Advent Travels: A Cool Drum Solo

I’ve edited this post and comment thread to remove a personal reference that upon reflection was inappropriate and unhelpful. I apologize to anyone hurt or confused by my actions. I will do better going forward. Thank you always for your patience.

It’s hard sometimes to think helpfully about the void. I have a lot to learn myself.

I don’t think the void is a question of belief, but I am glad there are folks willing to wonder if it might be. They simultaneously remind me of my spiritual poverty and justify the optimism that allows me to not fear that poverty but open to its creativity and healing. And I could always be wrong!

Human beings are limitations! I can’t see colors the way butterflies do, and ticks can’t smell as much as I can. Our cognition stops well shy of omniscience. Not only do we not know everything, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

That’s the void. The void is what you don’t know, don’t sense, and can’t sense or know. And it’s always right there.

I appreciate very much not wanting to go into all of that. It is the void which teaches us that choice is an illusion and free will a shallow con courtesy of evolution. We control nothing. People do die upon learning this; some people die instead of learning it. Some people kill to avoid going into it.

When you see all this clearly, fully for the first time, it’s like you’re already dead. It’s like you’re already dead and you’re going to die.

The void is alive. Like the Face of God (hint hint) once it has been glimpsed, it cannot be forgotten. You will think about it regularly, you will sneak back to it, you will toss something in – a friendship, an afternoon, a value system – to see if it floats or what comes back.

But here’s the thing. The void is not the problem. The existential crisis the void presents – and it absolutely presents an existential crisis – is the problem. The existential crisis is a defense against Love.

I don’t know if it was an advantage but I was tossed into the void often at an early age. Later, in my late teens and through a good chunk of my twenties, I routinely threw myself in, often dragging others along, whether they wanted it or not.

Sometimes people fished me out of the void, and I’m grateful to them. Friends, sponsors, therapists, lovers. I am grateful to them all! But sometimes there was another way out of the void that I seemed to find alone. Or maybe it found me?

It’s hard to say! But decades later, when it was time to consider the void in a non-self-destuctive way, I came to it differently. I was resigned, not scared. I was curious. As Tara Singh said, the point is to see what is – not change anything or refuse anything or even prefer anything. A kind of “hello darkness my old friend/I’ve come to talk with you again” vibe attended. I knew how bad it could get but was there anything on the other side? I wanted to know.

Spiritual poverty is when we let go of the comforting ideas and phrases and rituals in order to meet God with as few distractions as possible. It’s not chosen (ha ha) so much as accepted. I get it’s not for everyone. All God’s critters got a place in the choir and I will absolutely die on that hill.

But still.

One of the ironies of the Christmas mythology – especially its emphasis on gifts – is that God needs nothing and as His children neither do we. The man gifted at birth with rare spices, soothing shepherds and a cool drum solo explicitly told us to consider the lilies and the birds of the field and live accordingly. That was how God designed us.

For many reasons I have understood poverty well in this life. It doesn’t scare me, it’s a freedom not a restriction. What has been less clear and less dynamic – despite being just as and even more pervasive, and arguably more helpful – is optimism.

I really do believe in the power of Love to heal us, body and mind, and deliver us from the nightmare of separation. My commitment to this belief and its manifestation in the world can appear naive and even dangerous. Love does that to us!

I understand the rationale for optimism – and the fear it inspires in me and others – but I’m not as fluent or skilled in its application as I am with poverty. Optimism isn’t interested in wordiness or pedagogy, which are kind of my thing. But kites don’t want to conversate about aerodynamics – they want to be flown.

Anyway.

I was mumbling about all this with the horses this morning. Wind blowing at 4 a.m., trucks leaning on their jake brakes a mile or so away. They listened – the horses always listen – but they didn’t seem especially interested.

The horses don’t share my concerns about the void. Nor do the stars overhead, nor the sparrows and juncos who sing waking up in the hedges and raspberry bracken.

These brothers and sisters don’t say it with words but with a way of life, a way of being in the world: let go, let go, let go. Simplify, simplify, simplify. The One you seek is here, teaching you. Be happy and at peace!

Sometimes it is just that clear! Sometimes it is. I bowed to the horses, the stars and the birds, and went back inside to write, this.

Six / Eight