Tag: practice

All That’s Happening

Rachel Henry1 Comment

On Tuesday morning, after a long weekend of mostly solitude—more Netflix-watching solitude than holiness-in-a-cave solitude—I remembered to pray that my day’s work would contribute to the incarnation of God, an idea found in the Camaldoli oblate rule. The prayer reminded me that even while doing my job, I exist not primarily to get things done but rather to manifest God’s presence in the world.

Then on Wednesday I forgot all about it. As a friend said recently, imperfection is a…pain.

But imperfection is part of the deal, part of life, part of the practice. “Enter your practice until all of life is your practice,” Jim Finley says. What exactly are we practicing? Finley again: “Assuming the stance with the least resistance to being overtaken by God.” Because all that’s ever really happening is union with God, though we spend most of our lives not-so-blissfully unaware.

I’m not saying that there’s nothing more important than our relationship with the Divine; I’m saying that there’s nothing else period. Everything belongs to that relationship, as Richard Rohr often says. All the intractable limitations that I mistakenly think define me—they are part of the practice.

I don’t know how to include hatred and violence in this reality of belonging. Including them is not an argument for their continuation, but change doesn’t happen by exclusion; it happens by engagement. Plenty of terrible things we wish didn’t exist do, both internally and externally. How can we welcome actions and situations that are so clearly wrong?

Perhaps it helps to see that the most violent places are the hurting places, to know that, to one extent or another, every human being carries a wound. Physical wounds don’t heal by ignoring them, and neither will spiritual ones. Maybe we can grant our most difficult moments the same grace I attempted to grant my work, the possibility of being the presence of God in the world. Maybe that’s how healing happens. Maybe that’s redemption.

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.

Hard and True

Rachel Henry1 Comment

Jim Finley often counsels “keep[ing] faith with your newly awakened heart.” It sounds abstract, but I experienced it as practical advice this week.

Finley has a few examples of moments that awaken our hearts: “a flock of birds descending, seeing children when they’re really children.” I’m not sure what it was for me this week—the blooming jacaranda trees, a feeling of playfulness that resulted from a spontaneous trip to In ‘n Out—but there was a time when creation felt porous, as if the things we consider insides and outsides are separated by much less than we usually think, by something more akin to a cell wall than a cement one.

Then there comes the time to sit back down at the computer at work or read the news, and it is suddenly very difficult to believe in what a few moments ago was readily apparent. This is where the being faithful comes in.

It might help to admit first that it’s hard to do. It’s hard to remember that the jacaranda trees matter when there are Things to Get Done. It’s hard to believe that existence is evolving toward a greater consciousness of love while watching the news.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. We’re being asked to keep faith not with something abstract and far away but with something we’ve felt deeply. These experiences are every bit as real as those we see on the news. We don’t need to choose one over the other; we only need to trust the reality of our own path through life.

Everything is harder when we first start doing it, from walking to using power tools to trusting our hearts. Practice helps. Community helps. Remembering that we will fail again and again but that it doesn’t really matter because creation is there waiting for us to join in the fun helps, too.

Wave the White Flag

Rachel Henry4 Comments

I love it when my friends tell me exactly what I need to hear and I actually listen. Sometimes I ignore or resist their good advice, but now and then, it goes straight in.

This week a friend and I were talking about how change happens in life. At a time when things were shifting for her, a friend of hers said, “Well, you’ve gone over it mentally every way you can for months. Now all you have to do is give up.” She asked, “How will I know when I’ve given up?” Her friend said, “That’s when it will change.”

Though I’ve spent plenty of time resisting this truth, it’s still true. I also think we’re on God’s time, and we’re unlikely to give up ahead of the universal roll-out schedule. We still need to practice, though, so when the time comes, we’re ready to do it.

The spiritual journey is so odd when considered with the same lens we use to do the grocery shopping or complete tasks at work. We can’t rush it, we’re not in charge, but if we don’t participate, it doesn’t work. Participation mostly means practicing giving up.

I am of course not the first person to say this. Teachers in every wisdom tradition have been saying it for a long time. God’s will, non-action, falling into grace—it’s all the same thing: we’ll only find what we’re searching for when we give up thinking we’ll get there by ourselves. It also helps to realize we don’t even know where there is.

We need to strike out in some direction that we think is right— another strange twist—we just shouldn’t get too attached to the destination we’ve chosen. Julia Cameron describes this in her book The Artist’s Way. She says we go out looking for apples and end up with oranges, only to discover that’s what we wanted all along. But we never would have happened upon the oranges without leaving the house in search of apples.

None of this to say I’m particularly good at giving up. That’s why I write myself reminders like this; that’s why we practice.

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.

Momma Told Me

Rachel Henry5 Comments

I don’t know why we’re designed to go two steps forward and one step back, but I’m convinced we are. Last week: Zen master. This week: whiner.

I exaggerate last week’s accomplishments, but I did have this miraculous moment of getting over myself. One of the software systems at work appears to have been designed to decrease productivity, and I generally spend a lot of time and energy hating it while using it.

This time a moment of spiritual brilliance flashed upon me. If I changed the goal from finishing the task to being present and paying attention, I could stop fighting the inefficient system because its inefficiency would no longer matter. So I changed the goal. My mind cleared up. My patience increased. My work probably improved, though I have no way to measure that.

Fast forward to this week. While working on another not favorite task, I said to myself, you could use this time as practice; where is your attention? I replied, somewhat snappishly, I don’t want to practice, I want to be miserable and complain. I clearly saw myself making that choice, but changing my approach still didn’t interest me. One step back—at least.

I kept this up most of the day and wore myself down sufficiently that, by the time I was chopping kale for dinner, I could consider the option of simply relaxing and accepting my sour disposition. Then this line from William Stafford’s poem “A Message from the Wanderer” came floating in: “Tell everyone just to remember/their names, and remind others, later, when we/ find each other.” Some days that’s all we can do, remember who we are, and that’s OK because that day is not eternal. The next day we’ll be capable of making different choices.

I’ll end with the rest of Stafford’s stanza because he sums it up so beautifully:

“…Tell the little ones
to cry and then go to sleep, curled up
where they can. And if any of us get lost,
if any of us cannot come all the way—
remember: there will come a time when
all we have said and all we have hoped
will be all right.”

Finding Faith

Rachel Henry2 Comments

If you want to really effectively lose your car key, a stellar location to make the attempt is at the beach when the tide is coming in. Which of course is where I lost mine. Approximate odds of finding key in this situation: zero.

But of course I had to look. I’m not sure where that compulsion comes from, but I think it’s built into standard-model humans. I don’t know anyone who would leave the beach without searching.

I went one way and my friend went the other, and I thought, what the heck, I’ll ask St. Anthony (patron saint of finding things) and St. Jude (patron saint of lost causes, yes, seriously) for help.

I didn’t expect to find the key and knew that if it did, it would be due to great good fortune rather than any action on my part. Crediting my own finding skills amidst incoming tides and the shifting nature of sand would require some serious delusion. If my key and I were to be reunited, it had to happen because of something outside of me, but I still had my part to play. I had to walk a few miles, pay attention, and be open to the possibility of the key turning up. In other words, I had to practice faith.

I walked a couple of miles, paid attention, and maintained a steady attitude of non-expectant openness. OK, not really. I walked a half mile, forgot to pay attention, walked a little farther, started creating possible endings in  my head, remembered I was supposed to be non-expectant, got really tired of paying attention after about a mile, and attempted to not to completely give up hope for the second mile.

It felt a lot like meditation, and it felt as if this is what we are called to do. Show up, pay attention, be open to wondrous happenings but not expect particular results.

We didn’t find my keys. The run was not the triumphant, pre-race workout it was supposed to be, but the time at the beach was exactly the practice I needed.