onehouse

Lent 3: Repost: Obsession

From March 2006, so long time coming.

To be too conscious is an illness. A real thorough going illness.
-Dostoevsky

You can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind.
- Anne Lamott

I was joking with a friend last night about giving up God for Lent this year. Sort of joking. There are times when I just let go of all my little rituals to make sure that there is still a river beneath me and I am not in a leaky boat of my own making. I used to try really hard at religion and life and work, nearly squeezing the life's blood out of my own self and, in turn, those around me. I have seen in myself and in others that what we so quickly describe as meaning and passion can turn out to be obsession and sickness.

Detachment cures much of this. Not apathy. Not lack of care. But healthy detachment even to those things we think are good or we swear are bringing us so much joy and happiness. I am reminded of Cynthia's Bourgeault's reflection on the Psalms:

How does one become perfect (which in the language of Christ's time meant whole, truly and fully alive)? Not by theologies or theories, but by an actual spiritual practice that teaches you "how to get from here to there." This is the missing link people are really hungering for, and it's the wisdom the Benedictine tradition still has to offer. Embedded in the time-honored Benedictine motto of Ora et Labora--"prayer and work"--is a balanced path to conscious selfhood...

A conscious selfhood that is whole, true and fully alive. When I am overly conscious and overly conscientious (especially about my place in the world "Is this about me? No. Well then I've lost interest." Seinfeld) I become fragmented, false, and sick. So sometimes it is good just to give up for a little while, float along and enjoy the view. If God disappears because my tiny little mind stopped paying attention, well, it would be good to face that now rather than later.

let all go-the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things-let all go
dear
       so comes love

ee cummings

And all God's people said...

Amen.

"For the love of God, turn something off." she said to herself.

Blooming again

By Joni Mitchell

I moved up into the Canadian back bush where I could be alone. I lived with kerosene, stayed away from electricity for about a year. I turned to nature. I was going down, and with that came a tremendous sense of knowing nothing. Western psychology might call it a nervous breakdown, but in certain cultures they call it a shamanic conversion.

I read just about every psychological book I could lay my hands on, and threw them all against the wall basically. But depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, the angels fly off too. So there is a possibility in that mire of an epiphany.

The artist is a canary in the coal mine. We’re supposed to be out on the fringes of society, with an overview. If we are doing our work, we should be a little ahead of the strife. People would ask me if I was being a little negative. I’d say, ‘No, aren’t you being a little like an ostrich with your head stuck in the sand?’

I tried to train myself to be a realist. I am not cynical. To me it is, ‘Can you get through this life with a good heart?’ That has been my struggle. With all the injustice and all the things that piss you off, to try to get the heart to rebound. And bloom again, you know?

Source: Woman of Heart and Mind, a documentary film, via www.herondance.org

via inward/outward

Obsession

To be too conscious is an illness. A real thorough going illness.
-Dostoevsky

You can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind.
- Anne Lamott

I was joking with a friend last night about giving up God for Lent this year. Sort of joking. There are times when I just let go of all my little rituals to make sure that there is still a river beneath me and I am not in a leaky boat of my own making. I used to try really hard at religion and life and work, nearly squeezing the life's blood out of my own self and, in turn, those around me. I have seen in myself and in others that what we so quickly describe as meaning and passion can turn out to be obsession and sickness.

Detachment cures much of this. Not apathy. Not lack of care. But healthy detachment even to those things we think are good or we swear are bringing us so much joy and happiness. I am reminded of Cynthia's Bourgeault's reflection on the Psalms:

How does one become perfect (which in the language of Christ's time meant whole, truly and fully alive)? Not by theologies or theories, but by an actual spiritual practice that teaches you "how to get from here to there." This is the missing link people are really hungering for, and it's the wisdom the Benedictine tradition still has to offer. Embedded in the time-honored Benedictine motto of Ora et Labora--"prayer and work"--is a balanced path to conscious selfhood...

A conscious selfhood that is whole, true and fully alive. When I am overly conscious and overly conscientious (especially about my place in the world "Is this about me? No. Well then I've lost interest." Seinfeld) I become fragmented, false, and sick. So sometimes it is good just to give up for a little while, float along and enjoy the view. If God disappears because my tiny little mind stopped paying attention, well, it would be good to face that now rather than later.

let all go-the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things-let all go
dear
       so comes love

ee cummings

Farewell Pluto.

This summer I became the same age that my mother was when she became a widow. I was walking with two nieces, aged 14 and 12, when I realized that they were the age of myself and my younger sister when my father died. And my mother had three more children, ages 17, 19 and 21. I actually stopped walking when this came to mind, stunned a little by what I could be facing on this birthday. My mother had a Grade 10 education, worked part time at a shoe store, and had just learned how to drive when my father died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her with a 1966 Chevrolet Impala, no money (but, to the bank's surprise, no debt), and a parsonage filled with second hand furniture.

I have a rock on my  bookshelf shaped like a mountain. I took it from Frank's Slide last year. I looked all around and there were no signs saying I couldn't take a rock from the 83 million tons of  limestone that fell off the top of Turtle Mountain in 1903, burying a town in the process. I named the rock "Things Change" - a solid reminder that nothing is solid, that maleability and adapatability are virtues, that faithfulness does not mean a relentless clinging to the ignorance of what was or what we blindly think is. Farewell Planet Pluto. This too shall pass. I too shall pass.

The things that matter.

"The things I thought were so important - because of the effort I put into them - have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered." --Thomas Merton

Looking forward.

Look Forward
Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

All human endeavors are destined for destruction, yet year after year, God’s hand blesses us with springtime and autumn, seedtime and harvest. There is an enormous force behind that blessing. The sun treads its prescribed path, earth and stars go their appointed way. We must also embrace God’s appointed way for our lives, so that the outcome will be good and as sure as the bounty of the sunshine and rain. Then we can look forward to the goodness that will come from every heart, as surely as goodness comes from the earth.

via Bruderhof's Daily Dig

Words to live by.

More on detachment:

"Barn burned down. Now I can see the moon."

- Japanese poet Masahide

let all go dear.

It's been great to be away from blogging for nearly a week - to experience family and friends, tomatoes and national elections, work and weariness without an eye or an ear to writing about it. I spent much of the weekend at a family reunion that included one 40th birthday celebration (short), one 25th anniversary celebration (short), one aquatic acrobatics show by nieces (very short) and one high school graduation (too long). The only reprieve at the "let's-celebrate-by-being-boring" ceremony was my family shouting the hallelujah chorus as my nephew crossed the stage.

I have been thinking further on the ancient value of detachment and remembered this ee cummings poem:

let it go-the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise-let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go-the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers-you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go-the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things-let all go
dear
so comes love

Detachment and Discernment

I need to change the stories I listen to. Because I was heavily involved with The Church, Gospel, and Culture conversation a few years ago (I guess they call it "emerging" now? I'm not sure what that means but there it is...), I tend to visit the blogs of people I met on the road or sat next to on panels. Some of them continue to be good friends and even sit on my advisory board for the magazine.

Some voices I have found by following threads. I am still interested in a lot of different things even though I would consider myself now more interested in a life listening to the margins than one that talks of church parts. Talking about the mechanics of church is a good and necessary conversation. I just don't want to be involved in it any longer.

The things we pay attention to shape how we live. The stories we listen to discern what we think about and then what we act on.  Benedict's first words in the rule are "Listen". Nouwen says that it is in silence that community is born. Conversation and community can only come out of silence and solitude for it is then that true selves meet. Otherwise our attempts to connect come only from noise and pretention - our overly eager attempts to explain and explain and explain ourselves.

A few months ago, I posted TS Eliot's poem, Ash Wednesday. And then I read Karen Armstrong's Spiral Staircase . She based much of the telling of her life's journey on this poem. "Teach us to care and not to care" is one of Ash Wednesday's repeated refrains.

We might call this "holding all things loosely" - a phrase that is often used in religious circles to talk about money but rarely to talk about zeal or power or these little kingdoms we build to make ourselves feel important. Caring and not caring is closely related to "holy indifference" or detachment. As I read many blogs, I see some phrases repeated -   "It made me feel...", "I am offended by...", "I am personally invested...". A real emphasis on attachment - just as Nouwen reminds us that community is based on what we learn in silence and solitude, Chittister reminds us that spiritual discernment, seeking where we should put our life's energy is based, not on attachment, but on "holy indifference".

Designed to enable a person to regard all of life with an open mind and a willing heart, detachment -- holy indifference -- is the foundation of spiritual discernment.

It reminds me of the Elizabeth Bishop poem Deegy posted a while back:

One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

There are many other reasons why I need to stop reading the stories on a conversation I left. But they really don't matter.  Or maybe they are reasons that need to be discussed somewhere over tall bottles of something and a couple of Cuban cigars.  It's just time to really move on and unless something falls into my lap, I need to be quiet on the whole thing. I care. But then again I don't.