Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

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?

 

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.

 

 

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 ~

 

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." 

 

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

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.

 

Rebecca Solnit on storytelling and "calling things by their true names"

I don’t know why, but it's been a while since I have received the wonderful weekly called Brainpickings, a splendid collection of short essays by its creator, Maria Popova. So I was glad when today’s email included her most recent issue. Of the several intriguing pieces therein I found one that particularly stands out for me, because it is focused on the theme of storytelling, and because it is a description of the latest book of essays by a favorite writer, Rebecca Solnit: Call Them by Their True Names.

Since coming to my current abode among the redwoods of northern California, I've had many opportunities for exploration and growth, one of them being membership in a weekly group called "Searching for Meaning." We focus each week on aspects of our experience during the past few days in which we have found ourselves seeking and sometimes finding new meaning in our lives. So I found particular satisfaction in Rebecca Solnit's characterization of that process: "Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it's an individual or the earth itself.; and toward the historical record. It's also a kind of self-respect...The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you."

______________________

 

Rebecca Solnit on Rewriting the World’s Broken Stories and the Paradigm-Shifting Power of Calling Things by Their True Names

“Finding the words is another step in learning to see," botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in reflecting on what her Native American tradition and her training as a scientist taught her about how naming confers dignity upon life. If to name is to see and reveal — to remove the veil of blindness, willful or manipulated, and expose things as they really are — then it is in turn another step in remaking the world, another form of resistance to the damaging dominant narratives that go unquestioned. Walt Whitman knew this when he contemplated our greatest civic might: "I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy."

A century and a half after Whitman, Rebecca Solnit — one of our own era’s boldest public defenders of democracy, and
one of the most poetic — explores this crucial causal link between the stories we tell and the world we build in Call Them By Their True Names — a collection of her essays at the nexus of politics, philosophy, and the selective record of personal and political choices we call history. Composed in response to more than a decade’s worth of cultural crises and triumphs, the pieces in the book furnish an extraordinarily lucid yet hopeful lens on the present and a boldly uncynical telescopic perspective on the future.

Solnit writes in the preface:

"One of the folktale archetypes, according to the Aarne-Thompson classification of these stories, tells of how “a mysterious or threatening helper is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name.” In the deep past, people knew names had power. Some still do. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.

"When the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as diagnosis. Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what you can do about it. Research, support, and effective treatment, as well as possibly redefining the disease and what it means, can proceed from this first step. Once you name a disorder, you may be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one. And sometimes what’s diagnosed can be cured."

That, indeed, is what the philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton celebrated in his beautiful fan letter to Rachel Carson after she catalyzed the modern environmental movement by speaking inconvenient truth to power in exposing the truth about pesticides, marketed at the time as harmless helpers to humanity — an act Merton considered “contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization.” Such naming of wrongs, betrayals, and corruptions unweaves the very fabric of the status quo. It is, Solnit argues, “the first step in the process of liberation” and often leads to shifts in the power system itself. In the age of “alternative facts,” when language is used as a weapon of oppression and manipulation, her words reverberate with the irrepressible, unsilenceable urgency of truth:

"To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt — or important or possible — and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story."

More than a century after Nietzsche contemplated truth, lies, and the power of language to both conceal and reveal reality, Solnit writes:

"There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are 'hanging out' but the Black kids are 'loitering' or 'lurking.' Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them."

What, then, can we do as namers and storytellers, as part of the truth-telling brigade that stands as warden of reality? Solnit offers:

"Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it’s an individual or the earth itself; and toward the historical record. It’s also a kind of self-respect… The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you."

The precision and respect of our words add up to the precision and respect of our stories — something Virginia Woolf implicitly recognized when she asserted that “words belong to each other” in the only surviving recording of her voice. When James Baldwin insisted that "we made the world we're living in and we have to make it over," he did so with an eye to storytelling as worldbuilding. Solnit addresses this — the remaking of stories as a remodeling of the world — in another piece in the book, exploring the responsibility of those tasked with telling the world’s truths: the writers, journalists, and storytellers whose words shape our understanding of reality. She writes:

"Stories surround us like air; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. Being a public storyteller requires the same skills with larger consequences and responsibilities, because your story becomes part of that water, undermining or reinforcing the existing stories. Your job is to report on the story on the surface, the contained story, the one that happened yesterday. It’s also to see and sometimes to break open or break apart the ambient stories, the stories that are already written, and to understand the relationship between the two."

In a testament to the crucial importance — and difficulty — of breaking out of our presentism bias and taking a telescopic perspective of the past, she adds:

"There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those 'dominant narratives' or 'paradigms' or 'memes' or 'metaphors we live by' or 'frameworks.' However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and that, too often, are also the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions.

[…]

"Part of the job of a great storyteller is to examine the stories that underlie the story you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making, in this kind of writing."

In a sense, what Solnit is advocating for is the opposite of revisionist history — the opposite of the convenient erasure of wrongdoings and betrayals over which the lulling stories of the status quo are written. I think of it as revisionist future — the act of courage and creativity required for changing the terrain of reality by imagining alternative landscapes and new pathways of possibility. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed in her poignant reflection on how imaginative storytelling expands the scope of the possible. “We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.”

But the most powerful and transformative imagination, Solnit reminds us, is the informed imagination:

"The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or to dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. News journalism focuses on what changed yesterday rather than asking what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo… This is why you need to know your history, even if you’re a journalist rather than a historian. You need to know the patterns to see how people are fitting the jumble of facts into what they already have: selecting, misreading, distorting, excluding, embroidering, distributing empathy here but not there, remembering this echo or forgetting that precedent.

"Some of the stories we need to break are not exceptional events, they’re the ugly wallpaper of our everyday lives. For example, there’s a widespread belief that women lie about being raped, not a few women, not an anomalous woman, but women in general. This framework comes from the assumption that reliability and credibility are as natural to men as mendacity and vindictiveness are to women. In other words, feminists just made it all up, because otherwise we’d have to question a really big story whose nickname is patriarchy. But the data confirms that people who come forward about being raped are, overall, telling the truth (and that rapists tend to lie, a lot). Many people have gotten on board with the data, many have not, and so behind every report on a sexual assault is a battle over the terms in which we tell, in what we believe about gender and violence."

An illustration by Arthur Rackham from the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm

 

She considers the only antidote to these age-old stories:

"Journalists are the story-breakers whose work often changes the belief systems that then drive legislative and institutional change. It’s powerful, honorable, profoundly necessary work when it’s done with passion and independence and guts."

Building on her previous history-informed insistence that "the grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect," she highlights our warped weighing of which stories matter. Exactly half a century after Hannah Arendt — another of our civilization’s great political minds — considered the power of outsiderdom and asserted that “we humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human,” Solnit writes:

"We tend to treat people on the fringe as ideologues and those in the center as neutral, as though the decision not to own a car is political and the decision to own one is not, as though to support a war is neutral and to oppose it is not. There is no apolitical, no sidelines, no neutral ground; we’re all engaged.

[…]

"I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status quo bias, a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit; to let people who have been proven to tell lies tell more lies that get reported without questioning; to move forward on cultural assumptions that are readily disproven; and to devalue nearly all outsiders, whether they’re discredited or mocked or just ignored."

Solnit turns to the largest-scale cultural assumption, erected by our civilization’s most unforgiving institutional, corporate, and political power structures — the selfsame assumption Carson had begun to dismantle half a century earlier — from which arises our largest-scale truth-telling responsibility:

"For journalists and for human beings generally, the elephant in the room has been there for a long time. It’s not even the elephant: the elephant in the room is the room itself, the biosphere in which all life currently known to exist in the universe is enclosed, and on which it all depends, the biosphere now devastated by climate change, with far more change to come. The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war — and that was something that might happen, not something that is happening. Climate change is here, and it is changing everything. It is bigger than anything else, because it is everything, for the imaginable future.

[…]

"Future generations are going to curse most of us for distracting ourselves with trivialities as the planet burned. Journalists are in a pivotal place when it comes to the possibilities and the responsibilities in this crisis. We, the makers and breakers of stories, are tremendously powerful.

"So please, break the story."

Complement this particular portion of Call Them By Their True Names with Iris Murdoch on why storytelling is essential for democracy, Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem, and Susan Sontag on storytelling and what it means to be a decent human being, then revisit Solnit on breaking silence, living with intelligent hope in dispiriting times, catastrophe as a catalyst for human goodness, the rewards of walking, how maps can oppress and liberate, and why we read. [See elsewhere in Brainpickings for discussion of all of these.]

 

 

The Deep Stories of Our Time — Arlie Hochschild

I don't usually post longer pieces on Reckonings, but this one is a great exception, and in the accessible form of a conversation, an interview by Krista Tippett, founder of the valuable online program "On Being," with well-known scholar, writer and teacher Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her many books include The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. If you would rather listen to their conversation rather than read it, you may do so here.

FROM KRISTA TIPPETT’S “ON BEING,” October 18, 2018

 

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD

The Deep Stories of Our Time

 

One of the voices many have been turning to in recent years is Arlie Hochschild. She helped create the field of the sociology of emotion — our stories as “felt” rather than merely factual. When she published her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, in the fall of 2016, it felt like she had chronicled the human dynamics that have now come to upend American culture. It was based on five years of friendship and research in Tea Party country at that movement’s height, far from her home in Berkeley, California. Her understanding of emotion in society and politics feels even more important at this juncture. So does the reflective, self-critical sensibility this experience gave Arlie Hochschild on her own liberal instincts. Caring, she says, is not the same as capitulating.

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD: It doesn’t mean that you’re capitulating — that’s the misunderstanding, I think, especially on the left. “Oh, if you listen to them, that means you’ve been taken over.” Not at all.

TIPPETT: It just means being emotionally intelligent.
HOCHSCHILD: That's right. We all need to be makers. If you want to make a social contribution and help build a public conversation about the big issues of the day, you have to really be good at emotion management. It’s a contribution to the larger whole, to be really good at that.
TIPPETT: You were the child of a Foreign Service officer, so it sounds like you grew up all over the world.
HOCHSCHILD: I lived in Israel, from age 12 to 14 — very pivotal experience. Then Wellington, New Zealand. Then my folks were in Ghana, and I spent a summer in Ghana, but by then I was in college. Then they were in Tunisia. I was very fortunate, really, to get to experience all of that.
TIPPETT: Was there a religious or spiritual background to your childhood in your family or in those places?
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, I would say. My parents were very religious Unitarians. For Unitarians, the message I took away is that it’s a very big world, and we have to learn to get to know and empathize with people in radically different cultures. I think by the time I was 16, I had that message, but I felt something missing. I got interested in the Quakers, who seemed to be much more “OK, gang, so what are we gonna do about it?” Unitarians were very talky, [laughs] big talkers — talk, talk, talk. Quakers, they were doers.
TIPPETT: I think how you’ve spoken about how living in that diplomatic world — you are known within sociology as the founder of the sociology of emotion. I just want to summarize — and tell me if I get this wrong, but it feels important. I want to really dive deep into that the backdrop, in terms of how we analyze and address political and social dynamics, especially in a time of discord like this, where the sides become more defined, and everybody seems incomprehensible to everybody else. You describe in the book: There are ways of thinking about how people are being manipulated or bought; there are ways of analyzing how people are being misled; and then there are ways of us describing how we’re just different and that there are distinct cultural values. You’ve said that for you, and especially as you’ve watched these last few years unfold in American and, now, global life, what is missing for you in all of this — while all of these ways of analyzing are useful — is an acknowledgment of the reality of emotion in politics.
HOCHSCHILD: Right, and empathy. The idea of emotion being basic and foundational to social and political life is not new. Max Weber talked of it and Emile Durkheim, so that’s not new. But I found that this important, foundational reality of our feelings — we didn’t have a language, a way of conceptualizing it that was useful. Certainly three decades ago, the idea was that either you were thinking, or you were emotional.
I thought, “There’s something wrong about that because when you’re emotional, you are seeing the world in a particular way, and you have thoughts about the way you see it; you are thinking. When you’re rational — take the stock exchange, where people are making these “rational” decisions about buy/sell/buy/sell stocks on the stock exchange. They are excited, they’re elated, they’re depressed — they’re emotional. These two are intertwined in ways we have not carefully understood. So, yes, it led me to become extremely interested in emotion, in managing emotions, evoking emotions and suppressing emotions, in daily life and in work. I got interested in that.

TIPPETT: I think that’s so important, yes, that we don’t have a language for it but that also, especially in the late 20th century, I think, we don’t know how to take emotions seriously. [laughs] I think this is such an important statement you make, that runs all the way through your work, that, also, we think the other side is being emotional, and we are not. And the really important realization is that this a piece of how we are all inhabiting the moment.
HOCHSCHILD: That's right. Exactly.
TIPPETT: And that it’s social. That’s one of your big points that this line between our private emotional lives and social realities — acknowledging that is just being reality-based. It’s kind of like being in the world as it is and not as we fantasize it should be.
HOCHSCHILD: Right. In my latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land, I got very interested in something I call the “deep story,” which is a way of thinking about emotion. I live and have long taught sociology at Berkeley, in California, which is a blue state, as you know, blue town.
TIPPETT: I think I’ve heard that, yeah. [laughs]
HOCHSCHILD: And in 2011, I realized that, already, the country was falling apart. There were increasing divides between Democrats, Republicans, left, right, and that I didn’t understand those on the right, and that I was in a bubble. So I determined to get out of my bubble and come to know people that were as far-right as Berkeley, California, was left, and to try and climb what I called an “empathy wall” to permit myself a great deal of curiosity about the experiences and viewpoints of people that I knew I would have differences with. It turned out to be an extraordinary experience. It took me five years of really getting to know people, asking where they were born; where their school was; what row they sat in, in school; what their favorite thing to do was; where their ancestors were buried, and in the course of going fishing with them, in the course of really getting to know them, I came up with this idea of a deep story as a way of getting to emotion.
TIPPETT: That wasn’t a phrase you’d used before, the “deep story”?
HOCHSCHILD: No.
TIPPETT: The "narrative as felt." Right; that’s such an important — how would you start to tell the deep story of our time as you inhabited it in that experience?
HOCHSCHILD: What I came to feel and realize is that both the left and the right have different deep stories. What is a deep story? A deep story is what you feel about a highly salient situation that’s very important to you. You take facts out of the deep story. You take moral precepts out of the deep story. It’s what feels true. I think we all have deep stories, whatever our politics, but that we’re not fully aware of them. They’re dreamlike and are told through metaphor.
The metaphor for the right-wing deep story that I describe in Strangers is that you’re waiting in line for the American dream that you feel you very much deserve. It’s like waiting in a pilgrimage, and the line isn’t moving. Your feet are tired. You feel you are properly deserving of this reward that’s ahead. And the idea is, you don’t begrudge anyone in this right deep story. You’re not a hateful person. But then you see — the second moment of the right-wing deep story — somebody cutting ahead of you. Why are they getting special treatment?

Then, in another moment, the president of the country, Barack Obama, who should be tending fairly to all waiters-in-line, seems to be waving to the line cutters. In fact, “Is he a line cutter?” — the idea is. How did his mother — she was a single mother, not a rich woman — afford a Harvard education, a Columbia education? Something fishy happened. That was the thought there.

In a final moment, someone from the coasts, someone highly educated, someone from that so-called elite, turns around, and they’re really close to the prize, or they have the prize. But they turn around and look at the others who are waiting in line and say, “Oh, you backward, Southern, ill-educated, racist, sexist, homophobic redneck.” That is the estranging thing, that insult. And then they felt like strangers in their own land. “Wait a minute.” They would say — one man told me, “ I live your metaphor.” Another one said, “You read my mind.” Another one said, “No, you have it wrong. The people in line are paying for the line cutters, and that’s why we’re enraged.” Another one said, “Oh, look, we leave that line. We secede. We’re getting another leader.” They gave it different endings. But, you can see, it’s my effort to get at feeling and how detached it can become from facts.

TIPPETT: Yes, and something I think a lot about, and this comes through in you talking about the deep story — as you said, facts and moral precepts arise out of the deep story...
HOCHSCHILD: No; actually, we take them out of it.
TIPPETT:We take them out of the story.
HOCHSCHILD: We remove them from it. It’s not about facts, and it’s not about moral attitudes, either. It’s a felt truth.
TIPPETT: Yes, embodied.
HOCHSCHILD: In fact, when I went back and forth between Berkeley and the people I came to know and really respect in the “other world” of the South, Southwest Louisiana, I came to realize that they were looking at different truths.
There are facts. I believe in the reality of facts. But the deep story — and again, we all have a deep story — it repels certain facts that don’t fit it, and it invites other facts that do.

TIPPETT: You, in Strangers in Their Own Land, take up what you call a “keyhole issue” to go deep into, what are the dynamics that collect around a specific subject and to really understand the dynamics. You talk about the “great paradox.” You point at this dynamic that in the part of the country that you were in, there is, first of all, an abundant and beautiful natural environment and great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.
I think that’s such an example of where people from the outside of all the dynamics that go into that would say, “It’s just obvious.”

HOCHSCHILD: But, you know, there’s a background. I think, partly, the people I came to know in Louisiana felt that the federal government was a bigger, badder version of local government. The truth is that in the state of Louisiana, the local government, that is, the state government, has not protected people from pollution.
TIPPETT: There's this passage in Strangers in Their Own Land, that — as an example of this, and maybe this is the person you’re talking about: Harold. “The state always seems to come down on the little guy,” he notes. “Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden'll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go.” That example hits home. I can see that.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes. The big companies are so rich and powerful that they basically have bought the legislature. In other words, the companies have outsourced the moral dirty work to the state. They say, “OK, let’s get a legislature that goes along with our development. Let’s talk jobs, jobs, jobs.” So the companies, with the money that the state gives them in this — I think it was 1.6 billion dollars that was, in the last five years, offered to the companies…
TIPPETT: In Louisiana?
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, to come in with that public money, which came from taxes — they then can make donations to the Audubon Society or for new football uniforms for LSU games. They’re looking good and setting up third grade classes in chemistry. Meanwhile, the state officials, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, is being very weak and giving out permits, as one of the people I interviewed said, “like candy.” The state looks terrible, but the company looks good. It’s kind of emotional, actual, manipulation, you could say, to get you to feel like the company is your friend and to feel like the state is your enemy.
TIPPETT: You also describe this interesting dynamic that, again, is nuanced. It’s not something that would be obvious to anybody — a lot of this is true. For example, you have this chapter called “The Rememberers,” and there’s this amazing sentence about a sociological understanding that memory, just in general, is an indirect expansion of power. And then you say, “So ironically, strangely, embarrassingly, the memory of Southern environmental glory fell, in part, to respectful clerks in federal offices and to northern environmentalists.” There’s so much complexity there.
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, doesn’t it break your heart? It does mine, because the people I came to know, know more about the environment — they know which fish are in what area , where you set the crab pots, what ducks you can shoot at what period of the year. They love their land. And yet they’re caught, the people working in the plants. I talked to a woman — I asked, “Do you talk to your neighbors about the environment?” She said, “Our neighbors work in the plants, and I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I don’t want them to feel accused.” As if the people working in the plants would take on the guilt.
TIPPETT: Right, or as though the guilt belongs to them.
HOCHSCHILD: Poor person, you know what I mean? It’s not their personal guilt. It’s a company policy, and it’s the absence of regulation. There are rules here; California has very strict rules. We enjoy a cleaner environment as a result. It’s at that level. The guilt is not a personal one. That, I felt, was very poignant and sweet of her to be mindful that an operator might feel accused. That’s how poignant this whole thing gets.
TIPPETT: It does. What you are shining a light on is the human complexity here. It does make things messy. But again, this is saying, “Let’s deal with reality, not wishful thinking.”
HOCHSCHILD: And let’s talk about reality and not wishful thinking by having a civil, respectful, public conversation, where nobody is bullying, conversationally, anybody else. You’re coming together to see if there can be common ground on the environment. There can be, I think. The people I came to know are very interested and very approving of renewables. In fact, there’s something called the Green Tea Movement that is a Tea Party that’s all for renewables. But we’re not even finding that common ground because we aren’t even respectfully reaching out to look for it. We’re in our bubbles still. In fact, I think that problem remains with us. Especially on the left, I think, there’s a rigid sort of inward-turning, I would say. I find it very sad. I think we have to reach out looking for potential common ground.
TIPPETT: We started out speaking about your work in sociology and your focus on the sociology of emotion and taking emotion seriously. It’s hard for me to imagine anybody could argue that emotion doesn’t, in fact, seriously matter in politics now. Then there’s an obvious extension of that here, which is that we need emotional intelligence, right? That’s what mediation too. We need to say, this is as important as all of our other forms of intelligence that we wield very confidently and boldly.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes, absolutely. You could say that much of my work — I’ve done nine books now — has been an effort, one way or another, to honor, and try and get the world to honor, the importance of emotional intelligence, especially as used by service workers: caregivers, child care workers, elder care workers — anybody in the service industry is using emotional intelligence. It matters enormously that we all learn to do it well and don’t sneer at it but in fact see that, really, the crust of society is very thin. It needs water and sun and nurture so that it’s not as brittle as it has now become in America.
TIPPETT: Our life together needs caregiving. [laughs] I feel that we actually possess more intelligence about how to be in relationship where difference is present and where true misunderstanding is present. We have a lot of intelligence about that in our families.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes, we do. When I set out on this odyssey, I got two kinds of responses, which were very interesting. One was, “Oh, I couldn’t do that; I’d be so mad. Those people are wrong.” And the other one was “Oh, you’re going where? You’re going to the center of right wing…? Oh.” They wouldn’t say it, but the kind of facial expression — “Maybe you’re pretty ‘right’ yourself.” In other words, you’re going to an enclave in which you will be embraced as “similar.”
What was missing from those two responses was the idea that you can be exactly who you are and take your alarm system off, climb an empathy wall, and get to know people on the other side of it. Then I got, “Oh, you must be especially empathic.” No. Not at all. In fact, I think we’re all actually extremely good at it. The only thing is, we don’t apply that skill, that knowledge, to getting to know the “other,” whoever we define as other. That’s the only thing different I did.

TIPPETT:I looked at and read a number of interviews you gave and have given across the years, and I noticed that a great number of especially, let’s say, the “progressive” interviewers, they remark with great astonishment on your kindness, [laughs] kind of like, “How could you be so kind?” In a way, it models the rut we’re in.
HOCHSCHILD: Right, or “too kind” — foolish. “It’s a fool’s mission. What are you doing?”
TIPPETT: Somebody said after Charlottesville, “Now that we’ve seen that...”
HOCHSCHILD: “How can you talk to these people?”
TIPPETT:To me, another great paradox of engaging difference, which you describe — you said, it’s not about going in and saying, “Change my mind. I want to be a Republican.” Or “I want to join the Tea Party.” Or expecting them, because they engage with you, to say, “I want to be at Berkeley.” [laughs] So you didn’t change your politics, but what you said — and I think this is true, and I know you’ve seen this as a sociologist, across all kinds of meaningful encounter with a difference — you said, “It enlarged me as a human being.”
HOCHSCHILD: It did, to be able to imagine myself into a different heart. One man told me, “Look, we have similar minds, and we have similar hearts, but we have different souls.” I thought that was so interesting. So I said to him, “Thank you for saying that. Would you be a co-sociologist with me and figure out how the souls are different?” He looked at me — [laughs] scratched his head, “Well, I’m not sure I know what you mean, but sure.”
This empathy thing — another wonderful encounter was with a gospel singer who was sitting across the table at a meeting of Republican women of Southwest Louisiana. She said, “Oh, I love Rush Limbaugh” I first thought, “Oh, my goodness.” Then I thought, “Wonderful. Here’s a chance for me to get larger here.” So I said to her, “Could we meet sometime this week for some sweet teas, and you can explain why you love Rush Limbaugh?” She said, “Yeah, sure.”

The next day we were meeting for sweet teas, and she explains, “I love Rush Limbaugh because he hates feminazis.” I thought, “Oh, my goodness.” So I ask her, “Well, what is a feminazi?” “Well, it’s a feminist who doesn’t like children, wants men to cook...” She goes on to “environmental wackos, these people that want to regulate us to death.”

After I’m asking her, she stops me and says, “You’ve told me that you come from ‘the other side.’ Is it hard for you to listen to me?” I told her, “Actually, it’s not hard at all. I have my alarm system off, and I’m learning about you, and you are doing me such a big favor to share your thoughts. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.” Then she says, “Take your alarm system off? I do that too. I do it with my kids. I do it with my parishioners.” I thought, OK, let’s start with that, a little common ground.

TIPPETT: We, in fact, do that all the time. It’s a habit we have. We do it at work, because you can’t just blurt out how you really feel about what someone said at every moment.
HOCHSCHILD: No, there are rules about that, and there should be. It’s kind of the ground rules of social life that we can get, really, better at it than we are. So that’s a great invitation. It doesn’t mean that you’re capitulating. That’s the misunderstanding, especially on the left. “Oh, if you listen to them, that means you’ve been taken over.” Not at all.
TIPPETT: It just means being emotionally intelligent.
HOCHSCHILD:You've developed a way of talking. Actually, that is a fundamental floor of social interaction when you barrel on in there and ignore the competence and identity…
TIPPETT: And just the dignity of people.
HOCHSCHILD:…of the person you’re talking to. It’s just counterproductive.
TIPPETT: It is counterproductive, and the way people talk down to any point that might be made, I sometimes want to say, “Do you want to be right in every moment, or do you want to be part of the larger healing?”
HOCHSCHILD: That's right. We all need to be makers. If you want to make a social contribution and help build a public conversation about the big issues of the day. In order to do that, you have to really be good at emotion management. It’s a contribution to the larger whole to be really good at that.
TIPPETT: One of the poignant things throughout Strangers in Their Own Land and this time you’ve spent in Louisiana is — it’s the Bible Belt. One of the things you found, which I think is an interesting critique for the side that considers itself to be enlightened, is that a lot of the things that are coming at people as “what needs to be done” in fact is not about repairing, not about how do we get whole. You said, the question of how could repairs be made, a lot of people find that their Bibles are more useful, in that sense, than the government.
HOCHSCHILD: So that’s a question: OK, what has the government done for you? Maybe they have a point. Maybe it hasn’t lived up to its promise, or maybe it’s getting blamed for things it didn’t do. Let’s figure that out. Let’s have a respectful public conversation about just that: Is the government, in fact, letting people down? Or are they expecting too much of it? What’s the record? Let’s talk about that, the specifics.
TIPPETT:There’s a paragraph in your book — or maybe this was in another interview you gave — you said, even among the most ardent and extreme people you met over five years of research, you found specific issues on which there was potential for coalition: safeguarding children on the internet; reducing prison populations for nonviolent offenders; protecting against commercialization of the human genome; pushing for good jobs; rebuilding our rail system, roads, and bridges; and our social infrastructure. It’s so interesting to think about what if we started by saying what we could start talking about tomorrow.
HOCHSCHILD: Right. There are low-hanging fruit. That’s right. And do it in the spirit we’ve been talking about.
TIPPETT: In Strangers in Their Own Land, near the end you say you write a letter to a friend on the liberal left. I should say, you imagine, “If I were to write to my friends in Louisiana on the right, or if I were to write to a liberal friend.” There was a sentence in your letter to your friend on the liberal left. Again, it’s humanizing, and it’s provocative in a human way: “Consider the possibility that in their situation, you might end up closer to their perspective.”
HOCHSCHILD: That’s it. [laughs] I think that’s true — that we are products of our own experience. What if you grew up in a family — so many said, “Oh, we were poor, but we didn’t know it. Had a great childhood, but we were poor. Didn’t know it.” OK, what if that had been your experience? What if your dad’s job and how much he earned was the central fact of your life? What if it was a blue-collar job, but you felt put down for doing that blue-collar job?
I think that there’s something actually missing in the entire vocabulary we have for talking about social class, because I didn’t go just to another region or to people with different political views. I went to a different social class. And there is a lot of sneering on the left at the blue-collar class. They’re furious at it. “Look, we’re the daily workers. We are climbing the telephone pole to repair your telephone wire. We’re repaving your roads. Who are you to put that down?” There’s a lot of humble pie to eat here. I think it’s a problem I didn’t know when I set out that I would come back and be as critical of the little cocoon I’ve long been in, here, as I am.

It’s not only a contempt that really bothers me now whenever I hear it or see it, and that is buried to some degree, but there’s a kind of reluctance to reach out. It’s as if, on the left, there’s a lot of good political will, but it’s gotten curled up onto itself and become a kind of a self-monitoring program, “Oh, you said this wrong or that wrong,” instead of reaching out to build coalitions — because we’re a big country. Not everyone’s like us; not everyone’s like them. What we need are sturdy coalitions. And I think labor unions — when the labor movement was much larger, there was a way that people of different colors and classes got together. When you had a compulsory draft, people of different colors and classes got together in a natural way.

TIPPETT: It was an experience.
HOCHSCHILD: Public schools have done this. But we’re down on those crossover, connective institutions. I think we need to build another one. I would like to see a civil service, one year required of everyone.
TIPPETT: Of everyone.
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, of everyone, and you go to a different region and get to know people — first of all, get to know how to treat people respectfully and listen actively and be immediate. Everybody should learn those skills. And then go across to see if we can rebuild that connective tissue.
TIPPETT: I'm sure people have said to you, and I get into this conversation myself, this critique that there are all kinds of groups of people, including people of color, who have long felt like strangers in their own land in this country.
HOCHSCHILD: Oh, definitely; especially now.
TIPPETT: Yes, and especially now, yet again. And it’s the critique that white people wake up to this phenomenon when it’s about other white people. How do you work with that in your mind?
HOCHSCHILD: I say it’s true. I think it’s an important insight. Yes, I think it’s an excellent point. For example, the opiate addiction problem has been — now they’re called “diseases of despair,” which is kind of a compassionate way —
TIPPETT: And the crack epidemic was not, yeah.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes, whereas the crack epidemic in the inner cities, which hit blacks, wasn’t this benignly...
TIPPETT: It was criminalized.
HOCHSCHILD: That's right, and worse. It’s a point that should be broadly received.
TIPPETT: I want to draw to a close. This has been just such a big, wonderful conversation. I’m curious; you say somewhere that “the English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world and of having that interest welcomed.” You said, “Some of its own kind, mutual, is created.”
I just found that intriguing because I think so much about the power of words. Are there words you’re using now? Perhaps that gets at symbols and how important that is for us in constructing our world.
HOCHSCHILD: Well, I use the word “empathy.” It’s something we’re all capable of, and we, in a way, carry around empathy maps of who we should and shouldn’t feel empathic with. And we need to enlarge those maps and shift them. Maybe there are different kinds of empathy. One is, you could call it pragmatic empathy, to see if “OK, let’s see if we can heal this divide.” You’ve got a purpose to it. Then some is just there, and it doesn’t have that purpose. So that’s a very special word. Having it returned is, you’re seeing the humanity of the person you’ve reached out to — like Madonna Massey, this gospel singer, did to me: “Oh, I do that too,” she says.
TIPPETT: Right, when you talked to her about the empathy wall, and she said, “I have one of those too.”
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, and she said, “Oh, you’re my first Democratic friend.” [laughs] So we laughed, we could laugh; it was a new pool of laughter possible that started with an absolute acknowledgement of our differences.
TIPPETT: I think that’s a good metric: Have you created a new pool of laughter possible. That’s good. [laughs]

I want to ask you as we close, and perhaps thinking about how you continue to live with this, not just what you learned as a scholar, but what you learned as a human being — right now, as you look around in the world and as you move through this experience that has changed you, what makes you despair, and what is giving you hope?

HOCHSCHILD: Well, I’m a positive person, I would say [laughs] and tend to see the glass half-full. I think we’re at a moment of challenge as a culture, but we’ve been in those moments before. I think it’s time for us to look at leaders who have been real models of repair. Let’s look at Nelson Mandela, for example. His country was going to go to war with itself. It was bitter. If you look around the world, it’s hard to find a place pre-Mandela that was more bitterly divided, black and white. And he did it differently. He did it like Gandhi. He was a unifier. He was a guy who was very good at talking across these hardened lines. We have a lot to learn from Nelson Mandela.
TIPPETT: Studying that kind of history and that kind of leadership.
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, Martin Luther King — these were people who were not off in their corners, just separating themselves off, but were good at saying, “Look, there are better angels here. Let’s access them and create public conversation about a problem, see where we can go with it.” Let’s think of those positive leaders and look to them and learn from them because they were real experts in empathy and pragmatism.
TIPPETT: I really like keeping that “and” — empathy and pragmatism go together. This is a weird connection to make, but I think it’s in the afterword of your book that you mention Café Gratitude in Berkeley, which I didn’t realize had closed until I read that because it was kind of an institution there. It was a raw vegan place, and you were imagining, with these new sets of eyes you have, you were thinking about some of your Christian friends in Louisiana. You were thinking, maybe they would hear about Café Gratitude and think, “Oh, it’s a hippie place.” But maybe they would see that there are some real echoes there with their Christian way of —
HOCHSCHILD: A touch of church.
TIPPETT: Yeah, a touch of church. I was sad that it had closed, and I looked online, and I found this article in, I think, the Berkeley student newspaper. It was kind of an obituary for Café Gratitude, and the student was saying that they loved the daily question that they used to ask there. The examples they gave were: “What are you grateful for?” or “Who can you forgive?” Those are actually questions, for example, that Nelson Mandela asked, very surprisingly, given what he’d been through.
HOCHSCHILD:  Yes, that’s right. Imagine. We have a lot to learn. Don’t know if we can live up to his model, but it’s worth a good try.
 

 

On Stories, with Norman Fischer

Stories are at the heart of all spiritual traditions. Think, for example, of the parables of Jesus, the Hasidic tales of Judaism so wonderfully gathered by Martin Buber, the Sufi stories of Mullah Nasrudin, the koans of Zen Buddhism. Here Norman Fischer reflects upon the significance of koans or exemplary stories in Zen practice. In doing so, he reveals two kinds of story, or two ways of being with stories, that have helped me greatly in my own spiritual practice. Zoketsu Norman Fischer is an American poet, writer, and Soto Zen priest, teaching and practicing in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki.

 

on stories

by Norman Fischer | December 22, 2014

I’ve been thinking about stories in the light of koans, zen stories. Come to think of it, in zen the main literature is stories, certain kinds of stories. Koan stories are supposed to be exemplary stories—“koan” means public case—like a court case that stands as a precedent for a type of situation that could come up again and again in life. Koan stories are stories about classical Chinese masters and disciples, but also about us, about deep issues in our own living. When you study a koan you make it your own, see it personally - and yet not personally. That is, you have to take it personally and seriously - not see it as abstract or theoretical - and yet the whole point is that you see past yourself and your concerns to deeper realms of existence without, at the same time, ignoring your story, your own human problems that are the occasion for the deeper point to arise. This seems to be the whole trick of zen practice - to stay with your actual experience, your own personal story, and yet to see through it at the same time to something more.

So koans are little stories about the ancients. But Dogen extends the idea of koan when he speaks of genjokoan, which means something like, “the koan that manifests in this moment.”  I see this two ways. One way is that every moment is a complete story, a complete koan. Stories always revolve around conflict, problems, as do koans. But also stories have resolution - peace - as do koan stories. “And then he was enlightened.” You might see this as relative and absolute: relative is our life our story our problem; absolute is resolution, peace, depth of understanding. So Dogen is saying that every moment is this kind of problem and resolution, in the same moment. That life, that time itself, is the koan arising every moment. This is Dogen’s profound teaching about time. This is how he comes to say that practice and enlightenment are the same thing, that Buddha’s enlightenment under the bodhi tree and our sitting in zazen are the same moment, the same event. Problem/Resolution moment after moment on each moment.

The second sense in which I take Dogen’s idea of genjokoan is as a way of working with your own story arising in your life. There’s always something going on in your life, some story, some conflict, some urge toward resolution. Usually we see such stories, if we see them at all, as being entirely on the relative level - as being about me and my happiness or unhappiness, my desire and its fulfillment, my problem and its resolution. But suppose lurking underneath this relative story were the absolute story - the deep, impossible to understand, life and death spiritual issue that the story is suggesting, if only we could see it. Then practicing genjokoan would be trying to reframe our life’s issues, our stories, in this way. This makes life much more interesting!

The other day I was talking to Roger Walsh, who’s a psychologist and a dharma teacher. He had different language for this distinction. He said some life questions are knowledge questions. These questions have answers, you can figure them out. But some questions are what Roger called wisdom questions. These questions you can’t figure out. You have to remain with them for a long time, and even then you don’t exactly get an answer. But something shifts, and then you are in another place, with a new question.

 

Reconnecting with the Unconscious

Following a practice I began last week, I am including here in Reckonings the letters I send weekly to participants in our group exploring the tradition of Celtic spirituality.

Here is today's letter:

Dear friends,

This coming Tuesday we'll be discussing our responses to Chapter 7, "Reconnecting with the Unconscious," of John Philip Newell's book The Rebirthing of God. As John Philip writes on the first page of this chapter, "Whether as individuals or collectively as nations and religious traditions, new beginnings will be born among us when we open to the well of what we do not yet know or what we have forgotten deep within."

 

I offer these notes to you now, a little earlier than usual, because this chapter (befitting its subject) is more demanding than most, more deserving of our conscious attention, imagination, and rereading.

 

Shortly after the chapter's beginning, Newell invokes the words of a very early—one might say virtually original—exponent of the Celtic tradition, and long a favorite of mine, Brigid of Kildare, an abbess and tutor to Saint Brendan, both of whom I first came to know thirty years ago in Frederick Buechner's lovely novel Brendan. 

 

As usual in these chapters, John Philip chooses a companion as guide. In this instance, he could not have chosen better: the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung. In writing of Jung, John Philip says, "He devoted his life to accessing the psyche, a word .... meaning 'breath' or 'soul.' Jung believed that wholeness was to be found by coming back into relationship with the unconscious depths of the soul. We long for what is beneath the surface... We long for what we do not yet know to emerge from hidden and unawakened depths within us into the light of day, into the realm of full consciousness. The way to access these depths is through the world of dreams, intuition, and imagination." In my training as a clinical psychologist I had the great good fortune of finding as my first therapist a Jungian analyst.*

 

John Philip reminds us that at the heart of our Bible, whether Torah or New Testament, is not doctrine but story. He concludes this remarkable chapter with a discussion of Pentecost, and with arguably the most crucial of questions: "As Peter said on the day of Pentecost, when Christianity was born, 'Your young shall see visions and your old shall dream dreams (Acts 2:17).' It is a rebirth we are seeking, not a resuscitation. It is a fresh springing forth from the unknown depths of the human soul. New vision, new dreams, a new Pentecost, a rebirthing of Christ in us. Shall we open to it?"

 

Warmly, as ever,

 

John**

 

 

* I know of no other therapeutic method whose "graduates" continue to regard themselves as fellows of one another. At least when I last checked, there were dozens of "Analytical Psychology Clubs" meeting for discussion throughout many major cities of the U.S. and Europe.

 

** We have only one more chapter of The Rebirthing of God to read next week. So we face a choice. We can conclude our group after next week, or we can choose another book as deeply reflective upon the Celtic tradition. If we choose the latter, I would suggest the comparably moving and informed Anam Cara [Soul Friend in Gaelic], by the Irish poet and scholar John O'Donohue.

 

Violence and nonviolence

As readers may have noticed, I am including in Reckonings some remarks relating to a group here at The Redwoods exploring the tradition of Celtic spirituality. Here is my most current letter to participants:

 

Our meeting this coming Tuesday presents an intriguing challenge. In my view, in this singular chapter of John Philip Newell's The Rebirthing of God (Chapter 6: "Reconnecting With Nonviolence"), I find him off his feed. That is, he pays very little real attention to his subject. I have nary a passage worth quoting to you.

If I am even partially right, we nonetheless have at least one fine reason to spend a good hour together on Tuesday afternoon:

Whether or not John Philip makes a case for reconnecting with nonviolence as an important domain of spiritual development or rebirthing, do you do so?

What role has nonviolence played in your own spiritual development? Have you been committed to nonviolence in your life? If so, what role has that commitment played in strengthening your spiritual development? If not, or if less than consistently, when and why has that been so?

It is probably true that we are all generally committed to peace and averse to war: in our reconciliation of the dimensions of ourselves, in our relations with those with whom we have lived and loved, in our relations with our friends and with those we dislike, and in the attitudes with which we have responded to our nation's (and other nations') pursuit of war.

I also would bet a lot more than a plugged nickel that there is not a single one of us who has observed that commitment and that aversion without exception or qualification. We could even ask, did Jesus? See Matthew 21:12–17, Mark 11:15–19, Luke 19:45–48, and John 2:13–16. (Jesus and the moneychangers.)

What is violence, anyway? When is it justified, if at all? And if nonviolence is worthier, why some of the time but not all of the time? In self-defense and defense of those we love? To avoid a greater evil than would be served by nonviolence? For the sake of drama?

On Tuesday, come with examples you have known in heart, mind and action? If John Philip was, as I suggest, off his feed in this chapter, as he so seldom is, let's give him some help.

As ever, I look forward to our hour together.

Om mani padme hum

Perhaps this week in our group studying Celtic spirituality we will have an opportunity to chant together. We shall have read Chapter 5 of John Philip Newell's book, The Rebirthing of God. That chapter is devoted to reconnecting with spiritual practice, so practicing would not seem out of place. As he commonly does, John Philip in this chapter invokes a particular person whose work elucidates the themes he is addressing. In this event, that person is the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Newell writes, "Merton's first emphasis is that which is deepest in us, is like 'pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.' In meditation, he says, we penetrate the innermost ground of our life. This allows us to find our true meaning not from the outside, he says, but from within."

"Merton," Newell adds, "says we may not want to be seen as beginners in spiritual practice. 'But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!' The first people to acknowledge this are usually those who are most committed to the spiritual disciplines of silence, meditation, and mindfulness."

Chanting is a practice common to all spiritual traditions I know, and I could have chosen as illustration here a chant from the Taizé community in France, or part of a psalm from the Torah. Instead, I have chosen a short line translated from the original Sanscrit, a Buddhist text of just sixteen syllables. I include it below, along with a very short essay on its meaning written by the Dalai Lama.

Om mani padme hum

Om

 

The first word Om is a sacred syllable. The word Mani means "jewel" or "bead." Padme is the lotus flower (the Buddhist sacred flower), and Hum represents the spirit of enlightenment.

"The jewel is in the lotus." or "Praise to the jewel in the lotus."

 

On the meaning of OM MANI PADME HUM:

by His Holiness The Dalai Lama

It is very good to recite the mantra OM MANI PADME HUM, but while you are doing it, you should be thinking of its meaning, for the meaning of the six syllables is great and vast. The first, OM, is composed of three pure letters, A, U, and M. These symbolize the practitioner's impure body, speech, and mind; they also symbolize the pure exalted body, speech and mind of a Buddha.

All Buddhas are beings who were like ourselves and then following the path became enlightened…The development of pure body, speech, and mind comes from gradually leaving the impure states and their being transformed into the pure.

How is this done? The path is indicated by the next four syllables. MANI, meaning jewel, symbolizes the method—the altruistic intention to become enlightened, through compassion and love. Just as a jewel is capable of removing poverty, so the altruistic mind of enlightenment is capable of removing the difficulties of cyclic existence and of solitary peace. Similarly, just as a jewel fulfills the wishes of sentient beings, so the altruistic intention to become enlightened fulfills the wishes of sentient beings.

The two syllables, PADME, meaning lotus, symbolize wisdom. Just as a lotus grows forth from mud but is not sullied by the faults of mud, so wisdom is capable of putting you in a situation of non-contradiction whereas there would be contradiction if you did not have wisdom. There is wisdom realizing impermanence, wisdom realizing that persons are empty of self-sufficient or substantial existence, wisdom that realizes the emptiness of duality, and wisdom that realizes the emptiness of inherent existence. Though there are many different types of wisdom, the main [one] is the wisdom realizing emptiness.

Purity must be achieved by an indivisible unity of method and wisdom, symbolized by the final syllable, HUM, which indicates indivisibility. According to the sutra system, this indivisibility of method and wisdom refers to one consciousness in which there is both wisdom affected by method and method affected by wisdom. In the mantra, it refers to one consciousness in which there is both wisdom and method as one undifferentiable entity. HUM is the seed syllable—the immovable, the unfluctuating, that which cannot be disturbed by anything.

Thus the six syllables, OM MANI PADME HUM, mean that in your practice, through indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech and mind into the pure body, speech, and mind of a Buddha. It is said that you should not seek Buddhahood outside of yourself; the substances for the achievement of Buddhahood are within. All beings naturally have the Buddha nature in their own continuum. We have within us the seed of purity, the essence to be transformed and fully developed into Buddhahood.

 

 

Gifts From Beyond

I first knew Edward Espe Brown as the author of The Tassajara Bread Book, from which I learned to bake bread many years ago in a small village in western Massachusetts during the 1980s. Now that I live in his home territory of northern California, I delight in the fact that he is still writing about food, and about bread baking. The picture that accompanies this entry in Reckonings accompanies his article, "Gifts From Beyond," published in the Summer 2018 issue of Parabola Magazine. 

The article begins, "Many years ago, in the early '80s, when Thich Nhat Hanh was giving a talk prior to departing from the San Francisco Zen Center where I was living, he said he had a goodbye present for us. We could, he said, open and use it anytime, and if we did not find it useful, we could simply set it aside. Then he proceeded to explain that, 'As you inhale, let your heart fill with compassion, and as you exhale, pour the compassion over your head...' It was a gift I used daily, repeatedly, for two or three years. Rough edges softened. Tension melted. I had been given, I was giving to myself, a renewed body, which felt more and more like home, warm and hospitable. Gifts like this take practice, the practice of giving your attention, your warm-heartedness, to your activity."

........

"What is it we really want? What more could we ask for, than the capacity, the heart's capacity, to sense what is truly precious, to acknowledge and receive the gifts born of our care and attention, to nourish and be nourished? Hearts awaken, and we feast."

I remember those days as I remember yesterday. Yet this is a lesson in remembering and forgetting. I have not baked a single loaf of bread since those days. So now comes the graceful invitation of Edward Espe Brown to say, To remember is enough. The gift is within.

"To be at home in this world, to be at home in this body and mind, receiving the gifts from Beyond, and passing them on." That is the essence.