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.