Walking the Wall

Having recently added a book to my small group of books that are defining to my spiritual beliefs, I thought I’d take a look at them and their importance to me because I think they are a bit of an interesting mix.

1. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Huff. This was a book that had a tremendous impact on my mindset. I had struggled for a long time with completely letting go of the religion I had grown up with and wanted nothing to do with religion at all. Yet there were still so many questions I had and I still had a distinct sense that there was something bigger than the physical world. A friend suggested this book to me and I devoured it and I learned many things–but one in particular saved my sanity. My son was still pretty ill at the time and my mind was a whirling vortex of fear, anxiety, intense love, frustration, anger, focused will–whys and how do I fix this and what do I do all roiling and boiling and creating a mental breakdown mess. From this book I learned to stop fighting the current, that life really is like a river that flows down mountains, curving through fields, over rocky places and quiet and serene places–one person can’t stop the flow of the river, can’t avoid the rocks or fallen trees, can’t force it through waving fields. I can’t always know why, I can’t always fix things, I had to learn to stop fighting and just go with it, let it go, let it take care of itself. It helped me tremendously.

2. The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates. Later, another friend was reading this book, so I picked it up to read along and once again, something shifted in my thought patterns that still has an impact on me today. Now, a past rabbit got a hold of my original copy and ate it so I lost my initial notes in it, but luckily they reprinted it and I was able to snag it a couple years ago. In a nutshell, this book showed me the connectedness of the world–the sense that we are not isolated beings on a lonely road, but that everything is connected on that large web and when one thing shakes the web, it is felt by everything else. In the preface, Bates writes: “Wyrd refers to our personal destiny. It connects us to all things, thoughts, emotions, and events in the cosmos as if through the threads of an enormous, invisible but dynamic web.”

3. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. While I had read some of Joseph Campbell before because of my fascination with mythology, when I took a literary mythology class, this book was one of the required readings and it is an excellent way to pull together many myths and tie them together in sort of a short version of their impact according to Campbell. There is a lot that I learned from this book, or rather that solidified many things I had been mulling over for years. People think of the word myth and the connotation has become “a lie”…but that, in my opinion, is far off base. Mythologies are people’s way of asking the big questions, of trying to find ways to put words to the big, eternal Truths, of trying to make sense of things they didn’t or couldn’t understand. Myths are metaphors and symbols for Truth and so hold great value and meaning. Campbell writes, “Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble” (67). When asked to define the metaphor, he writes, “A metaphor is an image that suggests something else. … The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.” This looking at religion’s symbols for the larger Truth doesn’t demean religion, it opens it up. I could go on and on with this book, somewhere in it he writes that myths are the world’s dreams and they deal with the big problems of humanity and where we are in the bigger picture. This book started to allow me to see the Christianity in a bigger picture instead of the fundamentalist pigeon hole I had relegated it to.

4. & 5. The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness by Pema Chodron and Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh. These are the two books of the many I have read in the last 8 months on Buddhism that are defining books of what I’ve learned, and ironically Pema Chodron’s is the first, and Being Peace is one I’m just finishing up. Buddhism for me incorporates a lot of the things that I have slowly developed internally–it takes the idea of simply being, not fighting and pushing and trying to shape life but just going with it that I learned from the Tao of Pooh. It pulls in the concept of interconnectedness from the Way of Wryd, and mixes it with many things from the Power of Myth–like the understanding of eternity being in every moment and the sacredness in every place your feet are and the divinity found in every person–most importantly, in ideas of compassion. It ties in Pooh’s assertion that Tigger…that we all are…okay, really okay and takes it further, Pema Chodron writes, “The basic view is that people are fundamentally good and healthy. It’s as if everyone who has ever been born has the same birthright, which is enormous potential of warm heart and clear mind” (51). It’s a very different premise from the one I grew up that starts with the premise that man is essentially evil, fallen. That doesn’t mean that I think humanity doesn’t have the capacity for evil, obviously we see that too clearly–but maybe it’s time we start humanity out with the potential for good and work from there to keep that good from being destroyed.

6. Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. This is my most recent addition, but I’ve already written quite a lot on why this had so much impact on me here, so I’ll let that stand for itself.

I like to look at these all grouped together, a weird mix of taoism, celtic shamanism, mythology, buddhism, and a reshaping of christianity–proof of one of my strongest beliefs, that Truth can be found in many places and as soon as my beliefs become concrete, it’s a sure sign it’s time to stretch them further and wider and deeper.