Month: April 2017

Resisting Ourselves

Rachel Henry5 Comments

It’s been a good couple of weeks for resistance, the fingers-in-the-ear, la la la I can’t hear you variety. I’ve been putting some pretty serious energy into noticing others’ faults, imagining different ways to order the world, and telling myself I should be doing almost everything better or at least differently.

During these times, I usually ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” a question that feeds the dissatisfaction loop while allowing me to believe I’m on the track to self-improvement. Practice with a seasoned teacher before attempting this advanced technique alone.

In the midst of this fight with reality, a new question occurred to me, “What am I resisting?” The answer that came back was “myself.”

Only one thing is happening in the cosmos: incarnation—divine love being poured out as our every breath and heartbeat, as Jim Finley would say. In other words, to quote those great spiritual teachers the Borg, resistance is futile. We can’t resist our own coming into being, can’t order the enzymes in our cells to stop breaking apart and putting together molecules. And yet I often approach life as if I can.

We are always on the leading edge of becoming, not through any effort of our own but because we are part of the continual process of creation. Life is movement. Each ending begins the next step, and so we are always incomplete.

Perhaps resistance isn’t resistance at all but a misunderstanding of the yearning that comes with our always transitory state. Life draws us forward; Love won’t let us rest unless we enter into the movement we are already a part of and accept that in our unfinished nature, we are already whole. This is not resignation but recognition that creation is not about completion, and that includes us.

We are not a life but the flow of life. We are here not to satisfy a yearning but to yearn. “The palms of your hands are God’s horizon,” Finley says. Horizons are never reached. God is always moving toward us. We are always moving toward God. Resistance is futile.

Follow Me, Really

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Almost every Palm Sunday of my life, I have joined the rest of the church congregation in reading Jesus’ Passion—the cheery bit where he is betrayed, arrested, and crucified. We the church have always been given the role of the crowd, and our main line is, “Crucify him!” This is a terrible mistake.

As Cynthia Bourgeault wrote in a recent meditation, the Christian path is one of “acquiring [Jesus’] consciousness.” Not an easy task on the best of days but almost impossible when we’re taught to relate to the resurrection story as those responsible for Jesus’ death. He didn’t say, “Feel guilty forever for being sinful”; he said, “Follow me.”

That means follow me into the garden. Follow me when you’re facing something terrifying that you know is too big for you, when you’ve been betrayed, when your friends have fallen asleep and aren’t watching out for you, when you’re near death and know it. These common human experiences—I shared them with you. Do what I did. Put yourself in my place.

You probably don’t have to look beyond your circle of friends—perhaps beyond yourself—to find someone who is sweating blood right now. None of us knows what to do in those times.

Follow. Jesus prays. He says, “Thy will be done.” He doesn’t say it with equanimity. He doesn’t say it with great enthusiasm or even a shred of enthusiasm. It’s closer to, “Are you kidding me? Could we please do this any other way, take your pick? No? Are you sure? Well then, OK, I’m in.”

How much more in touch with the grace of our own suffering might we be if we experienced the Easter story from Jesus’ point of view? Maybe we would start to see, as he did, God’s presence in the midst of our suffering, not willing it, not causing it, but present with us as it happens.

Resurrection—the transformation of suffering into new life—comes from “Thy will be done.” We get to Easter through surrender. Not to the inevitability of suffering—though it may be inevitable—but to the reality of God’s grace and presence in every moment of our lives.

We have a fantastic teacher to show us the way. Let’s follow.

Don’t Whack, Wander

Rachel Henry3 Comments

Last week, I had a vision of my life as a giant whack-a-mole game about the size of Texas. I lay splayed flat over the fake gopher holes trying with all my limbs to keep the little critters underground, but of course there was a slight problem of scale.

In other words, as always happens about halfway through Lent, I found myself thoroughly embroiled in exactly what I was attempting to give up: effort, which arises from attempting to control a situation, any situation.

Then I went on vacation and began to wonder whether our lives might be easier, more effortless, if we lived every day as if we were tourists. Wandering around downtown Minneapolis with no particular destination, I walked over a bridge and saw a train passing underneath. A flat car held what looked like giant, metal spools of thread. Another held what might be girders for a bridge somewhere down the line.

I can’t remember ever watching a cargo train pass from above before. It would never have occurred to me to schedule in this experience, and had that been an ordinary day, I probably would have walked right by, focused on making life match my expectations of it.

Not one of us can look back on our lives and say, yes, that all went exactly according to plan. I knew that if I whacked that gopher first, I could easily get the next three that were obviously going to pop up over there. So why do we insist on approaching our current and future lives as if we can clearly chart the path forward?

On my monitor at work, I have a blue sticky note with the poem “Fluent” by John O’Donohue:

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.

Though it is often really, really hard, we can trust our own unfolding. Every river flows toward the sea. Our own destination—emptying into divinity—is just as certain.