Advent Journal: Briefly and Gloriously Perfectly Clear

Thaddeus visits briefly to say, stop trying to win an argument. Nobody cares. When I protest, he shrugs and disappears. Not my circus, not my monkeys, as the kids say. In holy circles I am just outside the perimeter of, identity is not what matters – Jesus’s or anybody else’s. You have to let it go.

I had a dream once about Ken Wapnick. I was climbing a mountain, and reached the parking lot where visitors parked to hike the last leg to the summit. Ken was surrounded by students asking questions. I caught his eye and he nodded every so slightly at the trailhead. The message was clear: I’m not your teacher, keep going.

I told a friend about it, someone who studied closely with Ken, and she said, that was Ken. That was an authentic Ken dream.

I’ve been thinking more or less continuously of E.’s comment yesterday, everybody wants a village, nobody wants to be a villager. It reminded me of something that floats around circles I’ve been on the perimeter of most of my life: everybody wants a revolution, nobody wants to do the dishes.

I was on edge yesterday, all day. Woke up worked up and raced through the day like fire over dry grass. Who knows why. But by evening, sitting alone in the dark, restless and hungry, and unable to say what I’d done well and what I hadn’t, it wasn’t unclear why. We are doing this to ourselves. Abhishiktananda visited, reminding me that the torment nexus (between Advaita and Catholicism) can take decades to undo. Even lifetimes.

“Become less,” he says. “Disappear.”

“But I don’t want to,” I say. It’s my truth (Ken said, be true to your own truth), but Abhi is well beyond that sort of spiritual advisement. Put your body into it and if you can’t, or won’t, then keep going. Don’t take a spot at the ashram if you’re not ready for the ashram. But on the other hand, Abhi could be so casual, refusing his guru’s commands because he had something else to do.

And you? asks Thaddeus – who always finds me when I’m putting up a tent in this space. You are not casual? You have not been told, stop arguing? Stop trying to win? And always manage to find some reason – some way – to keep arguing? To stay in the zero-sum context you have been taught – over and over and over – is neither your home nor anybody else’s?

I don’t remember falling to sleep.

But when I wake up a little after four, while I’m making coffee in the cold kitchen, shivering in the dark, the wind blows hard, shaking the house. Something is too big for me, right now. Something is too difficult. But I’m not allowed to rest or settle. I’m not allowed to let it go. I’m stuck in an impossible situation. Bob Dylan said, you can’t trust your conscience to guide you because you’re the one who has to keep it satisfied. What can I say? It is what it is.

Is it? Jesus asks, there in the corner. I never see him leave or arrive. He is endlessly patient and often amused by what I choose to struggle with and how I choose to resolve those struggles. I start to go into it – the coffee is kicking in, I like a vigorous dialogue, it’s obvious there’s some real material to cover – but he has something else in mind. He asks me to go back and review the lesson in itinerancy. The one we worked so hard on over the summer. He asks how the essay is going. Can he see a draft?

And then it is clear, briefly and gloriously perfectly clear. I am the rough draft he is composing – editing, amending, refining, perfecting – and my writing assignments are the way he has chosen to do that work. There is nothing else to do, and nobody else can do it.

And begin.