Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

The Peril of an Unexamined Life

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This bumper sticker, actually the title of a book by Thubten Chodron, probably summarized what life had to teach me in 2016.  This wisdom has been percolating in my heart for several years and primarily with the Presidential election in my country I finally “got it” fully, seeing how much lunacy I’ve subscribed to over my lifetime merely because I subscribed to every idle thought that fluttered through my mind without giving any of them much scrutiny.

I can’t fully explain how my life ever took the course of getting out of the echo-chamber variety of thought that I was born into and indoctrinated with, destined to continue for my allotted “three score and ten” years.  I do remember in my teen years posing a question or two in Sunday school that challenged some of the premises of my belief system but I readily overlooked my realization that my questions were not being answered and continued dutifully along my charted course into my twenties.

But critical thinking flirted with me, gradually finding a home, and I discovered the wisdom of the Greeks who told us to avoid “the unexamined life.”  For if we never mature to the point of using the metacognitive skills that our neocortex blesses us with, we will live our life in a very narrow world of unexamined preconceptions.  This is what prompted the fear of Henry David Thoreau that he would come to the end of his life and realize that what he had lived was not really life at all.   And this is very much what Jesus had in mind when he warned us about “gaining the whole world and losing our own soul.”  Jesus knew that we are only a soul, a spiritual being having an earthly moment, and to never engage in the “working out of our own salvation with fear and trembling,” as the Apostle Paul would  put it, would mean never knowing that Inner Essence that seeks so desperately to find expression.

Thinking itself is never the problem.  The problem is our ego’s attachment to our thinking which too often blocks us from the realization that other people might have equally valid ways of thinking about the world.  This is only too apparent in my country now as the division between drastically different ways of viewing the world has been exposed by the arrival of Donald Trump and the phenomenon of Trumpism.  And there can be no resolution unless these contrasting belief systems employ some transcendent reference point and get beyond themselves long enough to focus on a common good. I sometimes facetiously suggest to friends that what we need to have is the threat from an alien life form that threatens our very existence!  Perhaps that would encourage us to overlook some of our petty differences.

Systemic Trauma in our Culture

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When living in England briefly after the turn of the century, I had the honor of hearing a distinguished psychoanalyst,  Dr. Juliet Mitchell, speak in London on the subject of trauma.   One point she made etched itself deeply in my heart and mind— that a victim of trauma has suffered “the perforation of a membrane around their soul” which then allows a cascade of old brain fears and anxieties to cascade forth.  And with some trauma, such as sexual abuse, the real psychic pain is spiritual as down in the depths of the child’s heart, he/she is realizing that the person who purported to love him/her is stating with action, “I don’t give a shit about you.  I want what I want and I’m gonna get it regardless of how much damage it does to you.”  This trauma tells the child that he/she has no value to the perpetrator as a person.  And trauma never goes away.  The clinical task in my past life was to facilitate the grieving process and teaching adaptive responses to the anguish which would always lurk in the depths of the client’s heart.

But trauma can also be institutional and cultural.  This systemic traumatization is even more challenging as it teaches its victims on some level, “This is the norm.  Get used to it…and possibly learn to like it.”  Dr. Bruce Perry, the chief of psychiatry at the Texas Children’s Institute in Houston, has spent his career working with trauma victims and in the current edition of the literary journal, The Sun, he is interviewed and shares about the neurological wounds that take place, particularly when the victim is too young to even begin to process what is happening/has happened in “rational” terms.  He also explained how the systemic trauma inflicted upon the lower socio-economic classes is very real and creates a core identity of deprivation, giving them problems like addiction, learned helplessness, and aggressive behavior.

Trauma usually comes at the hands of those in power who are always tempted to be seduced with the prerogatives of their power and the tyranny of their assumptions.  For example, in some families I worked with in my clinical practice, the sexual abuse was multi-generational, in some sense a “family tradition” and men, when but young boys, learned that women were property, “things”, and that by virtue of their masculinity they were entitled to use “things” as desired, even if they were your own children.  And this does not mean these men have no redeeming human values but their sense of prerogative and entitlement is so pervasive that when sexual desire is on the table it over rides little niceties like “the teachings of Jesus” which they are “devoted” to most of the time.  The real issues in life, individually and collectively, are always unconscious.

Entitlement is a core issue in any tribe.  Those who have climbed to the top of the heap, i.e. the “patriarchy” in contemporary vernacular, see the world through the template of their own unexamined values and wishes and feel perfectly comfortable manipulating individuals, and even the whole tribe, to accomplish their end.  And, once again, I’m not going to say these power mongers are necessarily “bad” people but they are unconscious and have a built-in resistance to even considering the phenomena of an unconscious.  It would be too troubling.  And out of the unacknowledged dark recesses of our heart always flows “bad.”

Perry’s observations accentuated for me the importance of the economic divide that is egregiously apparent in my country today.  The wealthy “One per cent” are so trapped in their own narcissism that they cannot see the harm they are doing to the whole country, even to themselves, by not giving due attention to the middle and lower socio economic classes.  And now my country has a president elect who could be the poster boy for Narcissists Anonymous as his disregard for “otherness” and the attending “self-reflectiveness” is sorely lacking.  The trauma has already been inflicted on the dispossessed classes but now an administration is being set up which appears to be designed to further their alienation and hidden despair, leaving them with nothing to do but “cling to their guns and religion.”

So often Bible verses come to my mind at this pivotal time in history.  “Where there is no vision, the people perish” just flashed on my radar.  When I approached life literally, I never really understood the meaning of this though, of course, I thought I did!  The lack of “vision” that the Psalmist had in mind is the dilemma of the narcissist as he/she cannot see beyond the end of his/her nose.  They see things only in terms of their own immediate interests and have no understanding about the long term effects of what they are doing.  And I don’t think Trump has any interest or capacity to ever venture into the “dark” when he is so comfortable in the glorious light of his own narcissistic splendor.  Nor do his devotees.

( Link to Dr. Perry’s interview in The Sun—http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/491/the_long_shadow)

 

 

Danger of “Thinking Outside of the Box”

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As one who “thinks outside of the box,” I must admit that it is not necessarily a virtue.  I’ve had that aptitude since early youth and since my late teens I’ve been exploring its riches.  So, in a way, it is my “comfy zone” and at times I demonstrate my obnoxiousness and arrogance, those very qualities which I see residing in “box dwellers.”  As one dares to venture “outside of the box,” it is always very tempting to ensconce oneself in still another “box’ and there demonstrate the same arrogance that one is deriding with great contempt from his/her “comfy zone” outside of the box.

For, “the box” that I’m referring to is not merely a conceptual formulation but it is the gut-level orientation to take one’s view of the world as primary to the exclusion of others.  And those of us with “enlightened” and “noble” ideas are often the ones who pose the greatest challenges for civilization, witness The Crusades and Isis.  In each of these instances, they are whole-heartedly intoxicated with their world view and are willing to bring to those who disagree with them great displeasure, even death.  That is because those who are “intoxicated” with this delectable nectar of the gods (even though they are dark gods) cannot see beyond their limited perspective.  They have taken an “idea” and run it into the ground even to the point where they are willing to kill for it and to die for it themselves.  When you have reached this point, you are approaching the dark, demonic depths of being an “ideologue” regardless of how noble your idea might appear to be.

And ideologue always seeks to escape his own emptiness by glomming onto some “idea” which he naively thinks is “the answer.”  Been there, done that.  Now I realize that this obsession, even with an idea as noble as Jesus Christ, was just an escape from reality and an escape from my own spiritual depths just to hang on desperately to my illusion of reality and my illusion of myself.  As Jesus, and many other spiritually enlightened men and women have tried to teach us, there is a “spiritual” dimension to life which lies beyond the grasp of our finite, conscious mind.  But that “finite, conscious mind,” being an ego contrivance, resists this awareness and insists that we hang onto the world of appearance, the shadow world of Plato’s famous cave analogy.  And Jesus provided us a vivid example of just how gut-wrenchingly painful it is to give up this world of illusions and “climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.” (Leonard Cohen)

Winning the World to Jesus!

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In my youth, this was a favorite evangelistic cry in my fundamentalist religion and it often stirred my adolescent and, later,  young-adult passions with visions of “taking the world for Christ.”  Yes, I needed an identity back then for I had none otherwise and when I “surrendered to preach” I immediately knew that my life was laid out for me, that I had heard and answered “the call” and God would do great things through me.  And that passion and ambition is appropriate and common  in our youth and fortunately the exigencies of life slowly eroded the hubris and I am learning to approach spirituality with more maturity.

But looking back on the zeal to “win the world to Jesus” and seeing the same clarion call being announced from pulpits, and some version of it even from the political the platform, brings memories back about that phase of my life and the community I was raised in.  I see so very clearly now that my desire to “win the world to Jesus” was my desire to “win the world to Lewis Earl Chamness, Jr. (aka “literarylew”).  It was a deep-seated need to make “the world” like myself with my “world” being primarily those around me, those unfortunate souls who happened to cross my path.  I was lonely, alienated, depressed, anxiety-ridden and the anguish that tortured my soul could be mitigated by the comfort of having a safe little world of people who believed just like me.  And, yes, the long-term goal was to win the entire world to Jesus but mercifully my narcissism graciously allowed me to focus primarily on my little obscure tribe.

And now, having retired after careers teaching history and practicing as a mental health clinician, I’m finding the courage to apply my clinical “gaze” more to the human “predicament.”  The snapshot of my early spirituality presented above is seen with more maturity and even humility.  We are all children at one time and when we were children we behaved as children.  But if we ever find the courage to look back on our childhood, and discover that it still is very much present with us and very much an influence in our adult life, we can learn so much about ourselves and find the power and grace to make better choices.  This “gaze” allows me to see the fundamentalist zeal of my little Baptist sect (Landmark Missionary Baptists) in an historical context, realizing that the origins of this group were in the post-Civil War South as an expression of poor Southern white people who were feeling disenfranchised or dispossessed.  Any group feeling intense grief like that will always find some means of claiming “self” importance and with my little church it glommed onto the common notion in religion that they were “special” and that they, and other Christians, had to task of “winning the world to Jesus.”  (Though with Landmarkers, there were Christians and then there were real Christians who when in heaven would have the exalted status of being included in “the Bride of Christ.”}

But everyone’s belief system has an historical and personal context and that does not necessarily leave it without value.  For example, this critical look at Jesus presented above has nothing to do with the historical figure of Jesus; it merely demonstrates that Jesus, and any spiritual teacher, will always be utilized to some degree to fulfill tribal and personal wishes, including thate for aggrandizement.  But for people with a fervent spiritual impulse, recognizing and owning this need for aggrandizement, and other base impulses, is very difficult to entertain.  These baser impulses are what the Apostle Paul called “the flesh.”

I think that “winning the world to Jesus” could still be a valuable goal in our world but it would require a critical look at the terms and a willingness for those consumed with this passion to take a critical look at themselves.  In other words, it would require self-reflection which is very difficult, and often impossible, for those who are comfortably ensconced in the firm conviction that they are “right.”  Jesus was not, and is not, a toy or bauble for children to play with to avoid their existential malaise or anguish.  Jesus was, and is, about relationship and “relationship” involves connection with other people and with the world itself.  “Relationship” is not about subscribing to dogma and learning a lot of theology and philosophy.  It is about finding the courage to being open to other people and to see the inter-relatedness of all people even those that we find it easy to banish into that vast category “them.”  The spirituality of my youth, my passion for “Jesus”, was merely about maintaining a precarious immature identity which could only be done by drawing rigid boundaries between me and the world, having imbibed of the “us vs. them” mentality.  The Christian faith of my youth was only for the purpose of maintaining my isolation which theologian Paul Tillich described as “an empty world of self-relatedness.”  Oh how empty it was!

Sleep Walking in the Spiritual World

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An “awakening” is an interesting notion as it implies having been asleep before.  And it brings to mind the notion someone posited that we are a “nation of sleep walkers” in reference to not apparently having any idea what we are doing.  And the notion that one is not “awake” is disconcerting to say the least.  It can threaten one to the core and technically should do so as the “core” is where the “stuff” of life is found.  There we find the heart.

Spiritual traditions usually have awakening as a primary concern for spiritual teachers who help formulate these traditions always “see through” the falsities of life and want to bring them to the attention of others.  And this was certainly so with my spiritual tradition, Christianity.  But the spiritual truth that Jesus offered to the world was wisdom from the depths of the heart and this wisdom cannot be put into words.  Jesus, of course, used words but knew these words would only rattle around in many heads and never make it into the depths of the heart where meaning could be experienced.  This is what he meant by “having ears to hear, but hear not” and “eyes to see, but seeing not.”  For He knew that the real “stuff” of life takes place deep in the bowels of the heart and words can furrow there but only when great resistance is overcome.

This issue is very relevant to my spiritual history.  I was “Christianized” from early on.  I imbibed the “stuff” from even before I was conscious and one might say that since then everyday was summarized by, “Wind me up and watch me be Christian.”  And, yes, I grew up and got an education and dared to become a “damn liberal” and then it became, “Wind me up and watch me be a liberal Christian.”  Same song, different verse.  Only in the past decade or so have I realized just how I was embedded in my own thought, including in my own Christian teachings, and was largely just an indoctrinated automaton.

So, what is the solution?  Atheism?  Agnosticism?  Self-indulgence?  All of the above?  Well, I don’t know if I have a “solution” but I do know that I have been granted awareness of my self-serving faith, I have been made aware that ego-gratification was one of its primary intents.  And with this awareness, or “awakening,” I have suffered the disillusionment that I think is necessary at some point in life.  But this descent into the darkness has taught me that there is some inner resource I have other than the ego and its trappings.  I am finding a Center that is solid which words and spiritual traditions can only point to.  Yes, I still think of that “Center” as God, or even the “Christ child” that is within us all but I’m aware that these are only words.  I only know that in the depths of my heart I am a mystery, and that the whole of my life is a mystery, and that I’m living for a while longer in a beautiful world that is full of mystery, part of which are you!

So often I conclude with the observation, “But I have no need to convince anyone or to convert anyone.”  In my spiritual tradition, the spiritual passion has always led to an urgent need to evangelize and hope that others will “join the team.”  Not so in the least now, and that is one indicator that I’m growing up.  Changing others is no longer my job.  Changing my own life is the issue and gawd is there work to do there!  And I firmly believe that as I focus on “working on my own salvation with fear and trembling” any impact on others that needs to take place will occur.

“Eyes Wide Shut” opened!

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One of my favorite blogging friends is a beautiful young woman who has an equally beautiful little girl to whom she is obviously devoted.  (See http://hastywords.wordpress.com) She wrote this morning of the importance of “seeing” with feeling rather than merely with cold, brutal “cognition.”  And I’m still learning to “see” this way myself and, let me say, it is disconcerting to say the least.

 

Here are her thoughts:

 

You are missing the bigger picture if you are using only your eyes to see.

All of us, every single one of us, are more than what we appear to be. We are all beautiful and ugly in a million different ways in every second we breathe. When we are simply an image branded with likes and dislikes we make enemies of our friends. When we learn to see with our hearts we learn to make friends of our enemies. We are love and hate, we are perfectly imperfect, we are all strong and weak. We are all a story behind the picture that eyes alone can’t perceive.
I don’t like stereo typing but it happens, before you start slinging careless words remember stereotypes are meant for groups of people not to castrate individuals one at a time. None of us can be stereotyped…not one!

 

 

Belated Easter Thoughts

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Easter Sunday always brings back pleasant memories though always tinged with sadness for so often my dear momma had to work. And then, in retrospect, there was the “hell fire and damnation” emphasis of the sermon and the obsessive, self-indulgent emphasis of the passion of Christ….recently vividly illustrated in the Mel Gibson movie. Oh, I believe in the “death, burial, and resurrection of Christ” but I’m now mature enough to venture into the work of hermeneutics and interpret it for myself. I now see the obsessive emphasis of Jesus’ suffering on the cross….because of our complicit presence in the “eating of the apple”…does not have to be taken literally and in fact, should not be. I would never minimize the suffering of Jesus as he was certainly, like “moi”, a human being (at least) and torture hurt. I do not like pain and would not have the courage to endure what he did when, according to American hymnology, “He could have called ten thousand angels, to destroy the world, and set him free.” Jesus knew that life involved pain and offered to us “the way of Cross” in which, per W. H. Auden, we must climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

But, while Jesus was being tortured and humiliated on the cross, he uttered the incredible words, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” My “guru”, Richard Rohr, in recent months explained that Jesus was saying, “Hey, they are not conscious. They do not know what they are doing. Forgive them.” Now I have been mistreated, misunderstood, and have “suffered” to some degree in my life. But my “sufferings” were always of the neurotic variety but I have yet to find the courage to offer the words to oblivion, “Father forgive them. For they know not what they did.” Why not? I certainly realize and understand that “they” were conscious and didn’t know what they were doing and their “mistreatment” of “moi” was so minimal, weighing so heavily on me only because I was a “highly sensitive person”, meaning
I was “thin-skinned” and vulnerable. So, why don’t I let the memories of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” just fade into oblivion? Well, I think that Shakespeare had the answer to his own question, suggesting that we would “prefer to cling to our present ills than fly to others that we know not of.” In other words, our present misery…or “discomfort”…is preferable than letting it go and deigning to encounter the mystery of life part of which will be “pain” of some sorts.

Twenty years ago a psychiatrist, Scott Peck, offered incredible wisdom in his book, “The Road Less Traveled.” In the opening chapter of that book he noted, “Neureosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Neurosis is a maladaptive response to the difficulties of life, some of which are very intense.. Likewise, psychosis…or worse…is an even less adaptive to these same circumstances or perhaps even trauma. Now psychotics are not really capable of forgiving their malefactors. But neurotics are very capable. So, why not? Why do they cling to their pain? Why do “I” cling to my pain? Well, I have to follow my own reasoning and admit that I just don’t have the courage to abandon the neurotic structure that has comforted me all these years and in the primordial Absence that follows, dare to make a choice that can be
“Redemptive”,  not just for “moi” but for those that are nearest and dearest to me. In other words, do I dare to be “real” or, better yet, “Real.”  As T.S. Eliot asked “Do I dare disturb the universe?” It comes down to “getting over ourselves” which for some of us is industrial strength neurosis. Do we dare to escape the safe cacoon of our anguish and engage the rest of the world?

Nah, nah! Personally, I prefer my lofty thoughts and the smug satisfaction that I am in control. But then I, again today, avoid the redemptive power of the Resurrection which is always available in any spiritual tradition though expressed in different imagery.

More Blasphemy!

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As I increasingly find comfort using my literary license to approach Holy Writ, I find that I’m leaving behind almost daily the carcass of sacred cows. And it dawned on me recently, as “literal lew” whispered to me again, that my view of faith appears to invalidate that of the people I grew up with. In the childish mind of “literal lew,” those people are “going to hell” while “I am saved because I believe the ‘right’ way.” For in that mind set, there is only one way to believe, one way to think, one way to feel and if you don’t comply you will immediately find yourself banished to the prison of “them,” not allowed to bask in the comfort of being one of “us.” In other words, you won’t have the comfort of belonging to the tribe.

But I don’t think that Jesus had in mind rigidly carving the world up into categories like “good”, “bad”, “us”, “them”, “saved” and “unsaved.” Jesus came to tell us that we were free and always had been as He was “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.” He was the embodiment, the “en-fleshment”, or incarnation, of a freedom that had been written into the depths of the human heart from the very beginning, a freedom that at that moment was finding an expression in terms of time and space. So, Jesus said, “You are free but freedom is very risky and takes a lot of courage. In fact, you will have to die. You will have die to your pre-conceptions about everything including your faith. But you don’t have to and I won’t make you. You are free to do as you choose. In fact, you are free to take my teachings and turn them into another version of the same bondage you are under now if you wish…possibly even under my name…but that is your choice.”

The conservative believers that gave rise to “literarylew” were and are just as saved as he is. The story of Jesus is that we are all forgiven, we are all free, but that freedom finds expression in our life only if we are willing to die, only if we are willing to allow His Spirit to loosen the grip of our ego a bit even in the area of our faith. But when the ego is threatened, it is very skilled at calling in reinforcements and fending off the assault as disillusionment is too painful. As W. H. Auden noted, “When Truth met him, and held out her hand, he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

NOTE — See I have blasphemed again! “Universalism” is verboten in the faith I was presented with as a child.