Tag: existence

Reality Wants You

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I woke up early one day this week to do Important Things, e.g., pack a lunch, before leaving for work. Instead I spent a good amount of time patting Tux, my cat.

I said to him, “Looks like it’s going to be a Tux kind of day.” That simple statement opened up in me a sense that the day had a direction of its own independent of my plans. I saw the possibility of tuning into that movement rather than trying to lock each hour tightly into a pre-imagined form, like when you hold something squishy in your hands and it inevitably manages to squeeze through the spaces between your fingers.

Then a little tendril of terror crept in. To trust the universe to reveal itself and our place in it sounds noble in theory, but in practice it involves getting up close and personal with our lack of control.

Right before the terror, though, a feeling of aliveness prevailed. I believe it came from experiencing the reality of the newness of each moment. All creation really is coming into being each nanosecond, including us. “The sky gathered again/ And the sun grew round that very day,” as Dylan Thomas writes in “Fern Hill.”

This could be cause for great celebration, for dancing in the streets and on the rooftops.

I’m not saying that whatever we’re struggling with will be magically erased, but what could be more exciting than to consciously participate in the unfolding of existence? An unfolding that is now, as it was in the beginning, good. An unfolding that is bigger than our plans and moves in time beyond our understanding.

The world will surely be a different place when we go to bed than when we woke up. We may only recognize the wonder of its evolution if we step into the current that is already flowing toward Love.

Living into Love

Rachel Henry3 Comments

It’s remarkably difficult to align our lives with what we believe to be true. For example, I believe in love and compassion, in approaching all beings with an open heart, in kindness to self and others, in the power and beauty of words, in the importance of creativity.

But I forget and spend a good amount of time—especially mental time—acting as if I believe in getting things done and receiving recognition for doing them well. Why don’t I more consistently practice what I believe?

Or to phrase the question in a more useful way, how can we live our most deeply held convictions ever more fully? After all, we are and always will be works in progress.

Jim Finely says we must find our identity and security in God alone. That’s a radical statement. He’s not talking about our 401ks and insurance policies. He’s talking about the place from which we move.

Finley also says God is loving us into being with every breath and heartbeat. He’s describing our fundamental nature, beyond protons and electrons, our identity as beings of Love.

When we know we are loved and are made of love, we become free to express that love without worrying that its lack of reception will define us or that we’ll run out of love and there won’t be enough left to sustain us. This freedom allows us to act in accord with the beauty in and around us and discover and reveal that same beauty in others.

Life will always be unpredictable and insecure, but the nature of our existence is utterly reliable. We are made by Love for love. By becoming ever wider conduits of love, we live into the fullness of ourselves, and it is glorious.

Loving God’s Justice

Rachel Henry2 Comments

God’s justice is not our justice, Fr. Raneiro of New Camaldoli Hermitage emphatically pointed out in a sermon once. I had never considered that reality before, but looking around our world, it seems like the most obvious observation many of us never make.

In both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, God gets really clear about what justice is. Treat the widows and orphans like family. Feed the hungry. Tend to the sick. A just people cares for those who can’t care for themselves, for the poor, the marginalized.

These are not the principles on which our justice system is founded. Our justice system is largely concerned not with mercy but with maintaining privilege for the privileged. God’s justice system overflows with love and abundance. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” Jesus says.

It can be hard to picture a universal order that’s so much more generous than we are, and yet it’s all around us—trillions of galaxies, millions of species of insects, around 200 seeds on the outside of a strawberry. The author of existence is Infinite Love. What other kind of universe could it be?

If we can learn to see the generosity with which God gazes at us, we can then see the rest of the world with wonder and love.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….All things came into being through Him.” That’s God’s generosity, giving away the divine being in and as absolutely everything that is. Complete inclusion—not a single particle escapes that outpouring.

To no corner of the universe does God say, sorry, I don’t think you’re worthy of me. Quite the opposite.

The invitations to Judgement Day say, come experience absolute grace and forgiveness. This is going to be one hopping and everlasting party, and everyone’s going.

Coming and Going

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A friend recently texted a group of us a photo of her delightful new grandson not long after his birth. The previous text to this particular group communicated a moment of caring for her dying father.

Seeing this entering and leaving the world in such close proximity brought home to me how natural both stages are. We are not designed to stick around.

I once heard about an indigenous people—I don’t recall where they live—who instead of considering death the opposite of life considers it the opposite of birth. We arrive on this planet, spend some time here, and depart. We come into being, we exist, and we cease to be.

Richard Rohr says, “Your life is not about you. You are about life.” We participate in this cosmic evolution, this ongoing creation, but we are not the point. Perhaps getting this backward makes us reticent to even think about our own ending.

Of course the idea of not existing is terrifying because all we have consciously known is existence, but if we considered the significance of our existence differently, maybe leaving it would be less scary. We are not so much individual identities walking around as we are parts of a greater whole.

We can see it concretely in the DNA passed on from my friend’s father to his great grandson. In a very real way those genes form them but don’t belong to them. The people are expressions of the genes, which existed before them and will continue after them.

In a similar way, we are each expressions of Spirit. In her book God’s Ecstasy, Beatrice Bruteau likens God to the dancer and creation to the dance. Though a dance can be broken down into individual movements, it’s the relationship between the movements, the flow of movement, the giving way of one movement to the next, that makes it a dance.

Each movement is beautiful and necessary and significant. Without any one movement, the dance is not the same. At the same time, every bend of the knees and arch of the back exists only for the dance.

A dance is ephemeral, and so are we. It’s also beautiful, and so are we—in our being born, in our living, and in our dying.

This Gift We Are Living

Rachel Henry6 Comments

Thanksgiving is probably the wisest of our national holidays. President’s Day can’t quite transform our outlook or way of approaching the world the way gratitude does.

Perhaps gratitude sparks such a profound shift because it puts us in touch with the truth that every moment and every molecule of this life are freely and mysteriously given to us. Here are a few of the innumerable things for which my heart breathes a deep thank you:

The repetitive and enduring nature of patience—all the times we choose not to take a mistake too seriously, every time we remember that people are more important than outcomes, each hopeful beginning again, the infinite grounding of the world in Mercy.

The expanse of Reality—the Earth, the sun, the Milky Way traveling through space at 1.3 million miles per hour, the billions of other galaxies shaped like ours, the personal imperfections we will never overcome, our incalculable and inexplicable generosity toward other beings, the presence of God in all of it.

The daily amazements—the cat’s ability to jump onto the countertop, the whir of the hummingbird’s wings, the welcome from the giant sycamore tree near the University Union, the refreshing burst of a good laugh, the reliable supply of food in the grocery store coupled with the economic means to purchase it.

This graced and charged existence we share—this breathing, this intertwining of lives, this shaping one another, this distinct being here amid the myriad possibilities that could have arisen.

The people who bless my life—family, friends, coworkers, writers who died years ago and left their thoughts behind, restaurant servers, my mechanic, you reading this.

Happy Thanksgiving. May we all live in the wonder of this gift of existing.

What Are the Odds?

Rachel Henry2 Comments

I often choose to be annoyed by the tag line people attach to this or that online profile, but a few weeks ago, I saw one I liked: “Just to live is holy. Just to be is a blessing.”

A friend at work recently said that he often thinks about how huge the odds against his existence are. I once heard that if the timing at the Big Bang had been off by a trillionth of a second, particles would never have formed, much less stars, planets, and living beings. (This is one of those “I heard it somewhere” scientific facts rather than my usual “thoroughly researched on Google” scientific facts.)

He pointed out that you don’t have to get cosmic to be boggled by your good fortune. You only have to go a few branches back in your family tree because all of these people throughout history had to not only meet but also get together and feel frisky at an exact moment for your genome to come into existence. Not to mention all the twists and turns evolution didn’t take.

And then he said, “And what do we do with it? Play video games.” My internal response to this kind of reminder used to be, wow, I really need to change what I do. But trying to force myself to change my actions through guilt and mental chastisement has never really worked. The more effective question for me right now is “How do we do whatever we’re doing?”

If I could wake up every morning wildly grateful for and astonished by my existence, if I could maintain that reverence and wonder throughout the day whether I was doing dishes, working, or playing video games, I think my actions would change effortlessly, as a natural extension of my approach to life. If, with the psalmist, I could remember to sing, “I praise you, Lord, for I am wonderfully made,” I might start to do more of what I was made to do.