Category Archives: religion and spirituality

A Dalliance with Meaninglessness

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My “church” yesterday was a discussion-group with some other retired people who are associated with the local Unitarian church. The announced topic for this occasion was, “How to find meaning in your life.”

Well, let me explain. This group was comprised of highly educated and successful men and women who were “imports” to Taos, New Mexico from various parts of the country. So it didn’t take but a few minutes for “literallew” to stir and want to announce with resolution and ardor, “Back to the bible! God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Of course I didn’t as I too do not look at life through the narrow prism of conservative thought and see…and feel…the ambiguity inherent in life. For an hour and a half we sincerely and honestly shared re our struggles for meaning through the course of our lives, struggles which continue today. Initially “literallew” did feel the leering glare of meaningless and want to revert to “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” But as the discussion deepened, my spirits actually lifted as we wrestled in the morass of meaning/meaninglessness.

On the way home I mused with my wife about why this discussion had lifted my spirits. And it was readily apparent—I felt connection! I realized…and felt…that I was in the midst of other human beings who had, and still do, wrestle with the same doubts and fears that I do. And there is a “nakedness” that is apparent in moments like this but a very appropriate “nakedness,” simple acknowledgement of human doubts and fears. And it is this “nakedness” that ultimately unites us all. Beneath the surface of our “strutting and fretting,” beneath the veneer of civilization, we are vulnerable, fragile little boys and girls who hunger to know that we are not alone.

This discussion demonstrated “faith” as I now see and feel faith to be. Now certainly many of these people would not describe themselves as persons of faith and even more so, certainly not “Christian.” Faith is the word I wish to use to describe their courage to live their life purposefully when life often appears to her without purpose.

Here is a perspective on the matter from T. S. Eliot in his Four Quartets:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

More Blasphemy!

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As I increasingly find comfort using my literary license to approach Holy Writ, I find that I’m leaving behind almost daily the carcass of sacred cows. And it dawned on me recently, as “literal lew” whispered to me again, that my view of faith appears to invalidate that of the people I grew up with. In the childish mind of “literal lew,” those people are “going to hell” while “I am saved because I believe the ‘right’ way.” For in that mind set, there is only one way to believe, one way to think, one way to feel and if you don’t comply you will immediately find yourself banished to the prison of “them,” not allowed to bask in the comfort of being one of “us.” In other words, you won’t have the comfort of belonging to the tribe.

But I don’t think that Jesus had in mind rigidly carving the world up into categories like “good”, “bad”, “us”, “them”, “saved” and “unsaved.” Jesus came to tell us that we were free and always had been as He was “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.” He was the embodiment, the “en-fleshment”, or incarnation, of a freedom that had been written into the depths of the human heart from the very beginning, a freedom that at that moment was finding an expression in terms of time and space. So, Jesus said, “You are free but freedom is very risky and takes a lot of courage. In fact, you will have to die. You will have die to your pre-conceptions about everything including your faith. But you don’t have to and I won’t make you. You are free to do as you choose. In fact, you are free to take my teachings and turn them into another version of the same bondage you are under now if you wish…possibly even under my name…but that is your choice.”

The conservative believers that gave rise to “literarylew” were and are just as saved as he is. The story of Jesus is that we are all forgiven, we are all free, but that freedom finds expression in our life only if we are willing to die, only if we are willing to allow His Spirit to loosen the grip of our ego a bit even in the area of our faith. But when the ego is threatened, it is very skilled at calling in reinforcements and fending off the assault as disillusionment is too painful. As W. H. Auden noted, “When Truth met him, and held out her hand, he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

NOTE — See I have blasphemed again! “Universalism” is verboten in the faith I was presented with as a child.

“Closed canon” equals a “closed mind/heart”

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n the “closed canon” reflects a refusal to venture beyond the confines of one rational consciousness, or even to consider the possibility that such an enterprise is possible. Emily Dickinson beautifully described this encapsulated, endungeoned mind/heart in the mid-nineteenth century with the following poem:

The Soul selects her own society,

Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

Her choice of words describing selective attention– “closing the valves of attention like stone”— is intensely vivid and cold. This is the quintessential person that Eric Hoffer had in mind when he wrote, “The True Believer.” These people live in a hermetically-sealed prison and will probably gravitate toward a social/denominational group in which people of a similar persuasion are similarly ensconced on “the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collected lie.”  (W.H. Auden) This is the “group lie” or “group think” which sometimes is described as “epistemic closure.”

This rigid certainty has infiltrated to conservative right of the American political spectrum which is replete with hyper-conservative religiosity. This close mindedness gave rise to the ludicrous phenomena in 2012 of running a presidential campaign whose slogan, upon close scrutiny, was simply, “We hate Obama.” In in the budget battle of last fall, more than one of them were quoted saying, “We are right” on the issue and in a key Republican committee meeting on the issue they concluded with prayer and a spontaneous singing of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” And it is no accident that this wing of the party is vehemently against scientists’ warning of global warming and are anti-science in general. They might well be saying, “God said,I believe it, that settles it.”

Life is uncertain. No matter how much we try to deny it, we are extremely vulnerable little critters whose biblically assured “threescore and ten” might prove considerably shorter at any moment. But it is this vulnerability that makes us alive, that reflects a “quickened” spirit, which is what Jesus had in mind with his observation that to find our life we must lose it.  As Norman Brown put it, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

 

 

 

 

Karl Jung: Our Life is a “Flimsy”

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This move to Taos, New Mexico has been every bit the adventure I had anticipated…and more. Yes, the “adventure” has been intense at times as I found that “literallew” is very much alive and kicking in the depths of my heart and does not like change. I wish that rascal would go away! (But, not really! He is a key element in my heart and always will be.)

One of the first discoveries I made out here was a Jungian study group that was being organized by a Jungian analyst who was trained at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. My wife and I joined the small group and proceeded to explore several chapters of Jung’s Tavistock Lectures. This experienced as renewed my interest in exploration of archetypal energies present in my own life and in life itself. Jung had a tremendous ability to explore the depths of the heart, having explored his own even to the point of nearly suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Jung believed that dreams were very revealing about what is going on in our life and will announce what our hidden issues are and will continue to do so until we address them. But in the current reading I have now discovered that he felt that life itself is but a dream, that even our conscious life is the playing-out of our unconscious fantasies and is itself a “fantasy” of sorts. This is what Shakespeare had in mind when he said that “our life is but the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Now of course, Jung was not nuts and realized that “reality” is just that, “real.” But he felt there was more to this “real” world than what most people realize but that most people prefer to live life on the surface, not daring to look beneath that surface and begin to explore those subterranean depths where monsters and ghouls roam about at will. But as Jung noted, “What we resist, persists” and so the hidden dimensions of our life always find expression “out there” in the world, usually in other people. My favorite example of this projection is what I call the Chicken Little phenomena, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I grew up in a sub culture in the American South where impending doom was a basic assumption of life, where “the judgment of God” was always imminent, where “the sky is going to fall” was a constant fear. I now see that this subtle assumption of that culture…and primarily its religion…reflected a deep pessimism about life and an awareness of just how precarious our grip on life was. This belief system reflected a deep-seated existential insecurity which always requires the compensation of rigid belief systems. The more uncertain you are in the depths of your heart, the more fiercely are you certain about your belief system. And to consider that someone else’s belief system might be equally valid would threaten this certainty, requiring that other belief systems must be opposed or demonized in some fashion.

Here is the full context of the Shakespearean quote above, from “The Tempest”:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Flight 370: An Existential Observation

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I’ve read some speculation in the press about why we are so “obsessed” with the flight 377 disaster. On this note, I always think of Aesychlus observation thousands of years ago, “The gods send disaster so that mankind will have something to talk about.” That is a cynical viewpoint but certainly worthy of consideration. However, our fascination, i.e. “obsession,” goes much deeper than that, reflecting a deep-seated connection that we feel with each other in this precarious adventure we are all immersed in, one from which there is “No Exit” as Sartre once noted. But I believe a story like this taps deeply into our individual and collective unconscious and stirs a sense of vulnerability that we all carefully avoid each day of our life. The notion of floating innocently through the air and being suddenly sucked into oblivion by the caprice of circumstances is a metaphor for the fragility of our life.

Here is a short poem by Eugene Mayo which beautifully captures this existential predicament:

THIS WIND
By E. L. Mayo

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.

I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind
That blows like this
But there’s no taking

Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind
That we breathe and ride upon.

Ego-Ridden, Ersatz Spirituality

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I’ve shared here several times that Richard Rohr steal’s my thoughts. He continues to do that and is rich and famous and I am still poor and unknown. Life is just not fair! In today’s email he again chides Christians for their “dualistic” thinking and points out how the ego is hard at work in this process. It is really unnerving to realize that something as personal as one’s faith can be little more than an ego function, an escape from life, and not the expression of the Divine that one purports it to be. And that is what I’ve had to learn and am continuing to learn about my own faith. But when this truth began to sink in, the first faint glimmer of light dawned in my soul allowing me to see the darkness in which I lived. And I still live in this “darkness” and will always do so even as that “glimmer of Light” brightens each day. For, I now know…and feel…more clearly what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared that “we see through a glass ‘darkly'”.

Let me explain just one facet of the ego’s presence in the spirituality of my early life. One of the first things I learned as a child was the distinction of “saved” vs “unsaved”, a distinction which paralleled the infinite variety of other distinctions I was learning as my innocent world was being carved up into various categories. And, of course at some point I learned that I could recite the correct syllogism, the magical words, and presto I would join the club of “the saved.” This bifurcation of the world followed me through the first half of my life as I hid behind the facade of being “saved” and from that subjective prison lived and felt separate from the whole world, radically disconnected. Now, I didn’t know about this disconnection as I participated in a “saved” culture which daily reassured me that I was “one of them” because I spoke the right language and lived the right life…at least out in public! However, there was always unrest in my soul, an unrest which in the middle of my life began to grow and became a veritable tumult which is now blossoming fully in my life. But this “tumult” is merely the experience of life unfolding in my heart as it opens up and becomes, “filled with penetrable stuff” as Shakespeare once put it.

Rohr presents spirituality as a “personal” phenomena, not an ideology. Spirituality is not a mind-set or a template through which we are to view the world as “out there” and needing to be made like me. Spirituality is the process of letting boundaries down and seeing the connection between “me and thee” and between the whole of God’s creation. And the process never ends. We never “get it” as there is nothing to “get”. It is a process. “Saved” and “unsaved”???? Well, the concept does exist in Christianity and most religions have some way of setting themselves apart and reassuring its followers that they are “special.” I now feel that the only “saving” I am responsible for is the saving of my own soul…a life long process which always involves relationships with other people…and which the Apostle Paul had in mind when he instructed us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” This “fear and trembling” is the tumult I alluded to earlier.

Here is Rohr’s observations for today:
DUALISTIC THINKING

Resistance to Change
Friday, March 21, 2014

Sadly, the mind trapped inside of polarity thinking is not open to change. How else can we explain the obvious avoidance of so many of Jesus’ major teachings within the Christian churches? Jesus’ direct and clear teachings on issues such as nonviolence; a simple lifestyle; love of the poor and our enemies; forgiveness, inclusivity, and mercy; and not seeking status, power, perks, or possessions have all been overwhelmingly ignored throughout history by mainline Christian churches, even those who so proudly call themselves orthodox or biblical.

This avoidance defies explanation until we understand how dualistic thinking protects and pads the ego and its fear of change. Notice that the things we Christians have largely ignored require actual change to ourselves. The things we emphasized instead were usually intellectual beliefs or moral superiority stances that asked almost nothing of us—but compliance from others: the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the atonement theory, and beliefs about reproduction and sex. After a while, you start to recognize the underlying bias that is at work. The ego diverts your attention from anything that would ask you to change, to righteous causes that invariably ask others to change. 1 Such issues give you a sense of moral high ground without costing you anything (e.g., celibate priests who make abortion the only sin). Sounds like an ego game to me.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go. Split people split up everything and everybody else. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts.
1. Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, p. 94
2. Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
p. 151

My “Call to Preach”

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I recently started a second blog in which i am deigning to “preach”, explaining in my prefatory remarks that the notion of “preaching” brings to my mind the popular expression of the Valley Girl days, “Barf me with a spoon.” Though I have tried to avoid it, I’m sure that here from time to time as I’ve “held forth” I have ventured into a “preachy” mode in spite of myself. It is just part of who I am; and, fortunately, I approach the subject now with more humility have no pretensions to have any ultimate truth to offer, only my feeble, often self-centered, interpretation of Ultimate Truth.

In my youth, I got the “call” to preach when I was sixteen years of age. Now, of course, this was no surprise to anyone, including myself, as everyone knew that it was in my future. It was a role that had been proffered to me from early on…even from before my birth…as I learned that my mother had promised God that if only He would give her a boy, she would give him to God. Those of you who are clinically minded can immediately see the overwhelming issues that I was presented with even before I had any awareness of what was going on in this bewildering world.

This is such a complicated story but I will be brief. When I “surrendered to the call” at age 16, it really was good for me in some way as finally I had an identity. For, I was not a jock, not even close to being a “BMOC” (Big Man on Campus), and had my hands full carrying myself with the dignity that I did manage to muster forth. But, suddenly I was a “preacher” and I knew who I was. But now, looking back, I see so clearly the problem that I was dealing with on some level in my heart though not consciously at all. For, with this “surrender” I had addressed an ego need but spirituality and spiritual leadership is not about fulfilling our ego needs. I was the “Hollow Man” that T. S. Eliot wrote about though at that age only a “Hollow Boy” who would eventually grow into a “Hollow Man” and spent most of my life in that empty house.

In my early twenties, especially after a year in a hyper-conservative cemetery…I mean, seminary…I knew I had to listen to the tumult in my heart and quit this ersatz ministry. But, at that time, I had no awareness of just how ersatz the whole of my spiritual life was, only that I was very unhappy with it, and needed to escape. So, with great shame and even humiliation, I “renounced” my call to the ministry.

Forty years later, this “call” is still present as in some fashion it was my lot in life. But it no longer is the immature “call” of my youth and I’m not even for sure that “call” is the right term. That ego-laden spirituality of that era of my life is maturing and I’m so delighted that it leaves me with no need to “convert” anyone or to argue with them about spirituality. There is a Presence in this world that I like to call “God” and it/He/She is quite capable of doing any “converting” without any help of my manipulation or intimidation. God is a personal phenomena and if we do the bidding of the Apostle Paul and focus on “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” we will have our hands full and not have to project out on others our own spiritual inadequacies.

 

Being “Quickened” into a Soul

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Poet Claire Kelly quotes another poet, Emily Carr, who noted, “Without movement, the subject is dead.” Carr recognized that to be human…and an “alive” one…the subject must be alive, functioning in a dynamic fashion. She recognized that it is possible to be physically alive, and yes to have a “subjective” life, but at the same time be “subjectively” dead. She echoed the illimitable wisdom of Shakespeare whose Hamlet described a heart that could be “full of penetrable stuff” if it were not “bronzed o’er with damned custom.” By use of the term “penetrable” Shakespeare was describing the vulnerability that is present when one is “subjectively” alive And this lovely poem by Ms. Kelley provides a beautiful parallel of the vibrancy of a “subjectivity” that is fully alive.

But, let me utilize my “literary license” and introduce the term “soul” to this notion.  When one’s subjective experience is quickened by what I like to describe as “the Spirit of God,” a soul is born, a soul that is in unity with others and with the whole of God’s creation. This soul not only “knows” things about life but “feels” them in the depths of his/her heart and at times can only “glory, bow, and tremble” as poet Edgar Simmons described it. At this point thought and feeling are working in tandem and some version of the Incarnation has occurred, described by W. H. Auden as “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

But it is much easier and less painful to live on the surface of life and not bothered with the “intrusiveness” of God’s Spirit. But, that is just another way of saying that it is easier to live oblivious to reality and not allow Reality (i.e. “otherness”) to “mess up” one’s pristine Ozzie and Harriet existence. For, “god” or “God” is jusord we throw around to capture the experience of the Ineffable which is always found on the boundaries of life and if we disallow boundary violation…that is if our heart is not “penetrable”…we cannot experience the Ineffable.  Here is the beautiful poem by Ms. Kelley:

IN THE TORSO OF A GREAT WINDSTORM
(Odds and Ends, 1939)

The wind makes everything alive….
Without movement a subject is dead. Just look!
—Emily Carr

Put your hand over a flashlight,
watch it glow faerie pink. Picture—
lit from inside—a belly torch,

the backdrop—
knot of spruce tree organs: liver, kidneys,
bundle of intestine, stomach—
cool blue and green foliage hiding enzymes,
bacterium, acids.

That exact texture of pulse,
quiver, musculature connected
and contained, skyline and dirt grouted
together, a vista of
inner skin, the underside.
Airstream gale whipping
the pinprick stars into dashes,
molars into canines, evolution
of the Spartan firmaments. A breezy muse,
that gust of inspiration.

Now look at the actors erect at centre stage, see:
skinny veins with plump tops,
or—zooming in—synapses of birch foregrounded.
Holy trifecta, three ideas
announcing skyward:
home, joy, hunger.

“Judgment” vs “Judgmentalism”

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In Shakespeare’s marvelous play, Hamlet, Laertes is grieving for his sister Ophelia who he then sees as demented and laments that she is, “Divided from herself and her fair judgment without which we are pictures are mere beasts.”
Shakespeare understood a dimension of judgment that is often not considered, that being that “judgment” is merely a decision or choice. For example, cultures always evolve a legal system in which miscreants stand before a judge or tribunal for some misdeed and there the community tells him/her, “We do not approve of the choice that you made on such and such occasion.” The collective thought reflects the decision of what is “good” and “bad” for the commonweal of that tribe. In this hypothetical illustration, a community makes a “choice” and exercises power, declaring, “we will not abide that behavior” and will then impose consequences even up to the point of death in some cultures. (This brings to mind another observation in the same play, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”)

But, on an individual level…such as with Ophelia…we also exercise judgment and make choices all of which have consequences. But Shakespeare noted that Ophelia’s judgment was impaired so that her world was rigidly bifurcated between people as “pictures” or “mere beasts.” He was describing persons who see people only through two prisms—the extreme of a one dimensional idealized fantasy such as a “picture” or the other extreme…also a fantasy…a “mere beast.” Shakespeare recognized that we are infinitely complicated creatures and that our perception of others has to include the nuances between the two extremes. Yes, we are “pictures” but also “beasts” but also everything in between. And, this same impairment of judgment influenced Ophelia on the issue of “to be, or not to be” leading to seize the “bare bodkin” and take her life.

This brings to my mind the Christian notion of judgment and “judgmentalism.” Many Christians are proud that they are not “judgmental” and will piously announce this fact. However, that itself is a judgment!  Judgment is intrinsic to the human experience and we cannot help but make judgments if we have any degree of functional ability; and, come to think about it, we do so even without that level of ability! True, Jesus said, “Judge not that ye be not judged” but I don’t think that He meant that we should be so naive as to think we never exercise judgment. Jesus was merely saying, “Hey! Sl;ow down. When you are so quick to see the mote in someone else’s eye, take pause and realize that there is a beam in your own eye.” Yes, there are many times when we must exercise judgment and take a stand but if we find that we are “taking a stand” and making moral pronouncements a lot of the time, we might take pause and look closely in the mirror. “What we see is what we are.” Just to exercise judgment does not make us “judgmental” but when we find ourselves standing in judgment often of others, we might take pause and consider that “What we see is what we are” I’m learning to do this myself and the experience is not very pretty!

Shakespeare’s Literary Grasp of Life

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Shakespeare could see deeply into the human heart because he had seen deeply into his own.  Matthew Arnold might have had him in  mind when he noted, “The poet, in whose heart heaven hath a quicker impulse imparted, subdues that energy to scan, not his own heart but that of man.”  Shakespeare avoided the pitfall that Jesus warned of when he described people, “having eyes to see but seeing not, having ears to hear but hearing not.”

Shakespeare saw life as a story, a narrative that is always already underway when we arrive on the scene, taking our role on what he called the “stage of life.”  Seeing life as a story, he then was given the literary license to interpret the story and with the astute vision described earlier was able to plumb the depths of the human heart.  He did see the ugliness of life for he had seen the ugliness in his own heart and life, leading one of his characters to conclude that life was a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”  This particular line uttered by Macbeth is very bleak and appears to be nihilistic but not if you consider the body of Shakespeare’s work.  Sure, the “nothingness” is present in life but that is only the dimension of life involved in finding its meaning and purpose.  Shakespeare knew that if you do not see the “idiocy” (or lunacy) of life…including your own…you end up taking yourself and the whole of the human enterprise too seriously.