Category Archives: mental health

“Judgment” vs “Judgmentalism”

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In Shakespeare’s marvelous play, Hamlet, Laertes is grieving for his sister Ophelia who he then sees as demented and laments that she is, “Divided from herself and her fair judgment without which we are pictures are mere beasts.”
Shakespeare understood a dimension of judgment that is often not considered, that being that “judgment” is merely a decision or choice. For example, cultures always evolve a legal system in which miscreants stand before a judge or tribunal for some misdeed and there the community tells him/her, “We do not approve of the choice that you made on such and such occasion.” The collective thought reflects the decision of what is “good” and “bad” for the commonweal of that tribe. In this hypothetical illustration, a community makes a “choice” and exercises power, declaring, “we will not abide that behavior” and will then impose consequences even up to the point of death in some cultures. (This brings to mind another observation in the same play, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”)

But, on an individual level…such as with Ophelia…we also exercise judgment and make choices all of which have consequences. But Shakespeare noted that Ophelia’s judgment was impaired so that her world was rigidly bifurcated between people as “pictures” or “mere beasts.” He was describing persons who see people only through two prisms—the extreme of a one dimensional idealized fantasy such as a “picture” or the other extreme…also a fantasy…a “mere beast.” Shakespeare recognized that we are infinitely complicated creatures and that our perception of others has to include the nuances between the two extremes. Yes, we are “pictures” but also “beasts” but also everything in between. And, this same impairment of judgment influenced Ophelia on the issue of “to be, or not to be” leading to seize the “bare bodkin” and take her life.

This brings to my mind the Christian notion of judgment and “judgmentalism.” Many Christians are proud that they are not “judgmental” and will piously announce this fact. However, that itself is a judgment!  Judgment is intrinsic to the human experience and we cannot help but make judgments if we have any degree of functional ability; and, come to think about it, we do so even without that level of ability! True, Jesus said, “Judge not that ye be not judged” but I don’t think that He meant that we should be so naive as to think we never exercise judgment. Jesus was merely saying, “Hey! Sl;ow down. When you are so quick to see the mote in someone else’s eye, take pause and realize that there is a beam in your own eye.” Yes, there are many times when we must exercise judgment and take a stand but if we find that we are “taking a stand” and making moral pronouncements a lot of the time, we might take pause and look closely in the mirror. “What we see is what we are.” Just to exercise judgment does not make us “judgmental” but when we find ourselves standing in judgment often of others, we might take pause and consider that “What we see is what we are” I’m learning to do this myself and the experience is not very pretty!

Shakespeare Visited Me This Morning!

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Oh I love Shakespeare! He is one of my best friends, often visiting me in the middle of the night with memories of a finely-coined expression or phrase which plums the depths of my heart. But oh how I loathed him when in high school for he refused to speak plain English and then my teachers so often demanded that I memorize passages from his plays and, even worse, interpret them. The interpretation really frustrated me and even angered me at times making me want to cry out, “It means just what it says. There’s nothing more to say about it, damn it!” My attitude stemmed from the biblical literalism that I lived in at that time, its hermeneutical style being best expressed as, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But decades later Shakespeare and his ilk began to penetrate the pristine literal citadel in which I was imprisoned. And what devastation it has brought me! All things felt most certain are now seen as ephemeral and I am often left with doubt and anxiety with despair lingering not far behind. But I would not go back for all the money in the world as life is to be lived not to be escaped from with “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

For, the “devastation” I refer to has merely been the disillusionment I have had to encounter as my pretenses have been shattered and I’ve been left with nothing but naked reality. And, T. S. Eliot was right, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” In the “devastation” I’ve lived in for thirty years plus, structure has evolved but it has been fashioned out of Hope, setting it apart from the specious, fear-based ego contrivance that I was enconced in the first half of my life.

My life now features an openness that I used to avoid with a passion, an openness that Richard Rohr has described as “The Naked Now.” This openness can be described as a Presence which allows me to more fully accept the world as it is with less of a demand that it conform with my preconceptions. I no longer have the comfort of pretending I have no preconceptions.

Franz Kafka said that a literary work must be an ice axe which breaks the sea frozen inside us. That “ice axe” which first came my way in my teens has found me a challenge…and still does…but like any literary work, I’m an unfinished product; and we are all a “literary work,” a tale being told. Yes, perhaps one that often appears is being “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Space, Silence, No-thingness, and Spirit

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Caritas
(St Andrews Cathedral)
These stones speak a level language
murmured word by word,
a speech pocked and porous with loss,
and the slow hungers of weathering.
And there, in the broken choir, children
are all raised voice, loving the play of outline
and absence where the dissembled god
has shared his shape and homed us.
At the end of the nave, the east front stands
both altered and unchanged,
its arch like a glottal stop.
And what comes across, half-said
into all that space, is that it’s enough
to love the air we move through.
(by Rachael Boast)

The “air we move through.” That captured my imagination as it brought to mind the notion of “space” that people like Eckhart Tolle and Richard Rohr speak of, words which can be thought of as referring to the domain of “spirit.” For, “space” is the context in which we breath and live but it is a context that is only “there” but we can never apprehend it with our rational mind. It is the foundation of this ephemeral world that we take for granted but which is ultimately specious, though infinitely important as an expression of what I like to call the Divine or the Ineffable. It is the domain of the heart, the Spirit, of Life which gives meaning to this “dog-and-pony show” that I refer to so often. I heard a lecture by Richard Rohr recently in which he used the term Silence, a different name for the same phenomena, and describing it as “the safety net which lies underneath the tight-rope walker, those of us who walk the razor’s edge.”

I now want to juxtapose the above poem with one by Eugene Mayo that I have always loved, entitled, “This Wind.”:

By E. L. Mayo

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.
I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind like this
But there’s no taking
Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind we breathe and ride upon.

 

The Malady of Christian the Faith

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The unacknowledged malady of the Christian faith has surfaced again leading to tragedy. A 36 year old former mega-church pastor, Isaac Hunter, has committed suicide after a sex scandal. Another dimension of this tragedy is that his father…also a mega-church pastor…is Joel Hunter and he is a confidante of President Obama. Within the past year the son of mega-church pastor Rick Warren also committed suicide after a long-term battle with “mental illness.” Within the past year the pastor of a large, prominent evangelical church in Hammond, Indiana went to prison for having sex with a teen-age parishioner. And, from my youth on, I can recall the recurrent issue of “sex scandal” and “financial impropriety” and other misconduct surfacing in the clergy. When very young, it would usually lead to a sudden decision of the pastor that “the Lord” was leading him to pastor a different church, with the truth coming out much later. And, of course, we cannot overlook the horrible sexual-abuse scandal that the Catholic church is still dealing with.

My point here is not to point an accusing or shaming finger, or to snicker at the apparent hypocrisy but to express profound sorrow that men with deep spiritual direction in their life succumb to the lure of such poor choices that they wreck their lives and the lives of those around them. And, as in the present case, the anguish is so intense, that sometimes they even despair of living and take their own life. My concern is that these men have demonstrated that an essential element in faith has been missing in their life and that is an acknowledgement and embracing of dark impulses that are always present in all of our hearts. The problem is not in having these impulses but in refusal to acknowledge them and, when beset by them and the temptation to act on them, having no one to whom they can “unpack their heart with words.” They cannot disclose this shadow side of their heart because the Christian faith they have been taught does not permit them to acknowledge this darkness. Their faith is often a sanitized version in which “human-ness” is denied in the effort to trot out each day of their life a squeaky-clean “Christian” persona. They glibly quote Paul, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me,” but do not fully appreciate the extent of that evil; for the real “evil” is the evil that lurks in the “thoughts and intents of the heart” which needs to find the light of day somewhere.

This most recent suicide brought to my mind the anguish that sexuality can bring in a man’s life. And, I don’t care how “spiritual” you are or how “noble” or “good” you are you will continue to be a sexual creature and that will always involve the temptation to…shall we say…err and might include impulses with which one is uncomfortable. As Woody Allen put it, “Of course sex is dirty, if you do it right!” But whatever impulses surfaces in our sexual life they are just that…impulses…and don’t have to necessarily be acted on. Someone in the position of spiritual leadership needs to have someone to talk to about them. But my central point here is that in some faith traditions, opening-up about sexual matters will not be permitted. Because the real intent of this type of faith is to provide a denial system, a facade that will allow the individual avoid reality; and that type of  person will inevitably be leading his flock to live the very same kind of life.

Christian faith…or any faith…involves honesty and the first step in honesty is to admit that we are not honest. We are born with blinders on and, when we see this, we will still have blinders on. But, if we can accepted the “possibility” that we have blinders on, we can be given pause, and perhaps be a little more human and less “pious.” Yes, we will then later discover more blinders…and more, and more. But that is merely to discover that you are human. That is merely to learn that, being a mere mortal, you tend to see only what you want to see.

 

The Privilege of the Few

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Institutions that maintain soothing contact between men under unexpressed conditions and within unadmitted limits are certainly indispensable for communal existence; but beyond that they are pernicious because they veil the truth in the manifestation of the human existence in illusory contentment. (probably Walter Kauffman)

Culture was a pyrrhic victory for mankind. This “fig leaf” did accomplish its original purpose in that it covered our existential nakedness and allowed the development of what I often call this “dog and pony show” that we live and breath in each day. And without this contrivance we could not live together even as well as we do. We would still be a bunch of even smaller tribes always warring with each other as opposed to the present arrangement in which the number of tribes is actually quite limited though the violence and potential violence is lethal.

But our “illusory contentment”, satisfying as it might be, always comes at the price of excluding someone that we might describe as “the other” or “them.” Our smug satisfaction always rests on the backs of those who have been denied admission into the club.

There are many dimensions to this problem but let me focus on merely one, the often discussed “haves” versus the “have nots.” And technically, this poses a personal problem for, relatively speaking, I am one of the “haves” though that is the case only in comparison with the human tribe as a whole. Relative to the hordes who live in poverty, my middle class existence would have to be described as “plenty” and I would have to be considered one of the “haves.” But trust me, I am not wealthy! Everything is relative.

So, how do we solve this problem? I understand that we could solve the world hunger problem, for example, if we wanted to so why not? Part of me remembers the admonishment to “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor” and I’ve heard of those who have done so. Well, I’m not inclined to do this and do not feel it would be the appropriate thing for me to do. But I do think solving this particular part of the “have not” problem would cost me something and I can honestly say I would be willing to incur that “something” even to the point of discomfort. How could I insist on maintaining my level of comfort when millions and millions of people in the world live in squalor? But the same question needs to be considered collectively, not just with my country, but with the world and all of us would have to begin to think in terms of the human collective instead of our local tribe. We would have to begin to answer affirmatively the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

But this would require a profound paradigm shift in world consciousness. It would require that we create some space around our tribal identity and begin to see that the “other” is human also and deserves a quality of life that we could probably help bring about. And, I’m not saying that we would have to, or even could, give up our “tribal identity” but only loosen its grip on ourselves just a little, just enough to see that other people, and other tribes, are human also. A tribal identity is just another way of saying an “ego identity” and these dimensions of reality are imperative. But another dimension of reality is also imperative, that one of “space” which unites us all, an inclusive “space” or “field” which many have termed “Spirit.” Rumi put this so eloquently when he noted, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I will meet you there.” He was noting that beyond the distinctions that we draw with our ego or tribal identity there is a “space” and if we are willing to embrace this space…or allow it to embrace us…we can make connection with other people.

Let me close with the wisdom of a kindred spirit, my brother in Spirit, W. H. Auden, who noted:

…What except despair
Can shape the hero who will dare
The desperate catabasis
Into the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie?

More Perspectival Ruminations!

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Perspective fascinates me. Even as a child when I was being taught a very rigid perspective of the world, questions would arise from time to time about this perspective and I would receive a pat answer should I dare to pose the question. My usual response, not being very daring at the time, was to accept the pat answer and resign to the fiat of the bromide, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” I learned that when I heard that bromide, it was a way of saying, “End of discussion.” I also learned that I could use the same bromide myself later to end discussions but that contrivance worked only as long as I remained ensconced in that insular little world, an insularity which began to crumble when I went to college.

I have often quoted here, “We can’t have a perspective on our perspective without somehow escaping it.” (I think it was the philosopher Ricoeur to whom I should attribute that bit of wisdom.) When a perspective on our perspective first dawns on us, it is the advent of meta-cognition and a Pandora’s box is often opened. Pat answers will no longer suffice.

Einstein once noted, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This wisdom is valid on an individual and a collective level. Whatever it is that ails us, if we try to rely only on “figuring it out” we will only be stewing in our own juices in the long run, much related to Shakespeare’s observation about the human dilemma being that it feeds “even on the pith of life” when it opts for this self-referential cocoon. At some point we have to explore new horizons, venture out beyond the grasp of our cognitive grasp on the world, and that always involves faith of some sorts though I do not insist that it be called “faith.” Some of you might, for example, prefer a term like “courage.”

In my own personal life as well as in my professional life as a clinician, it was always important to realize that the ultimate issue in addressing the woes that beset us from time to time is trust. My natural disposition is to “figure things out” for I am very cognitively oriented and, yes, that is putting it mildly! But life is ultimately a Mystery and we can never “figure it out” and have to trust that Mystery at some point which usually involves trusting the life process itself and an individual or individuals in our life. It is easier to “trust” a “Mystery” or “God” rather than to trust that Process or Person in terms of flesh and blood. It is much easier and less risky to trust our noble and lofty ideas than to trust another human being.

Trust often means being willing to learn to look at life differently, to lay aside outdated, maladaptive behavior and thought patterns. For example, this change might be as simple as accepting the old bromide, “The glass is half full” and not “half empty”; or perhaps deigning to see the world as basically good as opposed to “deceitful and desperately wicked.” But it is very difficult to dislodge outdated perspectives and we usually fight the loss of these perspectives “tooth and toenail.”

I just ran across an observation by the philosopher Michael Polanyi which is very relevant, “Major discoveries change our interpretive framework. Hence it is logically impossible to arrive at these by the continued application of our previous interpretive framework.” I’m suddenly reminded of an old spiritual ditty at invitation time in my youth, “Let go and let God have His wonderful way. Let go and let God have his way. Your burdens will vanish, your night turn to day. Let go and let God have his way.” That was such a moving song, tugging at my heart so deeply, but I never realized that it would eventually mean even letting go of my faith as I knew it at that time in order to find a deeper more meaningful faith, one less steeped in the letter of the law, and one which would leave me more human. It would mean finding the courage to explore a new “interpretive framework.”

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Thank you for your response. ✨

A Van Gogh Observation about Christ

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I think that Christians can learn a lot about their faith from people from outside of the fold, people who have not been “Christianized” into their faith much like a machine-line product. Those of us raised in a Christian culture have to be careful that our faith is not merely something that we have imbibed from the atmosphere of our life much like other parts of our identity—gender roles, political affiliation, affiliation with the “local sports team”, etc.

Now I am not at artist though I am married to one and have learned a lot from her as I have had to recognize and learn to live with someone who looks at the world differently than I do. She also brings a different perspective to my faith from time to time, not having been “Christianized” as I have been. And I receive weekly emails from another artist, Robert Genn, who also has interesting things to share about space which are often relevant to spirituality. Today I want to share with you an observation about Jesus made by Vincent Van Gogh which I found really interesting. He saw Jesus as an artist but an artist whose medium was the human spirit and life.

I can well understand that you were a trifle surprised to hear how little I liked the Bible, although I have often tried to study it more thoroughly. Only its kernel—Christ—seems to me, from an artistic point of view, to stand higher than, or at any rate to be somewhat different from Greek, Indian, Egyptian, and Persian antiquities, although these also stood on a very high plane. But, I repeat, this Christ is more of an artist than all artists—he worked in living spirits and bodies—he made men instead of statues.

(This quote shared by one of my favorite bloggers, a Quaker who lives in England, whose blog is titled, “Finding God in 365 Days”)

“Thoughts Are Things. Choose the Good Ones”

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I receive an email each day from a New Age “guru” named Mike Dooley. I don’t always read his missive, but do check in from time to time as I find some of his observations very timely. And I love the quotation he concludes each email with, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.” This pithy observation summarizes his central message, that our thoughts control us and that we do have control over our thoughts….or can have more control that we often think we do.

Here is his email of a few days ago:

Dominion over all things doesn’t come with age, spirituality, or even gratitude. In fact, it doesn’t come at all. You were born with it and you use it every moment of every day, whenever you say, “I will…I am…I have…” And for that matter, whenever you say, “It’s hard…I’m lost…I don’t know…” And he wittily concludes with, “Careful where you point that thing!”

The “thing” he is referring to is our mind, or better yet, our heart which makes the “decision” of which thoughts to pack into our quiver each day. Now this “packing” is usually an unconscious process but if we will slow down, pause, and pay attention to our heart we can begin to notice how certain thoughts and patterns of thoughts are predominating in our life, not all of which are productive, not all of which are even “nice” to others and even to ourselves.

The Bible tells us, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Popular lore offers the bromide, “Our thoughts become us.” Shakespeare noted, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And even Henry Ford had very astute wisdom on the note, tell us, “Whether you think you can, or think you can;t—either way you’re right.”

 

The Angst of Duality and Rumi

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I feel like a broken record. Thinking back over my two years of blogging I realize there are certain themes that keep coming back, themes which are obviously very important to me, themes which one could even say haunt me. One of these themes is that life is not as it appears to be, that it is always something that is going on beneath the surface which must by design always elude us. It is kind of like a cat chasing its own tail; or better yet, the quest for it is like the mythological euroboric image of the snake trying to swallow its tail. I sometimes want to tell myself, “Hey! Stop this! Get a life! Get out there and make some money, watch a lot of reality TV, go ahead, drink that Kool-Aid.

And, spiritual lore in which I’m steeped even warns of the futility of spiritual obsession. For example, the Buddhist koan notes the lunacy of “riding an oxen, searching for an oxen,” the point being, “Hey, just quit trying! Don’t waste your effort. The thing you search for is already there. As W. H. Auden noted, “The Center that you cannot find is known to the unconscious mind. There is no need to despair for you are already there.”

From a clinical perspective, this quest can even be thought of as schizophrenic in nature and it is no accident that schizophrenics often have spiritual themes in their fantasies. The schizophrenic is trapped in a bifurcated world, not able to find his/her place in the “real” world and subjected to the torment of living in a hinterland, constantly buffeted by the daily torments that his “delusional” system presents to him.

So, let me demonstrate my venturing into another day of such mental machinations and share with you a beautiful poem by Rumi who too recognized the presence of this shadow world, insisting that it was the real one that we should give more respect to.

The Self We Share

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.

The cave wants nothing to do with the sun.

This is dumb, the self- defeating way
we’ve been.

A gold mine is calling us into its temple.
Instead, we bend and keep picking up rocks
from the ground.

Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source!

The origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give.

The bite of scolding makes ecstasy more familiar.

But look, fish, you’re already in the ocean:
just swimming there makes you friends with
glory.

What are these grudges about? You are Benjamin.
Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack and
accused you of being a thief.

Now he draws you aside and says,
‘You are my brother. I

am a prayer. You’re the amen.’

We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here.

This is the prayer of each:

You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud.

You honor my soul. You bring rivers from the
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.

The wine you offer takes me out of myself into
the self we share. Doing that is religion.

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

 

Wordsworth and a “Big Thought”

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From, “LINES COMPOSED NEAR TINTERN ABBEY” BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the midst of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Oh how I love “big thoughts,” those lofty ideas that carry me away and as they do so facilitate a grounding in this beautiful world. Beware thoughts that do otherwise! In the second line of this excerpt, I would assign a capital “P” for I think he is referring to a Presence which is actually the very Ground of our Being, the ineffable “Wholly Other” which is paradoxically deeply ingrained in our own mortal heart and in the warp-and-woof of our very life. And I see this “Presence” in others from time to time, even more so in recent years as I’ve allowed it to find more expression in my own life. And, yes, I feel this “Presence” is very disturbing though I can’t really say that I’ve graduated yet to the “joy” element. I do find joy in life, and I do feel joy, that I feel…and intuit…that there is some dimension of this experience which Wordsworth knew about that still eludes me.