wonder | Michael Valliant

I hope my daughters figure out time travel

Empty parking lot off Idlewild Avenue. Parking curbs. Concrete. Asphalt. No people, so I pull out my time machine, step on, and the sound of polyurethane on pavement spins back decades. The sound, the vibration under foot, the feeling of cruising carelessly, for no reason except that it’s fun.

What are the things you do regardless of what anyone else thinks? Things you can’t wait to do, that bring you happiness, just by doing them.

Rolling up to a curb, I sit down with a pen, notebook, Mary Oliver’s “Thirst.” I look up.

“Clouds are not only vapor, but shape, mobility, silky sacks of nourishing rain. The pear orchard is not only profit, but a paradise of light. The luna moth, who lives but a few days, sometimes only a few hours, has a pale green wing whose rim is like a musical notation. Have you noticed?”

When Mary O. asks you a question, you do well to consider it. Do I take the time to notice what goes on around me? Really notice? There are everyday miracles, right here on Idlewild Avenue in an empty parking lot on a Sunday afternoon.

Those things that you do for you–how did you figure out what they were? And how long have you been doing them?

When I think back, some of the things I most love doing today, I started in my early teenage years: comic books, skateboarding, writing, reading, running, being on the water, just being outside. And it’s some form of those things that still fill me up a few decades later. Those things maybe as close to time travel as I will get. They connect me to past and future versions of myself. They mark a moment in time, but revisiting them, they create moments outside of time.

I don’t know if my daughters will figure out time travel. I hope they do. I hope they walk the same beaches (and new ones) over decades, and remember when their feet were smaller, their minds saw more colors, and there were fewer distractions. I hope they remember, connect, and see outside of time.

I land in the parking lot again. It’s not supposed to feel this warm in February. The day is a gift. I can hear life in the back yards of Aurora Street. If I get quiet enough I can hear the universe.

“He or she, who loves God, will look most deeply into His works.”
Mary Oliver

Maybe that’s it. We don’t need to stay at the surface. If we look deeper, we can lose ourselves. We find ourselves connected; to our past through memory; to our future through hope; to each other through God, who is Love.

Need & Seek

Jesus digs questions. He likes to ask them to us and I think he likes us to ask them of ourselves. Rev. Daniel Groody points out that in the four Gospels, Jesus is asked 183 questions, only directly answering three. On the other hand, he asks 307 questions.

Groody put together a devotional booklet, “Daily Reflections for Advent & Christmas: Waiting in Joyful Hope 2019-2020.” He suggests daily Scripture readings and then provides reflection, meditation, and a prayer. It’s a cool and meaningful way to guide us through Advent. A perfect coffee companion in the mornings.

Groody quotes Martin Copenhaver and then adds something of his own:

“‘Jesus is not the ultimate Answer Man, but more like the Great Questioner.’ And through these questions Jesus holds a lantern to our hearts.”

In studying and discussing the Gospels and reading commentary, one of the first things to become clear is that God, through Christ, is after our hearts, first and foremost. Everything else follows. Our hearts function best when they are full of joy, wonder, and they/we are after the right things. Groody goes on to say, “Answers can foreclose new discoveries, but questions open up new possibilities.”

Both Jesus and Groody are speaking my language. In 47 years, I have more questions and fewer answers than ever. But also more than ever, I’ve come to love the questions, the seeking in and of itself. It (the seeking) gets me up in the morning, sends me into Scripture, sends me into nature, connects me to people, and opens me up to wonder and mystery.

Groody quotes theologian Bernard Lonegran, who said, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who need certainty and those who seek understanding.” I’m not big on anyone who tries to reduce the world to two kinds of people, but I like the distinction between needing certainty and seeking understanding. Probably there is a bit of both in each of us.

In his book, “Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems,” Gary Snyder writes:

The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
…
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.

Gary Snyder, still seeking. Photo by John Suiter. Great audio and photo essay over at Poetry Foundation.

Snyder strikes me as a seeker, not of certainty, but of experience, wonder, beauty, and understanding. Discovery is not about certainty.

Advent is a time of waiting, of staying awake, of readying ourselves. It’s a time of hope, and just finishing a study of Brene Brown’s book, “Daring Greatly,” she points out that we can’t know hope without struggle.

Part of our struggle as people, is the need to know for sure, the need to be certain–and yet, certainty precludes faith and mystery.

So on a gray, sleety, rainy Monday morning, I am going to sit in the questions, take a cue from Groody, and try to stay open to new discoveries.

Live the questions now

It’s tough sitting in not knowing. And at the same time, being able to be okay with not knowing is maybe the key to happiness or joy–being able to live in questions and uncertainty.

One of my favorite Facebook pages is “Contemplative Monk.” This week, they used a meditation on consecutive mornings by a favorite writer of mine:

Have patience with everything
unresolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions
themselves
as if they were locked rooms
or books written in a very foreign language.
Do not search for the answers, which
could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live
them.
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the
future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it, live your way
into the answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It comes from Rike’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” which is a book I keep on multiple shelves, because I forget it and need to hear it a number of times.

And along with Rilke’s words, the folks at CM posted the picture at the top of the page here, and the two washed over me–the peace, the anticipation, sitting at the ready for whatever comes. With coffee. One of my favorite ways to start a day and a posture I try to take when I sit down at my desk in the morning (though my desk has more books strewn about it).

It’s always the questions that drive me, and people a lot smarter than I am point out that we are defined by our questions. Jesus frequently answered questions with questions (or stories), Socrates was known for the same thing, as were the Desert Fathers and all sorts of deep thinkers around the world.

“Live the questions now.” When we hold out for certainty, we are hopelessly stuck. There are so many things I think I’d like to know, which would put my mind at ease, make life more simple. But that’s a waiting game we can’t win, and even in winning, we lose that beginning of the day, sunrise possibility.

The times my heart beats fastest, the times my mind is most open, the times when I feel most connected to God, Creation, other people, are the times when it’s not a matter of knowing or thinking, it’s a moment or experience full of feeling, shared and reflected back. When no amount of knowledge can add a single thing to it.

When I can look with the eyes of a child, the eyes of wonder, and live the questions now.

When does the butterfly read
what flies written on its wings?
Pablo Neruda, “The Book of Questions”

Beginner’s Mind: Reset to Wonder

“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” That line from Shunryu Suzuki and the idea of beginner’s mind have stuck with me as much or more than anything I’ve read. It applies to pretty well every breath and step we take each day, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately with different things–particularly practices and passions where you have to hit reset every time you do them.

Beginner’s mind has been loud for running, something I started doing when I was 15, but running doesn’t care how long you’ve done it. Every run is its own thing, no matter how good or bad the last one was. On a nine-mile run this morning, the races and distances I have run in the past don’t count. They don’t get me a step further. In getting ready for the Tuckahoe 25K (15.5 mile) trail race in November, I’m two minutes per mile slower than I was three years ago, when I was running more and in better shape. I may get some of that back, but I’m not really worried about it, I just like going out to run.

Seeing birds scatter from phragmites and cattails, watching cardinals and blue jays in trees along the rail trail; stopping to look off bridges at the sun coming through clouds; or watching a monarch butterfly fly across my path, followed instantly by a leaf of almost the same color, moving in the same way, mimicking each other, as God smiles and says, “see what I did there?” Even running on the same roads and routes I have run for years, there is always something new and different to hit the reset button and dial up the wonder.

Beginner’s mind has turned up during prayer or meditation, where what I did yesterday or last month or last year doesn’t mean I will show up, or make time, or connect today. If I want to get something out of prayer, I have to be mindful. N.T. Wright, in his book “The Lord and His Prayer,” says:

“Whenever we pray, that is what we are coming to do: to pursue the mystery, to listen and respond to the voice we thought we just heard, to follow the light which beckons round the next corner, to lay hold of the love of God which has somehow already laid hold of us.”
N.T. Wright

It’s funny how you can take something like the Lord’s Prayer, which maybe you’ve heard or recited enough not to even listen to the words anymore, but when you take it apart, pray or reflect on it line by line, or read about it, how it can take on new life, new meaning. Whether prayer, The Lord’s Prayer, or meditation, coming at it with beginner’s mind opens it to wonder and newness.

Each year, Uncle Chad and the kids make sand sculptures, just so they can wreck them.

Every year at the beach, my sister’s husband comes up with new ideas for sand sculptures. He and the kids have created airplanes, dragons, castles, all intricately and painstakingly built. But his end goal, the highlight of the creation, is when he has the kids destroy it. Sometimes they line up youngest to oldest to take their shots at it. The joy is in creating it, not trying to make it last. In that, their sculptures are like the sand mandalas the Tibetan monks create, simply to wipe them away. You start anew, every day.

Beginner’s mind applies to having new ears as well as new eyes. On the last mile of this morning’s run, the farthest I have run in a long time, Arrested Development’s “Tennessee” shuffled up.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this song, both when it came out, and from being on my running playlist for a while now. But it’s come to mean more over the last few years. The singer is talking to God and about their relationship. The song is a prayer.

“Lord it’s obvious we got a relationship
Talkin’ to each other every night and day
Although you’re superior over me
we talk to each other in a friendship way…
I ask you, Lord, why you enlightened me
without the enlightenment of all my folks
He said, cuz I set myself on a quest for truth
and he was there to quench my thirst.
But I am still thirsty.
The Lord allowed me to drink some more
He said what I am searching for are
The answers to all which are in front of me
the ultimate truth started to get blurry..
Speech (Todd Thomas)

There are songs whose lyrics wash over me new and differently maybe each time I hear them. At the end of a run, when legs are heavy, mind wants to be on autopilot, breathing is conscious, in a moment created and shared with the Universe, is an old song, a prayer, between a man and God.

Beginner’s mind is coming back for more. It’s seeing possibility. It’s starting again. It’s realizing we aren’t perfect and we don’t really know anything. It is finding wonder in the same roads, in the same songs, in the same body, but seeing it differently. It’s being thirsty for more.

And I am still thirsty.

And you may ask yourself…how did I get here?

We all reach a point in our lives when we look around and wonder how we got here. Maybe not all of us, but I definitely do. A friend recently described present life as feeling like, “I accidentally got dropped into this weird world.”

David Byrne gets it.

And you may find yourself
living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world.
And you may find yourself
behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,
with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, well
how did I get here?

Sometimes I get the sense that part of that not knowing where we are is because we’ve forgotten we’re on a journey. We live life like it’s the same, day in and day out, then we look around not knowing where we stopped paying attention.

We were recently talking about faith–what is faith? How can you have faith? And when we talk about it in that way, when we frame the questions like that, what people often mean is faith as belief: how do I believe in something? Faith is much bigger than belief, in the same way a mountain is much bigger than simply dirt and rock and a journey is more than crossing the street.

There’s plenty I don’t agree with theologian Marcus Borg about. But there is also a lot about what he has to say that excites me and gives me hope for what faith is and where it can lead. Borg, in a posthumously released book, “Days of Awe and Wonder,” asks what would happen if we look beyond our notion of faith as believing, and try to see Christian life as a journey:

“To be on a journey is to be in movement… A journey is a process that involves our feet as well as our minds and our heads. A journey involves following a path or a way. To be on a journey is not to be wandering aimlessly, though there are many times when it feels like that; people have gone on this journey before us, and there is a trail, a path, a way that we are called to. The journey image suggests that the Christian life is more like following a path than believing with our minds.”

If we allow that our life is a journey, it makes sense that the view is going to change along the way. And maybe if we walked looking through that lens, we’d key into when changes are taking place.

Borg digs back and looks at ancient meanings of the word faith as used in Scripture. He unpacks three: 1) Faith as trust (the opposite of which is anxiety), 2) Faith as fidelity (to our relationship with God), and 3) “Faith as a way of seeing the whole, the whole of that which we live and move and have our being.”

And he points out the different ways we can see the whole, the universe, in which we live and move and have our being: we can see it as hostile towards us, indifferent towards us, or we can “see the whole as gracious, nourishing, and supportive of life, to see it as that which has brought us into existence and continues to nourish us.” Let’s lean into the last option, gracious, nourishing, supportive.

And here’s a part I fully dig:

“Faith is thus about setting out on a journey in a posture of trust, seeking to be faithful to the relationship we are called into. We are invited to make that journey, that journey of faith, in which we learn to trust our relationship to God, learn to be faithful to that relationship, and learn to see it in a new way. We will be led in that journey into an ever more wondrous and compassionate understanding of our lives with God.”

If we look beyond faith as being as simple as belief, and we see it as trusting God, setting out on a journey to learn how to be in relationship with Him and with each other, and building that relationship over a continuing journey into more wonder, more compassion, more understanding; that’s a journey, an adventure I want to wake up to, dig into, and live into every day.

On Being Born

The last five years have been off the map. If you’d sat down with me on this day in 2013 and told me what the view in 2018 would look like, I’d have backed away slowly. And yet, they are some of the most important and beautiful years in shaping who I am, for better or worse.

One thing I remember clearly, when summer came and the Coast Guard contract we were working on ended, I was out of a job and searching for a direction. And I remember reading Frederick Buechner and having this overwhelming feeling that I should go to seminary; that there was something about a journey of faith that was key. I look back at Buechner’s words that I found again recently:

“Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks… It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.”

I talked to a long-time friend and mentor who is an Episcopal priest and looked into things and sat and prayed on it, and then let it go when another Washington, DC, job working for the Coast Guard presented itself. I simply couldn’t imagine what life would look like or what would have to happen to end up working for a church.

There is no way I can do justice to the events that have taken place or the unexpected cast of characters who have been a part of what has happened since. There have been so many unexpected and undeserved blessings, even while there has been confusion, frustration, and letting go. Looking with hindsight doesn’t show the heartbreak, missteps and mistakes, letting people down, the questions, or being lost in the woods for stretches. We each have to own our scars and those we cause others. And we each have to get up each day and ask and answer, “Now what?”

In his book, “The Heart of Christianity,” Marcus Borg talks about being what resurrection means in our lives:

“…the process of personal transformation at the center of the Christian life: to be born again involves death and resurrection. It means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being, dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity–a way of being and an identity centered in the sacred, in spirit, in Christ, in God.”

There is so much there. So much to live into, live up to, and I don’t always to the best job of it. But trying to focus and center and find each day, something of a new life, centered in God and the sacred. That feels like what I have been trying to get to since I was a teenager and started uncovering pieces of life and the world that I love.

There is something new and at the same time, there are the parts and passions and wonders and curiosities that abide and make us who we are, each of us a piece of a larger puzzle. And how we see things and how we see ourselves, they are and we are. I have been reading John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara,” which goes on my very short list of books I’d take with me anywhere.

“There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find… Each of us needs to learn the unique language of our own soul. In that distinctive language, we will discover a lens of thought to brighten and illuminate our inner world.”

“Anam Cara” shows how creatively and actively our inner world, our bodies, and the landscapes around us are all sacred and interconnected.

Each of the last five or six years, I have picked myself up a pair of shoes and a book for my birthday. Sometimes they have been trail running shoes, sometimes running shoes, Sanuks, or Vans. The books are more varied and tangential than I could even account for. The purpose is to invite in new adventures for the year: physical adventures on foot as well as intellectual adventures. Both make for adventures of the soul. This year it is trail shoes and Huston Smith’s autobiography, “Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine.”

Who knows what adventures year number 46 holds? I’ve learned I don’t know much. But I’m trying to get better as I go on about listening to my life and to hearing God speak. I am trying to use life up to this point, scars and all, to invite transformation and embrace new life ahead, centered in the sacred, centered in Christ, centered in God.

And I find life is generally better when I remember to get outside, with the dog 🙂

Wonder and Welcome

“We need to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.” – G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy.”

Watching the sun break the horizon, change the whole color of the sky and the landscape; watching fog dancing on still sleeping water on the cove–that conveys the sense of wonder we can find any given morning.

Smiling at the sunrise, laughing like it’s an inside joke, or on a morning with others running, skateboarding, or paddleboarding, realizing what a gift those moments are to share–that feeling, that recognition, that is welcome.

Maybe it is our job, with the time we have, to find both wonder and welcome. Maybe it’s our job, with the time we have, to be grateful for both wonder and welcome. Maybe it’s our job, with the time we have, to convey both wonder and welcome to others.

Part of that is finding what moves us. Part of it is staying after it, stoking our fire, our passion–what makes us who we are–and doing something with it, not settling, and not just being comfortable.

For me, that starts with waking up, wrestling the dog, smiling. Putting coffee on, grabbing a notebook and pen, a book. Praying. Reading. Reflecting. Maybe it’s a running or skateboarding morning. Maybe it’s watching hummingbirds light on the feeders next to the window.

Wonder and welcome are up to me to find. They are up to me to recognize. They are up to me to be grateful for. And they are up to me to pass along.

Faith, Wonder and Surfing

Faith and wonder are siblings. They begin in a curiosity, a fascination with something beyond us that we can’t fully comprehend, but we want more. Maybe they are intertwined, spinning around each other like a spiral shell.

Some people may feel like they outgrow either or both faith and wonder–they fill their minds only with facts that fit inside what can be understood and categorized. And there is little time for things that don’t fit.

In his book, “Simply Christian,” N.T. Wright works with the metaphor of hidden, living springs. He says to imagine those springs paved over with concrete so thick the springs couldn’t penetrate it, and that a complex system of pipes was built to use the water, chemicals added, and the water was controlled and brought to people, so that they didn’t have to do anything to get it. Useful, regulated, controlled, right to your door with no work. No thought. Wright posits that an explosion, something between a volcano and an earthquake taking place, that none of the water regulators could explain. The water, he says, is “‘spirituality,’ the hidden spring that bubbles up within human hearts and human societies.”

I started reading Wright to get to know the man behind Bible study guides that we will be using for classes on the Gospel according to Matthew and Paul’s Letter to the Romans this fall at Christ Church Easton. It has felt pretty quickly like I may have found another member of my tribe of writers–Thomas Merton, Frederick Buechner, Henri Nouwen, John Eldredge, Anne Lamott–who look at the world through a lens of faith.

The other book in my beach reading stack this week is Victoria Erickson‘s “Edge of Wonder: Notes from the Wildness of Being.” I’ve written about it a lot, think about it even more, and try to live and spark it when I can, but I often feel like wildness, passion, wonder, is the thing we (I) have the hardest time keeping in sight when daily work and life can keep us (me) so focused on what needs to be done–all good stuff, but all demanding time and attention.

Erickson gets us back to the wonder within us. “Are there equal parts magic, contentment and quiet beauty when you’re just being simple? If not, then wait for it.” She writes about walking, something I see also in running:

When I walk,
I can no longer feel
fear or weight
or worry or pressure,
as they vanish
beneath the rise
of movement,
breath and creative fire.
To me, walking is
recharging my life.

This morning I ran barefoot along the beach in Ocean City. This dance of spirituality (Wright’s water), faith, and wonder spiraling in my head; my head which wasn’t clearing itself as it was directed.

I passed a stretch of beach where people were learning to surf, kids and adults. I stopped and watched for a bit, and smiled. In a world where there are a million options for things to do and demands on our time, people are learning to surf.

If I want to play Wright’s metaphor into the physical world, where water is spirituality, that’s a response that makes me happy. Be in it, be a part of it, learn to ride it. We know the ocean is bigger than we can see, we know it is beyond us, and so, we learn to surf.

Faith and wonder both start from within us. They are a part of us, our response to something bigger than our minds, which we want to know more about.

Delusions of Knowledge

When I look up at the stars, my response is wonder. When I watch a hummingbird hovering in the yard, I am fascinated. In neither case is my first instinct to analyze, label, figure things out.

Likewise, when I think about God, it isn’t to solve the Mystery, but to dwell in the Mystery, sit with it, let it wash over me. Not to try to pull it apart.

The mystery of creation is like the darkness of night–it is great. Delusions of knowledge are like the fog of the morning. – Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore is a writer who I have recently been drawn to more and more. He was the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. His “Stray Birds” are several, rapid fire blasts of sunlight, glimpses of illumination that cut through the shadows of unchecked rational thought. The painting at the top of the page is Tagore’s as well.

I’ve been sitting with the idea of paradox a lot lately–the notion that two things taken together are seemingly impossible, but actually true. Like when physicists say that light is made up of (behaves like) waves and particles at the same time.

Science and scripture are full of paradoxes. How can Jesus be both a Lamb and a Lion; how are the worldly poor the spiritually rich? Why do you have to let go in order to have everything? Why is surrendering the only way to victory? Jesus loved paradoxes and deep thinkers like Einstein saw them everywhere.

Why is that? One reason might be that our intellect by itself is not the right faculty to get us to the deeper truths. It would be like trying to use smell or taste to figure out the tip when you get the check from dinner–could be interesting, but ultimately not helpful.

I am never more frustrated than when I try to have all the answers; when I want to have things figured out before I move forward. I am never more at peace than when I allow myself to be in the moment, to be happy with/by/from the things and people that make me happy. And it is still hard not to want to know that I am moving in the right direction, doing the right thing, moving further up the mountain rather than backpedaling.

“One of the great constants in life is change.” That was the doctrine of Heraclitus, a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. A paradox and a truth. And not new information.

How we deal with change, how we deal with the mind coming up just short of what it is we want to know, those responses to life are what our lives become. There are all kinds of options: we can doubt, fear, bury our head in the sand and not give it thought, we can lose ourselves in work, we can party like it’s 1999.

I go back to a favorite Thomas Merton thought:

You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope.

That feels right. So when I walk outside after the storm and through the boat yard to catch the last bit of sunset and see this…

And I walk back to the house and hear an owl in the top of a tree and then watch he or she take off and fly with outspread wings, I smile and sit with Tagore’s words that have been in my head on a Sunday:

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.