Tag Archives: W. H. Auden

Auden on the Incarnation

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The Incarnation is the story of the Word being made flesh, the “enfleshment” of the Holy to provide us a model for our life. This incarnation has many dimensions. I like to think of it as the process of “coming down” from our head into our heart, dwelling in our flesh, the mind-body duality finding some degree of resolution. In some sense “coming down from on high” is coming down from our head into our guts, the Word being woven into the fabric of our day to day life. The Gospel becomes experience, no longer consisting of mere dogma that we have imbibed from our Christian culture. Read the following excerpt from W. H. Auden about this process, especially that powerful notion of “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

“Climb the Rugged Cross of the Moment”

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One thing I love about being involved in the blog-o-sphere is that I learn from my followers. Just yesterday I discovered through one of them about Parker Palmer who I had not heard of before. Here is a note from Wikipedia about Parker’s views on faith:
Faith is not a set of beliefs we are supposed to sign up for he says. It is instead the courage to face our illusions and allow ourselves to be disillusioned by them. It is the courage to walk through our illusions and dispel them. He states the opposite of faith is not doubt, it is fear – fear of abandoning illusions because of our comfort level with them. For example, not everything is measurable and yet so much of what we do has that yardstick applied to it. Another illusion is “I am what I do …. my worth comes from my functioning. If there is to be any love for us, we must succeed at something.” He says in this example that it is more important to be a “human being” rather than a “human doing.” We are not what we do. We are who we are. The rigors of trying to be faithful involves being faithful to one’s gifts, faithful to other’s reality, faithful to the larger need in which we are all embedded, faithful to the possibilities inherent in our common life.

I think it was W. H. Auden who encouraged us to “Climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.” These “illusions” (or pretenses) are flotsam and jetsam we have picked up from the vortex of human culture, a veil we have spun to hide the void. They are essential dimensions of our human, ego identity but when they are the whole of what we know as our identity, then the words of Jesus become relevant, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul.” The teachings of Jesus tell us that there is another dimension to life that we need to access if our life, our ego life, is to have meaning. Having this access does not destroy our very necessary ego life; it merely gives it meaning.

W. H. Auden on Love and Marriage

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W. H. Auden is one of my heroes.  He led a complicated, often tortured life, and out of his pain came some beautiful, inspiring poetry.  As Emily Dickinson  noted, “Essential oils are wrung.  They are the gift of screws.”  Here are several stanzas of one of my favorite Auden poems, “In Sickness and in Health”:

 

Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command—Rejoice.

Rejoice. What talent for the makeshift thought
A living corpus out of odds and ends?
What pedagogic patience taught
Pre-occupied and savage elements
To dance into a segregated charm?
Who showed the whirlwind how to be an arm,
And gardened from the wilderness of space
The sensual properties of one dear face?

Rejoice, dear love, in Love’s peremptory word;
All chance, all love, all logic, you and I,
Exist by grace of the Absurd,
And without conscious artifice we die:
O, lest we manufacture in our flesh
The lie of our divinity afresh,
Describe round our chaotic malice now,
The arbitrary circle of a vow.

That this round O of faithfulness we swear
May never wither to an empty nought
Nor petrify into a square,
Mere habits of affection freeze our thought
In their inert society, lest we
Mock virtue with its pious parody
And take our love for granted, Love, permit
Temptations always to endanger it.ty

 

The Flat Earth Society?

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We look with bemusement today on the Flat Earth Society and stand amazed that this was the prevailing world view at one point in the past. And I’m sure that when the world was believed to be flat, many were persecuted and even killed for daring to question that “modern science” of the day. Of course, now we know that we are far beyond such tomfoolery and look at the world in the way that is objective, having finally grasped…pretty well…the nature of reality.

But I just don’t think that is the case. “Reality” is always in flux and in time to come there will be certain facets of today’s prevailing wisdom that our descendants will view with the same bemusement and scorn. And, this is true individually as well as collectively. There are so many things which I accept as common place today which forty years ago would have been preposterous.

This insight gives me pause very often. For example, I have very strong feelings about the current political campaign in the United States. And I see how polarized our country is on the same issue. But, as they say, “This too shall pass.” I don’t know what will transpire but I do have faith that “there is a wisdom that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Shakespeare)

A core issue is the transitory nature of life, including our belief systems. If we could only remember that at best we “see through a glass darkly” then perhaps we could be a bit less arrogant of regarding “the bad guys” and, with a little bit of luck and a strong tail wind, perhaps they will be a little less arrogant regarding us!

On this issue…and I realize it is a recurrent theme of mine…I always like to share an observation from W. H. Auden who posited the notion that our agreed-upon conventional reality hides the:

Snarl of the abyss
That lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed upon what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light
Of the collected lie.

 

Waging the War I Am!

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At times we soar. At times we crawl through the mud. But, the sum of it all is that….we be. I wish it was only soaring. But it just ain’t. It seems so much of it is mudding. But, in reality, there has been a whole lot of soaring. It is all a matter of perspective. How do we see things and, if we are honest, how do we choose to see things—is the glass half full or is it half empty?

But, when the curtain call comes, we can only declare that we succeeded the mandate “to be.” And as we pursued that mandate, we hopefully echoed the sentiments of W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are.” Sometimes I think I should rename my blog, “Waging the war I am”!

Perils of Excessive Love

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As is obvious, I love words. They speak volumes too us, but only if we are willing to break them open and let their meaning flow. Someone once said that to make a poem just grab a word and pull on it. It is the “pulling on it” that breaks it and lets its hidden riches spring forth.

Now we can’t do this with all words! That would get absurd. But key words, words that portend great value merit some of this “pulling”. I would like to focus briefly on the word “love.”

It is so easily used and has become so common place that often it has no value. For example, two people meet and find each other attractive, they are consumed with lust, and they “do the deed”, and ipso facto they announced, “Oh, we are in love!” Well, perhaps but only time will tell.

In my clinical practice, in my personal experience, and in my reading I have seen so many examples of horrible things take place under the name of “love.” For example, I’ve seen parents control and manipulate their children to keep them dependent on them, to keep them safe from “this evil, dangerous world”, when their real intent was merely to keep them from leaving home. I’ve seen this “invertedness” so extreme that at best the only “marrying-out” that could take place was to marry and pull up a double-wide next door to mom and daddy. I’ve seen extended families living in double-wides on a small plot of land. I’ve seen marriages gravely impaired because the primary emotional attachment with one of the partners was still with his/her mother.

A popular bromide is “love holds with an open hand.” It is often hard to love with that in mind as our own neediness is to powerful; and neediness is part of the human experience and even a component of love. But when neediness becomes paramount it could devour the other person and everyone in its path. Tangentially related, W. H. Auden asked, ‘Suppose we love no friends or wives, but certain patterns in our lives?”

C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce describes one mother’s love as being so needy and so oblivious to the reality of her son that she is willing to “love” him into hell itself. He described this “excess of love” as a “defect”, noting “She loved her son too little, not too much….But it well may be that at this moment she’s demanding to have him down with her in hell. That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it.”

Darkness and Poor Choices

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Life is incredible difficult at times. And then, at the end we die. It certainly must have been easier before we developed consciousness, the “knowledge of good and evil”. But, we can’t go back. As Sartre noted, there is “No Exit.”

Most of us cope adequately at least. But there are so many who do not have the resources to cope and life just beats the hell out of them. I know a few who fall into this category and they struggle even though they have so much going for them. Auden likened them unto the “toy of some great pain.” It is as if some darkness has enthralled them and will not let them go and it has nothing to do with intelligence, or will power, or moral integrity.

People in the grip of this pain often despair completely and make horrible choices, some of which we read about in the head lines. Others lead “lives of quiet desperation.” We must always remember that:

The Void desires to have you for its creature,
A doll through whom It may ventriloquise
Its vast resentment as your very own,
Because Negation has nor form nor feature,
And all Its lust to power is impotent
Unless the actual It hates consent.
(W. H. Auden)

Churches and “group think”

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The origins of my recent concern with spiritual incest lie in my youth when I was raised in a very cloistered denominational environment. I would like to elaborate as it would help shed light on my observations.

My first year out of high school I spent in a very conservative seminary.   This seminary taught formally and rigorously themes which I had already imbibed in my church upbringing.  For example, there was pronounced emphasis on the Pauline admonishment to, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.”  This meant to be morally upright so that the community would clearly know that you were different because of your faith, that your Christian testimony was unsullied by the temptations of the world.  But this same teaching was applied to ecclesiastical teachings as we were taught that our churches also should be “set apart” by our doctrinal purity and by our hard-line stance on moral issues of the day.  Furthermore, we were taught that this moral and doctrinal purity had set us apart throughout history, even back to the time of Christ, as we had been the only church which had been “stead fast in the faith” even as other churches routinely departed from the “faith once delivered unto the saints.” And another dimension of this teaching was that we were the only true church, the only church with historical continuity back to the original church that Jesus had started when he noted,  “Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

We did allow that there were people in other denominations who were saved…somewhat… provided that in some shape form or fashion they had “accepted the Lord Jesus as their Savior”;  but by virtue of not belonging to the “true church” they would not be part of the “bride of Christ” when they got to heaven.  This “bride of Christ” was an exalted status that would be given to the true church that had steadfastly held to the foundations of the faith throughout history.  However, there were many who were not saved and who would spend eternity in hell,  among them being Catholics, Jews, and Mormons and that is not even counting the hordes in other cultures who had not even heard of Christ.

Now, one example of the “historical scholarship” alluded to already needs to be further explained.  Great emphasis was placed on tracing church lineage back to the time of Christ as the only true church had to be able to prove historical continuity back to the time of Christ.  This was done by painstakingly researching church history and ascertaining which religious groups and movements adhered to cardinal teachings of the faith, one of which was “believer’s baptism”, meaning rejection of pedo-baptism (sprinkling of infants).

I could go on and on with an endless litany of beliefs and practices which set us apart as special people.  And, indeed it was often noted that the Bible taught that God would create a “peculiar” people (and, oh my Lord, were we ever “peculiar”!!!!), a people “set apart”, a “chosen people” who had the task of representing the Kingdom on earth.  Furthermore, we had the task of “standing in the gap” and acting as a deterrent from the onslaught of the evil forces that always beset this “wicked world.”

Now, so much of this dogma has a place if taken with moderation and with humility.  For example, I think that persons of faith will stand out and be conspicuous by simply representing quality and by seeking value in their life.  But they will not have to flaunt it!  And they certainly will not have to announce it with pride and arrogance!  They will not have to be ostentatious with it.  It will not have to be a response to an impoverished identity;  it will not have to be a fig leaf that hides them from their existential nakedness.

And this “incest” label is admittedly heavy-handed and is not exclusive to sectarian religion.  All religions, and indeed all groups, tend to be self-serving and tend to set their boundaries too rigid.  All groups tend to err towards “group-think” in which their primary purpose becomes the perpetuation of their own dogma and the exclusion of those who are threatening.  I recently quoted W. H. Auden on this note, where he described the individual who would deign to question conventional wisdom, diving into

…the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie.

The Illness that we Are

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In the book of Genesis the subject of nakedness is introduced to us.  Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and felt naked, exposed, and God fashioned for them a fig leaf garment and hid their nakedness.  The Bible said that this garment hid them from their sense of shame.

Art in recent centuries, and movies in recent times, often includes the image of the nude woman, caught unawares, covering her breasts with an arm and/or her privates with a hand.  Most men also have had dreams or fears of that horrible feeling of being caught nude in public, being exposed, being vulnerable.

I think this fig leaf represents the function of the ego in human culture.  It is a contrivance that hides us from our nakedness.  It is a persona that we can present to our community and to the world and not have to show to them the frail, frightened vulnerable creature that we are in the depths of our heart.  And this ego consciousness is very important as without it there would be no “world” as we know it.  For without it, we would be teeming multitudes of quivering flesh and could not function as a culture.  We would not be a world.

But this ego consciousness has become a monster that is run amok and threatens to destroy us.  Instead of acknowledging our frailty and recognizing the frailty of others, we have organized into armed camps the purpose of which is to barricade ourselves behind piles of “stuff”.  Or, to allude briefly to one dimension of the problem, in our country we have isolated into ideologically-armed political camps, each camp unwilling to recognize its own vulnerability.  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.” (John Masefield)

But as individuals we cannot correct the ills of the world. The only “illness” we are responsible for is illness that we harbor. But we can discover that as we address that illness in our own heart, as we “wage the war we are”, we will be a bit of an antidote to the collective illness that threatens us.

Political Polarization and Spirituality

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I am following this political brouhaha closely this year in part because it is such a look-see into the human psyche, individually and collectively. I’ve said many times, “We wage the war we are” (W. H. Auden) and that is true also on the individual and collective levels.

I’m really appalled at the overt hostility present today in the political process, the unabashed hatred of O’Bama in particular. At times, on the extreme, it is not even subtle. And I look at the other side…my side…and I see that we too, the “good guys” (wink, wink)…are dug in at the heels also. I recently casually noted to a couple of friends that the real problem in our country is a spiritual problem. But, I quickly backed down, realizing how dorky that sounded. And, merely trotting out the words “spiritual problem” can sound kind of dorky.

But, let me say the same thing but in different words. We have a problem of “values”. The issue is, “What do we value, individually and collectively?” Our need is some unifying ultimate value, “Ultimate” if you please, toward which we can strive individually and collectively. Without this Ultimate value we are inevitable fragmented and any collective purpose is difficult to achieve. Now as far as naming this “Ultimate Value” I have no problem with the word “God”. But that word has been so banalized and vulgarized that many people find it off-putting.

And let me close with a John Masefield sonnet which explains why this word has become so banalized, so vulgarized:

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things held in awe.

Masefield saw that so often the object of our worship, our “highest value”, or “God”, is merely our self.