eden
14 May 2011 1 Comment
Sometimes, all these years later, I forget what I know and begin to think…or worse, to talk. This is seldom a good thing, this move from my heart to my head, especially it seems when my mouth intercedes. Rationality can never completely wrap itself around experience, and language can’t begin to express encounter. Thank god for the garden.
The garden is. Without need for explanation. Without words. Without violation or fear, right or wrong, heartache or headache. Though I suppose I know a few folks for whom this isn’t entirely true, it is for me a place to forget what I think and to simply know.
Take the way Beauty and Dirt hold hands, for instance, the way they need each other. Or the way Beauty lies down at the end of the day and lets itself be surrounded by the dark, drinking in its moisture-laden breath. The way my hands start out in gloves but lose themselves along the way to dirt’s appeal. The way I try again and earth forgives my foolishness. The way my heart delights in morning’s find.
The way.
Ideas of God get tripped up by the tongue. Perhaps it would be best if we followed suit of early authors of the divine when instinct advised them to describe It as a garden. I am in love with God the way I am with the garden– fearlessly, foolishly, forgivingly. I don’t care if none of it makes sense, if the phlox keeps coming up each year beneath the goldenrod though I dig it out each year, if sometimes every single mountain laurel dies and the bluebirds move to the neighbor’s box, I just want to lie down in it and breathe.
And you? who read this? I don’t care what you think. Tell me what you know!
lamb of god
13 May 2011 1 Comment
Angus Dei ~ Denise Levertov
Given that lambs are infant sheep, that sheep are afraid and foolish, and lack the means of self-protection, having neither rage nor claws, venom nor cunning, what then is this ‘Lamb of God’? This pretty creature, vigorous to nuzzle at milky dugs, woolbearer, bleater, leaper in air for delight of being, who finds in astonishment four legs to stand on, the grass all it knows of the world? With whom we would like to play, whom we’d lead with ribbons, but may not bring into our houses because it would soil the floor with its droppings? What terror lies concealed in strangest words, O lamb of God that taketh away the Sins of the World: an innocence smelling of ignorance, born in bloody snowdrifts, licked by forebearing dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together? God then, encompassing all things, is defenseless? Omnipotence has been tossed away, reduced to a wisp of damp wool? And we frightened, bored, wanting only to sleep till catastrophe has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us, wanting then to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony, we who in shamefaced private hope had looked to be plucked from fire and given a bliss we deserved for having imagined it. is it implied that we must protect this perversely weak animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings suppose there is milk to be found in us? Must hold to our icy hearts a shivering God? So be it. Come, rag of pungent quiverings, dim star. Let’s try if something human still can shield you, spark of remote light.
There are many who have a tough time understanding this poem,
or the way a holocaust victim falls in love with God,
or how the world makes sense.
I am not one of those.
Of course, this doesn’t make me better or wiser or stranger, any more than someone who understands and adores astrophysics, or music, or Sanskrit is better or wiser or stranger. It is simply my native tongue, some strange combination of the accident of my birth, the shape of my mouth, and the geography of my life.
I expect God-Love-Spirit-Mystery-Christ-Tao-Beauty-Wonder-Grace…. comes to each of us in a language that s/he can understand, according to his/her particular wounds and gifts, according to his/her time and place, and in accord with what s/he is here to learn or to be…..comes to each with images and understandings that heal and lead to a more full expression of who we are to be. In the end, I suppose it matters not what we come to understand (‘right belief’, as they say) but how that understanding transforms us into compassionate beings.
So here goes.
What if god is both completely all powerful, and at the same time utterly powerless? What if Love needs our nurture as much as we need Love’s? What if Life is both beautiful and ugly at once, in the very same moment, both tragic and joyous at once, both ‘all is well’ and at the same time ‘all is really screwed up’.
There was a time in my life when it seemed that all of the suffering and grief in my life came rushing over the crumbled dam that had kept it at bay (and me numb to it) for so many years. The onslaught of that pain was so intense that I could feel nothing but it, and as I looked around the landscape of life surrounding me, I saw nothing but more of the same suffering, tragedy, and despair. My personal accumulated griefs – an emotionally unavailable mother, a childhood sexual molestation, 3 dead babies, an emotionally controlling and sexually abusive spouse, a ‘man of the cloth’ who turned out to be a predator (he was not clergy, but pretended to be and I was so hungry for words of grace that I believed him), a divorce ( I begged on hands and knees to not be abandoned) that left me bankrupt (literally and figuratively) – a lifetime of amassed personal shames – came spilling out and almost drowned me. Divorce is a grief like no other – the way it opens one to every other pain and failure of one’s life, the way the stages of guilt and blame and bargaining are accentuated by rejection and failure. Disentangling my sense of self from what I had been told I was for so many years was nearly impossible.
I was in deep despair. The poetry I wrote at that time was desolate and littered with images of trauma. I could find nothing redeeming in life… save my children… and there was even a tiny but terrifying voice in me that said they’d be better off not having to experience life. I was living on the very edge of life for close to 2 years, choosing whether to stay or to go. For months I alternately lamented and raged at god, uttering and outering those outraged ‘whys’ , and ‘wheres’ and ‘hows’. Pastors and chaplains could offer little solace that didn’t leak right away through that crumbled wall. The questions I asked of life had no easy answers and it seemed the best they could do was to join me in the pain of my disillusion and devastation.
Somehow, in all my raging-at, God began coming to me. (Isn’t that how psalms of lament most often resolve?) One of my earliest experiences of Divine Empathy was a rainstorm, witnessed from the window of my hospital room, that felt anguished somehow, as if God too was lamenting over the terrible pain of the earth. I began to catch more and more glimpses of that Empathy — rolling down my car window along a country road to a dark woods of katydids echoing my heartbeat , lying on the ground-as-embrace to feel its breath in rhythm with my own, feeling something profound pass between my hand and the tree as it took on something of my pain, tiny tadpoles drawn to take in nourishment from something so insignificant and lowly as my dangling toes…
One night, alone in my room, at a time when I was perhaps closest to death, I felt such overwhelming and profound love that I knew there was something there, waiting for me to cross over, to take me back into its all-encompassing embrace, like that ocean the mystics speak of I suppose. My pain was so completely dissolved by those experiences of love-so-close-to-death that they were quite seductive. Yet at the same time, I clearly understood that if there was a love that profound behind it all then there must be something terribly meaningful about life, or else Love wouldn’t have been asked to come.
Following one particularly and intensely painful evening, I fell atop my bed in my street clothes, curled into a ball, sobbed and rocked myself to sleep. That night a light-filled cross came to rest over my bed, with a voice that told me over and again to gaze upon it, to be filled by it, to see how the light was streaming down the vertical aspect of it directly into the depths of my soul. The voice told me I would be filled like that with love, filled and filled, then instructed me to notice the horizontal pieces and how they were made of the same light/love, though less perfect. I was told that the love would overflow through those cross pieces. It was the filling that was important for me to understand and to allow. (realize that at the time of this dream, I thought of the cross only as an instrument of suffering, shame, and torture.. definitely not an image my subconscious would’ve cooked up as an image of love!… and myself as someone shamefully unworthy and completely undeserving of love ) When I woke in the morning and touched my feet to the floor, I wept again, this time because I wanted so to go back … back to that place of deep love.
After that, god began coming to me as lover, carrying me away like something clandestine. Sometimes there would be a physical response in me. (when these things started happening, I was so grateful to be pointed to the mystics by a wise mentor. not many in my world understood love mysticism like this). I was both confused and blessed by this response — confused at how such an experience of intimate pleasure could come spilling out of me intermixed with just-as-powerful sobs of release. It was as if every emotion in my body was somehow tied to another. I was equally surprised, but not surprised at all, that God would come to heal my wounded sexuality with such tender intimacy. I would awaken, wanting to cover my shame, only to be penetrated by a Loving gaze so intent that I had to acquiesce to what it said it beheld in me. One time in particular it hit me while on retreat. I had come a few days before the others and was exploring/preparing/praying. That particular day, alone, in the sanctuary of nature, away from the pain of humanity, I was filled with the joy and the freedom of love, a dancing-with-Life kind of energy. I’d rolled down some hills and had finally leapt out onto a large bolder over the water in the creek, where my arms flew instinctively upward as if to receive. Soon I was lying on the rock … being loved. When I came out of that, I noticed a congregation of cows who’d come curiously to crowd the opposite bank, staring intently at me. I like to think they were drawn to something that day…a light, an energy… that humans can’t detect.
All this time, I was in deep and constant conversation with god about life, about pain, about suffering. I was still crying out, ‘Why?!’ and ‘How long’ and ‘How could you?’, still finding life a terrible tragedy, at times still scarcely keeping the fire on the other side of the door at bay, frantically stuffing towels around the cracks. On the eve of the opening day of the group retreat, I built a blazing fire in one of the campfire circles up on the hill, I was burning it for all my sisters who’d been raped and beaten and abused, mutilated and used as weapons of war, for all the powerless and vulnerable children, victims of incest and torture, tossing the pages of that book, one by one into the fire. I raged and lamented. How god could create such a world, allow such atrocity?
As I, along with the fire, quieted, I become aware of two owls there in the dark with me, sounding a call and response, call and response, call and response, moving closer and closer to one another, until their calls at once became unison. There was no separation between the two. It was like the beauty of that moment when light meets dark and sets the sky ablaze. Again I found myself on my back being loved. After this particular intercourse, as my body was wracked with those strange sobbing tears of joy/pain, the experience of god putting god’s head on my chest was so terribly palpable. In that moment, suddenly I knew god needed my compassion… my compassion for god’s inability to make the world good as I wanted it to be. God was clearly asking for my forgiveness for a world… and a pain… spun out of control that god felt responsible for but could not fix. God was beseeching my tenderness and mercy.
Now, some would call this heresy – (does God need forgiveness? … but then again, which party does forgiveness heal?) – but this awakened me. Awakened me to a vulnerable god who needs me. This god, this beloved one of my heart and my soul, needed my compassion, my grace, my acceptance, and my help. Suddenly, I could stop blaming God for the pain of my world, and start loving God – for the pain of the world. This was the great release for me from seeing life as desolate, cruel and harsh to seeing it as something terribly tender in need of my nurture. I imagine this not so very different from Jesus’ impulse to utter ‘as you do to the least of these you do unto me’. This lover of mine was beseeching me to LOVE him. To love him in all of the places I saw ‘him’ in the world….in humanity, in nature, in the whole of life.
Soon after that retreat, I viewed the film, ‘The Thin Red Line’. If you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend it. Not your typical war film, the main character is having an ongoing conversation with god throughout. I recall the dialogue being something like ‘is this you too?’ I wept then too. This was shortly after 9/11 and suddenly I was having the same experience at home… walking into my bedroom, god needing me to take god into my arms at the end of a long day of beheadings, military torture, and Rwandan rapes. I became that place for god to come to be received without expectation or demand, without needing to be hero or scapegoat, just to be loved.
This was the next challenge in my journey, as it felt as if the Beloved One who came to me in all its vulnerability, led me time and time again to witnessing atrocity and trauma, and seemed to ask me, ‘Can you love me here?’ My deepest experience and intuition of this Beloved One, whom I call God, is that God is all there is, that all is an expression of God, and that God IS somehow in the atrocity, in the crucifixions, hidden in the darkness. This has been both my deepest knowing and my most profound challenge .
The interesting thing about god being hidden in the darkness, right in the midst of the darkness (it’s interesting to read the first chapter of John in this light) is that we, as expressions or reflections or images of God (or whatever one thinks of the human), are also hidden in the darkness, from ourselves. Perhaps we can’t really see our own face any more than we can see God’s. We are mysteriously dark creatures. Who knows what we are doing here? Maybe we only catch glimpse from time to time of our backsides.
This might seem like heresy too, but this vulnerable god taught me more about loving my fellow humanity, about loving life, about looking for love in life than any image of God as all powerful could’ve for me. and perhaps that is the secret of god’s power after all… god’s ability and/or willingness to be small, to be vulnerable, to be powerless, to be needy and hungry, to let humanity be its nurturer, to teach it how about love …it reveals a power that doesn’t need power. I think of Jesus as vulnerable infant, Jesus before Pontius palate. This reveals much to me about the nature of God.
By the time I met Etty Hillesum a few years later, I knew I’d found my sister, my soul mate. by this time I’d grown to find a terrible and tender beauty in the whole tragic mess of life and I’d also come to know it all…. the good, bad and the ugly… as god, my beloved One. Along comes Etty, holocaust victim, in the midst of her own transformation during atrocity, finding god in the midst of it all, and knowing that ‘god is safe in our hands’. I remember that during the retreat in which I met Etty, I kept seeing a crown of thorns in the photo on the wall. I’d turn my head and it would be a basket of flowers. Of course, they were the same. During that same retreat, I read the inscription in the cemetery, ‘all who eat this bread and drink this cup shall have eternal life’, in a brand new way… of course, we all eat the bread of life and drink the cup of suffering while journeying here. We are all partaking of eternal life.
For me, this powerless One is a power that empowers. It empowers humanity to take the responsibility of loving into its own heart, and empowers the human soul to grow. For me, it’s not so much about fixing the world’s (or my own!) problems, but about loving in the midst of them. I am asked to love this One I love right in the midst of humanity’s suffering, which I think makes me a better person, a more loving person. A god who needs me to be god’s feet, hands, heart, eyes, ears, arms, inspires me to love. A god who needs me to co-create with…. through our love-making….needs a human being to catch the seed in its womb, to give birth and nurture that which has yet to be born in this place…. person, idea, beauty, or song.
Mutuality and reciprocality with my god, empowers me, lifts me up from ‘done-to’ to ‘doer of’. That is good for my soul… for one such as me who once was powerless and believed herself to be shamefully unworthy.
To bring it all back around to the beginning again, isn’t it amazing how powerful god is, to speak to me in a way that I can hear? To do that for me? And that’s how it works for me that I can allow for others to hear and see god so differently than me. To see God as all-powerful, or isness, or energy, or fire. in a paradoxical way, I can let go of my need for other’s to understand this same God as me precisely because I trust so implicitly in god, am so terribly smitten by God, believe so much in God’s power, I suppose some would say. It’s all God’s doing to me, no matter what language is spoken, and God doesn’t need me at all to pin God down into one adequate descriptor.
All is well,
vicki
mourning the violence
03 May 2011 1 Comment
It has been said that the basic, primeval religious impulse in human beings stems from the universal reality that in order for us to survive, something else must die. Something inherently good in us struggles with the great tragedy in that truth, even as every day this great sorrow of life plays out again and again. We cannot escape it, even if we consciously choose with great care what we eat, where we trod, how we persist. The cycles and circles of life itself depend on it.
I suppose this dual need-and-fear of death has been the crux of the human predicament, the source of both its anxiety and its great sorrow, since we became human. Yet what causes me even greater sorrow this day is the taking of life without sorrow. Worse yet, the taking of life with celebration. This troubles me greatly, and makes me question if what I have thought makes us inherently human is indeed so.
It seems to me that we, as humans, most humanely handle the harsh reality of death as essential for life, when death—the death of anything — is taken seriously, with solemnity and great weight. Our ‘primitive’ ancestors developed intricate rituals in order that this remembrance to honor the sanctity and dignity of life might occur. I have read, for instance, that in cultures where animals had to be killed slowly, by poison, due to the lack of natural resources that might make more efficient and powerful weapons, a hunter was made to remain with his prey over days in empathy as it passed through the throes of death. This, to not take its suffering lightly, or to make its killing too painless for the hunter.
I imagine this reality is the impetus behind sacred laws of all sorts…. the ten commandments, the 5 precepts, the golden rule…. to keep us grounded in a place of respect and compassion for life. I have believed that we don’t proclaim and follow these edicts… to love, to show mercy, to forgive… simply because some outside authority commands it of us, but because they rise from within as expressions of who we are, of what it means to be innately human.
Today we have watered down our rituals, with perfunctory blessings before meals at best, and whitewashed and separated ourselves from the sacred passages into and out of life by removing them from our homes and institutionalizing them. We don’t witness our food being grown or hunted, our babies being born, or our grandmothers dying. Many don’t consider at all the sanctity of the life they inhabit or consume. We are both removed from the violence inherent in our survival, and from the reverence for life such a knowing imbues.
At the same time, as a culture, we celebrate killing as redemptive vengeance, as retributive rather than remorseful. Our Hollywood films depict such an assault on the senses that they are easily identified by their fierce intensity in a lineup of world films. We use the language of warfare with our bodies… battle of the bulge or war on cancer… our politics, and our sports, and construct those metaphors so that there are not just winners and losers, but victors and victims. I cannot know if this is a cause or a symptom, but it is as if we have forgotten the language of reverence and dignity, know no other way to reflect and respond, and in our forgetfulness to regularly remind ourselves of reverence for life, through our culture, language, and ritual, I believe we drift far from who we are. And yet, there must be something still alive beneath the rubble.
Last night, while reading quietly, my husband watching his favorite team on national TV, my son texted me that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Soon thereafter, the news spread through the crowd in the stadium, too. At a time and place where I felt the need for a solemn moment of silence, to reflect upon and adjust to the gravity of what I had learned, the enormity of the long tragedy of death upon death, a victorious, celebratory chant ‘U.S.A’ erupted instead. As my husband flipped through the channels to land upon one celebration-riot after another, though I tried to ignore the noise, I felt the same sickness in my stomach and need to ‘shut out’ the sounds of violence that I do when I overhear a violent scene in a movie he has landed upon in his surfing. Even from another room, the sounds of violence assault, causing my stomach to tense and to turn.
Ironically, last night’s 60 minutes, aired just hours before our own celebrations at Bin Laden’s demise began, included an interview with Lara Logan, the woman reporter who was so savagely raped at such a celebration-riot in Egypt, when another regime was toppled. She was targeted by her assailants because she was a symbol; though in this instance a completely innocent one, she was someone to focus and take out their pent-up and bestial rage upon. At the same time, there seems to have been something completely unfocused about it, as if her assailants were swept into the mindless fury of violence by the mob. I think a more accurate adjective for the fury might be ‘soul-less’, for I both wonder and lament where the soul of the precious human has fled, or been buried, to permit the body to partake in such atrocity. And where has its humanity fled, with its basic impulse for the sacredness of life? I have read that some of our own celebration-riots last night and today have also led to destruction and injury. Somehow violence seems to beget violence. It feels utterly barbaric to me.
There is something so wholly distasteful and dis-easeful to me about a response to death that includes celebration, and I wonder about this bodily response in me. Since ancient times, the bowels have been identified as the seat of our emotional and moral impulses, and of compassion…. an internal compass of sorts. We say we are sickened when we hear of atrocities, or that something ‘leaves a bad taste’ in our mouths. We vomit to cleanse ourselves after trauma. We intuit the truth in our gut. Could it come from that basic connection between our stomachs and our survival, a survival that necessitates that violence be balanced with reverence? And when the sanctity of life is dishonorably sacrificed our stomachs remind us, when our language, our rituals, our culture, and our minds fall short.
In the meantime, my brain is rigorously trying to understand the celebratory and reveling response I have witnessed in my fellow human beings, to find empathy for it, so as not to add to the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ targeting, and so that I don’t simply project my own insensitivity onto yet another human being, labeling him as the ‘bad guy’. At the same time, are we not called to summon forth the inherent decency in our fellow human being? I so wish Obama had led his country in this way on Sunday evening, reminding it of the grave seriousness of this moment, and counseling the nation to behave with dignity.
I understand that this man was a mass murderer, who committed great atrocities, and who harbored and harvested much hatred. I understand that he instilled terror in the hearts of many people. I do not minimize the very real and terrible suffering he has contributed to this world. And so I do understand on some level the relief of anxiety. If my tent was being circled each night by a rabid predator and I feared for my infant’s life, I can imagine the relief I would feel at its demise. If my child had been killed, perhaps I would even find great satisfaction in the killing. Perhaps I would fall on my knees in gratitude and praise to my rescuer—human or divine – and as my fear lifted, make room for great tears of joy to erupt. Relief sometimes looks like joy, I suspect.
But I would hope that something human in me would be sobered and pull me back to reverence and mercy over the body of the victim, to at least stop me short of spitting or gloating at its demise. But I cannot be certain of that, can I? That which is in one is in all of us, and I certainly am above no one. Pushed to the limit, would I also succumb to such rage-filled vengeance and gloating? I certainly have felt something of that rage in me, when I perceived that my children were being threatened. It rose in me seemingly instinctual and inexorable -shocking me at my inability to contain it -to land upon an innocent bystander. It was shortly after that my grief at what was occurring poured out.
I understand that many person’s emotions were manipulated in order to create the state of frenzy I witnessed last evening, as well as the frenzy that has allowed humanity to commit countless other atrocities. We have been so woefully conditioned as a people on so many levels. So perhaps this might help me to understand the events of the past day. The stories of our lives, and the stories imparted that inflate our anxiety and fear, both real and imagined, create in us a great well of emotional energy that overflows like a volcano given a point of release. Was last night’s celebratory wave an expression of cathartic release of oppression and pain? Was it cathartic for those men in Egypt when the same celebratory-rage was expressed against Lara Logan? In both cases, I think not. This celebratory response is a hate-filled frenzy of another sort, a mindless fanaticism, not unlike the one we have feared and denounced in the other, but deny in ourselves. Some persons seem drawn to the frenzy as to a wild party.
Perhaps, we would do better in times such as these to look at our pain, to mourn the string of violence that caused it, to let ourselves be greatly, and deeply saddened by it……..and then to learn from our sorrow. This great sorrow of life, which tells us in our gut that there is something inherently tragic about the killing of things in order for us to survive, points us to the knowing that there is something even more tragic about celebrating that violence. May that kind of sorrow call forth our deepest humanity.
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