Accepting Powerlessness

. . . late winter notes from the garden

I am grateful to A Course in Miracles for adding “separation” to my spiritual vocabulary. It’s sharp and precise language. It carries theological and psychological weight. It also neatly mirrors the experience of being embodied in the world.

Giving attention to separation - in my thoughts and words, in what I’ve done and what I’ve failed to do - clarified something for me. It clarified my powerlessness over separation. The mind divides itself; it separates itself from itself and from everything else. I can see the separation happen but I can’t stop it from happening.

What happens then? What does the world look like when I can no longer pretend to control it? Master it? Take hold of and be in charge of it?

Lately, bald eagles have returned to our valley. Ten years ago they were 25 miles east in the Northampton oxbow. Now they are here. When I stand in the late March garden and watch them hunt along the river, I cannot help but perceive them as separate. Their grace and magnificence - their terrible beauty - is alien to me. Nor do I think they see me as kin.

But something crosses the separation, as if it were older than separation, more fundamental. My encounter with the eagles humbles me. It opens me. In a way, it empties me. In the presence of the eagles, there is only that presence. It’s not my presence or the eagles’ but it does join us. It does relate us to each other and to it.

This manner of relationship is not so much the end of separation as an effect of accepting my powerlessness over separation. That acceptance loosens separation’s stranglehold and makes a new way of living together possible in spite of powerlessness. As the prophet says, God gives strength to the powerless (Isaiah 40:29).

Life goes on. People talk over me at meetings; I talk over them. People still make beautiful art and fascinating poems. I still hate doing the dishes, still crave Doritos. Bombs are falling almost everywhere it seems.

I don’t want any of us to suffer. I do not believe a suffering world reflects God’s will. Yet something still allows for suffering. I can’t resolve this intellectually - it’s too scandalous, too close to obscene. What God or gods would consent to such a world? I have to live the answer, where “live” refers to being present to relationships I cannot control.

In the still-frozen garden, under the watchful eye of bald eagles, the question isn’t so much what can I do but rather, who can I do it with?

The answer to that question typically is: look around. Who is nearby? Who is crying out? How can we care more, love more, soothe more, grow more, nurture more, create more? Those are questions I cannot meaningfully answer alone. Honestly, I can’t even love the bald eagles alone. The desire to share them with you is embedded in the experience. Relationship doesn’t end separation; rather, it reveals what’s there all along, even before separation. Of course you are here. Me, too.

Following Jesus apparently includes understanding that helping you is not separate from helping me - even when (perhaps especially when) the price of helping you feels very high. We are in this together, no matter how different our needs appear, no matter where we are in our capacity to help. Holiness always sugars out in simple ways: help with the chores, keep your word, listen to understand, make things easier. I want spiritual drama, religious intensity, and poetic bliss. What I get is communal responsibility, an enacted practice of holiness whose ordinariness is the very thing that enables me to overlook and even dismiss it.

When I turn from the sky to the garden, a bit of vetch glistens in the cold soil. The green hints at late summer’s abundance; it reminds me the winter snows are blanket, not shroud. When I look up again, the sky is empty. But I’m not alone. I’m not unhappy.

On Palm Sunday - fasting under the gaze of hungry eagles, counting the hours to supper - Jesus invites me to look closer at separation. And what I find when I look is not separation but you. Always you.

Love,
Sean