Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 20

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Tim and I sometimes laughed, when I reported a detail from a Journey with Bear, “We never learned that in Sunday school!” Never was this more true than in Bear’s encouragement to enjoy life. Our sober Mennonite forebears were earnest and sincere—diligent in work as well as in prayer. Though they loved to quietly tease and joke, I never saw anyone my parents’ age or older break into boisterous laughter, at least not in public. My mother, when she laughed aloud, covered her mouth with one hand as if ashamed. I grew up being as serious as the best of them.

Yet if Bear was teaching an enjoyment I’d never learned from my elders, he often sounded remarkably like the Jesus my elders had followed—the Jesus who enjoyed hanging out with children, who stopped his too-earnest followers from shooing the children away, who said that the kingdom of heaven could be found only by becoming like a child. He’d also said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” a sentence that is just as accurately translated, “The kingdom of heaven is among you.” That more spacious place is here. Right now. Inside you, around you, in your midst. It only requires a shift to experience it. This same Jesus had partied with social misfits when his followers wanted him to cultivate more respectable contacts. He’d said that God is a loving parent who cares so much about the intimate details of life that even the fall of a sparrow—a sparrow so worthless it was sold in the market for half a penny—is noticed and held in divine love.

I remembered too a Sufi teacher I’d met years before, a roundish, unassuming man from Turkey named Sherif Baba whose dark-brown eyes were always shining. A decade earlier, in Berkeley, I’d even attended sohbet with Baba, a traditional Sufi teaching session in which people gather around the master and listen to his stories. That afternoon twenty or so of us had lined a makeshift, unfurnished room, sitting on cushions with our backs against the walls. Baba told simple parables, everyday stories, a few sentences at a time translated by his companion. I wondered what was so special about sohbet—and about Baba—until I noticed that Baba’s attention was shifting to a different person every few minutes. Glancing repeatedly at my friend who had invited me, Baba was telling a parable about a farmer who, on his way to market with his harvest of grain, hears of a valuable treasure. The farmer promptly leaves his cart of grain where it is, sacrificing all his hard work, because he knows that what he will find instead is priceless. My friend was watching Baba closely, smiling but also thinking, evaluating, a little wary. Baba was only telling stories, but something deeper was happening.

Then Baba began talking quietly about how life has a way of handing us things we don’t expect—some pleasant, some not so pleasant. Even very bitter things can happen, such as losing people or relationships that mean a great deal to us. Baba now was looking at me. “It’s very important to let go of things when it’s time for them to go,” the translator said.

I looked down, nodding. My intimate relationship of five years with the man with whom I co-owned a house was on the rocks, and I knew without knowing that it would soon end.

Baba went on: “Every experience in life holds a little bit of its opposite. Every sweetness in life holds a bitterness, and every bitterness holds a sweetness. When you go through a bitterness, find the thing hiding within it. Find the sweetness in the bitterness.”

Baba had been right. Within a month of that meeting, my relationship had ended, which over the next couple of years had led to the wrenching decision to leave my Oakland home. During the leaving I’d kept Baba’s words nearby, looking for sweetness. It hadn’t taken long to arrive. Only a few months later I’d reconnected with Tim, whom I’d met at eighteen—a momentous sweetness lifted straight out of those bitter wrappings.

Having spent time with Bear, I now understood Baba a little better. Baba’s shining eyes, his way of talking quietly with love—they reminded me a lot of Bear and of his gentle, down-to-earth manner, of the warm cloak that wrapped me in its shelter. Baba had known what to say to each person because he was listening. His Sufi order, after all, had been founded by the great twelfth-century poet Rumi, who had opened his most famous book, the Masnavi, with that exact word: “Listen.” Baba liked to say that the real divine wisdom is to listen to yourself, to that deep wisdom in your own center.

Bear too had a lot to say about listening; he called it the foundation for this new life I was building. “Meet each situation with listening,” Bear advised, especially when I was speaking with a group of people. “Always settle in the heart; always check against compassion. There is nothing firmer than that, in the sense that in this shifting world, one can’t get firmer than that.” The best guide, always, would be to ask, Is my heart open in compassion to this moment? To this person, these people, in front of me? To my Helper? “That is the best you can do,” Bear said. “That is the very best you can do. That is the way a little crack of openness can get bigger over time.”