The Mothers of God

I language the world for a living. And though I hate to admit it (because it’s bad for business) it really can’t be done. As a writer, lecturer, and singer-songwriter, my entire career has been a quixotic battle to achieve the impossible. I strive to express what cannot be expressed. I oversell and under-deliver every single day.

            And yet I keep trying. Because you get close. Once in a while you pierce the fog with the bright shard of an idea, a fortunate turn of phrase, an apt metaphor. You get close to naming the mystery. You almost sing truth. But stepping off stage you know you missed it. Your old friend disappointment comes to visit. You didn’t get it, not really. But on the calendar a string of speaking events, concerts, and writing deadlines loom before you, like downstream towns on a river journey – chances to try again. You’ll do better next time.

            I guess all work is like this. Raising children, starting a business, writing books, mastering any craft. You begin with the end in mind, or at least what you imagine the end to be, and you get busy. But you don’t really know what you’re doing, or where this is all going, or what value any of it will have. You have nothing to guide you but your gut sense that this is worthwhile, that it matters, that it will somehow help others meet their own nameless needs. Because that is one thing you do know – that all work is service, that we are all here to play our part in a symphony of infinite complexity and breathtaking beauty. Seen this way, life begins to shimmer with significance, and you begin to see your choices as instruments wielded not by your narrow self-interest but by the cosmos itself. It no longer feels like you alone are doing this. It’s more like you are being led or called or compelled by something not you. Maybe the way we show up and offer our gifts is how the universe shows up and offers its gifts. Everything in the foreground is the mouthpiece through which the background depths speak. When you get out of your own way your true voice emerges.

            When you begin to understand this better, you begin to relax. You let go of the illusion of control and you renounce the need to be perfect. You know that who you are, how you are, and what you are is enough. And with a sense of play you go about improving your work in a thousand little ways, not because what you did last time was lousy – it wasn’t – but because something better is trying to emerge through you, as you. And who are you to interfere with that?

            It’s liberating to know that you don’t have to have all the answers before you begin. It’s inspiring to know that your own nameless longing is the same nameless longing that courses through everything. And it’s empowering to know that our private suffering connects us to one another in a web of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “inter-being.” We are never alone. There is no such thing as alone.

            As we deepen into the realization that our yearning is not a private pang of deficiency, but the cosmos longing to give birth to itself through us, we surrender, let go, smile, and shift into optimism and wonderment. Being a witness and a participant of this great unfolding is our highest bliss.

            The 13^th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart put it this way: “What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1,400 years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.”

            And 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi put it this way in his poem Each Note:

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.

Each note is a need coming through one of us

a passion, a longing-pain.

Remember the lips

where the wind-breath originated,

and let your note be clear.

Don’t try to end it.

Be your note.

I’ll show you how it’s enough.

Go up on the roof at night

in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs

and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

When we live authentically, answering the call and courageously trading security for the danger of self-realization, we honor ourselves and the universal source in one fell swoop. How can this not lead to rewards unimagined in more timid hours?

We do not breathe – we are breathed. We do not sing– we are sung. We do not make art – art makes us. As Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” And when you begin to experience life this way – not as a private event but as a wave in a boundless sea of waves – you slip into illumined stillness and from there everything is possible.

It is the role of the artist to bring forth these realizations in ever new forms relevant for their time and place, and to show us our oneness. Art connects us all in a binding ritual and reminds us of our common humanity. Art crosses all borders, no, annihilates all borders. The storytellers and film makers who reveal our secrets through the lives of their characters, the musicians who color our silence with sound, the poets who say the unsayable, the painters who show what cannot be seen, the sculptors who wrest shape from shapelessness – artists re-present the ineffable power of our own lives to us over and over again, and in this way affirm us in our limitlessness and infinite beauty.

As Meister Eckhart said, we are here to give birth to God – the formless source that takes form as our thoughts, our bodies, our words, our actions, and the majesty of the entire cosmos. “God is always needing to be born,” he wrote, and he was right. As we midwife one another’s birthing, and as we endure the sometimes agonizing process of our own birthing, we honor ourselves, each other, and the sacred source. Our lives are the instruments through which the universe sings. And as Rumi wrote, “Let your note be clear…be your note. I’ll show you how it’s enough.”

Music and Meaning

When we lost Aretha Franklin, we lost an American icon, a towering genius of musical prowess. But in an important way, her beauty never left – it lives within us, and when we listen to her music, all of the power and magic is fully present. Music doesn’t die. Nothing real ever does. There’s a timeless essence hidden just beneath the surface of the waves of impermanence. Music reveals that eternal realm and draws us into accord with it.

            When words, doctrines, and explanations fail us, songs salve our wounds and bind our broken places. As Beethoven said, “Music is a higher truth than philosophy.”

            At the heart of every great wisdom tradition lies one core idea: ineffability. The ultimate source or ground of being is beyond words and thoughts. We cannot name it or describe it. We cannot even think it. Language and conceptual thought are wonderful tools, but they only get you so far. There’s a glass ceiling even they cannot penetrate. But what lies beyond that glass ceiling can be apprehended, experienced, and felt. And music is a powerful catalyst for that apprehension.

            In the weave of melody, in the dance of chords, in the breath and beat of rhythm there is an alchemy that binds the threads of our souls into the web of being around us. Of course we can’t talk about it. But the tears in our eyes don’t lie.

            Who hasn’t driven home, turned off the car, and sat in the garage unable to tear yourself away from a beautiful piece of music? This is home now.

            In Plato’s masterpiece The Republic, he argues that knowledge has four levels. The lowest level consists of images, say, the image of a tiger in your mind. The next level, slightly more real, is seeing an actual tiger. The third level is the rational level, beyond the sensory realm. Here, real knowledge begins to take shape, utilizing logic, evidence, and rational discourse. But even this isn’t the highest level of knowledge. There is a fourth level called noesis – intuitive grasping or awareness. At this level we no longer use logic, language, or concepts – just pure, formless, concept-free awareness. Plato, like mystics the world over, says that the highest truths and realities elude the grasp of the conceptual mind. We know them only when we transcend linear thought.

            In Buddhist philosophy, Nagarjuna makes a similar claim. For him there are two levels of knowledge: ordinary knowledge and transcendent knowledge, or prajna. Ordinary knowledge is comprised of concepts, analogies, logic, and categorization. Then there is a higher form of knowledge called prajna which has little to do with conceptual thought or language. It is direct seeing into the nature of things, without conceptualization. In Buddhism this is sometimes likened to “awakening” or “enlightenment,” although those are just analogies, and as we have seen, analogical thinking exists at the level of ordinary knowledge.

            In the ancient Chinese wisdom tradition of Daoism, Laozi begins his magnum opus The Daodejing with the famous line, “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.” With this warning, Laozi emphasizes the gulf between conceptual thought and reality. Our concepts, no matter how subtle, sophisticated, and well-wrought are pictures of a plum, never the plum itself.

            Zhaungzi, another Daoist teacher who lived a few hundred years after Laozi put it this way: “A fish trap is for catching fish. When the fish is caught, the trap is forgotten. A rabbit snare is for catching rabbits. When the rabbit is caught, the snare is forgotten. Words are for capturing ideas. When the idea is caught, the words are forgotten.” Like Laozi before him, Zhuangzi delights in the playful use of provocative language, but never as an endpoint – only as a starting point. Words and concepts are tools that help us construct a bridge to meaning. But they can never be the meaning itself.

            In a famous Zen story, one day the Buddha gathered his whole company together to deliver a talk. On this day, instead of saying a word he simply held up a flower. Only one man, Kashyapa, signaled with his eyes that he understood what was being said. For Zen Buddhists this is the origin story of their tradition – the origin of the wordless transmission: that wisdom or prajna is conveyed directly, not at the level of language and concepts, but at the level of experience. No scriptures or rituals needed. Just open hearts and deep surrender to what is.

            This is why music, and all art for that matter, is so powerfully effective at opening us to the cosmic mystery that we are. It administers to our whole being, not just our intellect. As wave after wave of powerful, beautiful music pours through our mind-body literally altering our energy patterns, it becomes us and we become it. The fortuitous energies of music make us over in their image, and this disappearance is exactly what our soul has been asking for. Art, especially music, disarms us and fosters that surrender.

            Lori and I were just in Paris, and like many visitors we stood slack-jawed before the façade of Notre Dame Cathedral. But nothing could’ve prepared us for what happened inside. Here was a cavernous space where architecture, engineering, stained glass, sculpture, theology, liturgy, devotion, mysticism, civic identity, and human achievement comingle into a tour de force that overwhelms you. And as synchronicity would have it, a mixed men’s and boys’ choir was performing. The sound of their harmonious voices reverberating throughout the towering 12^th century hall, washed in the divine light streaming through stained glass, was the very definition of ethereal.

One song came to an end. When the conductor spread his arms like wings, the choir began to sing a choral arrangement of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” As Barber’s mournful ascension began, something broke open inside of me – a resistance, a practiced façade, an artifice. I can never describe the wave after wave of knowing that rushed through me in those timeless moments – it was dumbfounding. The hairs on my arms stood up.

As the music bathed the room, another sound rose up through the strains of music, an all too human sound, the sound of scores of people around me weeping. We were all drowning in a sea of beauty and nobody wanted to be saved.

            This is how music works. It strips away all of your worldly cleverness and leaves you washed clean, innocent, newborn, and free; back in the Garden of Eden before it all went wrong. Music doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t have any answers. But it lifts you past the place where the questions have power, where finally everything seems right with the world. Music heals. Music restores. Music transcends and liberates. Music sets us aloft in the space between heaven and earth, where we taste the eternal right here in the realm of embodied forms. Aretha could do that. And she still can.

The Rock of Sisyphus

Sisyphus led a treacherous, murderous life, and he was rightly punished for it. Zeus sentenced Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill – only it was an enchanted rock, and every time Sisyphus reached the summit it would roll away and tumble back down to the bottom.

       Sisyphus would begin again. But he never complained. He accepted his fate. In fact, he more than accepted it – he embraced it.

       In his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus finds something heroic in Sisyphus’s resignation. No one would blame Sisyphus for giving up and muttering, “Why bother?” But he doesn’t. In spite of the apparent meaninglessness of his task, Sisyphus’s resilience imposes meaning. Life is absurd says Camus, yet we get up every day and do it again anyway. And it is from our struggle that meaning comes.

       We do the laundry even though our clothes will just get dirty again. We empty the trash knowing it will fill back up. We put gas in the car even though it will be soon be empty. We go to work and have the same conversations about the same subjects with the same people, drink the same coffee, tackle the same challenges, face the same absurdities, and watch helplessly as the inbox grows faster than the outbox no matter how hard we push.

       It’s never finished. We’re never done. There is no such thing as the end of the road.

       Sisyphus reminds us of the cyclical nature of our work. Life is not linear – it spirals into the future in a series of concentric arcs. Here it is Tuesday again, here it is lunch again, here I am washing my bowl again. Déjà vu is simply the recognition of this fact: we have been here before, many times.

       In the face of this repetition we might be forgiven for slipping into despair. “What’s the point,” we might mutter in our more melancholic moments. But despair isn’t inevitable. In fact, maudlin resistance to the apparent absurdity of life is, when you come right down to it, a pretty lousy read. In Camus’s final analysis, the world is neither absurd nor not-absurd – it is indeterminate. It is left for us to decide. Only we can carve the shape of our own meaning. That is why Sisyphus is such a hero to Camus. It doesn’t get any more meaningless than pushing a rock up a hill. The rock doesn’t do anything, it isn’t for anything, and it’s just as useless at the top of the hill as at the bottom. Yet we must see Sisyphus as triumphant.  

       Like Sisyphus, we have the power to turn our fate into a blessing. We cannot change the past, nor most of the conditions around us, but we can always choose new thoughts about those events and circumstances. In the boundlessness of consciousness, we are radically free to impose meaning onto the absurdity of life. It is only from our willful commitment and decisive action that meaning emerges. Life is not a fantasy – it’s an activity. When we come out of our head and into our body, life springs from every pore. When you throw your shoulder into the rock and push, the meaninglessness of the world disappears like a bad dream in the light of day. 

        When we perform our duty, says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, we participate in the divine play through which the whole universe comes into being. Of course we never accurately assess the value and scope of our work. How could we? We cannot see all the ripples that emanate from every intention, every gesture, every word, and every action. We must simply trust that we are enough. What else can we do? We are only one man, one woman. There is quiet heroism in facing every challenge nobly, and in playing our part in the great unfolding. Despite how it feels in our worst moments, everything matters. There are no small parts, only small actors.

[This piece was first published in my "A to Zen" column in the July/August 2016 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here by permission.]