Conversation: The Nature of Reality

I recently had the experience of being cut off from folk, from being able to communicate, to converse. I have been having mobile phone trouble. I phoned my mobile phone company over a couple of days and discovered that my software had become “corrupted”. It is not easy to speak with your mobile provider when your phone isn’t working, but thankfully I was able to use my landline. I was told that I would have to remove everything from my phone, save it to my laptop, relaunch the phone and then add everything back to the phone. This was a task way beyond my ability and so I had to call the company who made the phone and I was put through to a man named Alban. Alban who is originally from Albania. What followed was a three hour telephone conversation as he carefully guided me through all the steps, including several twenty minute phases where we waited for things to upload and download and other various technical things. During these blocks we got to know each other. We talked about our lives the things we have done in the past. Views about life, philosophy, politics, religion, music, sport, family, entertainment, the current pandemic and a whole lot more. It was a wonderful conversation, with a complete stranger I will never meet, in fact I will never speak to him again. It was a wonderful encounter, a beautiful conversation, and my phone seems to be working now.

I have been thinking about conversations ever since. I am discovering that they are deeperning, they seem more precious at this time. Whether that be the conversations in the supermarket, taking place behind masks, or the brief ones in the gym or street as I pass folk, moments of connection that are so precious. As well as the various phone calls I receive and all those Zoom conversations and other video based ones I have all week long. Last Monday I hosted the grief group, it was a quiet one, with only a few in attendance and yet it was so deep and rich in meaning. I loved the conversations we share in the poetry group. I reckon we share less poems each week and spend more time talking about the many varied things that the poems bring up.

I find it amazing how even though we are spending far less time in the company of people I am experiencing increasingly deeper conversations in my life. Thank God for that and thank God for modern technology, even social media. Where would we be without it.

Life is about conversation, good conversation. We spend most our lives in conversations, on all kinds of levels. Conversations are not of course always spoken, we are constantly in conversation with all of life, constantly engaging, speaking and listening.

Krista Tippet from “On Being” who spends much of life interviewing and engaging with all kinds of folk claims that “Good conversation is an adventure”. She states:

“I think of a good conversation as an adventure. You create a generous and trustworthy space for it, and prepare hospitably for it, so the other person will feel so welcome and understood that they will put words around something they have never put words around quite that way before. They will give voice to something they didn’t know they knew — and you will be a witness to thinking, revelation, in real time. This is one reason radio/podcasting is such a magical medium: everyone who listens joins that room, becomes a witness, the moment they push “play.” They are also there for the revelation. It’s a form of time travel. And if the conversation is edifying (one of my favorite, underused words), we all sync up in some mysterious way across time and space and grow a little together.”

Life is made up of conversation. We as humans have conversed in all kinds of ways over the years. People communicate in different ways in different cultures and sub-cultures within cultures, there has always been an etiquette in conversation. Now while conversation style has morphed and the methods of communication grown and expanded I suspect that the measure of good and bad conversation has remained the same. To quote William Spielgelman in “Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead”

“Here are some adjectives that do not apply to the best conversation: 'one-sided,' 'monopolizing,' 'condescending,' 'preachy,' 'abrasive,' 'hectoring,' 'loud,' and 'rude.' However many people it involves, conversation is, like chamber music, an exercise in intimacy, of give-and-take, of what Plato, who recorded the talk of one of history's first and finest talkers, called 'dialectic,' a word etymologically related to 'dialogue.' Conversation moves forward, or back and forth in starts and stops, like drama itself. That philosophy, democracy, and drama all began in fifth-century Athens says a great deal about the far from incidental relations among them.”

Conversation is not only about the ability to articulate oneself, it is about engaging in relationship with ourselves, with others, with life and with whatever we experience at the core of life. “The Creative Interchange” is a form of conversation. I am delivering this worship, this address but it is actually a part of wider conversation with life, with you who are listening and with all that came together to create it. You who are listeners will hopefully engage with the words shared and then engage and feed life in someway from it, leading to further conversation, engagement with life.

The goal of conversation is create understanding and connection between our thoughts and words. As Richard Saul Wurman has said “…conversations are an understanding machine, an imminently satisfying forum for the exchange of information.” I have noticed that tithey can be transformative too, they can change my whole psyche, my persona, they can bring to life my whole soul. So many times in the last few days I have felt transformed by a simple conversation.

Conversation though has been challenged for all of us these last six or months due to having to separate, to varying degrees, physically. We have had to adapt how we converse with one another. We are probably talking to one another less and perhaps this is why the conversation have deepened in meaning. I have also noticed a deeper conversation that can be had, that is often unspoken, a conversation with life itself and whatever we consider to be at the core of life, what some of us would call God and others give a different name. We are always in conversation; it is just that sometimes we speak and listen to words.

The philosopher poet David Whyte often speaks of “the conversational nature of reality.” He says that he became a poet, after a successful career as a marine biologist, because he felt a deeper need to communicate his experiences. As he states in a conversation he had with Krista Tippet:

“I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galapagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the “I.” But I was really interested in the way that the “I” deepened the more you paid attention. In Galapagos, I began to realize that because I was in deeply attentive states, hour after hour, watching animals and birds and landscapes — and that’s all I did for almost two years — I began to realize that my identity depended not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself — and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.

I began to realize that the only places where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you, that whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it. But the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass, and what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier. But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown both inside you and outside you. John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself in the world, letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.”

I love the way that David describes the conversational nature of reality, that we are constantly in conversation, whether we are speaking or not, so long as we are alive, awake and fully engaged.

This is beautifully illustrated in his poem “Everything Is Waiting for You?”

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

We are constantly in conversation, even if we haven’t spoken with someone for sometime. Life is about conversation, big and small. Conversation can happen anywhere and in any situation. Our tools for conversation are constantly changing and evolving. To enjoy a good conversation all that is required is for us to engage with life, to be alive and awake to the life around us, to take it in, to absorb it, to hear what it has to say and to respond in kind.

So let is join in the beautiful conversation, to engage in the conversational nature of reality.

Amen

Tales of the Expected and the Unexpected

A question I have been asked many times these last few months is “How is married life?” I usually answer with a smile, well it’s not exactly what I expected and then add, but then no one amongst us were expecting these last few months. This year has been like one long episode of the 1970’s television series “Tales of the Unexpected.”

I am sure that we all had plans for this year, ideas about what we would like to be doing, perhaps certain expectations and they have not quite worked out. I am sure that all of us have had to live with much disappointment at times. Many with deep tragedy, it has been a difficult last six months, of this there is little or no doubt.

Not that they have all been bad, there have been some lovely surprises too, some unexpected gifts have come our way no doubt. Sometimes these things can come from our greatest challenges as new connections and perhaps creations have grown from the suffering, perhaps you have risen to the challenge in new and surprising ways as so many have. Maybe you have been surprised by spontaneous and perhaps continuous acts of kindness, I know I have.

This brings to mind the wonderful poem “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye

“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

In an interview with Krista Tippet on “Onbeing”, that Sue recently shared with me, she explained what the poem is about and where it came from.

“Well, I really feel, amongst all my poems, that this was a poem that was given to me. I was simply the secretary for the poem. I wrote it down, but I honestly felt as if it were a female voice speaking in the air across a plaza in Popayán, Colombia. And my husband and I were on our honeymoon. We had just gotten married one week before, here in Texas. And we had this plan to travel in South America for three months. And at the end of our first week, we were robbed of everything. And someone else who was on the bus with us was killed. And he’s the Indian in the poem. And it was quite a shake-up of an experience.

And what do you do now? We didn’t have passports. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have anything. What should we do first? Where do we go? Who do we talk to? And a man came up to us on the street and was simply kind and just looked at us — I guess could see our disarray in our faces, and just asked us in Spanish, “What happened to you?” And we tried to tell him. And he listened to us, and he looked so sad. And he said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened,” in Spanish; and he went on. And then we went to this little plaza, and I sat down, and all I had was the notebook in my back pocket, and pencil. And my husband was going to hitchhike off to Cali, a larger city, to see about getting traveler’s checks reinstated — remember those archaic things?”

She continues

“And so this was also a little worrisome to us, because, suddenly, we were gonna split up. I was going to stay here, and he was gonna go there. And as I sat there alone, in a bit of a panic, night coming on, trying to figure out what I was going to do next, this voice came across the plaza and spoke this poem to me — spoke it. And I wrote it down. I was just the scribe.”

So out of this terrible situation, when something horribly unexpected happened, beautiful unexpected things also occurred. The response to what happened was in so many ways beautifully creative, both the kindness of the stranger, but also from this unexpected voice of inspiration that just came to Naomi as she wrote the poem, while waiting alone and somewhat terrified, waiting for her husband’s return. Where that inspiration came from is a beautiful mystery, but perhaps not to those of us who believe in the God of Surprises. That said I know many folk don’t believe in that kind of God, but God for some of us comes alive in that loving and creative response to life’s challenges, some pretty horrific at times.

I love that she described the poem as just being given to her. It is said that Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” was one of the poems that she said was just “given to her”. Some call this grace, others give it another name. As anything ever been given to you in a similar way? Perhaps something to ponder.

I wonder what we expect from life when we step out into the world. I wonder what we receive, do we notice all we receive, do we only notice the blessings or the curses that come with choosing life. What do we do with what life offers to us, does to us, how do we respond ourselves? How do we respond when something happens to those around us, do we ourselves offer kindness to strangers like the man who offered love to Naomi and thus inspired that loving voice to be heard as she sat down with her pen and pad. It matters how we respond, it really does, who knows what chain reaction we might set off with any and every interaction.

It matters how we respond to the unexpected things that happen in life. Perhaps even more during these times of global disturbance. How we respond to events matter, do we respond with more fear, or do we respond with kindness? For me God is in the action, the response. People can believe and disbelieve what they like but surely our faith is shown in our actions, in what we do and what we do not, the seeds that we plant each and every day in our simple human interactions. We plant seeds and if they are nurtured properly, they will grow into who knows what, perhaps something beautifully unexpected.

These thoughts bring to mind the following beautiful words of wisdom from Octavia Butler’s series “Earthseed: The Book of the Living” the collection that made up "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents"

“All that you touch You Change.

All that you Change Changes you.

The only lasting truth Is Change.

God Is Change.

In this work of science fiction Octavia Butler depicts God not as a figure or an all-encompassing nature, but “change”, a process that is somehow out of humanities control and yet working within humanities actions either for or against its will. In this work of fiction, the believers did not pray to their God, instead they learnt to shape and be shaped by God through their actions.

“We do not worship God.

We perceive and attend God.

We learn from God.

With forethought and work,

We shape God

Octavia Butler wrote some fascinating science fiction including two pieces that looked into what the world might be like in 2020 “The Parable of the Sower” and “The Parable of the Talents”. I wonder if she would be surprised by what she saw, in some ways yes, in others perhaps not. Of course we cannot know the answer to this as she died in 2006.

This final quotation from Earthseed does seem to speak of our time;

“When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must-
God is Change-
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.
When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
The create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear.

Does this speak of our world today?

Our world needs us to find a way to unify to work together, to connect to that power of change that brings about love and kindness and thus inspire one another to live from this loving kindness rather than fear. The seeds we plant today will make the difference not only now, but in the years to come. We must become the change we wish to see in the world, we must bring to life that Divine change.

Did you have plans my friends. I know I did. I had great expectations about my life, particularly this year. It has not gone the way I would have expected. I know I am not alone in this.

As Robbie Burns famously wrote

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

No matter how careful we plan and scheme life never works out exactly as we would like. Life is full of surprises, we all live tales of the unexpected some amazing, some terrible. Life is awry and usually or do I mean unusually incredible. Brother David Steindt Rast said "Another name for God is surprise." Ah yes the God of surprises, isn’t this the true nature of life? Surprise. It fills me with awe.

We cannot predict the future; it truly is unwritten. We do not know what is coming. There will be some difficult challenges ahead, there will also be beautiful moments too, some will be unexpected. They will come perhaps in our most difficult moments. These moments will affect us and change us, just as our responses will change and affect others. Therefore, it is important what attitude we take into life.

We can’t really live with expectation about what might be, but we can live with hope. I suspect that to live a life without any sense of hope may be the hardest thing to do. For it is hope, in life and humanity, that will allow us to live from that place of kindness, to give love form out hearts, so that those around us, including strangers, will hopefully receive what is needed when things go wrong. Hope and kindness will inspire us to stay open to that voice of love present in life. It will inspire us to plant seeds of love for others to share.

So, let us go plant seeds of love and let us become fertile ground for those seeds to fall on, to be nurtured and cared for, to flower and grow.

Let us go out into the world in hope, if not expectation.

I am going to end this morning with a little bit of David Whyte “Learning to Walk”

“Learning to Walk” by David Whyte

Walked out this morning
into a broad green garden
with the rising sun in my eyes
and the first hint of the day’s heat
touching my face,
feeling as broad as the garden
and young as the day
and soaking up the heat
in my black tee-shirt,
walked straight forward
out of the gate,
through the wood,
along the river,
toward the mountain
and thought of the future
I could make in the world
if I walked toward it
like this,
with my face toward the hills
and my eyes full of light
and the earth sure
and solid beneath me,
walking on
with a fierce anticipation,
and a faithful expectation,
with the sun and the rain
and the wind on my skin…

From “River Flow: New and Selected Poems”