"Outlaw Relationships on the Spiritual Journey"

Tom J. Lottman
November 9, 2008

My name is Tom Lottman.  I am a member here at Northern Hills UU Fellowship and I’m honored to have the opportunity to talk to you today.  My topic today is what I call “Outlaw Relationships” on our spiritual journeys.   These “outlaws” are the unexpected teachers that experience life outside the laws by which we understand ourselves, other people and the world in general.  By outlaws I don’t imply any sense of wrong doing or evil, I merely mean that they are so very much unlike us.  Our encounters with them challenge the laws of life to which we have been accustomed and with which we are very comfortable.  They have the potential to significantly impact our spiritual journey.  Our task is to recognize these unexpected teachers and to be open to their possibility. 

Years ago a faculty colleague of mine in Canada, Rich Alapack, wrote an article on outlaw relationships and how they affect adult sexual development.   I believe the concept of outlaw relationships can also be applied to our spiritual development.  Rich defines an Outlaw as “a significant stranger who brings a world totally different from yours, one at odds with your roots.”  Her or his entrance into your life represents powerful possibilities and challenges.

The entrance of Outlaws into our life is totally unexpected and unanticipated.  They are our unexpected teachers.  I believe that outlaws enter our spiritual journey through one of four experiential portals:  Belonging, Becoming, Believing and Beloving.  I am convinced that these are four critical experiential components of a spiritual journey and if one of these elements begins to fade from our experience we feel a dis-ease that opens the door for the outlaw. 

Let me share with you a quick reflective exercise I do during the prelude every Sunday here at Northern Hills.  Using our window with its four unequal panes, I map the words belonging, becoming, believing and beloving according to the level I have experienced them during the past week.  If a couple of weeks go by with one of the elements consistently in the smallest pane, or perhaps not even up there at all, I become intentional about seeking out those experiences and being open to outlaws who will help me see those experiences differently.

Now let’s take a look at each of these experiential elements and I will share with you the impact of outlaws in my life that helped to reshape my spiritual journey.

First there is belonging.  Belonging is a basic quest.  Recent research in neuroscience reveals that it even shapes the way our brain develops.  Dan Seigel the noted neuroscientist said it so eloquently.  “Human connections shape the neural connections from which the mind emerges.”

John O’Donohue, the Irish spiritual scholar and poet describes the need for belonging this way:
                “Something within each of us cries out for belonging.  We can have all the world has to offer and yet without a sense of belonging it all seems empty and pointless.  Like the tree that puts roots deep in the clay, each of us needs the anchor of belonging in order to bend with the storms and reach for the light.  Belonging shelters us from the loneliness of life. Though we may not reflect too frequently on the vast infinity that surrounds us, something within us is always aware of it.  Such infinity can be anonymous and threatening.  The universe is too big for any one of us.  We long for a sure nest to shelter.  The sense of belonging also shelters us from the inner infinity which each of us secretly carries.  There is a huge abyss in every mind.  When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent from falling within ourselves.”

This was exactly what had happened to my first outlaw, my first unexpected spiritual teacher, Art.

I am a graduate of a Jesuit high school, a Jesuit undergraduate school and a Jesuit graduate school.  I guess you can say that the Jesuits made me who I am today, a Unitarian Universalist.  When I was young, my spiritual journey was governed by what I call the Catholic GPS system.  It was real easy, you started out on Highway 1, punched in your destination.  Let’s see H-E-A-V-E-N, then you sat back and waited for directions.  “In .5 years complete your catholic education.  In 1.5 years get married and have children.”  I was studying pre-law and I knew exactly what my life was going to be. 

Art was my first outlaw.  I met him in a mental institution.  I worked there at nights to earn money for my undergraduate tuition.  Art had schizophrenia and delusions that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ.  I was fascinated with his thought processes and we would have long conversations through many a night.  As a result of my relationship with Art I changed my major to Psychology.  And that in turn fundamentally changed my both my professional and spiritual journey.

As O’Donohue described, Art had fallen into the infinity within. His lack of external anchors contrasted with my many life long anchors that kept me in place.  My experience with Art allowed me to let go of many of the anchors to which I was so securely attached. 

Now let’s think about the relationship between belonging and becoming?

I want to share with you a silly life long quest that Ann teases me about and which I still try to accomplish.  Ever since I was a child, I searched for what I call the achromatic moment.  That is, the very moment at dusk when subtle colors turn to shades of gray.  At dusk I still sit on the back porch with Ann staring at a leaf trying to capture the exact moment when the green disappears and it becomes a shade of gray. 

There is a similar experience like that in belonging.  There is a point, a subtle shift when our awareness of belonging to something or someone morphs into be longing for something or someone.  It’s at this moment, the cusp between belonging to and be longing for, that we are open to outlaw relationships.

Now we can, as many do, suppress this longing and cling to predictable and safe forms of belonging. But then as O’Donue says, “we sin against the rest of nature that longs to live deeply through us.”  When you suppress the longing, you stop the searching, you commit idolatry as Maslow defined it.  Namely accepting answers to questions of proximal concerns as answers to questions of ultimate concern.  Your spiritual journey is on hold.  But seldom is it on hold forever.  We who are free are also condemned to choose.

When we are open to outlaw encounters that awaken the longing within, when we embrace our inner longing we discover that it is often wiser than our conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth.  And then we change our lives and progress along our spiritual journey.  That is the gift of the outlaw to change belonging into becoming. 

Another outlaw that changed my spiritual journey was a psychotherapist who was a former Jesuit priest.  I came back to Chicago from active duty at the height of our Viet Nam involvement.  I had been a Captain in the Army and had just graduated from Air Defense Missile School.  Both Joe and I worked as therapists at a VA Hospital in Chicago.  Joe’s world and passion was the antiwar movement.  It was a world that clashed big time with my Army background.  I became deeply involved with the movement and carry those values to the present day disasters we see in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I let go of a lot of people and ideas I was sure I would belong to all of my life. My world and my self were fundamentally changed.

When I was teaching in Canada, I realized that we can be outlaws to ourselves.  I had been determined to work up a course on the Psychology of Religious Experience.  It was a tough sell to the department head.  I buried myself in the work challenging everything I read.  I encountered the outlaw inside that was open to new possibilities.  Developing and teaching that course created a life long commitment to reflection.  William James defined religious experience as “man’s experience in his solitude whenever he encounters whatever he believes to be divine”.  It’s that phrase “in his solitude” that should invite us to get to know the outlaw inside each of us.

Now let’s think about the experience of belief and its counter-part unbelief.  In the reading from Charles Taylor, you heard that he concludes that most of us experience the push-me pull-you of belief and unbelief.  That truly has been the story of my life.  Growing up Catholic, belief was not only an expectation, it was salvation …..salvation from an eternal outcome you didn’t want to contemplate.  However, the good nuns were going to make sure you did.  One day in the fifth grade after sharing with us the excruciating tortures of hell, Sister Stephens wanted us to reflect on the duration of eternity.  She showed us a picture of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world and then asked us to imagine a mountain 1,000 times taller.  Then she showed us a picture of a sparrow, a tiny little bird.  She said that if every one thousand years the tip of that sparrow’s wing just barely touched that mountain, by the time that mountain was worn to the ground, eternity would just be beginning.  Well, I tell you that after that belief became easy…..at least for a while.

In the end, my Catholic upbringing drove me to cling to unbelief as the lone island of sanity in a sea of pathological isms.  One time at a dinner party, someone asked what I was studying in my doctoral program.  I meant to respond, clinical psychology, but what came out of my mouth was cynical psychology.  At that time I didn’t realize just how true that Freudian slip was.  Unbelief and cynicism was at the core of my experience.  It affected my relationships and my happiness.

It was a whole band of outlaws that challenged my unbelief.  While teaching in Canada, a colleague in the Ministry of Health asked if I would lead an effort to establish mental health services for remote villages of indigenous peoples.  Flying to work in a bush plane sounded like an adventure so I said yes.  I spent five years going up North to work with the Ojibwa people.  At first, even after I had gotten to know a number of shamans and elders, every time the subject of religion came up they would ridicule the Ojibwa traditional beliefs.  It wasn’t until they realized that I was truly interested in and respected their traditions that they began to talk openly about their spirituality.  The Ojibwa truly integrate spirituality in all aspects of their daily life.  It would be unthinkable to the Ojibwa that life is lived and experienced only in a single dimension.  Seeing a white man so cynical that he believed only in the manifest evoked real pathos.  The Ojibwa don’t define God and there are some experiences they would not reduce to human terms.  They invented the word Manitou which at a superficial level can mean spirit, but at a more fundamental level means potential or mystery.

And the full integration of their spirituality brought an optimism and good will to their encounters with each others.  In Ojibwa, “Anishnabeg” means a member of your tribe.  But a more fundamental meaning is a “person of good intentions.”  For them, well-being and well-doing are fundamentally linked.  This is a lfe-long lesson I received from these unexpected teachers.

It reminds me of an interview I heard with Isaac Stern right after Irving Berlin had died.  The interviewer was asking Stern how such a mediocre musician (he could only play in the key of C) had become such a successful song writer.  Stern explained that Berlin had a very simple philosophy of life.  “Life was composed of a few basic fundamental elements: life and death, loneliness and love, hope and defeat.  When reduced to those basic elements, affirmation always trumps complaint, hope is more viable than despair, and kindness is always more noble than its opposite.”  Belief is an openness to the possibility of the positive.

Huston Smith in Why Religion Matters states that, “the finitude of mundane existence cannot satisfy the human heart completely.  Built into the human makeup is a longing for ‘more’ that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.”  In his book, Why God Won’t go Away, The neuroscientist, Andrew Newberg, argues that the brain is hard-wired for spiritual search. 

So no matter which way we choose to go in the push-me pull-you of belief and unbelief, let us be open to the outlaw that wants to show us the opposite.  The very fact that we are here, the very fact that we are Unitarian Universalists gives witness to that openness.

Now, what about beloving which needs a little poetic license.  The outlaw that enters our life through the door of beloving is the most powerful of all.  As Rich Alapack describes when two outlaws encounter each other, “two worlds collide and in the aftershock, time stands still.”  The beloving outlaw relationship not only questions our previous world view, it shuts it out.  In the context of passionate intensity their new relationship replaces their old world.  And in this case world is not a locale but rather a system of meanings central to who I am.  Outlaws are strangers to each other.  They are strangers not because they have just met but rather they are strangers because they were never supposed to have met in the first place.  They started out as the “wrong” man or “forbidden” women precisely because their meaning systems clashed. 

How do outsiders from one another become “soul-mates”?  It is in the intensity of love, passion and possession (in every twist of the term) that the relationship supplants the meaning system.  And if that is the culmination of the relationship, the relationship itself becomes idolatrous.  Belonging forbids becoming and the personal spiritual journey is sacrificed to the relationship.  The outlaw relationship becomes true love when the partners value and support the recurring cycle of belonging and becoming within the other.  Ann taught to me the wonderful circle dance of belonging and becoming.  (By the way she’s failed to teach me any other dance.)  Loving outlaws support each other’s spiritual journey.

Finally, I want to share just one more outlaw that enters and re-enters my journey in all four: belonging, becoming, believing and beloving experiences.  I am a twin.  That’s always been a component of my identity.  My twin sister died of breast cancer a year and a half ago.  All of my life I was always so proud of the fact that I was seven minutes older than she was.  In spite of being a twin, I always saw myself as the older brother. I would show her things. I would teach her new discoveries. Well outlaws are unexpected teachers.  My sister handled the dying process with such grace and dignity, she became an outlaw to many of us.  She showed us how to think of death differently and I am changed forever because of it.
 
Now I want to end with Rich Alapack’s words.  “In confrontation with my outlaw, I am forced to radically confront myself and to make choices which reveal genuine preferences and actual priorities.  As a result I eventually make decisions for which I must own responsibility and which irrevocably will shape the face of my future.”
Who knows, perhaps in your immediate future, at the post-service coffee session you’ll meet an outlaw or be an outlaw to another.  Be open to it.  May your gaze be gentle when you look within and may you help all of us to see the part of us that lives inside of you.

Now I want to re-introduce a friend and outlaw in my life, David Kisor.  Because of David I think we will have to take even more poetic license and add a fifth “B” …..Be Singing to the elements of the spiritual journey.  David will perform our song “Belong, Become, Believe, Belove.”