Terry Hershey

In This Issue:

• Sacred Necessities: Glory in the grey
• Sabbath moment
• Poem
• Words to live by

FEATURE ARTICLE
by Terry Hershey

Sacred Necessities: Glory in the grey

Show us the glory in the grey.
George MacLeod

The profound sense of the immanence of god in the world...the sense of an all-pervading presence.
John Macquarrie

The great lesson from the true mystics is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard.
Abraham Maslow

My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God’s lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature.
Henry David Thoreau

How many common things are trodden under foot which, if examined carefully, awaken our astonishment.
Augustine

You do not need to seek Him here or there, He is no farther off than the door of your heart.
Meister Eckhart

The world will never starve for wonders but only for the want of wonder.
GK Chesterton

And here in dust and dirt, O here
The lilies of his love appear.
George Herbert

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
Charles Schultz

In the pacific northwest, where I live, grey is not a metaphor. Grey is real. Grey is our canopy. Our sky. The garment of our psyche.

Like Eskimos with snow, we find that one word does not do justice. So. We have gun-metal grey. Confederate grey. Ash-grey. Thundercloud grey. High-school locker grey. Lead grey. And, for those special days, sullen-bring-on-the-prozac-grey. After time, grey becomes the lens, the filter, through which we see, interpret and translate our reality.

To call us pessimists is overly simplistic. Besides, there’s something to be said for pessimists. (I believe that an optimist is merely someone who does not have all the information.) Pessimists, on the other hand, are realists who have merely forgotten to take their medication.

Or, we could use a lesson from Pooh. Winnie-the-Pooh is riding his honey pot down the river. “I ought to say that it isn’t just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it’s a Boat, and sometime it’s more of an Accident. It all depends.”

“Depends on what?” asks Piglet.

“On whether I’m on top of it or underneath it,” says Pooh.

In the midst of writing this piece, I needed to call customer service at a computer related company, to ask questions about an inadvertent charge on my bill. After 10 full minutes of “if you want this, push one,” “if you want that, push two,” “if you want to talk with a real person, push fat chance,” I debated giving my computer to Goodwill.

Finally, I reach a person in customer service. Her voice is accented. After two sentences it is obvious: Either she’s not understanding me, or I’m not understanding her.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“India.” she tells me.

“The country?” I ask.

“Yes.” she responds.

It takes a minute for this to register.

“Do you have the name of someone I could talk with here? Someone local, who knows the situation about islands and the area where I live.” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

“Can I have that name and number?” I ask, feeling hopeful.

“No,” she says. “We’re not a liberty to say.”

“So you do have names and numbers of people in customer service here on the west coast of the United States?” I ask to clarify.

“Yes.” she says, “but we’re not at liberty to give you their names.”

“How do I reach them,” I ask.

“I don’t know sir.” she says. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

I hang up, leaking serious oil from my emotional baffles. (And wonder, who in their right mind would write about the taste of heaven, in a world like this?) I leave my office, and sit a spell in the garden. The sun is warm and restorative. There is something about fresh air, sun and the way the shafts of sunlight hit the limbs of the cedar tree that brings perspective.

And I remember a sentence from Esther de Waal.

“It is such a very simple thing to walk through life with my hands open, my eyes open, listening, alive in all my five senses to God breaking in again and again on my daily life.”

Okay. But how do we reconcile these two perspectives?

My world is, all too often, grey.

And yet, God is in the grey.

It doesn’t quite compute.

In addition, we all know that grey isn’t just weather related. We live in a world out of breath and out of time. We live in a world that preaches a gospel of exhaustion. Over a century ago John Ruskin wrote that, “Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.”

Imagine what he would say now. Now that we have specific stores dedicated solely to products indispensable for the purpose of storing other products. We buy stuff in order to store more stuff. (Yes, this sounds like enlightenment to me.)

(I get ribbed by my friends who have all the newest technology, especially my friend Kevin, in St. Pete, Florida, who tells me it’s really so easy to keep all of this “stuff” organized if you have a Blackberry. Of course, I still can’t find the operating instructions for my new cell phone, which means that my new Blackberry would sit in a box for the six months it takes to become obsolete.)

It is one thing to complain and moan about my busy or hectic or full or grey life, it is another to pursue a resolution (my compulsion with speed and consumption) which only exacerbates the problem. I live in a world that worships speed and volume. I live in a world that abhors an empty space. I live in a world that is suspicious of grey.

Glory in the grey? Are you nuts? I’m doing my best run from it.

Besides. . .I find some kind of satisfaction in the weight (the speed, the consumption, the anxiety) of it all. It serves some purpose. From it I derive some kind of meaning. But in the end, Every cask smells of the wine it contains. (Spanish proverb)

Many people are all to eager to tell me how to solve this “grey dilemma.” “You need to look on the bright side,” they tell me.

Nothing gets my goat like someone who assumes that their mission in life is the need to cheer me up. “Don’t worry, you’ll feel better soon,” they tell me. “Don’t worry, be happy,” they tell me.

I don’t deny that this type of therapy works, but only if and when it is Bob Marley singing it, and the CD is blaring while I lounge on a beach somewhere near the equator, holding a beverage possessing one of those goofy umbrellas.

And this I do know from experience: Nothing is worse than manufactured good cheer.

So here’s my prescription: We must regain the foolishness of wonder. And when we’re talking about wonder or amazement, wretched excess is just barely enough.

And we do this how? Is there a technique?

For starters, we listen to Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s reminder, “In our own lives God speaks slowly.”

In other words, we don’t run from the moment, we don’t suffocate the moment with stuff, we don’t sanitize the moment with platitudes. We sit. We listen. We look. We taste. We smell. We see. Looking for the light of God in the most ordinary, and even the most dull, of contexts.

It is here that the grey imparts its magic. God breaks in on the ordinary, daily, mundane and earthy.

Slowing down lets us see.

Seeing allows us to be amazed.

Amazement gives way to gratitude.

In Gratitude we relinquish control, and embrace life.

This life. This exquisite and extraordinary and often messy life.

... the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude,
the less you are a victim of resentment,
depression, and despair.
Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego
-- your need to possess and control --
and transform you into a generous being.
The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy,
makes us magnanimous --
large souled.
- Sam Keen

This is not a call to re-work or re-imagine reality. Standing at my study window, incanting, “This is not rain, this is not rain, this is not rain. . .” No. Not only is this rain, this is Noah redux, and we’re Googling “Ark building plans.” We have begun to pick two of each animal. . .

Meaning is found by entering into. This life. This moment. This grey. God is to be found not by stepping aside from the flow of daily life (by trying to recreate religious moments and environments, or by looking away from creation to a spiritual realm beyond), but rather by entering attentively the depths of the present moment.

And there, we find the truth of Hildegaard of Birgen, “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity.”

Last Sunday afternoon I wandered my garden. It is already deluged, we’ve had record rainfall. But the air on this morning is clear, the sky visible after a morning shower. Off to the west, there are breaks in the clouds, and layers of blue. I stifle my compulsion to prune or trim. I smile at the beauty of the skeletal framework of all the deciduous plants, now naked. The dogwoods still with a few stubborn leaves, like post it notes suspended in the breeze. I absorb the comfort of this walk. There is something in the embrace, this slowed pace.

Now. . .back to our prescription. We regain the foolishness of wonder in Sabbath moments.

This is the medicine practiced by the Benedictines for hundreds of years. A way of life, referred to the Rule of St. Benedict as,

“A life of self-discipline and inner conversion,
nourished by silence and prayer,
a contemplative orientation
less concerned to analyze than to
rest peacefully in the grateful admiration of the mystery of God and his works.”

In other words, it sharpens our senses to see God in the every flowing stream of life.

Yesterday it snowed. Several inches, which is a big deal in this neck of the woods. It shut down our island for the most part. Our roads are now skating rinks. Zach seems oblivious. He bundles up and shouts, “Who’s going to come out and play with me?” Outside my window I see him running (trudging?) through the back yard, his face lifted, eyes closed, his tongue extended as far as is possible. What is he doing in this grey? He is catching snowflakes.

Follow truth where ever you find it. Even if it takes you outside your preconceived ideas of God or life. Even if it takes you outside your own country into most insignificant alien places like Bethlehem.
George MacLeod

I’m enrolled in a school without
visible teachers,
the divine mumbling
just out of earshot.
Jim Harrison