Spirituality as Subtraction, not Addition

Decades ago my wife and I knew a man who loved to tinker with woodwork, doing some minor carpentry around his house. At some point, he decided to build an extra room onto his house. With family members helping in the project, he added the room. But one room was not enough. Soon he decided he needed another . . . then another. I don't know how many rooms he added in all, but over the years his house took up nearly every foot of his city lot. This amateur carpenter never took anything down, only adding to his existing house until it ate up his entire property.

We were guests in his house a couple of times, and when he would give us the tour of the latest project, we would walk through a room to a doorway cut in the strangest place, spilling into a misshapen hallway that led to the next room, where the same pattern would be repeated. It was the only way he could get everything to fit together. I suppose in an emergency there was only one way in and one way out, because the home seemed like an endless chain of rooms and angled hallways that had to be navigated single-file. The entire layout was connected, to be sure, but was only loosely held together by the builder's latest whim. While I'm sure the layout made sense to him, to others nothing seemed to cohere.

Because we regularly passed the house in our coming and going, my wife began calling it the "Add-on Extravaganza." It became something of a game to drive by and see what the latest project was, the next "add-on" in the extravaganza.

His way of adding on to his house was far removed from a renovation or refurbishment, in which walls are taken down, the existing arrangement of the house is altered, and the old bones of a house are given new life. In a renovation, something has to be subtracted before something else can be added. If you want more space for a kitchen, you demolish a wall and open up space into a dining or living area. In the end, you most always have to get rid of something in order to make space for something else.

In our desire for a deepening connection with God, persons who engage an intentional spiritual path often thrill to find new prayer methods, retreat experiences, spiritual books, conferences, and classes that hold the promise of another step toward awakening. I know this temptation well. The appeal of a new book or a gifted teacher can be overwhelming. It is quite easy for any of us to begin to add this teaching to that experience . . . to add this prayer practice to my bagful of spiritual disciplines . . . to add a new understanding of my own inner landscape to all the understandings of myself I've accumulated through the decades. Add add add add add. . . .

Jesus told a short, "the kingdom-of-heaven-is-like . . ." parable.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field." (Matt. 13:44)

It's one of my favorite parables on many levels. The field represents many things, including your life. If the field is your life, then treasure is within you. But the parable emphasizes that in order to apprehend the treasure, you much first sell what you have.

**Sell what you have in order to buy the treasure.
**Empty yourself of whatever fills your interior rooms in order to make room for the treasure.
**Spend whatever you currently have in order to receive this priceless treasure.
**Make any sacrifice necessary in order to claim the treasure.

And all this giving-up in order to receive does not happen in the context of a grinding, regretful sacrifice, as if spending and emptying were onerous tasks to undergo. The treasure is of such magnitude that the "selling" is undertaken with joy, what St. Clare of Assisi called a "laudable exchange." We exchange the small joy we have in our hands for the greater joy or the "pearl of great price" . . . the unimaginable joy -- because it cannot be imagined -- of this treasure.

There is an unmistakable "sell-buy" dynamic at work here. We cannot simply keep adding on, adding on, adding on, without at some point acknowledging that finding this treasure means there are things I have to release in order to apprehend it. I must let go of some things in my life-world in order to fully receive -- or "buy" -- some other things that bring life.

In other words, I cannot hold onto life as it is or life as I experience it now, and merely add-on components of the spiritual life if I want to become the person God created me to be. Spirituality is not an add-on extravaganza! In reality, it is more about subtraction than addition. Some things must be sold, released, emptied, and let go of, in order to make space within us for the treasure we seek.

Personal transformation is more like home renovation than an add-on extravaganza. Bit by bit, some walls are coming down, colors are changing, modes of access are becoming more spacious. There is some demolition involved, and very often the deconstruction is painful. But also, something new and beautiful is being built from the old bones of our lives.

In the life that is continually becoming, this process will take us to our final breath.

An Emerging Beautiful and Winged Life

In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau recounted a marvelous story that apparently was widely known in New England at the time. The story is recorded in Thoreau's reflections, Walden, written as he lived for two years, two months, and two days at Walden Pond.

The story is about old apple-tree wood. The tree had been cut and trimmed as a farmhouse table, and had been used for over 60 years, first in Connecticut, then in Massachusetts. One day, perhaps because of a hot urn or a coffee pot, strange gnawing sounds began to come from within the table and continued for a long while. Finally after a great many days of the gnawing gnawing gnawing, Thoreau describes a “strong and beautiful bug” that flew out of the table made of apple-tree wood . . . a winged creature that had been hidden within the table for decades.

And then Thoreau asks: What of the beautiful and winged life that dwells within each of us, “buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness” within us, hidden by our woodenness, waiting to be born, waiting to be freed to live and fly?

It is amazing to think that this well-hidden life within the tree was not disturbed when the tree was chopped down and trimmed for use as a table. It is amazing that the table could be used for years, for decades, without the inner life of the apple-tree wood being stirred alive.

Thoreau invites us to consider our own lives as tables, with "many concentric layers of woodenness" providing a tomb for the life that lives within us . . . the hardness, the shell, the crust that has only gotten more substantial through the years as we protect ourselves from the painful darts of the world. Within each of us, though, no matter how hard and weathered we are, is a "beautiful and winged life" waiting to be born.

While Thoreau didn't borrow the image from Jesus, he could have. Jesus used the image of a field that had within it a hidden treasure, a treasure so valuable it was worth giving everything to excavate the treasure. Of course, he wasn't merely referring to a field hidden away in some landscape on a map. Jesus was referring to the field of your life and mine, and to the immense and priceless nature of the treasure we each carry within us. The treasure of what it means to be fully YOU, fully ME, fully the people God created us to be, this is the interior treasure the parable points us to.

Jesus also counseled Nicodemus about being born anew or born from above. Some folks see this a being born a second time, a spiritual rebirth called being "born again." What if, however, this inner birthing is ongoing, happening not just once or twice, but over and over and over again. We are constantly and consistently being remade, re-created. In fact, Ignatius of Loyola believed that one of the defining marks of God's work in the world is that God is constantly creating, constantly remaking, constantly rebirthing, bringing to life the "beautiful and winged life" within us over and over again.

If you'll attend to your own life, I'm confident you can find evidence of your own interior "gnawing," the desire or longing that arises from deep within for your own hidden life to emerge.

And I would also guess that from time to time in your own experience, you have seen the emergence of a "beautiful and winged life" that you could hardly imagine was your own. (In fact, some of us, as soon as we see our own beautiful and winged life, subconsciously try to sabotage it . . . but that is material for another day.)

There is treasure beyond price within the field of you.

The life that God created you to live is being born from within you . . . you are constantly being reborn.

Or, if you please, there is within the concentric layers of your own woodenness, a beautiful and winged life waiting to emerge and soar.