Category Archives: human culture

The Courage to Hope When Hopelessness Seems Easier

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Again, the “liar” accusation from the Trumpian-inspired Republican base is sounding forth, especially in Fox News which is “the” Voice of the GOP.  I cannot help but chuckle at them for their brazen dishonesty and lack of self-reflection; but this moment is too grievous for any chuckling.; but yet I chuckle.  I guess I’m having trouble with the wisdom of, “There go I but by the grace of God.” This GOP dishonesty was optically demonstrated two days ago when Trump held a White House meeting with 20 Congressmen and other executives to address this crisis, all of them defiantly not wearing masks.  They cannot, and will not, wear a mask in deference to their chieftain who has taken a brazen stance on mask-wearing by his refusal to wear one.  Witness the sycophantic display of Vice-President Pence sans mask last week in a meeting in Iowa with food-processing executives. Five of these men arrived wearing a mask but were asked to remove them…and lamely did so.

Trump is the president of one political entity…himself…and his political base has fallen supine to “its” dark power.  He refuses to wear a mask and gloves, though he is probably safe given the availability of medical intervention available to him that is not available to the rest of us.  But, a person with some degree of spiritual maturity would recognize and appreciate the optics of being a leader who will not demonstrate proper protocol for our nation in this crisis. The full gamut of “social distancing” is now necessary, for our own sake and that of others. Following this protocol is a necessary reminder to others that I am “on board,” that I recognize the gravity of this historical moment and that “appearance” makes a statement. Texas Republican Congressman, Louie Gohmert offered again a dollop of his unwise “wisdom”, explaining why the group of Republicans and other executives meeting with Trump recently did not wear a mask:

I do want to advise our media friends before they write stories about how we didn’t wear masks and we didn’t possibly socially distance adequately, that you saw to it that we had tests, and that nobody in here had the coronavirus unless it’s somebody in the media. So the only reason we would wear masks is if we were trying to protect ourselves from you in the media. And we’re not scared of you. So that’s why we can be here like this.

The issue in this falderal that I again have put on the table is important; BUT, it is not what is “really” going on.  Only “beneath the surface” can we fathom the “tale being told by an idiot” that often has us in its grasp.  That Shakespearean wisdom applies to the ever-underway human toil found in day-to-day life.  Always we stand in the need of prayer, even in the form of ritualized prayer that can often be banal; “prayer” in human history is an institution.  But one dimension of prayer is best described as “prayerfulness” in which we don’t necessarily put it into words directed to a “god” out there.  This “prayerfulness” is an attitude in which we recognize the dignity of life underway through us…and even “them” who seem to be so gravely lacking it. The most meaningful prayer I can offer is found in the humdrum of day to day life.  I will shortly crank it into gear, getting up from my bed to pee, start the coffee pot, and feed by beloved little four-legged son, Petey.  Yes, even “peeing” is important here, recognizing that our body and its needs are present and even deserve respect. When the sun is up and beginning its daily chore of warming up the morning, I will venture outside to give attention to my gardening efforts.  I will take delight in the young seedlings taking  root and the dissatisfaction when they are not.  I will pull some weeds, fertilize some plants and trees, feel the sun’s warmth and the gentle breeze flowing through the morning air.  I will at times paw through the soil in the garden bed to comfort some of the new plants that are taking root. I will note the beauty of Taos Mountain from my backyard, still snow-capped and majestic.  I will give respect to the wisdom of the New Mexican high-desert lore, that this mountain is holy, that it draws some people here to find roots they could not find elsewhere.  Relevant to local lore is the belief that this Mountain welcomes some people who are captivated by its majesty and decide to stay.  Some do not find it and the culture it has granted to be hospitable and will move on, “driving their ducks to another market” as my mother used to say. This local lore explains that the Mountain has rejected them and will “spit them out” and they will return home.

At this point in my morning musing, I have come a “fur piece” from where I started with the socio-political, spiritual ugliness that besets us.  Here I am closing with a “prayerful attitude” towards the beauty and Grace that is present in this world.  I dare to “hope” once again. This “hoping” effort often does seem so paltry, but it is a “choice” that we need to brazenly exercise.
NOTEs: “Fur piece” is Arkansas red-neck parlance, meaning “a ‘far’ piece.”  Gawd do I love my roots! And another note re “prayerfulness” vs. prayer by a 20th century Catholic voice,  “Jesus said, ‘go into all the world and preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.”

A Lamentation of Reality’s Intransigence

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Today I am going to continue my “assault” on reality, the quotes necessary because “reality” is impregnable to the attack of one simple bloke like myself.  What makes it so invincible is its subtlety; it can’t be seen with the naked eye.  Its premises are commonplaces, most of which a society cannot be left without.  But so many can be lived without and a society is better off when they are given the light of day. One simple example from my youth in the American South involves racism—television shows were “white”; NFL quarterbacks were “white”; and miscegenation was verboten.

This “reality” that I am here kicking around ordinarily has the capacity to slowly evolve, to adapt to circumstances even against the down drag of inertia.  But in certain moments of history, there is tremendous “down drag” as the evolution appears too drastic and frightening to much of the population.  This leads to the socio-cultural ferment that we are currently witnessing in the United States, and even in the world.  This has led to civil war in the past.

We can’t escape the unconscious dimension of life which shapes reality.  Oh, well, we can simply assume that it does not exist and passionately insist that we know exactly what are doing.  But we don’t.  There is always more to the picture which is a frightening notion to most people. It is so frightening that people will cling desperately to their certainties and usually will find a leader who will be their champion.

If you are curious about this tenuous nature of reality, you might find the following book of interest, “The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman.

My Name is Mud…And I’m Kinda “Proud” of It

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One of the earliest stories I heard in my life was that God created us by digging into the earth and creating our progenitor, Adam.  I later learned that the name “Adam” meant “earth.”  And increasingly I realize just how much we are but “dust of the earth” and are destined to return to that dust. Shakespeare in “Hamlet” so pithily noted that we will ultimately become “food for worms.”

But from this humble origin we can become what Shakespeare described as “the quintessence of dust.”  However, achieving any degree of this quintessential…requires a lot of work, a lot of soul work, and there our dusty origins fights us tooth-and-toenail.  For one of the fundamental dimensions of our earthy, dusty origins is the constellation of the ego and that “beastly little treasure” has an intrinsic desire to never relinquish its “beastly” dimension.  Mine certainly does not! This ego is the “will of the species” and its willfulness if not mitigated by a concern for the “species” at-large will become self-destructive and that destructive energy will seek to wreak havoc on the species.  This is relevant to the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” He knew the grandiosity of his spirituality…among other things!  I just visited our present day “holy ghost” (Google) and learned that 1 Corinthians 15:46-48 is very relevant to this vein of thought, Paul noting that “the first man” (i.e. “the ego”) is of the dust of the earth but the “second man” is spiritual, “of heaven.”

I want to close with a poem by the man I shared from yesterday, Samuel Menashe, who daunted my ego with the notion that my, even my name, “is mud.”  Humility is good.  It takes all the pressure off!

 

 

ADAM MEANS EARTH

 

I am the man

Whose name is mud

But what’s in a name

To shame one who knows

Mud does not stain

Clay he’s made of

Dust Adam became—

The dust he was—

Was he his name

Samuel Menashe

Momma Nature Offers Her Wisdom Daily!

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I just discovered a new poet on the website of Commonweal, Samuel Menashe.  With short, even cryptic poems, he captures some essential dimension of life which I think Ram Dass had in mind decades ago when he coined the expression, “Be here now.”  Here is a sample of his work, entitled “Rue”:

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die—

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky

Sitting in the shade and looking at the sky is really good advice, though I would suggest a dollop of the lovely sunshine here and there!  Momma nature is so gracious and loving, though culture teaches us to live in the past and/or future and avoiding the loveliness of, “being here now.”

Carl Sandburg and Greta Thunburg

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I forgot to append a Carl Sandburg poem yesterday to my musings about Greta Thunburg.  And I admit I am a bit sheepish as the poem likens her unto a weed, but I have a hunch she will readily identify and appreciate the “likening unto” a weed.  She is used to it.  She has always been different and has become accustomed to it  She and I have that in common…and I don’t think her “diagnosis” is far removed from mine.  Perhaps more on that later.

Greta is accustomed to being “out there.”  And the awareness of being “out there” can be so terrifying that one is driven into a pathological orientation to life. It can drive one into such a radical estrangement that one feels the world is “out to get me” and thus something to be fearful of; this is paranoia.  This paranoia can find expression so readily in political and religious orientations, always pitting one view of the world against the rest of the world.  This profound distrust fails to realize that we can never escape the reality that we are in and of the same world and the attempt to escape this realization is at our own peril.  The “them” that we loathe is “us.”

Please read this beautiful wisdom from Carl Sandburg:

There is a desperate loveliness to be seen
In certain flowers and bright weeds on certain planets.
With the weeds I have held long conversations
And I found them intelligent
Even though desperate and lovely.
The flowers however met me with short spoken.
“Yes” and “No” and “Why” were their favorite words,
And they had other slow monosyllables.
They seemed to find it more difficult
Than the gaudy garrulous bright weeds
To be intelligent, desperate, and lovely.
Take a far journey now, my friend, to certain planets.
Meet then certain flowers and bright weeds and ask them
What are the dark winding roots of their desperate loveliness.
See whether you bring back the same report as mine.
See whether certain long conversations
And certain slow practices monosyllables
Haunt you and keep coming back to haunt you.
For myself, my friend, I have come to believe on certain planets anything can happen.

(“Bright Conversations with Saint Ex” by Carl Sandburg)

 

 

My Personal Struggle With the Ego

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I write about the ego a lot here and elsewhere.  Yes, I’m critical of its role in others but often admit it is very much a personal problem.  It always is if one is a human.  But only with the acquisition of the “ego integrity” I wrote about last time can one begin to recognize just how big a role it plays in his life.

When the ego is “hitting on all eight-cylinders” it is impenetrable.  I can remember pretty well in my youth when I was very insulated with a full panoply of the ego’s machinations, including hyper religiosity.  And religion is fertile ground for the ego as it offers a haven where one can be protected with the self-delusion that “the Spirit of God is leading me and therefore I see things correctly.  My judgment is sound.”  I well recall a moment when I was 18 years of age when this impenetrable religious veneer of mine was challenged in high school.  A girl I knew very well, and still know very well today, challenged the false piety I had just demonstrated in a school assembly.  I’ll never forget being taken aback, my “cage” rattled…but only briefly!  For the ego, when threatened is so adept at just sloughing off the criticism and retreating to the cacophony of internal reassurances, “No, this is not so.  This is a bit awkward, but just go away.  This is not so.”  And with that internal litany I resumed my performance art of a fundamentalist faith and fledgling ministry. But not for long!!!  In less than a year my tenuous, extremely impoverished identity would begin to submit to the “Divine threat” of Light and an adventure that continues now a half a century later.

My defensive retreat at age 18, essentially a “doubling down” inside an internal fortress is very human.  I continue this today, utilizing one of the many Divine adaptations available when the going gets too rough, relying on literature, music, philosophy, spiritual teachers, mantra’s and such.  Oh, I must not forget gardening, in season, and my marvelous canine son, Petey, two of the best “adaptations.” The God I believe in today gives us these adaptations, these “fig leaves” to cover up the existential nakedness when it becomes too much.

One source of my literary adaptations is the wisdom of poet T.S. Eliot who declared, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”  My country right now is getting an industrial-strength dose of “reality” that we’ve been avoiding, possibly since our beginning.  This reality is trying to tell us that something is amiss and now we must find the courage to let “reality” do its work, bringing to the table the harsh rebuke of Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done and done to others harm which once we took for exercise of virtue”

The Deadly Elixir of Group Think’s Certainty

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I just got a “like” from a blogger, one of which I am particular proud.  For this man is one of the “godless heathen” that my Christian tradition eschews….a Muslim.  I am pleased that a lot of the “hits” I get on this blog are from people of different spiritual traditions who see, who “grok” something in my blatherings that they find of value.  For spirituality has the pitfall of evolving into a death-trap in which only those of “like mind”…and therefore, “like biases.” are accepted.

I had that comfort as a child; a “comfort” which was mitigated by the realization that, “Oh, there is something not right about this.”  Somehow I knew from early on that the Grace of God, aka “the Grace” of the Universe, is inclusive and not ex-clusive.  This intuitive understanding was present from the early days of my life and instilled into my heart a deep experience of alienation, that I did not belong.  And I didn’t “belong” for “belonging” involved accepting unquestioned premises in which my young and innocent heart could not imbibe.  This was the onset of alienation, from which can emerge complete madness as the pain of alienation initially elicits terror.  It is this terror that elicits a demand for certainty,  a “certainty” which group-think always offers.

I am learning the value of just “being here.”  The ultimate purpose of life is not to find a place in a chaotic world that is often mad…and certainly is now in my country, at least; this ultimate purpose is to just be here.  Ram Dass called it “being here now” and Eckhart Tolle more recently described it as, “The Power of Now.”  “Being here” is, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, a “condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  Or as Janis Joplin put it so eloquently in the 1960’s, “Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose.”

Symbolic Communication and Susan K. Deri

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Susan K. Deri has been a profound influence in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life.  I only discovered her two years ago with her book, “Symbolization and Creativity.”  In this riveting book, Deri explored the creation of the symbol as it emerges from instinctual energy which has a built-in capacity for creation of this “symbol.” It is the creation of the symbol that is necessary for “symbolic communication” in which primitive, old-brain “jabberings” (Carl Sandburg term) are shaped into what we know as “language” which is the means of “symbolic communication.”  Without this facility we would still be in the stage of grunts, moans, screams, et al which precedes our ability to “wrap a word” around our wishes, including the ability to “name an object”; anthropologically this is very much related to the Old Testament accomplishment of “naming the beasts of the field.”

One critical dimension of this creation of symbols is “distance” or detachment.  We start life inside an uroboric state in which we are not separate and distinct from what the Buddhists call “the world of 10,000 things.”  We can’t “see” a rock because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” a tree because we are not differentiated from it, we can’t “see” momma’s breast because we are not separate from it.  “Close up everything becomes a blur,” declares Deri.  “There must be some separation between perceiver and perceived.  Symbols, in contradistinction to signs, provide this distance.”

But the creation of this “distance” is primeval; it is the “fall” from Edenic bliss into the limitation of form and the “fall” is so painful that we are insulated from the pain by repression.  This is the “loss” that led T.S. Eliot to declare, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” which is why we cling so desperately to our symbols, even if in doing so we disallow the symbol to accomplish its function of bridging the gap between instinctual experience and symbol.

Here I wish to introduce a relevant poem by a Mississippi poet, Edgar Simmons, who related this to an experience with the Divine:

THE MAGNETIC FIELD

Distance…which by definition
Indicates a separation from self
Is the healing poultice of metaphor,
Is the night-lighting of poetry.
As we allot to elements their weights
So to metaphor we need assign the
Weight of the ghost of distance.
Stars are stars to us
Because of distance: it is in the
Nothingness which clings us them
That we glory, tremble, and bow.
O what weight and glory lie abalance
In the stretch of vacant fields:
Metaphor: the hymn and hum of separation.

Tony Kusher, “Change Is Difficult”

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How do people change?  Well, most of us don’t; we start out lives in a rut, learn to cling to that rut, find others in a similar rut, take comfort there and try not to deviate.  To deviate is scary.  There is comfort in sameness.  When “deviance” presents itself…and any “difference” often evokes the fear of “deviance”… we are prone to put up the sign of the cross and run away.

But change is part of life.  Life is fluid; and its flow takes us different directions at times and if we resist that flow we will find ourselves in a static dimension of life.  Technically, that is “death.” However, if we are firmly ensconced in “stati-ticity” we will never make this discovery as it would be troubling to the safety we have found there.  There is comfort in living in the bubble.

Playwright Tony Kushner, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his play, “Angels in America.”  In this powerful play there is a scene which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words; here it is presented as  gut-wrenching, which at times it can be.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

Change is so painful as it often requires questioning the premises by which we have lived our life.  And “God” is involved often as the change involves premises that lie in the inner most part of our being, basic assumptions that we take for granted and would prefer continuing to do so.  This can be unnerving.  Theologian Paul Tillich understood this when he wrote a book entitled, “The Shaking of the Foundations” based on one of his sermons in which he presented the teachings of Jesus as intended for such a “rattling of our collective cage.”

The culture of my country is in turmoil because of the tension between the need for change and the need to maintain the status quo.  These needs are necessary in any social body and even in any individual psyche.  If any of these opposing impulses prevails to the exclusion of the other, catastrophe will take place.  The need is for some “over-arching” concern that can unite the two, can offer an harmony in dedication to a common cause.

The Perverse Delight of Being Right

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I grew up being right.  How did I know I was right?  Because I “knew” that I was right.  How did I know that?  Because I was taught what right was, and how to merit that label, and therefore it was simple to just adhere to the definition and make sure your thinking and behavior complied to its premises. “Right” is always something external to the subjective experience of a young child and gaining the delight of knowing that he/she is right requires dutifully imbibing the definition of right that is proffered.  I used the term “imbibing” because it is more than a mere cognitive matter; it is a matter of “soaking up” the nuances of the culture to acquire a subjective “experience” of being right, meaning it is not likely to be questioned.

I have questioned this “rightness” of mine my whole life.  Oh, somewhat less in my youth as just did not have the self-confidence, the courage to stand on my own two feet and think for myself.  “Thinking for oneself” in a collective mindset that discourages it will leave one with a sense of alienation and I got a double dose of that malady.  The experience of alienation was so intense that I desperately tried to comply, to believe the right things, to do the right things so that I would have the comfort of belonging.  But if you must “try” to belong, you are in deep shit as far as having the comfort that belonging offers.

This “splinter in the brain,” as Emily Dickinson called it, has tormented and blessed me, the whole of my life.  Even today, as I am standing on my own two feet, there is the deep-seated nagging realization that I am now defying nearly all of the offerings of the tribe I was born into that would offer one the “delight” of being right.  I now see that the desperate desire to be right of my early youth was merely the result of the implicit assumptions I had gained from my tribe that I was intrinsically wrong, leaving me with a deep-seated experience that my simple “being” in the world was wrong.  I now seek “The Joy of Being” wrong, which is the title of a very important book in my life by James Alison, the complete title being, “The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes.”  I personally believe this joy is what the teachings of Jesus was about, that he assured us that we could have this joy if we found the courage to relinquish all the pressures to fit in and just “be” present in the world.  This, in my estimation, is “salvation” which in the words of T.S. Eliot is, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”

A very important caveat is warranted.  This freedom to “be,” to live free of the bondage to social norms, does not allow one to live in disregard for the conventions of one’s tribe.  Many of these conventions might not apply to me but that does not give me the freedom to go on the war path against them.  In that case I would be guilty of the very same obnoxious contempt that a tribe utilizes to stamp out the individuality of a soul. But it does give me the freedom to speak out about perceived injustice and evil as long as I don’t get so arrogant with self-righteousness that I encourage violence, overt or subtle.

The inspiration for this discourse stems from an article I read this morning in the New York Times about an Indian woman, Gauri Lankesh, who had this courage to be herself and speak out about the injustice of her country. She was a journalist who was murdered in 2017 because of her bold, and at times brazen willingness to “speak truth to power”.  Extremism always springs from knowing you are “right” and the arrogance that gives one this assurance arises from deep-seated darkness that permits violence.  This darkness arises from primitive fears and anxieties so intense that the light of conscious awareness is disallowed, a light that would permit respect of difference.