Beholding is Believing

On Trying not to Try

Dear Friend,

There is a part of me that demands all the space in our letters. The part that is falling in love every day, and can’t wait to tell you about the strange and wondrous and beautiful people and animals and things that seem to find me; everywhere they find me. That part is young and unconstrained and simply mad about living and can’t wait to tell you about the blue squirrels and the downy woodpeckers and the different shades of the brown leaves on the trail around Deep Run and the way the birds seem to gather around me and sing their morning songs - note by exquisite note.  And of course, he is my favorite part and even though he demands so much space, I can’t even apologize for him. He is the first to wake up every morning with a deep breath and notices every aroma and feels every cool breeze from the ceiling fan and is just unable to stay in bed for even a moment longer because it’s almost as if today’s sunrise  is his very first or that every single day there are new mercies to behold and it’s time to be! To be! Almost as if he was born anew this very day and each day. How can I resist him? Why would I try?

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But there is another, perhaps a more compassionate part that gently reminds me that you care and you wonder how I am feeling. The part that suggests I tell you that the nausea and pain angels have never, not even once, left their posts. The part that insists I tell you how, aside from a growing patch of exposed scalp on one side of my newly lined scalp and my newfound appreciation for comb overs, and aside from my  willingness to lie down to rest and to leave doing behind for an hour or so each day, I am largely as you have always known me to be. Sometimes Kathryn and friends and I comment on the irony of doctors asking me if I am noticing any new deficits or new cognitive decline - as if I would be the one to notice. But Kathryn and friends assure me that they don’t see much, if any change in the way I sing or walk or feel or write,, which seems encouraging. I am seeing clients - albeit on line and far fewer of them because of the daily radiation and daily rests. I still love these sacred sessions with my clients, perhaps even more than I used to, and how I did love them. I have grown to love the pace of life without driving (did I mention that I cannot drive for another couple of months - or so - due to the seizure?), and have grown to love the moments spent in the passenger seat of a friend’s car while they trust little bits or giant chunks of their lives to me.  I suppose if I were to complain about anything, it would be that it’s too cold to ride my bike, but even that feels a little disingenuous. I am walking more and the walks are sublime, so complaining about not riding feels like a reach to me. Like I am searching for something to be unhappy about. Why?

All of which is to say I am feeling well. This is not magical thinking as far as I can tell. It is not to suggest that there are not hard days and hard moments. Like last week when a friend emailed to share news about my new FD friend, Charming, who I had only met in August and broken bread with each night for a week and competed with for taking the most swims each day on the Rogue River and who I had watched raise his arms in complete elation after navigating his kayak through a particularly difficult stretch of class three rapids, and stood with at the bottom of a canyon and admired the Oregon moon behind the wispy clouds and my only friend (that I know of) with brain cancer and who, like me, had taught math, and with whom I had felt quietly and deeply connected even before my diagnosis.  The note told me that Charm had died in late November. That was a hard day, and every time I look down at the strings around my right wrist from that week, I am reminded of Charm and Abi and John and Lopey and all my people who left too soon, and these are the hard moments. 

But also moments of peace that are beyond my ability to explain. And given that I am over half-way through my thirty radiation treatments and over half-way through my first round of chemotherapy, that seems pretty good and true. I am looking neither too far into the future nor too far back into the past. I hope you can trust me and I hope that you are finding some of the same crazy, holy peace that is being offered to me in this naked now. Are you?

So the compassionate part is happy. Feeling heard.

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I want to move on to the big thing. I have been thinking, thinking, thinking about the question. How do you believe in God? I am not sure that the answer is fully baked. I’m not sure the answer will ever be fully baked, even, but how about an initial response? 

Have I mentioned to you my fascination unhealthy obsession with Kathleen Norris? I think I told you once that she is one of my (many) spiritual mentors, which seems as good a description as any, mostly because I recognize so much of my own spiritual inheritance in her life. Kathleen is a reminder that my story, while unique, is not unique at all, and because I recognize so much of what she describes, I tend to trust her. I love her because she is me - at least in some important ways.

Kathleen and I share this longing to know  better what we mean when we say something. I find that we are both deeply skeptical of the literal and suspicious of claims of absolutely. Instead, like her, I find myself trusting what lies beyond words far more than the words themselves.  Trusting that the deepest truths are rarely the literal truths.

Kathleen was so intent on this that she dared to write an entire book on the matter called Amazing Grace with the most courageous subtitle I have ever read: A Vocabulary of Faith. It’s precisely what you would imagine. A lexicon of the words that, like Kathleen, I skimmed over for years after a childhood in a midwestern evangelical church, a childhood for which I remain deeply grateful. And that Norris dared to stare these words down, and to stare them down through the eyes of a poet, no less, thrilled me.  These are the words that matter, foundational words, but they are the words I just sort of assumed I understood until they began to crack under the weight of broken relationships and debt and illness and death and failure and loss of control - under the weight of life. 

Think of words like: Salvation, Perfection, Prayer, Idolatry, Worship, Church, Trinity, Hell, Judgment, and…well, you get the idea. Great big words. Kathleen pulled them back and looked behind them, and then she described what she found there - in the place we don’t often dare to look. It opened up a whole new universe to me. Truly. 

One of the words she took on was belief. So before I can answer your question, I need to do that annoying thing that we learn to do as children. I need to define my terms, and the most important one in your question is believe. I’m not going to Webster. I’m going to Norris. She writes:

I find it sad to consider that belief has become a scary word, because at its Greek root, “to believe” simply means “to give one’s heart to.” Thus, if we can determine what it is we give our heart to, then we will know what it is to believe.

But the word “belief” has been impoverished; it has come to mean a head-over-heart intellectual assent. When people ask,” What do you believe?” they are usually asking, “What do you think?”

…

(Because I could not conjure up that intellectual assent), I had to assume that religious belief was simply beyond my grasp. Other people had it; I did not. And for a long time, even though I was attracted to church, I was convinced that I did not belong there, because my beliefs were not thoroughly solid, set in stone. 

I could have written these words myself. Belief scary? Terrifying, actually. To anybody in whom there resides even a sniff of doubt, and particularly in a community where doubt is a shameful thing - to be denied at all cost and to be hidden away. I wanted to believe, but I doubted and could not, on my own, shake the doubt. What was wrong with me? And when there is shame, there is isolation. You know this, already. 

I have learned so many things in my practice, but perhaps the most important is the gift of offering my clients a place in which they can open up the back rooms of their interior castles, the rooms where they keep their shameful parts, and invite the shame to come out into the light. To be seen and heard and maybe even a place where my clients can be curious, rather than condemning. A place where my clients, as Father Greg Boyle suggests in Tattoos on the Heart, can stand in awe of the enormous weight that these parts have carried for so long rather than standing in judgment of the manner in which they have carried it.

That is precisely what Norris (and others) did for me. I got to know my doubt. Befriended it instead of sending it into exile. Listened compassionately, and after a long series of conversations, I simply quit trying to shame doubt out of existence or to convince it to change its mind. Decided that it wasn’t my work to try to manufacture intellectual assent or to solve the mystery of God. Decided, in fact, that any God who fit inside my feeble  head probably isn’t worthy of my heart anyway, and I simply quit trying. Full stop. I quit striving to believe. 

When I quit striving, when I quit trying to believe, everything changed. I was released completely and immediately from managing my beliefs, which, in retrospect, seems absurd anyway, and was set free  into the world of beholding. And belief followed. Let me say that again. Belief followed beholding. Not the other way around, which I had always sort of assumed to be true. I have no doubt that for some, beholding follows believing, but not for me. And I am finally at peace with that.

I know this is slippery, so let me try something. Imagine growing up in a home full of olympic swimmers. Imagine getting your first swimming lesson before your second birthday. Imagine lesson after lesson after lesson until you were able to describe in exquisite detail how to kick and how to hold your feet and point your toes and how to hold your body and how to move your arms and hands in perfect unison to achieve that graceful glide that makes beautiful swimming so beautiful. Then imagine jumping into a pool and sinking like a stone. That was me until I quit trying to do all the things I was describing, and simply trusted the water. It’s an imperfect metaphor, but it’s the closest I can come to describing what has happened. .  

Of course, we are not done yet. We need to talk about beholding and how it’s different than seeing or hearing or tasting or smelling. No, not actually different, but way, way more. More real. We need to talk about what it means to see through the eyes of our hearts, To hear as only our hearts can hear. 

Suppose Thomas Merton had it right when he said, “Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.” What if “All creatures are like syllables in a song which God is singing. Everything that is, is just a little syllable in this song which God is continually singing,” trying so hard to get our attention, and inviting us to join in? Suppose as St. Hildegard of Bingen writes, “Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity,” and suppose you caught a glimpse of that divinity. Suppose that is what it means to behold. To see the divine shining through.

 How could you resist giving your heart away to that?

Well there is a part of me that simply cannot. My favorite part. That same part that simply cannot stay in bed and cannot wait to see the world and falls in love with every single creature and every single note in the song and every reflection of the divine.

How do I believe in give my heart to God? Not in a giant leap of faith; but step by step, breath by breath, bird by bird, blaze by blaze, and note by exquisite note.

Oremus,

Chris