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.
This poem eloquently and intensely conveys the fragility and preciousness of life. It makes me think of some of the Old Testament writers, especially the Psalmist, who knew so much of despair.
I really believe in ignorance! I guess I watched too much of Hogan’s Heroes and remember the wisdom of Sergeant Schultz, “I know nothing, nothing, nothing.” I remember a wonderful pastor from my youth who would quip, “If ignorance was bliss, we would all be blistered.”
Yes, I’m intelligent, well educated, erudite as heck! I can throw 35 cent words around for nickle ideas like anyone. But, to quote the observation of Paul, the “wisdom of this world is come to nought.” We don’t know jack! For, words are but means to an end, they lead us to the truth, they lead us to the precipice of Truth, but we can never cross over and apprehend the truth in a definitive fashion. The Truth only glimmers our way and then only on occasion. For example, one such “glimmering” was the life of Jesus. And in the course of my life I have seen a “glimmer” or two but admittedly nothing that matches the Light that Jesus brought into the world. And the “glimmerings” that I have been privy too have never been cognitive; they have been the Light of Christ manifested in the life of other persons, some of them not card-carrying, born-again, USDA certified “Christians.”
So, let’s get ignorant today and hear a primordial word.
For example, Gerard Manley Hopkins noted in The Habit of Perfection:
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe to me pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From where all surrenders come
Which alone makes you eloquent.
And then there is William Butler Yeats who wrote:
Throughout all the lying days of my youth
I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.
Now may I wither into the Truth.
I want to share two short, pithy poems this morning. Poets are so adept at stinging us with truth, sometimes very sharply and sometimes just annoyingly. It was one of the ancient Greek luminaries, Socrates I think, who likened his role to that of a gadfly who would befuddle and annoy the populace.
Here are two such offerings from the past century:
QUERY
By E. L. Mayo
I died and three lemons
Arranged assymetrically
Took my place. Just why
Did you select that moment to comment on
The sweetness of my disposition?
A MAN SAID TO THE UNIVERSE
By Stephen Crane
A man said to the universe:
Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
“Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.” (E. L. Mayo)
I’ve always been captivated by this poem though I’m not for sure I understand it. I just intuitively know that it conveys great wisdom and wisdom is always complicated, paradoxical, and convoluted.
Failure is necessary as it counters our obsession with “success.” Oh, we need success and our species has been very “successful” in so many respects. We have created so much stuff and have made our life so much easier, perhaps too easy in ways. Auden noted, “We have made our lives safer than we can bear.” But it is the failures that humble us and teach us that there is more to life than “stuff”. These “failures” can show us a qualitative intelligence that allows us to see the graciousness of life and without this insight the “structure of the universe” is quite “bony.”
The origins of my recent concern with spiritual incest lie in my youth when I was raised in a very cloistered denominational environment. I would like to elaborate as it would help shed light on my observations.
My first year out of high school I spent in a very conservative seminary. This seminary taught formally and rigorously themes which I had already imbibed in my church upbringing. For example, there was pronounced emphasis on the Pauline admonishment to, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.” This meant to be morally upright so that the community would clearly know that you were different because of your faith, that your Christian testimony was unsullied by the temptations of the world. But this same teaching was applied to ecclesiastical teachings as we were taught that our churches also should be “set apart” by our doctrinal purity and by our hard-line stance on moral issues of the day. Furthermore, we were taught that this moral and doctrinal purity had set us apart throughout history, even back to the time of Christ, as we had been the only church which had been “stead fast in the faith” even as other churches routinely departed from the “faith once delivered unto the saints.” And another dimension of this teaching was that we were the only true church, the only church with historical continuity back to the original church that Jesus had started when he noted, “Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
We did allow that there were people in other denominations who were saved…somewhat… provided that in some shape form or fashion they had “accepted the Lord Jesus as their Savior”; but by virtue of not belonging to the “true church” they would not be part of the “bride of Christ” when they got to heaven. This “bride of Christ” was an exalted status that would be given to the true church that had steadfastly held to the foundations of the faith throughout history. However, there were many who were not saved and who would spend eternity in hell, among them being Catholics, Jews, and Mormons and that is not even counting the hordes in other cultures who had not even heard of Christ.
Now, one example of the “historical scholarship” alluded to already needs to be further explained. Great emphasis was placed on tracing church lineage back to the time of Christ as the only true church had to be able to prove historical continuity back to the time of Christ. This was done by painstakingly researching church history and ascertaining which religious groups and movements adhered to cardinal teachings of the faith, one of which was “believer’s baptism”, meaning rejection of pedo-baptism (sprinkling of infants).
I could go on and on with an endless litany of beliefs and practices which set us apart as special people. And, indeed it was often noted that the Bible taught that God would create a “peculiar” people (and, oh my Lord, were we ever “peculiar”!!!!), a people “set apart”, a “chosen people” who had the task of representing the Kingdom on earth. Furthermore, we had the task of “standing in the gap” and acting as a deterrent from the onslaught of the evil forces that always beset this “wicked world.”
Now, so much of this dogma has a place if taken with moderation and with humility. For example, I think that persons of faith will stand out and be conspicuous by simply representing quality and by seeking value in their life. But they will not have to flaunt it! And they certainly will not have to announce it with pride and arrogance! They will not have to be ostentatious with it. It will not have to be a response to an impoverished identity; it will not have to be a fig leaf that hides them from their existential nakedness.
And this “incest” label is admittedly heavy-handed and is not exclusive to sectarian religion. All religions, and indeed all groups, tend to be self-serving and tend to set their boundaries too rigid. All groups tend to err towards “group-think” in which their primary purpose becomes the perpetuation of their own dogma and the exclusion of those who are threatening. I recently quoted W. H. Auden on this note, where he described the individual who would deign to question conventional wisdom, diving 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.
Continuing the theme of spiritual incest, an old bromide from my youth was, “He who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.” This is relevant to groups and certainly to churches and denominations. A church that overly emphasizes the “come ye out from among them and be ye separate” theme can find themselves pathologically alone to the extent that they have no relevance to the world at large. They are suddenly lost in “a world of empty self relatedness.” (Paul Tillich) And since mental illness is a reference problem, they technically are mentally ill. A case in point is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of our present day world.
I would like to offer a quote from an Ibsen play, Peer Gynt, which so eloquently illustrates this “empty self relatedness” that Tillich mentioned. This is the superintendent of an insane asylum describing the constituents of his facility:
Its here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves sailing with outspread sails of self. Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with the bung of self and seasoned in a well of self. None has a tear for others woes or cares what any other thinks….Now surely you’ll say that he’s himself. He’s full of himself and nothing else, himself in every word he says himself when he is beside himself…Long live the Emperor of Self.
The language is a bit stilted, being centuries old, and it describes individuals. But the lunacy portrayed here is also relevant to groups who have so isolated themselves, so turned in upon themselves, so violated the law of exchange with the outside world, that they have essentially sold their soul to the devil.
Incest was a common theme in the clinical word that I did as a counselor. The incest always reflected pronounced family dysfunction, always gravely influencing each member of the family even if they were sexually abused themselves . Incest is about power and control and often occurs in families who are isolated in some respect from the local community, be that a perceived isolation or something more concrete such as geographical or socioeconomic factors.
But incest is also a term that can be applied to groups as a whole. Some groups can function as an incested family and be similarly inverted, turned-in on themselves with minimal reference to the outside world. Usually this internal reference is perceived as a virtue and in fact reference to the external world is not only discouraged but is often demonized. The world is perceived as dangerous and threatening, “evil” if you please, and contamination by this world is a constant peril. (I feel strongly that this is often an element in the home-schooling movement though certainly not in all cases.)
I would like to focus briefly on what I call “spiritual incest.” By this I mean the tendency to isolate ourselves in groups who believe just as we do and to discourage any dissenting beliefs. In groups like this “doctrinal purity” is inordinately emphasized. And there is nothing wrong with purity of any sorts but when it becomes an obsession it always leads to problems. For example, when the “doctrinal purity” demon is unleashed, it tends to never end. Once there is a “house-cleaning” and the miscreants are expelled or “churched…to use an old frontier term…the demon remains. So, a few years later, there arises a new doctrinal dispute and once again another “house cleaning” is necessary and the ritual is enacted again. For, this is tremendously rewarding to be on the side of the pure and know that you are “cleansing the temple”, that you are “standing firm for the truth that was once delivered unto the saints”, etc., etc. I know. Been there. Done that. Gosh it was fun. I felt so pious.
Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm which once we took for exercise of virtue. (T. S. Eliot “Four Quartets”)
(HISTORICAL NOTE: Historians have noted that this quest for doctrinal purity, especially in the 19th century on the frontier, created our “denominational society” as churches routinely split over picayune doctrinal disputations, giving rise to new churches and denominations)
One of my new friends in the blog-o-sphere sent me some interesting and provocative thoughts re my discourse of nakedness in the book of Genesis. He is well versed in Hebrew etymology and shared some nuances of the Hebrew word “naked”, noting that its meaning varies slightly from place to place in Genesis 2 and 3. If you are interested, I suggest you check out his blog, “Of Dust and Kings,” on WordPress.com. He is a very thoughtful young Bible scholar and pastor.
This gentleman’s observations remind me of why I love words—they are such treasures. And it is no accident that the Judeo-Christian tradition values so greatly the word and that in the Christian tradition Jesus was the Word incarnate.
I read somewhere years ago that words are “repositories of meaning.” As we focus on key words…especially in literature, and even more so in sacred literature…and begin to explore their hidden treasures, they can speak volumes to us. But, I must say, this is always an intense hermeneutical endeavor. It involves being able, willing, and humble enough to understand the hermeneutical enterprise and in so doing realize that we have to avoid the pitfall of mining the literature to merely prop-up our preconceptions and biases.
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. And humility is endless.” (T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets)
(Yesterday’s posting was about the subjec of nakedness in the book of Genesis.) The notion of nakedness and vulnerability is also relevant in clinical work. In one of my first cases as a therapist, a young man in his thirties had recurrent images of nakedness in his day to day life, often looking down to see if he was wearing his pants in public. He knew this was “crazy” but he also knew that it was clinically significant. He also quickly saw that this disconcerting imagery was related to several significant recent losses in his life—he had become estranged from his family, he had serious doubts about his childhood faith, and he has resigned from his job. Furthermore, he was feeling estranged from his friends. He had been cast adrift in his life. He had shorn the trappings of the middle class life that had been bequeathed him and he felt vulnerable, he felt naked.
The clinical work involved helping him to embrace this nakedness, to avoid the temptation to immediately “prozac’em”, and to explore the depths of his despair.
It amounted to holding his hands figuratively, allowing the grace of God to envelop him, and to facilitate rebirth. I offered comfort and direction as this young man dwelt for a while in what T. S. Eliot called, “the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.” Metaphorically speaking, I was a midwife. Or, a metaphor I like even better, I was a witness to a death, burial, and resurrection.
The theme of nakedness is so relevant to the work of a minister. Frederick Buechner in one of his books (and the specific title escapes my memory) wrote of the need of a minister to find the temerity and courage (and grace) to first “disrobe” his congregation before he could “clothe” it with the Grace of God. He explained that God’s Grace only comes as one is disrobed of his/her pretenses, illusions, false gods, and hypocrisies and that a minister who is not willing to address this facade cannot offer any genuine Grace. Without this disrobing there is only an easy believism that really doesn’t believe anything, there is only a religion of convenience. And, I might add, no minister can accomplish this task if he/she has not been disrobed himself/herself and does not experience recurrently from time to time.
I sometimes think I should rename my blog to some variant of “Shakespeare”. I quote him so often. And there is no need to quote anyone else. No one said more.
On the subject of change, he explained why we resist it so much, noting in Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy that we, “cling to these ills that we have rather than fly to others that we know not of.” To put it in plain red-neck English, “Hell, as bad as things are, if I fool around and make changes, things are gonna get a whole lot worse.”
This is best illustrated in a standard psycho-dynamic explanation of why a woman stays in an abusive relationship. She usually has such low self-esteem that unconsciously she feels she deserves nothing any better. In fact, if she manages to extricate herself from one abusive relationship, she will end up in another one very quickly. Some unfairly and unkindly opine, “Well, that is what she asks for.” But she is merely caught in. or trapped in, what Freud call a “repetition compulsion”, repeating a pattern of behavior which recapitulates an emotional trauma that she lived through.
Scott Peck said in The Road Less Traveled that neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering. He was suggesting that suffering is a basic part of life and that enduring pain from time to time is just part of life. Failure to do so is to get blocked or “stuck” in life.
The key to gaining release is always to “feel” the pain, the avoidance of which keeps one locked in a maladaptive behavior pattern. Or. to use a popular bromide, “No pain, no gain.”
literary lew 