Letting Go (Lovingly)

After the ungodly carnage of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, monk and activist Maha Ghosananda crisscrossed his homeland helping to heal and reestablish communities. Millions had been slaughtered in the "Killing Fields." Everywhere he traveled he found the orphaned, the bereft, and the terribly traumatized.

One of his practices was to gather communities together and have them chant for hours,

    Everything passes away.
    You have lost so much.
    Now you know how precious everything is.
    You must learn to love again and let new things grow.

What a gift to have a compassionate, wise, courageous presence at the heart of trauma and rebuilding.

It's my experience of myself and of Western tendencies in general that we resist the notion that "Everything passes away." In our relatively wealthy and stable lives in America, things don't exactly pass away, we think, they just wear out and we buy improved versions.

Of course, whatever our perceptions are, everything does pass away, and over time, if we're honest (and fortunate) we come to realize it personally, profoundly, and persistently.

When I was 20, my father had a heart attack at breakfast and died. I tried to revive him with 'the kiss of life' but failed. In a profound way, as I failed to give him the kiss of life he succeeded in giving me 'the kiss of death.' He bequeathed to me in that terrible moment an unshakable knowing that everything indeed passes away.

But it's taken me decades to shake that revelation free of enough of it's trauma to be able to experience it as the wisdom it is. I'm now 3 years older than Dad when we died. I knew 40 years ago that I had 'lost so much.' I know it much better now. And now I also know much, much more deeply 'how precious everything is.'

What a treasure it is to know in the marrow of our being 'how precious everything is.' But we only come to access this treasure when we take the time to take to heart that indeed 'everything passes away.' When we take the time to let go of the sleepy way we live with denial instead of affirmation, our minds and hearts develop a new capacity to hold Something Else.

Letting go of our strange notions of the durability of the stuff we've come to count on is not easy, but it frees us more and more to live where we live, with life as it really is. And the emptying of denial and delusion makes room for filling full with truth. And the truth is pregnant with wonder. Ah, loving again, letting new things grow. I want that.

O God, O God, O God, how precious everything is.
Your mercies are new every morning.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Why We Let Go (again)

A young friend, five-year old Jason, went with his big brother on a longish hike with me and my good friend Bob. When we got back his mother asked if he liked hiking. Jason said, "Yeah, I like it." Then cocking his head as he thought more about it he said, "Except you have to walk."

Do we like fullness of Life? Joy? Love?

Yeah. We like 'em. Except...it seems we have to make room for them because we're stopped up with other stuff. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have the pleasure of Fullness without having the bother of Emptying!

Here's another chanty kind of thing:

There is much to appreciate within our selves.

Yet the usual experience of fullness of self

blocks fresh experience of fullness of being.

As we work to be more mindful it doesn't take long to notice we are distracted by many, many things. Noticing is the first part of the work. Mindfulness teachers can describe the common kinds of things we all notice, but the real 'aha' comes from experiencing the noticing for ourselves.

The payoff comes over and over again as we do the work and recognize that much of what we're involved with in our minds and hearts isn't what we need or truly want to be involved with. With these recognitions letting go stops feeling like a chore and starts looking more like the very trail we long to hike.

Why We Let Go

Read the following, if you can, as a kind of chant or segment of liturgy:

God said to Abraham and Sarah,

“Leave the familiar.

Go to the place I will show you.”

Setting out and navigating by God’s occasional guidance,

Sarah and Abraham journeyed by stages

for the rest of their lives.

Come back, when you might need to, and chant/pray/declare it again later.

It's so easy to read the story of Abraham and Sarah and misunderstand it. We tend to think God promised the old couple a new home; and then, trusting God, they packed their bags, set off, and arrived. 

The reality is that from the very beginning to the very end Sarah and Abraham were wanderers. Explorers. Pilgrims. Strangers in a strange land. And being strangers in a strange land is how they got to know God. It is where the knowing happened--on the way.

Jesus invited the same kind of journey. Leave your work, your families, your stuff...and follow me. 

There is no such thing as a spiritual journey without journeying. And in order to have a spiritual journey we have to leave a familiar country. 

This is what letting go is all about, what letting go is. Letting go is finding trust and chutzpah enough to leave what we already know in order to discover what we yet don't know. This is spiritual growth. It's the same every day. We journey by stages.

In a profound way, Abraham and Sarah were in the Promised Land the moment they left home. Every time they trusted the promise and opened their minds and hearts to what God was calling them to explore, they were already there. 

When we leave the familiar we will often feel lost. Lost is the name of the place where we learn to love, take and value direction. 

Lost? Scared? Confused? 

Reoriented? Grateful? Confident?

These are place names on the way. Part of the map we've filled in as we've traveled. These maps show us where we've been and give us confidence for all the stages of the journey that remain.

Emptiness Is Like This

In my twenties, I river-walked the stream in this picture, Bubbling Spring Branch. We'd rock-hop when we could, wade or swim when we couldn't, and play in the water whenever we found a place to slide or a deep hole to explore.

Within 50 feet of where I took this picture there's a spring. Over the years somebody has made sure there's always a pipe embedded in a way that water flows out high enough to get a bottle or a jug under. I've been drinking from this spring a long time.

Last year I finally met a fellow who tends it--mucks out the weeds, cleans the pipe, resets it so the flow is good.

Emptiness is like this.

Emptiness as First Cousin to Absence

We tend to think of emptiness as a negative thing. A hollow feeling, a spiritual bankruptcy. And, of course, it can rightly have that connotation. But emptiness, in healthy spiritual practice, is a goal--and in it's most helpful form is a verb: EMPTYING.

Making room. Creating space for living water, holy spirit, wisdom, compassion. Preparing the way for our truest selves rather than small-ego-selves.

It's a bad pun, but I can't help but relate Emptiness to Ruminess, because of Rumi's wonderful poem, The Guest House, which is as wise a study of healthy emptying as has ever been passed on. This poem all by itself could form a degree program in spiritual practice.

And many of the classes would be on how to embody all these potent verbs...

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Absence as Prelude

So...Absence can be experienced as prelude to Presence (yesterday's post).

Mindfulness practice helps tune our receivers to Presence. As we faithfully, skillfully, lovingly do the work of paying attention and letting go we begin to make space and capacity for perceiving what the Buddhists speak of as 'The One Who Knows.'

Jesus promised us the Spirit of Truth would guide us into all that is true. Many years earlier, Jewish writers were proclaiming that Wisdom (Sophia) calls aloud from the gateways and doorways and marketplaces.

Wisdom, lucky for us, is both all the wise things our forbears passed on to us AND the ability to know truth from untruth. Wisdom is completely intertwined with The One Who Knows.

Back to poetry.

Mary Oliver works with the same materials R. S. Thomas worked with (yesterday's poem). But her point of view and tone are (to say the least) distinctly different.

Consider...

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

She suggests a lot is possible with a little, yes? The verb 'patch' is helpful. And the words 'doorway' and 'thanks' can encourage us to work with the words 'vacant' and 'silence' more expectantly, yes again?

Absence and Presence are intertwined.

So friends, the preacher intoned, don't let Absence put you off your game. Work with it as the gift it can be.

Faith and Emptiness, R S Thomas

Most people of faith struggle with faith. It's like snakes and snake skins--to grow, something dies and has to be sloughed off. It's usually unnerving.

But the more we tend our relationship with both God and the world, the more we let Wisdom speak to us regarding both, the more we'll grow and will need the sloughing.

The Welsh priest and poet R. S. Thomas writes like he was unnerved much of the time. He's a hard read much of the time. But worth it (though I don't read his poems without remembering to be prayerful, mindful).

He often describes faith in need of sloughing. Faith dried out and peely. Yet in the integrity of his bare honesty, there's something roomy, and in the skilled and beautiful ways he writes, there's something that inspires. Thomas writes so faithfully about his experience of Absence that I often find myself experiencing God as Presence, through the 'Rare Bird' named below, for instance.

More on this in future posts. In the meantime, see for yourselves. But pray first. Pray during. Pray after reading, remembering that emptiness precedes fullness.

Sea-Watching

Grey waters, vast 

                        as an area of prayer

that one enters. Daily

                      over a period of years

I have let my eye rest on them.

Was I waiting for something?

                                          Nothing

but that continuous waving

                             that is without meaning

occurred.

              Ah, but a rare bird is

rare. It is when one is not looking

at times one is not there

                                  that it comes.

You must wear your eyes out

as others their knees.

               I became the hermit

of the rocks, habited with the wind

and the mist. There were days,

so beautiful the emptiness

it might have filled,

                          its absence

was as its presence; not to be told

any more, so single my mind

after its long fast,

                          my watching from praying.

- R.S. Thomas

in Laboratories of the Spirit, 1975