Journey to nowhere

Earlier this week, I felt somewhat unglued and ready for a routine. Getting kids back to school in different weeks, with one attending evening college classes as a high-school junior and shy of her driver's license, there's been a lot of chauffeuring or, rather, being chauffeured. Then labor day, a day off and a weekend of 14th-birthday celebrations for the youngest. Summer retreated with a bang. It was a great season initiated by an incredible family trip to Europe.

So slinking off to school and work routines is not, exactly, exciting. Yet necessary.

I crave more-focused work, balance and rhythm. The busyness has caused me to let go of a regular spiritual practice, even weekly worship twice, and my daily gym visits. It's like skipping medication.  For one day, I'd like to just wake up to the day and head onward, no swim, sinus care, supplement taking or gluten-free lunch packing. Just once. And not have to experience repercussions.

Yes, I know that I am whining. Tuesday, I, dutifully, headed to the gym by 6:45 am, swam less than the usual mile (I must build up again), blended and slurped down my spinach-blueberry-and-brown-rice smoothie, dropped my oldest off at 9 am, returned to take my supplements, pack my lunch and get to the studio. Once there, my first action was to light a candle, welcoming Spirit's light, and pull out my daily devotional. The bookmark was still on August 21.

The passage was about beginning the spiritual journey with a reminder that we humans center the universe on ourselves. We can't help it. The shattering of illusions, Father Thomas Keating writes, is the beginning of the journey. The real spiritual journey and the way to nowhere.

The way to nowhere. I can identify with that.

Who likes to admit they haven't the faintest idea where they are headed? Practically no one. It's not practiced in this culture. Everyone knows exactly where they are going: to work, careers, up the rungs of  the social and corporate ladders, and, even Heaven. We are so sure of it. Otherwise, what are we left with? Feeling out of control?

Societally, we are launched on an upward path. I left that long ago and never really understood it until spiritual teacher Richard Rohr wrote that the spiritual path is one of descent ... into the messiness of life and brokenness. THAT I could identify with – over and over again like a skipping record.

With a new awareness, I have begun to notice something pretty radical. When I am slumming in the sludge of life, guess who is always with me? God. I don't especially remember feeling her presence when I traipsed up and down the steps of my corporate job years ago. As I traveled, marketed, plotted and planned I felt, well, hollow. Like I was just pretending. It seemed as if we all were. The lemmings marching in sober-faced, stiff and Zombie-like (perhaps mirroring our product, caskets) each morning and flowing out each evening, together at the same time. Like them, I was probably asleep.

I have since awakened and know Spirit's presence in the depths of darkness, on the average day and the heights of contentment. She is with me when I am alone, when I worship with others, when I struggle with others. I know her most intimately through Jesus and his universal Christ energy.

I know it best when I keep a daily practice that opens me to that energy and love as I journey to nowhere.

• What role does routine play in my life?
• What happens when it's not in place?
• Where do I pencil in time with God?
• What difference does that make?
• When have I felt I was on a journey to nowhere?


beginning of the
week I am
chomping to get
organized and
feel in control
again

that holidays,
and new schedules
become assimilated
... quickly

bouncing from
one busyness
to the other

when I remember
to light the candle
and let Sprit in

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More of Spirit within

Yesterday, I burned my log, which may not sound like a big deal, but, trust me, it was. The log, with hand-cut pages resembling what they represented and bound with green yarn, was filled with all of the the things I am burning off collected over six weeks. Purification is my word for this year. The list wasn't as long as I had expected and, when I read it to my spiritual director, who proposed this exercise, they really cycled down to two BIG ideas: limitation and paralysis.

Ouch, those words sting like anticeptic. The truth can hurt. I also planned to toss out my judgment meter, which I felt was external, but Mary suggested that I may have brought it inside. She's right. How incongruent. I have been using the world's exterior measure on my interior self. I can't think of a more hopeless and destructive combination. No wonder that, for years, I've felt beaten up. Indulging in one of my vices, horror, I watched an episode of the new Rosemary's Baby. A very pregnant Rosemary remarked that she felt like her baby was fighting her. I have felt similarly about my body. That's probably where the comparison ends. Father Thomas Keating writes, of course in one of this week's meditations, of dismantling the false self feeling "like interior warfare" and resistance mounting to "faith, determination and incessant prayer."

I wonder if limitation and paralysis were my ways of controlling the fibromyalgia, which made me feel completely out of control. Is it human nature to need to control? Perhaps it was the false self meddling.

Mary filled her ceramic burner with oil, asking me to hand her a napkin to wipe up spillage. We walked to the cavernous kithen, where she pulled out a stainless steel bowl in which to conduct our burning, then to the lovely terrace overlooking the Little Miami River. As I ripped off each page and fed it to the fire, Mary had me read my notations, then say I was releasing it. I was in a somewhat dreamlike state, but complied and understood the significance. Then we talked about how when we release one thing, something else takes it place. "What is that?" she asked. Hummmm ... "faith, trust, confidence, health, joy and Spirit," I said then. Mary nudged me to include hope. A good call. Now, I would like to add adundance, grace, peace and love. These remind me of the fruits of the Spirit.

As we neared the end of the sacrifice, I commented on the whiteness of the ashes, as if purified by the fire. The day before I'd worked with my shaman and experienced white lava flowing down from my third eye throughout my body. I believe the two are related.

After the last page burned, Mary asked me to notice how small all of these fears had been. "Just look at those small, little ashes. They're nothing compared to the power you thought they had." She'd said. They just crumbled to nothingness as I tossed them over the terrace and down to the river.

With these gone, I desire to be alert and present to noticing how my new tenants (faith, trust, confidence, joy, Spirit, hope, abundance, grace, peace and love) feel. I'm betting quite the opposite of limited and paralyzed. How about open, limitless, flexible and ready for Spirit?

• What in my life would I like to release?
• What is holding me captive?
• What would I choose as replacements?
• How can I burn these?
• How will that make more room for Spirit?


I've been blaming
the fibromyalgia,
giving it credit
and power

letting it
and my false
self dictate
and block

and, as I
undertake
the purification
process and
burn them
away,

I clear room
for more of
Spirit
within

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Lent, retreat, purification and truth

Growing up mostly Methodist and tuning out as a young adult, I didn't really get Lent. All of the Catholic kids at school were either complaining or comparing what they were giving up. Usually easy stuff like chewing gum or cotton candy. Nothing very persuasive or impressive. And there was the awful cafeteria fish we were served on Fridays in public school during this season.

And, I hadn't really considered it since except I am slowly building a relationship with a wonderful Episcopal minister (I think that's the right term; Mary doesn't strike me as a priest). She asked me once if I wanted her to "unpack" lent and I, politely, said yes, thinking what new could you possibly tell me. Plenty, I discovered. Wish I'd tuned in a little closer at first and taken notes. What I do recall is that she talked about 40 being such a pivotal number in the Bible: Noah's rainy 40 days and nights and the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness. Google showed many more examples. Then she spoke of lent in terms of a retreat time. Then, my ears and heart perked up. I always relish the idea of retreat, whether it's away or in my studio. She explained it as a time to be silent, still and listen to what challenges Spirit presents.

And today's Thomas Keating meditation fits right in:

"Biblical Desert: Interior PurificationSit alone in silence ...Lamentations: 3:28
Lent is the season in which the church as a whole enters into an extended retreat. Jesus went into the desert for forty days and forty nights. The practice of Lent  is a participation in Jesus' solitude, silence and privation ... The biblical desert is not so much a geographical location – a place of sand, stones or sagebrush – as a process of interior purification leading to complete liberation from the false-self system with its programs for happiness that cannot possibly work ..."
– March 4 from The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living: Excerpts from the Works of Father Thomas Keating

It's as if he knew my word for the year, the one Mary handed me last week, is purification.

Yesterday's meditation focused on how the Gospel calls us to be responsible for our emotional life, recognizing its weaknesses and how it interferes with us truly listening to others. "The work of Lent," he writes, "is to face the unconscious values that underlie the emotional programs for happiness and to change them ... with a discipline of contemplative prayer and action."

I love that, within the established church – perhaps not mine – there is a season for this work! You know, on the surface, Catholics and Quakers appear very different. Symbolism and ritual have no place in physical Quakerism and yet, when you look to the mystical aspects of both faiths, there is so much similarity. I'd guess that 75 percent of the "convinced"Quakers I know (not born into it) were Catholic. I've even heard people call themselves Quatholic!

I did pay attention to yesterday's message about taking responsibility for our emotions and their programs of happiness. I pulled out the microscope and looked at that coupled with this notion of purification. What I saw was sobering. I have built a life for so long based on pain, injury and woundedness. My lens was colored and I hadn't even noticed. At bedtime, a book I borrowed eons ago, called out to me. "The Prosperity Secrets of the Ages" (Catherine Ponder) was loaned to me by my wise spiritual friend Char. I had attempted it once before, agreeing with the first few pages, but putting it away. Last night, I couldn't put it down. It's the next piece in my purification puzzle. Blessing is God' way, cursing is not. I hadn't thought of my point of view as cursing, but it has been. I have been living with a filter of negativity. Understandable after 15 years of chronic pain, but no longer tolerable.

I began saying all manner of blessings last night and slept the best I have in over a week. Tuesday lap time is often prayer time, so midway through, I began blessing everyone and everything I could think of. With 88 laps, I still had more to bless!

I'm achy today, but it's so much easier to tolerate with this perspective of blessing. It seems like the self-fulfilling prophesy. Could it really be so simple?

I have chuckled over the past weeks as I hammer out a "Pain as Spiritual Teacher" workshop, beginning to see that my nemesis, woundedness and pain, is becoming my gift. Ah, the Wounded Healer!

• What meaning has Lent held for me?
• How has that changed over time?
• How can it become contemplative for me?
• To what challenge is God calling me right now?
• How am I examining that in stillness, prayer and silence?


no time for
my normal
get-away
January retreat

sick and
missed Mary's
new-year session

knowing I
need this so
centrally

and learning
there is a
season for it

the time I
always seek
rebirth and
resurrection

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