Time to Di-verse-ify

Rachel Henry3 Comments

Today is the first day of National Poetry Month! Rejoice!

Those of you who have been following the blog for a while know that every April I post wonderful, accessible poems to help us all remember that poetry can be more than something we suffer through in English class and then forget about. The poetry that speaks to us is our deepest connection to language, the closest words ever get to the unsayable.

I spent much of this past week stuck in my own thinking and annoyed with myself for being stuck. It seemed I would never progress past this particular way of engaging with myself and the world. Because thinking about your thinking is of course the best way to stop.

There are so many thought loops that I’m both tired of and apparently unwilling to give up. Here’s a poem by Jan Richardson that I find full of hope for this situation. It reminds me that life and spirit are always moving whether I happen to recognize it at the moment or not. And they’re moving in us.

Richardson’s blog, The Painted Prayerbook, features beautiful original artworks with each poem.

Risen
For Easter Day

If you are looking
for a blessing,
do not linger
here.

Here
is only
emptiness,
a hollow,
a husk
where a blessing
used to be.

This blessing
was not content
in its confinement.

It could not abide
its isolation,
the unrelenting silence,
the pressing stench
of death.

So if it is
a blessing
you seek,
open your own
mouth.

Fill your lungs
with the air
this new
morning brings

and then
release it
with a cry.

Hear how the blessing
breaks forth
in your own voice,

how your own lips
form every word
you never dreamed
to say.

See how the blessing
circles back again,
wanting you to
repeat it,
but louder,

how it draws you,
pulls you,
sends you
to proclaim
its only word:

Risen.
Risen.
Risen.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace

The Whole Death and Resurrection Thing in 360 Words

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Spending time away from California reminds me that things die on a regular basis.

A couple of weeks ago in Washington, D.C., I walked past a house with a bunch of pots in the front yard. Inside each pot was a dead plant, and I thought, “Why doesn’t this person remove some of these dead plants?” Then I looked around and remembered that this is what all plants look like in much of the world at the end of winter.

One of my least favorite parts of the Lenten and Easter season is this whole death and resurrection business. I’m OK with resurrection, but death—not so appealing. Do they have to go together? Couldn’t we all just agree that resurrection is far more pleasant and skip straight to that part?

Pretty much all of creation appears to answer no to that question. Nothing lasts, from flowers to humans to solar systems.

But this existence of ours also answers that death is not possible without resurrection. From stardust becoming humans to compost becoming next year’s garden, there are no permanent ends, only transformation.

I’m not trying to reduce Easter to the turn of the seasons. I am suggesting that separating death and resurrection is pulling apart two steps in a single process. Death is not a thing in and of itself. Death is step one of resurrection.

I suspect this is not going to make the small deaths that we endure as we grow in this life more fun. We won’t all be clamoring to go on the death ride at Disneyland (well, unless it’s really good). The peeling away of layers of our ego, the very real loss of health or dreams—we may or may not be able to weather these more gracefully knowing that they are not permanent. After all, as Jim Finley says about the Crucifixion, Jesus did not handle it well: he sweat blood, he felt abandoned.

So why does it matter that our endings and letting gos, our transformed re-emergence and everything in between are part of a whole? Because that means we are always, regardless of our present circumstances, heading toward Easter morning.

Like It or Not

Rachel Henry3 Comments

Coming into being is apparently not easy. From galaxies to stars to humans to any being that has to break its way out of an egg or a seed, taking form in this existence involves a good deal of struggle.

It’s so tempting to ask why, but that’s like asking why the lupine dotting the hillsides these days are purple. You can explain it in terms of the wavelengths of light, but that really only answers how they are purple, not the more fundamental why not red? In this case, why is not a useful question, as it says in one of Anne Lamott’s essays.

We are always coming into existence, but we—or at least certainly I—am not always happy about the struggle. There are things that we accept are going to be hard—giving birth, climbing Mount Everest, losing a loved one—and there are things that we can see will be hard for others—adolescence, for example. Yet we don’t tell anyone, you know, why don’t you just skip this whole adolescence thing, it’s not much fun. Whether a society has healthy or unhealthy ways of helping its members through this stage, they all still have to go through it.

And we don’t emerge fully formed at 20. As long as we’re alive, we’ll continue to be drawn forth. We’ll be invited to deeper and deeper communion with life, we’ll continue to be created, and that means we’ll continue to struggle.

In all likelihood, we’ll continue not to like that struggle, but maybe there’s something beyond our liking or not liking it. Maybe there’s a way to say, oh, this is happening, not in a passive but in a participatory way. And maybe that’s when it gets easy, not the kind of easy I generally picture where everything matches the version of life in my head but some other kind of easy that we can’t understand until we experience it.

This is one of those things I didn’t make up. The great religious traditions all include this idea. Now if only I would listen.

A Dose of Delight

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If riding giant, floating, multicolored, illuminated fish sounds like your idea of a good time—and even if it doesn’t—hop on the Sea Glass Carousel in Battery Park, New York City. My sister and I went last week, and we both left with huge grins on our faces.

IMG_0484
Some of the fish on the Sea Glass Carousel in Battery Park, New York City.

In our quest for happiness, especially as adults, we often forget to do those things that simply make us smile. Everyone on our round of the carousel was an adult, and everyone was smiling. Here’s how the Sea Glass Carousel works its magic:

 

It’s beautiful. From the colors to the lights to the shapes of the fish, you feel as if you’re floating in some underwater opalescent pool. Human beings are hard-wired for beauty. We may have different ideas of what that is, but it speaks to our hearts.

It’s whimsical. We need things that appear to be non-essential, that fulfill no practical purpose like food or lodging or contributing to our 401k. We need things that are designed to delight—they awaken our souls.

My sister riding the Sea Glass Carousel
Some of the fish on the Sea Glass Carousel in Battery Park, New York City.

It moves. And not just up and down but in all sorts of circular patterns. You glide up to and away from all the other fish in the sea, and you can’t predict where you’re heading next (Ok, some of your engineers probably can). We are mobile beings, and movement brings us physically into the present moment.

 

Someone posted a picture of a dancing goat on Facebook the other day. The caption read, “When in doubt, frolic.” My go-to position when in doubt tends to be “worry and attempt to figure things out.” But if instead I jumped on the Sea Glass Carousel or its local equivalent instead of worrying, I bet my figurings would be more creative and my solutions more fun.

Lenten Joy

Rachel Henry3 Comments

For Lent, I am giving up being frustrated with myself. We’re a couple of Sundays in, and I regret to inform you that I’m not yet walking around in a state of perpetual bliss.

My exterior behavior hasn’t changed much. I am still getting or not getting about the same amount done, still going to bed late sometimes, still missing the van, still haven’t written the great American novel. So what, then, is the point of this practice?

The more I do it, the more I think it helps me learn to “refuse to find my security and identity in anything but God,” as Jim Finley says. When I look at the source of my frustration, it’s usually not my actions but rather fear of what people will think about me.

On the one hand, it’s not an unreasonable fear. Most of us receive job evaluations that could have real effects on our lives, and our days are simply more enjoyable when people are kind to us. On the other hand, what exactly would happen if the nebulous “they” didn’t like me? To paraphrase Finley, when we think our lives are going down the drain, stop and ask which drain.

Not to mention that I’m making it all up—no one has ever approached me and said, I don’t like you because you don’t get enough done.

Basil Pennington, reflecting on the Rule of St. Benedict, says that the point of Lenten practice is to enter into the “fullness and joy of Easter” now, to look forward to Easter by being joyful. Richard Rohr in his daily meditations this week has included the prayer, “Astound me with your love.”

This wide open graciousness can feel risky. It’s much safer, at least to me, to stick within my narrow frustrations because there, I know who I am—I’m someone who’s going to mess up and disappoint myself. God may just have a better option than that.

The Love that We Are

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There is a lot of suffering in this world of ours. I usually resist this reality by wondering why, but this week, it’s been so present all around me in big and small ways, in the news and in the lives of those I love, that fighting it seemed inconsiderate to those who were experiencing it.

Grace and unforeseen good fortune are also always present. A lot of good things happened this week. I made some pretty spectacular chocolate icing, for example. I’m sure larger good things happened, too—all around us people fell in love, children were born into loving families, forgiveness sprang up in hearts that hadn’t even been looking for it.

I am always wondering why these co-exist and weighing one against the other to figure out which one comes out on top, as if that would answer some fundamental question. Aside from the problem of my being infinitely too small to take this census, I don’t think it would give any better answer to life, the universe, and everything than Douglas Adams’s conclusion of 42.

The problem is looking at the whole thing as if there were an answer, as if it were understandable. Richard Rohr says the problem with a college education is that then you think you deserve an explanation for everything. But each moment of loving-kindness and each moment of grief is immeasurable and inexplicable. Jim Finley says, who can measure the love of a married couple? Who can measure the beauty of a hummingbird or the tragedy of a child being shot?

So this week I attempted to allow grace and suffering to coexist. This was quite generous of me seeing as they do already coexist. I cried a lot and lost sight of this reality a lot, but this is what I’m beginning to believe is true:

Life is not given to us so that we can understand it; it is given to us to love. It is not an affair of the head; it is an affair of the heart. This doesn’t mean seek out suffering or justify it. It means be present to it because it’s here and so are we. And if, as Finley says, love is the only thing that is real, if we can be the love that we are, surely the world will be transformed.

 

A Plum Lesson

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There is a large, stately plum tree right in front of my office building. It flowers in a profusive offering of beauty every year, usually in February, and a group of us practice a Japanese tradition called hanami, or flower viewing, by eating lunch under the tree.

As beautiful as the tree is to look at, sitting under it provides an entirely different experience. It’s like going through a secret door into a peaceful oasis in the middle of campus.

At the beginning of this month, I looked at the plum’s bare branches and thought hanami would be late this year, sometime in March. Then it got hot—in the eighties—and almost overnight the tree filled with buds and this week is almost at the height of its bloom.

In his book The Inner Experience, Thomas Merton says that the desert fathers and mothers went into the desert not to get something but to give themselves away. This plum tree is doing just that, giving itself away.

The tree’s gift brings it life, attracts insects to pollinate it, produces the fruit that contains the seeds that will become new trees. For the tree, the prayer of St. Francis is literally true: “It is in giving of ourselves that we receive.” (For the record, St. Francis didn’t actually write this, but I think he could have.)

It is literally true for us as well, though it’s often more difficult to see. I am not talking about those times when we feel that too much is being demanded of us or that others are siphoning off our vitality. I’m talking about the kind of giving during which we blossom and in which we are both fed and become food for others. This is a giving as inherent to each of us as flowers are to a plum tree—we just don’t have as clear a grasp on our true nature as trees do.

It might help to remember that the plum tree doesn’t blossom all year long and that it takes a nice long rest in winter to gather energy for the next show.

In which God and I Disagree about Surrender

Rachel Henry6 Comments

Apparently it is not particularly effective to wake up and say, “Today, I will force myself to surrender to the Divine Presence in my life.” This approach, it turns out, is opposed to the whole surrendering gig. It is a little like saying, “Be happy or I will smash you.”

My approach to surrender has looked something like this:

God: I got this.

Me: OK, I’m going to do these five things to put myself in the right frame of mind so that you can get this.

God: But I already got it.

Me: Right, that’s why I have to do these five things—so you can get it.

This tightly controlled worthiness doesn’t seem to be exactly what we’re called to do.

Surrender, like every other gift in life, is not something we can earn. It is given or it is not, and the only thing we can do is create a space so that we can receive it when it comes. Creating space is not the same thing as doing it ourselves. Practice is good, but practicing with the aim of accomplishing any sort of goal is not so good, which is an annoying thing about the whole spiritual journey. I mean, what would a little bit of achievement thrown in here and there hurt?

Here in California, the first trees are starting to blossom. On campus, there are trees covered in flowers, and a hundred feet away there are trees with bare branches. I could be wrong, but I don’t think the bare-branched trees look at the flowering trees and start trying to form buds. They know enough to wait, and when it’s time, buds will form and then surrender to the beauty of full bloom.

Plugging in

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I played hooky from writing this blog last week and went to listen to Tommy Emmanuel play guitar. If you ever have the chance to play hooky from anything—even, perhaps, a date with the most amazing chocolate cake of your life—to hear this man play, I recommend it.

He played almost every flavor of music from blues to bluegrass to rock and played with virtuosity. But in addition to his incredible skill, what made him so fun to listen to is that he played with joy.

The program quoted Emmanuel as saying, “When I play, I feel like I’m plugged into something. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t really want to know. I just want to know that it’s there.”

I never considered that approach to whatever It is. I most certainly want to know what It is and how It works before I plug in, but it’s just possible that the socket is not the size and shape of understanding. The socket is much more likely the size of “accepting the imperfections…along with the obvious accomplishments,” to quote the program again.

In his book Listen with Your Heart, Basil Pennington says, “Happiness consists in knowing what you want, and then knowing you have it, or are on the way to getting it. What we want is God.”

He doesn’t say, “What we want is to understand God.” He continues, “Our minds seek infinite truth. Our hearts are made for infinite love.” These are experiences beyond our comprehension. These are plugging into the unknown.

Richard Rohr, in one of his daily meditations, writes, “Your image of God creates you.”

It seems to me that Emmanuel’s God is completely trustworthy and delights in him and his music. I’ll take that.

Beyond Powerball

Rachel Henry2 Comments

I should probably start by clarifying that the Californian who won Powerball is not me, just in case you were wondering.

One fun thing about Powerball fever is talking with people about how they would spend the money. Everyone I spoke with planned to share their winnings with friends and family, and some more widely. No one said, “I’m going to put it in a Swiss bank account, buy the biggest yacht I can find, and go live in the middle of the ocean by myself.”

The idea of having $1.5 billion dollars allows us to imagine abundance, which appears to inspire generosity. The thing is, we live inside of astonishing abundance every day.

I was eavesdropping on a conversation between a few students on campus the other day. (Yes, if you’re near me, I’m eavesdropping on you. It’s one of my favorite pastimes.) Two of them wished a third good luck on a presentation, and after he left proceeded to pick his appearance apart in a breathtakingly unkind and thorough way.

Wow, I thought, that’s harsh, and not five seconds later watched myself internally do exactly the same thing to someone who for whatever reason didn’t meet my expectations. It was unsettling.

I think if we were truly conscious of the abundance of gifts we have, that judgmental voice in our heads might quiet down. We might recognize that this other person is a gift, that he or she is part of ourselves in ways that we can’t fully understand and that quite literally make us whole. We might be more generous—with our patience, with our love, with our understanding.

And the odds of success are better than 292 million to one.