Tag Archives: Mental Health

Obama’s “Clinging” to Guns and Religion

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President Obama was caught on tape in the 2008 campaign speaking dismissively of those who “cling to guns and religion.” Now that was an impolitic moment for him but I agree that often people do “cling” to things, including guns and religion. I do not think he would disparage anyone for liking guns and certainly not religion. But he recognized that when people “cling” to things…or shall we stay “stuff”…it often impairs their ability to make rational decisions.

“Clinging” often belies an impoverished identity which makes an individual to compulsively place value on “stuff” (including ideas and beliefs) as a way to assuage a gnawing emptiness on the inside.

But how can “clinging” to faith be a problem; or, certainly “clinging” even to Jesus? I think a meaningful faith is very intense and passionate but if it goes beyond the pale, it poses problems and there are always warning signs. For example:

a) If your faith creates an urge to kill people who believe differently than you, I think there is a problem.

b) If your faith creates a need in your heart to intimidate, browbeat, and shame others (certainly children) into believing the way you do, there is a problem.

c) If your faith creates in your heart the belief that you have “got it right” and that everyone should believe just as you do, you have a problem.

d) If your faith creates in you an emphasis on correcting the ills of the world, while totally neglecting the ills of your own heart (which are always wreaking havoc on those nearest and dearest to you), then you have a problem.

Now these are four rules that I’ve created off the top of my head. There could be many more. Violation of these rules almost always comes from a passionate intensity which outruns the Shakespearean “pauser reason”. This is “clinging” to religion rather than having a simple faith which permeates the whole of your being and radiates out to others in your life. This is often an obsessive-compulsive disorder in full sway or even an addiction. This is at best an ersatz religion.

 

Emily Dickinson and Loss of Perspective

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Emily Dickinson was mad as a hatter and that is why she could leave us such a treasure trove of poetry. Now if she had been completely mad her poetry would have been incomprehensible and thus would not have merited the term “poetry.” But, in her case, she brings a different perspective on reality as do all good poets. She looked at things differently from her cloistered little room upstairs in her prominent father’s house.

Here she writes a poem about a boat that got pulled too far from the shore and its “perspective monitor” ( i.e. “observing ego”) was oblivious to the fact that “my little craft was lost.” I think Emily’s “little craft” got very near the edge often but it never completely got lost and thus she left us the aforementioned treasure trove of poetry.

‘Twas such a little—little boat
That toddled down the bay!
‘Twas such a gallant—gallant sea
That beckoned it away!

‘Twas such a greedy, greedy wave
That licked it from the Coast—
Nor ever guessed the stately sails
My little craft was lost!

Perspective is everything. That is all we have. If we lose sight of this fact, we have succumbed to the ministrations of those “greedy, greedy” waves. If we remember the fact that we only have a perspective, then we can echo the words of the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.”  And someone else once noted, “We can’t have a perspective on our perspective without somehow escaping it.”

 

The Meaning of the Cross

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New Testament imagery is rich, particularly if one is willing to explore the imagery and interpret them in personal rather than doctrinaire terms. Let’s look briefly at the image of the Cross and its evocative power.

The Cross means different things to different people. For some it is merely an historical event which they interpret in terms of time and space; and that is fine for them. I prefer to take that dimension of the image and broaden it to include various layers of meaning, layers which are actually infinite as is the case with any meaningful symbol or myth.

For example, this morning over coffee my wife was perusing my blog and came across a recent reference to the Cross. She noted that in art it represents two divergent lines intersecting. This brought to my mind a line from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets where he presented the Christian image of the Cross as a “union of opposite spheres of existence.”

Here is the context of Eliot’s observation which I think reveals a profound grasp of the meaning of the Cross:

But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint –
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement –
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;

The Crucifixion, including not merely this cross but Jesus upon it, is a powerful metaphor of transformation, of death, burial, and resurrection. It is an image of a psychic transformation in which we are integrated on a new level, where (to borrow from my beloved W. H. Auden) “where flesh and mind are delivered from mistrust.” When this happens, the incarnation has occurred. But, as Eliot noted, for most of us we don’t fully get it and are reduced to the effort, to “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” But that is the miracle of Grace—it comes to us when we give up the struggle and find that is is present even in our feeble, immature, ego-ridden spiritual fumblings.  It comes to us, often piece-meal, only when we cease to struggle and start to relax, not just in the “arms of Jesus” but at the same time in our own body.  (I’ll let you know when I’ve worked that out! wink, wink)

To use a different, though relevant image, from Auden, “The Center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. There is no need to despair for I am already there.”

Now at one time in my life, just the juxtaposition of “symbol and myth” and the New Testament was anathema. There was no room allowed for interpretation, for hermeneutics. The consequence of this rigidity is slavish devotion to the letter of the law and we all know what Paul said “the letter of the law” does.

 

Paul Tillich and “The Courage to Be”

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Change is hard. Change is so hard that most people solve the problem by opting
to not change, clinging to the routine of their life even if it is most painful.
People prefer to follow the admonishment of Hamlet and “cling to these ills that
we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

This is true individually and collectively. Social scientists teach us that
during times of social transition anxiety is very intense sometimes the
society’s adaptations are not ideal. Paul Tillich, a noted theologian from the
20th century, declared in The Courage to Be (1952) that the anxiety arises from
the threat of “non-being” and that this threat is found with conservative and
liberal extremes.

It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrated. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from his personal anxieties but he has means of overcoming them with well-known methods. In periods of great changes these methods no longer work. Conflicts between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions. Nonbeing, in such a situation, has a double face, resembling two types of nightmare (which are perhaps, expressions of an awareness of these two faces). The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating openness, of infinite formless space into which one falls without a place to fall upon. Social situations like those described have the character of both a trap without exit and of an empty, dark, and unknown void. Both faces of the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at them. Today most of us do look at them.

Non-being is merely the emptiness that we find when we lose the “fig leaf” (or “ego identity”) that we donned in our Garden of Eden.  And those “fig-leaves”, be they conservative or liberal…or at any point between the two extremes…are very difficult to let go.

 

Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear

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Fear abounds today. I see it in the news, I sense it in my day to day social life, and I feel it in my heart. I’m made to recall my early youth when fear really abounded, intensely, when I did not have the grounding that I now have in my life. At times that childhood fear beckons but I’m able to resist.

There are so many who have not been as blessed as I have been and who do not have this “grounding”. With them I see their fear abounding even to the point that paranoia rears its ugly head. And then I see how politicians, with the help of the media, exploits this fear to accomplish their goal—election. It is very sad. I’m made to think of the words of the New Testament (1 John), “Perfect love casteth out fear.” I think of that verse often when this fear besets me.

A favorite blog of mine (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/) shared an old story I’ve heard from my youth which is so relevant:

I’m reminded of the old Cherokee tale. A Cherokee elder is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil — he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good — he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you — and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Robert Frost and Mindfulness

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I love the many friends I’ve met in the blog-o-sphere. You “kindred spirits” are cut from the same bolt of cloth as myself. It is exciting to meet men and women from various corners of the world, with different belief systems, who demonstrate what the Buddhists call “mindfulness.” Here is a lovely poem by Robert Frost about the beauty of discovering  presence of mind:

A Considerable Speck
By Robert Frost

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink,
When something strange about it made me think.
This was no dust spike by my breathing blown,
But unmistakenly a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt—
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic, regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

Letting Go of Pain

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As one teacher said, “The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.” Love is the bridge. It is the whisper of underlying suchness. To enter this reality, we let go of the thoughts and feelings that filter mercy and forgiveness, the resistance, the fearful doubts that seduce awareness into identification with the unhealed. We let the mind float in the heart.

To cross from the banks of “my pain” to the shores of “the pain” we must cross the river of forgetfulness, constantly remembering our true nature and the healing that ever awaits our clear entrance into the moment. The fare is love and a constant remembering, letting go of our suffering, lightening our load. Like a ship that has to jettison its heavy cargo in order to weather rough waters, we begin to cut the fetters of our attachments with mercy and awareness, to let go of all that hinders our progress.

This wonderful, profound excerpt from Stephen Levine’s “Healing into Life and Death” is more than I can wrap my mind around. I just do not fully understand it. But a central notion, here and in the whole of the book, is letting go of our pain. Now, who would deliberately cling to their pain? Well, look around you and you will see many people doing this very thing; and then, if you are honest you will find you too are clinging to a lot of “stuff” that needs to go. I will admit, “C’est moi.” When I was a counseling intern at a psychiatric hospital, a psychiatrist noted re one of my clients, “She clings to her mental illness like most of us cling to mental health.” He was right, as this woman’s identity had morphed into one of pain or “mental illness” and to suddenly forego that identity would have been to entertain something which, in her estimation, was worse than mental illness.

Now most of us do not have “mental illness” to deal with. If we are lucky, we will have to battle some garden-variety, plain-vanilla neurosis. But, the issue is, how do we let it go? How do we let a maladaptive pattern of behavior and its underlying emotional state be cast aside? Well, I don’t have the definitive answer as those who know me well can readily attest. But I’m working on it! It do think it involves honesty, gut-wrenching honesty, as we “unpack our heart with words” (Shakespeare).

And always remember the observation of W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are.”

Highly Sensitive Persons

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I like the diagnosis “Highly Sensitive Person” and part of the reason is that I am a contrarion and do not feel obligated to subject everyone I meet…and myself…into neat, DSM-4 approved categories.  I think there are many “HSP’s” out there who labor under high-falutin, shame-based, medication-demanding diagnoses when they could be assisted greatly be merely seeing themselves as a “highly sensitive person.”  All that means is that they really feel things intensely, they don’t filter things as well as others, and yes, one could say, they are “thin-skinned.”

Someone who can suddenly understand that this label describes them can then take a break when they are feeling beset by day-to-day woes.  No, the woes will not immediately go away but a pause will be introduced and out of that pause can come…with practice…tremendous relief.

HSP’s feel too much.  Most people endure the daily dose of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare) and brush them off, go their way, and retire at the end of the day to a steady diet of re-runs of Law and Order and several PBRs.  And it is nice that they have those compensations.  Well, kind of nice.  Others are not so lucky.

If you think you might be an HSP, I strongly suggest you google the topic.  And then buy the book, The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron and let her give you some direction.

Shakespeare and Self Restraint

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“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking  makes it so.”  This is one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare.  He recognizes the role that reason had in ascribing value to our behavior and formulating social parameters so that we did not ever retreat to our violent, primitive past.  (Oh, let me be honest!  He saw that we could with reason sublimate our nastiness and pretend that we are civilized!)

Where would we be without this filter, though  I’ll take sublimated violence any day of the week over murder and mayhem.  I heard someone quip recently that the U.N. ought to solve recurrent outbreaks of tribal violence by giving th0se tribes N.F.L. franchises.

In another one of Shakespeare’s plays he attributes the beastly behavior of one of his characters to having his passions “outrun the pauser reason.”

And I’ll admit that my “pauser” has not always been operative and it has sure led to some poor decisions.

Waging the War I Am!

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At times we soar. At times we crawl through the mud. But, the sum of it all is that….we be. I wish it was only soaring. But it just ain’t. It seems so much of it is mudding. But, in reality, there has been a whole lot of soaring. It is all a matter of perspective. How do we see things and, if we are honest, how do we choose to see things—is the glass half full or is it half empty?

But, when the curtain call comes, we can only declare that we succeeded the mandate “to be.” And as we pursued that mandate, we hopefully echoed the sentiments of W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are.” Sometimes I think I should rename my blog, “Waging the war I am”!