Bare Earth, Clean Paper

Does anyone write something where something has been already written?

Or plant a sapling where one already grows?

No: he looks for a blank piece of paper,

and sows the seed where none has yet been sown.

Brother, sister: be bare earth,

be clean paper, untouched by writing,

so that you may be ennobled by the pen of revelation—

so that the Gracious One may sow seed within you. --Jalaluddin Rumi, tr. Camille Helminski

"Freedom, O Freedom!" is the cry of the soul. --Vivekananda, "What is Religion?"

Dear God:

I have learned something in these past weeks. I have learned that philosopher Thomas Kuhn was on the right track when he said that paradigms change radically and quickly in response to some crisis. I have been more radically taken apart and put back together since classes ended last spring than at any other period. Yet, looking back, I can see clearly that these changes have been a long time coming--that I have been holding them back, in fact. I think Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point" theory more precisely captures what has been happening with me: a slow buildup of pressure over so long a time as to render it unnoticeable, followed by an exponential acceleration and release precipitated by an event whose consequences were unforeseen. So now, something I have long toyed with wanting, played at wanting, considered the possibility of wanting some day: I actually want it now--intensely want it.

I want to die.

(No, not like that, friends--keep reading.)

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a grain, and nothing more--but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

God, help me to bear fruit; help me to die.

I am so heartily weary of myself. My every breath shouts, “I, I, I, I, I.” Let me disappear to myself; give me rest from the unremitting labor of self-assertion. Let me be a witness, an observer, a passerby.

All my life, I have asked You to help me, but what I have actually meant is, Do it for me. I have asked You for strength, but what I have wanted is ease. I would have every valley raised, every mountain made low—but without my having to die first. I do not ask You for this any longer. I ask to die.

I do not ask You to help me find the way You have set before me. I do not even know that You have set one, and such as there is to find, I understand now that I must find myself. Help me to look, to listen. Help me to quiet the roaring in my head that shouts down Your still, small voice. I have barricaded myself against You, and I do not ask You to storm the barricades; I ask only that I may persevere in dismantling them myself.

My world is a sealed room, arranged just the way I like it. Only it isn’t: the windows leak, the door doesn’t latch, and I am forever fighting to keep my room the way I want it. Help me open up my room to the whole noisy, untidy world; I am weary of defending it.[i]

My universe has been so narrow, and I have tried to confine You within its compass. (Forgive me; I did it in love.) You set the seas their boundaries which they may not cross, but Your children You have created for freedom. You have not received the spirit of slaves that leads you into fear again. Rather, you have received the spirit of God's adopted children by which we call out, "Abba! Father!"

Now, if any would say, “You must use these songs, these sacraments,” I will not listen; and if any would set themselves up between me and You, I will not heed them; and if any would deny the freedom of my soul, they shall be to me as a venomous serpent: a splendid creation of Yours, to be avoided for my own safety.

And surely Vivekananda discerned You;

And surely Lawrence of the Resurrection labored with You;

And surely Teresa built a castle for You;

And surely Black Elk saw visions from You;

And surely Rumi sang of You;

And surely Francis gave all for You;

And surely Socrates groped after You;

And surely Bach musicked Your creation;

And surely Elisha put on You like a garment;

And surely the Buddha served You even in denying You;

And surely in Jesus You lived our life and died our death;

And surely in Him, I will rise as He did.

And if any would chant Om to the Resplendent Lord, I would be a bhakta among them;

And if any would ponder the Impersonal Absolute, I would sit down, a yogi among them;

And if any would shout salvation’s story in concert with the blood-washed band, I would lift up my voice with theirs;

And if any would sing la illaha il Allah in the whirling dance, I would polish the mirror of my heart with them;

And if any would commune with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, I would receive Your Body and Blood with them.

--

Jesus, as my vision grows greater, You do not diminish within it—rather, You grow greater, too. My devotion to You increases as the universe around You expands, as the radiance of a jewel is increased by its setting.

Let me never try to force You back into that narrow space;

let me never begin a sentence with “God couldn’t;”

let me be bare earth, clean paper.

My little girl wants to walk along the top of a wall. “Hold my hand, Daddy,” she says. She is eager to walk, but unsteady and fearful. Steady my footsteps; bolster my willing but timorous spirit. At the right time, take away Your hand.

I am learning.

---

[i] I have borrowed this metaphor from Pema Chödrön.

Zuckerman's Barn

It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention. Children pay better attention than grownups. If Fern says that the animals in Zuckerman’s barn talk, I’m quite ready to believe her. Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more. E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

...a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Stage magicians Penn and Teller caused a stir in the magic world when they began showing audiences how tricks were done. (http://www.5min.com/Video/Penn--Teller-How-to-Do-the-Saw-Trick-4988312) This worked because, contrary to what you might expect, taking the magic out of the trick didn’t actually…take the magic out. When the audience saw what was really happening, they were as amazed by the reality as by the illusion.

I believe that miracles work mostly in the same way: God allows us to see the depth behind the everyday existence of which we usually see only the surface. And the reality is more astonishing than the illusion.

Here’s an example, from 2 Kings:

And it came about when the LORD was about to take up Elijah by a whirlwind to heaven…Elijah said to Elisha, "Ask what I shall do for you before I am taken from you." And Elisha said, "Please, let a double portion of your spirit be upon me." He said, "You have asked a hard thing. Nevertheless, if you see me when I am taken from you, it shall be so for you; but if not, it shall not be so." As they were going along and talking, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of fire which separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind to heaven. Elisha saw it and cried out, "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!" And he saw Elijah no more.

Elijah told Elisha that he would become his spiritual heir if he saw him—the clear implication being that Elisha might well not have seen a chariot and horses of fire come to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind. If Elijah would have been taken up that way whether Elisha saw it or not, the miracle is not in the occurrence, but in the seeing. Like Penn and Teller, God allowed Elisha to see the way it was actually done.

Another, more recent example: the nineteenth century Russian monk Seraphim of Sarov, after fifteen years of austerities in a hermitage, moved back to the monastery when, because of his reputation for holiness and wonder-working, people began to seek him out in his retreat. He took on the role of a staretz, or spiritual advisor. One day, sensing that he was having trouble getting through to a disciple, he took the young man by the shoulders and said, “Look at me.” The disciple told Seraphim he couldn’t bear to look at him, because lightening was coming from his eyes and he appeared to be all aflame. Seraphim told the disciple that he was able to see him in that way because God had opened his eyes. Once again, it’s evident that someone else might have been in the room also and seen nothing unusual—the seeing was the miracle.

So when we read some pious legend about a friar surprising St. Francis at his prayers and seeing him levitating or whatnot, the relevant question, it seems, is not “what actually happened?” but “what did the informant actually experience, and what does it mean that he or she experienced it?” The spiritual reality is always active behind the visible reality--we are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses.” A miracle is when we’re enabled to peek behind the curtain.

Of course, what we can actually see every day is pretty miraculous, too. In Charlotte’s Web, Dr. Dorian gives Mrs. Arable his take on the “miraculous” writing in the spider’s web:

I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.

The web is White’s symbol for the miraculous within the everyday. But what exactly is a "symbol"? Well, the word “symbol” comes from two Greek words meaning “thrown together.” When two friends were about to be parted, they would break an animal bone, each of them keeping one half as a symbol of the other. In other words, the symbol you hold in your hand is only half of a reality, the other half of which is elsewhere—and the two halves symbolically throw the two of you together. And I think the phenomenal world is sown with symbols of the spiritual world--effulgences of the hidden world that burst forth into the visible one. Why else should there be music? Or flowers? I think Christopher Smart was right: flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ. Notwithstanding all the valid evolutionary explanations about bees and pollination, the fantastic blue of delphiniums is here for us because God just couldn’t help himself. And the other half of that symbol is with God, and can throw us together with God if we let it.

So we needn’t be on the watch for something overtly extraordinary. A spider’s web or bird’s nest, photosynthesis, azaleas and the wonders of the human brain—we can explain them to an extent, but we can never explain them away. They are miraculous, and on our very best days, we can see that. There is a Zen Buddhist sutra that says, “Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away. We are like one who, in the midst of water, cries out in thirst so piteously; we are like the children of a rich man who wandered away among the poor.” We often miss the miracles because we are looking for magic.

When Elijah was hiding in the cave, God told him to watch, because he was about to pass by the cave. An earthquake came, but God was not in the earthquake. A great wind came, and God was not in the wind. A fire roared by, and God was not in the fire. Then came the sound of “a still, small voice”, and that was where God was.

That voice is the one I’m waiting to hear. I have become like the grownups in The Polar Express, who cannot hear the silvery tinkling of the sleighbell. When the miracle comes that will show me what I’m supposed to be doing with myself, it may come as a symbol, or it may come as a revelation, but it will surely not come as a magic show. All the stuff that got me this far down the wrong road—that was the magic, the illusion, the trickery. Perceiving the miracle will require attentiveness--which is not my strong suit—and waiting for it will require patience, of which I have never had much. I am too prone to trying to force things--too much like the frustrated child whose parents have said, “We’ll see.” As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really have very much faith.

With the summer about to end and the prospect of the fall semester beginning without my having anything to teach, I recently looked into enrolling in a trade school, with an eye toward making a career change. A number of people have told me I’d be good at the thing I’m looking into doing, and though becoming certified to do it would require a big investment of time and money, it would allow me to have at least a part-time job to go to.

But my wife is cautioning me against committing to any course of action I have picked out for myself. She thinks I should spend at least a semester neither teaching nor doing anything else to fill up the void. Rather than Finding Something to Do just for the sake of having it, she thinks I should wait attentively until just the right thing presents itself, applying myself in the meanwhile to figuring out who I really am and what I really value.

I’ll still need to curb my fearful, grasping nature in case that miracle, or fortuitous chance occurrence, or outcome of penetrating discernment comes along. When God rained down manna in the wilderness, he cautioned the Hebrews to gather only what they needed for each day. If they tried to force things by gathering extra and keeping some in reserve, on the next morning they would find it rotten and full of maggots. Instead of grabbing at something just because I think I need it or ought to be doing it, maybe I should apply that energy to cultivating attentiveness and trust.

And even if I didn’t think of this as waiting for a miracle—even if I thought I was waiting for something revelatory to happen by chance—chance, as Louis Pasteur pointed out, favors the prepared mind. And maybe if I talk less, the universe will talk more.

What's In You for Me?

We tend to think of chastity as having to do with sex. This is because we tend to think of everything as having to do with sex. A fuller discussion of sexual chastity, continence and celibacy is out of place here, and has been done elsewhere. (www.newadvent.org/cathen/03637d.htm, for example.)

I am more interested in chastity in the broader sense, as set forth in the Principles of the Third Order of St. Francis:

Our chief object is to reflect that openness to all which was characteristic of Jesus. This can only be achieved in a spirit of chastity, which sees others as belonging to God and not as a means of self-fulfillment.

By this definition, chastity is that quality of mind whereby we are able to perceive others, not in relation to ourselves and our agendas, but as complete in themselves.

You’ve probably seen at least one old cartoon in which each of two characters, marooned on a desert island or adrift in a lifeboat, seem to see the other transformed into a steak or a turkey leg or something. Then they start shaking salt on each other and whetting their carving knives. That’s what unchastity does to us: transforms other people before our eyes from something actual into something potential--with the potentiality being wholly in relation to ourselves.

Capitalism is rife with unchastity. Before I had CDs to sell, I had audiences; now I have potential CD buyers. So not only is the quality of my relationship to my listeners less immediate than it was, but I cannot be fully satisfied with the interaction unless it ends in a transaction. I used to want to connect with people; now I want to profit by them. (Or at least recoup my investment by them.)

How often have I been at a gathering and mentally divided everyone into those who could help me, and those who couldn’t? Does a person’s personal magnetism increase with their potential to buy what I’m selling, get me gigs, advance my career or introduce me to other useful people?

Unchastity doesn’t always appear in such gross forms—there are subtle forms, too. Will a person’s conversation amuse me? Or instruct me? Or provide material I can steal? How will this person respond to me? Will they be impressed by my knowledge and accomplishments, feeding my sense of self-worth? Will they find me interesting and funny, thereby helping me find myself interesting and funny?

In his “Essay Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger describes people’s tendency to view things not as things, but as potential other things. Our gaze transforms a river into a potential power source, a forest into potential building materials. Nothing is simply what it is—everything is “standing in reserve,” as Heidegger puts it.

What frightened creatures we are, always worried that the future will bring scarcity and lack unless we grab all we can in the present, always hopeful that every person we meet and every situation in which we find ourselves can be turned to our advantage. This must be why Jesus told his disciples not to worry about what they were to eat, drink or wear: so that our human interactions would be untainted by the dirty devices born of our fear. In fact, the single most frequent utterance of Jesus recorded in the Gospels is “Do not be afraid.” Prudent providence is one thing; faithless unchastity is another.

This is one of the best things about being a Eucharistic Visitor—a layperson who brings Communion to parishioners who cannot attend church. Most of them are elderly, confined either to their own homes or to a retirement home, and I am more free of personal agenda in my interactions with them than in almost any other interactions. And I think I am finally learning to really pay attention to people.

All the Gospels give accounts of Jesus seeming to read people’s minds. I don’t think there was anything supernatural involved in those incidents. If Jesus “didn’t need to be told about people, for he knew what was in a person,” I think it was because he was paying attention. He was able to size people up as they were, because he wasn’t trying to size them up as potential means for his own self-fulfillment.

Me and My Shadow

Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the state: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged. George Eliot, Adam Bede

While a visitor in a church other than my own, I had a strong negative reaction to one of the lay ministers—some confluence of mannerisms and appearance just grated on my nerves to the point where I couldn’t stop watching this person, in the same way that one will continually pester a cold sore.

It being apparently a good morning, I was able to self-transcend enough to notice not only the irritating object, but also my own irritation. Isn’t that interesting, I thought; now why should I respond so negatively to this person?

Trying to run my thought process to ground, I began to catalog all the things about the person that annoyed me, and ask myself why I was so annoyed at each one. This strategy backfired. In no time, I had gone from being conscious of an irritant within my field of awareness to being entirely subsumed by irritation: I had absolutely nothing on my mind but how much this person annoyed me, and a laundry list of self-justifying reasons for being annoyed.

Then I remembered something that Martin Laird pointed out in his book, Into the Silent Land: when Satan was tempting Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus didn’t debate with him; he didn’t allow himself to be hooked. Instead, he simply met each temptation with an appropriate quotation from scripture. “It is written…,” he said, then shut up, never giving the tempter the time of day.

(I’ll interrupt myself here to share the only thing I ever learned in my brief career as a vacuum cleaner salesman: “once you have stated your case, the next person to talk loses.” When you are arguing with someone—a sales clerk or petty official, say—make your point and then absolutely clam up. It’s difficult, but often works; the tension produced by the silence just becomes too much, and your adversary will begin to babble in order to break it. Then you win.)

So I tried Jesus’ stratagem; abandoning my bogus self-examination about why this person rubbed me the wrong way, I simply told myself what God told Samuel in 1 Kings: “You see not as God sees, but as mortals see; for you look at outward appearances, but God looks on the heart.” I had to repeat this a few times over the course of the service, but it worked: I set aside my involuntary response and put my attention where it was supposed to be.

(The fact that this person turned out, in later conversation, to actually be a jerk is immaterial. I suppose. It’s not as though obsessing about the offending mannerisms was doing any good. And anyway, maybe being a jerk is just one more layer of appearances between me and the heart that God looks on.)

Fifty years before Jung opened his practice, George Eliot put her finger on the problem: “unacknowledged agents” in our minds do stuff without our awareness or consent.

Now Jung attributed much of this stuff to what he called “the Shadow”—those aspects of our personalities which we reject and repress, and which undermine and sabotage us in a bid for self-expression. And Jung believed that, in banishing the unwanted aspects of ourselves into the unconscious, we cut ourselves off from our creativity and self-realization. Jungian psychologist and Episcopal priest John Sanford likened the Shadow to Jesus’ “treasure hidden in the field” (Matthew 13:44). Make friends with your Shadow, the pop-psyche mavens tell us--and why not? If some repressed aspect of my personality is forcing me to read political blogs all night instead of going to bed so I won’t be irascible toward my children the next day, I’m willing to take that as a sign that some fundamental change in my life is called for.

But sometimes the Shadow just needs to pipe down. The Desert Fathers externalized their troublesome inner promptings as demons, and oriented much of their lives and practice toward silencing them—and surely not every vicious or self-destructive drive is potentially redeeming. Sometimes evil thoughts are just evil.

Martha Graham counseled Agnes DeMille to keep open to the urges that motivate her. Well and good; the jungle is dark, but full of diamonds. But how do we distinguish between motivating urges that are potentially liberating, and those that are just plain bad? Or at any rate unhelpful? (“All things are lawful to me,” said Paul, “but not all things are useful.”) How can we tell the gifts of the Shadow from the Trojan Horse of the ego?

One thing I have heard before, but have only recently realized in my own experience, is that turning the attention from the object of one’s feelings toward the feelings themselves is a great disclosing tablet. When our whole field of awareness is filled up with the object, there is no room for awareness of self—the very reason, I suspect, that most of us “nurse our wrath to keep it warm” toward at least one person or situation: we don’t want to become self-aware on that score.

One evening I was at a motel desk with a friend, trying to get in touch with a mutual friend who was staying there and whom we had arranged to meet. Her room phone wasn’t working, and we were trying to get the desk clerk to somehow get a message to her—which, being more afraid of his employers than he was sympathetic to us, he refused to do. As we pressed him—OK, as I became angry--he became rude and dismissive.

Back in the car, my friend asked me why I so furious at this subaltern. As one reiterating the self-evident, I said, “Because he was rude to me!” “So what?” my friend asked.

And I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Later, upon reflection, I realized that if someone is rude to me, it constitutes an implicit statement about my relative worth—and that at some level, I take that statement at face value. This person is, by being rude to me, implying that I deserve no better, which some part of me already believes, so in order to distract myself from that externally validated self-assessment, I become furious at the rude person.

Lesson 5 in A Course in Miracles says “I am never upset for the reason I think.” The ego does a bang-up job of directing the attention outward in order to avert the inward gaze. Maybe the key to discerning between the (potentially) liberating drives of the Shadow and the cramping, self-protective machinations of the ego lies somewhere in there. Maybe if I had the keenness to discern and the courage to follow my redemptive inner promptings, I would find myself happier and more self-aware--whereas getting caught up in ego chatter invariably makes me more miserable and more aware of other people, other things (or rather, of my thoughts and feelings about them.) Maybe these internal agents need to start carrying ID. Or maybe I’m just breathtakingly self-involved.

(Or all of the above. Once as I stood in line at a convenience store in St. Paul, I asked the clerk, “Are magazines becoming trashier and trashier, or am I just becoming a grumpy old fart?” “Well, sir,” she deadpanned, “both of those things could be true.”)

Hide and Seek

“You say you seek God, but a ray of light doesn’t seek the sun; it’s coming from the sun...Because you don’t know that who you are is one with God, you believe all these labels about yourself: I’m a sinner, I’m a saint, I’m a wretch, I’m a worm and no man, I’m a monk, I’m a nurse. These are all labels, clothing. They serve a purpose, but they are not who you are. To the extent that you believe these labels, you believe a lie, and you add anguish upon anguish. It’s what most of us do for most of our lives.” Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land

The Altar Guild are after my daughter.

Last year, the cadre of parishioners--mostly elderly women--who oversee the linens, chalice, paten, altar book, candles, flowers and other arrangements for Communion at our church approached Allison and me about recruiting our then-five-year-old Clare to help out. Somehow, without our noticing, they had marked how meticulous Clare is, how attentive to the environment and interested in things being “just so.” We ultimately decided that, flattering as it was for them to ask, she was a little young to be committing Saturday mornings to helping out in the sacristy. I still wonder if we made the right decision about that. But the incident got me thinking about how much we rely on the old ladies to keep things running.

Many years ago, I remember sitting in the park in Lancaster, watching a group of elderly women volunteers tending the flowerbeds. And young and callow as I was, the question still forced itself upon me: who is going to take care of things when the old ladies are gone?

I’ve been thinking about this because I am in a golden position to be a helper-out. Having quit my job with no immediate prospects in view, I could simply make up my mind to being one of those unsung people who make things keep happening. I could devote myself to my home and family, working on my music and volunteering. Under any kind of rational scrutiny, this course emerges as a true win-win. But here are the two big barriers I face:

1) Most of my friends are not in a position to give up their jobs and devote themselves to pursuing a combination of parenting, creative work and good-doing. It seems ridiculous not to be stoked red-hot for such an option, but there it is: I feel guilty.

2) The extent to which one can be utterly mistaken about oneself is astonishing. The realization that one has altogether bought into a value system which one has always believed oneself to reject takes some serious adjusting-to. But I cannot escape the tinge of shame that comes with not being gainfully employed and living on my wife’s salary. I thought I was above that sort of thing, but apparently not.

Let there be no misunderstanding: I have friends who have given up jobs to be stay-at-home dads, and I have cheered them on. (Of course, during the most demanding time of babyhood, the girls were in daycare while I taught, so I can’t claim full Mr. Mom credit in any case.) And I have crusaded against the insidious fallacy that only work for which one is paid has any value. But something far deeper down in my makeup than belief chafes at not bringing in any money, at not “advancing” in my career, at not “using” that expensive Ph.D. And unfortunately, I’m not any better than anybody else at considering the lilies.

The fact is, I don’t really have very much faith. Or at least, not the important kind—and here is another area in which my reality is discontinuous with my professed positions. I have always said that belief in is more valuable than belief that. One can believe that God lived a human life and died a human death in Jesus of Nazareth, and give reasons for it; one can accept as true a certain constellation of factual statements about a thing and give one’s rational assent to them. That’s what doctrine is all about. And I do, more or less. But I’ve long believed that doctrinal/creedal belief—faith as assent--is less important that faith as trust. If I say, “I believe in you,” that isn’t shorthand for a list of factual statements about you to which I subscribe—it means I trust in you, I rely on you: I have faith in you.

And I don’t.

I’m too much of a control freak; it is very important that I be on top of things, that I be moving myself forward and leaving nothing to chance. Which is--if only by the measure of results, if nothing else--preposterous.

Of course, I have matured a little over the years in this respect. For instance, although I have never gambled, I fully understand the addictive quality of it, because I used to be addicted to applying for things. Every competition, call for scores, grant or any other opportunity that came along, I had to apply for it, because the one I didn’t apply for just might be the one I would have won. Just one more and I’ll quit.

I don’t do that any more; the constriction of time and resources that comes with parenthood, along with enough ding letters to paper the living room, have taught me the folly of blindside applying-for. But one can’t really call that faith, any more than avoiding a two-by-four upside the head because one knows it will hurt.

So lacking faith in God, I find it hard to have faith that whatever my hand finds to do can have value simply because I do it with my might. I still feel like any time not spent getting ahead is stolen time. Man, if only I didn’t have this laundry to do, I could be working on yadda yadda yadda.

But even if one resolves to devote one’s life to worthwhile pursuits, how does one find the measure of worth? Is working on the parish podcast as worthwhile as taking food to the homeless? Is writing letters for Amnesty as worthwhile as visiting the sick and imprisoned? Is my personal growth as important as making a measurable impact on the world? How much time can one take from volunteering and give over to reading and studying and writing music before one ceases to be the salt of the earth and becomes a privileged nabob? Don’t I have to actually retire from a job before I’ve earned the right to work in the garden during the workday? Behaving like a retired person at 45 smacks of failure, and carries a frightening presentiment of reaching retirement age without anything to retire from.

Now, wise people have said since forever that the most important work is the work that needs doing here and now.

There are some who are really the salt of the earth, who work for work’s sake, who do not care for name or fame or even to go to heaven…a man who can work for five days, or even five minutes, without any selfish motive whatever, without thinking of the future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant…If you want to do a great or a good work, do not trouble to think what the result will be…The only way to grow is to do the duty near at hand, and thus go on gathering strength till the highest state is reached….When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your whole life to it for the time being. (Vivekananda, Karma Yoga)

In fact, my malaise isn’t entirely attributable to what I am doing or not doing. Part of the discomfort—maybe the largest part—is that one’s identity becomes so bound up with what one does for a living. If I’m not working as a teacher, and I’m not precisely retired, and neither my composing nor performing are paying the bills, what account can I give of myself? What am I?

I knew a lifelong academic who was dying of cancer. She had held on for a long time to the possibility of returning to school, but when it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, she looked at me and said, “If I’m not a teacher, what am I?” I know I don’t want that to happen to me.

You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. The official, paste-up Potemkin Village me—job, social roles, professional accomplishments, consumer preferences—is not the real me; its life is not my real life.

So maybe the way to grow and gather strength and find value in the work at hand is to disentangle identity from profession once for all. The Altar Guild ladies are doing good even if they never held a job, and neither the altar, nor the flowers in the park, nor the letters one writes nor the sandwiches one delivers are a badge of identity. Our life is hidden, and what we do is not who we are.

And if I can find the requisite faith, I'll find out if that's as true as all the wise people say it is.