We've been doing this thing where after church, you can go sit at a prayer table and pray, or go sit at a discussion table and talk about the sermon.This is adding new additional awkwardness on top of the existing traditional awkwardness known as the passing of the peace, which is where you go around and shake hands with people and look at their eyes and say "peace be with you" "and also with you," which doesn't seem like it could go that wrong but it always does. There's plenty of not knowing if someone is going to come up to you, and being to scared to go up to someone, and there's no protocol for who goes first, so you talk over each other and laugh and shake hands weird...I don't know. It's a million opportunities for a little off.
Which is strange because at the end of a ritual or a good show or yoga or church, you feel so connected to all of humanity. It's the perfect time to laugh yourself through awkwardness with openness and grace. Instead it usually just hand-pulls the garage door of reality back down. The buoyancy of the sublime butting against the terror of the ordinary and submitting.
So last night I went to the discussion table, where Lawrence was already sitting. Lawrence is a socially awkward little guy who is going through some difficult family issues and his heart is consistently oozing all over his sleeve. He can't stop talking and he can't listen to anyone else, he's all balled up in tragedy and loneliness and the mechanisms designed to tell him how to behave with relative strangers are pretty much no go. We sit, waiting for the others/should we wait/what should we do, and are eventually joined by the elderly homeless gentleman with long dirty fingernails and shopping bags and a big puffy coat belted with a bungee cord who tunes out of any conversation as soon as the subject turns to something that doesn't end with -ology, and Nina, who, despite the fact that she sleeps in Suburban Station is always either in a fit of joyous rambling appreciation of life's blessing or humble rambling marvel at some trite thing someone's just said.
Lawrence starts the discussion and I have an all-out grade-seven panic attack. I am stuck for an hour with a nerd and two homeless people with nothing to do but chat.
Do you do that? Do you assess and reassess the social situation by the minute and with jungle-floor animal instinct worry that loser is going to rub off on you permanently? More to the point loss, tragedy or unwantedness? Does it supersede your compassion? I do this shit all the time.
Here's the thing about religious spaces, though, and maybe about some other places, although I haven't found other places like this yet. They are environments that, by their nature demand compassion. If you're not there to love your neighbor as yourself, then why are you there?
In this kind of place, you have to love everybody. You don't have to like them. But you have to love them.
And that sounds like a giant challenge, but what it is is a giant relief.
As soon as I was aware of it, I was able to relax completely into what was actually a completely lovely conversation.
It's not a relief because they have to love me (although that is good.) It's a relief because I have to love them. No resources have to be wasted on the churning anxiety of whom I am better than and why, for once.
What if I could walk into any room like that? What I could treat the green earth like the church basement. I wonder if I wouldn't calm down.
