III. Getting Real
From Illusion to Reality
Introduction
I took a run at “becoming spiritual” in my early thirties. Raised in the mainline Protestant tradition, I had studied religion in college, theological seminary, and graduate school. Intellectually, I had no problem embracing some of Christianity’s key tenets, such as grace, forgiveness, incarnation, and life overcoming death. Nor did I have any problem taking a pass on the arrogantly judgmental parts of some streams of Christian tradition, or affirming the vital role of science in our lives. I’ve always understood faith and reason to be partners, not enemies.
But I yearned for something deeper and truer than a head full of religious ideas, no matter how sound. I wanted a lived experience of a life that was less messy than the one I had, full as it was of confusions and contradictions that fell far short of “spiritual.” Or so I thought.
One day, I listened to a taped talk that Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, had given to a roomful of would-be monks at the Abbey of Gethsemane, where Merton was novice master. Addressing the super-pious young seekers in his care, Merton said, “Men, before you can have a spiritual life, you’ve got to have a life!”
Those incisive words—the monastic equivalent of “Get a life!”—laid bare my false notion that “becoming spiritual” meant leaping from the muck of my daily life into godlike clarity and purity. Merton’s words hit me like a one-two punch: “Wow, he’s right, I need to get a life. No, wait! I’ve already got one! It’s a god-awful mess, but I think he’s saying that only there can I find my spiritual path.”
The spiritual journey is an endless process of engaging life as it is, stripping away our illusions about ourselves, our world, and the relationship of the two, moving closer to reality as we do. That process begins with losing the illusion that spirituality will float us above the daily fray. Reality may be hard, but it’s a safer place to live than in our illusions, which will always fail us, and at no point is that more true than in old age. Death is, after all, the end of all our illusions—so why not do what we can to lose our illusions before death strips them from us? That way we are less likely to die disappointed or in despair.
The first essay in this chapter, “Contemplative by Catastrophe,” is a confession. As much as I envy people who practice spiritual disciplines that allow them to spot illusions before they get lost in them, I seem to need to get lost before I can be found. I generally do my contemplation after the train wreck, not before.
“A Friendship, a Love, a Rescue” is about my long-time relation to Thomas Merton, who has long been my most important spiritual friend and guide. I knew nothing about Merton until the year after he died. All of our meetings have taken place between the covers of books, or in moments when his words or something of his spirit come back to me. But I feel his presence as closely as I feel that of my face-to-face companions.
“Down Is the Way to Well-Being” takes a closer look at the notion that the spiritual life has nothing to do with getting “up, up and away” from the messiness of everyday life, and everything to do with staying rooted in “the ground of our being,” no matter how muddy it may be.
“Notes from a Week in the Winter Woods” comprises excerpts from a bare-bones journal I kept while on one of my annual January retreats. There’s nothing like a life-threatening subzero Wisconsin day to keep a person grounded in reminders of mortality.
“Welcome Home” is a poem I wrote about a moment on a walk in the hard-frozen woods—a moment when I broke through the fearful illusion that I’m not worthy of being here, back into the truth that I am, as we all are. That’s a truth we need to know before we die.
Contemplative by Catastrophe
I was about thirty when I first felt drawn to the contemplative life. Inspired by reading Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, I had visions of joining a monastic community. I thought the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Merton spent half his life, would be just right. Compared to Washington, DC—where I was caught up in the frenzy of my work as a community organizer—life at Gethsemani amid the wooded hills of Kentucky sounded idyllic.
Unfortunately, there were several major obstacles between monkhood and me. I was married, the father of three children; had a job on which my family depended; and was considerably more Quaker than Catholic. Clearly, my “visions” of a monastic life were hallucinations. So instead of applying to become a novice at Gethsemani, I ordered one of the abbey’s famous fruitcakes, which are soaked and aged in fine Kentucky bourbon.*
Fortified with fruitcake, I went in search of some way to live as a contemplative amid the world’s madness. Over the next few years, I read about the mystical stream that runs through all of the world’s wisdom traditions. I attended guided retreats and experimented with several popular contemplative practices. But, with the exception of the Quaker meeting for worship, I couldn’t find a practice compatible with my temperament, religious inclinations, and life situation.
Necessity being the mother of invention, it struck me that contemplation didn’t depend on a particular practice. All forms of contemplation share the same goal: to help us see through the deceptions of self and world in order to get in touch with what Howard Thurman called “the sound of the genuine” within us and around us.1 Contemplation does not need to be defined in terms of particular practices, such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, or lectio divina. Instead, it can be defined by its function: contemplation is any way one has of penetrating illusion and touching reality.
That definition opened my eyes to myriad ways I might lead a contemplative life—as long as I keep trying to turn experience into insight. For example, facing into failure can help vaporize the illusions that keep me from seeing reality. When I succeed at something, I don’t spend much time wondering what I might learn from it. Instead, I congratulate myself on how clever I am, fortifying one of my favorite illusions in the process.
But when failure bursts my ego-balloon, I spend long hours trying to understand what went wrong, often learning (or relearning) that the “what” is within me. Failure gives me a chance to touch hard truths about myself and my relation to the world that I evade when I’m basking in the glow of success and the illusions it breeds. Failure is one of the many forms contemplation can take.
Life is full of challenges that can turn us into contemplatives. Years ago, I met Maureen, a single mother with a daughter named Rebecca who had severe developmental disabilities and could do very little for herself. So Maureen had to live two lives, leaving her with neither time nor energy to go on retreat or take up formal spiritual practices. And yet Maureen was a world-class contemplative.
In her love for Rebecca—who would never be “successful” or “useful” or “beautiful” by conventional standards—Maureen had penetrated every cruel illusion our culture harbors about what makes a human being worthy. She had touched the reality that Rebecca was of profound value in and of herself, a being precious to the earth and a cherished child of God, as everyone is.
To be in Maureen’s presence was to feel yourself held in a contemplative circle of grace. When you are with someone who values you not for what you do but for who you are, there’s no need to pretend or wear a mask. You experience the blessed relief that comes from needing to be nothing other than your unguarded and unvarnished self.
Even the most devastating experience can be a doorway to contemplation. At least, that’s been true for me in the wake of my depressions. While you are down there, reality disappears. Everything is illusion foisted on you by the self-destructive “voice of depression,” the voice that keeps telling you you are a waste of space, the world is a torture chamber, and nothing short of death can give you peace. But as you emerge, problems become manageable again, and everyday realities—a crimson glow on the horizon, a friend’s love, a stranger’s kindness, another precious day of life—present themselves as the treasures they truly are.
If contemplation is about penetrating illusion and touching reality, why do we commiserate with others when they tell us about an experience that’s “disillusioned” them? “Oh, I’m so sorry,” we’ll say. “Please, let me comfort you.” Surely it would be better to say, “Congratulations! You’ve lost another illusion, which takes you a step closer to the solid ground of reality. Please, let me help disillusion you even further.”
I envy people who have whatever it takes to practice classic contemplative disciplines day in and day out—practices that help them get beyond the smoke and mirrors and see the truth about themselves and the world. I call these people “contemplatives by intention,” and some I’ve known seem to be able to get ahead of the train wreck. But I’m not a member of that blessed band.
I’m a “contemplative by catastrophe.” My wake-up calls generally come after the wreck has happened and I’m trying to dig my way out of the debris. I do not recommend this path as a conscious choice. But if you, dear reader, have a story similar to mine, I come as the bearer of glad tidings. Catastrophe, too, can be a contemplative path, pitched and perilous as it may be.
I’m still on that path, and daily I stay alert for the disillusionment that will reveal the next thing I need to know about myself and/or the world. Life can always be counted on to send something my way—who knows what it will be today? Maybe a reminder of a part of my past that I regret. Maybe a spot on critique of something I thought I’d done well. Maybe a fresh political outrage that makes me feel that my country has lost all semblance of soul.
Whatever it is, I’ll try to work my way through it until a hopeful reality is revealed on the other side. Regret can be turned into blessing. Criticism can refocus our work or strengthen our resolve. When we feel certain that the human soul is no longer at work in the world, it’s time to make sure that ours is visible to someone, somewhere. Those are some of the fruits that can come from being a contemplative by catastrophe.
And never forget that a few slices of bourbon-soaked Trappist fruitcake can help contemplation along.
A Friendship, a Love, a Rescue
I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible. And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech and beyond concept.
—THOMAS MERTON2
I met Thomas Merton a year after he died. I met him through his writing and through the communion that lies “beyond words,” met him in the seamless way good friends meet again after a long time apart. Without Merton’s friendship and the hope it has given me over the past forty-five years, I’m not sure I could have kept faith with my vocation, even as imperfectly as I have.
My vocational journey to what Merton calls “the margin of society”—at least, the margin of my known world—began in 1969 when I was completing my doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. As the 1960s unfolded, the academic calling that brought me to graduate school had become less and less audible. Vietnam, a spate of assassinations, race riots and “the fire next time” in several major American cities—all of this had me hearing an insistent inner voice saying, “Your vocation is in the community, not the classroom.”
With my PhD in hand, I turned down several opportunities to become a professor, and in July 1969 moved with my wife and children to Washington, DC, to begin work as a community organizer. No one could understand what I was doing, beyond committing professional suicide. In truth, I could not explain it to myself, except to say that it was something I “couldn’t not do,” despite the clear odds against success.
I had no training or experience as a community organizer; much of the work had to be funded by grants that I had no track record at raising; and I was an idealistic and thin-skinned young man temperamentally unsuited for the hard-nosed world of community organizing. Compared to accepting a salaried and secure faculty post, as such posts were back in the day, I was stepping off the edge into “a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.” Companions would have been comforting, but few are to be found when you go over the cliff.
Meeting Merton
After five months in DC—when the thrill of my free fall had been replaced by the predictable bruises, cuts, and broken bones—I walked into a used book store near Dupont Circle. A friend had recommended that I read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It was not on the shelf, but in the place where it would have been was a book I knew nothing about: The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.3 I remember thinking, “It’s about a mountain. The author’s surname begins with M. That’s close enough.” So I bought it.
That was early in December 1969. Merton, I soon learned, had died almost exactly one year earlier. But as I read his autobiography, he came alive for me, as he had for millions of readers who’d never met him. I didn’t feel that I’d merely discovered a new author worth reading. Instead, I felt I’d met a kindred spirit who understood me better than I understood myself, a fellow traveler who could accompany me on the strange path I had chosen. Or had it chosen me?
Wanting to learn more about my new friend, I set out to read everything he wrote. As Merton devotees know, this would become a lifetime project. The man published at least seventy books, and that counts only those published while he was alive—I’ve lost count of how many more have been published since his death. I believe his posthumous literary output is the first known case of “perish and publish.”
A few years after I began reading Merton, I learned about his correspondence with Louis Massignon, a French scholar who introduced Western readers to the life and work of al-Hallaj, a ninth-century Muslim mystic. Massignon felt that his relation to al-Hallaj was not so much that of a scholar to his subject as it was “a friendship, a love, a rescue.”4 He did not mean that he had rescued al-Hallaj from historical obscurity, but that the Muslim mystic had reached out across time to rescue him.
That’s what Merton did for me as I read and reread The Seven Storey Mountain. I’m still reading him almost fifty years later, still finding friendship, love, and rescue—essential elements in serving as a messenger of hope. Imparting hope to others has nothing to do with exhorting or cheering them on. It has everything to do with relationships that honor the soul, encourage the heart, inspire the mind, quicken the step, and heal the wounds we suffer along the way.
For nearly half a century, Merton has illumined the path and companioned me on my journey, offering life-giving ways to look at where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m headed. Here are a few reflections on four of those ways.
The Quest for True Self
First comes the pivotal distinction Merton makes between “true self” and “false self,” which helped me understand why I walked away from the groves of academe toward terra incognita. No reasonable person would call my early vocational decisions “smart career moves.” But looking at them through Merton’s eyes, I came to see that they were first steps in a lifelong effort to be responsive to the imperatives of true self, the source of that inner voice that kept saying, “You can’t not do this.”
I grew up in the Methodist Church, and I value the gifts that tradition gave me. But at no point on my religious journey—which included religious studies at college, a year at Union Theological Seminary, a PhD in the sociology of religion, and active memberships in several mainline Protestant denominations—was I introduced to the contemplative stream of spirituality that Merton swam in and wrote about.
His notion of the quest for true self eventually led me to Quakerism, with its conviction that “there is that of God in every person.” The quest for true self and the quest for God: it’s a distinction without a difference, one that not only salvaged my spiritual life but took me deeper into it.
“Most of us,” as Merton brilliantly observed, “live lives of self-impersonation.”5 I can’t imagine a sadder way to die than with the sense that I never showed up here on earth as my God-given self. If Merton had offered me nothing else, the encouragement to live from true self would be more than enough to call his relation to me “a friendship, a love, a rescue.”
The Promise of Paradox
The idea of paradox was central to Merton’s spiritual and intellectual life, not merely as a philosophical concept but as a lived reality. Given the many apparent contradictions of my life, nothing Merton wrote brought me closer to him in spirit than the epigraph to The Sign of Jonas: “I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”6 It is no accident that my first book was titled The Promise of Paradox, and featured a lead essay on Merton.
Merton taught me how important it is to look at life not only through the logical lens of “either-or” but also through the paradoxical lens of “both-and.” As the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Neils Bohr said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.”7 Thinking paradoxically is key to creativity, which depends on the ability to hold divergent ideas in a way that opens the mind and heart to something new. Living paradoxically is key to personal wholeness, which depends on the ability to embrace one’s self-contradictions.
For me, reframing life in terms of paradox became a lifesaver. It helped me understand that three devastating experiences of deep darkness—as dark for me as it was for Jonas inside the belly of that whale—did not negate the light that’s also part of who I am. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was the question I asked time and again as I was plunged into darkness in spite of my light. In response, Merton’s lived understanding of paradox came to my rescue: to be whole, I must be able to say that I am both shadow and light.
Paradoxical thinking can also save us from the crimped and cramped versions of faith that bedevil Christianity and are, at bottom, idolatries that elevate theological abstractions above the living God. Merton—who had a deep appreciation of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and Sufism— once put this in words so fierce and forceful that, if taken seriously, would transform the Christian world:
The Cross is the sign of contradiction—destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies . . . But the magicians keep turning the cross to their own purposes. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the cross contradict mercy! This is of course the ultimate temptation of Christianity! To say that Christ has locked all the doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved—while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.8
The Call to Community
Following the 1948 publication of The Seven Storey Mountain, the Abbey of Gethsemani was flooded with young men who wanted to join Merton in the monastic life. Though I was twenty years late to the party, and Merton was no longer with us, I wanted what they wanted. But, as I’ve said, I had some liabilities when it came to becoming a monk, including a family and Quakerish tendencies. If I were ever to live full-time in a spiritual community, I needed to find another way.
In 1974, I left my community organizing job in Washington, DC, and moved with my family to a Quaker living-learning community called Pendle Hill, located near Philadelphia. For the next eleven years, I shared a daily round of worship, study, work, social outreach, and communal meals with some seventy people in a spiritually grounded community that was as close as I could get to my image of Merton’s monastic life. I saw the monastery as a “community of solitudes,” a way of “being alone together,” a way of life in which a group of people could live more fully into Rilke’s definition of love: “that two [or more] solitudes border, protect and salute one another.”9
This is not the place to write about the many ways a decade-plus at Pendle Hill deepened and strengthened my sense of vocation, a topic I have explored elsewhere.10 Suffice it to say that in the Quaker tradition I found a way to join the inner journey with social concerns, which later led me to found the Center for Courage & Renewal, an international nonprofit whose mission is to help people in various walks of life “rejoin soul and role.”11 My experience at Pendle Hill also led me to take one more step toward “the margin of society.” Since leaving that community in 1985, I’ve made most of my living by working independently as a writer, teacher, and activist.
When my courage to work at the margins wavers, I take heart in what Merton said in his final talk, given to an international conference of monks in Bangkok a few hours before he died. Quoting a Tibetan lama who was forced to flee his monastery and his homeland, Merton advised the monks, “From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet.”12
In words that ring true for me at a time in history when our major social institutions—political, economic, and religious—are profoundly dysfunctional, Merton goes on to say:
[W]e can no longer rely on being supported by structures that may be destroyed at any moment by a political power or a political force. You cannot rely on structures. They are good and they should help us, and we should do the best we can with them. But they may be taken away, and if everything is taken away, what do you do next?13
The “Hidden Wholeness” in a Broken World
As the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe famously reminded us, “things fall apart.”14 But in “Hagia Sophia,” one of Merton’s most lyrical meditations, he writes about the “hidden wholeness” the spiritual eye can discern beneath the broken surface of things—whether it’s a broken political system, a broken relationship, or a broken heart:
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans.15
These words, too, have served as a source of hope for me. Once one has eyes to see it, wholeness can always be found, hidden beneath the broken surface of things. This is more than a soothing notion. It’s an insight that can shape what the Buddhists call “right action,” if we have eyes to see.
Here’s an example of what I mean. In the early 1970s—as I was reading Merton and learning a bit about how to organize for racial justice in a rapidly changing neighborhood—I began to understand that my job was not to try to force people into things they did not want to do, such as protesting against unscrupulous real estate practices like blockbusting and redlining. Instead, I needed to give them excuses and permissions to do things they really wanted to do—things related to the justice agenda—but were too shy or fearful to do under their own steam.
For example, the people in the neighborhood where I lived and worked had already run from “the stranger” once, driven by the fears that animate white flight. But in their heart of hearts, they had come to understand that there was no place left to run, no place to escape the diversity of the human community, and that embracing it might bring them peace and enrich their lives.
I knew that step one in stopping real estate practices that manipulate fear to generate profit was simple: give the old-timers and the newcomers frequent chances to meet face-to-face so they could learn that “the other” came bearing blessings, not threats. But instead of asking folks to do the impossible—for example, “Just knock on a stranger’s door and get to know whoever answers”—my colleagues and I began creating activities and settings for natural interactions: door-to-door surveys, block parties, ethnic food fairs, and a program we called Living Room Conversations about shared interests, to name a few.
Amid the tensions of “otherness” that are always with us, we helped people act on their deep-down desire to live in the “connectedness” that the human spirit yearns for. And it worked. Over time, because of our efforts and those of many others, a community that might have been shattered became diverse and more whole.
Things do not always work out so well, of course. History is full of tragically failed visions of possibility, and the more profound the vision, the more likely we are to fall short of achieving it. But even here, Merton has a word of hope for us, a paradoxical word, of course:
[D]o not depend on the hope of results . . . [Y]ou may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.16
As long as we’re wedded to results, we’ll take on smaller and smaller tasks, the only ones that yield results. If we want to live by values like love, truth, and justice—values that will never be fully achieved—“faithfulness” is the only standard that will do. When I die, I won’t be asking about the bottom line. I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, and to the ways I engaged those needs with my gifts—faithful, that is, to the value, rightness, and truth of offering the world the best I had, as best I could.
For helping me understand this—and for imbuing me with the faith that, despite my many flaws, I might be able to live this way—I owe a debt of deep gratitude to Thomas Merton, friend, fellow traveler, and messenger of hope.
Down Is the Way to Well-Being
When I was in my forties, struggling to survive a bout with depression, my therapist said, “You seem to image what’s happening to you as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to image it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down to ground on which it’s safe to stand?”*
My first thought was, “I need a new therapist.” When you’re depressed, it seems insulting, even insane for someone to suggest that the soul-sucking Spawn of Satan who has sunk its teeth into you is your BFF. And yet, as time went by, the image of depression as a befriending force began to work on me, slowly reframing my misery and helping me reclaim my mental health. Something in me knew that my therapist spoke the truth: down is the way to well-being.
During my first forty years, I’d been driven by the notion that “Up, up and away” was the right direction to go. I had worked hard to achieve altitude because . . . Well, because higher is better than lower, right? Wrong. Living at altitude is dangerous. When we fall, as we regularly do, we have a long way to fall, and the fall may kill us. But a life on the ground—a life grounded in the reality of our own nature and our right relationship to the world—allows us to stumble and fall, get back up, brush ourselves off, and take next steps without doing ourselves great harm.
The altitude at which I was living came from my misuse of four human capacities that, when rightly used, can serve us well:
• Intellect. As an academic, I’d been trained not simply to think, a capacity I value, but to live mostly in my head, the part of the body farthest from the ground. Learning to think with my mind descended into my heart—integrating what I knew intellectually with what I knew experientially—was not part of the program.17
• Ego. We all need ego strength, a viable sense of self. But I’d been borne aloft on an inflated ego—an ego that led me to think more of myself than was healthy in order to mask my neurotic fear that I was less than I should have been.
• Spirituality. The spiritual yearning to connect with the largeness of life can powerfully enhance one’s experience. But the spirituality I’d embraced was more about flying above life’s mess than engaging with it on the ground. How did the Christian tradition in which I was raised—one centered on “the Word made flesh”— become so disembodied?
• Ethics. I’d tried to live by the precepts of an impossibly out-of-reach ethic—an ethic framed by other people’s images of who I ought to be and what I ought to do. What I needed was honest insight into what is true, possible, and life-giving for me, just as I am, broken places and all.
Those external “oughts” had long been a driving force in my life. When I failed to live up to them—see how often “up” sneaks into our talk about the good life?—I judged myself as weak and faithless. I was stuck in that stage of moral development where one has high aspirations and equally high levels of guilt about falling short. It’s a formula for the good life, I tell you: aim high, hit low, and feel lousy about yourself as you go.
As I took on various issues and causes, I never stopped to ask, “Does such-and-such fit my sense of who I am?” Or “Is such-and-such truly my gift and my calling?” As a result, important parts of the life I was living were not mine to live, and thus were bound to fail. Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand—the ground of my own being, with its messy mix of limits and potentials, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.
Eventually, I developed an image that helped me understand how depression can have a “befriending” intent—and how my failure to “listen to my life” had left me in a place of deep pain. Imagine that for many years a friend had been walking a block behind me, calling my name, trying to get my attention because he wanted to tell me some hard but healing truths about myself. But I—afraid of what I might hear, or arrogantly certain I had nothing to learn—ignored his calls and kept on walking.
So my friend came closer and called my name louder, but I walked on, refusing to turn around. Closer still he came, now shouting my name. Frustrated by my lack of response, he began to throw stones and hit me with sticks, still wanting nothing more than to get my attention. But despite my pain, I kept walking away.
Since calls and shouts, sticks and stones, had failed to get my attention, there was only one thing left for my friend to do: drop the boulder called depression on me. He did it not with intent to kill but in a last-ditch effort to get me to turn toward him and ask a simple question: “What do you want?”
When I finally made that turn—and began taking in and acting on the self-knowledge he’d been waiting to offer me—I was able to take my first steps on the path to well-being.
Thomas Merton’s name for that friend is “true self.” This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us. It’s not the intellectual self that wants to hover above life’s mess with logical but ungrounded ideas. It’s not the ethical self that wants to live by someone else’s “oughts.” It’s not the spiritual self that wants to fly nonstop to heaven.
True self is the self with which we arrive on earth, the self that simply wants us to be who we were born to be. True self tells us who we are, where we are planted in the ecosystem of life, what “right action” looks like for us, and how we can grow more fully into our own potentials.
As an old Hasidic tale reminds us, our mission is to live into the shape of true self, not the shape of someone else’s life:
Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”18
Memo to myself: stay on the ground, turn around, ask, and listen. True self is true friend—it’s a friendship we ignore at our peril. And pass the word: friends don’t let friends live at altitude.
Notes from a Week in the Winter Woods
Monday, January 11
Arrived in midafternoon at my rented cabin in the snow-covered Wisconsin countryside. Went inside, lit a fire, and unpacked the car, quickly, motivated by the subzero wind-chill. Outside, acres of bright fields and dark woods. Inside, just me. Plus enough clothing, food, and books—body and soul sustenance for a week of silence and solitude.
Yesterday, as I was packing, a friend asked if I liked being alone. “It depends on who shows up,” I said. “Sometimes I’m my best friend, sometimes my worst enemy. I’ll see who’s there when I get to the cabin.”
It’s 9:00 p.m., an hour before Quaker midnight, but I’m going to turn in anyway. I’m drowsy and at peace. The fire I’ve been staring into seems to have burned away the worries that tagged along with me.
Tuesday, January 12
Woke up about 5:00 a.m. and lay awake for another hour in the dark, watching some of my dark emotions rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the night and flap around to get my attention. “Welcome and entertain them all!” says Rumi in his poem “The Guest House.” “Be grateful for whoever comes, / because each has been sent / as a guide from beyond.”19
Guess I need to have a chat with “the beyond.” Looks like he/she/it didn’t get the memo that I came here for some peace.
Now, a few hours later, I’m feeling that peace again. It came from a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast, all ready simultaneously despite the fact that I’m a certified kitchen klutz. My peace came as well from looking out on the snowfields, brilliant under the rising sun and beautifully etched with the shadows of trees and stubble poking up through the snow.
Rumi’s “beyond” was right: peace comes from embracing the interplay of shadow and light, and a good breakfast doesn’t hurt. After eating, I read the January 12 entry in A Year with Thomas Merton, a collection of daily meditations:
It seems to me that I have greater peace . . . when I am not “trying to be contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this.20
Simple and true, that, but so easily lost in Type A spiritual striving. What was required of me this morning was simply to make breakfast, despite my well-documented ineptitude. The deal is to do whatever’s needful and within reach, no matter how ordinary or whether I’m likely to do it well.
This afternoon, what I needed was a hike, though the windchill was six below zero. I’m no Ernest Shackleton, but as a longtime resident of the Upper Midwest, I learned long ago that winter will drive you crazy until you get out into it—and I mean “winter” both literally and metaphorically.
“In the depths of winter,” said Camus, “I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”21 I didn’t discover summer on my hike. But the sun blazed bright on the frozen prairie, warming my face. And high in the cobalt-blue sky, a hawk “making lazy circles in the sky” as I’ve seen them do in July. For January in Wisconsin, that’s close enough to summer for me.
Wednesday, January 13
I slept poorly last night, and I know why. An hour before bedtime, I binge-ate a box of Jujyfruits while reading a book about spiritual discipline. The book made a few good points but was not well written, and I scarfed down the Jujyfruits as a stimulus to stick with it. My bad, but clear evidence that I could use some discipline.
I feel better now because the oatmeal I made for breakfast—on my second try—was healing. Pure comfort food. On the first try, I got the ratio of oatmeal to water wrong and left it on the burner too long. The pan looked like an avant-garde sculpture of metal fused with grain: Agrarian Culture in the Machine Age. Again, my bad, but my kitchen klutz credentials have been fully restored.
I guess my theme today is “Screw-ups in Solitude.” In solitude, my bads make me grin. If I committed them in front of others, I’d be embarrassed or angry with myself. Self-acceptance is easier when no one is around.
The Taoist master Chuang Tzu tells about a man crossing a river when an empty skiff slams into his. The man does not become angry, as he would if there was a boatman in the other skiff. So, says Chuang Tzu, “Empty your own boat as you cross the river of the world.”22
In solitude, I can empty my boat. Can I do it when I’m in the company of other people? Maybe:
Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one’s self. It is not about the absence of other people—it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others.23
That quote comes from a book I wrote, so I should probably give it a try.
Woke up at 2:00 a.m. and found myself regretting some things I got wrong over the past seventy-seven years. Wished I had been kinder, or braver, or less self-centered than I was, and had a hard time naming the things I got right.
Remembering that the 2:00 a.m. mind is almost always deranged, I finally got up at 4:00 a.m., dressed, made some coffee, stood out into the dark and cold for a bit, and saw Venus gleaming low in the southeast. The goddess of love: that helped.
Then I read the January 14 entry in A Year with Thomas Merton. Once again, my old friend had a word I needed to hear, as he reflected on the complex mix of rights and wrongs in his own life: “I am thrown into contradiction: to realize [this] is mercy, to accept it is love, and to help others do the same is compassion.”24
Merton goes on to say that the contradictions in our lives are engines of creativity. It’s true. If we got everything right or everything wrong, there’d be none of the divine discontent or the sense of possibility that animates our growth. What we get wrong makes us reach for something better. What we get right reassures us that the “better” is sometimes within our reach.
Memo to self: Remember that you are never in your right mind at 2:00 a.m. Get outside and air out your brain as often as possible. Look for love in all the right places. (Venus isn’t a bad place to start.) When all else fails, make coffee.
Now I’m going to take a nap.
This morning, for no apparent reason, I woke up with a grin, another one of those “guests” Rumi spoke about, “sent as a guide from beyond.” But this time the guest is a welcome lightness, a sense of impending laughter.
Most of my heroes are no strangers to laughter. Grandpa Palmer comes quickly to mind. The man was proof-positive of William James’s claim that “common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.”25
I remember the driving lesson he gave me when I was fourteen, and how I made a dumb, dangerous move on a back-country Iowa road and missed a stop sign. We came to a quivering stop in the middle of a crossroad that could well have had traffic, and Grandpa was ominously silent for a bit. Then he said, laconically, “If I’d of knowed you was gonna do that, I don’t believe I’d of asked you to drive.” He never said another word about my near disaster, and for the past sixty-three years I’ve driven accident-free.
Merton was well known for his sense of humor, a quality not uncommon among monks. In The Sign of Jonas, a deeply moving journal of his early years in the monastery, there’s a line that always makes me smile: “I had a pious thought, but I am not going to write it down.”26
And I love this claim, found in a Hindu epic called The Ramayana, as told by Aubrey Menen:
There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.27
I’m sure I’ll experience all three today. The first is ever available, if my heart is open. The second is guaranteed, since wherever I go, there I am. As for the third, laughing at myself can easily consume a couple of hours a day, no problem.
Saturday, January 16
Today’s opening line in A Year with Thomas Merton: “You can make your life what you want” if you don’t “drive [yourself] on with illusory demands.”28 I don’t think it’s entirely true that I can make my life what I want. But it would help if I stopped making demands on myself that distort who I really am and what I’m really called to do.
After five days of silence and solitude, I’m noticing that many of the demands that hung over me when I came out here have lightened or wafted away. Since I’ve done little this week to meet those demands, the lesson seems clear: they were mostly the inventions of an agitated mind. Now that my mind has quieted, its tyranny has been undermined, and I feel more at peace.
I recall a story that my businessman dad told me about how he dealt with pressure. In his office, he had a pedestal desk with five drawers in the right-hand pedestal. He’d put today’s mail in the bottom drawer, after moving yesterday’s mail up to the next drawer, and so on. He’d open letters only after they had made it to the top drawer. By that time, he said, half of the problems people had written him about had taken care of themselves, and the other half were less daunting than they would have been if he’d read the letters the moment they arrived.
True story? I’m not sure—Dad was fond of morality tales. But as Black Elk said to the children in his tribe when he told a teaching story, “Whether it happened that way, I do not know. But if you think about it, you will see that it is true.”29
Of course, the blessed curse called email did not exist in Dad’s day. Still, his story points the way: make five folders for my email, and use them as Dad said he used his desk drawers. In certain respects, I guess you can make the life you want.
Sunday, January 17
On this last full day of my retreat, I’m still meditating on the opening line of the January 13 entry in A Year with Thomas Merton: “There is one thing I must do here at my woodshed hermitage . . . and that is to prepare for my death. But that means a preparation in gentleness.”30
What a great leap—from death to gentleness. So different from Dylan Thomas’s famous advice to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”31 When I was thirty-five, raging seemed right. But at seventy-seven, it’s Thomas Merton, not Dylan Thomas, who speaks to me.
The prospect of death—heightened by winter’s dark and cold, by solitude, silence, and age—makes it clear that my calling is to be gentle with the many expressions of life, old and new, that must be handled with care if they are to survive and thrive, and that includes me.
Sometimes, of course, that means becoming fierce in confronting the enemies of gentleness around me and within me. If that’s a contradiction, so be it. I think Thomas Merton would approve.
Welcome Home
Alone in the alien, snow-blown woods,
moving hard to stay warm in zero weather,
I stop on a rise to catch my breath as the
sun, setting through bare-boned trees,
falls upon my face, fierce and full of life.
Breathing easy now, breathing with the earth,
I suddenly feel accepted—feel myself stand
my own ground, strong, deep-rooted as a tree—
while time and all these troubles disappear.
And when (who knows how long?) I move
on down the trail and find my ancient burdens
returning, I stop once more to say No to them—
Not here, Not now, Not ever again—reclaiming
the welcome home the woods have given me.
*On Nov. 2, 2015, my friend Sharon Salzberg posted a superb essay on the On Being blog, “The Irony of Attachment” (http://tinyurl.com/y9fzl8nh). She told of the Dalai Lama receiving a gift of Trappist cheese while visiting the Abbey of Gethsemani, later telling the monks that he wished they’d given him a fruitcake instead. Sharon wrote, “A friend, hearing this story, commented that the Dalai Lama might be one of the few people on Earth who has longed for fruitcake.” I want His Holiness to know that he is not alone in this longing. But honesty compels me to note that this is the only way in which my life parallels his.
This is an edited version of an essay that originally appeared in We Are Already One: Thomas Merton’s Message of Hope—Reflections in Honor of His Centenary (1915–2015) (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae Press, 2015), pp. 24–29.
*Depression is a complex topic. I’m qualified to write only about my own experience of it, at least the parts I understand. What I say about it in this book is not meant to apply to all depressions, let alone serve as a “prescription.” My focus is on the situational elements of my depression, though it seems likely that elements of brain chemistry and genetics were also involved. People sometimes ask if I’m “for or against” antidepressants. In all three of my depressions, I was on meds for six to twelve months in order to get some ground under my feet, but some people need to be on them for life. I’m for whatever brings genuine relief from misery and allows us to live our lives as fully as we can.
Every year, I take a weeklong solitary winter retreat. These are excerpts from a journal I kept during a mid-January retreat in 2016.