Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Newtown, Ct, Faith, Hope, and Action

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The recent tragedy at Newtown, Ct. revealed the best and worst of our country. The worst is obvious—senseless violence, self-loathing turned outward. The best is seen in the ability of some of the parents to mobilize and in the midst of their agony voice a desire to take a lead in changing the laws re gun ownership. The event was so horrible that most of us can never really understand unless we have lived through something similar. It was horrible enough for us to hear and read about but to have actually had it happen to you is beyond my ability to comprehend. Part of me would be tempted to immediately surrender to bleak despair which always beckons just beyond the periphery of our conscious mind. In tragedies like this even our faith is sorely tested as that despair threatens that bedrock of our life, tempting us to go down the rabbit-hole of meaninglessness ourselves.

Maureen Down, the exquisite columnist for the New York Times, responded to this tragedy with a column entitled, “Why, God.” She then shared a response from a rabbi friend of hers, Father Kevin O’Neil,  to whom she posed the question. Here is his wisdom:

How does one celebrate Christmas with the fresh memory of 20 children and 7 adults ruthlessly murdered in Newtown; with the searing image from Webster of firemen rushing to save lives ensnared in a burning house by a maniac who wrote that his favorite activity was “killing people”? How can we celebrate the love of a God become flesh when God doesn’t seem to do the loving thing? If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives?
The killings on the cusp of Christmas in quiet, little East Coast towns stirred a 30-year-old memory from my first months as a priest in parish ministry in Boston. I was awakened during the night and called to Brigham and Women’s Hospital because a girl of 3 had died. The family was from Peru. My Spanish was passable at best. When I arrived, the little girl’s mother was holding her lifeless body and family members encircled her.
They looked to me as I entered. Truth be told, it was the last place I wanted to be. To parents who had just lost their child, I didn’t have any words, in English or Spanish, that wouldn’t seem cheap, empty. But I stayed. I prayed. I sat with them until after sunrise, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking, to let them know that they were not alone in their suffering and grief. The question in their hearts then, as it is in so many hearts these days, is “Why?”
The truest answer is: I don’t know. I have theological training to help me to offer some way to account for the unexplainable. But the questions linger. I remember visiting a dear friend hours before her death and reminding her that death is not the end, that we believe in the Resurrection. I asked her, “Are you there yet?” She replied, “I go back and forth.” There was nothing I wanted more than to bring out a bag of proof and say, “See? You can be absolutely confident now.” But there is no absolute bag of proof. I just stayed with her. A life of faith is often lived “back and forth” by believers and those who minister to them.
Implicit here is the question of how we look to God to act and to enter our lives. For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did over 2,000 years ago.
I believe differently now than 30 years ago. First, I do not expect to have all the answers, nor do I believe that people are really looking for them. Second, I don’t look for the hand of God to stop evil. I don’t expect comfort to come from afar. I really do believe that God enters the world through us. And even though I still have the “Why?” questions, they are not so much “Why, God?” questions. We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not.
One true thing is this: Faith is lived in family and community, and God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be God’s presence. When my younger brother, Brian, died suddenly at 44 years old, I was asking “Why?” and I experienced family and friends as unconditional love in the flesh. They couldn’t explain why he died. Even if they could, it wouldn’t have brought him back. Yet the many ways that people reached out to me let me know that I was not alone. They really were the presence of God to me. They held me up to preach at Brian’s funeral. They consoled me as I tried to comfort others. Suffering isolates us. Loving presence brings us back, makes us belong.
A contemporary theologian has described mercy as “entering into the chaos of another.” Christmas is really a celebration of the mercy of God who entered the chaos of our world in the person of Jesus, mercy incarnate. I have never found it easy to be with people who suffer, to enter into the chaos of others. Yet, every time I have done so, it has been a gift to me, better than the wrapped and ribboned packages. I am pulled out of myself to be love’s presence to someone else, even as they are love’s presence to me.
I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.

In moments like this, it is easy to rely on religious and spiritual bromides. And I’m glad this formulaic wisdom is available as it too certainly has a place. We do the best we can. But this Rabbi’s response speaks to me as he acknowledges the uncertainty in life that religion cannot take away and should not in some instances. The uncertainty provides an opportunity for a mature faith that cannot be found with mere spiritual rhetoric and platitudes, regardless of how noble the intent. And this faith avows a hope…a Hope…and a courage to respond with meaningful action. When life disappoints, and certainly when life deals us a body-blow, can we find the Grace to right ourselves at some point in our grief and act with maturity, intelligence, and spiritual wisdom. How do we “give the name of action” to our emotions?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

(Hamlet, William Shakespeare)

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” said Chicken Little

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Chicken Little’s famous lamentation has surfaced again in the form of the Mayan apocalypse scheduled for today. And this lunacy has been going on for thousands of years. (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/owen-egerton/11-other-times-the-world-_b_2332564.html)

Well, sooner or later, one of these ne’er-do’wells is going to be right as, according to physicists, the world is going to end at some point. And, there are certainly lunatics around today who could cause this to happen more immediately, given their crazed belief in Ultimate Truth, and a willingness to destroy the world to bring this Truth about…or at least wreak havoc on those of us who do not believe as they do.

Ultimately, we are all fearful of death and that is what this hysteria is about. We are going to die and it is a scary proposition that our ego cannot brook. We cannot accept our simple mortality and thus invent crazy belief systems to cling to so that this fear can be assuaged. And even tenable belief systems are often interpreted in such a way that they too are merely an escape from reality. And then we have these crazy episodic notions of how this end will come about so abruptly.

I like the approach that Jesus offered to the subject of mortality. To paraphrase, he said, “Yes, you are going to die. So, go ahead and die so that you can live.” And he did not attempt to camouflage our mortality but emphasized the presence of an Ultimate Reality that is always with us and to which we will return upon our death. And his teachings…and the teachings of the Christian tradition…contend that this Ultimate Reality can find expression in our contemporary mortal life if we are willing to undergo death now in a spiritual sense.

T.S. Eliot in his brilliant Four Quartets noted the importance of this symbolic death in our life and added, “And the time of death is every moment.” Or, to put in in Pauline terms, “I die daily.” Each day of our life there are little moments to die in the sense of humbling ourselves, accepting the limitations of reality and our limited grasp on reality, and making room for others and for the world at large. And, yes there are heroic individuals who often face death in a more literal sense. And at some point we will all face death in a literal sense and our ability to accept it at that moment will not be unrelated to how we have accepted the process of death in our day to day life, how we have accepted the bruises that our ego has been subjected to by “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

(A FACETIOUS CONCLUSION—It is tempting to start to daily proclaim myself that “the end is nigh, the end is nigh” as I just might be right at some point! Then wouldn’t that be so gratifying? Everyone would stand back in awe, saying, “Hey, Literary Lew got it right.”)

 

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.

“I Feel Your Pain”

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One of my blog-o-shere friends responded re a recent post of mine about the role of feeling in alleviating the “heaviness” of life’s burdens. (Twominutesofgrace@wordpress.com)  She has been a therapist at one point in her life and noted how that part of her healing was learning the art of “reciprocal vulnerability” in the therapeutic relationship.  One of the pitfalls of being professional care-givers is that so often we do carry our own load of guilt and shame and seek to assuage those feelings with our clients. If we go too far in that direction, if we trot out the Clintonian, “I feel your pain”  too often, we might discover we have made it too much about ourselves.  But if we refuse vulnerability in the first place—barricaded behind professional jargon, cliche, and the DSM IV—we don’t need to be in the position of therapist, pastor, or “care-giver” in the first place.

Someone once said, “To be is to be vulnerable.”  I think the Apostle Paul had this in mind when he wrote to one church, “I was with you in weakness, and fear, and much trembling.”  Shakespeare, in Hamlet, described vulnerability as having a heart “full of penetrable stuff” suggesting that without vulnerability we are “impenetrable.”  And impenetrability is the natural trajectory of the human ego.  It resists anything which causes it discomfort.

 

Heavy Hearts Need Loose Lips

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The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

These words from King Lear are very important to me, taking significance in my life at a very critical juncture decades ago when I was just learning about feelings. Shakespeare here taught me that it was important to just “let go” and value what I was feeling and deign to verbalize re these feelings.. This was critical as I had spent the first half of my life carefully monitoring myself and “thinking” and “saying” only what I “ought to say.” Yes, there were times when, like a kid with a new toy, I over did it and expressed some feelings at times when I should not have. But not often; and when I did, I usually did so with friends who were understanding.

And then for a few years I had the opportunity to facilitate this skill when I worked as a counselor, teaching young teen-agers the importance of their feelings and the value of expressing them, not only with words, but with art, music, and dance. It was very powerful to witness a young person make this discovery and watch many of them flourish. And I’ve seen the same phenomena with friends and acquaintances over the decades as the course of one’s life can grant maturity and with it the temerity to value one’s own subjective experience.

But I often overlook the first phrase of this Shakespearean observation—the weight of this sad time we must obey. Our culture’s disdain for feelings accumulates over the eons and becomes very “heavy.” And with this “heaviness” comes a profound sadness. And this sadness will be alleviated only when we “unpack our heart with words” (Shakespeare, “Hamlet”) and entertain the realm of “feeling which loosens rather than ties the tongue. (W. H. Auden.)

 

Death Panels and our Fear of Death

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Bill Keller in the New York Times wrote an article on October 7 entitled, “How to Die.” He was explaining the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying, a protocol that some British physicians are using to help terminally ill patients address their imminent demise. Yes, this brings to mind the infamous “death panels” of our dear friend Sarah Palin. But it is nothing of the sort. It is merely a protocol that physicians can gently and professionally use, if deemed appropriate, for patients who have no treatment options remaining and are in great pain. “It is not hastening death. It is giving choices,” declared Keller.

This approach seems so much more humane than does out hysteria-driven, death-denying obfuscation. Our culture needs to grow up and realize that death is an essential part of life and that it is simply going to happen; and that living in fierce denial of it only makes the parting more difficult. And, this denial system that we have created about death only makes it more difficult to live life fully in the first place while we are young and healthy. It was decades ago that Irvin Yalom declared that as long as we live in fear of death we are fearful of life also. You can’t live until you die! Hmm. Sounds a lot like something Jesus once said, doesn’t it?

Ernest Becker wrote a stunning book about this subject about three decades ago, The Denial of Death. He gave a brilliant portrayal of history as mankind’s efforts to deny his mortality, to pretend that he was going to live forever, and to interpret spiritual teachings and mythology to mean that he would live after death in some corporeal fashion.

The core issue is the ego. It is the ego who cannot fathom that it is such a contrivance, a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Some therapists and spiritual teachers have made a career out of this death issue, announcing in so many words, “Come to me and let me help you die.” Their belief is that once the individual is freed from the clutches of the ego…Karl Jung called this a “death”… he/she will no longer be ravaged by the fear of death.

Confirmation Bias and Epistemic Closure

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I learned a new word today…or pair of words—“epistemic closure.” Julian Sanchez used this term two years ago in conjunction with another term I recently learned and shared here—“confirmation bias.” To summarize, this refers to the human tendency to choose to believe what we want to, seek confirmation for that perspective, and shut out anything contrary. (See Sanchez’ observation at: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/07/epistemic-closure-technology-and-the-end-of-distance/)

Sanchez noted also that this is a human problem and not the exclusive province of any group or any ideology. But he did opine that it appeared to be a particularly egregious problem with the conservative movement in our country at that time; and, he would certainly agree that the problem is much worse in the intensity of this election campaign. This is becoming even more obvious in the past week, with Mr. Romney experiencing an hiccup in the polls, and the conservative press attacking the polls themselves, even Fox News.

The problem with this view of reality is the insularity. Feedback from the outside is discouraged and even in the greatest extremes forbidden. This always leads to madness. No, I’m not saying the conservative movement is mad; but I am saying there is madness on its extremes and these extremes have had too much influence on them. Even Karl Rove himself dismissed these extremists as “the nutty fringe.”

Emily Dickinson knew something about an insular life and her adaptation to this anguish was poetry. Here is an example:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.
The image of closing “the valves of her attention” is intense and vivid, cold and brutal. The person who does this has shut out the world and, like Hamlet, retreated “to a nutshell” and there comforts himself in “being king of infinite spaces.” Mental illness is a reference problem. When we have closed off all reference to the outside world, we are nuts. And on that note, Hamlet asked, “What is it to be mad but nothing else but mad?”

 

“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.

Prayer

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“My words fly up. My thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” King Claudius uttered this lament as he knelt in prayer with young Hamlet hovering nearby with murderous intent.

I think this is one of the pithiest notes about prayer that I’ve ever come across. Shakespeare was saying that for prayer to take place, words and thoughts must be conjoined and offered up wholeheartedly. In other words, there must be a singleness of purpose, a sublime focus. There must be meditation.

The Time is Out of Joint!

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“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that I was born to set it right.”

But Hamlet’s observation was skewed by his own personal demons. It was his time (i.e. world) that was out of joint and from his anguished perspective he deemed the whole of Denmark “out of joint.”

The doom-sayers, the proponents of “apocalypse now” always trouble me. Been there, done that…but grew out of it at some point. Yes, the world is always “out of joint” in that it is populated with individuals who are all too human. And, yes collectively we need to attempt to address this “dis-jointedness.” And even individually we have some responsibility to participate in this collective purge of the commonweal.

But our main focus always needs to be on our own “dis-jointedness”, our own brokenness, our own grave limitations. It is much too easy to avoid our personal woes and obsess with how evil the world or particular individuals are. The evils of the world can most effectively be addressed when we focus mainly on the evil that lurks in our own hearts; yes, even our noble, kind, loving, Christian hearts.