Poems: Mindfulness in a Nutshell

At the end of our Mindfulness class, our teacher, Miranda Bevis, would read a poem. These convey succinctly and powerfully what Mindfulness is about. 

• This first section of this web page provides copies or links to the Mindfulness poems from my 8-week mindfulness class and retreat day.  These are very popular--dare I say "standard fare" in mindfulness courses.
• The second section has links to other websites with Mindfulness poems. 
• The last section includes poems from ongoing "Keep Your Mindfulness Alive" refresher courses, and mindful poems I've come across more recently.  

Are you a Returning Reader? Scroll to bottom of page for newly added Mindfulness poems. Note: I have posted interpretations of some of the poems on this:  web page. 
Wow! Great Discovery!  "A Year of Being Here" -- Three years of one-a-day mindfulness poems curated by Phyllis Cole Dai. 
I welcome your suggestions via the comments box. One of these days I'll get around to reorganizing this poem collection, sigh. Cheers and best wishes!
Photo credits:  Celia Kozlowski.
-----------------------------------

Eight Weeks of Mindful Poems

The Summer Day
By Mary Oliver Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
With your one wild and precious life?

-----------------------------------

Autobiography in Five Chapters By Portia Nelson, from Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

1) I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost... I am hopeless.

It isn't my fault

It takes forever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don't see it.

I fall in again.

I can't believe I'm in the same place.

But it isn't my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.\I see it is there.

I still fall in... it's a habit.

My eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

4) I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I walk around it.

5) I walk down another Street

-----------------------------------
Another  by Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.
-----------------------------------
  The Guest House
Jelaluddin Rumi,  translation by Coleman Barks

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
-----------------------------------
 The last part of Little Gidding, one of T.S. Elliot's Four Quartets. Perhaps the most famous lines:

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

-----------------------------------

 Lost by David Waggoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

-----------------------------------

The birds have vanished  by Li Po

The birds have vanished in the sky,

and now the last cloud drains away. 

We sit together, the mountain and I, 

until only the mountain remains.

--------------------------------------

Love After Love by Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

-------------------------------------
 Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye --

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

(This link will take you to the poem as featured on Garrison Keillor's daily radio snippet, Writer's Almanac. Here you can read the poem, but also hear Keillor's excellent reciting of it (if you have RealPlayer--You do have to listen through the lengthy almanac entries for that day before he gets to the poem.) This powerful, emotional poem is very difficult to read well. I think Keillor nails it. I was hoping to find a YouTube video of Ms. Nye reading her poem. I found her reading other poems, but not this one. If you could use a laugh, here is a link to a  video of the poet reading another of her poems,  Boy and Mom at the Nutcracker Ballet.)
-------------------------------------

Other Mindful Poetry Web Pages

• A compendium! UC San Diego's page of poems used in MBSR classes
• Don't feel like reading? Listen and watch on this YouTube Mindful Poetry Channel
• A Mindful-Poem-a-Day!  A Year of Being Here's website 
• A crowd-sourced collection -- any member can contribute or rate mindful poems or scraps of wisdom at the Wisdom Commons (membership is free)
• From the Frey Art Museum in Seattle, a page of Poetry from Mindfulness Meditation
• From the MBSR in Central Pennsylvania's website
• An unusual collection from Carrie Katz, a mind-body practitioner in Berkeley
• A Mindful Poetry Facebook page!
• A small, beautifully illustrated collection from Dorset Mindfulness Centre's website
• The Mindful Living Programs' Mindfulness and Poetry for Transformation web page--includes lots of poems by Rumi
• BeMindful.Org's Favorite Poems page (includes quite a few poems we had in our class).
• The Awareness and Relaxation Training (A.R.T.) and Mindful Living Programs' Poetry for Transformation page.
• And for something completely different, a dissertation on the use of poetry in Mindfulness classes, by Anna Black from Bangor University,  "Does Poetry Matter in the Teaching of Mindfulness Interventions?"

Mindful Poems from  Refresher Sessions and Elsewhere

Keeping Quiet -- by Pablo Neruda from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
This one time upon the earth,
let's not speak any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.
The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.
What I want shouldn't be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.
If we weren't unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,
if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.
Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I'll go.

-----------------------------------
14

From The Kabir Book: Forty Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, Translation by Robert Bly. Beacon Press, Boston, 1993

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:

What is this river you want to cross?

There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.

Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or resting?

There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.

There is no towrope either, and no one to pull it.

There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!

And there is no body, and no mind!

Do you believe there is some place that will make the Soul less thirsty?

In that great absence, you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;

There you have a solid place for your feet.

Think about it carefully!

Don’t go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of Imaginary things,

And stand firm in that which you are.

 -------------------------------------

A favorite author, Rob Bell, posted this mindful meditation on his tumbler/facebook pages on Feb 8, 2013:

Q: If you could give any advice for the day, what would it be?

Walk, don’t run.
That’s it.
Walk, don’t run. Slow down, breathe
deeply, and open your eyes because there’s
a whole world right here within this one. The
bush doesn’t suddenly catch on fire, it’s been
burning the whole time. Moses is simply moving
slowly enough to see it. And when he
does, he takes off his sandals. Not because
the ground has suddenly become holy, but
because he’s just now becoming aware that
the ground has been holy the whole time.
Efficiency is not God’s highest goal for your life,
neither is busyness,
or how many things you can get done in one day,
or speed,
or even success.
But walking-
which leads to seeing-
now that’s something.
That’s the invitation for every one of us today
and every day, in every conversation, interaction,
event, and moment: to walk, not run. And in doing
so, to see a whole world right here within this one.

-----------------------------------
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935).  from: Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro: Complete Poems

IX

I’m a keeper of flocks.
The flock is my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and with my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

Thinking about a flower is seeing and smelling it
And eating a piece of fruit is knowing its meaning.

That’s why when on a hot day
I feel sad from liking it so much,
And I throw myself lengthwise on the grass
And shut my hot eyes,
And feeling my whole body lying on reality,
I know the truth and I’m happy.

-----------

You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life  —

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

-----------------------------------

One of my own (with apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson):

Analgesic Meditation -- by Celia Kozlowski

I am too old

to lose myself 

amidst a tableau of toys

sprung to life upon the duvet

So I listen intently

to the sound of blood

coursing through my ears.

I explore the contours

of my headache

like a blind man 

feeling the face 

of his beloved 

after being long apart.

I observe minute details

of each passing breath

like a careful scholar.

In this way the comforter

becomes my counterpane,

a garden of versus,

and the groaning ache

which takes my life

subsides.

-----------------------------------

Prelude to the Dance -- by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
(quoting just the last two lines. Please see the poem in full):

What if you knew that the impulse to move in a way that creates beauty in the world will arise from deep within and guide you every time you simply pay attention and wait?

How would this shape your stillness, your movement, your willingness to follow this impulse, to just let go and dance?

------------------------------------

Happy the Man -- John Dryden's  Imitation of Horace

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine,

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
------------------------------------
Found poem from Lecture to a Book of the Month Club by Frederick Buechner

"Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless.
Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful.

If you want to know which,
pay attention to    
what it means to be truly human     
in a world that half the time               
we’re in love with               
and half the time               
scares the hell out of us...  

The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. 
The good dream.  
The strange coincidence.   
The moment that brings tears to your eyes.  
The person who brings life to your life.

Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues."
-----------------------------------------

Big Hourglass

by L J Booth

I remember back in college
It was sometime in the fall
I was walking by a Maple tree
Flaming red and tall

And as I passed beneath it
One leaf out of that flame
Fell right into my breast pocket
And I haven't been the same

It was like the whole world
Was a big hourglass
Top is like the future, bottom like the past
And at that narrow middle part
Where only one grain can pass
Is the ever-living moment
And I want to understand
That simple grain of sand

It was somewhere in Nebraska
We'd been driving quite awhile
When I glanced over at my daughter
She had this very special smile

It had this extra little wrinkle
Like my grandma's used to do
And for a moment it was real hard
To tell the difference 'tween the two

It was like my family
Was a big hourglass
My daughter, like the future
Grandma, like the past
And at that little moment
Where only one smile can pass
The two were joined together
And I want to understand
This simple grain of sand

Spring is coming on here
There's moisture in the breeze
The river is running higher
Buds are popping in the trees

So I picked up my guitar today
I didn't really have a plan
And this song just kind of jumped right out
Buds were popping in my hands

And it's like the whole world
Is a big hourglass
Top is like the future, bottom like the past
And at that narrow middle part
Where only one grain can pass
Is the ever-living moment
And I want to understand
That simple grain of sand
Like my daughters's smile
Like that Maple leaf
I will give to you this moment
Because it's my belief
That the middle of the hourglass
Is this place where I now stand
So I'll do my best to sing
And try to understand
This simple grain of sand.

-----------------------------------------

A Blessing For One Who Is Exhausted

--by John O'Donohue, from "A Book of Blessings"
found on "Daily Good" webpage for awakin.org

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.
-----------------------------------------

Thanking a Monkey
Kaveri Patel

There’s a monkey in my mind
swinging on a trapeze,
reaching back to the past
or leaning into the future,
never standing still.

Sometimes I want to kill 
that monkey, shoot it square
between the eyes so I won’t
have to think anymore
or feel the pain of worry.

But today I thanked her 
and she jumped down
straight into my lap,
trapeze still swinging

as we sat still.

-----------------------------------------
Ich Glaube an Alles noch nie Gesagte
 ~ Ranier Maria Rilke

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
-----------------------------------------

Walking Meditation 

by Thich Nhat Hanh, from Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh
© Parallax Press, 1999.
Take my hand.
We will walk.
We will only walk.
We will enjoy our walk
without thinking of arriving anywhere.
Walk peacefully.
Walk happily.
Our walk is a peace walk.
Our walk is a happiness walk.

Then we learn
that there is no peace walk;
that peace is the walk;
that there is no happiness walk;
that happiness is the walk.
We walk for ourselves.
We walk for everyone
always hand in hand.

Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom under our feet.
Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Print on Earth your love and happiness.

Earth will be safe
when we feel in us enough safety.
-----------------------------------------

Advice

by Dan Gerber
from Sailing through Cassiopeia, © Copper Canyon Press, 2012

You know how, after it rains, 
my father told me one August afternoon 
when I struggled with something 
hurtful my best friend had said, 
how worms come out and 
crawl all over the sidewalk 
and it stays a big mess 
a long time after it’s over 
if you step on them? 

Leave them alone, 
he went on to say, 
after clearing his throat, 
and when the rain stops, 
they crawl back into the ground. 
-----------------------------------------

Hold Out Your Hand

by Julia Fehrenbacher
Posted September 5, 2014 on "A Year of Being Here daily mindfulness poetry" website 

Let's forget the world for a while
fall back and back
into the hush and holy
of now

are you listening? This breath
invites you
to write the first word
of your new story

your new story begins with this: 
You matter

you are needed—empty
and naked
willing to say yes
and yes and yes

Do you see
the sun shines, day after day
whether you have faith
or not
the sparrows continue
to sing their song
even when you forget to sing
yours

stop asking: Am I good enough?
Ask only
Am I showing up
with love?

Life is not a straight line
it's a downpour of gifts, please—
hold out your hand. 
-----------------------------------------
Landscape Survey 

by John Brehm* 
From Sea of Faith (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004)
*Link to another John Brehm poem at the bottom of this page

And what about this boulder,
knocked off the mountaintop and
tumbled down a thousand years ago

Kakabika Falls, Michigan. Photo by C. Kozlowski

to lodge against the streambank,
does it waste itself with worry
about how things are going

to turn out? Does the current
slicing around it stop itself mid-
stream because it can’t get past

all it’s left behind back at
the source or up in the clouds
where its waters first fell

to earth? And these trees,
would they double over and
clutch themselves or lash out

furiously if they were to discover
what the other trees really
thought of them? Would the wind

reascend into the sky forever,
like an in-drawn breath,
if it knew it was fated simply

to sweep the earth of windlessness,
to touch everything and keep
nothing and be beheld by no one?
-----------------------------------------

What Now is Like
by Tamara Madison
Posted Feb 21, 2015 on A Year of Being Here website

Let’s go see what Now 

is like outside. 

Let’s open the door 

look up at the sky 

feel the cold night air 

on our noses. 

Let’s look at our breath 

as we walk out 

to the street. 

Let’s look at how Now

holds the moon 

in black branches, 

how stars shine down 

with a Now from long 

long ago, how 

they stare down 

on our Now which 

has coaxed them 

to wink at us. 

Let’s listen 

to the night sounds 

that rove the dark Now 

beneath the traffic. 

Let’s stop, look back 

into the Now at the end 

of the street; there 

is something there

but I know it is behind us

in a place called Then

where our footprints

have forgotten

we ever made them.
-----------------------------------------

Any Morning

by William Stafford, from Ohio Review (Volume 50, 1993).
Text as posted on The Writer's Almanac (11/26/2012) and
A Year of Being Here 21 April 2015

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won't even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
-----------------------------------------

maggie and milly and molly and may

by e.e. cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may

went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

milly befreiended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone

as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

-----------------------------------------

Nuptial Song

by Susana Thénon Posted on A Year of Being Here website, 9 June 2015

i got married

i got married to myself

i said yes

a yes that took years to arrive

years of unspeakable suffering

crying with the rain

locking myself up in my room

because i—the great love of my existence—

was not calling myself up

was not writing to myself

was not visiting myself

and sometimes

when i dared call myself

to say: hello, am i OK?

I would deny myself

i even managed to write my name in a list of bores

i did not really want to join

because they babbled too much

because they’d not leave me alone

because they’d fence me in

because i could not stand them

at the end I did not even pretend

when I needed myself

i intimated to myself

nicely

that i was fed up 

and once i stopped calling myself

and stopped calling myself

and so much time went by that I missed myself

so i said

how long has it been since my last call?

ages

must have been ages

and i called myself up and i answered and could not believe it

because even if it seems incredible

i had not healed

i had only shed blood

then i told myself: hello, is it me?

it’s me, i told myself, and added:

such a long time no see

me from myself myself from me

do i want to come home?

yes, i said

and we got together again

peacefully

i felt good together with myself

just like me

i felt good together with myself

and so

from one day to the next

i got married and i got married

and am together

and not even death can separate me

from The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman (Oxford University Press, 2009). Translated from the original Spanish by Renata Treitel. 

Adios

by Naomi Shihab Nye Posted on A Year of Being Here website 31 December 2015

It is a good word, rolling off the tongue;
no matter what language you were born with
use it. Learn where it begins,
the small alphabet of departure,
how long it takes to think of it,
then say it, then be heard.

Marry it. More than any golden ring,
it shines, it shines.
Wear it on every finger
till your hands dance,
touching everything easily,
letting everything, easily, go.

Strap it to your back like wings.
Or a kite-tail. The stream of air behind a jet.
If you are known for anything,
let it be the way you rise out of sight
when your work is finished.

Think of things that linger: leaves,
cartons and napkins, the damp smell of mold.

Think of things that disappear.

Think of what you love best,
what brings tears into your eyes.

Something that said adios to you
before you knew what it meant
or how long it was for.

Explain little, the word explains itself.
Later perhaps. Lessons following lessons,
like silence following sound.

Let Evening Come

By Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come

*Getting Where We're Going By John Brehm from the January 2008 issue of Poetry magazine Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting,  nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers.  If I had a car in this town I'd  rig it up with a rear bumper horn,  something to blast back at the jackasses  who honk the second the light turns green.  If you could gather up all the hornhonks  of just one day in New York City,  tie them together in a big brassy knot  high above the city and honk  them all at once it would shiver  the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if  they were made of sand, and usher  in the Second Coming. Christ would descend  from the sky wincing with his fingers  in his ears and judge us all  insane. Who'd want people like us  up there yelling at each other, trashing  the cloudy, angelic streets with our  candywrappers and newspapers and coffeecups?  Besides, we'd still be waiting for    the next thing to happen in Heaven,  the next violin concerto or cotton candy  festival or breathtaking vista to open  beneath our feet, and thinking this place  isn't quite what it's cracked up to be,  and why in hell does everybody  want to get here? We'd still be  waiting for someone else to come  and make us happy, staring  through whatever's in front of us,  cursing the light that never seems to change.

Extract from Childhood Friends

by Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks/John Moyne
Hear a reading presented on BBC Radio 4 at 26:30
From The Essential Rumi, Published by HarperCollins.
. . .
What is the mirror of being?
Non-being.

Always bring a mirror of non-existence
as a gift. Any other present is foolish.

Let the poor man look deep into
generosity. Let the bread see a hungry
man. Let kindling behold a spark from
the flint.

An empty mirror and your worst
destructive habits, when they are held
up to each other,
that's when the real making begins.
That's what art and crafting are.

A tailor needs a torn garment to
practice his expertise. The trunks of
trees must be cut and cut again
so they can be used for fine carpentry.

Your doctor must have a broken leg to
doctor. Your defects are the ways that
glory gets manifested. Whoever sees
clearly what's diseased in himself
begins to gallop on the Way.

There is nothing worse
than thinking you are well enough.
More than anything, self-complacency
blocks the workmanship.

Put your vileness up to a mirror and
weep. Get that self-satisfaction flowing
out of you! Satan thought, "I am better
than Adam," and that *better than* is
still strongly in us.

Your stream-water may look clean,
but there's unstirred matter on the
bottom. Your Sheikh can dig a side
channel that will drain that waste off.

Trust your wound to a Teacher's surgery.
Flies collect on a wound. They cover it,
those flies of your self-protecting
feelings, your love for what you think
is yours.

Let a teacher wave away the flies
and put a plaster on the wound.

Don't turn your head. Keep looking at
the bandaged place. That's where the
light enters you.

And don't believe for a moment
that you're healing yourself.

Jesus, Joseph, and Mindfulness

I can't actually recall how I first heard about "Mindfulness." Maybe it was from a Facebook posting from "Action for Happiness," a secular movement in the UK that promotes increasing the world's happiness quotient.  Or it might have been via indulgence of my fascination with Positive Psychology, a newish branch of psychological science that, in contrast to the first century of work -- which focused on pathology of mental illness -- instead studies factors that make for a positive, healthy, and happy life.

At any rate, at some point I started noticing studies on the benefits of practicing mindfulness. Or perhaps I should write Mindfulness_tm -- it's been tidied up, formalized, taught to a small army of teachers, and packaged into a standardized 8-week course. I hunted around and found there were several of these courses not too far from home.

So it was that last night I found myself taking a full 10 minutes to explore the minutest details of a single raisin (yes, raisins, do make noise if you hold them up to your ear and squish them gently) and lying on the floor with six strangers as Miranda Bevis, a former NHS doctor, guided us through a 25-minute "body scan" which I am obliged to practice daily (accompanied by her slow, soothing voice on a cd, "... Bring your focus to the area around your left hip.... Repeatedly bring the mind back to the body, just exploring whatever you are experiencing. There is no 'right way' to feel...")

Miranda places the origins of Mindfulness  -- as well as the origins of her enthusiasm for it -- within the realms of traditional psychology -- and also Buddhist meditation. She relates how John Kabat-Zinn developed Mindfulness as one of the few helpful practices for people with painful but medically untreatable illnesses of the mind or body. He incorporated a sanitized, secularized version of Buddhist meditation into Mindfulness practice.

Miranda said she had been won over by the power of Mindfulness in helping the clients in her psychiatric practice. And at a taster session before the first class, she related how helpful Mindfulness had been to her late husband, who had motor neurone disease (the British term for Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS.) He hadn't expected it to be worthwhile, disliked it ... but ultimately found it transformed his life. I think it was Miranda's relating of this experience that  induced me to plop down my £225 for the course with her. Street cred.

Another exercise at the first class entailed pairing off with another course participant and discussing our reasons for being there, what we expected to get out of it, what we thought the obstacles would be. I rather inarticulately told my delightful partner, a reception (kindergarten) teacher, that I was hoping it would bring me some clarity in discerning the course of my life, and maybe greater happiness. I think I also mentioned hope for a sort of buffering effect on my moods. Mindfulness can't eliminate the stressful, depressing things that happen to us, but it can, I hope, reduce the intensity of my reactions to them -- make the lows less low and the anxious times less rattling.

My expectations might sound like a tall order, but consider this list of demonstrated benefits mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Mindfulness (psychology):

•  ...reduces distractive and ruminative thoughts and behaviours, reducing distress...
• ...emotional regulation ...
• ... declines in mood disturbance and stress
• ... increases over time in purpose in life, social support, and decreased illness symptoms.
• ...increased brain and immune function ...
• ...a lower financial-desire discrepancy and thus ... the perception of “having enough”.
• ...improved academic performance for women.
•  ...faster recovery time from exposure to a negative experience...

One should take this with more than a few grains of salt. I've left out a lot in the ellipses -- the underlying research, the caveats, qualifications, the 'needs further research' bits. As a science writer, I see neuroscience, including psychiatry and especially positive psychology as being in their infancy. There are so many problems just with basic definitions and appropriate controls for experiments, etc etc that the eyes glaze over just reading the comparatively non-technical stuff on Wikipedia. I am pretty skeptical of much of the research.

I think the real basis for my hopes for Mindfulness are actually a gut-instinct, emotional suspicion, call it "faith" that what one really needs to improve life is to be more present to what's going on right now, right where you are. And that is what seems to be at the core of Mindfulness. To wit: Kabat-Zinn's definition:

"Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the moment, and non-judgementally."

"Being Present" to me implies not replaying past troubles like a broken record. It implies not engaging in fruitless worry about the future. With less distraction from brooding and worry, Being Present could mean greater engagement in creative work with concomitant "flow" -- getting totally caught-up and engaged in what you're doing. Being Present implies noticing the world around you, including the everyday miracles and wonders right beneath our noses -- thus encouraging savoring and appreciating life, which makes for daily happiness. It implies really listening to -- and thus loving -- the people in our lives, thereby improving relationships, and again building happiness.

I feel a bit like a dilettante taking a course that was developed for people with more significant psychological problems than my garden-variety troubles. At the taster session for Mindfulness, people described their hopes that the practice would help them cope with addictions, sleeplessness, and extreme stress. I suppose the same dilettantism blame could be tossed at the field of positive psychology. Why should such talented psychological thinkers and research resources be lavished on maximizing the happiness of people who are basically doing okay? Especially when there are so many deeply hurting people in this world.

The way I rationalize this for myself is that perhaps, if I can get my act together via Mindfulness, I will be better able to help other people get their acts together, too. And perhaps this holds for positive psychology as well. By pursuing comparisons -- maybe even following gradients -- between unhealthy psychological states and healthy ones, the experts can come up with things that help the unhealthy become healthy. I know research on healthy bodies informs the understanding of disease. Just this morning on BBC 4 they were discussing Alzheimer's Disease researchers' need for post-mortem brain donations from elderly people who die with healthy (non-demented) brains. But I digress.

Martin Seligman, a father of positive psychology, defends the non-luxury status of his field with great magnanimity:

 "most of Positive Psychology is for all of us, troubled or untroubled, privileged or in privation, suffering or carefree. The pleasures of a good conversation, the strength of gratitude, the benefits of kindness or wisdom or spirituality or humility, the search for meaning and the antidote to 'fidgeting until we die' are the birthrights of us all."

Seligman's mention of spirituality and the some of the other pleasures of life being studied by Positive Psychology highlight one aspect of the field that particularly intrigues me: its links to spirituality. With a bit of arm-waving I could make a case for Jesus being the first Positive Psychology practitioner.

But back to Mindfulness ("You may find your mind wandering. That's just what minds do. Each time you notice your mind has wandered, gently bring your attention back...") Kabat-Zinn might have stolen mindfulness concepts from Buddhism. But I if I turn my head just so and squint a bit, I can imagine secularized Mindfulness being re-homed comfortably within Christian religions.

Think of the meditation involved in prayer, psalm, song. Aren't these ways of focusing the mind, bringing it back from its perambulations into worry and anxiety? Think of Jesus' 40 days of mindfulness in the desert. Or consider Jesus' invitation to consider the non-worried, beautifully arrayed lilies of the field. Recall the young Jesus getting so caught up in the flow of his youthful discussions with the rabbis at the temple that he forgot to head home with the parents. Jesus was consistently present to people around him. He was a here-and-now sort of guy who proclaimed the Kingdom of God was at hand -- the richest, fullest life possible--if we could just ditch the behaviors that separate us from God, one another, and ourselves.

Similarly, the Mindfulness handout, Session 1 says,

"The aim of the course is to increase awareness so that we can learn to live more fully, and, instead of always reacting automatically, we can respond to situations with choice."

Besides hearing echos of the full life Jesus offered, I see in the Mindfulness aim a harness for the charging elephant of automatic emotions and intuitions that Jonathan Haidt describes as dominating human behavior and leading to our many and profound societal disagreements over politics and religion. I see a way of helping myself to create equipause moments when I can stop and reflect rationally before jumping in automatically with an idiotic response that serves no one well.

Jesus mostly focused on individuals, as does Mindfulness. But by summing over lots of changed individuals, could we indeed build toward heaven on earth? If not with the help of religion, could this begin by more people paying gentle, non-judgmental attention to their thoughts, their bodies, and their surroundings, here and now? It's a smallish and happy step, I would guess, from there to focusing intentionally, kindly, and non-judgmentally on the people around us.

An appendix: Mindfulness poems

About-Face and Grace

I think I was four years old when I was introduced to the sociological concept of "face." My parents told me about a bizarre story, reported in the Ann Arbor News, of a foreign student who had been hiding out in the attic of our church for some months. One-shot Googling on "Student hiding out in First Methodist Church Ann Arbor" turns up the story, and it's even weirder than I recollected. The student actually managed to hide out in the church for four years! [Did my blog inspire this redredge of the the story by the University of Michigan's alumni magazine?]

The police archives record that the year before I was born, exchange student Cheng Lim had come to the University of Michigan from Singapore. His studies were sponsored by the church. But Lim was not doing well going into his fourth year  at Michigan:

In 1955, Lim did not apply for the fall term as he was distressed due to low grades, feeling he had failed the people that had brought him to Ann Arbor. In an attempt to fake his suicide, Lim walked down to the Huron River and threw his passport into it. Later that night he went to the First Methodist Church and climbed a ladder that led to an attic on the north side of the church. For the next four years, Lim lived in this cramped attic space. During the night he would sneak down to the kitchen for food and water.

Lim's poor grades had put him in a situation where he stood to "lose face" with friends, family, and the people who'd supported his studies. But his over-the-top response was incomprehensible to me. How could "facing up" to your shortcomings be worse than the living death Lim chose for himself? The story does have a happy ending. When Lim was eventually discovered, the church and members of Ann Arbor's business community helped him renew his visa and then supported him while he completed a master's degree before returning to Singapore. That's what I call grace.

 Although the term "face" wasn't used in the show, a few days ago the concept appeared in a BBC discussion of foreign soldiers being murdered in Afghanistan by local police or soldiers. A British officer told the BBC that one contributing factor in some of the first incidents had been foreign officers shouting at Afghan troops they were training. This was just the everyday sort of yelling military people do, but evidently being shouted at causes such severe loss of "face" among the Afghans that they resort to killing the person who humiliated them. Cultural-sensitivity training has since reduced that source of "green-on-blue" violence, but now other problems (including insecurities from perceived lack of commitment on the part of Western forces, signified by the impending withdrawal) have increased the attacks. Again it is difficult for me, as a Westerner, to understand the moral processing that leads to the decision to kill someone who has called attention to your shortcomings.

Then there's Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" which made it clear that Japanese soldiers were expected to kill themselves rather than be dishonored by surviving (or being captured) when other members of their platoon had been killed. I now see from Wikipedia that this is related to a military version of "face":

 "Bushidō (武士道?), literally "the way of the warrior", is a Japanese word for the way of the samurai life, loosely analogous to the concept of chivalry. It originates from the samurai moral code and stresses frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery, and honor unto death."

I gather from the Wikipedia page that the concept of  'face' came into the English language from Chinese, where the concept is conveyed by two different words referring to social status and moral character. Less dramatic than Lim, Iwo Jima, and green-on-blue shootings, but still bizarre from a Western perspective, is the high value placed on "face" in the social status sense. I remember hearing of fantastically expensive Chinese restaurant banquets that hosts really couldn't afford -- but were happy to pay for to buy "face" with status guests.

On the one hand you could dismiss "face" as just a weird Asian status thing. But as the Wikipedia page indicates, elements of it are fundamental to  humanity. Experts quoted there say that "face" is essential to functioning in one's community. At the high end, it translates to prestige, influence, authority, and power; minimally it conveys "trust within a social network" and undergirds cooperation. People feel good when "face" is in place, and stung by its loss. It's a bit like personal moral capital -- goodwill that makes for collegial relationships and an easier life within your hive. It is part of the delineation of your group and your standing within it.

But "losing face" is what I'm obsessed with at the moment. It starts with the agony of realizing you have made a mistake or fallen short of the mark in some way. But the key next bit is how you feel about the mistake and yourself as an imperfect person,  and how you expect the people around you will react (assuming others know of your transgression). Making a mistake is always going to be painful to some degree, but the strength of different moral values folds into it, both for you and for the people who've learned of your shortcomings. Clearly loyalty to one's group would figure much more intensely in Oriental cultures. I am also struck by the fact that the prime examples of dire consequences of "losing face" involve men. Does this reflect a fundamental difference in the societal roles of men and women?

A very provocative blog that I read recently proposed some of these issues came into play for Jesus and, at least from some perspectives,  he stood to disgrace himself in an incident recorded in Mark 7:24-37.  The blog article, "Jesus Was Not Colorblind: Racial Slurs and the Syrophoenician Woman," concluded that Jesus uttered a racist slur--calling a Gentile woman a dog:

a woman whose young daughter had an unclean spirit heard about Him, and she came and fell at His feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, a Syro-Phoenician by birth, and she kept asking Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 But Jesus said to her, “Let the children be filled first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”
28 And she answered and said to Him, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs under the table eat from the children’s crumbs.”
29 Then He said to her, “For this saying go your way; the demon has gone out of your daughter.”
30 And when she had come to her house, she found the demon gone out, and her daughter lying on the bed.

The blog's author, David Henson, says scholars have made various interpretations whistling past the fact that Jesus is calling the woman a dog. Maybe it was wink-wink, air-quotes "little dogs." But Henson thinks the straightforward interpretation is that Jesus was saying his miracles were for Jews like himself and not for the sub-human likes of the pleading Gentile woman.

As a good Jew, Jesus would have been reared to give thanks daily that he was born a Jew, not a Gentile, a man and not a woman. Jesus could not help but become entangled by such a sexist and racist snare. Jesus, given his embedded culture, could not be colorblind. And neither can we.

Our species is born to defend and live in groups. But Henson goes on to say the real jaw-dropping bit -- and maybe the reason this is in the Bible --  is not that Jesus said something offhand that was clearly in conflict with his values (as conveyed in the rest of his teachings.) Yes, He made a mistake. The amazing bit was what He did at that point:

When this woman, in boldness, confronts Jesus and his racist, sexist slur, Jesus listens, and hears. It is the only time recorded in the gospels in which Jesus changes his mind. “But even the dogs get table scraps,” she replies, a complex response often required of the member of the “lesser race” who stands up to dismissive racism even while accepting its instituted, ugly, dehumanizing order.

Jesus is astounded, the holy wind knocked out of him. A moment before, she was but a dog to him. In the next, the scales fall from his eyes as he listens to her and sees her for what she truly is, a woman of great faith, a moral exemplar, his teacher. Jesus does the most difficult thing for those of us born into the unfortunate privilege of dominance or prejudice. He listens. And allows himself to be fundamentally changed. When it happens, when we finally have ears to hear, we will never be the same...

Jesus fell into one of the types of trap that the rest of us stumble into every day. This time it was dismissal, ignoring, or disrespecting people from another tribe. He had already lost a bit of face just by being approached by the non-Jewish woman. Jesus could have "saved face" by not doing the about-face. He could have ignored her. But instead he hears her, tacitly admits his mistake, and changes course. That's when the love and grace begin. The woman's daughter is healed; Jesus is redeemed in my estimation; he's made a mistake, taken it on board, then corrected course. He's shown us how to handle being wrong. HINT: It's not by committing virtual suicide or hiding in a church attic for years; it's not by murdering or insulting the person who pointed out your shortcomings. It's by reversing with grace.

I must have been in my 40s when I realized that losing face is not as bad as I feared. I remember a kindly counselor giving me some constructive criticism--that I was thin-skinned; that I tended to jump into conversations too energetically with the witty riposte, even when someone else was getting to an important point and needed to be heard. I went home and fumed. How dare they? But when I finally found some equipoise and let this sink in, I realized the counselor was right; I was wrong; I had nothing to lose and much to gain by making a course correction. Life could be better if I were a little tougher, listened more and wisecracked less. I have found healing and grace in this -- as have, surely, the long-suffering friends around me.

It's always going to feel awful to make mistakes. I hate it. But I am grateful that I live in a fairly forgiving hive, imbued with the grace that permits admission and redress of shortcomings, so people can move on without compounding pain by hiding mistakes, pretending they didn't happen, trying to argue that wrong is right, punishing oneself, or punishing others for lovingly speaking the truth about our deficiencies.
-----------------------------------------
After-thoughts:
As it turned out, this reading was the subject of our curate's sermon last week. Jess gave a great sermon and I've invited her -- and Father Peter, a retired priest who lives in our village, to share their thoughts, along with my ever-thoughtful and thought-provoking Dear Husband -- a little writing-fest on the parable. But I'm not sure it's going to happen.

So Jewell's comment (thanks Jewell!) inspired me to just summarize these additional thoughts here for the moment. If curate Jess, Father Peter, or DH come through, I'll guest-post their words here.

Jess, like David Henson, mentioned some other ways people have skirted the painful thought that Jesus called the Syrophoenician woman a dog. Maybe it was a lesson to the disciples, standing in the wings. In the next breath, however, Jesus is doing what he does -- healing. It's a mystery, Jess says, but just the sort of thing that keeps challenging her in the Bible.

As I was congratulating Jess on a good sermon, she mentioned that Father Peter had suggested yet another gem of a reading. As I understand it, (and this is third-hand) Father Peter said that the "demon" that might have beset the Syrophoenician woman's daughter was racism. In the mother's interaction with Jesus -- persistently seeking him out, then drawing this reaction from him, she had done the work needed to rid the daughter of her demon. The woman was to go home and find her daughter healed. This is consistent with other healing that Jesus does -- or maybe I should say catalyses -- where he essentially says, 'your faith has healed you.'

This interpretation is also consistent with research findings about how parents of out-group children can help them cope with racism. In his book Nurture Shock, Po Bronson summarizes the work of April Harris-Britt. A little (but not a lot) of preparation for bias was helpful for coping. And coaching kids to be proud of their minority ethnic history

 "was exceedingly good for children's self-confidence; in one study, black children who'd heard messages of ethnic pride were more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort and ability."

I am having a nice little revel imagining the Syrophoenician woman going home, rushing in joyously to see her daughter in a new light. Fist-pump, YESSSSS, He DID it! Sweetie, We're IN. We're Syrophoenicians and even the God of the Jews LOVES US!

One last thing that interests me in a very equipoisey sort of way is that these various readings are not mutually exclusive. You can find the parable mysterious and provocative; you can find reassurance in Jesus reversing course and thereby demonstrating how this can be the beginning of grace; and you can also say the woman managed to heal the racism she had been subject to -- just by (sorry-) doggedly being herself and  speaking up for her race and her daughter.

Unapologetic Paths to God

I was ambling around hyperspace this week -- can't even remember what I was looking for -- and came across the following on Jane Goodall's wikipedia page:

When asked if she believed in God, Goodall said in September 2010: "I don't have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I don't know what to call it. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that's bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it's enough for me."

That immediately struck me in its similarity to a bit of Francis Collins' description of his coming to faith. I'm a great fan of Francis Collins. I was lucky enough to interview him in 1989 after he and fellow geneticist Lap-chee Tsui (along with others) discovered a key gene in cystic fibrosis (the cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator). Collins was already known at the University of Michigan as a man of faith. He famously volunteered (by putting an ad in the campus newspaper) to talk to any students about faith -- outside of his office hours (so it couldn't be deemed a violation of separation of church and state).

Collins would go on to lead part of the massive endeavor to sequence the entire human genome; to head NIH's Human Genome institute; and he now heads all of NIH. Through it all Collins has maintained his humility, delightful sense of humor, and accessibility to the people around him. Or at least he still did when I was at NIH six years ago.

In 2007, Collins continued his "coming out" as a Christian in his book, "The Language of God," in which he describes how his faith developed. Late in the book, after going through all the rational arguments he had considered for and against the existence of God, Collins writes:

I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall,  hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

For both Collins and Goodall, the real sense of the truth of the existence of God came not through logic, reason, and rational proof, but from a sudden spark of feeling sensed amidst the wonder and beauty of nature.

Kahlil Gibran observed: “Faith is an oasis in the heart which can never be reached by the caravan of thinking.” Jonathan Haidt, writing that most human activity is governed by our automatic, emotional reactions would probably agree with Gibran and not be surprised by Collins' and Goodall's descriptions of their ineffable encounters leading to spiritual belief.

I suppose I did have a moment when I almost got to the brink of such an encounter, albeit much more mundane--this is not going to make anyone's top 10 lists of rousing testimonies. It would have been in the early 1990s after I had just moved to what turned out to be quite a dangerous neighborhood. The neighbor on one side warned me that the neighbor's house on the other side was a cat house and a crack house. "But don't worry, I have a gun."

At that point I started worrying and decided to get to know the neighbors in the back yard -- a Methodist church. I began attending regularly and continued, if for no other reason than the people were friendly and I really didn't know -- or much want to know-- anyone else in the neighborhood.

I don't remember the name of the first pastor I met at the church -- he was only there for part of my first year in Hyattsville. But some months into my regular attendance at Ager Rd. United Methodist, he invited me to join. In a brief exchange with him I said I wasn't sure -- I couldn't honestly say that I heard the voice of God or put much stock in accounts of Biblical miracles from the Guy in the Sky reaching down to touch human lives. The pastor invited me just to consider whether perhaps I believed in transcendence.

I'm not sure if it was that day or after that I walked to the church through the back yard as my cherry tree was in glorious bloom in the brilliant spring sunshine. The beauty took my breath away. Beauty. Yes, there was more involved there than just photons of light bouncing off my retinas and triggering neuronal impulses... More than just the ancient evolutionary dance of flowers and pollinators... Yes, there was transcendence here; there was more to life than met the eye, more to life than what science could measure.

As I was thinking this morning about scientists connecting with the Creator through their awe in Creation (and there are many more examples than Collins, Goodall and my cherry tree) my Dear Husband called my attention to a passage from a book that will be released this week by Francis Spufford, called "Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense." The Guardian ran a long excerpt that convinced both DH and me that we need to get this book.

Doubtless I'll have more to say when I've actually read more than just this excerpt, but Spufford basically seems to be throwing up his hands on logically proving God's existence. He can't know God and neither can you or the New Atheists, he says. But what he does know is that there is something very recognizably human, something emotionally right going on in religion.

"Stop worrying about God and enjoy life" (a slogan plastered on busses by activist atheists) might be good for the few people left in the world who aren't enjoying life due to their fear of a disapproving God. But it just doesn't cut it for the rest of the world:

... suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, you are povertystricken, or desperate for a job, or a drug addict, or social services have just taken away your child. The bus tells you that there's probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, and now the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it's true, is that anyone who isn't enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. What the bus says is: there's no help coming.

Spufford doesn't invoke miracles or any other mechanism for how God might help at this point (I'll be interested to see what the rest of the book has to say) -- only that taking away hope is a very cruel version of reality, if reality it is. For Spufford, like Collins and Goodall, it is emotional reaction that affirms his faith. But in his case, it is not Nature that is the trigger; it's Mercy, as detected in the beauty of the middle (adagio) movement in Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, heard in a cafe after a horrible awful no-good night spent fighting with the Missus.

The world is wider than you fear it is, wider than the repeating rigmaroles in your mind, and it has this in it, as truly as it contains your unhappiness. Shut up and listen, and let yourself count, just a little bit, on a calm that you do not have to be able to make for yourself, because here it is, freely offered. . .

. . . So to me, what I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy-washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it's not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it's the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by, emotions like that. That's what makes it real.

Reasoning and thinking to support the emotions come limping along well after the emotional recognition, Spufford says, before slightly apologizing for the logical, rational defence--but not for his very human, emotional embrace of spirituality:

I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that...

.

Biblical Priorities--Back to Love

I had a brilliant boss when I worked at the National Institutes of Health, one Michael Gottesman, the Deputy Director for Intramural Research. His job entailed decisions that a lot of people would find agonizing. For Dr. Gottesman, solving organizational problems was pretty much like analyzing research problems. He went about it methodically and logically ( and also with great compassion and good cheer, making it a joy to work for him).

One of the most useful lessons I learned by watching him was to ask the question, "What's most important here?" before you throw yourself at a problem. Dr. Gottesman used this approach very successfully in deciding how to make some excruciatingly large budget cuts. The first step was looking at where the Intramural Research Program was spending the largest amounts of money. It seems obvious, but cutting 5% out of an item that represents half your entire budget yields a lot more savings, possibly with less pain, than whacking a larger percentage out of many smaller pots.

I think it was this sort of thinking I tried to apply when I sat down with the massive text of the Bible. With people proof-texting right, left, and center, throwing out conflicting philosophies and advice, including stuff that is incredibly difficult to buy into here in the 21st century, where do you start? What's most the most important thing? The oldest bits? The most-repeated bits?

I think Christians would probably say, if you had to pick, the most important bits would be "What He said," i.e. the words and ideas attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. But where do you go from there? There are lots of red bits in the Bible -- including some parables and other passages that are very ambiguous.

I had one suggestion from a very reassuring article that I found yesterday, written by Jim Burklo, an ordained United Church of Christ pastor who serves as the Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California. The article is reassuring in suggesting "How to live as a Christian without having to believe the unbelievable," as the title says. Basically, just get on with the important --and difficult -- things Christ said to do, Burklo recommends.

He goes on to tip the Sermon on the Mount as the key:

The key to Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7.  This is the first teaching that Jesus gave his disciples and a crowd of followers.   He exhorts them to love their enemies.  He urges them to be humble in prayer.  He tells the poor that they shall be blessed.  He asks them not to worry.  He tells them not to judge.

Pretty reasonable choice, I'd say. But still not what I would pick as the key. I would turn to Luke 10: 25-28, just before the parable of the Good Samaritan. An expert in Hebrew law is quizzing Jesus and asks what you need to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus kicks the question back to him, saying what does the law say? The man answers "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself. " The words aren't actually Jesus' but he says this is the right answer.

There are a lot of things Jesus doesn't say here, including a good few that noisy Christians today claim are the critical keys to Heaven. I think this is an awfully good 30-word philosophy of life, with His stamp of approval, a fine lens for viewing most of life... First, love God. Then love your neighbor -- and if you have any questions about what's loving, use how you would be loved as a gauge. (And note well, all you people who have difficulty loving yourself -- He IS agreeing you should love yourself.)

Jesus goes on to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan to answer "who is one's neighbor?"In a general sense, He says you should define your in-group, the people you will help, to include anyone you spot who needs your care -- even people from what would normally be considered a different group than yours.

Jesus doesn't elaborate on loving God here -- I guess he figures everyone knows what that means. But sadly, I'm not sure that I actually do. I don't have any confidence that I can even know what God is like (except to the degree this was exemplified by Jesus) and I am very doubtful about the versions of God that some people confidently put forward-- sometimes they are remarkably and conveniently like the God that they would very much want to exist -- a God that punishes people they don't like and gives wonderful lives and riches to their sort of people.

Brain studies show that when people think about God while in a scanner, the same parts of the brain light up as light up when they think of their dominant parent. I gather that's what psychoanalysts have suspected for a long time. And, come to think about it, Jesus did refer repeatedly to God as "Father."

I'm humbly skeptical, beset with doubts about the limitations of the human brain when it comes to thinking of that which passes all understanding. Mostly we humans can only get our amazing imaginations launched a few steps beyond the earthbound.

So maybe the thing to do amidst doubt is just to imitate -- try to do what He did. When Jesus went to the wilderness to pray, was this his way of "Loving God?" Or was Jesus' version of loving God manifest in what he did every day -- healing people and helping them to put aside the things that separated them from God?

Preaching to would-be preachers, Rob Bell urges those who would proclaim The Word to start at the beginning of the Bible -- with Creation. He waxes eloquent in describing how we humans exercise our creative powers -- mirroring the Creator God and in small ways extending that work. Is it possible to love the Creator by immitating Creation through your own creating and nurturing?

Or is loving God just doing what it says on the license plate of my old pastor's convertible: being "OPN 2 GOD"? That might mean trying to tune out the usual voices in your head -- the voices that you know are your own nagging worries, doubts, desires -- and listening to the silence and the sounds just beyond the birdsong or wind whispers.... Looking for the unexpected, unsought notion; that moment when there is one certain answer, YES, to a question you had never previously thought to ask.

And loving our neighbor (as ourselves) -- how does one do that? Now I loop back to Love, the place I wanted to start this blog. The biggest part of Loving, says The Road Less Travelled, consists of listening, really putting yourself aside for the moment and listening deeply, to people. And beyond that, or more generally, giving of yourself to others (or even yourself) to help them grow in healthy ways. (The author, M. Scott Peck, says that this type of love is inherently beneficial to both the person receiving the love and the person giving it.)

So, when the proof-texting and arguing begins, my first response is to hold up the Luke verses and see how the different sides line up next to that ruler's edge. What is the best way of loving God or loving my neighbor (as myself)?

Kay's Toothbrush & the Makings of Miracles

If everyone believes in something, implicitly or explicitly, perhaps the real foundation of my belief  is belief in belief. Or, more precisely, belief in the power of the mind to move a person to seemingly miraculous achievements and a "reality" otherwise unimaginable without this trick of faith.

I refer to this as a trick of faith from the cold, cruel standpoint of an outsider. If you don't share someone's belief system,  their world view, gods, and "miracles" may look delusional, silly, weird, desperate--even dangerous if they lead to unrealistic expectations or harmful behaviors.

Consider Kay's toothbrush. Our dear friend, Kay Ledingham, must be 93 now -- but don't go "Cluck-cluck, sweet old dear." Kay still has a very firm grip on her numerous and bodacious marbles. She has been a spiritual counselor to several people over the past decade and hosts a weekly Bible discussion group in her home. Over the course of her life, Kay has variously been a wife, mother, dog-breeder and trainer, commander of an airbase during WWII, church warden, and psychiatrist.

Kay is a trove of wonderful stories. One concerns her advice to clients when they were deeply stuck and couldn't find their way out of some rut: "Get yourself a new toothbrush." She says, in point of fact, this advice worked well for many people.

Or consider the miracle of Pip, the first grandchild of another dear friend. Pip was born months premature -- at about the term the National Health Service  considers the minimum gestation needed for viability outside the womb. Mother Charlotte first asked for prayers just that her pregnancy would hold up long enough for the baby to reach the critical gestation period. After delivery -- weighing 2 pounds -- baby Pip came through countless crises in the neonatal intensive care unit for weeks after she was delivered. The statistical chances are slim for babies born so prematurely.

I was among many people relaying texts and emails asking the folks I know who pray to hold this baby, her family, and medical team in their prayers. What else could we do? There was an incredibly difficult bit of surgery needed to drain excessive fluid from the ventricles of Pip's brain -- surgery with low odds of success. The doctors decided to chance it, and Pip was one of the lucky ones.

Charlotte, her husband Pete, and my friend, "Granny" Sandra, deeply believe in the power of prayer. They are part of a lively independent chapel in a nearby village. They enjoy the contemporary, low-church, friendly atmosphere there. I'm sure there were many, many people at their church praying for Pip, as well as lending personal support to the family.

Jess, then our Team curate, preached on the miracle of baby Pip one Sunday. She had probably been getting Pip prayer request from several directions. "It worked," Jess claimed in church -- the power of prayer, demonstrated! I pointed out that the "miracle" was also a testimony to the skill and dedication of the National Health Service staff at the neonatal intensive care unit.

I'm happy to say that Pip continues to defy the odds. She's been nailing her developmental milestones. Fact. She's alert, lively, and growing up quickly, still a miracle baby to her Mum, Dad,  and Granny.

But was there a "real miracle" here? If so, was it due to the power of prayer? Or was it the family's faith and deep belief in the power of prayer -- like a placebo effect, which has been shown to be very real? Or was it due to the people around the family continually supporting their faith and encouraging them with love (which they repeatedly said they felt) and the way this support kept up their spirits through the ordeal (community support effect)? Or was it the way the family's spirit, love, and ferocious belief in Pip inspired the health workers caring for Pip to do their very best for this long-shot baby (infectious optimism)? Does she continue to defy the odds because the family is super-motivated to give the very best of care to their living Miracle?

Maybe this miracle is, ultimately, a complex, self-reinforcing series of beliefs, interactions, and events involving everyone within the circle of people surrounding Pip and her family which was the potent force that ultimately drove Pip's outcome out of the "expected" range and way, way up to the far end of the curve of potential outcomes.  Could this "miracle" be reproduced, and, if so, how -- what are the key ingredients?

 I don't now recollect how I stumbled upon it, but last week I  found my way to a wonderful little Esquire article, (be warned, folks, this IS Esquire, which is your typical men's magazine website...)  by A.J. Jacobs. Here's a taste:

Self-delusion is not a defense mechanism or coping technique. It’s the most human thing we have. It’s faith, existential courage, essential to mixing a decent drink, loving our spouse, writing a sentence. It’s what separates us from the animals and the boring. 

I’m not just advocating positive thinking; I’m advocating a willing suspension of reality. Irrational exuberance. It’s not a matter of seeing the glass as half full or half empty. In reality, the glass is usually 5 percent full and 95 percent empty. But you have to force yourself to believe that it’s half full so that you can engage and try to solve problems and bring the real percentage up to 10. Because otherwise it’d drop down to zero... 

Jacobs goes on to say that this willful self-delusion--telling himself that the audience would like him just fine--was what made him "not bomb" when giving a talk following the comedian Jonathan Winters (who got two standing ovations) on stage. This is small potatoes as miracles go, but it does show the low-end value of belief. Even when it's as flimsy as self-avowed self-delusion, your beliefs can potentially improve performance and nudge outcomes a bit toward the brighter side.

I'm not sure exactly how this or any other trick of faith or self-delusion works -- maybe it's a placebo effect, but do placebos work even if you know you're getting a 'useless' remedy? Is there some sort of "positive priming" effect whereby positive stimulation to the brain of one sort spills over to other brain functions? I've heard of this kind of thing -- for example, telling students that they are really working hard during an exam (whether they are or not) actually helps them perform better. Touching a soft piece of silk improves your mood. Or perhaps more relevantly, touching newborns reduces their chance of death.

Maybe the real question is not how beliefs or self-delusions work, but rather, which ones will work -- even bring "miracles" -- for a given person in a given situation. As St Augustine suggested, our beliefs can't change the laws of physics. Nor can they push back the hands of time or bring back the deceased. In this sense, there is no such thing as miracles. But I do believe that your beliefs, can --maybe, sometimes -- change the odds a bit -- in ways science does not (yet?) understand within the realm of possible outcomes. No more, but no less.

So take your pick. Believe in the power of a New Toothbrush, Prayer, or Self-Delusion. Believe in the power of Love, Communion, Community, Caring for Others, or the Power of Relationships. Believe in your Therapist, your Priest, Yourself, or in Positive Psychology. Believe in Science. Believe Research will eventually show us how to solve any problem. Believe in your Heroes and Role Models, Rock 'n Roll, Heaven, or your Church. Believe your late Loved One is just there, helping you through this moment. Believe in being Really Present, right here, right now. Believe in Mindfulness, in Listening to Silence. Believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Believe in the Tenets of your Faith, the Bible, Placebos, Nature, or Grace. Be Open to God. Believe the Holy Spirit will whisper Great Truths in your ear. Believe in Jesus.  Believe in the Three-in-One. Or just believe in Belief.

Hearing a few of my thoughts about "miracles" put my Dear Husband in a foul frame of mind. He is unhappy to hear that anyone is invoking the power of prayer in an un-nuanced way as the source of miracles. Dear Husband asks, What does that say  in the case of the two kids from our village who died of brain cancer? We all prayed for them, too! Those evangelicals just gloss over the times when people pray for miracles and they don't come. Or they say the people praying aren't part of the True Faith and God really doesn't love them. And there have been lots of instances in which belief has been exploited over the millennia -- Just send us money and we'll secure that needed miracle!

I repeat, faith cannot accomplish the physically impossible, so it's unwise to put your God to the test that way. It might be empowering to stretch your faith as far as you can; but disillusionment, heartache, and their fruit will come from the expectation that Your Preferred God will, on demand, accomplish the physically impossible -- i.e. work miracles as most people understand that word.  Honest faith purveyors will acknowledge that. Be on charlatan alert if someone asks you to pay to procure the impossible.

I realize it's difficult, even impossible, to know sometimes what does defy the laws of nature. And science is only beginning to understand the powers of faith and what's susceptible to its nudges.  Beyond this,  there are all the serendipitous, unbidden  "miracles" -- dazzling grace that brings not what you asked for, but something different--and even better! Does belief make that more likely? Or does it just make you more likely to notice and appreciate such gifts?

Finally, if lots of different beliefs can improve people's lives, it's just wrong to disparage other people's beliefs. [Moment of self-doubt here -- is that what I'm doing here???] It's wrong to exploit others through their beliefs. And, as Jonathan Haidt's book shows, people are going to believe what they're set to believe, so however excellent your gods, you really can't expect anyone else to share them. So stop proselytizing--if your neighbor's belief helps them (and doesn't hurt others) -- let the miracles flow!

Teen Mortification & The Life Cycle of Faith

So where do you start solving the "wicked problem" of the collapsing church? Does it matter? Or can we just pick a place, anyplace, and work to solve the little bit we can or desperately must fix; Keep fiddling with that until it's working as well as possible; Figure out what we did and whether there are elements that might be applied to another bit of the problem; then start tackling that next bit? Was the eternally apropos, ever-sensible, and insightful early church re-builder, Francis of Assisi, the original solver of "wicked problems" when he said: "Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible"?

Call it random, but one possible starting point that popped up on my radar a few days ago comes from a blog article on church youth programs by Neil MacQueen (from "Sunday Resources.net, A Church & Tech Blog"). (My thanks to Peggy Watts Jeffries for putting this link on Facebook.)

MacQueen, with 30 years' experience in youth ministry, argues that churches that pull youth out of worship for their own youth discussion groups are dead wrong. As the mother of a recently teenaged son, I know he's right about the forces he thinks are at work. MacQueen says the keys are: NOT taking kids out of worship services; and NOT putting them in discussion groups with other youth. Instead, he urges getting kids to DO activities with the church in a very individualized program geared specifically to their skills and interests, working one-on-one with them and letting them pick up faith by osmosis (i.e. seeing it in practice) rather than being preached at.

MacQueen doesn't put it this way, but the psychological truth is that teens and pre-teens are constantly on the brink of mortification. They are busy doing the important work of figuring out who they are; who their friends are; how they fit in; relationships with the opposite (and same) sex. There's nothing easier than embarrassing a pre-teen. So put them in a room together and ask them to talk frankly about issues that even adults find difficult to talk about... and you have the makings of instant mortification and long-term disinclination to be involved with the church. MacQueen says the disappearance of youth from churches as soon as they can get away is testimony to fundamental errors of this approach.

[As an aside, and to see if my dear son is reading my blog, I'll give my favorite example of pre-teen mortification. Dear son's name is "Sam" and I came up with what I thought was a good bit of physical schtick: I would take one of Sam's little hands, put it flat between my hands, hold up our three hands together like that and ask the friend/audience, "Do you know what this is?" And when they gave up, tell them: "A Sam handwich." Hilarious, right? Not for Sam! After about the age of 7, he absolutely refused to tell this joke or let me tell it, no matter the audience.]

Instead of agonizing personal disclosure in groups with other youth, teens should be put to work, MacQueen says, doing what they do best or whatever they can be inveigled to take on in the church. Being a bit of a techy, MacQueen's been successful in getting teens to tutor younger children in computer workshops. (Of course not every church can come up with a computer room....). He also suggests getting teens to help adults teach younger children in regular Sunday school; assist or attend adult Sunday school; or assist with the regular worship service -- ushering, etc. In a rather High-Candle Anglican church in Bonita Springs, FL, my husband was impressed with involvement of considerable numbers of youth (boys and girls) as incense-swingers, Gospel procession participants, acolytes, and ushers.

Another superb example of effective youth ministry -- which I think hits all of MacQueen's keys -- is offered by Bethesda (Maryland) UMC, led by the ineffable Amee Fansler and Pastor Ron Foster (who I see has actually written a book on the subject. I haven't read it, but the Amazon reviews seem enthusiastic.) Each year the BUMC youth have several opportunities to go off on service projects (the public schools affirm and support this by giving community service credits for working on these. All kids need community service credits to graduate in Montgomery Co.) Currently BUMC and Amee's Facebook "status" pictures show maybe 50 adults and youth who just returned from this year's service week in Tuscaloosa.

Some youth have been drummers, guitarists, and singers in BUMC's praise band; they organize and lead a (non-cringeworthy) worship service each year; and (with Amee's direction and a good supply of adult volunteers) run the gigantic, very community-based Vacation Bible School that attracts 300 kids for a riotous week in August. The youth do a lock-in 30-hour fast to raise money for WorldVision. They dress up to host elegant Valentine's Day romantic suppers as fund-raisers for the church. But my favorite of their fundraisers is "Mingo May": For a tidy sum, you can have a friend/ family/ neighbor's lawn "flocked" with large tacky plastic pink flamingos for 24 hours (then they disappear) in May.  Or you can purchase "Mingo Insurance" for a higher sum to assure that your lawn does NOT get flocked. (My dear sister got flocked the day before her home-garden wedding, but I couldn't possibly say who ordered that!)

BUMC youth don't leave the sanctuary during worship services, but do tend to have their own hangout section of the balcony. They have gatherings on various evenings of the week for different age groups (never been to one, but my impression is that they are action- rather than talk-oriented, especially for the pre-teens.) Members of the confirmation class are assigned a non-family adult mentor from within the church and meet with them one-on-one to talk about faith issues and to do a project together. My assigned confirmand, Sara Foster (yep, the pastor's daughter -- gulp), was interested in scrapbooking, so she and I made scrapbook pages of one of BUMC's service trips. Low key. I did talk about my faith a bit and ask her about hers. I hope I didn't do any permanent damage.

I'm not sure of all the other ingredients in the confirmation program, but I do recollect that memorization was required. Sam already knew his Lord's Prayer. But I think he also had to learn a Bible passage by heart -- maybe the Beatitudes or the 23rd Psalm or the Ten Commandments? As tedious as memorization can be, I approve of memorizing a few of the most essential tenets of the faith. Keep to the essentials and try to have some fun doing the memorizing, but require it-- memorized bits sink deep into the psyche and worm their way into core values, perhaps. Or maybe they'll just be there as comforting lyrics for a moment when you desperately need them--like "The Mary Ellen Carter" (the most inspirational song I know), which is credited with saving the life of Robert M. Cusick when he was lost at sea after his ship, the Marine Electric, sank.

Stealing a page from the large Jewish community in Bethesda, the BUMC confirmation class celebrates after the event with a mass "Confirmitzvah"-- a giant party for friends and family, replete with food and frolics. Sam and his good friend and fellow confirmand, Daniel, invited their best friends from school; Sam's "Ba" (Grandad), Aunnie, and future step-Dad traveled to Maryland for the event, and everyone had a fun time. I think it was a great showcase for a church that is doing youth programs -- and a lot of other things  -- in a way that serves Christian faith well in the 21st century.

One of the best things about the BUMC youth programs and other programs is that they continue to evolve, adapt, and, I hope, improve. What I've written about is just the tip of the iceberg that I know about from my now much-missed life at BUMC, which drew to a close when I moved in 2006. Overall, Amee, the youth program, and BUMC appear to be going from strength to strength. It looks like it's still a happy church, a place people want to go on Sundays (and other days and evenings). It's got the Right Stuff -- however you want to gauge that. Surely other churches and other church anti-extinction efforts can glean some ideas about the nature of their problems -- if not the solutions -- by looking at MacQueen's model and examples like BUMC.

The success or failure of some of these experiments for saving or at least improving the church may not be known for many years--if ever. Despite making it through BUMC's confirmation class, my son no longer has any interest in church. Of course he's not a good test case, as we've left the USA and I've yet to encounter any churches here that are even vaguely like BUMC.

Recalling my own confirmation in the 1960s, I think First United Methodist Church in Ann Arbor basically made most of the mistakes MacQueen identifies. I remember "MYF" (Methodist Youth Fellowship)  and confirmation class as mortifying -- large, excruciating, gatherings of kids I did not want to be with (who were doubtless also forced to be there by their parents). I can't remember learning a single thing about faith. I witnessed nothing of the personal faith of the few adults involved, nor do I recall an invitation to think about or develop my faith. And, given the way they did things back then,  if they had, it probably would have pushed me from mortified to petrified. When confirmation day rolled around,  my parents were on one of their few trips without the kids. I think I took a taxi to church on my own.

I don't know whether my youthful mortification or my parents' sabbatical trip were to blame, but I pretty much dropped out of church after confirmation. I was married at "First Church" in Ann Arbor, but I didn't have further involvement with any church until more than a decade later. When I finally did come back, in my 30s, it's been for good, and despite constant and numerous doubts--an equipoise endeavor.

Is there a natural life-cycle to faith? Should church youth programs aim at getting young people to stay with the church throughout their lives? Or should they aim lower -- just try to help teens see the church as a place that's not too awful -- that they might want to come back to some day? Or should the goal be just to try to instill  some Jesus-values that people can practice throughout their lives, irrespective of church attendance? The latter would be a difficult result to measure, and maybe isn't going to keep churches alive, but strikes me as an impossibly wonderful end to the rainbow arching out from what's necessary and actually possible.