Tag Archives: Religion and Spirituality

Showers of Blessings we Plead!!!

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I woke this morning to the unanticipated sound of thunder and the flash of lightening. We were going to get a respite from this oppressive drought (which God has sent merely because of my sin!!! wink, wink; I just can’t get over this narcissism!!!). I performed a ritual that I’ve utilized the last two years or so and gone to the garage, opened the door, grabbed me a chair and cup of coffee and reveled in the gracious beauty of a magnificent, generous rainfall. An old hymn always comes to my mind on these moments, “Showers of Blessings” even though the hymn was not talking about rainfall!

And, being random as I am, that brought to my mind the following verse from my beloved brother, William Shakespeare. This is so magnificent and it gets more so every time I read it:

 

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. . . .
. . .
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
(The Merchant of Venice)

 

Oh, yes. Showers of blessings. They are around us each day if we but look.

Emily Dickinson was “visited” abruptly

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In my last posting, I shared an Emily Dickinson poem and put my twist on it, interpreting it to mean a “visitation” from the Spirit of God, a visitation that presented her with “difference.”

Most of us get this “visitation” over the span of a lifetime, sometimes starting with a conversion experience or a mystical experience. There are those, however, are visted more abruptly from time to time and find it very frightening. And I think the frightening nature of these “abrupt” visitations is why God approaches us gently most of the time as we can’t handle such approaches from the Divine.  (In the classic Jack Nicholson line, “You can’t handle the truth!”)

Here is another Emily Dickinson poem which, I think, expresses her having been visited abruptly on some occasion. It is vivid and harrowing.

The Master      

He fumbles at your spirit
        As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
       He stuns you by degrees,

Prepares your brittle substance
        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 their Paws–
The Universe is still.

Addiction as an Ersatz Religion

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“Break on through to the other side. Break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side.” These lyrics from a Jim Morrison (and The Doors) song are so compelling to me in part because I always hear the intense musical rhythm that accompanied the words. And I think these lyrics express a deep hunger of the human heart, a hunger to “break on through to the other side” and experience another dimension of life that that often teases us. Unfortunately, I think Jim succeeded in this quest literally as he died of a drug overdose in the prime of a brilliant career. The metaphorical, or verbal, or spiritual “breaking on through” is the route to take.

I do think this hunger can be fatal if not approached in a spiritual framework. From my clinical work and from my personal life I feel that addiction, for example, can be seen as an ersatz religion, a contrivance that has been fashioned to cope with the abyss of this primal hunger. Kierkegaard noted that in the abyss one is apt to glom onto any “flotsam and jetsam” that happens to be nearby and once one has “glommed onto” something, it is let go of at great peril—the very abyss it was chosen to replace in the first place.

The Bible has lots of verses which reference this hunger and I think they are relevant to this urge to “break on through to the other side.” For example, “Blessed are those that hunger and thirst after righteousness.” Or, “My soul followeth hard after Thee, O Lord.” Or, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so my soul panteth after thee O Lord.”

These writers were feeling the anguish of addiction, that deeply spiritual urge, and for some reason or other they used words to cope with those emotions, sublimating their hunger with articulation. (And I don’t think it is happenstance that in the Judeo-Christian tradition God is presented as “The Word.”) There is an incredible difference between the unmitigated, non-verbal (and therefore behavioral) experience of being an addict and the humble statement, “I am an addict.” This is the kernel of the success of the 12-step movement.

Now I’ve always had this hunger. And in my youth I cloaked it in traditional religious garb and sought to make myself “special” as…more or less, for lack of a better term…a “holy man.” But religious clothing or personae is deadly as it appears to assuage the ravaging hunger but is often merely the above referenced “flotsam and jetsam”. I now see that hunger of mine as merely a simple refusal of the “fig leaf” that culture offers each of us. And, yes, it is tempting to let that itself cater to my need for being “special” but I just can’t take that bait any longer. I don’t accept artifice as readily as I used to. Yes, I am “special” but in the very same way that you are, and that my beloved dachshunds are, and those who I don’t like are, and even those who don’t like “literarylew” are! All of us, and the whole world, is an expression of the Divine and that Divine is always seeking recognition and finds it when we merely, humbly accept our human-ness. When we do this, and to the degree we do this, the Word has been made flesh. But all we get out of this is the simplicity of day to day life, of “chopping word and carrying water.” Beware of that tempting “specialness” as it springs from the pits of hell. Remember the Christian doctrine of kenosis, that God “humbled himself” and took on flesh.

And here is an afterthought, relevant to addiction, from the always astute Marianne Williamson:

If there is something you want really badly, and you think obsessively about getting it, then know that on an energetic level your attachment is actually sending it away. The answer? Prayer. ‘Dear God, take away my idolatrous thinking, luring me into thinking that something or someone other than You is the source of my salvation.’

 

Embracing Internal Contradictions

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We are such complicated creatures, replete with hypocrisies, contradictions, dishonesties…and virtues! Add them all up and we are reduced to mere be-ing. We simply are. We have the gift of life and have that gift for just a brief moment. Yes, it often appears to be merely a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing” but even the author of that pithy observation (Shakespeare) reflects in the whole of his writing that our paltry efforts reflect value, quality.

The clinical term for this myriad of contradictions is “ambivalence.” Learning to acknowledge and even experience the torment of this ambivalence is one of the most critical lessons in life. It is always so tempting to not take this spiritual adventure and cling to the dogmas of our youth. But we yield to this temptation at the peril of our own soul.

Someone said…and it might have been Karl Jung…that one step toward maturity is when we can learn to tolerate in our heart these ambivalences, to embrace the presence of impulses and presences that are mutually exclusive. Read the following poem by May Sarton:

The Angels And The Furies

1
Have you not wounded yourself
And battered those you love
By sudden motions of evil
Black rage in the blood
When the soul premier danseur
Springs towards a murderous fall ?
The furies possess you.

2
Have you not surprised yourself
Sometimes by sudden motions
Or intimations of goodness
When the soul premier danseur
Perfectly poised
Could shower blessings
With a graceful turn of the head ?
The angels are there.

3
The angels, the furies
Are never far away
While we dance, we dance,
Trying to keep a balance,
To be perfectly human
(Not perfect, never perfect,
Never an end to growth and peril),
Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us.

4
It is the light that matters,
The light of understanding.
Who has ever reached it
Who has not met the furies again and again:
Who has reached it without
Those sudden acts of grace?

(This poem was shared weeks ago on the blog by Blue Eyed Ennis.)

A Lesson from St. Francis

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When I was a graduate student in history, a professor introduced me to St. Francis of Assisi. I’ll never forget when she shared an anecdote re his kindness toward “brother worm”, stopping on the path and picking the worm up and moving him to the side of the path lest someone step on him. I rolled my eyes and grimaced. “What a nut job!” I thought.

Well, as you might suspect, forty years later I realize that the “nut job” was I! I now understand St. Francis’ appreciation of the unity of all God’s creatures, the presence of God in the whole of his creation. Now, I must admit I would not stop on a path and move a worm to the side though I sure would take pains to not step on it. I would have done the same back then. I feel so strongly about this Unity that I wish I could find the Grace to become a vegetarian. This wish is greatly intensified by living in Northwest Arkansas and often finding myself driving behind a Tyson chicken truck, packed with chickens who have never known a “free range” and will shortly be in a freezer at Wal-Mart.

But this unity of all things is most important in the human realm. I am you, you are me, we are all one. To “work out my own salvation with fear and trembling” will influence those around me, especially those who are nearest and dearest to me. For who I am, who I choose to “be”, makes a difference in the world.

Of course, I am talking boundaries here. And to live in this realm of “no boundaries” is very risky for it makes it imperative that we have a strong sense of identity, that we do know limits, and know that we cannot be all things to all people. We have to have…to speak clinically for a moment…”ego integrity.”

Mature boundaries are porous. But they do exist; they can “filter out” in the interest of this aforementioned “ego integrity.” But they are not concrete barricades behind which we cringe, hiding from the world as we hide from our own self and from our Source.

 

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

by Edgar Simmons

 

the instant you can

accept the colon

you are christenened

in the right compromise

that no things are alike

but are related.

the greatest

the necessary

the most powerful leap of metaphor

is when I decide

I am you

the result is

a birth

a

metaphysical differentiation

carried out and on

not in flesh but in spirit–

prophetic fact in time

more than children of our flesh.

 

 

The elusive captivity of Truth

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Several days ago I quoted a Carl Sandburg poem about the elusiveness of Truth, a poem which concluded with, in fact, “My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.” (I will quote the whole poem again shortly.)

I’m captivated with the notion that Truth is an “elusive captive.” Sandburg recognized that Truth is a process that is always underway, that it is always present, but it always eludes our grasp when we attempt to own it. This makes me think of something Roland Barthes (I think) said, referring to someone who is “in love with the thing which recedes from the knowledge of it.”

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.” He did not say, “Blessed are those who find righteousness.” The “blessedness” comes as we hunger and thirst for that elusive prize, desperately seeking to own it, only to realize at some point in our life that there is no need to fret and stew, there is only the need to surrender to it. There is only the need to realize that, though we don’t have Truth, it (He) has us and is at work in our lives.

We learn to live with the anxiety of “not-knowing” as with the gift of faith we confidence (and hope) that we are Known. We then proceed with the task of “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (i.e. anxiety and doubt).

Yes, this elusive Truth is actually a captive! We have it and always have had it. We can’t escape it though we can escape its efficacy in our day to day life by desperately trying to avoid the doubt without which faith is not possible. We can opt for a specious certainty which is only a delusional system.

WHO AM I?
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’ve talked to 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.

Intense emotions and surrendering

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E e Cummings said, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Adrienne Rich noted, “When we enter touch, we enter touch completely.”
These two poets knew a lot about intense emotion, intense feeling. They knew a whole lot more about it than I do which is the reason they write poetry and I can’t manage to do it. The best I can do is quote the poetry of others! When I met my wife, I was always quoting poetry everywhere I went, and at one point she quipped, “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” (She was alluding to a line from W. H. Auden about W. B Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”)
The following poem by Marriane Moore is about intense feeling also and she concludes that “he who feels strongly behaves.” So often intense feeling is associated with dissolute behavior and emotions run amok. And, that has its place. But, I do feel that “he who feels strongly (can) behave.”
And, another important point she makes, “in its surrendering, finds its continuing.” It is so important to surrender, to give up. And one of these days, perhaps, I will find the humility to accomplish this sublime task:
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,

St Augustine Opines on Being and Nothingness

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St. Augustine and I are pals!  I never would have thunk it!  This is a profound observation about the majesty of God and his creation.  (This was posted this morning on (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/)  By the way, I intend to do a better job of giving credit for where I “steal” some of this stuff!

 

My brothers and sisters, where does time go? The years slip and slide past us, day by day. Those things which were, no longer are; those things yet to come, are not here. The past is dead; the future is yet to come, but only to pass away in turn. Today exists only for the moment in which we speak. Its first hours are already over and behind us, the remainder do not as yet exist; they are still to come, but only to fall into nothingness.

Nothing in this world has constancy in itself. The body does not possess being; it has no permanence. It changes with age; it changes with time and place; it changes as a result of sickness or accident. The stars have as little consistancy; they are always changing in hidden ways, they go whirling into outer space. They are not stable, they do not possess being.

Nor is the human heart any more constant. How often it is disturbed by various conflicting thoughts and ambitions! How many pleasures draw it, one minute this way, and the next minute, that way, tearing it apart! The human spirit, although endowed by God with reason, changes; it does not possess being. It wills and does not will; it knows and does not know; it remembers this but forgets that. No one has unity of being in himself.

After so much suffering, disease, difficulties and pain, let us return humbly to God, to that one Being. Let us enter into that heavenly Jerusalem, that city whose citizens share in Being itself.
Augustine,Commentary on Psalm 121 (Hebrew Ps. 122); CCSL 40, pp. 1801-3; quoted by Robert Atwell,Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury, 1999, p.416

Lowell

 

“Within be fed, without be rich no more”

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The Republicans have helped me appreciate the gravity of the national debt. And I’m glad to see that the Democrats at least have it on their radar. This problem reflects the penchant that our culture has for preferring unreality, opting to live as if the world is something to exploit and that its resources are endless. At some point reality will when this contest.

This makes me think of an old poem by Stephen Crane:

Said a man to the Universe,
“But sir, I exist.”
Said the Universe in reply,
“That fact creates in my no great obligation.”

We are a nation of addicts and “stuff” is our drug of choice. We just can’t get enough of it. And Gerald May noted decades ago that all human beings have an addiction problem, those who merit the designation “addicts’ are merely the reflection of the spiritual malady that besets us all. The rest of us are just more subtle with our addiction than are substance abusers.

I think the root problem is the sin of misplaced concreteness, taking for real that which is only ephemeral. As John Masefield noted in the 19th century, “Like a lame donkey lured by moving hay, we chase the shade and let the Real be.” The resulting inner emptiness gnaws at our soul and has to be assuaged. W. H. Auden described this spiritual hunger as our “howling appetites.” And I blame our moribund religion for this problem. Our churches rely on a steady diet of dead platitudes, “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) As Shakespeare noted, “With devotions visage and pious action, they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

I would like to close with my favorite Shakespearean sonnet which addressed this issue, encouraging us to “within be fed, without be rich no more.”

Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
[Thrall to] these rebel pow’rs that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
  So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
  And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Carolyn Briggs: Salvation Lost and Found

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I would like to recommend a very important book for spiritually-minded people, Higher Ground: A Memoir of Salvation Lost and Found by Carolyn Briggs. This is Brigg’s story of being raised in a very hyper-fundamentalist religion and her struggle to escape its oppressive grip on her life. It has now been made into a movie, Higher Ground, which which made Roger Ebert’s April Eberfest and was feted by the Sundance Move Festival in 2011.

I had the great honor of meeting this lovely woman at my church last weekend where she previewed this movie and then was interviewed by our rector about the movie and some of her experiences. Ms. Briggs emanated a lovely spiritual presence as she described her experiences, admitting that there is a sorrow that follows her to this day due to the loss of the certainty that once was such an essential part of her faith. She now recognizes that doubt is part of faith and shared how that now she has a deep, abiding faith in God even though she no longer has the comfort provided by the close-knit (and close-minded) group that she was part of. But she does have the comfort of like-minded kindred spirits, many of which have followed a similar path in their life.

I would also recommend that you read an article by her in Religion Digest last year about her trip to an atheist convention. Her observations are very amusing as they show just how fanatical and obnoxious some atheists can be, much like the “compulsive Christians” that they decry and redicule. (Google Brigg’s name and “atheist convention” and you will find it on the net.)

Let me clarify something about the notion of rejecting one’s faith, evangelical/fundamentalist or otherwise. This “rejection” does not have to be the end of one’s faith. This “rejection” can be merely letting go of the “letter of the law” and embracing the “spirit of the law.” The Bible and Christian dogma is no longer merely ideology with which one has been indoctrinated. It becomes personal and has meaning that it did not have before.

This experience means that we become willing to realize, and humbly experience, that we only “see through a glass darkly.” We do not know objectively the truth. Therefore we can be a little more tolerant of those who believe differently. We do not have to go on witch-hunts, medieval crusades, or jihads. We merely have to let our faith become articulate in our own day to day personal life and any evangelization that needs to take place will come naturally without our manipulative wiles and machinations.