Monthly Archives: December 2012

Batter My Heart, Three-Personned God

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The following sonnet by John Donne is one of my favorite poems. He portrayed mankind as coming to God kicking and screaming, coming to Him only after persistent and loving “battering” of our hearts. This, he argued, is because we are by nature “like an usurp’d town, to another due” and that steadfast loyalty has to be broken through. He also notes the limitations of reason in this process. We often try to think our way to God, believing with a little syllogism we can reason our way into the “bosom of Abraham”. But Donne laments, “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, but is captive, and proves week or untrue.” And I have a hunch that Donne had in mind those of us who have been “Christianized” by our culture; or “enculturated” into our faith.

HOLY SONNETS.

XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The Absolute Truth about the Gun Issue!

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There are two observations about the recent gun-violence issue that I would like to recommend. The first is by Neil Donald Walsch in the Huffington Post (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neale-donald-walsch/its-beliefs-not-behaviors_b_2348379.html) and the second is by Rebecca Hamilton in Patheos.com. See (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2012/12/affixing-blame/ )

Walsch can best be described as a New Age spiritual teacher and Hamilton is an Oklahoma legislator who has a strong Catholic faith. Each of these individuals emphasize the importance of addressing the underlying issues in the current controversy.

But the “underlying issues” are not easily addressed for they are not seen by the naked eye. They dwell in the realm of the spirit and that dimension of life is not really recognized by our culture any more. Yes, millions profess to be “Christian”…and therefore they are, I certainly don’t doubt that…but I suggest that their real god is often consumerism just as it is with the rest of our culture. We like stuff. Our real values are with stuff. We glibly profess “Jesus as our Savior” but if we look closely Jesus is merely another item in the category of our “stuff.” He is merely another accoutrement to our persona, something we have donned to convince ourself and others that we are “Christian.” And this is not the fault of Jesus or teachings about him!

And this emphasis on “stuff” belies what C. S. Lewis called the sin of “misplaced concreteness”, a taking for real what is only ephemeral. And being guilty of this sin, being immersed in this “misplaced concreteness”, our heart hungers for Reality and so we have to have “stuff” to assuage that gnawing hunger.

 

(Now re the title, please remember I love irony!)

Now the gun-fetish is only one of the many examples of impoverished identities glomming onto “stuff.” And most of the gun owners, even those who really like their guns, continue to have a life (which is to say an identity) and don’t hold-forth gun ownership as the essense of who it is to be a man or an American. A gun is merely an object and like any object it can elicit a fetishistic attachment. The best example of this was during the 2008 Democratic Primary debate when a question was posed to the candidates via You Tube in which a young man asked the candidates what they were going to do to protect “My baby”, proferring then an assault rifle. I think Joe Biden at that moment put things in perspective when he chided the young man for deigning to call a gun “my baby.” But the young man revealed an emotional attachment to guns which I really think is often part of the problem.

Now sure, it is important to like “stuff” and to do so means some degree of emotional attachment takes place. But with some gun owners, this attachment often goes way over the top and it becomes the primary element in their identity. And at that point a paranoid element is floating about in our country re an “intrusive government” who is going to “take our guns away.” That gets the rabid gun owners panties in a wad immediately, especially when right-wing media is egging them on.

Let me conclude on a facetious note, playing again with cause-effect: A recent survey revealed that gun-enthusiasts were two-to-one more likely to be Republicans. Being a loyal and pig-headed Democrat, perhaps we should ban all firearms and then everyone would be a Democrat! This is relevant to David Letterman’s famous quip, “Mobile home parks cause tornadoes.”

Harmonizing Those Internal Voices

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Elif Shafak is a Turkish writer whose book, Black Milk, explores her travail during a debilitating post-partum depression. In the process she presents life as viewed from someone who has been raised in a very multi-cultural world which is probably, in her case, related to the internal conflict and confusion she battled…and certainly battles even today.

An essential part of her story is recurrent dialogue with six internal voices which she calls her Thumbelina’s, six tiny finger-sized women who represented various dimensions of her psyche. At times these internal voices, and others, came to tyrannize her and as she worked through her depression she was able to find freedom from them.

Each of us is a composite work. We are a myriad of personalities and if we are lucky these various voices will be subsumed under a specific ego structure. We will know who we are and the other voices that would otherwise harangue us are more or less muted into private fancy or forbidden impulse. Some have rich imaginations, however, and often they are writers and can vividly portray a broader dimension of reality than most of us are permitted to otherwise have access to. And, of course, there is another alternative in which these voices can be experienced—mental illness!

I would like to share one excerpt from this very interesting and poignant book:

The Sufis believe that every human being is a mirror that reflects the world at large. They say each of us is a walking microcosm. To be human, therefore, means to live with an orchestra of conflicting voices and mixed emotions. This could be a rewarding and enriching experience were we not inclined to praise some members of our inner orchestra at the expense of others. We suppress many aspects of our personalities in order to conform to the perfect image we try to live up to. In this way, there is rarely—if ever—a democracy inside of us, but instead a solid oligarchy where some voices reign over the rest….Only when we can harmonize and synchronize the voices within can we become better mothers, fathers, and even writers

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” said Chicken Little

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Chicken Little’s famous lamentation has surfaced again in the form of the Mayan apocalypse scheduled for today. And this lunacy has been going on for thousands of years. (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/owen-egerton/11-other-times-the-world-_b_2332564.html)

Well, sooner or later, one of these ne’er-do’wells is going to be right as, according to physicists, the world is going to end at some point. And, there are certainly lunatics around today who could cause this to happen more immediately, given their crazed belief in Ultimate Truth, and a willingness to destroy the world to bring this Truth about…or at least wreak havoc on those of us who do not believe as they do.

Ultimately, we are all fearful of death and that is what this hysteria is about. We are going to die and it is a scary proposition that our ego cannot brook. We cannot accept our simple mortality and thus invent crazy belief systems to cling to so that this fear can be assuaged. And even tenable belief systems are often interpreted in such a way that they too are merely an escape from reality. And then we have these crazy episodic notions of how this end will come about so abruptly.

I like the approach that Jesus offered to the subject of mortality. To paraphrase, he said, “Yes, you are going to die. So, go ahead and die so that you can live.” And he did not attempt to camouflage our mortality but emphasized the presence of an Ultimate Reality that is always with us and to which we will return upon our death. And his teachings…and the teachings of the Christian tradition…contend that this Ultimate Reality can find expression in our contemporary mortal life if we are willing to undergo death now in a spiritual sense.

T.S. Eliot in his brilliant Four Quartets noted the importance of this symbolic death in our life and added, “And the time of death is every moment.” Or, to put in in Pauline terms, “I die daily.” Each day of our life there are little moments to die in the sense of humbling ourselves, accepting the limitations of reality and our limited grasp on reality, and making room for others and for the world at large. And, yes there are heroic individuals who often face death in a more literal sense. And at some point we will all face death in a literal sense and our ability to accept it at that moment will not be unrelated to how we have accepted the process of death in our day to day life, how we have accepted the bruises that our ego has been subjected to by “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

(A FACETIOUS CONCLUSION—It is tempting to start to daily proclaim myself that “the end is nigh, the end is nigh” as I just might be right at some point! Then wouldn’t that be so gratifying? Everyone would stand back in awe, saying, “Hey, Literary Lew got it right.”)

 

Addiction and Grace

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I recently posited the notion of addiction as an ersatz religion and alluded to the same in my last posting. But religion itself can easily be an addiction, a means of avoiding the very God that one purports to believe in so strongly. Or to speak more precisely, it is a way of avoiding the experience of God that one believes in so strongly. These people who immersed in the “letter of the law” rather than the “spirit of the law” and, of course, “the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive.”

These people are ideologues and ideologues of any stripe are dangerous. And by that I mean hyper-conservative ideologues and hyper-liberal ideologues as they are cut from the same bolt of cloth. They believe in their ideas so much that they can’t understand the simple fact that the word (or idea) is not the thing, that words are merely pointers, or to borrow from the Buddhist wisdom, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

These spiritual ideologues often have memorized tons of scripture and are well versed in theological intricacies. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with “tons of scripture” or “theological intricacies.” The problem becomes when the whole of the individual’s life is a mechanical regurgitation of words and phrases, dogma if you please. It is to be immersed in the Christian variety of what Conrad Aiken described the “glib speech of habit, of well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” The bible is an excellent way of avoiding the Bible, god is an excellent way of avoiding God. And we must remember the biblical admonishment against “having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.”

And I close with a relevant thought from Gerald May about the pervasiveness of the addictive process:

I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction. Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction. I mean in all truth that the psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being. The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addiction to ideas, work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, and an endless variety of other things. We are all addicts in every sense of the word. Moreover, our addictions are our own worst enemies. They enslave us with chains that are of our own making and yet that, paradoxically, are virtually beyond our control. Addiction also makes idolators of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another. (Gerald May, Addiction and Grace)

Obama’s “Clinging” to Guns and Religion

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President Obama was caught on tape in the 2008 campaign speaking dismissively of those who “cling to guns and religion.” Now that was an impolitic moment for him but I agree that often people do “cling” to things, including guns and religion. I do not think he would disparage anyone for liking guns and certainly not religion. But he recognized that when people “cling” to things…or shall we stay “stuff”…it often impairs their ability to make rational decisions.

“Clinging” often belies an impoverished identity which makes an individual to compulsively place value on “stuff” (including ideas and beliefs) as a way to assuage a gnawing emptiness on the inside.

But how can “clinging” to faith be a problem; or, certainly “clinging” even to Jesus? I think a meaningful faith is very intense and passionate but if it goes beyond the pale, it poses problems and there are always warning signs. For example:

a) If your faith creates an urge to kill people who believe differently than you, I think there is a problem.

b) If your faith creates a need in your heart to intimidate, browbeat, and shame others (certainly children) into believing the way you do, there is a problem.

c) If your faith creates in your heart the belief that you have “got it right” and that everyone should believe just as you do, you have a problem.

d) If your faith creates in you an emphasis on correcting the ills of the world, while totally neglecting the ills of your own heart (which are always wreaking havoc on those nearest and dearest to you), then you have a problem.

Now these are four rules that I’ve created off the top of my head. There could be many more. Violation of these rules almost always comes from a passionate intensity which outruns the Shakespearean “pauser reason”. This is “clinging” to religion rather than having a simple faith which permeates the whole of your being and radiates out to others in your life. This is often an obsessive-compulsive disorder in full sway or even an addiction. This is at best an ersatz religion.

 

Ignorance is Bliss

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The more I learn the more I know how little I know. (It makes me think of an old quip from a pastor of mine, “If ignorance was bliss, we’d be blistered.”)

William Butler Yeats put it this way, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun. Now may I wither into the truth.”

I once read a book entitled, “The Art of Unknowing” in which a psychiatrist explained how his clients were taught to un-learn many of the basic assumptions they had imbibed in their early life.

In the end, life comes down to mystery. We assume we know what is going on but from time to time Reality visits us and we are stunned, bewildered, and humbled. Most of the time we shut this experience out and try to arrange our lives to keep it from happening again. W. H. Auden wrote, “And Truth met him and held out her hand. But he clung in panic to his tall beliefs and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

But we should welcome the occasion. Grace is trying to visit us. It could be amazing! And on that note, let me conclude with a thought from the poet Mary Oliver:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms

Rumi, the Bible, and Self-control

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“He who has no rule over his own spirit is like a city without walls.” The writer of Proverbs recognized the battle we all wage with our internal haunts. The apostle Paul also acknowledged this human frailty, declaring “I will to do good but evil is present with me.” We are a composite of contradictory impulses and most of us manage to “give the name of action” (Shakespeare, in Hamlet)  to the good ones and sublimate the bad ones. Our news reports are filled with those who were less capable of that God-given fore-brain wizardry.

And the Persian poet Rumi put it this way, “intelligent people want self control; children want candy.”   God, that guy was good, even if he was a damn Iranian!  (wink, wink)

 

Showers of Blessings we Plead!!!

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I woke this morning to the unanticipated sound of thunder and the flash of lightening. We were going to get a respite from this oppressive drought (which God has sent merely because of my sin!!! wink, wink; I just can’t get over this narcissism!!!). I performed a ritual that I’ve utilized the last two years or so and gone to the garage, opened the door, grabbed me a chair and cup of coffee and reveled in the gracious beauty of a magnificent, generous rainfall. An old hymn always comes to my mind on these moments, “Showers of Blessings” even though the hymn was not talking about rainfall!

And, being random as I am, that brought to my mind the following verse from my beloved brother, William Shakespeare. This is so magnificent and it gets more so every time I read it:

 

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. . . .
. . .
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
(The Merchant of Venice)

 

Oh, yes. Showers of blessings. They are around us each day if we but look.