Living into the Questions

Chimney Rock, at Ghost Ranch

"Why do you keep talking about your New Mexico?," my thirteen-year-old son wants to know. He doesn't say, "your New Mexico trip." Just "your New Mexico." I think he's on to something.

The sum total impact of my trip was more than equal to its parts. "My New Mexico" was about the rocks and the trees and the quiet and the pure logistics of travel, but it was about much more than that.

In large part it was about changing the questions I've been asking myself and living into the answers. When I wrote the proposal for my sabbatical grant from the Louisville Institute I said that I wanted to use this time apart from my responsibilities at my church to explore who I am before God.  New Mexico's vast, stark and beautiful landscape challenged me to revise that question.

Now I'm asking,  "Who God is before me, and what is my response? 


Sheer cliffs surrounded by miles of flat, rocky ground force one to consider relinquishment. To let go of the ego. To empty out distracting thoughts. To shift the self out of the center of things and die to one's neurotic need for affirmation. I do not plan to move to the desert, but even a few days there prompted me to reflect on what God might be calling me to give up. Part of the answer I received is how I frame my questions. Instead of starting with me, I need to start with God.

Aspens in Santa Fe ski basin. 

It is a central paradox of desert experience that only that which dies can live again, writes Belden Lane.  He goes on to tell the story of an old monk who had lived in the desert for many years. Due to his failing health he had to move back to the community to be cared for. The move brought him great sorrow because it was the desert that taught him how to die to all the grasping and attention-seeking compulsions of his ego. The desert taught him how to live with a liberated soul.

Like the desert mothers and fathers in Christian tradition, and like Christ himself, yogi masters emphasize dying in order to be born.  In fact, the most important and yet most difficult pose is called "corpse pose," savasana. At the end of each yoga session we literally practice dying. For at least five minutes we lie flat on our backs with our eyes closed, our bodies as relaxed as we can manage, our hands facing the sky. We practice letting go of effort. We practice letting go of our impulse to run from what scares us.  We practice surrendering to the floor beneath us, and beneath that to a God who will always catch us.

Pine amidst aspens, Santa Fe ski basin. 

During savasana, yoga teachers always come over to me and gently push on the front of my shoulders, which invariably float off the floor even when I'm lying down.  As much as I crave the stillness of those last five minutes of class, I resist them. I don't want to "die a little every day," as one well-known teacher says we must do. Or "lose my life to gain it," as Jesus says.  So I push my shoulders forward, as if that posture could keep me in control. Yet in my more lucid moments I know that letting go of control is the path God sets before me, and I'm grateful for the chance to keep practicing--physically and spiritually.

"The point is to live everything. Live the questions now," Ranier Maria Rilke said. "Perhaps then, some day far in the future you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

As I continue considering the significance of "my New Mexico," I will take Rilke's counsel to heart.