My life story is like a crappy book, getting published by a dysfunctional press. Even if the author can get his act together and tell the tale, the editors rip it to shreds until nothing remains, and the publicity folks pitch it in all the wrong markets.
Writing, for me, is a sadhana. Sadhana is a hindu term that means "daily spiritual work"--working with words is mine. This can be a bit weird, because I exhaust myself trying to find the most concise ways to express ultimate truth. It can be a bit funky wondering if anyone else will find the tale useful. The effort is frequently an enormous drag. But I've tried to stop, and it doesn't work. To paraphrase Ram Dass, writing is my sadhana whether I like it or not.
If there's a single word that boils down what brought me to Christian Tantra, it's "Suspension." It comes from St. Guerric of Igny, a monk who was trained in the same lineage as myself. To him, it meant being crucified with Christ. It meant being immobilized between heaven and earth, so that one couldn't, for all the desire in the world, lay hold of the things of heaven. It also meant hanging just high enough so that one couldn't reach the things of earth. Guerric talks about suspension the way sick people do who've lost their appetite: put them at the most sumptuous feast they've ever been at, and they may eat, but they don't particularly enjoy it. They handle the world the way we do smelly garbage or a hot potato. You get the picture.
I think about suspension in a lot of the same ways Guerric did. But it's also morphed [bxA], and the ways that it morphed are important, because they produced Christian Tantra. To me, suspension isn't just a concept. It's a lived reality.
When I was in college, I sat in the back of Gethsemani Abbey's enormous stone church. The whole place was dark, and I was alone. At one point, I looked up and saw a monk pass in the back of the church. He was replacing the sanctuary light, the one that burns perpetually when the Eucharist is reserved in the tabernacle. He silently lit the new wick, then moved off into the dark with equal quiet.
I was left alone again. But now my focus was on the sanctuary. And in a moment I felt the emptiness of the distance between me and the light. Later, a monk named brother hugh would concisely say his vocation began in a moment of feeling "the presence of absence." In that moment, that's what I felt. It would take me years to realize that the "shunyata" or emptiness that is the essence of all hearts, was sympathetically resonating with the emptiness of the room.
I became a monk because I tried to wrap that emptiness in an ethos, the black and white robes of a prescribed role. I took the name Br. M. Dismas Warner OCSO. (All trappists once took "Mary" as a first name to honor Jesus' mommy, a practice that's common these days only to offensively pious postulants like myself.) I chose the name of the good thief because I wanted to love Jesus by sharing the experience of his loneliest moment. I had a deep attraction to the words from the Wisdom of Solomon. Chapter 17 talks about the "prison not made of iron"--a prison, the text says, that's ultimately forged of our own futile thinking. When I left the monastery, I saw my error: the prison wasn't made of iron, nor was the liberation to be found in a monastic cell.
I continued to feel "pulled." Back then I would have said "anxious." I used to dread it, until I realized that the nervous energy and the sadhana are two sides of a coin. Back before I wrote a second-rate blog, the more manic voices of my inner monologue produced tomes and tomes of second-rate poems. Early one winter morning, walking through the dark to the teaching job I had after leaving the monastery, I was feeling my round of daily angst and remember being stopped in my tracks with the thought "The anxiety is ok. It's just infant poems." Ever after, only at my most stressed did I call what I felt "anxiety." More often I'd call it "creative tension." Suspension may be just a concept to some. In its "creative tension" though, I found a reason to view jittery legs and chewed fingernails kindly.
If creative tension is floating around in life's stormiest moments, the body is a lightning rod. I gave that strain a name many years after I left the monastery, but I began to learn how to manage it while I was still there. During a run-in with Yoga Magazine in the basement of the monastery library, I learned a breathing technique that cleared my head immensely. Some of the technique had to do with posture. Later on, while standing in church, chanting the psalms with the community, I brought my shoulders and chin back a little and breathed from my diaphragm. My shoulders twitched, and suddenly I felt heat from the top of my head to the middle of each thigh. Before that day, I could feel my chest, my back, my arms and legs. After that day, I could feel every muscle in my chest, back, arms and legs. I could even, if I was gentle enough, coax a stressed muscle into relaxing. In India they call these experiences "Kundalini Awakenings"--where breath, energy and attention begin to work together, making whatever your sadhana is an embodied reality. I made too much of it, at first. In India it's not a big deal. The street sweeper, your octogenarian grandmother and the bloke who refills your chai tea all deal with kundalini however their Karma determines they should.
I bring all of this up because breath, attention and energy became, in my own practice of Christian Tantra, the primary tools of spiritual practice. There are others: when we're not grounded, the sounds involved in mantra practice can lead us back to energy through the door of physical sensation. Sound, vibrating in the body, can shift our focus to something other than the skittish energies of anxiety. Thought about the Trinity, when we're also asking where we feel tension, can let us know whether the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit is active in us. But too much attention to minutiae can fill us with self-importance. Suspension is to bring the attention to breath and energy, without writing blogposts about it later.
With nowhere else to go, suspension interiorizes spiritual work, and fragments the ego. There's a part of ego that's always evaluating things: this becomes, with practice, a patient observer. There's a part of ego that has equal trouble with pain and pleasure. This becomes, with a little attention, the impulse to experience something fully without judging. There's a part of the ego that's wounded and judges everything in a fruitless bid for control of its situation. Once this part of the ego can distinguish what it can change from what it can't, it becomes the discerner of skillful ways to deal with things.
In suspension, we learn to live in two "realms" simultaneously. One is the realm of mystery. As we live, more and more, in the realm of mystery, we gain more and more distance from our identification with ego. "There is an ego." we say, in impersonal monotone, "It rattles around in my body." I can work with the ego and try to limit its self-destructiveness. But there's a limit to how much I can do, because, like a man nailed to the cross, I can't leave this body. The other realm is the realm of revelation. In the realm of revelation, we learn to use the ego as it was meant to be used--as a self protective tool. Jesus said "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves." This means learning how to protect ourselves (as much as we can) from other people's manipulation, even as we admit that we're never free of it. It means being able to feel the difference between Satan, who prowls about the world seeking the ruin of souls, and the Spirit, who blows where it wills. It means cultivating the tools to actively live life, without the defensiveness of clinging to it. More than a "separate hell and heaven" we begin to see two different ways of wielding our "selves:" one that leads to non-attachment, the other too suffering.
Living a life free of tension doesn't seem to be my Karma. But I can be mindful of it, change how I relate to it, watch its subtle and constant shifts. Falling too cleanly into any one category doesn't seem to be my vocation. I feel pulled between heaven and earth, mostly unable to move until I realize Jesus was right: if I call my brother a fool, I'm liable to judgement. If I live by the sword, I'll die by it. It's not so much about what others do to me, but rather about what I invite into my life by my choices. So the curtain in the temple, and the seamless garment teach a lesson. Being torn between heaven and hell might just be what anchors us to earth. Accepting how pulled apart we are might just be the way to find wholeness.
Ok. Enough from me. Breathe. Pay Attention. Feel. Our egos are old wineskins, each day is new wine. But make no mistake about it, whatever the years have poured into us, what we're bursting with is life itself.
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