nature, spirituality

How we are meant to see

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My eyes need softening, my gaze the balm of what they were made to behold. We were not made to stare into that blue light of our screens. The computer, the television, the phone. None of these are part of our natural way of being. It is truest for us to see in the light of the sun and the moon, fire maybe too. It is good for us to take in the hues, the full spectrum of the natural world, the constant movement, rustling, shifting, drifting, and setting of nature around us.

I know this is true because I feel part of my consciousness cloud over after long periods of time in front of a screen. I wonder how many feel this and ignore it or consider it normal. I feel my eyes burning. I feel the longing to gaze upon the natural-scape. It is there that I learn to soften my gaze. It is there that I learn how to see another human being with compassion, empathy, and love on my face. If not for a softer gaze grown and birthed from time spent seeing what my body was meant to see, I would stare at others as simply sources of information, getting only a part of my attentions, easily losing interest, there to either satisfy my personal needs or nothing at all.

Give me trees, give me grass, give me a blue sky or rain drops, let the wind bring tears to my eyes. Let me find the bird in the branches, the deer among the trunks, the fish raising the surface of the water slightly as it swims by, the snaking of the centipede under the rotten log. These will train me to see as I was meant to see. These will unify my soul with windows to it and connect my body to how it was meant to be.

spirituality

You don’t “deserve” anything

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Writing about what we do or don’t deserve is a tough one as there is this pretty intense paradox around this concept. What we deserve, though, makes sense within the context of spiritual growth and maturity.

On one hand, in the world of self help, self care, and self honoring, I hear often, “Do this for yourself. You deserve it!” From taking a hot bath, to getting desert, to getting a pedicure, to taking a nap… there is an underlying sense that treating myself to something nurturing is good in a life where I may not do enough to look after my own needs. It is very good to take care of our own needs, but thinking of it in terms of “deserving” may not be the most helpful, especially when considering the other side of the spectrum.

Our  Western society has an entitlement sickness. Most people can list off plenty of “rights” that affirm that the world is treating them fairly. I hear things like, “I worked hard for my money. I deserve to spend it where I please.” Or, “I deserve to know the truth about what is wrong with my loved one.” Or, “I’ve been working hard, I deserve some peace and quiet.” People have the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to have religious freedom, the right to pursue happiness, the right to equality, the right to justice, the right to use the land for their own purposes, and on and on. Inherent in being human means we have certain “unalienable” rights.

entitlement3So some of our rights, some of the things we “deserve,” are good and some are not. Where I think the maturity, or lack thereof, shows itself is in the claiming of what we deserve. There is a time and a place on the spiritual journey where we feel the need to claim our rights and we need to claim the things we deserve. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we have a sense that there are others who would claim rights, freedoms, and things they deserve that would take away from our own. If this is the case, then there is inherently a problem… because the things that are rights should not take away from the rights of others. The whole paradigm is inherently limited and dualistic.

As we mature on the spiritual journey, we come to find that claim what we deserve and what rights we have is a useless, and probably detrimental, pursuit. At some point, we realize that more than anything, we are actually in a significant debt to the world herself and to others. What living being consumes so many natural resources to live without giving back to the natural order of things? Even in our deaths, we burn our bodies, embalm our bodies, or bury them in caskets which keep us from giving more life to the land! How many living things have to die in order for us to live, even for one month, let alone for 80 years? The earth doesn’t need us as humans to continue to thrive. We, in our living, carry with us a significant debt to the greater Life we are a part of. At some point on the spiritual life, we begin to recognize our place in the order of things. We begin to realize it consciously and then we begin to live it.

With a sense of our debt to Life, we begin to live differently. Things like the equality of all humans is a given, so we don’t have to claim our right to racial equality or economic equality. It becomes more than this though. Where does humanity land in its equality withentitlement all of creation? When we begin asking these questions the “rights” and “freedoms” and thingS we think we “deserve” seem to be such a useless hill to die on. So small, so temporary. Again, there is a place on the journey for making these claims but at some point they simply become unimportant.

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chaplaincy, dying

Why is it so difficult to die?

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I wish this were an easy answer, but unfortunately there are countless reasons why people have so much trouble dying. There are a few things that I am fairly certain about and that I have found that resonate with patients and family members. More often than not I find that people really DO have a difficulty with dying. Whether it be fear, denial, anxiety, or just avoidance, there is an underlying difficulty with dying.

Many people aren’t so much afraid of being dead, as they are of dying. I say this with intention, and I offer this to patients, in order to make a distinction. I have read in numerous places that it is best to think of living until we are dead. If we don’t then we could get depressed or think that our life is over as soon as we admit to dying. Think about it this way. “Dying,” an active tense word, is very different from the words like “dead” (adjective) and “be killed” (passive tense). There is no passive tense of “dying.” It is active, and so there for something we DO. It is something we live in, participate in, and include others in. So how do people want to go about their dying time? This is a good question to ask of people and to reflect on ourselves. We don’t just live until we are dead. These are the people who want to go out in their sleep or want to end their lives prematurely. There is no active participation in their dying there.

For many, unlike our ancestors, being around death and dying can be a very foreign experience. It used to be that loved ones would die at home attended to by family members in the upstairs bedroom. Now it is so often in a hospital or nursing home behind closed doors. The announcement comes from the RN or the doctor and the family comes in after a person has died. So many are not familiar with the signs of dying. They think a dying person may be on the road to improvement when they wake from days of sleeping and not eating and want to tell stories. These moments of clarity are often part of the dying process. Dying also is a very personal experience, different for each person, and something that each person can only go through once. If a dying person doesn’t share what it is like with their loved ones, they offer little of help to the next generation when it is their turn. But people are afraid of causing too much hardship to their loved ones by talking about it too much.

Dying in the hospital is very difficult because health care professionals are trained to cure, to heal, and to “fix.” In and of itself, this is not a bad thing at all. But when it comes to dying, there is no “fixing.” I have heard doctors say that having a palliative care team meet with a family is “giving up too early.” I have seen many many times doctors and nurses shy away from using the “D word” with families when the writing was clearly on the wall. Many will say a person who is accepting their dying is “giving up” or someone who is feeling sad about saying good bye is “depressed.” Too, too often do doctors trying treatment after treatment until a patient, who wants to die at home ends up unconscious while still hoping along with their family that they are going to “pull through.” Or a patient holds off  going home on hospice because a doctor or social worker feels trying out rehab first might be good, only to die the next day at the nursing home. I tell patients if they want to be an active participant in their dying experience, join hospice while they still have the capacity to choose for themselves.

If we can just begin to see how much death is a part of life. Dying is not a “bad” thing. It is a beautiful, sacred, natural thing. Not to say it is a “good” thing either. It just is. It is part of what happens to all healthy, mature, and connected to the earth beings. Going from living to dead is going around this natural process. As Stephen Jenkinson wonders, “How connected is someone to their life when they have to be told they are dying?”

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nature, Uncategorized

How does one process one’s grief?

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My wife asked me the other day, “How does a person process grief?” You’d think that as a chaplain, walking beside and with those who are grieving, I would have had an answer in that moment. Maybe because it was the last, lingering thought before sleeping and I was further along than she, or maybe because there is just no easy answer to a question like this… it goes to say, I didn’t have anything satisfying to give in return.

Maybe the question didn’t sit with me. How do I process grief? Is this different than asking, how do I grieve? I really don’t think it is a matter of processing grief as much as just grieving. Processing is talking about it, writing about it, thinking about it, sharing it, and moving through it. With processing, though, it is always something outside, something that is different than us.

I grieve every day. I grieve when I am with someone who has lost a loved one. I grieve when I hear someone say, “They didn’t tell me chemo was going to be this way. I should have had the operation.” I grieve when I see the wretched state of political debates, of violence, of abuse of our planet. I grieve so much and often that there is a weight I carry that never goes away. I pray for peace and mercy for our Earth and for the humans and the non-humans who live on it. God have mercy.

And yet, I never wish that I could remain naive of all this. I never wish for this weight to go away. It’s like saying, “Breathing is just too much work. I’d rather not do it for an hour or two.” When we learn how to grieve (not learn how to process grief) we grieve even when we are not conscious we are grieving. We become a person who grieves. There is a compassion and a union that happens there. It is a development of the person, something we have to learn and allow ourselves to grow into. Perhaps we begin by remembering that grief is not a bad thing, and it is not a good thing either, it is just a thing. It is a hard thing, yes, but so is waking up when we have been asleep for too long. It is painful, but so is exercising when our muscles atrophy. Perhaps our grief ability has been atrophied by a world that continues to tell us that grief is a bad thing that must be moved through, processed, and healed from. There is no healing from grief.

Community, nature, spiritual formation, spirituality, Uncategorized

To be rooted to the land you walk upon

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It means something to be where you are from. And not just your family, not just your culture, or your religion or your country… It means something unequivically significant to be an occupier of the land you live upon. I am quite certain that most do not have this sensibility, at least not consciously but perhaps when really pressed, would affirm how important it is to them.

What I am getting at is an extra level down into a deeper sense of one’s place in this world, one’s sense of self, one’s spiritual life, and one’s connection with all that is.

There is meaning to the old saying, “You are what you eat.” In a quite literal sense, our bodies our composed of the food and water that goes into us. What other way is there? This is why, when we lived in Oregon, we drank our water, straight from the land, straight from the spring. No filter, no chemicals. And food… Where is your body connected to if your food comes from thousands of miles away or is processed to the extent that it can only be called, as Michael Pollen terms it, “edible food-like substances.”

So it means something very literally in regard to our physical make-up. But what does it mean to be from the Fox Valley in WI? To have grown up on a farm and lived there your whole life? As a chaplain, living in one of the most “homegrown” cities in the country, it means something to talk to my patients about where they are from and wehter their parents grew up here too. For a person living in city and never having left, to never found one’s self in green space, with one’s hands in the dirt or toes in the sand… This means something to that person. Maybe an ungroundedness or a sense of nature as “enemy.”

There is a profound teaching in observing the greatest tai chi masters (watch a video of one on YouTube). Where do they draw this life force from that allows them to move people without even touching them or to be unmovable themselves?

Spiritual Direction and reflections on Spirituality

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