Habitual Love

Our freedom consists of two things, really. The lesser freedom that we talk about most frequently is what we call freedom of choice. It's a freedom from--from bondage, from compulsion, from enforced conformity. At its most mundane, it's the freedom to choose carrots or peas as you move through the cafeteria line or, if you're my son Andrew, to reject them both and choose a cookie instead. Freedom from is an important freedom. It's freedom from slavery in the many senses of that term, and I don't mean to diminish it by calling it a lesser freedom. It's the freedom that I wrote about in my last post about habits and our freedom from their domination.

But there is a second freedom. It is the freedom for something, or as monastic thinkers would put it, the freedom to love whole-heartedly. Freedom for implies freedom from. I can't be free to love one thing if I'm bound by my love of another. Whole-hearted loving is grounded in the ability to choose what or who we love, but it also goes beyond this choice. A simple example: I love my wife, and I find my love is able to deepen to the degree that the freedom of this love shifts from being the freedom of choice--the freedom to survey an array of women each day and choose which one I should love--to a freedom simply for her, so that my energy is not exhausted by a daily choosing, but can devote itself to knowing her and loving her more fully. I don't choose each day to love Cyndi. I simply love her, and the question for me is how I might move more into that love. (Not that I always give that question the attention that I should, or that my other habits don't crowd it out all too often.)

To say that I simply love Cyndi is to say that I've formed a habit of loving her--and I realize that can sound dangerous. Love that is mere habit sounds dull and repetitive--almost an afterthought. It sounds that way, but if you've moved to such a non-considered relationship, then you really aren't loving at all. Loving,..., true loving implies mindfulness. It implies paying attention. It implies a heart that is engaged. The true habit of love is whole-hearted, and so it can never be an afterthought.

To be mindful, then, is a two-step. It's to attend to our habits so that we might free ourselves from the habits that bind us. But we do this so that we can form new habits--habits of love or, more particularly, habits of loving what is life-giving. Mindfulness both brings to our attention what gives life, and then it allows us to give ourselves (in freedom) to the habit of loving what gives life.

The Gospel passage read in the lectionary this coming Sunday reminds us that we can't love God and mammon. The suggestion is that we free ourselves from the possession of material things---that we loose the bonds of that habit--so that we can give ourselves fully to the habit of loving God. A first step in the deepening of the spiritual life is to move from an obliviousness to God to a place where we ask ourselves if we will love God. A second step is when we stop asking ourselves if we'll love God because we are now asking ourselves how we will love God. That's the habit of love, and it is truly a gift.

Breaking Habits or Loving Them?

Augustine first introduced me to habits. Not those simple things that we call habits--that I bite my nails or drop my dirty clothes on the floor. No, I mean the darker habits that we harbor--habits of envy or anger or lust. The habits of our hearts that lead us, too often, where we've promised not to go. The habits that led Luther to write about the bondage of our wills. Luther's bondage language goes back at least to Augustine. Augustine believed deeply that God had created us with free wills, but as experience lent him its wisdom, he because more aware of our forfeiture of that freedom. We freely choose to chain ourselves, he argues. We make a simple decision--we commit a simple act--and we forge the first link of a chain. Then another decision or act follows the first, and then another, and before we know it, we have willingly forged a chain of habit that makes us into people that we would never choose to be. It's a story that most addicts know well. Augustine's recognition is that we are all addicts in some sense--we all have an addiction to envy or self-pity or lust or pride....

Any addict can also tell you that we forge strong chains---that's a part of the strength of our wills. But we have to know that we nonetheless maintain our God-given freedom. We are bound by our habits, but we are not lost to them. We still have some simple freedoms---the freedom to pay attention, the freedom to love, the freedom to be open to God's grace.

Mindful Prayer--habits cannot take it away from us, though they can impinge on our commitment to it. But we have the simple freedom to notice our breath, to quiet ourselves, to get out of the way to pay attention to the grace that surrounds us. I'll write about the effect of this attention to grace on our habits some other time. Simply put, grace can quietly unwind the chains in which we've bound ourselves, if we just give it the time.

But mindfulness can address our habits more directly, as well. When we learn to quiet ourselves, to be aware of our thoughts and our intentions even as they're giving birth to our actions---as we learn to quiet ourselves, we can notice the energy of habit as it arises within us. I notice the anger that's immediately spurred when someone cuts me off on the freeway, and I can notice as it requests that my foot depress the accelerator just that little bit extra. But what do I do with it then? There are times when I can just reject the habit in the moment, but I know that it doesn't go away. I know that it lurks, waiting until my guard is down. Is there another option?

Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that I can love my habit, instead of rejecting it. Loving it, of course, doesn't mean following it whole-heartedly. No, it means to notice it and let it know that I notice it. I can attend to it. I can invite it out into the open. I can bring it out of the darkness in which it hides and ask it why it is so tormented. He writes that when we notice a habit we can say to it, "Oh my dear habit energy, you are a long-time friend of mine I know you too well. I will take good care of you." (Buddha Mind, Buddha Body, p. 80) The habit does not, then, immediately evaporate. If only it were that easy. But if we live in a begraced world, then I believe that a constant exposure of our habits to the world's grace has to have a softening effect--a transformative effect. I don't know that my habits will ever go away, but if they can just become a bit more pliable, a little less insistent, then by grace I can find freedom amidst the chains.

Keeping Time

Every morning, Christopher and I go to his preschool. He runs up the steps and struggles to open the exterior door. (It really is very heavy.) He runs to the first interior door. (You'll note that the verb "run", as well as the verbs "bounce," "jump," "hop," and "bang" will be used quite frequently in juxtaposition with Christopher's name.) He opens that door, and then goes sprinting down the hallway. Every morning. And every morning I smile. It's precious.

This morning I smiled, but it was a little bittersweet. I knew that 15 years from now, as I was sending him off to college (or wherever he goes) I'll have a faint memory of this sweet time, and I'll miss it. I'll wonder where it went. I'll long for it and want it back--even, I'm guessing, while I won't want to give up those future years as well.

This entry isn't another meditation on staying in the moment, since it's the only moment that we have. Yes, one lesson from my recognition of the reality of time and change is that I need to treasure each moment with Christopher, because none of them will last forever.

No, this entry is a reflection on my desire to keep time--to possess it and not let it go. I don't want to just experience that moment with Christopher in the hall. I want to freeze it and lock it away as mine forever. I don't just want to experience the moment in the moment--I want to stay in the moment, even as I want all of the other moments, past and future. I want to keep time--to own time. And I know that it's futile.

How should I respond to the futility? I have a number of thoughts. An obvious one is to acknowledge it and learn to let go as a response. If I know I can't hold on to the moment, then at least I can alleviate the desperation of clutching after it as it escapes. Acknowledging futility gives evidence of a bit of wisdom. It even opens the way to self-knowledge. It opens me to the humility of recognizing that I don't own time. That's what it is to be human. Ultimately, we rent, we don't own.

A second thought is to let go of ownership so that I can just be present to the moment. (Okay, so maybe this is just another entry on staying in the moment, but it's different from the last one.) There was nothing bittersweet in my time with Christopher. The bitter only came with my desire to possess and the frustration of that desire. Let go of the desire and just stay with Christopher!

But there's the third impulse--the mystical/spiritual impulse. It's what I'll call a recognition of the flow---of the divine life that was/is there in that moment. I'll talk about that flow elsewhere--it demands multiple blogs of its own. But the divine--God--is present in all of these moments--and God holds all of these moments within. God does own them, if you will. And God can own me--does own me. If I can be present to God in the midst of my presence to each moment, then I can maintain my presence  to them even in the midst of their passing. God is God of the living, Jesus tells us. If God is the God of that moment with Christopher, then that moment lives in God and it is alive to me as I learn to live in God.

I can't keep time, but God can, and God can keep me. Now if I can just learn to be kept.

Time

 

I worry less and less these days if I have the time for this and that, and more about simply having Time. That’s largely because I’ve found that even if I can make time for this and that, I can’t make Time. Time is a gift. I don’t mean tomorrow’s time, or our total allotment of time on earth—though that is a gift as well. I mean this time. This day. The only time that we actually have, unless we ignore it and let it slip away, leaving us with no time at all.

Cyndi and I were talking last night about how cold this winter has been, and I realized that we’ve only just begun February. I longed for March, but then I realized, “Do I really want to just throw February away?” I don’t know how many more Februarys I get. Maybe I should treasure this one. I need to remember how to treasure even the cold, if cold is what fills the time. That’s a part of our problem with having time. We have it only by opening ourselves to what fills it. When we want to avoid the latter, we lose the former. We have no time left. Oddly, though, if we open ourselves to the time—if I remind myself to want February, at least while it’s February—then that transforms what fills February, as well. The cold is the embodiment of the time, and if I value the time, then I’ll learn to value the cold.

So often, when Jesus talks about time, he asks us to remember that time is a treasure. The rich man who fills his barns to secure his future—he loses both barns and future and misses the one the treasure that he couldn’t lose—the opportunity to love today. Likewise, Jesus reminds those who are anxious about their many things—their clothes, their food, their wealth—he reminds them to see the blessings of today, of this time, and to let those other things tend to themselves. To put it another way, if we fill our time with things, the things overwhelm our time. But if we treasure our time for itself, we will find treasures within it--treasures that he hadn't noticed when we were so preoccupied with our things.

Time is a treasure. It’s what God first creates, to hold whatever other treasures that God would give us. Do I tend to the treasure? Do I recognize that I can find God in it, if I’ll just open my eyes—put away distractions. Time—this time—this moment—now—it touches on eternity. Will I find the time for Time?