Tag: love

Love Everyone

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Phil Bailey is a lot like Jesus—if Jesus had to have a rum and Coke and half a ham sandwich on white bread every day. I don’t know whether Phil, who has little interest in religion, will appreciate being compared to Jesus, but he’ll surely let me know if he doesn’t.

How can I explain that I thoroughly admire and respect a boss with whom my main mode of communication is an exchange of insults? Perhaps with another question—how many people in high ranking positions are secure enough with who they are to welcome such a relationship?

Phil more than lives up to his responsibilities as dean of the college without considering himself more important than anyone else. While working with him has sharpened my tongue, it has also taught me humility. Phil knows who he is and knows that both is and isn’t a big deal. Jesus knew he was the son of God and he washed the disciples’ feet.

Which brings us to the second way Phil is like Jesus—he is first and foremost a servant. Though in a position of power, he uses every ounce of his privilege on behalf of the powerless. He and his wife, Tina, have invited many students in dire financial need to live with them. He mentioned to the university’s top donors that some students can’t afford to eat, and now we have a meal voucher program and a food bank. Though I don’t know whether I’ll ever have the capacity to emulate what Phil and Tina do, simply knowing someone does it has enlarged my view of what is possible in this world.

Jesus came to show us the divinity of our humanity, our own incarnate nature. Though Phil will undoubtedly find that last sentence too high-falutin’ (he’s from Texas), he, too, delights in his humanity and the humanity of those around him. Whether playing penny ante poker, watching football, or reporting with glee on some particularly stupid comment he heard on the news, he enjoys this world and enters fully into life rather than trying to escape from it.

And finally, Phil loves everyone, without exception and with incomparable generosity, which is really all Jesus ever asked us to do. I would gladly follow both of these men, not—as Phil will be the first to tell you—in blind obedience but rather in hopes of learning to live as they do.

Incarnate Endings

Rachel Henry1 Comment

I dug my first grave this week. There’s simply no way to deny the physicality of life when you’re standing in a three-foot deep hole the purpose of which is to prevent animals from digging up the body of your mom’s dog.

I am not generally good with dead beings, and I was worried about my reaction when taking Brave Soul out of the box and folding back the sheet to see where her head was. To my surprise, she looked peaceful rather than disturbingly dead. She had been sick for a long time, and even her body seemed glad to be at rest. It was the first time I could imagine participating in the ritual of washing a loved one to prepare her for burial.

The day before, I had watched a master taxidermist prepare a condor carcass. At first, I internally shied away, but a friend and I had been discussing the material nature of love. It doesn’t get much more material than a man with a deep respect and affection for birds finding just the right place to poke a sharp metal rod through the skin. This collection of feathers, bones, and skin used to be a condor and is still matter, still existent in its own right, still a manifestation of love, just a different manifestation now.

While we’re alive, our spirit and our body are one. That’s incarnation. In another context, this same friend quoted a Buddhist teacher as saying, “I am a body” as opposed to “I have a body.” A body isn’t something to transcend during life. It is our existence.

There will come a time when we are no longer a body, when we are no longer part of creation in the way we’re familiar with. As we covered Brave Soul’s body with dirt, Mom said, “Take care of her, Mother Earth,” which struck me as a truth. Regardless of our beliefs, the matter of which we are composed will return to Earth’s embrace in one way or another.

I don’t know what happens to our spirits. Cynthia Bourgeault speaks of dying as “leaving the planet.” I thought that maybe Brave Soul paused on her way out, cocking her head at us before she ran off across the field.

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.

Our Direction and Our Destination

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to will myself to be a better person. A new year and a couple of inspirational movies can do this to you, but attempts to improve through sheer willpower always fail rather spectacularly for me.

I fell into this approach partially because I have practiced it for most of my life and partially because I forgot where I’m going and how to get there. In his book The Homing Spirit, John Dunne writes about “living in love as a direction” rather than searching for some experience that will once and for all make everything OK. If love is a direction, then it’s going toward something—we are going toward something.

That something is God. It’s easy to get confused about this, as I have over the last few weeks. It’s easy to think we’re heading toward retirement, a promotion, a new car, a massive failure, or just Friday. But none of these things will satisfy our heart’s longing (or, in the case of the massive failure, destroy life as we know it); none of them will provide a direction.

Only if we’re headed toward God are our direction and destination the same, and perhaps only when we recognize that they are inherently the same can we locate within ourselves that “peace which surpasses all understanding.” Just as the oak tree is inherent in the acorn and the cat in the kitten, so we are already what we are becoming.

When we get stuck in conscious thought or in willfulness, we forget this. As a friend reminded me this week, we cannot live spiritual truths from the outside in. We cannot go in the direction of God—which is always pulling us—by following a set of self-prescribed holiness standards or, as in my case, thinking we must need a longer set of standards since we don’t seem to be living up to the current list.

We can only live in love as a direction by being loving to ourselves and others, by spending time being in love with God and letting God be in love with us. The good news is, this is as easy to do as it is to forget. Every moment of silence, every time we admire the shape of a leaf, smile at someone we don’t know, offer a compliment, or count to ten to avoid yelling at our loved ones—all of these increase our capacity to love, all of them point us in the right direction and make us more who we are.

How My Cat Taught Me about Death and Christmas

Rachel Henry1 Comment

One possible Advent practice is to take your cat to the vet to get six teeth extracted and then wait two and a half days for said cat to eat and drink again. After trying this myself, I recommend shopping instead.

During the cat not eating period, I decided to worry despite some pretty wise people—like, for example, the Son of God—advising against it. Occasionally I paused and told myself to relax; Tux, my cat, was not dying, and if he were, that would be OK.

I realize this whole “death is OK” thing is a bit of a jump, but I’d just come back from a retreat at which Jim Finley told this story:

Say you’re on a cruise ship and you fall overboard. You yell for help, but no one hears you and the ship sails away. There you are all alone in the water, and you realize that if you try to swim, you won’t last long. But if you float, you can last a lot longer (for those of you realists, it’s tropical water and you’re not wearing cotton), but you can only float if you relax. So you lie there relaxing really hard. After a while, you come to an internal place where, though you will continue to do your best to float, you know you’re probably going to die and you don’t have a problem with that anymore. Then the ship comes back and rescues you and you’re incredibly grateful, but you know you’ll never be the same again.

In his poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” Dylan Thomas writes, “Though lovers be lost love shall not.” Perhaps that’s what we would realize if we were floating in the ocean, that we have a “deathless nature” within us, as Finley would put it, that the essence of us, the lovers, is a love without beginning or end.

In reality, we’re all already in that ocean. At the retreat, there was a woman in her seventies who radiated joy all weekend. When I thanked her for it, she said she was so grateful to have someone talk about dying because her friends and acquaintances never did.

It seems a bit out of season, perhaps, to write about death when we are preparing to celebrate a birth. But this particular birth happened to show us our “invincible preciousness,” as Finley says, the eternal at the center of and woven through this passing creation. We are all part of the love that will never be lost. May an awareness of that love be born in our hearts this Christmas.

Note: The blog and I will be on vacation for the next two weeks. Wishing everyone peace and joy during whichever holidays you celebrate.

God Loves You, Really

Rachel Henry6 Comments

God always loves us just the way we are, and I often say, “No thanks.”

If you’re like me, when you read “just the way we are,” you hear “the way we ought to be.” God will love me when I maintain a peaceful mind, keep all my plants alive, and eat more vegetables. The thing is, God would rather not wait until we’re perfect because though God is infinite, we are not, and I may never become an expert plant tender.

This whole perfection thing, Cynthia Bourgeault says, has been misunderstood. We’re not aiming for perfection. We’re aiming for wholeness.

And wholeness includes those parts of ourselves we don’t much like, the parts we haven’t loved enough, to paraphrase David Whyte. The problem with not loving ourselves is that then we use our faults as a barrier between us and God. We point to them and say, no, I’m broken, I can’t let love in. God is ready to go outside and play, and we say, look at all the work I have to do first.

The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing from the trenches of WWI, said that so few of the soldiers were willing to give their suffering to God. I used to think that because God wants our suffering, God wants us to suffer, but now I think it’s quite the opposite.

Jim Finley says that when you touch pain with love, it disappears. God wants to transform our suffering into love.

It often seems impossible to us that our failings can not only be lovable but also be and become love. It’s impossible for us to work this transformation ourselves, but God can handle it. Really.

So how do we offer our suffering to God, what does that mean? We can’t just wrap it up in a neat little gift box, stick a bow on it, and shyly hand it to God next time we run into each other. Or maybe we can. All that’s needed is a willingness to let love be more important than anything else, a lot of patience, and some attention to the ways God is pointing us toward the “dump your suffering here” drop off station.

Still, this may be a little harder than watering the plants.

God’s Will: Greater Unity, Greater Love

Rachel Henry5 Comments

While trying to process the U.S. presidential election results, I picked up a book of Hafiz poems. I closed my eyes, asked for what I needed to know, and opened at a random page.

Here’s what I got. If you’re like me, you’ll love the beginning and want to throw this blog across the room somewhere in the middle. Just keep reading.

There Could Be Holy Fallout

We are often in battle.
So often defending every side of the fort,
It may seem, all alone.

Sit down, my dear,
Take a few deep breaths,
Think about a loyal friend.
Where is your music,
Your pet, a brush?

Surely one who has lasted as long as you
Knows some avenue or place inside
That can give a sweet respite.

If you cannot slay your panic,
Then say within
As convincingly as you can,
“It is all God’s will!”

Now pick up your life again.
Let whatever is out there
Come charging in,

Laugh and spit into the air,
There could be holy fallout.

Throw those ladders like tiny match sticks
With “just” phantoms upon them
Who might be trying to scale your heart.

Your love has an eloquent tone.
The sky and I want to hear it!

If you still feel helpless
Give our battle cry again

Hafiz
Has shouted it a myriad times,

“It is all,
It is all the Beloved’s will!”

What is that luminous rain I see
All around you in the future

Sweeping in from the east plain?

It looks like, O it looks like
Holy fallout

Filling your mouth and palms
With Joy!

Let’s talk about God’s will for a minute because that was the part that made me think, you have got to be kidding, except in slightly stronger language. I tend to think about God’s will in human dimensions, which in election terms would translate to God picked a certain candidate to win. Given that political systems rarely if ever reflect the kind of justice that wisdom traditions describe—regardless of which group is in power—I think it’s safe to say this can’t possibly be what God’s will means.

This poem still speaks to us almost 700 years after it was written because God’s will is always the same. It is self-emptying love, as Richard Rohr would say, the manifestation of love in space and time. We are manifestations of that love, all of us—the people we agree and disagree with, the ones who love us and who hate us, the animals, insects, plants, planets, black holes, etc. “It is all the Beloved’s will!”

Hafiz isn’t recommending submission to situations that injure our hearts and souls. He is urging us to get a wider perspective, to remember that we are all in this together and that there is something larger than human choices and actions moving in and through creation. We can pick any issue we want to divide ourselves over, but in the end it won’t work.

God wills ever greater unity, ever greater love. That’s what we, collectively, are growing toward. We don’t have any choice. That’s what God does, and all of us are manifestations of God.

If we can get clear on this—individually and together—Hafiz tells us, and I agree, that our destination is joy. Bring on the holy fallout.

There’s No Escape

Rachel Henry1 Comment

A friend and I were talking about our limitations the other day, our differing resistances to God. While we both want to surrender to the spiritual stream like a leaf floating on the surface of the water, content to go where the current takes it, we see ourselves as fighting upstream or trying to stay rooted in the mud.

I think we missed the point, though. We’re not the leaf—we’re part of the flow. All of us are the current and the water molecules. We were seeking to surrender to something external when all that’s needed is to recognize our true nature. As Richard Rohr says, you are what you seek.

This is somehow, incomprehensibly true even when we are in full resistance mode. And I do mean incomprehensibly. How can we be the flow that is God on the days when we’re mean or self-centered or just plain crabby?

I don’t know, but it must be true: in God we live and move and have our being. That statement contains no qualifiers. Not “sometimes,” not “when we’re fully present,” not “when I’ve been so good I’m sure my third eye is going to open any minute.”

To claim that we’re not that flow is like saying, today, I choose not to be a carbon-based life form. Not gonna happen. Today, I choose to be separate from God. Sorry, not up to you.

Does this mean it doesn’t matter when we’re impatient or unkind? I ask questions like this a lot, but they’re kind of stupid. The people on the receiving end of our misery-making—including ourselves—can answer that question. Of course it matters. It’s just that there’s room in God for all of it, and when we see that none of our faults can change that, we’re more likely to say, with the Sufi poet Hafiz,

I do not want to touch any object in this world
Without my eyes testifying to the truth
That everything is
My Beloved.

Or perhaps when we get even more daring:

All I know is Love,
And I find my heart Infinite
And Everywhere!

Poems “Today” and an excerpt in the introduction from The Gift by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky.

Nothing Less than Love

Rachel Henry1 Comment

This week I learned something from the source of all ancient wisdom: Facebook. Well OK, from a quote from the Tao Te Ching that my mom posted. The part that jumped out at me said,

Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

That’s a gigantic claim. Using definitions from dictionary.com, it means, approximately, “Having deep sympathy for yourself and a strong desire to alleviate your own suffering, you can bring all beings in the world into harmony.”

How does that work? I stop getting down on myself for not doing the dishes and suddenly there’s a ceasefire in Syria? Sounds preposterous.

A couple of days later, I saw this quote from Jim Finley that I’d written on an envelope: “refusal to let anything less than love define who you are.” Ah-ha, instructions on how to be compassionate toward yourself.

We generally define ourselves by our internal judgments — by what we think we have and haven’t done well — or by others’ opinions of us, both of which are much, much less than love and will never lead to reconciliation. They’re designed to do just the opposite, to keep us off balance so that we’ll continue to lean on them for support. The problem is, they can’t bear our weight.

Love, on the other hand, is freeing and freely given. It doesn’t reserve itself until we’ve reached some self-defined and non-existent perfection. It is always and only present, always giving itself away as our lives, as Finley would say. When we let Love define us, when we admit that love is what we are, we can see it accompanying us through our suffering, we can have compassion.

But there’s still that bit about reconciling all beings. Looking with the eyes of love, we can see that preposterous things happen every day: a woman gives half of her last tortilla to a child traveling alone to escape violence, an alcoholic stops drinking, the Berlin Wall comes down. This whole compassion thing might be worth a try.

 

Spiritual Vegetables

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Sometimes we would rather not do what is good for us—like eat our broccoli. I like broccoli, but the homemade hot fudge sauce I drowned my ice cream in last night was fantastic. I don’t recall ever applying the word “fantastic” to broccoli.

Here’s the thing, though: when I finally fix a spinach salad after a few days without vegetables, my body is so happy. It’s a little bit like that with living in and from a place of love.

There are days—a lot of days—when I wish that our achievement-oriented consumer culture told the truth, when I want to feel complete from finishing a project at work or finding the perfect dining table. There’s nothing wrong with either of these pursuits. Both of them deserve to be enjoyed, but that satisfaction is not going to last. Something will always come next.

Almost every day I reach a point where I think that staying present, reminding myself to approach everyone with love, and letting God lead are impossible and aren’t, after all, going to change the world. But you know what? They are.

We won’t be able to see it directly or prove it or explain it or predict it. That’s hard because we all want to be right. Maybe people can tell the difference between someone who is irrational and someone who is following a deep but invisible knowing, but maybe they can’t. Recognition is not the point.

Jesus asks the apostles whether they’re going to leave him, and Peter says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” This isn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy answer. Saying, “We’re stuck with you because you’ve got the best game in town” is not the same as saying, “We’ll never leave you because we love you and we think you’re great.”

But Peter got it right for once. We are told to love God and neighbor because only that will satisfy the yearning of our hearts, only that will allow us to see how we are already one, how our world—our universe—is already whole.