Tag: depth

Relating to the Depths

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I recently heard the advice to give up understanding anything (apologies for not remembering the original source). After living with this idea for a little while, it occurred to me that understanding is insufficient to being alive.

Comprehension and figuring things out are essential for a certain level of life. It’s remarkably useful that science has identified human beings as the cause of climate change and can calculate the most effective solutions. We don’t want to give that up.

But the depths of life require entering into rather than figuring out; understanding is too shallow an approach for the deep waters. We cannot comprehend death or loss, love or joy, but we experience them. The preciousness of this life sometimes overwhelms us—an incredible sunset, a flock of birds descending, or children at play to use Jim Finley’s examples. These moments open us to existence in ways that have nothing to do with thought.

In a very real way, we cannot understand any other being. We cannot think our way into the experience of a tree, a cat, our siblings, or the person who sits next to us at work five days a week. To see things from another’s point of view is useful but limited and different from being present with that person, from allowing our spirits to recognize one another.

We share life with all of creation. We are in relationship with all that is, and the foundation of that relationship is love. The desire of love is not ultimately to be understood. It is to see and be seen, to know and be known, to experience and be experienced.

The “peace that surpasses all understanding” is exactly what it says it is. May we dwell there.

Choosing the Depths

Rachel Henry2 Comments

As I was running late to work one day, my mind calculated and recalculated the fastest route, as if I could predict where the slow cars would be or when the traffic lights would turn. Not to mention that the time difference would, in reality, be negligible no matter which way I went.

An interior voice wanted to take a route that I was sure was not the fastest. The voice insisted, though, and off we went. About halfway to the freeway, a blue heron passed overhead. Its majestic, unhurried flight took with it all the melancholy and anxiety that had been gurgling around inside me.

I won’t claim with certainty that I was meant to go that way to meet the heron. Sometimes this is true and sometimes it’s not, and generally speaking, the world is more complex than we can account for. But I will say that the experience made it clear that I so often choose a course of action based on the wrong criteria.

Choosing to go the way in which we will encounter the beauty of our fellow creatures or lessen the suffering in the world is so much more important than making it to work one minute earlier.

I spend a lot of time on the innumerable daily equivalents of that one minute. They come in so many sizes and flavors—which task to do first, which type of olive oil to buy, what the right answer is. Their very quantity makes them seem important when actually they’re distracting.

To make choices that are worthy of us, we need questions that will take us to the depths of our lives where we long to be—is it loving? Is it kind? Does it bring joy to me and others?

We need to remember that we are these depths and that we are here to keep falling more deeply into them.

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.