For Times Like These -- a Spiritual Practice

“A spiritual practice for times like these,” reads the introductory sub-title in a book I’ve been steeping in, again. It’s entitled The Seven Whispers: Listening to the Voice of Spirit, written by Christina Baldwin back in 2002. Just that much suggests “times like these” means “post-9-11,” at least. Listening to the voice of Spirit seems a good description of a spiritual practice, in one sense. Practices come in all shapes and sizes, fit for persons of similarly varying temperaments and proclivities. Many engaged activities intend a deeper awareness, an awakening to voices within us deeper than the incessant ego-drives we live with every day. Drives that have us constantly comparing ourselves with others, assessing the love or intentions of others, judging behaviors as fit or unfit, etc. So a spiritual practice that frees us from ego-voices through listening to the voice of Spirit—defined for now as a presumably life-giving Force for good within and beyond nature—seems attractive, even compelling. But “seven whispers”? How are they a practice? Speaking them daily? Leaning on them in times dry and ecstatic? Thinking of them while engaging other activities like meditation, prayer, service, and the like?

I don’t know the answer to such questions for others, but for myself, I do know that the seven whispers of Christina Baldwin offer one of the most fruitful and rigorous ways to pray I’ve ever received. Speaking as a life-long Presbyterian, though now a wisdom-walker with more adjectives than I care to name, the seven whispers enter into then depart my life with a regularity that suggests tenable wisdom, durable practice, consistency of purpose. So I offer them (and her work) for a bit of invitation during this next season of life, whether one understands it as Lent or preparation for Passover or simply “what’s next.”

The whispers go like this:

• Maintain peace of mind.
• Move at the pace of guidance.
• Practice certainty of purpose.
• Surrender to surprise.
• Ask for what you need and offer what you can.
• Love the folks in front of you.
• Return to the world.

Seven imperative verbs—action-oriented invitations. Short sentences for memory’s sake. Each of them a practice unto itself, to be sure, but taken together, a holistic, ecumenical or inter-traditional path of listening.

Baldwin offers the narrative in which the whispers arrived, were given to her, in the book by this name. Each chapter offers prose, stories, questions to deepen one’s understanding of the whisper in question. Her writing style is familiar, but encouraging; revealing but bounded. Just what a good spiritual teacher offers, in other words.

For myself, I sometimes ruminate or mediate on only the verbs. Maintain. Move. Practice. Surrender. Ask & Offer. Love. Return. These speak a rootedness or groundedness in what has been given before, where one has been planted before. Maintain. But anything not moving or changing is dying or dead, so movement is necessary, unavoidable. Practice. Nothing grows or strengthens without consistent intention, activity, mistakes and missteps, then recovery and balance. Practice. Then the age-old resistant one: surrender. Not as imposed obedience. Not as power-over. But welcomed-within. Liberation from being in charge or having to know it all. Freedom to be who one is, without qualification or clarification. Surrender. The final three, thankfully, complete what is essentially a relational process from the very beginning with overt relational imperatives: ask, offer; love; return. Few of us learn easily to ask for what we need. More of us offer ourselves, but few offer only what we can, healthily and from abundance. More likely it’s offering what they need, regardless of whether one actually can do so from abundance, and asking for what one (in a starved imagination) think one might deserve, which is always less than Grace desires. Then love. Not out of need, but out of delight. And return, knowing that when one’s own needs are stewarded, it’s so giddy to return to the world, one can hardly stand it.

So, a spiritual practice for times like these. Begin the day with the whispers, even if you can’t remember them all. At the midday, repeat the imperative verbs, and listen for what Spirit might invite you to hear. And ask what Baldwin asked, to discern her own contribution for the world:

• What is it that you want me to do?
• How do I need to change in order to do it?

Amen, Amen, Amen…and a little woman. 

Re-Nerving

I’m fascinated now with what a Day of Disconnection reveals, some of which is even worth a morning muse. J It has been a time of fragmentation—fragmented energies (my spiritual director observed), fragmented directions (required at work), fragmenting tasks at work (changes in relationships with colleagues), disparate bodied impulses (resulting in a slight injury or strain to a shoulder). The amount of work accomplished these last six weeks begs review (in a coaching form, not here), but at what cost?

At the strong urging of my director—who is never directive, I should add—I spent yesterday in a day of intentional quiet. I disconnected both personal e-mail addresses from my cell-phone. I put the “Sabbath-response” onto my work e-mail address. I disconnected. Supposed silence, but I learned I talk to my dog all the time. If I weren’t married, people would wonder at the odd lady who talks “to herself” with too many books. Maybe I should beat the rush and start wearing big hats. Unnerving, I’d say to myself—really, talking to myself here—but today, I’m thinking the better word is re-nerving.

My work pulls me out of my body all the time. I didn’t know what to do with myself without being in front of a computer or reading for work or taking care of the needs of another. The first telling sign was that the day was to begin at 9 a.m. and I didn’t actually turn everything off until 9:47 a.m. I was tardy to even my own intention. I sat for a while, not resting. Thank heavens for Julia Cameron’s work. Whenever I’m at a loss, I do seem to return to the embrace of her ‘artist’s way’ series, this time Finding Water: the Art of Perseverance. I saw I had started it this past summer, prior to my trip to NYC. I reviewed the path I had trod, then received a little nibble of invitation “to list five small actions I could take on my own behalf.” A slight breeze of oxygen to my spirit, my body. The rest of the day meandered from one useless activity to the next…and it was marvelously disorienting. I concluded the day with a non-iPod workout at the gym, startled to find myself completing over a 3-mile run without strain or weariness. I stayed to do additional core and strength-training exercises I’ve learned until it was 6:03 p.m. I had “made it” to the concluding time of my Day of Disconnection. I called my beloved and we planned dinner and a Downton Abbey evening.

The shock or surprise always comes amidst fragmenting responsibilities, when I’ve a breath of oxygen to my spirit from a day like this: how could I have fallen off the wagon for so long, without even noticing the bump of the fall? When did I stray so far from how I want to live my life?!

Life offers so many things I’m eager to explore, after all. Learning to feel comfortable vocalizing and playing my new bodhran. Writing at least a little every day, or 5 times a week. Continuing my “body-literacy” project amidst the overwhelming cognitions of my work (September 17^th marks the last “body-literacy” posting! How is that possible?!). Learning qigong, perhaps a little yoga. Traveling with my husband into new adventures. Finally making a passable crusty loaf at home (without shattering Pyrex glassware all over the kitchen this time). The list goes on, not even including other items too ‘fresh’ or ‘possible’ to mention aloud here. How do I stray so easily from the fullness the world offers so very readily to those willing to receive it?

Rhetorical questions, of course, but it does beg a new question this morning, as I begin to attend to the responsibilities of the day. I wonder how many hours of embodied activity or embodied listening per day will be required to regain, even retain, balance of awareness across mind-soul-spirit-body ‘modes’ while immersed in these next four months of professional responsibilities? I will be foraying into my first completely online-course-teaching tomorrow, alongside a weekly face-to-face class with similar material but different pacing. I have a new writing project aching to be born, with energies to which I yearn to be faithful. Work always calls, in its multitude of voices I quiet at random moments—formation/integration, administration, student-advising, etc. So it’s always plentiful, the things I’m supposed to get done, some of which I simply cannot do, or do well, or do in a timely manner. So how to attend to the embodied listening first and foremost?

Good first steps have already happened, seemingly regardless of my inattention. A couple days of attempting to unwind (and failing), a spiritual direction conversation, an afternoon of re-arranging the contemplative space into a more open space, one with a returned altar space. (It had had one before the last “feng shui” movement). A day of disconnection, a re-awakening. So…while I don’t believe in resolutions as acts of will, I do sense some budding energies for balance in my near future. A return to hand-written pages in the morning, remembering my body while I write. Learning new qigong forms via digital recorded instructions. Personal training midday again, as entrance into “work must stop now” rhythms of work and body-listening.

It bodes well, this time of re-nerving.

Practicing the Whole Amidst the Partial

I have been asking the wrong questions of my nightmare. Big surprise. :)

An early November circle-practice led into a vision-nightmare of an intimate-spiritual friend (whom I’ll call Al) coming into town, staying with my husband and me, teaching at a local congregation then being shot. In that Christian sanctuary by a Christian fundamentalist. By “one of our own,” though only in the sense of sharing the ever-multiplicitous adjective “Christian.” Random violence I could not anticipate or control struck dead one I hold dear, one whose historical community has long been wounded by my historical community, and we were all faced with unbearable loss. What would I tell his wife? Would they ever forgive me? I was completely shaken, unnerved for several days afterward. My friend arrived, stayed with my husband and me, taught at the local congregation, then went home happily and well to his family, work, life. I have been asking questions of the nightmare ever since.

What in the world was that about? To what purpose? What was it to mean? Why was it so vivid and a felt-receiving of “something important,” yet it remains without any apparent significance? A couple days later, I wrote a bit “into the wind” to see what would come. A bit of poetry arrived, and then four cognitive guesses that may be accurate but still seem inaccurate somehow. Insignificant. The guesses—

·         I’m working out the costs of loving deeply across polarized religious difference(s)

·         I continue to be angry at the fundamentalist life-choices of my own sister, with whom I cannot even speak regularly, openly

·         Violence happens apart from our ability to control it, prevent it

·         The losses are felt intensely no matter what ‘circle’ you find yourself identified in/with, though there’s a particularly toxic cocktail when your primary relationships of learning-spirit-faith are outside “your own” community

—feel like stick-figure drawings of a breath-taking landscape: good first attempts, but completely un-fit or inappropriate media and representations for the phenomenon in view.

Then a dear friend and cousin came to visit for an evening, asking me a new question about it that jumped out at me: What part of you in this vision is your spiritual friend who was shot? Classical and contemporary psychological thought names each and every aspect of our dream-life some part of our own psyche, some part of our sub- or unconscious mind representing itself symbolically and characteristically. So, every actor in this nightmare is actually some part of my own psyche, leading my cousin to ask: Who or what of you is your spiritual friend representing? I was stunned, feeling something shift inside, but stunned also because I didn’t have a clue. Nothing came to mind at all. “I’ll have to sit with that one,” I told him. I have been asking that question ever since. Who was shot? What part of me was shot? Who or what in me does Al represent? All the wrong questions, except for being the right ones to get me to the next wrong ones.

The nightmare was about death, but only partially. In the face of all that fear, all the overwhelm of affect, a depth of interconnection was revealed anew to me, which is and inevitably will be source of both joy and pain. That is real, by which I mean an observable, communally-discernible, shared relation in an outside life-world. It’s not just in my own mind. In this sense, the nightmare was about Al and the “extended family” into which he/they has adopted me and my husband. Practicing the “daily dyings” of mortality requires regular discipline, willingness to welcome the reality of death. It is a gift unto itself, after all, though only if one practices and makes death a friend. A part of what must be for any new life to come. I acknowledge the love offered and received, the deep attachment that comes, but which is never to be the point itself. A Love can live only through those willing to love deeply and relinquish attachment, a balanced practice of overwhelming love and vulnerable mortality, both necessary for the devotion that lives through such persons.

Only partially about death also because a wave of relief came in circle last night when an awareness surfaced: it was just a part of me that had died, though I live and even live well today. This nightmare has had little to nothing to do with Al at all, in this view. And I don’t even need to worry about naming which part of me was shot. Some part of me is gone now, and I simply have to live into the path long enough to know who or what she, that part of me, was. The life and companions on the path remain. The work continues to beckon, and it’s good work to boot. And these “little deaths” (yes, pun intended) are required for maturity on the path, for diving more deeply into the Life intended for all. So part of me is gone now. I will learn more as I go, but may she rest in peace. 

So a part of me died. Death here is partial. It plays a role within a larger whole I had forgotten in my grief, my affect. It plays some part in a cycle also about the larger whole pervasive in that nightmare too: life. They are always intimately linked, never distinct. We are the ones who sever them, who misunderstand both because we grasp at one and avoid the other. As much as I’ve fretted about violence and death in this nightmare, it must also be about life in some fashion, because they are intimately linked. The nightmare can also offer itself as vision, no less affective and significant to listening to the path, perhaps even with new understandings to come.

You see, if we follow my cousin’s tack informed by Jung and others, the more interesting questions have to do with the “Christian fundamentalist.” Who or what part of me was the unknown assailant in my nightmare? What part of me came into an Evangelical Christian sanctuary with a gun, and used it? What in the world is going on my own mind that feels this polarized and polarizing animosity so intimately? I never have (or remember having) violent dreams at all. Scary ones, yes. Ones where I’m hiding from someone or something, yes. But out and out random violence? Rarely, if ever. Who or what part of me is the Christian fundamentalist?

So I’ll sit now with these awarenesses, held lightly with an impish smile. They are simply the next ‘wrong’ questions to ask the mysteries of death and life, deeply felt with those whose lives have shaped our own in breath-takingly beautiful ways.  The nightmare is about death, but death as an intimate reality of a Life that holds us in companionship without end, even were an end to arrive with excruciating pain. It is the life that bears witness, that observes the fundamentals, that practices the path on behalf of even the violent urges—the fundamentalists—within each of us. When the grief comes, whenever a lament arrives, how do we practice with and within our bodies so that we can hold the shape of Life while we rage at the loss(es) in death? Embodied remembrances. Observance. Practice. Practicing the whole while we receive the partial, each and every day.

I wonder what the nightmare will mean next?

Mindful Reading

When you read, whom or what do you have in mind? This question startled me today, while working out with a friend. I need to do a bit of study—what we would call hermeneutical study, in the biz—into literary criticism, various interpretive strategies over the years, but something in the question struck me with new force I had not felt before.

A picture of a favorite text appeared into my dumb-phone this week, with delight. As I considered the text, I realized it really was well-suited to the friend who had sent the pic. I picked out the volume from my shelf and browsed it again, with someone new in mind. I saw things I remembered, things I had forgotten, but each one felt different with the potential of a new reader I’m getting to know better.

Then another favorite essay came back into mind and recall, mentioned in an earlier posting here. Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion, specifically the chapter-essay on “Holy Obedience.” I had re-read bits and pieces, in search of precise specifics of earlier thoughts, musings. When a friend wrote a bit about life’s difficulties and commitments these days, the prayer that flowed into prose back to him had Kelly’s language in it. When the friend wrote back for clarity, I mentioned the essay and offered it to his attention. I re-read the piece again, this time closely, with him—an Orthodox Jew—in mind. The experience of it, the things heard and seen, were recognizable but different too.

When you read, whom or what do you have in mind?

In one sense, this is a basic college-prep inquiry. How do you assess the text and its legitimacy for what your needs are—information, conceptualizing a problem in various ways, relaxation, beauty, self-improvement… The list could easily go on. In another sense, though, I find it a newly fascinating question. First, is what you have in mind a whom or a what? Do you think it makes a difference? Second, for the "whom" responses, how big or small is your “whom”?

Think about reading scripture, for instance. I'm thinking about "in your own history or tradition," but it could be scripture read as holy text of another tradition too. Do you have yourself in mind, searching desperately for a word from God? The famous “I just opened the bible and this page spoke a specific Word to me” approach to understanding life’s challenges and human responses to them? Nothing drives a religious leader more batty these days than this grasping for the metaphysical proof of worth. Or the pinning of God down into evidential proofs of care. At least it infuriates one religious leader I know and love dearly. 

Perhaps one reads the text a bit more critically, engaging what scholars call “exegesis” to determine—as best we can—the historical, textual-critical, form-critical, archaeological contributions to understanding the text within original context, original intent of the author, etc. In this sense, what is in mind is “what was happening” or “what was intended” or a critical-realist sense of truth-claims. (At best, in my view). But now I hear mentor-teacher Fred Craddock in my head: “Lots of folks say we can’t get back to intention or what really happened. I don’t know about a lot, but whether I can find the intention or not, I know that the author had one.” In this context, it seems Craddock, like he always does, is attempting to bring the critical apparatus back to the person of the author, the web of relations in which he (most likely) wrote, the impassioned connection between the experience of God and the distanced-form of a text describing (probable) events of "long ago."

Both of these senses of “mindful reading” feel different from the kind of reading posed to me these last couple days, mentioned above. The first has only self-reference, reading for what the reading offers you. The second has a distance to it, whether historical or objectifying of other events and persons. Reading with particular persons in mind feels different from both those options to me.

I remember when I was in high school my father would “assign” me readings he enjoyed from C.S. Lewis or George McDonald, then we would go out for breakfast “to talk about them.” I was just beginning my theological education, though neither of us knew that’s what was happening. I loved those breakfasts, and the texts were good too. I didn’t think about it much, but part of what drew me to those readings was his own passion, his own “being-shaped” by them. They were ways to get to know my father a little better. Reading something another has read, has valued, does bring an intimacy into the experience of reading.

And therefore one does have to be intentional about reading “because the other’s enjoyment requires it” and welcoming their enjoyment while still reading “for what feeds you too,” “that you enjoy for yourself too.” Intimacy is always the dance between deep connection of selves separate enough to be connected and selves so enmeshed that one can’t tell who likes what and for what reason. Learning to say “Nope, that’s not for me” can be just as valuable as saying “This feeds me too,” in this sense.

The point drawing me forward here, however, has to do with reading considered religious in some way—scriptural reading, whether formal or not; lectio divina, or reading of smaller texts with prayerful intention and listening; textual reading for theological formation, engaged by students pursuing graduate degrees in higher education. If we experience the text differently, depending upon whom or what we have in mind, ought we not to name and claim that at the front? Ought we not to hold in a sense of mindfulness those for whom the text might be read this time? Ought we to listen for whether we’re only considering “our own,” however we may classify that phrase, “ourselves,” as we struggle against life’s inanities, our “intimate others” whom God or Providence or Grace has brought into our lives for reasons of mutual encouragement?

I think I may have a new “thought project” to consider when I’m finished procrastinating here away from the one I’m supposed to be working on today. I invite you to engage your practice—whatever that is, whether mindfulness, prayer, mitzvot, service, etc.—and welcome the reading texts that shepherd you along your way, choosing a person or two to have in mind while you read. Allow yourself to be interdependent with him/her/them for receiving what that text’s nurture is for you this day. See if there are easier or harder persons to choose to keep in mind. Be gentle with yourself too. Choose the easy ones first. But as your capacity deepens, choose the neutral ones whom you have little affection or aversion for. Then every once in a while, choose the one(s) who drive you batty, and allow them to teach you new things about texts you never read before, or things you never saw in the texts you know well. To be honest, I’m “vamping” here on the Buddhist practice of Tonglen; credit where credit is due. But I’ve never considered it within the highly scripturally-focused environments in which I serve.

Whom or what did you have in mind as you read this piece?

Obedience in Light of Love

In 1928, a young Ruth Berger, my grandmother, took the word ‘obedience’ out of her Brethren wedding vows. I know little about the service except it was a double wedding with Ruth and Ben alongside her sister and fiancé. Nonetheless, I have had a strange relationship with obedience ever since.

Here is Grandma Ruth, who became Ruth Berger Hess upon her wedding.  

My father sent the picture to me because a ministry student asked whether I might be related to the Mrs. Hess who had taken her sister and her under the wing in a rough time. As she spoke the details of her Mrs. Hess—guidance counselor, son was a doctor, Northmont High—it became clear her Mrs. Hess was indeed my Grandma Ruth. We both laughed, enjoying the unexpected connection. The picture is for her, but I startled to see it again myself, newly aware of a deep yearning to know her like I never did, never could have.

The corsage Mrs. Hess/Grandma is wearing signals that it’s Mother’s Day. Look closely and you’ll see four baby roses, one for each son born and borne. Her hair had gone gray fairly early in life, usually ascribed to these four. Boys, not roses. Her glasses were vintage 1980’s and if the composition allowed it, you’d see one hip slightly higher than the other. Scoliosis, we learned through various family inheritances of this diagnosis. Her eyes danced—one blue, one brown—even when she was severe. The “Little Red Riding Hood” doll she made for me when I was five mirrored these eyes. I still have it.

I find myself wondering today whether she would be pleased with her granddaughter who yearns and writes. You see, we wounded one another when I was young. Without intention, of course, but I’m not sure we ever quite recovered. I remember it fairly clearly, which is unusual for me. Junior high was my world, and I wanted to spend time with friends on a Sunday evening. A Sabbath evening, I should say, for Grandma’s thinking. Mom and Dad were away on a business trip and she was shepherding the homestead. We loved it when she could. On this particular evening, Grandma refused my desire. “No, you cannot go. It’s Sunday,” she probably said.

Not prepared was she for the will of a confined adolescent girl more like her than she knew. Tempers flared. I probably slammed a door or two, perhaps even saying things I would regret, if I remembered saying them. The evening passed in an angry silence. Whatever else transpired in this desire to be with friends whose names I cannot recall today, my grandmother and I were wounded that night. A natural course of events between generations, of course, but painful and poignant all the same. I discovered years later from my father that she was wary of me from that point on. She feared her granddaughter didn’t love her, though I had obeyed.

Love and obey. This is the combination historically spoken in wedding vows of old. This is the coupling Grandma Ruth uncoupled, with good reason. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians speaks of the wife’s obedience to the husband, “as the church is obedient to Christ,” or some such line. In most Pauline references, the task of the man’s obedience is often left implicit, unspoken, though it’s almost always written there too. Such texts have torqued relations for centuries, as men dehumanize themselves in the domination of women, and women dehumanize themselves in relinquishment of their own agency in relation to men. My grandmother reasserted her own agency. My grandfather was receptive to her—and his own—humanity. Yet she struggled to see them together all the same. Perhaps both my grandmother’s and my generation have steeped long enough in love as it was thought to be, avowed against  obedience as it has been. Perhaps love and obey can come alongside one another, when properly Referenced.

Thomas Kelly’s essay “A Holy Obedience” marks the first life-giving words I received for obedience that is holy, what he calls “a life of absolute and complete and holy obedience to the voice of the Shepherd” whose accent falls completely upon God as initiator, aggressor, seeker, stirrer into life, ground, and giver of power (to us) to become children of God. (Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 26). Holy obedience to the voice of the Shepherd. In a culture and overculture of multiple, conflicting voices, how is one to know this voice of the Shepherd? Especially if one is not Christian?

Kelly notes that this voice offers a “serious, concrete program of life,” for one, wholly different from “mild, conventional religion.” He calls that “the first half.” Obedience that is holy, on the other hand, is the other half, the second half (as Meister Eckhart would and did say). It is observable in an insatiable God-hunger that drives one into a “passionate quest for the real whole-wheat Bread of Life.” (p. 28). It marks a life whose joys are ravishing, whose peace is profound, whose humility is deepest, whose power is world-shaking, whose love is enveloping, whose simplicity is that of a trusting child (p. 28). States of consciousness will fluctuate. Visions will fade. But this holy and listening and alert obedience will remain as “core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, work-aday living.” (p. 32). Perhaps this arrives as a passive receptivity for some.

Most of us, however, (says Kelly) must follow an active path to this obedience, wrestling “like Jacob of old… whose will was subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.” (p. 32). The first step to this obedience of the second half comes, perhaps, in the “flaming vision of the wonder of such a life,” or in meditation on the life and death of Jesus, or through “a flash of illumination” or, in George Fox’s language, “a great opening.” However it comes, it comes as an “invading, urging, inviting, persuading work of the Eternal One,” wholly unaccountable to modern psychology. However the active path arrives, the second step to holy obedience becomes just this: “Begin where you are. Obey now. … Live this present moment, this present hour, in utter, utter submission and openness toward [God].” A third step then: “when you slip and stumble and forget God for an hour, and assert your old proud self…don’t spend too much time in anguished regrets and self-accusations but begin again, just where you are” (p. 34). Knowing well the American ear, he refines the way with yet a fourth step, “Don’t grit your teeth and clench your fists and say, “I will! I will!” Relax. Take hands off. … Learn to live in the passive voice—a hard saying for Americans—and let life be willed through you” (p. 34).

Most of my life, I’ve gotten stuck on the popular collusion of God and religion. Loving and obeying God meant obeying a religious institution, or a community’s fundamentals whose norms spelled out what I knew in my own experience to be lifeless. Or at least not life-giving to me. Simultaneously, I have recognized what Gerald May spoke in his Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology: we yearn to surrender ourselves to something or someone larger than we are. Whether we find healthy or unhealthy ways to deal with this yearning remains a regular contemporary challenge. Material prosperity found yet empty, addictions, serial relationships, and more show a quest, a search for something of meaning or release. 

In my own life, I learned surrender in both a beautiful and painful way. I had found a teacher, I thought, and covenanted my surrender to her teaching. What life I received! What energy, drive, direction, and significance. Heady spiritual stuff, to be sure. Until she became human, just as she was, as she ought to be. I had surrendered with inaccurate reference. Beautiful. Painful. But I received a glimpse of the life that is possible when surrender—even submission—arrives with the only Referent healthily chosen.

Kelly refers to this One as the Hound of Heaven. The One who never lets us go. The One whose love infuses all until light is all within all. He describes "a holy blindedness, like the blindedness of the one who looks steadily into the sun. For wherever he turns his eyes on earth, there he sees only the sun” (p. 36-7). This One does work in the church, in the religious institutions of historical traditions. This One also invites us into lives of devotion outside of these bounds too. I dare say I sense such Spirit in lives of atheists too, though I could never ascribe my language to their non-theist experience without misunderstanding and anachronism.

In this Referent, love and obedience do go together. They promise a liveliness in life unmatched by any substitute. How did Kelly say it? “A life whose joys are ravishing, whose peace is profound, whose humility is deepest, whose power is world-shaking, whose love is enveloping, whose simplicity is that of a trusting child (p. 28). Part of me thinks my grandmother knew that well. In her final years, alone but divinely companioned, she knew this Referent as she cooked dinner, cared for friends and family, told her stories again and again. Her language had grown rigid, untenable to one of her loving granddaughters, but I know she knew.

Perhaps someday I’ll learn more about Mrs. Hess as others knew her, but for now, I think Grandma Ruth would be pleased with the granddaughter who yearns and writes. We know so many of the same people after all, but especially, we know the One who pairs love and obedience into a freedom beyond reckoning. Regardless of worldly matters so often considered, each of us would see only the sun were we to gaze upon one another today.

Meeting Yourself at the Family Reunion

There is nothing quite like bumping into old versions of yourself you thought you had outgrown. Not only are you surprised, but you next feel sheepish, even embarrassed. Like meeting the beloved but slightly neurotic aunt in the hallway at a family reunion. She’s part of the family—so she must be loved—but it’s sometimes a bit painful to befriend or welcome her each year. You always hope she had made other plans.

This week offered opportunity for such an encounter all within my own mind. In what follows, I’d like to invite you into a mental soundtrack, hopefully for some amusement, but also for a very specific purpose: to shine light on the white noise—actually, multi-colored-aged-yellow-and-black-white noise—many of us have to quiet inside ourselves even in encounter with a friend or colleague, let alone another whom we might describe as ‘other’ in some way. I’m not referring just to those of us in highly homogenous settings—rural towns, ubran enclaves—but also well-sensitized, liberally-minded, interculturally-adept persons within institutions of higher learning.  The cultural noise can be impressive. Today I find myself astonished we do as well as we do, most times. The noise for me in this brief interlude includes a naïve upbringing in homogenous community (Ohio small-town, in my case), some cultural memes of the South, and lastly, a general tendency to overthink as an academic gifted with intensive affect.

The short version of the story is that I had lunch with a big-brother-ish professional colleague whom I’ll call Jed. I thought at noon. He thought at 12:30. In the end, it didn’t matter and we had a marvelous time. Like meeting the favorite cousin you can’t wait to see at family reunions and afterward wonder why you don’t get together more often. Though I’ve known him for quite a while now, always feeling a sense of resonance with him, this was the first time I’d met him in his work as a scholar. I could finally see in more systematic form, in his own writing voice, some of what the resonances had been about beyond our collegial respect and shared-ironic joviality. The longer version of the story? The week’s duration from the casually-phrased, e-mail-invite to him to the marvelously smiling lunch was accompanied by an out-dated soundtrack, increasingly shrill and grating as the days wore on.  

Allow me to introduce you to my slightly neurotic but beloved “aunt,” the lead-singer for this movie muzak. “Are you sure he’d want to see you?” she asked. “You have so little in common in your line of work, after all.” As the days wore on, her voice became more and more compelling. My institutional setting offers me maximum flexibility, even camouflage, for the real work I am learning to be about, but it’s small and struggling. No prestige, sometimes painful after living immersed in it in previous professional locations. His setting is an establishment institution of higher education—high money, prestige, external resources (if perhaps not internal ones…can’t tell). Perfect for what he does, but also with golden hand-cuffs of such settings. Small-town naivete kicked in with remarkable force, harmonized with professionalized notions of business assessments of success.

To interpret the lack of response to my inquiry, I then began to wonder whether I had offended him in some way. Had I unknowingly done something to disrespect him? “You’re white,” she added, picking up my cue. “He’s not, so perhaps it’s a race thing. Surely you did something like that”, she finished in a whisper, like speaking quietly would soften the blow, hide the imposition of whiteness that tears at earth, body, and more. As the days wore on, I began to catalogue any memory I could recall, assessing it for potential mistakes, miscommunications, and more. As I read his book, I found myself using it to imagine potential slights or faults I had unknowingly committed, imposed. These only got louder while staying in a posh, very white, cold-monied hotel. The de-humanization in such spaces, particularly when adjacent to large, monied, establishment institutions of higher education, hits old scars, now accompanied by nausea. Shrill memes, slight nausea.

“Sometimes your intense level of affect is simply too much for academics,” she whined next. “We know you can’t do anything about that, but he must be avoiding you because of it. Perhaps you experienced a closer connection or resonance with him than there really is? Oh, I know. You imposed it. That’s what you did.” When she got here, with this tone I’ve recognized for nearly three decades, I began to lose patience with her. In an act of mental defiance, complete with mental Bose-headphones,  I simply called him and inquired whether there was time for a chat, particularly as I was now into his book. We joshed like we always do, laughed together, and set up a time for lunch. “See?” I scolded my aunt, staring her down into a quiet murmur. And lunch was like it always is—filled with laughter, mutual respect and perhaps a bit of awe at one another’s work, audacious as we both are.

The sad thing about all this—which admittedly some might call navel-gazing or solipsistic ramblings—is that it has almost nothing to do with either Jed or me. It has little, if anything, to do with the professional history we’ve had or the sense of collegiality we may share today immersed as we are in resonant work across different educational ecologies. For nearly seven days, my mind was rehearsing and captivating attention with the plots and soundtracks of others, old stories, historically-received ways of interpreting actions in social spaces.

Mental chatter was captivated first by the oldest within my own history—small-town naivete I’ve been struggling to erase ever since I left the town of my youth. I may be more socially adept than I used to be, even enough to succeed in well-monied environments of privilege. But awareness of the economic, cultural, and class-chasms never leaves my subconscious. When cognitive dissonance between my expectations and mundane events in my life unfolds, my mind goes to that quagmire first.

Being in the South, quite aware of being in the South, and spending a week in a posh inn with bellmen, mostly dead-white-men in pictures all down the entry hallway, a golf-store, and over-priced breakfast options? Noise of privilege, Southern money, and black-white racial discourse became shrill in what would otherwise not have seemed remotely plausible to me. Jed is both a master at the “race” discourse in our environments, and critical of it. So much so that he encourages shared hope in mutual transcendence of it in God-given demands of intimacy. Largely due to shared hearts, resonant wisdom and spiritual disciplines of laughter, I’ve rarely if ever felt the discourse come between us, though both of us are well aware of it.

One of the most significant learnings for me in this reflection, therefore, is that being here, amidst days of solitary work, it did come between us, even if only in my own mind. I allowed my own mental chatter to cloud what I knew to be true about him, about me, about the professional sharing we have experienced together. Something in me needs to confess, I guess, though a sad smile of realized absolution accompanies the confession. Even when it has nothing to do with either involved, there are yet times to note the powerful presence of others’ plots and soundtracks, others’ stories, others’ ways of interpreting social actions lodged deeply inside each of us. Completing a bit of reflection while still here allows leaving it here with that sad smile.

Awareness of all this, ultimately reprieve from it, arrived when an old trope entered the mental chatter with well-weakened thrall to captivate: intense affect within academic environments. For nearly two decades, though arguably as long as I’ve had Pennsylvania-Deutsch uncles and a father of intellectualized-affect, I have had to ‘translate’ this gift and burden that I know in intense affect alongside substantial intellect. At times, the gift connects me with vocation, spiritual friends, innovative collaborations beyond all expectation. Other times, it ruptures collegial relations in misread social cues or subconscious requests—demands?—for shared intensities that are impossible, politely avoided, or at least distanced. Because this dimension has stretched and challenged me for as long as I can remember, because it’s such an old trope of my mind, it (blessedly) instigated self-reflective reconsideration, ultimately the phone call resulting in lunch itself.

So what to do with the slightly neurotic, outdated “aunt” who is actually an old version of myself with all her wounds and scars? Honor her presence, even welcome and care for her in the difficulties she has had to endure. Ultimately, sit her down with an old magazine that would comfort her and ask her to rest there quietly. She has much to learn from us “younger cousins.” She needs to know she will always have a place at our family reunions, a place at the table, but she must honor us too with her silence as well as her presence.

Family will always be family, in other words, but more of us need to live and model new life beyond her old stories. Cup of tea, cousins?

Experimenting with 'Family': Costly Choices against Tribalism

Experimenting with ‘family’ costs, but as a human family, we may have little choice but to proceed in this way.

I come from a tenaciously loyal, overly-educated, (fairly) emotionally-intelligent family, at least on my dad’s side. My mother’s side brings a different set of gifts, though she would demur from naming any of them. Mostly, she’d agree that from that side of the family, we got her, and she’s more than enough. But my mom’s side of the family offers—in my experience—an edgy humor, a tenacity to confront difficulty and survive, an awareness of human need, independence when necessary and mutual dependence when possible. Because of this diversity of gifts, however, when I think of ‘family’ in these reflections, I tend to lean toward my dad’s side. Relationships have been developed there. I know that side better, more fully in foibles and graces. And that side of ‘us’ is tenacious about ‘family,’ educated into confidence, and intensely self-reflective…though perhaps less about emotional dimensions of life than we might be. A couple of us have explored extending our loyalty of ‘family’ to others outside our origins, which seemed a natural and important thing to do at the time. Both of us have learned—are learning—that experimenting with ‘family’ is costly in all kinds of ways we never expected.

My own experience appears in several places here. Upon a startlingly intentional, intense spiritual friendship, my husband and I explored the notion of quasi-adopting two young women from our broader community, the daughters of this spiritual friend. We didn’t pursue it formally, in any means, but we did go so far as to craft a couple signs of covenantal belonging—a ‘swan’ ring for one of the girls, an anam-cara ring gifted by family and friends for the mother as a surprise on her birthday. In speech, the friend and I played with various family titles of affection and commitment, some intimate nicknames and others more formal role names—partner, and the like. As each of us grew in the companionship of the other, none of these had staying power except now, perhaps, companion. While this mother and I have little to no contact anymore, I will probably always count her as a companion. Her impact on my life was at archetypal and spiritually-intimate levels. She’ll always be a part of me—who she was then will always companion me—even if I never see or talk to her again. But none of the ‘titles’ or nicknames we explored remains.

I remain aware of the costs, however. The explorations in this fashion made it difficult for us to allow each other room to grow. We became overly dependent, overly focused upon one another. Our understandings of who we were, with attempted solidity in nicknames or roles, grew ever more inaccurate and disparate from each other. Neither of us could track this disparity of trajectories to see what was happening, though sustaining presence with one another grew increasingly difficult, to the point of impossible. Our experiment of inclusive-familial ties failed to sustain cohesion, regardless of our overt intentions. Both of us knew the words we had said, intentions we had shared, but the friendship—as it was—came to an end, decisively if gently. I still hold her in my mind with a sense of affection, but confirmation has come again and again that this was the healthy path of new life—dissolution of covenantal belonging, as we had crafted it together. One of the most costly things was relinquishing this tenacious understanding of ‘family’ we had professed between us. We were ‘family’ for a time. We are no longer. Given my tenacious loyalty about ‘family,’ I still cringe when I acknowledge that poignant truth.

Another in my family has explored extending herself and her ‘family’ to include a quasi-adopted daughter. The others in the family, though they need not have, accompanied them both in this decision and welcomed this someone new as ‘family.’ At a time of a wedding, even the extended family of aunts, uncles,  and cousins welcomed this new ‘daughter’ into the fold as ‘family.’ Nothing legal, but a couple things formal, between those in attendance. This was a beautiful signal of extending the ‘tribe,’ I thought. This was ‘family’ at its best.

Until it wasn’t. Fundamental disagreement—by which I mean disagreement about the fundamental underpinnings of the relationship, like trust, intimacy, vulnerability, and more—now tears at the fabric of the ‘family’ welcome. The strongest link that had invited the young woman in no longer holds, at least in the same way. The rest of us are now perplexed about how to honor our loyalties to family. Are we ‘family’ or are we not? Does that change our behavior? Should it? And the quasi-mother struggles now against her own convictions, her sense of integrity, her need of health and more. What is the healthy course of action for her, when her ‘daughter’ transgresses in a way she finds untenable? As seen from the outside, here, she is bound by the archetypal frame of ‘motherhood’ whether she wants it anymore or not. Using the frame of ‘family’ has been costly, for all of us.

I’m of a mind that the experiments have been extraordinarily valuable, however. I have ultimately more respect for the archetypal ‘hold’ of ‘family of origin’ relationships than I ever used to—father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife. There is something completely unconscious but exacting about these relationships—these roles—such that any who venture into relational explorations, innovations, needs to respect them in compensatory ways. In ways beyond cognitive awareness or expectation.

In a similar vein, I have much more respect for the biological sway we bring to our closest relationships, a sway that will require tremendous over-compensation if we are to extend human awareness to lovingkindness—being kinfolk—across traditional-tribal boundaries in the future. What would the world be like if we really lived into the notion of a ‘human family’? A healthy family, I mean. One that functioned for the good of all, in provision of physical, emotional, spiritual needs, in growth of consciousness for deeper and deeper learning about who we are and who we can become in this gracious eco-system we call home? Is it even possible to consider a world that does not require some to lose for a few to win? Maybe not, but the biological impediments to such utopian ideas are, in and of themselves, huMONgous. The family tribal structure has existed for millions of years for good reason, not least of which is the survival of the fittest over sacrifice/demise of the unfit. Part of the learning here, in the end, is don’t mess with Mother Nature.

But mightn’t learning to be 'family' across non-traditional bonds increase our ability to steward our world, respecting Mother Nature and living in harmony with her? Mightn’t ‘messing with Mother Nature’ in this way be a path toward living in greater harmony with others, whomever they be?

In the big picture, I say yes, but in the interim, it feels so impossible. Growth of any kind is costly, but emotional-relational growth can be excruciating. To sustain family ties across non-family origins is requiring new thinking, new reacting, intentional compensation for biological-reactions toward greater goals of new-family-cohesion. Sheer acts of will, in other words, but acts for which health and new life must be the goals. Not any sense of ego-pride or regret for having chosen new family poorly, but health and new life. For my part, the path of new life and health required dissolution of covenantal belonging, dissolution of ‘family ties.’ For my dear family-member-by-marriage, confronting the archetypal power of the Mother-Daughter bond? Time will tell what brings new life for her, for them both in the crucible of growth.

Maybe experimenting with ‘family’ like this is one of the new, best vehicles for the development of greater human awareness, regardless of whether cohesion remains or not. Maybe decades from now, more of us will know how to welcome even more of us into healthy family functioning, even if just for a time. For me, for now, however, I’m done experimenting with the names-roles-category of family. I choose instead a broadly defined notion of companionship. We need not be family to share a family dinner, after all. We may share bread with any who come to our table, for as long as it’s healthy for them to remain there.