I’m Getting a Reservation in Doggie Heaven!!!

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My beloved 11 year old daughter is now in doggie heaven, chasing butterflies, ground squirrels, rabbits and scratching furiously in the celestial dirt for “divine” insects.  She has found her brother and sister, also delightful dachshunds, and they are comparing notes with each other about the parental “mistakes” they were subjected to down here. In a text I just received, she told me that all of them completely forgive us and love us dearly.  She also told me she already put in my request with Dog that a place be reserved for me and their mother as “Doggie heaven” sounds like a better idea to both of us!  Lassie told her to tell us that She would “keep us in mind.”

I had a nice talk with this darling little girl this morning before we took her to the vet.  I told her how she had continued the lesson in loving in which her two predecessors had already done the “heavy lifting.”  For I had learned through them, and in my marriage to their mother, that love is not so much a thing that you “do” as it is something that you are “open to” and thus receive.  A 13th century Persian poet Rumi said it is what happens when you discard all the barriers you have constructed to keep it from happening.

With these three doggies working in consort with their mother for the past three decades I have learned that the heart offers evocative potential, an infinite source of riches which cannot be accessed without the ability to recognize the resistance that Rumi noted.  When the heart is open…Toni Morrison described it as “petal open”… it is full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare) and a Divine work of art like a puppy, or a delicate tulip, or a beautiful sunset, or a lovely wife can “evoke” a Divinity that has always been there.  This experience is what the spiritual tradition of my background termed, “the Spirit of God”; and that notion is now profoundly meaningful to me.

There is an absence in my soul this afternoon.  This absence can be described as an “Absence” for it is during loss that we can feel a dimension of our heart that is closely akin to the Divine.  For this experience can bring to our awareness…on a deeply emotional and experiential level…the profound connection that we can have with the whole of this world if we find the courage to “lose our mind and come to our senses.” (Fritz Perls, saw “senses” as the “feeling” dimension of human experience.)

Tony Kusher, “Change Is Difficult”

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How do people change?  Well, most of us don’t; we start out lives in a rut, learn to cling to that rut, find others in a similar rut, take comfort there and try not to deviate.  To deviate is scary.  There is comfort in sameness.  When “deviance” presents itself…and any “difference” often evokes the fear of “deviance”… we are prone to put up the sign of the cross and run away.

But change is part of life.  Life is fluid; and its flow takes us different directions at times and if we resist that flow we will find ourselves in a static dimension of life.  Technically, that is “death.” However, if we are firmly ensconced in “stati-ticity” we will never make this discovery as it would be troubling to the safety we have found there.  There is comfort in living in the bubble.

Playwright Tony Kushner, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his play, “Angels in America.”  In this powerful play there is a scene which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words; here it is presented as  gut-wrenching, which at times it can be.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

Change is so painful as it often requires questioning the premises by which we have lived our life.  And “God” is involved often as the change involves premises that lie in the inner most part of our being, basic assumptions that we take for granted and would prefer continuing to do so.  This can be unnerving.  Theologian Paul Tillich understood this when he wrote a book entitled, “The Shaking of the Foundations” based on one of his sermons in which he presented the teachings of Jesus as intended for such a “rattling of our collective cage.”

The culture of my country is in turmoil because of the tension between the need for change and the need to maintain the status quo.  These needs are necessary in any social body and even in any individual psyche.  If any of these opposing impulses prevails to the exclusion of the other, catastrophe will take place.  The need is for some “over-arching” concern that can unite the two, can offer an harmony in dedication to a common cause.

Will the Madness Ever End?

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The White House intervened to prevent the U.S.S. McCain from being seen during the Trump visit to Japan.  The Wall Street Journal reported negotiations between the White House and the U. S. Navy to move this ship “out of sight” so that the President would not see it.  This is because of the rage that Trump has for this now deceased Senator who dared to be critical of him.  Trump denies having anything to do with this decision, of course. Trump may not have had anything to do with this silly decision…directly.  He does not need to as his handlers are completely in his thrall and automatically move to protect this two-year old child from anything that might make him uncomfortable or angry.  Can you imagine the time, energy, and expense that went into this decision-making process and negotiation between the White House and the Navy?  And they even bought a tarp to drape over the ship!

My concern here is not Trump.  He is but the symptom of the madness that is unfolding in our culture, a madness that is daily being aided and abetted by a supporting cast of handlers, aides, cabinet members, and Congress persons.  He has them in his grip and many of them do not have the “awareness” to know it.  Some of them are aware of this I suspect but are stymied by intimidation or black mail, and do not have the courage to speak out.

Trump’s two-year old narcissistic wound has been aided and abetted like this his whole life and he has always felt indomitable.  He still does!  And now he has what he sees as ultimate power, for he is the “duly elected” President of the United States!  Holding that office, to him and his supporting cast, is the ultimate validation of their beliefs and they support him steadfastly. BUT, the “hunger” of a frustrated and angry two-year old can never be satisfied unless an “adult in the room” will find the courage to set limits.  If the “parents” continue to indulge, a monster will be created and catastrophe will ensue.  In my clinical experience, this “catastrophe” often would find a “parent in the room” with my intervention which at times entailed hospitalization or juvenile court referral.  At times, this did not suffice and catastrophe did happen in the form of violence, often leading to incarceration.  The “acting out” of the two-year old, then running amok as a 16 year old, could not be contained other than by the strong arm of the law.  The phenomenon of a “brain-stem without arms and legs” in life is usually reined in by reality; but when “reality” allows it to occupy the Presidency, the peril for all is great.

Something About “Nothing”

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A friend noted decades ago that I often quipped and joked about negation.  That was the first moment I noticed this feature of my soul and realized just how it influenced the whole of my life.  Poet Anne Carson noted, “The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people. But at a certain point he feels a lack. He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present.”

However, I am not a poet.  I am, though steeped in poetry and have been since my mid-thirties when a friend gifted me a book of poems by W. H. Auden.  I think that poets have the ability and courage to dive into that “lack” buck naked, and come back with the gift of poetry.  I don’t think my lot in life is to get that naked, probably because of a lack of courage or the gods’ wisdom that I could not handle the vulnerability.  But the “lack” is present and I am growing more comfortable with it, finding that “chopping wood, carrying water” is effective in assuaging the soul’s experience of this emptiness.

This lack is now being presented to our entire culture in the person of our president.  He illustrates what happens when one sell’s his soul to distractions and is left with a gaping maw in his heart that seeks to destroy everything and everyone.  These distractions are what allow most people to have that “full and satisfactory present” mentioned by Carson above.  These “distractions” are a gift but when they become the soul focus in one’s life, or a culture’s life, a meaninglessness eventually finds expression.  Watch and listen to Trump and one can see meaninglessness and emptiness personified.

Emily Dickinson Offered Wisdom Relevant to Modern Religious Zealotry

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The mass murder in New Zealand illustrates again the problem with “True Believers,” those who believe so strongly they will even resort to violence.  This is because if one knows the truth, and knows it with enough passion, it will shut down the “pauser reason” which would tell one that another person might feel differently about what the truth is so that violence would not be necessary.  Furthermore, it would reveal internal boundaries, i.e. discretion or “the faculty of judgement” which would allow for value of life, in all forms, so that any belief that one has would not merit acting with violence.

There is inherent in belief a peril as one can be so invested so strongly in his beliefs that the aforementioned discretion is obliterated.  This discretion involves a “still small voice” in one’s heart which might tell one thinking of acting in this fashion, “Well, maybe I don’t really have to go to that extreme.” And if this discretion is fully functioning, the issue of acting out will not even be on the table.

Poet Emily Dickinson offered wisdom about this matter of discretion and related it to meaning.  She wrote that at times, “a certain slant of light” will break through our consciousness and will bring an “oppressive” mood into our heart; it might even bring us “heavenly hurt” though “we can find no scars, but internal difference where the meanings are.”  The ability to feel “difference” in the depths of our heart, though often bringing distress, i.e. “heavenly hurt,” will offer us meaning to our life which will empower us to see meaning beyond the values and beliefs we hold dear to ourselves. The inability to experience “difference” that would offer a meaningful life will create a rigidity denying the “heavenly hurt” that is part of the human experience; it is then more likely that the resulting pent-up anguish will be projected on someone else.

People who can’t handle this internal “discord” which intrinsic to a heart that is alive, will inevitable have to “them” someone else or some group of people.  They will have to find someone who is seen as an “other” and vent their self-loathing on them.  This is a spiritual issue which is the reason why we find it so common among religious individuals and groups as spirituality often taps into a very dark dimension of the human experience leading to speech, attitudes, and deeds which can only be described as evil.

The Perverse Delight of Being Right

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I grew up being right.  How did I know I was right?  Because I “knew” that I was right.  How did I know that?  Because I was taught what right was, and how to merit that label, and therefore it was simple to just adhere to the definition and make sure your thinking and behavior complied to its premises. “Right” is always something external to the subjective experience of a young child and gaining the delight of knowing that he/she is right requires dutifully imbibing the definition of right that is proffered.  I used the term “imbibing” because it is more than a mere cognitive matter; it is a matter of “soaking up” the nuances of the culture to acquire a subjective “experience” of being right, meaning it is not likely to be questioned.

I have questioned this “rightness” of mine my whole life.  Oh, somewhat less in my youth as just did not have the self-confidence, the courage to stand on my own two feet and think for myself.  “Thinking for oneself” in a collective mindset that discourages it will leave one with a sense of alienation and I got a double dose of that malady.  The experience of alienation was so intense that I desperately tried to comply, to believe the right things, to do the right things so that I would have the comfort of belonging.  But if you must “try” to belong, you are in deep shit as far as having the comfort that belonging offers.

This “splinter in the brain,” as Emily Dickinson called it, has tormented and blessed me, the whole of my life.  Even today, as I am standing on my own two feet, there is the deep-seated nagging realization that I am now defying nearly all of the offerings of the tribe I was born into that would offer one the “delight” of being right.  I now see that the desperate desire to be right of my early youth was merely the result of the implicit assumptions I had gained from my tribe that I was intrinsically wrong, leaving me with a deep-seated experience that my simple “being” in the world was wrong.  I now seek “The Joy of Being” wrong, which is the title of a very important book in my life by James Alison, the complete title being, “The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes.”  I personally believe this joy is what the teachings of Jesus was about, that he assured us that we could have this joy if we found the courage to relinquish all the pressures to fit in and just “be” present in the world.  This, in my estimation, is “salvation” which in the words of T.S. Eliot is, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”

A very important caveat is warranted.  This freedom to “be,” to live free of the bondage to social norms, does not allow one to live in disregard for the conventions of one’s tribe.  Many of these conventions might not apply to me but that does not give me the freedom to go on the war path against them.  In that case I would be guilty of the very same obnoxious contempt that a tribe utilizes to stamp out the individuality of a soul. But it does give me the freedom to speak out about perceived injustice and evil as long as I don’t get so arrogant with self-righteousness that I encourage violence, overt or subtle.

The inspiration for this discourse stems from an article I read this morning in the New York Times about an Indian woman, Gauri Lankesh, who had this courage to be herself and speak out about the injustice of her country. She was a journalist who was murdered in 2017 because of her bold, and at times brazen willingness to “speak truth to power”.  Extremism always springs from knowing you are “right” and the arrogance that gives one this assurance arises from deep-seated darkness that permits violence.  This darkness arises from primitive fears and anxieties so intense that the light of conscious awareness is disallowed, a light that would permit respect of difference.

A Thoughtful Poem from Historian, William Irwin Thompson

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Am I more than I “know I am”? Historian, and former MIT professor, William Irwin Thompson thinks so and makes a powerful argument in his poem, “Four In the Morning.”  Thompson was just coming on the scene in history studies in the early 1980’s when I was doing graduate work in history at the University of Arkansas.  Thompson was an avant-garde historian, thinking out of the box and even “out side of the box that the box was in.”  The following poem demonstrates this “global” perspective on life, a view that could also be described as cosmic.

FOUR IN THE MORNING

The universe is crawling with unseen life:
angels and djinn and spiritual guides.
Like the excess in a stagnant pond,
this abscess of the Absolute
is obscenely corpulent
in every nook and cranny,
armpit and crotch
of the Great Mother
of dark energy and dark matter
we do not see anymore
than the germs in our guts see us,
because they are not germs
but neurons of a larger brain
in which an I is only an organ,
or rather an artificially imposed
membrane drawn arbitrarily
amid a mass of interactive
molecular gates with ions
coming and going as they please
without a thought of me.
Savages knew this once
and could feel it like an itch
beyond the reach of scratch.
Christian missionaries called it animism
and tried to beat it out of them,
bringing brassieres to contain breasts,
and bibles to contain minds,
but nights when I cannot sleep,
I wake at something the clock
marks as three or four,
with my mind teeming and itching
with alien cosmologies
of journeys through other galaxies
and I wake, knowing more than I am.

“Four in the Morning” comes from his blog, “Meta-psychosis” and appears to be a descent into a maelstrom which could be taken for lunacy, other than for his ability to wrap a perspective around disparate verbal imagery and tie it all together to make his point; what would otherwise be closely akin to psychotic word-salad is a thoughtful, poetic look at the intricate complexity of the beautiful world we live in.  Thompson’s study of history, and the liberal arts, and science, allowed him to present this beautiful poetic essay about the process of life itself in which our individual life is seen as but a component dimension of the pulsating energy field that is life itself.  He makes a persuasive argument that we are “more” than we think that we are, driven by something akin to what Shakespeare had in mind when he noted, “There is a divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”

Ash Wednesday Thoughts: “Dust Balls” Are We.

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In my youth, Catholicism was the epitome of “them.”  It was a given that Catholics were not even Christian for they “believed in Mary.”  But as I’ve aged I have increasing respect for them, not unrelated to my discovery of a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, NM, Richard Rohr.  I received via email yesterday an email from a blogging friend in Australia which included a powerful poem about “Ash Wednesday” which I will share at the end of this post.

I have faint memories of the term “Ash Wednesday” from my youth and young adulthood but these memories were tainted by the anti-Catholicism.   This brings to mind another blogging friend who I kidded with the label “Dust ball” in reference to her interest in “Mother Earth” and the biblical notion of us being “dust of the earth.”  For we are all “dust balls” bouncing around on this granite “dust ball” for a few decades with the innate, egoic tendency to take ourselves more seriously than we are.  This absence of humility fails to appreciate the emphasis that the Catholics offer with this Lent season event, symbolized with a smudge of ash on the forehead.

Humility is often confused with cravenness.  But this is related to what Carl Jung noted as two extremes of the same human egoic complex—ego inflation and ego deflation.  The “inflation” is taking our selves too seriously, but the “deflation” is not taking ourselves seriously enough, failing to respect the glory of just “being” here.  But in each instance the emphasis is on our “self” as in our ego.  The alternative would be true humility, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  Human nature is prone to focus on what we know to be reality, always a self-serving endeavor, failing to recognize that this “knowing” usually excludes so many who lie beyond that culturally contrived pale.  Humility involves letting that “pale,” i.e. “boundary,” dissolve a bit so that we can include some of those that we have heretofore excluded.  Sounds a bit like Jesus, huh?

Blessing the Dust
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

–Jan Richardson

The Imprisonment of Faith

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Cultic religion offers us occasional example of how a faith system can become bondage.  But, often this phenomenon of “cultism” can subtly creep into faith systems that aren’t readily described as cults.  A faith becomes cultic when he does not trust the spiritual presence that permeates this world we live in and resorts to power, manipulation, and emotional brutality to capture its children and to win converts.  The leaders of this type of faith will be firmly confident of the nobility of their motivations but the behavior of what they are doing will be apparent to anyone looking on from the outside.  One simple example is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, which btw must have crawled back under the rock from which they came as I haven’t heard of them lately.

This morning a young woman who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church and culture shared in Huffington Post about her captivity in a family that was involved in the “quiver full movement” which emphasizes the importance of parents producing many children.  This verse comes from the Old Testament where it is written that fathers whose “quiver is full” of many children will have “arrows” with which the world can be captured for Christ. This young woman, Cynthia Jeub, describes the emotional/spiritual brutality that she was subjected to in this family until her late teens when she finally had the courage to escape.

In a closely-knit family, or a closely-knit group, there will always be someone who escapes.  T.S. Eliot described this individual as the dysfunctional family’s “bird sent flying through the purgatorial fire” to find what I would call the redemptive Grace of God which the family had forbidden.  Eliot furthermore, described this individual as the family’s “unhappy consciousness” that has been assigned this torturous task.  For, in any family or group any individual who dares to “think out side of the box” will be venturing toward consciousness as those who spend their life confined to the “box” of group think will never be able to know the delight of exploring the mystery of being a conscious human being.  This brings to my mind the famous line from Martin Luther King, “Free at last, free at last.  Praise God, I’m free at last.”  While King was speaking of escaping from the bondage of racial oppression, Ms. Jeub is now writing about her escape from familial, cultural, and spiritual bondage.  Check the link out and then check her blog out. (http://cynthiajeub.com/}

A caveat is in order.  Those confined to rigid veins of thought, those who are orchestrating this bondage, are not necessarily bad people.  They are people whose good, noble, spiritual intentions have been hijacked for the purpose of ego; and all of us have an ego. This is just the way it is. This is life.  It is easy to heap venom upon them, but we must realize this is how human culture operates.  My remarks here are to commend one individual who has been graced with the courage to break out of the fetters that imprisoned her and speak of what I like to call, “The Grace of God.”  See the Huffington Post article at the following link.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cynthia-jeub-kids-by-the-dozen_n_5c798c1be4b0e5e313ca43e0

Shame, Truth, Courage, and Jeff Bezos

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Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, shocked the world yesterday by disclosing an effort by AMI (the National Enquirer publisher) to blackmail him with salacious text messages they had uncovered, including sexually intimate photos.  Yes, these photos even included the now quite common “d…k pix.”  Ami was trying to get him to back off an intense investigation he had initiated to determine how they had intercepted his texts and emails. But Bezos did not play ball, declaring he preferred to “roll this log over and see what crawls out.”  He admitted the shame of this experience but determined he would not be blackmailed and was willing to call the bluff of the National Enquirer. The National Enquirer and its CEO, Jeff Pecker (chuckle, chuckle) have been intimately involved with Trump, Pecker now having defected under pressure from Robert Mueller’s investigation of the President.  Trump and Pecker colluded to pay off Trump’s hush money to a prostitute and former Playboy bunny.

My concern with this story is shame and its relationship with honesty.  A sense of shame…a “healthy shame”…helps make us human, giving us the motivation to participate in the very necessary social fiction that makes us human.  We keep things hidden and should do so.  Not everything needs to be disclosed.  But when “healthy shame” has been obliterated by toxic shame, it reveals that there is so much to hide that the individual will go to any extreme to keep the secrets of his heart hidden.  Mr. Bezos, like all mortals, has sexual peccadillos fluttering about in his heart and mind and he “imbibed” of a few like most of us have.  But he found the courage and stubbornness to not be blackmailed and owned up to the accusations, taking the “wind out of the sails” of the National Enquirer.  (And, admittedly this “courage and stubbornness” was facilitated by the fact that he is one of the richest men on the earth.)

Life, i.e. “reality”, often pushes us into a corner where we are forced to admit things that are not pleasant.  But when shame tyrannizes us into a façade that is not simply a persona but a prison, we cannot allow “truthfulness” to break out; sometimes we will go to any extreme to deny what we are accused of.  Related to this machination, Trump introduced to us the term “fake news” as a simple term for, “whatever I don’t like or is unpleasant,” is not true.

This issue, given Trump’s intimacy with the National Enquirer, brings to my mind the question of what he and his compatriots have dug up on members of Congress.  We all have stuff we don’t want to come out and it is now clear that if the intent is there to uncover it, it can be uncovered.  Blackmail would explain some of the blind compliance with Trump’s whims that many noted Republicans have demonstrated; Lindsey Graham and McConnell comes to mind, to name but two.