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?
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Naming God vs. Keeping Silence II
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?
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?
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