Art, Empathy, and Ministry: Sword fighting with poets.

In the parochial model, the desire for deep life is addressed by “Stewardship Campaigns” and  “Stewardship Campaigns” encourage people to give of their  “Time, Talent and Treasure.”  Willing volunteers sit on a number of committees, run a series of events.  The problem is, from the Altar and Rosary Society to the Knights of Columbus Pancake breakfast, event running committees fall short of addressing the need for Transformation.  I suppose that’s why I left the parish structure for the monastic one.  In any case, it led me to evolve a different model.

First, art became my inner life.  Morning by morning, in the monastery, I would rise at 1:30 for coffee and an hour of uninterrupted writing time.  It began as a purely creative effort, and deepened into prayer over time.  

I came to see it as a process similar to the prophets.  Elijah, for instance, fled Queen Jezebel, and hid in a cave, objecting that he the only prophet of the true God still alive, and the queen wanted him dead.  By and by, through fires and storms, Elijah was drawn away from his concerns and outside of himself, to a point of quiet.  Then the Lord would reveal to him what he was to do.  God asked Jeremiah “What do you see?” and when Jeremiah replied “I see a boiling pot, tipping toward us from the north,” God revealed the coming of the Babylonian army.

My process was similar.  I’d take note of what I’m preoccupied by, then slowly turn my attention to my surroundings.  For some reason, that turn was always heavy with inspiration.  Words and images would coalesce and begin falling into metered, rhymed patterns.  Poems happened routinely, and became a vehicle for self examination.

Photo: Copyright Tumelo Khoza, as always.

Then my inner life became my ministry.  This evolution happened alongside my acquaintance and identification with Adult Children of Alcoholics.  Identifying with people of similar dysfunction, having the courage, even with strangers, to honestly self-disclose, these became staples of my emotional life.  Whole small collections of poems played on recovery themes.  When I’d narrate the process to friends, the poems my recovery yielded became, more than any other benchmark, inseparable from my story.  The “Ministry” of pursuing recovery and identifying with similarly afflicted others, became my model.  I was beginning to understand what the theologian Henri Nouwen called “The Wounded Healer,” and the reason the wounded side of Christ was seen as the birthplace of the church.  

Both happened at the behest—at best, at least—of a power greater than myself. While serving as a Catholic Worker at Phoenix’s Andre House of Hospitality, I was overwhelmed by the constant need of those we served.  Even back then, poetry and prayer were the way I came to know my inner life.  I remember writing a poem, that stands out as my life’s first example of divine action through art.  The poem went something like “I’m yours, God, when I awake to needs I can’t answer./  I’m yours  when the soup runs low./ I am yours when I turn Christ’s brother bums away for begging a third blanket this month./ Help me to remember that they all are yours as well.”

Looking back, I see the poem simultaneously as disgustingly pious and an honest statement of emotion.  On a whim I published it in the Homeless Shelter’s newsletter.  Unexpectedly, a week later, one of the shelter’s benefactors pulled up with a truckload of sleeping bags.  Having read and been affected by the poem, he’d decided to buy all the sleeping bags in the phoenix area and donate them.  He was kind enough to credit my writing with inspiring his generosity.  I struggled, and still do, to get out of the way, to focus on God’s inspiration and the benefactor’s generosity.

After I’d joined the monastery and during a time of struggle, I wrote another poem.  It was set in the past-tense context of the  Phoenix Homeless Shelter, but it’s last lines definitely voiced a resolution to my present-tense monk problems.  I quote it here in full:

By month’s end, everybody’s welfare checks
are as spent as my patience and the lines
are far longer than my attention span.
If our shelter runs out of food
and we have to close the soup line early,
most people walk away swearing under their breath.

When it happened on March 31st, there were few exceptions.
As for Willie, his typical slight smile
persisted as we turned him away.
All he said was “good night” and “peace” to us.
Then, wiping his nose on his sleeve,
he headed for our building’s south wall and the well lit, 

“Loitering Prohibited” sign beneath which we let him set up 

his cardboard and sleeping bag. 

That night someone stabbed Willie twice
for the new pair of shoes we’d just given him.
But not even death could change his facial expression.
The next morning, I was glad, as always, to see him lying there, smiling---

not till I was within ten feet did I see his blood puddling under him. 

After work I wept for an hour before sleeping.
All my tears left the pillowcase wet with a single doubt:
“How,” they asked, “can you keep doing this?”
But I know from when I crouched to check Willie’s pulse
that any question I kneel in
is an answer. 

This poem was published in volume 26 of Weavings Magazine, a spirituality journal with decent readership.  At the time, their pay was the most money my art had ever earned, and the ego strokes implicit in exposure were nice.  So I walked around on cloud nine.  Then the check came, and I did what was customary in the monastery.  I signed the check over to the brothers, and I went on with my life.

Some time later, a man arrived at the monastery from South Dakota, intent on allowing himself a silent retreat.  After several days there, he pulled me aside.  He said he’d crossed six states for two reasons: first, to thank me for my poem.  He said he was director of a palliative care facility.  He said, upon reading my poem, that he’d called his staff together and read it to them aloud.  He said the whole room was silent, and several people were tearing up.  He’d come to Mepkin, he said, because he wanted to know what I knew. I had no idea what I knew, but I wished him well in finding it. 

At the Homeless Shelter and afterwards, I was learning that when I face my vulnerability, God acts. 

After leaving the monastery, I made a friend, a performance poet from Durban, South Africa.  Her name was Tumelo.  We were united by a thirst for things beyond ourselves, by the positive ways Catholic Institutions had formed us, and ultimately by the burnout of failed belief.  So art was our spiritual practice, but, with her, I could dip freely into religious themes.

I explained my art to her this way.  “Poetry is like Moses’ burning bush.  The burning bush is the inner tension and longing I don’t have a name for yet.  If I just watch it, eventually a poem happens, and that poem is my inner life revealing its name.  You know, in ACA, I learned that a miracle is when God does for you something you cannot do for yourself.  For addicts, sobriety is a miracle, something God given that they tried and failed at.  Tumelo, I’m not a quiet man: it’s really loud in my head.  When I read a poem, if I’ve really connected with my audience there’s a moment of silence before they react.  To me, that’s God giving something I don’t have.”

Tumelo and I would meet, read poems, drink wine and eat bacon.  To this day it’s still our periodic ritual.  We’ve talked about old romances, we’ve talked about new ones.  We’ve gossiped about the Chicago art scene.  We even had a sword fight once, when too-much-wine made us decide my samurai swords were not just for decoration.

Tumelo gave me a writing assignment once.  She said “write a poem about the human experience as spirit.”  Because she had bought me bacon, I didn’t balk at the assignment, but my relationship to the transcendent was fairly unhealthy at that point.  All I knew was that I walked around tense all day.  None of my “requests for God’s help” remedied it, and I’d long since ceased to ask.

Knowing I needed to write a poem about spirituality, morning by morning I sat with the tension.  Then, on a random Tuesday, locking my car to head in for the teaching day, I had a solitary, peaceful thought.  Since then, it’s become the authoritative view of my inner conflict.  “Don’t worry,” I heard myself think. “Your anxieties are just baby poems.”

Driving home that day, I had the insight that led to “doing my homework.”  On its completion, Tumelo and I met at an Indian Restaurant.  My friend could be counted on to speak isiZulu when she felt things strongly, exclaiming things like “Aybo” when she was surprised.  If she felt things really strongly—mostly when she was mad—she would switch exclusively to her mother-tongue.  IsiZulu is Tumelo’s way of communicating seriousness.

That night we did all the small talk and we drank all the wine.  Eventually she wouldn’t allow me to delay any longer.  She asked “Have you done your assignment?”  She asked.

“I have,” I said, “First, let me just say that the human experience of spirit is that we have a voice, but we lose our voice before we use our voice.  That was my experience of writing this poem.”

“Eish, Josh, that’s deep,” she said, pulling out the isiZulu.  “I can’t wait to hear it.”

Then I read the poem:

As far as I know, y’all, 

what skylines and roads show 

is distance to speaking from hesitance.

Poetry's reticence rhymed with my fear 

that my healing’s impossible, deals are all sealed 

and that, baby, the bathwater’s tossable.  

Whispering's soft and my thinking is hounded.

It stinks how I’ve found that I’m often surrounded

by hoarseness and rough; see no city's enough, y’all

to comfort or calm me.  My throat is too raw

with the fucks, prayers and psalms

that I give but can’t hear over trucks trains and cars.

Folks my mouth is a scar; 

a reminder in skin of what words really are:

the city's best gift.  But it won’t yield its verse

without taking my strained voice and breaking it first.

Tumelo’s head was hung.  Her reaction was full: first, silence spoke, then her mother-tongue.  It was an honor, and it reinforced how transcendent, and what a gift our bond was.

I tell the story to highlight a theme: for me, at its best, ministry’s just resonance. This is why signing up for the parish bake sale at the stewardship drive’s never done it for me.  Over time I’ve learned to choose the words that label my inner tensions, and when I say them, folks who feel similarly find me. For me, art is just angst introducing itself.  But the real gift comes from God.  I don’t know if its always true, when christ said “whenever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  I’ve been to some stuffy parish committee meetings.  Even thought it’s never more than fleeting, I know how a room feels when common emotion unites it.  I’ve had indian food with poets who know my life from the inside out.  If there are candidates for spiritual experience, that’s certainly one of them.

Why I'm a Pluralist, and Other Travelogues.

Paradox is the silence of God.  In the silence of God, as the heart sutra says, form is emptiness and emptiness is form.  All times are now, all places are here.  Interbeing is a real thing: everything is part of everything else, including its opposite.  In the silence of God, all potential is actualized.  The silence of God is the Koan of koans.

To steal an idea from Jordan B. Peterson: our paradigm for God echoes our self concept because they formed at the same time.  Our idea of God “speaking” or “forming us with his hands” is an account of what it was like for us to transition from a preverbal to a verbal society, from a society that doesn’t use tools or throw pots, to a society that does.

So, for God as it was for us, to speak is a twofold maneuver: for one thing, it’s a journey from the general and potential to the actualized and specific.  To say one thing is not to say another.  To make one clay form is not to make another.  Articulation is, on some level, loss.  For another thing, though, all articulation contains a reminder of the whole, the original unity.  Since we’re a “Word of God” our speech is, forever, the articulation of an articulation.  It’s fuzzy, like a copy of a copy.  So for us, speech comes more easily than remembrance.  Writ large over the whole of human history, the problem only engrains more deeply.

Some traditions have a better program than others for facilitating, on a deep, felt level, the richness present in the silence of God.  Zen, by prioritizing transformation and giving the negative principle mu the pride of place it has, does a better job of transmitting living memory of interbeing.  It recognizes and deals prudently with, the root of the problem: a dualistic mindset.  A Zen Student who is “working on mu” shuts down his rational mind.  Sure, there are different forms, but form is emptiness: a tree becomes a flower becomes a trash heap.  Christianity has, in large part, baptized a dualistic mindset, and in turn graffittied dualism across its cosmic paradigm.  This gives Christian theology more moving parts than it needs.  Transubstantiation and Divinization both employ platonic philosophy.  Divinization says that we can all become God by a concert of wills and rigorous mix of imitation and intimacy.  Transubstantiation says bread and wine can become the body and blood of Christ if the right words are said by the right people over the right substances.  In the west, the innermost nature of things becomes a divine baseball card, traded poorly by those unaware of their value, and well by the more savvy. 

Hinduism, in its ability to accept the Goddess Shiva, does a better job of conveying the deconstructive or destructive aspects of divine, and therefore human life.  In Christianity,  destruction is a natural evil, a consequence of human sin.  Even the most pointed meditation on the image and likeness of God can’t backpedal fast enough to counter that.  We create theologies that add some force to our backpedaling, but it doesn’t solve anything because it misses the dualistic mind, the source of the problem.

Meanwhile, our own finitude isn’t a consequence of sin, it’s part of not being the creator.  Jesus’ kenosis may expiate sin, but it also recapitulates all creation, restoring to all things the dignity they possessed before the fall, and to all people the ability to accept their common finitude.  These “deconstructions” are part of the divine life, not a consequence of primordial mistakes.

  

The processes by which apophatic spiritualities let go of divine ruckus to embrace the peace of the here and now isn’t a consequence of sin, it’s an acceptance of createdness.  Wisdom literature in general exhorts us to remember that “all flesh is like the grass.”  Myriad sacred texts echo the rule of St. Benedict when it counsels the constant remembrance of death.

When I first brought the idea of Logos as Mu to a Hindu friend, he listened intently.  After I was done, and after a small, pregnant pause, all he said was “Om Nama Shivaya”—in other words, when I posited that perhaps the negative, deconstructive and destructive principle was lodged in the windpipe of God, he praised the Goddess of destruction.  The Triune God may be Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, but his creatures were finite from the start, which makes Jesus and the Spirit co-conspiring catchers in the trust-fall of life, quite apart from the realities of sin.   

For me, increased mental noise begets anxiety.  If remembering I’m part of the whole involves two steps in Zen, and five in Christianity, Zen is the path of peace.  If, for un-nuanced Christianity, all deterioration routes through the moralizing gauntlet of human mistakes, then we owe it the nuance that Logos as Mu lends:  perhaps dualism is the real problem, but one that comes simply from being the creation we are.

There is only one center point.  Maps are great efforts to show it: the Judeo-Christian map has important landmarks. Peace is the still middle of Christian contemplation.  Tranquility is in the way that Brother Lawrence’s “Practice of the Present Moment” meets the divine in all things.  Serenity is the fruit of Jewish “Remembrance” that unites past with present, and the end of all wisdom literature’s meditation on death.  On the journey, the Western Mind requires, and most Western Spiritualities take, too winding and anxious a path to that point.  I need to remember that, while there may be one, winding path for me, there are many direct paths for God.  The map I have is a good one, it’s just incomplete.  What I discover, I draw in.  

But not too much.  After all, on the path, there’s pausing to do.  Once in a while, a bloke’s gotta smell the flowers.

Biff, Kapow, Thwapp: A Study in Contemplative Attention

On a deep level, it was probably my messed up Mind-Body-Soul connection that got me back into meditation.  In the years after the monastery I’d given up prayer entirely, and overused the typical methods of self-extinction.  Full of a largely vain dissatisfaction with the pounds alcohol was packing on, and with the hangovers of middle age getting worse, I’d come to the conclusion that spirituality was something I ignored to my own sad, fat white peril.  Furthermore, I had learned a few new things about prayer that gave me the material, if I could use it humbly, to reapproach the zen-style sitting of my monastery days.

Superficially, I’m sure it also had something to do with the death of Adam West.

Around the time the city of Los Angeles lit the Bat Signal in memoriam, I realized that my body is a broken television.  That is to say, when it comes to “picking up spiritual signals”—the reason I have a body in the first place—there’s a lifetime of interference to get past.  Some days I’m staring at a dark screen, somedays I’m staring at snowlike static.  I have rarely felt at home in my own skin.  

I explain it with the mechanical efficiency of someone who’s been explaining why he’s different his whole life:  I have mild cerebral palsy.  It’s a neuromuscular disease that makes my muscles tighten faster than most. It happened because I was born premature.  The technology to deal with premature birth wasn’t as advanced in the late seventies. Because my lungs weren’t fully formed, I stopped breathing several times as an infant.  Actually, I’m lucky.  Most people with cerebral palsy are wheelchair bound.  I’m not.   Yes, of course I feel blessed.

In elementary school, everyone noticed I was different.  It made my psyche an anxious tangle of rejections, and provided psychologists with job security as often as I’ve chosen to go in that direction.  At first, I didn't know I'd feel that way.  In fact, with the rhetoric of the beatitudes, I imagined my disability rendered me somehow divinely-extra-special.  A “Blessed are the awkward, for they shall inherit the dance floor” type of thing. 

In my adult life, very few people have noticed I am different.  Only members of the disabled community can tell by sight that I’m a card carrying part of their club.  My privilege (of being able to pass as able-bodied) when it’s coupled with moderate spiritual proficiency, might have given me the mechanics to bypass my body altogether.  Except, that would be a lie.  And the contemplative journey, if it’s real, is inherently honest.  For better or worse, my own physicality is something I deal with repeatedly, with each time feeling like the first.

There are three kinds of attention in prayer, and I’d learned the first one.  For me checking out took the form of compulsive theological thinking. I thought about God to sidestep facing myself.  For years I told myself that disability equals specialness, that I ought to be glad about it.  The first thing that the contemplative journey did was allow me to call shenanigans on myself, to admit that I didn’t want to be special to God.   I wanted to be normal, to disappear, as God does, in the flow of routine.  Of course, in truth, I meant “normal in the eyes of society,” something I wasn’t and would never be.  And the thing that might come closest to being acceptable to God, personal acceptance of my reality, was a work I hadn’t even begun.  To this day, honesty about myself and honesty about God tend to be mutually exclusive.  Of course, it’s understandable: a complex of mild OCD and PTSD inspired habits of emotional stuffing stored pain in my body with a consistency and to degrees I was unwilling to face.  So thinking about God was my way of checking out, for a while.  It still can be, if I’m not watchful.

The second kind of attention in prayer was called Active Volition.  In the monastery, this had been  my bread and butter for years- at best, active volition was a resort to a higher self: I’d take deep breaths, I clear my mind of anything but my mantra.  I’d tell myself that nobody likes a selfish pig. On the surface, for years, I talked myself into being a quite selfless pig.  Apologists would have argued that a spiritual self was better than the more base alternatives. Active volition, they’d say, got a lot of good work done.  But an enlightened self is still a self.  As such, for years, when my good work went unrecognized, I nursed resentments.  I wanted all three of my good works and spiritual talents to be things I could stow in a spiritual utility belt.  But there was something else.  Growing up, given my lack of coordination, I fell more easily than most.  For me, it took more attention to do the same physical tasks others took for granted. Over the years I gradually equated attention with force, developed a compulsive tendency to hyper-vigilance that not only failed to keep me safe, it made relaxing impossible.  So the force with which I took deep breaths or stuck to a mantra pointed to a real handicap: I couldn’t just let things happen.

  

So these days when I reproached meditation, letting things happen has to be my focus. This is the third kind of attention in prayer, called “passive volition.”  Passive volition is a witnessing presence.  Far from simply allowing my mind to play mental ping-pong with my God-concept, in this mode I simply watch it happen.  Rather than forcing my breaths to be deep because it’s what meditating people do, I just watch: if my breath is shallow, I feel it and let it be shallow.  If my head’s full of noise about God, I notice, and let it be cacophonous.  Sometimes, by and by, feeling sensations and noticing noise yields to deep relaxation or quiet.

But of course, those quiet states are not guaranteed.  Perhaps it’d be helpful if I wrapped up this post with an example of a recent time that sliding into serenity was, for me, impossible.

Of course, when I sit down to pray, full of self conscious noise that says “I want meditation.”  And at first I make efforts to mentally delete the I and the wanting, hoping all that’s left is meditation.  No dice.  Then I delete the zen from the fact that I am meditating, hoping all I will be in the end is an embodied divine name, I AM without the modifiers.  Again, no dice.

I give my attention to my breath. It’s shallow today, and I can’t get underneath it, can’t name what’s panicking me.  The more work ‘giving attention to my breath’ is, the more I realize how much the whole thing stinks, both of effort and the ego driving it.  I have a problem with equating attention and force, and in one of those potentially meditation-wrecking  insights, I realize that the phrasing of that goal is part of the problem.  

Most of our lives, we maintain an egotistical and dualistic mindset: I am over here, God—and most of my spiritual goals—are over there.  “I give my attention to the breath” is a phrase that reflects that.  There’s an actor, an implied goal, and an object.  What I realized on that day is that breath is attention:  deep and long when I’m totally there, shallow and short when I’m distracted.  But breath is attention.  The I that imagines itself to be giving something to something else doesn’t exist.  It struck me as a true, and totally distracting, insight.  

My own panicked breathing continued.  Then another lightning flash:  the phrase “prophesy to the breath” flashed briefly across the mind-screen.  (FYI, this is a quote from Ezekiel 37.  God takes Ezekiel to a valley of dry bones, asking him ‘Son of Man, can you make these bones live?’  It’s basically a rhetorical question, followed by God’s command that Ezekiel prophesy, first to the flesh,which enfleshes the bones, then to the breath, which gives them life.)  Accompanying this was an ability, which doesn’t always present itself, to speak to my shortness of breath.  In ACA terms, to speak to my panicked inner child from the point of view of a healthy adult. So I did, and it was superficially calming.

I generally make distinctions: Reason is the stuff of staying stuck in Ego, and in Realization, a higher power moves me toward liberation.  It’s not that simple.  That day, I had two whole “realizations,” both of which resulted in no deep ability to chill in my own body.  But if passive volition is a mode of “watchfulness,” I can be present without judgement, to whatever arises.

If my body is a broken television, there will be snow or there will be nothing.  Sometimes reception will be good, and I’ll dig what I’m watching.  Sometimes reception will suck, and all I’ll hear is “Tune in tomorrow.  Same Bat Time, Same Bat Station.”  

Tomorrow will find me sitting cross-legged in front of the old idiot box.  Childlike. Waiting.  Watching.

Kairos, Koans and Conversion 7: John 3:31, Jesus, John and the teaching of Mu

There are images, phrases and stories in the gospel that function as Koans for us, and a certain number of Gospel interactions that qualify as Koans for the people involved.  The Samaritan woman at the well is an example of the latter, and we see Jesus guiding his student from logic to the illogical, from externals to internals.  He is the teacher par excellence.

But he was a teacher who had to shift his ideals.

Elaine MacInnes talks about Zen pedagogy:  shutting down reason is its goal, in order to make room for an intuitive process based on realization.  She cites the Koan Joshu’s Dog as an example.  The Koan says .  Elaine’s point is that no Zen Master would ask “Does a dog have buddha nature?”  The answers “Yes” “No” or “Maybe”—these all call on the very rational faculty it’s a Zen Teacher’s job to shut down.

Jesus impresses me as a teacher who began this wellside interaction with hopes of encouraging realization, and settled for the more elementary task of fomenting enough fascination to get there eventually. In John, 4:7, A Samaritan Woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her “give me a drink.”  There’s debate about why he’s speaking to her—Samaritans don’t talk to Jews, much less across genders.  Jesus responds at his most poetic. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you ‘give me a drink,’ he said ‘you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”  Her response proves she hasn’t taken the bait and gone deeper.  She’s still dealing with logic and externals, “Sir you have no bucket…where do you get that living water?  Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well?”  

All koans have an “illogical hook.”  They have nonsensical elements that stop the questioner cold, internalize the work of the Koan. For the Samaritan woman at the well, the initial illogical hook is the unobtainability of living water.  When she doesn’t get it, Jesus doubles down on the “how will you get this water” confusion, revealing to the woman extraordinary knowledge of how many husbands she’s had.  The debate becomes theological, not only of where we should pray, but also about what the messiah will do.  

In terms of Zen goals, Jesus is trying to collapse the distance in the “where we should worship” discussion and the expectation in the “messiah discussion.”  He wants the woman to come on her own, ideally to her own potential to be a messiah, but at least to his own.  He wants her to realize that now is the time to worship, and we should do it right where we’re standing.

No dice, though.  He began esoterically, and the woman talked about buckets.  He revealed well-nigh miraculous knowledge of her home life, and she started theologically debating him.  In the end Jesus simply tells her “I am he” meaning he’s the messiah, “the one who is speaking to you.”

We get the sense that what the woman transmits to the townspeople is his status as a wonder-worker. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

To me, the central piece of this story is the one we’re told least about.  The text says “when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days.  And many more believed because of his word.”

I pounce on that last bit, of course.  I believe that, in the true style of a Zen teacher, the scripture is silent precisely where “Logos as Mu” does most of its work.  When the story ends, they’ve gone beyond the woman’s proclamation of great wonders.

In the previous chapter, John 3:11 teaches us that, for Jesus and his community, revelation was about seeing and hearing, unembellished by even the most theological mental processes.  Jesus’ objection to the woman at the well could easily have been those words.  “we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.”  For John, seeing and hearing are a process more intimate than esoteric wisdom and inexplicable knowledge can convey.  Rightly, then, the people he portrays as truly coming to believe are those with whom Christ shares two mysterious days of breaking open, and being broken open by, God’s word.

So while we see, in Jesus, a teacher who—it’s plausible to guess—revealed a bit more than he would have liked, we see in John the Evangelist a teacher who withholds just the right amount at the right time.  Because ultimately the gospel story isn’t about whether the woman or the townspeople believed, or had the silence to witness “logos as Mu.”  The fact is, we ourselves have been the woman, waxing so logical that belief is impossible.  In the story, those who hear the word make the change. Logos will have done its work when the words come out of our mouths, as if our own: We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.    

Six: Sacraments, Vulnerability, and Mindfulness

When the bell rang, I started class the way I had, so often, over the last few weeks “What do we call this corner I’m standing in?”

Ralph Cain, without raising his hand, said “Isolation.”

“And what, Fatima, is the Acronym we use for the characteristics of Isolation?”

“Don’t take iguanas down escalators, Mr. Warner.”

“Good.”  I replied, “And Will—what does ‘take’ stand for?”

Will, looking at his notes, responded “Thinking we’re perfect and invulnerable?”

“Good,” I said, walking over to the other side of the room.  “Now Hillary, what is the sentence we use to remember the Characteristics of Community?”

Hillary, without looking at her notes, replied, “Here, Koalas ate uncooked Eucalyptus.”

“And what, Hillary, does ‘Koalas’ stand for?”

“Knowing we’re imperfect and vulnerable.”  Hilary replied.

“Ok.  Good.”  In a rare move, I positioned a chair at the front of the room, facing my students. “Ok, story time.” I sat down.  “When I was in the monastery, it was the most isolated time of my life.  I did that thing we talked about when we studied vanity. I said ‘I’m spiritual and you all are chumps.’ I elevated myself and put others down.  The way I teach this course, ladies and gentlemen, is totally ruled by my experience.  I don’t think I ever told y’all why I left the monastery.  Well, the fact is, I was so isolated that I suffered from some pretty intense depression.  I remember one day, I grabbed a bowl of cereal, sat down and started eating it.  After a few bites I realized that I was so preoccupied with my thoughts that I couldn’t taste my food.

“The point is this:  being in isolation, letting the eight evil thoughts run the game, places our minds between us and the world.  And it changes the way that we use our eyes.  We can’t look at a desk and see the God who made it anymore. We can’t taste our food because we’re too busy thinking about how exceptional we are.  We were told we could access God by thinking about him, and ultimately  we were misinformed.

“Here’s the big point, today’s topic:  The reason the sacraments are so important is because they teach us to empty our heads, to use our senses for what they were made for.  Sacraments use water you can feel, candles you can see and smell, oil you can feel, baptismal garments you can see.  It’s a way of restoring our connection to God using senses and feeling, not thought.

“In isolation, we deny our vulnerabilities.  This is true: for all those years, I didn’t think I needed anyone or anything.” I rose from my chair, moved into the isolation corner. After a while, I realized that’s why Jesus became a man.  As we move from isolation into community, we go from thinking we’re invulnerable to knowing we’re vulnerable.” As I said this, I moved to the center of the room.  “Though knowing we’re vulnerable is part of being in community, admitting we’re imperfect is only part of the story.  The fact is, the reason we were given a body, and the reason Jesus came in a body,” as I spoke I moved securely into the community corner, “is so that we could realize our vulnerabilities are holy.  Now, please open your notebooks.” I clicked a powerpoint button. “Write this down.  ‘The movement of Sacramentality, from isolation into community, isn’t just a moment from denying vulnerability, to admitting it.  It’s a movement from denying it, to admitting it, to knowing it’s holy.’ This is what the 7 Sacraments do for us.”

“Who can name a few times, in Human Life when we’re vulnerable?  Any moment when you realize you can’t do it on your own, your not perfect and you’re not gonna live forever.”

Will Parks raised his hand, I gave him a nod “When you die.”

“Totally—when you die.  That’s an easy one.  And I would add ‘when you’re sick’ to that, because one often leads to the other.  When else are we vulnerable?”

Fatima raised her hand. “When you’re a baby?”

“Sure, Fatima,” I replied “you can’t feed yourself, clothe yourself, shelter yourself as a baby.  Without protection you die.  That vulnerability is holy.  Ralph Cain, why would organizations like the black panthers start ‘free breakfast’ programs, and why would school systems nationwide provide children with free lunch throughout the summer?”  

“Hey…free food!” Ralph replied, checking-in for the first time that day. “I don’t know Mr. Warner.”

“What happens if you don’t eat, Ralph?” I asked

“Oh.  You die,” Ralph replied.

“You die!  So birth, death and sickness, and hunger all make us vulnerable.  What about growing up?  Does that come with an instruction manual?”

Three students in unison: “No.”

“When you ask someone out to the movies, what two things could they say, Hillary?”

“They could say yes, or maybe they could say no.” She replied.

“And really, asking someone to the movies is just a rehearsal for maybe asking them to marry you.  So love makes us vulnerable.  And the process of growing up and maturing.  If we do something wrong, what will happen to us, Cole?”

“You get thrown in Juvy.”

“Right, Cole.  So doing wrong makes us vulnerable.  What if, Will, I wanted to help homeless people, but instead of building them homes I put them all in Jail?  What might they say.”

“Well, you ain’t helping nobody, Mr. Warner.”

“True! So I have to listen to people if I’m going to serve them,” I said, “And I could mess that up.  So ‘Learning to Serve’ is an experience that makes us vulnerable.  Everyone open your notebooks!”

I put the next slide of our powerpoint on the screen. Click “The vulnerability of birth isn’t just made acceptable, but holy in the sacrament of baptism.” Click “The vulnerability of growing up and maturing isn’t just made acceptable, but holy in the sacrament of confirmation.” Click “The vulnerability of hunger isn’t just made acceptable, but holy in the sacrament of Eucharist.” Click. “The vulnerability of love isn’t just made acceptable, but holy in the sacrament of Marriage.” Click. “The vulnerability of learning to serve isn’t just made acceptable, but holy in the sacrament of Holy Orders.”  Click “The vulnerability of sin isn’t just made acceptable, but holy, in the sacrament of reconciliation.” Click “The vulnerabilities of sickness and death aren’t just made acceptable, but holy in the sacrament of anointing of the sick.”  They wrote feverishly.

I continued, “In Isolation, we think our thoughts will get us to God.  Our bodies, by using candles and water, by using bread and wine and oil, slowly retrain us to use the senses to get to God.  As we become less attached to thought, more at home in our bodies and the world, we become more attuned to our vulnerabilities and our need for others.

“I want to close with this bit from a buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.  I read this when I was in high school and it changed my life.  He’s talking about the Eucharist, but from a buddhist perspective.  This whole next section of the course is about getting out of our heads, into reality.  About getting out of isolation, into community through the sacraments, and learning to see God in the world again through our senses.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, a buddhist monk, said this about the Eucharist:

Holy Communion is a strong bell of mindfulness.  We drink and eat all the time, but we usually ingest only our ideas, projects, worries and anxiety.  We do not really eat our bread and drink our beverage.  If we allow ourselves to touch our bread deeply, we become reborn…eating it deeply, we touch the sun the clouds, the earth, and everything in the cosmos.  We touch life and we touch the kingdom of God…

It’s ironic that when Mass is said today, many congregants are not called to mindfulness at all.  They have heard the words so many times that they just feel a little distracted.  This is exactly what Jesus was trying to overcome when he said This is my Body, This is my Blood.  When we are truly there, dwelling deeply in the present moment…the body of Christ is the body of God, the body of ultimate reality, the ground of all existence.

I turned my gaze from the book to my students.  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the sacraments do.  This is what Jesus became human to teach us.”  The bell rang. “It’s time to go, but when we learn what the sacraments have to teach us, all that will exist is here and now.”

Kairos, Koans and Conversion 6: John 3:11-21 Belief and Acceptance

Genesis says we’re “Made in [God’s] image and likeness.”  And again, John 3:11 says “We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony.  If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” We are expressions of the logos, which means being committed to decay.  We have the dualistic mindset that comes from having settled for “being like God” over and against being with him.  But we have immortal longings, and are meant, on this side of the grave, for singleness of heart, body and mind. 

Salvation is acceptance.  It is a stepping into paradox, inhabiting a traditional Catholic “Both/And” structure, and feeling the illogical pull of both sides.  St. John knows his audience is of a different mind, knows that judgment is a biproduct of a dualistic “either/or” perspective and  “feeling condemned” is how it reacts to contrasting views.  He knows that egoic death is necessary to correct the dualistic perspectives.  In a 2010 interview, a questioner asked the Dalai Lama if he felt his time on earth was a success.  He replied “All human life is some part failure and some part achievement.”  Some people ask me “If I liked the monastery.”  I tell them “the monastic life is life. There are parts I liked, and parts I didn’t.”   Dualism makes us forget to hold the sides of a paradox in tension.  St. John knows his audience.

Jesus’ incarnation is an opportunity to wake up.  For St. John, the only “condemnation” is remaining in the Ego’s dualistic perspective.   For Buddhists, this is the state of “Samsara.”  Jesus hints at this when, in Matthew 5, he says anyone who calls his brother a fool is liable to, and some translations say already in, hell.  “Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”  Condemnation, in the end, is wholly optional.

I’ll admit that this last statement fits, for me, like shoes with pebbles in them.  In part it’s because I hear “belief” from the spiritualized dualistic perspective of too many modern christians.  “Belief” in that case, is the intellectual acceptance of the fact that someone wholly other than me (Jesus) is the Son of God.  The problem is, I buy that proposition, but the unitive perspective I’m drawn towards has more to reveal.

What I’m getting at, and what I’ll spend the rest of this post spouting about, is this: Jesus incarnation is an opportunity to wake up.  So is yours and so is mine.  Jesus “saves” and he’s “the son of God” but the fact is, so are you and so am I.

Let’s unpack this by means of a short primer on the link between acceptance and expectations.

All of the Gospels deal, to some extent, with the “worldliness” of God’s plan, exemplified in the Mosaic covenant.  You will prosper in the desert, says that iteration of the agreement, if you keep these laws.  If you don’t follow them, bad things will happen.  Whole Jewish generations grew up thinking that those to whom bad had happened were divinely disobedient.

When Israel was governed by the judges, and certainly by the time of the various exiles, a messiah was sent to lead the people back to God’s law, but restoration of worldly prosperity was the primary upshot of that movement, and it was easy to lose the forest for the trees. 

So particularly in Mark’s gospel, and to a lesser extent in all the Gospels, Roman occupied Judea was home to a very specific set of Messianic ideals.  At the most, a messiah was supposed to expel the Romans from Judea.  We hear echoes of this in Luke’s gospel as well, when, en route to Emmaus, the disciples tell the unrecognizable Christ that they were downcast because “[they] had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”  They’re still being periodically jarred out of that perspective in Acts, when they ask Jesus “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Jesus’ messianic ideal comes from the suffering servant paradigm of Isaiah.  In that model, one who suffers for the people heals and expiates the sin of the people.  “upon him was the punishment,” Isaiah says, “that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.”  The judges model gets caught up in healing symptoms.  Isaiah’s model heals the illness itself.  

Not only during, but after Christ’s life, the fact that Jesus doesn’t fit the Judges’ messianic paradigms accounts for a good bit of unbelief.  The problem grew worse when he began appearing as a stranger.  Jesus disappointed, at that point, both in physical resemblance to his earthly self and in his role as the messiah.  In the post resurrection appearances, Christ trains the apostles to discard what most often gets in the way of belief: expectations.

In short, the post-resurrection Jesus was unrecognizable: the apostles expectations about his appearance were based on knowing him during his lifetime, just as our expectations would be based on 2 millennia of Christian art.  When he didn’t meet those expectations, when reason couldn’t bring about recognition, realization had to kick in.

At Emmaus, Jesus appears as a stranger, walks and talks with his disciples, and presumably says a few things about the “suffering servant messianic model.”  I wasn’t privy to their conversation, but it seems to make sense that Jesus would take the opportunity to retool his disciples’ expectations.  It flows quite naturally into a moment when Christ the Stranger breaks the bread, and (aha!) his disciples recognize him.

Mary Magdeline assumes the gardener at the empty tomb is a stranger till (aha) he says her name.  By the time Peter is thrice asked “do you love me” we’re told “none of the disciples dared to ask him ‘who are you’ because they knew it was the Lord.”  His disciples are portrayed as needing less and less prompting to make that leap.  The Aha moments, once bestowed by a Transcendent source, become a mental maneuver the Apostles have been trained to do.

Shifting expectations prepare the way for realization, the aha moments show us that it’s expectation that gets in the way.  Without the conflict between reality and expectation, we’d more easily see the person right in front of us as Christ.  By the time Jesus ascends into heaven, their paradigm is fully adjusted.  They are trained to recognizing the stranger as Christ, by adjusting and ultimately delete, expectations.

When John says “those who do not believe are condemned already,” he’s not talking about someone else’s ability to tell me I’m going to hell.  He’s talking about how miserable the dualistic mindset is.  When he says “those who believe in him are not condemned” he’s talking about the way “acceptance of paradox and discarding expectations” yield greater serenity.

To me, these are the mere “earthly things,” the understanding of which Jesus takes as a given.  Expectations block acceptance in predictable ways.  I don’t know what the “heavenly things” Jesus had to teach were.  I reckon we’ll get there, though, following paradox-expanded hearts.  When we look in the mirror of heaven, perhaps our own image will be all we see.  Maybe, such “true visions” of ourselves were Jesus’ goal all along.  Everyone is the messiah.  May we, one day, not need reminding.

Five: the steps of deliberate thought and the eight honest virtues

Fatima Garcia approached me before the bell rang.  “Mr. Warner, your class reminds me of Mr. Sanchez’s psychology class.  When we talk about addiction, we talk a lot about compulsive thought.  I never thought about all this before this year, but you guys are right.  I do think compulsively.”

“The Desert Fathers had a way of doing theology that was very psychological.  They wanted the gospel to flood and fix the workings of their own mental and emotional life.  Also, though, remember what we said, last time.  ‘It’s not your fault, but it is your problem.’  It would be more accurate to say ‘Compulsive thought happens in your head.’  Remember that compulsive thought produces the ego.  Just because there’s something in your head that thinks compulsively and uses personal pronouns—I, Me and My—it can be you, but it isn’t who you really are.  You and I are egotistical sometimes, but not all the time.  We should be as gentle with ourselves as we can.”

The Bell rang.  Ralph Cain walked in late, and talked to everyone between the door and his seat.  I got within whispering distance, “Mr Cain,” I said, “You have 5 seconds to find your seat or we’ll add a detention to your tardy.”

“Aw, naw, Mr. Warner, you ain’t gotta do that.”  He sat down.  He’d forgotten his notebook, but was at least quiet.

I turned my attention to the whole class.  “Ladies and Gentlemen!  Please open your notebooks to the page where we talk about the Steps of Compulsive thought! I want to do two things today.  First, we know that compulsive thought is a characteristic of Isolation.  I want, ultimately, to talk about what we call the “eight honest virtues.”  But before that, we know that compulsive thought is a progression that happens on its own.  We have to examine the opposite of that.  It’s part of the reality of community, and it's called 'deliberate thought.'

“Open your notebooks to a clean page, but have your thumb on the page where we talk about the steps of compulsive thought.  At the top of the page, write ‘The Steps of Deliberate thought.’ Down the side of the page write. ‘Ugly Possums hate ripe pears.’  Give yourself room to write like always.”  I gave them a minute. “I’m gonna go on, ‘kay?”  No one objected.

“Next to ‘ugly’ write ‘uncomfortable emotion.’  That was the beginning of compulsive thought, it’s also at the root of deliberate thought. Next to ‘possums’ write “presence/reframing.” I wrote the criteria on the board. “Folks, the fact is, uncomfortable emotion only becomes compulsive thought if you deny it and cover it up.  The fact is, if you watch it happening, you keep it from progressing.  Lemme clarify though.  Presence is not force.  If you stuff uncomfortable emotion, it will manifest as compulsive thought.  So you’ve just got to watch it, let it come and let it go.  Now, there’s another word, one that doesn’t get it’s own line, but it’s part of what we do on this step.  Next to ‘presence’ write ‘reframing.’”  I spelled it on the board. “Just like you might give a picture a new frame, we can explain our experience in a new, more positive way.  That’s reframing.  Write that down, then stop for a moment.”  They wrote, and stopped. “You know, when soldiers come back from war, they have that thing called ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ where loud noises bring back all the memories of war and stuff?”  A few nods of assent, mostly blank stares that weren’t perplexed.  I put it in the win column, and continued.

“Recently people are questioning the use of the word ’Disorder.’  The fact is, for a soldier to be messed up by trauma makes total sense. If anything it’s the trauma that is disordered.  People who’ve been abused have a correct response to that abuse.  It’s the abuse that’s messed up.  When you live with a disability and your body is constantly rebelling against you, it’s normal to develop a fear of falling down.  This is reframing, folks.  To look at my responses and experiences in a positive, instead of a negative manner.  So ‘presence and reframing’ are one thing.  They’re about gently acknowledging and kindly interpreting your experience.  If you wanna add the word ‘really’ next to ‘possums’ so you can remember ‘reframing,’ go ahead.

“Next to ‘hate’ write ‘Honest Admission.’  Remember, uncomfortable emotion becomes compulsive thought if we deny it.  But if we find someone we trust, and we admit that our own emotions freak us out, then it can be different.  Best case scenario, if we go to a friend and say ‘my emotions freak me out’ maybe they’ll respond ‘oh man i know.  I freak me out too.  It’s a relief I’m not the only one.  We should hang out.”  Just for kicks, I asked the class “When we honestly admit what we’re feeling, Cole Jensen, what begins to form?”  

Cole stared back at me blankly.  “Can I phone a friend?”

“I’ll phone a friend for you. Fatima, what forms when we begin to honestly admit our emotions to safe people?”  

“Like, a group” she said and then the lights turned on. “COMMUNITY, community forms when we’re honest.”

“Yes indeed.  Now, go back to your list, and next to ‘ripe’ write ‘repetition.’  Doing this once isn’t enough.  Uncomfortable emotion comes back.  So we do steps 1 through three again.  Next to ‘pears’ write ‘peace of mind.’  That’s what happens when we do this consistently.  We don’t have to worry.  Uncomfortable emotion arises, we let it come, we don’t stuff it under compulsive thought or eat 10 million cookies to offset discomfort with a sugar high.  Ugly Possums (really) hate ripe pears.  Those are the Steps of Deliberate Thought.  As we’ve seen, they’re a way of encountering ourselves that forms community instead of isolation.”

“Now, Hillary, what was the last of the ‘Characteristics of Community’ that we talked about yesterday.  We remember the Characteristics of Community by the acronym ‘Here Koalas Ate Uncooked Eucalyptus.’  Tell me what ‘Eucalyptus’ stands for.”

Hillary Fidgeted a little, but named it without looking at her notebook “Eight Honest Virtues.”

“Ok.  Now each definition’s gonna have the same format.  Just like Compulsive thoughts arise on their own, the eight honest virtues are behaviors, or ‘natural tendencies’ that arise without us thinking about them. And each behavior leads to something.  We’ll talk about these tomorrow, but today I just want to go through and get them into notes.”  I wrote the next bit on the Dry Erase board. “Each definition will have this format: [Term]: the natural tendency to [behavior] that leads to [result.]  And remember, each of the eight honest virtues is the opposite of one of the Eight Evil Thoughts over in Isolation.

“So please write the ‘Eight Honest Virtues’ at the top of a page.  Down the left hand side, I’ll give you our acronym.  Please write ‘The Greatest Desserts Get Chocolatey, Pudding Satisfies Hunger.’  While you’re writing I’ll set up a little powerpoint that will help us through this.

“The First Honest Virtue is the opposite of Gluttony.  Next to ‘The,’ write ‘Temperance.’  This is ‘the natural tendency to avoid eating our feelings, leading to eating because you’re hungry.’  There was mild dissension among the ranks about how much writing this would be, but they got to it.  When pencils came to rest, I continued: the second honest virtue is the opposite of Greed.  Next to ‘Greatest’ write ‘Generosity.’”  I clicked powerpoint buttons “‘The natural tendency to give, leading to always giving what we can spare, sometimes giving what we can’t.’  While they wrote, I explained: for the catholic church, private property isn’t an absolute right.  You have the right to own what you need, and some of the things you want.  But at some point, your extra stuff—money or other resources—well, it belongs to the poor.  And the ability to give, at that point, it’s an important virtue.” Of course, very few kids were listening in the scribblestorm I’d initiated, but we’d go back to all of this over the next few days.

“The third honest virtue is the opposite of ’Sloth.’ Next to ‘Desserts’ write ‘diligence.’  This is ‘The natural tendency to handle life’s pressures without anxiety, leading to working just enough.  The fourth Honest Virtue is the opposite of ‘Sorrow.’  Next to ‘Get’ write ‘Grief.’  This is ‘the natural tendency to avoid manipulating with our sadness, leading to healthy grief and letting go.”  Clickety click, said the powerpoint. Scribbledy Scratch, replied the pencils.

“The fifth Honest virtue is the opposite of Lust.  Next to ‘Chocolatey’ write ‘Chastity.’ This is ‘the Natural tendency to treat sex/ relationships moderately, leading to valuing who others are.’  You’re not with them because you like the attention they give you, you’re not with them because they kiss your face.  You’re with them for who they are.  And maybe, if it’s a romantic relationship, you smooch a bit.” I went on quickly before the giggling commenced. “The sixth honest virtue is the opposite of ‘wrath.’  Next to ‘pudding’ write ‘Patience.’  This is ‘The natural tendency to avoid overreacting in anger, leading to healthy anger and letting go.’  I explained, while they ignored me to write: “If you step on my foot, and I’m being wrathful, I’ll over-react and burn down your house.  If you step on my foot, and I’m being patient, I’ll exclaim ‘Ouch.  Golly, that makes me angry.’  And if I’m really angry I’ll say ‘Dag nabbit! Why, if I didn’t know better I’d say I’m even feeling ‘quite angry.’”

We were beginning to run low on time.  I decided to talk faster. “If we don’t get the rest of this into notes before the bell, don’t worry, we’ll do it tomorrow.  For now, at least get the terms down, though.  The seventh honest virtue is the opposite of ‘Vanity.’ Next to ‘satisfies’ write ‘self-forgetfulness.’  This is ‘The natural tendency to avoid being the center of attention, leading to knowing others’ worth.’  And the eighth honest virtue is the opposite of pride.  Next to ‘hunger’ write ‘humility.’”  The bell rang.  “Nobody move yet!  This is ‘The natural tendency to accept our dependence on God and others, leading to community.’  We’ll talk more tomorrow.  I apologize to your cramping hands!”

But as the students left the room, it was those cramping hands I reflected on.  They say what muscles repeatedly do, they remember.  If this was the beginning of students being temperate and generous, being diligent and humble and patient, then I had, at least for that day, no regrets at all.