Tag: contemplation

The Neglected Center

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This week I read a very insightful article* about cultivating a “spirituality of contentment” through living a simple lifestyle that draws us into greater connection with God, our neighbors, the Creation, and ourselves. The author of this article, Dee Dee Risher, writes as a seasoned veteran of this approach to life, and as someone who is well-acquainted with its particular gifts and struggles. She is aware that “simple living” has the ironic tendency of becoming a very complicated existence which obsesses over material concerns: how many things do we own? How much money do we spend? How many square feet do we live in? According to Risher, all of these material concerns as a tell-tale sign that the external changes in our lives have outpaced the inner transformation of our heart, so that we are ascetically denying ourselves of things without moving toward some alternative. Simplicity, she says, is not about going without. Its about building something new: moving positively toward a fuller life that would have been impossible without the clutter in our lives being cleared away. If we try to throw off the yoke of mainstream culture without developing an alternative dream, then we will never be content because we will always be longing for the very things we have decided to set aside. For most of us middle- and upper-class North Americans, the narrative that has been programmed into us is upward mobility, accumulation of possessions, comforts, and status. It involves making a place for ourselves in the world and then sitting back to enjoy the fruits of our labors, letting others compete with us and fare poorly or well as they may. This is essentially the American Dream. If we want to walk a different path, then we need a different dream to guide us, because merely building our identity or our life in opposition to something will only turn us into a hollow inverse of what we wish to change. We won’t have created anything new.

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I resonated with this problem of externals outpacing internals. Perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened to me, living in the slum. Up til now, my spiritual growth has always been driven by external experiences. As I have chosen to act on what I felt was right, what I read in the gospels of Jesus’ life, my experiences of reaching out to others to serve them and to get to know them has always led me into deeper understanding and experience with God. External actions and circumstances have seemed to drive internal transformation, and perhaps that’s as it must be, in the beginning. Until we leave the realm of what we already know, how can we encounter anything new, or challenging, or larger than ourselves?

But I think this necessary and appropriate pattern may have led me, somewhere along the way, to mistake the means for the end. Serving the poor is the ultimate goal, I decided, living as simply as possible in the worst possible place and doing as much as possible to help. Alas, I am discovering that the opposite is true: compassion and service and simplicity should be the means of communing with God, of recognizing God in myself and the people around me (especially the suffering poor), and of joyfully living in Love’s embrace.

How did Jesus live? I asked myself. He hung out with outcasts, poor people, blind people, sick people, enemy soldiers, their yellow-bellied tax collector cronies, and heretical half-breeds like the Samaritans. So that’s what I’ll do, I thought. Find the poor and the outcasts, befriend them, tell them that God loves them, and invite them into the community of the Kingdom in which there is always a place for them at the table.

What I failed to realize until I was smack-dab in the middle of the needy crowds, trying to offer hope to the down-and-out people spit out by the system, was that Jesus didn’t just up and begin his mission with the sheer force of willpower. It takes more than principles or warm fuzzies to sustain any kind of long-term commitment to the messy occupation of loving other people, particularly in a demanding and depressing context like a slum. I neglected to pay attention to the forty days of fasting and prayer in the desert which immediately preceded Jesus’ public life, the lonely hours of prayer and solitude which sustained it, and the 30 years of spiritual preparation that preceded it. Jesus was only able to do what he did because of his strength constantly being renewed by God inside Him. He was only able to maintain hope among misery because of his intense awareness of God’s loving presence; to experience joy in the midst of exhaustion and suffering because he was already well-experienced in cultivating an awareness of God’s presence in all circumstances; to weather frequent rejection and confrontation, and eventually total betrayal, because by the time these things happened to him, he had such an unshakeable sense of his identity as the Beloved of God that he was entirely free from the opinions of others—free enough to serve others without any need of gratitude, to love even those who repaid his compassion with hatred.

This incredible love and courage was only possible for Jesus because he had already experienced this unconditional love in the depths of his own being. It had defined him, and it had become the root of everything he did.

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As for me, all the labor of love has been exhausting, and my feverish attempts to pour myself out has revealed an emptiness in myself that I was never aware of before. Now its impossible to ignore the aching expanse within myself that has yet to be filled with the unconditional love of God. I am yet to claim my identity as the Beloved, and am desperately trying to build an identity for myself out of all the good things I am doing. See how much I suffer! See how much I am willing to sacrifice! My soul yells. I will earn your love yet. And yet…

God is not waiting for a display of faithful obedience, for exploits of courage and self-denial in order to embrace me. He embraces me with my empty hands and tattered clothes, as the beggar that I am. As the child who could ever do anything to make her Parent love her more or less. As the Prodigal son, returned home after all his fruitless attempts at making a life worth living for himself apart from the love of his Father.

I am the poor, I am the sick, I am the rejected. I wait in grief and hope for the mercy of God to reveal my true identity to me, for God to rock me to sleep in strong arms like a newborn baby, safe and wanted and loved. My neighbors often bear their scars and their struggles openly on their faces and in the rough edges of their lives, but mine are hidden inside.

I am the poor and they are me. God is in us, and we are in Him. Perhaps the whole purpose of life is for us to realize, together, the depth of our poverty, and to help one another to accept the Love that will satisfy it.

*Cultivating A Spirituality of Contentment by Dee Dee Risher

Source: New feed

Only One Thing is Necessary

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Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.
Luke 10:38-42

          I’ve usually identified with Martha in that famous story—despite her unflattering portrayal as a complaining, somewhat self-righteous woman whose concern for superficial domestic details distracts her from Jesus.  More recently, I even started to question the moral of the story. Fine and well for Mary to soak up Jesus’ wisdom while her responsible, hardworking sister takes care of the rest, but really—what would the three of them have eaten for lunch if both sisters had been passively basking in their guest’s company? To broaden the sweep of my question, exactly who is supposed to take care of starving children and trafficking victims and do something about all of the injustice in the world if we’re all just contemplative hermits or church people who spend more time singing praise choruses and studying the Bible than we do engaging with the world outside our religious enclave? Maybe now a few others can identify with my defense of Martha.

But in response to these questions has come the gentle whisper that perhaps this story is not the simple dichotomy of practical action vs. pious devotion that is often taught, on Sunday school felt boards as well as in sermons intended for adults. I’m beginning to recognize the Mary in myself, too—the part of me that does want to just sit with Jesus and be still and be loved. And it occurs to me that the Mary in the story might have felt the same ambivalence and tinge of guilt while she sat there as I do. Maybe when Martha appealed to Jesus for some help with her “lazy” sister, her accusation tapped into that inner guilt and caused Mary to expect a rebuke from Jesus rather than the reassurance he gave her that she was justified in her stillness.  Perhaps Jesus’ response was a surprise to both sisters, rather than being a rebuke to either of them.

The more I reflect on it, the more I become convinced that the condition of distraction or of presence with Jesus is much more a matter of the heart’s posture than it does with external activity. It’s clear from Jesus’ life and teachings that there is a lot of important action that needs to be engaged in—he spent himself on behalf of the poor, healing the sick and shepherding the harassed crowds of the oppressed. But the equanimity with which he was able to meet both acceptance and rejection; the infinite patience and compassion he demonstrated for the mobs of needy people that followed him wherever he went—all of this leads me to believe that even between his times of obvious solitude, Jesus never really left his Father’s caring embrace. He was somehow fully immersed in the suffering of the world while managing to sit at the feet of God the whole time. He offered love, acceptance, and peace to the people around him out of the vast supply of what God was breathing into him on continual basis.

I feel attracted to this possibility growing in my own life. I hear Jesus’ invitation to sit contentedly with him in the hours of waiting in crowded hospitals and the scenes of violence in my neighborhood as well as in the quiet moments of prayer in the morning with my door closed. Paradoxical as it sounds, I believe Jesus when he says that he has called me to live in this crazy place and to do nothing but sit at his feet. It may take more time of focused sitting before we’re able to multitask with all the buzz of the realm of action and external events, but that inner stillness is the only thing that will sustain our action over time and give it significance. No point in running ourselves into the ground if we’re forgetting the one thing that is necessary.

A new year begins…

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view from the train window, somewhere in Madhya Pradesh

 

          We rang in the new year on a cold railway station platform in the middle of the night, waiting for an 11 pm train which finally arrived at 2 am.  An overnight train and an all-day bus ride later, we found ourselves in a small town in the hills of Madhya Pradesh, where we spent the next four days praying, resting, and venturing out into nature to hike. It was a welcome reprieve for our souls: sunny days in the wild under the big blue dome of the sky, instead of the cold, grey days we had been having in the city, with the clouds hanging like a low ceiling over the rising smoke of plastic and wood fires our neighbors were lighting everywhere to keep warm.  After experiencing so much of the ugliness and grime of the world, we needed to sit in a garden, surrounded by trees and flowers and birds that reminded us there is beauty in the world.  We needed this quiet, peaceful place to pray and think about God and suffering and resurrection and what it all means for us now, living in the world that is groaning for the transformation that is still out of reach.  We felt truly rested after our time there.
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a view from one of our hikes

 

          But on another cold platform at another train station on our way back, we came across a baby lying on the floor, seemingly abandoned. The shop owner who was standing within inches of the infant carrying on his business vaguely told us upon inquiry that the baby belonged to someone vaguely “over there”. We couldn’t see anyone, and after having ascertained that this guy actually had no idea who the parents were or where they had gone, we took the shivering infant into our arms and wondered what to do next. People seemed surprised at this, and other bystanders began to offer bits of information about a “husband and wife problem” and an argument during which the couple had left the baby and gone outside. Apparently lots of people had seen what happened, but no one had felt responsibility for the child lying helplessly on the cold ground while they bought snacks, sold bottled water, or sat waiting for their trains.  A moment later, a woman in a sari came hurrying down the platform. “Oh, that’s her,” the shop keeper motioned vaguely. As she approached, we saw that blood was flowing down the side of her head and dripping onto the platform.  Too shocked to think of anything to say, I wordlessly handed the baby to the bleeding woman.  Too embarrassed to look anyone in the eye, she wordlessly took him and walked back in the same direction from which she had come.  “Yes, husband and wife problem,” a man standing near me re-affirmed.  “No,” I retorted. “Husband problem.” We were sickened by the collective passivity of everyone throughout the situation, and by the total lack of compassion for either mother or child. Going outside could only have meant that this woman was probably beaten on a crowded street instead of in a crowded train station.
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weekly market in town

 

          Back home, we found our community much as we had left it nearly a week before, except much colder. There is beauty here too, in the warm welcome of our neighbors, some of children’s excitement at our return, and the invitation to drink hot chai around an open fire in our friends’ room.  But temperatures are dipping into the thirties at night now, and some of the animals (not to mention people) aren’t faring too well. There was a cow on the alleyway behind us who could understand Hindi and tell the future. Well, we never quite figured out whether she truly had some strange ability or whether her handler had somehow trained her how to respond appropriately to pretty much any yes or no question you can think of, but she did seem to know more than the average cow. This week two cows, including that strange creature, have succumbed to the cold. And this whole story would just be a bizarre side note if it weren’t for the fact that two families depended on those cows for their livelihood and will now be scrambling to find work in the midst of a cold season during which much of the community’s other work—furniture making and recycling collection—drastically slows down anyway.
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natural beauty was everywhere

 

          Life here is just so full to bursting that within the same day you can find yourself laughing with abandon, hot with rage, struck with curiosity or wonder, and later sad enough to cry (and maybe you do). This week was a little slice of everything, with the confusion, the disappointment, the joy, and the downright strangeness all thrown in together, the way real life always is.
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mother monkey crossing the road with baby in tow