Breath

Life begins for each of us with an inhale.  And it ends, for all of us, with an exhale.  They are, biologically speaking, involuntary responses from the autonomic nervous system.  In between those two breaths we have choice: we can allow our autonomic nervous system to control our every breath, or we can, from time to time, take control of our breath and become aware of the miracle of breathing.  

We can feel the coolness of the air passing into our nostrils and the warmth of our body as it passes back out.  We can feel our belly rise and fall.  We can sit in wonder as we picture that life giving breath filling every capillary in our lungs, providing oxygen to our blood.

Most of all we can simply pay attention to our breath, slowing the pace of our racing thoughts to a crawl and then a standstill.  And in the silence of our own being we can for once, be.  And we can experience the wonder of a breath taken.  The miracle of a breath released.  And if we pause in between for just a moment between inhale and exhale, hold that involuntary response to release, we might just find a space as large as eternity and as small as that moment.  A space that is just large enough for God to reveal himself and small enough for us to understand his love.

Breath.

The Great Before

This is a photo from the great before.  We four were at a Braves game on Family Night, the guests of an incredibly proud Griffin.  My work affords me front row seats right behind home plate, in front of the Braves batting circle with a gourmet buffet.  But as we waited out a rain delay and took our hot dogs and beers to sit as far from home plate as you can get in Truist Park, we were sitting in the best seats in the house. Griffin’s gift to us.

That’s the thing about great befores. They’re nostalgia.  Nostalgia is a Greek word formed from two words: nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain or ache.  The word was coined by a 17th century physician to describe the homesickness Swiss mercenaries felt when they were hundreds of miles away from home.  In the wake of the great before, nostalgia is the pain of a wound that won’t heal because somebody you love isn’t coming home.  And the only healing of that pain is when finally you’ve come home to them.

It's hard to believe that we are more than two years past my son’s death.  And the pain, if anything, is more intense than it was in the days and weeks after his passing.  The difference is only my ability to stow away those feelings just long enough each week that life can move forward.  And then there is the moment the photo appears on a screen saver and I look past the four people in the photo and remember the fifth in our family who isn’t in the photo, or in our lives except in our memories.

This was the great before.  And now we live with the pain of loss with only the hope, the belief in the great hereafter.

For The Heartbroken...

I woke up this morning and scrolled through Facebook and the second post I saw was a friend from high school mourning the loss of her mother.  I turned 58 years old this year and it seems there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t see a post like that one.  And it caused me to think about the nature of mourning.  Times of loss like a divorce, the loss of a parent or a good friend are heartbreaking experiences.  And we’re programmed to avoid pain; it’s in our DNA.  And these kinds of experiences are incredibly painful.  So it’s not a surprise that the first stage in the grieving process tends to be denial.  

Denial gets a bad rap in our society.  Denial in the early stages of grieving is simply nature’s way of telling you that you’re not ready to handle what’s in front of you.  But all to often we stall there and find ways to numb the pain.  We typically think of numbing as being substances and it often is.  But just as often we numb ourselves with distractions: we busy our schedule with chores or extra responsibilities.  I find myself binge watching television as an avoidance mechanism.

There comes a moment, though, when denial has run its useful course and it is time to deal with the painful emotions we’re feeling.  Time to uncork and unpack what life has left at our doorstep.  And that process requires courage. 

It’s a courage that is in short supply.  Because when it comes to our emotional and spiritual health we spend scant minutes a day if anything at all looking inward, sitting silently and listening more through ourselves than to ourselves.  Listening through is a listening that transcends us and becomes an all way conversation with God about what is rather than what I want it to be.

I must admit that I’m new to this kind of listening.  I must also admit that it was great tragedy that led me to trying this kind of listening through myself.  (I won’t bore you with the details other than to say this: a life threatening health scare and a global pandemic nearly broke me; the loss of my son Griffin most surely broke my heart.)  More often than not, as Fr. Rohr has written on dozens of occasions, it is these kinds of tragedies that instill in us a need for something transcendent.  We can either choose to remain heartbroken and allow the heart to  harden into bitterness, envy and contempt.  Or we can allow our heart to be broken open where it can be renewed and refilled by a union of with the One.  It’s not so much that He fills it as our hearts are mended together in these moments.  And I find the courage to face my loss and look beyond myself and see the needs of the others in my life and hopefully have something of value to offer having had the chance to listen through myself and find More. 

On The Naked Now. A Thought For A Good Friend

 

Being present to the naked now is as difficult and painful as balancing on the sharp point of a needle.  The concentration necessary to balance on that point is impossible so it is only through grace that we find that balance.  We wander away into thoughts and as we become aware of our wandering we judgelessly return to the present.  And through grace, begin again.

It is also painful.  Placing the full weight of our presence on the sharpness of the naked now pierces the soul.  Nobody ever died from a pin prick, but it can feel as if we might.  Our awareness brings to light pains repressed, regrets unresolved, relationships unhealed.  And, then, again, we return to the breath and the naked now resolved to live into the truth that Fr. Rohr expressed: “God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.”

Blessings this day, my friend.  God loves you and so do I.

The Invisible Man

As I prayed this morning, I asked the question, “What are we working on, Father?  Where are You trying to lead me.?”  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my ego and my attachments and the need to let both of them go.  But then I heard a whisper.  

“Enter into the pain.”  

It may have been God or maybe it was just my subconscious.  Either way it was a reminder of what Richard Rohr has said and written: “That which you do not transform you will transmit.”  It is still raw to think of Griffin’s passing, to imagine him struggling for breath alone amidst a dozen or more people.  He died in some fashion the way he lived when he was outside the environs of his family: invisible and alone.

How does one transform that reality into something good?  Where is the relief from that painful memory?  Where was God in that moment in time?

“I AM WHO I AM,” Yahweh told Moses.  Is it mine to ask where God was when Griffin struggled to draw his last breath?  Was I there when God breathed into Adam his first breath?  These questions are in so many ways just a way out of dealing with the pain of this loss.  Grief is so much more manageable in the head than in the heart.

The purpose of grief isn’t to manage it.  It is to walk with it, into it and maybe finally through it.  It is primarily a journey of the heart.  To willingly allow one’s heart to be broken a thousand times over only to be healed a thousand times more.  Grief is the place where we reconcile the unholiness of our loss with the holiness of Griffin’s gain.  Reconcile all the ways we failed him with all the ways we were uniquely equipped to be his parents.  Reconcile the bright, shining light Griffin could be with the dark, stormy interior life that was his prison.  Reconcile a world that was at once full of the most generous human beings that surrounded and celebrated Griffin with the cold world he entered when he left our home, a world where he was invisible enough to die choking in the corner of a room full of people.

This is my pain that needs transforming, lest I continue to transmit it.  

Pray for me.

 

My So-Called Superpower

I used to believe that the fact that my mind was in constant motion was a superpower.  Thinking about problems at work while mowing and trimming my near perfect lawn helped me “see around corners” and anticipate problems and dangers.  I would put my anxious mind at ease by devising solutions and crafting conversations that  would get me out of any bind I was in.

I can see now that that superpower was really a sickness.  A cancer of control that was poisoning professional relationships on multiple fronts.  My superpower allowed me to bend facts with words that planted seeds of ideas I could sow when it suited me.  And while that worked at times, the end result was relationships where trust was in short supply or about to be in short supply.  I was, unawaredly, gaslighting those around me.

The cancer metastasized in other ways, too.  One was the simple fact that a mind that cannot be calmed and quieted has an impenetrable barrier to self-awareness.  Only in the quiet of intentionally not thinking can we truly see ourselves and understand how temporal our thoughts are and that we are not what we think or feel.  I was one who overidentified with whatever I was thinking or feeling in the moment.  Happy, sad, competent, a failure: these were not simply feelings or thoughts, they were who I was and how I presented to the world.  So on any given day I might be owned by happiness and bring joy to the office.  Or I might be owned by frustration and bring disruption.  It has taken me all these years to understand just how insubstantial my thoughts are and yet how substantial I am in the eyes of God.  And what a difference that brings to how I present to the world.

The Buddhists have a concept of “not self”, the idea that all of the ways we identify ourselves as unique and separate beings from the world as a whole are an illusion.  That when we spend time examining our thoughts and the emotions they cause, there is no controlling “I” at the  center creating those thoughts.  They are like the weather.  They come and they go, conditions change and then they change again.  Perhaps this is what Jesus was describing in Matthew 10:39—That it is only in losing oneself that we can find ourselves.

And the last metastasis of my cancer is the cost to my relationships personally.  A mind in constant thought does not listen, is not present and life happens in the now.   Only now.  And only with a quiet mind can one hear what those they love need.  My busy mind robs thos I love of my presence to their pain, their joys, their sorrows and their struggles.  I want to be as Jesus was:

Open

Available

Inviting

Gravity

Our lives are bound by gravity.  In the physical sense it means our feet stay solidly attached to the ground.  Our bodies bend to that gravity, though some of us turn to advances in medical science to defy it.  At the end of the day, and of our lives, gravity ultimately wins and we return to the earth.  Most of us choose not to think of or imagine how gravity will ultimately win and that is probably good.  It’s a large, distant, difficult thought to grapple with in the midst of the daily struggle that is being alive on this earth.

There is another gravity that we are bound by.  Much more invisible, but very real just the same.  It is the gravity that we share in what we value. It is as shared belief around the value of family, of friendships, of community.  It is the belief that leads us toward the neighborhood potluck, or the Whine Down Wednesday with the ladies or the weekly foursome with the boys.  As we reach our mid-30s or so we’ve likely settled into the friends who will be the folks we sit around having coffee with when we’re 79.  There is a gravity that pulls us toward each other and just as we don’t question gravity keeping our feet on the ground, we give no thought to what is holding these friendships together.  

Throughout my life I have made cultivating friendships a priority.  I am an extrovert and for a those with a certain sensibility I have a magnetic personality.  I make it a point to ask probing questions about my friends lives, and share as deeply as they are comfortable about mine.  At one point I think I could point to more than a dozen men that I would call close friends.   And yet when the storms have come to my life the breadth of my friendships has been winnowed.  

It is a commitment to enter another’s pain.  And the gravity that bound us together, a shared value system around family, kids, and school just wasn’t enough to sustain when the F5 hit the ground and did its damage.  We are a society that runs from pain and denies grief entirely.  And for a subset of my friends this was the case.  Flowers, a card, a call and that’s as much as they can enter.  To enter that pain further would require an acknowledgment that there is pain in their own lives that they are actively wallpapering over in conversations, on Facebook and at work. 

They are taken with the wind.  The roots of the friendships were too shallow.  

And yet other friendships have been deepened.  Those friends have entered the pain because they’ve lived through their own storm and that gravity of shared values pulls us tighter.  They are the brave few willing to see the world as not a safe place, willing to not deny the pain in their lives, or minimize the challenges in their marriages and not constantly remodel their lives on Instagram by painting over the pain with pictures of perfect family vacations.  They are willing to share the messiness of their human existence and enter into the messiness of ours.  We share with each other the grief we feel when we look at our lives as they are and what they were intended to be.  And by entering that pain we actually begin the process of building the life God intended for us.

And so I look at the world and think, the gravity by which we are bound socially is weak.  Our relational gravity is far too shallow to  hold us through the storms.  Far too few friends and couples going deep enough into the pain that life brings us and sharing the knowing of the God who brings joy through that pain.  As hard as it is to live through the death of a child, it is also equally hard to simply be present to the friend who lost them.  And so it goes with every loss, be it a job, a parent, or a promotion.  Being present to another’s pain takes work and generally dredges up pain in our own lives.  That, however uncomfortable, is the only source of true joy in our lives as we drop the pretense, the façade, the construct, the ego…whatever you want to call it.  We share our story boldly and listen to others intently and we enter a joy that God has created for us when we begin to discover our true selves which can only happen in community.

This is the gravity that will hold us together.  The gravity of our true selves revealed and revealing.  Our friendships compel us ever deeper into the mystical.

And that is a gravity of an entirely different sort.