Another Helping of Brokenness
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I am prone to sudden jerky movements that are beyond my control. The other day, I was out on an errand. As happens so often when I go out, I experienced how we judge one another. And how sometimes we are both spectacularly loud and spectacularly wrong in our judgments.
Keeping On Though Not Yet
Were you ever going somewhere and impatient to arrive? Are we there yet? Have you ever been ill a long time and wondered when and if you would get well? When? I am sick and tired of being sick and tired! Have you ever gone without and gone seeking for it and not found it, weeks and weeks and years and years? Am I useful at all? Doesn’t anyone have any work for me?
How often do you tell others, “Not yet”? How often are you told, “Not yet”? How do we carry on, day after day, night after night, when we are fed a steady diet of stories, images, and songs that insist if we are living rightly, we will have all we need, be able to give all of our gifts for goodness right now and easily, and love and be loved without any challenges or difficulties?
Spiritual Drought & Restoration
I have to be mindful of the baskets of flowers that hang below the eaves. Even though it has rained for four days, the eaves have sheltered the flowers from the rain. This means that though the road is washed out and water sits upon the ground with no where to go, even though the dock is below the lake’s surface and the warbler flycatchers have to hunt not in the air but up and down the hemlocks seeking mosquitoes for their chicks, even though I am living in a surfeit of good cold rain, the flowers might die from thirst.
Spiritually, this is also true. How many spiritual leaders and regular religious adherents have I met who are going through a tough spiritual drought while all around them is running lush and wet? When we’re in those spiritually dry times, everyone we meet and the world around us can seem tremendously fresh and full and juicy, making our own thirst worse, somehow crueler.
Watering these hanging baskets by hand, refreshing the water in the dog’s bowl, I stop to pour myself a glass of cold water, knowing that I can ignore my own thirst for a very long time. I’m busy attending the thirst of plants that cannot draw up their own water, or the thirst of a dog who remains puzzled as to why there are no paws-alone working taps in the house, or to the spiritual thirst of a seeker, a stranger, or a friend. That needs doing. I also need to drink a glass of water, too, stopping to refresh my body and stopping to refresh my soul.
I’ve been quieter than usual lately, largely due to the acuity of an illness I live with – and expect to live with for the rest of my life. I’ve been learning my new limitations, adapting to what has emerged as patterns. Adaptation is just what human beings do, and I believe spirituality is our biggest adaptive response. The Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church taught: “religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” That may be so. I have found that spirituality is my response to the challenges of living. We innovate, we renovate, we create, and these are all forms of adaptation to change, to opportunity, to energy, to possibility. This season of my life has been a wet one, rich with opportunities to grow spiritually, full of change, most of which are not ones I would choose, welcome, or wish for someone else.
Yet, despite all these rainy blessings, I grew thirsty, inattentive to my spirit, my attention absorbed by other changes, by the needs of others, by loss and by the physical difficulty of each day. If one lets a basket of flowers dry out completely, a flood of water will wash off the top of the dry soil. One has to rehydrate the basket slowly, with sips, with gentle attention until the soil is full and spongy again. The same is true with our spirits. When we have gone through a drought or neglected to tend our spirits, we have to return with small, regular sips of life-giving blessings. As we do, our senses come back into balance, and we are more able to serve, more able to struggle well with what is needful, more able to laugh generously and to forgive, more able to fulfill our faithful promises and love this life sparkling in wonder and growing in hope.
Getting Out of Our Own Way Faithfully
Recently, I was on my way out the door at my local library. It was newsletter folding day, and several volunteers were out sick. I was asked to help out.
Now I pray regularly to be ready to help when asked. I had things to be done, but nothing urgent. Still, there was a moment of wrestling with the unplanned request. I stayed. I folded newsletters with my neighbors. I had a wonderful time and we all were able to go into a beautiful day sooner because of working together. It was a joy – and a moment of spiritual practice when I could transcend my expectations and plans for the day and answer the needs I met along the way. I was given the opportunity to live faithfully, to practice neighborliness and to be generous with what I had – time – letting go of my schedule that did not need to be so rigid.
Transformation Is
Early on, I grew to love tramping through the woods hunting edible mushrooms. The little depressions filled with pine litter that bloomed after a rain in late summer into a patch of golden chanterelles, the snag that drew woodpeckers seeking sustenance flushing twice a year with the heavy fruit of sulfur shell, the sandy dry patches that bore tiny black trumpets were each and all seasonal treasures of transformation. One wonderful and magical place became yet another. The leaf litter changed to leaf mold and then back to earth and from that once again mushrooms, herbs, and trees grew anew.
Once we harvested those mushrooms, of course, another transformation went on—we washed and cut and cooked them. Those fungi nourished us, changing again. And what we did not eat or could not use went into the compost, to change again to nourishing earth.
Transformation is life, including the transformation that results in death and decay.
Growing Our Hearts Wings
In a disposable world, brokenness is often terrible and terrifying. Who repairs, recycles, reuses, mends, and darns any more? We exile the attributes that shame us, wall away the hurting places, and shove the frightened and shattered behind a pretty curtain.
Brokenness just is, neither good nor bad. It is just as much part of being as birth and death, failure and success, crying and laughing, and all the emotions and deeds and aspirations and losses that make us who we are. What we do with that brokenness is what matters.
The story is told that the great violinist Yitzhak Perlman once was playing a concerto when one of his violin strings broke. Usually when this happens, everything stops, the string is replaced, and the musicians begin again. But Perlman finished the concerto with only three strings. Afterwards, he reportedly said, “Our task is to make music with what remains.”
Hospitality: Tuning Into Our Neighbors
Although I am hearing impaired, I spend time and energy each week attending to Radyo Lekól, a Creole language program on one of my local public radio stations. I always learn a lot, just as when I turn and attend to Democracy Now En Español. The news covered is sometimes the same stories as in the English language media, but often from different perspectives, and, even more often, completely different stories.
I am fluent neither in Creole nor Spanish, but tuning in and attending to the news of my larger community, in the languages of my larger community, is part of living faithfully. I listen as a stranger when I do not understand what is being said. I listen as a neighbor to seek to understand. Even though listening is exhausting—that’s part of life for many of us with hearing impairments—as a matter of faith, I need to spend energy attending to my neighbor’s concerns and dreams.
How can I care about my neighbors’ concerns and dreams if I do not know what is going on with them?
Attending to my neighbors’ concerns and dreams is the kind of hospitality we practice with committed multiculturalism, with working for justice and equality, with choosing and sustaining pluralism day after day. It is a hospitality where I am sometimes stranger, sometimes neighbor, sometimes host, and sometimes kin. But in all of those roles I am called in love to a generosity of spirit to hope, to cultivate understanding, and to care.
How are you attending to your neighbors’ concerns and dreams?
The Company We Keep: Hospitality and Mutuality
Moral communities in which roles of host and guests are not tightly defined but allow for mutuality are communities that recognize a multiplicity of gifts.
—Christine Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, (1999) p.122
Often in religious community we speak of nurturing diversity as welcoming. When we use the language of welcome, we are embracing the language of hospitality. When you think of hospitality, are you most comfortable as guest or as a host? How comfortable are you with being both stranger/guest and host at the same time? How easy is for you and your community to move fluidly between those roles?
Radical hospitality makes room for and is grounded in:
- the generous care of every person’s gifts,
- the belief that every person has gifts worthy of and necessary to the flourishing faithful community, and
- the commitment to answer the calling of each other’s gifts into the life of service, worship, leadership, membership, and spiritual growth.
Faitfhful Risk for Living Faith
I rarely speak of faith as a noun, but rather of faithing and faithful living. Every day we’re invited on a risky adventure of living into our promises and aspirations, of growing spiritually, and of contributing to the blessings of this world. If we’re not risking, we’re probably not faithing, but play-it-safe-ing.
Yet because so many of us have been taught that faith is either a virtue (you have it or you don’t) or a place (Greetings from Faith!), we have to unlearn the play-it-safe-ing that often accompanies the virtue and place ideas of what living faithfully is. We have to develop new spiritual habits, spiritual habits that have very real world consequences and actions attached to them.
Hope and Assurance
Hope is a virtue, which means it aids, abets, and bears goodness in the world. Yet hopefulness, like so many of the other virtues, is easily derided and denied. Hopefulness can be put down as unrealistic, or even as wish fulfillment. But hopefulness is not based in our hopes for shiny things or good parking spaces.
Hopefulness is a generous way of living. There’s a lot of allowance in hopefulness, one that accepts and works with imperfection, that encourages learning, innovating, and faithfully risking. When we’re living in the spiritual habit of hopefulness, we can fail and not be failures, make mistakes and not be mistakes. Why?
