Family: It takes just three cups of tea

Last weekend Sue and myself made a trip over to Yorkshire to catch up with some of my nearest and dearest. We have spent quite a bit of time, in recent months getting to know one another’s family and letting them get to know us. It is lovely but it is also challenging. Both families have their history and their stories. Mine is of course much more complicated. It is certainly bigger. Our wedding guest lists are not balanced at all.

When you enter into any family you have to take it completely in all its joy and suffering, we have both experienced much of this already. Last weekend was another experience of sharing in joy and suffering also.

Most of us started out in a family of some kind. Now whether we remember our childhoods fondly or with dread, I bet we all have some complicated feelings about our families of birth and upbringing.

Families are complicated things, they always have been by the way. My mum is a family history expert, purely self taught . Over the years she has spent a great deal of her spare time exploring people’s family histories. One thing that she has noticed is that they have always been complicated, full of mystery and secrets. People are the same as they have always been. Families are complicated things, therefore it should come as no surprise that so many of us have complicated feelings about them.

Most of us are born into a family of some sort, within these families we learn the basics of living and at some point we break away and establish our own emerging adult personalities. For of all of us the day eventually comes when we leave the nest, yes some are pushed, but leave we do. In the end we begin to make our own complicated families, merging with others and blending in all kinds of fascinating ways.

Families are fascinating and complicated things. The place of some of our greatest joys and desperate sufferings, no matter how they are made up. There are many ways to make and create family by the way. Once again this has always been so. Family is not just some idealized image of a 1980s sit com, thank God. If you take a proper look at your family history you will see so.

More than anything a family is made up of stories. Families tell stories, just as cultures and religions do, they are held together by the telling of these stories. Some of the stories are ones of deep suffering and others of incredible joy, so many funny stories too. Mine certainly are. I am told that my brother is currently collecting many stories for his best mans speech at my wedding next year.

These family stories are not static things, they are constantly being rewritten and re-told. Last weekend we recounted an amusing story from last Christmas, of playing “Family Fortunes” with a happy and mixed blend of my ever forming and reforming family. Please don’t ask me to explain exactly who belongs to who of those that were gathered together that day.

A family is a place of stories. Another word for this is “gossip”. We connect by telling our stories of each other, keeping up to date with varied members. The stories are not just of the past, but also of the present. Family members gossip about each other. Now such “gossiping” can be hurtful and diminishing, I am sure all have bad experiences of this from our lives. That said healthy gossip is shared too. Now this is closer to “gossip” in its original meaning. The word “gossip” is derived from words for God and sibling. It originally meant “akin to God”. The word originally described a person you were connected to in spiritual kinship, either a sponsor or God parent. So when we share such stories we are connecting people together in shared concern. Sadly, gossip these days almost means the exact opposite to its original meaning. It seems more to be akin to separation than connection.

Now this might not surprise you to hear, but the word family had changed in its meaning over time too. Family never meant the classic image of mother, father and 2.4 children. The word itself originally meant all members of a household, property or estate, this would include servants as well as relatives. The Latin word familia did not refer to parents and children exclusively, the word “domus”, from which domestic was thus derived. actually meant this.

Rather like the word itself, family has changed over time. What we consider as our family may well be different for all of us. I think that a healthy family is something that is constantly opening and changing shape. It ought to be a place of welcome and not one of exclusion. To live healthily by family is to not make the other the un-familiar. it is to instead invite them to become familiar. It takes time to get to know the un-familiar. Not too long though. Actually all we have to do is begin to relate, to “gossip”, in the old fashioned way, to tell our stories.

How do we do this, well simply by sharing time, usually over a meal or simply a cup of tea or coffee. In so doing we begin to relate to one another, in real ways. It doesn’t take long you know. As Thich Nhat Hanh has said 'We are most real when we are drinking tea.' In fact some suggests that all it takes is three cups of tea. This is beautifully illustrated by the following passage from “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson. The following passage describes the author being taught its meaning by a Balti tribesman in Pakistan, that  he was working with.

" 'The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time.' "

Perhaps all it takes is three cups of tea for the un-familiar to become familiar. For once we have shared our stories, once we’ve gossiped for a short while we will already have made deep connections, we see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves. We see that we are kin. Kindred spirits bound together by a simple ritual.

This I believe is the case for all of humanity. All it takes is the time to share our stories for all of us to truly see that we are related, kin, kindred spirits, part of the one human family.

Sadly, so often in life we do not see one another as kin, we see the other as different and not part of the one human family. The religious traditions at their worst have often perpetuated this and yet I’m not convinced that this is the essence of their teachings, just the way that some have taught and been practiced. The first book of the Bible Genesis, in chapter 1, depicts humanity being created in God’s image. So if one is to be a follower of the book then surely every act done by one person to another is done by and to a person made in that image, that all are part of the one human family. There is a similar suggestion in the Qur’an which in the fourth chapter declares 'Oh people, be conscious of your Lord who created you from a single soul and created from her, her mate; and from them, many men and women scattered far and wide.' Thus suggesting a deep unity within the one human family and that all people are not only created by God but are descended from a single soul.

Buddhism extends this familiarity beyond merely humanity but to all sentient beings. Seeing all individual beings as being like waves on the ocean. Although each wave has a sense of its own separateness (its 'lesser self'), it is better understood as part of the ocean (its 'greater self'). Suggesting that the key is to awaken to the larger truth that not only are we a part of the ocean but that we are in fact in essence the ocean. Or to paraphrase Jesus “What you do to the least of them you do to me. This is more than interconnection it is deep kin-ship, it is the family of life itself.

We are all part of the one family of life. We share a common heritage, but not only that, we share a common destiny too. We are deeply interconnected, in deep kin-ship. Thus no one is really un-familiar, we just haven’t shared three cups of tea yet.

There are two things in particular that all of us share, joy and grief. We all know joy and we all know grief. When one of those we call family have a success in life, we all celebrate, we all share in this joy. I witnessed this recently at my sisters wedding when all of hers and Howard's loved ones came together to share in this joy. It is the same with grief , when we gather as we lose someone we love. These are feelings that the whole human family share in. We are united in joy and grief. Feelings that are familiar to everyone. So often these are the very stories we share as we drink those three cups of tea.

I'm going to end this little piece with a story from the Zen Buddhist tradition. It illustrates ways in which we can connect and bear witness to our common kinship and familiarity to one another.

"Soyen Shaku, the abbot, each morning took a walk accompanied by his companion from the monastery to the nearby town. One day, as he passed a house, he heard a great cry from within it. Stopping to inquire, he asked the inhabitants, 'Why are you all wailing so?' They said: 'Our child has died and we are grieving.'

"The abbot without hesitation sat down with the family and started crying and wailing himself. As they were returning to the monastery, the abbot's companion asked, 'Master, is this family known to you?' 'No,' the abbot answered. 'Why then, Master, did you also cry?' The abbot said simply, 'So that I may share their sorrow.' "

Isn’t this our common humanity to share our sorrow and of course to share our joy. To become family to make the un-familiar familiar…Apparently it only takes three cups of tea…

I Still Feel the Wonder

This is one of my favourite songs... "Changing of the Light"

"...I still feel the wonder as the sky turns to fire..."

The following words by ee cummings have been floating around in my consciousness these last few days...

i thank You God for most this amazing day:

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;

and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;

this is the birth day of life and love and wings:

and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any

--lifted from the no of all nothing—

human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake

And now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I also love the fact that cummings hasn't used capitol letters, not even for his own name, except for two words...

"...now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened..."

D. H. Lawrence once declared “The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense and it is a natural religious sense”.

Our sixth sense is a natural religious sense, what on earth could that mean? I suspect that he is saying that the sense of wonder is something that is natural to us all and it this that sparks our natural religiousness. Viktor Frankl drew similar conclusions, with regard to our natural religiousness, claiming that we possess a will to find meaning; that in some sense we human beings are the meaning makers; that there is something within us that searches for meaning in life; that there is something that occurs when we truly see life in all its majesty; that there is something that ignites this natural religiousness within us. We are the religious animal.

We each of us seemingly have this religious impulse ingrained within us. Now of course sometimes that gets shut off and or closed down by life’s busyness and or suffering. We can all become desensitised to life from time to time, but the impulse is still there and can be reignited, even when all seems lost.

“I still feel the wonder as the sky turns to fire”

There is wonder present in all life. To see it we just need to reawaken the ears of our ears and open the eyes of eyes. Religious practise is one way of achieving this. It helps to create those Angelus moments I spoke of in the previous blog. We cynical adults need such moments to reawaken that natural childish enthusiasm and sense of wonder at life. It is no mistake that Jesus (Mark 10 vv 13-16) when speaking to his disciples told them that they needed to receive the kingdom of God like a child if they wanted to enter it. I suspect that he was talking here of the Kingdom now and not just what was to follow. He was teaching them that in order to experience that Kingdom that was already here and now they had to view life through the eyes of child; that they needed to reawaken the ears of their ears and open the eyes of their eyes; that they needed to reawaken their sense of wonder.

Prayer helps me to pay attention. Actually it does more than that; it helps me to connect to all of life. When I pray I feel that I am connecting beyond myself to the greater reality. This I believe enables me to reawaken the ears of my ears and open the eyes of my eyes. According to Thomas Heschel “to pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments.” I would go further than this and claim that the practise of wonder is itself a form of prayer.

Thomas Carlyle viewed wonder as the basis of worship. I see real truth is this. I believe that the purpose of worship is to reawaken, to maintain and to develop this sixth sense, this natural religiousness, this sense of wonder. One of the reasons I worship with others is to remember how to connect to that natural spirit in all life; to remember what is important in life; to connect beyond the confines of myself and then to carry that into my everyday activities. To worship is to remember, to re-bind together, this is the essence of religion.

That said I do not believe that mediators are required in order to achieve this. We can reawaken our natural religiousness, that sixth sense, that sense of wonder, alone. The nineteenth century transcendentalists brought this insight to western religion. They said that we do not need clergy, priests or religion itself to mediate our experience of God or the truth; we do not need the mediation of others in order to find meaning. They said that it was the inalienable right and duty of every soul to approach God directly. In fact they went further and said that there was no other way to know the holy or Divine other than to experience it directly through the creation, through nature.

Could this be true? Can the sense of wonder only truly be awoken through nature? Well personally I'm not convinced of this. That said I do suspect that if you cannot connect to the divine through nature it is unlikely that you will you will be able to connect to it through worship and words.

I recently came across the following words by Wendal Berry.

“I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine - which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.”

I suspect that this applies to all religion and philosophy, which can never be fully understood or experienced within the confines of walls, institutions or books. As I have heard many times "The religious life is not a theory, we have to live it." and in order to live with, we have to truly experience it. This means embracing all that is life and increasing our sensitivity to it.

The sense of wonder is never lost. We can reawaken the ears of our ears and open the eyes of our eyes. We can re-awaken this sixth sense, this natural religiousness, this sense of wonder. Wonder can re-open doors which invite us to a greater experience of living that can transform our experience of life. This can enable us to fully sense life in all its forms; to fully sense our senses. We can be swept away by the elements or stand next a mountain and feel as insignificant as a speck of dust. All that is required is that we let the natural wonder at the core of our being work through our senses and as a result we become instantly connected to the joyfulness woven into the core of all creation.

Everyone can awaken to the wonder of life; everyone can find that sustaining joy which is at the core of all life; everyone can reawaken the ears of their ears and open the eyes of their eyes.

"I still feel the wonder as the sky turns to fire."