Father's Day

So I am a few days late but after a recent conversation I have been thinking about what fatherhood really means. And I think we have it backwards a bit. What we really might mean when we honor fathers is not how we fathers as cool and groovy, but perhaps how very honored we are to be "father" to some one.
So for me, I have been thrice honored. The gifts I have been given are beautifully unique and wonderful. My eldest is a blessing of the deepest spiritual kind. She has always been able to put into words those mysteries most of us can only feel. Her gift of speech, her wisdom that has been evident since her childhood and her passion and compassion are wonders to me and I have had the honor of being a steward of her as she grew into what she is today.
My second is spiritual in a different way. She has always had a sixth (and maybe a seventh and eighth) sense about people. She can read a room like a book and can actually see how you are feeling without your ever speaking a word. And her touch - her touch is nothing less than divine healing. She is sensing incarnate and has turned that into a gift she uses to heal any with whom she has contact. But beyond that this one is a peacemaker. She is a truth-teller and an arbiter who cannot be ignored or dismissed. She WILL change you!
And my son, my word, what an honor to be gifted with him! He is sensitive - I don't have any other word for it - he feels things with an amplification that makes him like a receiver. Sometimes I have to be careful what I expose him to because he feels it so deeply. We don't know how he'll turn out (he's only 11) but his gift is already evident. No less articulate than his sisters, this one is destined for another type of greatness.
So this Father's Day I really did get some gifts - the gifts that just keep on giving. You can't get better than that!

Ordaination

Yesterday I witnessed an ancient Rite of Passage, one that has been handed down through thousands of years. The ordination of priests was first described in Exodus (though in typical ancient Judaism, with sufficient quantities of blood splashed about) and has been a ritual observed for consecrating our spiritual leaders since the earliest of times. It is, however, a double-edged sword. In one ceremony the ordinand is both lifted up as a leader, and humbled forever into the servant's role forever placing the ordained person in an irresolvable paradox.

Perhaps that paradox is purposeful as it serves to keep the priest in the question, and it is only in the not-knowing state that one is clear enough to see, feel and experience the Divine. Perhaps its purpose is to make certain that the power of spiritual leadership is never abused (which, history has proven, is so easily done). I cannot say - I just don't know. But as with most ritual, I am certain it is on purpose!

But the culmination of the Rite, is a point when the other priests, and ordained who have mentored and taught the new initiate lay their hands on the ordinand and pass the blessing and the paradoxical commission on to her. I am told by those who have received this, that it feels light a lightning bolt passing through your body.

Yesterday I witnessed the ritual of ordination for probably the 10th time, though for me it felt like the first time. I got to see that ancient tradition passed on to my daughter. And for me it was an out-of-body experience (I can only ask her what it was like up there). And I will let her tell others whether the lightning struck.

But what I can say is that the greatest gift a father can receive is to see his children honored - in form and title (like Reverend, or Doctor or whatever). It is the most unbelievable and breathtaking experience. Yesterday was one such day, and the power of that blessing really hit me - like a lightning bolt passed right through me!

Gifts

Least anyone reading my last entry (On Becoming An Elder) think me a depressive or negatively-oriented person, let me just add that life itself is a gift. Everything about is a gift - especially the present (time)! But do we really earn gifts or are they given, just because the giver wants to give? I think the latter, whether the giver is life, the cosmos, god, your best friend or a family member. Gifts are given, not earned.

Whizzing past 60 at relatively break-neck speed, celebrating its passage in living color, with family and a great many friends, but in celebration of life is how I would have wanted it - and befitting my attitude on life and living. This is all a gift. So much of my experience in life - the greatest percentage by far and away - is just given to me as a gift. I delight in every moment and even in retrospect have fully embraced the few lumps and bumps of my own screw-ups.

So if these gifts are not of my doing but the lessons of my failures are, then I can only lay claim to those. Oh sure - did I actually DO the accomplishments? Yes, I ran the Boston Marathon, yes I hiked the Himalayas, yes, I have DONE so many things of which I am proud. But these occur to me as the gifts of my privileged life - the gifts I have been given. Without the gift, they would not have been nearly as possible. So, yes, I did something with the gifts I was given. And when I messed up the opportunity - the gift - I learned, and grew, and gained. The gift never lost its giving properties.

So I seem to have talked myself into a corner here. Life is a gift (but only when I/we receive and do something with it), the lessons of failure, were sourced from a gift, that I could only receive after I got the lesson. So I either have to claim it all as mine, (given to me to do with and/or fumble as best I can), or recognizing them all as gifts, step back and be thankful for the abundance of gifts I have been given.

On Becoming an Elder

Well, it's official: I am now 60 years of age. It doesn't feel any different - really. Oh there are things like I can't life a refrigerator anymore and a solid day of construction makes me ache all over, but other than a few aches and pains, my mind still thinks I am something like 48, to pick an arbitrarily stupid figure.

But this number comes with some titles and labels, the main one of which that I would like to adopt is "elder." Now being or becoming an elder carries some trappings with it. For example, it is precisely twice the age we swore never to trust anyone older than, back in the 60's. It probably looks a tad silly for an elder to be rocking out to AC/DC, so my view of myself as a rocker may need some alterations. But most formally, an elder ought to be a mentor, not to anyone specifically, but to society and people in general.

So what is it that I have to give? On what do I offer my mentoring? All I really have to claim solely as my own are these scars - wounds from various battles - and lessons taken from really screwing up royally. But, you see, that is the wisdom of aging. We don't really learn much from our successes. We simply note it and say something like, "Cool, that worked!" But our failures - wow - we ponder them; we slice and dice and analyze them until we figure out where we went wrong and use the pain of the failure to make certain that the lesson sinks in so that we don't repeat the same mistake.

Several years ago I wrote an op-ed piece on what I called the "Shadow Resume" - the compilation, not of all our good accomplishments, but of our lessons taken from the crash-and-burn failures. That is what I have to offer today - I survived all of those tough, painful, don't-want-to-do-that again stuff. Perhaps it is all any of us really can lay claim to.

Unraveling The Threads

It is funny how this process works - this introspective thing, I mean. As I have been rapidly approaching the completion of six decades of residence on this orb, a date which is now less than a month away, I have been on a quest of unraveling the icon of self-ness which I have fabricated from the strands of memories, events, accomplishments and failures, to discover what lies beneath and beyond all of that. In two recent blogs I have peeled that down to the raw, naked "so what, now what?" However, that has all been about discovering who and what I actually am in my authentic self. But what then of god?
Following the same logic - that the concept of god is mostly a fabrication of myths and beliefs passed on to me by others, sewn together with experiences and reflections of my own - then what is or might be god that is not that when and if we are able to strip that away? The theologian John Ackerman makes the beautiful distinction between the god of our experiences and the experience of god. It raises the question of whether we can ever, really experience god's god-ness devoid of our preconceived categories and language for those experiences. Is it possible to have an authentic experience of the divine? I cannot speak for anyone else here, as I am certain to offend the righteous, the devout believers and he "faithful," so I will speak only of myself.
I have entered on a quest of discovery to seek the authentic experience of god without categories, words, theologies, epistimologies, and eschatologies (don't you just theo-babble!!). I choose to call this phase of spiritual development the Seeker phase (for lack of any better term). I feel like a Seeker. Armed with only a knapsack, a notebook (as it were) and nothing more, I have strapped on the proverbial hiking shoes and headed out into the wilderness of not knowing. These posts have been postcards from that trek, notes along the way as I continue to explore my unknown world. I would love to invite you along and ask that those of you who read these posts occasionally check in with me. Am I making sense? Do you take issue with these precepts? I will never know by myself, just as I will never know who I am without being in relationship with you all. Well? Is there anyone out there?

Undoing the Self (part II)

In recognizing that the self, which we have so long identified as who we are, is not the authentic self; and in stripping away layer after layer of evidence to that effect, we are left standing naked before god and the universe. The question we face in our nakedness is, "If I am not that, then who am I?" Our introspection leads us to what might be called our potentialities. But even these have taken on a different quality. No longer do we see our potentialities as what we can or might do or accomplish. Our true potential is to be used in whatever service each situation might require of us - to be an instrument of god's workings.

When I stop to think of that, I am forced to realize that I am not all powerful, I cannot "do" everything and this aging body certainly is not capable of what it once could do. That notwithstanding, the requirements of being an instrument of god's workings in the world seem far larger than any of that which my ego-driven self has been or ever will be able to perform. But that isn't the issue. It is god working through us, not our (willful) working of what we think god wants of us. There is a difference. I think that the 12-steppers slogan of "let go and let god" means that (though their arrival at that slogan and interpretation of its meaning may vary greatly).

This is no blind faith, It is a step out over the void like the Indiana Jones scene before he throws dirt on the invisible path. It is Moses in the desert saying "Okay, but I don't know why you would pick me!" It is the blind Saul going to the home of his enemy, Francis stripping off his clothes and stepping into the arms of his bishop. No slogans here! Just fear and trembling... and stepping forward, saying "Here I am, take me."

Hope

Hope is the power of the present moment that serves to interrupt and alter the current path of past-to-future that we perceive as existing within our worst-case fears, and moves us in the direction of possibility.