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| Letchworth State Park. Photo by Michael Philbin |
The time I spend in silence in the morning is becoming so precious to me. I have always been a seeker; of meaning, of purpose, of contentment, of truth. For much of my life, I found those things in religion: scripture, tradition, church membership, Christian fellowship. I always saw the flaws and contradictions, but overcame them by reason, rationalization, faith, or denial. A few years ago, those strategies started to fail me.
St John of the Cross, a Spanish monk who lived and wrote in the sixteenth century called that painful season of life The Dark Night of the Soul. He described the days (years?) when the soul questions everything, doubts everything, and experiences existence in the shadowland between dark emptiness and the light of God. I think that's where I was. I hadn't stopped believing in God. What I felt seemed worse. I stopped trusting him. I lost my faith in a God who cared.
I'm not sure I can pinpoint a moment or an event that let me see light cracking the distance. All I know is that somehow, morning is breaking for me. It has appeared both literally and spiritually in these early morning hours of silence as Sophie and I sit together, she on her cushion and I on my rocker, and listen to the morning, to our breath, to our heartbeats. I know that's what I'm doing, anyway. Sophie is a cat and possesses a far more enlightened, serene spirit than I will ever know.
My prayer time is no longer filed with words, but rather with listening. I observe my body, my thoughts, my emotions, and the images that drift into view. Pick them up. Embrace them. Kiss them, bless them, and set then down to drift away with the current as the river of life flows on. And so, I am coming to love this five-line prayer...
I am grateful for this new day,I embrace impermanence,I cultivate compassion,I walk the path of wisdom,I am at peace with myself.
I can't cite any authoritative source for it. I found it on one of those (sometimes fake) Buddhist YouTube channels. I must admit it has the fragrance of new-agey manifestation/affirmation gobbledygook. So I can't say if it comes from any specific source or spiritual tradition. All I know is that something about it rings inside me like a bell, and I find great truth in it. Here are some of the things that drift by as I contemplate this prayer in the mornings.
Gratitude
Sometimes I wonder if gratitude might not be the most powerful force in the universe. It has certainly proven to be my most valuable anti-depressant. Resting in gratitude for the new day as the sun is coming up gives me such hope and energy. Gratitude helps me to see opportunity instead of peril. I've started so many days with dread, knowing that something difficult was waiting for me, convinced that yesterday's sadness or anger or failure was sure to repeat itself again today. Gratitude reminds me that I live a life full of treasures - people who care about me, sun and rain that keep me alive, a mind that can help me to learn and change and grow, the river of life of which I am a part. Gratitude reminds me that I have not come to this day on my own, and that I have a chance to help someone else to get through today. We have a chance, a hundred chances to help one another. If hope is the cure for despair, then gratitude is the gateway to hope.
Change
Impermanence is a core truth about the universe. The only thing that never changes is that everything changes. The play closes. The loved one dies. The knee gives out. The friends drift apart. The river of life flows and bring happiness and grief, then it takes them away again. "The best laid plans," and all that. Everything changes. Always. Resisting that change makes us miserable, and our misery doesn't only hurt us - it spreads like ripples on an oil slick, doing harm to everything around us.
On the other hand, embracing impermanence and accepting the changes helps us forgive. Forgive the people who disappoint or hurt us. Forgive ourselves for falling short. Forgive God for not being who we wish he were. One of the finest directors I worked with when I was an actor used to say, "Include it in," whenever anything unexpected happened on stage. What he meant was that an actor has to embrace the truth of what's happening and make it part of the life of the play, no matter what the original plan might have been. Well, life isn't a play. We don't get to rehearse it, and we don't get to read the last scene before we have to play it, but we do get surprises, both good and bad. When they come, we can resent them, resist them, or embrace them. We can "include them in," learn what they have to teach us, then set them down and continue on our way. We can allow change to change us. This can be a source of sorrow, or a reminder that even at its most painful, life is rich and beautifully impermanent.
Compassion
It's kind of a shame that "Love" is so much more popular than "Compassion." I wonder if it's the same in other languages or traditions. We write love letters, we sing love songs, we watch love stories, we say "God is love," but at its heart, it seems to me that the story of Jesus is a compassion story. Jesus didn't just care about the people he encountered, he valued them. He didn't just feel for them, he felt with them. If you pay attention to the stories about Christ, or to the stories of the Buddha for that matter, you notice something important: they always listen before they speak. When Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the night, his questions are as important as the answers he gets. When a young pilgrim climbs the mountain to learn from a sage in a Zen Koan, the old master always begins silently, allowing the seeker to speak and listening not only to the words, but also the the silent longing concealed behind those words. Compassion is so much more work than love. And so much more powerful.
I have lived long enough to love so many people. I'm a little ashamed to admit that there are many more than I can remember. If I'm honest, I have to admit that usually, what I love is the way I feel when I'm with the one I love. I love the way they make me feel about myself. I love knowing that I'm lovable. And when the love changes, or even ends, what hurts most is the loneliness of losing those feelings. My experience of love has been that it is a thing that happens to me. Don't get me wrong. It's a beautiful thing, an amazing thing, a transformational, earth-shattering, gloriously holy thing. But it always feels beyond my control, somehow. It seems to come from outside, and it tends to leave at the worst possible times.
Compassion is different, somehow. It feels more like a choice. Compassion doesn't take me by surprise. I have to stop what I'm doing, put down the phone, turn my chair, put the TV on mute, open up my ears. Compassion doesn't start with a feeling, it starts with a choice. It says, "I honor you. I value you. I am grateful for you. You are worth my time." Love changes me. Compassion requires that I make a change. When I think of the great love affairs of my life, whether they have ended dramatically or faded slowly away, they have rarely failed for lack of love. More often than not, they have starved to death for a want of compassion. An untended garden will die for lack of water and weeding and pruning and cultivation of the soil. An untended friendship will die for the same reasons: because someone doesn't value it enough to do the work of keeping it alive. Cultivating compassion is the work of keeping love alive.
Wisdom
When God appeared to Solomon in a dream, the young king didn't ask for riches or power or long life. He asked for wisdom. Over the centuries there have been many personifications of Wisdom, most of them are feminine. Athena, Minerva; Tara, Inanna, and of course, Sophie's namesake, Sophia - Wisdom has been revered by many traditions, including both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures. Humans have always understood that knowledge is important, but that without wisdom, knowledge is a blunt instrument. I have always valued knowing stuff. I've spent a lifetime learning things. I wonder how different my life might have been if I'd spent a tenth of that time learning how to use the things I'd learned wisely.
Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?’ I Kings 3:9 (NRSV)
The path of wisdom isn't just a trip among the library shelves or a browse through the internet, though it can start there. I have learned a lot from YouTube videos or rocking under my reading light with a book in my lap, but wisdom's path makes more demands of the traveller. It demands practice. It risks missteps and dares to make mistakes, and that demands courage. My old friend Noah, a jazz pianist and composer used to say, "When in doubt, dig failure." He was a wise young man.
I think it is meaningful that Wisdom is so often seen to be feminine,. She is a nurturer. She teaches us to serve, to manage, to persevere, to sacrifice. Wisdom overcomes by yielding. She knows the power of patience. She embodies all the qualities we ascribe to the best mothers. She teaches, disciplines, comforts, and encourages. She receives the seed of knowledge and transforms it into the gift of life. When we walk the path of Wisdom, we walk with the one who gave us life: the one whose life we inherit and pass on when our own walk is over.
Peace
The last of the five prayers is the most elusive for me. "I am at peace with myself." Holy shit. Have I ever been? Can I even imagine what that might feel like? Maybe once.
I was on tour playing Prospero in The Tempest. We were set up on a platform in a field in Letchworth State Park in Upstate New York, Behind the audience, the stars were so numerous and bright that I could see them, even past the stage lights that normally blinded me. To the audience's right, just beyond a row of trees the Genesee river carved a deep gorge through the western Adirondacks that the locals called The Grand Canyon of the East, It was a fantastic setting for a company of actors from Hell's Kitchen who spent most of their days on a bus and all their nights in strange motel rooms.
At the opening of Act V, after Prospero dismissed Ariel, I turned to face an ocean of faces, raised my eyes to the stars, and began Shakespeare's magnificent, climactic soliloquy,
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoiceTo hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war...William Shakespeare, The Tempest V.i.
Many scholars believe that The Tempest is Shakespeare's last play, and if they are right, then this is the moment when the old poet summons his muses one last time, lays down his pen, and says goodbye. At least that's how I always saw it when I played the wizard who gives up his magic, so his daughter can have life. I was lucky enough to play the old fellow many times as a student and a professional actor, when I was much too young to understand him, but on that one night, with the eyes of 3000 people on me and the light of a bilion stars overhead, I heard Shakespeare's words echo back from that ancient canyon and I was transported. It was as if all of us were connected by those perfect verses and lifted up from the lawn to a place where we could see everything: our world, our selves, the futility of our petty rivalries and the glorious creation all visible before us like a revelation. It was not a moment in a play or a speech from an actor, but a breathless transcendence that only comes once in a lifetime. I imagine a lot of actors never get to experience something like that. How blessed I was to have such a moment. It didn't matter how good I was or how rich or famous or anything at all. I didn't matter. Being alive together: that's what mattered. That night, on that stage, in that field, I was at peace with the world. I was whole. I was at peace with myself. I hope some of those folks felt like that, too. I hope everybody gets to feel it at least once. I hope we made Will Shakespeare proud that night. May he rest in Peace.
And, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
That's how I imagine the fulfillment of that prayer for peace - the feeling of being whole. Connected. Accepting what life is and who we are and embracing her without needing to hang on. To be grateful. To accept what is. To value our neighbor. To live wisely and well. Peace. Ahhh... what a holy aspiration. What a perfect prayer.
I am grateful for this new day,I embrace impermanence,I cultivate compassion,I walk the path of wisdom,I am at peace with myself.
Dear hearts, may you have peaceful rest, and wake with gratitude for the morning.
Peace, y'all.
Pennsy
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