Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Jesus Said, “Let Go of Your Stuff!”

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My “literary license” has here been employed but I think that “let go of your stuff” is a good paraphrasing of the teachings of Jesus.  For example, this was conveyed in his observation that it would be easier for a rich man to enter the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven.  And in another place, he responded to a query re what one must do to have eternal life with the response, “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor.”  Now, I don’t think these words were to be taken literally but were merely his ways of pointing out how deeply attached humans are to their possessions, their “stuff.”  And his teaching that we find our self only in losing our self is another example of the same them.  This detachment from the material world was, and is, a motif in Eastern spiritual teachings as eastern thought reveals less of an investment in the object world.

 

In my culture, interpreting the teachings of Jesus as “Let go of your stuff” would real ring dissonant with most people.  For, we are very attached to our “stuff” and attached to such a degree that we can’t understand the notion.  Asking anyone to see this attachment is like asking a fish to see water.  And this attachment issue also pertains to spirituality for in the West we tend to approach faith as just another item in the category of “stuff” and so we glom onto it and proceed to exploit the hell out of it just as if it were like any of the rest of the “stuff” that we are so attached to.  And, in most cases it is!  And this is actually just a form of addiction and even if the object of our addiction….the substance is something purportedly noble…it is still an “addictive substance” in our case and thus is used to avoid reality.  And this is the reason that so much of modern day religion appears to be absurd to anyone with a capacity for critical thought as they can readily see that it has nothing to do with anything other than practitioner himself.  This is what Karl Marx had in mind when he described religion as “the opiate of the masses.”

 

Shakespeare understood this sin of misplaced concreteness so well, that sin of taking for real that which is only ephemeral.  He saw that our investment in “stuff” reflected a disregard for our subjective experience…our heart…in preference for an inordinate investment in the object world.  His conclusion was “within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Here is the entire Shakespearean Sonnet:

 

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Thrall to these rebel powers 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Shakespeare has taught me so much and his teaching continues to delve more deeply into my heart as I gain more maturity and with that the ability to swim in the depths of metaphor. Shakespeare did not live in this world; he lived “on high” up in the aether as I often claim to myself. That is to say, he lived in his head. With that aloofness, that cerebral detachment, he could take the liberty of “mis-using” words to convey wisdom but “mis-use” them in such a deft and artistic manner that he could reveal to us so much about the depths of our heart. Just one simple example is in a lovely line from Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy when Hamlet noted that the intense passion and desire of his heart was often “sicklie’d o’er with the pale cast of thought.” First of all, “sick” is not a verb and second how can words make anything sick even if you morph the word into “sicklie.” But by putting it this way he vividly described how one who is given too much to thinking…whose heart is beset with an over wrought inner critic…can find himself stymied by the thinking process itself.

Shakespeare knew that thought and feeling must work in tandem. If either is in too much control, there is a problem. Feeling run amok is lunacy but also thought…or reason…run amok is lunacy, the latter point noted so eloquently by Goethe when he noted in Faust, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” Just look at our contemporary linear culture and its egregious object lesson in the U. S. House of Representatives.

The Bard, like me, knew about “waging the war we are” as described in the 20th century by W. H. Auden. He was conflicted by myriad voices in his heart but wonderfully integrated by what I would describe as “the Spirit of God” so that he could harness the unleashed energy and convey to generations hence stunning revelations about our heart’s internal machinations. Matthew Arnold noted that the poet has great familiarity with “unleashed energy”, alleging that “the poet, in whose mighty heart heaven hath a quicker pulse imparted, subdues that energy to scan, not his own heart, but that of man.” Shakespeare did that. In terms of linguistics, he harnessed the energy of the “floating signifier” so artfully that many…but not all…can understand.

However, there is a price to pay for this aloof detachment, this cerebral, dispassionate view of the world and even of one’s own self—alienation and the feeling of loneliness…existential loneliness or solitude. But just this past week I discovered through a friend the writing of a contemporary spiritual teacher, Mary Margret Moore, who noted that discovering and embracing one’s solitude was one of the steps one must take in spiritual development. It is closely akin to St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul” or Dante’s going into “the dark forest”: or as Dante put it, “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

There one finds he/she is all alone and must explore who and what one really is which always entails a rendezvous with the boundaries of existence itself, an emotional/spiritual experience which in my culture is often described as “God” or by some as “the Ineffable.”

Letting the “Bud” of Life Blossom

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A friend of mine posted last week a quote from Anais Nin quote that has always really grabbed me, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
This brought to my mind several other literary references to the “bud” of our life, referring to life at its earliest point when we had just taken that quantum leap from non-being into being. At that point we were the quintessence of vulnerability, a vulnerability that will always be present in our heart but one from which we are protected with the “fig leaf” of an ego. Then later in our adult life we have the task of loosening the pernicious grip of that ego to the point that some of that vulnerability can come to consciousness and invigorate an otherwise barren life. When that happens, what my spiritual tradition calls the “Spirit of God” begins to come forth and we find that we can engage in the “flow” of life, no longer tyrannized by subterranean fears of annihilation.  T.S. Eliot described this “bud” as, “that tender point from which life arose, that sweet force born of inner throes.” And in another poem he offered another relevant thought, seeing this “bud” as, “some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”

But Shakespeare so brilliantly described this “bud” in his first sonnet and the peril of not allowing it to open and blossom, letting the essence of our life flow into the Void that we all live in, into the Great Round. In this context, the “blooming” he noted was in reference to some unknown friend who refused to get married and start a family. He described this friend as being unable to escape a narcissistic shell, accusing him of being “contracted to thine own brights eyes,” or seeing only what he saw…not able to see beyond the private world that he lived in. This is related to the Conrad Aiken line I quote so often, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.”

Shakespeare believed that in getting married and having a family a person had the opportunity to let one’s tender “bud” break open and blossom into the unfolding of life, to participate in the “mundane” task of perpetuating the species. In one of his plays he described a character as being unable to “spend himself” and that consequently said he, “spills himself in fearing to be spilt.”

In the first sonnet, he chided his friend for feeding “thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, making a famine where abundance lies, thyself thy foe, to the sweet self so cruel.” He saw this friend cowering within his bud, feeding himself with “self-substantial fuel” and not participating in life, not engaging in meaningful relationship, having “fled to a nutshell” where he could there safely be the “king of infinite spaces.” Shakespeare lamented this friend’s narcissism, seeing that he was his own worst enemy, to his “own sweet self so cruel.”

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
Now, speaking from experience, it is possible to find other ways to open that bud, that “tender point” without marriage or family. I utilized the Shakespearean sonnet merely to note one “contrivance” that life has afforded us to “die to our selves” and focus on a greater end. But, I will admit that, personally, getting married but not having children illustrated this “cowardly spirit” that Shakespeare had in mind. And perhaps that is why that late in life I am finding the vulnerability in which life appears to be flowing, my “bud” timidly and often half-hearterdly trying to open and blossom.

Nin vividly discovered the painful quandary of not letting that blossom come forth in some dimension of one’s life. The pain becomes so intense that we feel we are about to burst. The “einfall” (see a recent post on the subject) is so persistent that we cannot but surrender and find a symbolic death offering us the hope of resurrection. Jesus also grasped the importance of letting this bud die and then blossom, noting that unless a grain of wheat, “fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

Life often appears to be merely about finding a meaningful way to slowly die, to artfully approach the end of our life and in the process leave something meaningful behind. Now I certainly do not think that life is a grim enterprise in which we morbidly focus on our brief span of life and ultimate death but that we do need to realize that death and life are always intertwined. And I am made to think of the wisdom of a very astute psychologist of several decades ago, Irvin Yalom, who noted that in his practice he had discovered that those who lived in fear of death were actually very fearful of being alive. But when unconscious fears rule our life, we cannot acknowledge our vulnerability and spend our lives glomming onto whatever contrivance our culture affords us in order to avoid that “tender point”, that bud from which life wants to emerge, that “bud” that Nin so pithily referenced.

 

 

Tolle’s “Pain Body” and the Unconscious

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The blog-o-sphere teaches me so much! Just several days ago I came across this quote from Eckhart Tolle which just grabbed me and shook me, even though I’ve read it before and understood the notion of the “pain body” already:

Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable, or that believes it will get you what you want. Otherwise, who would want to hang on to negativity, make themselves, and others miserable, and create disease in the body? So, whenever there is negativity in you, if you can be aware at that moment that there is something in you that takes pleasure in it or believes it has a useful purpose, you are becoming aware of the ego directly. The moment this happens, your identity has shifted from ego to awareness. This means the ego is shrinking and awareness is growing.

Relevant to this subject, I am now part of a serious reading group of the work of Karl Jung who approached a relevant issue nearly a century earlier with his focus on the unconscious. In our present reading, (“The Roots of the Psyche”) Jung shared that he had discussed the unconscious with one philosopher of his day who candidly admitted that he could not acknowledge the presence of the unconscious; for should he do so would be opening up Pandora’s box—it would mean acknowledgement of subterranean forces in his heart which were beyond his control. Likewise, when we are in the grip of this “pain body”, we resist acknowledging its power over us for to do so would mean that we are powerless in some sense in the depths of our heart and make really bad choices that we cannot help. It is like we deliberately bury our head in the sand, choosing to live in our anguish rather than break free and tippy-toe into what one poet described as our “ever lasting risk.” As is so often the case, Shakespeare nailed it centuries ago when Hamlet noted that we prefer to “cling to these ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.”

Well, how do we break free of this pain body? How do we escape the grip of the unconscious? Well, technically we don’t but with simple awareness we can lessen its tenacious grip on our heart. If we can dare to “name the demon”…so to speak…the monster that is wreaking havoc on our life will have a battle on its hand. Tolle teaches that simple awareness of this “pain body”, and acknowledgement of its influence, is the beginning of gaining freedom.

And since I began this process of honesty, I have found freedom from some of these monsters but admittedly there are more to face. And I think that is probably part of what the Apostle Paul had in mind with his admonishment for us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (i.e. emotional duress) for he saw “salvation” as a process just as people like Eckhart Tolle today present spirituality.

Now, I can’t fail to kick my own faith in the shins on this issue, my faith being Christianity. So often people use religion as a denial system, approaching it only with their head and using doctrinal creeds and dogma to insulate themselves from life, from spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical life. Instead of exploring Holy Writ and spiritual tradition to find its meaning in the warp-and-woof of their life, they have been taught to use it as a repetition compulsion which serves as a mechanism to keep their “pain body” at bay. And, of course, their “pain body” is then seen outside of themselves in other people who need their intervention, at times in the past even at the point of the sword. Now, how do I know this is true? Well, I don’t. But I do know that it has been true for me nearly all of my life AND I suspect that it does have relevance to many other Christians. There are many other writers and thinkers, Christian and otherwise, who are honing in on this issue right now, one of note being Richard Rohr.

Life is painful. But it is more painful when we don’t accept the pain when it comes, discovering that it can wash over us and not lodge in our cognitive machinery…and behavior patterns… and keep us prisoners. Scott Peck said decades ago in his very astute book, “The Road Less Traveled,” that “Neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Neurosis…and worse…can be viewed as maladaptive patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that we have adopted in response to painful moments in our life, overt pain and even perceived pain. But the only way to get beyond the pain is to go into it, to own it, to “embrace it” as Stephen Levine teaches and discover that its grip will begin to lesson. We have to “feel” our way out of the morass. “Thinking” alone will never suffice.

Mother’s Day Thoughts

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Indulge me while I think out loud. I’m trying to decide what to blather on about today…perhaps the “meaning of meaning” or the “intricacies of the time-space continuum” or even the old tried and true “How many angels can God sit on the head of a needle?” Now I spend hours and hours each day wrestling with these important issues, stopping occasionally to gaze for a few hours upon my navel which, after 62 years, is really one handsome navel! I kid you not!

But, I don’t know what is coming over me today as I want to “hold forth” about something that really matters…perhaps I took my medication today! So, well…oh, I know, mothers, as it is mother’s day!

Let me start with my beloved mother who is just into her 12th year of watching her six children from heaven, grimacing from time to time at the bad choices they make, trotting out one of her favorite expressions, “Aw shaw” after I’ve done something really stupid. But also, I’m pleased that now she has gotten the opportunity to get the education she wanted so badly when she was here on earth and just the other day she whispered to me when I was moping through the house immersed in a book, “Look yonder. The poor wretch comes reading.” Yes, she now has the wisdom of Shakespeare and can offer those words to me that Hamlet’s mother had for him.

Mother knew nothing about this aether that I swim in and I am so fortunate that she did not; for, she could not have been the good mother that she was if she had found her navel so enchanting. Under very grim circumstances of Southern red-neck poverty, she demonstrated great courage and cared for her six children and brought them all to maturity before the bitch Alzheimer’s claimed her in 2001. She was dutifully “under dad’s thumb” for the first 12 years or so of my life; but then he made a bad mistake in that he insisted that she go to work. She hated going to work and leaving her beloved children alone in the evening but she had no choice. However, she discovered that she liked working and she thrived on the job as a nurse’s aide. She thrived so much that within a decade she had acquired the status of Licensed Professional Nurse and became the administrator of the convalescent home that she had started out as a mere grunt.

It didn’t take Dad too long to see his mistake and when he did, his various interventions to stifle mom’s ambition could not succeed. He was right, articulating the hyper-conservative belief that “you better not let the women folk off the reservation.” Mother got “off the reservation” and discovered there was a world “out there” that she could find a place in and she did not have to live rest of her life “under the thumb” of my dad.

I have watched my sisters and other young women over the years get married and then suddenly they step into “motherhood.” And, I don’t mean merely that they have babies, but they magically know how to “mother” their children, intuitively feeling a connection with them and it is this “feeling” of connection that they offer that provides an existential anchor for the developing soul. And yes, it must hurt to me a mother and watch their “young’uns” grow up and make many of the same mistakes they did. And it must hurt father’s also. But, you can be impressed with me, as I avoided that mistake—-I DIDN’T HAVE CHILDREN!!!! (Now, on this final point, please remember I am pathologically ironic!)

(Btw, on Father’s Day, I hope to offer a more sympathetic note re my dad with whom I increasingly identify.)

Ersatz, Ego-ridden, Spirituality

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I’ve shared here several times that Richard Rohr steal’s my thoughts. He continues to do that and is rich and famous and I am still poor and unknown. Life is just not fair! In today’s email he again chides Christians for their “dualistic” thinking and points out how the ego is hard at work in this process. It is really unnerving to realize that something as personal as one’s faith can be little more than an ego function, an escape from life, and not the expression of the Divine that one purports it to be. And that is what I’ve had to learn and am continuing to learn about my own faith. But when this truth began to sink in, the first faint glimmer of light dawned in my soul allowing me to see the darkness in which I lived. And I still live in this “darkness” and will always do so even as that “glimmer of Light” brightens each day. For, I now know…and feel…more clearly what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared that “we see through a glass ‘darkly’”.

Let me explain just one facet of the ego’s presence in the spirituality of my early life. One of the first things I learned as a child was the distinction of “saved” vs “unsaved”, a distinction which paralleled the infinite variety of other distinctions I was learning as my innocent world was being carved up into various categories. And, of course at some point I learned that I could recite the correct syllogism, the magical words, and presto I would join the club of “the saved.” This bifurcation of the world followed me through the first half of my life as I hid behind the facade of being “saved” and from that subjective prison lived and felt separate from the whole world, radically disconnected. Now, I didn’t know about this disconnection as I participated in a “saved” culture which daily reassured me that I was “one of them” because I spoke the right language and lived the right life…at least out in public! However, there was always unrest in my soul, an unrest which in the middle of my life began to grow and became a veritable tumult which is now blossoming fully in my life. But this “tumult” is merely the experience of life unfolding in my heart as it opens up and becomes, “filled with penetrable stuff” as Shakespeare once put it.

Rohr presents spirituality as a “personal” phenomena, not an ideology. Spirituality is not a mind-set or a template through which we are to view the world as “out there” and needing to be made like me. Spirituality is the process of letting boundaries down and seeing the connection between “me and thee” and between the whole of God’s creation. And the process never ends. We never “get it” as there is nothing to “get”. It is a process. “Saved” and “unsaved”???? Well, the concept does exist in Christianity and most religions have some way of setting themselves apart and reassuring its followers that they are “special.” I now feel that the only “saving” I am responsible for is the saving of my own soul…a life long process which always involves relationships with other people…and which the Apostle Paul had in mind when he instructed us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” This “fear and trembling” is the tumult I alluded to earlier.

Here is Rohr’s observations for today:
DUALISTIC THINKING

Resistance to Change
Friday, March 21, 2014

Sadly, the mind trapped inside of polarity thinking is not open to change. How else can we explain the obvious avoidance of so many of Jesus’ major teachings within the Christian churches? Jesus’ direct and clear teachings on issues such as nonviolence; a simple lifestyle; love of the poor and our enemies; forgiveness, inclusivity, and mercy; and not seeking status, power, perks, or possessions have all been overwhelmingly ignored throughout history by mainline Christian churches, even those who so proudly call themselves orthodox or biblical.

This avoidance defies explanation until we understand how dualistic thinking protects and pads the ego and its fear of change. Notice that the things we Christians have largely ignored require actual change to ourselves. The things we emphasized instead were usually intellectual beliefs or moral superiority stances that asked almost nothing of us—but compliance from others: the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the atonement theory, and beliefs about reproduction and sex. After a while, you start to recognize the underlying bias that is at work. The ego diverts your attention from anything that would ask you to change, to righteous causes that invariably ask others to change. 1 Such issues give you a sense of moral high ground without costing you anything (e.g., celibate priests who make abortion the only sin). Sounds like an ego game to me.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go. Split people split up everything and everybody else. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts.
1. Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, p. 94
2. Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
p. 151

 

Being “Quickened” into a Soul

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Poet Claire Kelly quotes another poet, Emily Carr, who noted, “Without movement, the subject is dead.” Carr recognized that to be human…and an “alive” one…the subject must be alive, functioning in a dynamic fashion. She recognized that it is possible to be physically alive, and yes to have a “subjective” life, but at the same time be “subjectively” dead. She echoed the illimitable wisdom of Shakespeare whose Hamlet described a heart that could be “full of penetrable stuff” if it were not “bronzed o’er with damned custom.” By use of the term “penetrable” Shakespeare was describing the vulnerability that is present when one is “subjectively” alive And this lovely poem by Ms. Kelley provides a beautiful parallel of the vibrancy of a “subjectivity” that is fully alive.

But, let me utilize my “literary license” and introduce the term “soul” to this notion.  When one’s subjective experience is quickened by what I like to describe as “the Spirit of God,” a soul is born, a soul that is in unity with others and with the whole of God’s creation. This soul not only “knows” things about life but “feels” them in the depths of his/her heart and at times can only “glory, bow, and tremble” as poet Edgar Simmons described it. At this point thought and feeling are working in tandem and some version of the Incarnation has occurred, described by W. H. Auden as “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

But it is much easier and less painful to live on the surface of life and not bothered with the “intrusiveness” of God’s Spirit. But, that is just another way of saying that it is easier to live oblivious to reality and not allow Reality (i.e. “otherness”) to “mess up” one’s pristine Ozzie and Harriet existence. For, “god” or “God” is jusord we throw around to capture the experience of the Ineffable which is always found on the boundaries of life and if we disallow boundary violation…that is if our heart is not “penetrable”…we cannot experience the Ineffable.  Here is the beautiful poem by Ms. Kelley:

IN THE TORSO OF A GREAT WINDSTORM
(Odds and Ends, 1939)

The wind makes everything alive….
Without movement a subject is dead. Just look!
—Emily Carr

Put your hand over a flashlight,
watch it glow faerie pink. Picture—
lit from inside—a belly torch,

the backdrop—
knot of spruce tree organs: liver, kidneys,
bundle of intestine, stomach—
cool blue and green foliage hiding enzymes,
bacterium, acids.

That exact texture of pulse,
quiver, musculature connected
and contained, skyline and dirt grouted
together, a vista of
inner skin, the underside.
Airstream gale whipping
the pinprick stars into dashes,
molars into canines, evolution
of the Spartan firmaments. A breezy muse,
that gust of inspiration.

Now look at the actors erect at centre stage, see:
skinny veins with plump tops,
or—zooming in—synapses of birch foregrounded.
Holy trifecta, three ideas
announcing skyward:
home, joy, hunger.

Hamlet, Depression, and Boundaries

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I quote from Hamlet more than any of Shakespeare because I identify so much with him.  For example, my momma too could have said when I was young and moping about the castle, “Look yonder.  The poor wretch comes reading.”  And, I too am full of thoughts and ideas the sum of which “if quartered, would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”  I am also very violent, as was Hamlet, but like he…in reference to his mother…”will speak daggers to her, not use them.”

Hamlet had serious boundary problems.  If I’d have been  his therapist, I would have diagnosed him with “depressive disorder” but only because I tended to be cautious when possible and avoided the “major” label to diagnoses.  But he simply suffered from “porosity of boundaries” as one psychiatrist I worked with once said of a patient, meaning that his boundaries were “holey” and “stuff” got through which did not get through for most people.  And it is no accident that there is an incest them in the play and boundaries are always skewed for every member of an invested family even if they were not the “victim.”

As Hamlet moped about that castle at Elsinore, people began to talk about the young prince and expressed worry.  Hamlet caught ear of these whisperings and at one point said, “My heart has in it that which passeth show. These are but the suits of woe.”  He was saying, “Oh, sure I’m depressed.  But heck, you don’t know true half of it!.”  He was saying that they only saw the outward “suits” or appearances of his emotional torment but inside he the unmitigated, nameless anguish, “that which passeth show.”  For, when boundaries are impaired, feelings that all of us experience are experienced more intently and his step-father noted at one point, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

The most striking theme that I see in Shakespeare is his emphasis on the depths of the heart, the sub-text of life, which most people meticulously avoid. Most people see only the “show” and dutifully live out the “show” or play their role on the stage of life while the heart is never delved into.  But, unfortunately this “Ozzie and Harriet” existence deprives them of the meaning in life, a meaning which is found only by “Diving into the Wreck” of the heart’s ambivalences.  (“Diving into the Wreck” is the title of a book of poetry by Adrienne Rich.)  And let us not forget the admonishment of Jesus who asked, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”

“Judgment” vs “Judgmentalism”

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In Shakespeare’s marvelous play, Hamlet, Laertes is grieving for his sister Ophelia who he then sees as demented and laments that she is, “Divided from herself and her fair judgment without which we are pictures are mere beasts.”
Shakespeare understood a dimension of judgment that is often not considered, that being that “judgment” is merely a decision or choice. For example, cultures always evolve a legal system in which miscreants stand before a judge or tribunal for some misdeed and there the community tells him/her, “We do not approve of the choice that you made on such and such occasion.” The collective thought reflects the decision of what is “good” and “bad” for the commonweal of that tribe. In this hypothetical illustration, a community makes a “choice” and exercises power, declaring, “we will not abide that behavior” and will then impose consequences even up to the point of death in some cultures. (This brings to mind another observation in the same play, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”)

But, on an individual level…such as with Ophelia…we also exercise judgment and make choices all of which have consequences. But Shakespeare noted that Ophelia’s judgment was impaired so that her world was rigidly bifurcated between people as “pictures” or “mere beasts.” He was describing persons who see people only through two prisms—the extreme of a one dimensional idealized fantasy such as a “picture” or the other extreme…also a fantasy…a “mere beast.” Shakespeare recognized that we are infinitely complicated creatures and that our perception of others has to include the nuances between the two extremes. Yes, we are “pictures” but also “beasts” but also everything in between. And, this same impairment of judgment influenced Ophelia on the issue of “to be, or not to be” leading to seize the “bare bodkin” and take her life.

This brings to my mind the Christian notion of judgment and “judgmentalism.” Many Christians are proud that they are not “judgmental” and will piously announce this fact. However, that itself is a judgment!  Judgment is intrinsic to the human experience and we cannot help but make judgments if we have any degree of functional ability; and, come to think about it, we do so even without that level of ability! True, Jesus said, “Judge not that ye be not judged” but I don’t think that He meant that we should be so naive as to think we never exercise judgment. Jesus was merely saying, “Hey! Sl;ow down. When you are so quick to see the mote in someone else’s eye, take pause and realize that there is a beam in your own eye.” Yes, there are many times when we must exercise judgment and take a stand but if we find that we are “taking a stand” and making moral pronouncements a lot of the time, we might take pause and look closely in the mirror. “What we see is what we are.” Just to exercise judgment does not make us “judgmental” but when we find ourselves standing in judgment often of others, we might take pause and consider that “What we see is what we are” I’m learning to do this myself and the experience is not very pretty!

“Unpacking my Heart with Words”

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When I started blogging I shared that I was doing so as a spiritual enterprise. I shared a quote from Job, that my “heart was like a taut wine-skin, full of words, about to burst” and noted that, borrowing a line from Shakepeare, I was going to “unpack my heart with words.”

And this endeavor has been very rewarding. I have learned so much about myself in part because I have made some very interesting friends from around the world who offer encouragement and gracious criticism. When we are dealing with matters of the heart we need feedback and that feedback does not need to come from an echo chamber.

“Unpacking my heart with words” brings to my mind a belief I used to have when I first began to explore the world of psychology and clinical practice. At that point I had the idea that therapy was merely a matter of exploring one’s heart, learning what one’s issues were, reaching an “aha” moment, and then going merrily along one’s way having been, for want of a better term, “enlightened”. But now I see how naïve that view was for therapy, or spiritual practice, is a life long process and that one never “arrives”, one never “gets there” has the luxury of taking solace in ensconcing oneself in spiritual bliss. It is always a process and is always underway. It makes me think of the New Testament admonishment to “Be filled with the Spirit of God” which a pastor of old explained that in the Greek it actually means, “Be ye ‘being filled’ with the Spirit.” In other words, one should always be “being filled: with the Spirit of God.

Re “unpacking my heart with words”, I used to think that at some point the task would be complete and the heart would be unpacked. Well, yes, at some point it gets unpacked of the burdens that are weighing on the heart at that moment. BUT, guess what? Immediately there are more that surface! For the “heart” is not a concrete phenomena, it does not dwell in time and space, it is an infinite domain, it is that part of our life in which our infinite nature, the God who is within, intersects with the finite world. We will spend the rest of our life exploring that infinite world, that part of our life which Jesus called the “belly out of which shall flow rivers of living water.”

We must beware of obsessing with the quest though. We must pay attention to what surfaces from the heart, give it due attention, discuss it with spiritual mentors and close friends, pray about it, and then drop it for the time and turn out attention to the day-to-day responsibilities of life, the infinitely important mundane tasking of “chopping wood, carrying water.” If we don’t have this balance, our spiritual endeavors will evolve into merely a narcissistic endeavor, a function of the ego designed to make us ostentatiously holy which is exactly what the the Pharisees did.