Terry Hershey

In This Issue:

• Shadows
• Read, Watch, Share
• Featured Product
• Sabbath Moment
• Poems
• Words to live by
• A place to watch the rain

FEATURE ARTICLE
by Terry Hershey

Shadows

As long as the most important thing in your life is to keep finding your way, you're going to live in mortal terror of losing it. Once you're willing to be lost, though, you'll be home free.
Robert Capon

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.
Flannery O'Conner

Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger.
Henri Nouwen

When I was young, the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party clothes, the pretty china, the family silver, the grown-up jobs. The future was an end of its own, and we couldn't wait to get there. Life is somewhere I am not.
Abigail Thomas, A Three Dog Life

There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

One had to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
Morris West

Much money and energy is spent trying to make people happy and relaxed by offering a moment of artificial bliss. This happiness is as contrived as the good meal given to a man on death row before his execution. It tastes good but does not keep him alive.
Henri Nouwen

Believe in yourself and stop trying to convince others.
James de la Vega

I've missed all my deadlines for the past seven weeks, including this newsletter.

I shrugged it off. And added it to a growing catalogue of discontent: stalled projects, lack of motivation, commitments unmet, a nagging unease–“this day is not what I signed on for”–a desire to sleep past noon, and a mood the shade of indigo. “Okay,” my friend reminds me, “so life is hard. You want to talk with the complaint department, take a number.”

Have you ever felt unmoored?

I have. And I do. When you feel like your day is a hop skip and jump to pointlessness, or at least that place where women in white uniforms pat you on the head while you sit drinking your meals through a straw.

Things had been going well. But. . .something derailed. I hit a wall. I tell myself, “There’s got to be a pill for this.” What is the use of receiving 200 SPAMs a day, if not to take advantage of every offer to make life a stroll-in-the-park.

Melancholy is exacerbated by our cultural expectations to rise above it. “Don’t let on,” people will say. Or if you do, tell the story as if this is a problem already resolved. “I used to struggle with that, but not anymore.”

On the plane heading to North Carolina, reflecting on my muddle, the woman next to me was reading a magazine article guaranteed to “Tone Thigh, Butt and Abs.” Maybe that’s the secret, a toned butt. I caught myself reading over her shoulder and leaning just a little bit too close.

Sedona, Arizona is famous for red rock.

On this morning, in Sedona, the air is cool. The sky is saturated with light. The color blue thinned, as if God painted this sky using water color. I am sitting on my hotel balcony, coffee in hand, looking at the rock faces. As I look, I notice the shadows. Without trees these red rocks are an ancient face, etched with wisdom creases, like a Navajo Chief. And each crease holds a shadow, each demarcation malleable, shifting as the sunlight washes over the mountain.

There is a story in each crease. From where I sit, it looks like old scarred wood, etched by time and wind and rain and shifting earth–in some cases a violent confluence, a mixture of water and fate and history. Born of a convulsive past, these rock outcroppings have no choice but to be bold, arresting and unabashed. But their beauty, their nuance, is in the shadows. It is the shadows that give credence, gravitas, substance and appeal. Over and against these pockets of shade, the face of red rock stands out. In relief, exposed to the unforgiving heat of the sun, it is the color of rust.

To make sense of the geology is beyond my pay grade and brain cell capacity. It is enough to know that according to intelligent people, it all started about 320 million years ago (give or take a few million), with a drama befitting a Greek Opera, first under water, followed by erosions, and ancient rivers depositing the sandstone which makes today’s red palate. (It was all the same upheaval that created the Grand Canyon.) Today, in Sedona, we have Bell Rock, Courthouse Rock, Cathedral Rock, Coffee Pot Rock and Steamboat, all unique and inimitable cliff faces, etched from the vicissitudes of history.

(http://www.soultones.com/sedona.html

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/verde.html)

This I know in my heart and soul: This place comes alive, exquisitely and excessively alive, because of these pockets of shade. These dark containers. They are like the pauses between the notes in a Mozart adagio. In these spaces, there is silence. . .and a beauty born of anguish. Despite my conviction, I’m with Calvin here (as in Calvin and Hobbes, not the pertinacious and grouchy theologian). Calvin told his Dad, “Can’t I ever learn any life lessons by doing something fun?”

In these rocks, the shadow lines are beautiful. But in my own life, I am less optimistic. Shadows are those parts of us hidden–consciously or unconsciously. They can be disappointments, doubt, sorrow, disillusion, insecurity, disenchantment, un-fulfillment, heartache, or shame. Why do we feel constrained to eradicate these lines? We buy creams guaranteed to make us look like Nicole Kidman. And workout equipment to make us feel like the Terminator.

This mixture of my own skewed expectations and an exaggerated sense of hope has this goal in mind: I want to be rescued from my shadows. By some event or person or experience. So I find myself starting sentences with, “I wish that. . .” or “If only. . .”

Odd. I’ve bought into the notion that my well being, my contentment or happiness is contingent on getting past this place.

This time.

This yearning.

This sorrow.

This sense of unease.

I tell myself that whatever I am experiencing is certainly temporary, and therefore, not my “real world.” There is a cultural sleight of hand (the trick of all good magicians and cultural keepers of public decorum), counting on us to focus on the wrong object. In this case, we want solutions, so we’ll do anything to fix this discomfort.

“Look on the bright side,” I have been told. Let me be clear: I have no desire to “look on the bright side,” because one, I squint too much; and two, my demeanor and well being look like a mediocre Shirley Temple imitation.

If I see the shadow as an indictment (to bring shame), or a blemish (to be eradicated), or a piece of bad luck (to be prayed away), I devote all my mental energy and expendable income on cosmetic improvement. How do I look?

I was weaned on the notion that prayer treated God as a cosmic slot machine, which assured that I would engender the requisite mental energy to entreat God. It goes well with the American notion that God exists solely for my well-being and mood disorders. What else is God going to do with her time, if not make Americans happy?

A couple anticipated attending the opening of a new museum exhibit. At the last moment, their childcare plans fell through. They were left with the only option of taking their young daughter, seven years old, with them. They expected that the event would be tedious for the girl, but hoped she would not be a drain on their evening.

The exhibit was large and varied. One room of water color paintings, another of pen and ink sketches. In another great bronze sculpting. In another, modern art in oil. And in another, small blown glass figurines. Exquisite. Gossamer.

The little girl spent the evening mesmerized.

On the way home, the parents said to their daughter, “We're sorry we took you to such a long adult event. But we're proud of the way you behaved. And we want to thank you. Did you enjoy any of the evening.”

The girl paused, and then told them, “All night, I wanted to touch the fragile things.”

My friend, talking about her own “shadows” said, “This never goes away. It never gets any easier. How do people cope?” I understand. We want to return to some place of invincibility. Of invulnerability. Of a place where hope still has power. My whole life is ahead of me.

So these places–places of reluctance, or uncertainty, or ambiguity, or confusion, or angst, or grief, or loss, or fear, or shame, or passion–are too easily dismissed as darkness. And we view hope in the same way we picture a lottery ticket, a way to remake or re-frame our circumstance.

But what if? What if hope is really about the incarnation–God (literally) with us? In the midst? In the middle of? In. As in, this life. This moment. These shadows. What if? What if it is in that place, in the long night, with no destination in sight, with only a stone for a pillow that we confront the truth: that here, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.” (Genesis 28:16)

I learn from people who do not divorce their faith journey from their times of “unmooring.” I learn from Henri Nouwen. Toward the end of his life, Nouwen moved to Toronto, to live in the L’Arche Daybreak Community, a community of homes for mentally challenged adults and their care givers. At L’Arche, Nouwen was among people who wanted his love, not his lectures. Working with these adults, Nouwen was no longer able to rely on his own intellectual expertise. Two years later, at age 55, he experienced a six-month crisis. He wrote, “Everything came crashing down: my self-esteem, my energy to live and work, my sense of being loved, my hope for healing, my trust in God... everything.”

From this place of shadows, a renewed sense self would emerge for Henri; more authentic, more himself. Nouwen learned the difference between “being productive and being fruitful,” through the "downward mobility" of living in community and not the "upward mobility" of academia.

Our enemy is clear: the notion that another life, a different life from the one I am living now, will take care of any problem. In her memoir Thee Dog Life, Abigail Thomas wrote, “If only life were more like this, you will think, as you and the dogs traipse up to bed, and then you realize with a start that this is life.”

Back on my Sedona patio, the sun has almost disappeared behind the red rocks. In this dusk light there are no shadows, and the outcropping faces appear flatter, less dimensional. My wish is granted: there are no more shadows. But the cost is too much. It is clear to me that in these places of unspeakable grandeur, it is the scars, the wounds, these great slashes from time and the elements of nature that draw me. They invite me. They hold me. They create a safe place. They comfort me. They teach me.

Some people give me grief about my personality style: for me, deadline means, “time to get started.” Now that, my friends, is hope. In our confusion or uncertainly or disillusion, it’s time to get started. Not with a pep talk, but with the permission to put down the weight of expectation about performance (“I should feel that way. . .”).

How do we learn to live in this sacrament of the present moment?

To live invested?

To awaken?

Lee Jaster introduced my to the Chuck Girard song, “Slooooooooow down. . .” Or in the Wendell Berry poem, “Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet.”

Before we mount our steads to slay the dragons of discontent, let us rest. Did you know that the first thing God called holy was not a place? It was time. The time to rest. In rest, in quiet, in Sabbath, we may be able to see prayer as living the moment with open hands and open heart. Open and awake to the wealth of life’s quirky offerings. In that space my heart can expand, to receive those parts of my life, all those parts. . .the messy, the uncertain, the doubts, the insecurity, the shadows. Just as Jesus made space for the disenfranchised. So too, there is room in my life and heart for the fragile things.

Thankfully, today, I have no compulsion to figure it out. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but an over examined life is hell. We talk too much. On the ferry dock, the clarity of the Olympic Mountains is hypnotic. They stand, as if preening. They are sun drenched and still laden with snow. The Puget Sound is tranquil. I am at peace.

God bless our contradictions,

those parts of us that seem out of character.

Let us boldly and gladly live out of character.

Let us be creatures of paradox and variety–

creatures of contrast;

of light and shade; creatures of faith.

God be our constant.

Let us step out of character into the unknown,

to struggle and love and do what we will.

Amen.

Michael Leunig