what can I bring?

My father taking me (in the carriage) and my sister out for a spin. He was 30 and I was just a few months old when this photo was taken.

My father and I are taking a trip today, but this time I will be doing the driving. He turned 87 this year, and I’ll be 57 next week. When he asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I told him that I would love to go up north (to the Saranac Lake/Paul Smiths area of New York where he grew up) with him and just see it through his eyes for a day.

We’ve talked about taking this trip for the past 10 years and at one point, I seriously doubted it would ever happen because he would never commit. I wasn’t even sure (until he called to confirm 2 days ago) if it we were still on for today, and I had made peace with this possibility …maybe I wasn’t ready until today.

As I think about this, I’m sure it is true. Up until the last few years, I’d still needed something from him. I’m not sure if it was approval, recognition or just attention, but for most of my life, I’d lived with the feeling that I wasn’t getting enough of him. He seemed just out of reach to me and this left me with a grasping feeling, which made me angry at both him and myself.

It wasn’t easy to turn this pattern around; to stop looking for what I was getting from the relationship, and to start thinking about what I was bringing, but the reward had been the feeling that I have even more love to give.

“The tighter you squeeze, the less you have“. Thomas Merton

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Our unique paths

Having been in, and around, the world of clergy, ministers, missionaries, monks, nuns…etc. for most of my life, the idea of self-sacrifice, poverty and suffering as the path to a spiritual life, was proffered constantly. Guilt for wanting nice things; comforts, beauty, and  time for one’s self, was the order of the day. So many of my good friends and colleagues won’t even talk about their desires for material possessions because they feel that this is somehow wrong. I used to be one of these too. At one point in my life, I gave all of my worldly goods away and went to work, and live, in the poorest region of the United States. My car barely ran, I owned one pair of pants and a few t-shirts. I lived in a house with fleas and plastic where a wall should have been. I don’t think it made me more spiritual. I don’t think that I was more helpful to people. It was just what missionaries did.

The thought in these circles is often, “Why should we have anything when so many are going without?” My question over the last 10 years has been, “How can we teach others that they can do, be and have anything that they want to accomplish in this lifetime, by a policy of self-deprivation?” So often, examples of great people who changed the world by embracing poverty, like Gandhi, (who without a doubt did) would be cited as the way to live, and yet,  Sarojini Naidu is said to have remarked, “It took a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”

We came here in bodies, that like soft, warm clothing, with eyes that can see beauty, taste buds that can appreciate wonderful food, bodies that have the capacity to love sexual experience and can appreciate rare and fine incense and perfume, minds that love great literature and books. Was the way that we were created a mistake? or one big test to be resisted? That does not seem like the plan of a loving God/Universal Spirit to me.  We are all different and have uniquely individual tastes and preferences for housing, cars, work, dress, worship….some find a very simple dwelling and no technology best for them. Others want elaborate furnishings and every gadget ever made to accompany them on their chosen path. How can we say what is right or wrong for someone else? There is no virtue in poverty or in living an inauthentic life. I am more helpful to others when I am living from my true center.

“It is quite a mistake to suppose that we must restrict and stint ourselves in order to develop power or usefulness. This is to form the conception of Divine Power as so limited that the best use we can make of it is by a policy of self-starvation, whether material or mental.” (pp. 90 The Hidden Power, Thomas Troward)

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