Ballets, Spotlights, and God

Every day this month I'm listening to Advent texts, mostly drawn from Isaiah's vision of who God is and what God is doing in the world. Isaiah tends to be lyrical, using vivid images to illumine honestly the situation of the world and God's place at the center of history -- not only in ancient times, but today as well.

Isaiah' prophecy covers a wide swath of time, from a season when Israel was threatened by foreign powers, to the time when those foreign powers devastated the people and the land, to the days when God began to restore what had been demolished. There are a lot of moving pieces in Isaiah, and it's not easy to follow the action. Only God and God's desire for healing and justice holds together the far-reaching prophecy.

I recently attended The Nutcracker again, performed by a troupe whose artistic director had a different vision of the story than that to which I was accustomed. His approach was quite nontraditional. At times the action on stage seemed disjointed. I tried to follow the story line as part of the troupe danced on one part of the stage, while children huddled in mock-conversation in another part of the stage, while other characters were coming and going, stage right and stage left. My eyesight -- and attention -- wandered from corner to corner in the busy scene as I tried to figure out how this scene was carrying the plot forward.

Then I noticed help. A spotlight from above and behind me was following around the stage one pair of dancers. These were the leads, the principal dancers. The spotlight was telling me, "Follow this action. At this moment, these dancers are the most important thing happening on stage." I realized that the production crew was helping novices like me to understand the story, to catch the important movements that were key to the unfolding narrative, by use of a highlighter. For the rest of the ballet, I followed the spotlight.

In a sense, Isaiah provides us a spotlight by continually calling us back to God. In his day, there was plenty going on in the world that asked for the attention of Isaiah's community. Pieces were moving everywhere.

And in our day, there are all sorts of noisy voices calling out, "Look at me! Look at me!" Our attention is prone to wander . . . to chase an act of brutality here . . . a new political reality there . . . spending our days chasing Facebook posts, angry tweets, and news-feeds. The relentless pace can drive you nuts.

But like that ballet spotlight, Isaiah shines a light upon God. In our day, we would do well to take our cue from the prophet.

In effect, Isaiah says, "All the commotion in the world is trying to call your attention to it. Be alert. Don't divert your gaze. Don't do that. Pay attention to what God is doing in the world. Keep the eyes of your heart focused on God's work, God's promise, God's nature. Don't be distracted. Don't let your vision wander."

This isn't easy to do. I'm as distracted -- and distractable -- as the next person. But I want to ask different questions about life, the world, and the commotion around us.

What are God's hopes for the world? What is God's design for the world?

What is God doing in the world?

How is God at work today, even in the midst of much hatred, division, and alienation? How do I notice God's presence today in concrete ways?

How am I invited to join God in what God is doing in the world? When I follow the spotlight, how might God invite me to respond?

Learning: A Poem by William Stafford

I have lots of reasons to love William Stafford's poetry. This poem is one of them . . . simple, straight, spare.

Stafford was a pacifist and a conscientious objector. It's worthwhile to spend some time keeping company with this poem.

Learning
by William Stafford

A piccolo played then a drum.
Feet began to come – a part
of the music. Here came a horse,
clippety clop, away.

My mother said, "Don't run –
the army is after someone
other than us. If you stay
you'll learn our enemy."

Then he came, the speaker. He stood
in the square. He told us who
to hate. I watched my mother's face,
its quiet. "That's him," she said.

[Stafford, The Way It Is, p. 9]

Two Images for Life and Prayer and Reality

This summer a large group of folks with whom I share life is reading Anthony De Mello’s The Way to Love. I’ve come across a couple of images in recent days that illumine the spiritual journey in some helpful ways. It occurs to me that they may be companion images that would help process De Mello’s ideas in The Way to Love.


First, we each respond and react to life and to life situations in ways we have learned over many years. Most of these responses live beneath the surface of our awareness. We react in certain ways and then assume, “This is just the way I am,” or “That is just the way life is.” In a sense, we have a whole storehouse of internal videos that play in our heads. These “videos,” which include our commentaries on people and events, also include attributing motives to others which may or may not be factual.

For instance, if we feel excluded, we may have a video that plays back other times we felt excluded, and the video may include a commentary that says things like, “That person has always excluded me,” and “I must be a bad person to be excluded like this,” and “She is a bad person because she has shunned me” . . . and on and on it goes.

For me, anyway, the impact of this internal video and commentary is spiraling. I spiral downward . . . downward . . . downward. The further I spiral, the more outrageous my commentary becomes. And all the while it seems very reasonable to me. If I don’t catch the “spiral” early and stop the internal video, I can be in a deep funk for hours and even for days. (“I needed to talk to him. . . . He didn’t answer my phone call. . . . He never answers my phone calls. . . . He must not like me. . . . I’ll never call him again. . . . Maybe I need to quit my job. . . . I should move to another city. . . . I’m such a failure. . . .”)

See? It makes no rational sense. If it weren’t so real, it would be humorous to see it written like this. But this is the internal noise with which each of us lives.

Every person has a whole host of these internal videos. In a sense, they have served to help us make sense of life. And for most of us, they have served as defense mechanisms, ways we have protected ourselves from the hurts and cruelties of life.

Most often, though, these videos are the cause of our upset, turmoil, fear, and defensiveness. We may say to another person, “You did this to me,” but the other person did not “cause” our specific reaction to their behavior. While their behavior may have been inappropriate, unhealthy, and even hurtful, our response to them is mostly a product of the internal video that plays within our minds in reaction to them.

The spiritual life invites our awareness of these internal videos that play within us, some of which are dear to us or seem hardwired within us. Awareness of the videos is the first movement toward detaching from them and from their compelling, addicting pull on us.


Here is another image.

Imagine you are in a valley, looking up at a mountain. You see the mountain and its shape, the trees and rocks that cover it, and the peak of the mountain. The mountain is really there. But take your gaze off the mountain for just a moment . . . then look at the mountain again. This time, you cannot see much of the mountain, because clouds have moved in to block your view. Your vision is obscured by the weather pattern.

If you didn’t know better, you could believe that the mountain no longer exists, or at least that the mountain’s pinnacle is no longer there. You could easily believe that the clouds are the main thing, that the weather is the only reality. After all, on this gaze, the weather is all you can see.

And in fact, the weather pattern is one part of the reality, but it also masks another more solid, more foundational reality . . . which is the mountain or the landscape behind and beneath the clouds.

If I am not careful, I can allow the clouds or the weather to determine my perception and shade how or what I see.

And the reality is that the weather will change. The clouds will move in and out, based on the weather.

You could liken the clouds and the changing weather to our human perception of reality, to the way we see life. To lean on the previous image, the clouds are something like an internal video. They are the immediate focus of our sight, what we most quickly perceive. If our gaze stops there, we will miss the more solid, foundational reality behind and beneath the clouds.

In a sense, the clouds, though beautiful, are a distraction. They obscure the mountain and its peak. The clouds come and go, but the mountain remains.

Spiritual vision, which is grown within us over time, is a function of prayer and meditation, the slow unmasking of the clouds and the gradual learning to trust what is behind the clouds. Quiet prayer, contemplative prayer, gives a foundation for connecting most deeply with God, grounding us in the Real, learning to recognize the distractions for what they are, and helping us to see beyond the scope of our physical vision.

Getting beneath the Resistance

I've spent a lot of time the last few days noticing my own interior reaction to a couple of situations "out there."

In one situation, I've been directly in the line of fire. I've been caught in the crossfire of someone else's issues.

The other situation doesn't directly impact me, yet, I have taken on its weight and felt personally attacked . . . even though the persons actually involved have no idea who I am. Strange, huh?

Both issues, and others of a more mundane, day-by-day nature, have invited me to pay attention to my own interior landscape. Specifically, I'm trying to ask hard questions of myself about my own resistance in these situations. What has stirred up within me? Why have I resisted so vigorously in these very different settings?

Frankly, this is interior work I don't like to do. And I don't always come to it quickly. Often, I'll swim around in angry thoughts for several days before I begin to track my own emotional and spiritual state back to my own inner framework.

That's not to say that what goes on in the outer world is "fair" or "right" . . . but then again, I'm not responsible for someone else's life, for the way they treat people, for the fences they build to exclude and alienate others. I am responsible for my own interior state.

In Matthew 5:20 - 26, Jesus invites persons to trace their behaviors and outer reactions back to the source within a person. In other words, what you are doing or feeling outwardly has some kind of interior component. An explosion of anger bursts out of some internal source. The feeling of resentment comes from some place within us. Our confrontation with the assertive co-worker or family member may arise from our own need to be right or to be perceived as knowledgeable.

Often in a class or workshop, I'll present a difficult idea or offer an image for the spiritual life that is unfamiliar or outside their normal "box" . . . something that challenges the life-framework of the class . . . then I'll invite the group to notice what they are resisting in this new idea.

Sometimes there are folks present who simply shut down. They say, in one way or another, "I'm not going to go there. I won't even consider that."

Some may stay with it, but start enumerating a "belief-system" on which they fall back, and which prevents them from seriously considering any new images or ideas.

There are others who get defensive, even combative. What I've said touches a little too closely to something within them, so they begin to discredit or demean what they have heard.

You'll find it to be a great gift in your own growth -- what I would call, your "becoming" -- to notice intentionally what you resist, what you object to. Try to get behind the accusations or blaming that you are tempted to throw at someone who seems to be causing your discomfort.

What is the "tender" spot within you that has been touched?

What is the "trigger" that this person or group has set off?

What is the "open wound" into which someone has just poured salt?

Track your resistance, if you can. Ask God to help you find its source.

I haven't finished with my interior work related to these issues in my own life. They are ongoing. But I want to notice, to see what is really there.

This "me," the "flawed, angry me" is the real me . . . and this is the "me" God loves.

The High Cost of Spiritual Health

I grew up in the day of $.29/gallon gasoline. "Gas wars" in my small, Oklahoma town would drive the price down to 19 cents, or even 18 cents. It was not uncommon to sit in the backseat of my mom's huge 4-door Chevy as she pulled into the local Kerr-McGee filling station and hear the attendant ask, "Fill-er' up, ma'am?"

She would either say, "Yes, please," or, "No, just $2 worth today."

So later, in the 1970's, when I attended conferences with my Baptist student group, the sermon that I still remember, the one that made a deep, deep dent on my heart, was the white Southern Baptist preacher who began a sermon by saying, "I'll take $5 worth of God, please. Not enough to love my black neighbor, and not enough to change my heart. I'd like to buy $5 worth of God. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough of God to make me love the outcasts or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy not transformation. I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $5 worth of God, please."

I've reflected lately on the high cost of life with God . . . the enormous cost of growing up . . . the astronomical cost of the spiritual life.

You can track it in the Gospels . . . disciples are asked to sacrifice jobs to follow him . . . the loyalty of Jesus-followers shifts from family and social circles to the emerging inner framework of the kingdom of God . . . Jesus invited men and women to lay down what they have and what they think they know, in order to take on a different way of seeing the world and being in the world.

The price tag is high, and not everyone is willing to go there. In the Gospels, some turn away sad, because they have lots of stuff, and they are not willing to let it go.

This is dicey stuff. On an intentional spiritual path, we change. The way we see and think and feel changes. Much that has been unconscious, underneath the surface of our lives, comes to consciousness. We begin to see our own interior landscape, the motivations and drives that have governed us. We see how we have manipulated people for our own ends, and we notice how self-interested our actions in the world have been.

We notice that for much of life we have been sleep-walking, just going through the motions, blindly accepting what society and popular culture has said was important.

We see the hidden emotional weapons we've kept stored away inside, the weapons we have used on others. Loyalties and allegiances we've never before questioned are seen in a new light over time. That which has been invisible -- and thus, unnoticed -- slowly becomes visible to us.

These growing awarenesses obviously have a huge impact on us. They also have a huge impact on the people around us. In their eyes, we are changing, becoming different people. They can no longer count on us to be in the same place we were when they last saw us. Since we are slowly discovering new landscapes within ourselves, these people don't always know where to find us. We are not where we were when they last put us down. We don't seem stable -- and maybe we're not at this point -- and it feels like we've left or departed. "I don't feel like I know you any more," is one way some express it.

It's a huge shift of equilibrium. The old rules and roles that we had been locked into don't hold us any more. And if persons around us are not exploring for themselves -- if they need us to be like we've always been -- the tension can be almost unbearable.

I don't think I'm overstating this. Do you see how high the cost can be? It threatens division and separation, the division Jesus spoke of that is sword-separating family members and friends (Matt. 10:34 - 39). It is not that anyone goes out looking for separation, but that growth -- any kind of growth -- puts you at odds with others.

I've been on both ends of this . . . resisting the changes within persons around me . . . and having others resist my own change. These are powerful resistances, and they signal the astronomical cost of growing up.

I have no easy suggestions for getting around the cost or the difficulties. In fact, I don't think we're to get around this cost by gathering coupons or looking for sale items. We must each live into these realities in different ways, in ways that are true to God and our most authentic self.

For instance, I know how deeply I hurt and offended persons close to me during some of my own spiritual evolution. My stance toward others during some seasons of my life was not salted well with charity and generosity, but rather hardness and stubbornness. I hurt a lot of people. I didn't necessarily navigate those days well . . . but perhaps I did the best I could with the tools I had available to me then. I have different tools now, so maybe I would do it differently . . . but I can't relive those days based on the place I stand now in life.

Jesus knew the cost was high. He knew it philosophically, and he knew it experientially. That's why he said, "Consider the cost . . ."

And for those of you who have dared to ask for more than $5.00 worth of God . . . you, too, know that the cost is high.

The Difficult Struggle of Noticing My-Self

I've had a couple of sleepless nights this week . . . and that's not a good thing on several levels. For one, it means that the next day is going to be long and exhausting. The upside is that the next night I'm almost assured of sleeping through the night.

But when I lay in bed sleepless, I also have a tendency to pick apart some of the people and situations around me. I'm not talking about the kind of racing mind that comes when I'm on chemotherapy and steroids -- that's crazy and crazy-making! -- and my mind won't stop running at full speed in circles.

This week I've laid in bed for hours at a time to a running inner commentary recounting hurts and slights and personal injustices . . . giving interior angry speeches and making silent ultimatums. It's crazy-making in its own way.

I had enough snap to realize that some of the events and situations were not intended to hurt me, and in fact many were not hurtful . . . until I started on the inner commentary and began stacking up the injustices, replaying them one by one, inviting each one to live angrily within me.

It became apparent to me that for the most part, the events of my life are not what hurt me. Sure there are some hurtful things that happen to me and to all of us. I'm not going to diminish those. But I am far more susceptible to the hurt or pain caused by my reactions to those events. These responses, what I've called the "inner commentary," are what send me into a spiral and drive me toward anger and ultimatums.

In a sense, I realize this or that event did not hurt me nearly as much as my reaction/response to them did.

So how do I parse out the actual event from my reaction (and the inner, emotional commentary that follows) to it?

It's not easy. We consider ourselves to be "thinking" creatures and we get a lot of energy from being people who think about things. Culturally we buy into the notion that, "I think, therefore I am." That is, our very essence is tied to our ability to think about things, to reason and consider and reflect.

But most great religious traditions, including Christianity, find that kind of thinking and emotional commentary to be damaging and stunting. In fact, in the Christian contemplative tradition, there are prayer forms that specifically address this kind of spiraled thinking.

Christian meditation, whether on the Scriptures or with a prayer word, is intended to give us a different field in which to reflect. Rather than narrow us down to the tight and closed world of our imagined hurts, it opens us to a wider world in which we (and our emotional commentaries) are not at the center.

And Centering Prayer gives us a specific method for allowing these commentaries entrance into our awareness, but then letting them go. During the silent prayer we do not set up a mental road-block, trying to stop the thoughts from coming into our awareness. We allow them to come, but then let them go just as quickly as they came. We let them go by use of a prayer-word which is a way of returning to the "center" when we notice that we have wandered away into our emotional commentaries, thoughts and distractions. As often as we need to use the prayer word to let go of the commentaries, we use it. This process of acknowledging, then letting go of the thoughts and commentaries is not reserved only for the quiet of the prayer time. Over time it becomes the way we deal with the thought patterns that arise in daily life. We receive the thoughts and then let them go; receive and release; receive and release.

This week it was helpful for me to distinguish between the actual life events and my commentary around them. They really were distinct and separate, and as much as I tried to tie them together (and wanted my commentary to settle me into anger!), I could not escape that they were separate.

Life happens. And my reaction to life happens.

I often have no control over life as it happens.

I most always have some say, though, about my response to life as it happens. As I gain awareness of my sometimes-cancerous response to life, and as I open myself more honestly to releasing it, I'm also more open to the good work of mercy and generosity that God is shaping inside me.

It gives me hope . . . and hope for all of us.

A Rilke Poem: About Attending to the Patterns of Our Days

Orchard and Road

In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance.

All things want to be heard,
so let us listen to what they say.
In the end we will hear what we are:
the orchard or the road leading past.

[Rainer Maria Rilke, "Orchard and Road" from the Collected French Poems, quoted in A Year with Rilke, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 131.]


Quakers say, "Let your life speak" or, "Listen to your life." It's more than just a saying that encourages us to live large.

I realize that when I'm faced with a decision or with some choice that feels significant, something inside me already knows what to do. I think that's true for all of us. It's the part of a human being I'd call "soul," or the "God-seed" within, that part of our being that already is connected and rooted in the soil of God's goodness. The soul is grounded in the reality of all that is. It knows what to do.

[Note: Mary Oliver begins her classic poem, "The Journey," with those very words:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began . . .]

So Quakers might say to us, "Listen to your life. Let it speak. It will tell you what to do." For many of us, that may seem easier said than done.

In the poem above, Rilke suggests much the same thing. "In the traffic of our days," he says, pay attention to each thing, to the movements and patterns and thoughts and reactions. Attend to what happens. Don't stumble blindly through the day, through the "traffic," as if the ordinary and mundane did not have some significance. Maybe in another day or from the wisdom of another tradition, he would say, "Live reflectively" or "Be mindful."

Because there are patterns at work within us, and perhaps there are predictable patterns at work in the world. The patterns of the world may have to do with image and conformity and popular notions of what it means to be successful; we are invited, though, to notice the more intimate patterns of our own DNA through the traffic of our days.

And to quote yet another poem that has come to mean a great deal to me, if we are not mindful of the exterior patterns or rhythms which press in upon us and to which we give ourselves and which we assume to be true in the world,

"a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong God home we may miss our star."
(William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other")

We tend to assume the patterns others have made (the "wrong gods") and miss the patterns that live within us ("our star")! The patterns and assumptions that are woven into our essence are waiting to be heard. They are, in Stafford's image, the "star" we must follow.

In the second stanza of Rilke's poem, he repeats three times the image of "heard . . . listen . . . hear."

Then he says it: The attending and listening is so that we might "hear what we are."

It takes a radical leap of faith to trust God . . . maybe even more radical to trust ourselves and our own capacity to hear and live into "what we are."

This, however, is the ultimate vocation of every human being. This is what we are made for. This is who we are.

We begin to live into this vocation by attending to the patterns of our days.

Blank Journals and New Terrain

On the first day of a recent retreat I opened a new journal. It was a marvelous experience, breaking open the cover and leafing through the blank pages. Nothing there. Blank.

I held the blank journal open on my lap for a few moments before writing a word in it. I allowed my mind to wander before putting my pen to the page . . . this particular journal will carry me along for several months . . . over those months, what will I experience?

Where will I go?

What will be the shape of my soul by the time I get to the end of the book?

What experiences and understandings will shape me and fill those pages?

What will be my growing edges?

I admit that I didn't spend too much time trying to predict what would fill the pages. I don't have a clue. The whole idea, though, was that it felt like standing at a new threshold, standing at a doorway into the days yet to come, looking at the blankness, the possibilities.

For me it was like seeing something for the very first time, opening my eyes to the mystery of something I have not yet seen. It was a wonderful moment.

John O'Donohue, the Irish poet, philosopher and former-priest, talked about his first day in Tubingen at attend that German university. He described seeing the city for the first time and his awareness that after that initial day, he would never see the city the same way again. The streets and buildings would become familiar. And as the city became familiar to him, he would lose his capacity to notice its nuances. His awareness would be dulled.

That's something of what my moment with the empty journal felt like. It was a pause to be open to every possibility. I sensed the invitation to be more expansive. I consciously thought of being receptive to the days ahead.

My journal will not necessarily lead my journey into the days ahead, but it will give some shape to my life. It will mirror the path. It will reflect my capacity to see, to notice, to live with consciousness the life which has been gifted to me.

In and of itself, that moment with the blank journal and new terrain was significant for me.

A Working Advent

Last week on an Advent retreat we were encouraged to consider past Christmas seasons in which life and love poured into us, as well as considering Christmas experiences from our past in which life was drained from us.

Like others, I have my own memories, many of them from childhood long ago. I considered Christmas traditions in a small Oklahoma town, small houses crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with family members, lumenarias lighting the streets in a "rich part of town," and attending special community-wide programs.

As I thought about my experiences, it became clear that I remember Christmas as simple and unpretentious. As I thought about each memory, however, my adult eyes recognized that every memory of a simple Christmas required that someone, somewhere work to provide the experience . . . my parents or extended family . . . persons setting out lumenarias through an entire community . . . ministers and community leaders who worked to put on Christmas programs. My simple Christmas was someone else's working Christmas.

Without fail, though, during Advent we will hear people lament that Christmas has become so commercial, that we have lost the simplicity of Christmas. As I thought about it last Thursday, I wondered if there ever was any such thing as a simple Christmas.

It certainly wasn't simple for Mary and Joseph. Neither was it simple for shepherds working their herds, interrupted by angel singing.

Has Christmas ever been simple? Even the Dickensian picture of a Christmas Carol Christmas was not simple, no matter how it is portrayed in cinema. With no electricity, thus no refrigeration and no modern cooking convenieces, putting together a meal would have been a huge chore, from gathering the food, preparing the food, cooking the food, etc. Simple? Bah humbug!!

I remember when my own children were in their youngest years . . . I suddenly had great appreciation for my own parents and their efforts in wrapping gifts, assembling bicycles, laying out gifts, and cooking meals. Like my parents, I worked hard to provide good memories for my own children.

That insight came together for me with the Scripture text for the first week of Advent. From Matthew 24:36-44, the text refers to the coming of the Kingdom of God. It is a quintessential Advent text about waiting for the coming of God's Kingdom.

At one point in the text Jesus says that two men will be in the field working. One will be left and the other taken. Two women will be working at the mill. One will be left and one will be taken. There is no direct explanation about why one is taken and the other not, just the next word of Jesus: "Be alert!" "Keep watch!" So the key seems to be attentiveness, that one person was keeping watch as she/he worked and the other was not.

But therein is the other lesson. With an impending religious event of significance (the coming Kingdom of God), these persons were working. If someone said to us, "The Kingdom of God is coming!" our tendency would be to stop working and go to prayer, or get to the church, or do something that feels religious. We want to be found doing something that feels religious when something of religious significance is on the horizon. The persons in Jesus' lesson, however, just keep working . . . but they work in a different way. They work with attentiveness. And that, in itself, is its own kind of religious!

I hear that as my Advent invitation . . . to keep working, but to do so with attentiveness. At Advent and Christmas, the occupational hazard of those who work within the church is busyness. It is easy to lose oneself in activity. And every year we lament communally how busy we are. We vow to change, to be less busy, less frantic.

But I also realize that the work we do at Christmas provides memories for others. In a sense, our busyness is a gift we offer to others, so that others might have the simplicity we remember from bygone days. Our work in providing services and activities and ministry projects fills our schedules, but it helps others be connected to God and to the world in life-giving ways.

So my Advent invitation is not to stop working this Advent. It is not to take more time getting away to a retreat center . . . though that would be really nice. The invitation I sense from God is to work, to be busy, to do what I do, but to do so with attentiveness, watchfulness, and intention.

Christmas may not be simple for me, but if my watchful work helps someone else move through the season with simplicity, then that is a Christmas gift I will offer.

Our Real Spiritual Guides

Who wants Trouble and Suffering? I'd like to avoid them if possible, to have them visit the house next door, but never show up on my porch. If they do come to my address, I'm not likely to throw out the welcome mat. I don't want to show Trouble and Suffering even a glimmer of hospitality . . . they may find a room and stay!

Actually, my knee-jerk response to Trouble and Suffering is to mumble and moan and -- sometimes quietly and sometimes passive-aggressively -- groan about "my miserable lot in life."

I may come around to prayer about them, and my first prayer is most always, "God, get them out of here!" Sometimes Trouble and Suffering come as a situation, sometimes as people, sometimes as an expectation or obligation. Removing the situation or the people or the expectation/obligation to a far away place seems to hold promise for getting rid of my stew. "If the presenting problem is removed, the thing that is touching my sensitive spot, then I'll be better," the thinking goes.

And then I come to what is going on inside me when Trouble and Suffering come around. Why my extreme reactions? What has this pair touched off within me? What turf am I defending? What do I have at stake in this situation emotionally?

I cycle through these patterns often. The situation can be as small as a minor irritation on a given day at work or it can be as major as daily life with a terminal disease. Either way, it seems like removing Trouble and Suffering would make for a more pleasant existence.

Only it doesn't work that way. Even when Trouble and Suffering are sent packing, I'm still left with myself, my own inner landscape. I may be free of that which was pushing my emotional buttons, but I'm not free of my own interior. The wound within me lives on.

In fact, one of the huge fallacies in modern life is the thinking that goes something like this: "My life would be wonderful and put together if she were gone . . . or if this situation were better . . . or it he would treat me right . . . or if I had the right job." We act as if -- and may even believe! -- that our happiness is dependent upon everything being properly arranged in the outer world.

This isn't to excuse all the crud that happens around us, nor to excuse the perpetuators of the crud around us who take advantage, abuse, and live mindlessly. It is to say, though, that I'm not responsible for their crud, only for my own.

In my most aware moments I realize that Trouble and Suffering may be the best spiritual guides I have. They put a finger on my tender places, on the spots where I am still developing, the places where my stance toward life is immature and incomplete. They invite me to become more attentive to my own interior landscape, to become familiar with what lives inside me, to notice what jerks me around on the inside, to see myself as I really am, not as I want to be (or think I am).

It pains me to admit that Trouble and Suffering are my best spiritual guides; I know from experience, though, that it's true.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford

A Ritual to Read to Each Other
by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider –
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give – yes or no, or maybe –-
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

(In The Darkness around Us Is Deep)


This is one of my favorite Stafford poems. An inner stirring within me confirms its truth.

Patterns made by others prevail within me. Taking the tail of the elephant in front of me, I'm liable to get lost and miss the circus, or to follow the wrong god home and miss the star written with my own name.

So it is important to wake up -- awake people need to be awake. Sleeping through life, those familiar patterns prevail and I'll fail to recognize that my feet are only stepping where the elephants in front of me have gone.

I've spent enough years missing my star.

Doggie Awareness

My brother-in-law, married to a vet (so he should know these things!), says that animals are aware --whatever THAT means! -- they just don't know it.

In considering doggie and kitty awareness, I've come up with my own corollary for humans:

Humans are not aware, and they don't know it.

That is, 99.9% of the population lives in a fog of drowsy unawareness and inattentiveness, but live under the ego-illusion that they are completely aware and know most of what they need to know.

What a grand lie!

A Different Kind of Coinage

In his journal on August 17, 1874, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: "As we drove home the stars came out thick: I leant back to look at them and my heart opening more than usual praised Our Lord to whom and in whom all that beauty comes home." Later he wrote this poem about his experience under those stars.

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-ness, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.


Most of the intricacies of a Hopkins poem escape my notice. This one is no different. What I noticed this morning was the idea that to be attentive to this scene that Hopkins describes, one must "purchase" it or spend something of oneself to apprehend it. He says, "Buy then! bid then!" How does one buy such wonder and beauty? What coinage does any of us have at our disposal that could pay for such awe?

The currency Hopkins proposes is not the riches most of us pursue and give our lives for. Wealth, success, status, and image have no worth in noticing the scene before him.

He suggests something else altogether: "Prayer, patience, alms, vows."

This is the coinage we spend to be attentive to the world, to God, to others, and to self. Hopkins implies that without these coins we won't notice, we won't see, we'll live blind to what is all around us.

Best then, to fill our pockets and purses with a different kind of coinage.