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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.2 (2002) 243-244



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Book Review

Learning to Fall:
The Blessings of an Imperfect Life


Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life. By Philip Simmons. New York: Bantam Books, 2002. 159 pp. $16.95.

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, like anywhere else, skiing is an exercise in deliberate falling. You learn not to lean into the slope for safety, but to stretch out away from the hill—falling, as it were, into the emptiness of space. That keeps the full surface of the skis moving over and with the snow. Otherwise you're perilously sliding on only a corner edge, falling into disaster. In skiing, as in life, keeping close to the ground, clinging to control, guarantees nothing but failure.

Philip Simmons understands this irony. Since being diagnosed with ALS (or Lou Gehrig's disease) several years ago, he's had to work intently at the art of falling gracefully. He lives in rural New Hampshire, near the mountains he once loved to climb. There he writes about the Zen (and Christian) mystery of falling into every present moment without trying to escape from it. He says, "You can't live long on this earth without confronting a fundamental truth. We're not in charge here . . . . All the plans we are in the business of making are continually being upset by both disaster and delight" (131). Being fully present to the contour of the hill before us, leaning into whatever comes, falling into a grace we cannot fathom is what life requires of each one of us.

The genius of this book is that the author perceives his illness as but a particular, idiosyncratic expression of the universal human condition. There's no self-pity here. No regret. No complaints about the unfairness of the universe. This is a man in his late thirties, forced to abandon his career of teaching literature and creative writing, who knows that the time he has left with his wife and two young children is very brief. Yet he insists that we all participate in the same process of learning to relinquish control, to accept our impermanence, to loosen our attachment to things we cannot hold. His experience is simply a more condensed, abbreviated version of what everyone encounters over time. Learning to live with imperfection, he argues, is one of the primary goals of all spiritual practice.

Simmons describes himself as having wandered from the roots of his Roman Catholic childhood, coming to a deep appreciation of Buddhist and Hindu teachings on the practice of mindfulness, yet "returning by odd and circuitous routes to the dual figure of Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ" (84). He quotes often from Eckhart, Merton, and the Desert Christians. Always his concern is the exercise of consciousness, learning to be fully present even in the midst of pain, knowing how little there is of such awareness in contemporary American culture. "The present moment, like the spotted owl or sea turtle, has become an endangered species," he laments (145). We'd rather live with senseless distractions than be awakened out of our sleep. Retelling the Zen parable of the man chased by a tiger who plucks a single ripe strawberry while hanging from a cliff, he concludes, "if spiritual growth is what you seek, don't ask for more strawberries, ask for more tigers" (9).

This is a crisp and delightful book, written with the sparkling clarity that Dr. Johnson said might characterize all of our writing if we knew we were to die within a fortnight. The author writes of spiritual things without the cloying religiosity we tend to associate with spiritual writing. Speaking of the silence to which our lives are drawn, for example, he points beyond the pending wordlessness of his death to memories in his youth of lying in a New England hayloft watching dust dance in a shaft of sunlight or looking down the front of Arlene Colebrook's dress at a country fair. "Both occasions...

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