Meaning and Authenticity

My daughter-in-law has a lovely voice, a rich alto that reminds me of...well, as I'm trying to think here, strangely enough perhaps, it reminds me of reality. I like soprano voices, too, but rich deep alto voices remind me of the kind of reality that just grabs me and makes me want to pay attention to the world with all its angst and beauty and substance. She, my daughter-in-law, has a great post today about "voice"--not the singing kind, although that's a means of expression, too--but more on the fear of claiming the power of our voices, something lots of people can relate to, I think, and a subject that interests me greatly. Her words remind me of how difficult it is to sift through the cacophony of "voices" we have in this culture to find those that make sense to us, that provide meaning for our lives, or offer comfort and hope. We have so many idiotic cowards on the national scene who daily scream their vitriolic hubbub. I heard Senator Lindsay Graham on...

When I was 8 or 9 years old, one of my little neighborhood friends was Charla. I remember one day at Charla's house, she and I were sitting on the floor by her bed. I don't remember exactly what we were doing -- maybe we were playing with dolls or some kind of game or something. I remember suddenly thinking something like: " Wait a minute. How do I know that what I mean by this doll is what Charla means? I'm seeing this doll and it's real to me, but how do I know whether the same thing is really real to Charla? I'm locked inside my body, and I can't look out and see the world from her eyes. " I didn't think about that experience again for 30 years--not until I took a philosophy class in seminary, and we read about epistemology. Whew! Suddenly that memory hit me like a ton of bricks! How do we know things? How do we know any thing? Modernist thinking would say that we can know what really exists -- the table is real. Scientifically I can tell you wh...

I'm 52. I don't fall easily. Two days ago, walking along in my church's parking lot, in what can only be described as the utter caprice of the universe, I fell down. No obvious reason; I didn't trip. I suppose I just fell off my shoes. It was unlike I've fallen in the past, where I take a few extremely ungracious steps forward in a hollow attempt to keep myself from actually hitting the ground. No. This was SPLAT. One second I'm walking along, talking to Cindy, our church administrator, and the next I'm flat out on the rough cement. I hurt my arm, and that's been an irritating inconvenience, but more than that, and the subject of this post, is how upsetting the whole experience is for me. Not the arm -- the fall itself. I'm an existentialist , big-time. I'm fascinated by issues of responsibility, freedom, guilt, authenticity, reality, death, control. And there's something about falling, at 52 years old, anyway, that is quite death-like and qu...

Both of the speakers at the Five Day Academy emphasized, in different ways, the patterns/cycles of our lives. Here's something I wrote in response during one of the silent times: Time has stopped this week... Strange intersection of exhaustion on multiple levels and the mysterious energy arising from openness to God's nudgings...Somehow together the dynamic between them has bestowed upon me a taste of the eternal... Liz and Robert and their talk of patterns, cycles ~ always intriguing for an existentialist like me... The pattern of time and eternity... The pattern of our lives taken, blessed, broken, and shared... The Psalms invite us to see our cycle of orientation, disorientation, and new orientation, where, yes, we do return to the beginning and know it for the first time... Creation itself here at this beautiful place, with winter on the march to spring and summer and back again to the cocoon of winter that will follow next year... Sunrise out of darkness... Resurrection f...

The last few days have been amazing. Really, it was the best Five-Day Academy I've ever attended--whether that's because I had no responsibilities or because my soul was simply ready to receive, I'm not sure. Probably both. As the week wore on, I felt more and more space open up within me. The last twelve years have been one HUGE event after another ~ for the most part the events have been good, but nevertheless HUGE changes take their toll. I left my job in corporate America, entered seminary, got ordained, sold my beautiful house and moved, took a six-month job as ED of a non-profit for older persons, entered a Ph.D. program, went through two + years of incredibly intense group therapy, lost my dear friend N to cancer, finished the Two-Year Academy for Spiritual Formation, qualifying exams, writing the dissertation, meeting D and marrying him, moving again, loving my new children-by-marriage, adjusting to family life and sharing living space, defending the dissertatio...

It's Saturday morning, and absolutely beautiful in North Texas. The sun is shining. The air looks clean (for a change). And it's suppose to be about 70 by mid-afternoon. Life is so incredibly good. D's play, Driving Miss Daisy, is doing well. Thursday night I attended the "preview" performance, where they invite people in from retirement homes for free. The house was about half full, I'd say. D was great! I admire his talent for acting and performing like that. The whole cast was wonderful. In fact, during the last act, when Hoak is visiting Daisy in the nursing home, feeding her with his old, shaking hand, I found tears streaming down my face. There is such a sadness involved in getting old. I mean, just existentially ~ sadness at the approaching end. I remember, when I decided to jump off the cliff and leave my oil company job...my Zen teacher, Ruben, told me that I had one month to live and challenged me: what will you do in the time you have remaining on ...

Why is beauty so important? In my twenties I was hardly aware of it, my soul so full of fear, self-absorbed. As I began to heal, the context in which I lived and worked came into view. The harshness of the flueorescent lights under which I worked at the oil company suddenly weighed on me. I began to buy furniture and home decor that spoke to me of the difference the divine can make. I yearned for an environment, a context for living and working, that mirrored the opening toward which I felt myself drawn. Why is beauty so important?

flickrfoto As 2007 winds down I find myself in the midst of a familiar feeling. It's an existential awareness of the end of my life approaching. That sounds like a real downer, doesn't it? But it's not. Not really. My birthday falls between Christmas and New Year's, so I get a double-dose of this each year...the passing of time, and my own personal passing of time. Buy a new calendar. Remember I can no longer say "I'm 51." This existential awareness began after my mother died in 1994. Being the oldest generation in my immediate family of origin makes a huge difference, I think. No longer is there that 'buffer' between me and death ~ plus, as friends correctly predicted, once past 50 my body just feels older. Several people I trust have told me that I have a gift for knowing, for recognizing, what is constructive and what is destructive in life. I can often intuit that kind of thing, which at times is complicated or hidden, fairly well. So, I don...

Tonight I had another opportunity to be with someone who is dying. Every Wednesday at 6:15 we have Taize-style Evening Prayer at my church. Tonight, just before we started, a parishioner came up to me and said she had a friend, an older woman, who has been put on hospice. The friend had a church, but wasn't comfortable with the ministers there... would I come and pray with her? Of course I agreed, and we decided that tonight, after Evening Prayer, would be best. I followed my parishioner to her friend's house and we arrived about 7:30 pm. The friend, Sally, is dying of cancer. My parishioner introduced me and said I was there to pray for her. I shook her hand, came around to the side of the bed, and ask if she felt able to talk a minute before we prayed. She said she did. I wondered if she could tell me a little bit about herself. She told me she was "happy person." She shared various details of her long life. Said she'd been a Christian most of her life and membe...

I spent my twenties making money. Out of college, my B.A. in journalism and political science got me nowhere practical, but three years working in Personnel right out of high school got me a job as a high-level clerk in the Personnel department at Pennzoil in Houston, where my parents had moved. I worked there two years. Got promoted. Managed the boredom of the job. Made several life-long friends. Quit Pennzoil to attend graduate school in government at UT in Austin. Made another life-long friend, but left after one semester when I realized I wasn't ready for graduate school. Moved to Dallas where I landed a job as a technical writer/editor at another oil company, ARCO. Within a year I was promoted to management, and my salary suddenly doubled overnight. I remember the feeling of my false-ego surging . You know that feeling? Ah, I'm somebody now. Somebody special. It was the same feeling when my father and mother bragged on me at the Christmas gathering of the extended family a...

(Google images. EmoryHealthCare.org) An artist friend of mine told me a beautiful story yesterday, a story of how she took "the narrow way" with her teenage son. The result was an opportunity for the Spirit to work in both their lives, creating deep connection and a strengthening love. Within this story, in order to say something about how much she loves her son (who is the fourth of her six children), she mentioned something a friend of hers, who was pregnant, had said to her once: "I have moments now when I'm aware of two souls within me." Moments when I'm aware of two souls within me . Wow. That just took my breath away. I've not had a lot of grief about being childless. I grew up thinking I'd never marry. Marriage was for my sister who was pretty . I was the smart one, so my appointed role was to get a good job, make money, and take care of my mother in her old age. My sister married young and had two children, so I was able to play at 'week...

I got to spend some time yesterday with a family who's father/husband is near death. He's almost 90. They've moved his bed out to the family room in front of a big picture window looking out into the back yard where they have a pond and waterfall and lots of beautiful trees. As I stood there yesterday I saw several different types of birds, squirrels, a neighborhood cat. Really lovely. When I arrived yesterday the hospice nurse was telling the wife that her husband's condition was worsening. She, the wife, had greeted me at the door in tears and the tears continued freely as the nurse spoke to her. She's very tired; it's already been an ordeal. The wife and the daughter and I sat in the living room and they told me stories of the dying man. Great stories. He's been a caring dad and husband. We laughed and carried on. Important grief work, and good. I don't know this man. My prayer is that he has "heard the Way" (see bottom of page). He seems...

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 ...

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.

Woke up this morning thinking, Life is a series of uncovering what's real. (I've always been a Platonist at heart, I suppose.) *Now we see through a glass darkly. *When mourning and death shall be no more. --All of that. I've been down with bronchitis this week, but part of waking up this morning was also the sense that my lungs are clearer. Maybe there's a mind-body connection here: Uncover my lungs, so I can breathe again. Hmm, that's a stretch, perhaps, but it always feels significant to me when I'm thinking something powerful like this when I awake. (No doubt part of my ongoing awakening .)

I said to my Zen teacher, "I have some issues going on that I know are related to trust. Can you help me?" As we sat on our mats, facing each other in formal Zen style, he said, "Ah, yes, Katherine. Today is April 16. On May 16, you die. Knowing that, what will you say and do and think and be in the time you have remaining on this earth?" I thanked him and did my little Zen bow, walked out of the room, and just about hyperventilated. I had granted a good measure of authority to my teacher, and his question took on the force of reality. One month to live. The pivot-point of my life, this moment evoked the courage I needed to leave my job with a major oil company and begin a new life. The business world had never held any meaning for me. I'd been trying to make it fit who I was, but part of me knew it was more my mother's desire for me than my own. I stayed for fourteen years because I was afraid. I was single and in my head were my mother's dire warnings ...