(from yesterday)
One perfectly beautiful hot Saturday, while in Southern California, I traveled into the high sierras to the Abbey of St. Andrew in the desert. It was a spectacular drive, dry and hot, rolling hills ascending into rugged peaks, parched and red.It was dry, with sparse foliage, only an occasional cactus.But, once we got to the Abbey it was a different story.
Lush rees, bushes, flowers, ponds, birds, ducks, fish, fountains and rose buses abounded. It was very much an oasis in the desert, and itself a metaphor, a living parable, of God’s love and the Gospel’s promise of his love to be like a river bubbling up with authentic life-giving water, which in the ancient Hebrew was synonymous with life itself, during our dry sojourn on this earth.
The abbot gave a beautiful homily calling us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Simple. Who hasn’t heard that homily a million times, but there was more to it than just that. He eloquently described love as vulnerability, openness, trust and revealing our truth to each other. He was challenging us to be tiger lilies – tough, strong and powerful in our radical openness, our vulnerability to God and each other, part of our beauty laid in the God-ness that was revealed when we removed our external shields, our property, our wealth, social status, higher academic degrees.
To be loved is to remove it, depart from its protection and trust in God’s protection. It also means that we must feel strong, confident and empowered from within in order to do it. So, it is a two-way effort. We need God to do it and we meet God when we do it. We also allow God’s light to shine in and out of us when we do it. By departing from the protective armor that wealth and status provide us, we are choosing intentional vulnerability and enter into a whole new dimension of powerful living by trusting on God.
I also think we will never know the power of love until we do this. And, this power is in our intentional vulnerability, not a defaulted hopeless vulnerability. It is full surrender to God. It contains the riches of the universe and the exquisite white power of true humility, which is God’s power at work rather than our own limited human and imperfect, sickly weak power.
We walked around the abbey's beautiful breath-taking grounds. The peace was palatable. It calmed my body and soul. I felt it touching me in a new way. Desert roses were radiantly blooming everywhere I looked. I felt the divine presence of our Holy Earth Mother everywhere. The air was fragrant with her presence and I knew we were on holy ground. I dipped my hand in the fountain, cupping the water.
Unknowingly, I was praying that my voice be freed which meant that I be freed. I’d been trapped all my life in the fear of offending people. My authentic self remained gagged. I’d lived a life of serving others needs, others fears, others wants and goals out of a maternal instinct, at the expense of my own. Somehow, gradually, I had become a cheer leader to everyone but myself.
I thought how interesting this spiritual oasis was, which was actually situated in the desert. The abbey was separated from one of the most pretentious, image-based, materialistic, idolatrous cities in the world by a vast, barren, yet beautiful mountain range which rose up as a kind of divine barrier between worlds.
Once again, the promised land was reached only after crossing through a dry, seemingly lifeless, desert from a place of spiritual bondage and slavery. Thoughts of the early Hebrews' 40 years in the desert and Jesus' 40 days, also in the desert, teased out of me the timeless nature inherent spiritual evolution as it spirals upward, inward, deeper as we grow into more whole, and holy, human beings.
“This might have been how it was for Jesus,” I said, strolling down one of the hot dusty paths at the abbey. Water would have been a premium then, so no wonder it found its way into his teachings as a life-giving highly valued commodity.
Suddenly, a tiny red salamander slipped by in front of me. I laughed as I remembered not to take anything too seriously or too intellectually, because you risk distancing yourself too far from the heart and forgetting your joy. Life always seems to call us into a kind of spontaneous playfulness.
Heaven is certainly for children, carefree and buoyed with joy, because no one with a heart burdened by the armor made of fear and judgment could penetrate its peace and bright effervescence.
Throughout the afternoon, I reflected aloud about the abbot’s homily. …. “to love your neighbor is to be vulnerable, open…”
Yet, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable has another side to it. It means honoring ourselves, our own thoughts, needs and ideas too. It means speaking our truth – even those little truths that we have too often and too easily not valued and discounted and which risk us the esteem of others. But each time we devalue ourselves, we knock ourselves down the ladder from heaven, until the sheer gravity of hell sucks us down under.
Heaven is a consciousness, won one thought at a time and lost just as easily. Heaven may have a dimmer switch, and if we don’t remain vigilant, we can slowly dim our own inner light by compromising away our values, our own interior sense of right and wrong, our conscience. We can let our souls be nibbled away.
If we say we honor God, God who dwells within us, and do not honor our own integrity, our own voice, our own choices, then we are liars. When we do honor our inner truths, then we do honor God, creation, all of life and our brothers and sisters. As soon as we choose to live into this, our power floods back into us. It is this simple. It truly is. If we decide to do what we know in our hearts is right, and we will know by the energy, the vitality, the life within us when we give in to our own heart’s desire, then our power surges back into us, like lifting a damn.
I think this is truly what it means to not put a bushel basket over a lampstand. Sometimes I say that people in our culture are all decorating their bushel baskets.Who has the prettier armor, the biggest house, the best job, the highest grade point average, went to the best school, makes the most money, invests the wisest, is the coolest, etc. etc. Those are all bushel baskets.
If anyone really wanted to live, they would ask who has loved best, who has played the most, with the most relish. Who is the freest, who can sing the loudest in the shower and not worry about being off key.Who isn’t afraid of liking geeky music? Freedom is unbridled living, without armor and it’s intentional vulnerability and total faith in the power and presence of our creator of life itself.
There are religions, institutions, governments and hierarchical corporations (more like command centers) which force people into collective mind camps. The message to comply is subtle. You see the one who does what is expected of him get the raise, the job advancements. Those who don’t, don’t. We might feel punished for not allowing ourselves to be controlled. Most of us fall somewhere in between being totally controlled and totally free.
The free are often too poor to have a voice so maybe we don’t hear from them. The intentionally vulnerable will have a voice, but even so there are too few of them. I truly believe to be a Christian (or Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindi, etc.) is to be radically dependent on God and to be intentionally vulnerable. It's a tough challenge, but we must try.
Thank you for reading this long winded reflection!
