Blog Posts - Open to the Divine

You Can't Build a Tree

7/31/2017

Mustard Tree

I have come to believe that one of the best reasons to read and listen to sacred texts many times over many years is that when we are ready, the texts spring into life and offer us the healing or insight we need

I have been anxious and on edge these past several weeks without understanding why. It had gotten so bad that my family was suffering because of it. Then, this past Sunday, I found myself becoming suddenly and inexplicably emotional, to the point of wiping away tears, during this portion of the Gospel reading:

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31-32)

After the reading, I racked my brains in order to understand why this passage, which I have heard and read ever since I can remember, should have had such a powerful effect on me on this particular Sunday. I realized that I had recently begun a new per diem hospice chaplain job, and had just been contacted about interviewing for another. I still have not lost the weight I have put on since my spinal surgery, and have been frustrated with the painfully slow pace with which occupational and physical therapy yield tangible results, if they yield any. I'd been struggling to re-learn how to play the harmonium, re-establish my physical and spiritual exercise regimens, reclaim the weed-choked flowerbed and half a dozen other things.

In a flash, I knew what had been making me so anxious: I have been trying to build a tree for myself, when what I needed to do was to plant a seed and trust God that it would grow. I could cultivate it to the best of my ability one day at a time, rather than trying to force it all into existence at once. Because the trees we build for ourselves may stand up, more or less, but they don't grow, they don't make good signs of the Kingdom, and they certainly aren't hospitable to those who perch around our lives.

What We Want Most

3/11/2017

"I have always wondered about the reasoning behind giving up your favorite thing for Lent," wrote a friend a few moments after I announced that I was staying off my personal Facebook page for Lent.

Well, a lot of people observe Lent, and for a lot of reasons. (I've even noticed a growing number of non-Christians observing it.) Some people do it as a way of bringing unruly desires under their conscious control, increasing their level of self-mastery and winning themselves a measure of personal freedom. Certainly when I was younger, and even more of a slave to my baser instincts than I am now, that was my goal.

It's a little different now, however; at any rate, I frame it differently.

A colleague of mine says that "we give up what we want most for what we want now." I genuinely want to read that book about Aristotle, but with a Christopher Moore vampire novel at hand, that's going to be a challenge unless I give up fiction for Lent.

There's less to be gained by walking to church for morning meditation if I stayed up late the night before watching Netflix than if I'd gotten a good night's sleep and came in fresh. I genuinely want a fruitful meditation time, so I give up Netflix for Lent.

Time spent on Facebook, while I enjoy it, is time not spent on musical and writing projects, so away Facebook goes for a while. That way, when Easter comes, I can meet it as something closer to my best self than I was forty days ago, having spent that season of preparation trading in what I want now for what I want most.

Getting Over It

2/27/2017

This afternoon in the supermarket, I caught sight of a display featuring some chip-and-dip snack food. The marketing goal seemed to be to give a more sophisticated air to the product, and the display's tagline read, "Life is short; use the good bowl."

I felt like I'd had the wind knocked out of me.

But I have to begin nearly twenty years back, during my mother's last illness.

Our family had a glass-fronted hutch in the living room, in which the "best" china and glassware were displayed. They were never used, because no occasion was ever festive or momentous enough to justify bringing them out of their glassed-in sarcophagus.

One day, my wife began removing the precious items from the hutch and marching them into the kitchen, placing them in the cupboards with the everyday dishes. After a couple of trips, my mother joined her, the two of them forming a little parade of crockery. "What am I waiting for?" my mother asked. "My next life?" We began putting the "best" things to their intended use that very evening.

I wasn't there when my mother died. I took my leave on a Friday afternoon for a weekend performing out of state. As I assured her that I would be back to see her on Monday, she appeared to have a rare lucid interval, her widened eyes intensely blue in her pale face as she shook her bald head, no longer able to speak but clearly saying "no." When I again promised to return on Monday, she took my right hand in hers, raised it to her lips, and kissed it.

I wonder how much of me understood that, knowing she would not survive the weekend, my mother was saying goodbye to me. Not too much, I hope; certainly not the parts closest to the surface. My capacity for self-deception is titanic, but I'd like to hope that I had no conscious awareness that I was seeing my mother alive for the last time, that I wasn't pushing the thought away because I didn't want to deal with it.

People die, and we think we get over it, but we never do. Grief goes into remission, perhaps for years, but some chance association can bring it roaring back at any time. Usually it's bittersweet, as when I see glimpses of my mom in my own two girls, and wish she could have met these children whom she would have loved so much. But sometimes it's like a blow, a shot to the gut that says, "The good dishes were ready, but you weren't."

The people we love are forever with us, and there's no knowing when circumstances will throw the loss of them into stark relief.

Life is short; use the good bowl.

Weaponized Compassion

2/22/2017

“Hate Has No Home Here” proclaims the popular yard sign. Now available in 29 states, the sign—red on one side and blue on the other--proclaims its message in languages including Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew. But as innocuous as the message itself is, I’ve heard it denounced on talk radio as “virtue signaling.” The yard sign, the safety pin, even driving a Prius are, the thinking goes, self-aggrandizing gestures meant to smear conservatives by proclaiming our own moral superiority. Expressions of human caring are now, apparently, political weapons.

What baffles me is why conservatives would give us so much power over them. By proclaiming the public expression of compassion a partisan weapon, conservatives are practically admitting that their own positions are morally flawed.

Which is not to say that say that taking a moral stand on an issue can ever be politically neutral. Shepard Fairey’s wonderful “We the People” posters, for example, while not explicitly partisan, are decidedly political statements in favor of inclusion and the embrace of diversity. But the administrators at a Maryland high school decided they were partisan anti-Trump statements, and made teachers remove them from their classrooms. And I wonder why people who want to be seen as good would loudly claim that expressions of diversity and inclusion are acts of aggression aimed at them. They are doing the weaponizing for us; they are like the mortally wounded eagle in the Aesop fable that, looking at the arrow that has pierced its chest, sees one of its own feathers. What a lot to give away.

So now that we know that compassion is a weapon, what do we do? Well, here are two things not to do:

Objectify those to whom we show compassion. If we make people into a means to an end, we become oppressors and exploiters ourselves. Even if, at some level, we help the objects of our spurious charity, we do not see them—do not apprehend their uniqueness and intrinsic worth. We make tools of them, and do violence to our own souls.
Use compassionate acts as a weapon against other people. “For we do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”. (Eph 6:12)

Marianne Williamson described the devil as our human tendency to think without love. Pema Chödrön lays human ugliness at the doorstep of our need to defend the vulnerable “soft spot” at the core of our being. Traditional Christianity attributes “this present darkness” to “spiritual forces of evil.” But however we conceive of the source of wickedness, it must be against that source that our acts of love are weaponized.

When Jesus gave His life in sacrificial love, he wasn’t aiming that act as a weapon at His tormenters; rather, He prayed for their forgiveness. But Jesus’ supreme act of compassion was indeed a mighty weapon, as St. John Chrysostom tells us in his venerable Paschal Homily:

Let none fear death;
  for the death of the Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed death by undergoing death.
He has despoiled hell by descending into hell.
He vexed it even as it tasted of His flesh.
Isaiah foretold this when he cried:
Hell was filled with bitterness when it met Thee face to face below;
  filled with bitterness, for it was brought to nothing;
  filled with bitterness, for it was mocked;
  filled with bitterness, for it was overthrown;
  filled with bitterness, for it was put in chains.
Hell received a body, and encountered God. It received earth, and confronted heaven.

Every act of love and compassion, undertaken for its own sake, strikes at the heart of Hell. The weapons of kindness are forged for use, not against those whom we think unkind, but against the cosmic forces of darkness—the Thing in all of our heads and hearts that makes us hate.

Once more unto the breach.

After the Election

11/9/2016

“The Adversary took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ --Mt. 4:8-9

Jesus knew that was a bad deal. Apparently, four in five white evangelicals in America do not. They traded in the Gospel for earthly power. They took the bait that Jesus would not.
Jesus never said, “Go ye out and become ye top dogs; yea, rule ye the roost in my name.” In fact, Jesus promised us persecution. And I don’t think he meant the crèche being taken off the courthouse lawn.

When the Emperor Constantine saw that the Gospel faith—a way of life that had grown by leaps and bounds in spite of being actually persecuted--was the only thing unifying his disintegrating empire, he made Christianity the official state religion of Rome. And even at the time, there were lots of brave men and women who knew what a terrible idea that was, and fled into the Sinai desert in order to have no part of it. They were the Desert Fathers and Mothers, known today for their radical hospitality to pilgrims and travelers, and for their rejection of political power.

I’m not advocating flight into the desert (or Canada), or living as hermits, or founding monasteries. But I am urging that we, who remember that Evangelical Christianity brought us the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, the suffragists, child labor laws and most other progressive social movements in America before being hijacked by the Republican Party in the 1980s, need to regard ourselves as being in a desert exile of a different kind, far from the centers of worldly power.

“When they go low,” said Michelle Obama, “we go high.” When the powerful church attacks LGBTQ folks, the exiled church must welcome them. When the powerful church rejects refugees, the exiled church must embrace them. When the powerful church tries to silence women, the exiled church must make sure women continue to have a voice.

A dear friend of mine adopted four Mexican girls. This morning, the seven-year-old declared, “We need to open our home to everyone that Trump doesn't want. We can make the room. We will keep them all safe".

Outward and Visible Signs

10/21/2016

"I don't know whether you could tell, but there was a lot of tension here this morning."

Um, yeah. I don't know what it was about, but the tension in the office of that South Philly body shop was obvious and discomfiting the morning I dropped off my car for repair. I couldn't get away from the awkward scene fast enough.

"But when I went to get your keys," the receptionist continued, having phoned to tell me the work was done, "I saw the medal of St. Francis on your key ring, and it reminded me of what's really important, and it put everything into perspective. I just wanted to thank you for that."
This is why I like outward symbols of faith. Bearing in mind Jesus' warning against practicing your piety in front of people in order to be praised by them (Matthew 6:1), and eschewing ostentation for simplicity, I find that something like a medal or pendant can be a great conversation starter. People with questions or qualms might never know otherwise that you are someone they can approach. When someone asks, "What's that?", it's an opportunity for dialogue.

This is why I wear my clerical collar to demonstrations; people need to see white clergy declaring publicly that black lives matter, full fair funding of schools matters, a living wage matters. Like the kids say: represent.

Showing Up

10/20/2016

I've been having a bear of a time getting my sorry butt to morning meditation at St. Martin's. It's a wonderful, diverse group, and I love the idea of starting the day with meditation. The reality, however, is that even when I'm not in the depths of my allergy season--which I am, and which makes me even more prone to drowsiness than usual--I spend much of the time just fighting off sleep. Which doesn't feel particularly "spiritual," whatever that is.

The lesson, of course, is that trying to stay awake is practice; showing up and exercising your will is practice; catching and correcting yourself over and over is practice. Half of the practice, at least, is just showing up.

My Pain in the Neck

10/9/2015

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

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.

Suffering, Grace and Euthanasia

10/8/2014

The American Life League has circulated a meme with this text:

Suffering is a grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ. Euthanasia selfishly steals that opportunity.

This statement is jam-packed with problems. First of all, the use of the word “steals” implies that euthanasia is generally, or even always, something the living inflict upon the dying without their knowledge or consent. Grandma’s looking a little peaky; let’s put her out of her misery.

I have seen articles citing studies showing that many patients in Belgium and the Netherlands are euthanised without their knowledge or consent, and I am not prepared to comment on that except by quoting Augustine: abusus non tollit usum--abuse does not cancel out right use. Many things that are right, good and fitting are abused, and they are still right, good and fitting. A thing ought not to be outlawed because some people may abuse it. Denying the mentally competent a choice because some might take advantage of the incompetent is monstrously patronizing at best.

Secondly, end-of-life care has come a long way since the days of Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian, and the choice between suffering and suicide is largely a false dilemma. Palliative care has gotten so good that people simply do not need to die in pain the way they used to (except in very rare cases.) I do not mean to imply that the loss of control and the ever-increasing restrictions and dependency attendant on degenerative diseases are not suffering; they are, of course, and there’s nothing we can do about that, for the most part. But we are far better at controlling pain than we used to be.

But the most troubling aspect of this meme for me as a Christian is the way is abuses the Catholic notion of “offering up” our suffering, debasing the idea for the faithful and misrepresenting it to those outside.

Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. –Colossians 1:24

The practice is, in itself, empowering—or can be. When suffering is inevitable, “offering it up” for God to use for redemptive purposes turns us from passive sufferers to active spiritual strivers. It gives us the option of putting our pain to spiritual use rather than simply enduring it.

The obvious question, of course, is whether such offering-up is of any value when suffering is inevitable anyway. A story from India tells of a man pouring grain from a high tower to allow the wind to blow away the chaff while the kernels fell to the ground.[i] When the wind picked up to the point where it was blowing away the whole grains, the man decided that he would offer that grain to God. If you’re going to lose something anyway, offering it up seems pretty meaningless. But is the alternative—suffering unnecessarily for the sake of being able to offer up one’s suffering--any more tenable? Does palliative care “steal” spiritual opportunity, too?

However we answer these question, these choices—whether or not to endure suffering for redemptive purposes, whether or not loss of control is endurable even in the absence of pain, whether or not to avail ourselves of palliative care—are choices that only the afflicted can make. As a Dutch blogger[ii] who suffers from a degenerative disease of the nervous system put it,

If you personally believe that euthanasia shouldn’t be done then don’t use that option. You’re free to do with your life as you wish and live it according to your views. But you cannot use those religious views to advocate for legislation that would force someone to go through something they don’t want to. Some have very good reasons to say “Please, no more.”

[i] Swami Tyagananda told this story at the Boston Vedanta Center.

[ii] http://www.realsceptic.com/2014/02/12/suffering-euthanasia-passion-jesus-christ/#comment-27106