Discerning the Path

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God

Or many gods.

I want to know if you belong or feel

Abandoned.

If you can know despair and see it in others.

I want to know

If you are prepared to live in the world

With its harsh need

To change you. If you can look back

With firm eyes

Saying this is where I stand. I want to know

If you know

How to melt into that fierce heat of living

Falling toward

the center of your longing. I want to know

If you are willing

To live, day by day, with the consequence of love

And the bitter

Unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have been told, in that firm embrace, even

The gods speak of God.

~ “Self Portrait” by David Whyte

Good morning.

I’ve returned often in my musings to my quest to live an authentic life. I define an authentic life or a life of integrity as one that flows seamlessly, ineffably from the values I hold dear:  from my desire to practice compassion wholeheartedly and live in greater harmony with all living creatures, and from my wish to live in an awakened, attentive state, where my awareness of God’s presence in everything and everyone becomes the firm ground of my speech and action. To use David Whyte’s phrase, I want to “melt into the fierce heat of living/Falling toward the center of [my] longing,” as that Center is God. I want to live a life centered on love, on mending and connecting in a world that too often fixates on fomenting hate, on fostering and sustaining differences and separation –between white and black, rich and poor, plant or animal and human.

As the poet suggests, though, this striving to live in the world in a way that expresses God’s plan for my particular life and that reflects these intentions frequently brings me into contact with the world’s “harsh need to change [me].” Here, I think the poet intimates both the paradoxical need to be changed – to be opened up, again and again, to the utter pain and almost unfathomable beauty of the world – but also the broader culture’s fundamental push toward the often unquestioned ideals of acquisition, consumption, accumulation, and allied activities that prove to be imposing obstacles to living of deep, compassionate relationship and interdependence.

In his book, The Three Marriages, David Whyte identifies meditation as an essential practice for living into what he calls “The Big Questions” of life. These questions probe our human sense of disconnection from other beings, our frustration with change or the impermanent nature of things, and our fear of dying. They are intimately connected to the quest to live a life that acknowledges and respects our interdependence with all living things. He frames these questions as:  Why do I feel different from everything I see? Why does everything I hold in my hands constantly slip through my fingers, and why can’t I live forever?  I think each of us can likely identify with some permutation of these:  Why do I feel alone/isolated/lost/abandoned? Why do I treat that person as my enemy? Why must I lose my job/my spouse/my child/my health? What will happen to my spouse/my children/my material legacy when I reach the end of life? 

Meditation, says David Whyte, “is the practice of dwelling in [an] underlying un-anxious all-seeing, all-appreciating un-defensive self that does not care whether it lives or dies, while not taking our eyes off the world.”  He describes it as opening up the door of the world and keeping it open, all the while maintaining a “fierce attention” that eventually comes to see and embrace, without judgment, the inherent nature of all things:  to evolve, to change. In meditation, we begin by noticing the ways our thoughts are constantly coming and receding, never stagnant. We learn over time to allow for this changeability without appraising it as good or bad; to acknowledge that it is the nature of thought to be volatile. Meditation trains us to bring this fierce awareness and this quality of non-judgment to other aspects of our lives, so that – more and more – we feel less bothered by life’s inherent bent toward change. More importantly, through meditation, we begin to glimpse the underlying quality that is unchanging, the essence that is found in all things and all people. It’s as if we learn not to see individual drops of water, but the ocean itself.  We begin to hear not just the cello or the flute, but the entire symphony as one complex and perfect thrum of harmony. We can see that our own humanity is tied to recognizing and acting as if that homeless youth, that gun-toting or drug-dealing thug, that dirty politician is also a fragile, flawed human being with the capacity to evolve. I conceive of this ocean as a greater capacity to notice the vastness that moves within and unites all of us:  the Divine.

Ideally, this deep and significant realization that flows from our commitment to awareness gives us the courage to act in ways that reflect our connectedness to all things and all people, that embody our desire of not harming and doing good. Meditation also provides an ever-present touchstone to which we can return when we lose sight – as we so often do – of the unchanging nature of God’s love for every speck of matter that makes up the universe; indeed, of God’s essence itself, which is love. Mediation is the doorway through which we again make contact with God’s indwelling presence, which is unchanging and timeless and food enough for each of our journeys.