Suffering

Last Sunday a gun man entered a Gay night club in Orlando, FA and killed almost 50 people and wounded many, many more.   US drones are flying over the middle East killing people, and climate change is causing the daily extinction of many species.   I have been thinking about suffering.

Clients often ask me why there is suffering.   We struggle against what we see as the unfairness and randomness of suffering.  It is unfair.  We feel if we could understand why suffering took place this would change it.  Each great religion offers explanations for suffering.  It does not change it for it is still part of our world.  We secretly hope that if we could understand suffering that we could escape it, and yet there is no escaping it.  Have you ever known anyone who did not suffer at some point in their life?  I certainly have not.  The question of why there is suffering is the wrong question.  The real question is how do we respond to suffering?   Perhaps if we could stop struggling against suffering like an animal in a trap we could learn to turn towards in and learn to respond with compassion.  Suffering is indeed with us like air, water and breath.

Christianity says that because God gave us all free will that this includes the freedom to do the wrong thing - to "sin" or to do evil.  But Christianity also says that God incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ stood looking down from a hill upon humanity and wept in response to our suffering (and way of treating each other.)  Christians are directed to identify the ways they sin or separate from God and bring themselves back to God and to pray for others to also have redemption.

Buddhism says that suffering is the nature of human experience.  But it also teaches that mindfulness is the way to reach detachment from the illusion of our experience being reality.  the Maras are the several forms of suffering that we are said to experience and believers are taught prayers of loving kindness designed to hold both people close to us and even total strangers in compassion and healing energy.

Judaism says that God contracted the divine self to make room for creation. Divine light was held in special vessels, or kelim, some of which shattered and scattered. While most of the light returned to its divine source, some light attached itself to the broken shards. These shards constitute evil and their trapped sparks of light give them power.

The first man, Adam, was intended to restore the divine sparks through mystical exercises, but his sin interfered. As a result, good and evil remained thoroughly mixed in the created world, and human souls also became imprisoned within the shards.  The “repair,” referred to in Judaism as Tikkun Olam that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts.

It is noteworthy that all three of these great religions identify suffering - two of them describing it as separation from God, and all three see the way out of suffering as a spiritual path, that it is our intentional striving for good that is believed to be the cure.  All three call their followers to compassion in the face of suffering.  Buddhism says we cannot stop or end suffering we can only learn a way to be with us that releases us.

Coming Home to the Holy One

Becoming disconnected from the Divine or losing our spiritual way is an age old spiritual problem. Almost all religions proscribe steps one is to take if one is disconnected from God to reconnect. Prayer of course is one of the main ways we are encouraged to make that connection.  Recently I was listening to a talk by Tara Brach (which I highly recommend checking out: https://www.tarabrach.com/) When she made the comment that the surest way to turn back to the Holy was to turn towards love.  I noticed that just asking myself the question: which direction is loving? seems to help re-orientate me.

Buddhism suggests that the first spiritual motion is to stop, to reflect, to pause and to be mindfully aware of what we notice in the gap.   While Buddhism does not believe in a Divine entity I find that for myself taking this pause on a daily basis is the best way for me to take inventory and notice both if I am connected or disconnected from the Divine Parent.   It is also the best way for me to notice what are the spiritual issues in my life.

Buddhism also describes the Mara (the demon), said to have 5 daughters or Kleśa-māra (unskillful emotions - or the things that make us off center): greed/attachment/desire/passion, hate, delusion, aversion/discontentment and the worst being fear.  It is said that as the Buddha was about to reach enlightment Mara sent all 5 to tempt the Buddha. Buddha had resisted the first 4, but to resist fear Buddha touches the earth drawing upon its strength and energy as an anchor.  As a therapist I often find that when working with people in facing the hardest emotions: fear, rage, grief....that people are greatly aided by calling upon God but that for those who do not believe in God that calling on something Vast and mighty like earth, wind, fire, the ocean or mountain is what it takes to anchor us.

What can anchor you? What can help keep you from negative emotions that take you away from God? What kind of prayer practice keeps you connected?   What have you learned disconnects you?

The spirit in God's Creation

Is there a square of earth or a couple of trees that you are in relationship with?  That you know intimately?  In the past 20 years I have lived in 9 or 10 different places, but all within throwing distance of the the same many fingered creek.  I have lived in some houses, and many apartments. I have worked hard to always live and work in places where I could look out at nature and not at another building or a parking lot.  (It is sad that it is work to accomplish that and how many city dwellers cannot see, without going to a park, God's Creation.)

In each place I have come to know when things bloom and what they look like and the rhythm of their cycle of blooming, flourishing and relinquishing for the winter.  I am in relationship with these bits of the earth, and just like the rhythms of my own reproductive cycle grounded me, or the rhythm of day and night, or the cycle of the moon, so too do these cycles.  I have tended fruit trees that demanded that they be harvested on their schedule not mine or the fruit would be spoiled on the ground.   Similarly dandelions in bud demanded action before they would seed and make next years weeding worse.   And invasive weeds let me know that if I did not tend them they would take over and kill everything else.

There is a quiz I took a few years ago.  It asks:
1. On what watershed do you live?
2.  What are five trees native to your state?
3.  What are five native birds?
4.  What are five native flowers?
Sadly most Americans cannot even partially answer these questions.   Partly because we move so often and partly because of how cut off from the earth we are.

The first year I looked out  my apt window at this tree I was completely amused by what happened when the buds opened: it was like party favors burst open. I grew to watch it as a friend.

Recently at my Church retreat we were asked the question is the Light of God in all Life forms?   As someone who scored highest on the belief.net test of religions as a pantheist/pagan this was not a hard question form to answer.

I like this quote from Rachel Carson:  "I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.  I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth."

The often quotes speech of Chief Si' ahl (pronounced Seattle by non-native white people), chief of the Duwamish also speaks to this deep love of place:

 Ever part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.... The White Man will never be alone. 

In the face of climate change I can only stand indited by the above.   I know that in terms of systems theory there are suppose to be feedback loops in every system that are corrective - signs, indicators that cue the system to correct when something is wrong.   But we are so deeply cut off from the earth that we do not even notice the warning signs.   I have been appalled as spring comes several months to early and birds arrive way before they should - that my fellow neighbors simply rejoice at "early spring" rather than hearing the earth's distress.  That our news reporters report forest fires, droughts and record rain and snow storms without ever uttering the word climate change, and we complain about the impacts of these changes, but we do not react with appropriate alarm saying "the earth is sick and what are we going to do about it?"  Many of us live in concrete and steel jungles were we are lucky if we see over manicured grass and a tree stuck in a square in the sidewalk.  How would we see then the miles of pine trees dying from pine beetle disease?  Or the trees that are dying from drought?  People drive by trees being smothered to death by invasive ivy without understanding that there is an invasion happening and a death is occurring in their sight.

Four hundred years ago Descarte taught us that body and mind, man and earth were separate from each other.  The whole western way of structuring society has been built upon this misguided polarity which has also separated our body from our soul - and apparently our souls from the earth upon which our very survival depends!   We have falsely believed we are masters over the earth rather than understanding that we are living cells within a body and that to fail to care for the body will mean our own death.  We have believed that we have the right to cut down trees because they are in our way or because we want to use them.  We have believed we have the right to blow the tops off mountains or  remove the deep recesses of the earth that which is within.  I don't believe in the concept of sin, but if there is such a thing this is what it would be - the desecration of the earth.  Who are we to say that there is not the divine spirit within every molecule of life?  How would we act if we believed that God's spirit dwelt in every living thing on this planet?  How would we act if the life forms around us was our familiar and cherished friends?

Is God Angry?

We know that early cultural tribes often prayed to multiple Gods - often having Gods that represented different aspects of life: war, love, justice, etc.   or in other cases represented the spirit within various aspects of nature: mountains, the ocean, trees, etc.   But under either of these schema natural disasters were viewed as a sign that the God's were angry.  In fact even after cultures increasingly went to Monotheism, the belief in one God, it was believed that God was mad when an earthquake or hurricane or a plague came.   I mean think about it, before one understood what germs were or how they spread how do you make sense of a plague coming to a town and wiping out most of the population?   It would seem arbitrary and cruel...like someone was trying to punish.   Before one could know about the plates underneath the earth shifting and causing earthquakes this too would seem arbitrary and mighty in its power to destroy.   Before one could understand conflicting hot and cold fronts and how they effected water bodies a hurricane would seem crazy - normally the water has predictable tides and now it has risen up in a destroying rage.

By the time we have reached the 21st century, science has become such a force that it can explain many if not most things.   It has increasingly shaped how humans understand our environment and the way our universe works.   It is taught in our schools around the developed world.  It binds us to a common understanding of the world even across language barriers.   In fact some sociologist have postulated that the waning of both church attendance and church influence in certainly the US is because of the rise of science - a fact that has made many fundamentalist churches actively hostile towards science.   Well that and the fact that the religious texts of most religions, written 2,000 some years ago reflect the scientific understanding of that era about the earth, and thus stand in opposition to certain current scientific findings like that humans evolved from apes, and that the earth was not created in 7 days.  Some sociologists argue that religion is simply a system by which humanity explains reality, which is increasingly being replaced by a new system for explaining reality: science.

So we stand in a curious time where many Americans have abandoned religion altogether as not a reliable source of truth - a sort of quaint mythology of the past.   At the same time that many religions cling stubbornly to their holy books claiming them as a more accurate source of truth than science and fight to keep science out of the school or even out of court cases.  So we have a battle in the US right now about what is the more accurate source of truth: religion or science.   (Just as several centuries ago the battle of European society was over whether the Bible or the clergy was the more accurate source of knowing Truth.)   No where can this disputes difference be more clearly seen than in US response to climate change.  While at first a non-partisan issue, the Republican party has increasingly made it matter of doctrine within the Republican party that all "true" party members reject the truth of climate change by pretending that the 97% agreement among scientists means there is not scientific agreement about climate change being created by human activity.  The party has actually refused to support financially members who will not embrace this orthodoxy.  (Just as the church of  a previous era persecuted those who subscribed to the idea that the world was round.)

I read something recently that startled me.  It pointed out that for the percentage of the world population that is not literate (~14%), they mostly do not even know the word climate change, much less what it means.   It was a shocking idea thinking of people facing tsunamis and droughts with no understanding of why it is happening.  Will they again believe that the God(s) are mad?  But then the thought occurs to me that if one does not believe in science then again how does one explain all these catastrophes that are coming with increasing frequency.  Is God mad at us?  

And if you believe in both science and God as the vast majority of Americans do - so science explains to you what is happening in regards to climate change - that begs the question of how God feels about climate change.  If God is the creator/designer of all life on this planet through mechanisms exquisitely described by science - how would God not be ....well if not quite angry than certainly heartbroken over what this one species of creation has done to all the rest of creation?  I have heard human's very cynically say that if we destroy all life on earth than we will get what we deserve - that we will destroy ourselves, but that the planet will go on without us.   This I think is hubris of a different sort and a falsely comforting notion.  It denies what happens to a planet if you make its ocean dead, and somehow justifies the destruction of every other species.  In science systems have feedback loops, those carry both information and consequences.  It is time for us to start listening to the increasingly urgent messages of the planet: earthquakes, droughts, hurricanes, forest fires, and tsunamis and hear the Creator's voice begging us to protect creation.   It is time for people of faith to rise up with one voice in moral indignation at what we are doing to the planet.

Praying to all the Faces of God

In a previous post I have described my written prayer practice, and also in other writings I have talked about my struggle decades ago to figure out to what God did I pray?  How did I start my prayers: Lord... as I had been taught (but felt so wrong),  Creator, Father, Mother, Protector, etc?  Each name felt incomplete and lacking while still also rich in its own right.  I eventually came to understand that God was a name for calling spirit as a noun, but not who I prayed to, and that no name was complete and all were valid.   I learned to pray by feeling into how I was experiencing God at that moment and calling out that name.   Curiously my written prayer practice as previously described does not call out to any name of God.

This weekend I realized that what has been missing in the last year of my prayer life has been the part that has to do with laying a burden down, giving things that trouble me over to God, not trying to be my own All powerful Being!   As I was trying to reflect on how to weave that successfully into my prayer life I realized I need to pray to all the faces of God.  I am going to interweave the steps that have been part of my practice with actually calling out to the faces of the Holy One in the following way.  (They are in a different and better order now)

Dear Provider:   This is the face of God for me that is God as Abundant and Provider of all Blessings.  So just as I have started with naming my blessings, now I will thank the Provider for those Blessings and that Grace.  I may even add on here prayers to the Holy One which for me is about the awe, wonder, beauty and mystery made by the Creator.  So I may also give thanks for that level of blessing here.

The second motion of my prayer practice has been to identify the worst event of the day and ask the magic question "How can it get any better than this?"   That question has helped loosen my despair and attachment to the stuckness of things.  It has allowed me to see possibilities and to be open to change.  However it has been sadly devoid of God. So now I will pray:

Aba:(or Father): This is addressing to the listening and loving God - a naming of the struggles and burdens of my day.

Dear Transformer:    By praying to the source of all transformation and asking the above magical question I can notice better that it is God who enters that difficulty and loosens and transforms it.

Mother (or Comforter):  This is the place where I used to notice whether I was in fear or love (which I eventually stopped doing because I was pretty much always in fear which just got discouraging.) By turning to the Comforting God is where I can now begin to lay down my burdens and my fears.  I have an image of crying in the Mother Gods arms, or laying upon her breast like when I lie on the sand of a beach.  I can even take this one step farther and call out to My Rock if I need to be anchored and grounded for challenges ahead.

Dear Creator:  This is where I usually say prayers for others.  I have said those as Thanksgiving for that which already exists in the mind of the Creator even though as I make the prayer it has not yet happened.  For example Thank you for Carla's new job.  So these prayers of Thanksgiving I will make specifically to the Creator in the awareness that it is the Creating force that brings these.

Gardener:  I am adding this one in.  I'm realizing I need to ask The Holy Gardener to root out, to weed from my soul that which stands in the way of other healthy growth and life.   I need to ask that One to also plant seeds where s/he sees fit and where I may not know to even ask!  This face of God is helping me to notice the need for humility about all that is unknown about the human journey.

Lover:  This is to call in the face of God what loves me...a face I have been sadly disconnected from my whole life.   (I did not grow up in one of those churches that sang hymn about "Jesus loves me this I know", or how "God loves all the little children of the world".)  I have always believed in a loving God but somehow that did not really translate in to noticing that God loves me specifically.  It will be good to pause for a moment in this prayer process and simply feel that and let that in.

Dear Source:  This has been the place where I have set spiritual intention for the next day (to walk in love, to forgive, to be grounded, etc.)   But again I must notice that all of my intentions must connect to Source or else they are but vain and puny motions of the ego.

And even as I sit back joyously prepared to pray a new I am aware that in another year, or more? or less? Spirit may move me to pray in yet another way as this is a process within the soul, not a practice graven in stone.

Holy One

Holy One:

Please take this burden from me.
Allow me to lay this down -
to give it into your care and your wisdom greater and deeper than my own.

Allow me to rest in your arms like a child in one's Mother's arm,
Like a shipwrecked sailor tossed up upon your shore.
Let me sleep knowing that what ever comes you will be with be with me, with us unwaveringly
not in perfection, not in everything being fine or without trouble - but that you will be with us
as our Comforter and our Teacher.

Teach me in this moment.
Help me to understand what you would have me learn here
Teach me to make sense out of the missed turns and broken dreams, the series of disappointments that make up this life, that make up all human lives.
Grow me
Grow me into a more perfect disciple of your love,  a better vessel of your message.

Heal me.
Heal me of the scar tissue that acts as a barrier to the new or the now.
Heal me of the fears rooted in the past and bring into the present with you.

Forgive me
Forgive me for my timidity that has kept me from action or faithfulness.
Forgive me for the actions I have taken in anger or in hurt that were not as you would have had me act - that were not pure.
Forgive me me from the arrogance of thinking I had forever, for tarrying and wasting precious time, for false priorities or missed opportunities to draw closer to you.
Forgive me for when I forget you and live completely in the Kingdom of Man rather than your Kin-dom.

I would ask you to be with me, but you have already promised me to always be with me.
So open my eyes so I may see you clearly and without fail.
Hold me in your gaze, so I am not wander into the veil of forgetting.

Show me what you want me to do.
Make sense for me out of these confusing maze of life events.
Does this mean stop or does it mean try harder?
Does this mean rest in solitude or does it mean wait for your companion?
Your language is hard for me to understand - help me to hear clearly your intent.

Spiritual Resources

Note of apology to readers:
To those of you who subscribe to Seeking the Spiritual Life, you may have wondered what has happened to the author and the postings?   My goal has always been to post once a month but even in the good years I have posted 10 a year...but this year I'm on track to post 5 - yikes!  And nothing posted since June.    I have actually been in a spiritual tangle (watch for future posting on that issue) and it has interfered with my ability to write for my blog.   But I believe I have untangled myself and will be back in 2016 with more to say.

Spiritual Resources

Today I sat with a group of people as we shared with each other what our spiritual resources are - what the books are that we turn to every time for spiritual nurturance, inspiration or uplift.  All great religions of the world have their own sacred scriptures.  But why be limited to only one source of spiritual enrichment?   Many of the people in the circle shared the same thing - that they had texts they had read all the way through and found inspiring, and now kept in a place of prayer.  They shared that they would open them randomly - trusting that they would be lead to just the right page, and that in fact it did feel that they were lead to just the right bit of wisdom.    So I share with you here the pile of books that lives on my bed stand and a little bit about why (in no particular order).   If you have not read these, then here is some 2016 inspiration for sure:

Illusions by Jonathan Bach...yes this is actually a novel.  But it is a novel about a man on a spiritual journey who is given the "Messiah's handbook"...the quotes in the "handbook" are as meaningful to me now as they were in 1989 when it first came out.   Pages that are not the handbook still point me to the ideas the book contains.

Emmanuel's Book I (or book II) compiled by Pat Rodegast & Judith Stanton.   My best-friend sent this to me as a gift, also in the 80's, with a sort of guilty note about how she did not really believe in channeling (the whole book is channeled - the authors are simply a medium and recorder of a spirit named Emmanuel.) but that she found great spiritual truth's in the book and thus found it useful to read.   I would heartily agree with this.   In other words I don't really understand how channeling would work, but when I hold the words in the book before my truth meter - the words ring true and consistent.    Very complicated spiritual issues are addressed since the audience got to ask questions and the answers are what are recorded.  I found answers in here early in life that helped ground my spiritual journey.  There were things I have not worried about because these answers worked for me.

A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly.    Thomas Kelly, a Quaker, wrote this book in 1945 as WWII was ending.   One would think this would make it dated, but his mysticism and ecstatic expression of God is so profound as to be timeless. (The only way it is dated is somewhat gender heavy language.)   A brief book with just 5 chapters...has to be read slowly, or over and over, to take in its richness.  The chapter On Holy Obedience speaks profoundly to a life of leading and faithfulness.   The chapter on Simplification of Life speaks to the need to slow down and to be faithful - to strip away distracts and false idols.   The chapter on The Eternal Now and Social Concern probably saved my life since I read this in my 20's.  Kelly states: "I dare not urge you to your cross. But He, more powerfully, speaks within you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments, and disquiets us with the world's needs.  By inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God's burdened heart particularizing His burden in us."  In this passage and throughout the book Kelly helped me to know that I did not have to fight every injustice, I had to listen for what the part God wanted me to do was and simply be faithful to that.   Without his words I indeed would have died on way to many crosses that were not mine.

The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer.   Over the years various Wayne Dyer books have been on my bed stand, but for me the gold standard is this one.   Dyer describes Co-creation or manifesting, but in away that avoids the materialism and self-centeredness of the Secret.  He also describes a helpful spiritual posture and some of the obstacles that get in our way as we try to do this.

The Prophet by Kahil Gibran  This book has also been on my bed stand since my 20's.  For those who came of age in the 70's or 80's this book was so commonly referenced by people as to be rather clique and therefore then disregarded.  However, I have found that those currently in their 20's and 30's are not aware of this book and that is frankly a great tragedy.  Again this book holds such wisdom about 27 different subjects (the key and central areas of life from love, to food, to freedom) in just 1 to 2 page chapters about each - as to inform one for a life time.   My ideas about marriage and child rearing and work have all been permanently and much to the good impacted by Gibran's timeless wisdom coming to us from 1923 Syria.

Happier than God by Neale Donald Walsch.   Walsch is better known for his series of books: Conversations with God (I, II and III).   I have read those and several other Walsch books, but this one is my favorite.   I hate its' title, and yet the book chose me.  I stood in front of a shelf of books by him, closed my eyes and pointed, landing on this one.  I winced and opened it to several different pages and knew that indeed I would need to purchase it.   This book is also about manifesting - but mostly about manifesting a God filled life.   Also Walsch, unlike all other books on manifesting that I have read, does not turn away from the fact that we live in an unjust world, or fail to mention that.   The book is also supremely positive.

Previous inhabitants of the Bed stand:
I have of course over the years had to remove some to make room for others, but I thought the previous ones are worth a mention here.  As noted above other titles by Dyer and Walsh.
The Bible...for obvious reasons.
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.   Hoff quotes from Winnie the Pooh throughout this book while relating it to Toaist teachings.   Both amusing and thought provoking.
Hind's Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard - this is an allegorical novel about a journey which takes place on many levels.  Heavily Christian imagery.   It has many allegories that speak profoundly to the spiritual journey.  I eventually removed it because some of the "obedience to God" part seemed to describe a kind of God and a kind of discipline which is not how I now conceptualize God.

Happy Reading.   I would love for readers to post a comment sharing their favorite spiritual source and why.