Prather

STUMBLING ONTO JOY

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If you’ve lived long enough, or perhaps if you’ve just REALLY lived, you’ve been the giver of unconditional love a time or two.  If you’ve been fortunate enough to be a parent, it goes with the territory.  You  give without ever asking or even thinking about asking for anything in return.  The ones you truly love make mistakes (sometimes a lot of them) and you forgive them.

You love them as they are, at their very best and at their most challenging.  And if it is the perfect kind of unconditional love, it means letting the other be most perfectly themselves.  It is like water for the soul, helping it to blossom into what it is called to be.

 When we love like this, we are not hoping that they fit an image,  perhaps really just a mirror image of ourselves.  Actually, when you come right down to the heart of the matter, the self has nothing to do with unconditional love.  The self that cares so much about checks and balances, that wants to know “what have you done for me lately” always get stuck in this building we call the body.

When there is no clutching towards the self, no seeking to find something particular to and for us; we love joyfully and without hesitation. 

If you experience this kind of giving, you have been given a glimpse of heaven. In the Christian Bible, Jesus shares the Parable of the Hidden Treasure to explain how priceless this experience of real love is (Matthew 13:44), “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.  When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy sold all he had and bought that field.”  This is not to say that accepting another fully is without pain or is easy, but rather it is priceless. It is a wellspring.

It seems most often in my life (and perhaps in yours), that I have stumbled upon these moments, have been gifted with the people I have loved unconditionally, and so it makes the joy even more precious as I did nothing to make them come about.  They have come into my life, not as a payment earned, but as proof of grace.

The Sufi poet, Hafiz writes,   

 “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me’. Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.”   

When you love freely, there is no end to how the spirit soars, no limit to how Love can expand.  

I was given this gift by father and it wasn’t his to keep, but to enjoy.  I give this gift to my children and it isn’t mine to keep, but to enjoy.   I know it is now theirs to take and enjoy.

THE BOOK OF JOB: “WHY ME?”

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For all those who say that the Bible has nothing to teach us, I say, “Read Job.”

Here is an open wound kind of story, a lament and a waiting, “Why?  Why me? Why?”  Job really tries not to complain. He simply and understandably wants answers to the injustice of it all.  Job is sore for the salve that most of the Bible ladles out…and there is none. Words of comfort and declaration of God’s mercy never come. Instead, grief and anguish rush deeply into every sinew of Job’s pain wracked body.

Job is blameless and upright.  He does all the right things.  He is faithful to his wife, they have seven sons and three daughters.  He rises early each morning to perform a good ritual, mixing herbs and sending up prayers, burnt offerings, so that his children will be protected against bad karma, so that they will be safe. 

By all accounts, Job was a saint. Like so many friends and family we know who daily do the right thing, often the hard thing, without complaint.  

He is the parent who daily prepares the injections for his chronically ill child, nurses the one with cancer, carries the one with cystic fibrosis, and soothes the one with a chemical imbalance.  It is love, this duty. It is all the hope that if they do everything right, all will end well.

God is pretty well pleased to be sure.  But then he gets talking to the devil (never a good idea) about what a great guy Job is.  And the Devil says: “Yeah, so what if he is your poster child for Righteous Living.  He leads a charmed life.  You’ve put a fence around him.  Let me at him: we’ll see how long it is before he starts hatin’ on you.”    

So God says, “Go for it.”  The devil kills all 10 children.  Still Job does not sin, does not rail mightily against God. 

God starts bragging to Job again. The devil replies, “He did all right, I’ll grant you, but let me get at his physical body, and I’ll turn him.” A nasty (that’s putting it mildly) skin disease is unleashed.

For the next 30 chapters or so, Job and his four friends try to figure this out.  This is not fair, this does not make sense.  His friends even go so far as to intimate that perhaps Job needs to review his life, that maybe he didn’t something wrong that he is not even aware of and this is God’s punishment.  Job is not buying it.  On top of all he has suffered, now others want to heap blame on him to boot. 

He is resentful, protesting God, he reads happiness in the Psalms and finds all the goody-two-shoes of the Bible hollow and a mockery of his pain.

He begins to build a legal case against God. God vs. the people.  Job is a hiccup in a book of praising God and a vital one.  Because sometimes you simply can’t kiss the ground with gratitude. Some things you go through not only knock the wind out of you, for good measure, they throw you down a well of hurt that takes more than a hot minute to climb out of.

That’s why this book of Job so significant.  Because you do not have to deny your life experience, round off its rough edges, and tiptoe, kowtowing with false deference to the Almighty.  You can have faith in all its messy and contradictory guises and be honest with how horrible are some of the things you have endured.  

At the end of Job, the LORD answers Job “out of the whirlwind” and it is mesmerizing and mysterious and unfathomable.  God’s response does not negate or dismiss his pain, but puts him face to face with the awe-inspiring mystery of all of creation with all its immensity and grandeur. 

At the end of all the protest and anger and confusion, Job begins to hear the old strains of his faith, the words and music and traditions that had once soothed and he sees them differently, with fresh eyes.  He has developed a stance towards life without a ‘tit for a tat’ expectation of anyone, including God.

And so it is with me.   I don’t take the bible stories literally as I did when I was a little girl. Yet  metaphorically their stories continue to enrich my own inner life.  The songs I sing at church are not with the same lightheartedness I sang them as a kid, but they can and do make me laugh and cry at the same time.

Job does not give neat little answers about why God is so great.  In fact, he understands less than when he started. He knows he lost too much, that he didn’t deserve any of the things that befell him.

And while he can easily be let off the hook to be bitter and twisted for the remainder of his days, he chooses to be drawn back into the incomprehensible  grandeur of life, with new eyes, eyes wide open.

WORD UP SOCRATES

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It was Socrates who said that “An unexamined life is not worth living.”  Of course, being a philosopher in the 4 century B.C.E., one didn’t have Voice Mail, Email, Facebook, Twitter, and Super Bowl predictions amidst a countless sea of daily to-do’s clamoring to distract you from this special task.

But is it a luxury, examining your life, or is it a necessity?

It seems the answer is the latter.  The challenge of finding meaning and orientation in life appears to have been one of our most basic of needs since the beginning of recorded time.  Psychologist James Fowler  describes human beings as “creatures who cannot live without meaning.”

While this need for meaning is present in each of us, it cannot be addressed exclusively-or even primarily- as an individual matter.  And none of us really gets to start from scratch.  We have been born into traditions, as a member of a family or as a member of the society we live in, and this has helped us to orient ourselves in the world, for better and for worse.

This meaning making is always BOTH a solitary endeavor AND eked out in relationship with others. Relationships being the vehicle in which we garner context in order to do any kind of self-examination and vice verse.

Maintaining relationships, having conversations with others, and choosing to be in community with those who are also trying to live their lives with intention helps to correct the all too human tendency (this correction is exacted sometimes with a feather, sometimes with a 2×4!) to make and keep assumptions about people, places, and things.