This is what happens

This odd conglomeration of images is what happens when I attempt to respond to something extraordinarily complex from an uncentered state.

After yesterday's post about the Farid poem that distracted my daughter from her intended flight, my friend Robin sent me a larger section of the poem, saying she would like to publish it on the ECVA Image and Spirit blog, and was looking for an image.


Here's that expanded version:

All who, reflecting as reflected see
Themselves in Me, and Me in them; not Me,
But all of Me that of contracted Eye
Is comprehensive of Infinity;
Nor yet Themselves: no Selves, but of The All
Fractions, from which they split and wither fall.
As Water lifted from the Deep, again
Falls back in individual Drops of Rain,
Then melts into the Universal Main.
All you have been, and seen, and done, and thought,
Not You but I, have seen and been and wrought:
I was the Sin that from Myself rebell'd;
I the Remorse that tow'rd Myself compell'd;
I was the Tajidar who led the Track;
I was the little Briar that pull'd you back:
Sin and Contrition -- Retribution owed,
And cancell'd -- Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Road,
Was but Myself toward Myself; and Your
Arrival but Myself at my own Door;
Who in your Fraction of Myself behold
Myself within the Mirror Myself hold
To see Myself in, and each part of Me
That sees himself, though drown'd, shall ever see.
Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide
Return, and back into your Sun subside.'

My first response to her determination to find an appropriate image was (typically) "Me, PICK ME" and I began a hurried search through my collection of reflection and mirror images -- that being a favorite subject of mine. But I was rushing, and everytime I came back to the poem, I saw that there was more, that in fact not only did every line suggest a host of images, but that every photograph I've ever taken or created out of my own sense of Divine connection could conceivably resonate with some piece of this poem.

So, in the end, my attempts (this is not the only one) to embark on a visual interpretation of this amazing poem (imagine what the other 249 pages must be like!) are drowning in a sea of images. It appears we have here another example of what my friends know I call "The Broccoli Theory:" that thing that happens when you pay attention, the way a single thread or moment seems to have contained within it an infinite number of related connections, the way a stalk of broccoli seems to explode out of itself and at the same time be so rich with flowering that it almost seems to curve back in on itself.

And of course, that's what the poem is addressing, so it should come as no surprise that an imaginal response would be subject to the same quality of infinite reflection and replication. So perhaps I've been too hard on myself. It's not that I wasn't centered when I started (though in fact I wasn't) -- it's just that I got distracted by my own responses and went the wrong direction: I followed my personal connections out to the edges, to where their connectedness seems less and less obvious, instead of tracking them back to the Source that lies at the heart of the poem, and of faith and life itself.

... hmm. A familiar mistake, I'm afraid...

Family Resemblances

Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide
Return and back into your Sun subside

My Oregon daughter, pictured here photographing the two of us reflected in a mirror at a hotel on one of our annual Thanksgiving trips, will be on spring break this week, so she made plans to visit her sister in Vermont. Originally her intent was to take a series of redeye flights, leaving out of Portland last night, but she called shortly after her plane was scheduled to leave to tell us she had missed her flight.

The problem was not that she was late getting to the airport; she had actually arrived early. But seeing there was no one at the gate, she decided to get something to drink and settle down to read for a while, got totally engrossed in the text, and only came to to discover the plane had left without her.

I was frantic when she called -- partly because an old friend of ours who had probably gone to bed hours ago (he's on East Coast time) was scheduled to pick her up in the morning. But mostly because her plan was to spend the night in the airport, which didn't seem particularly safe or wise. I passed the phone to her father -- who is a very clear thinker in a crisis, unlike me -- and I went downstairs to meditate and calm myself so she wouldn't have to deal with my anxiety on top of her own.

Fortunately he convinced her to check into a hotel for the night, so when she called again to tell us which hotel she was heading for I was able to be cheerful and encouraging. For those of you who think I should have yelled and screamed at her for being so stupid, I can only say that I had just finished reading a passage in Jesus the Teacher Within (I may have even written about this last week) which pointed out quite clearly that sin pretty much always carries its own karma and punishment with it and that guilt, whether applied from outside or rising up within, is fairly pointless. Clearly this was one mistake she would suffer from, and remember the rest of her life; there was no point in my adding to her pain.

So we were chatting fairly calmly at this point, and then she happened to mention that the book that had engrossed her so completely is a 250-page Sufi poem by Farid ud-Din Attar called "Conference of the Birds." Apparently she's reading it for a course in Islamic religion, but she was fascinated by it, and was writing notes all over the margins -- which was apparently why she missed the plane. I had to laugh -- this is clearly a case of the apple not falling far from the tree!

I've not heard of this poem, but I looked it up on the Internet, and Wikipedia tells me the verse quoted above is its most famous verse. I love it: it perfectly captures that longing to return to Source, which is also Light.

And now it is morning, and she's made it past the first standby barrier; she's on a flight to Chicago and hopefully will make the flight from there to Albany. Her time with her sister will be shorter, but at least they'll have a chance to connect. She'll write her essay on the plane, or sleep, and in the words of Dame Julian of Norwich:

All shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of thing shall be well.

Time for Mom to go take a nap: it's been a long night!

What rough beast?

Remember that old phrase: "We interrupt this program to bring you this special announcement"? The Divine breaks into our lives in surprising ways sometimes, interrupting our busy schedules with gifts of love, or light, or self-awareness, or humor -- and sometimes terror, horror, or deep deep sadness.

So I know I'm "supposed" to be writing about Lent these days, and the slow process of self-discovery and healing that always occurs during this season, but I really wanted to share this interruption we received yesterday.

I had taken our dog, Nemo, for his customary walk, and he turned right off the boardwalk instead of left as he usually does. Okay, I thought, no problem, I can be flexible about this. But when we were in the middle of our neighbor's portion of the beach this lovely lady lumbered out from behind the giant driftwood stump that sits about a hundred yards down from our house.

Though you can't tell from this photo, she was close to seven feet long, and almost four feet high standing up (if you can call it that). What amused me was that Nemo -- who believes he owns the beach, and exerts his authority by barking and chasing anything else that dares to step on it, whether human, bird or dog -- was struck speechless. He stopped dead in his tracks, planted his butt firmly in the sand and just stared -- and mama lion stared right back.

Eventually I was able to drag him away, but he kept looking back as we headed home. You could almost see his doggie wheels turning: What WAS that thing? Should I be defending my beach? Is it coming after me? He was so stunned he forgot to pee, and we had to go out again later.

I remember the day the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. I was standing in the doorway of my daughter's bedroom and staring at the radio, and one part of me was attempting to process the horror of the news while another part of me was shaking her head because the announcers on this college rock station were young and inexperienced, and they were relaying the story in a very unprofessional manner, repeating with trembling voices what they were hearing on NPR, which you could hear playing in the background.

I think at times like these a separation happens -- or perhaps we become more aware of the separation within us that already exists. Perhaps one part of us is always present in the moment, feeling whatever voltage is there, while another part of us is always distancing itself, busily churning away with critical observations or hastily mounted survival plans.

And what does this have to do with Lent, and the Divine breaking in? Maybe it's just that by taking on the disciplines of Lent -- whatever they may be -- we invite a deeper awareness of all those things: the Divine interventions, the sense of separation, the way our brains churn and churn under stress. I've always had those mixed feelings this time of year, even when I wasn't consciously observing Lent. And now I wonder if maybe it's a response to the call of spring, and new growth; the sort of churning feeling in the legs I used to get as a child trying to fall asleep. My mom always reassured me, telling me they were growing pains.

I hope that's still true, that this churning is growing pains, and that something new will emerge from it. And suddenly, as I write, The Second Coming, that Yeats poem, rears its head again:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A Tuscan Welcome

Last night my husband and I went to see "Summertime," a David Lean movie, made in 1955 starring Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi (a favorite star of mine from childhood) and set in (be still my heart) Venice.

There were several moments in the course of the film where I felt compelled to whisper "I'm sorry" in my husband's ear: he hates "chick flicks" and this was one of the worst examples of the breed. Though the movie was beautifully filmed, the plot was thin and I found the characters neither likeable nor believable. Worst of all, the writing was weak and so was the ending.

"So, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" All I can say is, thank God for Venice and Burano; they were the stars of the show -- and so, of course, I had to go back to my images of Italy for this morning's post. This one is not really my photograph: it's my photograph of a photo in a real estate office in Orvieto. I don't usually bother looking in real estate office windows -- I'm quite happy where I am -- but this particular property really pulled at me.

I think I like it because it says more about how I want to BE in life than it says about where I want to live. I did not want to be any of the characters in last night's movie, or even to be friends with them. But I would love to be the person who lives like this, who offers the sort of spiritual sustenance conveyed by the existence of this labyrinth; who offers the warm hospitality suggested by this simple Tuscan villa; who lives surrounded by green and by light, open and unguarded. Perhaps a little remote, but once they find this haven people are free to come and go, secure in the knowledge they will be welcomed and fed.

Maybe that's the function of this blog, to welcome and to feed; to say you are loved, you are not alone. And maybe that's the kind of church we long for as well.

The Reconciliation of Opposites

I opened my email this morning to find an incredible gift: this image, sent to me by my friend Robin. It is (if you don't follow both my blogs) a combination of Sunday's image of tormented longing from this blog and Saturday's image of loving acceptance from the poetry blog. I find it so amazing that she saw how they fit together; I only had this sense that each of them was incomplete.

As I wrestle with my own longing for church to "be all that it can be" -- and my distaste for how often it fails in that attempt -- I've been trying to figure out why that issue triggers me so. I mean, we all know that we dislike most in others the shadows that loom so large in ourselves, so can I reduce it to that: just a distaste for my own hypocrisy, for the ways I don't live up to my own ideals?

A week or so ago I reconnected (through Facebook) with the woman who was my best friend in high school. Amazingly enough, she now lives less than four hours away, so we have plans to visit when I take my daughter back to school after her spring break. We parted badly, all those years ago, separated by my jealous boyfriend (who resented the time I spent with her) and so this feels like yet another redemption in a long string of recent redemptions...

I mention this because she sent me, on Facebook, two photos she had of the two of us back in high school. So last night I was going through MY old photos to find the two I had of her. And in doing that I found the picture of me drinking champagne with the Archbishop of Canterbury back in 1992.

That picture was taken my first year in the job, and I see in that young face all the idealism I brought to that position. It feels so sad to me now, I can hardly bear to look. And it reminds me that my distaste for the church isn't just a projection of my own failures: it's a deep abiding sadness at all the disillusionments over the years, all the times I thought I had found "my people" -- people who believed as I did, and who would act out of those beliefs to bring the peace and joy and inspiration those beliefs brought us to other troubled souls.

I was thinking also, this morning, of my daughters and their longing for a community of like-minded souls -- particularly my younger daughter, who really struggles with her classmates' needs for drama, sex, drugs and alcohol. As a mother, I wish I could wave a magic wand, say "go to church, and there you will find others who believe as you do." But sadly now I doubt that that would be true, and I know for a fact that the word Jesus -- because their formative years were spent watching me struggle with the church -- frankly gives them, the younger one at least, the creeps.

That said, I really liked the Archbishop of Canterbury (or the ABC, as we called him). He seemed to me to be a good and forthright man who wasn't afraid to "tell it like it is." And over the years I have encountered other good and forthright people in the church -- two of them, in fact, the priest and his wife who served the church I helped found when our kids were little, still serve as my younger daughter's godparents.

But the fact is that most of those good and forthright people were sitting in the pews, not standing in the pulpits, though if I am honest the percentages may well be the same. And I was repeatedly dismayed to see how the trust of the folks in the pews was destroyed by those who claimed to lead them.

So yes, Robin: this image captures it perfectly. It contains both the deep love I have for all those who worship and trust, and the deep sadness I feel for not just my betrayals but ALL the betrayals over the years, even for Jesus on the cross. It is at the intersection of those two conflicting emotions that my questions and issues around prophecy fall. And it is also at that point of intersection that the potential for growth must lie -- as it always does -- in the reconciliation of opposites.

The Cry of the Prophet

For the last few days I've been finding it difficult to write in this blog. The poetry blog has been flowing freely, but this one has definitely been struggling.

I wasn't quite sure why this was happening: was it because I haven't been out with my camera lately, and so I wasn't finding appropriate photos to write about? Was it because I've been working a lot with poetry this last week, and just couldn't quite wrap my mind around prose? Was it because what I've been reading hasn't been stimulating thought in the right way? Or is the constant bad news about our economy distracting me?

And then, this morning, after reading and meditating, I just gave up and went back to bed. Because I realized the real problem is that I'm wrestling with the thoughts being raised by my Lenten discipline, and I'm not quite certain how to deal with them or where they're taking me. So I've been wrestling here in a sort of general way with Lent and its challenges, but I haven't gotten really specific. And this morning it became obvious that I needed to do so.

So here's the rub: for some reason I wandered onto the Spirituality and Practice website a while back, and I saw they were offering several online courses for Lent. I haven't done something like that before, but I was intrigued, especially when I saw that one of the courses was being offered by Sister Joan Chittister (whom I have long admired), and it was called The Cry of the Prophet.

Years ago, when I was working as communications director for the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, I was really struggling with my job. And a dear friend, the Rev. Linda Strohmier, who was then canon to our cathedral, told me that my struggles could be traced to the fact that I was essentially serving in a prophetic role -- never a comfortable place to be. I eventually left that job -- and the church I served -- and spent several years wandering in a theological wilderness. And though I am back worshiping again, I am still quite skittish about this whole entity we call "church" and very wary of involvement.

At the same time I have (and I'm not quite sure how to say this without sounding like I'm (as my father used to say) "tooting my own horn") a broad range of skills, gifts and experience accumulated over a lifetime of serving the church, most of which are going completely unused except as voiced in this blog. Most of the time that's okay; I just figure I've moved on. But when I saw this course about prophets, I thought: well, okay, if that was the heart of the struggle, then maybe now -- 13 years after I left that job -- it might be good to walk through this fire and see if there's something I can learn from it.

Now I will add that, having lived through the 80's, I confess it: I read The Celestine Prophecy. And though whatever else I may have learned from that book is now pretty much forgotten, what resonated with me at the time was his theory that there are no coincidences. So I have to assume that it is also not a coincidence that though I am reading two completely different books this morning for two completely different courses (I am still reading Freeman's Jesus the Teacher Within) they are both speaking to the woman I once was, the woman who left the church because she could no longer serve it with pride, and because she no longer had the courage or energy to continue challenging its flaws from within.

I will stop here, before this post gets outrageously long. But here are two quotations that might give you a flavor of what I am wrestling with. At the very least, you might see where the challenge lies.

"Christianity is one of the mysterious religious institutions of the human family that, for all its failings, has the role of a teacher of wisdom...Those who love their church do so because they see in this humanly impossible task an extraordinary potential for serving and uniting humanity. One loves the church then even for its failures, when these are humbly confessed. Yet in the end, we cannot be united to Jesus and at the same time belong to a church that lovelessly excludes or condemns anyone." (Jesus the Teacher Within)

"There is a major difference between a critic and a prophet. Critics stand outside a system and mock it. Prophets remain clear-eyed and conscientious inside a sinful system and love it anyway. It is easy to condemn the country, for instance. It is possible to criticize the church. But it is prophetic to love both church and country enough to want them to be everything they claim to be -- just, honest, free, equal -- and then to stay with them in their faltering attempts to do so even if it is you yourself against whom both church and state turn in their attempts to evade the prophetic truth of the time...

Criticize we must, but we cannot criticize what we do not love... The function of the prophet is not to destroy. The function of the prophet is to expose whatever cancers fester beneath the surface so what is loved can be saved while there is yet time...The horrible truth is that prophecy is not a harsh and heartless thing at all. Prophecy is unrequited love gone mad with hope." (The Cry of the Prophet)

When the water rises

It must be Lent; I've been playing with images since I returned from my after-church coffee, and all of them have this tormented quality.

Which is curious, because I'm not feeling particularly tormented -- life is running reasonably smoothly at the moment. But the news that 650,000 people have lost their jobs this month alone... Even if only half of those people are married, and only a quarter of them have children, that still means over a million new people are now facing seriously challenging economic hardship.

How could there not be a sense of torment in the air? How can those of us who still have our heads above water not be conscious that the water is getting higher and that more and more people are drowning in debt and fear? And how do we continue to hold out hope when things are looking so terrifyingly dark?

We have no choice in times like these but to support one another: to give as much as we are able, to release what we can, and -- as my friend Karen's FLYlady says -- to get really conscious about allowing that which we've been saving in case we might need it to bless someone else who needs it NOW.

So if you are one of the struggling ones, I send you my prayers and pray, not just that you will find a job, but that you will not lose hope. And if you are someone who still has "enough" -- whatever that is, I pray you will look closely and see if perhaps it may be MORE than enough. Figure out what the difference is, and find a way to share.