True or False: Cain killed his brother Abel because God rejected Cain's offering.

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The Dude Abides

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Progressive Christian

Last updated on: April 21, 2006 at 1:41 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2006-04-21T13:41:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF:

NOT SURE WHAT TO DO? TRY DANCING

I love it when he calls.

The Rabbi.

He has this knack for showing up right when I need him to, just as I’m flailing my way through uncertainty, in flux and fighting it.

When I hear Rabbi Irwin Kula’s voice on the other end of the phone, I imagine myself as an existential baseball catcher, crouched low, mask down, mitt open, ready.

Bring it, I think, nodding to the good rabbi, who, in my mind, is perched on the pitcher’s mound, ready to throw a spiritual heater.

“Messiness is where the sacred energy is,” Kula told me the other day, getting to the point after we caught up on each other’s lives for a few minutes.

“Messiness is being in the midst of life. Being in the midst of life, that’s God,” The Rabbi said.

Funny, most people think that the messiness is when you’re farthest from God.

“Yes, and that’s what I’m reversing,” Kula said. “The messiness, that’s tapping in. There’s your moment. A moment is coming of some growth, some development, some self-discovery. That’s the God moment.

“We’re taught that sacred is pure and clean and above everything, and that messiness is dirty. What I’m saying is no, there’s sacred messiness,” he said.

Kula is president of CLAL-the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City and co-founder of the Aitz Hayim Center for Jewish Living in Chicago.

He’ll be in town next week to film a PBS special called “The Wisdom of Yearnings.” And he has just finished work on a new book, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, that will be published by Hyperion in September.

Lately, Kula has spent a lot of time thinking about messes and paradox, “because those are the places where we grow,” he said.

Amen to that.

Life just seems to get more complicated year by year, accomplishment by accomplishment. Each time a goal is met, another seems to be lurking right behind it, waiting to draw us onward in constant motion.

It makes me think of that old Simon and Garfunkel song with the lyrics, “Half of the time we’re gone and we don’t know where and we don’t know here . . .”

And then there are the people: the ones we love, the ones we don’t, the folks we work for, the ones who work for us, the people we need and the people who need us.

There’s always more to do, more to juggle, more layers of life to peel back and examine. Or not.

“Right, and we can’t be afraid of it,” Kula said. “A lot of times the culture teaches us, ya know, ‘Just do it.’ It’s about, ‘Uncertainty is a weakness,’ or ‘Don’t dwell on the messiness,’ ya know. ‘Keep it simple.’ Those are all responses to not wanting to deal, because, actually, it is complicated. And that’s OK. And it is messy, and we know that.

“If you have no dirty dishes in your kitchen sink, you’ve never had a home-cooked meal. No kid wants to play in a playground and not get dirty. If you’re not dirty, you simply haven’t played. But as we get older, it’s more scary,” Kula said. “Can we become more fearless about the messiness?”

I was kind of hoping this would be the point where he would be giving me the answers instead of asking the questions.

“Look back on your life and see the times when messiness actually led to really interesting things. The struggles, the complications, the messiness, the hurts, the disappointments — they really did lead to your development and growth,” he said. “And that’s the adventure.”

As The Rabbi talked, I was reminded of the story from Hebrew Scripture of Jacob physically wrestling the angel (or God) all night until the angel relented and gave him the blessing, as well as a new name — Israel.

“All the biblical characters, they go through these incredible periods of uncertainty,” Kula said. “We always think that uncertainty weighs us down. But what would it mean if we danced with uncertainty?”

Thwap! Fast and low over the plate. A few days of R&R on the beach in Florida, where he was calling me from, must have been good for Kula’s throwing arm.

It’s a wonderful, lyrical, even biblical image — “dancing with uncertainty.” Instead of stooping under its burden. Instead of hiding under the duvet. Instead of being paralyzed by fear and indecision.

“I invite people to make decisions from 51 percent,” Kula said. “The fact is, when you’re 100 percent sure, there’s no decision to be made. . . . We all know that some of the most important decisions we’ve made we made without being sure. So why are we so scared of uncertainty when we look at that?

“When you recognize it, you can take a deep breath about it. It’s not going to pull you under quite as much if you’re aware of it,” he said.

“When you’re going through one of those insecure moments and going through those moments of self-doubt, it’s really important to actually take a glass of wine and make yourself a toast. Because it’s not going to be fun, but there is going to be self-discovery.”

In that case, cheers!

See you on the dance floor.

If you’d like to attend the taping of Kula’s PBS special, “The Wisdom of Yearnings,” at 7:30 p.m. April 26 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., in Skokie, call (847) 673-6300 or visit HERE Tickets are free, but there is a $3 per-ticket handling fee.

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