Advent Travels: Snakes and Hotel Windows

In the fourth dialogue in Dialogues on A Course in Miracles, Tara Singh asks a good question: what did you do today in which there were no illusions?

Some people say, “the wilderness” is a symbol, a metaphor, a word being a word. The real question is to what does it point?

I can’t decide which paragraph is the opening paragraph.

In the fourth dialogue, every answer someone gives to the question, Tara Singh easily undoes. Students always want to please their teacher. You and I want each other to know we’re serious spiritual people. Insecurity begets a kind of dishonesty; we confuse “ideals” with what’s actually happening.

The wilderness points to something – a work, an undoing, a relationship – that most of us can’t or won’t undertake. It points to something outside the world that we construct together – our hierarchies, our violence, our passivity, our emphasis on differences.

But most of us don’t see that it that way. We’re diligent and serious spiritual people. We write every day. We’ve got opinions about spiritual bypassing and eighties era feminist theologians. We run marathons, we don’t eat meat, we didn’t vote for Trump.

The point is not that those things are bad any more than that they’re good. If they arise from illusions – if they arise from the confusion of what we are in truth – then they’re illusions themselves. That’s all.

What will you do today that has no illusion in it? How will you know?

Tara Singh suggests that if we are honest, then we will recognize that the answer is: nothing. Everything I do is touched by illusion, originates in illusion, grounds out in illusion.

The crisis is not that we’re confused and bound up in the world’s opinions and ideals – i.e., socially-approved expressions of self, other and relationship. The crisis is that we don’t see the confusion or, upon seeing it, immediately fall back into the illusion of self-improvement. I’ll pray more, I’ll take up yoga, I’ll write a daily Advent journal.

It’s hard to just sit with the problem and not do anything.

Is not the actual, for us, the deception of lack, the illusions of insecurity and unfulfillment? That is our actuality. It is something we made. And therefore we can do something about it (Singh 108-09).

What will I do today that has no illusion in it?

If I am honest, and can say “nothing – everything I will today will have some illusions in it, in some way,” then something interesting happens. If I can really humble myself enough to see the problem clearly, then . . .

. . . then I can ask a new question. I can ask a question that doesn’t automatically reinforce the confusion it was meant to repair: in what way is it possible for a Child of God who is separated from Creation to be in a true relationship with their Creator?

Tara Singh is pointing at something helpful – nothing happens until we can be honest with ourselves about the separation. Everything else is just opinions and ideals.

“I’m not in a true relationship with my Creator” – who among us wants to say that? But if it’s our truth – right here, right now – then what else could we say? It’s a myth that truth makes us happy – being honest is hard. It’s scary. The truth liberates us – but freedom . . .

. . . freedom terrifies us.

Sometimes when I’m invested in symbolism and metaphor – and friends I am always invested in symbolism and metaphor – I feel like a mouse frantically cleaning itself while the snake unfurls on the far side of the cage.

I am sorry for the mouse but facts are facts. The snake is going to eat you either way. If we are free, and accept our freedom and the responsibility it imposes, it would create a different response, wouldn’t it?

Forgive us our illusions, Father,
and help us to accept
our true relationship with You,
in which there are no illusions,
and where none can ever enter.
Our holiness is Yours (T-16.VII.12:1-2).

It’s just words. They’re easy to repeat and even easier to interpret in ways that assure us we’re okay, it’s all okay, the snake isn’t unfurling, et cetera. But all they “point” to is more words, more insecurity, more lack.

Which fine. But what are we supposed to do?

Tara Singh said, become responsible for separation. Find out why you are separate from your Creator – who said you were? Why did you believe them? If they’re wrong, how do you know? When we can answer those questions, then we will know how to heal the separation. We are doing this to ourselves – we can undo it as well.

It won’t be easy – snakes and hotel windows abound, Advent journaling abounds – but it can be done. That was Tara Singh’s promise – it isn’t easy but you can do it. It’s not up to me, it’s up to you, but you can do it.

All I can add is that doing this work in community matters. At this point, it may be all that matters. I don’t know what I will do today that will have no illusion in it – probably nothing – but I’m grateful that you won’t leave me because of it. I promise I won’t leave you.

I’m glad you’re here and I won’t leave. That’s where I begin.

Ten / Twelve

Advent Travels: the Space of Solitude

The family was in New York City this past weekend to see Romeo and Juliet. I stayed behind to do chores and keep house. Things were quiet mostly, and I got a lot done. It snowed more than I thought it would, and I didn’t sleep well but it was okay.

When I am alone, and give space to the space of solitude, I am able to see certain things more clearly. I see the parts of me that others would label “sinner,” parts I want to share with you but am scared to share, and parts the world accepts and celebrates – obedient Sean, color-between-the-lines Sean, passive Sean – even though they are not really me at all.

The prayer I make most often is, help me be helpful. And if I can’t be helpful, let me at least not be harmful. And if I can’t manage even that much, then let me remember that all things – even my really bad mistakes – are redeemed in our shared desire for redemption. It’s okay. Or it will be.

A friend asks, do you know what do you really want? Not what do you really want but do you know what you really want. That distinction matters; it clarifies something important. It keeps the focus where it needs to be, on the part of our mind arguing it’s a discrete self.

Several years ago – standing in an open fourteenth story hotel window in Boston – a part of me floated away. The sun was setting in front of me, darkening my vision, but a shadow slipped out of me – near my left shoulder, like a snake shrugging out of old skin – and floated away.

A friend asked gently, did it tell you where it was going? And I answered, it didn’t say but the general direction was Braintree.

We kidded because it was no joke. After Boston I began to dissolve, to fall away from myself, pieces here and there, bereft even of the ability to make meaning out of it. Things got quiet and quieter; they got dark and then darker. It didn’t make sense.

The question that hides behind the question is, do you know what you are? Not do you have theories and opinions and reliable, socially-approved stories about what you are – of course those are floating around – but do you know.

For a long time, I didn’t care whether I was here or not. When I stood in that window, I realized that feeling – that it didn’t matter, was I here or not – was gone. And when I realized it was gone, and I did not miss or need it at, something left. Freud’s death drive? Some family ghost or Christian demon? It could as easily have been a trick of the light. But it felt like I was being released, like I was no longer a reliable host for something I’d never agreed to host.

Whatever it was, in the wake of its departure, my life – for the first time in decades – became unmanageable. Oh, on the outside, things were mostly fine – job, kids, wife, et cetera. But inside everything was crashing into everything else. Things were breaking and reshaping. I felt trapped and scared a lot. People who knew were worried. And none of the old healing tricks worked.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, I began to relax my spiritual practice, especially around A Course in Miracles. I held it all loosely, while also holding carefully in mind something Cormac McCarthy wrote in No Country for Old Men: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

This went on for a year and a half or so until, no warning, the darkness cleared. Some things had been revealed but a lot remained hidden. I know a reliable way to connect intimately with Jesus and, through that connection, become Christ. The hard part is how easy it is. The really hard part is remembering it’s up to me to do it.

Abhishiktananda, whose folly and grace are a great light in my spiritual practice, wrote in Ascent to the Depths of the Heart that only an act of “pure love” can awaken us.

Advaita, non-duality, is not an intellectual discovery, but an attitude of the soul. It is much more the impossibility of saying ‘Two’ than the affirmation of ‘One.’ What is the use of saying ‘One’ in one’s thought, if one says ‘Two’ in one’s life. To say ‘One’ in one’s life: that is Love.

I came back to that over and over this past weekend: practicing a stillness that neither grasps for pure love, nor refuses it. I took Saint Romuald’s Rule to heart.

Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish.

Sometimes my attention drifted, but mostly I was present. Feed the horses, shovel the driveway, make more coffee, sit quietly, give attention to what’s given . . .

I am that which – being capable of healing – is presently healing. Healing is a form of Love (about which I still talk too much). In Love I want nothing, because I both have and am everything, and I know it. Shy of that – which happens of course – there is the idea of healing, which often suffices to get us to the cross and the tomb and, more importantly, the wilderness beyond them.

It’s there we travel, you know. The Jesus myth of Christmas, like the Jesus myths of crucifixion and resurrection, are pointers, not historical data points supporting this or that flavor of Christianity. They’re clues to be interpreted in the lived context of our lives. They’re notes towards a practice, not fragments of a biography of a famous man.

The wilderness calls us – the wilds in us call to us – to remember ourselves beyond the comforting narratives and empty rituals of society and religion. They call to us from beyond what we want or think we want. Sooner or later, we follow. Sooner or later we call go into the wilderness.

The light out there is made of fire and it burns everything it touches, every one and every thing, until nothing is left but fire.

Yes. I know what I really want.

Nine / Eleven

Advent Travels: Hidden by Storm Clouds

I like this story.

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph.
He said, “Abba Joseph,
as far as I can say,
I do my little office,
and I read my psalms.
I fast a little and pray
and meditate.
I live in peace with others and,
as far as possible,
I purify my thoughts.
Tell me, Father, what else –
what more – can I do?”

And the old man, Abba Joseph,
stood up and stretched his hands
toward heaven, and his fingers
became like ten lamps of fire.
He said to Abba Lot, “my child,
if you will,
you can become all flame.”

Of course I like this story. I’ve projected myself onto Abba Joseph. Not only do people come to me for my wisdom, they can also read the Psalms in the light given off by my fingers. I am the one.

But even Abba Lot is an empathetic character. In a pinch, I can project myself there as well. A good brother doing everything he can to reach the Lord, studying and practicing with faith and diligence, ever seeking how to do better. What a good student! What a devout monk! He doesn’t have magic fingers . . . but he could. Everybody has to start somewhere.

The projection is hard to sustain, though.

Abba Joseph is a fourth century desert father. He gave up all the comforts of the world so he could pray in more sustained and intense ways. Imagine living in 4th century Egypt and deciding it was too comfortable and full of distractions for a meaningful prayer life.

On the other hand, imagine living in 2024 and thinking you yourself are only a couple of Our Fathers away from being a living flame. What would Abba Joseph say? For that matter, what would Abba Lot say?

Whatever they would say, it would come out of their rigid commitment to austerity. They were ascetics. Always fasting, never sleeping, drinking fetid water . . . To me, that kind of self-imposed suffering – they literally endangered their health and welfare – seems brutally dysfunctional.

And yet, I like that story, and other people like it, too, because it gets passed around a lot. And the thing in that story that matters is the fire. The fire is why we pass it around. So we have to understand the fire. Let’s begin by considering the relationship between human beings and fire, which begins –

– or maybe not?

I remember not feeling at home in the Vermont Zen Center many years ago, and the reason was, it didn’t matter how much you read or how thoughtfully you could speak abou Buddhism. Only zazen mattered and that was a thing you did, not a thing you talked about.

But if I say that the fire is a metaphor, and if I also say that what it points to cannot be known in words but only in a practice – and if I accept that for Abba Joseph that practice was asceticism and reading the Psalms but not discoursing on the psalms . . .

Where does that leave me?

There is another story about Abba Joseph.

Abba Poemen went to Abba Joseph
and asked the venerable old man –
how does one become a monk?

Abba Joseph answered, “my brother –
if you want to find rest
here and hereafter
then in all circumstances say “who am I?”
and do not judge anyone.

Oh. Oh.

I crave the fire. I love writing how Advent is a journey through darkness into light. For days the words of Abba Joseph have lived in my mind, bringing me back to something. Last night, on my knees in the snow, stars hidden by storm clouds, God said gently, “Sean, ‘will,’ not ‘fire’ is the word you are being invited to study.”

I rose then and went about evening chores, wondering what, if anything, I could say to you, or you to me, at this stage of our travels that would help.

Eight / Ten

Advent Travels: Relationship All the Way Down

Nancy reminded me when I mentioned this Advent writing project that whenever two or more gather in Jesus’s name, Jesus is with them. Historically, this is understood in ecclesial terms. We gather in and as a church which both keeps Jesus and makes him accessible (on terms and contions it sets as Jesus’s keeper).

But in the Matthean text in which that promise appears, it’s less about ecclesiology and more about justice. How do we judge another? How do administer judgment in a way that binds us as community?

Matthew’s Jesus walks us through a series of escalating approaches to judgment which culminate in treating the sinner the same way we would treat a pagan or a tax collector, e.g., they aren’t one of us. There’s the door, don’t let it hit you on the way out.

The promise is, if at least two of us gather in Jesus’s name to condemn a brother or sister, we can rest assured Jesus shares in both the judgment and the disposition.

Which, of course, is silly. There is no historical basis for arguing that Jesus excluded anybody, and lots of evidence – across multiple academic disciplines – that his practice was radically inclusive, which accounts for its popularity among marginalized people. Women, especially, were drawn to it.

(Writing exercise: what would a “radically inclusive” practice like that look like today? Who would it appeal to most? And, why aren’t we practicing that inclusivity?)

This inclusivity accounts for why – as the Jesus movement spread and became popular – local ruling classes (political, religious, economic) – worked so hard to coopt the movement and water down the message, culminating in the tragedy of the First Council of Nicea. Matthew is obviously putting words in Jesus’s mouth that serve Matthew’s objectives, not Jesus’s. Not Love’s.

But what interests me is less repairing the Matthean (and Nicean) confusion around that promise, and more reflecting on why we have chosen to reinterpret that phrase of Jesus against its theological and historical context.

In other words, Nancy was wrong in a literal sense but right in a much deeper and more helpful sense (which of course she knows).

I first heard the “two or more” phrase in a memorable way in Captain and Tenille’s “Wedding Song,” which includes these lyrics:

The union of your spirits here
has caused him to remain
For whenever two or more of you
are gathered in his name
There is love, there is love

I’m not defending the song so much as pointing out a popular example of a radical revision of the Matthean text. “Two more more” is about feeling the love of Jesus when we pair up in His name. It’s not about finding a rationale to kick someone we don’t like off the island.

And the revision is what most of us think about when we think about that line from Jesus.

It’s as if, on some level, we intuitively understand that Jesus would never condemn a brother or sister and would never endorse a community rule that privileges one person or group of persons over another.

For Jesus, Love was decentralized because God the Father both had all of it and gave all of it. The invitation he made was to see how this was true and then consent to be changed by that seeing so that Love might continue to extend more broadly and less conditionally.

That was the gift the Holy Spirit offered: to see the Lord and be remade in the Divine Image, effectively by realizing that Creation does not abide the judgment by which distinctions arise. Which is a paradox, right? There is no “image” of the Lord because you can only make an image through exclusion and God does not abide exclusion. As I said recently, the Pietà is not only the shape we see, but also what we don’t see, without which, no shape could exist at all.

What both has, and cannot ever have, form?

It’s helpful to see clearly that a body can’t not judge. A mind can’t not judge. You’re doing it right now and so am I. Bodies and minds world build. They make shit up.

Which is not a crime against God or nature! But there is another way, one that leads to peace and happiness for all of us.

That other way begins when we are faced – as in Matthew’s fear-based dogma, the bland legality of Nicea and the overwrought cry for help that is A Course in Miracles – with separation, and clumsily but surely stumble in the other direction towards Love.

We are so beautiful – we are so so beautiful – and I love us so much.

We really are lovers, not fighters. Peace, not conflict, is our mode. The kids are right – Netflix and chill is the way. But we only know this when we come together! We have to do the work of being able to join, we have to do the work of joining, and we have to do the work of sustaining and nurturing the resultant union.

It’s relationship all the way down.

It’s not Jesus who shows up when we gather in his name. It’s us. We remember who we are when we gather in Jesus’s name. And what we are together pierces the illusion of separate interests, and unifies what is held apart in the mistaken belief that existence is contingent on exclusion and division.

Today, in Advent, I remember the way we are together Christ.

Seven / Nine

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