It occurs to me…

In one of my favorite writings of Oswald Chambers he writes of “the graciousness of uncertainty.”  This seems like an oxymoron.  As he notes: “Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing.  We imagine that we have to reach some end [an end, I might add, that WE have defined], but that is not the nature of spiritual life.  The nature of spiritual life is that we are certain in our uncertainty….”  That in and of itself seems like another oxymoron, but he explains later – “we are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God.”

In our faith, Chambers notes, we can easily become advocates of a creed, not of God.  That is, “we do not believe God, we only believe our belief about him – which of course leads us down a perilous path.  We can, in the name of God, become like the guy on the street corner selling “genuine” Rolox watches for $29 in that we start selling a “knock off God,” one we have created in our own image.

I have always liked the way Anne Lamott treats this – “you can tell you’ve created God in your own image when God hates all the same people you do.”

Congratulations to author and mentor from afar, Anne Lamott.  No, I have never met her, though we were once in the same building together when she was speaking.  I read this week that she married recently, for the first time, at age 65.  This caused me to revisit some of her work, including her TED talk from a few years back:

https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_lamott_12_truths_i_learned_from_life_and_writing?language=en

To celebrate her marriage, I thought I would go back over her twelve truths learned from life and writing.  I only take issue with 1, and it relates to chocolate, so probably doesn’t matter that much in the scheme of life.  In her introduction she notes that each of us is a “mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread” which I think pretty much hits the nail on the head.  Anyway, Lamott’s Truth #1:

“All truth is a paradox.  Life is both precious, unfathomably beautiful gift and, and it’s impossible here….  It’s filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.  I don’t think it’s an ideal system.”

It occurs to me that perhaps the only thing we can all agree on is her last sentence, it’s not an ideal system.  But it is what we got, which leads to Lamott truth #2: “almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes – including you.”  Indeed, unplugging or rebooting, the “CTRL/ALT/DELETE” buttons of life (whatever they are for each person), come in quite handy.

The opening line from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata: “Go placidly amongst the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence.”

I have long admired that first line.  Ehrmann does not bemoan the “noise and haste,” doesn’t go on for lines thereafter about how awful noise is, how I need to slow down, or how in times past things were quieter and slower.  He doesn’t suggest that I find the source of and take it on myself to eradicate the noise, take something to lessen my anxiety, or fire up iTunes and overcome their noise with my own.  No, he instead invites me to remember, to “remember what peace there may be silence.”  This can, if I let it, instantly transport me from the “noise and haste” to a quiet moment under a canopy of trees in a still, sunlit forest, to a summer day sitting on a front porch swing with a good book in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other.  Granted, when I return the “noise and haste” may still be there, probably is.  But somehow, they seem a bit less troublesome.

From Anthony DeMello’s The Way To Love, this about how to think of “those people you dislike”:

“That means you cannot use labels like proud, lazy, selfish, arrogant.  The label is an act of mental laziness, for it is easy to stick a label onto someone.  It is difficult and challenging to see this person in his/her uniqueness.”

That’s difficult enough, but then:

“Consider the possibility that what you see as a defect in them may not be a defect at all but really something that your upbringing and conditioning have led you to dislike.”

And finally:

“If after this you still see a defect there, understand that the origin of the defect lies in childhood experiences, past conditionings, faulty thinking and perception; and above all in unawareness, not in malice.”

He closes with “…to understand is to forgive.”

Got it, but this may take a while.  The first thing I may need to do is get rid of my “Stereotypes are real time savers” t-shirt.  Or perhaps wear it inside out.

Photo taken recently on a clear spring day.

Reading today from The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis published some seventy-eight years ago, he writes about the need for, and lack of, solitude.  “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy….”  He bemoans that “even where the planners fail and someone is left physically by himself, the wireless [that is, the 1941 “wireless”] has seen to it that he will be…never less alone than when alone.”

It occurs to me that solitude, silence, and privacy have become less valued (more avoided?) in the seventy-eight years following.  It also occurs to me that if he dropped in on us today, Lewis’ head might well explode.

From Heather Harvilesky, What If This Were Enough.  Bear with me, for this is a bit lengthy, but cutting it in pieces felt like a betrayal of its worth.

“We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities.  We are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering an enervated, anxious state over our value and popularity.  We are called to view our actions as important, with our without consecration by forces beyond our control.  We are called to plant these seeds in our world: to date to tell every living soul that they already matter, that their seemingly mundane lives are a slowly unfolding mystery, that their small choices and acts of generosity are vitally important.

Here is how you will start: You will recognize that you are not headed for some imaginary finish line, some state of ‘best’ness that will finally bring you peace.  You will see that you are as much of a miracle as Mozart was.  You will remember that bit of advice lurking inside one of Shirley Jackson’s dark novels: ‘Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.’  You will feel this and know it in your heart and pass this feeling along  to the people around you.  You will breathe inn this moment – this imperfect, uncertain, not-quite-right, heavenly moment.

You will say to yourself, ‘it is enough.’  And it will be.”

Amen!

Glow and Shimmer

From Heather Harvilesky’s essay, The Miracle of the Mundane:

“[W]e have to see that every human is divine.  We have to train ourselves to see that with our own eyes.  It will fuel us, once we see it.  The ordinary people around us, the angry ones and the indifferent ones, the good ones and the bad ones, will start to glow and shimmer.”

Sadly, it does take work to “see that every human is divine,” but the difficulty should not deter the effort.  Thus: “We have to train ourselves to see that with our own eyes.”  That the “glow and shimmer” is more apparent in some than others does not speak to the presence of the “glow and shimmer” so much as to my vision, my ability to see it.

From Heather Havrilesky, What If This Were Enough?”

“From the day we are born, the world tells us lies about who we are, how we should live, and what we should sacrifice to cross some imaginary finish line to success and happiness.”

And that is just her opening line in the introduction.  She continues:

“More than anything we have to imagine a different kind of life, a different way of living.  We have to reject the shiny, shallow future that will never come, and locate ourselves in the current, flawed moment.  Despite what we’ve been taught, we are neither eternally blessed nor eternally damned.  We are blessed and damned and everything in between.  Instead of toggling between victory and defeat, we have to learn to life in the middle, in the gray area, where a real life can unfold on its own time.  We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock.  We have to open our eyes and our hearts to each other.  We have to connect with what already is, who we already are, and what we already have.

We want too much.  We don’t need that much to be happy.  We can change ourselves…by returning to that simple truth repeatedly.  We have to imagine finally feeling satisfied.”

Well, that’s a lot to do in the next 220 pages!

Back to – never far from – the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:

The son’s return, I suppose like any renewal, occurs in several stages.  He had to leave, he take his journey into a far country.  v. 13  Then he had to spend it all, and begin to be in want.  v. 14  He had to hit bottom with the pigs, then come to himself, to have an awakening, an epiphany.  v. 15-17  Still, there was more required, he had to arise and go to his father.  v. 18

While all those steps, those stages, were necessary to the story, the last one is the most important, and perhaps the most difficult.  Absent the physical acts of getting up and starting on the road back, this is just a sad story of a guy who lost it all and realizes he has screwed up.

It occurs to me that while all the parts are needed to make the story, those things, the getting up and starting, then continuing on the road back, are the important parts, and the important parts of any life story.  The good news is that regardless of the story up to that point, the getting up and starting on the road back are always available.