Advent Travels: Admitting the Wound

Yesterday it snowed a little as the sun set: prismatic flurries tracing faded planes of light down western hills slowly darkening.

I stood shivering on the front porch, breathless and grateful, now and then remembering to take a sip of coffee. I cannot bear the loveliness sometimes; I cannot compass the love the loveliness reflects.

Elizabeth Fiorenza invites us to set free “the emancipatory power of the Christian community which is theologically rooted neither in spiritual-sexual dimorphism nor in patriarchal ecclesial dominance, but in an egalitarian vision and in altruistic social relationships that may not be ‘genderized'” (In Memory of Her 92).

Everyone gets a seat at the table; everyone takes turns cooking, serving and eating. All power belongs to God; everything else is shared.

All day – coffee and writing, driving with C. to buy grain for the horses, dinner with friends and family – I kept coming back to that sentence of Fiorenza’s. It called and called but apparently I am still learning how to respond.

Yet later, laying in bed, on the horizon of sleep, something softened in the neural matrix, and I got it.

Fiorenza is clear about something I hadn’t noticed in Sawicki, but which is there, and which I cannot now unsee: those women are not interested in Jesus so much as they are interested in the wisdom movement that birthed and then resurrected him.

They’re not opposed to Jesus – not at all. They’re just not buying the whole “special guy who saved the world” schtick. That’s the order that he helps undo. It’s not about him; it never was.

They want to get to what it’s about – healing, comforting, feeding, sheltering, nursing.

Their work decenters Jesus by shifting focus to his program, his mission, and being clear that it’s meant to be lived now, in whatever context is given to us. It’s meant to be enacted here. Peace, happiness, fulfillment, love – all that follows the interior “yes” which activates our cooperation with God in and through Creation.

(Tara Singh often wrote how Helen Schucman told him the course was meant to be lived, and pointed at Mother Teresa as the premier example).

So Fiorenza is “ecclesial” – it takes a village, a community, a collective. Call it a church or whatever you like; it takes at least two to manifest the Lord. And as Lynice Pinkard says, it’s okay to be messy in community. It’s okay to be beginners when it comes to holy relationship.

There are no blueprints. And there is no space of purity from which to act. We must begin imperfectly from within the messiness, in ways that respond to and engage with our concrete and particular contexts and circumstances (Revolutionary Suicide).

I got distracted for a long time by oneness. I got distracted by my own personal “special guy who saved the world” schtick. I objectified myself as a spiritual hero in at least two religious traditions and resisted anything that suggested I was not.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been holding apart – a fantasy of spiritual accomplishment and the reality of how hurt I am and how needful of spiritual help.

But Sawicki and Fiorenza (and Pinkard, too) would say, you’re still keeping the focus on yourself, Sean. You’re still indulging the fantasy of going it alone, being a saint, a monk, whatever. Self-improvement is always an ego project. You’re making it personal. That’s the problem, they’d say. That’s what keeps you separate from the help you need and want.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post called Christ is a Collective, a kind of homage to Helen Beeth, whose writing and teaching feel so liberating to me. It felt like a deep interior cleansing, writing that post. It felt like coming to coherence. But also, I was concerned. Is this my reality or is it a fantasy? Am I hiding behind writing?

But now I see those questions aren’t real. Sometimes what we write isn’t our reality now, but can still function as a light making clear the next step or two. Just keep swimming. Don’t stop sharing.

So at last, I am beginning to piece together a practice – one that harmonizes with my eclectic study and innate wordiness, and liberates me from the confusion wrought by obedience unto men and orders of men who are often sincere but nearly always deeply confused. There is indeed another way and it is being revealed. Nor can I find it without you.

Yesterday Susan asked how am I keeping the Christ-embodied Mary outside of my heart, and my own heart briefly caught fire. Yes! That is the inquiry. But then everything slipped back into its familiar groove with one tiny exception: I knew I was not alone. And I thought then of Emily Dickinson, who wasn’t alone either, and yet still managed a vast and fertile solitude. She wrote these lines in I think 1870, after the “white heat” had passed and she was ordinary again.

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside –

How I wish I could have heard her read her own work! Can you imagine it? In the quiet seclusion of her bedroom after dark – moonlight and a lantern – and the world at her window leaning in?

Healing and attention are intimately connected. Admitting the wound is the way the wound heals, because the admission beckons the healers, in the same way a light calls weary travelers off the road.

I cry out and you are here, as if you always were. You lift me and ask am I ready – not to travel but to be home. Or am I lifting you? And does the distinction matter?

We begin again, again, companionate.

Twenty / Twenty-Two

Advent Travels: Waiting for Her

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Today is winter solstice. In my little town we’ll have daylight just over nine hours. This summer it was closer to fifteen.

Now, going forward, instead of darkening, the world becomes a little lighter and warmer. Things will grow differently; they will create differently.

More of my ancestors celebrated solstice than Christmas. But when I celebrate Christmas, ghosts of their rituals and festivities, inform me. There is no separation anywhere.

This morning, I nodded at them all as I sipped coffee on the back porch, awaiting the light in which writing becomes possible.

This morning, they nodded back. This morning they said, “hey Sean, what did you mean by “ecclesial reckoning?”

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The phrase “ecclesial reckoning” stunned me a little. It stunned me when I wrote it – I didn’t want to see it. But this morning, my family said, “don’t look away.”

Sawicki is less interested in a therapeutic model for its own sake because of the risk it will devolve into something merely personal, effacing the necessity of ecclesial reckoning. Whatever illusion resurrection penetrates, it must also takes with it the illusion of separate interests. Do you want to see the Lord or not?

I mean yes, I want to see the Lord. I want to look at the Lord. But no, I do not want to go to church. Fuck church.

I mean that.

I know what some folks say here: fine, don’t go to church. You’re an adult. The world doesn’t care. You do you.

But that’s not what I’m saying. Or rather, that’s not what the writing is asking.

The writing invites a “reckoning,” in the archaic sense of “settling up.” There’s a debt somewhere, somewhere justice is being measured and paid out. Expectations and obligations abound but not in the clear light of day and reason but deeper in the psyche, where Grendel lives and great floods begin and certain hugs and kisses have to suffice for lifetimes.

Sometimes I say to people who are lost in moral quandaries, strangling in scrupulosity, or all tied up in someone else’s text, “get right with your God.”

I mean, figure out your moral and ethical stance and then live by it. What does God want? What is God asking? There are answers to those questions but to reach them you have to realize in a deep and sustainable way that a lot of the interior welter is pitched against realizing those answers.

If, when someone asks, what does God ask of me, and you cite A Course in Miracles or some other gospel or self-help guru, then you have not yet gone deep enough. You are still collaborating with ego.

God is incredibly specific and totally transparent: I say this from experience.

When I sit quietly with God – when I go to the well, when I kneel at the altar, when I sip from the confluence of the Alpha and Omega – I do so always in fear and trembling. Why? Because God invites me to live in a way that heals my heart and the world’s but the world doesn’t see it as healing and so actively – sometimes murderously – opposes it.

Love is often mistaken for weakness, naivete, and disorder. To ego and ego’s works, love is a threat. A world constructed by guilt and fear is not going to just say, oh thank the Good Lord, Jesus is here.

Jesus wasn’t killed to atone for our sins or for any other fancy theological reason. He was killed because he lived a life of love that threatened the dominant political and religious culture and so they tortured and killed him. They always do.

The crucifix is no joke, nor is it merely an historical event. And absent the crucifixion, you don’t get resurrection, and it’s resurrection that joins the circle and unites us with all Creation.

Sawicki says, in order to make sense of resurrection, we have to interpret something. We have to learn how to see in a certain way, a new way. That’s the point of all our practice: we want a new way of seeing – a new way of making meaning together out of our living.

The Holy Spirit’s goal gives one interpretation, meaningful to you and to your brother. Thus can you communicate with him, and he with you (T-30.VII.6:2-3).

Sawicki says – it’s the part of her writing that I resist, set aside, it’s the part I forget – that you need a community in which to teach and learn this new way of seeing.

Also, this teaching and learning reflects an active pedagogy – it’s not just we feed the mind with beautiful scripture and deep metaphysics. It includes – it must include – the body.

Crucifixion and resurrection are things that happen to and through bodies. Miracles and meals – the crux of the historical Jesus’s practice of justice and mercy – are also things that happen to and through bodies.

I’m not saying throw A Course in Miracles away! I’m saying, it’s wrong in a vital way about mind/body dualism. But “wrong” is really a cry for help, one to which we are personally called to respond. We want to see it differently, right?

I will write more about this “cry for help” elsewhere later. Here, this morning, I simply want to stand in the light cast by the phrase “ecclesial reckoning.”

What is God asking me here? And is it separate from what God is asking you here?

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Jack Gilbert’s poem “Island and Figs” is a good poem to read on winter solstice. Everything in it is dense and bright and solid – the sun, the rocks, the stone. Even the old woman gathering snails owns an ancient quality, as if she has been there a thousand times a thousand years working to feed us.

Here is how Gilbert ends his poem:

The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.

Next to Emily Dickinson, Jack Gilbert is my favorite poet. Nobody taught me more about how to see the world by living in it a certain way. My debt (there’s that word again) is large.

And yet.

In Advent, on Solstice – heart weary, mind at range – I wonder. I wonder if Gilbert’s assumption is an error. What if that to which the word “heart” can sometimes point never ends? What if “journey” is merely “seeing another way together?”

I wonder about this fight I’ve been having for going on sixty years. I wonder who am I fighting? I wonder if my enemy is as lonely as I am? I wonder if he, too, wants a reason to lay down his arms?

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I wonder if he, too, has spent a lifetime looking at women – even a woman – waiting for Her to look back and see him? Sawicki again: “The word that became flesh was yes and Mary said it” (Seeing the Lord 326).

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The long night ends but this light, my God, it blinds me.

Nineteen / Twenty-One

Advent Travels: Behind the Barn

Reading Humberto Maturana taught me that love was not a feeling but a state of being, a way of giving attention to life that was creative and nurturing, that was, in and of itself, life-giving.

Through Maturana I discovered that love was inherent and fear alien, and that it was possible to be happy in a deeply serious way (which is different from being happy in a deeply serious way – that’s an effect of a practice).

In love – in this new understanding of love – I was born again, and the world was born again with me. I was instantly intimately related to everyone and everything, without qualification or condition. Human beings, deer ticks, shooting stars and viruses . . . – I gave – not paid, gave – attention to all of it. I was devoted to the gift of attention. I gave and received in perfect measure, and the peace that resulted was not subject to analysis. Judgment was not mine but the Lord’s, and the Lord was radical because He excluded nothing and accepted no less of me.

. . . in the relational domain of love the other is not asked and is not expected to justify his or her existence . . . Love is unidirectional, and occurs as a spontaneous happening of accepting the legitimacy of the other as a matter of course without expecting retribution (Maturana 273).

More colloquially, love is the relationship – itself comprised of relationships – by which we come into being and know ourselves as Love Itself. Knowing ourself is to know the other; no other knowledge is possible.

Love is a process of mutual recognition, in which we come to see each other as unique and valuable beings. It is a process of creating a shared world, in which we can experience intimacy and connection (Maturana & Varela The Tree of Life).

But creating is active. It is enacted. Understanding matters but application does too, perhaps more. Tara Singh knew. And he also knew that application in the fullest sense required a relationship of – or with, perhaps – the highest order we know. On our own it cannot be done.

If you want to bring the Course to application, know that you have His divine presence with you. Knowing that He is with you inspires a quality of love and reverence. How would you then sit in His presence? (Commentaries on A Course in Miracles 38)

I began and for a long time transitioned through projections of God. God the judge, God the father, God in Heaven, God-as-Love. But then I realized that god was everywhere in all things, far upstream of language, concept and even behavior.

Jeremiah heard God say, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you.” God is outside of time and space altogether, so must be his Creation.

We are discovering this; we are remembering it, together.

I began to see the wisdom of making all thing a gift unto God. If you believed you were in the presence of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, of God, what would you do? As Tara Singh wrote, how would sit in the presence of God? It’s not a criticism – it’s an invitation.

For me, I cannot answer that question alone. That is where I am at now – I have the pieces, I’ve made the puzzle – but the finished puzzle is not the answer. I thought it would be but it is not.

In yesterday’s Advent writing I wrote the phrase “eccesial reckoning,” and felt a deep call to go into it. Sawicki is clear that post-resurrection Jesus communities were ecclesial. Church matters. But I hate church, and always have.

This morning I woke up thinking about Maturana, who invites a more radical communion than the formality and dogma of church. Or does he imply an even older way of churching? A simpler way?

What needs to be organized in my life? What needs a new rule to remember what it is?

Outside this morning it was cold and overcast. I shivered with my coffee. You make this harder than it has to be, says Jesus

Not always, I answer, and he nods in agreement. Not always. Often, yes. But not always.

We are quiet then, behind the barn, the world waking up. I wander down to the raspberries and wonder again if I should cut them back. I’ve been here before; I don’t want to be anywhere else. The homestead calls to me and In that call Jesus dissolves. Specialness dissolves.

I come inside then to write. I sit quietly by the Christmas tree and write. Neither sad nor happy, neither asleep nor awake. When it will be enough asks a familiar angel, and for the millionth time since this difficult journey began, I say not yet. Not yet.

Advent Travels: Church Goes with You

What is clear at 4 a.m. is less so as the day goes on. It rained last night; I sat in the darkness and listened. Christmas is coming, plans are being made. I’m tired and I want to rest.

In Advent, in prayer, a lot opens up and a lot slips away.

I remember Elango all those years ago telling me outside the library in Burlington, it’s not intensity you lack but focus, which struck me as oddly backwards. This was around the time I told Andy I was going to wear my crucifix outside my shirt and he was visibly shocked. Pray on that, he said, and I did because of how it mattered to him.

I used to wake up Dan in the middle of the night, whatever floor or couch we’d fallen asleep on, and say things like, we have to drive to Boston. Or, we have to go into the woods. “My God you’re a fire,” he said once, forcing himself awake at two a.m. to drive us deep into the Northeast Kingdom. I was never happier than watching the sun rise over Lake Memphremagog that morning. The church goes with you or it’s not a church.

By dusk yesterday I realized the hypocrisy in yesterday’s writing: bragging how spiritually mature it was, not publicly engaging with my critic which was, of course, a way of publicly engaging with my critic, which neither surprised nor disappointed me. I’ve been walking in this direction a long time.

Separation is a way of thinking that produces behavior that makes us, singly and collectively, unhappy. We insist that something naturally unified must be held apart, and then expend tremendous energy keeping it apart. But what? What is being held apart?

In Advent, something hidden remains so. I have to accept it may always. I may not reach the manger. And honestly? It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

Yesterday I wrote this sentence to a friend:

It seems clear to me that your relationship with yourself as a writer – a creator, an artist, a free spirit – is somehow damaged and the damage lies in a domain signified primarily by gender and that you have hidden – protected, secured – the requisite healing in a version of Christianity you have yet to discover because you have yet to create it.

. . . and wished someone had written it to me. Like really wished it.

In those days – with Elango, Andy and Dan – I was still studying under Lorrie’s direction, even though we hadn’t talked in years. The reading list she’d left was vast – Derrida and Barthes, Mary Daly, Gertrude Stein. The curriculum was thrilling but private. Nobody knew what I was doing.

I read all the time, wrote as often as possible, and spent the rest of my days dragging men into various arguments that most of them didn’t realize were arguments. Or rather, didn’t realize how high I wanted the stakes to be.

Sawicki is less interested in a therapeutic model for its own sake because of the risk it will devolve into something merely personal, effacing the necessity of ecclesial reckoning. Whatever illusion resurrection penetrates, it must also takes with it the illusion of separate interests. Do you want to see the Lord or not?

My answer, not exactly on point: I don’t want to be seen doing this. Doing what? Writing this way.

Do you see what am I saying about separation? And projection? Do you see what I am not saying?

Dan and I fought exactly once, a terrible argument from which the relationship never recovered. Forty years later I am still baffled and hurt, wishing I could repair the damage. The rest of them it’s okay they’re memories. But I do miss Dan.

In Advent it rains. December softens growing darker. Each sentence this morning was a difficult pill. Who was the desert father who kept a stone in his mouth for thirty years in order to learn what silence was? I want to find his cell and take him in my arms. I want to say, “brother, spit out that rock, let’s talk.”

Eighteen / Twenty

Advent Travels: Under the Bookish Pedagogy

Often, at night when I am most with Jesus and the Holy Spirit in prayer, I draw the curtains. Privacy, seclusion, minimal distractions. I am not of this world but another.

But last night I let the curtains be. The moon was right outside the window, spectral and thin, and I was in the mood for ghosts.

But no ghost came. Or rather, the tired ghost of argument came, propping himself in the corner. My ghosts always say the same thing when summoned: me again? Who is haunting who here?

Yesterday, someone used the phrase “according to Jesus,” with respect to A Course in Miracles, as evidence I was wrong. It used to bother me terribly, that sort of thing. Citing Jesus as an authority and then arguing from that authority to support your interpretation of ACIM. It’s an understandable rhetorical move – trust me I get it – but it’s an error, a nontrivial one.

I took it all to Sawicki who laughed gently at my angst. They’ve been doing that with Jesus since before he was nailed to the cross, she says. Getting worked up about it just reinforces the error.

There is, she says, Bill Thetford-like, another way.

Tara Singh called this particular error “the lovelessness of ‘I get it and you don’t,'” and he raised it often enough in his writing that I can’t forget or ignore it. He saw it as a real problem, and it is. It’s my problem.

I mention this to the ghost, who nods tiredly. He’s dozing in the corner, letting Sawicki take point. Sawicki doesn’t fight, she guides. It’s a different kind of relationship.

The moonlight is blue, as snow is when moonlight touches it, and my heart softens, so much so it’s like a pool of bright water or a chalice in danger of spilling.

Yes . . . a chalice in danger of spilling, as if what is sacred is that which cannot be contained. Christ is contagious.

I have been here before. I have been to the well.

Sawicki waits patiently while I work it out. She was at the well once too, long ago. No lesson is lost on her.

Sawicki is serenely confident that one can be taught how to see the Lord – can, in fact, become so competent at seeing the Lord that they can teach others how to see the Lord as well. Her confidence is infectious; I submit to it totally.

For Sawicki, “seeing the Lord” means knowing Jesus which means being in relationship with resurrection – both the word and that to which it was made to point.

Whatever you defend, you attack. True safety is found in nonviolence and nonresistance. And those words and that to which they point mean nothing if you won’t put your body into it.

Putting your body into it is how your mind remembers what it is and what matters. Knowing Jesus now – a perfectly reasonable possibility – means knowing exactly what a body is and does and what it is for. There is nothing to fight; there is nothing to fight for.

A Course in Miracles was helpful to me not because it was an answer, much less a “way” or a “path” (I have big amends to make for that latter error) but because it exposed the underlying confusion in me that made Jesus both a spiritual ideal and a cheap con.

I was less interested in knowing Jesus than in you knowing that I knew Jesus.

The ghost gives a gentle snore. My thinking slows and quietens so as not to wake him. Sawicki taught me once and for all that if you need to protect or defend or save Jesus than you haven’t met Jesus.

The simplicity of that insight liberated me. Nor was it separate from my long and devout study of A Course in Miracles under the bookish pedagogy of Tara Singh and the half-assed lineage he cobbled together with Krishnamurti and Helen Schucman, nor from the Catholic Worker before that, nor the pantheistic idyll that was childhood, nor the void from which childhood emerges, perfectly innocent and free.

When my brother said I was wrong about the course, and used Jesus to buttress the argument, I wanted to push back. I wanted to defend Jesus.

But in the end, I just wrote “thank you.”

The ghost of argument left without me noticing. I am glad he can rest; I hope I can let him rest a long time. Sawicki would like to leave as well but she is a Teacher (not an arguer) and I am her student. It is the most sacred form of relationship I know. She will not leave until I am ready, and I will not be ready until she does.

The paradox is exquisite and by necessity arises in a text that you and I create together.

The moonlight was lovely, shifting in hue and intensity as the moon floated away to the west. You were there, and you asked me for help. Later I will try to help. But for now I am writing, this, because I want you to know you are not alone, because you cannot be.

You taught me this lifetimes ago. I am ready now to remember.

Seventeen / Nineteen

Advent Travels: A Critter in Creation

Briefly.

What did you think Love would look like, when at last you realized or remembered it? What did you think oneness with God would feel like?

When our fundamental unity with all life is at last revealed, what will it be like to be you?

We cannot crave that which we do not know exists. We cannot long for a state that we have not in some way, however faintly, known.

I mean, theoretically we can. We can play very fancy word games; we can invent states like “enlightenment” or “awakening,” and project them into the future as ideals to pursue. We can build whole thought systems supporting that pursuit.

But in terms of our practice – in terms of how we support one another in a practice – it’s neither a mystery nor a secret. God sugars out on terms you know presently and through means with which you are already fluent.

Whatever God is, whatever Love is, it is trying to get to you as much as you are trying – or professing to be trying – to get to it.

The first time I asked these questions – put both mind and body into them – I realized that whatever Love was, it had to include this. Which this?

This one, right here. This this.

God’s love – whatever it is – has to be here now. I may not right away recognize it – I may even resist it (man do I resist it) – but it’s not being kept from me. It’s not being hidden at the end of a long journey.

God and love – whatever they are – are simple because they are given to everyone equally. It doesn’t matter how you pray or whether you pray or what you believe or what shitty things you’ve done.

The gift is given. It’s yours. It’s one size fits all. It’s really really simple.

So I began to look for love where I was – doing the dishes, weeding the garden, driving to work, talking to friends, reading and cooking.

Not in those activities – not dependent on those activities – but rather the light in which those activities could be known.

That practice taught me the specific way in which separation is an illusion and, in doing so, healed it.

Again, I mean this in an experiential sense. I wasn’t trying to understand any theology or master any metaphysics. It wasn’t about one-upping anybody on ACIM stuff. I was looking at experience and understanding as they were expressed – as they were offered – in the moment.

I looked at the offer, what was offered, the one offering and the one to whom it was offered.

There was no separation in any of it.

Sometimes we try to retrofit the experience into this or that religious language. I really like the Abhishiktananda writes about oneness with God, Tara Singh about A Course in Miracles, and Emily Dickinson about revelation.

All good! All helpful!

But those are pointers and what they pointed at was orders of magnitude simpler and clearer than they could ever be on their own.

The practice became: give attention.

The gift is attention.

If we just give attention – if we are present as fully as we can be in the moment – what is God? What is love?

I am saying, you already know. At a deep level – but not a secret or a hidden level – you know. We all do.

It was very helpful to see this and then to accept it. Wonderful things began to happen. The power to be happy and at peace began to assert itself. A kind of deep coherence – far beyond my ability to disturb or offend or manipulate – began to show itself.

It’s not hard to talk about, though finding a shared language to do so can be challenging. You can get lost a long time trying to police your or someone else’s language. Ask me how I know.

But if the problem is how to talk about God and the gift of God – or what language to use – then we haven’t yet found it. We’re like kids playing with wrapping paper, while the true gift – given and opened – goes ignored.

Here’s the thing. No decent parent makes their kid stop playing with wrapping paper. You want to play with wrapping paper and look at the gift tomorrow? Or in a week? That’s okay! The divine parent waits for us to to finish being distracted by the wapping and turn to the gift. There’s nothing left for them to do.

God waits on us, not the other way around.

Are these Advent posts playing with the paper? Or are they pointers to the gift?

I am saying that the gift is given. That’s what I want to say. The gift is here. Nobody has to go anywhere or do anything to get the gift. After you get it (that is, after you realize you’ve had it all along) your life circumstances might change. Why not? But the gift is not conditional on those circumstances, much less on their being other than they are presently.

Or, rather, the gift is conditional but on one thing: you being a Child of God, a critter in Creation, an extension of Love.

Which you are.

Sixteen / Eighteen