Putting ourselves back together
We spend our entire lives learning to love and be loved.
I had Achilles heel surgery last week! Thank you for your prayers and well-wishes.
This week’s newsletter is about putting ourselves back together. This a cross-post with something I wrote this week for the Wisdom Well, the blog of the Modern Elder Academy (with edits):
Leisure and wholeness
“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.” ― Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
In our work-obsessed culture, do we use work to try to escape ourselves? Are we constantly trying to justify our existence? I’m reminded of Elizabeth Gilbert:
"And y'know that there are some times I think: I have no value. I'm just loved.
I love to offer that to people as an alternative to the American purpose-driven life that says you don't have any value unless you're serving a purpose and what is your purpose and all of us are born with a purpose and you have to find your purpose and then you have to change the world with that purpose. All of that just makes the tendons in my neck stand out and gives me hives of anxiety that I'm doing it wrong or that I might never get there or that I had a purpose but then I failed and it should have been this one. All of that is just so tremendously anxiety-producing.
It's so inhumane to teach people that that is what the point of their life is -- is to *earn,* somehow, their presence on this earth through purpose and through what they contribute and it better be good. It's just so mean.
The reality is that you are not required to have a purpose at all -- that's what it means to be loved. You are not required -- *nothing* is required of you. Nothing is required of you. You are part of all of this. And could not be if you tried. And that, I think, is real peace."
Pieper describes leisure as "being at one with oneself." With leisure, we move to our True Self, to what both psychologist Carl Jung and Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr described as the real task of the second half of our lives. Being at one with oneself involves integrating the lost and hidden parts of ourselves. This act of “putting ourselves back together” unifies our selves, reclaims our integrity, and finds our internal coherence.
Pieper later points out that the Greek word for leisure (σχολή) is the origin of Latin scola, German schule, English school. I recently graduated from my Franciscan spiritual director program and I’ve come away believing that we spend our entire lives learning to love. Any mistake that we made that hurt others, we were learning to love. Any mistake anyone else made that hurt us, they were learning to love. And so many of our mistakes, both of commission and omission, were because deep down, we thought we had to earn it. We thought we had to do something to be worthy of it. But you don’t. Nothing is required of you. You are part of all of this. When you get that, you are whole and free.
My friend (and current FF student) has this quote on her website:
"A spiritual process is essentially about enhancing your perception."- Sadhguru
I believe the spiritual purpose of our lives is to learn to love and to be loved, free and clear.1 Any spiritual practice that enhances that perception is a worthy one. Our lives are meant for this. Not to have a “purpose,” or any of the other tricks of the ego: looking smart, successful, or accomplished. Not even being “good” or “helpful” or “making the world a better place” (subtly, also tricks of the ego). The only point is to love and be loved and then let the fruits of that love manifest by themselves. Love is the lesson, life is the curriculum, and the world is the field of practice. And paradoxically, as any mystic from around the world would tell you, when we lose ourselves to love, we come home to ourselves.
“The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.” - Henri Nouwen
Love and wisdom
My friends and mentors Matthew and Terces Engelhart once told me, “Nothing is understood until it is understood with love.” It comes from a Rudolf Steiner line: "Nothing can reveal itself to us which we do not love." That includes the inner, perhaps hidden, and undesired parts of you too.
In March, I got to spend time with Richard Rohr, cited above, at a retreat. He told me, as he’s coming to the end of his life, his entire wish is to see love as wisdom and wisdom as love, until at last, the two are the same. How beautiful. My friend Bill Broyles, in his 70s, wants something like this on his tombstone:
“He was a slow learner. But in the end, he finally got it.”
Haha. Love is the lesson and life is the curriculum. May you always be learning.2
'You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.' - Thich Nach Hanh
Not coincidentally, “Always Be Learning” was the tag line for my old business Portland Underground Grad School. When you see with the eyes of love, you see with the eyes of God. And as Sadhguru says, we are all learning to see.