We Are Anxious, We Are Afraid, We Want to Fall Back Asleep

It amazes me how many ways we find to run away from ourselves.  The temptations are endless.

What is temptation? Anything that keeps you from becoming who you are, who you were meant to be.  Anything. 

Some temptations confront us with a clear and urgent choice like the one Moshe put before the fledgling nation:  Choose you this day life or death, the difficult freedom of the way of the Teaching or the easy way of the scattered and lost. Emanuel Levinas, in his essay “The Temptation of Temptation” (Nine Talmudic Readings sets before us another like choice like this:  Place ontology, the science of being, first, or ethics, the responsibility to the Other that confronts you, first.  The temptation of temptations is to choose knowledge, for knowledge sets you at the center of the universe.  If your choose obligation, you acknowledge that you stand always already in relation to an Other than has a prior claim on you. That is the way to life.

Some temptations come with the full force of drama, complete with warning lights and sirens and axes falling.  That woman or man who promises to be a better match for us than our current partner.  That urge to hurt the person we love.   The need to push another lower to raise ourselves higher. 

But it is the countless, tiny little temptations we face every day without realizing it that worry me today.  All the distractions of “normal” life that we allow to crowd our lives and dull our attention. We want to pay attention, be present to the Presence, and what do we do?  We watch TV, we exercise harder, we call our friends, we drink wine or beer or smoke, we surf the Web, we frenetically try to keep up and stay in touch on Facebook and Twitter, we read literature meant for consumption, we clean our houses, manage our family’s lives, search out great meals and other pleasures, shop, find new hobbies to “pass the time,” consult the stars and psychics, follow the lives of the gods and demigods we call “celebrities.”  None of these is bad in itself.  But when we do them unconsciously, repeatedly, they keep us from going deeper.  It’s easy to stay on the surface.  Nothing is required of us. 

We know how alive we feel when we wake up from this stupor and are really present, even for a moment, to another person or the natural world or ourselves.  Yet we keep going back to sleep.  We keep sipping that sleeping draught so we will not be fully present. St. Paul said it well:  “The good that we would we do not; and the evil that we would not, that we do.”

Why, when we know gives us life and what numbs us, do we keep choosing what numbs us?  Why do we keep enslaving ourselves to empty habits that drain the blood from our lives?  Why do we keep running away from ourselves?  Why do we keep hiding?  Why are we so frightened of becoming who we are?  So afraid to be free?   So afraid to be found?

To Be Free, Tether Yourself?

In the early 1970s, when I was at L’Abri in Huemoz, Switzerland, living in an Evangelical community that followed the monastic pattern of work, study, and prayer, I met two young men from Malaysia.  A group of us were sitting on the floor of a chalet perched high in the Alps, the sun streaming in. We were sharing our journeys--from agnosticism or atheism or existentialism to faith, from Hinduism or Islam or secularism or Satanism to Christianity.  The two recently arrived Malaysians both taught me something that afternoon that was essential to my life.  The first teaching I thought I understood,and I put it into practice immediately; the second haunted me for years.

When your mouth is burning from hot peppers, taught the first man, you time the fire by placing something sweet on your tongue. I’ve been doing this ever since.  It occurs to me now that there is a deeper, mystical meaning to his teaching as well—something to pursue another day.

The second man, born a Hindu, told the story of how he became a Christian.  He was floating free in the sky, he said, like a kite.  He was blown here and there at random, at times spiraling out of control, at times tangled in wires, at times crashing to earth.   Then he found Christ.  Now he could soar freely, soar higher, fly faster and farther, because he was tethered to this rock. 

When I heard this I was twenty and a hippie to boot, more interested in rebelling against all limits and chasing the illusion of absolute freedom than listening to any talk about being tethered.  The word tether called up images of playing tether ball on our three-room Christian school playground. It was bad enough being a player, playing against bullies who sent the ball flying so that it knocked with full force on your head and landed you in the gravel with a headache and bleeding knees.   Now I was supposed to be that ball, bandied about by anyone’s whim, being spun around endlessly in circles of absurdity?  Somehow the beauty and truth of this young man’s image pierced my heart.  Whether he meant Jesus the Christ or the cosmic Christ  of the logos open to all I did not know. But I heard the truth of his words: that we crazy creatures, we highly unstable combinations of earth and spirit, need to be tied to that which is ultimate to live in true freedom.

I heard, but I did not understand.  For decades my ego, my allergy to authority, my contrary temperament, and my suspicion of patriarchy and hierarchical religions kept me from understanding.  Not until my fifties, after undergoing a long series of  family traumas that crushed my spirit, did I begin to see.  Through a combination of hitbodedut, silent retreats, Sufi breathing and dhikr, and laying tefillin when I davened in the morning, I slowly awakened to the truth that we must tie ourselves tightly to the eternal to fly on earth.  My rabbi, a woman, had counseled me to try laying tefillin as a way of navigating a difficult transition in my life.  I found to my surprise that when I laid tefillin, I felt safe, calm, alive, whole--for I was bound to that which is constant.  Feeling the leather straps, the skin of another animal like me, tightened against my skin  was a liberating experience.  Their pressure against my flesh reminded me who I truly was:  I was not  a slave to anyone or anything, any circumstance or any theory.  I was a free servant freely choosing to bind myself to the One, the One Beyond Who is the One Who Dwells Among Us.  As I stood wrapped in my tallit, my head, arm, and hand wound round with darkened strips of skin containing and forming holy words of light, it seemed to me I was rooting my being, my whole being, in the only soil where it could grow.  And being so firmly planted, I could move with greater freedom, unencumbered. When I touched the root of all being and was touched by it, I was not shaken by fear, I was not compelled by desires, I was not distracted by the noise and things and frenetic activity within and around me, I did not get lost in possibilities, I did not  lose my mind in the giddiness of the spirit, I did not lose my way in meditation and forget how to return to the beautiful world we call human being.  I was present.  From this place I could live free, I could fly on earth.

  And I remembered the young man from Malaysia tethered to Christ and smiled in recognition.