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Being Peace
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NOTE: Below, I use the word "God." For Westerners, I think that word is useful, especially for it turns so many of us off. A word we do not like is a good word for us to use for the Absolute. But choose any word you wish, but, hopefully, not one you are overly comfortable with. It is better to choose a word that you are not comfortable with. Nevertheless, I would not apologize for using the word "God," and neither do I think God is what anyone says God is, including those who most talk about God. In fact, most of those who talk on and on about God this and God that are the last persons I would direct you to seek out to meet God. Anyway, you can meet God without them, and you already are meeting God, even if you do not know it.
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A man travels thousands of miles over land and sea to the mountain he has been told is where persons can meet God. When arriving at the foot of the mountain, a sign pointing upward reads, "I'm up there." The man labors the narrow path to get to the top. When there and enthused to meet God, as well as exhausted, he sees a second sign. This one points back down, reading, "I'm down there."
So, where is God? Up there? Down there? Over there? Or somewhere? How about nowhere?
I like "nowhere." Yet, nowhere is not an absence... not nonexistence, as it is not existence. Nowhere is a way of saying God - whatever that means - does not fit in any where anywhere. Possibly, then, we have a better chance of experiencing what "God" points to by not expecting God to fit anywhere, including places like churches, synagogues, temples, ashrams, ... And, then, that, too, allows us to be surprised by God showing up anywhere, including the places we are least prepared for God to show up - including places most religious people would not dare be seen at. My sense is... whatever God is and is not, God is as much at home in the grocery store as any place set aside for worship. Just imagine, people will travel the world to a so-called holy place, when God is hanging out at the local grocery store just down the street.
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*Coming out of an 8-Day Silence... Jan. 22.2022 -
After eight days in Silent Retreat alone in a cottage at Ferry Beach, Maine, I get in my truck in the cold winter morning to leave. I message a friend, "I'll drop by a while if ya'll [a hangover from my Southern upbringing] be in." Reply, "We are here. Ready for re entry?" "Never left [with emoticon 'thumbs up']."
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Possibly, I thought - jokingly -, I had been reading too much of the Diamond Sutra - a Buddhist Scripture filled with paradoxes. After all, I had left the everyday world of my usual habitation and was heading back. I had done this many times in the last over twenty years. I was being truthful and humorous.
When I began making these retreats, it felt like something very - yes, very - special. Now, I reflect, thinking on my reply to the friend while driving toward home, that it is special as is my everyday life. The more the everyday becomes special, the more the special is seen to be the everyday - each moment a flavor of the special, even those moments that do not feel special. And in this retreat, many moments did not feel special. So, in a sense, nothing is special, but it is, for it is. In the spirit of the Diamond Sutra, we could say, "Special is special for not being special; special is not special for being special." So, where does this apparent nonsense lead us? We drop the words - they do not fit what we have come to know.
So, we hold paradoxes within us - and walking the Way leads us more and more into paradoxes. The summons is to drop the paradox and feel the experience that does not fit anywhere. Like the experience of leaving the ordinary but not leaving it. Like re-entering my everyday life but not having left it. In fact, meditation is a practice in this - sit with experience, drop all ideas of it, and be intimate with what does not fit anywhere. This practice sounds simple, but for most of us consistently to be with this intimacy, rather than intercept it with thought, we may have to practice for decades. Why? We are so habituated to escape experience through commenting on experience - either out loud to someone or in our heads during the experience. We find while we like the idea of mystery as an idea, we resist it, so tampering with it even while it arises for us.
I discovered this avoidance in the churches, when I was a pastor. While people liked the idea of going to a worship meeting to meet with God, it is somewhat odd and humorous the many ways they would make sure God would be the last thing they would meet.
I do not mean to be critical, only pointing out how challenging it is to leave a direct encounter with Life free without spoiling it. And I have come to see there is wisdom in this style of interruption. After all, do we really need just to sit with Reality, if we are not prepared to do so? So, resistance is part of the Way, too. Fleeing the naked experience can be a safeguard built into our nature, protecting us until readiness arises. The key is to become aware of our avoidance. We need not judge ourselves harshly. Awareness of avoidance is a sign we are growing toward more comfort with the intimacy. Likely, in fact, the persons most avoidant of Divine Presence include those who boast of supposed nearness to the Sacred. Anyway, getting close to God leaves one less likely to boast about it, not more likely. And when you are really close to God, it usually feels like you are not anyway.
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In time, through our spiritual practice, everything becomes holy. Holy, not in some monochrome way, but in a richly divergent way. We get conditioned to live in a new environment: call it God, enlightenment... whatever. And living in this new awareness becomes not in an otherworldly way but not fitting in this-worldly or other-worldly. I know it sounds simple, but: It just is. And we come to find great joy in that intimacy with the textures of Life manifesting as life within and around us.
Our times in spiritual practice are one with the practice of the daily. Over time, they blend together - they always were, except in our mind. Both need to be engaged heartfully as unique in their own way; then, both are special, though different, and they support each other. It is like ice cream. I like ice cream, but I like different flavors. All ice cream is ice cream, but chocolate ice cream is not vanilla ice cream. I prefer the chocolate, but that is a preference and does nothing to diminish the vanilla.
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I noticed this time in retreat how I carried with me my "ordinary" life and its people, including where I live - the house and town - into the silence and aloneness. I did not choose to do this... it simply happened. And is that not a fruition of our walking the Way? The ordinary and the extraordinary, the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the unspiritual, heaven and earth, you and me, inside and outside, here and there, right and wrong, ... become something more than either by itself. And that is a lesson we learn from silence.
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*©Brian K. Wilcox, 2022.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
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