The Power of Gratitude

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I awoke this morning with a powerful sense of gratitude in my heart.  First, I had slept pretty well, my lovely wife was next to me as were my two dachshunds. I When I awoke this morning, I was intensely grateful for some reason for so many things. stirred and felt my hand on one of the lovely puppies. I got out of bed and paid attention this time to the simple pleasure of my mobility, knowing that as I age that will probably be more of an issue. I ambled into the kitchen, took pleasure in the fact that it was clean and organized, and made my coffee. Moments later I was grateful for the aroma and taste of this morning brew. I looked outside and could see the day breaking, noting the bird feeder where “bird theater” would be convening shortly. I turned on the television and found CNN where I could again watch the rest of the world, already spinning and weaving through the course of its day.

This gratitude is a new dimension of my life and has even been a discipline of sorts for the past couple of years. I read a book back then which noted the value of gratitude even for the simple things of life and I started to practice gratitude myself. I feel it has been a powerful influence in the spiritual direction of my life since then. By making this effort, I awakened a “gratitude muscle” in my heart which had long lain dormant and I have cultivated that muscle since then.

The New Testament teaches us to “Give thanks in all things.” Now, I do not think Paul had in mind compulsively “thanking God” each and every minute of our life, trying to earn “suck points” with a God who has nothing better to do that sit “up there” and offer “atta-boys” to those of us who follow His commands. I think he was suggesting that exercise this “gratitude muscle” from time to time in our life and discover that it can help us orient our life to the good that is present in this world, even in the midst of things that are often not so good. This discipline also has value as a cognitive behavioral therapy strategy as a deliberate focus on something positive when things are not going so well can be a powerful antidote to stress or even despair. And, it can be a powerful step in the direction of “getting over ourselves” from time to time, taking the focus away from our tendency to view the world through the narrow prism of our own self-interest and needs. I am currently reading a book by an evangelical Christian, Ann Voskamp, (One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are) in which she describes keeping a “gratitude journal” as a way of coping with difficulties in her day to day life.

That Elusive Quest for Objectivity

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Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping, one of my favorite novels  which was also made into a wonderful movie with the same title. In a recent interview with the New York Times she revealed the same elusive quest for “objectivity” that has always eluded me and will always do so:

Every period is trapped in its own assumptions, ours, too, so I am always trying, without much optimism, to put together a sort of composite of the record we have made that gives a larger sense of the constant at work in it all, that is, ourselves. The project is doomed from the outset, I know. Still.

Just as has been the case with myself, she has never allowed this quest to be debilitating. She learned as I have that we can never be “objective” but we can realize…and feel…that this objectivity eludes us and always will. And we can surrender to and be humbled by the awareness. Adrienne Rich once said, “We can never know ourselves until we are aware of the assumptions that tyrannize us.”  When we gain awareness of one set of “basic assumptions” that tyrannize us, we will discover another!  But that is merely the human predicament and if we realize it we can be more tolerant of others who are subject to a similar tyranny.

 

Change Means “Mangled Guts Pretending”

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Ann Voskamp, writing from a conservative Christian viewpoint, reflects great depth stemming from having endured great loss in her life. And she notes in her book, “One Thousand Gifts” that, “awakening to joy awakens to pain”, and describes joy and pain as “two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who do not numb themselves to really living…Life is loss.” She also interprets Jacob’s wrestling with God as an inner spiritual battle that we all risk if we desire to change into the expression of our inner essence that so many of us fear. She describes the quest for wells which hold living water, noting that these wells don’t come without first seeking them with desperation and that “wells don’t come without first splitting open hard earth, cracking back the lids. There’s no seeing God face-to-face without first the ripping…It takes practice, wrenching practice, to break open the lids. But the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt he is.”

But, now I want to share the same truth in the words of someone from a vastly different perspective, Tony Kushner, the noted playwright and author of “Angels in America” and more recently author of the screenplay for the movie, “Lincoln.” A character in “Angels in America” poses the question, “How do people change” prompting the following answer:

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. And then you up you get. And walk around. Just mangled guts pretending.

Wow, that is intense! “Mangled guts pretending!” Notions like this is enough to deter anyone from changing, to opt for the status quo, personally or collectively. Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, to, “cling these ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” (Shakespeare, in Hamlet)

And I can’t help but apply this to our country in its current turmoil. As Bob Dylan sang decades ago, “The times they are a changin’” and it is producing great political and social turmoil. And one point made in the brilliant movie Lincoln was the tremendous social unrest that Lincoln knew the country faced when he broached the subject of the 13th amendment.

 

“Lighten up” You Pain Mongerers!

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And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well. -Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a fine poet and I do think he experienced the “pain” of seeing things to well and that probably it felt like a “fatality.” For, the gods have forbidden us to look at things to clearly, too well, as it does not look pretty. For example, each of us could die at any moment but neurologically we are wired to not obsess with that thought. If we did, we would have trouble functioning. So we live our hum-drum lives “assuming” that we are going to live forever, knowing in the back of our hearts that we won’t, but not worrying about the fact that the very next moment the grim-reaper could be knocking on our door.

But some do live portions of their life in very dangerous situations and have the knowledge that their life is on the line. Soldiers are one example but they are disciplined and trained to now allow that fear to predominate. Others are racked with serious illness that could take them at anytime. But many others are merely predisposed to see through to the grim of life, its intrinsic ugliness and ultimate “fatality”, and at times get overwhelmed and even on occasion decide to throw in the towel and borrow Shakespeare’s “bare bodkin”

But, to those people, I challenge them that they are taking themselves too seriously. Yes, they see that “fatality” dimension of life and it tears into their soul. But, they need to “give it a rest” from time to time even as they write about it or preach about it for it is only one perspective. That perspective can become all-consuming as the mind can readily perseverate on anything, certainly something like the ugliness of life, and that “bare bodkin” or Socrates’ “hemlock” might beckon. In those instances, I fear these people are often just taking themselves and their pain too personally. THERE IS ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT IT! Often, “This too shall pass.” I strongly recommend that when life is looking overwhelming, try to utilize a simple cognitive-behavioral strategy and follow the advice from the movie, “The Life of Brian” and sing the little ditty, “Look on the bright side of life.” Make it a practice to look around you and focus…and feel…the beauty that is around you even in the midst of your pain.

Here is a picture I found that makes me think of myself with my wife when I have consumed with ponderous, boring thoughts about the heaviness of life:  I have just quoted  T. S. Eliot:  “Dark, dark, we all go into the dark, the vacant interstellar space…”  Note the look on her face.  She is pondering, “How in the hell did I ever get stuck with this morose loser?”

2be old bored couple pix

Group Think, Collective Psychosis, and Spirituality

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Indian novelist and social critic Arundhati Roy wrote one of my favorite novels, The God of Small Things, which I strongly recommend. She has been outspoken about political and social injustice in her own country and even in our country. He outspoken views have gotten her into no small amount of trouble with her own government. Recently in Amy Goodman’s radio program, Democracy Now, she was interviewed about the U.S. declaration of war on Iraq a decade ago and used the term “psychosis” to describe the decision. Now, I think “psychosis” might have been a bit over the top. But she does offer a very insightful, critical perspective about that decision, a perspective that is now agreed upon by many in this country. (Ms. Roy interview link: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/18/arundhati_roy_on_iraq_wars_10th)  Cultures do function as individuals in a sense and can be “mentally ill”, even psychotic. And it always takes someone from the outside, someone who is not caught up in the collective madness, to point in out. Thus the important role of Ms. Roy and other brilliant thinkers from other cultures.  Circular reasoning often prevails. We have something in mind that we want to do and then devote our rational processing of data into legitimating the conclusion to which we’ve already been led. Or, to quote someone (whose name I no longer recall), our thinking is often “the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

I know I sound like a broken record, but “this is a spiritual problem.” Now to call anything a “spiritual” problem and, already acknowledging there is the “broken record” issue with me, I myself want to say, “Oh, barf me with a spoon!” It is so easy to pontificate about “spiritual problems” and even more so I know that I’m doing so on some level, playing back an old recording in which I achieved cheap ego satisfaction from heaping “hell-fire and damnation on a lost and dying world.” Well, that is not what I have in mind. That is too simplistic. The solution I had in mind back then was very immature, reflecting spirituality seen as a rational process in which certain precepts merely needed to be accepted and followed. But by “spirituality” here I refer to the gut-level values of our culture, values that are usually reflected even in our religion. And, if we were honest, our supreme value today, our true “God” is consumerism, or “stuff.” We actually believe only in “stuff” and our heart lies with “stuff.”

But the spirituality I now value and seek to practice…and admittedly do so very poorly…is that of a new direction. It is a focus on the “eternal” but not in terms of time and space but in terms of value or quality. It is simply to recognize that our world is ephemeral, that there is an Ultimate reality that is present and expresses itself through this world. And our ephemeral, mundane world can have meaning only when we live in reference to that other dimension. Thus we daily “chop wood and carry water”, not knowing what the outcome may be, but knowing, i.e. “believing” and “hoping”, that it was make a difference. T. S. Eliot described it as the need to “offer our deeds to oblivion.” Of course, this offends our grandiose ego self who wants to know what the outcome will be and wants the outcome, especially the part that we played, to be really magnificent. But we can’t know. But we can take comfort in the hope that, collectively speaking, “There is a divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Shakespeare)

I offer two poems which so beautifully emphasize this external reference point, one from the East and one from the West:

First, from Lao Tzu:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness:
�Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.

And then there is a lovely sonnet by John Masefield in which distress in our life is seen as an occasion to “thrust on that Unseen” and “cast to the devil’s challenge” the man’s “yes”. For, the devil’s challenge is a resounding “No”, an emphatic declaration that our life does not have any meaning and that our efforts are futile. When that spirit of negation rears its ugly head, that is the moment to look around and find the beauty that is nearby in our world, to offer a “random act of kindness”, and try to do so anonymously and without ostentation, and perhaps offer to love to one of God’s critters, human or otherwise. In other words, “get over ourselves” for a moment which is what the black hole of despair is often about.

Man has his unseen friend, his unseen twin,
His straitened spirit’s possibility,
The palace unexplored he thinks an inn,
The glorious garden which he wanders by.
It is beside us while we clutch at clay
To daub ourselves that we may never see.
Like the lame donkey lured by moving hay
We chase the shade but let the real be.
Yet, when confusion in our heaven brings stress,
We thrust on that unseen, get stature from it,
Cast to the devil’s challenge the man’s yes,
And stream our fiery hour like a comet,
And know for that fierce hour a friend behind,
With sword and shield, the second to the mind.

Grace, Hope, and “The Peace of Wild Things”

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I have met several Indian friends in the blog-o-sphere the past two years and feel a real kinship with them. And, this kinship corresponds with an “Eastern” direction in my spiritual life as I see boundaries as less distinct than I was taught in my youth. I illustrated this several weeks ago with an anecdote I learned decades ago when someone pointed out that in one Eastern language, instead of saying, “I see the book over there” their language puts it like this, “The book is seen.” The separateness from the world is less pronounced. The world is less objectified…in some sense.

One of these Indian friends and I have had several very rewarding exchanges about the nature of reality, the nature of “spirituality”, and the role that culture plays in shaping our view of these things, and our view of all things. He, like me, sees the ugliness in the world…in my country, yes…but also in his own country. I get the impression that at times he finds it very troubling like I do. When I have these feelings, I will often deliberately miss-apply one of the scriptures, the shortest verse in the bible, and will tell myself, “This is why the Bible says, ‘Jesus wept.’” For, the writer of this “shortest verse in the bible” said Jesus was on a mountain, overlooking a city when he said these words. Using my “literary” license, I feel Jesus was weeping in realizing how unnecessary it was that mankind lives in the self-imposed spiritual squalor and I think that any of us who looks at the human situation with a heart, including his/her own situation, certainly wants to cry on occasion. I know I do.

But this friend this morning pointed out something which again caught my attention. Perhaps I fawn too much over his culture and it’s lesser emphasis of object separateness for he noted emphatically, “Forget culture shit. Culture is the same everywhere.” And I realized that yes, even in that culture of his with its different “object-relationship” paradigm, there is still the human tendency to absolutize to his/her worldview and to take it to be the only way of being in the world. And the minute people make this mistake poison is introduced and/or perpetuated in the world. This is the human predicament in a nut shell right there. We just can’t get around that obstinacy and it is that obstinacy that creates the profound problems that we are facing. I see it currently in my country’s recurring political pissing contests which I most recently illustrated with the internecine squabbling in the extremists of the Republican Party. But everywhere in the world, we just can’t “get over ourselves”.

Now, suddenly I realize I’m broaching too much despair! I try to not go there too often. When too much grim besets me, I am learning to counter this despair with focus on the beauty that always abounds in my life if I will deign to look for it and pay attention to it. And when I focus there for a moment, if I practice meditation, I will offer a prayer of thanks and find my Center again. This exercise helps me to appropriate and honor grace.

And the notion of grace brings to mind a powerful moment about a year ago when I was helping a dear friend exit this world after a long, ugly battle with that bitch cancer. KW and I had always talked about spiritual matters in the 25 years we had known each other so this was not merely a “death-bed” concern of his. On a particular day, he posed the question to me, “What is grace?” Well, I didn’t miss a beat and employed what I so often employ, a bit of poetry that I have gleaned over the years. And on that occasion I quoted an excerpt from a marvelous poem by Wendell Berry entitled, “The Peace of Wild Things.” KW was touched, and so was I, as I felt I had offered a “word fitly spoken” even if it was someone else’s words. Here is that profound wisdom from Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty in the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come unto the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come unto the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

Ludwig on Claire’s Crochet

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Ludwig on Claire’s Crochet.

This is my first “re-blogging” effort!  A dear blog-o-sphere friend wrote this beautiful poem about one of my beloved dachshunds, Ludwig.

Loving a dog is relatively new to me.  I often tell Ludwig that God sent him, and his younger sister Elsa, to me to teach me more about love.  For they have tapped into a “love muscle” that lay dormant for much of my life.  Oh, yes I always “loved” family, friends, and even the world.  But my love was always too measured.  But God has sent four puppies into my life to teach me about love in a less measured way—First, my wife Claire, second my first dachshund Sonya who is now deceased, third Ludwig, and then four years ago his sister Elsa.

And an important dimension of this love is merely paying attention to them, recognizing that they have needs, and that my first nature is to give most of my attention to my own needs.  These four puppies are teaching me to “get over myself” and I’m making progress.

So thanks “Inner Dialect” and also thanks Sandeep for sharing the same picture of Ludwig on your web site last week.  Sandeep announced to the world that Ludwig was seeking a beau and since then Ludwig has been very excited at the prospect.  The very next day after Sandeep’s post, I caught Ludwig in the bathroom primping before the mirror, sporting a pair of sexy sunglasses, and dashing Old Spice on his body.  I quietly backed out, hoping he didn’t see me, as i didn’t want to spoil his hopes of “getting lucky” after all these years!

“Come Out Ye From Among Them and Be Ye Separate”

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The biblical admonishment to “Come out from among them and be ye separate” and to be a “peculiar people” received strong emphasis in the church of my upbringing. And, looking back, God must have been proud of us for we certainly accomplished this, though with great (unconscious)  irony. We just had no idea how different we appeared, how “peculiar” we were! And, well….now, with hang-dog face and shamed faced…I have to admit, “Yep, I probably accomplished that more than the rest!”

There are so many anecdotes I could share to illustrate things we did to do maintain the illusion of this separateness. A common bromide was to never, “drink, smoke, chew, or go with the girls that do.” On the drinking part of that bromide, the onset of canned soft drinks in the ‘Sixties posed a problem as if we drank a soft drink in a can, it might appear to others that we were drinking a beer! One young adult I knew pointed out with pride that at office parties, he would drink a coke…from a bottle and with a straw…to make it clear to all parties that he was not imbibing.

This obsessive need to be the “peculiar people” of the Old Testament reflected a core identity problem . For, people who have a secure identity do not have to make a show of who they are in any respect to any dimension of life, certainly faith. They can merely “be” and have confidence that their “be-ing” in the world will suffice. These people of faith who are secure in their identity do not have to be ostentatious with their faith as it will not be a suit of clothes they wear, but merely be part and parcel of their life, a completely natural part of that life. They do not have to announce with word or deed, “Hey, world! I am a Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or whatever!” Their faith is very personal and is not for the purpose of show.

Now a person of faith will certainly stand out in an important sense as their life will reflect values different than most people have. Their focus will not be on the ephemeral, but on Value itself. In our culture, they will not be so obsessed with “stuff” though they well might have plenty of “stuff.” The roots of their heart and soul will not be in mass culture. they will not subscribe to the adage, “He who has the most stuff at the end of the game wins.”

Shakespeare described this ostentatious faith as that of “hollow men” who have to “show their mettle…like horses hot at hand.” When I watch a televangelist or some smug, oily Christian who is “strutting his ‘Christian’ stuff”, I often pictures a team of wild horses pawing the air, shrieking to anyone interested in looking on, “Hey, lookee here! Lookee here! See me! A’int I pious?”

And T. S. Eliot wrote a powerful poem entitled, “Hollow Men.” Speaking of mankind as a whole, not just with respect to spirituality, he described shallow, empty, “hollow men…stuffed men leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.” His poem beautifully captures the futile emptiness of alienated lives bereft of any spiritual connection to self, others, the world, or God.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Epistemic Closure and the Republican Party

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I had my weekly cup of coffee with God earlier this morning. As we sipped our celestial Starbucks, he pointed to an open-air classroom nearby where young gods were studying, preparing for their future rule of various worlds. “Let’s listen in,” he suggested to me. I obliged readily, knowing of course who I was dealing with.

The “young gods” were being lectured to about epistemic closure, the notion of living in a bubble and assuming that one knows about everything when in reality he/she “knows” only through a small prism. The teacher then ran a video that I have shared here before from Saturday Night Life, illustrating the phenomena vividly. (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9yn49_mr-belvedere_shortfilms#.UUWfUDctU9U)

Then the teacher continued, “Now for a couple of days we are conducting a laboratory experiment in epistemic closure on an obscure little planet called Earth. We are very concerned about this cosmic poison for wherever it gains a foothold, it is almost impossible to eradicate; and it is the one thing that prevents us from accomplishing our Purpose. It is Satan’s favorite weapon.” He then pointed to the screen and zoomed in to a place called “The United States” and suddenly the din of the Republican Party’s internecine squabbling filled the room

Now laying aside my reverie…

Those of you who look on from other countries must be appalled at what you are seeing in the current performance of my country’s political circus. But, please note that the gods are giving you a lesson about what can happen in your own country if it, or any faction within it, draws its boundaries too narrowly and refuses to broaden them. Now I am wont to note at this point of this argument that this tendency is present with all groups, liberal and conservative. HOWEVER, let me note this time that the “open-mindedness” I advocate will never be found on the extreme right fringe of any group as people of that sort desperately hate open-mindedness and desperately cling to “truth” as seen through the narrow prism of their hate-filled heart. It is amusing on one hand to watch the ultra-conservative’s quest for “purity” in their own rank as it creates frustration and consternation within their own ranks. But on the other hand it is not amusing at all, but very sad, as we see in the Taliban what would happen if our culture did not have sophisticated structural limits.

But this boundary dilemma is part of the human experience and reflects a tendency that we have to watch for even in our own heart. With my government’s current impasse…and specifically the Republican imbroglio…we have an object lesson in the lunacy of the human heart, individually and collectively. We are our own worst enemy; as Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The human temptation to create a cocoon…an Eden on earth…can be so compelling that it is counter-productive and can even lead to our own demise. As W. H. Auden feared, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

The answer is “self” awareness or “consciousness” which we can never acquire unless we first recognize that we don’t have it in the first place. In other words, the first step in seeing the light is realizing that we live in darkness just as Plato told us in the 5th Century BC and Jesus told us a few centuries later. And that is to name only two who have offered light in our darkness. Others certainly preceded them and many have come since and are even present today. “But Truth met him and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.” (W. H. Auden)