The Path to Paradise
Rain and wind are howling outside right now, pulling leaves from trees that haven’t had the chance to show their autumn colors yet. Cozy at my desk, I’m living outwardly what I’m longing for inwardly: stillness at my center, though storms of thoughts and questions rage around inside the rest of me.
Sunday a different storm passed through the area – less violent, less wet – and brought my mind over and over again to college days, when I lived in Oregon, and sputtering clouds marched through regularly (in fall, and really most of the year), along with spots of sunlight and golden leaves dancing on the wind. I got all nostalgic for some of the things I loved most about college, and noted that those things intersect well with what’s been on my mind of late.
I went to a Quaker university, and though I majored in International Studies, worked as a T.A. for a professor in the religion department. Nearly every day I spent some hours grading or proofreading or entering data at one of the little desks in the religion department lobby.
Who knows what that department is like today, but at the time it was filled with wonderfully nurturing people. Their Quaker-flavored spiritualities were different than most spiritualities I had known to that point, and were therefore fresh and intriguing. Most of the profs had a gentleness about them, as well as a sparkle in their eyes, as though their sense of the Holy made life and people and day-to-dayness altogether interesting and delightful and full of possibility. I breathed in their aura like fresh air. My academic studies were taking me into many of the darker sides of life – global issues of poverty, human rights abuses, international business and politics, war and peace – so it was grounding and hope-producing to balance the overwhelm-ment I was feeling in relation to all of that with people who had been around the block a few more times than I had, had seen their share of personal and global suffering, and somehow still maintained a centered sparkle.
I miss those profs. I miss the rest I felt in their presence – the kind of rest kids feel sometimes in their trust that no matter what happens, mom or dad will take care of things. It’ll all be alright.
Sitting with my weekend nostalgia, I realize that my homesickness isn’t only about the “mothers” and “fathers” of my college days, but about what they represent. They embodied for me a sense that there is coherence to the world, some sparkly, hopeful thing holding it all together, something giving it over- and under-arching meaning that humans can connect around and agree upon. My adult life has been FULL of attempts at finding this for myself, full of gathering and pondering all kinds of information, full of trying to connect meditatively and bodily and experientially with the Holy, of trying to write and live my way into “a-ha” moments, where life will finally make sense.
But I haven’t achieved what I’ve been working for. It’s not that I haven’t experienced life’s sparkle, or haven’t had moments of epiphany, or been caught up in wonder at the something that infuses this world with holiness.
It’s just that everything seems so terribly complicated and complex. And the more I seek coherence, the more illusive coherence becomes. Throughout my academic career I loved the feeling of walking into a test well-prepared – being familiar with all the material, having my own opinions about it, etc. Life right now has so much of…well, so much of not that feeling.
If Understanding the All is just something I need to stop trying for, what then? How do I fill the emptiness in me where a clear-cut orthodoxy used to live? …where coherence used to live? How do I find a center in this complicated, complex world? How do I learn to rest – with hope and peace and gladness – in so much not-knowing and not-understanding? How do I interact with people who claim they most certainly do know and do understand so much?
The wind has died down outside and the rain is falling gently. The movement in the scene has become mainly my own fingers at this keyboard, and steam rising from a shower vent on a rooftop nearby. The center of my cozy desk and the periphery of storm aren’t such a contrast anymore.
The path to Paradise, writes Richard Rohr, “is a gradual awakening and an occasional quieting, a passion for and a surrendering to, a caring and a not caring at all. It is both center and circumference, and I am finally not in control of either one. But we must begin somewhere…”
October 19th, 2004 at 12:03 pm
Your “But I haven’t achieved what I’ve been working for”…reminds me of U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. Your wistfulness is also a contemplative gift, an openness to invite the Holy in. She is with you, in the searching. As you and I have said in the past, maybe its the living of the questions that really counts. Cheers to you, dear friend.
October 19th, 2004 at 3:41 pm
Might I suggest that perhaps there isn’t any structure or coherence or consistency to the world? That there is no sense to it all? The Holy is the unknowable. It is that terrifying mysteriousness that you’re experiencing so viscerally. The Holy is frightening and chaotic and utterly beyond understanding.
It’s not that your Quaker professors had some coherent picture of the world that they relied on, but rather that they reseted peacefully in this sacred uncertainty.
I feel a little hypocritical writing this, because, more often than not, I find myself in your tremulous position, crying out a plaintive, why? My grandfather, though, was a minister in the same vein as those Quakers of yours. His soul shone through him, and yet he was adament in his reverence of the vast unknown.
I’m not sure how to answer your final questions. In my better moments, I can say I’ve found peace, but it came at cost, and not at a cost I’d be pressed to recommend. I do, though, think you’re underestimating your own “fresh and intiguing” spirituality. I think you’re more comfortable than you let yourself think.
Thank you, though, for a beautiful essay.
October 19th, 2004 at 4:33 pm
ah - more good words, Siona. Part of me says, “bingo!” when you speak of no coherence; another part says, “but…but…” That latter part of me is drawn to chaos theory, and other notions that aren’t either/or when it comes to the chaos/order question. This latter part also doesn’t want the Holy to be ONLY frightening and mysterious and chaotic, as you say, but also gentle, tangible, deeply knowable - maybe not in some intellectual way, but at that deep “knowing” level that is as natural as breathing. Or like seeing your own reflection in the mirror.
I think you’re right about those professors “resting peacefully in sacred uncertainty”…though surely they had a metanarrative giving them some sort of coherence, don’t you think?
As much as the yearning, frustrated, empty-feeling parts of me want to disagree, I think you’ve also nailed it with the “being more comfortable than I let myself think” idea. I’m coming to see humans as each being a community of people inside; in my community there are Kristins who are very frustrated and uncomfortable and want my nice clean boxes back for understanding God and the world. But there are also Kristins who feel much older than them, and actually much more settled and peaceful about letting things be what they are: un-boxable for me right now. I think you’ve pointed these latter Kristins out here, and for this I’m grateful. I really need to be reminded of them sometimes.
Chris - thank you, too. You have lots of that Quaker-professor aura about you, and I love it. Thanks for your words.
October 19th, 2004 at 7:53 pm
Your question “If Understanding the All is just something I need to stop trying for, what then?”, represents a transition point. Not that you ever need to stop trying, but rather that achieving that Understanding is not critical to living (and that’s a good thing, too!). What you do in the face of your neighbor’s suffering, or how you vote, or what lifestyle you choose to live - these choices and actions become data for beginning to define your coherence. This is the opposite of what you and I grew up being taught, ie that the Truth is what guides our actions, or at least should. So just from reading what you have been writing, one could conclude that you believe there is beauty in nature, you believe that there are just ways and unjust ways for people to deal with each other (the car repair incident), you believe in human equality, you believe there is beauty as well as utility in language - all of these things you believe without that Understanding All. I guess it is living with what you DO believe that is the “what then”.
October 20th, 2004 at 3:36 pm
What a helpful way to think about this, Roger! Thank you. This seems like a way out of a kind of paralysis that can come with thinking one has to have life figured out before one can actually LIVE (in the deepest sense of that word).