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In This Issue:
FEATURE ARTICLE
This is the life
 Having a good time. Wish I was here. Birth, like death, is not fully controllable. We weren't meant to understand birth or to control it. We are meant to take responsibility for the parts of it that we can, and then just experience it. . .At some point, we must let go and allow the process to be. Faith is not belief without proof but trust without reservation. This successful life we're living, got us feuding like the Hatfield and McCoys. The biggest spiritual problem of our time is efficiency, work, pragmatism; by the time we keep the planet running there is little time and energy for anything else. We can't do great things, but we can do little things with great love. Mother Teresa Those who dwell among the beauties and the mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.
It happened again. I was going to write about the Inner Rebel. But I received an email from my friend in Texas, “Okay...how do I keep balance? I am feeling overwhelmed by the book and a year or more of travel, signing, speaking engagements, 2 houses, 4 dogs, 3 B&B's, and a partridge in a pear tree, and not being 20 any more, and on and on. I know you will know the answer...” I'm glad for the email, and I want to be helpful. More than that, I want to rise to the occasion. But I'm not legally allowed to prescribe medication, so I'm racking my brain for something profound to tell her. I take a break, and am sitting on the bench in front of Bob's Bakery with Zach (Bob's is our Island morning gathering spot). We're having Cinnamon Twists. They are decadently yummy, and make me forget my need to be useful. The bench is made from a truck of an old downed log, it's seat now worn from years of time and use. Zach and I watch the Vashon traffic—“traffic” in a poetic licence sort of way—go by. And Zach, his mouth full of half a Twist, says, “Dad, this is the life.” With every question about managing life, or finding balance, there is a knee jerk temptation to offer solutions—which always means adding something else to the to-do-list. In the end, it's like the book 99 ways to simplify my life. . .because, apparently, one way is not enough. So it's relentless. I found another book about the “Balance diet,” (you know, getting my life in order) but after one week on the Balance diet, I start to wonder how I'm doing, as if there's a test. And if I fail, am I required to attend a workshop on Remedial Balanced Living? And I start to wonder about the benefit of the “balanced life” if I'm always looking over my shoulder to see who's impressed. As if that isn't enough, we have a tendency to exacerbate the problem with our solutions, a superfluity of well-meaning activities to make our life worth living. In the words of TS Elliot, we are “Distracted from distractions by distractions.” Like a pastor's conference I attended, on Personal Renewal. An agenda crammed to the gills (6 am to 10 pm, I do not exaggerate), and at the end of the week we sat glassy eyed and lifeless, hoping for some reprieve from this weight of good intentions. I've been inculcated with the assumption that any inability to balance my life is an indictment. All of this coming from our celebrity and vicarious-living oriented culture, where we are encouraged or forced to compare ourselves to others who are “successful”. (In this culture, it's not balance we yearn for, it's success, and all you need for success is to have the word millionaire attached to your name, or to be followed by paparazzi, or to be able to spend your winters at your casa in Barbados.) All of this white noise from Madison Avenue makes me susceptible to watching TV at 3 am, engrossed with some guy flashing gleaming teeth and imploring me to live my life by owning real estate in every continent. “With no money down!” To have, he tells me, “the life I always wanted.” Ahhhh. . .the trifecta. The holy trinity of our culture: bigger, faster and more beautiful. . .All implying that we should be living a different life, and not the one we are living now. In the end, we live divided. And a divided life is a wounded life, and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound. If we ignore that call, we find ourselves trying to numb our pain with an anesthetic of choice, be it substance abuse, overwork, consumerism, mindless media noise, or a pastor's conference on renewal. It starts young doesn't it? I read this in the New York Times, “The word 'kindergarten means 'children's garden,' and for years has conjured up an image of children playing with blocks, splashing at water tables, dressing up in costumes or playing house. Now, with an increased emphasis on academic achievement even in the earliest grades, playtime in kindergarten is giving way to worksheets, math drills and fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests.” (Clara Hemphill, On Education 7/26/06) Where's the payoff? There was another article about a neighborhood in Beverly Hills where's it's against the association guidelines to build a house under 5000 square feet. The houses average 10,000 to 40,000 square feet. I have no moral argument against building a big house, assuming that you are planning to house, say, an entire city block of families, or a small country. The cultural gauntlet has been thrown down. Success is the goal. These people have “made it.” Bigger is better. More is better. Faster is better. Mother Teresa apparently didn't get the memo. Think of it, she could have advertised the “fastest growing leper ministry.” I see it now. What Jesus needed was a “Spin doctor.” Someone to talk with the press, to translate what he really meant when he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “What Jesus meant was. . .” Don't we all get the nudge daily? Asked, “How are you? Are you keeping busy?” Inside we flinch, because it's another way of asking, “Are you somebody?” An organization recently asked me for my bio, which is a good a hook as any, to hang our hat of value. I'll admit to you that it gave me pause. I had a bad week. Was in a bookstore and saw my friend's book which outsells mine 100 to 1. Which takes me back to standing in front of the “success library” in that same bookstore, asking, what is missing? This is all a very toxic and dangerous sort of stew, and can only be dispelled by looking at the way dusk settles on the rose Winchester Cathedral, outside my study window. As the petals absorb the light of dusk, all the other stuff that clutters my mind, recedes. And I wonder, how do I put Zach's delight with a Cinnamon Twist on a resume? If I can stop the noise. . .then the fragrance of the rose, the joy of my son, and the quickening of the morning air in the garden all tell me that I am living this life, or this moment, or this conversation, or this event, and no longer need to focus on what is down the road, with its potential for some greater payoff.
Which brings me back to my friend's question, How do I keep balance? The answer? My grandmother's porch swing. This may not be the best answer in Texas (where my friend lives) right at the moment, since it's close to 150 degrees in the shade, but you get the idea. . . Let's spend the afternoon on the porch. Let's crank up Van Morrison or Roy Orbison, and let the afternoon heat recede into the trees. As the sun reaches the horizon, we watch and feel the earth itself breathe in relief. And the perfume from the lily Casa Blanca suffuses the air around the patio. We are absorbed in moments of grace. We find ourselves lost in (the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel) “radical amazement.” This brings us back to the Sacrament of the Blessed Present. And to Sabbath. That's when we allow the dust to settle. We allow the murky water to clear.
“Who is it that can make muddy water clear? But if allowed to remain still, it will gradually become clear of itself.”
Intelligence happens when you quit trying to be smart. A sense of self appears when you no longer have a need to be somebody. Transcendence arrives when you embrace the life that is given. Holiness happens when you give up frenetic striving.
Jesus didn't wait for the barking dogs of deluged living to reach a tipping point. He was proactive. Which meant that he got up, and left. He left the crowds. The accolades. He departed. . .to my grandmother's porch swing. Was Jesus busy? Yes. Was Jesus in a hurry? Never. Here's my assignment. Rent the movie Il Postino. Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet, is exiled to a small island for political reasons. On the island, the unemployed son of a poor fisherman (Mario Ruoppolo) is hired as an extra postman due to the huge increase that Neruda receives. Ruoppolo, on his bicycle, hand-delivers Neruda's mail to him. Though poorly educated, the postman learns to love poetry and eventually befriends Neruda. Struggling to grow and express himself more fully, he suddenly falls in love and needs Neruda's help and guidance more than ever. Mario: I'd like to be a poet. Neruda: It's more original being a postman. You get to walk a lot and don't get fat. We poets are all fat. Mario: Yes, but with poetry I could make women fall for me. How do you become a poet? Neruda: Try and walk slowly along the shore as far as the bay and look around you. Mario: And will they come to me, metaphors? Neruda: Certainly.
Writing about balance makes me wonder. . .What is it I am asking for when I seek balance? Do I want some reprieve? And this I know from experience: If I do “wake up to this life,” I may not like what I see. Busyness has always served a purpose. Like the middle-aged male journalist who went on Ritalin after his wife sent him to a doctor. She complained that he had attention deficit disorder because he wan't paying enough attention to her: after his Ritalin kicked in, he focused on the marriage, and decided it was over. I'll be honest, this is not easy for me because there is something oddly satisfying in the rush, the hurry, the stress. Maybe I'm afraid that if I stop, if I slow down and rest, I'll never amount to anything. What if someone told me (and this is indeed the scandal of Grace) that everything I am ever going to amount to, I am right now?
The biggest spiritual problem of our time is efficiency, work, pragmatism; by the time we keep the planet running there is little time and energy for anything else.
So let's go try the porch swing—our Sabbath space—for a spell. As Richard Rohr says, “Don't push the river.” Or as we say in golf, One shot at a time. Don't think about the score card. Only this shot. The next shot will take care of itself. If you think about the whole list, it will be overwhelming. In India, wise people tell us that in climbing any sacred mountain, if you think of it as a race, the mountain will beat you. However, if you climb one step at a time, the mountain will pull you up like a friend. Today, if you have a porch swing, use it. If you don't have one, today's a good day to find one.
Do you have any stories to share?
Would someone you know like to read this? Look at the bottom of this email for a "Forward to a Friend" button. Want to see Terry in Video? Newmornings TV now has over 80 clips of Terry's appearances on the Hallmark Channel that you can view online!
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| New Audio and DVD | |||||||||||||||||||
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Jesus in Skin “No one is a on the journey of faith alone. No one. We are Brother and Sister. We are community. We are Jesus in skin.”
Available on CD.
Live With Intention
This is for people who love life. And for people who wish to love life but are temporarily stymied by disappointment, exhaustion, anger, apathy, an excess of caution, or even a good reputation, and carry around an unused life. Available on CD and DVD.
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You can now listen to Terry on your MP3 player, iPod, or your computer. Tune in to Terry's Podcast and get the latest audio of Terry reading the newsletter, interviews, and segments from his workshops.
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| Sabbath Moment | |||||||||||||||||||
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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'
I'm even convinced that my lone Sunday mornings are more than a habit; they fill a profound need in my by no means exotic nature—again, a need for private engagement with ultimate mystery. The rest of my week, I plow my worship into writing my books, teaching my students, and living with friends and enemies in whatever decency I can muster (which is not enough). Am I bound for Hell in a swift handbasket? Many think so. But sure as I am of a lifetimes' errors, I never feel more deeply at home on this blue planet—in the whole universe—than in those solitary moments, trying to face the mind of God in a grove of trees.
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| Words to Live By | |||||||||||||||||||
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“Being realistic isn't realistic There is always a way to get something done. Untangle ropes by untying knots one at a time. If at first you don't succeed, try another way....the fall is part of thedance. Limitations have within them the seeds of liberation.”
It is forbidden to live in a town which has no greenery.
The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.
Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning....They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play.
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
The things that matter in a bad life, we know, are: gaining power over others, accumulating as much stuff as you can, getting revenge on your enemies (who are everywhere), and drugging yourself one way or another to forget the pain of not quite being human.
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| Poems | |||||||||||||||||||
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any morning Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world.
People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy.
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around, can be picked up and saved. People won't even see that you have them, they are so light and easy to hide.
Later in the day you can act like the others. You can shake your head. You can frown.
For The Children The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics lie before us. the steep climb of everything, going up, up, as we all go down.
In the next century or the one beyond that, they say, are valleys, pastures, we can meet there in peace if we make it.
To climb these coming crests one word to you, to you and your children:
stay together learn the flowers go light
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| Foreword | |||||||||||||||||||
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One of the greatest privileges of my life was the opportunity of knowing a man given to human wonder and divine seizure who was in turn so loving of everyone and everything whom he saw or met that the universe turned a corner for those of us fortunate enough to be in his presence. His was truly the Christic journey and his path was strewed with many miracles of love made manifest. Let me tell you what being with him was like. Let me tell you about walking the dog with Teihard De Chardin, or Mr Tayer as I called him then.
When I was about fourteen, I used to run down Park Avenue in New York City, late for high school. I was a great big overgrown girl (5 feet eleven by the age of eleven) and one day I ran into a rather frail old gentleman in his seventies and knocked the wind out of him. He laughed as I helped him to his feet and asked me in French-accented speech, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?” “Yes, sir” I replied. “It looks that way.” “Well, Bon Voyage!” he said. “Bon Voyage!” I answered and sped on my way.
About a week later I was walking down Park Avenue with my fox terrier, Champ, and again I met the old gentleman. “Ah,” he greeted me, “my friend the runner, and with a fox terrier. I knew one like that years ago in France. Where are you going?” “Well, sir,” I replied “I'm taking Champ to Central Park.” “I will go with you,” he informed me. “I will take my constitutional.”
And thereafter, for about a year or so, the old gentleman and I would meet and walk together often several times a week in Central Park. He had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it, which was “Mr Tayer,” as far as I could make out.
The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr Tayer seem to have absolutetly no self —consciousness, but he was always being seized by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly and literally falling into love. I remember one time when he suddenly fell on his knees, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed to me, “ Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhh!” I joined him on the ground to see what had evoked so profound a response that he was seized by the essence of caterpillar. “How beautiful it is,” he remarked, “this little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite! Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis.” He then regarded me with equal delight. “Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?” “Oh yes,” I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply faced teenager. “Then think of your own metamorphosis,” he suggested. “What will you be when you become a butterfly, une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?” (What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl!) His long, gothic, comic-tragic face would nod with wonder. “Eh, Jeanne, look at the clouds! God's calligraphy in the sky! All that transforming, moving, changing, dissolving, becoming. Jeanne, become a cloud and become all the forms that ever were.”
Or there was the time that Mr Tayer and I leaned into the strong wind that suddenly whipped through Central Park, and he told me, “Jeanne, sniff the wind.” I joined him in taking great snorts of wind. “ The same wind may once have been sniffed by Jesus Christ (sniff), by Alexander the Great (sniff), by Napoleon (sniff), by Voltaire (sniff), by Marie Antoinette (sniff)!” (There seemed to be a lot of French people in that wind.) “ Now sniff this next gust of wind in very deeply for it contains— Jeanne d'Arc! Sniff the wind once sniffed by Jeanne d'Arc. Be filled with the winds of history.”
It was wonderful. People of all ages followed us around, laughing - not at us but with us. Old Mr Tayer was truly diaphanous to every moment and being with him was like being in attendance at God's own party, a continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. But mostly Mr Tayer was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with everything. Always he saw the interconnections between things - the way that everything in the universe, from fox terriers to tree bark to somebody's red hat to the mind of God, was related to everything else and was very, very good. He wasn't merely a great appreciator, engaged by all his senses. He was truly penetrated by the reality that was yearning for him as much as he was yearning for it. He talked to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks as dear friends, as beloved even. “Ah, my friend, the mica schist layer, do you remember when...?” And I would swear that the mica schist would begin to glitter back. I mean, mica schist will do that, but on a cloudy day?! Everything was treated as personal, as sentient, as “thou.” And everything that was thou was ensouled with being, and it thou-ed back to him. So when I walked with him, I felt as though a spotlight was following us, bringing radiance and light everywhere. And I was constantly seized by astonishment in the presence of this infinitely beautiful man, who radiated such sweetness, such kindness.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr Tayer was the way that he would suddenly look at you. He looked at you with wonder and astonishment joined to unconditional love joined to a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one. I felt myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential palpably changed. I was yeasted, greened, awakened by such seeing and the defeats and denigrations of adolescence redeemed. I would go home and tell my mother, who was a little skeptical about my walking with an old man in the park so often, “Mother, I was with my old man again, and when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind.” That deeply moved her. You could not be stuck in littleness and be in the radiant field of Mr Tayer.
The last time that I ever saw him was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah, escargot,” he exclaimed and then he proceeded to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour. Snail shells, and galaxies, and the convolutions in the brain, the whorl of flowers and the meanderings of rivers were taken up into a great hymn to the spiralling evolution of spirit and matter. When he had finished, his voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, “Omega, omega, omega” Finally he looked up and said to me quietly, “Au revoir, Jeanne.” “Au revoir, Mr Tayer,” I replied, “I'll meet you at the same time next Tuesday.”
For some reason, Champ, my fox terrier didn't want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, looking back at Mr Tayer, his tail between his legs. The following Tuesday I was there waiting where we always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 83rd Street. He didn't come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn't come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had suddenly died that Easter Sunday but I didn't find out for years.
Some years later, someone handed me a book without a cover which was entitled The Phenomenon of Man. As I read the book I found it strangely familiar in its concepts. Occasional words and expressions loomed up as echoes from my past. When, later in the book, I came across the concept of the “Omega point,” I was certain. I asked to see the jacket of the book, looked at the author's picture, and, of course, recognized him immediately. There was no forgetting or mistaking that face. Mr Tayer was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet and mystic, and during that lovely and luminous year I had been meeting him outside the Jesuit rectory of St. Ignatius, where he was living most of the time.
I have often wondered if it was my simplicity and innocence that allowed the fullness of Teilhard's being to be revealed. To me he was never the great priest-paleontologist Pere Teilhard. He was old Mr Tayer. Why did he always come and walk with me every Tuesday and Thursday, even though I'm sure he had better things to do? Was it that in seeing me so completely he himself could be completely seen at a time when his writings, his work, were proscribed by the Church, when he was not permitted to teach, or even to talk about his ideas? As I later found out, he was undergoing at that time the most excruciating agony that there is - the agony of utter disempowerment and psychological crucifixion. And yet to me he was always so present - whimsical, engaging, empowering. How could that be? I think it was because Teilhard had what few Church officials did - the power and grace of the Love that passes all understanding. He could write about love being the evolutionary force, the Omega point, that lures the world and ourselves into becoming, because of a dog's tail, in the eyes of a child. He was so in love with everything that he talked in great particularity, even to me as an adolescent, about the desire atoms have for each other, the yearning of molecules, of organisms, of bodies, of planets, of galaxies, all of creation longing for that radiant bonding, for joining, for the deepening of their condition, for becoming more by virtue of yearning for and finding the other. He knew about the search for the Beloved. His model was Christ. For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ was the Beloved of the soul.
—Jean Houston, 'Godseed: The Journey of Christ', copyright 1988 with permission of Amity House Inc., Warwick, NY.
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