Category Archives: religion

Redemption in Marriage

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Boundaries are so important. I think that the concept of boundaries is relevant to every problem that mankind deals with, even on the biological level. Even cancer is a boundary problem as those bastard cells are running amok and will devour everything in sight. And certainly on an emotional/spiritual level, boundaries explain most if not all of our maladies.

One simple clinical intervention I used when in practice was to try to teach some simple little boundary for a client to set in his life. This could be something as simple as planting a flower and caring for it, this simple act of “caring” being one bit of order in a life that often had little structure.

And then I like to think of marriage as a boundary setting on a grand scale. I see marriage as an imposition of order on chaos, two disparate individuals with their own whims and fancies about life, choosing to commit to the “arbitrary circle of a vow.” (W. H. Auden) If this vow can be honored, marriage can be a container in which two individuals mature together and resolve many of the interior haunts they brought into the union. In short, marriage can be redemptive.

Let me close with an excerpt from a poem by Edgar Simmons entitled, “Bow Down to Stutterers”:

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

Creation and the Fall

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One of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the Apollo 8 mission to the moon on December 24, 1968,  I was gripped by the majesty of this technological accomplishment and the sheer beauty of the moon from such a close perspective and even more so of the beautiful earth floating so freely in the void.  This was a very humbling experience for me and I will never forget it.  A very important part of the event was the stirring reading by the three astronauts of Genesis 1:1-10.  I’ve always been captivated by those verses and have been even more so since that moment.

I love this creation story.  I find creation stories in all human culture fascinating and revealing.  We have always had this deep-seated need to explain our origin and thus make more sense out of what the hell we are doing here.  It is very hard to accept that perhaps this information is not available to us, that “flaming cherubim and seraphim” keep us from returning there and revisiting the Garden of Eden.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a marvelous little book entitled Creation and the Fall in which he speculated about creation, the fall, and mankind’s quest to escape his existential predicament.  He argued that mankind is aware that he is caught in the “in the middle” and is anxious about the beginning and the end.  I’ve read others who have described this status as being caught in the “in between” or the “metaxy”.  Mankind is obsessed with getting back to that beginning and understanding and explaining it and therefore “owning” it in some manner.  But we are trapped, fated to wonder the earth knowing that “our little life is rounded in a sleep.” (Shakespeare)

T.S. Eliot offered a thought on this notion.  He said, “Man’s curiosity searches past and future and clings to that dimension. ” For “past and future” is but a single dimension, the time-space continuum from which we cannot escape try as we may.  I’m made to think of Jim Morrison’s song, “Break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side, break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side.”  Morrison’s heart hungered to “break on through” and that is what drove him to drugs and alcohol. He could not accept being trapped like the rest of us, he could not accept “the fall” into space and time.

Silence is Golden

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Aeschylus once said, “The gods create tragedy so that men will have something to talk about.”  Well, I want to update his observation and append the following,  “And then cable tv news was created so that the chatter could go on endlessly.”  Actually, I’m hoping that in about ten thousand years, this wisdom will be,  “The gods originally created tragedy so that men would have something to talk about. And then sometime later they created cable tv news so that the chatter would be non-stop”  and that the wisdom will then be attributed to “Literarylew.”  You know, Aeschylus could be forgotten as will ultimately be the case with all of us, small fry or large fry!

Seriously, I’m so conscious of how much my mind is filled with chatter.  This is so very apparent since I started to seriously attempt to meditate and discovered the Buddhist “monkey mind” always chattering away; a blog-o-sphere friend recently posted re “the rush of a thousand voices”.

We are so afraid of silence even though it is only in silence that we find our Source.

We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.
Nicholas Spark, The Notebook
―

Paean to Ignorance

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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.

Pithy, annoying truth

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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

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“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.”

Churches and “group think”

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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.

More on spiritual incest

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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.

Dangers of Spiritual Incest

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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)

Hermeneutical Integrity

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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)