Seeing Beauty in Our Suffering

Suffering is inevitable; it's what we do with our suffering that matters.  We can't avoid it, so why not do something constructive with it?  What if we were to look deeply into our suffering and through meditation--earnest examination-- glimpse the flowers that can grow from the composted garbage of our suffering?  Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, says that without disciplined deep looking, we see only our pain and fear.  We are absorbed, even consumed by it.

But in deep looking we can also see the fruit our suffering will bear.  We see with the eyes of the Gardener, who prunes and feeds the vines through suffering (John 15).  And through the eyes of the Gardener we see grapes and peaches, tomatoes and blueberries in the unwanted garbage from the kitchen—for the garbage has become rich, dark compost.

So, I sit in prayer, and turn over and over what could otherwise be only garbage.  I enter my heart and feel the ache of fear and sadness, and I turn it over gain.  I may even have to hold my nose at the stench, but I do not flee.  With the eyes of faith I see flowers blooming, squash and beans and other things that delight eye and tongue.

On this, then, Buddhists and Christians are on the same page, for they both know that from death comes new life, from suffering comes beauty—these are two sides of the same coin.  The one is necessary for the other.  In every pain and loss is a new beginning.

I don’t have to create the flowers.  God has already scattered their seed in the compost of my despair.  But I do have to look, to cultivate a seeing eye for the beauty inside every brokenness.  That is hard, hard work.

The Nakedness of Pure Trust

God is love.  And so, prayer, the pursuit of God, is also a pursuit of love. Relationships then are the school of prayer.

There's a Sufi tale about a young man who came to a Sufi master seeking the life of prayer. "Have you ever fallen in love with a woman?" the master asked.  "No, not yet.  I'm only 18," replied the seeker.  "Then go and do that first." (for this tale see the Speaking of Faith interview with Dr. Keshavarz)

I'd like to think I can go the other way: love God and I'll learn to love others.  Frankly, it seems safer, purer.  But it can be more self-deceptive; I can hide behind my piety.  So, the Sufi mystic's got something right.  Love another truly and you'll learn the path to God. Experience the free-fall, the frightening tumble into vulnerability before the other.  Nothing between you.

Become "naked and unafraid" (Genesis 3).  This is the way of prayer . . . fragile and humbling, difficult and painful.

Love, and you'll find yourself right in the middle of the way of prayer.

Seek the face of the other whose love threatens to undo you, whose love will ask you to pull down the masks and illusions, challenging the falsehoods and pretentions.  For ultimately the mind with all its games stands dumb before the mystery that is God, and only love can carry you across the final abyss.

Love is "where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust."  Thomas Merton, see:

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When We Realize Something’s Died

An ebook excerpt—

Late in the second decade of my ministry, I took a long look at myself and wondered at what had become of me.  The same thing comes to many of us who’ve been related to something or someone for going on twenty years.  We wake up one day, look around at ourselves and at the person or career to which we’re yoked, and realize that something’s died.

My trouble had been coming, I suppose, for quite awhile.  Such things usually don’t just show up one day, knocking at the door unannounced.  We get hints along the way.  A whisper that haunts us in the night.  A gnawing in the gut.  An ulcer, high blood pressure, depression.  We get hints, but most of us don’t have a clue what we’re to do with them.  And even if we did, few of us have the time or space or wisdom to do much about them.  And so, we keep on—hoping things will change without us having to rock the boat, praying for a miracle so we don’t have to act, denying resolutely that we’re already living, to some extent, in the midst of a crisis.  But then the knock comes, crisis stands at the door, and we’re faced with a choice.  We can bolt the door and stop our ears against the crisis, or we can let it in.  Neither feels like a good choice.  But I’m learning—largely through the witness of those women and men who’ve lived life best—that embracing crisis is the path of God.  Ignore crisis and we’ve chosen a sure way to end up sidetracked or derailed entirely, maybe even dead.  And if not dead, at least feeling like we might as well be.

I think I knew deep in my gut that were I to ignore the crisis standing at the door, I could avoid some pain in the short term, but I wouldn’t have the muscle to hold off the pain further down the road—and with the freight my crisis was carrying, I feared I’d get buried sooner not later.  It was my desperation then, more than any psychological or spiritual savvy, that got me to open that door.

Read more.

The Problem with the Churches

An active and robust spirituality is what many people I meet long for.  They’re hurried and harried, fragmented and frustrated, and few have anyone to show them the way.  Unfortunately, many are turned off and turned away from Christian churches.  Churches too often meet those who seek God as too dogmatic and moralistic, oftentimes too concerned with church life to be much help to those seeking God.  Many of those who remain in the churches long for more, but figure this is all there is—read the Bible, give money, go to church activities, sit and listen to the preacher.  This is not what Christianity ultimately is.  And no one needs to settle for a second-hand spirituality.

To those who’ve dismissed Christianity as irrelevant to their heart’s desire, and those whose Christian experience is dull and obligatory, I extend this invitation:  join me in seeking a deep and continual experience of intimacy with God, awaken with me to the sacred in every day life, and to walk continually in it . . . revel in your sacred identity.

The interior life is the Way.

Deep within you’ll find God, and you’ll find the person you really are beneath the masks and charades, the wounds and busyness people like you and I use to prop up our aching selves.

This is what you’ll read about in these pages, and this is what I hope you’ll experience as you put into practice the invitation offered here.

The Tale That Points the Way

Everything on this site revolves around a particular story.  It’s the tale of an outer pilgrimage that carried me into the great sand sea of the Egyptian desert and among the craggy peaks and windswept isles of western Scotland, into the streets and halls of Oxford, England and along the rugged coast of California’s Big Sur.  It’s a tale of life lived in an ordinary American city, where I’ve tried to live all that I learned on that great journey.  But it’s also the tale of an inner journey that leads through moments of exquisite happiness and pleasure, but also into periods excruciating pain and bewilderment, unspeakable sorrow and loss.  In all this I was forced, through turns wry and unsparing, to enter the very core of my being, where I found God dwelling in astonishing fullness.  A radiant center that nothing can take away, nothing can destroy.

You’ll find little snippets of that journey here on this blog as a way to help you discern the mischief God may be up to in your own life.

The whole tale is told in my ebook, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World, available as a free download in the Resource section on this site.