For the past week I have been haunted by an insight Pádraig Ó Tuama shared with Krista Tippett during a recent On Being interview. As is often the case, Ms. Tippett began her interview asking her guest to say something about how their early life informed their understanding of spirituality. Specifically, she asked: "As you think about this moment we inhabit, I wonder if there’s something in the spiritual background of your life — your childhood or your vocational life, however you would define “spiritual” — that is especially present to you right now, and that may mean troubling you, motivating you, nourishing you." It is a good question and Ó Tuama replied:
There’s two things that come to my mind. The first is — so when I got to primary school, I didn’t know that I spoke two languages (English and Irish) and the teacher was introducing us to speaking Irish as if that was new for us all. The teacher said a few words and said, “Now you won’t have understood what I’ve said, but I’m going to teach you how to speak Irish.” And I felt like something was wrong, because I understood perfectly what she’d just said, because I had two tongues in my mouth without realizing it. And what that strikes me — I continually refer back to the realization, for me, that my first instinct was to think, “Oh, I’m wrong,” because the teacher said that. I trusted authority. I’m a good Catholic, and so… I’ve been spending my life trying to become a bad Catholic because I had an innate trust of authority. When the teacher said, “Now you won’t understand what I’ve just said,” I thought, “OK, that has to be true.” And what that teaches me is that it’s important to listen to the intuition, because we might know more than we know we know. I think that’s a deep, trusting relationship we have to have with ourselves.
The second thing that strikes me in terms of the spiritual background of my childhood is the Stations of the Cross. In Catholic and Episcopal churches, you’ll find 14 images from the time that Jesus of Nazareth was condemned to death to the time that his corpse was laid in the tomb. They’re just 14 stopping points. For ten years, I did the stations every day. And what I like about the Stations of the Cross is that they don’t say, “Oh, but then, there’s the fifteenth one, where it’s all lovely, fantastic.” In the traditional understanding, there isn’t a fifteenth station. The idea is to find hope in the practice of what seemed to be the worst. And it is the worst — there’s no pretense that abduction and torture and murder are anything other than abduction, torture, and murder; however, there is the understanding that within it, we can discover some kind of hope — the hope of protest, the hope of truth-telling, the hope of generosity, the hope of gesture — even in those places.
He is on to something crucial here - something salvific even if we trust it deeply - namely that: 1) intuitively we know more than we think we know; 2) it is both healthy and holy to question the authority of our spiritual, educational, and political leaders; and 3) our wounds can lead us beyond the emptiness of denial into the fullness of tenderness and hope. Together, these insights become counter-cultural commitments deserving serious consideration by those who sense that our status quo is pathologically out of balance. Beyond the confines and contributions of gender, race, class and spiritual perspective, these three commitments lead us into a dance with contemporary culture that moves gracefully through cynicism with creative compassion and carefully through fear with time-tested trust. Ó Tuama puts it like this in a prayer/poem:
So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.
Three images deepen this paradoxical transformation: the stones over which we stumble can become altars; our breath which is silent carries in it the essence of our truest name; and the wild, wonderful and wicked world in which we live and move and have our being is always pregnant with both clarity and chaos. Consider intuition: in her Contemplative School of Wisdom, the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault suggests that intuition is the experience of our mind, heart and flesh becoming integrated as “full-access knowing.”
Whenever heart, mind, and body are all present and accounted for at the same time, when they are all “online” in the language of Wisdom, we can experience pure presence, a moment of deep inner connection with the pure, gratuitous Being of anything and everything. It may be experienced as a quiet leap of joy in the heart, absolute clarity in the mind, or a deep centeredness in the body. .. (it is) both rational and trans-rational at the same time... The supreme work of spirituality, which makes presence possible, is keeping the heart space open (the result of conscious love), keeping a “right mind” (the work of contemplation or meditation), and keeping the body alive with contentment or... without attachment to its past wounds. (see Richard Rohr Daily Meditation on Mind, Body and Heart @ https://cac.org/the-wisdom-of-contemplation-2020-02-19/)
During the first week of training in the Wisdom Way of Knowledge, Bourgeault asked us to "pay attention to our feet." Notice how they feel and what they tell us about the present moment. Her point is foundational: we in the West, who live mostly in our heads, exist without a deep awareness of what our body is teaching us; and without our body's wisdom, intuition eludes us. In order to move towards full access knowing the wisdom of our flesh must be awakened - and honored. "Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains," writes therapist Resmaa Menakem. "This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of pain or ease, constriction or expansion, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous..."
This hit me hard some 20 years ago as I was melting down in the desert: stress and an addiction to over work were eating me up inside, too much alcohol was depleting my strength and health, and a feeling of claustrophobia was driving me to flee from my responsibilities. All I wanted to do was get on a motorcycle and drive off into the sunset. What was worse, however, was the throbbing, unknown aching in my forearms. It would show up from out of no where at night and pulsate with a torturous intensity that resisted every pain medication. Later that summer, while camping at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, I arranged a body massage hoping I might get some relief. When the skilled masseuse worked on my arms, I started to weep and could not stop. Afterwards as we talked about the experience. she suggested that there were some "body memories" born of a buried trauma that were calling out for recognition. That massage - along with my body's pain and tears - eventually pushed me towards the 12 Steps. Practicing surrendering my wounds to a love greater than myself changed everything. Menakem is clear:
The body is where we live. It’s where we fear, hope, and react. It’s where we constrict and relax. And what the body most cares about are safety and survival. When something happens to the body that is too much, too fast, or too soon, it overwhelms the body and can create trauma.
Bourgeault adds that our bodies are essential for helping us live into integration. "The most direct and effective (spiritual practice) of surrender and yieldedness is this: in any situation in life, confronted by an outward threat or opportunity, you can notice yourself responding inwardly in one of two ways."
Either you will brace, harden, and resist, or, you will soften, open, and yield. If you go with the former gesture, you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller self, with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the later regardless of the out conditions, you will remain in alignment with your innermost being, and through it, diving being can reach you. Spiritual practice at its no-frills simplest is a moment-by-moment learning not to do anything in a state of internal brace: bracing is never worth the cost.
(Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, pp. 74-75)
My flesh clearly knew more than my conscious mind could embrace - and it made itself heard and felt. The more I was free to feel the joy as well as the sorrow, the more I was able to trust the wisdom deeper than my understanding. Like the poet said: sometimes we might know more than we know. This is how I came to trust that the foolishness of the Cross is wiser and stronger than the wisdom of academics, professionals and popular culture. Not that there isn't truth there. Of course there is: but it is so driven by utilitarian habits and bottom line biases that it ignores patience, discards trust as sentimentality, and fails to recognize the peace of full access knowing.
You see, once you recognize full access knowing, you find it popping up every where as both caution and encouragement. Last week I started reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teach of Plants. She is "a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Pottawatomie Nation." Her academic discipline is botan and her life's journey involves integrating Western science with the deeper wisdom of her First Nations traditions. In a chapter called "Three Sisters," a reflection on what it means to grow corn, beans and pumpkins together in a mound rather than as isolated crops in agri-business "clean fields," Kimmerer writes: "Acre for acre, a Three Sisters garden yields more food than if you grew each of the sisters alone."
You can tell they are sisters: one twines easily around the other in relaxed embrace while the sweet baby sisters lolls at their feet, close, but not too close - cooperating, not competing...Without the corn's support, the beans would be an unruly tangle on the ground, vulnerable to bean-hungry predators. It might seems as if she is taking a free ride in this garden, benefiting from the corn's height and the squash's shade, but by the rules of reciprocity none can take more than she gives. The corn takes care of making light available; the squash reduces weeds - and the gift of the beans takes place underground (where her roots create a bacteria that creates the nitrogen fertilizer "that fuels the growth of the corn and the squash...") The Three Sisters offer us a new metaphor for an emerging relationship between indigenous knowledge and Western science, both of which are rooted in the earth. I think of the corn as traditional ecological knowledge, the physical and spiritual framework that can guide the curious bean of science, which twines like a double helix. The squash creates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing. I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges - and so all may be fed. (pp. 132-139)
Last night we watched the Democratic primary debate: what a horror show and what a revelation! Finally, Bloomberg was exposed as unprepared. He is so accustomed to buying what he wants - and using his clout to get his own way - he had no idea how to mix it up with his political rivals. They, in turn, acted like the debate was an episode of "The Apprentice." Shrill attacks, mean-spirited sound bytes, and well-rehearsed campaign rhetoric took the place of wisdom and insight. Absent was any impassioned calling to change the current regime's descent into plutocracy. It appears that crude stupidity and appeals to the lowest common denominator will continue to trump the organic wisdom and decency of each individual candidate. Somehow they all become more crass when culled together than I know them to be when apart. And it isn't simply the fault of the current autocrat in the White House. We are living through the embodied trauma of our American history.
America is tearing itself apart. On the surface, this war looks like the natural outcome of many recent social and political clashes. But it’s not. These conflicts are anything but recent. One hundred and fifty-six years ago, they spawned the American Civil War. But even in the 1860s, these conflicts were already centuries old. They began in Europe during the Middle Ages, where they tore apart close to two million white bodies. The resulting tension came to America embedded in the bodies of Europeans, and it has remained in the bodies of many of their descendants. Over the past three centuries, that tension has been both soothed and deepened by the invention of whiteness and the resulting racialization of American culture. At first glance, today’s manifestation of this conflict appears to be a struggle for political and social power... While we see anger and violence in the streets of our country, the real battlefield is inside our bodies. If we are to survive as a country it is inside our bodies where this conflict will need to be resolved... If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies. (as shared by Richard Rohr and adapted from Resmaa Menakem's, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Central Recovery Press, 2017, xvii, 5, 7.)
I believe it is going to take a lot more tears, to say nothing of the presence and spirit of the Three Sisters writ large, before we move into healing and hope in these so-called United States. I give thanks today for women, men, teens and children who are provoking us to trust the path of full access knowing. Ó Tuama restates the stations of the Cross starting with these words:
O God of the accused
and the accusing,
who made the mouth, the ear and
the heart of all in conflict.
May we turn ourselves towards that
which must be heard,
because there we will hear your voice.
Amen.
