The Truths That Abide in Election Week

11/3/20

Dear friend,

A good friend sent me an "Election Night Survival Kit" that landed on my doorstep yesterday, and it absolutely delighted me, mainly because I hadn't expected to receive it. It brought some much-appreciated levity to this very intense week here in the US.

Included in the package was a book by Pema Chödrön titled Comfortable with Uncertainty that holds 108 short teachings on fearlessness and compassion. This morning I opened it and read the first one, titled "The Love That Will Not Die."

I'm sharing the short teaching with you (below) because it might encourage you today.

I'm finding it coincides with where my own heart, mind, spirit, and body keep landing this week—the idea that we keep seeking spiritual awakening and deepening but that this spiritual path takes us deeper into the world, not away from it, ever closer to what is ours to do in love for this world we inhabit together.

Ours is not a spiritual escape hatch.

Here is the teaching:

Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all others behind. Their suffering continues, unrelieved by our personal escape.

On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is our heart—our wounded, softened heart. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die. This love is bodhichitta. It is gentle and warm; it is clear and sharp; it is open and spacious. The awakened heart of bodhichitta is the basic goodness of all beings.

—Pema Chödrön

I should say that I am not Buddhist and so the idea of the bodhichitta is new to me.

Even so, in my own spiritual practice and tradition, I can understand and embrace the ideas offered here. What she says of bodhichitta reminds me a bit of Henri Nouwen's teachings on the wounded healer. We love and serve the world from the place where our own heart has been wounded and softened, offered as healing to others.

I say that this teaching reflects where my own heart, mind, spirit, and body have been landing this week because each day this week, when I've paused to check in with myself, I've heard these words looping like a mantra: "Peace. Be still. Pause. Breathe. Pray."

They remind me that I belong to the universe of things that is cradled in hands bigger than all those things put together.

Yet the thought that is coupled with this joins with St. Teresa of Ávila, who wrote, "Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks on compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours."

I believe we each have a part to play and that our spirit joins with our body to live that out each and every day.

It happens in the smallest things, from how we regard the person doing our grocery shopping for us to how we reach out to someone else via text.

And it's in the bigger things too, like discerning our invitations and responding with intention to what we know is ours to do.

All of it matters, today and yesterday and tomorrow, no matter how the election turns. We will always keep living this way.

Grateful to be in it with you,
Christianne