Tag Archives: Conrad Aiken

Trashing Richard Rohr!

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I can’t stand Richard Rohr. He is a thief! Yes, I have all of these wonderful, deeply-spiritual, sublime thoughts and he puts them into print (or blog) before I do! And there he is rich and famous and I’m a mere Southern ne’er-do-well mired in the bowels of the blog-o-sphere!

Seriously, I love that man. He says everything I could ever say and says it much more eloquently and humbly than I could ever manage. I should do as I have threatened and merely let me blog consist each day of a link to Richard Rohr’s blog. (And, btw, Franciscan monks do not get rich!)

On a related note, I feel validated when I run across someone like Rohr. Conrad Aiken once noted, “This is peace to know our thoughts known.” And that is very important if life has you on an “unbeaten path” trajectory which has always been my lot. I also find this validation often here on the blog-o-sphere, crossing the path of other kindred spirits, some of which I have already shared the following Archibald MacLeish quote: Winds of thought blow magniloquent meanings betwixt me and thee.

Here is Rohr’s blog posting of today:

HEALING OUR VIOLENCE

If the self doesn’t find some way to connect radically with Being, it will live in anxiety and insecurity. The false self is inherently insecure. It’s intrinsically fragile, grasping for significance. That’s precisely because it is insignificant! So it grabs atthings like badges and uniforms and titles and hats and flags to give itself importance and power. People talk about dying for the flag of their country. They don’t realize that the Bible would definitely call that idolatry. What were you before you were an American? Will you be an American in heaven? Most of us don’t know how to answer those questions without a spiritual journey and an inner prayer life.
In prayer you will discover who you were before you were male, before you were female, before you were black, before you were white, before you were straight, before you were gay, before you were Lutheran, Mormon, or Amish. Have you ever lived there? At that naked place, you will have very little to defend, fight about, compete with, overcome, hate, or fear. You are then living in the Reign of God, or what Buddha calls the Great Compassion. Violence is unneeded and undesired.
Adapted from Healing Our Violence
Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)
Prayer:
We are love, and we are made for love,
and our natural abiding place is love.

 

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.

Listening

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It must have been exhilarating when we learned to talk, when we learned to assign meaning to our “these squeaks of ours” (Conrad Aiken), and to recognize that these meanings were by and large shared with others.  And even now it is very rewarding when we share something very personal, something rich in emotional valence, and intuitively know that the one listening understands.  Aiken noted, “And this is peace; to know our knowledge known.”  This is the heart of the therapeutic enterprise—being a good listener.  (And I’m made to think of the opposite of “listening”, recognized in this line from some old tv show, “You aren’t listening.  You’re waiting.”)

Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci had profound insight into the enterprise of listening:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them.  (from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.)

Political version of “us vs. them”

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The same tendency to bifurcate reality discussed yesterday can be seen in our political process.  We are currently watching our government stew in its own juices basically because each party is locked into a battle of wills, each locked tightly into “Democrat” or “Republican” loyalties.  AND, I am a Democrat and I will continue to be.  The Democrats best articulate my perspective on the world, not just politically but also culturally.  But, Democrats are not “right”.   They merely offer one perspective in the world and I happen to subscribe to it.  That does not make the Republicans “wrong.”  We must have, to use different terms for a moment, liberals and conservatives.  Without these two philosophies working in tandem, we will get into a lot of trouble.

The core issue here is identity.  Our task is to put our “reality” on hold for a moment here and there, to pause briefly, and to recognize that that there are people who look at things differently.  We must not be trapped in our various categories—-spiritually, politically, or even sexually.  Our task is to recognize once again, that we see “only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken).  For, those that lie in “darkness” have a reality of their own and that reality deserves a modicum of respect.  What is “darkness” to us, is “light” to them.

And, I could easily trash Republicans here.  But I’m saving that for another day.  Yes, they have their issue with nut-jobs on the far right.  I’m sure Republicans would respond with, “Well, yes, but what about your own party’s nut jobs?”  Well, I’m sure there are extremists on my side of the political aisle but naturally I have a more difficult problem in identifying who they are.

Ultimately, I must remember, to borrow a refrain from an earlier post, and recognize that each day I awaken and announce to the world, “Wind me up and watch me be Democrat today.”  BUT, having this belief does give me pause and in that pause I can try to give other perspectives that “modicum of respect” mentioned earlier.   I do believe that Democrats are more likely to be willing to enter that “pause”.  It is not unrelated to what Deepak Chopra describes as “the gap”

 

spiritual technocrats

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A college history professor, teaching a class on American religion, once noted that in the frontier days the men who often got the “call to preach” were those who couldn’t do anything else.  They were the wastrels, the ne’er-do-wells, those who were floundering with their life when they suddenly realized, “Hey, I could start preaching and immediately I will have a job, and respect, and a place in the community.”  (I suspect that a neurological conflagration also played a part in many of those “calls”, especially those that appeared to be of the “got a wild hair up their backside” variety)

I think that so many of our clergy today are assembly-line, mass produced, machine-produced men and women.  They are spiritual technocrats, adept at trotting out a good sermon, propping up the congregation’s pretenses, flashing that Christian (or otherwise) ivory here and there, and going their merry way.  They are, as a friend of mine once wrote, “heroes of spiritual contraception who have long since despaired of rebirth.” (Charles “Chuck” Dewitt)

They have been enculturated into Christianity and thus are professional ministers, preachers, priests, rabbis, mullahs, or what have you.  But they have nothing to offer from beyond the pale for they’ve never been there themselves.   These “spiritual technocrats” reflect our culture which also has long-since “despaired of rebirth.”  Our culture’s only frame of reference is itself and that, as noted earlier last week, is mental illness.  These “technocrats” have never experienced the “Dark Night of the Soul” (St. John of the Cross) or “The Cloud of Unknowing” which would then empower them to offer a prophetic word.  They have never done their “time in the desert” like Jesus did.

Conrad Aiken once noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.”  The clergy that I’m upbraiding here have never been outside of that “small bright circle”.  To do so would entail an encounter with intense anxiety and despair.  It is easier for them to stay within the cozy confines of this “circle,” thus mirroring the culture at large which has done the same, which has “made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (W. H. Auden)   This phenomena has been addressed in history and sociology as the church in “cultural captivity.”

“Wind me up and watch me be…”

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Last week I posted re this Shakespearean note:  With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.  I then paraphrased this wisdom into, “Wind me up and watch me be pious.”  I’m going to elaborate a bit.

This “wind me up…” concept can be applied to the whole of our life.  We are all “wound up” with a core identity and the verbal/ideological template that goes with it.  For example, I am again today saying with my thought and behavior, “Wind me up and watch me be…for want of a better term…a liberal.”  Many will be similarly wound-up today.  Then there are the conservatives.  “Wind me up and watch me be conservative”.  There are many of them too.

For, we are all “wound up” with some core identity, some template that we impose on the world and this template is usually not given any attention because asking someone to pay attention to his/her “template” is like asking fish to see water.  And then we have the human tendency to affiliate ourselves with other groups who subscribe to some similar template, thus shoring up our otherwise tenuous identity.

This problem is so apparent in our government.  Our leaders seem to be very smug, very rigid, very sure that the other side is wrong.  There is limited, if any, capacity to realize that the perspective of the other side deserves respect.  And corresponding with this arrogance is the all-too-human tendency to demonize those that view the world differently than ourself.  So, today go watch the news and watch the dog-and-pony show continue—-people saying, “Wind me up and watch me be Democrat” or “wind me up and watch me be Republican” or “wind me up and watch me be a Tea Partier.”

This is a deadly trap and this is a spiritual problem psychologically/emotionally.  And ultimately this is a Spiritual problem.  This reflects a fundamental problem with our culture.  We are all “wound up” and cannot, or will not, consider the possibility that all we have to trot out each day of our life is a mere perspective, it is not the ultimate grasp of reality.  Those people that we heap into the category “them” deserve a modicum of respect at least.

I conclude with the relevant wisdom of two of my favorite poets.    Conrad Aiken noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.”  Our challenge, individually and collectively, is to venture “into the darkness” and offer respect to someone else today.  And W. H. Auden accused us of dwelling safely “on the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collective lie.”

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.”

the “glib and oily art”

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In his play, King Lear, Shakespeare noted the “glib and oily art, to speak and purpose not.”  Words are usually trotted out….yes, glibly…and that is fine.  Words are the currency of any particular culture.  If we had to sit down and ponder re the meaning of what we were about to say, then our culture would quickly disintegrate into a morass of self-contemplation, “navel gazing.”  But the problem is that often people never into their entire life get beyond “the glib speech of habit, well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”   (Conrad Aiken).  We are often verbal auto-matons, offering the appropriate “words and phrases” for the various circumstances in our life.  We then fail to ever offer an authentic word, a word spoken from the heart.  We fail to acknowledge the wisdom of Shakespeare in the concluding lines of King Lear, “The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”  It is sad to realize that many people…..most people…never speak an authentic “feeling” word.  Even more so it is so sad to realize that our culture is set up to prevent authenticity, it depends on people trotting out those “well worn words and ready phrases.”  We are fortunate to live in a culture where there is some freedom to individual expression, in spite of the weight of socio-economic pressure, in spite of social regimentation.