Hearing and Heeding

A few weeks ago, I was lying in bed, desperately hoping the alarm was not about to go off. Then it did. And as I tried to gather my wits about me to lurch into my day, I heard a bird call I had not heard before. It was a little bit like a wolf whistle, but after the first part of the whistle there was a sound kind of like the whir of a ratchet wrench. Whoot (crik-crik-crik) Whoo!

It was a new sound to me, though I hear all kinds of bird sounds around the woodsy area where I live. There had been a soft lovely birdsong I had been hearing for a while in the mornings that was more like a trilling sound, throon-HEE!  I realized as I lay there, the difference is seasonal. Migratory. I have lived in Georgia for dozens of years and I have no idea what birds are here during what season.

It seems like the seasons creep on me every year, and while I can name many of the lovely plants that bloom through spring and summer, I am only partially able to sketch out their pattern. Forsythia, then azaleas, then everything at once, Azaleas-dogwood -Bradford pear. Then a pause and then the magnolias and the hydrangea and then the crepe myrtle. But when does the mountain laurel bloom? And what about the sweet shrub, best smell on earth?

I think it’s time for me to start keeping track, to be more like my beloved grandmother Ruth Burns, who kept a kind of journal noting the comings and goings the earth, rainfall and temperatures, the harvest of her garden. She knew nature, and she believed in it more than she believed in the progress of the human set. If you asked her what time it was during the summer, when the clocks were set to daylight saving time, she might say, “Well, the government says it’s five o’clock, but I believe it is four in God’s time.”

I’m quite a bit more modern minded than my grandmother—like I am wondering if it is possible that there is a birdsong database that will return an answer to a search query, “wolf whistle interrupted by ratchet”?  Still, I see the value in the simple recording and observing a journal would allow. But then, I have also been meaning to start keeping some kind of a spiritual journal, so I was wondering, which journal to keep: prayer or nature?

Lately, finally, it has been occurring to me that they might be, actually, the same thing.

It has usually quite turned me off when I heard someone use language like, “what God is doing in my life.” That kind of language tends to alienate me, as it always sounded before as if I was expected to have some dramatic evidence of the divine presence, some showy spiritual experiences. I haven’t got so much to report by that standard. Not many voices in the darkness or burning bushes or wild raptures. There have been moments —moments when I held my breath so as not to break the ineffable tenderness. But recently the words of a colleague made me rethink my reaction to the “what God is doing” business, and I began to realize that maybe what God is doing is as slow and natural as my deepening interest in the world around me, that the call of God could sound like a birdsong. What God is speaking might not be so much an audible voice God is speaking to me, as it is a deep sense of compassion and acceptance God is speaking through me.

So, I am going to keep this nautureprayerspirit journal. And try to catch a few of the moments that matter. Because to not see and hear all this—the bird in the morning, or the smile of the young man at the coffee bar who asks if I need room for cream, or the smell of sweet shrub, or the delight of dollar vinyl at Wuxtry, or the speed of the search engine—to not see it all as the divine fingerprint is a kind of poverty of imagination, like that of the guy I once heard described as “standing knee deep in the river, dying for a drink.”

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photo credit: Green Heron on Flatrock River, © Waldopics.

 

Deep and Wide

One day this week I had arranged to meet a friend for lunch, and as I went to meet her it was one of those moments when it was not yet clear how the day was going to go. You know how it is: some days it feels like I am fighting some invisible monster, who flicks stains on my new shirt, directs fellow drivers to cut me off in traffic, knocks out the servers of the websites I want to visit and eats holes in the socks I planned to wear. Other days, though the monster is sleeping, and I glide effortlessly along, receiving the benefit of green lights, unexpected discounts, and resources that seem to fall from the sky. What was this day going to be like? I thought I saw a great parking spot, but was beaten to it by a swifter driver. As I tried to go back around the aisle to get to the other side of the lot, a big delivery truck blocked my lane and I suddenly found myself forced out of the parking lot and onto a side street. There was a spot there, though it was metered parking and I wasn’t sure all the change I scraped up was quite going to be enough to keep me from the dreaded red “Violation” flag which my town enforces with some vigor. As I walked toward the meeting spot my friend and I had designated, I saw some seminary classmates walking into another restaurant. We waved, and they hesitated, which I interpreted as, “Hey, come say hello.” But when I got over to them, I decided I might have misinterpreted the message. They seemed distracted, or maybe just dazed from their Greek quiz, and so I went back across the parking lot feeling a little foolish, hearing the opening bars of my endlessly looping inner narrative about what a dork I am.

As I stood there, a woman walked past me to get into her car, and as she passed, she asked, “Everything okay?”

“Oh, sure,” I replied, sort of waving her off with a flap of my arm. “Just meeting someone.” I wondered what she had seen in my face, a little downcast, or in my posture, where I noticed, I was standing hugging my elbows to ward off the jabs of the monster.

I called after the woman. “It was really very kind of you to ask,” I said, and she stopped at her car door. She smiled at me. “I normally don’t do things like that,” she said.  We regarded each other.  There were more than a few things, at least on the surface, separating us: age, race, maybe social class (her shoes were so much nicer than mine.) But just for an instant those things seemed outside what we were sharing.  “Well, thanks for taking the time,” I said. “If more people were willing. . .” and she nodded, filling in the rest of my thought with her unspoken agreement.

Just then my friend showed up and we had lunch, a very pleasant conversation that ranged from writers we had admired to the problem of friends who send us unwanted emails about politics we don’t share. Somehow in the course of the conversation, I used the word “lackadaisical,” and a member of the wait staff, gliding by, exclaimed, “That’s my favorite word! I love you!” A very fine word, indeed, I agreed. Tragically underused. Seems like the universe does like me today, I thought. She really likes me!

The woman at the parking lot had changed the trajectory of my whole day, because she had been able to step outside her day, her errands, and see me as someone who needed a little kindness or compassion or just a bit of attention. I can only guess that she saw something in me despite our differences that made her able to feel she might have been in my shoes. Maybe she’s an unusually intuitive person, maybe she is a social worker or a minister, maybe she’s a brilliant businessperson who quickly sizes up situations. I have no way of knowing. But her ability to see me as someone she could relate to reminded me of something Joseph Campbell wrote, about how the basis for all great religions is simple compassion, which comes from seeing ourselves in the other.

Campbell also wrote this. “The experience of mystery does not come from expecting it, but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes.” (From Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor.)

I sometimes describe myself as a person seeking the mystery, searching the big answers. But maybe Campbell is right to suggest that the real experience we are seeking is not found so much in our striving, isn’t “found” at all, but realized in those moments when we fall out of the vessels of our expectations and into something bigger.

And then, as if I might have missed the point, as I walked back to my parking spot, I managed to intercept the meter reader and successfully plead for a chance to drive away before the ticket had appeared.

Photo credit: ©Gerry Thomasen

Buy This Soundtrack

Last week I saw the amazing documentary, Twenty Feet From Stardom. It’s about  backup singers, focusing mostly on three women who have helped make amazing music while remaining largely unknown. We know their music, like the songs of Merry Clayton, who was one of the key voices behind Phil Spector’s famous Wall of Sound, and the voice paired with Mick Jagger’s on the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” which is one of the most electrifying moments in rock and roll history. But for a variety of reasons, we don’t know them, the singers. Some of them despaired of the life on the road and found other work. Some were tricked and abused to keep them under the thumb of the people who control the “star-making machinery behind the popular song.” (Bonus points if you can identify the source of that quote.)

Some of them decided they did not have the temperament or the ambition to be the star, and preferred the backup work that let them have a life. As the singers and some of their famous cohorts discuss the choices they made or didn’t get to make, a narrative thread emerges about how becoming a star, finding solo success, requires some combination of narcissism and ruthlessness that these women did not quite possess.

There is something to that, and yet I wonder if that, too is a misreading of these artists and the process of turning into ourselves (as a great friend of mine puts it.)What my friend is talking about, I think, is what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “selving” the incarnational dance of finding the essence of what we were put on the planet to do or be or express. For some of us, finding that is just as natural as breathing, while for others, it’s a long hard slog. Some of us get told there is no category for who or what our soul cries out to be, and therefore no recognition, no reward. Some of us have to cobble together little bits and pieces of work and family life and volunteer work and side projects and wander in the wilderness for many years before someone else can see the pattern emerge of what we were really about, put a name to it. And having someone else see, and name, who we are and what our gift is can be the validation that makes us realize it really is a gift, and that the world might need it.

The process of selving is messy and painful, it’s kind of like being born. The single-mindedness it takes to peck open one’s shell might look narcissistic from the outside, or ruthless or cruel or ambitious, but from the inside it is about the divine leading, the call, which starts with the call to inhabit our own skin with as much particularity and authenticity as possible.

At one point in the film, Merry Clayton asks a question, something like, “If you have a gift, aren’t you really obligated to give it?” I would say we are; it’s a spiritual imperative. And the needful thing is to give, to announce our selving and add our voice to the song. Maybe only God sees the little tributaries, the branching off that kept a river from reaching the sea, and yet which brought water to a dry and thirsty place.

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Photo credit: copyright Adam Greig,  Eyjafjardarsysla, Iceland.

Water When the Well is Dry

Last week came amazing news from India, where the Constitutional Party led by Sonia Gandhi is pushing to declare a constitutional right to food. What an amazing, bold, ambitious idea that could lift millions from misery and signal that their country intends to live up to its ideals.

Here in the US, one might argue that we have implicitly made food a right. We don’t have people routinely die from starvation. We have a host of government programs, from WIC to SNAP, plus local food banks and soup kitchens that feed hungry people. But calling food a right seems unthinkable in our political climate, not because we don’t have the resources but because we don’t have the generosity. We like our poor people humble to the point of humiliation here. We want them to feel they are the ones that are wrong, not the politicians who use food stamp recipients as political punching bags so they can look fiscally responsible to their constituents.

The narrative about givers and takers in our economy continues to bubble up in ways that reveal us to be alienated, anxious, suspicious and pathologically addicted to convenience. We like to fly flags from our front porches but we don’t want to do the work citizenship requires. We claim to care about the earth but won’t give up our cars. We watch the cable news shows or read the blogs of the side that thinks the way we do and won’t listen to any serious political analysis that is not dressed up as entertainment. We say we support our troops but their salaries are so low some of their kids qualify for free school lunch.

 
And it feels like we are living in the wilderness right now, looking back to a time when our country did big things, when we stood for freedom, explored space, conquered diseases, marched for civil rights.  When we built schools, not prisons, when we were inspired by our leaders to dream and dare. The big river of our imagination and ingenuity has dwindled down to pathetic trickle. Maybe because because way upstream we failed to hear the prophetic call to let justice roll down like mighty waters?

We’re waiting for something, someone to inspire us again. Maybe we ought to take an example from India, to tie our political fortunes to those of the poorest and most vulnerable among us. What great things could we do if we decided to stop running in place on treadmills and start moving ahead toward one another, toward the place of common good?

The Fine Print

Back in the spring, I was writing a sermon that referred to the concept of pattern recognition, the thing our brains seem hardwired to do in order to learn from our experience, create symbols to carry meaning, use language and math and music. As I was looking for examples to explain this phenomenon, I happened to read a short piece in the New York Times magazine where a Nashville record producer, Callie Khouri, was asked about her Easter Brunch playlist, and among the cool music she singled out was the sentence: “I would definitely have some pop staples.” Now in the article, the words “pop staples” are lower case, implying they mean standard songs of the pop music genre, which, depending on who you are, might mean The Beatles or Smokey Robinson or Lady Gaga.

But I had a hunch that is not what she meant at all, having lived in Nashville for a while I believed that a hip Nashville record produced would not be recommending music so imprecisely. No, I suspected that what she actually was  referring to with the words “pop staples” was a proper noun, a person, Mr. Roebuck “Pop” Staples, the patriarch of the Staples Singers musical family, father of Mavis, a giant in the gospel world and the kind of staple you do want on your Easter morning ultimate playlist, maybe in their classic song, “I’ll Take You There,” which, if it does not make you glad to be alive, you might just better check to see if you really are.

And sure enough the next week after Easter, I just happened to notice in the Errata section a little notice correcting what they were calling a transcription error—the reporter recorded the interview and the person who transcribed the notes did not know the difference between pop staples, lower case, and Pop Staples, proper noun. And aside from pointing out to you what a terribly close reader of the NY Times I am, there is something there about this practice of examining facts and errors, setting the record straight, being willing to admit mistakes, that corresponds nicely with spiritual practices that help us sort out our actions and intentions, our values and our context, the pattern recognition of the inner life.

Add to that the following paragraph I noticed, back in the Times just last week:

A letter to the editor on May 5, about “Red Doc>,” a book of poetry by Anne Carson with some lines that refer to the velocity of a falling cow, misapplied the notion of a constant acceleration due to gravity near the Earth’s surface. The rate, 9.8 meters/second, refers to the increase of velocity per second, not the velocity itself.

It charms me and encourages me that we live in  a world where poets write poems about the velocity of falling cows, and readers write letters to the editors, and those editors try to keep the math and the poetry in balance. Surely, as long as we can give ourselves to such fancy and accuracy, creativity and precision, we have not unalterably wrecked the creation we were put here to make a garden of, or forever lost the pattern of its maker.