I Feel Sympathy For Jerry Falwell Jr.

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I really do!  Being a Christian, especially one with the last name Falwell, is quiet a burden.  I too was “guilted” into the Christian faith and when “guilt” continues to compel you to any particular mind-set, noble or otherwise, it is hard to let it go.  I firmly believe that Falwell Jr. is a good guy.  He would have to be, being raised a Baptist and that tradition does teach you to “make nice” in the whole of your life.  And, I’m glad that I’ve had that guilt ridden mandate, “make nice” to tyrannize my life as I realize that if it had not been there I sure as hell could have gotten into a lot of mischief.  And “mischief” is a nice way of putting it!

Guilt, and its sidekick shame, have their place in the human psychic economy  The orientation to “what are they thinking” and giving a damn about it is an important dimension of being human.  BUT, there is a limit to it. And when it comes to a spiritual tradition, that “dynamic duo” (shame and guilt) really need to get a rest at some point, allowing one to just quit the pretences and realize that the “making nice” can become more genuine.

I suspect that Falwell like myself was “encultured” into the Christian faith.  How could one not become a Christian if one’s father was “The” Jerry Falwell, the pastor of the fundamentalist hysteria known as “Thomas Road Baptist Church?  But if one lets his faith be his persona, that morass of ugliness that a persona is designed to cover up, is always apt to ooze through the cracks.  This has certainly been my story, though my “fall” was simpler and easier than it will be for Falwell Jr.  I was a nobody and if I’d have fulfilled the ambitions of my youthful heart I would have become “somebody”, though only a small fish in a very lonely little Arkansas ecclestiacal pond.  I just couldn’t master the “performance art” needed to become successful.  “Whew, what a relief!!!”

A Poem Relevant to Our Nation, “Bow Down to Stutterers.”

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Joe Biden put something on our table last week that Trump will never do, given a constitutional flaw that makes it impossible to admit any fault—he admitted a human flaw, stuttering.  Furthermore, he offered the stage to a 13 year old lad who he has coached recently about stuttering, Braydon Harrington. Braydon humbly accepted  this opportunity to demonstrate tremendous courage and offer a brief speech in which he did indeed stutter

Though stuttering is a neurological disorder…as is every malady, including “being human”…I immediately thought of a poem in which this malady was approached in poetic imagery.  Edgar Simmons,  a Mississippi poet who grasped the nuances of the heart and was able to present stuttering from an interesting perspective.  In the poem which I will offer, he saw stuttering as representing a heart with so much energy that conveying  its burden into words was a challenge. This poem is so rich but one particular image really speaks to me, “The stutter’s hesitation/Is a procrastination crackle/Redress to hot force,/Flight from ancient flame.”  Simmons presents the stutterer as being gripped by a passionate intensity that words cannot contain.  It brings to mind Goneril’s response to her father’s (King Lear) question, “How much do you love me?”  She responded with a simple, “More than words can wield the matter.”

BOW DOWN TO STUTTERERS
By Edgar Simmons

The stutter’s hesitation
Is a procrastination crackle,
Redress to hot force,
Flight from ancient flame.

The bow, the handclasp, the sign of the cross
Say, “Sh-sh-sheathe the savage sword.”

If there is greatness in sacrifice
Lay on me the blue stigmata of saints;
Let me not fly to kill in unthought.

Prufrock has been maligned
And Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors
Absorbing the tick, the bothersome twitch.

Let me stutter with the non-objective painters
Let my stars cool to bare lighted civilities.

Meditation Reining In the Spinning of My”Monkey Mind”

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In 2011 I stumbled into a meditation class at an Episcopalian Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas in which Eastern and Christian meditation were equally emphasized.  The class was exploring a book by Richard Rohr, “The Naked Now,” a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, New Mexico who was the founder and director of The Center For Action and Contemplation.  It was this class and luminaries such as Rohr, Thich Nat Hanh, Thomas Merton, et al who brought to my consciousness the relentless “spin” of my religious mind/heart.

That class taught me there was no “right” way to meditate.  I learned that meditation was about reining in the incessant chattering of the “monkey mind” and that any daunting of that relentless mantra of the egoic mind was the goal.  The basic instruction was, “When you find your mind, wandering away, merely bring it back to a mantra, a ‘sacred word,’ or even one’s breath.  The goal was merely “reining in” that mind, not doing anything “perfectly.”  One thing I quickly realized was just how much my spiritual life was about “getting it right,” aka “perfectly.”  I gradually became aware of the relentless unconscious mantra, an internal dialogue which had haunted my life, “Do it perfectly.” This venture into the discipline of meditation brought to my consciousness the tyranny of self-talk which was a piped-in “muzak” drone designed merely to fill the otherwise pregnant void of my life.

This experience was the advent of “the light of day” to my life, inviting me to “listen” better to what I was hearing “out there” but also to the incessant grind of unexamined internal dialogue.  “Ears to hear that were ‘hearing not’” were beginning to hear for the first time; eyes that had never seen before were beginning to see for the first time.  One could even say I was being “born again” in a very real sense though without the hysteria of the “born again” culture.  I want to share here a relevant observation from a noted teacher of meditation, Laurence Freeman, who is the founder of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM):


To see reality as it is, or at least to free oneself progressively of its
filters, is a major act of faith. It expresses the trusting face of faith
because our attachment to the beliefs and rituals of our tradition can
become a false and falsifying security. And so, many deeply religious
people feel an aversion or antipathy to meditation because it seems to
(and indeed does) undermine the secure boundaries that protect our world
view and our sense of being superiorly different from others.

A way of faith, however, is not a dogged adherence to one point of view
and to the belief systems and ritual traditions that express it. That
would make it just ideology or sectarianism, not faith. Faith is a
transformational journey that demands that we move in, through and beyond
our frameworks of belief and external observances—not betraying or
rejecting them but not being entrapped by their forms of expression
either. St Paul spoke of the way of salvation as beginning and ending in
faith. Faith is thus an open-endedness, from the very beginning of the
human journey. There is, of course, value in a framework, a system and
tradition. [But] if we are stably centered in these, the process of change
unfolds and our perspective of truth is continuously enlarged.

NOTE:  Laurence Freeman, WCCM, and meditation culture are a gift to me as a result of blogging.  Freeman and many others I would never had heard of without having cyber “met” a woman from Toowoomba, Australia.  Thank you, Anne-Marie.

Meditation Can Intervene With One’s “Monkey Mind.”

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The “spin” that I have kicked around the last few posts pertains also to religion, even mine! I was given by birth the Christian tradition, which I still greatly respect, but which I realized I was given in a socio-cultural context from my birth in the American South in the early 1950’s, coming with a particular “spin” which taught me that my hyper conservative Baptist church was very “special”; it was  so “special” that even the Southern Baptist Convention of which we were a spin-off was “too liberal.”  There was a sense in which my little denomination, the Landmark Missionary Baptist Church, took for itself the exalted position of the “bride of Christ,” an honor that awaited us when we got to heaven. These were good people, very, very,  good people, who afforded me this “spin.”  If I had not been given that “spin”, I would have been given another; we all get a “spin.”  Many of the generation I grew up in did not take it as seriously as I did and were able to slough off the spin-dimension  more readily than I was; they were secure enough to not take themselves so seriously.  I was very thin-skinned, very wounded and needed the specialness “spin” to protect me from the vulnerability that would have otherwise overwhelmed me.

My spirituality has, therefore, always been “all about me” more than I could have imagined.  This is still the case and will always be.  In a sense, “I can’t help it” for I am a mere human and can only “hold this treasure in an earthen vessel.”  My ego, still with its infantile baggage, wants to believe otherwise and have the assurance that the viewpoint I have on spiritual matters is beyond question, is “objective” in some sense.  But we are never as “objective” as we think we are and this leads to delusional thinking, especially in religion…and politics. But once you “see” a dark dimension of your heart, it is not eradicated but its power begins to diminish; that “diminishment” process follows one the rest of his life.

Beginning about a decade ago when I stumbled across the work of Richard Rohr and a meditation class at a lovely church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, this narcissism began to crumble.  St. Paul’s Episcopalian Church offered many treasures, one of which was a Sunday School class which emphasized Eastern and Western meditation wisdom and practice.  There this “monkey mind” of mine became more visible, its shrieking and chattering more apparent for what it was.  Next time, I will explore a bit more the importance of meditation in my life.

This “Fish” Sees Water…Kinda…And It Is Not Always Cracked up To What It’s Supposed To Be!!!

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Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. (David Foster Wallace)

The above quote, from my last post, is the essence of the “spinning” that occurs with a fish that cannot see its water. However, a “fish” can learn to see water and my life is a story about this accomplishment.  Actually, I must confess this has not been an “accomplishment” as I was born this way and it has merely taken me half a century to find the confidence to accept and honor this lot in life.  My confidence was buoyed last year when I read…twice…the Booker-Prize winning novel by Anna Burns, “The Milkman” in which she introduced me to the notion of living “beyond the pale.” In my life beyond this pale…and yes it is the “pale” separating reality and something “beyond”…which I’m increasingly learning is not a catastrophe but is merely the endowment of what poet John Keats called “negative capability.”  (It could, though be a “catastrophe” and often is!) This stance has blessed/cursed me with the “observer” stance which Emily Dickinson alluded to when she noted, “Life is over there, on a shelf.”  It is no coincidence that Dickinson spent her life “cloistered” in her father’s attic and I myself have spent my life “cloistered” in some attic, some cerebral detachment of sorts.

But in this cloister of mine I have not escaped the predicament the David Foster Wallace noted in the quote provided above.  I, too, offer but a “spin” about the world and I, too, have tended to take it too seriously and demonstrated too often a tendency to impose it on others; as some wit noted, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail.”  The ego has a difficult time ever acknowledging its machinations which are intrinsically a “spin” about the world and an attempt to make it wholly about itself.  When Humility begins to penetrate that hermetically-sealed chamber, the “spin” begins to rattle against the walls of the cage it has created and great is the “noise” to the owner of the ego…and sometimes to those looking on from the outside!

Let me close with a note about the “noise” which is clamoring in our modern world as our collective ego is under a related grave challenge.  Particularly in my country, the basic assumptions, the premises, the “water” that we “fish” cannot see, is being exposed.  In this situation, the part of our culture which most embodies this obfuscation is clinging obstinately to its ego and have found a leader who champions so vividly its cause.

In my next post, I am going to share about the “spinning” of one’s religious tradition and how that noble teachings can become merely an example of the aforementioned “kid with a hammer.”

Will a Fish Ever Learn To See Water?

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David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

That Damn Grim Reaper is Stalking Me.

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The Grim Reaper is at the threshold of my dear family.  My heart is very heavy.  The reason it is so heavy now is that I have a heart which I haven’t had in the past. This “death thingy” that we all live with is “the great equalizer” and humbles us…or at least it can anyway.  The fantasies, illusions, and hypocrisies that we hide behind, allowing us to “perfunctory” along our life’s way, disintegrate in the face of this “Humility”.  The formulaic, canned humility that I’ve used to imprison my heart can only dissipate in the face of this “Humility.” I am very humbled that one of my dear brothers-in-law has less than 24 hours left on this beautiful planet.

BUT I take comfort with the wisdom of Irvin Yalom, a gifted psychologist, that it is incumbent upon us as human being to “die” before Death, allowing us then to live as never before.  We are no longer hapless before our fragility; we can then find an anchor there that will stabilize us in the tumult of this emotional maelstrom. The tenor of Yalom’s observation is that until we “die” we will not be able to live, only “be-bopping” along our “three-score and ten,” deliberately, willingly opting to avoid the Life-giving dissipation of our persona’s grip.  Bill and I talked frequently of the “Anchor” that we were finding.  Irish poet, William Butler Yeats summed up the sentiments I have expressed here: The leaves are many but the root is one./  Throughout all the lying days of my youth, I have swayed my leaves and flowers under the sun./ Now may I wither into the truth.

The following is a link to a brilliant essay by a deeply-spiritual Quaker, Parker Palmer, in which death and fragility is powerfully presented.—   https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/10/parker-palmer-naropa-university-commencement-address/

Mary Trump, “Too Much and Never Enough

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The Trump maelstrom is teetering on that abyss of darkness that gave rise to it in the first place.  His niece, Mary Trump, has just released her tell-all book (“Too Much and Never Enough”) about this uncle that she describes as “the most dangerous man in America.”  I’ve read excerpts from her book, and watched a powerful interview of her by Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” in which she described the “currency” of the intimate dynamics of that modern “Robber Baron” family as being money rather than anything near love and respect for others.

The title of her book immediately triggered the Shakespearean dimension of my brain with a line from one of his sonnets, “mad in pursuit and more in possession so.” Shakespeare had his pulse on the human soul and revealed in this sonnet 129 the voracious appetite, one spawn of which is capitalism itself and that spawn’s offspring with characters such as individuals like Trump, the personal “toy of some great pain.”  Shakespeare in this sonnet explored this bottomless pit very elegantly and concluded that it leads to hell itself:

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

The heaven that leads men to this hell.

Mary Trump and “Expurgation.”

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Mary Trump is one expression of what T. S. Eliot had in mind with his play, “The Family Reunion.”  In that story, Eliot projected himself onto the character “Harry” who felt the abysmal ugliness of his dysfunctional family.  “Harry” carried the wounds of a tortured family and was able to put them into words in this very disturbing, dark drama.

With the publication of her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” Ms. Trump graphically put into words the demonic evil of growing up in the distorted world of Fred Trump, the father of our president.  It is no accident that she became a therapist as the training involved and the clinical work in her career has been “purgatorial” for her.  In the Eliot play, the wounded “pain bearer” of the family is described as, “a bird sent flying through the purgatorial fire.” Eliot was a deeply spiritual man and his literary work often uses biblical imagery such as “purgatory” to paint a picture of the struggle of the human soul.

In the following quote from “The Family Reunion,” Eliot summarized the spiritual work that is always underway in human experience, even in the political dance we call a “family.”   At the end, I will post a longer section of the play which provides more context.

What we have written is not a story of detection,
Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation.
It is possible that you have not known what sin
You shall expiate, or whose, or why. It is certain
That the knowledge of it must precede the expiation.
It is possible that sin may strain and struggle
In its dark instinctive birth, to come to consciousness
And so find expurgation.

Hold Tight, Hold Tight: T.S. Eliot’s “The Family Reunion”

https://mbird.com/tag/family-reunion/

Reason, Rationalization, Faith, and Trump.

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Faith traditions usually devolve into rigid distinctions, the “letter of the law” that Jesus chided us for. Christianity, which is my faith tradition, has a penchant for “legalism on steroids”, primarily the result of the Reformation. This has facilitated rigid distinctions leading to an “us” vs “them” mentality in many cases and a related penchant for seeing evil “out there.” This legalism coincides with the bastardization of Reason into rationalism in which our “rational-mind” orientation draws conclusions that Reason would be less likely to draw. This is related to the Goethe quote that I use here so often, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

This is vividly illustrated with a strong contingent of evangelical Christians who are passionate supporters of Trump, using that “rational” mind to conclude, “Well, the Lord has raised him up, using an evil man to accomplish God’s purpose. ” That is very good “rationalization” but not very good Reason, Reason being that quality of heart that the Apostle Paul had in mind when he described the Holy Spirit as furrowing into the hearts depths where there He can be a “discerners of the thoughts and intents” of that heart. When one has ventured into that dimension of the Human/Divine experience, the Shakespearean “pauser reason” would posit the notion, “Well, maybe it was just my ego that wanted Trump to win so that my prejudices and biases about my life, including my faith life, can be validated.” One simple illustration of this rationalization occurred in in my youth as a fundamentalist Baptist; a deacon in my church…who I remember so fondly…told my Sunday School class that if an African American happened to enter the doors of the church, he would kindly inform him that he was not welcome. And that man was a “good” man, a Christian by all means, but in the tribal culture that he was part of he could see things only that way. After all, just a decade earlier President Eisenhower had forcibly desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas and my Baptist culture had not gotten over that example of “government intrusion.”

A very relevant concluding thought…my favorite bumper sticker…”Don’t believe everything you think.”