Last night we went to listen to Christine Tassan, a jazz guitarist from Paris who makes her home in Montréal playing jazz manouche (gypsy jazz), at a variety of venues including our favorite Diese Onze. As we walked, we both felt the strain of tired muscles we have been exercising over the past week. It was a good tired, but tired nonetheless. It called into memory a question Cynthia Bourgeault asks repeatedly in her wisdom school: where are your feet? That is, what is your body feeling? Are you grounded or floundering? At peace or caught in chaos? Listening to the wisdom in our flesh is crucial for spiritual integrity.
Bourgeault insists that our deepest spiritual insights are usually first expressed in gestures turning the rhythmic movement of window or floor washing, raking leaves, kneading dough, or cutting grass into a type of apprenticeship in embodied wisdom. By practicing being present to life in these physical tasks - feeling the air on our faces, smelling the baking bread, experiencing the tension and release of hard manual labor as well as the satisfaction of a job well done - our emotional center can be awakened. As we give ourselves time and space to move and feel, we then find that our physical activity has evoked an awakening in our intellectual center, too. Quiet reflection begins to beat in time and sing in harmony with our bodies and emotions.
For the past 18 months I intuitively returned to the quotidian mysteries of bread baking, gardening, floor cleaning as well as a little music-making. I wasn't fully sure of all the reasons why except to say that I had a hunch that I had to physically slow down if I was going to relearn the basics of my inner life. I gave away most of my theological library. I quit reading the periodicals that had once sustained my professional identity. Like the Buddhist monk said: it was time just to chop wood and carry water. Apparently, this is foundational to all wisdom school traditions: we re-discover the grace that embraces the totality of creation incrementally by practicing gestures that open us to surrender, trust and hope. The Stillwell quote concludes that those who give themselves over to the spirituality of gardening can: "Lose in the ocean roll of the seasons little eddies of pain and sickness and weariness, to watch year after year green surging tides of spring and summer break at his feet in a foam of woodland flowers, and the garden like a faithful retainer growing grey in its master’s service. But for him who may live to see it, there shall be a wilder beauty than any he has planned."
For the past 18 months I intuitively returned to the quotidian mysteries of bread baking, gardening, floor cleaning as well as a little music-making. I wasn't fully sure of all the reasons why except to say that I had a hunch that I had to physically slow down if I was going to relearn the basics of my inner life. I gave away most of my theological library. I quit reading the periodicals that had once sustained my professional identity. Like the Buddhist monk said: it was time just to chop wood and carry water. Apparently, this is foundational to all wisdom school traditions: we re-discover the grace that embraces the totality of creation incrementally by practicing gestures that open us to surrender, trust and hope. The Stillwell quote concludes that those who give themselves over to the spirituality of gardening can: "Lose in the ocean roll of the seasons little eddies of pain and sickness and weariness, to watch year after year green surging tides of spring and summer break at his feet in a foam of woodland flowers, and the garden like a faithful retainer growing grey in its master’s service. But for him who may live to see it, there shall be a wilder beauty than any he has planned."
A wilder beauty, indeed. A beauty that invites balance. And tenderness. Even hope for those with eyes to see. Bourgeault believes that we in the West have been living out of balance for the past 500 years. We have lost touch with both our emotional and physical centers in our obsession with intellectual wisdom. In doing so there have been brilliant advances, but also tragic consequences. Our technology is stunning, but rarely is it put into service on behalf of the poor, the broken, the weak or the wounded. No, it serves wealth and power. Having perfected the means of mass destruction rather than feeding and housing our neighbors, our culture has become a cynical, greedy and fearful collection of post-apocalyptic automatons oblivious to the faith, hope and love that formed and sustains us all. As MLK warned, "Today our science has outrun our spiritual power creating guided missiles and misguided men (and women)."
My gut response was to the fear and chaos - as well as my own lack of focus - was to build a small terraced garden and raise fresh tomatoes, herbs and pumpkins. I didn't understand why this was vital for me before our time of walking and watching in Montréal, but I trusted it was true. Living by faith, St. Paul called it, not by sight. Trusting that when the student was ready, the Buddha would appear. Or as Martin Luther used to say when he was overwhelmed with anxiety: I am baptized. In other words, there is a love and grace bigger than I can comprehend right now and I am going to trust it. Imagine my delight when Bourgeault began to teach about the centrality of "the moving center" - the realm of gestures and embodied prayer - in her on-line wisdom school course. I laughed out loud this morning when I read these words from Richard Rohr who affirmed the integrity of living an embodied spirituality that reconnects the flesh with the emotions and intellect.
Just as different ways of interpreting scripture and various types of truth (e.g., literal vs. mythic) are valuable for different purposes, so scientific theories have different applications while seeming to be paradoxical and irreconcilable. For example, we have the Newtonian theory of gravity, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and quantum theory. Physicists know that each of them is true, yet they don’t fit together and each is limited and partial. Newtonian mechanics can’t model or predict the behavior of massive or quickly moving objects. Relativity does this well, but doesn’t apply to very, very small things. Quantum mechanics succeeds on the micro level. But we don’t yet have an adequate theory for understanding very energetic, very massive phenomenon, such as black holes. Scientists are still in search of a unified theory of the universe. Perhaps the term “quantum entanglement” names something that we have long intuited, but science has only recently observed. Here is the principle in everyday language: in the world of quantum physics, it appears that one particle of any entangled pair “knows” what is happening to another paired particle—even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which are separated by sometimes very large distances.
Scientists don’t know how far this phenomenon applies beyond very rare particles, but quantum entanglement hints at a universe where everything is in relationship, in communion, and also where that communion can be resisted (“sin”). Both negative and positive entanglement in the universe matter, maybe even ultimately matter. Prayer, intercession, healing, love and hate, heaven and hell, all make sense on a whole new level. Religion has long pointed to this... as Paul’s letter to the Romans says quite clearly “the life and death of each of us has its influence on others” (14:7).
Rohr goes on to quote Judy Cannato, a visionary of a new cosmology:Emergent theories seem to confirm what mystics have been telling us all along—that we are one, not just all human beings, but all creation, the entire universe. As much as we may imagine and act to the contrary, human beings are not the center of the universe—even though we are a vital part of it. Nor are we completely separate from others, but live only in and through a complex set of relationships we hardly notice. Interdependent and mutual connections are integral to all life... My heart tells me that the new physics is not new at all, but simply expresses in yet another way the fundamental truth that underpins creation... What science is saying is not contradictory to but actually resonates with Christian faith and my own experience of the Holy. As I continue to reflect, the new physics gives a fresh framework from which to consider the action of God’s grace at work in human life.
Clearly, our culture is not there yet. Our politicians are trapped in outmoded ideas that fan the flames of fear and cruelty without consideration of the consequences. More and more people of every age, class, gender and race are abandoning traditional religious practices, too. Cynicism alongside nativist pandering is ascending. But fear and anxiety are not at the heart of creation. They are neither the end of this cycle nor what binds us together: quantum entanglement is. In ways none of us can fully articulate, we know this is true. This poem by Li-Young Lee gets close.
I loved you before I was born.
It doesn’t make sense, I know.
I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.
And I’ve lived longing
for your every look ever since.
That longing entered time as this body.
And the longing grew as this body waxed.
And the longing grows as this body wanes.
That longing will outlive this body.
I loved you before I was born.
It makes no sense, I know.
Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse
of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes.
And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant.
That loneliness appeared on earth as this body.
And my share of time has been nothing
but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly.
Your face fleeing my ever
kissing it firmly once on the mouth.
In longing, I am most myself, rapt,
my lamp mortal, my light
hidden and singing.
I give you my blank heart.
Please write on it
what you wish.
I loved you before I was born.
It doesn’t make sense, I know.
I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.
And I’ve lived longing
for your every look ever since.
That longing entered time as this body.
And the longing grew as this body waxed.
And the longing grows as this body wanes.
That longing will outlive this body.
I loved you before I was born.
It makes no sense, I know.
Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse
of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes.
And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant.
That loneliness appeared on earth as this body.
And my share of time has been nothing
but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly.
Your face fleeing my ever
kissing it firmly once on the mouth.
In longing, I am most myself, rapt,
my lamp mortal, my light
hidden and singing.
I give you my blank heart.
Please write on it
what you wish.
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