Two spiritual questions, like lines of latitude and longitude, currently crisscross to trace a “you are here star” in the mapped-out newness of now. One deals with appropriating wisdom, the other with the distance inherent in love.
Regarding wisdom: At worst I'm a fraud, at best I'm one little insight away from my bodhisattva badge. And because longing for God is the infinite sinkhole in the center of all satisfaction, I am often, most accurately, somewhere in between: grasping at happiness, juggling discontent, painting a facade on the whole mess.
Fraudulence at first. When I was new to the spiritual path, I’d have said: interbeing and the present moment are concepts that express the truest reality. Everything is a part of everything else and there is no past or future. Separateness is an illusion that leads us to hate. Past and future produce in us anxiety (in the case of too much future) and remorse (in the case of too much past). But they’re illusions too. On the level of God, sorrow and joy contain one another as well....
I stole the bejesus out of all of that. Some of it’s Thich Nhat Hanh. Some of it’s Ekhart Tolle. The last sentence is the Trappist priest Thomas Keating. Even when I was a monk, I was not immune to Trappist-on-Trappist intellectual thievery.
If I'm caught up in my falseness, I can attribute it to deep wounds in the psyche that stem from early childhood insecurities. It is certainly true that I have a family inside of me that is to varying degrees functional and dysfunctional...
But here again I am ripping insights off from other sources. In this case, from the literature of adult children of alcoholics.
It is certainly true that I've had insights of my own. I could say “There is a presence within absence. Behind nothing there is something. Until you listen for nothing you will not listen to anything.” I could say “The opposite of checking out isn't clueing in. That would be to bring as much force to presence as I brought to absence. My goal is to deprive both presence and absence of force so that wherever I am, I can be there gently.”
In the monastery we used to call this “spending our spiritual cash.” It's seen as a bit of a douchebag maneuver: a way to be seen as a great teacher without being involved in the realities of practice. In the end, to spend my spiritual cash is to allow my ego to steal insights from myself. The fact is, silence increases as preaching becomes practice. Anything else is egotism.
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I paused as I wrote that last sentence. Perhaps I overstate things. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say “Engaging my own pious noise is practice. Ignoring it, or actively dulling it, is not.” I rephrase things because I know that, sometimes for me, chewing the cud of others’ wisdom is the only way to progress through spirituality’s four stomachs, toward a sacred cow-pie that feels like my own. Sometimes people benefit from that, and I don’t want to discount it.
So its important to look at love and service as well. Particularly, the quantity of distance it implies. Let’s keep a tension before us, embodied in three statements: 1: We’re not God. 2: A short definition of “Sin” is “distance from God.” And 3: We’re made to be with God. In the humblest sense of “Divinization” we’re made to “become God.” The echoes of divine love in the human situation easily make the pitfalls of this tension clear: how often do we misuse the word “love” at the service of ennobling codependence, and worse, abuse? Recovering codependents, accustomed to lovingly smothering one another, laugh about “love songs” because of the amount of un-individuated need their melodies mask.
Even our most pious concepts of love are warped. We “suffer in silence” to imitate Christ and we end up enabling dysfunction. Christ’s suffering is rarely seen as a reason for healthy self-care or for clear limits.
Scant indeed are love’s healthier paradigms. Before proceeding I need to restate something that’s fallen prey to cultural amnesia, something it’s taken me 38 years even to begin to address. To wit: sin is not the only reason for distance from God and each-other.
This realization began to set in when I took my monastic name. “Dismas,” my namesake, was crucified next to Christ. The person who most intimately shared Christ’s most difficult moment never, in this life, shook Christ’s hand. He never walked around Jerusalem with his arm around Christ’s shoulder. Nails and crosses marked and modified their communal intimacy, real though it was. Their experiences were the same, though their lives were different.
In the journey of prayer, God sometimes seems distant. With varying intensities and at different times, most monastics have experienced this distance. One of the brothers was the first to point it out: the Gerasene demoniac’s entire vocation was one of separateness from Christ. This is the bloke in Mark 5, from whom a legion of demons had been exorcised. The text says “As [Jesus] was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged [Jesus] that he might be with him. But Jesus refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him.” After it was pointed out, this became Gospel for me: many valid vocations involve nothing more than a communion of wills.
One day, feeling my distance from the brothers with particular force, and with the romance of the medieval mystics on my mind, I yelled an objection into the abyss: “Monastic Life is supposed to feel like a marriage!” The abyss implied an answer: “Well, if you’re looking for something that feels like a marriage, there’s a lifestyle for that.”
It’s called marriage. I began to adjust my paradigm, ultimately leaving the monastery. I threw myself into the study of other faiths, into professional life and dating. Nowadays, I entertain something that feels like belief for the Catholic God, the Muslim God and at least one Hindu God. I still count two of the men who lived in the monastery as brothers, and we speak of all of this often. Through them, I’ve gained a passing acquaintance with Buddhism, the yoga of relationships—taught by Ram Dass— and the Hindu God Hanuman. Hanuman, FYI, is portrayed as a big monkey, who delights in his separateness from Ram—he knows, see, that his service brings Ram happiness.
My girlfriend is my guru. She serves the same function as the Brothers once did: that is, she is a mirror, reflecting back to me the conflictedness or placidity of my mind. I don’t say these words lightly. Not every person I’ve dated has been able to fulfill the function so clearly. My girlfriend, as a person who processes things entirely in silence, echoes God more than most. That is, she speaks when she speaks, and she’s quiet when she’s quiet, and my part is to trust that silence doesn’t denote crisis.
When I began wanting our relationship to become more intense, I wanted that to look a certain way. Mostly I wanted to live closer to her: currently, a 45 minute negotiation of I-90 separated us, and it made seeing each other on week nights prohibitive. I felt like we were in elementary school, friends separated by distance whose parents could only drive to each other’s houses on the weekends. I wanted to see her on a Tuesday, for Christsakes.
Then one day, walking into a Chili’s for what was unfortunately the most lavish date night I could afford at the time, the question became an answer. Quite simply, the ways I’d envisioned of moving forward with her seemed increasingly inaccessible. I watched their remoteness grow, then I consciously gave them up. After that moment, when I opened the door to Chili’s for her, I knew I didn’t have to make up the way forward, that it would reveal itself to us, and we’d negotiate it together.
About 6 months after that—by this time we were living in a small apartment in a Northwest suburb of Chicago, She was ill and I ran out for essentials: sprite and ice cream, and other “sicky foods” that are, by now, standards shopping list items in a time of illness. I was tired from the work day, and was feeling more needy than I would have liked. As I walked into the Jewel, a thought formed clearly in my head. Hanuman revels in his separateness from Ram. And getting ice cream for my girlfriend was temporarily a little bit less warm and fuzzy than normal, but the distance was part of love, and I felt it no less intensely for the miles.
As I paid for the sicky foods, my memory was brought back to the Gerasene Demoniac. Hanuman and Ram had conspired to help me remember Jesus. And Hanuman and Ram had conspired to form in me something that Christianity, on its own, had not: the understanding, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, that “Union Individuates.” Love makes romantics more placidly separate, even as it brings them together.
These days, the love undergirding my words is green-eyes incarnate; she’s quiet and kind and much funnier than I. It took Ram, one Monkey God, one Messiah, and 38 years of patience to realize that, if God is everywhere, no distance can stray outside that love. What the days come from and return to, I try to find the right words for. All will be well, in the end: see, as preaching becomes practice, quiet has green eyes as well.
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