Advent Journal: If the Cross Comes

The cold breaks overnight, may I never forget to be grateful. Morning arrives gray but with a little mist. The river murmurs beyond the pasture, a language I love but never learned to speak.

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it.

There was a phase in my study and practice when, had somebody said that to me, I would have responded instantly with, “well, something is going to happen, that’s true, but whether it’s good or bad is up to you. Are you looking with ego or the Holy Spirit?”

And then I would’ve launched into a combination theological lecture / psychological pep talk about the role interpretation plays in experience. Just look with the Holy Spirit!

I don’t do that anymore. Or I try not to, anyway.

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. In the back of my skull – near the atlas and axis vertebrae – there’s a pressure, like a storm front gathering. It’s hard to describe. There’s an emptiness in me – there has always been an emptiness in me – and sometimes it grows teeth and wants to eat.

There was a time when, had somebody said that to me, that way, I would have said, very dramatic language! Great image! And then gone off a longish soliloquy about how ego loves drama, uses it to keep the stakes high, and the pressure on, and there’s a better way, et cetera.

I don’t do that anymore.

I’ve learned that sometimes the Holy Spirit uses that kind of language in order to help me go deeper, so I can see the error, the pathology, more clearly, so that the letting go – which is all healing is, in the end – can be authentic and as close to total as possible. I’m not saying it has to work that way for you but there’s a reason you’re reading this. Yesterday I called it all a Derridean play of signs; today I just seen distant lights, like fireflies, all of us lost in the lonesome valley hefting out lanterns. I’m here – find me!

I carry a flake of hay to the horses, pause by the hemlocks to see if I can hear the cardinals waking up. A few flakes of snow spiral through the air.

More and more I don’t want the metaphysical arguments – am I a body, is the world real, how does God intervene, et cetera. I indulged those questions a long time. They’re fun and interesting. And certainly all that work became the rich turf Sawicki used to teach me how to see Jesus. But still. Something in the abstraction no longer appeals. I want to hold something; I want to be held.

But wait – aren’t we talking about letting go? About healing as letting go? What’s this “hold me” cry? Are we channeling John Denver all of a sudden? Rihanna featuring Mikky Ekko?

What is going on today? In the writing and in my mind? Why is my heart so quiet, as if hiding or disowned? What’s wrong?

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. I’m going to have to just take it again, because of who’s giving it, aren’t I. I don’t have a choice; it doesn’t matter how I define or explain or poeticize it. It’s going to happen; it’s going to be bad; it’s going to hurt. I’ve been here before; I know how it goes.

I sit quietly in the hay loft with coffee, neither writing nor praying. The room lightens slowly; the cat paws the door. I can hear passersby on Main Street.

The world is waking up.

I wrote yesterday that we can’t avoid the cross. The crucifix says something specific and true about love, and we have to face it. But what does it say? Does it have to do with what you give? Or the way in which you give it? The extent to which you give it?

We don’t talk about it a lot but a Cynic, contemporaneous with Jesus, said to his fellow Cynics, look, if the cross comes for you, then the cross comes. Accept it with the same equanimity as you do everything else.

That was how Cynics rolled – you didn’t get worked about the vicissitudes of life, you accepted them. Food, no food, shelter, no shelter. It was all the same. You reached a state of coherence in which there was neither resistance nor reaction, only relationship. Of course that balance applied to whatever beef the imperial class has with you, and whatever form of death they decided to deal.

The suggestion is, Jesus was saying something similar. He and his followers knew that some form of religio-political persecution – up to and including torture and death – was possible, even likely. Following Jesus is no joke, then or now. But his take was, look, maybe crucifixion happens, maybe not. Either way, it doesn’t change our work – loving, forgiving, feeding and healing. And we’re not alone. If one of us goes up on the tree, the others carry on. And you can see the wisdom of that, and you can let the wisdom of it calm you. Yeah, a bad thing might happen but it’s okay – it’s more than okay. Deeper than the personal harm and suffering is a love that will make this all okay. This work didn’t begin with Jesus and it sure as hell didn’t end with him. There’s something important in that – a coherence, a continuity, a communion.

You remember theold Buddhist story? The farmer’s horse runs away and everyone is like, oh, that’s too bad. The farmer says, maybe good, maybe bad. The next day the horse returns and everybody says, great news! To which the farmer says, maybe good and maybe bad. On and on it goes. It’s the “on and on” we want to notice. Life happens, change happens, and what all that means is . . . kind of beyond us. Not really the point? Remind me again there’s another way?

The writing goes slowly; morning begins before it’s finished. Here and there – between breakfast, phone calls, chores, meetings – I scribble and jot. Notes for later, sentences I want to remember. Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. But I’m not afraid of it. And anyway, there’s work to do. I’m going to let the writing end here. Sometimes you have to let go. Sometimes you do.

Advent Journal: Stars Then

The stars were so bright this morning, the air so still and cold. Imagine craving diamonds or a lover when a sky like this is just given to you! Or am I confused again about God?

Laughing at myself in the darkness – my wordiness, my devotion to inquiry, my goofy knack for stumbling into moments of clarity and bliss. Shivering under the hemlocks, loving myself in the broken way that is yet to fully heal.

It’s okay. It’s more than okay.

I come inside and make coffee and sit down to write. I am finding I am not finished with A Course in Miracles, nor with the difficulties it poses for all my relationships. It points to the Sermon on the Mount, which points to a way of being in the world that is so radical I had to have a love affair with Buddhism in order to understand it (and still, from time to time, need that serene and grounded reminder what’s what).

In the toy store Saturday, I lingered in the rocks section – the crystals, the geodes, the shark teeth, the fossils. I felt such a longing for a piece of amethyst! But typically in my life I don’t purchase crystals, they are gifted to me, or show up in odd transactions that include music. It was just funny to be in the presence of the desire to possess something, to own it, have it, keep it, call it “mine.” It’s harmless enough (buy the amethyst or don’t but for the love of Christ get on with it), but desire scales up quickly. War and oppression are not accidents but predictable effects of refusing to accept that the present moment, presently constellated, is enough. It’s not fun to trip into the parts of your mind that are insatiable, that don’t care what havoc or hell their appetites unleash. To crave is to suffer, yes, but also, to crave is to cause suffering for others. And there is – my God there is – another way.

The woman at the well showed me how to find Jesus and so I instantly made the familiar move: I forgot about Jesus, put the woman at the well on a pedestal and began writing poems for her. It’s so easy to remain confused! Jesus gives himself away but we don’t want the gift. We don’t want it because he comes not giving but asking – that we love the way he loves, forgive the way he forgives, and heal the way he heals. You get the inner peace, yes, and you get the bliss, yes, but you also get the crucifix. You understand? The crucifix isn’t literal – all of this is just a word game, a Derridean play of signs – but it points to something deep and true about the nature of love that we just don’t want to see. You have to give up everything, including giving up everything.

I remember many years ago in Burlington, Vermont throwing away a packet of love letters, thinking it was a way to let go of the pain of losing the relationship. I hurt terribly; the loneliness was indescribable. I remember looking at the letters in the dumpster where I’d tossed them – the red, white and blue of the “par avion” envelopes – and knowing instantly that nothing had changed. But in the end, that was what helped – learning that what I did with the letters didn’t affect the interior suffering at all. That insight let a little light in. It allowed me – or helped allow me – to see the relationship differently and thus, eventually, become open to new relationships, new ways of being wordy, and new ways of living together in love. I have no memory anymore of the content of those letters; I can’t recall a single sentence. We were young, under the sway of Keats and Austin, and there is nothing new under the sun. But I can still see the script – the handwriting – and something in me softens accordingly, becomes happy in a kind of reckless flowing way, and I want to share that with you. Show that to you? Is it clear then? Becoming clearer at least? What matters and what does not? I’m not asking for myself alone, and I am asking.

Let those stars, then, be my gift to you. But you’ll have to use these sentences to find them, dear. How else will I possibly remember the way?

Advent Journal: When the Light Passes Through

Yesterday was funny. I bought four pretty little glass mugs at a tag sale for two dollars. All four together fit in the palm of my hand. I love colored glass and anything else that becomes even more beautiful when the light passes through it. How easy it is sometimes to be happy!

In the morning, out back doing chores, just past the blackberries, I remembered this sentence in Gerd Theissen’s The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World: “The historical Jesus revitalized Jewish religion” (41).

Everything I understand to be true or at least correct about Jesus crystallizes in that sentence. Its light is blinding.

I thought about it for a few minutes, standing still in the cold, each breath a gust of snowy air. You can let go of Jesus; Abhishiktananda makes pretty clear at some point you have to. I worked on this over the summer but didn’t get far – that cross is no joke. But Theissen – by reducing perfectly Jesus to a sign – shows the way. Jesus reflects – points to – a certain cultural religious understanding of right use of power. If that resonates, great! But don’t linger at the sign – go directly into that to which the sign points. Follow the instructions, follow the directions, and see what happens. That’s what Jesus did.

Does that make sense?

For me, the thing about becoming serious about Jesus – about being in actual relationship with him – is that he’s not in A Course in Miracles (which, paradoxically, is how I was finally able to see him). A Course in Miracles makes ontological claims that the historical Jesus did not make. It’s okay to make a different ontological claim than Jesus made! It’s less okay to make one he did not and pretend that he did. That’s just garden-variety projection, and there’s a better way.

In my experience (under the rubric of Marianne Sawicki more than anything else) it is possible to get very close to Jesus. But doing so doesn’t place us in the sphere of oneness in which ACIM operates and about which so many of us fantasize. Its emphasis on unconditional love is not theoretical but applied. Anybody can do it, and everybody does do it from time to time. It’s a different kind of practice arising from a different kind of study.

But if you do follow that path – have that relationship, accept that discipleship – then you will remember oneness and you will remember the Love of God and share it with all of creation. You’re just getting there on a different path. There is no separation anywhere.

Back of all of this wool-gathering is David Carse, who cheerfully indulges U.G. Krishnamurti’s “monstrous nihilism,” though he prefers more poetic expressions, like this from Nisargadatta Maharaj.

When you are very quiet, you have arrived at the basis of everything.
That is the deep, dark blue state
in which there are millions of stars and planets.
When you are in that state, you have no awareness of your existence.

Carse will not let you bypass nihilism. “Being and Nothing are the last concepts, and the last experiences, available to us,” he writes in Perfect Brilliant Stillness (386). You cannot possess or know or hold – you cannot keep – anything, not even awareness. Not even love. And certainly not Jesus.

Which, great. That’s absolutely a way to look at it.

But later, at the coop and the library, I ran into all these signs of Zen Buddhism, leftover decorations and so forth from Bodhi Day. The library even had an anniversary edition of Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen on display. I read that cover to cover seven times in my early twenties and didn’t learn a thing. Clearly the cosmos was signaling me, all but beating me over the head. Do you want to begin again? Even Carse had to laugh.

Now it’s Sunday, a day of rest. I’m writing while pea soup simmers. The Christmas tree lights are on, and the house is very quiet. I’m happy in a shy way; I know how much can be taken from us, often without warning. But also, there is a great love in the cosmos, and from time to time it remembers itself in my heart. How grateful I am to sip from this cup, hold it to the light, and bathe in its rays of blessing and grace.

Advent Journal: A Piece of Bread

Differences appear, right? This shirt is blue, that one is red. Sunflowers are not bluets. When you fall into the lake, I don’t get wet.

Differences are not a problem. The problem is when you and I say, “this difference is me.” When we talk about separation, that’s what we’re talking about – that subtle interior claim to possession. This is me, that is not. It seems harmless enough – even natural – but it’s the source of all our suffering.

The move to separate shows up inside us as the reflexive need to judge, evaluate, defend and attack. It’s the reflexive longing to avoid criticism and receive praise. But the world begotten by thatpractice is not a world of love and connection, but of fear and disorder.

We have so much potential for a gentler, kinder way. We are creative, compassionate, playful and kind. Waking up doesn’t mean LOSING those qualities. It means letting go of the imaginary center that claims that potential as uniquely its own. Waking up dissolves the sense of ownership – the sense that something is personally at stake in every moment.

The suggestion is that the appearance of differences is useful in terms of communication and cooperation. It takes two to be one. The differences that appear aren’t absolute. They’re more like suggestions. Try the one relationship this way; now try itthat way.

When we insist on separation, we feel shame, anger, guilt and fear. Those feelings lead to narratives about scarcity and trauma, the need to take care of ourselves over and against others. Those narratives become cultural, political, religious. They harden into borders. “I’ll never speak to you again,” or “we don’t want people from shithole countries.” Eventually it scales up to war and genocide, and the torturous logic that attempts to justify evil. If the outside world is the picture of an inside condition – and that is not an unhelpful way to frame it – then we have a lot of work to do, you and I. A lot.

The end of separation is just the end of our attachment to – our investment in – separation. Again, the appearance of differences is not the problem. Differences happen. But they can be used to isolate ourselves and instigate conflict or they can be invitations to join and collaborate in recreating the Edenic promise. What do you want? Really and truly?

In my life, this insight came first through eastern religious traditions being filtered through western culture and commerce. The Gospel According to Zen, Alan Watts. I was in high school when that stuff appeared for me. I had no idea what it meant but I liked it. I spent years trying to be Buddhist, and then even more years trying to understand why I couldn’t be Buddhist. I have great respect for those traditions, and profound gratitude for the folks who helped me discover and learn from them.

But my path is the following Jesus path, and Jesus doesn’t make those kinds of claims. He doesn’t ask is the world real or what am I in truth. He doesn’t care about projection and denial or whether forgiveness makes the error real.

Instead, Jesus talks about justice, and how practicing justice is the way to fully realize our potential for love. We are fully God’s children when we love the way God loves. For Jesus, perception of difference is simply an invitation to practice remembering that love does not do borders or hierarchies or conflicts. Justice is not an argument to be won or lost in a classroom or a court or a temple. It’s a practice that we take into the world and live.

Last night I was thinking about Therese of Lisieux. Therese is a good example of what I’m talking about in the drafty itinerancy essay mentioned yesterday. Itinerancy is not about the absence of possessions. It’s about the undoing of the one who claims a right to possession in the first place.

Therese made a commitment to being less by having less. She actively sought deprivation and hardship. If there was a nun she didn’t like, she made a point of sitting with that nun as often as possible. If a piece of bread fell on the floor, Therese volunteered to eat it. When she realized she had tuberculosis, she lit up with joy.

There is a lot of Catholic dysfunction in that. And, deeper, there is a lot of confusion about the relationship between suffering and virtue. I hear that, and I see that.

But also, Therese discovered something that Jesus had also discovered – you can let the false self go by actively refusing its claims to specialness. Therese put her body into the undoing of ego. And honestly? When you do that? Ego doesn’t stand a chance. That crucifix is no joke.

Putting our body into the undoing of ego means bringing it to the cushion, a meeting, therapy, a writing nook, whatever. But it also means – it has to also mean – actively working with each other to create together a world in which all bodies can bring themselves to the undoing of ego. We leave nobody behind. Heaven is all of us or it’s not Heaven.

A Course in Miracles is one way of packaging nonduality for consumption. How grateful I am for it! But it’s not special. It’s just another eddy in the brook, like you and me, and like Buddhism and Catholicisim. Is it helpful? Yes? Okay then. Work it.

Whatever path we’re on, it’s downstream of the work which is simply to notice the subtle interior movements towards possession – this is mine, this is not, I have a right to feel differently, you have an obligation to treat me differently, et cetera et cetera.

Notice the inclination to possess the experience and then ask – what is going on here? How is it going on? What is the inclination after? What beliefs does it depend on? What effects are produced by its activity? Are they fitting to a Child of God?

I found that once I could see clearly that inclination to possession, I did not want to align with it. I wanted another way. I wanted to align with something simpler and gentler, and given to coherence rather than conflict. And that other way is given – it was always right here. But it’s obscured by the error of separation.

We are nearing the middle of Advent, bearing down on Bethlehem and its as-yet empty manger. There are gifts at the end of this journey; there is new life. Here in the cold dark – frantically trying to finish writing before chores (the blind horse is crying out) – I thank God for you and for the way you showed me was the way.

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.

Advent Journal: Hinterlands Full of Apostles and Prophets

Holiness undoes the stranglehold of identity. It shifts the locus of identity from the body to the collective, and from the collective to God, Whom Jesus knew as a Father.

For me – maybe for you, too – holiness is mostly an invitation to tell a different story and, in doing so, to realize who is telling the story. We are doing this to our own self (T-27.VIII.10:1) is a diagnosis containing within it the solution to self-imposed suffering. Become creative and in your creativity, remember liberation.

“First person singular,” as James Hillman noted (in, I believe, The Thought of the Heart but don’t hold me to it) is neither first, nor a person, nor singular. Dylan was fond of quoting Rimbaud: “I is another.” Did Sean meet the woman at the well? Or did I? And who will say?

A little after four a.m., wind billows through the neighbor’s chimes and a delicate melody floats into the house and through my heart. Winter came hard and fast this year, all at once, much the way J. left, and I find myself sad and a little alarmed, as if waiting for news that can’t help but be bad.

I think we have to be responsible about Jesus. Between the rigorous cross-disciplinary work of historians since about the sixties, and the eschatalogical nature of women like Mary Daly and Elisabeth Fiorenza, we have the clearest sense of the man since that first Easter. If you aren’t beginning with the history, then you are beginning with something other than the Holy Spirit, and that way lies dragons.

Jesus was not about personal fulfillment, not about mind-body dualism and not – he was not – interested in the metaphysics of identity. He knew who he was, and he knew who God was, and – for him anyway – that meant he knew who everyone else was. And nobody has to accept that he knew those things, or take his teaching seriously – by all means shake the dust of your shoes – but you shouldn’t try to turn him into something he wasn’t. You shouldn’t put concepts and ideas on his lips that were not, you know, actually ever on his lips. Jesus didn’t say squat that aligns with A Course in Miracles. Now what?

Well, it’s not possible for us to interact with a Jesus who isn’t a projection of some kind. But the suggestion is, that projection has to start with what we know. Anything else is just ego.

Holiness means acceptance. But holiness is never resigned. It’s creative. It’s a way of being present without insisting that anything conform to some pre-determined conditions we set. Being present means remembering what is true and, eventually, being remembered by what is true.

Last spring, God said clearly to me, you don’t know what you want and you want too much. I disappeared for most of the rest of the year, first to understand what he was saying, and then to figure out how to respond.

Part of what God was saying was, want happens. Desire is a part of the human condition. But also, you can be intentional about that experience. You can investigate the nature of want, of desire. You can study its nature and effects. You can see it clearly, and clear seeing is the fundament of all holy relationships, because clear seeing is what enables authentic response.

Have you seen desire clearly? Have you identified the spectrum of its effects? Is there – should there be – another way?

I get up to wander the dark house with what’s left of the coffee. The darkness and quiet are a sensory blessing. My heart settles and my mind opens, at range in hinterlands full of apostles and prophets. I’m happy, against long odds. I’m grateful more than I can say. Where would I be without you?

Identity is not a crisis nor even a problem. It’s an effect of certain beliefs about what bodies are, what the world is, and what’s the best way to navigate this big old experience. Most of us don’t go into all that – it doesn’t feel amenable to investigation, and it doesn’t feel amenable to change. Why bother? Most of our core beliefs, the ones that seem to cement identity and mandate suffering, hide behind some version of “it is what it is.”

Five or so years ago – in a bright office twenty stories up, in a city I have not visited since – somebody said that to me. “It is what it is.” I said in reply – really I was split open to allow reply – “I reject that profanity.”

I’ve been confused about that for a long time, even as the directive remained clear. I do reject the profanity of “it is what it is.”

This morning, the confusion cleared. The coffee went cold, as often happens when he’s near. I forget a lot. Don’t need a lot?

Morning passing, day beginning, again.