Category Archives: mental health

Judgment vs. “Judgmentalism”

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There are two incidents in the life of Jesus which I would like to juxtapose. In one incident, he upbraids the money-lenders in the temple, fashioning a scourge and driving them into the streets. In another incident, he is with the “woman at the well” who has been caught in adultery. He merely tells her to “go and sin no more.”

That does not make sense. Anyone knows that sex is “dirtier” than financial shenanigans (wink, wink) and why would Jesus be so lenient on this woman and so harsh with the “job creators” of the day?

I think Jesus was demonstrating judgment. He could have come down harshly with either matter; or, he could have been lenient with either. It was his choice. He was demonstrating that judgment can involve being very harsh or disapproving; but it can also be very forgiving. But in either instance, “judgment” is exercised.

You cannot be human without exercising judgment. For example, you are exercising this faculty even as you read this—you can choose to continue reading this or you can stop! You can respond with lavish praise or you can send hate mail! Yes, instead of praise, you could send money…and if you do so, please send tons of it! These are choices you are making.

And Jesus was demonstrating that there is no hard fast rule you can follow about many matters. For example, if you try to make the Bible into a rule book you will find yourself mired in the “letter of the law” and will soon be a very unlikeable, “judgmental” chap…or chappette! From day to day you have to make choices about when to speak up, to take action, and when to merely let something pass or when to actively forgive someone for some offense. Remember, “Judge not that ye be not judged.”

 

A Lesson from St. Francis

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When I was a graduate student in history, a professor introduced me to St. Francis of Assisi. I’ll never forget when she shared an anecdote re his kindness toward “brother worm”, stopping on the path and picking the worm up and moving him to the side of the path lest someone step on him. I rolled my eyes and grimaced. “What a nut job!” I thought.

Well, as you might suspect, forty years later I realize that the “nut job” was I! I now understand St. Francis’ appreciation of the unity of all God’s creatures, the presence of God in the whole of his creation. Now, I must admit I would not stop on a path and move a worm to the side though I sure would take pains to not step on it. I would have done the same back then. I feel so strongly about this Unity that I wish I could find the Grace to become a vegetarian. This wish is greatly intensified by living in Northwest Arkansas and often finding myself driving behind a Tyson chicken truck, packed with chickens who have never known a “free range” and will shortly be in a freezer at Wal-Mart.

But this unity of all things is most important in the human realm. I am you, you are me, we are all one. To “work out my own salvation with fear and trembling” will influence those around me, especially those who are nearest and dearest to me. For who I am, who I choose to “be”, makes a difference in the world.

Of course, I am talking boundaries here. And to live in this realm of “no boundaries” is very risky for it makes it imperative that we have a strong sense of identity, that we do know limits, and know that we cannot be all things to all people. We have to have…to speak clinically for a moment…”ego integrity.”

Mature boundaries are porous. But they do exist; they can “filter out” in the interest of this aforementioned “ego integrity.” But they are not concrete barricades behind which we cringe, hiding from the world as we hide from our own self and from our Source.

 

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

by Edgar Simmons

 

the instant you can

accept the colon

you are christenened

in the right compromise

that no things are alike

but are related.

the greatest

the necessary

the most powerful leap of metaphor

is when I decide

I am you

the result is

a birth

a

metaphysical differentiation

carried out and on

not in flesh but in spirit–

prophetic fact in time

more than children of our flesh.

 

 

W. H. Auden on Love, Marriage, and Conflict

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W. H. Auden really had an unusual approach to life which is one of the reasons he was such a great poet. He felt that male and female were poles apart in their essence and that their union produces great passion, great intensity, and that at the root of it all lies violence. “Outside the civil garden of everyday love lurks the passion to destroy and be destroyed,” he noted in one poem. Of course, he was addressing the deep dimensions of the unconscious which most of us avoid with some version of an “Ozzie and Harriet” relationship. In the following poem he likens marriage to “particles pelting” each other in some inter-galactic conflagration:

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and sos,
Futility, and grime
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do
Or the atoms in our brain.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely, it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
Around a universe
In which a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel,
Since year after year it repels
An aging suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet, Euclidean space—
Exploded myths, but who
Would feel at home a-straddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for—
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really becomes a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.
(“After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”)

Death Panels and our Fear of Death

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Bill Keller in the New York Times wrote an article on October 7 entitled, “How to Die.” He was explaining the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying, a protocol that some British physicians are using to help terminally ill patients address their imminent demise. Yes, this brings to mind the infamous “death panels” of our dear friend Sarah Palin. But it is nothing of the sort. It is merely a protocol that physicians can gently and professionally use, if deemed appropriate, for patients who have no treatment options remaining and are in great pain. “It is not hastening death. It is giving choices,” declared Keller.

This approach seems so much more humane than does out hysteria-driven, death-denying obfuscation. Our culture needs to grow up and realize that death is an essential part of life and that it is simply going to happen; and that living in fierce denial of it only makes the parting more difficult. And, this denial system that we have created about death only makes it more difficult to live life fully in the first place while we are young and healthy. It was decades ago that Irvin Yalom declared that as long as we live in fear of death we are fearful of life also. You can’t live until you die! Hmm. Sounds a lot like something Jesus once said, doesn’t it?

Ernest Becker wrote a stunning book about this subject about three decades ago, The Denial of Death. He gave a brilliant portrayal of history as mankind’s efforts to deny his mortality, to pretend that he was going to live forever, and to interpret spiritual teachings and mythology to mean that he would live after death in some corporeal fashion.

The core issue is the ego. It is the ego who cannot fathom that it is such a contrivance, a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Some therapists and spiritual teachers have made a career out of this death issue, announcing in so many words, “Come to me and let me help you die.” Their belief is that once the individual is freed from the clutches of the ego…Karl Jung called this a “death”… he/she will no longer be ravaged by the fear of death.

Paul Tillich and “The Courage to Be”

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Change is hard. Change is so hard that most people solve the problem by opting
to not change, clinging to the routine of their life even if it is most painful.
People prefer to follow the admonishment of Hamlet and “cling to these ills that
we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

This is true individually and collectively. Social scientists teach us that
during times of social transition anxiety is very intense sometimes the
society’s adaptations are not ideal. Paul Tillich, a noted theologian from the
20th century, declared in The Courage to Be (1952) that the anxiety arises from
the threat of “non-being” and that this threat is found with conservative and
liberal extremes.

It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrated. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from his personal anxieties but he has means of overcoming them with well-known methods. In periods of great changes these methods no longer work. Conflicts between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions. Nonbeing, in such a situation, has a double face, resembling two types of nightmare (which are perhaps, expressions of an awareness of these two faces). The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating openness, of infinite formless space into which one falls without a place to fall upon. Social situations like those described have the character of both a trap without exit and of an empty, dark, and unknown void. Both faces of the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at them. Today most of us do look at them.

Non-being is merely the emptiness that we find when we lose the “fig leaf” (or “ego identity”) that we donned in our Garden of Eden.  And those “fig-leaves”, be they conservative or liberal…or at any point between the two extremes…are very difficult to let go.

 

“The Bubble” has us all!

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“The bubble” has gotten a lot of attention in the past election year, usually being the Democrat description of the Republican party living in an echo-chamber, turning a deaf ear to any information that did not fit their agenda.  And, I must admit, I think the Republican Party did this past year illustrate this phenomenon perfectly, largely due to the influence of an extremist fringe element which  Karl Rove called the “nutty fringe”.  But, “the bubble” is a temptation for any group, even the liberals as was pointed out in yesterday’s Huffington Post by Joseph A. Palermo.

The “bubble” results from the human need to create a world of meaning and the tendency to then draw the boundaries around that world too narrowly.  The more rigidly they are drawn, the more problematic the group becomes for the world at large.  For example, in our culture Westboro Baptist Church beautifully illustrates this phenomena but their extremism is child’s play compared with, say, the Taliban.

We must have “bubbles” to ensconce ourselves in but ideally we will have leaders who will facilitate a porosity for these boundaries which allows discourse with the outside world.

I now would like to illustrate this problem with a marvelous skit from SNL from the early 1990’s.  I warn you it is course in at times, and subversive in its implications, but overall just incredibly funny.  (If the provided link does not work, please copy and paste it into your browser.  You will find it worth the effort.)

http://www.hulu.com/#!watch/277808

“Work out Your Own Salvation…”

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The Apostle Paul admonished us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” And, as we diligently attempt to do this, any “salvation” that might need to come to others through us will take place without our manipulation, intimidation, and coercion. Here is this notion expressed beautifully by a contemporary poet:

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world so worthy of rescue.
(Martha Postlethwaite)

And, this brings to my mind the lovely poetry of William Wordsworth who also appeared to understand divine workmanship in our lives:

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange, that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!

 

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly, and “The Fall”

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When I first discovered D. H. Lawrence, my intent was pornographic! And, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” fulfilled that ambition and would do the same for any young man today of similar inclination! BUT, I’ve since then discovered that it is a fine piece of literature, reflecting DHL’s astute, elegant grasp of the human condition. Here is an observation he made in one of the early versions of “Chatterly”:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table. It is a question, practically, of relationship. We must get back into relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and the re-awakening, the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water.

I think the detachment Lawrence noted here is one dimension of “the fall” of the book of Genesis. We fell, or were banished, from Eden and by the nature of life are cut off from our Source. Thus, one could say that we are “lost.” Being “found”, i.e. “getting saved”, involves rediscovering our body and nature and its connection the universe; and this whole experience is the process of relating again to our Source.

 

Rabindranath Tagore’s Prayer for His Country

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Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; whee words come out from the depth of truth;where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

This beautiful prayer from the thoughtful Indian artist/poet/musician of the early 20th century reflects such wisdom and insight about the human predicament.  I really liked that thought about the “stream of reason” needing to not “lose its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.”  Reason is such a gift but it can sure be misused and often is; in fact, usually is.  When reason is devoid of Spirit, “dead habit” always takes over and we then become arrogant, overbearing, and even violent.  This reminds me of a word of caution from W. H. Auden re the peril of “mere habits of affection freezing our thoughts in their own inert society.”  And then Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

 

Boundaries and “I and Thou”

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On Friday a man in New York City demonstrated his belief that we are one with nature by jumping into a lion pit, explaining afterward that he wanted to be “one with the lions.” Well, he almost accomplished this purpose as one of them proceeded to chew on him.

I also feel that boundaries are a nebulous construction and that we do need to realize that we are one with the world, with the animal world, physical world, and the human world. But we must never carry it to the extreme that he did and will do so only at our great peril.

One dimension of this “object separateness” issue is drawing the social distinction between “me and thee.” Where do I end and you begin? If I err on either extreme there will be major psychopathology. In the early months of our lives we begin the process of formulating a “me” (and ego identity) and if this task is impaired, our life will be very challenging. But if our “me” is defined too rigidly, it will also pose problems. Ideally, it will have an age-appropriate rigidity at first, a rigidity which can be relaxed with maturity so that our “me” can recognize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as rigid as the social contract would have one believe.

Martin Buber wrote a marvelous book about the process of discovering this boundary subtlety—I and Thou. He also delved into the spiritual nature of the process of making this discovery and the spiritual nature of life itself. Our Source, he suggested, is found only in the “In-Between”, in that space between “I” and “Thou”, in what Deepak Chopra terms “the gap.”

Here is a marvelous poem by Edgar Simmons about this matter:

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

the instant you can

accept the colon

you are christenened

in the right compromise

that no things are alike

but are related.

the greatest

the necessary

the most powerful leap of metaphor

is when I decide

I am you

the result is

a birth

a

metaphysical differentiation

carried out and on

not in flesh but in spirit–

prophetic fact in time

more than children of our flesh.