I know why the demons declined to join me on my Grand Canyon spiritual retreat. One of the things they most enjoy is watching me get annoyed with day-to-day living. They may not have a hand in creating annoyance, but they probably try to help me focus on being annoyed and feeling justified instead of stopping to ask myself whether I want to indulge in this unnecessary, unhappy feeling. The Grand Canyon didn’t have nearly the potential for this compared to ordinary life.
But the retreat gave me a key insight, which now acts as a “shield of faith” back in the real world. I have better eyesight to detect these demons at work. (Note to new readers: I use the term “demons” metaphorically. I currently doubt the existence of invisible people-like entities of any kind.)
The insight: Love Everyone and Everything. This was so well put by Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima, yet a contrarian friend might retort, “Oh, yeah, isn’t that just the answer? Love! So many songs ask why we can’t just love and get along. What’s new? Good luck with that!”
No doubt, this will take more thought, time, and effort, avoiding trite and ineffective sentiment.
First, here are tenets of my faith in the concept of love that are the premises of my further reasoning. From the Bible:
- God is Love
- the commandment to love is said by Jesus to be paramount
- Paul says love is more important than faith
If love inherently describes the Creator, the entire universe must have a love force. Love must exist even in the blackness of cold, empty space.
But we must also define love. It cannot be merely an impotent acceptance of circumstances and a fawning appreciation or idolization. Loving enemies does not mean enthusiastically supporting evil actions or hoping that they succeed, even while grieving the Creator.
The Greeks had many more words for love than the three we are familiar with, and it seems that love of inanimate objects must be extremely different from love of spouse (for example). This could take a separate blog post. I love my crystal beer glass because it looks so lovely when filled with a cold IPA and feels good on the lips when drinking. If I love that beer glass, would it be wrong to toss it in the trash when I accidentally break it? Maybe this is ok because I lovingly send it to its next life, being recycled by humans, or ending up in a landfill. More on this kind of love later.
My first line of attack on becoming more successful at love is to reduce my annoyance. This is so preliminary that it is more like preparing ground for planting, much less sprouting seed or harvesting.
I claim to be someone who is not frequently annoyed. We all know a few people who embody unhappiness, who are always colicky, pessimistic, hypercritical, gloomy, or hopeless. I suspect that being annoyed can become a habit. We might want to acknowledge our annoyance rather than bottle up bad feelings, which might burst out later. We don’t want to become annoying to others when we express our annoyance, so we more often reserve the outlet of expression for our time alone.
Yet, today’s Mindfulness fad may help more people recognize and break the habit. I don’t mean to suggest that Mindfulness is merely a fad, but the concepts might be relatively new to many.
Since returning from my spiritual retreat, I’ve paid more attention to potential annoyances. Most of them are fleeting. I was walking the dogs, and a car came roaring by. The driver hit the gas pedal, with booming, popping exhaust, right next to us. He seemed intent on scaring the dogs. I had an immediate and somewhat elaborate assessment of the situation. I cursed at the driver under my breath. But the annoyance was fleeting. I let it go and thought no more of it. However, then I did think more about it (due to my retreat!).
Should I try to stop reactions like this? Aren’t they insignificant? Maybe not! Maybe mindfulness helps these situations not to be even noticed. If it is fleeting anyway, why let it bother you at all? Break the habit! Don’t decide that situations are annoying, and don’t judge the people involved as out to get you.
As I said, this is not loving. This is merely not hating.
Of course, other situations may not be insignificant. How would I react on the bus if some young thug verbally abused an elderly woman? Would I be quietly mindful and restrain my annoyance? Would I intercede and try to stop his evil treatment? What if he has a weapon? Real life can provide many complications that preclude easy answers.
A thought came to me. If I carry a little notebook, I can record every annoyance or potential annoyance. I quickly discovered that paying attention seems to ward off a lot. Watching for them puts my mind on a different plane. Yet, maybe a little notebook isn’t the most effective method. One way or another, we must unlearn to be annoyed.
To become annoyed, we almost need to be mindless, not mindful. Hmm… progress?
Another way of looking at love may also stave off annoyance. If love is a spiritual force and exists everywhere, like the Spirit of the Creator is potentially everywhere, we can see a value in thinking of love as impersonal. I mean, this love is not confined to human relations but includes animals and inanimate objects, as Father Zosima said. (See my retreat post.) For humans, perhaps sensing the love force (by learning to love all things) conveys a sense of vitality, one of tapping into a life-enhancing fact of creation, a glimpse into our true selves, our full humanity. Expressing love and sensing love in return may be sources of feeling most alive and becoming more thoroughly what we are meant to be.
If I can stop getting annoyed, I have a chance to explore the more active and vital thing: what it means to love. This may be the first of several post-retreat reports of my attempts at spiritual progress. Stay tuned…
Nice !