Mono No Aware

The concept of mono no aware suggests an awareness of the impermanent nature of everything.  Generally translated as "the pathos of things," this awareness intensifies the appreciation of beauty, and evokes a poignant acceptance at its passing.  Unlike Western ideals of beauty - primarily based on a external perfection - in Japanese culture, beauty seems to be embraced in a more subjective fashion; as an experience of the heart and soul, not merely the fives senses. 

With mono no aware, the ground strewn with fallen sakura petals is just as beautiful - or perhaps more so - than the fresh young blossoms clinging to the trees.   And, because everything is impermanent, getting attached to things can lead us to suffering (at least according to the Buddha, who, I think, nails it here).  It's not just a "stop and smell the roses" philosophy, but a "stop and smell the roses and sadly rejoice in their inevitable passing as a proof of this truth" philosophy.

On Sunday I took my daughter and a few of her friends to Sakura Sunday in Fairmount Park.   The weather was perfect and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom.  The kids had a great time watching the Taiko drummers, cosplaying, checking out all things Japanese and, most especially, enjoying being together outside of the school building.  It was a pretty good day.

But, as I consider this Sunday, and the previous years' festivals we attended, I can't help but think of how things pass so quickly when the kids are still kids.  Even though this was only the third Sakura Sunday we've attended, I can see how they are all changing, growing older (though, thankfully, not growing up too fast).  Soon enough I'll be completely extraneous. 

So, for now I'm going with mono no aware and reminding myself to appreciate the fleeting beauty in all things - the cherry blossoms, the seasons, and my teenage daughter's need for her mother.

The Idolatry of Fellowship

Lenten Learning 3: Sometimes I think I go to church more to see other people than to worship God.

I don't really have anything deep or pithy to say about it. It's just that, over Lent, I realized that I do this a lot. To the extent that I can't tell where one ends and the other begins

And because I can't always tell the difference between worship and fellowship, I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Like I'm putting being with them before God; that I don't believe He's enough. I don't know what to do about it. Part of me thinks I need to walk away from my church until I can guarantee that my focus and priorities are straight.

But when I look for advice, I don't always find the derision I expected:

"I vividly remember how I had, at one time, become totally dependent on the affection and friendship of one person. This dependency threw me into a pit of great anguish and brought me to the verge of a very self-destructive depression. But from the moment I was helped to experience my interpersonal addiction as an expression of a need for total surrender to a living God who would fulfil the deepest desires of my heart, I started to live my dependency in a radically new way. Instead of living it in shame and embarrassment, I was able to live it as an urgent invitation to claim God's unconditional love for myself, a love I can depend on without any fear." -- Henri Nouwen

"When I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and wouldn't go to the churches and Gospel Halls;.... I disliked very much their hymns which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren't fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit." -- C. S. Lewis

"Some Christians try to go to heaven alone, in solitude. But believers are not compared to bears or lions or other animals that wander alone. Those who belong to Christ are sheep in this respect, that they love to get together. Sheep go in flocks, and so do God's people". -- Charles Spurgeon

The best I can do is try to be honest about it, with myself and with God, until I decide how to handle it.

The Heart in (Accidental) Pilgrimage

"Everybody prays whether he thinks of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when a sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with all over your life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world.

According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather comic to have to explain it at all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again (Luke 11:5-8). Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there's nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). Even a stinker, Jesus says, won't give his own child a black eye when he asks for peanut butter and jelly, so how all the more will God when his children... (Matthew 7:9-11).

Be importunate, Jesus says—not, one assumes, because you have to beat a path to God's door before he'll open it, but because until you beat the path maybe there's no way of getting to your door. "Ravish my heart," John Donne wrote. But God will not usually ravish. He will only court." Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

Lenten Learning 2:  I spend a whole lot of time talking to myself (and maybe to God).

As I tried to pay more attention to my actions over Lent (and, apparently, overdosing on Frederick Buechner), I noticed that I spent a lot of time in my own head.  Mostly holding one-sided conversations, as opposed to actually thinking, heaven forbid.  Is this a bad thing?  Maybe not.  Maybe a little.

Worrying, wondering, speculating, planning.  Deep ideas and dull ones. Sporadic and often disparate thoughts. Occasionally, actual prayers. Often the same ones over and over. Pretty standard fare, right? Just an awkward protagonist delivering a semi-conscious internal monologue. My soul in paraphrase.

But, regardless of what I'm saying or how much sense it makes, regardless of whether it's stream of consciousness stuff, or structured, whether they're introspective or just crazy, it seems all that 'talking' can also be prayer.  I think God knows what's meant for Him.  

Bottom line - I think it's ok to spend this internal inadvertently-sacred time, as long as I start talking to real live people, too.

April (May, June, July...) Fool

“The life that I touch for good or ill will touches another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt.  Our lives are linked together.  No man is an island.

But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island.  It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell.  We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool.  And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe truth of it is that, indeed, he is a fool.  The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it.  So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way, of course.  Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be.  We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well – except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known.  In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity.  Part of what it means to be is to be you and not me, between us the sea that we can never entirely cross even when we would.  “My brethren are wholly estranged from me,” Job cries out.  “I have become an alien in their eyes.”

The paradox is that part of what binds us closest together as human beings and makes it true that no man is an island is the knowledge that in another way every man is an island.  Because to know this is to know that not only deep in you is there a self that longs above all to be known and accepted, but that there is also such a self in me, in everyone else the world over.  So when we meet as strangers, when even friends look like strangers, it is good to remember that we need each other greatly you and I, more than much of the time we dare to imagine, more than more of the time we dare to admit.

Island calls to island across the silence, and once, in trust, the real words come, a bridge is built and love is done – not sentimental, emotional love, but love that is pontifex, bridge-builder.  Love that speaks the holy and healing word which is:  God be with you, stranger who are no stranger.  I wish you well.  The islands become an archipelago, a continent, become a kingdom whose name is the Kingdom of God.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

I'm baaaaaaack.   I took an unplanned, self-inflicted break from blogging over Lent - did you miss me?  Over the next couple of days, you'll have to listen to I plan to tell you about what I learned over the last 40+ days. I've had plenty of time to think about stuff.

Today's learning, advantageously, coincides with the date.

Learning One:  My fear of looking like a fool trumps my ability to move mountains.

Thinking about relationships (work and personal, real and imagined) in retrospect, I've identified instances where I either did or said something which masked the way I actually felt.  Not lying, really.  Mostly just non sequiters, adianoeta, phrases turned which please the listener, but still convey truth when looked at sideways.  I wasn't dishonest, you just interpreted me incorrectly.

Why do I do that?  Well, simply put, I want to protect whatever I believe the relationship's status quo is.  Even if it's a crappy status quo, it's the devil I know.  And I want to be the me that I think you'd like.  It's incredibly difficult for me to take the chance of being completely honest with every man, woman or child.  I don't know any human who can manage that. 

I can save face for a while; ultimately I'll end up more and more detached from myself and others. In keeping with the landmass analogy, I break off and do a little continental drifting. 

I know someone who seems kind of like this   The self they've created is quite honorable:  intelligent, well-spoken, sincere, compassionate, able to cut to the heart of matters. But behind that, I sense a sort of detachment; not an insincere one, but an unconscious indifference created more through habit.  I don't know.  It kind of makes me sad.  Like there's a personal fortress of solitude. Or maybe it's just my imagination.

ANYWAY.  The bottom line is, even though I keep getting the word that I can, in fact, move mountains (enough, already), the leap of faith from private island to archipelago is pretty damn scary. 

I might take that chance if I knew for sure that you were a fool, too.