Pragmatism and Prayer

For the Long Haul

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody.(Richard Rohr)

The Wren From Carolina

Just now the wren from Carolina buzzed

through the neighbor’s hedge

a line of grace notes I couldn’t even write down

much less sing.

Now he lifts his chestnut colored throat

and delivers such a cantering praise–

for what?

For the early morning, the taste of the spider,

for his small cup of life

that he drinks from every day, knowing it will refill.

All things are inventions of holiness.

Some more rascally than others.

I’m on that list too,

though I don’t know exactly where.

But, every morning, there is my own cup of gladness,

and there’s that wren in the hedge, above me,

with his blazing song.

(Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early, via Laurel Kearns)

Violet-green northern lights, burnt orange gloamings, light blue dawns are sacred when received under the Promise. I am thankful for October Light after intimations of mortality and major surgery where I can walk again, listen, pray —under the Love.

Unfortunately in this presidential election—as my wife suggests— some people are looking for a father figure they never had. Radical individualism and isolation along with social media have degraded the American self. Add in white racism and misogyny, corrupt robber barons and the fact that approximately 42 percent of U.S. households don’t meet a survival budget and we are talking forces of non-being vs being.

How do we respond to threats of destruction with existential courage and intelligent love?

Anne Lamott spoke last weekend at a friend’s church in Northern California. She wrote on Facebook:

“Yesterday I did a long event at a local church, taking questions midway through… I also heard from the minister the three-part structure for a sermon: what you are going to be talking about, talking about that, and then summarizing what you have been talking about.

So, part one: I am going to be talking about how we will we come through the next 23 days, with the very real possibility that a man with fascist aspirations and dementia, a proud racist and convicted rapist, is going to win this election.      

Part two: Some of you have an unshakeable faith in God or Goodness, or Gus, the Great Universal Spirit, all the time, and are positive that He or She or They will not let fascism land in America. I think that is very nice. I myself am a tiny bit concerned. So my plan is to keep writing my Get Out the Vote Postcards, panic, breathe, stick together, sink into despair, draw flowers on my GOTV postcards, which gives me hope (I am a simple people), take care of each other, lose all hope, take care of the poor, take walks and pray, gasp for breath, not take the polls so seriously this far away from the election, panic anyway, do my postcards, donate, breathe.

Form small friendly groups to do the GOTV work. Remember Margaret Mead said, ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.’ Band together with friends.

I will adhere to my friend David Roche’s Church of 80% Sincerity, and keep the faith 80% of the time, trust in the democratic process 80% of the time, try not to hate the opponents 80% of the time, and not try to stress eat my body weight in fried food, 80% of the time… Optimism, and unconditional love! David believes in optimism as a decision, and that unconditional love is a reality (but has a shelf life of about eight to 10 seconds. So instead of beating yourself up because you only feel it fleetingly, you savor those moments when it appears. So we might say to our beloved, 'Honey, I've been having these feelings of unconditional love for you for the last eight to 10 seconds.' Or, 'Darling? I'll love you till the very end of dinner.') The same goes for optimism: I honestly feel confident, 80% of the time, that we’ve got this thing, as long as we stay alert and keep helping get out the vote in swing states, however we can…”

I largely agree with Anne. I would add that, for the long haul, ‘good enough’ walking pragmatism and intercession is the winning combination. It may involve going daily to a lonely or liminal place—and praying our fears in the Spirit: for loved ones, hurting communities, difficult people, ourselves…

As we turn away from tar baby toxicities and say Yes to life—something good, even very good, happens.

As we choose to bless others—in the Spirit—we are blessed.

How does liminality and turning towards the Light happen for you?

Jesus would go up in the early morning to a lonely place. With the Psalms… in Silence.

Thomas Merton writes, “Christianity is a religion of the Word. The Word is Love. But we sometimes forget that the Word emerges from silence. When there is no silence, then the One Word which God speaks is not truly heard as Love...The One Word which God speaks is [Godself] speaking, God manifests [Godself] as infinite Love... And though the revealed doctrines about God are true, yet what they tell us of God are not adequate as long as we grasp them separately, incoherently without living unity in Love. They must converge upon Love as the spokes of a wheel converge upon a central hub...No mind can comprehend God's reality… We must seek to communicate with God, not only by words, but above all by silence, in which there is only the One Word, and the One Word is infinite Love and silence.”

In silence we discover the faith of Jesus at work in us, Christ’s Spirit praying in and with our spirit—in ways too deep for words—to the Infinite Creator.

And God hears our prayers.

There’s deep reading and light. When I had a concussion two years ago I could only listen to audible books; I listened to Merton, Nouwen, Buechner, Lamott, Charles Taylor. Then I could read only print books; I read dozens, including Goodison, the Wests, King, Tillich, Thielicke, Niebuhr... Finally I could read Kindle, “…when with eagles eyes/He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise—/Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” (John Keats)

Reading can stir up existential awe and transforming dialogue. While in graduate school I developed a bad habit of skimming books. I am unlearning that. Most of the books I read now are on religious existentialism, faith and spirituality, social criticism, memoir, history. I write in the margins, creatively brood on them.

For many people, creative light is connected to conversations with friends, new and old. I’m old school, I like to use the phone—converse in depth. I enjoy one-on-ones, over coffee. Good friends are like green pastures, oasis, amidst life’s deserts and valleys.

There’s also praying while walking. Walking mediation. I love to walk by the River or Ocean, as the body allows. Moving and thinking go together. I used to bicycle to Frenchtown and back to Washington Crossing. Now I walk— and do physical therapy to bicycle again.

It also happens while traveling to thin places, like Iona, Adirondacks, Maine, Montauk. Pilgrimage stirs up holy creativity. It’s good to go away, and come back again.

Sometimes walking meditation, pragmatism and prayer, living pilgrimage intersect with real life events.

This is present now.

There is One who would gather us together as a hen gathers her brood.

God’s true Light is at work in our midst, alongside, and even in spite of us.

To complete what we cannot complete.

This is the source and end of all returning and rest, pragmatism and prayer…

“So work out your salvation with awe and trembling, for it is God who works with and in you, both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure…”