Friendship, Wounds, and More...Open the Door

[With deep appreciation to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, my teacher.]

Do you have friends who have betrayed you? Or angered you? Misled you or done something that pained you deeply? Perhaps I should have prefaced that with “If you are a person of faith, one of a deeply rooted historical tradition, do you have friends who have wounded you in some fashion?” I invite you to reflect on it a little. Really think of those who are closest to you, those you consider friends. Strangely, the answer I wish for you is “Yes, I do. Yes, those closest in my life have wounded me in some fashion.” Some masochistic notion here? Not at all. The wounding is not the point, nor do I wish such things on any sentient being. Painful. Destructive of trust and faith. At least at first, if one is fortunate. The point here, of awareness and of interest, is observing the relationship beyond the wound, the potential transformation that comes in multiple lives because of the wound.

Christian theological education these last decades has attempted to maximize on a notion of “the wounded healer.” Henri Nouwen is the name usually associated with it, as he wrote a short book with that title. I like Henri Nouwen. Respect his path of discipleship, the costs with which he walked his tradition. The notion of “wounded healers” has done great damage to our understanding of religious leadership, however. I hate the notion of “wounded healers.” The phrase draws our focus to the wound, for one thing. Churches are full today of those who are wounded but refuse the work of right medicine and healing that produce scars and strength. I was startled recently into an awareness that as a church leader, I'm simply not accustomed to being around strong people, those who are confident in their being and steward their own growth, healing. The phrase also places "healing" as a thing leaders do for others, not what life-giving relationship creates for us all. We focus on the wound or the healer, in other words, not the transformation or the relationship that survives the wound to teach us all something deeper.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of wounds at some length in some of her spoken work, Theatre of the Imagination, concluding with a chant of invitation to holy life, to transformative encounter with God. The etymological roots of “wound” connect with a “wonder,” a great “wonder” of the world, of an age, of life. She mentions the Pyramids. The Seven Wonders of the World. A wound in this sense speaks of a separation, a place where light comes in anew. Perhaps with great pain. Perhaps unintentionally. But a new opening, hole, door where light had not shone before. There’s nothing special about the wound itself, only the light that comes into it.

Wounds, she notes, also require cleansing. If one is to heal what has torn open, it must be cleansed with the right medicine. Also painful. But then healing. Then a scar. And scar tissue is many times stronger than skin that has never been wounded. One of the lines in her closing chant, “Abre la Puerta,” “Open the Door,” says it well: “All strong souls must first go to hell before they do the healing work they came here for.” Wounds healed with the right medicine make souls strong. They create the souls able to do healing work in the world. But then she moves to the point, to the path beyond any wound or any healing.

All this, any felt wounding, is a door. It is an opening to awaken to all that is holy, to all that connects us, to interdependence known in one’s bones. I think this is the most difficult and most liberating way to being fully human, to allow suffering or whatever wound we have sustained in our most vulnerable places to be a door to sacred consciousness, to awakening, to awareness. To see a Life that connects us in ways we could never have known except for knowing separation, cleansing, union. Nope, we lament the wound. We look for someone, a healer, to ease the pain. We forget we have been given resources of life-giving relationship with others that releases, unlocks, for our own healing, our own awakening.

Why? I have no idea. Perhaps it’s not like that in your experience, and perhaps even the notions here will be misunderstood and bastardized into something ugly. Most folks I know who parlay in religious life today bump up against different-others and sense a wounding, feel a pain of separation or difference. Then they leave the church, choosing instead to go to one that is more comfortable, that doesn't hurt them. Until it happens again. One couple in a small town I know was vehemently against the notion of the two mainline churches merging into one, for the good of both. I do not know for sure, but I do suspect a major reason was because they bounced back and forth between the two distinct churches, whenever they had an argument or disagreement with the pastor of one of them. If the churches merged, how would they escape discomfort? But then what they miss! Without the discomfort, without the wounding, there's no way to truly know the love that's stronger and deeper than all that. Loving deeply means walking through suffering...as a door.

This is not to say discomfort or suffering is good, again, it's just unavoidable. (Thanks to the Buddhists again). Those who live in relationship with others who have wounded them in some fashion, who have found a life-giving way to sustain connection with them, know and manifest a Life that’s deeper than the wound, deeper than the inhuman ways we can be with one another. Those who remain friends with others who have pained them in some way know a freedom and acceptance in a living relationship with a force of its own. When someone makes a mistake, does something he will regret later, he knows that both are yet committed to a shared Life bigger than either of them.

So I’m beginning to look for truly religious folks, by which I mean all those who have been wounded and have remained in a relationship of life-giving power and contribution with those who have wounded them. Religion is not usually defined in this way, true. And there are so many of us who remain in relationships that wound, not manifesting anything life-giving at all but out of fear of loss, grief, and more. But deeply rooted religious practitioners know this truth about life-giving relationship and contribution to the world around them.

Truly religious people know what some call the first noble truth of suffering. They know they will encounter woundedness in themselves and in others…and they gently smile in its face. They are the ones who practice bringing light to the wounds, placing the right medicine at the right times, living through wounds as doors to sacred consciousness, awakening. They stand strong against despair and hopelessness that can seep into wounds or rage in fevers. These wise ones guide our paths to practice living a path of interconnection with all that is larger and livelier than any specific wounding could ever be.If you are one of the lucky ones, you have friends who have wounded you in some way. Or perhaps better to say, those who have wounded you have become friends. I wonder if that's what Jesus meant when he said, "Love your enemies..." Wounds, cleansed and healed rightly, with just the right medicine and internal sustenance, temper love deeper than knowledge or desire. Wounds can grow us into lovers of God, friends of God, divine lovers of all.

Nothing more difficult. Hard work. But good work, if you can get it.

The Feat (Gift) of Loneliness

Loneliness seems to creep in on little cat feet, not unlike Sandburg’s fog. Do you know when you’re lonely? I mean really know? Last weekend, while my beloved was away at work, I found myself restless. Unmoored, somehow. Aimless. There is very little more disorienting for high-functioning achievers than restlessness, unmoored-ness, aimlessness. My ego did its ususal machinations for relief-while-in-control: talk with friends or family about other things, read up on Buddhist meditation (without practice, mind you), rotate through my contacts lists to see if one jumped out as someone to contact. That’s the title of the list, right? Time passed and then it was time to be at my evening commitment—a women’s circle. Upon my return, all restlessness, unmoored-ness, aimlessness had completely vanished,  receded. It dawned on me belatedly that I had been lonely.

I find this to be a strange state of affairs, for several reasons. It’s most essentially odd because I am blessed with family and friends, colleagues and good work to do. I have spent more time away from home this past summer than I ever have before, and one of the fruits of awareness has been how very rich and interconnected my life of work and practice is right where I live. I thrive at peripheries of communities, which means life comes to me from multiple directions and worldviews, through markedly different people who are willing to share a bit of their time and gifts with me. Some relationships root deeply, having been tempered by conflicts sustained and resolved across difference, betrayal, misunderstanding. Others are as deep-reflective or deep-playful (or not) as we want them to be, dependent upon temperament, inclination, desire.  How is it possible to feel loneliness in such a web of care and concern, mutual passion and diverse enjoyment?

I also find this strange because I couldn’t see it, name it, … admit it? There seems to be some shame or guilt or something attached to the phenomenon of loneliness that encourages us to ignore seeing it, realizing it. That’s fascinating, I think. Why does loneliness bring a sense of shame or embarrassment with it? In most of our cases, I would imagine, loneliness does not signal an inability to relate but simply a felt-emptiness of relationship for a time. It’s not like we haven’t learned how to connect or to contribute, but more like we yearn for more connection or contribution at the same time there is an apathy or resistance to it. I didn’t like the aimlessness of it all, but I also didn’t feel like doing anything about it. I yearned but resisted…what? I’m not sure. For whatever reason, I could not articulate that I was lonely. It was too quiet and I felt isolated. Surrounded by people, in one sense, but absent within as well.

Two ‘take-aways’ for me from this experience I hope will continue to teach me. One, I seem to have particular behaviors that signal this restlessness but which rarely feed it with any rest. Persistent e-mail checking. Facebook lurking. Compulsive tidying around the house. If I cannot articulate or sense when I’m feeling this disconnection or loneliness, perhaps I can track its agency in my habitual behaviors or patterns of thought expressed these ways. If I become aware I’m doing one of those things, I hope to listen for whether I’m yearning-resisting something (and yes, I’ve wondered whether it means Someone…) in particular.

Second, I’m beginning to listen for this loneliness and embarrassment about it in the lives of pastoral colleagues. I’ve begun to wonder whether religious leaders are ultimately some of the loneliest among us, seeking solace within theological education because that’s where it seems logical to find such solace—God, church, vocational direction and purpose. Ultimately, meaning, significance.  It’s no secret that pastors are some of the most potentially lonely, because their role sets them apart from the community for particular purposes, service. Ordination is about this setting apart. But what if our ‘best and brightest’ in faith community life are being drawn into environments where they seek intimacy and solace in community but find only obligation and duty? Will they recognize their own loneliness, meeting it in healthy ways outside of their work? Or will they substitute the full-bodied, high-Spirited intimacy that can be found within and outside of the institutional church with the slight connections to significance in religious duties? How do we serve out of abundance, not need, if we cannot even recognize when we’re lonely?

Loneliness does seem to have little cat feet after all, signifying a certain fog. Sandburg was right in his imagery, even if he couldn’t have intended this use of it. Little acts of mindfulness may offer a bit of the yellow fog-lighting necessary to make our way in its midst. It seems not to be a shame or an embarrassment, then, as much as an opportunity to experience seeing as surprise, knowing one’s own need(s) and being patient in the discomfort of self-insufficiency. In that, there’s a beauty. Walking in the fog simply requires a willingness to wear the proper attire (finitude, humility) and to welcome the cleansing mists (need, emptiness). Perhaps loneliness comes to those who have been given glimpses of intimacy in order to remind us all how sustaining it is, in presence and in felt-absence...both.

Hunger's Many Tongues

Hunger speaks in many tongues. I say this a bit “in-cheek” because my own experience of it seems to be changing, different than it was, as I pursue the body-literacy path with perspective from the core. I’ve also encountered the work of Jan Chozen Bays, Zen practitioner-teacher and author of Mindful Eating (Shambala, 2009), who has charted a helpful schema by which to imagine hunger’s various expressions, languages, tongues. My mind likes nothing if not a helpful schema.

Chozen Bays identifies seven different kinds of hungers (Chapter Two), the most basic kind of hunger being physiologic, a request of our body for food, for warmth and survival. Other kinds of hungers, as human beings who have multiple and complex impulses of mind and body, include eye hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, cellular hunger, mind hunger, and heart hunger. She also adds a kind of hunger that is actually thirst. Her supposition here is that ability to discern the kind(s) of hunger at play in any given moment creates a mindful pathway whereby we may thoroughly enjoy eating.

Too many of us thoroughly enjoy eating, you might argue. Too many and too much! Well, yes and no. Most Americans I know have a quite conflicted relationship with food. For instance, the foodie culture I love, in which I thrive. Many of us within these circles do live a life of delight focused upon food—its origin, freshness, exquisite taste combinations, artistry and more—but many of us are also more driven by it, to odd ends, than perhaps seems rational to others. We may visit four different grocery stores, taking well over 3-4 hours, in order to get just the quality of ingredients we desire.  While that may be entertaining, it also suggests a drive that is about more than just the food. Food is the focus, but its extraneous qualities of artistry and perfection in culture and taste organize this relationship to food.

Others, you may say, enjoy food too much—too much of it, too often. How often do we pull away from a restaurant table, with bodies in great discomfort because we’ve eaten what corporate restaurants have decided is one portion of food? A portion that would probably serve between 2-3 people, if not more in less-developed areas of the world? Is that enjoyment, or a mindless attention to other things while food is going into the body? What is enjoyable about such body-discomfort, in the end?

Chozen Bays observes the play-hard, eat a little, play hard habits of healthy young children. “Eating is secondary to the business of being a child,” she writes. And then she continues, “As these intuitive eaters grow older, eating is no longer a fueling stop. Food begins to serve many purposes. It is used to sooth, to distract, to procrastinate, to numb, to entertain, to seduce, to reward, and even to punish. The once straightforward relationship between hunger, eating, and satisfaction of our childhood becomes tangled up in all sorts of thoughts and emotions.” (p. 16). Speaking as a woman of classical (if not contemporary) beauty, I see the unwilling captivity of women in their/our mind-chatter about food all the time. Those who are so thin that food—or the willed lack of it—is a counter-intuitive way of being in control, sometimes to the point of dying (in extreme anorexia or bulima, for instance). Or those who eat what our culture force-feeds them, hiding themselves in layers of fat or clothes that are too large for their forms. That’s actually my strategy of choice. I will consistently wear clothes at least one size too large. Great way to avoid excess attention from men or women focused upon contemporary images of physical beauty and the cathected ways of forcing food/eating habits into conformity with this imagined ‘end.’

So how does one establish a healthy relationship with food, a mindful pathway whereby we may thoroughly enjoy eating, without attachment, drive, mental-captivity? Chozen Bays’s way is to discern which kind of hunger may be in play in each situation where food enters into awareness or choice. I do like the Zen wisdom with which she begins. “The Zen teachings encourage us not to worry about who started all this anxiety or guilt, or who is to blame for our unwholesome habit patterns around food. … The question we are interested in is, can we change it? If so, who can change it?” (p. 17). She says, “Yes,” to the first, and “Only you. You, just as you are,” to the second. Though I’ve not immersed myself in the book cited here, I have already found its mindful way of listening for kinds of hunger inordinately useful. I’m not nearly as straightforward about hunger as I used to think!

I’ve learned that there are ways to feed hungers that don’t involve eating at all. The longer I’ve engaged a diversity of body-practices—whether it be yoga in the morning, sitting practice at my (ir)regular intervals, gym-workouts, personal training, or more—the more satiated and whole my life has seemed to be. There are hungers in my way of being in the world, in other words, that I have traditionally understood as body/stomach hunger when in reality they were desires for visual stimulus, movement, deeper breathing or extended awareness, deeper connection. Because I’m a foodie, it was natural to look to food to satisfy any restlessness that emerged in my life. Because I’m an intensely verbal, mind-driven person, it was also natural to try to get out of my mind-chatter by means of food artistry, social engagements around food with friends.

I am also learning that I have been lonely in different parts of my body, a loneliness that food numbed but could never satisfy. My core, for instance. The more consistently I devote my way of seeing the world in a mindful path that moves through the core into the world, the less self-loathing I experience at my mid-section. The less disconnected I feel from my life, my family/friends, my world. The less hungry I am for substitutionary attachments, those things I attempt to grasp to cover over the needs or vulnerabilities I feel.

Ultimately, I’m beginning to experience hunger not as a fearful deprivation, that shaky-hungry sensation of not having enough and needing more immediately, but as a gentle signal that some new connection might be offered out in the world into my life. There’s a patient curiosity that seems to arise now as I feel a lack or emptiness that my mind begins to open to, listen for...to learn its name or ‘kind,’ its guidance or direction. Am I looking for beauty, artistry, attuned to eye hunger? When I smell freshly baked bread, am I really hungry for bread or do I just miss my family, like my father, who baked bread weekly when I was growing up? Am I seeking comfort or food? Stomach hunger is the one that drives me the most, so closely located and associated with pangs of anxiety and emptiness or loneliness I may feel in my core. As I have relied upon my mind for so very long, to navigate these hungers and needs for connection, mind hunger, allied with heart hunger, are close seconds with stomach hunger. Will this food assuage my fear, my anxiety, my intellectual prowess? I've even gone without food when I was hungry in order to enact my mind's strange sense of intellectual devotion. Sacrificing body food for mental focus somehow has been an act of prayer. Chozen-Bays calls this combination heart hunger, a signal of need for deeper connection in relationship somehow.

Regardless of name/kind, each of these 'hungers' now has a voice, a tongue, by which I may hear a new word, see a new image, sense a new way to be in the world. Each is a gentle signal, amidst my remaining (and probably constant) tasks of navigating food, society, and body demands and invitations. Hunger, of its multiple kinds, has become a welcome teacher. In this way, I still know loneliness, emptiness (not of the Buddhist kind), need, but there’s a spaciousness or breath about it, giving it a soft landing in my mind, my awareness.

I was sitting at breakfast yesterday morning, with my beloved. It was important for us to return to one of our favorite hang-outs for an early Shabbat-esque meal of bacon, eggs, and pancakes. This place does make the best pancakes I’ve ever tasted. I enjoyed ordering the weekly special. The scrambled eggs were just perfect. The bacon was heavenly. The one pancake with butter and syrup took on its Platonic ideal-form in my mouth and nose, with whiff of vanilla. And then enough became enough, at just the right moment. My body smiled, literally smiled, from the core of my ‘me.’

Eating, enjoyed thoroughly.

Mid-Section Blues Becomes a Willing Unknowing: Bodywork Literacy 101

My "mid-section blues" are growing into new form, perhaps best described as “bodywork literacy 101." Few but highly-verbal academics care about such semantic differences, but the more I examined the “blues” in voices I’ve valued, and the more I’ve received gifts from “living life from perspective of a liberated core,” the less appropriate the term “blues” has become. I’ll weave a bit of textual-resourcing here alongside some new narrative, all toward a more refined, ‘spoken’ intention within which to engage the practice(s) and listening-learning to come.

“The blues” as defined by James H. Cone, systematic theology professor at Union Seminary in NYC, is as good a place to start as any. (The Spirituals and the Blues, Orbis Books, 1972, 1991, 2004; what follows is paraphrased and cited from Chapter Six, 97-128). Written in 1972, this now-classic work of Cone argues against any white co-optation of the term “blues” for any of their/our experience. Cone, in other words, would bristle at even a metaphorical use of the term to wrestle with my embodied experience, because I am white. Fair enough. My socio-cultural location and history do mean I have absolutely no entrance into the experience of black people, except that which they welcome me into, translating every step of the way in what might be called ‘compassionate companionship.’ But metaphorical use relies precisely on that dichotomy, that “not-ness” brought up against “is-ness.”  Metaphor allows indirect teaching, learning, sharing, which is open to all who will open to it.

Within the “not-ness” so assumed, then, “the blues” name an existential focus/intent for this foray into embodied learning, awareness that I have described as “Mid-Section Blues.” Cone defines the “blues” as “secular spirituals” arising from a “state of mind in relation to the Truth of the black experience.” They are true because they “combine art and life, poetry and experience, the symbolic and the real. They are an artistic response to the chaos of life.” Their origin and definition “cannot be understood independent of the suffering that black people endured in the context of white racism and hate.” The blues offer black people a way to transcend trouble without ignoring it, nor being destroyed by it. They also give voice to “existence” as a “form of celebration. It is joy, love, and sex. It is hugging, kissing, and feeling. People cannot love physically and spiritually (the two cannot be separated!) until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.” The “blues” signal an unwillingness and inability “to follow white Christianity’s rejection of the body.” Ultimately, the “blues” express a belief that “one day things will not be like what they are today.”

“Mid-Section Blues” musings have arisen out of my state of mind in relation to the truth of my own embodied experience. Whatever truths may arrive come from art and life, poetry and experience, the symbolic and the real. Surprisingly, to me at least, this beginning writing-exploration speaks most powerfully with recognition of its deeply rooted self-loathing and decades of learned-imposed-imputed (self-)hatred in women’s embodiment, my own body. Nothing like systemic racism or white hatred of blackness, as per Cone, but vivid, costly, debilitating for me and those like me, who wrestle with physical form mired in shame, guilt, fear and more. I’m finding that these bodywork practices, these intermittent reflections along the way, seem to be paving a way to transcend trouble without ignoring it, without remaining captive to it. I’m finding unexpected moments of existence, from the core, as celebration, as an overflow of devotion/awareness from the wedded physical-spiritual life up against the self-loathing, the edge of existence known in hurts, pains, here in this place. The gift here for me is new ways to signal an unwillingness, an inability, to accept or follow any longer “white Christianity’s rejection of the body.” This line of learning, then, expresses my growing belief that one day, things will not be like what they are today.

I am already finding this to be true, in unexpected ways. For instance, I discovered while singing for a faith community recently that although I’ve not sung or practiced regularly for months, my vocal tone and range have cleared, extended. Huh? Specific attention to bodywork via brief yoga routine and continued training appears the only candidate for cause there. Singing flows out of the breath, aligned in body and posture. Yoga and training channel breath alongside energy currents within physical forms, posture.  Or another truth-awareness: simply taking an evening walk which can become boon for new awareness, gifted sentience of interdependence (see Eve’s Sermon).

But the significance is not the physical-biological cause-effect learning, that bodywork can renew or strengthen a singing voice, can open one’s heart to new sentience. I find those pleasurable, but not the rub of what impressed me, my body. The significant awareness for me today is that this fruit of sustained practice—expanded capacity in song, extended sentience—is/was completely unrelated to my state of mind and reasons for engaging the sustained practice. It’s like the mind functions for direct-sight dependent upon intention. Bodywork, “body-language,” in contrast, invites a peripheral life fundamentally necessary for, sustaining all seeing, only a portion of which we move to focus.

The bodywork path seems to be not solely to redress body-issues or self-loathing that remains rooted in my core, albeit in weakened form. Clearly that is one of the intentions, hopes, for this path of practice. But a more urgent of the emerging invitations appears to be an indirect pedagogy and surrender to a life-practice without clear awareness for the gains to be had, the ‘products’ to be ‘purchased’ in such activity. How often do we engage in a practice or activity or service for which we cannot precisely define its aim, its arguable end-point? How regularly do we submit to a commandment from ‘outside ourselves,’ minus some rationale for its completion? So it seems my path is to commit openness and resources, time and energies, to lively bodywork practices without knowing the end or outcome aimed. If the fruits so far are any clue, my intended aim/end will be ‘wrong' anyway, or at least inaccurate.

What will my life become, living into this primary commitment to embodied practices sustained with concrete resources, time-spent, openness to bodywork companions? What is it like to choose to unknown, from moment to moment, in order to learn the language of the body which is not literate or even a language. Perhaps its song instead?

Eve's Sermon: Suddenly...My Body

Eve Ensler gave a sermon recently, for us and the world, through her body. Unexpected, to say the least, to have the word "sermon" paired up with “Eve Ensler,” the tenacious poet-artist responsible for The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, a now global network working adamantly to end violence against women. But Ensler spoke with the refrain-rhythms of the best of Baptist preachers. You can listen to it here, if you’d like, about 13 minutes long.

It wasn’t a sermon in the disciplinary or religious sense, unless religious here refers to that which convicts, informs, enlightens, and demands something of you. The best religious sermons do all that. But rare is the male or homiletical-professor-preacher who will hear a sermon in what Ensler says so eloquently, with her "too-muchness" of wise passion we so need today. I heard: Our bodies are our intimate link with everything around us, within us, beyond us. Our bodies can awaken us to the interdependence of everything. They can awaken within us a strength beyond imagining, even if that strength comes at times of greatest physical weakness, even near death.

All this was serendipitous for me this past week, which often urges me to pay attention, to listen. I had spoken with a bodywise woman a couple days ago. We were lamenting together the abilities—sometimes the need—of women to dissociate from their bodies, to live a life of the mind with little reference to or awareness of the body. Many have much greater cause for this mind-body split than I—those facing rape, molestation, negotiating cultural demands for emaciated ‘beauty’ and more.  Nonetheless, I too had had a need to dissociate body from mind, my biological-fact from awareness. 

Earlier than anyone was prepared, awareness arrived in my young body of heightened emotional-intensities and sensate knowledge way “too much” for my family culture or school-town environments. This “too-muchness” was corralled in various socializing and religious fashion, hemmed into the darkest spots of shame and embarrassment available to a creative, young girl such as myself. During my junior year of high school, I was finally strong enough to vow suppression of it all forever. Live as if my body did not exist, except in moments of shaming weakness. I even ritualized the vow with words and action, just like any feminist would have shown me, had I known one “out of the closet.” (I realize I knew several—strong women who implicitly shaped my strength to respond to my needs like this—but none would ever name themselves in such fashion.)

Growing up in small-town life is reason enough for any girl to dissociate from her body, though my own home-life exceeded idyllic. I had all I needed, and more, except that which girlhood requires for healthy expression, acceptance, life. Communities under a (couple) twenty thousand population need all the skill-resourcing and shared labor they can muster. Families choose more often to live in closer proximity and things like women’s-equality or feminism have little entrance in places in which I grew up. Town sociability is strong, of course, but most women make their peace early with the inequalities, the sexual innuendoes, the body-slights from the old-boys. Sociable comfort requires swallowing a lot that seems unnecessary—was unnecessary—to most women of the town. So for nearly thirty years, or at least the twelve years of early womanhood from adolescence into age thirty, I lived solely in my head. I achieved in intellectual pursuits, through a terminal degree and a tenured professorship. And I love what I do, the way in which it provides both resources and spaciousness for me to explore life at large. But suddenly, I have a body…or better, it has me.

This is where Ensler got to me. Ensler’s sermon begins there. She became aware that when she was growing up, even through her mid-40’s, she “had no reference point for her body” at all. “For a long time,” her sermon begins, “there was me and my body.” … “Me was a floating head. For years I actually only wore hats. It was a way of keeping my head attached. It was a way of locating myself. If I took my hat off, I wouldn’t be here anymore.” What an apt description! Speaking now as a Protestant, as a Presbyterian Christian who loves her tradition, I can say with a sad smile we live as floating heads. Presbyterian heads in the South also wear hats to church. I’ll never see them going to church without Ensler’s words in my head. My head.

Then Ensler became aware of her body, before and after her creation/performances of The Vagina Monologues. Her body became a thing, an object, something to be conquered, “like the earth itself,” she observes. She now had a new commodity to use for entertainment, for work, for others. She notes that she did learn to take care of it—becoming vegetarian, staying sober, not smoking—but this was not unlike an abusive parent showing moments of kindness. “My father was kind to me on my 16^th birthday, for example,” she says. The man who beat and molested her for most of her young life had a kind moment, from time to time.

Then the cancer arrived. “Or I found out I had cancer”…“It was like a speeding bird, smashing into a windowpane. Suddenly, I had a body.” It was one to be poked with needles, burned from the inside-out with chemicals, weakened and threatened in its very life. But here’s the climax, so to speak. Here’s the turning point in her proclamation. “Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection,” she confides. “I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was happening in the world, and it wasn’t happening later. It was happening now.” Her greatest threat became her most startling awakening and call to action for the world. What had had no reference point at all became the opening life of passion, connection, interrelationship. Her rhythmic passions, now in prose: “Suddenly my cancer was the cancer that was everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed…the cancer of buried trauma. The cancer of caged chickens and polluted fish. … The cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.” She quotes author Phillip Shepherd: “If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you rather than the living continuum to which you belong.” Ensler’s body is now Eve’s reference point of connection to all others, to the suffering of all, to the gifts and graces of all. Her body—selflessly, without reciprocity—offers her now belonging to the wide swath of creation, to everything that is.

Ensler concludes in classic "black-preaching" form, though I'll leave that for now. Words in prose fail to communicate it anyway. For my purposes, and in quieted tone, I note simply that I got a whiff of Ensler's proclamation last night as I walked quietly, slowly, in the dusky light, filled somehow with the harmonies of crickets and cicadas. I crafted a space of mindfulness-in-motion, attending to open-bellied posture and breaths that went all the way to my knees. And I knew something I don’t know how to articulate. It knocked against my mind in funny insights—that houses and yards actually smell differently from one another; that as many times as we forget the breath we can always be returned to it, remembering; that a strange oneness and wonder is always on the cusp of the next step. Perhaps Eve’s sermon had simply created its spaciousness in a body over-weary from under-bodied-ness in intellectual employment. Perhaps Eve’s passions blossomed through my bodied-self, pushing up into my awareness at just the right time, having germinating for recent hours.

Or perhaps this Eve is offering me a newly harvested fruit, with her wizened and impish smile of welcome. This time, she says to me, this time the fruit redeems, invites, reconnects. You and your body. All of our bodies—male and female and all those in between—with the world. Women giving new life to anyone who can receive it, like we do.

Not-Much 'Tradition' for Life's Too-Muchness

The authority of ‘tradition’ may not be much these days, but I’m beginning to think it may be all we have. Each of the words in that sentence is specific to the musing-task I have in mind this morning: authority, tradition, much, these days, beginning, think, may be, all, we, have.

 Recently, I asked (in another context) how one authorizes the teachers in life, by which I mean “teachers for a path of spiritual maturity and integrity.” How do we decide that someone’s word or teaching is better than another’s? When do we—and are we aware of it at the time—“pledge our troth,” so to speak, to such a teaching, to such a person’s contribution to our learning?  Today, however, I’m drawn to the power, the compelling authority, that traditions of faith/practice have for some of us, and clearly not for others of us, in this (un)conscious discernment and decision-making for a such a path.

Sometimes this is asked within the lens of certification: how does one get certified as a leader or teacher within a tradition of faith/practice (recognizing that in some traditions, a leader and a teacher may be different roles)? What is the process, duration, cost, and endpoint for being a leader/teacher of a tradition? 

Other times it is approached through definitions of tradition. My favorite of these is also a most abstract one (go figure). Alasdair MacIntyre, a moral ethicist/philosopher from Notre Dame, described a tradition as “a living argument.”[1] In this sense, a tradition is a long-standing way of being in human community, structured by practices (a definition we will leave for posterity’s sake) with both goods and observable ends, which are continually enacted and evolving such that disagreement and discernment fund a living ‘argument’ about who and how and what it means to be within this community, as participant and as collective. See what I mean? Abstract. But this ‘buys’ a way of thinking about ‘tradition’ unhinged from religious identities, which I find compelling. In his terms, you can stand within a tradition of scientific discipline, tennis, golf, religious belief, ethnicity, etc. Personally, I think it’s good for religious people to be de-stabilized enough to see that what they do, while having ultimate significance for them, can be likened to what others do with vastly different nuances of ‘ultimate.’ [Neither is humbling religious folks a bad thing, I’ve found. Our path of maturity often requires it and staid notions of ‘tradition’ can prevent it, so along with an accurate sense of oneself (limited, humble, etc.), learning, growth, delight, and more may never occur.]

This topic of musing is also complicated by the fact that many of us find ourselves in a tradition that we did not consciously choose. We belong to a ‘living argument’ we didn’t start, in other words, but one we feel compelled to finish, for some reason. Good conversation partners in my life have pushed me here, in their desire to lessen the significance of ‘tradition.’ “Since there are so many different religions,” they would say, “none could be the only one. So how is it logical to commit to one ultimate, when you can’t prove that it’s the ultimate one? Furthermore, your unchosen social and biological location—i.e. family of origin—determines your belief structure, your tradition. How can that be true for you, therefore?” Often the tone here suggests such determination is a bad thing, something to be resisted. Without delving into the many religions/one religion quagmire—a tradition unto itself, by now—we do need to note that each of us does find him/herself in a pre-existing tradition, or at least, a governing narrative about tradition(s). Sometimes it’s one of adherence to an existing tradition, at all internal and external costs. Other times, it’s rejection of a tradition, with different internal and external costs. ‘Tradition’ is a living argument, even in its constitution and understanding. Before you ever get to its practices, its wisdom of the years.

So why bother? you may ask. Why learn a particular tradition (when there are so many of them to choose from) or why seek teachers within particular, more narrowly-defined traditions (when one could commit to teachers in any and all of them)? Why is certification within a tradition of practice worthwhile or valuable? How do you know if the tradition in which you find yourself is the one that will be true for your path?

The cool thing about these questions is that our answers are near-infinite. Those of us in the ‘business’ of teaching/learning within historically rooted traditions (in my case, Christianity) come into this work as our path from incredibly diverse origins, with incredibly diverse ends. Hence, living argument. This also means that the reasons to learn a tradition or seek teachers within a tradition become inarticulate for our purposes here. Simply too many of them. I can speak of my own path, however, my own reasoning.

I stand and live within a particular, historically rooted tradition because of the “too-muchness” of life for my own mind, body, spirit, personhood. Sometimes this “too-muchness” overflows my “me” with celebration, delight, ecstacy, pleasure, laughter and more. In those times, not only do I want to share it with those who live and work outside my communities, but I want to share it with those who have had similar experiences, sensations, histories. I want to be with those who speak a similar language and have been shaped in similar settings of community life, practice, steps on the path.  Other times, this “too-muchness” demands more of me than I can withstand on my own. It overwhelms what resources and ways of thinking I have, such that I am pushed to lean on “wisdom that works.” Well-defined traditions with long-standing records of response to such situations offer such a wisdom. Not band-aids I’ve found along the side of the road on my particular pathway, for this particular pain or that particular scrape, but coherent and longstanding wisdom(s) of surgery and medicine within which band-aids may be an element. The best way to proceed in the delicate demands of “surgery” and medicine, I’ve found, is to surrender to one’s own doctor or species of care. In pain, it’s better to be able to trust oneself to familiar doctors and read the medicine boxes in one’s own language, wouldn’t you agree? So, the “too-muchness” of life, in both pleasure and pain, pushes me to commit to a particular, historically rooted tradition, though I am well aware of the value in all such traditions.

I bother with learning/teaching within a particular tradition, therefore, as a steward of gifts and wisdom given to me, ways of becoming fully human that have shaped my own mind-body-spirit and that I have found, do find, valuable, trustworthy, worth stewarding. I don’t know the ‘grand scheme’ of a world of multiple traditions, but I can guess that each has particular gifts to offer an enriching life possible in an ever-evolving world—biologically-, psychologically-, socially-, culturally-configured. And just because I have found myself in a particular tradition doesn't mean that it's more or less true for wisdom within my experience. Does it guide me toward growth, disruptive transformation, nurture in the broadest sense? Does it offer a language and life in my path? Then it's a living tradition in which truth can speak. If I don't experience newness, growth, disruption, transformation, change...? Well, then I'm not living a tradition anyway, so the question is moot. 

“These days” offer additional and necessary “refining fire” for our understandings of and engagement with ‘tradition’(s). Popular conception of ‘tradition’ seems to lead to sectarian violence, tribalism, us/them polarizations driven by fear, loss, grief. Ways of recognizing traditions of life, aimed toward life-giving wisdom, appear necessary in imagination, articulation, modeling, and teaching. A new beginning, logically, begins there. Here. So how to proceed, committing to a particular—so as to value it ultimately—while growing into recognition of the many—so as to value persons, ‘others’ of oft-conflicting habits/practices/wisdom?

At the very least, such beginning will entail new conceptions of “we” amidst longstanding practices of “thinking together.” How big can our “we” get before it gets lost? will be important listening to engage. A tentativeness, lived with particular and tenacious commitment, also seems necessary. Some of us call these “humble absolutes.” Others a movement from convicted knowing into unknowing, perhaps ‘back again,’ returning as if for the first time.

We may resist it, in liberal habits of mind and fear of tribalistic traditions, but the “wisdom that works” across traditions of all kinds puts all the individual words in the second sentence into a coherent plausibility. ‘Tradiition’ recognized for its life-giving offerings does author new life. It gains an authority of years in personal experience and narrative, across generations. It forces a collective to come into being, a “we” that needs to think together about how we/it is a community and what it means to practice in such a communal fashion. I know no other vehicle for facing the “too-muchness” of life, though there are certainly multiple expressions of ‘tradition’ that provide proven-and-yet-diverse ways for facing such “too-muchness.” And “these days,” ‘tradition’ is a locus of old-birthing-the-new, a focal point of argument for how to live wisdom forward. Traditional folks don’t always get it right, but we do know that getting it wrong is part of the human pathway to living wisdom forward. As Richard Rohr says in his new book, "We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right." (Falling Upward, xxii). 

I may not like to admit it, with as much frustration and with as much failure as I observe in my own particular religious ‘traditioning,’ but it’s increasingly difficult to deny that 'tradition' for new life and a new sense of being human together is unavoidable. It may not be 'tradition' as 'we' think of it together today, but the living and ever expanding argument that is human beings, in particular and together as a people, will inevitably remain a 'tradition.' Such is all a we can have, in the end. 

---

[1] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 289?

Path Companions -- 2

To whom do you grant authority in your life? Religious folks may respond, almost immediately, “God,” with all the implicit and explicit difficulties/delights that entails. Secularists may think immediately “Reason or Logic,” with similar difficulties/delights but vastly different expressions. I want to have the question move into our relationships of teaching/learning and spiritual maturity within (or outside of) traditions/philosophies. How do you authorize those who are teaching you, will teach you? Those whom you grant particular voice in your thinking? How do you decide their voice is the one of hundreds today that deserves attention and value?

Authority is a slippery thing, you see. I remember a student asked me (and the class) at a seminary on the East Coast, “When do I have or get authority as a pastor?” I don’t remember precisely what I said. I probably evaded the question first, broadening it outward for class response. My recollection goes something like this, for what came out of my mouth, “Authority is a funny thing in congregations, for pastors. As soon as you grab it, you’ve lost it. As soon as you believe you’ve lost it, you may find it’s been given.” There’s something deep at play with authority, in my mind. It’s a primarily relational phenomenon—it must be given, not grasped. But there are behaviors and characteristics of a person to whom congregations will give authority, (which I will define summarily as) a responsibility and voice accorded to those who lead or teach, who ultimately encourage the authoring of others’ lives in love, knowledge, and contribution.

One of the figures in my own path whom I have granted inordinate authority is Julia Cameron, whom I’ve never met. She is author, artist, mother, playwright, composer, and more. Her Artist’s Way: a Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity has become a classic in the art/self-help world, confirmed in the variety of spin-off products the market can get persons hungry for more of her work to buy. As one who usually evades what I call “market tchotchke”—items or books that sit on one’s shelf and collect dust?—I’ve even purchased more Cameron products than I care to admit. What she has contributed to my life holds great authority for me, for my work, for my life.

When I was floundering in doctoral training, in search of “a creative dissertation proposal,” I found her book in the bookstore section subtitled, “creativity.” Yes, a type-A person would go to a bookstore to find a book under the label “creativity” to learn how to do it for a dissertation. [Little did I know then that creative proposals are rarely desired in higher education. Large thinking, which is necessarily more inarticulate and less analytically precise, is supposed to come afterwards!] I was finally out of a relationship that had been a whole lot of work and very little fun. I was completing another unit of some pastoral training as a Hospice chaplain. I was completing, had completed, my comprehensive exams at great personal-mental cost to me and those around me. I was reconnecting with an old college friend, who was to become my fiancé now husband, but neither of us had any remote intention in that direction yet. The Artist’s Way practices began, for work-product: morning pages, artist dates, magazine collages, fairy-tale writing, and more. A world of serendipity—what Presbyterians might call ‘providence’—unfolded before my very eyes (and ears, nose, fingers, mouth, even my mind). An awakening was underway from which I (and my life), thank God, would never recover.

One year later, I had my successful dissertation proposal. More importantly, I had a vibrant life of curiosity, new love, self-confidence (or at least self-commitment), and good work to do. My path within Cameron’s vision, work, and proscribed practices has waxed and waned as I’ve learned more about who I am as an artist, how I become attached to practices as the point, not a path. But anything Cameron will catch my attention with a special authority. “Listen!” I seem to hear in my mind when her work appears in my view-finder, my search-engine box, my Amazon “recommendations.”

So imagine my surprise when I read her autobiography on a plane-ride toward vacation-time with my husband in the San Juan Islands, and I learned I did not like Julia Cameron. The book showed me a woman who has lived a life of audacity, yes, but also privilege and traditionally baby-boomer values. Connections to a well-monied family in NYC, jet-setting life between New Mexico and the Upper West Side, NYC. Pursuit of her artistic path in locations across the globe, so detached from anything I know as real or connected to community life in my own path. All of a sudden, her mantra for my life, “Leap and the net will appear,” became empty. “Isn’t it easy to leap when you have your child’s grandparents’ money buffering a fall, assuring a net?” I thought to myself. How does such a life of at least two homes, various locations, accord with resources enough for all? And where is the life of the community, the common good in this path?

Such questions, such judgments—as that is what they are—are not really fair, of course. It’s never easy to leap into what is one’s calling, and others’ money may or may not be the net it seems to be from the outside. As a matter of fact, the judgment of family-others may make the leap even harder. And none of us in North American abundance can throw the first stone at any other of us. I live an extraordinary life of privilege myself, with more than I need to do what I still struggle to do. The resistance I have to baby-boomers is my own generational-learning-curve—how do I honor the contributions of the previous generation when boomers are the ones against whom I must differentiate myself, to work for the world within institutions they have deconstructed for all of us?

Such content of my awareness is not nearly as important or interesting as the fact that the awareness arose. A teacher in whom I had placed extraordinary authority for my path had become more of the frail and real person she actually is. Instead of this authority figure with an aura, of a sort, she became a human being, just like the rest of us. Liking her or not does not really matter in the end. All of the negativity that arose could even arguably be seen as liberating, the next necessary step on the path to seeing my own pattern of authorizing, a next step toward learning to trust my own voice and intuition as it is. Not transferred onto someone else, but as something holy and mysterious that arises at odd moments from within my own being, body, spirit. Cameron contributed an extraordinary wisdom to my own path, not only because of her ability to “leap” and “articulate for others,” but also because something in me authorized her to teach me, to lead my actions. She has had authority in my life because I gave it to her. Something in me surrendered to something she had to say, wisdom she was to offer for the good of all, including me.

I don’t know why we seem to need authority figures to discover our own voices, our own teachings (mishna, some friends would say) that we are to offer the world. I don’t know when the moment was that I decided her voice and pathway was to be so significant for my own. I do know that authority is something that Cameron earned in her audacious and fully human offerings. She has walked the walk more than most teachers I have had. I do know that authority was something that I needed to give her were I ever to mature enough in my own self to begin to trust my voice, my gifts to offer the world. I will always be grateful to her, though I doubt I will ever meet her face to face. (She’s an introvert, after all, and struggles with public contact. Learned in the autobiography!) I am speechlessly grateful to have had my illusions broken open here too. But this has taught me that authorizing another can be risky, painful, even hurtful for the one(s) we authorize. Perhaps that is simply how it always is. Growth requires deep connection and then the pain of departure or recognition of frail humanity which is never ‘enough’ in sacred desire.

It seems to come down to the rather staid cliché that no one is ever an island, or each of us needs others—at least an other—if we are to learn most deeply who we are, what we have to offer. Only by the act of surrender to this other do we gain the life we are to live. And that’s the tricky thing…being wise about that “other” is such a crucial decision. Julia Cameron was a safe bet, and I recommend her to you as teacher, as companion for the path. But more importantly, I encourage you to consider what your pattern is of authorizing others whose voices you value, will listen to. It’s an intimate decision. It requires an act of risk, to trust. But it’s one of those choiceless choices. You will not grow in the ways that matter without it.