Category Archives: poetry and prose

Internal differences where the meanings are

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“The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.”  Henri Nouwen recognized that the Spirit of God is a Presence that makes one aware of his/her inner life which, of course, parallels an awakening awareness to the outer world.  Some see this “Presence” as “coming down from on high” and intruding or violating.  They see it in terms of time and space.  I see it as interior process beginning to unfold and making one aware of his/her heart’s machinations and subtleties.  There is a verse from the New Testament (Hebrews 4:12) which recognizes this discriminating work of the Spirit, “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.”

 To be “mindful” of “the thoughts and intents of the heart” is simple awareness.  It is to pay attention.  It is to turn off the “automatic pilot” that we’re accustomed to operating by.

Emily Dickinson put it this way:

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the heft
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pithy truth

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“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”    (Da Vinci)

“There is no truth that cannot be turned into a lie if you just take it seriously enough.”(Anitra L. Freeman)

“And Truth met him, and held out her hand.  And he clung in panic to his tall beliefs and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”     W. H. Auden

 

The Power of Now

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I refer often to Eckhart Tolle, especially his best-selling book, The Power of Now.  The central emphasis of this book is that our culture is captivated by our orientation to past and future.  (T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets notes, “Time past and time future” and then claims that we “cling to that dimension.”)  And Tolle is only one of numerous gifted souls, men and women, who are aware of the shallowness of our particular culture and the unwillingness of organized religion to address the ensuing spiritual malaise.

Tolle emphasizes “the Now”.  Though he recognizes the importance of past and future and the imperative that we pay proper respect to “that dimension”, he encourages us to look below the surface, beyond the pale of the normal hum-drum of day to day life, and recognize the present moment.

But this is a very subversive notion.  It flies in the face of our most basic assumptions about life and suggests that there is more to life than meets the eye.  This “subversive function” is paid lip-service to in theological and ecclesiastical circles as the “prophetic function” of the gospel.  But most churches and spiritual teachings are unwilling to take on this “subversive function”, preferring to amuse themselves with the gospel-eze version of those “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”  (Conrad Aiken)

It is astounding that a book of this sort has been so well-received.  It speaks of the hunger of the modern human heart, a hunger that is rarely addressed with traditional religion.   However, I do believe that this heart-hunger could be addressed with many world religions…and certainly the Christian tradition…but it would require a clergy that was willing to follow Jesus (and other Holy men and women throughout the ages) into a desert experience.

W. H. Auden summarized it so beautifully:

ll those who follow me are led

Onto that glassy mountain where are no

Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread

Where knowledge but increases vertigo:

Those who pursue me take a twisting lane

To find themselves immediately alone

With savage water or unfeeling stone,

In labyrinths where they must entertain

Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

“humility is endless”

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Richard Rohr, a Catholic monk, is one of the most discerning spiritual teachers in today’s public forum.  His book, The Naked Now, is a powerful explanation of the need of “non-dual thinking” in today’s world.  “Non-dual thinking” eschews the tendency to bifurcate the world into categories, especially the oft spoken of “us-them” paradigm.  He also has a daily blog and will also send you a daily meditation which is always right to the point and powerfully worded.

In today’s meditation he declared, “When you truly know, the giveaway is that you do not know.  And by “do not know” he means that you “do not know.”  There is a pseudo-humility available in which you announce that “you do not know” but in the depths of your heart you are very sure of yourself and willing to pound people with the fact that “you do not know.”  This is just another version of Tolle’s “egoic consciousness” masquerading in liberal sophistry.

The “not knowing” he is advocating is a simple awareness that you do not know anything ultimately and that you are only offering one perspective.  Many others will have a different perspective and they too are blessed by God’s Grace.

It is our task to merely be willing to share our perspective here and there but not to get carried away with it and begin to wield it as a weapon.  When we do that we are merely another example of pig-headed fundamentalists attempting to bludgeon others into our world view.

T.S. Eliot, in The Four Quartets, declared, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility.”  And then he noted, “And humility is endless.”

Loss and spiritual experience

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Recently in a blog I borrowed a line from one of Donovan’s songs from the ‘sixties (First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.) and translated it into, “First there is a God, then there is no God, then there is.”    I was addressing the need to recognize that we learn a conceptual god early in our life, and must lose that god if we are to know God.  Someone has actually written a book about this subject, Anatheism:  Returning to God after God.

Richard Kearney delved into religion, philosophy, and literature to address the need of undergoing loss at some point in one’s spiritual development.  This loss, known in theology as kenosis (or self emptying) is articulated elegantly by Etty Hillesum, and quoted by Kearney:

One has to free oneself inwardly of everything, of all existing representations, of all slogans, of all comforts.  One has to have the courage to let go of everything of all standards and all conventional certainties.  One has to dare taking the giant leap…then life will be endlessly overflowing, even amidst the deepest suffering.

And Hillesum knew what she was talking about.  This was not an armchair hermeneutics exercise for her—she suffered persecution in Germany for being Jewish and eventually died in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 29.

T.S. Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets that we must be willing to “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”  The thing most certain for some—god—often needs to be discarded so that—God—might surface.

It is only in loss that we come to know our Source intimately.

Review of novel, Middlesex

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Jeffrey Euginides book, Middlesex, is about the integration of an extended family of immigrants into American culture in the 20th century, from the perspective of an hermaphrodite.  The fictional narrative of the social and political upheavals of the 20th century is fascinating in itself.  But the most powerful punch of the book is about the narrator’s sexuality and his/her struggles in adjusting to the cultural mandates re gender and sexuality.

Euginedes makes the reader vividly aware of how tenuous our sexual identities are and how intense the social pressure is to conform to the prevailing mandates on this issue.  He delves into the biology of sexuality and gender and its powerful influence on what it means to become male, female, or some combination thereof.

By tackling sexual/gender identity, he assails one of the lynch-pins of what I like to describe as “the way things are.”  This palpable entity is a template through which we see the world in our day to day life.  It consists of myriads of basic assumptions that we subscribe to, and to which we must subscribe, if we are to become human.  And sexuality and gender identity are two of the most basic of these “basic assumptions.”  Common sense tell us what it is to me a man or a woman.  But, Euginedes makes us very aware of just how specious and culturally determined “common sense” is.

One reason that hyper-conservatives are so virulently opposed to the gay-rights issue is because in the depths of their heart it addresses the issue of what is real and what is un-real.  To let go of this lynch-pin (sexuality and gender identity) is to accept that real and unreal are very nebulous terms  It would entail accepting what the sociologists describe as The Social Construction of Reality.  ( book by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman)

Note:  Forgive me for not delving into the difference between gender identity and sexuality!