Tag Archives: wisdom

We’ve had some intense rainstorms in Santa Barbara in recent years which have caused many trees to fall. This eucalyptus fell over San Jose Creek several years ago.  I see it every morning when I walk over the bridge near my home.  When it fell, one of its branches landed on the ground on the opposite side of the creek and became a support for the rest of the tree:

I’ve been fascinated to watch new growth rising skyward from the fallen branch. I remind myself that this branch began its life going vertical, then fell to its current horizontal position.  But that unexpected event did not change its purpose — it’s thick with new growth.

I recently came across this poem from Catherine Abbey Hodges who lives in Springville on the western foothills of the Sierras.  She witnessed something similar in her “neck of the woods:”

After the Flood

They looked like goners,

the cottonwoods and alders

downed when the river

went wild. And no wonder:

for two days we’d heard

the boom of boulders

above the water’s roar,

heard the crash and snap

of sturdy trees.

But now they’re sprouting

branches, new green

thrusting skyward

from prone trunks.

It’s a strange sight, hopeful

though not yet beautiful,

this ungainly resurrection,

early days of a miracle

etched in the seed.

I kept rereading the last stanza:

• such trees are indeed a “strange sight” – something that defies our everyday expectations. 
• It’s “hopeful though not yet beautiful” — it’s impressive not because it fits some pre-determined idea of what it should look like, but because it demonstrates the raw power of hope.
• It’s an “ungainly resurrection” – it looks more clumsy than graceful, yet the impulse to thrive and be reborn shines.
• This “miracle” is manifesting itself day after day, but the power to do so was given long ago when a regenerating life force was “etched in the seed.”

I began to imagine how such trees are metaphors for the lives of many people I’ve known in my life and career. 

Most of us begin life full of optimism, confident we will keep growing according to our plan as we reach for the sky. But storms come.  Branches break.  We fall. It’s tempting to give up.  Can we find some new way to live? 

The German mystic Meister Eckhart said, “The soul grows by the process of subtraction.”  I take this to mean that when we are full of our selves and rigid expectations, there’s no room for soul.  But when losses come and we break open — as our illusions are “subtracted” from our sense of self — the divine Spirit comes near to offer us a chance to experience new life that is “etched in the seed” of our soul.  We may never stop grieving for what we’ve lost along the way, but shoots of regeneration begin appearing. 

In my Goleta congregation, we would have annual retreats called “Crossroads” which would include 15 or 20 people. We’d begin Friday night by sharing a meal and getting to know each other. On Saturday morning we’d study a story from Scripture that I had chosen for its potential to offer insight into the experience of living.  I’d then give everyone a large sheet of newsprint and a box of markers and ask them to go off for two hours to create a “life map” — a visual representation of how their life had unfolded.  People would often draw a winding pathway with many ups and downs, then draw pictures or choose words to describe key events. (Some of our engineers were more comfortable with bar graphs.)  You’d see things like, “depression” or “fell in love” or “divorce” or “new job.”  When people were finished with their maps, I’d ask them to go back and mark any places on their road where they encountered God. 

We’d regather.  Each person had a turn describing their map and journey.  They would then tape their map to the wall of the meeting room. When everyone was done, we’d take time in silence to survey the range of life experiences in our group.  There was always a sense of awe at what people had been through and how, in many ways, they’d experienced unexpected growth and blessings.

The human spirit is like a seed, and etched into it is the potential to heal, integrate, grow, and adapt. 

I once traveled with a group to Ghana. In many cultures, if someone asks, “How are you?” the response is something like “I am well” or “I am fine.”  But our host said when someone in Ghana asks, “How are you?”  a traditional response is “Yesu Adom,” which means “By the grace of God” or “By the grace of God I am well.”

I imagine standing on the San Jose Creek bridge asking my friend, “How are you doing, Fallen Tree?” I would not be surprised to hear: “By the grace of God, I am well. I have not given up. I am determined to thrive.  Join me.”

By the grace of God, I will. May we all.

“After the Flood” by Catherine Abbey Hodges in Empty Me Full.  (forthcoming by Gunpowder Press, 2024) Used with permission.

“Human beings are animals. They are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals. They may prefer to think of themselves as fallen angels, but in reality they are risen apes.”  — Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape [i]

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – attributed to the priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin

Well, which is it?  Are we apes fooling ourselves that we are angels? Or are we spiritual beings inhabiting a body provided for us by our biological cousins?

My favorite movie when I was kid was Tarzan and my favorite character was the chimpanzee, Cheetah.  Cheetah was Tarzan’s best friend. They talked to each other in a special language.  If Tarzan was in trouble, Cheetah might dash through the jungle and summon a herd of elephants. Or find some lions and persuade them to save his friend.  I formed the Monkey Club in second grade and was its first (and only) president.  I would have traded all my baseball cards to have a friend like Cheetah. 

         I was a teenager in 1967 when The Naked Ape came out.  It was a popular bestseller describing how similar we are to apes.  I loved it.  I wanted to be a filmmaker at that time. I took our Kodak Super 8 movie camera to the San Diego Zoo and filmed chimpanzees grooming each other. Then I went back home to San Bernardino and planned to secretly film customers at our local barber shop getting similar treatment.  I planned to cleverly edit the clips so the movie would alternate between the human and primate footage, showing how similar we are. But I never did have the chutzpah to secretly film at the barbershop.  And I didn’t know the first thing about film editing.  Unlike the Steven Spielberg character in The Fabelmans, my cinematic career ended early.

  Growing up and going to college, I did not believe in “spiritual” or “religious” experiences. I believed everything could be explained through science.

         Then I had a spiritual experience.  In a time of personal desperation, I prayed without believing in prayer because I had nowhere else to turn.  Three days later, I realized something like a quiet light was now present at the center of my inner emptiness.  It was an unexpected and vivid experience that opened my mind to the possibility that there is a divine presence surrounding us, and it means us good.  Maybe we are “spiritual beings having a human (or biological) experience.”

         I had heard some folks say science and religion were incompatible — you either believe God created the world in seven days or you are a heretic. But that never made sense to me.  Science was not shutting out wonder but uncovering more and more for it.  What’s wrong with “descending” from apes? I considered that a compliment.

         This is not to say everything in nature is pleasant.

         In 2015 I attended the Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake. There were many interesting speakers from around the world, but no one drew as large a crowd as Jane Goodall. I was thrilled to listen to her – she has come as close to any of us as having friends like Cheetah! She said she first wanted to study chimpanzees because she was disillusioned with human behavior and felt that chimps in the wild must have greater nobility. But after living with them, she realized they could become vicious and violent when attacking a rival tribe. Her idealism ended, but not her reverence for our fellow primates.

         In 1912, Aldo Leopold was working for the Forest Service in New Mexico.  His duties included hunting wolves.  One day he shot a wolf on a rimrock canyon: “He reached the still breathing wolf and saw something that forever changed him. In his classic text, A Sand County Almanac, Leopold describes the experience, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”[ii]

   Leopold had sensed something profound in the wolf’s eyes and her being – something that inspired reverence.  He became an early prophet of the environmental movement.

         Have you ever looked into the eyes of an animal and felt a deep kinship?

         Would Native and indigenous people believe you must choose between the natural world and spiritual beliefs?

         I look at myself and my fellow human beings: we “are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent.”  And I look at life all around us: it can be messy at the same time it is permeated with the miraculous mystery of life.

         So which is it?  Are we “just” animals or are we essentially spiritual creatures? I’m not choosing sides.  I vote for both.

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[i] The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, 1967

[ii] http://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/light-and-seed-magazine/aldo-leopold-in-the-gila-wilderness

            In the eighties, a seminary friend underwent a kind of conversion.  He’d been raised with an older form of theology which held that this life is full of sin and suffering, and our best response is to focus on the hope of heaven.  But he became convinced that this perspective was misguided.  It had led our culture into an attitude of disregarding the integrity and sanctity of creation, which in turn contributed to the degradation of the environment; it also kept us from appreciating the blessings present in everyday life. He began to see divine life embedded in the natural world and became an early supporter of the “eco-spirituality” movement.  “Faith isn’t just about the pie in the sky,” he’d say, “the sky is in the pie.”  In other words, the divine presence surrounds us, and a primary spiritual calling in our time is to protect and nurture the earth and appreciate all that it offers.

            A turning point for me was reading Original Blessing, by the feisty priest and scholar, Matthew Fox.  Fox pointed out that Western theology had mistakenly become fixated on the doctrine of “original sin” in the fourth century and has never let it go.  But the Hebrew Scriptures – and Jesus’ teaching — are pervaded with the theme of life being a miraculous gift, not a curse.

            I appreciate the times in human history when peoples’ lives were full of suffering and focusing on future life in heaven – “pie in the sky” – made sense. There are many great spirituals with that theme, and no doubt they were powerful medicine.  I honor and appreciate that experience. But if that is the sole focus of our spiritual life, we are missing so much.

            I confess I come to this theme with a formidable bias – since the time I was a kid, I’ve loved pies.  It started with Mom’s apple pie.  Then it expanded to lemon meringue pies at Denny’s.  It grew further with a masterpiece made with home-grown pie cherries from the baker’s tree in her backyard. These all tasted “heavenly” to me; literal affirmations that “the sky” can be experienced “in the pie.”

            I remember the first time I stayed at a monastery — St. Andrew’s Priory near Pearblossom.  I was expecting to be served some kind of thin gruel.  But when I came into the dining room, a great, multicourse feast was laid out.  It turned out they were welcoming a new novice to their community, so it was my good fortune to be there as they celebrated with this banquet.  I later learned that the monk who cooked that night had been a chef with the Hyatt Regency before taking his vows. 

Several years later I was spending a day at Mt. Calvary Monastery here in Santa Barbara. Before lunch was served, the host said, “We don’t know if God has taste buds, so we consider it a spiritual duty to enjoy what we eat.”

            I’m hoping I can have it both ways. If there is “pie in the sky” after this life is over, I’m all for it.  But I’m not missing any opportunities on this side of the great mystery.  I’m hoping to have my pie and eat it too.

            What’s for dessert?

You may have seen this:

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 is authentic — the term for something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever.

A high-volume lookup most years, authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023, driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.

Authentic has a number of meanings including “not false or imitation,” a synonym of real and actual; and also “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate—two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary.[i]

When I think of the word authentic,” I think first of food: “That place serves authentic Mexican food” someone will say; “If you want to know what an authentic bagel tastes like, you’ve got to go to New York.”

Occasionally we have pizza delivered from one of the popular places in town. But recently we got some from Ca’Dario’s, a wonderful Italian restaurant in town.  The crust was quite thin, as it is in Italy.  My 8-year-old grandson picked up a piece and said, “This isn’t real pizza.”  I asked why. He said, “It has a floppy crust.” Authenticity can be in the eye of the beholder.

I think of art.  Occasionally we will read of some expert declaring that someone paid a lot of money for a work is fake.

We can debate what makes food or art authentic, but how about people? It’s hard to say how we know someone is “authentic.”  Maybe we could start with what must be the opposite trait — “phony.” 

Sometimes we encounter people who say and do all the right things, but after we are around them, we get the feeling they aren’t authentic.  We say things like “They’re just putting on an act.”  We can resonate with that 1971 soul classic, “Smiling Faces:”

Smiling faces, Smiling Faces, Sometimes they don’t tell the truth.

Smiling faces, Smiling faces tell lies and I got proof.

Beware. Beware of the handshake that hides the snake, 

I’m tellin’ you beware of the pat on the back it just might hold you back.

Jealousy, (Jealousy)  misery, (misery) envy.

I tell you you can’t see behind.[ii]

So, we might sense when someone is not authentic, but how do we know if they are?

Since the sixties, we have often heard that we each need to find our true ‘authentic” selves.  That can mean uncovering some gifts, talents, or creativity we didn’t know we had – a wonderful thing.  But I think it can also become a guise for being selfish – we decide we will act however we please and expect the world and other people to adapt to our needs.  Spirituality in that realm can be finding a set of beliefs that fit perfectly with what my ego wants.

From the point of view of the established spiritual traditions, the best way to find our “authentic self” is to experience and serve a purpose and presence greater than ourselves.  “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.”  (Luke 17:33) This is an invitation to imagine there is a way of being beyond my little self and to discover the wonder of being part of it.

I think of the Prodigal Son story.  The younger brother takes half of his inheritance, leaves home, and spends it all on himself. The money runs out and he finds himself in a moment of despair which leads to a discovery – “he came to himself.”   He returns to rejoin his family where he finds love and belonging.

I had a parishioner who is very quiet and prefers to be in the background in any situation.  She is always thinking of others, visiting them when they are sick or sad or alone.  She’s now 102 years old.  If you asked her if she’d found her “authentic self,” she would be mystified by the question. Her “real self” doesn’t exist in isolation as a trophy to display; it lies deeply in her connection with other people.  Her authenticity is a product of her humility.

I went on quite a few trips with teenagers to build homes in Mexico.  In the beginning, many kids were concerned they wouldn’t have the daily conveniences they were used to.  But when the work started, they forgot about their devices.  At evening campfires, as they reflected on their lives, it seemed to me they were finding their “authentic selves” by experiencing a bigger world – one that is challenging and engaging, but also includes a core element of serving others.

            As the announcement noted, one reason there has been so much interest in what is authentic is the advance of Artificial Intelligence.  This week I was making a hospital visit and saw a woman I know.  She told me of a sermon her assistant rabbi had recently given on the topic of AI.  She said it was an impressive presentation, but along the way, she and others felt somehow, something was off.  At the end, he told everyone the sermon had been entirely written by an AI Chatbot – then offered some thoughts about what that means.  “You just knew something wasn’t right,” she said, “But you couldn’t put a finger on it.”

            AI is rapidly becoming more and more capable of creating materials and relationships that will seem more and more “authentic.”  What will life be like?

Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate—two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary.  Pondering the word sends me not only to the dictionary but more and more into a new appreciation of being with real, down-to-earth people in my life who aren’t trying to be authentic — but are.  What a blessing.

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[i] https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year#:~:text=Merriam%2DWebster’s%20Word%20of%20the,and%20judging%20more%20than%20ever.

[ii] “Smiling Faces,” Undisputed Truth, 1971: https://youtu.be/g0WPPAN9JyM?si=imeqsAs6Eehn8ZYt