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.