The potential of receptivity

We create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us

The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart may have been one of the most emphatic on in encouraging unknowing. 

He says that the place where God speaks, and works has less to do with right action, right emotion or right mindset and more to do with space. Eckhart calls this open space the “potential of receptivity.” He says that we create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us. “There must be a silence and a stillness, and the Father must speak in that.” Eckhart affirms that this birth has nothing to do with good deeds or religious purity as we think of it but rather, it occurs in both sinners and saints – even those in hell.

Eckhart speaks of creating a space through the practice of silence and stillness that is absolute and is far more extreme than most Christian practices. It includes letting go of images, understanding, intellect, memory, sense perceptions, imagination and even ideas about God being good or compassionate.

Pope John XXII issued a bull (In agro dominico), 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical, another as suspected of heresy. Many today consider him to be one the great mystics.

Meister Eckhart. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009

Not finding the lost

We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

To love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily flood the room with a perfect a necessary darkness. - Heidi Prebe This is me Letting You Go.

Slain from the foundation of the world

The act of death is foundational to the very creation

Long before the incarnation of Christ or the crucifixion of Jesus, the death of Christ was at work.  In the book of Revelation, the author in his vision says that life is given by the “Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8, KJV)

The act of death is foundational to the very creation. In order to create, an infinite God, who filled all space and time had to make space for something else to exist – had to die in order for the world to live. It is this foundational death act that creates and gives life.

This is a revelation of the reality of things. We can see this in our bodies - cells have to die to allow cells to renew. When they don’t it’s a deadly cancer. All aspects of nature have to die in order for nature as whole to live. Plants die when they are eaten, leaves die on the trees each year, seeds fall to the ground in death. The engine of death is held in the DNA of life.

If we refuse to participate in this death, consent to this death - if we hold on tightly to power, control, certainty, survival in all its forms, no space is made for anything new to be created.

The impulse to reject

Grace must be emptied of power.

Grace must be emptied of power.  To be emptied of power, grace must first be entirely unconditional. Conditions to grace are means by which we “make sense” of something that offends our sensibilities of justice and fair play. Grace that requires action on the part of the individual is no grace at all, as it becomes tethered to an act of power on the part of the recipient.  Unconditional grace must also be unrelated to ideas of judgement of good and evil. 

The perceived knowledge of good and evil is a means by which mankind gains power over unknowing. It is the means by which we make meaning by assigning values to all things.  One thing is better than another, more beautiful, more desirable. Unconditional grace allows us to practice consent to reality without wanting to tamper with it by making it better, purer, holier, or safer. It is grace that allows us to see beauty in ugliness and God in all things and enables us to stop rejecting one thing over another. It is grace that enables us to cease crying out, as Peter did when he rejected the idea of Christ crucified, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:22, NRSV). It is this very impulse to reject and the lack of consent to reality that Jesus rebukes as Satanic in this story.

Creating Beauty

I wonder if the very creation of beauty is somehow wrapped up in violence? 

Chasing beauty

Three weeks ago, I had cosmetic surgery.  Nothing crazy, just a little work to my neck. (I’ve always been obsessed about not ending up with a “turkey neck”)

Everything went great.  Easy peasy.  Healing was going great, hardly any bruising or swelling.  Some of  my stitches were out and then in the middle of the night on Day 8 I felt a sharp pain in my left check that woke me up.   I put my hand on it and could feel the swoosh, swoosh of blood pumping into my cheek.  My face and neck swelled up like a balloon. 

Hours later I was in emergency surgery getting my face opened back up to clean out all the blood, cauterize the vein and stitched back up. 

Only this recovery was different.  Lots more pain.  Lots of swelling.  The doctor made  two house calls to check on me those first few days.  Still, a few days later I had an infection, despite antibiotics.  More antibiotics, stronger.  Every day I went to the doctor and he pressed and prodded, pushing infection out of the tissues.  Two showers with Dial soap each day.  Silver sufadine cream on the new incisions.  Lots of pain and pain medicine.  And still, the infection persisted. 

So, tomorrow I get to go back to surgery for a third time.  To clean out the infection.

I’m angry, scared, defeated.  I want to cry all the time. 

But mostly I’m angry at myself.  Angry for doing this to myself.  And in trying to extend grace to myself I’ve been thinking alot about all this. Why I did it. What it was about.

The first time I had a neck lift I remember feeling a distinct sense of the violence I had inflicted upon myself just to look better.  I told myself then I wasn’t going to do it again and yet I did.  (Never say never).  I was feeling old, and wanted to feel good about myself again.

After the infection set in, I had a couple of meditation sessions - hoping for peace, hoping for insight. What came to me was the realization that despite my promises to myself of ten years ago, what I had not done is learn to love myself.   Like really. I mean, there are a lot of things about myself I love. Even a lot of things about how I look that I love. But not my whole self. Not without reserve. Sometimes I see pictures of myself and unless they are just -so:  my hair is good, the angle is right, my makeup is good, etc., I hate what I see.  I can’t seem to learn to love it.  In one of my meditations, I had a distinct experience of loving myself, every part of myself.  The soft, flabby parts, the parts with brown spots, the saggy, baggy parts.  All of it seemed beautiful and wonderful in that moment.  But it was fleeting and the truth is I know that given a few weeks for the trauma of this face thing to wear off, I would go get lasers done on the spots on my hands.  I just would. 

Today, when I came home from my pre-op appointment, feeling like I want to cry all  morning, somehow, the beauty of my life started rushing over me. I touched the purple flowers on the vitex tree as I passed it.  My cactus are blooming.  My lantana are blooming.   Everything is green and lush and beautiful.  I thought about my life and just how breathtakingly beautiful it has been.  Even the parts you might say were ugly.  Even my first marriage which I’ve always said was my greatest regret.  But if you think about it, I got to marry and have children with a great love of my life.  I got to experience one of those relationships that is filled with SO much pain and so much ecstasy too.  Not many people get that.  I thought about my marriage now and how it is the most tender, beautiful thing I could ever imagine.  It brings me to tears.  I’ve gotten the gift of being with a man who loves me in a way I honestly didn’t know existed and still to this day find hard to take in.  A relationship that has changed my life and the lives of my children in ways I know and probably to depths I have no idea .  I have three utterly beautiful children.  Not just utterly beautiful physically (which they are), but utterly beautiful souls.  They all have such depth, such intelligence, such light in them and also such rich and honest darkness. I have two amazing - and also beautiful stepchildren - who are intelligent and thoughtful people with whom I’ve become friends and who I love and respect. I have just the best friends who love me and whose friendships have been seriously life giving. I have three siblings who love me and would do anything for me. I’ve just had the absolute cutest grandson ever.  He and I have our secret. We know how hilarious the whole thing is – this life.  We smile and laugh at it together.  One night, we swam through twinkling lights and dark blue water together.  We know what we know about how beautiful swimming through life is.  The twinkling lights of it and the dark, deep waters of it.  And I’m about to have a granddaughter

My house is beautiful, the trees around it are beautiful. I’ve loved and been loved by four beautiful dogs and now two beautiful cats. 

 My life is so excruciatingly beautiful. I sometimes wonder how it’s possible.

I got to thinking about how beautiful this world is. Beautiful in a way that can hardly be expressed. All of life is a yearning for beauty. The seeds in the ground, the buds on the trees, the bees gathering pollen. The sex that everything and everyone is having and the incredible beautiful creatures it creates.

Even the hours we spend earning money, so we can buy beautiful things.  The effort we spend trying to be beautiful, stay beautiful.  Sometimes painful effort.

As I get older, sometimes I look at young people and just think about how beautiful they are and they don’t even know it.  Their smooth skin, their thick hair, their white teeth, their firm bodies.  So beautiful it makes you want to cry. 

The sunsets, the mountains, the milky way, the butterflies, the bees, the flowers.  So beautiful it makes you want to cry.

When I was on my psychedelic journey this spring, all I could think was how beautiful the entire journey was.  What I saw ,what I felt, the tears I cried, the grief I felt, the death.  

But it seems I missed it.  Or I would have been able to see how beautiful I am.  The wrinkles, the sags, the brown spots.  All of it.  

So I enacted violence upon my face to make it more beautiful.   

Is that what we do to try to create beauty?  Is that where violence comes from?  We want a beautiful world, an idealistic world that fits our idea of beauty – our IDEOLOGY of beauty .  And we cut and tear at it and at ourselves, and at one another in violence to try to get at it.  Often though, instead of creating beauty, we create scars and wounds and infection instead.   Because we can’t see the difference between beauty and an ideology that seems beautiful. We can’t take in that beauty must also include ugliness. There can’t be one without the other.

I wonder if the very creation of the beauty of the world somehow wrapped up in violence?  Is that why we have the metaphor of Christ slain from the creation of the world?  Before the creation of beauty it was just unified -- formlessness and void.  Peaceful perhaps, but no beauty.   And God had to enact violence upon gods-self to create a space for something other than gods self.  Kenosis.  The death of god, the emptying, the nullifying, the cutting open and rending apart, the opening.   Absolute “beauty” - ideological perfection making space for something else so that actual beauty can exist. Slain from the foundation of the world. 

The sensuality of a baby

The experience is animal in nature. Visceral.  Sensual. 

We have a new baby in the family.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a baby. But I was there for this birth, and for the first week of his life, and for most evenings for the past month and it has been beautiful.  But what has struck me is how earthy, how visceral, how sensual the experience of a baby is.  From the birth with the pain and the moaning, the tearing of flesh, the blood and the fluid and the shit.  To the immediate latching on of the baby to the breast. 

Then weeks afterward.  Weeks filled with blood and pain for the mother.  Weeks of sheer survival - trying to get enough sleep to not lose your mind entirely.  Weeks filled with the joy of milk coming into the breast and the unbelievable rush of the baby latching to the breast and eating.  The smell of the baby, the velvety feel of his head.  The warm heavy weight on you and your bodily response to it – better than any relaxation pill you every took. 

A black rotten cord that falls away, and diaper after diaper of shit. 

You rejoice at a great belch, and a great shit coming out of this soft, velvety creature. 

You are constantly analyzing whether or not he’s eating enough, pooping enough, sleeping enough,

…..the prevailing experience is animal in nature. Visceral.  Sensual. 

Smells, bodily functions, body fluids, bodily connections.  One body feeding on another. Two bodies so connected that when one cries, milk falls from the breast of the other.  One body so connected to another that even when no sleep has been had and it’s the middle of the night, love so strong reaches out to this creature that is keeping you awake and he is the most beautiful creature on earth. Nothing is more sensual than this. Nothing makes you feel more alive.

It seems to me that modern culture has sanitized life. We are clean. So clean that we don’t smell of anything human most of the time.  It’s all perfumes and body products and we are offended by human smells.  I’m the worst at this.  I hate the smell of body odors, breath, farts, urine.  But the baby...every poop, every fart, every smell of him – washed or unwashed – is amazing.  We’ve sanitized the human body visually as well.  We don’t want to see rolls of fat, or cellulite or stretch marks.  Blemishes, flaws.  We don’t want the body to be too human.  We’d rather see bodies that look perfect.  But babies … we love the rolls of fat, the “stork bite” on the back of the head, baby acne. We love bald babies and babies with hair that stands straight up.  We love wrinkles on babies.  We have no expectation that babies will look alike or fit a certain mold.   We have sanitized all aspects of life and death. Sex isn’t even sensual – it is as sanitized as the rest of it.  Bodies that look perfect and perform perfectly.  But the thing we cannot sanitize is a baby and in this way it is the most sensual creature on earth. 

Connecting to your own life

We are picking and choosing what to be present to. 

I was speaking with a woman who said that she was dissatisfied, but objectively if she looked at her life, she had everything she had hoped for, down to the last detail.  She didn’t know why she felt disconnected from her own life in this way.  She is a deeply spiritual person. She has a daily gratitude practice, and yet still feels disconnected from her own life in some way.  She said she feels like she is writing the story of her life and is on Chapter 3, but seems to reside internally in Chapter 15. 

To say that the issue here is living in the future rather than the present is true, but I wondered, what keeps us from connecting to the present?  I suspect that many of us, when we can be present find that the present is lovely. I suspect we find that what makes us suffer is when we connect to the past, or to the future.

Could it be that what keeps us from staying connected to the present is that we are only trying to connect to the parts of the present we like?  We are picking and choosing what to be present to.  Gratitude practices are great, but they might only connect us to part of our lives - the good parts - if we fail to be grateful for the suffering. 

We know that when we shut down sorrow, we shut down joy.  When we shut down presence to the suffering, we shut down presence in general. 

To connect to life, one must connect to death. 

Wholeness

Do I even believe in wholeness?  Not really.

I was in a group last week and the leader asked us what kind of spiritual practice we had that was helping us become whole.

I thought – what does that even mean to me?  Whole. 

Do I even believe in wholeness?  Not really.

We are always incomplete, always missing something, always imperfect. 

Never whole.

But I knew what she was getting at.  She wasn’t trying to get at wholeness in a perfection sense, but in some other sense. But she wasn’t going to define it for us.  She was going to let us define it for ourselves.

For me…

Wholeness is:

Being able to sit with what is missing: in me, in life, in others and be at peace.

It is not feeling the need to fix, control, strive to move from the current place of lack to place of non-lack But it’s not a numbing to the desire.  Not a detachment from the longing for the place of non-lack.

Instead it’s the ability to feel all the strength of desire and longing and be completely in love with the longing, without needing to fulfill it. 

That’s the closest I can get to love and grace co-existing in me.

The Fire of Life

Desire and Uncertainty are the fire that keeps life burning

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I knew a man who, after his retirement said, “I’ve done everything in life I ever wanted to do,” and I knew a woman who, at 101 years old said she wasn’t ready to die because she still had so many things she wanted to do. 

I considered the man a lucky man and the woman’s situation a sad one. 

Neither the man nor the woman were doing anything particularly enviable with their lives. 

The man had a good life, a nice home, a devoted wife, children, and grandchildren.  He had traveled and had the career or his dreams.  Most days, he sat at watched TV in his recliner.  Some would say he had lived the ultimate life and was enjoying his retirement. 

The woman was a widow living alone in her home.  She had been an abusive and judgmental mother and had driven wedges in her relationships.  She was a hoarder, and her house was filled with trash and she would let no one in to visit.    

And yet … the man no longer had anything he desired, and the woman did.

Life is made up not just of what we have and what we have achieved, but of what we desire.

Peter Rollins tells a story about a compulsive gambler who died.  When he was in eternity, he found himself in a casino at the craps table.  Winning.  Every time he played, he won.  Over and over.  After some time, he began to be a bit bored with the whole thing, all the uncertainty and risk seemed to be gone and he knew he would win this time and the next.  He said to the dealer, “who knew heaven would be a craps table and I would win every single game!”  The dealer replied, “what makes you think this is heaven?”

Look at the things you don’t have, the house you don’t have, the children not yet born, the flaws in your partner and yourself as the very things that create life.  These are the things that give us something to strive for, something to look forward to.  It is desire and uncertainty that are the fire that keeps life burning. 

Proper Interpretation of Scripture

Isn’t it about Control?

I read a post on social media today.  The author of the post was quoting a foreword he had written for a book. 

“Ever since the reformation it has been fashionable in certain Protestant circles to speak blithely of the perspicuity of the Scripture.  A desire to democratize the Bible led to the wishful thinking that the proper interpretation of all Scripture is self-evident.  But if anything is self-evident about the Bible, it is the glaring fact that a myriad of possible interpretations set forth by well-meaning exegetes compete for our allegiance.  And this is never more the case than when we consider the Pauline epistles. The New Testament itself admits that when it comes to Pauls’ letters, ‘there are some things in them hard to understand’ (2 Peter 3:16). So the notion that one can just open the Bible to Romans and easily grasp Pauls’ often dense arguments is wildly over optimistic.  Though it may offend our individualist and egalitarian aspirations, the truth of the matter is that we often need some scholarly assistance if we are to properly interpret our sacred text.  Thankfully, the church has such scholars…”

I’ve not read the book, but I like the work of the guy who wrote the foreword (and who posted it).  I’m intentionally not mentioning his name because I am not trying to cast him in any kind of negative light, but I do want to explore a question that this foreword brings up for me.

(I have to write an aside about “perspicuity” – maybe you are more literate than I, but I felt the need to look that up to be sure I knew what it meant -  the ability to think, write, or speak clearly.  Ok, so with that out of the way, on to my questions)

I wonder about all the discussion that goes on in religion around the subject of “interpretation of Scripture.”  It seems to me that what is at the heart of it is authority and control.  The debate seems to revolve around what/who gets to decide what is right or correct.  I agree with the author that the Bible has a myriad of possible interpretations.  I agree that those who put forth these interpretations compete for our allegiance. The author here seems to conclude that the solution is not a swing toward individualism, but to lean upon scholarly assistance to obtain “proper interpretation.”

I have no beef with scholarly interpretation of scripture.  I consider myself a scholar of scripture.  I’ve learned a ton from my studies and my understanding of scripture has widened and broadened from it.

But for me, there is a bigger issue at work here.  An issue deeper and more important than how much scholarship one has or whether or not someone has interpreted scripture poorly.   That issue is this … Why are we competing to try to “win” the contest over correct interpretation of scripture at all?  Isn’t this simply the pursuit of a kind of knowledge of good and evil?   

Isn’t the bigger issue here the belief that if we just know enough / have enough scholarship informing us, we can attain to the knowledge of good and evil?  ( In this instance, “good and evil” being good vs. bad interpretation of scripture.) 

Isn’t the quest for proper interpretation of scripture rooted in control? If we have the proper scholarship, or give authority to the proper person, place or thing (i.e., biblical scholars, the bible itself, the pope, the priest, the minister), then we can be more assured that we are right.  Authority imparts control.  Someone or something has the authority to determine what is right and thus we don’t have to rely completely and entirely on grace.