Daily Dose (Feb 18 – 21)

TUESDAY FEB 18 —

Let us be this alive. No longer afraid…
Gratefully, our topic this week will keep taking me back to baltering. (To balter is to dance without particular skill or grace, but with extreme joy.)
When we hear, “Let us be this alive” in our minds we say Amen, or “sign me up.” And yet, there’s a gnawing sense that to live fierce with reality, we must get it right, as if some heavenly committee is grading us.

“Being this alive” is a paradigm shift: From attainment (still waiting to arrive) to embracing what is alive and well inside. Now. Perhaps covered up and or unused, but still alive and well.
The Hebrew word that we translate as holy in English is, qudosh, (kedusha) is often defined as “set apart” but which would be more accurately translated as life intensity. To be holy in the Hebrew context is to be fully alive, not sedate and restrained.
Perhaps this translation misunderstanding has led to the loss of vitality and “life intensity” in the life of faith today. The holy life should be intently dynamic, ever changing, and ever realizing. The concept that holiness is restrained, controlled, has made the holy life unattractive to those in the world who are seeking life at its fullest because all they see is closed and stuffy lives filled with “don’t” and “can’t”, instead of celebrate and revel. Live as richly and as passionately as possible: that’s as close to the meaning of holy as you can get.
And, to be holy, baltering is recommended. I’m just sayin…
Let us be this alive…

Which is another way of being reminded that spirituality means waking up.
“Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know, all mystics—Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion—are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep.” (Thank you Anthony de Mello)

WEDNESDAY FEB 19 — Let us be this alive. No longer afraid…
And yet; there are so many reasons I quit, or stop, or am afraid. And I let fear win.
In The Measure of My Days, Florida Scott-Maxwell wrote, “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done… you are fierce with reality.”
Florida was 85 when she wrote those words.
Parker Palmer talks about reading them and thinking, “I knew she was speaking directly to me.”
Palmer goes on, “At age 43, I was succeeding and failing as a husband and a father on a daily basis, had done battle with the evils of racism as a community organizer while ignoring the cocoon of white privilege that protected me from them, was alternately laid low and energized by the rejections I received in route to becoming a writer, and had drowned and then surfaced from my first deep-sea dive into clinical depression. I was, in short, a reasonably normal person: a complex and conflicted soul who yearned to be whole. I wanted a life of personal fulfillment that served others well — a life of love of self and others — and I knew that getting there would require me to be ‘fierce with reality.’ But I devoutly wished for an easier path than the one Scott-Maxwell recommends! At age 43, I didn’t have the courage required to ‘truly possess all [I had] been and done.’”
Scott-Maxwell got it right: there are no short cuts to wholeness.
Palmer continues, “The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, ‘I am all of the above.’ If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.”
Thank you, Parker. And my heart tells me that your words were speaking directly to me. And I am so grateful…
Yes. Let us be this alive. No longer afraid…

THURSDAY FEB 20 — Let us be this alive. No longer afraid…
This is an invitation which requires a pause. In order to see.
To pay attention. To absorb.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard once wrote.
Many years ago, I attended a writer’s workshop in Well, a village on the southern border of Holland (near Germany). The workshop took place in a real, honest to goodness twelfth-century castle, with genuine moats to protect us from marauders and pillagers. The setting was idyllic, of course, a memorable backdrop for my two week stay. Sitting by the river, nursing German beer, and watching the barges float by, we swapped stories, fed the insistent ducks, told tall tales, and laughed from the gut.
One evening at dusk I sat alone by the river. The sun was just above the horizon, a dying shimmer. With the harsh light of day dissipated, the contrasting aqua blues and greens of water and foliage melded into four dimensions—lucid and penetrating. I hopped on my bike and rode by a wall where a villager was finishing her evening gardening chores. I stopped and watched.
She held a hand tool and was bent from the waist as she scratched the soil around a lilac shrub, her gestures a mixture of fussing and coddling. She didn’t seem to be aware of my presence and went about her business lovingly, as if she had all the time in the world.
The wall surrounded a rectangular lot, stone walkways through emerald grass patches flanked by borders of late summer blooming hollyhocks and monkshood. It didn’t look like any home I’d ever had, but brought tears to my eyes nonetheless, and filled me with a yearning for something deep and still unnamed. And for some reason, I felt giddy and alive. I wanted to hug the woman and thank her for the gift.

“This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.” Thank you, Maya Anjelou.
This is replenishment fueled by (or using my gardening metaphor… grown and nurtured in the soil of) daily miracles.
Let us be this alive… Yes, finding the wonder, and the marvel, of an ordinary life.
Yes: The ordinary, the hiding place for the holy.

And in the home garden; Iris reticulata—a concentrated lavender bloom that gives me gooseflesh. One of the earliest flowers of spring, blooming at the same time as snow crocuses. My favorite part of this little spring miracle? The bulbs of iris reticulata are about the size of a nickel, and shaped like teardrops.
And I’m on my way to Anaheim, CA for the Religious Education Congress. I tell people it’s a gratifying and entertaining gathering of a few thousand of my closest friends.

FRIDAY FEB 21 — Václav Havel was the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism, from 1989 until 1992. And the first president of the Czech Republic, from 1993 to 2003.
During the Communist era that preceded, his political activities resulted in multiple imprisonments by the authorities, and constant government surveillance and questioning by the secret police. His longest period in prison, from May 1979 to February 1983, is documented in letters to his wife that were later published as “Letters to Olga”.

There are so many things that can get in the way, that can interrupt our being fully invested in this life. Real pain or suffering yes, and at times suffering inflicted by others.
But we know from experience that it doesn’t require the four walls of a cell to create an imprisonment mindset. Fear, and self-doubt, and trepidation from threats, do the trick just fine. But here’s the deal: What matters is how we respond. How do we choose to live?
I recently picked up the book, Letters to Olga. And what Havel wrote to Olga does my heart good.
“I’ve discovered that in lengthy prison terms, sensitive people are in danger of becoming embittered, developing grudges against the world, growing dull, indifferent and selfish. One of my main aims is not to yield an inch to such threats, regardless of how long I’m here. I want to remain open to the world, not to shut myself up against it; I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them. I have different opinions of different people, but I cannot say that I hate anyone in the world. I have no intention of changing in that regard. If I did, it would mean I had lost.”
In other letter he writes, “Jail, of all places, may seem to you a strange instrument of this self-reconstitution, but I truly feel that when I’m cut off from all my former commitments for so long, I might somehow achieve inner freedom and a new mastery over myself. I don’t intend to revise my view of the world, of course, but rather to find a better way of fulfilling the demands that the world — as I see it — places on me. I don’t want to change myself, but to be myself in a better way… It also seems to me that the only way for someone like me to survive here is to breathe his own meaning into the experience.”
Amen. And yes.
Let us be this alive… “open to the world”. No longer afraid.

And greetings, as I write this from Orange County, CA where the sun shines brightly today, where the Religious Education Congress is now underway. Onward together.

Prayer for our week…
Messenger
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird-
Equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
Keep my mind on what matters,
Which is my work,
Which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
And these body-clothes,
A mouth with which to give shouts of joy
To the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
Telling them all, over and over, how it is
That we live forever.
Mary Oliver

Photo… “Hi Terry, Sunset at Big Bend National Park,” Art Brucks… Thank you Art… I’m so grateful for your photos, please send them to tdh@terryhershey.com