Advent Journal: The Way to Freedom for All of Us

There are phases to a life, like there are phases to the moon. Flavors to a season of writing, the way Halloween had a flavor as a child, or Christmas. In Advent, I am happy and a little reckless. When you know the way God is alive and Christ afoot, then the work changes. It stops being work, really. It takes no time at all to be as God created you, and God does not make mistakes, nor drafts that need editing or other changes. Happiness is serious, inclusive and disciplined, naturally so. Have you met Jesus?

I ask that seriously. In Advent – this season of readying ourselves for his arrival in the world, which signifies a new way of being in time together – what I don’t quite say is, you can learn how to see Jesus. Seeing him is like seeing justice or a birthday or a pet. Not until I could see Jesus, clearly and unequivocally, did the change begin. And even then it took some time. Takes time? All he asks is that I be a willing learner.

Last year, I don’t remember the precise date, but Jasper read something on my substack and said, brother, one of these days, you’re going to have to come out to these folks as Catholic. And in the slant-wise nature of truth (lauds and praise, Sister Emily, lauds and praise), I haven’t thought about much else since. I haven’t been to church for myself in what? A quarter century now?

And yet.

Morning deepens – three o’clock, now four, now five. Soon the day will begin. The prayer cycles closer to amen, as it must.

Jesus doesn’t call me to church but to writing and, by extension, to teaching. This is our shared calling; we are here together. Teaching – like psychotherapy, to which it is closely related – is an expression of honesty. Whatever formal role it assumes, its whole function is to bring us together to honesty. But honesty about what? And the answer is, honesty about talking about what is missing and how to live in its absence. But what is missing? Well, you tell me. Because for me, increasingly, nothing is missing. Not even the haunting, hard-to-scratch sense that something is missing is missing. And yet here we are.

When you know nothing is missing (even if you still kind of suspect that something is missing), and you know that God is alive and Christ afoot, then the tides of ego obscuring both moon and sea, soften a little. You see the moon and the sea, and know the tide as an effect. A predictable effect, a measurable effect. “We are in this together” means something a little different. It doesn’t mean there’s a crisis and we’ll solve it together. It means that learning situations abound and this is one of them, yet again. What do you want to learn? I ask myself this question constantly. So does Jesus. Constantly.

What do you want to learn is related to what do you want to teach. We can sharpen that a little. What you want to teach is related to what you want to give away – and what you want to give away is related to what you think you need. Generally, the various answers to all these questions sugar out in the concept of relationship. Beyond the specificity of form – we are lovers, we are friends, you are my therapist, I am your teacher, we use familial lingo like “brother” and “sister,” whatever – lies relationship. A word pointing to a concept that points to . . . what exactly? And why are we all fighting over it?

I joined the battle when and the way I did because I didn’t want to be an object. I insisted on subjectivity. Nor did I consider time a friend or ally. I was a child! And so decades passed in an expanding compounding error (related to subjectivity and objectivity) that I could not see and, on the rare occasion when I did catch a glimpse, I didn’t understand. I thought the mind and the body were separate; I thought it was possible to move through the world unattached and unaffected; I thought the rules changed according to social status; and I thought these things were desirable because they were fundamentally right in some way, over and against anything else.

A turtle or so down then, the problem was my conviction it was possible to be right at all with respect to remembering God’s Love. God’s Love burns the right/wrong binary (e.g., the lovelessness of “I get it and you don’t”) to ash! Really, the problem was my misinterpretation of somebody else’s misinterpretation all the way back to the garden. That’s what saved me, by the way – the realization that the world I was living in was my misinterpretation of the misinterpretation of others – parents, teachers, priests, gurus, whatever. Jesus corrects that interpretation. Or rather, learning how to see Jesus allows me to correct that interpretation, which really really means just noticing that it is an interpretation. When I saw that, I saw the way to freedom for all of us. It was obvious; it was simple; it was given.

“Obvious, simple and given” because you are given. You are always given. You are always here, ready to listen, ready to remind me to rest, ready to go over what I’m learning in order to purify and perfect it, ready to remind me that “purify” and “perfect” are tricky and often slip us up. Et cetera. You are you – a reader, a fellow traveler, a distant observer taking notes for later, or something else altogether. To share in the way we do eclipses time and space, bringing both to the holy instant where they gently dissolve in relationship. I write and you read but something – but what – is fully present now, for both of us. The writing isn’t it but the writing does reflect it – but what “it” is can only be present, can only be reflected the way it is, because we both know it and consent to its presence. Together we create it. This is it.

Advent Journal: In the Country of Sins

Eventually, you reach the sins. You make contact with material that’s so bad even God turns away. I hail from a long line of sufferers, folks who destroyed themselves rather than face the possibility God doesn’t love them. They died bravely but forsaken, hard deaths I don’t wish on anybody.

Paradoxically, looking at my unworthiness in the eyes of God required humility. I had to stop emphasizing status in the world, and I had to let go of the interior emphasis on blaming others. It was the only way to get close to the interior monstrosities. I don’t understand why.

And it’s funny because “stop emphasizing status in the world” and “let go of the interior emphasis on blaming others” are really good tips for living in holy relationship. When we commit to living that way, when we make it a practice, we really do begin to perceive others the way God perceives them. Our shared holiness becomes a vibrant symbol of love.

Looking at my sins was hard but it was easier when I was also percieving in others – in their relationship with the world – the broad outline of God’s Love for them, which was total and unconditional. And I understood – at first intellectually only, but then in an inegrated and coherent way – that I could not be excepted from that Love. God’s Love for you was proof of God’s Love for me.

So the gaze at myself as a sinner was joined to the gaze at myself as an innocent child of God, beloved of their father in heaven. Is that clear? The problem and the solution arose together (and in relationship).

People in our circle don’t like the word “sin.” I’m often having certain lines from A Course in Miracles tossed at me, especially those reminding me that sin is an “error” not a moral wrong or ethical violation. That’s absolutely correct in ACIM terms and, in the context of the course, very helpful.

But the course is a beginning (think of it as an entry-level exam that allows you to begin a course of study and practice) that adapts itself to the student. Self-study means there’s going to be a lot of personal variation. The word “sin” is not foreign to me and – in other circles where I sometimes move – my “story” is pretty fucking grim. I can’t even handle all of it. One way or the other, that needs to be responded to.

When I began to reach that desolate country (The Country of Sin, the Land of the Forsaken), I realized I was not alone. And to realize you are not alone is also to realize that the ambit of God’s Love includes you, whether you want to accept that or not. Non-acceptance is an option! But denial is not. Do whatever you want with God’s Love – that’s the nature of God’s Love – but don’t pretend it’s not love.

So that becomes the work then – going to the places (within and without) that you believe love won’t go, maybe can’t go, and so are yourself terrified of visiting. But honestly it is a great relief to face the ghosts, name the monsters, and map the haunts. You realize how much effort goes into sustaining the illusion of “places where love won’t go.” You see the illusion. You see the collaborative nature of it, the way we are doing this to ourselves, together.

In the Country of Sins I was neither alone nor unforgiven. In the place that love doesn’t go, love was waiting.

This is my witness.

Advent Journal: How Lonely One Becomes in Victory

1

There was a sense that something big was going to happen, something important. Maybe even something miraculous.

I was going to do this big thing, or the big thing was going to happen to me. Somehow I was integral to it. Its effects were going to be transformative, world-changing, definitely for the better. People would be glad I was alive.

And so I waited. And waited.

And waited.

2

I can’t sleep. The usual tricks don’t work so I’m up and about in the middle of the night. Not it’s two, now it’s three, now it’s half past. Trying to be quiet and failing. Trying to avoid the Byzantine spiritual inquiry, the endless psychological excavation. I was determined to be a subject, not an object, and I won certain early conflicts in that struggle, never realizing how lonely one becomes in victory.

Conflict entails loneliness. You can’t go to war without making holes in your life, some of which you will learn too late cannot be filled. I was a fighter early because I had to be and later, when I tried later to transform myself into a lover, certain habits and scars lingered as impediments.

Life gets dark, then darker. We are none of us excepted.

3

A long time ago four a.m. became holy to me. I don’t know why. I was always alone at that hour, usually outdoors with the dogs, and whatever was missing was either unnecessary or easily recoverable. Not missing at all? Prayer flowed and when it didn’t the Lord was forgiving. Who needs to talk when you can listen? But now four a.m. finds me mute, distracted, unsure. I asked for too much without knowing what I wanted, and this is what happened. I don’t know where to lay my head. Wouldn’t lay it anyway?

Well, something deeply wrong crying out for healing anyway. Something deeply healing saying don’t deny what’s wrong?

4

“You have to do this part alone.” Who taught me that? Who taught them? I learned the lesson so well it generalized recklessly. “You’ll be doing all of this alone.” What God would insist on such a penance? What kind of creature would consent to it? My life recedes now in images, like Polaroids skimming off the table in an unexpected breeze. Who left the window open? Who stacked the photographs just so? What did they mean by “this part” and why – at such a late and getting later juncture – am I still unable to answer these questions?

5

Oh but then I go outside with my coffee. Crunchy snow, gusting breath. The river a low murmur beyond the pasture. The waning moon blurred by clouds, yellowish and dim. Thank Christ for Advent at four a.m. on the seventh of December. The beauty of it – the here-and-nowness of it – is a familiar gift, a practical blessing. My lungs open to the world and something inside settles. “There’s another way,” you whisper, from that bower in my chest you share with Jesus. You’re right, of course, and I know you’re right. I know where to find you and how to close my eyes.

I stay outside a moment or two longer, though. A gift to us? What else could the world be for? You don’t find Jesus; Jesus finds you. Nor can you be estranged again. Love is here; this is love.

I want to do something with my hands – or open my mouth to sing maybe – but the stillness and silence reflect God better than I can. Become less. Less and less. Even without me what is sacred continues. I’m like a child in his father’s house, playing hide and seek. Now you see me, now you don’t. Now I do. Now I am, again.

Advent Journal: Edenic, Heavenly, Utopian, You Name It

I’m up early as usual. There is no moonlight in the kitchen making coffee. Nor can I pray exactly. Last night I wrote for almost four hours, coming away with seven scrawny paragraphs. Nothing sits well; I feel rough and difficult. “What’s wrong?” he asks gently, there in the darkness.

I can’t lie to him. That’s one way you know it’s Jesus you’re talking to. I tell him I don’t want to write about A Course in Miracles anymore but I’m scared to stop. “Okay,” he says. “But why?”

I go into it. Its emphasis on mind / body dualism, especially its hierarchical ordering of mind over body, is not only incorrect but the error isn’t harmless. A Course in Miracles reinforces the very separation it intends to undo. It hides this error behind a quasi-new age / self help facade that’s fundamentally racist and misogynistic. And when the cracks and seams do show, they’re written off as evidence that we’re wrong. It’s incoherent and dysfunctional. I’m embarrassed I bought into it as long as I did. Years went to waste.

He listens. He knows these arguments better than I do – he’s the one who taught them to me. But then he interrupts.

“No,” he says. “what I meant was, why does stopping writing about the course scare you? Write about it or don’t, I don’t care. But the fear . . . “

Morning opens into a swale, the bottom of which I’ve never found. I step outside to get away, ground myself, whatever. The sky is low and full of heavy clouds. The blind horse whinnies down by the run-in. Feed me. I know the feeling.

Listen, I say. I’ll do whatever you want. You want me to write about ACIM? Say the word. You want me to write about something else? Say that word.

He laughs, amused as always at my propensity for spiritual drama, my stubborn insistence on playing a role. “I have already said the word,” he says.

And then he is gone.

The kitchen brightens when I come inside. Snow outside the east-facing window looks blue in the dim light. I get lost a little in the loveliness of it. Distracted by the loveliness? Sawicki teaches you how to see Jesus but Jesus teaches you how to love the other as your own self, which is otherwise (so far as I can tell) impossible. He imagined (with others – never forget this) a world – a way of being together – that was utterly antithetical to the fear-based, survival-based, scarcity-based, suffering-based world in which we are still – still – fatally dithering.

Advent deepens, becomes wintry.

Over the past year I have seen The Skull. Do you know it? The skull is death but death is just a symbol of not knowing. The skull represents the uncertainty inherent in our experience. It does not speak. It has no argument. Its silence is its message.

The skull appeared when I realized that A Course in Miracles was not only not my path but was an intentional avoidance of that path. I had fallen into a dream of following Jesus because I was too scared to actually follow Jesus.

It is an old story.

Marianne Sawicki pulled me back from that abyss, and showed me how to avoid falling into it going forward. But that was all. We can be taught how to see Jesus, but once we do see him, we’re on our own. It makes sense though, right? It’s a relationship. It’s a dialogue. You talk, he talks. Questions are asked, questions are answered. What else is there?

Day begins before I finish writing. I carry kitchen scraps to the outside compost, wading through snow. My daughters’ voices from the barn float through cold air like bird song or garlands strung by angels. I can’t quite make out the words but it doesn’t matter. It’s not me they’re talking to. A little snow begins to fall. I remind myself not to forget to bring Christmas decorations down from the attic for later.

When you stop being scared of the skull, the cross on which Jesus was crucified looks different. You can walk away from it; you can let him die on it. That was his calling, not yours. Yours is here, in this world, with these people. The skull teaches you to forget about time and its effects and instead focus on what you can do in this moment to be helpful to others. Often that means clarifying some interior confusion, forgiving an old grievance, or practicing a new way of responding to this or that condition. But it has to sugar out in service; it has to sugar out in the familiar (the family-like) radical vision of peace and joy. Jesus was taught to do a work, he did it and taught others how to do it, and here we are. What are you doing? How can I help|?

Chores finished, I come upstairs to write by the bedroom window. Snow has changed to sleet; voices in the kitchen float through the floorboards. I’m happy, against long odds. I was supposed to die alone a long time ago. Nor am I finished trying to get it all right. I still believe in him, in his claim that a world premised on love rather than fear is possible. I fucked up but I’m still here. As Leonard Cohen said, “I’m broke but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet.”

But a few sentences into the writing – I’m riffing off Gerd Theissen’s comment in The Historical Jesus that, for Jesus, “the rule of God . . . was already a hidden reality in the present” (175). I think I can make it clear to you how that sugars out in application, in a radical way of knowing and loving one another that’s Edenic, Heavenly, Utopian, you name it. I think we are very close, I think –

– “Sean?” he says.

Yes, Jesus? I ask, a little annoyed that he’s interrupting. I’m in the flow now; I’ve found the words. I’m doing the work.

“Do you owe her an apology?” he asks. He asks it gently but it stops me. He’s not judging me, nor is he angry or even disappointed. It’s an old story and he’s been at it a long time. He’s a teacher, not a cop or a lawyer. He’s a healer, not an executioner.

Morning opens into a swale I have never found the bottom of. I do, I say. I do.

And begin.

Advent Journal: Together We are Briefly Heavenly

The moon was impossibly bright this morning, a few fingers above Arunah Hill. The clarity was shocking in the still-dark kitchen; I brewed coffee with the lights off, finding my way, in order to keep the moon and its uncompromising light in focus. There are moments when the confusion subsides and identity settles and an interior vista opens that is not other than the cosmos. We are in this together, and nothing is missing.

What I mean in this essay (which only came together once I agreed to make nine sections of five paragraphs each, writing is weird!) is that fulfillment is personal – my happiness, my contentment, my peace. It’s not a crime against God or nature but there is a way in which that happiness, contentment and peace – that coherence – can be extended to all Creation, rather than this or that briefly priviledged part. We really have to care more about others, their survival and their fulfillment, and that care has to sugar out in material ways. Illusions are no excuse for passivity or indifference; indeed, passivity and indifference are means by which illusion gains and sustains its stranglehold on our capacity for justice, truth and love.

I come back often to food. Our gardens are snowed in now, and everything is mostly put up. We are still eating fresh tomatoes though – we got lucky with temperatures in the hay loft. The fruit, while soft and a little wrinkly – you do have to do some trimming – was delightful on turkey sandwiches over the weekend. The earth, the gardener, and the food come together. Eating is the nexus of survival and fulfillment. A unique genius of Jesus’s program was its emphasis on open commensality – that is, the table that excludes no one, and the ritual that abides no hunger anywhere.

Fulfillment and survival come together in the meals we eat, and so the way we bring them forth together matters. This is not a call to drama! It is more a call to intentionality, and realizing that we can’t heal the world without making some changes in the way we live in the world. Inside and outside are related in helpful ways and pretending otherwise – especially in the name of spirituality – helps nobody. Making changes outside does point to patterns of thinking and belief systems that are fairly encompassed by the word “mind,” and which are, in a reasonable sense, inside. But does the mind change and the ass follow or does the mind play catch-up with the ass? I remember long ago being told to just show up, take a chair and eventually something good would happen. And it did and I didn’t have to wait long either. I think Jesus was saying something similar about the table in the Kingdom of Heaven. Don’t worry about the thought and don’t worry about the ass; bring both of them to service and let the Will of God do what it wills.

In the ultimate sense (this is what Grant was saying), Jesus is not about race or gender or religion but about something even more fundamental, something that can’t even really be compassed by language or signs at all. But to get there, you have to work through the fear and the famine, the war and the torture. Don’t just shelter the widow, don’t just feed the orphan. A world in which nobody suffers is possible – it is actually possible, not theoretically possible – but in order to get there we’re going to have to find a way to forget everything we think we know about love and begin again. Jesus clarifies the confusion; he transforms the heart into a light and the mind into a prism. The way is given – hell, the fellow travelers are given – but ego is masterful at making us think we have to find it ourselves, are all alone in the world, need a better walking stick before we begin, et cetera.

If you ask me how we get beyond words or signs – how we transform systems that are bigger than us, and move of their own accord (powers and principalities, sister, powers and principalities) – then my answer is, love beauty. I learned this lesson early in life and have fucked it up constantly but I’ve never forgotten it. Don’t possess the beauty, don’t perserve the beauty (those are errors to which I can speak volumes), just notice it. Give attention to it. And when it passes, great. Letting go of the one you want and the one who wants is hard work. But we’re in it now, no going back.

The moon grew faint as the sun rose, softening to a chalk-covered disc slipping under the hill. The coffee was hot and delicious, and I wrote while I finished it, sentences unfurling as the kitchen warmed and brightened. Beautiful moon, beautiful coffee, beautiful you, beautiful me. Together we are briefly heavenly, and then it subsides to something we can talk about, and talking about it how we learn that it doesn’t have to subside. Relationship, insight, careful attention. Salvation is a dialogue from which no body and no thing can be excluded. Look – there on the sideyard fence leaning over in frozen snow – a pair of chickadees fluffed up against the cold. How happy I am, against long odds! How grateful for you, and for this love we have shared since the beginning. May our Advent travels deliver us Emmaus-like to the one who shares the way, allowing us to find ourselves in relationship all over again.

Advent Journal: Wind in the Lilac

Bright sun on the sideyard lilac, snow buntings weighing down each branch. For years that bush didn’t bloom at all. Then, the year I planned to cut it down, it threw a couple of scrawny blossoms skyward. It has been blooming – awkwardly, sparsely, beautifully – ever since. Point taken, I guess. Angels abound.

It is hard to impress upon people that in order to see Jesus you have to let go of Jesus. You have to turn away from the cross and let him die on it. He’s gone and he’s not coming back.

When you really reach that juncture – when your condition is the condition of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus (imagine their grief, imagine their fear) – then Jesus becomes possible. But remember! He finds you, not the other way around. And – I track the Emmaus story very closely here – it can take a minute to recognize him.

Hence the invitation, always: Jesus is here but you’re overlooking him. Or you’re looking right at him and calling him something else. Stop looking for him, stop insisting on him and instead just let him be. He’s here; there’s nothing you need to do. Sit on the pending revelation.

Wind in the lilac knocks one or two buntings to the earth.

Marianne Sawicki makes an important point in Seeing the Lord. She says that the earliest followers of Jesus emphasized hearing rather than seeing him. The value of seeing Jesus with the eyes comes later, as the Greek tradition and its emphasis on logic and order (and hierarchy) take precedence. But before that, in the Aramaic language, in peasant Jewish communities in lower Palestine, the focus was on hearing Jesus. Even more critically (for Sawicki) what one heard was validated by the action it inspired. Jesus was a teacher who wanted his lessons brought into application (thank you Tara Singh). The emphasis was not on understanding but on doing. In other words, the healing contemplated by Jesus wasn’t conceptual but actual. And the actual wasn’t mysterious either. It sugared out as reliable food and shelter for everyone, without qualification or condition. For Sawicki, there are two basic conditions for seeing Jesus: first, words are inadequate unto the task and second, “sharing of the necessities of life is essential to it” (84). On the Road to Emmaus story, the disciples don’t recognize Jesus until they invite him to rest with them for the night and share their food.

I don’t think this is about soup kitchens and food shelters and whatnot. Those are fine – I’m glad they’re there – I donate and volunteer. But I think the invitation is to go deeper. I think we really have to discover the specific way in which we desire the other’s well-being. Not as a condition of my personal happiness or fulfillment but as an authentic expression of Love Itself. Nor is it about martyrdom – you eat, I’ll starve. It’s about sharing. We are by design cooperators, communicators and coordinators. And the outcomes of all that activity – that cooperation, communication and coordination – is coherence.

Coherence is about relationship, and relationship is about sharing. Noah Websiter, in his 1828 dictionary, said that coherence had to do with consistency and connection, all “proceeding from the natural relation of parts or things to each other, as in the parts of a discourse, or of any system.” Coherence is about flow and fit – the river within its banks, say, or how a close friend kind of knows when you need to hear from them. Coherence is what works, and works without calling attention to itself. When we cohere we are happy, we are settled. We can handle what happens. We know we are in it together, and that togetherness is salvation.

I’ve been tired the past few days – a bad cold, lots of work, et cetera. I’m writing slowly this afternoon, long paragraphs that kind of meander and I don’t have the inner discipline to stop them. I keep gazing at the lilac. A few minutes ago a snow squall nearly obscured it; now the sun is bright again. What I said earlier about desire – that’s going to need to be reflected on and developed.

The woman at the well points to Jesus but for me she truly pointed at the interior blocks to my awareness of Jesus’s presence. Paradoxically, addressing those blocks meant letting go of Jesus – which really just meant, becoming responsible with respect to my projection of Jesus. Absent Jesus, you find yourself realizing he had some good ideas and you might as well in your own stumbling sort of way try to practice them. “Bring each relationship to coherence,” the woman at the well said. Or was it Jesus? It’s hard to say sometimes. Did I save the lilac bush by not cutting it down? Or did it save me? Who is grateful for who here?