So Many Broken Things: The Importance of Inner Lives and Spiritual Friendship
Rebecca Doverspike, St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, Boston, MA
Recently, on maternity leave as an interfaith hospital chaplain, on a walk with my partner to a nearby playground with our 3 month old daughter and 11 year old pup, we explored a patch of woods behind the basketball court. In our own ways, we each light up in the woods: baby Esme loves to take in leaves and the air touching her skin (“this is wind,” we told her of a thunderstorm filtering through the screened window the month of her birth); pup Seneca emboldens the balance between her ancient instincts and domestic comforts/confines, I am in love with the falling leaves and their effortless letting go, and Chris is invigorated by seeking new trails in the unmade, a visionary that sees possibilities amid brambles I’m trying not to catch the baby’s eye on. Between the empty playground a busy street of public housing, ambling through this patch of woods, Chris said excitedly, “you can tell that it’s been used before, because there are so many broken things,” pointing to branches that weren’t from the clean cuts of machines, but rather footsteps or deer hooves. I love this form of tracking-- wondering of presences from marks left by absence, and I love how it enlivens him. I’m struck by his tone, how the broken things he’s referring to are beautiful, not painful or sad, and that the land being “used” is something meaningful rather than exploitative. I marvel at this little patch of woods he has opened my heart to, certainly more overlooked than loved, for this moment holding us in refuge.
These days, part of my work as a chaplain and as a person who values spiritual life is trying to reconcile how the Zen center that was once dear to me has broken from teacher misconduct and other teachers’, priests’, and leaders’ ill-informed responses, trying to sift through wise teachings amid fallible humans. In the experience of misconduct, many Buddhist leaders engaged in spiritual bypassing, utilizing Buddhist language to justify the situations unfolding, and so the question became, how can the Dharma (teachings) be medicine for this, even as it is being used for poison? In Wendell Berry’s notion of taking two things that belong together and putting them back together, I think of how healing it is to reconcile the inner life with the outer life. When I became a mother, I felt this new being in everything-- the light, the leaves; I understood oneness in a way I had not previous. I also newly and intensely felt the pains of separation, as each new and subtle thing required a kind of letting go that felt beyond my capacity of courage. That combination is the core of Zen: innate oneness and lived separation of different forms.
This paper seeks to explore how our inner lives can heal the separation from our outward ones. It particularly seeks to offer a learned jewel from the casualties of spiritual abuse-- spiritual friendship with kindred beings invested in ethics as necessary fastenings alongside spiritual wonderment. Spiritual friendship does not have to be with other people; it can be with literary companions, a forest, or even memory, a story, or a community’s story. As one of my own spiritual friends said of keeping our community’s story in safekeeping from distortions or exile, “I need to hold that story as carefully as I held baby Esme when I met her.” This paper seeks to offer responses, from personal experience and scholarship, to the following lines of inquiry: how might inner life be an ally for our outer ones? What would it be to imagine their coherence rather than separation? What might such healing offer the world writ large? Where are places inside and out to seek and find spiritual friends? When our spiritual refuges are as shifting sand rather than solid ground, how can we find comfort and then extend that support beyond ourselves? This paper will situate itself within the Buddhist paradox of there being a “self” and “other”, the integrity of difference in our world, and at the same time an inherent oneness and interconnection. What might such a paradox teach us about inner/outer, poison/medicine, and broken/whole? What might we trust of coherence even when we can only see a few stars/pieces?
These days, part of my work as a chaplain and as a person who values spiritual life is trying to reconcile how the Zen center that was once dear to me has broken from teacher misconduct and other teachers’, priests’, and leaders’ ill-informed responses, trying to sift through wise teachings amid fallible humans. In the experience of misconduct, many Buddhist leaders engaged in spiritual bypassing, utilizing Buddhist language to justify the situations unfolding, and so the question became, how can the Dharma (teachings) be medicine for this, even as it is being used for poison? In Wendell Berry’s notion of taking two things that belong together and putting them back together, I think of how healing it is to reconcile the inner life with the outer life. When I became a mother, I felt this new being in everything-- the light, the leaves; I understood oneness in a way I had not previous. I also newly and intensely felt the pains of separation, as each new and subtle thing required a kind of letting go that felt beyond my capacity of courage. That combination is the core of Zen: innate oneness and lived separation of different forms.
This paper seeks to explore how our inner lives can heal the separation from our outward ones. It particularly seeks to offer a learned jewel from the casualties of spiritual abuse-- spiritual friendship with kindred beings invested in ethics as necessary fastenings alongside spiritual wonderment. Spiritual friendship does not have to be with other people; it can be with literary companions, a forest, or even memory, a story, or a community’s story. As one of my own spiritual friends said of keeping our community’s story in safekeeping from distortions or exile, “I need to hold that story as carefully as I held baby Esme when I met her.” This paper seeks to offer responses, from personal experience and scholarship, to the following lines of inquiry: how might inner life be an ally for our outer ones? What would it be to imagine their coherence rather than separation? What might such healing offer the world writ large? Where are places inside and out to seek and find spiritual friends? When our spiritual refuges are as shifting sand rather than solid ground, how can we find comfort and then extend that support beyond ourselves? This paper will situate itself within the Buddhist paradox of there being a “self” and “other”, the integrity of difference in our world, and at the same time an inherent oneness and interconnection. What might such a paradox teach us about inner/outer, poison/medicine, and broken/whole? What might we trust of coherence even when we can only see a few stars/pieces?