What We Need Is Here
Jan K. Nielsen

I remember thinking:  it’s going to be a good day.
My daughters and I were headed out for lunch,
before an afternoon of errands and a little shopping,
just the three of us.
We had loaded the car
with outgrown clothes and odds and ends,
all to be donated to the Salvation Army store.
“Salvo’s,” we call it, it’s also one of our favorite places to shop.  
(It’s like a ritual: we take stuff in; we bring stuff out.
It’s for a good cause, I remind myself.)

It was a bright winter’s day,
full of light, despite the cold.  
As we drove along I glanced to my right,
for what seemed like just a second.
Then when I looked straight ahead, I saw it:
the car I had thought was turning right was stopped.
With a loud thud, I “rearended” the car ahead of me.
I knew it was clearly, without question, my fault;
I hadn’t been paying full attention.
The three of us were fine.  No bumps, no scratches, nothing.
Before I could open the door to check on the other driver,
he leapt out of his car and began shouting at me,
using nearly every curse word in the English language.
Although my inattention had made him very angry,
our collision seemed not to have impaired his functioning.   
One of my daughters came to my defense;
she got out of the car and said,
“Stop!  You can’t talk to her that way!”
It was an unforgettable moment in my life.  

As it turned out,
his car was undamaged
and mine suffered only a few slight marks.  
There was a problem, however.  
The front bumper of my Prius
had lodged over a large hitch on the back of his car.
Our cars could not be separated;
it would be over an hour
before someone could cut our cars apart.
It was not what I would call a serene moment.
I may have looked calm on the outside, but inside,
I was churning.
As I stood beside my car and answered the officer’s questions,
I noticed the long line of cars waiting at the red light,
and there he was, from our church, Paul Popinchalk,
sitting in his car, smiling at me.
Paul’s face radiated
all the calm and serenity of the Buddha himself.
What could I do but smile?
Some of you know that Paul faithfully practices
with our Buddhist mediation group here on Monday nights,
and it shows.   
His was just the right face to stop my insides from churning.
His peaceful smile helped calm me at my core.
Paul helped me to “cross over,”
carrying me to a place where I could find some peace,
some laughter, in the present moment,
imperfect as that moment felt at the time.
It did turn out to be a good day.  

The truth is: we never really know what our days will bring.
Life can be full –
outrageous, sad, tragic, frustrating, funny, joyful –
maybe even all in the same day.
Our days sometimes seem anything but normal.
The fullness of it all can lead us to wonder about ourselves, too.
We might ask, “How do normal people manage it all?”
Not long ago,
someone sent me these words seen on a bumper sticker:
“Normal is someone you don’t know very well.”  
Wise words.
My situation that day was but a minor bump in the road.
No one was hurt.  Life went on.  
That day was stressful, a little dramatic at times,
but really just another full day in the wild journey of this life.

Sometimes though our days bring the unexpected
and everything changes.  
Nothing seems certain anymore.
Maybe there’s trouble at work, or trouble at home, or both.
Maybe there’s news from the doctor and it’s not good.
What do we do then?
When we feel that anxiety churning inside,
what helps us cross over to a more peaceful shore?  

We have inside us,
Emerson once said,
all that we need to meet whatever life may bring.
His was no easy optimism.  
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
the 19th century poet, prophet and Unitarian preacher,
knew great pain and hardship in his life.
His beloved wife died.
He buried his five year old son.
He buried far too many friends.    
Still, he lived with courage and hope
believing that something deep inside us can carry us,
no matter what.  
“What lies behind us and what lies before us,” Emerson said,
“are small matters compared to what lies within us.”   

We’re living in anxious times.  
Nearly every day for months now, we’ve heard hard news.
The economic numbers are all wrong
and most of us are worried.
It goes even deeper though.  
A huge portion of our population is experiencing acute anxiety,
says sociologist Dalton Conley, always feeling we should be “elsewhere.”
Michelle Obama spoke to this when she said,
“If we’re at work, we’re worrying that we should be at home.
And if we’re at home,
we’re worrying that we should be at work.”
The “Elsewhere Class,” Dalton Conley says,
is part of today’s knowledge economy,
always on the go, always available by cell phone and email,
haunted by the feeling that we are expendable
because our output is intangible.
Knowledge workers can’t easily step back at the end of a day
and look at what our efforts produced.
No matter how hard we work,
or how many hours we put in,
it doesn’t seem like enough,
and we often don’t feel like enough for all that lies before us.    

All of us, no matter what we do for work,
have days when we don’t feel like we have what we need
to make it through.
We may feel overwhelmed and overloaded,
weary and worried,
our insides drained of strength, either physical or spiritual.  
I know; I’ve been there and you probably have too.
Life has taught me, though,
that even then,
even when I might feel empty and adrift,
I have inside me all that I need.

We could come up with lots of different ways to name
this something we all carry inside.
We might call it the Spirit of Life,
our higher power,
or our true self.
Like the Quakers,
I believe that there is “that of God” in every person
and that source of strength
we carry deep in our core I name God.  
Our God, the Indian poet Kabir taught,
is inside, inside the “clay jug,”
inside these bodies of ours.  
Whatever we name it, our source of strength is always there.
It never leaves us,
but life can sometimes leave us feeling less connected,
less in touch, especially these days.

It is in times like these in which we live
that we most need to find ways
to tap into our all that runs deep within our core –
the strength, the spiritual stamina,
the deep peace we can find inside.
We might meditate or pray.
What I am talking about, of course, is spiritual practice.
A spiritual practice can be whatever helps
bring you back to your center, to what grounds you,
and yours might be something
other than meditation or prayer.    
It can be whatever helps you cross over
to more peaceful shores,
whatever puts you in touch
with the Spirit of Life, or your God.

This isn’t about adding one more set of obligations
to an already overscheduled, overfull life.
It was Emerson who said religion
is not something we add to life;
religion, he said, should be a part of our lives,
a part of everything we do.
Emerson’s words are as practical as they are philosophical.  

One of my colleagues treats his daily drive to work
as a spiritual practice;
landmarks along his route are reminders
to give thanks for the blessings in his life:
family, friends, community, work.  
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, teaches
that washing the dishes can be a meditative practice.
Or we might get up early, throw in a load of laundry,
and then sit down with a journal,
or a book of poetry and our prayer list.  
Some of us in my Living by Heart class
were inspired to try this
after hearing of a writer who does this each morning because, in her words,
“ . . . the sound of the whirling laundry
makes me feel like I am doing something,
like something in my life is moving,
while I sit and think and pray.”
(Doing laundry, you see, can give the achievement oriented
permission to be still!)      

Whatever practice you choose, it’s not wasted time.
Our friend, Paul, whose peaceful face helped me that crazy day
is living proof that spiritual practice can make a difference in your life,
and maybe in the life of another.  
Spiritual practices, studies show,
actually train the brain to return to a state of calm,
condition the body to feel more peaceful, more of the time.   
Just as there are exercises to train the body’s physical core,
you might think of spiritual practices
as exercises to train the body’s spiritual core:  the soul.

For me, time with poetry or scripture
(and they’re often one and the same)
is a spiritual practice.
The time quiets my heart
and helps open my eyes
to the joys of an ordinary day,
joys like, to borrow the poet’s words,
“the untrimmable light of the world.”      
I save some of the words I find.
Some, I’ve told you before, I hand write in a special book;
some become a part of my memory.  
Either way, I carry with me words,
words help cut through
all the static and tension that life can bring,
words that help me return to my spiritual core.
Long ago, I first found these words from Wendell Berry,
words I offer you for these days:

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes.  Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here.  And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear.  What we need is here.  

The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
February 1, 2009