Responses to the Questions II

This past Sunday, July 22nd, I facilitated the "Questions & Responses" service we have annually in the congregation I serve.  Congregants write questions on index cards, which are then collected, and to which I offer my in-the-moment responses.  Over the next several weeks I plan to devote this page to attempts to offer written responses.  If you'd like to see the entire list of questions asked, they're the bulk of my post-Sunday post on July 23rd.

For the most part I expect my responses to the questions I was able to play with on Sunday to be very similar to what I said them.  (Although I reserve the right to have changed my mind in the meantime!)  There are also several questions that were asked more than once (in slightly different ways).  I'll group them together here.  (And I'd remind readers that these are only my responses, and my responses today, at that.)




Help me learn to pray, please.

Given that I've literally written a book on prayer, this feels something like a softball.  (Simply Pray: a modern spiritual practice to deepen your life, Skinner House Books, 2005.)  Yet before responding to this question specifically, I want to pull back and address the larger issue of "spirituality."

I think that the heart of "spirituality," shorn of any particular theological overly, is the universal observation that there are, let's say, two ways of living -- living in such a way that we are truly and deeply alive, and, well not that.  Our Unitarian Transcendentalist ancestor Henry David Thoreau wrote in his classic book Walden that he wished to live in such a way that when he came to die he would not discover that he had not lived.  (That's a rough paraphrase.)  And this sense that there are two kinds of living can be found in nearly every religious tradition we humans have developed -- alive and dead, living in sin and living in the spirit, deluded and enlightened, asleep and awake.  I could go on, but probably don't have to.  "Spirituality," then, has to do with this living life rather than not-life.  This would mean that spiritual practices -- like prayer -- are tools to use in the effort to be alive.

How, then, do you pray?  I'd say that we should pray in the way that "works" for us.  It's not necessary to believe in some anthropomorphic deity with whom we "talk."  It's not necessary for "prayer" to involve "talking" at all -- either externally or interiorly.

I'll digress here to make a plug for another book project I've been involved with.  In 1999, Skinner House Books published the ground-breaking Everyday Spiritual Practice:  simple pathways for enriching your life.  It's an anthology which offers an extremely wide variety of understanding of just what could justifiably be called a spiritual practice.  Earlier this year, Skinner House Books published something of a successor -- Faithful Practices:  Everyday Ways to Feed Your Spirit.  I was honored to have been the editor for this anthology, which includes examples of spiritual practices as wide ranging as sitting zazen, blowing bubbles, walking through your neighborhood, chopping vegetables, playing roller derby, and "playing" with action figures.  (Guess who wrote that chapter?)

To learn to pray, then, in it's most expansive understanding, is to (again) feel your way to the answer.  What are you doing when you're feeling most alive?  Most connected to the universe?  I'd say that you could call that "prayer" and that, after defining it that way, paying attention to how your experience of it might change.

[If, of course, this question was actually a specific request for help in learning to do the "talking to" kind of prayer, this response may not have been at all helpful.  I would, somewhat modestly, recommend my book as one resource.  There are many others I could suggest, and I know that I would be glad to talk with you directly if this is your question.  (Whether you actually wrote this question or not.)]



I am trying to find my space in this liberal religion -- where there are more questions than anything else.  Where do I start?

I'll begin my response by saying that, properly understood, Unitarian Universalism is filled with lots of answers as well as questions.  It should!  What would be the point of asking questions if we were never to find an answer to them?  That said, our faith tradition encourages us to hold on to the answers we've found ... lightly.  We're encouraged to be willing to let them go when new experiences lead us to new ways of thinking.  There are two quotes I love which speak to this.  The first comes from someplace I've never known, "if you're not willing (or able) to change your mind, how do you know you still have one?"  The other, which I just heard a week or so ago, comes from the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.  He once wrote, "If the you of five years ago doesn't consider the you of today a heretic, you're not growing spiritually."

All that said, I think it's important to remember that there are not set answers for you to find.  Unitarian Universalism invites us to look to our own lives as "sacred scriptures," as full of depth and meaning as any text revered by one of the world's great religions.  I've often said that for UUs, "experience precedes theology."  I mean that, in a great many other traditions, we are told what, for instance, God is like, and are then encouraged to go out and look for experiences of that in our lives and in the world.  We, on the other hand, invite us to first look to our own lived experiences to identify what we would consider "sacred" or "holy" (whether or not those are the words we'd use).  Then, after discovering our own experience, we can apply more traditional religious language, or not.  (I once wrote what I think was a pretty good sermon about this.  I'll see if I can find it, and I'll post it here sometime in the future.)



Well ... those two questions took up a lot of space, so I'll hold it here for today and come back tomorrow with more responses to more questions.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

How do you explain "Unitarian Universalist spirituality"?

The Membership Committee of the congregation I serve is wrestling with the question of how to explain Unitarian Universalist spirituality to newcomers (and old-timers).  Since I'm unable to attend their retreat this Saturday (since I'll be at our Board's retreat!), I wrote something up for them to consider.  Here's what I said:

I’d start by saying that we are not as unique as we sometimes think and say we are – progressive Christians too, for instance, encourage people to think and explore and search their own lives in coming to understand God.  We are, however, generally more expansive in our encouragement of that search.  Using a video game analogy, ours is more of an “open world” model rather than one that restrictively directs your movement.  I would also note that I do not believe that “spirituality” is about what someone passively “believes” but, instead, how a person actively engages their inner and outer world.

That said, there is a line in the hymn, “We Laugh, We Cry” (#355) which says that we believe, “even to question, truly is an answer.”   An important part of the spiritual grounding of our faith tradition, as I understand it at least, is precisely this encouragement to seek for truth and meaning.  This is not the same as saying, “UUs can believe anything we want.”  That’s way too simplistic.  It is to say, however, that our faith encourages us to challenge ourselves to look into our own lived experience (equally with the insights of religion, science, and the arts) as a source of understanding “the twin realities of being born and having to die” (as the Rev. Forrest Church put it).  This is no small thing.  Ours is, at its best, an active faith that calls on us to examine, to re-examine, and to keep on examining our understanding of the universe and our place in it.  One way to describe the spirituality of Unitarian Universalism is that it calls on us to become comfortable in the discomforting place of not-knowing.

So no, you can’t “believe anything you want.”  In the first place, “belief” is not, for UUs, the core of “spirituality.”  In the second, we are encouraged to actively engage ourselves and the world in a free search for meaning; to then engage with others in open, inquisitive dialog about what they’re discovering in their searching; and to then arrive at our own tentative beliefs.  Unitarian Universalist spirituality truly understand and engaged, ought to lead us to the place so many of our youth model for us during their Coming of Age service – “this is what I believe now, but I know my beliefs will change over time.”

One other aspect of our faith tradition’s spiritual core – it is not enough to engage in this search for truth and meaning.  We then must strive to apply our discoveries to the way we live our lives in the world.

One final, general, observation – this is not, in my experience, the way a lot of UUs understand and experience our faith.  Far too many, it seems to me, come to UUism having already decided on the “answers to life’s big questions,” and have no real interest in looking any further.  We come, many of us and maybe even the majority of us, to have our understandings affirmed rather than challenged; we want our already established biases reinforced instead of re-examined.  In this we are absolutely no different than the majority of other religious traditions we humans have ever create.

So here’re three "elevator speeches" about the spiritual core of Unitarian Universalism:

·    Unitarian Universalism challenges us to hold our beliefs lightly, always ready to let go as we discover new and deeper truths.

·    Unitarian Universalist spirituality is found in the free and ongoing search for truth and meaning, within the context of a community of open-minded seekers.

·     Unitarian Universalist spirituality is an active search for meaning in life as we experience it, which we then strive to put into practice in life as we live it.

I hope it need not be said, but this is, of course, a provisional answer ...

Pax tecum,

RevWik

A Model for an Annual Spiritual Checkup

I will confess up front that this isn't original to me.  Unfortunately can't remember where I discovered it, so I'm unable to thank the person who created it.  I have made a few minor adjustments so that it is more readily applicable to the average Unitarian Universalist (if there is such a thing).

So ... here are ten questions any person could use as an annual review of his or her spiritual life:

Spiritual Practice
How has your practice been this year? Blossoming? Fading? Faltering? Open? Routine? Is this an area that needs more focus for you?

Learning
What have you studied this year (formally or informally)? What have you learned?

Worship
Are you worshiping at least weekly? How has that time been? Highs? Lows? Are you taking time to prepare or "just showing up"?

Leader Skills
Do you sense that your capacity to lead has increased? Are you observing the leadership of others? What are you learning?  What have you helped others to learn?

Community Building
How are you helping your congregation to thrive, formally and informally?

Action
Where have you been visible in your faith? What blocks you from action?

Serving Others
Where have you served the wider world this year?

Sense of Growth
Where do you feel you have grown this year – spiritually, emotionally, in terms of relationships, or in terms of knowledge?

Balance
How is your sense of living a balanced life? Do you keep any kind of Sabbath?

Growing Edge –  Stretching Beyond the Comfort Zone
If we accept that we are not living in the fullness of beloved community, where are you called to focus in the coming year?

Pax tecum,

RevWik

 

On Our Knees

I have been introduced recently to the Franciscan preacher, teacher, and monk, Richard Rohr.  Since then I've been voraciously reading everything of his that I can put my hands on.  I recently encountered a line that really jumped out at me:

I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel.

Let that sink in for a moment.  Sit with it, as it were.  I've had these words circling around in my brain and heart since coming across them a couple of days ago, and I realize that I don't either.  Yet I do.

There's a paragraph that was written by a teenage member of the Unitarian Church of Ithaca, NY, after their youth group visited a local Benedictine Monastery for vespers.  (It was originally published in their church newsletter; I first came across it in the Worship Reader compiled by the Congregation of Abraxas.

“In the chapel there were only a few people watching the service, and I sat in front of them.  I wanted the sensation of being alone there.  I wanted to be open to the beauty of the chapel and the circle of monks and to the chanting.  And I see now that I wanted more than that.  I wanted thru some sort of magic to enter into the service, not simply because its forms were beautiful, but because they seemed at once mysterious and full of meaning. . . .  The monks knelt and rose and bowed; bowing, their bodies bent forward from the waist, torsos almost horizontal.  But I could not move. . . .  I was brought up I this [Unitarian] church where no one kneels and no one bows.  Physically I’m very inhibited, so that I don’t move easily.  And when has it ever been suggested that I might kneel, even figuratively kneel, before or to something?  I wanted to kneel, that’s the important thing.  But I could not. . . .  To kneel and to mean it would be frightening because there is a darkness in the kneeling and a darkness in us which we cannot reason about.  You [Unitarians] teach the fear of form without meaning, and that is right; but having avoided forms, you have sometimes avoided the darkness, and it is from the darkness that the real questions arise.” [Italics are mine.]

Not that long ago the Christian Fellowship in the church I serve held a communion service.  Afterward, one of the members came up to me and, very excitedly, told me that they had "used the original words."  By this she'd meant that they'd sung, "Let us break bread together on our knees" instead the oft used variation, "Let us break bread together you and me."  When has it ever been suggested that we might kneel, even figuratively kneel, before or to something?

That teenager sure had it right -- to kneel and to mean it -- would be frightening.  Is frightening.  It means acknowledging that we are not the Grand High Poohbah of All Existence.  As the Rev. Barbara Merrit put once put it, "Whether or not we believe in God, we must recognize that we ourselves are not God."  And that means, ultimately, recognizing that there is absolutely nothing we can do to control the Universe and our part in it.  We cannot guarantee success for ourselves and our friends and doom for our enemies.  We cannot ensure that things will work out as we wish they would -- that we always will be safe, happy, and secure.  We just can't.  And whether or not we believe that there is some kind of Sacred Something that is holding us through it all, we do need to come to terms with the fact -- the inescapable and undeniable fact -- that we are not in charge.  That can be a terrifying thing for some of us, and kneeling -- and meaning it -- can be an embodiment of this truth.

If you haven't done it in a while, I encourage you to do so.  Kneel.  Literally get down on your knees

and see how it feels.  (Not so much how it feels in your knees and hips, but how it feels in your heart.)  Bow your head even, maybe, or lift it upward.  Do this in your home in front of a home altar or, just the end of your bed.  Do this in the sanctuary, before or during the service, with or without other people there.  Do this outside, in the woods or just a corner of your yard.

Richard Rohr said, "I do not want to be part of a religion that cannot kneel."  Neither should you.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Vice Versa

I can no longer remember who I was reading at the time, but a Christian author made the following assertion:  in every encounter each of us has we have two options -- to see Christ in the other person, or to be Christ for the other person.

I've been thinking about that a lot for a while, trying hard to remember it.  (Although, I'll admit, I've probably only gotten to the point of trying to try to try to remember it, if you know what I mean.)  Yet while this particular phrase resonates with me, I realize that it may well be "too Christian" for lots of folks.  So here are some alternatives:

In every encounter you have you will have the opportunity to be either a teacher or a learner.

I every encounter you have you will have the opportunity to either be a healer or receiving healing.

In every encounter you have you will have the opportunity to either rise to your best self or to help someone else to rise.

This last one kind of gives it away, doesn't it?  I mean, it's hopefully become obvious that these are not really two things.  Truth is, there's only one option.  Because . . .

if you rise to your best self you will naturally help others to rise as well;

and if you are a healer you will receiving healing in the process;

and there is not a teacher worthy of the name who is not also a learner.

Naturally the inverse of each of these is true as well -- learners are always teachers, those who receiving healing themselves offer healing, and those who help others to be the best have already become their own best selves.

But what of that first one?  It works this way too, because the surest way of being the Christ for another is seeing it in them . . . and vice versa.

Now maybe because I've written it down I might remember.  If I do, I'll remind you;  if I forget, I'm counting on your.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Where Did It All Begin?

Last week the staff with whom I work had a "retreat."  It was really just an ever-so-slightly longer than usual weekly staff meeting, but we did have a different agenda.  Well, again to be honest, we had our usual agenda but we whipped through it double-time so that we could do something different -- we wanted to intentionally work on deepening our relationships with one another. After all, we're all working for a church -- an intentional faith community -- and so it seems to make sense that we shouldn't just be to each other people who happen to work at the same place.  We, too, should be about cultivating connections among ourselves.

And, so, after our usual work was done I invited everyone to think of a time when they most fully felt their "calling."  I was purposefully vague by what I meant about that, and I offered alternatives to the question such as:  "Can you think of an early spiritual experience?"  "When did you first feel yourself stepping on to the path you're on now?"  "Would you talk about a time when you felt profoundly alive?"  (To be honest, I figured that folks would all have their own interpretations of the question anyway, no matter how specific I got, and after all the point really wasn't the particular answer as much as the sharing.)

When it was my turn I talked about a time when I was at either Camp Westminster or Denton Lake.  (Both were Presbyterian camps that I attended during elementary school.  I think it was around 5th or 6th grade that I switched over to the Methodists, so this event happened pretty early in life.)  I remember a conversation between a couple of counselors that had begun around the camp fire which eventually moved over to the picnic table near our cabins.  This conversation has a lot to do with who I am today, what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it.

One of the two was a guy we all called "Rev. Ev."  His name was Evan, and he was going to be going to seminary that next year.  He'd earlier that evening told us the story of his sense of "call."  He'd been in a terrible car accident a year or so before.  The entire car had been demolished, it was truly totaled, except for the driver's compartment.  His door opened easily, and he was able to walk out of his mangled car without a scratch.  And right then and there he dedicated himself to serving the God he believed had saved him.

The other participant in this late-night conversation somewhere around forty years ago was one of the female counselors.  I don't remember her name.  But I remember the way she challenged Rev. Ev, the way she pushed, and prodded, and refused to accept too-simple answers.  My memory is that she wasn't being mean, although I think she was certainly somewhat enjoying the discomfort she knew she was creating.  But at her core she was truly curious; she really wanted to understand; and she took all of this too seriously to be satisfied with pat answers.

Visually I remember the way the campfire highlighted only their eyes as they talked.  And if "eyes are the windows of the soul" then there was a true conversation, perhaps even a true communion of sorts, between those two souls.  I can close my eyes today and be vividly back there in an instant.

And one of the things I believe that evening did for me was to awaken a delight in such conversations that has only grown over the intervening years.  I find them thrilling.  Delicious.  ("Taste and see that the Lord is good," is one of my favorite of Biblical verses for describing the delight of the spiritual life.)  There are few things that bring me to life more than really engaging deeply and courageously with someone else's spiritual journey; seeing how it's been for them and sharing how it's been for me.  And as an ordained minister -- a professional spiritual person -- I get to have these kinds of conversations a lot.  Not as much as I'd like or as my non-clergy friends might imagine, but a lot.  And every so often I get to have one during which it seems that everything else fades away but our eyes, and I can almost smell the woodsmoke.

In Gassho,

RevWik

I Don't Know

The last sermon I preached while the settled preacher in Yarmouth, Maine was titled, "Everything I've Said Was Wrong."  In this sermon I looked back over eleven years of preaching and tried to show how every single thing I'd said from that pulpit was as wrong as it had ever been right; that the words we use to describe the ineffible are, by the nature of the task itself, going to be short of the mark.

I was really proud of that sermon -- proud of the intellectual and spiritual humility I believed it demonstrated, proud to see those words on the sign board out in front of the church as if they summed up my ministry.  And, in a sense, they did, although I'll confess that I put a lot of thought into the sermon that showed that my thoughts had been wrong, and the idea of being proud of your humility is a bit of a head scratcher.

This morning my friend James Ishmael Ford -- who is both a Unitarian Universalist minister and a Zen priest and teacher -- wrote a really fantast piece on his blog.  In it he said,

"[D]on’t know.


For heaven’s sake don’t know.

It is the universal solvent to all human ills.

Doesn’t mean give up.

It means don’t know. Really don’t know, right down to the soles of your feet."

Now I know all about the Zen concept of "Don't Know Mind," and have always advocated it myself.  I think that that's partly what I was trying to point to and embrace in that sermon.  Yet I was reminded again this morning of this advice and saw more clearly than I have in a while just how hard it is to put into practice.

And I mean, I want to be clear, how hard it is for me to put into practice.  I can remember the summer I first learned to juggle.  Or, to be more precise, the summer I was first taught to juggle.  Now, in the years since I have used exactly the same technique to teach a couple of thousand people how to do the basic three-ball cascade that is the foundation of most juggling.  I can teach you in an hour and, if you practice for fifteen minutes each day, you'll be juggling solidly by the end of the week.  I can say this with some certainty because I've done it so often.

Yet that summer that my friend Donna Hunt tried to teach me I just couldn't get it.  No matter what, I couldn't pick it up.  Forget the one-hour lesson, she tried for days and weeks . . . nothing.

I've come to realize that at the camp where this was all taking place I had something of a reputation.  I was a magician and a clown.  Everyone assumed that something like this should come easy to me; that I'd be a natural.  And, so, for psychological reasons of my own, I developed a real block.  I didn't want to not-know how to do this and, so, I was unable to learn.

I've seen that in other situations in my life, too.  (And I've heard about it in the lives of many of the people I've talked with over the years.)  Not-knowing requires a willingness to be a beginner, to risk appearing less than.  If I don't-know, why would anybody want to listen to my sermons (or read my blog)?  If I don't-know, how will I demonstrate my worth (having grown up so valuing intellect and knowledge)?  If I don't-know, how will I gain status, or prestige, or respect, or . . .?

And yet, not-knowing is the only way to learn.  (Unless you embrace your not-knowing you'll never have any room inside for learning anything.)  And, truth be told, not-knowing is pretty much the real state of things anyway, just as not-in-control is.  (But that might be the subject of another blog sometime.)

So todayt I'm thankful for James' reminder of the importance of not-knowing, "right down to the soles of your feet."

In Gassho

RevWik

Another Danger

Last week I wrote about the danger that's lurking in notion that we should not be striving for "perfection."  Rather, it's often said these days, we should recognize that we are works in progress and that our attempts -- our "trying" -- is enough.  The Twelve Step movement talks about focusing on "progress not perfection," and that's well and good as long as there is, indeed, progress.  If we're honest with ourselves, though, it's all too easy to let ourselves loose sight of the goal when we don't make attaining the goal our goal.  That's the danger, that we'll settle for trying and that that will make it too easy for us to slip into not trying.

There is an analogous danger that I've seen often among those of us with a "liberal religious" bent.  I've known it myself firsthand.  We note that, as it's often said, there are many paths up the mountain to God and no one path is necessarily "better" than another.  We recognize, and I believe rightly, that the spiritual journey takes many forms and that no one can say "this one way is THE way for all people for all time."

At the same time, we emphasize that the goal of the journey is not as important as the journey itself.  As I once put it, it doesn't really matter if you get to the top of the mountain or not.  God is the mountain, as much at the base as at the summit.  As long as you are on the journey, you have already arrived.  (This is why the great Zen masters have said that to sit on your cushion is to attain enlightement.)

And yet . . .

Once again we come to that, and yet . . .

I have noticed that this kind of thinking can lead to a spiritual laziness in which we either stand around in the crossroads admiring all the various paths there are and congratulating ourselves on our enlightened understanding that any of them could get us where we want to go, or else we take a rest at some scenic overlook, knowing that we needn't hurry to arrive at our destination, yet somehow never quite get up and get moving again.

Note this point -- no one ever said that the journey isn't important.  The journeying.  Standing still isn't enough.

In Gassho,

RevWik

For All The Saints

During the Battle of Pamplona in 1521 the Spanish nobleman and knight Ignatius of Loyola was seriously injured.  (A cannonball injured one leg severely and broke the other.)  During his long and painful convalescence he read De Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxony as well as stories of the lives of the saints.  Through his reading he was converted from a desire to be a great knight to a desire to be a great saint, and during this period he began to develop many of the principles that would later be organized in his famous Exercises.

Throughout her life, the great mystic Theresa of Avila, who produced such classics as The Interior Castle, was tormented by extremely serious illnesses.  Some of these lasted for years, and it was during some of these intense times of sickness that she had her deepest spiritual experiences.

Last month I fell down the basement stairs and broke my right proximal humerus into three pieces.  I needed a surgeon to screw it back together for me.  During my convalescence, though, unlike Theresa and Ignatius, I've had Oxycodone and Vicodin to help moderate the pain.  (And help me to sleep through the night.)  And I've had TV, and On Demand movies, and the Internet, and FaceBook to keep me stimulated.

What would have happened if Francis had had Twitter in Assisi?  Or if Hildagarde had had an iPad in Bingen?  Perhaps they would have headed the call anyway.  Even in their day there were ways, as my teachers at Shalem said, to get "kidnapped," but they managed to stay true to the call.  Yet it seems as though there is exponentially more noise today, more distractions, more side paths, dead ends, calling for our attention.

So I've decided to try to take advantage of the opportunity my broken shoulder has afforded me.  I am, thankfully, able to work again already, but not yet full time.  So in my "off" time, rather than turning on a lot of electronics I'm opening up a series of books I'd collected a while ago, intending to use them in a parish setting.  Now I'll use them on my own.  They're called, Bridges to Contemplative Living With Thomas Merton, and I'm finding the program to be quite rich even though I am doing it alone.  I've also entered into relationship with a Spiritual Director again, after many years away.

There is so much clutter, and so little time.  Or, rather, there is only now . . . and I want to make the most of it.

In Gassho,

RevWik

The Real You

Today I'm going to let someone else have their say in my blog -- two people, actually.  The words belong to Alan Watts, the Brittish philosopher who helped bring Eastern philosophy to a Western audience.  The artistic expression of Watts' words, though, belongs to John Boswell, the creative force behind the Symphony of Science videos that are among my favorite modern scriptures.  I hope you enjoy both.



In Gassho,

RevWik

PS -- in honor of Memorial Day on Monday I'll be taking the day off.  See you here again on Wenesday.

A Rose By Any Other Name

"Even to speak of 'God' is to invite confusion," I wrote this past Wednesday.  "It is so easy to be misunderstood."  Of course, there is a bit of wisdom from Al-Anon, and the other 12 Step traditions that reminds us, "What you think of me is none of my business."  Perhaps I needn't worry so much if I'm misunderstood.

And yet . . . 

And yet it matters because communication is all about the intention of taking the thoughts and feelings and experiences within me and attempting to convey them as accurately as possible to you.  If I know, at the outset, that the manner in which I plan to do this will almost certainly lead to distortion, then shouldn't I take that into consideration?  If I know that you will not understand me if I say something in a certain way, shouldn't I try saying it in a way that I think increases the liklihood that you will understand me?

Imagine, for instance, that we are both bi-lingual, only you know English and French and I know English and Japanese.  I know that if I speak in Japanese, my Japanese friends will be able to understand me, but you will not.  Doesn't it make sense for me to speak in English when we're together?

So if I know that the use of traditional religious terms like "prayer," and "God," are likely to cause confusion -- because I can be fairly confident that I don't mean by them what you do -- then shouldn't I look for other words?

On Thursday I was facilitating a workshop on prayer at Andover Newton Divinity School, and among the sixteen participants most said that they were there because they wanted to deepen their spiritual lives.  Nearly all described, in one way or another, having some kind of "problem" with prayer and were hoping that this workshop could help them.  I said that I thought that I had an insight and wondered if they'd agree:

Our fundamental problem with prayer is that the word itself -- prayer -- is linked in our unconsious mind to the concept of "Talking To God So That HE Can Know Our Problem And We Can Ask HIM To Do Something About Them."  And this concept is so intimately connected to the word, so inextricably bound to it, that we cannot hear, or speak, or even think the word without this idea coming up in our unconscious.  And since we reject this concept, we have a block even with the word.  How, then, can we not have problems with the practice?

Just about everyone nodded in agreement.  This, it seemed, hit the nail on the head for them.  The word, the concept -- and all of its attendant baggage -- was getting in the way of the experience.  So what are we to do?  Forget the words, of course!  Do the thing; don't get caught up in what it's called!

As Shakespeare said so long ago, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," and I remember a teacher once telling me that a rose is called a weed when it's growing in a tomato patch.  Don't get so caught up in the names -- they're just signifiers, pointers.  Perhaps that's why the author of the Rule for a New Brother of the Brakkenstein Community of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers in Holland advises, "Don't talk too much about God."  Perhaps that's why Lao Tzu said, "Those who know do not talk; those who talk do not know."

Of course, he said that in a book of eighty one chapters.  Because, eventually, we want to try to communicate, to take the thoughts and feelings and experiences within us and attempt to convey them as accurately as possible to others.  And so we resort to words.

We could create new words -- and some mystics and contemplatives have done just that.  And some, I suppose, simply put their sandals on their head or thwack you with their stick rather than say anything.  But we can also take up the old words and "breathe new life into them," attempting to infuse them with the understandings and insights we have discovered.  So when I do this thing that is most definately not "Talking To God So That HE Can Know My Problems And I Can Ask HIM To Do Something About Them," and then use to word prayer to describe what I'm doing I'm helping to expand the word, to make it more useful, more descriptive, and helping to dissolve the linkages that have made the word a block for so many.

And the same can be done with all of the traditional terms:  God, sin, grace, redemption, resurrection, repentence, miracle -- all of these words are only that, words.  The meanings we give them are up to us and should come out of our own experiences.  After all, isn't religion a meaning-making enterprise?  Why are we so often contented to have the meanings of religious words given to us?

In Gassho,

RevWik

A Good Example

Here's a good example of what I was talking about in the last post -- waiting until you really have something to say to be up and about the work of saying it.

The Christian scriptures tell the story of a young Yeshua ben Miriam going with his family to Jerusalem for Passover when he was around twelve or thirteen.  It must have been a tremendously stimulating experience, overwhelming even -- a family from the sticks getting a taste of the big city.

And we're told that things got a little chaotic as they were getting ready to leave and that, in fact, the family got separated in the caravan and didn't even realize it until all of a sudden Miriam and Yosef realize that their son isn't with them.  They rush back to the city and begin to frantically look for the boy, eventually finding him in the temple.  As the book of Luke puts it he was, "sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. [And] everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers."  [Luke 2:46-47]

Precocious kid, right?  Maybe you know somebody like that.  Maybe you were somebody like that.  And what are we told that Jesus did?  Did he go back and become President of his youth group?  Did he become the favorite speaker on Youth Sunday?  Did he go on a circuit of local congregations, and regional gatherings, the talented kid who everyone knew was going to grow up to be a rabbi?

Not as far as the tradition tells us.  According to Luke 2:52 he, "grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men."  That's it.  No great accomplishments.  He lays low and grows up.

And then, some twenty years later, he hears about a wandering preacher named Yochanan who's baptising in the river Jordan and he goes to check him out.  And in that encounter the heavens open up and the voice of God identifies him as God's own beloved.  Yet even with such a clear mandate does he begin his ministry?  No.  Even then he heads off into the desert for forty days of discernment -- prayer and fasting and "wrestling with the devil."

In the last post I noted that Anthony de Mello councils the importance of resisting "the urge to be up and doing before you are freed from the compulsion to act; the urge to communicate to others what you yourself have not yet experienced."  It seems that Yeshua ben Miriam -- Jesus, son of Mary -- himself embodied this approach.

That's good enough for me.

In Gassho,

RevWik

Wait . . .

I felt the urge again. 

Once again I felt the urge I've felt so often throughout my ministry -- the urge to pack it in, metaphorically "take off my collar," and go flip burgers somewhere or retire to a cave. 

Here am I, this guy who's had the audacity to stand up in front of two different congregations on a regular basis (as well as an untold number of others as a guest), who's led retreats and workshops, given talks and presentations . . . not to mention having written three published books and essays included in two anthologies.  You might think I know a thing or two.

And that's the thing.  So do I sometimes.  And then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, it hits me.  I don't have a clue.  I have no idea what I'm talking about.  And the urge comes upon me again.  As Mark Twain once famously said, "It is better to keep your mouth closed and risk appearing a fool, then to open it and remove all doubt."

The impetus for this most recent urge is my reading of another of my beloved mentors in prayer, the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello.  de Mello, who was born and lived most of his life in India, brings a very Hindu perspective to his Christianity; he has sometimes been called a "Christian guru."  In his fabulous book Awareness:  the perils and opportunities of reality, he says,

"Spirituality means waking up.  Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep.  They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.  They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thin that we call human existence. . . . most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep.  They are having a nightmare. . . .

The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don't want to wake up."

How's that for provocative?  He also says, and this book is a transcription of talks he gave during a retreat, "Do you think I am going to help anybody?  No!  Oh, no, no, no, no, no!  Don't expet me to be of help to anyone.  Nor do I expect to damage anyone.  If you are damaged, you did it; if you are helped, you did it.  You really did!" 

I love this guy.

So I'm now reading a book which is new for me:  Contact with God.  It also is transcripts of talks he gave to Jesuit priests who were on retret with him, and so far it's really great stuff.  I'm having to do some "translation" of course -- his theology and, especially, his mode of expression are not fully in synch with my own -- but why would I expect them to be?  What he says, though, comes from such a deep place, and it resonates with that equally deep place in me.  In that deep place we speak the same language.

Well, anyway, in an early chapter -- it was the beginning of the retreat -- he says this: 

We read in Acts 1:4: "While Jesus was in their company he told them not to leave Jerusalem.  'You must wait,' he said, 'for the promise of my Father.'"  Do not leave Jerusalem.  Once again, resist the urge to be up and doing before you are freed from the compulsion to act; the urge to communicate to others what you yourself have not yet experienced.  Once the Spirit has come, "You will bear witness for me in Jerusalem . . . and to the ends of the earth."  But not before, or you will be lying witnesses -- or, at best, you will be pushers, not apostles.  Pushers are insecure people who have a compulsion to convince others, so that they themselves will be less insecure.  (italics mine)

That's all it took, and the urge was once again upon me to shut up and go flip burgers, or start bagging groceries at Stop n' Shop. 

There is a line in Richard Bach's book Illusions:  adventures of a reluctant messiah -- "You teach best what you most need to learn."  I have always felt that that's what qualifies me to speak and write about spiritual matters.  I am a seeker and, as Anthony Bloom said of himself, am only a beginner.  Yet I claim nothing more than that -- I offer only descriptions of what I have seen and heard and felt and tasted and touched along the way that I have wandered. 

Still I wonder if Lao Tzu was right -- those who know don't talk; those who talk don't know.

In Gassho,

RevWik