Meaning and Authenticity

Giving birth has always been a powerful metaphor for me. Not that I relate it to physical pregnancy, but since I started awakening, 20 years ago now, in my early thirties, I could feel the creative element in life moving within me, making me something new. I'm listening to Jennifer Berezan's CD, "Returning." She chants throughout: returning, returning, returning to the Mother of us all... This music is haunting, smoky, with rhythms that sink to the beginning of time itself. She recorded the music is a subterranean temple/tomb used by the Neolithic people of Malta. The 3-level labyrinth has 33 chambers, stairs, passageways, all carved out of the limestone with flint and antler tools. Some of the chambers, 5.25 meters beneath the surface, are egg shaped. Maybe now you can begin to imagine the haunting quality of this elegant sound. Our local public radio station aired an interview yesterday with a scientist who is using DNA markers to track human populations movements ...

A Harvard psychologist is claiming that humanity is becoming less and less violent. His article was in the New Republic, and www.edge.org , where I found it at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html Really interesting article. Toward the end he provides some possible reasons: 1. The decreasing sense that life is cheap. "As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life." 2. The more we realize that two people can come out ahead if they cooperate (trade, division of labor, sharing peace), the more we'll want the other person to stay alive. 3. Evolution bequeathed us a bit of empathy. Let me quote this part: "Through the centuries people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity,...but it might also be inflated by...

My dear friend A. was suppose to come over for lunch today, but I called her to say I didn't think I was quite up to it. Asthma's a bummer. Although I miss seeing her, it's probably just as well it didn't work out because it sounds like she needs a day at home without an agenda. A. is a business executive, and her job keeps her going at a frantic pace. I know she longs for a time of rest and renewal, and I wish that for her with all my heart. Our phone conversation, plus being cooped up here in the house all week, prompts me to wonder about my own pace. There are weeks when I work too many hours, but that's not really the problem. The problem is what I'm doing with the hours--I'm being productive and not taking the time to reflect. When I don't pause and think about the meaning of my work and relationships, it feels like life is passing me by. I clearly remember the moment when I understood the gift of my parents' lives to me.* I'd been r...

I was taught so WELL in my Ph.D. program. I'm thinking now especially of the emphasis that was always placed on the profound respect that we owe our clients. The postmodern emphasis on not-knowing, on allowing the human being sitting before us, trusting us, to teach us about who they are, and are becoming--it's just so right in so many ways. Although the temptation to play "expert" was and remains a temptation for me (arising mostly when I feel insecure), the program's postmodern emphasis on mutuality was a good fit for me overall. As a pastoral counselor, minister, and spiritual director, I'm reminded of this almost every week. I'm simply in partnership with people--a mirror for them--as God's Spirit does the work of nudging them toward health and abundant life. It's the most exciting thing to see that happening! And each time, I am changed for the better.

As I write, D and Lovely Passionate Feminist stepdaughter are driving to Waco; they probably won't be home until 11 pm or so. But Young Man with Integrity stepson is here. As I write from my sick-bed, I can hear the low-rumblings from the television in the living room. I find it's not so bad being sick now that I no longer live alone. Getting married has brought so much joy to my life. The joy of feeling cared for when I'm sick. The joy of nearly-always having someone to go to dinner with. The joy of touch and intimacy. The joy of D's three children who are now in my life, enriching it beyond measure. The joy of being deeply known. The joy of working through who I am, and am becoming, as a married person. Yet I am also grateful for having been single for so long (until I was 48, three years ago now). It was time and space to begin to know myself, and to like and even love myself. Loneliness motivated me to seek out good friends--so many wonderful friends who have nouris...

Whispers Late at Night "Death is more than parting, but it can't annul a marriage, nor can it revise the terms of an impassioned covenant or teach you how with scalpel to excise your former self from you that still persists. Without your lover, you are emptied of yourself, it seems, and nothing true exists anywhere, and yet you keep your love. There is an end to kissing and an end to whispers late at night, but never shall there be an end to heartache lovers send across the greatest barrier of all. Though lovers into deepest night are blown, there is no death for what the heart has known." Robert Daseler Existentialist that I am, death is a subject/idea (sometimes even an experience, if only emotional) that is never far from my awareness.

"This is what connects you to who you are. What you love. What you caress. Whatever it is that leaves you and in its absence makes you lonelier than Loneliness itself. When it returns, it becomes holy. When it returns, you see the sacred in the profane. You do not fall prostrate before it. You hold it close. You let it go. You live with it. You live. " Parabola magazine We are indeed relational creatures. That probably accounts for how that sense of coming-to-myself increased so much when I married. And earlier, when I became a minister. And more on authenticity...from A. Come, a Kierkegaard scholar: "In the crisis-moment of confrontation, I must learn and accept the fact that God’s judgment is God’s love, because only by coming to see transparently that I dwell in untruth, in unrighteousness, in non-being can I be transformed into the authentic being of goodness and so become my authentic personhood." I just see that as so true. Self-deception is the danger.