To mark that, I'm reprinting this excerpt from my Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. I originally posted it last year, a few days before my 56th birthday. It talks about birthdays, including my bar mitzvah, birth and rebirth, and the never ending journey into the unknown that is the human journey, when it's lived at its most authentic.
As a side note, I was living in California when I wrote this, without the remotest expectation that, two weeks later, I would decamp and return to New Mexico for another leg in this infinite journey of surprise...
September 27, 2010
Costa Mesa, CA
In six days I’ll be 56. Five days, really, if you figure that here in California the hour of my birth falls on October 2. (I was born just the other side of midnight, Montreal time, on October 3.)
So far, this is showing up as perhaps the strangest — and potentially most powerful — birthday ever.
I don’t remember anything about my childhood birthdays. I don’t remember parties, though there must have been some. I don’t remember presents, though I know I received them.
You’d think I’d remember my 18th or 21st — landmarks in any journey to adulthood. But those, too, are blanks.
My 20th stands out because that’s when I moved out of the parental home and into my first apartment. But I don’t recall whatever celebration must have surrounded that.The only early birthday it would be impossible for just about any Jewish boy to forget was my 13th. Even then, October 3 is overshadowed by my November 11 bar mitzvah, itself a blur of wobbly knees and congratulatory hugs from people I barely knew, including the so-called friends who surrounded me at the reception. So-called, because I only had one close friend back then. The rest were filler.
My clearest memory of that day, apart from nervousness, was of looking down from the bimah, the stage-like platform from which I would sing my Torah portion, to see my father watching me intently from his wheelchair, a white-clad orderly at his side. By then, nine months to the day before his death, he was already a full-time resident of the Grace Dart Convalescent Hospital, increasingly incapacitated by the diabetes that had weakened his vision and heart, stolen his sexual potency and ended his architectural practice. He must have been proud that morning, but I never knew it...never really knew him.
That week’s Torah portion, the one I’d spent months learning in a bearded rabbi’s dark study, was Lech L’cha, the third Sabbath reading of the Jewish year (Genesis 12:1–17:27). In it, God commands Abram (not yet renamed Abraham) to “lech l’cha,” to “go forth” to a strange land.
Go forth from your native land and from your father's house
to the land that I will show you.
At age 75, accompanied by his wife, Sara, and nephew Lot, Abram left all that he knew and followed that higher imperative into unknown territory.I couldn’t know, at age 13, how fully that call would play out in my life...and on future birthdays.
Three months before my 29th birthday, I left my native Montreal to launch a new life in Toronto.
On September 30, 1994, I left Toronto, having sold most everything I owned. Three days later, on my 40th birthday, I drove off the Princess of Acadia ferry for my rebirth in Nova Scotia.
A year later, again on my birthday, I knew it was time to return to Toronto, which I did seven weeks afterward.
Another new beginning occurred on October 3 the following year, when I once again left Toronto, this time for Penetanguishene, two hours north of Toronto on Lake Huron.
In 2004, a month after my 50th birthday, my marriage ended, seemingly abruptly. Within weeks, another lech l’cha ensued. This full-time road odyssey lasted 30 months and dropped me in Albuquerque, New Mexico for yet another rebirth.
Today, less than a week from from this next birthday, that Torah portion carries its most potent significance yet.
When we’re born, we arrive on this earth naked, vulnerable and fully reliant on a higher source for our every need. There’s nothing to figure out, nothing to force. There’s nothing we need to make happen, nothing we need to think about it. We feel our way through this new experience and carry an innate and inchoate knowingness that all is well. No faith, trust and surrender are required. No anxiety about the next moment exists. We carry no baggage of any sort, certainly no disempowering original sin.
“Now” is the only is that is. And being is the only imperative.
It’s the ultimate lech l’cha. We’ve left our “father’s house” for an alien land. Yet it’s a land filled with promise.
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
And curse him that curses you;
And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you.
In Abram’s life, there’s nothing he needs to do in order for that promise to be fulfilled. The only call is to follow the imperative of the moment, which is the revelation of his deepest heart’s desire. His job is to know, as does the newborn at some level, that all will be revealed in God’s time...to take himself beyond the place of trust to the place of knowingness...to strip himself of all he has been in order to become all that he is destined to be. To become the “great nation” that is his birthright.
It’s difficult in moments for me to feel that a great nation awaits me on this birthday, six weeks after my most recent lech l’cha brought me to Southern California and the aptly named Spirit Street.As much as I stripped away to get here — by selling off, giving away or throwing out most of my Albuquerque life — the shedding has been even more intense since I got here on August’s Friday the 13th.
Somehow, I’ve found more material possessions to let go of. But more significant has been the emotional and psychological residue that has been peeled off me as harshly as if someone had yanked a dozen bandaids off my arm.
With a disturbing blend of joy, gratitude, pain and anxiety, I’ve seen all the ways in which my thoughts and actions have continued to support scarcity-thinking, codependence and disempowerment — even as I recognize how much of that patterning I’ve already let go of. I’ve seen, too, how plugged in I can still be to a world built on those dysfunctions and hypocrisies — even as I recognize how much unplugging I’ve already achieved.
Every day, I let go more and more of that. Every day, I leave behind more and more of the distractions that have kept me from me, that have kept me from the fullest recognition and expression of my deepest passions. Some of those distractions are behavioral and emotional. Others relate to my work and to the ways I’ve supported myself.
And every day, my bank account edges closer to zero.
Part of me is alarmed by what it perceives as a profound disconnect. “I’m doing the ‘work,’” it says. “I’m doing what Abram did. I’m moving from a life of surrender to a life beyond surrender. Where’s the payoff? Why am I teetering toward total financial collapse when I’ve been promised to be blessed as a great nation?”
In reading, just now, of Abram’s travels in Genesis, I see that his ride, too, wasn’t an easy one. He encountered war, famine, separation and expulsion. Yet his path ultimately led to the promised blessing.
That story reminds me, once again, to see the ongoing miracle that is my journey. Not only have I been supported magnificently (if sometimes uncomfortably) since committing to the move to Los Angeles, I’ve been supported just as wondrously (and unconventionally) at every step in the years leading up to it. Each act of surrender has brought gifts I could never have imagined, predicted or thought I desired.
Most recently, I never would have connected so profoundly with Adam had my iffy financial situation not brought us together. It’s been a roller coaster ride of increasing acceleration for both of us — a blend of comradely exhilaration and button-pushing exasperation that I couldn’t have consciously sought and wouldn’t trade away.
In this moment, if nothing changes, my bank account will reach zero by my birthday. And if the smaller me is scared by that, the larger me sees the divine perfection in returning to that newborn state on the anniversary of my birth...on what, no doubt, is a metaphor for yet another rebirth.
What will my next new life look like? Part of me would have preferred to have an answer by the time I reached this sentence. Yet, despite that very human wish, I know that this new birth can no more be predicted than could any of its predecessors. How can I predict what I can’t yet imagine?
All I know is that Abram’s legacy is also mine, that I’ve never been let down and that if the bungee cord of my journey has dropped me this close to bottom, the laws of physics demand that the upward bounce be equally dramatic. Put another way, I’ve returned to the empty void that launched Genesis. By getting out of the way and letting my new world form as God did his, I’m guaranteed a creation at least as astounding as that one.
This is going to be one hell of a birthday.
I am a shield to you;
Your reward shall be very great.
Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.
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3 comments:
The quotation from your memoir says:
When we’re born, we arrive on this earth naked, vulnerable and fully reliant on a higher source for our every need. There’s nothing to figure out, nothing to force. There’s nothing we need to make happen, nothing we need to think about it. We feel our way through this new experience and carry an innate and inchoate knowingness that all is well. No faith, trust and surrender are required. No anxiety about the next moment exists. We carry no baggage of any sort, certainly no disempowering original sin.
“Now” is the only is that is. And being is the only imperative.
It’s the ultimate lech l’cha. We’ve left our “father’s house” for an alien land. Yet it’s a land filled with promise.
Reminds me of part of a sermon I fabricated as part of my own memoir, an admonitory speech given to some novice rabbinical students in a school I once attended:
As soon as we are born, we are released into a material world, a world of things. We are in a kind of freefall, just like a person who jumps out of an airplane. There we are heading toward the earth, where we will all finish. In youth, we feel such a sense of freedom! We are so intoxicated by the flight, by the air, that we forget to notice that we are falling. This is why you think that freedom is your natural condition.
At first, we do not recognize our speed. We are blind to the truth, that the earth is rushing up to meet us. It is so beautiful and so distant. We can hardly see the details below. Only in our last moments can we appreciate the danger we have been in all along.
Our free flight will end. But if we wait until we can see the ground moving before we try to protect ourselves, it will be too late. Even if we have a parachute, we must open it long before it becomes a matter of life or death.
We must all hit solid ground at last. If everybody knew that from the beginning, wouldn’t we prepare ourselves? Wouldn’t we protect ourselves? If we were really thinking, wouldn’t we keep our hand on the parachute right from the start? Wouldn’t we clothe ourselves in some kind of shock absorber and learn how to direct ourselves toward a landing in a soft place?
If we are unprepared, we will end life with the shock of annihilation. How many of us are prepared?
Thanks for the comment, Gene. If I'm reading you correctly, we may have a fundamental philosophical disagreement here. In my world-view that leap to earth is but the first of an unending series of leaps of faith we are called upon to make -- from the moment our soul leaps into the body of the fetus developing in our mother's womb until the final leap, from our body, at the end of our physical life. As with all leaps of faith, there are few meaningful preparations we can make...other than to do our best to be present in each moment and for each experience, be it challenge or a miracle (both of which, often, ending up being much the same thing).
This discussion could get complicated, and this may not be the proper forum to carry it on. The words I quoted were not the entire sermon. It was about twice as long in the original work, and were words I could have heard as a student. Thus, the voice is not my own. The speech reflects a position I was trying to reflect accurately in my memoir, but which was abandoned and eventually repudiated by the first-person in the work (the presumed me).
As you know, traditional Judaism does not consider hitting the earth to be the end of the journey. There is far more in the sermon than I have quoted.
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