All in a Day’s Work: The Magic of Both/And

I met with a young woman who promised me she only used clean needles.  Going through withdrawals from heroin, she wept as she begged the Emergency Room doctor for something that would make everything feel better.  She wanted to quit using—she just didn’t want to experience the pain of quitting.  She expressed anger when we couldn’t produce a magic wand and make her addiction and it’s consequences go away.

In a world that emphasizes either/or, black/white, now/never, there is a place for learning that there is more to the moment than now-or-never.  I tried to help the young woman recognize that she was in the best place she could be, and did my work to get her the help she so desperately needed.

It was easy to see her “I want it NOW” mindset.  I see it often in my line of work.  I grew up with it in the bowels of Christian fundamentalism (The sinner’s prayer or go to Hell!).   As destructive as I know it can be, I inadvertently carry it around with me all too easily.

As a clinician, I want to be amazing…now.  As a parent, I want to be incredible…now.  As a partner, I want to get all this relationship stuff exactly perfect…now.  When I get into the now-or-never mindset, I can start beating myself up at the drop of a hat whenever I feel like I fail in any of those areas.

Instead of getting it all “right”, I fumble around, lost in the forest when I should be observing a tree, or stuck in the tree when I need to have a view of the forest, and only sometimes managing to be at the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

Or maybe that is more of that either/or, right/wrong thinking that trips me up so often.  Maybe there isn’t necessarily a right thing.  Maybe it’s okay to be stuck up a tree when a view of the forest is handy.  Maybe I can learn how to climb a little higher in that tree and get a good look at the top of the forest, in both at the same time.

Both/and.  Both/and.  Both/and.

I love the concept of both/and…but it can sure be hard to live.

The young woman wanted a magic wand.  Both/and can be that magic wand.  It is an instant anxiety-reducer when one is in the grip of  the stressful either/or.  Both/and gives me space to breathe, to think, to feel, to know that all will happen in its time, remembering process as well as product, journey as well as destination.

Spiritual Growth Re-Defined: Finding Me, Finding God

“The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not.  It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening.  The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.”  — Aldous Huxley

I like this.  Spiritual growth is the growing awareness of who I am, at my core.  My essence is wildly Divine.  My ego? Not so much.  My pain-body (as Eckart Tolle would call that thing that has a life of it’s own) is a disaster.  But there is a difference between those things and my essence.

In the evangelical Christianity of my childhood and young adult years, I was taught that my essence, my spirit, was dead.  I learned that the whole of humanity was like walking zombies.  You were born with a dead spirit.  I was born with a dead spirit.  Until the day that I asked Jesus to live in my heart, they explained, and then that was the day that my spirit came alive.

And so then it wasn’t so much a matter of coming to myself but a matter of trying to learn more about who Christ was.  Because it wasn’t about me—it was never supposed to be about me.  It was all supposed to be about Him.  And my spirit was now alive and all the work was done (since we can’t earn salvation) and that was that, so the business Huxley is talking about, the business of growing in awareness and understanding of my own essence, wasn’t on the table.  It wasn’t even under the table.  It wasn’t even in the room.

But for some of us, it somehow accidentally got in there.  Or we accidentally got out there, however it happened.  We started asking questions that our books, our theologians, our pastors, our Bible study group couldn’t answer.  We started noticing how those questions were hushed, shamed, or just ignored.  Sometimes we were even told that a good Christian would never ask such questions.  And sometimes, working to be good Christians ourselves, we told other question askers that very same thing…

There is a lot of energy that goes into making sure that people do not become aware that they are very powerful beings.  My suspicion is that this is because powerful beings will not be dependents.  And while I happened to experience this primarily within Evangelical Christianity, this interesting expenditure of energy focused on keeping people from their power is certainly not solely found there.  It’s found all through history in a variety of contexts, settings, governmental structures, religious paradigms, relationships…

I am walking in the awareness that coming into my own power (coming into my own God/dess-likeness) and learning to walk in that power (learning to live and move in love and compassion and truth and mercy, etc) is the spiritual journey I have been on for my whole life.  I just got really mixed up on the way.

God: So Very NOT In Another Galaxy, Far Far Away…

“The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw—and knew I saw—all things in God and God in all things.”  ~ Mechtild of Magdeburg

For days and for years and for an entire life I was told the confusing evangelical tale about two Gods who were the same God.  One was a God who looked down from Heaven upon me, watching what I did, and the other was a God who lived inside of me.  It was supposed to be both/and, only it was often very difficult to meld the two.

I dutifully sang the song as a child, “Oh be careful, little eyes, what you see.  For the Father up above is looking down in love, so be careful little eyes, what you see,”  I learned that little hands, little feet, and little eyes had better always be careful.

It was scary, knowing about that God in the sky.  They said He was a God of love, yet He was always watching in such a way that one had better not mess up.  “Oh.  So that’s what love is…”  Little girls can’t help it if they draw appropriate conclusions from confusing messages.

And yet there was also the God who lived inside of me.  After all, if I didn’t ask Jesus into my heart, I wouldn’t be in heaven.  So the God who lived far away now also lived inside of me.  He died so that I wouldn’t be sent to a place of eternal torture where I would beg for death but not be allowed to have it.  In order for me not to go to that place, He had to suffer horrible torture Himself as the sin of the world was placed upon Him, at which point (even though He too was God), the God in the Heavens was not even able to look upon Him.

This was a strange system, very confusing, yet constantly and consistently presented as simple fact and, given the disastrous consequences of pissing this God off, one tended not to question such a salvation. In fact, quite the opposite.  I began preaching this salvation to my friends, starting in 2nd grade and into adulthood.  I truly and honestly meant well.  I didn’t want to see these poor people go to Hell, the reality of which was so built into my core belief system that I did not even question it, even while hating it, until I was in my thirties!

The first set of verses I memorized as a child in a Bible memory program (a very popular one in the church world I grew up in) were about the wickedness of humanity.  I was taught that God was not even able to look at us unless we had Jesus (who was also God) in our hearts.

I remember my child learning those same verses, when I enrolled her in that very same program.  Good moms put their kids in that Bible club.  It’s just how it’s done.  How I winced as I helped her learn that same passage, “There is none righteous, no not one.  There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.  All have turned away.  They have together become worthless.  There is no one who does good.  Not even one.”  The book of Romans, as we interpreted it, clearly explained that we were, quite literally, worthless.

No wonder conservative Christianity is known for being judgmental.  With a worldview like that, how could a faithful practitioner not be?  Many loving and compassionate people live within the fearful walls of Christendom.  They don’t mean to be judgmental.  They are just doing what they are told, believing what they are taught.  Their awakening may come, some day.  Until then, it helps not to take their behavior personal.

God, as I was taught, was very separate from you or I.  He was male.  He was in charge.  And He was most emphatically not smiling when He looked down at what He deemed as worthless beings who had all turned away.

I love being out of that theological world.  I love looking out at humanity and not seeing them as either lost souls to be won to the Lord or evil “secularists” to beware of.  I love having a view of God/dess that is wide, expansive, and joyous.

I was quite specifically taught that those who said God was in all were dangerous.  For three straight decades, I eschewed even that thought.  And then the awakening began.  Now God is in my hands as I hug my little one.  Goddess is in the cucumber vines pushing out their sweet harvest.  The gods are in the water, air, wind and fire.  The Divine is everywhere.

This isn’t a world to be feared.  Don’t be careful, little eyes, what you see.  Eyes are open and you are awake now!  Drink it all in.  The colors, the richness, the pulsing vibrancy of life.  It was meant to be celebrated.

Sleep Until You Waken

“Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you’ll see the world
If I’m not mistaken…

Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure…

Face your life
Its pain,
Its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.”

― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Many tried to wake me up while I lay fast asleep.  I remember those who spoke to me with urgency on their faces.  They had been where I was going, they saw the signs of a long hibernation, and they warned me, but I could not hear them.  I had closed off my options.  There were only two options.  The world became very black and white, and if I did not dive headlong into my fundamentalist faith, then Hell was the result.

They loved me.  So they tried to warn me, but the time for me to hear was many years away.

I have done the same thing since.  I have watched young women, hungry for truth and searching for a safe place, grasp hold of the promises made by the sharp dualistic world of fundamentalism.

I couldn’t keep silent.  I warned.  I cried.  I begged.  They began to see me as an agent of Satan.  I stopped, finally learning.  I stood by as the sparkle went out of their eyes.  My heart ached for them but I finally understood.  The sleeper cannot awake until the sleeper is ready.