Useless Old Tree

The Tao gives birth to all beings,
nourishes them, maintains them,
cares for them, comforts them, protects them,
takes them back to itself,
creating without possessing,
acting without expecting,
guiding without interfering.
That is why love of the Tao
is in the very nature of things.

–Tao Te Ching, Ch. 51 (transl. Stephen Mitchell)

And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.

–John 6:39

The death of a loved one casts a long shadow. It covers us and our entire lives, makes it hard to see where we are or where we’re going. The shadow it casts is also long in duration – it lingers long after the person we’ve lost is gone, and long after the world around us has moved on, moved forward, and expected us to do the same.

Grief, in its persistence, can feel an awful lot like the nights around the Winter Solstice – the longest nights of the year, when the darkness seems least likely ever to end and the dawn least likely ever to arrive. Seen through our grief, these are the nights of confusion, inner turmoil, and fear, the dark times of the soul when the night is all-enveloping and the way forward seems lost to us.

[Read more…] about Dark Night of the Solstice: Sojourns In the Valley of the Shadow

“If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us on into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths in to the strangeness of the night that is our real home, we have misunderstood or failed to understand the words of Christianity. For they all speak of the unknown God, who only reveals himself to give himself as the abiding mystery, and to gather home to himself all that is outside himself.”

– Karl Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian”

“It is this nameless being that words try to speak when they speak of things that have a name; they try to conjure up the mystery when they indicate the intelligible, they try to summon up infinity when they describe and circumscribe the finite.”

– Karl Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian”

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

– Tao Te Ching, Ch. 1 (transl. Stephen Mitchell)

We live in a world obsessed with certainty, obsessed with decisiveness and having all the right answers. We start teaching our children, from a young age, that life is filled with tests, and that there will be right and wrong answers. And as we grow up, those early lessons take root and grow in us as individuals and in the ways that we shape our communities, our organizations, our broader society, and our belief systems.

When I was younger, I used to think I had things pretty well figured out. I had a clear sense of what I wanted and didn’t want out of life, where I thought it would take me, and the kind of person I would end up being. And of course there are through-lines that could be traced from my childhood to who I am now, and some of what I thought when I was younger I still hold dear today.

But I’ve also found that growing up is often about learning to be at home in our uncertainty. Over and over again through the years, I’ve had to question my assumptions and judgments. I’ve had to revisit conclusions made long ago, both about myself and about the world around me. I’ve had to let some of my expectations go, while at the same time learning to welcome the unexpected into my life.

[Read more…] about At Home In Our Uncertainty: An Advent Reflection

There’s an old Chinese story – from the writings attributed to the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu – about a master carpenter who was traveling with his apprentice through the countryside when the two happened upon a rather remarkable tree.

[Read more…] about The Tale of the Useless Old Tree (Take 1)