Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Evtach v'lo efchad – I will trust and not be afraid

Editor's preface

The words are from Isaiah. They serve as the text of the following reflections on the theme of trust by Joshua Boettiger. The occasion was his formal installation as rabbi of Congregation Beth El, in Bennington, Vermont, in May 2007.

Erik Erikson proposed that the development of trust is the first, most primal task of human development, shaped by the character of the relationship between mother and infant in the first year of life -- a task never completed, evolving in dynamic balance with mistrust throughout the life cycle, underlying our capacity and expression of hope and care for ourselves and others.

Joshua says that evtach v'lo efchad "is more a prayer than a statement of fact." When that prayer is consciously drawn into our regular and evolving practice, it becomes an instrument of the enduring task of human development Erikson describes.  So the insights of psychology and religion unite and serve a fuller understanding and experience of our lives.
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I want to welcome everyone here this evening, and I want to thank you for coming. I won’t repeat the names of those we are particularly grateful to tonight, but I do want to name and thank one person who has done an extraordinary amount of work, and who has done an extraordinary job around making this installation weekend happen -  Carrie Greene.

I first came up to Bennington six years ago as the rabbinic intern at Congregation Beth El – and felt a real kinship with this town, with the area, with the Jewish community, and essentially said to myself: I’d love to find a town like that to settle in when I get ordained. And so, you know, sometimes you can’t stand in the way when poetry wants to have its way with you – it felt deeply appropriate when this job opened up in my final year of seminary.

Even though the congregation and I have been working together now for nine months, it feels important to mark the beginning of this relationship. And I love what Adam said in his opening remarks around challenging one another. A chavruta in Judaism is one’s study partner. Chavrutas are supposed to learn together and debate l’shem shamayim, for the sake of heaven. The chavruta relationship is a sacred relationship, each partner working to bring out the best in the other, recognizing the unique gifts in the other, challenging the other lovingly. I think this model of chavruta, of being partners in study, is a fitting one to describe the relationship between a rabbi and a congregation. In Judaism, learning together is an act of serving God. It is said when two study Torah together, God is present. When this many of us study Torah together – which in a very real sense we are doing tonight – there’s a lot of God in the room. It’s a privilege to have come into this community, and to have been welcomed in such a full way. I don’t take this for granted.

As it says in the program, tonight provides an opportunity to mark where Congregation Beth El is at this moment in time. It’s an amazing history. People who I talk to are always saying, that was originally built as a synagogue? There’s been Jews in Bennington that long? And indeed, 2009 will be our centennial as a community. We have gone through different incarnations and resurrections – and it is really an inspiring story throughout. We treasure our small, strong community, and we treasure our relationship with the larger community in Bennington and beyond.

One other person who I want to thank, who I feel deserves special mention is Rabbi Howard Cohen – who served Beth El and the larger Bennington community for twelve plus years, who put so much of himself into this work and this synagogue and this town. And, among other things, did so much to bring our communities of faith in this town together around common projects.

The theme we are working with tonight is evtach v’lo efchad. I will trust and I will not be afraid. I have been turning this verse over in my head these past weeks. Of course it is easier said than done. Though it originally comes from Isaiah, we say it during the havdalah ritual, a time when we are reluctant to say goodbye to Shabbat, a time when the sky is darkening, a time of transition, a time when our prayers are most filled with longing, a time of fear mingled with hope. And we hold up a full cup of wine, and we say: I will trust and I will not be afraid. It’s more of a prayer than a statement of fact. Aviva Zornberg says one only says, don’t be afraid, when one is, in fact, afraid.

This past Yom Kippur, we talked about fear, and what a healthy relationship to fear might look like – so it feels appropriate now, to turn towards trust, to explore what that might look like to really learn how to move and live our lives from a place of trust. To choose trust, at least as much as we’re able.

In the world we live in, we have grown increasingly accustomed to the politics of fear, and it seems, in my experience, that the automatic fallback place, or default position is often one of fear, even if it’s subtle. That if we’re not conscious of it, we tend to make our decisions - as individuals, communities, and as a nation - from a place of fear. We want to preserve, and so much around us announces so often how much we are in the process of, or at risk of, losing. Starting with the earth, I guess, and the environmental crisis, which I believe is the most pressing issue of our time – and working out, or in, from there. It seems too easy to move through the world as if it were a place of scarcity, and the best case scenario is simply holding on to what we have. So how to respond, how not to despair?

It strikes me that trust is not something that just shows up one morning and announces itself. Perhaps trust comes in small moments, but then it retreats again. Maybe trusting is something we need to learn how to do, that it is an acquired skill. It has been occurring to me more and more that trust - the intention to cultivate trust – needs to be a practice. What does this mean? We need to develop habits that cultivate trust. Trust is not passive. Trust creates its own reality.

I think this is among the primary roles religion can play: it can give us practices that teach us how to trust.

There is the Jewish tradition of giving tzedakah (charity), or of hospitality, or of prayer that I might name as some trust practices, but of late, I have been thinking about the havdalah ritual itself. Now we do this ritual at the end of Shabbat, when there are three stars in the sky. We bless the wine, the spices, the light from the candle, distinction itself – all as a way of bringing some of the spirit of Shabbat with us into the week. This ritual is the beginning of a trust practice When it’s Shabbat, we are in Shabbat mind – mochin gadlut, as the rabbis called it, ‘big mind. Shabbat is trust. It’s essentially saying, OK, we’re all together now, we’re in this Shabbat mind of abundance and fellowship, but the regular week is about to begin – how can we hold onto this reality as we go back to our lives? Put differently, how can we remind each other to trust when we fall back into the daily rhythms of fear?

There’s a Rebbe Nachman story of a King and his faithful advisor. The advisor tells the king that there is a diseased wheat crop, and everyone in the kingdom has eaten from this diseased wheat and become mad. The men realize that either they eat of the crop and become mad as well – or – they don’t eat of it. But if they are sane and everyone else is mad, it will appear as if they are the ones who are mad! This feels a little bit like fear as it drives our society – that we’re catching this fear from what we eat, what we take in, or imbibe, as we go through each day.

In the end, they decide to eat the wheat, but before they do so, they each put a mark on the other’s face, so that, even in the midst of madness, they can look at one another, and be reminded by that mark, by the other, of what is really true. So we could call this the mark of trust in the other’s face. How much we need each other. One person cannot have enough trust by himself. And the rabbis say that about the mitzvot as well. There are 613 mitzvot in the Torah, but an individual cannot keep all those by him or herself. We need a community to keep them – literally. So we can remind one another. We can look at each other and say: right, it’s OK to trust.

How can trust become an embodied verb, and not just a mental decision? How do we live it into action? When ritual works, it works because it is embodied. The cup of wine is full on havdalah. That is the first reminder. There is enough. The world – at its core – is an abundant place. The spices wake us up. They are sweet. When we hold up our hands to look at the candle, we see the play of shadow and light – we see that both exist, and we must be true to each, and aware of each. We cannot afford a Pollyanna approach. And as my stepdad told me before I left to travel in Europe after high school, Trust, but bind your camel. And the final blessing is the blessing of separation in general. In Judaism to make something holy is to set it aside. Maybe this seems counterintuitive since we’re talking about coming together, but each of us expresses our trust by just trying to love who is right in front of us, or near us, or by choosing a tradition or a craft, or our work – and trusting that through this particular focus, in the end it will serve the greater community. Committing to the small tribe teaches us about commitment to the larger tribe.

And then we close the ceremony by singing Eliyahu Hanavi, Elijiah the Prophet, which is our Jewish version of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” It’s a commandment in Judaism to hope.

Rabbi Arik Asherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, who spoke in the area this past week, said in his peacemaking work, he needed to trust that relationship can be transformative. That even in the darkest times in Israel, he needed to trust that encounter, even with one person, could change things. So perhaps trust is also about allowing ourselves to believe in real transformation through encounter.

May we continue to become practitioners of trust. May we learn to recognize the mark of trust in each other’s faces.

Fear - Yom Kippur reflections by Joshua Boettiger

My son Joshua Boettiger is rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Bennington, Vermont. He offered these thoughts as a Yom Kippur sermon in the fall of 2006. Some of Joshua's other reflections are in The Rabbi's Blog on the congregation's website. As he notes below, he and I have talked often over the years about the themes he discusses here.

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There’s a Hasidic story where a holy rebbe went on a journey and failed to lock the door of his house. While he was away, a crowd of demons entered and took over his dwelling. When the rebbe returned and opened his door, the demons rushed at him, ready to devour him. The rebbe slammed the door shut and prayed. Then he took a deep breath and opened the door again. At once, the demons pounced but as they reached for the man, he bowed low and acknowledged their presence. An amazing thing happened. Half the demons disappeared but the biggest and strongest were left, and they leapt at the rebbe. He reached out to them and offered them hospitality. Could he give them drink? Cook them a meal? At this, the rest of the demons disappeared – all but one who was the chief. This demon was huge and very fierce. It was not going to be deterred. It opened its jaws, showing the sharpest of teeth, and as it came close, the rebbe put his head right inside the demon’s mouth. At this point, the chief demon also disappeared and the rebbe had his house back.

Listening to NPR the other morning, I heard Arianna Huffington talking about her latest book, which is about fearlessness and how we can all achieve a state of living without fear. I thought of how in so much self-help terminology, fear is talked about as an emotion to overcome, something that keeps us from realizing our true potential. Judaism is counter-cultural in this respect. Yirat HaShem, translated as ‘fear’ or ‘awe’ of God, is a traditional Jewish value, understood as a necessary ingredient in one’s spiritual life, particularly at this time of year. So I wanted to look more closely at Yirat HaShem, what exactly is holy fear? Put differently, what is the role of fear in our lives? Is there such a thing as good fear and bad fear?

At first, fear is a gift given to us. We need it for survival. As Joy Cowley writes, “fear might be an uncomfortable emotion but it is the gift connected to our survival…As new infants we blink at strong light, flinch at loud noise, cry when we experience hunger and discomfort. In early childhood it is our fear that helps keep us safe.” And yet children have an instinctive sense as well for when to confront their fears, when a particular fear is perhaps no longer useful. Cowley is a Catholic thinker who also writes children’s books, one of which is about a farmer who discovers a giant weta in his bed (I don’t know what a weta is either). A mother wrote to Cowley, complaining that her four-year old insisted that his six-year old brother read him the story each night before bed, but then would later wake up screaming that there was a giant weta in his bed. Cowley points out that even though it was terrifying, the four-year old was insisting upon hearing it every night, and was somehow actively dealing with his fear.

Fear is obviously a reality for adults, too, it’s one of our core human experiences. So the question for most of us is not whether or not fear is a good or a bad thing, but rather, how to be in relationship to fear. Arguably, much of our lives and our decisions are affected by our relationship to fear. And it was the same for our biblical ancestors. God tells Abraham, Al tira, Avram. Don’t be afraid. Which, as Torah scholar Aviva Zornberg points out, is a clue that fear was present, that is signifyingthat Abraham was afraid. It’s like Bob Dylan singing, “Don’t think twice it’s alright.” There it is – you’ve just thought twice. You don’t tell someone to not be afraid unless they are feeling afraid. Moses, Rachel and Sarah – all ancestors living with fear. One of God’s names is Pachad Yitzhak, the fear of Isaac. In our sacred stories, fear is one of the ways that we come to know God. In fact, along with love, fear is probably one of two chief paths we have to God.

In our own family narratives, we can probably name the fears that were lifelong companions for our parents and grandparents, our siblings. Entire generations share certain fears. For the one that grew up during the Great Depression, for instance, it is the fear of not having enough. Some of our family’s fears we’ll never know because of how closely many of us guard our fears. And we guard for good reason: in our society, fear is likely to be viewed as a weakness, not to be aired in public. Some fears are related to the stories of our lives. My father lost his father at an early age, and because of this experience, he would probably say that the fear of abandonment has been a companion for him ever since.

When I was little, like almost every child, I was terrified of the dark. There was a crack on the ceiling above my bed that haunted me. Wanting to help, my mother put a band-aid over it, and I subsequently became afraid of the band-aid. My persistent dream was of a man coming down the chimney with a sack to put me in and take me away (maybe this dark and thinly veiled Santa Claus imagery accounts for why I chose Judaism as my path and not Christianity). But as I got older, my fear of the night stayed with me, unabated, and when I was eleven, my parents found a psychologist to whom I could talk to about my fears. In an effort to make me comfortable, he spoke about movies and such, but he kept going on until I was aware that the hour was almost up, and so I worked up my courage and blurted out, “I came here because I was afraid of the dark!” In some ways, even today this fear is just as strong, though it has transformed. I have made some amount of peace with the actual nighttime, but the fear of the dark grows with me and finds new things to attach onto. Fear of the night is fear of what we can’t see. I think in my braver moments, personally and professionally, I am able to step forward towards the fear, and blurt out, “I came here because I’m afraid of the dark!”

In many ways, we are a society driven by fear. At the Interfaith Council meeting last week, one of the ministers who has been in town for years bemoaned the fact that we haven’t been able to get the Bennington Banner to cover events like the interfaith prayer service, or volunteer projects where teens help the elderly. Instead, what sells papers are the grizzly car accidents, the abductions, and the untimely deaths. This was one of the central messages in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 – how our media routinely keeps us terrified. So each day on the news we read of violence, loss, destruction, and tragedy. How are we supposed to process those stories? Vanessa and I were talking about this over breakfast at the Blue Benn, and she said that a natural reaction to what we read every day in the newspapers would be grief – but how can we feel that much grief? So instead we respond with fear, with slowly building up a wall of fear to distance ourselves from those terrible events. We practice a fear that leads to distance, rather than a compassion that leads to closeness.

On a hike a few years ago, I asked my father – who is making a lot of appearances over this Yom Kippur - if he considered fear to be a useful emotion. He said he thought it was, because in his thinking, fear is relational – it is something real that invites us into relationship with whatever or whoever it is that we’re afraid of. And where there is the potential for relationship, there is the potential for real work and transformation. Anxiety on the other hand, he said, was less useful – because with anxiety, there is no relationship. In anxiety, one is just spinning round in one’s own head.

I want to turn to the notion of what our tradition might mean when it speaks of yirat hashem / fear of God. For those of us who do not find resonance with the idea of a rewarding and punishing deity, we probably relate less to yirat hashem as fear of getting smitten from above by a well-placed thunderbolt. But let’s take that anthropomorphic image away and see where we’re left. What is the role of fear in our spiritual lives? And when I say spiritual lives, I’m talking about our daily lives, because the daily regular stuff that life is made of is where Judaism has always said spirituality plays itself out.

Art Green has said that we don’t know what yirat hashem could be: it’s usually death or suffering that we fear – and that’s not the same as fear of God. But what if fear of God could be understood as fear of change? If change is the only constant in our universe, what if God could be defined as change? I think of one of Yehuda Amichai’s – whose yahrzeit was last week - final poems called “Jewish travel: change is God and death is his prophet.” I think of the fall: driving on Kellystand Road a few days ago - blue sky, wind and sun, leaves falling, the mountain positively on fire with color – thinking there is absolutely nothing here I can hold onto. This fall, this season we’re in right now, is about nothing if not change. I don’t even know what to say I love because it’s changing so fast. I felt love and fear. Was this a moment of yirat hashem?

If we’re conscious about it, perhaps the fear of change doesn’t go away, but we learn to see it as a companion, or as a houseguest. Sometimes we slam the door on it and pray, sometimes we bow to it and fix it dinner, sometimes we even stick our head in its jaws. If we’re conscious of our fear, perhaps we don’t act out in unhealthy ways when we feel afraid. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about the trop in the movie, “Beautiful Mind” – where the mentally ill protagonist’s voices are embodied and each is a figure in his life. When he is sick, he thinks they are real – and it brings him great suffering. As he gets well, he knows they are not real, but they are still there, hanging out with him, almost like old friends or old companions. He sees them, but does not react to them unconsciously. By the end of “Beautiful Mind,” the protagonist still sees his collection of characters, but he has befriended them. He has brought them into the light where he can see them better. Which is one thing we can do when we are afraid of the dark.

How do we know when we’re in healthy relationship to fear? Cowley says that simple awareness is usually enough. We can ask, “What is it within us that feels tight and restrictive? What thoughts harden our lovely soft hearts? What ideas do we hold in a tight fist? What takes us forward on our sacred journey and what holds us back? Where is the clutter in our lives and how do we name it? How do we fill that inner emptiness that was created for God?”

The commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, and your might comes after the sentence, “What does the Lord your God want of you except that you fear the Lord your God, and walk in his ways.” (Deut. 10:12) Green says that “Judaism has always insisted on the proper balance of love and fear as ideal for maintaining the religious life.” There is a kabbalistic kavannah, or intention, that someone praying begins his prayers with: L’shem yichud kudsha brich hu, uschinte bidchilu ur’chimu l’yached shem yud hey b’vav-hei b’yichuda shelim b’shem kol Israel. For the sake of the unification of the Blessed Holy One’s name, in love and fear, in the name of all who wrestle with God. In love and fear. God’s name is shorthand for how God is manifest in the world. It is our task to make sure that God’s name is unified on this earth, meaning that God’s presence is real to us. And we experience God in moments of love and moments of fear.

The Australian cartoonist, poet and mystic Michael Leunig writes: There are only two feelings. Love and fear. There are only two languages. Love and fear. There are only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear.

There is a famous rabbinic saying, reshit chochma yirat hashem: the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. This has always been difficult for me to understand: I couldn’t relate to fear of God as a phrase or emotion. I tried translating fear as ‘awe’ for a while – but that didn’t feel quite right either. Norman Fischer, one of my meditation teachers, has helped me understand this: The ancient rabbis wanted us to be afraid, he says. We spend most of our lives resisting fear – that what we call fear is not actually the direct experience of fear, but the feeling of resisting fear, of trying to keep it at arm’s length. He says the goal is to let ourselves be afraid when we feel afraid, to actually experience the fear. To say, fear is happening – and to not fight it off.

My dad and I have had a chavruta around fear for years. And after sending him a draft of this he wrote back with these thoughts: “So yes, perhaps there is such a thing as good fear and bad fear. Good fear is fear expressed, unleashed, felt, embraced, shared, drawn into relationship, in the light. Bad fear is fear resisted, contained, held at bay, or tightly inside, rejected, in the dark.”

On Yom Kippur, we come forward and put our heads into the jaws of our fears. We acknowledge our habitual avoidance of that which makes us afraid – and we see the connection between the avoidance of fear and hurting other people and ourselves. On Yom Kippur, fear is infused into the liturgy, we call God by the name of fear, we feel our fragility and the change swirling around us. May we be willing. May there be mercy.

"Losing My Religion" - by Joshua Boettiger

My son Joshua Boettiger is rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Bennington, Vermont. He offered these thoughts as a Rosh Hashana sermon in the fall of 2006. Beth El is a Reconstructionist congregation now nearly 100 years old. Some of Joshua's other reflections are in The Rabbi's Blog on the congregation's website.

Religion has a bad name these days. That's not really a news flash, I know. At a time when stakes have probably never been higher on this little planet that we live on, religion is seen, by and large, as part of the problem, perhaps the central part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

These days, religion is more typically characterized as something that is divisive at root, and leads to violence - at a time when we desperately need to come together to collectively tackle global issues. Whether we are speaking about the conflicts in Israel, Iraq, Iran, and Darfur, or ecological issues like global climate change - religion is usually portrayed as, if not the firestarter, then at least that which adds gasoline to the flames. The religious people who grab the headlines tend to be the Mel Gibsons, or the Sheikh Nasrallahs.

Those of us who are not fundamentalists are left wondering about the relationship between fundamentals and fundamentalism. Are the fundamentals of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – their basic tenets - so full of intolerance and hatred that fundamentalism would translate into this? And if not, what's wrong with all of our religious traditions that their fundamentals could be so easily misappropriated? Is what we offer, as a non-fundamentalist, progressive faith community only a watered-down version of 'the real thing,' where we selectively edit, hold up the high points of our tradition and duck its darker, more violent side?

In Reconstructionism, we talk about reconstructing words and imbuing them with new meaning, kind of like a new wine in old wineskins sort of thing. I've been thinking about what it might mean to reconstruct this word, 'religion.' First of all, religion is not going away, and America is one of the more religious societies there is. Religion pervades our lives. The wonderful and erudite contemporary Christian thinker Jim Wallis writes, "The real question is not whether religious faith should influence a society and its politics, but rather, how: what form of influence would be most consistent with our faith and provide the best opportunity to positively impact our culture?" Some of us may feel all right about this, some of us may feel profoundly uncomfortable. But regardless - I feel that we need to offer alternate clear, persuasive and humane models of what a religious person is or can be, and what a religious path could look like.

I want to make a case for what I will call progressive religion: what we are doing here, and what other progressive faith communities around town are doing. I want to make a case for our activism being Jewish activism– whether we are Democrats or Republicans or neither. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that prayer must be subversive, that it must challenge the status quo, that it must be daring and imaginative. Rather than being part of the problem, religion can be the fertile ground from which we might prospect for solutions.

On a political level, faith is a term that has been misused. Headline religion talks about faith as that which we know, that which we are sure of. "Our faith tells us this." Faith, to me, refers to my relationship to that which is completely mysterious, that which I cannot know but that occasionally winks at me. When I am in authentic relationship to the mystery, I am in relationship to faith. Faith is not about knowing. Faith is about not knowing. Rather than convey surety and give one a dogma to rally around and shout down others, faith can teach humility - a humility in relationship to both what we know and what we can and cannot control. A religious practice can make us humble. In some conflict resolution training, the first rule is to say 'I don't know.' Because we don't know, we are able to listen deeply to the other, to ourselves, and to the mystery. This model of faith, by definition, makes room for dialogue.

As a progressive Jewish community, in our case as Reconstructionists, we are used to picking and choosing from what we understand as the greater Jewish tradition. We are grounded in Jewish tradition, but we are also informed by democratic, pluralistic values – and we are used to weighing options and making choices. But here's the thing: fundamentalists also pick and choose. There is a series of choices involved in someone's decision to thump his Bible and talk about the overthrow of the infidel, the sinfulness of gays and lesbians, or the coming apocolypse. One could thump one's Bible just as heartily, if not more heartily, and talk about health care for all, the obligation to treat the stranger with compassion and respect, worker's rights, and the fact that the earth does not belong to us, that we are among its caretakers.

Dr. Laura is a nationally syndicated radio host – maybe some of you are her fans, and I can even say that I think at times, she dispenses sage advice. A little judgmental, but sage nonetheless. There is a very funny internet bit where someone plays off of a Dr. Laura quotation in which she says that homosexuality is wrong – plain and simple. Read your Bible and follow it, she admonished a caller. Well, this web author wrote, the shamed caller could have written back to her and asked, "When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?" or "I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?"

Fundamentalism – simple two-dimensional literalism - does not hold up. Reading scripture literally is a destructive way to be in relationship to the Bible. You can't read the Torah that way - the Torah is multi-dimensional. The Torah is a book of paradoxes and poetry: rich imagery, narrative, metaphor and ambiguity. It is disturbing and violent and beautiful. It is full of ethical mandates and human folly, cruelty and compassion. It is our world today. A reason to still be religious is that Torah is a source of life for us. It asks that we engage it, as we engage our world; it asks, in the words of the poet Stanley Kunitz, that we live in the layers.

Judaism has always taught that there are many ways to read a text. It asks us to study the text together. Where two people study Torah, there God is present – a famous saying goes. Not one person who makes a truth up and clings to it, but two people debating, two people in relationship, two people in tension, in common attention and devotion. There is religion.

Religion doesn't need progressive as an adjective. Religion is progressive when practiced deeply, with whole and open heart. There is a Jewish teaching that we are iconoclasts, that a Jewish faith is that which is affirmed, broken, affirmed, broken, affirmed, and broken again. Moses smashing the first set of tablets teaches us this. The second commandment prohibiting idolatry tells us that we cannot hold or concretize the truth. Rabbi Irwin Kula says in our world, we can only know 'moment truths…In Heaven there is Truth, on earth there are truths.'

Rabbi Kula relays an ancient parable where God consults the angels before creating humans. Some angels argue: human beings will lie and kill in pursuit of the Truth. Other angels say, yes, but they will also engage in wonderful acts of love in their search for truth. And so God decides in the end to create humans, but God casts down Truth from heaven to earth, where it shatters into innumerable fragments. 'Absolute truth cannot exist for any human being.' Adam, the first human, is created from that dust, from the shards. "From now on," Kula writes, "there will be only partial, multiple, and contradictory truths…Each person, each culture, each religion has part of the truth; none has it all." If we don't have it all, then it is imperative that we listen to others at the table.

There is a fascinating discussion taking shape about the role of religion in the public sphere. We are used to cringing when we hear that conversation begin, as it used to be equated with issues like school prayer, and other areas where Jews get squeezed or forgotten in a majority Christian country. But there are a growing number of progressive voices – again not necessarily Democratic or Republican – that are calling us to look again at the role faith and religion can play in the global crisis today. Jim Wallis compares human politics with what he calls 'God's politics,' and says that while human politics tend to be ideological – we are drawn to sweeping ideas and beliefs – God's politics are always on a case by case basis, and deal with actual human beings in need, not with ideas. Family values has become a vague ideological term, when it should be about the day to day work of protecting families, working to ensure a living wage, working to feed the hungry. Family values are about human beings, not ideologies.

We are used to faith, ostensibly a private matter, being made public in distasteful ways. But faith – that which teaches humility, idol-smashing, hope - is a public matter to the degree that we are all in the same fragile boat on a planet that is in dramatic peril. Illinois Senator Barak Obama gave an address this past summer, in which he talks about why religion is dangerous to democracy and why it is also essential. He argues that, as non-fundamentalists we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse: "when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends. Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity." Faith needs to be in the public debate, but we need a kaleidoscope of faiths, a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Obama also says, "democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values." As Reconstructionists, committed to Judaism and democracy, this is refreshingly familiar language.

Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard asks, "What would it mean to seize the opportunity to promote pluralist spiritual expression in the public square as a way of re-engaging us, to make room for new language that welcomes spiritual/religious expression in matters of public policy w/o compromising real separation between church and state?"

Obviously this is a large conversation, one that I hope in the months and years to come we can engage in as a community. I wanted today to begin to imagine a third way: between fundamentalism and anti-religion - a way that takes a committed faithful stance in our community, learning from the root Jewish concepts of humility, mystery, relationship, inclusivity, and iconoclasm.

In Proverbs it says, "Without vision, the people perish." (Mishlei 29:18) It is time to do the work of developing an alternate vision to the current religious one of triumphalism, destruction and exclusivity. As humans, we need faith. Faith opens us up, it does not close us down. It brings us toward the other. It offers hope, new visions. A progressive vision might say that faith is grounded in authentic struggle and humility, not absolutism – and that this is a holy struggle that we pray for the strength to do together.

Modum Bad: A Resource for Healing and Renewal

Modum Bad - A Resource for Healing and Renewal

(This paper was published in May 2007, and may be downloaded in its original format at http://www.modum-bad.no/FullArticle.aspx?m=3&amid=9405.)

Modum Bad is an internationally recognized center for residential psychotherapy, education and research, set among the forests and farm fields of southeastern Norway, 60 miles west of Oslo. I first visited for six weeks in 2005, then returned to consult for three months in the winter and spring of 2007. Between us, my fiancée Leigh McCullough and I had long professional experience in a variety of mental health settings in the United States, as well as familiarity with residential centers and communities devoted to personal and professional growth, meditation and the arts. None of that quite prepared us for the richness of our time at Modum Bad.  

Introduction

As we drove from the nearby village of Vikersund onto Modum Bad’s land, tall pines and birch lining the narrow road, we could see evidence of a gentle evolution. A 350-acre estate had for a hundred years been one of Europe’s well-known spas—Modum Bad means “the baths at Modum”—before becoming a residential clinic and learning center in 1957. The cold, iron-rich water of St Olavs Kilde – St. Olav’s Spring – was long considered to have medicinal qualities.

 

Legend has it that Olav, 11th century king and patron saint of Norway, stopped for a Mosaic moment to rest with his men at Modum. The king’s horse grew restless; when he struck the ground with his hooves, the clear water of the spring poured forth. Summer guests at the spa were urged to drink up to five liters a day (through a glass straw, so the iron would not discolor or erode their teeth). Although the main spa building burned in 1940 – on the same day Nazi Germany invaded Norway – Olavs Kilde continues to flow, literally and symbolically.

 

Henrich Arnold Thaulow, physician, patron of the arts and entrepreneur, founded the Modum Bad spa in 1857, and it soon became known throughout Europe and beyond as a haven for rest, recovery and renewal. Physicians confirmed the medical value of the spa’s treatments and entrusted their patients to Modum Bad’s care. Dr. Thaulow was a member of a well-known family of artists; his attention to the role of music, painting and other arts in the healing of souls established a valued tradition still honored in the community’s life.  Artists, writers and musicians, among them Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch, were among the spa’s guests. The present Norwegian King Harald’s grandfather, Prince Carl, came to Modum Bad to improve his health during the summer of 1890.  Families often came together; there is a real sense in which Modum Bad’s distinctive tradition of residential family therapy has been more than a century in the making.

 

“Taking the waters,” stimulating social companionship, ample opportunities to rest, reflect and recreate in peaceful natural surroundings: Modum Bad’s foremost legacy for the past century and a half is a thoroughgoing commitment to holistic health.

 

The spa survived Thaulow’s death in 1894 as well as the collective European trauma of World War I. The Norwegian Red Cross purchased it in 1939. Plans for the development of a Red Cross hospital were not realized in the wake of World War II. Renewal and transformation came with the opening of a distinctive psychiatric clinic and learning center – the current Modum Bad – in December 1957, a century to the year after Dr. Thaulow founded the spa.

 

It would be another era for Modum Bad, with nourishing roots in earlier history – and another era, as well, for Norwegian psychotherapy and the inpatient treatment of mental illness. 

 

Gordon Johnson was a widely-known and respected Norwegian psychiatrist and devout Christian with the inspiration and the manifold leadership skills to bring life to the new enterprise. He was not yet a psychiatrist in 1935, when he took the first steps on the long road to creating a new kind of mental hospital, and he labored tirelessly on behalf of that calling for 22 years before Modum Bad became a reality. Johnson’s vivid public presence, his conviction that Christian values offered a humane and hitherto unrealized potential for shaping holistic residential treatment of human suffering, and his intensely personal devotion to the well-being of his patients continued to direct the growth of Modum Bad for another two decades – until his retirement in 1976.

 

____________________

 

In the weeks after our arrival in the autumn of 2005 we came to know Modum Bad’s woods, fields and narrow lanes. Most of the buildings are gathered on a plateau, sloping to the west into the valley of Turi Fjord, melding elsewhere into the patchwork of forest and small hill farms characteristic of southern Norway.  Dark brown loam mixes with red sandy soil. In the woods one can still find pits from which, more than a thousand years ago, iron ore was dug to fashion tools.

 

Some of the original 19th century houses have been renovated and are still in daily use. The clinic’s main buildings date from the 1950s and 1960s but have been tastefully remodeled to blend with the older Swiss style. There are residences for staff and for families in therapy, gardens, an apple orchard, and paths for walking and cross-country skiing in winter.  On an early exploratory walk we came upon a lovely small pond with wooden bridges, gazebo and benches along its banks, and way stations marked by framed copies of well-chosen Norwegian poems. Stopping by one of those poetry markers late one winter afternoon in the fading light, we watched a young boy playing with his dog on the ice of the pond. Snow was falling gently around us, and lines of a favorite poet came to my mind:

 

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.[1] 

 

Leigh had for sixteen years directed an international research program in psychotherapy, with its home at Harvard Medical School but most of its ongoing activity in Norway – primarily at the universities in Trondheim and Bergen. In 2005 she was invited to return to Modum Bad as a consultant, to introduce and assess the value of her model of short-term dynamic psychotherapy in an inpatient setting. She had first come to Modum Bad in the fall of 2004 to give a presentation of her therapeutic model and show videotapes of her practice to Modum Bad staff. The following year she was eager to return and probe more thoroughly her intuitive sense of good match and congenial collegiality.

 

My own role during that first visit was less defined and more informal. I had no assigned task and was free to explore. The six weeks were an introduction to a remarkable way of integrating residential psychotherapeutic treatment, professional education and clinical research in a “village-like inclusive community.”[2] I looked forward, when we arrived, to learning about the life of that community. My own professional experience had spanned several realms, but repeatedly returned to two primary themes: the character and significance of the stories we tell about our lives, and the intersection and mutual enrichment of religious and psychological perspectives on human development through the whole of life. I had ongoing reading and writing to do, and I anticipated the pleasure of long walks in the woods. I did not know in those first days that I would become as thoroughly and intriguingly engaged in the life of Modum Bad as Leigh.

[1] The first lines of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

[2] “Modum Bad: A centre for therapy and research, training and counseling,” Modum Bad brochure (2005). 

 

Sabbath 2 - Reflections on a Parable

The following reflections and retelling - reimagining - of a familiar story are drawn from one of a series of talks shared in the winter and spring of 2007 with staff and patients at Modum Bad, a psychiatric hospital, retreat center and learning community in Vikersund, Norway.

I discovered Modum Bad in 2005, and returned for a second extended time as a consultant in February 2007. Of course I've learned more than I've taught. My first impressions of Modum Bad, gathered after a first leisurely visit in 2005, are gathered in an informal essay on Modum Bad's website. I am revising and extending that essay for publication later in 2007, Modum Bad's 50th anniversary year -  in fact,  its 150th anniversary year, as it began as a healing spa in 1857. Modum Bad means The Baths at Modum, gathered around St. Olavs Kilde, St. Olav's Spring. My own retelling of Jesus's parable owes a great deal to the translation and commentary of Stephen Mitchell in his Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2001).

The story I retell here is the last and longest of three parables of Jesus recounted in Luke's gospel. The thread they share is that of losing and finding and rejoicing in the renewal or life-redeeming experience. It is a tale of critical turning in life's journey. The theme of turning – a cycle of loss, of tender, halting discovery, and of redemption – is a central one in the history of the human psyche and soul, in the generations that gave us birth, in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth.

[continued]

                                                                            

Sabbath as consciousness, practice, relationship and journey

Adapted from a talk given at Modum Bad, a remarkable psychiatric hospital and learning center in Vikersund, Norway.

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

        Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”

Preamble

We need conceptions of healing and renewal that embrace the whole human being. We need conceptions of human being and of physical and emotional health that embrace human experience more fully than we are accustomed to imagine. Such exploration requires an expansion of our accustomed ways of knowing, our practical epistemology.

In that adventure there are several paths to follow, some worn by many feet, some freshly made.  The one suggested and illustrated here echoes the values upon which Modum Bad was founded. It may be appropriate, in this 50th anniversary year, to assess their significance and their presence in our midst today.

Re-imagining

Whatever one's healthy, toxic or nominal religious history and convictions about religious practice and belief, the experience of suffering, recovery and renewal is usefully conceived integrally as spiritual journey as well as psychological transformation. Human development and spiritual development are one story, one path, not two. Psyche and soul are descriptive of the same reality (they are, after all, the same words in the original Greek).

In this inquiry it is useful to turn to religious thought and practice with a fresh eye free of jaundice. These days, in the thin air of secular ascendancy, such wisdom is more often latent than manifest. Its relevance to a re-visioning or re-imagination of human development, suffering, healing and clinical practice, can hardly be taken for granted.

We may have to formulate a new language to quicken our hearts and minds. To do that responsibly and with care, we should start with a re-examination and reinterpretation of the old language. Such language will be unfamiliar to some, and may seem dauntingly archaic to others, irrelevant to our current challenges of growing, healing and living well with one another and with our patients.

The old wisdom, however, stands ready to be reawakened and drawn into our daily lives—even those of us determinedly secular in our sense of the world. We have only to suspend disbelief and imagine anew the stories and songs, the rituals and symbols, the praxis of religious life. We will need to contemplate and re-imagine words and concepts we have known and to which we may have become averse – God, soul, prayer, the sacred and the profane, ministry, the cycle of life, death and rebirth or resurrection, holiness and redemption, immanence and transcendence.

Such words, for most of us, have not lost their emotional potency, however much we have set them aside. Re-visioning can offer us – and those for whom we bear responsibility – freedom from constraint and a shedding of armor – relief, awakening and inspiration.

Re-imagining can be demanding, and may ask of us a full measure of empathic compassion – first toward ourselves. We shall have to shed at least some – and perhaps many – of our preconceptions and habits, and bring only our full presence—body, mind, heart and soul.

Let’s say that soul is the whole—our embracing integrity, our most capacious and harmonious identity, never fully manifest in consciousness. The instruments of soul are imagination and memory, soul’s emotional tone typically one of pathos and joy. In our partial awareness of soul we yearn (Senshucht is the manifold German word) for the wholeness that is already ours. We might say, then, that soul at once embodies and searches for presence. It is both dwelling and seeking.

The Norwegian word for pastoral counseling is sjelesorg, soul-work, soul healing. It should describe psychotherapy as an integrated whole.

For what, for who does soul long? For what do we engage in soul-work?  For relief from suffering. To be seen and known. For reconciliation. For joy. For wholeness. For home among "all creatures great and small."

Consider the remarks of UCLA psychiatrist and neurobiologist Dan Siegel:

Elucidating the links between the physical brain and the processes of the mind has shed light on the deepest nature of the self. When we examine the deep layers of our neural selves, we come to glimpse not only the roots of our mental and social lives, but the essential reality of our selves as part of an integrated whole across the span of time.

It may be that our work as human beings is not only to seek meaning and satisfaction in our lives and to dedicate ourselves to alleviating suffering in others but to be a part of a larger effort to bring integration and healing into the many layers of our interconnections with each other.

As we explore and incorporate the many domains of integration, what seems to evolve naturally is the sense of being connected to a larger whole, something more than just our bodily defined sense of self in this time we call our "life." This [integration] enables us to become more fully aware of our interconnected belonging as we, in Albert Einstein’s words, "widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

The experience of Sabbbath: an example of re-imagining

The word “Sabbath” may evoke vague memories of onerous obligation and inconvenience. In all but a few marginal instances, Sabbath remains in Christian practice a small stub of its former self. We must dig deeper into the layers if we are to find suggestive meaning and value for our everyday lives.

[continued]

Jerome: Life and Language

St. Jerome is best known as a fourth century translator of the Bible from its original languages into Latin, then becoming the language of the Church. He was the personal secretary of Pope Damasus, who commissioned the young priest in 382 to undertake the task of translation. Jerome was an excellent choice, as he had mastered not only Greek, which had been the common language of the Western world, but also Hebrew and Aramaic, the first being the original language of the Bible, the second the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples in the Holy Land.

Jerome spent over twenty years at his task. He not only went to ancient texts of the Hebrew Bible, but actively--and at some cost to his reputation among his fellow churchmen, including Augustine--sought out help from Jewish teachers as well. He was sensitive to matters of idiom: sense for sense rather than word for word. And he was a gifted interpreter of the texts.

While he was still at work translating, his patron Damasus died in 384, and after a short time in Antioch, Jerome settled in Bethlehem. Among the most learned Christians of his day, he became widely known as the greatest scholar of the early Church. He said: “Love the holy Scriptures, and wisdom will love you. Love wisdom, and she will keep you safe.” Jerome died in Bethlehem at the age of 80 in the year 420.

Albrecht Dürer's famous 16th century engraving of Jerome at work in his study is the inspiration for a poem by the contemporary translator and poet Stephen Mitchell. A Jew having experience in a Christian school while a boy, Mitchell is well known for his translation of The Book of Job, The Book of Psalms, and for his own rendering of The Gospel According to Jesus, as well as for his translation of the poetry and prose of Ranier Maria Rilke, and a version of the Tao Te Ching. Erik Erikson said of Mitchell's translation of Job, "The thoughtful reading of this astonishing translation has been for me a rare experience combining poetry and enlightenment."

It is no wonder, then, that Mitchell was attracted to the scholar and translator of the early Church, and came to meditate so deeply and memorably upon Dürer's engraving.

The poem is especially moving in the intimacy, the love with which the poet addresses Jerome, and in its portrayal of Jerome's experience of the life of the Spirit--the Kingdom of God--"an innermost truth"--as one with the flesh, the sacred realities of everyday life. Tat twam asi. That art thou.

sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying

____________

JEROME

In Dürer’s engraving
You sit hunched over your desk,
writing, with an extraneous
halo around your head.
You have everything you need: a mind
at ease with itself, and the generous
sunlight on pen, page, ink,
the few chairs, the vellum-bound books,
the skull on the windowsill that keeps you
honest (memento mori).
What you are concerned with
in your subtle craft is not simply
the life of language—to take
those boulder-like nouns of the Hebrew
text, those torrential verbs,
into your ear and remake them
in the hic-haec-hoc of your time—
but an innermost truth. For years
you listened when the Spirit was
the faintest breeze, not even the
breath of a sound. And wondered
how the word of God could be clasped
between the covers of a book.
Now, by the latticed window,
absorbed in your work,
the word becomes flesh, becomes sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying:
the whole vibrant life
of Bethlehem, outside your door.
None of it is an intrusion.
You are sitting in the magic circle
of yourself. In a corner, the small
watchdog is curled up, dreaming,
and beside it, on the threshold, the lion
dozes, with half-closed eyes.

- Stephen Mitchell


Literally, yes, "the word becomes flesh," the sacred language comes alive, bursts from the text into life.  "Flesh" is descriptive of more than human being, of mule and leaf-mold and sunlight, of all the earth.

If Jerome was the man evoked by Stephen Mitchell, and heard his words, I can imagine him at such a moment taking up his quill pen and writing his own poem in response, something in the spirit of these lines by Robinson Jeffers:


..... I entered the life of the brown forest,
And the great lfe of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the
     changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain... and, I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit;
    and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind
    also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...

_______________________

"I was mankind also, a moving lichen on the cheek of the round stone..." That is as lovely an image of homo sapiens as I know--as lovely and as necessary to absorb into our hearts, that we might renew ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy.

I am indebted to Leslie J. Hoppe, O.F.M., for his account of Jerome's life in the Church and the character of his translations, and to Joanna Macy's book, Coming Back to Life, for the gift of Robinson Jeffers' poem embodying earth consciousness. It is an excerpt from "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford University Press, 1988).

_______________________________

The Holy Fool

The holy fool, or the fool as wise soul, is a figure in many wisdom traditions, including notably those of the Sufis of Islam, Zen Buddhism, Christianity and the inheritors of the Hasidic movement of Judaism, as well as folklore that is not specifically religious, like some of the tales collected by the brothers Grimm. Fools in the courts of kings in the plays of Shakespeare are typically wise men who cloak their wisdom in a mask of foolishness, thereby reaching their master as straight men cannot.

Such fools amuse, confuse, sometimes speak in simile or circuitous riddles, are often ridiculed--they are, after all, intentionally ridiculous, sometimes insulting or scatological--but can succeed by that very character in breaking through a crust of resistance or disbelief. There is an enigmatic quality to the fool's cloak of madness or nonsense that provokes attention, response, reflection, as well as laughter. The fool's inherent humility, too, may loosen the defensive, ego-inflated character of those who make too much of themselves and thus lose touch with a deeper reality.

Finally, there is another sense of the holy fool, less a matter of conscious and intentional disguise, more a matter of guilelessness, transparency, embrace of wonder and mystery. "The path of soul, writes Thomas Moore, "is also the path of the fool, the one without pretense of self-knowledge or individuation or certainly perfection. If on this path we have achieved anything, it is the absolute unknowing Cusanus and other mystics write about, or it is the 'negative capability' of John Keats--'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'" (Care of the Soul, p. 261-262)

Here are a few illustrative stories:

Saint Symeon

Saint Symeon, for those who know of his existence at all, probably would be viewed as a curious candidate for canonization by the Catholic Church. He came to the Syrian city of Emesa in the sixth century. On his arrival, he tied a dead dog he found on a dunghill to his belt and entered the city gate, dragging the dog behind him. Schoolchildren saw him and called out, “Hey, a crazy abba [father].” For he was dressed in the habit of the ascetic Desert Fathers (indeed, that is the community from which he came), but behaved in Emesa quite otherwise. The next morning, a Sunday, he entered the church, put out the lights, and threw nuts at the women. On the way out of the church, he overturned the tables of the pastry chefs.

In Emesa, Symeon quickly consolidated his reputation as "a crazy abba." He walked about naked, ate enormous quantities of beans, farted prolifically, defecated in the streets, gorged himself on raw meat, pastries, virtually anything at hand, kept company with dancing girls and prostitutes, all without the slightest shame. On one occasion, having been invited to join the men in the public bath, he stripped off his clothing and wrapped it around his head like a turban. With his sexuality starkly apparent, he walked past the men’s bath and rushed into the women’s. When there was a new moon, “he looked at the sky and fell down and thrashed about.” In short, he violated virtually every norm of civilized urban behavior, and the citizens of Emesa responded with righteous indignation and not uncommonly with beatings. They were outraged: the most common word used to describe their reaction is "scandalized." That is our first hint of secret sainthood, for the same word was commonly used in the Bible to describe people's response to the behavior of Jesus.

Symeon left the desert for the city, having mastered the practice of the ascetic life of the Desert Fathers, with the purpose of saving souls and "mocking the world." He drew attention to the spiritual pollution of urban life in Emesa by exaggerating its expression. He maintained his spiritual practices in private, and his intimacy with the untouchables, the outcasts of Emesa, like that of Jesus, is full of loving kindness and the spirit of conversion, turning, metanoia.

In playing the fool, Symeon demonstrated that spiritual truth is obstructed, lost by the more dangerous pretenders: those upright, worldly and proper souls whose reputable lives hide an inner emptiness of spirit. In the phrase of St. Paul from First Corinthians, Symeon is "a fool for Christ's sake."

(I am indebted in this brief portrait of Symeon to Derek Krueger's scholarly study, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius' Life and the Late Antique City, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Krueger demonstrates that the later Church, although recognizing a tradition of the holy fool, had difficulty with some of the more colorful of Symeon's antics.)

Sufi Stories: Mulla Nasrudin

Probably the best known of the holy fools is Mulla Nasrudin, at once a central figure of the esoteric tradition of Sufism within Islam, and a popular folkloric figure from the Middle East to East Asia. The person who, above all, made Nasrudin accessible to readers of the Western world was the Afghan writer and Sufi scholar, Idries Shah (1924-1996), who wrote or compiled over thirty books on the Sufi way of life and Sufi stories. The way of the Sufis, in fact, antedates Islam, and has thrived in many cultures and wisdom traditions. That may be why so many people, in such diverse parts of the world, grew up hearing stories of the marvelous Mulla. Evidence of the interpenetration of stories in diverse traditions includes their reappearance in different cultural guises. That is true of several of several Sufi stories, including those of Mulla Nasrudin, as I shall illustrate and you may recognize below.

Unsentimental teaching stories are a staple of Sufi practice. They are intended lightly to provoke--laughter, mostly--then contemplation and insight. Some are longer, and some are very short. There are examples of both below.

A tortoise carries a stranded scorpion across a river. The scorpion stings the tortoise, who demands indignantly: "My nature is to be helpful. I have helped you and now you sting me." "My friend," says the scorpion, "your nature is to be helpful. Mine is to sting. Why do you seek to transform your nature into a virtue and mine into villainy?"

An elephant and a mouse fell in love. On the wedding night the elephant keeled over and died. The mouse said, "Oh Fate! I have unknowingly bartered one moment of pleasure and tons of imagination for a lifetime of digging a grave."

Stories of Nasrudin:

My beloveds, I remember a time long ago when I was still a Mulla. I lived in a small town, just big enough for a real mosque, with a beautiful mosaic wall. I remember one evening, we had finished our prayers. The stars were clear and bright, and seemed to fill the sky solidly with lights. I stood at the window, gazing at the lights so far away, each one bigger than our world, and so distant from us across vast reaches of space. I thought of how we walk this earth, filled with our own importance, when we are just specks of dust. If you walk out to the cliffs outside the town, a walk of half an hour at most, you look back and you can see the town, but the people are too small to see, even at that meager distance. When I think of the immensity of the universe, I am filled with awe and reverence for power so great.

I was thinking such thoughts, looking out the window of the mosque, and I realized I had fallen to my knees. "I am nothing, nothing!" I cried, amazed and awestruck.

There was a certain well-to-do man of the town, a kind man who wished to be thought very devout. He cared more for what people thought of him than for what he actually was. He happened to walk in and he saw and heard what passed. My beloveds, I was a little shy at being caught in such a moment, but he rushed down, looking around in the obvious hope someone was there to see him. He knelt beside me, and with a final hopeful glance at the door through which he had just come, he cried,

"I am nothing! I am nothing!"

It appears that the man who sweeps, a poor man from the edge of the village, had entered the side door with his broom to begin his night's work. He had seen us, and being a man of true faith and honest simplicity, his face showed that he entertained some of the same thoughts that had been laid on me by the hand of Allah (wonderful is He). He dropped his broom and fell to his knees up there in a shadowed corner, and said softly,

"I am nothing...I am nothing!"

The well-to-do man next to me nudged me with his elbow and said out of the side of his mouth,

"Look who thinks he's nothing!"

_______________________

Late one moonlit night a friend came upon Nasrudin stooped, walking back and forth in the street in front of his house. "What are you doing, Mulla?" said the friend. "I have lost my keys and am looking for them," replied Nasrudin. The friend agreed to help, and they both continued to comb the ground. Finally the friend asked, "Where did you lose them?" "I lost them in the house," said Nasrudin, "but there's more light out here."

_______________________

My beloveds, I travelled again to the village of my friend Tekka, after years away. He had become very devout in his ways, sometimes a little pompous, but still the kind soul I had loved for years.

I visited him, and we picked up our friendship as if we had never been apart.

"Nasrudin, you are a light to the eyes," said Tekka, "Please stay with me. I insist."

I accepted his kind invitation. He showed me my sleeping room, with a window to the east, and the bed made up. "I have arranged it so your head faces toward Mecca," he said proudly. "You must always sleep with your head toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet, on whom be peace."

My first night, I tossed and turned, and finally fell asleep. I am apparently an active sleeper, for when Tekka shook me awake the next morning, he was very agitated.

"Nasrudin, I am disappointed in you!" I looked at myself, and said, "I am often disappointed in myself, Tekka, what seems to be today's problem?"

"You have slept with your feet toward Mecca! This is most disrespectful!"

"My apologies, Tekka, it was unintentional. I am a very active sleeper."

Tekka was mollified, but insisted that the next night I must do better. I promised I would.

The next night resembled the first. I slept well, after some tossing and turning, but awoke to find my feet on my pillow and my head resting on the floor at the end of the sleeping mat. Just as I realized my predicament, Tekka stood in the door and clucked in concern.

"This will never do, Nasrudin. I am a good citizen and a good Muslim. You must sleep with your feet pointing the opposite way from Mecca, and your head pointing toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet and devotion to Allah."

"What is your reason for insisting on this, my friend?" I asked.

"You must point your head toward God!" he said, and repeated it, "You must point your head toward God and your feet away from Him."

I thought about this. We spent the day together, and that night Tekka was most emphatic. "Nasrudin," he said, "If you cannot sleep with your head toward God, I regret to say I cannot have you in my house. It pains me to say this to an old friend, but my devotion is to Allah."

The third night was much like the other two, except that this time I awoke with my nose pressed against the floor at the foot of the sleeping mat. It was pushed out of shape, and I was rubbing it when Tekka appeared. His face was clouded with anger and sadness.

"Before you speak, Tekka, answer me this," I said, springing up. "Does Allah rule over everything, even the fate of men?"

"You know he does," replied Tekka, puzzled.

"Is Allah there in every part of His creation?"

"Of course he does."

I pointed out the window at the birds rising from the edge of the well. "Does he live in the birds of the air?"

"Yes," said Tekka. "Why are you asking these questions?"

"Please have patience with an old friend," I replied. "Is Allah everywhere, even across the desert and the mountains?"

"Allah is the creation. Allah is in the creation, and is the lord over the creation!" exclaimed Tekka.

"So, Tekka," I said, holding out my feet. "Point my feet where God is not!"

_________________________

Nasrudin was invited to give a sermon.
When the people had assembled, Nasrudin asked:
"Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"
"No", they answered.
"In that case", said Nasrudin, "there's no point in telling you anything. You're too ignorant to start with. I'd be wasting my time."
The people were disappointed. They asked Nasrudin to come back the following week.
When he did, he started his sermon by asking the same question.
"Yes!", they shouted.
"Very well", said Nasrudin, "then I see no reason to speak."
And he left.
But Nasrudin was persuaded to come back a third time.
"Do you know, or don't you?", he asked the people.
"Some of us do, and some of us don't."
"Great!", said Nasrudin. "Those who know can share their knowledge with those who don't."
Having said that, he went home.

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Nasrudin used to stand in the street on market-days, to be pointed out as an idiot. No matter how often people offered him a large and a small coin, he always chose the smaller piece.

One day a kindly man said to him, "Mulla, you should take the bigger coin. Then you will have more money and people will no longer be able to make a laughingstock of you."

"That might be true," said Nasrudin. "but if I always take the larger, people will stop offering me money to prove that I am more idiotic than they are. Then I would have no money at all."

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Consider this one in relation to the meaning of Sabbath time:

Mulla Nasrudin was eating a poor man's diet of chickpeas and bread. His neighbor, who also claimed to be a wise man, was living in a grand house and dining upon sumptuous meals provided by the emperor himself.

His neighbor told Nasrudin, "If only you would learn to flatter the emperor and be subservient as I do, you would not have to live on chickpeas and bread."

Nasrudin replied, "And if only you would learn to live on chickpeas and bread, as I do, you would not have to flatter and live subservient to the emperor."

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Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side:
    - "Hey! how do I get across?"
    - "You are across!" Nasrudin shouted back.

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Since we began this venture with one saint, Symeon, let's end it with another, this one an imaginative creation of the translator and poet Stephen Mitchell, leaving us with the valuable conclusion that one need not be wise to be a holy fool.

Saint Ineptus

Born in third-century Illyria, he soon established a reputation for spilling his food, bruising himself, and tripping over non-existent objects in the street. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, in the hope that the rigorous training would make him more attentive. But he refused. Instead, he spent his time looking for angels in the dark alleyways of his native town, and feeding the stray cats. Even his martyrdom was botched. He felt so terrified, as the wild beasts approached him in the amphitheater, that he forgot the words of the Lord's Prayer.

He has become the patron saint of the clumsy, the tactless and the unqualified. They are instructed to leave a candle burning for him once a month (making sure there is nothing flammable in the vicinity). His intercession is said to do more good than harm.
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Reflections on Soul: Loss and Redemption

More than a decade ago, Thomas Moore suggested that the greatest malady of our time was neither heart disease nor cancer, but loss of soul: loss of wisdom about it, loss of interest in it. "When soul is neglected," he wrote, "it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning."

While Moore (in Care of the Soul) warns against efforts at precise definition, he associates the word soul with recognition of depth and genuineness or authenticity in our lives. As such it is no less present or absent in our ordinary daily rounds--work and love, play, active and contemplative times--than it is in rare moments of dramatic crisis, insight or vision. He argues, I think persuasively but less capaciously than is justified, that the instrument of soul is imagination. That is so if we understand imagination to include experience of all of our sensory, emotional and intuitive faculties, including the enormous range of bodily sensations in movement and at rest.

But, with that caveat, imagination is a useful word, because it conveys the important sense that soul is not merely more or less present or absent in our lives, but that there are crafts available for its cultivation, renewal and redemption. One further limitation of the term, however, is that it encourages us to conceive of soul as an exclusively human phenomenon. More classical notions of soul acknowledge that it is present in all animate creatures; indeed, it may be most usefully understood as the very principle of animation or vitality, and care of the soul as the craft of reanimation. Anima mundi, Moore reminds us, refers not to some abstract concept of  world soul or organizing divinity, but to "the soul in each thing," and our capacity truly to tend with lingering and loving attention.

Paradoxically, as spiritual traditions have commonly recognized, soul is more accessible, more nourished, when we are simply attentive and mindful, rather than when we deliberately seek. One of the most beautiful expressions is found in the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching (here in my own adaptation from several versions; I don't speak or read or write Chinese, but this book has been a treasured companion.)

Of old, he who was well versed in the way
was subtle, mysteriously comprehending,
and too profound to be known.
Just because he is unknowable,
The best one can do is describe him.

His alertness was as that of one crossing
        a river in winter.
His caution was as that of one who must meet danger on every side.
His gravity was as that of a guest.
He was fluid as melting ice,
simple as uncarved wood,
open as a valley.
inscrutable as murky water.

Who can be muddy and yet, settling,
        slowly  become limpid?
Who can be at rest
till the right action arises by itself?

He who preserves this way
does not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
he is present, and can welcome all things.

When we think of ways of caring for soul, tradition often suggests, rightly, that we think of the liturgies,  the music and other practices of our religious traditions, including prayer and meditation. For all of us, though--and especially for those who have lost effective connection with those traditions, it is worth recalling that soul makes no hard and fast division between sacred and secular. Reckonings time and again recognizes poetry as a deep well of imagining, reimagining, evoking soul.

One of the oldest and most treasured ways of gaining access to soul is through the ancient craft of storytelling. Many traditional tales, if written--or preferably spoken, sung or enacted--by a genuine artist, bring soul to life in ways that are both moving and profound. A contemporary example is the work of an old friend, Gioia Timpanelli, who, in her writing and (best) in the full presence of her telling before an evening fire, breathes new life into old tales in ways that reveal both the depth of their familiarity and their ineluctable mystery.

In her novella, Rusina, Not Quite in Love, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable in Sicilian guise, she weaves a tapestry of mutual awakening, that of the young woman Rusina and that of the reclusive Master Gardener, Sebastian, whom Rusina initially knows as both gentle and "the ugliest man I had ever seen." The story, of course, is that of their coming to know each other more deeply, and particularly that of Rusina's awakening, through kindness, care and love, to Sebastian's true nature. At story's end, when they are talking, Sebastian says, "My favorite part of the story, Rusina, is when you take my hand and look into my eyes and see me." Rusina replies, "As always, mine, Sebastian, is now when you will say for the first time and again, 'This has happened not because we have loved beauty but because it has loved us.'" (Gioia Timpanelli, Sometimes the Soul, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998)

Care of the soul, writes Moore, "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel."

I spent my professional life (as well as much of my childhood and adolescence) in schools, colleges and universities, which--particularly as one moves from high school to college and on to graduate study--pay too little attention to recognizing and developing the crafts of soul. The very pace and fragmentation of the school day, as well as preoccupation with information, cognition and skill, have more to do with socialization and functionality in the marketplace than with human development. Intellect and soul are not antithetical; at best, they complement and nourish each other. When they are out of balance, when intellectual accomplishment and physical prowess are rewarded in service to a narrow or superficial sense of vocation, soulfulness--a more capacious identity--withers.

Nature and God—I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
of My identity.

        - Emily Dickinson

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A Brief Reflection on T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit
of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


Every day as I climb the stairs to our second floor I pass those lines framed on the wall. More often than not, used as I am to them, they register obliquely, with little consciousness. But I always know they are there. Less often, but sometimes, I stop and say them again, as prayer, breviary. The calligraphy in which they were written is sun- and time-faded now. The words and their plea will outlast us all.

They are the last eleven lines of T.S. Eliot's poem, "Ash Wednesday." Less widely celebrated and anthologized than his earlier and later work--especially "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and, incomparably, "The Four Quartets"--"Ash Wednesday" is a poem of midlife, both chronologically and spiritually. It was completed when the poet was 42 years old, three years after he was confirmed in the Church of England: his first major poem after that formal turning.

And "Ash Wednesday"—like and unlike its great successor “The Four Quartets”—is a poem of spiritual turning, purgatorial and penitential, as is the day, the changing season, the cyclical movement of its meditation: life, death, and rebirth. Turning (which I'll discuss elsewhere in Reckonings) is explicit in the poet's language, in the poem's structure, its circling, moving refrain.

It is liminal time, between time, dream time.

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking…

The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

….....


Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

The absence of hope is not foregone, but turns from loss, mourning, mimetic hunger for worldly things, turns slowly, with many a backward, suffering slip—is one "between birth and dying" or "between dying and birth" or both?—to sitting still, silent, listening, waiting for new life.

The poem begins,

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

The poem is full of repetition, cadence, circularity in its journey like that of Dante as he rises through the circles of Inferno and Purgatory. Near the end of the poem there is, of course, no resolution, no final synthesis. There is prayer. It is still

….the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Always dialogue, even in solitude. The yew-trees: aged, ageless, often planted in churchyards, associated with loss, grief and strength, an ancient symbol of the tree of life.

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