Do I need to be right?

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“The need to clarify, explain, or justify oneself in personal relationships, is always self-serving.” Mike Dooley shared this recently on his daily post.

There is certainly a time to explain oneself, to defend one’s position. But so much of it is unnecessary waste of energy, merely trying to “cover our ass.” There are so many times when we merely need to “offer our deed to oblivion”…verbal or otherwise…and then practice the wisdom of the Beatles—“Let It Be.” So much needless disputation amounts only to egos sparring with one another for dominance, each insistent on being right. And, of course there is no better example of this than in the nonsense which has created this current deadlock in Washington.

And, as is always the case, I speak from experience. So much of my life has been spent in trying to convince others that I was “right”, in belief and in behavior. I have now given up. But, having given up and living with ambivalence, I have firm confidence that there is a Right that graces the universe and that in some faint fashion I am part of that process.

“I Will to do Good, but…”

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“I will to do good but evil is present with me.” The Apostle Paul was a bloke like the rest of us and faced his dark side. I bet that this lamentation revealed it even prevailed on occasion. I don’t think Paul was saying that he was abject evil; he was merely recognizing that there was darkness within his heart which opposed every noble enterprise he had. Yes, he wrestled with Satan.

But Satan is so much more than the popular conception that we have of him. I think he is that tendency to stagnate, to succumb to inertia, to not participate in the flow of life. That is merely another way of saying, “a tendency to not allow the Spirit of God to have free rein in our heart and life.”

Paul summed it up with the famous observation, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

And I close with my frequently quoted observation of W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are.”

The Time is Out of Joint!

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“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that I was born to set it right.”

But Hamlet’s observation was skewed by his own personal demons. It was his time (i.e. world) that was out of joint and from his anguished perspective he deemed the whole of Denmark “out of joint.”

The doom-sayers, the proponents of “apocalypse now” always trouble me. Been there, done that…but grew out of it at some point. Yes, the world is always “out of joint” in that it is populated with individuals who are all too human. And, yes collectively we need to attempt to address this “dis-jointedness.” And even individually we have some responsibility to participate in this collective purge of the commonweal.

But our main focus always needs to be on our own “dis-jointedness”, our own brokenness, our own grave limitations. It is much too easy to avoid our personal woes and obsess with how evil the world or particular individuals are. The evils of the world can most effectively be addressed when we focus mainly on the evil that lurks in our own hearts; yes, even our noble, kind, loving, Christian hearts.

Physician, Heal Thy Self

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“Physician, heal thyself.” These words of Jesus (Luke 4:23) apply to all care givers. My particular concern is mental health care givers, having been one for about twenty years.

The dilemma with being a professional care giver is that we tend to have as our main issue our own personal issues/agenda. We have to be very careful to avoid the pitfall of waking up one morning and realizing, “Oh no. This is all about me.” I know. Been there. Done that.

I remember giving one of my college professors pause when, on this general topic, I posed the question, “What would happen to our profession if suddenly there were no mental illness?” The answer is obvious—“we would be out of a job.” So, in a way, counselor educators should provide a course in which students are taught to be effective in alleviating client’s woes…but not too effective! We don’t want the market to dry up!

Seriously, “we wage the war we are.” (W. H. Auden) Yes, we go into the care-giving fields to address our own ills as well as those of our clients. That is because we are human. We are flawed. But, we care givers need to be always aware that mental health (and spiritual health) is a process and that as we provide it, we are seeking it. And somewhere in our life….in our own therapy, or spiritual discipline, or church…we need to acknowledge that we “wage the war we are” and own our personal demons and recognize that always, “it is me, it’s me, it’s me O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.”

Get Over Yourself!

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Jesus spent thirty years roaming around the little corner of the globe he happened upon, noting the complete insanity of its inhabitants, and then spent three years admonishing them…and I summarize (and use my “literary” license)…to “get over yourself!” And then he provided specifics about how to accomplish this self-abnegation, which are eloquently described in the New Testament and then later summarized by W. H. Auden (or was it Leonard Cohen?), “Climb the rugged cross of the moment and let your illusions die.” Yes, dying to self ultimately means being disillusioned and seeing yourself as you really are, just a “poor bare forked creature” (King Lear) “pelted” by the same “pitiless storm” that has pelted us for eons.

In that moment of humility, i.e. humiliation, one can then choose to affirm with belief/action what his/her ultimate value is and then be guided toward that end. But one is then shorn of his/her grandiosity and realizes that he/she is a mere human, a human be-ing, and has that station by virtue of the simple but illimitable and marvelous grace of God. For, “by him all things cohere”; yes, even the simple be-ing of my day to day life exists and “coheres” by the grace of God. Therefore, I don’t have anything to prove, I don’t have to persuade you to subscribe to my creed, I merely have to be. And as I “be”, the Grace of God will flow through me; and the universe…and His will…will unfold. But if I stubbornly adhere to my own agenda, to my own ego-driven demands….”enlightened” and “Christian” as I might assume them to be…then the “flow” cannot take place, at least through me.

Yes, the meaning of the Cross is to “get over yourself.” It is easier to invest in the gore of the Cross and to self-flagellate with an emotional anguish. It is much more difficult to “get over yourself”, to die to the ego and do so daily as Paul admonished, and then engage more fully and maturely in the human enterprise.

Life is so flimsy

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We are here for but a brief moment. We cling to a flimsy; it will give way, as is the way of flimsy, and we will return to the Real.

As John Masefield put it, “Like a lame donkey, lured by the moving hay, we chase the shade and let the real be.” I would merely capitalize the “R” on his “real”.

The Hamlet Syndrome

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I love Shakespeare. I think he is the profoundest individual I have ever come across, demonstrating more insight into the human imagination and heart than anyone else has even approached. And of his work, I prefer the tragedies and especially Hamlet.

Hamlet was a very depressed young man who was stymied by indecision. This indecisiveness stemmed from obsessive thinking, a thoughtfulness which he noted, “if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.” Shakespeare valued thoughtfulness but realized that being lost in thought was as much a problem as being incapable of thought.

In his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy he concluded “thus conscience (i.e. “consciousnessness”) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great kith and kin, in this regard, their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.”

Shakespeare realized that excessive “self-awareness” was merely a ruse, an escape from the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day grind of life. He realized I’m sure, that self-awareness was critical in life but needed to be balanced with a willingness to plunge head-long into the fury of life, to make a commitment in action.

Hamlet’s indecisiveness has given rise in the past few decades to the clinical conception, the “Hamlet Syndrome”, describing young men…usually they are young men…who are similarly stymied and incapable of taking the plunge into life.

And I close with a relevant observation from W. B. Yeats:

God, guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone…

Or perhaps, from an anonymous source:

The centipede was happy quiet
Until a toad in fun, said,
“Pray which leg goes after which?”
This through his mind to such a pitch
He lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.

Give Thanks in All Things

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I lead a pretty boring life. My idea of a good time is sitting in the garage, sipping a beer, and watching a rain storm approach. This is because we are in a drought and rainfall is such a blessing. In fact, the old hymn “Showers of Blessings” often comes to mind as I sit there watching the leaves of the trees dance about, smell the rainfall moving in, and then watch the droplets splatter on the pavement.

And I do thank the good Lord for rain…and for many other simple things in life which so often I’ve taken for granted. I try to be more attentive, i.e. “mindful” of my world and often offer casual prayers of gratitude for things as simple as the mere breath of life.

Early this morning as I watched rainfall move in…this time with coffee in hand…I imagined how it might have been in eons past when our predecessors first began to attribute “blessings” such as rainfall to what would come to be known as “the gods” and eventually…in our culture…”God.” The notion must have percolated for hundreds of years, at least, in our dawning consciousness before it crystallized into a concept.

I guess that in spite of being a bona fide intellectual (pseudo perhaps!) and often looking askance at religious dogma, I am now following the biblical admonishment to “In all things give thanks.” Now why do I do this? I no longer believe that I am picking up any brownie points with God for “praising Him” or “thanking Him.” I mean, He is a really big God and does not have such a frail ego that he needs me to fawn over him. He is not keeping a ledger and dutifully noting each time that “Lewie praised me” again!

So, why bother to “give thanks in all things”? Well, it just kind of flows out of my heart. It is kind of natural. And it is therapeutic. Rumi once noted that praise is the best antidote to despair. And I’ve learned that when despair does beckon, it does help to just turn my attention to some of the many things in life for which I am thankful.

Beware of ideologues!

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It is now about a year ago since Harold Camping had his 15 minutes of fame with his end-of-the-world insanity. Like all of his predecessors, he proved to be wrong and he and his followers were left with egg on their face. Religion Dispatches posted an article recently in which followers of Camping were interviewed about their life in the past year since they got “egged.” A few now totally denounce their former “apocalypse now” style of faith but most of merely reformulated it, offering revised interpretations of the “end of the world.” In other words, they now adopt the pose, “No, it didn’t happen as we anticipated. But, in a way it did happen and here is what I mean….”

In other words, they cling to their lunacy. And that is how we humans tend to behave—we get something in our heads and then hold on to it for dear life. Tearing someone away from a lunatic idea is like trying to take a piece of red meat away from a hungry mongrel. But, I think it goes further than that. We cling to all ideas as if they were ultimate reality and fail to look at what the ideas have reference to; we fail to “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) as such an enterprise would be too scary. W. H. Auden noted, “And Truth met him and held out Her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall beliefs and shrank away like an ill-treated child.” Decades ago I read someone who noted, “Our thoughts are the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.” In other words, we think and believe only what we want to.

Now let me clarify and be honest. The temptation of being an ideologue is not the exclusive domain of conservative religious zealots. It is a temptation for all of us. Yes, even for the “literarylew” ilk! I have seen egregious examples of this obnoxiousness with liberal, educated, “enlightened” people. It is all the same.

And I close with the oft quoted Buddhist observation about words: the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.

Perspective and meta-cognition

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JUST AT DARK
By Marilyn Dorf
the young doe
every night
gazes long at our window pondering
perhaps
the glow of our lamp this moon fallen down
in her pasture

Now we have no idea what animals think but it is interesting to speculate how life appears to them. This interesting poem in the Christian Science Monitor brings to the subject of perspective to my mind…and perhaps will shake me out of my long doldrum in publishing here in WP.
I read somewhere years ago…I think it was the philosopher Ricoeur…that “it is impossible to have a perspective on our perspective without somehow escaping it.” This meta-cognition was an incredible development in human consciousness. “Homo sapiens sapiens” a friend noted months ago, “Man knows that he knows.”
We are incredible creatures, just like the deer, the birds, the squirrels, and the rest of the animal kingdom. But this meta-cognition appears to set us apart in some way, allowing us to create culture but with the price tag of awareness of our own mortality.