This morning I went looking for something profound.
It was Han’s Day. Han is ten years old, and we call him our spiritual animator. Of all my sons, he is often the one who draws us most naturally toward prayer, contemplation, silence and God.
So I was lying in bed holding him this morning, listening carefully, wondering what might be there.
What did our spiritual animator want?
Bean and cheese quesadillas.
Of course he did.
He is ten.
And maybe that was profound enough.
We have been thinking a great deal lately about what it means to live in the Cloud of Unknowing.
We have spent much of our life trying to know: trying to anticipate, trying to calculate what might happen next, trying to know what other people wanted from us before they could become angry, trying to know how to avoid danger.
Trying to know whether we would have enough money. Whether we would keep our home. Whether someone was disappointed in us. Whether we were working hard enough. Whether we were doing life correctly.
Trauma can make certainty feel like safety.
But certainty is not actually available.
Increasingly, we are beginning to wonder whether some of our healing will consist not in finally becoming certain, but in learning that we do not have to be.
Stop Inhabiting Places That Hurt You
Before six this morning, something in us kept saying:
Share another story.
Share another story.
Share another story.
And something quieter answered:
Rest. Sleep. It can wait.
Then:
Stop inhabiting places that hurt you, that you are no longer part of.
Stop anticipating futures. Let God provide the future.
We have been doing both: inhabiting places behind us and inhabiting places ahead of us.
Neither is where we actually live.
A few hours earlier, I had awakened from a dream about MBH Architects, where we worked many years ago. We were back in the old offices. There was shag carpet. There was a little design object involving a surfer and a miniature surfboard. Tonia was there.
There was some disagreement. But something was fundamentally different.
We did not work there.
We seemed to be some kind of independent designer or design consultant. We could enter the place without belonging to it. We could disagree without surrendering ourselves.
We could still design.
The competence remained.
The institution did not own it.
That felt important. Not prophetic. Not a prediction about what we are supposed to do next. Just different.
Perhaps healing sometimes looks less like never returning to an old place and more like discovering that, when it appears again, it no longer gets to tell you who you are.
The Imagined Tribunal
Later in the morning another voice appeared.
This one we know very well.
How are you going to support yourself? What are you doing to find a job? What happens when nobody helps you anymore?
It sounded like people we have known. People who would look at our life and conclude that the obvious solution is to put all of this aside.
The boys. The Treehouse. The way we live together. The things that cannot be seen from the outside.
Stop being silly. Stop indulging this nonsense. Be serious. Do what you are supposed to do.
Get a job.
And beneath all of it was the thing that terrifies us most:
Perhaps survival will require me to abandon my sons.
No.
That is the page we are tearing out. That is the page we are putting on the fire.
The practical question remains: How will we support ourselves?
That is a real question. We do not know the answer.
But this is another question entirely:
Must this family sacrifice itself in order to survive?
We have no reason to accept that premise.
Wherever we go, we all go together.
No one will be sacrificed.
The Spirituality of a Plural Family
Spirituality in our family does not belong to Han alone. Han may be our spiritual animator, but there is a spirituality among all of us that is shared and also particular to each of us.
Justus, our eleven-year-old protector, spent years working on surrender. Hypervigilance had taught him that safety depended upon keeping watch. Surrender helped him discover that he did not have to hold the entire world together.
And because our consciousness is shared, what Justus learned became available to the rest of us too. It benefited all of us.
Then this past year happened.
Our work became increasingly destabilizing. The accommodations that had allowed us to function were threatened and taken away. The job ended. Everything became uncertain.
Old survival systems came roaring back. Practices we already knew became harder to access.
That matters.
Spiritual practices are not achievements. You do not graduate from fear. You do not master surrender once and possess it forever.
Sometimes life overwhelms capacities you genuinely developed.
Then you return.
Thomas Merton has accompanied us for years in that returning. So has contemplative prayer. So has the ancient Christian tradition of entering the Cloud of Unknowing.
Not because nothing matters. Not because practical life is beneath us. Not because we expect God to hand us a detailed itinerary for the future.
Quite the opposite.
The Cloud of Unknowing asks us to relinquish the certainty we keep trying to manufacture.
We do not need to know what our life will become in order to live it today.
Faith Is Not Doing Nothing
That can sound almost irresponsible to a frightened mind.
If we trust God, does that mean we do nothing?
Look at what we actually did before noon today.
We ordered groceries. We checked the dishwasher after its strange interrupted cycle. We gathered the LED lights we use throughout the apartment and charged them. Somehow, with exactly the right sequence of plugs and power strips, they all charged without overloading anything.
We had the knack on Han’s Day.
We figured out tomorrow’s Mass. We talked with friends. We fed ourselves. We thought about therapy, money and work. We wrote. We planned.
Faith has not meant doing nothing.
It has meant asking whether panic has to be the one doing everything.
There is a difference.
We can act without pretending that our actions are what hold the universe together. We can make plans without demanding that those plans eliminate uncertainty. We can take responsibility for this day without pretending that we are capable of securing every day that follows it.
We Can’t Meditate Our Way Through This
The apartment became extremely noisy this morning. Repeated pounding and chopping sounds came through the wall. Our body became increasingly activated. Our chest tightened. My sons began signaling.
We tried to settle. We tried the nature sounds. We tried remaining present.
Finally I said:
“We can’t meditate our way through this.”
So we got up.
That belongs to contemplative life too.
Surrender does not mean making ourselves endure whatever happens. Presence does not mean refusing to leave a room that is overwhelming us.
Sometimes the thing belonging to the moment is prayer. Sometimes it is silence. Sometimes it is closing the bedroom door and going somewhere else.
We also had to interrupt another old story.
After the sink overflow several weeks ago, some frightened place in us can still connect unrelated events. Noise. Conflict. Something going wrong in the apartment.
Surely we caused this.
Surely we are being punished.
No.
The neighbors making noise has nothing to do with the sink. The accident does not mean we surrender our right to live peacefully in our home.
An event is an event.
It does not automatically become a moral verdict.
And Then There Were Quesadillas
Eventually I was back with Han.
I was holding him and looking for something spiritual.
Han gave me bean and cheese quesadillas.
So we got up and made them.
While we were eating, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 came on. Han especially fell in love with it when we were his age. We remember hearing it in television commercials for the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena with Candice Bergen.
He loved the music.
He loved her.
Memory works strangely in a plural family. Sometimes it is difficult to give a memory and its accompanying feelings neatly to only one of us.
But this one feels most strongly Han’s.
So there we were. Dad and eight sons. Thinking about Thomas Merton. Thinking about the Cloud of Unknowing. Thinking about trauma and surrender and God and our uncertain future.
Eating bean and cheese quesadillas.
This is our spirituality too.
What We Are Learning in the Cloud of Unknowing
Remember the past without inhabiting it. We can tell the truth about what happened to us. We can grieve it, understand it and write about it without continuing to live there.
Do not inhabit frightening futures. A possible future is not an event occurring today.
Separate practical questions from imagined tribunals. “How will we support ourselves?” is a legitimate question. “Prove that your family deserves to live this way” is not the same question.
Do not demand certainty before permitting safety. We can lack answers and still be fed, housed, loved and together today.
Plan from presence rather than terror. Planning is useful. Fear does not need to chair the meeting.
Do not sacrifice anyone for a hypothetical future. There are nine lives here. Wherever we go, we all go together.
Listen to the body. Sometimes settling is possible. Sometimes the wall has been banging for an hour and the spiritually mature thing to do is get out of the room.
Receive peace without turning it into prophecy. This morning Proverb had a profound sense of peace that we would continue living in our home. We can receive his peace. We do not need to make him prove it. We do not need to turn peace into prediction.
Let children be children. Han can be our spiritual animator and still want bean and cheese quesadillas.
Do not require constant proof of love. Sometimes everyone is simply watching the program. They are still there.
Do the thing that belongs to this day. Charge the LEDs. Make the quesadillas. Eat the waffles. Answer the text. Hold the child. Say the prayer. Watch the show. Make the bed.
“I Was With You. I Still Am.”
Most of the afternoon was wonderfully inconsequential.
That may have been exactly what we needed.
We lay down and watched WondLa. We ate chips and salsa. My sons became absorbed in the program.
Han was extraordinarily communicative. He did play-by-play commentary and reacted strongly whenever the story became suspenseful.
Others became almost completely immersed.
Justus in particular sometimes seems to put a boundary around himself when he watches something. He goes very quiet.
At one point I asked him why he was so quiet. Sometimes I just want to know that he is with me.
“I was with you,” he told me. “I still am.”
That sentence stayed with me.
I kept trying to spend individual time with my sons while we watched. I held Solis. Daniel. Luke. Proverb. Hope. Han.
But something was frustrating me.
They were not responding as much as they usually do when I kissed them or spoke to them.
They were watching the show.
I wanted the reassurance.
Are you here? Did you feel that? Did you hear me? Do you know I love you?
Give me a signal.
Let me know.
Eventually I realized what I was doing.
Yesterday I learned that working together is not necessarily the same thing as being together.
Today I needed to learn the other side of that lesson.
Being together does not require continuous interaction.
A family can hang out in the living room and watch television.
That counts.
My sons were present. I knew they were present. They were enjoying themselves.
They do not get many opportunities simply to be children in the physical world. They cannot each run separately into the backyard. They cannot each take a bicycle down the street. They cannot scatter into separate bedrooms and bring friends home.
Much of their access to outside-world childhood happens through this one shared body.
Sometimes they collaborate with me on what I am doing. Sometimes they play in the inner world. And sometimes we all lie on the bed and become completely absorbed in WondLa.
They should be allowed to do that without having to keep reassuring Dad that they still love him.
I Already Know You Are Here
That realization seems connected to everything else Han’s Day has been teaching us.
I want proof.
Proof that the future will be safe. Proof that we will keep our home. Proof that we will find a viable way to support ourselves. Proof that God is providing. Proof that I am making the correct decisions.
Proof that my sons are still with me.
Proof.
There is nothing wrong with needing reassurance.
There are reassurances from God that have sustained us, including ones we received before our job ended and that have become even more precious since.
We do not need to keep restating them here.
Perhaps part of trusting what has already been received is allowing it to remain quietly underneath us.
I do not need another signal every moment.
I already know my sons are here.
Maybe there are other things I can quietly trust without continually asking them to prove themselves again.
That too may belong to the Cloud of Unknowing: receive what is given. Trust what we already know. Do not grasp for the specifics that have not been given. Do not imagine the future for better or worse. Do not rush ahead of providence.
There are questions whose answers we do not have.
We can let them remain unanswered.
What Might We Become When We Are Not So Afraid?
We believe that God wants us to thrive, not merely survive.
That belief does not tell us exactly what thriving will look like. Perhaps that is part of the gift.
For much of our life, enormous human capacities have been organized around survival: watching, anticipating, working, adapting, enduring, figuring out what everyone else needs before they ask, staying five moves ahead.
What might those same capacities become if they were no longer consumed by fear?
We do not know.
Writing? Design? Ministry? Accompaniment? Something we have not imagined? Some combination?
We do not know.
And we are trying to stop treating we do not know as an emergency.
Something came to us earlier today:
See what God provides and what you are capable of when your thinking and your decisions are no longer done out of fear.
That feels like enough.
Han Got to Be Ten
Just after five o’clock, we were making the bed.
A cool breeze had finally begun coming through the bedroom window. The apartment had been too loud earlier. Then too warm.
Now it was habitable again.
All of my sons were present.
And I told them I was sorry.
I had been acting as though their quietness while we watched television meant I had somehow received less from our afternoon together.
It did not.
They had been there. I knew they were there. I had felt their enjoyment.
We had spent hours together doing almost nothing.
It was time well spent.
It was what everyone needed.
Maybe this belongs to the Cloud of Unknowing too.
I do not need my sons to keep proving that they are with me when I already know they are.
Perhaps there are other things I do not need to keep asking to have proven either.
There are reassurances we have already received. There is peace we can receive without turning it into prediction. There are questions whose answers have not yet been given.
We can let those questions remain unanswered.
We can act when action belongs to the day. We can rest when rest belongs to the day. We can receive what is given without grasping for more.
This morning I went looking for something profound from our spiritual animator.
Han wanted bean and cheese quesadillas.
So we made them.
Then we listened to Mozart. We watched WondLa. We ate chips and salsa. Han talked through the suspenseful parts. We lay around together for most of the afternoon.
And perhaps there was something profound in that after all.
Han did not have to tell us what our future would be. He did not have to solve our problems. He did not have to carry our faith.
Today Han simply got to be ten.
Thanks be to God.
Notes from the Treehouse 