There’s been a lot of talk in our household lately about what it means to be and stay human in our world. So much pulls at us to turn off our hearts, turn off our minds, and fit nicely into roles and activities and concerns dictated by systems (institutions, social groups, media) that seem far less interested in meaningful connectedness (with self, others, earth, the divine) than in keeping “the machine” alive (our economy, our institutions, our entertainment industry, etc.). How do we stay human in the midst of these Powers?

As I’ve personally been adjusting to a new city and surroundings, this question has been scratching at my insides.
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Something I wrote earlier this week keeps nudging at me for more attention. I wrote in my post on the Tao that while in Boston I “felt starved for a sacred space in which to be.” And later, of my time at Grace Cathedral, “I was ready to appreciate this sacred space and its open-hearted hospitality in a way I couldn’t have last year, even had Boston’s diocese flung thirty church doors open.”

It’s this notion of sacred space that I want to return to.

So far as I can tell, people need sacred places to return to – whether these be literal houses of worship, or simply spots out in nature, a favorite friend’s or grandparent’s house, a curve on the highway where an epiphany came to us fifteen years ago. Sacred spaces connect us with something deep and meaningful; they feed our souls.

At the same time, something seems incongruous, somehow, about dividing our world into places that are sacred, and places that are not. I’m drawn to the way that contemplatives in many traditions have discovered sacredness glistening from everything – glinting off of dewdrops and teardrops, presidents and bums, gutters and rivers and church bells and whore houses. Holiness – the divine – being everywhere the attentive soul can look (the darkness that also pervades I’ll leave for another post).

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As a young child I remember envying adults (which included teenagers) for knowing everything, and being so capable and confident and self-assured. I couldn’t wait to reach such heights.

Now that I’m in the adult category, I see that very, very few of us are as knowledgeable or capable or confident as I used to assume. It almost seems like all of us have insecurities to wrestle with, and all of us are working in one way or another to establish, or at least give the impression to those whose opinions matter to us, that we’re (fill in the blank): smart enough, hip enough, hard-working enough, relaxed enough, witty enough, good-looking enough, talented enough, kind enough, strict enough, compassionate enough, conservative or liberal enough, involved in enough good causes…you get the point. Though often not consciously, life can be filled with an underlying tension connected with whatever we’re trying to prove.

Last night I laid on a lounge chair on my deck and looked up at the stars. Huge evergreens stood silently in yards within my view, solid, dark, unmoving. Planes too high to hear winked red and yellow lights. A family in the next complex clanked forks and knives against dinnerware.

I lay there soaking all of it in, noticing how loud the crickets had become, how gentle I felt toward the flying things brushing past my face, how glad I was for the ballad that spilled briefly from my neighbor’s door when she opened it to put out her trash. And I thought to myself: I am a part of the universe. I exist. Along with all the rest of this, I am. And for just a few moments, that tension I just talked about vanished, and the blood in my veins began singing what sounded like, Yes, that’s right. Like the bugs and the trees and the rooftops and the people and the galaxies way out there – right there, behind that shooting star – you ARE. Things that are don’t need to prove anything. And I smiled, and relaxed, and wanted to hug it all.

I’ve learned a bit about Taoism in the last year, and find myself returning again and again to its notion that our lives have a natural flow to them - a Tao - which we can either listen to and try to dance gracefully with, or, conversely, get in the way of and trip up. Most of us have experienced conversations where we sense it isn’t the right time to bring up a certain topic or question, but we push through anyway and make an awful mess of things. That would be going against the Tao. Most of us also know the feeling of words and thoughts and emotions just falling into place, ching, ching, ching, as though choreographed ahead of time. That’s going with it.

I’ve been thinking lately about the Tao of my search for the Holy, and the ways I’ve both danced and obstructed its course.

Last summer my husband and I traveled to Boston, where Nate (my husband) was presenting at a conference. Our first day there I noticed the gorgeous spires of an Anglican church not far from our hotel, and determined that the next day, while Nate was in conference, I would sit in the quietness of its sanctuary. With all the religious upheaval of my last few years, I felt starved for a sacred space in which to “be” – regardless of whether or not I could repeat a church creed.

Off I marched the next morning, partly feeling like a moth flapping toward a light by which I had already been zapped a few times. By the time I reached the church, I was dripping thick, high-humidity sweat.

The first door I approached was locked, so I went to another, but found it locked as well. Signs posted at both read open. I knocked and waited by each one before traipsing the entire church perimeter (and then some…I accidentally got turned into a maze-like residential block). But no luck. All were silent, bolted doors. My shame at the thought that anyone had seen my tenacious, fruitless hovering only slightly distracted from the pain I felt at the symbol this experience was turning out to be – of innocent, yearning attempts at finding a sacred place of belonging, but discovering myself to be persistently excluded. I sat for ten minutes on the church’s concrete steps before tearfully walking home for a shower.

“Going with the Tao” doesn’t look like this, I don’t think.

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Stumbled across this poem last spring and find it such a lovely alternative to the critical, uptight fellow I long believed God to be. It’s by Kaylin Haught, and is found in The Palm of Your Hand, 1995.

God Says Yes to Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Lately I’ve thought a lot about the notion of belonging. For the last six years my husband and I lived in Fresno, California, in a large condominium complex where we, as Caucasians with Master’s degrees and a middle-class income, were minorities. We came to know and participate with the rhythms of our neighborhood, but always felt a chord of differentness playing inside; no matter how long we lived there, we didn’t quite fit in.

A month ago we moved from there to the Bay Area, where my husband will soon begin doctoral work. And I’m surrounded now by neighborhoods of highly educated, wealthy people, the majority of which are white. By outer appearances (minus my filthy car), I’m at home.

But I’m not quite feeling so. It’s not that I don’t want to be here; for this season, I very much do. But I’m realizing that for all my efforts at being an adaptive, world-wise person, any extreme – wealth or poverty, diversity or uniformity – leaves me yearning for a place to belong.

But maybe my yearning to belong runs much deeper than race or income or education level…

For whatever combination of reasons, I’ve lived most of my life believing the world is primarily a place of conflict, where good and evil are constantly at war. In many ways my religion supported this idea, and too the daily news and every cop show aired on television; listen to George W. for even a moment and you’ll hear its message clearly. There’s the good guys, and there’s the bad guys; whose side are you on?

I respect what this view highlights. Good and evil do exist. I’ve personally felt them wrestle, and seen the wonder and destruction they leave in their wakes.

But the longer I think and observe and live, the more the world seems much more complicated than simple dualities. It begs more nuance than good-and-evil wars imply.

Here’s why I think this matters. When I view the world through a lens of good-vs-evil, my stance toward life (people, nature, decision-making, prayer), becomes vigilant, tight, expectant of resistance and threat. I have only two categories in which to place myself and those around me, and, for fear of finding myself in the wrong one, must work diligently to establish my position among the good…often by means of establishing clearly who the bad guys are, and proving I’m not like them. I’m not free to recognize or acknowledge the darkness within myself, or the light within my enemies; to do so could jeopardize my spot with the good.

This life-stance deeply troubles me. It looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy whose content, though maybe intended by many to “protect us from evil,” actually perpetuates fear and prejudice and division and hate. It perpetuates conflict.

I wonder whether there aren’t alternative ways of understanding good and evil that can produce more compassion and connection and reconciliation and…hope. Ones that cause muscles to relax and fists and guns to lower, and create safe spaces for honest dialogue and self-appraisal and discovery of common ground.

Maybe focusing on good versus bad – at whatever outer or inner or spiritual level – actually ensures that peace is never won.

Sometimes I feel like the universe is electric. Everything, all of creation, is singing this amazing song, and my ears and soul can barely take it in for its size and volume and complexity.

I’ve been working on a song this summer, trying to put to sound and poetry fragments of this notion and the implications that accompany it. I’m calling the song Untoward Choir.

Verse 1:
I’ve been listening again to words that aren’t words
And melodies mostly unpitched.
Untamed is the truth I’m hearing.
Sand through hands, a wave’s retreat:
Displays of its captors’ defeats.

Vendors package and sell pale echoes of lines
Laying lifeless though painted for show
While the sources sing on
Their Voice ‘come a wild terrible glory
Mocking each manicured Story.

Chorus:
Earth, wind, water, fire
Love, fear, trust, desire
Seasons, cycles, orbits, turnings
Tasks mundane and witches burning
Wars, forgivings, can’t keep livings
Textures, colors, fathers, mothers
God and goddess, child that taught us
Dark and light, religion’s fight
Wisdom, madness, torture, gladness: sing.
All sing.
The Untoward Choir

Verse 2:
From a tiny, dense seed
Booms the universe’s show
‘Til the force makes its splay return inward.
A cosmic flasher flashing.
Brazen expansion exposes the all
‘Til contraction curves secrets back into the pall.

Outward, inward
The cycle repeats
in my listening, history revealing
the secrets dense in my soul.
Look out to look in, look in to see out
Chaos’ pattern the fount from which all Music flows.

Verse 3:
Each life sings a line
On Millennia’s scroll
Weather noble or base in its creed.
Truth-telling unaware.
The Choir impartial to evil’s intrigues
Neither forcing a limit to angelic deed

In the choice that appears
In this consciousness raising
To fashion the shape of my phrasing
My soul beats time
Pulsing to sing with the flame in me burning
Melodies birthed from the Love of my yearning.