Читать книгу A Companionable Way - Lisa M. Hess - Страница 5

This is a book for conscious loving in divisive times, which means it cannot be read from start to finish, nor should it be read quickly. It invites you into a spiraling journey of holy desire and sacred work, therefore in the nonlinear, episodic fashion you determine. This is an adventure only you can choose, then choose to stay with when its demands confront you. You may uncover your deepest Self, your own deepest wisdom within the Wisdom of ages crafted specifically within you. I found the way here when I became responsible for developing a master’s level course on “interreligious and intercultural encounter,” which ultimately offered fruit I had neither anticipated nor sought. From here emerges good work worth doing in a world hungry for it. Healthy relationships seed and blossom here with others whose lives also open to unexpected invitation. I have Christian language for this, as that is my home tradition, but these pages emerge from significant encounters with strangers and spirit-friends in other historic traditions and no tradition at all. Conscious loving in divisive times requires a disruptive, potentially peaceable awakening in each of us toward the blessed assurance that comes when living into rigorous abundance able to hold the suffering of self and others.

A Companionable Way resisted straightforward prose for nearly four years before becoming this collection of stories and reflections, experienced with spirit-friends across differences of many kinds. As a theological scholar, I had attempted to place this unfolding journey of devotion into the academic learning/teaching genre. There I would state the problem and survey the field, honoring the resources received to address the problem and even solve it. I would have woven the voices together in a tight, analytical argument to persuade your mind and heart of the significance of the problem and the innovation of the solution. I became full professor in a freestanding Christian seminary by doing just that kind of work. Then I read Judith Duerk’s Circle of Stones, an invitational, interactive, and intuitive book exploring inner/outer transformation in a nonlinear, even spiraling journey fashion. As obvious as it may be to some of us, my theology-professor heart finally got it, at least for this work. Inviting an interactive, intuitive journey into devotion in conscious love requires invitational, intuitive, and interactive language, be it poetry, prose, or somewhere in between. My years-long struggle was with genre more than content, how to share with integrity what I have received more than what the words might be.

True to our divisive times, you have a decision to make in how you proceed. If you identify within a historic wisdom tradition, particularly an institutionally mainline and/or more hierarchical or intellectually expressed Western/European one (those strands of Protestant or Catholic Christianity, Mormon, secularist, etc.), then I invite you to read slowly, but as traditional custom dictates: from the front to the back, linear order. An introduction outlines the conceptual intentions of the work, and you can begin to listen to your own voice and experience amidst the “yearnings” and “habits of minds” that drive and divide our world into many worlds, often at odds with one another. You can decide whether you want to focus on the more interpretive chapters or whether you have the patience to enter into various stories of encounter for what might arise in you in more inarticulate or intuitive response, underneath or before the interpretive language offered.

If you are more a seeker, by which I mean you find your center and energies grounded in a more fluid, nonlinear, secular feel of equanimity, then I invite you to begin with the last chapter, “Circle.” With that as foundation, you may then receive the encounter stories, refrains, and interpretive writings in a fashion well suited to your own proclivities and habits of mind. Your gift has already been finding grounding “out there,” bringing it to the wholes in your life from the ground “up.” You might read the sections in reverse order, from “Circle” back toward the table of contents, or choose whatever order attracts you. In either case, the text offers you choice in how to best receive what is offered in good will, with open-hearted intention. A nonlinear journey needs to be open from multiple vantage points, so this text lives into that reality.

What I am attempting to share beckons from opposite directions, after all—establishment and “out there,” tradition and no tradition at all—as well as the numerous places “in between.” No matter how you self-identify, we may all meet metaphorically and energetically in the central teaching of the book, which is devotion. Devotion is the word that found me for the embodied receiving/awakening to the Holy that unifies without power, loves without attachment, opens without expectation of return. At least as much as each of us can withstand the Holy, its river of devotion, and the invitation to practice this in body. Devotion is the single-point flow out of which unity and interdependence can actually be sensed and seen. Devotion lives within an embodied heart more than intellect as conceived today. From this place, all discourse about encounter, about interreligious-intercultural learning, begins in earnest toward peaceable awakening and an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and other.

Academically inclined readers may find the text imbalanced and repetitive as it spirals through similar or related themes from several different directions. In the mental habits of what Walter Ong calls “the literate mind,”1 A Companionable Way may even be deemed uncritical, with an overreliance upon personal experience to suggest future directions of engaged scholarship. I no longer accept that judgment as determinative for what needs saying. We teach and learn best when we share precisely where we are without the smoke and mirrors of abstraction and obfuscation. Our captivity in fear and violence require new risks and willingness to be seen. Duerk’s work taught me me to invite you into this journey with much more transparency.

Actual encounters and stories offer you a narrative feel of some of the terrain that welcomes and divides us today, whether religious, political, or cultural. A refrain accompanies each section, which you are encouraged to ponder, digest, sense your way into, feel what rises. The final portion of each section then gives a more textual interpretation of the themes needed to keep my own balance in a journey of devotion in conscious love. I offer here some of the most psychologically and spiritually demanding material I know, which makes repetition and engagement from several angles absolutely necessary.

A Companionable Way therefore offers you a both/and of expertise and invitation. While I suspect the expertise acquired will only be minimally useful to you, I am well credentialed and established in both mainline and seeker/nonhierarchical communities. I have worked hard to get where I am, taking pleasure in it. Still, the outward work dims greatly in light of the inner work required to write here. The intention is to offer whatever of this journey will feed your own bodysoul and to encourage you to relinquish all else without thought, reliant upon your own embodied wisdom. I hear Walt Whitman smiling as he sings in our ears, “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”2 Amen to that, which is the gift I had to learn to give myself in order to arrive here, sharing this invitation with you.

All rests within the image of a “circle of stones,” an ancient-new space of stones and the necessary spaces between them. I offer you hard-won words and the necessary silences out of which they emerged. You are welcome to the contributions of my journey, but for it to matter, you must learn to name your own experience, accountability, and yearnings as they arise in you—a process less and less traditioned in our fearfully bound schooling. The transfiguration of each of us, individuals immersed in community, whether we desire it or not, requires this both/and genre of prose made flesh. The more deeply listening, widely devoted, consciously loving and heart-seeing human beings there are in the world, the better and safer it will be for all of us.

1. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 100–102.

2. Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, 11.