Hummingbirds & Questions.

Once, as I watched two hummingbirds, I found myself overwhelmed by a series of questions.

· Were they flitting in and out of the flowers to pollinate them?

· Were they trying to nourish themselves with nectar?

· Were they there so I would remember to marvel at the world?

· Why where they there?

While I was in rabbinical school, I had weekly spiritual direction meetings with a wise woman who wrote the book on spiritual direction. (Actually, she’s written a number of different books about spiritual direction.) One day, she told me something that changed everything and nothing at the same time—it was a statement that has stayed with me ever since:

The answer received depends on the question asked.

How true!

We’ll never know everything. We’ll only get some answers – and only based on the questions we ask.

In the end, I don't know why the hummingbirds were there, probably never will, and I'm okay with that. Can I learn to be as comfortable with all the other unanswered questions in my life?

With wishes for patience for everything unresolved in your heart,

Spiritual-religious advice: Be satisfied that you’ll never have all the answers.

Certainty

Certainty is a state of being certain – not a state of being right or wrong.

If you’re certain about something, all it means is that you’re absolutely sure about it. You have no doubt. But the absence of doubt does necessarily mean you’re “correct.”

We all want to be right. (I’m certain of that.)

Not feeling certain is a little uncomfortable, like that sensation of your chair tipping backwards and almost falling. Nobody wants to endure that feeling for too long. (Therapists call this feeling of discomfort disregulation. In education circles it is referred to a state of disequilibrium.)

I’ve previously written “Faith: Not There, Here” and “Control or Suffer,” which both reference one of my favorite phrases:

Dubium incommodum est.

Certum ridiculum est.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable.

Certainty is ridiculous.

Let’s face it. We all want to be comfortable, and we all want to be certain about things in our lives. We want our doubts removed. But the truth is, it’s not possible to ever be 100% certain. Life is always changing, always throwing us a new curve ball at the precise moment we think we’re settled in. (Think of how the seasons change, for example.)

Ben Franklin stated,

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

We need to accept that we’ll never have full or complete knowledge about what will happen. We must learn to become comfortable with the awkward feeling of disregulation and disequilibrium.

Spiritual-religious advice: Know that you’ll never have full certainty, and get comfortable with feeling uncertain.

Side of the Road

[You can find today’s story in issue 28/40 from 2009.... it’s the same original tale, same spiritual-religious advice, but I wanted to re-write it. Let’s call it the “new and improved” version.]

A few years ago, my wife Jane and I were traveling, and I had what I call a “side-of-the-road” experience.

We were driving to Las Vegas from California, so it was a bit of a road trip. Everything was going fine. We reached a steep hill, and as the car moved up the hill, suddenly the engine quit working.

Right there in the middle of traffic, our forward velocity decreased to zero very quickly.

Jane was the one driving. She panicked. Cars swerved around us, honking. She started freaking out.

A large truck stopped behind our car to protecting us from oncoming traffic. At that point, I got my wits about me and knew exactly what to do.

I jumped out of the passenger seat, told Jane to put the engine in neutral. I got behind our car and started pushing. The large truck shielded us as I pushed the car to the side of the road, out of traffic. Once we were there, Jane felt better. We waved goodbye to the truck, called for a tow truck, and talked casually about what had just happened.

Once the emergency vehicle arrived, that’s when I lost it. I started to convulse, my whole body shaking. All the fear and anxiety I’d been holding back now appeared.

That’s what I mean by a side-of-the-road experience.

In stressful situations, many of us “hold it together” out of a kind of necessity. We hold it together, but then it – that energy we’re hiding – needs to go somewhere.

Many of us assume that just because we look like we’re holding it together, our past traumas, our past experiences, aren’t going to need to come out. This is a spiritual-religious mistake.

When I counsel wedding couples, I often see “unexpected feelings” coming out during the sessions. One of the individuals finally feels so safe, so loved – it’s as if they’re on the side of the road, free from danger. They have someone who loves them completely for who they are, and this allows them to deal with some past trauma. All the feelings they’ve held back for years can now be fully expressed in this non-threatening place of their relationship.

That’s a side-of-the-road kind of thing.

You might have experienced this at funerals. Some people can hold it together, go through the entire burial, and they’re “fine.” But a week or so after the service, after everyone has left and gone home, that’s when they start losing it: “I don’t understand. I was fine at the funeral, how come I’m not fine now?”

This is another side-of-the-road experience. At some point in our lives, when we feel secure, we finally feel and give ourselves permission to deal with our trauma. We allow ourselves full expression of what we previously kept hidden.

Spiritual-religious advice for the week: Remember that sometimes it’s only when you’re relaxed that you can feel anxieties you thought you got away from.

A hat, the well, and insanity.

Here's one definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

My friend Charles explains it like this:

· I go to a well for water and it doesn't have any water. I am disappointed.

· I go away and come back. The well still doesn't have any water. I am shocked.

· I leave and come back a third time. But this time . . . I'm wearing a hat!

And yet we all do this — all of the time.

We expect that because we have "put on a hat" that the dry wells in our lives will suddenly contain water.

We need to face reality, make the changes we can, and then stop going to empty wells — with or without hats.

Spiritual-religious advice: Don’t think that because you are doing something different that people in your life will necessarily act differently.

No One Path

Iconoclast means someone who challenges traditional beliefs. The etymology is from the words eikon (image) and klastes (breaker). The word was coined to refer to religious folk who destroyed images that co-religionists had made of God.

Modern-day iconoclasm is what ROTB is about – replacing monolithic, arcane notions of the divine with what makes more sense.

Before I continue in that charge, let me give you some history. 

In the Second Book of Kings, Hezekiah is one of the first celebrated iconoclasts. The controversy on challenging traditional beliefs got really heated in early 8^th century Byzantium, when the hot issue of the day was whether or not it was acceptable to have a pictorial representation of the divine.

(N.B.: while it is glossed over and even seemingly biblical literate types don’t know about it, the Hebrew Bible contains numerous references to God’s corporality. We won’t go in-depth with this here though.)

Hezekiah is a noted Biblical iconoclast – ridding his world of pictorial representations of the divine.  [If you read the Bible account before him, you will find that God “walked” in the garden (Gen. iii. 8); closed the ark door with “his hand”; “smells” sacrifices, “ate” with Abraham (Gen. xviii. 8); “wrote with a hand” upon the tables of stone (Ex. xxxi. 18), had a “back” seen by Moses, and more. See anthropopathism and learn a new word. ]

Iconoclasm changed in early 8th century Byzantium where the question was whether or not it was acceptable to have a pictorial representation of the God-the-son. By this time, no Muslim, Christian, or Jew was depicting God-the-father.

The idea is that if is it certain, it is limiting, and if it is limited, it is not God.

An extension of this is the notion that God has no name.

To this end, anyone suggesting that there is a proper path to God, does not worship the same notion of the divine that I do. 

As Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “Truth is a pathless land.”

There’s no one, singular path to God!

As William Blake said, “Jesus Christ is the only true God, and so am I, and so are you.”

There is no notion of God that is more correct than the one that you have – or are working on.

Let us love each other and each other’s notions of the divine.

Let us smash the false idols of certainty when it comes to the limitless.

Let us reclaim the word “God” for our notions of the divine. 

Let us be modern-day iconoclasts.

Spiritual-religious advice: Claim God as our own, if only linguistically.