Here is a marvelous display of how subjective our worldview is. If one picture tells a thousand words, several pictures here will tell billions of words! For once I will be silent.
So, after viewing this slide show, do you still think that the world is as you see it?
For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews ch. 12)
I have always loved this verse. In my youth it was one of my favorite verses and I frequently used it as a text for my sermons as I was intoxicated with the ego-ridden notion of wielding the “word of God.” And even then I grasped the significance of the notion of “discerning” the “thoughts and intents of the heart.” I still believe in the Judeo-Christian notion of the “Word” of God having been spoken, that the whole of creation is His “Word” reverberating throughout this void that we live in. Of course, at this point in my life, I am wont to ask, “Now, just what does that mean? which leads me into this complicated, ambiguity-filled world of “literarylew.” (I’ve tried medication but it just won’t go away!)
Yes, I do believe that I speak “the Word” today but not in any special sense, any more than do you, or even those people who believe differently than myself. And, even more so, “the Word” technically speaks “me” just as it does “you” as it is a basic, guiding energy which lies at the heart of life. For, science and mythology tells us that the whole of this universe is merely energy…including ourselves…even though I still prefer to refer to that “energy” as a “Person.”
But back to that “discerning business.” This “Word” that I believe in is indeed “personal” and therefore is essentially dynamic; it is alive. When we come into the presence of life that is static, I argue that we are face to face with death. This is very much related to the scriptural observation that “the letter of the law killeth but the spirit maketh alive.” Those who live only in the “letter of the law” (those who are literalists, for example) live in a static world and according to the Bible, they are in an important sense, “dead.” And when this Word is allowed to live within us, to be dynamic, it does offer us a “discerning spirit” which often comes through the feedback from other people. This “discerning spirit” is closely akin to the Buddhist notion of “mindfulness.”
I have friends and a wife who frequently facilitate this “discernment” process in my heart; they give me feedback. And the blog-o-sphere also provides valuable feedback re my “literarylew” ramblings which, as a body, are very reflective of what is going on in my heart. Two of my readers are very well blessed with this gift of “discernment” though both of them would be given pause for me to assign to them this “gift” as they are hardly Christian. But the Spirit that I believe in, that spoke this world into existence and continues to allow it to cohere, supersedes all religious creeds and belief systems, including those who avow that they have none. These two individuals often cut directly to the “heart” regarding my musings and their blogs themselves approach the heart issues on basic life issues that we all face. These two people have the gift of “assessing” or “judging” (in a good sense) and providing critique of what is being said and of what is going on in their world. This is a “discerning spirit” which is often missing in our world.
My “monkey mind” is harassing me again so that I cannot sleep. I am so full of chatter. And I do like my “chatter” but to have any meaning it has to find the primordial silence that is its Source. And I sure appear to be fearful of this Source even though I so often affirm my faith and confidence in it/Him/Her.
I recently read Jiddu Krishnamurti for the first time, a blog-o-sphere friend having recommended Freedom from the Known to me. This book so eloquently presents what I would call a Presence as encompassing the whole of life. As I read this incredibly insightful and powerful book, I am amazed at how it resonates with me on some level and I even suspect that I have some unconscious memory of having known this Presence in my early childhood and yearn to go back there. I think that probably I did know that Presence but discovered that I lived in a world where “chatter” predominated and opted for the validation that it offered.
Here are a couple of paragraphs from Krishnamurti that really grabbed me:
You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone you must die to the past. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.
We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young – not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age – and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.
I do not think that Krishnamurti felt that we could or should purge our minds of accumulated memories. His concern was the attachment to these memories, this “accumulated rubbish,” an attachment which keeps us from being able to “be alone” in the sense of being autonomous.
But note what T. S. Eliot said in The Four Quartets on the issue of attachment and detachment and the oblique relevance of death to the issue:
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” (Anais Nin, quoted in http://juliegreenart.com/)
This was a stunning line by Anais Nin. And, though I have not read much of her work, I have read enough to know she was full of “stunning” lines. And I also know she battled her demons throughout her life; it is only as we “battle our demons” that wisdom comes to us.
Remaining in a “bud” is to not live. For the blossoming to occur, the “bud” has to break apart and even disintegrate so that “purpose” might be achieved. This is the wisdom that Jesus had in mind when he reminded us that unless a grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it could not bring forth life. And this is the meaning of the Crucifixion. Ranier Rilke approached the same life-out-of-death theme with these words, “Daily he takes himself off and steps into the changing constellation of his own everlasting risk.” (Duino Elegies)
Shakespeare also knew this essential truth of life, using the “bud” image himself in his first sonnet. In this lovely sonnet The Bard described a young man who balked at commitment to marriage, holding onto his heart’s “bud” and being unwilling to participate in the Great Round:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
I first became familiar with St. Francis in college studying medieval history. When I heard the anecdote of him stopping on a path to pick up a worm…“Brother worm” to him…and removing it to the side of the path so that it would not be stepped on, I privately guffawed, thinking, “Oh my Lord. That guy was nuts.” And though I have matured and understand him much better and am even very sympathetic to his teachings, I still think he had, clinically speaking, “boundary problems.” His “boundary problem” was that he did not see clearly and distinctly between himself and others and even clearly and distinctly between himself and the earth. But now at this point in my life I’ve even gone further “down hill” and don’t see my diagnosis of “boundary problems” as being as valid as I once thought. St. Francis was just a very sensitive soul who saw the inter-relatedness of all things, of the whole world, and recognized that we are not separate and distinct from the world in the way we think we are. We are, after all “dust of the earth.”
Now, I might add that some people do have “boundary problems” and failing to draw clear boundaries can pose major problems in one’s life. However, someone with this “problem” can be a gifted person who has something to teach us and I think St. Francis was one of those. Furthermore, one of his contemporary devotees, Richard Rohr who is a Franciscan Monk, is one of those gifted individuals and his teachings have had a profound influence on my in the past few years. Here is his blog from today:
When I first joined the Franciscan order in 1961, my novice master told me we could not cut down a tree without permission of the Provincial (the major religious superior). It seemed a bit extreme, but then I realized that a little bit of Francis of Assisi had lasted 800 years! We still had his awareness that wilderness is not just “wilderness.” Nature is not just here for our consumption and profit. The natural is of itself also the supernatural. Both natural elements and animals are not just objects for our plunder. Francis granted true dignity and subjectivity to nature by calling it Brother Sun, Sister Fire, Brother Wind, and Sister Water. No wonder he is the patron saint of ecology and care for creation.
Once you grant subjectivity to the natural world, everything changes. It’s no longer an object with you as the separated and superior subject, but you share subjectivity with it. You address it with a title of respect, and allow it to speak back to you! For so long creation has been a mere commodity at best, a useless or profitable wilderness depending on who owned it. With the contemplative mind, questions of creation are different than those of consumption and capitalism, and they move us to appreciate creation for its own sake, not because of what it does for me or how much money it can make me. For those with spiritual eyes, the world itself has to be somehow the very “Body of God.” What else could it be for one who believes in “creationism”? As Paul puts it, “From the beginning until now, the entire creation has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22), so it is not only an evolutionary body but an eternally pregnant body besides. God’s creation is so perfect that it continues to create itself from within. The Franciscans were not wrong in not cutting down ordinary trees without a very good reason.
One of the common problems of our world today is that we don’t “grant subjectivity” to our world and even to other people. We assume other people see the world just as we do and often tyrannize our young children into doing so. And when we have tyrannized a young child into forgoing their own subjective view of the world, we have taken their soul from them.
When I started this “literarylew” adventure about two years ago, I prefaced my efforts with a line from the book of Job, noting that “my heart is full of words, like a taut wine skin, about to burst.” I then borrowed a line from the other important body of Holy Writ in my life, Shakespeare, and proposing that I would “unpack my heart with words.”
As I have been “unpacking” in word, and in the “deed” of my day-to-day life, I’ve realized that when you “unpack” anything at some point you empty it out. You realize the obvious, the suitcase or box is empty and you can quit unpacking. But when you “unpack” the heart, you do discover and experience “emptiness” but you find that it is a never ending “emptiness” and that, paradoxically, in some very uncanny way you are full when you are empty.
Now part of me is still very vain and wants the above to conclude with some report of an epiphany of sorts, some glorious spiritual experience which puts me up with the luminaries of the past and present. And, I might add, this “unpacking” spiel kind of invites it! But, it ain’t there! And I’m so glad I don’t want it to be and in part this is because of cowardice. I have a hunch it would be too painful. “It is what it is” or “I am what I am” or the Popeye the Sailor Man version, “I yam what I yam.” I know emptiness more than before but mine is mercifully a very prosaic emptiness. Thus I’m not a poet, huh?
We so miss the point. And we do it persistently, brazenly, and deliberately. This is because we do not like to confront our emptiness for doing so exposes our frailty and foolishness, showing us to be veritably “strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage.” Now, don’t get me wrong. My life is now also daily “strutting and fretting” but I view it with a different perspective now. I don’t take it (i.e., myself) so seriously and, paradoxically, realize just how infinitely important “it” is. The Infinite becomes manifest through each of us as we go about our day-to-day lives humbling chopping wood and carrying water.
I want to share again Lao Tzu’s thoughts about this emptiness:
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.
(trans. By Witter Bynner)
“The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth forth his handiwork.” And this is the time of the year when this glory is so manifest as the earth begins again to blossom, a magnificent delight I’ve been part of for sixty one years. And it gets more delightful each year as I am more attentive to this unfolding and conscious that a parallel unfolding is present in my heart and life.
We can worship God, find attunement with Him, in so many ways. We can worship him formally with other people in organized religion, we can worship Him in work and play, we can worship him in psalm and hymn, and we can worship him in careful attention to the beauty of his natural world. And “attention” is a critical word for I think early in our life we learn to put blinders on and live with only cursory awareness of our world, including even our own body, by the way. So, when the beauty of Spring graces us each year, we see it and note, “How pretty” but do so in that cursory fashion without any real attention. The Buddhists would use the term “mindful” to describe this careful attention. And this is not to stare at a flower or bird like some zombie and zone out into some alienated bliss. It is simply to be “aware” from time to time each day.
I would like to share with you a couple of poems by a soon-to-be friend of mine who has this “mindful” awareness. She is Sue Coppernoll who is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister living in Northwest Arkansas. My wife has known her for a couple of years and I’ve become familiar with her poetry through her. And later in this month I will get to meet her. But she has allowed me to share these two beautiful poems with you, poems in which she echoes the observation of T. S. Eliot that “April is the Cruelist Month” in reference to natures vicissitudes.
The Very First Day, Again
Sunlight streams through slats
In blinds on the window
Birdsong blends with gentle breeze
No Fool she,
April has come to the mountain.
Wild pear, hyacinth, tulips and forsythia
Wreath hills and hollows in glorious array.
Mocking Bird atop the tallest tree
(a redbud about to burst)
Presents her eclectic performance as a gift
To all who would hear – and welcome –
The magic of her songs.
“Get up,” her command issues forth.
“Walk in the grass.
Inscribe your dreams
Upon the cathedral of the sky
With the fingertips of your heart.”
April, who has come to the mountain
Awaits you there
In the splendor of rebirth and renewal
Her hand outreached in welcome
She beckons you to join the dance of life.
Susan Starburst Coppernoll
1 April 2013
Dialogue with April Second
Where’d you go?
Has April left the mountain?
Cloud cover obliterates visions of spring,
Tulips and daffodils bend their heads to the ground,
Battered youngsters in a sea of mud.
How so perfidious, lovely one?
Have you no constancy, no shame?
Birdsong falls silent in the dark of noon,
Yearling rabbits do not parade across the garden,
Squirrel chatter disturbs not our ears.
Whither your promise, April?
Are you gone from us, or hiding?
Lungs eager for respite gasp in the cold air,
Arms prickly with chill reach for a comforting cape,
Feet return to shelter of rain boots.
Do you hear our lament, cruel month?
Shall we cling to anticipation of your return?
Warmed by a glorious glimpse of Earth’s ripening,
We bow in supplication, we nurture in the caverns of our hearts
Dreams of yesterday’s joy, tomorrow’s delight.
Freedom from the past, or anything else for that matter always comes in the very instant you stop thinking about it. (Mike Dooley)
That notion will give you pause. It does me. This is basic, garden-variety Norman Vincent Peale who I used to disparage so readily. But, I now see so clearly how the trajectory of my life has been guided by self-talk, that subtle pattern of speech that we don’t really pay much attention to and do not think as being important. But it is. I think it was Jesus who said, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Another thoughtful person whose name escapes me said, “Our thoughts become us.”
Technically, this means that if I wake up in the morning and think like Donald Trump, I will become a very wealthy man. Well, I don’t take it that literally but I do believe that if I suddenly had the focus that he does on the financial world, and had his keen insight into its machinations, my financial circumstances would probably improve. But, “Oh me of little faith.” I think it is a little late for that kind of transformation and that is not really where my values lie. But, I do think it is important to pay attention to the thought patterns that we allow to predominate and work on changing those that might be counter-productive.
Two other thoughts on the power of words merit attention. Shakespeare noted, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” and Henry Ford, of all people, said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, either way you are right.”
I’ve invited some blog-o-sphere friends over this morning to play and you too are welcome! I asked momma last night, “Can I have some new friends over Saturday morning” and she said “Yes, as long as you are nice to them this time.” So, ya’ll come on over and we’ll play in the back yard, making mud pies, playing house, playing church, playing tag, wrestling, and such. AND, this time, I’m gonna try to talk one of you cute little girls into a private moment of, “I’ll show you mine, if you’ll show me yours!” (No, I actually never played that game but kind of wish I had’ve!)
This little reverie is a thought I have already shared with a couple of my readers and reflects what a delight it is to meet kindred spirits from around the world. Discovering you makes me feel connected even more to the world, appreciating the power of words and imagination to reach across the abyss that separates us all. And this power is useful with all relationships, cyber as well as real-time.
And, as I start each day now I often think of it as “another day on the playground.” I start it with my favorite friend (my dear, lovely wife Claire) and the second runners-up for that honor, Ludwig and Elsa, the two most beautiful dachshunds that ever lived. But then I go to work, or go to “Wal-marts”, or visit with friends, and still it is “another day on the playground”, this lovely world that God has given us.
And, according to Shakespeare, with mere thought, we can escape the bounds of space and time and commune with each other. For, “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, injurious distance” would not separate us! The Bard had in mind something relevant to an Archibald MacLeish observation, “Winds of thought blow magniloquent meanings betwixt me and thee.”
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But ah! thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.
Not long after I married in 1989, my wife and I were taking a road trip out west. I had already discovered that she was not as anal-retentive as I was…how could I expect otherwise as she was a musician and artist…but this difference became more apparent on this trip.
To make a long story short, we could not keep track of our road maps and related travel information. I had an easy solution to this—keep maps and such in a side-pocket on our respective car doors. But Claire, lacking this god-given (and mandated) anal retentiveness, would use that door pocket for all sorts of stuff—gum, food wrappers, reading material, sun-glasses, newspapers, etc, etc. and pretty soon it was overflowing with all sorts of stuff, so much so that often the road maps and other “pocket material” would end up elsewhere. Thus, when needed a map it could not be found. I was frustrated for, clearly, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, God had instructed us to “Keep the categories pure” and side-door pockets were meant only for specified material, “specified material” which I was clearly more qualified to define than was she.
After this trip, I was sharing re the trip with a good friend and sharing re frustrations which had arisen, as is always the case when newlyweds travel for the first time. And, I remember emphatically making the point to him…albeit facetiously and self-consciously…that I wanted to scream at her from time to time, “Keep the categories pure! Keep the categories pure, dammit.” Fortunately, and wisely, I knew that sharing my frustration at that point on this matter with her would not have been prudent!
But this anecdote is admittedly so revealing about how my mind works and how alienated I am, how detached I am, how “clinical” I am in my approach to life. Sure, she needed to honor the Old Testament Levitical instruction more closely but my emphasis on this categorization was also very problematic. For, in reality none of us can “keep the categories pure” as I was implying and, as I admit, my first nature dictates. For, reality is not clearly defined and in fact is, ultimately, not defined at all….it is a flux…and our “definitions” are very arbitrary and limiting.
This “categorization” is a verbal or cognitive enterprise and reflects the human penchant for subjecting the whole of reality into cognitive structures, i.e. “thought”, so that he/she can manage and manipulate them and feel that he/she is in control. And, without this ability, we would not be human and we would not have human culture; for culture is an invention, the result of our ability to carve up reality and make it subservient to some purpose even something as simple, and necessary, as the well-being of the group.
But, this carving up can become problematic and I think most observers of the human predicament….particularly the Western expression of this predicament…will agree has become problematic. For, we have come to see the world as our oyster, something to be exploited and used. We have come to see ourselves as separate and distinct from the world and done so to such a degree that could ultimately lead to our demise as a species.
Yes, we must always “categorize” and “think” but we do have a forebrain and with that God-given contrivance we can find the capacity to get outside of ourselves, to “think outside of the box”, and think in less categorical terms, in terms that are more inclusive of others and of the world as a whole. We can come to the point where we no longer see the world as our oyster and see ourselves as part of the world, an expression of the world even, and that the world includes all of us….even those who are different than ourselves! Even more so, it even includes those people who we do not like…cursed be the thought!
To sum it up, we can have our “categories” but the goal is to not worry so much about keeping them “pure” as I have been wont to do. For anybody who actually succeeds in “keeping the categories pure” is certifiably nuts! Fortunately, I never literally went to that extreme! Yes, we can have our “words” and “thoughts” and must have them. But we can realize that they are not to be taken literally, that they are a means to an end, that the astute Buddhist wisdom is very appropriate, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”
literary lew 