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?

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.”

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