Humility

“Take a happy pill, Heather,” said my daughter’s violin teacher. “You’re just going to have to do the work it takes to learn this – you might as well be happy about it. Settle down and do it with humility and attention.” – Something like that.

I was struck by the wisdom of his words, and the fact that humility is, indeed, a crucial component for learning anything. It gives me the willingness to go ahead and work at something even if it’s hard, instead of making excuses for why I don’t know it already. I look back these days on huge swaths of my life in which I didn’t make the effort to learn something that I wanted to and could have. I see that arrogance was a large cause of my inactivity. I felt I should already know something, given my great education and/or experience, so I didn’t want to put myself in the group of those who didn’t know in order to actually learn it. This has been true at different times about my writing, my music, illustration, web design, and probably other things I could have been good at.

Thinking deeper, wondering how I could have not seen this arrogance at all, I realize that it was tied in with my sense of self-worth. My self-worth rested on my concept of myself as a smart, well-educated person. The way I had it set up, to be a person who still needed to learn all those things was in conflict with what made me worthy of existence. I apparently was willing to accept huge blindnesses in order to preserve the illusion (delusion?) that I knew as much as I needed to know to be the person I thought I needed to be.

Going deeper still, I see that I could have, and still can, place my sense of self-worth on something more elemental than an image of myself as a certain kind of person. I can place it on my source, and my place in the universe - on my identity as a child of God. This view of myself maintains my worthiness no matter what, and allows me to admit to ignorance, and to missteps, and to my need to learn and grow.

Isn’t it funny that having my self-worth be placed on a much greater thing would allow me to be more humble? Isn’t it interesting that arrogance is a mark of a deep need to find the elemental source of self-worth that isn’t dependent on a cardboard cut-out self-image?

I got an award two weeks ago. It was for showing up. It was because two years ago I stumbled across an organization that struck me as so good that I needed to give something of myself to it. It’s a self-organizing advocacy and support group for homeless women. I remember thinking about the fact that I didn’t have anything in particular to offer them, but that I could be, perhaps, a body – answering the phone or doing whatever humble labor might help them. It turned out that they set me up to work with a writing group, which spluttered along weakly under my unconfident leadership, such that I felt lucky they were allowing me to be there. This evolved, for a time, into my helping with the production of a bi-weekly newsletter. I felt mostly like a weak catalyst prompting them to keep putting in the energy it took to do it.

Eventually my comfort and confidence evolved, and the writing group started to get stronger. This coincided with my clarity that my best role was to do the very least – to impose no expertise, offer very little advice, and basically encourage them to listen to themselves. So I continued to feel that my role was a very humble one. That’s why I was astonished, at the 13th annual Homeless Women’s Forum, to be this year’s recipient of their “Woman of Light” award, for a woman who, while not homeless, does much to help their cause.

It was an amazing feeling to get the reward. There was the kind of embarrassed astonishment, and the awed sense of the great work the organizers and attendees were doing, and the gratitude for being allowed to work with them.

Later, I found myself thinking about the paradox of humility. Jesus talked about how we have to humble ourselves to be exalted. But being humble doesn’t turn out to be a wretched state, and being arrogant feels anxious, not confident. The strongest basis for humility is having an unassailable understanding of true worth. And humility is the grounding that allows things to be accomplished.

Grace

A friend and I started getting together about a year ago for coffee or lunch, to talk about matters of Spirit and of the heart. When the food arrived, the first time, I lifted up my fork as usual to begin to eat. But before the food reached my mouth, he said, “grace.”

It wasn’t like he was admonishing me, telling me we should say grace first. The word itself, the way he said it, was grace. It made me stop the automatic movement of restaurant habits, made all my trajectories disengage, spin like gears on a coasting bicycle. I felt myself lifted – my thought floating into a much larger place. Grace. He continued, “It’s right here. It’s all that ever matters.” From that point I was ready for all our interactions to be grace-filled – to exude what matters.

At several Thanksgivings over the past years, I’ve felt the momentum of all the food steamroll over the thanks. We were a group of friends together, each family bringing something, doing the last preparations together in our kitchen. When it was ready, there seemed to be the need to eat it while it was hot. But later I missed the taking time – or whatever it takes – to disengage from the trajectory of motion and float, still, in grace. Last two Thanksgivings I had us spend a moment before eating to express thanks. It almost worked. I still needed to find a way to invoke that sudden peace that came with Peter’s “grace.”

So this Thanksgiving, before all the food was set out, I had everyone gather in a circle. I told them that I wanted to do a grace, and that others could have the opportunity to share their expressions. Then, when we were all holding hands, I said, “Grace. It’s right here. It’s all that really matters. It’s the joy that’s in everything that’s joyful, the thing that makes anything you’re doing feel worthwhile.” In that moment, for me, the grace came present. It stayed as other people shared thanks, and one friend shared a movement exercise. It continued throughout the time of food and conversation and movement and music, till the end of the evening.

Trajectories

Last week I spent a lot of time scraping glue off a plywood subfloor. I had taken off the linoleum first, and when I was pulling it off I thought the swirly patterns on it might be the grain of the plywood. But on closer inspection, I found that they were swirls from the combed application of glue before the floor went down. They left bumps on the subfloor which, when scraped off, revealed the actual patterns of the plywood.

The scraping-off process was laborious, so that after a session of it I would still see the activity when I closed my eyes – feel the rubbing of the scraper against the glue until it would suddenly slice through, and the persistent scraping that would eventually lead to the smooth gliding of the scraper over the clean plywood surface. And I found a parallel to this image in something I was thinking about.

All the swirly glue lines are like the trajectories I often assume comprise my life – the pattern of me driving on the freeway to go downtown, the start and finish of a task, the arc of mortal life from birth to death. I may think they show the character of my being, but they are not the true grain. I reach the true grain by ceasing to direct my attention along the lines of the trajectories, to get still and look (or scrape) down and under to find out what I really am.

There is much energy, and much money, directed to selling the notion that these trajectories constitute life. Most recently I’ve become aware of the vast propaganda machine that hits people at 50, saying, time to fall apart – you’re on the downward slide now. It took me a few weeks of being pulled under by it before I stood up and said no. I recognized that this trajectory, like all the others, was just another bumpy application of glue that needed to be scraped off the subfloor. I did step back and look at the scope of the lie: just as people are thinking they’re free from the ropes of careers and family raising, they’re asked to take on a new burden of self-absorption – that of imminent physical and mental decline. As I looked at the story, it basically said the same thing throughout its arc from birth to death: you’re not at the right time for happiness, fullness, maturity, and blessing. First you’re too young, then you’re too burdened, then you’re too old. So when I rose up in rebellion to it, I rebelled against the whole arc – not just the decline being sold to me now, but also the awkwardness being sold to me for my adolescent children, and the sense of the burden of careers, and the basic bumpy lie that good is somehow delayed or missed, instead of being the signature quality of every moment.

The true grain of being says, good is here now. This moment is a blessing. You have always been exactly good, exactly right, and you are now. There is no importance in the direction or placement of any of the trajectories of mortal life. The deep value of each of us has nothing to do with what trajectory we are on or where we are in the arc of that trajectory. It has everything to do with our constant relationship with the Mind that thinks us up, fresh, moment by moment.

Parenting Lessons

I’m getting a lot of mileage this fall from a confession of ignorance. A friend said she felt it illustrated true wisdom. Other friends also have given it a proper, respectful space to be listened to. It has made a big difference for me in raising my kids.

The confession is: I don’t know anything about how to help a boy become a man.

It has made me stop trying to pretend I know, or thinking I have any understanding of the best decisions of guidance and discipline for my son. It has allowed me to give up the burden of it and consider that everything he needs, to be who he is, is already in him. It is the nature of his being, as he is created, that provides him now with what he always has been, and develops it day by day. The qualities of manhood, which are so attractive to me even though I fathom them faintly, are already part of who he is. The strength of character, compassion, integrity, and ability to do are not my job to construct in him. Phew! They are part of who he already is as the reflection of God.

As I’ve relaxed in this, I’ve seen, day by day, that it is true about my son. It makes me happy to know him. It makes him happier to be around me. I’m no longer worrying about whether he’ll develop the qualities I think he’ll need. Even if I knew what they were, I wouldn’t be able to make them appear. But I can trust with the same trust I have towards the goodness of the universe that his Creator does know everything he needs (for he is, after all, his Creator’s idea) and gives it to him.

In the last few days I’ve reflected that this is also true for my daughter. Though I may have felt more comfortable about guiding someone into womanhood than manhood, I really don’t know anything about this either. Even what it is to be a woman is something I may be only just now discovering. It is lovely to feel that I and she can both be led, each from within, in the development of our own womanhood.

Jesus said, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?” – implying that none of us could. Depending on interpretation, that could mean: since you can see that you can’t, by setting up a self-help program for yourself or by worrying, make yourself a foot taller, don’t try to set up such a program, or worry, about any part of yourself. God is taking care of all aspects of you. And it can mean, since you can’t, either through worrying or a self-help program, do anything to improve your self-esteem, give up the effort and rejoice in the royal place that you are granted in being the child of God.

I’m learning that this applies to parenting, too. I can’t add a cubit to their stature, I can’t make them be a woman and a man. But I can relax and enjoy the expression of Life that Life, Love, gives to us in our relations with each other day by day.

“Mortal existence is a dream . . .”

Wednesday was rainy. I was walking down the hill on Yesler, from up above Broadway where I had parked. I was carrying about ten Bibles in a plastic bag, and a similar number of Science and Healths in my backpack, along with my books – going to the jail to deliver literature and visit people. I had already gotten pretty wet picking up the books – unlocking the padlock at the gate, walking up to the Reading Room, walking back, closing the gate, replacing the padlock, stepping gingerly through the half-inch deep sheet of water pitted by raindrops. And I had driven in low visibility on a freeway thick with cars, my windshield wipers thrashing. The rain now was a little lighter but still getting me wet.

The walk down Yesler is always a bit breathtaking. There is the sweeping vista down and across the Sound, and to the left across the valley. To the right is the roar of freeway cars being channeled down various parallel and diverging rampings of concrete. Then you come down, across the homeless encampments, into the land of the skyscrapers.

So I was walking along, hunched and squinting, when I suddenly got an arresting thought. I imagined that this was all a dream, and I had awakened. I still found the dream interesting, so I was describing it to myself, trying to remember everything. I told myself, we had these things called cars that could move us along special channels that we had made for them. And we had these things called bodies that we moved around in, too. We considered the bodies more attached to us than the cars, but we moved them with similar instrumentation – with both we would listen to their feedback and supply them with what they were said to need.

A funny thing happened to me at that moment. The rain, which had been an annoyance, suddenly became an interesting detail of my dream. I felt the drops on my face as cool and soft, refreshing; something to notice. I wanted to remember everything – I felt a love for it. I also started to think about what I knew now that I was awake – that good is here, now. I could feel that goodness, that feels-like-flying lightness inside.

After I was done at the jail, walking now up the very steep hills but with a lighter load, I again put myself into mind of noticing what was in the dream. I thought, in the dream, we all had different things we were supposed to be doing. Some of them were considered more desirable than others. There were people that we really loved, and things we really cared about. But we didn’t necessarily notice that love is present all the time.

As I maneuvered my car onto the freeway, I felt a surge of satisfaction at having accomplished all my tasks successfully. And I thought, in the dream, we thought we could have goodness based on certain conditions. We set up the conditions, or felt that others had, and then we tried to meet them. If we succeeded, we got to feel goodness. Otherwise, we didn’t.

There are two places in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy says, “Mortal existence is a dream”. I’ve accepted that on an intellectual and analogical level, but hadn’t come so close before to feeling what it might mean. The question, so if it’s a dream, what difference does that make? is an important one. I could say, it’s just a dream so it doesn’t matter what happens. But that feels like a cop out, and also something my heart would never quite believe. I could say, it’s just a dream, so if we get good at lucid dreaming, we can make whatever we want happen. But that misses the point – it is an attempt to live in the dream instead of wake up. I could say it’s like the premise in The Matrix – that while this may be a dream, it may be preferable to stay asleep than to give up everything I know as true.

My experience on Wednesday pointed to a different answer. I had the feeling of being awake to the truth that good is here now, and that nothing else is absolutely true. The particulars of the dream give me many opportunities to love, and the love is real, something I’m actually doing in my waking state. I start to see that elements of the dream are only real to the extent that they are opportunities for me to love. The phenomenon of cars and highways is dream, but the desire to move freely and to harness power is real. I have the opportunity to love the dance of harmony, and the swift movement, and the ingenuity of invention. The phenomenon of bodies is dream, but locus and volition, presence and interaction with the environment, feeling and caring, are real. I have the opportunity to love the long strides and wide vistas of high hills, and tender touch, and being with people.

There are so many issues in the dream that cry for healing. The ground beneath the highways cries to breathe; the air cries to be clean; people cry to know their worth and purpose. All the currents of human systems, many swept along by blind grabbing for a misunderstood need, cry to be set right so they don’t keep on impoverishing people and wreaking environmental havoc. What delivers healing to the dream is doses of awakeness, moments of vision which guide actions toward the natural good that all creation desires.

My World is Mine to Save

The problem with comparing my life to other people’s runs deeper than its being a bad idea, something that’s not good for me. It’s not one of those things to know I shouldn’t do but still do “because I’m only human”. The problem lies in its being an artifact of a false paradigm – an error which exposes a misunderstanding of the whole way the world is put together.

There is a part of the daily prayer (given by Mrs. Eddy in the Manual of the Mother Church) that says, “Let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me.” When I think of the “me” in the prayer, I sometimes think “the kingdom of me,” to remind myself that everything I perceive is part of myself, and the establishment of the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love in me means that it’s all I can ever see, in my whole world.

This is not a megalomanic statement. It just acknowledges that all I can ever know of others is my perception of them. My prayer for others is my looking to God – my source, our common source, to see something of their true identity. Seeing them, then, as perfect, is not some wonderful thing I do for them. It’s just cleaning up my own act about something that is already true.

It comes down to this. I have access to my world through my perceptions. What I perceive is, in a very real way, my world. I can’t assume that it is the same as anyone else’s. I don’t have access to anyone else’s world, except for this: through communion with God, I have access to the truth. The truth as God knows it doesn’t include any relative opinions about people. It doesn’t include an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, achievements and follies. It only includes the deep and perfect being, rooted in the infinite, sustained by Love itself. The only opinion I can have that comes anywhere near the truth is this perception of reality. Any other opinion is only my construct – the story I tell myself, based on my projections.

When I interact with you, it is an intersection of our worlds. I know that I am interacting with you, but what I think you are, and what I think you do, may be very different from what you think you are and do. You may say something that I feel compels me to react in a certain way –say for example, with indignation. But since what I see as you is just my construct, I’m not actually compelled to react in any way at all. I can notice that my impulse to react is based on my perception, but that my perception isn’t the actual fact. I can stop and check in with Truth before I react.

If I act on assumptions I have about you, based on what kind of person I think you are, I probably will offend you, as the assumptions expose the difference between my and your perceptions of you. My best chance at having an authentic interaction is by acknowledging that I can’t rightly know anything about you except by seeing what God knows.

Comparing my relative achievements with others is just comparing my view of myself with what I’ve projected about others. I can only do it in my world. I may assume that I have some kind of an objective standpoint from which I can judge, but I don’t. The others I would compare myself with are just my own constructs, and are probably unrecognizable by the people who share their names.

The powerful part of this realization is that my world is mine to save. It’s up to me to make sure that I view my world correctly, that I take careful and diligent time to make a fair estimation of what everything is, based on what God knows about it. Then I can expect to see my perceptions come more and more in line with the perfect reality. I may have wondered when “they” would get around to seeing things in a more intelligent way. But now the answer is clear: it’s up to me. Of course, this can be said by everyone else as well, though of course, I can’t say it for anyone but me.

Walking to the Mountains

I imagine this conversation with someone who watches out for my spiritual growth and progress. I say, “It reminds me of the story my grandmother used to tell about how she looked out from her house and saw the mountains so near, and suggested to her sister that they walk there that day. So they set out and walked, but even though they walked for a long time, and covered a lot of ground, they never seemed to get any closer to the mountains. I feel like that – I’m covering tremendous ground spiritually. I’m loving the things I’m seeing and learning. But I’m still not making it as a practitioner, and no one is calling me for healing. I thought I was ready but I guess I must not be.” He says, “It doesn’t have anything to do with your not being ready.”

I’m not sure what he says after that. But my sense is that the paradigm in which I could be ready or not ready puts too much weight on me as the center of things. Here’s a thing that Mrs. Eddy says about it: “God will heal the sick through man, whenever man is governed by God.” In the past, in what I believe is the false paradigm, I would have put my patient in the place of “the sick” in that sentence, and me in the place of “man.” Then I would ask myself what I needed to do to be sufficiently governed by God in order to heal the sick. However, the appropriate place to put my patient is in the place of “man.”

So then I ask myself, when does God govern man? Well, duh. God governs man all the time. So God heals the sick through man by talking directly to, emanating directly from, being the source of, everything that man – my patient – is. Which, of course, is exactly as God intends it to be. Which is, of course, perfect. “The sick” in that sentence turns out not to need an identity – it’s like a cloud of dust that just needs to dissipate. And there isn’t God and me and the patient, there’s just God and man – God making man perfect, and man enjoying it.

What I’m working on now is this moment. I told someone recently, faith is the habit of looking again to see God’s presence; holding out for a better answer if evidence seems to go against goodness. I’m holding out for a better answer, not for my future, but for right now. It’s clear to me that the better answer isn’t in the way human circumstances bend to be more favorable, but in the presence of Love that renders human circumstances irrelevant. The circumstances do, and must, align themselves with harmony, but they don’t carry the harmony any more than iron shavings define the shape of a magnet.

So maybe I’m walking to the mountains. But maybe I’m walking in the mountains, and maybe I can feel the fresh, fresh air every time I breathe in goodness. Maybe the view is right here, and I am looking right at it.

The Waters of Meribah

I had thought that I was finally through the bitter waters – that I had conquered the anxious edge that drags on consciousness, where the brightness of day or of someone’s smile seems obscured by dank mists of self doubt. I was surprised to find myself lost in the internal clouds again.

There is a singer whose music I love, who died, I believe, from despair. I never understood how she could have done that, when all her songs are so uplifting. They are not songs of one who’s never been in darkness, but of one who has been there and come out. I thought, here in these songs is the proof of healing. How is it that she still succumbed?

I had been in the brightness of Love for many months. I was buoyed by the practice of unconditional love, and saw many old constraints fall away. I told myself in wonder, there’s nothing people can say to me to make me unhappy. There are no conditions that can make me unhappy. Good is here now, and my only job is to notice it.

Then I encountered turbulence. It grew out of what felt like a competitive edge in some people I hoped were friends. Suddenly I found myself asking, What have I accomplished in my life? Where are the fruits of my labors? Where are my labors? Have I even found the “on” switch for productive activity? Has all my sense of OKness been delusional, hiding from myself the serious flaws that everyone else has obviously seen all along?

I grappled with these demons and won. I came out with the following conviction: No amount of personal achievement will ever make me immune from feeling terrible about myself. The voices may say, if only I would accomplish this; or if only I had developed that skill; or exercised the strength of character needed to actually complete that task, I would be worthy, and I could relax. But the voices offer false promise: those demons could still come to me no matter what peaks I scaled.

Conversely, no personal achievement or lack thereof can keep me from my innate worthiness as a child of God. I can be immune from feeling terrible about myself by leaning all of my being on the goodness of being itself – by trusting that the order of the universe, which keeps the planets in their right place, also keeps me in my right orbit, and I can relax in that.

Having won the fight, I emerged triumphantly into the sunshine. But a week or so later, I found myself back in the clouds again. The sunshine seemed as fleeting as actual sunshine in Seattle, instead of being the burning rock core that I needed it to be. And that’s where the waters of Meribah came in.

I found this quote in an address Mrs. Eddy gave in 1899: “The Christian Scientist knows that spiritual faith and understanding pass through the waters of Meribah here – bitter waters; but he also knows they embark for infinity and anchor in omnipotence.” On reading it, I immediately identified the bitter waters as the waves of despair that seemed to want to engulf me again. What I sensed from the passage was that the suggestion of despair may come with the territory, but that I don’t have to indulge in it. I can recognize it as a reminder to draw close to God – to cuddle close in consciousness to the wonder of being that is always there; to put aside my sense of needing to control or achieve, and draw my sense of who I am from what Life is.

When I looked up the waters of Meribah in the Bible, I found that they were waters that Moses struck from the rock for the Children of Israel, while they were complaining that God didn’t provide what they needed. The waters nourished them, but they were bitter because they showed that the Children of Israel hadn’t yet learned to trust God, and in that state of non-trust they wouldn’t be capable of perceiving, and therefore entering, the promised land.

So I see that from time to time I may again fail to see the ways in which my sustenance is provided, especially as I learn to crave that higher level of sustenance that is fed by healing Love. But I have this promise - that as long as I look to infinity for my understanding, I will pass through the waters safely.

Casting out the beam

Jesus taught, “first cast the beam out of your own eye so you can see clearly to cast the mote out of your brother’s eye.”

I’ve come to see that this is more than just a figure of speech telling me to pay attention to my own problems before criticizing others. It turns out it isn’t literally impossible for me to have a beam in my eye, and it is with great enthusiasm that I report that I have found out what the beam is, so now I can cast it out.

A beam is a structural member that holds up the floor and the roof of a building. The relevant structure here is my paradigm – my construct of the system of laws that govern my world. Everything I see is dependent on this construct – every deduction I make regarding cause and effect, every conclusion I make regarding what happened and why. And if a part of my construct is faulty, it will distort my vision, hampering my ability to see what’s what. It will be a “beam in my eye.”

So I found out what the beam in my eye is. It’s the notion that it’s possible for one person to be better than another, or for me to be a better or worse person based on my choices. I cast out the beam by realizing that this isn’t true.

There is nothing I can do to make myself a better person. There’s nothing I can do to make myself a worse person. There’s no way for me to be better than anyone else, or worse than anyone else. How does that make me feel? What does it mean?

It means there’s no need for me to ever criticize myself. There’s no need for me to make resolutions to be better. There’s no need for me to look to others to see if they’re doing better or worse than I am. There’s no need to feel anxious because maybe I haven’t done enough, or I haven’t done it well enough.

It is a big structural plank. Lots of things rest on it. Lots of things threaten to fall if I remove it. How can I get myself to be good if my behavior doesn’t matter? What motivation will I have to achieve anything? If I give up that plank, what makes me be good?

God makes me be good, just because God makes me that way. My being good is in gratitude, in joy, in delight – it is what I want. It’s not in trying to measure up, to be worthy, to earn God’s approval. God approves of me because God made me that way.

This was Job’s lesson: he thought God would be good to him if he was good. He needed to learn that God is good anyway, and that he was good because God made him that way; there was no way he could be otherwise. After he learned this lesson, he was healed.

The beam I get to cast out functions like a teeter-totter – giving the sense that one person can be up and another one down. In fact, no matter what we do, we are all of the same quality. We are each here in our nakedness, with all of our mistakes and failures, and all of our beauty, and all of our desire to be redeemed. We are all here with our love, and our loneliness, and our desire to be loved, and our desire to be holy. We are each the child of God.

One theological view says, “God loves you even though you are unlovable. This shows you how great God is.” Another says, “God loves you when you are good. Do well to be worthy of God’s love.” Both of those are just shadows of the truth, that God makes us lovable and good, and loves us that way.

If I can cast this beam out of my eye – this false paradigm that leads to comparison, then I will be able to see clearly to cast the mote out of my brother’s eye, for I will see him with compassion, and with oneness, and with love.


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Christian Science and the shell of it – breaking free

Since the time in ninth grade when my faith came alive for me, I’ve wanted to share it with others. And sometimes as I’ve tried to do so, a certain brittleness has come up - a sense that this wasn’t an area of interest to my conversation partner. The response would bewilder me, though I came to expect it. I couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to hear about this great thing I had to offer. Lately I’m looking at it from a different perspective. I see several obvious reasons why these past communications were brittle and awkward.

First is the problem of trying to tell about something: As I’ve mentioned, feeling the lift of God’s presence is much like flying. All of my being is on a bright and moving edge; I am illumined; I feel myself at the cambium, the growing place where all things unfold in the fresh newness of being. But to share this with someone else, they have to feel it. They have to experience God’s love, with its assurance that nothing they’ve ever worried about has ever mattered, that they have always been beloved beyond imagining, which takes care of everything. Mere words, however inspired, don’t bring this about.

Second are the limits to my own life proof: Christian Scientists are taught to operate from a different paradigm from the one assumed by popular culture. It is a paradigm in which perfection is the starting point, goodness is substance, and bad things are considered insubstantial, and are expected to fall away. We operate from that standpoint when our experience corroborates that – when we live at the point of healing. But there is a question of how I am to be when I find myself waiting for understanding – waiting for the clarity which shows itself as healing. I think there is a need to be very humble and quiet in my faith. I need to be watchful that the starting point of perfection doesn’t devolve into perfectionism, in which, though I don’t feel myself perfect, I feel I should be, and expect others to be. This falls into the posturing and judging, the precarious maintaining of facades, so familiar to social-climbing America and so antithetical to Christ.

Related to that is a problem of language: When speaking of a different paradigm, it’s easy to convey the wrong impression. Perfection in Christ can sound like perfectionism; the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free can sound like a burdensome responsibility. This problem is even greater when I cease to know what I’m talking about – when my words get ahead of my experience and I speak from my notion of the theory instead of the understanding only found in love.

Finally, there’s the question of relationship: I guess I assumed that it would be good and helpful to others for me to impart inspiration, or at least information, in my communications. What I didn’t account for is that my desire to be the giver left others in the role of people who needed my help. Often, as it turns out, people don’t appreciate being cast in that role. So if I come along telling them that their lives will be much better if they only allow themselves to be moved by my insight and wisdom, or if they adopt aspects of my faith, I shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t respond with great enthusiasm.

So what does this all indicate? Even within my own faith I have felt the resistance to the things others resist. I, too, turn away from mere words and crave the authentic experience, the overwhelming sense of the God presence, that makes many words unnecessary, and makes the ones that are spoken perfect. It’s useful to start noticing what doesn’t work so I can stop trying to do it. It’s even more important to begin collecting the moments of perfect love that define everything I want to have and be. Recently, facing the need to comfort a loved one, I found myself choosing not to say thought after thought that came to mind. I felt that words of instruction, however insightful, would fall flat, and that even words of encouragement must not contradict his feelings. I needed to keep my own thought in the place of pure love. No words that strayed from this could be any use at all. What I shared was not important. What mattered was that the solid Love that holds the whole world together be felt by both of us. Listening in this way allowed the needed comfort to come in. It was conveyed in touch more than in words – touch guided by love.

Words about Christian Science are a mere shell of what I value. They are a shell that can be brittle, and that can keep the glorious essence from shining forth. By insisting to myself that I stay centered in truth, I can begin to break free of that shell. No longer do I feel the need to share the great truth that I have found with others. Instead, through my faith I can see the light that they are already shining. My sharing can be in appreciating what they are. Then it will be their words as much as mine that bring inspiration.

Feels like Flying

Ever since I was very little, I’ve had the sense that I know the feeling of free flight, and have longed for it. I have flown in dreams from time to time, and always awake from such dreams with a deep sense of well-being.

When my being grasps for a moment the wonderful law of goodness, it feels like flying. There’s the same sense of expansiveness, of filling with more joy than my lungs can hold, of hope soaring – a buoyancy behind my chest and beneath my throat. There is power, belonging, and coming home – a sense of the rightness of this, and that it has always been part of me. It also feels like a huge new world to explore. In those moments my questions are gone – questions of how I am to improve, what my course of growth should be, how I’ll ever get there (wherever “there” might be). For I am conscious of the rightness of here and now.

My sister said this morning, “We’re taught that our thoughts determine our experience, right?” I said, “We’re taught that, but I’m not sure it’s right.” I told her of a book I had been looking at, on the Sermon on the Mount, which said it would bring out the Science of Christianity by explicating the meaning of those teachings. But it didn’t mention Mrs. Eddy anywhere, or even Christian Science. I soon determined that what it said may have been along the lines of what I was taught as a child, but also that those lines would never get one to the flying place, never bring healing, and so would lead seekers awry.

The problem is that it shares the underlying world view of the great body of self-help instruction to be found in our society. It assumes that there is something wrong with us, or at least something that can be improved upon, and that if we adopt this course of discipline and work hard at it, we can make ourselves better.

In this paradigm, God is not the moving and shaping force in our lives, our creator and determiner, the law which governs us. At best, God in this scenario is a judge, someone whose favor we might eventually earn if we are good enough. This is not the God that Jesus taught when he said “the kingdom of God is within you”, “I and my Father are one”, and “Our Father, which art in heaven.”

When I have been in the self-help paradigm, I’ve found it hard to love, much as I wanted to, much as I thought it would make me a better person to do so. I was too busy being anxious about myself, how I was doing, how I was progressing in my self-help program. The love that Love teaches is a celebration of universal oneness. It is a joy that springs forth in the contemplation of others, an exaltation at their presence and all the unique qualities of their being. It rides in the deep confidence of being well-loved, of belonging, of being home. It feels like flying.

It is an interesting project to steadily untangle myself from the self-help view of life and to embrace, more and more, the love that is the law of Life. The benefit is opening up those soaring spaces, where the fabric of my world view rips open and my whole vision fills with light.

Saying Yes

Last weekend I went to Ocean Shores with my husband, who was hired to do a drum circle for participants in a motorcycle rally, the Harley Davidson Surf and Sun Run. As we drove south and west we saw more and more motorcycles. Black leather vests and chaps, hair sheaths, tattoos. Shortly after we got there, we went to a place for pizza. The two couples that were sitting together in the back room where we went might not have been part of the rally, but they were sympathetic to it. One woman referred to the rush she got from feeling the rumble of the motors. What they said to us was, “Are you sure you want to be in this room with us? There are twelve of us, and the kids greatly outnumber the grown-ups.”

I was sure I did. This was the room where you could see the sky, and besides, I found myself looking forward to the experience of sharing the room with this group. I soon discerned that most of the kids were occupied in the video arcade room. The little ones, aged maybe 4-7, kept coming back in a steady trickle for quarters, which several of the adults were benevolently dispensing. Then they were ordering pizza, and pop by the pitcherfull. Though soda pop and video games would not have topped my list as things that were wholesome for kids, my sense here was that they would do no harm. I felt that whatever the items were, the substantial thing was the saying yes. I could feel those yeses going deep into the being of those kids, giving them depth and confidence, providing a foundation from which they could grow tall and strong. Later there was an incident in which one of the kids had to be disciplined. The discipline was measured, loving, and offered a clear path back to acceptance in the group, with hugs all around.

It was a new clarification of substance for me. In my efforts to be a good mom, I have tried to steer my kids towards what’s good. Here I saw a clear indication that in steering kids towards what I think is good in terms of activities and things to consume, I might be missing the key point – the need to say yes to their being, regardless of the material trappings. Just as my whole being said yes to this group of families at the pizza place, just as it said yes to all the black-leather clad people at the Harley Davidson rally, I began to feel that my whole purpose, with all my interactions, must be to say yes.

I was telling this story to my sister, and she said that she and her daughter had been talking about the same thing. She said saying no was like trying to back up over the spikes at the rental car place. It doesn’t achieve what you want – you have to go around another way. Her daughter corroborated by pointing out that in improv theater, one of the cardinal rules is that you can’t say no. You always say yes to whatever idea someone else presents, and then you can try to turn it in whatever way comes to mind.

Three of my entries in this blog so far have had titles beginning with “Christ says yes.” It makes sense to me that, in following Christ, I find more and more ways in my own life to do the same.

Giving and Receiving – the divine equilibrium of Spirit

Yesterday a friend shared an experience that had been upsetting to her. She spent a weekend with two other friends – a thing they had done before and which she had happily anticipated. But one of the friends acted differently this time, becoming bossy and controlling, “taking over the whole thing.” This included preparing all kinds of delicious food, but my friend said, “it was all about her.” Apparently she left no room for the normal breathing of relationships, for other people to express what they wanted, to have a say about what was being done, to give their gifts to the group.

I reflected to my friend that I think I’ve been like that friend at times. I had ideas about what things meant and how to do things, and I thought I was being interesting and helpful to share them. On one occasion (when I was once again sharing with the other English teachers how I had approached a certain lesson) I saw a look of unmasked distaste on the face of one of the teachers. But I couldn’t fathom why, and it seemed I couldn’t stop myself from “being helpful” – sharing my experience.

After the conversation yesterday, I felt the need to pull myself back to equilibrium. Though those gaffes are well in my past, and I can mostly laugh about them, I’m not entirely removed from hurt and self-disappointment at discovering that what I meant as a gift was unwelcome; that I had been blind to the needs of others. I needed something more than to reiterate hard-learned lessons about listening, and how receiving another is often the one most needed gift. I needed the clarity of a wholly spiritual perspective.

At feeling this need, I instinctively turned to God, leaning my weight into the all-embracing presence of Spirit, letting go of my own sense of balance to sink into the equilibriating presence of Soul. I remembered that I’ve given up faith in my own ability to find a balance through the careful weighing of give and take. It’s not that I’ve become successful at achieving grace through razor-thin balancing acts. It’s that, when I achieve balance, it’s because I’m leaning on God.

Then I thought about how this law is also governing my friend, and her friend, and everyone who lives in life’s longing for love and fulfillment. It’s actually a force that is governing us more constantly than gravity, though we may think of it even less. Thinking of it more helps me relax and appreciate the glory of being. Understanding it helps me move in accord with the will of Love, and so feel empowered to bring more good into the world. But even when I haven’t understood Love’s governance, it still has shepherded me. How else can I account for the thread of joy that has held my life together, even on days when I didn’t feel it?

On my bike ride this morning I thought about the Bible passage “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.” I realized that this supported my earlier thought: God is the giver of everything. Therefore we, as God’s reflection, can’t be tied up in knots with regard to our need to give and receive. It’s not possible for God’s reflection to feel the need to give but be confused about how to do it. It’s not possible for God’s reflection to see a proffered gift as an act of self-aggrandizement. It’s not possible to feel a mismatch – that our gifts are unwanted or that we can’t get what we need. It doesn’t take years of trying and failing to get it right until we learn how to interact in graceful give and take with others. There aren’t people who will just never get it, and I’m not such a person.

I still have a vestigial reflex, when I’m learning a lesson, to conclude that I’ve been wrong, along with everyone else who I believe holds the same approach. Feeling the governance of Spirit, holding each life in the perfect equilibrium of giving and receiving, generating joy and glory, is a sweet antidote, which replaces the bitterness of wrongness with the gratitude of being home.

More than I can hold in my hands

At a meeting of our spiritual formation group, we were asked to page, in our thoughts, through the past few days of lives, as if we were viewing a photo album, and to notice what stood out.

I saw the image of me driving up Third Avenue at ten that morning, after talking with women in the jail. The sky was intense blue between the buildings, the green of the trees luminescent. I felt in that moment the vibrant aliveness of everything, seated in a deep gratitude.

The talks with the women, the sharing of scriptures and stories of their lives, had been satisfying. My feeling was that no stratification of society, from homeless to penthouse executive, can put anyone closer to God. It also can’t put anyone further away. That closeness to Truth is right here for any one of us. It doesn’t need us to dig out of a hole, improve ourselves, earn it. Truth is Truth because that’s what it is. Truth is Love, so everyone has that perfect place – the true nature of themselves as loved and loving.

Paging back a day, I thought of the service we had done in the jail on Sunday. The feeling of love was palpable, comfortable, as we sang together, prayed together. I noticed how different it was from my earlier days of doing services, where I had just hoped to get through with out too much disruption. How before I doubted what our humble (and long) reading had to offer to those who came to hear, and now I knew we were sharing truth as if breaking bread, and it would nourish and sustain.

Going back to earlier that morning, I remembered the moment when the attendant had opened the door to my Sunday school class to tell us it was almost time to join the congregation upstairs. “They’re kneeling now” – Sacrament Sunday, where we kneel together in silent prayer, and then pray the Lord’s prayer again, together.

My two students, aged five and three, were standing on the table. It’s a heavy board table, so it wasn’t in danger, and though they had been jumping around quite a bit, my students weren’t, either. I felt a bit red-handed to have them both standing there, full of laughter and exhilaration. But I also knew it was good. In between their jumping around we’d been learning the First Commandment, talking about the words and what they mean, talking about their right to be governed by good alone, all the time. I felt that the love that was filling that room, the joy of their enjoyment of each other and their activity, was the main message of the class. Yes it was almost out of control. As I remembered the moment, I thought of the phrase, “more than I can hold in my hands.” I felt it was perhaps OK to be almost out of control just because there was so much life flowing there, so much goodness. It seemed right to me that I didn’t have to try to hold everything of life in my hands – because it there’s too much to it. Its order is not of my making, but of its own being – of God’s making. As a companion phrase, the Biblical “my cup runneth over” came to mind.

This was the image I shared with my group, though in my mind all the images contributed to the feeling. A member of the group offered a beautiful prayer for me – it mentioned increasing wonder at the presence of God’s glories, and at the miracles flowing through my hands. I desire to help my hands to remember not to grasp so much as to let the waterfall of life flow through them; not to control the flow but just to create a bubbler from which I and others may drink.

Another dimension

I have no personal experience with the fierce loyalty of a soldier. I haven’t had the intense feeling of being willing to die for a cause or a person. It’s a thing I’ve read about in books, a thing I’ve felt the edges of in the “yes, ma’am,” of people involved with the military. It’s not something I’ve missed – my tendency is to be suspicious of obedience, wary of the blindness of following orders. Still, I’ve felt, from time to time, a wistfulness for the fervency such an allegiance could have. A book I read recently once again hinted at its power as an ordering principle and a giver of purpose in life. It left me thinking about what it would be like to have this kind of a relationship to God.

The intense eagerness to serve God wouldn’t have the pitfall of serving a person – the inevitable human failings – or of serving a cause, with the tendency of causes to get bogged down in process and co-opted by power-hunger. I felt a kind of swift excitement when I thought of being in service to Love – of dedicating all of my life to standing for Love, living it, acting according to its impulses. Though I think of God as Principle – as the creating, controlling force governing the universe, rather than an anthropomorphic entity, I found this sense of loyalty to be everything I hoped for it – galvanizing, ordering, purpose-giving. It added a dimension to my prayer. I thought, so this is the legitimacy of that whole allegiance concept. It is a thing we are meant to feel. It’s not a seductive but misguided way of having ones life ordered, or a great thing we miss out on if we are civilians. It’s part of the nature of love – part of my nature – to want to give myself in service. And service to Life, Love, is obedience to the great first commandment. Another compelling reason to give my allegiance to God.

Arc of the Covenant

My daughter and I returned to Tae Kwon Do last week, after a month off. As we were practicing spinning hook kicks, I thought of the fact that, whatever the steps we are taught in learning the movement, we have to go beyond those steps to really do it. The steps are like dots we connect, but the movement itself is a smooth arc. Though we use the dots to understand the arc, we must then let go of them so that our movement is the smooth flowing from one impulse, with no stopping along the way.

This is true in many areas of life. In my daughter’s fiddle training, she goes beyond “the dots” – the musical notation – to the actual music, which is governed by its own internal order – the natural flowing of one phrase out of another. In social interaction, we go beyond the dots of polite behavior to find grace. In seeking truth, we must go beyond the dots of religion to the graceful arc of spirituality.

Riding my bicycle up the hill, feeling the complementary circles of arms and legs, connected by the undulating s-curves through my torso, I heard in my mind, “arc of the covenant.” I know the actual Biblical phrase says “ark,” and refers to the box which symbolically carried God’s promise to His people, or alternatively, to the boat which carried the promise of continuity of life for God’s creation. But I like to think of God’s promise, instead of something carried in a box or even a boat, as the laws which hold us in harmony, which make our movements flow in a perfect arc.

I’ve thought about how waves in water reflect the motion of Love. Each molecule receives the impulse of the wave in its own moment. No one is left out, and there is no strain of the impulse hitting a molecule more than once or failing to move through it to the next one. Each one is needed; each one is touched. Each one passes the impulse on to the next. The message of Love reaches everyone. The arc of the covenant is the circle-impelled wave that must fulfill all needs, because that is the law of it.

Even the first ark story also contains an arc – the rainbow which signified the promise of God’s continuing presence. And that arc appears unfailingly as a law of light – it’s not there at the whim of God; it’s there as a sign of God’s constancy. So, too, is the presence within us of the skill which lets us go beyond the dots to the arc of grace. Our lives are, themselves, a testimony to God’s constancy.

More on presence

I was thinking more about presence Saturday, riding the bus with my son to the Fremont parade – watching the people get on the bus, listening to the boy behind us telling his parents about his plans. I was wearing clothes that were tighter than I’ve sometimes worn – living into my being, pushing out with my presence into the world. I saw other people living this way, too – being present, not hiding behind their clothes. Couples with kids and strollers they muscled up the stairs; single people; friends; people of all ages. The bus stopped often in the suburban neighborhood, and I had given up worrying about arriving on time. I figured the time we arrived would be right.

My son was slouched deep in his seat reading a book. I was watching everyone else. And this is what I thought to them: your presence is welcome. I felt a bit like I was just waking up from a long bad dream, and was teaching myself, again, what’s real. I thought of how, actually, no permission is needed to be fully present. You don’t have to be the right shape to be allowed to be seen. You don’t need the right credentials to be allowed to look at someone and smile. You don’t need to wait for permission to speak. You don’t have to already know the other people to appreciate them. And they don’t need to fit into any molds to be worthy of acceptance. There, with all the signs of who they are that they allow to show, all the choices they’ve grasped as signs of their identity, all the inside parts they maybe didn’t hide because they didn’t know were showing – there they are, welcome.

I tell myself again: my being is not based on absence. The goodness of my body is not based on the absence of pounds. My peace is not based on the absence of stress. My smile and eye contact are not based on a lack of inhibition. They are my presence, and presence is what I am.

I wondered what odd stamp of the world had made me at times think otherwise. Was it that I learned my kindergarten lessons too well – sit cross-legged on the rug, face the teacher, don’t speak unless given permission and only reply with the answer asked for? But in kindergarten I already had a disapproving judgment of the girl who sat under the piano (not like everyone else) and said, “just call me Nina,” instead of just saying her name. And I already had the sense that cats and dogs are enemies, and that enemies form the essential structure for a good story, and that good and bad define each other.

I broke myself away from those musings, for the line they lead in doesn’t lead to this new wakefulness, which I love. I recall that even then I was a dreamy, light-filled spirit who would lose myself in the pumping of the backyard swing, singing out songs that caught at my heart. This dwelling in absence is a story that I can put on all parts of my life, up to and including now, or I can let it all go and dwell in presence.

This is very important to me. I want to hold each one in my spirit’s embrace and say, welcome – your presence is appreciated. It is good, it is allowed. I don’t want to look through the old frame where I felt people were to be appreciated if they matched standards – if they looked right and dressed right and didn’t have bad habits, and lived within all of society’s painted lines. And I believe this is the paradigm shift that Jesus was talking about when he said, “a new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another,” and when he said “judge not, that ye be not judged.” I think I am now only in the surface layers of it. There is such depth to love – it’s able to go down to the very foundations of being. I sense that it’s able to change everything, to wake everything up to the harmony of universal presence, to heal everything. It is my deepest desire to participate in it.

More and more lovely clues

I recently read that where Jesus said, “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand,” the Greek word for “repent” has the same root as the word “metanoia”, which I had earlier learned to mean “paradigm shift”. So Jesus was going around saying: have a paradigm shift, because the kingdom of God is here. It doesn’t just mean change your mind within the same structure of right and wrong; decide you’re wrong where you had been thinking you were right. Instead it means change the very structure by which you decide everything you do.

At this year’s annual meeting of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, I heard a practitioner talk about how she had helped a patient achieve physical healing by applying to herself Jesus’ command of “Judge not,” which Jesus illustrates with the following words: “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.”

She said she realized she had been thinking her patient had to change some things about his attitude before he could be healed. She realized that this was a flaw in her own thinking, the “beam” that she had to remove from her own eye before she tried to take the “mote” out of his eye. She said the removing of the beam from her own eye was the recognition that God made him already perfect, and he didn’t have to change in order for that to be manifest. Shortly after she recognized this, the patient called and said, “what did you do?” – He was completely healed.

Listening to her account, I realized that the beam in the saying denoted more than an impossibly large object to be unaware of having in my eye, in contrast to someone else’s problems that seemed so real to me. A beam is also a structural component – the main part of a building that holds everything else up. So casting the beam out of my eye means ceasing to rely on the same structure of thought, releasing presuppositions, expectations, and conclusions based on them. With these gone, I can “see clearly to cast the mote out of [my] brother’s eye.” In other words, I can see the evidence of spiritual being which establishes my brother’s perfection in my eyes.

Christ Says Yes III – nothing shall offend them

In my orthodox period, as an aspiring good person, I tended to believe that when people were good, they deserved good things, and when people were evil, they didn’t, Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding. (Jesus says, Love your enemies, …; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.) Also, though I loved Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” as immortalized in Beethoven’s ninth symphony, I squirmed a little at the concept that “Everything that’s good and everything that’s bad follows Joy’s rose-strewn path.” I didn’t really want the bad stuff to get to be in there.

Lately I have been loving the concept expressed by these passages. To me they are gateways to a paradigm shift. In order to embrace them in my world, I have to change my understanding – have to open new dimensions in order to include them. The new worldview that includes them is much richer, more comprehensive, and more satisfying than the old one, so I am happy to be here.

I read something in a Christian Science Sentinel this morning which I found very interesting. In a discussion about the practice of Christian Science healing, one of the participants says, “You need to be the practitioner that is in you, with your own love. You cannot duplicate someone else’s life-experience or life model.” (Christian Science Sentinel, June 11, 2007, p. 7.) This seems very true and important to me. I think I allowed at least some of my upbringing to be guided by the grave, hushed voices that spoke, with eyes averted, of some unfortunate choice someone had made. Make sure you don’t do what she did. The implication was that you could make a good life out of negatives, by avoiding all of the bad things other people might do.

To me the message from this practitioner says that I can’t build my life based on what someone else found to be the right path. Similarly, I can’t base what I don’t do on what someone else felt would be a bad idea. There is a good reason Christian Science practitioners don’t give human advice. It’s because human advice is not scientific – it’s not based on anything provable, accountable, or replicable. The advice I would give is, decide your course based on what increases your love.

I will now illustrate why that advice must remain based on spiritual terms – your love – rather than human terms – the activities you take on. For me, one of the things that very greatly increased my love was having a baby. The influx of love for my children also strengthened the love in my marriage, increased my appreciation of others in general, and multiplied the level of my compassion. Yet it’s obvious that it would be very bad advice to tell someone looking for more love to have a baby. I knew it was the right step for me at the time; other people find their right steps, too. One person may find an increase in love by serving in a soup kitchen; another, by climbing a mountain; another, by writing a book; another, by an intense romantic relationship. All of these human things can be right steps for people at certain times. Only the individual, looking within and testing each step along the way for the increase in love, can know what the right step is.

This is the very loving way that the Christ works, leading us from within and saying yes to everything that affirms our being. This also leads us to a judgment-free appreciation for the different paths others take. I’m finding it very freeing to realize that no human pursuit is intrinsically more spiritual than another. An athlete is not less (or more) spiritual than an intellectual; a person who does finance not less (or more) spiritual than one who does art. Each person’s gift, nurtured and given with integrity, blesses us all.

Neither do I ever have to feel that grave concern that someone’s life has taken an unfortunate turn. I don’t have to become like my (perhaps faulty) memory of older church members, casting on myself and others the fear of some life courses and the people who take them. It says in Psalms, “Great peace have they which love Thy law, and nothing shall offend them.” It is my great joy to challenge myself to not be offended by anyone, but to love the law of Love and how it guides us all in our right paths.

Presence

Part of my daily prayer involves thinking about God as presence. I started out thinking about God as omnipresence, but I wanted to avoid the thought of filling up a space that was there first. I think of presence as being there even before space. Instead of presence being within space, I think of space as a concept within presence, where presence is the very fact of existence.

Last Saturday at the folklife festival, I saw two sisters performing. The older sister is thirteen, though to look at her, she might have been older. She was playing fiddle in a group, and she stood poised, her foot tapping, her bow moving confidently and jauntily. She was smiling at everyone, and her eyebrows would go up as the music lilted. She clearly was enjoying the songs, and encouraging all the audience to enjoy them too. My thought, looking at her, was that she exuded presence. Not a self-important or ego-based stage presence, but something much more engaging. I suppose in the past, from my own struggles, I might have thought stage presence was basically the absence of stage fright, but this was something different. This was a positive and powerful thing.

In the next number, the girl performed with her younger sister, who played the harp. The younger sister is maybe about nine. She has the same expressive eyebrows, and a softer version of the same poise. As she was playing her harp, she looked out at everyone and smiled with each pluck of a string. My sense was that she had full expectation that she was pleasing the audience, and she was drinking in the love, reveling in their appreciation. I looked at their mom, then, who was in the back, as I was, watching and cheering them on. I thought, what could their mother have given these girls to have them be so confident? It must have been a deep and constant appreciation of their presence, with no judgment waiting to happen. Their great musical ability must have arisen in an atmosphere of permission, not pressure.

I had a little remorse, then, about my own parenting. Had I not, all too often, focused on absence instead of presence? - Noticed things that I saw as wrong or lacking, and tried to find ways to fix or develop them? I saw that this would always be counter-productive, making it seem like there were gaps and holes in my childrens’ being, engendering self-doubt and fear. My next thought was to be grateful that I’m not the parent – God is. It’s God’s being that determines what they are, and no foolishness on my part can change any of that. Indeed, since presence is substance, presence determines what we all are. So the only influence I can have had on them, all this time, is what comes from my presence. Things that come from absence – worry, fear, foolishness – can’t have any influence, while what comes from presence – my love – will always be felt. I realized that even now, I don’t have to look for ways to fix any results of my absence-based approach. The way to help – and really heal – any seeming gaps in confidence and presence is simply to see what’s present and love it. In other words, see everything that’s good (since, after all, God is all presence and God is good.)

This might seem like yet another refrain of “accentuate the positive”, but here’s what’s different about it for me: presence and absence are not complementary opposites. They don’t act the same way but in a different flavor. Two illustrations:

1) Though we have flashlights to use to get rid of darkness, there’s no such thing as a flashdark. There can’t be any device that can throw a beam of darkness into a place and get rid of the light. This is because darkness is not a positive quality. It has no presence of its own, no ability to move itself around, no ability to determine anything.
2) Artists often work with negative space. They train themselves to see the spaces in between the objects, and to use these spaces when considering the balance of their composition. But in real life, negative space doesn’t have presence. You might see the space between two trees, and it might look like some kind of a beast. But that space has no power to come hulking out from its place and sit in front of you. It can’t grow bigger and change the shape or size or position of the trees that delineate it. It can’t make any difference about anything at all. And whenever you move, the negative space changes. It has no continuity nor ability to maintain itself as an entity.

So if God is presence, there is really never any need to focus on absence. The way to fix any problem is just to look at what’s present. Then any sense of absence simply falls away.

This is a radical approach for me. It means no more diagnoses of any problems. No more thrashing through how to fix things. No place for annoyance, irritation, despair. Or, at least, a quick path out of them: a simple question – what’s present here? A reminder that it’s useless to focus in on absence, since absence has no substance. A reminder that all I am comes from elemental goodness itself, which is as present as God, who is presence itself.

I can feel this presence of myself as the expression of the presence of God. From this perspective, anything I need to attain seems easy. It comes out of the infinite substance that is already mine. I don’t need to conjure up something to fill in gaps in my achievement. I just have to live in God as a flower lives in the morning – supple and fragrant with the life force whose flow is my being.

Joy

My deepest joy is in being one. On my bike ride, I saw a black bird sitting on the post of a yield sign – its beak yellow, its head tousled like a pajama’d child, its throat moving, showing it to be the source of the joyful sound that rose beside the trail. Joy rose up in me then, too, and I felt a oneness with the bird and all the living things expressing themselves in that moment. I have heard people who think they should know say that birdsong is a mere proclamation of territory, but I never have believed this. It doesn’t account for the spontaneous rising of joy.

People also say that joy is chemical. I think saying joy comes from chemicals is similar to saying Michelangelo made his statues with chisels. It may be so, but chisels, even a vast array of them, can’t account for the works. Neither can a deep knowledge of anatomy, though he must have had that. The one thing that would need to guide the artist in the creation of such works as the Pieta is that moving of the spirit, alongside and within, that feels the presence of another – feels the weight, the gravity – that which is deeper than emotion – in the other. This spirit is what allows the viewers to feel the same thing – to not only be there watching the drama of the moment, but to be in the bodies that are portrayed – to feel the presence and gravity as if they were our own.

Joy is the same way. Though chemicals may create a high, joy guides the spirit into oneness. Joy always leads to an expression that affirms Life and benefits other living things. It leads to the leaps of grace that cause more joy to rise spontaneously in other living things. We recognize it across species as well as among our own kind.

I have heard people say they have heard no compelling reason to believe in God. To me, God is the only way to account for joy. It can’t be explained in material terms. It can’t be predicted by the presence or absence of any material elements. It is something we recognize as highly substantial, and, in fact, as one of the main things of deepest worth and value, yet it is not made out of matter. To me this says that if joy is real, then Spirit is real. And just like the tousle-headed bird beside the trail, I choose to believe in the reality of joy.

Here I am

Yesterday my teen-aged daughter participated in a Taekwon Do tournament, and my husband was there for part of it. When he was telling me about it afterwards, he said, “It was great – I was giving her advice, and she was actually hearing it.” He told me that the advice he was giving had nothing to do with the placement of hands and feet. Instead, it had to do with presence – feeling the purpose of each thing she was doing, feeling it deep in her belly, breathing. He told her to walk into the ring with a presence that would command the judges to look at her – one that said, even before the first move of her pattern, you’re looking at the winner. It wasn’t a matter of psyche-out or bravado. It wasn’t a matter of positioning herself as better than the other competitors. It was simply a matter of being fully there, of standing behind and within herself, of being a fair representation of everything that she is. Not one of many waiting to be judged, but one being of integrity, whole within herself.

I found this to be very good advice. I took it in, took it for myself, and considered how consonant it is with everything I’m learning about being. It doesn’t make sense that presence and poise be the exclusive purview of celebrities and a small percentage of people born to perform. If I am, in fact, the image and likeness of God, good, it doesn’t make sense that I would be missing the capacity to represent myself, to stand in myself, and to stand up with poise and confidence. These aren’t surface qualities. They’re not about polishing my image or developing a persona, however much popular culture would say they are. They aren’t contrary to humility, but are in fact an expression of it, an acknowledgment that God is the creator, that God does a good job, and that it’s not our place to say otherwise.

There’s a song I’ve sung a few times in other Christian churches. It says, Here I am, Lord – send me. It is in this willingness to be sent that I also find the presence and poise that will allow me to do the job required. It is interesting to consider that we are sent each day – that our being is the evidence of God’s being, and we don’t have any other purpose. So it is right to feel competent in every pursuit in which we find ourselves. It’s right to expect our actions to be effective.

My Purpose – Not for my Purposes

I was sitting in the sun today taking in the cosmic rhythm – the dance of the trees and grasses, the low tones of the bamboo wind chimes, the sweet songs of birds. I could feel a breathing that went through me, though it neither started nor ended with me. Breathing in the rhythm with everything around me, it was easy to feel the oneness. In oneness everything seems possible. If everyone can feel this peace and harmony, we will able to breathe the world we want into being. Just by who we are, we will bring it about.

This perception cast a new light on an old memory – that of the moment I fell in love with my daughter. She was two or three days old, and was sleeping upstairs. I went up to check on her. I remember thinking, on the way up the stairs, about how I would be able to tell she was fine – wondering how easily I would know if she was breathing. When I got to her, it was easy to tell, from farther away than I had expected. Her whole body was breathing. Even in sleep she exuded this tremendous aliveness, the expressiveness of something thriving. Before that moment I had felt maternal care for her, and a generalized happiness to have her, but in that moment I felt a leaping out of love for her, a love which stayed.

It occurs to me now that the aliveness she expressed was the same oneness, the same sense of a breathing much larger than oneself. It called to me to participate in a larger truth, a larger purpose. And though it was exactly the thing that I most wanted in the world, I could also say that the purpose was not my own. It wasn’t something I could have dreamed up and set as a goal for myself. Yes I had intensely wanted to be a mother; I had intuited that it was one role that would use all of me. I had a miscarriage shortly before we conceived her, and it was a time of deep grief. But the lesson I took from it, and the thought that I felt made me ready for motherhood, was, “not by will, but by willingness.”

I’ve been learning that lesson ever since. Most recently, I’ve been thinking about “firing the manager,” where the manager is the one who tries to figure out the direction for my life, and, while she’s at it, the direction for the life of everyone whose life path crosses mine. I find her to be stressful, anxious, and entirely incompetent. She forgets that she is not the center of the universe, and tries to make everything orbit around her. She tends not to remember that the divine Creator is giving every life form its perfect purpose, ideas, and course.

In firing the manager, I come upon a truth which is quite clear, but sometimes gets tangled in language so as to seem paradoxical. The greatest fulfillment, my greatest purpose, is not for my purposes. My purpose, which is found in oneness with everything living, is not something I (or the manager) can tweak or harness or use to enhance my place in society or my own designed sense of who I should be. It’s not something I can even know except in the context of oneness – something much greater than what I usually think of as me.

There is Christian language for this, as when Paul says “ye are the temple of the living God,” and “ye are not your own.” But it may also be one of those mysteries where the meaning is easy to misconstrue. We get told that we must not be selfish, and this is supposed to mean that we should suppress what we most desire and serve someone else’s purposes. But that is not an authentic meaning. I believe that it’s part of the law of Life and Love that everything is designed to want to be exactly what it is. We are designed to want what we want, and to fulfill the purpose that is our heart’s desire. And we are designed to be part of the oneness – to find our unique participation with all of the universe to be our ultimate fulfillment, the ultimate embodiment of our essential individuality. So our purpose is our own, and not to be suppressed for anyone else’s purposes. But it is not our own concoction. We find it in oneness, in the law of Love. We fulfill it in service, as do all living things. And we rejoice in it with the special high of being part of something bigger than anything the manager could grasp.

Standing for Peace

Yesterday afternoon, on Mother’s Day, I stood in a circle with about 12 other people in a park near our home, to observe a five-minute vigil with the Standing Women – standing for a better world. It wasn’t just women – we had asked the men in our lives to stand with us. Three of the people were my immediate family – we had walked the 10 blocks from our house to get there. Three were people I had never met, who had seen my posting on the Standing Women website saying where we’d be standing. The rest were members of our school community.

As I looked around at this small, beautiful group, it occurred to me that the vast majority of people in the world want this – a good life for our children and all children, our grandchildren and all grandchildren, the planet. We want to live in peace; we want to love each other. Since that is the case, I reflected, the only thing we need is to claim our individual sovereignty, our ability to manifest what we are in our lives.

I had the image the other day that I am perhaps more like coral than I had thought. Instead of my life being a collection of intentions, events, and material artifacts which I need to manage and come up with a way to make work for me to achieve my purposes, my life is something that grows naturally out of who I am. Just as the intricate and colorful structures of the coral form effortlessly from the animals’ own being, so all the visible attributes of my life can flow from mine. I don’t have to worry about whether they will fit, or do what I hoped they would do. I can leave that to the grand plan of God.

In this context, my sovereignty and my faith are one. Saying I have the ability to manifest what I want in life is saying that my Creator has designed me so that the artifacts of my life, like coral, grow to serve the needs of my life. It is natural that the life of a being who is the expression of Love should be lovely, full of love in every moment, bringing forth blessing and healing. I get to bring forth what I want by being what I am. I am designed so this happens naturally.

I was talking afterwards to a woman in the circle who’s been active in organizing for peace. I said, it must be a constant consideration how to stand up for peace without taking in any elements of war and violence – such as anger and resentment. She agreed, commenting that most peace work is internal, but that there’s also the need for outward work – that it calls for a balance. I think this is true, and is consonant with the law of Life, in which giving and receiving are always reciprocal. I want to practice this balance by letting my life grow like coral. I know that the Creator’s design is for exactly the kind of world we want the world’s children and grandchildren to have. My faith is that as I give the job of managing my life over to God, God will do a good job. God will help all of us grow lives that support life, bringing forth beautiful, sustaining structures that provide safe habitat for all.

No more silence

At a retreat I recently attended, we decided to spend a period of the afternoon in silence. While I was fine with the silence as I walked the beach and communed with the sunlight, I found it uncomfortable when I met another of our group and interacted with just a smile and a wave.

The nature of the discomfort was that it felt like I was shoving myself back into a box that I had been in for too long – it was a very familiar place that I had recently been finding my way out of, and I didn’t want to be stuck back in there again.

It’s not that I’ve been habitually silent. In fact, I’ve caused people discomfort too many times by dousing them with a torrent of thoughts with too little attention to the natural give and take of conversation. But these floods were perhaps induced by the paved over areas in my internal landscape, areas of enforced silence, the prohibitions to speaking in certain ways and situations.

Some of these silences were words that I wouldn’t say; some were things I wouldn’t talk about; some were situations in which I didn’t give myself permission to speak; some were people I didn’t give myself permission to speak to. These enforced silences didn’t keep me from thinking things – all kinds of things, which would get so thick that they would sometimes become another source of silence, as I knew or usually thought there was no way to fit them through the gates of communication.

What I want to say about this is that, although I didn’t even know before that it was a problem, I feel profoundly liberated to be out of that box. And I want to talk a bit about how I got out of it and why I think it’s a good thing.

The first step in liberation was starting to glimpse that I don’t need someone’s permission to be their friend. When I first glimpsed this, it was profound for me, and gave me a lot of courage to overcome shyness. But it has taken me many more years to fully realize this truth. I recounted my most recent revelations about this in the entry “Christ says yes II” in this blog. (Also in this blog, the entry “On being a Christian” touches on important parts of this realization.)

It’s been more recently that I’ve experienced a release from charged words and topics. It used to be that, in my internal landscape, there were certain words and topics where, if my mind would run over them, my voice would go silent. In some cases this was some sense of propriety, some sense of what kind of a person I am, which forbid me those words and topics. In some cases it was also that I had such a long habit of not speaking about these things that the words would come difficult. Then, if someone else began talking along those lines, while I might not actually have a problem with it, it would be impossible to convey that fact. My silence would shout judgment, whether I felt that way or not.

The release came about as I was working on finding my voice, and in conjunction with compassionate treatment of me by others. As it was coming about, I found some Biblical support for the direction I was going.

I was thinking about the third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” And thinking about the name of the Lord, I thought of the passage in John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. These thoughts came together as – have only one God; have only one Word. Don’t have words be gods.

There were a few ways this was meaningful to me. First, because I realized it wasn’t right for any words to make me uncomfortable or make me judge someone else for using them. Second, I realized that also, in the area of persuasion and marketing, it’s not legitimate for words to make me or anyone want to do what is against our Godlike nature to do. It’s not legitimate for people to be brainwashed. The Word has the power to make itself heard. Finally, this corroborated what I wrote in this blog in “Love me; I love you, and the Hungarian Phrase Book” – that it doesn’t matter what words people are saying – only the Word can be communicated. Only love, and the deep value of each life form.

So I remain committed to staying outside of the box of silence. I remain committed to digging up the pavement in my internal landscape and exposing the soft earth to the penetration of rare seeds. I remain committed to keeping things light and moist so that new infrastructures of root and leaf may grow. Then my permeable surface will be able to take things in better, and give things out more appropriately, and the words I do speak will be of greater service.

Believe, and ye shall be saved?

“Don’t talk like that,” I said to him. “Don’t you know that saying you can’t do it makes it harder for you to get it?”
“People learn things differently,” he said darkly. In other words, mind your own business.

Thinking about it many months later, I realized the foolishness of my words. What I had voiced, in the name of some kind of faith, was only the degenerate set of it, the way that popular culture, without understanding the depth of faith, talks of the power of positive thinking. This kind of talk is considered acceptable, and people agree that it might have some vague result. But it’s similar to other things people toss around as “good for you,” like a diet or an exercise program. There are some adherents, but their example doesn’t offer overwhelming proof. In honesty, I can’t base my faith on such a platform. If I have faith in the power of Truth to establish harmonious conditions, it must be something much deeper than this.

A friend was talking last night about how evangelists are trained to make a two minute pitch and then close the deal like a sales person, asking for the decision: Are you ready to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior? - As if someone could choose that like deciding to buy a car. Jesus does say “believe, and ye shall be saved,” but that doesn’t answer the question of how we come to believe.

When I was in ninth grade, I had a few direct experiences of God, and I was hooked. A couple of instances of feeling my hand led in a math test to guide me to understanding when my mind was blank, a few instances of going directly to objects I had lost, and God was unshakably real to me. It wasn’t just the help but the exhilarating feeling of being held. I remember going down the halls to lunch after those math tests, and I felt like I was flying. Other signs of God’s presence followed – the understanding that gave me the courage to take resolute steps out of painful shyness; the healing of rifts in communication within my family, a sudden healing of tonsillitis, guidance in my choices about school and relationships.

There were other times, painful times, where I didn’t find the healing I was seeking. I came to dread getting sick, and having to try to pray for myself, and feeling some unnamed obstacle between my words and what I actually was thinking. I wanted to say, with the man whose son Jesus healed, “Lord, I believe – help thou mine unbelief!”

Some internal voices would ask me from time to time why I didn’t just give up. But my answer was always, where else would I go? Once having felt the divine presence, and having experienced it as something more real and satisfying than anything else, I simply couldn’t give it up. So I persevered at the practice of continuing to seek, growing to almost like the feeling of having the rug (of all my presuppositions) pulled out from under me, leaving me in an ignominious sprawl to rediscover my center in the resulting stillness. Through many, many of these experiences, I'm coming to have a clearer, more powerful faith.

There are only a few things I know to tell people about the process of coming to believe. One is illustrated in the fact that the Ten Commandments address the reader as “thou”, which is second person singular intimate. Singular – this is not addressing a group. It’s not offering rules for people to hold over each other’s heads to judge them. Intimate - it’s addressing the very inward thought of each individual, with intimate individual care for each unique case. So it is that the fundamental, foundational teachings about behavior, in relation to God and man, command a very individual search. They are not for others, even the others who reside, judging, in the rooms of consciousness. We find God not by being told what to believe and what to do, but by locating God within our very blueprint – finding God’s hand in the nature of what we are.

Another is that belief can’t be forced – that you can’t believe something by willing yourself to do so. Belief is not what you adopt because you like it and it sounds plausible (such as whether you believe there is life on other planets, or whether you believe in parallel universes.) Belief is what you walk on. You walk over the bridge because you believe it’s strong enough; you leave your children with their Grandma because you believe she will take good care of them. You believe in God as you feel God’s gentle presence in your life. If you haven’t felt it yet, you can consider what’s good in your life, and you can consider your marvelous fortitude in difficult times, and you may find some proof there. Being quiet within helps a lot. But God doesn’t need to be conjured up. God is able to make God’s self known.

And one more: coming to believe isn’t a process of choosing a God off the shelf based on a comparison of ingredients. Though some religious movements may try to sell you an off-the-shelf concept of God, this doesn’t have anything to do with what God is to you. Though you may not have heard anyone present a plausible concept of God, this doesn’t mean you can’t know God. Clearing your mind of preconceptions helps. But God doesn’t need to be pre-defined. God is able to make God’s self known.

Christ says yes II: loving one another

Last night my husband said, the message Jesus brought says love – love each other is the main thing he taught – yet the churches seem to say: but only within prescribed limits. Only within your marriage.

To elaborate on that, it is supposed that there is one kind of strong love that should occur only within the confines of the marriage bed, another kind of strong love for family and some close friends, and then a sort of a weak, diffused love for everyone else.

He and I are working out a different paradigm. We have identified two planes in which the thought of love plays out. One of them is the plane of pure energy exchange. The other is the plane of temporal negotiation. Both planes are valid in their own right. The shift from one plane to another can happen quickly and without being noticed. Confusion about what plane one is operating on causes all kinds of problems.

The plane of pure energy exchange is the one in which one life form recognizes another, sees the deep and shining soul within, and rejoices. This is the plane of the brilliant smile of a stranger on the street, and it is the plane of “namaste” – the divine in me salutes the divine in you. When such an exchange occurs freely, both participants go away enriched. They are affirmed in two ways: one, by sending out a shining signal, and two, by being recognized as shining. This kind of exchange can be a deep blessing, sending out ripples of joy through succeeding interactions. And I believe it’s fair to call such an exchange an act of love – of loving and being loved.

The plane of temporal negotiation is the one in which people ask, what am I to you? Will you be there for me? It is the one in which they seek to define what the relationship is in time, in the course of lives as they play out. This kind of understanding is important. It takes many loops of feedback to come to clear communication, to find the common language and an agreement of expectations. It can only happen successfully when both people are committed to making it happen.

Here are some examples of how these planes get confused: Someone shoots a smile at a person, and she wonders, is he coming on to me? Would I be leading him on to smile back, would I be sending the wrong signal? Because she’s confusing the pure energy exchange with a temporal negotiation, she feels the need to mask her natural response of joy towards another life form. Thus the exchange doesn’t happen, and the world gets a little colder. Another example: Someone shoots a smile at a person, and she thinks, he has no right to smile at me. He can’t follow through with a relationship, and I wouldn’t want him to do so. Men are so arrogant, thinking they have the right to have any relationship they want to. So she gives him a dirty look back, to make sure he knows that she will not be entering into relationship with him. Again, the energy exchange doesn’t happen, and life is not as delightful as it could have been. I use these examples because, as a woman, I have experienced both these states. I expect the examples told from a male perspective would sound a little different, but I’m not so intimately in tune with them to pull them up.

The planes can also get confused in the other direction, where someone thinks that, because there has been an energy exchange between the two of them, something is owed, obligation is incurred, an agreement for temporal relationship has been made. Or it can be confused when someone thinks they can do things that have consequences in the temporal plane without entering into relationship.

It has consequences in the temporal plane to say you’ll be there for someone. It has consequences in the temporal plane to make a baby with someone. It can have consequences in the temporal plane to get to a certain level of intimacy with someone, and that level may vary from person to person. This is why very deliberate communication is important in the negotiation of temporal relationships. An energy exchange does not signal a temporal relationship. It also doesn’t preclude one. Temporal relationships are built on the communication that explores these issues.

Meanwhile, I think it’s of crucial importance in the world that we not confine our love to temporal relationships. We must love in every way – in the way that treasures and holds up each life form, in the way that offers quick aid without obligation, in the way that allows us to be graceful and loving in our dealings with others.

It has been supposed that such exchanges should only be from the neck up – share a nice smile, but don’t get too involved. Feel it down to your heart maybe, but don’t feel it in your gut, don’t feel it to the core of your being. Don’t feel turned inside out, turned on, transformed. Save those deep feelings for your temporal relationships. But I believe that is not so. If it were, the love that Jesus tells us to do would be a dull duty, a tiresome obligation.

What distinguishes an energy exchange from a temporal relationship is not its depth, but simply its continuity through the plane of time. An energy exchange can be rockingly deep. It just incurs no obligations. It can be reciprocal, but the love is given unilaterally, with no expectation of a temporal relationship. It is given from the nature of who we are, because it’s what we are made of.

An energy exchange can also be practical and kind. It can help and bless someone (and when it does, it blesses both, by the law of balance.) It can be the stranger who changes your flat tire, the man who walks a mile with you to show you the way.

Does that sound familiar? Love one another, say yes to the core of each other, be rocked, transformed by each other. That’s how you’ll know that you’re his disciples, he says. I don’t think there are two kinds of love. There’s one kind of love, and if you do it, you’re going to feel it, and it’s going to feel fine. No temporal obligations, but deep aliveness and satisfaction. I don’t think it’s sacrilegious. Christ says yes.