Make Haste Slowly

Yes, these are my sandaled feet on the threshold of the outdoor Labyrinth at the Mandala Center on a beautiful, moderately chilly day in New Mexico over a year ago. I'd walked Labyrinths many times before, but the walk this day, I realized, could take place without the pressure of any meetings or deadlines whatsoever. And with that realization came an idea: why not walk each circuit by taking a mental journey through each year in my life? I decided I would pace myself according to the flow of memories, making my way around the next turn only when I had remembered everything I could from that year. The year I was born, 1963, went by rather quickly: other than recollections of some old sepia prints of our home, what I remembered was what was going on in the wider world: the assassination of JFK, Viet Nam, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and lest we forget, the introduction of the VW Bus.

Yet as year led to year and circuit to circuit, I had to slow down my pace. The more I remembered, the more slowly I walked. The more slowly I walked, the more I remembered. And I remembered things, and people, I'd long since forgotten. By the time I'd completed the walk, over an hour had gone by utterly lost in contemplation and I was deeply moved by the recognition that my life, like most, is an ever-widening web of grace-filled connections, relationships and encounters, a work forever in progress.

I look at this photo now and then as a reminder that if I truly want to go deeper in anything: relationship, thought, prayer or understanding...I need pull back on the reins and slow down my own galloping life. It's a logical axiom: the slower I go, the deeper I go. Of course, who has the luxury of slowing down much these days? Still, even the brief moments are of great value to the soul.

There is a saying woodburned into a plaque at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico: Festina Lente. Or, in English: Make Haste Slowly - a little bit of monastic humor that somehow makes more sense to me with each year that passes. If life is, in fact, more like a series of circles around a sacred center than a linear vector, what's the real advantage of all this rushing anyway? If our paths all lead to the same center anyway, why sprint to get there? Why not savor the journey?

Hardwired for God

Much of the wisdom entrusted to me during seminary has leaked slowly out of my bucket of memories, but these words still linger: "we are hardwired for God." This saying rings true for me. I am convinced that we are born, to varying degrees, with the necessary receptors for the divine. I remember as a young boy having trouble inhaling when I looked up at the stars and wondered with the psalmist, "who are we that Thou art mindful of us?" I remember my youngest brother, also at a very young age, contemplating the mystery of life and death, and declaring to the family, "I think when someone dies, God gets stronger." Surely the conditioning of language gives us new words with which to describe our experiences, but the experiences are there from an early age. God is not something we "study:" God is a power we experience. God is someone we just...know. The trick with us and God is that we grow up and "put away childish things," and with them, our fundamental ways of knowing and experiencing.

Every year I have my Confirmation Class respond to this question: "Describe a God you could really believe in." What never ceases to amaze me is that once they're given permission to forget about responding with the "correct answers" they think I'm expecting of them, I find words spilling forth from them that describe the very God I have come to know. A God described by words like, "love," "fair," "hopeful," "strong in unusual ways we can't explain," "forgiving," "challenging."

Faith is about what we know in our bones...or knew once upon a time, and have since lost hold of. Our faith precedes the outward forms of religion, the articulations of formal beliefs and statements of faith. Before we are confirmed, before we have read all the latest authors, we experience the divine without having to interpret. God is not in our heads, but in our hearts, in our hands, and in all the world around us.

U2's lead singer, Bono, once said that religion is "what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building." (Paraphrased from Ashley Kahn's "A Love Supreme.") Religion is our collective attempt to hold onto what we know so that it won't slip away. If only we could trust what children know....that God simply is, and if we open our hands, hearts and mind, God is still here. And always will be.

First, Emptiness

There is a fable about a man who sought the wisdom of a guru who lived in a simple hut atop a mountain. The man was filled with a desire to attain spiritual enlightenment, and had spent many years preparing himself for the day when he would meet the wise man atop the mountain. Finally, his head filled with wisdom and his heart full of expectation, he made the dangerous ascent and found himself at the ascetic's door, whereby he knocked. The old man welcomed him in and invited him to tea. Beside himself with excitement, the visitor felt compelled to speak excitedly and without pause about all that he had learned, convinced that his wisdom would impress the guru. The old man said nothing while the younger man talked and talked, he simply waited for the tea to steep as he listened. The two sat down, the younger man still talking. The guru filled his own cup first. Then, slowly, still listening to the younger man, he reached across the table and slowly began to fill his tea cup, only he did not stop pouring: he kept pouring until the tea was generously overflowing the cup and the saucer and was forming a pool on the table, at which point the young man exclaimed, "What are you doing?!!" The wise man looked at him and said, you are much like this cup of tea...your head is so overflowing with your own thoughts that there is room for nothing new to enter. You must descend the mountain, return home and forget all that you have learned. When your mind is again uncluttered like that of a child's, you may return. Only then will you be ready to receive wisdom.

We need emptiness. More than we know. Emptiness is the precondition of receptivity. When I travel to the New Mexican desert and find myself standing in the midst of windswept mesas and mountains without another soul for miles around, an odd thing happens: I feel strangely filled. The cacophony of my digitized life turns to inner quiet and eventually to renewed alertness. I feel life with freshness. I am fully present to everything within and without. I rediscover the appetite for God that I had almost lost. I am again like a chalice longing to be filled with holy wine, or like a dry sea sponge anticipating the creeping tide, and with it, a joyful, original saturation.

Paul wrote that Jesus "emptied himself," taking the form of a slave and humbling himself. The work for "emptied" is kenosis: a pouring out. We know that he poured himself out for our sake. I wonder, though, if he did so also for himself. To empty ourselves is to make room for the only thing - the only One - who can truly fill us.