The “Judgment of God” in Tandem with Grace

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The concept of “boundaries” did not exist in my youth, at least not in my culture. This concept is one of the most fundamental dimensions of life and I’m pleased to note that now, even in early grade school, teachers and care-givers introduced the concept and reinforce it frequently.

When I think of “boundary” I think of a limit. And it is that, but much more; it is even a beginning. Heidegger once said that boundaries are where the Essential begins its unfolding. He argued that without boundaries there could be no unfolding of the Essential. From his observation, I suggest that without the development of boundaries (which is basically the formation of an “ego”) the child would remain lost in a maze of reptilian-brain impulses, basically a brain stem with arms and legs. And we have all seen adults who are still captivated by this old-brain energy!

Boundaries give us the power of choice. They enable us to make decisions about our impulses and behaviors, determining which ones are appropriate, and whether or not the setting is appropriate for their expression. One simple, but powerful example is sexuality. When sexuality is rearing its ugly head (wink, wink) in a male’s teen years, if he has good boundaries he will know how and when to “make a move” on a winsome young lass, having confidence that his “moves” might be and ultimately will be successful in accomplishing this physical and emotional goal. If his boundaries are poor, he will be rude and offensive, often guilty of what we now call “sexual harassment”, and sometimes even sexual aggressiveness.

This subject is very relevant to the phenomena of “feelings” about which I recently discoursed here. If our boundaries are present and mature, we will own our feelings and embrace them, but not allow them to run amok. I suggest that if they do run amok, it is not actually “feelings” but instinctual energy without the modification of boundaries, that God-given gift of our forebrain. If, on the other hand there are too many boundaries and/or if they are too rigid, there will be still another problem—the person will be pent-up and restricted and often overly moralistic. These “overly moralistic” people will emphasize the “letter of the law” and will probably merit the description “judgmental.” They champion the “judgment of the Lord” over His grace.

Let me illustrate from the New Testament. On one occasion, Jesus cast the money-lenders out of the temple, chasing them with a scourge. On another occasion, at a community well, he encountered a known adulteress and offered her forgiveness, telling her to, “Go and sin no more.” According to the letter of the law, he should have quickly organized a mob and stoned her to death. But he exercised mature judgment and “chose” to offer grace, forgiveness, and love rather than brutal punishment. I suggest that on that occasion Jesus demonstrated “feelings” and “boundaries” working in tandem in a mature fashion. Neither one predominated and he “chose” to exercise grace.

It is so easy to exercise judgment when an offering of love is usually much more appropriate.

 

Wind Imagery and Transitoriness of Life

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T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is one my my favorite poems of all time, It is a powerful statement of mankind’s existential plight and of hope in the midst this hopelessness. He grasped the transitory nature of life and used vivid imagery to convey this. For example, in one of the Quartets (Burnt Norton) he wrote of, “Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind which blows before and after time. It reminds me of a favorite scene in the movie, American Beauty, when two characters are silently watching a video of the wind silently buffeting a plastic bag, conveying the same message of Eliot’s line.

And on the same existential theme, here is a poem by E. L. Mayo:

THIS WIND

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.

I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind like this
But there’s no taking

Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind we breathe and ride upon.

I conclude with the context of the Eliot quotation above:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

 

Poetic Thoughts re Intense Emotion Running Amok

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In Hamlet, Laertes knows that his daughter is “palling around” with that wastrel Hamlet and cautions her, knowing something himself about masculine rapacity:

Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.

Laertes did not want his daughter to give into emotions, but to “stand in the rear” like he did and keep her distance. For, he feared that letting go of that detachment would lead to overwhelming emotion and take her totally out of control, just as he feared it would do to him. Laertes was speaking of an “observing ego” which he knew monitors our impulses and keeps them from running amok.

For, Shakespeare knew that “feelings know no discretion but their own.” (W. H. Auden) When feelings predominate…and begin to tyrannize…they cannot submit to “monitoring” and insist on fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Adrienne Rich wrote of this immersion in emotion when she said, “when we enter touch, we enter touch completely.” And e e cummings agreed with Rich, noting that, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.”

I suggest some balance is needed. (Yes, my “observing ego” is doing its magic today!) We need intense emotion, we need to be “carried away” with passion, but the “balancer” must not be discarded. When this “balancer” or “observing ego” is discarded, or lost due to neurological impairment, Shakespeare might note of us, “The expedition of his violent love outruns the pauser reason.” Or, to put it in my words, “expression of his passionate intensity outruns the pauser reason.”

 

A Poem about Parents, Family, Sex, and Life

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I never had children. I guess it was not in the cards though I fear it was merely a lack of faith, a lack of faith in the Universe and in God and confidence in myself and my wife, though mainly myself. I guess I thought too much about it and I always remember what Hamlet said about his own tendency to think too much, saying that if this pensiveness were “quartered, it would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”

Here is a beautiful poem by Sharon Olds as she conjectures about her own conception, eloquently describing her parents meeting in college, the story of their life together, the doubts and fears of their marriage, and the sexual union which produced herself. Olds’ image of coitus is just stunningly beautiful, consummately poetic.

I Go Back to May 1937

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.

Oscar Wilde “Playing” with Reality

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I am currently reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey. I have seen the movie years ago and loved it; but the novel itself has so much more to offer. Wilde has an as astute grasp of human culture in the 19th century and could eloquently convey which way the winds were blowing. He, and other astute individuals, certainly had some insight into what was going to unfold in the 20th century.

For example, modern science was toying with human culture at the time and leaving it in the throes of relativism, ambivalence, and uncertainty. Truth, and even reality itself, came to be seen as paradoxical, leading Wilde to declare in this novel, “The way of paradoxes is the way of Truth. To test reality, we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” T. S. Eliot would later echo this perspective on truth, declaring that to know truth, or reality, we must “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.” (The Four Quartets)

So, today, a century plus from Wilde’s death, we live in the tumult of what he, “modern” science of his day, and literary license would produce. We wrestle with the question of, “What is real and what is unreal?” In my country (the United States) I feel that this is the essential issue that divides the country, that is wreaking havoc on our political system, and even spreading confusion within the erstwhile hermetically sealed “safe” confines of the Republican party.

And, ultimately I feel we must discover that “Real” is apprehended only by faith and once apprehended, we have to realize that we don’t actually “apprehend” it at all. We only intuit it, “faith” it, and hope for it. But, that does not diminish the power of its Presence. It merely humbles us, reminding us of the wisdom of the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.” But this Presence is with us, and in us, each day as we seek to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.”

 

The Essence of Religion, Part Deux!

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In “The Essence of Religion” posted several days ago, I shared a lovely poem by Hafiz about what religion is always about.  To sum it up, in the Words of Jesus, “Love your neighbor as yourself” though Hafiz broadened this to include the whole of God’s creation.  And he noted that just about any religious passion, or ritual, or belief system is quite okay…IF…it facilitates the love of God’s creation.  It is so easy to “love god” and do so with “sound and fury” (often signifying nothing) but it does not mean jack if the whole of your life demonstrates a disinterest, contempt, or hatred for any part of God’s creation.  Someone has said, “It is not so important what you say as what you do.”  “Saying” is important, yes, but not without behavior to back it up.   Again I share one of my favorite bits from Shakespeare, “With devotions visage and pious action they do sugar o’er the devil himself.”  And here again I share the Hafiz poem:

 

Becoming Human

by Hafiz

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
“Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”

He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,

“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.”

 

 

Heaven on Earth

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Here is a poem by W. R. Rodgers, an Irish poet from the 20th century.  He describes a beautiful world that we all long for, a world which can basically be described as Eden or Heaven.  It is a dream we all have and one to which we are all working but one which I don’t think we will ever realize literally.  But we need to seek it, especially to seek it in our own personal life.  I think the opening line is most important, describing a land where all “Is, and nothing’s Ought.”  The tyranny of the “oughts” is the ego run amok.

 

Neither Here Nor There

by W. R. Rodgers

In that land all Is, and nothing’s Ought;
No owners or notices, only birds;
No walls anywhere, only lean wire of words
Worming brokenly out from eaten thought;
No oats growing, only ankle-lace grass
Easing and not resenting the feet that pass;
No enormous beasts, only names of them;
No bones made, bans laid, or boons expected,
No contracts, entails, or hereditaments,
Anything at all that might tie or hem.

In that land, all’s lackadaisical;
No lakes of coddled spawn, and no locked ponds
Of settled purpose, no netted fishes;
But only inkling streams and running fronds,
Fritillaried with dreams, weedy with wishes;
Nor arrogant talk is heard, haggling phrase,
But undertones, and hesitance, and haze;
On clear days mountains of meaning are seen
Humped high on the horizon; no one goes
To con their meaning, no one cares or knows.

In that land all’s flat, indifferent; there
Is neither springing house nor hanging tent,
No aims are entertained, and nothing is meant,
For there are no ends, and no trends, no roads,
Only follow your nose to anywhere.
No one is born there, no one stays or dies,
For it is a timeless land, it lies
Between the act and the attrition, it
Marks off bound from rebound, make from break, tit
From tat, also today from tomorrow.
No Cause there comes to term, but each departs
Elsewhere to whelp its deeds, expel its darts;
There are no homecomings, of course, no goodbyes
In that land, neither yearning nor scorning,
Though at night there is the smell of morning.

W. R. Rodgers
Irish poet 1909-1969

That “Time-and-Space” Bitch!

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I am intrigued, fascinated, and haunted by the concept of “time and space.” I understand it enough to discuss it…and discourse about it…but I know so little about it—I suspect because I am so caught up in it. I think one dimension of the biblical notion of “the fall” was a “fall” into time and space, a world of limits, a world of certain death. But mankind hates his suspicion of these limitations and so fashions schemes and fantasies in which he pretends that he is not subservient to this, or any limit.

Let me suggest one writer from the evangelical pantheon who has some very interesting things to say about this precise issue. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Creation and Fall noted, “Because thinking desires to penetrate to the beginning and cannot do so, all thinking crumbles into dust, it runs aground upon itself, it breaks to pieces…” “Thinking or reason” will take us only so far and then we are left with primordial nothingness which offers us faith or nihilism. And let me reiterate, Bonhoeffer was a Christian who is in the evangelical pantheon so he can’t be dismissed as a nihilist!

I have a lovely poem to share regarding this general subject:

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.

The Essense of Religion

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In the following poem, Hafiz offers true wisdom into the essence of religion. And it is not about lofty theology, or philosophy, or powerful mega-churches. There is so much egotism in spirituality–such a great desire to have “great” visions of God, or attend “great” churches, or be a “great” Christian.  (Hafiz was a 14th century Persian poet!)

Becoming Human

by Hafiz

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
“Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”

He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,

“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.”

Lessons from Senator Kirk’s Brush with Death

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Senator Mark Kirk had an interesting report in the Washington Post yesterday about his recovery from a life-threatening stroke last year and the emotional and physical anguish that this NDE (near death experience) subjected him to. His report suggests this event has greatly humbled him, enriched his faith, and given him new hope in life, not only for himself but for mankind, even including the always dead-locked, hyper-partisan Congress.

His facing death forced him to address his finitude. Death does that. And the teachings of most world religions is that we can, and should, die before death and thus begin to live a more full, mature life. When we die symbolically we can tap into another…or other…dimensions of life which our ego-bound consciousness has kept us from seeing and experiencing. This will allow us to see that we are all on the same team, that the “us-them” paradigm is deadly, and that there is more to life than meets the eye. Here is Kirk’s report:

“Am I going to die today?” I asked Jay as we rode together in an ambulance through the streets of Chicago. Jay Alexander was my doctor but also my friend, and I knew he wouldn’t lie. “Just give me a percentage,” I pleaded.

“There’s a 98 percent chance you’re not going to die today,” he said.

It wasn’t the way I expected my day to go, but as soon as I’d felt dizzy and experienced numbness in my left arm that Saturday morning, Jan. 21, 2012, I knew I was in trouble. An MRI soon discovered that the inner lining of my carotid artery had peeled away. The dissected artery was blocking the blood flow to my brain, putting me in imminent danger of a stroke.

Anticoagulants kept my blood pressure down, and for a few hours I seemed to stabilize. But then the numbness and tingling on my left side worsened, and my vision got blurry.

Jay, who had met me at the emergency room at Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital, ordered me transferred to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, which has a certified stroke center. It was on the way there that he gave me my chances and assured me that, given my age and health, my chances for recovery from a stroke were good.

I was in my hospital bed when the waves came and I began to lose control of my body and mind. Unbelievable, I thought. I’m only 52. I didn’t even know anyone who’d had a stroke.

More than a week later, I regained a confused consciousness in the intensive care unit. I knew I was lying in a bed. I thought someone was sharing the bed with me, but it was my own leg. I vaguely remember a party the ICU staff had for the Super Bowl and the smell of the food they brought.

I had two operations to relieve the swelling in my brain and remained at Northwestern Memorial until Feb. 10, when I was transferred to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). In all that time, I remember only one rational thought: I needed to get out of there and back to reality, back to my job serving the people of Illinois, which has always been the greatest ambition of my life.

I still worried I would die. I dreamed that three angels came into my room and wanted me to go with them, but I said no because I knew where I was, on the ninth floor of the RIC, and why I was there: to begin a long, difficult recovery from an ischemic stroke.

When you’ve been flat on your back for weeks, your circulatory system doesn’t respond well the first time you try to get up. The therapists at the RIC were prepared for that. They strapped me on a table and tipped it upright. I passed out immediately. When I came to, I realized how hard a recovery I faced if I couldn’t even stand up.

I had blood clots in my leg that were treated with anticoagulants. I asked a doctor what would happen to me if one of the clots broke loose. “You could have a pulmonary embolism,” he answered, “and you would die.”

At best, I thought it unlikely that I would recover enough to return to the Senate. I had always been a glass-half-empty kind of guy, a believer in Murphy’s Law.

The staff at the RIC consider that kind of attitude debilitating, and they don’t tolerate it in their patients. My physical therapist, Mike Klonowski, was a tyrant and, God bless him, a great inspiration. The stroke had severely impaired my left leg, but Mike expected me to walk again. He would teach me how to do it, or we would both die trying.

One day he pulled me into a seated position on my bed, but I couldn’t stay upright. He kept pulling me up, and I kept falling over. “Give me a second, will you,” I snapped. “I’m about as weak as you can get.” But whenever I thought I couldn’t do anything, Mike and everyone at the RIC always answered, “You will be able to.”

He had me on the treadmill as soon as I could manage. I regarded my left leg as a lifeless appendage. Mike kept insisting that it would bear weight. The moment I realized that it would, and that I could swing it from my hip and propel myself forward, was the breakthrough revelation of my rehabilitation.

Kept upright by a track and a harness, I wanted to run down the hallway that day — and tried. But Mike stopped me and told me that slow walking was more instructive to my brain. I disagreed; we had a screaming match. He prevailed.

Hour after hour on that infernal machine, trying to do a simple thing that my brain would no longer communicate to my limb, was torture. Once, during an exhausting session, I threw up on Mike. He just looked up and said, “I can’t believe you did that to me.”

I wanted to give up almost every day. I was indescribably fatigued. I wanted to sleep all the time, a common desire in stroke sufferers. But I was beginning to believe. I used the prospect of returning to work, of climbing up the steps of the Capitol and walking the 50 paces to the Senate floor, as motivation. With every swing of my leg on the treadmill, I became more convinced I would do it.

Once, when I was a little down in the dumps, the RIC chaplain read to me from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”

I’m different from what I was. My left leg and left arm might never work like they once did, but my mind is sharp. I’m capable of doing the work entrusted to me by the people of Illinois, but I am forever changed.

I’m an optimist now, grateful for every blessing. Bad things happen, but life is still waiting for you to make the most of it. I want my life to count for something more than the honors I once craved. I believe it will.

My faith is stronger. My humility is deeper. I know I depend on family and friends more than I ever realized. I know, too, that the things that divide us in politics are infinitesimal compared with the dignity of our common humanity.

Climbing the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 3 was one of the greatest moments of my life. It was a goal fulfilled and a message to all stroke survivors: Never, ever give up.

I was the beneficiary of many kindnesses from colleagues on both sides of the aisle after my stroke, and those acts will forever matter more to me than any political differences. I don’t expect to be the same senator I was before my stroke — I hope to be a better one. I want to make my life matter by doing work that matters to others. I want to do it with the help of my friends, Republicans and Democrats, and to share the satisfaction of knowing we have honored our public trust together.

I was once a pessimist. I’m not that man anymore. And that change, brought about by misfortune, is the best thing that ever happened to me.