Tag: Lent

Blue Light Special: a Better Life on Aisle Three

Rachel Henry3 Comments

Though it’s a little early, I’ve decided what to give up for Lent this year: comparisons. I’ll still price check at the grocery store, but I’m going to stop comparison shopping for my life.

I do this all the time. I have an impressive mental list of things other people have, or more importantly are, that I don’t or am not. I like to check this list regularly to keep myself a little off balance because that is clearly the straightest path to self-improvement. Though of course I wouldn’t dream of assuming someone else’s life is perfect while simultaneously being hard on myself. That’s silly. I mean, who does that?

Life doesn’t come with a shopping cart. We can’t stroll down the aisle and pick unlimited good health off one shelf and a love of gardening off another. No one person’s cart is full of all joy and no suffering, all talent and no failings, no matter what their Facebook feed says.

That’s not to say our actions have no effect. We can eat healthy and exercise. But we arrived in this existence as a particular blessed, beautiful, and messy bundle, and life will happen to all of us fragile and imperfect human beings.

Aside from the unpleasant mental anguish that comes with comparing ourselves to others, the deeper problem arises in our relationship with God. Any time we spend trying to be someone else takes us farther from God dwelling in us and in the other person. God loves us and everyone else as we are, so if we want to encounter God, we need to inhabit ourselves rather than search for someone better to be.

We strive to categorize a world that longs to be celebrated. I watch my mind struggle to find some assurance that I’m better than others—or worry that I’m not—by counting my and their accomplishments and mistakes, strengths and weaknesses. It’s such a poverty-stricken way to relate to the manifestation of infinite love that I am, that everyone else is.

Instead, I plan to hold the mystery of the coexisting wholeness and brokenness of myself and others and let God reveal each moment’s celebration.

 

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.

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.

Two Steps Back

Rachel Henry3 Comments

If I were a space capsule, my re-entry from last weekend’s silent retreat at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur into the everyday would have included some layers being burned off in the atmosphere. This might have had something to do with my decision to give up protecting my heart as my Lenten practice.

On the last morning of the retreat, I was trying to be present as I ate breakfast, looking out at the fog that hid everything beyond my little garden, and worrying about this whole open heart thing. I looked down at the empty sugar packet I’d used for my tea and suddenly there was holy presence of sugar packet.

This was not an art deco sugar wrapper. This was your standard white with scrolly blue letters proclaiming, “Sugar, sugar, sugar.” It was a little rumpled and, in that moment, exactly as it ought to be, as if the essence of this particular sugar packet were shining through. This awareness lasted for a little while—holy presence of bowl, holy presence of plate. Then it faded, and we drove home.

I was determined to “keep faith with my newly awakened heart,” as Jim Finley says. Then I went to work Tuesday morning.

At my parish’s Advent retreat last year, Father Jim Clarke said that when you ask God for something, God rubs his/her hands together and says, “OK, let’s get down to this,” and shows you exactly how much you need to work on what you’ve requested. It was a normal Tuesday—I was late, work was busy, some things went according to plan, many did not. But by the end of the day, I was angry and impatient and had made snide comments about people I didn’t think were doing their job well, people who I had been practicing holding in my heart for months.

There are so many ways I protect my heart. Dwelling on others’ shortcomings and wrapping my own identity up in how well I do my job are only two. Worrying that people will like me and having imaginary conversations to convince people to see things my way also come to mind.

I don’t know how this is going to work. I never do at the beginning of Lent. But I still have the sugar packet and thirty-eight days—clearly enough time to complete a lifelong practice. Pray for me.

Don’t Drink the Rat Poison

Rachel Henry1 Comment

As usual, it appears I’m not going to attain enlightenment by the end of Lent this year. I’m giving up resentments and grudges—in other words, practicing the F word, forgiveness—and there just might be a few still hanging around at the end of forty days.

I am really good at resenting people, even people I don’t know. For example, I have a running grudge against all people who weave in and out of traffic, not a mild annoyance, an active dislike. True, their actions are unsafe, but what happens in my brain after they pass me has nothing to do with safety. It sounds more like, “How dare they make me feel as if I’m not going fast enough” or “they should wait their turn.” Meanwhile, they are several cars in front of me, merrily on their way to wherever, and I’m still fuming.

Here are some things I’ve learned from other people about forgiveness:

  • “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” – Anne Lamott
  • Forgiveness is a refusal to judge someone’s soul. – I forget who
  • You have to forgive yourself first. – my mom
  • Forgiveness does not mean that you are saying what the person did is OK. – lots of people, most recently Fr. John Heagle
  • It is not necessary—and sometimes not safe—to add forgetting to forgiving. – Fr. Heagle again
  • Forgiveness is a practice that takes time. – Paula D’Arcy, Fr. Heagle, other people

There are interestingly no how-to instructions on this list. What I’ve learned so far is that first we have to realize we’re the ones mixing and drinking the rat poison. What the other person did has ended—it no longer exists, and I don’t have a time machine in which I can travel back and force him or her to do it differently, though my mind incessantly recreates the situation as if that were possible.

And then we have to ask God/the universe for help. Because it’s hard and we’ve been hurt. But it’s worth asking because then all that energy that’s been tied up in being angry can be used for joy instead.

Running the Universe

Rachel Henry3 Comments

I have an atheist friend who always wants to know what I gave up for Lent. This combination of question and questioner is one of my favorite things in the world.

I don’t enjoy failure, so I don’t choose things like chocolate or sweets. Plus, I don’t really believe in the utility of suffering. Instead I give up an attitude or action.

This year I gave up being worthy, meaning earning God’s love. I think this could translate into non-religious language if you thought about earning being alive. No matter what you do, you can’t make yourself somehow good enough to have deserved coming into being; it’s all gift. I soon realized not being worthy also had to go because it gives me a reason to refuse that gift.

Letting go of worthiness is one step in my ongoing attempt to recognize that perhaps I am not running the universe. It’s risky, though, allowing God to try her hand at this particular task because clearly omniscient and omnipotent have nothing on me.

I confess I haven’t gotten very far. I like being in charge, and it’s easier to maintain the illusion of control if my actions are filling up some imaginary scales that will determine how nice God is to me.

My main practice has been remaining mindful of these few lines in St. Romuald’s Brief Rule for Camaldoli monks, “Remember above all that you are in the presence of God.” The rule goes on to suggest being, “…content with the grace of God,” which takes earning or controlling anything out of the equation. I sometimes translate the first line into, “Remember above all that you are in the presence of infinite love,” which helps me trust God a tiny bit more.

There are two more weeks of Lent, and my odds of achieving enlightenment by Easter are low. I’m not sure I’ve even given up enough control to fill a mustard seed. But occasionally I remember to stop and imagine myself surrounded by God’s presence, and in those moments, the world opens up and out and offers a sense of another way to be.

In case you’ve lost count, God, I think I’m at thirty-seven moments—approximately.