Choose Life!

I have set before you Life and Death, blessing and curse. Choose Life!
(Deuteronomy 30:19)

Not just once a year, once a week or even each day, but every single moment we can choose Life. This means choosing to let go of a negative thought or judgment; it means choosing to live with uncertainty; choosing the kind word or generous attitude; choosing to let go of tension and relax. In every moment we can choose to “be chosen” by God for the best possible Life, for the life we were meant to live fully. In each moment, we can choose to accept the gifts, challenges, opportunities and responsibilities that we are being given.

This spiritual challenge of choosing Life, can only be taken up when we learn how to “stand before God.” (which is religious language for coming into full awareness). In standing fully before God, we can finally embrace our whole selves completely. We can take responsibility for our choices. This season of the High Holy Days is in fact the time for us to take responsibility for our choices, both personally, and collectively.

I was once asked to lead High Holy Day services at a large Mindfulness retreat that was to be taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist teacher whose reputation for gentleness and wisdom drew hundreds of followers. The retreat was scheduled during the Jewish Holidays, and the organizers thought there might be some Jews at the retreat who would benefit from the presence of a rabbi. In preparing for the retreat, I wrote to Thich Nhat Hanh to explain what we’d be doing at his gathering and I sent him a few books about Judaism so that he’d have a better understanding of the importance that these days held for his Jewish students.

At the opening session, he welcomed the Jews who would be celebrating their holy days at the retreat. In a tone that was both incisive and tender he said, “It is my understanding that the purpose of all Jewish practice is to live every moment in the awareness of God’s Presence… and that is Mindfulness.”

He understood that to stand in God’s presence means to stand outside the whirlwinds of change, anchored in the stillness of center, shining out the fullness of our own presence, attentive to the truth of this moment. From that still center, from that open-hearted awareness, the choice between Life and Death, Blessing and Curse at last becomes clear. Until we can stand before God in a state of calm, alert clarity, all the layers of distraction, turbulence and conditioning will rob from us the freedom of choice. And so as we rise to the challenge of choosing Life, we must learn to stand before God, or as Thich Nhat Hanh explained, “to live every moment in the awareness of God’s Presence.”

We’re already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness. And awareness is the essential factor that allows us to Choose Life. The kind of awareness I’m talking about has two components. As I journey, I am distinctly aware of this very step, this breath, this miraculous moment…. While at the same time, I cultivate an awareness of the whole journey- the long winding road that led me here and the great mysterious possibilities stretching out before me.

Shortly before he died, Oliver Sachs, described the view from where he stood on the precipice, which could be a description of the vantage point of Yom Kippur.

He said, “Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of connection of all its parts.”

Through my own meditation practice I am beginning to see that it is only by entering fully into this miraculous moment, this breath, this step of the journey, that I’m able to achieve the “great altitude” that will give me a perspective on the landscape of my life, a perspective that will reveal that undeniable “connection of all its parts.” Entering this moment means letting go of distraction, releasing my worries about the future and regrets about the past, letting go of the surface of life so that I can receive the depths.

Authentic religion is always more about subtraction than addition, more about letting go of artifice and pretense, than any attempt at getting the truth from somewhere else, or engineering a true self. You can’t create what you already have. Underneath all of our conditioning, habit, prejudice, neurosis, complacency and numbness, we can find that core something that is true, essential, and uniquely authentic. We might call it your soul… or your God-self. At our core we are unconditional Joy, unqualified Love. And there, we are profoundly connected to each other. We are Echad, simply One, and living inside the Unity. (The place that our prayer, the Sh’ma is talking about)

So we pray to strip away all those extraneous layers. We pray to circumcise the heart. We pray so that we can release all of our defenses and dissolve all our stinginess born of fear, and finally give ourselves away.

Though we come together and say a lot of words, in the end, prayer is not about saying words, singing songs, or thinking deep thoughts. Prayer is a stance, an attitude towards Reality. It’s a way of living this moment in the awareness of God’s Presence, addressing ourselves wholly to this mystery… while at the same time cultivating the wider view, the “great altitude.” I think that we come together to support each other and give each other the courage to take this stance. It’s so easy to lose our awareness, to fall away from the “great altitude,” and fall prey to the tyranny of emotions, the addiction to self-image, and the false promises and seductions of this world.

It’s no accident that the first commandment is the one that says I am YHVH your God who brings you out of constriction, out of slavery. It’s first because if you don’t have “one God before you”, you will always either become your own god, or make something else into a god. And when you do that, you are back in constriction, back in slavery.

Choosing, means being able to sometimes stand against the flow of mainstream culture, and to stand for values that are positively counter-cultural… values like, introspection, kindness, slowing down, inner calm, acceptance of differences, humility and faith.

Faith is the choice that we make to live with uncertainty, to live with paradox, to resist cynicism. Having faith doesn’t mean that we think some God-in-the-sky will intervene. Faith is an end in itself. In Faith we plumb the depths of our humanity to find our Divinity. In Faith we lift ourselves up into the “great altitude,” to glimpse the mystery of connection within our own landscape and between all of us.

Eric Hoffer, the street philosopher said, “In times of great change (which is always), learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.” Faith itself is actually a stance that allows us to be learners, continually growing, learning from our mistakes and loving the questions. From that fragile stance of Faith we are free to keep choosing Life, in these times of great change, because from my stance of Faith, I can imagine what is possible and even what might seem impossible.

Each moment we are standing at the crossroads, between Life and Death, between Blessing and Curse. And sometimes the only reason we choose Life and Blessing is that we start down a road that we’ve been down before and we remember that it’s a dead-end.

Yom Kippur reminds us that we live in times of great change. The world that we thought we knew no longer exists. We are always standing at the crossroads, the place of choice. We are always being called to awaken to the blessing, to Life.