Category Archives: literalism

A More “Aesthetic” and Poetic Approach to Judgement

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Today I’d like to approach the “judgement of God” more aesthetically.  Though I emphasized yesterday the metaphorical approach I had in mind, I want to further gloss the term over…if even possible… with a bit of poetic finesse. W.H. Auden wrote, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into being alive.” Auden captured the starkness of those moments when reality stuns us, stripping us of the adornments of our personality of which we have become so comfortable.

Emily Dickinson, with her cryptic and even severe style, put it more starkly:

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys —
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by Degrees —

Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so — slow —

Your Breath — has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals One — imperial Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked soul —

When Winds hold Forests in their Paws —
The Universe — is still —

Mercifully, as I’ve noted before, most of us get this “wisdom” gently over the years…if at all.  I like the way William Butler Yeats put it, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now may I wither into the Truth.”

Boundaries is the subject matter here.  I might quip, “We can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em.”  By that I mean part of us resists restraint but fortunately we are hard wired to appreciate the “reining in” of our deep-seated desire to be unrestrained.  Proverbs 16:32 captures this inner conflict beautifully, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

Lao Tzu, Emptiness, and Protestantism

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Lao Tzu (6th century BCE) first introduced me to the paradoxical dimension of reality.  One stanza of his Tao Te Ching, #11, grabbed my attention before I really knew where it would lead me.  Here is my favorite translation of that wisdom by Witter Bynner:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,

By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;

The use of clay in moulding pitchers

 Comes from the hollow of its absence;

 Doors, windows, in a house,

Are used for their emptiness:

Thus we are helped by what is not

To use what is.

This ancient Chinese sage realized that there is a hidden dimension of life which is the essential dimension of life but is recognized only to those are attuned to the subterranean regions of the heart.  This hidden dimension is described in the Christian tradition as the spiritual realm.  But the Christian tradition, especially here in the West, has erred by not appreciating the true essence of spirituality as emptiness, and fashioned a spirituality which is merely a thing among other things, an object among other objects.  Western thought has objectified the world and its spirituality has, therefore, been reduced to a rational enterprise that has no room…in most circles…for the wisdom of Lao Tzu. What has happened, therefore, is that spirituality has become a “graven image” which the Old Testament rather sternly prohibited. This subtle “idolatry” is particularly so with Protestantism which does not emphasize mysticism and meditation which places value on the quietness of the mind.

 

I ran across a beautiful poem today on Facebook which brought these thoughts to mind, a poem which was shared on the page of Parker J. Palmer, a noted member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker):

WHAT ELSE by Carolyn Locke

The way the trees empty themselves of leaves,
let drop their ponderous fruit,
the way the turtle abandons the sun-warmed log,
the way even the late-blooming aster
succumbs to the power of frost—

this is not a new story.
Still, on this morning, the hollowness
of the season startles, filling
the rooms of your house, filling the world
with impossible light, improbable hope.

And so, what else can you do 
but let yourself be broken 
and emptied? What else is there
but waiting in the autumn sun?

 

Shakespeare and Jesus Heard the Same Call!

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Shakespeare’s wisdom in Sonnet 46, “Within be rich, without be fed no more,” brought to my mind the teachings of Jesus who clearly understood the presence of a dimension of life that most people are oblivious to which He called the kingdom “within.”  The “call” of this inner voice that Jesus heeded, as did Shakespeare and many others, can easily be misunderstood as purveying an “us” vs. “them” paradigm in spirituality—“some of us have heard the call, the rest of you haven’t.”  The temptation of this egoic arrogance always presents itself to those who have heard this “call,” for the ego loves the knowledge that it is special and others aren’t.  There is a certain intoxication to ferreting out truth in literature…or in life in general…and realizing that most people do not see or understand this “truth.”  And that awareness is understandable if one can avoid the temptation of then sitting in judgment of those who view life in more prosaic terms.  Jesus recognized there were distinctions in his world but he did not subscribe to the temptation of bifurcating his world neat categories of “us” and “them, or “right” and wrong,” or even “saved” and “unsaved.”  Those who insists on this bifurcation have been intoxicated with binary thinking and cannot see beyond this limited view of the world.

Let me illustrate from the ministry of Jesus in Matthew ch. 11.  He and his disciples were walking along the shores of Gallilee one morning and one of them wanted to delay heeding the call to follow Jesus, explaining that he needed to first go bury his father.  Jesus responded with, “Follow me, and let the dead bury the dead.”  In my youth, I understood this to mean that Jesus was saying that those who did not heed his call were “dead” in the sense they were “lost and going to hell.”  My understanding at that time was that Jesus was promulgating a cognitive gospel, a set of teachings to which one could merely intellectually assent and then take comfort in knowing that he had done so.  But the Truth that Jesus offered when he said, “Come follow me” was not offered in any creed or body of dogma but in a relationship that his ministry and the whole story of his Incarnation was an elaboration of in terms of flesh and blood, i.e. “human life.”  “Come follow me” did not mean to Jesus, “Come tag along behind me and be one of my groupies” but “Come follow me” and participate in a relationship with a spiritual Presence that I have embraced, one that can include you and one that does not emphasize “ex-clusion.”  His message was one of “in-clusiveness, not “ex”-clusiveness which has been the tradition in Western Christianity, especially Protestantism.   By describing those who were not following him that day as “dead”, those who were busying themselves with the important responsibility of burying a dead man, Jesus was not condemning them to exclusion from the Kingdom but merely telling the hesitant follower that a more important responsibility was beckoning him that morning.  Those left behind, dutifully “chopping wood, carrying water” are equally covered by God’s grace and those who consider themselves so spiritually “sublime” as to think that those with a different, “less enlightened” lot in life are “lost and going to hell” are not reading the gospel closely. Truth, when embodied and not merely an idea, offers unity, not disunity.  “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  He who sings a lasting song will think in the marrow bone.” (W. B. Yeats)

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ADDENDUM—This is one of three blogs that I now have up and running.  Please check the other two out sometime.  The three are:

https://wordpress.com/stats/day/literarylew.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

A Mother Teaches Her Daughter About God

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The Washington Post yesterday offered a fascinating report of a young mother’s attempt to introduce her four-year old daughter to the notion of god, even though she herself had given it up.  She knew that the “notion” of god was part of the culture her daughter was being raised in and wanted to help her to understand the idea with a broader based viewpoint than she had experienced during her youth in a mainline Protestant denomination.  (See link at conclusion.)

One dimension of this issue was the use of gender in reference to god.  She explained the use of “he” as a traditional choice but would occasionally use “she” to show her daughter that gender when describing our Source was “neither male nor female.” At one point in the exchange the young girl has gotten the hang of the free-play which is possible with word selection and, instead of concluding a prayer with “amen,” she playfully…being gender sensitive…concluded with “ah…carrot.”

This was beautiful parenting.  This mother, have done her time in religion, including evangelicalism and even fundamentalism, had learned the nuance of language and was gently teaching her child of the beautifully fluid world that she lived in.  But what she was also doing was teaching her child that all words, i.e. labels, are useful but only refer to “things” and are not the “thing-in-itself.”  The beauty of this gracious mothering is that this young lady, just beginning to formulate an identity, would learn that her very identity itself, the core of her being, could not be confined to words and her spirit would not be endungeoned within a conceptual prison.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/03/22/an-atheist-moms-challenge-teaching-my-daughter-that-god-might-be-a-girl/?utm_term=.9e0d6e9fd64a

The Pleasure of Being a Victim

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In my country there currently a rise of “victimhood,” best illustrated by the current standoff in Burns, Oregon by right-wing armed extremists.  These men have succumbed to the siren call of politicians on the far right who routinely appeal to a profound sense of alienation and despair in the hearts of the disenfranchised often who happen to be “low-information voters.”  One of the most popular pieces of red-meat these politicians toss out there is, “President Obama is coming to take your guns.”  And related to this fear is the fear of “government/Presidential over reach” which is the suspicion that the government is intruding too far into individual freedoms.

I grew up in this madness, though the version I lived through never led to anything like we are witnessing today.  My father was the patriarch in my early life and he often brought home right-wing fears that evoked fears that were already in my youthful heart as I was discovering that life was capricious all too often.  But dad never would have participated in an armed insurrection.  And another factor in my life was hyper-conservative fundamentalist Christianity which presented me with a “loving” God who was always ready to pinch the heads off of any miscreant and that the world was a really bad place, merely a temporary abode we must endure before we go to heaven and pluck on harps and fawn over Jesus for quatrillions of years.  In my study of religious history, this style of religion is termed “the religion of the dispossessed.”  And my family roots, as well as denominational roots, stemmed from the post-Civil War era when Southerners were first dealing with the alienation that comes from having one’s life wrenched from them by some invading force.

But fear is just a fundamental dimension of human experience.  Human culture is a contrivance that has evolved to help us deal with this fear…usually by completely avoiding it…but also by providing adaptations that allow us to invest in the common good and realize that in spite of the fact that life is transitory and capricious it is a worthwhile and important endeavor.  And I think that religion, and other expressions of faith, can provide a helpful accommodation, but only if we can avoid the challenge of using our accommodation only to escape of the vulnerability that is intrinsic to the human experience.

I have fear, often a lot of it, usually in the form of anxiety.  But for some reason, I can now cope with it more effectively than when I was a child and so without the need for stockpiles of guns and ammunition, belief in an absent Despotic Deity, or even bowing before my country’s true God—consumerism.  So, what does this get me?  Well, if I take it down to MacDonald’s in the morning and lie about my age, and given them a dollar, they will give me a senior cup of coffee.  I don’t think there is anything to “get” other than the simple pleasure of life, the beauty of this world and being here to experience it and be able to handle my frustration that it will not last long enough to satisfy the demands of my ego.

But, this approach denies me the great delight and satisfaction of victim hood, knowing that “they” are always out there to get me, mistreat me, and shame me.  It was so ego-rewarding back then to know that my tribe was a “band of brothers” beleaguered by forces greater than I/we could control but that “we” were together in our faith and knew firmly that we were believing and doing the right thing.  And if anyone should challenge our belief system, we would merely rely on the comforting premise, “We are right, and they are wrong.”  And we knew this because God was leading us.  And armed men in Oregon have the same comfort today, knowing they are “right” and they are willing even to die and to kill because if their convictions.

But this emphasis on “being right” and certainty of having acquired this status always stems from a deep-seated lack of security and feeling of “wrongness”.  This existential doubt is buried deep in the unconscious and, of course, those driven by those subterranean forces never will consider its influence in the choices they make.  To consider these “influences” that are beyond the grasp of consciousness would require a knowledge of the mystery of life, feelings of not being as much in control as once thought, existential doubt all of which lead ultimately to a need of faith.

These feelings of powerlessness often evoke an expression of physical power often in the form of overt aggression.  The pain felt within has to find expression and inevitably leads to acting out, a phenomena vividly illustrated by anthropologist Rene Girard in his classic book, “Violence and the Sacred.”

(New York Times article related to the above:  The delight of victimhood—http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/opinion/sunday/the-real-victims-of-victimhood.html)

 

 

Poetry is Dangerous!!!!

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Yes, it will wreak havoc on your life; so, if poetry beckons, just turn around and go the other way or at least give it a wide passage for if you let it come to close it will insinuate its way into your heart and then, katy-bar-the-door, your life is over! Your are a dead man….or, at least, the man (or woman) you think you are is going to die.

Let me explain. I was in my early thirties and had quit teaching school and was beginning Dante’s venture into a “dark forest.” And then a young man who purported to be a friend had the audacity to give me a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden and I was almost immediately on the road to perdition. To make it worse, about the same time I discovered T. S. Eliot and his “Four Quartets” where I learned that words were ephemeral, that words “break, slip, slide, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place….shrieking voices always assail them.” you deign to venture into words to the extent that suddenly you awaken and discover that you are knee-deep in…ahem…the Word!

And since that point in my life, poetry has continued to worm its way into the depths of my heart, relentlessly delving into the secret corridors of my inner most being where I have discovered that, just as the Apostle Paul said, it is “quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Wow! Wow, wow, wow! That poor friend had no idea what he was doing to “literallew”…but, on the other hand, perhaps he did. He was a very astute soul.

But, how can “poetry” do this? Well, “poetry” as such does nothing. But poetry is a process, a dynamic process which is an expression of life, and if it happens to present itself to a heart that is ready to discover “penetrable stuff,” magic can unfold.

Why was I so ready? Well, the first clue was my fury at literature in high school and those dear schoolmarm teachers who would deign to force me to answer the question, “What does that mean to you?” I reacted with mute anger, dutifully trotting out whatever I thought they wanted, not daring to tell them what was really on my heart, “It means just what it says!!!!” Certainly, I did “protest too much”; and, yes, Shakespeare was my worst nightmare at that time as he just would not speak plain English, and certainly not Arkansas redneck, “po white trash” English.”

But now I swim in poetry…though I cannot write even an inch of it! As my wife told me not long after I met her and was obsessively quoting poetry (ncluding Auden’s note re Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry), “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” That was a veritable “word fitly spoken.”

Poetry is the Spirit of God at work, tearing words apart and allowing their hidden meaning to flow. Poetry is the word, broken….crucified, if you please…which allows its innermost depths to burgeon forth. This reminds me of a note by Gabriel Marcel, that words have meaning, or value, when they “burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves.” The literalist will not permit this as the “words” they use are concrete and will not be permitted to “break” and that is because the “ego” that they are will not be allowed to “break”…or, as Jesus taught, “die.”