She and I stood facing each other in the guest room at the seminary the first day of our visit to New Orleans, a fourteen-hour drive eastward on I-10 from our home. We had planned to drive on into Texas to look at another school and choose, then, between the two. Looking at each other, we knew, though we did not know why. We agreed not to go on into Texas. Here, we said "Yes," and remained seven years. A wonderful season in a wonderful city. Our leaving after those seven years, and not as planned, three years, and me with a Ph.D and heading into a college professorship - which I never planned for either one - began with not knowing why, only that we knew. We did not even know how we knew.
* * *
Mary Rose O'Reilley, Quaker, Buddhist, in The Barn at the End of the World, tells of a moment of following. She says it was thirty years in the past, while she was hanging out one night in London. She was wearing a black trench coat and smoking an unfiltered Gauloise. She says in this behavior she was "working ... on some more-than-usually-obnoxious false persona." She continues ...-
[A] woman approached me with her two teenaged children and began to chat. They told me they were Quakers, and in some mysterious way they attracted me so powerfully, despite the pretentious image I was cultivating at the time, that I wanted to baah! like a sheep and follow them home. Why? I don't know. I wanted to get into the soft light that held those people. So I understand how Jesus could say to someone, "Follow me," and they'd drop everything. Indeed, dropping everything is half the fun.
* * *
To assign a single cause to why others or we ourselves do what we do is simplistic and mistaken. There is never a single cause for anything anyone does. And, sometimes, we have no simplistic and mistaken idea why we did something.
O'Reilley writes, "... I wanted to baah! like a sheep and follow them home. Why? I don't know. I wanted to get into the soft light that held those people." She wants to get into that "soft light," yet she does not know why. That seems contradictory. Still, she does not understand why she wants to follow them to do so.
We can feel drawn, as though by an unseen hand, gently pulling us in a direction, and we cannot fathom why. If someone asked, "Why are you going to do this?," our answer is, "Honestly, I don't know." We may find ourselves willing to be more yielding and risk-taking, which is out of character for us.
Perhaps, we know something of what we want to be drawn to, so we are glad to be drawn; yet there is still a sense of not fathoming what has led to our being willing. We are drawn, yet we are baffled as to what is luring us, and why we are eager to act on this urge.
Yet, we act. The "Yes" arises from Nowhere. We cannot name what all has led to this one moment of attraction to yield to a silent summons, not heard or seen. Not knowing why, we know.
* * *
As we grow spiritually, living more in the present than in the past or future, more spontaneously and less from thought, we shift more into this zone of acting without a why. We gradually become more comfortable living this way. And we do not see it as a big deal, as some awesome spiritual feat. In fact, we learn calling it spiritual is not accurate, for it is just as what is. Yet, we may use "spiritual." Actually, it feels more natural than our previous way of living. We still live with "why," for it has its place. Yet, we live more with "don't know why," when previously, "don't know why" had little to no place in our life.
