Vacation & Vocation

A neighbor's peaceful pathway.

Very early one morning I saw a woman doing a walking meditation, such as Buddhists do, pausing after each step taken, perhaps pondering a koan. As I drew closer, I realized the “koan” she concentrated on so intently was, in truth, an iPad. 

Running through the park, I approached a young man sitting in the lotus position, his face downturned in meditation. As I passed by, however, I saw his thumbs busily texting.

On each occasion, the only hope of my original fantasy was that they were tweeting or texting their spiritual directors or gurus!

We all know of such impulses to check tweets, messages, e-mails, and news media! C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters comes to mind, in which Screwtape advises Wormwood, his tempter in training, to put into his ward’s head the impulse to take a break just as he’s about to discover something important to his spiritual progress, thus distracting him.

One dictionary defines vocation as “an impulse to perform a certain function.” Vacation is defined as freedom from such an impulse, a letting go of our compulsions to do things we have always done, a release from doing things the way we have always done them. Thus vacation invites play.

I’ve known too many people, including clergy, who brag about never or rarely taking a vacation. In my view, vacation is a vital balance to vocation, as necessary to one’s work as sleep and nutrition and compensation.

Some of us get away from our work by going away, but others of us get away from our work by going within: inside ourselves, listening to that inner voice that is the root of the word “vocation.”

I’ve been reading a lot about the spiritualities of the desert: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. The desert is an excellent place to listen for God’s voice, our own voice, the voice of a lover or friend or calling. Distractions are diminished, silence surrounds, we may breathe easier, we may breathe.

In deserts, Moses heard God’s voice, Miriam danced, Elijah listened for “a voice of a gentle stillness,” Naomi accepted Ruth’s vow, Jesus pondered his vocation and found lonely places to pray, Amma Theodora identified acedia (spiritual lethargy), Muhammad received his divine mission. 

Progressive Christians have our wilderness too. We are letting go of religious compulsions to rediscover the God of the desert (metaphorically).

Writing of desert spirituality in Contemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton concluded that “without the disquieting capacity to see and to repudiate the idolatry of devout ideas and imaginings…the Christian cannot be delivered from the smug self-assurance of the devout ones who know all the answers in advance, who possess all the clichés of the inner life and can defend themselves with infallible ritual forms against every risk and every demand of dialogue with human need and human desperation [108-9].”

Perhaps vacation from religious compulsion is also our vocation.

This post appeared on this blog on July 11, 2012.

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Copyright © 2012 and 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Help Me Understand

"I am the mountain. The mountain is me." --A homemade Zen saying.

Look closely for me at the bottom of this photo of the Matterhorn, taken in 1973. 

I did not have the faith to move this mountain, but I did have the faith to be in awe.

Zen almost silenced me. Or it did, and still I’m blogging!

I’ve written several posts about a book on Zen Buddhism I’ve just completed reading. I found myself becoming quieter and quieter as I read a brief section each day during morning prayer. Part of it was that Zen was telling me to shut up, just be. And part of it was that the whole enterprise had the effect of a Zen koan like “the sound of one hand clapping” to still the mind.

I especially loved this example of Zen mondo (questions and answers): “What is it ultimately?” “Willows are green and flowers are pink.”

“Willows are green and flowers are pink.” I wish I had thought of that when asked some outlandish question during Q&A’s in the church or equally, in the LGBT community, on whether one can be gay and Christian. Or another, “Only those who know it know.”

“Willows are green and flowers are pink.” Also a good answer for thorny theological questions like, how can a good God allow suffering in the world?

“The ‘beauty’ of Zen is the inner power that unites nature and life from within,” Abbot Zenkei Shibayama writes.

I have only an inkling of what that means—some intuitive, receptive neuron in my brain that may or may not get it.

And that’s why I became quieter and quieter as I read. I often get quiet when I don’t understand something, which has saved me from embarrassing moments of pretense.

But I liked it. Like witnessing a magnificent waterfall cascading from verdant cliffs down the face of a grey stone canyon wall to a valley below. Like hearing a musical composition caringly played that lifts the soul to cosmic, heavenly realms. Like the final gasp of an instance of prolonged lovemaking so profound as to put the most elevated sacred texts to shame.

I don’t need to understand something to see its beauty.

Years ago, I occasionally worked with another activist who sometimes questioned my thinking with the words, “Help me understand…” Given the context of our connection and other put-downs of me, I always thought the words were patronizing, as in “Help me understand how you can come to such a crazy conclusion.”

Only recently have I thought perhaps the phrase came from PBS and NPR, whose news interviewers often use the phrase, “Help us understand…” to aid interviewees to better explain their thinking to viewers and listeners.

A seminary professor with whom I served on a school committee told me privately that I sometimes seem to speak aloud mid-thought, mid-thinking process, so that what led to my conclusions were unclear. Perhaps that’s what was happening with my fellow activist. Perhaps that’s what happens on this blog!

Long ago I learned that my own need to understand something could be a means of control. In college, French existentialist author and philosopher Albert Camus spoke to me when he described “true understanding as ‘standing under,’ receiving without being in control (as understanding or ‘superior’ knowledge often implies).” I wrote this in Henri’s Mantle (p 94).

So I have been standing under Zen Buddhism, hoping a little of its wisdom and beauty will gently fall on me.

A final thought from Abbot Shibayama (A Flower Does Not Talk, p 122):

Zen asks us to open our eyes to the realm where subject and object are not yet separated, and I and you are one; and then to live and work in this new dimension.

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Fresh Takes on the Lord's Prayer

Early morning fog on the Ganges, January 1983.

Sitting in a literal fog out on our deck, reading of Darwin’s investigations into the propagation of flowers which attract different pollinating insects by using different colors or scents or shapes, somehow gave me fresh takes on the bits of the Lord’s Prayer, with which I concluded my morning prayer time.

The literal fog is still outside my windows, but the words I am writing now are coming out of a metaphorical fog of uncertainty and unclarity. I feel rather like Pooh trying to think really hard. Forgive me if you consider this exercise sophomoric, the blather of “a wise fool.”

“O God, mother and father of us all” (my modification of the prayer) now flashes as a primordial, unknowable kindling of life eons ago which we have colloquialized and anthropomorphized as “father” or “mother and father” to make our origin familiar and friendly and immediate.

“Who art in heaven” reinforces this unknowability both spatially and temporally. Heaven is a kind of heavy fog that neither lifts nor is penetrable, as inscrutable as a Zen koan.

“Hallowed”—but it is a sacred space, to be revered and remembered—“be thy name”—even if unnamable and unknowable.

“Thy kingdom come” has been a seeming eternity in the making, and will be a seeming eternity in the becoming, yet is instantly in our hearts as we believe it.

“Thy will be done” suggests agency and purpose, something (to me) more knowable than origins as we witness life and love, compassion and consciousness as pinnacles of experience.

“In earth / on earth” from the atom to the cosmos, from the cell to civilization, a driving and unstoppable force unites us. The Big Bang is still banging, like the reverberations of a Tibetan singing bowl.

“As it is in heaven”—not Plato’s realm of ideals, more like “harmonizing with the ultimately real” or true, the Tao (the way) as understood by Kung Tzu (Confucius), the way of life that gives “visible expression of the ultimate reality hidden in the universe.” (Merton quotes.)

“Give us this day our daily bread.” In the midst of this cosmic enterprise, we still need bread, and art, and wisdom.

“Forgive us our trespasses” when we overlook the larger picture or step on another’s property, holdings, or dignity.

“As we forgive those who trespass against us.” Help us let go of our sense of personal ownership of what we have been given, and share its grace.

“Lead us not into temptation.” Never for a second think we are not part of some cosmic dream that calls us to recognize our worth, the value of our time, and our call to add worth and act worthily.

“But deliver us from evil.” Save us from willful ignorance and from the “unquestioned self” in ourselves and in others, including our institutions.

“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.” Not mine, but ours to share, in memory and in hope of the greater good.

Where is God? you might ask. Why, in all of this, of course!

An earlier post: The Lord’s Prayer—What It Means to Me

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Photo from a religious studies tour of India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.

The Thoughtful Pause

My quote from Viktor Frankl in last week’s post about our very human desire to leave “an immortal ‘footprint in the sands of time’’’ made me remember a poignant archeological find. Fossilized footprints of several human-like ancestors crossing volcanic ash millions of years ago were discovered in Africa.  As archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey described her discovery, at one point only the female paused and briefly turned, as if to gaze in another direction—at a scenic vista? Looking back toward home? The road not taken? Toward an ominous sound? Then the footsteps continue on an otherwise straightforward path. Leakey concluded, “This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.”

I was deeply moved to think that her momentary pause was recorded in the sediment of ground for all time, now known by people like me she would never know or even imagine but whose imaginations are captivated by her mysterious turn. Was hers an “ah-hah” moment, a sentimental reflection of things past, a vision of another possibility, or simply a cautionary glance? 

The image is an icon, the story is a parable, a Zen story or koan whose inscrutability is the very thing that attracts me, causing my own thoughtful pause, stilling what Buddhists call my “monkey mind.” 

In the preface to my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, written for spiritual seekers rather than a particular faith group, I write of “the thoughtful pause.” I mention poets as “secular mystics” whose choice of words and cadences, like scripture, require a thoughtful pause after each phrase or line to allow seeds of comprehension to germinate. For me, the thoughtful pause is the food of the spiritual life. 

Lord knows we need thoughtful pauses, bombarded as we are continually by IMs, texts, tweets, e-mails, news, spam, ads, pop-ups, radio, TV, cell phones, iPads, iPhones, iTunes, honking horns, rumbling condenser units, sirens, overhead planes, police helicopters, and shrill beeps telling us our food is ready, the dryer is done, our time is up! I could go on Walt Whitman-like with several pages of things that vie for our attention, but you get the idea. 

To take a moment to turn, to gaze, to think, to contemplate, to reflect, to really see—is almost countercultural. Yet that’s a purpose of the contemplative life. During workshops I encourage what I call “monastic moments” for people to turn inward to consult themselves, their stories, their heart before engaging in dialogue. Otherwise, too often, someone else will speak up before others can formulate their own thoughts, their own answers. 

Jesus often searched out a lonely place to pray. If he needed to do so, given his apparently natural affinity for the sacred as well as the relative quiet of first century Palestine, think how much more we need to find such places!? And he said, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door…” The room implied is a pantry, at the center of a house, with no windows—in modern terms, no distractions, no Windows (sorry, I couldn’t resist). 

My youthful prayers were filled with words. Now my prayers are filled with silences. I need the silence to offset the noise of my life, to (in the words of technology) re-set, re-boot, refresh. 

The woman who turned so long ago reminds me of all the saints whose thoughtful pauses gave rise to insights passed down to us. And she reminds me what I also need.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Donations to this ministry are welcome! 

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Gay and bisexual Christian men are invited to join Chris Glaser and David Mellott as they lead a retreat on “Claiming the Blessings! (Despite the Burdens)” Oct. 4-7, 2012, on the scenic grounds of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center in Pennsylvania. 

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