Nemesis

Betrayal

What we consider the crowning achievement of evolution turns out to be my nemesis.

I consider myself smart. I associate that with my brain.

As we have finally acknowledged, brain smart is one brand of intelligence. Another might be called body intelligence.

As an 8 year old boy, when my dog was run over and killed while I watched, I experienced a sensation that, in retrospect, shaped the rest of my life. Sensation, as in “sense-ation”. Not seeming dependent on being sorted out by the brain.

I have been a priest for over 50 years. It defines my adult life as much as almost anything. I “believe” God is love and that love is the strongest piece of our reality. I take that as another way of saying what Dr. King meant when he said the arc of history is long and bends toward justice. Love/justice means that our fate – individual and collective – is bound by the undeserved love that calls us into being. And, whatever the ultimate fate of our fragile species, that love is somehow ultimately indestructible.

So far so good.

Unlike the eastern mystics, I rarely, if ever, feel those convictions in my body. I sit down to meditate and my brain/ego goes on a multi-faceted romp through everything happening today, yesterday and maybe tomorrow. In other words I am distracted.

What I believe, am convicted of, has a bloody hard time making its way past the brain/body barrier into my emotional nervous system.

Maybe that’s why I actually look forward to dying, when it must be that all those distractions give way to the ecstasy the mystics advertise. It is that “letting go” they talk about. Finally by-passing the brain/ego

Our chief metaphor for where those emotions are focused is the human heart.

My therapist invites me to watch my breath fill my lungs, then flow through my heart valves, sending rich oxygenated blood to my extremities. I love the “idea” even though I dan’t find it easy to feel that wonderful sensation.

When someone says they don’t think they believe in God, I suggest that it’s not what we believe about God that counts, but what God believes about us. And that got settled when the pneuma, God’s holy breath, filled us with life we couldn’t have imagined.

Guess that’s enough for this lifetime.