Musings

The Coyotes of Hollywood

For months, I've been hiking a lot more, and a lot longer, than I did before.  It all started when I became unemployed, and suddenly had more time to enjoy the great outdoors.  I used the time on the trail to practice a simple meditation.  I kept asking myself the same question, over and over:  "Am I here?"  It is a gentle way to snap myself out of obsession with what is on my mind, and be more fully present and aware of the beauty that surrounds me.  Am I here, really here?  Not lost in thought about what I'm going to do next, or what I want to do next, or where I next want to be.  Am I here, fully aware that my feet are on the dirt and my gaze is on the mountains and trees?

This week, my five-month period of unemployment came to an abrupt end. I started on Monday as the Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles.  Instead of taking long walks in the woods of Marin County in between using the computer and telephone to search for a job, I'm living and working in the heart of America's biggest city.  Each day I ride a bus to the Metro, take the subway to Macarthur Park station, and from there hop on another bus to USC.  So far, on that bus, I'm the only white person aboard.

I love my job.  My boss, Varun Soni, is also new to his job as Dean of Religious Life.  He's a very bright young Hindu lawyer who is getting his PhD in religion with a thesis on the spirituality of Bob Marley's music.  Needless to say, he and I have hit it off very well and are having a great time scheming and dreaming together.  Sherry and Tim, the support staff in our office, are wonderful people, and we're already off to a great start as a new team.  Together, we create and coordinate interfaith events and programs for a campus community of 33,500 undergraduate and graduate students.  We're scrambling to assemble our plans for the rapidly-approaching school year.  My wife, Roberta, is up north in Marin County settling our affairs so we can get our own place here in LA, while I stay with my stepdaughter and her family in Hollywood.  It's an intense time for us.

The traumatic part of it, for me, is that I've moved from Marin County, which abounds with gorgeous open space, to Los Angeles, which lacks it.  So each evening, after some time playing with our 2-year-old granddaughter, Rumi, I seek out what there is to find.  I take a sunset hike up Beachwood Canyon, a densely-populated street that ends at a dirt road leading into the 5-square-mile Griffith Park.  It's an island of natural landscape surrounded by the vast metropolis.  I hike up the dirt road to a turn that affords a panorama of the top of the park's ridgeline.  I stand there for a while and listen to the coyotes yipping across the canyon.  And I thank God for them!  Because I know that their crazy howling can bring sanity to a new city-slicker like myself, whose head is abuzz with all that comes with a new job.

The coyotes are yelping the human equivalent of the words "I am here!" "I am here!"  They remind me to ask again:  am I here?  Am I paying attention?  When I am on the bus, am I here?  When I am working in my office, am I here?  When I am on the dirt trail gazing at the chaparral in Griffith Park, am I here? 

I praise the Lord for the coyotes of Hollywood.   "Ow oooooh!  Yip yip yip!" They let me know they are here.  I'm working on being here, too -- body and soul.

-------

PS:  Thanks to so many of you, dear "Musings" readers, who have been so supportive and helpful in my job search!!  I am really grateful to you .... and hope I can "pay forward" to others who are between jobs.

The Coyotes of Hollywood

For months, I've been hiking a lot more, and a lot longer, than I did before.  It all started when I became unemployed, and suddenly had more time to enjoy the great outdoors.  I used the time on the trail to practice a simple meditation.  I kept asking myself the same question, over and over:  "Am I here?"  It is a gentle way to snap myself out of obsession with what is on my mind, and be more fully present and aware of the beauty that surrounds me.  Am I here, really here?  Not lost in thought about what I'm going to do next, or what I want to do next, or where I next want to be.  Am I here, fully aware that my feet are on the dirt and my gaze is on the mountains and trees?

This week, my five-month period of unemployment came to an abrupt end. I started on Monday as the Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles.  Instead of taking long walks in the woods of Marin County in between using the computer and telephone to search for a job, I'm living and working in the heart of America's biggest city.  Each day I ride a bus to the Metro, take the subway to Macarthur Park station, and from there hop on another bus to USC.  So far, on that bus, I'm the only white person aboard.

I love my job.  My boss, Varun Soni, is also new to his job as Dean of Religious Life.  He's a very bright young Hindu lawyer who is getting his PhD in religion with a thesis on the spirituality of Bob Marley's music.  Needless to say, he and I have hit it off very well and are having a great time scheming and dreaming together.  Sherry and Tim, the support staff in our office, are wonderful people, and we're already off to a great start as a new team.  Together, we create and coordinate interfaith events and programs for a campus community of 33,500 undergraduate and graduate students.  We're scrambling to assemble our plans for the rapidly-approaching school year.  My wife, Roberta, is up north in Marin County settling our affairs so we can get our own place here in LA, while I stay with my stepdaughter and her family in Hollywood.  It's an intense time for us.

The traumatic part of it, for me, is that I've moved from Marin County, which abounds with gorgeous open space, to Los Angeles, which lacks it.  So each evening, after some time playing with our 2-year-old granddaughter, Rumi, I seek out what there is to find.  I take a sunset hike up Beachwood Canyon, a densely-populated street that ends at a dirt road leading into the 5-square-mile Griffith Park.  It's an island of natural landscape surrounded by the vast metropolis.  I hike up the dirt road to a turn that affords a panorama of the top of the park's ridgeline.  I stand there for a while and listen to the coyotes yipping across the canyon.  And I thank God for them!  Because I know that their crazy howling can bring sanity to a new city-slicker like myself, whose head is abuzz with all that comes with a new job.

The coyotes are yelping the human equivalent of the words "I am here!" "I am here!"  They remind me to ask again:  am I here?  Am I paying attention?  When I am on the bus, am I here?  When I am working in my office, am I here?  When I am on the dirt trail gazing at the chaparral in Griffith Park, am I here? 

I praise the Lord for the coyotes of Hollywood.   "Ow oooooh!  Yip yip yip!" They let me know they are here.  I'm working on being here, too -- body and soul.

Empty Religion

Last week I took an eight mile hike on Mt. Tamalpais with a 19 year old friend of mine whom I’ve known since he was five years old.  At one spot on the trail, with a spectacular view of Tiburon and Mt. Diablo and the Bay in between, he told me how much he loved the astronomy class he was taking.  One night, after having stared into space in a high-powered telescope to see a distant nebula, he stood in the parking lot of the community college and looked up at the stars again.  “I was so excited by the stars that I just had to bang my head against my mom’s minivan, over and over!” he said.

Just so you know, I’m not too worried about my young friend.  He was overcome by a wave of youthful enthusiasm.   Maybe he was so overwhelmed at the vast scope of the universe above him that he wanted to empty his head, shake out its contents, so there would be room to take it all in. 

That might be a quirky way of describing the practice of progressive Christianity.   

Christianity was the dominant religion of western civilization for so long that it got cocky.  It got into the bad habit of thinking it had all the answers to life’s big questions.  It got into the bad habit of thinking that the Christian way is the only path to God.   

St Paul said in Philippians 2: "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men."  So how did the religion of an empty man get so full of itself that it claimed to be the only way, or hell to pay?

But, thank God, Christianity is being broken of this bad habit.  Mostly the hard way, unfortunately: religious chauvinism has turned a lot of people off from having anything to do with the church.  The fastest growing religious demographic group in America is – no, not the Southern Baptists, no, not the evangelicals – the fastest growing religious demographic group in America consists of those who profess no religion at all.  Check out the new statistics from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Even self-professed evangelical Christians are emptying themselves of religious hubris:  the Pew report says that 57% of them believe that more than one faith can lead to salvation.

The progressive Christian movement is about emptying the faith of dogma and doctrines that get in love’s way.  It is about the practice of individual Christians who are emptying themselves of selfishness and egotism.  In prayer, in worship, we are challenged to do what Jesus did, and empty ourselves of old, tired, uptight beliefs.  Empty ourselves of judgment and prejudice.  So that we can be amazed by the stars.  So that we can be filled with the insights not only of our faith, but of other religions as well.  So that we can have holy awe when we look at each other in worship, knowing that each of us flickers with a spark of the divine.

And we don’t have to bang our heads on the sides of minivans to make room for this experience!  Christianity is about emptying ourselves, over and over, every day.  So we can listen with open ears, see with open eyes, think with open minds.  So that we can be humble servants for the world.

 

The Bible and Eckhart Tolle

A few weeks ago a young friend of mine asked if we could talk, so we had lunch together.  She knew that there had been a period in my life when I coped with the serious mental illness of one of my family members. She wanted to hear more about how I handled it.  That set me off on a long story about that difficult period in my family's life.  I got pretty animated about it - telling about it brought up a lot of feelings for me.  Finally, I asked her how my story related to her own, and right away she started to cry.  She poured out her heart about her boyfriend, who suffers from a couple of different psychiatric problems that were putting a huge strain on her relationship.  As she wept, telling her story, my own story suddenly evaporated. 

Later I realized that while I listened, I had an out-of-ego experience.  I was there, but my ego wasn't there.  I was there, but only that which was essential about me was present.  My ego-self didn't matter to me. Only she mattered.  Her story was a sad and hard one, but she did something wonderful for me in sharing it.  She snapped me out of my fixation on me, me, me:  my fixation on my needs, my urges, grudges, ideas, plans, schemes, etc, etc, which fill up so much of my life but aren't the essence of my life at all.  Her tears crucified my ego, and resurrected God, who is the loving, listening presence within me.

One of the more significant books I've read recently about the practice of Christianity was written by a non-Christian.  "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose" by Eckhart Tolle got a huge boost in popularity when Oprah Winfrey focused on it.   

I found Tolle's book to be an exceptionally good introduction to spiritual practice.  The message of the book is very simple.  The more often we can have what I call "out-of-ego experiences", the happier we'll be and the better life will be for human beings on planet Earth.  If we can wake up to the fact that the essence of who we are is divine and one with the whole universe, if we can wake up to the fact that our egos are artificial constructions of our minds, then we can live more in harmony with the here and now, and more in harmony with each other and with the earth. Tolle describes this awakening beautifully in clear, non-sectarian, non-religious language.  But he also salts his prose with quotes from the great world religions, like Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and, yes, Christianity!

I think it's more than a coincidence that this writer, Eckhart Tolle, would share the name of Meister Eckhart, the 13th century German priest whose mystical sermons are classic works of Christian spirituality. Meister Eckhart understood the idea of "out of ego experiences".  My favorite line from one of Meister Eckhart's sermons goes like this: "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."  We share the essence of divine being with God.  That's what it means for us to be created in the image of God, as the book of Genesis says. 

A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited with our granddaughter in Hollywood.  Rumi is almost two years old.  Rumi was playing with Roberta one afternoon and started to play rough.  She pulled Roberta's hair very hard and wouldn't stop even when Roberta cried out in pain. Rumi had to be pulled away - she didn't seem to understand what she had done.  But the next morning, Rumi woke up and toddled into her parents' bedroom and hopped up on the bed and said, "I'm sorry I hurt Grandma."

We start out life thinking that life is all about me.  And that's okay.  It's developmentally appropriate for a baby to think he or she is the center of the universe.  But there comes a time when the child goes through another kind of birth, the birth of conscience, the birth of awareness that other people exist separately from him or her, that other people have their own needs and feelings to which the child is connected.  Rumi seemed to have this kind of born-again experience when she woke up that morning. 

But the process doesn't end with a two year old having an out of ego moment, realizing that she hurt somebody she loves.  Over and over, I keep having to wake up to the fact that the person I think of as myself isn't who I really am.  As adults, we still get caught in the spiritual trap of thinking we're the center of the universe.  And we have to keep waking up to the awareness that this person I think of as myself is mostly a construction of my mind.  A construction that often gets in the way of fully enjoying and appreciating life, and enjoying and appreciating other people.   

Which was the message of Jesus. Which is the essential message of the Christian religion.  Which is what Eckhart Tolle is saying on Oprah's show, and in his book that is sold by the truckload at Costco.   In Matthew 16: 24, Jesus says:  "If anyone wants to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."  Tolle interprets this as follows (p 79):  "When Jesus said 'Deny thyself', what he meant was: Negate (and thus undo) the illusion of self.  If the self - the ego - were truly who I am, it would be absurd to 'deny' it.  What remains is the light of consciousness in which perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and feelings come and go.  That is Being, that is the deeper, true I."

Tolle's interpretation reminds me of St Paul's understanding of the image of the cross in Galatians 2:20:  "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."  Paul got it that the whole point of the Christian faith is to turn life into an out-of-ego experience in which we live and love and serve from the divine center of our being, which we share with all other beings.  The cross is the symbol of the universal human experience, shared across all religions, of the figurative "death" of the ego that resurrects and awakens us to our true divine nature. 

This crucifixion of our egos can happen automatically, when we "lose ourselves" in some overwhelming experience of awe or wonder or delight or sympathy.  It also can happen with our active intention, when we meditate or pray, when we get ourselves up on Sunday morning to go to church, when we commit ourselves to works of service to others, when we do art or perform music or other kinds of creative expression that wipe away our egos like a sponge wiping up a spill on a table. 

Eckhart Tolle offers a down-to-earth way to practice this crucifixion of the ego.  (p 215)  "A powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it.  I recommend that you experiment with this from time to time.  For example, when someone criticizes you, blames, you, or calls you names, instead of immediately retaliating or defending yourself - do nothing. Allow the self-image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep inside you.  For a few seconds, it may feel uncomfortable, as if you had shrunk in size.  Then you may sense an inner spaciousness that feels intensely alive.  You haven't been diminished at all.  In fact, you have expanded.  You may then come to an amazing realization:  When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute non-reaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that noting real has been diminished, that through becoming "less" you become more.  When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image.  Through becoming less (in the ego's perception), you in fact undergo an expansion and make room for Being to come forward.  True power, who you are beyond form, can then shine through the apparently weakened form.  This is what Jesus means when he says, "Deny yourself" or "Turn the other cheek.""

Tolle's interpretation of Jesus rang true for me - and his suggestion for how to practice it rings true, to.  It seems like terrific marriage counseling, actually.  It almost never works, in a spat in an intimate relationship, to react defensively to protect one's ego.  That's my own experience, learned the hard way!  Defending the ego eats up a lot of life-time in marriages, in parenting, in relationships at work and in our community life.  It feeds animosity between nations, it even starts wars.  Ever see the bumper sticker, "Don't mess with Texas"?  Why is Texas so concerned about being messed with?  At one level, that bumpersticker makes me laugh at folks who appear to have chips on their shoulders for some reason.  But then I realize that the bumpersticker is about me, too.  I have a chip on my shoulder, too.  We are all worried that we're going to be messed with. But what would happen if I just let my emotional and spiritual guard down long enough to let my ego get crucified, so that it is no longer my self-centered idea of myself that lives, but the Christ, who is God, who is Love, that lives within me?  So that the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me?  So that I can be fully present and aware and delighted by the divinity that is your essence and mine?  Indeed, if we could let down our guard over our egos, it would be a "new earth" for us all!
____________________

To see Rev. Polly Moore's study guide for the biblical passages in Tolle's "A NEW EARTH", have a look at:
http://tcpc.org/library/article.cfm?library_id=514

The Bridges of Hanalei Bay

A road that ends in Paradise has no need of two-way bridges.  Perhaps this answers the question of why the local government of Kauai has never invested in widening the spans that cross the rivers flowing below the waterfalls tumbling from its sheer, verdant mountain walls... if it is a question asked at all among the people who flip-flop around Hanalei Bay. 

In any case, a comfortable etiquette has developed at the approaches to the bridges.  Maybe one vehicle on one side will glide to a stop on one end of the bridge, to let one vehicle pass from the other end.  Or maybe one vehicle will yield to a line of eight cars.  Or maybe seven cars will yield to one.  Nobody seems to care how it goes.  There's no bridge rage here.  Waiting feels good.  The bridge is crossed in irregular reggae beats and hesitations.  If there is a rhyme or a reason to it, it might be just this:  make way for others, if you want to enjoy heaven on earth. 

The mountains of Kauai, sculpted by the ceaseless rain at their summits, rise so dramatically above the surrounding warm waters of the Pacific that it is hard to feel anything but holy awe while gazing at them.  The sight of them makes it easier to wait at one end of a one-lane bridge.  But the message of Jesus, still ringing true two thousand years later, is that you don't have to fly across the ocean to find Paradise.  Heaven is on earth not just in Hawaii, but in Iowa and Omaha and Ohio, too.  It's in the crumbling brick tenements of Baltimore and in the grittiest neighborhoods of Los Angeles. 

Jesus said "whoever would be great among you must be your servant." (Matthew 20:26)  And he said "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, `Lo, here it is!' or `There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you." (Luke 17: 20,21) 

You don't need to cross a bridge to get there, much less book a flight on an airline.  You can stay right where you are and create heaven on earth just by being patient and kind, savoring the joy of existing, and delighting in showing compassion to others who need it.

Because heaven is wherever people make way for others.  It's wherever people wait and listen to folks who are in crisis.  It's wherever a person stops and lets somebody else receive some needed caring attention.  Heaven is where people enjoy stepping aside to let others take center stage for a while, to let others have access to privileges they might not often enjoy.   

So to Jesus' parables, I add my own:  The kingdom of heaven is like the one-way bridges of Hanalei Bay, where people stop and let others pass over with a smile, a wave, and a "mahalo"!
_____________

(PS:  A very special "mahalo" to Cynnie and Jerry, Diane and Jerry, Charlie and Vivian, Edna, and Jeff and Mandy for "making way" for Roberta and me to come and stay in Hawaii!)

Voices from the Silence (and a PS)

(This will appear soon in my "Sacred Space" column in the Marin Independent Journal newspaper.)

“Do I center my life in an awareness of God’s presence, so that all things take their rightful place?”  Linda Lang reads this “query” from Faith and Practice, which in effect is the ‘constitution’ of the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers.  Lots of Christian denominations and preachers make pronouncements about how individuals should behave, or how politicians should vote.  Instead of taking positions, the Quakers ask questions.  They take considerable time to form the questions and repeat them to themselves, seeking guidance from the “inner light” about how to respond to them personally and corporately. “I have a hard time with this one,” Lang says with a smile.  “It’s about simplicity, one of the central virtues of the Quakers.  Look at me!” she chuckles.  “I like nice clothes.  I probably have too many shoes.  How many does a person really need?” 

Indeed, her image wouldn’t fit too well on a carton of rolled oats. She’s a tall, attractive woman who wears makeup and smart-looking professional clothes.  She’s the vice president for human resources for Millennium Hotels.  She’s not someone you’d expect to be wearing granny glasses and holding up a peace sign.  But that’s part of the beauty of her deep involvement in the Society of Friends. 

Lang grew up going to Mass and attending Catholic school in New York City. “I would pray to God every night to take me to heaven.  I was taught that this world was something to endure, in order to be ready for the next.”  At 17 years, after much doubt and questioning, Lang wrote a letter of resignation to her parish.  That didn’t settle the matter, however.  For years, she felt something was missing in her life. 

When her daughter was young, she and her husband decided they wanted to offer her some kind of spiritual grounding.  So they went church-shopping in San Francisco. “The second place we went was the Friends Meeting on Lake Street, our first visit to a Quaker community.”  There they sat in silence, not knowing when something would happen next, if anything!  But the peacefulness and simplicity of sitting in silent worship was moving to her, so she and her family stayed.  “I have two speeds: on and asleep. I’m a hard-charging person.  So I came to value that hour of quiet very much.” 

“Any faith that questions who you are will translate that into how you work in the world,” she says.  “Being a Quaker is not about beliefs but about what you are doing.”  The silence is a rich time for Lang.  “I have come to the point where I don’t care whether it is God’s still small voice speaking to me in the quiet, or just my own voice.  I now realize that it is God’s gift in either case, if I am somehow given the capacity to receive inspiration.”

Five years ago, Linda and her family moved to Marin, and she began to attend the Quaker meeting in San Rafael.  Her obvious leadership skills led the congregation to elect her for the past three years as the clerk, the highest volunteer role in “unprogrammed” Quaker communities, which have no professional pastors. 

At 10 on Sunday mornings, Marin’s Quakers gather at the Falkirk Community Center at 1408 Mission in San Rafael.  Slanting rays of sun stream into the old parlor where they are circled in chairs.  In many churches, silence is a fleeting element within a liturgy of words and music.  But in a Quaker meeting, the few words uttered are surrounded, grounded, and interpreted by quiet. George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends in the seventeenth century, believed that an “inner light” shines from within every soul.  The people in the circle bask quietly in that light until someone might be moved by the Spirit to speak.  Linda Lang rises and, with closed eyes, in a slow, eloquent cadence, recounts the biblical story of Jacob and Esau as an example of how forgiveness transcends conflict.  Then she sits down again, her words, and her soul, absorbed by the quiet.

____________________________________

PS: Thank you, dear "musings" readers, for the many soulful comments you sent to me in response to last week's piece about "The Theology of Unemployment".  I'm doing well in my job search and am enjoying a break from work.  Your kind sentiments mean much to me!  Many of you shared your similar experiences with well-meaning but unhelpful platitudes that people have expressed to you when you were in a crisis.  Here I want to share an email from my friend, Brady Gordon.  It underscores what helps, and what doesn't help, in offering support to people who face major challenges.

  Hey Jim,

I really liked your musing this week.  Your framing was different, but it reminded me of a human truth revealed in a a psych study I participated in as a confederate (i.e. fake participant) back at Stanford. 

In this study, the real participant was asked to describe a recent difficult experience, and then the confederate would respond with one of three listening styles:  normative ("oh, that happens to a lot of people, I'm sure you'll be fine"), listener-focused ("I had a very similar experience, let me tell you about it"), and speaker-focused ("Wow that must have been very difficult for you, tell me more"). Following the conversation that resulted, the real participant would fill out a questionnaire about how they felt. 

As you can imagine, the participant ranked the speaker-focused style the most helpful.   It also sounds a lot like the practice of divine love, as you describe it:  to "open our hearts to the pain of others, and listen, ask questions, and stay present for them." 

The psych study noted that the speaker-focused style was often the least-practiced, but offered little explanation as to why.  But your musing gets at that issue -- it's scary to really be open to people's pain.  As you say, "They were just revealing their discomfort with the stark reality that things can, and often do, get worse instead of better."

The Theology of Unemployment

Nothing is more effective at turning a person into a theologian than witnessing somebody else’s personal crisis.

Recently, I lost my job, or my job lost me.  I’m still not sure which description is more accurate.  In any case, it’s my first experience with unemployment.   I’m blessed with very supportive family and friends (including so many of you, dear readers of my “musings”).  But it’s still been a trying time.

People want to say and do the right things.  Their attempts at compassion are sincere.  While I am learning to receive gratefully their underlying intentions, some of their expressions make me wince.  And make me think about what helps, and what doesn’t work so well, in offering sympathy to people in crisis. 

So in addition to the wonderful kindness that is being showered on my wife and myself, I am getting an off-the-job training course in compassion.

Consider these words which have been said to me, in one form or another, quite a few times in recent weeks:  “When God closes one door, He always opens another.”  When I first heard this one from one of my parishioners, right after my employment imploded, I was taken aback.  What about the people in Baghdad?  I thought.  When their doors are kicked in by men with machine guns, does God magically open another door for them to exit gracefully?  All too often, the answer is no.  Lots of people lose their jobs and go bankrupt.  Do we worship a God who washes away the front door of your nice house in New Orleans with a devastating flood, and then opens a trailer door for you in a bleak vacant lot, months later?  Are we expecting divine intervention to solve our personal or social problems, or are we taking action to make sure that when a door is closed, another one will open to something good?

And yet, the people who said it meant only the best for me.  Kind and caring souls who really did want another door to swing wide for me, with an even better job on the other side.  And of course that is what I want, as well.  So I took deep breaths and politely thanked them for their concern.

I don’t believe in a supernatural door-opening-and-closing God.  I believe in the God who is the door that opens to love.  We practice that divine love when we open our hearts to the pain of others, and listen, ask questions, and stay present for them.

Another line I heard repeatedly was this one:  “When it’s all over, you’ll be grateful for this.  You’ll wind up with a much better job than this one, and you’ll be glad this happened.” After enduring this assertion several times as my job was collapsing, I realized it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The idea of stocking shelves at Home Depot began to look like a blessing by comparison.  Those well-wishers had no more clue than I do about what my next job will be like. They forgot, if they knew in the first place, that mostly I really liked the job I lost.  It did not serve me to hear their assurance of something that’s impossible for them to predict.

But again, they meant well.  They were just revealing their discomfort with the stark reality that things can, and often do, get worse instead of better.  It was a spiritual discipline for me to be gracious in accepting their caring thoughts and their unconscious self-revelations.

Not even God can predict what will become of my career after this current debacle.  I am hopeful and in good spirits.  I am grateful for my severance package.  I get a lot of encouragement and I have some really good job leads.  I am in much better circumstances than so many other unemployed people.  But nobody can be sure how this current crisis will play out.  For me, it seems more God-like to accept my ignorance of the future, and just be present in the moment.

I’m thankful for those who simply recognize my pain, inquire about my feelings, and offer their presence.  They are my guides in how to offer this kind of compassion to others.  I hope to pay their God-like goodness forward to the next person I encounter who goes through the loss of a job!

Holy Dirt

I keep a container of it, myself.  I’ve given away a fair share of it to others.  It’s holy dirt from the Santuario de Chimayo in northern New Mexico.  Pale, pink dust dug out of a hole in the back room of the old adobe chapel.

You drive north of Santa Fe, through hills studded with cholla cacti, pinons, and junipers.  You wind down the side road into the little town tucked in its narrow valley.  You park by the old gift shop and walk through the gate in the adobe walls into a courtyard paved with native stone around the cottonwood trees.  Inside the old sanctuary with its tin roof are pews facing a typical New Mexican Spanish altar with painted wood images.  To the left of the altar is a doorway, and through it is a room lined with pictures and crutches and “milagros” – little metal images of body parts representing the miraculous healings attributed to the dirt in the earthen hole in the back room on the other side of a doorway so small that a six-footer like myself must stoop to enter. 

It is said that after you rub this dirt on the part of your body that is afflicted by injury or illness, a cure will follow.  Claims to this effect cover the walls in the vestibule outside the room with the hole.

But one who doesn’t make this attestation is the Catholic priest who has tended the Santuario for the last 50 years.  Father Casimiro Roca says that it is God alone who does the miraculous healings.  For him, there is not any mystery or romance in the dirt itself.  After all, he has the prosaic duty of seeing to it that there is a steady supply of it delivered to a storehouse near the chapel. Perhaps it is his disdain for this presumed causal relationship between the dirt and healing that caused him to place a children’s red plastic sandbox shovel in the dirt, for the convenience of visitors who want to take away a supply.  I found the shovel to have a certain folksy charm, an unpretentious simplicity, when I used it on the most recent of my many visits to the Santuario.  A simplicity that reflects the very faith in the effectiveness of the dirt that Fr. Roca strives to dispute. (See the website for the NY Times story about him, below.)

My intellect resonates with Fr. Roca’s denial of the dirt’s direct healing efficacy.  I'd go further, and say that since God and Nature are one, all healing processes are natural, not supernatural, miracles.  But all that said, my soul has experienced great power in that hole in the ground in Chimayo.

In my first visit to the Santuario, about twenty years ago, I walked into the chapel and instinctively knelt down by the back pew and made the sign of the cross, despite the fact that I’m not Catholic.  I sat in the pew and gazed at the altar and began to weep.  My body and soul knew that I was in a holy place.  After regaining my composure, I got up and went to the back rooms.  Seeing the crutches, I wept some more.  And just looking at the little room with the hole in the ground was enough to make me sob some more.  I went in and scooped up some of the dirt and folded into a piece of paper, and took it home.  A treasure.

In the Santuario, I strongly sensed the prayerful intentions of the thousands of people who had come there, in hope of cures for their illnesses or the infirmities of others.  When I open up the box where I keep my supply, and run that dirt through my fingers, I sense the suffering and the faith of the countless souls who have sought it.  The dirt is holy, indeed.  Made sacred by the heartfelt yearnings of so many people, ever since 1810 when pilgrimages to Chimayo began. 

The devotion this dirt inspires in me is dampened not at all by knowing that a backhoe digs it up somewhere else in New Mexico and dumps it in a truck that hauls it to the church, no differently than it would haul a load of fill to a construction site.  As far as I’m concerned, all the dirt in New Mexico is holy.  They don’t call it the Land of Enchantment for nothing.

Some devotees of Chimayo dirt make tea out of it and drink it for healing.  I am willing to bet that the dirt has no medicinal quality to it, or if it does, that quality is hardly different than what could be found in a tea made from the dirt of the least enchanted vacant lot in urban America. 

But I’m sure of this:  the tears I shed every time I visit the Santuario de Chimayo have a healing effect on me.  The peace people feel when they worship in that little chapel can only help them recover from insults and injuries to their hearts.  The hope that fills people when they enter into that dirty holy of holies can only help to bring their bodies and souls together.  It is hard for me to imagine that a visit to such a simple, quiet, beautiful place could harm anyone in any way.  It is easy for me to imagine that, on the contrary, just being there could have a subtle but real healing effect on a suffering person.

I feel better, just writing about it!  So to Father Casimiro Roca, I say, thank you for keeping that dirt coming in the dump trucks.  Thank you for the little plastic shovel, too; it really helps when I come for a refill.  Thank you for your wise, cautionary words questioning any direct effect of the dirt: you make an important distinction.  But most of all, thank you for keeping this holy, healing place so beautiful and accessible.

 

New York Times article about Fr. Roca:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/20dirt.

html?ex=1204174800&en=a0dca7a1950d321

d&ei=5070&emc=eta1

My Own Spiritual Autobiography

Last week, I gave you a suggested assignment, to write a short spiritual autobiography. I don't think it's right for me to make an assignment I don't complete myself!  So here goes.

The earliest experiences of the spiritual dimension of my life that I can remember were at age 3 or 4. The first five years of my life were spent in Los Gatos, California. At that time, the Santa Clara Valley was still the Valley of Heart's Delight. There were still thousands of acres of prune and apricot orchards, and the smell of the blooming trees in springtime still haunts me. I remember looking up at the Santa Cruz Mountains, glowing in the late afternoon sunshine, when I was very young, and having a powerful sensation of awe. The mountains beckoned my soul toward them. That sight is engraved in my consciousness to this day, and I can still feel that feeling of reverent wonder.

The lesson that stays with me from those tender years is that the essence of spirituality is awe. Libraries are filled with books about who God is and what God want. Heresy trials and pogroms have been waged about such matters. But there's no arguing with the experience of humble, reverent, slack-jawed wonder that fills us when we contemplate the everyday miracles that surround us. Awe is about all the religion that we need!

I grew up going to Presbyterian and later Congregational churches, but it wasn't until I was in high school that I began to connect the dots and begin to understand that God had anything to do with the many incidents in my childhood in which I was overwhelmed by the beauty of nature. I recall having a very fun childhood, with lots of playful happiness, but I also recall being a pretty serious guy when it came to studying and trying to understand the world. Our family had library night every week, which I cherished, and on my own I did a lot of reading, mostly about natural history. I took Sunday School very seriously, too, and asked my teachers a lot of questions. Because I was so fascinated by nature and science in general, and by geology in particular, I had trouble dealing with the creation story in Genesis, and later I was bothered by the story of Jesus being born from a virgin. Science and religion weren't lining up together very well and that disturbed me. I think I was about ten or eleven when I realized that my church was telling me that my status in eternity depended on my ideas. I thought I believed in Jesus, all right, but then I wondered if I believed in Jesus the right way. I knew that sometimes in school I thought I had the right answer, but then the test would get graded and I'd have got it wrong. What if that was how I believed in Jesus? Since I was just a kid and didn't understand the Christian religion very well, how could I be sure I believed in Jesus the right way? And if I didn't believe in Jesus the right way, I'd surely go to hell and have my skin roasted off my body for eternity! I talked to my parents about it. My mom said, "Jamey, don't worry, honey, you are a Christian and you are going to heaven. It's okay!"   But it still bothered me a lot.  I was old enough to know for sure that my mom couldn't read my mind. Only God could read my mind and know what and how I really believed. And God must have know that I was not sure that I believe correctly, so that must have been evidence for God that I really didn't believe correctly. So if I died then, I'd go to hell.

Thank God, life provided me plenty of happy distractions from these existential questions. I had a lot of pals in my childhood, but one friend became the most important. Bruce Urbschat and I would talk for hours about religion and science and philosophy. We'd walk home together from Sunday School and talk about our questions about religion. I think this friendship had a powerful effect on both of us. We're still very good friends and correspond to this day. Our friendship emboldened us to think for ourselves, study for ourselves, explore on our own outside of school and church. Our friendship gave me the confidence to question the religion in which I'd been raised. Bruce and I concluded that one day, there would be one world religion that would replace all the current ones. We had concluded that God was bigger than any one religion, including Christianity.

My friendship with Bruce has taught me a spiritual lesson that I want to pass on to those who come after me. To grow in my relationship with God, I needed the companionship of a friend; someone who would be a mirror for me, and for whom I could be a mirror, so that we could validate our experiences for each other, give each other courage and motivation to explore and discover. To draw closer to God, you need the help and company of friends. Which is why I'm a member of a church, which is a company of friends who help each other in their spiritual journeys.

Our family moved to California when I was thirteen. It was the 60's and quickly I found myself taking great interest in social and political issues. In high school I got involved in anti war activity, and at age 16 I was appointed to a federal advisory board of students, focusing on environmental issues. I was still going to church; I was the president of my church youth group. But I was increasingly frustrated that my church had nothing to say about the great issues of the time - the war, the environmental movement, the civil right struggle, the problems of poverty. Religion was, to me, another subject for debate. It was still a matter of ideas.

Until I went on a backpack trip in the Sierra at age 16. I had signed up for this trip through a Christian retreat center. I had no idea that the leaders of this backpacking trip were hard-core fundamentalist Christians who believed in the Bible literally. Every time we stopped along the route of our hike, one of the leaders would pull out his floppy Bible and start talking. I was outraged by the stuff they were saying. I argued with virtually every word they said. No wonder, I suppose. At that time I was a star of our high school speech and debate team. The other boys on the trip kept telling me to stop debating with the trip leaders. "The more you talk, the longer they talk! Just be quiet so we can get it over with."

On the top of Kearsarge Pass, a spectacular place where I was stunned at the beauty of the lakes and mountains, sure enough, the leader got out his floppy Bible again. I groaned at the idea of him spoiling this beautiful experience with dogmatic nonsense. This time, he read the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. "Love your enemies", said Jesus. And when I heard those words, I had a very sudden and powerful sensation, very physical, almost like an explosion, leaving me with a sense of peace and calm and awe all over my body. I was sure it was God. I was sure that God was the kind of love that even extends to one's enemies, and I felt that love in my mind and body, and I was sure that practicing that love was what life was worth living for. It was overwhelming. And I knew this love was also what was behind and within all the beauty that surrounded us from that pass in the Sierra.

I was speechless, something for which I'm still not well known, and didn't say anything for a day and a half. Finally I knew I had to practice what I had just discovered. I had to love my enemies: the leaders of the backpack trip, with whom I still disagreed about practically everything. I went up to the main leader of the trip, looked him right in the eye, and thanked him for helping me discover the reality of God.

I learned a powerful spiritual lesson that day, which I want to pass along to those who come after me. God is love, and love is something you do and feel, not just think. Love that extends even to those we don't like and even to those who do us harm. We may not be any good at loving our enemies; I'm still very far from living up to this ideal. It's very difficult, sometimes seems impossible; it gets me into thorny and confusing situations, puts me between a cross and a hard place. But the challenge of trying to do so is supremely worthy of one's life. The path to reconciliation in our private lives, families, communities, and world is to go beyond the kind of love that we share with folks who are easy to love, and dare to love those who seem unlovable.

That incident in the Sierra set the course of my life. It is what set me on the path of becoming a minister. In college and seminary, I sought to put it all together, to find the universe in the university, to connect the dots of my spiritual experiences, the discoveries of science, the wisdom of philosophy and theology, and the insights of art and literature and poetry. I served as an aide in a nursing home for a couple of years, making money to get through college, and I learned that changing bedpans for sick elderly people could be a form of spiritual service. That job helped me put body and soul together, to understand more deeply the way that our spirits and our substance can come together or fall apart. Being with people as they were dying, I lost a lot of my fear of death. I realized that life after death is not so much a matter of belief, or of positing an objective place in the universe that you go after you die, as it is a powerful and vivid subjective experience. I deepened in the awareness that God is not a being out there who intervenes in the world, but rather that God is the divine quality of nature, that God is one with the universe, the essence of the universe, and that this divine essence is always beyond our complete knowing. Certainly God is experienced beyond the confines of any one religion.

In seminary, I was assigned to live with a roommate who had spent a year and a half in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal. He taught me how to meditate. This was a major discovery for me. In silent meditation I experienced what I had read about in so many books about religion and spirituality. I felt at one with the universe and with God, though that did not mean I understood or could describe God. I experienced that eternal life is not about the afterlife; it's about experiencing eternity in the moment, while we are alive.

I met other spiritual explorers when I was in seminary and learned much from them. The spiritual lesson I learned during that time is that our potential for seeing the world in radically different ways, our potential for creativity and insight, is enormous and largely untapped. I want to pass along the lesson that while changing our minds doesn't necessarily change the world, the potential is huge for changing the world for the better by opening our minds to new, positive ways of seeing and understanding. The future of humanity depends on our willingness to set aside our usual way of defining and describing things, and make room in our minds and hearts for radically different points of view.

Being married has been a profound spiritual practice for me. From my relationship with Roberta I have seen so many sides, discovered so many rich dimensions of what love is all about, and thus known more of God, who is love. We have been to the top of the mountain and down to the bottom of the swamp together, and back up again. I'm so grateful for her in my life. You know, our culture gives us plenty of sex education. But it gives us hardly any sense education: it gives us hardly any education in the art of loving. I want to pass along the lesson that by telling the truth to your partner, no matter how hard, by sharing your heart, and not just the ideas or opinions of your mind, the way to the bliss of intimacy will be opened.

My daughter has been my spiritual teacher from the moment she was born, 21 years ago, and we gazed into each other's eyes for the first time. Nobody has been able to get me out of myself more completely than Liz! Years ago, a friend of mine, Dan Rauker, said a wise thing: "I am not here for me." Those words stuck with me, but it wasn't until I was a parent that I felt the full truth of what Dan said. All the accomplishments of my life pale in comparison to the privilege of loving and serving my daughter as she has grown into the lovely, bright, caring young woman she is today. St. Paul said of Jesus that he "emptied himself" to become a servant. I have emptied myself, so many times and in so many ways, in the course of parenting. For this I am very, very grateful, because the emptier I am, the closer I feel to God.

I have cherished my years as a pastor in churches, on the streets with homeless people, and on campus at Stanford. The many moments I have spent at the side of people in crisis, at death, in illness, and also through joyful passages, have opened my heart. From you and so many others I've served as a pastor, I have discovered that my walk with God is not so much about those mountaintop experiences, those sublime moments of rapturous union with God, nice as those times have been. My walk with God is most importantly about the divine quality of the relationships I have had with people, those amazing moments when the soul's truth is revealed, when tears flow and hearts break open, in the hospital, at weddings, at memorials, in counseling sessions, and in tender encounters in everyday life. Just having the privilege of being present at so many sacred moments in people's lives has made my career completely worthwhile. Yes, there are hard parts in my profession: fractious internal politics, budget crises, and the like. But the spiritual rewards of this work are overwhelming. I am so grateful to have this job. The spiritual lesson I want to pass along from my career as a pastor is that if you want to find God, you don't need to look any farther than the people around you. Pay close attention to them, be emotionally and spiritually and physically present for them, honor the turning points in their lives, and you, too, will enter the kingdom of heaven on earth.

I expect I have many more spiritual lessons to learn and pass along as my life continues. Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing and reading the stories of your spiritual development and the lessons you want to share from them!

Spiritual Autobiography

How has your relationship with ultimate reality changed over the course of your lifetime?  What spiritual lessons have you learned, that you would like to share with others?

Recently, my church hosted a  talk by Pam Grisman, former Newsweek obituary writer, about how we can shape the way we are remembered after we die.  She introduced us to the idea of writing our own obituaries. During the discussion, one of our church members, Char Maasen, made a comment that impressed me.  She said that most obituaries tell us nothing about the inner lives of the people they describe.  How did their spiritual lives unfold?  Hardly ever will we read the answer to that question in the newspapers' obit pages!

Right then and there, Char and I agreed that we would try to get our church people to work on their spiritual autobiographies, to explore our souls' journeys, and prepare for the passage of death. 

It's a good idea to create an "end-of-life" file for yourself, your loved ones, and your clergy person.  Your file can include a listing of ways you would like to be celebrated and remembered, through a memorial service or other means.  It can include your will, your wishes regarding end-of-life physical and spiritual care, and your wishes regarding the disposition of your body.  (Go to the web for useful forms and advice re: advance health care directives, a free California statutory will form, and low-cost funeral arrangements.)  And your file can include a traditional obituary and/or a spiritual autobiography.

Pam Grisman describes obituaries as "biographical haikus - succinct yet poetic prose that captures the essence of who we are".  Here I urge you to write a sort of "spiritual haiku" - a short account of the development of your spirituality.

Here are questions that might stimulate you as you write your spiritual autobiography:

    1)  What is your earliest memory about the spiritual dimension of your life?

    2)  Who or what was God to you, in your earliest memories?

    3)  How did your understanding or experience of God change during your childhood and adolescence?

    4)  How has your understanding or experience of God changed during the stages of your adulthood?

    5)  What incidents or experiences have been "turning points" in your spiritual journey?

6)  What spiritual lessons have you learned in your life so far, that you want to share with the people who matter most to you?

I'd love to see what you write, and with your permission, I'd like to excerpt some of your responses in a future "musing".

Don't worry about whether or not you produce a work of literary art! Remember that the truth of your heart is precious, in and of itself. Your life story is a unique treasure that nothing and nobody can replace!  All the more reason to reflect on it, and glean from it the lessons that might inspire you and others to draw closer to the divine potential that exists within us.