If you are here to explore working with a Spiritual Director, you may well be in the right place. Explore the site -- go to the GETTING STARTED (FAQ) page where many of your questions may already be answered; read the blog and listen to how you feel; follow some of the links to learn more; find out a little something about my background. If you'd like to contact me -- either to set up an appointment or ask a questions, there's a contact form on the right side of each page that you can use to MAKE A CONNECTION.
Most simply, though, the spirit of my practice can be summed up in these words (adapted from Robert Mabry Doss): For those who come here seeking God ... may God go with you. For those who come embracing life ... may life return your affection. And for those who come to seek a path ... may a way be found, and the courage to take it step by step.
I am not a wire walker. I've tried a few times, and intend to keep trying until I get it, but this isn't a skill I can speak to first hand.
I have watched tightrope artists, though, and have read both their own words about the experience as well as the observations of others. And I've worked with some teachers, and bring their thoughts to this post. Here are some of the things wire walking has to teach us:
Don't look down: A mistake that's often made by beginners is to look down at their feet. This makes sense, you want to be sure that you're putting your feet in the right place. Yet this will virtually guarantee that you'll lose your balance and fall. Instead, you fix your gaze at the end of the wire, the place you're walking toward. And you keep your eye on the goal, perhaps even especially if you begin to lose your balance.
Not too tight; not too loose. There are both tight ropes and slack ropes, and they are each exactly what they sound like. Neither, though, is exactly what it sounds like. A tight rope has to have a little slack in it, a little play. Similarly, a slack rope needs to be a little taught if order for someone to walk it. This is like the story of the Buddha hearing a sitar teacher telling her student that a string must be tuned neither too tightly nor too loosely -- too tight and it will break; too loose and it won't make a sound. This, the story goes, is where young Siddhartha discovered "the middle way" between hedonism and asceticism, which became core to his teachings.
The longer I juggle, the more I learn about life. This isn't hyperbole; it's absolutely true. Let me offer just a few examples:
"St. Francis, Le Jongluer de Dieu"
by Br. Robert Lentz
Order out of chaos: Although it might appear that a juggler is trying to somehow "keep everything up in the air," there's actually a very set, rhythmic pattern involved. It isn't random, nor is it frantic. (At least, it shouldn't be!)
Adapting to the unexpected: It's true that there is a pattern, and it's equally true that no two throws are exactly the same, so the juggler is constantly adapting. One ball is a little bit further out than the last; another has too much spin; a third is thrown a little lower. These (hopefully) slight and subtle variations mean that your hands have to adjust to compensate.
One thing at a time: There's no question -- there's a lot going on when you're juggling: balls are going up and down, from the right to the left, and there are all those little variations you need to constantly respond to. Yet from a certain perspective there's really only one thing going on at a time. You throw the ball in your right hand. That leaves it empty to catch the ball coming in from the left. When the ball you just threw from the right peaks before down to your left hand, you throw the ball that's there to make room for it. Throw ... catch ... throw ... catch.
Find your rhythm: When you're first learning -- whether it's the basic three-ball cascade, or you're trying five, or seven balls for the first time -- it's hard to remember that there's only one thing going on at a time. Everything seems to be demanding your attention all at the same time! If you stick with it, though, you will generally begin to feel the rhythm, the pattern. It will begin to make sense. When that happens, you're back to seeing more order than chaos. Here's a quick story:
After you've been juggling on your own for a while, it's really fun to juggle with someone else. "Passing" is what it's called when you combine your pattern with another person's so that your right hand throws to their left hand, and vice versa. If you've been juggling for a while, passing six balls between the two of you is relatively simple. A friend of mine and I were working at one point on trying to pass seven balls, and this changes the usual rhythm in ... interesting ... ways. The balls not only have to move faster than when you're passing six, the rhythm becomes a little syncopated ... uneven. As we kept trying this new thing, both my friend and I had to admit that we were feeling a little frantic. It felt as if the balls were moving too fast for us to keep up, and we weren't quite sure when they were going to come. Each of us, though, eventual experienced a moment when the pattern suddenly "clicked." And once we'd found the pattern, the rhythm, it seemed as though everything suddenly slowed down. The balls were still moving as fast as they had been, but we had been able to slow down internally and it felt like we now had all the time in the world.
If so, you're not alone. It’s actually not all that uncommon to hear
images from the circus used to describe the chaos (and, sometimes, the joy and
delight) of our lives. Inside the Big Top there is a wild, out of control
quality which is a large part of its allure. What do we mean when we say
-- as people have said throughout time -- that we want to "run away and
join the circus."? For many "The Circus" symbolizes
adventure, a life without oppressive regularity, unbridled freedom; it's big,
it's bold, it's brash, it's wild.In the
song, “The Greatest Show,” from the movie musical The Greatest Showman, the circus is describes as being “covered in
all the colored light,” a place where “the impossible comes true.”
At the same time, though, most people recognize that “The Circus” might be a
nice place to visit for an hour or two, it's a world most of us really only
want to peer into.Truth be told, we're
just as glad when it pulls up stakes and moves on to another town. To
quote from Ryan Lewis, Justin Paul, and Benj Pasek’s song again, we know that
in The Circus, “the runaways are running the night,” and that the whole thing
has something of the quality of a “fever dream.”It's not for nothing that Ray Bradbury used a traveling carnival for his 1962 novel Something
Wicked This Way Comes. At the same
time that we're drawn to it, we sense something frightening in it as well.
There is something primal in The Circus, which may well be why we seem to so
often turn to the imagery of circus arts when trying to describe a life that's
a little (or more than a little) "out of control." Yet we also turn
to those very same images to symbolize a life that’s in control, a life being
lived skillfully.A person can speak
with pride about their ability to “juggle so many things at once,” while
someone else might bemoan the difficulty they’re having “keeping everything up
in the air.”
Preachers are often accused of "finding a sermon in everything." To a certain extent, that's a well-deserved stereotype. Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote, "Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees." (Nature has often been called, "God's other Bible.") Poets have demonstrated over and over again that anything can be used as a symbolic vehicle for the deliver of insight, and what is religious language if not fundamentally poetic? So why not look at life through the lens of The Circus? Over the next several weeks that's exactly what I'm going to do.
Last week I wrote about that well-known phrase, "leap of faith." It's like walking above a chasm on a bridge the far side of which is shrouded in fog, I wrote. It's like taking a step up even when you can't see the entire staircase you've begun to ascend. It's like stepping into cold water, trusting that it's really dry land.
Yet for all that, I think I wasn't really looking at a true "leap of faith." For sure what I was describing was an act of courage and faith. It might even be indescribably hard to take that step, especially when you really can't see through the fog to the other side ... when you can't even really be sure that there is another side. I don't want to disparage this in the least. A real leap of faith, though, requires something that's missing from these metaphors.
In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade there's a scene in which Indiana finds himself in a cave at the edge of a huge cliff. He as to get to the other side, but there just isn't any way to get there. He can't go back and take a different path to see if he can avoid the drop altogether. There's no bridge to cross, with the far side shrouded in fog or not. He is well and truly trapped.
Yet he's been following the clues in an old journal. It hasn't let him down so far, and the book says that there's a bridge there. Apparently finding his way across is the last of the three challenges that most be overcome if one is to find the Holy Grail (which is what Indiana is looking for). The clue for this challenge says, "Only in the leap from the lion's head will he prove his worth." So our intrepid hero takes a deep breath and steps out into the empty air.
It's a great scene, and a great metaphor -- a true example of a real leap of faith. He steps off the solid ground, the safe, the known, and into the quite possibly deadly unknown. What happens next is what makes it such a great image: as he steps off into the void, a bridge appears.
And that's the promise made by every religious tradition we humans have ever developed: if you trust the universe -- God, the Spirit of Life, the Great Unknown, the Mother of All -- your trust will be met in kind.
Now, to be honest, it may not work out in the way you'd planned or hoped. It may not even seem to work out at all. In the prayer by Thomas Mertion I quoted last week, the Trappist monk said,
"I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death."
That's what makes it a true leap of faith. Unlike with the fog enshrouded bridge, or the staircase that rises out of view, in a true leap of faith you don't know that there'll be anything to catch you, yet you go forward anyway.
This is not, however, an invitation to foolhardiness. It's not about testing the universe, but, rather, trusting it. There is a difference, and discerning that difference is something that a spiritual director could help you to do.
