Finding Our Way Home

I’ve lived long enough to be convinced that most of us are politely, properly a little out of our minds most of the time.

What at times possesses you?

During Lent, this is an excellent question to ask.  The late Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk at Snowmass in Colorado and a leading light in the Contemplative Prayer movement, claimed that we each bear “original wounds” inflicted by our journey through childhood.  These wounds have bruised our three basic human needs:  the need for security, the need for affection, and the need for approval.  This occurs often unintentionally, but inevitably.

I think often of my younger brother, Tim, who at the age of 6 ripped up every prize-winning tulip from an elderly neighbor’s garden to present to my mother, who was highly distracted by our ill sister.  He’d wanted her attention and love desperately.  But the offering had just the opposite effect.  My mother was horrified, embarrassed by the neighbor’s inevitable rage, distraught at her inability to manage her children, and overwhelmed by her life.  In an instant she would regret for years, she punished Tim.  A sad story made sadder in recollection.  The incident set in motion a childhood of attention-getting misbehaviors that morphed into habits with even steeper consequences as he grew older.

Most of us don’t form the defenses my brother did, but we all form some kind of barrier to potential hurt.  These barriers feel like protection, but end up sealing us off from a deeply-lived life.

We spend years in service to: our ambitious achievements, our accumulated wealth, our over-developed clown-persona, or our efficiencies — all to hold at bay our fear of invisibility, our sense of not having received enough love, not being seen, or valued.

 There is another way, and this way has been called many things.

This Lent, I am calling it, “the way home.”  Home to our true selves.  Home to freedom.  Home to saying no to the social crutches and accommodations that keep us stuck in half-lives….Home to saying YES to the pearl of great price:  self-compassion, honesty, gentleness, balance, and generous love towards all living things.

In case it has escaped you (and this would be understandable, given what religious institutions have done to the message), this is what Jesus was teaching, especially after he started his period of teaching and healing after his time in the desert.  He spoke back to “Satan” in the desert because Satan was offering more substitutes for real inner freedom.

The path home demands a lot of dismantling of false idols, but it flourishes in the practice of silence, which I will write about next week.  Until then, just notice when those attitudes and behaviors that keep you in your false securities show up.  Look them in the eye.  That’s enough for now.

Blessings.