Author: Cherie Renae

You are tired and overburdened. Come! Rest. I will ease and refresh your soul. – Matthew 11:28 (CHT*)

I don’t understand. I did suffer clinical exhaustion, and I spent a year recovering. I’m not back to my old fighting self, but I’m making good strides.

I’m fifty-five years old. I only have forty or so years ahead of me – I need to make the most of them, not spend them ‘resting’. Relaxation is for my dotage, for when when I’m ninety-twelve.

This is my inner monologue every time I’m given the message to REST, which is every time I seek a word with the Divine, like I did this morning.

I don’t WANT to rest! I want to go play, and play hard. I don’t need to rest anymore. I’m not tired…

Except that, if I’m honest with myself, I am. I’ve worked hard. I’ve endured tragedy, strife, dreams realized and dreams lost. I’m bone tired of the struggle to survive, to thrive.

I just don’t understand what resting will gain me. More lost time? I lost so much to my husband’s death – years spent immersed in numb gel, unable to feel others, unable to feel myself, except when the strongest of emotions burrowed in. I continued to move my body in appropriate motions – smile, pat, hug. But I didn’t feel it. Seven frozen years before the thaw and flood. Emotions restored. Life renewed. I don’t want to waste any more time.

To me, rest equals boredom – hours, days, months spent doing nothing. It’s my personal definition of hell.

But perhaps that’s not what Spirit has been saying. Maybe she’s not insisting that I let my physical, mental and spiritual muscles atrophy. Maybe there’s another message, one that I’ve been missing.

I decided to research the word ‘rest’. It comes from the Old English raeste meaning rest, bed, or mental peace. In turn, raeste comes from an Old Germanic word rasta, which was a unit of measure amongst nomads. ‘After this distance, it is time to rest.’ And the word translated‘rest’ in the Matthew quote is from the greek anapauo – which means to rest, to be refreshed, soothed, or to have a fixed abode – in other words, a home.

I’ve been on a lifelong journey for home. I’ve found pieces of it in people, houses and neighborhoods. But for most of my life, I’ve felt like a nomad – a homeless spiritual wanderer. Over and over in my journals is one beseeching cry – “Where is home?”

Now it begins to make sense.The Divine isn’t asking me to be bored. She’s inviting me to stop my physical, emotional and spiritual wandering. She’s offering to lead me home.

*(Cherie’s Heretical Version)

“You are not one for whom it comes easy.”

These are the words that came to me as I was shuffling cards this morning. It always takes a long time for the Tarot cards to feel right. This morning, I’d gotten impatient, and stopped at good enough. As a result, the cards were incohesive. So I picked them back up and started shuffling and shuffling….and shuffling. That’s when the phrase popped into my head.

I’m not one for whom it comes easy. It’s true with cards. It’s true with physics. I struggled in my college physics class. I kept forgetting things like GRAVITY when solving homework problems. In frustration, I decided to drop out, and went to inform my professor.

“No, no, you mustn’t drop out,” he protested. “You understand it better than anyone else in the class.”

“But I’m always getting the answers wrong,” I replied.

“That’s because you’re looking at it on a deep level. The other students? They’re just memorizing formulas. They’re going to be in big trouble when we get further along, and they have to understand, not just memorize. You just need ‘stare at the wall’ time. Take time to think. To puzzle. To stare at the wall, eyes unfocused, and wonder.”

. . . . . . . .

I remember my uncle sitting beside me at my husband’s funeral. “You’ve had a hard life,” he said, patting my hand. “It’s always been tough for you.”

I was shocked. What was he talking about? I’ve owned a home since I was twenty-one, been married, a member of church, held gainful employment, earned my bachelor’s degree – how is this a hard life?

Looking back, I see that he spoke truly. For many reasons not pertinent to this conversation, it HAS been a challenging life. I am not one for whom it comes easy.

But my physics professor had it right. I just need stare-at-the-wall time – lots of it. Because whether it’s physics or Tarot or life, I dive below the surface to stare upon the face of the deep.*

And that does not come easy.

* Genesis 1:2

If Ringo’s song is going through your head now, here’s a YouTube video: It Don’t Come Easy

PS: After I posted this, I wandered over to Facebook, and in my news feed was this quote from Hugh Jackman: “”I truly believe that the job of an actor and the drive of an actor is simulating the internal journey in life which is to get deeper and deeper into our understanding of who we are.”

My spiritual focus, what I understand to be true in this moment:

I believe in the Divine –
Father, Mother, Architect of the Universe.

I believe in Jesus Christ, our brother, true child,
conceived in holy Spirit and born of young Mary,
who suffered under worldly authority,
was executed and buried with soul unfettered.

I believe on the third day he returned,
now wholly inhabiting both physical and spiritual realms,
fully united with the Divine.

I believe in holy Spirit,
in humans united with inspired accord,
in the communion of all life,
the forgiveness of error,
the resurrection of creation
and in life unending.
Amen.

“In belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.” – T. M. Luhrmann

There’s a difference between belief and faith. Many people think you have to have belief before you can have faith, but that’s exactly backward to the way most people experience spirituality.

At least, that’s the opinion of T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford. Her article is thought-provoking: Belief Is the Least Part of Faith.

It mirrors my experience. Ten years after I’d first experienced and immersed myself in Christianity, I looked upward and said, “I’m done playing pretend. I don’t know if you exist or not. I can’t *make* myself believe, and I’m done trying. What I can do is struggle. Every day, I offer up the struggle, only the struggle, because that’s all I have to give.”

Why did I struggle? And I don’t mean, why did I question, because if we’re honest, we’ll admit that we all question.  I mean, why did I bother to struggle? Why did I wrestle? Why didn’t I just walk away and join the secular worldview?

The reason is, I experienced joy in faith. I experienced purpose and communion with others and with the universe. Whether I believed seemed less important than whether I felt connected – umbilically connected – with the cosmos.

So, every day, I offered up the struggle. Years later, I realized I wasn’t struggling anymore. Somewhere along the line, belief had merged with faith. Now, I still struggle with exactly what it is I believe/have faith in, but that’s a different article. 🙂

If you liked Luhrmann’s article, check out her book, “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God“

A story is told about Jesus. Here’s how it goes:

There was this young rich guy who got all excited when he heard Jesus speak. He asked Jesus, “Hey, how do I live the life you’re talking about?” Jesus quickly ran down the ‘how to be a good person’ list, and the rich guy nodded even more excitedly. “Yep, yep, I’ve done all that since I was a kid. Give me more, man!”

So Jesus said, ‘OK. Get rid of the stuff that ties you down, and come along with me!” As we all know, the rich guy didn’t follow Jesus. Instead, he went away heartbroken, because while he loved what Jesus had to say, he loved his stuff even more.

This story is often used to smite the rich. Bad, bad rich people! Look at you, turning your back on Jesus and clinging to your filthy lucre!

But a question arose as I read this today. How many people do I know, rich or poor, who’ve sold everything they have to follow the path of the Christ? How many have left family, property, and all sense of home for the adventures of the Spirit? The answer: I don’t know ANYONE who’s done that. Not personally. Even clergy bring their families with them and settle into comfortable homes as they follow a spiritual call.

I don’t think this story is about *those* rich people. I think it’s about you and me. What would WE do if Jesus asked us to drop everything and follow? What if he said, “Just walk away, child. Let go of the striving, of the worry, of the conflicts. Leave your health-robbing lifestyle. Just let it all go, and come.”

Would we do as he asked, or would we say, “We can’t do that! There are children to raise. There’s the job and the mortgage and the new hybrid car. There’s furniture and hobbies, and expansive vacations to escape from it all.”

Would we rationalize our decision by saying, “It’s not US that he’s talking to! We’re not rich, we’re the 99%. It’s not us that he’s asking to let it all go. It’s THEM. It’s Bill Gates and the Woz, it’s the sheikhs and the stars. They all have too much. We, on the other hand, deserve what we’ve worked for.”

But this isn’t a ‘would we’ exercise, it’s a ‘have we’ exercise. And the truth is, we haven’t.

The story for the rich young guy is a reminder to listen, to believe and to dare. So here’s my question: What does the Divine ask of you and of me? Will we follow or will we walk away mournful?

“To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and the exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together.” – John O’Donohue, Anam Cara  (order the book here: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

To be holy is to be whole. So easy! All we need to do is embrace the totality of ourselves.

Wait. That’s not easy at all. How the heck am I supposed to balance the mystic and the mundane, kairos and chronos, old memories, new experiences, my aging body, my deepening wisdom? That’s a task for a thaumaturge, not a mortal like myself.

Maybe that’s why so many religions emphasize one aspect of wholeness above another. On one hand, we have earth-centered Paganism, while on the other is Buddhism, with its emphasis on escaping the corporeal. Of course, I’m oversimplifying, but organized religions do tend to lean in one direction, ignoring (or reviling) the other. Christianity does a psychitzophrenic dance in the middle, abhoring bodily pleasure for its own sake while insisting on the resurrection of said flesh.

I don’t think balance means motionless stasis. Rather than a goal to be achieved, balance is like a teeter-totter, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes another. The ride is fun, but we generally don’t want to land too heavily on one end, because a jarring bump occurs if we do.

As a child, I loved standing in the middle of a teeter-totter, leaning gently one way and another, controlling the sway, enjoying the movement. That analogy works for me. As I gain skill, I can enjoy greater movement while retaining my balance. The better we develop our physical, emotional and spiritual muscles, fine-tuning our inner ear, the better we are at staying on – and enjoying! – the ride.

In recent years, I’ve explored many of the major (and some of the minor) religions. By ‘explore’, I mean I’ve read the wikis that describe their basic beliefs & tenets, read some of their sacred scriptures, visited their temples and looked at the wisdom writings of a few of their most fervent followers. Granted, it’s not an exhaustive study, but it’s given me a taste of the culture, the people, and the god(s) or goddess(es) of these paths. I’ve looked at Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Baha’i, Paganism and others. My spiritual understanding is enlarged by this exploration. Yet each time, my inquiry serves to reaffirm my commitment to the path of the dusty-footed, bloodied Semite we call Jesus.

My understanding of his mystical path does differs from that of many who also call themselves Christian. For example, I don’t believe Jesus ever claimed to have an exclusive relationship with the Divine. I don’t believe he was the *only* child of God, and I don’t believe he saw himself as such. I think he is a Boddhisattva (to borrow from another religious tradition) who illumines a path we ALL can walk.  But Jesus goes beyond, because unlike other Boddhisattva’s, he does cross over – and then returns.

I believe that we (and the entire universe) come into existence beautiful, perfect, good. We are not born sinful or ‘fallen’, predestined for punishment because of primogenitorial peccancy.

There is no hell. Early church shepherds fabricated a tale of eternal damnation to frighten a theologically diverse flock into a single pen. It was a construct of political power, not theology.

I don’t believe God created us, found our performance lacking, and imposed upon himself draconian rules that required him to sentence everything he created to ever-lasting torment – and then ordained the murder of his child as a work-around to the rules.

I do believe Jesus died and rose again, and in so doing showed us that we are both spirit and matter, both human and divine, and our destiny is to achieve perfect balance in this life. I believe that he stands before me, laughing, arms outstretched, inviting me to joy, to a life of deep fulfillment and yes, to divinity.

Am I a heretic? In the eyes of some, probably yes. In the eyes of the Galilean whose Spirit fills me, I don’t think so. And his is the opinion that matters.

to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else – you must fight the hardest battle and keep on fighting.  — e.e. cummings

When we choose to be ourselves, the world will push back. Hard.

But we can learn to hold our feet firmly: to gently sway, like martial artists, out of the tornado path of angry coercion.

And when the whirlwind  has passed, there we will be, still ourselves.

“Never cosign for a loan unless you are willing to assume the debt. Never loan money unless you are willing to forgive the debt. Never let money be more important than relationship, or you will probably end up losing both.”

This was my response when I was asked for advice recently.

I first learned this lesson in my twenties, when my husband and I foolishly cosigned a loan for acquaintances, who then (of course) defaulted and disappeared.

Since then, I’ve given money without expecting to be repaid. That means I’m never disappointed, and I’m often delightfully surprised when it returns! I’ve also turned down requests for assistance, because I know my boundaries and I take responsibility for them.

When it comes to money, possessions, time, and to our physical, emotional and spiritual selves:

Never give with strings attached – give generously or not at all. 

I have a dear friend whose teeth, car and home all needed attention at the exact same time. It was STRESSFUL and expensive. He commented, “I hate adult stuff. I’m done with it for now.”

His comment disquieted me, but it took a bit of inner reflection to figure out why. I finally realized it’s because I don’t think of those as ‘adult’ things. What they are is maintenance – unavoidable activities and expenses that result from possessing bodies and things. Honestly, that’s partly why I’ve been drastically reducing my collection of worldly goods. Less maintenance!

True maturation gives us wings, not anchors. Real adult stuff is about daring to dream. About creating pathways for our dreams. About bravely placing our feet, one after another, on those paths. With all due respect – and much love – to my friend, THAT’S adult stuff.

The rest is just maintenance.