Meditative prayer

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I think it is important to pay attention to how we pray.  Often when we pray we are merely chattering, tossing words around, praying to some kindly old gentleman “up there”, possibly one who sits on a golden throne with a baby sheep under one arm and a thunderbolt under the other.  Our prayer is often of the “gimme, gimme, gimme” genre, reflecting a vision of God as sitting “up there” with a huge duffel bag full of goodies to toss our way.  But an essential dimension of prayer is to clear our minds, to rein them in, to focus—that is, to meditate.  Meditative prayer can help us find our center and from that center we can make better decisions about our day to day life.   We could even, then, say “The Spirit of God leads us in making better decisions.”

Our words speak volumes about us, including the words we use in prayer.   Our word selection and the nuances of our speech reveals where we are existentially and spiritually.   For example, our word selection in prayer can reveal the perception that He is “afar off”, that He is “out there” and that we are fundamentally estranged from Him.  It is this perception of estrangement that leads to the belief that our tone of voice, our volume, and our ardor will help influence Him in his responses.  We forget that though God is transcendent He is also immanent.  In the words of Jesus, “The kingdom is within.”

prayer

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I think it is important to pay attention to how we pray.  Often when we pray we are merely chattering, tossing words around, praying to some kindly old gentleman “up there”, possibly one who sits on a golden throne with a baby sheep under one arm and a thunderbolt under the other.  Our prayer is often of the “gimme, gimme, gimme” genre, reflecting a vision of God as sitting “up there” with a huge duffel bag full of goodies to toss our way.  But an essential dimension of prayer is to clear our minds, to rein them in, to focus—that is, to meditate.  Meditative prayer can help us find our center and from that center we can make better decisions about our day to day life.   We could even, then, say “The Spirit of God leads us in making better decisions.”

Our words speak volumes about us, including the words we use in prayer.   Our word selection and the nuances of our speech reveals where we are existentially and spiritually.   For example, our word selection in prayer can reveal the perception that He is “afar off”, that He is “out there” and that we are fundamentally estranged from Him.  It is this perception of estrangement that leads to the belief that our tone of voice, our volume, and our ardor will help influence Him in his responses.  We forget that though God is transcendent he is also immanent.  In the words of Jesus, “The kingdom is within.”

Wanta go to heaven?

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In my conservative upbringing, I was taught that the story of Adam and Eve was about creation and “the fall.”  I was taught that when Adam succumbed to the temptation of Eve’s offering of the forbidden fruit (i.e., the apple), we as a species were plunged into sin, we had “fallen” into sin.

I now see that story as a myth and a very compelling and rich myth.  It is the story of how we did indeed fall from grace but only in the sense that it was the fall from a primordial unity with nature into the realm of consciousness—from raw, unmediated, instinctual experience into the realm of conscious, cognitive, rational reality.  And this event in our psychic development is very much related to the advent of language.  This event can be thought of as a fall from the pre-conscious into the realm of the verbal.  Even Aesychlus noted, circa 500 b.c. noted how that Zeus had “banished us thought-ward”.

Karl Jung taught that before the advent of language, the child dwells in a state of unity with his/her mother.  The mother’s world and that of her child are tightly intertwined until the process of differentation leads them to that radical juncture in the process of separation—language. (That world of unity is sometimes thought of and conceptualized as the ouroborus, symbolized by the snake eating its own tail.)  Furthermore, I have read of speculation that those children with speech impediments have been overly enmeshed with their mothers and have not formed clear and separate boundaries.

And, yes, “sin” is relevant to this situation.  Human experience is that of a sinner in that we sense on some level that we “come from out there” or at least somewhere else.  It is a sense of being separate from our source.  We are cut off from our source and cannot go back.  Our longing for heaven is the yearning for that Edenic state of one-ness with nature, primordial unity.  On some unconscious level we recall “heaven” where all was well with the world, nothing ever went wrong, all of our needs were met.  And, as conscious adults we subscribe to the belief that after death, we return to that wonderful state

Unaccomodated man/woman

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When President Clinton was being impeached, he became famous for his splitting of one hair in particular.   In answer to a particular question, he responded with great deliberation, “Well, it depends on what the meaning of is, is.”  I intend to continue this vein of hair-splitting here regarding the same infinitive, “to be”.

I feel that the best we ever get from our various spiritual perambulations is “to be.”  We get our “is-ness”.   Now, I have always had a spiritual streak about me.  It was my endowment from my community and family.  The role I was to play was, anthropologically speaking, “a holy man”, some conservative Arkansas variation of a shaman.  However, in this particular little corner of the world, my title was “preacher”.   Writing now five decades later, I recognize that I wanted a whole lot more than mere “is-ness”.  I wanted an identity, I wanted a place in that little back-water village, I wanted respect, and I wanted a career.  And what this meant was that my brief ministry was, in the words of an evangelical preacher of the day, “a platform on which to display my carnal abilities.”  It was a “work of the flesh”, to borrow a concept from the New Testament.  It was all about me.

So there I illustrated a basic problem with spiritual aspirations—the ego. The ego is not satisfied with merely “be-ing”, it prefers to shine, to “strut and fret” its hour on the stage and have people admire its holiness, its piety—“Wind my up and watch me be pious!”  And though my spiritual ego has today a degree of subtlety about it….I want to say…I still find myself from time to time really proud of how pious I am, something akin to the Pharisee’s pride in how broad their phylactery was.  (See Matthew 23:5)

AND, that is ok.  For, at that moment, sometimes the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh comes to the fore and I practice his “half smile” and prayerfully breathe the word, “mindfulness.”  I then go on with my day to day life.  There is no need to beat myself up, no need to bemoan my spiritual immaturity, no need to flagellate myself with, “Oh what a rotten sinner I am.”  There is only the need to be “mindful” and to then continue to “chop wood, carry water.”  For, no matter how spiritually “refined” we might become…or think we have become…we are going to find a hefty dollop of ego always ready to manifest itself.  And that is always going to be present.  I have a suspicion that this is some part of what the Buddha had in mind when he attested that “mara” was always with him.  And Jesus was always beset by Satan and I’m sure that ego was one of the seductions that Satan had even then in his repertoire.

The goal is to glory in our mere be-ing, in our “is-ness”, in the fact that we exist, that we “are”.  To recognize and experience that we have been “thrown into being” by some force or presence (and I like to say Presence) far beyond the grasp of our feeble minds.  It is to recognize as did Einstein that at the depths of our existence we find merely a mystery, and incomprehensible mystery, that some of us choose to term “God”.

But it requires joining King Lear out on the heath, “unaccomodated”, naked, pelted by the same “pitiless storm”, bereft of our kingdom and family, shorn of the trappings of our egoic consciousness.  It is to experience our emptiness which came to us in the New Testament in the doctrine of “kenosis”, merely meaning, “the emptying of ourselves.”  It is to experience our solitude, our “Dark Night of the Soul”. (St. John of the Cross).

Now the nice thing about this is that it does not have to leave us so “unaccomodated.”  This spiritual process merely loosens the attachment to our “stuff”.  No longer does our “stuff” have us.  We have seen and experienced our true self and that will be the core of our identity, not the piling up of earthly treasures, or the acheivement of success, and certainly not the acheivement of “spiritual” success.  We know that essentially we have only our “is-ness”, we have it only for this brief sojourn in this parenthesis of time before we return to our Source.  And in the mean time, we can have and enjoy our “stuff” but hopefully with less obsession and with an increased proclivity to share some of it with others.

Several weeks ago I quoted Shakespeare’s 146th sonnet and I conclude with an excerpt:

Oh soul, the center of my sinful earth

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array;

Why doeth thy pine within and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay.

(And he goes on to conclude with:)

Within be fed, without be rich no more.

Warren Jeffs and mental illness

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Warren Jeffs provides us with still another object-lesson in madness.  His private delusional system eventually was confronted by the world outside of himself and he was found guilty.  It was interesting to note that even as the hand of justice came down on him, his only defense was to recite his self-serving interpretation of FLDS holy writ.  He still didn’t get it.  And, he won’t get it.  His delusional system is too rigid.

Jeff’s delusional system was mirrored by a somewhat larger delusional system, the sectarian religious culture that he had lived in for his whole life. But that sectarian world-view was not mirrored…eventually…by the world at large.  And the “mirroring” by the world at large is what separates a sect from non-sectarian religion

We all have private belief-systems even apart from religious/spiritual beliefs.  That is to say, we all have our own private world that we live in.  But the issue is always the boundary-region between that private belief system and the world at large.  If the belief system is too rigid, if there is no permeability with the world-at-large, then madness reigns.  Mental illness is a reference problem.

The more rigid the private world view, the less permeable it is and the more likely it is that an “us-them” paradigm will emerge. Those ensconced in such a paradigm tend to be paranoid.  And, of course, the more paranoid one is the more likely one is to see “them” as being intrusive and aggressive, even threatening.  This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the paranoid individual’s attitude, speech, and behavior eventually lead to intervention by “them.”  (For a provocative analysis of this phenomena on the group level, see Richard Hofstadter”s Paranoid Style in American Politics.)

Groups such as the FLDS are always in-bred in the sense that they are their own private reference system.  Being “in-bred” like this, it is no accident that incest and child-abuse takes place.  For incest…speaking now in terms of family-system theory…is always an illustration of a family or group feeding on itself.

Ravished by God

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One of my favorite sonnets is by John Donne:

 Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

This is a beautiful portrayal of God’s persistent but gracious intervention in our lives.  It recognizes our bondage to reason, noting how that reason is “captiv’d” by subterranean forces, forces that I would describe as the ego.  As long as that bondage continues we will live a life “betroth’d unto your enemy” which I would also describe as the forces of the unconscious.  We will be what Colin Wilson described as a “sleep walker.”

And do note the sexual imagery there!

Primordial grace

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Grace is a wonderful concept.  I even love the look and the sound of the word in biblical greek—charis!   But grace preceded the Judeo-Christian era.  Several days I even quoted Aesyclus re “the awful grace of God” and Aesychlus lived some 500 years before Christ.  But grace was not new even then.  I believe grace much earlier had been a concept in the evolving human experience, first being articulated as imprecise grunts and squeaks millenia earlier when some man or woman, probably sitting around a campfire, experienced the Beneficense of the universe he/she lived in.   Only much later did this “verbal imprecision” become more elegantly conceptualized and expressed.  Remember that Revelations 13:8 describes Jesus as “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world”, meaning “Jesus” was “sacrificed” before the advent of the space-time continuum.  Grace was something proferred to us in eternity past, something in the original germ of being.

For a poetic description of this concept, check out Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

the Ultimate

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In fundamentalist Christianity there is the oft-used phrase, “in the word” as in “I’m in the word a lot now-a-days.”  I’ve been there, done that, and it has its place.  I now am “in the word” daily though my “word” has broadened to include non-Christian holy writ, spiritual teachings (contemporary and historical), and literature (past and present), philosophy, and religious tomes.

I’m aware of how much brain-washing is involved here.  It is a way of indoctrinating ourselves, filling the void that we are with something we deem important to keep that void from sucking us up.  It is part of maintaining the identity that we formulated a long time ago, that identity being “a veil we spin to hide the void” (Norman O. Brown).

So, what’s the point?  Is brainwashing all there is?  Am I merely espousing nihilism here?

I think the answer is to realize that the “stuff” that we have filled our minds and heart with must have meaning beyond itself.  This “stuff”   (words, images, ideas, etc) is important but it has no meaning unless we have an ultimate reference point outside the realm of time and space.  I think it was Gabriel Marcel who once noted that “words have meaning only when they burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves.”  So, when it comes to spirituality…at least…does our ideology, our words, our dogma “burgeon-forth into a region beyond themselves” or is it merely so much flotsam-and-jetsam that we have glommed onto to stave-off the existential abyss that we live in.

As a culture…and I could broaden that to “world culture”…I fear that we do not have an ultimate reference point.   Or to put it more correctly, an “Ultimate Reference Point.”  Therefore we “glom on” to “stuff”.  We are materialistic.

Christian social grooming

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CNN over the weekend posted an article about “talking Christian.” The author, John Blake, describes this as the Christian habit to obsessively regurgitate various words and phrases, sometimes having little idea what is really meant by them. The author had stolen my thunder! I was at that moment preparing to blog on the subject of what I call, “God talk.” To illustrate my version of this phenomena, let me describe another “talk” of the same genre—“car talk.” This “car talk” is chatter, usually between men (young and old) about the intricacies of the automobile. (I can’t do this glibly for I don’t know how to do “car talk”.) But it involves lots of discussion of the subtleties of carburetion….”four-barrel Holly” comes to mind. And there are the complexities of engine compression and possibly the desire to bore out the cylinder and install larger pistons to get enhanced power. And I remember “glass pack mufflers” being the rage. And there were details about “the struts” and “the cam shaft” or perhaps the fear of “throwing a rod.” Now, if I knew how to “car talk”, I could tie all the above…and more…into a meaningful conversation which would constitute an example of “car talk.” AND, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this “car talk.” It is one example of human engagement, it can be thought of as “social grooming”, much like chimps in a cage picking fleas off each other. ( Another example is “talking baseball” which I can do very well!). This social grooming is an essential part of day to day life.

Now though I am a “mal-adept” at car talk, I can recall being very adept at “God talk”, especially the hyper-conservative variety. It involved “well worn words and ready phrases” (Conrad Aiken) such as, “Jesus is my savior” or “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” or “He’s on the way back this very moment” or “I’m just a sinner saved by God’s grace” or “Why weren’t you in Sunday school yesterday, Brother Lewis?” or “Well, let’s remember to pray about it”. These and others are worn into a tapestry of routine conversation, the point of which was that each would recognize each other as a Christian and as a particular type of Christian. One would fit into the social context, one would be able to “offer a convincing performance” in that social context. And, once again there is nothing necessarily wrong with this variety of “talk”; for, religion does have a social dimension and this example of Christian “social grooming” has its function.

The problem lies when Christians, or persons of other faiths, never go beyond the social dimension of their glib expressions and search-out the hidden meanings. Failure to do so means that one has merely imbibed his/her faith, or the verbal trappings of his/her faith, from the social context. The words and phrases have only superficial meaning. They are “shop talk”. They amount to “chimps picking fleas off each other.”

more re “awful grace”

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Now, Emily Dickinson got it “awfully” and apparently several times.  But, from this trauma a lot of beautiful, thoughtful poetry ensued.  Let me illustrate:

 He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by degrees —
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals — One — imperial — Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked Soul —

When Winds take Forests in the Paws —
The Universe — is still –

Now most of us do not get it so “awfully.” Neurologically we’re are wired so that at worst we deal with garden variety anxiety and depression. But there are those who get their “naked soul” scalped. In modern times, there is Eckhart Tolle. And, even Byron Katie. And then there is the Apostle Paul in biblical times.

A tale of grace spoken of in an earlier blog about the contemporary poetry and memoirs of Mary Karr. Particularly in Lit, she eloquently and passionately describes her difficult childhood, her abuse, her abuse of alcohol and drugs, and a difficult marriage.  Substance abuse was the arena in which she wrestled with God most intensely, fighting tooth-and-toenail to resist God’s grace.  And prayer was the most difficult phase of this “wrestling” with God.

Now I can’t describe this as an example of someone having “their naked soul scalped”.  But it was not the aforementioned garden-variety neurosis and depression.