Sunday, April 29, 2007

Rock and a hard place

There’s no one that can tell you what is right for your life. There is no one that can assess your situation and recommend a path to follow. There is no one thing that when you do it must turn out well.

Except to give yourself to your potential – to give yourself to that which is fundamentally true in your life, to give yourself to love and to become an agent of some higher meaning.

I suppose our journeys are about finding, discerning, and discovering what exactly we mean by higher meaning.

Once finding that connection to higher meaning, we search for the vehicle to get us there. It is at this point in this physical, human-constructed world that competing realities converge in the moment as credentialing agencies vie for authority of anointing the seeker to their emerging path. Not wanting to vague, in the future profession that I seek, it is the Unitarian Universalist Association and their Department of Ministry that determines whether I have the authority to be a community minister in affiliation with them. They have a series of rules, hoops as they are called here at Starr King School for the Ministry, which a person must jump through.

Up to this point I have been allergic to their rules that tell me that I cannot be a minister in my own community after I achieve my ministerial degree. I bang into this reality continually, most recently in writing a grant for the Fellowship to be chosen as a recipient of growth funds within the district and the funding of an internship there. The application was not awarded to the congregation right now, among other reasons, because of a rule that a student cannot intern in their home congregation.

And now, in this moment, I question whether I need to be a credentialed minister at all to do that which I am called to do. Again, I wrestle with the concept about whether my quest to be a community minister is about the title or simply doing the work and living the spiritual life that I seek.

While the process is distressing in this moment, I have a trust that I will make my way through these questions to the end I seek.

In photography, I have learned that I have to work within the limitations of the particular lens that I am looking through and frame the best image I can.

Perhaps it's a truism that we can apply to many situations in our lives.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Beginner's Mind

According to Evelyn Rosch in her essay Beginner’s Mind: Paths to the Wisdom that is not Learned, there are levels in our mind. “On the surface is the mind of ordinary concepts, emotions, desires, fears, even boredom -- the mind with which everyone is familiar. Below that is the mind that is more in contact with basic wisdom and better able to see and act from it. It is beginner’s mind.”

“The beginner’s mind claim, ordinary yet radical, is that we already have such basic wisdom -- the “innate primordial wisdom in the world as it is,” the “self revealing truth” that “God has put into everything that exists.”

“Thus people do not need to acquire more information, more logic, more ego, and more skills to make them wise. What they need is to unlearn what they have accumulated that veils them from that wisdom. When they do this, it is believed, they find not only what they themselves really are already but also what the world actually is, and, from that vantage point, they can live a good life.”

I find her words comforting and amusing as I have spent the last nine months trying to accumulate more information, more logic and more skills to guide me on my ministerial path.

I have always believed that we know what we need to know, and that we just need to remember it.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Checking in

In one month’s time, I will have finished my two end-of-semester projects and six remaining papers and will be winging my way back to the Upper Delaware to begin the next phase of my seminary education: internship.

The reality that my time is almost over is ever present and I savor the clear, cool and flowery surroundings in Berkeley. My eyes tear briefly when sitting with friends at mealtimes or during class and I know profoundly that it is a unique moment that we share.

I am happy to have been away; I am ready to come home.

I have learned a lot about a lot of things. But the most significant learning has been to understand the fabric of the heart. For it is there that love is born.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Finding energy in stillness

As I create a felt meditation as part of my Centering Prayer project, I cut a white circle into thin strips. Desiring to keep the image circular, rather than creating an oval, I take the strip that I am removing to create negative space and place it on the second black square.

I ponder the notion of surrender and the creation of the vacuum that is created when we relinquish our thoughts. What is negative space in one realm becomes positive in the other. I understand fully the idea that nature abhors a vacuum and comprehend the universal law that we must be in harmony with the energy that we desire. Is this what is happening as I attempt to empty to the flow of spirit.

Is that why Centering Prayer deepens the connection to spirit?

In this physical meditation, I take what I have removed to create negative space and place it on a different field. What is negative becomes positive. In Centering Prayer, I empty my mind of my worldly thoughts and I make room for thoughts or energy that flows beyond our earthly borders.

Through the physical process, I moisten the two layers and carefully roll it to consummate the newly formed unit. As I sit in meditation each day, I reinforce my desire to detach from earthly concerns and apply myself with loving attention to the experiences in my day.

To be fully present is indeed the outcome of letting go. It is deliciously ironic, the humor of divine intention on earth.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Come what may

Many students, from a variety of denominations apart from Unitarian Universalism, have spiritual directors. It’s part of their schooling. So when I announced that I would begin a Centering Prayer practice, dorm mate Elizabeth suggested that I consider that practice in conjunction with spiritual direction. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but spiritual direction had been recommended to me before, and the mention again seemed synchronistic. She suggested a particular PhD student that we both knew.

So every other Friday, I go to Beth’s apartment across the street and we talk about what it is that I believe in. It’s kind of like a counseling session, but not exactly, as we talk mostly about my relationship with spirit.

Interestingly enough, at least to me, while I know that I believe, I’m not exactly sure what I believe. And as this connection is growing through Centering Prayer, is seems apropos to explore and to figure out what I do believe the earthly manifestation of the divine is for me.

So it was with a sense of curiosity that Beth showed me a picture that had come into her mind while I was relating my experience with Centering Prayer and the feeling of being “buoyed” by the shedding of past pain and a newfound sense of trust for the unknowing. It was a painting of a young Mary and the angel Gabriel. I thought it amazing because the particular Biblical passage that inspired this painting, carried great meaning for me last semester.

I have made it my screen saver and enjoy the sense of wonder whenever I close down my computer.

Our life journeys are one step at a time, and it is comforting for me to know that I do not have to know what tomorrow brings; I just need to be open to whatever comes my way.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Seeking reverence

I came to seminary to become reverent.

It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t spiritual or reverent before. In fact, my adult life has been spent in the comfort and the confines of the woods. My remote area has afforded me the option to spend my years revolving around a small axis, removed from the commercial world, opting for silence instead of the bustle of twentieth-century living.

While it’s true that I ventured out on a daily basis to fulfill my responsibility to the community through the publication of a newspaper, my actions circled around a life of service and not material goods or concepts.

I liked it that way -- in fact I liked it so much that when it became apparent that I had positioned myself as a community minister, I wished to be further identified as a spiritual person and leader in an outwardly obvious way. I came to seminary seeking the state and the title of reverend.

To me, reverend is a commitment to an other-than-self reference. To me, reverend is maintaining at all times an understanding, a relationship and a dedication to the Spirit of God in daily living. To me, reverend is a mindfulness that places at the center a commitment to say, “yes” to the presence of divine mystery. To me, reverend is surrendering worldly attachment to an unworthy self-history.

And that has been the toughest challenge. How do we surrender worldly attachments to an unworthy self-history? How do we stop ourselves from our inner dialog about how we’re not smart enough, or disciplined enough, or committed enough, or don't have enough time to think that we are “children of God,” unique individuals with the power and the intention to make a difference in our troubled world?

Howard Thurman, in his essay on commitment in “Disciplines of the Spirit,” sets up an argument that within our living universe, life itself is alive and that aliveness expresses itself in goal seeking. He argues that life has a determination to actualize its unique potential.

He quotes German mystic Meister Eckhart, who espouses that there is an inherent determination upon which God enters a man’s life. Eckhart writes that to the extent that man rids himself of creatureliness, to that extent God must enter his life. “I never ask God to give himself to me, I beg him to purify, to empty me. If I am empty, God of his very nature is obliged to give himself to me to fill me.”

But what does this mean in terms of becoming reverent?

For me, it means coming to an unshakeable belief that all is as it should be. It means making sure that all decisions, all actions, stems from a place of commitment to a higher self-good. It means participating in a self-surrendering practice that moves energy away from the mind and down into one’s heart and soul. It means practicing a mindfulness that has at its core an essence that our live journey is to learn the lessons of earth in relation and in honor of a life-giving and all-loving expression of wonder.

Thurman writes, “The yielding of the center of consent may be a silent, slow development in the life. The transformation may be so gradual that it passes unnoticed until, one day, everything is seen as different.

With five week left of this "away from home" seminary experience, I can only hope it is so.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Finding our path

One of the difficulties of the Photography as Meditative Practice is that we are required to present only one picture to the class. So the question always becomes which one do I pick? What image represents the path of my life: the staircase behind bars, the broad colorful steps with the closed pointy gate on top, the smooth cement slide in the playground, the complicated maze of handrails in the park, the arduous steps that never end or the beautiful path that traverses the ravine? (See slideshow at "Ravine in Berkeley" post.)

I choose the ravine because it represents a current journey and read this section of my meditative writing on paths.

We make our own stories. We find our own paths.

I found this one because I was bold one night and asked for company on a walk. Wanting to give something back, I showed my companion a long set of steps, which bordered a undeveloped ravine in the Berkeley hills. We were accompanied in that moment by a rambunctious dog and an owner thankful for our assistance in reigning in her pet's exuberance. She told us of a gate and a path that led to a beautiful waterfall.

Last Sunday, I pushed open that gate located about a third of the way up those steps, and ignored the private property sign because of her instruction. Around the first bend, posted signs read, "keep to the path, travel at your own risk, and leave nothing but your footprints." I proceeded with caution and invitation and soon sat on a 12-inch plank, straddling the ravine and contemplated the paths that had brought me to that moment.

A survivor, willing, daring even, to make my own way, asking for companionship, and refusing to give up my sense of love and harmony, this is my path. It leads me to experience God's beauty and spirit on earth.


Sunday, April 01, 2007

Ravine in Berkeley

Back in my room after five days on the Olympic Peninsula visiting with my brother and his family, I settle into my solitary routine. I’m shocked, and perhaps a slight bit relieved, that there are only six more weeks of school before I return to the Upper Delaware and continue my studies from afar.

I was in contact with my assistant, Danielle, this past weekend as the newspaper made its way through the New York Press Association's 2006 Better Newspaper Contest and kept its first place “Best in Show” position for the third straight year in a row. We squeaked by with a five-point margin and will need to work doubly hard from here on out to keep that tradition going next year. I’ll be happy to influence the pages before printing, rather than seeing them some three weeks after publication.

Still, I have grown accustomed to this rather loose schedule and at noon, after spending the morning in centering prayer and perusing Carolyn Myss’ “Invisible Acts of Power” Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Taming the Tiger Within” and Wayne Teasdale’s “The Mystic Hours,” I took myself out to contemplate paths as part of my “Photography as Meditative Practice” course.

The paths that our lives take are often circuitous at best, and amazingly straight in hindsight. Following directions from weeks ago, I found a beautiful ravine that is just minutes away from my dorm. Deep, still, and alive, it exists, available to me whenever I take the time to find it.

For photos from Meditation on Paths, click image.

Paths