Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Memento Mori

                                                          PERSONAL HISTORY

                                     MEMENTO MORI

                                   "The port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

                                                                            - Henry James

Preface

It is nearly thirty years since I wrote a book about my parents and the extraordinarily different families and personal histories from which they came [A Love in Shadow, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978].  I had made a conscious decision at that time to tell their stories as truthfully as I could, and to venture as modestly as possible into the realm of autobiography.

One of the book’s more perspicacious reviewers, Geoffrey Wolff, recognized the fault line in that choice. In revealing little of my own experience, my memories of my own childhood with (and without) my parents, I revealed less of them. This brief essay, then, is an experiment in remediation, a rebalancing of a chapter of my personal book. I write now, as I did then, particularly for my children, that they may know better a part of their own histories.

Each of those children, now adults, two with children of their own, have asked me for memories of my parents, particularly of the grandfather they never knew, around whose legacy an ominous and beguiling cloud still lingers. So much of that memory is gone, casualty of time and trauma. What remains is part of my truth, my story, even as I have inevitably reshaped it through the years, even as it has become difficult to separate the real memories from the stories of others, from the photographs into which I have poured so much of my hunger. For those reasons and others of which I speak here, he must always be the father I barely knew. My children only knew him through the fragments of my telling, and have wondered about his shadowed gifts to me, and through me, to themselves. I did not write or speak much of my loss of him when they were young.

My parents met on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign train in the autumn of 1932, and immediately fell in love. Both were married to others at the time, though separated from their spouses. On that train they were not successful in hiding their liaison from the press corps of which my father was a member.  Had the story of their affair broken, it is just conceivable that the campaign, and perhaps the course of history, would have taken a lurch. Or so, much later, I liked to imagine.

[continued]

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]

                                                                            

Rummaging in the attic (I)

I've been spending time in the attic before the weather gets too cold, rummaging through old files I've carried around through too many moves. I'm not a pack rat who deliberately collects things. I have little patience for filing, so when I do get around to it, what is filed tends to stay filed; I have as little interest in getting rid of those boxes as I did filling them in the first place. Also, moving is traumatic enough without having to make decisions about what goes and what doesn't.

But this month, sitting on the floor in the dim light and the dry, quiet air of disuse and time past that attics everywhere seem to possess, I began to feel something like the old adventure and intrigue of archival research. However likely it was that most of this stuff will become (already was) trash, there is something of my history here, and therefore the history of those I love. With patience, perhaps, a treasure or a painful artifact of years gone may work its way into time present with unpredictable consequences. Who knows? There may be gifts buried here that if freely given and received will renew themselves and create new life.

So I have begun to find, thanks to a first priming experience. I brought a box home, among several that had been stored in a friend's barn, and found it on top of the pile. My friend had alerted me to the fact that it contained something unusual, a special copy of a book written by my father.

John Boettiger wrote one book in the course of his 50 years. It was called Jake Lingle, or Chicago on the Spot, and was published by E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1931. In those years, the 1920s and early 1930s, my father was a general assignment reporter for The Chicago Tribune, then as now Chicago's morning daily paper. For ten years he had known Jake Lingle, The Tribune's senior reporter who had long covered the city's criminal underworld.  Lingle  had long known people on both sides of the law, as well as those--like himself--who plied the shadow world between the two.

John Boettiger, reporter for The Chicago Tribune, at the time he covered the Lingle case

So when Jake Lingle was shot in the back of the head at close range on June 9, 1930 while walking in the Loop on his way to the racetrack, it was assumed that the murder was a gangland execution, and my father was assigned by The Tribune's notorious boss, Col. Robert McCormick, to cover the case. Arriving at the crime scene only minutes after Lingle's death, he spent the next 11 months almost as close to the investigation--and the subsequent trial and conviction of Lingle's killer--as the police themselves. He was on hand, crouched silently in the neighboring apartment, when the suspect was surprised and apprehended outside his door in the Lake Crest Drive Apartment Hotel on  December 21, 1930.

So readers of The Chicago Tribune were treated to a succession of first-hand accounts of an absorbing homicide case, for as my father put it in the foreword of the resulting book, "Never, before the murder of Lingle, had the murderer in a Chicago gang killing been caught and punished."

I read Jake Lingle when I was a boy, and several times since. My father's prolonged absences from the family when I was very young, and his death by suicide when I was 11, precipitated a long search for the man he was, and the book was for a long time one of the few tangible artifacts I had--the kind of artifact that lent itself to the romance I wanted to construct. When I was not much older than he was when he wrote that book, I wrote one of my own, using all the resources I could find to make sense of the lives, families, generations and times from which I had emerged.

But the particular copy of Jake Lingle I held in my hands yesterday in the attic was indeed a special one. I had thought it a major discovery when I was writing 30 years ago, but it had since slipped from memory. Putnam's had mailed my father several early copies at publication time, and he sent one of them to his parents, who had retired from Chicago to San Diego. I don't know how my father got that copy back--likely from his family after his parents' deaths--but it was passed on to me, his only child. Tucked in among its pages is an envelope dated October 10, 1931, postmarked San Diego, addressed to Mr. John Boettiger, Oakdale Ave., Glencoe, Ill. It contained two long letters, one from his father Adam, the other from his mother Dora, responding to the gift of their son's book.

There is no other surviving correspondence between my father and his parents. Those two letters, full of pride and pleasure, written to the 31-year-old reporter and author whom they both still called "my baby boy," offer but one small window on his meaning for them, small and ambiguous hints in their language, their references and asides to inevitably more complex relationships. They are no less precious for that.

The same could be said of the lines written in my father's hand on the book's fly leaf, lines I thought about often in earlier years, and feel again as I re-type them here:

To my beloved Mother and Dad
whom I could never repay in a million years
for the love and the will to live
and to learn and to write
which they gave to me.

From their ever devoted and grateful son

John.

Barbara Kingsolver: Natural Places

Like most people, I came to know and admire Barbara Kingsolver first as a novelist, initially as author of that  rollicking, lyrical, passionate quasi-trilogy starting with The Bean Trees in 1988 and continuing with Animal Dreams (1990) and Pigs in Heaven (1993). With The Poisonwood Bible five years later, Kingsolver sustained the lyricism, humor, moral compass and fine characterization of her earlier three novels, and added a new depth and range of human struggle as well as a new geography.  In Prodigal Summer (2000), the most recent of her novels, she returned to her own birthing ground of Appalachia, her love of--and our need for intimacy with--the natural world, and in particular to one of my totem animals, coyote. (Read it as well, if you haven't, for Lusa Landowski's devotion to moths.)

While better known for those novels, it is her poetry, and one essay drawn from her most recent volume of essays, Small Wonder (2002), that I want to highlight on this page of Reckonings, because of their moving eloquence, their graceful melding of the political and the personal, their passionate oneness with the land, their offering, in the words of her fellow writer Sandra Cisneros, of palabras del corazon, words of the heart. Although I have--perhaps misleadingly--responded to her poetry as if it is manifestly autobiographical, it doesn't, in the end, make any difference. The poems, the novels, stories and essays are hers, of her life.

Kingsolver says to the reader of any of her books:

"What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place. Whether we are leaving it or coming into it, it's here that matters, it is place. Whether we understand where we are or don't, that is the story: To be here or not to be. Storytelling is as old as our need to remember where the water is, where the best food grows, where we find our courage for the hunt. It's as persistent as our desire to teach our children how to live in this place that we have known longer than they have. Our greatest and smallest explanations for ourselves grow from place, as surely as carrots grow in the dirt. I'm presuming to tell you something that I could not prove rationally but instead feel as a religious faith. I can't believe otherwise.

"A world is looking over my shoulder as I write these words; my censors are bobcats and mountains. I have a place from which to tell my stories. So do you, I expect. We sing the song of our home because we are animals, and an animal is no better or wiser or safer than its habitat and its food chain. Among the greatest of all gifts is to know our place."

Click below to read some exemplary passages from the works of Barbara Kingsolver.

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.

______________________

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.
___________________________

 

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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Living and Dying: Jane Kenyon

I wrote recently that I'd sidetracked myself while planning to write a short piece on Jane Kenyon.  Sidetracking in my experience is more often a good thing than a source only of distraction: I like to think that the sideways skittle of crabs is the product of eons of natural selection. They got the hang of it before the rest of us did. In the instance at hand, the day before yesterday, I wrote about companionship and solitude, and included a Kenyon poem that memorably expressed her love of peonies.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

There is a world of difference between this experience and, say, looking admiringly during a stroll in one's garden--or even more, not looking, or looking but not seeing. Mr. Ramsey, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is vaguely aware of color in some periphery of his vision but he neither looks nor sees while walking with Mrs. Ramsey in her summer garden. In Kenyon's poem the experience is one of genuine intimacy, bending close, searching "as a woman searches a loved one's face." It is a kind of consciousness, an identity, a dimension of relationship that Mrs. Ramsey has--with her children and other people, as well as with the natural world. One can't imagine Mr. Ramsey, who has eight children and is devotedly dependent upon his wife, searching a loved one's face, except to determine if it can be turned to his own needs.

It is too much to identify this quality of consciousness with life and its absence with death-in-life. But not a great deal too much, for it is a quality of consciousness that is critical to nourishing life. It's absence does not necessarily destroy, abuse or deplete life, but without it life lacks, I'm convinced, a crucial depth of perception, of imagination, that has profound consequences for our capacities to care for ourselves, each other, the earth around us, and other people and creatures whose well-being depends on our capacity and will to attend to them.

In that context I want today to circle back on the writing of Jane Kenyon.

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 -     )

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