The moon shines in my body, but
my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me and so is the
Sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is
Sounded within me; but my deaf
Ears cannot hear it.

[Songs of Kabir]

The Washington Post published an article entitled “Pearls Before Breakfast”, starting out saying:
“Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?”

The article is about an experiment done at one of DC’s busy metro stations in rush hour, where one of the most famous violinists of our day, Joshua Bell, stood anonymously (in jeans and baseball cap) and played his violin. Only about a handful of people stopped to watch and he made a little over $37. And only one man was truly transfixed by the beauty of the music.

The article questions why this is. I can assure you of one thing—it’s not because Bell’s music is not very remarkable. I’ve followed his career since he was young and at Indiana University (where I knew his sweetheart of a dad who would likely be both outraged and laughing at this experiment were he still around). And I can tell you that to hear him play violin is to have your heart and soul touched—if you listen.

The article suggests perhaps beauty is irrelevant to people nowadays and quotes the philosopher Kant’s position that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments.

People rushed by, talking louder on their cell phones or not even hearing, with their earbuds in. Most just ignored him.

This made me start thinking about the concept of beauty, particularly in my own life. I also posted a question on a few Tribe groups asking people to tell me something beautiful they had noticed that day. The replies really lifted my heart, images of clouds shifting the color of the water over which they passed, of sparkling diamond snow melting to moisture that dogs drank, of an emerald green frog breakfasting on bugs, of rain patterns in puddles, of thunderstorms and peregrine falcons and a loved ones face in the morning, or the look of love in an elderly man’s eyes as he cared for his incapacitated wife in a nursing facility.

One person noted the transitory nature of beauty—how the sun passing over melted the diamond beauty of the snow. Which got me thinking—is beauty really transitory? Somehow it just doesn’t feel that way to me. In fact it feels like the most important and ongoing thing in my life. Yes, the physical things that we consider to be beautiful have endings, but so does everything, including the sun, moon and stars. But I think there is some kind of energy that never dissipates, that is eternal, that underlies the beauty we perceive. Maybe that is Love, as in “eros”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes exquisitely of this:

Steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life…….You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal?….Never say….’the kingdom of matter is worn out, matter is dead’: till the very end of time matter will always remain young, exuberant, sparkling, newborn for those who are willing…Purity does not lie in separation from, but in a deeper penetration into the universe. It is to be found in the love of that unique boundless essence which penetrates the inmost depths of all things.

I know that the beauty that I have witnessed in my life has altered me, my very essence, in a way that is not transitory. There is something about beauty, when it is allowed to express freely and fully, to flourish, when it is received with honor and appreciation, that is transformative. The poet Mary Oliver, who writes again and again about the power of beauty, uses a phrase in one of her poems, “beauty the brave, the exemplary”. I don’t think we often associate those words with beauty, do we? The poem is about peonies in bloom, “all that dampness and recklessness” offered “gladly and lightly”. Such beauty is a kind of grace. A grace that has kept me alive during difficult times. Or kept some part of me alive, kept the spark alive. Until I could get to a point in my life where I could build it back to a flame. I can think of specific instances. Like the bird that sang the most heart-wrenchingly lovely song every evening at sunset, during one of the darkest years of my life. I would sit on the front porch step, and for those moments be plugged in to glory. Or the moonlight shimmering on the water on a hot summer night, when, as an adolescent, I would go for walks late, when everyone was asleep. Transported awhile by the magic of that sight along with the scent of honeysuckle. I don’t think I would ever have been able to spend the time alone I have needed to get to my deepest self, if I had not been embraced and comforted by the beauty of nature. This winter the song sparrows have cracked my heart open a tiny bit more every single day.

So yes, I would say without hesitation that beauty is critical and generative—at least to my life.

When I was talking of this to my sister, she said “You feed people beauty—instead of food you feed them beauty, little morsels of it with photography, words, your home.” Wow, what a wonderful thought—I really like that idea. And in a turnabout way, I guess you could say I feed beauty itself. I think my reverence for and appreciation of the beauty around me feeds that beauty in a way. And then it feeds me—a divine loop. It makes me think of that story in the Bible about Mary and Martha. What Christ appreciated most was Mary’s listening to him, seeing him, reveling in him. More than Martha’s literal feeding him with food. I think it’s a gift we often overlook—just utterly delighting in someone or something. I would prefer that to any other gift I can imagine—being delighted in completely and without reservation– not admired or praised—delighted in. I guess that’s why it’s the “gift” I most often find myself giving to the Earth. My way of saying thank you, I love you, again and again. That gratitude is endless, not transitory.

It is my longing that makes me love you intensely,
For I yearn to be loved from the heart..
[How God Answers the Soul, Mechtild of Magdeburg]

While filming the controversial movie about the Passion of Christ several years ago, Mel Gibson should have gotten the message. According to newspaper reports, while filming the movie, the guy who played Jesus was struck by lightning, twice.

The odds are 350,000 to 1 that you will be struck by lightening once. The odds that we might be struck twice, are what?

“Jesus struck by lightning.” Now there’s a headline.

Imagine if one of the three remaining presidential contenders were struck twice by lightning. The media would have a field day. Actually it could be argued that Barack Obama was struck twice by lightening during the Jeremiah Wright episodes.

As the candidates make their way down the campaign trail, who knows when lightning will strike again.

If you are running for president the idea is to be popular, well liked, out on the edge without being too controversial. When you are running for president the idea is to tell people what they want to hear. But at an even more fundamental level the idea is to get elected. This means you must appeal to that 8 to 10 percent margin of swing voters on which all presidential elections hang.

It’s tough to run for president. It’s not a sprint but a marathon and in every moment you must choose your words carefully. In the nuanced art of presidential politics one must pay attention to appearance, image and spin. Then of course there’s the issue of the media focusing on your past associations and mistakes as a rationale for dismissing what you are saying here and now.

This is why presidential campaigns have their own spin doctors. A good spin doctor can put out a message that sets a prevailing tone. For presidential candidates a spin doctor can be ally or foe. Spin doctors are not a modern invention.

What would be the first century equivalent of a “handler”? Without a modern media presence it’s hard to know. Jesus could have benefited from one–maybe. Who knows, a competent spin doctor might have kept him from being crucified. According to the Gospels, Jesus had at least 12 message spreaders. One turned out to be a quisling, which according to the accounts was enough to do him in.

Jesus after all, wasn’t a perfect patriot. He didn’t wear the flag of orthodoxy or the flag of Rome on his lapel. His lack of patriot credentials made it easy to spin his message as destructively subversive. Consequently, religion and organized politics conspired together to string him up. They said he was a threat because he challenged the status quo.

One way or another, those who really challenge the status quo inevitably get strung up.

Imagine if Jesus were a presidential candidate today.

This supreme challenger of the status quo would dare us to face the truth about terrorism. He would tell us that we cannot overcome terrorism until we understand why terrorists are terrorists. He would say that terrorists are not born, they’re made. Until we understand what makes a terrorist we cannot overcome terrorism.

He would challenge us to stop worrying about investing in the stock market and start paying attention to the importance of investing in the poor.

Here’s the closer. Jesus would challenge America’s glorification of the military mindset. He would tell us that we must stop measuring our success in terms of military might. He would say that peace is not the product of being tough with our enemies but the result of understanding why our enemies see themselves as our enemies.

Throughout his presidential campaign Jesus would reject the spin of his handlers. He would say, “Don’t you know that our real enemy is not our enemy but rather the alienation, the hostility that separates us from our enemies? Aggression and the desire to dominate is the enemy that comes home to roost.”

If Jesus were to run for president he would lose. Big time.

In his own time Jesus never gave politicians the advice they wanted.

It’s no different today. Progress is never linear.

In this regard, I take solace in the words of Vaclev Havel: “Hope…is not the same thing as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good–not just because it stands a chance to succeed…Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

This past weekend, my congregation, the Lake Street Church of Evanston, celebrated its 150th anniversary.

By their very nature, anniversaries evoke nostalgia.

As I reflected on the history of Lake Street Church I remembered the colorful characters I have known throughout my 28 year tenure. Recalling this parade of parishioners, the power of life shared and remembered opened my heart.

Then it occurred to me.

Our 150th anniversary is not merely about an institution that has survived 150 years, but about, as the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament puts it– our “cloud of witnesses”, past, present and future. This anniversary has been a celebration of the enduring journey of a spiritual community. The spiritual community of Lake Street Church has repeatedly found its way and lost it, found it and lost it again—over and over again this has been the case. And yet, somehow this spiritual community has endured and is at the moment, thriving.

What does it mean to be a spiritual community?

Being a spiritual community is not about the destination but the journey. This is not just a cliché, it is the experience of all who live in community.

But finally, the point is that being in spiritual community is to know that we do not take this journey alone.

Eighty years ago, George and Ira Gershwin wrote the song, “Someone to Watch Over Me.” The song is sweet and touching, so much so that over 70 famous artists have recorded it. This song strikes a chord because we all need someone to watch over us.

Innate to the human experience is the need to know we are not alone. We need to know that when we are down, someone will take us by the hand to help us up. We need to know that when we are in tears, another will dry them. We need to know that when grief breaks us open, there are others who will surround and hold us with loving kindness.

Sometimes we think we need for others to solve our problems, remove our pain and deliver us from our suffering. We think our deepest fear in life is that reality will not conform to our expectations. We think our deepest fear is that life will deal us a bad hand. But this is not our deepest fear.  Our deepest fear is that we will end up alone.

By standing with us, the spiritual community reminds us we are not and never alone.

The spiritual community blesses us in our strength—blesses us in our weakness—blesses us in our wholeness and in our brokenness.

But it not only blesses us—it also stretches us.

Living in community stretches us to remember it’s not all about me, it’s always about We. And here’s the spiritual paradox. It’s only when we become larger than ourselves that we become our true selves.

Living in a spiritual community corrects our vision. Living in spiritual community helps us to see life from a different angle.

Life inevitably brings unbearably painful experiences, disappointment, grief and disillusionment. But to live in a spiritual community is to remember that beneath the broken surface of our lives there is a hidden wholeness.

We are conditioned to seeing life through the eyes of the small and separate self.

But if we look deeply we see deeper truths. If we look deeply and stand together we will not fall apart because we see the whole is in every part. Life is unified, complete, it is already whole.

Everyone is a part of the Whole. The Whole lives in every part.

We live our many lives, but in some inexplicable way there is but one life being lived through all of us.

Time and time again people approached Jesus saying, “I hope everything will be all right”, and Jesus would answer, “it already is. The realm of God is in your midst already. Wake up.”

The word Guru, comes from Sanskrit, the classical language of India. It means “dispeller of darkness” or “giver of light”. Over the years I have had the good fortune of being in the presence of several illumined gurus. When one is in the presence of a true Guru, typically, the mind becomes quiet and the heart opens. Often there is the feeling of intoxication—not like one gets from alcohol or drugs—it’s an intoxication of bliss—nothing to be anxious about—nothing to fear—it’s the intoxication that comes from seeing the innate beauty and unity of life.

The Guru is not the message but the messenger, the divine torch bearer that shows us the way to liberation.

In its highest and best sense, the spiritual community is a guru.

The spiritual community keeps reminding us that not one of us has all the Truth. It reminds us that we are only close to Truth, close to God, when we are close to love.

This is my experience.

And yours?

At my niece’s wedding a few weeks back, it was pouring down rain most of the weekend and even during the festivities. The festivities took place in a tent (it was supposed to be an outdoor wedding)—the ground was soggy, there were trenches filled with water, but there was a dance floor. And we danced. You’d expect that at a wedding I dare say. One of the things I loved about the wedding was that everything took place in the same space: the vows, the blessing of the marriage, food and drink, the cutting of the cake, the toasts and the dancing. The so-called sacred and the so-called profane occupied the same space. It was one seamless (and damp) celebration.

The dancing you’d expect at a wedding came when a band played following the service and couples danced—including, of course, the bride and groom, and the bride’s parents. But, later, after the band had finished their gig, there was karaoke—singing and more dancing.

What could be more hokey than karaoke? (perhaps the hokey pokey, but not much else.) But, here’s what happened, and it made me think. Young adults, children, old folks, families, families and friends—sometimes singly, mostly in groups—all got up on the stage, took mike in hand, and sang some of their favorite songs. And people danced—the same people danced: young adults, children, old folks, families and friends. And, when the karaoke guy took a break, he left the music on and invited us all to dance the Electric Slide—which we did for better or worse in our own version of that line dance.

All this singing and dancing in community made me think about our bodies and how moving them together is a gift that somehow has been generally relegated to secular partying, rock concerts, wedding receptions (often in my part of the world held in some distant place from the religious ceremony if there is such a thing). And much of our dancing has been focused on couples dancing where the dance is about courtship and romance.

Many of us have lost dance as an expression of the spirit and of mystery. We’ve misplaced or never known the gift of dancing in community as expression of deep feeling and spiritual connection. We’ve forgotten how young children so often spontaneously break into dance just from sheer joy when they hear a beat.

I’ve been taking a folk dance course at the local junior college. The teacher is wonderful; she demonstrates, encourages, and dances with us—full of lightness. There are longtime folk dancers (some in their 80s), total newbies like me, and teens dressed as teens, and everything in between in our class. We dance together—most often in a circle—and just about always holding hands or with our arms on each other’s shoulders. We are a community of dance. Once I looked around the room and thought as I often have in church, Who picked these people? How did I end up here with these people? How is it that here we come to know our oneness as human beings? A friend of mine told me she came close to the divine in this very beginner’s class held in an old gym. One night when we were dancing hand in hand, circling round and round into a spiral—she lost herself, the steps fell away—there was only the spiral, the community, the oneness.

The Western church has had such a hard time with the human body. In spite of the incarnation—the assurance that bodies are fit places for the divine to dwell, we have been so afraid of our bodies that dancing has been pretty much removed from worship. What a loss. Oh, I know that quite a number of places offer liturgical dance—usually done by accomplished dancers who invite the watching congregation into the mystery of God through the movement of their bodies. But, at least in most Anglo congregations in this country about the only movement encouraged is clapping and swaying to the music in place, or in the case of my own Episcopal tradition, there is sitting, kneeling, standing, and walking up to receive communion. Some people still bow too at certain places in the liturgy—there is that. And, oh, yes, there is processing—the clergy and lay leaders and choirs often process into and out of church. Except on Palm Sunday mostly the people just watch this procession.

Whatever experiences I’ve had of the divine in my life have been in my body. Once or twice I’ve had what I could describe as an out-of-body experience—but those started in my body. I have to be in my body first. Just as meditation can be a way into the silence and mystery of God movement and dance can be too. It’s all about that losing of your self, the letting go. One time at the Mercy Center in Burlingame I was part of a group of men and women who moved our bodies in worship to the music of a piano played by Sr. Suzanne Tolan. We did this each of us in whatever space we chose around the altar; there was hardly any light; there was only the music and the movement—-we adored God by moving our bodies to it. Separately and yet together in community. It’s one thing to think “I praise you O God,” it’s another to praise with my body. For periods of time I have made a spiritual practice of bowing to the ground to honor God. In the silence of my own home I have bowed low and prostrated myself before the divine. These bodily experiences open me to a mystery that I could never reach by thinking and cannot reach in words—even in song.

Once I officiated at a burial service in a little mission church. The partner of the man who had died and a relative, both from Hawaii, offered a Hawaiian dance of farewell. They danced side by side in this little church, packed with family and friends; they danced between the altar and the casket. I have no words for the beauty of this expression except to say that for me the rituals of the church paled in comparison to this simple offering. I felt as though we should have ended the service there. In silence.

There are other rich traditions that continue to celebrate the spiritual in dance—the Sufis certainly do. And, in the freezing pre-dawn I’ve watched the Turtle Dance in Taos pueblo where men and boys dressed beautifully but hardly at all, danced into a trance to the beat of the drum. An embodied experience of the holy it seemed to me. Years ago in South Africa, I visited some small most impoverished churches—churches out in the middle of the Kalahari, where blacks had been driven and dumped after being removed from their ancestral lands—these were churches that had nothing by our standards. Yet there the people sang and danced. Once as we were leaving the women of the church gathered outside in a circle and sang and danced to us—I will never forget it. Encircled by song and dance, there was a unity and a holiness that could not have been expressed otherwise.

Not everyone can dance. I have an older friend (older even than me!) who tells me her dancing days are over. She still appreciates dance though. I’ve been privileged to see a woman in a wheelchair perform a beautiful dance. I am aware that I cannot move the way I once could. Even so, there is more to us than our thoughts and our words, and whether our parts can move as expansively or gracefully, or even if they mostly move not at all—it’s important to remember that we are bodies—physical and spiritual beings.

Here in the Bay area there is a church, St. Gregory of Nyssa, where the congregation dances at every service. I’ve been blessed to dance with them in worship. At St. Gregory’s we dance simple folk-dance steps to carols that we sing. We dance from one space where we’ve shared the service of the word, to another around the altar where we share communion. Then after communion we dance again in circles. Hands on each other’s shoulders moving together to the beat of the drum, we celebrate with our bodies the mystery that brings us together in community. It’s a gift to be able to use silence, words, beauty, sacrament, and dance to open ourselves to each other and to God.

God is with us in our bodies. We are made for dancing.

If you came back as an animal, which one would you most like to be, and which would be your last choice? That question was posed to me once, and there were lots of possibilities I flirted with for the first, but one that stood out hands-down for the second—a chicken. I mean they don’t seem to have much in the brains department, are fearful and fretful, and seem to be helpless prey, right? Think of how it’s used in our vocabulary—a taunt that school kids hurl at each other “Chicken!!” Or a description for hysteria, “She was running around like a chicken with its head cut off”. The theory is that the animal you least would like to be may be the one you have the greatest lesson to learn from. One might even say it is your “shadow”. I would imagine that most of us think of the Jungian concept of “shadow” as something big and dark and scary—the foul slavering beast kept repressed in the cellar. But mine seems to be fowl, rather than foul.

Chicken synchronicities began pecking at me a few weeks ago, telling me it was time to look a bit more closely at what I might need to learn from this creature. It began when I wrote a piece on my website about fear, as I thought of making some big changes in my life. A friend in my favorite online community told me that I didn’t have to worry about my friends there ribbing me about the fear—no one would call me a chicken. He then proceeded to post a hen picture the next day as the community’s icon.

My next chicken encounter that week was not so humorous. Driving, I came up on a truck transporting chickens to slaughter. The sight/energy of it slammed into me, a wave of horror. I thought they were dead until I got close enough to see they weren’t– and wished they were. Jammed in so tight they were on top of each other, wings crushed against metal bars, crippled, in obvious pain. I was crying and babbling incoherent phrases…”No, no can’t be true… not right….no, no….” The swirl of emotions included shame—that I have contributed to this nightmare, by eating chicken, knowing they live in awful conditions, but not really wanting to focus on it.

I was still reeling the next morning, as I sat to read and to write in my journal. I opened A Voluptuous God, and on the page in front of me saw the word “chicken”. Huh? Yes, a story about a chicken. In which a guru tells his students to take a chicken somewhere they can’t be seen and kill it. And the student who comes back to tell the guru it’s not possible because no matter where he went, the chicken could see him, is the student who gets the lesson right. The Divine spark is in us all. The next time I picked the book up, I’d just gotten off the phone with a friend, telling her about my chicken synchronicities, and again on the page I opened to was the word “chicken”. An Annie Dillard quote…”There is no one here but us chickens.” My curiosity piqued, I decided to scratch and peck a little deeper.

Animals bring so much to my life—as friends, teachers, bringers of joy and color. I often research what their “medicine” is to enrich my understanding. As I read about chicken’s medicine, my resistance to them began to dissolve. Descended from wild red jungle fowl of India, they have an exploratory, inquisitive nature, loving to scratch in vegetation and uncover “treasures”. They have patience and determination—will peck away at an obstacle until it is gone. Personal space is important to them—they can become aggressive if confined. They symbolize nourishment. (Source for this information—www.sayahda.com/cycle.htm).

I asked my online community what they knew about chickens. One friend from the Netherlands told me of his chicken, Mrs. Rapture, who would call to the other hens when she found a worm, so they could come and share. He also wrote:

Three ladies in the garden will make a lovely coven, very spiritual. Nice feathers to collect and make dreamcatchers of. They have a lovely language and chat all day long.

Another friend said,

Chickens are smart enough not to cross the road, usually… Their voices are such sweetness to hear. There’s nothing like a flock of sweeties happy and beautiful and clucking quietly and getting the chance to use their native wits outside.

And another told me about her rooster, who if you gave him a cracker, would go share it with each hen, until they’d all eaten, before he’d have any himself.

The more I learned, the more my heart softened towards these creatures I’d excluded from my inner menagerie. I began to open to their energy in me– imagining not having to be “important” or “successful”, to be happy with no more agenda than to peck in the dirt, part of a flock, sharing the occasional worm with my sisters, clucking in pleasure. To give of myself completely to nourish others. We don’t value those sorts of qualities much in our society. We don’t see them as sparks of divinity.

I’ve been determined most of my life to make sure it is known I have claws and an intelligence that you’d better not take for granted, that I am unique. For me nourishing another has too often been confused with being devoured by them. And all I have to do for these fears to be confirmed is to look at the world around me—countless images of people consumed by consuming—no balance in giving back or respect for the generosity of our earth. Everyone may talk about chicken soup for the soul, but there is no soul in how we most often make that soup.

However, experience has taught me that pushing a part of yourself away, no matter how much it scares you, never leads to wholeness. Since chicken has come pecking on my door, I feel it is time for me to acknowledge that even if it doesn’t seem safe in this world, I’m tired of shoving my inner hen back in its cage. I want to let out that simple soft nourishing part of me, and see where she roosts…or flies.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

[William Carlos Williams]

As a post script to this entry, the day I was readying it to send I opened a new book (this one by Arnold Mindell, The Shaman’s Body) to find a story about a ritual in which an African shaman rubbed a live chicken all over the body of the person he was healing. I hear the gods laughing…or maybe clucking.

My heart gets so full I don’t quite know what to do. The fullness expands within my body’s cavity, through my lungs, into my belly, up the corridors of my limbs and eventually eloigning into my head. I often feel as if I might burst. When this fullness comes, I sense I am out of place, or rather, not knowing what place there is in which to be. I brim with tears, and search elusively for words. To say to whom?

I recently journeyed to the beautiful Trappist monastery in the Willamette Valley of northwest Oregon, Our Lady of Guadalupe (si se puede!). The monks have located themselves on a thousand acres of dark forested hillside, with miles of trails crisscrossing their property. Before they built a permanent set of buildings for themselves, they built guest houses and a lovely meditation hall, indistinguishable from a zendo. It’s north wall of window opens onto the light-filtered pine forest. Breath taking, and giving, too.

I carved out eight days from my work as a therapist to be present to what the monks rightly call the deeper work, that of silence. Were I a single man (and I am very blessed to be married) I would buy a sleek Airstream (aesthetics matter!) and park it outside some Trappist monastery somewhere (there are several in Ireland…), and join in the chant each day, and then retire to the zendo, to be. For a man of many words, as I am, the silence draws me. As one who wants to express himself with clarity, the silence draws me. The silence draws me to that which is inexpressible, for That which requires nothing but me.

I made my first silent retreat as a 21 year old man, a thirty day Ignatian retreat in the dark January of a Minnesota winter. In my ten years as a Jesuit, I made annual eight day retreats, more or less silent, focused on the Spiritual Exercises, the psychologically astute contemplative path articulated by Ignatius of Loyola close to 500 years ago. I loved these times, these week-long graces, these places in-between everything else which somehow illuminated the year’s remaining 357 days.

I left the Jesuits a long time ago, but have never entirely. The gift the Society fostered in me, my longing for the divine, has creviced within me these nearly thirty years lay. I still feel a contemplative-in-action, the Jesuit model, and am conscious of the magis, the attention to doing the more for the divine’s glory. A curious word, this glory. My work life has been deeply suffused with the particular Jesuit mantra of the preferential option for the poor, a reading of the Gospel I believe unparalleled in contemporary life, so maxed out are we on the absolute seduction of riches, and power, and glory.

At the monastery, during Holy Week, I was once again, as if time existed, seduced by the divine, in all the mysterious ways the divine acts once we allow ourselves to be drawn in, and succumb. I thought I was going to have a particular experience, thoughtfully under my control, planned and booked. But the books and the plan were abandoned the first night, despite myself, or rather, on account of Another’s regard for my real self. And for those eight days I was. With gratitude. And silence. And awareness. And keening. And peace. And a surrender I could not and have not been able to architect for the past many years.

Grace happens. That’s what the antidotal bumper sticker says, correctly, but all the time and everywhere and suffusing everything, including us, through our pores and cells and synapses and heartbeats and pulse and neuron activity, through us to each other in some mysterious, but not so much, large and necessarily cosmic unfolding of love that in the nanosecond we become aware leaves the memory and informs us in our bodies of how we can now live, being the recipient of its great grandeur.

Teilhard de Chardin knew this in his body, Gerard Manley Hopkins found words to express it.

This is the gift silence offers. I should probably spell silence with a capital S. This is the work that is for me worth doing, that is, worth attending to. It is work, thankfully; it requires time and attention and labor and gut and butt and afterwards one is tired and ready for rest. It is demanding and exacting work. Like tilling the soil, it is its own reward. And yet it portends always more. Magis.

I feel enormous gratitude for the Jesuits when I retreat, for giving me this discipline when I was a young man, too young to acquire this on my own. And I feel such gratitude to the Trappists, brothers to my brother Thomas Merton, who have placed on the land in most every land these spaces where Silence reigns. My friend Grace, a contemplative nun who lives in silence in upstate New York, a now old woman with whom I used to pray back in Saint Louis in the early ‘70’s, has over the years, I observe in her letters, come to refer to the divine exclusively by the word Love. Silence taught her tutor-able heart this truth.

When I entered the Trappist land on the Monday after Palm Sunday, I sensed this presence, and it only grew as the days ripened into the Last Supper, the ensuing death of Jesus, the dark entombment, and the startlingly unexpected emancipation of humankind from all the slavery we tenaciously cling to, for once and for all. This is the work of Love. Two days after Easter, I was home, on our land in rural Santa Rosa, welcomed by love in the person of Scott Hafner, still beckoned to a deeper silence, to living an abiding life, to allowing the slavery to be un-manacled, again, once and for all.

I am yet brimming these days, not quite sure what to do with it. I called my friend this morning and tried to word it, and he patiently encourages me to be. He offers love. Or Love. They are indistinguishable. We’re human and need to get it out, this love we are given, this love which only exists in communion, with each other, with the poor, with the Love which is it source.

So I don’t have to know any more, or do any more, nor hopefully say any more, today. Just do the hard work of Silence, and then the less hard work of being a human being, going about my day, being a therapist and a husband and a friend and healer of this still broken and somehow glorious world.

Several years ago I was having a conversation about end of life issues with an older member of my congregation named Jeanette. She interrupted me mid sentence, reached out and grabbed my arm. “Bob, you know what I’ve been thinking lately. I think there may be something to this reincarnation stuff. And you know what? When I come back I want to come back as a cat. I think it would be great to be a cat!” 

I said, “well Jeanette, would that be an alley cat or a house cat?” “Oh Bob, I’d like to be a cat in a really wealthy household!”

I never would have suspected that Jeanette believed in reincarnation. It’s true that for some of us one life is clearly enough, for others, one life is more than enough. Some believe there is life after death, others hope to live before they die. We all have our guesses and our imaginations. Who knows what the real deal is? Somewhere I read of one skeptic who said, “I didn’t believe in reincarnation my last life either.”

In Eastern religions, belief in reincarnation is a given. Until the last 30 or 40 years most in the West have rejected it.

My first serious exposure to the concept of reincarnation occurred while a seminary student in Berkeley in the early 70’s. Some of my hippie friends were dabbling in Eastern spirituality and to me they believed beyond a doubt that reincarnation was true. I always smiled politely and privately thought that was a bunch of hogwash. It’s funny how we can change our minds. Now, 35 years later I believe in it myself. It’s funny that what seems like nonsense one day, can make perfect sense the next.

If you believe in reincarnation it’s seductive to speculate about past lives. Once in a great while somebody will tell me they know who they were in a previous life—and of course it’s always somebody who was really important. But what good is it if you were the Queen of Sheeba 20 life times ago. Maybe you were a warthog between that life and this one! What are you doing now?

People say, “we only go ‘round once”. But conventional wisdom often runs counter to actual experience.The conventional wisdom in Chicago this past March was that Spring would never come! But it’s Spring again. Regardless of what we think, the seasons keep appearing, disappearing and reappearing.

Going around only once can create a lot of pressure. Get it right, go to heaven. Get it wrong, go to hell. It’s not much of an improvement to believe there’s no life after death.

To believe we only go round once is to believe that if we screw up this one chance—we are screwed forever.

In my experience, life is bigger than legalisms. Intuitively, reincarnation just makes sense to me. Whatever happens to us in this life is not the end of the story but merely one chapter in the epic of the life of a soul. In living through the body over many lifetimes, the soul receives many opportunities to wake up and see its own light—the light which comes from God and is God. I know I need more than one lifetime to fully wake up to the Divine Presence in this world. 

There’s no evidence that Jesus believed in reincarnation. Jesus did not say “I am the reincarnation and the life”. But there is evidence Jesus did believe in karma, though he didn’t use that word explicitly. Literally, the ancient Sanskrit word “karma” means actions. Karma is about the law of cause and effect.

If you plant an apple seed, you don’t get a mango tree. If you start a war in Iraq, don’t expect the middle east to be more peaceful. Karma requires understanding that every deed carries a spiritual seed. If you give hatred to the world, the world you should expect the world to hate you back. If you live your life around material rewards, then don’t expect spiritual rewards. 

Karma says sooner or later, what we get out of life is what we give to life. What tempts us is to make judgments about the karma of others—we make a big deal out of the actions of others perhaps saying, “look at the bad karma he’s making—look at the bad karma she’s creating. To judge the karma of others misses the point. We are each responsible for our actions. In this life and the next, no one pays the cost for our actions—but us. All of which implies it is not God who judges us. We judge ourselves through the actions we take.

Jesus believed in karma he just didn’t use that word. The Golden rule as we know it is a perfect example.”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “You will reap what you sow”.

It’s true that sometimes we hold out our hand, and get it slapped. There are times when we reach out in compassion and are greeted with a closed fist.  But karma is not like instant rice. It takes time to cook. 

Karma is simply one thing leading to another, day after day, month after month, year after year. Wherever we find ourselves today it is because one thing, leading to another, has brought us to being who we are, where we are. Bad things happen to us that apparently we have not brought on ourselves. Good things happen to us, and sometimes we can’t imagine why. But asking why can only take us so far.

I know many people who lives their lives stuck in “why”. The way to move beyond why is to ask what. This is a spiritual practice readily available to all—turn the why into what. Ask not why you are where you are, but what you can do here and now. 

Karma as the law of cause and effect and reincarnation offer the promise that embedded in life is not one chance, but many opportunities to live a happier, fuller and more complete life. Taken literally or metaphorically karma and reincarnation remind us that the last thing that happened to us is just the last thing—it’s never the final thing.

Today in Chicago, it is sunny and 65 degrees.

Hope Springs eternal.

I have been reading A Woman’s Journey to God, by Joan Borysenko. In a chapter called “Trains to Glory,” Joan writes, “Spirituality is the glorious destination that the train of religion is bound for.”

I like this distinction. It does not disparage organized religion or dismiss it as irrelevant. But it points out that, while religion is a vehicle that can carry us to the wild land of connection to the sacred, at some point we need to get out of the boat and step onto the shore.

The great mystics of all paths have known this for millennia. Catholic saints like Teresa of Avila and Francis of Assisi, Indian gurus like Neem Karoli Baba and Ananda Maya Ma, Sufi ecstatics like Rabia and Rumi, were all quintessential devotees of their own faith traditions, yet ultimately used their religion to transcend religion and encounter the Divine directly.

Maybe that’s the difference between religion and spirituality. Spirituality is about having a direct, personal experience of the Great Mystery. Religion is a matter of explaining the nature of this relationship and attempting to prescribe a methodology for achieving it. Such prescriptions, otherwise known as dogma, often seem to fall short of their goals. And yet, within the very heart of ritual and ceremony, participants may find themselves transported beyond the forms to a place of glorious formlessness.

It’s the way the best poets use language to point beyond language. Words, inspired and artfully arranged, may not be able to adequately describe the Holy One, but they can evoke a numinous experience: ultimately ineffable yet powerfully felt. That’s why, for me, all good poetry is sacred poetry.

Still, we need to be careful when we make a distinction between religion and spirituality. Such a dualistic stance can be dangerous and misleading. It tends to glorify self-defined “spiritual” people as good and enlightened, and judge “religious” people as bad and blind. This is disrespectful to those who choose to deeply delve into a particular faith and cultivate a serious discipline of religious practice. Some of the most profoundly spiritual people I have ever met have taken traditional vows and worn the robes of monks and nuns, carried a title of “Father” or “Sister”, led a congregation in chanting the Holy Name or singing love songs to the Divine.

Religion can lead to spirituality, as a crush can lead to marriage. Perhaps commitment to one way can trigger a living recognition of the interconnectedness of all. Maybe by cultivating awe of God — sometimes misinterpreted as fear of the Lord — we can revitalize our love of God. By reaching outward in prayer, we might discover that the object of our longing lies within.

I am someone who has never been able to dedicate myself to a single path. Sometimes I think of this as an act of conscious rebellion against institutionalized religion, an iconoclastic attitude instilled in me by my iconoclastic parents, who considered organized religion to be diabolically patriarchal and guilty of inexcusable crimes of oppression throughout history. But sometimes this inability to commit strikes me as unutterably sad. I find myself feeling a little like a wanderer, who comes across a lighted temple in the middle of a desert. I peer in the windows and watch those assembled there as they make a joyful noise unto the Lord. Theirs is a contentment I will probably never know. They have the security of answers, while all I have is an elusive relationship with the questions. They rest in community worship, while I exile myself to intentional solitude and silence.

Yet I remind myself again, as every great being from Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha to Mother Teresa of Calcutta has reminded me, that there is no “they” versus “I.” That there is only one of us, and we are yearning for a deeper connection to the sacred in our everyday lives, searching for the Absolute Ground of Being, and suspecting that that ultimate Reality, known by many different names, is Love. In that great light, all distinctions are obliterated.