Cinnamon Pershings

A narrow dirt walkway runs along the edge of a wash near the place where I work. A wash, for those of you not in the desert, is a dry river bed or stream bed that fills with water when the rains come. Because the soil is wetter, plants often make their home there rather than in some of the less hospitable wider spaces of the desert.

I like to walk there sometimes during my lunch hour, and the other day I noticed the sign by the entrance:

ATTENTION

Stay on the Path

I thought of that sign quite a bit yesterday after I went to the grocery story and picked up a couple of cinnamon pershings, a cinnamon roll type pastry. I knew, of course, when I bought them that they contained more sugar and fat than anyone who's trying to lose another 20 pounds should consume in one sitting. I knew that the roll that remains on my belly would not be going anywhere anytime soon if I keep eating like that. And I knew that if I have to take on that many calories, it should at least be in the form of something even marginally nutritious. None of this knowledge prevented me from buying and downing the pershings just the same.

Why did I do it? I'm not sure, but the impulse was and is familiar. Sometimes it's object is TV watching; sometimes it involves recalling past mistakes and berating myself over them; sometimes, like yesterday, it's about consuming something that I just have to eat. In each circumstance, I feel an overwhelming sense that if I don't buy and eat, don't watch, don't indulge in that thought or emotion, something terrible will happen. Or maybe something satisfying won't.

Yes, it is satisfying, even the recrimination afterward. When I do those things, that's the old familiar self, the one who can't help it, the one who doesn't have to change, the one who can go on living life asleep. And I don't really want to get rid of that guy; he's part of who I am. But he also keeps me anxious and oblivious and jumping jumping jumping for the latest bright emotional gizmo to keep me amused. He's always out of breath.

I want to breathe. I want to feel the air in my lungs. When I was a little boy, I used to tell myself in the middle of asthma attacks that I would be satisfied if I could only breathe. When my parents fought, I'd think that if I could only have a home where no one hurt anyone else, where I could feel safe, that would be enough.

And it is enough. To love and be loved, to have a safe, clean home, to be healthy, to be in the peace of my own mind. All I have to do is pay attention. All I have to do is stay on the path.

In the interval

"My name is Sybil, and I remember."

Sybil

Tomorrow, for the first time in about 27 years, I'm going to run intervals. Real timed intervals. For those of you who don't know, intervals are the grunt work of running. You stretch your body further than it would like to go for a (relatively) short distance so that you can build your ability to run faster at a longer distance. Five times I'm supposed to run hard for 400 meters, taking a rest of walking of slow jogging between each one. Intervals scare me.

I can remember doing them in high school. Quarter miles. Half miles. Six hundreds. Jog half a lap, run half a lap. I remember the aching sensation in my calves and thighs rising eventually to a kind of screaming for air in my lungs by the time I was done. The desperate slapping of my feet on the ground as I tried to pull myself forward. The tightening of my body, my muscles as oxygen debt and the build-up of lactic acid overtook me.

But the sensation was worse. The feeling rising in me as I approached the line before each interval began. My body moving slowly, anticipating, knowing that when I reached that invisible threshold I would push it into difficulty, discomfort, even pain. That anticipation, that fear, was the worst moment of each interval. It was the moment of commitment, or so it seemed.

Actually the commitment had occurred much earlier, had been rehearsed for days and weeks and months. Deciding to be on the team, to get up for morning runs, to build my after-school afternoons around practice and running. The moment at the beginning of the interval was only one of a host of decisions that helped to make the decision to run the hard 400 meters easier, however the difficulty of the task.

"Discipline," a minister friend of mine once told me, "is the art of remembering what you want." I'd say "of remembering what you love." It would seem so easy, remembering what I love. I love to run. I love the motion of my body when I feel healthy, when my muscles move together, fueled by my lungs, by the air, buoyed by the ground beneath me, cooled by the breeze my motion creates. But sometimes, when I am away from it, I dismember the experience. I imagine and amplify the sensation of pain. I get bits and pieces--in flashes: blisters, twinges, tightness. I extract all the elements that feed my fear.

That's how my fear functions. It breaks my life into pieces, into sharp dangerous fragments of disappointment and defeat. But love re-members everything. It puts them all back together: the pain and the joy, the difficulty and the breakthrough to a place when I'm running--really runnnig--that has no name, that has no words. When I sit here now and relax and breath, I feel that place through my whole body. I feel a calm pass over me like a cooling cloud pushed by the wind on a brilliantly hot day. The prickly response of my skin to the coolness envelopes me.

When, with love, I remember, it isn't just the running or my writing or being with those I care about. I am remembering myself, who I am at my deepest source, what I'm capable of when I am whole, not chopped into bits by my fear. So memory isn't about the past and discipline isn't about the future, about some person or some runner or some writer I'm going to become. It's about seeing the universe that every moment contains, all the possibilities and opportunities, and making a choice through love.

Tomorrow, when I stand at the starting line for each interval, I'll pause and I'll breathe and I'll remember what I love.

Thoughts on rising

No, I'm not thinking about the difficulty of getting up in the morning. That's actually getting easier as the sun climbs over the horizon earlier and earlier. I'm talking about Easter, about the resurrection it represents. But mostly I want to talk about some differences in how I've seen people approach religion.

All during Lent this year, I felt pretty spiritually stagnant. In the past, I've looked forward to the 40 days and 40 nights before Easter--my favorite holiday of any kind (my second favorite is November 11 which I still insist on referring to by it's original title of Armistice Day). For me Lent has always been a quieting time, a time for reflection and self-examination, for digging down into my own spirit and clearing out the inessential. But this Lent, I found myself struggling.

The problem, I think now, was words. That may be odd for a writer to say, but the funny thing is that words for me have always been the interface where my spirit and the world meet. Words are a kind of surface, something I can touch. But it's crucial for me to recognize that they can never, ever represent accurately the experiences or truths they talk about. They're just a beginning, a way in.

In so much of conventional Christianity, though, words are at the heart of what it's all about. Fundamentalists cling to the literal words of the Bible. More moderate Christians return again and again in disputes to what's Biblical, what particular passages present as god's word, though, of course, we are perfectly willing to ignore the words we don't like in other passages. "That's not what it means," we say. The parts we don't like we treat as anachronisms or poor translations or remnants of Hebrew culture at a particular time. The parts we like we treat as the revealed word of god.

Now, aside from my belief that that's theological cheating, I'm wary of giving words that kind of authority. No words written anywhere by anyone can ever accurately represent the reality they deal with. When we say the word "Jesus" or "Christ" or "God" or "resurrection," we haven't come close to naming the true nature of any of those things. And to think that any words will tell us that true nature strikes me as the height of folly. That just isn't what language does.

Words, like any artistic medium, reveal us, the user of them. Language is a mirror that shows us what we value, how we're thinking, which is why the Bible is so different now from what it was 200 or 500 or 1,000 years ago. It's changed because we've changed.

To treat words any differently is like watching Oliver Stone's JFK and thinking you now understand the Kennedy assassination, or watching Amadeus and believing you now know what Mozart's life was like. They are fascinating films, interesting and even enlightening artistic works. But they are only points of departure in understanding and living the reality that is each and every minute of our lives.

As much as I love them, I've believed for a long time that words--whatever text they come from--can only represent the beginning of the quest to understand god's nature. In fact, that's what I love about words and writing. They remind me constantly that I've never gotten "it" and I never will. In their imperfection and inability to capture the immediacy and vitality of existence, they admonish me to remain humble whenever I think I know the way with certainty.

The greatest, most beautiful, most powerful text in human history is rendered mute beside the lived experiences of holding my children for the first time or watching my father mute and dying in a VA hospital bed or listening to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Reality--the reality of this moment, right now, mundane though it may be--holds more sanctity than any words because right here right now is where god dwells: in my fingers, in the keyboard, in the air I'm breathing, in my blood, in the light and trees outside my window.

Remembering that on Sunday was like being resurrected, like being brought back. It reminded me that I always want to rise beyond words into life.

Power or truth

I had another hard conversation with my elder son today. He's become pretty politically conservative--he reads lots of Patrick Buchanan--and the furor over the immigration bills in Congress has gotten him especially in a lather. But the latest issue is that he rails against the liberal charter school his younger brother attends.

It all came to a head (again) this morning when he criticized me for not complaining to the charter school that it isn't presenting all sides of the immigration debate. He told me, essentially, that I was being hypocritical, and included asides about how the immigration protesters are disloyal to America, being led by those who know nothing, and using children.

"Fine," I said at last. "You're right. You win. Now leave me alone." I left for work early.

It wasn't so much his arguments that bothered me, though. It was the way he was using language as a kind of stick to prod and push both me and his younger brother. I don't doubt that he believes the political views he expresses, but I also know that emotionally more is going on.

It always is, isn't it? We tend to talk about politics as though we're being driven completely by logic, by evidence and certainty and facts. I know, though, that at least for me, it's always been about more than that. My son always wants to talk about evidence, but I know that finally it gets down to values. I've come to see two ways making choices about what we'll value, two lenses: one is truth and the other is power.

If you look through the lens of power, then choices and values are about winning. They are about who will end up being "right." Power is about "us" (our country, our religion, our political party, our ethnic group, our interests) ending up on top, about being safe, about making sure that you can control as much turf and ideas and material as possible to protect yourself from anyone and anything else that might want to hurt you.

The lens of truth is less certain. When you look through it, you don't get to pretend that you haven't made mistakes or haven't gotten things wrong. You have to admit that there are things you don't know; you have to admit that you don't have the answers and you're doing the best you can; you have to acknowledge that your experiences and emotions and fears color the way you look at the world. And you have to be willing to continually re-examine and even change your point of view. About everything. When you seek truth, being open is more important than being right. Argument isn't about winning; it's about understanding. And success means the ability to see things just a bit more clearly now than you did before, knowing that you're never really going to get it right.

Like many people, my son doesn't seem to have those kinds of doubts--at least not that he expresses. Most people don't. But I do. I know that my values have been shaped by being a fourth of five boys, by feeling dissatisfied with so much of what the world tells me I'm supposed to value, by my belief that no system or ideology or creed is more important than living human beings and what will nurture them physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually; by my conviction that my life is no more important than that of any human being anywhere else in the world, that I deserve no less but certainly no more than anyone else.

I should say that I don't see any real difference politically between the people who pursue truth and those who go after power. It isn't a radical/conservative, Democratic/Republican divide. In general, the use of the truth lens is pretty rare in my experience, including its use by me.

These are the things I'd really like to discuss with my son. I'd like to talk with him about what's in his heart, about what scares him and how his successes and difficulties have influenced what he reads and listens to and believes. I'd like to know how he feels. And I'd like to tell him about how I've gotten to where I am. I'd like all of us to talk about that, to let go of strength and authority and just look at ourselves and each other. Just look.