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Welcome to the Comfortable Words.
I just found an essay that I started to write many, many years ago, but apparently never finished. So I wrapped it up just now. Let’s just say my view from the front porch has changed quite a bit.
So I’m sitting down myself, slowing down too, like maybe you are. How about we take a deep breath together?
How do you feel today?
What cares do you carry with you as we begin? If you could imagine coming across something that you wrote years and years ago, what might it be about?
The comfortable words this week are from John:
Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:24-25)
Size cannot predict health by itself. It is an indicator, sure, but not the only one. Yes, healthy things grow, but so do tumors and forest fires. Healthy things on healthy trajectories in this world at least, also age and decline and die.
But for years, size and growth has been seen as an unquestioned signpost for health. Babies are supposed to grow. Your wealth definitely should grow. The city you live in… we love growth! The company… your LinkedIn network, these things too… everything is supposed to grow! Your retirement, the number of people following you on your platform… it should grow, let it grow, let it grow.
Even your spirituality, your feelings of faith, we think more and bigger and more passionate is always better.
But another way to think about this is that uncontrolled growth in the human body is a medical emergency. Uncontrolled growth in the human mind is a mental disaster. Interestingly, our brain is constantly and intentionally in the process of forgetting in order to allow us to remember.
The need for forgetting might be one of the most compelling spiritual instructions I’ve had in ages.
But my point is that there is an ebb and a flow built into the natural world that seems to be necessary.
One thing needs the other.
Beginnings develop into middles, which develop into ends. And we cannot choose to exist on one side and ignore the other, even if we might prefer it. We have to embrace both sides of this paradox, the inhale and the exhale, the gain and the loss, the incline and the decline.
And just as natural, just as biologically embedded, and I would argue just as necessary to individuals and to organizations as growth, is stasis and even decline.
My daughter, when she was small, found it amazing that my body had stopped growing. That I would never need a larger shoe size. I couldn’t find it in myself to tell her that one day my feet may shrink even. That my bones will compress from the force that holds us to this earth. That I will be even physically reduced before I die and am carried away to an eternity that lives somewhere outside this observable reality.
It seems obvious to anyone who has ever had a child, who has ever flushed a goldfish, who has ever watched a loved one die. The entire cycle of life is unavoidable.
But no one wants to ask: how to let go of vitality gently and with grace. Instead, we cling to the upswing, to continued vitality, to effervescence and unrestrained growth because that’s beautiful and it feels safe, and because we can maintain the illusion that we and what we do are eternally important.
If however, one does believe in a cosmic and intentional arc to reality, then there’s nothing to fear in the points on the curve that represent stasis and decline. Those points themselves are as much a part of the growth process as are the inclines. In other words, stasis and decline are as much a part of the upward vector as are beautiful beginnings and accelerated growth.
This has the ring of so many truths. That a grain of wheat must fall to the ground and die before it reproduces in multiplicity.
The truth that somehow becoming less can result in becoming more.
So doesn’t then a new question arise? How do we embrace and allow for our own reduction?
Over the years, I’ve learned how to be humiliated, how to let go. I’ve learned how limited I am, and how limited my ideals are, and how limited all human beings are. I’ve had the bar of expectations lowered in my life. I’ve learned to calm and quiet my own soul. I’ve learned how to consent to a sort of shrinking, and how to push through the burn of my ego. I’ve learned to be weak and to press on and to take off all that hinders.
I’ve learned in reduction that God loves me and that I am enough, and that even when people slander and conspire against me, tell me that I’m a failure… even then I’ve learned that I have an inner reserve of enoughness because of a love around me.
The psalmist writes, “I cling to you. Your right hand upholds me.”
To cling then, when one is being upheld, is less real than felt.
Clinging is not my ontological state. My state is being upheld. My amygdala state is clinging.
In other words, even if I lose my grip and my sweaty palms slide off the edge, there’s not far to fall.
Your right hand upholds me.
You are a firm foundation beneath my feet.
God, it strikes me in this moment that the only way to be sure of the upholding business is to truly let go. To trust that if I loosen my grip, I will not fall to my death, but drop down six inches or so.
This is what Martin Buber called relational ontology. I do not exist as an I, but as a part of a pair. In the world, the pair is I and it, but Buber wrote about I and Thou.
Thou upholds me, therefore I am ontologically upheld.
Buber wrote that all actual life is encounter. That when I encounter Thou, I then, become a Thou myself.
And so I wonder, is it in the dropping from clinging that I find this encounter?
Does the encounter come when I fully let go and feel Thou under my feet instead of the empty void that I fear?
And I pray, Lord, if I long to feel your upholding, then do I need to let all the way go?
Is the letting go the only thing that will allow me to feel upheld?
The grain of wheat must fall to the ground and die before it reproduces in multiplicity. So somehow becoming less results in becoming more.
Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary.
But what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.