utterly humbled by mystery

(a part of NPR's series "this I believe.")06

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don’t think so. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both.

I’ve had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. “Hints and guesses,” as T.S. Eliot would say. I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don’t scare me anymore.

When I was young, I couldn’t tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it’s all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe — I’ve counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.

Whenever I think there’s a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say “only” or “always,” someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like “principles of uncertainty” and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of “faith”! How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It’s the people who don’t know who usually pretend that they do. People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is — quite sadly — absent from much of our religious conversation today. My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

Richard Rohr is founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, N.M. He took his Franciscan vows in 1961, and was ordained as a priest in 1970. Rohr is a frequent speaker and writer on issues of community building, peace and justice.

summer

Just now, at 10:15 am, I am finishing up my cup of fresh-press coffee. I am nibbling the last bit of a juicy white peach which I purchased last night from the farmer's market three blocks from my apartment. I am reading a very funny story. I am not listening to anything, just the murmbling of the fridge (which happens to be stocked with all of my absolute favorite Trader Joe's goodies) and the stuffy mountainy summer air. 

In three days I will hop on a plane to visit a lovely friend in Seattle. Until then, my pressing and urgent plans include putting the final layer of paint on my green desk, hitting up the beach one more time, baking some pear-bran muffins, and finishing "Seymour: An Introduction." 

I love summer. I'm thinking maybe I was designed for summer...I do summer very well. :)

doowah

Compounding matters, and by matters I mean it being the last day of my job and me sitting in my very warm apartment surrounded by teenage literature I picked up at used bookstores and curriculum I wrote and funny little gifts from students, is the fact that I've had a fictional R&B ballad stuck in my head for the past week. 

By fictional, I mean that it has no words and is not a real song. It's just a mystery tune; a loop running over and over again in my head like the beginning of a DVD. It sounds pretty much like, "Dum dum duh DAH da dum, Dadada, Dadadah, Duahhawah (repeat)." Slow and steady with a shuffle beat, it rolls around my brain at the most inopportune times, making everything incredibly cheesy.

It's rather like the time I got the NBC morning news theme lodged in my head for a week.  When that happened, everything took on this superfluous importance and I had a constant urge to straighten my collar and speak directly. 

is to come

You 

taught me this,

so you ought to

understand it:

I've already stood

upon eternity

climbed up

onto the highest piece

of the staircase

and watched

down below

every single stacked minute

before/behind

fade grey and fall

away.

and that, that's living.

it was and is

(and is to come)

and ever will be. 

snicker

So funny.  

deep breathing

Song for today: Jesus, etc. (off Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). Stolen from a great cloudy day playlist. 

(How you know you've been teaching english too long: you wonder if there is an MLA format for citing songs, and you feel slightly guilty for not investigating.)

Story for today: In the breakfast line at staff meeting, a co-worker insinuated, quite seriously, that I'm a jerk for not also having the yearbook reprinted in braille.

Hmm. 

fully

we expect from ourselves, constantly,

immortality. we're not able to be aware 

of the shortness of things, so our waking days

are spent in spinning circles. we know

in our head all the true things: we will die,

we will not remember all the throbbing

paper-cut injustices at the end of things.

we will love, and those moments

will burn and sweep and cleanse away

in smoky fire, everything.

everything else. even the moon.

this is a poem composed while leaning against

the kitchen sink

in the moonlight through the window slats

at 11:29 on a Friday.

I think, more these days that I ever have

that we will wake up laughing.

but it will be quiet laughter:

the way we laugh when we learn something

we should have known before

but have only just discovered, fully. 

Burnt Norton

Oh, please, please read this.  I am re-reading Four Quartets and just like every time I have read them they are so much more important to me than most everything else I've ever read (except for a few things, of course).  

V. 

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

    The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.