Breath of God
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by Jay McDaniel
Can dogs and backyards and rivers and air and breathing offer spiritual direction? Can our concerns for justice, and our powers to help bring it about, be enriched by the "green grace" of nature?Traditional Native elders--Sioux, for example--would have answered: "But of course." They sought guidance from the animal spirits, from the elements, and from pipe smoking. These were aids to "discernment." But Christianity and other book-based traditions have been more neglectful of such palpable bonds. In general, the classical religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, etc.) have emphasized human-human relations and human-divine relations, over human-Earth and human-animal relations. As a result, they-we-have neglected the revelatory power of the "other ninety-nine percent of creation."
I offer here an example of how I have received and am receiving spiritual direction from an animal with whom I have been bonded for some years; from my father, who recently died and with whom I am also bonded; and from a most intimate of earth-processes, that of "breathing."
As I write this, my dog, Nathan, lies listlessly in the veterinary hospital, suffering from an infection and anemia. These are his last days. I've had him ten years, and I love him. I've tried to be with him as he is dying: to touch him and to be present to him. Amid it all, I've paid special attention to his breathing. I've been "keeping watch."
Keeping watch is not new to me. For many years now, I've been keeping watch on my own breathing, understood as a portable icon. Every morning I sit in the half-lotus position and, as best I can, attend to the rhythms of my own breathing: in and out, in and out. I've learned this from Zen. For me, such attention is a form of prayer. Often I can't pray with words, but I can pray with breathing.
Now I'm attending Nathan's breathing, not my own. This is a different kind of keeping watch. Still, it requires zazen-like mindfulness. I cannot make Nathan breathe. I wish I could. I can only be present to his breathing, attentively. This is how I pray for him and with him. Surely God must pray in this way, too. Surely God, too, must keep watch on Nathan's breathing. Not a sparrow falls without God's knowledge.
Nor a person. Last month I found myself joining God in mindfulness of still another, even more intimate, struggle with breathing. The breather was my father. He was 81, and he had just undergone open-heart surgery--surgery which my family did not want but the doctors performed anyway. I was with him in an intensive care unit of a hospital in San Antonio. He was confused and in great pain. I could do nothing to help him, except to be with him, in a spirit of intimacy and prayer. I cried a lot. I prayed a lot. But I followed his breathing, too. With Dad, too, I kept watch.
It's too soon to write about my own experience of Dad's death. The experience seems as if it happened yesterday. I miss him, but he is available to me in ways not possible before. What I can say, however, is that Dad's breathing==and Nathan's and my own==have been occasions for great learning. By keeping watch over breathing, I've learned that each breath is a unique moment; that each breath is a living and dying; and that the last breath-in life as we know it==is an opportunity for still deeper trust in God, both for those who undergo that last breath and for those who witness it.
Can the Earth offer spiritual direction? Of course. Most of us already know this. Our souls have been nourished by sacred places we knew as a child, by animals we've loved, by parks we've walked in, by vegetables we've cooked, by wilderness areas we've camped in, by air we've breathed, by breathing itself. We've learned to feel the "green grace" of the Earth, its creatures and its processes.
But I've learned of late that the Earth's impermanence, too, offers us lessons. Nowhere is this impermanence more manifest than in breathing. In part the lesson is this: You cannot hold on, not even to breathing, whether your own or someone else's. But in part the lesson is also this: Even as you cannot hold on, you can trust, without clinging, in a Breathing that transcends breathing.
Who speaks this lesson? Some might call it the "inner teacher." I call it, as well, the breath of God, the Holy Spirit. I am grateful to Nathan, and to my Dad, and to breathing itself, for helping me hear Her voice. I sense that when we truly let go, even of our own breathing, we rest in the Spirit's arms.
Jay, a professor of religion at Hendrix College, is the author of five books on theology and the environment, the latest being With Roots and Wings. This article is taken from one of his Spiritual Guidance Program papers.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.