Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Praying With the Heart

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[This post is the second in a series on prayer. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read last week’s post — Learning to Pray — as an introduction.]

disconnected telephone_prayer
How’s your prayer connection working out for you?

Down the street from our house is a booth for a pay phone that’s no longer there (another casualty of the cell phone age) that somebody decided to have fun with. They glued a fake paper phone on the back wall of the booth and stuck a tin can on the end of the cord. Anybody who walks up to that booth expecting to place a call is in for a surprise.

I’ve been walking by this faux phone for a while now, appreciating the humor of it, but recently it occurred to me that it’s an apt symbol for the way a lot of people feel about their prayer life — like they’re trying to connect with the divine realm and it’s just not working. If this describes your experience, it might be an invitation to change your way of approaching prayer.

Before I get into the details of how I go about praying, let me clarify something that you’ll need to know about me. I often use the word “Reality” to describe what monotheistic religions usually call “God,” and the reason I do comes out of my own spiritual experiences that have shown me that all is One, that nothing exists outside of the Great Love, that all of our notions of separateness are illusion, as well as any apparent forms that arise from that notion. Because the word “God” can conjure up ideas of a Being that stands apart from the world and humankind (think Sistene Chapel), I don’t often use it.

This perspective about Reality has significant implications for how I go about prayer, because I no longer approach prayer as though I were placing a phone call to request help from an external being. When I pray, I move inward, to the part of my being that already knows my oneness with Reality and with the situation or people for whom I’m praying.Continue Reading

The Inner Bucket List

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skydiver in free fall
What’s on your bucket list?

Last week, waiting for a dentist appointment, I couldn’t help but overhear an 80 year old woman standing in front of the receptionist’s window of the medical building, loudly explaining that she needed a note from her doctor. She planned to go skydiving the next morning, but the skydiving company wouldn’t let her unless her doctor could confirm that she had no major medical issues.

It seems this woman had a bucket list. “I’ve already done the hot air balloon and the whitewater rafting,” she said. Now she was on to skydiving, and she made it a point to let the receptionist know that her priest was going along (maybe so he’d be on hand to administer Last Rites if needed?). She also said she’d be wearing a girdle, though I missed the reasoning behind that one.

After making her case, she walked out, and as the door closed behind her the woman sitting next to me, who had been holding her head in disbelief while listening to this conversation, looked up and said, “Good for her!”Continue Reading

Spiritual Teachings From the Garden: The Purslane Parable

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My spouse and I have a plot in a nearby community garden that a number of weeds would like to call their home — dandelions, thistles, morning glory — and keeping them in check is a never-ending task.

There’s also another weed whose name I’ve never known that grows like crazy. Like most weeds, it’s hardy. It doesn’t seem to mind heat waves or dry spells, nor torrential rains for that matter, and try as we may to pull it all one week, the next week it’s always back, spreading its long red stems, with their shiny oblong leaves, low to the ground.

So you can imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I saw bundles of this weed for sale at our local farmer’s market. “You’re kidding me,” I thought. “This stuff that I’ve been tossing onto our compost pile for years sells for $2.50 a bunch?!”

The vendor, an Asian man who apparently didn’t feel compelled to follow American rules about what is a weed and what is a vegetable, knew that purslane (such a dignified name!) is loaded with vitamin A and C, and is delicious in salads and stir fry. He recommended sautéing it with garlic and a pinch of chili powder.

Sometimes Life Challenges Our Norms

Life is always challenging us with parables like that, isn’t it? It plops down right in front of us things that upset our assumptions and insist we shift our perspective. Purslane’s presence in our plot (forgive me for having a bit of alliterative fun here) has been a parable I’ve been parsing now for weeks.

First of all, it’s challenging any vestiges in me of the assumption that life is all about effort, and than nothing good comes to us except through hard work. This vitamin-loaded plant grows all on its own, thank you very much, without our fussing over it in the least. Heck, we didn’t even need to send away for any seed packets, nor, I’d lay bets, is Monsanto’s research team in their lab trying to figure out how to genetically modify and patent it, at least not yet.

Now according to Arla, an Ag teacher we knew in Missouri, a weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it to grow, and the purslane episode has also gotten me thinking about things in my life that I might see as weeds — unwanted and irritating — that might in fact be offering something quite useful if I would only stop rejecting them.

Sometimes life circumstances can be like that. Experiences we judge to be unpleasant often turn out to be the very things that enrich our growth. They’re loaded with all sorts of spiritual nutrients that grow our capacity to do very healthy things, like practicing acceptance and letting go.

From the Chopping Block to the Cutting Board

One of the most fertile fields this purslane parable invites me to explore isn’t necessarily what’s outside of me, but what’s right here inside of me. In the inner field I encounter a whole host of qualities, some of which I like and some I don’t, and the ones I don’t I often try to reject or resist.

And here’s the crazy thing: oftentimes it’s the very act of resisting them that causes them to thrive. My brother-in-law, Tim, recently told me that if you try to pull a thistle out by the roots, not only will you not succeed in getting all the roots, but you’ll trigger the thistle’s growth response and you’ll end up with more of them than you had before.

When it comes to our inner qualities, resistance simply doesn’t work. What does work is acceptance.

It’s the difference between trying to use the chopping block and the cutting board. The things we put on the chopping block are things we want to get rid of. The things we put on the cutting board are things we intend to take in, welcome, metabolize, absorb, knowing it will make us whole.

Needless to say, the next time I went to the garden after my farmer’s market discovery, I didn’t throw the purslane onto the compost pile after I pulled it. I brought it home, washed it up, and fixed it for dinner. The Asian farmer was right. It was delicious.

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Sabbath-Keeping: Nurturing the Spirit

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When was the last time you stepped back?
When was the last time you stepped back?

This past weekend my spouse, Kip, and I agreed to observe Sabbath by not doing anything that felt like work on Sunday. We’ve been very busy lately completing some household projects and it just seems like there’s never an end to it. The weekend comes and goes, Monday arrives and we’ve had no time to rest.

When I was a pastor — which I was for 17 years — I was much more committed to Sabbath-keeping. Pastoring, like many occupations, is a job that’s never done, and recognizing the dangers of burnout (which pastors suffer from in large numbers) I was diligent about taking a day off.

In the Christian world, Sunday is the Sabbath, but for pastors of course Sunday is a work day. So I decided Friday would be my Sabbath. On Fridays I would do nothing work related. No email. No sermon preparation. No planning. No phone calls. The only exceptions were the rare pastoral emergencies or wedding rehearsals.

After I left the pastorate I became more lax about my Sabbath-keeping, in part because I felt the weight of trying to figure out what was next for me and building a container for my new vocational work. There was too much to learn and too much to do, and I no longer felt entitled to take time off.

And yet, deep down I knew that was a foolish and counterproductive way to live.

The Counterintuitive Wisdom of Sabbath-Keeping

Many years ago I heard a lecture by Marva Dawn, author of Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, and during the lecture she told an account she’d come upon in her research of a group of pioneers who set out for the Pacific Northwest on the Oregon Trail. They were a religious bunch, and each Saturday, when it was time to stop their traveling for the night, they would unhitch the mules from the covered wagons, set up camp and stay put until Monday.

But as summer waned, the days began getting shorter and the weather cooler and they started to worry that they weren’t going to make it to Oregon before the snow. Wrestling with what to do, they wondered if they should continue observing the Sabbath or just push ahead in hopes of beating the winter.Continue Reading

Simply Noticing — A Path to Mindfulness

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shadow on wall
Do you see what there is to see?

Each morning I begin my day reading a poem by Mary Oliver. Yesterday morning I read “Humpback,” from her book American Primitive. The poem brought me to tears.

Oliver has a unique gift of opening herself to Reality—the Reality so many of us spend our days asleep to—and of finding words to convey it such that its radiance can pierce our own minds.

It got me thinking about how the poet’s foremost job is to be awake to life, to notice things that most of us don’t. Only by being awake does the poet have anything to say. Only after her raw encounter with Reality does she turn her attention to the difficult work of finding the words to describe what she has witnessed, words that have the power to stir her readers into our own wakefulness.

All of this made me think of Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, who for over 35 years has been researching the effects of mindfulness on health and happiness.

Langer takes a different approach to mindfulness than most of us are accustomed to. For her, mindfulness doesn’t require a rigorous practice of meditation or yoga. And in her opinion admonitions such as “Be present” are useless, because when we aren’t present, we aren’t present to know we aren’t present.

For Langer mindfulness is quite simple. It’s simply noticing, setting the intention to go about our day noticing things we’ve never noticed before. This practice pulls us out of the sleepwalker’s life in which our body is on automatic pilot while our mind wanders through the maze of its own fictions.

Later on yesterday I was walking home, following Langer’s advice to notice things. As I walked by a flowerbed near our house I noticed the shadow that the cap stone cast on the stuccoed wall. Its dance of light and shadow looked like an inverted mountain range.

I had walked by that flowerbed countless times. But this time, having set my intention to notice, I saw something beautiful I’d never seen before.

Langer is right. Noticing is a path to mindfulness, one that doesn’t demand we squeeze yet one more thing into our crowded schedule. After all, it takes just as long to walk home mindlessly as it does mindfully.

This simple practice can help us live more like poets—awake to the radiant Reality that is always present when we let ourselves see.

 

 

Becoming a Practicing Creative

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clay revelation
What in you is paralyzed, longing to be set free?

Whether I was weeping outwardly I don’t recall. What I do know is that inwardly I was — from gratitude and a deep sense of relief for what the lump of clay in my hands was revealing to me.

I was at a workshop led by theologian Walter Wink and his wife June Keener-Wink, a potter. We had just been studying a biblical story about Jesus healing a paralytic whose friends had hauled him up onto the roof of a house, dug through it, and lowered their friend down on his mat to get him near Jesus, who was teaching in a crowded room below.

After we studied the text, we did a role play, and then June gave us each a lump of clay and instructed us to go find a quiet place and simply work the clay as we held the question: What in me is paralyzed?Continue Reading

Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield

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shield
What do you think you need to defend?

Several years ago I was attending a Quaker meeting when a young woman stood up and began singing, slowly, the old gospel song “Down By the Riverside.”

I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside…

After singing a few lines, she spoke the first few words of the lyric, adding an emphasis that opened up the song in a new way for me. “I’m gonna lay down my sword — and shield.” 

In all the years I’d sung that song I’d scarcely paid any attention to the shield part. After all, it was a song about studying war no more, and war, as we all know, is about swords.

But when she emphasized those words — “and shield” — I realized that laying down the shield is even more radical than laying down the sword, because to lay down one’s shield is to lay down one’s fear.

In truth, we rarely lay down our shield. We spend a lot of energy trying to defend ourselves  against the threat of attack, whether it be of terrorists, lawsuits, or even personal embarrassment. If you start paying attention, you’ll probably notice how often you use the shield in everyday interactions. Every time you feel the impulse to defend your opinion, or your experience, or your worth you are holding forth the shield.Continue Reading

Casting Love upon the Water

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IMG_3373This week we had what will probably be the last trace of snow for the season here in Philadelphia, something a lot of people are happy about. Personally, I have mixed feelings. Sure, the spring is gorgeous, but I also love the winter and have especially enjoyed this one with all of the snow days it brought with it.

One sunny February morning, while I was out shoveling our front sidewalk after one of our big snow storms, I enjoyed watching a Dad and his two young children down the block gleefully piling snow into an enormous mound in front of their house.

Later that day I found out what they had been so excited about when I walked down the block and saw an enormous snow person in front of their house. With kale for hair, clementines for eyes, lemons for buttons, sporting a purple scarf around its neck and a street tree coming out of its head, it drew the admiration of parents and grandparents from all over the neighborhood who brought their little ones by to take a look.

The snow person, of course, is long gone. During the following week, when the weather warmed up, it joined the rest of the melting snow trickling down into the storm sewer, and by now it is surely wending its way across the Atlantic ocean.Continue Reading