The “Packaging” of Women and Sex

7 Replies

Loving words, and loving to play with them, I’ve always been taken by the turn-of-phrase, “I often turn my objects into women” as opposed to the lamentation of “turning women into objects.” But my focus today is on the objectification of women, an offense of which I am guilty as charged…I admit. For, I was raised in a culture where women were a mere commodity and this is still the case today, though there is much greater awareness of the problem. Fortunately, though still “cursed” with the “male gaze” that objectifies women, I have another dimension in my heart where I can see that women have value other than in gratifying my sexual urges.

Sex, like the rest of life, will never be “done” perfectly. Our sexuality always has a flavor that is determined by the time and place of our birth and upraising and it often takes decades to slough-off the unnecessary and unwholesome dimensions of “sex.” We must always remember that a primary function of sex is “making babies” and to carry out this primary need of the species, the human imagination is left to its own devices, including some that are immature and even “nasty” or brutal.

Sex, like everything else, comes to us as a packaged product. (Yes, even religion and spirituality does!) It takes a while to determine what parts of the package we wish to keep and maintain. And, we must remember, most people on this earth will never have the luxury of distinguishing between the “packaging” of any cultural contrivance and the “thing-in-itself.” I’m fortunate to be living in a culture, in an era where distinctions can be made…if one dares.

I’m in love with Maureen Down, a columnist for the New York Times. Merely look at her picture and you will see why! But it is more than her physical beauty that I enjoy. She is acid-tongued, brilliant, erudite, and adept at cutting to the core on issues in our culture. In today’s NYT, she addresses the aforementioned “packaging” of women through the ages.

Here is the link to Dowd’s column: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/opinion/sunday/dowd-the-tortured-mechanics-of-eroticism.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

And I close with my favorite line from Woody Allen, “Of course sex is dirty…if you do it right!”

 

“Mindfulness” in Blogging

2 Replies

Like many other bloggers, I often wonder, “Why am I doing this?” It seems so foolish and even vain in some sense; for, “Who am I” to be holding forth as if he has anything to offer? It is, in a sense, an exercise in humility as I “put myself out there” when I post something. I have fortunate to have a very nice response from very interesting, thoughtful, “mindful” people from all corners of the world. I now feel a real connection with some of these people as we have engaged in dialogue from time to time, exchanged emails on occasion, teased and chided each other, and shared reading lists.

I do think the “mindfulness” is one of the key things that I seek now in the whole of my life, in real time and also here in the blog-o-sphere. And by this term, I do not mean merely intelligence…you can find that anywhere…but I mean a “presence” in their intellect which reflects a self-reflectiveness and sensitivity to their own subjective world and that of others. This quality reflects an “aliveness” that is so often not present in our modern, machine-produced world. This brings to mind a wonderful poem by Robert Frost which I will share shortly in which he studied an insect on a white sheet of paper and used its “antsy” behavior to poetically approach “mindfulness.”

And mindfulness is very much related to another primary motivation in my blogging—connection. I am fortunate to be well connected in my social circle and community, “well” in that I have meaningful friends and relationships. But, I am discovering that in this respect, and so many areas of life, I want more! I am discovering a hunger in my heart right now for the whole of life, a significant part of which is connection with other people and the natural world. And so I toss these words out into the void, always curious to see who if anyone will respond and what they will have to say in response; and, what are they offering on their own blog. I have noted before that, “Winds of thought blow magniloquent meanings betwixt me and thee,” (Archibald Macleish) and it is the “meaningfulness” that provides the sense of connection. For, with words, we can evoke a resonance in the heart of other like-minded souls and allow a reciprocal evocation in our own heart. This is what takes place when two, or more, people “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot)

And note what Shakespeare said about the power of words.

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote where thou dost stay.

He saw words as sublimated “flesh” and implied that if the whole of his body could be “sublimated”, he would be conveyed across distance into the presence of his beloved. Now, of course, he was not being literal; but, he was noting the power of thought and words to “carry us” beyond the “small bright circle of our own consciousness” (Conrad Aiken) and reach a hand across the abyss that separates all of us. But, for this to take place, these words must be “meaningful” and not merely palaver. This means dialogical engagement which exposes us to different ways of seeing the world thus broadening our own world view. In most people this is discouraged in favor of merely regurgitating “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) This brings to mind the pithy observation of T.S. Eliot regarding a family that was locked into a closed verbal world, describing them as, “Too strange to one another for misunderstanding.”

A Considerable Speck

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think,
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt–
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.
Robert Frost

Rumi Points Us to the Real!

Leave a reply

This beautiful poem by Rumi illustrates what I see as a central message of Jesus. In my own words, Jesus’ ministry can be summed up with, “Hey, you guys and gals, you got it all wrong! You are taking for real that which is only temporary.” This was most clearly emphasized when he said in Matthew 6, “ Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. Earlier Plato had noted the same phenomena with his myth a man being chained in a cave in which he could only see the shadows of the world that was going on behind him outside the cave’s opening. He naturally took the shadows to be the real thing. I think it was C. S. Lewis who described this as “the sin of misplaced concreteness,” taking the ephemeral to be the real. Here, Rumi presents the notion with customary eloquence:

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.The cave wants nothing to do
with the sun. This is dumb, the self-
defeating way we’ve been. A gold mine
is calling us into its temple. Instead,
we bend and keep picking up rocks
from the ground. Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source!
The origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give. The bite of scolding
makes ecstasy more familiar. But
look, fish, you’re already in the ocean:
just swimming there makes you friends
with glory. What are these grudges about?
You are Benjamin. Joseph has put a gold cup
in your grain sack and accused you of being
a thief. Now he draws you aside and says,
“You are my brother. I am a prayer. You’re
the amen.” We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here. This is the prayer
of each: You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud. You honor
my soul. You bring rivers from the
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.
The wine you offer takes me out of myself
into the self we share. Doing that is religion.

 

Do We Dare Let Go of Guilt?

3 Replies

Huffington Post offers a very insightful article about dealing with guilt and escaping its clutches. (Huff Po =— http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/dealing-with-guilt-iyanla-vanzant_n_3472594.html)

How do we let go of any emotion that has tyrannized us such as guilt has. Sure, I accept the notion of the forgiveness of God offered in the story of Jesus, for example. But that comes to us first as a rational, conceptual “idea” and does not necessarily burrow into the depths of the heart where the “real” guilt abides; for the “real” guilt is in the affective domain which controls how we use our rational mind. Thus, our guilt can make us “guilty” believers of any stripe which will always make us so fanatical and legalistic that people who come across us will want to put up the “sign of the cross” when we approach and run away. For, guilt-ridden faith offers no “human” quality and therefore has no “godly” quality to it. It is just an “idea” devoid of any experience; or, better yet, it is an “idea” devoid of any Spirit, as in the “letter of the law killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.”

Guilt so often is so intrinsic to our being that we can’t fathom living without it. Letting it go would make us feel like a duck out of water or a fish on dry land. It would be scary and even fatal in a sense in that our ego would definitely be threatened by the loss of this core element which allows it to cohere. My dear friend, brother, spiritual mentor, and soul mate, Bill Shakespeare said it so eloquently, noting in Hamlet that we would prefer to “cling to those ills that we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” Our guilt is so comforting because it is the only thing that we have ever known. And, we are validated daily for living in this guilt as it is guilt (and shame) that binds our world together in the dog-and-pony show that the Hindus’ call Maya and fundamentalist American Christians call, “Well, it’s just the way things are.” And many faiths depend on guilt as without guilt attendance of their churches, synagogues, and mosques might decline, worship palaces fall into disrepair, clergy go underpaid or unemployed, and its constituents left with the challenge of dealing with Reality…which always requires faith in a Beyond which I often label our Source. And, I am of course referring to a transcendent deity who is, paradoxically, immanent; and the appreciation of this powerful truth requires ability and a willingness to hold contradictory notions in the mind at the same time. In other words, this notion “ain’t makin’ no sense” to many people and it never will!

But, there is always “method to our madness,” individually and collectively. The best we can ever do is muddle through and believe fervently that there is a “wisdom that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Last two quotes from “Bill”)

 

A “Fig Leaf” for Existential Anxiety

Leave a reply

We are such vulnerable little creatures, described by W. H. Auden as “clinging to the granite skirts of our sensible old planet.” I think we are acutely aware of this vulnerability which is why God gave us a “fig leaf” to hide ourselves from our existential anxiety This “fig leaf” we know as our “ego” and if it does its job, we will be mercifully unaware of our vulnerability, assuming (i.e. “pretending”) that we will live forever. But, alas and alack, some of us were issued defective “fig leaves” and have been cursed with existential anxiety. One way we have to cope with this distress is poetry and I will now share a wonderful poem on the subject of vulnerability:

Edge

by Eamon Grennan

When I’d walked out to the sea surfing and spuming
into meerschaum heaps of lettuce-tinted gauze —
breakers becoming light then noise, the ocean raging
and rearranging this long spit of sand like a life
at the mercy of circumstance — I saw the north wind

drive trillions of sandgrains to scour every last trace
of what the previous tide had done, and gulls snatch
huge clamshells from the swirl and smash them
to get at and gobble each salt, soft-bodied helplessness
at the heart of its own broken home, and I felt caught

between water-violence and the gulls’ patience,
between shifting ground I stood on and the thunder-
turbulence of water, between a slowly disappearing
ceiling of cloud and the blue sky-cupola it leaves
behind, between titanic ocean-roar and the ticking heart.

 

 

Plucked by a Tulip????

2 Replies

It was a lovely, cool spring morning in 1990 and I had just been married about 9 months. I was in our front yard and was greeted by a bounty of lovely tulip blossoms. I bent down to pluck one and as I did so, the notion fluttered through my mind, “Am I plucking or being plucked?” That was such a random, silly thought that just “happened” but it immediately caught my eye even before I knew about “mindfulness.” And it is no coincidence that this event happened shortly after my first and only marriage, each of us being in our mid thirties.

This was the beginning of the end for my rigid, “lost in the head”, concrete thinking though it would take another two decades and more for the process to get to the point where the “flow” of life would begin to take place in my heart. The boundary ambiguity noted in that observation flourished over those decades and I increasingly have become more adept at drawing less of a distinction between “me and thee.” Now I do draw distinctions; and failure to do so would be a serious problem for we do live in the “real” world where distinctions and ego-functioning is required. But I’m not trapped in the paradigm of “I’m over here” and “you are out there”; I’m more able to see my world, human and natural, in more inclusive terms.

Now, I must point out that “I” was plucking the damn tulip! But in so doing the beauty of the moment was toying with my heart, bringing to my mind and heart the notion of “being plucked.” There is such magnificent beauty in the world but we can’t see, and feel, this beauty unless we are able to let go of the rigid ego-identification which our culture always mandates. But the ego identification is so insidious that we can’t even see it without having already somehow escaped its clutches. This is relevant to an old philosophical bromide that I came across decades ago, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it” ; or, “Asking someone to see his ‘self’ is like asking a fish to see water.” Or, even better yet, one of my Indian blog-o-sphere friends offered, “Someone who has fallen into a vat of marmalade can’t see anything but marmalade.” I liked his observation because it was new to me and registered dissonant at first, thus communicating to me effectively as I quickly mulled it over.

This drawing of distinction between “me and thee” is intrinsically a spiritual process. And I’m not even address “Spiritual” here though it is very relevant. I’m referring to “spiritual” as a human enterprise in the depths of the heart, a willingness to look inside which is an enterprise that our culture discourages. And if we deign to venture “there”, we will eventually end up wrestling with “God” in the realm of the “Spiritual.”

We Are “Needful Things” at Heart

4 Replies

Jenny Kissed Me is an excellent blog featuring a steady array of very thoughtful poetry. (http://jeglatter.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/let-go-of-everything-that-does-not-serve-you/) In the poem linked here, she describes emptiness as a place of fulfillment and strength and uses the image of the mother’s breast as the model of need fulfillment. “Dear One, Let go of everything/That does not/Serve you/Then lay, rest//And suckle here,/Until your emptiness/Becomes/A strong new you.”

Clinical theory offers object-relations theory to explain the “needfulness” of the human heart, suggesting as the subject begins to formulate it “needs” objects with which to constitute itself. Or, better stated, it needs objects against which to define itself, this process of definition often described as “object separateness.” The mother, according to this theory is the first object, the “primary object”, and her breasts are the “primary” part of her as they are quickly learned to be satisfaction for a primary need, physical hunger.

But a primary dimension of the human experience will always be “emptiness” or an “object hunger” which we will return to if we do anything meaningful in life. If our ego is mature…if we have “ego integrity”…we will be able to let down our boundaries here and there and step into that “neediness” and there find a Strength that we will not find otherwise.

Marilynne Robinson wrote a marvelous novel entitled Housekeeping about twenty years ago, a novel that was turned into an excellent movie by the same name. In the novel she noted something that grabbed me even before I knew why, “Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.” Robinson knew that need, though a very scary dimension of the heart, is fertile territory if we dare to go there. And, by describing it as “fertile” I am assigning it femininity and I do so deliberately; for, there in the maw of primordial hunger is our Source and it/He/She is the Ultimate compensation that can be found there. But, unfortunately, addiction of all varieties is always a ready temptation when we visit that matrix of life.

However, emptiness is antithetical to everything we are taught in Western culture and this is not unrelated to the misogyny that we making inroads into in the past 100 years. Our culture emphasizes “be strong” in an ego-maniacal way, not realizing that real strength is found in weakness. Sounds a whole lot like the teachings of Jesus, doesn’t it? Hmm.

And let me close with a facetious note. Stephen King wrote a short story entitled “Needful Things.” I sometimes like to think that this is a good description of the human race.

 

“Say it Ain’t So, Buddha!”

2 Replies

Buddha must be turning over in his grave this morning. The New York Times has a story about “radical Buddhism” in Myanmar (Burma) which reports re an anti-Muslim movement in the country spearheaded by Ashin Wirathu. To illustrate his extremism, he recently described a massacre of Muslim children in one city as a “show of strength,” declaring, “If we are weak, our land will become Muslim.”

Of course, I know enough about religious history to know that extremism finds its way into all spiritual teachings, Buddhism included. But this is the most flagrant example I remember in my life time of Buddhist extremism. And this current “flavor” is merely another rendition of a favorite theme of all small-minded people of any persuasion, “us vs. them” with “them” always being a catch-all category for people who we disagree with or do not like. We must always remember that when we are captivated by an ego need to categorize our world, we will inevitably find ourselves comfortably ensconced in the luxurious confines of “us” while someone else is always banished into “them.”

This is binary thinking, the spawn of ego-mindedness run amok. Instead of using Reason to find common ground, to search for inclusiveness, this gift is used to carve the world up into pieces and always leaves the “carver” in isolation. Or to look at it slightly differently, this “carver” is horrified by his own isolation and misuses the God-given Reason to perpetuate that isolation. As Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

 

Southern Baptists and “The Wisdom of Humility”

Leave a reply

Terry Mattingly reported re a recent discussion with leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention re decline in baptisms, reflecting a decline in “conversions.” I here provide a link to this article so you can see how the SBC is attempting to explain this decline. (http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/jun/14/terry-mattingly-baptists-with-fewer-baptisms/)

But, having been a Baptist myself, I have an opinion which I shared weeks ago after a newspaper article reported about a new demographic category, the “nones”, people who now selected “none” when asked about which religion they are affiliated with. (https://literarylew.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/an-open-letter-to-the-clergy-re-the-nones/)
I feel that Baptists err in that they adhere rigidly to the “letter of the law” even while preaching against this very thing. But by taking the Bible literally, they fail to see the nuances of the Scripture and fail to appreciate the layers of meaning that it offers. They fail in exercise of hermeneutic discipline.

I here would like to share a paragraph by a professor of religion in San Antonio, Glenn Hughes:

…there are those who try to hold on their sense of the divine by tenaciously attaching themselves to religion in a quite uncritical manner—in a closed-minded manner that renders the world of everyday responsibilities, and the awareness of historical complexities, more bearable though massive psychological reliance on intense, unexamined feelings evoked by religious symbols, rituals, and texts. Thus is forged an attitude of intransigent certainty that one is in possession of the sole and absolute truth about divinity. And thus the full complexity of the challenges of existential self-making and of responsibility for history is sidestepped, to some degree, by ignoring the problematic fact of the transcendence of divine transcendence—that is, its profound mysteriousness and its unavailability to direct or substantive human understanding—that the former child’s sense of the nearness of the divine absolute becomes transformed into an inflexible, dogmatic, and (as we all know) sometimes murderous conviction that the intense feelings evoked by one’s own religious tradition are infallible guides to absolute, exclusive religious truth.  (A More Beautiful Question:  The Spiritual in Poetry and Art)

If the Gospel is to be meaningful, it must be refracted through a heart in which meaning is present. By that, I mean a heart that is “petal open” and full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare’s term) not one that’s keeping human frailty at bay with rigid, compensatory certainty. In other words, a heart that is humble. And, as T. S. Eliot noted, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. And humility is endless.”

SNL Video Vividly Illustrates Shame

Leave a reply

Shame is so powerful yet it is an elemental force in our psyche. If we “have no shame” will find ourselves knee-deep in psychopathy but if we are overwhelmed with shame we will find ourselves cowering through life like the two characters at the counter in this old Saturday Night Live skit. Watching this skit is almost too painful as it resurrects old recordings in the depths of my soul. But, it is just so funny! And, having our haunts laughed at can be helpful as it helps us look at them openly.(http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/brenda-the-waitress/n9922)

For my international readers, if you are not familiar with SNL, you should check out the clips on You Tube. They are so funny and so insightful about our culture, including our dark and ugly side. I hope you enjoy this one.