Author: itoccurstocp

“People are not finished business.”  Johathan Rowson

I heard this in a podcast yesterday and it immediately stuck.  What a freeing agent in a messy world.  It provides a means of understanding why that schmuck cut me off in traffic, why I don’t seem to be able to ________, and why that thing that _______ does annoys the hell out of me – all indicators that we are all “unfinished business.”

It would take someone smarter than me to understand this concept on a deeper level, but what I know is that somehow the thought that people, including myself, are unfinished business not only makes logical sense (I regularly see empirical proof of it) but it also somehow helps to remember that – “People are unfinished business.”

From Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar In The World, this on the spiritual practice of getting lost:

“In my life, I have lost my way many times more than I can count.  I have set out to be married and ended up divorced.  I have set out to be healthy and ended up sick.  I have set out to live in New England and ended up in Georgia….  While none of these displacements were pleasant at first, I would not give a single one of them back.  I have found things while I was lost that I might not have ever discovered if I had stayed on the path.  I have lived though parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned.”

This rings true to me – getting lost is not an exception to life, not an appendage of life — it is part of life.  For all my best intentions, my retentiveness, my desire to plan things out so the path ahead is well-lit and clearly marked, I still find myself lost/clueless/out of ideas from time to time.  But that recognition is more an admission of reality, not an admission of defeat.  Which leads to Taylor’s punchline:

“I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.  The Bible is a great help to me in this practice, since it reminds me that God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.”

So there.  When next lost, I need not be frustrated or embarrassed.  I can simply acknowledge that I am engaging in the spiritual practice of getting lost, and (hopefully) move aside long enough to allow God to do some of his best work.

I often have a song rolling around in my head.  Sometimes it just appears for reasons I can’t explain, at other times it is prompted by something I see, hear, or think of in the course of a day.  This morning, these two lines from Prayers, by Stephen Kellogg greeted me for an as yet unknown reason:  “Every unkind word we say leads to our unhappiness.”  And in the next verse: “Every unkind word we say, only drives the love away.”  Should be an interesting day!

In Genesis 28 a tormented Jacob sets out on a journey (more of a flight) from Beersheba to Haran.  The text (v. 11) tells us only that he chose his spot for the night “because the sun had set.”  In other words, this was no special place.  Yet this is where “Jacob’s Ladder” dream occurred.  Thereafter, he thinks to himself: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it….  How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of Heaven.”  What made the place so “awesome?” What made it “the gate of heaven?”  It occurs to me that what made it special was that this was a spot where Jacob’s mind was open to God’s presence.  That is, of course, what can transition any place to an “awesome” place.

“Enough” as defined in my dictionary is “as much as is needed or required.”  It is a tricky thing, enough.  Even in a state of “enoughness,” if I am not careful, my focus turns to scarcity, to times when I did not have enough, or to the concern that while I may have “enough” now I might not have “enough” in the future.  That is, I can squander my ability to enjoy “enough” now because I am focused on having “more” later.

In An Altar In the World Barbara Brown Taylor writes of “the practice of wearing skin” as a spiritual practice.  Granted, we don’t think of it so much in those terms.  We think of spirituality more in the intellectual sense, something played out in the mind, not in the physical body.  But, se writes: “In an age of information overload…the last thing any of us needs is more information about God.  We need the practice of incarnation….  Not more about  God.  More God.”  In his last chance to meet with his disciples before dying on the cross, Jesus didn’t fill their heads with information, he didn’t recite the Ten Commandments, repeat the Beatitudes, or, as far as we know, the Lord’s Prayer.  He sat down amongst them, had a meal, and washed their feet.

It is, of course, much safer to live out spirituality in the head, but the actions we take once the thinking is done, that is where “the rubber meets the road.” As Taylor notes, “here we sit, with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body.”

I have written and commented on Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata a good deal over the years.  A copy sits on my desk at home, and it is more likely than not that I read all or part of it once a week, perhaps more.  I have gone through the exercise enough to know that  different parts of the Desiderata jump off the page on different days, yet today I focused on two words in the middle that I don’t think I had previously focused on – “Be Yourself.”

At first those two words seem a little silly – I mean, who else would I be?  As Oscar Wilde put it: “Be yourself; everybody else is already taken.”  Yet while we know those things to be true, I am me and everyone else IS taken, that doesn’t stop us (no matter how irrational) from trying to be something or even someone else.  Heck, most all advertisement plays on that.  We are bombarded with the images of what or who we could be if only we bought ________.  Indeed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Thus, Ehrmann’s reminder – “Be yourself.”

In An Altar In The World Barbara Brown Taylor  notes of herself (though she could have taken this from my journal): “I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings….  Particular human beings rarely do things the way I think they should do them, and when they prevent me from doing what I think I should be doing, then I can run short of reverence for them.”

I guess “running short of reverence” is a nicer sounding than “get pissed off at.”  But most important here is Taylor’s proposed remedy:

“One remedy for my condition is to pay attention to them when I can, even when they are in my way.  Just for a moment, I look for the human being instead of the obstacle.”

Relationships, indeed, life, can take on a different tone when “I look for the human being instead of the obstacle.”

From Rachel Remen’s My Grandfather’s Blessings:

“Life has an elegance that far exceeds anything we might devise.  Perhaps the wisdom lies in knowing when to sit back and wait for it to unfold.  Too hasty an activism may lead to lesser outcomes and, more important, may cause us to trust ourselves rather than learning to trust life.”

I like that initial sentence – “Life has an elegance that far exceeds anything we might devise.” It is such a genteel way of reminding me that I am not as smart as I think I am.  But the phrase that really sticks with me is “learning to trust life.”  That is some tough learning, a degree plan seemingly not offered at the “School of Hard Knocks.”  Still, based on the returns to date, relying on life’s elegance may be the better bet.

Photo taken recently at a nearby movie theater.