Tag Archives: spirituality

“Eyes Wide Shut” opened!

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One of my favorite blogging friends is a beautiful young woman who has an equally beautiful little girl to whom she is obviously devoted.  (See http://hastywords.wordpress.com) She wrote this morning of the importance of “seeing” with feeling rather than merely with cold, brutal “cognition.”  And I’m still learning to “see” this way myself and, let me say, it is disconcerting to say the least.

 

Here are her thoughts:

 

You are missing the bigger picture if you are using only your eyes to see.

All of us, every single one of us, are more than what we appear to be. We are all beautiful and ugly in a million different ways in every second we breathe. When we are simply an image branded with likes and dislikes we make enemies of our friends. When we learn to see with our hearts we learn to make friends of our enemies. We are love and hate, we are perfectly imperfect, we are all strong and weak. We are all a story behind the picture that eyes alone can’t perceive.
I don’t like stereo typing but it happens, before you start slinging careless words remember stereotypes are meant for groups of people not to castrate individuals one at a time. None of us can be stereotyped…not one!

 

 

More on Ego-Ridden Faith

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Yesterday I addressed dualistic thinking and the “saved” vs “unsaved” emphasis of some religions, portraying that emphasis as merely an expression of an “us” vs “them” approach to life. This expression of faith is very guilt-ridden and must have very rigid boundaries and often appears to be searching daily to find things “that we don’t do that others do” which “make us good, and them bad.” Looking back on my life, I realize that my tenuous identity was explicitly based on this false premise and consisted of a relentless list of “thou shalt nots” which I religiously sought to adhere to to compensate for a deep-seated self-loathing. And even though I was a professing Christian, that approach to spirituality was intrinsically antithetical to the teachings of Christ who said that He accepted us “as is.”

Now, in this “second half of life” (to borrow a Richard Rohr term), I find that spirituality is letting down some of these rigid boundaries and acknowledging some of those unsavory impulses, a process that Karl Jung described as “embracing your shadow” or “withdrawing your projections.” For, as Jung also pointed out, “What you resist, persists” and is therefore created in your outside world. To illustrate, the notion of “saved” would not have any meaning, would not even exist, without its complement of “unsaved” much like “green” would have no meaning or existence without “un-green.”

But recognizing this spiritual subtlety is antithetical to the interest of the ego who, should it recognize this ambiguity, would have its authority in jeopardy. So usually when an ego-bound person encounters teachings like this, they will respond with something like, “Of the devil” or “straight from the pits of hell” or “damn New Age stuff.” Thus the ego continues merrily on its way, smug in its faith, not listening to Shakespeare who noted, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

“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.

C. S. Lewis and Shame

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In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis said re shame:

Don’t you remember on earth there were things too hot to touch with you finger but you could drink them alright? Shame is like that. If you will attempt it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing; but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.

This made me think of the Richard Rohr observation which I recently shared, “I look daily for some little humiliation in my life.” He explained that he did this as it reflected an opportunity to address an occasion of his ego rearing its ugly head.

I think that Lewis and Rohr realize/realized the role that shame plays in spirituality. Its presence, when not addressed and acknowledged, leads to profound ugliness and even brutality in the spiritual world. But, addressed and acknowledged, embraced if you will, provides an opportunity to draw a little closer to one’s Source. For, I intuitively know that shame lies at the core of our identity and we have to tippy-toe into it as we approach that core. And, I might add it behooves us to have someone holding our hand as we begin to tippy-toe into it—perhaps a pastor, a therapist, a friend, or a spouse.

But we must avoid the easy way out which is to cling to dogma, those “well worn words and ready phrases” (Conrad Aiken) which insulate us from any real, human/spiritual experience. We must go beyond the shell of the words, the “letter of the law”, and get into the Spirit.

One last thought on this note. Twenty years ago John Bradshaw was in the self-help vanguard with a series of books on the family. In one of them he noted that in his clinical work he felt that shame was the core issue with a lot of deep seated issues, that often there were high-falutin diagnoses which could merely be explained in terms of “shame-based” behavior and emotions. My own clinical work confirms this. We are often dealing only with deep-seated shame which binds the individual and will continue to do so until it is gradually, gently, and graciously brought to the fore and experienced and then processed.

Elif Shafak and faith

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English: Elif Şafak

Image via Wikipedia

Elif Shafak delves into faith in her book, Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within. From her book, I think she would call herself a “Sufi” personally. But she makes a thoughtful distinction between atheism and agnosticism. She noted that she lacked the arrogance to outright reject the notion of God, as in atheism, but implied that she found herself agnostic at times. She described an agnostic as “befitting of people who were perpetually bewildered about things, including religion.” She described an atheist as “sure of his convictions, and speaks in sentences that end with a full stop. An agnostic puts only a comma at the end of his remarks…he will keep pondering, wondering, doubting.”

Shafak might describe me as an “agnostic.” Hmmm. But, I appear to have the gift of faith which perseveres through the tribulation of doubt. Though to reiterate on old refrain of mine, “I’ll take an agnostic ( or an atheist ) over the notion of blindly regurgitating what one has been indoctrinated with.”