Category Archives: religion

Truth is stunning

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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

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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.

Boundaries and spirituality

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Boundaries are such an essential part of life. That is what I enjoyed about Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell as he illustrates how boundary setting is so essential even on the biological, i.e. cellular, dimension of life.

I think it was Rollo May who likened the absence of boundaries to a river without banks. For, a river without banks is not a river any longer it is just a muddy bog, not useful for much if anything. Yet, if we set our boundaries too rigidly then we have merely imprisoned ourselves and again will not be very useful. We will be encapsulated in an autistic shell.

Martin Heidegger in Basic Writings made a very interesting observation about boundaries and spirituality. He said, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, a boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.” A boundary is a container that is necessary for spiritual unfolding, a vessel in which Divine purpose can be revealed. And if we don’t have boundaries, and if we don’t wrestle with boundary issues, our spirituality is going to pose real problems for ourselves and for others. I’m made to think of the Apostle Paul’s admonishment that “we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” “Fear and trembling” is just the anxiety that we experience as we wrestle with these boundaries.

My work as a therapist was merely about boundaries. My job was to help clients discover various boundary problems and to address these problems. And I might add that my work also involved a daily battle with boundary-setting myself.

One of my favorite verses from the Bible is from the Proverbs, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city without walls and broken down.” And we know what happened back then if the walls of a city was broken down back then—the enemy got in.

The Dialectics of Identity

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In yesterday’s blog I discoursed re Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell and the symbiotic relationship between the setting of boundaries and willingness to “relax” them for the sake of the collective. Someone once described this process as the competing drives for homeostasis and change and is relevant to the individual and the collective. If the drive for “homoeostasis” is unbalanced, the individual will be trapped in a static, autistic world. If the other need becomes predominant, the individual will be trapped in an incorporative mode of being in which “strange” is so needed that it overwhelms the ego. This individual will be trapped in perpetual “hunger.” This can even describe the addiction process.

On the collective level, I like to illustrate with politics and there is no better illustration than our current political and social polarization. To function healthily, a culture must have “conservative” forces present as well as “liberal” forces. There must be a tendency to “conserve” tradition but that tendency must be balanced by a willingness to engage with “strange” or “difference.” There must be a setting of boundaries but this boundary-setting must be balanced by a willingness to “relax” boundaries here and there. On one extreme there is stagnation and ultimate death. On the other extreme there is “change” run amok and ultimately death.

Re this dialectic of the collective noted above, there is an interesting article in today’s Washington Post newspaper. The article describes the conservative response of one Oklahoma community toward changes that seem to be threatening them. The article reported the citizenry’s anxiety, fear, and anger toward an over-reaching government, creeping socialism, and liberal values from that bastion of liberalism “up north in Norman.” But this was not a hatchet job on conservative values. It merely conveys to the reader the genuine sadness that some communities feel when their world view is perceived to be threatened. And on the same idea, you might find PBS’s American Experience from this past week as it portrays the Amish response to encroaching civilization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/to-residents-of-another-washington-their-cherished-values-are-under-assault/2012/03/01/gIQAsbhXlR_print.html

Sociobiology and Lewis Thomas

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Though I am steeped in the liberal arts, I have been increasingly curious about the biological sciences. Those of us who have “escaped” into abstraction must always remember that there is a biological dimension to all these “new-fangled ideas” that we revel in. One of my favorite books in biology dates back to 1963, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. Thomas vividly describes this “biological dimension” and suggests at times its inextricable relationship to human behavior, individually and collectively.

From this book I posit the notion that life itself is basically about the creation of boundaries and the evolution of these “boundaries” into increasingly complex relationships. These relationships require that boundaries be there in the first place but at the same it time means that these boundaries cannot be so rigid that communication between the various “boundaries”, or entities, is not possible. Either extreme leads to grave complications and ultimately death itself.

On an individual level this means that an ego, a specific identity that wells up from within a body, must have boundaries to exist psycho-socially. Without an ego we would have only a blob of proto-plasm with no process of differentiation that can lead to higher-order organisms and eventually human beings. But simultaneously this “ego” must not be too impermeable. It must be firm enough that it can quickly learn to endure Shakespeare’s “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” And for this “learning” to take place, this ego must not become a fortress but must be open to the world outside of itself, it must be a “human” at some point, a social creature.

I would like to here share one tidbit from the book itself, an observation about the Iks culture from Uganda. Thomas argues that impingement from the outside, “modernity”, encroached so much and so quickly on these people that they could not function. They devolved into a very reproachable, detestable tribe of erstwhile human beings. Their talk with each other was rude and self-serving, they stopped singing, they lost emotional connection with their children, and they even would defecate on each other’s doorstep. Thomas’ intention here is a demonstration on what will happen on the collective level if the outside world does not respect the boundaries of a specific culture. And the impact that the “victim” culture experiences depends on two things—-1) its own “ego-integrity” (the ability to handle feedback from the outside) and 2) the rapacity of the outside world.

The above example illustrates the “abuse” that one culture, or even the “world culture” at large, can impose on a particular culture. It also vividly illustrates what can happen on the individual level if a child, in particular,  is abused—sexually, physically, and even emotionally . In human terms, the “soul” gets ravaged and often the soul cannot function meaningfully any longer or is at least gravely impaired.

The “Peace of Wild Things”

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I have a penchant for worry. I tend to try to control myself with my mind, anticipating the future and making sure I’ve done everything possible to make it work out for me. This has been my orientation as far back in my life as I can remember. Yes, I’m a control freak. I must admit that at this point in my life I am learning that life is beyond my ability to control and that the very effort itself reflects the machination of my ego. Therefore, the old wisdom of Jesus is having additional meaning for me at this point in my life:
Matthew 6 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

I love watching the flowers coming to bloom, this process starting prematurely this year due to the very warm winter in North America. Daffodils are strutting their stuff already. (I recall plucking one of them years ago and having a very powerful subjective flash—-“Am I plucking this flower or is its exquisite beauty plucking me?”) And I thoroughly enjoy watching the birds cavort about in the yard, queuing up at the feeder on my deck, dashing in and out, soaring high in the sky, dancing to a nearby tree but sure to return for another bite. I’m struck by their intensity, by their striking colors, and their relentless determination to articulate “bird”in this corner of the world again.

These above verses from the gospel of Matthew reassure us that it is not necessary to worry and fret any more than do these birds and flowers. The Grace that they live in and emanate daily is available to all of us. I’m sure that this peace they have is related to what Wendell Berry had in mind in a poem, ascribing to the world of nature, “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” Berry understood that they do not live in terror of the inevitable end that is in store for them and the rest of His glorious creation, the stark finality of death.

But the teachings of Jesus (and other Holy men and women in our history) teach us that death is something that we should not fear, that it is not as stark as it appears, and something that actually can be accomplished before the end of our physical life. People like James Hillman, Karl Jung, Richard Rohr and many others posit the notion that the real issue, in the depths of our heart, is a willingness to let the ego die. They teach that the crucifixion represents symbolically the “death, burial, and resurrection” of the ego.

And I close with an observation from a psychologist of yesteryear, Irvin Yalom: those who are most afraid of death are actually terrified of life.

The Shadow, per Richard Rohr

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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.”

Charles Williams on “bibliolatry”

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One of the basic problems with biblical literalism is that its adherents often take themselves too seriously, so seriously that if you examine them closely it often appears to be all about them.  Sometimes they use their faith to bludgeon others into submission, into believing “right.”  As Goethe noted, “They call is Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

People with this theological/spiritual stance transfer their activities from themselves as a center to their belief as a center.  They use their anger on behalf of their religion, and their morals, and their greed, and their fear, and their pride.  It operates on behalf of its notion of God as it originally operated on behalf of itself.  It aims honestly at better behavior, but it does not usually aim at change.  (paraphrased from Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven)

And this leaves their faith lumped with what the Apostle Paul called “the works of the flesh.”

The sin of bibliolatry

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I really like the Bible.  Now able to approach it as an adult, I find that it offers profound wisdom about the human experience and has practical direction for day-to-day life.  But, I don’t feel you have to view it the same way and if you don’t…even should you burn it…I WILL NOT BE TRYING TO KILL YOU!

This recent “trouble” in Afghanistan re the accidental burning of the Koran reflects one of the problems that comes with being a “people of the book”, particularly those who are extreme literalists. I would never harm or deface the Bible; even if it was quite tattered and worn and I did not want to keep it, I would take it somewhere and leave it for someone else to make use of.  Yes, I am so traditional that I will always treat the Bible with reverence.  BUT IF YOU DO OTHERWISE, I WILL NOT BE ATTEMPTING TO KILL YOU!

The problem with this fanaticism is that the “holy writ” is taken to be sacred in itself, not being merely “words” that point one in the direction of the truth.  The literal words themselves are taken to be sacred.  The admonishment of the Buddha is not taken into account, “the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  Or, to use the words of Gabriel Marcel, “Words have meaning only when they ‘burgeon forth’ into a region beyond themselves.”  Therefore the word, for example, “G-o-d”, is not “God” but merely a sign/symbol that makes reference to that Ultimate Experience that we all hunger for and many of us find in some faint tenuous fashion from time to time in our life.  The “word is not the thing.”

Now this is relevant to personal identity and this issue itself is relevant to personal and collective identity.  For example, my name is Lewis but “L-e-w-i-s” is not “Lewis” as a name is only a sound that we have learned to respond to.  But if I am guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, I might venture to the extreme in which I would take my personal identity to be only memories of those subjective experiences that are evoked when I hear the sound “L-e-w-i-s”; or when I ruminate about myself.  And, if I have ventured to that point even  the sound “G-o-d” could come to mean the experience of “God” and I might have to kill you if you believed differently than myself!

Now actually, I’ve said all of that not to address the problem with other religions.  In our culture, and in the Christian tradition, there is the same tendency to be guilty of the sin of “bibliolatry.”  We definitely have extremes in our culture but thankfully we channel our anger and violence in such a way…that is, we “sublimate” it… that rarely is anyone in danger of being killed because of believing differently than ourselves.  But, beneath the surface the same arrogance, contempt and scorn are usually present.

Jacques Ellul addressed this issue in The Ethics of Freedom:

For we have to realize that Satan can use God’s truth itself to tempt man.  He even uses holy scripture…Thus obedience to the letter of scripture can be obedience to Satan if the text serves to bring about isolation and independence in relation to the one who has inspired it.  It can be a means of self-affirmation over against God in in repression of his truth and his will.  The biblical text, and obedience to it, do not guarantee anything.  They may be the best means of not hearing God speak.  (Ellul here points out that the Pharisees were) authentic believers, faithful adherents of scripture, and rich in good works and piety.  In reality everything depends on our attitude to the text of the scripture.  If I seize it, use it, and exploit it to my own ends...then I am obeying Satan under the cover of what the Bible says.  (Or, as Shakespeare noted, “With devotions visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.”)

Social Awkwardness & the GOP

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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.