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.”

Our Sacred Longing

Sometimes it’s a subtle nudge. Other times it’s an insistent desire. We can’t tell if we’re being pulled toward something or pushed away from something else, or both. All we know is, we can’t stay here.

            Frustrations mount. Powerful emotions like sadness and anger cloud our vision. We know we’re not happy, but we don’t know why. Things feel stale, old, and uninspiring. How do we break out, and when we do, where are we supposed to go, what are we supposed to do, and who are we supposed to be?

            This cosmic restlessness drives us like a lash. It impels us to sail oceans, cross continents, climb mountains, write symphonies, create solutions out of problems, draw healing out of woundedness, and forge justice out of suffering. Everything great every human being ever did came from this one source: our sacred longing.

            If we are a spark from the Divine Mind as the Stoics taught, or if we are a manifestation of Brahman as Vedanta teaches, or if we are a mixture of matter and spirit as the Bible teaches, or if we are all Buddhas waiting to awaken as Buddhism teaches, then the energies that move through us are not entirely our own. We are fountains through which the holy waters flow. Our only duty then is to stay open to what is trying to move through us, as us. Our lives are the way the universe heals itself.

            In his poem Each Note, the Persian Sufi poet Rumi (1207-1273) put it this way:

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!

            In Rumi’s image, the world is God’s flute, and each need coming through us is a note from that flute. Therefore, our yearning to grow, to create more, to have more, to be more, is a sacred longing born not from ego or fear, but from the divine flow that pours through everything around us. It’s the budding of the blossoms on the branches, it’s the powerful tail stroke of the humpback whale swimming thousands of miles home to its calving grounds, it’s the discipline of a young medical student pushing through the impossible conditions of residency, it’s the courage of the soldier running toward danger to save a wounded brother-in-arms. In this sense, our passions are not our own – they’re a message from the source. We are called to manifest our potential, keep our divine appointment, and honor our roots by daring to bloom boldly and humbly. Our own happiness is impossible without this alignment. If we fail to give way to what is trying to arise through us we not only dishonor our source, we also rob the world of whatever ripples our loving would have stirred in others. It is not for us to say no. We must always have the holy word upon our lips – yes.

            Another Persian Sufi poet, Hafiz (c. 1320-1389) put it this way:

           

Now is the time for the world to know that every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time for you to deeply compute the impossibility

that there is anything but Grace.

Now is the season to know that everything you do is sacred.

            If Grace is all there is, if all aspects of realty exist in a single, vast, interconnected web, then we can rest in the knowledge that we are supported. This means that our own best thoughts, intentions, convictions, passions, empathies, and actions are also woven into this same singularity. And if you learn how to be still through meditation, contemplation, yoga, prayer, sacred service, reverie in nature, or aesthetic rapture you soon feel for yourself this interweaving grace. No one has to tell you about it, explain it to you, or prove its existence. Your own unimpeachable experience confirms its existence, even, its primacy.

            And then finally you can dispense with this “I’m not good enough” business. That tired mantra is shown for the lie that it is. We wake up and realize that our imperfections are part of the process. Awkwardness is natural in any evolutionary transformation. The doe can hardly walk when it’s newly born. The wings of a just-hatched bird are good for nothing but wild gestures. So too our efforts often pale in comparison to a conceptual ideal. No matter. There is music and majesty in the simple effort to be good, to reach farther, to be more. The vision of flight comes before the flight, every time. Vision and intention have the power to arrange outer conditions until they align. You are good enough, because there is nothing but grace – and this truth is shown to us over and over again through the lens of our loving.

            In her poem Wild Geese, American poet Mary Oliver puts it this way:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

           

            It isn’t mysterious. Our love shows us where to turn. When we “follow our bliss,” as Joseph Campbell put it, we feel in our bones that we are finally, fully alive. Our sacred longing, our wordless loving, the unassailable convictions born only in the clarity of direct experience all lead us toward our own best life. We don’t have to wonder anymore. We know what to do. As Rumi put it, “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”

Beyond Conflict

It’s liberating to realize that you don’t have to have an opinion about everything. It’s okay not to know. It’s okay to withhold judgment, wait, and let things play out. It’s even okay to let the other guy be right once in a while.

            Wisdom is a fluid way of being in the world, not a rigid position paper. Conflict is fathered by certainty. Peace is mothered by patience.

            As the 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

            On one hand, it’s important to carefully discern between truth and falsehood. We gain little by leaving truth-claims unexamined. On the road to knowledge every step counts.

On the other hand, when we elevate our momentary assessment of the moving target of reality to the level of dogma, we distort reality to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable. We trade in the messiness of the real world for a conceptual cage of our own making. Lost in the rarefied air of our own self-serving thought-constructs we slip further and further away from the fact that reality is a vast, interdependent field of energy, matter, and consciousness too fluid and fast-moving to ever be reduced to a simple, fixed set of truth-claims.

We have become masters at accumulating information. We’ve mistaken information for knowledge. Not everything can be Googled. Just because you can provide a link or a YouTube clip does not mean you understand. In fact, there may even be an inverse relationship between information-accumulation and insight. Sometimes too much knowledge clogs up the works, clouding our natural, unadorned insight. As Laozi wrote in the Daodejing, “The more you know, the less you understand.” Clarity is the fruit of emptiness. A busy mind is barren ground.

When the Oracle at Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens it sent Socrates on a quest. He didn’t believe he was wise, so he set out to interview everyone with a reputation for wisdom to see how he measured up. He quickly realized that while these allegedly wise men had lots of opinions, they knew no more than he did. In fact, their endless opinions obscured their insight and impeded their ability to learn. The damage caused by their habit of mistaking unfounded beliefs for facts far outweighed whatever actual knowledge they may have possessed. This led Socrates to conclude that since he knew nothing, and admitted it, he was in fact wiser than all of these supposed wise men. From this ancient tale we get a clear message – humility and the admission of ignorance are a sign of real wisdom. As the Zen saying goes, “Don’t seek enlightenment. Just get rid of all your opinions.”

When we move past rigidity of thought we open up to infinite possibility. As the complex and fluid phenomenal realm unfolds before us, we stay in the present moment, keenly aware and awake to what is revealing itself. All energy, consciousness, and matter connects together into a single field of awareness of which we are an integral part. In the language of the mystic Meister Eckhart, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Individuality slips backstage while unity consciousness steps front and center. Or as St. Francis of Assisi put it, “What you are looking for is what is looking.” All of this is true, according to the Hassidic tradition of Judaism, because “The creator and the object of his creation are a unity inseparable.”

This is why reducing the whole of reality into tiny conceptual boxes is an act of violence. The fluidity of not-knowing allows everything in, while the arid rigidity of conceptual categorization blocks everything out – we never get at things-in-themselves, only our thoughts about those things. This is why Laozi wrote in the Daodejing, “In the pursuit of knowledge everyday something is added. In the practice of the Dao everyday something is dropped.”

In a famous Zen story, a learned professor of religion and philosophy went to visit a Zen master. When he arrived the master set the table and began to serve tea.

“Why have you come to see me?” the master asked.

“I have come to learn about Zen,” said the professor. “I have studied all the world’s religions and philosophies. I have learned the languages and read all the books. I am known as an expert the world over. There is very little I don’t know. But Zen eludes me.”

As he was speaking the master poured tea into the professor’s cup. When the cup was full he kept pouring. The tea brimmed over the rim, spilled onto the table and into the professor’s lap.

“What are you doing?” the professor cried as he leaped up.

“Your cup is already so full,” said the master. “There isn’t room for anything else.”

If, as these ancient sources show, emptiness is an essential quality of wisdom, then how do we attain it? By letting go of the illusion that we are in control, and renouncing the delusion that we have to solve every problem, iron every wrinkle, heal every wound, and right every wrong. Far from the philosophy of acquiescence or apathy, this open-hearted stance is a starting point for genuine growth and healing. Our actions are purer, stronger, and more effective when we work without attachment either to our own ideas or to a specific outcome. We should not work to see our own narrow ends met – we should work collaboratively with others and with the energies coursing around us intending simply to do good. Krishna calls this “working without attachment to the fruits of work.” In this consciousness of renunciation we become instruments through which the highest good manifests itself. The Daoists call this effortless-effort or wu-wei. You don’t have to know the final destination before taking the first step. You just have to move in the right direction and let the rest take care of itself.

Otherwise there’s a danger. If we instead seek to impose on the uncarved whole of the world our narrow, cookie-cutter conceptual framework, we give up any chance at genuine wisdom. When we build a limited and limiting worldview full of answers and inflexible doctrines, we have lowered ourselves into a well from which we can only see a tiny piece of the sky. And from our narrow view we see alternative perspectives as the enemy. We live in perpetual conflict with one another, and ultimately, with our own, truer self. This is no small thing. The whole world pays the price for this parochial narrow-mindedness. In his 1933 essay “The Triumph of Stupidity” Bertrand Russell wrote, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” And I think we all know what happened to Europe, and to us all, in the dark years following 1933. It is a mark of wisdom to have doubts. It is a sign of danger to have none. Certainty is both the refuge of fools and the bludgeon of bullies.

Certainty is the seed of conflict. Unity is born from humility. As we learn to move beyond conflict into the consciousness of peace, we turn again to the words of Rumi, and this time include the next line: “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.”