We Dare to Say by Ken Trainor

Posted by Helen on: 11.19.2007 /

Last week I heard Ken Trainor give this talk. I’m posting it here with his permission.

The talk is about Ken and his book We Dare To Say: An Adventure in Journalling.

What I like best is: Ken creates a safe place for people to be spiritual.

(Ken is the Wednesday Journal editor who’s been publishing my dialog with Rev. Dean Lueking).

---

Since the topic tonight is spirituality, I’ll start with a confession:

Writing this book [We Dare To Say: An Adventure in Spiritual Journalling] forced me out of the closet. It has forced me to admit publicly that I am a spiritual person. I suppose I always have been, but I kept it hidden for years.

Spirituality, after all, has been hijacked by hucksters selling salvation and wild-eyed zealots dripping with sanctimony. Who wanted to be included in that company?

It all started 12 years ago. I was terribly unhappy and a friend suggested I go for a retreat to New Melleray Abbey in Iowa. If you want to raise some eyebrows, try explaining to people that you’re spending your vacation at a Trappist monastery. These days people regard it as an endearing eccentricity, but then …

Well, of course, when I got there, one thing led to another, and pretty soon my thoughts were turning to God.

Here I was, a reasonably sophisticated, properly skeptical, modern intellectual, and I was having these IMPULSES I couldn’t control.

It was like Spock in the old Star Trek series discovering he has a sex drive - very humiliating.

So I stand before you tonight, shaken and repentant. Some of you came out tonight innocently, expecting to enjoy some braised duck, or whatever it is Laura has on the menu, completely unaware that you’re about to be afflicted by a discussion on spirituality.

I throw myself upon your mercy and beg your understanding and forgiveness.

THE BOOK

Here’s my book. It’s a serious book, with a little playfulness sprinkled in.

Open to any page, and the first thing you’ll notice is it’s mostly blank.

Given the demands of my job, I knew that any book I managed to write outside of work would have to be short.

This one is 224 pages and approximately 300 sentences long. And the publisher is selling it for $14.95!

These are original sentences, my sentences, and they’d better be pretty good because you’re paying a nickel per sentence. The Bible verses at the bottom of most pages we threw in for free.

One of the themes running through the book is the notion that when we’re born, we’re sentenced to life. Not life imprisonment - unless we choose to see it that way - just to life. And as we go through life, we construct our own “life sentence,” which sums up who we are.

The first sentence of the book is my life sentence:

Hearing a great silence, I asked the spirit to speak through me - with wisdom, about life … and love.

Hearing a great silence …

Silence is a problem for a lot of people. They experience it as emptiness, absence. A void we try to avoid. As a writer, my impulse is always to fill the void.

In spiritual terms, modern man views The Great Silence as evidence of The Death of God - or at the very least, divine indifference.

We saw that with the recent revelation that Mother Theresa, everyone’s choice for saint of the 20th century, spent the last 50 years of her life suffering a “dark night of the soul” because she didn’t feel the presence of God. Some people might find that troubling. I find it reassuring. Welcome to the club. If we’re honest, I think, we have to admit that our primary experience of God is … silence.

But there’s another perspective. Some Native Americans - the Sioux, I think - heard The Great Silence (much more clearly than we do in our industrialized, media-crazed noise factories), and instead of despairing, they believed that God is “The Great Silence.”

They experienced silence as full, fertile, benevolent, all-surrounding and embracing, the ground out of which all creativity springs.

On the other hand, we fear and flee silence, filling our world with noise in order to drown out the even louder noise within.

The glass of our lives isn’t half empty or half full. It overflows, yet we often feel empty. We’re almost always surrounded by people, yet we often feel lonely.

At any rate, I did. Seven years ago my marriage ended, and I found myself living alone. I also stopped watching television, so suddenly I had a lot more solitude and silence on my hands.

When the internal noise started to die down, I found I could hear myself think - what Bill Burke in his introduction refers to as “tuning in to an ongoing conversation.”

I’m a writer, so I keep a notebook in my back pocket and two pens in my front pocket, and started recording what I heard. That’s how this book came about.

The book is dedicated to the proposition that we need more emptiness, more solitude, more silence in our lives - the fertile ground out of which all creativity springs.

“I asked the spirit to speak through me - with wisdom, about life and love.”

That’s a writer’s prayer. Anne Lamott, who manages to write about spirituality without being sanctimonious - which is also my goal - says most people use two kinds of prayer: Help me, help me, help me! and Thank you, thank you, thank you!

The writer’s prayer, however, is a prayer for wisdom. Speak through me with wisdom, about life and love. That may sound a little like New Age channeling, but it’s really an act of humility. Wisdom always feels as if it comes from elsewhere.

As the book’s title suggests, when we take ourselves seriously as a spiritual authority (one of many), when we begin to see ourselves as a potential source of wisdom, we engage in an act of daring. We Dare to Say.

But before wisdom can be drawn to the surface, you have to create the right conditions. You have to be willing to spend some time alone, and you have to be willing to hear a Great Silence.

Is there wisdom in this book? That’s for you to judge, of course, and the only way to do that is to read some of these sentences.

The book is divided into chapters and there is a progression, though it’s not particularly logical or linear. Since love is my favorite topic, I’ll read from the chapter titled “Love Letters.” You’ll find it in the second half. Unfortunately, the publisher decided to go without page numbers.

[At this point Ken read from his book]

Bill Burke and I chose the Bible verses as a counterpoint, an echo, to add depth and context. I liken it to a musical fugue, two voices running parallel, never quite reaching resolution until the end.

The blank lines, of course, invite readers to pen their thoughts. So you have three options with this book:
You can read it and not write in it at all (or, if you’re like me, you can doodle).
You can write in it and not read it at all (which I really don’t recommend).
Or you can do both.

The goal is to put you in a contemplative frame of mind where wisdom is likely to surface. I suggest solitude and quiet. The silence doesn’t have to be absolute. You don’t have to go into some sensory deprivation tank to use this. I always write better while listening to music, which helps me connect head and heart and the words begin to flow. Music, I think, lubricates the soul

There are plenty of ways to reach a contemplative state - yoga, structured meditation, gardening, long walks. I have a friend who does dream analysis. I also attend a very loosely structured spirituality discussion group once a month with friends. Whatever works for you. The point is to reduce the external and internal noise, and create the conditions that allow the “better angels of our nature” as Lincoln put it, to emerge.

THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

I believe everyone is spiritual, and we’re all on a spiritual journey - from birth through death to whatever lies beyond, if anything does. Some of us call it “personal growth” or “self-actualization,” but it’s the same journey.

As I mentioned, 12 years ago, I started visiting New Melleray Abbey each October for a personal retreat. The monks are in church seven times a day, if you can imagine, starting at 3 a.m. - every day for the rest of their lives. But it works apparently. You won’t find a happier group of individuals.

The place works for me, too, though I only make it to church three times a day (and, believe me, 3 a.m. is not one of those times). While I’m there, I don’t exactly deprive myself. I eat three very satisfying meals a day (and there’s always dessert). I get plenty of sleep and plenty of exercise (walking the surrounding hills). Basically, I read, think, sleep, eat, and write for five days. I have a friend there, an 82-year-old monk who grew up in Oak Park. We get together to talk, but it’s mostly about movies. A former philosophy teacher, he turned into a big film buff after Vatican II.

It takes a couple of days for the noise inside to die down, but by the end of the week, I’ve moved from rest and relaxation to inner serenity. Consciousness expands. The ego takes a well-deserved vacation.

When I return home, the serenity fades, of course, but not entirely. Life quickly becomes hurried and frenetic, and I need to work harder at recreating the conditions in this environment.

Fortunately, I’m older. My son is grown. When we’re younger, raising a family and/or establishing a career, spirituality seems like a luxury. In midlife, however, our deeper selves call out for integration. Many of us long for something more than church can give us on Sunday.

With all due respect, and I do respect it, organized religion has its limits. I’m not anti-denominational so much as extra-denominational. Just as Clemenceau said war is too important to leave to the generals, religion is too important to leave to the bishops. Did you see the headline in the Tribune today? “Catholic bishops say voters’ souls at risk.” I repeat, religion is too important to be left to the bishops.

I think we need to demystify, decentralize and democratize spirituality. Some of this we can do on our own. Much of it we have to do on our own.

We’re all on this journey. Spirituality is a natural part of life - what James Joyce called “the holiness of the ordinary.” What we’re really talking about, I think, is “the pursuit of happiness.” By midlife, we recognize happiness can’t be found through wealth or power or pleasure or material possessions. It has to be found within.

Each journey is unique. We have to find what works for us. But we can share that with our fellow journeyers. We can learn from one another.

So who am I, spiritually speaking? A combination of the conventional and the unconventional, like pretty much everyone else.

I call myself a free-range Catholic. I’m too much of a free thinker to stay in the flock for long, so I spend time on the “open range,” but my faith community keeps me grounded and connected.

I spend a lot of time alone, so I need community. Most people, I’ve found, err on the side of community and need more solitude. We live in a culture that encourages neither healthy solitude nor healthy community. It creates herds of loneliness (Oak Park is a happy exception).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian imprisoned and executed by the Nazis for his resistance, once said, “Let him who cannot be alone, beware of community. Let him who is not in community, beware of being alone.”

We need to find the proper balance.

A few years back I took one of those Internet surveys to find out how my beliefs matched up with mainstream religious denominations. I had a 97% correlation with Liberal Quaker, whatever that is.
If I were to lay out my spiritual profile, it would go something like this:
One part free-range Catholic
One part Sioux vision quest
One part Trappist monasticism
One part Irish pagan (Druid)
One part English Romantic poet (Wordsworth)
One part Emerson Transcendentalist
One part Zen Buddhist
One part Jungian psychology
One part spiritual evolutionary (Chardin)
And apparently one part Liberal Quaker (whatever that is).

And what about God? I think we can say a few things. If there is a God, God must be good. God might allow evil to exist, but God would not create evil. Therefore whatever God creates must be inherently good. So we are inherently good. Our task then, is to create the conditions most favorable to allowing our inherent goodness to emerge.

We all know the more radically self-centered you are, the more unhappy you’ll be, no matter how powerful or successful you become, and hell is total isolation. The other end of the spectrum is universal compassion, feeling connected to all humanity. There’s a reason the Dalai Lama smiles so much.

Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss,” but bliss isn’t the goal. It’s the result of intentional spiritual development. That’s why drugs don’t work for expanding our consciousness. You have to earn your bliss.

One of my mantras comes from a Franciscan named Richard Rohr who says, “Life is not about me. I am about life.” Life is not about you. You are about life. When we transcend our egos, we are enlarged.

Love is how we experience God in this world. Is God a personal being, a state of mind, the Great Silence, or just an unreachable mystery? Is finding God the goal or the result of our spiritual journey?

If we never experience God in this lifetime, is life still worth living? Is the spiritual journey still worth pursuing?

Yes. Even if there were no God, we would still be taking this journey.

I believe we are here to love and to appreciate and create beauty. That is who we are.

My theology is hopeful. I believe human beings are evolving. As Teilhard de Chardin put it, “Some day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, humanity will harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.”

We’re all on a spiritual journey. We move at our own pace, we have to do much of the work alone, but we can share what we’ve learned with one another. The journey lasts a lifetime - at least. As Teresa of Avila put it, “Every part of the journey is of importance to the whole.” As Catherine of Siena put it, “The road to heaven is part of heaven.”

The journey isn’t competitive. It isn’t a race. We go as far as we go, but we will no doubt go further if we take the journey intentionally. You know you’re on the right track in those moments when you experience life’s goodness.

I had one of those moments Tuesday afternoon. It was warm for November, so I hopped on the Green Line after we finished our deadline and ended up at Buckingham Fountain at sunset under a wide, open sky with the Chicago skyline to the west and the lake to the east. The sky was filled with wispy cirrus clouds that caught the fading light, turning pastel rose. The thumbnail moon followed in the sun’s wake. I was free of deadline pressures and the million details involved in putting out a newspaper. The external and internal noise died down and thoughts began to flow. I felt connected to everything around me - a quiet exhilaration, the holiness of the ordinary.

These are the moments we live for, but too often we dismiss or discount them because they’re fleeting, transitory. If they’re not permanent, what good are they? But that’s wrong. This is exactly what we live for, those moments when we can appreciate the authentic goodness of life and realize that heaven on earth is not entirely beyond our reach. For a few moments, we can return to the Garden of Eden.

There’s a prayer I say on such occasions, borrowed from poet e.e. cummings: “Thank you, God, for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirit of trees and a true blue dream of sky and everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is Yes.”

So there, I’m out of the closet–exposed. I’m not an expert and I’d be very interested in hearing what works for all of you. Have I gone off the deep end? Yes, but not entirely. I think of it as dangling my feet in the deep end of the pool. I invite you to do likewise. This book invites you to do likewise.

This is what I’ve learned so far on my journey. Writing this book was a major step along that path. I hope you find it worth your while. And if I might be so bold, I think it would make a nice gift for the thoughtful people on your holiday list.

---

Semi-Related Posts

• Update on my newspaper dialog with Dean
• Sharing our Spiritual Journey by Ken Trainor
• Update on church dialog in local newspaper
• Professing what God is not
• Why I Don’t go to Church Anymore
• ACT 3 Lunch about God and Movies
• Would I go to heaven or hell?

---