Tag Archives: Toni Morrison

I’m Getting a Reservation in Doggie Heaven!!!

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My beloved 11 year old daughter is now in doggie heaven, chasing butterflies, ground squirrels, rabbits and scratching furiously in the celestial dirt for “divine” insects.  She has found her brother and sister, also delightful dachshunds, and they are comparing notes with each other about the parental “mistakes” they were subjected to down here. In a text I just received, she told me that all of them completely forgive us and love us dearly.  She also told me she already put in my request with Dog that a place be reserved for me and their mother as “Doggie heaven” sounds like a better idea to both of us!  Lassie told her to tell us that She would “keep us in mind.”

I had a nice talk with this darling little girl this morning before we took her to the vet.  I told her how she had continued the lesson in loving in which her two predecessors had already done the “heavy lifting.”  For I had learned through them, and in my marriage to their mother, that love is not so much a thing that you “do” as it is something that you are “open to” and thus receive.  A 13th century Persian poet Rumi said it is what happens when you discard all the barriers you have constructed to keep it from happening.

With these three doggies working in consort with their mother for the past three decades I have learned that the heart offers evocative potential, an infinite source of riches which cannot be accessed without the ability to recognize the resistance that Rumi noted.  When the heart is open…Toni Morrison described it as “petal open”… it is full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare) and a Divine work of art like a puppy, or a delicate tulip, or a beautiful sunset, or a lovely wife can “evoke” a Divinity that has always been there.  This experience is what the spiritual tradition of my background termed, “the Spirit of God”; and that notion is now profoundly meaningful to me.

There is an absence in my soul this afternoon.  This absence can be described as an “Absence” for it is during loss that we can feel a dimension of our heart that is closely akin to the Divine.  For this experience can bring to our awareness…on a deeply emotional and experiential level…the profound connection that we can have with the whole of this world if we find the courage to “lose our mind and come to our senses.” (Fritz Perls, saw “senses” as the “feeling” dimension of human experience.)

I am a Writer

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I’m a writer.  It has taken me 65 years to make this bold assertion though this blogging experience of the past five years has been a very tentative, left-handed way of making this announcement.  And “endeavor” was a deliberately chosen term as it has been and always will be a struggle as writing of any substance must come from the heart; and anything that flows from that bastion of “beastly little treasures” will be a struggle.  The heart is the innermost recess of our being, so “inner most” that, if you will let me slip into Zen for a moment, it is a “No Thing” and can best be described as emptiness.  Therefore, if you “know” what your heart is…that is if you cognitively grasp your heart, or think that you do…I would beg to differ with you.  For the “heart” always lies beyond our conscious grasp.  And this “emptiness” is very much related to the Christian teaching of “losing your self to find your self” and finding our “self” in the sense that Jesus had in mind is much more than a cognitive, rational, linear-thinking enterprise.  You could even say it is a “work of the cross” but not in an intellectual way but in the constellation of archetypal energies which will often feel like a crucifixion.

Acknowledgement that anything is beyond the grasp of our conscious mind is frightening to most people, especially those of us in the West.  Since the Descartes dictum, “I think, therefore I am” the West has been worshipping thinking or reason and we have slowly come to be convinced that the whole of life can be reduced to linear thinking, i.e. reason.  And this has made us technologically and scientifically great but left us with a spiritual emptiness that will soon leave my country, the United States, with a man who is egregiously mentally ill as its President.  “They call it Reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.” (Goethe)

But writing and all artistic enterprises can only spring from a heart that novelist Toni Morrison described as “petal open.”  That is where spirituality flows from, other than the “letter of the law” variety which is only what the Apostle Paul called a “work of the flesh.”  My favorite description of this vulnerable heart was written by Shakespeare whose character Hamlet, with great intensity lamented to his mother that he could never unburden his heart to her because it was, “bronzed o’er with the damned cast of thought so that it” is a barrier against “sense” (or feeling) and thus not “made of penetrable stuff.”  Shakespeare knew that an open heart can be “penetrated” while a closed heart, one shrouded by an enculturated verbal patina will be reduced to mindless palaver, “the well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

But words do have the capacity to furrow into the depths of our heart and there we can use them to “unpack our heart.”(see footnote below).  But the unopen heart will only reflect from its patina a slough of jargon and packaged, formulaic speech in accordance with what the speaker perceives will gain him the greatest approbation.  Here is the opening stanza of a poem by Irish poet W. R. Rodgers who in 1942 recognized the “post-truth” dimension of language that is currently plaguing our world.

WORDS (an excerpt)

By W. R. Rodgers

Once words were unthinking things, signaling

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar,

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish,

Its actual ache or naked rancour.

And once they were the gangways for anger,

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires.

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise

Carried the feverish message of fact

In their effortless core.  Once they were these,

But now they are the life-like skins and screens

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae,

To terrify or tame, cynical shows

Meant only to deter or draw men on,

The tricks and tags of every demagogue,

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys,

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.

(FOOTNOTE:  For you Shakespearean scholars, I am misapplying this line of “unpacking my heart with words” to describe something useful, when in the play “Hamlet” it described prostitutes deliberately plying their trade knowing that they could then go and perfunctorily confess their sins.  Hmm!)

A Perspective on “Enlightenment”

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WordPress and Facebook introduce me to so many interesting people from different walks of life who I would have never met otherwise. I would like to introduce you today to a young Korean woman, Wanyoung Kim, who can be found on Facebook and is stunningly intelligent and erudite.

Recently she declared on Facebook, “You can be mentally Enlightened, but it is really the power of Christ that heals a person.” I was puzzled as this declaration reflected a dimension of Christian faith that I had not noted before with her postings. So I responded, “I agree. But, I’m curious how you would define ‘Christ’? This is not a cynical question. I just know that you are a very thoughtful person.”

Ms. Kim responded with:

A friend of mine (name omitted here)once described Him as the Internet of all hearts and minds- I cannot say it more succinctly than this. To believe is to know that his suffering accounted for all grievances of every heart and mind that walked upon this Earth in world history. ‪Christ is a man of sorrows himself like me, one can say. The heart of Christ is to see Him in every human being including myself- to empathize with the pain I see of a stranger in the street and this empathy is a healing act where a collective feeling of sharedness which in itself is a unity to the Other reassuring them we all are part of this suffering of Christ. I become Christ my self.

Ms. Kim does not see Christ through the narrow prism that I was taught as a child in conservative Arkansas as a Baptist in the fifties and sixties. And as I read her insightful observations some ancient part of my soul…which I often refer to as “literallew”…wants to denigrate her thoughts immediately. But “literallew” is increasingly buried under the Light of what I now see as Spirit of God which wants us to interpret the scripture and not merely regurgitate it as we have been taught. And this is not merely an intellectual enterprise but a gut-level enterprise that cannot be taught with “book learnin’”. It requires a willingness to have a heart that is “petal open” as Toni Morrison once put it; or, in the words of Shakespeare, a heart that is full of “penetrable stuff.” And this is scary for it subjects one to the flow of life and deprives him/her from the cold, sterile “certainty” that I was told was available and strived for so desperately and never was able to obtain.

Christ is not a “thing” that can be reduced to our “ideas” and thus captured by our ideology, as noble as that ideology might appear to be. He was, and is, an expression of the “Wholly Other” and can be known only when we are willing to experience our own finitude which can only occur when we come face to face with the Otherness that faces us daily with each one we meet and even with this beautiful world itself.  Eckhart Tolle reports He is the “Presence” which is the only thing that “is” if we can separate ourselves from our compulsive thinking.

But seeing Christ in non-linear terms requires an ability to see ourselves in non-linear terms which for most of us requires a radical transformation in self-definition and view of the world. It requires a transformative shift of perspective which brings to my mind the notion from the Apostle Paul, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” It is much easier to just tenaciously hang onto the  way that we have always seen and experienced our world. As W. H. Auden put it, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

But I’m aware that what I’m writing now is “nuts” to nearly anyone from my youth that might happen to read this. This does not make any “sense” to a linear mind that is confined to the time-space continuum. But I have learned that it is very possible to escape confinement in that prison and still respect it and those that live in therein. And I, too, can still live within its confines which is known as “reality” even as I revel in the freedom which Christ represented and offers today.

 

The Apostle Paul and Anxiety

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The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians telling them that he had been with them “in weakness, and fear, and much trembling.”  I think Paul was referring to what clinicians would describe as “mood vacillation”.  But, to put it in terms of plain English, Paul was saying that he had mood swings, that he battled anxiety and depression.  And I suggest that this stemmed from genuine faith and genuine faith includes a lot of self doubt, awareness of personal demons, and personal insecurities.

A key element in the development of my faith has been giving up certainty and the compulsive need to be “right.”  And when one does this, he/she often deals with “weakness, fear, and much trembling” in his/her day to day life.  This is merely part of being alive and being open to the full gamut of human experience, the full gamut of spiritual experience.  Toni Morrison described it as being “petal open.”

In closing, I would like to recommend reading Richard Rohr re the Apostle Paul.  (You will have to google these terms.  I’m’ still learning how to provide links!)