The Path of the Heart

When I was in seminary, I had a lot of questions about the nature of the divine, and the meaning of life. Fortunately, my advisor was Rev. Bob Kimball, the professor of theology. I would ask my questions with some angst, and often he would change the subject to my sweet little dog Waldo whom I loved so much. My husband and I had adopted him when we first moved in together. My husband had never had a dog before, and though I grew up in a family with dogs, this was the first dog who I was fully responsible for. We were constantly amazed at how wonderful he was, and how much we loved him. When Professor Kimball would bring up Waldo, I thought he was just trying to cheer me up, to give me something positive to think about. As I grew spiritually, I began to understand that he was trying to show me a path to the divine. I had been using my reason, my mind to try to figure out the Divine, and he was suggesting I use my heart. He was suggesting that in my search for the divine I should go towards whatever felt like the sensation of Love I had for little Waldo.

Have you ever loved someone like that? I sure hope you have had a chance to love someone with your whole heart, which to me felt tender and sweet. Sometimes our love for the people in our lives is complicated. Sure, I love my husband, but often amid the complexity of living together, taking care of a household together, there are lots of feelings and textures that make up that love. The love we had for our Waldo had a simplicity and a clarity to it that was easy to follow. I’ve heard grandparents often feel that way towards their grandchildren. I know my love for my son, though also complex, is strong and unconditional.

Recently I have once again found myself with a lot of questions about God, about the meaning of life, and our role as humans within it. The questioning only leads to more questions. I remembered my old teacher’s advice -- to set aside the questioning, and focus instead on love- the simple love we had for Waldo. I am learning to use that feeling, that particular quality an almost physical sensation of unconditional love, as a homing beacon, to notice where else that feeling is available, where it is evident. This inquiry of the heart helps us find our way back to love, and love leads us to the divine.

This path of the heart is not something my professor invented; it is present in many religious traditions. In the Christian scriptures Jesus, when asked what the most important commandment is, invites us to “love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.” (Mark 12:30) . In the Uddhava Gita from the Hindu tradition, Uddhava asks his teacher Krishna: “Which is the best path in man’s journey to God?" Krishna answers, “Uddhava, my child, there are many ways to attain the Supreme. Each of them leads to the knowledge of God beyond scriptures or creeds. By love, or by inward control of the mind, by faith, or by wisdom, by serving mankind—all these have been taught as the way to reach God, but the best way of all is devotional love.”

It is not uncommon in such tumultuous times as we are living in to question beliefs that have served you your whole life, to find even basic meaning making structures no longer serve. If you find yourself in a quagmire of questions and doubts, know that the path of love is always available. It is simple and profound, challenging but open to every seeker.

How Can We Know What is Right?

When I took my first meditation class, the teacher gave us a list of ethical precepts. She said, “this list is from my religious tradition. You may be from a different tradition with different ethical precepts. The important thing is not that you follow this list, but that you have your own ethical code, and that you follow it. If you do the deep work of meditation and are not acting in alignment with your own integrity, it will bring pain and difficulty on your spiritual path.”

How can we know what is right? One way to go is to follow the law. The 10 commandments are a good start, but they don’t provide guidance for every situation. The Torah contains 613 laws. The US Congress adds an average of over 6,900 pages of new public laws each year. Certainly, knowing and following the law is a good idea. This is the agreement we have made with other citizens of the US. Following the law keeps us safe from legal punishment and keeps the society heading in a shared direction determined by our elected decision makers. But we all know that some unethical things are not illegal. Owning and enslaving people was legal in this country for centuries. Sexual harassment was not illegal until the 1970s. Simply following the law does not mean we are making the most ethical choice we can make.

How can we know what is right? We might ask “what is normal in my community today?” Years ago, I rolled my grocery cart out of the store without noticing the case of soda on the bottom of the cart that I had not paid for. When I got to my car, I realized my mistake. I brought my soda back into the store to pay for it. I thought I would just go right to the cashier and pay her, but of course now there was a line. I waited until it was my turn and received eye rolls from the cashier and from other customers. Why was I wasting everyone’s time to pay the $2.50 for the soda? I told this story to a group of folks and they agreed “no one does that” or “most people wouldn’t do that.” This is the problem with using the community standard as a test for ethics- “what most people do” is not “what is the most ethical thing to do.” Often there are more ethical options if we look.

Once during an “Introduction to Buddhism” course, classmates brought to our discussion a proposed law that was being debated in the state where we lived. It seemed to us students a very complex issue. The Monk said, “it’s quite simple- it’s a matter of compassion.” We were all shocked. But budgets! But complex politics! “Simple compassion” responded the monk, and as he said it, the dust cleared, and we all saw what the most compassionate solution would be. 

This is hard for our human brains to handle. Scientists have shown that it is very difficult for us to believe one thing if we are doing a different thing. It’s called “Cognitive dissonance” and eventually it must be resolved because it is so uncomfortable. The way it usually resolves is that we decide that what we are doing must be ethical, because we are good people, and we wouldn’t do something unethical. But the spiritual path is full of paradox. We are imperfect beings on this journey, and sometimes with the best of intentions we will harm others, we will do things that are ethically grey, we will make mistakes. We will compromise because don’t want to disrupt the peace of community. We have all faced choices where no outcome is perfect. The spiritual path asks us to hold all those things in our attention-- to take an honest look at what we do, to notice when it misses the mark, to change when we can to bring our action into closer alignment with our integrity, to ask forgiveness from others, and to stay present with our shortcomings even when they are uncomfortable.

I’ve often relied on Walter Burghardt‘s definition of spiritual contemplation “the long loving look at the real.” As we seek an ethical path in life, we can start by simply taking a good long look at what is real. What are we really doing? How does it really impact others? We look lovingly and compassionately at ourselves, knowing we are imperfect and have only a partial view. We look lovingly at those our actions impact. Being a person of ethical integrity is not something that happens all at once and is perfect forever. Being a person of integrity is something we live anew each day. It is a powerful spiritual practice. And it makes all our other spiritual practices possible. 

What Endures?

Recently I went to visit a friend and noticed that her beautiful hand woven rug was gone. It turns out, hidden under the bookcases moths had been gradually eating away at it for years. Professional rug cleaners told her the wool rug was irreparably damaged, and that she should look now to saving the smaller wool rugs she had around the house. This shook her. These beautiful rugs she had loved were being silently eaten away, and now were un-salvageable. She said “have you ever noticed how often moths are mentioned in scripture?” I looked it up myself when I got home. For example, the book of Matthew says: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.” One way of looking at the spiritual journey is this simple- is there anything that neither rust nor moths can destroy, that thieves cannot steal? [Matthew 6:19]

Our society values work very highly, and specifically our culture values material success- a large salary, a prestigious job title. The Buddhist precept of “right livelihood” encourages us “to engage in compassionate activity, and to make [our] living in a way that does not cause harm and that is ethically positive.” At the most elemental level, this involves choosing an ethical type of work- Assassin, for example, that’s an easy one to rule out. But even if we have chosen work in an ethical field, whether paid or unpaid, we must continue to ask -- do we do our work each day in an ethical, honest, compassionate way?

Then we apply the moth test. My congregation volunteers as part of the “food for thought” program, where kids with food insecurity can take home a backpack full of food over the weekends. That is surely a compassionate activity. But no matter how many times we help with the backpack program, there will still be hungry kids. Nothing we build will last forever. Even the great architectural wonders of Rome, the great Empires crumble. According to Huston Smith, the Hindu practice of Karma yoga is not, as we often say in the west, about doing kind and generous acts, but in fact is about doing any kind of work with a detachment from the outcomes. Can we build the new building with equanimity knowing that it will one day crumble? Can we fill the backpacks knowing we have not cured hunger? Can we write that report our boss asked for knowing that no one is ever actually going to read it? The Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita (IV:1) says: “he who does the task dictated by duty caring nothing for the fruit of action, he is a yogi”

Whenever we experience a setback in our work, it is a huge blow to the ego. We feel like we played the game of life and we lost. At the moment when we lose a job, or don’t get into the college we most wanted, our simply have a low turnout at the event we planned, this is an invitation ask “what is the meaning of my life when my plan is shredded and torn, when I have not achieved in my work what I hoped to achieve? Am I more than my work and my accomplishments?”

So the path of karma yoga is not about finally ending hunger, but loosening the grasp of the ego, and finding the Self that is unchanging whether or not our work is ever completed. What feels like a failure to the ego, is an opening for the soul, a separation between what we achieve and the larger nature of ourselves. Even in profound disappointment, in the discomfort of uncertainty and not being in control, it can be such a relief to see that I am not my work, I am not my job or my bank account, I am something much more expansive. And each time we put our hands to a task, we are all on that journey.

Emerging

Every spring I watch the first flowers out my window. My early irises and the crocuses who bravely came up first are done with blooming already. The daffodils take longer, because they have longer to grow, and don’t do a well with the unexpected spring snows. So goes the progression of spring flowers, through the tulips and bleeding hearts and other flowers who love the extra sun before the trees leaf out, and count on the lack of competition from the summer flowers who don’t have their built in antifreeze. My Morning Glories won’t even sprout until late June, and it isn’t until the full sun of July that it is their turn to grow inches a day, and cover my trellises with heart shaped green leaves and purple flowers.

Every spring as the days grow longer and the spring flowers push up through the soil, I realize “I haven’t seen my friends in forever- do I still have friends?” And as the days warm it becomes a worry, “why don’t I get out more? What have I been doing all winter?” And every spring I remember, eventually, that in this part of the world it’s normal for humans to do a bit of hibernating in the winter, and that spring lures us back out into the sunshine in our own good time, and back to one another.

This year, the spring drama is overlayed with the ongoing covid pandemic. We have been more cloistered than usual this winter, especially those of us who work or study from home or are retired. In the same way that I feel out of shape the first creaky time I get back on my bike each spring, I feel like I am currently out of shape for being with other humans. I’ve heard many people talking about an increased social anxiety- our social muscles have atrophied a bit, and we are worried we won’t remember how to do it, when we finally get together. “I’ve gone feral” one friend told me- and I realized I felt the same way. I’ve put most of my energy into my inner life, feelings, hopes, worries, and very little attention to my outer life, although I do try to straighten my backdrop and check my hair before I join a Zoom gathering.

As difficult as this time has been, there are things we may miss, or worry about losing from our long year of covid. I know that although I miss my friends and family terribly, I have settled into a comfortable routine with my husband and our dog. In fact, a silver lining of working at home is that my older dog has some medical problems, and because I am working from home, I am always close by to make sure he is cared for. I even have house plants that need water every day- no big deal when working from home, the plants have been a great joy and distraction during this time, and it’s easy to notice when they need water and make sure they have it. A couple retired friends who live alone tell me they have settled into the quiet of their covid household and are surprised to find they will miss it.

Though I sigh with relief and joy every year to see the first crocus blooms, I worry with them through the inevitable snow falls of early spring- a snow at the wrong time can ruin the blooms, and no bee will come out to pollinate flowers in a snowstorm. So even though we humans have been waiting to return to “normal” for over 2 years, it’s healthy to have worries and reservations about the coming transition. It might help to remember that really there is no rush. The spring flowers know this. If you watch the tulips, you will see that though they seem to grow inches in a single sunny day, when the late snow and frost comes they will stop their growth just as quickly, and can hover at that same height until the warm sunny days return. The return to normal won’t happen overnight, it will grow in fits and starts like the spring foliage. And like a spring garden, each year is like no other. This very strange spring be easy with yourself. It’s okay to open slowly to the returning sun. Trust your own inner wisdom, bloom at your own pace.

Prioritizing Presence

For several years I’ve been part of a reflection group with other spiritual directors. At our first gathering we talked about what we wanted out of our time together and someone suggested we “prioritize quality of presence” when we were together. Everyone agreed- our priority was not getting a lot done, or even learning new things, but being fully present with one another so that we would feel supported and heard. Each month as we begin our gathering the quality feels a bit different: some months we are tired and energy is low, some months we are all busy and overwhelmed. Then we remember what we want our time together to feel like- loving, contemplative, caring. No matter how we feel as the gathering begins, by the end of our time we have found that quality together. I would even say that the quality of presence we hold for one another feels sacred. That is why we come back, month after month, year after year.

Imagine you have built a guest room in your house. It has a comfy bed, a sunny window with a lovely view. You make up the bed and even put a chocolate on the pillow, but chances are if you don’t invite our family and friends, it will most likely remain empty. If we want companionship, we have to invite that into our lives. Moreover, we can all probably remember an unpleasant visit to a place that was orderly and clean. Yes, a lovely guest room will definitely encourage guests to return, and increase their comfort while they visit, but that warm feeling of “home” comes not from a good floor-plan, but from those subtle qualities we feel while we are in it- safety, love, connection. If we don’t fill our homes with love and connection and caring, there is no premium bedding that can create those feelings for us.

When I was a new minister, I worked hard on creating well thought out well written sermons, and did lots of research, but sometimes my best planned services would fall flat. I would say now that they were hollow, like a beautiful house that no one lives in. The sermons felt flat because I didn’t put myself into them, my heart, my spirit. A teacher once told me “if you want the spirit in your life, you have to invite the spirit into your life.” If I want to feel compassion and support, the best thing I can do is invite the qualities of compassion and support into this moment.

Now when I am at a gathering of any kind that doesn’t feel right, I ask myself -- what is my quality of presence? Am I distracted and scattered, or am I cultivating a quality of presence that feels good? Instead of bustling about the proverbial kitchen stressed about making a perfect feast, anxious that each dish be perfect, and assuming that once the feast is on the table I will feel peaceful and content because my work is done, I imagine what it feels to be truly welcomed as a guest, the kind of hospitality that makes you feel safe and welcome and cared for, and cultivate that quality with the same priority as the main course. Because in fact that quality of hospitality is the main course.

“If you want the spirit in your life, you have to invite the spirit.” We are used to thinking that happiness or peace or enlightenment will come when we have made conditions right, when our life is orderly and successful. As if the spirit wouldn’t be with us if we were sad, or discouraged, or confused. If feeling supported and inspired is what I need, I let go of everything my scattered attention has caught, and just be present -- be the thing I am hungry for.

If there is some quality you are craving in your life, I encourage you to invite it into your life right now, without waiting to achieve your goals, or creating the perfect space. Prioritize that quality of presence, invite that quality you most need into your life. Not every guest comes when we invite them, but a gracious invitation is always a good place to begin.

A Simple Cup of Tea

During a difficult time in my life, I asked my Spiritual Director for a practice that might help. She recommended “a simple cup of tea.” I was, at the time, scattered and overwhelmed, so I could see why she thought sitting quietly and doing something simple might help. But it wasn’t until I was on retreat sometime later that I began to understand the gifts of the practice.

I had made a habit of sitting by the window in the morning- looking out at the birds while I ate my breakfast and drank my tea. I would often bring my journal and write a bit as well. As the mornings passed, and I became more centered and focused, I noticed that while I was watching the birds, I wasn’t truly paying attention to my tea- I would make it, and let it cool, and sometimes even drink it, but I wasn’t really paying attention to and enjoying my tea. One morning while I was gazing at the birds my tea had gotten cold, and I had missed the whole thing!

I decided to start over and put all my attention into drinking a cup of tea. What had seemed like a pretty simple combination- drinking tea, noticing the birds, and jotting in my journal, began to seem like too much multi-tasking. To truly “drink a cup of tea” I needed to pay attention- first, I wanted to catch the moment when the tea had gone from boiling hot to “just right.” I realized the best way to do that was to hold it in my hands and realized that having a cup of tea in one’s hands on a cold day is its own joy. I prefer my tea when it’s still too hot to chug -- just cool enough not to burn myself, but still warming. Drinking a cup of tea at just the right temperature requires attention and patience.

To really savor the tea also requires attention, or the whole cup will be gone before we’ve ever really tasted a single mouthful. It can be a lovely practice to enjoy the warmth and flavor of each sip, and notice the warming feeling that spreads to the body until the last sip is gone.

I’ll be honest, when I’m not on retreat, my attention doesn’t last through the whole process, but I am glad whenever I remember to savor the feeling of the warm mug in my cold hands, whenever I remember to stop whatever else I am doing and really enjoy a sip or two when the tea is just the right temperature.

I invite you to try this practice during the remaining
cold days of winter. Find a favorite mug, one that feels good in your hands. Find a comfy place to sit, and something quiet to gaze at, like birds at the feeder, or trees rustling in the breeze (for me a video or a book is too distracting to really enjoy my tea, but see what works for you). See what you notice from the moment you pour the water over your tea bag, (coffee drinks work too- choose your favorite!) until the mug is empty. Enjoy the warmth of the mug as you wait for it to be just right and once it is, savor as you drink each sip. Spiritual practices don’t have to be complicated to be rewarding. Let me suggest a simple cup of tea.

At Our Own Pace

The Labyrinth journey is an ancient spiritual practice which has touched many people in recent years. You find labyrinths in churches, like the famous one in the Chartres Cathedral, but also in backyards and public parks. One moves through the simple, winding path as a form of moving meditation or prayer. The first time I ever walked a labyrinth our leader was a religious educator- responsible for the children’s program at a local church. She mentioned that when children entered the labyrinth they always ran. I had only ever seen people walking a labyrinth slowly and quietly and I assumed this was the proper way to do it. But as someone who tended the spiritual lives of children, she wisely understood that it’s not always effective for kids to emulate adults in their spiritual practices, but to follow the path that is natural to them. That was almost 20 years ago, and the idea has grown in me; that we all walk the labyrinth at our own pace.

Many spiritual traditions extol the benefits of being still and quiet. At this time in my life, I find 20 minutes on a meditation cushion to be a refreshing break from my busy work life. But it certainly wasn’t always so. When I was younger I dreaded sitting in quiet meditation. Then I stumbled across a vigorous yoga style called Ashtanga, where the teacher mentioned the goal of this practice was preparation for meditation. It worked for me- I found there was nothing like 90 minutes of vigorous, mindful activity to prepare myself to sit quietly.

If you are someone who can’t get comfortable with spiritual practices that are quiet and still, don’t despair- it may be that you are just suited to a different kind of practice. As we enter the New Year, I encourage you to explore something new. I feel confident there is a practice out there that suits your unique rhythms. If you don’t like to sit, walk. If you can’t walk, run. What matters is your intention. Whenever you begin your practice, dedicate that time to listening for the spirit, to opening your heart to the divine. Let your practice be child-like; run or dance or play as the spirit moves.