Life and death, our constant companions.

I belong to a small group of folks who meet one early morning each week to pray and share together. To give some structure to our sharing we are using a book of meditations built around the writings of Thomas Merton, the American monk who was one of the major spiritual writers of the 20th century. One of the additional writings is by a Tibetan Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron. I wanted to share some of the excerpt because I feel it to be so apt for our modern time. It is from her book: When Things Fall Apart.*

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head.... The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter.
  

Life and death are always with us.

This excerpt says something that has been on my mind for quite a while. I see around me - and maybe there is something of this in me too - such a fear of suffering and aging and death (they are all related I think) that we are spending huge amounts of time and money to overcome this. But I think that Pema Chodron is saying, try as we may, we can't do that. 

Life is full of fragility and vulnerability; life and death, and that can be a gift or it can be destructive. We get to choose how we will view these aspects of being alive, we don't get to avoid them.

*Chodron, Pema: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Boston, Shambhala, 1997.

More present moment thoughts

You will realize by now that I am very taken by the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh and especially his thought about living in the present moment. I have certainly come to appreciate with sadness, how often I am not in that moment and therefore, how much I have missed. Still, the other thing that the great sharers of wisdom tell us is that it is never, never too late to start to change and grow. I will know that I am dead long before I am physically dead, if I see that I have given up being excited by all that is beautiful and challenging and amazing in our world.

Anyway, another quote from TNH that is really worth pondering:

Life is impermanent, but that does not mean that it is not worth living. It is precisely because of its impermanence that we value life so dearly. Therefore we must know how to live each moment deeply and use it in a responsible way. If we are able to live the present moment completely, we will not feel regret later. We will know how to care for those who are close to us and how to bring them happiness. When we accept that all things are impermanent, we will not be incapacitated by suffering when things decay and die. We can remain peaceful and content in the face of continuity and change, prosperity and decline, success and failure.

These words are of course, not only about the present moment but also about the reality of life and death. We are - most of us at least - afraid of death and spend a good deal of time avoiding the reality of it in ourselves: our aging, our growing aches and pains, our increasing frailty and vulnerability. 

 As a Christian I have always found the words in the Letter to the Hebrews in the bible so very supportive and hopeful. The writer is trying to say something about what Jesus by his life and death offers us. So, the writer suggests that Jesus came to help 'free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death'. Those seem perhaps, like strong words but just looking around our society at its stress on youth, on health, on protecting ourselves from suffering - maybe there is fear of death there, especially in our fear of suffering. Maybe we miss the present moment because we are worried and distracted and fearful of many things...  
       

Children are pretty good at being in the present moment .

*Thich Nhat Hanh: Your True Home, The everyday wisdom of TNH, Shambhala, Boston and London, 2011.
 

Anticipation and the Present Moment

For some time now I have been planning a very big trip. I am going back to England to visit the sisters with whom I lived for almost thirty years. I have been back before but this time feels different for some reason. I am very excited and the anticipation and what seems like a very slow passage of time is really putting me to the test.

The test I am being 'put to' is the whole issue of living as totally as possible in the present moment. I realised early on that I was going to have to undertake some serious attentiveness to keep myself here, now and not be dreaming of an as yet, unrealized future. It has been and still is, a really good exercise for me. 

All this is further enriched by my awareness as always now, of my age and the reality that there are not a lot of years ahead in comparison with what is 'behind' (is there an ahead and behind in time?) and that through the years I have missed a lot in my rush to get to whatever is planned for tomorrow. What a waste - rushing towards a non-existent future! But, once again, that man of wisdom, Thich Nhat Hanh comes to the rescue: 
 
'It's best not to lose ourselves in uncertainty and fear over the future, but if we're truly established in the present moment, we can bring the future to the here and the now, and make plans....the present moment contains both past and future. The only material that the future is made of is the present. If you know how to handle the present in the best way you can, that's all you can do for the future. Handling the present moment with all your attention, all your intelligence, is already building a future.' *

For me, this is very much a present-momentish image

So, I am trying to be grounded in the present; trying to be attentive to whatever is happening in my life now so that when (and I suppose, if) the trip happens I will not have 'wasted' any moment. All this is so contrary to my temperament that it is very much - and perhaps always will be - a work in progress.

*Thich Nhat Hanh: Your True Home, The everyday wisdom of TNH, Shambhala, Boston and London, 2011.

Loneliness as a journey to human wholeness

I took this photo a few years ago and it has, as its title, 'Midnight Wait at the Pizza Pizza'. At the time I was struck by the solitary space the woman was in and I wondered why she was there, all alone, waiting for her pizza at midnight. 

 

Who was she? where had she come from? what was her story? Of course, I still don't know and won't ever. However, I felt that she was in some way symbolic of loneliness in our modern cities. There seem to be a lot of people who, even if they have friends, family, colleagues, feel isolated and alone. Of course, loneliness is part of our human condition even when we are deeply loved and closely held, but in the cities perhaps especially, it can be hard to reach out in our loneliness to seek the love and community we each need. 

I have begun reading Jean Vanier's book 'Becoming Human'* and was startled that he begins his book speaking about this very thing. He speaks about how loneliness can become either an open wound or a journey to wholeness. When Jean speaks about loneliness as a journey to wholeness he says for instance, 'loneliness can become a source of creative energy; the energy that drives us down new paths to create new things or to seek more truth and justice in the world'. When he then goes on to speak of the wounding aspects of loneliness he says, '[Loneliness] can also be a source of apathy and depression, and even of a desire to die. It can push us into escapes and addictions in the need to forget our inner pain and emptiness'. 

In the book Jean will go on to speak of the importance of human relationships which are healing, forgiving, nourishing through community...community which is large or small, but in any case, caring, accepting and loving. I think he wants to say to us that we can seek this out, we can form community with others, we can help one another if we grow to overcome our fears. 

I found two other photos in my collection which speak to me of how these relationships of healing and joy are meant to begin. I am sure each of these older men and each of the children is experiencing the delight of companionship and the joy of being important to another. 

 We surely must not let loneliness be a destructive element in our lives when it can be a source of life - odd though that may seem.

*Jean Vanier: Becoming Human, Paulist Press, New Jersey, 1998