Let It Go (A New Nativity)

Wish I could always be this peaceful!

Have you ever been in the grip of something? Something that wouldn’t let go of you or that you couldn’t let go of?

Have you ever felt possessed or been obsessed by something? Or, after doing something, asked, “Whatever possessed me to do this or that or the other thing?”

What about being gripped by fear? Or overtaken by anger? Or grief? Or anxiety? Or stress? Or lust—that is, an overwhelming desire to have something or someone?

Have you had the experience of being in the grasp of infatuation—that is, something that felt like love but was more like fear of being deprived of the object of your attraction?

Have you ever been possessed by an addiction—that is, something that once gave pleasure but became more about fear of being deprived of it? We tend to think of drugs or alcohol in this regard, but it may be something as ennobling as our work, our convictions, our causes, even our compassion. (Yes, compassion! We know compassion has “possessed” us when we experience burnout in its wake.)

Once I was looking for the remote control and I became absolutely obsessed with finding it right then and there. “What was that all about?” I wondered later. Surely the margaritas earlier in the evening did not help. But there was something more. As I get older, I misplace more things, I have greater difficulty finding things, and I don’t like it one bit. I was gripped temporarily by anger at myself, gripped for the moment by fear of losing my faculties, gripped by anxiety over loss of control that the remote symbolizes in our age. After all, it is called the remote control!

My obsession with finding the remote alarmed Wade and some friends who had joined us to watch a film together—and I apologized. Where was my Christian calm? Where was my Buddhist detachment? What happened to my “spiritual” demeanor? I’m a “propagandist” for the contemplative life, for God’s sake—why do I let the “things of this world” trouble me so much?

Well, you know, we’re all “works in progress,” as they say.

I invite you to make a fist with one hand, as tight as you can. Put whatever anger, stress, or fear you can into that fist. Do you feel the blood being squeezed out of your hand along with all of its oxygen that feeds the cells?

Now keep it clenched and, with the other hand, try to open it. No luck, huh? Now release your fist slowly. Feel the blood flowing again, bringing oxygen—breath—into its flesh. With your other hand, gently massage your hand, caressing its palm, running fingers along the inside of the fingers that have been clenched. Feel the pleasure of it. Take a deep breath. Exhale slowly. Take another deep breath and imagine that breath coming into your heart and radiating through your blood vessels to the palm of your hand, then to the tips of your fingers.

Almost all of us at one time or another become like clenched fists. The agenda of a day may slowly constrict us. Worries at work may cramp us. Expectations of others or of ourselves may constrain us. A diagnosis may confine us. Anxieties about world events may restrain us. We need release.

Last week’s Midrash referenced one possessed by an unclean spirit. In an encounter with Jesus, the unclean spirit convulses the man, screaming, and releases the person from its grip. What may possess one person for a lifetime may possess any of us for a moment. We all need release.

Nowadays what was understood as unclean spirits are neatly catalogued by doctors and therapists in diagnostic manuals. Treatments and medicine are prescribed. This gives an illusion of control—knowing what it is, knowing what to do. But control is not release. Jesus releases. He does not simply control.

Think of the fist you just made. Your other hand may be able to control it, but to open it requires another strategy that inspires the cooperation of the clenched hand.

This may be a new way to comprehend our selves as Christ’s body. Mystically we breathe in his Spirit, even as he nourishes us and quenches our thirst. His breath, body, and blood flow through us, unclenching our minds, our hearts, our hands. Jesus is born again in us into a world desperately in need of release.

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Hang-Gliding and Mudwrestling: The Spiritual Life

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blog site.

During my workshops I like to use two metaphors for different ways of thinking about spirituality: hang-gliding and mudwrestling.

Some think of spirituality as hang-gliding high above your troubles and the troubles of the world, giving you perspective, so that, like God in that popular song years ago, you can see everything “from a distance.” And there’s some truth to this; spirituality can give us perspective in which we see the larger picture, the grander scheme, the wonder of it all.

But spirituality, to me, is often the task of mudwrestling, in which we wrestle with the powers that be, whether within our own psyches, within families and faith communities, in the workplace or the public square. We also wrestle with suffering and failure and disappointments, with disabilities and limitations and challenges. Some few wrestle with success or wealth or attractiveness. And this shapes our souls for good or ill. But whether they warp or enlarge our souls is the choice of the conscious spiritual life.

For many of us, religions in which we were reared caused the very pain with which we struggled. A friend, brought up as a biblical literalist, felt compelled to burn all of his family Bibles to embrace a new way of understanding scripture.

Yet I believe it’s in the Bible that we find people and a God willing to wrestle with one another. The spirituality of the Bible is more mudwrestling than hang-gliding, from the depiction of a God who wrestles mud into human shapes in Jewish scriptures to the depiction of creation itself groaning in childbirth in Christian scriptures.

Most obvious is the myth about Jacob wrestling with God in the middle of the night. “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” Jacob tells God. Thus Jacob is renamed “Israel,” which means one who strives with God.

I thought of this story one Sunday morning when reading The New York Times Magazine, featuring stories of how “Health is All in Our Minds.” Daniel Smith wrote about his and his brother’s lifelong struggle with debilitating anxiety in an article entitled “The Maniac in Me.” He eventually concludes with Kierkegaard that his anxiety is his “best teacher”—but not of itself, rather because of his “lifelong effort to think clearly and act well in spite of it.” He writes:

My brother and I grew up in a Jewish but largely secular home. Each of us had a bar mitzvah, but we managed to emerge from childhood with little understanding of, and littler faith in, religious texts. [My brother] is convinced that our lack of religion has handicapped us psychologically. “It’s not really fair, when you think about it,” he told me…. “We’re surrounded by people who came into this world with these portable little bundles of certainty, these neat foundational texts. They don’t have to go rooting around for comforting words. What do we have? What did we get? Nothing. A handful of movies and a few of Dad’s jokes. We’re at sea. We’ve always been at sea.”

On reading this I immediately thought of all the great characters in Jewish scriptures these anxiety-ridden brothers could have identified with: the stammering Moses, the reluctant Jonah, Jeremiah with feelings of inadequacy, Isaiah of the “unclean lips,” but especially the struggling Jacob.

     

That’s what I saw in the Bible growing up—people like me, wrestling with God, wrestling with the powers that be for acceptance, respect, equality, justice, and compassion. My own struggle shaped the soul I am today, shaping a spirituality within me of acceptance, respect, equality, justice, and compassion. What I wanted I now am better able to give. And I daresay many of you will identify with that sentiment. That’s probably why you’re reading this.

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