I Love You, Little Beast

The following is less of a review, than a reflection, inspired by a reading of Richard Rohr's The Divine Dance. I was fortunate to hear Rohr on a recent On Being Interview with Krista Tippett and I knew within minutes of listening to him speak that he was a reliable spiritual mentor because he quickly passed the sacred beer test, which basically amounts to crudely measuring the overwhelming goodness of what he has to say (by way of the love, relief and hope it inspires) against the sense of security that he would be excellent company with which to share a friendly after-work pint or two. I find that my own energies tend to gravitate more strongly towards those for whom the distance between these two realities is short.

I am still absorbing my thoughts on his writing, but on a recent morning I highlighted this passage, in which Rohr (a Franciscan priest, now in his seventies, who has devoted his live to contemplation and understanding of what he calls "perennial wisdom") discusses the paradoxical need to embrace suffering - especially that which is borne of love. Because as he explains later, there is "no resurrection without death," and because "Grace shows up where logic breaks down." In this line of thought, he observes:

"I am going to somehow enter into solidarity with this pain. I'll not allow myself to participate in other people's abandonment, betrayal, rejection, or marginalization.

How different this is than other passages I have read on suffering. How much more accessible it is to me, because it requires only that I love its essence. I can do this so much better than I can pretend that it does not exist or that it is not some essential part of my basic nature.

So much easier said than done. Give me something beautiful and I quickly want to define it, measure it, name it, capture it, or find a way to claim it. At my best I may accept it as it is, delighting in its presence (thinking of my daughter here) and yet still waste countess hours and evenings worrying over its loss or spoilage.

Even now as I write this, I cannot keep from noticing that scarcely an hour - perhaps not even fifteen minutes - has gone by today during which I did not check my phone, my email, my recollection of the events of the day - reviewing them for signs of some basic lack. I am missing something, somehow; I know it. Something is essentially deficient about my ability to understand, and the suffering of this  hour, this month, this year, this lifetime, must be because I have failed, somehow to correct these inherent deficiencies.

These fears are code, of course: for “I may not be worthy,” and this suggestion inspires latent anger and deep fears, such that it seems necessary - immediately and desperately necessary -  to relieve some of the pressure by sharing it - usually by blame, or irritation, or by making sure to add their perceived slight to the endless tally of perceived slights -  immediately, because I feel myself too small to hold within me the tension of needing to love against the doubt that I am worthy of being love. 

It is easier, it turns out, to reject true intimacy, than to take it - with all of the unpeeled layers and resultant exposure that it implies. 

Better, if one is leaning towards coldness and bitterness, to be wrapped in the heavy, oily furs of familiar demons. Here they come, at the first sign of doubt in an endlessly renewing warmth, which needs no clothing to keep it in, only constant openness to its flow.

Enter: fear, anger, insecurity over being loved - all the old demons, awake and eager to play at the first signs of discomfort. I can feed them, or I can watch them move. I am trying to watch them move.

Most active among them seems to be the one in charge of keeping track of the accumulation of numerous minor offenses. This one certainly growls a lot. It is very greedy, and always wants to be fed, and when it is not satisfied (and generally its way of being is one of complete dissatisfaction) - it tends to resort to incessant and loud detailing of the innumerable wrongs it has endured in its constant hunger.

“Yes, yes, beast.” I try to pet it now, “I know, you are never satisfied.”

"Pug Dog" image provided by Alex Brown 

It seems even the wisest of dogs will occasionally be unable to resist eating so much that it throws up the very visible remainder of last night’s dinner in a heap on the carpet. The dog isn’t bad, it just couldn’t resist the pull to eat food. I hope I’m not all bad, and yet I must acknowledge that it is only by a great deal of effort and also by moments of Grace that I am able to resist the ever-toxic and ever-alluring pull towards defending my self-importance.

“I know, beast,” I tell it,  “You want someone to tell you you are wonderful." And so on, like this:

There, there beast. I tell you all the time but you do not listen. You do not know what is good for you and you insist on eating the food that you are going to throw up hours later, all over the carpet. 

Silly beast, you always want the very praise that makes you sick.

Come here, you poor little depraved thing. You are okay.

I won’t let you go, little wretch. 

Look at you; fur matted and half of you covered with mange, still begging to be pet; still looking startled when I come close, as if you fear I would hurt you. You are either too dumb or too stubborn or too much of an animal to hear what has been said to you all along:

Listen: You are loved. You are loved. You are loved.

"Ugly Dog" by Nick Thompson

Even in your ignorant tunnel vision, even in your seeming incapacity for refraining from your endless measuring, tallying, hoarding, envying, and worrying over the measurement and shoring up of constant abundance; you are endlessly worthy of this close connection, and how could you ever doubt that when you will approach in earnest, someone who loves you will forever be ready to reach out a hand to scratch you behind your ears? How can you doubt that when you roll over with your vulnerable belly to be scratched, a hand will be there to meet you and let you know that you live in a space that is loving and communal?

It’s all we want, isn’t it? 

Communion: From the Latin, meaning mutual participation. Meaning, the  act or instance of sharing, as of thoughts or feelings. Meaning also, the sacrament by which the elements of God are received by a congregation. Congregation: the gathering of two or more people in the name of all that is seen and unseen at the deepest level of our longing, in observation of the sacred wound which is inseparable from everlasting hope.

I used to say in church, in complete ignorance of the meaning of my words at seven years old when I was clasping the hands of my grandparents on either side, “I am not worthy to receive, but say the word, and I shall be healed.”

So listen, beast: you are beautiful, blind little thing, in your desperate gnawing at that which is freely given. You want more than anything, with your twisted, small, and jealous heart, to be reminded over and over of the truth. 

O pathetic creature, I want to extend to you now my compassion. I am sorry that someone stole from you once, and I am sorry that they whispered to you in your moments of greatest and most trusting vulnerability - when you were at your best, feeling lowest! - some indication that the way to survive was this: doubt everything, trust no one, and hoard what you can until the inevitable end of all life.

O helpless creature, you are so fallen that you doubt the endurance of your very life.

When did you stop knowing what you are?

Don’t you realize - of course you don’t or you would not behave this way - that you have within you a connection to all that is eternal, to all that is, ever was, or will be? 

In light of this realization, you would have a sense of how ridiculous your posturing is. 

But we never know our blind spots until we rise above them and look, and we never rise above them except in the presence of Grace, that overwhelming knowing that begins only at the end of all that makes sense.

It is the thing that makes our mouths fall open at sunsets and babies and unexpected acts of kindness by strangers, and also at the senseless suffering of children, and a burgeoning awareness at the way the children we once were have been - almost, but not yet, systematically destroyed.

Come here, little beast. Sit with me awhile. You will not eat me up, you are so blatant in your needs. Come, and let me pat with my hands, the quivering tension of your trembling body. You never outgrow your infant hunger, do you? 

Sorry, beast. I don’t have any food for you now. We ate it all, remember? We feasted on shame, and on a warehouse of mistakes and wrongs we’d been storing up - were we afraid, somehow that we would run out? We have indulged in orgies of tears and in wild flights of panic. It’s gone now.

But I will sit with you in silence, and we can look and see what comes. And when it comes I know you will startle with its arrival, and spring into action as you must always do, and then my hand will be here, and we will breathe together and take it in, and you will stay hungry and I will stay open, with my beautiful and hopeless beast beside me, hoping still.

And in this silence comes the music of all that is made to dance.

Perhaps I have given the dog and other beastly-seeming creatures short shrift with my crude metaphor.  As Rohr reminds, dogs tend to often be better models of acceptance of their divine place than are people. He observes, “We’re the only ones who deprive ourself of essential ecstasy,” and goes onto offer this illustration:

“Dogs don’t stop the ecstasy. You get tired of them jumping up and licking you, but they don’t. It’s pure, unadulterated, fascinated enjoyment being a dog, apparently. And then most of them just lie down one day and die. No drama. The dog doesn’t question reality. It doesn’t anguish in existential malaise, beating its paws in the dirt and asking, Why aren’t I a duck? Apparently, dogs just like being dogs, mulberry trees like being mulberry trees, and bees like doing what bees do; the red snapper does not mind if we name her “red snapper,” although surely she knows her real name. All things give glory to God just by being what they are.”

Funny, how it is so difficult to acknowledge this small weak presence within myself that I resort to metaphor, and even the tool of my metaphor falls apart, for when I compare the “beast” to a needy dog, I miss the point: the dog is generally more at home in admission of and being within his own needs and vulnerabilities than I am. 

Even the broken, abused dog, needs only to find a small, vulnerable creature to love an protect in order to calm itself away from its own tortured and warped reactions to pain.

On the night that I am first drafting this reflection, I come across a video posted on Facebook, highlighting an incredible affinity between a formerly abused dog and a child it wants to protect. They do little together but sleep and nap. They wage no campaigns against the former abuse. They craft no knowing testimonies of survival. Mainly, as far as I can observe from the video, they hold on, and rest in a place where they can sleep, pressed closely together in an intimate embrace. 

For to know God in the triunal sense that Rohr explores is not to trust in an abstract idea, but in the recollection of a deep and intimate dance between the divine source and its fleshly and imperfect incarnations, in all of their flawed and beastly forms. 

He calls to mind these lines from Theodore Roethke’s “The Rose.”

Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madras, 

Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself, 

As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being, 

And I stood outside myself, 

Beyond becoming and perishing, 

A something wholly other, 

As if swayed out on the wildest wave alive, 

And yet was still. 

And I rejoiced in being what I wasn’t.

"Desert Rose" by gomagoti

Perhaps it is not possible to dance, except by complete surrender - first to the silence of the frightened beast who can finally accept being loved, long enough to sleep - and then to a music beyond what can be seen and understood. In order to be able to do this, perhaps it is necessary to lovingly acknowledge the countless weaknesses that crave artificial certainty over divine flow, who would rather gaze endlessly at the watery pool of its own small reflection, than endlessly up at the wonder of all that may be - and take it in, arms splayed out, spinning, growing dizzy with the joy of a child at the exhilaration of dancing and falling at once.