Wellspring: inspiration and guidance for a spiritual journey

A bum knee and Buddhism, by Joy Collins

I have been an avid runner for 37 of my 53 years. Whereas I was once speedy and competitive, for many years now I have been a slow jogger without a running watch. Running has been my most constant meditation practice.That has changed in the last six weeks. As oft happens to a post-50 year old body, my knee began acting up for no apparent reason. As a young, fierce runner, I would just continue running and my body would miraculously heal. Now, 6 weeks later, even a leisurely dog walk around the block causes me pain. I hope to get it correctly diagnosed by an orthopedic doc in mid-January. Meanwhile, my frustration mounts as my body fails me. No endorphins to elevate my mood. No aerobic exercise to burn off holiday chocolate. No anchor of my most constant and calming meditation practice. I find myself snippy, this morning even telling my partner I resented her being able to go to her water aerobics class. This is not very spiritual!

When I paused to check in with myself, I was reminded of a quote from one of the books for our upcoming Wellspring session on Buddhism. In Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor asks the question: “Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” How does this connect to my bum knee? My knee is a teeny reminder that eventually my whole self will fail. That is certain. When and how is unknown. But not the “if.” Given this truth, what shall I do? There are people I know who seem so gracious and serene at the end of their lives, let alone when they have something relatively minor like a knee problem. And there are those who seem to go kicking and screaming. I think Batchelor is suggesting that while I might not have a choice about my injured knee, I DO have a choice about my attitude. And that Buddhist ideas and practices can help me move away from snippy, a bit more towards gracious. Since I’m not getting any younger, and more ailments and injuries are certain to appear, why not cultivate a bit of graciousness today with my knee? As Batchelor says, “it requires that I examine my attachments to physical health…for they are ultimately lost.” He believes it is simply the ability to keep pondering the illusion of permanence and to stay in THIS moment that will get me through.

Maybe on this gray December day, I’ll go sit for a few minutes in front of the fire with my snoozing dog, and contemplate all that I in fact am grateful for in this very day.

Evolutionary or Revolutionary?, by Joy Collins

Last weekend my spouse and I were in New Jersey to attend a civil union ceremony. New Jersey legalized same-sex commitments earlier this year. The couple, in their mid-60s, have been in love for 47 years. One of the pair, Marge, is a practicing Catholic, active as a lay leader in her parish. Though she knew the answer, she asked her parish priest to perform the ceremony. He declined, but asked if he could come, without his collar. So the ceremony was instead performed by a federal judge, with “Father Mark” incognito. Both Marge and Father Mark have chosen to stay in the Catholic Church, trying to evolve it from within. They take a lot of heat from their more revolutionary friends. Father Mark told me it’s his and Marge’s church too, and if they leave, the powerful win over the loving. Some might think Marge and Father Mark are weak-spined.  However, I think theirs is a courageous stance. The stance of hanging in to slowly move an institution forward.

In Rochester on the other hand, our city gained notoriety 10 years ago when Father Jim Callan not only blessed same sex unions, but allowed all worshipers to receive communion and allowed a woman in vestments on the altar. The Vatican removed Jim as a priest, and he and his 1,000 person congregation are now part of the American Catholic movement at Spiritus Christi Church. I think Father Jim is courageous too. Each is expressing their radicalism in a different way.

I compare this to almost 500 years ago. Our Rochester Wellspring groups are currently reading For Faith and Freedom, a short history of Unitarianism in Europe, by Charles A. Howe. There are two chapters dedicated to Michael Servetus, who by daring to challenge John Calvin’s Protestant doctrine was burned at the stake in 1553. He believed Jesus was human as well as divine – a heretical threat to the prevailing power structure. Micheal Servetus, the first (and unfortunately not the last) Unitarian martyr, was willing to lose his life for his beliefs.

We don’t ask our Wellspring participants what they are willing to die for. We DO ask them what they are willing to lose, in order to stand up for their beliefs. There is no right answer. Are Marge and Father Mark “right” for working within, some say supporting, the Catholic dogma, or is Father Jim Callan “right” in forcing the Vatican’s hand, and being ousted? I believe we are each called to shine a light to support the “inherent worth and dignity of every person”. And we need to be willing to lose something in that endeavor. At the same time, where we are on the evolutionary – revolutionary spectrum is up to the conscience of each of us.

An Unexpected Treasure, by Libby Moore

Saturday morning I was out running errands and found myself poking through the "hot books" section of our local library. I had a list in my head of a few things I wanted to read, but a new book jumped out at me and landed in my hand and my heart. It's called Here If You Need Me, by Kate Braestrup, a memoir by a woman who become a chaplain for the Maine Warden Service. The dust jacket says she found an unusual calling as a chaplain for search-and-rescue missions in the Maine woods, and that sounded interesting enough. What really grabbed me, though, after I laughed and cried my way through the first couple of chapters, was discovering that she's a Unitarian Universalist minister and that her theology felt completely comfortable to me. In the midst of heart-rending, complicated and difficult stories, she holds an unwavering certainty that love is present and that it matters. Dealing with death more often than most of us, she has thought deeply about what it means and says, in words that sounds so completely right to me: "If you want my considered opinion on what actually happens to us when we die, I have to tell you, I think we just die….If you are, in Christian terms, following Christ, or in Unitarian Universalist terms, completely and wholly in love, then you are in heaven no matter where you are. If you are not in love, you are in hell, no matter where you are. The stories we tell of heaven and hell are not about how we die, but about how we live." So much of this book is about living, about simply being there, loving and caring, not necessarily having the right words (although she often has loving words, funny words, caring words, prayerful words) but being present with the people who need you. May we all find the grace to be present with those we love and to be blessed by the presence of those who love us.

Dailiness, by Libby Moore

Some summers ago at Chautauqua I was introduced to a wonderful little book called Illuminated Life: Monastic Wisdom for Seekers of the Light, by Joan Chittister, who describes the contemplative life in the context of the modern world, with all its distractions and demands. Writing from the Benedictine tradition, which is far removed from my Unitarian upbringing, she still speaks to what matters to me as she sees the challenges of life but keeps a clear sense of what matters most deeply. The lessons from the desert monastics along with her chapters on the spiritual life have relevance for my far-from-monastic life because she is so realistic about the contemplative life in the modern world and why it is so important.

Chittister illuminates the spiritual life by going through the alphabet of its qualities – awareness, beauty, community, and so on, through yearning and zeal. I'm particularly fond of the chapter on Dailiness, which reminds me that the small daily routines of my life are not boring interruptions of my quest for spiritual growth but give me the space to ponder the greater questions. Resistant as I am to household chores, I'm trying to do these chores with a sense of love and connection. I'm trying to keep my life in order because I like having my life in order, because I like being in a calm and peaceful environment.

I've taken to reading a chapter of Illuminated Life as part of my morning mediation, because it gives me something rich and grounded to consider as I sit in silence and then as I move through my day. Here's a piece of what Chittister says about dailiness:

Regularity has been a mark of the spiritual life in every century, in every tradition. The rule of Benedict is built on an ordo of prayer, work, and reading that forms the backbone of every day of the monastic life. Why? Because the spiritual life is meant to be dull? No, because the spiritual life is meant to be constant, meant to be centered. The dailiness of spiritual practices, the practices of daily life, focus the heart and concentrate the mind. Incessant agitation, unending variety, constant novelty, a torrent of gadgetry, a life filled with the strange and the unfamiliar irritate the soul and fragment the inner vision. Dailiness, routine, sameness freees the heart to traffic in more important matters.

During this summer of travels and visits and parties and beaches, it's been such a pleasure each time to come home to the quiet routines of our daily life, where I can look out the window at the pond as I'm washing the dishes and know that this is where I find peace.