The Touch Of Connection

Have you ever observed closely how people tend to greet each other?  Typically there is an awkward momentary hesitancy as each person tries to determine the proper gesture for each particular situation.  Sometimes it is just a nod of the head.  Oftentimes, for both genders, it is with the traditional outreach of the right hand – a centuries-old demonstration that says “I come in peace, and my right (sword) hand contains no hidden weapon intended to harm you.”  Or, increasingly, a hug is exchanged.  Many of those hugs – intended to show affection and make physical connection – are in fact entirely perfunctory, with little real human connection effected.  Often, primarily with men, the hug is accompanied by loud, forceful slaps on the back as if to reassure everyone that one’s manliness has not been lost.

The point of these observations is that they are examples of the awkwardness and hesitancy we feel when trying to connect ourselves to the vast world surrounding us.  The Universe, and Life in all its forms, is so vast, so all-encompassing, and so overwhelming vis-à-vis that little speck called “me.”  When proportions become that disproportional, we do what we always do: pull back.  We separate and distance ourselves from that which seems so unknowable.  We shrink away from the fearsome power of all these forces upon us.

Yet separation itself creates its own fear.  When we feel truly “alone” in this world, we also feel that we are completely on our own for our very survival.  Deep down we crave a sense of belonging, of connection, of being part of all that vastness, even as we may shy away from it in the moment.

Hence our need to touch.  To literally touch the world.  To place fingers, hand or body up against the forms of life that surround us.  Because when we touch, we can find reassurance from our fears.  And the sense of belonging once again within the overall Universe.

The feel of a summer breeze blowing through our hair cools us and awakens us.  Sitting in a calm, meandering stream relaxes us and cleanses us.  When the sun shines on our body we are warmed and feel secure.  The touch of a tree’s bark reminds us of how each thing in the Universe is given appropriate means of protection, and has the potential to live a long and productive life.  A gardener’s hands digging in the dirt yields a true sense of understanding of how nature works.

But it is in the touch of one human being with another that we become most connected.  A human being can be incredibly cruel to other human beings.  But in reaching out to take someone’s hand in yours, or the simple gesture of a hand on another’s shoulder when they are feeling tense or threatened, or giving the genuine wrap-around hug that says “everything is OK and you will be supported when you are hurting” – it is in these simple moments of touch that aloneness dissolves, that connection is made, that inner peace is achieved beyond what words alone can express or achieve.

Perhaps this is why so many people admire Native-American spirituality, which is rooted in respecting and connecting with all of Life’s forms.  It is a oneness that breaks down our usual sense of separation.  In our own spirituality, it is the almost-silent touch of God that reconnects us to our shared essence.  If all of creation is God’s creation, then we have been given the capability to touch that creation in some manner or another.  To understand and know things not by sitting on the sidelines as we too often do, observing (or ignoring) Life from a safe distance.  To know by direct experience.  To know the rain not by viewing it outside through the windows of our home, but to know it by standing in it as a child does, or at least extending a hand into it, and thereby making rain a shared, connecting experience.

To touch one another in a genuine spiritual embrace is to touch Life is to touch Creation is to touch the Universe is to touch God.

© 2013 by Randy Bell

Leaving Fear Behind

An 8/14/2013 posting on my companion blog “Thoughts From The Mountain” discussed “Where Fear Takes Us.”  These are the deep fears we have that drive us to disconnect ourselves from friends and loved ones simply due to “failed expectations.”  That pass up reasonable risks for career and personal advancement.  That avoid traveling to new places out of fear of an unknown danger in an unfamiliar setting.  That avoids the insight into our deeper self that we need to do in order to grow spiritually and mentally.  That posting illustrated that the real tragedy of the Trayvon Martin killing was how a growing surrender to one’s darkest fears can lead one into an ultimate and unanticipated course of negative action.  Action that damages not only the fearful perpetrator, but also potentially those innocents in surrounding proximity and beyond.  In response to this posting, a reader wrote to me to ask, “So what is the opposite of fear, in your opinion?  Faith?  Love?  Peace?”

Each of those suggested words (as well as others) has valid elements towards keeping our fears in check, if not dissipated.  Hope gives us motivation and direction, but it is a transitory state.  Love and Peace are outcomes of a non-fearful state of being, but they are not in and of themselves vehicles for arriving there.  Faith helps to move us away from fear, but something more is required to be in place for Faith to be effective.  That extra something is the certainty of absolute Trust.

I have written about Trust before, most particularly in a 12/10/2011 posting as part of a series on “The 7 Virtues of a Spiritual Life.”*  When we are looking to turn away from the door that leads to our deepest fears, it is through the door of Trust that we walk.  A door that leads not to a dark alley of confusion and harm, but to a bright staircase that leads us to our higher and truer self.

This is not a blind Trust that is given to ourselves or others at face value.  It is a Trust built upon a full knowing of Truth.  It is not a Trust built upon what we would like our friends, institutions and life itself to be or how we would like them to perform, but a fully informed and fully realistic understanding of how these things truly are.  We see Life not through a cloudy fog of misperception, but through acute and clear lenses.  We do not need to create fearful images of things as they are not, because we can Trust things to be as they intrinsically already are.  And what they are always has elements of good, and a catalyst for spiritual growth and learning.

We experience fear when we close our eyes and minds to the Truth of “what is.”  We experience disappointment when we build our expectations based upon our fears instead of that Truth.  We build Trust when we align our expectations with realities.  For real Trust is not just Hope, it is a deep Knowing of what life – people, nature, God – is truly about.  And a knowing that every thing that comes to us comes in multiple layers.  In my home, the whole Universe appears to be centered about me; in the Universe I am but a small, minor spec from a distant star.

“Through Trust, the Spiritual Person does not live in phobic anxiety about all the presumed dangers waiting to befall, but lives confidently and openly knowing that all that comes to us is right in that moment – a rightness perhaps not apparent except in retrospect.”*

How we decide to apply these ideas to our fears is ultimately how we decide to live our life.  It is from passing through the door of Trust that we can then appropriately move through the next door to Love.  Where there is not Trust – in ourselves, in others, in nature, in God – there cannot be genuine Love.  Love without judgment, conditioning, or restrictions.  When we can Trust that the object of our love is exactly as it is, only then can we give that inclusive and unbounded Love toward all things that is as God loves.

*(Complete series available as free digital document from McKee Learning Foundation.)
 

© 2013 by Randy Bell

 

Experience As Teacher

We Americans are a people infused with curiosity.  And usually also very short of patience.  These traits lead us to continually wanting to know more, but also wanting to learn that new thing as quickly as possible.  With no mistakes made along the way.  And the way we are taught to learn – starting in early childhood through beginning adulthood – is very specific: sit quietly and attentively at a desk; listen to someone in authority tell you what you supposedly need to know; then read more about the topic in a book written by another “expert.”  Thanks to all that knowledge pouring in, you then know what there is to know.  Your brain is now full and properly trained.

We take essentially the same approach with our personal efforts in spirituality.  In our desire to be more spiritual, or to live a more spiritual life, we turn to teachers – a priest, rabbi, minister or imam – for instruction and spiritual knowledge.  To answer for us What is spiritual Truth and How do we achieve it?  We read books one after another, whether paperbound, e-books  or audio tapes.  We go to special workshops to hear featured lecturers, whether in-person, in videos, or on Webcasts.  We sometimes even echo the marketing lingo – “this (book, speaker) changed my life!”  The brain becomes saturated with all this information.  But yet we are not satiated.  We somehow do not feel as though we are “there” yet.  So we read one more book; we listen to one more speaker.  We think even harder about all that we have heard and read, yet our search continues.

Books are a wonderful thing.  I have many of them.  A truly inspirational speaker projecting love, wisdom and truth can impact us greatly, inspire us forward in our spiritual journey.  As a spiritual writer and teacher, I hope that I am contributing something worthwhile to someone’s spiritual journey, however small a part.  But in truth, is all of this continual searching, jumping from one resource to another, helping us find what is actually right in front of us?  Our brains feel full.  But what about our hearts, and our souls?

True spirituality is not a way of thinking.  It is a way of being.  The brain may sometimes open some spiritual doors for us.  But it is in the body and the heart, moving into everyday action, that our soul finds its spiritual home.  It is when we leave the spiritual classroom, and begin to live the spiritual truths, that we find our spiritual place.  We put the brain aside, because if we continue to try to feed it, we find its appetite unquenchable.  Instead, we must leave the comfortable familiarity of the books, and the teachers, and live God’s truth in the world all around us.



They are simple Truths.  Be kind to one another.  Be kind to yourself.  Protect and care for all that God has provided to us.  Revel in the natural overwhelming beauty that so completely surrounds us everywhere.  And just love God.

In the end, it is not about arguing dogma, rationalizing the logic of the brain, observing religious rituals.  Those are just tools, not targets.  It is simply learning the spiritual lessons from living the simple spiritual life.  We will never find our spirituality in our minds.  We will only find it in the awe and embrace of the unquestioning heart that sees and accepts the majesty that envelops us.  Hence Jesus’ challenge: to be reborn spiritually so as to see the world as from the innocent, trusting, and believing eyes of a child.  God, the most complex entity that exists, is just that simple.  We can only know that by our experience of it.

“I hear and I forget.  I see and I remember.  I do and I understand.”      (Confucius)

©2013   Randy Bell

Being As Purpose

In the formal Mission Statement of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, CO, it says, “The monk’s life is based more on how he lives than on what he does, and how he works more than what that work is” (italics added).

We all wear many hats and hold many labels simultaneously during the course of our lives.  We rush about everyday trying to find the necessary time to fulfill each of these multiple roles.  We struggle to determine the proper manner in which we will realize these roles.  We often work to find worthwhile meaning in these roles as regards our well-being and self-satisfaction.  And when we fail to find sufficient self-satisfaction, we typically simply take on even more roles – often without discarding any old ones.

Underneath all of this frenzy is a continual search for Purpose in our life.  We sense the nagging feeling of Why Am I Here in this life?  What am I supposed to be doing with it?  What is my Purpose and Calling for my time on this earth?

In our search for answers, we usually focus on What we do, trying to find that “one, specific, overriding thing” outside of us that we should be “doing.”  Most of the time, it is an elusive search.  Elusive because the answer to our Purpose is not in the “out there doing.”  It is to be found in the “within of being.”

“Being” is about how we live, how we think, how we act towards others and to all of creation around us.  Being is how we feel, and how open we are to experiencing those feelings.  Being is having a connection with all that which surrounds our life, regardless of its seeming pleasure or discomfort in the moment, and having a full participation and engagement with it.

When we have quiet clarity inside of us about our Being, then the specifics of what we select to do in the outside world is less important.  How busy we are is less important.  How “successful” we are by traditional external measurements is less important.  Rather, success is realized by how grounded we are in our true self.

Our purpose in Life is simply to Live This Life.  To experience it however it comes to us.  To learn and to grow by life’s teachings.  And then to use that learning to give back to Life.  God does not generally care what we do for our “job” or “career” as long as we are learning and growing well by our experience.  No job is too mundane or beneath us if we do it properly.  No role within society is more exalted than another.  All work is both our teacher and our gift to others.

Instead of agonizing over trying to find our Purpose and Calling, we should instead look to live in simple openness and responsiveness to the calls that come to us.  To seek out many doors, knock on them, and pass through the ones that open to us.  Our life is a trial and error existence, a constant experiment, always fluidly in motion down a curved path not a straight one.  So we choose to move through Life as it comes, as God sends it to us.  It is in that movement itself that we find both God and our True Purpose.

©2013 Randy Bell

The Dark And The Light

Dark.  The word itself often triggers a sense of apprehension, of dread.  It suggests the things that go bump in the night, the scary creatures hiding under our bed.  It is a covering blackness that hides the potential danger and evil that threaten our well-being.  It calls up the shroud of the grim reaper, the time when the evil-doers work their destructive havoc.  It represents the dark corners of our mind, the black holes that live in our hearts.  Yet in the dark we also obtain some relief from the never-ending demands of our working hours.  It is in the dark where we find our rest.  The rest necessary to sustain our bodies and calm our minds.  The fuel to recharge our creativity.

Light.  The brightness in our life.  The force that dispels the totality of darkness that would otherwise envelop our life.  The light awakens our mind so that it can fulfill its creative purpose.  The light gives warmth to the body as well as comfort to the soul.  We arise with the morning rising of the light, and then rest with its evening setting.  Yet with too much light we can suffer sunburn – or worse, skin cancer – so even the positive energy generated by the light still needs limiting.

The dark and the light need each other to mutually define themselves and give purpose to each other.  In the dark, we know our world by touch, smell and hearing, envisioned by the imagination of the mind.  In the light, we know our world by sight, envisioned then by the rational thought of the mind; touch, smell, and hearing diminish as tools for our “knowing.”  In the dark, we create.  In the light, we try to understand.

In a battle for supremacy, the light usually wins.  The dark requires the totality of its being to accomplish “darkness.”  But light dispels that darkness by the mere flicker of a small candle.  A sliver of moon in the sky.  The flame of a single lit match.  Though surrounded by darkness, that candle, moon or match flame will break through the dark, expose our surroundings, and show us all of the directions that are available to us.  Where we may have been hesitant to move in the total darkness, a simple burst from a small light allows us to move on to the next place in our journey, without fear.  We see where we need to go.

It is perhaps thusly that “the light” plays such a prevalent role in the ritual of our spiritual traditions.  Spirituality has a great affinity for the stillness of the dark, because in the dark there is calm, there is rest.  And it is in the calmed and rested mind and spirit that one can best hear God and connect to God’s Universe.  But it is in the light that we can then see best our direction out of the blindness of our dark.  We need not the full light of day for the rational logical mind to guide us.  We need merely the small light of the candle to allow the trusting, intuitive mind to move forward appropriately in quiet humility and confidence.

In the dark we are enveloped by the incomprehensibly vast existence of the Universe.  In the small candlelight that penetrates that dark, a spiritual path is illuminated very narrowly.  And we see our narrow individual path that we follow to God.

©2013 Randy Bell

A Bow To Bowing

What a marvelous little thing a well-placed, properly-intended bow can be.  There is the royal bow, the deep bending at the waist or the full curtsy to bended knee.  But these are intended as a sign of subservience or allegiance that acknowledges a supposedly superior one.  Those are the secular expressions of separation that some people incorrectly ascribe to all forms of bowing.

But then there are the bows not of separation and subservience, but of unity and equality of being.  The bow that, for a moment, returns us to the desirable state of proper humility.  Because arrogance is one of the greatest hurdles to insight and internal peace, and humility is a key to opening that spiritual door.  In this context, the small humble bow can make such a large impact.

The Buddhist and the Hindu place open palms together, with fingers pointed upward, in front of the heart.  The separate parts (the two hands) join together into one wholeness (the form).  She bows slightly from the waist to another, or to nature’s creations, not out of inferiority but in equality.  This gesture can be for one to honor and appreciate the other: the teacher honors the student who honors the teacher.  Through this simple gesture, she can express, “The Divine Light in Me honors the Divine Light in You.”

The Muslim can drop to his knees and touch head to ground.  By this action, he can also reaffirm a lack of personal arrogance or superiority – another form of expression of personal humility shown before God and all humankind.

The Catholic can genuflect before the image of Christ in the sanctuary (or elsewhere).  It can be an intended “interruption” and refocus as she mentally hustles mindlessly from current task to the next to-do item.  The genuflection can remind her to always stop and remember God and the spiritual in the midst of one’s earthly travels and distractions.

The Christian, both Catholic and Protestant, can bow his head, using only a slight movement of the body.  That slightest of motion can be a historical protest to the old royal subservient bow, while subversively acknowledging instead a power far greater than any royal.  Combined with the joined palms of the hands, he can come quietly into prayer – a prayer not of request, begging or supplication, but of communion and connection – the unity of the hands acknowledging the unity of God and God’s creations.

The bow, however specifically performed, is intrinsic to most all branches of spiritual expression.  Done mindfully and intentionally, it can be an expression of outreach to one’s God / Nature / Universe.  To all living things.  To one’s self.  It says to the object of our attention that, “I see you.  I acknowledge you.  I respect who and what you are.  And I give thanks to and for you.”

When we bow to honor another person or thing, we simultaneously bow to honor ourselves.  Namaste.  Gassho.  Amen.

Religious Radicals And Terrorists

There are many tragic stories that have come out of the recent Boston Marathon bombing.  Stories that cause us to quietly contemplate the numerous events such as this, and whatever larger lessons we need to draw from their occurrence.  Lessons in the positive power of government and law enforcement working in cooperation, demonstrating public service at its best.  Stories of selfless heroes, rushing into potential harm’s way to help strangers in need.  These are the good stories we etch into our minds and speak of to others.

Then there are the other things we say that betray our real intentions.  I have written before that “words matter.”  They matter because words create images and impressions either for ill or good – depending upon the degree of thoughtfulness and the intentions of the speaker.  One of the worst of the thoughtless use of words is the media’s and public’s overuse of the terms “radical Islamist” or “Islamist terrorist” as they speculate on the bombing perpetrators’ sick motives.

Islam is a religion.  Islam is not a person.  Just as Christianity and other religions are a religion, not a person.  One who follows Islam has a different name – i.e. “Muslim,” one who “surrenders unto God” (as we all might well do).  Just as a follower of Christianity is a Christian but more appropriately a Methodist, a Baptist, a Catholic, an Episcopalian, an Evangelical, etc.  These are the actual people.  People who interpret and practice what and who they believe across a wide spectrum of words and actions regarding themselves and their fellow human beings.

When we accuse someone who makes extreme statements, or takes violent actions against innocent people, as being an “Islamist radical or terrorist,” we inherently (and inappropriately) confuse the religion with the individual.  An individual who has perverted an expansive religion into a misrepresented personal belief.  Islam did not call for those bombs on Boylston Street to be set.  Rather, two young, disaffected men compensating for their self-perceived inadequacies struck back to make a public, attention-getting statement – as is the case with virtually all terrorists and mass shooters.  But when we paint them with a broad “Islamist” brush, we betray the message of love and peace in the Qur’an nearly as much as those two men betrayed it.

For whatever reasons of history and cultural bias, we seem to find it easy to incorrectly link the religion of Islam with its disaffected radicals.  But we are self-servingly reluctant to apply the same reflex to disaffected Christian radicals and terrorists.  We are quick to criticize Muslim fundamentalists, even as we willingly accept Christian fundamentalists all around us; yet both are extremely rigid interpretations of their core religious teachings.  But what else can you call a North Carolina legislator who recently proposed that Christianity be declared the official state religion?  Or the callous Westboro Baptist Church members who picket funerals of innocent victims and servicepersons as being “an affront to God?”  Or the several Christian shooters and bombers who have killed supposedly “to save lives” from abortion doctors?  Or the Catholic Oklahoma City bomber who killed adults and children as a protest against the government?  Or the bigot who indiscriminately killed peaceful Sikh worshipers in Wisconsin?  Or the small-time minister in Florida who burned the Qur’an to protest Islam and incited ill-will the world over?  Or the Fox News commentators whose continual anti-Muslim rants – done to bump up their ratings – fall just a hair short of being legally classified as “hate speech.”  These people claim a Christian affiliation, purporting that their acts and statements are done “in God’s name.”  But theirs is a God most of us do not recognize.

If we insist on speaking of “Islamist radicals and terrorists,” then let us similarly label the many “Christian radicals and terrorists” who live among us.  Let us at least be consistent in our verbal slandering of good religions and good-hearted people because of the inexplicable and despicable acts of miscreants.  Or better yet, let us just leave religion out of our terminology altogether, and simply call all purveyors of hate what a Muslim acquaintance called the 9-11 perpetrators several years ago: “These people are just a bunch of thugs.”  No religion has a monopoly on thugs.