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.

 

Values

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Here is a graphic description of where our countries values lie. This corresponds with the banality apparent in the highest value of our congress—getting re-elected. Paul Tillich said that religion is our “highest value”. Hmm.

http://deadspin.com/infographic-is-your-states-highest-paid-employee-a-co-489635228

 

Steven Pinker and Human Opportunity in Science

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Steven Pinker is a psychologist and linguist who I feel is one of the best thinkers present in American culture today. In a recent edition of The New Republic, he argues that science has given us an opportunity to totally change the world for the better and that in spite of how it often appears, great strides are being taken toward that end.

But, in this article (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities), he commits the sin of irreligion, that being the sin of approaching reality with a perspective other than that of “literarylew.”! He argues that science is creating opportunities for us, opportunities that are often gravely hampered by childish, self-serving obscurantism often voiced most vehemently by the religious. He argues that this “dishonesty” is often present even in science itself when scientists are unwilling to be self-critical about their own pet theories. Here is one paragraph in which he makes this point:

The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

The acquisition of knowledge is “hard.” I would attribute this to the phenomena of resistance, that tendency to not want to see things other than we see them already. And he clearly sees the relevance of this to science, the tendency for scientists to succumb to “subjective certainty” and fail to look critically at their own perspective.

And though he does not spell this out as pointedly as he could, the same could be said of religion and faith. Yes, spirituality also usually falls victim to this human need for “subjective certainty” and we end up believing only what we want to believe, not daring to consider what is obvious to everyone else—our faith is only a form of self-indulgence. And when faith devolves into that narcissistic morass, it fails to offer a redemptive influence in the culture. One writer, George Marsden, described this as the “cultural captivity” of religion. And, if one reads the gospels critically, one can see that Jesus saw this clearly about the religion of the day, calling them “hypocrites” which actually means “actors.” Those whose faith is wholly in the grip of contemporary culture can only be “actors”, having a “form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” Thus I close again with the pithy observation of Shakespeare on this note, “When love (or religion) begins to sicken and decay/It useth an enforced ceremony/There are no tricks in plain and simple faith/But hollow men, like horses hot at hand/Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.”

A Maya Angelou Prayer

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Here is a prayer by Maya Angelou which I recently came across, demonstrating the “non-duality” approach to spirituality that I have come to appreciate.

 

Prayer
 
Father, Mother God,
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.
 
Thank you for your presence
during the bright and sunny days,
for then we can share that which we have
with those who have less.
 
And thank you for your presence
during the Holy Days, for then we are able
to celebrate you and our families
and our friends.
 
For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.
 
For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.
 
For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.
 
For those who are lonely, we ask
you to keep them company.
 
For those who are depressed,
we ask you to shower upon them
the light of hope.
 
Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give all the
world that which we need most — Peace.
 
— Maya Angelou

 

Showers of Blessings!

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When I awoke this morning, lightening, thunder, and blowing wind greeted me. I peeked outside and found that this time the weather forecast had been accurate and a generous rainfall was coming our way. I then got to do one of my favorite things—take my laptop and cup of coffee to the open garage and watch “Showers of Blessings” visit me again.“ Showers of Blessings” is an old hymn that I loved in my youth and in the past couple of years as drought as beset my part of the country I have employed the image as I feel and express my gratitude for refreshing rainfall that breaks the drought occasionally. This is part of a new emphasis of my life these past few years, experiencing and voicing gratitude for the many blessings that come my way, so many of them usually taken for granted. And this experience and expression of gratitude is no longer perfunctory but now has an authenticity it used to lack as I truly “feel” grateful.

Another dimension of this experience…of this “awakening”…is that I pay better attention to the whole of the world around me, the social world but also the natural world. The entirety of the world “speaks” to me in a way to which I was once deaf; for I am less guilty of “having ears to hear but hearing not, having eyes to see but seeing not.” This parallels another important discovery of mine—the “Word” of the Judeo-Christian tradition is more than these “squeaks of ours” that we usually think of as the only means of communicating. This “Word” is found in the whole of Creation such as was suggested in the Old Testament when the writer declared, “The heavens and the earth declare the glory of God.”

I used to take this “Word” business literally and how could I do otherwise when at that time I took “words” literally, taking the word to be the thing-in-itself, mistaking the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. But now I see words as being inherently ephemeral just as are we humans that use them. But grasping this ephemeral nature of human experience and of the world, I now see and feel how powerful these words are as they can do more than merely denote, but can connote…or better yet, evoke. Words can reach into the heart and evoke a response but only if they come from the heart and only if there is a heart to receive them. If they are merely those “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness,” they will only denote and will never evoke. It all depends on having a heart and having one that is alive. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, described a heart that was dynamically alive as “full of penetrable stuff,” not “bronzed o’er” with the “dull speech of habit,” those aforementioned “well worn words and ready phrases.” A heart full of “penetrable stuff” can be “penetrated.”

A key issue is merely paying attention, being “mindful” of what is going on around us and in our own heart. We have to have awareness of the capricious “monkey mind” which so often holds us captive, imposing a template on the whole of our experience and keeping us from paying any attention to anything but the template itself, which is to say, to anything but our self. This insight allows me to glory in the trivial things I used to ignore—a summer morning rainfall, a beautiful flower, lovely birds cavorting in my yard, or two lovely dachshunds arguing with each other over who loves me the most!

 

Charlotte Joko Beck and Disappointment

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Disappointment is a recurrent feature of our lives. Some people handle it well while others are just devastated, not able to cope with the misfortune, perceived or otherwise, that has come their way. But Charlotte Joko Beck sees disappointment as an opportunity:

When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it’s the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we’re alert. This gift is always present in anyone’s life, that moment when ‘It’s not the way I want it.”

I’ve seen people face the disappointment and then with sheer will power and brute force face the disappointing circumstances and get what they want, only to later learn that it was not the best thing for them or for others. Yes, there is a time to confront the disappointment but Beck’s point was that there are definitely times when the disappointment needs to be embraced as a learning opportunity.

One of the greatest causes of disappointment is failure and it can be one of the most horrifying experiences of our life. But failure also often has something to teach us. E. L. Mayo put it like this, “Failure is more important than success because it brings intelligence to light the bony structure of the universe.” When in the throes of failure, our heart torn asunder with the disappointment of having our dreams crushed, if we can manage to pause for a moment, and exercise “mindfulness”, we can often find an intelligence present in the moment that will teach us something we would not have learned otherwise.

 

The Intricacies of Marriage

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The Bible so succinctly and tastefully describes coitus as “the way of a man with a maid.” Shakespeare in Hamlet referred to it as “country matters” and in Othello so vividly and lustily as “making the beast with two backs.” This union of man and woman is one of the great mysteries of life and I often marvel with my own marriage, wondering, “How did this ever happen?” For, we are two people so very different in so many ways but have been drawn together for 24 years into a bond that is increasingly indissoluble.

I have three poems about this relationship and its intricacies. The first by W. H. Auden likens two couples coming together to physics and two disparate “particles” pelting each other.

ON A CHILDHOOD’S GUIDE TO METAPHYSICS

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and sos,
Futility, and grime
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do
Or the atoms in our brain.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely, it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
Around a universe

In which a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel,
Since year after year it repels
An aging suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet, Euclidean space—
Exploded myths, but who
Would feel at home a-straddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for—
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really becomes a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing nature
Be altogether wise.

The second poem, by Sharon Olds, describes a man and woman meeting at college, falling in love, and having sex from which a child comes. This coitus is described as, “I take them up like the male and female/ paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to/strike sparks from them.”

I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell)
By Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

One of my favorite poems is by Wendell Berry in which he beautifully describes the turmoil that is always part of a marriage when both parties are alive, each of them allowed to be present in the relationship, a “presence” which is disallowed in most marriages of the day.

MARRIAGE

How hard it is for me3, 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.

“Unaccomodated Man”–The Absence that we Are

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King Lear gave up his kingdom, became estranged from his family, became very disconsolate, lost his eyesight and even  his mind,  and suddenly found himself out on the heath, pelted by a pitiless storm and retreating to a hovel where he lamented,  “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare forked animal…” Shakespeare saw clearly that man was other than he takes himself to be, that the trappings of his life merely cover up his internal nakedness. He realized and repeatedly emphasized the absence that we are.

And, when we get to the point in life where we entertain this spiritual impoverishment and experience the loss of our “kingdom”, the trappings of our ego-bound life that we have always taken to be of such great importance suddenly appear to amount to nothing. And when we get “naked”…as King Lear did literally after the above quote…we can discover meaning in our life and meaning for all of these trappings which until now have been merely “accomodations.” At this point many, if not all, of these “accomodations” can still be ours but they will not be the core of our identity any longer. We will have them. They will no longer have us.

Listen to what Thomas Merton said about this subject in his book, Seeds of Contemplation:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself in glory to make myself perceptible…as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface….But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structures of pleasures and ambitions have no foundation. I am my own mistake…..The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.

Shakespeare, Merton and other great spiritual luminaries recognized that entertaining this “absence that we are” is an essential task in life and is a spiritual enterprise. They recognized that only when we embrace our emptiness, not just cognitively but emotionally, can we find the fullness of our Source. This is what Jesus had in mind when he said that to find our life we must lose it, we must lose the ego investments in ephemeral things in order to embrace the Essential. And, this also often means “losing” our religion as we have to forgo the ego-ridden, “letter of the law”, approach to spirituality and this often feels like we are losing our faith. Sometimes we have to lose our faith to find it.

 

Stanley Kunitz on Reason’s Limits

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The lunacy of reason unchecked is one of my concerns, owing in part to the fact that mine has gone decades trying to remain “unchecked.” But reality always wins out in the end and reason, like all human contrivance, has to meet its limits. Stanley Kunitz addresses this issue in the following poem, “Organic Bloom,” in which he declares the life always escapes “closed reason” and notes in conclusion that those who fail to learn this are making a perilous mistake. This is true for individuals and for groups. Remember my oft-quoted note from Goethe, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

ORGANIC BLOOM
By Stanley Kunitz

The brain constructs its systems to enclose
The steady paradox of thought and sense;
Momentously its tissued meaning grows
To solve and integrate experience.
But life escapes closed reason. We explain
Our chaos into cosmos, cell by cell,
Only to learn of some insidious pain
Beyond the limits of our charted hell,
A guilt not mentioned in our prayers, a sin
Conceived against the self. So, vast and vaster
The plasmic circles of gray discipline
Spread outward to include each new disaster.
Enormous floats the brain’s organic bloom
Till, bursting like a fruit, it scatters doom.

Paean to God’s Little Children

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Last year I substitute taught in public schools with young children ages 5-8. I have noted here before how deeply moved I was by the experience, learning anew how precious and beautiful they are. These children were so very alive, not yet having been deadened by the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too”…most of them anyway. (There were some who, sadly, had been deadened and it was horrible to see. Their “life” had been taken from them already, their spiritual vitality missing or depleted.)

The “life” present in these children, though, really galvanized the spiritual reawakening I have experienced the past few years. My “inner child” was stirred deeply by the innocence, vulnerability, neediness, and love of these children. And, I might add, these children loved me too which should be the highlight of my resume henceforth for there is no accomplishment of which I am more proud.

This experience made me often think of these words of Jesus regarding children, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (Luke 18:16-17)” Jesus recognized in the children of his day the same qualities I noted in my classes last year, seeing that they trusted openly from the depths of their heart, not having learned to do otherwise. He was telling us that he wanted us to trust Him, our Source, just like these children were trusting. The trust that he had in mind was not a rational experience as much as one of the heart, not something that was carefully thought out, the conclusion of a research project of sorts. This trust was just a spontaneous flow from the depths of the heart.

And most of us have a hard time getting this “flow” underway as the “research project” method of faith that we were inculcated with is hard to shake. It sure has been for me and still is at it is an ongoing process. Getting the flow to going is a matter of being willing to peel off the layers of our social self, that contrivance of the ego, and get down to the core of who we are, to our “be-ing” itself. And, when we “be” we are going to have to entertain at some point the “Be-ing One” (as in Yahweh’s ‘I am that I am’) in some fashion, though our conception of the experience might be different; for, conceptions are culturally determined where as Being (the “Being One)” lies beyond the realm of conceptions and is, by the way, That which ultimately unites us all.

These thoughts were inspired by Richard Rohr again who continues to almost daily steal my ideas and never gives me credit for them! Damn him!

PEACE OF MIND IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS

“Beginner’s mind” is actually someone who’s not in their mind at all! They are people who can immediately experience the naked moment apart from filtering it through any mental categories. Such women and men are capable of simple presence to what is right in front of them without “thinking” about it too much. This must be what Jesus means by little children already being in the kingdom of God (Matthew 18:3-4). They don’t think much, they just experience the moment—good and bad. That teaching alone should have told us that Christianity was not supposed to be about believing doctrines and moralities. Children do not believe theologies or strive for moral certitudes. They respond vulnerably and openly to what is offered them moment by moment. This is pure presence, and is frankly much more demanding than securing ourselves with our judgments.

Presence cannot be easily defined. Presence can only be experienced. But I know this: True presence to someone or something allows them or it to change me and influence me—before I try to change them or it!

Beginner’s mind is pure presence to each moment before I label it, critique it, categorize it, exclude it, or judge it up or down. That is a whole new way of thinking and living. It is the only mind that has the power to actually reform religion.

Adapted from Beginner’s Mind (CD, DVD, MP3)

The Daily Meditations for 2013 are now available
in Fr. Richard’s new book Yes, And . . . .