Moments with a bigger view

        I was on a very quick 24 hour retreat at San Damiano Sunday-Monday of this week.  I love it there.  Beautiful in every way.  Also challenging of my soul in so many ways.
         While I was sitting at breakfast I had this sudden moment of stepping out of myself, the culture, the routines and seeing everything in a completely different way.  I was watching people walking to the food that was set up, filling their plates, heading back to their tables.  Each person did exactly the same thing: walked to the same place to pick up a plate, walked over to the buffet at the same place, picked up the same utensils to serve themselves the food, walked to their tables, sat down, put their own utensils on their plates, put their napkins in their laps... you get the idea.  The conference wait-staff were walking around filling people's mugs with coffee or hot water, checking in with folk about their food, directing where guests were to take their dishes when they were done.  It was "normal" in terms of the way we eat, serve ourselves, do things in this culture at retreat centers.  There is a flow, there is an expected movement, there is a "script", if you will, for how we move and function and work.
         But I had this moment of stepping out, a moment of remembering that this was exactly what I said it was: a script, a cultural routine that is not innate to being human or being each individual that we are.  This is a learned behavior of how we do things in this particular setting.  It does not define us, it is not set by genes or by some higher authority that tells us that this is what it looks like to be civilized, educated, "acceptable" people.  These are traditions, practices, and rituals of how we function that we've all sort of tacitly agreed to without thinking too much about it.  And in that moment those particular movements struck me as so odd, so contrived really, that I had a hard time not bursting out with laughter.  I saw and found myself questioning everything.  Why did we decide that we need to eat three times a day?  Why not 5 or 6?  Why not twice or even just once?  Why do we butter our bread on one side?  Why do we toast it on both sides?  Why do we put our napkins in our laps?  Why do we cook our eggs the way we do?  Why do we eat together at tables?  Why do we sit in chairs?  The questions went on and on.
          We've separated ourselves from the basics of survival through these rituals.  Our meal times were "normal" but decided for us based on what we do as a culture, not when we are hungry.  None of us picked the tomatoes, none of us retrieved the eggs from the chickens, none of us milked the cows.  None of us slaughtered the pig for the bacon, or cured the ham, or even saw the animals or plants: the life that was involved in our breakfasting.  We did not touch our food with our hands, but ate with utensils that further separated us from the baseness of what we were doing: supplying nutrition to our bodies, all of which was life for something else at one point or another, so that we could continue another hour or day or week.  It is a strange part of our current humanity that we try to hide the realities of what we need to do to survive under layers and layers of "culture" that separate us so fully from acknowledging our basic needs and the first level of survival that is central to living for all of us.  But I had a bigger moment, a bigger insight into seeing all of this as just a game, a play, an act.
          I heard recently about a Dungeons and Dragons game where the player rolled a 20 on perception (for those who don't play this game, that means that in the role playing situation, they rolled the highest possible number to perceive perhaps something that they were unaware was going on).  The Dungeon Master had nothing new to give the player: there was nothing there to perceive.  So he said, "For just a moment your character sees dice, a table, a group of huge giants looking over the landscape.  And then everything returns to normal."
         At my meal at San Damiano, I felt I'd been given that 20 perception roll and had suddenly stepped back to see the world as it really was, rather than as we pretend it to be.
         My daughter is struggling to find her way.  That is the job of teenagers.  She is struggling with the patterns of culture, how to fit in to what society tells her she must do to make friends, to get along, to walk through this world.  She is especially struggling to make sense of it in light of who she is.  How does she maintain her integrity in terms of being herself, while still putting on enough of the cultural garb of acceptable behaviors to walk through the world in a functional way?  We learn how to share, we learn how to greet one another and talk to one another, we learn to say "hello" when we enter a place and "goodbye" when we leave.  We learn please, thank you, and I'm sorry (if we are wise), we learn to hold doors open for one another and to smile when we pass each other while walking the dog.  But these things are not who we are.  For example, my daughter struggles to decide how much of her introverted self to honor and how much she must put aside to not appear to be snobby or aloof.  She struggles to know how much of her true feelings and thoughts she should share, and how much she needs to keep inside in order to not be "threatening" or invasive of the other.  These are the dances and lessons of growing up.  But they also cause many people to forget that these are not who we are: these are cultural behaviors and routines and not the depth of our beings.  
        The rituals of our faith are the same.  For outsiders they feel odd, different, "weird" maybe... but they are also things we put on to make sense and to navigate complex beliefs and ideas and even feelings: intuitions, hunches about what is beyond.  And sometimes I have moments in church as well where I feel it is all so contrived.  Do these rituals still mean what we intended them to mean?  Do they still serve and communicate and support us in our faith, in our love, in our growing?  Or do they keep us stuck and unseeing of who we and God and one another really are at our core?
       We've all heard stories of wild children, kids "raised by wolves" as it were, who somehow did not grow up in a culture and so did not learn our routines, our ways of being.  They seem wild, they seem untamed.  Do we also see that they are really, in many ways, so much more real?
       We need our rituals.  We need our routines.  We need our ways of navigating how to work and talk and worship and live.  But it is important that we remember that they are just that: rituals, routines, practices and ways of working with and walking with and being with one another.  They are not who we are, they are not who we are called to be. Those moments of perception also give us options as they help us to remember that we have choices about which cultural constructs we choose to adopt and which ones we can choose to put aside in favor of something different, something more true to ourselves, something that perhaps carries for us more integrity in our living and being.
       I see some of those choices in the people around me and in myself.  I know people who, out of their concern for the environment, grow their own vegetables and who bike everywhere rather than driving, trying to lessen their carbon footprint, striving to truly live with more integrity in this way.  I have a couple friends who are truly trying to "live off the grid" - making their own electricity, using well water, living in a home that is not tied in to the usual systems, growing their own food.  Personally, I am trying to use minimal plastic.
        For other people, values may center more around not spending money on things the culture decides are "necessary" but are really luxuries.  My girls choose not to cut their hair, feeling that a monthly hair cut is an unnecessary expense.  I cut my son's hair and my own myself, for the same reason.  We don't find using blowdryers to be necessary.  These are small things, but they are steps towards seeing that not everything we are told is necessary really is.  
        Our cultural activities contain within them many assumptions about what matters, what is important.  But they are often not said outloud.  They are assumed, and they take form through our daily practices.  The more we can step outside of those routines and rituals, the more we can choose for ourselves what really matters, and to make choices based on what we really value, rather than what the culture tells us to value.  So my prayer for all of us is to have more moments of perception, more times when we see the values that are behind each act, each thing, each interaction, and that we therefore have a chance to choose what we really value and to live with deeper integrity, closer to being who we truly are.