Getting Un-stuck

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This morning I was “conversating” with a friend I have met in Sunday School.  This friend also grew up in a conservative Christian church but now subscribes to a different faith orientation as I do.  Meditation is a key emphasis in our Sunday School class and we commiserated this morning about the pronounced resistance we often face in disciplining our “monkey minds” to meditate.

Personally speaking, meditation meets fierce resistance in my heart as if something deep inside views it with fear and disdain, as if every fiber of being finds it anathema.  I think this is because of deep-seated old recordings from my youth in which anything like “meditation” had the ring of “Eastern” and “non-Christian” and was therefore “of the devil.”

But now I see meditation as a primary direction in my spiritual life, as a key element in the development of my spirituality. I see it as the next step for me to take in the experiencing of my Source, in achieving a very paltry, limited experience of the Incarnation, of the “word being made flesh.”  And this resistance I see in Pauline terms as spiritual warfare.  To borrow the words of Paul, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me, or, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.”  For the Pauline term the “old man” is merely a term for resistance, that stubborn energy constellation that seeks to perpetuate itself, to resist change and maturity.  It is the “letter of the law” resisting the “spirit of the law”

Now still another term I like to use, from modern-day clinical colloquial jargon, is “stuck” or “stuck-ness.”  We tend to live our life in a “stuck” mode and it is very hard to get dislodged.  This is because we tend to live life on automatic pilot and our “automatic pilot” does not was to lose its autonomy.  You could think of this automatic pilot as a constellation of energy which wants to continue to discharge in the pattern to which it is accustomed.  Other relevant terms are “neurosis” or “maladaptive behavior patterns.”

And though relationships with other people, especially close and intimate relationships are essential in addressing these “stuckness”, we are ultimately alone as we battle these demons.  As Shakespeare noted in Macbeth:

MACBETH
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorry,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of the perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

Christian Wiman and Faith

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Bill Moyers interviewed poet Christian Wiman on his PBS show last month, Moyers Reports.  Wiman is a 45 year old poet who is battling a terminal blood cancer and shares how this experience has reinvigorated his Christian faith. He openly and intelligently shares re his fear and doubt as he wrestles with his mortality.

Wiman noted that faith is not merely an accoutrement to one’s life, a mere adornment, something you wear like a fashionable suit of clothing. It is nothing you have to be “proud” of, it is just something that is, an essential part of your humanity . He also argued that we need a new language for belief to articulate this urge that is within us.  This made me think of something T. S. Eliot said in his Four Quartets:

Last years words belong to last year’s language
And next years words await another voice.

Eliot later noted the reason this linquistic revision was needed:

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

I guess Wiman’s story would count as a “death-bed conversion”; or, in this case, a “death bed reinvigoration” But that does not diminish his experience in the least for me. Perhaps faith is for the weak and infirm, those who are fearful of their mortality, who want an escape from the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” If so, count me in. Guilty as charged! Those who know me and my life-story could certainly make that argument. I just don’t know. I know that my faith is not any “virtue.” It just is. I can’t explain it and no longer attempt to. I just gain strength from it in my day to day life. And when I come to the end, I think…or at least hope…it will give me strength then too. And I think Wiman would say something similar.

Marianne Williamson and Shadow Politics

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Marianne Williamson is one of my favorite spiritual voices of our time. She writes in, A Return to Love:  Reflection on the Principles of ‘A Course in Miracles‘ , “ I spent years as an angry left winger before I realized that an angry generation can’t bring peace. Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it.”  She elaborated about a dream that she had at one time in her life which taught her that she was bringing to bear on the right wing animosity which had to do with her own personal issues, aside from the validity or appropriateness of the views and actions espoused by the right wing leaders .  Elsewhere in her teachings she explains that what she had to learn was to realize that she could hold firm with her political convictions and do so with great passion but without crossing the line to hating the persons who held the views that she disagreed with.

Williamson was dealing with something which is very hard to learn—how do we learn to be tolerant of the “intolerant” and even deign to learn at times that we are equally intolerant.  It is intoxicating to know you are right; but the greatest tragedies are perpetrated by people who are dogmatically assured that they are right.

This makes me think of something I recent ran across in the blog of Richard Rohr. He noted that we most pay attention when we have a lot of “anti-“ activity going on in our life, as in, “I’m against this, I’m against that…”   Rohr suggests that hen we have a lot of things we are against and are vehemently opposing them and campaigning against them, we should be given pause and should ask ourselves, “Is this our shadow rearing its ugly head?”   This is not to say we should not have standards and convictions and be ready to speak out for them.  But we need to take that “pause” occasionally and make sure that we aren’t merely grinding an axe in the guise of “truth, justice, and the American way.”

“With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.” (Shakespeare)

Political Polarization and Spirituality

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I am following this political brouhaha closely this year in part because it is such a look-see into the human psyche, individually and collectively. I’ve said many times, “We wage the war we are” (W. H. Auden) and that is true also on the individual and collective levels.

I’m really appalled at the overt hostility present today in the political process, the unabashed hatred of O’Bama in particular. At times, on the extreme, it is not even subtle. And I look at the other side…my side…and I see that we too, the “good guys” (wink, wink)…are dug in at the heels also. I recently casually noted to a couple of friends that the real problem in our country is a spiritual problem. But, I quickly backed down, realizing how dorky that sounded. And, merely trotting out the words “spiritual problem” can sound kind of dorky.

But, let me say the same thing but in different words. We have a problem of “values”. The issue is, “What do we value, individually and collectively?” Our need is some unifying ultimate value, “Ultimate” if you please, toward which we can strive individually and collectively. Without this Ultimate value we are inevitable fragmented and any collective purpose is difficult to achieve. Now as far as naming this “Ultimate Value” I have no problem with the word “God”. But that word has been so banalized and vulgarized that many people find it off-putting.

And let me close with a John Masefield sonnet which explains why this word has become so banalized, so vulgarized:

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things held in awe.

Masefield saw that so often the object of our worship, our “highest value”, or “God”, is merely our self.

Truth is stunning

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Czeslaw Miloz said, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” He knew truth always comes as a shock, piercing our zone of silence and stunning us for a moment. After that moment of stunned silence we usually right ourselves and resume our path as if nothing had happened, content to be ensconced in “the glib speech of habit, the well worn of words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

Miloz was echoing W. H. Auden’s words, “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose word, caught unawares, we prick ourselves alive.”

Let’s hope and pray for a little “exposure” today, the sound of a “pistol shot” in our heart, and the brief dawn of coming alive.

Richard Rohr on Humility

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I quote Richard Rohr more than any contemporary spiritual leader. Once again I strongly recommend that you subscribe to his free daily blog as it is always very insightful and very encouraging. He says everything I could ever say and says it much better and much more succinctly.

In his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he noted, “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. In my position, I have no other way of spotting both my well-denied shadow self and my idealized persona.”

Rohr is very attuned to the pernicious presence of the ego in all spiritually-inclined people and is forthright about wrestling with his own ego daily. I think that his daily prayer for “one good humiliation a day” is his way of asking for his eyes to be opened daily to his own frailty and egotism. For, it is often very humiliating when this happens to someone, especially one who holds himself/herself forth as a “spiritual person.”

I do not think he is calling for us to deliberately go out and humiliate ourselves each day. He is merely asking us to pay attention, to be honest with ourselves, to practice “mindfulness” and be prepared to embrace the subjective experience of a sudden illumination about our own “flesh” being hard at work in our spiritual practice. This might be merely being taken aback, or given pause, or embarrassed, or yes it might be occasionally humiliating. It might even be as simple as a “Rick Perry moment” when we have to say “oops” to some obviously self-serving spiritual enterprise.

T. S. Eliot noted in The Four Quartets:

Oh the shame of motives late revealed,
And the awareness of things ill done
And done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Boundaries and spirituality

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Boundaries are such an essential part of life. That is what I enjoyed about Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell as he illustrates how boundary setting is so essential even on the biological, i.e. cellular, dimension of life.

I think it was Rollo May who likened the absence of boundaries to a river without banks. For, a river without banks is not a river any longer it is just a muddy bog, not useful for much if anything. Yet, if we set our boundaries too rigidly then we have merely imprisoned ourselves and again will not be very useful. We will be encapsulated in an autistic shell.

Martin Heidegger in Basic Writings made a very interesting observation about boundaries and spirituality. He said, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, a boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.” A boundary is a container that is necessary for spiritual unfolding, a vessel in which Divine purpose can be revealed. And if we don’t have boundaries, and if we don’t wrestle with boundary issues, our spirituality is going to pose real problems for ourselves and for others. I’m made to think of the Apostle Paul’s admonishment that “we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” “Fear and trembling” is just the anxiety that we experience as we wrestle with these boundaries.

My work as a therapist was merely about boundaries. My job was to help clients discover various boundary problems and to address these problems. And I might add that my work also involved a daily battle with boundary-setting myself.

One of my favorite verses from the Bible is from the Proverbs, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city without walls and broken down.” And we know what happened back then if the walls of a city was broken down back then—the enemy got in.

The Dialectics of Identity

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In yesterday’s blog I discoursed re Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell and the symbiotic relationship between the setting of boundaries and willingness to “relax” them for the sake of the collective. Someone once described this process as the competing drives for homeostasis and change and is relevant to the individual and the collective. If the drive for “homoeostasis” is unbalanced, the individual will be trapped in a static, autistic world. If the other need becomes predominant, the individual will be trapped in an incorporative mode of being in which “strange” is so needed that it overwhelms the ego. This individual will be trapped in perpetual “hunger.” This can even describe the addiction process.

On the collective level, I like to illustrate with politics and there is no better illustration than our current political and social polarization. To function healthily, a culture must have “conservative” forces present as well as “liberal” forces. There must be a tendency to “conserve” tradition but that tendency must be balanced by a willingness to engage with “strange” or “difference.” There must be a setting of boundaries but this boundary-setting must be balanced by a willingness to “relax” boundaries here and there. On one extreme there is stagnation and ultimate death. On the other extreme there is “change” run amok and ultimately death.

Re this dialectic of the collective noted above, there is an interesting article in today’s Washington Post newspaper. The article describes the conservative response of one Oklahoma community toward changes that seem to be threatening them. The article reported the citizenry’s anxiety, fear, and anger toward an over-reaching government, creeping socialism, and liberal values from that bastion of liberalism “up north in Norman.” But this was not a hatchet job on conservative values. It merely conveys to the reader the genuine sadness that some communities feel when their world view is perceived to be threatened. And on the same idea, you might find PBS’s American Experience from this past week as it portrays the Amish response to encroaching civilization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/to-residents-of-another-washington-their-cherished-values-are-under-assault/2012/03/01/gIQAsbhXlR_print.html

Sociobiology and Lewis Thomas

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Though I am steeped in the liberal arts, I have been increasingly curious about the biological sciences. Those of us who have “escaped” into abstraction must always remember that there is a biological dimension to all these “new-fangled ideas” that we revel in. One of my favorite books in biology dates back to 1963, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. Thomas vividly describes this “biological dimension” and suggests at times its inextricable relationship to human behavior, individually and collectively.

From this book I posit the notion that life itself is basically about the creation of boundaries and the evolution of these “boundaries” into increasingly complex relationships. These relationships require that boundaries be there in the first place but at the same it time means that these boundaries cannot be so rigid that communication between the various “boundaries”, or entities, is not possible. Either extreme leads to grave complications and ultimately death itself.

On an individual level this means that an ego, a specific identity that wells up from within a body, must have boundaries to exist psycho-socially. Without an ego we would have only a blob of proto-plasm with no process of differentiation that can lead to higher-order organisms and eventually human beings. But simultaneously this “ego” must not be too impermeable. It must be firm enough that it can quickly learn to endure Shakespeare’s “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” And for this “learning” to take place, this ego must not become a fortress but must be open to the world outside of itself, it must be a “human” at some point, a social creature.

I would like to here share one tidbit from the book itself, an observation about the Iks culture from Uganda. Thomas argues that impingement from the outside, “modernity”, encroached so much and so quickly on these people that they could not function. They devolved into a very reproachable, detestable tribe of erstwhile human beings. Their talk with each other was rude and self-serving, they stopped singing, they lost emotional connection with their children, and they even would defecate on each other’s doorstep. Thomas’ intention here is a demonstration on what will happen on the collective level if the outside world does not respect the boundaries of a specific culture. And the impact that the “victim” culture experiences depends on two things—-1) its own “ego-integrity” (the ability to handle feedback from the outside) and 2) the rapacity of the outside world.

The above example illustrates the “abuse” that one culture, or even the “world culture” at large, can impose on a particular culture. It also vividly illustrates what can happen on the individual level if a child, in particular,  is abused—sexually, physically, and even emotionally . In human terms, the “soul” gets ravaged and often the soul cannot function meaningfully any longer or is at least gravely impaired.

The “Peace of Wild Things”

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I have a penchant for worry. I tend to try to control myself with my mind, anticipating the future and making sure I’ve done everything possible to make it work out for me. This has been my orientation as far back in my life as I can remember. Yes, I’m a control freak. I must admit that at this point in my life I am learning that life is beyond my ability to control and that the very effort itself reflects the machination of my ego. Therefore, the old wisdom of Jesus is having additional meaning for me at this point in my life:
Matthew 6 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

I love watching the flowers coming to bloom, this process starting prematurely this year due to the very warm winter in North America. Daffodils are strutting their stuff already. (I recall plucking one of them years ago and having a very powerful subjective flash—-“Am I plucking this flower or is its exquisite beauty plucking me?”) And I thoroughly enjoy watching the birds cavort about in the yard, queuing up at the feeder on my deck, dashing in and out, soaring high in the sky, dancing to a nearby tree but sure to return for another bite. I’m struck by their intensity, by their striking colors, and their relentless determination to articulate “bird”in this corner of the world again.

These above verses from the gospel of Matthew reassure us that it is not necessary to worry and fret any more than do these birds and flowers. The Grace that they live in and emanate daily is available to all of us. I’m sure that this peace they have is related to what Wendell Berry had in mind in a poem, ascribing to the world of nature, “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” Berry understood that they do not live in terror of the inevitable end that is in store for them and the rest of His glorious creation, the stark finality of death.

But the teachings of Jesus (and other Holy men and women in our history) teach us that death is something that we should not fear, that it is not as stark as it appears, and something that actually can be accomplished before the end of our physical life. People like James Hillman, Karl Jung, Richard Rohr and many others posit the notion that the real issue, in the depths of our heart, is a willingness to let the ego die. They teach that the crucifixion represents symbolically the “death, burial, and resurrection” of the ego.

And I close with an observation from a psychologist of yesteryear, Irvin Yalom: those who are most afraid of death are actually terrified of life.