LOOKING OUT FROM THE SCREEN PORCH AT MY PARENTS' home onto the back of their little farm – the corn and soybean fields in midsummer splendor; the vegetable garden offering up its bounty of lettuce, green beans, and sweet corn; the newly adopted cat skittering across the lawn and up a tree to get a closer look at the bird feeder – it’s sometimes possible to forget that 11 years ago this August, we got the call.
My mom had felt unwell on the flight home with Dad from Paris to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. For years, she’d dreamed of going to Paris. In one of those rare alignments of the cosmos, reality lived up to expectation. We rented a garret apartment in the historic Beaubourg. Everyone, including our two teen-age kids, was entranced. We had long walks through old neighborhoods. Simple, gourmet dinners on warm summer nights. Fresh croissant and dark coffee every morning. Museums. Monet’s Garden.
Best of all to my mom were the leisurely evening boat trips down the Seine, an experience she loved so much we repeated it on our last night.
Barely three weeks after our return, she phoned with the news. She was going into the hospital. Her doctor had found a mass. It didn’t look good.
Life stopped. Became a blur. We hurriedly packed the car. I remember calling from a phone booth at a gas station in eastern Ohio, and praying, over and over, hold on, hold on, hold on. We arrived to find her preparing to go to Indianapolis for surgery.
The morning of her operation, we encircled her on her bed to gather her in light. My dad. My family. An uncle. The nurses. My mother proudly told the nurses that I’d begun seminary studies, which, technically, was true. A class in preaching, a class in the philosophy of religion, and a class on peace and reconciliation, squeezed in between a full-time job, family responsibilities, committee obligations at our Friends meeting, and a beginning practice in 12-step. That year, as I rode the subway up to my classes, and spent my evenings reading and writing, I felt a new world opening up. But, in this moment in the hospital, I felt woefully unprepared. I quick-sifted my memory for a ministerly insight. Blank.
Mom, as it turned out, said all that was needed. She thanked us all for being there. She said she’d “had a good life,” and was ready to accept whatever the day would bring. “I trust the doctors and trust God. I love you all.” We took in her words, returned our expressions of love, said we would always be there for her. And she was wheeled away.
In my mind’s eye, I can see the scenes that ensued as fresh as this morning’s drive into town. We waited, uncomfortably. Occasionally there would be reports – the doctors were beginning; they were making progress; they were almost done. Then the lead doctor came out, ashen-faced. “Gather your family,” he said. “She didn’t make it.”
To this day, the medical explanation for what happened – complete system shutdown – and when it happened – after they’d removed what they could, discovered the cancer's startling extent, and were finishing up – still jars. She knew, we surmised. She knew, from her experiences with others, what was to come – the months of pain and hardship of what, inevitably, would be a losing cause; the doctors said she might have six months. She decided in faith, we believed, to turn it over, surrender, let go.
Numb, shocked, in tears, we walked out later that night and gazed up into the most beautiful, vivid star-filled sky we had ever seen. One of the nurses attending mom, on hearing the news, brought out a tray of cookies (“she was such a lovely woman,” she said) – communion, on a starry night.
This week, I’m resuming seminary. It’s been a fits-and-starts, on-off journey, a class here, a class there, between work, family, and other obligations. For this class, in a new program, in Indiana, that I switched to two years ago, I’ve been asked to write a spiritual autobiography. In the paper, we’re to reflect on what’s been “rich, inviting, and memorable” in our spiritual journeys; what’s drawing us to seminary “at this point” in our spiritual lives; and what “spiritual hungers” seminary may nourish. We’ve been asked to think back on people, places, events, and spiritual communities that have been significant to us.
I didn’t intend to start with my mother. But, when I sat down to write this morning, it’s what came out. In truth, she’s been with me all week, since I arrived in Indiana to visit with my father, in his 85-year-old farmerly spryness, before beginning classes, on the farm that he and mom had bought – and worked – as the retirement gift to themselves.
The other day, I asked a friend if anyone’s ever done research on how much being read to as a child affects intelligence scores when you reach your teens. The ostensible impetus was a summer reading camp I’d bumped into while going to the college library to work. But I was really thinking about my mom's weekly library visits, from as early as I can recall (was I four? three? two?), and her checking out a foot-high stack of books to read to me. Blueberries for Sal. Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. Winnie the Pooh. The Little Red Lighthouse.
She always had big plans for my brother and me. We were to be the generation that would go to and finish college (a project she virtually ensured by taking a secretarial job at a college, earning us tuition remission). Mom and I did not have an easy relationship. We fought, a lot. But over time, the tensions mellowed.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the different ways we can be called to witness. There’s a tendency to think of witness, in the religious sense, as action: to witness against war by refusing to pay taxes, for example. I’ve had some experience with active-tense living-out of belief in recent years – clerking Quaker meetings; overseeing a Quaker wedding and a Quaker funeral; 12-step service like speaking in meetings, going into classrooms and hospitals; and searching for a voice to write about the experience of the spiritual in work and life in this space.
It’s my hope that seminary will deepen me in all of this and, perhaps, point toward work that engages them. But as I look back on the circle that formed around my mother eleven years ago, I see again that often the most profound witness that can be offered is not to what we say, or do, but to be present and listen, fully.
I'M THINKING ABOUT INVENTING A SPIRITUAL GPS. I NEED A device to guide me through life decisions. I can see it in my mind’s eye. It would sit on the dashboard of my car or reside in the memory of my mobile phone, just like geographic GPS. I would tap in a question: Change careers? Move? Become a spiritual wanderer? Stay put? The machine would whir, beep, then pop out an insight.
The wisdom would be delivered in the voices of beloved teachers. The Dali Lama (with giggle option). The rough brogues of the poets/lecturers John O’Donohue (Irish) and David Whyte (Welsh). The Buddhism of Tara Brach (calm, soft) and Sharon Salzberg (urban, deadpan). The Midwestern mellow of the Quaker Parker Palmer. And people I know – elders from Quaker Meeting, 12-step sponsors, my friend just back from an adventure vacation to Africa with a new mantra (“3-2-1 Bungeee!”).
There’d be quotes I’ve copied onto scraps of paper and tucked into my wallet: “Life involves one risk after another.” “It can work. It may work. I’m open to finding out."
And prayers. Like “the two best prayers” the writer Anne Lamott says she knows: “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Or the archly funny morning and nighttime prayers of a woman she knows: “Whatever” (said in the morning) and “Oh, well” (said at night). They are similar to the morning and bedtime prayers of a friend of mine: respectively, "Show me" and "Thank you."
I’d program in the Serenity Prayer, maybe breaking its pleas for serenity, courage, and wisdom into three prayers (the way I often recite them). Plus the mantra a Buddhist teacher gave me during a challenging time: “Let this serve to awaken me.”
There’d be random bits of insight gleaned recently from conversations, emails, and books I’ve been reading. Like: “In a difficult time, always carry something beautiful in your heart,” from John O’Donohue's book Anam Cara. And this one, also from Anam Cara: “We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes to us.”
I'd include light-in-dark-times propositions like this one from Anne Lamott (which, like her quotes above, is from her wonderful memoir Traveling Mercies): “When a lot of things go wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.” I'd have messages forwarded by friends, like "Happiness is a muscle we must use or it will wither away" (a Marianne Williamson quote) and "Remember: we're not in the outcomes business" (a 12-step reminder to let go). And sayings I've found on friends' refrigerators, like these two spotted this week: “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature; beautiful old people are works of art” (Eleanor Roosevelt) and "Always make new mistakes" (Esther Dyson). And ancient wisdom like the Celtic belief that nature is "latently and actively spiritual" (O'Donohue).
You've probably noticed that my spiritual Automat isn't big on specific direction. There’s no “turn right, then left, and, bingo, you’re there.” I don’t believe an algorithm exists that can tell us how to get to where we want to go spiritually. Nobody’s been there and come back. We all have our own lives to lead, with our individual choices to make, from matters small (“fix the windows or start painting the front hall?”) to large (“what do I do with my life now?”). The wisdom we gather can only point in a general direction -- what the writer Brent Bill calls the "sacred compass." We need to be like the friend who recently described turning off the car’s GPS to drive home, “scared but brave.”
Perhaps what I crave is not a full-blown GPS but a low-tech phone app -- or no-tech Magic 8-Ball -- a go-anywhere repository of the insight I’ve scribbled into “quote journals,” slipped into books, briefcases, and wallets, and carried in pants pockets until the pants got washed (field note: true insight doesn’t always “come out in the wash”).
Maybe someday someone will devise an e-Harmony for the soul. Fill out a questionnaire and get all the answers. But I hope not. There should always be room for serendipity, that random event that sends us off life’s interstate onto the small, squiggly kinds of roads where William Least Heat Moon regained his sense of self in the off-the-beaten path memoir Blue Highways.
I want something that creates space rather than closes it off – a device that nudges me back toward the expansiveness of morning meditations, Buddhist silent retreats, and Quaker silent worship. O’Donohue notes that an original meaning of “salvation” was “space.” Similarly, the directions shouldn't be too obvious, but true to what O'Donohue recalls is the root of the word “revelation”: “re-valere,” to “veil again.” I love it when Anne Lamott throws down the challenge, asking why God uses “dreams, intuition, memory, phone calls, vague stirrings in the heart” rather than something more direct; then admits she's tempted to say it “really doesn’t work” for her; but then confesses, “except it does.”
Sometimes we just need to shake the Magic 8-Ball to see what vague answer rolls to the top out of the cloudy ink ("Magic 8-Ball, what is the meaning of life?" "Yes."). And, when we get stuck, shake it again.
That’s I.T.
I learned from a friend to keep a journal of quotes. I've filled up two so far. In my recent rush to finish up the books I've been reading (Anam Cara; How the Irish Saved Civilization) and start readings for an upcoming seminary class (Traveling Mercies), and the gleanings of emails and conversations, I've currently got a surplus. Some that didn't make this week's essay but are being tucked into my quote journal include, "We are so privileged to still have time" (O'Donohue), "Pain is the requisite of change. So is fear" (a friend). "Accept good feelings. No questions asked!" (another friend).
For more on Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, or to buy a copy, click here. For more on John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara, or to buy a copy, click here.
BALANCING, SKIPPING, TUMBLING, DANCING: “People with Parkinson’s Can’t Do That, Can They?” is not just the title of a video celebrating the graceful achievements of the Parkinson’s Disease patients who are students of John Argue. It is also a phrase that comes easily to mind watching the film (to view, click here or go to end of article).
For the past 25 years, John Argue has been teaching people with Parkinson’s how to move mindfully and consciously. Drawing on the skills he had developed to train actors – ranging from traditional theater arts to Tai Chi and yoga – he helps Parkinson’s patients mitigate the stiffness, tremors, and impaired balance that are characteristics of the disease.
His pioneering methods, developed in his studio in the San Francisco Bay Area, have spread across the country, through books, videos, and teacher training.
I talked with John about his work and the remarkable path his life has taken, from his upbringing in Catholic orphanages in the Southwest – where his desire to teach first took form – to the spiritual approach he calls “jackhammer Zen.”
QUESTION: To start, could you give me a brief CV?
JOHN ARGUE: I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1936. When I was very young, just turning 7, my family disintegrated because of my father’s alcoholism. I was sent to St. Patrick’s Indian Mission in Anadarko, Oklahoma. I attended through eighth grade; my two sisters and I were among a small handful of non-Indian, non-Mexican kids there. I graduated high school from John Brown Military Academy of the Ozarks, in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, a Christian military academy for "wayward youth." In 1954 I joined the Navy. I mustered out in 1957, and used the GI bill to go to college in California.
I took a BA in English and an MA in drama at the University of California, Berkeley. I worked for a while in professional theater, then set up my own small theater company and acting school in Berkeley in about 1970. I did that for about 10 years. Sometime in the middle of that period I started doing drama therapy with children and with hospitalized adults.
In the 1980s a friend of mine with Parkinson’s asked me to help her by teaching her to “move consciously.” So I took her on. We were so successful her doctor began sending other people to me. Over time, my career shifted over completely to working with Parkinson’s people. I’ve now been doing this for 25 years.
Q: Tell me about your work with Parkinson’s patients.
A: I lead classes here in Berkeley, and travel and train movement therapists from across the country. I have two classes running now. I’m starting a third one. The Monday morning class is for beginners. I call them the Freshman Class. It runs an hour and a half and has maybe 12 people. Tuesday’s class, the Sophomores, is for people who have been with me more than a year, some for as many as 8-10 years. Since the illness is incurable, people stay with me.
Constant training, constant reworking, seems to be the way to keep the major symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease at bay. That is basically what the work is. Through exercise and mindfulness training, I teach people to keep themselves active and use their bodies in efficient ways, to prevent the kind of curling-up and withering that happens to people with Parkinson’s who don’t exercise.
Q: At the time that you started this work, what were the options out there for people?
A:There were medications. And the medications were pretty good. There was a recommendation from the medical community that exercise was helpful. But nobody had devised a specific Parkinson’s exercise program. I was the first in that area. My background in yoga, Tai Chi, and teaching acting, all my skills that I had developed to teach actors, were very applicable to the problems of Parkinson’s.
I broke it down into three main features. One was mindfulness. People with Parkinson’s can control their movement if they keep their mind engaged with what they’re doing. If their mind wanders or if they do things automatically, their disease takes over and they become awkward.
Second, actors because of their training learn how to be graceful in everything they do. One of the marks of Parkinson’s people is they tend to move clumsily. The automatic gracefulness they mastered as children, they lose that as a result of the disease.
So they need to be taught again how to gracefully get up from a chair, or gracefully get out of a car, or even roll over in bed. All of those things have to be done mindfully. If you train in it, a lot of people can move, on good days, so that nobody really knows that they have Parkinson’s.
Third is completion. One trains to complete each action before beginning the next. People with Parkinson’s Disease tend to begin the next action well before the first is complete, causing a cascade event, like the soldiers behind stepping on the heels of the ones in front, or like the crowd furthest from the door in a fire trampling over the people closer to the door. So we train in "mono-tasking" to break the common habit of multitasking. As in a zendo, we train to bow to the pillow before we sit on the pillow.
"We train in 'mono-tasking' to break the common habit of multitasking. As in a zendo, we train to bow to the pillow before we sit on the pillow."
Q: It sounds like you had a lot to learn. How did you do it?
A: I learned primarily from the people with Parkinson’s who came to work with me. They would come in with this problem or that problem. Using my acting skills, I would give myself the problem and figure out how I would solve it. Then I would go back and teach people how to do it.
For instance, they were having trouble standing up from a chair. So I tried to give myself an imaginary Parkinson’s, have the same problem they were having, figure out what they were doing that was causing the difficulty, and devise a method of getting up from a chair.
Q: It’s a fascinating how you describe the solution: to move to the front of the chair, then put one foot back, and, bringing your arm down to the floor, lean over to push yourself up. How did you figure that out?
A: If you observe your own self, standing up after sitting in a chair, particularly when you’re tired, you’ll notice you actually do this. You put your nose beyond your toes. You put your head beyond your feet. What that does is shift the center of balance to a point between the two feet. When you’re sitting on a chair, the point of balance is somewhere behind your feet. The rock forward shifts the physics of the center of gravity in your body to a point between your feet.
A young person can do that with his or her feet parallel. An older person needs to move the line between the feet closer to the chair. In Parkinson’s you can’t use momentum for any movement. Everything slows down with Parkinson’s. People are moving against a lot of interior resistance. The muscle tone that inhibits movement is stronger than the muscle tone that initiates the movement. The brakes are on. It’s like moving with the brakes on all the time. If you’ve driven your car with the emergency on, you know what I mean. You have to figure out how to do all the moves in the way Tai Chi is done, in slow motion.
Q: When I watch your videos, and read through the book, one thing that comes through is you’re having fun. Do you have that sense as well?
A: Acting is playing. You play a part. I deliberately set it out to be that way. I wanted to avoid as much as I could anything that smacked of the rigors of boot camp or anything that had to do with calisthenics or pushing. These people are too old to scold. I made it as playful as I possibly could. I feel creativity always functions better out of a spirit of play. I am training them to be actors and dancers. I want them, if they work with me long enough, to move better than most people their age, to have more grace than people who are not trained.
Q: Did you ever wonder how you would deal with your own, personal reactions to their disease?
A: Being an orphanage kid, I always felt like I was passing as a normal person in the world away from the orphanage. So acting was second nature to me. As I moved into new situations, be it the Service, or college, or moving from Oklahoma to California, I always learned how to talk like the locals as quickly as possible, and to walk like them and trim my hair like them and turn my collar up like them, and all of that. Acting is the way I go through the world. (The photo above shows John, second from right, at the orphanage.)
I’ve always identified with the person who is the odd one out, who needs to find out how to pass, how to get by. I don’t see people with Parkinson’s primarily as their awkwardness or their illness. I tend to be able to see through to the person underneath whatever mask or disability they have.
"I’ve always identified with the person who is the odd one out, who needs to find out how to pass, how to get by."
Q: You said you worked earlier in hospitals. What did you do, and how did that happen?
A: I had a mentor who was a clinical psychologist. He gathered around him several artists. He collected us, and showed us how some of what we were doing could be used therapeutically. He invited us to attend his groups, in the day care facility, the mental institution, things like that, in Berkeley and Oakland. I worked for a while doing drama in a local hospital for acute care mental people. Then I worked with children in a residential home where they were attempting to treat seriously acting out children without a lot of drugs, with a lot of staff, 3-1 ratio, and a lot of physical contact and direct mental engagement with each kid. I was the drama teacher. I did plays with them and taught acting.
Q: You understand now that your background helps you work with people who are learning how to be in the world. Did you know this immediately or learn it over the years?
A: I’ve always tended to accept people how they are. Remember that the kids in the orphanage, we were all pretty crazy. We were all kids who had been in crazy homes. We were the cast-off kids of alcoholics and people that hadn’t made it in life. So I didn’t have that feeling of either revulsion or fascination with people with mental-health issues.
With Parkinson’s, it’s different in a certain sense. When I started working with Parkinson’s, I was in my late 40s. I started working with people who were 20-30 years older than me. All of a sudden, I was surrounded in my classroom with people who had already completed their careers. In Berkeley a lot of Parkinson’s people are retired professors or doctors. These are folks who have made it in the world. I was useful to them. I got their approval, their interest, even their affection.
I was getting a lot of my parenting needs met. And, with my history, I have a big parenting deficit in my life. In a sense, I found the perfect right livelihood, where I was able to be helpful to people who could help me. They would shower me with approval, just beamed me up the way parents do. I felt like I got a major contribution to my emotional and psychological health through choosing this work. Isn’t that pretty amazing? I was guided into this kind of work to heal the biggest wound of my life.
"In a sense, I found the perfect right livelihood, where I was able to be helpful to people who could help me."
Q: If someone had told you coming out of the Navy what your life would be like, what would you have said?
A: At that point, when I just got out of the Navy, I had pretty well identified what I wanted to do with my life. The grownups I knew and admired most as I was growing up were my teachers. I decided to be a teacher. At 21 or 22, I thought to myself, where are you happiest? Where do you feel best? I felt happiest in the classroom; at some point in my childhood I began to shine in the classroom. I’ve been a teacher all my life.
Q: Who was your first influential teacher?
A: The priests at the orphanage in western Oklahoma. In particular, there was Father Girard Nathan (OSB). Basically we were kept by the nuns. But there was one priest who headed up the orphanage. It was a farm orphanage; we all did farm work. I saw Father Girard on a tractor quite a lot.
Q: What did you learn from him?
A: I’ll tell you a story. That’s probably easiest. At harvest time, when they’d harvest the corn, there would always be ears of corn that dropped to the ground throughout the field. Father Girard got all the little boys down by that field and gave us each a bushel basket, and said, you get a dime for every bushel basket of corn you glean. So we went out gleaning, filling our baskets as fast as we could and hurrying them back to get our dime. We kept this going as the sun went down. We were barely able to see anymore.
Exhausted, we traipsed back up to the main building to find that we had missed the dinner bell. Here you had 8-10 boys, all around 10-11 years old. Since we’d missed the dinner bell, we’d missed dinner. The nun wouldn’t let us in the dining room. We went back up to Father Girard’s house, which was unheard of, 200 yards up the road, and told him about it. He by then had changed out of his farm clothes and was wearing his cassock, a long floor-length black gown, and was reading.
Well, he headed back off down the road to the main building, with all us little boys dancing around him, walking so fast that we were all running – these long strides with his long black cassock. And we got into dinner. He just said so, no bones about it.
Q: He cared about you.
A: He cared about work. He cared about being fair. He would bend the rules when justice demanded it. And he would stand up to the nuns; we were all terrified of the nuns.
Q: Those were all good lessons to learn.
A: Oh, yeah. I feel grateful for an awful lot that I learned there.
Q: This is probably a good segue to ask about your own sense of spirituality and how you see it reflected in your work.
A: What makes work delightful to me is I always feel better at the end of my class than when I began it. I get something from every class. That’s proof positive to me that I’m in the right line of work. If you feel better at the end of the day then when you started, you must be doing something right.
My work is about serving others. I find that when I forget myself and focus just on what my students need, where they’re at, what I can bring, what need I can answer, I do my best work. Something comes through me. How does that relate spiritually? To me, spirituality implies service.
Q: How would you describe your practice? Do you go to church? Create a spiritual space in the morning?
A: My practice is to rise early and to sit without turning on the lights. For maybe 45 minutes, I reflect on my life and let the dawn come up around me. I gradually see the world comes in as the light increases. My mind seems to work at its very best in this moment, so I’ll take a notebook and assign tasks if they float into my mind.
My other time, which I’ve been practicing for the 10 years I’ve lived in my current home, is to take a walk for about an hour in the afternoon in a large cemetery, which serves as our local park. I’ve learned all the paths in that cemetery. I’ve learned a lot of the names, too. Sometimes I’ve gotten interested in a particular tombstone and looked up who that person was. I’ve gotten to know the gardeners. I sometimes think this is a melancholy place to get your exercise. But it suits me. Sometimes I think of the Memento Mori meditations you find in Christianity and in Buddhism, to remember death, that life is not permanent, and that what you have is the present moment. And also to live a good life, to use your life to create good in the world, to make the world a better place. That seems to be the message of my local graveyard. What people record on gravestones are their family relationships, their contributions to the world around them, a line of verse.
"...remember that life is not permanent, and that what you have is the present moment. ...live a good life, use your life to create good in the world."
Q:I’ve just been reading about how the ancients integrated death much more into life.
A: One problem of working with people with Parkinson’s, who are 20-30 years older than you, is that your students die before you do. That’s not quite usual for most teachers. Most teachers are teaching the young. I love my people. They’re with me for a good, long part of their lives. To see their courage and walk this path with them is a real privilege. But then they’re gone. Part of what I do while walking is remember them.
In my spiritual world I didn’t connect with any religion. I did a lot of religious stuff as a child. I started high school as a priesthood student. But somewhere along the way I figured out that celibacy was not going to be part of my path. Then I got seriously antireligious. I developed a big interest in Zen in graduate school, and practiced ZaZen for 10 years or so. I wasn’t particularly good at Za-Zen. So I went into studying Tai Chi. I started thinking Tai Chi was a spiritual practice, but also it would strengthen my body, so I could sit longer. I found I could get into as meditative a state as I was moving in Tai Chi as I could sitting still.
Eventually, I coined the term for myself of jackhammer Zen. I don’t want to retreat from the world. I want to be in the jackhammer world. I want to walk the walk where the noise and the pressure are high, and not feel that I have to go off into a closet to hear the message from a power greater than myself. I should be able to hear it at the moment of crisis. And, often, I do.
"I don’t want to retreat from the world. I want to be in the jackhammer world."
That’s I.T.
For more on the John Argue Method, or about John’s book, Parkinson’s Disease and the Art of Moving (New Harbinger Publications, 2000), or about his exercise and movement DVDs, Parkinson’s Disease and the Art of Moving and Parkinson’s Disease and the Activities of Daily Living, please visit his website, http://www.parkinsonsexercise.com/ .
THE OTHER EVENING, WHILE OUT FOR A RUN, I CAME ACROSS A NEIGHBOR and her three, little cherubim daughters going up to a nearby woods to leave rose petals and cookies for the fairies for the summer solistice. Made sense. In these dense, misty June evenings, the world is thick with possibility. If nature can produce fireflies, with their strange, flashes of fluorescent yellow-green, why not fairies?
Plants, fed by early-summer heat and humidity, seem to grow at will this time of year. A vine will reach down and snag you when you're out for a walk, if you're not careful. Back home, the tomato plants are exploding over their baskets, the first fruit taking shape – tennis-ball-size early girls, long-teary-eye plums, squat, chubby heirlooms, perfect, round little cherries. The basil, impatient (“Good luck if you think we’re going to wait for the tomatoes”), is practically begging to be harvested. The roses are on their second of what likely will be a continuous series of blooms running well into autumn. They give the lie to the old line about the bloom being off the rose (“Just wait; more’s coming”).
Surprises often lurk in early summer’s possibilities. A handful of lettuce plants, having managed to survive the winter’s snows, have been supplying salad greens for a few weeks now. Nearby, potato plants are elbowing their way into the masses of bush beans, their long, vine-y arms clamoring up above the beans to get their share of sunlight (“Us, too!”). How these volunteers got over there, who knows. Last season, the potatoes were on the other side of the garden.
A family of foxes has taken up residence just up the road. A friend posted onto Facebook a photo of a mother deer and two fawn breakfasting in her yard. Groundhogs, skunks, and possum make daily rounds.
It’s not quite a Disneyesque peaceable kingdom. The other morning, walking to work, I was stopped by a shower of feathers floating down from the sky. In wonder (“A sun shower of feathers?”), I looked up and saw a red-tail hawk, high up in a tree, making a meal of a blue jay. A few days earlier, a young eagle swooped in front of me across the new path along the Hudson River while I was out on a run, an awe-inspiring vision from one of my favorite poems come to life (“air, pride, plume, here, Buckle!” Hopkins, “The Windhover”).
Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss the possibility of possibility in our own lives. The pileups of missteps, mistakes, setbacks, and traumas can condition us to decide that things will never change; this is just our fate, same-as-it-ever-was. But nature tells us differently. Change is the constant; you just need to grab on.
The ancients knew this. A few weeks ago, I went to an Open Center lecture in the city on Algonquin spiritual traditions. It felt frankly odd in the moment, getting smudged with sage smoke, listening to a Native American chant, while looking out a window onto Manhattan (nee Mannahatta) street of honking taxis, rumbling trucks, and on-the-make executives.
But the night’s ideas have stayed with me. The Algonquin spiritual world was thick with spiritual forces: Geezoolgh, the supreme being; Kitche Minitou, the great spirit/mystery; Kichelamukong, who “dreams us into being”; the 12 levels of the clouds; the grandmothers and grandfathers of the four directions; regional spirits; mother earth; animal spirits; ancestral land spirits; et. al.
Spirits were not “out there” but active presences. They guided you toward principles like Tchichan Kweewee (literally, “great spirit, watch over me”), being open and trusting of the world and finding inner peace wherever you are, and Madnach Afulams (“right way to live”), learning skills and tools to make your way through life.
Serendipitously, this idea that nature is not apart from us but with us, and within us, also came up this week in readings I’ve been doing on Celtic spirituality. The Celts believed nature was an animating force. “I arise today, through the strength of heaven, light of sun, radiance of moon, splendor of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of wind, depth of sea, stability of earth, firmness of rock,” proclaims “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” one of the oldest Celtic prayers.
To the ancient Celts, writes John O’Donohue, nature was both “presence and companion.” Within nature, the Celts drew nourishment and felt their “deepest belonging and affinity.” The experience of nature engendered “warmth and wonder.”
Joseph Campbell says the goal of life is to “match your nature with Nature.” “Follow your bliss,” his famous dictum, begins with journeying within. “Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain,” says Campbell. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again and again.”
Sometimes, that can mean just stopping and taking life in. I never realized until recently that the oft-quoted epigram at the end of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” – “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – a favorite go-for-it, just-do-it challenge of life coaches – in fact, follows a description of a quiet day strolling through fields, falling down into grass, and asking open-ended questions (“Who made the world…the swan…the bear?”). The day’s highlight is watching a grasshopper “eating sugar out of my hand.” “Tell me,” the poem asks, “what else should I have done?” Sometimes, the call is not to do but to just pay attention.
That’s I.T.
For the full text of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” click here.
For the full text of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover,” click here.
The excerpt from “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” and quote from John O’Donohue are from O’Donohue’s winsome book Anum Cara. For more information or to buy a copy, click here. A fuller version of “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” appears in Thomas Cahill’s wonderful How the Irish Saved Civilization; for more information, or to buy a copy, click here.
The lecture on Algonquin spirituality was part of a series by Evan Pritchard at the Open Center. For more, visit his website; click here. For more on the Open Center, click here.
SOMETIMES NOSTALGIA ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK IT WILL BE. Going back to West Richmond Friends Meeting, the sturdy, old church I grew up in, the memory that often comes up first is about the Kinks.
Yes, those Kinks. The raucous, anti-authoritarian, 1960s British rock band. It was at West Richmond Friends that I first heard the Kinks.
I’m not sure exactly how it happened. My recollection is that my Sunday-school class had been turned over that week to two girls in the high-school group. After finishing the lesson, they decided to spin some of their LPs.
I don’t remember what they played. What I do recall is a room full of 10- and 11-year-old mop-tops bouncing up and down like the kids in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
And I remember what I thought: “These Quakers are cool.” It wasn’t the first time the idea came to me. And it wouldn’t be the last.
Within a few years, it inspired me to don a black armband, skip school, and join a group of Quakers on National Road West to protest the war – no small act in a town that was, and remains, heavily Republican. Over the years, it’s inspired me in other leaps of faith.
And it’s kept me coming back to Quaker meeting. Some people go to their place of worship for the experience’s predictability, the constancy of the rhythms and ritual. I prefer the surprise of the experience.
The open, expansive silence of Quaker worship, in which themes emerge through the collective, mystical grappling of the group, and anyone can speak (or, more accurately, be “spoken through”), is, to me, an adventure. I never know what I’ll find in meeting for worship – within myself (the insights and images that come up, particularly after the initial period of settling down), or within others’ messages (which, amazingly, often synchronize with what’s coming up for me that week). Or the stories I hear before and after meeting.
This surprise-inside has come to be a measuring-stick for me for all spiritual experiences, from visits to other churches and synagogues, to 12-step meetings, workshop retreats, yoga talks, or morning meditation on the train into the city. That may sound a bit unusual. Religion is often portrayed as a force of conservatism, the never changing “rock of ages.”
I side, instead, with the 20th-century Quaker leader Rufus Jones (pictured), who argued for an “open, expectant” religion that would spur “hope and faith and vision,” over “comfortable formulations that seem to ensure safety” and “endeavoring to coin repetitive phrases.”
Experience encouraged me to pay attention at meeting. From Friends, I learned early on that it’s possible to pack up your worldly possessions and go off to China to become an educator, or to Kenya to teach business management to local crafts groups – revelations that encouraged me to envision a larger life than I otherwise might. I still remember one speaker pointing on a world map to where she’d been. I never looked at a map the same way again.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that the most important gift of a spiritual community to its young is the often-surprising stories of "how" people live out their beliefs, more than the “what” of the Bible stories, commandments, etc. When kids in meeting grow up, I hope that the first memory that comes to mind isn’t a detail, like that certain Quaker beliefs spell “SPICES” (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship).
I hope, instead, they remember a story of how people put those ideas into practice. Like how Rosa, a woman in our meeting, went to court to try to win the right to not have her tax dollars go to war. Or how Horst, another member, saw a parallel between the Quaker concept of Light and the light he created, in his work as an engineer, in vast, tensile structures like the Denver airport. Or how a college student and adult in our meeting recently flew to Latin America to help facilitate workshops for the Alternatives to Violence Project.
It said a lot to me about the openness of the meeting I grew up in that it trusted the teens enough to let them put on a record. In its own, idiosyncratic way, it created a sense of openness and expectance in the 11-year-old me.
Periodically, religions have back-to-basics turns. It can mean anything from clamping down on “looseness” in vocal ministry to rejecting influences outside the religious tradition in Sunday-school lessons.
But, from my experience, it’s a balancing act. This came home a few years ago when a prolonged wrangle over whether infants should be permitted in meeting for worship was resolved when a beloved older Friend declared that the recent burbling of babies was one of the most life-affirming messages he’d ever heard in meeting.
You never know what will connect with someone. It may be that the shaggy-haired radical preaching peace and love, and making the grown-ups uncomfortable, is carrying an electric guitar and has a beat you can dance to.
That’s I.T.
This post was set in motion by a “Quaker Dialogue Series” initiated by the First-Day School in my Friends Meeting (Purchase, NY). Over successive Sundays, adults in the meeting were invited to come in to meet with the kids (ages 7-14) and address six questions:
(1) “What was First Day School like when you were a child? (or, for those who came to Quakerism as an adult, “what led you to meeting?”); (2) “What is it about meeting that keeps you coming back?”; (3) “What does being a Quaker mean to you?”; (4) “How does silent worship strengthen your faith?”; (5) “How do you handle feelings or thoughts that may be in conflict with Quaker beliefs?”; (6) “If you have experience with another faith, do you find more similarities or differences between it and Quakerism?”
They’re great questions, not only for breakfast discussions but to just think about on your own. I was the interviewee two weeks ago. As it turned out, I never got to tell the Kinks story. The kids were more interested in my experiences on clearness committees, Quakers’ tradition of assembling a group to ask you questions to discern whether you’re “clear” about a decision you want to make; couples often are asked to go before a clearness committee before marrying. The consensus of the kids was that clearness committees could be useful for family decisions like whether to get a pet and who’d care for the pet. One boy suggested he’d be happy to take care of petting the dog's head, and his sibling could handle the business at the other end.
Also, I believe the Kinks record I heard all those years ago was “The Kinks’ Greatest Hits” (1966, pictured above). I found a copy a few years ago at a tag sale and, have to say, it's still pretty danceable.
FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, SINCE SEEING THE REMARKABLE new film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet Cave in France, an image has been haunting me. It’s not the hundreds of beasts – bison, lions, rhinos, horses, et. al. – rendered with the stunning sophistication that prompted Picasso to marvel of a similar set of paintings at Lascaux, “they’ve invented everything.”
Nor is it the cave's painting of a Minotaur-like creature, with a head of a bison on a human body - though that image has recalibrated the myth’s frame of reference for me. Apparently what I always thought of as an ancient Greek image was ancient to the Greeks, too.
Nor is it the age of Chauvet's paintings, carbon-dated to 32,000 years ago, roughly double the age of the previously oldest known cave paintings - almost 1,800 generations old (assuming 18 years per generation), or about 600 grandparent-parent-child family portraits laid end to end.
What stopped me was the image of a hand, outlined in ochre-red paint on the wall at Chauvet. When I saw it, I thought: I know that hand. There are two such hands on my bureau, small, delicate clay sculptures my children created decades ago for elementary-school art projects. In each hand, I keep a small object – in one, a card that says “release,” in the other, a stone with the inscription “serenity” – my wishes as my son and daughter move into the world. Periodically, as circumstances shift, I move the objects from one hand to the other, offering a prayer that a power greater than myself will see through my adult-experience-borne skepticism and respond.
Scientists debate what the Chauvet Cave hands mean; the cave was only discovered 17 years ago. But, from the reading I’ve done since seeing Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a point of view is emerging. And it’s not so different from my bureau-top ritual.
The handprints – there are literally hundreds, bearing the imprint of men, women, children, even babies – appear to have been a ritual of entry. In pressing their hands to the cave wall, the visitors likely believed themselves to be “palping” the rock “in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force behind it.”
Caves were sacred spaces, sanctuary from the outside world and gateways to deeper, spiritual connection. One source compares the caves to twelfth-century churches. Like the great cathedrals, the caves satisfied familial, communal, and individual needs; people knew and were drawn to them. “For a nomadic people, living at nature’s mercy, it must have been a powerful consolation to know that such a refuge from flux existed,” writes Judith Thurman, in a 2008 New Yorker article that inspired filmmaker Werner Herzog to make Cave of Forgotten Dreams.Cave painters were, in effect, “sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.”
Jean Clottes, the French archaeologist who for many years led the exploration of the Chauvet Cave, thinks the cave paintings should force a rethinking of early humans. Rather than Homo sapiens, the wise, rational man, he contends, we are, in fact, “Homo spiritualis.” “The ability to make tools defines us less than the need to create belief systems,” Clottes says.
All of which, it seems, has implications for us today. In engaging in spiritual practice – praying, meditating, chanting, preaching, singing, making offerings, taking communion, listening to spiritual teachers – we are, in effect, following in footsteps going back 32,000-plus years. Like the hands on the walls, we are reaching toward the unknown for structures to contain an endless universe; narratives to connect us with our fellow beings, creatures, and environment; lessons to make sense of the past, the future, and our place in the present moment.
For someone like me, who appreciates history – that, since 1723, Quakers have been gathering for silent worship on the grounds where I go to meeting each Sunday; that Quakers have been around since the mid-1600s; and that Quakerism is an offshoot of a religion (Christianity) that has evolved over 2,000 years – the notion of spiritual practices reaching back 32,000-plus years is, well, a bit mind-blowing.
It makes me wonder:
Is what’s important not the labels we go by – Quaker, Buddhist, Unitarian (to name some that an online “find your religion” poll recently affixed to me) – but that we are following a deeply embedded, 32,000-plus-year-long path?
To the extent that we attach ourselves to a contemporary religious label, are we cutting ourselves off from a longer human lineage, and, in the process, denying ourselves a potential source of consolation and strength? Are we isolating ourselves from nature at a time when – given the vast destruction humans have wreaked on the environment – we should be deepening that connection?
Does the depth of human spiritual practice – that people have been seeking the sacred for 32,000-plus years – mean that there’s something within spirituality that humans inherently need; that, despite the protestations of the atheist movement, that there’s something in this tradition that can’t be undone?
Instead of focusing on this or that belief, should we instead concentrate on how we live our lives – reforming religion to lift up those in need, seek justice, create peace, offer comfort, prevent war, “walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone” (in the words of George Fox, Quakerism's founder), and, as the Dalai Lama says, profess that “my religion is kindness”?
That’s I.T.
For more on Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, click here. To view the film's trailer, click on the video below.
For more on the Chauvet Cave, including taking a tour, click on the French government’s site here.
For Judith Thurman’s wonderful New Yorker story, “First Impressions: What Does the World’s Oldest Art Say About Us?” published June 23, 2008, click here. Most of the quotes above on Chauvet are from her article.
Yes, I considered invoking the pun "the handwriting on the wall." But I thought it'd be better if you thought of it first.
HOW DO YOU KNOW IT’S A TRUE CALLING? Gregg Levoy, author of the book Callings, ran down the list of what he was told by people who’d found an authentic vocation. “True callings keep coming back.” “It scared the daylights out of me.” It had enthusiasm, in the original sense of the word, “en theos,” the god within. “It felt right.” “It had integrity.” The call came from many different channels, creating a "clustering effect."
By Monday morning, after the three-day workshop at Omega Institute had ended, and we’d scattered back home, what stuck most for me was not a word, or phrase, or story, or tip, but an image. Gregg, a shaggy, easygoing former newspaper reporter whose persona invites a first-name basis, asked us to start a dream journal that weekend. The first night was a blank for me. Nada. But the second night, I caught one.
In the dream, I am driving in the country in a foreign land. Open, green landscape sweeps out in all directions. Suddenly the road comes to an end. Ahead lies what looks to be a four-lane superhighway under construction. To the left, gravel has been laid; the road will be rough, but passable. To the right, it’s just grass. Aware that I’m taking a risk, I instinctively ease to the left and onto the new road.
Gregg promised that the weekend would produce “a ton of data.” He wasn’t kidding. I came back with 46 journal pages thick with notes. I'd developed a 12-item “to do” list of things I can do in the next few weeks to get a new venture off the ground (yes, I’ve started); a 10-item list of people and resources that I can draw on; a 7-item list of what I stand to gain; and an 8-item list of reasons to say “yes” to the calling (aka "the voice of yes").
I also got a clearer understanding of obstacles: an 11-item list of the challenges before me (aka “the voice of no”); a 4-item list of sacrifices I can anticipate; and a 2-item list of negative responses I can expect from people. (Yes, the latter was surprisingly light. Most of my friends, I realized, will probaby say, "It's about time!"). There were also analytical insights – a 25-question, rapid-fire inventory of questions ranging from what I’ve enjoyed most in life, to the book I’d like most to write, to my parents’ unfulfilled dreams.
While some of the resulting material did not surprise me (e.g. I love the work, see value in it, and have time in this stage of life to carve out for it), a lot was unexpected. Some of it was nice; one of my resources was “nature.” Some haunted. Did my mom’s dropping out of college in the Great Depression to take a job to help her family, and going on to become a secretary at a college rather than her dream of being a professor, plant the nagging doubt in me to choose security over aspirations?
But the dream struck the deepest chord. In its strange, imagistic way, it’s defined where I’m at (the end of a road) and where I’m headed (onto a new, probably bumpier road, in a strange land) in a way that will be hard to shake.
In his book, Gregg (pictured) describes how an indigenous tribe in Asia has trained itself to shape its responses in dreams. When they have a dream of being chased, rather than run away, “they turn and face their pursuer” and ask what message it brings. “That is the heart of dream work,” Gregg says. In the words of a dowser he once met, who consistently found water where engineers could not, it’s searching beyond what can be understood with “the normal five senses.”
Serendipitously, on returning home, I came across an interview with the Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue. In it, he describes dreams as “sophisticated, imaginative” texts that speak to a capacity we have within us to envision larger, fuller lives. O’Donohue deems it one of the “debilitating” tragedies of our time that the inner, invisible world has been overtaken by the outer, material world. “I feel there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times,” he says.
We need to learn to draw back inside ourselves. It is there that we’ll find beauty, which in our media-centric world has become mistaken for glamour. There, we see, in O’Donohue’s words, that “the visible world is the first shoreline of the invisible world”; that the “body is in the soul, not the soul in the body”; and “a human being…is the place where the invisible becomes visible and expressive.”
There’s great power in the interior world. O’Donohue quotes Nelson Mandela, who, on his release from decades of imprisonment, said, “What we are afraid of is not so much our limitations but the infinite within us.” Or, as Yeats said, “in dreams begin responsibility.”
That’s I.T.
For more on Gregg Levoy and his work on callings, visit his website; click here. For more on his book, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, click here. The book, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, has been named one of the top careers books – a fact my thrice-read, dog-eared, underlined, Post-It-marked copy attests to.
The interview with John O’Donohue, “The Inner Landscape of Beauty,” was with Krista Tippett for her program Speaking of Faith (now called Being). You can listen to it, or obtain a transcript, by clicking here. It was one of the last interviews with O’Donohue before he died, all too soon, in his sleep at age 52 – and one of the most perfect interviews I’ve ever heard.
FOR TWO YEARS IN MY 20S, I WORKED AS A REPORTER FOR a small, weekly newspaper in northern California. Geographically, it was a modest enterprise, extending about 20 miles north-south, and from the coast to a few miles inland. But within it were the most fascinating people – hippies, ranchers, activists, artists, eccentrics, oyster farmers, rock stars, old Italian families.
Every week turned up amazing stories – from heated protests against offshore oil drilling to recipes for barbecuing oysters; from a local angle on the repressive Pol Pot regime in Cambodia to the wild politics of California pot growing; from new ideas for preserving farmland to a breakthrough first novel from a writer who has gone onto great fame.
Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting in this space with creating a small-town newspaper approach to spirituality, both in the workplace and in my actual, physical community, through Q&A’s with people doing interesting, spiritual work, and personal essays on my travels through New York. At times it seems like a far-fetched venture – particularly when I glance over to the file cabinet drawer holding the bills coming due.
But a series of messages this week has made me wonder whether the question that’s been holding me back – how do you pay the mortgage? – frames it all wrong. Better, instead, to ask: What do you really need?
Bill Cunningham is one of the most important people in the world of fashion. And he’s done it, basically, with just three things: A camera, a bicycle, and an unwavering interest in fashion. For decades, Cunningham, now in his 80s, has been bicycling up and down Manhattan, photographing fashion in the street and among society’s elites for two weekly photo features for the Sunday New York Times (“On the Street” and “Evening Hours”).
He leads a monk’s life. For most of his career, he lived in a modest artist’s apartment above Carnegie Hall with no kitchen and a communal bathroom. His apartment mostly served as storage space and crash pad. File cabinets of photos and negatives dominated the space. He slept on a mattress stacked on storage crates.
Money? Not important. “Money’s the cheapest thing. Freedom is most important,” he cheerfully declares in Bill Cunningham New York, an absolutely revelatory new film on his life and work. Material comfort? “Who the hell wants a kitchen and bathroom?” He patches his discount-priced rain poncho with duct tape. He wears a sturdy, utilitarian, blue French street-sweeper’s jacket (bought on work trips to France). He goes for simple bikes (sometimes used) – a good thing, since, by his count, he’s had 29 bikes stolen over the years.
Cunningham goes to church. But his spirituality – what breathes life into him – is his work. He has passionate points of view. “The best fashion show is in the street. Always has been. Always will be.” And clear ideas about approach. “I let the street speak to me. There are no shortcuts…. It isn’t what I think, it’s what I see.” He has a philosophy. “It’s as true today as it ever was: He who seeks beauty will find it.” And a political perspective. He’s championed outsiders from ‘60s hippies to the gay pride parade to whatever is in the moment with youth.
While he’s witty in an old-Boston way (reflecting his family’s roots), and charming (confirmed by a neighbor of mine in her 60s who has worked with Cunningham, who says he always calls her “Child!”), Cunningham has a gimlet-eye realism. “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.” He has a reputation for integrity. He once quit a magazine job after an editor changed the slant of a story to make fun of his everyday subjects (which mortified him). He refuses food, drink or any kind of favor on the job. But, he allows, “to be honest and straight in New York, that’s Don Quixote tilting at windmills.”
And he has fun. He’s been interested in fashion seemingly forever. He jokes at one point that he spent most of his time in church as a child “looking at women’s hats.” He made women’s hats for a while before going into journalism. “I don’t work,” he says. “I only know how to have fun every day.”
Charles Mingus, one of jazz’s legends – for, among other things, his temper (at the Village Vanguard jazz club, he once got so mad, he thrust his bass up in the air, smashing the light above him; the fixture ever after was known as “the Mingus light”) – added a coda in a film I saw a few nights later. “Play yourself,” he would tell his musicians. Don’t be someone else. “Be who you are.”
It’s altogether too easy to focus on obstacles instead of following the rules of Mingus (“play yourself”) and Cunningham (“freedom is the most important thing”). For his book Callings, Gregg Levoy created a list of “strategies of non-compliance” with callings that I love (and regularly need to be reminded of). They range from “waiting for the Perfect Moment” (aka my good friend once the mortgage’s paid off…); to “hiding behind the tasks of discernment” (as in, just one more workshop…); “telling yourself lies” (I’m just not [fill in the blank] enough…); “distracting yourself with other activities” (hello, email…); “turning a call into a Big Project, intimidating yourself into paralysis”; “choosing a path parallel to the one you feel called to”; “self-sabotage”; “playing sour grapes”; and convincing yourself you’re “unworthy” of a project. For the most part, these are just stories we tell ourselves.
Sometimes, says Judith Pruess, in a Friends Journal article passed along to me recently, we delude ourselves into being “too practical.” We figure out lines of work we can enter “without too much trouble,” which pay the rent and hold “some” interest. We fall into the “trap of compromising ourselves for money” rather than focusing on the “single most important task in life” – what to do with our “one precious life.”
These are not new ideas. Pruess’ article was written in 1996, Levoy’s book in 1997. Digging around on the Internet, I found a 2002 first-person story by Bill Cunningham in The Times saying many of the same things he does in the new film. Levoy quotes the warning against self-deception by Simone Weil (1909-1943), “The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that by a lie it should persuade itself it is not hungry.” Hundreds of years before Bill Cunningham, Shakespeare’s Hamlet proclaimed, “Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.” Samuel Johnson said, “Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”
Last year, researching a paper for seminary, I came across a snippet of a quote from the journal of the 17th-century Quaker businessman. Having “got a little money” from his work, “a little being enough,” Thomas Chalkley writes that he’s decided to devote the next period of his life to spiritual work and service.
How much is “a little money”? What’s “enough”? The answers, it seems, lie less in what we have to pay than what we have to do.
That’s I.T.
For more on the film Bill Cunningham New York, including to view the trailer, click here. To see Cunningham’s recent work – including video clips combining his smart, and often beautifully captured photos, with his whimsical commentary – visit The New York Times resource on his work; click here. (The movie poster and photos of Bill Cunningham in this article are from the movie website; the "On the Street" logo is from The Times' website.) For a 2002 first-person article by Cunningham in The Times, "Bill on Bill," click here. Warning: some of The Times articles may not be available to non-subscribers.
For more on 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz, produced by the BBC, from which the Mingus quote was taken, click here. The film appears to be coming to the U.S. in limited distribution, and hopefully will be available in video soon. Covering four of the seminal albums of all-time – Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, Mingus’ Ah-Um, and Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz to Come – it’s a good starting point for educating yourself on modern jazz.
For more on Gregg Levoy’s book Callings, or to buy a copy, click here.
“HOW OLD IS THAT KID?” We were four miles into the Leatherman’s Loop trail race Sunday, running through a woods in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Westchester County, NY, when the guy next to me asked the question. “Good question,” I replied, and turned back to ask. “Hey, how old areyou?”
And in an instant – just as our tow-headed, skinny, young friend chirped “11!” and we marveled back “Wow!” “Nice job!” – it happened. My left foot hooked under a tree root and I toppled forward like a felled tree – knees, chest, elbows, hands – in the first of what turned out to be three full-frontal face-plants. Luckily, I had an all-dirt landing; no rocks. I got up, made a joke (“Well, that’s out of the way”), and started anew.
Rule #1 of trail running says you never, ever take your eye off the trail in front of you. But in 6.2 miles fording up-to-your-chest stream crossings, crossing suck-your-shoes-off mud flats, scrambling up and down hills, and hopping over more fallen trees, rocks and roots than you could imagine, at some point, inevitably, you forget.
Falling is part of the experience. It wasn’t the first time recently that I heard that idea. A week before, going to church with my dad and brother in Indiana, we heard it in the Easter Sunday sermon. An “unwillingness to fall” is normal, the pastor said; no one likes to fall. But falling is “the central truth of the Christian gospel”: “Life springs from death,” not only in the Christian belief in resurrection but from “the many little deaths” of life. My friend Bill, who is Jewish, says the larger spiritual lesson of death-and-rebirth has made Easter his favorite Christian holiday.
In falling, we come face-to-face with our smallness. And that’s OK. We gain humility (I love that "humble" and "humus" -- dirt -- have the same root). We learn. We move forward.
In his new book, In the Valley of the Shadows, Biblical scholar James Kugel calls this recognition of smallness the starting point of belief. “Religion is first of all about fitting into the world.” We may think we're masters of our destiny. But we’re still subject to forces we can’t really conceive. And, in our “modern, clumsy” way, we moderns are in some ways less adept at relating to those forces than people in ancient times. Faced with the unexpected (as Kugel was, with a cancer diagnosis that, fortunately, he survived), we realize like the author of Psalm 102 that “all things tatter and fade like a garment” in the face of a power that stays “the same,” whose “years never end.”
There’s always something larger. As the singer-songwriter Steve Earle says in the song that seems the centerpiece of his new album, “God ain’t me.” It’s not an easy concept to grasp in New York, where people can seem so big and the world so small. It’s one reason I go back to the farm country in Indiana where my family's from; you can almost feel history unpeel there, today’s sights and sounds giving way to the Great Depression and my Dad and his brothers damming the nearby stream to go swimming; travelers on the Civil War-era underground railroad stealing their way to freedom across these fields to the Quaker safe houses in New Garden; and hundreds of years earlier, Native Americans coming to the swampy woods here to hunt. Sometimes it all seems to be alive at once -- a feeling that is as awe-inspiring as any I know.
Being small means surrendering, at least once in a while. Try as we may, we can’t control everything. "We're not in the outcomes business," as a friend says. That pretty much describes Sunday's face-plant #2. Coming down the last little slope of the race, I carefully put my foot down into gloppy, black mud – and the foot just slid back and I went down with a plop. I laughed again, and looked around. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. The mud felt all right.
So we try with our might but remember above all to enjoy the day (hello again, Ecclesiastes). That essentially seemed to be the message before the race from Danny Martin, the former Catholic priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual director. He urged the runners to look on the day as an exercise in sustainability: All the environmental good works we do will mean nothing if we don't take the wonder of the earth into our hearts. It was a fitting preamble to the Irish/Navajo blessing he then led us in, that there is beauty before us, behind us, below us, above us, and within us.
An hour later, arriving at the last, largest, deepest stream crossing, aka the “Splashdown,” just short of the finish line, it seemed only right, then, to end the day not with a ginger wading-across but -- why not?! -- to instead stretch my arms high, let out a "whoop!" and take a big, arcing water-face-planting dive forward…
That’s I.T.
For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, click here. Coverage of this year's race, including photos, are on the site. The Navajo/Irish blessing is in the FAQ section. Or go back to my Feb. 27 post, "A Spring-Seeking Blessing" which quotes it (amazing how this year's endless winter did turn to spring); click here.
To read the full transcript of "Our Own Resurrection," the Easter Sunday message at West Richmond Friends (IN) Meeting, delivered by Kelly Burk, director of religious life at Earlham College, click here. The quotation she cited is from the book Leaving Church, by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.
For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadows, or to buy a copy, click here.
For more on Steve Earle's new album, "I'll Never Get Out of this Life Alive," or to buy a copy, click here. To view Joan Baez's cover of "God Is God," click here.
I'D JUST TURNED THE CORNER ONTO ELLIOT ROAD ON an 8-mile run from my Dad’s farm to the Indiana High Point Wednesday evening when that strange sensation returned. I did a quick inventory. Nothing actually wrong. No pains or strains. Just a feeling of lightness. Then it hit me. Right. I was experiencing happiness.
Sealing the conclusion: I’d started singing along with the Springsteen song on my iPod (“I ain’t here on business, baby, I'm only here for fun…”). And my hands jet-winged out as I turned the corner, then started keeping time like a backup singer in an old Motown video.
My mind drifted to wondering if Shakespeare had, in fact, gotten it right in the sonnets, that in midlife, with its attendant maturity, sadness, and clear-eyed realism (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red, than her lips red…”), happiness does not recede but grows more precious and real.
How I got to this point, I don’t know. Eight months ago, hitting one of those emotional bottoms that come in middle age, I’d made a vow to get myself to a better place. We blew up the TV (OK, not exactly, more like canceled the cable service, but I’ve always loved that line from the John Prine song).
I cleared the pantry of all the foods I reflexively reached for when I felt what the Buddhists call shenpa, that “tightening, tensing, closing-down,” poisoning, hooked sensation, in the words of the author and teacher Pema Chodron, of wanting to withdraw and “not be where we are” that can be set off by an event (“someone criticizes you”) or just unease, restlessness, or “insecurity of living in a world that is always changing.”
I recommitted to meditating, and, moreover, to doing anything I could to keeping it fresh – including creating a guided meditation playlist of Motown songs. (Amazing, when you listen, how Psalms-like certain songs are – “As I walk this land of broken dreams, I have visions of many things…” What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?)I started reading more; started training more – running, biking, swimming; tried yoga (ha); stopped drinking; tried to reach out more to friends and family...and other things.
But I can't honestly say whether those resolutions were cause-and-effect to my running up Elliott Road, smiling first at the miles of rolling farmland stretching to the horizon in all directions, then at the friendly black Lab who came out to greet me, then at the cow that wandered into the road, while I occasionally snatched a lyric to sing (“you were only waiting for this moment to arise”).
Nor can I really explain the other similar feeling running a 10k in Central Park in New York the previous sunny, bloom-filled Sunday with a friend and his daughter, then joining a larger group for a walk. Or going to concerts, museums, and dinners recently. Or, back in November, running two miles of the NYC Marathon with the “running priest” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (who eventually sped ahead to make his commitment to lead a 5:30 Mass).
Which is the problem with happiness. We can do all we can to make a place for it in our lives. We can follow the self-help advice to “choose happiness.” We can pray for it. But in the end, it’s ephemeral. It comes. And it goes. There’s good reason “happiness” is so close “happenstance.” Both share the Middle English root “hap” which means “luck.” More than “pleasure,” “satisfaction,” or “joy,” happiness means “good fortune.” We can create space for it, but not expect it. When it comes, it is a surprise. One friend says he feels “attacked” by happiness. Rather than take credit, we can only give thanks.
I’ve recently started reading In the Valley of the Shadows, the new book by James Kugel, a Biblical scholar and Harvard professor. The subject is far from happiness. It’s a meditation, set off by the author’s treatment for cancer, on the meaning of religious belief. The book is strikingly self-aware and beautifully written, perhaps most memorably for its depiction of how the author describes, when he receives his diagnosis, “the background music” of life suddenly stops. Life grows silent. He experiences a primal feeling of being very, very small.
Turning to Ecclesiastes, he realizes anew that we pass through seasons of life (which, he says, translates in Ecclesiastes as “Everyone is in a season, [for] there is a time of [doing] each thing in this world” – not “for everything there is a season” of the Byrds song). But we “never quite succeed” in understanding life. There is always “something hidden.” Life, to quote the original Hebrew, is “hebel” – not so much “vanity” (“all is vanity,” as Ecclesiastes is usually translated) as a quality of being “fleeting” and “ungraspable.”
To the list of “To-Do’s” for happiness that I’ve worked through these past eight months, I’d add one more, then: try to have faith. In her book, Faith, the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg says that in Buddhism, hard times are considered “the proximate cause of faith.” If we open our hearts and minds to take in suffering, there is healing –“not because the suffering itself is redemptive or healing” but because if we open ourselves fully in the face of suffering, we let in all life – including the capacity for healing, love, joy, and happiness. One of the meanings of saddah, the word for faith in Buddhism, she notes, is hospitality.
I’ve been wondering if – in contast to the drawing inward of illness that Kugel describes, there’s a centrifugal force in happiness that propels us outward into connection. My friend who describes happiness as an attack says one of his first impulses, when he experiences happiness, is to tell someone. I wonder if it’s an impulse in all creatures. I’ve always loved how my dog, about 15 minutes into a walk, turns back and smiles. “Isn’t this great?” he seems to be saying to us. I wonder if the same thought goes through his mind when running toward a tennis ball we’ve just thrown, he suddenly breaks stride and, for no reason beyond the joy of it, leaps through the air. “Isn’t this great?”
After 40 minutes of running, I reach Hoosier Hill. In truth, while it’s the highest point in Indiana, the "peak" (1,257 ft. elevation; pictured throughout) is only an ever-so-slight incline higher than the surrounding woods and farmland. I always stop to read the logbook where “summiteers” record their impressions. There’s usually some wry humor. “Not as hard as Mt. Whitney,” note Carol and Jim from Baltimore, who have now summited 35 states' high points. “Raining. Morale low. Rations lower. But summit gained! Looking for safe descent,” quips Brooke, from Palo Alto, CA. “Failed in our first attempt to reach the summit 2 years ago. We needed help from Garmin GPS to locate,” jokes another person. “Meet me here when the levy breaks,” writes C.S.
But then I come across a different kind of message, speaking directly to happiness, and it puts a goose-bumpy coda on the week. “Happy to be here today. Tomorrow makes 2 years clean. I am truly thankful for my life. Life ain’t so shitty.” He signs his name, and then writes “Indiana boy,” then “p.s. Thanks, God!”
That’s I.T.
I’ve lab-tested this 20-minute Motown guided meditation recently, and personally have found it happiness enhancing. Who knows, you may start the day with a dance move. Here’s the list: “What Does It Take (to Win Your Love)” (Junior Walker); “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted” (Jimmy Ruffin); “Mercy Mercy Me” (the marvelous Marvin Gaye); “Tracks of My Tears” (Smokey Robinson); “What’s Going On” (Gaye); and, to end with uplift (hey, this is Motown), “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” (Marvin Gaye and Tammy Tyrell) and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Marvin & Tammy). All can be previewed on YouTube.
For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadow, or to buy a copy, click here.
For more on Sharon Salzberg’s Faith, or to buy a copy, click here.
The Puma Chodron quote is from the Shambala Sun article, “How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked.” To read the article, click here.
And for more on Hoosier Hill, the Indiana high point, click here, here, or here.
MY CELL PHONE BUZZED: “HAVE YOU HEARD FROM____?” I’ve learned through experience to be wary of text messages from people I don’t know asking for my friend’s whereabouts. So after making a quick mental checklist of the possibilities – someone looking for money? someone looking for a fight? a social worker? collection agency? – I texted back circumspectly: “Yes. Who’s this?”
“I know him from the homeless shelter. He’s a friend.” Then, seconds later, “Do you know where he’s headed?”
I didn’t have time for this. I’d just come off the train at Grand Central Station, and needed to squeeze through the rush-hour crowd and get a downtown subway to a lecture by a renowned spiritual teacher.
“Dunno,” I replied, still skeptical. “He didn’t say.” That was true. I had seen my friend the day before, to give him some things I’d been keeping for him. But he didn’t say where he was going. My guess is he didn’t know himself. “He wasn’t too communicative,” I added.
The next day, my friend resurfaced. I asked him about the texts. “Oh, yeah, that’s xxxx,” he said. “He’s been a good friend.” I changed the phone number on the texts to a name, and sent an update. “Good to hear,” xxxx replied. “Hopefully he will be good. Thanks for letting me know.”
Years of keeping company with people on both sides of alcoholism and addiction – the sufferers and the friends and family trying to detach with love – have created a reflex in me to go to dark places when I’m on unfamiliar ground. But reality is more than darkness. And that should not surprise me.
In Liberation Theology, people talk about the lessons that can be learned from those on society’s margins. The marginalized “can help cultivate a new look at the way things are.” If we learn anew “how to listen,” we can gain insights “in places where we least expect it” (Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor).
I sort of got it intellectually when I read it in seminary. But, to really get it, I had to have real-life lab practice – like seeing again last week that that friendships exist, too, among the homeless, maybe especially so. I needed to experience that a lesson can come in unexpected places, at unexpected times – including on the way to what I think is my lesson. As a friend says, “If you want to hear God laugh, make plans.”
The surprise of insight in places we least expect it came through in my reading this week, too. On the recommendation of my friend (who found solace in it during a recent stay in a drug-treatment program), I bought Grand Central Winter, Lee Stringer’s 1998 memoir of the decade he spent living on the streets of New York addicted to crack cocaine.
In some ways, the book confirmed my worst fears. Life on the streets can be predatory. There's what the author calls "the pocket incident": two men carefully cut into the pants pocket of a sleeping homeless man and make off with a wad of cash. Guys routinely con each other and the system – and assume the system does the same to them. “It’s all a hustle,” advises one of the author’s acquaintances. What outsiders think will be havens, like the homeless shelters, turn out to be riven with a “watch-your-back, watch-your-mouth, watch-out-for-number-one, jailhouse mentality.”
But it’s not all darkness. There’s a moral thread that runs through Grand Central Winter. Guys keep an eye on each other. It’s rare for someone to get lost on the streets; the homeless generally know where each other are. There's humor. There’s creativity; for a while, a group of guys keeps a large population fed on the food thrown out by the train crews because it’s passed its sell-by date. There are charitable impulses, like when Stringer tries to give a passerby a copy of Street News, the newspaper for the New York’s homeless, arguing “If I couldn’t give something to someone every now and then, wouldn’t that make me even poorer than I am?”
Most important, there’s hope. The author eventually puts down his crack pipe and goes into recovery. It’s not a clean break. He has near-misses, then relapses, leading to an epiphany, on his knees, praying for help on Dog Run Hill in Central Park, and receiving it in the form of a seemingly heaven-sent dog that dashes up the hill...sits down...and leans into him. "I break out in goosebumps," he writes. "From that second...I never, ever had another craving."
Stringer remarks that he does not know any “hardworking, moral, churchgoing, non-addicted American who would go to the lengths to which recovering addicts and alcoholics go for the sake of spiritual growth." He repeats the oft-heard wisdom in the rooms that “religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.”
On the other side of that hell, he finds that the “miraculous world” that he believed in as a child, then through “grinding disappointment” had given up on, is still present. It’s in the joy he rediscovers in his travels through the city, coming up out of the subway, seeing the day with new eyes. Most, though, it’s in the people whose stories he hears – “people who’d stopped kidding themselves” and now “took solace in revealing their weakness and pain.”
“I doubt if people are ever so profoundly attractive as when they are being honest about themselves,” he writes. “…Damned if it isn’t a miraculous world after all.”
That’s I.T.
For more on Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter, or to buy a copy, click here.
WHAT DO YOU CALL A LAPSED PRESBYTERIAN WHO makes an offering to a Buddha in her Manhattan apartment before she leaves for a business trip? Or the man who puts his Jewish identity aside for a moment when he passes St. Patrick's Cathedral to go inside and light a candle? Or the practicing Catholic who feels most spiritually connected not inside a church but sitting at Jones Beach watching the waves come in?
My answer is: Friends. People I learn from and lean on, and whom I try to reciprocate in their times of need. Fellow travelers in spiritual New York.
Over the years, they – and the many more like them in what has come to be an ever-widening circle – have come to embody a saying I love: “Your problems are only as big as your God is small.”
I tend to use the word “God” carefully. I don’t have a good, day-in-day-out, working definition of what the word means. Frankly, I hope I never do. Sure, it’d be nice if God had Louis Armstrong’s voice – and, while we’re at it, preceded every pronouncement with the 1-minute, 35-second trumpet solo that opens Louis’ version of La Vie en Rose.
And yes, in my mind’s eye, Satch is sometimes accompanied by a fleet of angels who look just like Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire, coifed in long, ponytailed hair, wearing long, dark overcoats, and quoting Rilke. Better than a burning bush.
But, in the end, some things should be beyond our creaturely grasp. Otherwise, where’s the adventure?
That said, there is a feeling that I get when I’m part of a group that is gathered in what the Buddhists call lovingkindness, Christians call “the beloved community,” and, in 12-step, is described as the healing and recovery found in the group. In these times, I feel part of something good, loving, and right that is larger than myself.
Likewise, there is a sense I get when one of those fellow pilgrims says something – be it the trembling words of worship, or a mischievous gleam over coffee – that is a wisdom I’ve known, but never heard; that is truer than I had imagined; or seems to have been plucked right from my soul. As the old Quakers said, “that Friend speaks my mind.”
At such times, I see how a more spacious spirituality can make the hardest problems seem smaller. It may not be La Vie en Rose. But it works.
This was such a week. The more I put myself out there, the more that spaciousness got played back to me. It came through in new experiences – leading a group to the East Village to join 40 New Yorkers singing (actually, often, roaring) the ever-expanding, thrumming harmonies of the rural American tradition of Sacred Harp.
There were new lessons – a lecture in lovingkindness meditation at Tibet House. (Tip: Choose 2-3 wishes. Direct them first to yourself, then extend them to others. “May I be happy. May ____ be happy.” “May I live with ease. May ____ live with ease.” “May I find peace.” “May ___ find peace.” “May I be healthy and whole. May ____ be healthy and whole.” Try it at home. Then try it in the subway, a supermarket, or walking down the street – remembering to not walk too slow. This is New York, after all.) And there were trips to familiar havens – silent worship among Friends on Sunday; three12-step meetings.
But what I’ll most remember is many conversations with friends, asking them about their practices, how they handle situations, what they lean on.
There’s a perception in the wider world that New York is a spiritually bereft city. Being the center of the financial empire (Wall Street), media empires (The Times, The Journal, the news networks), and, yes, may as well, baseball’s evil empire (the city’s beloved Yankees), the thinking goes, rules out having a spiritual center.
It’s like the conventional wisdom that I read in the press, and sometimes hear in seminary, that the loosening of Americans’ religious affiliations, and the rise of new practices like yoga and meditation, have somehow made this a less spiritually serious country. Some see us as a nation of confused, feckless spiritual grazers in need of being corrected and brought back into the fold. I don’t agree.
Rather, in the personal stories I’ve seen play out in New York, I see something close to the non-polemical, open-minded, trial-and-error building of spiritual “toolkits” that Quaker blogger Diane Reynolds, quoting recent readings of hers, wrote about last week. In the stories is a spiritual experimentation like the essay’s description of “the creative and improvisational nature of jazz,” more about “invention than perfection.”
My friend goes into the church and lights a candle because, “it can’t hurt” and, in fact, feels right. With an adult child in recovery from heroin addiction, he’s earned the right, I’m persuaded, to try whatever he thinks can help. My other friend goes to the beach because every pore in her body tells her that’s where she will find serenity; invariably, she does.
And there’s the friend who, with her mom, was attracted to the century-old Buddha they saw in the store in upstate New York. As her mother grew ill, they bought the Buddha. When her mom passed, the statue came to my friend’s apartment, where it now has a special place of honor (photo below). When she leaves the offering of coins to the Buddha before heading off to the airport, she is, in essence, redrawing her connection to her mother.
Along the way she’s acquired more Buddha’s, as well as a few Shiva’s and Ganesh’s. She carries a tiny, smiling Buddha in her purse. “It sounds silly. But it makes me feel good to know he’s there,” she laughs. “I’ll stumble across him, and feel relieved.”
In their own, idiosyncratic (the root of which literally means “mix it oneself”) ways, I’ve come to see these friends as like the early Quakers who said they knew spiritual truth “experimentally.” They’re following the Buddha’s advice to his followers to take nothing on his word, but to test everything and find truth themselves.
Their personal striving after new images seems to me not so different from the absorption, in a different age, of the ancient pre-Colombian Nahuatl metaphor flor y canto, flower and song, into Christianity – the notion that beauty is a blessing, a reflection of the divine – and that we are to respond to it with flower and song of our own.
In breathing new life into their beliefs, I think, they are enacting a conception of God that I read a year ago in seminary, and that could grow into my definition: that “God is the communion of all things fully alive.”
The journey to connection is not easy. Many of my friends these days have been to the place Dante describes when he writes, “In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” They’re proof of what the poet David Whyte, who often quotes the Dante image, says: “Every courageous life is lived in the grit and difficulty of existence.”
They have lived on the other side of the equation “there but for the grace of God go I” – the place others dread going – and have found that grace is evident – in fact, can be more abundant – on the other side. The least I can do is listen.
That’s I.T.
Steady, wise, and touched with joy and wistfulness: That's how I hear Louis Armstrong's La Vie en Rose. Have a listen by clicking here. Who knows, you, too, may hear angels sing from above. Let me know what you think -- and whether another voice or instrument better captures the Eternal to you.
I’ve written often enough about 12-step, it’s probably time for a link. Here’s one for those who interested in learning more about Al-Anon, the amazing, six-decade-old fellowship for those impacted by others’ alcoholism and addiction. Here’s a link Al-Anon/Alateen World Service Organization. It includes questions to consider if you think you or someone you know could benefit from Al-Anon, and lists for finding meetings around the country.
Given how often I write so about the silent worship of Friends, it’s also time for a link for those interested in learning more about Quakerism, my other spiritual base camp. Here are links to Friends General Conference (where you can find newcomer info and directions to meetings) and Friends Journal, the magazine of "Quaker thought and life today."
The Quaker Blog I referred to is Emerging Quaker, by Diane Reynolds, a journalist by trade, now a student at Earlham School of Religion (where I've studied). The essay I cite is “Utopia.”
Learn more about Sacred Harp by clicking here; find out about New York area sings here.
The idea that "God is the communion of all things fully alive" is from Elizabeth Johnson, in her book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. Click here to learn more.
IN SEMINARY, STUDENTS LEARN VARIOUS TERMS FOR TAKING A CHANCE ON LIFE. There's Pascal’s Wager, the 17th-century proposition that the rewards of belief are so compelling that even non-believers should give it a try (“fake it ’til you make it” in today’s parlance). Kierkegaard speaks of the leap of faith toward the eternal moment.
For my part, I prefer stories. Lately, with the turn to spring, I’ve been thinking about a great uncle who took a chance on life as it presented itself to him in the early 1900s in the farm country of Indiana. Claude Elzy Berry was a runt of a kid – 5 feet 7 inches tall and 165 pounds – from a nowhere town (Losantville, IN, current population: 257). But he finagled his way into a tryout with a baseball team.
From 1902-1917, Uncle Claude crisscrossed the country playing catcher for professional ballteams from Dallas to Louisville, the Chicago White Sox, and Indianapolis; then Cedar Rapids, Fort Worth, the Philadelphia A’s, Cedar Rapids (again), Williamsport, and Philadelphia (again). He then went west to the Pacific Coast League, playing five seasons for the San Francisco Seals, then going to Portland, OR, before spending his last seasons in Pittsburgh and Kansas City.
By the time he retired at age 37, he’d played for two major league teams – the White Sox and A’s; one of the teams in a controversial, short-lived league that tried to take on the National and American leagues (Pittsburgh of the Federal League); some of the most colorfully named teams in sport (the Dallas Griffins, Cedar Rapids Rabbits, Williamsport Millionaires, and Pittsburgh Rebels, also known as the Stogies, one of the great all-time names), and even got a couple baseball cards (two featured above).
Moreover, he piled up stories that we are still telling a century later. Like the time he bet the legendary Ty Cobb a straw hat that he’d throw Cobb out stealing second. He lost the wager when Cobb, who besides being fast was notoriously dirty, called time out after hitting his way onto first, pulled out a file, sat down on first base, and sharpened his spikes. The thoroughly spooked rookie second baseman was nowhere to be found when the ball and Cobb arrived at second.
Uncle Claude earned a measure of distinction with his game as well. While he never became a standout hitter (in baseball’s Deadball Era, hardly anyone did), he was known for his arm and ironman durability. Uncle Claude caught a staggering 167 games for the 1908 San Francisco Seals – more than most teams play today. He once caught every pitch of a 24-inning 1-0 Seals win over the Oakland Oaks. Both, so far as we know, are records that stand to this day.
Those Seals – known for their guile and wit – also captured a special place in etymological history. The first recorded use of the word “jazz” in print was a 1913 story in the San Francisco Bulletin describing the team as “full of the old ‘jazz.’” The piece went on to define “the ‘jazz’” as, “why…a little of that ‘old life,’ the ‘gin-iker,’ the ‘pep,’ otherwise known as enthusiasalum.” (To do: work enthusiasalum into a conversation with friends or colleagues.)
Uncle Claude remained the family trickster to the end of his days. According to one of the weathered clippings lovingly copied and passed down through the generations, he once carried around a $10,000 bill for a few days “for the thrill” of seeing the “shock” of shopkeepers when he’d ask if they could break it for a $5 purchase. (“A hundred-dollar bill?” marveled a gas-station attendant. “Hundred nothin’. That’s a thousand-dollar bill,” chimed a second attendant – to which a third, with a choice profanity, exclaimed, “That’s a $10,000 bill!”)
To younger generations growing up in small-town Indiana, the stories lit up the horizon. They showed that life is possibility. It is to be relished. No matter where you come from or which side of the tracks you grew up on. No matter what had happened to you that day. It was a lesson we never forgot.
For the past month, I’ve been carrying a scrap of paper in my pocket with a snippet from a meditation. “Life involves one risk after another.” It’s a reminder, like a verbal string around my finger, to stay open, take a chance. The reading ends with a quote from Helen Keller: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.”
In the way these things happen, life has been feeding that message back to me lately. This week, my Dad – an 85-year-old farmer who’s itching to get on his tractor and start working his fields – told me a cousin’s daughter is going sky-diving to celebrate her 18th birthday. A Quaker friend has just come home from three months facilitating non-violence workshops in Latin America. Over dinner another friend shared his dream of moving to Spain after he retires to join medical missions to the Third World. Two friends – one old, one new – are deferring opportunities to work in the corporate world to start their own businesses.
We hear so often that life is there for the taking, it's easy to tune out. But who’s to say it’s not right – that, in fact, at any moment, we could be Pete Rose, the Ty Cobb of my generation, standing by third base near the end of one of the greatest games of all time, game six of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and his Cincinnati Reds, shouting to the Sox’ grizzled third-base coach, Don “Popeye” Zimmer, “Hey, Popeye! Popeye! Win or lose, Popeye, we’re playing in the fucking greatest game ever played!”
It begins – going back to Kierkegaard, Pascal, et. al – in faith. This week, I read that in Pali, the language in which Buddhist texts were first written, the word used for faith, saddha, translates to “place the heart upon.” When we take a leap of faith for something we care about, we are placing our heart upon it. Faith, then, is not a static state – something we eventually achieve – but an action. According to the book, Faith, by Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist author and teacher, saddha was a verb. “We ‘faithe,’” Salzberg writes. “Saddha is the willingness to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure.”
I don’t think it’s such a big leap from baseball to spirit. (And not because the statistic that Uncle Claude took pride in later in life was a streak of 20 years of churchgoing without missing a Sunday.) In both we see glimpses of what life can be like, that we can take back with us into our daily lives. We’re given images, visions, messages that we will wrestle with in the days after – for example, the quotation from William Penn recited by a Friend in my Quaker meeting last Sunday that's been grappling with me through the week: “Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity…for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.”
When we take a chance on life, we are, in a phrase another friend told me this week, “taken to the edge – and softened.” It’s there that, in the traditional Quaker term, “way opens.” We see and hear things that challenge us to take the next step – even if we’re not sure what the next step after that one will be.
That’s I.T.
According to the story passed down in the family, Ty Cobb so much wanted to win the wager with Uncle Claude that, despite banging a hit off the wall that could easily have been a triple, he stopped at first. Thanks to my Uncle Bill Berry (who, himself, got a big league tryout) for letting me record him telling the story. The details on Claude Elzy Berry’s career come from a combination of news clippings from 1943-1974 in the Richmond (IN) Palladium-Item and Baseball Reference’s minor-league and major-league reference guides. The story of the San Francisco Seals’ association with “jazz” can be found by clicking here.
The Pete Rose quote – fast-becoming one of my mantras – is from the book The Long Ball: The Summer of ’75 – Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle, and the Greatest World Series Ever Played, by Tom Adelman. Click here for more information.
In addition to insightful reflections on faith from a Buddhist perspective, Sharon Salzberg’s book Faith is a beautifully written account of the author’s spiritual journey – one that I never would have guessed. Click here for more information.
No music in this week’s essay, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Louis Armstrong lately, especially Life Is So Peculiar, a good reminder to keep our sense of wonder. Unfortunately there's not a pristine version on YouTube, but here's one that comes close. There's a nice recording of the song on four-disk budget boxed set, C'est Ci Bon: Satchmo in the Forties (available on Amazon here; some of the tunes are also in iTunes);the colletion also includes three of my other Louis favorites: his slowed-down On the Sunny Side of the Street; C’est Ci Bon; and La Vie en Rose (sigh).
I'M NOT VERY GOOD AT LETTING GO. I'LL BELIEVE I'm doing well. Then someone will ask one of those seemingly innocuous questions that, are in fact, a Pandora’s Box of raw, unresolved emotions. And I'll wonder – as the old, familiar demons rush back to the surface – whether there's ever such a thing as putting the past in the past.
But then I found myself picking up a handful of small, fresh, green leaves to place at the outer edges of the sunbeams emanating out from a mandala created from sand, seashells, pinecones, and stones – one of a series of group exercises in a participatory service on reconciliation and forgiveness at South Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry last Sunday – and feeling strangely…peaceful.
A similar feeling washed through when we were asked, in a separate exercise, to write down something we were ready to unburden ourselves of – something inside us, or in our lives – then roll the paper into a tube, breathe into it (to inject our spirit); light it in the flame of a candle; then drop it into a bowl, to burn, commingled with others’.
It’s been a week of lessons in new tools for letting go gently. Sunday’s service, premised on Matthew 5:23-25 (essentially, the notion that we cannot “work things out with God” until we “make things right” in our relationships) seemed to segue into Tuesday night’s lecture on mindfulness at Tibet House in New York City by the Buddhist author and teacher Sharon Salzberg.
Different traditions; different cultures. Yet Sunday’s prayer response – a chant-like, sung round of the words “Open my heart” – seemed not so different from Tuesday’s Buddhist prescription to be present to what’s before us (“Be present while the present is here,” in Salzberg’s words). Sunday’s opening hymn – a plea for reconnection written by a modern-day South Korean (“make us one body”; “reconcile your people”) – seemed of a piece with the Buddhist perspective to see our connectedness to each other and the world.
Asked for practices for letting go, Salzberg responded – not so different from the Presbyterian service – with exercises. Try to not take the first action that comes to mind when you are overtaken by a powerful feeling like anger. Give something away when you become too attached. Practice a loving-kindness meditation to rebalance yourself.
Most fundamental, she said, listen to what’s inside you. Sit with yourself not to figure out why you are feeling what you’re feeling, or how to get rid of the feeling, but as a vehicle for self-awareness. “Take apart the cord” of the strands of emotion within the emotion (like the powerlessness, grief, and fear often hiding inside anger). And when the feelings come up again, as they inevitably will -- we're only human, after all -- gently begin again.
Through taking this time – a kind of inward-directed generosity – we gain a more comprehensive understanding of ourselves. That can help us see others, and the world, more clearly, and be more present to both. It reminded me of something that Bill, a well-traveled, old-school mentor of mine, once said about grief: “Carve it down to a clean, sharp pain.”
There’s a Native American expression that I occasionally carry: “Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the time, I am being carried on great winds across the sky.” It’s a spiritual kin, I think, to the climactic utterance of Job in the poet Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Old Testament fable. Having heard the Whirlwind, and been awed by its cosmic spectacle, Job says, in a reconnection to the world as powerful, to me, as the Buddha's touching the earth on the night of his great trials, that he is “comforted that I am dust.”
Several times, stepping outside after hearing bad news, I’ve been nudged back into life by a sight in nature – a huge, star-filled sky over San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake cut power to the city; the thick, sparkling band of the Milky Way cutting across a late summer Indiana sky the night in 2000 when a family member passed on; a shimmering moon river off Long Island (the photo above, which I took to press the image into my memory) stretching across the ocean to the horizon a few years ago in the midst of a crisis in someone close.
Early in the week, I asked my friend Paul, a devotee of the traditional American a capella chorus singing of Sacred Harp, for a hymn on letting go. The centuries-old one he forwarded begins with verse after verse of spiritual torment: “My God has me of late forsook/ He’s gone, I know not where”; “I’ve strayed! I’m left! I know not how; The light’s from me withdrawn.” But then, in the last verse, it breaks beautifully in a different direction, toward faith.
“What shall I do? Shall I lie down
And sink in deep despair?
Will He forever frown,
Nor hear my humble prayer?
No; He will put His strength in me,
He knows the way I’ve strolled,
And when I’m tried sufficiently
I shall come forth as gold.”
“Come forth as gold.” In the end, that seems the point of it all – the promise of burning away, creating something new, making things right, extending generosity, taking apart the chord, being present in the present, beginning, then beginning again, and remembering that, even in those days when a feeling we want no part of takes over our life, we are still “carried on great winds.” I think I caught a glimpse of that promise two Fridays ago. Levon Helm – whose, great, rough-hewn tenor once powered The Band, and who now performs with his own homespun Americana ensemble – was settling into the second encore of a pitch-perfect evening at the Tarrytown Music Hall.
With his grown daughter Amy, a singer in the band, he began an a capella rendering of “Gloryland,” an old, country gospel song about life’s end and going to a place with no pain. For Helm – now in his 70s, a survivor of throat cancer, his voice raspy, lucky and so evidently thankful to be alive – and for his daughter, who must have gone through the depths of emotions as her father’s life was in the balance – it must have been a profound, sweet moment of letting go – witnessing to love, and being present, no matter what tomorrow brings. Gold indeed.
That’s I.T.
I can’t find a link to the Levon Helm Band signing “Gloryland.” For a still-powerful version by country music legend Ralph Stanley, with similar, sweet a capella harmonies, click here. For the lyrics, click here.
Thanks to my friend Paul for the song "Columbus," from Sacred Harp: Words from Mercer's Cluster (1823). For more on the history and practice of the Sacred Harp tradition, click the site of FASOLA, the Sacred Harp Music Association. It includes links to a just-completed full-length documentary on Sacred Harp, “Awake, My Soul"; check out the recording and trailer, and while you're at it, see if there's a sing near you. I get shivers listening to this stuff -- no wonder this people's tradition is still alive and, in fact, undergoing a revival -- hundreds of years on.
Though my faith tradition means I’m in silent worship among Friends at Quaker meetings most often, I sometimes detour to South Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry, NY, for its creativity, terrific music, and vision of peace and social justice.
Sharon Salzberg has a new book, Real Happiness. Her series of talks is continuing at Tibet House. For Salzberg's full schedule of appearances for April 2011, click here.
Stephen Mitchell’s translations of spiritual works are wondrous both for their poetry and their insight. Three of my favorites of his are the Book of Job, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of Psalms.
EVERY COUPLE SUNDAYS, I DRIVE TO QUEENS to visit someone close to me who’s in a long-term drug-treatment program. It’s the latest stop in a downward spiral that’s taken him through a half-dozen detoxes, hospitals, rehabs, and shelters in New York City in the past nine months and, over the past 12 years, on a labyrinthine journey across the country for a cure that so far has proved elusive.
But we don’t talk about the past. Maybe an expression of gratitude for the nurse in Westchester who gave him $40 to get to a hospital, and said "just pay it forward.” Or the woman who came across him in the street in Manhattan and called 911 to get him an ambulance; the guys in the shelter who kept an eye out for him; the nurse’s assistant who prayed at his bedside; the psychiatrist who offered to see him essentially for free when he’s ready; the cops, ambulance crews, social workers, and others who treated him with dignity when they didn’t have to.
Or maybe the waitress who looked past the wear-and-tear signs of homelessness in his appearance one morning last fall when I took him out for breakfast – the grungy clothes, the urban grit on his hands – and greeted us with a cheery “what’ll you have, boys?” (Question to ponder: Does the Buddha wear a waitress’ uniform?)
Mostly, for the hour or two that we have together, we just sit with each other. Not focus on the past. Or project into the future. Instead talk about the present – how we’re doing, what we’re reading, what our day has been like.
I’m not sure this is what Sharon Salzberg, the Buddhist author and teacher, had in mind in her lecture on mindfulness at Tibet House in Manhattan last week. But what she said seemed familiar: Mindfulness means opening fully to the moment. We need to learn to let go of clinging to things we love (as if holding on hard enough will keep them from ever going away); sit with pain rather than push it away; not go to sleep or numb out on distractions when life bores us. Not fall into traps like thinking “it’s never going to get better.”
Instead we are to engage in a balanced way with whatever life brings. “Learn the ‘letting-go’ muscle,” she said. When we slip, which, as in meditation, inevitably happens, “begin again.”
Investing in the here-and-now fully (it’s not mindhalffullness) seems to be in the core of many spiritual traditions. It’s the essence of one of my favorite 12-step slogans (actually, one my friend turned me onto): “Look down at your feet.” Where we are is where we’re supposed to be. The most important lessons for us are not out there in the future, or over there where the cool people are. They’re right in front of us, in the quotidian rhythms of life – children, spouses, parents, friends, work, colleagues, the person in front of us in line at the bank. They can especially be in the places we never seek out – doctors’ offices, unemployment, visiting days at rehabs.
In seminary, I’ve learned that some of the deepest, most healing changes occur in the unexpected places. The road. By a well. A cave. Hardship.
“Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,
I praise you for that which is.
…I pray for whatever you send me,
And I ask to receive it as your gift.”
- Psalm IV, translated by the poet Stephen Mitchell
I’m not by nature a transcendence-seeker. I agree with the singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who wrote that he spent most of his life “avoiding transcendence” for the simple reason that “the shit hurts.” These kinds of experience ask us to change. Go to new places. Leave the comfortable. Let down our guard.
I flinch a bit when I hear people say they’re thankful for their troubles because of how much they’ve grown spiritually. “Hey, take mine," I think. "You’ll grow even more.” But they have a point. The kindness my friend found in the group of guys he met in the homeless shelter changed me – how they looked out for each other so they wouldn’t get into trouble; bought each other slices of pizza when they came into a little money; swapped tips on negotiating the social services departments, getting a library card, finding hot meals at churches. I can’t walk by a homeless person now without offering a silent prayer.
Others’ generosity, too. When a local cop was critically injured in a car accident on duty, I gave blood, wrote get-well cards, made donations, prayed. Experience has bonded me to an ever-widening community. The world has become sweeter, more precious, more of an adventure – when I remember to keep my eyes open.
Life is a package deal. We don’t get a menu (“Yes, I’d like Pleasure, with a side of Pleasure. Dessert? No Pain.”). And, as Salzberg says, life can “turn on a dime.” The next moment could bring a natural disaster. Or a full ride to graduate school. A dreaded diagnosis. Or true love.
Or we could be like the woman I fell into a conversation with on the train home the night of the lecture (funny how life can put a coda on what we’ve just heard). Fifteen years ago, during a snowstorm, she decided to check in on a new neighbor and found, to her dismay, there was little she could do. The neighbor was deaf; they couldn’t communicate. She resolved to take a sign language class so she could talk with the neighbor. That led to another class. And another. Now she’s in graduate school to become a counselor to the deaf. All because of snow.
I used to think the beatifically smiling Buddhas my kids have bought me were beaming because they’d risen above the world. Now I see that they smile because they're connected to everyone. And everything. And, within this torn world, find joy.
Psalm IV
Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,
I praise you for that which is.
I will not refuse this grief
or close myself to this anguish.
Let shallow men pray for comfort:
“Comfort us; shield us from sorrow.”
I pray for whatever you send me,
and I ask to receive it as your gift.
You have put a joy in my heart
greater than the world’s riches.
I lie down trusting the darkness
for I know that even now you are here.
– translation by Stephen Mitchell
That’s I.T.
Sharon Salzberg has a new book, Real Happiness. Her series of lectures is continuing at Tibet House. She’s worth listening to (as a wise commenter inferred in response to an earlier post): down-to-earth, accessible, witty, droll, learned, laser-sharp, and an amazing storyteller. Check the Tibet House calendar.
I’ve always liked Steve Earle’s ornery take on transcendence. After trying out various definitions – “going through something” brings to mind “plate glass windows and divorces”; “rising above” problems “smacks of avoidance as well as elitism” – he settles on it meaning “being still long enough to know when it’s time to move on.” He then adds: “Fuck me.” From the cover notes of Transcendental Blues.
More and more, I value the notion that all ground we walk on can be sacred ground – no matter if it’s in as church or synagogue, in the wilds of nature, a city street, or a hospital. Last year, I wrote a post on the theme. Here’s a link to it.
I GOT HIGH-FIVED BY GRACE ON FRIDAY. It happened as I was coming down the stairs into Grand Central Station in Manhattan to catch the evening train home. “Don’t race that man down the stairs, Grace,” I heard a voice behind me say. I looked down and to my side and found Grace, a 2-or-so-year-old ragamuffin, giving me a daredevil, just-try-me grin. I looked up at her mom, who gave me a why-not smile, looked down at Grace, and took up pursuit. Grace, of course, won. We traded enthusiastic high-fives before slipping off on our separate paths across the Main Hall.
You never know what you will find when you open your eyes and ears. For three days last week, I tried to do just that, counting “OMJ’s,” Observed Moments of Joy, in my travel to and from work in New York City.
For some time, I’ve been trying to get unstuck on a project I want to start. The OMJ Experiment came together in my mind as a way to get there. It combined two ideas I’ve heard over the years.
The first: “If you don’t have faith, borrow some.” One reason I make the effort to sit spiritually with others – be it in Quaker meeting, 12-step, or another setting – is to immerse myself in the energy of the group. It can be powerfully healing. The so-called “home study program” just isn’t the same. If I can borrow faith from a spiritual group when I’m in deficit, why not from the world?
The second: “If what you’re doing isn’t working, try something new.” A few weeks ago, a friend described how a spiritual mentor sent her to a sporting goods store to buy a “pitch counter” – a small, simple gadget used in baseball to count the number of pitches a pitcher has thrown. Her assignment was to track attitudes and behaviors she was trying to let go of. The device was easy to carry (just slip it into a pocket) and could be clicked surreptitiously, without anyone noticing.
So, with a newly purchased pitch counter, and a pen and scrap paper to keep notes, I ventured into the world to test the notion that, for all the bad things there are (check today’s headlines), the world also presents opportunities to absorb something positive. Here’s what I learned:
There is joy out there. In all, I counted 85 OMJs over three days. Many were small events. But, days later, they’re still in my mind. A woman smiling to herself as she left the subway. A man whistling as he walked down a corridor. Jokes among friends. A boy doing a little dance in Grand Central while holding a parent’s hand. A burly construction worker walking into the 14th Street subway station and breaking into song (“Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah!”), convulsing the guys he was walking with in laughter. There were small acts of kindness, too. A deliveryman pushing a dolly across Ninth Avenue hit a bump, spilling boxes into the street. A businesswoman stopped to offer help. He declined, and quickly restacked his load. As they went their separate ways, a huge smile rippled across his face; the stranger had made his day. It made me wonder how many such moments I miss when I’m in my mental tunnel hurrying from Point A to Point B.
Surprise amplifies joy. So many days, we head into the world hoping that nothing happens. “Please, just a normal day.” We’re so used to expecting the other-shoe-to-drop to be bad, we forget that surprises can be good. Stepping out of the subway at the Times Square station, quite a few commuters were slowed, then stopped, by the sweet sounds of bluegrass music. The Ebony Hillbillies (pictured below), who play the station most Thursday mornings, were swinging into high gear. Buskers are not uncommon in New York. The good ones attract crowds, no matter the time of day; people smile, bounce in time, drop money into the case, and move on. I found a similar scene that lunchtime in the Chelsea Market building passing the “Cajun Cellist” Sean Grissom plucking and bowing Stand by Me. I love Bach’s Cello Suites, but there’s something exciting about hearing a cellist play Ben E. King, the Beatles, or punk, and having obvious fun.
Serendipity is close by. As I focused more on the world around me – by the second day, the experiment felt like a walking meditation – I started noticing peopleI know. I fell into more conversations. Those encounters usually led to a smile, laugh or poignant detail (e.g. it’s been two weeks and Bozo, the stray cat taken in by a neighbor, still won’t come out from under the bed). And they often produced a useful tidbit – like a recommendation to read a recent Outside magazine article about a kayaking trip gone awry on the Nile (right up my reading alley). But there was also sheer, amazing serendipity. Turning a corner in Grand Central on Day 1, I looked right into the eyes of a friend I hadn’t seen for months. The first words out of both of our mouths: “I was just talking about you!” We caught up on family news, like how much he’s appreciating his two kids (“They are joy machines,” he said); compared notes on his biking and my running; empathized with each other’s injuries and setbacks, and exchanged hugs. I never would have had the conversation if I hadn’t been keeping my eyes open.
OMJs are transformational. Focus on observing joy in the world, and you risk becoming part of that joy. My running into my friend – the surprise “whoa!” greetings, the animated conversation – likely became an OMJ for passers-by. As did the moment on Friday when in the midst of the busy evening commute, a middle-aged man was seen gently racing a toddler down the steps of Grand Central, then trading high-fives with her at the foot of the stairs – leaving that man – me – smiling, a touch exhilarated, ready to move on with life, and feeling, right, moved by Grace. And grace.
That’s I.T.
Exercise: Finding OMJs. Get a pitch counter. Or just keep count on paper. Grab a pen and some notepaper. Open the door and head outside. Look for patterns in what you see. What produced joy in you?
Social networking is making serendipity a hot topic in business. "In Search of Serendipity," an essay in The Economist, prompted by the business book The Power of Pull, says “managing serendipity” is increasingly seen as a key to success. “By mingling with…many strangers,” the article says, a smart businessperson “bumps into people who can give him valuable information.” Rather than discouraging employees from social networking on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, employers should encourage workers to nurture their online and offline networks; “your friends’ friends may have knowledge or skills you need.”
For more on the Ebony Hillbillies, visit their website, Google their videos, or, better yet, listen to a terrific interview with their violinist nonpareil Henrique Prince in the New York Times’ “1 in 8 million” portrait series (click here). Best, stop by and listen the next time you’re in NY.
For more on Sean Griffin, visit his website or Google his videos. This collection includes a clip of him playing Stand by Me, from a collection of his videos.
You should be able to buy a pitch counter at your local sporting goods store; Amazon also stocks them. They’re pretty cheap. Mine cost under $10.
Last note: One evening during the experiment, leaving work, I saw Jerry Seinfeld walking through Chelsea Market. But I didn’t count it as an OMJ because he was engaged in what looked like a very serious business conversation, and, other than me, nobody seemed to notice him. Or maybe they were just being very cool about it.
I FELT LIKE A WATERBORNE VERSION OF THE "BEAR who goes with me” from Delmore Schwartz’s poem when I went for a swim the other night. The first five minutes of treading water with this clumsy, lumbering body seemed like an eternity. But I pressed on – four strokes, breath; four strokes, breath – and eventually I began to move internally as well as through the water. I looked at my watch, and forty minutes had passed. Where had the time gone?
That but-but-but hesitation melting into effortlessness is not new. It occurs many Sundays when I plunk down onto a bench in Quaker meeting. Skepticism – An hour? Of silence? – gives way to a deep, still stream that renews, resolves, and sends me back into the world.
I periodically wonder if this stream courses through more of life than I recognize. Is “flow” – that pure state of focus and creativity at work, when I am lost joyfully in the task at hand – just a secular description of the mystical reverie I experience in Quaker meeting?
Is an athlete in “the zone” – the sheer being-in-the-moment and time standing still around you – in a state akin to what the Friend a few seats over from me feels in meeting for worship?
Would it bring down some of the walls between our workaday worlds and our spiritual lives if we recognized a kindred spirit – whatever name it goes by – at work (and play) in both places? Would we look at our colleagues differently? Make decisions differently? Look differently at all the “others” in our lives – secular vs. sacred, religion vs. "the world"?
I have an engrained resistance to religious terms. Too often, they’re used for manipulation, position, and power. But I think that life on some level is essentially mystical. It holds mysteries that we can’t explain – from the edges of knowledge to our even being here (how did that happen). It holds the possibility of joy. Surprise. Wonder. Spaciousness. Moving outside time. Of deeper connection.
My life works better when I recognize that this deeper flow is everywhere, and not just in “my” church, “my” meeting, “my” meditation spot. I think that’s part of the epiphany that’s beautifully described in the recent PBS documentary The Buddha (photo above). After years of torturous seeking after enlightenment, Siddhartha remembers sitting under a tree, as a child, on a beautiful day, and in that moment realizes that “the underlying fabric of this world,” with all its brokenness, “is joy.”
That joy, to me, is not so different from the feeling that washed over me the first time I heard a Friend in Quaker meeting recite the wonderfully rhythmic prayer from early Friend Isaac Penington describing the “sweet experience” of spiritual surrender:
“Give over thine own willing, give over thine own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the seed which God sows in thy heart, and let that be in thee, and grow in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is his portion.” - Isaac Penington (1681)
It helps me to know that such moments of joy can break through at any time. That joy can take me by surprise – like the time a few weeks ago driving into New York City when we were directed to the onramp of the Willis Avenue Bridge by a woman traffic cop who was giving directions while dancing (yes, a dancing New York City cop).
Or slip through my ear buds, when I listen to music both overtly spiritual – from Renaissance polyphony (like Huelgas Ensemble) to the second disc of Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence – to spirit-infused affirmations of life, from John Coltrane’s Ballads, to some of Duke Ellington’s solo piano pieces, to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s duets.
Sometimes I can help move myself into the stream. But here, too, it’s an idiosyncratic practice drawn from sources as disparate as my faith tradition to 12-step (the Serenity Prayer) to a mantra given me a few years ago by a Buddhist teacher while I was going through a hard stretch. That mantra, “Let this serve to awaken me,” now sits on the bulletin board at my job in a place where my eye easily falls while I’m starting to write.
The point, I believe, is not how I get there, but that I get there.
That’s I.T.
For more on the PBS documentary The Buddha, including to view it, click here. The quotation in my essay is from Mark Epstein, one of the experts interviewed for the program.
For the full text of Delmore Schwartz’s poem “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” and its evocation of “the withness of the body,” click here.
For more on Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence,which confounded the mainstream rock press (like his other albums on spiritual seeking), but inspired a devoted following among fans like me, click here. Click the album title for more on the other music, Piano Reflections(Duke Ellington), John Coltrane's Ballads,Utopia Triumphans (Huelgas Ensemble), Ella & Louis, Ella & Louis Again.
You can find bios and writings of Isaac Penington on the Web, but I think a better starting point for him and other Quaker writers is an anthology like The Quaker Reader.
THE GEORGE HARRISON LYRIC GOT THIS year right: Little Darling, it has been a long, cold, lonely winter. More snow. More bone-chilling days. More people I know going through pain, loss, hardship, and harrowing near-misses that there-but-for-the-grace-of-God could have been worse, than any winter I can remember.
This morning I walked the dog up to the Aqueduct Trail to see if I could go out for a run there this afternoon. No go. It’s still a river of ice.
But in nature there is more sun – almost two hours more a day than the first of the year. The thaw has begun. As always, it’s not fast enough for me -- nature’s version of the 12-step world’s most sweetly humbling three words, “in God’s time.”
A day in the 60s, then snow. A spring-like downpour beats away patches of ice; I look earthward with expectation (a.k.a. a “premeditated resentment,” another great 12-step turn of phrase). Any crocuses? No. The next day, cold blows in; the puddles are frozen again.
It’s natural in this in-between season for a mind to drift forward, then back. After all, Nature is going back-and-forth. Maybe the trick is to follow Nature’s lead: Bring a bit more light into our interior lives each day. Force Spring into our hearts, like the forsythia and quince on the kitchen counter (thanks, Robin). Get outdoors when we can, but keep the stocking-hats and gloves handy.
I sometimes feel a bit old to call myself a runner. My PRs are likely long gone. But there’s a new season to look forward to. A friend, Stuart, called from the city this morning to report he’d just finished a couple loops of the reservoir in Central Park, and, yeah, it was icy, but it felt good. “When are you getting out?” “Now.” “Go to it.” "Right."
Three weeks to Spring. By the Equinox, we’ll have another hour a day of sun. Sunset at 7 p.m. Imagine. Soon I’ll be sing-songing Cummings as I slosh along the trail in mudluscious just-spring.
Leatherman’s Loop, a 10k rite of spring at the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Katonah, NY, is two months away. It’s is romp of a run, coursing through streams, hills, woods, and a mud flat that last year almost pulled my shoes off, then more hills, winding up at the “splashdown,” a water crossing that, depending on recent rainfall, can be shin-to-chest deep. You finish soaked, muddy, happy, dizzy with gratitude. What’s better than that?
A blessing is given every year before the race. It’s a sublime moment. The thousand runners pawing at the starting line fall silent all at once, and Danny Martin, the Irish-born retired priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual counselor (he calls the race “a communion more than a competition”), gives the following prayer, a goosebumpily wonderful reminder of the grace of waking up to the world, perfect for this regrounding time of year:
Beauty before me when I run.
Beauty behind me when I run.
Beauty below me when I run.
Beauty above me when I run.
Beauty beside me when I run.
Beauty within me when I run.
I see Beauty all around.
In beauty may I walk.
In beauty may I see.
In beauty may we all be.
That’s I.T.
For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, including photos, stories, and information on signing up for future years’ races (sorry, 2011 was booked up long ago), go to the race’s web site. The blessing is in the FAQ section. Click here for more.
To see how much more sun we’re getting each day, search the Internet for “sunrise sunset.” Or click here.
I didn’t realize it until researching this piece, but “Here Comes the Sun” actually did come out of a tough winter for George Harrison. The details are on the Wikipedia entry for the song. Or just go out and buy Abbey Road. It has one of the two best sides of a rock album that I know.
Last, for the full text of ee cummings' "In-Just Spring," go to the Poetry Foundation website (click here) and search by the poem's title.
MANY PEOPLE HAVE EXPERIENCED THE FEELING OF being led toward a decision by something larger than themselves. But what do you do with that feeling? Sometimes the practical tools for decision-making, like writing down lists of pros and cons, fall short. In his book Sacred Compass (Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA, 2008; also available on Kindle and with a study guide for groups), the Quaker author J. Brent Bill has created a spiritual tool kit for the spiritual practice of discernment.
Drawing on his own circuitous spiritual, personal, and professional journey, as well as historic sources, and friends' and mentors' experiences, Sacred Compass is smart, wise, and disarmingly accessible. The book doesn’t promise easy solutions. Life brings challenges. Sometimes we get confused. Instead of turning away from those moments, Bill encourages us to work through our problems, developing the tools of discernment. I interviewed Brent a few years ago when the book first came out, then put it aside. Recently, searching for help in discernment, I came back to our conversation, and, with Brent’s permission, reproduce it now.
QUESTION: As someone whose life has followed a winding path, I found your description in Sacred Compass of the journey your life has taken, with “15 jobs, 16 homes, and too many cars,” to be refreshingly honest, funny in an I-can-so-relate way, and really different from what I often read in self-help books.
J. BRENT BILL: I’m not a spiritually perfect person. I do my best to make my way through this life and be true to my understanding of faith and what it calls me to do and be. I don’t get it right a lot of the time. So an expert voice doesn’t help me much.
If people have all the answers, I tend to distrust them. When I read those kinds of books, I just note my inadequacies all the more. As a reader, I look for fellow companions, people who are spiritually wise and a couple steps further down the road and willing to share their experiences.
Q: Have you had people in your life who are “a couple steps further down the road”?
A: In my writing life, I certainly have. Anne Lamott comes to mind. Kathleen Norris is another; her writing is so beautiful. The Quaker Scott Russell Sanders is another. I’ve been fortunate to have folks who are that way in my personal life. My wife, Nancy, is one. Our views are fairly disparate most of the time, but she’s one of the most spiritually sensitive people I know. There are other folks as well.
Their honesty, for me, is what sets them apart. I never feel like I’m with a professor who’s studied it, and I’m sitting at their feet. Instead, it’s “here’s how I’ve gotten this far.” That speaks to my condition.
Q: Let’s go back to all those jobs and houses and cars. Did you see spiritual direction at work in this circuitous path, or did that come later?
A: I would say both. I don’t feel that I ever took a job that I shouldn’t have. But there were times that I wondered why I did something I did, like being photocopier salesman.
Q: Tell me more about that job.
A: I’m not a salesperson. But that job came at a really important time in my life. I had gone through a divorce. I knew I wasn’t in any place to take care of anybody. I needed being taken care of. A friend of mine owned a copier company. He said, “Why don’t you come do this? You may not like it. But you can do it and it will put food on the table.” And it did.
Q: It must have felt strange to move into the workaday world after being a pastor.
A: A lot of my mindset was on just surviving the day. I was living in a new city, and trying to make friends. I realized I didn’t want to spend my life in commerce. I wasn’t going to stay with the company for 20 years and retire a district sales manager. That wasn’t going to be my thing.
But what would be my thing? I realized there’s a whole lot wider world out there. After having been a pastor and denominational staff person, I was so wrapped up in the Quaker world. Everything that seemed so important, that we fussed about at Yearly Meeting, really was not all that crucial.
Q: I love William Penn’s line about true love sending us out into the world. Problem is, when we go into the world, we have to deal with all the frustrations of that world.
A: On some levels, I think it’s easier to see spirituality at work in the business world. You’re examining significant questions. You deal with ethics. You deal with politics. “What would I say to make a sale? What would I do to meet my quota?” “Where is God in this person who’s just really giving me hell right now?”
"On some levels, I think it’s easier to see spirituality at work in the business world. You deal with ethics. 'What would I say to make a sale?' 'Where is God in this person who’s just really giving me hell right now?'"
My experience really forced me to seek that of God in everyone. What are their needs? I couldn’t look at a person as just a number or a customer. I tried to remember who I had bought things from. It was usually people who I felt I had some kind of human connection with, who looked me in the eye, or who I'd been out to lunch with. I also learned from the experience of being a copier salesperson that I was extremely introverted. I was not meant to be in such an extroverted profession.
Q: How did you resolve that? Did you try to become a bit more extroverted, or practice acceptance and find work that was more reflective of you?
A: The latter. I felt like this is obviously not who I was. I have friends who are super successful at selling. It’s who they are. I couldn’t do it. My next position, as a United Way executive, felt much more like ministry to me.
Q: Have you always had a sense of spiritual connectedness in your life, or did you cultivate it?
A: I think it was a combination. I grew up in a fairly religious family.
Q: What did your dad do?
A: He was a factory worker and independent electrician for most of my life. I grew up going to Friends Church in Ohio. We went to Sunday school, church, and Sunday evening service. Sometimes we went to a midweek service. My folks were always hospitable so when traveling ministers or evangelists or anybody was passing through they always seemed to stay at our house. I met ex-convicts who had gotten saved and were doing a ministry tour. A couple years later [Quaker theologian] T. Canby Jones of Wilmington College stayed at our house.
Q: How did those experiences affect you?
A: I felt pretty convinced by the time I was 12 that I was supposed to do what we called “full-time Christian service.” I did not have a Road-to-Damascus-type revelation. I’m a Midwesterner; we don’t have those kinds of experiences. God works on us long enough that we say, “All right, OK, that’s what I should do.” Frankly, a Damascus Road experience would scare the crap out of me. I need slow, steady revelation. I think God works with our teachability. God works with us where we are.
"I think God works with our teachability. God works with us where we are."
I was in some ways the kid least likely to become a minister out of our youth group.
Q: How so?
A: Even at a young age, I was a smart-ass. You don’t think of those kids as the ones who go on into service. Usually it’s the really good, pure kid who knows his Bible really well and prays in that wonderful, stained glass voice, or the reprobate who everybody writes off, then gets saved. Instead it was one of the normal kids in youth group who was a smart mouth. When we chose life verses – the verse to pattern our life after – other people would choose John 3:16 or the 23rd Psalm. I’d pick obscure references like 1 Chronicles 26:18 from the Old Testament, “two west at Parbar and three at the gate.”
Q: What does that mean?
A: It doesn’t mean anything. It was just so weird. I always had a questioning mind, asking, “Why is that in the Bible?” But I think God can work with anyone.
Q: That sense of examining things in different ways comes through in your writing.
A: I’ve known folks who have crises of faith: “Is there a God? How much is true?” I’ve never had that experience. God has always been a given for me. The questioning part, for me, is to say, “Let’s kick the tires on this thing and check it out.” If all truth is God’s truth, it’s got nothing to fear from my puny brain kicking it around asking questions.
"If all truth is God’s truth, it’s got nothing to fear from my puny brain kicking it around asking questions."
Q: That’s a good segue to talk about the book. Why did you write Sacred Compass?
A: A statement kept coming back to me from the old London Faith & Practice [the book of faith and practice of the London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends] about “the art of living.” It connected with me. Living really is a kind of art.
Quakers talk about decision-making through “leadings” – “as way opens.” I started talking with other people about the topic, and they said they’d like to read something that doesn’t tell you what to do, but how to do things.
Q: How do problems of discernment come up?
A: A lot of times it happens in crisis. It can be a professional opportunity: “I’ve got a job offer. Should take it?” Or a decision about where to go to school. Or getting news about an illness. “Where is God in this? How could this be part of my path?” Sometimes, when people ask these questions, the answers that others give them are platitudes. “God wanted it that way.” “Your son got killed because God wanted another angel.” Well, that's not helpful. It often just wounds people. I wanted to say, “It’s ok to wrestle with these questions. Let’s explore.”
Q: If you were just meeting someone, and wanted to communicate the essence of your book, what would you say?
A: There are folks who say God loves you and has a plan for your life. The Sacred Compass says God loves you and has lots of plans for your life. Your life is a pilgrimage. It’s about a trip of going to God. The good, the bad, the happy, the sad, they’re all part of our existence. God is present through it all. Our ways as humans are unique, based on our personalities and life circumstances. God uses all of these, including our ability to be taught and led. At each season, God is with us and working with us.
"Your life is a pilgrimage. It’s about a trip of going to God. The good, the bad, the happy, the sad, they’re all part of our existence. God is present through it all."
Q: Why “sacred compass”?
A: A compass points us in a general direction. It’s not “turn left here, go down the boulevard, then turn right.” In workshops I have people do an exercise of creating a life map, with the different points in their life. “Has it been a straight line – or curvy and twisty?” “Looking back, why do you think you went there? Did you learn something?” The idea is to see our lives as journeys. Often things pop up that people have held down or forgotten.
Q: I really like your idea in the book that it’s important to learn to listen to how lives speak, and that our lives speak in different ways, through our individual dreams, stories, problems, opportunities, inclinations, even our bodies. How did you come to this?
A: Some of it’s based in my own experience, especially my experience of getting out of touch with my body and getting sick. Shortly after I turned 40, a whole bunch of physical stuff started happening to me. My body had been telling me things were going wrong for a while, but I had not been paying attention. Growing up fairly evangelical, I tended to think my body as an unreliable witness. Turns out, it was pretty reliable.
I started thinking, if my body’s telling me about this, what else is it telling me? I started noticing things. When I speak I have some of the same reactions as when I have low blood sugar. So what’s that telling me? That “this is important.” Otherwise I wouldn’t be tense. I never thought of paying attention to my body to teach me about my spirit.
When I researched Sacred Compass, I asked friends about their spiritual experiences. One person talked about God speaking to her through housecleaning; she hates housecleaning so much, God must speak to her through it. There are all these ways God tries to get our attention. Often times, we’re not paying attention.
Q: I like what you say about learning to trust our individual patterns.
A: We decided to start a little worship group out at our farm. I’d been fighting the idea for three years, and it wouldn’t go away. I finally said, “Well, OK.” It was beautiful and persistent and not from some ego need. Lots of signs were coming together. I had to learn to trust them.
Q: What signs speak most to you?
A: Love is a big one. Love is about caring for things. A friend of mine walked across the United States, from New Castle, Indiana, to Washington DC, in a walk for peace. She wore a vest that said, “Pray for Peace.” Some people wanted to join her at times and carry antiwar signs. She asked them not to. The idea of being for peace was much more loving than being against war.
Persistence is also big for me. I get lots of ideas and can get confused. I have friends who are writers who keep a pencil and paper right on their bed stand to write the idea down before they lose it. I’ve gone the other way. I feel if an idea’s still there in the morning or comes to me later that day, it’s worth recalling.
Another important sign for me is a feeling of rightness. “This feels right.” This can be confirmed when we talk with other people, when they say, “Yeah, that feels right for you.”
Q: You talk about the Quaker practice of asking for a clearness committee. Have you been part of clearness committees?
A: I’ve been part of them, and have used them. Sometimes they are formally named. Other times, they’re less formal. I’ve even done them electronically. I have friends across the U.S. and the world who can’t get together but whom I trust as a sounding board.
Q: What’s the difference between a clearness committee and someone telling you what you should do?
A: Clearness committees won’t tell me what I should do. Instead they ask questions that point me back to myself, to Christ my inner teacher. “Why do you think you should do this?” “Why do you think this is the right time for you?”
Q: Is where you’ve wound up where you expected?
A: About the only thing that is where I thought I’d be is the writing part. I always was a reader, and always wanted to be a writer even as a kid. But the rest of my life, no. I never would have ever thought I’d be living on a farm in Indiana with 50 acres, planting prairie grass and trees. I was a city boy. I still am at heart. Hardly anything’s turned out the way I thought it would. It wasn’t a direct route. And I’m exactly where I should be at this time.
Q: Talk about a time when you experienced everything coming together.
A: One of the times it became clearest to me, and probably put me in a place where I could write this book, was when I turned 50 and took a job at the Center for Congregations, and we moved to the Indianapolis area. The responsibilities that were called for in the position brought together almost every position I’d ever held. Even copier sales. I supervised an education program, and that involved conference planning. I had learned to put on trade shows when I was in photocopier sales. So far the only job I haven’t drawn on is running a go-cart track – though maybe I do, because people sometimes seem to be going in circles, so it’s my job to call them in for pit stops.
To read an excerpt from the book, learn about Brent's other books, or find out about his upcoming workshops and talks, visit his website: http://www.brentbill.com/
THE GREATEST INSPIRATION CAN BEGIN IN THE PARTICULAR. I was reminded of this while reading Pamela Haines’ article
“Faith and Economics” in the May issue of Friends Journal,
the magazine of contemporary Quaker thought. Haines describes how she pursued a goal that initially seemed beyond her – starting a
conversation among Friends to challenge the way the economy works in our society – by
breaking it down into human-sized actions.
While the essay's focus is her process of
organizing an interest group on the subject at Friends General
Conference’s annual “Gathering” last year, she communicates a larger
idea relevant to this era in which so much seems to be askew: that we
have the right to speak the truth as we seek it. We have the right to take a seat at the table; to say, as Haines does, that there is more to life than “the idolatry of materialism,” that
“unbridled growth comes at the expense of the planet’s integrity,” and that “we can do better.”
Early in life, Haines writes, she learned that “I
had the right to think, to question the standard way of doing things,
and to act.”
Reading the Old Testament this spring for a
class at Earlham School of Religion , I’ve been impressed at just how
grounded that right to question and call to mercy and justice is in Judeo-Christian tradition. In challenging the world – be it to help people suffering in this economy; to prevent environmental catastrophes like massive BP oil spill now spreading through the
Gulf of Mexico (BP photo of the leak below); to end military aggression; or to create a more compassionate workplace – we live out an idea
that goes back thousands of years. We become what one writer calls "present-day Abrahams" bearing witness to "the scandal of the particular."
I think I first heard the story in Genesis 18:22-33 of Abraham persuading God to spare the city of Sodom if 10 righteous people can be found. Studying it again, as an adult, I’ve been amazed at Abraham's feat. It’s not only just Abraham "talks God
down,” as a friend, recalled the other day, smiling at the memory of his
Hebrew school lesson.
It’s how Abraham does it – asking
whether God really wishes to “sweep away the righteous with the wicked”;
appealing to God’s sense of justice (“Shall not the Judge of all the
earth do what is just?”); acknowledging his secondary status in this
negotiation (“I who am but dust and ashes”); admitting he’s pushing
things (“Do not let the Lord be angry if I speak”; “Do not let the Lord
be angry if I speak just once more”); and negotiating God down in
increments, resting his case first on finding 50 righteous people, then
persuading God to accept 45 (“Will you destroy the whole city for lack
of five?”), then 40, 30, and 20, before resting at 10. To which God
says, essentially, all right.
Some scholars don’t seem to know what to make
of this. Is Abraham (depicted below in an earlier encounter with God by the artist Raphael) being shrewd or foolhardy? Compassionate or heretical? In the end, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed
(presumably, lacking the 10). The New Oxford Annotated Study
Bible deems the story “a theoretical reflection” on
“how many righteous people are required to save a broader group.”
But the passage -- though less famous than other wranglings with the Divine, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Job arguing with God, and Moses' intervention for the Israelites -- has inspired passion that belies that "theoretical" conclusion. It has been drawn on in calls against war, poverty,
and degradation of the environment. “This story boldly states that what
we do does matter,” writes a minister on the Episcopal Diocese of
Minnesota’s website on environmental stewardship.
Word-Sunday.com, the Catholic
lectionary website, holds it up as a model for
prayer: Abraham is “clear,” “logical,” and “persistent,”
pleading, essentially, “If you are the God of the just, then act with
justice… Be faithful to those who are faithful; be merciful to
those who
treat others with mercy.”
Most striking to me is Nora Gallagher's essay on the website Journey with Jesus (fast becoming a favorite for its interweaving of theology and world events). Within the back-and-forth of Abraham and
God, Gallagher says, is “a wonderful theological idea: the scandal of the
particular.” God, who “‘hung the stars’ and created ‘that great
leviathan just for the sport of it’” can be concerned with the
particular, a tiny group of 10 persons in the vastness of humanity and creation. The "small" is imbued with Divine importance. Archbishop Tutu of South Africa makes a similar point in a recent interview on "Speaking of Faith," saying that everyone, regardless of our station, is a "God carrier."
To Gallagher, this insight is more than a small-is-beautiful-type sentiment. It speaks truth. Individual
human experience binds us in a special way. It's attested every day in the media in the photos of individuals; in the ability of stories to inspire, anger, sadden in a way that statistics or statements about aggregates like "nation" cannot. Gallagher quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “I don’t love ‘groups.’ I can only love persons.”
This interdependence calls us to speak up and be
“present-day Abrahams,” says Gallagher. She cites the example of 150
scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project who petitioned President
Truman to not drop the bomb on Japan. That Truman overrode
their decision is a tragedy that will forever haunt. “Our lives begin to
end,” says Gallagher, “on the day that we are silent about things that
matter.”
**
For
more on Friends Journal, a magazine that I am a major fan of
(and, full disclosure!, a member of the board of trustees of), please
visit Friends Journal.
To
read “Reflection on Genesis 18:20-33,” by the Rev. Wanda Copeland, in
the lectionary of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota’s Environmental
Stewardship Commission, please click on Reflection on Genesis 18:20-33.
To
read Larry Broding's essay on what Abraham teaches us about prayer on the Catholic lectionary
resource Word-Sunday.com, please click on Negotiating with God.
I REACHED THIS WEEK FOR FAITH
AND PRACTICE, the book that Quakers turn to for guidance on how to live
their lives in accordance with the testimonies and beliefs of Quakerism, to see
what it says about debt. I was surprised to find that it says virtually
nothing. At least that’s the case with the version I use most often, from my
yearly meeting.
That’s a shame. The first generations of Quakers had a lot
to say on the subject. With the U.S. struggling to crawl out of a financial
collapse and recession brought on by a decade-long debt-fueled spending spree,
our society could benefit from a point of view that looks at debt from a spiritual context.
I’m not an expert on Quaker history; someone may jump in with a more seasoned perspective. But my sense from readings over the years and being part of Friends meetings is that early Quakers
would say that the piling-on of debt in contemporary consumer culture through
credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, lines of credit, personal loans,
business loans, student debt, et al, has exacted spiritual as well as financial
costs. It's hard to be spiritually free if you're encumbered with debt.
“Owe no man anything but love,” in the words of George
Fox (pictured), the founder of Quakerism.
According to Israel Grubb’s history Quakerism and Industry before
1800, Quakers were not opposed per se to
debt. Securing financing was a fact of life. Records from the 1600s and
1700s, in fact, show Quaker meetings advanced funds to help members start
businesses, buy tools and materials for their businesses, and acquire training. (The generosity wasn't limited to financing; meetings also helped Friends find jobs and provided care for Friends in need.)
Cork Meeting, for instance, loaned £4 John
Hartford to buy materials for his trade. Dublin Meeting advanced £3 to help
Richard Lloyd start a business, extended £5 to John Ashton to buy leather for
his trade, and bought a loom for J. Baggiley. Meetings also recorded repayments
of debt; one meeting said it'd received £20 from a young Friend it’d help relocate to Pennsylvania.
But Friends also warned followers of the dangers of being over-extended – “trading beyond your ability” and “stretching beyond
your compass,” in the language of the day. They offered advice on managing
money, and stepped in on occasion to help Friends avoid bankruptcy. Their
cautions on debt were often stern. Going into debt to support a lifestyle was
especially disdained. George Fox deemed people who lived on credit “wasters of
other men’s goods” and “destroyers” of resources that could be put to better
use.
Such words may sound harsh to today’s ears. But how Friends
managed their money, as all of life, was seen as an expression of one’s faith.
Religion was not separated from daily affairs but “lived out through them,”
Grubb writes.
From my readings, the message I take away from early Friends
is that debt, as often as not, gets in the way of faith. It
complicates life, posing conflict with the Quaker belief in simplicity. It
can lead to turmoil – stress, sleeplessness, tension in relationships, late fees, and, if it progresses, calls from collection agencies, foreclosure, and
bankruptcy – creating conflicting with other Quaker
principles including peace and integrity.
Though modern advertising often presents debt as leading to
abundance – enabling us to buy to our hearts’ desires, create “priceless”
moments, be “everywhere you want to be,” “tap” our equity, and be members of a
special club that “has its privileges” – debt can also cut us off from
paths we’re spiritually led to. The more bills we have, the harder it is to pursue a leading. Can we really “let our lives speak” if we’re
weighed down by debt?
To early Friends, it was important to stay flexible. It was
not uncommon for Friends to step back from paid work periodically to devote
themselves to good works. Thomas Chalkley. for example, noted in his journal
that, having “got a little money” from his work, “a little being enough,” he
planned to now devote himself to “the work and service of my great master Jesus
Christ.”
Some of what early Friends said and did seems strange from a
modern vantage. In addition to proffering advice, meetings sometimes asked to
look at members’ finances. Quaker elders in Ireland in 1702 ordered a “strict
and diligent inspection into the condition and circumstances of all Friends,”
with followers asked to “cast up their accounts, debt, and credit,” to address
concerns that people were “falling into debts beyond what they have to pay.”
One meeting separately reported that “to our great grief,” members were not paying their
debts punctually.
But in an era when Friends, as an upstart, disapproved sect, were subject to religious persecution, and debtors prison was a threat to all,
debt was a big deal.
A friend notes that there are times when debt makes sense, to pay down in increments something you couldn't cover all at once. That's true. But I wonder if meetings could do more to help people practice spiritual discernment about when those times are. Should we offer clearness or oversight committees on money decisions at different stages of life? Should we be updating Faith and Practice and holding breakfast
discussions and conference seminars on debt?
With millions of people today caught up in the “virtual
debtors’ prison” of foreclosure and bankruptcy, Quakers’ timeworn wisdom could have new value.
Friends’ blend of common sense and Spirit could offer a new voice to other conversations as well -- for instance, the
modern application of the biblical “jubilee year” of debt forgiveness.
While the Old Testament talks about debt forgiveness (e.g.
Deuteronomy 15:1 “Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts”) and
counsels against charging interest (e.g. Exodus 22:25’s advice not to “exact
interest” from "the poor among you"), I struggle to find Biblical advice on taking on debt. The closest I come is
Deuteronomy 15:6 “you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow,” but that’s
a prescription to nations.
A good starting point for conversation could be
this sentence from Christian Faith and
Practice, from London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (which has a
bit more to say on the subject of debt): “From its earliest days our Society
has laid great stress on honesty in business and the payment in full of debts
justly incurred.” I particularly like the emphasis on “debts justly incurred” in context of consumers and Third World
countries who have been inveigled into debts they couldn’t afford.
Or there's advice 15 from "Advices from the Elders at Balby," from 1656, the one mention of debt in my Faith and Practice, tucked back in the section on the history of Quakerism: "Friends in callings and trades are to be faithful and upright, and keep to yea and nay. Debts to be punctually paid, that nothing they may owe to any man but love to one another."
**
Israel Grubb's Quakerism and Industry before 1800, the primary source for the Quaker anecdotes in this essay, appears regrettably to be out of print. I was fortunate to be able to read a copy earlier this year while in Richmond, IN, for a class at Earlham School of Religion.
“YOU HAVE A CHOICE!” THE DECLARATION, from a woman in Detroit trying to stop a
foreclosure, captured in Michael Moore’s recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story, has been echoing through my week.
As have two stories in the morning paper. One, headlined “In a Job Market Realignment, Some Workers No Longer Fit,”
unspools
the unsettling truth that many of the jobs lost in the recession
resulting from
the 2007-8 financial collapse
“are not coming back.” “I know I’m
good at this,” says a 52-year-old
administrative assistant who’s been out of work for two years. “So how
the hell
did I end up here?” The other story, “Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies,” peeled back
another other layer of the inside machinations of the collapse. Says one discomforted insider who knew something was wrong, “I
can’t tell you how upset I have been in reviewing these trades.”
I don’t profess to have a direct line Upstairs. But I think
something deep and spiritual speaks to us through others. In the voices of the people
being quoted in films and stories in these hard times, I believe, is a
prophetic voice for our times. It’s a voice of anger, frustration, and
bewilderment. And it’s a voice carrying moral weight, reflected, for example, in the three priests
quoted in Moore’s film, who call the current economy “immoral,” “obscene,”
“outrageous,” and “radically evil,” and warn that “in some form and fashion God
will come down” and punish capitalism. It is a voice that says to our society,
like the woman to the foreclosure officers, that we have choices.
A parallel voice can be found in scripture. More than 2,500
years ago, the biblical prophet Amos sounded a similar warning. He denounced the
exploitation of the poor that he saw in Israel. “They sell the righteous for a pair of sandals… They trample the head
of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way…
They lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in
pledge…and…drink wine bought with fines they imposed.”(Amos 2:6-8)
Amos criticized the consumer culture of the affluent, with its preening over lying on “beds of ivory,” being anointed with “the finest
oils,” and real-estate-pride of “the winter house and
summer
house” and homes “of hewn stone” (6:4-6, 3:15, 5:11). He challenged the country’s smug patriotism, pointing to the
countries surrounding Israel, and asking, “Are you better than those
kingdoms?” (6:2). He questioned which gods Israel really worshiped
– the god of Israel, or “Sakkuth,” “Kaiwan,” “your images, which you made for
your self” (5:26) – and disparaged the false piety of going to church then
putting it all aside the other six days of the week. “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn
assemblies” (5:21).
Instead of “burnt offerings and grain offerings” (5:22),
said Amos, God desires justice. “Let
justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
(5:24), he says in one of the Old Testament's most famous passages.Following God, he says, means doing good. “Seek
good…that you may live…and the Lord…will be with you. Hate evil and love good,
and establish justice in the gate” (5:14-15).
As one modern theologian writes, reading Amos today feels
“like a blast of cold, clean air.” And with good reason. Amos was called to
prophecy in a time like ours. According to The
New Oxford Annotated Bible, Israel
was reaching “a height of territorial expansion and national prosperity.” That
prosperity “led to gross inequities between urban elites and the poor.” By
“manipulation of debt and credit,” the wealthy amassed capital and estates at
the expense of small farmers.” Those loans became “a wedge” that separated
farmers from “their land and personal liberty.”
Amos was the “consummate outsider,” “blue collar rather than
blue-blooded,” “a farmer from little Tekoa, about 12 miles southeast of Jerusalem,” says Daniel Clendenin,
author, professor, and founder of the website Journey with Jesus. Not
surprisingly, given his critique of the culture, the elites of his day "despised Amos as a redneck.” They
tried to run him out of town.
Rereading Amos this week, I’ve been wondering if there
should be an “Amos day” – a Sunday in which every house of worship across the
country turns over its services and education programs to reflecting on Amos’
message. Doing so might give comfort to those afflicted in this economy; they are not alone. It
might prod those who are in positions of responsibility in business,
government, the media, and other institutions, to take action –
through their decisions, investments, purchases, and other actions – to create a more just
economy.And it could bring a moral,
spiritual dimension to a discussion that all too often seems to be dry and remote, about regulations more than spiritual intent.
What would Amos say today? Would he growl out his prophecies
in a rock band, on YouTube, or in rallies on Wall Street and Washington? Would he proclaim, “They buy sports cars with the fees they’ve
taken from CDOs of subprime mortgages”? “Your offer of a new wing of the library
won’t make up for the way you earned your money”? “You have built mcmansions
but you shall not live in them”? Would he, too, say “You
have a choice”?
***
There’s a lot of
good writing on Amos’ relevance for modern times on the Web. Daniel Clendenin’s
essay on Amos, “Growing Strong By
Destroying Others:To
the ‘Notable Men of the Foremost Nation,’” though written in 2007, before the crash, is particularly good:
SHOOTS OF SNAP PEAS POPPED UP from the ground this week. Nearby the first flowers have appeared on the tomatoes. Hyacinth vines that in a few months will cast showers of purple on the side of our house, stand in a row an inch or so tall. The Irises, allium, and salvia are in bloom.
Our garden is a small space, two patches on either side of the driveway and a border along the postage-stamp back yard. But when I step into it, even if it’s en route somewhere else – leaving for work in the morning, for example – I feel I’m entering sacred space.
At this time of year, I’m stopped by the miracle and mystery of life springing forth. Before long, with the right mix of sun and rain, it will be wonder at ripening tomatoes, basil, string beans, rosemary, and greens.
Over the years, I’ve come to respect that different people experience the sacred in different places and ways. For some it is entering a timeworn place of worship: a spare, simple Quaker meetinghouse with worn benches, or an ancient, spacious cathedral. For others it is in nature. One friend goes to the beach; sitting there, with the ocean stretching out before her, the waves coming in, she feels closest to God. My Dad feels it looking out onto his farm in summer, the wheat, corn, and soybeans shimmering in the breeze.
Reading the Old Testament for school this spring, though, I’ve been wondering if I’ve placed too narrow a boundary on sacred space. Encounters with the sacred can happen anywhere in scripture. Jacob is visited by God in a dream one night on his journey from Beer-sheba toward Haran (Genesis 28:12). Moses is called by God speaking through a burning bush on MountHoreb (Exodus 3:2).
In one of his lectures, the poet David Whyte says that for him the moment of “sudden insight” for Moses – what in Zen is called “kensho,” revelation into one’s true nature – comes not when God calls to Moses, telling him to “take off your shoes, you are standing on holy ground.” (Ex 3:5: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”) Rather, it is when Moses looks down, Whyte says, and realizes “in the echo of the voice, not only was he standing on holy ground but had been for the whole of his days.”
My professor probably would call that “gap-filling.” The Old Testament does not say what goes through Moses’ mind. It’s a gap in the narrative. Moses’ first words – after God has gone on to reveal that He has heard the misery of the Israelites in their enslavement in Egypt, has “come down to deliver them” to a “land flowing with milk and honey,” and wants Moses to go to the Pharaoh to seek their release – are astonishment: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”
But I think David Whyte makes a good point. Who is to say but that the ground we’ve been walking on the whole of our days is holy? Rather than trying to confine sacred space, maybe we should think of it as expansive, reaching beyond our safe, predictable sacred spaces of church and nature to wherever we may be.
Would it change how we are at work? How we are with others? How we approach tasks? Would we work harder? Do something else? Would it change how we are in the quotidian tasks of life, in the subway, the supermarket, bringing the kids to school, paying the bills? Would we be more present? More charitable? Stronger in our convictions? Would we see and hear more of the life unfolding around us and be more aligned with what Whyte calls “the particular conversation with the deity, with God and Creation, the ground itself,” that only we can have?
Once, after reading a poem on Moses’ encounter, Whyte was approached by a rabbinical student who offered a further insight. In the original language, the student said, the word in God’s command to Moses to “take off” his shoes is “the word that is used for an animal shedding its skin.” In that moment when we have an encounter that takes us beyond ourselves, we go through “a falling away of old skins.”
We all need a “periodic molting” to reveal new possibilities, Whyte says. While that can happen stepping into the garden and being awakened anew to the mystery of new life, it can also happen at any time, anywhere, perhaps when we expect it least.
**
More on David Whyte is available at his website, http://www.davidwhyte.com/. A poem based on Moses’ encounter with God, “The Opening of Eyes,” is available on the website, http://www.davidwhyte.com/english_opening.html. Whyte’s comments on the encounter are from his lecture “Midlife and the Great Unknown.”
WHEN I READ THAT A 31-YEAR-OLD WALL STREET BROKER had joked
in an email about selling toxic investments to “widows and orphans,” my first reaction was shock. Did he realize what he was saying?!?
My response
turned briefly to empathy. Who hasn’t said something in a private email that they’d
be mortified having repeated in public?
Then the question shifted back outward.
Does Wall Street see how much trouble its language gets it into with Main Street?
The firm and the broker issued
quick apologies. The incident reflected “very badly on the firm and on myself,”
the broker said. He noted that his customers, in fact, are institutions, not
individuals.
Still, I’ve been wondering if
there’s a larger lesson to be drawn.
Perhaps new employees at public-facing
businesses, as part of their training, should be asked to spend an afternoon
searching through the references to “widows and orphans” in the Bible, Torah or
other treasured text, then spend some time reading how the phrase comes up on
the Internet. And maybe give a brief presentation on what they learn. Call it
language/values sensitivity training.
They might get a better
understanding of how that email, sent in 2007 by Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman
Sachs broker, to his girlfriend, and released recently in response to the
federal Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud lawsuit against Goldman,
struck such a deep nerve.
And how, by within a week, it generated
5.2 million hits in Google, everywhere from The
Wall Street Journal (which deemed its “dark humor” reflective of the
“take-no-prisoners” mindset of the firm) to The
Washington Post (which called the broker “a Michael Milken for the current
times”) to Al-Jazeera (for which it
was business as usual in America: “Goldman ‘boasted as market crashed,’” read
its headline).
Some words are sacred to people. They’re vested with thousands of years of
religious meaning. “Widows and orphans” is among them. The phrase is at the
heart of a moral life in the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Religion that is pure
and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows
in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained in the world” (James 1:26).
It comes up early. “You shall not
abuse any widow or orphan” is among the commandments passed down to Moses
(Exodus 22:22). It is echoed by prophets, who call on their audiences to “plead
for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17) and “oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless,
the stranger, nor the poor” (Zachariah 7:10).
And it comes up often. In all,
“widows” appears more than 90 times and “orphans” or the “fatherless” more than
40 in the Bible (“religion,” interestingly, appears only five times).
Most are in the Old Testament.
There, we are called to care for the vulnerable and defenseless. Deuteronomy
says to setting aside a portion of one’s harvest for “the alien, the orphan,
the widow” – “grapes of your vineyard,” olives from the boughs of their trees,
and gleanings from the field (Deut 24:19-21).
Doing so aligns one with faith
tradition. God has a special concern for the marginalized, establishing a
“border for the widow” (Proverbs 15:25) and bringing “justice for the orphan
and widow” (Deut 10:18).
It is a reminder to be humble. “Remember
that you were a slave in the land
of Egypt,” says
Deuteronomy. You never know but that one day one or a loved one could be in
that same place – crying out, as in Lamentations, “we have become orphans,
fatherless, our mothers are like widows” (Lam 5:3).
Not
caring, in contrast, sets one against tradition. “If you do abuse them, when
they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry” and respond with “wrath,” Exodus
continues. Job, searching for explanations for his suffering, asks if he’s done
harm to widows (Job 31:16).
Linking ethical acts with spirituality,
as these texts do – the care of the vulnerable with “obligations to God,” the
“humanitarian” with the “religious” – and making that bond “unconditional,” is
significant, says The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Actions
carry importance beyond being the right thing to do. They can be expressions of
the sacred. They bring religion to human scale, showing it’s not just what we
believe but what we do with that belief.
Many on Wall Street know all this.
Many firms have charitable arms. Living in New York, one sees the results in the
charitable giving, both from financial firms and individuals in the industry,
supporting AIDS care, food banks, shelters, museums, education, parks, and the arts.
Goldman Sachs is a case in point; its Goldman Sachs Foundation has given away
more than $100 million in grants in 200 countries promoting education.
But the culture of Wall Street –
the brusque, master-of-the-universe mindset popularized in books and films like
Liars Poker, Barbarians at the Gate, Bonfire of the Vanities, Wall Street, Boiler
Room, and Capitalism: A Love Story –
can talk a different language. “Widows and orphans” is a case in point. Wall
Street has its own take on the words, both benign (a “widow and orphan stock”
is a low-risk stock that can be counted on to generate income “through
difficult financial times,” says the website Investopedia) and aggressive
(“widows and orphans” is “Wall Street’s traditional euphemism for unsuspecting
investors,” notes the UK
newspaper The Independent).
Courts of law will ultimately
decide whether Wall Street firms have committed fraud in the financial
meltdown, as the government claims in the Goldman case. But there’s also the
court of public opinion.
With the country trying to crawl
back from the financial collapse and recession, and Main Street convinced that
Wall Street has profited from its suffering – and speaks, literally, a
different language – it’s an opportune time for the financial world to show
that, at least, when it comes to words, it gets it.
**
The Wall Street Journal, I think, has been particularly strong in its coverage of the
Goldman case and the controversial emails. Here are two examples:
“Goldman’s Tourre
Meets with Senate Investigators,” Wall
Street Journal, April 26, 2010:
This American Life, the National Public Radio program, has
done terrific explanatory work on the causes and consequences of the financial
meltdown. “Inside Job,” a co-production with ProPublica, is, I think,
Pulitzer-worthy – and closes with a wonderfully arch Broadway production
number, “Bet against the American Dream.”
There is a wealth
of good non-scholarly writing on the Web from individuals wrestling with scripture’s
implications today. One that has stayed with me was from an evangelical
videographer working in the Sudan.
Reflecting on the conflict there, which has killed so many men, leaving behind
wives and children, brings James 1:26 into the present: “Religion that God our
Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: that WE provide for those who
cannot provide for themselves.” See his videos, too:
At Goldman Sachs' annual meeting on May 7, chairman/ceo Lloyd Blankfein, responding to criticism that the firm needed to better serve the public and economy, said events had created "an opportunity to be introspective," and promised that the firm would review its practices:
I HAVE A FRIEND WHO, A FEW YEARS AGO, HAD IT ALL. HIS business was booming. His large, sprawling family was the envy of everyone with four beautiful, athletic kids, and a cherished, loving wife. They had a nice house. And a second house on a lake. They drove new cars.
Then the recession hit. The business folded. They lost the lake house. They lost the home. They gave up the second car. They moved into a small apartment. Money is tight.
But the family is good. The kids – now out in the world, in college and first jobs – are still beautiful. My friend has had a few fits and starts in the job market; so far nothing’s worked out.
That’s left him time to cultivate life. In a few weeks, he plans to run a half-marathon with his oldest daughter. On weekends, he and his wife take walks in the state park. He checks in on his mother-in-law.
They’re not rich, but they still have a rich life.
I’ve been thinking of my friend the past few weeks since reading the biblical book of Ecclesiastes for a class I’m taking at Earlham School of Religion. Its message of adjusting and accepting seems to speak to what my friend, and the 15 million others in this country displaced by the recession, are going through.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Biblical scholars say Ecclesiastes was written in a time much like the present. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) says the period after the Israelites returned from exile, about 2,500 years ago, saw “tremendous economic activity.” Money became prized, “a commodity desired for its own sake.” It was a time of opportunity; even the poor “could become wealthy.”
But with that came economic volatility and widespread insecurity. Some became wealthy, while others lost out – raising questions of why and how this was happening. Into this gap, the NOAB says, the author of Ecclesiastes – the title translates to “Gatherer” or “Acquirer” – offered an explanation of a world, that was “contradictory, if not altogether absurd,” and of human attempts to control life. (The image at left is by the artist Gustave Dore.)
The world, says Ecclesiastes, is larger than our understanding. Sometimes our efforts pay off. But other times it is not “the season,” and there is no easy explanation. Trying to explain it, says Ecclesiastes, in what becomes a recurring theme, is “vanity and chasing after wind.” (Ecc 2:11).
Instead, Ecclesiastes extols accepting and appreciating the gifts that life gives. That can mean simple pleasures – savoring “your bread with enjoyment and…your wine with a merry heart” (9:7). Appreciating the light of the day; “light is sweet, and it is pleasant…to see the sun” (11:7). Being there for loved ones; “enjoy life with the wife whom you love” (9:9). Not getting caught up in possessions (“eyes are never satisfied with riches,” 4:7) or worry (“banish anxiety,” 11:10).
It must have seemed like a radical message in its day. The dominant message of the Old Testament is to strive. Seek the promise land. Be fruitful and multiply. Do good. Hard work produces results. “Honor the Lord with your substance, and…your barns will be filled with plenty,” as Proverbs 3:9-10 says.
Ecclesiastes is not exactly arguing against striving. One of the most-quoted passages in the book (and the motto of my daughter’s high school) encourages that “whatever your hand finds to do, do with thy might” (Ecc 9:10). We should “take pleasure” in our toil (3:13), “enjoy” our work (3:22), and “follow the inclinations” of our heart (11:9).
But it is saying to check your motivation. Don’t do something for a the result you hope it will bring. As another famous passage says, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecc 9:11). Or, as a 12-step friend says, we’re not in the outcomes business. (Ecclesiastes resonates with many friends in 12-step programs.)
Some people see Ecclesiastes as the odd-book-out in the Bible – too gloomy and world-weary. But, reading it, then rereading it, these past few weeks, I think it’s well-rooted in the spirituality of the Old Testament. Its message that we humans are not as in-control as we’d like to think is like the lesson of the Tower of Babel. Its connectedness to God and Creation in places sounds like Genesis. Nature and God's majesty play large roles in this book. Ecclesiastes' pronouncement of “vanity” seems like God’s message to Job. When we try to fill in God’s blanks, we come up empty-handed (vanity’s Latin root is “empty”).
Better, when we’re disappointed, to step back, reflect, be humble. Remember, says Ecclesiastes, that it’s God’s work that “endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.” Sometimes what we’re supposed to do just to “stand in awe” (Ecc 3:11-14).
That may be hard in times like this. But I think it would be reassuring for my friend to know that someone in a time like this 2,500 years ago struggled with questions he’s struggling with now, and found hard-earned wisdom.
