Night Dancing

This weekend I participated in my first InterPlay event – something called an “Untensive,” three days of moving and standing still, on my own, with a partner, and with a crowd. This experience, which sounds mundane as I write these words, was anything but. Something broke wide open in me as I moved through my stories and others’, through forms danced and witnessed with inspiration and spontaneity – with tears and shouts and sighs – that connected Spirit with Body with Mind.

But the biggest surprise has come to me in my sleep. I’ve been waking in the middle of the night with ecstatic dreams. This morning I woke about 4 am with a dream so vivid I wish I could dance it here rather than describe it.

I was standing up in a Quaker Meeting for Worship, where we usually sit quietly, and occasionally share words. I was boldly lifting my arms, looking to the heavens, exclaiming about the bits of cosmos that were showering down on us, the charged particles of light that fell upon and into us, electrifying the cells of our bodies, causing our very bones to burn bright. 

I turned into the center of the worship circle and sank, a folded leaf onto the cork floor, laid my forehead and palms on the coolness, felt the pulsing energy of the fiery earth core deep beneath and within. Sang to Mother Earth my thanksgiving for magnetizing us to herself, keeping us close, saving us from being flung into empty space. The curling tendrils of green energy rising incessantly through the crust of ancient and recent history. The wet films of microbes blooming in the dirt, digesting our garbage to make rich, black soil for green life. Colonizing our intestines and our lungs, our eyes and our mouths, to create these walking, talking hybrids of human and microbial cells – us, the species we call human beings.

I danced the passion, the zest, the big J JOY of Life – falling, rising, showering, tendriling, filling, flowing, loving, holding, leaving, making – this awesome miracle that dances around and inside us 24/7!

We are aware of this moving, ecstatic, miracle of Light and Life – when? When our babies are born, when we make love with ourselves or with others, when we stand firm against injustice, when our pets curl up on our laps, when a storm rips through our towns, when a loved one is felled by violence or mishap. At those times, it is possible to feel Aliveness and the preciousness of being Alive. Maybe at those times we can even dance in and on behalf of Life.

But most of the time, nearly all of the time, for the limitless tiny moments that lie between the Big Moments, for nearly all of our lives…..

don’t we sleep through the whole thing?

A Principle Which Is Pure

 "There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath had different names." -John Woolman

Last June I wrote a blog called Postcard from the Lip of the Void. One small element of that experience included an experience of God/Not God as a pure principle, signified by a cold and perfect mathematical equation. I’ve been thinking about that image a lot recently.

Many of my friends, compassionate, warm, and loving people who are also highly intelligent, do not experience the relationship, visions, or emotional release that I experience when I pray. These friends seldom use God language, and feel a little uncomfortable with some of the ideas generated by the great religions through the ages. They accept the ethics of the Golden Rule, understand the human principle that an “eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” and experience awe in the presence of glorious art, music, and landscapes. The idea of surrender to and union with God, however, gives them the heebie-jeebies. They have never, in their own estimation, had an experience of God. And so, in order to be authentic, they call themselves “nontheists,” as opposed to “atheists” who are “against the idea of God.” They don’t hold a belief that God exists since they have never experienced God. And while they are not sure what they would do with a mystical experience if it ever came to them, some of them yearn for God events like mine, with relationship, consolations, comfort and awe. They just won’t pretend to a belief that is not based on experience.

I am ashamed to admit that I have felt a sense of superiority in the past about our experiential difference. In the same way that the math whiz might feel vanity about being able to calculate rings around the mathematically challenged, so I felt vanity about my very sensory and emotionally satisfying experiences of God. I confess this with regret.

Usually, however, when hubris makes an appearance, a learning experience is given to me. So, in order to help me learn, God led me to a startling vision in which God suckled me at her breast and simultaneously appeared to me as the Principle of Perfection – cold, abstract, unapproachable, mathematical, fearful. Awe-full.  This face of God was an alien one to me, frightening and inhuman. I liked my humanoid face of God – or even the formless, energetic face of God that is also part of my experience - much better than this one. I had found an aspect of God that gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I have never given the intellect – the logical mind – the credit it deserves. I have treasured my “right brain” functions: intuition, holistic thinking, imagination, openness to divergent possibilities. I have not felt so kindly toward “left brain” functions, including linear and analytical thought, logic, reasoning, and attention to detail. This type of thinking has seemed boring to me, a necessary evil, a tool for survival which we would someday outgrow.

But the vision of the Pure Principle has helped me understand that God can also be found through the intellect. How could it be otherwise, since we are “made in the image of God” and we have intellect, as well as intuition? I am developing a deep respect for the aspects of the mind that can focus, capture detail, detect inconsistencies, and reflect order. I have learned that God is not only sensed and felt but mentally perceived. That God is not only Something Greater than Ourselves into Which We Can Merge, but a Pure Principle that is separate from me, and which can be perceived dimly by the mind, if not the heart. I can’t really perceive God in this way; I don’t understand God in this way. But the glimpse of a vision has helped me understand that there are those who can. And that it is a valid way of experiencing God.

I think this might be good news for my nontheist friends. Those of you who yearn for an experience of God may have been experiencing God all along, as Principle. If so, you get to redefine God according to your own experience! You do not have to yearn for a way of perceiving which is not native to you. I would love to hear what you have to say about this.

And we theists, who favor the consoling warmth of a God we can sense, might do well to open our minds to the Principle which is Pure. And drop the hubris. Thank you, John Woolman.

Help Thou My Lack of Trust

I felt agitated in our silent Meeting for Worship this morning. My mind kept going to the ways in which I am not satisfied in my life, the mistakes I have made, and the anxiety I can feel about “getting it right.” As I sat with the agitation – I have learned that it is not helpful to try to tame it or replace it with more comfortable feelings, like peacefulness or calm – I became aware of the presence of Jesus.

This doesn’t happen to me often. Although I like Jesus a lot, and feel that he is definitely my Friend, it has been quite some time since he stepped into the picture without being asked. But there he was, standing before me in Spirit, inviting my spirit to lean on him.

As Jesus is standing there before me, I inwardly hear the words of an ancient hymn that is in our Quaker hymnal, Worship in Song, though I’ve never heard anyone sing this hymn in a Meeting for Worship or a choral event. It is set to a familiar tune by Thomas Tallis, circa 1567:

I heard the voice of Jesus say,

“Come unto me and rest;

Lay down, thou weary one, lay down

Thy head upon my breast.”

I came to Jesus as I was,

Weary, worn and sad;

La-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la,

And he has made me glad.

I cannot remember the second-to-last line! The verse is going through my head, over and over again, with a missing la-la-la line, one that I know is critical to the meaning of the song. I work with it, trying to remember. I sing the song inwardly several times, hoping that my associative memory will click in and supply the missing words. No luck. I think of walking over to the stack of hymnals and bringing one back to my chair. I will have to cross the entire width of the meeting room, however, which could be somewhat disturbing to the other worshippers. Our worship dog, Dalva, is able to be still and silent during worship, even during ministry. But if I were to rise and walk across the meeting room, I think, she might think it is the end of worship and bound toward me for her after-worship hug. And that would disturb the other Friends present even more. I think of all sorts of excuses to not get the hymnal. I stay in my seat.

When I come home, I look up the hymn. The missing line is “I found in him a resting place.” It is one that I have rememorized countless times, but always, if I haven’t thought of or sung the song in awhile, I forget that particular line. Memory is a chronic issue for me. But even so, I can remember the rest of the verse. Why does this particular line continue to elude me?

I think it is because that line, of all the lines in the verse, evokes for me the inward experience of actually consenting to rest in Jesus. The rest of the verse is either an invitation from him or the happy outcome at the end of the story. But the actual, uncomfortable, inward act of making myself vulnerable, of laying my head down, of consenting to rest in Jesus – that is the sticking point for this stiff-necked, independent, “don’t tell me what to do,” theologically multilingual Friend.

Today Jesus came to me. Today he invited me to rest in him. Nothing more. He didn’t demand that I give up my connection to Mother Earth. He didn’t ask that I believe that he, and only he, is the Son of God. He didn’t require that I believe every word of the New International Version of the Bible. He didn’t require that I treat my inward experiences of Spirit and spirits with suspicion.

He simply invited me to rest. Period. And he used my poor memory to help me remember that it is only my consent that is needed to experience the happy outcome of resting in him. Jesus is pretty brilliant.

At this moment I cannot, with a whole heart, consent to his invitation to rest in him. But I can say that I am willing to be willing. I can say that I want to be able to lean into him in this way. Like the father of the epileptic boy in the Gospel of Mark, I pray, “Help thou my lack of trust.”

Free at Last!

The other day I watched a PBS American Experience episode called Soundtrack for a Revolution. I saw television footage in that segment that I remember seeing while I was in high school. I didn't really understand what I was seeing back then: police dogs attacking nonviolent protesters, freedom riders pulled off buses that were then torched, people being clubbed by police, dragged by their hair, set upon by fire hoses, turning up missing, killed. Seeing those clips again resurrected the horror of the violent sixties for me, when John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were all assassinated, over one million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were killed in the war, and untold numbers were killed, injured, or maimed in the nonviolent movement for civil rights.

A portion of Dr. King's I Have a Dream
speech was also included in the episode, made all the more poignant by the contrast with the violence of the television clips: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" I wept, seeing that speech again all these years later, after countless viewings during Black History month. I watched it again today on YouTube, and wept again. You have to remember the violence to appreciate the full power of his words.

On Saturday I practiced telling the story of the Ten Best Ways (a/k/a the Ten Commandments) in a Godly Play/Faith and Play training. The background of the story is this: The Hebrews, enslaved in Egypt, have escaped on foot. They are following Moses and are being chased by the Pharaoh and his soldiers, who have horses, chariots and weapons. The Hebrews are afraid. They come to the Red Sea, an inland sea that is about twice the size of Lake Superior. They believe they are trapped, and they think they are going to be killed or enslaved again, with the punishment that comes following escape. Then God tells Moses to hold his staff out over the sea. And the water is parted so the people can cross.

The Ten Best Ways lesson begins at this point. The story is told in a "desert box" or sandtray, using small human figures and a tall mountain. I began: "The people came through the water to freedom! They were so happy they danced!" As I moved the figures over the edge of the blue tray into the desert, it felt very real to me. My own body's joy joined with the joy of the people as they leaped to their freedom. I could feel the rush of adrenalin, the bubbling up elation, the anticipation of being "free at last!"

Freedom is such a precious thing. I never knew freedom as a child or teenager, except inside of myself. I could create worlds with my imagination, read stories, watch movies, and I could feel free for awhile. But the reality of my physical life was not an experience of freedom. I didn't realize it then, of course. It was many years later when, as an adult in a therapy session, I could feel the relief of escape. And the burden of it.

Because it takes courage to be free. Rollo May, the American existential psychologist, once wrote, "The opposite of courage … is not cowardice, it is conformity." Conformity means that you go along with the crowd, you don't follow your inward leading. In order to resist going along with the crowd, it seems to me, one has to practice doing the things that help you be free. In my language, this is a "discipline" or a spiritual practice.

The people of the Civil Rights Movement practiced the spiritual discipline of nonviolence. They received the physical blows and attacks, the spitting and harassment. They fought back with music, words, and prayer, not with violence. Occasionally someone may have lost the discipline. Perhaps they bit the policeman who was dragging them by the collar, or yelled an insult at someone who had insulted them. But the Civil Rights Movement achieved freedom under the law for African-Americans because they had the courage to deeply practice the discipline of nonviolence.

When the Hebrews were marching across the desert to God-knows-(literally)-where, they began to complain. They were tired and hungry and scared. The first time Moses went up Mt. Sinai, he was gone for awhile. The people became even more anxious. They longed for the certainty of their enslavement, they longed for a God they could touch, a God they could see. They longed to conform to the life their captors had created for them! So they melted all their gold and made a golden Baal, a God of Egypt. Everyone there had presumably heard Moses tell them that if they committed to Yahweh, Yahweh would commit to them and lead them to the Promised Land. And probably not every last one of them felt at ease with dancing for the God Baal. But they did it anyway. So there was another level of conformity when those who were not led to dance conformed to the prevailing mood of the crowd. The people lost their courage, and their commitment to the discipline of monotheism. They made a graven image, and returned to the ways of their captors.

Personally, I like graven images. I have several in my home: Isis, Innana, Kuan Yin, Kali, Nut, Ix Chel, Brigid, Ganesha. My God doesn't require that I forsake these aspects of myself in order to worship with the Unity. My disciplines are different, but I must practice them in order to experience the freedom I seek. I must practice breathing, singing, drumming, and inward worship. I must practice physical movement, and healthy eating. My disciplines set me apart in some ways, since I avoid foods that are commonly eaten, and engage in some practices that are uncommon among Friends. Sometimes I feel an internal pressure to conform to what I perceive to be others' ideas about what is socially comfortable or Quakerly. I lose courage and I let go of my disciplines. When I do that, I am unfaithful to my freedom. I conform to my perception of what other people, not God, want for me. And then we all lose. Everyone loses my power, and my authentic, sovereign self, including me. Everyone loses what I could offer, if I were courageous enough to be free.

Quakers can also lose their freedom and leak their power through rituals of conformity. When we don't practice our discipline of mindful listening for the will of God in our Meetings for Business, we lose our freedom to discern creative ways forward. When we focus only on our own comfort without attending to the needs of the different, the poor, and the disadvantaged, we lose our freedom to live in harmony with the whole complement of humanity. When we allow ourselves to vent our frustrations about others in our meetings, rather than approaching the offending Friend personally, in kindness, we lose our freedom to be in unity. Every time we fail our discipline, every time we expect other Friends to conform to the prevailing Quakerly political attitude of the day, every time we recognize the "heavy" Friends of our meeting but slight the "light" ones, we are like the Hebrews, building our golden Baal of social and political correctness around which to dance.

It takes courage to be free. And when we have the courage, "… when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children … will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"



 

What the Teacher taught me Part 2

The experience of living with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis has brought me a whole course of lessons about living in a body. Before I began to engage with these lessons, I was very Spirit-oriented. I experienced Spirit strongly, and in a very real way. Spirit was my source for guidance, protection, comfort and strength. In my early life, when living in a body was frightening and even more painful, it was Spirit who led me to another dimension where I could be safe, a dimension which delivered me from the pain and discomfort of the body and introduced me to the pleasures and joys of the unseen world. So the Spirit and my spirit were good friends, and all was tonking along well, I thought. And then…my body became ill and a whole new dimension of spiritual experience was opened for me, a dimension in which spirit and body intersect, work together, are companions and soul mates rather than opponents. So here are a few of those lessons, presented in no particular order, and certainly not yet mastered.

1. Life is very sweet.
   

   That life is good and sweet may seem like an obvious thing to some, but because of the intensity and ongoing nature of my childhood challenges, I hadn't ever really noticed that the struggles were over and I was alive. I kept reliving the feelings, body sensations, images over and over in my thoughts, dreams, and general orientation toward the world. Therapy helped some with these PTSD symptoms, and I am very grateful to my former therapists. But it was the contrast provided by chronic pain that allowed me to finally appreciate that I was alive, and that life was very sweet indeed. On the days when there was no pain, I was filled with gratitude and delight to be able to walk, work, pull weeds, hike in Canyon de Chelly, enjoy my friends, sleep through the night. Simple pleasures became rapturous delights. I learned that these mundane things, which I hadn't even noticed before because I was so blinded by the memories of struggle, were wonderful blessings. And I came to understand how important they were to my quality of life.
   

2. That I hated my body, and that it was life or death for me to learn to love it.
   

   I never knew that I hated my body while I was hating it. I just thought that it was slightly disgusting – because it was too fat, too weak, too uncoordinated, or too something-else-or-other. I felt ashamed of it, but thought, vaguely, that this was normal and okay. That one should distrust one's body, that somehow a body was untrustworthy and in need of firm handling. So it needed stringent diets, stringent exercise, stringent sleep regimens. (I once tried to exist on five hours of sleep per night because I had read somewhere that five hours was all the human body needed in an optimum situation. I didn't consider, of course, that my situation wasn't optimum, and I certainly didn't consult my body.) I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. Any health habit that I tried to initiate was introduced with a firm resolve to shape up the body and make it over – and so, of course, every resolution failed, and I experienced once again how "untrustworthy" my body was. And then I got sick, eventually receiving the diagnosis of the chronic, inflammatory, autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In RA, the body attacks itself – the immune system attacks the synovium, or the smooth lining, of the joints, as well as ligaments, tendons, and other soft tissue. It can result in shortened life span, increased risk of heart attack and stroke, and increased risk of lymphoma and blindness. My body-hatred had finally manifested as a physical disease. When I came to realize how closely linked these two things were - my attitude toward my body, and my body's attitude toward its own mobility – I knew it was life or death for me to learn to love my body.
   

3. How to ask for and accept help.
   

   When I was young, there was no help. Either the trustworthy people could not see – and I could not tell – or the offers of "help" were tricks designed to provide access to manipulating or exploiting me. So I grew to suspect offers of help, and to keep to myself. I was blessed to receive some kindness early in life, however, so I was able to imagine what it might be like should someone just see through the secrets, notice my need, and respond to it. When I had my tonsils out at age three there was a nurse who rocked me and sang to me when I was frightened in the middle of the night, and there were various kind teachers who saw my unhappiness but could not fathom the source of it. Doctors just augmented the trouble, either treating my body like a piece of meat, much like my tormentors did, or heaping judgment on me as a young adult when I was unsure about my willingness to have babies. Years later, my first successful attempt to ask for help was motivated by needing help for my children. So I was able to risk asking for their sake. That asking had a happy outcome, so I found it encouraging to continue, and to eventually learn to ask on my own behalf. A tiny seed became a tree. My advice to those for whom it is hard to ask: choose your helpers carefully, but DO take the risk. It will get easier. And as you receive the living water of others' love and kindness, you will have more in the well to share with others.
   

   More lessons to follow in future posts.
   © 2010 Merry Stanford
   
   

Why "Sink to the Seed?"

When I would hear the old Quaker phrase, "sink to the seed," I used to imagine a roomful of old-timey, plain Friends in a wooden meeting house, sitting quietly, and practicing "sinking down." They become quieter and quieter until there is not a sound except for what floats in through the open window on a lush, sunny, early summer day: buzzing of honeybees, snuffle of waiting horse, singing of robin. What an idyllic scene, based almost entirely on what I imagined the outward experience of "sinking down to the seed" would look like. But what was happening inwardly?

Here is what the experience of "sinking to the seed" means to me now, and why I am naming this blog after it. Let me trace the three strands of my woven faith using the pattern of this metaphor.

When I am close to Jesus and think "sink down to the Seed," I can't help but to think of the parable of the Sower and the Seeds (Mark 4:3-9). We have all heard the story. The Sower broadcasts his seed. Some falls on the path, where the birds come and eat it up. Some falls on rocky ground, springs up quickly, but cannot set down a deep root and so withers quickly in the hot sun. Some seed falls among "thorns," perhaps an aggressive, invasive species of plant, and the thorns choke it out, and it yields no grain. But some seed falls upon good soil, and it sets down deep roots so that it can draw up the water of life into itself, and it is able to grow strong. So it bears a great deal of new seed, sometimes as much as a "hundredfold." (One hundred new seeds grown from a single plant, which was produced by a single seed. Think of it! God gives and gives and gives some more!)

It seems to me that my inward spirit is a complex terrain, and that all of these kinds of soil exist within me. When I feed the good soil and tend the garden, so to speak, the Seed of Christ can set down deep roots within me. When I sink to that deeply-rooted Seed in the garden of my soul, I am immediately in the place of Life and Goodness and Abundance. I am in the kingdom of God, which Jesus assured us was among us at all times. And it has a wonderfully fresh smell.

When I am in touch with my experience of the Light, "sinking down to the Seed" leads me to what Isaac Penington called "the true peace, the true righteousness, the true holiness, the true rest of the soul, the everlasing habitation which the redeemed dwell in." (19.14 in Britain Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice) This is the innermost room of the soul that is both full and empty, the still point, the place where the authentic One lives, where the Light shines continually and the dark, velvet night holds it tenderly, where all is revealed and all is acknowledged and all is forgiven. It is the center where my human limitations and destructive errors (sinfulness) are revealed, where I can acknowledge and move through the brokenness, where I admit that I've been guilty of a god-awfully painful imitation of the Wizard of Oz! And it is also the place where my unique soul is also revealed, where I get a glimpse of what it is that Spirit sees in me, and this gives me a sense of both awe and peace, that this wondrous Spirit has found a home in me, and expresses itself uniquely through me. When I sink down to the Seed, as a child of the Light, I go to the place where I cannot avoid seeing either my human limitations or my original and blessed beingness, and I am reclaimed by the Spirit.

When I am in the experience of being a child of Mother Earth, "sinking down to the Seed" is very like all of the above. But in this case, that part of me which is original -- the part of me which can never be hurt or deformed by the plagues of the world, the part which holds the Creator's original intention for me, the part I sometimes call "big I" as opposed to "little I" -- is the seed, and I drink deeply from the water of the Mother. I plump up, break the now-too-tight bounds of the seed case, send forth a green, juicy shoot, shoot up to the light (Light?) and find freedom in the heady excitement of new growth under the blue sky. In this case I am not so much in touch with my brokenness and healing but with my soul's original template. I am in touch with that aspect of myself which I believe is most like the Creator, that part of me which is made in the likeness of the Creator, which still resides in the garden of the Mother, and which is Green and Growing.

No doubt my experience of “sinking to the seed” will change as I use this gift of blogging to explore the limits of my soul. I look forward to the transformation.