Resilient.
When you are able to make two become one, the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside…[so that you] become a single whole…then you will enter in.
~ Gospel of Thomas, logian 22
The Scottish poet Robert Burns observed in his 1785 poem To a Mouse that “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.“ (The original line is "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley"… but my Gaelic is a bit sketchy!) Kellie and I are traveling in Europe again, sort of our second home these days as we just can’t go long without seeing our daughters and their families! When you travel in new places… mostly by trains… and can’t speak the language, you learn quickly that plans do indeed go awry.
Even in the good ‘ole USA, we’re on the way to the RDU airport, and I realize that I left my phone at our son’s house. Fortunately, we had the extra half hour to retrieve it (Can’t do anything these days without a phone!). Yesterday we lost the lock key to one of our rental bikes, spent an hour looking for it, and eventually had to eat the €36 fee. In-between those two events were perhaps a dozen small obstacles, pivots, and redirects… all with utter poise and equanimity of course.
Let’s just say that RESILIENCY has been my watchword over the last week.
This desire also resides in the koan above from the non-canonical, but deeply insightful Gospel of Thomas: two becoming one, a single whole. Reading that line, it struck me that this is one insightful way to describe the entire journey of spiritual formation: becoming united, unified, integrous, consistent in body, mind, and heart. Isn’t that what we desire? To not be fragmented in our actions and affections… to not be one person at one time and place while another entirely at another time and place?
Sometimes I really am my Zen-steady best in the midst of great turmoil; at others I am thrown into absolute panic by the slightest of misfires. Can you relate?
Disregulated is another way of saying fragmented, and it represents a lack of coherence between the True Self and the False Self. The letter of James describes this condition as double-minded and unstable and goes on to offer examples of this internal tension: ambition and poverty, blame-shifting and contrition, hearing the truth but not following it, discriminating against the poor, etc. His enduring metaphor is poignant: “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (1:23-24).
Such existential amnesia lies at the root of our suffering in this world! What I sometimes call “squeezing the cactus.” In these moments, we have forgotten who we are and believed a broken narrative (anxiety, willful appetites, the inner critic, etc), and we are caught between what is True and what is False. The wise sayings of the disciple Thomas invite us to let the Spirit stitch us together again and make us whole. Unified. Undivided.
When that happens, Thomas assures us, we “enter in” to God’s realm, to living out God’s kingdom on earth. And it just feels really good to live from this whole place, that grounded place, that Christ-in-me-the-hope-of-glory place. From this posture, we can respond to any provocation or threat with actual equanimity and resiliency. From that place, wisdom emerges and we know what needs to happen next.
Just over the course of today, I had two challenges: First, my GPS misguided me to our morning destination in our rental car, and I was driving randomly through endless traffic circles… in heavy traffic… in a stick-shift car… with Kellie calling out directions. It was stressful, but I have to say that we were a great team, and I threaded that needle without losing my cool. Later this afternoon, I couldn’t find the e-tickets for our train ride tomorrow from La Roche Sur Yon to Le Bouscat Sainte-Germaine… and I totally lost my cool.
As the French say, C’est la vie! This is the stuff of life! And this is precisely where we live out our spirituality, sometimes well, sometimes less well. It’s easy to get hard on yourself when you blow it and grovel in frustration and self-blame. Take it from me: Don’t do it! It is a waste of energy, it’s unnecessarily painful, and it actually slows our journey of formation. Some of the voices from our spiritual past say that shame is a legitimate voice, but I disagree. Freedom comes in simply admitting our mistakes, apologizing in humility, turning our souls to the radiance of God’s unceasing delight in us, shaking it off, and moving forward.
Resiliently.
finding our way home
I invite you to name one place in your life that feels fragmented now. What would it look like to bring that dissonance into “a single whole”? Talk to God about this.
takeaway
Relax. Breathe. Pivot.