Alicante

after a line by Jacques Prevert

A small bowl of fruit and a spoon, raspberries

growing dark overnight,

the blueberries getting skin like the swallow of milk

left in a glass this afternoon.

What else has lost its color? The apples, their brown

crept into my arms

and I was like the river that slackens under bridges.

{The hand I waited for when the lamp,

after drowsing with it on,

is put out, and for a short time, drunken with sleep,

the hand I waited for never came.}

All the signs of days spent never settling, each one

abandoned to the will

of the hour, like Father Causade’s duty of the present.

Faith is a gulf of shadows,

he wrote from the Garonne. A life, the olive hue

of bare feet,

especially at this hour when it appears in its remains—

crumpled cloth napkins

and wine’s grainy stain in the bottom of a glass,

a life of anonymous work,

a clutter of old things, leftovers in the fridge rumpling

with mold, pieces of

dream that naggle for days—the gnocchi I ate in Pisa

with a German woman,

and how she leaned into me for a picture on a sidewalk

crowded with passersby,

her hand on my arm. The eggs and tomatoes and black

bread we ate in her kitchen,

weeks later, in Koln.

{I have drifted through rooms putting

lights on and off. I have floated

the way a saint floats in a lover’s dark windows.}

A life of interruptions that keep me,

and darkness. The Garonne,

stone/source, God’s nothing being in nothing, pouring

out of the Pyrenees. A crossing

and staying, a faith in getting used, the house asleep

upstairs emptying itself.

{The still-life preserves an imminent

unrest. At hand the promise

of hunger quieted, a lucid flesh between the savaging

flow of these hours

and the dark sweet clots in a bowl, ageless,

meant for you.

Not the end of this ache when I stoop at the sink,

a present roused

and succulent. The chestnut color of a wet face

near the bottle’s.}

Keep me here. Since never for a single day have you

left my thoughts, and at night

a sound, when the house merely settles in the cool,

could be you,

sweet present of the present, opening a door,

you on the steps,

and you in the morning, if you could just see me,

a face and its rice-paper wrinkles.

Dark as We are Able

“With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it” (Mk 4:33). How discomforting to feel that something is missing, something intimately our own that prevents us from seeing the bare light of Heaven. What we face in this lesson is the thing which our hyper-ordered thinking can hardly bear: loose analogies, resemblances, stories in which one thing seems to tremble with the presence of another. From the beginning we are left feeling like the lummoxes that the apostles seem to be. “Do you not understand this parable?” Jesus asks (Mk 4:13). The twelve are alone with him, asking him to explain, to spell out his meaning. So, he tries again. Some seeds are sown on good soil. They will thrive. Some seeds scatter into rocks, and some into thorns, and these seeds will be rootless or choked off, and perish. What could be clearer?

Just about everything. Yet, if anyone’s going to get the skinny on this business about mustard seeds, then certainly an apostle will, someone so close to Jesus, so moved by him that everything else was put aside at once—home, livelihood, friends, all sense of security. Certainly the apostles, each profoundly in their own way, felt so addressed by the storyteller from Nazareth that they abandoned the life they had always known. How else can we explain their decision to follow Jesus? Still, somehow they don’t get it. We can feel them waiting on his every word. The apostles, rather like each of us, who perhaps want all the loose ends neatly tied up, they themselves become like those who look, but do not perceive, who listen, but do not understand.

We want the sure and unambiguous. How can we say that we don’t really understand when the question Jesus asks makes it clear that so much depends upon our understanding? What’s at stake—“Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them” as soon as they hear (4:15)—is this: Our limited capacity to understand the birth and growth of heaven in our midst causes us to be fumbling, distracted gardeners, unable to care well for what we’ve been entrusted. Here, Friend, open your hands. Hold this most precious of gifts while I am away, this smallest and most inconsequential of seeds on which our love and fellowship and well-being depend.

Distracted gardeners, but gardeners nonetheless. The mystery of Heaven’s growth remains a mystery, despite our best efforts to define the word-seed that comes to us. This is why the contemplatives speak of the humbling dark. They find God’s company in it. And why Dylan Thomas, who said he wrote his poems out of love for people and in praise of God, why he writes, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age.” What if we are heartened by our darknesses? What if, in our suffering as well as our bumbling, we are closest to God, just as the apostles were so close they could pull on a sleeve and say, But why? I don’t understand. Help me. What if our darknesses ought not to be flooded with our own best lights, but instead ought to be entered gropingly, hands out, feeling our way across a darkened room when we cannot sleep, across a darkened but familiar patch of ground where we will wait? What if, even when we wish otherwise, we leave the dark intact? That is the time we will recognize how, since the day of our birth, as the poet says (Ps 71:6), we have leaned on God for everything. Let us be dark as we are able.

Lenten Meditation

In Memory of Molly Sara Sokulski August 16, 1999 – December 3, 2007

Maybe we move between comprehending the sacred quality of our existence, the hand of the Holy Spirit in the relationships we keep and care for, that and being like the crowd that presses in on the house in Capernaum where Jesus has healed Simon’s mother-in-law, bed-ridden with a fever until he “lifted her up” (Mk 1:31). This is one of many healings in which we find ourselves in the position of the ill, the weak, those who suffer. Here, too, begins a strange movement as we follow Jesus: his coming and going, through which we remember the scene of his baptism, and feel how strikingly at odds it seems to be with his search for solitary places.

What could be more certain than the voice from heaven that says, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased” (Mk 1:11)? The heavens were “torn apart” and the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus. And yet, Jesus goes away. After all that, and so soon into the story, he goes away. His disciples have to hunt for him. It isn’t difficult to see their uncomprehending looks, the frustration, worry, even the wildness of fear on their faces, when they do finally find Jesus. “Everyone,” they say, “is searching for you” (1:37). Stranger still, Jesus doesn’t go back to those who are searching. Instead, as if to instill a longing to be found, Jesus says, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do”(1:38). To come, and go so soon?

What happens to those who were searching, to those who say with St. Paul, “I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1Cor 2:3)? What happens to those who heard the story of a healer, and out of the painfulness of their life came looking for him, only to find that he’s moved on? They heard the stories of the cured. Implausible words. Some became bitter, having not found his touch. And some became more deeply attached to the life they’ve been given to lead, and found a humbling repose in that. Isn’t it true that our lives are punctuated by moments of exquisite clarity, in which we are bestowed with a sense of purpose and meaning and peace, even peace, awake and thankful that somehow things aren’t so tenuous, so hard, moments in which even suffering, because of who we became in it, is full of light? It may be that we don’t always understand how we are healed, but that we are.

So, here is the worth of all that being close and then being left. Moments of bare relation with the Holy Spirit disrupt our lives and everything that seemed solid and immutable in it. They resemble what happened to the fishermen who were busy at work one minute and then, astoundingly, adopted as apostles the next. They followed. We are overcome, for unaccountable reasons, opened up, and then left.

We are never the same afterward. We may begin to crave such experiences, only to find ourselves “out in the dark.” Sometimes, like those who heard of a healer, we crowd in after whatever promises to take us away from ourselves, hoping for relief from what is otherwise so difficult hold—relief from the physical pain, sure, of a chronic affliction, but also relief from the anguished spirit that cannot carry anything more, and yet carries all that and more. In those moments of Spirit, we are offered the chance to turn back, to choose God’s way as it is revealed to us, and to keep ourselves for the beloved, as if we’re about to be found and adored.

Mutable, Brief, and Small

The Slaughter House Gallery in Lawrenceville hosts a reading series called Choice Cuts. One night a call came. I was invited to read my poems. In the days leading up to the reading I’d become anxious, because all my verbal and emotional ticks jumped right out at me as I leafed through my poems, looking for the right thing to read. Sharing a piece of writing, though not necessarily writing the piece, is an awful lot like meditation in this sense, because in many ways you become, not opaque, but transparent, plain to see. In the end, on the advice of a friend and fellow reader, Jeff Oaks, I choose three for a beginning, and went with the feel of the listeners following that. They were generous.

We had a conversation of sorts. There were maybe thirty people in attendance that night, and I felt heard, which is an immense gift, especially perhaps to writers, for whom anonymity is the defining quality of their work life. They seek to be heard, to make sense with others in the hearing, and often are not. In other words, anonymity is just as much the defining quality of their work voice as it is of the spiritual life. Writers may be heard in other ways, as a friend, for instance, or a parent, but in writing their voice is hard to hear, something like the whos in Dr. Seuss’s story Horton Hears a Who. Writers must shout we are here to save lives. And who is saved?

Sure there are lots of literary magazines now, lots of contests. But what about the face of someone a few feet away? What about the warm body of the listener? What about Horton? The immediacy of that relationship is unique and unprintable. The page gives us a contained experience, something in our control as we consume it, and largely kept to ourselves. But the live hearing gives us a public encounter. Responses are exchanged in ways the page can’t imitate. And the relationship slips away as it unfolds. What we share in that encounter is mutable and brief.

To continue writing anyway, and for years, entails a leap of faith: the simple fact that you are willing to voice a response to those nearby, one that in all likelihood will go away without notice, but that is nevertheless, somehow, still meaningful to offer, a leap of faith—like a prayer, in the immense reach of the darkness that surrounds our lives, must nevertheless be voiced, even though you can’t be sure you’ll hear the response. Smallness defines us. Maybe a few friends know you write. Maybe a few have even read something of your own here or there. And you’re grateful for their attention. At least then your words have fallen on ears. The more trying faith, though, is to write despite any attention, to write in that smallness. We ought not to seek escape from our life by being heard. We should be the voice of our smallness. The spiritual gift of small work is profound, and life-changing.

Sometimes we hear the response, like the lead goose who is winged on by the honking of the flock. Who leads? Not the lead goose. Because of my smallness I have been aware for a long time that countless are not heard, the voice a singularly delicate and sing-song contingent feature of life, even the one hoarse from shouting. But I am strangely comforted in knowing that I do not hear much, not because I do not hope to hear, but because I am never going to finish listening for what I have missed. The writing life wrings out the person who enters it, as does any spiritual practice. The struggle to come fully into the voice you must write with in order to speak fully of the life you have been given to lead most often takes place outside the ear shot of shared community. Saints have their desert, writers their page. So, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the people at The Slaughter House for hearing this who, and especially to Kris Mamula for organizing the series and inviting me to read. And thanks also to my writing friends for their generosity.

The honking in my meditation came on a recent afternoon because of anger, which is a way of saying that I’d forgotten to listen. I was frustrated by the bickering of my daughters, by the problems we had in getting out the door to go walk in the woods—to collect the weeds, the drying wild flowers, the leaves, and hand-sized sloughs of bark. Maybe, too, I was quick to anger because of a bit of let down after all the excitement to read for others: the sole focus of so much physical and emotional energy, and the obvious return to the small rhythms of my daily life.

I took myself out. I sat on my low bench between the day lilies and sunflowers beside the garage and tried to keep my face warm, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it in a poem he wrote following the bombing of Ben Tre during the Vietnam War. I kept my face warm—my anger grew, and it got snagged on all kinds of things, clung like burdock to anything that passed my attention, the truck that whirred by and rattled on the cobbles in the alley, for instance. I’d come back to my breath, only to experience a flash of it again. Gradually, though, my attention was drawn not simply to angry feelings, but to incidents of anger—the light show of past lives.

One scene after another passed my attention, as though I was unpacking the garage next door with those men whose grunts I heard as they moved large somethings. At first I thought I’m just reliving all the old crap—back to breath, except this was what the breath gave me. Most gifts are easily overlooked. I began to see what was happening, as the men loaded their pick-up, in those times I’d been seized by the furies. But I was not merely rehearsing. Instead, I was coming to the insight— like a voice I heard—that anger is always self-destructive. There is nowhere for anyone to go in it. And in the moment I heard that, I felt my connection to people I love, like my daughters, whose faces I could see, and with whom I’d been angry. I felt a living connection to them, and just as instantly felt a warmth wash over me, a soft sadness and empathy for us all, as though I understood someone to say we are here.

Who Is Free?

In October 1999, Thich Nhat Hanh gave a talk to inmates at the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown. Imagine for a moment the scene: a skinny little Vietnamese monk with a colossal presence slowly makes his way through sixteen security checkpoints to the prison chapel, where more than one hundred prisoners were waiting for him. Imagine the harsh signs of power and the sense of hopelessness you might experience as one after another of the automatic steel doors opens onto a holding room and clangs shut behind you: Passing through one after another containment area until the sense that you are being forever separated from the outside world squashes out all sense of hope and purpose and dignity, all sense of possibility for a humane future.

As a prisoner, what you are left with, I imagine, is a kind of humiliation that all things in your life led inexorably here, that no other way ever really existed for you, that you have always been stamped with meaninglessness and despair, with the belief you found in other people’s eyes—your teachers, your parents even, and strangers you passed on the street—that you were never good enough, never worth the time of day, that you were a monster, a defect, and that the only thing you ever really owned was trouble. Prison is a hell: It is no wonder that above the passageway down, Dante, as he begins his descent, reads: “I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE. I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE. I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW…. ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.”[1]

The inmates waited for Thich Nhat Hanh to speak to them. He was slow, full of purpose. They were restless, and then settled into a remarkable stillness with the little monk, and then the monk began to talk. What he said that day forms the basis of his book called be free where you are. In many ways, what you can read there is not all that remarkable. Thich Nhat Hanh speaks to the prisoners about mindfulness—mindful eating, mindful walking, mindful breathing. Over the course of his life as a monk, Thich Nhat Hanh has taught about forms of mindfulness in many different books, so the teachings themselves are not new.

They are ancient, really, and for this reason bear repeating—at least they do for me, because I find it helps me to overcome habitual ways of pushing my way through the world. I like having the reminder. Growing up I learned that the world I live in values assertiveness, aggressive independence, being driven by goals and dreams and giving no quarter in the pursuit of them. Anything else smacked of weakness, of being unworthy of everything that is good and best. “To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/Of all the western stars, until I die/….To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” as Alfred Tennyson wrote in his poem “Ulysses.”[2]

In our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, we have our Ulysses in Ralph Waldo Emerson. He writes out of this sentiment in his essay, “Self-Reliance,” in a passage which was a kind of mantra, a kind of willed reality for me as I tromped through the city streets in London and Paris and Rome in my early twenties, a sentiment that is deeply imbedded in the North American psyche. Here it is: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”[3] Now, the greatness is too caught up in egoism to be worth embracing. Much of that sweetness went rancid after the traumas of the First and Second World Wars. But, must we live our own life? Yes. Because we must care for ourselves or experience a living death.

And is it our own life to live? I don’t think it is entirely our own life. We may be trying to shape our life through the good that is not really our good. It seems to me now that our educational system fails insofar as it does not assist us in learning to be who we are as unique beings—as beloved of God, to use Henri Nouwen’s thought. We tend to be blind to our own place in creation, to what makes us beloved. Education in our country demands uniformity, that we learn in the same ways the very same things at the same rate of progress—that there is such a thing as progress toward the one, bright, orderly future. Yet, a particular kind of person is desirable. Not all comers. Those who fail to measure up in that way are thought to have something wrong with them.

We are stamped with a sense of individuality that usually excludes our deepmost connections to others. Even our faith traditions have typically failed us vis-à-vis our belovedness. Many people have a crippling sense of self that stems directly from unforgiving, even cruel, religious beliefs, such as those about sin. Yet, as to connections, in my face you see my ancestors. And in your faces I see the people you come from. The matter that composes our bodies is not ours. It has been passing through the universe in a broad variety of forms for eons and will continue to change in endless ways long after the person you recognize in the mirror as you is gone. The stars are part of us. The sunlight, too. The dirt we walk upon. The water that has flowed from rivers and seas into your body, and fallen as rain from clouds that countlessly shifted into new shapes across the sky—alligators, and rabbits, and lions, and monkeys, and deer, and fish—that water is part of others as well. We are not separate beings. So, we acknowledge and give thanks for the interconnected web in which we have our existence. We are part of creation.

We can be separated, though. We can be blacks and whites, Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, cowboys and Indians, rich and poor, gay and straight. The list is endless, and so is the suffering that comes with separation, a suffering which, the longer you live with it, the more it effaces the humanity of others in bitterness and anger and despair, and not lastly, but from the beginning, effaces your humanity as well. What is remarkable about Thich Nhat Hanh’s visit to that prison in Maryland is not the teaching he came to share, not the learning he attained over many years of study, but rather that in his presence prisoners could glimpse a way out of suffering, even in that hell. That way is compassion, and it leads to freedom. “By cultivating freedom for yourself, you will be able to help the people you live with” (7). The power of being seen for who you are, in your belovedness, in the natural abiding goodness of your heart of hearts, is the power of compassion, and that awakens in others their aspirations to be free.

There are lots of stories about going to hell, stories which emphasize wrong-doing and fallenness. Broken spirits abound. But I like to remember that there are also other ways to hear these stories. I mean the stories in which hell is entered by someone whose heart is full of love and compassion. The liberator is not always successful—think of Orpheus, or even Lot leading his family into the hills outside Sodom and Gomorrah when it’s being destroyed. Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. Eurydice gets caught in the underworld when Orpheus looks back to make sure she is following. In a film of a few years ago called What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams played a doctor who was killed at the scene of an automobile accident. He tries to reach his wife from the other side, as it were, but she gradually falls into despair and kills herself. Her soul is trapped in hell. When he learns of this, he makes undertakes perilous journey to bring her out. What more, I like to think that compassion and love are behind the story of Jesus’s descent into hell. A sweep of the neighborhood just to let everyone know who’s in charge hardly seems necessary. But for love and compassion, that’s different. What’s the message here? That we can be consumed with suffering? Lost even beyond our own understanding? That we can lose our love by withholding our trust in its saving grace? That love is irrepressible?

Thich Nhat Hanh held onto his love. He tells the prisoners a story about the U.S. bombing of a village during the Vietnam War. The entire place was destroyed, the home of one of his dearest colleagues, Sister Chan Khong. Sometime after the bombing, he’d heard an officer claim that he had to devastate the village in order to save it from Communism, an atrociously ugly thing to say. It’s significant that this is how Thich Nhat Hanh begins his talk with the prisoners, because the story provides an example of how, through mindfulness, he kept his soul. Compassion is the way. We can see how the seed of anger was planted in him because of the bombing. The story is really about how that anger bloomed later on. He can, like his listeners at the prison, succumb to anger and violence and fear. Through mindfulness, however, he avoided responding in a way that would cause harm and further suffering. He describes it in a poem as holding his face, keeping his “loneliness warm.” He lived with it, took care of it, and in this way saved his soul.

I’m trying to hold onto my love too, as I know you are. The world is difficult, and it can be a struggle. So, I practice sitting meditation as often as I am able—sometimes twice a day, in the morning and before bed, sometimes once, and sometimes it seems once or twice a week. I try to eat mindfully, slowly tasting all there is to taste with each bite. And if quiet reading and reflection counts—that is, reading slowly and allowing someone’s words to settle inside me and pausing over their meaning or the insight they bring me—then I practice mindfulness in that way as well. “Mindfulness,” Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “is a kind of energy that helps us to be aware of what’s going on. Everyone is capable of being mindful. Those of us who practice daily have a greater capacity for being mindful than those who do not. Those who do not practice still have the seed of mindfulness, but its energy is very weak”(3).

When I first began trying to live with this energy, which Thich Nhat Hanh calls a liberating energy, I noticed what seemed like a constant barrage of difficult emotions filling my thoughts. Sometimes, even for a long time into the day, for instance, I’d still be wrapped up in those emotions. The practice of sitting mindfully seemed exceptionally hard. I used to joke that if everyone would just meditate, no one would feel like life is so short anymore, because sitting a few minutes seemed endless. I believe what happens—keeping the face warm—is that the practice of mindfulness begins to filter you, sort of like being poured through one of those Britta filters. It’s not as difficult as it used to be, and it’s often pleasurable, though some days still feel hard. I try to be patient. Paying close attention to the person who you happen to be from one moment to the next, without being judgmental about the so-called bad or good you find, has the effect of charcoal on the soul. That kind of attention rinses us. Gradually, we come to be aware of our responses to people and circumstances before we enact them—an opening, a pause in the unconscious flow, an opportunity not to lose our heads. The practices, such as listening to the woods, as I do with my daughters fairly often, capture the impurities that have been poisoning our relationships with others, and diminishing our ability to respond with loving-kindness to the suffering that surrounds us.

I have a confession. I found myself unexpectedly experiencing difficult emotions. As many of you know, I was admitted to the social work program at the University of Pittsburgh. On the day following my last visit here in August, I attended a series of student orientation meetings. I moved from one place to another, and gradually I found myself feeling like I didn’t want to be there at all. As I sat with my response to the university that night and the next day, I had this insight: My life is in a really different place now. I realized that I didn't want anything to do with prerequisites. I didn't want to prove myself in that way anymore. Overwhelmingly, I felt that I just want to be myself, move on with who I am and what I have, and decided to withdraw from the program.

I thought I’d tell you all because this congregation has been so supportive of me for years, and I greatly appreciate that fact. You’ve always been welcoming, and encouraging, and that has helped me to speak openly from my heart. But you were involved in my insight and decision to leave the program in a more direct way. After our last service together I listened to many of you speak about your struggles to find purpose and meaning and value that mattered to your heart. Some of you are lonely. Some uncertain, and some slog through feelings of despondency, and lack of hope. But you all come here, sit together, and offer each other your company, your friendship, your support. That morning, Doug spoke about doing what the Creator wants you to do, that doing that comes easier than not—which I understand to mean a life lived in accord with sacred intentions, in harmony with the way you’re bent—however you work that out, and wherever that unfolds. It does not mean, to my ear, that your life will be without trials.

In all that talk that Sunday following the service, I heard something that helped me not to separate, and for that I’m grateful also. Now, of course I don’t mean to suggest that the University of Pittsburgh is hell. But way leads on to way, doesn’t it? One separation leads to still others, and before long you may find yourself, Dante put it, midway in your life’s journey, and lost in the Dark Wood of Error. I kept thinking about your words that day, your aspirations for clarity, for your own authentic life, which you seek here, in community, with such openness, and I felt emboldened to follow my own heart—to lead my life that way, openly and in its own nature. It doesn't seem to be without its challenges, but those challenges feel organic, and at the very least this means I don't have to disengage from the life I have now to meet them. I can be free where I am. I think I discovered that what my life can accommodate, and what I'm willing to bend it toward, diverges from some of the ways I have tended to think about it—from my habitual energies, my unmindful responses. So, I feel free, and thank you for your example.

Finding and developing a spaciousness of spirit leads to a clarity in which you can see yourself as you are—a kind of birth. You stop clinging to the shells and masks of the self you wish you were, the should have beens and should have dones that constrict you life. Spaciousness of spirit allows even for the hard and wrenching circumstances in life to be faced with peace—the peace of those Buddhist monks in Myanmar who risked their lives, rice bowls turned upside down in their hands, to challenge the brutality of the military government there. Really, it is the peace of countless martyrs, countless saints, countless people of faith who, completely anonymous, risk everything for justice, love, and compassion. “Every step you take,” Thich Nhat Hanh says, “can help you reclaim your freedom” (7).

It is the peace that the Buddha experienced, before he became the Buddha, when he was in hell. Thich Nhat Hanh tells the prisoners this story, too: The guard in charge of the inmates in hell carries a big pitchfork. Any time any of the inmates does something wrong, he plunges the pitchfork into inmate’s chest. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Although the inmates suffered greatly from their treatment, they could not die. That was their punishment: They suffered, but they did not die” (30). Well, one day the inmates are forced to carry heavy loads on their backs, and the guard, because he has no compassion, and thus he too is in hell, he drives the prisoners to move faster.

Soon, one of the prisoners is singled out by the guard, because he’s struggling under his load, and at that moment, witnessing this, compassion is born in the Buddha, who wants to intervene. Now, the Buddha knows full well that if he challenges the guard about this, he himself will suffer. Even so, he says to the guard, “Don’t you have a heart?” Just as he expected, the guard plunges his pitchfork into the Buddha’s chest, and instantly the Buddha dies and is born again. He is freed from that hellish existence, and begins practicing compassion until he becomes a fully enlightened being. Compassion for others makes a way through hell. But you have to begin with yourself.

delivered on October 14, 2007
at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ligonier Valley

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[1] Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Tr. John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 1954), Canto 3:1-3, 9.

[2] Victorian Poetry and Prose, Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford UP, 1973) 418.

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First and Second Series (London: J.M. Dent & Co.) 34.

The Birds Shoot Straight up

In that time that seemed not to pass

like listening for bird trills in the deep shade

he waited too for the bus at the roadside

standing by the way they give themselves over

mornings after water spills from the ditch troughs

the loud sloughs of passing cars in the wet road

people standing apart or rushing up to board

the heater’s blow and clatter of coins into the till

that time turning to him might interrupt his visit

when my grandfather stayed on at the stop it was

like watching bathing birds that shoot straight up

endure that light even as they expose themselves

he waved in the place he had stood just then

a quake of wing before becoming part of the trees

Drinking the Water

The other day a friend told me about a rafting trip she made years ago in the Grand Canyon. My family had just returned from Arizona a few days earlier, where we’d traveled to visit my parents, and sisters and their families. Telling Debra about our trip put her in mind of the “life changing” journey she’d made. She’d been down the canyon for eight days. She said, “You know, you can’t spend all that time in the earth without being changed.”

Experiences of nature, like hers, are centering for us—even when our opportunities for bare, simple encounters with nature seem to be diminishing. Part of what I want to say this morning is that we need those bare encounters in order to survive: encounters with nature, encounters with others, but also—and this is the significance of them—encounters with our own true self. With this in mind, I’d like to think out loud about the story of the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well of Jacob.

But for the moment, these encounters. What we look for in faith, I think, is something life-changing, like what happens when we spend “all that time” in the earth as my friend did. Buddhists say that looking for change like this involves a subtle form of violence. When we look for change, we aren’t as attentive to the present as we could be. Instead, we’re wrapped up in illusions about who we are and how we want to be. We tend to tell ourselves that we’re not OK as we are, and tend to regard our troubles and problems, our fears and insecurities as things to be gotten out of the way, gotten past—trash, instead of compost. So, you see we’re violent even to ourselves. We think about being cleansed, about one day being good enough, one day being right enough, together enough, living in the right way so that we can speak without being a hypocrite.

How can we be engaged in the present, how can we be oriented to the sacred potential of the present in a non-violent way? In meditation what happens is that we create an open space for ourselves to be who we are, however we find ourselves, as opposed to laboring to become the person we’re supposed to be. That’s not to say we won’t change. It’s just that we start where we are, instead of where we think we’d like to end up. Here’s the beginning of non-violence. The kind of encounter I’m thinking of, one which exposes our life as it really is, is one we need to experience with each other. This is how we are called to live by the core of all faith traditions, face to face, without exception.

One way to be engaged in the present is to live openly, with our guard down, in a community like this one. But we begin with ourselves—with our own breath, rooted in our own soil—because we can’t truly be a compassionate, healing presence in other people’s lives if we regard essential parts of ourselves as so much trash to be dumped. This is why Ghandi said, “To serve one’s neighbor is to serve the world. Indeed it is the only way open to us of serving the world… All living beings are members one of another so that a person’s every act has a beneficial or harmful influence on the whole world.”[1]

But let me say something more, as an illustration—something that relates to a feeling I’ve had since I was a boy and slipped out of the house to wander in the dirt mounds. They were pushed up by bulldozers that razed nearby fields for more streets and homes. I remember being fascinated by all the debris. Sometimes people used the mounds as a dump for broken and used up household items. They’d take out their stuff under the cover of night. The fascination was that all the debris had a story to tell about how people lived, and I could feel those stories.

One time I found a trove of pottery shards dating to the first farmers in the area, the Hohokam. And I was captivated by the rawness of the flattened out field, stripped of its weeds, like it had never been used. Have you ever had the feeling that, in coming upon a place, you’re not finding it intact, but that you can sense how it used to be through its present appearance? The scrubby bare field, as I think about it now, is an external sign of what happens internally to each of us when we participate in our own diminishment, when we perform subtle acts of violence against ourselves and, by extension, others.

After the bulldozers had done their work, all kinds of creatures would find their way to our houses, because theirs were now ruined. The time I spent out like that was quieting and mystical. If anything has guided me into poetry writing it is the time I spent in those dirt mounds. I felt like myself there—maybe a little razed and scrubby, even as a child, but alive still. What I want to say is simply this: We need life-changing encounters with Milkweed, and water, and shale, with trees and grass, with dirt, and seeds and roots, and the moon and its shadows, and the air at morning and evening. We need them with all of life, and all of our life. The core of world faith traditions won’t ever be exhausted, because the vision of life they hold as a continually unfolding sacred encounter is necessary to well-being. Faith traditions won’t ever be things of the past, because at the core of all of them is a sense of wholeness that is challenging to respect. What they say about Justice and Compassion, Grace, and Gratefulness, and Gift, and Love, and Community is how they point in the broadest possible terms to what sustains our lives.

Sometimes it seems we’re a little like cats. If you point off into the distance, a cat will just look at your hand, and not at what you want them to see. Now dogs will look out beyond. They’re ready to head off into the great open, but not cats. We’re a little like cats when it comes to faith traditions, because we get wrapped up in who’s doing the pointing. We get so involved in all the excruciating minutiae of how something’s said and what isn’t being said that we forget to notice that we’re being pointed beyond.

We live in incredibly confusing times. Many of us turn to faith because we feel lost. We’ve examined to death the hand that points. We can see the beauty of the hand, and its ugliness, and become incapable of accepting its direction. We’re looking for life-lines, and they are there in the “old” faith traditions and practices—at least they have been for me. If only we could be like the dog for once, accept the direction and go, just to see what happens.

There’s something more, though. We’re also looking for fixes. And that’s a little different. I’ve noticed a deep, unquenchable thirst in myself for a faith that can contain me. I’ve wanted to submerge myself in the songs and prayers, the rhythms and rituals, and I’ve felt deeply disspirited and even bitter when I haven’t been able to do this. Partially, the desire to enter fully into a faith is a response to the emptiness of our society’s dominant values. Partially, it’s a response to the heartbreaking suffering we see everywhere. My point is this: It’s one thing to recognize our need for authentic encounters with the sacred ground of being, but something else may be going on when we’re possessed by an unquenchable thirst for these encounters, and run from one to the next with our rosaries, our kabalistic red strings, our singing bowls, and incense burning. Perhaps this is a kind of escape seeking in which, to quote Thomas Merton, “God is experienced as an object outside ourselves, as “another being” capable of being enclosed in some human concept.”[2]

Our spiritual thirst can point us in two directions, it seems to me, either to the open-endedness of our life or to an egoism in which we increasingly fool ourselves that we’re in control and have a hold of what’s real. The prophets have always criticized the egoism—think of Amos. Our actual position, though, is that we’re always negotiating between the two. One suggests that we seek to find ourselves centered in an awareness of the preciousness of our birth, to use a Buddhist phrase. The other, in effect, means that we’re not willing to accept a faith, a spiritual practice, even a sacred encounter unless it conforms to our own demands about how it comes and what it says and means. Isn’t this one another kind of self-inflicted wound? Both directions, in any case, have profound implications about how we consider responsibility, and the meaning of generosity, and about how fully we lend our life to love.

For years I’ve felt an attraction to Catholicism. Which thirst leads me there? Despite real theological differences, I’ve kept going back, kept looking for a way to make it all work out. Maybe you’ve had similar experiences, trying to find some angle, some Archimedean point, from which a tradition could work out for you. It turns out, again and again, that both kinds of thirst, for different reasons, are so great nothing can satisfy them. And what could quench such thirst? Our lives are full of endless encounters, endless openings onto the preciousness of life, and therefore endless opportunities to give up egoism. Here’s where the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman appears for me. I’m interested in it because of what it suggests about their relationship to the Holy Spirit. When Jesus and the Samaritan woman meet each other he makes a lovely distinction between common and spiritually living water. It’s marvelous that in a desert town their talk of water turns out to be a rich and subversive conversation about God’s love.

Jesus says, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water I shall give him will never thirst; the water I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13). It will be endless water, which is pretty attractive in the desert, and pretty attractive to people who are stunned by violence, irreverence, and the waste of life all around them. We all have our razed fields.

There’s a tendency to think that the “old” faiths have been broken open and can no longer hold our lives or meet our needs the way they used to. Maybe so. We tend to speak of, and seek comfort in, a plurality of truths. The contemporary orientation is not really concerned with actually choosing a faith, because the belief is that a single faith can’t contain or speak meaningfully to the whole self. This sense of faith is attractive because it offers flexibility, a kind of freedom, and improvisation. The field’s wide open. It represents an intensely creative life, diverse, rich in rewards... The assumption is that the “old” faiths are just not creative and liberating.

The drawback of this way of thinking about spiritual truth is that it says very little about our broken hearts. It describes what’s going on outside us—the conditions in which faith-seeking occurs. But it does not describe what’s going on inside of us. It does not describe where we stand in our interior, in our personhood right now. It does not speak to our limitations, because it views life as essentially having no limitations. The sky’s the limit.

Isn’t it easy to lose touch with the reality we started with somewhere? And isn’t it perhaps true that a broken heart drives us more than we realize? In a passage from Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian flood epic that predates our Noah story, the sage figure Utnapishtim, who survived the savaging waters with his wife, says this: “Many years ago through loss I learned / That love is wrung from our inmost heart / Until the loved one is and we are not. / You have known, O Gilgamesh, / what interests me, / To drink from the Well of Immortality. / Which means to make the dead / Rise from their graves / And the prisoners from their cells, / The sinners from their sins. / I think love’s kiss kills our heart of flesh. / It is the only way to eternal life…”[3]

The Gospel encounter I’ve been alluding to is heartbreaking itself. The whole scene between the Samaritan woman and Jesus needs to be unpacked, because so much is taking place between them that concerns faith and searching. The woman wants the living water—who wouldn’t? She doesn’t want to be thirsty anymore. She’s tired of drawing water there. The story takes place in a town outside Judea where the roads to Jericho and Jerusalem meet. It’s midday, and Jesus is tired and sits down to rest at a well—he’s thirsty and asks the Samaritan woman to give him a drink.

The only place this story occurs in the gospels is in St. John’s account. It is the only mention of a well named after Jacob, and it occurs early in his narrative surrounded by the Cana wedding and so-called cleansing of the Temple, John the Baptist’s activities, a feast and healings in Jerusalem, and loaves and fishes on the Sea of Galilee. The place they meet lies between Jesus’s home country and the seat of Judaism, its holiest center, Jerusalem. Their exchange happens in view of the mountain where the Samaritan woman’s “fathers worshipped” (4:20).

In the first six books of St. John’s gospel, Jesus is constantly on the move. He traverses great distances, and at least twice he leaves home for Jerusalem and returns. In all his restlessness, the Pharisees are increasingly opposed to him, and outcast people, like the Samaritans, and the wounded and suffering, slowly become “followers.” In this context, the well of Jacob and the mountain are extremely potent metaphors. The evangelist’s account smacks of propaganda and condescension. St. John is telling us that the believers of other faiths don’t really drink the living water. Using the image of a debased and pariah people, the Samaritans, St. John is saying something like, “Look, even she gets it, and look who she is.” He tries to bolster Christian faith claims, oddly, by denigrating Jesus’s own faith tradition.

That’s the heartbreaking ugliness of the hand that points. But maybe we can look past that to the image of the water itself. The water alludes to the wholeness of life in God’s love. What can emerge if we look to the water is the sense that in the face of God we must be bare, and that in our bareness we begin to lead a real life. Jesus is alone when he meets the Samaritan woman. The disciples have gone away to buy food. In some sense, they don’t get it about the water either—but she does. “Jacob’s well was there,” we’re told, “and so Jesus, wearied by his journey, sat down beside the well” in the heat of the day (4:6). He’s finding his life too. It is not a life without pain, but one in which pain can lead to growth.

Everything unfolds in the ache of present need. He doesn’t have to explain a lot, especially to his disciples. It’s a meeting in which he can simply be himself. It’s open and raw on both their parts. Each one is careworn, each one struggles. Why is their talk of water subversive? Because we can see the way in which their meeting cuts through oppressions that each one carries. We see her strength, and his. We see his world weariness and hers, the hard life she’s led—married five times, lives with a sixth man, and now draws a drink of water for this guy. We see the oppressions are not erased but stand out in stunning relief in their meeting, and yet they nevertheless see each other.

Their meeting is wonderful for this reason, hopeful, significant beyond the particulars of religion. We don’t have to ignore St. John’s sadness, the way he creates suffering out of his love for his faith. But it is possible to let the vitality of the encounter sift through St. John’s sadness to the feeling, which Jesus expresses, that a relationship with God calls us to worship “in spirit and truth” (4:23). If we let ourselves hear that broadly, wherever we are, we can begin to live in a transformative way. Your heartbreak matters. And so does your love.

Delivered March 4, 2007 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ligonier Valley

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[1] M.K. Ghandi, Vows and Observances (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999) 90.

[2] Letter to Erich Fromm, October 2, 1954 in Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, William H. Shannon, Ed. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985) 310.

[3] Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative by Herbert Mason (New York: New American Library, 1970) 74.

The Heart's Eye

Mysticism is a liberating movement in humankind’s experience and history.

It is perhaps the most precious treasure with which the human family has been entrusted,

and it is our most effective resource for transformation of attitudes, actions, and lives.

Brother Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart

Henri Nouwen once wrote, “You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”[1] I love the directness of this thought. It rises out of living with questions about meaning in our lives, and purpose, and on some level it is a response to the need to belong. So much of our lives—so much of mine anyway—is spent in a search to find and to feel belonging. Nouwen’s insight is the sort that comes after a long time searching, and probably not finding the answers one hoped to find. Still, there’s a gentle humor in it. It’s not weighed down with disappointment, so the simplicity of it is all the more stunning because his insight resonates with profound need and longing. “Our life’s journey is the task of refining our belonging,” says John O’Donohue, “so that it may become more true, loving, good, and free. We do not have to force belonging. The longing within us always draws us towards belonging and again towards new forms of belonging when we have outgrown the old ones.”[2] For some of us, our search may not lead to new forms but to new depths and resonant qualities in the faith we were first given.

“You cannot be competent in God.” This is an insight that comes with a skepticism of unchanging answers. When I read it (it comes from Nouwen’s essay, “From Resentment to Gratitude”) I was reminded—for whatever reason—of a conversation that took place years ago. Shortly after my wife, Alexis, and I joined the Unitarian Universalist congregation on the North Side of Pittsburgh, we had one of those arguments about religion that end up feeling like you’ve chased your tail all night. Well, you know arguments get started for the oddest reasons sometimes, and I have no idea anymore how this one started, but I remember saying, “Jesus is not God.”

It was a show stopper. There we were, in the basement of that little church, cleaning up after some gathering, just as you all do all the time, putting away the chairs, picking up the papers, washing up the coffee cups. And the whole time we’re having a conversation about who Jesus is. At the time, Jesus was someone who points the way, a guide with the closest of relationships with God, someone who carries an open-ended sense of the sacred in our lives, and in that sense a follower among followers. That night at the church, Alexis was explaining, with a little too much relish as I recall, that Jesus was not just the son of God, as I claimed, but God also. She recited the Nicene Creed. It just rolled out of her, as it does from all Catholics I know—that poetry of belief in “all that is seen and unseen,” the son “eternally begotten of the father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” Really, it was a stunningly beautiful moment. And besides, how on earth do you argue with people who’ve been saying that since the year 325?

But how can this be? I persisted. Jesus is the Son of God. Sometimes he’s the Son of Man. Everywhere he goes he talks about his father, and his father’s kingdom being on its way, so how can he be the Father? Well, that’s the mystery, Alexis explained. I heard a theology professor once say that Christianity inherited this conundrum of logic from ancient Greek philosophy. He didn’t know how anyone could bear thinking about it much. The western churches hold that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both God the Father and Jesus the Son—the phrase in dispute is the Latin “filioque.” In the eastern churches, saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the Son is thought to undermine the distinctiveness of the person of the Holy Spirit, whereas in the west it is felt to maintain the unity of the trinity.

That’s a head full. All this follows from saying Jesus is God. “Filioque” marks a mystery, perhaps the mystery of Christianity, the lynchpin that holds the story together, the healings and miracles, the parables and the last supper, the empty tomb and the road to Emmaus, Jesus and Christ. Our argument stepped right into it. And wasn’t I a Christian, too? Didn’t I also belong? I wonder now if being able to acknowledge Jesus’s own intimate relationship with God actually opens and safeguards the possibility that each of us could have so close a relationship, and that, in a curious way, each of us could go out to a quiet place in the desert and also find that place in ourselves where God thrives for us and where we could thrive in God? Perhaps the experience would be something like Meister Eckhart described: “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one loving.”[3]

Well, despite her best efforts, I was still unconvinced—he was the son—some might say I willfully persisted in my error, so Alexis appealed to a higher authority and called over Art McDonald, a former Dominican priest, as many of you know, and our minister at the time. Now I’m in for it. Alexis rehashed the whole sorry story, making sure to emphasize her side of it, and then Art looked at me, with a soft and matter of fact sort of look—and said, “Yeah, Scrap.” (Scrappy is his nickname for me). “Yeah, Scrap,” he said, like I was some puppy learning not the chew the furniture.

“You cannot be competent in God.” It’s revealing how baffled I was—and still am, frankly. But being baffled, living without answers is the insight behind Nouwen’s comment. It’s his response to the incomprehensible quality of experience that quickly takes us beyond ourselves and the certainties that once felt so solid and dependable. Belonging cannot be forced. We have to learn to live with mystery. If our spiritual life is to be a mature one, we have to be open to what we don’t understand. “True belonging is not ownership,” says O’Donohue, “it never grasps or holds on from fear or greed. Belonging knows its shape and direction. True belonging comes from within”(3).

We can recite the list of beliefs we learned as children, the creeds and prayers that formed the bedrock of our belonging to the faith. Those beliefs are a fundamental part of our identity, of who we say we are. Even if we reason that a certain sets of beliefs are part of who we used to be, in the sense that we may think of ourselves as former Catholics or former Methodists, or even formerly Christian, the lived experience of those beliefs, the habits of community and family and self they shaped, are still actively part of our ongoing response to life. They create a sense of expectation and need. They are part of our organism, our living being, our existence.

But what if our answers don’t remain answers for long? What if they slip away? It seems to me that, in a fundamental sense, there are no answers. So, what does it mean to be open to what we don’t understand—open to the mystery? Nouwen says we have to be willing to face the painfulness of our questions in our search for purpose and meaning. O’Donohue says, “When we forget how partial and temporary our belonging must remain, we put ourselves in the way of danger and disappointment. We compromise something eternal in us. The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within oneself” (4).

That work involves our will and our consciousness. We come to feel the will of God in our own life circumstances, though it is difficult to discern, and we come to see God’s face in the face of others, and to respond to the call of their life through our will. “When we have cultivated a subtle spiritual awareness,” Brother Wayne Teasdale writes, “no separation between inner and outer exists. The quality of our consciousness permeates everything we do because that awareness is who we really are.”[4] The effort to live our questions, that is, to live as a response to the sacred in our midst, is essential to being human—perhaps it’s essential to life itself, and as much a part of being the fly that walks across the pane of glass as it is to being the person who looks through that same window. Perhaps we cannot be competent with life, and this is why we tend to be on the move all the time. How often does it feel like you’re always on the look out for the right window, for the place in which you can make sense of what is happening to you now, the cast of light you live in and who you have become? What new forms of belonging were developing for you when you walked in the doors here?

For Nouwen, when we allow ourselves to confess our questions, we are coming into contact with God. Better, he reasons, to be a Job in the rawness of our life than to be quick and easy defenders of God—of established and acceptable answers. Maybe we should allow ourselves to be speechless in the face of great pain and anguish, and maybe when we feel ready to speak, maybe even then we should pause, and live in the silence, however it is shared. What does one say to the parents of five children, all under the age of six, who recently perished in a house fire in Pittsburgh?

My first sight of Tucson, Arizona, when I moved there to begin undergraduate studies, was of a city park on Speedway Boulevard near the freeway. Many dozen homeless people, mostly men, were clustered around benches, and in shade where it could be found. At the end of summer they’d pour into the city from northeastern regions where the winters are harsh. Most social services were being slashed at the time, two years into the first Reagan presidency. When I asked about who they were, it was not unusual to hear dismissive comments about “transients.” The name suggests those people chose to come and go as they please, its history reaching at least as far back as Depression era “hobos” and “tramps.” It was one of the first times I became aware of the ways in which people use language to obscure the reality of social conditions, and to distance themselves from the harshness and brutality of social problems.

Does this mean, if we live with our questions, that we must always be “those who seek with groans,” as Pascal put it? Maybe. But I have found that the more familiar I have become with suffering, the more gratefulness and compassion have grown in my life. It’s a curious thing, perhaps, but as I’ve been able to let myself experience the face of suffering, whether it be my own or the face of people I hear of and see, pain has not been constricting, as it is when I have closed myself off. I’ve learned this as much from Henri Nouwen and Buddhist teachers as I have from my own work with contemplative practices.

We cannot avoid the painfulness of our search, the uncomfortable and persistent silences, the back and forth between one kind of answer and another. We can of course be well versed in the answers. After the fire, many people didn’t hesitate to say what the deaths of those children means about the community where they lived and about the mothers who were out at a nightclub when two eight year sons, who did escape, began playing with matches. However, I tend to fall silent, not because I have nothing to say, but because the words themselves seem worthless next to the little coffins being carried out of a church. Worthless next to someone’s immense anguish. Maybe our company, wholly inadequate as an answer, could be enough as a response. Maybe as a response, our full company and attention are a way to know God’s will, not discursively through proofs and catechesis, but through intuition and open hearted presence. From there we will become involved in compassionate service.

The danger of quick and ready answers is that we may become Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, Job’s friends—we may become them instead of being fully alive and attentive to the lived quality and depth of our questions. For me, the breathtaking insight behind Nouwen’s comment that we cannot be competent with God is that answers, fundamentally, don’t matter. When you think about your spiritual journey, wherever you have come from and wherever you seem to be now, is it that you are searching for the right answers or for more questions?

Think for a moment of a light switch. Countless times you’ve moved from room to room flipping it off or on. Maybe that little phrase—“filioque”—can represent a switch, but there can be others. The switch can be a kind of prayer—“Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven—on or off? It can be sin—born with it or something that happens out of the brokenness of human relationships—on or off? It can be a particular sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense of love and even of God. If our focus is on the right answer, we may vacillate between what our faith tradition says about major issues in our lives and what we perceive about them from within. And then we look something like children flipping the light switch on and off. This happens even between one faith tradition and another. Think for a moment of the market place of religions, the spiritual tourism advertised in magazines, the insatiable hunger for experiences of connection, recognition, and belonging. We get focused on how we belong, and what supports us in that sense of belonging.

If we keep ourselves in this state, we may tend to argue about whether we let the dark in or put the light out when we flip the switch. And we may not have understood our own questions very well. We may never shed on them the necessary light for our understanding, and for our openness to the mystery of how God moves in the life we have to live—we may not understand our darkness or our lightness. “Life passes on in proximity to the sacred,” Abraham Heschel writes, “and it is this proximity that endows existence with ultimate significance.”[5] It may be that, over time, we move into the faith of Job’s friends, but after listening to our questions, and feeling how they lead us instead of answers we find and cling to, we’ll have joined Job’s friends in a truly open hearted way.

The questions, not the answers, lead us to clarity. Our questions awaken us. It may be finally that we need the banisters that the available answers give us. Who isn’t able to point to a time when one of those answers steadied us when we most needed steadying—a prayer, a song, lighting a candle, some act that gave us balance when we would have fallen otherwise? The point is not to be dismissive of the replies of our friends, or even of ourselves when we discover that we are Eliphaz. The point instead is to focus on the openness of our heart—not the answers we hear, because the issue is not their validity, but on our long and unflinching attention to the questions, because they are how we experience the need of God. As Heschel writes, “The human is the borderline of the divine”(265).

This is why contemplative practices are important to me. They are about listening, and letting go of the chatter in my head. Through contemplation I pay attention to the quality of my life as it unfolds in its fluid, mutable ways from one moment to the next. In that movement I feel God. I listen, and try to respond by listening more. In meditation—whether I sit early in the morning or practice mindfulness as I prepare a meal for hungry mouths because the day is already underway—in meditation I find a new form of belonging. Meditation allows me to pay attention to the sacred duty of being an individual, and a husband and a parent and a friend. And I should be sure to add, a son, since my mother is here!

Meditation helps me to be close. In this sense, as I practice meditation, and though I’m all the time interrupted, because there are so many voices telling me what is right, which is the answer I should keep, and which truth is fully true and everlasting, through meditation I gradually avoid flipping the light switch altogether. If you don’t flip the switch, the house will change over time. It takes a long time to leave the house and live in the openness of the sky, because there are so many switches, so many either/ors that we absentmindedly flip.

The monotheistic religions have tended to say that God is outside, whereas in Buddhist and Hindu practices the thought has been that the divine lies within—this is another switch. In our own monotheistic traditions, there is a powerful current of thought and practice that seeks the sacred within. Jesus himself, after all, said that the kingdom of God lies within. The extroverted search for ultimate purpose, meaning, and belonging really does exist simultaneously with the introverted search. Meditation helps me remain close to the way the outside is always involved in the inside, and the way the inside is always enmeshed in the out. In this sense, meditation has become for me a new form of belonging to the faith tradition I inherited from my ancestors—some of them Methodist, some of them Quaker, some of them Catholic. It enables me to respond to others, and to hear a call I would not have heard without it, in the quiet of the heart that is not my heart only.

Delivered August 26, 2007 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ligonier Valley

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[1] Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader, Robert Durback, Ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1989) 50.

[2] Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Yearning to Belong (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999) 2.

[3] In Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999) 100.

[4] The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999) 96.

[5] Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: The Noonday Press, 1951) 265.

Unitarian Universalist Satyagraha

My thoughts this morning are concerned with our life, our life as a community. More to the point, they’re concerned with Ghandi’s notion of truth and love and, necessarily part of truth and love, nonviolence. I wonder how we might enact them in our position as Unitarian Universalists. Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with examples of nonviolent protest. Most famously in this country, of course, is Martin Luther King’s use of nonviolence during the civil rights work of the sixties. It’s easy to see, in fact, why King was one of Ghandi’s most deeply inspired students.

On accepting the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace, Martin Luther King said, “We will not obey unjust laws nor submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully, because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself…. we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witness to the truth…”[1] I pause over the purpose of a “community at peace with itself.” That goal is visionary and full of hope and faith in the creative and sacred potential of people, even one’s enemies, to hold each other’s well being at heart.

Further still, and perhaps most significant for a religious tradition like ours, one of King’s most profound thoughts, I believe, expresses the heart of Ghandi’s understanding of our interconnected well being. “I can’t be who I ought to be until you are who you ought to be.” It’s in this thought that we can hear an affiliation that Jewish and Christian thought have with Ghandi’s religious practice; we can hear it in Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, Philip Berrigan. We can hear that truth in the Sermon on the Mount, which Ghandi deeply admired. We can hear a sense of truth that is not solely the product of a single religious practice, but which, perhaps because it is shared so widely, has the weight of orthodox belief.

Satyagraha is literally means “hold onto the truth” (Wolpert 66). It’s a Sanskrit phrase that was coined around 1907 to describe the spiritual orientation of Indians in South Africa who protested, under Ghandi’s leadership, the consolidation of that modern racist state. But Satyagraha is more richly nuanced than “hold onto the truth” implies. It could be called “truth force,” and because Ghandi associated truth with love, Satyagraha could also be translated as “the force of love” (66). Writing from prison in Johannesburg in January 1908, Ghandi said, “I seem to hear it whispered in my ear that God is always the friend and protector of truth. Our success in bringing this campaign to this stage is a triumph for truth” (66). The stage, in their campaign against a law requiring Indians to be registered, is that they are, in prison, witnesses for the truth, witnesses for the common good.

What would Unitarian Universalist satyagraha look like?

The truth, these days, must seem like the last thing you’d claim if you believe in the inherent, no, the sacred worth in the eyes of God of every living being. So many people, particularly those attached to a religious tradition, ascribe all manner of rapacious behavior to the truth, they slander God. In the name of God, the religious right supports our war in Iraq; it seeks to enshrine bigoted, homophobic beliefs about family in our constitution; it actively supports the dismantling of social services and the largest transfer of wealth into the hands of the few. But that’s not religious truth.

So, it seems to me, precisely for this reason, that we should hold onto the openness of our sense to truth. We find spiritual truth in many sources. Our sense of truth embraces many traditions, many cultures, many practices. It is broad and vigorous. It seems to me our orthodoxy—the truth we share in the sanctity of life—is why Unitarian Universalism appeals to people, including secularists, who feel alienated by intolerant religious traditions.

But our problem here is not merely the religious right. We have to struggle with ourselves. I have heard of UUs who refuse to live with the demands of authentic religious truth. They want life practices and understandings of their own fashion alone. They are so hurt, and so reactionary, I think, that the moment someone proposes a shared sense of truth, they claim it is a creed, a violation of their individual conscience, and therefore unacceptable in our tradition.

What would Unitarian Universalist satyagraha look like? How can we hold onto a shared sense of truth, a shared sense of love, in a non-violent campaign against oppression, if we are unwilling as a faith tradition to claim our common well being? Would we bicker over the language of love as much as we’ve bickered over the language of reverence? Even phrasing the issue this way distances us from the experience of love and the experience of reverence. So, can we be committed to the point of suffering? What will we draw on, when we are imprisoned in our own Johannesburgs, if it is not the truth of our common welfare? What sense of truth will be so close it is like breath if we do not claim it as our orthodoxy? What will we hold fast to?

I wonder if our open-ended sense of truth can carry the depth of Ghandi’s satyagraha, its sense of witness, its sense of sacrifice, its faith in the capacity of oppressors to be enlightened, its goal, come what may, of a community at peace with itself? I think it can, but it involves paying deeper attention to the demands of our orthodoxy than we are perhaps accustomed to. Our responsibilities toward others are clear and crucial, not formless and insubstantial, because we embrace an open sense of truth.

Many of you may remember that I took part in the first wave of antiwar protests. As I’ve said to you before, they form an extremely important experience for me. The war in Iraq, it seemed to me then and does still now, was a bald exercise of illegal and undemocratic government. And the war is all the more corrupt not because it’s a grab for Iraq’s natural resources. That’s an age-old reason for war, and not surprising coming from the social forces that put George W. Bush in the White House. Our war in Iraq is corrupt because our government played a major role in keeping Saddam Hussein in power the whole time he was murdering political rivals, gassing Kurds, and amassing a bloody fortune at the expense of innocent people. George Bush’s war has always been ruthless and immoral, though it’s been served to us as a war for democracy. Thousands of innocents have died because of his war, and the lives of many more thousands have been forever disrupted in the trauma.

So, I lay down in a frozen street with a clutch of maybe one hundred others that steadily dwindled from one hour to the next. I remember seeing the police helmeted, dressed in black riot gear, boots to their knees, bestriding the top step at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute. The snow was falling in large wet flakes. My coat became wet and then stiff with frost. And gathered around the die-in (those on their backs were enacting the death taking place in Baghdad), was, for me, a bizarre carnival of drummers, shouts and cheers, people of all ages watching the spectacle of a man in a George Bush mask goofing about as another guy cajoled the crowd with jibes against the president.

To this day, the sights and sounds of that afternoon jar against each other—the deadly seriousness of the police, the silent resolve of those on their backs in the road, the harried earnestness of a young woman, hoarse with shouting, demanding that onlookers lock arms and protect the protestors from the charge and the arrests that never materialized, the frivolous and vapid jokes about the rich, about Bush’s mediocre grades at Yale, the closed doors at St. Paul’s. And I remember hearing the voices of children I know, looking up to see their faces, and then finding their parents, good friends, lying in the street with me, people from my congregation.

People of all faiths were there. It is a memory of satyagraha, to be sure. But the ludicrous behavior of some suggests that not everyone there really understood, let alone attained in their heart, the goal of a community at peace with itself. If I find myself hating the cops, I have already lost. If I find myself hating the soldiers, I have already lost. We are right to be angry about the corrupt actions of leaders. We are right to be outraged by gross inequalities, by the suffering we live with every day. But I am after something deeper, and much more difficult to attain, than protesting out of reactive anger.

If we live out of anger, we will be forever chasing the loss of our lives. There will always be something more taken away from us. For Ghandi, the principle of love, and therefore the depth and effectiveness of our non-violence, is harmed “by every evil thought, by undue haste, by lying, by hatred, by wishing ill to anybody.”[2] Is love so weak? No, love is that difficult. Our capacity to be moved by and to live the truth is fundamentally affected by our capacity to love. The image of our life shows us to be full of many beautiful moments as well as deeply scarred when we consent to live with oppression. As Ghandi wrote from his cell at the Yeravda Mandir Central Prison in Poona in 1930, love and truth are “so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them….[Love] is the means; truth is the end. If we take care of the means, we are bound to reach the end sooner or later….Whatever difficulties we encounter, whatever apparent reverses we sustain, we may not give up the quest for truth which alone is, being God Himself” (Vows 125).

As we lay in the streets of our future Johannesburgs, we must work to keep our own hearts free of ill will. We must keep at heart the well being of others, even those who seek to harm us. We must learn to see their scars, and their beauty, which can be hidden by scars.

In the streets of our future Johannesburgs, we must avoid using our non-violent protests as another form of violence. Our work to create a community at peace with itself cannot be effective if it is just another example of naked power. Let us not be murderers who hide the knife in our hearts.

Some among us might say that is not my Johannesburg when we feel called into the streets. But in the streets of our Johannesburgs, the cities of everywhere that we all live in right now, we shall have to hold onto the full, demanding call of our faith. “To see the universal and all pervading spirit of truth face to face,” Ghandi wrote, “one must be able to love the meanest creatures as oneself…. That is why my devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics…. Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means” (Wolpert 267). The causes will differ. But what is at stake in our Johannesburgs will not. If the truth we lie down for is separate from our love, we lie down for false reasons. If our truth is separate from our love, our truth is pornographic, an idolatry. So, we must seek to love as God loves. That deeply. That inclusively. With that much attachment. And for that long.

Delivered June 19, 2005, at Smithton Unitarian Universalist Church

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[1] As quoted in Stanley Wolpert, Ghandi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Ghandi (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 265.

[2] M.K. Ghandi, Vows and Observances (Berkelely: Berkelely Hills Books, 1999) 124.