Musings

Fall Equinox in Ojai

Fall Equinox in Ojai

The sun slips a bright note under my door:
Its announcement of the season's arrival.
I stare at it reverently.
A quietude falls over the valley:
All is caught in a hush, a pause,
Languid in autumnal bliss,
Receiving the blessing of the bowing sun.
The sandstone boulders in the canyons
Are bathed in the quality of light
That they richly deserve.
All in shadow basks in backlit reflection.
The fine powder on the mountain trail
Transmutes to precious dust of gold.
Sweet sadness, a nostalgia for the ineffable,
Hangs like an old hat on a sunlit rack.
Hurry is cancelled, worry evaporates;
Shadows stretch time
For pedestrians under the portales
Of the plaza downtown.
The season turns, and we with it,
Into slanting sunshine.

Faith and Friendship

(art by Bardia Soltani)

 

 

 

There is a crisis of loneliness in America and much of the rest of the Western world.  I have seen its effects first-hand on a university campus.  It's an epidemic in higher education generally, contributing mightily to the mental health crisis among students.  There's no worse loneliness than the loneliness of a student surrounded day and night by thousands of peers.

Religion ought to be part of a positive response to this serious problem.  But alas, on campus and beyond, it's often part of the problem.

Progressive Christians don't believe that anyone who fails to "accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior" is going to hell. Nor anyone else, for that matter. We understand that other religions - or even no religion at all - might be as good for others as our religion is good for us.

 

Our religion boils down to divine agape - unconditional compassion for others, whether or not they go with our religious program. For us, friendship is an end in itself. Friendship is deep connection between equals who accept each other "as-is", honoring and respecting their differences. Friendship has no agenda except friendship!  And as community-builders, we're devoted to creating contexts in which real friendships can form and thrive.

But the implicit assumption of many evangelical Christians is that it is more important to save people from eternal hellfire than it is to engage in honest, open, equal friendship with them.  Evangelical Christian campus ministries train their students to commodify their relationships with non-Christians into full-court-press efforts to convert them. These non-Christian students think they have been befriended, but then they realize that the primary reason they are being treated so warmly and kindly is for the purpose of evangelizing them. If they don't join the fundamentalist club, they're often ghosted. It's a bait-and-switch that is often deeply disappointing to the "evangel-ee".

 

Of course, evangelical Christians aren't the only ones guilty of fake-friending other people. It's a cultural problem everywhere. In order to rise in status on campus, students make nice with others whom they think can help them get more social media followers or get them admitted to sororities or fraternities. It's no wonder that loneliness is endemic.

One would think that Christianity ought to be a cure for this pernicious pattern, rather than a perpetrator of it.

 

And that's where progressive Christians can make a difference. It may seem strange to suggest it, but in our churches and campus ministries, we need to teach people, particularly young people, how to make and keep friends. Because of the anti-social consequences of "social" media, because of the transactional nature of so many relationships, because of the alienating nature of our culture, people are losing people-skills.  Our churches and ministries need to inspire our people to think deeply about what true friendship is all about - and what it isn't about, too!  It starts with asking open-ended questions - and knowing how to really listen to the answers they inspire. 

 

Intentionally, we can create and maintain community that makes friendships more likely to form. We can structure our communities so that people engage with each other one-on-one.  One way to do that is to hold "campfires". A campfire encourages people to circle up and go into a contemplative state and open up with each other in deeply personal ways. It gives the eyes a focus while letting what others say sink into the soul. Hold "virtual campfire" conversations, using a video of a campfire on participants' smart phones, placed on a table in the middle of a circle, as the focus. (If your community needs in-depth help in community-building and encouraging friendship, contact my friend and colleague, Cat Moore, for consulting.)

Progressive Christians are well-situated to help move the wider culture in the direction of true friendliness.  Let's make the most of our position, and go further in doing our part to end the scourge of loneliness!

 

Savoring the Silence

 
“Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.”  From “Advices and queries” of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain

Tucked back on a narrow plot, on the winding high street of a lovely tree-lined neighborhood in London, sits the Hampstead Quaker Meeting House.  Two Sundays ago, I entered and took one of the chairs in the circle inside the simple 1907 Edwardian building.  And sat for an hour, with people of diverse shapes, sizes, ages, and ethnicities. 
 
At first, I practiced mindful contemplation: closing my eyes and observing lovingly my thoughts and emotions and sensations until I began to recognize that the divine Knower was the one doing the observing.  Then, to put it in Quaker terms, I was prompted by the Holy Spirit to open my eyes and look at the people around me.   Each was doing silent worship in their own way.  Yet I had a powerful sense that the silence of each permeated and supported the silence of all.  After looking at the people for a while, I found myself settling into a state of simple presence.  No urge to be anywhere else.  No urge to make plans or devise schemes or even to gain new insights.  Not much sense of the passage of time.  Just being there with the others, in the now.  Unperturbed by the cell phone that rang loudly in the pocket of the old man with the scraggly beard near the door.  Unperturbed by someone’s cough, or by the sight of a woman checking her text messages. 
 
Some Quaker communities are self-deprecatingly called “popcorn meetings”, where, moved (hopefully) by the Spirit, many people stand up, one after the other, with silent pauses between, and share aloud what the Light has revealed to them.  Such utterances have always been part of Friends worship.  In all other Quaker meetings I’ve attended over the years, at least one or two people have stood up to speak.  But this meeting was quiet for the full hour, which I found to be positively delicious.  I was at a loss to imagine what anyone could have said that would have been more profound than our shared silence.
 
It reminded me of a passage from the Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, a collection of aphorisms from the earliest Christian monastics in the 3^rd and 4th century.  One particularly revered hermit, Abbot Pambo, was visited by a notable bishop who sought wisdom from him.  Likely as not, the bishop also sought a measure of “cred” that would come from having associated with the famous hermit:  “…the brethren coming together said to Abbot Pambo: “Say a word or two to the Bishop, that his soul may be edified in this place.”  The elder replied:  “If he is not edified by my silence, there is no hope that he will be edified by my words.””   
 
At the hour, the clerk shook hands with the people on either side of him, and we all did the same.  And then proceeded to coffee and tea time, where I really enjoyed meeting some of the members.
 
“When you are preoccupied and distracted in meeting let wayward and disturbing thoughts give way quietly to your awareness of God’s presence among us and in the world. Receive the vocal ministry of others in a tender and creative spirit. Reach for the meaning deep within it, recognizing that even if it is not God’s word for you, it may be so for others. Remember that we all share responsibility for the meeting for worship whether our ministry is in silence or through the spoken word.”  (“Advices and queries”)

Silence is a great leveler.  Keeping it, together, reminds us that we’re all in the same boat on the sea of life. 
 

(I highly recommend reading the “Advices and queries” as a profound and useful guide to worship and congregational life for any progressive faith community.) 
 

UFO's: Unimaginable Feeling Organisms

The Bible is mostly a collection of profound myths:  unreal stories that can help us see what it is real, and see what we really need to change. 

One of these wonderful biblical myths is the story of Balaam and his donkey in the book of Numbers in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The people of Israel are wandering around in the desert with Moses on their way to the Promised Land.  And they are making the people who live in the desert very nervous.  Will they conquer their lands?  The people in the desert land of Moab saw them coming and decided to get a diviner from Syria, a guy by the name of Balaam, to come and put a curse on the Israelites.  He told them, sure, I’ll work for you, but I’m a professional witch doctor.  I only do stuff that I am told to do, or allowed to do, by the spirits.  So off he went on his donkey to meet up with the leaders of Moab. 

But on his way, the God of Israel sent an angel to block his path.  Balaam didn’t see the angel, but the donkey did.  When the donkey stopped in front of the angel, Balaam kept hitting it.  Until God made the donkey talk!  And chew out Balaam for hitting him when all the donkey was doing was obeying divine orders – which is what Balaam was supposed to do! 

I love this dialogue in the story:  “Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and it said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?”  Balaam said to the donkey, “Because you have made a fool of me! I wish I had a sword in my hand! I would kill you right now!”  But the donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I been in the habit of treating you this way?””

Balaam was so deafened by his anger that instead of being left speechless by his donkey’s speech, he immediately argued with the donkey instead.  Then the donkey replied in a perfectly reasonable manner.  Saying, in effect, do you suppose I’m any old donkey, a generic donkey, somebody else’s donkey?  A rental donkey?  Come on, man, we have a relationship, right?  I wouldn’t just stop in the middle of the road for no reason? 

That donkey was definitely not a dumb ass!

Roberta and I have two donkeys, and we can attest to the fact that they follow orders from sources that we know nothing about.  Because they sure don’t follow our orders!  Some say donkeys are stubborn, but really they’re just smart.  They do what makes sense for them to do, not what makes sense for us for them to do.  I go out and look at them doing what they do, and stand in awe at the gap between their consciousness and my own.

Lately there’s a lot of talk about aliens and UFO’s.  Seems like the subject bubbles up into the public awareness on a regular basis.  What do you think?  Seems like in my lifetime it has resurfaced as a thing every decade or so. 

Meanwhile, alien intelligence surrounds us every day.  We confabulate about strange beings zipping around us in flying saucers, while all around us are alien beings that think thoughts and have experiences that are far beyond our comprehension.  UFO’s – Unimaginable Feeling Organisms.

We call them animals. 

We humans assume that we know more than them, since we can read and write and do calculus and they cannot.  But of course animals know stuff that humans can’t.  Dogs have 40 times more scent receptor cells than humans do.  We can’t begin to conceive of the experiences they have as a result.  They might have complex olfactory sensations as sublime for them as listening to a symphony is for us.  Birds see and smell stuff that we can’t.  Honeybirds are a kind of bird that will intentionally lead humans to beehives that humans can’t detect, so that the humans will empty the hive of its honey and leave the wax for the birds to eat.  When I heard about these birds recently, I was totally blown away. 

Some birds can see ultraviolet light that human eyes can’t detect.  And their visual acuity is much greater than ours.  If they could feel sorry for us humans, surely they would, because of our pitifully weak eyesight.

Once I was on a hike on a trail next to a cliff.  Above me I heard dirt falling down the cliff face, and looked up – and there was a raven, watching the dirt fall down.  After the dirt stopped falling, the raven scratched the earth at the top of the cliff and made more dirt fall down.  The raven watched it fall all the way down.  And then did it again.  There did not appear to be any practical purpose for the raven to be doing this.  It appeared that the raven was playing.   Doing what I used to do when I was a kid.  And what I’ve done as an adult, truth be told – tossing stuff off cliffs just to see what happens!  But what do I know?  What was happening in that bird’s brain is hard for my brain to fully conceive.

So that ancient made-up story, the myth of Balaam and the donkey, awakens us to this reality that animals have intelligence – and even possibly a spirituality - that humans do not, and that we do well to stay humble about our own intelligence as a consequence. 

When we got our donkeys, we were given a small library of books about these noble creatures.  Almost all of these books were sappy tales of how donkeys relate to humans in a human way.  How they have feelings and emotions like ours.  But I’m pretty much convinced that our donkeys are doing their lives their way, and not ours.  They feel, they emote, but in ways profoundly different than we do.  This doesn’t mean we can’t interact with them and connect with them and become bonded with each other.  But to assume they bond with me in the same way I bond with them is, I think, disrespectful.  For me, the differences between us are invitations to show awe and deference toward them. 

As the prophet said on behalf of God in Isaiah 55:  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth. So are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

We should not assume that our ways and thoughts are higher than the ways of donkeys.  Rather, we should humble ourselves before the Cosmic Consciousness beyond that of ourselves and of donkeys.

And this humility can move us to treat all living beings with respect and kindness as much as possible.  When a species of animal goes extinct because of human-caused climate change, we have wiped out a uniquely precious and amazing kind of consciousness. Who knows what kinds of angels can be seen by each and every kind of creature on earth?  Who knows what messages they receive, messages that could be useful to us?

May our relationships with animals, whether in the wild or in our living rooms, humble us into an awe-filled awareness of how much more there is to experience than we are able to know.  May our humility be a divine way of touching the untouchable, smelling the unsmellable, hearing the unhearable, seeing the unseeable – just enough to awaken us to the vastness of the potential experiences that surround us.  Amen!

In Our Small Town

(Above: a Hindu juggernaut in the Ojai, CA, 4th of July parade this year - it has a big American flag on the back. Watching it, hearing the Hare Krishnas chanting "hare hare" around it, made me proud to be an American...and an Ojaian.)

 

 

In Our Small Town - words by Jim Burklo

 

In our small town we’re proud to wave

Our stars and stripes – red, white and blue

To cherish freedom, and the brave

We raise the rainbow colors, too.

 

‘Cause folks who live in our small town

Love what makes us each unique;

When times are tough we rally ‘round

The good of all is what we seek.

 

Burmese curry, hot pad thai –

Steak burritos, Chinese beer

Give our food downtown a try!

Folks from ‘round the world are here.

 

We welcome migrants who endured

Trials, privations, hunger, fear

To reach our town and rest assured

That we’ll defend their presence here.

 

To spread the love and chill the hate

Here Hindus chant and Christians pray

We keep apart the church and state

So you can worship your own way.

 

Try banning books in our small town!

Where we defend the right to read:

What some folks like makes others frown

But that’s our price of liberty!

 

Try telling teachers ‘round this town

To censor history in their class!

They teach the truth of what went down -

And trust our kids with gnarly facts.

 

In our small town we’re proud to wave

Our stars and stripes – red, white and blue

To cherish freedom, and the brave

We raise the rainbow colors, too....

Revelations of Ashley

 

 

The Revelations of Ashley
As Typed with her Thumbs onto her IPhone
 

I, Ashley Anderson, was parking in the staff lot at the Great Mall on my way to work at the Yogurt Shop, when I received revelations which I immediately recorded on my IPhone and sent to my friends.
 
In my job scooping yogurt, I had the occasion to meet many interesting people.  Some were perfectly kind and pleasant folks who belonged to various religions, but not to the True Faith to which my family belonged.  One day a lovely Hindu woman ordered pistachio yogurt on a sugar cone.  She was wearing a sari and was a most enchanting person in every way.  Looking at her, listening to her, I could not imagine that she would not join me in the third celestial paradise after we die.  It did not seem fair or right.
 
So I began to read the sacred scriptures of the world’s religions.  I had long conversations with people who belonged to other faiths.  This led me to further questions about matters spiritual and religious, but I never dared to talk about them with those closest to me.
 
But on that day, sitting in my mom’s car, I lost my fear. 

This is what I wrote:
 
1)  All religious scriptures are the words of humans about God, not God’s words to humans.  They were written by humans no holier than you or I.
 
2) Just because lots of people believe a scripture is absolutely true, that doesn’t mean that it should make any more sense to you than a Kyrgyz road map, assuming, of course, that you aren’t Kyrgyz.
 
3)  Anything in a religious scripture that looks like a myth probably is one. 
 
4)  Myths in scriptures can provide important insights and valuable guidance for living.  But that might come as much from your own interpretation of them than from what they actually say.
 
5)  Not all the advice given in scriptures is worth following and not all the rules given in them are worth obeying.
 
6)  People who claim to have been chosen by God to give final and definitive messages to humanity should not be trusted, especially with children.
 
7)  People who invite you to discover God for yourself might be worth listening to.
 
8)  Religious rituals and customs can help you to be more kind and loving.  But you can be kind and loving without them, too.
 
9)  God is love.  If there is more to God than love, I don’t know about it and I don’t think I have the time to find out because trying to figure out how to love other people well, or even at all, takes up most of my time.
 
10)  Religion is good when it brings people together to help each other love. 
 

Attestation of Ashley

 
I, Ashley Anderson, attest that it is myself who had these revelations and sent them to my best friends.  I do not know whether or not they are inspired by God.  But if you get something out of them, well, that’s cool.
 

Attestations of Ashley’s Friends

 
We, the following besties of Ashley Anderson, do solemnly attest that on the day she received them, she texted these revelations to us.  We think they are dope.  Ynez Mendoza, Arlene Crouch, Jenny Souza, Marie Smith, and Ella Masterson.

Elemental Contemplation

 

When life crawled onto the sand out of the sea, it brought a share of the magnesium in the ocean, at 1200 parts per million, with it.  And then, at a certain point in the evolutionary process, the human body, with its roughly 25 grams of magnesium, began to devise ways of extracting the metal from its primordial source. 

At this point in my developmental cycle, my magnesium, along with the rest of me, ponders its elemental role in the way my life has turned out. 

My relationship with magnesium began at my conception, in Los Gatos, California, where my parents lived at the time.  In my mother’s womb, I floated in a simulacrum of seawater. 

When I was five years old, our family moved to the Midwest, where Dad had a job in the steel industry.  Dad worked as an engineer at a factory that made refractory bricks and mortar used to line the inside of blast furnaces.  One of the critical components was magnesium. 

When I was 13, during the first Summer of Love in 1966, Dad came home from work to announce that he had been transferred back to California to work in the refractory plant at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz.  This operation extracted magnesium from seawater.  The process had first been used to get magnesium for making firebombs used in World War II to incinerate Japanese cities.  Later, it was used to resist fire in furnaces.  Magnesium is critical for human brain and nervous system functioning.  Functioning for ill or for good.

When Dad announced the move, in so many words I responded:  “How soon can we go?”  My magnesium was powerfully attracted to the water from which it came.

Two weeks later I stood on the sand and gazed in wonderment at the Pacific Ocean, surging and receding on the shining beach.  Magnesium in awe of magnesium.

Without magnesium, I would not be writing about magnesium.  Without magnesium, I would not be a Californian.  Without magnesium, I would not be here, or anywhere, at all.

My relationship to magnesium is a fractal dimension of the universe’s relationship to itself.  The universe has unfolded over billions of years in such a way that, at least here and at least now, it has developed self-consciousness... through us.  The noble purpose of our existence is to admire the cosmos with holy awe – through all our constituent elements....

Whorls in the Flow

 

We are but eddies in the current of life.

I walked along a dirt path next to a roaring canal fed by the Deschutes River in Bend, Oregon: past budding chamisa, golden grasses nodding in the morning breeze, stubby juniper trees studded with pale blue-green aromatic berries. 

Through narrows the water rushed, over steeps it fell in smooth sheets.  Around bends it tumbled, creating backflows that spun into eddies.

Graphic visualizations of the human metabolic pathways include whorls of biochemical transformations that cycle back on themselves.  As our hearts spin our blood through arteries and back through veins and then through arteries again, molecular processes swirl within our organs as well.

Memories arise and subside and swirl into sleep and then spin back into consciousness again in fresh contexts, taking on new meanings. 

Thoughts swirl in circles, sometimes obsessing us with frustration, sometimes spinning us with delight, affording us the opportunity to mindfully contemplate the ways they spin.

I am a whirlpool in the stream of the universe.  An eddy consisting of eddies that consist of eddies.  Spinning now, spinning here, someday to be swept away into whirlpools downstream from my body and my ego.

We are all but eddies in the current of life…

 

Beyond Shame

 

Love is attention.
Temptation is what leads to losing attention.
Sin is inattention.
 
But the instant that you recognize you have lost attention, you are paying attention again.
And also in that instant, you are forgiven for having lost attention.  The inattention is erased, the sin is gone.  As if it never had been. 
 
So there’s no need to let shame stick to you.
No reason for shame to cloud your vision, making it harder to see what’s real.
No reason to believe your shame’s hallucinations.
What kind of shame is eating at you from within?  What deep embarrassment haunts you? 
Let’s look at it, see it for what it is – and on doing so, we catch it, release it, and let it float away. 
 
When we pay attention, we activate not only our perceptive abilities – we also more fully activate our imaginations.  When we see clearly what is, without preconceptions or prejudices or opinions that make our vision murky, then we have the right raw material we need to imagine different courses of action, and imagine their outcomes.  So much sin is the result of a failure of imagination.  If we’re paying close attention to our urges, if we’re fully unleashing our imaginative capacities and paying attention to the possible outcomes of our actions, we will go the distance and imagine the possible messy consequences of acting out on our urges.  If we aren’t paying attention to where our minds and bodies are going, and our imaginations are short-circuited as a result, then we stumble into trouble. 
 
In Christianity we have the tradition of prayers of confession and absolution.  As a pastor, I don’t include them in our worship because I think Christianity needs a break from all that.  We got too focused on sin and punishment, and spent too much time begging a supernatural being to forgive us. 
 
But there’s a more humane and dare I say divine way to deal with our failings and our need for reconciliation.  That’s to pay attention to what we’re thinking and feeling.  To pay attention to the way we are treating other people, and how the way they treat us affects us.  To pay attention to our urges and compulsions, and become loving observers of those urges rather than just the subjects of them.  To pay equal opportunity attention to all experiences, dropping judgment about them so that we can see them clearly enough to enable us to make better choices about how to respond to them.  To pay attention to our feelings of shame, and thus change our relationship to that shame, so that we can release it and both do differently and feel differently.
 
It’s worth a good long hard look within to see how powerful grip that shame holds on our lives.  We are social beings: we depend on our relationships with others to survive.  So if we think others think ill of us for what we’ve done, or failed to do, we imagine what they are thinking and emotionally punish ourselves on their behalf.  Which does nobody any good.  Shame is so hard for us to sit with, so hard to face, that we shove it into the background of our lives.  From which it haunts us day and night, twisting our perceptions and circumscribing our horizons.
 
Shame's usefulness is limited.  We think we deserve it, so we hang on to it, but it just gets in the way.  We think if we’re ashamed enough, we won’t do whatever thing we did that made us ashamed.  But there’s a better way to motivate ourselves to do the right thing.  
 
So instead of being ashamed, let’s just be conscious.  Conscious with the eyes of God, who is pure unconditional love that makes shame evaporate on contact.  Conscious enough to see clearly what actions harm and what actions help, what actions hurt and what actions heal.  Conscious enough to trust that doing the right thing is attractive enough to inspire us to do it….

 

The Golden Hint

When I was directing the drop in center for homeless people in Palo Alto, one day one of our regulars, a panhandler who suffered from alcoholism, excitedly reported to me an incident that had happened the day before.  A man in a suit came up to him on the street and gave him a $20 bill and said, "Go buy a good bottle of wine!"  Which is exactly what the panhandler did.

The guy in the suit was practicing the next step beyond the Golden Rule.  He was practicing the Diamond Rule:  do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

It sounds good and right to do to others as you want them to do to you.  But what you want isn’t necessarily what others want.  Very often at our drop in center for the homeless, the staff and volunteers wanted different things than a lot of the homeless folks wanted.  So they would offer things to our homeless folks, assuming that the homeless folks wanted what they wanted.  And often that did not work at all.

In turn, if certain of our homeless folks gave us what they wished we would give to them, we would have received baggies full of contraband every day! 

So the Diamond Rule has its pitfalls, too.  Sounds really good to serve others the way they want to be served – that can be a lot better than self-centeredly assuming that they like to be served just the way I like to be served.  However there are times when the way somebody wants you to do unto them is really and truly not good for them nor for you.  Like giving a bottle of wine - good or bad wine - to an alcoholic.  At the homeless drop in center, we couldn’t be handing out cocaine and heroin just because that is what some folks desired more than anything else. 

So maybe the Golden Rule and the Diamond Rule should be renamed—the Golden Hint and the Diamond Hint.  When trying to decide how to treat someone, it’s a good hint to ask, how would I like to be treated in this situation?  But we can’t stop there.  We get more hints by asking:  how does this person want to be treated that might be different than how I’d like to be treated?  And is it really appropriate for me, and for them, for me to treat them that way?

Much as we have in common, much as we share across all ages and cultures, we humans have our profound differences, and to love each other requires of us a profound curiosity about those differences.  The Golden Hint and the Diamond Hint get us started asking questions, exploring what it means to love and serve a particular person – but we can’t stop there.  Love requires an emptying of assumptions, a willingness to ask yet more and more questions.

 

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard meditated on this principle of loving your neighbor as yourself.  He came up with this brain-teasing version of it:  “You shall love yourself as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself.”  That is, you can’t love your neighbor without loving yourself.  But the self you love when you love yourself needs to be the self that loves your neighbor.  And that self is one that is constantly emptying itself of assumptions and judgments and opinions about others, so that it can be filled with love for neighbors.

 

In the letter to the Philippians, St. Paul offered a deep mystical interpretation of the life of Jesus.  He said that Jesus didn’t count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but that Jesus emptied himself and took the form of a human servant.  He didn’t assume he had all the answers about what everybody needed from him.  His inner divinity wasn’t something he could hold onto.  

I love the quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh:  “People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.”  You know, a lot of people talk about Jesus as if he was something you could give, too.  They talk about Jesus as if they could get their arms around him and assume they know exactly who he is and what he wants.  They talk about Jesus as if he was something they could hand out to people who they thought needed salvation, as if Jesus was something that a person could receive like an armful of flowers, neatly trimmed and wrapped in a bow.  Meanwhile, St. Paul tells us that Jesus had emptied himself.  It’s the spiritual practice of emptying one’s self of egotism and selfishness and reactivity so that there will be room for God to take up residence within us.  A God we can’t grasp.  Any more than we can grasp each other.

And that is the great pitfall into which I drop, over and over again, in my stumbling efforts to love.  I keep thinking I can grasp my wife.  Yes, I can hold her hand, yes, I can get my arms around her.  But until I am empty of my assumptions about her, empty of my judgments and opinions about her, I am a long way from really loving her.  I like this quote from Stewart Emery:  “Most people who say they have a commitment ... have an attachment.”  And I like that Henry Miller line:  “Looking back, I realize my loves were, in actuality, obsessions.”  Until I let go of my obsession for and about my wife, let go of grasping for her, let go of my attachment to her, until I am empty, I cannot really act on my commitment to love my wife. 

 

And we are hungry for this kind of love.  The love that is emptied of ego, emptied of presumptuousness, emptied of the assumption that the other person is not an other – but is the same as you.  Yes, we have a lot in common --  most of us hunger for this kind of love that can be given only by someone who has emptied him or herself.  But other people are others!  So basic, but we forget it all too often.  This otherness is something to celebrate!  ...and always to take into account. 

I find myself jumping to conclusions, finishing other people’s sentences in conversations, not taking the time to let what they say and do sink into me – because I’m so full of myself that there’s not enough room for them inside of me.  I can’t pay attention unless I’m empty enough to have room within me to receive what I see, hear, and begin to understand about others.  Jesus kept asking his disciples and followers:  “Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?” (Mark 8:18)  Jesus wanted his followers to pay attention.  Not just to him, but to pay deep and close attention to the world around them, to the glory of creation, to pay attention to the people that they could heal and help, to the needs of their society, to really listen to the wisdom of children and women who were supposed only to be seen and not heard, to pay attention to the stories and struggles of people who were considered unclean and unacceptable.  For this he emptied himself, over and over, so he could love with a clean and clear heart.  For this, we are challenged to let ourselves be emptied, so that we can satisfy our common yearning for love.