Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

Resting in His Grace

2 Replies

A friend of mine in the blog-o-sphere has entitled his blog, “Resting in his Grace.”  I was reading his post this morning and the title itself spoke to me as a friend of mine is currently experiencing first-hand a powerful manifestation of this grace.  My dear friend, “KW” is dying, and he is doing so with the “grace of God” so clearly present in his life.

I should explain that KW and I grew up in a similar conservative religious environment in Arkansas.  Both of us did the obligatory “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” when we grew up and went to college and discovered there was a world outside of Arkansas.  But as we aged, we continued to have a spiritual dimension to our life and in recent years we frequently mused about holy writ from all religions, certainly including Christianity.  And in these final days and weeks of KW’s life, certain little tidbits of biblical lore have found meaning for both of us.

One of these tidbits was “grace” and I had the pleasure of sharing with him one of my favorite poems (The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry) which so beautifully conveys the grace found in the world of nature.  One line from this poem notes how animals do not “tax their lives with forethought of grief” and I think this is a fundamental dimension of grace.  We humans live day to day well aware that our life is very fragile and will come to and end sooner or later and only grace will allow us to not “tax our life with forethought of” that particular grief.

KW has battled this monster cancer for over a year now and he has wrestled with the full gamut of human emotions.  He has been very angry.  He has told me of throwing one huge fit in the backyard of his place, enraged at God. He has had “pity parties” from time to time.  He has been depressed on occasion.  But he has come to peace with his mortality and now he is comfortably ensconced in the grace of God.  It has been deeply moving to be part of this experience and this will help me immensely as I approach that point in my own life.

Getting Un-stuck

1 Reply

This morning I was “conversating” with a friend I have met in Sunday School.  This friend also grew up in a conservative Christian church but now subscribes to a different faith orientation as I do.  Meditation is a key emphasis in our Sunday School class and we commiserated this morning about the pronounced resistance we often face in disciplining our “monkey minds” to meditate.

Personally speaking, meditation meets fierce resistance in my heart as if something deep inside views it with fear and disdain, as if every fiber of being finds it anathema.  I think this is because of deep-seated old recordings from my youth in which anything like “meditation” had the ring of “Eastern” and “non-Christian” and was therefore “of the devil.”

But now I see meditation as a primary direction in my spiritual life, as a key element in the development of my spirituality. I see it as the next step for me to take in the experiencing of my Source, in achieving a very paltry, limited experience of the Incarnation, of the “word being made flesh.”  And this resistance I see in Pauline terms as spiritual warfare.  To borrow the words of Paul, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me, or, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.”  For the Pauline term the “old man” is merely a term for resistance, that stubborn energy constellation that seeks to perpetuate itself, to resist change and maturity.  It is the “letter of the law” resisting the “spirit of the law”

Now still another term I like to use, from modern-day clinical colloquial jargon, is “stuck” or “stuck-ness.”  We tend to live our life in a “stuck” mode and it is very hard to get dislodged.  This is because we tend to live life on automatic pilot and our “automatic pilot” does not was to lose its autonomy.  You could think of this automatic pilot as a constellation of energy which wants to continue to discharge in the pattern to which it is accustomed.  Other relevant terms are “neurosis” or “maladaptive behavior patterns.”

And though relationships with other people, especially close and intimate relationships are essential in addressing these “stuckness”, we are ultimately alone as we battle these demons.  As Shakespeare noted in Macbeth:

MACBETH
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorry,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of the perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

Political Polarization and Spirituality

Leave a reply

I am following this political brouhaha closely this year in part because it is such a look-see into the human psyche, individually and collectively. I’ve said many times, “We wage the war we are” (W. H. Auden) and that is true also on the individual and collective levels.

I’m really appalled at the overt hostility present today in the political process, the unabashed hatred of O’Bama in particular. At times, on the extreme, it is not even subtle. And I look at the other side…my side…and I see that we too, the “good guys” (wink, wink)…are dug in at the heels also. I recently casually noted to a couple of friends that the real problem in our country is a spiritual problem. But, I quickly backed down, realizing how dorky that sounded. And, merely trotting out the words “spiritual problem” can sound kind of dorky.

But, let me say the same thing but in different words. We have a problem of “values”. The issue is, “What do we value, individually and collectively?” Our need is some unifying ultimate value, “Ultimate” if you please, toward which we can strive individually and collectively. Without this Ultimate value we are inevitable fragmented and any collective purpose is difficult to achieve. Now as far as naming this “Ultimate Value” I have no problem with the word “God”. But that word has been so banalized and vulgarized that many people find it off-putting.

And let me close with a John Masefield sonnet which explains why this word has become so banalized, so vulgarized:

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things held in awe.

Masefield saw that so often the object of our worship, our “highest value”, or “God”, is merely our self.

Truth is stunning

Leave a reply

Czeslaw Miloz said, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” He knew truth always comes as a shock, piercing our zone of silence and stunning us for a moment. After that moment of stunned silence we usually right ourselves and resume our path as if nothing had happened, content to be ensconced in “the glib speech of habit, the well worn of words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

Miloz was echoing W. H. Auden’s words, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose word, caught unawares, we prick ourselves alive.”

Let’s hope and pray for a little “exposure” today, the sound of a “pistol shot” in our heart, and the brief dawn of coming alive.

Richard Rohr on Humility

1 Reply

I quote Richard Rohr more than any contemporary spiritual leader. Once again I strongly recommend that you subscribe to his free daily blog as it is always very insightful and very encouraging. He says everything I could ever say and says it much better and much more succinctly.

In his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he noted, “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. In my position, I have no other way of spotting both my well-denied shadow self and my idealized persona.”

Rohr is very attuned to the pernicious presence of the ego in all spiritually-inclined people and is forthright about wrestling with his own ego daily. I think that his daily prayer for “one good humiliation a day” is his way of asking for his eyes to be opened daily to his own frailty and egotism. For, it is often very humiliating when this happens to someone, especially one who holds himself/herself forth as a “spiritual person.”

I do not think he is calling for us to deliberately go out and humiliate ourselves each day. He is merely asking us to pay attention, to be honest with ourselves, to practice “mindfulness” and be prepared to embrace the subjective experience of a sudden illumination about our own “flesh” being hard at work in our spiritual practice. This might be merely being taken aback, or given pause, or embarrassed, or yes it might be occasionally humiliating. It might even be as simple as a “Rick Perry moment” when we have to say “oops” to some obviously self-serving spiritual enterprise.

T. S. Eliot noted in The Four Quartets:

Oh the shame of motives late revealed,
And the awareness of things ill done
And done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

The Shadow, per Richard Rohr

Leave a reply

The shadow is always with us.  It is that dark side that we all loathe and are prone to projecting “out there” on our favorite scapegoat.  Karl Jung and many others have taught the need to “withdraw your projection” and embrace that dark side.

Richard Rohr writes in Falling Upward:  A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life:

Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see….Be especially careful of any idealized role or self-image, like that of minister, mother, doctor, nice person, professor, moral believer…These are huge personas to live up to, and they trap many people in lifelong delusion.

This delusion makes me thing of Emerson’s fear (or was it Thoreau???), that “I will come to the end of my life and realize that I have not lived life at all, but somebody else’s life.” (paraphrasing).

And Rohr does not have any problem with, for example, “nice persons”.  His concern is that a genuinely nice person will need to embrace the shadow side of “nice” and embrace the fact that at times he/she is less than “nice.”  But our pretensions die hard.  They die hard.  W. H. Auden noted, “And Truth met him and held our her hand and he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

Social Awkwardness & the GOP

Leave a reply

One of my favorite vignettes from The Simpsons TV show is Mr. Burns attempting to curry favor with his rank-and-file employees. His role in the show is that of the mega-billionaire owner of the local nuclear power plant and thus his arrogance and obnoxiousness is stretched to the max by the writers. But in this scene he has decided that he needed to be seen as “one of the boys” at the plant and so he sidles up to a small group of workers. Social banter is underway and Burns seizes the moment to offer an overture, “Hey, how ‘bout that local sports team, eh?”

Romney is socially awkward and stumbles in this social arena so often that I actually fill sorry for him. (I really liked that bit about “even the trees are the right height!”) The press just pillories him and I’m sure his party leaders just grimace every time he speaks publicly. But, heck, there is nothing wrong with being socially awkward! And I can live with that if he happens to persevere and when the nomination and election. It takes tremendous courage to trot yourself out every day, know that you have a problem of this sorts…and continue to show up. I admit it, I would just want to run to a corner of the playground and cry.

Ronald Laing once wrote extensively about social interactions and taught that to function socially…at least in an adroit manner…one had to offer a “tenable performance.” For, even though one might not be ostracized to the same degree as with sociopathy, maladroit performances make people, i.e. the “social body,” uncomfortable. And those who cannot muster a “tenable performance” might not be imprisoned or executed, but they will have a real problem is achieving the heights of Romney. How he has done it so far I can’t really explain. Other than perhaps money.

Nuances of Prayer

2 Replies

We are inextricably caught up in the time-space continuum.   Everything we think,
do, and say is influenced by our bondage to this master. It is called
“reality.”

When we pray, for example, we tend to think of God as “Someone” who is “out
there” and I remember some in my youth who appeared to even think it was
necessary to raise one’s voice in prayer as if volume made a difference. And
then “earnestness” was an issue—if we prayed with the utmost passion and
sincerity, the fervor itself would make a difference. And, of course, we had to
“live right” or God certainly would not hear us!  We had not heard of T.S. Eliot who described prayer as “more than an order of words, or the sound of the voice praying, or the conscious occupation of the praying mind.”

The nuances of language are very revealing, even in prayer, as they reveal our
attitude, our spiritual perspective. This led to a change in my word
selection when I prayed for someone else. For example, if I prayed for a friend
or relative back then who was in distress, I prayed, “Lord, send your Spirit to
comfort them.” But, I now see that God’s Spirit is not time-bound as we are and will not be sent anymore than He already has been sent.  Therefore, I now pray, “Lord, may he/she be aware of your Presence today and feel your Spirit’s healing, comforting touch.”

For God is always with us. He is intrinsic to our being itself. All we have to
do to commune with Him is to merely get out of the way.

Meditative prayer…again!

Leave a reply

I have often quoted a line from Hamlet re prayer.  King Claudius is on his knees, in prayer, saying, “My words fly up.  My thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

That is a very subtle observation as is often the case when something is profound.  Shakespeare noted the distinction between a prosaic, formal, perfunctory prayer and one that is essentially meditation, “thoughts” and “words” conjoined.   Richard Rohr’s blog posting of today presents this notion more eloquently:

In what is commonly called prayer, you and your hurts, needs, and perspectives are still the central reference point, not really God. But you have decided to invite a Major Power in to help you with your already determined solution! God can perhaps help you get what you want, but it is still a self-centered desire, instead of God’s much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13, Matthew 7:11). It always takes a bit of time to widen this lens, and therefore the screen, of life.

One goes through serious withdrawal pain for a while until the screen is widened to a high-definition screen. It is work to learn how to pray, largely the work of emptying the mind and filling the heart—that is prayer in one concise and truthful phrase. Or as some say, “pulling the mind down into the heart” until they both operate as one.

Faith and doubt

Leave a reply

I was taught in my youth that faith and doubt were incompatible.  Now, I find they go hand-in-hand.  I feel that faith without doubt is largely dishonest, or as Sartre described it, “Bad faith.”

And note what Unamuno had to say on the subject:

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe in the God idea, not God himself. ~Miguel de Unamuno

And William Butler Yeats puts this truth so pithily:

Oh God, guard me from those thoughts

Men think in the mind alone.

He who sings a lasting song

Must think in the marrow bone.