Nat

It amazes me when the right book comes to me just when I need it. Last week a friend recommended Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat. Pray. Love. I had read the reviews and walked by it in bookstores for months, thinking that I would probably like it, but when I received the recommendation last week, I was particularly desperate for advice about reaching out to God.

For those of you who haven’t read it–and I strongly recommend that you do–Gilbert opens the book sobbing on the floor of her bathroom, desperate for guidance about whether to leave her marriage. She asks God for help, and receives a clear answer back. The answer is, “Go to bed, Elizabeth,” and what she writes about this is that she recognizes it as wisdom. “True wisdom,” Gilbert writes, “gives the only possible answer at any given moment” (p. 16).

It’s a great definition. Typically I expect that real insight will allow me to solve all of my problems at once. I know this is ridiculous when I am being rational, but suffering has a way of making me want to know everything all at once. Gilbert’s reminder that we only need to know the best next step strikes me as great advice, both because we can only take one step at a time, and also because it reminds us to narrow our focus on a problem to the tiny portion of it that we can handle right away.

Brilliant. (Plus, the rest of the book is funny and charming.)

Today was a study in contrast. While hundreds of thousands of delirious Red Sox fans celebrated the team’s World Series victory at a raucous street parade, my office struggled with some very difficult news. I couldn’t really enjoy the thought of the victory parade, because it seemed frivolous.

This kind of contrast, between joy and sorrow, always raises the question for me how best to retain a sense of well-being when we are challenged with bad news and hardship. While I don’t always have the answer, I have learned to reach for the source of my greatest and most reliable comfort and peace.

For me that is my faith and my family. For you it could be something else, but returning to what always makes me feel better takes me beyond the circumstances in front of me. I think this is why so much of Buddhism focuses on giving up attachments. Being attached leads to suffering. I take from that the need to believe that there are enduring sources of joy. On days when they appear uncertain, I am learning to hang in there and wait for tomorrow.

My wife always makes me feel better after a day like this. She knows that words alone may not comfort me, but her presence always does. I’m hunkered down waiting for the wave to roll over.

Flo’s blog page includes a link to purchase the book Writing the Mind Alive by Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon. I finally bought the book this week and read most of it on the plane today.

I can’t believe I waited so long or that I had never heard of it before Flo put it up. The authors are former literature professors who have been teaching this writing method since 1982. (See www.Proprioceptivewriting.com.) Their method articulates a writing process that emphasizes learning to hear and transcribe your thoughts in your own voice. They cite other writing process teachers Peter Elbow and Natalie Goldberg, but they emphasize the ability of their approach to provide clarity to you about your life.

I can hardly wait to start. One of the interesting suggestions they make is that you play Baroque music while doing Writes, because its slower movements employ a rhythm that closely mirrors the human heart beat. I’ve already tried this today in the Northwest airport club in Memphis where I have been working between flights. It works like a dream, especially with my great Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

The sudden arrival of a 25-year old writing process method in my life the day after I pledged to start back in on regular writing process typifies the kind of serendipity that Michael has taught me to expect. Another element of the method that I like is the authors’ insistance that 30 minutes’ practice in a day is more than enough to feel its full effects over time. That seems like a very little commitment for the possible payoff of clarity in one’s writing, emotional development, and spiritual progress.

Go figure.

David Brooks of the New York Times, wrote this in his column today, which explained why Catholic “quasi-believers” are so successful in our society:

For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.

First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.

This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.

One eye open. It’s an interesting notion, and it may well be that this recipe predicts success in our society right now. But it only rings true for me if by “one eye open,” you mean that you are looking to supplement the wisdom that one tradition teaches you with additional wisdom.

I prefer belief to skepticism. My belief in a powerful God has often been the only reassurance that got me up and out of bed in the morning. Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and waited for enlightenment. He wasn’t evaluating options; he was looking for an answer to explain human suffering. As far as suffering goes, I believe that God doesn’t bring it to us.

I don’t have all the answers, but I don’t feel the need to keep one eye on the possibility that God has suffering in the works for us. It’s a better world if he doesn’t.

The April 16 New Yorker magazine has a short item in “The Talk of the Town” about German filmmaker Philip Groning’s 3-hour documentary about Carthusian monks, called “Into Great Silence.” The movie portrays–largely in silence–the lives of monks in the Grande Chartreuse monastery in France.

The film has become so popular at the Film Forum art movie house in Manhattan that the theater has extended it’s engagement indefinitely and now brings a Carthusian monk, named Father Michael Holleran, to the theater to host a Q&A session after some screenings. Father Holleran no longer lives in a monastery, but he spent 19 years in monasteries, in which speaking was only allowed a few hours each week.

After the movie screenings, members of the audience ask questions about what life is like in the monastery, “You guys are supposed to be celibate, right?” It’s fascinating to me, and encouraging, that so many New Yorkers want to see what it’s like to be a monk with a vow of silence. When I was in my twenties, becoming a monk appealed greatly to me, though never enough that I really considered going forward with it.

Still, the thought of retreating from the onslaught of words, messages, and intrusion on our thoughts and plans brings peace just in the thought of it. Our words, so much of the time, fall short of what we need them to construct. It would be nice, I sometimes think, if we didn’t have any responsibility but to do things, without speaking about them.

It would be nice. Maybe some day.

I have always loved Easter. It’s the day of the year when I am most convinced that God loves us. Today, when Zach Johnson won the Masters golf championship, he said that his faith was very important to him, so it was especially meaningful to win his first major tournament on Easter.

It’s easy to question whether God or Jesus would care who wins a golf tournament, but the way Johnson spoke, he didn’t make it sound as if Jesus was pulling for him to win at anyone else’s expense, he just said that he could feel Jesus with him.

In the end, that’s what I love about Easter: that the son of God has a message for us. God loves us. Even more than that, God’s love is also power to protect us, even from torture and death. Don’t be afraid. That’s what I sense on Easter. Don’t be afraid. There’s reason enough to be happy on Easter.

Esther Hicks in one of the latest “Abraham” CDs talks about the importance of turning your thought toward what you want to experience in your life. In other words, however far away your desires may seem, filling your thought with what you want rather than with what you don’t draws you closer to what you want.

It’s easy to think this is nonsense, that your thought has little to do with circumstance. On the other hand, if you accept that there is some force influencing events, then it is possible and even likely that some idea governs what happens in the world. We talk about a law of gravity. What created the circumstances in which the force of gravity acted as it does?

Fill your thoughts with the condition you want to experience. Our thought has more to do with how we experience the world than anything else. Give it a try.

In a blog post on being sick in London, Michael wrote about the difficulty of settling down to relax and rest when there are other things to do. The challenge is that there are always great things to do.

Today I’ve felt tired and run down all day, but I got myself up and through the work day, drove home on crowded, snowy roads, and am waiting for it to be late enough to sleep the rest of the night.

It is a relief, sometimes, to be out of thoughts. I like to meditate when I am this tired. The mind lets itself go blank with such ease. It’s enough to make me think I can just wait it out, the drive to make an impact, the wish to make things better, the need to achieve something and be able to talk about it, or not.

Just to sit or lie and wait for the thinking to stop. I’m glad that I rarely remember my dreams. I usually have to get this tired or desperate in some way to pray.

My not-so-secret guilty pleasure is that I love lots of mediocre TV. Tonight’s rerun of “Men in Trees” has a great bit of dialogue. Anne Heche’s character tells how troubled she is by small, short earthquakes in Alaska, and she asks on her character’s radio show, “How do you people deal with living on shaky ground?”

It’s an absolutely great question, since that’s what we all have to do eventually. Or always. When I lived through two very large earthquakes in California in 1987 and 1989, I found the experience very odd and unsettling. For starters, all of the car alarms go off at once.

But metaphorically, it’s an even harder question. How do you learn to handle finding out that things in life are not as durable or solid as they appear to be?

So tell me, How do you deal with living on shaky ground?

Here’s another great quote from Happiness, by Matthieu Ricard:

We all have the ability to study the causes of suffering and gradually to free ourselves from them. We all have the potential to sweep away the veils of ignorance, to free ourselves of the selfishness and misplaced desires that trigger unhappiness, to work for the good of others and extract the essence from our human condition. It’s not the magnitude of the task that matters, it’s the magnitude of our courage (p. 65).

The courage, that is to confront our suffering by facing our own minds. According to the Buddha and Ricard, the external examples of suffering (poverty, war, hatred, loss), can give way to our individual ability to see the causes of our suffering and correct them.

More on this.