This time of year is hard on us in many ways. To the regular stress of making a living and dealing with the challenges of life we add some sky-high expectations of peak experiences that make Norman Rockwell look like a piker. What to eat, what to wear, who to give to, how much etc. We stress over eating and drinking too much. Dire warnings issue from newsrooms if we consumers don't get out there and bust through some target numbers to show that our economy is not going into the toilet. I can get caught up in that most durable of illusions that this product or that product will absolutely, positively make me happy -- until it doesn't. Gautama Buddha said the root of all our suffering is desire -- meaning craving, the illusion that we must have something to feel happy. Jesus spoke of the kind of treasure to have that doesn't decay. We forget such wisdom too easily. Many clients I've had over the years can't wait for the holidays to be over so they can go back to a more manageable level of stress and pressure.
The best holiday celebrations I've ever experienced usually have involved people I love, in a setting that allows for some conversation, and often some rituals, religious or secular, that remind me of what we are actually celebrating. The final credits of the movie "Love, Actually" are enhanced by a flurry of real airport reunions and homecomings, another great aspect of holidays -- people coming from far and near to connect with each other. Just catching up with each other is a great ritual -- to talk and to listen can be so healing in a life where anxious aloneness all too often feels like the norm.
A Jewish friend reminded me recently that her best appreciation of Christmas came when she spent the season in Naples and Rome. Her experience was that the people of those great cities enjoyed family meals and some religious services as the heart of the holiday, with a few small gifts, especially for the children. The famous nativity figures made in Naples were all over that city during the season, depicting not only the familiar cast of characters in Bethlehem but also hundreds of folk characters, laborers, artisans, ordinary people from a bygone age, reminding people that the Good News was for everybody. People love the famous Rockefeller Center tree in New York City, but there's a less famous tree in the Metropolitan Museum of Art called the "angel tree." Those same Neopolitan folk figurines surround a towering tree with ranks of beautifully rendered angels descending to an earthy scene of people working and laughing and living life -- and in their midst a rude stable where a Babe is born and honored.
Quiet music fills the big hall and the museum-goers seem to naturally slow down and get a little quiet as they admire the beautiful scene .
May your holidays be filled with some quiet beauty, some loving family and friends, a good meal or two, and perhaps a few moments to recall things you're grateful for. If there's a lonely person you can visit or call, or a family in need you can reach out to, or a military member overseas you can contact, this is a great season to get out of oneself and let someone know that they're cared for. That will make the season brighter for them and for you. Happy holidays.
Once again this morning, I walked the half mile up to the monastery, this time by myself. My retreat brothers and sisters, perhaps saner than me, opted for warm beds. It was a cold pre-dawn darkness, but once again there was a soft light from the half-moon still risen in the southern sky. Sounds just out of recognition filled the woods on either side of the gravel road and I added the sound of my breath and my boots crunching with each step. And just as the two mornings before, the priory bell rang through the darkness to announce that day's prayer.
I arrived at the chapel with the skin on my face refreshed by the cold air of the walk. The only other people in the chapel were two women up from Massachusetts we had met the evening before. The brothers came in randomly over the next few minutes. This morning the Sunday service of morning prayer began with Brother Alvaro lighting a taper in the rear of the chapel and bringing the light forward to several candles -- it was reminiscent of the Easter Vigil light ritual. This morning, we sang to Christ, light of our hearts and sign of God's love. The psalms flowed back and forth in easy chant.
The Gospel for this Sunday was the familiar, awful parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25). "When did we see you hungry, naked......." the people ask and Jesus gives that most touching of responses: "Whatsoever you do to the least (the weakest and most "unimportant") of my brothers and sisters, you do to me." In a world of 99% and 1% class and economic divides, here's a reminder that God is not about effete abstraction, but about standing for the poorest and most undefended among us. And that makes us family with each human being.
These brothers of Saint Benedict are an intentional community of commitment and choice, an alternative kind of family. If "friends are the family we choose," this particular family has chosen to live a life up in these woods that is steady, modest and full of meaning. They are "perfectly imperfect" men whose witness to the gospel call is genuine and compelling enough to bring visitors and fellow pilgrims like us to share, very briefly, in their lives of faith and worship. They remind us all of what's important in a way that's not fussy or so strange that we can't see ourselves in them. I return to my own family blessed and strengthened by theirs. And I'm grateful.
Once again this second morning in Vermont I walked out before dawn. Another man on the retreat joined me, and the two of us walked through the cold and dark. The light of the stars and a half moon created a wonderful soft light as we walked up the country road, woods on either side, with the gravel crunching under our feet. Once again, the sound of a bell flowed through the darkness, sounding the call to morning prayer.
The monks at whose priory we stay when on retreat sound that bell several times each day, all the year round. Whether or not outsiders come, and they usually do, these brothers of Benedict gather to sing and pray the ancient psalms and listen to the Word. Why? What might they be teaching us?
We met yesterday with two of the brothers. Our group's custom has been to determine a serious question we have about life and living, and then ask for any wisdom or insight the brothers might have. This year's question went something like this: how can I come to accept my dark side and so be more able to connect with others who may be hurting? How can my failings and imperfections actually draw me closer to others? It's a great question, and the two older brothers who gave us an hour of their time certainly rose to it. One brother (I swear he has "merry" eyes!) has always struck me as having something to say worth hearing, and he didn't disappoint this time, either.
The brother said that whenever he experienced conflict and division with his fellows, he liked to remember to go back to beginnings...... by that he meant the "why" of the relationship. He observed that each of us first experiences connection by feeling the heartbeat of our mother right in the womb -- not a word, but an experience of connection, physically felt. When he is in conflict with a brother monk, he told us he remembers the original commitment they made to each other -- to be brothers in the service of their spiritual calling. That's a beginning remembered, and helps sort things out. Not a bad standard.
What are the beginnings in my relationships? What do I need to remember? Most importantly I remember the choice of my wife (and hers of me); the choice to be a parent; my choice of profession as counselor, teacher and writer; and my choice of a spiritual path. All these beginnings remind me of what's important. If I've given my word to do or be something, that's a beginning that needs to be affirmed when life frays and sometimes tears like worn fabric.
What those Benedictine brothers stand for as they return to that chapel several times a day seems clear: connection, community and purposive commitment all matter and are worth celebrating. So it's also worth a cold morning's walk to witness and briefly join them in their way of choosing life and mending what's frayed.
As I write this, I'm on my third annual "conscious contact" retreat of folks in recovery at the beautiful eastern Vermont location of the Weston Priory. We're in the Green Mountains and out beyond my window at the desk where I write this is a small mountain (a 'monticello!"), getting clearer to my sight and more defined as the morning light rises. The clouds, just a few minutes ago mauve in the dawn light, are now an array of grays and beiges and whites. They scud across the little mountain top, pushed from the north as they journey to unknown parts south.
It was just over a year ago that I began this blog at this same desk, looking at this same mountain and the surrounding woods. It's been a momentous year in part because I nearly lost my life to a virulent staph infection. But it's also been a year of blessings, especially in the people who rallied around my wife and me, Just as I wrote that sentence, I looked up and saw an immense cloud, bathed in sharp, pink light, move across the mountain top. It was followed by outlier clouds, russet and violet against a deepening blue sky. The trees at this time of morning take on tones of white and gray and green, and the whole scene changes from moment to moment. It's dynamic, powerful and peaceful all at once. The fullness of it all is surely a metaphor.
The morning began before dawn, just a couple of hours ago. A few of us walked up the road towards the priory, a collection of buildings that recall a Vermont farm, but with a difference. Halfway up the wooded country road, bells rang out through the darkness, calling the monks and any willing lay folk like ourselves to the ancient morning prayer of the Church. In a few minutes, we arrived and entered the chapel which was mostly in darkness. The chapel looks and feels a bit like a Zendo, but with the flickering light of a eucharistic chapel off to the right. The prayer begins with a rainstick, drums and the light of a few candles, then proceeds to sung psalms, readings and prayer. "Let the heedless get the trouble they need!" went one sharp petition.
The darkness dispelled by low light, an ancient language (Greek in the Kyrie) and the drum recall another sacred space I am privileged to attend regularly, a sweat ceremony on the land of the Shinnecock nation not far from where we live. In that ceremony, two medicine people, Shinnecock and Kiowah, respectively, lead the people in prayer, chant and ritual actions, much of which is in the ancient language of the Lakota nation. At the priory we sang the ancient words, "In the shadow of your wings, my heart rejoices." In the sweat lodge there comes a moment where people experience the sensation of eagle wings circling inside the lodge -- a contact the Creator grants as a gift to the men and women struggling in the intense heat to pray more open-heartedly. As the heat rises from the "Grandfathers," the stones glowing red from the fire in which they lay for a few hours, the people in the circle of the lodge cry out, "Pity, me - pity me!" hoping for help in enduring the heat for the sake of their prayers. No such endurance is called for by the chapel-goers, except perhaps the struggle to stay awake at this hour of the morning.
A little over an hour later, writing at this desk, the sun has come up a ways, with the ridges and valleys becoming clearer and more defined in the beautiful cold sunshine. I think of the two spaces, chapel and sweat lodge, and how they connect and complement each other in my life. I feel blessed to share in the experience of each one. "Kyrie elieson (Lord, have mercy!)" and "Mitakuye oyassin (All my relations!)" join in my heart and make me full.
My aunt Edna Finnerty Kelliher died last week at the age of 93. She was bright, funny, smart and outspoken, but almost never unkind. She was a wife (widowed from her beloved Neil). She was a mother to three children, the youngest of whom, Paul, died all too young. She was a sister, cousin, aunt (I want to add the word "favorite" almost automatically) and, by all accounts at the wake and funeral, a very great friend to many. She had that quality of ordinary courage that really is extraordinary. Years ago, whenever my sister and I heard she and Uncle Neil at the front door of our flat in Brookline, we were delighted because we knew we were going to laugh. Edna was a mighty presence on the earth and she will be greatly missed.
My wife, Nancy, observed that in Edna's passing, I was losing a significant part of my history, and that's true, I thought, as far as it goes. . What's also true, I found over the past few days, is that one can connect with that history in some powerful ways. Let me explain.
We stayed as we usually do in the apartment of my sister Betsey. She just moved into a new apartment in Weymouth with a great view and very comfortable layout. Her apartment sits on a peninsula that includes Webb State Park, with many wonderful view of greater Boston and the many islands of Boston Harbor. Thousands of years ago, various indigenous groups fished and gardened and hunted on the shores and islands of this harbor. When the Europeans came, followed soon by Africans and other citizens of the world, they displaced those people with great force and terrible things like infectious diseases against which they had little defense. Africans brought to these shores were mostly brought in servitude and slavery in the early years. Wave upon wave of immigrants made and remade Boston at least a little in their own image. Boston is a very American city and region, with "here comes everybody" an apt regional slogan, with millions of stories of hope and heartbreak, courage, venality, resounding success for many and grinding injustice for some. In other words, life.
All that history pushed in on my consciousness as I walked Webb Park in the mornings. Later in the weekend, as I drove through Milton and Brookline, the towns of my childhood, a more personal set of memories intruded, clamoring inside my head for attention and respect. The streets and fields where I played as a kid were mostly still there, and I flashed back on walking and bicycle riding, the latter an amazing experience of freedom and competence once I mastered my J.C.Higgins Special. The funeral home was directly across the street from the Brookline Public Library, a shrine and a refuge for me when I was young. Edna was buried from the church, St. Mary's of the Assumption, in which I was baptized and received First Communion. Part of my spiritual consciousness was shaped by that building and its leaders -- including my eight year old rebellion against them telling me that our Presbyterian neighbors across the street weren't going to go to heaven: didn't buy it then, don't buy it now.
As we made our way in the funeral procession to St. Joseph's Cemetary, we passed by so many of the spots that defined my childhood, Everett Morgan's drug store, the reservoir, St. Lawrence's Church, Chesnut Hill. Thousands of headstones with mainly Irish surnames dominated the cemetary, with Edna laid to rest just a little ways from my maternal grandparents' graves, not far from my paternal grandparents and the grave of my father. All that history on a sunny fall morning. Finally, we ended up at a golf course clubhouse for the funeral luncheon -- back in my day a municipal course I had caddied when I was 10 years old.
Blessed Yogi Berra supposedly said "nostalgia ain't what it used to be." I don't know -- it felt pretty good reliving at least many of those times in those familiar Boston settings. Some day, hopefully not for a great while, my poor remains will go on a similar journey, perhaps on the very same streets. Until that day, I celebrate the ancestors and forebears, related by family and related by common humanity. And I celebrate the current generations working hard to make a living and to make life. We're all of us in a mighty flow.
I had lashed our kayaks down just before the hurricaine last month, so I hadn't had a chance to get out on the water for over a month. Yesterday's holiday and blessed reprise of summer-like weather gave me an opening to bring my boat out and I decided to take advantage of it.
When we're at home, deciding to kayak is a semi-big deal. I have to haul equipment out of the basement, install the rack on my car, lift the kayak onto the rack and tie that down for the car trip to the water. The kayak is almost eighteen feet long and is an awkward sixty pounds whose weight is tricky to manage because it can shift all too easily in the loading, travel and unloading. Murphy's Law fully applies and usually kicks in.
Putting the kayak rack securely on to the car is one of those groaner chores that I can try to skimp on, but end up inevitably paying the price for if I do skimp. Fine finger-eye coordination and hand strength combined do not make my skill-set list, so getting the Thule rack fit to receive my boat tests my patience and my ability to defer gratification, neither of which qualities I have in any abundance.
Suffice it to say, I managed to load up the kayak and make the fifteen minute journey to the Scallop Pond waterways in the woods and wetlands along Peconic Bay. Stepping out of the car, I was immediately struck by the sunshine and warmth, the clear and fragrant air, and the medium strong colors of early fall -- the green grasses going sere and golden, a few russet leaves and the diamond sparkles on the water.
I reversed the loading process and managed to get the boat down off my car roof without hurting me or the kayak, no easy feat. I put on my spray skirt and PFD (personal flotation device) and stuck my cell phone in a waterproof holder I hung around my neck, got into the boat and pushed off.
Sometimes I am so stressed and hungry for a workout that I paddle hard without interruption for a half hour or more. Not this day. I kept stopping and gliding, listening, looking, smelling and feeling the air around me as the sun warmed up the morning. I listened to birds and insects constantly sound their various signature noises. I watched the even ripple lines my boat carved as I paddled forward. I smelled the salt tang in the air and the marsh aroma, redolent with life. I saw lots of birds and crabs and fish, big and small. A flock of wild turkeys patrolled the marshlands, aware of me but not unduly agitated by the glide of my boat thirty feet from their foray in the grass. Several times during the two hour paddle, beautiful small bright yellow moths buzzed my head. And six cormorants set up a picket line on separate navigation buoys, carefully following my progress and ready to blast away if I came too close.
I was tired at the end of the two hour paddle (and grateful I could do that much after my illness earlier this year), so I got careless in reloading the boat onto the top of the car. Predictably, with the iron laws of gravity and Murphy combining in perfect coherence, I almost lost the boat off the car driving on the highway. So I had to stop and resecure the kayak with a great deal of effort and some extra twine fore and aft. Home safe, I reversed the process of earlier in the day and put everything away. Whew.
The lessons and gifts of the day are many. Time spent in readying things for safe transport is time well spent -- shortcuts can be costly. Beautiful early fall days are fleeting and need to be grabbed and experienced before they give way to gray, cold winter days. Colors and movement and aromas on a day like I had on the water are occasions for prayers of gratitude, of course, but also opportunities to just be aware and take it all in. To be one being in such a wide canvas of creatures feels like a blessing, and that mends the frayed ends of my over-stressed nerves. It was a good day to be alive.
Here on Long Island, we're still getting the edges of a pesky low that has unsettled our weather all week. Looking up the neighboring yard, I just saw a brief, beautiful little sun shower that made the grass brilliant and glossy. More often this week, it's been gloomy or humid or rainy. One break this weekend was a drop in temperature, so the nights have been great for sleeping under a blanket or two, and we even had a fire Sunday evening, the first of the season.
When I walked out at 6:00 this morning, it was cool and still early dawn, with just the edges of light. I was walking alone, so I had my i-Pod Nano on shuffle to make the walk easier. The mix was unusual, like my eclectic taste in music. Bob Dylan, The Christ Church Choir of Cambridge University, Aretha Franklin, Mumford & Sons, etc. I love the surprises of the shuffle, particularly when the tune has a beat that picks up my step -- this morning a couple of pieces featuring the Irish skin drum, the bodhran, really worked for me. Johnny "Ringo" McDonagh of Arcady had a sure and insistent hand on the beater that made me walk stronger and almost feel like I was dancing a good quick reel.
The clouds in the building light of the dawn were at first pale silver, and then became almost mauve in the first color the as yet unrisen sun provided. "How can I keep from singing?" goes the old hymn. How, indeed. It's easy to feel gratitude and expansiveness and connection on such a morning. The poets and psalmists of all the traditions have variations on moments like this, with all of creation "glorifying" the Maker. I think the experience they're reflecting is one of wonder, joy and awe at such a beautiful moment -- and gratitude seems the most natural of emotions.
(
Excerpted from a talk given for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork, Bridgehampton NY, Sept. 25, 2011)
Several years reflecting on my work with trauma survivors taught me that the same God I believed in before the trauma would not survive the trauma. My own "dark night of the soul" [a life threatening illness] led me to a less certain, but deeper experience.... I came to know in my bones that sometimes the best thing to say about God is no-thing -- silence about God is sometimes the most eloquent word.
But words can also touch us and feel true....the words that come to mind to describe that experience are ones like mystery, connection, light in darkness, strength, power, hope, peace, friend and, of course, love. They're the old words certainly, but they're brand new when they're filtered through experiences like sickness, dying, losing a loved one or the shock of divorce. Those experiences make us feel like grown ups, and those old words take on a new and deeper meaning....
I look to people like veterans, cops, firefighters, medics, cancer survivors and Alzheimers caregivers to catch the faint signals that love is deeper than hate and despair, that hope is not stupid, or that while we can be beasts at times, we can also be sisters and brothers. Maybe I can't mend your body, but I can help mend your heart on the hard days and you can do the same for me....
....a few weeks ago after Hurricaine Irene passed, we went down to the ocean in Southampton and saw the mighty churning of the waves as the remnant winds roiled those waters. Another time, years ago I stood as close as I dared to the edge of Niagra Falls as those waters poured over the edge of the Falls. When I'm looking across a flooding river or I'm close by a surging ocean, I can hold on to hope. There is a Bridge. Raising my arms in thanks, even when it hurts, there is a Bridge. Looking deep inside my own broken heart, there is a Bridge. And maybe the most astonishing truth out of this darkness and pain....? The fact that you and I are that Bridge for each other. My look for what's godly in this life finds a good start there....
(cf. Aretha Franklin Live at the Fillmore West on iTunes for her version of "Bridge over Troubled Waters")
The best job I've ever had was the 3 and 1/2 year therapist position I held with the counseling services unit of the Fire Department of the City of New York. What made the job so great was certainly some wonderful colleagues. There was also that incredible spirit that happens when people pull together after a disaster. But more than those things, it was "the guys." I did see some female EMS workers and officers, but the overwhelming majority of my clients were men.
For a firefighter to even come to counseling was unprecendented. Previously the counseling unit was primarily engaged in helping people with drinking problems. Now it had to cope with the single largest one day loss of life of any service other than the military. 343 members died that day. To say it was devastating to these men is severe understatement. As I came to learn, the brotherhood of the FDNY was held together by years of tradition and experience. Each of its officers, including its chiefs, came up through the ranks. Those ranks, right up through a number of chiefs, were decimated that terrible day. The grief felt thick and heavy. So many firehouse lockers empty. So many widows and kids left behind. So many hurting.
The first few weeks on the job threatened to shock and dismay me. Story after story was told to me of unspeakable sights and wrenching losses. I'd drive home feeling empty and overwhelmed, questioning if I was up to really helping these people or had much to offer them. Then I experienced something I count as a grace..... I began to connect with these men. Many of them shared my ethnic and religious background. They seemed to get it that I had immense respect for them and what they did. I didn't talk down to them (how could I?) or judge them or pretend I knew exactly what they were going through. The respect and compassion I felt didn't have to be forced. What a privilege and an honor it seemed to me to walk with these guys through their dark days and be able to sometimes ease their journey.
The take-away from this for me is a name I would offer for the experience we term "God." That name is connection, or to give it a more active note, connecting. Some of the proudest and most grateful moments I've ever felt was to have one of these firefighters or EMS workers leave the office after a session, visibly relieved, often saying something like, "Thanks. I feel better." That's the closest I may ever get to feeling like I was a channel for Higher Power to help heal someone. In the connection is the healing, I say. The magic, the power, the "juice" of those healing encounters is to me an experience of God. In this light, God is what connects us, allows us to be connecting. Can you think of a better embodiment of Love?
Just before I became ill earlier this year, I began a series with the above title. I'm on the mostly mended side of that illness and want to pick up the theme again.
I start with a silly story. A jaded westerner finds himself in the Himalayan mountains on the trail of a world famous hermit guru. After much struggle and suffering, the traveller reaches the cliffside cave of the wise guru where he is welcomed and made to feel at home. After taking some refreshment and resting from his arduous journey, he asks the old man the question he's harbored in his heart for years, "What is the meaning of life, O wise one?" The hermit pauses, and ponders, and finally answers, "Why, that is easy, my son......the meaning of life is this: life is a bowl of banana pudding!" The westerner finds himself agitated, and then angry at the apparently flippant answer given by the guru. "That ridiculous!" he shouts and proceeds to heap insults on the old man for his folly. The guru looks bewildered and hurt by the pilgrim's response. Then he says, "So maybe it's tapioca?"
Banana or tapioca? God or Darwin? Mother Theresa or Kim Kardashian? We live at a time when the very idea of God (and what it might mean to follow God) has come under fire. Perhaps more seriously, the idea of God has become simply irrelevant to many people. Even among nominal believers, old certitudes about God seem gutted, without the weight and heft they had for the generations just past. Religious themes that used to dominate much of western culture and society have been crowded out or marginalized by things like celebrity "news", masses of data of all kinds and too many distractions.
Some people deal with this massive shift in religious attitudes by hardening their positions. A good many religious folks adopt the fundamentalist impulse; in a time of uncertainty and moral drift, having answers that are black and white brings such believers clarity, comfort and inner assurance. A similar position, I maintain, would be that of militant scientism, wherein people tend to see "scientific" method and perspective as having absolutely all the answers to life's questions. Neither position satisfies me intellectually or spiritually.
What makes sense to me these days is a deep conviction that when I say "God" I'm affirming not only "a" truth, but the very condition necessary for there to be truth in any meaningful sense of the word. What's real, or bedrock in our pictures of reality? Theologians and philosophers have suggested the best answer is mystery. By that they don't imply an unsolved puzzle, but instead something so deep and unfathomable that no word or concept could hope to do it justice. The best thing one could say about God? No-thing at all. No thing, but rather the ground of all being, as Paul Tillich termed it (drawing on centuries of thought and intellectual/spiritual humility).
Our disappointed pilgrim in the silly story still deserves a better answer than the guru gave him. As we'll see in some future entries, there are some interesting and thoughtful possibilities that might satisfy him much more.
Some conceptual teasers: the sacred; source; creator/creative force; love; the deepest energy; connection; power; spirit; truth and/or the foundation of truth. What's your best synonym or metaphor for God?
It's been over a month and a half since I last posted a blog. What happened to me was a predictable but nevertheless unexpected depression in response to my life-threatening experience with staph. It's very humbling if not embarrassing for me to admit that, but one of the signs of depression is a low energy level, a falling off of interest in things that "normally" engage us. Life just feels flat, and we function minimally if we're able to function at all. My wife said I just seemed to lack the joy and energy she's come to expect of me.
Not to "should" on myself, but I had been warned that my recovery would be slow and mixed, two steps forward, one step back typically. I had sort of accepted that on the physical level, but implicitly behaved as if my psyche and spirit were immune from such bounces. I had even been told by some wise medical people that such a mixed process was part of the healing itself, a way our complex organism regroups and fixes itself. The old maxim that "everything happens for a reason," seems to me in this case to express the truth that the body and its mechanisms have a wisdom we would do well to heed. In the world's wisdom traditions, acceptance of what is (vs. what I would want) has often been held up as spiritually and psychologically sound.
The gift and potential lesson in all this is to question my assumption that straight line recovery is the norm. Let me give an example from the past several weeks. If you know me, you know I love music of many kinds, rock, jazz, folk, choral, classical etc. Mostly I stopped listening to music in the past several weeks, and when I did listen it was with no great feel or transport into a positive mood. Did I think I should be different? That could be arrogance that "I'm the boss of me!" The reality, I think, is that I'm not in lots of important ways. My depressed mood seems to correspond to a time of evident physical healing -- I really have gotten physically much better -- perhaps I needed to slow down, to rest . If I had been less depressed, maybe I would have charged into too much activity than was good for my healing. Looking back, the depression allowed me to care for myself in ways that I probably wouldn't have had I been my usual frenetic self.
"All will be well. And all will be well. And, all manner of things will be well." 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich was given these words by her Lord in a vision at her writing desk. The message has comforted countless people that a power greater than themselves has things in hand, that life can ultimately be trusted despite contrary evidence. Can I be grateful for my depression? Apparently.
Last posting, I wrote about my illness and the trauma associated with it -- the real conviction that I was going to die or be permanently disabled. I said I mainly wanted to speak of the spiritual side of the experience. To do that, I recalled that two of the main convictions that I've come to based on my counseling many trauma survivors: trauma is a spiritual wound and requires a spiritual healing; and the second, the same God a person has before the trauma is not likely to survive the trauma.
The first idea is based on the clear experience that trauma removes the sense of safety and relative predictability that life affords, at least as we go about our daily living. A good Buddhist or Hindu might chide us for being naive in such an unpredictable world, but my experience of people before and after any severe trauma is that we (Westerners, at least) all pretty much think the world is generally safe and that what we expect of life will pretty much be the story. Our mental health is unconsciously dependent on these assumptions. Imagine those being ripped out of you. That's certainly what I experienced, especially in those lonely sleepless nights in the hospital. In those moments, there was no safety for me - I felt so helpless I couldn't sleep for fear of not waking up. To make an obvious point, such feelings hit us at the deepest or spiritual level. Our spirit is changed fundamentally. We don't feel at home in our own world.
The second idea is related to the first. If I have any kind of higher power, whether God or a philosophic or scientific worldview or the inner self as God, that higher power doesn't work well anymore, if at all. The world I knew is overturned. There is no rescuer or comforting thought. Something new or at least different has to be found to replace the old, because living with radical uncertainty is pretty intolerable. I've seen too many trauma survivors get stuck in very partial "answers" like trying to reduce their life to a basement room or becoming workaholic (or otherwise addicted). The more fortunate go through their "dark night of the soul," and emerge with a different, but durable "something." That may take many shapes. One hallmark of such a shift, but common, is an increase in compassion or empathy for other peoples' suffering. Another hallmark is a sense of mystery, whatever one's higher power may be -- less about words, more about deeper feelings of connectedness, transcendence, purpose, perhaps being loved and cared for, as well as a newfound gratitude. Mysteriously, the trauma has eventually(although not inevitably) led to feeling a part of a much larger scheme of things.
So what happened to me? In a nutshell, naming my fear and trauma to a good friend and fellow therapist, I was skillfully and compassionately aided in developing some very useful tools -- tools that helped me regulate those fear-based physical and emotional reactions. One tool was a personalized affirmation: "I am a strong, powerful warrior getting well." Repeating that alone several times countered the very negative thoughts my deep self harbored. Next, using the words of that same affirmation slowly and deliberately, I was asked to visualize myself doing my favorite sport, kayaking, in my favorite bay, with a left -right stroke of the paddle hitting each word of the affirmation. I cannot over-praise the power of that combination of word and image in quelling the fear that threatened to overwhelm me. It not only calmed, but helped me sleep, a very precious gift. I was so grateful for feeling safe.
The third gift my colleague gave me involved three very specific fears, and the images we came up with together that came to regulate them. My three deepest fears were these: that my heart was damaged irreparably by the infection; that my lungs were also compromised permanently in their ability to allow me a full breath; and that my kidneys, those blessed filters and source of other important functions, like regulating blood pressure, were also damaged beyond repair. "How would you image your heart?" my friend asked. I answered, "As a continuously rythmical pumping spring, sourcing a woodland stream that flows gently downhill, giving life to many creatures." Then she asked, "Can you give me an image for your lungs?" I immediately answered, two big Red-tailed Hawks, downstream, lifting and lowering their wings slowly and powerfully, lifting and helping me fill and empty my lungs. And finally, I imaged my kidneys as a low pile of white quartz rocks, filtering the flowing water and making the water of the woodland stream even more pure and life-giving. Using these images, seeing myself walking down the gentle stream in the beautiful woods, I experienced an ability to breathe more deeply and gently let go of those three specific fears of damaged heart, lungs and kidneys. Without a doubt, this experience helped me heal as well as relax from my fear-driven loss of control. Once again, I felt safe.
If I'm not crazy or delusional (and that may be in question!), this experience has some important clues as to how spirit may work in a crisis like this, using (with help from the right people) the very elements that tear us down to build us up. More on this next posting.
I've been sick the last nine weeks or so, with a major staph infection serious enough to be hospitalized for five of those weeks. My wife (my best caregiver) didn't tell me right away that the second night in the hospital, my doctor told her that I "might not pull through." Twice in the course of the five weeks I experienced "flash pulmonary edema," where fluid filled the areas around my heart and lungs and I felt "air hunger," literally not being able to take a full breath. During these attacks, my blood pressure skyrocketed to over 240. I believed in those gasping moments that I was going to die. Without the very skilled medical attention I did receive, I might have stroked out or otherwise been compromised enough to stop living.
I'm home now two and a half weeks. I'm much, much better. I'm walking and moving, although a cane sometimes provides security. My zest for food has returned, although I don't have half the appetite I did before I got sick (some would say that's a good thing). My sleep is beginning to get better. I am slowly returning to work, a few patients at a time.
It's the spiritual side of all this that I want to talk about. In the hospital, many sleepless late night hours gave my mind free rein. I couldn't beat down the creeping fear of losing my breath and dying, or at least being terribly sick the rest of my life. A young rabbi who was the chaplain on our floor asked me in one conversation: "How do you experience God here in the hospital?" I answered mainly through the helping, healing hands of the staff, from janitors to aides, nurses and doctors, etc. So many loving, kind and skilled people helped me feel cared about and taken care of. But that's the story I told myself in more hopeful moments.
As I said, during much of the hospital stay, there was a fear in me that felt crippling. As someone intimately knowledgeable about trauma from counseling hundreds of firefighters, EMT's, and other 9-11 survivors, I saw that I was traumatized acutely, especially by the two scary episodes of pulmonary edema and that doctor's doubts about my survival which I learned about a few weeks after he spoke to my wife. The looping re-experiencing of those awful moments, especially in sleepless late night hours, was terrrible. Trauma takes away that implicit sense of safety and predictability in life we all usually take for granted.
I was fortunate in that a dear friend and fellow therapist, also intimately aware of trauma and its effects, picked up on my state of mind and soul and asked if she could help. The tools we worked on together helped me regulate and better manage my fear-based physical and emotional reactions. I have given many workshops on trauma, and one of my experience-based observations is that trauma is a spiritual wound and needs a spiritual healing. Another is that the same God a person might have before the trauma will not likely survive the trauma. Both ideas could not have been more true for me.
I'll end here, because I want to give my own experience the room to detail and expand upon. I'll continue this discussion in the next blog.
I've been in the hospital with a nasty infection all month. Hope to resume soon!
In 1953, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a terrific science-fiction short story called, "The Nine Billion Names of God" (http://downlode.org/EText/nine_billion_names_of_god.html). The premise was simple and brilliant: an American computer company sells a large, fast computer to a Tibetan monastery. The monks buy the machine to more quickly complete what they believe to be humanity's purpose: to print out all the possible names of God, pegged at about nine billion. Not to spoil the plot, but the monks succeed, abruptly ending the story and ....
One of the purposes of this blog is to explore the language of experience that might fairly and broadly be called spiritual. Of all the possible spiritual questions and topics, none may be more fundamental, at least to this Westerner's sensibility, than that of God. The funny thing is that we think and pretend we know what we're saying when we use that three-letter word. As kids in America, many of us thought that God meant that Bearded White Guy in the Sky, a benevolent or punishing being not unlike Santa Claus. As adults? Jesus. Higher Power. Ultimate Reality. Love. Creator. Wakan Tanka (Lakota). Alpha & Omega. I Am Who Am. Pure Being. The Source. Etc.
Are we talking reality or fantasy here? An experience of what is or what we want to be true? Perception or projection? In the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries increasing numbers of thoughtful people began to find the concept and experience of God marginally important or, for some, patently absurd. Advances in scientific, historical and scriptural studies have, for many, gutted out the easy, comforting beliefs and spiritualities we learned at home or at religious instruction classes. While some variations of the traditional religions flourish, millions live their lives happily without much formal religious expression, particularly when it comes to community experiences like church, synagogue, mosque, etc. Numerous scandals and their subsequent cover-ups in many religious institutions have become all too frequent and added to the exodus of practicing believers.
Filling the vacuum have been many instances of what some folk mean when they say, "I'm spiritual, but not religious." With roots in Emerson and the Transcendentalists, an appreciation of world religions and the New Thought movement, many people find a self-driven and personally validated spiritual practice to be a very important part of their lives. Millions of Twelve Step practitioners adopt a Big Tent conception of Higher Power that lets individuals choose what's meaningful to them in the spiritual arena. Still others meditate or do yoga and buy millions of spiritually themed books to nourish themselves.
Over the next few entries, I want to explore what it could mean to name God and what it could mean to keep silence, what it means to pray and meditate, and how people of our time might find some common ground to talk to each other about our most interior experiences.
Meantime, treat yourself to Arthur Clarke's story..... and stay open.
Late last night, my wife and I arrived back from a week in Barbados. We came back to a temperature probably seventy degrees different from what we left in that beautiful Carribean island nation. It was hard to leave, but it's also good to be home. We're unpacking, doing laundry, enjoying a fire in the fireplace and getting geared up for a return to work with the good energy of vacation.
Winter vacations in a warm place seem to me to be a particular luxury. I can handle the next several weeks of deep winter because every day last week I walked into water where I didn't shiver at all. I snorkled five days in a row right off our apartment's beach in Carlisle Bay. Ten minutes out in that bay is an eighty foot French freighter that sank in twenty-five feet of water in 1918. The Berwyn is now an artificial reef, home to hundreds of fish so tame that they barely move as you glide among them. My first day a big green turtle startled me swimming deliberately only a few feet below. Snorkeling like that is a real in-the-moment meditation, helping me concentrate on breathing deeply and evenly, and noticing the smallest change with interest and gratitude.
We saw several parts of the island from wild seacoasts to deep, jungle-like forests. But undoubtedly the real beauty of the island were its people. The beach we stayed on is a mile long, and local people moving on it from early morning to dark outnumbered the visitors by about 20 to 1. They walked, ran, vigorously exercised and just visited with each other bobbing in the warm, clear water. Fishermen, sailors, restaurant workers, boat repairmen, etc. were like a tapestry of life and humanity. Some were very friendly, others probably like ourselves just tolerating the influx of vacationers in our part of the world in summer. Most fun, of course, were the children who had that great kid spirit whether coming home from school or goofing around with each other on the beach. We felt privileged to share that beautiful part of the world with them.
One young man we met stands out in my recalling several memorable people whose paths crossed with ours. We stopped for a bite to eat in a little strip mall in a tourist section. Helping out at this one Greek restaurant was a young man of about 20 or so. He described himself as a designer and entrepeneur. His vision was to form a collective of young artists and musicians, interacting with both local citizens and visitors from abroad interested in the sort of cutting edge art scene found in places like London and New York. I have no doubt he'll realize his vision.
Travel in our own lands or abroad allows me to appreciate and learn from people who broaden and deepen my picture of the world and its inhabitants. "All my relations!" say many Native American peoples as they begin or end prayers or ceremonies. When I travel, I see how true that affirmation is. And I'm grateful.
As I write this, that fleeting thing known as the National Conversation has focused on this question: can angry or demeaning words contribute to violent incidents like the recent killings in Arizona? The killer was apparently deeply ill psychologically. Could the effects of verbal insult, condescending words and mean characterization typifying a lot of political talk nowadays somehow have fuelled this young man's terrible actions? At the very least, I think, they didn't help.
Words matter. As a long-ago undergraduate English major, I came to love words and deeply respect their power. Experiencing a great actor's use of words that move me to my soul or listening to the lyrics of a song that take me away are just a couple of examples. Some of my biggest regrets in life are about times I tried to be clever or sarcastic and only found that my words misfired or truly hurt someone about whom I cared. "Restraint of pen and tongue," says one twelve step program, is a great mantra for living humanely and moderately.
The word "sarcasm" has its literal origin in the phrase, "to tear flesh." Sarcasm can be very funny, of course, but also be verbal violence. Imagine yourself on the receiving end of the most clever put-down you've ever spoken. Does it feel respectful? I can abhor your ideas about something, and still see you as a fellow human being, worthy of my respect for no greater reason.
If I see you as a son or daughter of Creator or Life, and keep that thought paramount, it's hard to treat you like an enemy in words or actions. When I erase that thought by some form of verbal abuse, it's not such a long step to someone else treating that life as expendable. Disturbed people, in my experience, are often acutely aware of currents in the culture; and some of them amplify the more negative currents with tragic consequences.
Words count. Their highest uses in scriptures, poetry, songs and expressions of love and warm regard bespeak a presence, a truth so great that using them for put down or self-righteous judgment just seems shabby as well as potentially volatile. We're better than the way we use words sometimes. Minding that is important.
For the past week I've been low-level battling an upper respiratory infection of some species or other. My doctor is usually very cautious about this sort of thing, but he prescribed a 10-day course of antibiotics. I stayed in all last weekend to try to kick the illness, reading and watching some very good and some very bad television. Mel Brooks got my thumbs up for his great film, "The Producers."
But mostly I felt lousy all week, sitting, lying down or working. Working? I'm afraid I'm susceptible to the pokes of the Spirit of Macho urging me to slog on, no matter what. There was a recent television commercial for a cold remedy that featured NFL quarterback Drew Bledsoe, last year's Super Bowl hero. I think the slogan ran, "There are no sick days in the NFL!" Damn you, Drew Bledsoe!
Seriously, my coping with this sickness led to some dark thoughts and moments of feeling badly, indeed. Upon awakening, for instance, intimations of mortality, the realization that there will one day be an illness that will be the final one, took brief hold several times.
When I'm sick, I'm vulnerable and I feel helpless, the opposite of the power and control illusion that's usually operative in most of our lives. The reality is that death is the truth, at some point, for each of us. The odd and graceful thing about that is that embracing that truth can be incredibly liberating and enlivening. Robert Lifton once said that accepting my mortality, my certain death sooner or later, enhances my life qualitatively. Each day becomes precious, more poignantly rich and interesting.
I like that last thought, a great deal. I can endorse its truth at least when I'm not prostrated by a pesky infection. I'm off to have the vegetarian equivalent of chicken soup. Don't ask. It involves tofu and vegetable broth.
