Just Showing Up
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by Ann Kline
It is with great dismay that I realize, after eight years of studious prayer and meditation, I feel no closer to God than I ever did. This fall, at the Jewish New Year, I stood on a bridge over Rock Creek throwing my sins (in the form of bread) into the water. It was the same bridge I've stood on for many years and the sins, sad to say, were also much the same. I left with the same good intentions as I always have, and with the knowledge that I would be back again next year. After all this time, I feel I am no better a person than I ever was.So, what is the good of all my spiritual practice? Why do I sit in silence, coaxing my wayward mind and heart toward God? Why do I strive to stir my soup, wash my dishes, and kiss the mezuzah on my door with present-centered attention if I only find myself once more getting impatient in traffic, fearful of the future or angry at what I see on the nightly news? If God's transforming love is truly at work in me, shouldn't I be better, different, holy by now?
The distractions in my life are endless. The pain and problems of this world are undiminished. Why do I bother to keep bringing my mind and heart back and back again to silence, to a point where everything is just what it is, where I sit accepting this moment as gift? A gift that, I'm afraid, the next moment will find me quite ungrateful for.
In our society we tend to diminish the value of steady, dogged, stick-to-itiveness. Either we want things to come easily and conveniently or we respect the effort only after we see the evidence of some reward. Otherwise, we are being foolish or dreamers, or both. What is the point, we want to know before we start. We naturally want to have something to show for it all.
At this moment in my life, however, I have very little to show for all those hours of sitting in silence, alone with God. I am not enlightened and I am not "better" at life or loving. I am beginning to understand that I haven't known what I was looking for. In fact, I realize, there is absolutely nothing for me to seek, nowhere to go. Persistence itself is the "point" of all my practice-the turning again and again to what is true and real, right now. There is nothing else. God is nowhere else. Persistence is not "a means to a means to a means to," to quote Randall Jarrell. Persistence is what we are about in living.
Norman Fischer, in his book "Taking Our Places," wrote that:
In the shaping of our lives, we pay a fair amount of attention to skill and effort, to intelligence, talent, good looks, technique, training, education, and so on. But it seems to me that a primary virtue is the simple ability to be persistent with what you do, to not look for quick fixes or miracle cures, to be able to go on with a good feeling come what may.
What this says to me about the beauty of persistence (and is Fischer's point) is that in the persistent turning and returning of our attention to what is true and real, this moment, we learn to trust. Much of my "trust" has come from my intelligence, my experience, my ability to figure things out. That may be a good insurance policy for living, but it is not trust. Trust is more summed up in the Zen koan "every day is a good day." It does not need to prove itself. We just show up for what is.
It is the persistence of just showing up, over and over again, that is faith. It is a faith that finds God in each precious moment of starting anew, which is there in every breath. In those silent hours of my sitting with God just as I am, I am already what I seek to be: a person who lives for God. My persistence is the gift of water upon the rough rock of my desire. It is with persistence that my desire is polished into a smooth faith, that can live each moment as it is and let it go.
That kind of faith is at best a glimmer more in God's eye than my own right now. I only know that in the turning and returning my attention back to the silence, my intention back to stirring the soup, over and over, I am all that I need to be.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.