Category: Reflections

Observations on the beauty, sorrow, wonder and paradoxes of life and the tragicomedy of being human.

Posted on

The Power of Deep Dive Reflection

I usually see my path as it advances, eyes forward, looking to see what insights might be waiting up ahead. Every so often, it is helpful to look back and see the distance traveled. I recently did a deep dive reflection that included this question:

“Has there been a time when something you believed about God, the Divine, spirituality, or the meaning of life changed profoundly? What happened, and what emerged from that experience?”

Memories come flooding back.

I see the small-town church where I was raised. It was a loving place. There was no fire and brimstone, only the Gospel preached by a mysterious rabbi who wandered the plains of Palestine, imploring people to be more forgiving than resentful, to care for the stranger, to love their neighbor. I marveled at his courage and wisdom, and tried to follow the path he laid out. I believed; I was confirmed; I was active in youth ministry; I felt held and loved. This was where my spiritual yearnings were first awakened.

That life was my foundation, and so when the belief scaffold began to crumble under the weight of reason, it was a hard fall. I could not reconcile the inner presence I felt with Christian tenets that said salvation required specific beliefs. Jesus told me to forgive transgressions continually, not seven times, but seventy times seven. How could such boundless forgiveness be a commandment if God could not abide a person’s honest convictions? The contradictions mounted. I asked questions, but the theological answers I was given were dry, detached from the experience of love I had thought was the heart of Christianity.

Continue reading “The Power of Deep Dive Reflection”
Posted on

Knowing the Rightness of the World

My morning ritual usually has a quiet portion where I let things settle and be with myself in contemplative space. I try to set my small, ego self aside while I sit with my higher self, my true essence. It can come quick or slow, skimmingly or in fullness, or not at all. But when contact is made and I fall in, reality opens with a hush. The sky, the window, the table, my body, everything I had assumed to be complete, absorb their own images and become ten times more real.

It can start as a line running down the center of my chest, just under my breastbone, a live current, moving in the same channel as my breathing; cool air coming in, exchanged for the warm breath going out, utterly physical, sensory; then growing to fill my interior, flowing to my arms, hips, legs, my attention merging with my body like water overflowing a cup. I am alive and I know my aliveness. The quiet is unforced, thoughts dropping, drifting as leaves on the surface of water. Sweeping the room, my line of sight stops at the light glinting off a glass vase, shades of gold mirroring the sun rising through the window beyond. The flowers look wild, impossible, as if I am seeing pink and red for the first time.

Alongside this realness comes a sense of rightness, a knowing that the world is sound, doing what it was designed to do, that underneath there is an order, that all will be well. This rightness of the world brings a sense of peace, which is calming to my soul but confusing to my mind.

How can the world be right when children die by violence? How can all be well when war is waged as blood sport? What does rightness mean if goodness seems overwhelmed by malice? Valid questions, but not ones that abide by logic, which by its nature must stay within straight lines and arrive at proofs. Logic leads my thinking to questions that circle themselves: Could there be a world where children do not die? Would I remove from human will the choice for cruelty, and so also banish the choice for mercy? These lead to interesting arguments, but not to answers that satisfy me. I have to seek alternative ways of knowing that are not limited to the lines of logic. The rightness of the world allows that there is something bigger going on, deeper than my opinions and preferences, a basic goodness that outlasts all tragedy, genocide, wars, all suffering, and even death. Because my sense is authentically felt but not provable, it is hard to understand or articulate at the level of the thinking mind.

The rightness of the world contains a promise that the world is good. To the thinking mind, this is an audacious assertion in need of proof. But when I am in contact with my essence, expanded beyond my normal depth, the world revealing itself in multi-colored dimensions, the validity of the promise becomes self-evident. At my core, running directly through my heart, is a fiber that tells me when things are true. I trust the promise because when I tell myself the world is good, the fiber sounds and sustains. If I contemplate a world where we are doomed to cycle through endless swings of power between brutal factions, where we make no progress toward our betterment, where goodness is a fiction, the fiber in my heart recoils.

I also trust the promise because I see sparks of goodness constantly working to show themselves, to break out of the soil and sprout. Perhaps you do too. Each time you give or receive, or even witness, an act of kindness, the fiber in you sounds. When calamity strikes any portion of the globe, whether natural disaster or human catastrophe, people’s desire to rush with aid is irrepressible. The note sustains.

These are more than separate acts of compassion, they are part of a reciprocal drive between Spirit and the world. The Sacred requires our participation to flower, and our participation immerses us in goodness. We are invited into the continuing work of fulfilling the promise. As we each awaken more and more to our essence, I feel the connective tissue of the fiber growing stronger.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Posted on

When Virtue is Lacking

Some days, I feel I’ve been dropped into someone else’s dream, a world I do not recognize.

Leaders with the judgment and appetites of adolescents wage wars for the sake of ego. Aggression and naked power are rewarded. Respect for the rule of law, even a sense of basic fairness, is eroding. Personal values like character and integrity are mocked as naive. The fever of greed is growing into a cancer. The structures of society are warped when they no longer serve society, but are manipulated to funnel obesity to a few while millions scratch out a bare existence.

And these could be the early days. It sickens me to watch humanity’s slow descent into moral madness. We are capable of being so much better.

I can’t help thinking this is not the game I came to play, that I am living in the wrong time, one not suited to my talents and temperament. My talents are collaboration, friendship, warmth. I am here to foster good relations, positive regard, mutual respect. My temperament is accommodating, inquisitive, willing to overlook false exteriors to see where goodness is hiding. My soft skills seem wasted in a landscape so harsh. I want to call out to the Gods, “Why am I here at this time? What is being asked of me?”

I want a thunderclap, but there is only silence. So I sit with my questions, and my longing, and my aching grief. Silence, actively encountered, is not nothing. It is a void, but it is fertile, a place worth visiting. When I slow my mind, gaps appear. Fresh insights sneak through the cracks, sprouting among my complaints, like this: Perhaps what is being asked of me is to grow.

Our evolution, both personal and cosmic, has never advanced in times of ease, but only in the heat of friction, where our vision of what can be abrades against the world as it is. I have a talent for words, an ability to describe events that sheds light into the corners. My temperament is steadfast, willing to endure. The bag of tools I carry may be exactly what is needed to show what decency looks like, more striking in its contrast. The mirror may arouse kindness in hearts where it lies dormant. The modeling of virtue by people of virtue is its own kind of power.

We are going somewhere. An intuition deep in the grain of my being tells me we are on a path of progress, that our current times are not a devolution, but a temporary backslide, and that we each have something to give that adds momentum to the good. Why, then, would I consider retreating? How can I expand the limits of virtue if I don’t pursue it, if I fade in the face of difficulty to tend my bruises and abrasions? When virtue is lacking in the world, it is needed most from me.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

Posted on

Punish with Charity

I’m wandering the halls of the museum at the Igreja da Misericórdia, in Porto, a lay order of brothers founded Portugal in 1498. The order was founded on the works of mercy, seven corporal and seven spiritual. These principles are hung on floor-to-ceiling banners lining a long corridor. One reads, “Punish with charity those who err.” I stop and stare with a quizzical expression.

In traditional Catholic teaching, the works of mercy instruct believers on how to fulfill our divine purpose and come closer to God, what I might describe as living a spiritual life. The corporal works direct us to relieve the bodily suffering of others, feeding the hungry, clothing and sheltering the poor, caring for the sick. The spiritual works guide us to relieve the spiritual suffering of others by such acts as comforting the afflicted, forgiving others willingly, bearing insults with patience.

Traditionally, one of the spiritual works of mercy is phrased, “Admonish the sinner.” But here at the Misericórdia, the wording is, “Punish with charity those who err.” This is not just a softer phrase, it upends the energy entirely. Charity is the opposite of punishment. To admonish a sinner assumes a superiority, where I am the one who judges and corrects. Charity offers an abundance that does not stop to assess merit. It erases the need for judgment.

Continue reading “Punish with Charity”
Posted on

Tears

Recently, I find tears come to me easily. I’m not sure why.

Maybe it was the passing of my parents two years ago. A broken hip and pneumonia, a broken heart and dementia, a numbing fog in and out of hospital rooms. In eight months, they were both gone. Or maybe it’s the background hum of an unstable world that seems to grow darker every day. Or maybe it’s my advancing age, and the realization that my remaining sunsets have a finite number, making each beautiful and horrible thing so precious, I can’t afford to let it pass unnoticed.

I’m in the sanctuary of the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, Portugal. I’ve been sitting for an hour, sitting with my thoughts, sitting with questions in a place people have come for centuries seeking answers, or at least solace. I’m wondering why we are continually confronted with impossible questions. It can’t be that we expect clean answers, a formula with algebraic precision. It’s more like the tangents of a wicked geometry, the curve of my mind measuring whether the points are coming together or falling away.

At the heart of our wondering, I think, is the desire to know we are living a moral life, and that can only be known by walking through the brambles of impossible questions and making choices. We look for a source of wisdom to lay the question against, see where it fits, where the corners stick, and take guidance as best we can. Over time, we find that some sources of wisdom serve us better, or are more suited to our nature, or grow with us as we walk. Wisdom shows us truth in glimmers, as light through a moving curtain, and something in our soul remembers and points our steps in one direction or another.

How does this philosophizing help me with my questions? Why did my parents’ deaths unfold the way they did? How do I hold the country I love even as it transgresses the bounds of evil? Do I give or refuse the man begging change outside the bottle shop? Is my life significant beyond the people I touch in this small flicker of time?

When I am still for a time, a frame of mind can come where my thinking slips to the back and a fuller presence comes forward. Under the quiet of the gothic vaults and blue-white tiles of the sanctuary, I let go of myself. The space absorbs me, my inner and outer indistinct. I feel large but empty, a weight floating at the top of my chest like a bruise. It wants to move but can’t find a way out.

A father wanders through, his young daughter, a tassel of curls, holding his hand. At a side chapel, she leaves him and moves toward a stand of votives. I watch her gaze into the candles and then hurry back to take his hand and place her head against his hip. An ache rises in my throat and my eyes spill over. What is this glimmer? A pair of strangers and their tender moment, a source of wisdom.

Photo by Steve Sphar

Posted on

How Many Words for Love? 

How many words have we used to illuminate this indefinable idea, the desire we never exhaust, the experience we can never say enough about, the word beneath all other words, as if it refused to be another item on our wish list, but was the paper our lists are written on? It lies at the root of all our motivations, carries our longings, sustains us in absence or abundance, meets us in any circumstance, uplifting or depressing.

Our expectations are unreasonable for this small, soft syllable, and yet it holds up well. However incomplete the language, I want to understand the many words for love.

Appreciation, seeing the qualities in another I most want to see in myself.

Forbearance, holding my tongue when words would cut, even when I have the right.

Yearning, the slow, aching wish that orbits but cannot land.

Care, sensing needs before they are spoken.

Enchantment, seeing the color in gray clouds.

Forgiveness, the gift I’m afraid to ask for, the salve I withhold until I’m ready for repair.

Bearing pain, my carrying capacity for burdens.

Exuberance, the shameless joy that overspills, laughing and giddy.

Sacrifice, giving away what is most precious.

Discipline, the patience to wait and trust that seeds can bloom.

Grief, the water seeping under the door I had shut to hold it out.

Darkness, the cold unending absence I endure.

Despair, the proof that I still care.

Self-regard, choosing to believe the voice that treasures me, not the voice that disparages me.

Protest, refusal to accept the things that drag us backwards.

Presence, lavishing attention with such outrageous availability that we are mirrored in each other.

Smile, the small gesture that opens doors.  

Touch, pure connection, wordless and warm.

If these words are scattered bits of color turning in the cosmic kaleidoscope, what is the light they are aimed toward? I think it must be some form of this: I hold the interests of another equal to my own; I recognize that the exchange between us, the giving and receiving of love, is the fundamental purpose of being human. The crowd of words continues, vanishing in the distance, but none of them can escape the gravity of that first word. No healing comes outside of its embrace.

Photo by Felicia Montenegro on Unsplash

Posted on

Talking With My Twenty-Year-Old Self

If I could sit across from my twenty-year-old self and speak honestly about the spiritual life, what would I say?

I see it clearly. We walk toward each other and embrace, and then we sit and talk. We talk and talk and fill the night with our philosophies. What fun, what exuberance. We talk about the hard-to-answer questions. He wants to know the answers. I’m glad to share my thoughts, but I tell him they can’t carry much weight for him because any answers you haven’t figured out aren’t yours. Real answers can’t be given, only learned.

I am amazed at his dedication, burning through books in his thirst for wisdom, consumed with a desire to know how the cosmos works and what it wants from him. I remember. There’s a momentum in his passion that feels like running. I want to tell him he can slow down, but maybe that’s how he’s figuring it out, grinding grain at the mill to find the kernel of truth. So I tell him to keep going.

“Love yourself,” I want to say, but don’t. It’s one of the real answers, a cliché until you find your own way in. It was my biggest stumbling block for a long time. I recognize the forward pressure in his striving, running toward enlightenment while running from yourself. All the corroded bits I stuffed into the cracks of my psyche, that, really, this spiritual seeking was a way to look good while I hid the truth: I was a shit. Running was how I covered my tracks.

So, so much wasted effort, running from those ancient, rusted-out beliefs. I could weep for the waste, though I guess it was necessary. Perhaps the lesson was to deepen empathy for everyone who stuffs themselves with some version of the poison. Which is everyone. Maybe I was running from the burden on my back so I could know the breaking weight of others and weep for them, forgive the misguided steps they took running from themselves.

Near the end, we stand. I can’t hold my peace, I say, “Listen. Love yourself.”

He nods quickly. “I know, I know. I do.”

I move in and take his face in my hands. “No. Really. Love yourself. I’m here, it’s me. I love you. I love you.” And we part. He can’t hear it fully, yet. But the seed is planted.

God, what a great kid. He’s got a lot of potential. He’ll figure it out.

Thank you to my friend and colleague, Veronika Tracy-Smith, PhD, for her beautiful question. It’s part of a spiritual survey she uses in her ongoing work helping people find their authentic self.

Photo by Paul Zoetemeijer on Unsplash

Posted on

Stop Quibbling

I have a tendency to be short-sighted.

Lately, my life seems stuck, caught in a trickle of details that matter little. Events are careening across the planet, unsettling the ground and stretching reality. I want to do something to stop the chaos and cruelty, but I feel small and numb. How can I help push us toward sanity, even a smidgen? My choices do not seem to matter.

But then, that’s me. When fear grips me, I tend to catastrophize and lose track of the larger cycles I am part of. To gain perspective, I have to step back. Way back.

It’s true, of course, my life has been a series of choices. Decisions I made in school, work, and romance, the interests and passions that rose and faded, were all forks in the road, taken or abandoned. I’m here because I knocked on door two instead of door three, answered this ad and not that one. All had consequences. But it’s a mistake to think the choices were mine alone. If I lift my head from my current worries, I see a line of ancestors stretching into the distance who have been making choices for a long time.

My family came to this country almost three hundred years ago on a three-masted ship called The Crown. They huddled in the squalid cargo hold for two months with five hundred other people. I don’t know why they left their homes, but the fertile river valley they lived in had been in dispute between warring powers for centuries. The times must have seemed desperate. And my ancestors further back? Ancient Europe, the caves at Lascaux, the plains of Africa? Who knows, but I doubt life was easier. I’m sure they all faced hardship, and yet their courage and perseverance brought me to this moment. 

I feel their presence, as if they are watching me, waiting to see how I will act. I don’t need to know the particulars of their lives to know they wanted to be safe, to flourish, and to nurture a future where their progeny could do the same. However limited their options, they took small steps in the direction of hope so that tomorrow might be brighter than today.

From this perspective, I realize I have more choice and face less danger than any of my ancestors. I am here because of a long line of choices by people who cared. Don’t I care too? Why am I complaining, whining myself into paralysis? I hear their voices, “Stop quibbling; act yourself into the future; take your own small steps that continue the work of creation; make us proud.”

Photo by Kate Kasiutich on Unsplash

Posted on

Unlearn the Constellations

“We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”

          Jack Gilbert, from his poem, “Tear it Down”

When did we first try to corral the stars – was it the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Mayans, Chinese astronomers of the Zhou dynasty? According to their traditions, the first Australians have been mapping the skies for 50,000 years. Or was it further back, archaic humans, their memories lost in time, who looked up in awe and wondered themselves into the night sky?

Constellations are human constructs, framing the stars with stories that explain something to us, about us; that we are brave, or foolish, or brokenhearted. We project our fears, desires, and frailties onto a glorious cast of characters – a guardian dragon, a boastful hunter, a vain queen, seven sisters seeking safety, wise animals offering guidance, the twins who stand at the portal between the worlds. Constellations reflect our nature back to us so we can ponder who we are.

I love stories because they help me make sense of things. They make the incomprehensible grandeur of the cosmos something I can relate to. But reducing reality into meaning diminishes the light and color of the stars themselves, as any filter must. We are arrogant if we think the stars have meaning because we name them. There was a time when they had no names, and we looked at them directly, fully as they are.

Continue reading “Unlearn the Constellations”
Posted on

Fighting Evil Without Hatred

I carry my judgments like stones, heavy in my pocket. They have the appearance of being trustworthy, solid as anchors, but their rigidity does not breathe. I know they harm me more than help me, but I find it hard to lay them aside. If I continue to collect them, they will drown me.

Making judgments is embedded in the way I learn about the world. I’m constantly discerning, evaluating, and making choices based on my past experiences. I learn what works and what doesn’t, what is right and what is wrong, and those lessons condition how I respond to people and events. But judgment adds an unnecessary step, assigning a moral conclusion that something is inherently good or bad. When I arrive at a judgment, my process of discerning and evaluation collapses into a simple fixed declaration.

I hold my judgments dearly. To reconsider them means my opinions and choices may have been wrong. Actions I took, pain I caused, may have been misguided. Fervent defense of my judgments becomes an exercise in self-justification. If others are bad, I am good when I oppose them. But if my judgments about others are misplaced, wholly or partly untrue, then where am I on the scale of goodness?

Continue reading “Fighting Evil Without Hatred”