Spiritual Path

The following is an excerpt from Annie Dillard's book, For the Time Being.  It sums up in a very succinct and poetic way the experience we've all had, and that which we seek.  I hope you find it resonates with you and would appreciate your comments.

"Spiritual path" is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape; they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why. They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it awhile, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is. Their life's fine, impossible goal justifies the term "spiritual". Nothing, however, can justify the term "path" for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage - except one thing: They don't quit. They stick with it. Year after year they put one foot in front of the other, though they fare nowhere. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark.

The planet turns under their steps like a water wheel rolling; constellations shift without anyone's gaining ground. They are presenting themselves to the unseen gaze of emptiness. Why do they want to do this? They hope to learn how to be useful.

Their feet catch in nets; they untangle them when they notice, and keep moving. They hope to learn where they came from. "The soul teaches incessantly", said Rabbi Pinnhas (see footnote) [1], "but it never repeats". Decade after decade they see no progress. But they do notice, if they look, that they have left doubt behind. Decades ago, they left behind doubt about this or that doctrine, abandoning the issues as unimportant. Now, I mean, they have left behind the early doubt that this feckless prospecting in the dark for the unseen is a reasonable way to pass one's life.

"Plunge into matter", Teilhard[2] said - and at another time, "Plunge into God." And he said this fine thing: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."

Here is how adept people conduct themselves, according to the Son Master Chinul: "In everything they are like empty boats riding the waves...buoyantly going along with nature today, going along with nature buoyantly tomorrow." Was he describing people now extinct?

"Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself - even to make of oneself a righteous person." Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the Nazis hanged him for resisting Nazism and plotting to assassinate Hitler.

"I can and I must throw myself into the thick of human endeavor, and with no stopping for breath," said Teilhard, who by no means stopped for breath. But what distinguishes living "completely in the world" (Bonhoeffer) or throwing oneself "into the thick of human endeavor" (Teilhard), as these two prayerful men did, from any other life lived in the thick of things? A secular broker's life, a shoe salesman's life, a mechanic's, a writer's, a farmer's? Where else is there? The world and human endeavor catch and hold everyone alive but a handful of hoboes, nuns, and monks. Were these two men especially dense, that they spent years learning what every kid already knows, that life here is all there is? Authorities in Rome or the Gestapo forbade them each to teach (as secular Rome had forbidden Rabbi Akiva to teach). One of them in his density went to prison and died on a scaffold. The other in his density kept his vows despite Rome's stubborn ignorance and righteous cruelty and despite the importunings of a woman he loved. No.

We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

What to do? There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views. Each impels an individual soul to undertake to divinize, transform and complete the world, to  - as these thinkers say quite as if there were both matter and spirit - "subject a little more matter to spirit," to "lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned," to "establish in this our place a dwelling place of the Divine Presence," to "work for the redemption of the world," to "extract spiritual power without letting any of it be lost," to "help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of creation in which we are living," to "mend the shattered unity of the divine worlds," to "force the gates of spirit, and cry, ‘Let me come by.'"

When one of his Hasids complained of God's hiddenness, Rabbi Pinnhas said, "It ceases to be a hiding, if you know it is hiding." But it does not cease to hide, not ever, not under any circumstance, for anyone.

[1] Rabbi Pinnhas was a Kabbalist who lived in upper Galilee town of Safad in the 18^th Century. A student and scholar of the Torah, he descended from a long lineage of Kabbalists, including Rabbi Isaac Luria, Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Akiva (killed in gruesome fashion by the Romans for his teachings). 

[2] Pierre Teilhard de Charding (1881 - 1953) was a Jesuit priest and incredibly prolific paleontologist (his discoveries included Peking Man and the first evidence of hominids in all of Asia).  He won (4) medals of bravery for his service as a Corpsman in the trench warfare of World War I. Teilhard wrote (14) books in his lifetime, but was forbidden to teach or publish his entire life because Rome still considered ideas of evolution too "controversial".  Later most of his philosophies and teachings were calmly incorporated into Vatican II, and all his books were eventually published after his death.  Teilhard maintained a friendship with the widowed Lucile Swan for 23 years, yet remained always faithful to his calling and his vows to the Jesuit Order.