More and more, I find that in order to navigate my days with a measure of patience, I have to screen out quite a lot:  avoid too much hearing and reading the latest news, stay focused and ignore noise around me when I try to write, turn away from yard signs that too often seem to support the candidates I don’t support, duck phone calls and let texts and emails go unanswered.  Our culture bombards us constantly with communications of all kinds; that, coupled with what seems our innate human tendency to be easily distracted and want to pursue whatever catches our attention, all challenge me to put on my blinders and stick some noise plugs in my ears and keep going.

     An understandable survival mode, even a necessary kind of discipline whenever there is work to be done—but also a way of being that is contrary to a teaching found in many spiritual traditions that tells us we live best when we live open and inviting to the world.  A familiar poem by Rumi , “The Guest House,” captures this alternative approach well, as he notes that the ongoing parade of visitors,  people and events and experiences and ideas, that present themselves to us moment by moment are to be welcomed as honored “guests” who come with gifts that we need even if we are not aware of that need.  The Centering Prayer tradition includes a companion practice called the Welcoming Prayer which challenges one to meet each thing that happens, however undesirable, in a spirit of acceptance and willingness to have nothing changed from what is present right then.

     All well and good, all perspectives that I can readily see as fine ways for me to grow spiritually and widen my worldview and maybe even become a bit more patient with the frustrations of life—but just how wide open am I to hold my door?  I grew up in a household where the lack of boundaries meant suffering, even trauma:  why would I now simply set aside the boundaries I need to keep myself safe and whole?  Even further, I am intensely introverted, which means it will always be a struggle for me to welcome the unexpected “guest” since such welcoming is contrary to my basic way of being.

     Whenever this particular spiritual practice shows up, the practice of invitation and being open to the ongoing flow of life and experience, the usual counterargument runs to the opposite extreme, claiming that being open means letting in terrible people and damaging events.  What is actually called for, I suspect, is a kind of middle way, of working over time to open the doors of my mind and heart and spirit a bit more often, a bit wider, a bit more readily, instead of immediately closing and locking those doors because I am unwilling to see who or what is on the other side asking to be let in.  And maybe I begin to invite more differences into my life.  And maybe one day I even invite someone, some experience, some idea, some emotion, I actually dislike, distrust, fear to enter.  Because in the end, if I actually believe (as I insist I do) that life is fundamentally good and meaningful, then in the end I will become that guest house of Rumi’s where every morning a new arrival is invited through the door with the expectation that somehow, perhaps even against all odds, that new arrival will turn out to be just what I need.