Souljourning

by

A week ago, I and my grandson Jake – 2 years old – stood next to a little creek behind our house in Ojai.  The sun shone gold on the water.  There was a rippling little flow around a rock in the creekbed, and Jake stared at it for a long time.  “Fountain!” he said, pointing at it.  A few hours before, we had gone with the family to the Ojai park downtown, where there is a big fountain, which Jake had approached slowly, reverently, fascinated by the movement of the water.  Now he was seeing something similar in the creekbed.

I was enchanted by his enchantment.  There we stood, sixty-six years apart in age but united in timeless wonderment.  He at the water, myself at him. 

Both Jacob and I are following our natural pathways of spiritual development.  He nurtures my spirituality, and I nurture his.  We’re “souljourning” together.

St Francis is said to have said this line:  “Preach the gospel at all times.  Use words only if necessary.”  In fact there is no evidence that St Francis of Assisi ever uttered these words.  But he did say the following to his brother monks:  “The preacher must first draw from secret prayers what he will later pour out in holy sermons; he must first grow hot within before he speaks words that are in themselves cold.”  Good advice for preachers like myself.  And good advice for everybody else, too – We must all draw from our secret prayers what we’ll later pour out in our words and deeds.  We must first grow hot with life within before we bring our words and deeds to life in the world.

I watched my grandson stare at the creek in silence for a period at least as long as a standard Protestant sermon.  And the gospel I received in that time with him was as profound as that in any sermon I’ve ever heard.   And I hope I can pass along at least a glimmer of that message to you.

God is love.  Love is attention: open hearted, open minded attention liberated from preconceptions and agendas.  Jake appeared to give that kind of divine attention to the creek, turning his head upstream and downstream with a serious expression on his face.  As the creek commanded his attention, so Jake commanded mine.  We were one in the attention that is the love that is God. 

We don’t need to teach 2 year olds anything about God.  Jake is better at God than I am.  A month ago I took him on another walk, this one near where he lives in LA with my daughter and her husband and his little 9 month old brother Asher.  We approached the back of a Goodwill donation reception warehouse.  Jake stopped and stared at the workers pushing carts and raising truck lift gates and opening and closing doors.  For a long time we stood there in silence.  I had the urge to move him along toward the nearby park where there would be trees and grass and squirrels – features that I considered much more worthy of attention.  But Jake is a remarkably equal-opportunity attender.  Staring at the Goodwill warehouse was as sacred a moment to him as staring at the golden shimmer of sunshine on a tree-lined creek.   So I joined him in gazing reverently at the Goodwill warehouse.  And began, if only began, to appreciate it with something of the intensity of his experience. 

We’re at different places along our “souljourning” way.  He’s seeing and learning with me.  I’m learning from him to unlearn, in order to see more clearly and purely.  He’s re-introducing me to the joy of staring.  He stares without preconceptions.  But at the same time he is learning conventional conceptions and categories and names for things, as he needs to do.  Meanwhile, I receive from him an invitation to let go of my preconceptions and categories and names for things – and just receive experiences from them as they are, in themselves, on their own terms beyond my own.  I’m invited to look at what I call a creek and to temporarily abandon the word and concept of “creek”, and take time to let it be whatever it is outside of my definitions – and be fully present with my raw experiences of it.  The shimmer of sunlight on it, the quivers on its surface, the colors it reflects, the swirling of the algae at its bottom… all aspects and features that have an existence apart from my words for them.  All of them command the attention that is the love that is God. 

In the 14th century, a German mystic wrote a short letter to his fellow monks, called the Silent Outcry.  In it is this line:  “Learn how to let go of God through God, the hidden God through the naked God.”  His way was the via negativa, the apophatic way to the direct experience of God.  We get to God by letting go of our ideas, categories, names, and conceptions of the divine.  And this is the way of love…. To love another person is to let them go, to let them be who they are in and for themselves… to release our fixed conceptions of who they are.  To let go of who that person is to me, and open myself to encountering them as they are to themselves.  And that leads to encountering that person with awe....

To learn more about Rev. Burklo's free resources for parents and grandparents, visit the Souljourning website.