CrossFit: A Step One Meditation

As I committed to sitting down for a second cup of coffee in my resistance to going back to bed, a committed power walker strode down the street, by which I mean a white woman lacking the good sense to be indoors when it's th9s chilly outside. Her eyes locked straight ahead, her arms swinging in wide, low opposite arcs at her sides, she powered down the street, sidewalks be damned. 

She's a sharp contrast to my complete bafflement at where I fit in the world at all. 

To my eyes, other people seem to be able to power forward, maintain, some, even thrive in toxic systems - familial, organizational, corporate, or church (usually the same thing). I can't. 

I've come to understand that when I'm forced to admit that I can't, what others hear is that I'm not willing, that I refuse, that I'm determined not to. They're wrong and always have been.

What I mean is: I. can't.

Tiptoeing in a work environment minefield is like being triggered and hearing the gunshots in a funhouse mirror. My deepest determination and best intentions have never been enough for me to make different decisions in a survival-of-the-sickest atmosphere. I can't walk on eggshells, never having my hands free because they're much too busy constantly changing masks to survive.

This fact, of course, means there's something wrong with me. 

But not prayers or mantras, a made up mind or a willing heart has changed what's wrong with me. 

The simmering anger I woke with cools to mire in despair and I imagine a church for those of us so often brokenhearted and grieved, so often riddled with vengeance, confused by a sick world and where we fit in it, hearts unseen, minds not renewed, but broken, contrite and repentant, a church without fakes or flags. 

I don't know where such a place exists anymore      or if it ever did. In fact, I don't know so much about what salvation or enlightenment look like anymore, only that they're ill fitting on those still bent or still self-inflated. 

Maybe what matters most,

from all of our places of surrender - 

altar, temple, bedside, or bar- 

is the cruciform intersection displayed at Calvary

and propagated by disciples and hippies

and gurus ever since: 

that we can, we must be low enough                         

to rise, reduced before resurrection,

surrendered to soar and receive, 

not to grasp or withhold,

but to remain arms outstretched,

palms open in offering to merge

at this intersection, to dwell, finally,

freely in the swell of this tide,

in the Hum, in the Who, 

in the I am eternally manifesting 

mercy and compassion from which 

we begin.

pdk