Yes, Chris Christie is Fat!!! So What?

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Chris Christie is Fat!

Yes, he is fat! AND, he has the courage to live with that, hold his head high, do his job to the best of his ability, and be happy with himself. He does not know that his size is supposed to have shamed him into submission and that he is to crawl about meekly on this earth taking whatever scraps are offered him.

And then, he “knocked one out of the park” by “palling” around with the arch enemy of his Republican party, Barack O’Bama, deigning to lay aside political risks and working with the president to help his people deal with this horrible weather tragedy in New Jersey and the Northeast. I personally think he has fatally wounded himself with the conservative extreme as they are enraged that he would break ranks and fraternize with the enemy. Those extremists demand that everyone on their team march lock-step in their pursuit of their raison d’etre—defeat of Barack O’Bama. (If they would lay that aside, and merely promote their very legitimate political agenda and hope to win the election on its merits, they might discover that they could have a life!)

Now I am merely giving credit where credit is due. I’m a liberal Democrat and feel intently about its agenda and Christie is on the other side—he is one of the “bad guys.”! (wink, wink!) But I’m very impressed with his testosterone (I like to call it “male spheroids”), not merely in this example but on other occasions where he has not cow-towed to the party line. We need other people in both parties to demonstrate this kind of courage and merely “do the right thing” at times.

No, I do not think he is being “objective.” He has his motivations, whatever they might be and you can bet they are in part selfish. He is human. “Let him who is without guilt cast the first stone.” But, of course, here lies an essential problem in our political culture, there are so many people who know without a doubt that they are “without guilt” and therefore authorized to “cast the first stone.” Their capacity for self- awareness is greatly diminished, to say the least.

 

Casting an “affirming flame” on election day!

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A Mennonite pastor has organized a nation-wide communion service on election day. I enclose the CNN on-line link to the article about this effort and its rationale: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/03/my-take-on-election-day-proclaiming-my-loyalty-to-jesus/?hpt=hp_c1

I’m very impressed. An event like this helps us to remember that “this is not about us”, at least not in an exclusive sense. There is an “otherness” present in the world that we often forget about in our day to day life and certainly in the intensity of political debate. The event is a simple, brief bowing of our heads (literally or figuratively) and recognizing this “otherness” (Otherness). It is a simple shift of focus for a moment and recognition that we are finite creatures in a complex world and that a Mystery that is beyond our comprehension is present in our life, individually and collectively. A refrain of mine is, “Mental illness is a reference problem.” In ceremonies such as this we offer a momentary deference to an external reference point that is sorely lacking in our world consciousness.

I want to share a poem by W. H. Auden that is relevant to gestures like this:

Defenseless under the night,
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
ironic points of light
Flash out whever the Just
Exchange their messages.
May I,composed like them
of Eros and Dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

May we each day, in word and deed, show an affirming flame.  It is so easy to do otherwise.

W. H. Auden “Sept 1, 1939”

“We Rattle the World for our Babies”

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I love the image created by this poet…and I think it was Edgar Simmons. I recall in my youth in the early sixties shaking a piggy bank and hoping to come up with six cents to get a “soda pop” down at the local mom and pop store in central Arkansas. Those coins were precious.

And so are our babies. I have deep appreciation for the beauty of nature…for birds, flowers, butterflies, deer, and certainly for doggies, being the devoted father of two lovely dachshunds. I gaze upon them, or look into their eyes, and I see the glory of God holding forth. But none of these can offer the glory of God that I see when I encounter one of God’s little children. They are our hope, our future. They represent millions of men and women voting with their feet…or some other part of their anatomy!…that life is worth living. Children represent the will of the species expressing itself.

In my retirement years, I have returned to work as a substitute teacher and I am deliberately focusing on early grade school and special needs children. They are teaching me so much about myself and about human nature. They are so fragile, so needy, and I’m so aware that even in my temporary role in their life I am part of our collective effort to “care” for them. And I’m so proud to see that even in Arkansas…always near the bottom of the education spectrum in our country…we provide such quality education and care. Some of these children would not have a chance in some countries. They would not be considered of any value at all and at one point in some cultures would have been left in the forest for nature to dispose of. But we value human life. That is a powerful decision that our culture has made. And it costs immensely but it is money well spent.

Ultimately, spirituality is about our values. What do we value? And, yes, our country is very suspect in many respects; we are so immersed in consumerism, for example. There is so much tawdry in our culture. But we do have our strong points one of which is our value of human life.

(And this is not even addressing the abortion issue! I don’t have the temerity to get into that yet.)

 

Ranier Rilke and “Dying Daily”

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“Sometimes I don’t feel spiritual.” I’ve heard this many times and feel that way myself quiet often. But at this point I take comfort in the belief that “feelings” on the matter do not matter; for, I believe that regardless of how we feel we are a spirit. Spirit is not something extrinsic to who we are; it is intrinsic to the very nature of our being.

“Knowing God” does not mean merely accepting a bunch of concepts. That should be merely a stepping stone, a means to an end. “Knowing God” means merely means getting out of the way and discovering that our Source will fill the vacuum. It is the Christian doctrine of kenosis or “self emptying”—losing oneself to find oneself or as the Apostle Paul said, “dying daily”. And I like Ranier Rilke’s take on the matter in The Duino Elegies, “Daily he takes himself off and steps into the changing constellation of his own everlasting risk.”

The Ephemeral Nature of Words

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The beauty of words stems largely from their ephemeral nature. Conrad Aiken described words as “these squeaks of ours”. Poets spend their life contriving meaning out of these “squeaks”, a process which T. S. Eliot described as, “wrestling with words and meanings.

The poet is very aware of this ephemerality of language. They know firsthand how flimsy the conjunction between a simple mere sound…a “word”…and subjective experience can be; and always is when any particular word is first formed. Carl Sandburg described this as “the moment of doom when the word is formed.” (See full poem in posting of 10/28/12 ) And listen to Eliot describe his experience:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(Four Quartets)

And I love Archibald MacLeish likening this poetic moment to “the flight of birds flung from the branches where they sleep”:

Bewildered with the broken tongue
of wakened angels in our sleep
then lost the music that was sung
and lost the light time cannot keep!
There is a moment when we lie
Bewildered, wakened out of sleep,
when light and sound and all reply:
that moment time must tame and keep.
That moment like a flight of birds
flung from the branches where they sleep,
the poet with a beat of words
flings into time for time to keep.

 

Words must be vibrant, alive, dynamic!

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A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules… Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. ~ Wade Davies

This is why language is so rich and so worthy of exploring. Words can “open up” and reveal hidden meanings and can do so endlessly; and, as noted yesterday, this is the task of poets. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once wrote that words have meaning because they can “burgeon forth into regions beyond themselves.” But one has to be willing to let them open up, to “burgeon forth.”

Unfortunately, words can be (and often are) taken literally. No effort is taken to parse words and individuals who take this route are left with the “letter of the law.” And of course we remember what 2 Corinthians teaches: the letter killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.

Let me share from the profound wisdom of T. S. Eliot on the dynamic nature of language:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(The Four Quartets

 

The Power of the Word

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I love words! Words make us human. That ability to symbolize re our subjective experience and assign meaning to that domain is just incredibly fascinating to me. And as we assign meanings to our experience we find connection with others, we discover that they too use the same sounds to refer to the same experiences…more or less! And how did that ever happen and why does it continue? Yes, it is a neurological issue; but, ultimately it is a philosophical and spiritual issue.

(Let me share a relevant personal anecdote. Years ago in a casual conversation a friend of mine dropped an aside, “Well, our name is just a sound we learned to respond to.” This “word” of his spoke to me and continues to do so. It resonated and I realized what he meant, that my very name “Lewis” was merely a sound that “I” had learned to respond to at about the age of one and a half or two years. My “I” (a rudimentary ego) preceded that moment in some shape, form, or fashion but when I was able to associate that subjective experience with the sound “Lewis” I basically joined the human race.)

Poets are one of God’s gifts to us as they can play with words and teach us about meaning. They can use words and use them skillfully and artistically—with spiritual finesse—and usher us into realms of meaning which would otherwise be hidden. Here is a sample from one of them that I have discovered in the blog-o-sphere (enerihot.wordpress.com):

I Write Because
by Irene Toh

Here it comes: a manifesto.
I write because words are
necessary shadows, the way
they augment light that
shines on every thing.

I write because any object
may become a subject
by simple appreciation,
being talked about so
it becomes the light.

I write because after god,
we speak things into creation,
because day turns into night,
because after you there’s no
one who is truly you and
words are dying stars.

And then here is another example from one of my favorite poets, Carl Sandburg:

Precious Moments

Bright conversations are transient as rainbows.
Speech requires blood and air to make it.
Before the word comes off the end of the tongue,
While the diaphragms of flesh negotiate the word,
In the moment of doom when the word forms,
It is born, alive, registering an imprint—
Afterward it is a mummy, a dry fact, done and gone.
The warning holds yet: Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Ecce homo had meanings: Behold the man! Look at him! Dying he lives and speaks.

Richard Mourdock’s God

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Richard Mourdock’s observation about God and rape speaks volumes about himself and the inner machinations of his own heart. I have suggested before that our view of God speaks much more about our own heart than it does about God. Mourdock’s God is confined to time and space and He is meticulously, even mechanically in control. Therefore if conception occurs in rape, then God must will it. His God is a really big guy sitting up on some celestial throne, very far away but definitely “out there” in terms of time and space, and pulling the strings of our day to day life.

I believe strongly in God. But I don’t believe in my belief of God. God is beyond my belief. My belief is a work of faith. My faith has deepened once I came to realize the limitations of my own reason and its ability to grasp and own God. But I must reiterate that I am not disavowing the role and use of reason. It is a gift from God and must be used. But it can easily be misused to contrive a belief system which is actually only a reflection of our childish, self-centered ego. “They call it reason, using light celestial; just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” (Goethe) Or, another quote the author of which I no longer recall, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

 

“I Feel Your Pain”

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One of my blog-o-shere friends responded re a recent post of mine about the role of feeling in alleviating the “heaviness” of life’s burdens. (Twominutesofgrace@wordpress.com)  She has been a therapist at one point in her life and noted how that part of her healing was learning the art of “reciprocal vulnerability” in the therapeutic relationship.  One of the pitfalls of being professional care-givers is that so often we do carry our own load of guilt and shame and seek to assuage those feelings with our clients. If we go too far in that direction, if we trot out the Clintonian, “I feel your pain”  too often, we might discover we have made it too much about ourselves.  But if we refuse vulnerability in the first place—barricaded behind professional jargon, cliche, and the DSM IV—we don’t need to be in the position of therapist, pastor, or “care-giver” in the first place.

Someone once said, “To be is to be vulnerable.”  I think the Apostle Paul had this in mind when he wrote to one church, “I was with you in weakness, and fear, and much trembling.”  Shakespeare, in Hamlet, described vulnerability as having a heart “full of penetrable stuff” suggesting that without vulnerability we are “impenetrable.”  And impenetrability is the natural trajectory of the human ego.  It resists anything which causes it discomfort.

 

Heavy Hearts Need Loose Lips

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The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

These words from King Lear are very important to me, taking significance in my life at a very critical juncture decades ago when I was just learning about feelings. Shakespeare here taught me that it was important to just “let go” and value what I was feeling and deign to verbalize re these feelings.. This was critical as I had spent the first half of my life carefully monitoring myself and “thinking” and “saying” only what I “ought to say.” Yes, there were times when, like a kid with a new toy, I over did it and expressed some feelings at times when I should not have. But not often; and when I did, I usually did so with friends who were understanding.

And then for a few years I had the opportunity to facilitate this skill when I worked as a counselor, teaching young teen-agers the importance of their feelings and the value of expressing them, not only with words, but with art, music, and dance. It was very powerful to witness a young person make this discovery and watch many of them flourish. And I’ve seen the same phenomena with friends and acquaintances over the decades as the course of one’s life can grant maturity and with it the temerity to value one’s own subjective experience.

But I often overlook the first phrase of this Shakespearean observation—the weight of this sad time we must obey. Our culture’s disdain for feelings accumulates over the eons and becomes very “heavy.” And with this “heaviness” comes a profound sadness. And this sadness will be alleviated only when we “unpack our heart with words” (Shakespeare, “Hamlet”) and entertain the realm of “feeling which loosens rather than ties the tongue. (W. H. Auden.)