LEAVING

(This is re-write/up-date of an earlier blog post)

I have been in a church all my life.  There is a theme that is throughout bible stories I have yet to hear preached or taught.  

The theme: leaving 

One of the deeper mysteries of life is that you will not ‘find’ if you do not ‘leave’.  Because leaving often doesn't make sense to us, we resist it, we fear it but then we either surrender ourselves to the truth of it, or we spend way too much energy grasping for what we think will offer us stability and safety trying so hard to stay where we are.

Just as Abram left Ur, just as Dorothy left Kansas, as our children leave home—we too must go.  Isn’t that what any change is about?  Why do I fear leaving so much?  What is so scary about it?  When I left home at eighteen for college I was venturing into an unknown neither of my parents had experienced.  I was drawn aside and warned by the wary dad of 'the girl next door' that the state school I was headed to had multiple ways of leading me astray.  Particularly beware of the philosophy department.  The implication was that had I chosen a Christian campus I would have been much safer and on a more righteous track.   

Ironically it was my freshman philosophy professor that required us to read Plato's Allegory of the Cave. A powerful allegory that burnt its' truth deep within me.  It is about leaving what you thought you clearly knew; about not fearing turning around—seeking, searching; about getting off the bench in the cave and walking toward the light even though no one else will go with you.  It has been writings such as Plato that have constantly resonated with what I've seen as God's direction in my life over the years. God was/is always asking his people to leave whether that be Abram, Moses, Joseph, Jonah or most any one of the prophets, down to Jesus himself who left the ‘realms of glory’.

Jeannie and I were the ones in the family that as a young couple (22 and 23) left Oklahoma.  Six months after we married, we moved to Texas for three and a half years of graduate school.  That decision resulted in some life education we'd likely never gotten had we stayed near family.  In the beginning knowing no one in Fort Worth, no jobs and only $75 in our pockets, it was a powerful learning lab.  The fact that we are both first born may have had something to do with accepting the challenge (but also added to the amazement that we are still together—firstborns can be headstrong, her of course).  Not having parents around to run to or to tell us what to do was scary, even lonely at times, but an adventure.  We learned self reliance as well as inter-dependence.  We found jobs, we met friends and made our way as Texans.  Following that season, we took off 'even further' to Tennessee where we established a new homestead.  We left an income in Fort Worth for an initial income in Nashville that was several thousand less but it seemed the thing to do.  Had we stayed in Texas would life have been as good?  I think so, just different.  Hopefully we would have found other ways to ‘leave’.

Sometimes it's leaving a job, a social circle, a church, a friendship, this country, an ideology, or at times a theology—even if only for a time—it is necessary.  ‘Away’ gives perspectives being 'here' does not.  As a therapist I saw this with those who were having a marital affair.  You often don't know what you have until you've left it.  I remember after three weeks in China in 1990 I felt like kneeling down and kissing the tarmac when we landed back in the states out of thankfulness for what I have as an American citizen.  As much as I've enjoyed our travels outside of the United States, I come back with a broader perspective—an appreciation for home.

Besides God repeatedly coaching us to leave, the globe we live on is in flux as well.  The very faith group—Judeo-Christian—we give our allegiance to is nomadic.  We are meant to be tent people—teepee people, tabernacle folks rather than brick and mortar temple people; possibly as a reminder of the impermanence of life.  Some see that as scary, dark and depressing.  But there is Light in the darkness.

There is a principle of thermodynamics I heard of years ago.  Entropy says that all matter flows from order to disorder.  In practical terms you could say things naturally tend toward falling apart, breaking up and decline.  Another has described the concept as the net entropy of any isolated or closed system will alway increase (or at least remain the same).  Ironically, the Greek root of the word translates “a turning toward transformation” beginning with chaos. 

“Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m going to fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re going to fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”

— John Green, Looking for Alaska

So you see, entropy ‘encourages’ us to move on, initially in an attempt to restore some sense of order, we look for something new, something innovative. Closed, isolated systems are the problem in our own lives and in the world at large.  Check out world history or look at the global situation at the present.  Our tendency often is to circle the wagons, to pull back building walls to protect ourselves. Maybe in the beginning a reasonable move, giving us a chance to think. But if we stay circled away, isolated behind the wagons, it does not end well.  

So even the principles built into the universe are operating all the time ‘encouraging’ us to move on.  As when rafting a river, there are times you need to pull the raft over into an eddy to recoup, but then—to push back out into the flow once more.  

I’m no different in that when circling the wagons or pulling aside into the eddy,  I want to stay there.  My deep desire for security, especially when momentarily exhausted by the rivers flow, tempts me to try climbing the banks out of the river entirely.  Sorry Mike, as in life, it doesn’t work that way.  Stay in the raft, in the river—always keeping a bag packed.

 Leaving doesn’t only apply to physical places.  It applies to everything.  Whatever knowledge I thought I had, it applies to ideas, to faith, to all understanding.  All understanding will remain incomplete.  Sadly, this realization, although driven home with age, doesn’t get any easier.  We get weary.  Gee Abram, I’m feeling your pain.  Think new wine skins, old skins won’t work. So where do you find new skins? 

A client many years ago labeled me the 'book of the week' therapist.  Guilty of always recommending they hear another voice in addition to my own. When you can't jump in the car or a plane and go, get into a book.  Reading takes you places way outside yourself, beyond your frame of reference.  In books I meet people I would have never met in that they lived generations ago yet I often imagine I am conversing with them.  I find we share so much sameness of life and experience. Time as we understand it, the years between us collapses.  Having read Leon Uris' novels Trinity and Redemption, I 'm now great friends with Connor Larkin and Seamus O'Neil.  Their desires and dreams for life are my own.  They reach down into my Irish heritage to show me more of who I am.  I love them for it—like the characters in the Bible these characters out of Uris’ mind are now ‘friends’.  Reading takes me away—momentary sojourns to places I never knew—or ways of thinking new to me.   Movies and music offer similar times of transport.  New wine, new skins.  

What we see at times while 'away’ is often ineffable—so seemingly impossible, almost painfully unspeakable struggling to describe it— yet it is more vivid than all the so called tangibles in this realm we currently occupy.  There is new sense within our own being and awareness of a vast cosmic BEING. The radiance of the eternal in everything is reason that upon return, home is different.  The truth, the difference is within me.  It is a beginning awareness of truth that existed within me from birth that is tied to universal Truth. What I feared the most—change, now I long for.  A connectedness that is palpable. 

In my own reading decades ago, an author I don’t even recall pointed out, not in a heading or in bold print, but buried down in a paragraph that the only thing we ever really do is let go.  Yet another line from a book that captured me even though in the beginning I did not fully get it.  Life since that read has only served to drive home that truth. 

The last thing I will do in this life is let go—letting go of the breath of this life trusting that what I’ve said I believe all along is true. It will be the final recognition of the impermanence here in this earthly closed system giving over to the vastness of an endless eternity—which we are already in. 

So that which gives us hope in the chaos outside (and inside) of our lives is the effect of a force from outside the isolation, my seemingly closed system.  Creation is much, much more than we ever understood.  There are unlimited universes, realms within our Being, untold unknowns left to be explored, experienced.  

Keep a good pair of hiking shoes handy.  (Asolo is a great brand)  And realize too that it is not wrong for a moment to circle the wagons in order to restore, to be still.  The Force (thanks Spielberg) outside of my little closed system comes most often in the midst of silence.  Entertaining the world’s noise and chaos makes it hard if not impossible to hear the sounds of the cosmos. 

Just maybe one of our fears is that we will hear the same voice Father Abram heard, that it is time to pack up. The Way, is as much about the journey as the destination.  We are tent people, nomads.  There is this leading principal throughout life, throughout scriptures.  Going is our theme song. 

It is our reality, beyond this present reality we are in momentarily.  

I struggle to explain, to describe these matters even to myself let alone you.  This was an attempt.  At least you read this far.

So, what are you waiting for.  

Leave.