Why Being With is the Answer
Those of my generation (X) and the one just before probably remember Lennon's Mind Games where he says, 'Love is the Answer'. I want to explore what it is about love that heals
As inspired as I am with the course Being With, this is really about what the course seeks to embody, what it points to: the transformational power of loving presence.
To begin though, being with in a loving presence is not trying to fix someone.
When you try your best, but you don’t succeed
When you get what you want, but not what you need
When you feel so tired, but you can’t sleep
Stuck in reverse
And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can’t replace
When you love someone, but it goes to waste
Could it be worse? (Chris Martin lyrics)
What do you need, what do I need, at times like this? It is exhausting to live as if one is all alone in the universe, and even more exhausting when the response of the other is to treat one like a broken machine. Must. Fix.
It’s not working with:
Working with can be exhilarating, empowering. If you’ve ever collaborated with others on a big project, participating in putting on a play, creating a movie, or performed with a choir, you know the thrill of working hard together with others and together creating something beautiful. Last night I spoke about the feeling of completing the last movement of the Brahms Requiem when I performed it with a choir the first time in Montreal. What a rush!
Feel free to watch the entire stunning performance. Or if you have less time, go to the last few minutes of the last movement (starting around an hour and 7 minutes), listen to the final gentle notes from the choir and orchestra, the last tender strums of the harp, and then, after a deep silence, the conductor drops his arms and the audience explodes in grateful, appreciate applause. It felt something like that, not a feeling of pride as much as wonder and awe that we had together completed a performance of this beautiful work that felt worthy of it.
This is glorious, but not really being with.
It’s not being for: it’s not about having the right words or right attitudes or being seen as such. Performative political correctness and the dark side of being a social justice warrior have created landmines in conversations and relationships around how well people are seen to posture as the most enlightened. I’m sure Hamilton, Ontario is not the only city where weaponization of these have poisoned both political discourse and the community at large, especially in the continuing fracturing of the ‘left’. I have always thought of myself as left-leaning, very left-leaning, but apparently not enough! It’s deeply tiresome when the focus is less about the people you are supposedly trying to support, and more about what a superlative job you are doing using the correct words on Twitter or Bluesky to demonstrate your amazingness.
In other words, virtue signaling.
It was supposed to be a progressive response to a toxic repressive culture described in the song Signs. It’s become something else entirely.
And now for something completely different!
Being With Begins With Being With Myself:
I don’t know what you, gentle reader, think about contemplation and meditation, or how you would define them. I have come to understand meditation, after being with it for decades, as learning to open as fully as possible into the Moment As It Is, Reality Now. Am I always really open? Not at all. In some moments, I want that cookie.
Being with myself in meditation means tenderness to wherever I am at the moment. It could mean craving a cookie, which is code for craving escape from whatever the nature of the suffering is that I am struggling to sit with. It could mean simply being filled with energy and excitement and having thoughts jumping around in me instead of inner stillness. It doesn’t really matter what I am feeling or thinking or not thinking. Meditating is just…
Being With. Being with myself as sweetly and lovingly as I have the capacity to be with myself right now.
The secret is that the more I settle into that place of connection with my Self, the closer I am to God, who remains at all times in loving presence in the very heart of me.
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship [and daughtership]. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely . . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
Thomas Merton, following his ‘conversion’ at Fourth and Walnut
Being With Others Flows Out of Being With Self
As Rev Ian Mobsby so beautifully describes in his post today on Substack, being an ordained parish priest, or a commisioned lay missioner, or really, any being seeking to live a life of service and connection to others in humility, flows naturally out of contemplative practice.
Ian says: ‘Rowan Williams once wrote that “to be contemplative is to be open to the truth that the world is held in being by the love of God.” If this is true, then the vocation of the ordained priest must begin not with doing, but with being held. The ordained priest is not first a manager, but a witness to this divine holding.’
and in stark contrast ‘…functional atheism - the quiet, practical assumption that everything depends on us. It is rarely spoken aloud, but it governs how many of us lead. It shows up in the exhaustion of clergy who feel that if they don’t hold every string together, the parish will unravel.’
My spiritual director quietly pointed out to me in our very first session together that I was living my life as if God couldn’t heal me.
In other words, I was suffering from functional atheism. It was a real wake up call, and the work since every day for me has been really centered around the focus to open and keep opening myself daily to God’s healing presence in my life.
And at the same time, I have been noticing my tendencies toward others to seek to fix, to work with, and to be for. Again, working with can be great, in context! But it can take over and become the foundational paradigm.
The foundational paradigm needs to be Being With.
Being With rather that trying to fix you, work with you, or being ‘for’ you.
Hold me ‘til I die
Meet you on the other side
I’m so glad to have the app again so I can “be with” you 💗