Tag Archives: faith

Wisdom From Novelist Joan Didion

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Wisdom comes from a “literary” grasp of our life and world. It means having a relationship with the metaphor. The word metaphor means “to reach across” or venture from a concrete-thinking world into our adjoining world of meaning. Taking this step across means to loosen one’s moorings, to follow the wisdom of poet Stefan George, “To journey to a far world, it is necessary to lose sight of the shore.” Joan Didion who just died this week offered really profound wisdom in the quip I will now share with you:

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all….I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Stanley Kunitz, a former poet laureate of the United States put it this way, “We have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was, though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.” Following is a link to this poem, “The Layers”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54897/the-layers

GOP’s “Hunkering-Down” is Tightening Up!

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This phenomenon always brings to my mind the David Koresh cult of 1993 which “hunkered down” near Waco, Texas and self-immolated. Cultic experience always ends in tragedy if no “out let” is found, such as in ancient times a sacrifice. (See Rene Girard, “Sacred and Violence.”)

The cult leader of the GOP and his minions cannot accept reality, that being a “shared” experience, not one that is “ex”-clusive. Registered voters are fleeing from the Republican Party in droves, mega-donors are “pulling the plug” from him, some Republican Party members are critical to him, if not completely excoriating of him. And now he can’t find a lawyer with only two days before he needs them to present his case. The lawyers that argued his case a year ago would have nothing to do with him this time, then a team of lesser-light attorneys that took on his case this time suddenly backed off on Friday. And if that is not enough, he and the GOP has to deal with the stench of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But the mindset of Trump and his stalwarts is always galvanized with disapproval which permits them to voice their feelings of beleaguerment. It is not possible to reason with people whose mind is made up so rigidly. Giving up, giving in to beseeching of others, would evoke an anguish in their heart that is staved off only by the rigid belief system which often finds a figurehead, the “cult-leader.”

So how shall we respond? Well, with”faith” which is a subject I will soon explore given a blog responder this morning. But the “faith” I have in mind is not regurgitation of rhetoric but venturing into one’s own heart and finding the anguish that is lingering there. That will allow us to meet them on a more level playing field without the condescension that is always our first response. These “cultic” individuals have been forced into these rigid beliefs because they could not find solace anywhere else in our culture. This will force us to address the bankruptcy of our modern world and have a “come to Jesus” moment in our culture.









					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Knowledge is Capricious
			

										

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Daniel Boorstin, a noted American historian declared in his book, “The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself,” that, “More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.” Boorstin in this quote had gleaned from his study of history that the comfort of “the feeling of knowing” often, if not most of the time, would triumph over knowledge itself.  Throughout history we have records of cultures in which “the feeling of knowing” proved to lead to their demise while letting that “feeling” give way to some critical thinking could have allowed them to continue, though with a moderated view of reality.


It is comforting to feel that one knows, permitting one to “know” that one knows.  It is so comforting that human nature has hard-wired us to prefer “knowing that we know” in the interest of preserving our tribe.  But when the world grows so small…as we are now experiencing…then “knowing what we know” begins to compete with other tribes who “know that they know” with equal conviction. Then violent conflict ensues unless leadership is available which will direct us to tolerate the notion that diametrically opposing ideas of reality can co-exist. There is no need to attempt to obliterate “them” just because we see “them” as, “not knowing correctly.”


The core issue is the comfort of “feeling that we know” not understanding the wisdom of poet W. H. Auden who told us that, “feeling knows no discretion but its own.”  Auden knew that our view of the world is not a rational matter, but one whose origin lies beneath the surface in the murky realm of feelings, closely akin to the unconscious.  But to recognize this truth is to take away the certainty that we can have in believing our beliefs and discounting anything or anyone that threatens them.  Another word for this realm of feelings is the heart, that center of our being which is unlocked only when we are willing to forego the tyranny of rational thinking and permit the grace of a non-tyrannical rationality which is quickened with the intuitive wisdom of the heart.


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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.


https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/


https://literarylew.wordpress.com/


https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Rebecca Chopps On Our Country’s Malady of the Soul
			

										

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Barack Obama has answered the bell and has come out swinging, addressing the Republican morass of recent decades that has created our country’s present debacle, and yes, taking not-so-veiled jabs at the figure-head and spokesman for this roiling cauldron of chthonic energy.  I stumbled across a book just last week by Rebecca S. Chopps entitled, “The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, and God,” which is relevant to this cauldron as she explores how language, including religious language, can be used to give expression to hidden dimensions of the heart, individually and socio-culturally. But for this “revelation” to occur, there must be a voice/voices from beyond the pale of the status quo who see into the heart of the poisonous mindset which is always oriented primarily to maintain the prevailing power structure.  Chopps writes as a feminist but also as a Christian…apparently…though if she calls herself a Christian she is certainly beyond the pale of the Christian power structure that would “legitimate” her wearing that label.


Here I will share a couple of paragraphs from Chopps’ book:


Proclamation, in feminist discourses of emancipatory transformation, resists and transforms the social symbolic order.  Proclamation is a form of resistance to the practices and principles of modernity that control, dominate, and oppress.  But proclamation resists by way of transformation, seeking to provide new discourses by a variety of strategies, methods, and ways, and to transform the ruling principles and order into ones that allow, encourage, and enable transformative relations of multiplicity, difference, solidarity, anticipation, embodiment, and transformation.  Transformation occurs by creating new images of human flourishing, new values of otherness, and multiplicity, new theoretical practices of solidarity and anticipation.


This is reminiscent of one of the most powerful of Paul Tillich’s sermons, “The Shaking of the Foundations” in which he argued that the purpose of the church is to, “rattle the cage” (my term) of the status quo.  But the status quo does not want to be “rattled” and will arm itself to the teeth in an effort to deny any affront to its comfy zone of satisfaction, where “they bask, agreed upon what they will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light” of the unquestioned assumptions which give them privilege and power.  This is also obviously so with the power structure of religious culture though often those most ensconced in that power structure are basking even more in the comfort of a falsetto humility which does not permit any consideration or discussion of their motivations.


I conclude with another paragraph from Chopps:


Through discourses of emancipatory transformation, proclamation enables those marginalized voices who so often have not been heard, to speak: to speak of the beauty, hope, pain, and sorrow they have known on the margins.  Proclamation also speaks within the ambiguities of the order, the ambiguities, for instance, of the bourgeois who, though promised freedom in his autonomy, discovers few genuine possibilities for the community, relationships, and love he so desires.  Unable to find any “authentic meaning” the bourgeois attempts to fill in the empty spaces of his or her soul through the attainment of material goods that great momentary satisfaction with increasingly diminished returns.


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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.


https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/


https://literarylew.wordpress.com/


https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				David Whyte and T.S. Eliot on the Subject of Faith
			

										

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The following poem by David Whyte portrays faith in a more meaningful fashion than what I’ve been familiar with most of my life.  In this poem, faith is presented with a “loss” dimension, poetically conveying the need of “losing one’s faith to find one’s faith” (my paraphrasing). This is related to the observation by evangelical-Christian literary, “hall-of-famer,” Oswald Chambers who noted the danger of “believing only in our belief.”  Whyte and Chambers, and many other spiritually-oriented persons, see the danger of an ideological faith, understanding that the ideological dimension of faith must lose its tyranny in order for the underlying dimension of human experience that faith points to can be experienced.  This is precisely the wisdom conveyed in the famous Buddhist teaching, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  Whyte captures this truth with the image of the moon fading away and offering, “the last curving and impossible sliver of light before the final darkness.”


Poem by David Whyte: “Faith”


I want to write about faith,

about the way the moon rises

over cold snow, night after night,


faithful even as it fades from fullness,

slowly becoming that last curving and impossible

sliver of light before the final darkness.


But I have no faith myself

I refuse it even the smallest entry.


Let this then, my small poem,

like a new moon, slender and barely open,

be the first prayer that opens me to faith.


T.S. Eliot also understood this subtle dimension of faith, noting in The Four Quartets:


And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning 

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled 

If at all. Either you had no purpose 

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured 

And is altered in fulfilment. 

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Self-awareness and Bullying
			

										

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In my last post, I shared thoughts about bullying and self-consciousness or “self” awareness.  A couple years ago when I was on Facebook an upper classman when I was in Jr. High at my small Arkansas high school shared his shame and regret about bullying a helpless, self-conscious, insecure lad in his class. This gentleman had been a star athlete himself, later to have a tryout with the Arkansas Razorbacks; he was handsome, intelligent, and headed to success in his life.  On Facebook he shared about his effort to reach out to this man he had bullied to apologize but had received no response.  This gentleman had found awareness and now sincerely rued his cruel behavior to this “nerdy” and perhaps handicapped classmate.


Self “awareness” is something we mature into, slowly becoming aware of the “presence” of other people in our world and becoming sensitive to their reality.  There are times, however, when this maturity never comes and, furthermore, there are times when people are ensconced in a social milieu where this “self” awareness is discouraged.  The best example I find of this occurred in the New Testament with the crucifixion of Jesus, as explained by Fr. Richard Rohr who interpreted the famous words of Jesus on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” as, “Father, forgive them for they are not aware (or conscious) of what they do.”


These men did not awaken that morning, convene down at Starbucks, and suddenly decide, “Hey, let’s be mean and nasty, violent and brutal, and put that guy to death who does not see this world as we do.”  They had many meetings at that coffee shop in planning their deed and came to the firm conclusion that they were going to do the right thing, the “lord’s will,” if you please. They were firm in their convictions and many of them I’m sure were morally upright men, probably in a respectable position down at the local church….or, “synagogue” in that day.  They were probably members of the school board, members of the Lions Club, active in what used to be called, “benevolent societies,” and faithfully they bought Girl Scout cookies each spring.  And I’m sure that there were young, unmarried men in the mix also, those who avowed that they didn’t, “smoke, drink, chew…or go with the girls they do.”  But it is possible for good men to do bad things when they are driven merely by ideology, steeped with preconceived ideas about their world and the deep-seated conviction that they objectively understand the world.  When men and women are addicted to their ideas, regardless of how “noble” those ideas may be, they lack “awareness” and are capable of great evil in what they deem as service to the good.  T.S. Eliot summarized this problem, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm, which once we took for exercise of virtue.”

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Politics, Belief, and “a bit of wobbly”
			

										

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Margaret Thatcher in 1990 brought the expression, “Don’t go wobbly” to the political table. At the time Saddam Hussein had invaded Iraq, Thatcher and George W. Bush were together in Aspen, Colorado discussing the ins and outs of a military response. As “W” appeared be equivocating, Thatcher told him, “This is not the time to go wobbly, George.” The opposite of, “wobbly,— going full speed ahead on a matter, throwing caution to the wind with utmost certainty–will always be appealing to many but the rigid certitude of such a stance often needs at least a tad of hesitation, a small dollop of what Shakespeare called, “the pauser reason.”


The relevance of this issue to our current political/cultural climate is obvious. And one dimension of this climate is the area of religion where “belief” is often held to so rigidly that many believers have found themselves “believing” themselves into a corner from which they can’t escape. This mind set avoids the wisdom of faith traditions that belief must be moderated with a bit of doubt here and there as when St Thomas prayed, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief,” or even Jesus when he prayed to his Father as the Crucifixion approached prayed, “Lord, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” Following here is a lovely poem which speaks of the need of a touch of “wobbly” in a person’s faith:


Belief by Lia Purpura


Light being

wavy and particulate

at once

is instructive—

why wouldn’t

other things or states

present as

both/and?

For instance

I both

believe and can’t.

Holding these

together produces

a wobble, I think

it’s time

to take seriously

as a stance.

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Faith and Truth, per Carl Sandburg
			

										

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WHO AM I?

By: Carl Sandburg


 MY head knocks against the stars.

 My feet are on the hilltops.

 My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of 

 universal life.

 Down in the sounding foam of primal things I

 reach my hands and play with pebbles of 

 destiny.

 I have been to hell and back many times.

 I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.

 I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.

 I know the passionate seizure of beauty


And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs

 reading “Keep Off.”

 My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive 

 in the universe.


All of us have a body of thought rattling around our skull which constitute “truth” and is taken for granted.  This is a necessary, though in a sense specious, certainty that allows us to function in our consensually-validated reality.  But within the noisy “rattling around” in our skull, there are certainties and premises that need to be examined occasionally and Sandburg was telling us this is especially so with those posted with the sign, “Keep Off.”  Sandburg did not mean there are no “Keep Off” dimensions to our heart and mind but that we need to pay attention to this signage and occasionally entertain the notion, “Well, maybe I should look at that idea a little further?”  This is related to my often-cited favorite bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  One simple little example from my youth in central Arkansas was the certainty that blacks were inferior to whites.  There was no need to question it for it was a definite, and, “The Bible said it.”


I have watched so many truths fall by the wayside in my life time and have long since given up any faint belief that I own the truth, that at best there is some primordial Truth that lies beyond the grasp of our finite mind and that yes, in a sense that “Truth” even has us!  And if I ever start trying to explain that to you, flash the sign of the cross in my face and run away quickly as this is a matter that eludes the grasp of human cognition.  This “Truth” involves faith, but not of the escapist faith that is so common, but faith that there is a, “Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may,” as Shakespeare told us.  And I personally think that those who are the most obnoxious about objectively knowing about that end…and usually the end for others…are doing the roughest hewing!

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				Imprisoned With Ideas!!!
			

										

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Jungian cage cartoon
“Woo-hoo, we’re Jungians!!!”


This cartoon beautifully illustrates the fate of ideologies which captivate lost souls who thus become “ideologues.”  Posted in a Carl Jung facebook discussion group, it demonstrates the necessary role of irony in dealing with ideas and avoiding their imprisonment, including the caption, “Woo-hoo, we’re Jungians.”  This cartoon reflected knowledge of a lesser known but profound quote from Carl Jung himself, “Thank God I’m not a Jungian!”  Jung knew that his teachings were captivating to some who did not exercise what the New Testament calls as, “discerning Spirit” and used his teachings to create a shallow ideological identity in which they could hide and avoid the gut-level wisdom that his teachings offered.


I facetiously toy with writing my copy of the Gospels someday, clearly identified as, “fictional,” and in them I would toss in at some point Jesus saying as he fled the hordes of “mindless” escape-oriented seekers, “Thank God I’m not a Christian.”  For Jesus’ teachings clearly recognized the entrapment of taking spiritual tradition and teachings only on the superficial level and he used the world, “hypocrites” to describe them, people who were simply actors offering to their community merely the “performance art” of spirituality.


This phenomenon which is so egregiously conspicuous now in my country takes the teachings of Jesus only as “ideas” without ever bothering to explore them in depth to the point of discovering that, “the idea is not the thing” and that ideas have value only when they open-up into a region beyond themselves.  The ability to understand this includes getting to the point where one realizes that buried in his heart is a hidden region that can be found only by opening oneself to it, an opening-up which is not a simple rational undertaking resulting from a moment of revivalistic fervor.  This “opening up” is the discovery of the mystery of life, buried far beneath the conscious edifice of one’s persona, related to what T.S. Eliot described as, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  Jesus put it this way, “You can find your life only by losing it.”  This is really difficult if you are a “cradle Christian,” one who has been enculturated into the Christian faith as it will often feel as if one is losing his faith.  In a sense, one will be losing his “faith” but possibly only its ideological dimension, allowing the freedom to venture into the, “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”


 


 

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				New Years Thoughts About the Perils of Thinking.
			

										

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“Dear Creator, Help me let go of everything I think I am, to make room for everything I really am.” This is a Facebook post this morning from a local poet (Taos, NM), Lyla June Johnson, who is a very gifted soul and is a passionate spokeswoman for Native American issues, spirituality, and social activism.  This woman “gets it” and does so much more quickly than I started the process of “getting it.”  Here she puts on the table a core issue that I’m wrestling with in my life, “we are not what we think.”  This is part of what leads me to use the bumper sticker wisdom so often, “Don’t believe everything you think,” realizing that beliefs are merely thoughts and are readily seductive with self-serving whims of the ego.  Sure, welcome the thoughts that flow into and through our mind but occasionally take pause, mull them over, and we might learn that these “beliefs” could be a bit less certain than our ego wanted them to be.


Without realizing the limitations of believing in our rational formulations, Truth which is an elusive process and not an accumulation of factual knowledge can lead us into folly.  Novelist Hermann Hesse noted this when he wrote, “My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” We will inevitably be guilty of this “dishonesty” if we can’t practice the self-reflection, i.e “meta-cognition” noted here for the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, “Reflection requires that the plain opposition of positive and negative be left behind. Thinking is not content with the abstraction of mutual exclusivities, but struggles to conceive of a structured wholeness nuanced enough to contain what appeared to be contradictories.”  We must learn to occasionally find the capacity to, “think about our thinking.”