Category Archives: poetry and prose

The Power of the Word

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I love words! Words make us human. That ability to symbolize re our subjective experience and assign meaning to that domain is just incredibly fascinating to me. And as we assign meanings to our experience we find connection with others, we discover that they too use the same sounds to refer to the same experiences…more or less! And how did that ever happen and why does it continue? Yes, it is a neurological issue; but, ultimately it is a philosophical and spiritual issue.

(Let me share a relevant personal anecdote. Years ago in a casual conversation a friend of mine dropped an aside, “Well, our name is just a sound we learned to respond to.” This “word” of his spoke to me and continues to do so. It resonated and I realized what he meant, that my very name “Lewis” was merely a sound that “I” had learned to respond to at about the age of one and a half or two years. My “I” (a rudimentary ego) preceded that moment in some shape, form, or fashion but when I was able to associate that subjective experience with the sound “Lewis” I basically joined the human race.)

Poets are one of God’s gifts to us as they can play with words and teach us about meaning. They can use words and use them skillfully and artistically—with spiritual finesse—and usher us into realms of meaning which would otherwise be hidden. Here is a sample from one of them that I have discovered in the blog-o-sphere (enerihot.wordpress.com):

I Write Because
by Irene Toh

Here it comes: a manifesto.
I write because words are
necessary shadows, the way
they augment light that
shines on every thing.

I write because any object
may become a subject
by simple appreciation,
being talked about so
it becomes the light.

I write because after god,
we speak things into creation,
because day turns into night,
because after you there’s no
one who is truly you and
words are dying stars.

And then here is another example from one of my favorite poets, Carl Sandburg:

Precious Moments

Bright conversations are transient as rainbows.
Speech requires blood and air to make it.
Before the word comes off the end of the tongue,
While the diaphragms of flesh negotiate the word,
In the moment of doom when the word forms,
It is born, alive, registering an imprint—
Afterward it is a mummy, a dry fact, done and gone.
The warning holds yet: Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Ecce homo had meanings: Behold the man! Look at him! Dying he lives and speaks.

“I Feel Your Pain”

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One of my blog-o-shere friends responded re a recent post of mine about the role of feeling in alleviating the “heaviness” of life’s burdens. (Twominutesofgrace@wordpress.com)  She has been a therapist at one point in her life and noted how that part of her healing was learning the art of “reciprocal vulnerability” in the therapeutic relationship.  One of the pitfalls of being professional care-givers is that so often we do carry our own load of guilt and shame and seek to assuage those feelings with our clients. If we go too far in that direction, if we trot out the Clintonian, “I feel your pain”  too often, we might discover we have made it too much about ourselves.  But if we refuse vulnerability in the first place—barricaded behind professional jargon, cliche, and the DSM IV—we don’t need to be in the position of therapist, pastor, or “care-giver” in the first place.

Someone once said, “To be is to be vulnerable.”  I think the Apostle Paul had this in mind when he wrote to one church, “I was with you in weakness, and fear, and much trembling.”  Shakespeare, in Hamlet, described vulnerability as having a heart “full of penetrable stuff” suggesting that without vulnerability we are “impenetrable.”  And impenetrability is the natural trajectory of the human ego.  It resists anything which causes it discomfort.

 

Heavy Hearts Need Loose Lips

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The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

These words from King Lear are very important to me, taking significance in my life at a very critical juncture decades ago when I was just learning about feelings. Shakespeare here taught me that it was important to just “let go” and value what I was feeling and deign to verbalize re these feelings.. This was critical as I had spent the first half of my life carefully monitoring myself and “thinking” and “saying” only what I “ought to say.” Yes, there were times when, like a kid with a new toy, I over did it and expressed some feelings at times when I should not have. But not often; and when I did, I usually did so with friends who were understanding.

And then for a few years I had the opportunity to facilitate this skill when I worked as a counselor, teaching young teen-agers the importance of their feelings and the value of expressing them, not only with words, but with art, music, and dance. It was very powerful to witness a young person make this discovery and watch many of them flourish. And I’ve seen the same phenomena with friends and acquaintances over the decades as the course of one’s life can grant maturity and with it the temerity to value one’s own subjective experience.

But I often overlook the first phrase of this Shakespearean observation—the weight of this sad time we must obey. Our culture’s disdain for feelings accumulates over the eons and becomes very “heavy.” And with this “heaviness” comes a profound sadness. And this sadness will be alleviated only when we “unpack our heart with words” (Shakespeare, “Hamlet”) and entertain the realm of “feeling which loosens rather than ties the tongue. (W. H. Auden.)

 

Marriage and Boundaries

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Boundaries are one of the essential lessons of life. Sometimes life does not afford us stable families and so learning to set boundaries takes us decades and decades. It often takes many difficulties, many failed relationships, and even incarceration at times. I have had clients before who thrived when incarcerated and were able to make good choices upon their release. I’ve known others who can only make good choices when they are incarcerated and frequent incarcerations are part of their life. I’ve known other young people start to thrive when they get into the work place and discover the reward that comes from fitting into the structure of the work place.
Marriage also can provide a ‘container” in which boundary issues can be addressed. Yes, some wits might even think of it as “imprisonment! If two people can make a commitment, and somehow honor that commitment through the vicissitudes of day to day married life, many of an individual’s “rough edges” can be smoothed off.

Edgar Simmons put it this way in a poem:

Proofrock has been maligned;
Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors,
Absorbing the tic,
The bothersome twitch.

If Hamlet could have endured the tedium of “domestic corridors,” the routine of “hearth and home”, he could have avoided his madness and premature tragic death.

I now include the whole of the poem from which the above excerpt was extracted which might make it more meaningful to you.

BOW DOWN TO STUTTERERS
By Edgar Simmons

The stutter’s hesitation
Is a procrastination crackle,
Redress to hot force,
Flight from ancient flame.

The bow, the handclasp, the sign of the cross
Say, “Sh-sh-sheathe the savage sword.”

If there is greatness in sacrifice
Lay on me the blue stigmata of saints;
Let me not fly to kill in unthought.

Prufrock has been maligned
And Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors
Absorbing the tick, the bothersome twitch.

Let me stutter with the non-objective painters
Let my stars cool to bare lighted civilities.

 

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.

 

 

Bonheoffer, the Fall, & Time/Space Continuum

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(I posted this yesteday but forgot to include a title!)

 

Several days ago I discoursed re the time/space continuum and the human dilemma of being trapped (i.e. “lost”) therein. This is a very abstract notion and I recognize it probably sounds like a lot of non-sense to some. But I’d like to refer you to the work of Dietrich Bonheoffer who was one of the noted theologians of the 20th century; I think I could even safely place him in the evangelical pantheon of that era. In his book, Creation and Fall, he interpreted Genesis 1-3 and explained the extent of “the fall” in a similar vein to how I did in the aforementioned posting.

He posited the notion that the fall left mankind in this “time-space continuum” and that reason is itself a reflection of this fall and is intrinsically tainted by the experience. But mankind thinks he can “think” his way out of this existential predicament, not realizing that ultimately faith and hope have to have a role in the process if his rational quest is to have any ultimate meaning. Here Bonheoffer describes the circular reasoning that is the essence of this narcissistic endeavor:

…the thinking of fallen man has no beginning because it is a circle. We think in a circle. We feel and will in a circle. We exist in a circle. We might then say that in that case there is a beginning everywhere. We could equally say that there is no beginning at all; the decisive point is that thinking takes this circle for the infinite and original reality and entangles itself in a vicious circle. For where thinking directs itself upon itself as the original reality it sets itself up as an object, as an object of itself, and therefore withdraws itself behind this object again and again—or rather, thinking is antecedent to the object which it sets up.

Now I know this is convoluted. Let me try to interpret what he is saying. Bonheoffer is is echoing the words of Paul Tillich who said that “A religion within the bounds of reason is a mutilated religion.” And neither of them was disavowing reason (thinking); they were merely emphasizing its limitations. As long as mankind can keep his experience “reasonable” then he is safe in his illusion that he is in control. Spiritual teachers over the centuries have taught us that the experience of being “out of control”…momentarily, at least…is redemptive as it is in those moments that we can find an Anchor that transcends the mundane which is paradoxically immanent therein. But it/He is found only when we relinquish control and to the degree that we have done so.

And it is this “out of control” moment that teaches us the presence of a Beyond which graces the whole of our day to day life, a Beyond that gives meaning to all facets of human experience, including reason! Without this knowledge…and experience of this Beyond…we are reminded of the words of Goethe in Faust, “They call it Reason, using light celestial; just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

And again I am brought to a perfect object lesson in my country, the United States, and its current political impasse. We have so much confidence in “reason”, in “common sense”, in our political, military, and economic might. But we don’t pay any attention to this “Beyond” to which I make reference. If our leaders would pay the faintest attention to this Ultimate, they would at least be able to cooperate with each other well enough to address our issues like mature adults and not like two school-yard groups of thugs. Ultimately, our national issues…just like our personal issues…are resolved in the realm of the Spirit.

Is there “No Exit”?

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We are lost. Yes, just as the Christians teach us, we are “lost” though I differ with them on what that means. We have “fallen” into a world of contingency, the domain of cause and effect (time and space), and we are often at our wits end. We don’t know what to do. To cope with this tremendous anxiety, the vulnerability that comes from being a mere mortal, we have created culture (including myths) and we cling desperately to this culture to hide our nakedness. Yes, we cling to our fig leaves.

In the following poem Jessica Goodfellow so beautifully and elegantly describes this dilemma that we are in. We are always tempted by the hope of a “beginninglessness” or its counterpart, an “endlessness.” But either extreme is perilous. For, reality is merely that we are here, we are in the “in-between”; we are caught in this parenthesis of time and space. As Sartre noted, there is “No exit.” This realization is the point at which we can opt for faith, the belief (hope) that something Wonderful is underway in this void that we live in and that we are part of it.

Navigating by the Light of a Minor Planet

The trouble with belief in endlessness is
it requires a belief in beginninglessness.
Consider friction, entropy, perpetual motion.
And the trouble with holding to both is that
belief in endlessness requires a certain hope
while belief in beginninglessness ends in the absence of hope.
Or maybe it’s vice versa. Luckily,
belief in a thing is not the thing itself.
We can have the concept of origin, but no origin.
Here we are then: in a world where logic doesn’t function,
or else emotions can’t be trusted. Maybe both.
All known tools of navigation require an origin.
Otherwise, there is only endless relativity and then
what’s the point of navigation, in a space where
it’s hard to be lost, and even harder not to be?
Saying “I don’t want to be here” is not the same
as saying “I want to not be here.” It rains
and it rains and it rains the things I haven’t said.

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”)

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.

 

“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!