Category Archives: mental health

Sin, Words, and Grace

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“Speak words that give shape to our anguish.”  This poet recognized the power of the spoken word to provide a container to human experience, to impose a limit to what would be otherwise unbearable.  Another poet put it like this, “To name the abyss is to avoid it.” There is a profound difference in the raw, unmediated, emotional, pre-symbolic (pre-verbal) experience of the abyss and the concept of “the abyss.”

Let me share an anecdote from clinical work many years ago.  I had young male for a client who was very addictive and functioned very poorly at times.  He had no history of religion and church.  He stumbled upon the phenomena of “religion and church” and found himself attending a formal, non-evangelical church fairly regularly.  He told me several times of how comforting the liturgy was to him, particularly that portion where he acknowledged, by the spoken word, that he was a sinner.  As we explored this experience of his, he recognized that by conceptualizing that he was a “sinner” he was able to articulate a deep-seated feeling of “badness” and “darkness” and “shame.”  He was able to apply a limit or boundary to the experience.

There are some whose life is sin articulate.  Their life is raw, unmediated, unmitigated “hell on earth.”  And I’m not talking about “sin” as it is usually taught.  I’m talking about sin as the experience of being separated from one’s Source and separated in a radical fashion. It takes a quantum leap for the individual so confined to say, “I am a sinner” and in so doing escape that “hell on earth”,  that world which Paul Tillich described as “an empty world of self-relatedness.”

This is actually a conversion experience and is a quantum leap from one sphere of existence into another.  It involves the experience of discontinuity, what St. Augustine described at his moment of conversion as “that moment when I became other than I was.”  This is not simple compliance with a syllogism

Let me close with the marvelous sonnet of John Donne:

BATTER my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due, 5
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie: 10
Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

My soul followeth hard after Thee

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“My soul followeth hard after thee.” I think that voices the deepest sentiment of my heart from my early youth. And recently reading St. Augustine again, I discover that he was saying the same thing in the 4th century a.d. and furthermore many other ancient men and women did the same. And, my passion for literature has introduced me to many contemporary men and women who have the same intense drive in their life. Furthermore, the blog-o-sphere has allowed me to meet many others who feel that passion and do so with the same anonymity that I enjoy.

I think that from our earliest days on the planet there were men and women who made this discovery and dared to share it on occasion. Often the tribal elders looked askance, I’m sure, probably private chuckling with each other and saying, “Hell, I just wish he would get laid and get that stuff out of his system.” And in modern times, I have to wonder if back in the ‘fifties “they” had known about the “god spot” and been able to tweak it with neurotransmitters, what would have happened? Hell, I might even be living an Ozzie life of the “Ozzie and Harriet” genre! But no, I’ve been cursed with this “lean and hungry look” and daily pine, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.”

Seriously, I don’t know what this is all about. Some of us have sentiments like this one I’m describing and I’m glad that we do. Many of our ilk have accomplished a lot in the world and left a lot of wisdom for mankind. This passion for me does not have the fury that it used to. I’ve grown up and don’t take myself as seriously as I used to…most of the time! But it is there and it is more comforting as I take it…and myself…less seriously.

Throughout all the lying days of my youth
I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.
Now may I wither into the truth. (W. B. Yeats)

No need to convert you!

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I have realized that my blogging career has paralleled a newly-found, complete disinclination to convert anybody to anything. Here, I do hold forth and usually about things which I take very seriously and believe in very strongly. But, these beliefs are only my perspective and are not therefore eternal truth that you must subscribe to. Now I do believe they are relevant to “eternal truth” but are not eternal truth itself and the degree that they are relevant is probably less than I am wont to believe.
I believe that spiritual truth must be personal, that it must be woven into the warp and woof of our day to day life so that it is very casual and natural. If so, any “converting” that needs to take place will be in the very capable hands of God. He does not need me to argue for him, to reason for him, to intimidate, manipulate, or browbeat. My faith is not something I wear, like my Sunday best clothing, it is just an important element of who I am; it is my “highest value” and will be apparent to those who know me best.
My newly-found approach to faith emphasizes ignorance. I just don’t know a whole lot. Oh yes, I am well educated, well-read, and very verbal—I am very adept at throwing 35 cent words around for nickel ideas. But I don’t know a whole lot. I don’t have objective knowledge of anything, certainly not God and His wisdom. I only at best “see through a glass darkly” and I always come to realize that my class was more “darkly” than I had previously thought, But I see this limitation as being merely my human-ness and something I must live with. And it keeps me more humble than I would be otherwise; it keeps me from needing to “convert” you!
I would like to conclude with a lengthy and insightful quote from Henry Miller from his lurid novel, Sexus:

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission it is to preach and to teach. These are the gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that?

To be sick, to be neurotic, if you like, it to ask for guarantees. The neurotic is the founder that lies on the bed of the river, securely settled in the mud, waiting to be speared. For him death is the only certainty, and the dread of that grim certainty immobilizes him in a living death far more horrible than the one he imagines but knows nothing about.

The way of life is towards fulfillment, however, wherever it may lead. To restore a human being to the current of life means not only to impart self-confidence but also an abiding faith in the processes of life. A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and rightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface of life like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and from below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. Beginnings and endings are only partial steps in the eternal process. The process is everything…the way…the Tao.

Thoughts re Incarnation

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I think the Incarnation is an essential issue in life. But it is also essential that this be a personal issue and not merely historical dogma that one has been imprisoned by. The issue is always, “What does this mean to me?”

One meaning of “coming down from above” and “dwelling on the earth” (i.e. “incarnation”) is to stop living in my head and to start living in my body. And though this is most obviously applicable to a pointy-headed pseudo-intellectual cerebrotone male, I think it is applicable to the human race. Our task as we evolve, individually and collectively, is to follow the advice of Fritz Perls and “Let go of our mind and come to our senses.” W. H. Auden described it as “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

And, how is this done? Why don’t I just do it? Well, I wish it was that easy. I actually think it is a life-long process, that it is the actual experience of “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” And, that process is underway here in some paltry fashion. That is why I can borrow the words of Leonard Cohen again today and humbly pray, “Oh bless this continual stutter of the Word being made flesh.”

Otherness, Hell, and Grace

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“Otherness” is the paramount issue for our day. ‘Otherness” (and it is usually enclosed in quotes) refers to the awareness and experience that “beyond the small bright circle of our consciousness lies the dark” (Conrad Aiken) and that beyond that darkness lies the object world. The task is to venture into that darkness, struggle through it, and find the “light” that lies beyond. This “light” represents our escape from the Platonic shadow world and allows us to see things, including people, as they are and not merely as a means to fulfill our needs. They are “other” than we are. Their wishes, their desires, their fancies, their intents will be different from ours in very critical ways. And we don’t have to like them, we don’t have to even put up with them, we can always just leave them alone and try to avoid them. And, yes, there are times when their “otherness” is of such a nature that our “respect” for them will not over rule a responsibility to call the cops! But we will still respect them, realizing that “there go I, but for the Grace of God.”

But venturing into this darkness of “otherness” is often scary as hell and somehow hell is very related to this spiritual adventure. But that is another story. This experience of “otherness” has been written of from ancient times though it was described in different words. For example, I think Jonathan Edwards famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is an example of the terror that is often encountered in this adventure. And too often the terror is so intense that a quick antidote is sought and one will do as Kierkegaard suggested and grab the nearest bit of flotsam and jetsam that the vortex provides. And these antidotes can play a role if they are merely used as a respite and are not glommed onto as a means of preventing any further spiritual growth; further spiritual growth will always entail imbibing more of this terror.

St. Augustine’s conversion also reflects this same subjective anguish. In his “Confessions” he declared, “At the very moment wherein I was to become other than I was, the nearer it approached me, the greater horror did it strike into me; yet it did not strike me back, nor turned me away, but held me in suspense.” He even used the term “other” and I liked his phraseology, becoming “other than I was” which reflected he knew this was a moment of transformation, rebirth, or salvation. And though this terror was great, yes this “God” appeared very angry, “it did not strike me back” but actually…if I might exercise my literary license here…”held me in its loving arms.”

And I love Aeschylus’ reference to the “awful grace of God.”. This Grace is perceived to be “awful” because our pretenses, our illusions, our vanities, our false gods are melting in the “judgment of God” which precedes are awareness of God’s infinite mercy and grace. It is not that God is awful, or even judgmental. It is merely that our ego clings so desperately to our fig leaves that having them dissolve so suddenly….and even if it is over the course of a lifetime it can still be conceived as “suddenly”…feels like we are “sinners in the hands of an angry (judgmental) God.”

Rilke in the Duino Elegies described this experience with otherness as a terrifying moment, declaring, “Beauty is only the first touch of terror we can still bear and it awes us so much because it so coolly disdains to destroy us.”

And then there is Emily! Ms. Dickinson certainly understood and embodied otherness and her brilliant poetry illustrates this so beautifully. I’m going to share one of her poems which is so terrifying, not merely because of the imagery, but because in this poem she does not conclude with the Grace that she acknowledges elsewhere in her work:

He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,

Prepares your brittle substance
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.

C. S. Lewis’ Hell & Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky”

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In my last posting I discoursed re boundaries and love, noting that everything that passes as love is not necessarily love if scrutinized carefully. Boundaries get easily confused and often we aren’t loving our “lover” or “loved one” but merely loving ourselves projected onto that person. As I said, quoting Auden, “Suppose we love not friends or wives but certain patterns in our lives,” the other person being merely a “pattern” that fulfills some need of ours.

As a result some awfully convoluted, twisted, enmeshed, disgusting relationships get hatched and, per C. S. Lewis, often end up with both parties writhing in the hell that was initiated on earth with one person’s possessive love and the other person’s lack of the wherewithal to escape. Yes, ultimately the responsibility is mutual.

Paul Bowles anecdotally illustrated such a relationship between a mother and son in his excellent novel, The Sheltering Sky. The novel, and the movie bearing the same title, portrays the two as reprehensible, disgusting, and ugly human beings. Eric, the adult son, is his aging mother’s traveling companion and is accustomed to the various and sundry indignities that go with this role. He is, among other things, her “step and fetch it” and can never do anything right. She scolds him for not being able to stand on his own two feet but he musters up the courage at one point and fires back, “But you sabotage any effort I make to become independent.” Bowles describes her as very lonely and noted that the only way she had to engage with the world was to be hostile and disputatious, especially with the hapless Eric, but with the whole world. These two characters epitomize the mother-son dyad confined to hell in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

Perils of Excessive Love

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As is obvious, I love words. They speak volumes too us, but only if we are willing to break them open and let their meaning flow. Someone once said that to make a poem just grab a word and pull on it. It is the “pulling on it” that breaks it and lets its hidden riches spring forth.

Now we can’t do this with all words! That would get absurd. But key words, words that portend great value merit some of this “pulling”. I would like to focus briefly on the word “love.”

It is so easily used and has become so common place that often it has no value. For example, two people meet and find each other attractive, they are consumed with lust, and they “do the deed”, and ipso facto they announced, “Oh, we are in love!” Well, perhaps but only time will tell.

In my clinical practice, in my personal experience, and in my reading I have seen so many examples of horrible things take place under the name of “love.” For example, I’ve seen parents control and manipulate their children to keep them dependent on them, to keep them safe from “this evil, dangerous world”, when their real intent was merely to keep them from leaving home. I’ve seen this “invertedness” so extreme that at best the only “marrying-out” that could take place was to marry and pull up a double-wide next door to mom and daddy. I’ve seen extended families living in double-wides on a small plot of land. I’ve seen marriages gravely impaired because the primary emotional attachment with one of the partners was still with his/her mother.

A popular bromide is “love holds with an open hand.” It is often hard to love with that in mind as our own neediness is to powerful; and neediness is part of the human experience and even a component of love. But when neediness becomes paramount it could devour the other person and everyone in its path. Tangentially related, W. H. Auden asked, ‘Suppose we love no friends or wives, but certain patterns in our lives?”

C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce describes one mother’s love as being so needy and so oblivious to the reality of her son that she is willing to “love” him into hell itself. He described this “excess of love” as a “defect”, noting “She loved her son too little, not too much….But it well may be that at this moment she’s demanding to have him down with her in hell. That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it.”

C. S. Lewis and Shame

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In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis said re shame:

Don’t you remember on earth there were things too hot to touch with you finger but you could drink them alright? Shame is like that. If you will attempt it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing; but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.

This made me think of the Richard Rohr observation which I recently shared, “I look daily for some little humiliation in my life.” He explained that he did this as it reflected an opportunity to address an occasion of his ego rearing its ugly head.

I think that Lewis and Rohr realize/realized the role that shame plays in spirituality. Its presence, when not addressed and acknowledged, leads to profound ugliness and even brutality in the spiritual world. But, addressed and acknowledged, embraced if you will, provides an opportunity to draw a little closer to one’s Source. For, I intuitively know that shame lies at the core of our identity and we have to tippy-toe into it as we approach that core. And, I might add it behooves us to have someone holding our hand as we begin to tippy-toe into it—perhaps a pastor, a therapist, a friend, or a spouse.

But we must avoid the easy way out which is to cling to dogma, those “well worn words and ready phrases” (Conrad Aiken) which insulate us from any real, human/spiritual experience. We must go beyond the shell of the words, the “letter of the law”, and get into the Spirit.

One last thought on this note. Twenty years ago John Bradshaw was in the self-help vanguard with a series of books on the family. In one of them he noted that in his clinical work he felt that shame was the core issue with a lot of deep seated issues, that often there were high-falutin diagnoses which could merely be explained in terms of “shame-based” behavior and emotions. My own clinical work confirms this. We are often dealing only with deep-seated shame which binds the individual and will continue to do so until it is gradually, gently, and graciously brought to the fore and experienced and then processed.

Mass hysteria besets us!

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Tacitus noted, “They terrify lest they should fear.”  He had in mind fear-mongerers who were always espousing the latest doomsday scenario, reflecting the fear that their own hearts were consumed by.  And then Aescychlus noted that “the gods send tragedy so that men will have something to talk about.”  Modern media fuels hysteria with “breaking news” and such. And we thrive on it. Sometimes I think we need to get a life.  Ok, I’ll admit it  Sometimes I think I need to get a life!

Life is inherently full of fear and tragedy strikes all too often . It could hit any moment, even to myself!  But I’m not inclined to live in terror of it.  I’ll deal with it when it happens. “Sufficient unto the day will be the evil thereof.”

e e cummings and misplaced concreteness

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when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because.

I read this e e cummings poem 25 years ago and have had it in my memory ever since.  It is very complex and even beyond my comprehension on some level.  Yet, I love it and it sticks with me and this fact reveals that it has great truth for me. This poem speaks to me.
I will forego the first stanza as that is beyond me.  But the second stanza deals with mankind’s fallenness, his sinfulness, his bondage to the time-space continnum, and his inability/unwillingness to venture out of that domain into freedom.  The essence of this 2nd stanza is man’s inability/unwillingness to escape the cause-effect mind-set, very much related to the time-space continuum.  And cummings realized that as long as we live there, as long as we are rooted there, we ensconced in a world that will be destroyed as it is an ephemeral world.
I have read enough in quantum physics to understand that scientists see the cause-effect domain as something that is perceptual in nature.  In fact, they would say everything is perceptual.  Some loudly protest at this point, announcing with vehemence, “Oh no, they are nihilists, saying that nothing is real.!”  I don’t think that is necessarily the case and it is certainly not the case with me.  It is just that there is a Real beyond that which we take for “real” and that Real is known only by faith.  Those who mistake the common-place world, the everyday world, the physical world as “real’ are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness,“chasing the shade and letting the Real be.” (John Masefield)
I just can’t wrap my head around this, however.  I believe this, and know it intuitively, but cannot understand it completely.  But the very desire to “understand it completely” is the fallen mind at work, trying to grasp and own its own spiritual nature as if it is something we can objectively apprehend.  But our “spiritual nature” is something we are…one might say “Someone” we are…and not something that we can apprehend.
Now a caveat is very important.  I am not advocating rejection of the cause-effect world.  That would be lunacy and the attempt to do so would be even more lunatic.  I am suggesting that meaning and value is given this cause-effect world when we intuitive recognize and respect…and surrender to…the Real which lies beyond the grasp of our rational mind.  And, all we have to do is to learn our own ignorance and recognize the Intelligence that graces this void that we live in, an Intelligence that has visited us on occasion.
I close with an excerpt from “The Habit of Pefection” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear. Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: 5 It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent. Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light: 10 This ruck and reel which you remark Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.