We have few sources of cool, clear water to drink from in these days of upheaval. They’re found mostly in those rare places where friendship, love, and community have carved a basin. This is where water from the deep springs can pool.
The trustworthy holding and acceptance, the reminders of what we know but might have forgotten, the respite of a place safe enough to think and process and grieve together—these gatherings sustain me. This water gives me life.
We all need that sustenance. Yet there are toxic pools where people gather in their longing for community, for belonging. There are poisoned wells, watering the ugly desire to vanquish and overrun.
Almost a year ago Carl Bernstein spoke of a “cold civil war.” It describes the state of our country. We’re living a clash of world views, of values. It feels like a siege.
The battle we didn’t want is here. It poses the question of who is best supplied, not just with material provisions, but with ideas and vision. Who has the fortitude to see clearly and respond appropriately, with strength and wisdom? Who invites others to join in a life-affirming movement.?
Fear or Love? That is the choice. Fear has its place. It can show us what needs attention. But it’s a terrible way to live. It limits our vision and our choices, and constrains our lives. How can we best live from the truth that love makes us free, and fear is a prison? How do we find our way to the water of life?
We need to find strength to live from love; we need the encouragement of others. What are the communities that truly give life? They matter. Find them, if you don’t have them. Hold onto them. Be clear about the water you’re drinking.
Sometimes the only writing I accomplish in a week happens with my writing group, when we spend a few minutes responding to a common prompt. Balance, Not About Me, and What’s Difficult were three of the possibilities to get us started last week. The writing is done quickly to get past the inner censor, and it’s infused with the energy of the conversation we’ve shared. This is what it sparked from me:
The Three of Swords from the Rider-Waite tarot deck
Not only is it not about me, I don’t even know where I am.
So that’s an indication of my Enneagram type structure showing up. It means I
need to go into the body, find what’s present there. And what I find is a heart
that feels assaulted by the realities of this world and its leaders, by the
ways people run over others, by the trauma each of us has lived through,
endured, survived, and risen above. We move forward even if parts of ourselves
were left behind in those devastating places, wounded and powerless, split off
from the self that had to keep going.
I feel all of that as a sensation of weight and constriction in my heart. This sense of a heavy heart seems to be both for myself and for others. I asked for an open heart earlier this morning, and confessed in conversation that this is my work, my growing edge, the center of knowing I need to explore. But it hurts, and everything about me doesn’t want to hurt. I want to shut that pain down.
But I’m not able to just move on from it, and I don’t want to deaden it (mostly) because to do that is to deaden myself. So I sit here with this felt sense that sounds like a country song, like my heart was run over by a Mack truck. It brings to mind a song title, “You Done Tore My Heart Out and Stomped That Sucker Flat.” And somehow this, this makes me smile.
This calls for the laughing barrel that Maya Angelou
describes, leaning into the barrel to let loose with the laughter forbidden to
slaves, the laughter that says this world is f*ing crazy, these circumstances
are absurd, but here we are and we’re alive. Alive! And the life showing up in
us is bigger than the rules, or the hurt.
There’s a power, a life force holding all of this. Something
bigger is at work. And yet my life and yours, my pain and yours, are not less
than any other part of it all. I matter. So do you. I’m not separate from the
flow of all that is. I’m in it.
What was God thinking, making this world with so much energy
unleashed in ways that allow people to hurt each other? It’s like giving a
toddler a sharp knife. Who does that? And yet here we are with our knives and
our wounds, the cuts we make and the cuts we bear, the scars where we have
healed, marking what we’ve learned, the compassion it has taught us, and the
tender places we protect.
Hendree—my priest, my friend—says Love is All. He dwells in the heart space and he is my teacher. Maybe all heart types are my teacher. It’s the knowing that feels farthest from me. Grief at the loss of connection drives that space on the map of the Enneagram. Earning back the connection in different ways is what happens there. In my space it’s impossible to believe I can earn that connection, but maybe I can invite it.
For me, opening the heart means being undefended, allowing what messes with my sense of peace and harmony. What makes that ok is remembering and trusting that I’m held, that we’re all held, by Love bigger than anything I can try to recreate on my own.
It took a long time to make much progress through John O’Donohue’s Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. I mean that in the best of ways. The Gaelic term, anam ċara is literally “soul friend,” and if books can be friends, this is such a one. Most pages hold something rich enough to send me off thinking about it for a while. I’ve kept returning through about two-thirds of it now, and today this is the passage on my mind:
Spirituality is the art of transfiguration. We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any pre-determined shape. We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program or plan for our lives. Rather, we need to practice a new art of attention to the inner rhythm of our days and lives. This attention brings a new awareness of our own human and divine presence.
A willingness to grow is a good thing, but the programs and plans available to encourage our development are overwhelming. Bookstore shelves teem with personal growth books, religious and secular, as if we can’t stop flagellating ourselves with agendas for self-improvement. And yes, I’m familiar with these store displays because I’m irresistibly drawn to them. It’s hard to pass up some bit of wisdom that will make me more capable, more fulfilled, more deserving. When an article promises to share Five Steps to Happiness, I can’t help but read it.
I want to grow, but I’d prefer to do it without all the messy uncertainty and annoying unpredictability of not knowing the way. I would love to learn what to do and just do it. But O’Donohue spells out what’s lacking in such a prescribed approach:
It is far more creative to work with the idea of mindfulness rather than the idea of will. Too often people try to change their lives using the will as a kind of hammer to beat their life into proper shape. The intellect identifies the goal of the program, and the will accordingly forces the life into that shape. This way of approaching the sacredness of one’s own presence is externalist and violent. It brings you falsely outside yourself, and you can spend years lost in the wilderness of your own mechanical, spiritual programs. You can perish in a famine of your own making.
Creating, growing, transforming—these are all mysterious processes. They happen underground, in the depths, in the dark. Paying attention while a process unfolds that we can neither control nor rush is a counter-cultural way of life. It can be hard to learn and harder to trust.
But if we lose faith and limit ourselves to the kind of processes we can control, we banish ourselves to the wilderness O’Donohue describes. Will power is hard work, and doesn’t make for a very joyful life. Maybe it’s trust power I need to work on.
