Category Archives: religion and spirituality

A Van Gogh Observation about Christ

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I think that Christians can learn a lot about their faith from people from outside of the fold, people who have not been “Christianized” into their faith much like a machine-line product. Those of us raised in a Christian culture have to be careful that our faith is not merely something that we have imbibed from the atmosphere of our life much like other parts of our identity—gender roles, political affiliation, affiliation with the “local sports team”, etc.

Now I am not at artist though I am married to one and have learned a lot from her as I have had to recognize and learn to live with someone who looks at the world differently than I do. She also brings a different perspective to my faith from time to time, not having been “Christianized” as I have been. And I receive weekly emails from another artist, Robert Genn, who also has interesting things to share about space which are often relevant to spirituality. Today I want to share with you an observation about Jesus made by Vincent Van Gogh which I found really interesting. He saw Jesus as an artist but an artist whose medium was the human spirit and life.

I can well understand that you were a trifle surprised to hear how little I liked the Bible, although I have often tried to study it more thoroughly. Only its kernel—Christ—seems to me, from an artistic point of view, to stand higher than, or at any rate to be somewhat different from Greek, Indian, Egyptian, and Persian antiquities, although these also stood on a very high plane. But, I repeat, this Christ is more of an artist than all artists—he worked in living spirits and bodies—he made men instead of statues.

(This quote shared by one of my favorite bloggers, a Quaker who lives in England, whose blog is titled, “Finding God in 365 Days”)

“I Want to Know it All!”

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I discovered another wonderful poem, this time on Krista Bennet’s blog, “On Being.”  The author is Marie Howe who is the poet laureate of the state of New York:

 

MAGDALENE–THE SEVEN DEVILS
by Marie Howe
“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” —Luke 8:2.
The first was that I was very busy.
The second — I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.

The third — I worried.
The fourth – envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too – its face. And the ant – its bifurcated body.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.
The second that I might make the wrong choice,
because I had decided to take that plane that day,
that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early
and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.
The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
the house would blow up.
The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer of skin
lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth — if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh — I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that was alive and I couldn’t stand it,

I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word – cheesecloth –
to breath through that would trap it — whatever was inside everyone else that
entered me when I breathed in

No. That was the first one.

The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened? How had our lives gotten like this?

The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it – distinct, separate from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.

The second was that the laundry was never finally done.

The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.
And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was
love?

Someone using you as a co-ordinate to situate himself on earth.

The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong
to anyone.

Historians would assume my sin was sexual.

The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.

The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.

The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying.
The sound she made — the gurgling sound — so loud we had to speak louder to hear each other over it.

And that I couldn’t stop hearing it–years later –
grocery shopping, crossing the street –

No, not the sound – it was her body’s hunger
finally evident.–what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath —that was the first devil. It was always with me.
And that I didn’t think you— if I told you – would understand any of this –

Once again I’m captivated by someone else who is haunted like me by the knowledge that there is something “out there” or, as she put it, “underneath,” that “none of us could ever know we didn’t know.” And suddenly I’m almost a child again and can see myself curling up on the kitchen floor, screaming at the top of my lungs to God, “Why not? Why not? I’m gonna hold my breath until you let me!” For, this is a childish impulse, probably not unrelated to that age-old quest for the “knowledge of good and evil” which got us all into this mess in the first place!

But, it won’t ever happen. We will not know it all, we will not wrap out head around this marvelous mystery that we are caught up in. Even in his death throes, Hamlet, reflecting Shakespeare’s penchant for wrapping his head around the whole of human experience, lamented that “things remaining thus unsaid will live behind me.” Hamlet had so much more to say but had run out of time. (And, he could have said more had he not been driven by that unconscious need to satisfy his incestuous need and vanquish the interloper to his desire, Claudius. But even then, not “all” of it could have been said for there is always “more” to be said, endlessly “more.”)

We always come back to limits. The heart of man has boundaries as a core issue and spends his lifetime learning to accept them, knowing in the depths of this heart that the ultimate “limit” will eventually prevail and he will return to the dust from which he was made. But until that moment we are hard-wired to “keep on truckin’” and the will to life often continues even after our conscious mind fades into oblivion. As bad as it might appear to be at times, we always prefer to “cling to these ills that we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

 

“Thoughts Are Things. Choose the Good Ones”

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I receive an email each day from a New Age “guru” named Mike Dooley. I don’t always read his missive, but do check in from time to time as I find some of his observations very timely. And I love the quotation he concludes each email with, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.” This pithy observation summarizes his central message, that our thoughts control us and that we do have control over our thoughts….or can have more control that we often think we do.

Here is his email of a few days ago:

Dominion over all things doesn’t come with age, spirituality, or even gratitude. In fact, it doesn’t come at all. You were born with it and you use it every moment of every day, whenever you say, “I will…I am…I have…” And for that matter, whenever you say, “It’s hard…I’m lost…I don’t know…” And he wittily concludes with, “Careful where you point that thing!”

The “thing” he is referring to is our mind, or better yet, our heart which makes the “decision” of which thoughts to pack into our quiver each day. Now this “packing” is usually an unconscious process but if we will slow down, pause, and pay attention to our heart we can begin to notice how certain thoughts and patterns of thoughts are predominating in our life, not all of which are productive, not all of which are even “nice” to others and even to ourselves.

The Bible tells us, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Popular lore offers the bromide, “Our thoughts become us.” Shakespeare noted, “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And even Henry Ford had very astute wisdom on the note, tell us, “Whether you think you can, or think you can;t—either way you’re right.”

 

The Angst of Duality and Rumi

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I feel like a broken record. Thinking back over my two years of blogging I realize there are certain themes that keep coming back, themes which are obviously very important to me, themes which one could even say haunt me. One of these themes is that life is not as it appears to be, that it is always something that is going on beneath the surface which must by design always elude us. It is kind of like a cat chasing its own tail; or better yet, the quest for it is like the mythological euroboric image of the snake trying to swallow its tail. I sometimes want to tell myself, “Hey! Stop this! Get a life! Get out there and make some money, watch a lot of reality TV, go ahead, drink that Kool-Aid.

And, spiritual lore in which I’m steeped even warns of the futility of spiritual obsession. For example, the Buddhist koan notes the lunacy of “riding an oxen, searching for an oxen,” the point being, “Hey, just quit trying! Don’t waste your effort. The thing you search for is already there. As W. H. Auden noted, “The Center that you cannot find is known to the unconscious mind. There is no need to despair for you are already there.”

From a clinical perspective, this quest can even be thought of as schizophrenic in nature and it is no accident that schizophrenics often have spiritual themes in their fantasies. The schizophrenic is trapped in a bifurcated world, not able to find his/her place in the “real” world and subjected to the torment of living in a hinterland, constantly buffeted by the daily torments that his “delusional” system presents to him.

So, let me demonstrate my venturing into another day of such mental machinations and share with you a beautiful poem by Rumi who too recognized the presence of this shadow world, insisting that it was the real one that we should give more respect to.

The Self We Share

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.

The cave wants nothing to do with the sun.

This is dumb, the self- defeating way
we’ve been.

A gold mine is calling us into its temple.
Instead, we bend and keep picking up rocks
from the ground.

Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source!

The origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give.

The bite of scolding makes ecstasy more familiar.

But look, fish, you’re already in the ocean:
just swimming there makes you friends with
glory.

What are these grudges about? You are Benjamin.
Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack and
accused you of being a thief.

Now he draws you aside and says,
‘You are my brother. I

am a prayer. You’re the amen.’

We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here.

This is the prayer of each:

You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud.

You honor my soul. You bring rivers from the
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.

The wine you offer takes me out of myself into
the self we share. Doing that is religion.

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

 

Is it Feelings or “Old-brain” Passion run amok

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“He who feels strongly behaves.” Marianne Moore wrote a beautiful poem about intense emotion and the heart’s ways of accommodating that intensity. She used beautiful watery imagery of those intense emotions doing battle with structure and describes them as “surrendering” but noted that “in its surrendering, finds its continuing.”

I think here a distinction must be noted between raw, unmediated passion which Freud would have called “drive energy” and feelings or emotions. Feelings are the product of the primal energy but they have been “processed” by our neurocortical machinery and can find expression in an “appropriate” fashion. Admittedly “appropriate” is a nebulous term and many people of mature, strong feelings must push the limits of “appropriate” to give expression to their feelings and to accomplish their purpose.

I have written lately of my three-decade long escape from “literallew” who preceded this present altar ego. And now I often have intense emotion burgeoning forth in my heart and life, emotion so intense that at times I don’t know what to do with it. Yes, it rattles my cage on occasion and besets me with a lot of anxiety. But I am blessed with the ability to listen to Ms. Moore’s directive and “behave”…most of the time! And my “behaving” includes a lot of attention to my daily devotional which I describe as “chopping wood, carrying water.” And I love T. S. Sliot’s wisdom on how to respond to intense religious emotional sentiment, telling us we have to offer only, “Prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.” And these actions, in my case, usually find me deeply immersed in “Mother Earth” and caring for her and her creatures, flora and fauna.

WHAT ARE YEARS
By Marianne Moore

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,

 

Simone Weil and Detachment

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Simone Weil once said, “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can only be attained by someone who is detached.” I have not read Weil at length though I think I will, having come across this statement this morning. And though I’m going to be critical of the tenor of her thought, I deeply admire her passionate faith and stubborn commitment to her beliefs. She definitely thought “out of the box” and, yes, I’m sure that her “god spot” was usually in over-drive. Yes, if prozac had existed back then, she could have had the gentle life of a nun, or school marm, or doting mother to occupy that mind that was fated to run amok with “big thoughts.”

I too am “detached” much like Ms. Weil but I have come to believe that one needs to be careful with any approach to life lest he/she take it (and self) too seriously and thus relegate everyone else to the category of “them” where, I am sure, there will always be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Even more so, a clinical awareness would have told Ms. Weil just how careful she needed to be with this “detachment.”

Life is to be lived and not merely noted. This detachment is a necessary stance that we need to bring to life and is sorely lacking so often. But too much of it will leave one in the position of Emily Dickinson who lived her cloistered life in her father’s attic, noting on one occasion, “Life is over there, on a shelf.” She saw life as a mere curio on the shelf for idle amusement; and, yes, I’m glad she lived her life that way as it provided us stunning poetic observations about life. But the price tag for my dear friend Emily was a very isolated and lonely life.

This detached perspective on life usually involves an analytical mind, a mind which is obsessed with making “observations” which is merely imposing the categories of one’s own subjective imprisonment onto other people. And, “mea culpa” but mercifully I have learned, and will continue to learn how to turn this feature of my cognitive apparatus off from time to time and allow others to “be” in their own right.

This does not mean that my “detachment” is wrong. It is my “gift” though I am not for sure what I have done with it or will and sometimes in private reverie fear I will one day stand before that Great White Throne and hear God say, “Well, IlliterateLew, that is not what I had in mind for you at all!” This is just who I am and it carries a price as does any stance in life, any perspective, or “cognitive apparatus” that we trot out each day of our life. But I must remember as must each of us that there is always another way of looking at the world and each day and moment of our life we need to be conscious of the need to open up our world view and give more space to some of the people we meet and especially to the ones who closest to us. I recently read someone who suggested that the real, etymological meaning of the New Testament Word “repentance” was to “let go of your small mind” and take on a larger mind that is more inclusive. In other words, Jesus was saying, “Hey, look at life a different way. That person or persons who you have subjected to banishment into “them” need to be included, to be embraced by your approach to the world.”

 

“Failing Boldly” Has a Place!

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Once again, one of you blog-o-sphere friends has issue a “word fitly spoken” to me. In fact, several of you did that today! Here I am sharing a post by The Journey Home (http://elizabethsjourneyhome.wordpress.com/) in which she describes the anguish and reward of “failing boldly.” I can so relate to her experience on the stage as a youth though I have never found the courage and humility to dive into the morass of my own subjective world as she did that day. (I shared with her a brief poem on the subject of failure by E.L. Mayo, “Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.”

FAIL BOLDLY by Elizabeth

My first memory of failure is from Grade 9. I failed a Science test. I’ll never forget the shame I felt. Like I was stupid, unable to do anything well, an idiot. That’s how failure made me feel that first time.

I think I was always kind of afraid of being a failure. I think we all are.

I spent high school watching my step and setting unreachable goals. And hoping I’d never fail again.

Then, I started university. And they told me that I had to fail to pass.

I don’t remember when they said it — whether it was during orientation, in my first acting class, or when I went for my advising session. But I know I heard this strange and impossible quote: Fail Boldly time and time again throughout September, October, November, and December.

I didn’t get it. Failure wasn’t good. I’d spent my life striving for just the opposite and I couldn’t imagine why anyone else wouldn’t.

Maybe they meant that you just had to be able to admit your mistakes and show that you were humble. Maybe failing boldly was just being able to laugh at your self. Maybe it wasn’t really “failure.” Perhaps it was just an artsy phrase or a figure of speech, I convinced myself and continued to hope for perfection. Because I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would ever want to fail on purpose.

I didn’t get it. My first monologue mark in the beginning of second semester reflected that. And I hated my work, felt like a failure, and considered giving up. I just couldn’t really, flat on my face, fail boldly.

The rest of the semester unfolded in a weird, tearful mess of beauty and growth. And slowly, I learned. I began to undo, to understand, and to fail.

I can’t explain it completely. But I do remember when I willingly failed boldly for the first time.

It was the end of March. The day had been bright and spring like. I’d memorized and learned and cried over a monologue for weeks. And now I stood, a bit breathless, a bit tired, a bit nervous, after the group audition, in the middle of the stage. I was alone and absolutely vulnerable. Right there, I lay one of my greatest hopes out and put myself on the clothes’ line. And as I opened mouth and began the text, I lay everything I had down and just let it go.

I had that actor’s moment where you don’t feel memorized and the words just slide out of your tongue as if you’re saying it for the first time. I stopped thinking about my audience or how I looked. I let myself be, for a moment. I felt a strange peace in my soul and my stomach, instead of the butterflies that usually reside there. I think I let the Holy Spirit in and it felt like He carried me on His wings.

And I think I failed. Boldly.

And I realized that failing boldly isn’t really what I thought it was after all. Failing is allowing yourself to be human. Its giving yourself the freedom to live and breath and let yourself move. Failing boldly is finding rest and growing and trying again. Its submitting yourself to the gift of Jesus and letting him take control of your life and future. Failing boldly is about grace and peace and life.

I don’t know if this is really what my professors meant about failing boldly. But this is what I learned when I tried. And as I think about this coming year, I hope to stay in this state, to tumble a bit, and fall on my face and then get back up again.

I hope you’ll try it too — failing boldly isn’t so bad as we thought

Another Paean to “Mama Earth”

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I stumbled across a lovely poem this morning about Mother Earth and our intricate relationship with her; specifically, we came from dust and will return to dust.  And, that evokes “grim” in some level of my heart but that is only because I was taught wrongly, taught that we are separate and distinct from the earth which is really a “grim” notion and will be fatally so if we, as a species, do not get our head out of our backside.  Seeing our “earthiness” is such as important discovery and is so very much the “Truth” for which we long.  I’m made to think of the words of W. B. Yeats who noted, “Throughout all the lying days of my youth I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.  Now, may I wither into the Truth.”

 

 

Agriculture Begins by Sasha West

Cleared forests and carbon for warmth
Rice in paddies and cows in pastures and the methane rising—

Failure evinces in the boy a tenderness towards the pig,
A need to kiss its soft ears and mouth.

And the family sleeps by the rotten grain,
And the workers breathe in the wasted cotton, the boles.

[Pause for the Black Death, as plows and shovels still, the world temporarily cools—]

The gods made land so we could bury in it—

From coal, release the old sunlight it holds and build again.

***

We till the fields and tend the fruit.

Bacon called the self “a grinding machine:”
One machine causes dreams of horses, another great sadness.

Returning, like Persephone,
To the scene of the crime, willingly, repeatedly.
I plant my body in the ground and in the spring I grow.

Like fire that burns the field, prepares it for crops, let the mind be seared by failure into readiness.

Smaller rabbits this year, fewer quail—

At last the animals starved by drought will eat the cactus, spines and all.

***

[crops that dissolved into earth with drought, crops that through mouths became winged things and flew, ice that wilted the lettuce, train car that stalled on tracks, water diverted to the city, that we had no wood for coffins, that I could keep no hens alive, that leaves become lace overnight, the field a gown with delicate feathers, mold that ruins the hay, in your lungs the blooms, in your lungs the delicate tendrils and trees from the mines]

***

Trees burned back to root. The long-drawn-out filaments of smoke. Saltbrush that chokes everything.

Egyptians covered mummies in wet linen to plant corn on,
Osiris sprouting green, flowers through the cloth.

Woodpeckers work to hollow the flesh of the tree.

Ten years of growth, ten years of fire.
The worst fire in the worst drought
Of recorded history.

[Cue: Each year, a new state’s announcer speaks this line.]

[Plant upon your gods, make them fields and keepers of the fields, if crops fail on the bodies of gods you have proof of earth acting upon you, proof of the sun’s vast power, proof of indifference and decay.]

—A scourge over the sky of birds and white ashy snow.

[Ancestors in the ground means you own the land.]

A slow combing through the dark warm soil—

Each year, we bury more of it.

Sasha West

 

Lessons from Poetic Obscurity

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I’ve always been drawn to obscure poetry and obscure observations, some of which linger with me years before I begin to understand them. They “linger” there on the periphery of my consciousness for they have something to offer me when I’ve matured enough to let their truth sink in. I now have three poems to offer here which I have always found “obscure” but now I feel I am beginning to understand what the writer was seeing. I’m going to share them here and offer my perspective on what they mean.

AS BAD AS A MILE
By Philip Larkin

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Show’s less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

I now see this Larkin poem as quite obvious. He was talking about mankind primordial before he had “bitten the apple” and fallen into the realm of time and space. Before we tasted that forbidden fruit, we were perfect, still living in the Uroboros, delighted in the Edenic delight of pure freedom. But the minute we succumbed to Eve’s charms (see, it’s always a woman, damn them!) we entered the realm of cause and effect, or time and space, and gained a formal introduction to failure. Now, this side of Eden, we never get it “right” but have it in our heart to try and have available stories of Grace which tell us each step along the way, “Hey, its ok. Hey, you are okay. Just keep on truckin’. You are forgiven. Something is underway that you can’t figure out with your finite mind.” Or, as T.S. Eliot said, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is none of our business.”

HOUSE
By E. L. Mayo
House
Vast and ambiguous
Which was before we were
Did you
Build yourself and then grow populous
By taking thought, or
Did someone leave a tap on long ago
In You
Which with its spatter
Affirms at the very least a householder
Who will return at the last if only to
Turn off the water.

This poem is about the very roots of our being, that subtle spirit of consciousness which is always there but always lies outside the grasp of our conscious mind. This is what we are when we are bereft of all the superficies of our existence and feel so very alone, comforted only by the intuitive knowledge that there is a “householder” who is the very ground of our being and that this “householder” is He Who unites us all ultimately.

Navigating by the Light of a Minor Planet

by Jessica Goodfellow

The trouble with belief in endlessness is
it requires a belief in beginninglessness.
Consider friction, entropy, perpetual motion.
And the trouble with holding to both is that
belief in endlessness requires a certain hope
while belief in beginninglessness ends in the absence of hope.
Or maybe it’s vice versa. Luckily,
belief in a thing is not the thing itself.
We can have the concept of origin, but no origin.
Here we are then: in a world where logic doesn’t function,
or else emotions can’t be trusted. Maybe both.
All known tools of navigation require an origin.
Otherwise, there is only endless relativity and then
what’s the point of navigation, in a space where
it’s hard to be lost, and even harder not to be?
Saying “I don’t want to be here” is not the same
as saying “I want to not be here.” It rains
and it rains and it rains the things I haven’t said.
By Jessica Goodfellow

No less a conservative Christian luminary than Dietrich Bonheoffer discoursed on the human dilemma of wanting to know and own his origin, to grasp it with his rational mind only to find that no one can “wrap his head around it.” Life is an incredible mystery and, though some of us find it amusing to wrestle with this mystery, ultimately we have to accept that mystery and recognize that we only “see through a glass darkly” and must busy ourselves with the Divinely “mundane” responsibilities of day to day life. Relativity is something one wrestles with if he pursues spiritual matters beyond the confines of his little ego. But, though we can “tippy-toe” in that bewildering world of doubt and despair…and some of us even take a swim in it from time to time…we have to come back to the only “real” that we know and act purposefully, knowing that we have an impact on this world.