I Don't Know, and I Don't Care :)

I don't know what or who or if God is anymore.

Conversely,  I feel just as close to God as I ever did.

I don't know what or who or if Jesus is or was anymore.  I don't know if he's just the invention of a bunch of people, if he was an enlightened being of the best sort of kind (the kind that leads the way for others ~ or is supposed to, if he doesn't get hijacked into the ugliest religion that ever did make horrors of people who would be far better off not having fallen into cultural religion).  I don't know if he was the Son of God, rescuing the entirety of humanity from itself in the most beautiful possible way, or demonstrating to the souls of humanity aspects they could never see about themselves without someone so unafraid of death laying their life down.  I don't know if Jesus was one of many, or one of one, or none of one.

Conversely, Jesus is still as dear and wonderful and challenging and scary and inspiring to me as he has always been.  Just without so much crap surrounding him.

I don't know about God.  All I know is that when I was reading something before (Julia Cameron's Walking in This World) and she mentioned God as "he", and I said in response to the God within, "I am SO sick of us talking about you as if you have a dick," and inside I felt like this shapeshifting, gurgling laughter.  And I don't know if that is just me, or if it is God.  It feels as if there is a space within me that feels like the me that is mySelf, the Me of the future and the past and the now all wrapped up together, and this Self is connected intimately with this god and yet is separate.  Joined and yet separate, with no loss of myself and yet myself swallowed up inside the vastness of this ... whatever, this Great Creator.

And all I know is that sometimes when I think about that, or feel it in my body and my soul, the joy is intense and I want it to be so, and I want God to be there, and I want everyone in the world to shut up talking about God, and naming God, so that we can reclaim some of the magic.

And all I know is that last night I crawled into bed, and I was listening to my favourite storyteller at the moment, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, talk on my mp3 player about creativity, about Persephone and Demeter and Hades, and she was lulling me to sleep like a child being told a bedtime story.  And all I know is that how it feels to me is that all of those elements are inside of me, the devil inside, the god inside, so much beauty and wonder and mysterious sexy dark, and destruction, and hot sunny creation, all inside.

All I know is that am sure of less than I was 15 years ago (and shudder when I think of how I once was, which is perhaps how life should always be if we are growing enough).

All I know is that I don't need to know so much anymore.

Pastiche

• I've just been reading Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk, sitting in the winter sun in my dressing gown.  She is about all I can stomach at the moment Christianly speaking.  I trust her.  Who could not trust anyone so open about their accedia and their doubts?  Her fight against depression entails exercise and spiritual direction, and so she takes me along on her version of that to places I cannot go, into church buildings on Sunday mornings.  At least through her eyes, I am reminded again and again that the best of Godde is found everywhere, that which brings life and change and courage and healing and hope.  And the rest can go fly.  The sooner the better.
  
  
• In my blogging reading recently (slimmer trevails these days) I came across a comment by someone saying that it is patently obvious that the Bible talks about eternal hell and a holy God who will send people there eternally.  I sometimes forget that people still believe this and my heart goes out to them because that is a small and a thin and a rancid place to be in where your fears congeal like fat on a piece of old meat and the words of Jesus to love your enemies and do not fear become anomalies you cannot reach no matter how hard you try.
  
  And I thought, it's not at all patently obvious in the Bible that that is the case, but the smearing of centuries of people with overblown egoes makes it appear so.  It is so ingrained in so many people, this evil concept that no one can stand up under.  And it makes the word "God" out to be something evil, something so evil that I cannot bear to read anything Christianish except Kathleen Norris and say anything except Godde.  To remind myself.
  
  
• "Anger is the seed of compassion,"  she said, quoting some old desert monk dudes of centuries past.  I sat with this in the sun this morning and it unravelled out before me like golden silk too expensive for a price tag, and yes, I said, and yes, yes, yes.  All those seeds.  Infinite possibilities.  All it requires is honesty, courage, and walking forward in the dark.
   
• Speaking of the dark, I went to the McClelland Sculpture Garden on Monday with my love.  It was a chiaroscuro sort of a beginning to the day - we sat in the car for half an hour beforehand because I was feeling dizzy, the effects of whatever bug it was I'd been (successfully) holding at bay due to the enhanced immune capabilities of Susie version 39.5.  We finally began walking around the lovely gardens, on a chilly but sunny almost-Winter's day.  Is there anything more redolent of childhood than unanticipated gifts?  They are available in adulthood also but we do not fall across them with anything like the frequency that we could unbidden as children (if and/or when we were still so new that the psychic slaps had not reddened our nerve endings).  These sculptures fell across my path and from round bushes and corners like gifts.
  
  A forever-held gift now, a memory:  a toilet block, it seemed, but no, not a toilet block.  How could it be a toilet block when it has a plaque outside it and a request to wipe your feet?  Anyway, it was stainless steel.  And yet, all the hallmarks of perfunctoriness:  square, squat, windowless, and ugly.  A step upwards into the space.  A walk forwards of several steps.  A sharp turn right and back upon yourself.  Plunged into the dark.  Walk forwards, slowly, edging your feet forwards, reaching out your hands, feeling silly, feeling like a trick might be played on you, feeling silly for feeling like that because this is a sculpture garden, not a third grade playground.  But anyway.  Edge forwards.  Feel the wall to your right start curving its way round to the left.  Walk around another corner ... into a starry night.  Holes punched into the roof and a canopy of tiny lights.  A reminder that there is beauty above our heads, under our feet, in the dark.  Do not fear.  We stood in the middle of the starry night in the middle of the sunny day and kissed.  I have never been in love quite like this before.
  
  
• Hawthorn by 27 points.

The Truth in the Inward Parts

My son-in-law, Alan, says in his book, Journey into Christ, 'Our identity is hidden, even from ourselves ... The doctrine that we are made after the image of God proclaims that the human being is fundamentally a mystery, a free spirit. The creative artist is one who carries within him the wound of transcendence. He is the sign that human beings are more than they are.'

... A real problem for most of us is that this 'more than we think we are' is not necessarily recognized as good. It is difficult for most of us to recognize, accept, and affirm those large areas of ourselves which are not compatible with the image of ourselves we would like to project or which the world has taught us we ought to project. Jesus was very clear about these projections, referring to those who projected them as 'whited sepulchres,' clean and white without, and full of dead bones and decay within.

Madeleine L'Engle - Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

A favourite saying is, "God helps those who help themselves." I think the phrase can be understood correctly, but in most practical situations it is pure heresy. Scripture clearly says God helps those who trust in God, not those who help themselves.

We need to be told that so strongly because of our entire "do it yourself" orientation. As educated people, as Americans, our orientation is to do it. It takes applying the brakes, turning off our own power and allowing Another.

What the lordship of Jesus means is that first we come to him, first we put things into his hands. Our doing must proceed from our being. Our being is "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3).

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p.77

I have been pondering this idea all day today, gleaning its comfort. I have become so much more aware in the last year or two how deep I go. How much there is in me that is just patently impossible for me to know. Like Paul, I am frustrated at the depths to which I do that which I do not want to do, and do not do that which I do want to.

Thinking about this today, reading those words from L'Engle this afternoon, I thought for the first time really about how these deep parts must also commune with God. God does not commune simply with my mind and my heart, the conscious elements of me. There are parts of me groaning in prayer. Just as there are animals living their entire existence, only recently discovered, so far down in the ocean that it was commonly believed nothing would or could exist down there. God is speaking to the deep, deep calling to deep, without me even being aware. That is so comforting to me. The depths of my soul scare me just as much as they thrill me with their deep deep knowings and their strange dark beauty.

I mentioned to my friend a few days ago how it felt to me as if the seasons were about to begin transitioning from summer into autumn. The most subtle of feelings, the very beginning, like it feels when I know the very second my period is beginning. Autumn is not even palpable on the air yet, certainly not manifested into a smell. But just evident this evening, as I noticed the sun going down just a little earlier than usual. The sun was a beautiful golden ball of light. I let it seep into my soul. I could feel, for a moment, the urge to hang onto the light. But it is the way of things that the light must die. I must share it with my northern friends too :) (There is also a tinge of melancholy attached to summer now, this one being so full of destruction. This season I am not sorry to see the end of summer).

My friend mentioned to me, in the striking way that female friends have with each other, that I am in the process of transition. I am transitioning, my friend assured me with the conviction of one who can see. It's just that I can't see it yet, she said.

I agree. How weird it is this agreeing, down deep, down where the knowing is and the blood starts. I can't see it at all. I have no real idea what it entails. But it is coming. A turning. In accordance with the seasons, as the leaves will begin to twist and turn their ways off the trees. Just as the leaves become their real, true colour in autumn, I pray also, with fervency, that this autumn I will become just that little bit more like myself. Or putting it another way, I look forward in my turning to becoming just a little bit more like Christ. Whatever that looks like.

Kairos Space and Kairos Time

"In moments of mystical illumination we may experience, in a few chronological seconds, years of transfigured love ... Time is to be treasured, worked with, never ignored. As the astrophysicists understand time now, it is not like a river, flowing in one direction, but more like a tree, with great branches and smaller limbs and twigs which may make it possible for us to move from one branch to another, as did Jesus and Moses and Elijah, as did St Andrew and St Francis when they talked with each other in that light of love which transcends all restrictions of time."

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections in Faith and Art


Time as a tree - it's the only way it makes sense :)

Madeleine is waxing lyrical in reference to this painting by El Greco, of Andrew and Francis traversing the times and the spaces to converse with each other. She believed such things were possible. God only knows what she's believing now she's crossed over the river :)

The spaces feel thin today, now, swimming in kairos time. Anything seems possible to me, even though it is 400 million degrees celcius and I could fry eggs on the lounge room floor of my house when I get home on days like this. Tomorrow is going to be 41 celcius, the day after 40, the day after 40. I be sleeping in the lounge room all this week with the aircon on. Apologies to the ozone layer.

If my dog knew he was going to the beach in an hour, such joy would make all his molecules explode.

I think that's why dogs can't see into the future. Occasionally I feel like the veil parts, and I can, just down the road, just for a moment ~ not the actualities, but the possibilities, the infinite possibilities that are truer than boredom and smallness ~ and it throws me into these little mini paroxysms such as you are seeing displayed before you today.

Madeleine L'Engle always sends me into this state. She understood the paroxysms too, I think. She believed crazy things, too.

When we become too rational and logical, and can't believe in crazy flights of fancy that children believe easily and wholeheartedly, in dreams that present themselves to you and ask you to fulfill them, in time travel, in hope, in streams flowing in the desert, then we are quite possibly insane :)

We are seated with Christ in the heavenlies.

The Child World and the Child Within

Sometimes I think the world is like a child who has been hit by a semi trailer and our parent is holding our hand and unable to explain in a way we will understand why it is that the doctor is digging the scalpel in and twisting and causing us even more pain.

Spiderweb thread is very strong indeed. I read ages ago that if it was magnified 10 times it could hold the weight of a jumbo jet. This is how my above perspective on God in a suffering world feels. My faith hangs on it, and I cannot help but believe that, somehow, along with Julian of Norwich, all shall be all and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. That belief looks so fine, like spiderweb thread. Sometimes it feels like a strong wind could blow it away. It shimmers and threatens to break, but for all of that it has remarkable staying power.

Today is Australia Day. It feels so very, very wrong to be celebrating our country on the anniversary of the day the First Fleet sailed into harbour and displaced the oldest culture in the world. I concur with Mick Dodson, the Australian of the Year, who said yesterday it alienates the indigenous population. Is that what we want to happen, every Australia Day? I agree with Dodson. If we change it to another day, it totally changes everything, gives it a forward-focussing thrust straight away.

Dodson was realistic that any dialogue to change the day would be a long-running one so, despite K-Rudd's emphatic no, hopes that the conversation continues. I do too. It is a worthwhile conversation for us to have, not simply for the leader of a fallible political system to make, but for us, the people, to make. It is an idea whose time has very much come.

From little things big things grow.

(As an aside, I was very pleased to hear that George Schofield, dog chiropractor extraordinaire, was awarded an Order of Australia Medal yesterday for his magical chiropractic skills, for service to the greyhound industry and to the health of dogs in general. Nice one.)

I met up with my mother today for a little musical do in the Treasury Gardens. It was first organised a few years ago by a bunch of Aboriginal artists and musicians. The vast majority of the acts were hip-hop artists, so that is probably the cause of the headache I am nursing right now. But those aside, there was some great stuff too. Archie Roach, the dearly beloved, headlined. There was a reggae band called Soul Nation, and another band whose name escapes me but who began their set playing African drum solos, and who were mighty fine also.

And it was good to be there, where the indigenous people called today Survival Day, and I saw a man wipe a tear away from his eye as Archie sang about the stolen generations.

"It's begun," Archie said, "the change. It began last February with the government's apology to the Stolen Generations. It's continuing with the election of Obama to the White House. Ever so slowly, the change is happening."

The hope and growing confidence and pride of indigenous people is a beautiful thing to watch. One day we will wonder how so many of us ever fell into the blind pit of racism. I reckon too one day we will wonder how so many of us ever had the blindness to not see God in every atom. But that's just my fond, spiderweb hope for a future world that will lose all of its eye-scales. Even the non-trendy ones. 'Cause it's trendy to not be racist anymore, but it's still way, way non-trendy to love the God of the Bible.

Archie's last song was Beautiful Child, about that inner spiritual part of us that sees, that's eternally young, that creates, that loves, and I thought, I don't think I will ever quite, quite be satisfied until the God of the Bible is likened more to that beautiful child than to the God that comes out of Empire religion. Whose outward flow was a generation of well-meaning people who displaced childen from their families and thought they were doing God a favour in the process.

God help us. We always need it, after all.

But Wait! There's More

I put some more sardines out for the kitten this evening, in a fit of weakness. I looked outside but couldn't see it anywhere. Figured it must have gone back home. Sat down to watch a movie, and then got up to have a quick look outside. And there is kitteh, chowing down on sardines.

But wait. There's more. From under the house comes another kitteh. And another. There are three kittehs under my house. I really need to go talk to the people down the road. Check out what their kittens look like. See if maybe these are their cats who are traipsing down to the take-away joint a few doors down, or if I've got myself a couple more cats than I bargained for.

Edit: an hour and a half later. It is quite mesmerising watching scared-of-you pusses eating food. They battle between being scared of you and being unable to resist the smell of sardines. I sat almost motionless in the doorway for about half an hour. After a while I began to be able to distinguish between the three of them. Until the fourth one came along. The fourth one is more black than the others, less tabby markings. It must take after it's mum, who I saw at the very end. She came walking around the corner and bolted even faster than her kittens when she saw me. Looks a bit like she hasn't eaten for a while, too. I suppose the rest of the sardines are going to have to go out there, aren't they?

I don't think these cats live down the road somehow. I think maybe they live here. Aaaggh! Is this some kind of cosmic joke? I talk about my dislike for cats, then begin to consider getting one, and suddenly I attract an entire family under my house (which is an especially good house to live under, having as it does so many different spots for entry). I sat and watched them, how sweet they are. I can hear them banging around under the house as I type. I suppose I shall have to go door-knocking over the next few days, see if I can find out whose they belong to. I must confess, my mind began wandering while I watched these pusses. Do vets take discounts for group desexing? :)

As I sat and observed these kittens, in that wound-down way that comes with sitting and watching and doing not much else, I thought that if I kept watching them I would come to know them. That simply sitting and observing, without the distraction of beeping electronic things, draws you deeper into something or someone, into its itsness. Knowing. In the same sort of way I know my little wooden chair so much better now after I sat and drew it for an hour a week ago. Got so involved in it it almost disappeared. The deep knowing that comes, I think romantically, from living quieter, simpler, contemplating. The kind of knowing that astonishes you at times with the realisation that you have forgotten to see again the rare beauty that infuses everything.

This beauty is sadly so often exempted from our eyes simply because of the pace we are forced to live. I can feel it when I slip back into it, like slipping into something most comfortable of all, and I wonder how I ever manage to slip out of this relaxed alertness without realising it. It's the way I felt when I used to do yoga. It's the way I feel when I mould clay and, more recently, when I draw things. And it is so terribly easy to slip out of it that it bewilders me.

Nature is what draws me back in, slows me down, gives me peace. Enables me to gaze at the objects of my focus with the gazing it requires, lest I gaze too quickly and begin treating that object abominably before I even realise it ~ dismissively, like an enemy, as something not-of-God.

You are "within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased" (Bonaventure)

Unstretching

My brother has departed for the moment. Has gone to stay over in our old South Oakleigh stomping ground, to catch up with friends, our parents and his ex/new girlfriend, to do a few days' work, get his car fixed, etc. He was so fine when I said to him this morning to not take it personally but that I need my space or I will go insane :) How hard it was to work up to saying that. Ouch! But he was gearing up to leave anyway. He has things to do, and he knew that he was cramping my style. Could probably sense it in my stroppiness of the past few days, my downcast eyes. I can't help it. After a while, I just can't breathe.

Such powerful validation when you tell people what you need and they accept it and feed back to you that it's okay. It's like I am growing, but also doubting, and when I get the encouragement that maybe something really is okay, I grow into it a little bit more, there on the spot. Staking my claim, stating my claim, that this is what I require - this size and shape - breathes it into being and solidifies it before my eyes. I often don't quite realise how much I need something until I have spoken the words. And then sometimes I surprise even myself as a the words are coming out of my mouth. Why, yes, that's exactly what I was sensing, but I didn't know how well I could articulate it until I did. This life is a spinout.

My solitude requirements are so different to so many people I know that I really do need encouragement from others that it is okay. I feel guilty. It feels self-indulgent. But then that is often the way when you start unfolding yourself into the sizes that you actually require. It feels too free, so there must be something wrong. But maybe there's nothing wrong. Maybe it is just the space you were always meant to take up until the people around you and your own stupidity and lack of courage folded you down smaller than you were meant to be. We can become so used to self-created discomfort that we miss it when it's gone.

I think this struggle for what I require shall go on for a while, this knowing what I require and this resisting it, this feeling guilty for it. But there is nothing for it because if I don't walk into the spaces I have ploughed, my anger and resentment come spilling out the sides, as they have been doing over the past few days.

I once thought this sort of anger and resentment was just plain childish petulance. Now I believe it is something different, a warning device more than petulance. And yet still the guilt remains. I compare myself to others - always a pointless enterprise. But I look at my friend Jane, who put me up in her house for three months until I found my own place after Mark and I broke up. Sure, I was flitting off for a fortnight at a time, but still, for a great portion of the time I was there. And Jane seemed to cope pretty well without having a nervous breakdown. But then, I can spend countless hours and days with Jane and it doesn't rankle me because we are much more well-matched than my brother and I.

And I think of my cousin, Andi, who also harboured me for weeks at a time at her house, slotted me in amongst her husband and two children. But of course, it is even more easier for me and Andrea to be around each other than just about anyone else I know, really. We have got so good at it, from all those childhood school holidays spent together, six weeks on the trot, day and night, without hardly breaking stride. Ahhh, memories :)

So I am thankful for these two women who helped me when I really needed help. I am grateful to them. But if I compare myself to them, I feel guilty because I have only had my brother here for a few weeks and already it is driving me nuts. But still, there are differences in dynamics, obviously. Andrea and Jane have not affected my boundaries in the way that my brother has, and so there is always a psychic kind of thing that goes on when I am around him. I understand the difference. It drains me so. But still, I feel guilty. This is a long process, it seems.

Tonight, I have the house to myself. My brother is away until next Tuesday, and then probably back for a day or two here and there, but generally, I have my house back. Of course, as often happens, the first hours I have had the house to myself it has felt strangely empty. It's as if the people that have inhabited the spaces before you are still hanging around, and the space has not yet stretched itself back to how it was before they were there. Does anyone else get so whackily influenced by spaces in this way, or is it just me and my flakiness? :)

I feel like I have been sleeping sitting up on concrete all night leaning against a cold fence. Part of it is actually physical - I am way overdue for a chiropractor visit. Most of it is psychological and emotional. I must have my space. I just must. It is non-negotiable. But as you are seeing, dear fellow blogger, I am struggling with this requirement. It seems so big to me. Why do I have require such ridiculous crazy amounts of solitude? And yet, I can ask the question all I want but the answer only comes in acceptance. It is how I am. It is how it is. God must be okay with it, even if I am patently not there yet. I believe that. Sometimes.

So this evening, to celebrate getting my couch back, I lay on it for way too many hours in a row and watched the last 4 episodes of the last season of Six Feet Under. And cried of course. And laughed of course. It's so funny to me that this show, with such a Buddhist emphasis, still manages to call to me about God. I'm sure it was not the aim of the show's producers but nevertheless, it does. I think I see God in strange, downbeat, outcast places and oh, it is some kind of freedom :)

I am very mindful of needing my space and my silence because the times are a-calling for it. I need to get quiet. I need to listen and sniff the wind. I feel so unsettled in my spirit at the moment. Does anybody else feel that way? Politically, economically, it feels like so many changes are underfoot. And I need the silence the silence the silence to get some sort of handle on what it is that is unsettling me so much.

The silence. Oh, the beautiful silence where everything rights itself. Where I hear my heart speak. Where I quell the fear and God speaks and I cry and he watches and I watch him and we gaze at each other with our non-eyes. I go through the days filled with people and colour and light and noise and I love all of that. But it is strangely emptying. The emptiness drives me paradoxically to the empty desert silences to be filled. These silences are so full they overflow their banks and the outflow drives me to stick my hands in clay and paint and move words around on the page and write poems. I feel like I have stacks of words floating around in my head waiting for a poem skin to put them into and I can't wait to get back there because I feel unsafe for too long outside of that space.

You Left a Thousand Women Crazy

You Left a Thousand Women Crazy

Beloved,
Last Time,
When you walked through the city
So beautiful and so naked,

You left a thousand women crazy
And impossible to live with.

You left a thousand married men
Confused about their gender.

Children ran from their classrooms,
And teachers were glad you came.

And the sun tried to break out
Of its royal cage in the sy
And at last, and at last,
Lay its Ancient Love at Your feet.

~ Hafiz

Yes, he is talking about God's abundant presence walking through the streets of time and city, but his images come from human fascinations and feelings. Yes, he is talking about seething human desire, but he is also convinced that it is a sweet path to God. Why has this integration, this coincidence of seeming opposites, occurred with relative rarity in religion traditions? It is more common in native spiritualities, and a bit more common in Hinduism (witness the HIndu temples and rituals) and among the Islamic mystics. But one would think that if there were any religion that would have most welcomed this integration, it would have been Christianity. After all, we are the only world religion that believes that God became a living human body. We Christians are the only believers in a full, concrete, and physical enfleshment of God. We call it the "incarnation" and we call him "Jesus".

~ Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

An Act of Surrender

Mike from The Mercy Blog is pondering lyrical as always, this time about silence. Who knew it could contain the whole universe? I love what he has to say, so I reproduce it in its entirety here (the actual post is here):

Maggie Ross has just posted number IV in her Ethics Issuing from Silence series. She begins:

When silence is the wellspring, day-to-day living evolves toward simplicity and unobtrusiveness. To inhabit silence naturally leads to embracing silence in the exterior as well as interior worlds. Changes to the way you live may take place subtly and gradually, almost without your realizing it.

and ends:

In short, there is good news and bad news. The "bad" news is that you will never again feel at home in the culture around you. The good news is that you now lead a life whose riches were once unimaginable. There is no language to describe it. Far from being a selfish exercise, a life lived from the wellspring of silence influences other lives - but without our being aware of this fact. Silence itself has resonances, but the way you have come to be in the world quietly opens the possibility of transfiguration to everyone around you.

I would urge you to click over and read the whole post. But I mention it here not just as a recommendation - heartfelt though that is - but because I am so convinced that this life of prayer comes to permeate all that we are, and that accepting that God has called us in this way is to accept the most profound rearrangement of all we have come to accept as "normal life".

Richard Rohr writes:

The most simple and spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's also the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love.

We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place of the soul without a great love, without the light and love of the Lord. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique...

We must learn to trust God. Developing that trust is worth some particular attention, worth making time to stop and pray, and be quiet in God.

That may be impractical, but the way of faith is not the way of efficiency. God has not called us to an efficient way of life. We are called to a way of faith. Much is a matter of listening and waiting.

(Radical Grace, Daily Meditations)

This act of surrender, this taking of our hands off the controls of our life, is anything but a trivial thing. It is perhaps the most radical act, short of dying, that we're likely to find ourselves involved in. As Rohr suggests, it requires courage - but not the raw, exhilarating courage that comes in some emergency, and permits acts of bravery we'd never consider if we had time to think. It's a long-term kind of courage, much more like the courage that keeps a mother at the bedside of her sick child through the cold hours before dawn. But this courage is ultimately a decision for joy, paradoxically enough. The love of God is the most joyful thing there is, and all we stand to lose are the things that stand between that love and our own heart.

For silence is not God, nor speaking; fasting is not God, nor eating; solitude is not God, nor company; nor any other pair of opposites. He is hidden between them, and cannot be found by anything your soul does, but only by the love of your heart. He cannot be known by reason, he cannot be thought, caught, or sought by understanding. But he can be loved and chosen by the true, loving will of your heart.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Sounds good to me

Re-creation, holy leisure, is the mainstay of the contemplative soul, and the theology of Sabbath is its cornerstone. "On the seventh day," scripture says, "God rested." With that single image, that one line of Holy Writ, reflection, re-creation of the creative spirit, transcendence, the right to be bigger than what we do, is sanctified. To refuse to rest, to play, to run loose for awhile on the assumptions that work is holier, worthier of God, more useful to humankind than refreshment, strikes at the very root of contemplation. ...

Recreation is the act of stretching the soul. When we stop the race to nowhere, when we get off the carousel of productivity long enough to finally recognize that it is going in a circle, we reclaim a piece of our own humanity. ...

Only Sabbath, only re-creation gives me the chance to step back and think, to open up and be made new, to walk through life with eyes up and heart open, to expand the human parts of my human experience.

Illuminated Life, Joan Chittister

Lifted from Barbara's blog.

This just goes right into the middle of my solar plexus, and it whirls around in there like it's got fins and a tail.

This just goes right into the middle of my soul because in that space of holy leisure lies all the trinkets I've been uncovering, exploring, re-exploring, all those creative things that I can do that really yell "fuck you" to the culture more than holding up signs and protesting does. Turns out that being myself, and walking into what that means, fully inhabiting myself instead of abdicating 6 feet above myself, ends up being the absolute best thing I could be.

Okay. So I'm obviously not a rocket scientist. But still, who woulda thunk it?

The creativity/spiritual connection

I feel really stuck creatively. All of a sudden, I just don't know what to do with myself. I've squeezed out a few poems recently, still writing my morning pages, did a collage last week. But I just feel so stuck!!

It's weird but I have noticed this pattern that whenever I feel unwell, I don't go in the playroom. I feel like there is a reason for that. It's some kind of not wanting to sully my space - not in a superstitious kind of way; it just feels too creative in there when I'm not feeling up to it. Whenever I want to get creative and I'm feeling unwell, you'll generally find me curled up on the couch with the blanket and a tray. I'm a big believer in trays.

So I haven't been in my playroom for a week or so. Was just getting ready to come climb into bed and be cosy. Thought, I wonder if there is a connection between how totally disorientated I am feeling spiritually and how totally disorientated I am feeling creatively? I am feeling very far away from it all, and while I wrote last week some time about how these days I have developed a confidence in knowing I can make it back there again with much more ease even when I've slipped away, there is still that unsettling feeling of not having any idea at all of actually how to get back there. The willingness to just go and sit with the nothingness and see what happens. But hey, I feel like I'm doing that anyway so I may as well be doing it in a creative space and see what happens.

Grabbed Julia Cameron's The Sound of Paper on my way past the bookcase. She is the solace I most seek when I am feeling creatively dead, the way that Richard Rohr and Madeleine L'Engle are my lifelines when I'm feeling spiritually dead.

And here is what I opened the page at, as I hunkered down in bed, crying into a tissue (standard procedure):

Try this: Often when we skid to a halt in our work, we skid to a halt in our spiritual life as well. We do not think to ask God' s help to dissolve our creative resistance, and yet such prayer is often the right answer. Take pen in hand and pray on the page. Write a letter to whatever you conceive of as the Great Creator. Complain, gripe, moan, sigh, weep, scream in sheer frustration. And ask for help. Next, pick up the phone and call an open-minded and positive friend. Explain that you need spiritual support for your creative endeavour. Ask her to pray for your restored productivity. Finally, go back to work. Your prayers have been answered, and you have achieved enough mobility to give work a try.

This definitely felt like one of those God moments. And I haven't even come bashfully with my tail between my legs about swearing at him yet. But hey, that's why I didn't even really felt like I needed to, you know? He knows I'm angry at him. He knows I still am. He knows why and he knows why I'm frustrated.

So anyway. I don't need to pick up the phone. I'll just ask you guys instead? Please pray for me for restored creativity. I seem to go a bit batty without it (battier, anyway). I'm going off to sleep and to write aggro prayers to God. And I imagine I will probably say 'fuck' in them there, too. But he can handle extended dummy spits. And I will at some point get my tail between my legs, not because I feel like I should in all due reverence, but because I know his grace and his love will compel me out of sheer beauty.

But in the meantime, Johnny Lydon was so right. Anger is an energy. I'm just not sure that I'm really expending it on anything meaningful right now but you know. Whatever.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

The cross, as we see again and again, is the "coincidence of opposites": One movement going vertical, another going horizontal, clearly at cross-purposes.

When the opposing energies of any type collide within you, you suffer. If you agree to hold them creatively until they transform you, it becomes redemptive suffering.

This stands in clear and total opposition to the myth of redemptive violence, which has controlled most of human history, even though it has never redeemed anything. Expelling the contradictions instead of "forgiving" them only perpetuates the problem.

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness

Go read Mike, who is waxing lyrical at the moment, about the reality we live in and the reality created by the cross. Wonderful stuff. Stuff you can swim in. Love your work, bro. Especially the Rohrmeister inclusions.

Me, I'm off to work, on a sunny Saturday. But that's okay. The buffer zone is expanded a bit this morning. Feels like I can go to work and be busy and still have space to sit inside myself at the same time. Nice.

So happy Saturday, bloggers :)

Buffer zones

Sometimes I feel like there is not enough of a buffer zone between me and the rest of the world. It's like a psychological force field or something, which allows you to feel like you can breathe, in the space between where you end and everybody else begins. Does that make sense, or am I betraying my insanity? I think when humans are functioning healthily, we have a large zone between us and everything else. It enables calm inside the storm. It is the rest of God which I have been talking about so much this week. Living in that rest is a bit of a production, though, and I am so glad that the Producer is committed to wonderful outcomes no matter how long they take.

Buffer zones. I watched a show several weeks ago about a man with Tourette's Syndrome who found it very hard to filter things out. They took him to stand in the middle of Grand Central Station, and he picked out how he could hear that woman's footsteps over there, and hear the conversation these people were having over here, on and on. Maybe I do have Tourette's Syndrome after all :) But no, mine isn't quite as intense as that. Mine is more a case of needing tons of time to reflect and process, not so much on an intellectual level as emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. I think all of humanity has problems with filtering. Especially living in our world.

That thing out there, that world, it's no secret it's frenetic. Now, of course, sometimes frenetic is fun. It's good getting caught up in colour and life and stuff happening. But when you're of a contemplative bent then it all gets a bit frazzling quite quickly. I went into the desert of CFS of a philosophical bent and came out a philosophical contemplative. To be too long out in the frenzy of 21st century Western culture is much more overwhelming these days than it used to be before I got ill. Perhaps it is a case of having discovered the rest of God; it's like once you tune into the speed of life, you find a rhythm there that just makes the pace of current life look like some kinda crazy whirligig, a blustering after nothing much of the time, a spinning in one spot, chasing our tails. So much of what we do is pointless. How scary it is to discover that.

And how awesome to have discovered that. Deserts might be barren upon first inspection; no one could mistake them for lush. And lush has its place. Lush is ... well, you can swim around in lush, immerse yourself, fill yourself up, wash your hair in it and drink it. Lush is grace. Do that in the desert and you'll get grit in your eyes and sand burn. It's lonely in the desert and there is the potential for dying of dehydration or of hypothermia. Those changes in temperature are brutal. But the desert slows you down. It strips away. It shows you a stick and it tells you to start digging for the living water underneath. The desert is necessary. The desert can become a friend.

I did some centering prayer this morning. It made me wonder: if you had to choose a verse which Westerners in this time are thirsty to hear the most, what do you think it would be? Sometimes I think it's, "Be still and know that I am God". We are running to stand still, because we are scared that there's nothing there if we look into the nothingness. But it turns out there's more in the nothingness than there ever will be in our frenzy.

I never wanted to live in the desert. It isn't after all a place that we are really meant to live in. Not forever, anyway. It's not a place we're destined for. We get to have a whole lotta lush; it's what we've been made for. But sometimes the most direct way to lush is through the desert.

God is everywhere, man. Centreing prayer - expands my buffer zone. Makes me feel ... centred. Funny, that :)

Medicalised mysticism

Perhaps why I identify with Francis of Assisi so ;) Hehe (HT to The Website of Unknowing):

Straightjacket Needed in Assisi

I think sanity and insanity are fluid constructs, and maybe we all flow regularly in and out of each state. All of us.

But maybe God's holy fools need these days to be prepared to go to a psychiatric institution rather than to prison :)

A visit from the great sky monster

Last night, Lester stood barking out the open door, into the dark at nothing, seemingly. So I told him off. Turns out he was saying his piece to the great sky monster before it came too close. Then it came closer, rushing through the city in a great swathe that stretched from the north all the way down to the Bay (I checked. I love the Bureau of Meteorology website ;)

The great bucketfuls were so loud on my flat roof that I couldn't hear the radio playing and couldn't walk anywhere without a shivering dog at my feet. As the rain fell, the intense pressure I'd been feeling in my body began to ease. It was like an outward manifestation of the inward relaxation that had happened when I had sat down earlier at my computer to write I knew not what, and the words came, and they relaxed me, and I felt his pleasure. And I swapped, for the 388 millionth time, expectations for expectancy and relaxed into the moment to find God there. Again. Enough.

The rain stopped and the great sky monster brought out his party tricks, throwing his beautiful bolts through the sky, lighting up into the black that wonderful sensuous blue. Sending his great shards of crackling sound through the air. Releasing further the pressure in my body that had threatened to pop it earlier in the afternoon. It's something to do with barometric pressure. Ever since I have been sick, it's been really bad. Some days it can send me to the couch in a raging frenzy of anxiety and tension, sending all my internal dials buzzing backwards and forwards. When I'm already unwell, it's just too much. And so the relief when the storm hit was palpable. With the change in the air, the balloon deflated back down to garden variety crappy, feelings I was able to put aside in such rarified air that can only come with a storm, the sun, a waterfall, or standing on the side of a mountain.

Poor Lester didn't fare so well. I got up with renewed energy and began cooking myself dinner at 9.30 pm. Lester, however, cowed by the overhead shenanigans of the great sky monster, cowered at my feet, all 40 kilos of him, trying to stuff himself into the open cupboard in some kind of frantic effort to get away from it all.

I mourned with him for a while. Poor darling, he does have such a hard time of it. But selfishly, I hope that when the next great storm hits he is at his Dad's place so that I can rejoice with myself rejoicing, instead of mourning with a dog who just doesn't understand that the great sky monster is just having a bit of fun and ain't gonna do him no wrong.

The storm passed, as they always do. I felt cosy, all of a sudden, cooking myself up some good nosh, feeling the exhilaration of feeling slightly unwell. In comparison to how I felt earlier, it felt like magic. Always our moments are defined by the ones that have gone before. Light and dark mixed together, redeeming each other.

The radio was able to be heard once again after the sky monster moved on. Phillip Adams got talking on Late Night Live about his usual interesting subjects and I felt that cosy, comforting, inside feeling of the cooler months. Phillip discussed melancholia, and the place of sadness in our lives, and whether we are too quick to medicalise melancholia, that there is a place in the world for all sorts, that go-getting extroversion might be the only way to be in a culture that expects 24/7 productivity, but that we are much, much more than our small, small culture.

Nothing like a bit of philosophical pondering to redeem a day that was totally shot to hell several hours earlier. Yesterday ran the gamut of emotions, more than usual. I may be a positive melancholic, I have decided, after listening to LNL. I don't know if there is such a thing. I do know that there is certainly a place for it in our world, the world that God inhabits, in dark and alien places. Sometimes, when I ponder that, I get so Zen and calm I couldn't reach out and touch the edges of the moment even if I tried.

Excuse me, your chakra needs aligning

I think I am still absorbing my art therapy session. It was fun! (It was also nerve-racking. I had the biggest comfort eating session I have had for YEARS - or at least the biggest non-munchies-related one. On the way up the mountain - which is really a hill rather than a mountain - I had a double cheeseburger with fries and a chocolate thickshake even though I was hardly hungry at all, and then on the way down the mountain I had a Maxibon ice cream and a packet of cheese Twisties. Disgusting. It sat in my stomach like a stone and felt shite. I don't plan on doing that again anytime soon ... but gee, it was kinda fun at the time! It filled the empty nervous hole quite nicely, thank you very much.

I took along my collages and also some dreams I'd written down since I first spoke with Maggie last week. She is the most lovely, non-judgmental, accepting person, a real sweetheart. I felt immediately comfortable with her. She sealed the deal when, after hearing about my tree fetish, at the end of our session took me out into her backyard where she has a 200-year-old something-or-other-I-can't-remember which was sitting there reaching all his amazing spindles to the sky. I wanted to marry this tree. Is there something wrong with that? :) We are going to sit out there in one of our sessions, under this tree, with such a beautiful, commanding presence in her lovely garden.

Maggie saw linkages between my collages and my dreams, which I couldn't particularly see at all. My dreams seemed like so much gobbledegook, but after a few symbolic elements pointed out in one in particular, suddenly I realised how congruent this dream was, what a story it was telling me about myself, a story about self-nurture. I get the feeling I have quite a bit to tell myself if I'm willing to listen (I am; I love the sound of my own voice, even internally ;) This dream ended up including, surprise surprise, elements of creativity and, yes, sexuality :) Those damn phallic symbols - they're just everywhere.

Anyway, it seems that creativity and sexuality share the same chakra, and mine is out of whack :)

Now, see, this is where I would have balked 10 years ago and called this woman names in my head about how deceived she is and all that stuff and considered not returning. But you know what? I don't think, from observing where I am sitting at this juncture in my journey, having learned what I have learned over the past 10 years, that Western Christianity seems to have all that great a monopoly on the truth of reality. I am not talking here about the ultimate Truth of Jesus, who is a deliciously hidden treasure in the field of time, but about the propensity of Christendom to try to fit absolutely everything in the outer world into a paradigm taken from the Bible, to the extent of ignoring the facts in front of our noses if they don't fit into our sometimes narrow interpretations of a book that does, you have to admit, from our very limited perspective, contradict itself.

This is not to say that I don't hold the Bible in the highest regard. Indeed, I still give it a big capital buh. There is something magical about that collection of books. They are, however, not a science document. And when I look at the human body, it seems obvious to me that it is a body of energy. (It is also a body of water, and a body of clay, and all sorts of other wonderful things as well, all at the same time). It makes sense to me that if the body has some sort of energy thing going on in it, that it could have "centres" of energy in the body and those centres could get blockages in them. And if it's possible to get blockages in them then I imagine it's somehow possible to unblock them.

I don't know what it takes to realign an out of alignment chakra, but if I get that radar buzzing, that easy to ignore but nevertheless real constriction somewhere in my soul that tells me that Papa doesn't want me to go there - then I won't. But if I sense this is something that will be helpful to me physically/spiritually/emotionally then I will go with it. There have been so many things that I have discovered along my Christian journey that would be labelled as bad that have turned out to be either neutral or even good ... I'm not interested in hearing people who operate out of a system of fear to tell me what is right or wrong anymore.

See, this is the thing that annoys me about Christians too. We get into this paradigm of good and evil - even though Someone somewhere has told us that we don't have the ability to know what is good for us and what is bad for us - and we willy nilly throw things we have no understanding of into the "good" or the "bad" basket, creating barricades for ourselves. Not only that, but we often refuse to believe that anyone who is not a Christan could possibly have any kind of contact with the truth. Chakras? What a ridiculous concept, evil hocus pocus from Satan. We don't stop to think that perhaps a certain group of people in a different time or place to our own have been free to see certain realities because they have or haven't had a certain set of presumptions to blinker their view.

Even the way we read the Bible can endorse that kind of black and white thinking (but really, the Bible can endorse any kind of thinking we want, containing as it does some kind of strange spiritual mirror that reflects us back to ourselves). Then you can get all godhatesfags.com about everything, going around with the divine right bestowed by an angry God to root out the evil from amongst us to throw out of the camp so that Jehovah will deign to shine his face upon us and bless us, even though elsewhere it says he sends his rain on the just and unjust alike, and even though Jesus didn't see fit to rile with anger against anyone except those convinced of their own rightness and the blackness of others' hearts because they weren't walking the same way.

So anyway, may your chakras all be aligned. I watched Robin Hood (the British TV serialised version) the other day (I might watch it again; all those blokes getting around in jerkins with vast amounts of facial hair was edifying). There was a woman on there being drowned for being a witch, and I couldn't help feeling a certain kind of camaraderie :)

The least of these (sometimes that's ourselves)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

Rumi

(Taken from One House. Go check out their little corner of Blogopia, and especially the photo of this cool installation).

I love that quote by Rumi. It leads me on in my brain's convoluted fashion to think of this one:

"Everything is permissible for me" - but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me" - but I will not be mastered by anything. (1 Cor 6:12).

The issue is not one of black and white right and wrong. Life goes beyond that. Moving beyond narrowly-defined issues of "right and wrong" does not send us out into a field of licence (unless that was already in your heart to do so). It sends us out into a field that is so wide that it is big enough to enable us to begin to love the unlovable. It moves us beyond "us and them" mentalities, out to be able to love even those who are, shock, horror, walking in the dark, whatever that might mean.

It means being free to be able to discern, instead of Bible thump with our own agendas, what God may be saying to us about the people we come across who are in need in some way, and to be able to reach out to them with no prior agendas (even if that agenda is showing to them the love of God - he is capable of doing that without us). It also enables us to see that sometimes, as SaltSister said so eloquently on her post, what people need may not even be spiritual milk. Her analogy to a newborn baby:

They don’t even get milk at first. They get colostrum, which precedes the milk flow. It assists the immune system and acts as a laxative to clear out the digestive tract. It’s sort of a detoxifier. Some people are so messed up that it’s exactly an analogy of what they need before they can receive milk. Detox, droppers, milk — in that order.

Happy Saturday, bloggers.

Be still and you will know that I Am

In my more cynical moments I have questioned whether those of us who are the Church in the world believe that God is there at all. Or if he is, whether he is away, off doing something else, and perhaps if we enter into the deathly silence we shall find that there is nothing there but the sound of our own breathing.

If we do believe he is there, why do we of all people persist in filling up our lives and our meetings with talk, our worship with noise? Are we afraid of the silence? Why are we so afraid of the silence? At times I am guilty of the cynicism of thinking that all the Church is contributing is clanging cymbals.

So watching The Monastery, a three-part BBC production, exposd my own levels of cynicism, humbled me on a couple of levels, and inspired me greatly. This series was produced in 2005, and saw 5 modern blokes, only one of who claimed a Christian faith, spending 40 days in Worth Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in England. What a fascinating journey. It is so easy, even as Christians - perhaps especially as Christians - to label others. The man at the beginning who I tipped to be the one who would fall and be cracked open on the experience was the one who was cracked open, but not in the negative way that I expected. His outward shell fooled me (will I never learn to stop being fooled by outward bluster?); his job writing sex scripts for the soft porn industry set me to thinking that this man would not be open to God (will I never extrapolate what has gone in in my own heart and apply it to the rest of the world?). My heart is nothing like God's. By the end of his 40-day stay, Tony had come out with a real, questioning, mysterious beginning to the journey of knowing Papa.

Gary, the Christian of the group but also one of the most wounded, had a run-in with Anthoney, the other wounded soul. They just clashed. Both were irritating in their own ways, but the end of the show saw Gary come to the wise conclusion that even though he could well have been right in his arguments with Anthoney, there is a way of being wrong even while being right if your attitude is sucking. Speaking the truth in love - sometimes in our zeal to speak the truth, we turn it into lies by our attitude. It is better to say nothing if we cannot speak it in love. What a great challenge this is. To be vulnerable in the world. Soften my heart.

This show brought me up against my own humbling. For many years I derided the Catholic Church and all of its traditions - basically the entirety of Christendom for centuries, when you think about it - and found little of value within it. These days, I have begun to see that my rigid doctrinal stance had me throwing babies out with bathwater. My attitude cancelled out any rightness there may have been in my summations by the wrongnness of my spirit. This community of monks were a true community, regardless of whether or not living by the rule of a man who lived 1500 years ago is turning tradition into a pointless idol. I disliked Gary's treatment of Anthoney because it reminded me of my own stance at times; in his zeal to defend himself, he inadvertently trod on the soul of another person. Oh to learn to prefer the other over myself.

I tend to make the same mistakes when it comes to institutionalised religion. Sometimes I find myself mistaking the structure of the building instead of the structure of people's hearts as the problem. But God is found even within bad structures, within rigidities that he may not have originally planned, rigidities which do damage, but which he still moves into. Because he is gracious and graceful. He will come into wherever we are, even if that happens to be a rigid place. I should know. He came into me :)

Papa, I will never be satisfied until you have made me like you. May we know your goodness, your kindness, your gentleness and your life so intimately that it binds up our wounds, salves our hearts and spills outwards into the world. May we live as contemplatives in a world which is screaming out for peace and silence. May we all experience the continued peace that comes from being still and knowing that you are God.

The Desert of the Real

Chatting with Barefoot Barbara about the desert this morning and pondering how it is that I have come to love this place that I once fled from as if my backside was on fire. It has become for me the desert of the real. Where once it felt like a barren, dry place, now I have "got my eye in" I can see the beauty in the barrenness. God is all around. This picture deserves a second time round on this blog. It is one of my very favourites; I love it so. It speaks to me so loudly, so aptly describes the beauty I can see now in the desert places.

I think of the promise that God made when he said that he would make streams of water come up in the desert. I feel a stream or two inside of me. It began springing up as I was forced to spring down, to die to my own wilful steering. The stream is not as big as I would like it to be. It hasn't drowned many of my multitudinous sins. It hasn't changed me as much as I would like. But there's life where before there was death, and it amazes me. It's a reminder that God's intention is to make all of my deserts streams. Whether in this age or the next or the next. However long it takes. Which gives hope. But can also create frustration. A day is as a thousand years is very true - his conceptions of time are certainly not mine :)

My mate Richard said:

We have to pull back and learn the great art of detachment, which is not aloof, but the purifying of attachment. Our religion is not pure detachment or pure attachment; it's a dance between the two. Another set of images for this reality is the desert and the city. Jesus moves back and forth between desert and city. In the city, he feels himself losing perspective, love, and center and has to go out to the desert to see the real again. And when he is alone in the desert, his passionate union with the Father drives him back to the pain of the city.

Everything Belongs

Life and Death. Attachment and Detachment. Light and Shade. Yin and Yang - Rebirth

"All the world can give us is small mind. But small mind, without the unitive experience of big mind, makes us feel unbearably alone. We feel lost, existentially guilty, and often fragile and powerless. A lot of guilt is not about this or that particular sin; it's really a guilt about not having lived yet. We call that essential or primal guilt. It's deeper than guilt for an offense we can name. It feels like shame, not about anything in particular, but about who we are and who we aren't. Many of us suffer from this primal guilt and this essential shame.

"There is a certain fear of death that comes from not having lived yet. I had to face death myself when I had cancer a few years ago. I don't think I was afraid of death at that time, but I also knew I had already lived. Once you know you have touched upon this mystery of life, you are not afraid of death. But there's an existential terror about losing what you've never found. Something in me says, 'I haven't done "it" yet.' I haven't experienced the stream of life yet. I haven't touched the real, the good, the true, and the beautiful - which is, of course, what we were created for.

"When we know we have experienced the stream of life, we will be able to lie on our deathbed like Francis and say, 'Welcome, sister death.' I'm not afraid to let go of life, because I have life. I am life. I know life is somehow eternal, and another form is waiting for me. It is the last threshold, but I've been over this threshold before. I think this is what Paul means when he speaks of 'reproducing the pattern of his death and knowing the power of his resurrection' (Phil. 3:10). It is an actual pattern that we must live through at least once - and then we understand something forever."




"We have to pull back and learn the great art of detachment, which is not aloof, but the purifying of attachment. Our religion is not pure detachment or pure attachment; it's a dance between the two. Another set of images for this reality is the desert and the city. Jesus moves back and forth between desert and city. In the city, he feels himself losing perspective, love, and center and has to go out to the desert to see the real again. And when he is alone in the desert, his passionate union with the Father drives him back to the pain of the city.

"We go back to be purged by God's mercy and regrafted to the vine; we go back to the well until we know what the real is, and then we return to the city. The work of the soul is attachment; the work of spirit is often detachment. Without the art of detachment, the culture becomes addictive, and we have massive codependency. We have people enmeshed in one another who do not know their own identities. They have nothing to give because there is no "I" there. Without attachment, however, there is no risk, no passion, no compassion, no social justice, no holding the tension and collision of opposites ...

"The contemplative stance is the Third Way. We stand in the middle, neither taking the world on from the power position nor denying it for fear of the pain it will bring. We hold the realization, seeing the dark side of reality and the pain of the world, but we hold it until it transforms us, knowing that we are complicit in the evil and also complicit in the holiness. Once we can stand in that third spacious way, neither fighting nor fleeing, we are in the place of grace out of which newness comes. Creativity comes from here, and we can finally do a new thing for the world. When our ego stops getting hooked, when it's not our agenda, then we can hope ours is the agenda of God. We can stop building our kingdom and become usable in the kingdom of God."

Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs