Tag Archives: Religion Spirituality

The Delusional World of Trump Continues

8 Replies

I just finished my morning foray into the mad world of Donald Trump and was not even taken aback to see that he is now focusing on the mental instability of Hillary Clinton.  This is just further illustration of how completely out of touch with reality he is; for, if he paid any attention to the feedback that he is getting from friend and foe he would realize that he should not touch the subject of anyone’s else’s “mental instability.”

But this is the problem with narcissism, especially when that mental illness has reached the stage of malignancy it has with him.  For in that state of madness, one is impervious to feedback from the outside.  One then finds himself comfortably ensconced in a delusional system and inevitably will have constructed himself a social world consisting of people who will help him maintain his lunacy as they too live in a version of the same delusional system.  Theologian Paul Tillich described this as “an empty world of self-relatedness”, a pristine world comprised of people who march lock-stepped to the beat of the same demonic drummer.

I speak from experience.  As noted before in this venue, I grew up in a context of delusional narcissism in which I learned that I was one of God’s “special” and “chosen people who had the truth; and, yes, others perhaps had the truth also but no one had it like we did!  And I’m not free of this poison yet and will never be completely as it always tempts me to bask in the safety of my present day mind-set and dismiss any and all those see the world differently.  But when the Grace of God has intervened and one has “named the demon” the demon can no longer work its tyranny in your heart with the same degree of abandonment.  Yes, I still catch myself taking myself too seriously…in this venue and in the whole of my life…but then “reality” chides me and I am reminded again that I’m only a finite perspective in a world of other perspectives.  I don’t have “the” Truth though I now feel that I am in the loving hands of the Truth and therefore don’t have to be so damn “right” any more.

And this is often quite uncomfortable.  For in my heart’s core I still have that childhood desperation for “certainty” but am learning to live without it, learning that this is what faith is about.  And, yes, this is faith in God…though that is a long story…but it also is a newly found faith in myself as I’m discovering that the certainty which used to offer comfort was specious at best and was predicated upon a denial of my human vulnerability.

Trump has a god-like power over many people in my country.  His message preys on reptilian-brain fears which are readily assuaged by his promise that he is gonna “Make America Great Again.”  He knows that he can say and do anything he wants to and his followers will stay with him for they are hapless before his demonic falderal.  Last fall he even declared publicly that he could shoot someone dead in the streets of New York City “and my poll numbers will still go up.”  The very next day his poll numbers spiked.  He offers a delusional hope and when desperate people have imbibed of this nectar it is usually impossible to take it from them.

And many evangelical Christians are drinking the kool-aid with relish, disregarding the advice of one of their own spokesmen, Chuck Swindoll, who posed the question of Trump, “Where is the basic thread of human decency?”  It is not there but many evangelicals, terrified by the reality of the modern world, are willing to sell their soul for the specious hope of a “strong-man” who will turn back the clock and restore our country to the “good old days.”  They fail to realize that these “good old days,” that I remember well, were the days when blacks knew their place, women knew their place, gender diversity did not even exist, and those Communists occupied the place that “Muslims” occupy in our present day mindset.  The “good old days” required rigid demarcation between “us” and “them” which is best illustrated by Trump’s promise today to “build that wall.”  “Walls” and boundaries are necessary for life.  But when they are emphasized to the neglect of openness and inclusiveness they are destructive, destructive of the world outside but also of those that are inside the “safe” confines of those boundaries.  As W. H. Auden noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

Spirituality and Paradox

6 Replies

Spirituality is paradoxical. There is no other way to cut it. For example, I live when I die. I’m up when I’m down. I’m most when I’m least. I’m found when I’m lost.

Read how Kabir put it:

I won’t come

I won’t go

I won’t live

I won’t die

I’ll keep uttering

The name

And lose myself

In it

I’m bowl

And I’m platter

I’m man

And I’m woman

I’m grapefruit

And I’m sweet lime

I’m Hindu

And I’m Muslim

I’m fish

And I’m net

I’m fisherman

And I’m time

I’m nothing

Says Kabir

I’m not among the living

Or the dead

— Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

 

Boundaries and “I and Thou”

2 Replies

On Friday a man in New York City demonstrated his belief that we are one with nature by jumping into a lion pit, explaining afterward that he wanted to be “one with the lions.” Well, he almost accomplished this purpose as one of them proceeded to chew on him.

I also feel that boundaries are a nebulous construction and that we do need to realize that we are one with the world, with the animal world, physical world, and the human world. But we must never carry it to the extreme that he did and will do so only at our great peril.

One dimension of this “object separateness” issue is drawing the social distinction between “me and thee.” Where do I end and you begin? If I err on either extreme there will be major psychopathology. In the early months of our lives we begin the process of formulating a “me” (and ego identity) and if this task is impaired, our life will be very challenging. But if our “me” is defined too rigidly, it will also pose problems. Ideally, it will have an age-appropriate rigidity at first, a rigidity which can be relaxed with maturity so that our “me” can recognize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as rigid as the social contract would have one believe.

Martin Buber wrote a marvelous book about the process of discovering this boundary subtlety—I and Thou. He also delved into the spiritual nature of the process of making this discovery and the spiritual nature of life itself. Our Source, he suggested, is found only in the “In-Between”, in that space between “I” and “Thou”, in what Deepak Chopra terms “the gap.”

Here is a marvelous poem by Edgar Simmons about this matter:

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

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.

Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear

6 Replies

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.”

Reason has its Limits!

Leave a reply

 

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because (e e cummings)

 

This is another one of those poems that I cannot explain but completely love. It is so complicated and inexplicable. To some of you it will probably be nonsense. And it is about “non” sense in that it is about reality that lies beyond the grasp of reason. It is about reality that lies beyond the time-space (i.e. “cause-effect”) continuum.

And to take a quantum leap…as I am wont to do…it is about God for He lies beyond our paltry little world, our rational “dog-and-pony” show. And, yes, He was “made nigh by the blood of Christ” but that doesn’t mean we can apprehend Him with mere reason, with Christian (Biblical) syllogism. We apprehend Him only with faith which means we apprehend him in the context of a whole lot of doubt. We “have Him” only when we “don’t have Him”. This is to allude to the Zen koan from the ‘60’s, “First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.” God is present only in his absence.

(AFTERTHOUGHT: Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, only to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”)

(COMIC AFTERTHOUGHT—Quip from David Letterman, re cause-effect, “Mobile home parks cause tornadoes.”

 

Man’s Quest for Meaning

3 Replies

Oliver Sacks writes in the current New Yorker re his battle with drug addiction during the 50’s and 60’s. He introduced the subject with a very thoughtful note re mankind’s quest for meaning:

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

This adventure we are caught up in, from which we cannot escape, is just an incredible, mind-boggling enterprise. It has been delightful to spend my life pondering over the inimitable mysteries of life, poring over history and discovering that even thousands of years ago men and women looked up at the stars and felt the same overwhelming awe that I often experience.

We are such fragile little creatures who somehow have climbed to the top of the food chain, a success which now presents us with profound existential questions all of which can probably be summarized as this quest for meaning. And this quest for meaning inevitably tempts us with its antithesis…meaninglessness…and the struggle between the two often leads to some really poor decisions, individually and collectively.

We lost our religion in the 20th century and our culture is showing the wear-and-tear that happens when this happens to a tribe. Now, it is true we needed to “lose” our religion in that it had become moribund, primarily consisting of, “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken) But now the task is to find spiritual roots again and these roots can be found often in the very religious traditions that we have discarded.

I Hate Intolerant People!

6 Replies

Yeah!  I hate’em!  And I thank they should be all lined up and shot!

Ok, ok.  I hope you understand irony.  I speak in jest.  But it is important to recognize that even those we deem “intolerant” deserve a certain amount of respect.  But how much is a judgment call.  There is certainly a time when one must speak out against intolerance; but certainly not every time.

Sometimes it takes patience to respect people that are different than us.  It is just so very apparent that they should see things differently  But, of course, there is the catch—who gets to define “should”?

And here I am in the morass of “relativism”, that murky domain which I was taught to eschew as a child.  Oh how wonderfully safe and secure it was!   (Oh, to be honest, it was not a very pretty world!  It was unreality.)

Metanoia Strikes Deep

Leave a reply

Repentence became caricatured at some point in my life into the epithet, “Turn or burn.” That phrase had an aire of facetious over-statement to it even then but conveyed the angry, harsh, judgmental intent of many of my fellow believers.

Repent merely means to have a change of mind, a change of heart, a reorientation of one’s outlook on life. It means a turn about in word and deed but also in attitude and orientation. I think one could summarize the teachings of Jesus to say, “Hey, you guys been looking at things this way; take a break and look at things differently.” Just one illustration from the New Testament illustrates this. In the story of the “Woman at the Well”,(John 8) Jesus noted that he knew that she was an adulterous woman and he knew that the law called for her to be stoned to death. But he looked at things differently, did not view the law so rigidly on that occasion, and told her to “to go and sin no more.” He demonstrated a repentant point of view by approaching an individual with a mindset contrary to the conventional wisdom of his day.

In terms of today’s world, I think repentance can be illustrated in many ways. But a fundamental feature is that people who have truly repented…in the depths of their heart…have found the temerity to view the world in a different manner than they were taught, in a different manner than the prevailing culture would have them think. Repentant people, perhaps, will have come to see the glass half full whereas before they always say it half empty. They will see the world as offering hope whereas before they saw it as grim and ugly, bereft of any hope, with only apocalyptic doom in the offing. One who has repented might find the grace to see himself/herself has having intrinsic worth whereas before he/she saw only worthlessness and self-loathing. One who had repented in the depths of his heart may no longer see homosexuals as less-than-human, worthy of scorn and contempt and even violent persecution. One who has repented might see the other political party is more human terms, seeing them no longer as the personification of evil or devoid of any intrinsic value

“Meta-noia” is the word. Check it out. It is a rich concept.  An old rock tune included the lyric, “Metanoia strikes deep.”

Ignorance is still bliss!

Leave a reply

I would like to recommend an excellent blog to you: http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/. Lowell is an Episcopalian priest who emphasizes meditation in his ministry. He is very thoughtful and very humble.

I would like to share a couple of his thoughts from yesterday’s blog:

I don’t know now what I don’t know, but God grant me the courage to turn away from my falseness whenever the Spirit of truth comes and guides me into new truth, no matter how scary or humbling it may seem.

Lowell values ignorance like I do. He knows that he does not know a whole lot. And he views faith as the process of learning more and more just how little we know and how that in this process we are always getting closer to our goal. Whatever that is! And yes, our “falseness’ is a steady foe. It never leaves us; for, we always “see through a glass darkly” and tend too often to take our “darkly” view too seriously.

But there is also the need to jettison old ideas and attachments that no longer work. I think it was Teresa of Avila who said something like, “God in mercy never makes us aware of our sin until God has also given us the grace to confess it.”

Our shortcomings mercifully come to us when we are ready for them. Oh would it be painful otherwise! I think narcissism is a basic human flaw. If I’d have seen my narcissism decades ago, it would have blown my mind! Now, when it peaks at me from time to time, I feel the sting of self-awareness, practice that Thich Nhat Hanh “half-smile”, and continue along my way.

Redemption in Marriage

Leave a reply

Boundaries are so important. I think that the concept of boundaries is relevant to every problem that mankind deals with, even on the biological level. Even cancer is a boundary problem as those bastard cells are running amok and will devour everything in sight. And certainly on an emotional/spiritual level, boundaries explain most if not all of our maladies.

One simple clinical intervention I used when in practice was to try to teach some simple little boundary for a client to set in his life. This could be something as simple as planting a flower and caring for it, this simple act of “caring” being one bit of order in a life that often had little structure.

And then I like to think of marriage as a boundary setting on a grand scale. I see marriage as an imposition of order on chaos, two disparate individuals with their own whims and fancies about life, choosing to commit to the “arbitrary circle of a vow.” (W. H. Auden) If this vow can be honored, marriage can be a container in which two individuals mature together and resolve many of the interior haunts they brought into the union. In short, marriage can be redemptive.

Let me close with an excerpt from a poem by Edgar Simmons entitled, “Bow Down to Stutterers”:

Proofrock has been maligned.
And Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors
Absorbing the tic, the bothersome twitch.