Seeing with two eyes

Salisbury Cathedral

ROSLYN -- I’ve been away from the parish these last few days on a personal retreat, and naps have definitely been a part of the agenda. I’ve also read a book by John Phillip Newell, a gift of a parishioner.

Newell is best known for his work in Celtic spirituality. This recent book, A New Harmony: The Spirit, The Earth and The Human Soul, is really an essay about his expansive journey through many spiritualities including into India in the 1990s and how he has found a harmony within all of them.

Newell notes, as many have noted, that western Christianity over the centuries had put God “out there” or “up there,” keeping God at a distance while we ourselves go about our daily business. Church architecture, though beautiful, underlines that concept, with spires pointing skyward.

Newell re-discovered the harmony and the balance in God’s presence in creation by traveling to India. God is up there, but God is down here, and God dwells within. To see God is to see God in both places, to see God with two eyes, and not just one. He traveled far to find the balance that was always looking him in the face.

For me, that is not a new concept, but I am one who left the church to seek God before returning to church. I also needed to travel far, though not as far as India, to see what was already in front of me. My moment of harmony, as Newell might put it, came years ago while walking on a road late at night in Mojave Desert. The stars and galaxies, the desert floor and sage brush, and my own body seemed that night to be as one.

I could sense that night how G-d, the One who has no human name, courses through all of existence and time. We are made not merely by G-d, but we are made of G-d because G-d dwells in all things, and all things are knit together with G-d. You might say I have spent the rest of my life, in one way or another, trying to understand that one night in the middle of the desert.

And while we over-educated western Euro-centric folks may find all of this new and foreign, it really isn’t. The ancient Hebrew writers of the Bible lived with that idea daily, and the balance of God’s transcendence and immanence exudes from their writing.

Psalm 85, appointed for today, is a beautiful example:

Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Truth shall spring up from the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven.

Even our church architecture can be made new if we see it new. We can look at the ceiling and the spires with one eye, and look at each other with another eye. When we do, we will be very close to seeing that which knits all together as one. We really don't have to travel far to see with two eyes.

An Advent discussion: The Big-Hard-Questions

This Advent, I would like to do something special with you on this blog.

I want to spend time here considering a few of the big-hard-to-get-your-brain-around questions about God, prayer and life itself. Those are huge topics, and writing on these can easily fill a library.

So I propose going slowly, circling around a bit, talking a few steps at a time, and seeing where we end up.

Think of this as walking a labyrinth.

Every few days this Advent, I will write something on one of these topics. I hope you will walk with me, and lend me your wisdom, your experience, and maybe share some of your spiritual practices. What works for you? Please add a comment or two.

Some of what we usually do here on this blog will continue, like the Monday Funnies. But let’s spend Advent being a little more intentional, a little more aware of our faith journey. Let’s ask those big-hairy-questions, maybe acknowledge a few doubts, examine our prayers, and share a few moments when we feel the presence of the holy.

I am partly inspired to do this by my friend Ilana DeBare, who recently began a journey to her Bat Mitzvah as a middle-aged adult. She noted recently that although she was raised Jewish, and lived for a time in Israel, she had not explored very deeply her Jewish religion.

I’ve known Ilana for many years, from when we worked to together as reporters in The Sacramento Bee Capitol Bureau. Ilana moved to The San Francisco Chronicle, got married, has a wonderful daughter, helped start a girls school (The Julia Morgan School in Oakland), wrote a book or two, and left The Chronicle along with everyone else I know who once worked there.

Ilana decided to study with a rabbi and work her way to a Bat Mitzvah in February 2011. I tell you all this because Ilana also started a blog, inviting her friends to walk with her on her journey. You can follow her journey by clicking HERE; I would ask that readers of this blog be respectful when reading hers.

She has begun at the ground level, always a good place to start, by asking basic hard questions about faith, God and prayer. I’ve been intrigued by her questions and by the answers from her friends. I think it a good Advent exercise for us to go into these questions, too, on this blog. Please do not see this as competing, but more as a parallel path through the labyrinth. I am not looking for doctrinal arguments or turgid theological treatises, but something less loaded, more simple, and closer to who each of us are created to be. There are no extra points for being "right," and I am not looking for sameness.

I begin this journey with an observation made by Ilana: “I don’t believe there is an old white man with a long white beard sitting on a throne up in the clouds” who is deciding who gets sick and who gets well, which prayers to answer, and which to ignore.

I don’t believe that either.

But that begs the question: What do I believe? About God? About prayer? About life and death? Let’s walk with those questions; walk with them through the labyrinth for a time.

Our answers may not be perfect, and my answers may not be your answers, but maybe by walking together we will find ourselves at the center somewhere looking at the face of God.

I want start our walk by considering prayer. Tomorrow I will share with you a glimpse of my own prayer life, not as a recipe guide, but simply as an offering of my own experience with prayer and what works for me.

I hope to see you back here again.

The labyrinth design is from Chartres Cathedral, and the design has been duplicated all over the world. The photo shows people in a yoga class on the labyrinth (same design) at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.