Graveyards and Nurseries
Dear Friend,
Are you still walking in the morning? Do the people you meet change with the seasons? What are you noticing? Smallest to largest, what creatures are you falling more deeply in love with?
These past weeks I’ve wondered if I have, for far too long, sought God as a path to happiness, either now on earth, or for eternity in heaven. I wonder if my ultimate goal has been to be happy, and any such happiness necessarily went through God. As if God was the cosmic gatekeeper into the city of Happiness.
Happiness was the end. God was the means.
One day and in my spiritual imagination, I boldly slid onto the barstool next to Jesus, leaned in, and offered to buy Him a drink. Then I laid out a deal I was pretty sure he would simply be unable to refuse.
“Jesus,” I said. “I want to change directions. I want to make a new commitment to you. I promise to follow you. I will go wherever you tell me to go and keep your commandments - to the very best of my ability. I will tell everyone I know about you and introduce you to my friends. And you in turn, will reward my hard work with happiness. And if not happiness right now, that’s okay. As long as you deliver on ‘eternal-bliss-in-heaven.’ That’s sorta the whole point of this thing, and it’s non-negotiable. (I have boundaries, you know.)”
I called this Enlightenment. I called this Repentance. I called this Conversion, and sorta congratulated myself for my small step. giant leap.
I extended my hand to seal the bond, but weirdly, He never accepted it. Neither did He turn away. He just sat quietly, listened, looked lovingly at me, let a smile sneak onto His face, and sipped whatever it was the barkeeper was pouring into His glass. Though I didn’t quite got the answer I hoped for, I took His silence as consent, checked my messages and my instagram feed, then headed out of the bar looking for happiness. Seeking joy.
When things started to get rough, I’d return to the bar and remind Jesus of our bond. His kind look never wavered. He always listened attentively but never spoke in response, and He never accepted my offer to shake on it.
Looking back, it’s easy to recognize that no matter how I may have dressed up this prayer with churchy words, my objective was never to be with God at all. Rather, my objective was my own happiness. If I had to spend a little time with God to be happy, I guessed that was the deal. But the with-God thing was incidental. With-God, in my mind, was a sleepy town you had to pass through to get to Happiness.
You might play with some of the words above. Change happiness to joy if you’d like, or make it freedom from shame. Even go with contentment or peace.
But I think it doesn’t matter all that much which word I speak if I am using God as a means to achieve it. If I am more concerned with my own pleasure than I am with pleasing God. If I am using Love to earn love. If I am using the Great Love of the Universe as just another life hack. You know, like daily affirmations.
Did you notice Andrea posted again this week? It was only their second since hearing the cancer was back, and it was stunning, and stunningly related to all of this. This was the beginning:
Like so many of us, I’ve chased the ever-elusive concept of ‘self-love’ for decades now. Yet it is only in the past three years that I can say I have genuinely experienced loving myself. (Honestly, I thought it would involve a lot more bath-bombs and ‘you are enough’ post-it notes stuck to my mirror.) Through this time of self-loving, I have discovered that the phrase self-love is not only an inadequate way to describe the experience, but it may be a roadblock in the way of truly knowing what self-love is.
When I am feeling what we call self-love, I feel the self fall away, and the love is not aimed at an Andrea-shaped target, but instead it is pointing everywhere, in every direction, at the whole of us, the collective, of which I am a part. In fact, only when I am experiencing this love does my sense of being separate from others reveal itself to be an illusion.
This sort of takes my breath straight away. Sends me into the washing-over-place. I am contemplating the beauty of their insight, and imagining your response right now.
Might Andrea be reflecting that the greatest commandment is not self-love at all? Rather, it is to love God completely. And in loving God completely, we come to love both our neighbors and ourselves, and perhaps then, and only then, the cycle continues, not through our own efforts but through the outflowing of perfected Love. Hard to get more countercultural than that, I think. But who was Jesus if not terrifyingly countercultural to both the empire and to the established religion?
I am no scholar, and I get easily squirreled. But this resonates so, so deeply in me.
Okay, I don’t want to get too thinky, but I wonder if, by making my own good feelings the goal for which I am striving, I am just feeding my old/shadow self. Feeling like I should listen to him as he says to me, “Okay fine. You can do this God thing, but there has to have something in it for me. For us.”
And when I get tired of his words and finally (finally!) change the locks on his old apartment and refuse his demands, he pounds, pounds, pounds on the apartment door. Then he wails, and asks me if I ever really loved him. (And oh, how I did love him.) Then he threatens to hurt himself if I don’t let him in, and insists that if anything happens to him, he has no choice but to take me with him. To burn the whole thing to the ground.
“Are you prepared for that?” he demands.
Am I not hearing the desperate, manipulative heaves of my shadow resisting his own death? Is it callous to admit that I hope that is exactly what I am hearing?
I am not arguing that there is no contentment or happiness or joy or peace to be found in union with God. Only that God, and God alone must be the end I am seeking. Not merely a means to a shadow-self-ish end. This theme seems so clear and consistent in Christianity, it almost leaps off the page:
Job: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him, yet will I argue my ways to his face.” (The second part made me laugh. I hear you, brother, Job. I hear you.)
Eli: “He is the Lord; let him do what is good in his eyes.”
Jesus: “Not my will but yours be done.”
Paul: “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Context here is everything. None of these individuals was having a good day as he uttered these words. It would be really hard to suggest that any of them were feeling particularly happy, or even the churchier version of happiness we often call joy. No, each of them was in the middle of a full-blown life-storm. And I dare you to argue that by their surrender to God they were simply trying to sneak into the back gate of happiness (or joy). No way. I believe they were speaking capital T-Truth because each knew the time for pretending had long-since passed.
I am pretty sure I could keep going, and I’m open to correction. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I write to you in the first place. But this is one of those things I can’t unsee:
I have been called to die before I die so that I may live. Not because death is the end of the story, but maybe because it’s the beginning of another, truer story. What else could it mean to be ‘born again’ or to ‘become like a child?’ What else could Jesus’s very words and especially His very example be telling us, if not this very thing? We have to die to live.
On my walks this week, I have let my eyes fall away from the tree canopies. Resisted the urge to follow the songs of the wrens, and instead, looked downward. Do you know what I saw? I saw death. So much death. Broken branches rotting in real time. Brown, decaying leaves. Brittle pine needles and pine cones. The bones of squirrels and blue jays. Moldy acorns.
There was death, but there was more than death. In the middle of this forest graveyard was a forest nursery. Saplings and baby moles. Butterflies and mosquitos and red and yellow flowers and all manner of creatures seemingly sprouting their first leaves, or taking their first steps or flying their very first flights. Each of them nurtured and nourished, directly or indirectly by the rich humus of the forest floor.
I asked a rotting tree stump, “Are you happy?” “What is you?" the stump replied. "What is happy?”
Next time you walk, look down. I wonder how it will affect you.
What does all of this mean? I think it means something that is so far beyond me that any words, except for The Word must necessarily fall short. There is no poem, as much as I might want to believe otherwise, that can explain this. It is only through grace that we get even a hint, and only grace invites us into God, and God into us And I believe - that is, I have given my heart to the idea - that the reward for union with God is union with God.
What is mere happiness compared to with-God?
(And I imagine the bar scene far differently now: I think I would walk in and sit next to Jesus. I ask the bartender for whatever He is having. I would say nothing, and I would wait….)
Oremus,
C
In you, Lord, we are complete - even with fewer possessions. You strip us of that which is not, and array us in those things that truly are. Death is swallowed up in victory, and you turn us to yourself. You make us worthy to be heard, you fortify us, and you lead us into all truth.
Augustine of Hippo
Personal notes:
Health is unchanged. So far, this round of chemo has been gentler than last. I’m leaning on the zofran more, but only a little more, than in previous rounds. It seems to have helped.
Getting ready to visit UVa Cancer Center in the next few weeks. This does not reflect a change. See first note. Rather, it’s simply getting into their system to streamline entry into a trial should one become available and necessary. (And to be clear, we know of no such trial. Nor is one necessary at this point.)
There are so many things coming up to which I can’t help but look forward: The beginning of the college football season in which The Ohio State University takes its vengeance on TTUN, and is crowned national champions, an opening day party with some new and old friends and family - complete with Richmond grape jelly meatballs(!) and Buffalo chicken dip. Two days with my older son, his wife and two of my grandchildren. A visit from my mom and her husband. A month-long “retreat” to the mountains right in the middle of leaf season. The challenge for me is to be where my feet are and not to go wandering off into the next month.
Chris, thank you for your share. I like Jesus more now that I know he hangs in saloons! Never thought to look there.
And thanks for reposting Andrea's words. For a whole variety of reasons that I won't get into, I have discovered that I don't know how to receive love, nor feel gratitude. I can see it but getting from the brain to the heart, well that is a work in progress.
But what my "Prayer Walks and Meditation" have revealed to me is that I first need to work on believing and receiving God's love. My belief now is that then and only then can I start to develop a healthy and humble self-love so powerful, that it will run over, and I will crave to give it away.
Not there yet, but making progress.
Chris, this taps into something I have long wondered . . . of all the paintings we see of Christ, in diverse places, through the ages . . . we almost never depict him smiling. He almost never looks "happy." Why not? I can't imagine it's because we believe he did not know happiness. No, I tend to think that although he knew happiness, happiness was not his essence, and deep down we've always understood it. His essence of course was, to use your term, with-God. And this is what we are growing towards. Thanks for this, Chris. Again.