The Gift of Now

My sister (the bicycle lady) responded to my two last posts. I think the essence of her comments is: you have to work with what you have. If you don’t have the floating lift of joy, you have to power on anyway. If you’re not feeling completely holy about your family, you still need them, and they need you, and it is a comfort.

I think she’s right. She brings up a question that must trouble all seekers of a spiritual view: what to do with the messiness of now? So you know Spirit is the only thing that sustains - how does that wash the dishes and pay the bills? How does it intervene in an awkward conversation? How does it impart grace?

Here is what I think: although I may say that spiritual sustenance is not found in material things, it’s always true that spiritual sustenance is found right here. In every single right here, in the opportunity of every moment. Whatever I’m seeing right here and now, therefore, has the ability to provide me with deep spiritual sustenance. A kitchen full of dirty dishes? Check. There’s the symphony of sound, the clanks and pings, or there’s the music I put on to accompany my work, or simply the opportunity to move in grace. My son? Check. I can be delighted by Spirit revealing itself to me in his unique being.

I have an image of what this looks like. It’s of a bright light released, rising up from a person (like plasma in my picture), an unbelievable illumination. In my vision, every individual in every moment has the ability to be that node of illumination, that place of opening. The opening has the feeling of incredible richness. I have examples in mind: the way my father-in-law can, in a certain moment, feel deeply loved, uniquely appreciated, so his spirit floods with a sense of comfort and gratitude for the simple care provided him. That comfort is the light-release of that moment, similar to the looks of joy on the faces of the dying men suddenly cared for by Mother Teresa’s ministries, in the movie I saw about her. Another example is the spark between two young people (or people of any age) awaking the possibility of love.

Here’s the big secret: love is not proprietary. We may think it’s only released when all the stars are aligned and all the circumstances are perfect. But any moment, any person can release it. This is the source of spiritual sustenance - the release of those plasma flows of love. And though I make it sound exotic, it is something I have known throughout my life - in my love, as a teenager, of little kids; in my love of my own kids; in my attraction to music and moments of beauty. I’m just learning it’s more universal than I thought.

So for me there’s no asceticism, no denial of anything present. My practice instead is to look at each moment and ask to see the gift of now - the light-release that lifts me up in joy.

What Sustains Me

Today I had my writing group at Angeline’s. (I show up at the homeless women’s day shelter and see if anyone wants to join me for writing, and we publish what they write in The Occasional Times, a newsletter by and for homeless women). My friend Janice joined me, and she had a suggested topic: What Sustains Me? So I wrote the following:

What sustains me? I was thinking about that this morning, wide awake at 5:30 when I needed to get up, aware of my husband’s weariness, the sheer inertia against which he pushed, after a restless night, to start another day. I could feel the weariness a little, but I waited for the buoyant hope to lift me, float up the sunken place behind my eyes, give me the lift to move me through my morning duties.

I don’t know what I’d do, I thought, if I didn’t have it. Don’t know how I’d function, day after day, if I just had to talk myself into moving. Mine is not the fortitude of great determination that powers my sister day after day, fighting off anxiety through bold activity. My movement is more of a floating, held up by a sense of life’s basic joy. I pray for this for my husband and for my sister, not because they need it to function, but because they have a right to joy and peace as they go through their days.

I am sustained by the fundamental joy of life. I am sustained by the sense of goodness - goodness as the law in which we all operate. And I am sustained by Spirit.

I see Spirit in the release of light and comfort that comes when anyone is seen for what she or he is - when their elemental divinity is recognized, or recognizes another. A single smile can unlock it, and the tiniest recognition of that divinity can sustain people for a long time. I try to imagine: what would it be like if we all got used to a lot more? What if we got used to loving and being loved as the baseline for interactions, instead of that rare thing to be occasionally obtained? I think we would save the world.

The Network of Our Support

At the beginning of this year I started to feel the urge to think big, comprehensive thoughts, to lay them out on great sheets of paper, and they would cover The Network of Our Support, That Which We Rely On. It came to me clearly the next morning while I was praying - a rolling list of networks, things we try to put in place to make our lives happy, safe, fulfilled. Church was an example. I don’t generally think of church that way - I usually think about it in spiritual terms - but at the Religious Leaders Lunch I started seeing how for many people it could function primarily as a network you could join for safety and support. If you’re in the hospital, a pastor will come visit you. If you’re a shut-in, church members might come sing you Christmas carols, and otherwise you might find purpose doing such things for others.

I realized that morning that each of the networks could be thought of in spiritual or material terms: marriage, as a spiritual connection or as a financial/social arrangement; career, as a calling in which your deepest being is fulfilled or as an agreement to do certain things in exchange for a name, a recognized place, an economic niche, etc; family, as a holy chord of deep love or as a set of people to count on for company and to keep you from falling through the cracks. I reflected that in each case (and I also considered friends, community, government) the spiritual sense was satisfying, and the material sense, though it might initially seem important, would ultimately feel like a death trap. So I realized, as I was praying, that it was pointless to put my weight into the material manifestations of all those things I feel we need (we being I, my children, my husband) because all the good of them is provided in the spiritual experience, which is already established, and which will, because it must, make itself tangibly manifest in our lives. So. No need for great sheets of paper. A simple clarity small enough to fold up and put in my pocket.

Or, to say the same thing in another way (from my Daily Sonnet discipline):

The focus of my early prayer revealed
A simple answer to an urgent query
What harbors me, what shelters, what will heal
All doubts about security and purpose.
While doubtless through each mortal net I’ll tumble
Not church, not home, not job can keep me safe
With Spirit’s strong support I’ll never stumble
Knowing my Principle will bring me sure relief
For everyone I’ve diligently cherished
In my persistent early morning prayer
And claimed for them a good that wouldn’t perish
Each need is met with Spirit’s constant care
One sweep of Truth enfolds us all in grace
The arms of Love, a radiant embrace.

Having One God

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
- Exodus 20:3

If God were any less than All, this might be a problem. If there were God, and then some other things, not necessarily God but possibly good, the command would be asking us to choose. Asking us to give up some good things for what we might presume to be better things. Asking us, perhaps, to gamble, not knowing for sure if what we are giving up is worth what we’re giving it up for.

But if God is All, and God is good, then anywhere anything good is, it’s of God. There is no good anywhere that isn’t a result of God’s presence. In other words, and very basically, good is good. There is no bad good, no evil or forbidden good.

When God says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” it is a statement of utmost tenderness and conscientious care for us. It means, don’t go buying into the lie that there is ever a price in evil to pay for good - that in order to have good, you must suffer, or you must hurt someone, or you must sacrifice something that you love. Don’t believe that it is part of life to be sick, disappointed, miserable. False gods require human sacrifice. God is Love. Love always delivers good and not suffering.

So what of all the suffering in the world? It is from the tyranny of false gods. You can tell they are false because they speak with contempt in their voices. Moses told the Children of Israel to choose: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” He exhorted them to choose to know they were under the control of the God who is good, and that they never should settle for any other cause to control them.

Every one of us has the right to obey the first commandment, to have good be the only thing in our lives. The snapping jaws will respond with scorn that there is no way we can have that, that we have no right to ask for it, that we can’t have it because other people don’t have it. But the all-loving God is everpresent, and tells us that we, along with everyone else, can have all good.

Discussing Scriptures (thoughts on Isaac)

My friend Audrey was over the other day, telling me about her experience reading Torah at her little group’s Rosh Hashanah service. And how the tradition afterwards is to sit together and discuss, what does this mean? How does it apply to our lives now? She said often at Yom Kippur, which was coming up, the section read was the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. She said in one discussion group, someone had said, “Well, I think God was just wrong on this one.”

I’ve heard this before, in the context of, how could you worship a god who asked for human sacrifice, and especially of your own child. I said, check out what I’ve learned about this through my study of Christian Science. In the book of Genesis, the deity in the first chapter is called God, or Elohim. In the second chapter, it’s the Lord God, or Jehovah. (At this point we looked it up in the Hebrew, Audrey reminding me that they never spoke the name of Jehovah. We found it there, as I had said, starting with the 4th verse of Chapter 2. We found that Lord God in the Hebrew was actually Elohim Jehovah.)

Anyway, I said afterwards in Genesis the usage is mixed, but if you translate Lord God as the people’s idea of God, or their best understanding at the time of what God is, then a lot of things make more sense. If you know that God is Love, you would know that if Love said, “sacrifice your son to me,” it wouldn’t mean kill him. It would mean give up everything in your conception of him not based on love. Give up your ego, your human expectations, your material sense of paternity. Give this relationship to Love, and let love inform your entire understanding of your son and your relationship with him. But Abraham didn’t get it, because he didn’t fully understand the nature of God. So he thought God was telling him to kill his son.

I think the great hope in this story is that, because Abraham was willing to walk with God step by step, continually listening, he was able to understand enough about God in time to not do a terrible thing. I think if he had made an interpretation of what God meant and stopped listening at that time, it would not have gone well. But the nature of Abraham’s relationship with God was to do as God had said: “walk before me, and be thou perfect.” So this experience became for Abraham what it was intended to be, an occasion for him to learn more about the nature of God.

Another bout with the snapping jaws

I had a rough patch on a day last week, where a feeling of isolation and rudderlessness went down to tears. But even at the very depths of it, when my whole face was being pulled down - gravity suddenly inexorable, the wallow of tears and snot compelling - I found the inner voice to say, “This is the snapping jaws.” I felt, at that point, immediate release from the pull. I had to admonish myself a few more times, as further waves of sadness swept over me, and each time felt the same release.

My insides, it seems, were wound up in a story about neediness - needing others in my life to be strong so I could go blubbery, feeling that I couldn’t do so without the balance of the family falling around my ears. Noticing that I had not set up for myself, among family or friends, a safe place where I could dare to be needy. But the whole story belonged to the snapping jaws. I put it aside and helped my son set up his room, and I was fine.

Later I found myself thinking about a sentence from Mrs. Eddy’s message of 1902: “. . . conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can.” It feels very relevant to me at this time. (Here’s the whole quote: “Happiness consists in being and in doing good; only what God gives, and what we give ourselves and others through His tenure, confers happiness: conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can.”)

But I also noticed how effective it was, in the moments of deep tears, to tag the snapping jaws. The change it brought about was was physiological as well as mental. The overwhelming gravitational pull on my face was suddenly gone, as well as the compelling pull of the story that swept me into self-pity. I started thinking then, and have been thinking more, that it is like that for any disease - it can leave as quickly, when recognized as being merely the snapping jaws and nothing having to do with me. I begin to feel less incredulous about this. I start to remember that feeling of waking up from a dream, shaking myself into focus and being released from images I was sure were true. Yes, I recognize this. Healing works this way.

The Big Lie

In a radical departure from mainstream Christianity, Christian Science calls the story of Adam and Eve an allegory, the purpose of which is to help us tag faulty perceptions and correct false conclusions about cause and effect. When we buy into a faulty story about the nature of God (as a being which creates evil, or coexists with it) we get the Adam dream - a blighted view of life, a degraded sense of who we are. I call it The Big Lie.

 One thing the big lie says is, you have to till the soil.  To me this means always having to do something to make myself better.  Fix my body, fix my thought, improve myself, accomplish, achieve.  To try, through my efforts,  to go from a state of unworthiness to a state of worthiness.

But life isn’t about self-improvement. Nothing I do makes me better or worse. When I first considered this, I wondered how I would possibly be motivated to do anything good if it absolutely didn't matter.  Then I glimpsed that my motivation to be good comes from goodness itself - the nature of what I am.

Human thought tries to appropriate the I Am, and dress it in all kinds of garb of conditional worthiness.  When I saw Mrs. Eddy's instructions to throw out material thought, it used to sound to me like I was being asked to throw out all the goodness I see in nature, and people, and embrace some abstract concept.  But I now see that she is asking me to throw out the garb of conditions, the box of limitations that error tries to shove good into.

We all know what good is.  We know it by how we respond to it, resonate with it, desire it.  It is a huge thing to say that good is infinite, and in fact all that there is.

The big lie tries to say a couple of things:

* that if everything were good, we wouldn't appreciate it anymore - that we need evil or blandness to make good seem good to us.  Similarly, that if everything is good, goodness isn't such a great thing.  

* that good comes in limited packages, and you have to take very careful care of the packages or you will lose the good.  I had an image of goodness like all the sunshine that was pouring out, free to everything in the landscape, and evil saying, yes, that's very good.  Here, let me put it in this box for you so you can have it.  And then adding - make sure the box doesn't fall apart, and don't let anyone steal it, and be careful who you share it with, because you don't want to lose that good.

The big lie leads us to darkness and despair.

But there's no place for that.  Goodness really is the nature of the universe.  It includes each of us - what we think of as our insides as well as what we think of as our perception.  We can't own it or contain it or make it more or less by our presence.  But we are loved in it.  There's no contest between individuals to be the best or even to be reasonably accepted.  We are all of the One.