Sacred Space today

I visited the prayer site, "Sacred Space" today. (See my third blog entry in the August 2006 archive.) Here are a meditation and a prayer that made me really pause and ponder:

Something to think about this week:

I cannot experience God directly. My mind cannot cope with his infinity. But in various ways I experience his effect in my life, for instance in moments of communion with others, in the joy of being in love, or with real friends, or in company that transports me beyond myself. Or I sense God’s touch when I feel empty, incompetent, a failure, unable to make of myself what I want to be. Or when I feel unsettled and long for quiet and peace. In all these situations, I feel my incompleteness and am moved by a force beyond myself. St Augustine said it exactly: You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.

Freedom
What most often stops me achieving freedom is my tendency
to be caught up in fears and expectations about what I 'ought' or 'should' be.
My usual automatic responses tie me down and inhibit me from exploring new areas of growth.
I ask and pray for a greater sense of inner freedom
and that I might reach the fresh and challenging possibilities that God wishes me to realize.

Learning biofeedback! Wondering...

Check out this Biofeedback article from Mayo Clinic (click here!)

This short article is a good introduction to biofeedback.

I started learning biofeedback last week with the hope that learning to relax and relieve anxiety might help me some of my physical and psychological ailments and my general state of hyper-alertness.

The first session with the biofeedback therapist was just to go over forms he had emailed me which I had filled out. We talked about my goals for treatment. One thing I'm interested in is neurofeedback as well - I think that could be extremely helpful. But for now I'm just doing biofeedback training. If I go for neurofeedback, I'll find some helpful links for you on the subject.

The first actual biofeedback session was a week ago. First, he asked me about how I feel stress in my body. That was not as easy a question to answer as it would seem. I am used to feeling tense, so trying to mentally recover these sensations was a trick. I thought maybe my jaw got tense, I frowned, my shoulders tensed.

He attached sensors to my fingertips, my wrists, and he put a belt around my rib cage. I sat facing a computer monitor. He set up the display so I could see everything we are trying over time to control: hand temperature, hand sweat, pulse, and rhythm of breath. My hands were very warm, which is a sign of relaxation, and they had very little sweat as well, another good thing. My breath was shallow and a little rapid, as I was to discover later, and my pulse was rapid as well.

So here I am happily looking at all this interesting information go by - the rise and fall of my breath, especially, and the steadiness of my temperature and sweat. Then he asked me to briefly remember a time of stress. All I had to do was imagine myself at work and pow! Temperature dropped! Sweat increased! Pulse sped up! Breaths sped up! I could see the immediate feedback on the screen. OK, so I'm persuaded that this stuff really works.

For the rest of the session I worked solely on my breath. We found a good rate of breathing - 6-1/2 seconds per breath - and I practiced breathing in such a way that it matched the pattern on the screen. Up and down, up and down. I learned that it is important to allow a slight pause at the top and bottom of each breath. While I just focused on the breath, the therapist recorded the session on the computer. Then I stopped the conscious breathing and we looked at my charts from that 5-minute session. As my breathing steadied, my heart rate slowed, and my skin and sweat levels remained steady at good levels. But I felt that I was not drawing in enough oxygen. So we did a 1-minute session in which I breathed as deeply as felt comfortable for me, while still remaining within the 6-1/2 seconds per breath, and my heart rate immediately improved. So we adjusted how I should practice breathing over the following week.

This week, the therapist added sensors to my forehead to measure tension there. We started with my hand temperature and sweat being good. I did a little bit of conscious breathing while looking at the monitor. Then he showed me the line that indicated the tensison in my forehead. Actually, it also measures tension in your jaw and throat as well, as I later discovered. We did a little work with me watching the screen and practicing tensing and relaxing my forhead and jaw. The feedback goes wild when you even so much as swallow!

Then he put the CD in the computer and the music began - a very relaxing New Age-y CD called simply "Yoga." (I should add that the room was very dimly lit, to help with relaxation.) He then programmed it to play whenever I was relaxed below a certain level; whenever the forehead sensors detected tension, the music would stop. At first this was frustrating. I couldn't feel any difference in my body whenever the music would stop. He eventually had to raise the level of tension to go by so I would not be completely frustrated.

So then he had my lie back in the comfortable reclining chair with my feet up and close my eyes. All I had to do was breathe deeply the way I had been taught and try to keep the music going.

Okay, so "try" was the word he did not want me to use! Don't try to relax, he said, just let yourself relax. He suggested remembering a time of special pleasure or relaxation, or to think of someone I love very much.

I remembered two Labor Day weekends ago, I was staying with my brother. On the Saturday, the whole crew of us went hiking on the nearby state trail that follows the Little Red Cedar River. I was too fatigued from illness to hike very far, so I set myself up in a comfortable chair that had a footrest, armrests, a place to put your water bottle - the whole works. I had intended to read or write. But I ended up slipping into a reverie of the sounds around me. Bit by bit I heard more and more of the gentle sounds around me. The quiet river just a few yards away down the bank; the sounds of children shouting to one another in the distance. Bit by bit I heard more and more until, after a long time, I finally heard the quiet sound of the wind going through the cedars. Pure bliss. I sat there for a full hour until my family returned. For the first time since falling ill a few years before than, I felt totally refreshed.

As I remembered this, and tried to recreate that serenity (there's that word again), I head the music playing and often turning off for short bits. Slowly I began to actually feel which part of my head was causing the sensors to shut off the music. The number one culprit was the jaw and the back of the throat. When I kept my throat as open and steady as an organ pipe as I breathed, the music stayed on. Whenever my jaw pulled back, the throat closed, and the music would go off.

While practicing by myself later in the afternoon, I remembered a bit of advice from meditation instruction for mindful breathing. Let your tongue lie loose at the bottom of your mouth, but have the tip of your tongue gently touch the roof of your mouth just behind the front teeth. When you do this, you keep the tongue from shutting off the throat.

But the beautiful part of practicing by myself was that I remembered the day after my riverside meditation. We all went tubing down that same river. A leisurely float down the shallow, lazy river. I loved it. And then two special things happened. First, a doe and her youngster decide to cross the river just ahead of me and my nephew. They calmly splashed across and disappeared into the thicket. I hadn't been that close to a deer in a long time, and the deer I had always seen before were either standing at the roadside waiting to cross or dead at the roadside because of supremely bad timing. But here this gentle scene.

But it got better. My nephew and I were far ahead of the rest of the family. Then I noticed a bald eagle circling over our heads. Without warning, it dropped to the river just a few yards ahead of my nephew then swooped back up. It was fishing. It circled above again, then dove again. On the fifth or so try, it caught a fish and flew away. I was in awe.

So as I practiced by myself in the afternoon, I remembered the deer and the eagle. Then I began to recall other close encounters with wild animals that were so beautiful they made time seem to stand still. Other deer, other eagles (there's a nest near my home), the red fox that patrols my garden, a woodchuck that started trying to dig a hole beneath my home - now there was an animal not easily intimidated. It could be three feet away from me, and it would just look at me, then calmly continue on its path. The catbird that fell to the patio when I was nine years old. It had flown into my bedroom window. I rushed downstairs and outside to see if the bird had recovered. It was sitting upright but unsteady. I put my cupped hands near the bird, hoping to catch it. But to my surprise, it stood up and walked into my hands! I instinctively closed my hands around it, keeping it warm as it recovered from shock. Then, when it felt better, it wiggled in my hands. I opened them, the bird stepped onto the deck, then flew away.

Yes, it was relaxing by submitting myself to a sense of wonder. And perhaps that the lesson I learned today, the big lesson. Moments of wonder - and the remembering of them - are life-giving. It is good to be full of wonder.

Maybe that's why healthy babies and young children can withstand such extreme changes in their bodies as they grow ever so fast. They are filled with wonder. Just watch them!

I agree with Barbara Taylor Brown when she says in her latest book that her favorite parts of the Bible are not the theology, but the places of wonder. Angels appearing and saying "Behold!" Jesus healing a person who then is filled with the Spirit. Miracles. It's a mystical faith, not a theological one.

So perhaps all this dry, technological therapy is triggering much deeper changes - that is my hope.

You Are Here

Sharon Bryan published a collection of poems titled Flying Blind (1996, Sarabande Books) which contains about 44 poems with titles that go alphabetically from A to Y. If you listen to public radio, you may have heard Garrison Keillor read one of her poems from this collection, "Sweater Weather," during one of his daily "Writer's Almanac" readings. He's read it at least twice, actually. The first time he read it too slowly - it's a play on cliches that goes very fast. Ms. Bryan very nicely let him know it's meant to be rapid-fire, so he read it again at a later date.

This is the very last poem in the collection. It's about longing and discovery. It's about how language opens up whole new worlds once we have that gift. It's about being centered. To me it is a hopeful poem, and hope is a good thing, is it not? Now I am teasing you, so let's just get to the poem:


YOU ARE HERE

1

But the sign is over there,
its red arrow pointing
to X, one more letter

of the alphabet we use
to locate ourselves
in time and space --

there's plenty of room
for confusion, given the gap
between the map and the ground

we keep our feet on,
feeling our way,
listening for something

on the same wavelength,
for clues to our whereabouts
in words that come back to us

from the unknown, the ether
they've traveled through --
as if each syllable

were a question, a probe,
a toe in the water --
testing, testing -- a tentative

caress, a lover's hand
asking the body to yield
its secrets. asking the world

to speak our language.

2

You are here: that's the news
you wake up to each morning,
and of course it's everything,

the crucial fact, the story
of your life, the words
that open your eyes --

as they did when you learned
to speak and read,
when what had seemed to be nothing

turned out to be fog
and its lifting revealed
fragments of landscape,

an entire city of possibilities,
avenues of meaning to explore,
nooks and crannies of language

no broom sweeps clean...
it all comes down to the body
and what it gives rise to:

the spirit that hovers
just above it, reciting
an alphabet of longing.

by Sharon Bryan

Rilke - Containing life and death

I've been rereading some of Rilke's poems lately. Here are the opening and closing stanzas of The Fourth Elegy, as translated by Stephen Mitchell:

O trees of life, when does your winter come?
We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us
like migratory birds'. Late, overtaken,
we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind
and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.
Flowering and fading come to us both at once.
And somewhere lions still roam and never know,
in their majestic power, of any weakness.

...

Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him
in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod
of distance in his hand? Who makes his death
out of gray beard, which hardens - or leaves it there
inside his round mouth, jagged as the core
of a sweet apple? . . . . . Murderers are easy
to understand. But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one's heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.

***

"...But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one's heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible."

When one suffers from a chronic illness, especially one that has the potential to be fatal, death is always right there with you, whether you acknowledge or not. Even if all it is is fatigue of unexplained origin, something you hope will simply go into remission since there seems to be no cure - even then, death is right there.

Rilke hits it on the head when he addresses all of humanity, not just the ill and aged, and says that from the very beginning of even your potential for life, you contained death. "Your parents handed to you - your life just handed to you, to be lived right through to the end." That's from the key scene in the movie version of Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa wanders away from her party to reflect on the suicide of the young man mentioned by one of her guests. You are handed parents just as your parents are handed you. And you are forced to live your life right through to the end, no matter what form or at what age that death may come. Old age, suicide, murder, illness, accident. You have been forced to take on life, and you will be forced to die.

"Force " is a strong word. Life is a gift, after all. But it's a gift one doesn't get to refuse at the outset when it is first given.

Some people believe that one can, in fact, choose one's parents in one form of belief about reincarnation. I have a friend who believes that it a person chooses horrible parents, let's say, for a particular need for a particular life lesson. I am not comfortable with this view of things. At the same time, many people try to make sense of bad luck by referring to "karma." Sometimes they mean this this within the span of a single lifetime - you beat up your little brother when you were young, so now you feel you must atone for the sin or else be visited by bad karma. Boy, can you get your theology mixed up! It's a sort of "A Christmas Carol" theology. And it has widespread appeal. What really sealed it for Scrooge was not the past or present - it was looking into a ghastly, disgraceful end to his life, with the vultures descending upon his few material things, that persuaded Scrooge to swear to change his ways.

Scrooge didn't begin to live life fully again until he could hold death to his heart gently and refuse to give up living. I mean, he could have given in to despair. So perhaps Dickens was not so far from Rilke, in some odd way. Those two hit upon the edges of a universal truth, coming at them from different cultures and backgrounds. Carl C.G. Jung would say that they tapped into the collective unconscious.

" Flowering and fading come to us both at once," says Rilke. So all one can do is live fully in each moment. A common phrase used is "I've had my moments" when looking back to one's past and recalling the more notable times. Why have just a few moments? Every nanosecond presents you with the moment to act or rest or listen or speak or make love or watch a falling star (the Perseids meteor shower just hit its peak two mornings ago). I am deeply Romantic about the possibilities of life if one opens one's eyes and heart and brain to the moment.

"You only live once."
"There's no time like the present."
"A stitch in time saves nine."

It's been said before in so many ways - cute aphorisms, theological texts, scriptures of all stripes, self-help slogans. Why don't we listen for more than just that one moment? Why don't we hold onto the lesson? Why is it so difficult? Repetition of the message doesn't seem to work. We're lucky if we have enough moments to remember at the end that we feel we lived well - but how wonderfully full life could be if those moments were impossible to count!

And think how the world would be transformed if more and more of us began to live in the moment in the true, rich way it can be. What if our leaders took this way of life more seriously. Beyond the platitudes toward a deep commitment to letting go of the past. One must learn from the past, but the past must not dictate the present and, thusly, the future. That's like saying we have to keep letting our soldiers die and get wounded in Iraq because of the others who went before them in this war. Somehow that logic is supposed to keep the previous deaths and injuries meaningful. The only way for them to have died with honor is to pour more living souls into the war zone?

Ah, but I digress. I am getting beyond the scope of this blog.

Just think on this: Our lives contain, from the very beginning of the potential of their existence, the inescapability of death. Just think how meaningful that makes every moment inbetween.

Too tired to blog, but here's a poem

An interesting, short essay: "A Kind of Amazement," by Peter Day.

The following poem by Rilke means a great deal to me because it gives a mystical answer to the admittedly nebulous question, "What should I do with all this suffering? All these deep feelings?" Plus, it's just a great poem in a great translation by Stephen Mitchell.

XXIX of the Second Part of The Sonnets of Orpheus

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.
And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

Forget yourself on purpose!

Thinking about yesterday's post on gratitude reminded me of this quote from Thomas Merton, the great 20th century Roman Catholic monk, theologian, writer, and activist. "...[I]f we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance."

from New Seeds of Contemplation
By Thomas Merton

What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as “play” is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of the wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join the general dance.

Gratitude

Sometimes in my life it has seemed like the door to hope was closed.

Every path led to frustration or pain. Every night I would lie in the dark and worry or simply despair. I would wake in the morning tired and sad. Another day. Another day.

Sometimes I have put things in the perspective that suffering has forced my hand - it has given me an inescapable opportunity to improve or disintegrate as a human being. I like to say to myself that I have become a better person because of my struggles with illnesses and childhood this and that, and, objectively speaking, I'm a much nicer person than I was as a child.

But I would not dream of telling a person who is suffering to be grateful for their illness or suffering or tragedy. How could I dare to tell another person how they "should" feel under those circumstances? I have learned - and this took a long time - that it does no good ever telling anyone how they should feel. Feelings are feelings, after all.

I am not grateful for my troubles. I would rather to have been born under different circumstances and with a healthier set of genes. I would rather not to have encountered certain people. The "what if's" and "if only's" list could grow quite long should I continue on this train of thought.

But I want to talk about a different setting for gratitude.

One year for my birthday my mother gave me a copy of Simple Abundance, by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I was struggling, and it was the newest self-help book on the market aimed at women who were suffering in some way or another. I have never quite finished reading it, but I recommend it.

In any case, I drew one incredibly helpful exercise - a practice, a ritual - from the book. I believe the author has since parlayed that one exercise into another whole book. The idea is a simple one: Keep a "Gratitude Journal." At first I rebelled at her suggestion. What did I have to be grateful for at that point? But I decided to give it a fair try.

I got a smallish spiral notebook to keep on my nightstand. Every night, the last thing I did before I turned out the light was to list 10 things I was grateful for that day.

I felt pretty sarcastic those first two weeks. Hmm...let's see. I'm grateful that I didn't get that job I'd had my hopes pinned on. Oh, and that crying jag was really fun.

Nonetheless, I dutifully filled out positive things in those ten spaces.

What was I grateful for on a dark day? I am grateful for a reliable roof over my head. I am grateful for having enough food to eat. I am grateful for having television to while away the depressing hours. I am grateful for....? Ten things??? It was easy to run out of ideas really fast. But I slogged my way through it every night.

Soon the knowledge that I'd be writing these things down that night made me start taking mental notes during the day. Oh yeah - I just made some chocolate chip cookies, and that first one tasted really good. I want to remember that one for later on. Oh - and that first rush of fresh, cold air felt good when I finally (finally!) got up, got dressed, and stepped out of the house. All those little things began to crowd my mind so I wouldn't forget to write them down.

What I didn't realize until a couple of months later was that I began to enjoy my days again. I was looking for the good things, and the little things that were good were everywhere to be experienced. That didn't mean that quite a few days weren't like dark holes and so that's night list was back to basics. But the inward turning - the self-absorption - of depression was forced outward as I looked for answers to that night's question: What ten things are you grateful for today?

I heard the Great Horned owl this evening when I came home.
My friend Pete made me laugh.
The air conditioning works.
I rediscovered a favorite joke while I was researching what to blog today.
I enjoyed remembering how healthy my dad looked during my last visit.
The cat smells deodorizer stuff finally seems to be working sort of.
It feels good to wiggle my toes on the foot of my chair while I'm at the computer.
My mother removed and adopted a large plant I kept forgetting to water and was in the way anyway.
Today the temperature outside was in the 70's (F) instead of the 80's or 90's (or higher).
The big, complicated salad I made for lunch was thoroughly satisfying.

Every night became every day - What am I grateful for right now?

Let's not get overly serious here

THE GOSPEL OF DEBBIE
by PAUL RUDNICK

from The New Yorker
Issue of 2004-03-08
Posted 2004-03-08

http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/?040315sh_shouts

Recent works like “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Da Vinci Code” seek to illuminate the life of Jesus. Not long ago, an additional text was discovered in an ancient linen backpack found in a cave outside Jerusalem, surrounded by what appeared to be early-Roman candy wrappers and covered with stickers reading “I [heart] All Faiths” and “Ask Me About Hell.” A parchment diary found inside the backpack appears to contain the musings of one Debbie of Galilee. Many of the pages are still being translated from high-school Aramaic; here are some persuasive excerpts:


October 5

I saw him in the marketplace! Everyone says that he’s the son of God, but I don’t care one way or the other because he’s just so cute!!! O.K., he’s not hot like a gladiator or a centurion, but he’s really sensitive and you can tell that he thinks about things and then goes, “Be nice to people,” and I’m like, that is so true, and I wonder if he’s seeing anyone!


October 21

Everyone says that he’s just totally good and devoted to all humanity and that he was sent to save us and that’s why he doesn’t have time for a girlfriend, although I swear I saw Mary Magdalene doodling in the sand with a stick, writing “Mrs. Jesus Christ” and “Merry Xmas from Mary and Jesus Christ and All the Apostles,” with little holly leaves all around it. And I’m like, Mary, are you dating Jesus? and she says, no, he’s just helping me, and I’m like, you mean with math? and she’s like, no, to not be such a whore. And I said, but that is so incredibly sweet, and we both screamed and talked about whether we like him better when he’s healing the lame or with a ponytail.


December 25

I wanted to get him the perfect thing for his birthday, so I asked Matthew and he said, well, myrrh is good, but then Luke said, oh please, everyone always gives him myrrh, I bet he wishes those wise men had brought scented candles, some imported marmalade, and a nice box of notecards. So I go, O.K., what about accessories, like a new rope belt or clogs or like I could make him a necklace with his name spelled out in little clay letters? and Mark said, I love that, but Luke rolled his eyes and said, Mark, you are just such an Assyrian. So I go to see Mary, Jesus’ mom, and she said that Jesus doesn’t need gifts, that he just wants all of us to love God and be better people, but I asked, what about a sweater? and she said medium.


January 2

Oh my God, oh my God, I couldn’t believe it, but I was right there, and Jesus used only five loaves of bread and two fish to feed thousands of people, and it was so beautiful and miraculous, and my brother Ezekiel said, whoa, Jesus has invented canapés and I said shut up! And then my best friend Rachel asked, I wonder if he could make my hair really shiny, and I said, you are so disgusting, Jesus shouldn’t waste his time on your vanity, and then Jesus smiled at me and I’m telling you, those last seven pounds, the stubborn ones, they were totally gone! And I spoke unto the angry Roman mob and I said, behold these thighs! Jesus has made me feel better about me!


March 12

Everyone is just getting so mean. They’re all going, Debbie, he is so not divine, Debbie, you’ll believe anything, Debbie, what about last year when you were worshipping ponchos? And I so don’t trust that Judas Iscariot, who’s always staring at me when I walk to the well and he’s saying, hey, Deb, nice jugs, and I’m like, oh ha ha ha, get some oxen.


April 5

So Mary Magdalene tells me that Jesus and all the apostles had this big party and that it got really intense and Jesus drank from this golden goblet and now it’s missing and the restaurant is like, this is why there’s a surcharge.


April 23

It’s all over. And it’s been terrible and amazing and I don’t know what any of it means or who’s right and who’s wrong but maybe I’ll figure it out later. Anyway, I’ll always remember what Jesus said to me. He said, Debbie, I can foresee that someday you’ll meet someone, someone wonderful, but for right now let’s at least think about college.


Copyright © CondéNet 2004. All rights reserved.

Sacred Space today

http://www.sacredspace.ie

Consciousness

In God's loving presence I unwind the past day,
starting from now and looking back, moment by moment.
I gather in all the goodness and light, in gratitude.
I attend to the shadows and what they say to me,
seeking healing, courage, forgiveness.

Rumi meditates on the mirage of pursuing goals

The Water We Seek
by Rumi

The eye or the spirit that focuses on the transient
falls on its face wherever it goes.
Someone who focuses on the distance,
without knowledge, may see far,
but just as we do in a dream.

Asleep on the bank of a river, lips parched,
you dream you are running toward water.
In the distance you see the water of your desire
and, caught by your seeing, you run toward it.

In the dream you boast,
“I am the one whose heart can see through the veils.”
Yet every step carries you further away
toward the perilous mirage.
From the moment you dreamed you set out
you created the distance
from that which had been near to you.
Many set out on a journey
that leads them farther away from their goal.

The intuitive claims of the seeker are a fantasy.
You, too, are sleepy; but for God’s sake,
if you must sleep, sleep on the Way of God,
and maybe some other seeker on the Way
will awaken you from your fantasies and slumber.

No matter how subtle the sleeper’s thought becomes,
his dreams will not guide him Home.
Whether the sleeper’s thought is twofold or threefold,
it is error multiplying error.

While he dreams of running through the wilderness,
the waves are lapping so near.
While he dreams of the pangs of thirst,
the water is nearer than his jugular vein.

MATHNAWI IV, 3226-3241
Translated by Kabir Helminski
from The Rumi Collection

"If you're going through hell, keep going." Winston Churchill

From the novel The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (page 148 in the hardcover edition):

"I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said, 'I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.'

"...I speak in all modesty as I say this, but I discovered at that moment that I have a fierce will to live. ...Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of them - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It is not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, and inability to let go. It may be nothing more than life-hungry stupidity."

Is it courageous to keep fighting in the face of defeat? Is it always wise? Is it even courage? When your very survival is at stake, it is essential. "What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery in Wind, Sand and Stars) But what about when the demons are of a subtler sort?

Sometimes it is important to rest. To trust that you do not have to do all the work. There is a Presence - call it God, call it Love, whatever - that can bouy you up when all you need to do is weep like a child and fall asleep, into sound, safe sleep.

Madeleine L'Engle, in her book Two-Part Invention, relates the following story:

"Someone tells me the story of a bishop who lost his wife and child in a tragic accident. And he said to his people, 'I have been all the way to the bottom. And it is solid.'

"Yes."


I look forward to the day when I stop striving to reach a goal, however noble that goal may be. The most noble goal I can think of is to be a loving person who makes a difference in people's lives. Yet I think that all major goals are futile if you do not live in the moment. You must deal with that perplexing dichotomy of doing good versus just being. And yet it's not a "versus." The wisdom of the Tao te ching (I prefer the Stephen Mitchell translation) deals with this dichotomy many, many times. "Where there is no desire, / all things are at peace." (from no.37). Many mystics have tackled this problem.

Sometimes one must just trust that things will turn out all right for a change if one just stops trying so hard!

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mood settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arise by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.
(Tao te ching, from no.35, translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Food for thought.

from The Book of Hours, by R.M. Rilke:

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Chronic illness - whose fault?

There are many people who believe that if you get cancer or autoimmune conditions or any number of horrors, you somehow brought it upon yourself. You didn't eat enough antioxidants. You didn't go to therapy to purge your anger at your bullying/cold/abusive/neglectful parent; you didn't deal with sexual abuse as a child; you need but refuse "anger management" therapy; you're a Type A personality; you don't stand up for youself. And so on and so forth.

I have often meditated on this because I have had since childhood quite a few maladies. I had a callous doctor as a child who told me bluntly it was "all in my head" and then he would refuse to help me. In adulthood the illnesses have continued to mount and to grow more serious. The thing is, those childhood maladies were, in fact, probably related to stress and not having the tools to deal with it. To think how my life would turned out if he had continued to think about my case in a constructive way and guided me to the nearby biofeedback lab at the local hospital where he did rounds every week! Because I don't know the true cause of my current sufferings, I can only wonder.

Eckhart Tolle, the mystic and visionary, has thought about chronic illness and how it fits into the bigger picture of one's life. I have read a number of books and articles aimed at those who suffer chronic illnesses - they run the gamut from "you got a case of bad luck, plain and simple" to "it was in your genes" to a well-meaning "you brought it upon yourself" (though they phrase it in a roundabout way, such as I described above). I could pull out any number of helpful quotes from the wiser of these sources, but here's a quote from Eckhart Tolle's newest book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, p.57. He speaks from a background in Hinduism especially, though he has been influenced by all the great spiritual paths. I can also relate to what he talks about when he refers to the ego because I have read extensively about Jungian thought about how the subconscious and conscious work. Here it goes:

"It is not just people who with good or near-perfect bodies who are likely to equate it with who they are. You can just as easily identify with a "problematic" body and make the body's imperfection illness or disability into your identity. You may then speak of yourself as a "sufferer" of this or that chronic illness or disability. You receive a great deal of attention from doctors and others who constantly confirm to you your conceptual identity as a sufferer or a patient. You then unconsciously cling to the illness because it has become the most important part of who you perceive yourself to be. It has become another thought form with which the ego can identify. Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let it go. Amazingly, but not infrequently, the ego in search of a stronger identity can and does create illnesses in order to strengthen itself through them."

Note that Tolle doesn't blame the person for getting sick. He notes that everybody - sick and well - tend to identify with their bodies. Both groups face the challenge of freeing themselves from the tight grip the ego places on a person's soul. His two major books, this one and the earlier The Power of Now are guides for spiritul growth which include dealing with the tricks of the ego. He doesn't promise that you will no longer have MS or cancer or diabetes; instead he promises serenity.

Remember the "Serenity Prayer" by Niebuhr, which was adapted by Alcoholics Anonymous?

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

So many paths of wisdom point to the same things, do they not? Eckhart's definition of serenity is on a different plane from the AA version, but they both reflect the common human need to be released from suffering, with the key being that hard-to-define concept of "serenity."

Here's another quote, which I think pertains to my thoughts this day. It's from the mystic Meister Eckhart (no relation!):

"God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting."

I think true health, which I equate with serenity and spiritual development, is found not by adding doctors and cures and regimens and religious rites and so forth, but by shedding the things which come between you and God. Things like the fierce grip of the ego.

I guess what I'm saying is that illness is not one's fault, any more than childhood abuse is. The child is a helpless target. And I'm not saying chronically ill people should toss their medicines and fire all their doctors. But undertaking spiritual growth in a way that opens doors and sheds unnecessary inner demons is the way to making peace with your body and finding a new identity other than "Patient." Being a chronic "patient" means being way too patient with one's identity as a sick person!

One time I was in the grip of a terrible depression. I wasn't working at the time, and I often whiled away the time by watching movies I found at the local public library. One sad morning I sat down to watch Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen's really good films. It was watching Woody Allen's psychosomatic character desperately try all sorts of ways to find a cure for what ailed him that got me thinking about myself in a new way - laughing at myself in a kind way. I began to laugh - really laugh - for the first time in months, and by the end of the movie, that particular depression was cured.

I do wonder if I'll ever shake my illnesses or whether they will hasten my demise. But I'm becoming more aware of the inner battles going on as part of me fiercely clings to my illnesses. Is it because the illnesses in my childhood brought positive attention from my mother? Is it because my ego has locked onto that sort of identity because the ego will lock onto anyplace weak in order to thrive? I'm still working on this, but so many things I encounter that seem wise seem to point to the practices of meditation and creativity. And that is a subject for another day.

Sacred Space

August 5, 2006

http://www.sacredspace.ie

Sacred Space is a prayer site run by the Irish Jesuits. It can be read in any of 21 languages. They invite you to spend about ten minutes each day praying at your computer by following their site. The prayers change each day. I do not believe that Christianity is the only “true” religion, as if any human construct could be “true.” As soon as you create an organization, you have begun limiting its scope, and the Divine is without limit. But I have found this site to be a gentle guide to prayer when “free-form” prayer or those proscribed by one’s Book of Common Prayer (Episcopalians) or other official prayer books do not suffice. Some days are just like that.

So here’s Sacred Space:

First, those Irish monks present you with something to meditate on all week long. Here is this week’s meditation:

Something to think and pray about this week:

To prepare for prayer, clean the heart and the senses. If the weather permits, go outside and look at the sky; and stay looking. Gaze at its colours, its changes, the forms and movement of clouds, the effects of the wind, the particular pattern of the horizons all round you. There is so much to watch, not with the eye of a meteorologist or physicist who seeks to analyse, but with the eye of a beholder, seeing and marvelling rather than thinking. With your energy focussed on watching, your mind calms down and your heart settles. On other occasions ring the changes with the other senses: focus for a while on what you hear, or what you feel, or what you taste, or on breathing in and breathing out. This is not strictly prayer, but a preparation for prayer; it can have unexpected effects.

The first prayer is called “The Presence of God.” Here’s a typical prayer:

The Presence of God

What is present to me is what has a hold on my becoming.
I reflect on the presence of God always there in love,
amidst the many things that have a hold on me.
I pause and pray that I may let God
affect my becoming in this precise moment.

Then comes a meditation on “Freedom.” Here is today’s:

Freedom

There are very few people who realise what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into his hands, and let themselves be formed by his grace. (St Ignatius) I ask for the grace to trust myself totally to God's love.

Then “Consciousness”:

Consciousness

I exist in a web of relationships - links to nature, people, God.
I trace out these links, giving thanks for the life that flows through them.
Some links are twisted or broken: I may feel regret, anger, disappointment.

I pray for the gift of acceptance and forgiveness.

At each step there is a “Prayer Guide” if you should want to read it. Here is the Prayer Guide for “Consciousness”:

What is a Review of Consciousness?

If it is true that God is at work in every detail of our lives, how do we begin to recognise his action and our reaction?

At the end of the day, especially before going to sleep, the mind, without any conscious effort on our part, tends to play back some of the events of the day so vividly that if the day has been particularly eventful we can find it difficult to get to sleep. We may find ourselves re-enacting a quarrel, thinking of the clever and cutting things we might have said if we had been more quick-witted, and so on.

The Review of Consciousness is based on this natural tendency of the mind. It can help us to be more aware of God's presence and action in our daily lives, and to be more sensitive to where we are cooperating with God's grace and where we are refusing it.

“How to Do a Review of Consciousness” is key to Ignatian prayer:

How to do a Review of Consciousness

Let your mind drift over the last 24 hours, refraining from any self-judgement, whether of approval or disapproval, attending to and relishing only those moments of the day for which you are grateful. Even the most harrowing day includes some good moments, if only we take the trouble to look - it might be the sight of a raindrop falling, or the fact that I can see at all. When people attempt this exercise, they are usually surprised at the number and variety of good moments in the day which otherwise would have been quickly forgotten - obscured, perhaps, by any painful experience in the day. Having remembered the events for which you are grateful, thank and praise God for them.

After thanksgiving, the next step is to recall your inner moods and feelings, noting, if you can, what led to them, but again refraining from any self-judgement. Be with Christ as you look at these moods and beg him to show you the attitudes which underlie them. The important thing is not to analyse our experience, but to contemplate it in Christ's presence and let him show us where we have let him be in us and where we have refused to let him be. Thank him for the times we have 'let his glory through' and ask forgiveness for the times we have refused him entry. He never refuses forgiveness. He knows our weakness far better than we do. All we have to do is show it to him and he can transform our weakness into strength. We can conclude with a short prayer, that also looks forward to the day to come, and asks for God's help.

That “Short Prayer”:

Lord, you know me better than I know myself.
Your Spirit pervades every moment of my life.
Thank you for the grace and love you shower on me.
Thank you for your constant, gentle invitation to let you into my life.
Forgive me for the times I have refused that invitation,
and closed myself off from you.

Help me in the day to come, to recognise your presence in my life,
to open myself to you, to let you work in me, to your greater glory. Amen.

Then comes a reading from scripture (Old or New Testament, or the Psalms):

The Word

God speaks to each one of us individually. I need to listen
to hear what he is saying to me. Read the text a few times, then listen.

Psalm 68(69):15-16, 29-30

Do not let the flood sweep over me,
or the deep swallow me up,
or the Pit close its mouth over me.
Answer me, O LORD, for your steadfast love is good;
according to your abundant mercy, turn to me.
But I am lowly and in pain;
let your salvation, O God, protect me.
I will praise the name of God with a song;
I will magnify him with thanksgiving

What are you saying to me, Lord?

Then comes “Conversation”

Conversation

Jesus, You always welcomed little children when
you walked on this earth.
Teach me to have a childlike trust in you.
To live in the knowledge that You will never abandon me.

Then to end:

Conclusion

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen.

Amen.

Like electricity

"Silence is the perennial flow of language, interrupted by words. It is like electricity. When there is resistance to its passage, it glows as a lamp or revolves as a fan. But in the wire it remains as pure energy. In the same way, silence is the eternal flow of language."

Ramana Maharshi

(Collected by Stephen Mitchell in The Enlightened Mind)