Gifts of the Goddess

Listen to this poem by Pem Kremer, called “Epiphany”:

Lynn Schmidt says
she once saw you as prairie grass,
Nebraska prairie grass;

she climbed out of her car on a hot highway,
leaned her butt on the nose of her car,
looked out over one great flowing field,
stretching beyond her sight until the horizon came
vastness, she says,
responsive to the slightest shift of wind,
full of infinite change,
all One.

She says when she can’t pray
She calls up Prairie Grass.

That’s the poem, about a woman named Lynn Schmidt who describes her experience of the Sacred. A vastness of prairie grass, responsive to the slightest shift of wind, full of infinite change. This is the image she conjures up in her mind, when a need for prayer rises up in her but she can’t easily give voice to it. Not an image of some powerful, transcendent male monarch battling and triumphing against enemies; not an image of a majestic, distant, forbidding grandfather who exists outside and beyond the earth that He has manufactured. Not any of these, but rather: a memory of prairie grass, evoking wonder and awe in her heart. A memory, but also a seed for nothing less than a new mythology, a new way of imagining the Sacred.

Today our topic is the Goddess: what this symbol means and can mean for women and men today.

Definitely this: consciousness-raising. Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow (with whom I personally studied in seminary) tells a story about a gathering of mainly Christian women in 1972, in Loveland, Ohio, to explore theology together. “In one of the small working groups that was a daily part of the conference, the women realized that traditional names for God no longer adequately reflected their experience. They began to call out words that meant God to them, putting their designations on a large newsprint board. One of the fascinating aspects of the resulting list,” says Plaskow, “was its large number of ‘ing’ words—changing, creating, enabling, nurturing, pushing, calling into question, suffering, touching, breaking through. The God of their experience was not an immutable being ‘out there,’ but a process of which they were part.”

“Brushing out my daughter’s dark silken hair,” writes poet Sharon Olds,
before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her purse full of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.

That’s the poem. Mother and daughter—the changes of life—the story of replacement. And it is a sacred story, told with the “ing” words of the women from Loveland Ohio in 1972: changing, creating, enabling, nurturing, pushing, calling into question, suffering, touching, breaking through. This is what the Goddess is. The Goddess moves within the cycles of life and death and rebirth, in the natural world as well as in our relationships, in community. The Goddess is a symbol of that, a way of giving honor to that.

But does the Goddess actually exist? Is the Goddess a being in Her own right, or simply a poetic symbol of the inherent worth and dignity of nature and people, as well as of the flow of interdependencies in which we live and move and have our being?

Here’s how Starhawk answers this question. Starhawk is a feminist writer and activist, a major figure in today’s neopagan movement, as well as an influential voice in the 1995 decision by our Unitarian Universalist Association to formally include earth-centered traditions as one of the six sources of our faith. She says, “It all depends on how I feel. When I feel weak, [the Goddess] is someone who can help and protect me. When I feel strong, she is my symbol of my own power. At other times I feel her as the natural energy in my body and the world.” That’s what Starhawk says, and right here we have another opportunity for consciousness-raising, relating to our understanding of what good theology looks like. Must good theology insist on single answers, or can it be large and contain multitudes? “Is there,” asks Carol Christ, another leading voice in the Goddess spirituality movement, “a way of doing theology that would not lead immediately into dogmatic controversy, would not require theologians to say definitively that one understanding is true and the others are false? Could people’s relation to a common symbol be made primary and varying interpretations be acknowledged?” And then she says: “The diversity of explications of the meaning of the Goddess symbol suggest that symbols have a richer significance than any explications of their meaning can express….”

For me, one particular use of the Goddess symbol is especially profound, and like Starhawk, I go back and forth with it, sometimes seeing it as factually true, other times regarding it as sheer beautiful poetry, but all times moved and inspired to wonder. It’s this: the image of the earth as the body of the Goddess—the one source out of which everything emerged, guaranteeing the interrelatedness and kinship of all things. All beings as children of the same womb, cherished by Her.

“How the days went,” writes poet Audre Lorde (and imagine her voice as the Goddess, speaking to the world that is her body):

How the days went
while you were blooming within me
I remember each upon each—
the swelling changed planes of my body
and how you first fluttered, then jumped
and I thought it was my heart

How the days wound down
and the turning of winter
I recall, with you growing heavy
against the wind. I thought

now her hands
are formed, and her hair
has started to curl
now her teeth are done
now she sneezes.
Then the seed opened
I bore you one morning just before spring
My head rang like a fiery piston
my legs were towers between which
A new world was passing.

Since then
I can only distinguish
one thread within running hours
You, flowing through selves
toward You.

Just listen to that. How different our world would be if this had been the prevailing image of the Sacred in the West—not patriarchal male God, who manufactures the creation as something outside of him, as a watchmaker would skillfully make a watch, but the Goddess, for whom creation is birthed out of her very substance and essence, in pain and in joy? Then, a vision of earth that is common today would simply be unthinkable: that the earth is but a temporary, discardable stage upon which the drama of individual salvation is played out—valuable only insofar it functions as a stage, a holding place, a location. OK to pollute, OK to poison, OK to use as humans see fit. How could this even be thinkable, if the earth were seen instead as the body of the Goddess, in fact or simply in poetic imagination?

Poetry is powerful, whatever the facts may turn out to be. Symbols are powerful. Carol Christ emphasizes this when she says that “Even people who no longer ‘believe in God’ or participate in the institutional structure of patriarchal religion still may not be free of the power of the symbolism of God the [domineering, jealous] Father. A symbol’s effect does not depend on rational assent, for a symbol also functions on levels of the psyche other than the rational. […] [The] mind abhors a vacuum. Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.”

I remember a college philosophy class from years ago, when I triggered a mini-crisis in my students. We had been talking about traditional Western God images and how they have a stubbornly masculine, angry-jealous-God-of-the-Old-Testament dimension. My class of course denied this. Not just men in the room but women too, saying, “Everyone knows that God is beyond gender.” Then I talked about a classic argument for why the Catholic Church rejects women as candidates for the priesthood: Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God was male, maleness is thus tied up with God, therefore only men can be priests. I talked about this—how it was only the tip of the iceberg of instances where women have experienced oppression because they are not made in the masculine image of God. Women locked in stereotypes of passivity, completely contrary to the strength seen in the Goddesses of old: Athena, Artemis, Isis, Brigid. Women absorbing the prejudice that there is something fundamentally wrong and shameful about female bodily functions, like menstruation. Childbirth treated like a disease requiring hospitalization. The fanatic pursuit of youthfulness—postmenopausal women knocked off the pedestal they were placed on when younger—their distinctive beauty not celebrated as it should be. All these instances of misogynism, and more.

Then I gave them the challenge. Thanksgiving was coming up, so I said, When you go home to see your family, ask to say the Thanksgiving blessing over the meal, and just see what happens when you pray like this: “Mother God, who gave birth to our universe and to the abundance that is before us, we thank you….. “ I could just see the wheels turning in their minds, eyes widening when they imagined the consequences. Symbols go deep. Rationally, of course God can’t be male. But the poetry of this persists. Poetry is powerful, deeper than reason, comes first—it is, in fact, the material which reason, second of all, sifts and sorts and makes sense of…. But the poetry, the imagination comes first.

It’s exactly as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

Consciousness needs to be raised. Reminds me of an incident that happened a couple weeks back. One morning, just as I was starting my car and about to leave my home in Decatur to come here, I resolved to take a slightly different path than was my usual habit. I wanted to avoid the noxious traffic on South Candler Street right beside Agnes Scott College, and to do that, early on in my trip I needed to turn right on Kirk Road rather then left. Just this—so simple. Turn right on Kirk, then left on Avery, Avery would take me all the way down to East College, which in turn would take me to Commerce, and on and on. Less traffic this way.

Great. I shifted the car into drive, started off, and my thoughts immediately turned away from my plan to take a different path to work and raced way ahead to the work itself: meetings and conversations and issues and things to do. Details details details. I was already on South Candler Street, slowing down to a stop behind a long line of cars, before I realized what the heck had happened. I had switched to auto-pilot, and auto-pilot doesn’t follow new orders that disagree with deep programming. How could I have lost focus so easily?

For me, the image of the Goddess is powerful because solidifies my intent and my decision to take a different route through my world than usual. It reminds me to expand my sense of the sacred beyond the patriarchal male images that are an inescapable part of our cultural programming, because I don’t want to get stuck in that kind of traffic. Gives a man a heart attack. Alienates a man from love. I mean this sincerely. It happens when men attempt to model their lives after the patriarchal God, which they do. I want to take a different route, turn right when my programming says turn left, and for this, I need to stay focused, I need to stop the chatter of the status quo from taking center stage, I need a God-image that helps me imagine the sacred to be BIGGER than that. BIG, because what I am worshipping I am becoming, and I want to be BIG in my heart. That’s what I want, and I suspect you want it too, men and women alike.

I’ll close as I began—with a poem about prayer. This one comes from Joy Harjo, entitled “Eagle Poem”:

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

Comic Spirituality

Coyote is a key trickster figure in Native American mythology. He’s a shape shifter, part human and part animal, combining within himself all that makes up the human character. In numberless exploits, he is portrayed as greedy and gluttonous, thieving and lecherous. Clever and foolish at the same time. Yet he is the one who created the world, created people, stole sun and moon and the seasons and made them available to the people he created, shaped the very character of the land. 

Here’s one story about this fascinating being: Coyote is sealed up in a hollow log as punishment for some trick he played. Once again, he’s been too smart for his own good. So he’s caught in this log and he tries with all his own personal power to escape but it’s useless, he can’t move an inch, the fit is too tight. He’s stuck.

Which makes what happens next so ironic. There he is, stuck in the log with no way out, and all of a sudden he hears the sound of a woodpecker pecking away at the hollow log. And while you’d think that Coyote would be overjoyed at this possibility of release, he’s cranky instead. “What a racket!” he says to himself. “What an irritating sound,” he says. Doesn’t even occur to him that Woodpecker was going to be his salvation. He just hates all the noise. So he shouts at Woodpecker to get away. “Stop that!” Luckily, Woodpecker keeps on pecking. He can’t hear Coyote shouting from within the log. He keeps on pecking away until he’s drilled a small hole that lets in a bit of the light.

And Coyote sees the light—in more ways than one. Suddenly he’s not at all irritated by the sound. Now he wants more of it! He starts shouting again, but this time, it’s to say, “Hurry up! Get me out of here!”

But now that there’s a hole, Woodpecker can hear Coyote more clearly, and Coyote’s shouting scares him away. He just flies away. It’s only when Coyote begins to appreciate the humor of his situation and disengages from all his anger and irritation and just shuts up that Woodpecker feels safe enough to come back and start pecking at the log again, according to a pace and a rhythm that is natural for him. Coyote just shuts up. Doesn’t say another word. Just waits until enough of the log is pecked away, and he is free, and then … he laughs! 

For me, a story like this suggests some of the central themes of comic spirituality, which is what I want to talk about today. Comic spirituality is about being at home in the world amidst all its conflicts and struggles and dangers. Comic spirituality counters the temptations of the tragic point of view. Comic spirituality also says that, when life is at its worst (or when it just happens to be another round of Daylight Savings), a sense of humor saves. Laughter saves. Asbestos gelos. The person and the community and the world that laughs, lasts.

One of the things I love about Coyote stories is that they give us a behind-the-scenes look at how things came to be and how they are—which is playful. Coyote represents an unquenchable lust for being and life, and he creates and acts out of this lust, but he does not do this like the God of the Hebrew Bible, who always seems to know what he is doing and has everything in control. Coyote acts, but he is vulnerable to the surprising and unexpected consequences of his actions, so he can find himself stuck in a jam, and he’s got to figure a way out, and he does, and this results in yet another close call, leading to yet another burst of creativity, and on and on, and such is the process of the evolution of the world. Not by long-range planning—design established from the very beginning and then executed ideally without flaw—but experimentation, throwing yourself into it, seeing what happens next, facing loose ends and incongruities, experiencing breathtaking beauty and meaning but only to the degree you expose yourself to risk and therefore to pain. Shrugging shoulders at this fact of life; perhaps even laughing at the joy and absurdity of it all….

This is what Coyote stories reveal to us, as they take us behind-the-scenes of our everyday here-and-now. The heart of reality is not serious, but playful. Incongruity and pain are an integral part of the deal; sometimes it’s our fault, sometimes it’s not, and our best bet is to stay cool—to resist nurturing resentments and rage—to go with the flow, stay creative and loose. “One day,” goes another story, “Coyote was walking along. The sun was shining brightly, and Coyote felt very hot. ‘I would like a cloud,’ he said, so a cloud came and made some shade for Coyote. But he was not satisfied. ‘I want more clouds,’ he said, and more clouds came along, and the sky began to look very stormy. But Coyote was still hot. ‘How about some rain?” he said, and the clouds began to sprinkle rain. ‘More rain,’ Coyote demanded. The rain became a downpour. But now Coyote wanted a creek to put his feet in, so a creek sprang up beside him, and Coyote walked in it to cool off his feet.’ It should be deeper, said Coyote, and so the creek became a huge, swirling river, and now Coyote got more than he bargained for. He found himself swept up into the currents, rolled over and over, thrown up on the bank far away, nearly drowned. When he woke up, he saw buzzards circling him, trying to decide if he was dead, and he shooed them off. He looked around him. He had made the Columbia River. This is how that great river began.

I always think of Coyote when I sing “Bring Many Names,” #23 in the grey hymnal. There’s a verse that captures his essential spirit: “Young, growing God, eager still to know, / willing to be changed by what you started, / quick to be delighted, singing as you go: / hail and hosanna, young, growing God!”  This is the only kind of God I could ever believe in, I think. Not a God that somehow stands outside of the natural order of the universe, who intervenes supernaturally in ways that favor one person over another or one tribe over another. Not a God that is locked inside the metaphor of maleness, or the metaphor of the human. Not a God that is all-powerful, with unlimited ability to act and yet appears to remain passive and uncaring when evil in the world is truly excessive, far beyond what seems needful for people to grow strong and wise. Especially not this last part, since then, how could the heart of reality be playful? How could anyone truly feel at home in a world in which a God existed who had the power to prevent evil but held back from using it? Allowed the very worst to occur?

There is a current in contemporary theology, called process theism, that takes very seriously the idea that behind-the-scenes is a playful force like Coyote, or the “young, growing God” of our hymnal. Process theism sees God as the creativity of the universe, and there are two sides to this. One is the body of the universe, the evolving interdependent web of all existence. Process theology tells us that it is sacred: galaxies and stars, trees and animals, you and I. All of it is part of God’s growing body. The world is God’s body. That’s the first side, and here is the second. God is a consciousness over and above the universe, just as you and I have a consciousness that is over and above our own bodies. You and I feel our bodies and think about them; we hope things for them and envision goals and futures; and it’s the same thing with God. God has a conscious side to complement God’s physical side. God is both the world and the consciousness of the world. Put the two together, and this is the kind of God that process theology envisions.  

One of the immediate implications of this picture of things takes us right back to Coyote, and to comedy. God simply cannot force the universe to do whatever God wants. Therefore, things can get tangled up. Slapstick happens. Evil happens. God’s power is not unlimited. The universe has creative independence and freedom, just like your own body when it gets sick. Your mind doesn’t want it to be sick, but it is anyhow, and you have got to deal. Same thing with God. God doesn’t want the world to be sick, and yet the world has creative independence. God simply can’t enter into the world supernaturally, like a bull in a china shop, and stop this and start that. All God can do is influence the world from the inside—and I know this might sound strange, but think of how cancer patients participate in their own healing. Cancer patients visualize their immune system as strong, as powerful, as potent, and the immune system responds. Similarly, God visualizes blessing and healing for this world, and if we are open to it, we can respond and receive. Nothing supernatural here at all. God influences the world from the inside, showers continual blessing up on us, impartially, universally, and does it without us having to ask. But the world has creative independence too, and so the blessing might not be received, we might be so stuck in the log of our fears and angers and resentments that we can’t hear God’s still small voice…. The blessing might not be received. That is simply the reality and risk of freedom.

And by now you may be noticing something about comic spirituality. It’s not frivolous. It’s a way of being in the world richly, in the midst of incongruity of every kind—pain, suffering, death. It says, if the heart of reality is like Coyote, or like the God of process theism, then there’s nothing malicious behind-the-scenes for us to resent and rebel against, like some tragic existential hero. Life is an open adventure. Accidents do happen. We can get firmly stuck in logs of all kinds. But don’t forget about the woodpeckers out there, who are on their way. All we have to do is stay calm, and let them do their work to free us, so we can continue the adventure.   

And this takes us to the next theme of comic spirituality, which has to do with resisting the temptations of the tragic point of view. The temptations are great. Two quick illustrations are in order. One has to do with an observation about kite string. Ever gone kite flying, and (wind being the trickster that it is) your kite takes a nose dive, and in the process of reclaiming your kite, you tangle up the string? If you are like me, trying to untangle it can make you impatient, and then angry, and suddenly you feel like a tragic hero. The world is unfair, the world is against me, the world is doing this to me … and before you know it, you have forgotten that your best bet is to finesse things. You are pulling on the tangles way too hard, jerking and tugging them, making a bad situation worse. What was originally just tangle is now a hard knot, an unredeemable mess. 

Second illustration. Think Achilles, from ancient Greek mythology: his famous rage. Rage is the fundamental emotion that moves Achilles in the Trojan War—rage at being dishonored by the Greek general Agamemnon, so he will not fight; then rage at the Trojans who killed his close friend Patroclus, so now he will fight. Rage has him in its grip, and he is bursting with it, and not once does he question whether the Gods are on his side. He does not think: he acts. His deeds are larger-than-life and always to be remembered, but no one would call Achilles wise. The tragic mindset is not wise. Fundamentally reactive as it is, it simply cannot step back from the righteous heat of the moment and cool off; and this means it has a hard time being self-critical, or empathetic towards a different point of view, or creative. Every problem is a nail, to be solved by hammering. Our world—with all its curves and complexities and behind-the-scenes jitters—is just not a good fit for straight-arrow people like Achilles, and that’s why the traditional ending of a tragic story is not the journey that runs ever on, but the journey stopped short by the death of the hero. Tragic heroes are swept under and destroyed by the very life that they are so ill-equipped to understand and work with.

Succumb to the temptations of the tragic point of view, and the result is disaster. We never get out of the log, in one sense of another. Emotions like anger and sadness and fear sweeping us away, and out of these we react to whatever life sends us; we become so noisy we scare away savior woodpeckers for good. This is the key ingredient of the tragic mindset: stuckness in difficult emotions, endless rumination, which makes it difficult to stay loose and creative in our thinking, keeps things way too serious, causes us to feel discomfort with ambiguity and complexity, prevents us from being able to walk a mile in another’s shoes. In other words, low emotional intelligence. People finding themselves in a tangle, challenged by a diversity of valid perspectives and valid concerns, and before you know it, the tangle, which could have been finessed, has become a hard knot, another Middle East conflict. Well intentioned people wanting to fight for justice and for peace, but somehow they bring the fight to each other, and there is petty bickering and posturing and rigid political correctness and a party line; and suddenly these well-intentioned people, wanting to fight for justice and for peace, find themselves in the middle of a circular firing squad of their own creation. If you have ears to hear, then hear this.

But a comic perspective keeps things sane. It keeps us working together in world that is impure, keeps us hopeful even when the system we can’t extricate ourselves from is compromised and flawed. In this regard, I like what Chinese writer Lin Yutang has to say: “[T]he tremendous importance of humor in politics can be realized only when we picture for ourselves … a world of joking rulers. Send, for instance, five or six of the world’s best humorists to an international conference, and give them the plenipotentiary powers of autocrats, and the world will be saved. As humor necessarily goes with good sense and the reasonable spirit, plus some exceptionally subtle powers of the mind in detecting inconsistencies and follies and bad logic, and as this is the highest form of human intelligence, we may be sure that each nation will thus be represented at the conference by its sanest and soundest mind. […] Can you imagine this bunch of international diplomats starting a war or even plotting for one? The sense of humor forbids it. All people are too serious and half-insane when they declare a war against another people. They are so sure that they are right and that God is on their side. The humorists, gifted with better horse-sense, don’t think so.”

Amen to that. The temptation of the tragic point of view is ultimately a temptation to do violence and war—especially in the name of our highest and noblest ideals. But comic spirituality counters it. A sense of humor saves us. Which leads to the third and last theme of comic spirituality I want to address today: the power of laughter—unquenchable, invincible laughter. Asbestos gelos. The person and the community and the world that laughs, lasts.

Consider the experience of Captain Gerald Coffee, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. After three months in captivity, Coffee’s Vietnamese jailor ordered him to wash in a rat-infested shower room littered with rotting things and garbage all around him. As he felt the stream of cold water against his body, he was overcome with despair. There he was in a dismal hole, body broken, totally uncertain of his fate, pressure to do this, do that, hostility his daily fare, men dying every day, the fate of his crewmen unknown. That’s where he was, mind, body, spirit, as the cold water washed over his body. Then he raised his head, and saw something. There at eye level on the wall in front of him, scratched in by some other American who’d been there before him, were these words: “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” And he couldn’t help but smile. In that crazy place, woodpecker had come for him, and he laughed out loud. He felt such gratitude for the spunk of that unknown American who was able to rise above his own dejection and pain to inscribe a line of encouragement. And Captain Gerald Coffee, there in captivity in a Vietnam prison, found strength to go on.

Sometimes laughter takes us by surprise, and we find strength to go on. Better yet, though, is a conscious intent to nourish our sense of humor regularly. Never allowing the humor tank in us to go empty. Brush your teeth every day, top off your humor tank every day. Watch John Stewart, or Bill Maher, or South Park. Read The Onion. Whatever. Whatever can puncture our self-righteous pretensions, loosen us up, bring us back down to earth, keep us energized and plucky. We laugh so that we can last.

I want to close with some humor aerobics. It’s just like regular aerobics to get the blood pumping—humor aerobics to get the sense of humor pumping. To do it, you don’t have to feel particularly happy beforehand; although by the end, you might just be laughing like crazy, and it feels so good….

Here’s the exercise. It’s one of my favorites—it’s called The American Bat Face. It’s especially good to do right before you are about to enter into a difficult conversation. Let me describe it first: 

1. Place your hand on top of your head, with the fingers pointing straight forward

2. Reach down with the middle two fingers and touch the tip of your nose—pull the nose up, flaring the nostrils

3. Flap your tongue in and out of your mouth while making a high-pitched squealing noise

4. Think to yourself repeatedly, “This is not stupid, it’s silly.”

If this feels too uncomfortable for you, you absolutely have permission not to do it. But I hope as many of you as possible will try it and see what happens. As you do it, see if you can hear Coyote laughing with you…

Ready? Let’s go on three…..

*

You see, there’s an important difference between “stupid” and “silly” that comedian Steve Allen’s son, Steve Allen Jr., points out. He says that “stupid” means ignorant and uneducated. But having fun and playing is not stupid—it’s “silly,” and “silly” is a word that comes from the Old English, meaning completely happy, completely blessed. Silly was a blessing you wished upon those you loved.

I wish that upon you today, and forever. Be more silly in your life, and be blessed.

 

 

Notes on “How to Find Your Mission in Life”

Notes on How to Find Your Mission in Life (by Richard Nelson Bolles)

 

What life is like when people are living their mission: “We now have a strong desire for living combine with a strange carelessness about dying. We desire life like water and yet are ready to drink death like wine.” (G. K. Chesterton)

 

Three aspects of Mission (according to Bolles)

 

First aspect: “to seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your Mission is derived.”

·         Mission is shared with all others

·         Requires unlearning the idea that our Mission is primarily to keep busy doing something—it’s more about learning how to BE a Son and Daughter of God

·         “Before we go searching for ‘what work was I sent here to do?’ we need to establish or in a truer sense reestablish contact with this ‘One From Whom We Came and The One to Whom We Shall Return.’ […] [B]y the very act of being born into a human body, it is inevitable that we undergo a kind of amnesia… We wander on earth as an amnesia victim. To seek after Faith, therefore, is to seek to climb back out of that amnesia. Religion or faith is the hard reclaiming of knowledge we once knew as a certainty.” “But we are ever recalled to do what we came here to do: that without rejecting the joy of the physicalness of this life, such as the love of the blue sky and the green grass, we are to reach out beyond all this to recall and receive a spiritual interpretation of our life. Beyond the physical and within the physicalness of this life, to detect a Spirit and a Person from beyond this earth who us with us and in us…”

·         Cf. Rabbi Steinsaltz: “every descent is for the sake of ascension; when we fall, what we get is the opportunity to pick ourselves up and perhaps be even stronger than we would have been had we not fallen.”

 

Second aspect: “to do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guiding of God’s Spirit within you and around you.”

·         Mission is shared with all others

·         Requires unlearning the idea that everything about our Mission must be unique to us

·         “But instead of the mountaintop, we find ourselves in the valley—wandering often in a fog. And the voice in our ear says something quite different from what we thought we would hear. It says, “Your mission is to take one step at a time, even when you don’t yet see where it is all leading, or what the Grand Plan is, or what your overall mission in life is. Trust Me; I will lead you.”

·         “In every situation you find yourself, you have been sent here to do whatever you can—moment by moment—that will bring more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness, more honesty, and more love into this world. There are dozens of such moments every day. Moments when you stand—as it were—at a spiritual crossroads, with two ways lying before you. […] It all devolves, in the end, into just two roads before you, every time. The one will lead to less gratitude, less kindness, less forgiveness, less honesty, or less love in the world. The other will lead to more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness, more honesty, or more love in the world.”

·         “It is necessary to explain this part of our Mission in some detail, because so many time you will see people wringing their hands and saying, ‘I want to know what my Mission in life is,” all the while they are cutting people off on the highways, refusing to give time to people, punishing their mate for having hurt their feelings, and lying about what they did. And it will seem to you that the angels must laugh to see this spectacle.”

·         “The valley, the fog, the going step-by-step, is no mere training camp. The goal is real, however large: ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth, as it is in Heaven.”

 

Third aspect: “to exercise that Talent which you particularly came to earth to use, in the place(s) or setting(s) which God has caused to appeal to you most, and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world.” 

·         This aspect of Mission is uniquely individual

·         Requires unlearning the idea that our unique mission (1) is something that we are ordered to do, without free choice on our part, (2) consists in achievements which all the world will see and recognize as valuable, (3) is something we accomplish on our own, without the Spirit’s constant partnership…. 

·         The talent we most rejoice in using “is usually the one which, when we use it, causes us to lose all sense of time.”

Trying to act just like the God we might not believe in

We remember (again) that we are human when we fail in our attempt to be like God. This is what I learn every time I act on the presumption that I am a limitless self in a limitless world.

 

Congregations learn this too when they try to be all things to all people—when they try to gather two of every kind into their midst like a Noah’s Ark, and in this way attempt  to exert the kind of power only the Hebrew God of myth has.

 

This is what they learn—that they are only human—when they are driven by the anxious presumption that if any good is going to happen in the world, it must happen through them.

 

Congregations and individuals try to be like God, and we can do this even if we don’t believe in God. We might not believe, yet this disbelief is powerless in the face of the anxious urgency to act just like the God we don’t believe in.

 

When people stop taking God seriously, they unconsciously and unknowingly fall into the trap of trying to be like God.

 

This is what happens. And so, when all our efforts to be God-like fail—and after we are finished beating ourselves up and beating each other up because we fall short of omnipotence and omniscience—we are grounded in the earth of our humanity. We can find a more honest and compassionate way to live.