Human to Human

Interesting terms, no?

They come from Parker Palmer, someone whose writings I’ve long enjoyed. I read these particular words in a post by Alisdair Smith, sent to me by a friend.

I’m the kind of person that has long been interested in the relationship between these two, reality and idealism. In fact, it was way back in Grad School that I remember feeling inspired and challenged by Parker Palmer’s invitation to be careful of the polarity, and not to collapse it. Both are needed. Beware of the either / or choice. Develop the ability to stay in the third space.

The reality side for me is far more tenuous than I would have been able to claim 25 years ago, though I think I had the instinct then, as I do now, to recognize that reality is not as it seems. Objective reality is not as it seems. It has become my life to support the creation of alternative realities. Not just because I can, but because it is a core operating principle for being in the world that is ever unfolding. Think of the subjective experience that influences outer perception. Think of Byron Katie’s work on decolonizing fear and stress. Think of the Appreciative Approach and the principle, “what you give your energy to grows.”

The idealism side for me is far more concrete than I would have been able to claim 25 years ago, though I think I had this instinct too. Invoking a world into existence matters. Reifying it matters. Having the discipline to speak to, even a fragment of an ideal, matters. Like when someone says something is all wrong, I usually hear it as “some parts of it are wrong.” I’ve rarely run into situations that are absolutely all good or absolutely all bad. Our brains want to believe it. But I just don’t find it to be true. There is a place for idealism.

The key that is more helpful and interesting to me as I think of these terms is that there is choice. Reality itself is a choice. So is idealism. Perhaps the corrosive parts are when we are stuck, forgetting that choice of reality exists. Perhaps the irrelevant parts of idealism are when they don’t connect enough to a story, discipline, and practices of choosing what to narrate into the world.

Parker Palmer has inspired me many times for the narrative he creates. It invites and evolving, individually and collectively, which is quite interesting, no?

Later this week I will participate in a men’s retreat, Soultime. It is Friday evening through Monday afternoon, this time with nine men, including myself. This is the fourth time that I have participated.

Soultime works from the simple premise that contemporary men are largely without initiation. I’m not talking refiner’s fire now. There is plenty of challenge in life to be met with various levels of tenacity and endurance. I am talking deliberateness in ceremony and the kinds of together that are about resonance and remembering who we are. Less doing. More being.

There will be food that we prepare together. There will be drumming. There will be singing. There will be story-telling. There will be sharing dreams, both those experienced over the nights and those present in waking life. There will be spontaneous rounds of conversation in circle, moving the inner worlds of each of us to the outer worlds of shared witness.

There is much that I love about Soultime. Foremost among those is that there is something uniquely beautiful and important about men tending to each other. Calling out the experiences that are most sacred, tender, or even unknown. I experience this with many people, men and women, yet, over the last 15 years, this has been particularly valuable with men.

Soultime is, well, for the soul. In the story I tell myself, it isn’t just about us as individuals retreating. There is that. But I like to also believe that in the work we are doing together at Soultime, it is also for a broader group. I don’t make that my focus — I choose to stay in the simple presence of the moment, not thinking it too much. But I’m aware that maybe Soultime is also for men in general, not present for the singing.

Maybe it is an evolving that reclaims what we, both at Soultime and not, need for the next phases of development and maturing in these rather involved and rapidly times.

Yesterday it was my privilege to listen to my friend Charles LaFond read to me a poem that he had written that morning. “Fluent in Thunder” is a poem for holy week in the Christian tradition. I was deeply moved to hear it. Charles is Canon at Saint John’s Cathedral in Denver. And he is a genuine human being, that wept through reading these words.

Read it here, with a photo posted in his blog, The Daily Sip. And follow his blog. It is worth it. Or, read it below. Sink in to this one.
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Fluent In Thunder
Charles LaFond

It is hard to imagine what She felt that week.

She covers the planet in green, brown, blue
and every color of the rainbow-reminder.
She waves as wheat.
She swoons as flower.
She bears the massive responsibility of air as tree.
She waits as water.
She paves as grasses.
She makes food as vegetable plants;
growing for the hairless bipeds
whose rich seek to destroy her and whose poor
have little access to her food.
She lays majestic as sand making life
even when life seems impossible or unlikely.
She warms as earth even as she warms as sun.

She too was there that day at the cross,
whispering breeze and speaking thunder so fluently.

She provides small holes in which there is birth and metamorphosis.
Only the humans scream – most of her females bears life in the
same silence in which God does.
She eats and processes what she eats as billions of
worms, bees and maggots, making mulch.
She freezes molecules of ice between molecules of rotting wood,
splitting them apart so that soil may appear over time;
which is her great friend.

It is hard to imagine what She, the natural world, with a body
of green and blue, undulating in the chaord of growth,
felt like
that week
in which humans plotted and planned
the destruction of the Loving-Truth-Teller
the One with soft skin and kind eyes.

Creepy-clergy-climbers could see He needed to die.
Political leaders of church and state,
afraid of their smallness, could see He needed to die.
Counterfeit monks and artists could see He needed to die.
Religious competition could see that He needed to die.
Thousands of savior-impersonators could see that He needed to die.
Scribes in their book-forts could see that He needed to die.

But perhaps only She could see that part of God which God
implanted in her and also in Him:
the ability to die and then, after waiting in silent darkness, live again.
Perhaps She could see what would be Jesus’ emerging
simply and precisely because she experiences it so often,
so casually, so cyclicly, so naturally.

As Nature, she could recognize a being whose nature was life,
even if occasionally interrupted by being
cut with a scythe
or starved of water
or denied food
or choked on fumes
or poisoned by chemicals
or left alone to die.
Nature could see that all would be well, even if weird or stinky.

And yet, as Jesus began this Walk this week,
navigating princes, principalities and powers
in majestic silence,
head down,
looking at the planet’s crust for his encouragement,
She looked back and she wept through
her smile into his eyes. “Keep walking on me. I feel your feet.”

And then, in a few steps again she speaks his language;
“Jesus, king of kings, show them what we are.” She whispered
in her feminine voice of breeze, missed by influent scholars
as male voices accused
in their insecurity; little boys in big togas, punching at the One Who Is.

And Jesus, looking down at dirt, saw God and remembered the
mountain-side chats they used to have before the Great Silence;
remembered divine encouragement,
inhaled, and allowed the story to unfold, just for the next 15 minutes, and the next, and then the next – the way we must live in those times.

And so Nature and Jesus let life unfold in
manageable segments, 15 minutes at a time
in  horror
in increments of a few minutes
when night and day were too long a stretch for the unfolding.

And then, as whips hit flesh, the blood spattered onto Her grasses,
As the nails hit bone, the blood spattered onto Her rocks,
As the fever-sweat dripped down wood and slid silently into dirt and around maggots from past occupants.
And as His eyes rolled back into a sacred socket-darkness,
and as saliva dropped onto a lone dessert flower emerging from the rock,

After dawning every day at God’s agreement for existence to Be;
after mornings and mornings of her request for life were again and again granted by the One,

She almost died.

And in her fight to stay alive, God flared up inside her
and in her revival she She clouded over
and thundered blue-black, like his bruises,
just to show Him, with closed-eyes, that she was still there.

He could see Her stormy darkness even under his closed, sticky lids
and felt the chill of the brief desert-night as Nature commiserated with Jesus

And his question,
about whether or not
God had abandoned Him
was answered.

We think God was silent.
Perhaps only because we are not fluent in thunder.

 

“A vocation is not an ego thing; it is the opposite of an ego thing.
It is a call from history, the ancestors,
and those not yet born,
to be thoughtful, just, caring, courageous,
imaginative, creative — that is, alive.”

I appreciate these words from Matthew Fox in his essay, Leadership as Spiritual Practice. I haven’t met Matthew Fox. Yet, many people have pointed me to his writings and work. Leadership as Spiritual Practice is a theme that has centered my soul and carried expressions of my work through the last twenty plus years. And, it will likely continue to be so for the next twenty. My particular focus has been “participative leadership” as spiritual practice. Bringing people into shared contexts to animate and activate the energy and insight of the whole group.

Last night I shared some of this article with my daughter, a sophomore in college. She is finding her way into her major classes. Like most her age, she has dreams for the future. Some doubts too. How can one not in this era. She has many criteria for this stage of choosing vocation, including, “what would lead to a good job?.”

I feel for the people that are fixated on utilitarian aspects of jobs. Fitting in. Securing income. Securing security. Is that even possible anymore? All of this was very strong in me at that age. It still is. Some dispositions don’t go away.

Yet, what has become stronger in me with age, is the spirit of “calling” to what you want to offer to community and society. It is less about what the world will provide for you. It is less about what you feel entitled to. It is more about offering the gift of who you are. As Matthew Fox says, on behalf of ancestors and those not yet born.

That changes it, doesn’t it.

I dream of a world in which our primary medium for organizing human endeavor is to welcome gifts. To discern gifts together. To welcome surprise. To welcome even the wobbly paths that refine vocation and its new expressions, rather than chain one to a bad choice.

Crazy? I hope not. Spiritually grounded practice? I hope so. For my daughter’s sake. For all of us.