Abide

“Abide” by Larry Smith

I can recall this term “abide” from my childhood while standing in church and joining choir and congregation belting out “Abide with Me.” It was a term my father used at rare times when talking about troubles and troubled family or neighbors. “We just have to love and abide with them.” I didn’t really grasp its meaning…something like “accept” them for what they were or are. But at other times the word meant “accept and obey the rules and regulations.” I couldn’t find the love in that, except when it meant with God.

As I matured and went off to college where we quietly learned to question everything, I began to doubt simple faith and to question the idea of “abiding” with things. During the time of the Vietnam War, I stopped abiding with our government policies and worked actively to change our acts of aggression in war, at home, and eventually in myself through spiritual work. 

This ongoing struggle with “abiding” has led me into my 70’s now where I find the spiritual work of such teachers as Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Keating, Cynthia Bourgeault, and others inspiring and challenging. All remain active and alive to social wrongs, but work to ground oneself in humility and deep human connection. It’s a good starting point for any action.

James Finley, puts it so well in his appreciation of Thomas Merton’s truth:

“Before undertaking any project, assuming any stance, fulfilling any purpose, we are called upon to abide ourselves, to do what we do, to ‘just live,’ and in simple presence to life learn to expect nothing out of anything and everything out of nothing.”  

In this I hear again my father’s advice to “love and abide with others.”