Make friends with the edges

“Walk in the middle of the path! That way you won’t fall off the edges”.

I remember, as a child, walking the cliff tops from Lynton to Lee Abbey in Devon and being corralled by my mum’s anxiety to keep us away from the edge, because it was a long, long way to fall to a certain death. As a parent I now totally get her concern, but as a child it was the edges that had the real views of the deep blue, transparent water, the sea bass, the rock pools and the dancing rocks themselves. The edge is where the adventure was. But, yes, it was also where the danger was. And there is something about growing older that often reveals a desire for safety over growth, the known over the unknown, the safe middle ground over the edges.  We grew up with the explicit message from our art teachers, ‘stay within the lines! Don’t go over the edges’. Colouring outside of the edges was seen as clumsy or rebellious and certainly unacceptable.

But one sure way to discover, or recover, the spiritual journey is to make friends with the edges.

I have a deep appreciation of Buddhism and yet when someone introduced me recently to a Buddhist Compassion meditation, I felt myself lurch inside myself to the middle of the path, heading for the safety of the middle way, the known road. ‘I’m not a Buddhist’, I could hear myself defend. And yet the suggestion to taste a Buddhist meditation came from a Jewish rabbi, to an eclectic, Christian agnostic. It was a voice from the edges. And I went there. To the edges. Nervously I tried it and I discovered a way of meditating on a kindness to myself and others that I had both longed for and never discovered in the previous 45 years of searching. I found a new path on the edges. There is greater risk in staying in the middle safe place, staying away from the edges of our experience, than the risk in going there.

There is the core of our everyday life. The middle of the road. Our routines and rituals and familiarities and our prejudices (we all have them). We build these into a solid edifice that feels known, immovable, certain safe and familiar. These routines in our thoughts and actions keep us secure and stable, impermeable, reasonable, logical and sensible and un-cancelled.

Then there are the edges. The edges of everything ‘out there’ and everything ‘in here’, within me. Abraham Joshua Heschel captures the edges well when he says,

‘We dwell on the edge of mystery and ignore it, wasting our souls, risking our stake in God.  We constantly pour our inner light away from Him, setting up the thick screen of self between Him and us, adding more shadows to the darkness that already hovers between Him and our wayward reason.[1]’

If we don’t sit on the edges then we settle, we don’t grow, we don’t explore, we don’t journey. But we can summon up courage and make friends with our edges by encountering wonder, awe, kindness, love, suffering, disruption, the unexpected, the kindness of strangers and the death of friends. All of these moments pose huge questions to us about who we are, why we are here, what meaning is there to it all and whether there is a God that exists that we can ‘do’ or ‘not do’. These questions force us and face us with the vast unknowns of life and invite us to sit with them, rather than settle for fast and easy answers. The best scientists in the world, with all that they know, sit daily on their edges of not-knowing’s. We and they have, or can, learn to live on the edge with the questions.

Questions invite us to the edges. 

The unknowns invite us to the edges.

Even silence invites us to the edges. (Meditation is an invitation to the edge each day)

We were born in silence and we will return to silence. Being filled with noise and Smartphone-distractions keep us away from the womb of silence. In sitting on the edge with silence we suddenly realise the world is not noisy and interrupted by occasional silence, but it is full of silence and occasionally interrupted by noise. Silence is the bass-note of existence. We are the noise within the silence. But when we sit on the edges, in the silence, we reconnect with the very essence of where we came from and who we are. The unknown edge of silence can be a little scary because it reveals just how much distracting, anxious, inner noise we carry around.

Making friends with our edges leads us forwards, it expands us, it deepens us, it brings us back to what is truly at our core, to what is ‘out there’ and what is ‘in here’. Out on the edges we discover, recover, that we are a meaningful part of a mystery, a meaningful wave on an ocean, a meaningful leaf in a vineyard.

This article is a chapter within the latest book that I'm working on called We don't do God? - how unreligious people can start a genuine spiritual journey
(Remember Alistair Cambell's intervention in Blair's interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2003)

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel I asked for wonder