The Marco Polo Prayer

Sometimes I can’t feel god.  I used to think this was because of something I had done.  That god had withdrawn from me.  I learned in church that god cannot dwell in unholy places so I assumed if I couldn’t feel god then something unholy was going on inside of me.  I felt shame about this.  I thought it meant something bad about me.  But I was wrong.

I am not sure exactly when I figured this out.  It was sometime after I had given up on doing everything correctly.  After I had shed another cage.  I observed that there were good people—people that I knew to be truly good at their essence—that didn’t keep all of the commandments, that didn’t worry about all the things.  I wondered if they felt god.  I believed they did.  I wondered if we could really distance ourselves from god.  And why would a god, who truly loved us, want distance from us?  

This didn’t make sense.  

I thought about the times when bad things happen to good people.  Like when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 21. Like when my friend’s babysitter was picked up for a DUI with her kids in the car the night she left for a trip across the country.  Like when my sister’s daughter had her first seizure the night she left on vacation.  Like when my grandmother’s oldest son was born with a heart defect.  Like when my friend’s daughter developed leukemia and was maimed by the treatment.  Like when my other friend gave birth and then broke her leg four days later at the same time as her dog was dying of cancer.  Where is god in all of this? Where are you, god!?! 

“I’m right here.  I’m right here.”

God is always here.  Right here.   

I learned this in the midst of my own suffering.  Mark Nepo related his experience with terrible sickness from chemotherapy to Oprah on her Supersoul podcast.  After a night of vomiting to the point of vomiting blood, Mark’s wife asked, “Where is god?” And Mark, in a moment of excoriated clarity, declared the knowing, “He’s right here.” 

This idea of suffering and god has formed a new kind of prayer for me.  I find myself, in moments where god feels particularly distant, asking, Are you there, god?  Then I answer for god, I’m right here.  It's like a game of Marco Polo, where I call out and god responds. And it always feels true.  God is right here, in the happy, in the suffering, in the mundane.  God is here inside of me.

God is in the peace AND in the suffering.  God is both.  God is all.  

So if god is in all of it, all of the human experience, then surely it is sacred.  Sometimes we get this confused in our minds.  We think god will preserve the righteous.  The scriptures are filled with this sentiment.  Yet bad things continue to happen to people we know and love and people we’ve never met that we only hear about in tragedy via the news.  That voice in my head that wants to distance me from god would say, If you would have done this differently then this might have gone differently, or If you were really listening to God you might have avoided tragedy.  Or prayed harder or been kinder or read more scriptures or donated more money or whatever things are on the to-do list of the "righteous."

Cheryl Strayed wrote this in a life-changing (for me) installment of her advice column, Dear Sugar.  It was in response to a letter writer who was struggling with her belief in god after her infant daughter developed a brain tumor that required invasive surgery.  Please visit this link for the full piece, as it is beautiful:

“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking if there were a God why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life threatening surgery?—understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.”

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

The very half that makes rising necessary—is first having been nailed to the cross.  Maybe we are all to be nailed to the cross in this life.  We are meant to be set ablaze.  And even as this is happening we are meant to reach out to each other and up to god.  Maybe god is the love the burns between us in such moments of vulnerability and pain.  Maybe that is a close as we get to understanding god’s love for us.  Maybe that’s when we touch it.  

What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

What if god was here, right here, always?

Cover art for this piece: I saw this on display at The Broad museum in LA. It's by Edward Ruscha, The Right People and Those Other People, 2011.

The golden cord

Last year a wise friend said to me, “Michelle, it’s okay to hope for good things.”  I’ve spent most of my adult life releasing hope as a means of protecting myself from disappointment.  It’s actually a very efficient way to make oneself disappointed.  I now call it pre-disappointed.  It happens when I decide I will be disappointed in advance for something that might (or might not) happen.  That way, I beat disappointment to the punch.  It’s very smart because then you get to be right about being disappointed and being right is the best, right?!?

This largely shut down my ability to dream and hope.   My therapist described this process as "turning to stone."  It happens when you are not allowed to be your true self, either by a threatening environment, or by you holding yourself back.  Slowly, you turn to stone.  The divine sparks inside of me became layered over with sediment that hardened until the light was almost completely vanquished.  I distinctly remember feeling that at two points in my life.  I described it then as feeling like a shell.  Hollow.  A cast of myself but with no substance within.  The truth is, I was living for everyone else’s expectations.  I wasn’t living for myself.  And I had been doing this for so long I couldn’t imagine what living for myself would even look like.  Most of the work I have been doing is to encourage my self—that fun, motivated, divine being that God created, lodged inside of me—that it’s safe to come out.

As I’ve done this, I’ve started to see this image of walls being removed from around me.  I used to press my hands and feet into them to know where I was in space.  The walls were things in my external environment that gave me a sense of who I was and how I was doing.  Gradually the walls, roof and ceiling have all dissolved.  I’ve pictured myself reaching out in all directions feeling for the limits of space and finding nothing.  At times it has been extremely disorienting.  Sometimes I haven’t been sure which way was up.  As I have considered this image, I wondered, what do I hold on to?  What do I know? 

I know love.  I envisioned love as a golden cord, extending from the heavens, coming down through the center of my head and my body.  As my limbs reach and struggle in an effort to examine and understand the space, my being is suspended from this thick golden cord, which is love.  Love is the anchor.  Love is the guiding light within me.  My sense is that if I can stay in love then I don’t need the walls.  Love will hold me.  Love will center me.  And love is the basis of hope and trust.  I trust the golden cord, that I am anchored in love, that it will support my weight and my flailing about.  And this allows me to hope for good things.  For aliveness.  For expression.  For the surge of spirit that gives me the sense that I am awake, I am here.

This is the golden cord. This is love. With it, I can be human and I can be free.

Hello, Anxiety. Who are you exactly?

I read an article recently that suggested that when anxiety appears, you have a conversation with it.  Being the eager guinea pig that I am, I decided to give it a try and it was really helpful.  At the risk of revealing my inner crazy, I’m sharing it here.

Me:  I think there are two voices here.  The first is the Judgmental Older Sister.  You obviously need to go first. 

Judgmental Older Sister:  You know when all of this ends badly? I’m going to say I told you so.  I’m going to look at you with disgust and remind you that you knew better.  I’m going to be sorry for you that you are hurting, but I’ll remind you that you could have avoided the pain if you only did the smart thing. 

Disclosure: I have two older sisters and, for the record, neither of them talk in the voice of the judgmental older sister.  It’s just the way I picture this particular voice. Love you, sistas!

Me:  I think what I am unsure about is how will I know when it’s time to REALLY let go?  And will I be able to do it?  That’s the deep essence of my hesitation.  I am not sure about that.  I guess I can say this.  I knew when it was time to let go of my marriage.  And I was able to do it.  Why the hell would that not give me all kinds of confidence about this?  I just made it through the divorce finalization which was hell.  I did it.  I made the decisions that got me through it.  I did it with my eyes wide open.  It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty damn good.  So how can I be unqualified for this?  I  AM smart.  It doesn’t mean I always do the smart thing, because who even knows what that is?  Certainly not me.  I spent a long time doing the “smart” things and it was totally stupid.  It was my best, but if I had to do it over again, I would totally do it differently.  So I’m not looking for the smart thing anymore.  I’m looking for the precise thing.  That’s all I can do. Because smart is too subjective.  It’s too hard to call.  So, Judgmental Older Sister—you are ego personified.  Ego is the real fear—that I’m going to look or feel stupid.  That’s the worst case scenario.  I can handle that.  I do stupid things all the time.  Let it roll.  I can get through that.  Okay, let’s hear from the second voice.

Fear-of-Pain: I just don’t want us to hurt anymore.  Haven’t we been through enough?

Me:  You mean well.  You really do.  I get where you’re coming from.  Pain sucks.  It hurts.  Sometimes it comes and stays a while.  It makes me cry in front of people which can feel awkward.  It makes doing little things seem hard.   But it’s also where all the growth is.  And avoiding the right thing or the true thing to avoid pain never works because pain is there either way.  Pain shows up in the avoiding and it shows up in the embrace.  Pain is on either side of the equation.  It doesn’t matter how you solve it, pain will be there in some measure.  So, my dear Fear-of-Pain voice, you can be present, because, you’re right—pain hurts.  But you can’t drive the car.  You can’t run the show because pain is coming along too, at least for part of the trip, and we have to make room. 

Then I wondered… could I have a dance party with Judgmental Older Sister and Fear-of-Pain?  Is that possible? Does Judgmental Older Sister dance?  She can sit on the side and watch with mild loathing.  Fear-of-Pain will probably only safely sway in the background.  It’s okay—I will dance for all of us.