A fascinating and lively program.
David Brooks, E.J. Dionne on the Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Future of Christian Realism from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.
Monday, 02 March 2009
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
"Witness," a poem by Denise Levertov
WITNESS
Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
~ Denise Levertov ~
Note: For commentary on Levertov and three more of her poems, click here.
Saturday, 06 December 2008
A Wendell Berry poem, for contemplation
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~ Wendell Berry ~
Tuesday, 03 July 2007
Saturday, 30 June 2007
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).
Continue reading "Modum Bad: A Resource for Healing and Renewal" »
Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
Sunday, 29 October 2006
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).
_______________________________
Thursday, 26 October 2006
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.
______________________
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."
_________________________
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."
_______________________
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.
_______________________
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.
___________________________
Friday, 20 October 2006
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
_________________________________________
Thursday, 19 October 2006
Tuesday, 17 October 2006
Friday, 13 October 2006
Friends for Life
I know a little more than the barest sketch of the circumstances of my birth. My mother and I--and surely my father, waiting anxiously a few rooms away--were in Swedish Hospital, in Seattle, Washington. I emerged at 12:43 PM on Thursday, March 30th, 1939. The experience of those primal hours during which I moved from my mother's womb through her birth canal and into the bright lights of a wider world, is a living part of my body's legacy and has its place among the determinants of the person I became. It has a persuasive claim to being the most formative event of my life, as for us all, and remains forever, I assume, beyond my conscious memory.
Whoever else kept my mother company during those hours--her family doctor Richard O'Shea, attending nurses--I've always been glad to know that my mother's mother, the only grandmother I ever knew, was there, and held her daughter's hand. I have a photograph of my grandmother holding me aloft not long thereafter. Both of us appear happy to be together, to begin what was to be another twenty-three years of one of the most nourishing relationships of my life. (I can't lay my hands on that photo at the moment, but I found a contemporaneous one in which my mother joined the two of us.)
Why the evocation of this memory these many years later? I have been reading and thinking about a short and important essay by Daniel Goleman that appeared in The New York Times two days ago (October 10th). He called it "Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing." I'll reprint it below, for it has important connections, I think, with themes that lie at the heart of Reckonings, themes that I'll call the determinants and consequences of kinship.
Goleman's essay describes a phenomenon he calls "emotional contagion"--"the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another," to experience rapport--evidence for which has emerged from the discovery of a class of brain cells called "mirror neurons." The emergent field of social neuroscience, Goleman reports, is demonstrating the physiological -- cardiovascular and neuronal -- paths by which two persons, two psychobiologies, as it were, coordinate and merge. An example reminded me of that long ago event of a mother and a daughter holding hands as I was being born, and even suggested something of why the memory continues to give me pleasure:
"A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue."
It is a new way of thinking about old subjects literally at the heart of our lives and our relationships with the rest of the world: love, happiness, alienation, neglect, illness and healing, wholeheartedness and broken-heartedness.
_____________________________________
Thursday, 12 October 2006
Wounding and Cure
Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) is an adaptation of Sophocles' play, Philoctetes, written in the 5th century B.C. In Heaney's version it was first performed at the Guildhall, Derry, Ireland, on October 1, 1990.
Philoctetes, by James Berry
Philoctetes was a Greek hero of the Trojan War renowned as an archer, having inherited the great bow of Hercules, which was known never to miss its mark. Maimed with a foul, supperating wound to his foot, Philoctetes was marooned by his Greek compatriots on the small island of Lemnos ten years before the play opens. Now, still battling the Trojans, the Greeks have heard a prophecy that only Philoctetes and his bow can lead them to a final victory. So they have sent the cunning Osysseus and the youthful son of Achilles, Neoptolemus, to Lemnos to persuade the bitter Philoctetes to return and lead them in battle.
The Chorus, when not doubling as Odysseus's ship's crew, serves the common role in ancient Greek drama of greater wisdom or foresight than that of the protagonists. They set the first scene by noting, unflatteringly but with an eye to their own complicity, the self-regard and overbearing pride of the heros, Philoctetes, Hercules and Odysseus:
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.
People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
The young Neoptolemus is exempted from this critique, and it is his growth into mature manhood, generous and kind in true friendship, and without duplicity or guile, that constitutes one of the play's two central themes. The other, linked to the first, is Philoctetes' ultimately successful struggle to give up his self-pity and rage at the comrades who betrayed him, rejoin the Greek cause, and thus be cured of his wound. The interweaving of these two themes, the vicissitudes of developing trust and friendship between these two, is the heart of the play, as it moves from a kind of death-in-life to a genuine change of heart, emergence from a life dictated by past suffering to one embracing greater authenticity and a still wounded but more capacious, honest and forgiving justice.
It is in this context, in a penultimate but not final moment, that the Chorus utters the lines adopted as the subtitle of Reckonings. Its moving speech is worth recording in full, as it speaks of our own struggle, too, and echoes through every page and thought of this journal:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
None of us is without wounds. None of us escapes the wounding of others. We all speak sweet double-talk, lose hope, sleep when we should wake, fail to see, bear shame, hurt, betrayal and their armor of body and heart.
We can, as well, join others in healing and forgiveness, that "utter, self-revealing double-take of feeling." That sea-change, giving and receiving, that change of heart, is what we call grace, and it can happen not only once in a lifetime but over and again through a lifetime. Not often, perhaps, with whole heart and full-fledged trust, nor without distress, but still "someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term."
"I leave," says Philoctetes at the very end of the play, "half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk, and the half-true rhyme is love."
Full circle. For the poet-translator Seamus Heaney has begun his play with an epigram, these hard and beautiful lines of W.H. Auden:
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.’
Seamus Heaney (1939 - )
Wednesday, 11 October 2006
Pigs as Angels?
Galway Kinnell's A New Selected Poems appeared in 2000. He was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his first Collected Poems in 1980. In the autumn of 2001 he was interviewed by Elizabeth Lund, poetry editor of The Christian Science Monitor, and in her resulting account there is the following passage:
"Whether he's writing about his family or describing the loveliness of sows, Kinnell's work reveals affection for creatures both great and small. 'The other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels.'
"A pig as an angel?
"'I try to see past the usual clichés about things,' he smiles. 'Pig' is a pejorative word, but if you get to know them, get a feeling for them, you see that they have an extraordinary beauty. When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older.'"
On another occasion earlier in 2001 he said:
I don't think of myself as a "nature poet." I don't recognize the distinction between nature poetry and—what would be the other thing?—human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth. All the creatures have their intricate ways of living on earth. Humans are unique in one respect: we've taken over. We've taken over so successfully that we've become a threat to many of the other creatures and even a danger to the earth itself, so that's why I don't think of myself as a "nature poet." Poems about other creatures may have political and social implications for us.
St. Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even for 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;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
On Sabbath
We commonly know Sabbath as a day of rest corresponding to the Biblical seventh day of creation, in which "God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation." (Genesis 2:1-3) The Hebrew word translated as "rested" is shabat, corresponding to the noun sabbath: Sunday for Christians, Friday sundown through Saturday sundown for Jews.
To understand the reality of Sabbath more deeply, we must consider not only the character of that day and the meaning of shabat, but inquire into the nature of Sabbath time, keeping in mind the distinction between sacred and profane discussed elsewhere in Reckonings. "There is
a realm of time," writes the great scholar of Jewish ethics and mysticism, Abraham Joshua 
Heschel, "where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord." That is Sabbath time. While there is great wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom that may reside within our souls--the Biblical command to keep the Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word "Remember," as if it refers to something we already knew, but may have forgotten--Sabbath time is not limited to that day, but is a way of being in time. If it is not a familiar practice, one might start with an hour--in which one is less likely, in any event, to be interrupted.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Heschel, in his small book of meditation on Sabbath, first seeks to convey an understanding that may not coincide with our common intuition: Sabbath, wisdom, holiness, life in its most vivid authenticity, has to do essentially with the sanctification of time. The verb shabat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing conclusion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is a verb, not a noun. ("Even God," writes Heschel, as if we should know better, "is conceived by most of us as a thing.")
The essential spirit of Sabbath is that of reanimation, redemption and resurrection. All week--in profane time--"there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world"--in sacred time--"man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the Earth." Sabbath is the soul in time, and time is full of such moments, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Indeed, our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, even to the experience of life as Sabbath. As one wise soul recently wrote to a dying friend,
"This sacred time is not about convenience or inconvenience; it isn't about meeting deadlines. It isn't about you (or anyone else) being in control. This sacred time is about learning to trust the eddies and shoals of the River. It is... about mystery. It is a broader, deeper, infinitely more significant agenda that is beyond our charting. It is singularly about you and your union with the Other. It is beyond our reckoning."
It is our choice and our gift, then, our craft and our practice, if you will, to make the most of Sabbath. The traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when not sinking like all dogma into formalism and legalism, are designed to assist us in that task. The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. (Think, in mundane terms, of the difference between digital and analog watches.) Heschel's language is particularly vivid. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce..., the screetch of dissonant days,... the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [our own lives,]" the farther we move from Sabbath.
The more we rest quietly and peacefully into stillness; find accord among body, mind and imagination; harmony, love and delight among one another and with the natural world; the less anger, agitation, tension, conflict and fear we feel; we are the more drawn into Sabbath time. That is why we are wise to turn off the computer, the television and the telephone; avoid money and shopping; walk instead of drive; make love instead of fuss (or war); play softly rather than hard, and without competition; listen more than talk, be quiet, let it be. If prayer is familiar, let it be prayer of thanksgiving, not petition or repentance.
Thomas Merton was writing about good folks when he said, "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence [that is] activism and overwork... To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence... It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
To return to the Biblical roots of Sabbath time, through the words of Wayne Muller, "The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha--tranquillity, serenity, peace and repose--rest, in the deepest possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquillity and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete." (Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, NY: Bantam Books, 1999) The Book of Genesis tells us that the Sabbath is both part of creation and a rest from creation.
What I want is to leap out of this personality
And then sit apart from that leaping--
I've lived too long where I can be reached.
- Rumi
Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems written between 1979 and 1997 are gathered in a volume he called A Timbered Choir (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998). Here is one from 1996:
Some Sunday afternoon, it may be,
you are sitting under your porch roof,
looking down through the trees
to the river, watching the rain. The circles
made by the raindrops’ striking
expand, intersect, dissolve,
and suddenly (for you are getting on
now, and much of your life is memory)
the hands of the dead, who have been here
with you, rest upon you tenderly
as the rain rests shining
upon the leaves. And you think then
(for thought will come) of the strangeness
of the thought of Heaven, for now
you have imagined yourself there,
remembering with longing this
happiness, this rain. Sometimes here
we are there, and there is no death.
Tuesday, 10 October 2006
Three poems of Denise Levertov
(for Gil and Liz Bailie)
Denise Levertov, photo by David Geier
Denise Levertov's last volume of poems, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, was posthumously published by New Directions in 1999. She died from complications of lymphoma two years before at the age of 74. Her father was a Hasidic Jew who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican parson in England. Levertov came to the U.S. in 1948 at the age of 25. She was a major voice in American poetry for over forty years. Among her persistent themes, as Robert Haas has written, were "the brokenness of the world, its violence and injustice, and her longing for wholeness, the longing that sent her back to her Christian roots at the end of her life." The first poem reproduced below, "Aware," is the last she wrote. "The Fountain" was written in the 1960s, "I learned that her name was Proverb" twenty years later, so these three poems span some thirty years of writing.
In a final interview only two months before her death, Levertov said, "There's a lot of dependence on technology today, and a willful ignorance that it's messing up resources, may end up destroying life on this planet, and then we'll have to start over without it. Our ethical development does not match our technological development. This sense of spiritual hunger is something of a counterforce or unconscious reaction to all that technological euphoria....When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."
She once wrote that she found "certain analogies, and also interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith," and in an essay written in 1984, "A Poet's View," she said that the "acknowledgement and celebration of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry ..."
"Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidence, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God."
I believe that is an important statement about the centrality of imagination in spiritual life, in our capacity as artists, scientists or parents--as human beings--to realize ourselves and truly to embrace our fellowship with creation. Imagination, as Levertov uncommonly recognizes, is a faculty of perception. It can be terribly misused--think, after all, of the inhumane ways we have synthesized "intellect, emotion and instinct"--but without its creative exercise we remain, as Hasidic legend has it, imprisoned "as in a block, so that [our] hands and feet cannot stretch themselves and the head lies on the knees." That is suffering, and that is a posture of prayer.
Aware
When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I'll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.
The Fountain
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched—but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.
'I learned that her name was Proverb'
And the secret names
of all we meet who lead us deeper
into our labyrinth
of valleys and mountains, twisting valleys
and steeper mountains—
their hidden names are always,
like Proverb, promises.
Rune, Omen, Fable, Parable,
those we meet for only
one crucial moment, gaze to gaze,
or for years know and don’t recognize
but of whom later a word
sings back to us
as if from high among leaves,
still near but beyond sight
drawing us from tree to tree
towards the time and the unknown place
where we shall know
what it is to arrive.
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