Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

RECKONINGS - A brief introduction

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimensions -
personal, social, political, economic, environmental, poetic.

Attention to such themes is often expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over 18 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still built upon the twin aspirations of integrity and love. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page, and the search box in the same location.

Now, in 2018 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old or young as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when my wife and I were living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending wilderness trails. That remains my calling. My vehicles are still words and images, poetry, fiction, memoir, biography, and photography, in addition to shovel, hoe and mattock. (Truthfully, the last three are now a domain of personal history rather than current practice; but I've added meditation in the last seven years, for which I'm deeply grateful.)

Photo: Blueberries and Granite, by John R. Boettiger (2001)

My formal training is that of a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice that discipline straightforwardly. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, my mentors Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, my poet friend Richard O. Moore, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, my wise age-mate Parker Palmer, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, my sister Ellie and brother Curtis, my parents Anna and John, my children Adam, Sara, Joshua and Paul,  my eight grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.

The more the years, the more I feel blessed.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckonings is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from poet Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos (the right time, the opportune time) than chronos (chronological or sequential time).* Another useful word, sometimes fortuitously applicable, is the Greek hôrâ, similar to kairos, the seasonal time, the beautiful time when everything comes together. The pages of Reckonings are linear or chronological in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said that they are circular or elliptical or spiral. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others, ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly,

john@reckonings.net

Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment; I'll try to understand and respond. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (Your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

_______________________

* The contrast of chronos and kairos has been well described by my friend Gil Bailie: "In contrast to the word chronos – which means an interval of time, time as chronology, a sequence of identical units of time – kairos refers to a qualitative, not quantitative, experience of time. It implies a moment pregnant with consequences and demanding a decision, and, more importantly, the present moment, 'the present time.'" 

Attention to such themes is often expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over 18 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still built upon the twin aspirations of integrity and love. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page, and the search box in the same location.

Now, in 2018 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old or young as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when my wife and I were living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending wilderness trails. That remains my calling. My vehicles are still words and images, poetry, fiction, memoir, biography, and photography, in addition to shovel, hoe and mattock. (Truthfully, the last three are now a domain of personal history rather than current practice; but I've added meditation in the last seven years, for which I'm deeply grateful.)

Photo: Blueberries and Granite, by John R. Boettiger (2001)

My formal training is that of a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice that discipline straightforwardly. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, my mentors Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, my poet friend Richard O. Moore, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, my wise age-mate Parker Palmer, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, my sister Ellie and brother Curtis, my parents Anna and John, my children Adam, Sara, Joshua and Paul,  my eight grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.

The more the years, the more I feel blessed.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckonings is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from poet Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos (the right time, the opportune time) than chronos (chronological or sequential time).* Another useful word, sometimes fortuitously applicable, is the Greek hôrâ, similar to kairos, the seasonal time, the beautiful time when everything comes together. The pages of Reckonings are linear or chronological in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said that they are circular or elliptical or spiral. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others, ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly,

john@reckonings.net

Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment; I'll try to understand and respond. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (Your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

_______________________

* The contrast of chronos and kairos has been well described by my friend Gil Bailie: "In contrast to the word chronos – which means an interval of time, time as chronology, a sequence of identical units of time – kairos refers to a qualitative, not quantitative, experience of time. It implies a moment pregnant with consequences and demanding a decision, and, more importantly, the present moment, 'the present time.'" 

Mary Oliver on her great love, Molly Malone Cook

Maria Popova so often evokes a grateful response from me in her own online journal, BrainPickings. Here she is again, describing the poet Mary Oliver's long love of her partner Molly Malone Cook, in Oliver's book Our World. Oliver says she drew from Molly, "Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter."

"Our World — part memoir, part deeply moving eulogy to a departed soul mate, part celebration of their love for one another through their individual creative loves. Embraced in Oliver’s poetry and prose, Cook’s photographs reveal the intimate thread that brought these two extraordinary women together — a shared sense of deep aliveness and attention to the world, a devotion to making life’s invisibles visible, and above all a profound kindness to everything that exists, within and without.'

"Oliver — who refers to Cook simply as M. in most of her writings — reflects in the opening essay:

'Though you have known someone for more than forty years, though you have worked with them and lived with them, you do not know everything. I do not know everything — but a few things, which I will tell. M. had will and wit and probably too much empathy for others; she was quick in speech and she did not suffer fools. When you knew her she was unconditionally kind. But also, as our friend the Bishop Tom Shaw said at her memorial service, you had to be brave to get to know her.

[…]

'She was style, and she was an old loneliness that nothing could quite wipe away; she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s. She lived sometimes in a black box of memories and unanswerable questions, and then would come out and frolic — be feisty, and bold.'

Oliver writes of the affair Cook had in the late 1950s, shortly before they met:

"She had … an affair that struck deeply; I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad… This love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed — not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much."

The following year, Cook met Oliver and they remained together, inseparable, for more than four decades. That encounter — which calls to mind the fateful first meetings that occasioned such iconic literary couples as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes — took place at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where Oliver had landed the day after her high school graduation at the age of seventeen and stayed for several years.

One evening in 1959, when Oliver was twenty-four and Cook thirty-four, the young poet returned to the house and found the photographer sitting at the kitchen table with a friend. She describes their encounter with her signature elegance of unpeeling the mundane to reveal the momentous:

"I took one look and fell, hook and tumble. M. took one look at me, and put on her dark glasses, along with an obvious dose of reserve. She denied this to her dying day, but it was true."

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

It turned out that Oliver and Cook, in their regular lives beyond Steepletop, lived right across the street from each other in New York’s East Village. So they began to see one another “little by little,” and so their great love story began.

But perhaps the greatest gift of their union was the way in which they shaped each other’s way of seeing and being with the world — the mutually ennobling dialogue between their two capacities for presence:

"It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles. I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability… We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a rich and abiding confluence.

[…]

"I don’t think I was wrong to be in the world I was in, it was my salvation from my own darkness. Nor have I ever abandoned it — those early signs that so surely lead toward epiphanies. And yet, and yet, she wanted me to enter more fully into the human world also, and to embrace it, as I believe I have. And what a gift [that she] never expressed impatience with my reports of the natural world, the blue and green happiness I found there. Our love was so tight."

To lose the love of one’s life is something few have dared to live in public — the most memorable such bravery being Joan Didion’s — but Oliver brings to death’s darkness her familiar touch of emboldening light:

"The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms."

Oliver ends with a breath-stopping prose poem that brings full-circle her opening reflections on never fully knowing even those nearest to us — a beautiful testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

 

THE WHISTLER

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

 

W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Circle of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, ca. 1590-95, Museum van Buuren, Brussels, Belgium

(double-click to enlarge)

 

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

 

The lost Father — yearning for God in our days — by Notto Thelle

Editor's notes (JRB):

Long reads of more than more than 5 or 10 minutes are seldom posted on Reckonings, but I hope readers will enjoy this exception. (Anyway, it barely makes it into the long-read category.) Notto Thelle is an old and dear friend.  We came to know each other during my years living and working in Norway. We continue to nourish our conversation via Skype every other week or so. He is professor of theology at the University of Oslo, a Christian minister in the long-prevailing Church of Norway, and a longtime student of diverse spiritual traditions, especially those whose homes include China and Japan, to both of which he has been a frequent visitor.

Whatever my talents as an adult, they have not included facility in the learning of languages other than English, which remains late in my eighth decade a deeply pleasurable work-in-progress. It is partially in anticipation of the response I would elicit that I don't say, when asked, that my favorite book is the Oxford English Dictionary.

As a psychologist, I have necessarily become adept in the practice, as Notto puts it, of "taking the dark side seriously." Doing so, indeed, is essential to our realization of the light within us and in the earth.

The other key element in the chapter of Notto's book reprinted below that is central to experience of the sacred and the life of the spirit, whoever is learning and practicing, is relationship or dialogue. Even when one is practicing alone, one is not alone, but in relationship to an Other. Notto writes that "conversation is the innermost essence of faith in God." There is, of course, risk in every conversation. "But if we refuse to take this risk, there will never be any true encounter! Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his [or her] reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it." And this: "We must never forget that silence too is part of the conversation." The interplay of silence and speech is crucial.

"What is it about faith that makes us break our silence all the time? And what makes us believe that the conversation is possible and meaningful? We are now coming near to the very center of our understanding of God, and of ourselves as human beings."

"Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it....This is why we continue to speak. Hope must be proclaimed, hope must be repeated as a protest. We must urge people to hope, setting up a bulwark against pessimism and all the forces that destroy life. We must remind one another unceasingly of the signs that point to the deepest forces in life and are stronger and truer than the signs that point to annihilation."

I have followed Notto's writing as best I can, and have been grateful both to the Paulist Press for publication of some of his works in English, including the book excerpted below, and to Notto himself for translating portions of other publications, most recently his prefatory essays in a forthcoming collection of four books, translations into Norwegian of the haiku masters Bashō, Issa, Buson and Santōka.

 

The lost Father – yearning for God in our days

 

Apropos Solar Eclipse

 

Notto R. Thelle[1], Professor of Theology, University of Oslo

 

Nearly fifty years ago, there was a total eclipse of the sun over southern Norway. We knew what would happen, so we sat and waited, with over-exposed black and white film covering our eyes, to see the details of the sun’s disappearance. Slowly, the sun was eaten up by the moon, and then it vanished. Only the radiant corona continued to glow. It was not in fact the darkness that made the greatest impression, but something we had not expected – the silence.

First came the shadow, like twilight in the middle of the day, then the brief night; all this was expected, but not the silence! The birds stopped singing, the cheerful group of people stopped talking, the world held its breath. It was not the peace of the night that descended upon us, but a paralyzing stillness. Was it the groaning of creation we heard, or the fear of emptiness, of being abandoned?

In his short book The Eclipse of God, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber interprets our age, i.e. the last two centuries, as an historical hour of destiny in which the sun is eclipsed. God himself is overshadowed by other phenomena.

In the silence which descends after God has vanished, philosophers seek new words, new images, new ideas that can bring him back. But Buber affirms that God is silent in the systems of the philosophers. One can dedicate oneself to ideas, perhaps even love them – but ideas do not love, so our love remains unrequited.

Buber reminds us that an eclipse is an event which takes place between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself. How are we to see the light again? Not by recreating it in our systems, for our words and ideas sometimes block the view, intensifying the darkness and imprisoning us in a fictional conversation with our own selves; no, we must search behind the eclipse until we find the divine mystery.

How can God once again become a reality, so that our words are more than mere sounds in the empty air? I believe that, if our yearning is to succeed in uniting words and reality, we must also take the dark silence seriously.

Let us remain in the darkness of the eclipse for a little while. I shall not attempt to explain it; instead, let us listen to three writers, Sven Delblanc, Per Olov Enquist, and Arne Garborg. Their experiences are not mine, but I can recognize the truth in what they say. They intensify the darkness, but their somber words are also nourished by a yearning for the light, for play, for birdsong, and for conversation.

Are they talking with God? I think so, although I am not always sure whether the conversation is over – or only just beginning.    

Sven Delblanc’s solar eclipse begins in a cornfield one beautiful autumn day in the Canada of his childhood. The golden, sweet corn is attractive. The book is called Livets ax (Life’s Ear of Corn). A little boy is getting to know the world by tasting and biting. The ears of corn are sweet, but they become rough and sharp, they crawl down his throat and try to strangle him. He coughs and cries out, but in vain: his father stands there and laughs uproariously, since he is a brutal, unfeeling tyrant. His sisters too laugh, since they are afraid of their father. For the screaming child, his father is a tower reaching up to the skies, mocking one who is helpless. Those who are stronger refuse to help! And then he sees the sun for the first time, hanging there like a blind face in the cloud, burning evilly, a face without eyes. He thinks: the sun is stronger than I am. The father who should have bestowed love and security gave us nothing but terror. And the sun was blind and evil.

A terrible childhood formed the picture of a world without grace. “His father had given him an image of God. Childhood had given him an image of what life was about: there were two alternatives, to lead the life of an executioner when possible, or to lead the life of a victim when compelled to do so.” The blind god is the counterpart of his father. His father is the Yahweh in his life, and the son lives in his shadow.

“I am. I am the One who is. You are only my shadow.”

I understood that he was speaking the truth – he was my life’s Yahweh. I am his shadow. As the years pass and the divine evil rises to its zenith, I shall shrink more and more. At the last, I shall be merely a stripe of gray dust at his feet.

What does one do when life is eclipsed by a blind and evil god who is stronger? What does one do when one is destroyed by an avenger who demands sacrifices and forgives nothing? One hangs on. The child grows up in an unchangeable world where God is eternal, his father never gets older, and terror endures. And the fate awaiting him is a rest devoid of feelings, like a fossil with staring eyes, its fear turned to stone.

But this petrified endurance in the feelingless shadow is not the whole story. His yearning and his dreams are alive. He has seen glimpses of another world: the dream of a lost paradise, fragments of faith in Jesus, and a cherry tree in bloom.

This tree is the most important factor. He discovered it on one of his wanderings away from home, a fountain of blossoms in spring, full of dark berries in summer. The tree was a friend and sister, with an important message for him: “Something about consolation in spite of everything, a message about a generous love which grows in the barrenest of soils … Only this flowering cherry-tree communicated to the boy that faith in life which many a time halted his steps on the threshold to madness, as he was on the point of going out into the darkness.” “The stony ground was bathed in a froth, the unimagined blossoms of the fruit-tree. It was like seeing God.” This is another God than the one he knew from his childhood home in Mölna.

The cherry tree is perhaps just another word for the dream of that lost paradise where the evil god had no power. “There existed a far-off country where his omnipotence did not reach: there, peace reigned. Only, you were expelled all too soon from that country, and this made you grieve all the more at the split in our existence.” In his childhood, he had wandered unnoticed and unhindered between that realm of shadows which we call “reality” and the far-off land of mysticism. He longed to get back to the true reality, to the light which cast shadows on the walls of his cave.

Jesus is a minor character in Delblanc’s world, far too powerless to create any hope in the narrator’s darkness. He could indeed recognize and understand Jesus’ suffering, but he could make no sense of the idea that this suffering was meaningful! In his world, there was no place for grace and reconciliation. What weapons did Jesus possess to resist the overwhelmingly powerful blind god who enjoyed seeing human beings suffer? And Jesus never knocked on the door of his childhood home at Mölna:

Perhaps Jesus did indeed bear the lamp of love in his hands – that was possible. But he knocked in vain on the gate of Mölna, for no one heard him, no one let him in. The only love that still existed there was female and nature-grown like the cherry tree in the wood.

Per Olov Enquist writes about a mind darkened by life. Kapten Nemos bibliotek (Captain Nemo’s Library) is a mysterious book on the borders between poetry and madness. Only gradually does the reader understand that we are going through an inner world which is confused and darkened. At the same time, this darkness is a place of refuge which opens up the path back to reality.

The external drama is simple. Two boys are mixed up at birth in the hospital and grow up as best friends. When they are six years old, the mistake is noticed, and they exchange homes. The newspapers write about them.

The inner drama is a callous story about what it means to be abandoned in a town in northern Sweden where people find it very difficult to express their feelings. A child loses his parents, loses the friend with whom he had been mixed up, loses his identity, loses his mind – or rather, he takes refuge in mental illness, and the reader is introduced to a part of the landscape of his mind. This is a world where imagination and recollection and reality are woven together, but where the boy can find interconnections and perceive signals; perhaps he can even “put everything together” and create a new wholeness.

What has all this to do with God? Our initial impression is of harshness and tears – nothing else. There are only three kinds of human beings: executioners, victims, and traitors. God is overwhelming, distant, one who punishes. The human fathers are absent and dead, but nevertheless represent a threat in virtue of their very absence; the same is true of God, the highest “father.” The boy had heard Mia Hallesby’s pious stories which were served up to children at that time, and had understood that God was eternal. Eternity was a huge rock in the sea, where a bird flew once every thousand years to sharpen its beak. It takes an immensely long time for the rock to be completely worn down, but all that time is merely one second in eternity. And the human being fights against this overwhelming God, sharpening his beak against the rock in order to destroy it and so gain access to his Benefactor.

Hope was to be found in the Son of Man, who was not evil like God. He had a wound in his side, in which one could hide. In the local chapel, there was a picture of him and the children, with indentations in its frame. He made intercession with the divinity. “It took me all my childhood to learn that the Son of Man usually had no time – only very, very seldom.”

If God is a crushing eternal rock, and the Son of Man has no time, one must find other helpers. The boy’s benefactor is Captain Nemo, whom he had met in one of Jules Verne’s books. Captain Nemo leads him into a concealed world under the rock, with his submarine “Nautilus” as its innermost, closed room.

The name Nemo means “No one.” In one way, both he and his world are the product of a sick imagination; but it is a world that offers a place of refuge, and Nemo acts as guide to the narrator’s ego, which has no identity of its own. “If one has no name, one is No one – and that too is a kind of liberation.”

Is this merely a story about someone who returns from the eclipse by reconstructing his life with the aid of a fictional helper? I do not think so: because en route, after more than four years in silent illness and confusion, he has perceived signals and signs.

He has come to understand that the biographies of the victims, the executioners, and the traitors are interwoven. He has perceived the clumsy, almost invisible signs of goodness in the barren society of his childhood, a society so poor in feelings. He writes without bitterness – and that in itself is a little miracle. He has seen the loneliness of the friend who became a traitor. Not least, he has grasped the abandonment and fear felt by his stepmother as she stood at the top of the stairs like a deity and destroyed her children’s lives. Her fear showed him a glimpse of a deity who was different: “I saw her face when she turned towards me. Afterwards, I thought: How strange that a powerful God who punishes us can be afraid of being abandoned.” He had experienced something similar when he made his escape and climbed a fir-tree with branches as thick as God’s fingers. The branches had begun to tremble, as if God was afraid:

One could reflect on that for a while. It had never occurred to me before now that God was afraid, but this time the fingers had trembled, just like Elma Markström’s fingers – her hands were shaky. Really, it seemed that God was afraid.

When I looked for a Norwegian parallel to these Swedish voices, I thought at once of Arne Garborg (1851-1924). Some consider him a rather old-fashioned writer, but he may be more modern than we think, despite all the distance in time. When he writes about human life, he has something of the intensity we find in the two Swedes. He speaks of one so wounded by life, so wounded by faith, that he had to leave home in order to seek a remedy. And yet he still longs to find a light and a meaning behind the solar darkness of his childhood religion.

In Den burtkomne Faderen (The Lost Father: the title alludes to the parable of the “lost” or “prodigal” son), he writes: “I had lived like the lost son and had experienced destitution, just like him. But when I made my way home again, my father was gone. I never find peace. I am myself this unease that never comes to rest … I was a son of an age that has forgotten what ‘home’ and ‘rest’ are.”

 

         Truly,

         I am not the lost son,

         but you are a lost father;

         and no one dares to wait for your return,

         but you are missed by all your little ones.

 

The beautiful and empty words of the church sound like a wake held over the dead Father. But here there is nevertheless one last hope: the Master.

 

         A God?

         What do we need God for?

         We are perfectly capable

         of condemning ourselves.

         But a Son of Man

         who knew us

         and knew everything,

         and possessed the healing word

         and help

         where the others merely pronounce judgments

         and raise cold eyes;

         a Son of Man –

         oh, why are you no longer here on earth!

 

I have used fragments from the worlds of these three writers as material for my own reflections, but in doing so, I discovered that they also do something with me. They draw me into their world and make the subject matter much more difficult than I had initially thought.

Two points are particularly appropriate to this book. First, all three speak clearly about the pain caused when God is eclipsed. Their characters are marked by this absence, consumed by loneliness and abandonment, crushed by fear of the evil and arbitrary divinity. They hang on, they flee, or else they rebel. But will they ever escape?

Secondly, behind the pain and the flight and the rebellion lives a yearning: Garborg’s search for the lost Father, which leads him to yearn for the Son of Man; Enquist’s description of the helper in his imaginary world, Captain Nemo, the “No one” born of the imagination, and his glimpses of a God whose hands tremble; and Delblanc’s longing for “a far-off country.”

Both absence and longing are clothed in strong language. There is something universal here; we are not speaking of phenomena confined to Scandinavia at the beginning of the new millennium. When his longing reaches breaking-point, the human person returns anew to his search. The night is at its deepest just before the dawn.

Our task, then, is to speak credibly of God in a world full of distorted images of the divine. We must find something to replace the images of malicious and absent fathers and dominating mothers, something other than loneliness and guilt and repressed sexuality, something more human than power-hungry groups who so readily utter condemnations. We must speak of a God who does not crush us or force us down into the dust, but instead lets us stand upright so that we can meet him face to face and talk with him. Without a credible language, there is no true answer to human longings.

All this is no doubt true; but at one point, our writers disturb the clarity of our system, because they touch on something that gnaws at us and leaves us uneasy. It is not just a matter of a distorted religiosity that destroys people’s emotional lives, their language, and their images of God – for Delblanc’s father did not believe in God, nor did he desire to force any particular religious ideas on his son. He was merely a bad and brutal father who ruthlessly laid bare one aspect of reality, namely the cruel harshness of the world. How can we believe in a good Father, when it appears that quite different forces form human existence? Are not abandonment, violence, and heartlessness far more obvious realities than the goodness of existence? Is there any reason to believe in a good and loving Creator, rather than in a cold regularity, blind chance, or an evil power which has made the world our torture chamber? Is it not true to assert that we are abandoned? Must we not create our own world and find a benefactor, our own Captain Nemo?

If we take this reality seriously, we will not speak superficially about God.

However, many Christians breathe a sigh of relief in the present time: “Yes, people are truly longing! At long last, we can talk about God – and people pay attention to us. Our young people get involved in church activities. The poets and writers own up to their emptiness, the theaters take up religious problems. People are having religious experiences, they are rediscovering the Bible, they light candles in churches, they grope for words to describe their longings. There was indeed a silence after God’s light was eclipsed, but the empty space is now being filled!”

We must never forget that silence too is part of the conversation; nor that the solar eclipse and the paralyzing stillness were often due to the fact that the conversation had lost all meaning. The denial and mockery of religion can be prophetic words that are far more true than many a polished affirmation about God. If the conversation does not allow this silence too to be heard, words become cheap. Garborg noted something of this truth in his novel:

Many seek God today; and some even tell us that they have found God. I read these testimonies. But in this matter, one person cannot help another. They have had it too easy, and they write too fluently. They write and write and write. But we have so little confidence in words. We feel disturbed by everything that is said to the blast of trumpets.

 The solar eclipse is not experienced only by those who lack faith. Often, faith too speaks out of the same desperation, crying out to God and refusing to accept the account the Christian faith gives of him.

It was Abraham, our father in faith, who refused to accept God’s terrible solution to the problem posed by the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah. He called God to account, opposing the small-mindedness of the tribal deity in the name of the divine generosity. But perhaps he fell silent when the towns were destroyed all the same? Is it not Job’s protest against unjust suffering that has inspired people for more than two thousand years, rather than God’s overwhelming demonstration of power, which brings Job to silence at the close of the book? In every generation, there have been Christians who had to get out, to reject the language of their tribe, and settle somewhere else. They had to bid farewell to a fossilized theology and to the pious folklore of their childhood home. Faithfulness to God required them to say “no” to God. They had to lose their speech and their language before they could sing a new song.

A few years ago, I read Tatiana Goricheva’s little book Talking about God Is Dangerous. The title has a double message. It recalls that one risked one’s life in the Soviet Union if one talked about God – this could lead to prison and torture. But the title indicates something even more terrible. She refers directly to her title only once in the book, when she describes the church in the West. She saw a preacher talking about love on television with smoothly practiced gestures and a polished surface. He was long-winded, empty, faceless. “For the first time,” she writes, “I understood how dangerous it is to talk about God. Every word must be a word of sacrifice, full to the brim of authenticity. Otherwise, it is better to be silent.”

Otherwise, it is better to be silent … And yet, we speak!

What is it about faith that makes us break our silence all the time? And what makes us believe that the conversation is possible and meaningful? We are now coming near to the very center of our understanding of God, and of ourselves as human beings. In order to speak clearly, I shall employ images.

According to a Jewish legend, the world was created when God gave birth to the earth from his own body. In other words, the earth is life born of God’s own life, bound to the divinity by the bonds of love and of blood. But at the same time, when the world was born, it became something completely distinct and separated from God. It was to lead its own life: it would attain a true relationship to its origin precisely by being something other than God.

I remember clearly the birth of our first child. As soon as she emerged and the umbilical cord was cut, she opened two big blue eyes which looked at us and said: “Here I am, and there you are.” And we returned her gaze and saw the miracle of a new life – an infant totally dependent on our care and love, and yet the tie binding her to her mother had been cut.

A child is an autonomous living being who must find an equilibrium between nearness and distance, in order to become a complete human being. We can suck the strength out of a child by binding it to ourselves with a thousand ties, we can dominate it and over-protect it, raising it in a symbiotic relationship; but we can also cripple it by means of distance and poor care, creating a mirror image of our own inability to show feelings. In both cases, the relationship is distorted and we end up unable to communicate with each other on any meaningful level. A genuine relationship needs a wide space where child and parents can live in a free interplay. The nearness is taken for granted, but a living relationship presupposes freedom and difference. If a genuine conversation is to take place, distance is just as important as nearness.

The world is God’s first-born creation and bears the imprint of likeness to its Creator. But the umbilical cord is cut before God looks at his earth with proud and loving eyes and sees that his work is good. We must live in an open space of distance and nearness, free to form our lives and to become ourselves. Then we can encounter God face to face, as one distinct from our own selves, and we can talk together. The conversation needs a shared space, a relationship which binds both dialogue partners together; but it also presupposes their difference.

I have long been fascinated by two biblical expressions for the relationship between God and the human person: face and name.

This book speaks of the wish to find the true face of the Godhead. I have described the fear faith experiences when his face disappears. But many are just as much afraid of an insistent nearness, of the face that looms at close quarters, seeing everything and controlling everything.

What sets us free is the presence in an open space, the blessing and peace which are imparted when the Lord lifts his face and lets the light of his face shine. Our conversation with God is now an anticipation of what Paul calls the face-to-face encounter in perfection, when we no longer see only in fragments, and no longer talk like children. Our conversation trains us to approach the Godhead as fully mature persons, freed from parental authority and false ties, so that we can stand upright when we meet Him who is our origin. According to a mysterious tradition, Moses spoke face to face with God on the mountain, as one human being speaks with another (Exodus 33:11).

The name is related to the face. For the Bible, name and reality are one: to know the name is to have power, and power may be used wrongly; but to know the name is also the basis of trust and fellowship. To know God’s name is to share in God, but to misuse his name is to assault God himself.

According to the creation narrative, Adam was permitted to give names to all living beings on the earth. This implies an enormous power, for it is really the Creator who puts names to things. God calls the day light and the darkness night, he gives names to heaven and earth, he determines the number of the stars and calls each one by its name (Genesis 1; Ps 147:4). When he put names to things, Adam received a share in the divine power.

In reality, trust is more important than power. Trust is the close relationship between the one who knows the name and the one who bears it, as we see clearly in the manner in which the Bible employs names. Again and again, we are told that God calls people by name: “Adam, where are you? … Your name shall be ‘Abraham’.” Jacob is given the name “Israel” because he wrestled with God and won. God calls Moses, Samuel, the prophets. The Servant of the Lord is called from his mother’s womb, and God has spoken his name before he was born (Isaiah 49:1). He has called and formed the people too: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). The good shepherd calls his sheep by name. In the New Testament, the nameless are given a name: we do not know the name of the rich man who lived in luxury, but Lazarus, the beggar at his door, has a name that resounds down through the centuries (Luke 16:29-31). He is the representative of the innumerable nameless and despised persons who received life because the Master gave their names a meaning.

We say: “In the name of Jesus,” and there is a rich treasury of hymns and prayers which praise this name – love-poetry at its finest.

Faces can be disfigured, images can be distorted until they are unrecognizable, names can be misused for evil purposes. This is the risk in every conversation. But if we refuse to take this risk, there will never be any true encounter! Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it.

We are formed by the images and words we use. Faces and names do something to us. It is certainly not irrelevant to ask which images of God we carry around with us; and our choice of words and names for the divine thing is equally important. Do we evoke the radiant face of blessing, or the blind god, the stern father who mocks the helpless? God's eye can be full of concern, an eye that neither slumbers nor sleeps. But it can also be Garborg's divinity, who watched over him "with eyes of fire," so that he had to escape in order to know gladness. Or it can be the Son of Man who "possessed the healing word / and help / where the others merely pronounce judgments / and raise cold eyes.” Or it can be a divinity who is the eternal rock that blocks the path to our benefactor.

We have tried out a number of images and words: face to face; the name that calls to another name; the umbilical cord is cut and the child meets its own origin as Another. Many people criticize Christianity for directing its faith to something outside the human person, thereby depriving us of our autonomy. There is something correct in this charge, but it is basically wrong, since the point is not that we localize faith somewhere else and seek an object “out there.” The important thing is the relationship, the interconnection. Faith lives in the space between, i.e. in what we call trust, conversation, encounter, and love.

When we keep on breaking the silence and speaking, this is not because we have adequate words to describe God or to speak to him, but because conversation is the innermost essence of faith in God. If the divine had been a set of rules inherent in the world, an idea, or an impersonal divine force permeating all things – including the deepest dimension in our own being – then we could perfectly well have remained silent, as in some forms of mysticism, which rest in the realm of the unutterable. Enter your own sanctuary, they say, and remain in the silence; words are superfluous, since you yourself are the divine. Here there is no face for us to meet, no Other with whom we can converse, only unity with our own innermost self.

In the Christian faith, I encounter Another, a face and a name that are not my own. This is my origin, but the umbilical cord has been cut. I must grow apart from my mother’s womb and my father’s embrace, learning to straighten my back and stand face to face.

We too can remain silent as we stand before the divine mystery; words are obviously inadequate. But the silence will always be broken, just as a man and woman who love one another will always grope for words to express their love, however poorly. In the same way, friends cannot remain silent. The beloved one has a face.

How can we speak credibly about the object of our faith? How can language be recovered, and the words arise from the dead?

“We must pull up our socks,” think the preachers – and get a bad conscience. “We must improve our formulations, discover new images, seek inspiration in poetry and literature, speak with greater commitment, draw on art for help …”

Rhetoric and beauty are certainly important, but I have come to believe that the vital thing is not our ability to formulate or our rhetorical skill, but the space in which our words are heard, and not least the space which our words create. We must help people to experience faith anew as an open space, a landscape they can enter, where they will receive a language by hearing and speaking, seeing, and experiencing. But they need fresh air around them in this landscape, and they must be free to leave again.

People are accustomed to see faith as something ministers and preachers want to force down their throats: a system, a language, a whole world of opinions that they must accept. The words are weapons launched against them, seeking their weak points. They are meant to sting like salt in open wounds, giving them a bad conscience. The goal is to bring them to conversion. But they get claustrophobia and then retreat, since there is no place for their own reality in the words’ closed room. The church’s language reminds them too much of authorities that seek control, of parents who cannot let go of their children.

If language is to live, it must be formed in a vast space, large enough to accommodate the whole of life. It must be tested in longing and rebellion. It must have depths in which both blasphemy and adoration can resonate – and desperation, fear, and exultation. Abraham could quarrel with God because he inhabited a huge universe of faith. Job and the prophets shook their fists at God and cursed the day of their birth because they needed fresh air around them. Language must be heard in a vast room of faith which people can enter without feeling imprisoned. Perhaps such a room will make it possible for them to really commit themselves!

Some people have to go so far away that the last remaining bit of the umbilical cord breaks, before they come as adults to long for another kind of conversation, and try to pick up the threads once more. Perhaps the god who breathed fear and coldness into them may turn out to have loving qualities. There must also be space for the “foreigners” who want to try out a language they have never learned. In this way, faith can become a voyage of discovery, on which their lives are given a place in a larger landscape with new dimensions and new joys – though assuredly, there will be hitherto unknown abysses as well.

Ultimately, it is the Gospels’ stories about Jesus that open up the landscape and sketch a face of God that allows us to believe that our longing can actually lead somewhere.

It is not by chance that Jesus was a wanderer – from one village to another in Galilee’s mountain landscape, with their pastures and small fields, on streets and market squares, and in the wildernesses where no one lived. Around him, a whole world took form. People were drawn into a reality that was utterly close yet different and new – a reality he called “the kingdom of God.” This was not a place, but a path and a landscape which they were permitted to share by following him and trying it out for themselves.

The Gospels speak of very simple matters: Jesus meets people and talks with them, touches them, blesses them, eats with them, heals, weeps, speaks about life’s mysteries, about God. They had indeed heard about this, but now it was here! The path also went to Jerusalem, where it seemed that Jesus’ world was collapsing – the king in the kingdom of God received a gallows as his throne. In his world, God was the highest and the lowest. Heaven and hell were God’s place.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not a nice but powerless reconciler, with no weapons to challenge the divinity who was an “eternal rock.” The Jesus of the Gospels is not an absent figure who never dared to knock on the door, because a brutal father and a blind god were all too much alive for him. No, in the Gospels it is the Highest himself who visits the earth. God makes his way through narrow lanes and back alleys and says: “Let there be light!” Eyes that were dulled become bright, people straighten up. Those who had been despised are given back their names, and the sinners receive a face.

If this is the face of God, then we can straighten up and try to speak. The Almighty has a human countenance. This is a God whose hands tremble, to borrow Enquist’s image: “It had never occurred to me before now that God was afraid … Really, it seemed that God was afraid.” This is a God whose image is reflected in the fear felt by the victims – and by the executioners and the traitors. What other founder of a religion was terror-stricken and cried out: “Now is my soul full of fear” (John 12:27)? Jesus’ life and death – his failure, in human terms – were not a sacrifice demanded by a harsh God, nor were they the defeat of a well-meaning idealist. No, they were made of the same stuff as life itself. Those who ruled were able to take power and honor from Jesus, for he himself had already laid such things aside; but they could not take life and love from him.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, something of this Jesus was revealed in the glimpses of life and of meaning in Delblanc’s gloomy world: the fruit-tree in the abandoned smallholding which bloomed unseen in the dark forest and told him “something about consolation in spite of everything, a message about a generous love which grows in the barrenest of soils … It was like seeing God”!

What I have written about the relationship to God implies that the meeting between God and the human person takes the form of a conversation. This relationship is nourished by words, develops in words, and is shaped by words. The intensity varies, and there is an alternation between distance and closeness; words may be many or few. And it is certainly true that the spoken word is not the only form of expression! Nevertheless, faith seeks words.

It may be tempting to reflect on the consequences which this basic relationship to God has for the language of theology and of preaching, but I content myself here with one single affirmation. One element in the crisis in theology and preaching is that they have become detached from the fundamental language of conversation, that conversation which takes the form of prayer, lamentation and hymns of praise, cries of fear and of joy, accusation and protest, the longing of the abandoned lover, the intimate dialogue, the poetry of love, and the silence that simply waits for the other.

The language of preaching and theology is not, of course, this direct conversation itself. But its language is without passion when it loses contact with the experiences and insights we derive from the direct conversation. The words become abstract, lifeless, and tedious.

We must return briefly to one point, which was taken up in the introduction to this section: the solar eclipse, the silence after God disappears. For it is not only ideas that put God in the shadow; it is not only distorted images of God and a ruined language that reduce us to silence. We can solve such problems by renewing our language and painting other images. But what are we to do when the eclipse is caused by the brutality of reality itself, when we are plagued in our hearts by the absence of light and of goodness, when it seems that darkness reigns?

Faith has no solution to this, nor any genuinely satisfactory answer; nevertheless, it answers in the inner distress. It answers by speaking. The biblical answer is protest, the cry of anguish, accusation, and expectation – “How long? Have you forgotten us? Have you forgotten who you are, o God?” Faith speaks because it goes deeper than the inner distress, and is nourished by hope’s defiance. Many factors can block our view, dull our eyes, and spread the contagion of hopelessness. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is impossible for us to profess the optimistic faith in divine providence which came so naturally to earlier generations, whose life was successful but who perhaps saw less. A thousand truths assault our faith in God’s goodness, which is full of contradictions and as vulnerable as a little child in the thick of battle.

This is why we continue to speak. Hope must be proclaimed, hope must be repeated as a protest. We must urge people to hope, setting up a bulwark against pessimism and all the forces that destroy life. We must remind one another unceasingly of the signs that point to the deepest forces in life and are stronger and truer than the signs that point to annihilation.

In the depths, our words of hope draw their nourishment from faith in a God whose hands tremble, who is familiar with abandonment, a God who resembles the cherry-tree defiantly blossoming unseen on barren ground, a God who has a face like the Son of Man.

 

But a Son of Man

who knew us

and knew everything,

and possessed the healing word

and help

where the others merely pronounce judgments

and raise cold eyes;

a Son of Man –

oh, why are you no longer here on earth!

 

Garborg was right to reject the overwhelming, power-hungry Father. If he had persevered in his search, his appreciation of the Son of Man might perhaps have restored the Father to him. The reader perceives this possibility in the silent wonder at the close of his novel: “If I could live a few more years, and lead a new life, I believe that I could still find the Father.”

 

[1] Chapter from Notto R. Thelle, Seeking God’s Face: Faith in a Time of Perplexity, Paulist Press, 2008.

 

 

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

From Wendell Berry:

 

"Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns."

 

 

The insect apocalypse is here: what does it mean for the rest of life on earth?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html?emc=edit_nn_p_20181129&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=1872223section%3DlongRead&section=longRead&te=1

 

The address above points to an article that appeared in the NYT Magazine last Sunday, and I find myself circling back on it: reading of deep consequence. I found it fascinating and deeply troubling, confirming much that I knew but often extending my understanding and making connections I hadn't made. It sticks in my mind. Here's the last paragraph:

 

"In addition to extinction (the complete loss of a species) and extirpation (a localized extinction), scientists now speak of defaunation: the loss of individuals, the loss of abundance, the loss of a place’s absolute animalness. In a 2014 article in Science, researchers argued that the word should become as familiar, and influential, as the concept of deforestation. In 2017 another paper reported that major population and range losses extended even to species considered to be at low risk for extinction. They predicted “negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization” and the authors offered another term for the widespread loss of the world’s wild fauna: 'biological annihilation.'"

 

 

 

 

 

Van Gogh's "The Starry Night"

Vincent Van Gogh, "The Starry Night"

 

I was reading today an essay about turbulence, and came across a comment about Van Gogh's "Starry Night." He painted it in June 1889, depicting the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of a village that was wholly of his creation. He had voluntarily admitted himself to the asylum after cutting off his left ear.

From the essay I was reading: "Recently, when physicists examined Van Gogh's work, they found something remarkable. They discovered that there is a distinct pattern of fluid structures which are nearly identical to those found in Van Gogh's sky in 'The Starry Night.' This pattern is not found in works he created when not in periods of mental distress; only in periods of great mental anguish was Van Gogh able to illustrate one of the most complex processes in all of physics."

"Vincent Van Gogh transformed the chaos in his mind into beauty on the canvas. And, without any proper training in mathematics or physics, he was able to illuminate a concept which confounds physicists to this day: turbulence."

 

Parable — Louise Glück

I confess that I am at a loss on the very first line of this fine parable by Louise Glück: I have failed, at least thus far, to divest myself of worldly goods, as I use my computer to maintain this journal and remain in touch with friends and family near and far; and my closets are full. Since argument is a prevailing presence in this parable, however, I can quibble about whether electronic possessions are really worldly, but I would surely lose that argument. Unless... ah, another opening, perhaps a bit more accessible than the first: is it possible that those particular worldly goods do not distract me by gain and loss? Sometimes — right now, in fact — I do not feel such distraction. But truthfully that case feels a slippery slope. I think I'd do OK on the mountain passes.

On the second question, should we have purpose, I am among the pilgrims more than the wanderers, though I partake of both modes. I am more among those who dream, who seek glimmering among the stones. My journey began long ago,  continues to this day and beyond, I expect until I die and perhaps beyond. I am not stuck in continual debate with anyone (that would be tedious and exhausting). I am glad to be among fellow pilgrims as well as fellow wanderers, though more commonly I tend to wander alone. Truth is both elusive and common, and I treasure it alongside its dearest sibling, that is love. 

 

Parable — Louise Glück

 

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

 

Glück, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems (pp. 3-4). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

Fierce with Reality

Florida Scott-Maxwell (1883-1979), whose striking thought Parker Palmer uses as an epigraph in the short essay below, was a remarkable woman, a
young actress who moved from New York City to Baillieston House, a 17th century home east of Glasgow, Scotland, when she married John Maxwell Scott-Maxwell in 1910. In addition to raising four children, she worked for women's suffrage and as a playwright. Later, living in London as a divorcee, she studied analytical psychology in Zurich with Carl Jung, and afterwards practiced as an analytical psychologist in both England and Scotland. She is best known for The Measure of My Days, an autobiography begun as a private journal about the experience of growing old, published when she was 82. Deeply engaging and insightful, sometimes stark, often with quiet humor, something of the book's spirit can be gleaned from these six passages:

• “I was astonished to find how intensely one lives in one’s eighties. The last years seemed a culmination and by concentrating on them one became more truly oneself. Though old, I felt full of potential life. It pulsed in me even as I was conscious of shrinking into a final form which it was my task and stimulus to complete.
• "Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.
• "Life has changed me greatly, but it has also left me practically the same. I cannot spell, I am over-critical, egocentric and vulnerable. I cannot be simple. In my effort to be clear I become complicated. I know my faults so well that I pay them small heed. They are stronger than I am. They are me.
• "Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.
• "The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being.
• "It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty."
  
  

 

Fierce with Reality: Living and Loving Well to the End

 

by Parker J. Palmer

 

"You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality."

—Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days 

 

Florida Scott-Maxwell was 85 when she wrote those words. I first read them when I was half her age, but I knew she was speaking directly to me.

At age 43, I was succeeding and failing as a husband and a father on a daily basis, had done battle with the evils of racism as a community organizer while ignoring the cocoon of white privilege that protected me from them, was alternately laid low and energized by the rejections I received en route to becoming a writer, and had drowned and then surfaced from my first deep-sea dive into clinical depression. I was, in short, a reasonably normal person: a complex and conflicted soul who yearned to be whole.

I wanted a life of personal fulfillment that served others well — a life of love of self and others — and I knew that getting there would require me to be “fierce with reality.” But I devoutly wished for an easier path than the one Scott-Maxwell recommends! At age 43, I didn’t have the courage required to “truly possess all [I had] been and done.”

Today, at age 76, I know Scott-Maxwell got it right: there are no short-cuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.

Of course, naming, claiming, and loving the whole of who we are is easier said than done: honest self-examination is a well-known source of human misery! Yet the alternative is more painful still. In Erik Erikson’s scheme of adult development, he argues that if we can’t accept all that we’ve been and done, we’ll age away from “integrity” toward “despair.”

As I look around at my age-mates in late midlife and beyond, it’s not hard to witness despair and its sad consequences. Some consequences are personal, as people who try to deny their inner darkness carry resentment in their hearts and leave it in their wake. Some consequences are political, as people who fear whatever feels alien in themselves project their fear on “the alien other” — while shameless politicians cynically manipulate that fear to play the divide-and-conquer game.

But if we are willing to move through the pain of honest self-examination toward the grace of compassionate self-acceptance, the rewards are great. When we can say, “I am all of the above,” we become more at ease in our own skin, more at home on the face of this richly diverse earth, more accepting of others who are no more or less flawed than we are, and better able to live as life-givers to the end of our days.

How can we learn to embrace with love the whole of who we are — a task that need not and should not await our elder years? Of course there are tried-and-true aids such as meditation, journaling and therapy, all of which have been helpful to me. Here are three others that I’ve found equally helpful, sometimes even more:

Spend as much time as you can experiencing the natural world. Nature constantly reminds me that everything has a place, that nothing need be excluded. That “mess” on the forest floor — like the mess in my own life — has an amazing harmony and hidden wholeness to it.

 Move toward, not away from, whatever you fear. I try to remember the advice I was given on an Outward Bound course when I froze with fear on a rock face in the middle of a one-hundred-foot rappel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If, for example, you fear diversity, get to know “the other’s” story face-to-face and watch your fear shrink as your empathy expands.

Reach out to the younger generation—not to advise them but to learn from them, gain energy from them, and support them on their way. That’s a life-enhancing act that Erik Erikson called “generativity,” an alternative to the “stagnation” of age that sooner or later leads to despair.

 Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. The sooner we understand this, the better. It’s a truth that can set us free to live well, to love well and, in the end, to die well.

I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that, as best I knew how, I showed up here as my true self — able to engage the world in freedom and with love because I had become fierce with reality.

 Here’s a May Sarton poem about the journey toward becoming fierce with reality — and how often being “dissolved and shaken” is required to live into the joy of becoming one’s true self:

 

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song;
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

 

                ~ May Sarton ~

 

Audacious

Audacious is one of those words whose splendor consists, at least in part, of its representation of two diametrically opposed meanings. Most of the information herein is from the incomparable Oxford English Dictionary; Merriam-Webster is a useful adjunct to the OED, not a substitute. It may be characterized (as it is audaciously on its website) as "America's most trusted online dictionary;" the OED is English.

On the one hand, daring, bold, confident, intrepid, as in T. Nicolls' translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War ii. cvi. 67: "More bolde and audacious in this thing, wherein we have much experyence."

On the other, unrestrained by or expressing defiance of the principles of decorum and morality; presumptuously wicked, impudent, shameless, rash, insolent, as in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), 323: "I grew more hardn'd and audacious than ever."

Merriam-Webster has a helpful descriptive paragraph:

"Audacious first appeared in English in the mid-1500s. It was borrowed from the Middle French adjective audacieux, which was derived from the noun audace ('boldness, audacity'). Audace came from the Latin audacia, a derivative of the Latin root audac- ('bold'). Audac- is also the source of audacity, which appeared in Middle English (as audacite) in the 1400s. Audac- can be traced, by way of the Latin verb audēre ('to dare'), to the Latin adjective avidus ('eager' or 'greedy'), which was also borrowed by English, either directly from Latin or via the French avide, to give us our adjective avid. Among the early adopters of audacious was William Shakespeare, who used the word seven times in his plays, as in Henry VI, Part 2, where Somerset addresses York with the lines, 'I arrest thee, York, / Of capital treason 'gainst the King and crown. / Obey, audacious traitor, kneel for grace."

I promise to toast here in Reckonings any reader who persuasively reveals any other word in English that similarly conveys two such opposing meanings.

Sanctuary and Soul — Part Three — "Let us practice for life's sake."

My model of a place dedicated to the nourishment of soul—the one I know best—is the Meditation Room at The United Nations in New York City. It was conceived and designed by Dag Hammarskjöld when he was the UN’s Secretary General. He wrote this description:

"We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.

This house, dedicated to work and debate in the service of peace, should have one room dedicated to silence in the outward sense and stillness in the inner sense.

It has been the aim to create in this small room a place where the doors may be open to the infinite lands of thought and prayer.

People of many faiths will meet here, and for that reason none of the symbols to which we are accustomed in our meditation could be used.

However, there are simple things which speak to us all with the same language. We have sought for such things and we believe that we have found them in the shaft of light striking the shimmering surface of solid rock.

So, in the middle of the room we see a symbol of how, daily, the light of the skies gives life to the earth on which we stand, a symbol to many of us of how the light of the spirit gives life to matter.

But the stone in the middle of the room has more to tell us. We may see it as an altar, empty not because there is no God, not because it is an altar to an unknown god, but because it is dedicated to the God whom man worships under many names and in many forms.

The stone in the middle of the room reminds us also of the firm and permanent in a world of movement and change. The block of iron ore has the weight and solidity of the everlasting. It is a reminder of that cornerstone of endurance and faith on which all human endeavour must be based.

The material of the stone leads our thoughts to the necessity for choice between destruction and construction, between war and peace. Of iron man has forged his swords, of iron he has also made his ploughshares. Of iron he has constructed tanks, but of iron he has likewise built homes for man. The block of iron ore is part of the wealth we have inherited on this earth of ours. How are we to use it?

The shaft of light strikes the stone in a room of utter simplicity. There are no other symbols, there is nothing to distract our attention or to break in on the stillness within ourselves. When our eyes travel from these symbols to the front wall, they meet a simple pattern opening up the room to the harmony, freedom and balance of space.

There is an ancient saying that the sense of a vessel is not in its shell but in the void. So it is with this room. It is for those who come here to fill the void with what they find in their center of stillness."

___________________________

 

This small collection on sanctuary and soul began with my memory of a thought by poet, writer and psychotherapist Gunilla Norris, which in turn reminded me of Denise Levertov's poem, "A Gift." Norris wrote "We have two hands: one for receiving and one for giving. Putting our hands together, however, they make a cup, a little cistern where what we have been given can fill to the full and can then be shared with others. To receive fully enables us to share fully. It is the sustainable energy of serving."

So it feels appropriate to conclude the series with some further lines of Norris. She is a longtime student of what she calls "household spirituality": "the practice of spiritual awareness in the most mundane and simple of circumstances." She characterizes her books on that subject as "part of one thing and yet [they] shed light from different perspectives on the humblest of our day-to-day tasks. It has always been my understanding that when we are really present in our daily activities, our lives become more luminous, filled with love and grace." I particularly recommend Inviting Silence (2004), from which the following lines are taken. 

 

 

Within each of us there is a silence
—a silence as vast as a universe.
We are afraid of it…and we long for it.
When we experience that silence, we remember
who we are: creatures of the stars, created
from the cooling of this planet, created
from dust and gas, created
from the elements, created
from time and space…created
from silence
In our present culture,
silence is something like an endangered species…
an endangered fundamental.
The experience of silence is now so rare
that we must cultivate it and treasure it.
This is especially true for shared silence.
Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act.
When we can stand aside from the usual and
perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen.
Our lives align with deeper values
and the lives of others are touched and influenced.
Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses,
to our selves. It locates us. Without that return
we can go so far away from our true natures
that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves.
We live blindly and act thoughtlessly.
We endanger the delicate balance which sustains
our lives, our communities, and our planet.
Each of us can make a difference.
Politicians and visionaries will not return us
to the sacredness of life.
That will be done by ordinary men and women
who together or alone can say,
“Remember to breathe, remember to feel,
remember to care,
let us do this for our children and ourselves
and our children’s children.
Let us practice for life’s sake."

 

Sanctuary and Soul — Part Two

My gifted age-mate Parker Palmer is a Quaker elder, an author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He is the founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal. His most recent book is On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old. (2018). He is a regular columnist for Krista Tippett's wonderful project, On Being. 

When some of us in my community thought of redesigning a small lounge into a room for meditation we decided to call The Sanctuary, I had Palmer's words in mind, especially his personal understanding: "Sanctuary is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival."

Palmer wrote the following short essay in the year of Trump's election in 2016. I will not call the culture Trump has stimulated and drawn upon "the new normal," but certainly violence and conflict, Trump's ego, narcissism, bigotry and crudeness are a larger force in our public life than has been true of any time in living memory. The results of the 2018 midterm elections have been encouraging, especially in the size of Democratic gains in the House of Representatives. Democrats flipped nearly 40 congressional seats and will control the House. Nearly 6 million more Americans voted for a Democrat to represent them in the House than those who voted for a Republican. The thinner margin of Republican leadership in the Senate is important as well. But most striking is the fact that the number of people who exercised their right to vote was a larger portion of the electorate than in any midterm election in the nation's history.

 

Seeking Sanctuary in Our Own Sacred Spaces

by Parker J. Palmer (2016)

When I was a kid, “sanctuary” meant only one thing. It was the big room with the stained glass windows and hard wooden benches where my family worshipped every Sunday. Church attendance was not optional for my sisters and me, so that sanctuary was where I learned to pray — pray that the service would end and God would release me back into the wild. I also learned that not all prayers are answered, no matter how ardent.

Today, after 77 years of life in a world that’s both astonishingly beautiful and horrifically cruel, “sanctuary” is as vital as breathing to me. Sometimes I find it in churches, monasteries, and other sites designated as sacred. But more often I find it in places sacred to my soul: in the natural world, in the company of a trustworthy friend, in solitary or shared silence, in the ambiance of a good poem or good music.

Sanctuary is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival. Today, seeking sanctuary is no more optional for me than church attendance was as a child.

We live in a culture of violence. Even if we’re not at daily risk of physical injury or death, as are so many in the gun-obsessed U.S., our culture relentlessly assaults our souls with noise, frenzy, consumerism, tribalism, homophobia, racism, and more. It’s common to become desensitized to these assaults. We “normalize” them in order to get on with our daily lives, disregarding our need for sanctuary as we do. But at times something happens that makes us hypersensitive to all that threatens our souls.

Three deep dives into clinical depression were such "somethings" for me. For long months, I lived in closed rooms with the shades pulled down. When a friend insisted that I get outside more, I said,

“I can’t. The world feels like it’s full of knives.”

In my fragile mental state, casual encounters felt perilous, and reading the news of the day made me feel utterly unfit for life in this world.

Depression made me exaggerate life’s dangers and underestimate my own resilience, of course. But recalling the bad old days when my world was “full of knives” reminds me that it’s easy to die the death of a thousand cultural cuts without even knowing we’re bleeding.

People have different ways of dealing with cultural violence. Some turn to escapism by, for example, embracing world-rejecting religious or political beliefs. But this can easily lead to deepening isolation, a siege mentality, and paranoia about how “those people” or “the government” are trying to control us and destroy our way of life. There’s a lot of that going around these days.

Others jump into the mosh pit, seeking wealth or power or notoriety, contributing to the world’s violence as they do. There’s a lot of that going around as well, despite endless warnings like the one Wordsworth famously issued two hundred years ago:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Others try to call our culture back to sanity and make the world a better place. But even they can get caught up in the violence of the very culture they want to change: we not only live in it, it lives in us. To quote Thomas Merton,

“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.”

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.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her) work...because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Merton puts his finger on our deepest need: to protect and nurture the “root of inner wisdom” that makes work and life itself fruitful. Fed by the taproot some call the soul, we need neither to flee from the world, nor exploit it. Instead, we can love the world with all of its (and our) flaws by trying to live in a way that models life’s finest possibilities.

That kind of love is possible, I believe, only if we know when and where to seek sanctuary, reclaiming our souls in order to engage the world in life-giving ways. When service emerges from whatever kind of sanctuary nurtures the root of one’s inner wisdom, it’s much less likely to be distorted by the violence of activism and overwork. Once we understand that, we are moving toward the heart of nonviolence — the only way of being that has a chance to transcend and transform the violence of our culture.

I was reminded of this fact in March of 2011 when I went on the annual three-day Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage led by Rep. John Lewis. On the first day, we visited movement sites in Birmingham, Alabama; on the second day, in Montgomery; and on the third day — the 46th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” — we marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis once again in the lead, as he had been in 1965 at age 25.

Rep. John Lewis walks across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. (Dave Martin / AP Photo / © All Rights Reserved)

During our three-day pilgrimage, two things struck me about the history we were revisiting. The first was the fact that so many young people were so well schooled in the disciplines of nonviolence that they were able to sustain ferocious attacks from sworn “public safety” officials without striking back. By refusing to succumb to the violence of our culture, they transformed a movement that might have become armed warfare into a moral witness that altered the lay and the law of the land.

The second was the fact that most of the Civil Rights sites we visited were sanctuaries like the one I sat in as a restless kid — sanctuaries in which generations of African Americans planted the seeds of the movement that flowered in the mid-20th century. I was especially moved by Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma. That’s where peaceful protestors prepared for the first march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and in which they sought refuge after being bloodied and broken on the other side.

As a person who aspires to live nonviolently — knowing I will forever fall short — I know I need sanctuary if I want to loosen the grip of our culture’s violence on me. I also know that there are many Brown Chapels. The one I need may not be in a church, but in the silence, in the woods, in a friendship, in a poem, or in a song.

A year ago, I was talking about these things with my friend and colleague Carrie Newcomer. A few weeks later, Carrie sent me a sound file of a song called “Sanctuary” she’d written in the wake of our conversation.

That song has just come out on Carrie’s new album, The Beautiful Not Yet.

The song has already become a place of sanctuary for me. May it serve you that way as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sanctuary and Soul — Part One

Some years ago I shared in Reckonings a poem by Denise Levertov that she called simply "A Gift." I want to reprint it here because it seems a good introduction to the entry that follows on the subject of sanctuary and soul. 

All of us surely know the feeling with which Levertov begins: when "you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions." The apparent fragility of our internal web of consciousness and of the questions—the threads—themselves, speak of our confusion, the elusiveness of satisfying meaning or response. In confusion and absent of meaning, our lives lose their luster. As another poet, Gunilla Norris, writes, "We endure our days rather than embrace the living of them. To enter the realm of meaning requires attention and dedication. It requires an interior, reflective life. It requires the calming of our usual chattering minds. It requires trusting the life-giving nourishment of silence, that vast field of permission and sustenance in which our lives are held." It requires truly being with others rather than merely passing on the sidewalk or a hallway with a "How are you?" and an "OK." Now read Levertov's "A Gift" with Norris's thoughts in mind: at least twice, slowly and reflectively, as good poems ask us to do.

 

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer. 

~ Denise Levertov ~

 

Note the character of the gifts Levertov offers. First, they are gifts—questions—of others, in which we have no proprietary belonging, no ownership. So they are gifts of relationship, requiring a caring response from us. They are gifts entrusted to us that we must gently cup in our hands. Their life, in this moment, is ours to protect and nourish: the songbird eggs that can still hatch if we keep them warm, delicate butterflies trusting us "not to injure their scintillant fur, their dust." We are their sanctuaries, and they are ours. The answer may be implicit in the question. The delicacy—the may be, the as if, the perhaps—remains.

 

You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer. 

 

Some readers will recall a book published some 26 years ago, Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul. Moore believed that the greatest malady of our time is neither heart disease nor cancer, but loss of soul. "When soul is neglected it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence and loss of meaning."

While Moore 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 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, Goia 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: Two Novellas of Sicily. 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 most 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

 

I Have Come Into This World to See

In the midst of an evening meditation yesterday, I recalled the beautiful poem below. There are at least two versions of the poem available in English, one a skillful Christian adaptation, the second probably closer to Hafiz's original. I reprint here both of them, because they are both lovely, it's interesting to see them at the same time, and perhaps there are readers of Reckonings and readers of Hafiz who may shed further light. Despite my lack of Persian, I'm still in search of a translation true to what Hafiz composed. I found the Christian version in David Ladinsky, (ed.), Love Poems from God.

Wikipedia offers:

"A standard modern edition in English of Hafiz's poems is Faces of Love (2012), translated by Dick Davis for Penguin Classics.

"Peter Avery translated a complete edition of Hafiz in English, The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, published in 2007. It has been awarded Iran's Farabi prize. Avery's translations are published with notes explaining allusions in the text and filling in what the poets would have expected their readers to know. An abridged version exists, titled Hafiz of Shiraz: Thirty Poems: An Introduction to the Sufi Master."

 

 

 

 

I Have Come into This World to See This (a Christian adaptation)

 

 

I have come into this world to see this:

the sword drop from men's hands even at the height

of their arc of anger

because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound

and it is His - the Christ's, our

Beloved's.

I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as

we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way

to even a greater being of soul,

a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play

with Him.

I have come into this world to hear this:

every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in

the Divine's womb and began spinning from

His wish,

every song by wing and fin and hoof,

every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child,

every song of stream and rock,

every song of tool and lyre and flute,

every song of gold and emerald

and fire,

every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity

to know itself as

God:

for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching -

only imbibing the glorious Sun

will complete us.

I have come into this world to experience this:

men so true to love

they would rather die before speaking

an unkind

word,

men so true their lives are His covenant -

the promise of

hope.

I have come into this world to see this:

the sword drop from men's hands

even at the height of

their arc of

rage

because we have finally realized

there is just one flesh

we can wound.

 

 

 

Here is the version from which the Christian adaptation above was clearly derived:

 

I Have Come Into This World To See

I have come into this world to see:

the sword drop from men's hands
even at the height of their arc of anger

all creatures holding hands
as we pass through this miraculous existence
we share

every song the Earth has sung
since it was conceived in His womb
and began spinning from His wish

every song of hill and tree
and woman and child
and stream and rock
and tool and lyre
and flute and fire
and gold and emerald,

every song of every heart.

I have come into this world to see:
women and men so true to love
they would rather die before
speaking an unkind word,

women and men so true to love
their lives are His covenant -
the promise of hope.

 

David Whyte on Anger

Prompted by my fellow journal-writer Maria Popova, I've begun reading poet and philosopher David Whyte's new book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Whyte's attention to anger is illustrative of his often counter-intuitive contemplations:

"Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being...

"What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

"Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics...

"Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence." 

 

Truth and Virtue in the Age of Trump

You’re a hero if and only if you serve The Leader’s interests.

by Paul Krugman

Remember when freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose? These days it’s just another word for giving lots of money to Donald Trump.

What with the midterm elections — and the baseless Republican cries of voting fraud — I don’t know how many people heard about Trump’s decision to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, wife of casino owner and Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson. The medal is normally an acknowledgment of extraordinary achievement or public service; on rare occasions this includes philanthropy. But does anyone think the Adelsons’ charitable activities were responsible for this honor?

Now, this may seem like a trivial story. But it’s a reminder that the Trumpian attitude toward truth — which is that it’s defined by what benefits Trump and his friends, not by verifiable facts — also applies to virtue. There is no heroism, there are no good works, except those that serve Trump.

About truth: Trump, of course, lies a lot — in the run-up to the midterms he was lying in public more than 100 times each week. But his assault on truth goes deeper than the frequency of his lies, because Trump and his allies don’t accept the very notion of objective facts. “Fake news” doesn’t mean actual false reporting; it means any report that hurts Trump, no matter how solidly verified. And conversely, any assertion that helps Trump, whether it’s about job creation or votes, is true precisely because it helps him.

The attempt by Trump and his party to shut down the legally mandated Florida recount with claims, based on no evidence, of large-scale voting fraud fits right into this partisan epistemology. Do Republicans really believe that there were vast numbers of fraudulent or forged ballots? Even asking that question is a category error. They don’t “really believe” anything, except that they should get what they want. Any vote count that might favor a Democrat is bad for them; therefore it’s fraudulent, no evidence needed.

The same worldview explains Republicans’ addiction to conspiracy theories. After all, if people keep insisting on the truth of something that hurts their party, it can’t be out of respect for the facts — because in their world, there are no neutral facts.

So the people making inconvenient assertions must be in the pay of sinister forces. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has probably won a Senate seat on the strength of late-counted ballots. Did you know that the state G.O.P. has filed a freedom of information request for information on interactions between election officials and, you guessed it, George Soros?

It’s worth pointing out, by the way, that this rejection of objective facts and insistence that anyone insisting on inconvenient truths must be part of a left-wing conspiracy dominated the Republican psyche long before Trump. Most notably, the claim that the overwhelming evidence for global warming is a giant hoax, the product of a vast plot involving thousands of scientists around the world, has been G.O.P. orthodoxy for years.

True, the party’s presidential candidates used to be mealy mouthed about rejecting facts and endorsing conspiracy theories, rather than being full-throated crazy. But Trump is only going where many of his party’s senior figures have been for a long time.

 Anyway, my point is that the rejection of any standard besides whether it helps or hurts Trump extends beyond true or false to basic values. In Trumpworld, which is now indistinguishable from G.O.P.world, good and bad are defined solely by whether the interests of The Leader are served. Thus, Trump attacks and insults our closest allies while praising brutal dictators who flatter him (and declares neo-Nazis “very fine people”).

And the same goes for heroism and cowardice. A genuine hero like John McCain, who was critical of Trump, gets dismissed as a failure: “He’s not a war hero. … I like people who weren’t captured.” Meanwhile, Miriam Adelson, whose service to the nation basically consists of giving Trump campaign contributions, gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Oh, and this, too, predates Trump. Remember how Republicans denigrated John Kerry’s war record?

As with so much about the current political scene, it’s essential to realize and acknowledge that this is not a symmetric, both-sides-do-it situation. If you say something along the lines of “truth and virtue are now defined by partisanship,” you’re actually enabling the bad guys, because only one party thinks that way.

Democrats, being human, sometimes have biased views and engage in motivated reasoning. But they haven’t abandoned the whole notion of objective facts and nonpolitical goodness; Republicans have.

What all of this means is that what’s going on in America right now isn’t politics as usual. It’s much more existential than that. You have to be truly delusional to see the Republicans’ response to their party’s midterm setback as anything but an attempted power grab by a would-be authoritarian movement, which rejects any opposition or even criticism as illegitimate. Our democracy is still very much in danger.

 

Wild and Domestic — Wendell Berry

Orion Magazine > Articles > Ecology & Science > Wild and Domestic

Wild and Domestic

 

by Wendell Berry

 

I. Gary Snyder said that we know our minds are wild because of the difficulty of making ourselves think what we think we ought to think.

II. That is the fundamental sense of “wild” or of “wilderness”: undomesticated, unrestrained, out of control, disorderly.

III. There are two ways to value this, as exemplified by the sense of “wild party”: from the point of view of the participants and that of the neighbors.

IV. To our people, as pioneers, “the wilderness” looked disorderly, undomestic, out of control.

V. According to that judgment, it needed to be brought under control, put in order by domestication.

VI. But our word “domestic” comes from the Latin domus, meaning “house” or “home.” To domesticate a place is to make a home of it. To be domesticated is to be at home.

VII. It is a sort of betrayal, then, that our version of domestication has imposed ruination, not only upon “wilderness,” as we are inclined to think, but upon the natural or given world, the basis of our economy, our health, in short, our existence.

VIII. It was hardly surprising that, as our dominant economy battered and plundered “the wilderness,” some would undertake to save it in parks and wilderness preserves.

IX. But this began a theoretical, and false, division of the world and our minds. Some of the world, though never enough, would be preserved as wilderness, whereas much the greater part would be abandoned to the violences of our “domestic” so-called economy. We would love the wilderness and plunder or ignore the economic landscapes of food production and forestry, not to mention mining.

X. But if we were really to pay attention to what we’ve been calling “wilderness” or “the wild,” whether in a national park or on a rewooded Kentucky hillside, we would learn something of the most vital and urgent importance: they are not, properly speaking, wild.

XI. Our overdone appreciation of wildness and wilderness has involved a little-noticed depreciation of true domesticity, which is to say homemaking, homelife, and home economy.

XII. With only a little self-knowledge and a little sitting still and looking, the conventional perspective of wild and domestic will be reversed: we, the industrial consumers of the world, are the wild ones, unrestrained and out of control, self-excluded from the world’s natural homemaking and living at home.

XIII. To that world we strangers can come home only by obeying both Nature’s laws and the specifically human laws adding up to self-restraint and love for neighbors.

XIV. I have in mind now what Robert E. Lee, from the far side of defeat and humiliation, said to a mother who asked for his blessing on her son: “Teach him he must deny himself.”

XV. Defeat and humiliation are our inescapable subjects now. We are defeating ourselves and our land by economic violence, normative homelessness, all the modes and devices of estrangement and divorce.

XVI. The so-called wilderness, from which we purposely exclude our workaday lives, is in fact a place of domestic order. It is inhabited, still, mainly by diverse communities of locally adapted creatures living, to an extent always limited, in competition with one another, but within a larger, ultimately mysterious order of interdependence and even cooperation.

XVII. The wildest creatures to be found in any forest, if not surface miners and industrial loggers, are the industrial vacationers with their cars, cameras, computers, high-tech camping gear, and other disturbers of domestic tranquility and distracters of attention.

XVIII. The “wilderness vacation” is thus a wild product of a wild industry and is a sort of wild party. One “escapes” to the “wilderness,” leaving one’s home vacant, to what purpose? Not, apparently, to study the settled domesticity of Nature’s homelands and households, and thus to make one’s home less a place needing to be escaped from.

XIX. And what of the world in which and from which we live our “domestic” lives and “make our living”? Well, I can think of no wilder weeds than corn and soybeans as they presently are grown. The seeds, the poisons, the gigantic machines and their fuel, all come from our wildest industries to our wildest fields. The fields which, remember, are the very substance of our country and the world are eroded, toxic deserts, drained by waterways similarly degraded and toxic. Cropped continuously, the fields lie naked to the sky all winter, without the protection of a cover crop.

XX. Crops of soybeans and corn are reliably profitable to the corporate suppliers of “purchased inputs,” but they are notoriously unreliable as sources of income to farmers. Because production is unlimited, there is an ever-present threat of surpluses, which can depress prices below the cost of production.

XXI. By ignorance, indifference, or a principled cynicism, both fields and farmers are sacrificed to the so-called free market. Thus our “domestic” crops become domicidal: homewreckers, destroyers of ecosystems, farms, farm families, rural communities, and ultimately, by the same dreadful logic of limitless consumption, also of urban communities.

XXII. Our lives now depend almost exclusively upon two kinds of mining: fast mining for fuels and ores; and agricultural mining, mostly by annual grains, which is comparatively slow, but much too fast. The rule in both is to take without limit and to give back nothing. We are treating the fertility of our croplands, not as the forever-renewable resource it in fact is, but as an extractable ore, the only limit being eventual exhaustion.

XXIII. This is the business of America, which has been and is fairly directly the pillage and ruin of both the natural world and its human communities, except of course for a few reserved plots of “wilderness.”

XXIV. The ruling assumption of both conservationists and political progressives appears to be that we will use our big brains and technological cleverness to bring about “clean” and “green” innovations, until we all can speed away on our wilderness vacations with our consciences clear.

XXV. This fails, typically, to see that our vehicles and our uses of them are as damaging as their bad fuels. The talk is all of limits on pollution, but not of the extravagance that is the cause of pollution and of all other damages. If we had an unlimited supply of “clean energy,” we would destroy the world by driving on it.

XXVI. The only antidote would have to be thrift in our use of all the quantitively limited resources of the world. Thrift, unfashionable as it now is, is yet apparently an inescapable law, both natural and traditionally human. Thrift requires attention to carrying capacity, land maintenance, the character of good work, and sustainable rates of use.

XXVII. Thrift would require not only the most careful husbandry of the world’s renewable resources, but also rationing of its exhaustible fuels and ores in accordance with their limited quantities and our actual needs. The test of the sincerity of conservationists should be their willingness to limit consumption.

XXVIII. By our habits of exploitation, our limitless consumption, and our version of conservation, about equally, we withhold our attention from the laws of Nature, the laws of human neighborhood, and the always vulnerable health and wholeness of the living world — the things to which our attention has most urgently been called by our best teachers.

XXIX. I don’t like or trust our obsessive talking of the future, but it is obvious that attention finally will have to be paid. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, our economy of limitless consumption will collide with the immutable limits of the given world.

XXX. And then, as some foresters, farmers, and ranchers already are doing, we will have to submit ourselves as students to Nature in her innumerable local incarnations, asking her how we humans, the most singular and the strangest of her children, can live as good neighbors to all of our neighbors.

XXXI. I now need to say plainly that I am not opposed to what is called “wilderness preservation,” which is necessary to the health of the natural world, of human nature, and of human livelihood. I wish there might be patches of “wilderness preservation” on every farm and in every working forest or woodland. The setting aside of such privileged places ought to be recognized as essential to the practice of good land use, and to the good health of land-using economies.

XXXII. What I am opposing is the language, by now utterly trite and thoughtless, by which conservationists prefer the parks and “wilderness areas” over the rest of the country, to which they consign the servitude, excess, and violence of our continuing version of domesticity, which is to say our misnamed economy.

XXXIII. Thus they falsely and impossibly consign Nature to the “wilderness areas,” forgetting that all the world is hers. By so confining her, if only in their thoughts, they imply, permit, and even require the uproar, waste, and ugliness of their domestic lives, which they need to vacate every year to spend a few days in scenes of “wild” quietude and beauty. O

 

 

Wendell Berry lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. An essayist, novelist, and poet, he is the author of more than thirty books. Berry has received numerous awards, including the T. S. Eliot Award, the John Hay Award, the Lyndhurst Prize, and the Aiken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee Review. His books include the classic The Unsettling of America, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.

 

 

From the Talmud

 

Do not be daunted
by the enormity
of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated
to complete the work,
but neither are you free
to abandon it.

 

 

- The Talmud

A party defined by its lies. Vote! and vote Democratic!

In the nearly 20 years I have been editing and writing Reckonings, I haven't once urged readers to vote, much less to vote for a particular party. I'm doing so now for the first time, because I believe the forthcoming elections on November 6 are the most important midterms in U.S. history. I've been tempted to do so for a while, but the following column by Paul Krugman in The New York Times today offered eloquent and well-reasoned rationale. Others have made the case, but I believe none so clearly and compellingly as Krugman does. Please read, and please vote.

 

A Party Defined by Its Lies

At this point, good people can’t be good Republicans.
By Paul Krugman

Nov. 1, 2018

During my first year as an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, I wasn’t allowed to use the word “lie.”

That first year coincided with the 2000 election, and George W. Bush was, in fact, being systematically dishonest about his economic proposals — saying false things about who would benefit from his tax cut and the implications of Social Security privatization. But the notion that a major party’s presidential candidate would go beyond spin to outright lies still seemed outrageous, and saying it was considered beyond the pale.

Obviously that prohibition no longer holds on this opinion page, and major media organizations have become increasingly willing to point out raw falsehoods. But they’ve been chasing a moving target, because the lies just keep getting bigger and more pervasive. In fact, at this point the G.O.P.’s campaign message consists of nothing but lies; it’s hard to think of a single true thing Republicans are running on.

And yes, it’s a Republican problem (and it’s not just Donald Trump). Democrats aren’t saints, but they campaign mostly on real issues, and generally do, in fact, stand for more or less what they claim to stand for. Republicans don’t. And the total dishonesty of Republican electioneering should itself be a decisive political issue, because at this point it defines the party’s character.

What are Republicans lying about? As I said, almost everything. But there are two big themes. They lie about their agenda, pretending that their policies would help the middle and working classes when they would, in fact, do the opposite. And they lie about the problems America faces, hyping an imaginary threat from scary dark-skinned people and, increasingly, attributing that threat to Jewish conspirators.

Both classes of lie are rooted in the real G.O.P. agenda.

What Republicans truly stand for, and have for decades, is cutting taxes on the rich and slashing social programs. Sure enough, last year they succeeded in ramming through a huge tax cut aimed mainly at corporations and the wealthy, and came within one vote of passing a health “reform” that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would have caused 32 million Americans to lose health coverage.

The G.O.P.’s problem is that this agenda is deeply unpopular. Large majorities of Americans oppose cuts in major social programs, while most voters want to raise, not reduce, taxes on corporations and high-income individuals.

But instead of changing their agenda to meet voters’ concerns, Republicans have resorted to a strategy of deception and distraction. On one side, they have gone full black-is-white, up-is-down on policy substance. Most spectacularly, they are posing as defenders of protection for people with pre-existing conditions — protection that their failed health bill would have stripped away, and which they are now trying to take away through the courts. And they’re claiming that Democrats are the ones threatening Medicare.

On the other side, they’re resorting to their old standby: race-based fear.

But selling racial fear was easier in the 1980s and early 1990s, when America really was suffering from high levels of inner-city crime. Since then, violent crime has plunged. What’s a fearmonger to do? The answer is: lie.

The lies have come nonstop since Trump’s inauguration address, which conveyed a false vision of “American carnage.” But they have gotten ever more extreme, culminating in the portrayal of a small caravan of refugees still 1,000 miles from the border as an imminent, menacing invasion — somehow full of diseased Middle Eastern terrorists. And now there’s the added insinuation that sinister Jewish financiers are the real culprits behind this invasion. Because that’s where people doing this kind of thing always end up.

 

The crucial thing to realize is that these aren’t just ugly, destructive lies. Beyond that, they shape the G.O.P.’s nature. It is now impossible to have intellectual integrity and a conscience while remaining a Republican in good standing. Some conservatives have these qualities; almost all of them have left the party, or are on the edge of excommunication.

Those who remain are either fanatics willing to do anything in pursuit of power, or cynics willing to go along with anything for a share of the spoils. And it’s foolish to imagine that there are any limits on how far a party of fanatics and cynics will be willing to go. Anyone who might have had a sticking point, some uncrossable red line of bad behavior, has already taken the offramp.

That’s why a Republican campaign built entirely on lies should itself be a political issue — a reason to vote Democratic even if you want tax cuts. For we’re not just talking about a party selling bad ideas on false pretenses. The addiction to lies has also — let’s be blunt — turned it into a party of bad people.

So what will this party do if it retains full control of Congress next week? What we’ve seen over and over again is that for these people there are no limits and no bottom. If they pull this midterm election out, expect the worst.

 

Brain Pickings: twice a week

Maria Popova's "Brain Pickings" remains a collection of valuable reflections on important issues, especially now that she has added a midweek message devoted to themes she has addressed in past years. I encourage readers of Reckonings to subscribe to her now twice-weekly mailings. Here is a current example of her work.

Tchaikovsky on Depression and Finding Beauty Amid the Wreckage of the Soul

“An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion,” Joni Mitchell once told an interviewer. Indeed, the history of the arts is the history of the complex relationship between creativity and mental illness. But while psychologists have found that a low dose of melancholy enhances creativity, its clinical extreme in depression can be creatively debilitating.

Few artists have walked that fine line with more tenacity and self-awareness than the great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (May 7, 1840–November 6, 1893). Frequently throughout his correspondence with family and friends, collected in The Life and Letters of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (public library; public domain) — the source of his enduring ideas on work ethic vs. inspiration, the paradox of client work, and why you should never allow interruptions in your creative process — Tchaikovsky notes his cyclical lapses into depression, undergirded by a dogged dedication to looking for beauty and meaning amid the spiritual wreckage. This intimate tango of sadness and radiance is ultimately what gives his music its timeless edge in penetrating the soul.

In a letter from the spring of 1870, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Tchaikovsky writes:

I am sitting at the open window (at four a.m.) and breathing the lovely air of a spring morning… Life is still good, [and] it is worth living on a May morning… I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything! This “everything” includes the following items: 1. Illness; I am getting much too stout, and my nerves are all to pieces. 2. The Conservatoire oppresses me to extinction; I am more and more convinced that I am absolutely unfitted to teach the theory of music. 3. My pecuniary situation is very bad. 4. I am very doubtful if Undine will be performed. I have heard that they are likely to throw me over.

In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too.

Even though Tchaikovsky frequently lamented his “wearing, maddening depression,” perhaps most remarkable yet quintessentially human about his disposition was the ability to assure his loved ones of the very things he was unable to internalize himself — for who among us hasn’t found that it is far easier to offer light to our dearest humans in situations that leave our own inner worlds shrouded in impenetrable darkness?

In the fall of 1876, Tchaikovsky consoles his beloved nephew through a period of dejection and melancholy:

Probably you were not quite well, my little dove, when you wrote to me, for a note of real melancholy pervaded your letter. I recognized in it a nature closely akin to my own. I know the feeling only too well. In my life, too, there are days, hours, weeks, aye, and months, in which everything looks black, when I am tormented by the thought that I am forsaken, that no one cares for me. Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone. Were I to vanish from the face of the earth to-day, it would be no great loss to Russian music, and would certainly cause no one great unhappiness. In short, I live a selfish bachelor’s life. I work for myself alone, and care only for myself. This is certainly very comfortable, although dull, narrow, and lifeless. But that you, who are indispensable to so many whose happiness you make, that you can give way to depression, is more than I can believe. How can you doubt for a moment the love and esteem of those who surround you? How could it be possible not to love you? No, there is no one in the world more dearly loved than you are. As for me, it would be absurd to speak of my love for you. If I care for anyone, it is for you, for your family, for my brothers and our old Dad. I love you all, not because you are my relations, but because you are the best people in the world.

 

No Wall Between Amigos - La Lomita Chapel

No Wall Between Amigos

The crisis continues at the U.S.-Mexico border.

By Sandi Villarreal 

November 2018, Soujourners

 A SMALL WHITE CHAPEL sits just a couple hundred yards north of the Rio Grande river in Mission, Texas. While the chapel no longer hosts an active parish, its interior shows signs of frequent use. Prayer candles and silk flowers line the altar and the base of a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. An entryway table holds dozens of prayers, written on folded loose-leaf paper. Children’s composition notebooks, filled with more handwritten prayers, are stacked in piles.

“Please watch over our brothers, sisters, and all the children being held hostage at the border,” one prayer says. And another: “Please bless our health & the children being separated from their parents @ the border.”

La Lomita Chapel is now part of a municipal park and serves as a rest stop for passersby—while Border Patrol trucks sit just outside the park entrance and a helicopter circles overhead. The chapel land was originally granted to Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate priests in the mid-1800s. Given its location—midway between mission centers in Brownsville and Roma, Texas—La Lomita served as a meeting place and “housed transient visitors to the mission,” according to a historic marker on the site.

I visited the chapel, quite by accident, during a reporting trip at the border at the height of the family separation crisis. The separation of parents and children moved the hearts—and wallets—of people across the nation. But that fervor waned after a U.S. District Court judge gave a July deadline for reunification and more than 1,500 children were reunited with their parents, largely thanks to the efforts of faith groups and advocates. For many, it seemed, the story was over. The reality is that the crisis continues.

As of this writing, 497 children remain separated from their parents, 22 of whom are under the age of 5. More than 300 parents have been deported, and many who signed a waiver to be reunited say they were coerced. Children, including some babies and toddlers, haven’t seen their parents in months. It’s likely that some of those children will never see their parents again.

Residents’ signs listed a host of environmental and humanitarian grievances. The most pressing? Immigrants demonized by the Trump administration are, quite literally, their neighbors.

But even that tragedy is just part of an overwhelming story of what happens every day at our border as hundreds of families cross from South to North seeking refuge and finding a broken system with little space to accommodate them. Instead of engaging in efforts to fix the system, the Trump administration has zeroed in on one “solution”: erecting a border wall.

Last year, Father Roy Snipes, who serves at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and watches over the nearby La Lomita mission, organized a prayer walk and rally at La Lomita protesting the proposed border wall. The current plan would cut off the historic site and place the chapel between the wall and the Rio Grande. Residents’ signs listed a host of environmental and humanitarian grievances. The most pressing? Immigrants demonized by the Trump administration are, quite literally, their neighbors.

“No wall between amigos,” read one of the church’s signs. Though plans and congressional funding are still on track to build a wall along the border through parts of Hidalgo County, the faith resistance continues.

The prayers of the faithful lifted at La Lomita Chapel serve as a reminder that the story of Christian faith is one of migration, of sojourning, of welcoming—and of warning to those who refuse their welcome. As Snipes put it at the protest, “We continue the journey through time into eternity, and we know we are only here for a little while, so we make haste to be kind and we are quick to love.”