Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (16 page)

But not always.

The chain of choices we make for ourselves is not the whole of our life’s story. They are not, often, even our most important ones.

The truth is that life’s just not that neat. We make decisions every step of the way, yes, and we change many of them as time goes by. But in many instances as many things just happen as much as they are chosen. Or many of the selections we make simply evaporate even as we grasp them. What we wanted we do not get. Not because we changed them; because life changed them.

And at that point disruption sets in at the crossroad of all our plans. We are cast adrift in life with the great plan gone and nothing on the horizon to put in its place. Then, the heart cries out in the night, now what?

Loss, when it comes, is indiscriminate. It comes in many forms. A veritable viper’s tangle of circumstances always. Death brings loss. I planned to move across the country until my father dies, but now someone has to stay home to look after my mother. Rejection brings loss. I wanted to work in a big city band. In fact, I was sure I’d gotten the job—until the letter came. It was a one-word answer: No. Health conditions bring loss. There’s a position opening for civil volunteers in South Africa. I was accepted for it until my asthma started up again and they sent me back home. Insufficiency brings loss. I applied for a position with great promotion possibilities but they wanted credentials I did not have. A fellow five years younger than I got the job instead. Conflict brings loss. I wrote a political opinion on my Facebook page and the company fired me for identifying myself as working for them.

No doubt about it. Loss comes in many forms.

We choose, yes, but all those others are choosing, too. Their choices affect us, too. So, is life nothing more than an adult game of pickup sticks–tossed into the air helter-skelter for us to pick our way through with resignation or be felled by despair?

Not really. The Spirit of Life in us is simply richer, broader, more perceptive than we are. It takes a bevy of lost choices, it takes some experience, to come to understand that. Every choice we make for ourselves in life leaves unnoticed a number of choices we could have made. One choice cancels another. The choice we did not make represents a number of capabilities we have that this particular choice will not cultivate, a number of opportunities available that call the rest of me out of my protective shell in order to enable me to become the more of me.

The pain of one loss is always an invitation to open myself to the rest of life, to the rest of myself, to the rest of this great wide world I carry within me. Choice is still mine—only the situation has changed.

Life lies in adapting to choices that are not mine. It requires that I understand that life is not final until it ends. The space between then and now depends on choice, yes, but what I would choose to do and what is available to do are not both under my control. It is a matter of realizing that the clay of life is the clay in which I find myself. Life is not a clay I create; it is the clay I have before me at this moment to use.

It is the choice I make when unlimited choice is not an option that determines both what I do and what I am. It identifies not only what is in me but what I intend to
become. Everything I choose is not the best choice I could have made, perhaps, but the way I deal with it is the choice that will define me in the end.

No, no single segment of life is final. None of them can be cast in stone. Each of them will end for some reason somewhere. But as long as everything I do and everyone with whom I share my soul represents something that when it was over I did not want to leave, I will have finally known happiness.

Those are the choices we want to make in life. Those will be the ones that really count.

Or as William Jennings Bryan put it: “Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

Choose wisely. May sadness be the measure of your wisdom as you go.

The world is an absolute marketplace of spiritual ideas now. Religion is not regional anymore. Seekers from every major tradition live within blocks of one another in every major city in the world. And in most of the small ones, as well. At one time, the very thought of such a society was unacceptable. In the United States, the integration of Catholics and Protestants was feat enough, never mind Hindus or Muslims. But those days are gone now. Great mosques and temples stand within sight of one another, even if still strange to one another, but certainly not as threats to either’s integrity.

No, it’s not the fear of syncretism that is at issue now—religions are not melting into one another—but, for the first period in history, they are in conversation with one another.

We are all sharing ideas, listening in to one another’s debates, watching one another for signs of holiness and prodding one another for answers to the questions that keep us apart, and sharing answers in ways that bind us together. We are listening to one another’s programs, going to one another’s festivals, hearing one another’s talk shows on radio and televisions. We are all looking everywhere for paths to the Unknown and, interestingly enough, discovering our common questions, evaluating our unique answers to them and beginning to image God from other perspectives.

Of all the things we share, the most central is not in the liturgical or theological or canonical dimensions of the religion. It is in the realm of our personal search and experience of God.

I have danced in a Sufi
fikre
, sat for hours in a Zen Buddhist tea ceremony, been part of a Hindu
puja
, attended Shabbat services in multiple Jewish synagogues, and never, in any of those moments of worship, did I doubt that these people were just as deeply involved in the search for God as I am. And that God was with us all.

And why not?

God is everywhere, they told us as children. But the question never goes away: Yes, but—where is God for me? I don’t feel God. I don’t hear God. I don’t know how to know God. So God is surely in all these other places where the consciousness of God is also real, as well. But as much as I knew, even as a child, that it had to be true, that God was everywhere, still God was nowhere in particular in life. And, though I did not know it at the time, and so struggled
through the thought of God for night after night in life, in that reality was all I needed to know about the search for God.

It was years, of course, before I realized that I was looking for Something rather than for Everything, and so I found nothing because I was looking for the wrong thing. And it is that kind of seeking that causes all the pain.

Spiritual elders in every tradition know the truth of all of that. There is no way, no trick, no strategy, no magic ritual or formula necessary to “get” God. God is already with us. We can only grow into the God who is already with us one insight, one awareness, one experience at a time. Yet, however much we sincerely seek for it, it can take years for us to sink into a perpetual sense of the presence of God.

The Sufi Sheik Ansari says of the process:

“Lashed by desire

I roamed the streets of Good and Evil

What did I gain? Nothing–

The Fire of desire grew only fiercer.…”

As the Sufis knew, the truth is painful: The more false starts I make, the more I want of the real thing. We seek and in seeking only want more of this God who is the magnet of our lives, the Center of our seeking. Always more.

At the same time, in the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia whose model of communal life became the model for Benedictine monasticism to this day teaches that we already have God. The “fear—the awe—of God,” he says, must be “always before our eyes.” We are, he tells us, to come to see the beauty and glory of God everywhere. Then, bowing down before it in our hearts, we will live
in its aura. In us, around us, before us—this awareness of God is a slowly consuming process. But an ever clearer one.

So the seeker’s life is a gradual sinking into the consciousness of God but, oh, the diversions along the way while we look for the trick to make it so. While we become enamored of more exciting kinds of spiritual tinsel on the way. While we look for quicker, more esoteric practices to assure ourselves that we are finally on the way.

It is a long and discouraging process, this making of the Presence of God in life some kind of magic act. When the darkness sets in and we thrash about at night looking for answers to the commonplaces of life: Where will we get the money? How can we control the child? What has happened to the relationship? We seek for God the puppeteer, God the magician, God the avenger to change the world to our designs. We tell ourselves that we are really seeking the God of Mystery and Life but we actually seek the god we have created for ourselves rather than the God of Life out of whose creative energy came our own.

When those avatars of God do not do the magic we want, or punish the people we want to punish, or change the weather and raise the stock market for us, we lose faith, we sink into the pain of abandonment—either God’s abandonment of us or our abandonment of God.

We panic and begin to search in strange places, in frantic ways. We go seeking charms and spells, or we run from one temple or set of esoteric practices or saints or set of stars to another, looking for what we already have: the Presence of God who companions us through life always.

But at the heart and core of every great tradition, one
understanding is clear. We have forgotten the findings of the mystics of every religion: that God is with us. Always. That there is no reason to seek God, that now and always God is seeking us, waiting for us to respond. All we really need to do is to attend.

In that reality is all we need to know about the search for God.

In the name of God we reject whole bodies of people. In the name of God we make our god some person. For the sake of God we allow our families to be divided or abandoned or forgotten. And we call ourselves good for having done all these things. God must wince at the very thought of it.

The Hebrew Scriptures relate a story that shocked me as a child but, after years of reflection and a more open heart, gives me great hope. The story tells us that in their passion for the spiritual life—when the whole world still had only one language, were one race, one nation and were, then, capable of working together on such a great project—this people decided to dedicate themselves to the building of a great high tower. The goal was to build the tower high enough to enable them all to go up to God together. A grand design, a great model, a mighty trick, I thought. (I was in second grade, just old enough to be greatly impressed by that kind of spiritual effort in life.)

But then, the story goes on, God looked down and saw them all at work and instead of being impressed by their plan was deeply disturbed at the very sight of it. This great tower, this singular definition of one path to heaven, this foolish notion that God was available for capture made a
mockery out of the very spirituality for which they sought: the awareness that God was everywhere, that God was with everyone, that God is the very Life of life. “I will confuse their language,” God said, “so they cannot understand one another and I will scatter them across the world.”

The story troubled me in second grade and continued to trouble me for years. What kind of a God was it who would not want people to reach the top of their tower to find God? And then I realized what was going on in the story. Without a common language anymore and dispersed across the world, they would all have to be open to learning from one another about the nature and presence of God in life. Otherwise, they would always think that their one experience and perspective and relationship was all there was to know about God.

It is a story more important now, I think, than ever before.

The spiritual life is a very personal thing. All of life is its teacher. No one has all of it at any one time and everyone has some of it always. Indeed, we all have God but melting into the presence and heart of God takes great contemplation, conscious effort, total immersion and the willingness to give up our own ideas of God. Clearest of all is the fact that each and all the traditions of all the ages and all the people we will ever meet have something to teach us about it. That takes a lifetime of listening, of living, of suffering the pain of the process and the pain of the distance.

Eddie Cantor once said, “It took me twenty years to become an overnight success.” In the end we will certainly succeed.

I did not realize until I sat down to write these acknowledgments just how difficult it would be. This book is about what it takes to live well in the prevailing atmosphere of contemporary social life. It has no scientific answers to provide because these are not scientific issues. These are issues of the soul, of the overworked mind, of the hurting heart, of the overwrought life.

The fact is that this has been a very different kind of book. Its ideas can’t be “proven” statistically, though the statistics on their existence are surely close to universal. They can’t be pronounced on morally, though they surely tax the moral latitudes of every level of life. They are untreatable in psychological terms, though they are undoubtedly part of every conversation about what both strains or enhances an individual’s emotional balance.

So to all these friends and colleagues I owe a special note of thanks for their interest and for their assurance that the work engaged them in rethinking their own lives, as
well as in the evaluation of the clarity and niceties of the writing.

I acknowledge my editors at Random House, then, with special gratitude. They saw this book through from beginning to end. Gary Jansen and Amanda O’Connor have given this small volume devoted to the conundrums of contemporary life at least as much attention as is customarily given to tomes of history and the great ideas of modern science twice its size. Their commitment to beginning this conversation on what it takes to be human, a human being today is itself a sign of the importance of what is obvious but unspoken in society. Their careful concern for every step of the process has given this project depth and quality beyond its size.