Lisa Bowden

Dear Friends,

Today’s reading from John is about Jesus’ teachings being dismissed by the arrogant claim that educated, egoistic knowledge is superior to Jesus’ ways. (“How does this man have such learning when he has never been taught?” Jesus’ says. . . “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. . . Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me? . . . Do not judge by appearances but with right judgment.”)

Recently, dizzied by the tragic news that a friend’s 18 year old son died unexpectedly, I couldn’t speak, or move. I’m no stranger to loss, but as a mother in the face of another mother’s earth-swallowing loss, I wanted information, answers, a certain knowledge that would tell me what to do, how to be in this unimaginable. I wanted hard science. Relieving expertise to outsmart the fear of misspeaking, misstepping at the worst possible time. I wanted someone to tell me there was a good and right thing to do. A perfect thing, instead of feeling grief’s unhinging.

Is it fear (or arrogance?) that links the thought of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time to the dread of being rejected by the tribe? Why the loom of “irritable reaching after fact and reason” (as poet John Keats said) instead of reaching into a deeper knowing, and gift—what the wildfires of losing my own child taught me?

I’m not sure exactly which constellation of sins wears well the grooves of my ego, but it requires an intentional practice of intervention on a hard-wired logic modeling that rightness outside myself. The easy muscle memory will short circuit that potentially deeper Keatsian state of resting in murky uncertainty, or, what meditation calls the tiny space between inhale and exhale (where nothing exists and everything is possible). If I don’t pause, I’ll believe that truth is elusive.

But Jesus, as he’s wont to do, points to the opposite of what is at the surface of difficulty—the radical belief there is ceaseless calm, an abiding internal telemetry of God’s flow running counter to what’s obvious, even to the self.

I wonder what would happen if we played the higher stakes moments in our lives as opportunities for humility—the applauseless, fruit-bearing, quiet, glowing dark? If we allowed the restructuring of our deepest tendencies to defend, to accuse—-and to lose—to happen?

In peace,

—Lisa