Aspirin and contraception

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Foster Freiss, the Rick Santorum’s designated“millionaire” really stuck his foot in his mouth yesterday with his decades old joke about aspirin as a contraceptive. Later, Santorum tried to cover for him, dismissing him as a jokester whose jokes are sometimes not funny. He continued, “He told a bad, off-color joke and he shouldn’t have done it, but that’s his business.”

Well, first of all the “off-color’ note reflects Santorum’s prudery. When I first heard the joke 40 years ago, I too was quite the prude and was taken aback when I heard it—-my late-teens sister had been told the joke by her dentist. But Santorum does not grasp the issue here. The issue is horrible judgment on Freiss’s part as he trotted out a lame, ages-old joke in the midst of a very intense debate about a very personal matter for females. One would think that Freiss would have had the presence of mind, or to allude to a recent blog posting, an “observing ego”, and would have not trotted that inanity out there.

It is kind of relevant to Gingrich’s recent proposal of a moon colony “by the end of my second administration.” At that time he was being hit hard by critics about his narcissism and grandiosity. His “observing ego” should have given him pause and let him know, “Oh, wow, I can’t say that. It sounds very grandiose.” But he is “meta-cognitively challenged.”

(Oh, back to the Freiss joke. Here is how I heard it. And, it was designed to be told by an older male to a virginal young lady for maximal shock value. Question from the dentist to my sister, “Hey, did you know that aspirin can prevent pregnancy?” Taken aback and curious, my sister responded, “Well, no. How can that be.? Answer, “When you go on a date, put an aspirin between your knees and don’t open your legs.”)

Nuances of Prayer

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We are inextricably caught up in the time-space continuum.   Everything we think,
do, and say is influenced by our bondage to this master. It is called
“reality.”

When we pray, for example, we tend to think of God as “Someone” who is “out
there” and I remember some in my youth who appeared to even think it was
necessary to raise one’s voice in prayer as if volume made a difference. And
then “earnestness” was an issue—if we prayed with the utmost passion and
sincerity, the fervor itself would make a difference. And, of course, we had to
“live right” or God certainly would not hear us!  We had not heard of T.S. Eliot who described prayer as “more than an order of words, or the sound of the voice praying, or the conscious occupation of the praying mind.”

The nuances of language are very revealing, even in prayer, as they reveal our
attitude, our spiritual perspective. This led to a change in my word
selection when I prayed for someone else. For example, if I prayed for a friend
or relative back then who was in distress, I prayed, “Lord, send your Spirit to
comfort them.” But, I now see that God’s Spirit is not time-bound as we are and will not be sent anymore than He already has been sent.  Therefore, I now pray, “Lord, may he/she be aware of your Presence today and feel your Spirit’s healing, comforting touch.”

For God is always with us. He is intrinsic to our being itself. All we have to
do to commune with Him is to merely get out of the way.

The Observing Ego

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The “observing ego” is that ability to self-monitor and make appropriate choices about public, social behavior.  Without this faculty one is knee-deep in abject narcissism.  And I argue that all of us have this problem to some degree, individually and collectively.  That is why we need to be socially involved AND to be sensitive to the feedback we get from others, explicit feedback and feedback that is more subtle.  Some have described it as having “antennae”.  And close, intimate relationships is the arena where the feedback is the richest as those people who are “close” and “intimate” see us best.

Here is Shakespeare’s observation re this issue in Julius Caesar:

And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of.

 

Meditative prayer…again!

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I have often quoted a line from Hamlet re prayer.  King Claudius is on his knees, in prayer, saying, “My words fly up.  My thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

That is a very subtle observation as is often the case when something is profound.  Shakespeare noted the distinction between a prosaic, formal, perfunctory prayer and one that is essentially meditation, “thoughts” and “words” conjoined.   Richard Rohr’s blog posting of today presents this notion more eloquently:

In what is commonly called prayer, you and your hurts, needs, and perspectives are still the central reference point, not really God. But you have decided to invite a Major Power in to help you with your already determined solution! God can perhaps help you get what you want, but it is still a self-centered desire, instead of God’s much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13, Matthew 7:11). It always takes a bit of time to widen this lens, and therefore the screen, of life.

One goes through serious withdrawal pain for a while until the screen is widened to a high-definition screen. It is work to learn how to pray, largely the work of emptying the mind and filling the heart—that is prayer in one concise and truthful phrase. Or as some say, “pulling the mind down into the heart” until they both operate as one.

Faith and doubt

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I was taught in my youth that faith and doubt were incompatible.  Now, I find they go hand-in-hand.  I feel that faith without doubt is largely dishonest, or as Sartre described it, “Bad faith.”

And note what Unamuno had to say on the subject:

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe in the God idea, not God himself. ~Miguel de Unamuno

And William Butler Yeats puts this truth so pithily:

Oh God, guard me from those thoughts

Men think in the mind alone.

He who sings a lasting song

Must think in the marrow bone.

 

The Power of Thought

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Just a couple notes re the power of thought.

Mike Dooley noted, “Freedom from the past, or anything else for that matter always comes in the very instant you stop thinking about it.”

For, thought has a powerful hand in perpetuating our reality. This is true individually and collectively. It makes me think of an old bromide, author unknown, “Our thoughts become us.”

And peripherally related, Shakespeare noted, “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

And I close with another observation of Mike Dooley, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.”

“Heavenly hurt it sends us”

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Richard Rohr argues that there is “an incurable wound at the heart everything” and that in the second half of one’s life maturity comes when we recognize and accept this. He states in a recent blog that “your holding and ‘suffering’ of this tragic wound, your persistent but failed attempts to heal it, your final surrender to it, will ironically make you into a wise and holy person.”

Now, I would qualify this and note that this “incurable wound” comes to us in varying degrees. For many, those who are merely the “walking wounded” it presents itself as plain vanilla depression and anxiety. But even that “plain vanilla” version of pain must be confronted, just as others must confront their “incurable wound.” It makes me wonder if this is what Paul meant by his “thorn in the flesh.”

And note here what a “difference” Emily Dickinson’s “heavenly hurt” brought her:

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the heft
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
‘Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.

Prayer and humility

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I have discoursed several times re prayer and its meditative function. I don’t believe that God sits “up there” waiting to bestow “stuff” on us when we want or to bail us out of a mess we have created with our life. I think prayer, like all dimensions of spirituality, is ultimately a mystery. I don’t know definitively how it works but I do believe that it is important that we pray.  So I think you should pray as you are inclined to pray. You know as much about this mystery as I do. But I hope that you will consider the perspective that I offer from time to time.

Rabbi Adam Jacobs made an interesting point in the Huffington Post that I would like to share. He noted that in the Hebrew language the word “to pray” is a reflexive verb, something you do to yourself. And the root of the word means “to judge”, “rendering the actual translation of prayer as something more akin to self-evaluation. Therefore, when a person stands before God to communicate, she is taking stock of her capabilities, current level of spiritual consciousness and willingness to accept reality for what it truly is. The deeper notion is that we are willfully trying to integrate the inescapable fact that we are utterly dependent on the Creator.”
The upshot of this observation is that humility is an essential element in prayer. And humility always comes hard to those of us who have been educated into “humility.”  And I close with my favorite Shakespearean observation re prayer, King Claudius on his knees in prayer, offering the following observation, “My words fly up.  My thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

Purity and Extremism

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I recently posted a review of Reza Aslan’s book Beyond Fundamentalism and explained how he takes to task all versions of extremism, though his focus was on Islamic fundamentalism.

He addressed the purity emphasis of the Jihadist movement, noting that the Jihadists “consider themselves to be the only true Muslims. All other Muslims are imposters or apostates who must repent of their ‘hypocrisy’ or be abandoned to their fate.” He goes into great detail re the rivalry and hostility within the Muslim extremists as each sect tends to attempt to set itself apart as “the true Muslim” faith.

I’m personally sensitive to this type of lunacy as I grew up in a Southern conservative Christian sect which taught that it was the only true church. And within that sect there was the same “purity” emphasis which included, of course, moral purity but also doctrinal purity. The latter in particular often gave rise to dissension and “splitting” of churches.

Purity is a dangerous notion.  But when it is overly emphasized, one needs to beware as lunacy is beckoning. To be human is to recognize ambivalence, to recognize the presence of good and bad in all human hearts. Those that can’t handle ambivalence gravitate toward some form of extremism.

I strongly recommend Mary Douglas’s book, Purity and Danger.  Douglas approaches the purity notion from an anthropological stance and provides insight into its origin and function in tribal cultures.  And her observations are relevant to our particular “tribe”.

Shakespeare and hypocrisy

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I love Shakespeare with a passion. He is perhaps the greatest gift that the gods have offered us to date, with due respect to the holy men and women who have also graced our lives.

He was a very spiritual man and thus had a critical eye re “spirituality” and astutely took we “spiritual sorts” to task for our innate tendency to be hypocritical and insincere.

For example, in King Richard III the King confesses:

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol’n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

And then my favorite observation on this note was: With devotions visage and pious action, we do sugar o’er the devil himself. (Hamlet)

And I close with one of my favorite lines from Goethe’s Faust: They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.