Spiritual Eldering
September 19, 2010I recently read From Aging to Saging. What a remarkable work to support those in the third or fourth phase of life to enthusiastically move forward, to express, to mentor, to be active in causes for a better world, and to reflect and learn comfort with the stillness, and finally to design the last few weeks, days, hours in our physical body. An amazing work…
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From my friend Barry …
I awoke this Saturday morning, confronted.
Most of my life I have been going “some place,” accumulating degrees, writing some books, establishing a couple of consulting businesses. That has been satisfying. And the importance of “going someplace,” as a result of family urging, the larger cultural ethos preoccupied with success, and my own ego needs, sometimes left me feeling it was all ephemeral, fleeting . Going someplace, accumulating some things (not just outer, material things, but also inner gratification, esteem, and fame), began to seem superfluous.
It was about 20 years ago that I began making visits to monasteries, in silence, initially a week once a year, increasing to week-long stays, every three months, four times a year. These stays at the monastery stand in stark contrast to going some place. I thought this morning, that for me, this was my most perfect expression of going nowhere.
During this period of time I came across the story of St. Francis hanging upside down in a tree, to the amusement of his brothers. He admonished his followers that the essence of life is not the conventional, “right-side-up” view of things. In short, his life was a testimony to not going anywhere, not getting anything as it tends to obscure the truth of the deeper reality of life.
As I awoke this morning I felt bummed that I didn’t know how I would entertain myself, going somewhere, getting something (maybe food, seeing a movie, etc.). I recognized the drift of these thoughts. It was all very familiar. THIS was the very “ground of being” of my life, going somewhere, scurrying for someone, something. (Thank God, I would awaken to the going nowhere of my monastery time, that I would come across the more-is-less urging of St. Francis.)
Jim Sloman’s book, Nothing, has become my “bible,” for the sort of minimalism I got in touch with today. His book is brilliant. Sloman makes the case fro releasing the relentless chatter of my mind (which is almost always about going someplace — or the obsession, worry, or resistance related to that place). He urges entering the now and the deep peace that resides there.
What prompted me to look more carefully at my early morning state was a book, The Wound of Love, I began to read when I awakened. It describes Carthusian monastic spirituality, tracing the counter-intuitive, upside-down discoveries of Carthusian monks arising out of their journey to solitude.
Reading this book I became more cognizant of the futility in how I had put my life together — the compulsive, almost desperate, reaching out for, clutching on to something, anything . . . going somewhere. And then the awareness that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do.
During the greatest loss of my life — the death of first my mom, and then my dad — I was more manifestly present to the light that inspires all of life (despite the darkness) than I had ever experienced before. This time of loss was infinitely more sacred than the desperate holding-on to their life that had occupied me during periods of ill health during their later lives. And now today, St. Benedict’s admonition to “keep death before your eyes,” seemingly “crazy” talk at an earlier time, makes prefect sense — yet another expression of this upside-down perception of life.
Finally, my morning musings somehow speak to my preoccupation with mortality over the last year or so. I know that whatever conventional understanding I might construct about what I think it means to die will be wholly inadequate. Death is the penultimate state of going nowhere. And so I trust that yet another, incomprehensible, upside-down unspeakable flash of paradox will emerge as I transition on to some form that I can not possibly conceive.