Odd Companions

In his book the Water of Life, Michael Meade retells an old story about a group of companions on a quest. At the center of the story is a prince, and in the course of his journey, he picks up a strange collection of characters: one who can see great distances, one who can hear all the way to the center of the earth, one who can swallow whole oceans, and so forth. Nearly all are physically marked in some way, such that their oddness is immediately obvious. And all, in the beginning, are isolated, but of course, as the story progresses, they learn to work together quite well and are able to accomplish amazing things.

The story is not new, but it does show up in contemporary culture (think X-men) as often as in folklore. When stories show up again and again, it’s because they resonate with us on a deep level, deep enough to transcend the various zeitgeists we progress through and speak to the center of the human condition.

I have always been a bit drawn to friends who are obviously unusual in some way, sometimes in many ways at once. The world being what it is, those who wear strangeness are often a bit on the outside, because our choice of companions reveals something of where we truly are, and most want to to deny strangeness. In truth, though, everyone is strange, and even those who keep it less than visible feel its isolation from time to time.

This Saturday, I’m graduating after what feels like a lengthy era of juggling way too many things at once. If I had actually thought about everything that would need to happen so that I could come to this point, I would have said it was impossible, like swallowing the ocean or hearing to the center of the earth.

Luckily I found my own collection of odd companions with various superpowers they were willing to lend me. (Sorry if this comes as a shock to any of you, but you people are quite bizarre, and I mean that in the best possible way.) So as I’m finishing up this week, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of my odd companions. Thanks for lending me your superpowers, for blessing me with your strange company, and for occasionally helping me swallow a whole ocean when the need arose.

The God Image

Saturday I attended a wonderful workshop by Lionel Corbett, who spoke about spirituality, religion and psychotherapy. He read passages from the book of Job as we talked about suffering and the God image. Corbett noted that research is pretty clear about the relationship between a person’s early experience of family life and her image of God; either she keeps to the same basic image for most of life, or she rebels against it radically, but either way, family shapes God within the individual in a lasting way.

To know what your God image really is, he said, see what happens when you’re truly frightened or suffering, and you feel like you’re four years old again. However you see God at that time, that’s the real God image you carry.

In my family, the God image was not something each person formed silently on their own. We talked about it often. We shaped God in the Bible stories we read at night and the church services we attended on Sundays and Wednesdays. Our collective God image suffered some trauma as the church we attended began to behave in disappointing ways.

As we have all grown and moved apart, so have the God images grown and moved apart. We try to understand each other but often find our differences in this regard popping up in unexpected ways. Each time someone begins a family prayer with “Father,” for instance, I am acutely aware of these differences, and I scramble for a moment to find a comfortable way to stand in a space where the Divine is understood in that way.

Ultimately all the traditions tell us that each image, any image, is false. As the Divine is beyond category and beyond understanding, any image that we can point to will automatically be one thing and not another, and therefore, not a true understanding. In this way, diversity, multiculturalism, even sitting within the microcosm of family differences becomes spiritual practice, an attempt to open to the God beyond the limitations of our understanding. It’s the difference between reaching for experience of the Divine and clutching only to its picture.

Little Water, Big Water

When PBS aired a special on Fred Rogers some time after his death, they played a clip of him talking about things children are afraid of, and how easy it is for adults to forget that kids fear simple things, like getting a haircut, or taking a bath.

On a recent trip to the beach, my three year old cousin, Ayden, felt cowed by the size of the ocean. His father, who, as I recall, has loved few things more that the ocean since childhood, kept urging him to come and swim. Ayden replied that he liked little water, not big water.

He seemed particularly distressed by salt water getting into his eyes, which stings a bit to be sure, and by the prospect of getting knocked down by waves as tall as he was.

The Nurse seemed to know just what was needed. Working with sick kids in a pediatric ER, he is no doubt better acquainted than most with the nature of childhood fears. Ayden needed to be told, and shown, some simple things: If water gets in your eyes, just rub them a little to clear it out. If someone bigger is holding you, the waves won’t knock you over.

It’s easy to get frustrated with these fears when they surface in children, or in ourselves, to dismiss them as irritating and irrational. But they are not; fear kept Ayden from wandering into water that was too deep for him to handle.

As adults, we are asked to venture into big water all the time. The same fear that keeps us from getting in over our heads has the power to keep us playing around in little water our whole lives. Sometimes we need to have patience with the child self, to tell it simple things, to guide it gently towards bigger water.