The Tenth Prayer

The First Prayer for the Tenth Chapter

I am unsure where to begin because I have been homeless for years. As the text for today suggests, I need to come home to myself. However, my culture and branch of religious tradition have under-equipped me. There is a prevailing emphasis on striving, which unsurprisingly leads to strife. There is an insistence that I be tied into a great tradition of Promised Lands, longed-for places that can never be reached and ultimately never could exist. People pressure me to acknowledge a first covenant and then a second, to either be a follower or a replacement in the tradition of grasping; I refuse. Today, I want to take Christ as the starting point, not the resolution. There is no dead-Jesus in my tomb and the living Jesus will be my first guide. “Love the Lord God with all your mind, heart, and spirit and love your neighbor as yourself – on this hangs all the law and the prophets.” There is my mantra.

Make the spot of Earth I sit upon to be Holy and Home to me, all-touching God. Bookend my struggles of ten years gone by – sequester them and grant me the freedom to move on toward a new home. Help me to see the beauty left in this fading planet and perhaps, from the peace You grant, give me a portion to pour out into the world. First, take me up onto the metaphorical mountain to be instructed. Replace my striving for achievement with a diligent practice. My fondest wish is that I can be separated from my history at last and move into the further reaches of my life with a renewed sense of childhood. Every time I take a deep breath to push away something bitter, I see the joy of living in defiance of existing so wretchedly. Give me no promise but your Presence, even if I feel a deficit at first. I feel that I also have a passionate side, that this is natural for me, that I have fires to be kindled, but take me instead into my snows. Take me first into my rest and make me at home so that I quit my pushing and pulling. I have not transcended my feelings yet so I pray you would sit with me and teach me that meditation is more than suppression – that meditation is always the opposite of suppression. It is a vacuum that draws in – first the terrible stenches and then the fresh-air. It draws in my dust, first, and then flower petals.

I digress. Bring me home,

In All Your Powerful, Serene Names, please...

-Daniel Xavier

Dreams & Luck

Last night, I struggled against my writers' block for a while by starting a poem. The act of writing, I realized, was not going to feel natural anymore but it could again if I engaged the process with less expectation than exploration. This was after a meditation in the same vein. Then I slept; I slept until my alarm then I declared a Saturday and slept more. Somewhere in the ninth hour of sleep I dreamed some insight. I often have dream fragments that I quickly forget, sadly. I think I held onto the scant remains of these segments because of one moment.

Some point in the middle of the unremembered, I was walking to a checkpoint I had never seen before, a tunnel through the jebel that must have passed underneath al-Waleje --a tunnel that does not exist in reality. At its mouth, the guards were traitorously apathetic (I liked them instantly) as throngs of us poured into the tunnel. There were no metal-detectors. Half-way through I came to the turn-stile and waited for the guard to return so I could get a green-light. Someone tapped me vigorously on the shoulder and gestured forward: the lock was broken.

I pushed through, into the underground campus of some unknown West Jerusalem University. It resembled a large shopping mall. I knew where I was going and who I wanted to meet. She was a friend's roommate while I was in college. Back then, I asked her on a date to the planetarium and she offered to go as friends. I regret losing the courage to go as friends. In my dream, I found her in class and tried to be discrete. She was, to my surprise, happy to see me! I cannot remember how I greeted her or where I suggested we would go. I knelt next to her while she put things into her bag and I started to tip over. When I grasped her hand to regain my balance she gave it a squeeze and looked at me.

She looked into my eyes. Between us there was a mingling of affection and respect that told me we were actually together. Of course, this was the archetypical dream woman, dressed in the visage of my friend from years ago. The feeling was remarkable for what was absent: fatuous longing for attention, passionate sexual desire, tentativeness, rejection -- it was respect and affection only. There was a hug for confirmation but that was all ~ that was all I needed to know.
How refreshing.

After that, it became more like a random dream: we wandered around the mall/campus with a friend of hers -- at one point, they tried to ditch me with the shopping bags, just for fun, and Adam Shaw helped me find them again. Everyone laughed.

In my waking life I have mostly forgotten my desire for a relationship like that. I was not heart-broken to awake because I felt like a spell lifted long enough for me to dream that feeling. The poem I was writing before I slept is about a necklace given to me by another woman from the same period in my life who reappeared late this past December. She stayed in my life long enough to send me a box of items with wonderful, thoughtful notes attached. At last, I felt more cherished than curious. My Palestinian co-workers were excited to speculate with me about a marriage and I had to admit to them that it was possible. In that box was a necklace with a viking-rune pendant -- rumored to drive away bad luck. I put it on and never, even once, took it off.

I understand that some Chinese philosophers do not believe luck becomes good or bad, only that it changes. I mismanaged my stress this February but recovered myself in Ireland. The lady mostly left my life and she is happy and, reluctantly, I am happy to see her be happy. Israel forced me from Palestine but I had safe passage into Jordan. I am Skyping with a friend on Sunday. The list goes on. I am living in the tension between reflecting in my 'cell' and walking around the biggest city I have ever dwelt in: Amman. Some of my luck is perfectly neutral and perhaps that is the healthiest luck because I can be curious without the need to be evaluative. *tilts head* I can't wrap my mind all the way around it, yet. My thoughts run on... longer than I had planned...

My meditation last night was well short of levitation but I did have a beautiful moment where, instead of offering God my endless and dark thoughts, I felt sunshine and sent it back. The thrust of the poem, if it can ever be finished, was that I had put the necklace on intending it to redirect my circumstances and instead it was redirecting my self. Its hard to describe, which is why struggling with this poem is probably necessary, whether it can be finished or not.

Finally, I found a new reason to not take-off the necklace. First, I wanted magic. Then I wanted commitment. I had hope, then possibility. This rune is not an 'M', a 'C', an 'H' or 'P': it looks like an 'N'. N like the giver's name; N like Nirvana: to be worried about nothing? Here, my thoughts really run on longer than I planned...

The Ninth Prayer

First Prayer for the Ninth Chapter

I am just talking to You with my hands...

I sit on my bed in the least adorned of all my rooms, in the least expensive of all my buildings, in the least familiar of all my places and I wonder if I will find you at last, Allah. You have combed my life of its contents so that it is made of spaces between threads. I wanted a blanket and you gave me a net that I do not know how to throw. Now, teach me to sit still and close my eyes. Send a river through me.

I loved someone and let them go. I had a blank check and I came to an alley-way hostel. My trumpet is wrapped in bubble-wrap, my showers are cold. Yet, I thank you for making me more dependent on your strength than my happiness. I hear flutes and smell schwarma; I have no television but my bed is enormous. Oh God of my heart, I wish that I will know you better and finally be your clay because I closed my eyes and I felt that your will is like a strong river and I am a stone. You will take away every scale and chip until I am a smooth boulder. You use everything to inspire me – I wanted to compose but all I will ever do is arrange. I am streaming my consciousness to you.

Today I read about simplicity but I know I can be simpler – please uncover my eyes so I will see the elegance of your design. I still live many careers in my mind but will you show me the color of emptiness? Will you show me the outline of blue? Will you help me hear the edges of my transformation? Should I hush now? Do you mind if I sit and listen to Zen tracks and forget where they came from? Do you mind if I have hopes for a necklace, so long as I look up to You? Can I wonder aloud with my fingers on the keyboard? Will you intervene with sighs too deep?

Yes. I love you... but these are only words until You fill me. Fill me with fresh air – cool air. Remind me of my manitou. I forgot I had one.

Thank you for Jesus and other good examples. Draw my eyes to them.

Amen

The Eighth Prayer

Protector, thank you for delivering me into the present moment in spite of all the drag in my past, especially the weeks and months leading-up to now. Though I feel serene, I have also lost vigor and am having trouble finding the space to re-launch. I am reaching for the perspective to transcend; I know that you have given it to me and given me peace that surpasses understanding but there is not constant happiness. I have found that I sit with my sadness, even when I let go of my attachments. I am feeling my deficits, unexplored submerged caverns in my heart. The price of letting-go is that I will not give-up. Lord, put air in my chest. Help me to breath in and out again. Please come down to my level and sit with me in this time so I can learn from you. Do not let me be tempted by fear, perfection, drugs (literal & metaphorical), rage, or any other false comfort that would fill those places. Map my places and teach me to be friends to this sensation. Teach me the meaning of a steady love when my heart is restless.

There are so many more things in life worth learning. Make my eyes young again so that I can look upon the world in wonder. Make my ears old so I can listen with discernment. Make my nose... nothing more or less than it is! Just let me smell spring, summer, fall, and the essence of people close by. Let me smell every beautiful thing and taste wonderful food. Let me feel and be hugged. Bring me inextricably into the present tonight and speak to me. I will always be less than you but with you I never need to be deficient.

Amen.

The Sixth, Seventh & Eighth Lies

To make a quick comment about my mental state, sometimes what doesn't kill you can actually make you stronger. Every re-entry seems to usher-in about half of a new life-stage -- so two re-entries means I am in a different stage of my life than at commissioning.
With this growth has come many insights that I have not always spared time to share. This morning's revelation could be that unrequited longing and having fun are not mutually exclusive. Certainly, the past few weeks have revealed that I cannot discipline myself into accepting myself and that accepting myself makes discipline much easier. If that sounds like a catch-22, then an explanation for my difficulties is not far away. At some point, I had to give myself some unearned slack and take a moment to step-back. Not only did I get that from travel but also from writing a very personal article that I think IOW might be willing to post. Since then, I am noticing how I am able to take pressure off myself to perform without slipping into total hedonism, though the mechanisms are still developing. It can be said for certain that the key is replacing negative mechanisms with neutral ones (perhaps I just debunked another lie?): instead of getting angry with myself for unnecessary browsing, I am teaching myself to recognize it and simply "call halas" on myself. Done.

The sixth lie is that I need to react to things in proportion to their atrocity -- a lesson I think I learned before but could not quite internalize -- as if I am obligated to react on behalf of humanity, with my emotions, to how terrible something is. That is a LIE: just because I find the strength to have a poker-face in the moment doesn't mean I don't care. Two things helped me gain this insight. First of all, my latest entry called for poker-face tactics. Any play-acting would be disingenuous and getting upset was a liability. Being tired helped. While I was waiting to get my skimpy (problematic) 3-week visa I decided that it was okay to take the abuse with a straight-face. It was just plain okay. Neutral mechanism. Whether that came from God, tiredness, or drugs (of which I had none), I don't care: if I am naturally calm when I need to be calm, that's a good thing! I don't need to be any more rattled than I am.

The other debunked lie has to do with more personal things but it amounts to acknowledging gaffs with courage and healthy curiosity. If a pattern continues to occur, it cannot simply be thrown under the bus: it needs to see the light of day with the help of people I trust. The problem with the forbidden fruit, I maintain, was the fig-leaf cover-up (and I read that passage allegorically, in a dream-time sense -- which means it never occurred but it's always happening). To gain clarity, I need to risk hearing bad news or perhaps accepting a new paradigm that I previously thought was "wrong". Make mistakes, admit them, be aware of patterns, etc. A life of dichotomies is too draining. Better to stay engaged with life's diametric tensions.

While I am playing catch-up with my lie detector function (and listening to great play-lists, honestly) I might as well throw the eighth lie into cyber-space for your consideration. No one in their right mind would honestly think that a peace & justice intern could keep his comments to the intrapersonal. There are plenty of lies perpetrated by society and I have become all too familiar with them. Yet, I cannot always be projecting them outward. This one has leaked into my consciousness from time to time:

"If someone would just blow them off the face of the Earth, that would fix things."

LIE. Terrible, evil, insidious lie. Lie that hurt people, lie that keeps hurting people, lie that BROUGHT ME HERE. "Shoot the bad guys" "Us versus them" "Preemptive strike" "By any means necessary". LIES LIES LIES

This is not the last time we hear from this lie, here.

The Seventh Prayer

First Prayer for the Seventh Chapter

Heavenly One, I want to invite you to paint a beautiful picture on the fabric of my community today. I Hope with my whole heart that all would know what it means to feel valued without needing to feel important, to feel loved without needing to feel central, and to feel supported without being afraid of criticism. Momma, everyday I see evidence of people who have lost their trust in your day-to-day mercies. I see evidence of a people who want to find safety and fulfillment in their own devices, to the exclusion of others. I see people who live in a fantasy that has become a nightmare. God, please touch the Israel inside all of us and be in the process of healing our species of our own misguided ideas. Teach us to humanize not only ‘the other’ but ourselves – bring us down off our own pedestals. Teach a zealot like me to have compassion for Israel when it reminds me of the worst aspects of my own self – help me to see into the mirror, ironically, by taking my eyes off of myself and onto my global family. Teach me that my meaning is not more when I am central because then I have lost my context. Likewise, help me to celebrate that my context means just a little bit more because I am in it!

Yet today is not about me or my job but about remembering the loving support of the family that HAS contextualized me. Thank you for my parents who both not only love me but have been remarkably open to my mission. Thank you for my sister, who I pray I can grow closer to as the years advance. Thank you for grandparents who taught me the best ways to be and for a boss in Palestine who appears to be tying-together and shedding new light on all of what they had to say. Thank you for friends at work and in my host family who have shown me my value precisely. Yet, thank you also for my colleagues around the world who were my first, true peer group—not just in terms of intelligence but in the qualities of our character. I do not know where I would be without the support from the other “YAMs”. All due credit should also go to my most die-hard friends from high school and college – one of whom is nearly a full-fledged psychologist* and the other is, well, Hannah K. Kearby: a unique and sweet character.
With some sadness, I thank you for a friend who needs some space right now. I am helpless to say or do anything except pray to you for her time of development and for me as I continue to wonder...
Thank you for new communities who I have not fully explored – and who have not fully explored me yet either?
Thank you for quiet-time today in the Ramallah Friends’ Center. I certainly hope that you will cause my mind to fruit with fresh insights. Nevertheless, I thank you, El Shaddai, that I never have to be alone in my thoughts because I am part of an entire mural of humanity. Beautiful!

Amen!

*Corinne Brenneman

Sailing

I have been doing some thinking lately; that is no revelation...

Yet my thoughts have ventured far enough from my usual patterns that I had to concede that making myself understood to everyone at every stage is not feasible – and disruptive. The olive grove image, which concludes the pivotal “He Wept” entry, remains a critical metaphor. My attention has turned to a long history of tension between orientation to outcomes and to process, for years not realizing the depth of the distinction. In summary, I think that neither is more innate than the other, to me, but I worked strenuously to orient to outcomes. I am sure Western culture helped lead me there. I never realized I had the potential for another ‘way of being’ all along. Being divided within myself this way used to scare me into denial but I am choosing, right now, to believe it is not a pathology but a precipitation, as each nature rises and separates from the mixture.

I want to submit a maritime metaphor. Several people advised that I “just live my life” as a way to escape the need to ‘solve’ myself and reach resolution. They suggested what amounts to living an open-ended life, which is a topic I may write about too. My initial reaction was peaceful, since that would mean sliding into the small things about life that I inevitably enjoy. The secondary reaction was more potent and negative. It cannot do it justice without profanity. I told a friend that it was as if someone had told me to go sailing when I did not understand the wind. Suppose that I have lived a long time on the water, shuttling from place to place. The wind has been something in my face, causing me grief. More accurately, there might have been a time that I knew how to sail but I ran into too many storms in a row (truly bad times) and installed a massive outboard engine. For quite a while, it has been drift or drill. I go until I run out of gas. When I do drift and let the engine cool, its equivalent to apathy – I worry where I will run aground. Sometimes, I need a tow but I have inevitably refueled, serviced the engine, and started motoring again and again. Throughout the past five years, I have become more a mechanic than a sea-man.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with having an engine to get you around in tight spaces, or out of a jam when the wind is raging. There is a certain security one feels, with the capability to take a straight tact in any weather. Yet it seems that I am not a steamer or icebreaker, after all. My engine is only big enough to shuttle me into port, not take me all the way across the oceans in my life. There are sails around here somewhere and I have romantic notions of using them. Nevertheless, it is easy to see what is frightening about trusting the wind when one has seen both the squall and the doldrums. My dedication works against me. Not to mention, the sense of power that comes with going against the wind and currents.

The more peaceful, restful, and natural way is to allow for the wind and be patient with my tackle, if you will allow the pun. It means I have to accept I might end-up ‘somewhere else’ while I learn – that the feeling of being lost (which I keep rediscovering) will be a companion rather than a stranger. Where I once burned energy I will have to burn time instead. I will have to accept taking the longer tact, even doubling-back sometimes, and reimagine what it means to ‘try my best’ at risk of losing recognition in Western culture. My thoughts on the topic run onward but perhaps I should allow the wind to take this metaphor in all your minds – let it sail.

Another friend wondered what the genesis of these paradigm shifts was. I told her. Exploring a little deeper, I found that Palestine is enabling me to see alternatives more easily. I reminded myself that I only have to tip the motor up into the stern, not throw it away. If a jam surfaces, I can drill again. Still, I do not fully understand how to harness wind. For my first clue, I re-understood (yes) another concept from the Pauline epistles, about “praying constantly”. Dutifully, I try to do that but prayer is an unfurling, a source of drag. If I have given myself over to drift, perhaps this ‘drag’ can take on a new meaning. No word, yet, on results.