Volume 24, No. 1-Winter, 2000
Table of Contents
Uttered by God
by Anne Walsh
Is Spirituality Good for your Health?
by Gerald May
Praying Beyond Safety
by Lois Lindbloom
We Go On Waiting
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Jesus and Buddha: Good Friends
by Tilden Edwards
Uttered by God
by Anne Walsh
When we experience ourselves as being uttered by God, or when we hear and experience God's logos in and/or around us, we burst forth into life--whole, warm, alive, en-spirited on the solid surface of this sacred earth. The more we open to such experiences, as well as speak of them, the more God's logos takes earthly shape in some wild and wondrous uttered form.
I think of this as being theological grounding-at least this is the theological ground Libby and I walk on when we meet together for spiritual direction. When awake and present, we "know" the Sacred is in everything and at the same time is more than everything, that the Sacred is alive and breathing us.
Libby calls herself a Buddhist-Celtic pagan who is devoted to the Blessed Mother. She came to me when spiritually exhausted, feeling burnt out by the pain of dealing with the dark forces of life and with grief. Yet, even at that time, I could see the largeness of her heart as well as her deep faith, though she herself had lost sight of that faith. There was a luminosity in her darkness and always a sense of Presence.
Libby is a healer, although I doubt that she would call herself that. She rescues, tends, fights for wild animals, primarily geese and swans and particularly wounded ones. She experiences this as her calling and her prayer, her main form of prayer. This prayer/work involves looking into the face of terrible pain and an intimate encounter with human cruelty, but it also opens into the Sacred.
As Thomas Merton said, "Life is this simple. The world we live in is transparent and God shines through it all the time." Libby says that, in facing the suffering, one also sees the beauty and the joy. She lives an extroverted, "eyes wide open" form of mysticism. When one lives and prays this way, the world is filled with glory but also, as she says, "wonderfully, reasurringly ordinary."
Libby is building a water garden for the Blessed Mother and is being led step by step in this as in all important aspects of her life. The path, she says, is only clear for this present step. Ahead is a cloud through which she knows she must go when the present task is done. She knows that when she walks into the cloud it will clear and there will be a message about what she is to do. So on and on she goes, into the cloud, unknowing but led. When she follows this lead, all is well, and when she doesn't follow the path, listening to the deepest message, things go asunder. She knows she needs to be constantly present to the Presence.
The water garden is becoming a place of healing not only for a swan with broken wings and a blinded goose but also for people. They bring injured animals and the injured parts of themselves as well as truck loads of plants, flowering trees, medicine, and loving company. They seem to get in touch there with the realization that we live in a God-infused world, a world being compassionately uttered.
When I reflect on being with Libby, I see her as being in partnership not only with her friends and animals but also with the Sacred Mystery. I, too, am drawn in. We are all practicing tikkun olam-healing the wounds of the world together. When we are awake and actively compassionate to another being's beauty and suffering, we are stitching together the rents and tears in the holy fabric of the universe in this particular place and time.
Both Libby and I have travelled a long way from an old God who was grim, distant, punitive and extremely confusing, and we have come to realize that our deepest experiences of wisdom, compassion, amazement, joy, kindness and love are hierophanies--breakthroughs of the sacred into everyday life--and so are the little broken swan, the person beside me, wherever I am. All are uttered by God. This God is not dead but alive, risen from a cold, stifling tomb, and is here among us but different from how we had imagined the Sacred before.
Anne is in Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Class of Winter 2001. This article is taken from one of her program papers.
Is Spirituality Good for your Health?
by Gerald May
The relationship between spirituality and health has always been confusing for me. As a child, I wondered why prayers did not heal people as they were supposed to, and why some people recovered from serious illnesses "by the power of faith," while others, who I sensed had just as much faith, suffered and died.
The confusion worsened as I grew older and became a physician. Pop explanations about the differences between "healing" and "curing" did not help. I understood the cosmic sense of healing that means wholeness and integration, and how different this is from curing a particular disease. But I both saw and experienced cures that I could only call spiritual. And Jesus didn't just help people establish a right relationship with the universe; he actually cured diseases--and told people their faith had done it.
The confusion has not been helped by the recent popularity of books and articles citing scientific evidence of the "health benefits" of faith and spiritual practice. I've long felt uncomfortable with people's response to these studies--as if faith, prayer, and spiritual disciplines somehow acquire greater legitimacy if they can be shown to be good for your health. I was happy, therefore, to see an editorial in the January 27, 1999, issue of The Christian Century criticizing this sort of "utilitarian religion." It cited studies demonstrating that faith and spiritual practices can lower blood pressure, that religious people are more resistant to stress, and (of particular interest to me) that "smokers who go to church live longer than smokers who don't." The criticism reflected my own feelings: "It's not that we don't think spiritual and physical health are somehow aligned ... and it's not that we don't think the interaction of body and soul is a subject worthy of investigation. It's just that we don't like to see the therapists of wellbeing ushering people to the pews."
My concerns, however, go deeper. In spite of demonstrated "health benefits," I believe it is, at best, false advertising to maintain the myth that spirituality is necessarily good for your health. Jesus' faith was not good for his health-nor was that of at least eleven of his apostles. Last fall, some of the Shalem staff went to visit the bones of St. Therese of Lisieux when they came through Washington on their American tour. Spirituality did not seem good for her health either; it led her into obsessive scrupulosity and terrifying inner desolation, and failed to protect her from an agonizing death from tuberculosis at the age of 24.
So is spirituality good for your health? For me, the answer is unequivocally yes and no! Religious belief and faith community can support physical and mental wellbeing. Some spiritual practices can lower blood pressure and help handle stress. The power of prayer is unquestionable for those who have experienced it. And I myself have no doubt that miraculous healings do occur. In all these senses, spirituality can certainly be good for your health.
However, one cannot ignore how faith may not only fail to help physical and mental illnesses but also sometimes even seem to invite people into greater disease, disorder, suffering and death. If you reflect on the physical and mental health of the holy people of history and the ones you've known personally, you may find yourself inclined, as I am, to suggest that every Bible come with a warning from the Surgeon General.
Things would, of course, be simpler if the spiritual life clearly led to better health. Then we could treat the life of the spirit, to quote the Christian Century editorial, "like a nutritional supplement or a leafy green vegetable." But things are obviously more mysterious than that. In my own lived faith, I feel certain that God does not want people to suffer, not now, not ever. So how is it that authentic spirituality can sometimes be bad for your health? My hunch is that it has to do with something that the contemplative strands of all the great religions proclaim: the ultimate meaning of human life is not health; it is love.
As Biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson and others have clearly pointed out, Jesus' mission was not to heal but to teach and preach the Good News, the reign of heaven. This primary "project" of Jesus was interrupted on numerous occasions by people requesting healing, and Jesus responded to them compassionately: from the love that was the core of his being. In its rightful place, I believe healing is not the reason for spirituality but one of many expressions of the Love that is the reason for spirituality.
Jesus pulled no punches about the implications of the spiritual life. He said those who wanted to follow him had to take up their crosses. The life of the spirit does involve suffering. More foundationally, it requires letting go of one's agenda for personal wellbeing in favor of a larger love. Like the Bodhisattva vow of Buddhism, the Christian stance of love finally sets the liberation of all creation ahead of one's own comfort, health, and even life. Faith, then, does not make us suffer, but it does lead us toward a willingness to suffer, a relinquishment of the idolatry of wellbeing.
So the answer, for me, is still yes and no. Spirituality can be very good indeed for my health, and there's nothing wrong with desiring it to be so. The 12th century St. Bernard of Clairvaux called it "loving God for one's own sake," a perfectly normal and legitimate dimension of the love of God. But the life of the spirit inevitably puts love above health. And where the two come into conflict, as they sometimes do, the challenge is to let love win. Jesus' life, beyond all, let love win. So did the lives of Therese and Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the countless other known and unknown saints who have taken up the cross of love throughout the centuries.
Praying Beyond Safety
by Lois Lindbloom
Just a few years ago, I lived my daily life in our family with my husband and two teenage sons. Our older son left home to begin college-a planned change in our lives. Two weeks later, my husband died suddenly--a totally unexpected and shattering event. As I experienced the early weeks of raw grief, I was very aware of how fragile life is.
Our younger son had just gotten his driver's license and began taking the car to go to football games and other evening activities. That left me alone with my imagination and fears of what could happen to him. I prayed for his safety. If he did not return exactly on time, I prayed desperately, "Lord, keep him safe," while I tried to beat back the frightening images of a car accident. Then he would return, and I would sigh in relief and thank God for his safety.
One evening, as I was preparing for a group of parents to gather at my house to pray for our children, I thought of Mary, the mother of Jesus. She parented a young man the ages of my sons. Perhaps she had some feelings of fear like mine. Perhaps she prayed for Jesus' safety. But what if her prayer for his safety had been answered? In that moment, this challenge came to me: Could I pray "beyond safety" for my sons, even in this time of grief and fear?
Through the next months, this question brought me to a new way of praying for the people who are closest to me. In prayer, I entered the presence of God, sometimes by sitting with Jesus in nature, sometimes by encountering the unconditional love of God in an imageless setting. I invited my sons, each in turn, to join us there. Then, instead of speaking my desire, I asked what God's desire for my son was.
As time went on, my older son went to France and Croatia for two years of volunteer service. Some of that time I had no way to reach him; once again I was fearful. Entering the presence of God and inviting my son to join us helped me trust God's prayer, a prayer that could go beyond my knowledge of my son's needs. (This way of praying was interspersed with various versions of fearful, clutching, parental prayers for his safety!)
When I attended a Shalem workshop on group spiritual direction, the staff described this way of praying as intercessory prayer, openness to God on behalf of another. In intercessory prayer we stay in the presence of God on behalf of another. We begin by listening for God's desire, rather than by speaking our requests.
Often something in me gets in the way of my hearing or embracing God's desire for the person for whom I pray. With my sons, my own fear was a barrier. Sometimes other feelings or beliefs are barriers. My own desires get in the way. My belief that it is more important for me to do something or say something than to remain in the presence of God in prayer gets in the way. Part of being open to God on behalf of another is a willingness to admit what the barrier is and then to surrender it to God.
Intercessory prayer also opens us to God's desire for ourselves, not just for the person for whom we are praying. As Douglas Steere writes in Dimensions of Prayer, "When I start boldly enough to pray 'O God, may thy kingdom come in Mary and thy will be done in Mary,' something seems to inquire whether I have not left out something. I begin again, adding this time 'be done in Mary and in me.'" In being open to God on behalf of another, I may be the one who is changed.
I also practice intercessory prayer in the spiritual direction groups I facilitate. In the presence of God and one another, we hold these questions, offering ourselves as part of God's redemptive process:
God, what is your prayer for this person? What do you want my prayer to be? -- Is there anything I need to surrender in order to join your prayer for this person? -- Is there anything you want me to do or say to this person on your behalf?
Then we wait in prayerful silence for a sense of whether or not we are given something to say to another. We may be nudged to say something or we may be called to continue in prayer without speaking.
For me personally and for the groups with whom I meet, intercessory prayer is a continual invitation to pray beyond the safety of our own agendas. It is an invitation to pray, "Thy will be done."
Lois is a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Summer 1997.
We Go On Waiting
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Recently I have been in a number of conversations where people are wondering about the real purpose of their lives. One woman particularly comes to mind who typifies this. As she mused about the rightness of her current job, she said things like: "I'm just waiting to find out what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. I know there is some purpose for my being here. I guess I just need to do what I'm doing until I find out what the real thing is. And I'm not getting any clues."
As I sat with the woman, I found myself struggling to "hear her where she was." An incredulous voice inside me kept shouting, "How can this person possibly believe there is anything more important than what she is doing now? I sense her compassionate presence; I know of her work for justice in the workplace; I've heard her prayer for herself and her family. What could be more important than what is for her right now? God seems so present in her life, and through her, present for others. What can she possibly be waiting for?"
When I listen to this woman, and people like her, including myself sometimes, invariably a bit of sadness wells up in me. The waiting as we experience it seems to lack vitality; it is something to be endured like the imposed marking time that a plane does as it circles an airstrip waiting for permission to land. It's as though life will only resume meaning when the "real thing" (whatever that might possibly be) shows itself. Our marking time is spent shaping our expectations of what the real thing will be, or at least, of what it is not. (Often what we decide the real thing can't possibly be is what we don't like in our present situation.) We end up dismissing the present as insignificant because it doesn't fit our expectations of the real thing. Sometimes we miss a whole lifetime waiting for the real thing. As the Advent hymn describes, "We go on waiting even though we know the One for whom we wait has already come."
As I think about times of seemingly fruitful waiting in my own life, I realize, in retrospect, that the process of waiting was as important as the living into that for which I waited. These have been graced times when I almost have forgotten that I am waiting and simply give myself to what is, trusting God to lead me through what is to what will be. Some of these times of waiting have included a call to conversion, a readying of the heart for love.
Recently, in an extended time of retreat, I woke up with a clear message, "I can't keep doing what I am doing." I wasn't sure what it meant, but again I was overwhelmed with sadness. I loved my work and the people around me. I was hitting my stride in life and didn't want anything to change.
After the sadness subsided a little, I began a conversation with myself and God, "If not this, what? This is what I thought I was meant to do with my life. It all seems to fit so well. What's the next thing for me?" Then I began to daydream about the "what next." I had myself in lots of different circumstances, none of which seemed to fit. I decided I'd wait to see what showed itself when I was back in the familiar.
I spent the first few weeks back home in a remote, "won't be here much longer" attitude. When something happened I didn't like, I said, "Thank God I won't be here much longer." When I liked what was going on, I said, "Woe is me! How can You possibly ask me to leave this?" Then I woke up one morning, I mean, really "woke up," realizing that I had missed half the message meant for me during retreat. The message didn't end with, "I can't keep doing what I am doing." It continued. The full message was, "I can't continue to do what I am doing the way I am doing it." There was a clarity in that. I didn't know what needed to change, but I knew I had to be willing to be changed. I felt the invitation to pray for the freedom to see and to love in my present circumstances. I sense the prayer being granted through and for these circumstances. It seems important to be where I am.
Does that mean I will always be where I am, doing what I am doing? I doubt that. But I don't think the "what next" will be any more important than the "what now," though it may be very different. I don't have a clue about what the "what next" might be, and that doesn't much bother me right now. If there are any clues to be had, I think they will be given through my wide-eyed living and whole-hearted loving right where I am. Perhaps the waiting is about the longing to do that more fully, and that's the only purpose for my life. I know God is in the waiting.
I've learned so much from the people who have shared with me their difficulties in waiting and their wonderings about the purpose of their lives. They have given me glimpses into myself that I may not have had otherwise. In fact, I suspect God has brought them onto my path because I need this learning. For them and for me, I pray for a faithfulness and trust in the waiting times.
Jesus and Buddha: Good Friends
by Tilden Edwards
For many years, I have kept in my office an ink drawing of two smiling figures with their arms around each other: Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha, with the caption: "Jesus and Buddha must be very good friends." They are not the same, but they are friends, not enemies, and they are not indifferent to one another. From the very beginning of Shalem, I have been moved to affirm that statement. In my recently revised first book, Living Simply through the Day, I tell the story of my experience with a Tibetan Buddhist lama in 1973 and how my time with him helped me understand Christian contemplative tradition in a more experiential way.
Many years ago, the Roman Catholic theologian John Dunne said that the spiritual adventure of our time is the passing over to the standpoint of another religion or culture and returning with new insight to one's own. Indeed, many members of Roman Catholic religious orders have taken the lead in recent decades in "passing over" to Buddhist practices and standpoints and returning with a fresh perspective on Christian faith and practice. This venture also has been shared by many mainstream non-Catholic clergy and laity, as well as by many Jews. What has led so many to value such an exploration?
We live in a time of great renaissance for contemplative understanding and practice. Many people have discovered the contemplative strands of other traditions that contribute to Judaeo-Christian ones. I believe that the Holy Spirit is in these enrichments across faith lines, not only for individual deepening but also as a way of discovering an underlying human spiritual connectedness beyond our authentic differences-a sense of connectedness that is essential to the world's peace. Rather than being competitors and finding grounds for holy wars, we can recognize that we share the same basic yearnings for truth, love, and wholeness, and that each tradition has received a unique treasure of grace that can enlarge the other's understanding and response to these longings.
Judaeo-Christian scripture itself is full of the influences of other traditions. These were incorporated where they were seen to be complementary to and enriching of basic strands of Hebraic and early Christian experience. The period of history that follows the freezing of the Biblical canon of scripture has continued this enrichment process in its own way, through great Spirit-inspired saints and movements. The story of Gautama Buddha actually entered Christian tradition in the Middle Ages in a disguised way as the story of a popular saint: Josephat (one of two St. Josephat's at the time). As I have encountered that story through some of the Buddha's living practitioners, the story of Jesus has not disappeared nor been watered down for me. On the contrary, Jesus has come alive in a larger and more intimate way than ever before.
In the space that I have, I will give the barest outline of just three places of overlap and enrichment that I have discovered. For many years, I have kept in my office an ink drawing of two smiling figures with their arms around each other: Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha, with the caption: "Jesus and Buddha must be very good friends." They are not the same, but they are friends, not enemies, and they are not indifferent to one another. From the very beginning of Shalem, I have been moved to affirm that statement. In my recently revised first book, Living in the Presence
1) In their contemplative strands, each tradition shares in its own way a basic stance of compassionate "presence to what is," before and through any mental interpretation of what is. Particular Buddhist practices that I have experienced in the last 26 years have, with grace, shown me such an "inclusive" mind. They have helped me recognize and sometimes drop beneath my ego-conditioned fears and grasping that skew my perceptions and quality of presence. In graced times, I have been brought to a place of energetic availability to the loving Holy Spirit in the heart of what is. There I have realized my intimate interdependence with everything that appears. I think this awareness touches the edge of the Mind of Christ, which I am called to share.
2) "The mind is as large as the sky, and our actions need to be as fine as sand." This quote of a Buddhist teacher summarizes the intimate connection of contemplative presence and action. I have learned that a fully graced contemplative presence is free, boundary-less, and loving, and that this presence is not just an end in itself but is meant to be a gift for others. From the openness of this sky-large mind, grounded in the tradition's teachings, discerning actions are meant to flow with great attentiveness to what is called for in the moment. Contemplation and action, prayer and morality, are not indepen-dent realms. They are meant to be intimately connected, as we see in Jesus' life and in the heart of Judaeo-Christian tradition, but in practice they are often insulated from one another.
3) Certain Buddhist practices include"skillful means" for the body's assistance to the mind in becoming open to the larger Loving Wisdom that pervades reality. Particular practices, "skillful means," have given me an intimate sense of the body's connection with the mind. These practices have offered subtle ways to let my breath, gestures, bodily positions, movements, and senses draw me to the Presence. Such practices provide ways of actualizing a basic Christian view of enspirited bodies: the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (not only the human body but the body of creation). Our bodies are precious carriers of divine loving energy. The "skillful means" for realizing this spiritual truth have been impoverished by the over-separation of body and spirit in much of Christian practice, despite Christian advocacy of an incarnational faith.
Many Buddhists have been learning a lot from Western traditions as well recently. In the new millennium, I expect we're going to learn even more from each other across contemplative faith lines. The Buddhist-Christian encounter has been the most extensive of these recent border crossings, but other explorations are well underway with the contemplative strands of different traditions.
Today so many spiritual boundaries are being stretched. We seem to be living in the midst of a Spirit-caused earthquake that is shifting the ground of all faiths. The Spirit appears to be shaking out our minds and structures so that we can let collapse what doesn't assist our presence to the Presence and let rise what the Spirit is calling forth in this time. As some have suggested, perhaps we should no longer speak of interfaith relations but of intrafaith relations as we come to realize that we share the same mysterious divine ground with different, evolving experiences of it. Contemplative traditions can be particularly helpful in showing us the inclusive ground that is deeper than words, structures and categories; a holy ground that is finally trust-worthy, liberating, and pervaded by a mysterious love ever drawing us.
Jesus Christ has his own unique way of showing us that great, underlying, loving light. Gautama Buddha illuminates some of its facets through his own profound experience. Today, I think many of us are called to see them as special friends. The world will be the richer for it.