Heart Surgery

God has to work on your soul “in secret,” according to the saints and mystics.  If God gave you any idea of what God was doing, which is always radical surgery, you would do one of two things:  you would try to stop it, or you would try to engineer it and take control of the process.  God has to operate in darkness to get the job done.  ~Richard Rohr

I chose the word bless as my word for the year because of a book that friend, author, and fellow blogger, Jonna-Lynn gave me.  This book is called The Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World and was written by a man named Pierre Pradervand.  The premise of the book truly is simple; it's the idea of practicing blessing any- and everyone who (literally or mentally) crosses your path (including yourself).  And in terms of freeing the mind from negative and obsessive thoughts about the self and others, it really works.  For it to work, however, the blessings must be sincere, they must come from the heart, and this of course is the hard part.  But I've discovered that if I am the least little bit willing, and can muster up just one simple blessing-thought, it quickly blossoms into more.

With this blessing practice combined with green as my color for the year, which is the color related to the heart chakra, I already feel enfolded in an intense gentleness, energized by a vibrant airiness, circulated by a  lush bright flow.

And yet, there is something else going on too, something I've been having great difficulty putting my finger on.  When I tried to write about the feelings I've been having in my journal the other day, I kept seeing the image of cutting up a chicken, and thinking of the word "unhinged," and a Bible verse came to me, Hebrews 4:12:  "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart."  This is the best description of what's been happening within me that I have found so far.

I have been slowly replacing the word "God" in my vocabulary with "Being."  Eckhart Tolle points out in The Power of Now that for many people, "God" as a word has become too tired and overused (and even abused) to truly point to what it points to anymore, which is far more mysterious than anyone can fathom.  The word "Being" however, is very open-ended; an atheist could probably use it comfortably, and it points to the great mystery of sentient presence, whatever you believe its origins to be.

My point in saying all this, is that for me, "the word of God" is any manifestation of Being that I pay close attention to, which is to say, anything at all.  By this process of blessing and by simply practicing presence in the moment as I have for several months now, things have become loosened within me, and lately I have this sense of being unhinged.  When negative thoughts try to take over my mind these days, I experience it far more intensely in my body than I ever used to.  Specifically, I feel it as a trembling and weakness and acute anxiety in the area of my heart.  However, it's also much easier for me to recognize and move out of such negativity.  Moving into blessing is one way to do that, putting my attention on how I feel inside my body is another.  Sometimes all I need to do is breathe.

The dividing of soul and spirit mentioned in the verse above I read as the division of the temporal and the eternal, the self that uses mind to operate in the world, and the selfless spirit that is the eternal witness.  According to these definitions, I can say that by practicing watching my self/soul, I have become more aware of the spirit, the one who watches.  All of these words are inedequate; I have no way to really explain this.  I'm always relieved when I find a metaphor to express such things, and yesterday morning as I sat in meditation with these deeply disturbing physical/emotional sensations, I finally landed on a metaphor that fits, and the moment I did, I felt centered and calm:  Pruning.  Green surgery.

Back in June, I discussed pruning as metaphor in a post called The Ruthless Gardener, but back then, the pruning was about outer situations and relationships; now it's more intimate.  It's about thought processes, cherished mental habits and beliefs, and so on.

Somehow, by envisioning limbs being cut off a tree, I came to peace with the loss of control I've been feeling. Which has resulted from a greater and greater recognition of the illusion of any such control, that the thought-habits the mind cherishes are its always futile attempt to make control real and grasp it forever.

Yikes!  That's way too convoluted.  Let's try this instead:

The spirit prunes the soul; Being prunes everything that interferes with Itself.  

Saying Yes to the Impossible

Because my free time has been very limited over the past months, and because I am now writing for a living, I have been spending far more time on Facebook than on Blogger.  When I'm sitting at my computer, working on an article or a grant, I can flip over to Facebook for a five minute break, and happily, I've been able to keep up with some of my blogging friends this way.  One of those friends is Claire, of A Seat at the Table.  Today she has shared several wonderful ruminations on Advent and Christmas, which I have been so inspired by that I had to come blog about it, even though a huge pile of laundry, an unwritten article, and unbaked goodies await my attention.

One of the links she shared was a post called Annunciations All the Time, at dotMagis.  The author shares the poem, "Annunciation," by Denise Levertov (one of my favorite poets).  This poem deals with the idea that we are always being presented with things to say "yes" to the way Mary said yes to the angel.  And this brought me back to something I've been ruminating about this Advent, which is the part of Mary's 'yes' that included giving birth away from home, in a stable (or cave, as I hear is more accurate).

It seems to me that if an angel came to me and told me I was going to give birth to the son of God, saying yes would be a no-brainer.  But then if the time came to give birth and I found myself far from home and family, in a dirty stable, I'd be questioning if it really was God after all.  I'd be thinking, "This can't be right, this can't be the way such a one should be born."

Last year, I blogged about the messiness of Christmas.  This year, I am deeper in the messiness, not just of Christmas but of life.  How is it that my most cherished notions of the way things should be can be so far from reality?  It helps me to think of Mary in the stable, saying Yes.

Claire shared another poem by Denise Levertov, on her own blog today, and this one is about the importance of welcoming grief when it comes.  I can't help but put this together with my Mary rumination.  When we think of grief, we usually think of the big losses, of people we love dying, but there are so many little losses.  So many.  And some losses we experience as big even when they might not seem so to others.  I think again of Mary in the stable, of reconciling with the loss of an imagined experience of giving birth surrounded by the comfort and familiarity of home and loved ones.  For me, this would likely bring a sense of great loss, and I would grieve.  For Mary, it was the introduction to a life of losses around her son.  And for all of us with children, we know that the moment we give birth, we begin to lose them.

To allow grief is to say yes to the loss that has caused the grief, and then to open up a new and more abundant set of possibilities.  This is what I continue to learn at deeper and deeper levels, or actually, in more and more circumstances, even the ones that have seemed impossible to accept.

The third link Claire has shared today is to a post called The Christmas We Are Waiting For, by Sister Joan Chittister, and it reflects upon the Advent theme of waiting.  Chittister comments that Christ's birth was really about establishing a whole new order, which in many ways, disappointed those who were waiting for a Messiah.  She asks, "For what have we been waiting...For the restoration of the old order or for the creation of the new?"

The creation of the new may be very different from what I had imagined and thought right, and I will grieve the loss of the old, but doing so may be the only way to really let go of it and welcome true freedom, peace, and joy.

May we all be awake to the blessings of the season, in whatever messy form they come.

Setting Scraps of Light on Fire

Scraps of light through the adobe ruins next to the grove

Today is my one year blogoversary.  It is this and only this that has finally gotten me to sit down and write a post.  I have missed blogging and think about it almost every day, but my life has become so full of other things that I haven't had the inspiration.  To find some, I walked over to the church today, but there were too many people around so I ended up in the grove, where I sat and wrote this post by hand.   I have found myself sitting in the grove more often lately than in the church courtyard.  It's green again, although the mass graves of trees are still untended.

So much has happened since I last posted, that I don't know where to begin.  Should I tell you about my busy life?  The immense sense of loss and sadness I've been feeling?  Should I talk about how disconnected I've become from my writing?  

Or maybe I should try to be more positive, and tell you about my discoveries about bats, or the white cat I keep seeing, or my lemon tree dream.  But all these things are moments that have passed, inspirations that have faded in the face of too much work.

I'm not happy.  I know I need to just accept the way my life is right now, surrender to it.  Believe me, I'm working on that moment by moment, but there is a very sad little girl inside me who wants to come out and play.  And I don't know what to tell her to make her stop banging on the door.

And I realize how much I miss you all, my blogging friends.  It's not only the writing that I miss, it's the community, the support.  I feel very alone in my life these days, very much like I'm carrying a heavy burden by myself.  Stumbling and faltering under it.

But life goes on, and I just keep taking the next step.  At times I have glimpses of all this as a journey of significance, but mostly it just feels like stumbling in the dark.  I get tired of trying to hang onto the scraps of light that are tossed me.  I get mad at God for not giving me more, and then I'm ashamed for feeling that way.

And that's why I need - NEED - to write about those scraps, because it's the only way for me to hold onto them as guides, as reminders of the greater journey, the better story.  I need to tell you about last week when I had both a butterfly and a dragonfly on my finger in the same day.  They were both trapped in my house at different points, and I freed them.  

I need to tell you about dreaming of a sugarlaced lemon tree so glorious that gazing up into it was like eating the sun.

I need to tell you about the lessons bats have been trying to teach me about surrender and rebirth, about echolocation, in which bats navigate in the dark by using their voices to create sounds that reverberate off objects - the ability to see with the ears, to hear with the voice.  Because by telling you, I have a greater chance of really learning the lessons, internalizing and integrating them.  I too hear with my voice.  I learn by teaching.

And now, just by writing all this, I feel lighter, happier, inspired, free.  It occurs to me that this post follows a similar structure to some of the biblical psalms that start out with a lament and end with praise because by writing the lament the psalmist has seen the joy again.

Now I see that the writing I haven't been doing had hardened around me like ice, that scraps of light left unshared leave me cold, and once that happens, I have to write into the cold to break through it.

The fire must be tended or it dies out.  The fire must be fed, and for me that means writing it. 

Backstory

As it turns out, I have given up church for Lent. 

Will I go back once Lent is over?  I don't know.  I have no idea what's going to happen next in any area of my life.  I'm out of control.  (I looked all over for it - I'm definitely out.)  Hurray!

Giving up attachment to stories.  Surrendering all goals except awakening, the paradox being that to awaken, even that goal must be surrendered.

Learning to say Yes to everything.  As someone very wise once pointed out, Yes is surrender.

I started out by giving up bitching for Lent.  That was the surface goal, but I recognized that to truly do this, I had to give up the negative thinking that leads to bitching in the first place, otherwise it would just be a sorry attempt at control.

When I announced my intention on my blog, Dan recommended Byron Katie and The Work.  I began to explore that website, then mentioned what I was discovering there to Jennifer, who suggested I also read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.  From there began an amazingly rapid process of unraveling:

To give up bitching I had to undo negative thinking.  To undo negative thinking I had to look at my beliefs, which led to examining the stories I tell myself, which led finally to seeing that all stories are untrue.  Even the good ones.

I came to the edge of this forest once before, a long time ago, but I wasn't ready to enter then.  There were still stories I wanted to believe, and I didn't understand that one doesn't come to Reality by denying the body (or the world) and its stories, but by fully entering into them with an alert and embracing yet questioning mind.

To see the world as illusion or Maya is not to blow it all off and sit in your head.  It's merely to perceive the deeper Reality that is the Source.  (I feel like A.A. Milne, using all these caps.)  That was one of my biggest stumbling blocks when I tried to come to this before, and I ultimately found myself lost.  That's when I turned to the Bible and church.

In adopting a biblical worldview, one of the greatest joys was in experiencing the earth and myself as Creation, as real.  (Now I'm thinking of The Velveteen Rabbit.)  Reading the Bible, especially some of the beautiful nature imagery in the Psalms, and shifting my worldview this way turned me into an environmentalist and a social activist, because I finally had permission to care, to love Creation and all of its creatures.  Before that, when I saw the world as illusion, as something to be transcended, I didn't see it at all let alone feel that I wanted to care for it.

And so I entered a new paradigm, one in which there was a true Presence and Creative Intelligence who loved the earth, who made it and continues to make it in every moment, and who - could it possibly be??? - loved me.  Forgave me.  A Being who I didn't have to keep trying to climb some endless ladder to get to, who was instead reaching down to me, just where I was with all of my flaws.  I spiritually relaxed for the first time in years, maybe ever.  I accepted the gift that I now saw was always being offered, and realized that this was all I'd ever had to do to be with God.  In Christianity, that gift comes in the form of Christ.

I had spent so much time and energy trying (and failing) to connect with a formless, distant God, that it was an immense relief to embrace the incarnate version.  So much more accessible.  The Son became for me the access point to the Divine and to my own incarnation, the intersection of the ineffable and the tangible.  This is one of the most important symbolic meanings of the cross for me.

It makes perfect sense to me that if there is a God that God would take the form of a human to be able to communicate in a language humans can hear and comprehend.

Now, as this most powerful and unexpected Lenten journey winds down toward Easter, I find myself considering anew the Resurrection.  There are those who never seem to get to that part of the story.  There are others who try to jump straight to it and miss the point of the way of the cross, which is about surrender, the ultimate Yes.  Without that Yes, resurrection is impossible.  However, the Yes can only happen because it sees the deeper Reality that makes resurrection not only possible but inevitable.

Asking if (or stating that) Jesus and the Resurrection really happened loses all importance when one comes to the point of view that nothing has ever really happened, no story is true except in the telling.  Anything with a beginning, middle, and end necessarily falls into the realm of illusion because the present moment is the only ultimately real thing, and the Being within it.

And so, as I contemplate the Jesus story during a time in which all stories are dissolving, what I see, the true beauty of this and any good story - which is any story rightly perceived - is that the point is to go beyond the story into the Yes, the surrender, the all-encompassing Now that is eternal reality.  In that Yes are both the crucifixion and the resurrection; in this one moment they occur simultaneously, and are seen for the stories they are. 

Gradual change occurs in an instant.  And now, all that's left is love.

Laundry Day

Today is significant for a number of reasons.  

First, it's my birthday, and as it seems to work out every year, I'm going to the laundromat to wash clothes.   This is not something I have planned as a tradition - it just sort of happens.  I'm not complaining; I actually don't mind doing laundry, and there's something fitting about getting garments clean to usher in a new age.

I have, in fact, been thinking a bit about clothing.  Eryl posted recently about her appreciation for high fashion, which made me think of the movie The Devil Wears Prada, which I then had to go watch again.  And I've encountered some biblical references to clothing recently that remind me of the theological term I made up a few years ago:  "pantstheism."  This is not the same thing as pantheism, which is the belief that the Divine is within and contained by creation and does not exist outside of it.  Pantstheism is basically an alternative to the word "panentheism," which is the concept that God exists within all of creation but also created it and is beyond it.  The creation of my term was inspired by Psalm 102: 25-27:

In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
       and the heavens are the work of your hands.
 They will perish, but you remain;
       they will all wear out like a garment.
       Like clothing you will change them
       and they will be discarded.
 But you remain the same,
       and your years will never end.

The Divine is in the creation the way we are in our clothes.  Our favorite jeans and sweater take our shape, conform to our image, absorb the energy and scent of our bodies.  God is both the maker and the wearer of the garment that is creation.

This rumination has been coming to me in a new way lately, as I've been immersed in contemplating the distinctions between the inner and the outer life.  More than ever before, I'm focused on true inner change, deliberately turning my attention away from outer distractions, whether they be situations or thoughts.  Mostly thoughts.  Why don't I consider these thoughts part of the inner world, you may ask?  Because I'm increasingly seeing this kind of Monkey Mind thought as something that is actually foreign to my true Self, which is why it is so confusing, unpleasant, and even destructive to identify with it.  It's like wearing rough polyester clothing that's garish and too tight.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was dreading Lent - the dryness of the desert, the stripping away.  But I feel incredibly blessed to realize that the reason for this self-denial is to discover a joy and abundance so far beyond anything else that the stripping is a relief.  The analogy that jumps immediately to mind is that if you want to fully experience the ecstasy of physical intimacy, you have to take off your clothes.

But in the moment  before embrace there can be discomfort and disorientation; you are naked, and the room is too cold, the lights are too bright.  You doubt who you are without your clothes, and if you identify with those thoughts, the embrace will be diminished or avoided altogether.  I have had moments like this lately, too.  But unlike the past, I'm finding it in my Self to not become so identified with these thoughts that I go hide in the closet or get dressed again in fifteen layers of confusion.  And a large part of why I'm able to do this is because of blogging - being able to write and share my process with a supportive community that interacts with me by introducing me to wonderful resources or giving me helpful suggestions or simply listening and understanding.

Which leads me to another significance of this day, which is that this is my fiftieth post.  I have been blogging for just over five months, and in this time I have connected with some incredible people and reclaimed my voice as a writer.  I am continually astounded and inspired by the community I find myself part of here and its genuine effects on my life.

And so it's fitting that today I'm accepting an award from Entrepreneur Chick.  I feel somewhat ambivalent about blogging awards for a number of reasons that I don't want to lengthen this post by discussing, but this particular award is one I will be pleased to display on my blog because it's pretty and happy-inducing to look at.  And it has an orange flower!

 

I hereby dedicate this post and pass along this award to all of my blogging friends, my cross-pollinators.  You know who you are.  Your blogs and your comments have truly pollinated my life and helped me bloom, and for that I have immense gratitude.

A Sacrifice of Praise

Life is amazing.  Just when you think there's nothing left, no hope, no color, no meaning, you get a glorious surprise.  We say and we shape and we dance around everything, always trying to reconnect, always working, always penetrating, only to find that we actually did know the whole time what we knew.

I'm here to say that life is good.  Because it's life.  All the horror in the world is to show us the way beyond horror.  All the buttons our loved ones push are to show us the buttons so we can leave them alone.  All the brokenness points to the wholeness that has always and will always exist, and only exists.  Does this make any sense?  Why have a world like this?  It can seem a cruel joke, but the only ripe option is to trust.  To embrace the mystery.  To become the beloved.

I love and I love and I love.  There is nowhere else to go.  Every blooming thing is a gift, if I know how to unwrap it.  And thankfully, everyone and everything shows me how.  Hallelujah. 

The Epiphany Chronicles III: The Impossible Union of Spheres of Existence

Day of January 6

The Feast of the Epiphany

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time...

Music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.  These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union.

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future 

Are conquered, and reconciled.

~T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"

I woke the morning after my nightmare refreshed and calm, with more energy and clarity than I'd had in a few days.  My goal for the day was to get caught up on my grantwriting work and do a house blessing, a traditional ritual for Epiphany.  But when I looked around my house, I realized neither of these things were going to get done unless I cleaned first.

  What was I going to do with all this stuff?

The house was chaos, most of it worse than this table.  But I was apprehensive about starting to clean because I knew once I started, it could go on all day.  If it hadn't been for the house blessing plan, I probably would have ignored it and worked instead, but there was no way I was going to bless a dirty house.  So I took a deep breath and plunged in.  I tidied and mirted (opposite of "trimmed") the Christmas tree and put away all the decorations and washed dishes and rearranged shelves and furniture and vacuumed and swept and blogged in between tasks.

I found a perfectly intact dead bee on top of a pile of stuff in the recycling bin.  What the heck was a bee doing out here in the middle of January?  At first I thought it was alive, it was so perfect.  If you're not acquainted with my connection to bees, read this.  Most people would probably not find much significance in a dead bee, but for me it was a definite message, an alert.  The last time a dead bee came to me so clearly, I was making a three-dimensional medicine shield collage and needed something for the center of it.  I walked outside barefoot and was stung by a bee I stepped on.  But amazingly, it wasn't crushed and it ended up in the center of my shield, just where it belonged.  It was the first and only time I've ever been stung by a bee.

The first time I checked my email that morning, there was a new post announced on The Website of Unknowing, called "Dark Epiphany."  Since I was processing the nightmare, I was very curious about this.  Turns out, it tied in perfectly with my "dark epiphany" of the night before.  Carl McColman, the author of that site, says, "struggling with the absence of God is a way of experiencing God’s presence. Call it a dark epiphany, perhaps. We fool ourselves if we think that God only shows up in the light."

This also ties in nicely with the comments some folks have left on my previous two posts in these chronicles. A dark epiphany is still an epiphany to be welcomed.

Then, a little later, I read Rebecca's Epiphany post on Whatever else my life is....it is also this dazzling darkness.  She says:

Having the aha moment or the great epiphany can be very exciting. Having all of the puzzle pieces fall into place after a long discernment or just receiving the grace of an understanding from seemingly nowhere can be a spiritual and emotional thrill. But, it seems to me that most of my epiphanies have brought with them an invitation to change and to transform. They come for my benefit and for the benefit of the world, and so I am asked to act. That action usually requires courage, integrity and discipline.

I cleaned some more, pondering all of this. During my next break, through investigating the blog of one of other commenters on "Dark Epiphany," I clicked a link called The Bee Goddess, where I read that in ancient Crete, " the bee signified the life that comes from death." Discussing a golden seal found buried with the dead in that culture, the author describes the image on it: "The bee goddess, the figure in the center descending to earth among snakes and lilies, is being worshipped by her priestesses, who, characteristically, take the same form as she does, all raising their ‘hands’ in the typical gesture of epiphany." Snakes and lilies; this spoke to me. Would it be over the top to mention that my name, Susan, means "lily?" And that lilies symbolize forgiveness and purity?

And then I remembered a small piece of what I had read in my daily prayer book, Celtic Benedictions, the night before the dream.  I went back and looked at it.  Just before going to sleep, I had prayed this with the words of the book:

Let me learn of you in the soil of my soul, O Christ,
and your journey through death to birth.
Let me learn of you in my soul this night
and the journey of letting go...

...Set free my dreams of the unknown.
Safeguard this time of resting, O God,
enfold me in the darkness of the night.

Astonishing.  My dreams of the unknown were certainly set free, just not in the way I would have chosen.  I was definitely enfolded in the darkness of the night.  I was also “safeguarded”, but again, not in a way I would expect, or normally associate with that word.  And after I went back to sleep that night, my rest was deep and whole.

This is when I got the overwhelming sense that my epiphany experiences thus far were asking to be written and shared.  It was an uncomfortable thought, and was definitely an action requiring "courage, integrity and discipline." It was becoming more and more apparent to me that there was real significance to my experiences over the past couple of days.  But what was I going to do with all this stuff? How to create the impossible union of spheres of existence?

I began to process all of it in earnest.  As outwardly I cleaned and organized my house, I inwardly ordered my mind and heart.  I mused about the meaning of Epiphany.

I've mentioned before that one of the big appeals of religion for me is entering into the narratives of my tradition, Christianity. The Epiphany narrative is of the Three Wise Men following the star and coming to see the Christ-child. I've heard that they didn't actually get there until Jesus was two and the family was living in a house, which I kind of like. I am amused by the image of Jesus as a toddler, fondling a chunk of gold and then trying to smash it on the floor, or flinging frankincense around the room with gleeful abandon.

At any rate, the rationale of the house blessing follows from this story. This ritual, which I'd been planning for days, now seemed even more important and meaningful after my experience of the previous night.

It was mid-afternoon before I got to a satisfactory stopping point with the cleaning (no, it is never "finished"), and prepared for the house blessing.  I used a ritual from the book To Dance With God, by Gertrud Mueller.  There's a little bit of liturgy to recite, and then you're supposed to go around the house with incense, or sprinkling holy water in every room while consciously blessing that space.  Then you're supposed to take a piece of chalk that you've blessed and write above the main entrances of the house, the year and the initials of the three wise men (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar) like this:

20 + C + M + B + 10

It seemed a little weird to me, this last part, but what the heck.  I didn't have a piece of chalk so I used an orange colored pencil. Very lightly.

I visited each room with a sage smudge stick a soul-friend of mine made for me and which I'd never used, and wafted the smoke with the large wild turkey feather I found last fall in the grove by the St. Francis church.  Then I carried a silver bowl of water that I keep by my bed to enhance my dreams, and sprinkled some in every room.  I finished by ringing a little bell in each room.  Maybe all of this sounds goofy to you, but it felt great.  My house felt so clean and calm and clear and fresh at the end of it all.  I was really really glad I'd spent the day this way.  And I began more and more to see that dream as a gift.

I also anointed myself with frankincense essential oil, a fitting gesture, I thought, for an Epiphany celebration.  But what struck me was that I REALLY like the way it smells.  And it's the same smell that it was 2000-odd years ago when it was offered as a gift by the wise men. Through a little research I discovered that "the mythical Phoenix bird was thought to build its funeral pyre out of frankincense and myrrh". Also, that  it was used in pagan purification ceremonies in many cultures. Purification. Yes.

Now it was time for the kids to come home, and to get ready for the Epiphany service that my church was holding that evening.

When I entered the quiet, candlelit church, the atmosphere of peace resonated with the clean quiet of my heart. My mind was not quite as clear. I was holding the big question at bay, Should I, can I, continue with Justin? The Applebees fiasco was still with me, asking me to see the reality – that despite our best intentions, we harm each other in a way that shuts us both down. And no matter how much progress we seem to make, these instances set us back to square one. I wasn't exactly fighting this recognition, but laying it aside for the moment, letting these unfolding experiences work on me and bring me the answers deeper than intellect or willful resolve.

The pastor, Wayne, was dressed in a simple white robe with a cord of rope around his waist, not what he usually wears. The service was simple and prayerful. Wayne played a song on his guitar and sang – things I had never witnessed him do. 

 

The scripture was from Isaiah 60:

 Arise, shine! For your light has come,

and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth,

and thick darkness the peoples;

but the Lord will arise upon you,

and his glory will appear over you...

I felt tears welling up and looked down at my lap, lest someone notice. And then Wayne read:

Lift up your eyes and look around;

they all gather together, they come to you...

Then you shall see and be radiant;

your heart shall thrill and rejoice.

I was moved to my toes. I lifted my eyes and saw quiet love. Wayne began speaking, what he spoke of was not the gifts of the wise men, or the brilliance of the star, but of Herod. For those of you not familiar with the story, when the wise men come at last into Jerusalem, they go to King Herod to inquire of the whereabouts of the “new king” that has been born. Herod, afraid of this potential threat to his authority, tells them that once they find this child, they should report back to him. Once he knows where the child is, his plan is to kill him. The Wise Men, being wise, realize the malicious intent in Herod, and return to their homeland “by a different way,” to avoid Herod.

Something that has struck me since that night is that the Wise Men were strangers to the land, aliens, and must have seemed especially so when they showed up at Mary and Joseph's doorstep. But they were welcomed, just as I must welcome the strangers in my own soul.

What Wayne preached about was Herod's fear, how everything he is reported in the Bible to have done was out of fear. How even in the joy of the nativity story, there is the backdrop of shadows and death. How we all live against this backdrop. Darkness creates fear in the human heart, he said, using the example of a child wanting to leave the lights on at night because the monsters grow larger in the dark. But, he said, fear also creates darkness, it works the other way too. And yet, there is this glorious light beyond all light, that is real, and all we have to do is find the courage to lift our eyes to behold it. All we have to do is trust it, and then there it is. 

And there it was. 

And here it is.

No simple answers, only “hints followed by guesses,” but in the weeping, in the lifting of eyes, the impossible union beheld.

 

The Epiphany Chronicles II: Menaced by Monsters

Night of January 5/6

We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

In the middle, not only the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment...

...The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires.
~T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"

I am in a dismal psychiatric hospital with dingy yellow stained walls and seizured fluorescent lights.  A variety of infirm people are milling about in a commons area.

I'm not a patient, and I have some kind of purpose here, but I don't know what it is.  I'm trying to leave but patients keep detaining me, trying to tell me their stories.  I need to get back to my children, I say.  I've been gone too long.

Something is amiss, there's some sort of threat being announced.  Someone is attacking.  I begin to move out of the commons area into the hallway, and they're saying it's a lock-down, that no one can leave.  I have a growing sense of the presence of evil, and of being trapped.  I must escape.

As I move into the hallway, chaos is building, and there are more people, all rushing in different directions.  I'm trying to move past them, get to the doorway at the end of the hall.  I notice a figure to my left.  She's skinny, blonde, and ugly, with gaping pale blue eyes, and she's carrying a small black to-go box containing an iceberg lettuce salad.  She's not human.  She's an evil creature; I can feel it, and I'm terrified.  She seems fake, like she's made out of heavy rubber.

She's inching up behind someone, sniffing at the back of their head with horrible intent.  She catches me looking at her, and then throws some of the lettuce toward me.  I'm doomed.  She moves toward me and I know I will not leave this place alive.  I know she has the strength to do with me what she will, and there's no point in fighting it.

I say something to her, how I know that she can throw me against the wall and kill me in an instant, and she says, "I don't have to."  Just then, I notice  huge rusted pipes, the thickness of barrels, lining the wall of the hallway.  They begin to creak and rumble, and I realize that they're filled with water.  They're about to send a force of rushing water through the building that will quickly drown everyone there.

"Here it comes..." she says.

And I woke up.

The evil black sludge had filled my bedroom, it was a tangible presence, and I was frozen.  I haven't had a nightmare like this in a very long time.  There have been times when I've sensed the presence of evil on the perimeter of my awareness, and deliberately pushed it away, but now it encompassed me, and I couldn't even get out of bed.

My first rational thoughts were that a) It's the night before Epiphany, and I have had an epiphany of evil, and  b) if evil has actual substance and presence, how much more does God have, the divine love and goodness.

I made myself get up eventually, and I went to the living room to ponder and pray.  I wrenched myself away from the sludge enough to turn my thoughts and heart toward God, toward the quiet love I have avowed myself to.  I thought of a scene in Paulo Coelho's novel, Brida, in which the heroine must spend the night in the forest alone.  At first she is terrified with the sounds and the shadows of the night, but then she realizes that she has the CHOICE of how to feel, that if she turns her mind and heart toward love and beauty and goodness and joy, then that is where she will be.  Because it's real.  She eventually falls asleep in peace.

I also thought of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, who witnesses a manifestation of evil among his fellows, and can never embrace them again, even though he's not sure if it really happened or if he dreamed it.

Sitting here now, several days later, in the comfort of distance and day, it's easy for me to see how I manifested the nightmare in response to the events of the day before.  The deep fears and pain that I had given up trying to control were leaking out.  Threatening to rush out, in fact, as if from huge rusty pipes, and drown me. I have had several insights into the meaning of this dream just by writing about it here.  But I can't write it off as merely "psychological."  It was a manifestation of evil that was not merely within me.  It had a presence of its own.

I don't want to get into armchair theology of evil just now, because that would diminish the actual experience and what it meant to me.  Besides, I don't even know how to distinguish between "within" and "without" when an issue comes to this level.  The sludge was definitely in the room, but isn't the room "in me" in the most profound sense? 

As awful as this experience was, it showed me my spiritual growth, because I didn't just run and turn on a light and try to externally comfort myself.  I never even looked at the clock.  I also didn't sit and try to analyze it, to think it away.  I immediately went to God, to divine love for that comfort.  I leaned into myself to the source instead of outwardly to some illusion of control. And this deliberate invocation of divine love was much more effective and comforting than turning on a few lights and telling myself it was nothing.  It didn't make the sense of evil "go away," but rather came into that evil and illuminated it.  Experiencing the substance of evil confirmed for me at a deep level the substance of God.  The light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

Of Messes, Masses, and Ships

Christmas this year, like every year, was messy. But it's a mess I'm learning to surrender to. In the imperfect and often sloppy, can be beauty and joy.

We made a mess of gingerbread cookies early in the season. They didn't look like the cookies in the Christmas books, but they were fun to make and eat. Even my 16-year-old's ubercool boyfriend helped.

One of my goals this year was to make a photo calendar for the relatives, but with the messiness of end-of-semester insanity at the same time as Christmas preparations, it didn't happen. I kept trying to get everyone in the same place at the same time to take one good family photo with a Christmas theme for the December page. The day when I finally managed to gather everyone, Eliana was tired and fussy. After about thirty (wasted) shots, these were the only two that came out anywhere near presentable.

But by the time I actually got these on my computer, there wasn't enough time to get the calendar out by Christmas and I was swamped with other things, so the project was abandoned. Oh well, maybe next year.

Because June Amber had to work on Christmas Day, we decided to have our big dinner on Christmas Eve. But I also knew that my beloved's mother was coming to town on or shortly after Christmas Day, so I bought a prime rib and a turkey. Well, actually, two turkeys, since it was buy one, get one free. We had the prime rib Christmas Eve.

In case you're not familiar with the paper crowns, they come out of Christmas "crackers," which are sort of like toilet paper tubes wrapped in shiny paper of various colors. (You can see a silver one in the above photo.) Everyone at the table holds an end of one with one hand and an end of another with the other hand, so that a chain is formed around the table. Then everybody pulls and they make a terrific popping sound as they come apart. The contents of the tube - which consist of the paper crown, a really bad joke on a small piece of paper, and some small plastic item like a whistle or a tiny yo-yo - then go flying everywhere.

It is mandatory to wear the paper crowns throughout dinner and to tell the lousy jokes. The weirdest joke this year was "What do you get when you cross a cow, a sheep, and a goat? A milky baa kid." If anyone at all gets this, please explain it to my unenlightened family. Poor Justin was quite disturbed and spent most of dinner trying to figure it out.

For dessert we had my famous eggnog cheesecake.

The Bourbon Fruitcake I made is behind the candle, but you don't want to see it, I promise. The whole top of it stuck in the pan, so it's, well, messy-looking.

I had been making a very conscious effort to "go with the flow" this Christmas, and not be attached to things happening a certain way, but the one thing I really was determined to do was walk to Midnight Mass at the San Francisco church. However, by 11:15, having just finished dessert a half hour before, and Eliana still up and cranky, the exhaustion set in and I began the process of talking myself out of it. I put Eliana to bed and was reading her stories when I heard the church bells begin to ring. I squelched the yearning that arose and went back to reading about the Christmas mice who get a present of cheese from the cat. Just then, Justin came into Eliana's room and said he'd take over so I could go. I hedged, but he looked me tenderly in the eye and said, "The bells are calling you."

This was my second time attending Midnight Mass here, but my first since I moved into the neighborhood. There was something liberating and exciting about walking over there by myself late at night. I used to attend Midnight Mass at a cathedral in Baton Rouge, and this one is so different. The cathedral mass was decidedly "high church" with the Gregorian-type music and much solemnity. In this mass all the songs were in Spanish and accompanied by a single acoustic guitar and a mediocre lead singer. The combination of this with the traditional Catholic incense and liturgy gives it a strange combination of high church and low. And then the priest is Scottish. I can't begin to explain the incongruity of the Spanish music and the Scottish brogue, but it works, and is lovely, and somehow holy spaces are created in the disparities.

After the mass, we all walked out through the courtyard, which was lined with luminarias. The statue of St. Clare was circled by them. In the parking lot was a series of small bonfires, and people were standing around them wishing each other a Merry Christmas. I walked home at peace with the world, my heart full of love, pondering the pettiness that often holds that love back. Earlier in the evening, when I was preparing to serve dessert, I had a moment of self-pity because everyone had disappeared and left me to do the dishes, and now here I was serving an elaborate dessert, and no one seemed to even care enough to be there. Unfortunately, I dumped this negativity onto Justin (who was the only one who WAS there), effectively pushing him away for the rest of the evening. As I thought of this, I resolved to be more magnanimous and selfless with those I love.

The house was quiet and dark. When I entered my bedroom, I was greeted by an overpowering scent of essential oils and the sight of Justin and Eliana sprawled out asleep on the bed. Apparently, they had somehow migrated from her room and he had fallen asleep before her, because she had gotten into my essential oils and poured out the entire bottle of cypress and most of the ylang-ylang. She also had found and torn open the little gift I had carefully and beautifully wrapped for Justin earlier and had planned on giving him after Mass.

I felt devastated and angry with Justin for allowing her to do this. All that waste of time and energy and money and scent. But I firmly turned my heart back to what I'd been feeling before I walked into the room, and heroically refrained from losing it. However, in the middle of the night, Eliana woke up and was fussy, and in my sleepy haze, I was grumpy and said something mean to Justin. The next morning, I knew he was hurt and I regretted my harsh words. We avoided talking about it though, putting our personal mess aside to engage in the glorious mess of opening presents.

Later, however, I was sad and discouraged that it's so hard to be kind and loving, and that often when it feels like Justin and I are getting closer, I succumb to a negative emotion and express it in a way that drives him away. Sometimes I feel like a failure, and it's so frustrating to fall into the same stupid mindless destructive habits when I've resolved to change them. At times like that, it just feels overwhelming, and it's hard for me to get back to the perspective that it's a work in progress, a practice, and there will be failures but that's ok. Consequently, I spent most of Christmas afternoon in tears, feeling like I'd "ruined" everything (a lifelong issue for me). Why do I waste so much time making mistakes?

But somehow this emotional spilling was also cleansing. That night, Justin made an awesome stew with the prime rib leftovers and we had a cozy and satisfying evening, lazing about in the messy living room watching the movie, Elf.

So my lesson this Christmas, my big epiphany, is as follows. There are basically three things you can do with the ongoing wastefulness and messiness of life:

1. Spend most of your time and energy focused on cleaning up messes and regretting making them.
2. Ignore them.
3. Transform them into something beautiful by perceiving and attending to the beauty that's already in them.
   

The first one is the default state for me. Or, more accurately, it's the default state I tend to think I "should" be in. In reality, the second one is equally my default state; I tend to go back and forth between the two. Which is why my house is usually either completely messy or spotless.

I've been reading Karen Armstrong's memoir, The Spiral Staircase, which I won't summarize here, but there is a scene in that book that is relevant to this discussion. After having lived a life of rigid order and discipline, Armstrong goes to board at the house of a family who are very loose and somewhat radically liberal in their lifestyle. She describes the house as being a complete mess, utterly disordered, but she finds this liberating. She says the state of this house reflected "a cheerful disregard for appearances."

In church this past Sunday, the pastor said something about how God doesn't care about how we look on the outside, and I thought of Armstrong's expression. Could it be that God, too, has a cheerful disregard for appearances? The scripture related to the pastor's comment was from Colossians 3, when Paul advises in verse 12 to "clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience." The point is that these are the qualities that give order and peace to our lives, not outward appearances.

When I apply all this to the messiness of relationships, it helps me to remind myself that although there will be mess and waste, these are just "appearances" as long as the qualities listed above are the ongoing focus and goal. Is wrapping paper "wasted" because it's tossed aside to reveal the gift? Was it a waste of time to make all those gingerbread cookies because they were gone in an hour? To take all those "useless" family photos? Was Christmas afternoon wasted because I spent it crying? The answer is No to all of these, if I cheerfully disregard the appearances of waste and focus instead on the spiritual qualities that were shared or expressed or taught.

The third method of dealing with messes and waste came clear to me a couple of days after Christmas, when we went out to visit Justin's mom and her boyfriend at the Earthship they booked for their stay in Taos. (If you're unfamiliar with Earthships, click here.) The basic premise of an Earthship is that they are houses made from as many recycled materials as possible and designed to be extremely energy efficient and sustainable, entirely off the grid.

Linda and Bob stayed in the Phoenix Earthship which has a jungle behind the living room, where banana trees, flowers, and even vegetables are grown.

The walls are constructed with tires, and old glass bottles are used to decorate and filter light through walls.

I'd heard a lot about Earthships, since I live in Taos and the first Earthship community was here, but I'd never been inside one, and was stunned by the beauty and attention to detail.

I tell you, it was just like being in Rivendell. Imagine being in a house where everything feels handmade by a master artisan. That's a TV screen above the fireplace/waterfall.

There was even a strange spiral staircase, and I could see my reflection on its walls.

To take what appears to be waste and turn it into something like this Earthship is downright inspiring. It gives me hope that what is wasted can be redeemed and messes can be transformed into beauty and order. And when it comes to relationships, this experience has given me a new guiding metaphor. Instead of regretting or ignoring their messiness, I can work on turning them into Earthships.

Hurray! For He is Good in Nature

One of my favorite Christmas carols has always been 'Twas In the Moon of Wintertime, also known as the Huron Carol.  As a child I adored this carol because it told the story of the nativity as though Jesus had been born Native American, or as they say in Canada, as a First Nations person.  Even at a young age, it inspired my theological imagination.  There is something that rings very true for me in the idea that Jesus could have come to any culture at any time and had the same effect.

I found this nativity scene on the Virtual Museum of Canada's website.  This piece is housed in the chapel of the village of Huron-Wendake, near Quebec City and  was created to interpret The Huron Carol.  Click  here to read more about it. 

Photo by Pierre Soulard

 
After living in the U.S. for a few years, it suddenly occurred to me one Christmas that I hadn't heard this carol in a long time, so I did a little research and discovered that it was the first Canadian Christmas carol, originally written in 1643 in the Huron language by a French Jesuit missionary named Jean de Brebeuf.  It was then translated into French, and in 1926 into English.  The English lyrics, while beautiful, are quite different from the original Huron ones.

I found a line-for-line translation of the Huron into English here, which is charming in its simplicity.  The Wise Men ("elders") come and praise the Christ child by "greasing his scalp many times" and saying, "Hurray!  For he is good in nature."  But even the English lyrics are respectful enough to Native culture that they have been used by various tribes.  For instance, I found one website with a translation from the English version into Mi'kmaw.

Here is a beautiful rendition of the carol, with a mixture of Huron, French and English lyrics.

Jean de Brebeuf had a deep appreciation of the Huron culture.  He wrote a set of guidelines for fellow missionaries on how to deal with the Huron, emphasizing understanding of and respect for their ways.  Apparently, the Huron respected him as well.  He lived among them for only a few years before he was tortured and killed by the Iroquois in one of their raids on the Huron.  Reading of how he was flayed to the bone and then doused with boiling water as a mockery of baptism, I was haunted for days.  They cut off his lips because he would not stop praising God as he underwent this unspeakable torture.  They also ate his heart because they saw that he was a man of courage and strength.

And then I ponder this line in the Huron Carol, when the Wise Men say of the Christ child, "Let us show reverence for him as he comes to be compassionate to us."

I just can't seem to get away from this theme of violence and compassion.  For one thing, I keep reading other people's posts that touch on it in some way, highlighting some aspect that I had not considered.

This is such an adult theme, so serious.  Frankly, I'm weary of it.  The Christmas season is upon us, and my heart is wandering toward happiness, as it always does at Christmastime. 

It recently struck me like a bell that the reason I love Christmas so ridiculously much (and I have been ridiculed for it) is because it enfolds me in a fairy tale that is real because it's a complete and intense sensory experience.  A feast for all the senses at once.

I once had a boyfriend who introduced me to the joy of lying under the Christmas tree in the dark, looking up through the colored lights and branches.  If you lie there long enough holding hands, occasionally sitting up to sip your eggnog, with carols playing on the stereo, and a crock pot wafting the scents of orange, cinnamon, and clove through the air, the spirit of Christmas envelops and possesses you.  The resulting feeling of comfort and joy is not to be underestimated.

For me, the story of the birth of the Christ child is satisfying and enchanting.  It's a story I can immerse and find myself in, and each year it takes on a new meaning, a new direction to explore.  This year, I am entirely focused on the earthy, sensual, childlike qualities of Christmas, both in this story and in all the traditions and stories of Christmas that I know and love.

The humor of the Nativity story is striking me this year.  What kind of a goofy God would have His Holy Self born in a pile of dirty straw surrounded by a bunch of livestock?  I can only imagine what the Wise Men must have felt after traveling all that way, thinking they were going to meet a powerful political leader in his palace or something.  It's just downright silly.  And very, very messy.  Who would have made any of this up?  It's too irreverent for anyone of faith to come up with.

What I'm getting from contemplating all of this is primarily that by being born into the messiness and sensuality of the flesh, it is made holy.  What else do I need to know?

Eliana, my two-year-old, is my best teacher right now.  What in the world is more chaotic and messy and full of delight than a two-year-old?  When I watch myself responding not-so-gracefully to that chaos at times frequently, I always realize, however dimly, that it is my heaviness, my fears surrounding survival and control and self-preservation that lead me to respond that way.  And then I want to escape.  I want "alone time."  I want order.  I want things to be pleasant and smooth for say an hour or two.  I want a break.

So I've been planning an Advent Quiet Day with my friend Cathy, which happened today.  This is a day set aside to gather and focus spiritually through prayer, silent periods of meditation, discussion, reflection.  I was in charge of leading a reflection on John 1:14 - "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  And what I found myself saying was, "We're not here today for a brief escape from the messiness and chaos of life, but to learn to receive it as a gift and experience it as children."  Eliana doesn't care if her face is dirty, if the ornaments are on the tree or all over the floor, if Miracle on 34th Street plays all the way to the end. 

I suspect we all just take ourselves too damn seriously.  (Well, except for Entrepreneur Chick.)  Advent is called a time of preparation for the coming of the Christ child, and it's generally considered a solemn time of self-reflection and repentance.  But what is the real purpose, and what can this preparation possibly be for but  joy?  How does one prepare for joy but by lightening the load?  What is there to repent for but the heaviness and fear that make us forget to receive life with childlike wonder and delight?

Maybe Christmas was God's way of saying "Lighten up!"  Maybe it's about being so filled with joy that someone has to cut off your lips to get you to shut up about it.  Maybe the idea of being "saved" by Christ is largely about the sanctification of incarnation, with all its senses, its messiness, its ordinariness, its awkwardness.  And its joys.

I find myself returning to the idea of compassion with new eyes.  Karen Armstrong, author of the Charter for Compassion, says it's about the willingness to enter into another's experience.  Jean de Brebeuf's, for instance.  The Iroquois who killed him.  But it can also be entering the unfettered delight of your two-year-old.  Or even looking into the face of the Christ child and seeing your own.

Ghost Ranch Gathering: Into The Heart of the Desert

A time to gather
myself to myself.

A time to gather sacred life
into silent landscape.

A time to gather heart to mind
and back again.

A time to gather in the heart
of the high desert
with twelve brilliant women,

contemporaries and ancients.

My home for the next three days

is Casa del Sol,

a hacienda,

the spiritual heart

of Ghost Ranch.

 My room is small and simple.

Some previous visitor

has left seven-day candles

in the hearth.

We begin each day walking

the labyrinth.

Mornings

and evenings,

we study

the Desert Mothers.

In the 300s,

when Constantine made Christianity

the state religion,

many rebelled, saw it as sellout.

They retreated to the desert,

against the status quo.

Some, especially men,

became hermits.

But often the women

created communities

where they shared
and prayed
and taught.

Syncletica
was considered very wise.

She taught about living
an authentic life.
She said,

It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind 
while living in a crowd, 
and it is possible for one who is a solitary 
to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.

Mary of Egypt
was a probably a prostitute
or at least quite promiscuous.

She left that life
and entered the wilderness
where she lived
to the end of her days.

Macrina was the woman
behind the famous brothers,
St. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa.

She was compared to Socrates

for her wisdom.

Gregory said she was:

A woman who raised herself by philosophy

to the greatest height of human virtue.

Mary C. Earle,

in her book, The Desert Mothers,

 says the lesson of these women is:

Daily practice, 

focused on what matters 

in the long run, 

shapes each of us

into true human beings,

marked by the glory of God.

  

My practice,

afternoons at Ghost Ranch,

is solitude and silence.

Just me

and the desert.

This huge silence is

the Word of God,

living and active,

listening, alert;

not even a bird

breaks into it.

 

Unadulterated sunshine

holds hands

with a breeze,

and they both

hug the rocks.

 

A single plane

passes over

the daymoon.

 

I crawl on my belly

up soft windswept mounds

of red dirt,

 

immediate geology,

cracked

like an old elephant.

 

In this overflow of solitude,

I think, What if

my longings

are God's longings?

That could be my soul

turned inside

out,

these monuments

of rock,

 

 

these fractal branches,

 

this perfect pentagon

of white stone.

Resting with this Earth,

I receive

her healing.

She is the greatest

Desert Mother

of all.

No agenda but to love

this self

in this body,

on this earth,

my own monastic cell.

The Desert Father, Abba Moses said,

Go to your cell

and your cell

will teach you all. 

Nothing that isn't,

nothing to escape,

when there are no walls.

The final morning

brings first snow,

a perfect symbol

of renewal,

purification,

 

an unexpected alteration

from beauty to beauty,

movement

from earth to earth,

home to home.