Waiting

When I was a kid one of the highlights of the year was the night they would show both "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas."  I would wait for it all year, and as Christmas loomed near, I looked forward to that night with almost as much anticipation as I did Santa himself.

One year I had a toothache.  That's too small of a word, actually -- it was a burning, stabbing, exploding pain in my mouth.  But I didn't say anything to my parents because I wanted to see these shows.  I was determined to see them, no matter what.  Even pretty excruciating pain.

I can't now remember which order they were in but let's say that "A Charlie Brown Christmas" came first.   The pain finally got to be too much for me and, so, during the last few minutes of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" I let out a scream.

Luckily one of our neighbors across the street was a dentist who worked out of his home.  My parents rushed me over to him and he determined that I had an exposed nerve.  He said he couldn't imagine how I had been able to bear that kind of pain; it took a whole lot of Novocaine to numb it.  (I remember five shots, but my memory might exaggerate.)  And through it all I cried and protested that I simply had to get back home or I'd miss "The Grinch ..."

I tell this story to my children and they can't really comprehend it.  They're growing up in an on-demand world where they can watch pretty new movies in full HD right in our living room.  They can go onto Netflix or Amazon and watch several seasons of some show they become interested in, one episode after another.  No waiting involved.  I tell them that you once had to wait from week to week to see what would happen next in something you were watching.  They get impatient when Netflix makes you wait something like 17 seconds for the next episode to being.

I'll admit, I've gotten pretty used to it myself.  When Netflix released the entire season of "Daredevil" on the day it premiered I rejoiced that I could watch as much of it as I was able at a time.  When I wanted to relive the pleasure of "Lie to Me" I could do it without commercials and without distraction.  

Yet I think we pay a price for this convenience.  In Robert Heinlein's classic novel Stranger in a Strange Land.  An expedition to Mars goes silent shortly after landing.  Twenty-five years later another expedition returns and finds only one survivor -- a young man who had apparently been born there and raised by Martians, Valentine Michael Smith.  When he is brought back to earth he encounters a very different culture that the one he'd known, which provide Heinlein a wonderful vehicle for cultural critiques.

One aspect of Martian philosophy that Smith shares is the importance of waiting.  He finds humans to be extremely hectic, moving way too fast for our own good.  "Waiting is fullness," he says.  Even as he is eventually greatly acculturated to our ways, even when he, himself, begins to move more at our pace, he does not entirely give up on his Martian philosophy.

"He was not in a hurry, "hurry" being one human concept he had failed to grok at all. He was sensitively aware of the key importance of correct timing in all acts — but with the Martian approach: correct timing was accomplished by waiting. He had noticed, of course, that his human brothers lacked his own fine discrimination of time and often were forced to wait a little faster than a Martian would — but he did not hold their innocent awkwardness against them; he simply learned to wait faster himself to cover their lack

The timeless wisdom of the Tao te Ching asks us, "Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?"  I worry that our on-demand, binge-watching world is making that harder than ever.

Pax tecum,

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