Getting Lost

I was at Council for the Diocese of Virginia the last couple of days. It was an unpleasant experience for me, as that kind of experience always is. Not because of the content of the meeting, and I enjoyed seeing old friends there. But simply being at an intimate gathering of close to a thousand folks in a room--it's overwhelming for me. I end up feeling scattered. Dislocated. Lost.

Earlier today I celebrated at the burial service for a wonderful older parishioner. It was a gift to be able have a part in his service--to celebrate his life and, even more, the life he has in God. Yet, again, it's a discomfiting experience for me. It's another experience in which I get lost. Not dispersed across a sea of faces though. More lost in the face of death. However much I believe that we abide in God, by grace, through death, I am still aware at a deep level that in death we are undone. Confronting that reality, I am always undone, at least for a bit.

What do these two experiences challenge in me? I suppose that a western psychological approach would use the term "ego"--that my well-guarded sense of self is attacked in either situation. I think that's right, but I'm not sure that it goes far enough. I'm attracted to the Buddhist term that I've learned in the psychology of Thich Nhat Hanh--manas.  Manas is that consciousness within us that turns in on our selves and finding something to desire within us, worships that aspect of our self. It's that propensity within us to set our self up as a deity, as a self-sufficient, independent, and dare-I-say ultimate being. To put it more simply, it's that tendency within us to assume that we're special, by which we mean extra-special, or even more-special-than-everyone-else. And it banks everything on that specialness, and so it must assume that this specialness will endure.

But then we get lost in a crowd of thousands, each of whom is special in their own way. Each of whom has so much in common with us--and who wants to be common. Each of whom challenges our claim not just on specialness, but on the prize of being ultimately special. And death, well it reveals the speciousness of the whole enterprise. We are not an enduring island. What is most common about all of us is that we do not abide---at least not in splendid isolation.

Thich Nhat Hanh would like us to use experiences like these to see our interrelation with all things. He would hope that this challenge to our ego, to the manas within us would not destroy us, but would lead to see that our richness and glory lie precisely in our commonality--that our lives are interwoven with one another, and that any desire within us to exist in splendid isolation only blinds us to the true richness of our interbeing with all around us.

In my experience of quiet, I find the deepest truth of this interbeing in the life of God that we all share. It's not just that we're related each to one another, but it's that we are all rooted in God--in the source of this great life that we share. God abides, and we each abide with one another as we abide in God. The ocean of faces at my meeting--I need to embrace the rootedness in God that I share with each of them. The burial service--it needs to be an icon for me of my rootedness in God. It can free me from an isolation that's not so splendid, and so it can invite me into a fellowship that is resplendent with life.