Jesus Taking on the Religious Establishment

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Yesterday, I paraphrased the teachings of Jesus as simply, “Get rid of your stuff!” Today, I’d like to elaborate on that theme a bit, hypothesizing about his view on the human race.

You see, what happened was that Jesus came down here and pretty soon found this a bewildering place. Often in his youth he would exclaim to his parents, “What the hell! This can’t really be happening! Why don’t these people get their heads out?” Mary and Joseph would often roll their eyes as they watched him grow up and periodically express his frustration with the human race. Much later when Jesus’ frustration became more intense they began to worry and once Mary even anticipated the mother of Hamlet and said, “Oh what a noble mind is here o’er thrown.”

It took a few more years of maturity but it dawned on Jesus that the problem was that people invested in the material world to the exclusion of the spiritual world. Even worse he realized that this was also true for the religious establishment of his culture, that the Jewish religious tradition was nothing but pomp and circumstance, summarizing one visit to Sunday School when he was 13 with the words, “Yada, yada, yada.” (You see, Jerry Seinfield was not the originator of this expression.”)

So decades later Jesus saw the potentates of the religious establishment together in the village plaza and overheard their conversation enough that he understood them to be sincerely discussing ways in which they could improve attendance each Sunday at the synagogue and also trying to be subtle in their comparison of the size of each others phylacteries. (Yes, Jesus did note that this probably had Freudian overtones.)

So Jesus was in a pissy mood that morning and decided just to saunter up to this august group in which he had no standing in the first place. “Hey guys,” he said, “Just a thought here. I see you guys are having a good time with this religious thing you got going on here. You really get a charge out of this ‘holy’ thing and you succeed in teaching your congregations to drink the same kool-aid. But may I suggest that you simply get over your self which will require getting rid of your stuff, certainly including this religious falderal which amounts only to the dissonant racket of ‘sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.’ If you don’t catch my drift, I’m saying your worship services and spiritual practice have become simply a lot of noise which provides you and yours a whole lot of satisfaction but does nothing for the world outside of yourself. Now forgive me, but I can’t help but liken this particular little tete-a-tete you are having this morning as reflective of the circle-jerk that I see at most of your Sunday morning dogma-fests.” He paused a moment and listened to the deafening silence and noted the apoplectic visages. “Anyway, just a thought here. Excuse me. Carry on. Talk amongst yourselves as you were doing. Oh, and have a nice day,” and he walked away.

So Jesus resumed sipping privately on his cup of latte as he watched these religious elders out of the corner of his eye. He saw them intensely discussing something and he knew it was him, he knew that he had put a bee in their bonnet; but he didn’t care. Occasionally he would catch a furtive glare from one of them as they continued to angrily discuss what he had said and they were gesticulating wildly. He occasionally heard words like “bastard” and “son of a bitch” and something about “probably was born in Kenya”, a reference which Jesus, even with his omniscience, did not understand.

After a few minutes, he saw them coming his way and he thought with amusement, “Uh oh!”

They approached him and the leader of the group announced, “Jesus, we don’t appreciate what you had to say and no one had asked you say anything in the first place. We are left with only two choices—a)ignore you and let you continue in your lunacy or b)to vote you off the island.”

Jesus interjected, with a wry smile, “And let me guess which one you have opted for!”

 

 

 

Jesus Said, “Let Go of Your Stuff!”

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My “literary license” has here been employed but I think that “let go of your stuff” is a good paraphrasing of the teachings of Jesus.  For example, this was conveyed in his observation that it would be easier for a rich man to enter the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven.  And in another place, he responded to a query re what one must do to have eternal life with the response, “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor.”  Now, I don’t think these words were to be taken literally but were merely his ways of pointing out how deeply attached humans are to their possessions, their “stuff.”  And his teaching that we find our self only in losing our self is another example of the same them.  This detachment from the material world was, and is, a motif in Eastern spiritual teachings as eastern thought reveals less of an investment in the object world.

 

In my culture, interpreting the teachings of Jesus as “Let go of your stuff” would real ring dissonant with most people.  For, we are very attached to our “stuff” and attached to such a degree that we can’t understand the notion.  Asking anyone to see this attachment is like asking a fish to see water.  And this attachment issue also pertains to spirituality for in the West we tend to approach faith as just another item in the category of “stuff” and so we glom onto it and proceed to exploit the hell out of it just as if it were like any of the rest of the “stuff” that we are so attached to.  And, in most cases it is!  And this is actually just a form of addiction and even if the object of our addiction….the substance is something purportedly noble…it is still an “addictive substance” in our case and thus is used to avoid reality.  And this is the reason that so much of modern day religion appears to be absurd to anyone with a capacity for critical thought as they can readily see that it has nothing to do with anything other than practitioner himself.  This is what Karl Marx had in mind when he described religion as “the opiate of the masses.”

 

Shakespeare understood this sin of misplaced concreteness so well, that sin of taking for real that which is only ephemeral.  He saw that our investment in “stuff” reflected a disregard for our subjective experience…our heart…in preference for an inordinate investment in the object world.  His conclusion was “within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Here is the entire Shakespearean Sonnet:

 

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array?
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Shakespeare has taught me so much and his teaching continues to delve more deeply into my heart as I gain more maturity and with that the ability to swim in the depths of metaphor. Shakespeare did not live in this world; he lived “on high” up in the aether as I often claim to myself. That is to say, he lived in his head. With that aloofness, that cerebral detachment, he could take the liberty of “mis-using” words to convey wisdom but “mis-use” them in such a deft and artistic manner that he could reveal to us so much about the depths of our heart. Just one simple example is in a lovely line from Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy when Hamlet noted that the intense passion and desire of his heart was often “sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought.” First of all, “sick” is not a verb and second how can words make anything sick even if you morph the word into “sicklie.” But by putting it this way he vividly described how one who is given too much to thinking…whose heart is beset with an over wrought inner critic…can find himself stymied by the thinking process itself.

Shakespeare knew that thought and feeling must work in tandem. If either is in too much control, there is a problem. Feeling run amok is lunacy but also thought…or reason…run amok is lunacy, the latter point noted so eloquently by Goethe when he noted in Faust, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” Just look at our contemporary linear culture and its egregious object lesson in the U. S. House of Representatives.

The Bard, like me, knew about “waging the war we are” as described in the 20th century by W. H. Auden. He was conflicted by myriad voices in his heart but wonderfully integrated by what I would describe as “the Spirit of God” so that he could harness the unleashed energy and convey to generations hence stunning revelations about our heart’s internal machinations. Matthew Arnold noted that the poet has great familiarity with “unleashed energy”, alleging that “the poet, in whose mighty heart heaven hath a quicker pulse imparted, subdues that energy to scan, not his own heart, but that of man.” Shakespeare did that. In terms of linguistics, he harnessed the energy of the “floating signifier” so artfully that many…but not all…can understand.

However, there is a price to pay for this aloof detachment, this cerebral, dispassionate view of the world and even of one’s own self—alienation and the feeling of loneliness…existential loneliness or solitude. But just this past week I discovered through a friend the writing of a contemporary spiritual teacher, Mary Margret Moore, who noted that discovering and embracing one’s solitude was one of the steps one must take in spiritual development. It is closely akin to St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul” or Dante’s going into “the dark forest”: or as Dante put it, “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

There one finds he/she is all alone and must explore who and what one really is which always entails a rendezvous with the boundaries of existence itself, an emotional/spiritual experience which in my culture is often described as “God” or by some as “the Ineffable.”

Auden on Judgment and Grace

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W. H. Auden is one of my the most important influences in my life. He offers a stunning insight into the human heart and its complex machinations, including in the area of spirituality. I’m sharing here a paragraph from “The Sea and the Mirror,” in which he brilliantly describes the Christian mystery of judgment and grace, poetically juxtaposing the two so that we can see them as something other than mere concepts in reference to a concrete God in the sky, “out there” but something intrinsic to the human experience. You might want to use “google” with some of his terms and images. For example, that “wind-whipped cornice” and our wills “chucking” in our hands made more since when I did some research.

 

Yet, at this very moment when we do at last see ourselves as we are, neither cosy not playful, but swaying out on the ultimate wind whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void—we have never stood anywhere else—when our reasons are silenced by the heavy huge derision—There is nothing to say. There never has been,-and our wills chuck in their hands—There is no way out. There never was,—it is at this moment that for the first time in our lives we hear, not the sounds which, as born actors, we have hitherto condescended to use as an excellent vehicle for displaying our personalities and looks, but the real Word which is our only raison d’être. Not that we have improved; everything, the massacres, the whippings, the lies, the twaddle, and all their carbon copies are still present, more obviously than ever; nothing has been reconstructed; our shame, our fear, our incorrigible staginess, all wish and no resolve, are still, and more intensely than ever, all we have: only now it is not in spite of them but with them that we are blessed by that Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essential emphatic gulf of which our contrived fissures of mirror and proscenium arch—we understand them at last—are feebly figurative signs, so that all our meanings are reversed and it is precisely in its negative image of Judgment that we can positively envisage Mercy; it is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work which is not ours. Its great coherences stand out through our secular blur in all their overwhelmingly righteous obligation; its voice speaks through our muffling banks of artificial flowers and delivers its its authentic molar pardon; its spaces greet us with all their grand old prospect of wonder and width; the working charm is the full bloom of the unbothered state; the sounded note is the restored relation.

 

(If Auden interest you, you might check out the following link: http://thepoetrycollection.wordpress.com/w-h-auden-1907-1973-in-sickness-and-in-health/)

 

(NOTE: One reader recently made some suggestions about technical improvements I could make on my blog. I am not very savvy re the technical dimensions of WP but am trying to learn and do appreciate any suggestions you might have.)

In the Hands of an “Angry” God

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Is it a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Well, yes, according to the author of Hebrew 10:31 who some think was the Apostle Paul. But then I, as I am wont to do, must ask the question, “What does this mean?”

With this “literary license” that I employ here…as well as in real time very often…I take the liberty to suggest this interpretation, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the ‘hands’ of Life.” By this interpretation, I suggest that it is scary to suddenly become “alive” and to realize that until that point you have been largely “dead,” living life on automatic pilot. It is even scarier to suddenly realize that you spiritual life has been part of this “automatic pilot” , robot-like life in which everyday you basically asked of life to “wind me up and watch me be Christian” or whatever your spiritual persuasion may be. When this happens one is beginning to escape the clutches of the “letter of the law” that the Apostle Paul warned against.

And yes, life is scary. It is very frightening to suddenly realize, not just as an intellectual notion, but as a feeling in the depths of the heart what it means to be human. It is horrifying to suddenly no longer be able to hide behind/beneath the superficies of our existence….ideas, intense emotions, cultural contrivances (including “stuff”) and even out faith; for, in this moment of existential crisis we often have to embrace the superficiality of faith, realizing it has been “all about me.”

But though the pain can be intense, it can be a moment of redemption in which we discover the Grace that T. S. Eliot described as “a complete condition of simplicity costing not less than everything.” And Aesychlus’s reference to the “awful Grace of God” thousands of years ago reveals an ancient understanding of the ambiguity of an experience with our Source; for, there, standing naked before God (and often humankind) we can experience and embrace the Eternal juxtaposition of judgment and grace.

With a superficial reading of these thoughts it is easy to conclude that I see God as merely a label that we can apply to the life process itself and that, therefore, I don’t really believe in a God. Well, this is a complicated matter for I do believe in God but not in the “God” that I’ve hidden behind and escaped reality with most of my life. Here I am referring to a subjective experience that is available to all and when we get there we understand—cognitively, intuitively, and emotionally–that there is a transcendent dimension to live as well as an immanent one. Yes, God is “out there” in some sense but he is also “in here” in some sense which is what Paul had in mind with his declaration, “Nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

Yes, it is complicated. But reality…that is life itself…a process so intrinsically complicated that to willfully simplify it so that it will fit into our preconceptions is very dishonest and…yes…very human. It is so much easier to avoid asking the essential questions of life that can lead is into the very depths of the human experience, that very same “condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything,” referred to earlier.

Here is a closing note from my dear friend and brother, W. H. Auden, “O blessed be bleak exposure on his sword we are pricked into coming alive.” That “sword” comes from “out there” beyond the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken)

Ermines and Marriages

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DOG AND MASTER
by Henri Cole

Consider the ermine—
territorial, noxious, thieving—
its dense fur whitening
when light is reduced.
Mesmerizing its victims

with a snake dance,
killing with a bite to
the back of the neck.
Born blind, deaf, and toothless,
the male is called a “dog,”

a roamer, a strayer,
a transcient. But huddled
in my arms for warmth,
with my fingernails
stroking his underbelly,

he forgets his untamable
nature. His rounded
hips shiver like mine.
In folklore, he holds the soul
of a dead infant; and in life

he prefers to give himself
up when hunted, rather
than soil himself. Thus is
civilization, I think, roughly
stroking his small ears.

But then suddenly
I’m chasing him around
the dining room screaming,
No, I told you, no! like two stupidly
loving, stupidly hating

creatures in a violent
marriage, or some weird
division of myself,
split off and abandoned
in order to live.

(Need I say more? Well, of course not. But that would never stop me so I’ll add one note: makes me think of the oft-quoted Auden wisdom, “We wage the war we are.”)

Letting the “Bud” of Life Blossom

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A friend of mine posted last week a quote from Anais Nin quote that has always really grabbed me, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
This brought to my mind several other literary references to the “bud” of our life, referring to life at its earliest point when we had just taken that quantum leap from non-being into being. At that point we were the quintessence of vulnerability, a vulnerability that will always be present in our heart but one from which we are protected with the “fig leaf” of an ego. Then later in our adult life we have the task of loosening the pernicious grip of that ego to the point that some of that vulnerability can come to consciousness and invigorate an otherwise barren life. When that happens, what my spiritual tradition calls the “Spirit of God” begins to come forth and we find that we can engage in the “flow” of life, no longer tyrannized by subterranean fears of annihilation.  T.S. Eliot described this “bud” as, “that tender point from which life arose, that sweet force born of inner throes.” And in another poem he offered another relevant thought, seeing this “bud” as, “some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”

But Shakespeare so brilliantly described this “bud” in his first sonnet and the peril of not allowing it to open and blossom, letting the essence of our life flow into the Void that we all live in, into the Great Round. In this context, the “blooming” he noted was in reference to some unknown friend who refused to get married and start a family. He described this friend as being unable to escape a narcissistic shell, accusing him of being “contracted to thine own brights eyes,” or seeing only what he saw…not able to see beyond the private world that he lived in. This is related to the Conrad Aiken line I quote so often, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.”

Shakespeare believed that in getting married and having a family a person had the opportunity to let one’s tender “bud” break open and blossom into the unfolding of life, to participate in the “mundane” task of perpetuating the species. In one of his plays he described a character as being unable to “spend himself” and that consequently said he, “spills himself in fearing to be spilt.”

In the first sonnet, he chided his friend for feeding “thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, making a famine where abundance lies, thyself thy foe, to the sweet self so cruel.” He saw this friend cowering within his bud, feeding himself with “self-substantial fuel” and not participating in life, not engaging in meaningful relationship, having “fled to a nutshell” where he could there safely be the “king of infinite spaces.” Shakespeare lamented this friend’s narcissism, seeing that he was his own worst enemy, to his “own sweet self so cruel.”

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
Now, speaking from experience, it is possible to find other ways to open that bud, that “tender point” without marriage or family. I utilized the Shakespearean sonnet merely to note one “contrivance” that life has afforded us to “die to our selves” and focus on a greater end. But, I will admit that, personally, getting married but not having children illustrated this “cowardly spirit” that Shakespeare had in mind. And perhaps that is why that late in life I am finding the vulnerability in which life appears to be flowing, my “bud” timidly and often half-hearterdly trying to open and blossom.

Nin vividly discovered the painful quandary of not letting that blossom come forth in some dimension of one’s life. The pain becomes so intense that we feel we are about to burst. The “einfall” (see a recent post on the subject) is so persistent that we cannot but surrender and find a symbolic death offering us the hope of resurrection. Jesus also grasped the importance of letting this bud die and then blossom, noting that unless a grain of wheat, “fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

Life often appears to be merely about finding a meaningful way to slowly die, to artfully approach the end of our life and in the process leave something meaningful behind. Now I certainly do not think that life is a grim enterprise in which we morbidly focus on our brief span of life and ultimate death but that we do need to realize that death and life are always intertwined. And I am made to think of the wisdom of a very astute psychologist of several decades ago, Irvin Yalom, who noted that in his practice he had discovered that those who lived in fear of death were actually very fearful of being alive. But when unconscious fears rule our life, we cannot acknowledge our vulnerability and spend our lives glomming onto whatever contrivance our culture affords us in order to avoid that “tender point”, that bud from which life wants to emerge, that “bud” that Nin so pithily referenced.

 

 

“Grab a Word and Pull On It”

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I am taking a writing class from a local author who is very talented and accomplished. The experience of offering my written thoughts to face-to-face feedback has been very, very helpful on a personal level and with the writing process itself. This teacher has helped me to “pay more attention” to what I am writing and how I am writing it,” and to “pay more attention to the prospective reader.” That is a subtle but very important shift in focus. Here I’m going to share my first effort in this class, after revisions made as a result of the feedback from the class and from my wife.
“Grab a word and pull on it. Grab a word and pull on it.” Hmm??? So to
make a poem, all you have to do is, “Grab a word and pull on it? Huh?” He
pondered about this for days but just had trouble wrapping his head around the
notion of “pulling” on a word. “Words just don’t get ‘pulled on’” he told himself.
“A word is a word is a word and that is the end of it.”

Now the notion of writing a poem sounded pretty cool but about the only thing
he could manage was, by his own admission simple teen age doggerel. So pretty soon he just forgot the idea and busied himself with his thirties and forties; though even then he was often teased with the notion of “grabbing a word and pulling on it.”

But then “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” began to work their magic in his life and he began to “get it,” to “feel it” and found that poetry was worming its way into his heart. Sure enough, just as T. S. Eliot told him the week before, words do “break, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place. He realized that this internal chaos that Eliot was describing was the subjective rush of words being “pulled on,” and torn apart, allowing them to burst and meaning begin to flow. “Sounds like an orgasm,” he thought.

However, this literary tumult he was experiencing went much deeper than mere
words. He often felt he was swimming in the aether, that he had lost his grounding, that nothing was certain any longer. He drew upon linguistics to facetiously describe his anxiety to some of his friends…those who might be familiar with Derrida…announcing with feigned desperation, “My signifier is floating. My signifier is floating. Help! Help!” Yes, subject-object distinctions were not as pronounced as they used to be as poetry had lured him into its murky, mysterious depths where only metaphor was to be found as an anchor; and with the metaphor the signifier is always apt to float away to points unknown.

 

My Marriage and “Einfall”

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Several times I have referenced my participation in a local reading group of Karl Jung. One of his notions is that sometimes the depths of the unconscious will spontaneously break forth into one’s consciousness, almost like an invasion. He used the term “einfall” for this experience. (I will include a link to some very witty, and insightful, cartoons about this experience.)

My “einfall” is still underway and has mercifully been piece-meal, my Source knowing that I could not take it all in one fell swoop like the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road or Eckhart Tolle on a park bench. One pivotal event in this process was getting married which I blogged about yesterday, marriage definitely being an “invasion” into my pristine, narcissistic world of Paul Tillich’s “empty self-relatedness.” A very interesting anecdote illustrates the impact this marriage was having on me just about the time of our first anniversary in the spring of 1990. One beautiful, cool, dewy spring morning I discovered the first tulip bloom in our yard and I knelt down to pick it and take it to Claire. Immediately afterward a wisp of thought fluttered through my mind, “I don’t know if I was plucking or being plucked.”

A light bulb turned on in my heart. I didn’t know as much as I do now about object-relations theory and the subject-object distinction but I realized that this “wisp of thought” illustrated that my boundaries were in transition and that this was very much related to having finally gotten married, and to the “work” of marriage described so vividly in the Wendell Berry poem provided yesterday.

Now, let me share a related thought that later came to mind. Some clinicians hearing this report of “not knowing if I was being plucked or being plucked” would be alarmed and think, “Uh oh. Psychotic break approaching! Danger, danger, Will Robinson!” And, spiritual growth is a coming apart as with a psychotic break but for some mysterious reason…which I can only describe as the grace of God…I knew there was nothing to be alarmed about, that something beautiful was underway. “Coming apart” is necessary at some point in our life so that we can be reintegrated as a more authentic person than we thought we were. This is very much related to the pithy wisdom of Fritz Perls who advised, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses” for he knew that senses or “feeling” will provide the redemptive healing that all hearts need.

 

(NOTE: I could not capture the link for “einfall.” But if you will simply google “einfall” you will see a selection entitled “images of einfall” which you can open. It is very funny…and illustrative of the idea.  Also, the reference to “Will Robinson” was from a stupid 1960s sci-fi tv show, “Lost in Space.”)

My 25th Wedding Anniversary!!!

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Last Sunday I celebrated by 25th wedding anniversary with my lovely wife Claire. It is unbelievable to realize that I have now been married a quarter of a century! Where has time gone?

Getting married was a mind boggling experience for me as I had given up by the time I met her at age 36. But it was love and magic at first sight…pretty much…as I was immediately captivated by her boundless energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, and beauty. We were soul mates almost immediately and I had longed for one of “them there thangs” all my life!

A college psychology professor of mine once described marriage as an opportunity for a young man to “be redeemed by the love of a good woman.” That redemption started immediately and will continue to the end of my life as redemption is always an ongoing process, a process which is best conveyed by the poet Wendell Berry in the poem I will conclude with shortly. One dimension of this redemptive process is just the simple structure provided by the commitment of marriage, two separate individuals with separate agendas deigning to live together under one roof. “commingling” their lives.

And when a man and woman begin to live together under one roof, that is when the sparks begin to fly! And they have certainly flown and it is a wonder at times that the entire house did not burn down! For marriage is work and if it is done “right” the work will challenge one to the core. Someone once noted that we marry a fantasy and when we get “in the saddle” together, the fantasy begins to dissipate and we discover the reality of the other person. AND, in the process we make a parallel discovery of the “reality” of who we are ourselves.

This “self” discovery is the most important gift that marriage has given me. As the work of marriage unfolded, I began to realize the true meaning of the biblical description of man and woman together as being “one flesh.” I began to see how Claire was truly my complement, embodying so many things that I wanted but also so many things I did not want! And, of course, being a professional…and compulsive…“care giver”, I wanted to “fix her” which I came to discover meant that I wanted, and even demanded, that she be just like me. Well, I soon learned that hell would freeze over before that would happen!

It probably took twenty years for me to learn just exactly what relationship is, to see…and feel…that Claire and I were “one flesh.” I had to learn to make space for her in my life, to make room for her in my heart, and that entailed that I had to understand that I had not been doing so in the first place! And, even more so, it meant that I had not been doing so with anyone! I had known about the notion of “otherness” for a long time but suddenly the experience, or “feeling,” of “otherness” was on the table and that was, and still is, disconcerting to say the least. Suddenly I was face to face with the subtle narcissism that had shrouded my life since early childhood. And slowly, and even shyly, I began to peer out of that shroud and to discover not just Claire but the whole of God’s beautiful creation. I had understood Karl Jung’s notion of “withdrawing our projections” but now I began to “feel” it also.

Here are two poems that so beautifully capture the mysterious work of marriage:

MARRIAGE
by Wendell Berry

How hard it is for me, who live
in the excitement of women
and have the desire for them
in my mouth like salt. Yet
you have taken me and quieted me.
You have been such light to me
that other women have been
your shadows. You come near me
with the nearness of sleep.
And yet I am not quiet.
It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open. It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever. I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing. It is never whole.
And the second poem conveys the redemptive dimension of living together within the confines of marital commitment:
BOW DOWN TO STUTTERERS
by Edgar Simmons

The stutterers hesitation
Is a procrastinate crackle,
Redress to hot force,
Flight from ancient flame.

The bow, the handclasp, the sign of the cross
Say, “She-sh-sheathe the savage sword!”

If there is greatness in sacrifice
Lay on me the blue stigmata of saints;
Let me not fly to kill in unthought.

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

Let me stutter with the non-objective painters
Let my stars cool to bare lighted civilities.