STANDING
STILL:
SPIRITUALITY
AND SENSE
By
Julie Leibrich
M.A.Hons
(Eng), B.A.Hons (Psych), Ph.D.
Dedicated to Betty
Munnoch (1927-2002)
Part II of a two-part invited presentation at
the National Conference on Spirituality and Mental Health Melbourne, 29 &30
March 2004. Part I is called Making
Space: Spirituality And Mental Health.
Contact:
Julie
Leibrich, PO Box 2015,
Raumati
Beach, New Zealand.
WORDS LIKE MIND BODY AND
SPIRIT
Yesterday
I said that personal stories are precious, a way we relate to each other, share
our insights and invite connection. So
today, I want to tell you the story about my own experiences of spirituality
over the last three years. How important
it has been for me to stand still.
First, I
want to review the main points of yesterday’s talk, which as you know, I
originally wrote for the World Congress on Mental Health in Vancouver in
2001. Fortunately, when invited to this
conference, I found that I still agreed with myself enough to give that talk
again! Three years on, though, I see
some things much less clearly, others more sharply.
Words like mind,
body, and spirit chase me around all the time. To say nothing of soul! Sometimes I chase them.
One of the
quirkiest categorisations of the mind-body-soul triangle occurred in the 17th
century. At that time, epilepsy was seen
as a spiritual malady, the curse of the gods.
(Previously, in Ancient Greece it was seen as a divine blessing). Then in 1664 a remarkable thing
happened. Thomas Willis, in his Cerebri
Anatome, proposed that there were two souls - a ‘body soul’ and an ‘immortal
soul’. He said that the ‘body soul’ was
in the brain and in one clean cut he snatched memory and intellect from the
palms of priests and put them into the pockets of doctors.
When we
are trying to define things, we tend to categorise for ease of understanding,
description and control. But categories
can become things in their own right – we reify them. Then, they can inhabit our experience and inhibit our understanding. We can define ourselves out of the picture.
I
experience my mind as part of my body.
Accordingly, the distinction between mental and physical illness makes
no sense to me, other than as a convenient but limiting categorisation. I experience
my spirit as a separate entity, which inhabits and encompasses my body. I do not distinguish between spirit and soul.
To restate the main points of yesterday’s lecture with
those things in mind (so to speak!):
Ř
Spirituality
is a personal experience - I experience it as the space within my
heart. The space where I find meaning. It is being home.
Ř
Religion
is an interpretation of spirituality.
Ř
Health is
a sense of being whole.
Ř
Illness
can produce insight, capacity for compassion, and a stronger sense of
self.
Ř
Spirituality
is crucial to healing.
Ř
Healing is
about connection, not control. When we can relate our own experiences of vulnerability with each other, then we can help
each other heal.
Ř
We are all weak. We are all
strong. We are all wounded. We are all healers.
Ř
In a
world, which values being perfect, it is difficult to acknowledge
vulnerability. Yet being vulnerable is
being human.
Ř
Things
which impede healing are a scientific model which says something only exists if
we can measure it, false notions of perfection, blaming the patient, social
exclusion and personal prejudices.
Ř
In some
areas of life, we need to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, wait for wisdom
to find us, and allow insight to be the teacher.
Years ago,
a friend of mine called Ailsa took a day’s leave simply so she could enjoy the
experience of getting up at the usual time, getting the bus to work, staying on
when it got to her usual stop, and going home.
When I
resigned as a Mental Health Commissioner, I was worn out, burnt out and close
to down and out! In the four years I did
that job, I moved from optimism to scepticism to cynicism. It
became impossible for me to do the work that needed to be done. There were many reasons – my diminishing
health, lack of support, and the inherent nature of bureaucracy – a word I
can’t even spell without consulting the dictionary. But the heart of the matter was that I felt my spirit was being crushed.
The relief
of giving up the struggle was enormous. I felt like I stepped off the third
floor window ledge but didn’t plunge to the ground. I was flying. On
the train home that night, I felt a distinct presence on my right shoulder and
heard a voice inside saying that I had done the right thing and I would be all
right. Another strange thing happened. Someone came to my door to tell me they had
had a dream about me. They had been
given a message for me that everything would be all right. Crazy?
Maybe. Helpful? Definitely.
There were
many practical insecurities to face, but my plan was to live simply, give
myself as much time and space as I needed, and focus on silence, stillness and
solitude. I wanted to know more about my
spiritual world. I felt it was a new
beginning.
A fresh
page in the book
the hope
of morning in your hand
clean
sheets, new year
windows
after rain.
We carry
the dead within
the ghosts
of might-have-been
those lost
connections
with our
self.
Beginnings
take the edge off pain.
The
comfort of one moment
when
time’s a child
and we are
born again.
Over the past three years, I have seen
more clearly how my early experiences of religion have shaped my expression of spirituality.
I was brought up in a Jewish
neighbourhood, attended a Methodist Sunday school, and went to a Protestant
school where Catholicism was despised. I
used to visit a Catholic church secretly to light candles. I believed in
spirits and ghosts because I saw them.
Not long after that, I
started to see the spirits.
I’d see the paupers
floating above the church, in the trees, watching me. And when we went inside to light a candle, a
ghost would make it flicker.
Whenever I stayed at
Auntie’s, I could hear breathing in the oak trees at night. I even saw the White Lady herself. Auntie had told me about her. But I’d never seen her till now.
That's
when I started to cross myself.
By
Christmas, the ghosts were everywhere.
They called down to me from the grime on the factory walls and winked up
at me from the River Irwell. They even
began to follow me to school, biting my heels as I ran.
I
couldn’t stop crossing myself.
Mr Small is very tall
He goes to church on Sundays
He prays to God to give him strength
To whack the kids on Mondays.
School Chant
At the end
of Our Father, before
the
distribution of the cod liver oil
I trace a
cross upon my chest
north
south east west.
Mr Small, Being Tall, Sees It All.
‘Julie!
Come out to the front!’
I hold my
breath. Those who are
now
spectators settle back. ‘We'll have
none of
this Catlicker nonsense, do you hear?’
My Heart Conceals My Fear.
I am a nun
in white, tending the sick
on a
distant hill, far from this Proddidog school.
Fingering
my beads while cherubs smile
and float
around my face.
Mary Mary Quite Contrary, Mother Of Grace.
‘Betsy or
Bert?’ he asks. I whisper ‘Betsy.’
Ash may
smart, but birch will only bruise.
He flexes
the thicker cane. I spread my palm.
It's as
well to learn at the age of eight:
You Can Choose Your Pain If
Not Your Fate.
As a teenager, I sang in various church
choirs because my brother earned extra cash as a schoolboy playing the
organ. Wherever he went, I went. So my experiences expanded to Unitarian and
Presbyterian churches. As a teenager, I
was confirmed in the Anglican church but simultaneously discovered pantheism
when I discovered Wordsworth.
My mother’s parents were Catholic. We
think her mother’s family, further back, were Jewish. All my life I have had a deep feeling of
connection with Judaism. My father’s
parents were Anglican and his mother refused to come to my first wedding
because I married a Catholic.
For many years I did not talk about
religion or belong to any religious group, although I occasionally attended
various places of worship. I made a sort
of policy decision in my late teens that I would not discuss my spiritual life
with other people. And that I would stop
asking questions about the meaning of life because it was too depressing. I could not find satisfactory answers. I did not realize then that the answers
create the questions. Asking questions is proof enough of meaning.
My knowledge of religion so far, is
haphazard and more or less limited to Christian and Jewish religion, with small
scurries into Eastern ideas. I love old
places of worship, incense, hymns, and chanting of psalms. I sometimes think that to be really at home
religiously, I would have to travel back in time.
All my life I have had strange experiences
to do with spirituality but I have never been able to interpret them with any
one religion. Sometimes they have been
linked to specific places – St Columba’s church on Iona, a Maori healing
ground, The Isle of Tiree, places of standing stones, a Jewish community, a
monastery. Other times they have been
linked to being nowhere - that is to say being now
here.
Over the past three years, I have been
blessed in many ways. The biggest
changes for me have been a great slowing down – from astronomical to geological
time, an overwhelming longing and need for a reduction in outside
stimulation. I have had the chance to
stand still and look around me and within me.
I
have found that I am secure after all, in all sorts of ways, and my life is
much happier. There is more love in it,
more creativity, less stress, more ease. I have a greater sense of living my
life in a way that is somehow truer to my self.
That, for me, is at the heart of my developing spiritual life and it
brings ease. Yet there is still
dis-ease. I still experience mood swings
and I struggle to accept the multiple sclerosis that has fundamentally altered
my everyday life.
There is a
story of a monk who was asked what went on at the monastery. “We fall down and get up, we fall down and
get up, we fall down and get up.[5]
When I am
depressed, meaning, presence, appreciation, love and acceptance go out of the
window. And as for thinking that there is nothing to be ashamed of in being
ill, well! I have to deal with shame
every time I am depressed – because shame is one of the symptoms. And that’s why I sometimes resort to sham. I switch from:
o Feeling that my life has meaning to feeling that it doesn’t
o Being present to fearing
tomorrow or regretting the past
o Appreciating what I have to
dwelling on what I don’t
o Accepting to expecting.
o Loving to hating
Meaning,
Presence, Appreciation, Love, and Acceptance. At times, these states do not
come easily to me. Maybe that is why I get depressed? Maybe the depression causes me to be like that? Maybe being like that is the depression!
Such analysis is pointless. Why is not the right question. Or at least, not for me. A better question is how. How can I survive? How can I reconstruct myself to a positive state
again? This is the place I start from
time and again.
I suspect
many people feel the way I do, but it’s hard to say those things about
ourselves. I am constantly surprised by
how much other people seem to know and by how sure they are of themselves. Are they pretending? As I have said, we live
in a society that does not encourage us to express our vulnerability.
It doesn’t look like I am ever going to be the tranquil, confident
person I’d like to be, but I am beginning to accept that limitations are not failures.[6] We all have limitations –
it is the nature of being human.
As
for the MS, there is a bone marrow deep fatigue about MS. One friend wryly but acutely commented that
maybe I long to stand still because I am just so tired! The most disabling symptoms for me are
cognitive. I have been going through what I would call “My Deconstruction
Period”.
Things
deconstruct almost of their own accord, - memory, perception, concentration,
and verbal communication. When I am tired, conversation is just too difficult and I
avoid people rather than struggle with it. I crave silence because it is a balm and gives my brain a chance to
rest. Written language has been
unimpaired but is much slower now. All
this is frightening and isolating. But as my dear friend Betty used to
say during her final illness, “I’m winning when I’m conscious!”
The inner self is inside out
And sense has gone to dinner.
My brain’s left home,
My heart’s on fire,
My soul is getting thinner.
I try to get my head together,
Try to make it go
But it’s dead on the left
And lost on the right
Drowning itself in snow.
I cannot hear
Yet hear loud clangs.
Can hardly see a blur.
The only thing between me
And a cat is a thicker layer of fur.
I turn around on one pin’s head
And try to count the angels
But they’re at tea.
I can only see a strange face
In the angles.
Some say the future’s in the sky,
The past is in the sea.
Well, where am I
And who are you?
How can we just be?
I take in time,
Time takes me in,
We court, we wed, we sever.
In between there are no words
which mean
forever.
Sometimes, I am able to view some of my experiences as almost
mystical. As if I see everything in it smallest part – the units of creation
connected. I am pushed, taken, carried
into seeing things in new ways where the reconstruction has a deeper meaning.
Can we experience a rich spiritual life
and have an illness?
Can we experience no spiritual life and not have an illness?
My answer to the first question is a
resounding yes. My answer to the second
is that I do not yet understand what people mean when they say they have no
spiritual life. I am tempted to think it
is an absence of consciousness. But I
don’t know. I will write a further talk
if I find out!
Integrating my spirit and body makes me
whole, healthy. But this does not mean
that I will not have illness. I think we can be fundamentally healthy, whole,
as a human being, yet still have an illness.
Major determinants of illness lie in our bodies - genetic
predisposition, biochemistry, neurobiology[8] and our
human context – environment, upbringing, society, and life experience.
Mood swings are related to my brain chemistry in such a direct way
that my mood can change, when nothing in my life changes. And the right drug can alter my
experience. Many years ago I was
force-fed drugs in hospital greatly to my detriment. Then for years I would not take any at all,
again to my detriment. My position now
is one of pragmatism.
My spiritual life can bring relief from symptoms and also personal
growth. Drugs bring relief from symptoms
but may impede personal growth. However, sometimes, drugs are what I need. Without them, I am barely able to survive,
let alone make substantial personal change.
Many years ago I attempted to
commit suicide. I have only ever made
one attempt. It was intended. I
failed. If I look back at the moment now,
I remember the absolutely certainty that there was no hope and no comfort. I
reserve the right to return to that decision should I ever need but a more
healthy position for me is to keep alive a sense of comfort.
A
spiritual life makes it easier to say that I am not the illness; the illness is
not my essential self. It does not necessarily prevent illnesses,
nor cure it, nor treat it, but it can comfort and that makes
illness more bearable. Comfort is the
giving of strength. Comfort is healing. This takes practice. The practice of faith.
As I write
the talk, I keep trying to come to some truth. It is as if I want to be able to
say this is this and that is that and I sure of it. That I am steady as she goes. But that’s not
how things are. I am a mood swinger. My life is hardly ever at the mid point.
When I
look back at my journals to write this talk, although I can see a developing
faith and a practice of spirituality that is utterly central to me now, I am
still beset by appalling depression at times, and huge self-doubt. The difference is this. I might still doubt me but I don’t doubt God. That is where the comfort comes from.
Journal 9/03/04
The core of many illnesses we call “mental illnesses” is
disconnection, unreality and meaninglessness.
Either the world is unreal or we are unreal.[9] Maybe both.
We enter the realm of illusion, even delusion. Not
being.
The core of spirituality is connection, reality and meaning. We enter the realm of illumination and
connection with the source of life. Being[10].
It is easy to see how some people believe that illness is caused by spiritual defects – an absence
of compassion, persistence of resentment, and so on[11]. Some even argue that what we call “mental
illness” should really be called “spiritual
illness”[12].
I not only find that proposition unhelpful, I find it abhorrent. Maybe I’m being defensive? Maybe I’m just afraid that my own spiritual
life isn’t up to scratch? Maybe I’m not on good enough terms with God? I will
take that risk.
The view that illness demonstrates a dis-ease of spirit, and that
the patient is to be blamed for a demon, is a throwback in time. Sadly, it is also quite trendy. Both a fundamentalist chaplain and a new age
healer suggested there must be “something not quite right” in a family because
their one-year-old son was dying of leukemia[13].
Spiritual guidance and nurturing can be wonderful, when they are
requested, but the idea of judging and diagnosing someone else’s spiritual life
is presumptuous and offensive. Perhaps the spirit police will follow the body
police. Spiritual Sanatoriums with devotional triage and intravenous holy
water. Astral monitors, sanctity readings, piety rates. And no patient rites.
After the publication of my talk “Making
Space; Spirituality and Mental Health” I had many letters from people who made
some personal connection with what I had said.
I also saw from these letters, how some people fear taking the risk of
talking about their spiritual experiences precisely because they fear
“diagnosis”.
“Spirituality is another area that is
potentially dangerous to talk about. Most dramatically, it can be used to
diagnose someone as mentally ill and have all the tragic consequences of that
befall one. It can also be dangerous to talk about it in the
"scientific" mental health realm because of loss of
credibility. I am vulnerable on both counts so don't really emphasize it
that much. I do include it at a level that is not likely to give me
trouble, but not more. It is so important, however, that
you and the others talking about it are doing what you are doing. Thank
you.”
Our
spiritual lives are the most precious and private part of us. Intimacy is by invitation only. Otherwise it is invasion. Thomas Merton said it beautifully:
A
person is a person insofar as each has a secret and is a solitude of their own
that cannot be communicated to anyone else. I will love that which most makes
them a person: the secrecy, the hidden-ness, the solitude of their own
individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand. A love that
breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all their
secrets and besiege their solitude with importunity, does not love them: it seeks to destroy what is best in them, and
what is most intimately theirs.
Thomas Merton[14]
A spiritual journey. I know
that the idea of a sacred journey is at the heart of most religious traditions,
but at this time in my life, that metaphor doesn’t work for me.
A journey sounds too positive, active, and directive. As if there were a target, a
destination. I don’t know where I am going, I haven’t got a
ticket and I’ve no idea what platform I’m supposed to be on. I don’t feel
like I’m on a journey. It’s more like an
amble, a wandering. Actually, it’s
more like standing still. I pause to
stare at the scenery again and again until I can make out the shape of it and
sometimes, the finer details. I stand
and watch the clouds and stars sail by, discover they are going in circles
until I realize that I don’t mind, and then circles begins to spiral.
Sometimes I just wait for time to go by. Sometimes I want time to wait for me. I just want to stand still. Find the still point. Be stable[15]. I am not stagnating. Not at all.
I’m open to change, but stable.
At heart, I am a hermit. Stillness, silence, and solitude are the
conditions, for me, for sensing the space within my heart. Sense is a wonderful word. Sense means
feeling, sense means awareness, sense means meaning. That is a theme of my
entire life, and over the last three years has become its absolute focus. I long for those conditions with such
intensity, that longing underlies almost everything I do.
Yet I am convinced that the
society in which I live sees these states as vices – indications of being a
social misfit. And we become open to criticism of being withdrawn, selfish, and
antisocial. Or people see it as a
“phase” you are going through and find it very difficult to accept that it is a
state of being. They also assume it’s because you are ill or depressed. What astonishes me is that people hardly ever
see it positively.
Before words
melted brains
we stood on the
edge of silence.
Only the sound
of snow dissolving.
No way to
express what we saw.
In the absence
of words
ideas danced
lightly.
What were we
waiting for?
The dawn of this
new age
where we travel
backwards
in the rush to
know.
Flee silence
like the edge of death.
Hollow to hear.
Too cold.
Breathing in
light restores our heart.
It is braver to
stand still
and be counted
than count
to let words find
us
than forever be
searching
for meaning.
It is psychically very noisy
for me around other people. I pick up
other people’s feelings and moods. I get
if you like, “sensitive” interference. I have known this since I was a
child. It is both a burden and a gift.
The best description I have ever found of this state of being was in a letter
that John Keats wrote to his friend Richard Woodhouse in 1818, when he was
dying of consumption.
When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from
speculating on the creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to
myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so
that I am in a very little time annihilated.[16]
That is one of the reasons I
need solitude and silence. I need to
protect myself. I can also become very internally driven and pressed to do
things. Finding the still point is
crucial for me.
My longing for silence,
stillness and solitude has led to me to several places of retreat.
My
first retreat happened by chance, in a Jewish community in Manchester,
where I had gone to look after my mother for a few weeks.
For the first two weeks I was there, she was in hospital and I
stayed alone in her flat in a sheltered housing complex for elderly people. I visited the synagogue and was in a Jewish
community at Passover. I made a long bus
journey every day to visit my mother.
Suddenly I had numerous Jewish mothers wanting to take care of me while
I was taking care of mine. The
remarkable feature of this experience was that despite being quite interactive
with others I had a sense of a complete peaceful retreat.
I have been trying to work out why. There was some sense of
"hardly anyone knew where I was". The state of being
anonymous, unobserved. The state of being able to extend our boundaries
as far as we can. To "stretch out" spiritually.
Maybe that is why mystics went out into the desert - for a kind of
"spiritual stretch"?
While
there I saw a healer, a visiting Rabbi from Israel. Afterwards I had a mystical experience more
intense than any I have known. I think
such experiences are deeply personal and sacred. And even if I wanted to, I could not describe
it in words.
Do not dwell in the words; let the words dwell in you. Dissolve in you.
The Rebbe
About two years ago, I began
attending Quaker Meetings for Worship.
I found them by chance and began to experience shared silence, which I
had not known before. Later, a Quaker
retreat was offered at exactly the time I needed it. It was based around silence and wordless
expression through art[17]. Once again, I felt that things found me when
I stopped searching.
A couple of years ago, I
began visiting a Cistercian abbey.
Why have I
come here? To be still and to
listen. To rest. To step off the treadmill for a while and be
amongst others yet be safely alone…. To meet you more honestly, closely,
fearlessly.
Journal
12/9/02
It is a wonderfully welcoming place. Each time I go to the Abbey it is
different. But always healing.
There is a powerful presence in this place - something
palpable. There is a sense of protection
and truth there, wise monks to talk with, and a freedom to just be. The offices give the day shape and
meaning. When I am there I can join in that religious expression of
spirituality as a means of connecting with my own.
There is also a strange bookcase
there. A sort of divine bookcase that
seems to know exactly what book you need as you walk past it. Each time I have gone, the book “that I most
need to read in the world but have never heard of” seems to fall into my hands.
I think about it when I am not there - I
write things in my journal like “the monastery will be covered in snow
today.” I take great pleasure in growing
cuttings from the garden there so I could have something of it in my own. Such
simple things tell me what it means to me.
A Cistercian Abbey is a
School of Love.
A row of Trappist monks
open a door on light,
the chant in the trees,
a boundless view. You.
The shape of the day curves
on itself, like a wheel.
All I do is step on the rim
carried from morning to night.
Three
years ago, preparing for that Vancouver talk, I was researching the writings of
a French Jewish psychiatrist called Henri Baruk. There was only one English
translation of his work.
Amazingly,
it turned out to be written by a childhood friend whom I had lost contact with
fifty years ago. We spoke on the phone
that night and he sent me a book the next day.
He introduced me to the Rebbe.
Rabbi
Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the head of the Lubavitcher movement for over
forty years. [19] He was one of the world’s
greatest religious scholars, a much-loved leader and teacher, a sage and
visionary of the highest order. He died
ten years ago, aged ninety-two.
The
central point of the Rebbe’s teaching was that life is meaningful. He said that we can never be happy unless we
nourish our soul as well as our body. He taught that love is the transcendence
of the soul over the body.
“Love is the single most necessary component in human life. It is both giving and receiving; it allows us
to experience another person and lets that person experience us. Love is the origin and foundation of all
human interaction. To live a meaningful life, we must learn more about love and
how to bring it into our life.”
The Rebbe
The Rebbe
believed that our soul directly reflects our connection to G-d. That we can and
must merge our body and soul to give focus and meaning to all we do. We should acknowledge the conflict between
our souls and our bodies and see them as separate entities, but strive to
integrate them. For this, we need to
“allow the soul to yearn.”
Listen when your soul yearns for better nourishment. Listen to
your inner voice. Trust it.
The Rebbe
What is so
comforting and therefore so healing about reading the Rebbe’s work is that
whenever I do, I do not doubt there is meaning in my life.
Thomas Merton was a Cistercian monk who spent much of
his life as a hermit but communicated with the world through his writings. He had a way of making the mysterious world
of a contemplative order accessible to ordinary people while still preserving
its mystery. He was a poet, a
photographer, and a consummate writer.
He died in 1968, aged 53.
What is so comforting and therefore so
healing about reading Merton is that he shows himself. He sees himself clearly
and he lets me see.
He says
“above all, don’t be worried about the pace, about what is happening or
not happening, about what seems to be going on on the surface.” He also knew about human frailty and saw love
as “the resetting of a body of broken bones”.
I first
came across the mediaeval mystics many years ago when I was studying
mediaeval English at Edinburgh. I have a
deep fondness for that period and a fascination for paradox. So it is unsurprising that they are part of
my “re – membering” now.
I find the Cloud of Unknowing[20] a deeply moving book. And that’s the clue for me as to why I stand
still. Because then, I am moved.
When I enter the world of unknowing, I
understand that what matters is to see that I am, rather than who I am or
why I am. When I see that I am, the
other things follow.
o By disintegration I integrate.
o By detachment I connect.
o By letting go I am held.
o In constraint I find freedom.
o In nothingness I find everything.
o In space I see shape.
Over the past three years I have come to
value a daily practice of faith. I know
now that I do have to practice
it. Also the importance of order in my
life. We do not have a chaos of
monks! The activities that make up the
order of my day in this way are
o
Prayer
and morning pages
o
Noticing
and appreciating
o
Meditation
o
Walking
o
Writing
poetry.
These daily practices connect me to my
life force, they balance me, and they help me to stand still, to be
stable. They comfort me. They make be
stronger. Comfort – from Latin con (intensive) and fortis
(strong).
I began daily meditations a
year or so ago. Sometimes I think the
meditation becomes contemplation but I have a lot to learn about this.
I like being here
somewhere between
my eyes and the horizon.
Above the derelict church
I see a fine line of cloud
ethereal.
Closer, the rust that clings
onto life while ancient
bell towers crumble.
Closer, a window
where someone has pressed
his face, too eager for dawn.
Closer, I see that I see beyond
the glass, the wall
the church, the dusk.
This is the place of no shadows
no sound, where you do
not feel alone.
I slip here from time to time
without meaning to - into the arms
of this old familiar love.
Meditation helps me feel more
detached, therefore more connected.
Detachment helps me stop expecting things of the world, of other
people. One thing I am learning, and not
easily, is to stop expecting things and to accept what is. Accepting, not expecting
things of other people. Unconditional
love. Yet not accepting behaviour which harms me. Loving myself. I find these
things very hard. The changes are very small, very slow. But they are happening.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes
the old Sikh says as he stirs his lentil soup.
I gaze at his turban longing to know if he cuts
his hair but instead ask the meaning of life.
Fate he says, adding salt to my wound.
What is the cornerstone? Submission.
The highest point on the roof? Forgiveness.
The purpose? To comfort.
Only to comfort.
I glance sideways, looking for the audience
of cross-legged pupils sitting at their master’s feet.
I want to continue the lesson.
I ask him his name and he smiles.
In
a way walking is also a kind of meditation for me. It is not only good for my body but good for
my spirit and integrates the two. It
also gives me more time when I can listen to the universe.
What is prayer to me? When
I am talking to, listening to God. When
I am. Just am.
I don’t find verbal prayer easy so I write. Many books about writing suggest the idea of
writing a few pages each morning – spontaneously and without a critic present.[23] Some have a more spiritual agenda. It is like
talking to someone – maybe yourself, maybe a friend, for me, God.
At some point in the morning pages, I write a thank you letter – a
list of ten things that I noticed and was grateful for the day before.
I sound a bit like Pollyanna. Once or twice when I have mentioned this to
people I get strange reactions – “Grateful?
That’s a strange word.” “Can you
always find ten things to say?” I remember a period when I was really ill and
my list actually read, “Bed” ten times.
But I was still grateful!
Paying attention to
the given moment is one of the hardest things in the world for me. I am easily
distracted; easily head off into the past or future. Paying attention is my way to live in the
present. For me, that is an art I have to practice all the time. To focus on
the small things of life. See the
remarkable in the ordinary.
Through
prayer, I discover what I already have. After a while, this can become a state
of grace.
"If
the only prayer you say in your whole life is 'thank you,'
that would suffice."
Meister
Eckhart, 1260-1328
13th-Century Dominican Mystic
I write to God. Do I think God writes back to me? I suppose I do.
How do we
know the tide will turn?
We learn
by rote.
Suns
rise. Moons set. Tides turn.
We
breathe, we love, we eat
we live,
we die.
It is
benignly predictable.
All we
have to do is notice.
Language frees us but it restricts us. Sometimes I think that if we had wordless
days – you know, like they have no diet days – then we would communicate so
much more deeply. Maybe touch fingertips
or stand a bit closer to each other to brush spirits. We wouldn’t stumble over nouns or get
squashed by adjectives or trampled into the dust by verbs.
Over the past three years I have been changing my relationship
with language. I keep thinking I should
give up writing. I
began to paint instead because it is wordless.
But words still follow me round, even when I am asleep.
It
is as if they want to remind me that, despite the limitations of language and
despite my longing for silence, writing, especially poetry, is my most creative
experience. A relation point between my spirit and body, my self and
others.
Poetry
is a marker of who I am, where I am and how I am, but most importantly, it is a
marker that I am.
At the start of today’s talk I said that
definition can create categories that define us out of the picture. Our logical selves have a predisposition to
separate, sort, order, and categorise.
As I am putting the finishing touches to
this talk, I see that I have done exactly that. Separated, sorted and ordered
certain reasons – categories of explanation – for why I need to stand
still. Spiritual needs, depression, multiple
sclerosis, my “sensitive” nature, the writing of poetry. But these features of my life are really just
part of a whole. And standing still is a healthy (whole) response, at every
level of my being, at this time in my life. It is not explanation that matters,
but integration.
We relate when we relate our stories. My
experience is not yours, nor yours mine, yet we can still connect. Some of you
may be seeking, I am being found. Some
of you may be journeying, I am standing still.
It is not definition that matters, but experience.
There is no journey I can pinpoint
from there to here.
No ‘I took this road and not another’.
I no longer wait for awakening.
It happens every day.
In the sun on the back of rain.
We are all in a waiting room
locked in by yesterday
where the blind man still sees scarlet
the deaf man dances a jig.
There is no good grief, no bad world
only love.
++++++++
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d
like to thank the monks at Southern Star Abbey for the warmth of their welcome,
especially Fr. Niko Verkley, Br. Mike Clark, Br Tony and Christine Ash for
their wise counsel; my mother and others residents of Carmel Court for giving
me such a meaningful time; Friends at the Kapiti Society of Friends Meeting,
for our shared silence; to Barry Lent for leading me to the Rebbe, and to
Tralee Sugrue and Elaine Youngs for their knowledge and practice of healing.
Thank
you to Kate Loewenthal for publishing the Mary Hemingway Rees Memorial Lecture
and Jim Gottstein for putting it on the Alaska Mental Health Consumer Website's
(http://akmhcweb.org/recovery/rec.htm) and
to the people who, as a consequence, have written to me to share their own
spiritual experiences.
My thanks to
Ann Goodwin, Geoffrey Daw, Nina Mariette, Margaret Thompson and Oliver Riddell
for reading a draft of this talk and for their valuable feedback. Additional thanks to Ann for our regular
discussions about spiritual matters and to Nina for our regular meetings about
creativity and self. I am also grateful to other friends for valuable insights,
including Tessa Thompson, Syd Moore, John Brophy, David Guerin, Julia Buck,
Doug Harvie, Robert Miller, June Read, Viola Palmer, Christine Beddoe, Dianne
Cooper, Christine Lenk, and Glenda Fawkes.
Lastly, my love and gratitude to Betty Munnoch, who died at Christmas
2002, for being my golden friend and mentor for so many years.
[1]
Making Space: Spirituality And Mental Health, Julie Leibrich, - A Keynote
Address at the National Conference on Spirituality and Mental Health Melbourne,
29 &30 March 2004. That address was a shortened version of the Mary
Hemingway Rees Memorial Lecture given at the World Assembly for Mental Health,
Vancouver, July 2001, and which was first published in Mental
Health, Religion and Culture, Vol 5, Issue 2 2002.
[2] Beginnings, Julie Leibrich, First Wellington International
Poetry Festival Anthology, HeadworX: Wellington, 2003
[3] The Starling. Julie
Leibrich, Published on CD, read by Shirley Dixon, Winning
Entries from The Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Competition
2001-2002. Commonwealth Broadcasting
Association. London, England.
[4]
From a poem sequence called A Little Learning, Julie Leibrich, first published
in Printout, 11, Auckland, 1996. Also The
Paper Road, a collection of poems by Julie Leibrich , Steele Roberts Inc, Wellington, 1998.
[5]
Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict, Esther de Wall, The Liturgical
Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 2001.
[6]
Brother Mike at Southern Star Abbey opened my eyes to this distinction in a way
that I had not seen before.
[7]
The Land Below the Waves, A collection of poems by Julie Leibrich, Steele Roberts Inc,
Wellington. Scheduled for release, August, 2004.
[8]
The Emerging Mind: The BBC Reith Lectures.
V Ramachandran, Profile Books: London, 2003.
See Ch 5. for a discussion of neurological measures of mental illness.
[9]
Ramachandran op cit
[10]
reality – from Latin – to be.
[11]
For instance, the early teaching of Jay Adams. See The Nature of Man and
Mental Illness, Andrew A White, Journal of Biblical Ethics in Medicine,
Spring 1991.
[12]
Amongst them, Carl Jung.
[13]
Prayer of the Heart and Mental Health, William T Ryan. An article on www.alaska.net
[14]
No Man Is An Island, Thomas Merton,
Harcourt, Brace and Co: New York, 1955, pp244-4.
[15]
Stability from Latin stabulum, from stare
(to stand)
[16]
Poetry and Prose of John Keats, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922.
[17]
Appleseed Workshop, Quaker Settlement, Feb 15-17 2002. Run by Chris Cook and
Brenda Heales.
[18]
See Endnote 5
[19]
See Towards A Meaningful Life: The Wisdom
of Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Adapted by Simon Jacobson, William Morrow
and Company Inc. New York: 1995. See also,
Bringing Heaven Down to Earth. 365
Meditations from the wisdom of the Rebbe. Compiled and interpreted by Tzvi
Freeman, Class One Press, 1996.
[20]
The Cloud of Unknowing, edited by William Johnston, New York: Image
Books Doubleday, 1996
[21]
The Place of No Shadows, Julie Leibrich, Kalimat, 13, 2003.
[22]
See Endnote 5.
[23]
See Becoming a Writer, Dorothea
Brande, London: Macmillan, 1983. (original edition, 1934). Also The Artist’s
Way, Julia Cameron, London: Souvenir Press, 1994.
[24]
All I Know, Julie Leibrich, First
Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology, HeadworX: Wellington, 2003