A knock came at my bedroom door at four o’clock yesterday morning, while I was sleeping deeply; I barely heard it. Then it came again. “We can’t sleep; we’re leaving,” said one of my guests.

The night before had been difficult for them. We had sat at a Devon Avenue restaurant, eating mild Indian food. We tried to talk. We did talk, but not easily. They clearly were distracted.

Earlier in the day, they had learned about a leaking pipeline in one of their rental properties back home in Indiana. It really did not matter much that they were here in Chicago as they sought a solution. What they needed was an expert who could be located as easily here, by phone, as there. But still they worried. And worried.

Until they located the right person, the water would keep leaking. The water bill would keep rising. Their profits would keep pouring away, into saturated earth between the city water line and the renter’s house.

Thus, the 4 a.m. knock, to tell me they were going home two days early–home, where they might find some peace of mind, knowing that they were doing all they could to get the leak fixed.

I understood. I’d have done the same thing.

Twenty minutes after they drove away, I got out of bed, unable to sleep myself now. I made coffee, and went to my waiting e-mail–sorry for them, irritated by the disruption of it all, and grumpy about the fact that the morning paper would not come for another 90 minutes.

There, awaiting me on the computer screen, was a message from my son in Tokyo, containing the axiom: “Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.” (Laurence J. Peter)

My guests, misers? Surely not. Attached to their profits? Definitely. Able to roll with things as they came? Not this time.

I wanted to laugh. But I just chuckled. We’d lost most of an evening’s conviviality. We’d lost two days of enjoying each other’s company. We’d gained a good deal of anxiety, and fear, and distraction. And I’d become grumpy. All because of leaking water and vanishing money.

Bob Thompson reminded us on this blog last May 28: “Among life’s greatest challenges is getting over our attachments.” He was in good company in thinking that.

Jesus said it too: “Take no thought for tomorrow.” “You cannot serve God and Money.”

Buddha taught that attachment–to anything–causes most of life’s pain. In the worlds of The Dhammapada, “One is the way to gain, the other is the way to nirvana.”

Yoshida Kenkō, an ancient Japanese essayist, observed, “Since olden times there has rarely been a sage who was wealthy.” (As a teacher, I loved putting that one at the bottom of student review sheets, to shake them up a bit as they studied.)

And my favorite Japanese writer, Kamo Chōmei wrote, after living for years in a ten-foot-square mountain hut, “Quiet is my only wish,” though he admitted that, in the end, he never could stop loving his hut–itself an attachment.

Then there was the Dao De Jing: “Lessen selfishness, diminish desires; abolish learning, and you will be without worries.”

I do wish I had remembered all these; I might have been able to sleep when I went back to bed yesterday morning.

Several of the people who have posted here have written about their spiritual journey. I have often found those narratives interesting both for what they tell me about the writer and for what they suggest to me. Bob Thompson’s book is, of course, one such narrative, viewed as a whole, so perhaps what follows here is not out of place.

I was raised in a Lutheran Church in Brookline, Pennsylvania, a church affiliated with the United Lutheran Church in America, the relatively liberal Lutheran contingent. My parents had both grown up in the Lutheran church in Chicago, had met, in fact, while singing in the choir, and they took their faith and their church membership seriously. They saw to it that I was fully involved – Sunday School, the Junior Choir, eventually confirmation. I remember the church experience warmly. It was a close community. Many of my school friends were also church members, and my parents had close relationships with several church families. Though our lives weren’t completely centered on the church, it was definitely an important part of my youth.

When we joined that church the pastor was an elderly man who was not particularly good with young people, but he soon moved to emeritus status and was replaced in the pulpit on most Sundays by a young pastor who was very interested in engaging us. The emeritus’ somberly intoned “Thou shalt not” was replaced by the new guy’s eternally sunny “God is love.” His ringing bass voice was inspiring, and the loud sport coats he wore at church picnics and bazaars told us he wasn’t averse to fun. As I slipped into adolescence, I thought the ministry might be in my future.

But something happened during my high school years, and when I emerged from that institution in 1960 my politics were pointed 180 degrees away from those of my parents and my naïve faith had disappeared. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how that happened. It was a mystery to my first wife, who, after meeting my parents, thought I may have been a foundling.

I recently unearthed a clue to my evolutionary leap. An online acquaintance sent me a stack of CD-ROM disks containing hundreds of hours of humorist Jean Shepherd’s radio programs from 1957 through the mid 70’s. During my high school years Shepherd conducted free-wheeling monologues on WOR, a powerful New York radio station, every Sunday evening from nine o’clock until one o’clock the next morning. And I listened. Listening anew, I think I see what happened. Shepherd opened a hole in the wall of my little world, and I, a teenager with the requisite rebellious tendencies, squeezed through. Because of Shep, I subscribed to both The Village Voice and The Realist, a very left-leaning magazine. Moreover, I began to look critically, ironically at what was going on around me. I began to see the humor but I also began to see some of the cracks in the fabric. As for the religious practice of my youth, what I began to see at church was hypocrisy, hidden intolerance, empty rhetoric. I drifted away.

There were other causes. I began to read widely and constantly, and, once in college, began an investigation of French philosophical and literary texts that would land me eventually in grad school. But I think Shep opened the door.

My graduate school experience was unforgettable and exciting, providing close contact with some of the major French thinkers of the time: Roland Barthes, Lucien Goldmann, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida. At one point I had a brief consultation with Derrida himself about my thesis topic, the fiction of Maurice Blanchot. My attraction to Blanchot’s work was at least partially the result of my spiritual state at the time. Blanchot, after 1940, was an extremely rigorous atheist, making of his atheism an article of intellectual commitment. To follow Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God fully was, for Blanchot, to be wary of any kind of effort to unify existence artificially, to rationalize life, to hide the reality of death. Blanchot’s attraction was the greater as I learned about his commitment to left-wing causes: he wrote many of the manifestos that fueled the May ‘68 demonstrations. The problem that absorbed my attention in Blanchot’s work and in my own thinking about life was how to forge the basis of an ethical life without the transcendent authority of God the Father.

My first marriage, to a Jewish woman, lasted the rest of her life, thirty-two years, and brought me back into the realm of organized religion, not exactly kicking and screaming, but certainly with a healthy gang of reservations. To provide a Jewish family framework for our sons, we belonged to a succession of three Reform congregations. I have very positive feelings about that experience, but I’ll admit that I was in a privileged, independent position, able to pick and choose the elements of the experience that I liked, since I never converted. At the time, since I considered myself to be without a religious identity, I felt that conversion made no sense: convert from what?

The non-transcendent features of Judaism attracted me: acts of loving-kindness, the family as the center of life (a necessity of diaspora?), the survival of the departed in our memories, atonement as a function of social justice.

In the spring of 2000, my wife lost her battle with pancreatic cancer. The loss was immense. I felt, for one thing, that I had lost a large portion of my memory. Bereavement counselors will tell you that long-time couples frequently divide up the past, each becoming a memory specialist. I felt that this had happened, and I stood there reduced, a man with a memory full of holes. My job lost its meaning and its joy. I eventually walked away from it, re-directing my time and efforts to the musical practice that I had always had with me but that I had kept on the side.

Slowly, haltingly, I began to come back to life. My wonderful sons helped. My music helped. A growing awareness of what is unique about life helped. As the last several years have unfolded, I’ve thought more about that uniqueness, and I suppose that I am ready, finally, to call it The Divine.

The process of emerging, I think, became complete when I met the extraordinary woman whom I married four years ago, and I am slowly beginning to understand how important it is to connect with a community. I’m a little surprised (and so are my fine, Jewish sons) that I’m a Baptist these days, but Lake Street Church, where folks from sixteen different denominations have come together, is a long, long way from the Lutheran church of my youth. God is still Love, however.

Only more so.

To say that Yogi Berra is the godfather of malapropisms, is not to say that many other athletes aren’t quite capable of screwing up normal conversations. Take the Olympic athletes. Gymnast Paul Hamm who said, “I owe a lot to my parents, especially to my mother and father.” In defending the sport of boxing, boxer Alan Minter said: “Sure there have been a lot of injuries and deaths in boxing, but none of them serious.” And then there was the soccer player who said, “I’ve never had major knee surgery on another part of my body.”

Every four years, athletes from around the world gather for the Olympic test and sometimes these athletes say really funny things. But getting into the Olympic games is no laughing matter.

During the Olympics we repeatedly hear stories of athletes who have had to overcome one obstacle after another simply to arrive at the games. Every athlete has a story—and many of these stories are touching, sometimes heart wrenching tales of grace and grit, commitment and sacrifice.

When these athletes tell their stories, without exception, they gratefully confess they couldn’t have made it to the games without the support of family, the help of friends, the encouragement of coaches and teammates. Every athlete is tested along the way and every athlete faces obstacles and difficulties. But without exception, every Olympic athlete confesses that she or he couldn’t have made it to the Olympics without the love and support of others.
Inevitably though, there comes a moment of truth.

The sprinter shoots out of the blocks. The gymnast twists on the parallel bars or the diver, poised on the lip of the diving platform bounds up and takes a leap. In these moments the athlete is utterly alone. Nobody, not one’s family, friends or coach can run that race, take that leap or make that dive. In the heat of competition each and every athlete must face the test alone.

This is the Olympic paradox. Olympic athletes can’t make it to the games without the help of others, but in their moment of truth, they are all on their own.

Sport imitates life.

For every human being, life brings trials, tests and intense challenges. None of us can make it through our tests and trials without the support of others but in the final analysis, no one can take our tests for us. This, at least, has been my experience.

In the late 1980’s I entered a period of about 5 years of tests, trials and tribulations like I had never known. First, I went through a painful divorce. Two years later I was hospitalized with asthma. Five months after that I suffered a manic episode and found myself locked up in the psychiatric intensive care unit of a local hospital. Two years after that I was hospitalized again with broken ribs from an automobile accident.

Through all of those trying experiences, I was surrounded by the tremendous support from my family, friends and my congregation. But during that time I encountered an immutable truth.

Nobody else could take my place. Nobody else could take my tests for me. Whatever I found myself in, I was in it alone. There was no savior. No one showed up to deliver me.

We can’t make it alone but we are always alone. This paradox defines our humanity.

It’s like we are all standing in line, waiting for our turn, waiting to be tested. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I guarantee that some day you will. Are you struggling at work? Have you lost your job? Are you facing surgery? Do you have cancer? Is your crying baby causing sleep deprivation and you don’t know how you can keep going? Have you tested positive for HIV? Is your life in transition? Has death stolen someone near and dear? Are you standing at a crossroads and engulfed by the fog of uncertainty?

M Scott Peck began his bestseller The Road Less Traveled with these three words, “Life is difficult.” A book that begins with those three words is bound to be a bestseller. This is a universal truth, isn’t it? Life brings one challenge after another. Some times it seems like a pop quiz. Sometimes it’s like a final exam. Whether the test is large or small, every difficult experience challenges the spirit to rise above it.

Without these tests we have little motivation to face our fragility. Without these tests we cannot appreciate how precious life really is. But we cannot really know how fragile and precious life is unless we experience our own lives as fragile and precious.

Unlike the Olympic games now being played in Beijing, the purpose of the Olympic games of the soul is not for us to become winners—but rather to wake us up.

The Olympic games of the soul teach us to look at life with new eyes, with different eyes than the eyes of the head. The Olympic games of life teach us to look at life with the eyes of the heart. To see life with the eyes of the heart is to look beneath the broken surface of life and see the hidden wholeness.

I love the story about Thomas Merton who had a vision while standing on a street corner in Louisville Kentucky. He suddenly saw something in the people on the street that he had never before seen. He writes, “Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could see each other that way all the time, there would be no war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

If you have ever come through a really big test in your life, when you have made it to the other side, having fought the fight, expended all that energy, having your insides turned out, to find yourself on the other side of it, one thing you don’t feel is self important. On the other side of tribulation one is filled with indescribable humility and incomparable gratitude. It is only when the heart is cracked open that we see the beauty of life that is indescribable and breathtaking.

In his song, “Panning For Gold,” Ben Sollee sings:

I saw God by the river, panning for gold
I saw God by the river, weary and old
He said “son, I used to know where I put things. I used to know”
I saw God in the forest teaching Tai Chi to the Trees in the wind
bowing to the sea
God said “son, I used to know where I put things. I used to know”
I saw God on the mountain tearing at the sky
I saw God on the mountain with tears in his eyes
He said “son, I used to know where I put things, I used to know
I could have shown you all the beauty in the world
but now I need you to show me.”

So when we are tested, maybe it helps to remember to listen for the Divine voice speaking from within—I can’t remember where I put the beauty in the world, now I need for you to show me.

“Naruhodo” is the Japanese word for a personal epiphany, that moment when you understand something in a new way. Life has been full of “naruhodo moments” for me. I muddle along, confused or mentally lethargic, then suddenly–sometimes out of the blue, sometimes prodded by a comment–the light goes on. “Naruhodo!”

One of those moments came forty years ago, in Curtis MacDougall’s editorial writing classroom at Northwestern University, there beside Lake Michigan, a dozen blocks from Lake Street Church (a place of which I’d never heard).

No one maddened me more than Professor MacDougall. He was dogmatically, ostentatiously liberal. He tossed us wild ideas, sneered at conventional ones, made us defend our own. Some days he exhausted me; others he intimidated me. But he never let me stop thinking–and after two quarters, I loved the man.

He was the one who made me understand that in a democracy, government is not “Them” but “Me.” I am the government I critique. But that was another naruhodo moment.

This time, I was listening to fellow students tear apart conservatives, my kind. I loved God; I loved America; I loved capitalism; I loved self-sufficiency; most of all, I loved surety. I even loved my certainty that liberals were not just wrong but bad, people out to milk this country on behalf of handouts for the lazy. If allowed, liberals would steal America’s soul.

Now, here were my classmates criticizing conservatives as not just wrong, but bad, cold-hearted people out to enrich themselves at the expense of the system. I was stunned: they didn’t just disagree with my people; they considered us selfish and evil.

Naruhodo!

They saw us the same way we saw them: in the words of Lanny Davis (repeated by Scott McClellan in What Happened), as “cultural enemies who were traitors to American values and who needed to be destroyed.”

. . . And then, naruhodo again!

I knew that my conservative friends actually were good people, whether you agreed with their ideas or not. I knew that because I knew them. As people. And my classmates clearly thought the same about their liberal friends: right or wrong philosophically, they were good, humane human beings.

So there it was–and it was so simple: If we each knew our own kind to be good, maybe we were all good. All of us. Maybe I should trust the hearts of liberals, and they should trust the souls of conservatives. Maybe we were indeed all enclosed in God.

As the years passed, I began to expand the circles: believer, agnostic, pro-choice, pro-life, Assemblies of God, Unitarian, the colleague who hates me, the relative I can’t stand. Even (in the words of one sermon at Lake Street Church) Ann Coulter. I don’t have to come round to their ideologies; I do have to accept their God-given, God-embraced humanity.

Talk about getting a glimpse of The Kingdom! Talk about implications for life!

I’ll write at other times about those implications. For now, it is enough to say that I have moved beyond merely believing in this path; I’ve come to love it–at least during those moments when I’m able to get my head around it enough actually to follow it.

It would seem that the warm weather of summer is an inducement to slow down and live life at a more leisurely pace. Summer time and the livin’ is easy-and it’s a good thing because if things didn’t slow down for at least a few months out of the year, many of us would just fall over dead from the incessant demands of life in the 21st century.

While walking through O’Hare airport several weeks ago I looked around and saw that practically everyone was talking on a cell phone. I remembered some 10-12 years ago, all those people would have had to find a pay phone if they wanted to call someone, or wait until they got home-and that was okay then, but now expectations have changed.

It’s ironic. Faster and more efficient technological devices promise to save us time—but everyone I know feels like they have less time.

Did ancient people also feel that time was a thief? No doubt.

But this perception is undeniably compounded by an increasingly frantic pace of life in modern times. When I was a teenager my mother put up a refrigerator magnet that said, “the hurrieder I go, the behinder I get”. It seems that this modern age nudges us to hurry up. But as many of us experience, the more we hurry up, the less time we seem to have.

The less time we seem to have, the more impatient we become. When we are impatient, the world around us becomes a source of frustration. If we are feeling impatient, we are feeling self absorbed.

Last Labor Day weekend, I found myself in the airport in Atlanta. We had just celebrated my grandson Henry’s first birthday. The plane was supposed to leave at 4:00 pm. Thunderstorms put O’Hare on a ground stop. But by 6:00 pm the status had passed. A voice came over the speaker saying we would leave by 7:00, 3 hours late but we all knew it could be worse. We boarded the plane, taxied to the tarmac and sat there 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes. The man sitting next to me struck up a conversation saying he was worried that he wouldn’t get into Chicago until after midnight and he had to be on the job by 6:00 am. Finally, by 9:00 pm, (5 hours late) we took off. An hour into the flight the pilot announced there were more storms in Chicago and rather than burn fuel in a holding pattern we’d land in Indianapolis. There was no way we were going to get into Chicago until 2 or 3 in the morning. My seatmate exploded – he hit his seat and cursed.

Fidgeting impatiently, he broke into a sweat and loosened his tie. His mantra was-I can’t deal with this-I can’t deal with this…. He kept mumbling about how tired he was going to be. It was now midnight, and we were sitting in the Indianapolis airport awaiting permission to take off. Suddenly my seatmate burst out laughing. He said, “I might as well just accept it, I’m not going to get any sleep.” “I might as well accept it,” this became his new mantra. Earlier he had told me that he was staying in a Lakefront Hotel in the loop and he had a view of the lake, so I tried to cheer him up. I said, “It’ll be great. You are going to walk into your room and the sun will be coming up over Lake Michigan. It will be a beautiful sight.” By then he was laughing about how all of that angst was a waste of energy.

We have all been in situations when our expectations about what was supposed to happen didn’t pan out. We all know what it’s like to erupt in frustration when events turn against us. We all know what it’s like for our minds to scream at us that it shouldn’t be this way. When things go haywire or we are falling behind impatience invades the mind.

When my seatmate first realized how late we were going to be, his mind began to speed up with negative thoughts. He quickly thought of at least 10 horrible things that could happen.

In the book Take Your Time Ecknath Easwaran says that when our minds are in a hurry, our thoughts are usually negative. A mind in a hurry is not a healthy mind.

Many years ago I had a full blown manic episode. It landed me in the psychiatric intensive care unit. One thing about that experience I remember was how my mind speeded up. Fast thinking is characteristic of a manic episode.

I was thinking fast and thought I was so smart because of my fast thinking mind. But now I see that when my mind was thinking so fast I wasn’t being smart, or clever — my mind was in overdrive which meant that I was so taken with my thoughts that my speedy thoughts were all that mattered to me. To have a crazy mind like that is a weird sensation. The faster the mind the more you create your own version of reality.

But when the mind slows down, there is space and spaciousness—and space and spaciousness in us is what makes room for others and other thoughts. When the mind slows down we become patient—when the mind is quiet, panic dissolves. And when we are less in a panic, less in a hurry, we see that life is not all about me. Learning patience is the process of quieting the mind.

The Sufi mystic Meher Baba put it like this: “A mind that is fast is sick. A mind that is slow is sound. A mind that is still is divine.”

Slow down the mind.

There are two ways to learn patience by slowing down the mind. The first is to become aware of what our minds are doing.

Whether driving a car, biking or walking, if we are running late, we probably started late. If there is not enough time in the day then we are probably trying to fit too much into the available time. If we are feeling irritated with our kids, frustrated with a partner or spouse or annoyed with a relative or aging parent what we need is patience. And the way to get patience is to slow down the mind. The first thing I do to practice patience is to have a little chat with my own mind. It helps me to remember that I have a mind but I am not the mind.

The second thing I do is practice patience every day. I know of no better way to practice patience every day then to practice meditation.

The purpose of meditation is to train the mind to be quiet. By the silent mental repetition of a mantra, the mind becomes absorbed in one thing rather than everything. As long as the fluttering mind is in motion, it is creating a commotion for us. As long as the fluttering mind is in motion it is pushing us to think thoughts, chatter internally, make judgments, keep things moving. Meditation teaches the mind to be patient. The more we are patient, the less we suffer.

Just think about times when you have felt impatient. Think about those times you have felt restless, irritated, anxious and intolerant. To be impatient is to suffer.

The purpose of spirituality is to give us tools that will reduce our suffering. A basic spiritual truth is that the more self absorbed I am, the more I will suffer, and the more I suffer, the more suffering I cause others.

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama once said, “The moment you think only of yourself, the focus of your whole reality narrows, and because of this narrow focus, uncomfortable things can appear huge and bring you fear and discomfort and a sense of feeling overwhelmed by misery. But the moment you think of others with a sense of caring, however, your view widens. Within that wider perspective, your own problems appear to be of little significance, and this makes a big difference.”

We practice patience because it not only reduces our suffering but it also reduces the suffering of those around us.

As I practice slowing down my mind, I learn to settle down, and when I learn to settle down I develop the capacity for compassion and love. Compassion and love are two sides of the same coin. Compassion is the wish for other beings to be free from suffering. Love wants other beings to have happiness.

Compassion and love grow naturally out of the mind that is spacious and slow. This is why practicing patience is the ground out of which compassion and love take root in our lives. And this is why lately, I’ve been repeating the mantra: practice patience – don’t hurry, be happy.

A “voluptuous God” was the exact opposite of what I grew up with.

I became a born-again Christian at the age of 13 in the ultimate act of teenage rebellion for the household in which I was raised. It was a household in which my mother, a single parent and schizophrenic, had been prostituting to support us. She’d taught me in great detail about all the swear words and their meanings by the time I was eight. She’d taught me her techniques and strategies for shoplifting when I was nine. I had full access to and permission to use any alcohol in the house by the time I was 11. In retrospect, it was the height of irony that I would individuate and differentiate by becoming a Bible-toting, Scripture-quoting, gonna wait ‘til I’m married Christian at 13. My mother was deeply offended by my sanctimonious evangelizing of her. In retrospect, it’s pretty hilarious.

Shortly after that, I entered foster care, and I lived with one family and then another who were Evangelical Christians, as well. I can’t blame them for my skewed views of God – they hardly knew let alone understood the depths of the abuse I’d experienced as a child and the baggage I brought to my relationship with God. They really didn’t know how to access me and my deepest thoughts, and I wasn’t about to help them. But the Bible-based teaching I received at home served as a sort of icing on the proverbial cake of my spiritual life: I used my Christianity from that point forward to repress any inkling of personal desire and connection with my dreams and individuality.

I was going to be like Jesus – and abandon any personality I had in the process. Asking myself what I wanted in my life, in my future, in my relationships, in my home – this was, I thought, an irrelevant question. After all, I believed, what really mattered was what God wanted for me and from me. My desires were to be nailed to the cross, and I was only a vessel for God’s will. When I pondered my career options, the second most odious thing I could imagine being was a missionary. (The first most odious thing was to be a minister’s wife, and I have to admit, that one nauseated me too much to consider. And being a minister wasn’t an option, either, as a good Christian woman, though I thought I’d really like that one.) So I chose “missionary” as my goal. I’d have to live in miserable circumstances, be alone (and most likely single and virginal my entire life), and generally have to slog through evil to bring even the slightest ray of hope to a dark world. It sounded like exactly what God would ask of me. (I was sure he wanted this for everyone, but I was equally sure that most of us were unwilling to answer The Call.)

What I am grateful for now is the health of the human spirit, despite my own and my family of origin’s best attempts to repress and destroy it.

I developed an eating disorder. I was completely mystified by this, initially. I wondered why I would possibly have so little self-control with food, so little sense of satisfaction and happiness and gratitude. What was this mysterious depression about, too? Didn’t Jesus wipe all of that away when I was saved, I wondered? Wasn’t I healed when I became a Christian – and now my task was to live for Him?

Fast forward 20 years or so, past the college years in which I began to face that there were “demons” in my past that continued to haunt my present; when I began to confront the overwhelming mystery that is “God” and “God’s will” for me; and when I began just barely to touch the tip of the iceberg that was my own tamped down spirit and repressed desire for happiness and satisfaction in my own life.

I’ll be 40 this year, and I am now a single parent (and obviously didn’t attain that “alone, virginal” standard I’d idealized in high school). And I still don’t have those mysteries “figured out” or in any way perfected in my life. But I do have some insights and have made some progress toward living in the mysteries rather than trying to avoid them.

My God is, indeed, voluptuous. This, in spite of my desires to fashion my God after my parental example and my subsequent neurotic need for total control and even obliteration of everything that was human about me. I have come to experience God in every kind and loving gesture that has been extended toward me over the years – mentors, teachers, ministers, friends, therapists, self-help groups. At some point I had to let go of the need to convert everyone who wasn’t a professing Christian because it became obvious that many of them were far kinder, gentler and wiser than I, the born again Christian, ever was. Whether Jewish or Muslim or agnostic, many of these people were ministering to me, and I saw God in every one of them.

Up until the point where I had my son, I had attained a remarkable level of functioning for someone from my background. I had also achieved a level of internal misery that was a vast improvement on what I’d experienced in my earlier life – but it was still misery. All my explorations of 12-step groups, Buddhist meditation, therapy and self-help groups had gotten me to a better place…but still not one in which I wanted to stay. I simply didn’t know how to get beyond that place.

The unexpected pregnancy was a blow, though I knew from the beginning I wanted to keep my child. I just didn’t know how I was going to do it…how was I going to support us both, be a present and loving parent, and still have anything left for me? Becoming a parent plunged me into what I liken now to a pressure cooker. The lid clamped down. The pressure built up. I thought I was going to explode from the intensity of what I faced as a single parent. It was like re-living the trauma of my childhood in some ways: I was faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles under continuous responsibility that was profoundly heavy.

Enter a voluptuous God.

My son turned two this spring. As time has gone on, I’ve awakened to my need to re-parent myself as I parent my son. They say on airplanes that if you are responsible for someone else’s air mask in an emergency to make sure to attend to your own, first. If you don’t, you’ll be no help to anyone else, and you’ll both perish.

That’s essentially what happened to me. I began to be forced to attend to my own desires and need for nurturing, for tenderness, for rest, for play, as I attended to the needs of my son. If I didn’t, I became so fatigued, so burnt-out, so miserable that I was no good to him. How can I give my son a fun, rich experience if I’m so miserable I can’t smile, can’t play with him, can’t even think ahead to plan fun and interesting things to do? It became obvious to me that I had to attend to my own oxygen mask – my own deeply repressed needs for nurturing, care and self – or I would never be able to attend to my son’s.

I began to ask questions that were different from the one’s I’d wrestled with in high school. Rather than asking what God wants from me, despite my longings, I began to explore that my longings might be the very things I was created to explore and play with and fulfill. They were gifts to me rather than signs of sin to be obliterated in God’s name. They were part of what make me this unique expression of the many faces of God in the world: no one else has precisely the gifts and longings and interests that I have. If I don’t explore them and make space for them in this human life I have been given, they will die with me, wasted. I have been given these resources as an investment – and it is up to me to cultivate them to the fullest. Rather than trying to quiet the longings of my heart so that I might hear the voice of God, I explored those longings as the voice of God herself – a voice calling me out to play, to explore, to connect.

I guess, in an ironic sort of way, I am the missionary I thought I might become – but with a twist. I’m not interested in converting people to dogma anymore. I am interested, though, in living and spreading spaciousness, grace and loving connection. I am interested in the places we all get stuck in suffering and self-hatred – and in sharing my own story with others so that we all might find a little light along the sometimes dark path of life.

There are many landscapes which evoke for me the longing that I feel subcutaneous, just under my skin, just out of reach. The evergreen fields of Ireland, squared off by ancient stone walls; the basined and ranged deserts of Nevada, sweeping and endless; the oceanic Sand Hills of the Great Plains, recently visited, essentially treeless for hundreds of miles, pale green and haunting. Spain, in every part.

I long for the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, though I know little of them. The endless boreal forests of Canada and Siberia stir my imagination. The formidable Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho hold a tenacious resonance for me.

We all have these places I think. They are ancient to us, perhaps part of our genetic code: the moors of my Irish, Scotch and English ancestors, the flat farmscapes of my great grandparents in Denmark, the endless sweep of familial Nebraska.

That they evoke this longing is curious to me. How the desert abbas and ammas knew to flee metropolitan Alexandria into the desert, how Benedict knew to remove himself to the mountains, how monasteries are mostly located in regions remote, they share a common knowing of landscape and spiritual availability.

Their remoteness suggests what seeks is not so available where everyone is so busy. In a desert landscape, you must really scratch the surface to find life, even microbial. And to find water, well, you will be drilling pretty deep. The refreshment of community is not next door, nor even nearby. The solace of companionship is dear for being elusive. Trinkets are not so available, though our capacity to covet fool’s gold remains large.

Remoteness itself does not qualify one for anything. But it does offer possibility.

I am plotted on a couple of acres in Sonoma County Califonia, with my spouse Scott, and our Airedale, Maude. A black beauty we have named Clementine lives next door. Ex-urban, semi-rural, out in the county. No longer suburban or city dwellers, which we have been. While far from remote, it is remoter. While not isolated, it is at a distance.

For many reasons, we moved here four years ago, but primary for me was the need to spend more time alone.

I am cusping a decade as I write. The world of my earlier years, so involved in so much, so many good works, if I might, productive and beneficial and active and engaged and very appreciated, too, seems no longer exactly what I am to do. And yet, I am afraid not to. Who would I be?

I cannot explain this being alone to anyone, let alone myself. I sense it somewhat misunderstood, in a culture which so values busy. I know it in my heart, not hardly anywhere in my head. And I do it not so well.

But something, some one, some how calls me out.

It is not saying more. It is not saying why. It is not comforting. Nor illuminating. Nor fecund.

It is silent. On some days, more silence than seems bearable. But it is unmoved. Silent it remains.

I distract, and act as if busyness matters. I tidy things up, get productive, still pretend perfection is not a trap, tend to my business, make plans, act as if.

That to which I have bowed and made my ablutions for the past six decades is unmoved. And, I might add, perhaps I am finally knowing why. My bowing and ablutions have been carefully designed, in the main, to keep me in charge. But I am discovering I am, in the profoundest of ways, not.

I cannot justify my existence. I cannot truly earn my keep. I cannot create an equation in which I am owed a thing. I cannot pretend the work of my life qualifies me for anything more than the breath I take as I write these words. It is all a gift. It is all a grace.

I cannot save others, nor can I save myself. And God knows I have tried. But it is not my, nor our, work to do.

I cannot bribe nor cajole nor psych out nor manipulate nor shade nor sleight-of-hand nor justify myself in the presence of that which I am so aware cannot be named. Though name we must try. Doris Grumbach says it best by my lights: The One Whose I Am. About that One I know actually very little. But, if I too grow silent, about that One I will know all that I need.

My ego, the busy center, adept at planning and managing and protecting me from harm and justifying me in every situation of my life on this planet, is pained. Silence is not in its interest. Not knowing is certainly not in its interest. Surrendering, the ultimate gifted task, is most certainly in violation of all that for which it stands.

James Carse says that marginalizing the ego is precisely the work of the soul. What a blow!

The therapist in me, and the client, and the seeker, all know the ego is beyond durable. The author of that humbling work, The World Without Us, notes that after we have passed, what will remain is plastic, glass, and highly-fired bathroom tiles. I have a hunch disembodied egos will be in the detritus as well.

These past few months have been a desert. And a desert they remain. I cannot see my way out. But the desert offers many clues, and one who dwells therein learns to operate on the desert’s terms, not one’s own.

Moses went alone to the mountain in the harsh Sinai. He experienced a theophany seemingly too great to bear. But from that singular moment our spiritual patrimony has been shaped.

It perhaps is not so peculiar that our longing is indeed met in these harsh places, those of the earth and those of the soul.

Perhaps it is only there, in the seemingly barren landscape, really fecund beyond reckoning, where we must scratch below the surface to find life, and if, in addition, water is sought, to drill deep within.

Silence is the map and the journey’s end, too.

Surrender. Submit. Release. Un-grip. Cease. Sit. Stay.

Stop. Still. Breathe. Listen. Hear. See. Sense. Feel.

Trust.

These are the initial entries in my new Dictionary of Ego-Antithetical Words.

I have sensed a need for this dictionary for some time.

Letting go, emptying—over and over. Some days I feel like I am that little symbol used by the email system where I used to work, for deleting deleted files. The little trash can with trash levitating out of it and drifting off to the bigger trash can in the sky or wherever. Every day something/someone else seems to leave or I let go of it. My career. My wine at night, coffee, comfort foods that don’t bring comfort anymore. Ideas I’ve held for so long. Patterns. Friends. Routines. Weight. And most humorous of all, I lost my “I.” My “I” key on my keyboard that is. The universe is such a clever trickster. Ha ha. (Growl)

Sometimes it feels scary. And lonely. I may believe from much of my reading that creation comes from the Void, that you have to make room for the new to come in by letting go of the old==but being in the midst of it is different than believing it.

I like the word “liminal” for where I am better than “Void.” Jane Hirshfield writes beautifully about liminal states in her book about writing poetry.

Victor Turner describes the liminal as the time and space integral to all rites of passage. Entering this condition, a person leaves behind his or her old identity and dwells in a threshold state of ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. Only afterward may the initiate enter into new forms of identity and relationship.

Her point in the chapter is that artists often exist in liminal states, empty themselves out and thus become open to all, being inhabited by and speaking for others, including those beyond the realm of the human. Interesting that she quotes Emily Dickinson as an example of this liminal state, since I was just talking about her to someone this week.

Between my country—and the others—
There is a sea”.

I’ve felt that way much of my life. But also wonder if part of the process I’m in now is about even emptying out that sea. Of letting go of some of the distance that exists between me and others, of the breadth of my solitude. In keeping with that thought, she also quotes Thoreau who says “ I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

Hirshfield says “A superficial or external marginality can become an identity as conventional as any other, and then it too becomes only a thing to be dropped..”

It’s hard though—I do love my ruts, they are so comfortable. Being dragged out of so many of them at once is painful and scary. I look at the little trail I’ve made over time down to the tree I put the suet on for the birds. Just walking down there once or twice a day has created it. It’s interesting to me how it curves, not a straight line. I’ve followed that exact curve for over 3 years now.

I was up at top of driveway the other day, and it was like I’d entered another world. So much activity going on, my eyes skipped excitedly from place to place. I’ve let it go completely wild up there, so there are all kinds of wildflowers, some I’ve never seen. And lots of wildflower lovers were flitting about—bees and beauteous butterflies, swallows out in the lespedesia field. A wild green dragonfly with jaunty striped tail.

Daisy couples in love.

A spider lit by the sun so that it looked made of light, descending a glowing strand of silk from the sky. The scent of honeysuckle permeated all. And happily for me Tiger was keeping me company stalking grasshoppers. A beam caught the loveliest little butterfly I’ve ever seen (an Eastern tailed blue I’ve discovered since) as she lit on clover. My heart fluttered along with her wings. And I thought how wonderful to contemplate that something so incandescent with life had not so long ago been in her own liminal state.

[There are images related to Billie’s post on her blog site: http://www.sensuousbroom.com/]

That title is actually the name of a jazz tune, a blues by the legendary Charlie Parker, but it’s become a bit more than just the name of a tune to me. Lately. Bob Thompson, from the pulpit and from the pages of his book, has set me thinking about the Now, the Present, the only temporality we really, actually have. The past is gone, and the future will never be here, because what’s here is . . . here now.

And yet. I began this train of thought a few days ago in Kansas City. I was there to attend a strange ritual called ClarinetFest, a gathering of clarinetists of all ages, shapes, and sizes that happens annually and must be mysterious and disconcerting to the non-clarinet-playing folks who are besieged by the attendees. There were many performances – some of them quite wonderful and amazing – and there were several world premieres of compositions. One of these was called “Dreaming Bird,” and it was a tribute to Kansas City’s own Charlie Parker written by Italian clarinetist Antonio Fraioli and performed by a clarinet quartet, a string orchestra, and the incomparable Larry Combs (retiring principal clarinetist of the Chicago Symphony). The tune “Now’s the Time” figured in Fraioli’s offering (as did a number of other Charlie Parker tunes), and the very title got me thinking about that Present.

Performing musicians – and I, in a small way, am one – understand the Now. Quite often they understand it as pure, unadulterated terror. Especially when they are young, ill-prepared, rash, and foolish and have ventured out in front of an audience with little but doubt, anxiety, a faulty memory, and almost no technique. That early experience has the same effect on many musicians as the ClarinetFest as a whole did on me (and I should add that Combs, while accepting an award, admitted to the same effect): it makes them want to practice, to prepare, to improve, to excel.

And when does one practice? Well . . . now. Which seems a very simple thing to say. But, as Bob has often pointed out, we thinking beings are able to avoid the Now, to focus ourselves in the past or in the future, to let our nattering mind completely drown out the present moment. Musicians who practice are certainly like everyone else in this respect. When I’m doing my warmup routine – long tones, scales, arpeggios — my mind, noticing that the fingers are doing just fine on their own, scampers off to fifteen minutes ago or when I was fourteen or simply somewhere else. And this isn’t entirely a waste. Kinetic memory does get something out of mindless repetition, and it can save a musician’s bacon from time to time. But every good musician knows that practice that happens mechanically, with the mind floating in other times, isn’t good enough. Real practice means deep engagement in the Now of Practicing. It means opening oneself completely to the present moment, experiencing it fully. And when the Now is a performance, the terror is gone and joy appears.

It’s magic. I sat at the last concert of ClarineFest in complete delight as the virtuoso jazz clarinetist Paquito d’Rivera carried off a bravura performance, throwing the doors to the Now wide open and inviting us all in, to share a musical present, a moment of stunning creation.

All of which should make it clear that I find special values in music, and my point here is that it helps me think about the spiritual concerns that have become increasingly important to me. Music is of course a thing in itself, but it is also a spectacular metaphor. It has divine aspects of its own (how is it possible?), and it operates like the divine in all of us. As musical practicing is an example of awakening to the present moment, it is also a sort of model for the kind of awakening that we need — that I need — to do all the time. Now. Now’s the Time.