Living by Faith - from Thomas Merton

In getting the best of our secret attachments - ones which we cannot see because they are principles of spiritual blindness - our own initiative is almost always useless. We need to leave the initiative in the hands of God working in our souls either directly in the night of aridity and suffering, or through events and other men. This is where so many holy people break down and go to pieces. As soon as they reach the point where they can no longer see the way to guide themselves by their own light, they refuse to go further. They have no confidence in anyone but themselves. Their faith is largely an emotional illusion. It is rooted in their feelings, in their physique, in their temperament. It is a kind of natural optimism that is stimulated by moral activity and warmed by the approval of other men. If people oppose it, this kind of faith still finds refuge in self-complacency.

But when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us light -- then we find out whether or not we live by faith.

Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation, 1961, page 257-8.

Make It Worth It

I just learned that the wife of a friend and associate, a vibrant and beautiful woman of just 42, died suddenly a few days ago. What makes this already tragic loss hurt even deeper is that my friend had worked diligently for many years to achieve a level of success that would afford him more time with his partner and friend. And through all of that she had been a champion, running the race with him both figuratively and literally (as they had run several Boston Marathons together). Last May the ship came in and my friend, then the president of a thriving firm was rewarded for his efforts as his company was bought. When we talked then he said that though he was staying on in a consulting role for a while, his delight was that he could spend some quality family time.

Part of that ended Thursday. I cannot begin to imagine the depth of his pain and emptiness. I can only take notes and learn. When my son was first born I used to evaluate everything I did other than work in terms of trading time with Jesse. The "Jesse factor" as it became known would literally cause me to leave a meeting if it seemed to be going nowhere fast. "Am I willing to trade two hours of Jesse's life for this?" I stopped doing that after a while; I thought I had things pretty well in control.

But this event has just kicked me in the can. I didn't even know her, but I knew how much he loved her and how he smiled when spoke of her and the kids. She had to have been special. As Sarah and Jesse are to me. It seems like a platitude to talk of making every moment count, or to be reminded of what Thoreau called the "arrogance of tomorrow." But damn it all, it's the truth and we do need to burn it in - I need to burn it into my flesh or write it with Delores Umbridge's quill until it bleeds through where I can never forget it.

I am leaving on a class trip for nearly two weeks next Monday. I am all signed in, paid and packed. I damned well better make it worth it. There are no "trade-back's" in the game of life.

Dazed and Confused

I have always been in charge of my career or at least that's what the self-reflective organ in my skull would have me believe. I have always gotten the job I wanted and even when a job disappeared I quickly secured some temporary work (cooking or tending bar) to bridge through the period of searching. I did that, my determination, my sense of responsibility.

But my confidence in that as fact is crumbling and as each chunk succumbs to gravity, what is revealed is the core engine that has been at work all the time - driving my machinery all along. That force is God; the divine force of pure intention. So I am faced with the possibility that none of this past was of my doing but that I have been led through all of those changes, peaks and valleys for the express purpose of getting here with, now, with these particular experiences and tools.

Thank God!

There are two problems with this realization: 1. I am now faced with having to discern God's intention for me - like what do you want me to do next, Oh Great One? and 2. My profession classifies what I am now doing (talking openly and regularly with some unseen force or entity) as delusional. Let me start with the first. This conversation I keep having with God goes something like this: OK God I give up, you win, I'm yours. Now what would you have me do? (Otherworldly Voice in my head) I cannot tell you that. (Me) Might I ask why? (OV) Sure, if I tell you, then you will try to "do" it and do it your way, and if you have surrendered to me, then I would like you to do it my way. (Me) And that means not knowing? (OV) And trusting completely. (Me) But that is no way for a professional to manage his career. (OV) So manage your career, this is my work we are talking about. (Me) Which is...? (OV) Sorry.

And so it goes - round and round.

So that is when the other voices of my professors and the ghost of Dr. Freud kick in: (SF) You are actually hearing voices? (Me) Duh, I just wrote it out in plain text. (SF) That, son, is delusional, whacked, touched in the head, a couple of bricks shy of a load, well you get my drift.

But the truth is that I have longed all my life to have an active and conscious contact with God. I envied Abraham as he walked and talked with his God. Heck, it was nothing for people in biblical times to hear voices or to see God walk into their village and sit down for a meal with them. Were times so different? Did God get bored of us or were they all whacked back then?
As for me, I am just confused.

But I will not give up. Fifty eight years of doing it my way had some severe limits. So I have done the Sam and Elijah thing and uttered those fateful words,"Here I am, take me." Dazed and confused, but putting one foot in front of the other.

The Next Border to Cross

I have begun looking at activities from the metaphor of Border Crossings: where and what are the boundaries (real and artificial) that we or I have established in our living and in our professions? I look at all of the rubrics of my profession (I am an executive coach). I must not cross into the land of the spiritual - at least I think that is the unspoken mandate. People I coach must be allowed to be their own person; free from moral challenge from (especially) their coach. But it seems to me to be an artificial barrier. It relegates people into feelingless and flat doings not beings.

The question becomes how and where do I cross the borders? Do I need some coyote to lead me across this border? Do I sneak across under the cover of night or do I brazenly flaunt my rebellious character in front of the cameras and guards? Hey, I regularly cross the skin color line and the homo-hetero line - they aren't a challenge anymore! Every PC do-gooder has done those. And the political Hillarobama righteousness is even beginning to be acceptable - gosh how these walls are falling!

But the spiritual/moral boundary (unless you are willing to be a conservative, right wing fundamentalist - for God and for Country) - that one must not be touched. That one is verboten. See, we dare not think of what it means to be economically successful in spiritual terms, because that means we might have to think about the women in the sweat shops just across the border of El Paso and Nogales who assemble parts at unthinkably low wages. That means we have to consider that our smart use of vegetable fuels for our oh-so-PC hybrid cars means that the Mexican farmer whose balanced protein formerly came from corn and beans now must eat ramen noodles instead of his own corn. Oh, and we dare not talk about Jesus of Nazareth, that radical great great great grandson of a Moabite refugee intermarriage (Oh did we forget that too?), this potentially illegitimate son of a teenager, who dared talk to women, children, tax-collectors and heathen, and who dared to call the ruling power elite "vipers!"

I am a border crosser. I am a follower of that rebel. I choose to call the question. I dare to taunt the guard enforcing his arbitrary boundary. I can't stay quiet any longer.

This trip is not a metaphor. This trip is my coming out party. Bring it on! Where is the next line? If someone must be the first to step there, let it be me! Here am I Lord, take me!

Aliens Among Us

Oh here we go again! The thing I keep coming up against in the Christmas season is this whole CB DeMille view of the star and the pristine manger and cutsie lambs and shepherds all stunned into silence by the choirs of heavenly beings singing "Glory to God."

But in my mind I imagine a good man with a (somehow, but by his doing) pregnant teenager as lost and homeless aliens in a foreign territory where even the language was so different they didn't recognize what people were saying. So they found, as so many homeless do, the only shelter they could, a barn, ripe with manure, probably crouching in the back so none of the "real people" of that territory could see them. And to this alien, homeless, scandalous couple, was born a child - not a king, not a floating avatar of divinity - a baby. Little. Helpless. Undocumented alien. Perhaps unwanted, at least for now.

God, the all-powerful, supreme all, the incomprehensible source of all, chose a homeless, undocumented, unmarried alien couple to host this divine coming out party! Crossing the threshold from divine to incarnate/human might be easy if you happen to be the Almighty, so why cross over in such an enemy, foreign, and hostile place? Unless... unless there is some reason, some message that these inhabitants of the third rock from Sol needed to learn. So I go there and follow the Christmas story.

And the lessons abound, none the least of which is that entry. So if it was purposeful, then perhaps I am called to see Christ in the homeless, see God in the most desperate situations, and hear my calling as a beckoning to cross the many arbitrary thresholds (boundaries and barriers we erect to keep us in and the "other" out). I am recently inspired by Jerry Gill's Borderland Theology (2003) and the analogies he finds in the life of Jesus as a "border crosser." It fits with my understanding of this God-like message. (Oh I love God's twisted sense of humor!)

It seems to me that the reason God speaks through the poor and infirmed, that the reason God chose a child of an undocumented homeless couple as an entry portal, that the reason Jesus continually worked through the unwanted and outcast is simply that any other way might have seemed magical. In my work life I have seen companies so cash rich that they literally could do anything. But when times got tough they faltered. It is those who with little who do much that really set the standard of excellence. Had Jesus been a rich man, or apparated as an adult in full glory, we would be left with an awe of his grandeur but just as clearly with a sense that none of that was within our grasp.

But when we walk among the poor, when we cross over the boundary from our station into the realm of just being human - with not even a single trapping of civilized and pampered existence - then we have access to understanding the true human experience. Then and perhaps only then can we begin to feel true compassion. And when we give of ourselves from that (presumed) nothingness, we are capable of divine love.

Two millennia ago, love passed through the portal and smiled up through the darkness. And it just may have been quite alien for anyone who noticed it.

Prayer and Meditation

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer and meditation lately. Interfacing with The Divine, with God, or at least my experience of God. Now, in order to do that, I have to deal with a lot of abstract and previously defined concepts (or at least defined previously by others, or maybe even defined in other ways by others). Take for example the experience of God. I need to use that terminology to distinguish between how I become aware of God’s presence in my life, as differentiated with what others have identified as God-like characteristics (ranging from anthropomorphic God – you know, bearded and robed and sitting on high like some sky father – to conceptual referents like omniscient, omnipotent, and the omni-lists of catechism). I also need to be wary of confusing the God of my experience with the true experience of God and getting present to how else that might manifest in each unfolding now of my mortal existence. And that’s just for starters!

So I start with an assumption of God – that God exists and is, like life itself just “is.” And I recognize that for some, that is a leap of faith – “How do you know God is?” That one at least is easy for me: because I look for God in everything, I see God in everything. The same logic is true for the atheists: because they doubt God’s existence, they are looking – in essence for the absence of God – that is their perception. But for me, there is God; present in through and around every living thing. But I stop there because right behind that statement follows a whole raft of self-defined experiences I have had of God’s presence. I am wary of ascribing what I experienced as the expression of God-ness to being what God is, because to do so would immediately begin to limit The Divine though and by those definitions. They are just my experiences of God’s presence to me. So I think it must be true of others, that how we experience God becomes what God is. Therefore, the God of our understanding is a uniquely defined and individual experience.

Perhaps in organized church religions, God may be described by the masses in similar ways creating a “majority view” of God-ness. But weren’t they told what they were looking for in the first place? Isn’t it true that we always see what we expect to see? It’s like what I call the “new car syndrome.” The day before buying my new midnight blue Saab 9-5, I was not terribly aware of how many others there were on the road. But that purchase shaped my seeing such that the experience was almost as if that same day hundreds of other Bostonians went out and bought midnight blue Saab 9-5’s – there were suddenly so many of them. So likewise, if we are told to look for God as manifest in bread and wine, or the smiles of children, or as the Virgin of Guadalupe, or whatever, that will be what we see. But that is not simply the power of suggestion. Rather it is the opening of eyes to what is already present, but to yet another select set of manifestations, as opposed to the complete, total and incomprehensible range of God’s infinite possibility.

So meditating on God for me is not looking for the predefined but rather trying to be present to what wants to be seen this time. Surprise me! I am waiting and open to what you would have me see. Open like this, the experience of God washes over me and opens my seeing to some new (and sometimes renewed) awareness. That hasn’t changed much in recent years – that sitting and opening to the next experience of how God presents “I am-ness” to me. But what has evolved is prayer – my communing and attempting to open the other channel of communication with The Divine.
I remember all of the different classifications of prayer I learned in my childhood: prayers of request, prayers of and for forgiveness, supplication, contrition, and so on. But those were to a God of otherness for me; a great God of the sky, who could and would grant wishes, or wash me to be “whiter than snow.” But what becomes of that type of prayer when God is infinitely incomprehensible? How do I commune? In fact, if I start from an assumption that God is in everything, knows everything and completes everything, then why (if at all) do I need to inform “him” of my needs, wants and wishes?

I don’t.

And suddenly prayer shifts from “out there” to “in here.” Prayer becomes speaking out loud that thought path to alignment with The Divine purpose already at work, and already manifest even before I become aware of it (like the ubiquitous Saabs I had not noticed. As I sit in prayer, I mentally and verbally begin to align my thoughts to Divine intention. And as I do that, the language of my prayer shifts from my laundry list of needs, wants and fears to seeking the humility to become an instrument of God’s work in my world.

It isn’t easy. I want a God who will fix it for me. But, like I always say, I am on a journey here, not looking for the end point, just on the path.

Still Puzzled

Beginning the new year has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Why is this day any different than any other (sounds like a child's question at the Seder meal)? Really? What is so special at this point? Why don't we just celebrate the day after the solstice as the beginning back to light? Or why not March first or December first? Heck why not the start of each month? I think it's just that we need to mark beginnings - a chance to wipe clean the slate, drop the guilt of last year's attempts bobbled and relieve the guilt of missions failed. Jews and Muslims do this in the fall with their high holy days but the rest of the people of the book choose to close the book at the end of December and start clean in January.

So I look back at the year - marked with less than exemplary performance at work, but balanced with a hat trick of "A's" in seminary courses. Our charity, Operation ELF, served more than twice last year's number of kids, but the satisfaction is quickly staggered by the recognition that poverty seems to be growing faster than we can counter it. So we just press on.

And this year, as we head into January and I anticipate a trip to Nogales and Altar and the land of despiration that drives even women and children to attempt their futile crossings of Desolation and Sonora, I wonder what value I can put into the stream of life. I don't even know really what my calling is or even why God has me going this way. So I press on.

Still puzzled.