Fall fire while out on a walk in St. Louis this past 

November 3, 2022

Back in July my wife Janet and I with some friends took an amazing bicycle tour in the high desert country around Bend, Oregon and Crater Lake National Park for some 190 miles or so. Yes, that was something. The new friends made on these trips are a real gift as well. One such new friend is Jayne, to whom I later wrote a letter and from whom I got permission to publish that letter. I’d like to tell that on this day when we are on the verge of the Nov. 8 huge election where democracy itself is at stake (please get out there and vote!) that this letter has something to do with all that. It does not. However, it is about how we find our way in our challenging world. Use it, apply it, as you will.

July 23, 2022

A Letter to Jayne (You Have Already Arrived)

I’m going to suggest you not search too hard for who you are or for what you are made to do. Maybe even don’t search at all. If you do you may miss everything while in that search for something. 

Just think of it: you walked the woods of the entire Appalachian Trail in 2019 – some 2,194 miles including 14 States! I envy you that hike. I know you told me you felt something unique and different about your life, about life itself, after some time there in that Trail traveling. It was something full and real and wonderful, so much so that as you described it to me more than once you placed your hand over your heart. And you said you have rarely, or was it never, have felt that again, whatever it was, since. 

What was it?

What is it?

Whatever it was it came to you, it happened to you, simply as you were walking along. Ok, some days strolling and some days straining, but each day doing exactly one thing, putting your one foot out after another and paying attention to what was around you – in front, behind, beside. 

I told you that coincidental to our Crater Lake Bike Tour I am reading Barry Lopez’s Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. Its language is extensive and thought expansive. Lopez is new to me, but his attention to paying attention (to what is in our life right before our very eyes) is not new and I mentioned to you that in that appreciation (too light a word for it, but leave that be for now) he is much like Frederick Buechner, the author and long-time mentor of mine (by his literature). Buechner’s by-word is “listen to your life.” To listen to another person is to actively engage what they are saying and doing so without any agenda or projection of your own self upon them. To listen to another is to listen to them, not yourself. How can we learn to listen in this way, to pay attention in this way, to our own life, our own self? To pay attention to our self without trying to apply something, say, meaning, to our self?

In his essay “Invitation” Lopez writes, 

“If the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved, later, the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body’s extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colors in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind. 

As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow; and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial”

I tend to reflect, not to say analyze, on the daily stuff to perhaps the point of personal oppression. While I find the reflection “meaning full” I also find that not finding meaning (perhaps “meaning empty”) by thinking but rather finding, what?, significance?, by touching is the way that burden (that “oppression”) is lifted. Years ago now, my wife and I started to practice Hot Yoga. Now pandemically, regular yoga, but we try too to use the heat offered outdoors on our back porch in Florida. I have noted to others in conversation that the thing about yoga that is most liberating and exhilarating for me is the sheer physicality of the thing. I am, well, less than graceful or complete in any given posture on the mat. But it is in the movement of muscle, bone, ligament, tendon, skin and whatever else there is that comprises me bodily (do I have sinew?), I am released.  I seem to know myself again, more directly if not also clearly, than any thinking about my life could ever provide. 

It's popular today to say that life is a journey. While well intended (people are trying to say by that, it seems to me, that we can be too focused on completing things while in that focus actually miss the getting there) I don’t think it’s the best way to describe what we’re doing, what life is that is life. In fact I don’t think its accurate at all. And while the “don’t miss the getting there” may sound alike like what I am describing here as “paying attention” to your life, it’s really not that at all. Rather, “paying attention” means life is not a journey, but if I might continue to use location language, it is a destination. In other words we aren’t going somewhere to find something, say, ourselves. Instead, this: we have already arrived. We are here. 

Before I retired last year I was a lunch-bucket theologian (a working church pastor) most informed and shaped and imagined by what the discipline calls “the theology of the cross” (named such and attributed to Martin Luther most directly from his writing in The Heidelberg Disputation of 1518).  Now I am still, and I suppose will always be, a theologian most enlivened by this theology and discovering it’s depths. At the heart of this theology is the notion that any spiritual quest we might consider ourselves to be on is not only misguided but could in the end be downright dangerous and life-threatening to our “selve’s” soul (by this I am not saying somehow God condemns us. I mean we condemn ourselves). Life is not a journey, it is a destination. We have already arrived: all we are is all we have and it is also all we need. We do not find God. God finds, has found, us. Luther said a rather pithy thing in that 1518 Disputation that relates to this: “The thirst for glory is not ended by satisfying it but rather by extinguishing it.” How this applies here: when we think we are on a journey to find meaning and purpose that is somehow mysteriously out there for us to discover we will simply always keep looking and never be satisfied (thirst not satiated) because we’ll be thinking there is something, just there, around the corner, that will bring a completion for us. So, rather, this: it’s not that there is no meaning and purpose in life, it’s that it’s not out there for you to find but right there exactly where you are. 

All this is not to say, of course, that there is not room for improvement in the things of our life: the disciplines around learning, finances, health/nutrition/fitness, vocation, interpersonal-social relationships, and emotional wellness are always with us and call out to us for engagement. It is to say that there is nothing Ultimate there in any of that. They are vital and important, even fun. But they are not Ultimate. They will not provide you with your Meaning and Purpose if you seek to find that there. Meaning and Purpose can only be given to you, never attained, never searched for and found. 

So, to “pay attention” to our surroundings, to “pay attention” to our life, to listen to our life is to rest in knowing that all we have and need is given to us and will never be lost to us. We are forever found.

So, live on my friend! And remember how I told you the story of my friend Bishop Harold Jansen’s years ago talk to those young people at a conference most yearning to know what direction they were to take in life and how God’s answer to their question of “what am I supposed to do with my life” is the amazingly liberating word of “Surprise me!”?

Well, that is what I wish for you: that freedom in knowing that wherever you go and whatever you do you have already arrived and it is the best place ever to be!

Grace, and all best,

Johan