The Human Spirit

Whether a father, a child, a friend, a president life can overwhelm.  A problem eludes even the solution fashioned by great minds.  In the midst of battle, another problem takes the stage.  A third joins and the weight borne crushes.  Impossible to avoid or ignore how do you act when confronted by such problems?

I don’t know.  But even in ignorance pieces of the puzzle are there.  Keep breathing.  Call on foundational values.  Openness created from honesty, humility, the history of your journey, reason, love, propel the next small step.  To reach the objective movement is required.

A man approaches Abraham Lincoln and asks how he could have known the strategy to win the Civil War.  I didn’t, replied Lincoln.  Like the captain on a Mississippi River boat I could steer toward the next visible point.  Repetition carries us home.

Great battles with some problems alter life.  Stamina, like hope, has limits.  Lincoln paid a price for the weight resting on his shoulders.  It is a life truth that some are called to carry more, to suffer more.  Whether a father, a child, a friend, a president, life can overwhelm.  Keep breathing.  Take the next small step toward the next visible point.

Watch the video of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death in Tehran Saturday and any concept that the turmoil is a matter confined internally to Iran disappears.  She pulls us irreversibly with each moment of her death.  The world is no longer the same.

The experience revives my 11 year-old reaction to much less personal images from the 1956 Hungarian revolution.  They created a personal longing for my country to validate those who stood up for theirs.  Aside from the many who shared those feelings, it didn’t happen of course.  A deep sense of the injustice in life took root.

Saturday Neda Agha-Soltan drives to the area of the anti-government protests with her music instructor.  They step out of the hot car.  A bullet pierces Neda’s chest.  She collapses on the roadway.  “It burned me,” were her last words.  The cameraman circling the scene captures much more than blood pouring from her body.  He records her most haunting eyes.  The injustice of this death deepens its collective wound.

A great sense of powerlessness grips our world.  My country does not hold the remedy I now know.  No country can make this right.  But injustice shared does not disappear into the void.  The millions who witness Neda’s death hold a force.  It can bring Neda Agha-Soltan’s haunting eyes to each ruling Cleric in Iran.

Elizabeth has been at a conference in Denver all week.  Arriving to our empty home one retrieved voice mail startles.  “Call Austin.  It’s an emergency.”  Numerous possibilities flash.  All are bad.  None even close to forecasting the scrambled life that soon will be mine.

The answering voice is calm, measured, distant.  “There was a terrible car accident this morning. Willam is going to be OK.  He’s here at Austin General.  But Chuck, Aletha didn’t make it.”

There is no proper way to learn your 2-year-old grandson lives though injured, but your 30-year-old daughter is dead.  The soul simply contracts.  Disbelief offers temporary, weak shelter.  The result is some hollow, automatic, unremembered response offered to the voice from Austin.

In a kind of slow motion my parts separate in protective disconnection.  The silence of my house where we sat on the balcony and filled past estrangement with coffee, cigarettes and confession overwhelms.  I fill it with Aletha’s suggestion when once I described the music experience I wanted.  Annie Lennox, she said.  Her lament filled the space:  “Hold on.  Hold on to yourself.  This is gonna hurt like hell.”

Alcohol slowly flowing to the stomach convinces in its journey.  This isn’t real.  I redial the Austin number.  “Did you just call me and tell that Aletha died this morning?”

“Yes, Chuck, I did.”

This is how Aletha physically disappeared from my life.  She remains in every other way.  In my mind.  In my heart.  In my soul.

We she left walk with an unhealed wound-testament to our ability to survive a test beyond our capacity.  Aletha continues to nourish.
Her gift of unconditional love a harmonious, continuous vibration.  It sounds like 1,000 monks chanting a great “ohm.”

I experienced a sacred moment last night in Ubuntu-a group of friends meeting regularly on a journey to faith.  A collective epiphany emerged.  Something became individually clear in the company of the group-an idea living in murky waters just below my conscious surface.

Ubuntu, a Zulu word, roughly means, “we only become human in the company of other humans.”  Bill Moyers and Karen Armstrong joined Ubuntu through interview transcript to midwife our epiphany.

Moyers says Armstrong “is one of the foremost, and most original thinkers on religion in our modern world”-a personal standing caused by her own epiphany.   In her studies, Armstrong crossed a footnote that referenced the “science of compassion.  Science, not in the sense of physics or chemistry but in the sense of knowledge, scientia, the Latin word for knowledge…Feeling with the other.  Putting yourself in the position of the other.”

Seeking to practicing this difficult art sets Karen Armstrong on the journey to the most fundamental and difficult teaching of all great religions:  The Golden Rule.  “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”

Compassion seems more harmonious with life in the pre-modern world.  Individuals found meaning in the great religious texts as they married the words to their personal experience.  The antithesis of collective absolutes and certainties no religion stood superior to the other.

Armstrong quotes a scene in the Koran.  God is talking to Muhammad: “If We-using the royal we-had wanted the whole of mankind to be in one single religious community, We would have achieved it, We would have made that happen.  But We did not so wish.  This is not Our desire.  So you, Muhammad, leave them alone.”

Listen to Karen Armstrong on Bill Moyers Journal and ponder your own what ifs.  For example, this age of terrorism:  What if we understood the Osama bin Laden’s of the world work from a political, not religious, foundation?  What if we knew that 92% of those surveyed in 35 Muslin countries believe the 9/11 attacks were not justified?  What if we learned their religion is the basis for their opinion?  What if post 9/11 we practiced compassion to better know how Muslims experience Western politics?

Karen Armstrong knows society in today’s world does not live in compassion.  She also understands what the great religious leaders understood-its practice offers escape from violence that will destroy the world.

As I leave the company of Ubuntu I sense human possibility.  A new consciousness brews.  I pray it makes me more deeply human.

For me, the path to faith is an inside-out journey.  Touching the part within us shaped in God’s image, faith’s seed grows with authenticity.  My eyes first opened in the company of the Sunday sermons of the Rev. H. Laron Hall.   Each one brings liturgy to life through everyday experiences by everyday people.  Those experiences breathe life into growing conviction.  Many of Laron’s sermons are included in the collection titled No Darkness At All.

“…to me Christianity is a thing of immense grace and beauty.  I think ministers should communicate love and build bridges which allow people to reach God,” Laron said.  Each Sunday at First Church in Portland we heard not the intellectual explication of liturgy.  Its essence simply filled us as Laron told a story of someone finding the part within touched by God.

Through secret ballot First Church chose to be a reconciling congregation.  Our shared belief:  “As a sign of faithfulness to God’s covenant, as communicated by Christ, with all humankind we believe God is challenging the Christian community to accept lesbians and gay men as sisters, brothers, and co-workers in the house of faith.  Sexuality is a good gift of God and we believe persons may be fully human only when that gift is acknowledged and affirmed by themselves, the church and society.”

The community of First Church healed personal wounds deepened by the life and death of my brother.  The post titled Max Leon might explain.

Having spent more time in doubt than certainty, confessing faith as part of a Sunday service was one of my steepest climbs.  Laron guided self-conscious steps with grace.

I truly believed I would grow old in the company of his loving wisdom.  What we believe, of course, not always is.  Laron died of complications of AIDS May 3, 1994.  I openly wept at his funeral.  A long search leaves his role in my life unfilled.

For nearly everyone at First Church Laron’s end journey was both of, and not of, this world.  In small discussion groups his diagnosis was revealed.  Each remaining Sunday, with emotions sharpened by finite time, Laron would tell another story.  They often incorporated his own experience.  “You have been the means by which God tells me I’m not alone.  My soul has been stirred by your eager willingness to share this part, even this part, of my journey.  It is the best of times.  I sail on a sea of grace.”

Occasionally private condemnation surfaced.  A consuming, powerful congregational love surrounded each with no mercy for its holder.

The Reverend H. Laron Hall was a master teacher in my life.  He deeply marked my awareness, my understanding by revealing that part of him touched by God.

A philosopher once noted that the best experiences of life are beyond words.  My spiritual journey lives within that admonition and mysticism.  I approach using words for its sharing with humility.  It is my truth.  To preach this truth as universal would destroy its meaning.

I have walked multiple, sacred paths:  the Christian, the Native American, the Buddhist, and Ubuntu.  The forces encountered teach me that faith is a natural element of being human.  If allowed it emerges, inside out.  Outside in strategies from the multiple, structured religious systems can teach, but they freeze my experience of God.

Walking a sacred path requires different steps for different branches of my experience.  I love Jesus.  Especially I love the Jesus of St. Thomas:

He who drinks of my mouth will be me and I will be him.

The Kingdom of God is spread upon the earth but men do not see.

Kernels of the human experience revealing ourselves and the creative power we hold.

Adult growth has come from the deep pain of knowing that that at which we grasp seeps through clinched fingers.  Mysticism reveals faith contemplating a single rose held aloft.  Inside out faith manifests.

The bone melting heat of the Inipi, accompanied by Lakota chants, spreads my soul across the universe.  Earth, wind, air, fire are the base of physical reality.  Individual knowing of its existence, with no intermediary, elevates God.  We open from within that which He placed.

Individual knowing does not erase our inter-dependence.  “I am who I am because of those around me.”  This is the philosophy captured by the Zulu word Ubuntu.

A few years ago a small group of Portland friends gathered, driven by an individual desire for intentional community.  The dialogue quickly revealed that our foundational hunger was to experience faith.  We adopted the name Ubuntu.  We meet regularly with the freedom to be.  We share the design of the experience.  In the time since our birth, we have together fed the hunger.  Each holds their truth, but I have learned two great things:  I am who I am because of those around me.  My deepest faith has always been there awaiting discovery from inside out.