Like a River
We are not human beings on a spiritual
journey. We are spiritual beings on a human
journey. Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin
The plain fact is that the planet does
not need more successful people.
But it
does desperately need more peacemakers,
healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers
of every kind.
It needs people who
live well in their place.
It needs
people of moral courage willing to join the
fight to make the world habitable and
humane.
And these qualities have little
to do with success as we have defined it.
David Orr
"Life," said the guru, "is like a river."
"That's it?" shouted both annoyed seekers in unison. And the two men began to choke the guru.
"Okay, okay," the guru said. "Life is not like a river."
There's something very seductive about finding the right box or container for life--for meaning, for faith, for intimacy. (Even better if it fits on a bumper sticker.)
And nothing quite so maddening as the discovery that life seldom fits the box we have created.
Not that we don't stop trying.
We've wired ourselves to derive meaning from the explanation, rather than the experience.
We have put our faith in a creed, rather than a relationship that would make any creed possible.
We too often see prayer in the words, rather than in the silence that holds the words.
We want to find our meaning in the moral of the story, and not the mystery that veils it.
I spent this past week in the Arizona desert at the Franciscan Renewal Center. I started my week with a personal retreat, and spent the weekend leading a group on a retreat using The Power of Pause. During our retreat we laughed and prayed and cried and played and soaked up the sun. In the evening, we watched sunsets the color of molten lava, and sat around a bonfire, singing the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel to a starry sky. And we spent time coloring and tearing up magazines to make collages. After one of our games, one participant asked, "Now tell us again, why are we doing these exercises?"
I could have told her, "Because life is like a river."
Or I could have told her, "Because our faith journey is not a test or a contest or a beauty pageant. Our spiritual development is about openness and receiving and listening, and entering into the moment, this moment, before we analyze it."
Easier said than done. I know, because earlier in the week, my own retreat was off script, with melancholy emotions crashing the party, as I came face with parts of myself that feel incomplete and deficient.
And yes, my knee-jerk was to figure it all out, or look for answers. (Certainly Spiritual Direction would be easier with Cliff Notes.)
When a young girl returned home from school in tears, her Mother worried, and asked, "Sweetheart, what happened?"
"It was awful," the girl told her Mother. "My best friend's cat died. And she was very, very sad. And I don't think I'm a good best friend, because I didn't know the right words to say, to try to help her."
"What did you do?" the mother asked.
"I just held her hand, and cried with her all day."
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Beginning on Tuesday, I will be blogging from Portugal.
Witness sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
Denise Levertov
(A poem written with reference to Mt. Rainer)
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
Rumi
Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, "How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it."
Jewish Prayer
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