Christmas always brings me here

This time of year really is full of magic. I have my advent candles again, and I'll be going to a cathedral on Christmas eve. I haven't ended up in any church: in the end there's always more dissonance than seems fruitful in the moment. But I can visit without pain. My spiritual life these days is still entirely without anything that I could nail down as belief, but I have more room for magic, mystery, the unseen, and the edges of my own reason. I've laid down the thought that I could maybe scratch out a literal God for myself that would line up with my intellect and experience of the world, who I could lean on for hep or guidance, but I've also found compassion for the part of myself which needs something greater than this small fragile shaky stumbling self in order to tolerate the terrifying world. Right now I'm spending time with the Buddhists asking if I can ever believe that I really am the same substance as that "more." It feels unlikely, but everything is entirely unlikely if you think about it long enough. Self-compassion is my biggest practice, and remains both immensely difficult and tremendously fruitful.

When I think about this blog and my many years of spiritual questing, I feel gentle compassion. I love this generous poem by Hafiz:

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet, crushed angel,
To have ever neared God's heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy
To hear.
So what if the music has stopped for a while.
So what
If the price of admission to the Divine
Is out of reach tonight.
So what, my dear,
If you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.
The mind and the body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the Beloved's eternal habits.
Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing
For Long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
O my sweet crushed angel.

2015. I like that impossible number.

So Christmas came and went. It was meaningful, and intense, and helpful. I have not been back to church since Christmas eve, but I continue to rotate around the idea of practice and liturgy and how helpful it could or could not be to me and how I feel about the integrity of my concepts of god and not-god and the usual fascinating/boring/unanswerable/ineffable. I continue to swing between the intellectual purity of my Quakerism and the right-brain riot of Anglican liturgy, though swing is a strog word. I'm sort of just dangling there somewhere in the middle. The new year is well underway, and I have all sorts of exciting things happening in my exterior life. Aside from the occasional morning candle lighting and journal writing session, I haven't remained as purposeful about my interior life.

I am considering doing with Lent what I did with Advent, and perhaps taking up a discipline. Suddenly grand gestures like walking the Camino seem hugely attractive, which is usually a sign that I am running away from something. Even writing this post is running away in a small way because I ought to be doing some work. But ah.

I am interested in turning Lent inside out for myself. I have nursed a hatred for the season, for the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. Even once I dropped a literal belief in the substitutionary redemption idea I still thought it was a cruel and gory story and a disgusting myth. Some of that anger lingers. But I recognise in it the anger and disgust I have about the state of the world, about the existence of suffering, about my life-long inability to reconcile the Christian idea of embracing suffering or even the Buddhist idea of accepting suffering. I rage and rail and cry and pout and despair and flail my fists upon reality and it's all a bit messy and futile and embarassing. Still don't know what to do with it. But anyway. I have some guy-lines in my mind about all of this and how it may connect and the metaphorical truths in there but I need some way to lash it down to my experience or...something.

Thinking about thinking about all of this in a structured way for Lent, leaning into the gory metaphors of the Christian myth and seeing if they have something for me. I am of two minds about discipline or fasting...I would like to reclaim that too, because I know I have a very messed up relationship with it. Guilt, self-hatred, self-punishment, self-cruelty: those are all strong "demons" in my life, and I have done a lot of work to try to get out from under them. Self-acceptance and gentleness are hard-won. But still I struggle and want a better balance. At the moment I seem to have a foot in both camps: indulging myself and then yelling at myself for it later. Living without structure or discipline and then suffering the consequences. I'd like to make it better but never seem to gain any ground. With the disclaimer that I really am happy and healthy on almost any scale you care to use, this interior conflict is the most troublesome thing in my life. I am trying to approach it with fearless curiosity, but it is a challenge. Is this something that the scaffolding of a liturgical season could help me with?

I found a new-to-me Rilke poem today which I will carry around with me carefully.


I have many brothers in the South

who move, handsome in their vestments,

through cloister gardens.

The Madonnas they make are so human,

and I dream often of their Titians,

where God becomes an ardent flame.



But when I lean over the chasm of myself -

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.



This is the ferment I grow out of.



More I don't know, because my branches

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of a Monastic Life