journey | Michael Valliant

The Miracle of Being Here and Going Home

I think about the movie “Shawshank Redemption” a good bit. In one of the most quotable conversations of the film, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says to Red (Morgan Freeman):

“It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”

And that might be the simplest breakdown, though likely too simple, of the last section of John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara.” The section is called, “Death: The Horizon is the Well.”

Death has a lot to do with life. In our lives, negativity and fear exile us from our own love and warmth, O’Donohue says, and to live life fully we need to transfigure or transform the negativity and fear “by turning it toward the light of your soul.”

“Eventually what you call the negative side of yourself can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity, and growth within you.”

O’Donohue says that part of transforming this negativity and fear happens by us letting go of it.

“Mystics have always recognized that to come deeper into the divine presence within, you need to practice detachment. When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes. False things, which you have desperately held on to, move away very quickly from you. Then what is real, what you love deeply, and what really belongs to you comes deeper into you.”

Like the subject of aging, which was the previous section in “Anam Cara,” we don’t like to think or talk about death. It is an absolute fact of life, but it’s not a place we are comfortable going in conversation. We see death as separate from life, an ending, a horizon that we head towards. O’Donohue points out that it doesn’t really work that way. He quotes Hans Georg Gadamer, who says:

“A horizon is something toward which we journey, but it is also something that journeys along with us.”

Death is something that is always with us, not just at the end. And there are ways that we can get to know it.

“The meeting with your own death in the daily forms of failure, pathos, negativity, fear, or destructiveness are actually opportunities to transfigure your ego. These are invitations to move out of that productive, controlling way of being toward an art of being that allows openness and hospitality.”

What we go through in life can help us live more deeply. When we risk something and fail or fall and learn and get back up and move on, we can learn to release our fear and anxiety about it. This is also true of death.

“When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging.”

Our life and our faith can help us to see death as a release into a completely new divine belonging. We can see examples of the natural life cycle, birth, life, death, rebirth–in the landscape, in nature, and all around us.

In our lives, we can see and feel and know that love goes on beyond death, love is bigger.

If we see death as going into nothingness, O’Donohue points out that “nothingness is the sister of possibility.” There needs to be space, nothingness, in order to create. In the creation story in Genesis, out of a formless void, God uses light and creates space for things to happen.

“Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected… This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch… Death is not the end; it is a rebirth.”

This is all heady stuff. We are dealing with something we have no first-hand experience of, it is not something we can know. But it’s something we come to know in terms of losing people we love. During the six weeks that our study was together, we had multiple people lose dear and close family members as well as bringing in home hospice care to care for a parent. Death is ever present and devastating when it claims those we love.

Some folks in our group found this chapter helpful, some felt it was a subject that was too close to process. The thing about a study like this, or a Bible study, or any small group of people who you meet with and are close to–I think Ram Dass put it beautifully in saying, “We are all walking each other home.” We need to be there for each other in the tender and tough times of loss and pain.

We get a chance to be there for one another. But as for those who have died, O’Donohue says, why grieve them?

“We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home. They are with God from whom they came. They have returned to the nest of their identity within the great circle of God. God is the greatest circle of all, the largest embrace in the universe, which holds visible and invisible, temporal, and eternal, as one.”

There is the good stuff. Those who have passed have gone home. They are contained in the circle of God. They have moved from our temporal world into the eternal.

And then O’Donohue does something cool. He talks about how he sees eternal time:

“In eternal time all is now; time is presence. I believe that is what eternal life means: it is a life where all that we seek–goodness, unity, beauty, truth, and love–are no longer distant from us but are now completely present with us.”

Completely present. Complete presence. There is something wonderful, whole, and beautiful to that. In the deepest sense, that is home.

What do we do with all that? How should that inform our lives? Well, if death is a release, a homecoming, a rebirth, then it isn’t something to be feared or ignored. Being at peace with what happens at the end of our lives, we should focus on how we live our lives.

We should transfigure the small deaths–the failures, the fears, the setbacks–and try to grow in presence with others in love, grace, hospitality. We should look for and try to experience eternal presence in our temporal lives (we go back to chronos and kairos again).

O’Donohue reminds us:

“It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.”

If I think back to Shawshank Redemption, and “get busy living or get busy dying,” I can think of living as taking advantage of the miracle of being here. And I can think of get busy dying is forgetting that privilege, of allowing fear and negativity to control how we live, which would be not living to the fullest.

So Andy Dufresne may still be on to something.

We closed our last class this past Monday with part of a prayer from “A New Zealand Prayer Book,” in their Daily Devotions, excerpting from the Monday prayer. Since it is Monday as I write, we will close here with it as well:

From “A New Zealand Prayer Book”

From Monday Evening

There is nothing in death or life,
in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers,
in the world as it is or the world as it shall be,
in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths –
nothing in all creation
which can separate us from the love of God
which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Love never comes to an end.

Holy One, holy and eternal,
awesome, exciting and delightful in your holiness;
make us pure in heart to see you;
make us merciful to receive your kindness,
and to share our love with all your human family;
then will your name be hallowed on earth as in heaven.

Support us, Lord, all the day long,
until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes,
the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over,
and our work done;
then Lord, in your mercy, give us safe lodging,
a holy rest and peace at the last.

Amen.

Pilgrimage at home

There’s a good chance that a whole lot of people are feeling stuck at the moment. Stuck at home, stuck in a rut, stuck in the time warp of several weeks known collectively as blursday.

And this won’t do. We are far too busy, we have too much to do to be sitting at home. We believe Tom Cochrane when he tells us, “Life is a highway, I want to drive it all night long.”

Of course, if you are like Holly, Michael, and Daryl from “The Office,” or me, or a lot of people, you realize how old that song gets, how old that way of thinking gets, and how easy it is to get “stuck” and restless with that approach to life.

Maybe we needed to pull the car over anyway. And get out and look around. Thomas Merton helps me do that. The photo at the top of the page was taken by Merton in northern California in 1968. I first came across it in an incredible multimedia piece by Emergence Magazine. One of the most calming, soul-opening, wonder-producing things I have ever watched, if you have 11 minutes, this video captures more of how I feel about God, spirituality, solitude, and pilgrimage than just about anything I have found.

I say this frequently, but Merton has been one of the most influential thinkers in my faith walk; he not only speaks to my soul, he often speaks my soul, and sends me into wonder and awe and connection and helps me find my own words for my own journey.

In the film, Merton talks about the metaphor of the journey.

“Going off where God leads you… We’re all on a journey, we’re all going somewhere… The geographic pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. Every moment and every event of every person’s life on earth plants something in their soul.”
Thomas Merton

In the photo, Merton and company have pulled over. They are out of the car. I think that’s significant. Journeys aren’t always about traveling physical distance; you run the risk of missing what’s going on around you.

Pilgrimage is one of my favorite words. It has been since the first time I heard it–it imprinted on me in a deep way, like it was already waiting in me, just to be woken up, and it may end up as part of a tattoo. Pilgrimage is equal parts an interior word as it is exterior/geographic.

There was a great deal of care and thought given to the house where I live by people who lived here before me. There is a winding path of stepping stones from the back deck, around the yard, to what has become my writing shed/sanctuary. The stones sit above the puddles when rain collects in the yard and it also makes a meditative, mindful, intentional walk in any weather. There are days when I try to make each stone a prayer. Among the stepping stones, there are two with pottery, stones, sea glass, rocks and found objects incorporated into them.

“Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.”
Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude”

If I think about it, a walk across the yard can be a symbolic pilgrimage. It can take me somewhere new, even while taking me to the same place each day.

If I take each step as a prayer…

“God utters me like a word, containing a partial thought of himself. Let me seek then the gift of silence and poverty and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer. Where the sky is my prayer; the birds are my prayer; the wind in the trees is my prayer. For God is all, in all.” (Merton, Emergence video)

At the door to the shed is the second art-dazzled stone. It puts creativity right at the doorstep. The kind of journey, the kind of art we need right now, maybe the kind we always need is the kind that connects us. It’s the art where we can see another and be seen by another, in the truest sense. And it’s a journey into and from our own solitude that shows us how we are connected.

Into our solitude…

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon, if we’re not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.” (Merton, Emergence)

And back out…

“Our task now is to learn that if we can voyage to the ends of the earth, and there find ourselves in the stranger who most differs from ourselves, we will have made a fruitful pilgrimage. This is why pilgrimage is necessary, in some shape or other. Mere sitting at home and meditating on the Divine presence is not enough for our time. We have to come to the end of a long journey and see that the stranger we meet there is none other than ourselves.” (Merton, Emergence)

Pilgrimage, really faith is about transformation. It’s both about finding ourselves, which we have to do first, and then seeing ourselves in others and them in us.

Whether we are at home or when we can get back out into the world, we are on the same journey. And if we want to get the most out of it, we are going to have to get out of the car. We’ll want to meet the strangers. And meet ourselves. Maybe we will come out of this pilgrimage at home finding ourselves more connected than when we started.

And you may ask yourself…how did I get here?

We all reach a point in our lives when we look around and wonder how we got here. Maybe not all of us, but I definitely do. A friend recently described present life as feeling like, “I accidentally got dropped into this weird world.”

David Byrne gets it.

And you may find yourself
living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world.
And you may find yourself
behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,
with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, well
how did I get here?

Sometimes I get the sense that part of that not knowing where we are is because we’ve forgotten we’re on a journey. We live life like it’s the same, day in and day out, then we look around not knowing where we stopped paying attention.

We were recently talking about faith–what is faith? How can you have faith? And when we talk about it in that way, when we frame the questions like that, what people often mean is faith as belief: how do I believe in something? Faith is much bigger than belief, in the same way a mountain is much bigger than simply dirt and rock and a journey is more than crossing the street.

There’s plenty I don’t agree with theologian Marcus Borg about. But there is also a lot about what he has to say that excites me and gives me hope for what faith is and where it can lead. Borg, in a posthumously released book, “Days of Awe and Wonder,” asks what would happen if we look beyond our notion of faith as believing, and try to see Christian life as a journey:

“To be on a journey is to be in movement… A journey is a process that involves our feet as well as our minds and our heads. A journey involves following a path or a way. To be on a journey is not to be wandering aimlessly, though there are many times when it feels like that; people have gone on this journey before us, and there is a trail, a path, a way that we are called to. The journey image suggests that the Christian life is more like following a path than believing with our minds.”

If we allow that our life is a journey, it makes sense that the view is going to change along the way. And maybe if we walked looking through that lens, we’d key into when changes are taking place.

Borg digs back and looks at ancient meanings of the word faith as used in Scripture. He unpacks three: 1) Faith as trust (the opposite of which is anxiety), 2) Faith as fidelity (to our relationship with God), and 3) “Faith as a way of seeing the whole, the whole of that which we live and move and have our being.”

And he points out the different ways we can see the whole, the universe, in which we live and move and have our being: we can see it as hostile towards us, indifferent towards us, or we can “see the whole as gracious, nourishing, and supportive of life, to see it as that which has brought us into existence and continues to nourish us.” Let’s lean into the last option, gracious, nourishing, supportive.

And here’s a part I fully dig:

“Faith is thus about setting out on a journey in a posture of trust, seeking to be faithful to the relationship we are called into. We are invited to make that journey, that journey of faith, in which we learn to trust our relationship to God, learn to be faithful to that relationship, and learn to see it in a new way. We will be led in that journey into an ever more wondrous and compassionate understanding of our lives with God.”

If we look beyond faith as being as simple as belief, and we see it as trusting God, setting out on a journey to learn how to be in relationship with Him and with each other, and building that relationship over a continuing journey into more wonder, more compassion, more understanding; that’s a journey, an adventure I want to wake up to, dig into, and live into every day.

Matthew and the Rock Face

If you’d told me 15 years ago that I would find laughter, joy, friendships, tears, questions, answers, life, sorrow, challenges, confusion, exhaustion, and exhilaration, all in a Bible study, I am sure I would have dismissed it.

At the beginning of October 2017, two groups at Christ Church Easton started a journey through Matthew’s gospel, using N.T. Wright’s “Matthew for Everyone” as a touchstone. We weren’t sure whether to end at Christmas, part-way down the path, but both groups wanted to see it through. With three weeks left to go, Jesus has been arrested, and we know what’s coming.

Wright looks at where we are in the story and compares it to standing at the bottom of a huge rock face.

“That is how we should feel as we stand at the foot of the final ascent of St. Matthew’s gospel. We have walked at a steady pace through the hills and the valleys of the story. We have sat down to hear Jesus deliver another parable or discourse. We have marched with him along the road, enjoying the sunshine of the early days in Galilee, and the remarkable views as the disciples gradually realized more of what the kingdom was about. We have arrived in Jerusalem at watched dramatic events unfold. But we are now standing in front of a sheer wall of rock, and if we don’t find it both compelling and terrifying, we haven’t got the right spectacles on.”

I feel that. I feel it in my life and I feel it as we read and work through Matthew. I feel it as we approach both spring and Easter. With all the beauty and questions, there is death ahead. There is rebirth and renewal after, but it only comes after and because of a death. I think that is also true of our lives. It is of mine–some of the most beautiful and meaningful times come after loss, come after the low, come after the crap. And sometimes they only happen because of the painful experience that preceded it.

Wright goes on:

“The theories about why Jesus died–theories of the ‘atonement,’ as they are called–are like maps or old photographs, taken from a distance. They may be accurate in their way, and the’re helpful particularly when it’s cloudy and you can’t see too much for the moment. But they’re not the same thing as climbing to the top yourself, and perhaps, if you’re lucky, getting there on a clear day when you can see the view. When that happens, you will find you quickly run out of words to describe what you are looking at.”

It’s not the same thing as climbing to the top yourself. What we find in Scripture is a lot like what we find in life–we get out of it what we invest in it, what we live into it. And if we are going to understand Scripture, or life, it is going to help to have guides, and friends to share the journey with, and the views. We are going to stumble and we are going to need help.

We’ve got three classes left, finishing this ascent during Holy Week as we head into Easter. Our two groups of pilgrims are at the rock face. A journey that started together five months ago. When I look back, when I look around, and when I look forward, I “quickly run out of words to describe” it.

A Journey with Fire

There are a few times in life where I have felt my heart and soul consumed by fire. It’s an incredible feeling. One that I am starting to feel again. It is wholly overwhelming. It’s a stirring of the soul, a call to action.

I am laid back, I tend to go with the flow and enjoy where the ride goes. That’s a tendency I like about myself, but it’s also one I can let get taken to the extreme. It’s a good thing until it becomes passive. Then it can lead to complacency. I am not a fan of complacency.

I’ve come to recognize that my whole being needs challenges; needs adventures; I need to be roused. Woken up. I’ve been feeling that in crazy ways of late. Fire is the best metaphor I can offer. It feels like flames.

Thursday was bookended by soaring thoughts. In the morning, it was from reading John Eldredge’s “Wild at Heart.” Eldredge flies in the face of the notion of Christian men and women as simply “nice” and “good” people; he sees the church today as being too full of bored (and thereby boring) people and points us more toward living a life with passion, adventure, not playing it safe, and finding our true name, our calling.

The history of a man’s relationship with God is the story of how God calls him out, takes him on a journey and gives him his true name.

It strikes me that it different key points in my life, books have found me that bring up and work through the warrior spirit. The year Anna was born it was Chogyam Trungpa’s “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior,” from which I have a tattoo on my upper back, and now it’s Eldredge calling me back to that energy with God. It has stoked more inner fire, seeded more prayer, and roused a renewed energy at a time when I need it.

My other Thursday bookend came from watching “The Shawshank Redemption” at the Oxford Community Center’s movie night.

I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope. – Red

The team of Andy Dufresne and Red stir my soul every time. But here we are with the journey again, at it’s beginning.

I fractured my skull during Sunday School at church when I was three years old. That should have been all the indication I needed that my journey was not going to be easy, or boring, or safe. Our walk with God is a full contact sport.

This morning’s sermon ended with a prayer from Thomas Merton, which the minister found during college. He claimed that Merton helped save his life. I feel the same way and have written plenty, and will continue to write, contemplate, and quote Merton.

This morning’s prayer came from the book, “Thoughts in Solitude:”

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not know the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Our journey, our road is ours. It’s not like anyone else’s. It’s wired into our unique DNA, and we have the Holy Spirit in that same DNA, a compass to help us find our way. The Holy Spirit, is also that fire in our hearts, which gets stoked in each of us after our own passion, our own calling. The closer we get, the more it gets stoked, the higher and brighter it burns. We have to find what stokes us, and how to sustain it. We are given maybe a spark, which we have to help grow and light us up.

I’ve got all this dancing around in my head, walking up to communion with the girls together for the first time in our lives. I’ve got deep joy welling up, as the closing hymn begins playing.

The song? “Light the Fire in My Heart Again.”

Amen.