a polarized public.
At elemental levels, therefore, we go unseen, unheard, yearning to connect while being saddled with a decreasing awareness in how. Without formation and practice, we know less and less about how to connect deeply with one another. Our previous ways of gathering—as well as the amount of time we remain in one place—do not allow consistent skill development or the emotional formation for how to connect with one another. Without heightening awareness of it, we are “taught” every day to disconnect and rarely how to connect. The yearning grows. The urgency is leading to violence in many of us.
Few institutions today are structured well to meet this yearning. The naysayers of our world point to the crumbling institutions, the horrific state of human relations across race, nationality, gender, orientation, political party, and more. Listening to the news, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by hopelessness. Many historic religious traditions are declining in membership. Government is polarized and fraught. Marriage is changing, and families increasingly take diverse forms today. This grieves some of us terribly and welcomes all of us uncertainly. From the other direction, the visionaries, the idealist ones, paint pictures for us in their words and websites about the magic that is all around, the power of positive listening, the creative life that is at our fingertips if we just . . . (fill in the blank). Somewhere in the middle, each of us receives the perhaps undesired but unavoidable challenge of making a life in a complicated time rife with overwhelming choice. How then shall we live? ask the poet-authors Wayne Muller and Terry Tempest Williams. What do you want to do with your one wild and precious life? asks another, Mary Oliver.
These pages invite you into recent and tentative answers to such questions, facing yearnings well met and new habits of mind able to hold more than our current divisions. On this path of devotion in conscious love, I was awakened to see and be seen in a fashion beyond my own tradition, though deeply faithful within it. In circle-way communities, I have been heard more deeply than I ever knew possible. As a theology professor and Presbyterian clergywoman, I am a deeply traditioned woman, yet I was given myself anew—found myself reborn—when I became grounded in exile as a befriended outsider, when I sat at table with spirit-friends across irreconcilable difference, when I found myself a theist at home in non- or no-theisms, when I was welcomed in a circle of wilding women. As such, A Companionable Way is a record of my own spiritual adventure to companion anyone awakening to a nameless, potentially fearful yearning that was previously unknown, even a little unwelcome. That sneaking suspicion that life was meant to hold more than it seems to? Or this curiosity to trust God more than you ever knew possible, even when all the voices in your head tell you it is dangerous to do so? I welcome you to breathe into this “more” both within the institutions that hold your life and in a wondrous life unfolding “outside” of them. Perhaps these categories of “tradition or not” no longer serve us or name the search as well as they have before. Which means our habits of mind must also be redressed.
Habits of Mind
A young woman startles awake, finding herself driving an 18-wheeler. She watches herself driving safely, soundly, but cannot recall how she got there. She has no recollection of training to drive a semi, but this is precisely what she seems to be doing. Without much thought, she drives through tree-lined streets of rather bland, suburban, North American neighborhoods. On the passenger’s seat beside her lies a map that she has followed step by step. Finally, she turns right into a cobblestone driveway. After the long winding drive, she pulls up in front of an old colonial mansion, bright red brick, white trim. She observes with pleasure its spacious lawns, flowing down a steep decline off to the side of the truck. Behind her is the labyrinthine driveway, lined with ancient elm trees and dappled sunlight. In the distance beyond the lawn lies well-trimmed landscaping, bountiful beds of multicolored flowers. With the semi slowing into the driveway, the cab turns at a right angle to the trailer, grinding the goods to a halt. The engine stalls. With some alarm, she realizes she cannot move forward or backward. There is no way to drive a semi down the slope without great harm to her, the semi, and the goods in the trailer. She cannot move backward, with the trailer of such size and the angle of the cab and driveway. Anger and curiosity begin to arise in her as she wonders whether the map was misleading. “I have been betrayed,” she says, to no one in particular. She opens the door, jumps down from the cab, opens the back of the truck and starts unloading the boxes, one by one.
These reflections demonstrate one way to unload our conceptual boxes: boxes of our minds, whether steeped in a tradition or not, to look anew for what can speak peaceably today; boxes of how we live our lives, looking for old-new ways in which more of us may find deeper human being; and boxes of the ways we have been conditioned to think about who we are in community or how community needs to be. The dream above arrived several years ago, spurring me to ask much more radical (at the root) questions than my professional degrees, ecclesial ordination (Presbyterian Church USA), or successful establishment life would ever directly encourage. In what “communities” or “containers” do you spend your time—religious, civic, political, familial? Are you willing to reflect critically on this, perhaps see some things you’d rather not see? Most of us do our best to live within the streams of human belonging we’ve been given, afraid it will be “worse” on “the outside.” To become critically reflective about “our tribe” can threaten the ground on which we live our lives.
For instance, a dear friend found herself in a fundamentalist religious community close to home, yearning for the community while trying to quiet the dissonant voices. She disagreed with the cognitive norms of doctrinal exclusivity and internal conformity required to belong there, but she had also learned to hold her nose and tolerate it for the sake of belonging. As she found herself in a more egalitarian community that fed her spirit “on the outside,” she began to “unpack her own boxes.” She began to ask questions and gently open her heart to others in new ways. She then discovered herself perceived as a threat in her faith community. High exclusion, after all. Or consider politics. My uncle found his sense of belonging in grass-roots politics. Organizing campaigns guided him to deeper connection with others, at least until the campaign was over. Then his community would unravel and he would have to start all over again. Itinerant communities of temporal purpose. In these instances, and perhaps more of your own, communities of practice defined by religious tradition, political persuasion, or other named-identity groups are less and less able to cultivate the deeply embodied habits of mind needed to reconcile the tensions we face.
A Companionable Way therefore opens boxes and allows each of us to examine their contents in some surprising ways—steady, slow, curious. It suggests that the conceptual categories or “habits of mind” so prevalent today are simply no longer the best way to move the goods of heart into a world of wonder and need. Talking, deepening the discourse, argument and counterargument have had their time in the spotlight but now must bow to other ways of engagement. The ways we “see the obvious” need to open anew in different ways of being together that are rooted in invitation, not obligation, and that presume good will, even in the face of violence and betrayal. Our mental habits need to be held more loosely in a love that liberates (thank you, Maya Angelou), all while resisting the immediate critique and judgment of expert rationalists promising the certainty we crave. You don’t have to believe everything you think—a good bumper sticker I saw once. Sometimes allowing thoughts that discomfort you is the way toward a deeper love and life than your mind could ever hold. Contemplative practice, new flows of spiritual friendship, and strong “containers” able to hold deep feelings—from intense joy to righteous rage without social cost—will invite us into embodied, nondualistic habits of mind, sustained in a simple but spiritually demanding fashion beyond polarized-polarizing identities.
Having been invited for years on this journey, I am now inviting any with ears to hear: unload your own boxes; examine the contents of your life through the inner work of your mind-body-spirit. Learn to place only the necessary nourishment and simplest tools you find into a knapsack to carry on the road with those you will meet on the way. It will take some time to walk past the trucks of certainty, the sculpted gardens, and the colonial architecture of how we’ve crafted our worlds before. A different kind of journey into unshakable abundance and assurance beckons
