The House of Spiritual Belonging

I wrote yesterday about John O'Donohue's critique - in his book, Anam Cara - about how we see. Continuing his discussion of how we relate to the world through our senses, today I'm quickly sharing some passages relating to speaking, smelling and breathing.

Words

After bemoaning the loss in much of modern society of the rich experience that eating a meal used to provide, O'Donohue notes a broader metaphor that today's fast food society provides:  

"The fast-food metaphor provides a deep clue to the poverty of sensibility and lake of taste in modern culture ... Many of the words we use are of the fast-food spiritual variety. These words are too thin to echo experience; they are too weak to bring the inner mystery of things to real expression. In our rapid and externalized world, language has become ghostlike, abbreviated to code and label. Words that would mirror the soul carry the loam of substance and the shadow of the divine."

Again, I am moved by O'Donohue's prose. Truly, his words echo experience and reflect deep thought and insight.

On Fragrance and Memory

"Experts," writes O'Donohue, "tell us that smell is the most faithful of all the sense in terms of memory. The smells of one's childhood still remain within." I found this a fascinating thought. 

As anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, the subject of memory is important to me. For so much of my life, most of my memories of my early life have been filed away somewhere deep within my brain. The image of the Room of Requirement (from Harry Potter), where things are hidden, comes to mind. For more times that I care to remember, I have stood before that stone wall that conceals the Room and have tried to will the door to that Room to appear, only to face the disappointment of its refusal to materialize.

But, it seems like more and more, flashes of memory are coming back to me. Yesterday, for example, Mark and I went skiing here in Utah for the first time this year. As we rode the lift, images flashed in my mind of when I used to go skiing with my fraternity brothers during college at Big Powderhorn Mountain in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan: the room where I rented my gear in the lodge; the bunny hill there; the chair lifts; the view from the top; etc. In a sense, these flashes are like smells that waft through the air, savored briefly before they dissipate and disappear.

On Breath

"Traditionally," writes O'Donohue, "the breath was understood as the pathway through which the soul entered the body." He continues:

"[Among other things], the dynamic of breathing also takes in the deep world of prayer and meditation, where through the rhythm of the breath you come down into your own primordial level of soul. Through breath meditation, you begin to experience a place within you that is absolutely intimate with the divine ground. Your breathing and the rhythm of your breathing can return you to your ancient beginning, to the house, as Eckhart [Meister Eckhart] says, that you have never left, where you always live: the house of spiritual belonging."

Meditation is something I have always struggled with. The few times I have tried it, it seemed contrived and artificial. But O'Donohue's comments have provided me with a new way to look at this practice, as have other material I have been reading over the past couple of months. I'm looking forward to putting theory into practice after the holidays when things have settled down a bit in our lives.

How We See

I continue to be fascinated by my reading of John O'Donohue's Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. A Catholic priest (when he wrote the book) who was raised and lived in western Ireland and who had received a doctorate in theology/philosophy, focusing on the writings of the 13th century German mystic Meister Eckart, O'Donohue infuses his writings with ancient Celtic concepts, adapting them to modern life.

One of the key concepts O'Donohue writes about is a Celtic notion that the body inhabits the "soul," rather than the other way around, i.e., that the soul inhabits the body. Therefore, he writes, "Being in the soul, the body makes the senses thresholds of soul ... Your senses link you intimately with the divine within you and around you." O'Donohue then discourses on the various senses, commencing with sight.

"Many of us," he writes, "have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore." What do we really see? What do we miss seeing, even though it is in plain sight? "The human eye," O'Donohue continues, "is always selecting what it wants to see and also evading what it does not want to see ... It is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determine how and who you will be."

The Fearful Eye

“To the fearful eye," O'Donohue points out, "all is threatening. When you look toward the world in a fearful way, all you see and concentrate on are things that can damage and threaten you. The fearful eye is always besieged by threat."

I have a lot of experience with the fearful eye. Some religious systems, instead of seeing wonder and good in the world and in others, instead see evil, an increasing tide of wickedness, engendering fear rather than compassion. Some people, for one reason or another, naturally look at life as something to be feared, with threats everywhere, and they encourage others to have the same vision. Wouldn't it be better to go through life with a sense of impending wonder, rather than impending doom?

Of course, all of us, to some degree or another, have been assaulted by life, and a certain amount of fear, in my opinion, is natural. However, this should be a temporary phenomenon, rather than a permanent condition. "Perfect love casteth out fear." Fear and love cannot exist in the same place. Personally, I have made it an element of my practice to try to see love, rather than fear.

The Greedy Eye

I have commented before that I don't believe I have ever read anyone who can dress beautiful thoughts in such gorgeous prose as can O'Donohue. Each sentence in a passage is pregnant with meaning, as in the following passage:

“To the greedy eye, everything can be possessed … This can refer to land, books, companies, ideas, money or art … Greed is poignant because it is always haunted and emptied by future possibility; it can never engage presence. However, the more sinister aspect of greed is its ability to sedate and extinguish desire. It destroys the natural innocence of desire, dismantles its horizons and replaces them with a drive and atrophied possessiveness … Having has become the sinister enemy of being."

How many addictions are disguised by a desire to have, rather than be? We acquire, seeking to fill a hole. We cannot be because we cannot abide who we are (or who we *think* we are). Having is a salve that never heals. Part of my practice is to recognize this desire to have and to ask myself what is more important, having or being.

The Judgmental Eye

“To the judgmental eye, everything is closed in definitive frames. When the judgmental eye looks out, it sees things in terms of lines and squares. It is always excluding and separating, and therefore it never sees in a compassionate or celebratory way. The see is to judge."

The Judgmental Eye is close kin to the Fearful Eye. I have even more experience with the Judgmental Eye. It is something to which I have been exposed and with which I have struggled most of my life.

Case in point. This past Sunday, I went to mass in the Cathedral of the Madeleine in downtown Salt Lake City. One of the things I enjoy most about going there for solemn mass is the music. I also enjoy the ritual and the visual beauty of the cathedral itself. So this past Sunday, went I walked down the aisle to my usual spot, I saw what I presumed to be a homeless man lying down, asleep, in a pew. I Saw him, alright, but I didn't See his face or anything else about him, because I was looking through judgmental eyes. (This was confirmed when he started snoring during the scriptural readings, and it became my practice to try not to let this bother me.)

But O'Donohue pinpoints the main reason I have struggled with Judgmental Eyes: "Sadly, the judgmental eye is always equally harsh with itself. It sees only the images of its tormented interiority projected outward from itself. The judgmental eye harvests the reflected surface and calls it truth.”

Is not that last sentence a rich vein, waiting to be mined?

My practice is try to overcome decades of looking at life through judgmental eyes, and this starts with being more loving and accepting of myself in order that I can be more loving and accepting of others, so that I can see in a "compassionate and celebratory way" - which includes seeing myself in such a way.

The Sacredness of One's Own Presence

"Spirituality is the art of transfiguration. We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape. We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program or plan for our lives. Rather, we need to practice a new art of attention to the inner rhythm of our days and lives. This attention brings a new awareness of our own human and divine presence."

So writes John O'Donohue in Anam Cara. I have written previously about this book. I'm sure I will write much more. Practically every sentence of this book causes me to pause and appreciate the beauty not only of O'Donohue's prose but also the beauty of the concepts he is describing and articulating.

I read a passage the other day that caused me to stop and contemplate, yet once again, the spiritual framework in which I existed for most of my adult life, i.e., Mormonism. My purpose, when I write about Mormonism, is usually not to criticize but to analyze. In particular, I wish to bring the light of consciousness to how I was impacted and how my thoughts may continue to be influenced by the doctrine and practices of the Mormon Church.

With that note of explanation, I was prompted by the following passage to contemplate the concept of "will":

"It is far more creative to work with the idea of mindfulness rather than with the idea of will. Too often people try to change their lives by using the will as a kind of hammer to beat their life into proper shape. The intellect identifies the goal of the program and the will accordingly forces the life into that shape."

To me, this passage has macro and micro applications. My first thought when I read this was how Mormonism (and, to be fair, other strains of Christianity) stresses that one must diligently and constantly work to beat our lives into a shape that they are "supposed" to be. Of course, no matter how disguised, this view takes as its premise that human nature is inherently bad, or at the very least predisposed to bad. This premise affects one's entire outlook, not only upon oneself but upon all other humans. This is the macro application.

The micro application, i.e., as applied to my own life - a realization I had only as I sat down to write this post - concerns my sexual orientation (which of course is much more than a "sexual" orientation; being gay is about a whole lot more than whom one falls in love with and has sex with). I used my will as a hammer to beat my life into what was stated (by Mormonism) to be its proper shape: a heterosexual male. But of course, the "proper shape" of my life was homosexuality. That's who I am.

O'Donohue goes on to comment on the results of this "proper shape-beating": "This way of approaching the sacredness of one's own presence is externalist and violent. It brings you falsely outside yourself, and you can spend years lost in the wildernesses of your own mechanical, spiritual programs. You can perish in a famine of your own making." 

I knew exactly whereof O'Donohue wrote, both in a macro and micro sense. On a macro level, it seems to be an implicit (and never-stated) goal of Mormonism (as well as other strains of Christianity) to keep oneself outside oneself, i.e., spirituality comes from without, rather than from within. Truth is "out there"; one's sense of self comes from "out there." 

On a micro level, living in the closet is "externalist and violent" in ways of which most straight people are innocently (or not so innocently) ignorant. Living in the closet brings one "falsely outside" oneself because one cannot validate or accept oneself; one spends "years lost in the wilderness of [one's] own mechanical, spiritual programs," perishing in a famine of self-love and acceptance. I wonder how many heterosexual Mormons and other Christians understand or appreciate this fundamental existential dilemma that gay people face at some point on (or throughout) their journey through life ...

O'Donohue proposes an alternative:

"If you work with a different rhythm, you will come easily and naturally home to yourself. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey. There are no general principles for this art of being. Yet the signature of this unique journey is inscribed deeply in each soul. If you attend to yourself and seek to come into your presence, you will find exactly the right rhythm for your own life."

The first step: trust one's own soul. Trust that it knows - more than anything or anyone else - the geography of one's destiny. I am working - and have been for three years - on building this trust, of finding this rhythm. 

Abuse and the Victim Identity: It Doesn't Belong to Me

Journal writing can be such a meditative and revelatory process. The other morning, I sat down to write about a thought I had noted in my iPhone notes either just before or during our recent trip back East: "Do I believe Mom wanted to be different than what she was?" When I got home and looked at that note, I asked myself what I had meant by that question when that thought came to me. I think what I originally had in mind were the external forces that contributed to Mom being the way she was - a subject for another post. But as I started writing in my journal, different thoughts came to mind, and as a result, I had what I would describe as a revelatory and game-changing experience. 

I certainly don't remember hating Mom when I was a child or even consciously disliking her, i.e., because of her abusive behaviors. Afraid, yes. I was afraid of her, particularly in my younger years, and I did what I could to steer clear of her temper outbursts which all too often led to physical attacks. She was mercurial ... 

As I write this, I am having another insight: I thought back on the time when I was six or seven years old that she grabbed me on either side of my head and repeatedly banged it against the plaster wall in the dining room of our house. It has just occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons this incident stands out so traumatically in my memory is that it was so unexpected; I didn't see it coming. Life was ok one minute, and the next minute I was being horribly violated. Life could go into a tailspin at any moment.

Anyway, like I said, I don't remember hating her or consciously disliking her. She was the way she was. It was my "normal." 

Shift in thought while writing in my journal: I asked myself whether - to paraphrase the words of John O'Donohue in Anam Cara - I had carried around in my heart the "corpse of a past relationship" and became "addicted to hurt as a confirmation of identity." 

As I continued to reflect and write, I came to clearly see how I did in fact become so addicted. I realized that this addiction is not something I need to exist, to be. My ego had told me that I needed this hurt in order to validate my existence and what happened to me, that I was justified in holding onto it; that I had suffered a grievance and that it was totally normal, acceptable and right to hold onto it. But as I sat there writing in my journal, I realized with laser-like clarity that I do not need to hold onto it. 

I can simply let it go because it is not part of "me," but is, rather, a part of my ego. 

"So," I wrote in my journal, "I choose to let it go, casting out into the river a raft I no longer need. It's not the same thing as 'forgiveness,' as that term is usually thought of, which implies grievance and moral superiority and notions of self-righteousness [i.e., I am the victim, what was done to me was wrong, and I have every right to hold onto the wrong and will 'forgive' when I decide to forgive, recognizing I am in the superior moral position] - all of which are notions that the ego clings to. Letting go, however, is morally neutral. It is a process whereby one simply observes something that belongs to the ego - not 'me' - affirming that 'ownership' and turning and walking away. It simply doesn't belong to me."

"Wow," I concluded, "it feels really good to let go."

I know, however, that I wouldn't have been able to come to these realizations had I not done the work to get to the point where I could let go. This was validated in passages I recently read in a book by Jungian psychotherapist David Richo (Catholic Means Universal) when he wrote, "True compassion and forgiveness follow the anger and remembrance [of abuse] ... Reminiscence means baring the abuse instead of bearing it. It is an admission to ourselves of what happened and what we felt about it ... The result of knowing and grieving will be to shift our focus from how we were victimized to a disidentification with the victim role. The healthy version of dissociation (denial) [a common phenomenon among abused children] is disidentification (freedom from the sense of oneself as victim) …" 

I also would not have come to these realizations in quite the way I did had I not embarked a few weeks ago on a new spiritual path/journey. I sense very strongly that my spiritual path and my own path of recovery toward emotional and psychological health and wholeness have merged and are one and the same. In this regard, I'll close with another quote by David Richo in Catholic Means Universal:

"Renewal of faith in an adult requires the psychological ingredient of mourning the pain of the past and letting go of it. This brings recovery and moving on. A space opens for us where before there was none [which is precisely what happened to me the other day]. We find the reserves of our own energy and the graces always accessible to us but never fully evoked."

I'm now looking forward to examining and letting go of other "roles," to spaces opening where before there were none, and to finding other reserves of my own energy and graces.

Anam Cara: Soul Friend

A week or so ago, I mentioned that I have started reading a wonderful book entitled Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. The book, written by John O'Donohue, was apparently an international best seller when it was published in 1997, and I was introduced to it through quotations from it in another book I recently read.

According to Wikipedia,

"O'Donohue became a novice at Maynooth, in north County Kildare, at age of 18. Here he earned degrees in English, Philosophy, and Theology at St Patrick's College in County Kildare. He was ordained as Catholic priest in 6 June 1979. O'Donohue moved to Tübingen, Germany in 1986, and completed his dissertation in 1990 on German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel for his PhD in philosophical theology from Eberhard Karls University. In 1990, he returned to Ireland to continue his priestly duties, and began his post-doctoral work on the 13th century mystic, Meister Eckhart.

"O'Donohue's first published work, Anam cara (1997), which means "soul friend" in Gaelic, was an international best-seller and catapulted him into a more public life as an author and much sought-after speaker and teacher, particularly in the United States. O'Donohue left the priesthood in 2000 ... Just two days after his 52nd birthday and two months after the publication of his final complete work, Benedictus: A Book of Blessings, O'Donohue died suddenly in his sleep on 4 January 2008 while on holiday near Avignon, France." 

I have fallen in love with the prose in O'Donohue's book, and I will quote from it in posts from time to time and perhaps add a couple of my own thoughts. Here are some passages that I've recently read.

Love Is The Nature of the Soul

"The soul needs love as urgently as the body needs air. In the warmth of love, the soul can be itself. All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honor these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow."

"Sometimes a friendship turns, and the partners fix on each other at their points of mutual negativity. When you meet only at the point of poverty between you, it is as if you give birth to a ghost who would devour every shred of your affection ... Others want to love, to give themselves, but they have no energy. They carry around in their hearts the corpses of past relationships and are addicted to hurt as a confirmation of identity."

The Anam Cara

"In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cars, you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart ... The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul. There is no cage for the soul. The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other."

"In everyone's life, there is great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension ... Where you are understood, you are at home ..."

"Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other."

"A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you."

*****************

"Ireland is a land of many ruins. Ruins are not empty. They are sacred places full of presence ... The life and passion of a person leave an imprint on the ether of a place. Love does not remain within the heart, it flows out to build secret tabernacles in a landscape."

Kindness and the Ego

"In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion."

~ Rumi

I wrote on this subject the other day. The Dalai Lama has said that his religion is kindness. Buddhists speak of “loving kindness.” I have come to see the invitation to kindness as being – among other things - a peaceful yet very effective way of disarming my Ego, and thus progressing to a more enlightened person.

Case in point. Again the other day at the grocery store, I was confronted with situations at which my Ego was practically salivating, e.g., the woman who left her cart right in the middle of the aisle. “What was she thinking?!” my ego says. “How inconsiderate.” “Really?” I asked, do they really have to move that slowly? Do they not realize that there are other people in this store besides them?”

And then, and then, the gentler angel of my nature says something like, “Really? Really, Joseph? Do you really enjoy letting yourself get irritated by thoughtless acts of others? You do realize, don’t you, that they have not come to the store at precisely the same time you decided to grace the place with your presence, just to irritate you?”

Well, that maybe is not the voice of “the gentler angel of my nature,” but it’s pretty spot on.

The gentler voice comes next, full of compassion. “Joseph, you are called to something better than this. Try to work on it, ok? I promise that, if you do, you’ll have marvelous experiences.

I sense very strongly that this voice speaks truth. As I reflected upon that experience at the store while writing in my journal, I wrote, “In kindness is love found and conveyed. It’s a win-win situation. I suspect that one of the reasons I have been and am unkind is because I don’t like – or rather haven’t liked – myself, and my attitude and behavior toward others is a reflection of how I feel about myself. As I practice loving kindness, I can learn to better love myself.”

In this regard, I have started reading a wonderful book by John O’Donohue entitled Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (Anam Cara is Gaelic for "soul friend"). I’m sure I will have much to say about the treasures of this book as I slowly work my way through it. As it happened, I read the following passages the day after my experience at the grocery store:

“Each person also has an inner face, which is always sensed but never seen. The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautiful. It is here that love gathers within you. Love is absolutely vital for a human life. For love alone can awake what is divine within you. In love, you grow and come home to yourself. When you learn to love and let your self be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. You are warm and sheltered. You are completely at one in the house of your own longing and belonging … You lose the balance of your soul if you do not learn to take care of yourself. You need to be generous to yourself in order to receive the love that surrounds you.”

Moral of the story: practice loving kindness to yourself and to others. It becomes a cycle, a circle that grows in richness and blessings.

One more quote by O’Donohue about love that perfectly describes some of what I have felt since meeting Mark:

“When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, not there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.”

Sigh. Such beautiful prose.