Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Turning III: Turning and Following

Prefatory note: In much of what I write below--in this post's continuation or "extended body"--I owe so much to my reading and re-reading of Stephen Mitchell's inspired reflections on Jesus's tale of the prodigal son (in his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Harper, 1993) that it's hard, in retrospect, to pick all his thinking, his examples and imagery, from my own. I hope I've given him sufficient credit in the text as well as here. In the interest of narrative continuity, I have chosen not to clutter that portion of the text with as many quotation marks as it technically deserves. The story at its heart belongs to him, to me, and to neither of us.

When I was eleven years old I had a beast of a paper route. It was the kind of beast that had red, predatory eyes even in the soft dawn of morning. I was folding and carrying on my bike and heaving toward peoples’ front porches a free shopping news filled from front to back with ads. That paper made up in weight for what it lacked in content. It was as if half the world had something to sell, and had chosen this particular paper to convey the news, in bold print and big colored pictures, to the other half of the world.

The bale of papers left on the corner for me to distribute was the size of a bale that might have been left for an elephant who hadn’t eaten in a week. And my route seemed to cover roughly the United States west of the Mississippi: including both the Sierras and the Rockies, if you can imagine them with tract houses cheek by cheek.

In short, if it had occurred to me to put my situation into church language—which it actually did, if you can believe it of a boy raised in a minimally observant Episcopal household—I didn’t exactly feel that I was doing God’s work.

I happened to notice one morning when my rebelliousness was reaching an intolerable pitch, that the truck which dropped off my elephantine bale of papers did so beside a long, tall and dense evergreen hedge. I realized that those six feet of dense evergreen provided adequate cover, in a large number of places, for bales even as big as mine. I convinced myself that I was doing virtually everyone a favor by depositing the bales in the hedge, and conveniently forgot that I was continuing to be paid for my labors. My freedom lasted about two weeks before somebody missed his shopping news, and I had to pull every waterlogged bale out of the hedge, and return my ill-gotten wages. My mother let me know that I was headed down the slippery slope to a life of crime.

But it’s the other part of my solution to this paper route from the Underworld that I want more to describe. Before I discovered the irresistible hedge—while I was still trudging my rounds—I began to talk with God. At least I assumed it was God, before I later reflected on how the whole misadventure concluded. These talks were not aloud. I was too shy for that. These were silent conversations in which I mostly put questions and waited for answers. I was old enough to realize that my active imagination may have been at work, so we agreed on a secret word that only He could speak.

I have tried, but I don’t remember much of the content of those talks, of that listening for the voice of God, that search, on ground I suppose as likely as any, for His Kingdom. I don’t think the talks had anything to do with my paper route. They touched upon the subject of fathers, present and absent (my own had died only a few months before), on fear in the nighttime, on anger and what only later I came to understand as forgiveness. I remember that we spoke of loneliness, and the kind of companionship one might experience even when one thought oneself alone. We spoke more than a little about Jesus, I think partly because I was preoccupied with fathers and sons, and because some of the stories of Jesus’s life, and the stories he told to others, had begun to exercise their mysterious hold on me.

It’s been a very long time since those talks, a lot of time for puzzlement, disbelief, interpretation—too much time for interpretation. I’ve come to think of much that I call interpretation as close kin to whatever it was that led me into that thicket of a hedge. I’ve never lost the love of asking questions, or listening for answers, or of Jesus’s stories.

I can talk and write more clearly now than I could at the age of eleven. For example, when I was eleven I was sure than God was a noun; now I’m more inclined to think of God as a verb, and the Kingdom of God as a path rather than a destination.

_____________________________

When Andrew and Peter first encountered Jesus, they asked him, “Rabbi, where are you going?”; and he answered, “Follow me.” That has always been for me one of the simplest, hardest and most moving exchanges in the Gospels. Andrew and Peter meant the question simply and literally enough. Jesus's response dramatically raised the stakes. There was no way to tell them where he was going.

There is another simple exchange: another touchingly straightforward question, and another answer that continues to echo long after it is spoken, maybe the essence of gospel, of the good news.

“....someone asked Jesus, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ [there’s the noun]
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” [listen: there’s the verb]

 

Rembrandt, The Prodigal Son

  The Prodigal Son. Let me share a familiar story Jesus told, among the stories that help us to grasp what it is to follow. (There, of course, is the verb as well.) They are such familiar stories that it helps if you can read or listen to them as if you’ve never heard them before. So I’ll tell it just a little bit differently; though basically as Jesus did. Oh, and one other thing that is helpful in listening: Jesus doesn’t ask us to do this, but it seems consistent with learning to follow. Imagine, as you might with the characters in a dream, that you may be each of them, all of them, not only the one who first seems most familiar to you. It’s your dream, all of it. I think Jesus is saying that this story is our story: all of us, all of it.

Like Stephen Mitchell, I think this story is "one of the tenderest and most compassionate in all literature." It conveys both the heart of Jesus’s teaching, and the following for which he asks, which are one and the same.

Once there was a man who had two sons. And the younger one had ants in his pants. He said to his dad, ‘Father, let me have my share of the estate.’ So his father divided his property between his two sons. We’re not told how old the sons are, just that one is older than the other, that the younger asks for his share—no more, no less—and that the father lets go, effortlessly, without question or hesitation or equivocation, without conditions. That’s our first tip that he’s an unusual man, and an unusual father.

Not many days afterward, having turned his share of his inheritance into money, the younger son left and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered all that inheritance in riotous living. He didn’t kill anyone, or join the Roman legion, or do heavy drugs, or anything else really bad; he just made a mess of his life and lost all his money. After he had spent it all, a severe famine arose in that country; and he was destitute. He went and hired himself out to a fellow in that country, who sent him to his farm to feed the pigs. And he longed to fill his belly with the husks that the pigs were eating, since no one would give him any food. Very few had any food to give, and those who did were afraid that the famine might catch up to them.                                            

Talk about feeling like a motherless child a long way from home! Cut off from any real connection with other people, reduced to taking care of pigs; even, in his desperation, longing to eat the pigs’ food. And there, at that moment, in the trough, in the sty, comes the start of a kind of turning, or metanoia. When we give in to how lost we are, when we abandon all our flotation devices, and sink like the stones or the husks we’ve become, to the bottom of our lostness, then we can begin to rise, to come to ourselves, to find our path.  I imagine you’ve heard it: “The only way out is in and through.”

I'll repeat what I wrote recently: The theme of turning or redemption is central to our Jewish−Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth. There are no short cuts: from one level of consciousness to a transition that is nothing short of death, thence to an experience of rebirth or renewal that is qualitatively other—larger, fuller—than the life one previously knew. One unity of being and purpose is broken, undone: the soul, in effect, impounded. It cannot be redeemed, or even held beyond its time, without becoming some poor, hapless shadow of itself. Let’s call that: half-way on this journey. Another, more traditional name for it is purgatory.

Back to the young son. “And when he came to himself [those are Jesus’s words], he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have more than enough to eat, while I am dying of hunger. I will get up [he’s been lying down with the pigs, remember] I will go to my father, and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against God and against you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Let me be like one of your hired men.’ And he got up, and went to his father." As Mitchell puts it, he’s begun to come to clarity, to wake up to his truer self.

Jesus doesn’t tell us how long he had to hike, but you can bet it was a long way, and a painful journey, with lots of time to think more about his sorry adventures, lots of time to think about his family, lots of time to rehearse what he was going to say to his father, lots of time to feel shame.

Shame is usually a big part of coming to oneself, and it can be excruciating. (Like virtually all other feelings, there is useful shame and destructive shame.) T.S. Eliot writes about this time in “Ash Wednesday,” his special poem about turning: “This is the time of tension between dying and birth.”  And Eliot writes later of the experience of shame, in one of his Four Quartets called “Little Gidding”:

...the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to other’s harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

So yes, a long trek, along a path this young man knew somewhere way back in his mind, but a path along which he was also slowly picking his way for the first time. He was suffering now, in this purgatorial stage, from a kind of blurred double vision: diplopia. He was like the man whose doctor said, “Read the chart.” And the man answered, “Which one?” He was like the person coming home from the pub seeing four yellow lines instead of two.

While he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His father had been looking all this time. He had, as we say, eyes to see and ears to hear, and he was moved with compassion. His father ran to him, and threw his arms around him, and kissed him. How do I put the beauty of that running and that hug and kiss? Safe to say that’s not what fathers commonly did in those days, nor often enough now. And his son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against God and against you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ The son is stunned: those are the same words he thought up while he was still lying in the pig sty, just beginning to wake up, and he doesn’t know his father’s been awake all the time.

But his father doesn’t even let him stutter out his last line. His father said to his servants, ‘Quick, bring out the best robe we have, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and make merry. For this son of mine was dead (indeed he was), and he has come back to life; he was lost, and he is found.” And they began to make merry.

The shame and degradation, the wallowing lostness of the son are being shed, the two of them—father and son—become one in the healing, washed in the father’s joy. The experiences of forgiveness and forgiven-ness come together, are sealed in a loving embrace, the dancers and the dance.

You know there’s a third act to the play, a shadow cast over the rejoicing, another pain to endure, another redemption to accomplish. My colleagues and I saw it often enough in psychotherapy: when one member of a family gets well, another may get sick. Worried parents come in to the school’s counselor or principal to see what can be done about the fact that Billy has been picking fights on the playground, and just punched his fist through a glass door, or stole some money from another student’s locker. In ten or fifteen minutes with Billy’s parents,  the principal or counselor learns that Billy is more the current symptom than the problem, that in some sense he has been chosen to act out the family’s problems. And a long and often painful disentangling and reweaving begins. Or so we hope. So we intend.

Were it not for the love and compassion of this father, we might see something like that here, with the older son. (We should ask, by the way, as Stephen Mitchell does, where is the mother in this story? For the father acts like both rolled into one. Jesus’s relationship with his own mother would bear some attention; I recommend Stephen Mitchell's book for that.

The older son had been out in the fields, working; and on his way home, as he got closer to the house, he heard music and dancing, and he called over one of the servants and asked what was happening. The servant told him: ‘Your brother has come home, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has him back safe and sound.’ That made the older brother angry, and he wouldn’t go inside the house. But his father came out and tried to sooth him.

It was a hard job. His son said, ‘Look: all these years I have been doing your bidding as a loyal son. I’ve never disobeyed you. Yet you never even gave me a goat, so that I could feast and make merry with my friends. But now my no good brother comes back, after spending your money on whores, and you kill the fatted calf for him!’ (Killing the fatted calf is a very big deal.)

Now: here is another turning point. You can imagine so many things that could go wrong. The father doesn’t want his joy and generosity spoiled by the older son who was going to get two-thirds of his property anyway (that’s the way it got split up in those days). Who was he to remind his father just as this celebration was getting under way that he hadn’t thought to reward normal filial loyalty with the gift of a goat?

And the older son is at a turning of his own. He’s telling the truth. He’s not smug or prideful. He’s been obedient as he should, and now he feels hurt and resentful. He’s been treated unjustly. He really has. His father hasn’t done for him what he’s doing for his wastrel brother. He has a point, and it’s a dangerous moment. His father could have sent someone to call him home from the fields. Earlier, he could have been more attentive to his older son’s need for appreciation and love. But if we get too tangled up in this kind of family psychology, we miss Jesus’s point. Listen to the tenderness of the father’s response to his older son:

“The father said to him, ‘Child, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But it’s proper to make merry and rejoice, for your brother was dead, and he has come back to life; he was lost, and is found.”  I hope—I imagine—that his son can see the tears in his father’s eyes.

I agree with Mitchell's summary of this parable. "I don’t know that there has ever been a more heartfelt and beautiful statement of the reality of resurrection."

Forgiveness is probably the most distinctive of Jesus’s teachings. He mentions it, in the stories that have come down to us, only a few times, and the parable of the prodigal son is a miracle of its accomplishment. You remember Peter, wonderful straight-talking Peter with a literal mind like a rock, asking of Jesus, “how often should I forgive my brother if he keeps wronging me? Up to seven times?” And Jesus’s response, “Not just seven: seventy times seven.” In other words, it isn’t a matter of counting, Peter. There is no mention of forgiveness in the parable of the prodigal son. The father’s heart has long been open. The son didn’t have to do anything to earn his father’s forgiveness; it’s simply there, in his running, in his robes flapping, in his sandals slapping on the ground, in the whole body of his embrace, in his father’s face, which looked like the rising sun, before his boy can open his mouth to ask. His father’s heart has long been open.

Coming back to life, becoming found, awakening fully, isn’t done in one critical moment. It takes time, more than a single night of feasting. But that said, let's imagine such a shortened version:

The younger son wakes up the next morning, after the party. He’s a little bit hung over. He wonders if yesterday is still true today. Then he smells breakfast cooking, and he comes downstairs. There’s his father, and his brother too, welcoming. Still a little wobbly, he sits down at his place at the table, and notices a small scroll on his plate. He unrolls it, and finds his brother’s painstaking handwriting. Here’s what it said:

 

….he will raise you up on eagle’s wings
Bear you on the breath of dawn
Make you to shine like the sun,
and hold you in the palm of his hand.

 

 

Prefatory note: In much of what I write below--in this post's continuation or "extended body"--I owe so much to my reading and re-reading of Stephen Mitchell's inspired reflections on Jesus's tale of the prodigal son (in his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Harper, 1993) that it's hard, in retrospect, to pick all his thinking, his examples and imagery, from my own. I hope I've given him sufficient credit in the text as well as here. In the interest of narrative continuity, I have chosen not to clutter that portion of the text with as many quotation marks as it technically deserves. The story at its heart belongs to him, to me, and to neither of us.

When I was eleven years old I had a beast of a paper route. It was the kind of beast that had red, predatory eyes even in the soft dawn of morning. I was folding and carrying on my bike and heaving toward peoples’ front porches a free shopping news filled from front to back with ads. That paper made up in weight for what it lacked in content. It was as if half the world had something to sell, and had chosen this particular paper to convey the news, in bold print and big colored pictures, to the other half of the world.

The bale of papers left on the corner for me to distribute was the size of a bale that might have been left for an elephant who hadn’t eaten in a week. And my route seemed to cover roughly the United States west of the Mississippi: including both the Sierras and the Rockies, if you can imagine them with tract houses cheek by cheek.

In short, if it had occurred to me to put my situation into church language—which it actually did, if you can believe it of a boy raised in a minimally observant Episcopal household—I didn’t exactly feel that I was doing God’s work.

I happened to notice one morning when my rebelliousness was reaching an intolerable pitch, that the truck which dropped off my elephantine bale of papers did so beside a long, tall and dense evergreen hedge. I realized that those six feet of dense evergreen provided adequate cover, in a large number of places, for bales even as big as mine. I convinced myself that I was doing virtually everyone a favor by depositing the bales in the hedge, and conveniently forgot that I was continuing to be paid for my labors. My freedom lasted about two weeks before somebody missed his shopping news, and I had to pull every waterlogged bale out of the hedge, and return my ill-gotten wages. My mother let me know that I was headed down the slippery slope to a life of crime.

But it’s the other part of my solution to this paper route from the Underworld that I want more to describe. Before I discovered the irresistible hedge—while I was still trudging my rounds—I began to talk with God. At least I assumed it was God, before I later reflected on how the whole misadventure concluded. These talks were not aloud. I was too shy for that. These were silent conversations in which I mostly put questions and waited for answers. I was old enough to realize that my active imagination may have been at work, so we agreed on a secret word that only He could speak.

I have tried, but I don’t remember much of the content of those talks, of that listening for the voice of God, that search, on ground I suppose as likely as any, for His Kingdom. I don’t think the talks had anything to do with my paper route. They touched upon the subject of fathers, present and absent (my own had died only a few months before), on fear in the nighttime, on anger and what only later I came to understand as forgiveness. I remember that we spoke of loneliness, and the kind of companionship one might experience even when one thought oneself alone. We spoke more than a little about Jesus, I think partly because I was preoccupied with fathers and sons, and because some of the stories of Jesus’s life, and the stories he told to others, had begun to exercise their mysterious hold on me.

It’s been a very long time since those talks, a lot of time for puzzlement, disbelief, interpretation—too much time for interpretation. I’ve come to think of much that I call interpretation as close kin to whatever it was that led me into that thicket of a hedge. I’ve never lost the love of asking questions, or listening for answers, or of Jesus’s stories.

I can talk and write more clearly now than I could at the age of eleven. For example, when I was eleven I was sure than God was a noun; now I’m more inclined to think of God as a verb, and the Kingdom of God as a path rather than a destination.

_____________________________

When Andrew and Peter first encountered Jesus, they asked him, “Rabbi, where are you going?”; and he answered, “Follow me.” That has always been for me one of the simplest, hardest and most moving exchanges in the Gospels. Andrew and Peter meant the question simply and literally enough. Jesus's response dramatically raised the stakes. There was no way to tell them where he was going.

There is another simple exchange: another touchingly straightforward question, and another answer that continues to echo long after it is spoken, maybe the essence of gospel, of the good news.

“....someone asked Jesus, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ [there’s the noun]
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” [listen: there’s the verb]

 

Rembrandt, The Prodigal Son

  The Prodigal Son. Let me share a familiar story Jesus told, among the stories that help us to grasp what it is to follow. (There, of course, is the verb as well.) They are such familiar stories that it helps if you can read or listen to them as if you’ve never heard them before. So I’ll tell it just a little bit differently; though basically as Jesus did. Oh, and one other thing that is helpful in listening: Jesus doesn’t ask us to do this, but it seems consistent with learning to follow. Imagine, as you might with the characters in a dream, that you may be each of them, all of them, not only the one who first seems most familiar to you. It’s your dream, all of it. I think Jesus is saying that this story is our story: all of us, all of it.

Like Stephen Mitchell, I think this story is "one of the tenderest and most compassionate in all literature." It conveys both the heart of Jesus’s teaching, and the following for which he asks, which are one and the same.

Once there was a man who had two sons. And the younger one had ants in his pants. He said to his dad, ‘Father, let me have my share of the estate.’ So his father divided his property between his two sons. We’re not told how old the sons are, just that one is older than the other, that the younger asks for his share—no more, no less—and that the father lets go, effortlessly, without question or hesitation or equivocation, without conditions. That’s our first tip that he’s an unusual man, and an unusual father.

Not many days afterward, having turned his share of his inheritance into money, the younger son left and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered all that inheritance in riotous living. He didn’t kill anyone, or join the Roman legion, or do heavy drugs, or anything else really bad; he just made a mess of his life and lost all his money. After he had spent it all, a severe famine arose in that country; and he was destitute. He went and hired himself out to a fellow in that country, who sent him to his farm to feed the pigs. And he longed to fill his belly with the husks that the pigs were eating, since no one would give him any food. Very few had any food to give, and those who did were afraid that the famine might catch up to them.                                            

Talk about feeling like a motherless child a long way from home! Cut off from any real connection with other people, reduced to taking care of pigs; even, in his desperation, longing to eat the pigs’ food. And there, at that moment, in the trough, in the sty, comes the start of a kind of turning, or metanoia. When we give in to how lost we are, when we abandon all our flotation devices, and sink like the stones or the husks we’ve become, to the bottom of our lostness, then we can begin to rise, to come to ourselves, to find our path.  I imagine you’ve heard it: “The only way out is in and through.”

I'll repeat what I wrote recently: The theme of turning or redemption is central to our Jewish−Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth. There are no short cuts: from one level of consciousness to a transition that is nothing short of death, thence to an experience of rebirth or renewal that is qualitatively other—larger, fuller—than the life one previously knew. One unity of being and purpose is broken, undone: the soul, in effect, impounded. It cannot be redeemed, or even held beyond its time, without becoming some poor, hapless shadow of itself. Let’s call that: half-way on this journey. Another, more traditional name for it is purgatory.

Back to the young son. “And when he came to himself [those are Jesus’s words], he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have more than enough to eat, while I am dying of hunger. I will get up [he’s been lying down with the pigs, remember] I will go to my father, and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against God and against you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Let me be like one of your hired men.’ And he got up, and went to his father." As Mitchell puts it, he’s begun to come to clarity, to wake up to his truer self.

Jesus doesn’t tell us how long he had to hike, but you can bet it was a long way, and a painful journey, with lots of time to think more about his sorry adventures, lots of time to think about his family, lots of time to rehearse what he was going to say to his father, lots of time to feel shame.

Shame is usually a big part of coming to oneself, and it can be excruciating. (Like virtually all other feelings, there is useful shame and destructive shame.) T.S. Eliot writes about this time in “Ash Wednesday,” his special poem about turning: “This is the time of tension between dying and birth.”  And Eliot writes later of the experience of shame, in one of his Four Quartets called “Little Gidding”:

...the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to other’s harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

So yes, a long trek, along a path this young man knew somewhere way back in his mind, but a path along which he was also slowly picking his way for the first time. He was suffering now, in this purgatorial stage, from a kind of blurred double vision: diplopia. He was like the man whose doctor said, “Read the chart.” And the man answered, “Which one?” He was like the person coming home from the pub seeing four yellow lines instead of two.

While he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His father had been looking all this time. He had, as we say, eyes to see and ears to hear, and he was moved with compassion. His father ran to him, and threw his arms around him, and kissed him. How do I put the beauty of that running and that hug and kiss? Safe to say that’s not what fathers commonly did in those days, nor often enough now. And his son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against God and against you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ The son is stunned: those are the same words he thought up while he was still lying in the pig sty, just beginning to wake up, and he doesn’t know his father’s been awake all the time.

But his father doesn’t even let him stutter out his last line. His father said to his servants, ‘Quick, bring out the best robe we have, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and make merry. For this son of mine was dead (indeed he was), and he has come back to life; he was lost, and he is found.” And they began to make merry.

The shame and degradation, the wallowing lostness of the son are being shed, the two of them—father and son—become one in the healing, washed in the father’s joy. The experiences of forgiveness and forgiven-ness come together, are sealed in a loving embrace, the dancers and the dance.

You know there’s a third act to the play, a shadow cast over the rejoicing, another pain to endure, another redemption to accomplish. My colleagues and I saw it often enough in psychotherapy: when one member of a family gets well, another may get sick. Worried parents come in to the school’s counselor or principal to see what can be done about the fact that Billy has been picking fights on the playground, and just punched his fist through a glass door, or stole some money from another student’s locker. In ten or fifteen minutes with Billy’s parents,  the principal or counselor learns that Billy is more the current symptom than the problem, that in some sense he has been chosen to act out the family’s problems. And a long and often painful disentangling and reweaving begins. Or so we hope. So we intend.

Were it not for the love and compassion of this father, we might see something like that here, with the older son. (We should ask, by the way, as Stephen Mitchell does, where is the mother in this story? For the father acts like both rolled into one. Jesus’s relationship with his own mother would bear some attention; I recommend Stephen Mitchell's book for that.

The older son had been out in the fields, working; and on his way home, as he got closer to the house, he heard music and dancing, and he called over one of the servants and asked what was happening. The servant told him: ‘Your brother has come home, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has him back safe and sound.’ That made the older brother angry, and he wouldn’t go inside the house. But his father came out and tried to sooth him.

It was a hard job. His son said, ‘Look: all these years I have been doing your bidding as a loyal son. I’ve never disobeyed you. Yet you never even gave me a goat, so that I could feast and make merry with my friends. But now my no good brother comes back, after spending your money on whores, and you kill the fatted calf for him!’ (Killing the fatted calf is a very big deal.)

Now: here is another turning point. You can imagine so many things that could go wrong. The father doesn’t want his joy and generosity spoiled by the older son who was going to get two-thirds of his property anyway (that’s the way it got split up in those days). Who was he to remind his father just as this celebration was getting under way that he hadn’t thought to reward normal filial loyalty with the gift of a goat?

And the older son is at a turning of his own. He’s telling the truth. He’s not smug or prideful. He’s been obedient as he should, and now he feels hurt and resentful. He’s been treated unjustly. He really has. His father hasn’t done for him what he’s doing for his wastrel brother. He has a point, and it’s a dangerous moment. His father could have sent someone to call him home from the fields. Earlier, he could have been more attentive to his older son’s need for appreciation and love. But if we get too tangled up in this kind of family psychology, we miss Jesus’s point. Listen to the tenderness of the father’s response to his older son:

“The father said to him, ‘Child, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But it’s proper to make merry and rejoice, for your brother was dead, and he has come back to life; he was lost, and is found.”  I hope—I imagine—that his son can see the tears in his father’s eyes.

I agree with Mitchell's summary of this parable. "I don’t know that there has ever been a more heartfelt and beautiful statement of the reality of resurrection."

Forgiveness is probably the most distinctive of Jesus’s teachings. He mentions it, in the stories that have come down to us, only a few times, and the parable of the prodigal son is a miracle of its accomplishment. You remember Peter, wonderful straight-talking Peter with a literal mind like a rock, asking of Jesus, “how often should I forgive my brother if he keeps wronging me? Up to seven times?” And Jesus’s response, “Not just seven: seventy times seven.” In other words, it isn’t a matter of counting, Peter. There is no mention of forgiveness in the parable of the prodigal son. The father’s heart has long been open. The son didn’t have to do anything to earn his father’s forgiveness; it’s simply there, in his running, in his robes flapping, in his sandals slapping on the ground, in the whole body of his embrace, in his father’s face, which looked like the rising sun, before his boy can open his mouth to ask. His father’s heart has long been open.

Coming back to life, becoming found, awakening fully, isn’t done in one critical moment. It takes time, more than a single night of feasting. But that said, let's imagine such a shortened version:

The younger son wakes up the next morning, after the party. He’s a little bit hung over. He wonders if yesterday is still true today. Then he smells breakfast cooking, and he comes downstairs. There’s his father, and his brother too, welcoming. Still a little wobbly, he sits down at his place at the table, and notices a small scroll on his plate. He unrolls it, and finds his brother’s painstaking handwriting. Here’s what it said:

 

….he will raise you up on eagle’s wings
Bear you on the breath of dawn
Make you to shine like the sun,
and hold you in the palm of his hand.

 

 

Turning II: Dance of the Dervishes

There is another embodiment of turning in the spiritual literature of human development that bears a deep kinship to the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is from the Sufis, usually described as an esoteric or mystical domain of Islam, perhaps having its origins in central Asia, but in fact at home throughout the Near and Far East and beyond. Sufism has been represented in Reckonings both in the tales of Mulla Nasrudin and in the incomparable stories and poems of Rumi. The Sufis gave birth to those we describe but little know as "whirling dervishes." Here the turning of their movement is evoked by Coleman Barks:

"The 'turn,' the moving meditation done by Mevlevi dervishes, originated with Rumi. The story goes that he was walking in the goldsmithing section of Konya [in what is now Turkey] when he heard a beautiful music in their hammering. He began turning in harmony with it, an ecstatic dance of surrender and yet with great centered discipline. He arrived at a place where ego dissolves and a resonance with universal soul comes in. Dervish literally means 'doorway.' ... Turning is an image of how the dervish becomes an empty place where human and divine can meet. To approach the whole the part must become mad, by conventional standards at least. These ecstatic holy people, called matzubs in the sufi tradition, redefine this sort of madness as true health.

Daniel Libert adds in the preface to his lovely small book, Rumi: Fragments,Ecstasies, (Santa Fe, NM, 1981): "In the ecstatic trance of the 'Sema,' this dance to wailing flute and pacing drum, Rumi extemporaneously recited thousands of odes which students hastily transcribed."


The weeping flute
remembers
the riverbed

the stick beats the drum,
“I was once green,
a living branch.”

the skin of the lute
trembles
like living flesh

the lovers turn
bewildered
like Jacob seeking Joseph

if you heard their cries
your heart would shatter
like glass

             - Rumi

 

Turning I - Notes on a Bach Cantata

Spiral Shell, photograph by Edward Steichen

A Note after Listening to Cantata No. 104 by Johann Sebastian Bach

The initial choral passage of Bach’s cantata is drawn from the haunting 80th Psalm, which portrays a deeply troubled time for the people of Israel. The growing vine—the tree of life—which once bore so plentifully has been destroyed.  Once nourished in its shade and by its fruit, the people of Israel feel confused, fearful, betrayed. The haunting quality is found most poignantly in the psalmist’s refrain, repeated three times: “Turn us again, O God, and cause Thy face to shine…” The mid-passages of the cantata—the four recitatives and arias—are a facing and working through of the tensions between fear and trust, and faith is painfully and movingly reborn. Bach can then turn to those magnificent and familiar words of the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…” The movement of the cantata—from the distressed, even anguished plea of the 80th Psalm to the peace and affirmation of the 23rd—is a dramatic turning.

The theme of turning or redemption is central to our Jewish-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth, from one level of consciousness to a transition that is nothing short of death, thence to an experience of rebirth or renewal that is qualitatively other—larger, more capacious—than the life previously known. One unity of being and purpose is broken, undone; the soul, in effect, impounded. It cannot be redeemed, or even held beyond its time, without becoming some poor, hapless shadow of itself. We talk of the puer aeternus, of zombies, of the walking wounded, indeed, of the man in the gray flannel suit. Someplace in his reflections on the Gospels, Stephen Mitchell writes, “Only when we realize that we are lost can we begin to be found.”

The panic and shame of that awareness can be awful in its purgative clarity:

                        …The rending pain of re-enactment
                            Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
                            Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
                        Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
                            Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

                                                      - T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

There is imagery from Hasidic legend that vividly conveys a sense of the soul’s impoundment and of its release:

The spark in a stone or a plant or another creature is like a complete figure which sits in the middle of a thing as in a block, so that its hands and feet cannot stretch themselves and the head lies on the knees. He who is able to lift the holy spark leads this figure into freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this.

Elie Wiesel, 1928-2016

This is a belated testimonial to Elie Wiesel, who died earlier this year, on 2 July 2016, thirty years after he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary work on justice, testimony, memory, violence, oppression and persecution. On 10 December 1986, in Oslo's City Hall, Elie Wiesel spoke of the significance of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He cast his address in the form of a dialogue with himself as a young boy, imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, a story he told so eloquently in his autobiographical account, Night (retranslated in 2002 by his wife Marion). "The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future."

______________________

 

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember: he asked his father: "Can this be true?" This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?

And now the boy is turning to me: "Tell me," he asks. "What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?"

And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my peoples' memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of our people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands ... But there are others as important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much of a disgrace as Josef Biegun's imprisonment. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and political persecution, writers and poets, prisoners in so many lands governed by the Left and by the Right. Human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. And then, too, there are the Palestinians to whose plight I am sensitive but whose methods I deplore. Violence and terrorism are not the answer. Something must be done about their suffering, and soon. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.

Yes, I have faith. Faith in God and even in His creation. Without it no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all. Isn't this the meaning of Alfred Nobel's legacy? Wasn't his fear of war a shield against war?

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done. One person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

 

The Cracked Sphere (redux)

Today I happened to revisit this entry, composed over a decade ago. Very little is changed.

For Paul and Joshua

It is an image that has been a recurrent part of my imagination from the prehistory of early childhood: a globe, the world, perhaps as seen and so memorably photographed from the reaches of space. I do not have to look closely, so intimate is its companionship, to know that jagged cracks run from surface to core.

In my youth I took it for my own fractured world, ominous and mysterious, and I wondered how an indelibly broken life could still offer so many occasions for love, intrigue, discovery, laughter. As if in response, I came upon a resonant phrase, "the crack in the cosmic egg." [Joseph Chilton Pearce,  The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality (1971)]. All along, it appeared, I had been patiently accompanied by an ageless image that has echoed through time and across cultures. Dying and birthing are like the moon's shadow and light, going and coming not in linear sequence but as one uroboric whole.

On the plaza outside the United Nations in New York there is a remarkable sculpture. I didn't know of its existence until I read this description:

"It consists of an enormous sphere of burnished bronze, suggesting a globe. The sphere is pleasing to behold, even though it startles with its imperfection. There are deep, jagged cracks in its golden-hued surface, cracks too large ever to be repaired. Perhaps it's cracked because it's defective (like the broken world), one thinks. Or maybe (like an egg) it has to break in order for something else to emerge. Perhaps both. Sure enough, when one peers into the gashes on its surface, there is another brightly shining sphere coming along inside. But that one is already cracked, too!"

So wrote Mary Ann Glendon in her book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001, p. 240).

The charcoal drawing on the left was made by my son Paul at the kitchen table one morning, in his sketch pad. It literally took my breath away. I'd never before told him about cracked spheres in his father's imagination or in my experience of the world.

A few years later, reading a collection of poems by Joshua, another of my sons, I found the following prayer:

"Help me to build that which will break."

Sphere on UN Plaza

Today I happened to revisit this entry, composed over a decade ago. Very little is changed.

For Paul and Joshua

It is an image that has been a recurrent part of my imagination from the prehistory of early childhood: a globe, the world, perhaps as seen and so memorably photographed from the reaches of space. I do not have to look closely, so intimate is its companionship, to know that jagged cracks run from surface to core.

In my youth I took it for my own fractured world, ominous and mysterious, and I wondered how an indelibly broken life could still offer so many occasions for love, intrigue, discovery, laughter. As if in response, I came upon a resonant phrase, "the crack in the cosmic egg." [Joseph Chilton Pearce,  The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality (1971)]. All along, it appeared, I had been patiently accompanied by an ageless image that has echoed through time and across cultures. Dying and birthing are like the moon's shadow and light, going and coming not in linear sequence but as one uroboric whole.

On the plaza outside the United Nations in New York there is a remarkable sculpture. I didn't know of its existence until I read this description:

"It consists of an enormous sphere of burnished bronze, suggesting a globe. The sphere is pleasing to behold, even though it startles with its imperfection. There are deep, jagged cracks in its golden-hued surface, cracks too large ever to be repaired. Perhaps it's cracked because it's defective (like the broken world), one thinks. Or maybe (like an egg) it has to break in order for something else to emerge. Perhaps both. Sure enough, when one peers into the gashes on its surface, there is another brightly shining sphere coming along inside. But that one is already cracked, too!"

So wrote Mary Ann Glendon in her book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001, p. 240).

The charcoal drawing on the left was made by my son Paul at the kitchen table one morning, in his sketch pad. It literally took my breath away. I'd never before told him about cracked spheres in his father's imagination or in my experience of the world.

A few years later, reading a collection of poems by Joshua, another of my sons, I found the following prayer:

"Help me to build that which will break."

Sphere on UN Plaza

Thistle

The most ordinary of flowers, the thistle is widely considered a weed. Maude Grieve indicates in the book noted below, "It has always been a plant of ill repute among us." I took a photo yesterday while wandering in the woods near Point Reyes.

What a delight, also, to discover Mrs. Grieve's book, A Modern Herbal, published in 1931, still available in book form, as well as online: a marvelous compendium of information on the medicinal, culinary, cultivation and folklore of herbs.

Mrs. Grieve's brief introductory discussion of thistles is delightful:

Thistle is the old English name - essentially the same in all kindred languages - for a large family of plants occurring chiefly in Europe and Asia.

In agriculture the Thistle is the recognized sign of untidiness and neglect, being found not so much in barren ground, as in good ground not properly cared for. It has always been a plant of ill repute among us; Shakespeare classes 'rough Thistles' with 'hateful Docks,' and further back in the history of our race we read of the Thistle representing part of the primeval curse on the earth in general, and on man in particular, for - 'Thorns also and Thistles shall it bring forth to thee.'

Thistles will soon monopolize a large extent of country to the extinction of other plants, as they have done in parts of the American prairies, in Canada and British Columbia, and as they did in Australia, till a stringent Act of Parliament was passed, about twenty years ago, imposing heavy penalties upon all who neglected to destroy Thistles on their land, every man being now compelled to root out, within fourteen days, any Thistle that may lift up its head, Government inspectors being specially appointed to carry out the enforcement of the law.

The growth of weeds in Great Britain, having, in the opinion of many, also reached disturbing proportions, it is now proposed to enact a similar law in this country, and the Smallholders' Union is bringing forward a 'Bill to prevent the spread of noxious weeds in England and Wales,' the provisions being similar to the Australian law - weed-infested roadsides, as well as badly-cleared cultivated land, to come within the scope of the enactment.

Among the thirteen noxious weeds enumerated in the proposed Bill, the name of Thistle is naturally to be found. And yet in medicine Thistles are far from useless.

When beaten up or crushed in a mill to destroy the prickles, the leaves of all Thistles have proved excellent food for cattle and horses. This kind of fodder was formerly used to a great extent in Scotland before the introduction of special green crops for the purpose. The young stems of many of the Thistles are also edible, and the seeds of all the species yield a good oil by expression.

Two or three of our native species are handsome enough to be worthy of a place in gardens. Some species which flourish in hotter and drier climates than our own, such as the handsome Yellow Thistles of the south of Europe, are cultivated for that purpose, and have a classical interest, being mentioned by Hesiod as the flower of summer. This striking plant, crowned with its golden flowers, is abundant throughout Sicily. The Fish-bone Thistle , from Syria, is also a very handsome plant. A grand Scarlet Thistle from Mexico was grown in England some fifty years ago, but is now never seen.

 

The thistle is the national flower of Scotland. Legend has it that an invading Norse army was attempting to sneak up at night upon a Scottish army's encampment. One barefoot Norseman had the misfortune to step upon a thistle, causing him to cry out in pain, thus alerting the Scots to the presence of the Norse invaders.

 

 

 

I have no idea which one of the many varieties of thistle I photographed yesterday, but many of their names belie their characterization as weeds. For example, there are holy thistles, melancholy thistles, creeping plume thistles, woolly-headed thistles, milk thistles and dwarf thistles, as well as the yellow thistles, fish-bone thistles and scarlet thistles mentioned by Mrs. Grieve above. Here is my photo (double-click to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

Two teaching stories

I want to write briefly of two parallel statements − teaching stories − about the centrality of love in Christianity and Buddhism.

In Luke 10:25-37 Jesus was asked by a lawyer, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" In reply, Jesus asked his questioner to tell him "what is written in the law," the great commandment of Judaeo-Christian faith. The lawyer responded, " You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." Jesus replied, "You have answered right; do this and you will live." [Italics added.]

The lawyer then asked, "And who is my neighbor?" Instead of offering a short reply, Jesus told a short narrative, a teaching story that has become known as The Parable of the Good Samaritan:

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

"Which of these three do you think," Jesus then asked, "proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" His questioner replied, "The one who showed mercy upon him." And Jesus said, "Go and do likewise."

Focus for a moment on the last phrase of the great commandment: "[love] your neighbor as yourself." In the parable, the neighbor is manifestly the Samaritan: loving, kind, compassionate, generous. If that is Jesus's definition of neighbor−his answer to how to respond to the suffering of others− how should we understand the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself? He may have been speaking of a presumption of self-love common in many cultures. Surely Jesus did not mean that love should flow only to those possessed of the gifted qualities of heart and spirit expressed by the Samaritan in his parable. We know the importance Jesus attached to loving one's enemies: "love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you." (Matthew 5:44) They too, then, must be our neighbors. How to reconcile the two views of neighbor? If, at heart, we love ourselves and would be loved by others, The Golden Rule emerges: Do to others−all others−what you would want them to do to you. (Luke 6:31).

 

Here is a similar (and less radical) passage from the literature of Buddhism:

A man who had learned that the Buddha believed in the principle of great love which commands us to return good to anyone who does evil to us, came and cursed at him and struck him. The Buddha was silent.

When the man had finished abusing him, the Buddha asked him, "Son, if a man refuses to accept a present that is given to him, to whom would it belong?" The man replied, "It would belong to the person who offered it."

"My son," said the Buddha, "you have cursed me and struck me, but I refused to accept it. You must keep it for yourself. It will become a source of great  misery and pain to you. As the echo belongs to the sounds which made it, and the shadow to the object creating the shadow, so misery belongs to the person who makes it." The man did not reply, and the Buddha continued. "A wicked man who tries to harm a good man is like a person who looks up and spits at heaven. The spit doesn't reach heaven, but falls back on the spitter."

 

Thoughts on a Zen Buddhist Parable

Here is a well-known parable told by the Buddha:

 

A man, crossing a field, encounters a tiger. The man flees, the tiger pursues. Coming to a cliff top, the man grabs the root of a vine and swings  himself down below the tiger's reach. The tiger waits. Looking down the precipice upon which he precariously swings, the man sees another tiger looking expectantly upwards at him. As if this were not sufficient cause for peril, two mice begin to chew the root from which he hangs. As he digests his unenviable condition, the man sees a ripe strawberry within his reach. Releasing the vine with one hand, he gently picks the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

______________________________

 

 

Teaching tales are a wonderful part of many other wisdom traditions, including Sufism, Taoism, Hasidic Judaism, the life of Jesus in the New Testament, and the stories of the desert fathers of early Christianity. Like this Zen parable, they lend themselves to meditation and revisiting.

When I first read this story, in my twenties, I took it at reasonable face value: a doomed man's capacity to pluck a last moment of pleasure before imminent and certain death. Having no experience of such, I nonetheless imagined that there was nothing like such inevitability to focus and heighten one's sensibilities.

Years later, ruminating on the story again while preparing to discuss it with a group of students, I wrote in my journal, "Can I, in the midst of all that distracts and destroys, with no hope of release from such circumstances, reach out to taste the fruit of life? I have a fierce and, I think, irredeemable tendency to hold on tighter to what I've learned to know as dear life. Perhaps, if I will not let go, I can at least learn to grasp with only one hand, leaving the other to reach out freely."

Now, later in life, I am more inclined to hear the tale as a nudge towards recognition of the evanescence of time in contrast to a world more and more compelled by the tyranny of time's presence and precision. None of my readings is lost. I live, as Stanley Kunitz writes elsewhere, "in the layers," and I too am not done with my changes.

There is a brief Sufi tale whose characters are not unlike those of this Zen parable:

A man being followed by a hungry tiger turned in desperation to face it, and cried: "Why don't you leave me alone?" The tiger answered: "Why don't you stop being so appetizing?""

 

Thoughts on Abiding

Well over a decade ago I wrote the lines that follow below the photograph. The landscape they portray I keep in memory on my wall. I remember it vividly, as I remember the companionship that accompanied the days I lived nearby, grateful for the love I received, wishing that I had offered in return more of the fellowship I found and felt in the beauty of that natural world.

 

 

 

I linger beside a familiar granite boulder and small juniper in a pasture. I am drawn to their simplicity, common juniper (even in Latin: Juniperus communis) and common granite, united in lasting companionship. They aren't rare. We will find them on many of our walks. They thrive everywhere in our landscapes. Even after suburbia has invaded and overrun,  a keen and patient eye can see evidence of pastures, old fields, rocky slopes. There's strength in these two fellow creatures, a sense of lasting through whatever elements they meet. The granite boulder isn't especially dramatic or remarkable, but it was too large for the farmer to move aside when he cleared the pasture. So it was left, perhaps just where a receding glacier dropped it ten thousand years ago. The juniper, of course, came later, but its gnarled tenaciousness—like its cousin cypresses on the California coast—makes for fitting fellowship. These two rough textured green gray souls live together in satisfying complementarity. One can't imagine them losing each other.

 

 

Consciousness and companionship: written for a 50th anniversary reunion at Amherst College

Nearly seven years ago, on September 29, 2009, living and working with my wife Leigh in southern Norway, I sat down to write a 500-word account of my life and learning, requested of all members of the Class of 1960 at Amherst College, in anticipation of our 50-year reunion the following spring. I came upon it today shuffling through the papers on my computer.

My reflectiveness, I hope, has grown a little over the nine years since that writing, but apart from obvious changes of circumstances−chief among them the loss of Leigh−I'm struck that there is nothing that I would change. The words seem as familiar and fair a sense of self now as they did then.

 

 

The poet David Wagoner was 28 when, at his friend Theodore Roethke’s suggestion, he moved from his Indiana homeland to the Pacific Northwest. He was awestruck by the green luxuriance of life. “When I came over the Cascades and down into the coastal rainforest for the first time in the fall of 1954, it was a big event for me, it was a real crossing of a threshold, a real change of consciousness. Nothing was ever the same again.”

I didn’t travel as far – just a few miles down the Notch road, in fact. But I felt a similar new life in the offing at about the same age, when I resigned my faculty position at Amherst to join the intrepid little band just down the road in the apple orchards of South Amherst, preparing to give birth to Hampshire College.

Mapping those liminal or threshold times is one way I’ve imagined the character and consistency of my life. It serves in this instance to say something that must be true in a sense for all of us. The four years from the fall of 1956 to the spring of 1960 were an extended coming-of-age experience, with attendant pains, pleasures, accomplishments and missings of the mark.

The first months as an Amherst student were mostly excruciating. I did my shame-ridden best to hide the fright, but my skills of hiding seemed – to me, at least – to have deserted me with all the rest. Everything felt stripped away but the soft underbelly. At Thanksgiving I told my mother I was going to join the Army; it had to be more forgiving of my deficiencies.

My mother thought not, and I returned to Amherst. A kind of competence began to take hold, and an interest in the wider world reawakened – especially at that time the world of politics, my Roosevelt family’s delight and pride, bread and butter of the dinner table. Alongside a few Amherst friends and memorable teachers – foremost, Henry Steele Commager and Leo Marx – my real mentor was my grandmother, whose home became mine in those years. Her compassion and canny wisdom, her belief in the United Nations, social justice and human rights, fed me and shaped my values and choices. I didn’t begin my undergraduate years with social conscience or consciousness, at least none focused or articulate. Thanks largely to her I graduated with some measure of both.

For me, Amherst seemed – and seems still – effectively to have done what it promised, or at least that which the College most prized. I learned how to think more carefully and usefully, to apply discipline, practice, and the rules of evidence to the intellectual challenges I encountered, to find satisfaction in words that fit what I needed to describe and understand.

God knows – and my mother, sister and girlfriends knew – I didn’t grow up. Emotionally I was as callow a youth at 21 as at I’d been at 17. For me at least, and I think for the Amherst culture I knew, maturity in that deeper sense was not among the liberal arts. I later sought, with middling success, to make it so in my designs for Hampshire College.                

Speaking of God, while I learned something about the application and misapplication of imagination and metaphor in those years, I learned next to nothing about their essential applicability to spiritual life. Intuitively I knew otherwise, but I didn’t find my way until later to those who would reawaken that hunger, help me understand that religion was more than the blessing of a no longer required attendance at Chapel. Soul and psyche – the central re-pairing of my adult years of teaching and learning at Hampshire and after – hadn’t yet come into conscious focus.

We’re born yearning for companionship and community, and I’m still growing in their realization. My wife and I now live and work as members of a gifted community of healing in southern Norway - psychiatric hospital, research institute, community outreach program for couples and families, pastoral and professional retreat centers for clergy, physicians, psychologists and nurses.

This past March all of my immediate family – Leigh and I, four children and their spouses, and seven grandchildren – gathered on a Pacific Northwest shore, my birthplace, to celebrate Grandpa’s 70 years. My first great-grandchild - a girl, we already know - is expected at Christmas time. I worry a lot about the state of the earth; I’m very happy to anticipate sharing it with her.

 

Egret

Sometimes I am lucky enough to take a photo that immediately feels like a "keeper," one that moves me with the quality of its capture beyond what I intended. A few days ago I was following and admiring an egret feeding in a nearby stream. When I got the photo home to review, I was particularly struck by the backdrop of the water behind the bird, and by his (or her) foreshadow in front.

Double-click to enlarge.

 

 

 

Love as Ethical Insight − Arthur Zajonc

Arthur Zajonc is a physicist and a contemplative. His long practice of those disciplines − his wide-ranging thinking, writing and teaching − have brought fascinating integrative presence to diverse realms of human endeavor. He is emeritus professor of physics at my alma mater, Amherst College, where he taught from 1978 to 2012, as well as former president of the Mind and Life Institute and former director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. His publications include Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love; The Dalai Lama at MIT; and with co-author Parker Palmer, The Heart of Higher Education: A Call for Renewal.

In addition to those resources, I want to highlight here two very accessible documents that provide readers and listeners with a fine introduction to his work.

The first of those is a recorded conversation with Krista Tipppett in 2013, called "Holding Life Consciously," available on Tippett's website, On Being.

The second is a short (3-page) essay titled "Love as Ethical Insight," available here.

Zajonc's own website, containing much additional information, is here.

To re-imagine love as ethical insight is not a self-evident phrase or practice. Consider its persuasiveness in two paragraphs drawn from Zajonc's brief essay noted above. The first is a quotation from Nelson Mandela's remarks at the trial that sent him to prison in South Africa for 20 years. The second paragraph contains the essence of Zajonc's understanding that love is embedded in our empathy for others.

This is Mandela at his trial: "During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

And here is Zajonc on love as moral insight and imagination:

"We are empathic beings. As such we are profoundly connected to other human beings, as well as to all of nature. We can feel the joy and suffering of others, and as innately moral beings, we seek to mitigate suffering and promote the flourishing of others, even at a cost to ourselves. True morality carries the marks of insight and imagination.... In my view this is the moment in which love takes on the character of knowing. Love allows us gently, respectfully, and intimately to slip into the life of another person or animal or even the Earth itself and to know it from the inside. In this way, love can become a way of moral knowing that is as reliable as scientific insight. Then our highest challenge and aspiration is to learn to love with such selflessness and purity that love becomes a way to true moral insight, one that transcends social construction and biological imperatives."

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