Category: spirit

Being Sacred

Rachel Henry6 Comments

If you want to be filled up and cleared out by the power and beauty of orange-ness, I highly recommend a trip to the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve. I had never seen such a dense carpet of flowers.

My mom and I visited last weekend along with thousands of people wending their way along the paths. “They’ve all come to receive a blessing, whether they know it or not,” Mom said. The wind was whipping the poppies about, and I thought, perhaps they’re prayer flags. Maybe each petal sends a message to the Divine every time it flutters back and forth.

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A few days later an interior knowing arrived: we are not here to improve—not ourselves, not the world. Along with this thought came a feeling of a layer lifting and beneath it a joyful thrumming of life was released.

The Tao Te Ching says, “The universe is sacred./ You cannot improve it.”

How can this be given climate change, racism, poverty? What are we to make of the reality that some people appear to live into their full potential and others are destroyed by life? Don’t we need to work toward changing these conditions?

Of course we do, and yet some years the hills are blanketed with poppies, and some years the rain doesn’t fall. Some days everything we touch turns to gold, and some days it all ends up in the trash can. “Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily.”

Far more important than improvement is to allow ourselves to be the blessing that we are, to allow the wind to blow through us and spread our beauty and love to those around us. We can live in that joyful thrumming on the easy days and the hard.

This sacred universe is evolving. We participate in that process, but we don’t make it happen. We are the doors through which evolution passes, but we don’t initiate the transformation. “If you try to change [the universe], you will ruin it.”

Tuning into the Divine Frequency

Rachel Henry8 Comments

Life would be so much easier if fulfillment could be found in exterior things. The world’s most amazing piece of chocolate cake exists somewhere, so find it and bam! you’re done. Mission accomplished. Life well lived. Carefree from here on out.

But nothing outside of our selves—space intended—will ever satisfy us, a reality that can cause a lot of joy or a lot of suffering.

So many things seem as if they describe or comprise our selves but don’t: our accomplishments, our responsible-ness, our moral conduct, others’ opinions of us. Sometimes, though, we really mess up all of these things—I mean really, or at least I do—and so they can’t be who we are.

What’s left when everything our society teaches us to value or work toward is not us? In a recent meditation, Richard Rohr writes, “Gospel holiness…is almost entirely about receiving God’s free gift of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness.” Or to put it another way in another tradition, “We don’t need to look outside of the present moment to find inner peace and contentment; when experienced with awareness, everything becomes a source of joy,” according to Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

This sounds great but can be frustrating because there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves happy or become who we want to be once and for all. We are more than anything else receptors, and the best we can do is attune ourselves to the divine frequency, a station that only plays in the present moment.

“I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through,” says the Sufi poet Hafiz. When we allow that music to flow through us, our actions become notes in the divine song—natural expressions of our true selves. I suspect this receiving and giving is better than chocolate cake.

Seeing Clearly

Rachel Henry5 Comments

I got my first pair of glasses about a week ago. So far, it’s not a love affair.

Perhaps it’s the anti-glare coating, but I’m always aware that there’s a layer between me and what I’m seeing. This is so often the case when I relate to other people as well. I automatically and instantaneously put the lens of my idea of who they are between us. This prescription does not improve my sight.

We’re invited into a very different gaze when viewing an icon. In that practice, as I understand it, the viewer looks at the icon until she somehow passes through it, until she is no longer looking solely at the painting but also at the spiritual reality that it represents, or perhaps more exactly embodies.

I looked up icon, and its root means “likeness, image.” So we are icons of God, made in God’s image and likeness. The reality that we embody is God. Which means this is true for our fellow human beings as well, even the ones we consider difficult.

My glasses are mild progressives, and I keep trying to figure out which part of the lens to look through for what distance. My boss told me that my eyes will find the right place automatically if I stop thinking about it.

Meditating on an icon is not a matter of thought. It must be a matter of connection, of recognition—God within us recognizing the divine that is present in every creation, whether God’s Creation or our works of art, our feats of engineering, our scientific discoveries.

If we could look at ourselves and each other the way we look at a sculpture that blows us away or a flowering jacaranda tree whose purple flowers stop us in our tracks, if we could pause and let that whatever-it-is within each of us connect, we might be astonished at our own beauty.

All That’s Happening

Rachel Henry1 Comment

On Tuesday morning, after a long weekend of mostly solitude—more Netflix-watching solitude than holiness-in-a-cave solitude—I remembered to pray that my day’s work would contribute to the incarnation of God, an idea found in the Camaldoli oblate rule. The prayer reminded me that even while doing my job, I exist not primarily to get things done but rather to manifest God’s presence in the world.

Then on Wednesday I forgot all about it. As a friend said recently, imperfection is a…pain.

But imperfection is part of the deal, part of life, part of the practice. “Enter your practice until all of life is your practice,” Jim Finley says. What exactly are we practicing? Finley again: “Assuming the stance with the least resistance to being overtaken by God.” Because all that’s ever really happening is union with God, though we spend most of our lives not-so-blissfully unaware.

I’m not saying that there’s nothing more important than our relationship with the Divine; I’m saying that there’s nothing else period. Everything belongs to that relationship, as Richard Rohr often says. All the intractable limitations that I mistakenly think define me—they are part of the practice.

I don’t know how to include hatred and violence in this reality of belonging. Including them is not an argument for their continuation, but change doesn’t happen by exclusion; it happens by engagement. Plenty of terrible things we wish didn’t exist do, both internally and externally. How can we welcome actions and situations that are so clearly wrong?

Perhaps it helps to see that the most violent places are the hurting places, to know that, to one extent or another, every human being carries a wound. Physical wounds don’t heal by ignoring them, and neither will spiritual ones. Maybe we can grant our most difficult moments the same grace I attempted to grant my work, the possibility of being the presence of God in the world. Maybe that’s how healing happens. Maybe that’s redemption.

Loving Our Failures

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I saw a man at a bus stop this week trying to look as if he chose to be there, and I thought, how much time and energy do I spend maintaining that “everything’s OK, nothing to see here” front?

Nadia Bolz Weber in her book Accidental Saints says that we live in a society that only loves winners. In that society, we must ride the bus as a preference, not because we can’t afford a car. That would make us unlovable. In that society, we will be deserted if we fail, and the norms of that society are alive and well in my brain.

This mindset guarantees a life of fear because as long as we’re human, we are going to fail. We’re even going to fail at the same thing over and over again despite our best intentions. I certainly do, and I avoid looking at those failures because they terrify me, because part of me believes that whoever sees them will walk away and never come back.

The first thing to do when petrified in this way is to read this article from The Onion because it is true and on topic and funny, and it’s hard to be afraid while you’re laughing. The second is to consider surrendering, which may initially kick the fear up a notch. I tend to picture my post-surrender life as oppressive, but we’re raising the white flag not to an enemy but to a God who loves us, a God we can entrust with our failures without dreading abandonment, a God who gives life and freedom.

A little anxiety might be reasonable, though, because with surrender comes greater vulnerability. God doesn’t suddenly transform us into the faultless person we’ve always known we could be. Instead we are opened more and more to our own shortcomings, to our and others’ humanity. We let go of needing to appear on top of it and paradoxically find that, even in the midst of failure, we are much more than OK—we are loved.

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.

Giving Up the Effort

Rachel Henry2 Comments

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog (which continues below) to bring you an actual emergency broadcast, not merely a system test. New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur has been clobbered by winter storms this year, as have all the inhabitants of Big Sur. The monks are currently cut off from any deliveries or travel, with Highway 1 closed north and south of them. The road has been closed much of this year, making it impossible for them to host retreats and visitors, their main source of income.big-creek-768x447

They’ve set up a gofundme page, and if you feel so inclined, I encourage you to contribute to their relief fund. Due to the closures, a friend and I missed our annual retreat there, which reminded me what a rare gift of silence and contemplative solitude New Camaldoli offers. As my friend said, it is a place where we can more easily access the holiness that suffuses all of creation, and we all need those spots.

That concludes our emergency broadcast. We now return you to your originally scheduled programming.

Lent has arrived. Giving things up, ashes, penance, alms, the whole nine yards—ready or not, here it is. As this essay by Mags Blackie reminded me, it helps during all this to remember that the end game is resurrection—a rebirth in love.

In A Homing Spirit John Dunne writes, “My pilgrimage of heart was not a fathoming of hearts so much as a being fathomed in my own heart….It is being known that leads to knowing, being loved that leads to loving. I had to give up the effort to know, the effort to love, and instead let myself be known and loved, be given the gift of knowledge and love.”

Fathom means not only to understand but also to measure the depths of. As long as we come to love through our own efforts, the depths to which we can go will be limited. God’s depths, on the other hand, are infinite. Allowing God to explore our hearts and reveal the mystery that we are—that life is—will uncover and expand our capacity to love.

So for Lent I’m giving up the effort to know and the effort to love—once I figure out how to do that.

Dunne says, “I had to go from striving to prayer.” I do a lot of striving through inner admonishment—I will go to bed earlier, I will do an evening meditation, I will respond kindly instead of with irritation. The effectiveness of this method is either zero or it is short-lived. It does not lead to resurrection.

A prayer is a request for God to act, not a reproach to ourselves to act better. In prayer, God gets to do everything and take all the credit. It’s terribly unfair to our egos, but there’s no getting around it.

To start recognizing God’s action in my life—to practice seeing that I am known and loved already—I’m going to start with radical gratitude, paying more attention to the thousand things I take for granted every moment. I’ll let you know where it takes me—hopefully to resurrection.

Spiders and Eucharist, Together at Last

Rachel Henry8 Comments

If you want to convince yourself of the incarnational quality of this existence, I suggest the Nature Channel, especially when it’s live at your house. A big spider has been hanging out in my front window, and this week I watched her spin her web. (OK Australians, not as big as your spiders but bigger than your average household arachnid. And yes, clearly it’s a she because Charlotte’s Web.)

How differently would we conceive of everything if we used the bottom of our abdomens not to expel waste products but to craft a tool that sustained our lives? If we had eight dexterous extremities that bent in all sorts of creepy ways? Nothing would be the same, beginning with the non-creepiness of the leg bending.

Our bodies determine how we experience this world. At church, some people are not well enough to walk to the front to receive Communion, and so we bring it to them. I don’t always respond with compassion to others’ infirmities and had to remind myself to see beyond one woman’s failing body to the divinity within her.

Then my perception shifted, and I realized that God isn’t separate from her aging. We don’t share in divinity despite our physical state but rather through our physical state, whatever it happens to be.

God is very much in our physical nature. How could it be otherwise when that nature shapes our relationship to reality? It’s not the only thing affecting that relationship, but it’s always part of the equation. We can change our attitudes and attachments, but if you’re six feet tall, life will always look different than if you’re five foot two—or if you happen to spin webs for a living.

And it is in this life, shaped by this physical reality, shared with these spiders, that we encounter the holy. God is at our fingertips and in our fingertips. We don’t have to go anywhere or change anything to find what we’re seeking. We can recognize its presence as our own.