Advent Travels: A Cool Drum Solo

It’s hard sometimes to think helpfully about the void. I have a lot to learn myself.

I don’t think the void is a question of belief, but I am glad there are folks willing to wonder if it might be. They simultaneously remind me of my spiritual poverty and justify the optimism that allows me to not fear that poverty but open to its creativity and healing. And I could always be wrong!

Human beings are limitations! I can’t see colors the way butterflies do, and ticks can’t smell as much as I can. Our cognition stops well shy of omniscience. Not only do we not know everything, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

That’s the void. The void is what you don’t know, don’t sense, and can’t sense or know. And it’s always right there.

I appreciate very much not wanting to go into all of that. It is the void which teaches us that choice is an illusion and free will a shallow con courtesy of evolution. We control nothing. People do die upon learning this; some people die instead of learning it. Some people kill to avoid going into it.

When you see all this clearly, fully for the first time, it’s like you’re already dead. It’s like you’re already dead and you’re going to die.

The void is alive. Like the Face of God (hint hint) once it has been glimpsed, it cannot be forgotten. You will think about it regularly, you will sneak back to it, you will toss something in – a friendship, an afternoon, a value system – to see if it floats or what comes back.

But here’s the thing. The void is not the problem. The existential crisis the void presents – and it absolutely presents an existential crisis – is the problem. The existential crisis is a defense against Love.

I don’t know if it was an advantage but I was tossed into the void often at an early age. Later, in my late teens and through a good chunk of my twenties, I routinely threw myself in, often dragging others along, whether they wanted it or not.

Sometimes people fished me out of the void, and I’m grateful to them. Friends, sponsors, therapists, lovers. I am grateful to them all! But sometimes there was another way out of the void that I seemed to find alone. Or maybe it found me?

It’s hard to say! But decades later, when it was time to consider the void in a non-self-destuctive way, I came to it differently. I was resigned, not scared. I was curious. As Tara Singh said, the point is to see what is – not change anything or refuse anything or even prefer anything. A kind of “hello darkness my old friend/I’ve come to talk with you again” vibe attended. I knew how bad it could get but was there anything on the other side? I wanted to know.

Spiritual poverty is when we let go of the comforting ideas and phrases and rituals in order to meet God with as few distractions as possible. It’s not chosen (ha ha) so much as accepted. I get it’s not for everyone. All God’s critters got a place in the choir and I will absolutely die on that hill.

But still.

One of the ironies of the Christmas mythology – especially its emphasis on gifts – is that God needs nothing and as His children neither do we. The man gifted at birth with rare spices, soothing shepherds and a cool drum solo explicitly told us to consider the lilies and the birds of the field and live accordingly. That was how God designed us.

For many reasons I have understood poverty well in this life. It doesn’t scare me, it’s a freedom not a restriction. What has been less clear and less dynamic – despite being just as and even more pervasive, and arguably more helpful – is optimism.

I really do believe in the power of Love to heal us, body and mind, and deliver us from the nightmare of separation. My commitment to this belief and its manifestation in the world can appear naive and even dangerous. Love does that to us!

I understand the rationale for optimism – and the fear it inspires in me and others – but I’m not as fluent or skilled in its application as I am with poverty. Optimism isn’t interested in wordiness or pedagogy, which are kind of my thing. But kites don’t want to conversate about aerodynamics – they want to be flown.

Anyway.

I was mumbling about all this with the horses this morning. Wind blowing at 4 a.m., trucks leaning on their jake brakes a mile or so away. They listened – the horses always listen – but they didn’t seem especially interested.

The horses don’t share my concerns about the void. Nor do the stars overhead, nor the sparrows and juncos who sing waking up in the hedges and raspberry bracken.

These brothers and sisters don’t say it with words but with a way of life, a way of being in the world: let go, let go, let go. Simplify, simplify, simplify. The One you seek is here, teaching you. Be happy and at peace!

Sometimes it is just that clear! Sometimes it is. I bowed to the horses, the stars and the birds, and went back inside to write, this.

Six / Eight

Advent Travels: The Final Step

0 The Mirage

Yesterday, shoveling a path to the horses – following tracks in the snow my daughters had made earlier – I was visited by God.

What do I mean by this?

1 The Oasis

Many years ago, during my first run-through of the ACIM lessons – some time after the devastation wrought by Lessons 79 and 80 – I was visited by God.

It was two or three a.m., late January, and I was sitting alone on the porch watching snow and the moonlight couple in a luminous – an ethereal – way. I was lonely – I am often lonely – but also happy.

I was happy because I was grateful for the beauty, grateful for the idea of God, and grateful for the way it all somehow coalesced in me. “It’s enough,” I whispered. And I meant it. In that moment, it was enough.

The world disappeared then, and there was only God. I’m not allowed – because I wouldn’t know how – to say more about that. I don’t know how long the moment lasted but I know exactly how it ended: I called it mine.

As soon as I tried to possess it, the moment was gone. I did not experience that grace again for almost thirteen years.

2 The Desert

When I remember that God is both the absence of difference AND everything signified BY difference, then something opens up in me and God pours through. Light pours through.

By “light” I mean the light in which everything – including darkness, including abstractions like math and philosophy – actually appears.

By “God” I mean that from which this light emerges and into which it returns.

The rule is, you can’t claim the experience because the law is, you don’t control the experience.

Which in application sugars out as, you don’t even understand the experience, maybe stop making up rules and laws for it?

3 The Mirage

In A Course in Miracles, we say that “God takes the final step.” It means that we get ourselves to the place where God can reach us, and that’s it. We don’t get to decide the when, where or anything else. God takes the final step.

Therefore, all that matters is readying myself. And the way I do that is by giving attention to the One Relationship presently still manifesting as many relationships, including ours.

The many relationships all point to the One Relationship. The One Relationship points to God. That’s what I know. I was shoveling snow, halfway between the horses and the house, and I was visited by God.

When the moment of unity ended – because I found in it an absence, yours – I was sad and lonely. When will Love finally come to stay?

Snow flurries whirled in the cold air; sunlight turned them prismatic.

“Soon,” you whispered across the precise distance fear insists we keep. “Not yet,” you whispered. “But soon.”

Five / Seven

Advent Travels: The Posture of a Guest

I stepped outside last night at about eight or so and the snow had already begun. Douglas used to say, you’ve got the writing part down. The question is, what do you want to do with it?

I had hoped for a quiet snow gently falling so I could use “sussuration” in today’s writing, but cold winds howled blowing the snow into spirals and sheets. Even down by the hemlocks, where the world always slows and quietens, the weather verged on riotous, denying me.

The lesson is, never assume you speak the language of the Lord, always adopt the posture of the guest.

Douglas didn’t have rules about writing so much as a sense that order was explicable, and if you couldn’t explain what you were doing and why, then you were at risk of losing the whole project. He had earned the right to say that, that way. I was grateful listening.

I remember talking to him about Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” which is one of my favorite poems ever. He said that reading O’Hara closely taught him writing was more about what you didn’t say, rather than what you did.

Imagine Michaelangelo’s Pietà in terms of the marble that is not there. Actually look for it! What is absent defines what is present; it makes what is present possible.

The void is always present; it is the only way that form can appear at all. If I study the hemlock tree, I can only do by separating it from the cosmos and naming the part I want to focus on “hemlock.” The rest is . . . gone. It’s void.

At least until it’s called forth – until it’s desired – into some new form.

Because, critically, that which is not hemlock remains – is fully present – as the void from which the hemlock was drawn and into which it will return when my attention drifts elsewhere. There is no other way for there to be a hemlock in the first place.

This is true for literally every formal thing from a passing thought to a flake of snow to a spiral galaxy.

What we seek is always a form – Jesus, a friend, a hot meal, a hand on our shoulder, a kind word et cetera. But in desiring the form (which you cannot not do, which is a really important insight) we reject – separate from – everything the form is not.

Separation is not realizing – as George Spencer Brown wrote, here paraphrased – that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. We see the hemlock literally by denying the rest of the cosmos.

The suggestion is: notice what you do not ordinarily notice. Notice noticing: what even is noticing?

I remember working through this exercise with James a long time ago, both of us walking in circles around Upper Highland Lake for most of a day. He asked me if I thought Jesus did something similar, and my answer was, I don’t know but yes. We both laughed.

One way or the other, we have to see the void. It was the void that taught me the way choice was an illusion, and free will as simple a fantasy as Santa Claus ramming himself down chimneys. It was the void that allowed me to begin to accept that “the personal” was merely a perspective, no different than any other and thus not actually worth attention.

The void is the remedy for “me and mine,” because it undoes the ground of all the questions we ask as spiritual seekers, students, healers, stumblers, et cetera. Law and logic falter. Psychology falters. Even language falters. There’s nothing there. Also? Everything is there.

When I awaken, and after writing a bit, I go outside. It’s dark yet. Snow is still falling but the wind is gone. I wander to the sideyard lilac and listen to flakes of snow graze its leaves falling. How still the world can become! How happy I am in the darkness and cold!

And how diligently I write, word after word, as if seeking the perfect one, as if I were incomplete without these sentences, as if something – but what – could not possibly otherwise be.

Four / Six

Advent Travels: Happy Servants All Evening

What do I have to give to Jesus?

What does Jesus want?

Or are those the wrong questions?

An Advent journey ends at the manger in Bethlehem, with a gift for Jesus. But what if it doesn’t?

What if, halfway to Bethlehem, one of the wise men falls in love and bails on the journey?

What if we stumble and don’t make it in time? Or get lost? The desert is vast and the trail faint.

What if – halfway to Bethlehem – we realize that we don’t actually need to get to Bethlehem? Jesus is everywhere all the time! Or we change our mind altogether? I’m going to be a Buddhist after all!

What is a good question and what is a distraction?

It is clear to me and has been for a while that our minds have to change. I don’t mean change as in swap in a new set of tapes – listen to Rupert Spira instead of Ken Wapnick or whatever.

Nor do I mean changed as in, become more optimistic or less jealous.

I mean that the tendency of a mind to coalesce around identity, where identity is yoked to a body in culturally-conditioned ways – that has to change.

In my experience, minds can change at deep levels. I am a better listener today than I was twenty years ago; there is a lot more space for you and your story. I see reason for hope.

Mind is pliable and creative. In my experience – contra Ken Wapnick and other neo-Platonic thinkers and teachers (I really need to write about this) – it is not separate from the world or the body.

Driving home yesterday (through snow squalls and fading light – it really does feel like winter) Chrisoula and I talked about the form of relationship (any relationship that intends to be holy rather than special) in terms of its capacity to extend Love on terms and conditions others recognize.

That is the change of mind I think we are being called to consider and – through acceptance – create together.

We were happy servants all evening.

Yet in soft dreams – a kind of gold light, a kind of gentle drift – I continuously heard a voice warning me not to become casual or comfortable. It was as if I were about to fall again for a familiar lie, and the voice didn’t want that to happen.

I woke thinking: the goal is to awaken, not fall into a cozier sleep. The happy dream is less dream. Therefore, be alert; be vigilant.

And came downstairs to write.

Part of my Advent writing process is apparently to start writing and then – at a juncture that announces itself as “almost finished” – go outside with my coffee and poke around.

This morning I was barefoot on the porch which was dusted with snow. The stars were so clear and bright that parts of me melted on the spot. I prayed a little, hopping from one foot to the other, laughing at what an idiot I can be, and yet how happy.

It’s good to laugh at ourselves. It’s good to laugh.

Back inside, finishing the writing and making a second cup of coffee, I turned to Jesus and asked: what do I have to give you? What do you want?

And the question was so silly! I laughed at it. Happiness is a kind of light; laughter a kind of prayer. Is it possible I arrived at Bethlehem early? With Chrisoula last night in the car as we talked? Or after, as we happily quietly kept house for the Lord?

Or maybe this morning outside – so eager to see the stars and say good morning to Jesus – that I forgot to put shoes on? In December? In snow?

What am I asking that’s already been answered?

And: is there something I should ask that I haven’t yet?

Three / Five

Advent Travels: The Rule is, Don’t Lie

The rule is, don’t lie. And related to that is the understanding that I don’t always know when I’m lying.

This game we are playing – this work we are doing – is not for the faint of heart.

“Lying” is a bad word because of its moral and negative connotations. “Fantasy” is better. As in, when I write, the reader is always a fantasy, and the fantasy is always a defense against love.

That’s what I don’t want to say this morning. That’s what I don’t want to see.

People sometimes object to “fantasy,” on grounds that is can have positive connotations. It’s good to fantasize, it’s a way of seeing what we want. And anyway, who doesn’t daydream?

But I am saying something different. I am saying that when I write in and from that fantasy, I don’t see you at all. I see a process at work in me and I see its product, the sentences and lines that emerge on the page, some of which will survive the later cull named “rewriting.”

I hear you saying: so you’re focused on the writing, so what?

But no. I am focused on healing and the writing serves that focus. It has to or the writing becomes part of the problem – it becomes part of the illusion of separation.

Ihe writing serves the healing.

When writing serves healing the rule is, don’t lie, so I won’t: I don’t know you really but I do want your attention. I do want you to praise me. I do want you to argue with me. I do want you to say that you’ll be back to read tomorrow and the next day.

None of those “wants” are crimes against God or nature. But they do point at a perception of myself that is not complete without you, and that is a lie.

Believing that hurts me and you.

It hurts me because it allows me to remain in behavioral cycles that don’t make me happy. And it hurts you because it refuses to allow you to be the God-lit, God-created self that you naturally and perfectly are.

When we only see the other in relation to our own narrative, our own story, our own drama – then we are not really seeing them.

People are allowed to help of course but we are not allowed to demand their help or insist it take some specific form.

Relationship – true relationship – is when our whole existence is based on the other’s liberation from ego and all ego’s systemic effects (which are the world).

Holy relationship is when we intentionally make our relationship about that liberation.

When you are audience – when you are my audience – then I am still stuck in the very frame of self/other from which I long to escape.

What do I do?

I was thrown yesterday because reading others I saw instantly the many ways we can be in Advent, and I felt lost. What about my Advent? Will I have to give it up?

I felt like as a child, when I faced the playground at recess, and wondered who would play with me, and what would we play.

That’s fear.

And like I tried to make clear on Substack yesterday, we have to go into the fear. We have to basically deconstruct it. We have to pass through the easily identified levels in order to find ego so that we can offer ego up to the One Who Heals.

But we have to see the way we can offer ego up – that ego is a thing we made and so it’s up to us – not ego – what happens to ego.

We have to remember always that we want to heal and – at a deeper level than most of us can readily and steadily access – what we really really want is to heal the other.

I started a writing project, some folks are doing it with me, and they are already doing it differently than I’d expected.

And I am scared.

And I want you – yes, you reading – to fix this fear by acting in specific ways dictated by me, e.g., praise, respect, loyalty.

But, doing that holdis you to a standard set by judgment. I’ve decided for you that your function is to make me feel better.

And thing I want to be clear about – more than aything the thing I want to be clear about right now – is that when I decide in advance your function, and it mysteriously turns out to be about my ego drama – I am not loving you, but rather wallowing in fear.

Neither one of us truly wants that!

So I waken early – 3:30 a.m. – and I go outside with my coffee. The cold wakens me as much as the coffee. Everything is still except the sky. Polaris is right above the neighbor’s chimney but fifteen minutes later it’s a little to the right.

God is moving the Heavens.

God is moving in the Heavens.

The work is to find what obscures our remembrance of Love as our inheritance, and the Source of Love as our Identity.

Writing is a way of finding out what we think. I think I need you as a student – my student – or as a fan – my fan.

I know I’m an ACIM studet because I’m not concerned about “student” or “fan” – that shit is easy, take it or leave it – but about “my.”

It’s the “my” that locks us both into a fantasy of separation. It’s the “my” that makes it hard to notice this, let alone become still enough – dialogic enough – to undo it.

One thing that saved me was realizing the healing nature of curiosity. When I am curious about you – how you ended up on this path, why you’re into this teacher and not that one, whatever – then I quickly realize you aren’t grist for my mill. You’re something else – what?

When I am curious about something I study it. I give attention to it.

I enter into relationship with it as a student.

It’s pushing five a.m. now. The coffee is gone, the sleepers upstairs are stirring. Soon the sun will rise.

I am happy in this moment – the writing led me to happiness in the moment – because I have found my function: I am your reader. I’m here listening for the sound of you writing – pen scratching, keys tapping. I know that sound well; I’ve shared in its gift. It’s the sound of God moving in the Heavens, the deep quiet from which language arises and back into it falls. It’s a single star, high in the sky, that cannot steer us wrong.

Two / Four

Advent Travels: Running Away

It is relatively easy for me to talk about the birth of Jesus as a mythological event that you and I can actually experience. My brief but intense study of James Hillman – especially The Thought of the Heart – prepared me well.

It was Hillman who taught me that: “the thought of the heart is the thought of images, that the heart is the seat of imagination, that imagination is the authentic voice of the heart, so that if we speak from the heart we must speak imaginatively.”

Imagine our journey guided by a single star, imagine the stable in which a poor woman gives birth, imagine the baby squalling in the manger, imagine . . .

But Kimberley reminds me though that before the heart concocted that comforting narrative it was grappling with a much deeper one: solstice, the season of darkness and going without. In Circles and Lines, John Demos suggests that winter was an existential crisis in New England. Food was sparse, light less frequent, the cold potentialy fatal. For them, the Advent journey reflected intimacy with our inherent frailty and the inevitability of the grave.

Kimberley calls it a time to “be hidden” but not – so far as I understand her – in a shameful way or a maybe-the-crisis-won’t-find-us way so much as a nurturing way, a resting way, a grounding way.

It is here in the darkened quiet that stillness dissolves us and helps us to escape the busyness of our sleep-walking life. In the interior silence, we know what we are and what everything is for. In quiet communion with God and with every particle of Love, we hear the notes of heaven rise and fall and we become the song.

I’m currently re-reading Marianne Sawicki’s Seeing the Lord for the third time since it arrived in late October. The book is literally falling apart in my hands. Sawicki’s thesis is that the work in no trivial way is simply to listen to women – let women demonstrate agape love, let women establish the communal rule, let women show you how to follow Jesus now.

Margaret talking about spiritual doulas, Valentine the drudgery of chores, Sawicki patiently reframing the Jesus project in terms of competencies, learning ways to live together in peace and justice, which she believes are fundamentally female . . .

The Holy Spirit murmuring, let me have the appearance of gender difference, and the distribution of power attached to it, and I will heal you with it . . .

As I write, a bright sun rises off hills bisected by the river and Route Nine. Juncos pick through the crumbs where yesterday I ate a bagel outside. The snow has held for three days. We have to move a few hundred pounds of gravel to the run-in but mostly our outdoor chores are over. A kind of hunkering down energy appears in our living and we lean into it together, as a family.

Amanda’s beautiful witness to loving the inner child and Donna’s “the one thing that colored the entire day with muddy colors was really nothing more than my frame of mind” have unsettled me.

I’ll have to look at that today.

What I want is a chill Advent, and a chiller Christmas, and then smooth sailing until Easter and the summer solstice. But the invitation being extended through the communal sharing is, go slower. The invitation is, be still.

Yesterday I wrote “I’m going nowhere.” This morning, all I want to do is run away.

One / Three