Beginner’s mind. The ability to approach life from a fresh angle. I’m striving toward this daily, and know it’s a daily practice, not something you achieve and finish, swipe your hands and call it done. In the earthly form life is ever-shifting, and embracing the shifts— the movement under our feet—is the only way to go.
My favorite thing to do now is to read like I am drinking deeply from a well of the good stuff: books by mystics and visionaries, by humans who speak truth to power, who see the world in terms of what we cannot see as much as by what we can. Evelyn Underhill tops my list lately, especially her reflection on the “Our Father,” entitled Abba: Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer. In it she says “Love is a grave and ruthless passion, unlimited in self-giving and unlimited in demand….May all my contacts and relationships, my struggles and temptations, thoughts, dreams, and desires be colored by this loving reverence.”—a reflection upon “hallowed be thy name” as “the first response of the praying soul.” She goes on to point out our need for humility, and by golly I have been humbled over and over enough in middle age to see this point clearly (and yet somehow still question and doubt and wonder at these words): “Thus the four words of this petition can cover, criticize, and reinterpret the whole of our personal life; cleansing it from egoism, orienting it toward reality, and reminding us that our life and work are without significance, except insofar as they glorify God to whom nothing is inadequate though everything is dear.”
Equally on the bedside table is James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. In it there’s a moment that stopped me cold: “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
In both these approaches to humanity there is centrally love—the love which has made us, which continues to make us. The reality of which Underhill speaks is our reality as much as it might have been hers, in a time post-WWI, in the early 20th century. Baldwin grasps a core element, a consideration of the human spirit which rings true today as well—that indifference is the true villain of our lives in the 21st century just as much as it was in the 20th. Indifference is what drives an empty reality.
I have certainly felt both love and terror—sometimes both at once. Baldwin’s statement inhabits what I know in my bones, but put together he and Underhill have reminded me about looking toward what God has placed within, and shakes me out of my doldrums, out of my dull stupefaction too easy given the state of our world, never mind the deep challenges each of us face daily. I hold you dear, beloved; do the same for someone else.