montréal reflections: day eleven

NOTE: We are on holiday for rest and reflection in Montréal before a new year of engagement, teaching and creativity begins. This is the tenth in a series.

My yearnings have long been for a unity or embrace between my spirit, flesh and mind. Incarnation, in all its manifestations, has mattered to me since I was small. Same with the mystery of the Holy Trinity. When my abstract-thinking, intellectual Unitarian grandmother asked me why I was so interested in Sunday School, my fourth grade soul blurted out: "Because I want to meet God face to face!" What did that even mean to a fourth grader? Who knows except to say my heart, mind and soul ached for something more profound than conversation. As time ripened, my participation in Eucharist and beautiful, liturgical common prayer - chanted Psalms, incense, candles - became the way I best experienced something of my longing. For decades I have found nourishment in these words from Psalm 85:

Let me hear what God the Lord will speak,
for he will speak peace to his people,
to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts...
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.
The Lord will give what is good,
and our land will yield its increase.
Righteousness will go before him,
and will make a path for his steps.

Biblical scholarship teaches that this song of worship is post-exilic - most likely from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah - after ancient Israel's bondage in Babylon. What energizes me is the radical marriage of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, justice and compassion. It evokes the realization of my deepest prayer. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault suggests that such unity and integration is at the core of all spiritual quests. She calls it the universal school of wisdom that exists in each discrete religious tradition with surprising parity: Buddhists, Sufis, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus and every other seeker learn that the blessings of the holy are to be experienced now (in addition to later) and can be encountered through disciplined work, prayer, silence, song and instruction. The essence of Christ's wisdom concerning the "kingdom of God" is not qualitatively different from Buddhist "mindfulness." I love the way the 15th century Hindu mystic, Kabir, put it:

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before
death. If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten—
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City
of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

This is part of why I finally got a new tattoo. I don't understand why some want to cover themselves in ink. Nor do I have a love for the physical pain as is true for others. For me, it has been part of the unfolding journey of becoming my truest self. In retrospect I realize that I shut down a lot of my heart when I chose the path of ordination into ministry. There's no point in pondering whether this was the right/correct decision as there's no going backwards in time. Still, I am aware that for good or ill, I sensed that it was essential for me to conform to a host of bourgeois externals if I was going to "make it" in ministry. 

And that, of course, is part of the problem: making it in ministry. While it is true that the insiders do not readily value or reward those who obviously fail to fit into the "guild" - and they still don't - the notion of striving to be successful and marketable as a spiritual guide is antithetical to the way of Jesus. It continues to happen, of course, but it is still wrong. For decades I bought into the status quo of my particular tradition - and it slowly devoured my soul. My first break came after about 15 years of ordination when I got an earring on my 40th birthday. I had wanted one since seeing Al Pacino's portrayal in the movie "Serpico." On the road from Cleveland to California for my brother's wedding in San Francisco, I knew I just had to do it. So somewhere just across the California border, I got it done. Celebrating that wedding beyond the confines of organized religion was another break with conformity: the artists, Beat poets and hippies gathered on a moored sailing vessel resonated as one when I spoke of God's grace that was being shared with creation through the language of music. It was the first adult affirmation that perhaps my calling really wasn't within the church as I had come to know it, but maybe more like the church of my calling at age 16. To artists. To those on the boundaries. To those wrestling openly with their brokenness rather than masking it in the trappings of middle class propriety. And taking place so soon after my piercing... 

To say that the next three years were tumultuous would be am understatement as old commitments came to an end - and new ones began - with each change being marked with a new earring. There was something important happening within me that these piercing helped me remember. They became a part of my embodied prayers. Later came my on-going collection of bracelets from journeys around the world; our new wedding rings as we renewed our vows, my prayer beads and my first tattoo. It was a Jerusalem Cross - one large cross with four smaller ones in each corner - representing the apostles and Jesus as well as the wounds the Lord experienced at the hands of the Roman Empire. Being marked was another step in owning the radical grace of God in my life even as I was leaving my traditional ministries. I like the way one woman using tattoos to tell the story of her spiritual journey put it. It rings true to me, too:

She sees her tattoo as an outward mark of an inward journey, accessing a part of her self that had always been there. (When) I asked her how this step along her journey made her feel and she replied: Fierce!

An outward sign of an inward, spiritual grace is the way many Christians speak about a sacrament: an embodied way of expressing and experiencing a deep spiritual truth. In my case, my tattoo not only affirmed my abiding love for Jesus, but became a visible testimony for me that this love was about living into a spirituality of tenderness. That is the paradoxical wisdom of the Cross to me: it is a call to be compassionate in the midst of real suffering trusting that this is where and how God becomes flesh. Tenderness is what drew me to the writings of Jean Vanier. Tenderness is what lead me out of traditional ministry. It has been my deepest calling since I first "heard" God's still, small voice of grace at the Church of the Savior's coffee house ministry: The Potter's House. And it is what took me into L'Arche Ottawa. Tenderness is how I seek balance in my heart, body and spirit and the key to mindfulness.

Perhaps two years ago I began to explore another dimension to tenderness: in nature. Within God's first word: creation. The more I was outside, the more I sensed that there was I lot more for me to learn about "the unforced rhythms of grace" from the circle of the seasons. I now realize that this was a new/old way of restoring me to balance. The more I tended our small plot of earth with love and attention, the more I grasped God's abiding presence in all things - even the cruelty of our current politics. Hatred hurts us all. It may even devour many of us as Mother Earth burns and cries. But over and again, I have seen how God's love grows greater than the hatred. God's will to live is greater than our obsession with death. God's foolish tenderness is wiser than all of our ephemeral obligations and norms. And I choose by faith to trust God's grace rather than the foolishness of this or any other regime.

My new tattoo is my outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual commitment: a call to honor the earth and the cosmos - to learn from them - and walk by faith, not just by sight into the light as well as the darkness. Imagine my heart's delight when I read Fr. Richard Rohr on-line posting this morning:

“There exists in all beings,” says Teilhard, “a common centre” through which “(all things)meet together at a deeper level...and we may call this Centre equally well the point upon which they converge or the ambience in which they float..." This bond of unity constitutes the “axis of all individual and collective life. It is in virtue of that axis that we see that Christ has not only a mystical, but a cosmic body... And this Cosmic Body, to be found in all things...is eminently the mystical Milieu; who ever can enter into that milieu is conscious of having made [their] way to the very heart of everything, of having found what is most enduring in it.” 

I know that the Light shines in the darkness and both not only remain, but can be excellent teachers - the Word continues to become flesh - the Alpha and the Omega meet and become One - steadfast love and faithfulness embrace as justice and compassion kiss in heaven and on earth - and:

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.