So I’ve mentioned before that I’m taking a class on Buddhist ritual.  Every week a different practitioner comes and demonstrates and/or lectures on a different ritual from the Buddhist tradition.  We’ve studied mantras, sand mandalas, poetry, meditation, pilgrimage – even something called goma fire ceremony (quite something to observe!).  Every week I leave struck by the worlds the presenters inhabit – worlds filled with symbols that I know little about, practices mostly foreign to me, convictions about what is real and true, what can and can’t be known, what’s best and worst to pursue or desire.

I’m struck by the fact that we’re all living on the same planet, and yet in so many ways inhabit different ones. (I could write piles on what it seems like everyone has in common, but I’ll leave such thoughts for other posts.  I want to look at the differentness angle here.)  And it’s living in our worlds that keeps those worlds alive, keeps them real.  To explain…

So often in my study of world religions, I’ve heard or read of devotees’ frustrations with “outsiders” observing and studying religions at arm’s length.  “To understand our world, our community, our God, you must participate.  You must become a disciple.  Then see what of us you think, or feel, or know.”  Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Sufis – even a woman I know whose life is immersed in Japanese tea ceremony:  all have suggested that practice comes first.  Distanced analysis simply can’t get to the heart of each tribe, each religion.

But here’s the thing that trips me up:  inhabiting a world and surrounding oneself with people who live in it is itself reality-producing.  True, some realities are more believable than others, more readily or thoroughly convincing, but by and large, surround yourself with a world of people saying the sky is red, and even the best of us will sooner or later believe it.  A host of social psychological studies confirms this.  We’re tremendously shaped by those around us – their assumptions, their values, their thoughts, their claims.  For good reason practitioners of religion gather regularly with those who see reality the way they do.  "World" maintenance depends (in large part) on it.

This is frustrating me this week, though.  I’m frustrated by how thoroughly we humans can believe things that are only one way of “seeing” (one way of understanding what’s real, true, trustworthy, etc.).  I’m standing at the overlap, or rather juxtaposition maybe (?), of so many worlds that each have recognizable wisdom, depth, history, resonance…but each claims to be The Story, The World, The way of knowing what’s real.  I don’t have enough lifetimes in the next fifty years to become a disciple of each, and even if I did, I don’t think I could suspend my knowledge-of-the-truths-in-other-worlds long enough to be able to do so successfully.

I’m reminded of the process of awakening that children often go through when they discover that the ways things are done in their nuclear families aren’t the ways things are done in every family.  What in the world are the Johnsons doing, they may ask, eating ketchup on their eggs?!  Shock can mellow into realization that there’s more than one way to eat eggs, and eventually can even become appreciation of alternatives to one’s own.

So here’s the rub:  What do I do with my knowledge that there are all kinds of Johnsons out there, practicing all kinds of ways of knowing, maintaining all sorts of realities, believing any number of disparate things about God and Truth and the meaning of the cosmos?

Postmodern angst indeed. 

I left class last night feeling like every religion, on its own, is a rich dessert.  Amazing.  Beautiful.  Delectable if taken in the right time or amount or temperature or context.  But I feel like I’ve been eating a whole meal of the stuff.  It’s making me sick.

I want something simple now.  Something less elegant.  Less sophisticated.  Something that’s vegetables or protein or grains right from the stalk. No butter or sauce, please.  No sugar.  And please, no chefs fighting over the right way to make it, or the proper method for enticing rough audiences to try.  Or over what will happen if they don’t.

I want to stare at the moon on balmy spring nights.  I want to smell earth smells.  I want to send out my gratitude for life and love and hope and resurrection without getting tripped up on who it is I’m sending it to.  I want to feel my anger and fear and indignation at a world where so many suffer.  Where I suffer.  And I want to learn to embody all the things I admire.  Like honesty and integrity.  Like gentleness and strength.  Like respectfulness and awareness that we’re all interconnected – gloriously and perilously so.  Confidence and humility in knowing how much light and darkness are inside of me.  And you.  The ability to hold a lot in tension and still have joy.  Levity.

I want a simple, earthy faith, and to feel unthreatened by the voices who say that’s not enough.  People who fear or prophesy, because of the worlds they inhabit, that people like me are going to hell.  Or straying far from God.

God help us all.  This world of sweets and dear sweet-eaters is just too much for me right now.

I wonder whether Mother Nature has a way of quieting us down sometimes, when quietness is needed.  There’s probably times when she tries and we trump her efforts, banging away internally or externally so loudly she hasn’t got a chance to get through.  But for me lately, quietness is taking over.

My inner life has long been a chorus of competing voices – so many questions to be asked, tasks to try to imagine accomplishing, messages about what’s important and not important, what I should feel happy or sad or proud or guilty about, what I should or shouldn’t spend my time doing – even simple curiosities about all sorts of subjects, from science to politics to religion to economics.  But week by week, as my belly starts to bulge and the accompanying hormones go about their thing, my inner chorus is sounding a lot more like…like a flower sitting in the sun.  Like dust, suspended in a beam of light.  Can you hear it?

A line from Indigo Girls makes me mindful this morning of how different I feel these days from my usual self.  “You set up your place in my thoughts, moved in and made my thinking crowded.”  I could have said this to pretty much all of the people and stimuli in my life until now.  But now…

I take my morning walks, and think mainly about how fresh the air feels on my face, how melodious the birdsong sounds, how fragrant the vegetation is, and heart-warming the footprints of dogs and owners next to dew-kissed grasses.

I sit down to write, and though present to my characters and enjoying watching layers of story unfold, feel un-preoccupied with it all when I’m done for the day.  My stack of “current” unfinished books and magazines holds little appeal when the dishes are done and I’m ready for the evening.  I’d rather just sit on a comfortable chair and be (with a snack).

Is this resounding hush a gift?…a gift given before baby bursts into our lives and quiet is a rarity?  Is it my body’s way of saying, “Peace, dear one.  Let peace, not worry, form the baby in your womb”?

The world keeps on spinning its jumbled, stumbly course.  Big questions are not answered and all around are important thoughts to think and actions to be taken.  But in this soul of mine, in this little apartment where all I hear right now is the hum of the refrigerator and the silent kicks of this baby I have yet to see, I think I’ll simply be.  And for now, in this season, I’ll call that very good.

This post still makes me happy every time I remember it.  Just look at those faces!

In one Buddhist strain (can’t remember now which), teachers speak of a choice we have in relating with the Real, with the Divine…with God, if that word can be understood broadly.  Monkeys or cats, they say.

We can relate with God as baby monkeys to their mothers:  holding on to mother’s back or chest, carried along, yet requiring effort to be so.  The image is a partnership, where the supplicant sees self and God both putting out effort, and self somewhat stranded if the effort of holding on gives way.

Another option is relating with God as newborn kittens.  The image is of being carried by the mother’s effort entirely.  A kitten can no more cling than a lump of clay; it can only cry when it’s hungry, rooting blindly for milk.  Its shelter, its protection, its very survival depend on mother’s care.  My doctor has a poster in one of her receiving rooms of a mother lion with a baby in her jaw, gently carrying it to safer ground.  I think of the cat-teaching every time I’m there.

The teachers say the choice of approach is ours:  monkey or cat.  Neither is better or worse.  Just options we always have.

My roots are Christian, and I’ve often heard Christian teachers exhorting the monkey way.  Through doubts, through hardships, through seasons when life makes no sense and God appears dead (or on serious vacation), hang on.  Maybe especially through such times.  Be faithful.  Let not your heart be swayed.  “Though all else forsake you, still I’ll remain true,” the Psalmist says.

I think the monkey way may be necessary sometimes.  I think it may even be crucial, sometimes, to an important kind of survival.  But I wonder whether the kitten way can sometimes be crucial, too…whether there are cases when the deepest kind of survival requires a complete letting go.  A going limp. An admitting that this clinging business just isn’t working anymore, and, come to think of it, I couldn’t keep clinging if I tried.  God help me, but I can’t do it anymore.

Maybe falling into the “den” isn’t always a fearsome thing, and can actually be the only path, for some, of finding God.  Could those who preach the monkey way most relentlessly be those whose inner voices sound a lot like hungry kittens?  Kittens who think mother monkey’s the only thing they’ve got?

If God is like a roaring lion, as Hebrew scriptures say, maybe God’s lion-ness goes a whole lot further than that.