For so much of my life I was confused about what it meant to see with my heart and live into an authentic life of prayer. I fantasized about monasticism even as I raised two wonderful daughters. The wisdom of Brother Henri's words took a long time to grasp - and I suspect they will continue to take root within me oh so incrementally. Mother Cynthia Bourgeault put it something like this in her extended wisdom school class: Every moment invites us to awaken our bodies, our minds and our hearts. When we know and feel where our feet are, when we sense the air we are breathing along with the thoughts we are exploring, when we take the time to notice the real people and living beings we are engaging with in a tender and honest way that refuses to be obsessed with drama: then we are living a true spiritual life. (My paraphrase) Or as Jean Vanier used to say: "We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love."
Paying attention, sharing love, feeling honestly without drawing undue attention to ourselves, making compassion flesh: this is spirituality. It is not heroic, just real. I can't say when I began to honor this truth - sometime in the past 15 years - but it has been a slow moving realization: the spiritual life... is contained in the most simple, ordinary experiences of every day life." Thanks be to God!
The other quote comes from President Barack Obama in a forum re: activism. Say what you will about his tactics and analysis - and there is room for serious and important critique - what spoke to me was this: "This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws."
There ARE ambiguities. And messiness. And God knows there are flaws. In this the former president sounds a lot like Reinhold Niebuhr to me: Niebuhr was the master of political and religious humility. One of his insights was to link pride to original sin. In other words, when we take ourselves too seriously and fail to notice the brokenness in our own hearts - when everyone else is the problem and the enemy is always outside of us - we are destined to advance the cruelty we despise. Further, we will wind up cynical and disengaged, confusing our own arrogance with integrity and our naivete with righteousness. I can hear the old philosopher/preacher now: "Oh save us, Lord, from becoming what we hate!"
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