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The Ripening of Souls
Avocado Theology
The timing of the soul and everyday time are not the same; the task of patience concerns coordinating these two times — the time of slowness, of contemplation, brooding, mulling things over, seeing deeply, feeling intensely, with the time of getting something accomplished, getting on with the work, moving to what needs to be done next, being effective and out there in the world.
— Robert Sardello, The Power of Soul
Discernment requires patience and timing, like waiting for an avocado to ripen. We can't hurry things, and our timing needs to be in sync with the rhythms of our lives and the wider world. We can be too early or too late.
The possibilities we receive from God are always ripe for the occasion; but we must be ripe for the possibilities. God is within us as the lure to ripen.
Two Kinds of Ripening
There are two kinds of ripening: long-term ripening and situational ripening.
Long-term ripening is spiritual well-being or wholeness, understood as a relatively continuous trait of the soul. It sometimes emerges in old age, as people build upon a lifetime of experience, including mistakes. Its primary qualities are wisdom, compassion, and interior freedom, understood as an inner capacity to respond to circumstances with some degree of inner freshness. Wholeness of this sort is a matter of degree. We may be more or less ripe, more or less whole. Most of us are on the way toward wholeness, but we've not fully arrived. A more complete ripening, a deep sense of inner peace and joy, lies in the future, although we can have tastes of it. .
Situational ripening is obedience to the call of the moment. It can be a fruit of spiritual maturity, but it can also happen quite apart from it. Often young people are better able to be obedient to the call than older people, because they are less subject to the constraints of convention and fear. Obedience to the call of the moment is a momentary response to a given situation in a healthy way, with a quality of heart and mind that is attuned to the circumstance at hand. Such obedience can take many forms: attention, a sense of beauty, gratitude, kindness, compassion, courage, honesty, wonder, playfulness, laughter, zest for life, and tears. It is what the moment calls for.
Community Ripening
No two people ripen in just the same way. What ripening means for one person is not what it means for another. Still, we can ripen together and be enriched by one another's companionship. We form a network of inter-dependence and mutual becoming, like the avocadoes on a single avocado tree. Indeed, we can ripen together, as communities. Communities ripen by becoming more just and loving. The healing ministry of Jesus was not for individuals alone but for his own community, the people of Israel. He wanted to help them soul-ripen, to make guacamole salad together.
God is an avocado, too. At least God has an inner life of God's own that is different from our own inner lives. This is God's transcendence. But God's transcendence does not negate God's immanence. We need to shift the metaphor a bit. Let God be the Avocado with an upper case A, and let the universe be the seed inside the avocado with its many, many cells. Each cell is one of the billions of avocados.
On this view the universe with its billions of avocados is inside, not outside, the big Avocado. The big Avocado is very healthy and its aim is to provide vitamins and nutrients for the world. These vitamins and nutrients are the aims of God as felt in our own hearts.
Our ripening contributes to divine Ripening. Divine ripening lasts forever. It is God's everlasting concrescence (coming together) of the billions upon billions of avocadoes in the universe, turning the many into one. New avocadoes are being added to the universe all the time, so always there is something new for God to gather into unity.
Muslims speak of God's unity as tawhid, which can be translated as "making one." God is the ongoing activity of making one of the many that are given to the divine experience. Whitehead speaks of this making one as the consequent nature of God. This side of God is the "making one" of all the sufferings and joys, achievements and failures, tragedies and joys, of all that has happened...up to this point. It is Beauty with an upper-case B. It is not a static Beauty once and for all; is an active Beauty, a Beauty in the Making,
A Ripening.
— Robert Sardello, The Power of Soul
Discernment requires patience and timing, like waiting for an avocado to ripen. We can't hurry things, and our timing needs to be in sync with the rhythms of our lives and the wider world. We can be too early or too late.
The possibilities we receive from God are always ripe for the occasion; but we must be ripe for the possibilities. God is within us as the lure to ripen.
Two Kinds of Ripening
There are two kinds of ripening: long-term ripening and situational ripening.
Long-term ripening is spiritual well-being or wholeness, understood as a relatively continuous trait of the soul. It sometimes emerges in old age, as people build upon a lifetime of experience, including mistakes. Its primary qualities are wisdom, compassion, and interior freedom, understood as an inner capacity to respond to circumstances with some degree of inner freshness. Wholeness of this sort is a matter of degree. We may be more or less ripe, more or less whole. Most of us are on the way toward wholeness, but we've not fully arrived. A more complete ripening, a deep sense of inner peace and joy, lies in the future, although we can have tastes of it. .
Situational ripening is obedience to the call of the moment. It can be a fruit of spiritual maturity, but it can also happen quite apart from it. Often young people are better able to be obedient to the call than older people, because they are less subject to the constraints of convention and fear. Obedience to the call of the moment is a momentary response to a given situation in a healthy way, with a quality of heart and mind that is attuned to the circumstance at hand. Such obedience can take many forms: attention, a sense of beauty, gratitude, kindness, compassion, courage, honesty, wonder, playfulness, laughter, zest for life, and tears. It is what the moment calls for.
Community Ripening
No two people ripen in just the same way. What ripening means for one person is not what it means for another. Still, we can ripen together and be enriched by one another's companionship. We form a network of inter-dependence and mutual becoming, like the avocadoes on a single avocado tree. Indeed, we can ripen together, as communities. Communities ripen by becoming more just and loving. The healing ministry of Jesus was not for individuals alone but for his own community, the people of Israel. He wanted to help them soul-ripen, to make guacamole salad together.
God is an avocado, too. At least God has an inner life of God's own that is different from our own inner lives. This is God's transcendence. But God's transcendence does not negate God's immanence. We need to shift the metaphor a bit. Let God be the Avocado with an upper case A, and let the universe be the seed inside the avocado with its many, many cells. Each cell is one of the billions of avocados.
On this view the universe with its billions of avocados is inside, not outside, the big Avocado. The big Avocado is very healthy and its aim is to provide vitamins and nutrients for the world. These vitamins and nutrients are the aims of God as felt in our own hearts.
Our ripening contributes to divine Ripening. Divine ripening lasts forever. It is God's everlasting concrescence (coming together) of the billions upon billions of avocadoes in the universe, turning the many into one. New avocadoes are being added to the universe all the time, so always there is something new for God to gather into unity.
Muslims speak of God's unity as tawhid, which can be translated as "making one." God is the ongoing activity of making one of the many that are given to the divine experience. Whitehead speaks of this making one as the consequent nature of God. This side of God is the "making one" of all the sufferings and joys, achievements and failures, tragedies and joys, of all that has happened...up to this point. It is Beauty with an upper-case B. It is not a static Beauty once and for all; is an active Beauty, a Beauty in the Making,
A Ripening.
The Ripening of Souls:
Whitehead, Jung, and Wholeness
The Ripening of the Soul:
Thoughts on Aging
Printed in the Fall 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bull, James L., "Levels of Awakening"
Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 112-113
By James L. Bull
For many years I believed that retirement was only a sad commentary on the unpleasantness of most work. After all, if work is an unpleasant necessity and to be avoided, as it is for many, then why not seek relief at every opportunity? Weekends are to the work week as vacation is to the year, as retirement is to a life’s work. The assumption is that leisure is what’s enjoyable and work is the price one pays to get it. The solution, of course, is to have not just a job but a satisfying life’s work, thereby blurring the distinction between work and nonwork.
Now in my early eighties, I’m no longer working, but I’ve found that being active as a volunteer satisfies needs that were there all along. Energy and output may not decline much, but there may be a qualitative shift that comes with age. On a deep level a shift may occur which sends reverberations to the surface that influence the course of my life. Parallel to the natural physical changes and declines, there may be a spiritual shift which is its own developmental stage, a period of reflection and deepening.
Of this the commercial world has no clue. From that point of view, aging is some sort of malady. A recent magazine cover announces that there is a “cure for aging.” Is aging a disease? Another magazine reports on an “anti-aging’’ medication. Is aging an adversary, to be fought? Of course, it is fought in countless ways, from face lifts to sexual potency enhancers. This oppositional attitude parallels other struggles against natural phenomena to be conquered or overcome, such as the wilderness. But aging, if engaged consciously and without a disabling fear of death, may open the door to a deepening of appreciation and an enhanced capacity for reflection, made possible by having more of life to remember.
To enjoy these benefits, we first need to loosen our grip on some of the skills that served us so well earlier, including rationality, linear thinking, necessity, and precision—all those left-brain qualities. Intuitive skills may now be more important, and with this softening process, we may discover vulnerability within us. The strength required to be vulnerable is more appropriate to age, just as the strength to be tough serves the young and ambitious. The deeper, more appreciative qualities that may now emerge are not as well expressed with words; when words are used, poetry probably works best.
None of this means that we leave the world of necessity and responsibility. We still pay the bills and keep the car running. But we may be able to choose more consciously between the world of adoration and the world of necessity. I was reminded of this distinction on a recent camping trip. While fixing dinner, I paused to appreciate—and to praise and pray in thanksgiving for—the setting sun and the clouds illuminated by it. But soon I was pulled back to the ‘‘necessities”—checking a pot, adding more wood to the fire.
I’m not suggesting that the perspective of necessity is any less important than that of appreciation; they are complementary. They are the two modes of attention that we carry through this life. They are the content and context of life. Because we are normally only aware of the content of our daily lives, we may naturally overlook the context in which it all takes place. Earlier in life, it may not have been useful to spend as much time in reflection. Now we can allow ourselves to drop down, away from the necessary and toward the essential, closer to the soul. There, there may be moments of nonduality, of recognition: not everything is content; there is a surrounding meaning, or context, in which all takes place. Life has meaning; we are not here by accident; there are no accidents.
In order to give ourselves to the surrender of awe and wonder, we need to be well-grounded in the first place. To be insufficiently grounded in this life, and in our bodies, is unhealthy. I have often had the impression that some mentally ill persons are not well-grounded in their bodies—not fully located here. But once we are fully grounded —and reasonably secure —we may allow ourselves a reverential pause. How absolutely natural that we should become completely absorbed in the details of this life! We are provided with the combination of extraordinary sensory equipment and equally rich experiential potential—and a world to match. We are placed in a world of such richness, how could we not been enraptured by it all—longing, sadness, taste, laughter, beauty! It can be thought of as a sort of divine joke: we are dropped into a life so inviting that we become caught up entirely, Spirit chuckling all the while. Perhaps it is useful for us not to see this life in its full context while we are living it. This way, we are allowed to focus on our present situation without distraction.
Nevertheless, as I grow older I get more of a sense of hidden meanings. Our inner task is to stay aware, to sense the context, to be in touch with who we really are and who we were all along.
Otherwise, we might be swept away and lose the self.
Kierkegaard understood the tragedy of those who live their lives “outside of themselves.” In Either/Or he writes:
And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and now is possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside of themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away.
The context of this life may be far more subtle than the immediate content; it is usually sensed intuitively; it may seem elusive and more a matter of revelation than verification. It is everything we sense that surrounds this life and makes it possible, the aura of meaning and mystery which encloses all we know. Although there are effective methods for tapping into this realm, such as meditation and prayer, the maxim seems to apply that “this thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.”
In a recent workshop, poet Robert Bly referred to a poem by Kabir that reads in part:
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves
birds and animals and the ants--
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you
n your mother’ s womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around entirely
orphaned now?
In this workshop, Bly used the poem as a point of departure to ask the question, “What did you know before you were born?” I wrote: ·
What we knew before we were born is like one of Rilke’s sealed letters, an epistle we carry through life in our bodies. Perhaps we dare to peek, tearing back the envelope at one comer, seeing a word or two. Rarely would we read the whole thing. Perhaps when we are old, the paper yellowed and brittle, we may find the courage to open, to read, to weep.
What could it be that I carried with me always, but never knew? What I knew before I was born might literally be whatever I learned in my mother’s womb, plus whatever I brought to this life before that. But in a larger, more metaphorical sense, this question asks that I pause to consider the context of this life. As I grow older, my birth and death (the two most important events of my life) may begin to come together. (As Shakespeare wrote, “This little life is rounded with a sleep.’’) If there is a part of me that transcends my birth and death—call it the soul—I can stay in touch with it along the way.
The idea that we brought something with us to this life is not a new one. It is described excellently by James Hillman, who asserts, “Each person enters the world called.” He continues,
The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we were born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe that we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern. And therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.
Clearly Hillman believes we were loved before we were born:
Despite this invisible caring, we prefer to imagine ourselves thrown naked into the world, utterly vulnerable and fundamentally alone. It is easier to accept the story of heroic self-made development than the story that you may well be loved by this guiding providence, that you are needed for what you bring, and that you are sometimes fortuitously helped by it in situations of distress.
We are born into situations and families that give us opportunities to work out issues that require our attention. This may not be easy: the son of the macho father goes on to become a ballet dancer; the maternally overprotected child finds assertiveness and learns to be bold. So there may be a great deal, on a deep level, that we knew before we were born. Our lives take place on the surface of a very deep sea. As I grow older, I sense that all is not forgotten. The accidents of my life dissolve into purposes; the purposes become harder to explain, and explanation matters less and less.
- James L. Bull
More about Actual Avocados
Avocados or “alligator pears” are known for their creamy smooth flesh and bumpy skin. They are a popular food across many cultures. Perhaps best known as the star ingredient in guacamole, they are versatile and prepared in an array of dishes, or simply eaten plain with a spoon. Although not sweet, avocados are botanically classified as a fruit with a large berry and single center pit, grown from the Persea americana tree. They are believed to have originated in Mexico or Central America, with Mexico being the leading producer worldwide.
Their nutrition profile makes them a staple in various healthful meal plans. Avocados are a good source of fiber, and contain more fat (the good kind) than carbohydrate, so are popular on lower-carbohydrate diets such as with diabetes. Their heart-friendly fats do not increase blood cholesterol, which can provide satisfaction on a traditional cholesterol-lowering diet that is often low in fat and cholesterol. It is one the highest-fat plant foods, making it a popular inclusion in vegan and vegetarian diets. The slightly earthy but neutral flavor of avocados works well in sauces, salad dressings, sandwiches, baked goods, salads, and grain dishes to add richness.
- Harvard School of Public Health, TH Chan, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/avocados/
Timing
Not yet - Not yet - Not yet - Eat me now - Too Late
Avocados are probably one of the greatest fruits-that-moonlight-as-vegetables ever invented. It’s like nature woke up one day was like, “I do a lot of annoying shit (tornadoes, earthquakes, hail storms) so today I’m going to make up for it and give you guys the avocado.”
The only caveat about avocados is that you have to be a total produce ninja to know exactly when they are ready to eat, as evidenced by an Internet meme making its round on Instagram:
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
EAT ME NOW!
Too late.
– Avocados
With a banana, you can tell what’s happening on the inside thanks to a peel that changes from greenish to yellow to spotted brown. Not an avocado, where the whole ripening process ranges in mind blowing shades of the same color: very green, to green, to army green, to…I think this is still green, but it might be brown, and does that mean it’s ready to eat? Everyone who has ever waited an entire week for an avocado to ripen to make guacamole knows the horror of realizing that the specimen — perfect just one hour ago — has suddenly gone rogue.
- The Avocado Theory, Amelia Diamond, 10/21/2013, The Repeller
The only caveat about avocados is that you have to be a total produce ninja to know exactly when they are ready to eat, as evidenced by an Internet meme making its round on Instagram:
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
EAT ME NOW!
Too late.
– Avocados
With a banana, you can tell what’s happening on the inside thanks to a peel that changes from greenish to yellow to spotted brown. Not an avocado, where the whole ripening process ranges in mind blowing shades of the same color: very green, to green, to army green, to…I think this is still green, but it might be brown, and does that mean it’s ready to eat? Everyone who has ever waited an entire week for an avocado to ripen to make guacamole knows the horror of realizing that the specimen — perfect just one hour ago — has suddenly gone rogue.
- The Avocado Theory, Amelia Diamond, 10/21/2013, The Repeller
The Music of Avocados
kathleen dooley
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