Advent Travels: the Space of Solitude

Chrisoula and the kids were in New York City this past weekend to see Romeo and Juliet. I stayed behind to do chores and keep house. Things were quiet mostly, and I got a lot done. It snowed more than I thought it would, and I didn’t sleep well but it was okay.

When I am alone, and give space to the space of solitude, I am able to see certain things more clearly. I see the parts of me that others would label “sinner,” parts I want to share with you but am scared to share, and parts the world accepts and celebrates – obedient Sean, color-between-the-lines Sean, passive Sean – even though they are not really me at all.

The prayer I make most often is, help me be helpful. And if I can’t be helpful, let me at least not be harmful. And if I can’t manage even that much, then let me remember that all things – even my really bad mistakes – are redeemed in our shared desire for redemption. It’s okay. Or it will be.

Kimberley asks, do you know what do you really want? Not what do you really want but do you know what you really want. That distinction matters; it clarifies something important. It keeps the focus where it needs to be, on the part of our mind arguing it’s a discrete self.

Several years ago – standing in an open fourteenth story hotel window in Boston – a part of me floated away. The sun was setting in front of me, darkening my vision, but a shadow slipped out of me – near my left shoulder, like a snake shrugging out of old skin – and floated away.

Chrisoula said gently, did it tell you where it was going? And I answered, it didn’t say but the general direction was Braintree.

We kidded because it was no joke. After Boston I began to dissolve, to fall away from myself, pieces here and there, bereft even of the ability to make meaning out of it. Things got quiet and quieter; they got dark and then darker. It didn’t make sense.

The question that hides behind Kimberley’s question is, do you know what you are? Not do you have theories and opinions and reliable, socially-approved stories about what you are – of course those are floating around – but do you know.

For a long time, I didn’t care whether I was here or not. When I stood in that window, I realized that feeling – that it didn’t matter, was I here or not – was gone. And when I realized it was gone, and I did not miss or need it at, something left. Freud’s death drive? Some family ghost or Christian demon? It could as easily have been a trick of the light. But it felt like I was being released, like I was no longer a reliable host for something I’d never agreed to host.

Whatever it was, in the wake of its departure, my life – for the first time in decades – became unmanageable. Oh, on the outside, things were mostly fine – job, kids, wife, et cetera. But inside everything was crashing into everything else. Things were breaking and reshaping. I felt trapped and scared a lot. People who knew were worried. And none of the old healing tricks worked.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, I began to relax my spiritual practice, especially around A Course in Miracles. I held it all loosely, while also holding carefully in mind something Cormac McCarthy wrote in No Country for Old Men: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

This went on for a year and a half or so until, no warning, the darkness cleared. Some things had been revealed but a lot remained hidden. I know a reliable way to connect intimately with Jesus and, through that connection, become Christ. The hard part is how easy it is. The really hard part is remembering it’s up to me to do it.

Abhishiktananda, whose folly and grace are a great light in my spiritual practice, wrote in Ascent to the Depths of the Heart that only an act of “pure love” can awaken us.

Advaita, non-duality, is not an intellectual discovery, but an attitude of the soul. It is much more the impossibility of saying ‘Two’ than the affirmation of ‘One.’ What is the use of saying ‘One’ in one’s thought, if one says ‘Two’ in one’s life. To say ‘One’ in one’s life: that is Love.

I came back to that over and over this past weekend: practicing a stillness that neither grasps for pure love, nor refuses it. I took Saint Romuald’s Rule to heart.

Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish.

Sometimes my attention drifted, but mostly I was present. Feed the horses, shovel the driveway, make more coffee, sit quietly, give attention to what’s given . . .

I am that which – being capable of healing – is presently healing. Healing is a form of Love (about which I still talk too much). In Love I want nothing, because I both have and am everything, and I know it. Shy of that – which happens of course – there is the idea of healing, which often suffices to get us to the cross and the tomb and, more importantly, the wilderness beyond them.

It’s there we travel, you know. The Jesus myth of Christmas, like the Jesus myths of crucifixion and resurrection, are pointers, not historical data points supporting this or that flavor of Christianity. They’re clues to be interpreted in the lived context of our lives. They’re notes towards a practice, not fragments of a biography of a famous man.

The wilderness calls us – the wilds in us call to us – to remember ourselves beyond the comforting narratives and empty rituals of society and religion. They call to us from beyond what we want or think we want. Sooner or later, we follow. Sooner or later we call go into the wilderness.

The light out there is made of fire and it burns everything it touches, every one and every thing, until nothing is left but fire.

Yes. I know what I really want.

Nine / Eleven