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Good Friday: "I Am Thirsty"

4/9/2019

I have been told that when physicians attach exotic diagnoses to commonplace symptoms, their colleagues say that they “heard hoofbeats in the hall and assumed it was a zebra.”

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, "I am thirsty." But according to the gospel, he said it, not for the obvious reasons – that he had probably not had anything to drink since dinner the night before, that he had lost a lot of blood during a flogging, that he was hanging in the hot sun, that he was thirsty – but that he said it "in order that the scripture might be fulfilled." With all due respect to the author of John's Gospel, that sure sounds like a zebra to me.

After my recent spine surgery, between the pain and the virtual paralysis in my left arm and leg, going to the bathroom was such an ordeal that I basically stopped eating and drinking -- or rather, I ate and drank just enough to stave off the loving nagging of my attentive physician wife. This went on for five days in the hospital, and the first two or three days of inpatient rehab. But somewhere around the third day, I began to drink. A lot. The nurses kept the big Styrofoam cups of water coming, and I kept draining them as fast as they came; I simply couldn't get enough. Every cell in my body cried out for it; my blood, my lymph, my cerebrospinal fluid – all of them cried out to be replenished. I was thirsty.

Discomfort with the fact of Jesus’ bodily humanity has a long pedigree. The third century Alexandrian theologian Origen only grudgingly admitted that Jesus ate and drank at all, and insisted that he did so "in a manner unique to himself, such that the food did not pass from his body." Apparently Jesus wouldn't have had the same problem I had in the hospital.

The church’s troubled relationship with the physical body has persisted into our own time, and the world has been watching. I used to write for a large amalgamated blog that specialized in Buddhism and yoga. As one of only two Christian writers on the blog, I often had outraged yogis unload on me about the presumption of a Christian writer writing on a blog about yoga. After all, Christians hate the body. Everybody knows that.

Once I asked a commentor to quote me a passage from the Gospels that suggested a hatred of the body. He came back with about a dozen passages – all from the letters of Paul, not the Gospels. I decided to let that go. But I informed him that the New Testament uses two Greek words that are both translated as "the flesh." Soma means the literal, physical body, and it hardly ever appears in the New Testament. Sarx means the carnal nature, our tendency to sin for the sake of gratifying our physical desires. I looked up all of the passages the angry yogi had provided, and discovered that every single one of them used the word sarx where the English text said "the flesh." Not a single one of those passages referred to the literal, physical body.

And yet, it isn't enough to point that out, because there is truth in the angry yogi’s criticism. The Christian religion, which is predicated on God taking on human flesh, has often had an ambivalent-at-best relationship with the physical body. I believe the downplaying of Jesus’ physical humanity is part of what allows some Christians to applaud the possibility of food stamps and health care coverage being taken away from the poor. "I was hungry, and you gave me food," said Jesus in the parable of the sheep and the goats. "I was naked, and you clothed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink." There are no thoughts and prayers in the parable. It's all about concrete needs, most of them relating to the physical body.

Because the physical body is a huge part what the Christ project is all about. In Jesus of Nazareth, God lived a human life and died a human death, and along the way experienced hunger, thirst, pain, pleasure, heat, cold, desire, aversion, and all the thousand natural shocks that the flesh is heir to – and all the messy emotional stuff, too: love, loss, grief, anger, and abandonment. So when we are suffering, we can turn to God in Jesus, and God in Jesus will revive our spirits.

In fact, if it were up to me to choose a passage of Scripture that the Christ project fulfilled, it would be this passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah:

Thus says the High and Lofty One
Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
“I dwell in the high and holy place,
But also with those who have a contrite and humble spirit,
To revive the spirit of the humble,
And to revive the heart of the contrite.

The unchanging, transcendent, incorporeal creator of the universe has stubbed his toes and blown his nose and seen his loved ones die, in a body just like ours.

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A Force of Love and Fury (Part 2 of 3)

10/29/2018

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The illness Amy was to develop in young adulthood had its roots in this culture of divine retribution. Her budding adolescent sexuality, in particular, plagued her with fear and shame.

“My sexuality was probably the biggest casualty,” she recalls. “This was right in the middle of that really intense purity movement, and you can imagine, with my church’s emphasis on fear and purity, the kind of message we received is that every time you touch yourself you're nailing a nail into Jesus's hands, or piercing his side. That was what I was told! So you can imagine, as a 16-year-old girl who has sexual feelings, every time I even had a sexual thought I would literally burst into tears and sob in my bed, crying to God to save me from having sexual thoughts, because every time I was murdering the Jesus I was supposed to love. It was just awful. And that was my life every day-- just living in fear and anger and regret and shame. And it just built and built and built and built.”

Because of Your Anger, There is No Health in My Body (Psalm 38:3)

The “purity movement” to which Amy refers dates back to the 1980s and 90s, when the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s fell apart in the face of the AIDS epidemic and the resurgence of conservative Christianity during the Reagan years.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’” said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28) Jesus’ insistence that outward observance of the Law was insufficient, and that a conversion of the heart is necessary, amounted, for the purity movement, to a declaration that “any sexual feelings,
desires, or thoughts that occur before marriage are sinful.”[i]

This radical demand for sexual purity exacted a high price from the young women toward whom its message was primarily directed, and who bore the brunt of the responsibility for observing its proscriptions. Besides policing their own sexual feelings, they were made to feel responsible for whatever lustful desires their bodies might stir up in teenaged boys. Because the girls’ feelings are perfectly appropriate developmentally, they cannot succeed in excising them, though the effort often leads to feelings of shame and fear, as well as emotional problems and difficulty with sexuality and intimacy.[ii]

Amy would begin to learn how widespread this sexual malaise was among her peers when she entered the wider world of university life. As that time drew near, her need to get away became more and more urgent.

“By my last year of high school,” Amy recalls, “I was desperate to escape. My parents were still together at that point, though my mom was so depressed, she was like a ghost passing through the house. So she wasn’t much help. I was looking at colleges, and my parents told me the only way they would pay for college was if I went to a Christian school. I didn't want to take all the debt upon myself, so I set out to find the most liberal Christian school I could find!” She laughs as she recalls the subterfuge. And as often happens, it was a seemingly chance encounter that made her path clear.

“I had one other Christian friend, and she was really conservative--though her father ended up being gay, and now she's a huge gay rights advocate. But at the time she was talking to colleges, and she said, ‘I heard that at Eastern University, apparently, there's a big gay underground, so there's no way I'm going there.’ And that clinched it; that was the moment I knew I was going to Eastern. I didn’t care what that school offered or anything; I just knew I might have some measure of safety there--that I could explore and ask questions. That was the first, kind of, “awakening” period for me.”[1]

In college, though Amy began to interrogate her received faith with ever-increasing determination, she found it impossible to break out of the mold into which she’d been cast.

“I was able to start to grapple with some of the spiritual abuse that I had been through,” she explains, “but I continued to maintain, theologically and emotionally, a connection to the punisher God, and was just incapable of breaking free of that. It didn't matter how much I tried, how many progressive books on theology I read, how many professors I talked to, how much I prayed— I just couldn't break free; it had a vice grip around me.”
Her stint as a sounding board for her college peers ultimately led her to pursue a degree in counseling at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. Run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, Chestnut Hill College emphasizes spirituality and women’s studies in a way that seems made on purpose to equip young women like Amy to practice “holistic therapy” aimed at the whole person: mind, body and soul. Many women, Amy has observed, have tried to excise parts of themselves that are causing them pain and holding them back from experiencing a full, normal life and spiritual growth.

“This is something I've become really aware of in other women: the extreme shaming of my body, as a woman, really forced me to shut off from that part of myself.

“There are just so many women who are so hurt in that place,” she continues, “and they are looking for answers, and (either) abandoning spirituality altogether, or just digging in further to what they know. And it's causing a lot of problems for a lot of women, and I know what that's like because I've been grappling with this kind of thing my whole life.”

Over time, Amy began to identify her own femininity as sinful, and to reject it both emotionally and, what was in some ways even more dangerous, physically.

“Between being constantly asked questions in front of the church and in youth group about how pure I was being,” she remembers, “and seeing my mother being trampled over because she was trying to live out the submission theology, I just wanted nothing to do with being female.”

The dual demands of sexual purity and feminine submission exerted such force as to make Amy feel as though she were being “spiritually raped.”

“I know that’s an aggressive term,” she says, “but it really felt that way. And I just didn't want any part of that. So I really shut that whole part of myself off, emotionally.”

The word “psychosomatic” comes from the Greek words for “soul” and “body.” And just as Amy’s soul shut down against the onslaught of shame and scrutiny, so her body, too, armored itself against its own femaleness.

“I think physically that shut off happened literally in my uterus, my ovaries--I just clamped down, so not to have any part of being female. And it ended up literally manifesting itself into an illness that has to do with my progesterone.”

The Body Keeps the Score[2]

Autoimmune Progesterone Dermatitis, in which a woman’s body reacts adversely to her own progesterone, is very rare. In its more serious forms, it is called Autoimmune Progesterone Dermatitis and Anaphylaxis, which is extremely rare. Since 1921, there have been as few as fifty published cases of APD, of which as few as 9 attained the status of full-blown APDA.[iii]

APD often presents as some combination of eczema, skin lesions and hives, inflammation of the hair follicles, oral inflammation with ulcers or blisters, and skin edema.

Additional symptoms that may indicate anaphylaxis include fever, shortness of breath, vomiting, internal bleeding, and the accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal cavity or the chest cavity.

Both conditions are tested for by injecting progesterone under the skin. APD can often be treated topically, or with injected steroids or progesterone-suppressing hormones.[iv](It has not been shown to respond to conventional treatments such as antihistamines.)[v]  APDA can only be resolved with a hysterectomy and ovary removal.[vi]

In Amy’s case, the disease did not manifest in its full severity all at once.

“It took a while to get there,” she recalls. “I had been getting sicker and sicker, and I was losing weight, and every time I would ovulate, seven days after I ovulated I’d be covered in hives the size of a fist all over my body. And then, as that progressed, I would start vomiting, and I’d be so nauseous that I couldn't sleep; I would lay in bed and waves of nausea would literally wake me out of a dead sleep, because it would it would be so severe I would just have to get out of bed and throw up.

“APDA is incredibly rare,” she explains, “and so it took a long time to figure it out. But eventually we connected the dots that it was cyclical and we did a simple test. They inject progesterone under your skin. And within five minutes, I had hives racing down my arms and my hands, and I was wheezing. And that’s a clear diagnosis."

Once they knew what they were dealing with, and that it carried the risk of a sudden, fatal flare-up, the doctors prescribed a syringe of emergency allergy-counteracting adrenaline called an Epi-pen.

“I had to carry around an Epi-pen all the time, because it can eventually stop your breathing because of the hives. It had fortunately never happened to me, but I had to carry it around just in case. Progesterone rises and falls, and it is pretty clear when it does, so I usually knew when I was in the danger zone. But yes, sometimes it would just randomly surge and I would get hives all over the place.”

It seemed Amy’s unconscious mind had come to the defense of her femininity, protecting it from the onslaught it endured at her church even at the expense of causing a dangerous illness—a sort of scorched earth gambit in which the territory under attack was damaged so as to keep it out of the enemy’s hands. And the unconscious knew exactly where to work its sabotage: on the hormone that controls much of her body’s expression of its femaleness.

“Progesterone is what makes breasts grow,” Amy says, her smile breaking through at the irony of it all. “It’s what gives you cycles, and it's what helps babies grow, and I literally became allergic to it. It’s so literal—I mean, Freud would laugh, you know? I shut myself off from my own pain and shame and suffering, and it came back as this physical manifestation, in my body."

During her time as a dormroom doyenne, Amy heard from many of her friends about the problems with sex and intimacy they had acquired as a result of purity-oriented teaching.
“What's really interesting is I had this discussion with, I think, almost every one of my Christian friends, or at least who grew up Christian, and not one of has had an easy transition into being able to just be sexual. To this day they all still struggle with that with their partners.

“It had effects on my marriage big-time, because I went into a marriage having all of these problems with my body and my sexuality, and then I was supposed to suddenly be sexual! Oh my God, how you even function like that? It was so damaging. And it’s stuff I am genuinely still sorting through my husband.”

The Sins of the Fathers

Amy’s husband may not be alone. The parents have eaten sour grapes, says the old Hebrew proverb, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. And apparently, Amy’s parents have passed along their sour harvest of shame, fear, and sexual dysfunction to their other daughter as well.

“My sister went through everything I went through,” Amy recalls, adding that they helped each other process their experiences of home and church. “And interestingly enough, my sister, who just turned 25, just started getting the hives. Same exact age I got them, and also cyclically.”

I Know There is Freedom

Amy has not allowed her experiences to shut her off from her thirst for knowledge, or her search for an authentic spirituality.

“I never give up,” she proclaims. “There’s always a pull.  There's just no rest for me; that's just the way that I am, and I will always seek hard after it. I am a little bit of the spirit junkie; I will read any book, anything anybody gives me, on spirituality. One of my favorite genres is spiritual autobiographies; anytime I find them I will devour them.

“Spirituality is always at my heart, and I know that there's this place internally that's free of all of the shit that's been heaped on it. I know--I know--that there is freedom and I never, ever, for one second, stop searching for it.”
Eventually, her search took her, with two of her four adopted children, to—of all places—a church.

“Because I am a seeker and I will always seek, I attended a ‘healing weekend’ the Episcopal church that my husband had been attending was doing.

“I like anything healing; I'm always game for that sort of stuff. It never works,” she adds, laughing, “so I tend to come away more sarcastic than I came in. I'm always on the alert for charlatans. So I went to that weekend, and in usual fashion was just like, ‘Yeah, it’s all right."

“Actually, it’s like an anthropological study for me; I like to go because I like studying what happens. I'm fascinated to see all of the different ways that people find healing—interact with the concept of healing. I mean, I’m a therapist; that’s my job. So really, that’s a lot of it for me, was going to just watch other people, and see how they received healing, and see what that process looked like for them.”

In very short order, however, Amy’s trip to church became far more than a participant-observer academic exercise.

“That Sunday, the whole church had this healing service, and the priest had asked everyone to join hands and pray together for healing. And so this lady I had never met--I don't really attend the church at all--came across the aisle. She grabbed my hand and I just stood there watching everyone like I always do. And after the prayer she grabbed both of my hands, turned me to her and said, "I just have to tell you that Mary is here with you; she's holding you in her lap--she knows that you have been given a mother's heart recently, and she wants you to know that she is continuing to open your mother's heart."

“It was obviously very timely, because I had just adopted four children, and was struggling mightily. And I very uncharacteristically, especially in a church--because that is not a safe please for me at all--burst into tears. I was just very taken aback by it.”

Part of the shock was due to the fact that the woman was nothing at all like the women of Amy’s childhood church.

“She was so motherly,” she says wonderingly. “The women in the church I grew up with so cold. I think they were very shut down, now that I look back at it, and I had never received nurturing at the church. Never! I had no idea what that looked like—for a church to be nurturing.That’s not their job! Their job is to kick you in the ass and get you away from hell! And so this very motherly, nurturing woman, she embraces me, and she was rubbing my back and squeezing my hand as a mother would. It was very rattling for me.

“So after communion they asked each family to go find a prayer team; they had these prayer teams stationed, and you’d wait, and the next one that opened up, you’d go to.

“I don't normally do communion, because that’s reserved for Christians, and I don’t consider myself one. But my girls do. I only had two of my girls, my younger two at that time, because the other two had stayed home with my husband. So I went up, and the girls took communion, and we waited, and sure enough, in the prayer station that opens up is this lady who had held my hand. So she motions us over, and we go over.”

Amy has asked me not to tell too much of her girls’ story, because that story is theirs to tell, not ours. So we agreed to say only that the girls’ mother, having lived with them on the streets for two years under frightening conditions, finally gave them up into the foster system, and disappeared without a trace. The girls haven’t seen or heard from her since.

“Now, the girls, especially the older one that I brought over, had never, ever, ever talked about the loss of her mom, or what she had been through; she's really shut down about it. And when the woman asked what we could pray for, she looked up and said, ‘I just want to pray for my mommy--that she's okay.’ And of course I’m already starting to bawl my eyes out, because my baby is talking about, or even just mentioning, her mom, which is a big deal.” Amy is visibly and audibly emotional as she tells the story.

“So this woman immediately motions for a couple other older women to come over, and they scoop both of my children up, and are just rocking them; they’re not even praying, they’re just like, ‘It's okay; Jesus has your mommy, it'll be all right.’ I get choked up just thinking about it. And my girls are sobbing their eyes out, and I could see a moment of healing, especially for my oldest, in that moment, because she hadn’t even acknowledged her mom, and the loss of her mom. And I know she has to struggle with it; I mean, what a horrible thing, she's been through hell and back, these kids. And these women are just, like, saviors; they’re coming in and nurturing and loving on these girls. They're not telling them what they need to do—they didn’t even pray! They were just wiping her tears away like, ‘we understand, it's okay, you can be sad, you're being held.’ It was just so healing for them, and it was very healing for me in that moment, too.”

When Amy said a second time that the women didn’t pray, I asked her what she meant by “prayer.” She answered, “I guess I mean ‘pray’ in a traditional sense, like saying ‘Jesus please heal these girls’ or anything. Instead, they just kept telling the girls that they were safe, that God is holding their mother, and they are loved.”

“I felt like in that moment this fissure happened in that brick wall inside me. It was very eye-opening, and I didn't know what to do with it. I was very disturbed by it, because I had kind of banked my whole life on knowing exactly what church people are, because I hadn’t met any different ones. So that was really amazing."

To be continued...

[1]Full disclosure: Amy was one of my students at Eastern University.

[2]This is the title of a book by Bessel van der Kolk.

[i]Barbee, Amanda. “Naked and Ashamed: Women and Evangelical Purity Culture.” The Other Journal: An Intersection of Theology and Culture. March 3, 2014. Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.

[ii]Ibid.

[iii]Snyder, Joy L., MD and Krishnaswamy, Guha, MD. “Autoimmune progesterone dermatitis and its manifestation as anaphylaxis: a case study and literature review.” Annals of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology. Vol. 90, May 2003.

[iv]Ibid.

[v]“Autoimmune Progesterone Anaphylaxis.” Bemanian, Mohammad Hassan, et al. Iranian Journal of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. June 2007; 6(2): 97-99

[vi]Snyder

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A Force of Love and Fury (1 0f 3)

10/27/2018

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Photo: Israel Folau

Amy has four adopted special-needs daughters, and they are a handful.

“The amount of nurturing they need exceeded the amount of nurturing that I had to give,” she confesses, “especially because it triggered some stuff from my childhood and not getting any sort of nurturing, because my mom was too depressed and my dad was too angry. So I felt like the kids kept coming against a brick wall inside me, and I was really struggling with that.

“And I was sick,” she adds, “which was making things difficult, too, though that had been a challenge for years at that point.”

Amy is a small-boned, slender, birdlike young woman in her mid-thirties; as she perches on the edge of the chair, her quick, wide smile and surprisingly deep voice belie her almost fragile appearance.

In practice since 2007, Amy is a Holistic Therapist, employing nutrition, meditation, and spirituality, as well as cognitive psychology, to help her patients find healing “not as a collection of symptoms and issues, but rather a whole being.” Treating exclusively women and adolescent girls, she works with them in such areas as anger, anxiety, depression, grief, infertility, LGBTQ issues, marriage and relationship issues, parenting, self-esteem, sexuality, spirituality and sexual abuse. “Healing is a sacred process,” proclaims her website.

Amy got her start as a therapist early and informally, serving as a sort of wise-woman to her peers at her evangelical Christian university—peers who, it turned out, had had many of the same harrowing experiences she had growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household.

“What started happening,” she recalls, “was, because I was so vocal about my feelings and the things I had been through, a lot of girls in my cohort started coming to me and asking the same questions. And as I found myself on the listening end a lot, I found myself really thriving in that space. And as I was working through my own stuff, I realized that there was this huge need out there for someone who understood what it was like to be a woman and be oppressed in a spiritual space.”

Storms, wrote Carl Sandburg, begin far back--and the tempestuous forces that ultimately led to Amy’s healing experience, and her finding a safe haven, were set in motion long before she was born.

“My parents met at a fundamentalist evangelical college in New Jersey; even listening to the radio was not okay. So they both came into their marriage with a really intense fundamentalist background, and my father continued pushing that, so we ended up going to more and more extreme churches.

“I started off in a fairly typical evangelical church, then moved to an even wackier Baptist Church, and then a really wacky Evangelical Free Church.  And that church is where I spent most of my time.”

“It was the kind of fundamentalism that’s insidious,” she explains. “We didn’t have to wear skirts, for instance; it wasn’t outward, where somebody could pick me out of the lineup and say ‘that’s a fundie kid.’

“But there were expectations on your every thought, breath, action--and everything was constantly focused on the evangelism of others and the submission of yourself. And I guess that those are well and good goals, but the way that they pushed them was very cult-like; it wasn't like, ‘We want to share Jesus because we love Jesus, and we think other people will find peace in Jesus,’ it was, ‘We share Jesus because that's what Jesus has commanded and everyone else is going to hell, and we have to save them.”

The institutional emphasis on fear was brought home for Amy in the person of her father.

“My father was an elder in the church, and so he really drove a lot of that agenda, along with a number of other elders. Unfortunately, it was very clear from the beginning that I was a free thinker, and that was a huge problem, because I asked questions.”

The answers dispensed in Amy’s church did not come in response to questions, but directly from the doctrinal and scriptural source that was, to the church’s way of thinking, divinely inspired, literally true, and not open to question.

“We had to take a confirmation class, where we read evangelical classics, and then the pastor would just brutally browbeat into us what our message was supposed to be, and how we were supposed to spread it. And I was constantly asking questions, like, what was the point of the Trinity, why does that make any sense?Just basic theological questions I think any person would be wise to ask. But that was never okay; the pastor got extremely defensive and start pushing back on me.”

The expectation of spreading the message wasn’t simply a matter of principle—it was homework so demanding as to both beggar belief and inspire flights of fiction.

“One of our assignments was, we had to evangelize 20 people a week, and we had to keep a journal of all of our ‘conquests.’ So I just made up every single one of them. I’d come up with these fantastical conversion stories, where my friend was kneeling in the middle of the cafeteria, with the light of heaven shining down, and the pastor must have read this and known that I was completely BS-ing, and that was a problem.

“So at that point,” she continues, “the attempts at saving my soul began. For the church, that looked like berating me and separating out from other people.”

I Would Fly Away and Be at Rest (Psalm 55:6)

As the state of Amy’s soul became increasingly suspect, so did the state of her mother’s. But the woman and the girl responded to this scrutiny in markedly different ways.

“I think she started to pull away,” Amy says, “and it was really sad. I could sense that she was struggling, and there was no room to struggle (at the church.) So my mom started kind of falling into a deep depression, and I just fell in anger. I just became angrier and angrier and angrier.”

As adolescence set in, the tension between the authoritarianism of her church and Amy’s questioning mind—and concomitant “mouthiness”--intensified. By the time she was in middle school, Amy was chronically angry—a trait she came to share with her father. The father’s and daughter’s anger, however, came from very different sources.

“My father’s anger was fueled by fear,” she says. “Fear for my soul, for my salvation. So his one goal in life was to manipulate me into being saved in any way possible. It didn't matter whether it was hellfire or whatever it was he’d be threatening me with, it was just so important. And I know he did it out of love, but it's certainly didn’t feel very loving.”
The fear-fueled scrutiny planted the seeds of an anxiety that would last well into Amy’s adulthood.

“(I developed) this sensation of constant fear in the back of my mind that the punisher God was going to smite me at any moment--and I developed anger that I had to live with that on a daily basis. And it reached into every corner of my life; I felt like I couldn't do anything about it without doing everything wrong.”

To be continued

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What Can I Do When I Can No Longer Do What I Once Could?

2/28/2018

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Me playing the tabla, before spinal stenosis

Me, playing the concertina at a Renaissance festival, before spinal stenosis

I first knew for sure that I had a problem when I was using the elliptical exerciser. I had been keeping myself in shape with it for years, but it slowly, almost imperceptibly, became more difficult to use. When the reckoning finally came, my left foot would clench up like a fist after only a few minutes of exercise. Then things began to happen faster.

Within a short time, I could no longer play the piano, concertina or harmonium without pain, and could only type with my right hand. (I am using dictation software to write this article.) Centering Prayer became difficult because I could no longer sit still comfortably for any period of time. Cooking became a challenge as my left hand became less adept at holding vegetables while my right hand cut them. And while "any place is walking distance if you have the time" had always been a motto of mine, I soon found even walking taxing. Spinal stenosis – a condition in which the bones of the spine thicken, putting pressure on the spinal cord and causing weakness, loss of dexterity, and decreased range of motion on one side of the body – had left me unable to do a lot of the things which had previously given me joy.

Me, playing the harmonium at a Renaissance festival, before spinal stenosis. The left hand pumps the bellows.

The problem had been a long time coming on; like the frog who boiled to death because the heat under the pan had been turned up so slowly that it hadn't noticed, I failed to register my increasing debility for at least a year before it became too severe to ignore. Besides, I somaticize my emotions a lot, so it was easy to assume that the muscle tension in my left arm, leg, hand, and shoulder were symptoms of stress.

I had surgery which, unfortunately, didn't work; in fact, I was worse after it than before. Everything from picking things up off the floor to putting on my pants became harder, so I did less, and between my physical inertness, and depression urging me to spend many hours sleeping on the couch, I managed to put on about 90 pounds. I went from being a person whose age people routinely guessed ten years low, to getting offered senior citizen discounts at a glance.

I developed an obsession with my "glory days," when I could do so many things I could no longer do, or do as well as I used to. At the same time, I would see friends 10 to 20 years older than me – I am 53 now – move around much more spryly than I could, and be beset with panic about ending up a miserable, contracted 65-year-old in a wheelchair. I was caught between mourning the past and dreading the future.

And the fatigue! Just walking eight tenths of a mile to church and back for Morning Prayer leaves me well-nigh exhausted, and if I follow that up with an aquacise class at the gym, I’ll either need to take a nap or drag myself through the rest of the day at 60% power. My left hand has become so maladroit that even tying my shoes makes me break a sweat. Moving around in a crowded room has become an ordeal, as I strive not to use other people as a luge course from my seat to the bathroom or buffet. Even if it’s for something I love, like shape-note singing, if it’s going to involve a lot of people in close quarters, or there aren’t comfortable chairs, I may stay home. My world is contracting.

“Most people start the day with an unlimited amount of possibilities, and energy to do whatever they desire, especially young people,” wrote a blogger with Lupus. “The hardest thing I ever had to learn is to slow down, and not do everything. I fight this to this day. I hate feeling left out, having to choose to stay home, or to not get things done that I want to.”

I hate it, too, and the anxiety and weariness still trouble me during my weaker moments. I still fiercely miss making music with friends, cooking without dropping things all the time, and walking for pleasure, and I still dread those further losses that may be coming. But the good news is, I have begun, with the help of my wife and a lot of prayerful introspection, to emerge from that narrow space between the Scylla of the past and the dire Charybdis of the future. It sounds ridiculously obvious, but the secret is to focus on what I can do now.

I cannot play instruments that require the equal use of both hands, but I can play predominantly right-handed instruments like the Irish bodhran, the Basque string drum, the Indian karatals (tiny brass cymbals)—and thanks to some kind biomechanical engineers at Temple University, I now have a motorized harmonium that doesn’t require my left hand to pump the bellows. (I also found a one-handed accordion, with a keyboard on the right but no bass or chord buttons on the left.)

I cannot sit, erect and still, in meditation any longer, but I can pray Evening Prayer or Compline out of the Prayerbook, pray the Rosary once a week with the Morning Meditation group at church, and observe novenas when saints to whom I feel a connection come up in the calendar.

I cannot practice yoga or use the elliptical exerciser, but I can go to aquacise classes and walk to church for Morning Prayer.

It’s hard to slice and dice by hand, but it’s easy to use a Cuisinart and buy frozen chopped onions and pre-minced garlic. (Helpful hint: a hardboiled egg slicer can be used to slice mushrooms, too.)

All of these accommodations have been exercises in humility, of course; having to face loss of ability and accept help are potent medicine for a misplaced sense of self. The cooking accommodations have also shown me that many of the things I thought were quality-of-life choices—always using fresh garlic, rather than powdered or pre-minced, for instance—were actually ego-driven choices rooted in pride; whatever else I was, I wasn’t one of those sorry people who didn’t know what to do with fresh herbs. Now, I save physical discomfort by opening a bag of frozen chopped onions rather than chopping them fresh, and each time I do it, the ego discomfort is a little less.

Best of all, God seems to be validating my adjustments with a stream of successful and rewarding workshops, discussions, and other professional and volunteer opportunities; chances to use the training I received at the Shalem Institute, graduate school and seminary. It almost seemed as though every time I resigned myself to finding a new way of doing something, I get a phone call or email about some new project. It's enough to make you think you're doing something right.

Perhaps most excitingly, I got an email asking me to serve as a Formation Counselor for the Third Order of St. Francis--a religious order within the Episcopal Church whose members live a Franciscan life, with a Rule and under vows, but in the world rather than in community. I had plenty of reservations, and plenty of reasons to say "no". Things like deadlines, files, email, and other things to be kept straight and organized can be daunting to me. Moreover, as I read the handbook and other materials, I realized how much I had been bobbing along the surface of Third Order life in some ways.

When I was in formation, I took to heart what the formation letters said about how it was I, and not my family, who was becoming a Franciscan, and when my children were small – and until quite recently – I missed a lot of fellowship meetings because they were on Saturday mornings, which I considered family time. While the day-to-day business of keeping the rule was something I could still do, I fell out of touch with the larger order in some ways; the newsletters, the intercession list, and other ways of keeping my finger on the pulse sort of fell through the cracks. But I remembered what the Principles of the Order say about humility: "when asked to undertake work of which they feel unworthy or incapable they do not shrink from it on the grounds of humility, but confidently attempt it through the power that is made perfect in weakness."

Harmonium with an electric motor to pump the bellows, courtesy of the Temple University Department of Biomechanical Engineering.

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My Pain in the Neck

10/9/2015

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http://spinalstenosis.org/blog/spinal-stenosis-arthritis/

I had surgery in July to correct my cervical spinal stenosis. I went through a lot of pain that I will not bore you with a rehearsal of--unless you want it, in which case you can read about it here.

There is more than one cause of spinal stenosis--a condition in which the spinal column puts pressure on the spinal cord, attenuating the flow of nerve signals to the body. Typically of stenosis in the neck, I found that, slowly over the course of a year or more, I lost strength, dexterity and range of motion in my left arm, hand, shoulder and leg.

As of now, I am able to type mostly without pain, but I am unable to play the piano or the tabla, and I can play the concertina for only a short time. Frame drums have become more difficult, too. My nurse practitioner tells me it can take up to two years for the symptoms to resolve, allowing me to know how much functionality will return and how much is permanently lost. (Whether it would have been better to have developed lumbar stenosis, in which the arm and hand are spared but one becomes incontinent in the bladder and bowels, is an open question. Actually, it isn't very open; just a tiny crack. Barely at all.)

A number of factors can contribute to the onset and exacerbation of stenosis. My right leg is a half inch shorter than my left, which has given me mild scoliosis which, in turn, contributed to the spinal squeeze. More important, however, is the fact that I have always carried a great deal of tension in my neck and shoulders. "All muscles pull on the bones they are attached to," wrote Paul Grilley in Yin Yoga: A Quiet Practice, "and the bones respond by growing thicker and stronger. This is why a forensic scientist can examine a skeleton and determine the strength of the deceased. The bones will have thickened and strengthened where powerful muscles have pulled on them." Apparently, my neck muscles pulled on my vertebrae until they became arthritic, causing them to constrict the spinal cord. Long before the symptoms appeared, I had already included neck and shoulder stretches as part of my yoga practice, but by then it was too late. Now, I am unable to do any intense neck stretches without risk of damage to the expensive hardware with which four of my vertebrae are fused.

If, like me, you find yourself walking around with your shoulders in your ears and your neck stiff as a cable, I urge you to begin now to loosen up those muscles before it is too late, and you end up needing spinal surgery. (The pre-surgical consent forms I had to sign warned that the procedure could result in blindness, paraplegia or death--but the discomfort and debility were more than enough of an ordeal even without those grim outcomes.) Click in the link below to download a free ebook from Yoga Journal called "Yoga for the Neck and Shoulders." And good luck!

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My Book

10/9/2015

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If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know that I have struggled off and on with depression for the past ten years or more. When I began blogging after leaving my university teaching job, I noticed that I always got very positive responses from readers when I wrote about that topic. Evidently, there are a lot of people out there who are dealing with this disease, and my thoughts on the subject were helpful to some of them.

For that reason, I decided to write a book on faith, spirituality, and depression. When The Sacred Feet Publishing Imprint--a project of the Jones Educational Foundation, which also oversees the Slate Branch Ashram--expressed an interest in publishing such a book, I sifted out my depression-related blog posts from Elephant Journal, Progressive Christianity and Recovering Yogi and dunked them into the boiling pot of my thoughts the way you might dunk a string into a pot of sugar water, and the book built itself around them like rock candy around the string.

If you have "Liked" Open to the Divine on Facebook, you will be getting notices of upcoming promotional events, such as combined book signings and kirtans in New York and Philadelphia. (And if you haven't, why haven't you?) In the meantime, you can learn more about the book here.

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The Lamp of Tenderness

3/3/2012

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I have always had heart trouble–by which I mean that I have always lived primarily in my head. In meditation, it is always much more natural for me to put my awareness in the ajna chakra between the eyebrows that in my chest area. When I chant the bija mantra “Yam” into the anahata chakra, I become aware of the heart center through the tingling of the sound vibrations, but maintaining awareness of a spinning green light, or any other attempt to be “aware of the presence of God in my heart” has always felt artificial and contrived. No matter how many times I mentally repeat the Jesus Prayer while going through my day, I keep “hearing” it in my head, not in my heart.

But I discovered this passage in Abdul Baha’s Prayers and Meditations, concerning those people with discernment to see the divine majesty everywhere:

Surely the lamp of Thy love is burning in their hearts, and the light of Thy tenderness is lit within their breasts.

This passage leapt out at me, demanding my attention, so I treated it as a subject for lectio divina, or "holy reading" meditation, repeating it slowly and deliberately in silence as thought it were mantra or a Centering Prayer “prayer-word.” I found it very focusing. Certainly, the image of a burning lamp in my heart was much easier to hold in awareness than an abstract “heart center” (even one with a rotating wheel of green light in it) and a flame much more concrete than an abstraction like “love.”

Something else that has plagued me for years is my tendency to sublimate and somaticize difficult emotions. When my mom was dying, I had suffered from fainting spells; before leaving home and fiancée for graduate school halfway across the country, I endured shortness of breath. My tendency to live in my head has pushed my body into advocating for my heart, demanding attention for my emotional challenges. Through the practice of yoga and, perhaps, through meditating on this image from this passage, I hope to be finally be able to allow, as the Eastern Orthodox contemplatives put it, the “mind to descend into the heart.”

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Sound and Body Awareness

9/21/2011

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Dame Evelyn Glennie

When we were small, our caregivers–with all the best intentions–taught us something that simply isn’t true: that we “hear with our ears.”

OK, perhaps there’s some truth in that statement–about as much as saying that we experience the sunshine with our eyes. But if we only wore dark glasses without using sunblock, we’d quickly realize how much of the truth we were missing.

Sound, like light, impacts our entire bodies. No matter how good digital sampling becomes, no digital piano will ever replace a real one because, though my ears may be taken in, my knees will know, as there are no hammers hitting strings inches from my knees on an electronic keyboard.

Another picture of Evelyn Glennie, because why not?

The first full-time touring classical percussionist of the 20th century, Evelyn Glennie, is deaf; she plays barefoot and “hears” through her feet (as well as the rest of her body.) Sound is a tactile phenomenon to her; she describes the sound of the snare drum as being alternately like “bullets” and “velvet.”

During a performance of Schönberg’s immense Gurrelieder, for extended orchestra and multiple choirs, I “heard” the first entrance of the male chorus in my sternum. And did you ever notice the small, white fireworks whose sound, though immensely loud, is deep enough that we feel the impact in the chest more than in the ear?

Sacred Harp Sing

At Sacred Harp sings, I often notice that the book vibrates in my fingers from the impact of my voice.

I could go on with myriad examples, but the point is that hearing is a full-body experience, and if we become really aware of the sounds we produce and receive, it can help us tune in to our bodies–which is, after all, the best way to come fully into the present moment.

When I am having trouble focusing in church, I often find it useful, during some part of the liturgy in which everyone is speaking or singing in unison, to let the words means themselves for a while–without my having to work at meaning them– and just let the sound of all those people behind me fill my back like wind filling a sail. (Because I have smallish kids, I am invariably seated right up front.) It brings me right back into the present like no amount of applied willpower possibly could.

Here’s an exercise you can try:

Hum a little while on one note. Where do you feel the vibrations? If you’re like most people, your lips are pressed together, and all the resonance is in your lips, teeth and jaws.
Now try humming as though you had a raw egg in your mouth, and you didn’t want to break the yolk. Your jaw is slack, your tongue down, and your lips just touching. Most people report that the resonance drops down into the chest and even the belly when they hum this way.
I usually practice five to ten minutes of body-awareness chanting–generally on the bijas, or “seed-mantra” syllables “MA” or “OM”–as a “warm-up” before mantra meditation. But occasionally, I devote the entire practice period to body awareness through meditation on the chakras.

The chakras, a chain of “energy centers” that runs up the spine, are very useful focal points for body awareness. When meditating on them, I use the associated bijas for each chakra, chanting the syllable while holding my awareness on the area of the body in which the chakra resides.

There are many teachings on the correct or most efficacious way to use chakra bijas, and they are as divergent as they are passionately propounded. As Sound Yoga teacher Russill Paul says,

The Tantric tradition from which this sequence is derived never had a central authority that determined any specific methodologies and so there exist a variety of possibilities within the tradition offering a number of variations on the same practice.

Not wanting to take sides, I have devised my own method, in which I chant each bija for a given time period, with my awareness resting at each chakra on the way up, and ending in a period of silence.

I felt free to devise my own method because, for me, chakra meditation is strictly about awareness and intention. I do not know what it means when teachers say that a certain bija “opens” or “activates” its associated chakra–in fact, though I try never to rule anything out, I am generally skeptical about claims that mantras, mudras, “healing sounds,” or other aids to practice have an empirical effect on us. For me, a bija mantra is a string around my pranic finger, helping me to focus on the area of my body to which it points by dint of association built up by repetition and practice. I suppose it’s almost Pavlovian in a way: just as my dogs know food is coming when they hear me pick up their bowls, my awareness goes straight to my muladhara chakra the moment I begin chanting “lam.”

Here is the version of the chakra bijas that I use: the “a” is pronounced like the “o” in “come,” and the “l” is pronounced with the tip of the tongue on the hard palette:

Muludhara (“root”)   Lam

Swadhisthana (sacral)   Vam

Manipura (solar plexus)   Ram

Anahata (heart)   Yam

Vishuddha (throat)   Ham

Ajna (brow or “third eye”)   Sham (Aum is also common)

Sahasrara (“crown”)   Om

Imagine that you are chanting each bija "into" the associated chakra; see if you can feel the resonating vibrations of your voice in each part of your body. Feel free to experiment, both with the various methods that are taught–for instance some teachers chant the bijas, some whisper them, and some speak them silently and internally–and with methods of your own that you may find more helpful. To quote again from Russill Paul,

Although there is a classical system of Kundalini Yoga that has been standardized and which must be respected, it is also necessary that we stay true to our personal experience and experimentation especially if it is rigorous and put to the test over a substantial amount of time. Rather than have our powers of perception dulled and our awareness lack the conviction of personal experience, mantra shastra is, in the final analysis, a science that is based on research and experimentation. Furthermore, there are exceptions to every rule, so we must learn to learn from our body as much as from our head...At the very least, you will know what works for you.

Is there such a thing as too many pictures of Evelyn Glennie?

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Chakras and Body Awareness

8/19/2011

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My wife and I recently went to hear Krishna Das–she for the first time, me for the third. (It was her first kirtan, in fact.) On the way home, I described an experience I had during one of the chants.

While I still have Jesus as my ishta, or “chosen ideal,” I long ago came to view Him as one Way among many. But though I have sung many kirtan chants, both other people's and those I have composed myself, I still experience occasional resistance to other divine names–a legacy of conventionally exclusive Christian training. This resistance usually breaks down fairly early (when it appears at all) and so it did on this evening.

I felt the moment of breakthrough viscerally, in my body–as though a golden wash of warmth burst out of my heart and flowed down into my arms.

“And then,” I told my skeptical physician wife, “and you’re going to think I’m crazy, but by the time the chant was over, my hands were hot and tingling.”

“Really?” she said, more curiously than incredulously. She then surprised me by saying, “You have more body awareness than I do.”

Now, my wife is far more naturally athletic than I am, and I would have thought that she’d be more physically attuned than I. However, I have two practices specifically aimed at increasing body awareness. One–body awareness through sound–I will discuss in a future entry. The other is cultivating awareness through attention to the chakras.

Chakra,a Sanskrit word meaning “wheel,” refers to seven “energy centers” in the body, according to Yogic thought.

1.                 The muludhara, or “root” chakra, located at the perineum (or at the anus, depending on the school of thought,)
2.                 The svadhistana chakra, located just below the navel (or at the genitals or the spleen, once again depending on whom one asks,)
3.                 The manipura chakra, located at the solar plexus,
4.                 The anahata, or “heart” chakra,
5.                 The visuddha, or “throat” chakra,
6.                 The ajna, or “brow” or “third eye” chakra, located between and above the eyes, and
7. The sahasrara, or “crown” chakra, located on, or just above, the crown of the head.

The chakras each have their traditional associations–for example, the throat chakra with communication and relationships, the “third eye” with intuition, and the “crown” with superconsciousness and union with the Divine–and “blockages” in, or “imbalances” between them are believed to cause hindrances to spiritual progress, emotional problems and even physical disease.

Let me interrupt myself at this point. If you’re familiar with the Sanskrit word shraddha, you’ve probably heard it translated as “absolute faith in God.” But I subscribe to what I believe to be a more nuanced and realistic definition: the willingness to suspend disbelief long enough to give a thing a try and see whether it works.[i] (For me, this experimentalism is probably the single most bracing and refreshing thing about Hinduism/Yoga; nothing is to be taken on blind faith, but everything is to be put to the test. As Kabir wrote, “If you have not lived through something, it is not true.”[ii])

I am exercising a great deal of shraddha toward most of the traditional beliefs about the chakras. Whether they are each really located at or near an actual neural plexus, whether they literally “open” as kundalini energy passes through them on its journey up the spinal canal, whether they truly become “blocked” or “imbalanced”–any or all of these things may be so, but you can’t prove any of them by me.

For me, the great revelation of the chakras is the enormous leap in body awareness one can make through attending to them. I’ll talk more about that in future entries; for now, I’ll just say that turning our awareness toward these centers can open us up to what is going on in our bodies, especially as they respond to emotional-spiritual stimuli.

Why is this awareness important? Because we are embodied beings, and all our experiences–including our experience of God–are rooted in what Bhagavan Das calls “this precious human body,” the only vehicle we have in our striving toward spiritual liberation.

We are all so overstimulated that it is easy to miss the “still, small voice” of God in our lives. Awareness of our physical being can help put us in touch with the God who is, as the Islamic hadith says, “closer to you than your jugular vein.”

“One needs to do so little, really, to experience God,” wrote Anthony de Mello. “All one needs to do is to quieten oneself, become still–and become aware of the feel of one’s hands. Be aware of the sensations in your hand…There you have God living and working in you, touching you, as near to you as you are to yourself.” [iii]

The great Carmelite mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, knew vividly the value of our embodied experience, and how our bodies allow us to be the Presence of God in the world:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours–no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which Christ is to go about doing good. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
________________________
[i] Paraphrased from talks by Swami Tyagananda at the Boston Vedanta Center.
[ii] Translated by Robert Bly.
[iii] de Mello, Anthony, Sadhana: A Way to God. Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 1987.

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Pratyahara and Praying Without Ceasing

8/6/2011

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There is a yoga discipline called pratyahara, which means “control of the senses” or "withdrawal of the mind from sense objects." During practice, the mind is supposed to be so focused that no distractions are able to enter our awareness. And that withdrawal is a good thing—I want to experience my experiences fully. But I like to think of pratyahara more broadly than that. When I am on a hike or picnic or retreat, for instance, I don’t want radio, television, recorded music or the internet intruding; I want to withdraw my senses from the overstimulating media that usually occupy them, so that my mind may be more available to the subtler experiences around me.

But even then, my “monkey mind,” as the Buddhists call it, continues to interpose itself between my awareness and the world. Everything I see and hear reminds me of something I need to do, someone who is trying my patience, another time and place in which I saw or heard something similar, something I know, or wish I knew, about the thing seen or heard. Nothing just is what it is on its own terms—everything becomes an object of my judgment and analysis, a springboard for my daydreams.

So I find it useful to regularly withdraw my attention, not from external stimuli, but from my internal commentary on them, which allows things to be more what they are. Be a stranger—be “not from around here,” the better to experience things as for the first time. It helps if the field of stimuli is relatively narrow—any activity I do more or less mechanically can clear a space for contemplative practice—and on a good day, when I am mowing the lawn or cleaning up the kitchen or folding laundry, I will remember to take advantage of the opportunity. Here’s what I do:

I begin by becoming aware of my breathing, which “takes attention away from thinking.”[i] The moment I begin this is one of the most satisfying moments of the day; there is a sense of release and restfulness, but not a somnolent restfulness—rather, a heightened awareness charged with energy even as it calms me, that gives me a pale glimpse of what it means to be “he who in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity, the silence and solitude of the desert.”[ii]

"Pratyahara"

I then begin to pray the so-called Jesus Prayer:  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.  This prayer, adapted from the words of the blind man who called out to Jesus from the roadside, has been used in contemplative practice since the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and is still widely practiced in the Eastern churches. It is prayed over and over, like a mantra.

(A word of explanation: the Greek word eleos, which is translated “mercy,” actually has a broader meaning than we ordinarily ascribe to it, including not only forgiveness but healing. The word has the same root as elia, meaning “olive,” because prayer for healing was—as it often still is—accompanied by anointing with [olive] oil. The point being that a repeated prayer for mercy is not necessarily the grimly penitential exercise it might sound like.)

Now here’s the counter-intuitive part: you’d think that repeating something over and over in your head would just add to the chaos, but in fact it does just the opposite. When the monkey mind is occupied with the mantra, I am actually freed from the distraction of memory, anticipation, plans, regrets, fantasies and all the other busywork that occupies me most of the time. So I am able to see, hear, feel everything much more vividly, without a layer of commentary between my deeper self and my experience. What a potato feels like as I rub the dirt off its surface under the tap, how the ocean sounds on the far side of a stand of trees through which the wind is blowing, the licorice smell of a pile of pulled weeds—everything is novel and intensified, unfiltered by commentary and classification. Experience bypasses the monkey mind and registers more directly.

The Indian sage Patanjali wrote, “The Seer is intelligence only, and though pure, sees through the coloring of the intellect.”[iii] When the intellect is otherwise occupied, the view is less colored. The monkey mind leaves you alone.

"Pray without ceasing." –1 Thessalonians 5:17

This entry was originally part of a larger post at Little Teaboys Everywhere.

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Good Friday: "I Am Thirsty"

A Force of Love and Fury (Part 2 of 3)

A Force of Love and Fury (1 0f 3)

What Can I Do When I Can No Longer Do What I Once Could?

My Pain in the Neck

My Book

The Lamp of Tenderness

Sound and Body Awareness

Chakras and Body Awareness

Pratyahara and Praying Without Ceasing

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