An extra half-cup of not-especially strong coffee, looking around the kitchen as I plan supper, checking out what needs to be cooked before it goes off (those big brown mushrooms, the slightly wilting Swiss chard, the last two tomatoes) , what can be done with left-overs of boiled rice and baked butternut.
Thinking too about the woman, a friend of a friend, who came and spoke with me yesterday about doing a spiritual retreat, somebody who has never as far as I can tell, spent any time alone with herself, let alone with silence or any sought presence or mystery. I know many people like her, who have grown up in churches where the crucial question ‘Is any of this true?’ is never asked, in families where ingratitude or cruelty are the norm, where sons and daughters emerge into adulthood obscurely guiltridden about themselves, and without any hunger for mystery or strangeness. People to whom religion only signifies lies and hypocrisy. Who would rather believe in ‘nothing’ than ‘something’ so as not to find oneself disappointed. Or who believe what they were taught as children in order to stay children. Unparented adult children of disengaged parents, incurious, discontented or complacent, blinkered, adrift.
We have all been there and many of us have then found ourselves thrown into some dark night of suffering or awakening. We sit down in silence and ask, ‘What else might be possible?’ and a new journey begins, we change direction, we venture into unknown territory where the horizon lies in shadow.
The turning point of the year, the seasons of lights in Hannukah and Diwali, Advent’s candles and wreaths, the winter solstice for some, the high white midnights of mid-summer, the year about to end, turning and burning in darkness. I go on reading Frederick Buechner each evening by lamplight, making notes to myself and letting those sentences sink in.
Frederick Buechner:
“The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather”
For so many years, I denied there was a Higher Power. But there were several instances that occurred, especially those when my parents died, to ignore that there was something much greater than me. Opening the mind and the eyes can reveal so much of what is possible.
That sense of ‘something much greater’ is what I was trying to express, Syd — often we feel it at liminal times to do with birth, loss, dying, rebirth.
One of my co-workers was singing in a Christmas Concert at a church over the weekend. My boss went. When the co-worker asked how she liked the concert, my boss actually said, “I liked it but it was so religious!” Umm, yeah. Christmas. Church. Oh well.
The word ‘religious’ has so many negative connotations to people who have had no deep faith experience or have only found negativity in church-going, so sad Mary Christine.
We have all been there and for me I have come full circle and can see that each path leads to the same place. It is just us and our own mind that has to sort out the information or misinformation that has been to given to us.
We have to make peace with our interpretation of that information. If there is the least bit of resistance there is more work to do. Its all good. We can embrace what scares us and what appalls us and seeing that it just represents our own deep lies we have about ourselves.
I hear you Grace — to embrace what scares us and what appalls us, to look deeper. The Buddhist understanding of Maya or ‘illusion’ is similar to what Thomas Merton spoke about as ‘false consciousness’
Oh, what a wonderful quote from Buechner–”the original, shimmering self” and putting on and removing other selves like coats and hats. It’s exactly how it seems to me. It’s only now, with the need for some of the other selves becoming less pressing, that I begin to get glimmers of the original. Age has its advantages. And sobriety!
He has a wonderful gift of expression Susan and I too have known those different ‘selves’ or illusions of self. I do think age has many advantages and insights, a shedding of the inessential
Incredible quote from Buechner, thank you for introducing me. I like to believe that within me is the authentic self waiting for me patiently as I jump off the diving board one more time to find it my way. I like what Suzuki Roshi says about beginners mind.
When he spoke of “beginner’s mind,” I think Suzuki Roshi was pointing to that kind of mind that’s not already made up. The mind that’s just investigating, open to whatever occurs, curious. Seeking, but not with expectation or grasping. Just being there and observing and seeing what occurs. Being ready for whatever experience arises in this moment. Abbess Zenkei Blanche Hartman
Dee that is the difference between that fresh open curious alert receptive beginning — and what is often called conditioned mind with a reified and static, rigid ways of seeing trapped in fear and illusion. We do need to find ways of breaking free and starting over, glimpsing what might be possible. Wild mind, perhaps.