tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55937354987835075662024-02-07T20:26:18.848-05:00Little Teaboys EverywhereNotes from a Midlife CrisisScott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-37033147101053483012010-09-13T21:28:00.003-04:002010-11-07T21:24:51.327-05:00Words I Do and Do Not Like<div class="MsoNormal">Inspired by my friend and fellow <a href="http://www.elephantjournal.com/">Elephant Journal</a> contributor Joslyn Hamilton, here are some of my most, and least, favorite words. (You should read <a href="http://outsideeye.onsugar.com/">Joslyn’s blog</a>; she’s younger and hipper and funnier than I am.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><u>Words I Like<o:p></o:p></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Sanguine </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Cheerfully optimistic<i>. I am not sanguine about the Democrats’ chances in the mid-term elections.</i></span> Jane Austen uses this word a lot. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Cacao</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> [<span style="color: #333333;">k<i>uh</i></span><span style="color: #333333;">-</span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><b>kah</b></span><span style="color: #333333;">-oh] It’s just fun to say. Say it out loud: “Seventy percent cacao.” You’ll feel better.</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Sanctimonious </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">This is what people usually mean when they say “pious.” Not only is it more suited for the purpose–”pious” can simply mean “devout”–it also sounds a lot worse.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Imposed upon</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> This is another Jane Austen favorite, a happy alternative to “deceived” that has the advantage of laying the blame squarely on the deceiver. <i>You have been most grievously <a href="http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/08/straightening-the-dogs-tail/">imposed upon</a>.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Niggardly</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> I am this word’s pity-friend. It doesn’t have anything to do with race, though the ill-educated and excessively PC <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%22niggardly%22">persist in thinking it does</a>. It means stingy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Cataract</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> So much more satisfying than “waterfall.” <i>Behold the awesome power of the cataract!<o:p></o:p></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Piquant </b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> I use this as a euphemism for <a href="http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/08/why-we-need-rude-comments/">bitchy or rude</a>. (Understatement makes you sound unflappable.) I pronounce it in English, with the accent on the first syllable. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Candid</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Less threatening than “frank” or “blunt.” <i>May I be candid with you?</i></span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Fraught </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Past tense of the verb “freight”–same as “freighted,” but oh, so much more satisfying. <i>The gesture seemed fraught with meaning.</i></span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Bounder</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Meaning an ill-bred, unscrupulous man, this word is archaic and British enough that I have never yet had occasion to use it. But I’m always on the lookout for an opportunity. Josiah Bounderby, the “man perfectly devoid of sentiment” from Dickens’ <i>Hard Times</i></span>, is a good example.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Snarky<u> </u></b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Sounding a lot like what it means, this word is like Doritos for your vocabulary–self-indulgent, but tasty.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Schadenfreude </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Pleasure taken in the misfortunes of others. <i>Every time President Bush screwed up, the liberal blogosphere lit up with <a href="http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/08/straightening-the-dogs-tail/">Schadenfreude</a>.</i></span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Obviate </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Often used incorrectly to mean “make obvious,” this word actually means to prevent a problem or remove the need for something. When you use correctly a word that other people use incorrectly, it makes you feel smart.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Egregious </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">One of my all-time favorite words.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Foofaraw </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">I love this word. Whenever I use it, I feel like I have a big walrus mustache and a pocketwatch. Which I like, for some reason.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Imbroglio </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">A complicated, tangled, and usually embarrassing situation. My life is too dull to warrant its use as often as I’d like.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Debacle </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">It just sounds like one; even if you didn’t know what it meant, you would.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Quotidian </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Meaning “everyday,” this word isn’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Monumental </b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Conveys hugeness as few other words do. <i>The Deepwater Horizon disaster was a monumental cock-up for BP.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Gravitas </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Having the unusual property of lending the very quality it stands for to any sentence in which it is used, this word enables you to say “seriousness” without sounding like you’re in grade school. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><u>Words I Don’t Like<o:p></o:p></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Policy </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Inoffensive in itself, this word has been used so often to obviate the need for independent thought or initiative that I cannot bear to hear or use it. <i>I wish I could help you, but that’s just not our policy.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Flexible </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">There is not anything actually wrong with this word, either–it has simply been tainted by employers who use it to mean “roll over and play dead.” When people want you to take on more work without an increase in pay, or work without a contract, they tell you to “be flexible.” I now use “limber” or “supple” in its place.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Proactive </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">I don’t know why; I just hate it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>As of yet </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">You never, ever have to say this. You can <i>always</i></span> just say “yet.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>At this time </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Why not just say “now”? (See “As of yet” above.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Presently (used to mean “at present”) </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">People say this to mean “now”. <i>We are presently at work on the problem.</i></span> This is wrong, wrong, wrong. It means “soon.” <i>Miss Dashwood will be down presently.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> What people usually mean when they say this is “at present”—but of course, why even say that? (See “At this time” above.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Itch (as a transitive verb) </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">If you have an itch, you scratch it; you do not “itch” it. Hearing that makes my skin crawl. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Epic (as an adjective) </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">You know.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Fail (as a noun) </b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> See “Epic” above.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Meme</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> I don’t really hate this word–it just reminds me of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHphaS4aPX0">Beaker from the Muppet Show.</a><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-63732070505023119842010-07-31T17:32:00.003-04:002011-01-18T12:54:06.430-05:00The Creeping Death and the Hidden Life<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 14.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">If you've read my post <a href="http://littleteaboyseverywhere.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html">Christmas 2009</a>, you are already familiar with this passage from Betty Smith’s novel, <i>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:</i></div><blockquote><i>There was a cruel custom in the neighborhood…about the trees still unsold when midnight of Christmas Eve approached. There was a saying that if you waited until then, you wouldn’t have to buy a tree; that “they’d chuck ‘em at you.” This was literally true. </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>…The kids gathered where there were unsold trees. The man threw each tree in turn, starting with the biggest. Kids volunteered to stand up against the throwing. If a boy didn’t fall down under the impact, the tree was his. If he fell, he forfeited his chance at winning a tree… </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>On the Christmas Eve when Francie was ten and Neely nine, mama consented to let them go down and have their first try for a tree. Francie had picked out her tree earlier in the day…(and) to her joy it was still there at midnight. It was the biggest tree in the neighborhood and its price was so high that no one…could afford to buy it… </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>The man took this tree out first…”Anybody…wanna take a chanct on it?” </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>Francie stepped forward. “Me, Mister.”… </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>“Aw g’wan. You’re too little,” the tree man objected. </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>“Me and my brother—we’re not too little together.” </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>She pulled Neely forward. The man looked at them—a thin girl of ten with starveling hollows in her cheeks but with the chin still baby-round… </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>“These here kids is got nerve. Stand back, the rest of yous. These kids is goin’ to have a show at this tree.”…The man flexed his great arms to throw the great tree. He noticed how tiny the children looked…(and)…went through a kind of Gethsemane. </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>“Oh, Jesus Christ,” his soul agonized, “why don’t I just give ‘em the tree, say Merry Christmas and let ‘em go. What’s the tree to me? I can’t sell it no more this year and it won’t keep till next year…But then…if I did that…next year nobody a-tall would buy a tree off of me. They’d all wait to get ‘em handed to ‘em on a silver plate. I ain’t a big enough man to give this tree away for nothin’…I gotta think of myself and my own kids…Them two kids is gotta live is this world. They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and take punishment. And by Jesus, it ain’t give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned world.” As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, “It’s a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!”</i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">The writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, who is identified as "The Teacher," had a surprisingly similar take on life: </div><blockquote><i>Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless. What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless.</i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">How did an educated member of the elite ruling class of third or fourth century B.C. Israel, and a semi-literate Christmas tree salesman from turn-of-the-last-century Brooklyn reach such similar conclusions about life? What could they have possibly had in common that gave them such compatible worldviews? While at first glance, the existential despair of the Teacher and the kitchen-table anxiety of the tree salesman seem worlds apart, I submit that the former’s <i>Angst </i>and the latter’s tight-fistedness have a common root. I think that each, in his own way, lacked the courage that makes generosity possible. I think it is courage, born of faith, and not an abundance of resources, that makes a person “big enough” to help when need arises.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">The tree salesman wasn’t a “big enough man” to give away a tree to two underfed children. His fears of privation and lack were immediate and concrete. But judging by how worked up the writer of Ecclesiastes was about leaving his wealth to his own children, it doesn’t seem like he was overflowing with liberality either, though he was certainly “big enough” to be open-handed. Evidently, being a “have”--as opposed to a “have-not”—is not enough to stimulate generosity. (Any restaurant server will tell you that the wealthy are the worst tippers.) <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">While the tree salesman was unmanned by the struggle to provide for his family, the Teacher quailed in the face of his own inability to make himself feel fulfilled. Both had tried to wrest happiness and security from life, failed, and withdrawn to avoid further pain.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">So what stimulates the development of courage? I had an insight into that, I think, on a recent visit to my Dad. My father moved, several years ago, into the same planned community near Syracuse that my brother and his family live in. Though he has made numerous social overtures to his neighbors, they have never reciprocated. He told me during my latest visit that he has no connection to any of his neighbors—that he doesn’t, in fact, consider himself to have “neighbors” at all, but simply “people who live nearby.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">In the neighborhood I grew up in, my Dad’s liberality was generally known—the way he would tip, or stand people drinks, or mow every lawn, snowblow every driveway and fix every kid’s bicycle in the neighborhood. Having grown up on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia during the Depression, my Dad learned early the importance of good neighbors.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">“Out in the country,” he explained, “people needed their neighbors; you had to have good neighbors to survive.” In his current setting, everybody thinks themselves self-sufficient enough not to need neighbors. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">It must have taken courage for my great-grandparents to build that house in the holler in which my Dad grew up, setting up in that rugged country knowing they would eventually depend on their neighbors for survival. It must have taken courage to come to the aid of neighbors in need when one’s own resources were always precarious. Each time you primed the pump of neighborliness, it must have been an act of faith. Having grown up making those acts, my father grew into a generous person.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">Let me clarify the word “faith” as I’m using it. My Dad never went to church with us when I was a kid. Taken by one of his aunts to a Pentecostal mountain snake-handling church, he was sufficiently traumatized that he put off baptism until he was fifty-five. So, by “faith,” I don’t mean intellectual assent to a list of creedal propositions, or even a regular discipline of devotion; I mean a basic belief that all, as Julian of Norwich famously put it, will be well, and the corollary belief that we can afford to be generous—that we cannot, in fact, afford not to be. At very least, it is the belief that our duty is clear whether we can make sense of life or not. God, C.S Lewis said, wants us to be concerned with what we do; the Devil wants us to be concerned with what will happen to us. This is the understanding of faith the Teacher does not seem to have developed.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">When we are young and callow, we can be very generous; I used to pick up hitch-hikers, take in strays (actors, mostly,) and lend freely of what little I had, and my friends did the same for me. When I lived largely on Ramen noodles, I was the kind of person who would bicycle thirty miles to attend a friend’s graduation party, then crash on the friend’s floor. Now, in comfortable middle age, I’m more likely to say something like, “This is not the Stilton I like.” So I cannot pretend that I don’t understand the impulse to tear down the barn and build a bigger one. I have thought a lot in my middle age about Garrison Keillor’s challenge “to be the person you set out when you were nineteen, instead of the dull, greedy old weasel, snarfing all the food on the plate who you turned into instead.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">Of course, the young do not generally believe that horrors are in store for them, and what middle age calls “prudence” is mostly beyond their imagining, so generosity may come more easily to the young. But at the same time, it is not for nothing that Lewis called middle-aged prudence “the creeping death.” It is what makes us store up treasures for ourselves and forget God; it can cause us, as we become more worldly, more established—and have more to lose—to become more fearful and less generous. And even if the mature are more apt to name God than the young are, we often seem less apt than they to trust that all manner of thing will be well. What we once did without, we come to regard as essential. Tracy Chapman described this state in her song, “Mountains O’ Things”:</div><blockquote><i>It's gonna take all my mountains o' things<br />
To surround me<br />
Keep all my enemies away<br />
Keep my sadness and loneliness at bay…<br />
I won't die lonely<br />
I'll have it all prearranged<br />
A grave that's deep and wide enough<br />
For me and all my mountains o' things</i>.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">Jesus also taught what the end was for those who believe we can barricade ourselves against life by amassing wealth: </div><blockquote><i>The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” Then he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.</i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">The Teacher saw through the delusion of purchase-able happiness and security. Something obviously made him lose his nerve with respect to life being worthwhile, but he did see very clearly what the value was of the kind of earthly success the farmer in Jesus’ parable tried to achieve:</div><blockquote><i>I wanted to see what was worthwhile for men to do under heaven during the few days of their lives…I built houses for myself and planted vineyards… I…owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces…I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure...Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind…</i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;">The Teacher learned that we cannot insulate ourselves from the vicissitudes and apparent meaninglessness of life by an abundance of earthly success. But he does not seem to have translated that insight into an affirmative and faithful way forward.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 11.0pt .5in; text-autospace: none;">So how do we, in a way that is faithful to the Gospel, move forward with the courage that begets generosity? I think Paul shows the way: </div><blockquote><i>…[I]f you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in Go</i>d.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">When I was younger, I used to interpret all that “things that are above” stuff as world-denying nonsense from an apocalyptically deluded evangelist who believed the world was coming to a speedy end. As I have grown older, I’ve come to realize the wisdom of knowing that our lives are hidden with Christ in God.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">Martin Luther used to begin each day by making the Sign of the Cross and saying aloud, “I am a baptized Christian.” What if we were to remind ourselves every day that our lives are hidden with Christ in God? What if we were to repeat it morning and evening, meditate on it, post it on our walls, and season our successes and failures alike with the remembrance of it? What if we recalled it with each rejection letter we read, and in the midst of every pleasure that we know will not last? When my daughters no longer want to hold my hand and sit in my lap, will I mourn that loss less, and enjoy more the gifts that the future brings, if I remind myself now that my life is hidden with Christ in God? And when any tax is made on my generosity, will I find it easier if I really believe that all will be well, and that giving of myself will not diminish me? Would the tree man have given Francie and Neely the tree, and would the Teacher have found a better use for all his wealth? And when my life is demanded of me, will I be able to smile, knowing where and with Whom it is already hidden?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;">Fear makes us stingy, grasping and deluded; despair—even if undeluded--leaves us with an ungenerous view of life. It is faithful courage that makes us able to live bravely and generously. Maybe that’s why Jesus’ single most frequent recorded utterance is “Do not be afraid.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 50%; tab-stops: -1.0in -23.4pt 0in 13.5pt 1.0in;"><br />
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</div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-83280386027833583032010-07-11T01:58:00.007-04:002010-07-12T13:41:37.238-04:00The Home Version of Our Game<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Looking at reviews on Amazon of a book I was considering buying, I came across this gem:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I keep waiting for the day when someone writes a version of Buddhism for the working mom. I think that person should herself be a mother with at least one ADHD child. She should be clinically depressed and have a couch potato for a husband. If she manages to help the child grow into someone with a good marriage and a real profession, I'll buy all of her books. Unfortunately what we keep getting are philosophies created by self-satisfied, introverted, childless, hermits like (Xxxxx.) There is nothing wrong with an introverted, childless, hermit being self-satisfied. What is wrong is suggesting that his way of being represents THE path to enlightenment for everyone.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I see the reviewer’s point: many writers on spiritual topics do seem to be either members of religious communities or unattached people who can order their days more as they wish than we in the married-with-children crowd can. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">As I sit on my porch writing this, I can hear my five- and seven-year-old daughters playing inside the house. While they were in school, I was able to meditate twice a day. Now, while they are home for the summer, I read the Office of Morning Prayer and, if I’m lucky, doze off during meditation before bedtime. And vexingly enough, when I have the flexibility to do what I need to in order to present my best self to the world, I only see my children a few hours a day; when I scarcely have time for practice at all, I have them with me hour after hour. They are, I think, not the better for it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">—Hang on…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">OK, here’s what I’m talking about: I just had to go change the bedclothes after one of my girls got so involved in an audiobook that she put off going to the bathroom until she wet herself—and because I am not </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">yet</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> the Worst Dad in the World, I did </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">not </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">say, “You did WHAT? How freaking old are you, child?” But I thought it. I’m pretty sure that never happened to Thomas Merton.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But here’s my point: while hermits and free spirits may have it easier than householders in some ways, I think there is an Absolute Value of Practice in everybody’s life, and that practice can be neither created nor destroyed. The big difference is this: what we all do—householders, hermits and the unattached—on the black mat is mere scrimmage; the game is what happens everywhere else. The difference between “them” and “us” is that we don’t get as much dedicated scrimmage time, and so must do more of our practice “in game.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">—Shit, hang on…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">OK—and I am not making this up—my wife is being admitted to the hospital because an injury she received last week (an upholstery nail clean through her thumb) has become infected, and the infection has become systemic, so they’re going to put her on IV antibiotics and possibly operate, so I’ll be taking the children to grandma’s house by myself tonight, I guess.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Ima finish this later.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="border-bottom: dotted windowtext 3.0pt; border: none; padding: 0in 0in 1.0pt 0in;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: dotted windowtext 3.0pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Later:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’m told that Tibetan Buddhist monks meditate in the charnel pits; I’ve read that Swamis meditate in the cremation grounds. My life isn’t set up for me to do either of those things right now. I have to settle for taking Communion to elderly people in nursing homes—which is great practice, too, when I am paying attention, and has the added benefit of giving comfort and a sense of connectedness to a living person while I contemplate mortality and the dissolution of form.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I drove my children to Hershey, where we had planned a weekend with my wife’s family, then drove back to Philadelphia to be near the patient.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">There was a certain amount of medical drama the relation of which would compromise my quality of life at home, but though she would have been dead by now had this happened in our grandparents’ time, she is just fine now. As I watched her sleeping on the hospital bed, her bandaged hand suspended from the IV pole, her drawn face pale above the tangle of thin blankets and her gown askew on shoulders that looked frail in the weird hospital half-light, I reached into my pocket for my rosary. Then I changed my mind. I sat down and, for a long time, simply looked mindfully at my wife and the mother of my children, breathed in and out and let go of all thoughts. I cannot describe the experience in words, but I can say that I was present, that the frailty and freakish blessedness of human life was contemplated, and that practice happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of course, every life has drama and exigency; it isn’t the press of events that makes a householders’ life challenging, but the press of non-events, the minutiae of day-to-day life. Here’s a recent update from one of my Facebook friends:</span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">_______</span><span style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">is totally overwhelmed by all the little details of her life: buy stuff for Xxxx’s camps, reschedule orthodonist, find few last props for (the play,) clean house and look for new car. I need a personal manager.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is what Sri Ramakrishna, the 19</span><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">th</span></sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">-century Bengali saint whom many consider an Incarnation of God, meant when he praised the householder who also managed to be a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">bhakta,</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> or devotee:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #333333;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A devotee who can call upon God while living a householder's life is a hero indeed. God thinks, 'He who has renounced the world for My sake will surely pray to Me…But he is blessed indeed who prays to Me in the midst of his worldly duties…Such a man is a real hero."</span></i></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: LucidaGrande;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></i></span></span></a><span style="color: #333333;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The real challenge for us sheet-changers/dog-poop-scoopers/grocery-shoppers/pediatrician-appointment-makers is to find the practice in the game that sometimes leaves us little time or energy for scrimmage. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Swami Vivekananda told of a young hermit who, after several years of ascetic spiritual exercises in the forest, one day felt a shower of twigs fall on his head as he meditated under a tree. Looking up, he saw a crane and a crow fighting in the tree, and as he inwardly cursed them for disturbing him, fire shot forth from his head and consumed the birds. Elated at his new power, he went as usual into the village to beg his food. At the first house he approached, a woman’s voice within bade him wait. “How dare she make me wait?” the hermit thought. “She does not yet know my power.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Again he heard the woman’s voice from within: “Boy, do not be thinking too highly of yourself; here is neither crane nor crow!” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">When the woman finally received him, the chastened hermit asked how she had known his thoughts.</span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><i>"My boy, I do not know your Yoga or your practices. I am a common everyday woman. I made you wait because my husband is ill, and I was nursing him. All my life I have struggled to do my duty. When I was unmarried, I did my duty to my parents; now that I am married, I do my duty to my husband; that is all the Yoga I practice. But by doing my duty I have become illumined; thus I could read your thoughts and know what you had done in the forest.</i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><i>[ii]</i></span></span></a></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I cannot yet say that I match this woman’s zeal—but it’s surely a worthy goal. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’m going to bed. I will not be meditating tonight.</span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</span><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, abridged edition. RamakrishnaiVivekananda Center, 1988.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[ii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Swami Vivekananda, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982.</span></div></div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-17174970519915904352010-06-17T11:57:00.002-04:002010-06-17T15:26:54.689-04:00Teresa's Way<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><div class="Section1"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We may take a whole hour over saying (the “Our Father”) once, if we can realize that we are with Him, and what it is we are asking Him, and how willing He is, like any father, to grant it to us, and how He loves to be with us, and comfort us. –</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">St. Teresa of Avila, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Way of Perfection </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I decided to try the Lord’s Prayer in Teresa’s way, taking an hour to pray it once. Because typing takes longer than praying, I gave myself eighty minutes. I then went back and edited it just enough to be understandable—no sense publishing something that only makes any sense to me and God. I have omitted my usual endnote citations, so there are a number of Scripture and Prayerbook references that will have to stand on their own. Also, this is considerably more raw than my more polished entries—not enough to get the an Adult Content warning on the blog as a whole, but something to be aware of. I didn’t think it would be honest to gussy it up. I have used the contemporary language version from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which is the version I pray in the context of the Daily Office.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Our Father </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I am </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">so angry</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> with Clare! She and Sophie were each trying to tell me a story, and they remembered one key detail differently, and Clare’s version was probably right, it made more sense, but she was absolutely determined to shout Sophie down, and I told her over and over to let Sophie tell the story her way, and then Clare could tell it in hers, but she just </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">defied</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> me and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">would not stop</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> interrupting Sophie, just </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">insisting</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> on shouting her down; why can’t Clare let someone disagree, why does she do that? I remember when I was about 10, my cousin and I had been fishing in the morning and found a little back-eddy where we caught 14 fish within a half hour or so, boom, boom, boom one right after another, and you know how on summer days when you’re a kid and every moment is so full, and by the time the evening comes, the morning can seem like the day before? And my cousin was absolutely convinced that we had been fishing the day before, but he was </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">wrong, </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">know</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> he was wrong, but my big fat coarse redneck uncle said he was right and he didn’t want to hear any more about it, and good God, thirty-five years later I still get angry thinking about that, what the hell is the matter with me? And I swore I would never ever do that, that everybody gets to talk and everybody gets to say it their way and nobody has the right to stifle anybody, but of course if I had defied my parents like that, I’d have gotten hit, which I will also never do, so I piped down like I was told to, but God it burns me to this day, but I wasn’t telling Clare not to talk, just to let Sophie finish, why couldn’t she understand that, why wouldn’t she stop, why did she </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">defy</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> me like that, and why does it make me so angry, and what should I have done besides get mad and shout her down in turn, and why is it so important to her to be right, she’s only six? What have I done to deserve someone so much like myself, and how can I keep her from becoming as fucked up as I have become? My parents were always nagging me, nagging me, and I was a good kid—there were always so many bad things that other kids were doing and I wasn’t and I never seemed to get credit for that, only nagging for the ways in which I somehow failed to measure up; dear God, please please </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">please</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> don’t let me do that to my children! I was bitching about how Clare keeps grabbing food off the counter while I am cooking, and Allison said, “Don’t worry, she’ll grow up and leave home pretty soon;” God, I don’t appreciate her enough, either.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">My college roommate lost his three-year-old son to cancer, remember? (Of course You do, that’s stupid.) My God--the last time I thought about that was before my own children were born; now, it’s beyond my capacity to imagine, she can steal all the grated cheese she wants to; my baby is already gone, someone stole her and replaced her with a kid, and when she was three she still yelled “Daddy!” and ran into my arms when I picked her up at daycare, and good God, if that little Daddy-adoring toddler had died, I think I’d have died with her, I’d have died for her, I’d have torn down the universe to keep it from happening, and now there’s this willowy six-year-old who pisses me off so much sometimes, where did the baby I used to make laugh in the bathtub by dribbling warm water onto her belly go? Dear God, do you love me like that? Half so much? </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in heaven,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">What does this mean? If the Kingdom of Heaven is within me, am I praying to Our Father Within Me? What is Heaven? If we are born again, are we there? Wait, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">there</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> is </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in here</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. Or do we really “go to heaven” after we die? Go inside ourselves? This whole “heavenly” thing is such a red herring; Aristotle said that we do not praise men for being happy, yet it seems like we are called upon to admire your heavenliness, and if there is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven, and no place where earth’s failings are such kindly judgment given, what does that mean about eternal bliss, how can You be blissful and feel our pain, too? You said you dwell in the high and lofty place and inhabit eternity, but are also with the contrite and humble of heart; why don’t we pray Our Father Who is With the Humble of Heart? I read somewhere that most of this prayer was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the Temple liturgy, that Jesus was telling His disciples, “Look, you’re over-thinking this prayer thing; here, just say this;” or maybe if I pray to Our Father Within Me, maybe it would be too much like Wonder Twin Powers, Activate! or Green Lantern twisting his ring, or something.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">hallowed be your Name,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Wow, wow, wow, do our girls’ friends, and their friends’ parents say “Oh, my God!” a lot! I remember once when Clare was very small, three or so, she was in her car seat and I was driving and she said, “Oh, my God” apropos of nothing in her kid-pushing-the-envelope voice, and I ignored her, and she did it again, and I pretended not to hear, and finally she said, “Daddy, I say oh my God!” and I said something noncommittal, like, “hmm, so you did,” and that was that for a while, but now she says it whenever there are other kids around, and I catch her eye and shake my head, or murmer “not so much,” and she stops until the next time; she wants so badly to fit in, she is so awfully self-conscious, and doesn’t want to stand out; she begged me not to take my Anglican rosary to Meeting at school any more, because she didn’t want her friends asking her “what is that?’, and I pointed our that half her friends are Roman Catholic and surely know what prayer beads are already, but to no avail. But why do people abuse Your name like that? They profess unbelief, or some kind of wifty “spiritual-not-religious” malarkey, yet toss the mention of You around so promiscuously, and I know the commandment means not to use Your name in a curse, “may-God-strike-you-dead” fashion, but still, people want to have it both ways—they want You gone, or trivialized to the point where you could be hosting The View, or something, yet invoke you whenever they want to express strong, or even middling strong emotion.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoSalutation"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">your kingdom come,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This I can picture, though I struggle with my tendency to imagine that it means that all the people who piss me off will just </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">stop it,</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> already; but I can imagine what it means for the unmanifested kingdom within to become manifested, for everyone to realize You and seek and serve You in all persons, loving their neighbors as themselves, though I remember what Evelyn Underhill (whose feast day is today, by the way, I don’t know whether You pay attention to that sort of thing or not) said about how there is no use in our praying “thy kingdom come” every day if we are not prepared to do anything about it ourselves--got to love those no-nonsense stiff-upper-lip Greatest Generation Brits—and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing; I don’t think it means FedEx us your kingdom packed in bubble wrap, but at the same time, what does this petition imply? The Lubovicher Hasidim believe that Messiah is ready to come now, and that while we believe we are waiting for Him, He is in fact waiting for us, but can we really possibly do that on our own, get our act together enough to deserve Your coming? I cannot believe in the Immaculate Conception of Mary—that Mary was conceived without original sin—because if You would only be born to a sinless woman, is that really a human birth? Can we ever get our house in order enough?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">your will be done, on earth as in heaven.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This one, too, is relatively easy to imagine, though also difficult to divorce from my own agenda, like what Screwtape said about other people’s “sins” meaning any of their actions which are annoying or inconvenient to ourselves. But I can see a world where the rich do not pick up the grapes or grain that fall to the ground, but leave them for the poor to glean, or some post-agrarian equivalent—if only all those people on the Gulf Coast could glean all that oil, I think it’s a crime for BP to be selling what they reclaim, they ought to give it away. I can imagine a world without Lady Gaga in a latex nun’s habit fellating a rosary, a world in which every baby is wanted from the moment of conception, a world in which no one emails Jim Wallace saying “I never realized that I could be a Christian and also care about the poor,” because they are taught that from the very beginning. I remember when Clare and Sophie were playing in that gazebo in the rose garden at Hershey Gardens, pretending it was their castle and the garden its grounds, and Clare said, “I’m going to give some gold to the beggars at the gate,” God, I love that kid, we must be doing </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">something </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">right! (I love Sophie, too, of course, though her response was “I’m off to meet my boyfriend!”, oh God, I am so screwed.) Maybe that’s where the Heaven thing comes in—when we all do Your will on the manifested plane as we all have it within us to do in unmanifested form, that will be on-earth-as-it-is-in-Heaven, Heaven being where You are, heaven-within-us now, but then us-within-heaven later, for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face, right?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Give us today our daily bread</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The hardest thing in the world for me—OK, one of the many hardest things in the world for me—is to trust, to consider the lilies. Oh me of little faith. What was it that Marianne Williamson said—“if a train doesn’t stop at your station, it’s not your train!” But what do I do? Chase down trains, flag them, force them to stop and take me on, then wonder why I don’t enjoy the ride, why I don’t get where I want to go. I just have to go out and get, do, make; I have no faith at all that anything good will happen unless I am breathing down the neck of life. And yet, every single thing that has come to me that I wanted came when I was looking the other way, when I wasn’t chasing after it at all. When I met Allison, I was on the point of giving up on that kind of love and looking into becoming a monk. Maybe this is why everybody in every tradition emphasizes renunciation—because only by giving up everything can we be “as those owning nothing, yet possessing everything.” And I don’t really understand the idea of Providence; why should You give me my daily bread while others starve? What does it mean that I have some weight to lose while others don’t have enough to eat? “Lord, forgive us that we feast while others starve.” I suppose it probably doesn’t “mean” anything except that we who have are not sharing with those who have not—because we have no faith, we think we have to grab all we can and hold on, and if those people are starving it’s because of their bad choices; we make good choices, let God give them today their daily bread. That You might do that by our hands doesn’t seem to occur to us. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I think I can do this; I think I can finally do this. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Everybody is so scared, Lord; we hurt and reject and devour each other because we are so afraid. When I used to go to academic conferences, I should have realized that I wasn’t meant for that world, because I was detached enough to look around and see how scared people are—everybody wants to seem smart, competent, good enough. We praise the emperor’s clothes so much that after a while, we really see them. Forgive us. How can I cherish hatred against people who are so afraid? Thank You, thank You for allowing me to see this. My Dad said to me that he’s about given up on things ever getting back to normal, but I think that things have always been a mess; maybe it’s the apparatus through which we experience the world that falls apart as we get older; maybe it becomes harder to believe that we know what’s right and we have the right to judge. Please, God—don’t let things get back to normal; I don’t want to be again that person who used to be so right while so many others were wrong. So many of the Psalms pray for a firm ground under our feet, for the Rock that is higher than I; does that prayer recur so often because You in Your mercy withhold that firm footing from which we, standing secure, are able to believe we have “arrived”? I’d rather be in transit my whole life than believe that. Never let me believe again that You created the things in others that hurt me; I know now that those things are those peoples’ defences which they have erected out of fear. Hecubah was right, wailing beneath the ruined walls of Troy: “Here lies a little child, slaughtered by the Greeks because they were afraid.” Forgive them; forgive me; forgive us all.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.25in; tab-stops: -45.4pt -.5in 0in 45.0pt 76.5pt 1.5in 2.0in 2.25in 3.0in 3.5in 4.0in 4.5in 5.0in 5.5in 6.0in 6.25in 7.0in; text-indent: -2.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sri Ramakrishna said that if we pour milk into water, it cannot be retrieved, while butter will float in water without being lost in it; he said that if our minds are like milk, they will be lost in the world like milk in water, whereas if they are like butter, they can float over the world without being merged in it. When I read that, I finally, this late in the day, began to understand why we bother to continue asking You to deliver us from evil, because You plainly don’t, at least in the way we expect. Churn us, Lord, until we are rich enough to weather the world with integrity, until we can remain uncontaminated by it without being aloof from it, until we can be in it but not of it. You got down in the mud and breathed life into us; Jesus was born and lived an earthly life, tempted in every way as we are yet without sin. I know that we cannot escape evil, trial, temptation, testing; I no longer believe that You “deliver” us from those things by placing us in some kind of spiritual Smurf Village, with Gargamel prowling outside seeking whom he may devour. If we are not in the world, we cannot reach out the hand of love to those who are. Deliver us from forgetting who and Whose we are; let us walk through the evil of the world like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Amen.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div></span></span>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-64902857290654554012010-06-13T13:58:00.004-04:002010-06-15T09:26:53.355-04:00Troubling Grace<div class="MsoNormal"><i>Religious people want there to be meaning in everything. Randomness is hard on us: that things happen for no reason sometimes brings us closer than we want to be to the possibility that we’re not central to much of anything, and most of us are still too wedded to our ancient anthropocentrism to give that up</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. –Barbara Crafton, </span><i>Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet</i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a><i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Some time around the second grade I was traumatized by an educational movie about Beethoven. I remember sitting in the music classroom at my elementary school, hearing the cinematic re-creation of the humming in the composer’s ears as his deafness advanced, and his anguished voice asking God why He would give the gift of music to one destined not to hear it. Believing that his gifts as a composer meant something, and that his hearing loss was equally fraught with meaning, the irreconcilability of meanings tortured him, perhaps even more than the deafness itself. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">His unanswerable question nourished in me a terror that would plague me into middle age: the terror of the possibility that things don’t have any meaning. The notion that neither Beethoven’s ability nor his disability meant a cotton-pickin’ thing is so deeply unsettling as to render it well-nigh inadmissible, yet the opposing position—that either or both <i>did</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> have meaning--raises the specter of Divine indifference, negligence or downright cruelty.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Though I am experiencing more presbyaudia than I like, I do not appear to be in immediate danger of going deaf--but I did struggle for years with vocation and meaning in my career. The facts of the matter are these: 1) I can write worthwhile music, and 2) I cannot get it performed. Because I believed there was meaning in Fact #1—that I was “called” to be a composer—I spent years in fruitless agony over Fact #2: why would God bestow the gift of music on someone who was destined to go unheard? Yet both are just facts, and the question of what they <i>mean</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a non-starter because they don’t </span><i>mean</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a blessed thing. So it is up to me, the facts being what they are, to decide what to do with the bundle of desires and predilections I blithely call “myself”; trying to derive meaning from the meaningless and wanting things to be other than they are just eats up your life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So when I see people in danger of inflicting the same injuries on themselves as I did, I want to stop them, warn them off their self-destructive course. Earlier this year, I read this Facebook status update posted by a friend and former student who is a talented writer and sci-fi/fantasy übergeek:<i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i>(Xxxx Xxxxx) got rejected by (xxxxx.com) for a position writing about Star Wars. WRITING. About STAR WARS. If I can't get that job, I really don't think I have much chance in this world... <o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Oh no, I thought; she thinks it <i>means</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> something that she didn’t get the job. And her friends’ comments, trying to make sense of the slight--explain it away--aren’t helping. Not wanting to see this smart, talented, creative young woman become bogged down in bootless speculation about meaning, I decided it was time to put in my own unsolicited oar. I wasn’t about to tell her that hard work and talent are inevitably rewarded and she must surely succeed some day, that everything happens for a reason, that America is the Land of Opportunity and God Has a Plan For Your Life, because that’s all bullshit. The truth, as I see it, is actually far simpler than all that.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i>Don't look too hard for meaning; there is a lot less of it than we think, and the search for it burdens us. Sometimes things just suck.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Her response followed quickly.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i>It's rather amazing how that comment was depressing and encouraging at the same time...<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Except that it isn’t amazing, really. “Joy and woe,” as Blake knew, “are woven fine, / A clothing for the soul divine.” The older you get, the more you realize that both are always present. They are inextricable warp and weft; we put them on like garments and they take our shape for a while, then they fall away. They, too, do not mean anything. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Which is not to say they have nothing to teach us; woe in particular has a hefty teaching docket, as Aeschylus affirmed:<i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: LucidaGrande;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>He who learns must suffer<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget <o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Falls drop by drop upon the heart, <o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>And in our own despite, against our will, <o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Loathe as I am to retard anyone’s learning by sparing them instructive suffering, I recount here a few of my own drops of meaning-related pain, in more or less chronological order, for whatever vicarious teaching value they may have.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><u>Churchy People<o:p></o:p></u></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At my high school, like most high schools, the graduating seniors wrote “senior wills” in which they “bequeathed” various items to the classmates they were leaving behind. Evidently there was some kind of minor scandal during my junior year, in which some student or group made hurtful bequests resulting in tears and outraged phone calls. As a result, members of the faculty made so many black-marker redactions in the issue of the school paper in which my class’s senior wills appeared that it looked like it had been wrested from the Defense Department using the Freedom of Information Act. The teachers simply blacked out anything they didn’t understand (including, for instance, all references to LAX, a common abbreviation for “lacrosse.”) <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That is how many churchy people read the world: like a suspect document whose author is trying to put something over on them. For people who profess to worship Jesus Christ as both fully divine and fully human, a lot of churchfolk are intensely uncomfortable with ambiguity and paradox. If a painting, poem, story or piece of music leaves them at all mystified, out it goes. Perhaps Archibald MacLeish had them in mind when he wrote that “a poem should not mean, / But be,” because churchy people want to know what <i>everything</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> “means.” By the time they’re done, the world is a mass of redactions. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What, then, becomes of the Sacred Mysteries of the Christian faith—the Holy Trinity, the divine nature of Jesus, the Sacraments—those bafflingly beautiful and beautifully baffling signs that are the hallmarks of the Gospel way of life? They are treated like the kid who owns the kickball: we have to let him play if we’re ever going to get on with it, but we don’t generally invite him to the picnic afterward. A mystery, said Cambridge musician-theologian Jeremy Begbie, is not “a problem to be solved, but a reality to be enjoyed.” Yet for many churchy people, to “take something on faith” means to profess belief in it while steadfastly avoiding thinking about it. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">No doubt, the spiritual stinginess of some churchy people is motivated by a genuine concern for doctrinal purity and the safeguarding of souls. Much of it is doubtless the result of low intellectual wattage masquerading as zeal for orthodoxy. Most of it is probably a combination of the two. While still a teenager I found myself arguing with an elderly Baptist lady who asserted that, because I had not undergone full-immersion baptism, I had not really been baptized at all, but “sprinkled.” As the argument approached the point where her position must soon become untenable, she ended the conversation by saying, “I think you read too much.” Her heart may have been in the right place in some twisted way, but that encounter set back my Christian formation by years.<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">“</span>Where is the wise man?” asked Paul in his first letter to the Christians at Corinth. “Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">[ii]</span></span></a> And the answer of course is yes, God has. But Paul, himself a learned man steeped in the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew scriptures, would have either told me why my baptism was not valid, or admitted that it was. Human beings in the pre-modern world, Screwtape told his nephew Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’s novel, “still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.” Perhaps this is why so many churchy people are uncomfortable with reason, even as they demand meaning: their real object of worship—their accustomed way of life—is the last thing they want to risk altering.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I had a churchy private music theory student who came to my home for lessons for a short time--a very short time, as it turned out. Catching sight of my <i>tabla</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> on the first day, she asked me what they were, and when I told her they were North Indian hand drums and that I played them, she went all strange on me. Eventually she asked, in a weird, squirrelly, not-making-eye-contact sort of way, if I were “interested in Indian philosophy as well.” Not having yet studied Yoga or Vedanta philosophy, I replied that, while-I- found-the-Indian-cyclical-conception-of-time-to-be-a-useful-counterweight-to-our-Western-linear-model-of-time-which-we-assume-to-be-Biblical-but-is-I-believe-largely-cultural, on the whole, no, I’m a Christian. That evidently wasn’t reassuring enough, because I never saw her again. The fact that I played those foreign drums must, in her mind, </span><i>mean</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> something, and it couldn’t be anything wholesome.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There’s a scene in the movie <i>Peter and Paul </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in which we briefly see Paul (brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins) laughing and dancing to frame drums and </span><i>aulos</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with the Greeks in Corinth—caught in the act of being “all things to all people.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></a> I love that scene, but am under no delusion about the willingness of most churchy people to do anything of the kind. Professional missionaries do, of course, but not the people in the pews, for the most part. (Hell, I couldn’t even get the Episcopalians at my church to risk English Country Dancing at our parish Twelfth Night party.) What would it </span><i>mean</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> if we did that stuff?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">OK—I’m not going to labor the point by detailing all my petty encounters with Gospel-tinted bullheadedness. (The train wreck of my two years in the pre-ordination process merits a whole post to itself, if not a whole book, if not to be consigned to merciful oblivion.) Anyone who’s ever run athwart churchy peoples’ determination to insulate themselves from the unfamiliar knows exactly what I mean here. I’m sure that when God said “Behold, I do a new thing” to the ancient Hebrews, many of them said, “But we’ve never done it that way before!”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><u>Measured and Found Wanting<o:p></o:p></u></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As an undergrad I showed an art-song I had composed to one of the faculty members. A setting of a comic poem by Rudyard Kipling, it had a light touch but, I thought, a reasonably sophisticated approach. And a catchy tune. “Well,” he said after I’d played and sung it for him, “Stephen Sondheim has written less intellectual things than that.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>He dismissed my piece by comparing it favorably to Stephen Sondheim.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Some years later in graduate school, my composition teacher’s hard-nosed wife summed up a choral piece of mine with a grudging, “Well, I’d rather listen to that than John Rutter.” Thanks; that means a lot. Maybe you’d prefer it to a gingivectomy as well?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I came of age during the last gasp of the twelve-tone era; my instructors were at pains to dismiss the music of Steve Reich and Phillip Glass as so much wifty ephemera. Looking back, I think of them as the <i>Classical Music is Very Serious Business Generation.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> And for a long time, I bought in to the fiction that it was very important that all my music be as intellectually rigorous as possible—that music is only worthwhile if most people do not understand it. I still vividly remember the visceral intensity of my relief in the world-changing moment when I realized that God was not going to judge me on the </span><i>gravitas</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of every note I write--that writing simple music was not the moral equivalent of pissing in the well. “Some of us tend to think that what we do and say and decide and write are cosmically important things,” wrote Anne Lamott. “But they’re not.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iv]</span></a> My music doesn’t </span><i>mean</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> anything! Praise God! <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But Saint Peter is not the most stringent gatekeeper out there. I once showed some choral scores to a Very Important Choir Director in an Episcopal parish (my own at the time.) Glancing at them, he nodded and said, “I’ll bet people ooh’d and aah’d over these when they were premiered.” Well, yes, actually, they did, I rejoined. Nodding again, he said—and I am not making this up—“Fortunately, I’m in a position not to have to care about that sort of thing.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Some weeks later the choir performed a piece by a well-known contemporary composer that exhibited many of the same musical characteristics the director had objected to in my work. When I pointed this out, he replied that the composer in question was entitled to a performance because he is famous, and it wasn’t his job to make me famous, too. Looking back, I wonder what on earth kept me beating my head against the wall for as long as I did. <i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If only I had known at the time that the rejection <i>didn’t mean anything at all about me.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> It meant plenty about him, and the fact that the music programs of the Episcopal Church are chock-full of people like him means plenty, too. And all it meant about my work was that, while good, it wasn’t transcendently fantastic enough to overcome the fact that I hadn’t gone to the right schools and cultivated the right people. But about </span><i>me</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> it meant nothing at all. Because I didn’t realize that, I made myself and a lot of people around me miserable for years.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">During graduate school, I applied for a composer residency with three houses of worship. After all the participating consortia had reviewed my materials, one of them called me in for an interview, which went very well. So I was disappointed, though not shocked, when I was not chosen for the residency; after all, there were other qualified applicants. In the interest of turning a rejection into a learning opportunity, I contacted the staff member at the composers’ forum that administered the program to ask where I had gone wrong. The staffer startled me by babbling incoherently about “demographics” and “variables” is a highly stressed-out way. Having learned nothing of value to apply to my next application, I then contacted one of the participating choir directors. Though less panicky, she too hemmed and hawed in obvious discomfort. “It wasn’t you,” she said cryptically, finally admitting that I had been passed over because the chosen composer was a woman. From what I could gather, this was her third attempt at one of these residencies, and the forum wanted to avoid the appearance of gender discrimination. “Now that you know that, what are you going to do?” she asked.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I suppose I ought to have done everything—hired a lawyer and made them make it up to me—or nothing. In the best case scenario, the first option would have resulted in my being handed a thrown-together project whose point people had been pressured into it and which was destined to painful failure. The second would have spared me and everyone else the cataract of painful drops that attended the vitriolic grousing I actually did, the relation of which would fill up a large and breathtakingly boring memoir.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But here’s the point: about the forum, the incident meant only that they cared more about social engineering than about music, which everybody knew anyway; about my work, it meant once again that it was good enough to be desirable, but not to sweep all other considerations aside. Had I only known that it didn’t mean anything at all about me, I could have avoided bringing scalding pain on myself and others. But I didn’t. To me, the fact of my talent <i>meant</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that I had a calling and a right to fulfill it, and that they were thwarting me and it was an outrage. Exhausting, isn’t it? I could have walked away and been much happier.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet, like some <i>femme fatale,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the musical world in which I was trained knew just how long it could hold out on me before trailing some tantalizing hint across my path to keep me hooked. The Vice-President of a prestigious publishing house once told me, “Your stuff is better than ninety per cent of what comes across my desk, but I can’t use it.” What does a creative person do with that? Give up and allow music you know is good, that you poured yourself into, lie unheard? Or stay hooked, and keep trying, and trying, and trying forever? When do we show the devil-we-know the door?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(Of course, I realize that the truth is far worse than this: the academic music world wasn’t stringing me along—in fact, it doesn’t even know I exist. My own brain has projected the stringing-along fantasy in self-defense, finding cruelty more endurable than indifference.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><u>Death<o:p></o:p></u></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have a friend who grew up in the church—who majored in church music, in fact—and turned her back on it when her three-year-old niece died. What could I say to her? In the years since she told me about it, I have said nothing. I don’t how to make what I want to say—that whatever meaning there is in her niece’s death resides, not in the event itself, but in the responses to it of the people who loved her—leap the synapse that exists between one who has suffered such a thing and one who has not. Perhaps it ought not to be leapt. I also don’t know what she was taught to believe about such things; if anyone were to tell me to accept that my child’s death was part of a divine plan, I might well walk away, too.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We want to find meaning in things. When Sri Ramakrishna was dying of throat cancer, his devotees tried to make sense of his illness, some by believing that he had willed it on himself to bring his devotees together, some believing that the Divine Mother had caused it for reasons of her own. </div><blockquote><i>But the young rationalists, led by Narendra</i> [later known to the world as Swami Vivekananda]<i> refused to ascribe a supernatural cause to a natural phenomenon. They believed that the Master’s body, a material thing, was subject, like all other material things, to physical laws.</i><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;"><i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title="">[v]</a></i></span></span></span></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">I love Vivekananda’s steady clear-sightedness. It takes courage to stop looking for meaning in events and take on instead the task of bestowing meaning by the way we live in the face of them. His stern pursuance of reason, and impatience with what he called “superstition” and “beings above the clouds” make a bracing tonic for anyone caught in the God Has a Plan for Your Life trap. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 313.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">We have desires, and we call them promptings; abilities, and we call them vocations; we parse them, and call it discernment. We make choices, and navigate our way through their consequences. Things happen to us, and they do not have meaning in themselves--we endow them with meaning by our responses to them. In a Catholic church in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the celebrant announced that a beloved former priest of the parish, who was dying of cancer, was “offering up” his suffering for that community. Never having heard of such a thing outside of Irish literature, I was stunned when I realized what it really meant: by voluntarily joining his suffering with Jesus’, the priest was refusing to be a victim of his circumstances, turning instead a thing that had happened to him into a freely-offered instrument of redemption. Love, as Evelyn Underhill <span style="font-style: normal;">put it, makes all the difference between an execution and a martyrdom. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The Devil trembles when human beings know “that horrors may be in store for (them,) and are praying for the virtues wherewith to meet them.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vi]</span></a> Things may happen to us--even fatal things—but spiritual death is not visited upon us; we bring it upon ourselves.</div><blockquote><i>Those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”</i><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;"><i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title="">[vii]</a></i></span></span></span></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">Phillip, the semi-autobiographical protagonist of Somerset Maugham’s novel <i>Of Human Bondage,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> met a dissipated and largely unpublished poet in Paris named Cronshaw, who gave Phillip a remnant of a Persian carpet. The carpet, Cronshaw told him, held in it the answer to the meaning of life. Phillip kept the remnant for many years, through titanic struggles, repeated failures and almost relentless suffering as he tried to find what the world called “success” in life. One day, long after the carpet fragment had been lost, Phillip realized, with the abruptness of revelation, the truth that had eluded him for so many years: life does not have any meaning.</span></div><blockquote><i>His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i>…(T)hat was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life…Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful…In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace…His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design.</i><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;"><i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title="">[viii]</a></i></span></span></span></span></i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">Whatever meaning, whatever beauty there is in life resides in our living of it, and not in the events of life themselves. Sloppy biblical interpretation often involves <i>eisegesis,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the “reading in” of meaning to the text. I have spent most of my days doing a similar thing: reading meaning into life. But meaning is not in life any more than a pattern is in the threads; we must weave our carpets for ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a> Crafton, Barbara, <u>Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet.</u> Jossey-Bass, 2009.<o:p></o:p></div></div><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a> 1 Corinthians 1:20</div></div><div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></a>1 Corinthians 9:22</div></div><div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iv]</span></a> LaMott, Anne. <i>Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Anchor, 1995. (115)</span></div></div><div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[v]</span></a> <i>The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna: Abridged Edition. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Translated by Swami Nikhilananda. Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1988. (68)</span></div></div><div id="edn6" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vi]</span></a> Lewis, C. S. <i>The Screwtape Letters<o:p></o:p></i></div></div><div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[vii]</span></a> Luke 13: 4-5</div></div><div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[viii]</span></a> Maugham, Somerset, <i>Of Human Bondage.<o:p></o:p></i></div></div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-75315277265783868802010-06-04T11:30:00.000-04:002010-06-04T11:30:27.487-04:00Rope Trick<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><i>To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It gets you from some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[i]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>–</i><span style="font-style: normal;">Eckhart Tolle, </span><i>A New Earth:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;">–The Emerald Tablet of Hermes <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(Note: if you’ve been following this blog, you may have noticed that the time between posts has been increasing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is because once I had plucked all the low-hanging fruit about my cute children, bad mental habits and shifting doctrinal landscape, I was left with nothing to do but actually confront the root causes of my profound screwed-up-titude—and that confrontation is something my inner Senate continually threatens to filibuster. I mean, how many times can a relatively reasonable person check his email, Facebook and the Huffington Post?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enough to fill up whole afternoons with not-writing, apparently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A large part of my brain wants to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I’m probably going to bail early,” I told the grad student who requested a ride to the potluck-and-bluegrass-jam that wrapped up the first day of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had left Philly at dawn to drive to Charlottesville, daylight savings time began that night, and I was giving my paper the next day; everything argued for a good night’s sleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Need I say that’s not what happened?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Most of the non-jamming guests had left by the time we packed up our instruments and said our goodbyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I looked around for the people I’d come with, I heard the sound of an <i>axatse </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(a West African instrument comprising a gourd enclosed in a network of beads) and turned to see our hostess demonstrating a complex 12-beat rhythm to a colleague by bouncing the gourd between her hand and thigh. I stifled an impulse to go over and learn the rhythm, too—I have to go to bed! I told myself--then turned sheepishly to the waiting grad student.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I guess that bailing early plan didn’t work out,” I admitted.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">En route to the hotel, I told my passengers that “I used to smoke weed when I was younger, until I discovered that the world is fascinating already.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I let the dogs out before bedtime and hear the wind soughing in the neighbor’s gigantic sycamore tree, its looming form blotting out the stars over our back yard, it is fascinating; when we open up the Styrofoam cooler in the shed and find that the children have filled it with grass while playing Underground Railroad (apparently the grass represented provisions of some kind) it is fascinating; when I am bawling out my five-year-old, and my six-year-old tells her, “Daddy’s not saying you’re not a good person, Sophie,” it is altogether fascinating. Bluegrass and the <i>axatse</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are fascinating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who needs weed?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, we all need fascination—what Paul Gauguin called “a sense of the beyond, of a heart that beats.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One evening while our first daughter Clare was still a baby, my wife and I were having dinner at a friend’s house when Clare began to get fussy. Our hostess picked her up and took her across the room to look at a candle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Let’s get fascinated!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our baby stared, rapt and slack-jawed, at the flickering flame, and I saw for the hundredth time how numinous and mesmerizing the world was in her infant eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not presuming to have all the answers about anything she saw, or to be able to control things by naming them, she was happy to let the world be its fascinating self--almost as though she could detect “the dearest freshness deep down things”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ii]</span></span></a> with some special sixth baby-sense. “We see the world with the five senses,” said Swami Vivekananda, “but if we had another sense, we would see in it something more.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iii]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Longing for this “something more” is, I believe, the reason people smoke weed; having lost the baby-sense, people turn to THC to open their minds to the bottomless fascination of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because we no longer have eyes to see and ears to hear, we have lost touch with the infinite, absolute, eternal life that animates our narrow, relative and temporary lives. <span style="color: #08131f;">"I tell you the truth,” Jesus said, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iv]</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #08131f;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But changing is hard, and chemicals can seem to bypass the need for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not for nothing that the body’s neurotransmitter that the cannabinoids in marijuana mimic is called “anandamide”; <i>ananda </i></span><span style="color: #08131f;">is Sanskrit for “bliss.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[v]</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #08131f;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We will, apparently, take our bliss any way we can get it.</span><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 14.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #08131f;">People do drugs because they want, as Marianne Williamson put it, “a different experience of what is.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it seems to work because “what is” is slippery and unstable; so much so, in fact, that many things can alter your roadmap of reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My first year or so of temp work was strictly blue-collar, from assembly line and warehouse work to flagging traffic to shoveling ore in a government mineral depot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During a run of success as a composer, when my temp agency supervisors noticed my name appearing in the local papers and heard me interviewed on public radio a few times, I started getting “cleaner” jobs, like setting up insecticide displays in supermarkets—jobs for which I wore a tie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was astonished at how differently people treated me--even out in the country where nearly all the men wore work boots and lined flannel shirts--when I wore a white shirt and a tie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was the same person who had worn the reflective orange vest the week before, but when the complexion of the <i>maya, </i></span><span style="color: #08131f;">or illusion, around you changes, people perceive and respond to you differently. If a drug could make that kind of difference in our experience of the world, you couldn’t keep it on the shelves.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #08131f;">(Sometimes a little <i>maya</i></span><span style="color: #08131f;"> bait-and-switch can be fun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During a period when I was getting a lot of commissions and performances, expensively-dressed people would approach me at post-concert receptions and ask me where I taught.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Actually, I work at K & W Tire,” I’d tell them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The visible discomfort in their faces and bodies before they extricated themselves from my company and went to freshen their drinks:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>priceless.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #08131f;">So what happens when our experience of our lives is wildly out of tune with any rational assessment of our circumstances? </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During a rehearsal at another musician’s house, my hostess handed me a drink.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Distracted with a piece of sheet music, I took the glass, seeing peripherally the clear liquid inside and assuming that it was water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I took a drink and was appalled by the nastiness of the fluid in my mouth—which, as it turns out, was Sprite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which I like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But because I had been expecting water, and my mind was configured for it, I experienced the Sprite as unpleasant. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My life is like that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have a fantastic life:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>two wonderful, intelligent, thoughtful, exuberant children, a loving wife who puts up with me and keeps me honest and earns enough to allow me to stay home, keep house and garden running, compose and perform music and spend hours on a self-indulgent blog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But because it isn’t what I was expecting, I often experience my life as confining, unfulfilling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I expected it to be full of height and depth and <i>gravitas,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and have found it full of dog fur and goutweed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I looked forward to being intellectually and aesthetically stimulated on a daily basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(What I thought would happen about the dog fur and goutweed I don’t know.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought I would feel more important.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are no Desert Fathers around when you need one to adjust your attitude.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am haunted by the story of the young monk who went to Abba Moses for advice on spiritual advancement. “Go and sit in your cell,” the Abba told him, “and your cell will teach you everything.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your life as it is, here and now, is gravid with everything you need to know--but it seldom appears that way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet, if we had eyes to see—if we could get our thoughts out of the way of our perceptions, if we could stop labeling everything with a “yes, I know all about that”--who knows what we could detect in the seemingly undifferentiated landscape of our lives?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we had no mental category for “green,” the woods would be a riot of color.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have never owned a television in my adult life, but when I was a child I watched a lot of TV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of course, life on TV always seems more interesting and fulfilling than life elsewhere, as it’s meant to. My own life involved a lot of being bullied on the schoolbus and playground, so TV had a lot of allure for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, my budding religious sensibility was stewed in a sort of vindicationalism: I got picked on at school, but I was going to reign with the saints in the Kingdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So there were some pretty powerful incentives to regard day-to-day life as unreal--a preparation for some more fulfilling, fascinating “real life” that was going to happen at some time in the future. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The worst of this is that so much good passes us by while we are on the lookout for something better. I read somewhere that most of us meet some 1400 people during our lives with whom we could be compatible life partners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So why aren’t we all happily married?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because we see other people through the filter of the ridiculous ideas in our heads. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And not just people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Early on in my folksinging days, a number of friends urged me to “go on the circuit” as a folk musician.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was reasonably good at it, and I loved doing it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But something had happened in my brain that made me regard ballads, pub songs and fiddle tunes as mere avocation, and somehow frivolous; my <i>real</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> work, I always told myself, was in the musical world in which I was being trained in graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It didn’t matter that playing my concertina and inviting my listeners to sing along made me happy; I was a </span><i>composer—</i><span style="font-style: normal;">which is to say, a “serious” musician.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I cringe with shame to recall this—some of the most phenomenal musicians I have known have worked in traditional music--but that is honestly how I thought about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could watch a group of novice dancers and extend a tune until they had completed a figure before moving to the next part of the tune, I could invent lyrics on the spot, I could improvise a musical accompaniment to a </span><i>Commedia dell’ Arte </i><span style="font-style: normal;">performance, I had several hundred songs in my head ready to go at any time—but those skills all involved music in the service of something else, while </span><i>serious</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> music existed purely as a sonic object to be politely contemplated in a concert or recital hall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I spent years of my life, great pots of money, untold hours of unflagging industry and enough emotional energy to power a small city trying to fit into that world and make that music.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why didn’t I see earlier that I was barking up the wrong tree?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Half my lifetime ago I had an experience that, had I known at the time how to interpret it, could have saved me a lot of anguish and wasted time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But life, as Kierkegaard pointed out, can only be understood backwards, and it would be many years before the lesson the experience had to teach me would finally become clear.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(All my former students should stop reading now.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The summer after I graduated from college I was with a group of friends, and we had all eaten psilocybin mushrooms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For some time, I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about; I didn’t seem to be what I thought of as “tripping” at all. “I just feel stoned,” I said to a friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“That’s it,” she replied:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Just relax into it.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And she was right:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as soon as let go of my prefabricated mental construct of “tripping” and simply allowed my experience to be what it was, I discovered that I was indeed tripping, and in a big way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was all happening already, but my willing-it-to-be had kept it from my awareness. Sober, I had the life I wanted already, and I didn’t know it, because I <i>never</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> “relaxed into it.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Zen teacher Sunryu Suzuki made a very similar point about the pursuit of </span><i>satori, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">or sudden awakening, in meditation:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>(A)s long as you think, “I am doing this,” or “I have to do this,” or “I must attain something special,” you are actually not doing anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something. When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something.</i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vi]</span></span></a><i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Relax into it.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(Now, let me be clear:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not recommending mind-altering drugs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are far too many uncontrolled variables, too many dangers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the mind, moreover, is like a computer:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>garbage in, garbage out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second time I used mushrooms, I was in a worse state of mind than I realized, and the drug released an amazing trove of mental garbage; the experience was so terrifying that I vowed never to do it again, a vow I have kept for twenty-four years. Finally, drugs and the like only seem to be expanding our minds while we are under their influence; they make no real and lasting change in us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eckhart Tolle posited that, while things like meditation can take us above our thoughts, things like drugs and television take us below them; both can free us from our thoughts, but not in equally beneficial ways.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vii]</span></span></a>) <i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sri Ramakrishna, the 19<sup>th</sup> century Bengali saint who is regarded by many Hindus as an Incarnation of God, used a telling metaphor about wisdom seekers “doing something” in their quest for God. They climb the stairs of renunciation one by one, Ramakrishna said, and when they finally reach the roof, they discover that it is made of the same brick and lime as the stairs.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn8" name="_ednref8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[viii]</span></span></a> We are not going anywhere, because we are already there—or at very least, “there” is not essentially different from “here,” now matter how much we sacrifice to our belief that is surely must be.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><i><a href="http://www.iwise.com/I70UN"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.</span></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ix]</span></span></a></i></span><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 15.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m tired of wandering; if the “one indivisible Self” resides in us all, where is there to go?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Infinite does not “go” anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is—you are--already there.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Jesus was apparently trying to get his hearers to “relax into it” when He told them, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">x</span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no place to go;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it is already here--you are already there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This is how the world regains its fascination: by our looking at it neither through the eyes of deluded desire that compare it to something “better” in our heads, nor through the eyes of calculation and greed for gain, but through the eyes of the Kingdom within, the eyes of a little child who sees “the dearest freshness deep down things.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not of drugged sleep, but of alert wakefulness.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Could you not stay awake with me for one hour?” Jesus asked His disciples on the last night of His earthly life.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn11" name="_ednref11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xi]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think He asks each of us the same thing—“Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn12" name="_ednref12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xii]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Jesus asks us to keep awake with Him, he is inviting us to share in His divine life and ministry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to poet Andrew Hudgins, Jesus is <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>…someone walking through his life—or hers—<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Until God whispers, It’s you. And God’s ignored…<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Or does God simply choose us all?</i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn13" name="_ednref13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13;" title=""><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiii]</span></span></a><i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So OK, smartass, I tell myself:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if you’re Jesus—if you abide in Him and He in you like vine and branch<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn14" name="_ednref14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14;" title=""><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiv]</span></span></a>--stay awake with yourself! Don’t be continually falling back into the sleep of life inside your head, don’t be always drawing a veil of expectations and desires between yourself and the circumstances in which God and your <i>karma</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> have placed you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t end up like Jacob, who had to physically wrestle with his Creator and sustain a painful injury before he could say,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.</span><i>”<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn15" name="_ednref15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title="">[xv]</a></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><br />
</i></div><div class="MsoNormal">Vedantic philosophy uses the image of coiled rope in a dimly-lit room to explain our cognitive dysfunction. If upon entering the room we mistake the rope for a snake, we will be unable to see the rope, and we cannot see the rope until we stop seeing the snake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As long as we see our lives as preparatory, stalled, unreal or unfulfilling, we cannot see them as numinous, fascinating, “charged with the grandeur of God.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn16" name="_ednref16" style="mso-endnote-id: edn16;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xvi]</span></span></a> These, says Paul Simon’s song, are the days of miracle and wonder—but <i>all</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> days are the days of miracle and wonder if we are fully present to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The earliest Christian texts speak, not of the “return” of the Christ, but of Christ’s “revelation;” when the scales fall from our eyes, we will see that we are already in God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is surely what the Psalmist longed for when he prayed,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>When I awake, I will be fully satisfied, for I will see you face to face</i><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"><i>.</i></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn17" name="_ednref17" style="mso-endnote-id: edn17;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10.0pt;"><i><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xvii]</span></i></span></span></a><i><o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> <div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[i]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> Tolle, Eckhart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>A New Earth:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Awakening to Your life’s Purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Plume, 2006.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(202)<o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Hopkins, Gerard Manley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“God’s Grandeur”</span></div></div><div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Vivekananda, <i>Jnana Yoga.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(28)<o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[iv]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Matthew 18:3</span></div></div><div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[v]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">http://drug-abuse.suite101.com/article.cfm/what-does-marijuana-actually-do</span><o:p></o:p></div></div><div id="edn6" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vi]</span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> Suzuki, Shunryu. <i>Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.</i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"> Shambhala; 2006. (page 44)</span><o:p></o:p></div></div><div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[vii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Tolle, Eckhart:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>A New Earth:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Awakening to Your life’s Purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Plume, 2006.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(229)</span></div></div><div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[viii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><i>The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, </i></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Abridged edition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Translated by Swami Nikhilananda.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1988.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(271)<o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn9" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[ix]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Katha Upanishad<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>II.i.9</span></div></div><div id="edn10" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref10" name="_edn10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[x]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Luke 17: 20b-21</span></div></div><div id="edn11" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref11" name="_edn11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xi]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Matthew 26:40</span></div></div><div id="edn12" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref12" name="_edn12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Matthew 25:13</span></div></div><div id="edn13" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref13" name="_edn13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Hudgins, Andrew. “Crucifixion—Montgomery, Alabama.” Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=David%20Impastato"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">David Impastato</span></a></span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">, Editor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oxford University Press, 1996. (8)<o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn14" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref14" name="_edn14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xiv]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">cf. John 15:15</span></div></div><div id="edn15" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref15" name="_edn15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xv]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Genesis 28:16b, ESV</span></div></div><div id="edn16" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref16" name="_edn16" style="mso-endnote-id: edn16;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xvi]</span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">Hopkins, Gerard Manley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“God’s Grandeur”</span></div></div><div id="edn17" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref17" name="_edn17" style="mso-endnote-id: edn17;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[xvii]</span></span></a> <span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 10.0pt;">Psalm 17:15b, NLT</span></div></div></div><!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-59823159381452223122010-04-08T13:25:00.016-04:002010-05-14T08:08:02.527-04:00Easter<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 15.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Jesus said, "Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”…Clinging to life causes life to decay; the life that is freely given is eternal.</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> –Principles of the Third Order of St. Francis</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 15.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Before we left on our honeymoon in Greece, a friend who is a classics scholar gave us this heads-up: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The gods of Olympus are very much alive. </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I little understood what he meant until we were ensconced in the highlands of Epirus, near the Albanian border. We were staying in a little village called Tsepelovo, where the owner of the guest house introduced us to an English expatriate couple who had just opened a tourist lodge in nearby Kikouli. The couple took us under their wing and showed us around their village one evening—separately, to avoid scandalizing any of the kerchiefed matrons with the company of an unknown man. </span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">As I relaxed in the home of Petros, the village postman, in a living room with Ottoman-style divans, or raised cushioned platforms, lining all the walls in place of furniture, my host reclining on an elbow while his wife brought me a tasty dish of broad beans and spinach, I realized what my friend had meant: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Zeus Xenios, </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">the God of Travelers, still animated these people who had been among the first to embrace the Gospel some two thousand years ago. The “guest-friendship” of Homeric epic is still, for them, one of “the deep themes that tell the myths we live.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (I found the same spirit in Turkey; </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">buyunuz,</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> or “help yourself,” was one of the first words I learned there.) The myths of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Zeus </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Hestia, </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Goddess of the Hearth, are still a motive force in people’s daily lives.</span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></u></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">What is the source of a myth’s power? Not its historicity, certainly; some myths are based in historical events, while others are pure invention. Nor is it the aesthetic power of the narrative itself; many myths are downright bizarre—even grotesque and disturbing--and while there are legions of beautiful stories, very few of them aspire to the mythic. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I think the power of a myth lies in the contact it makes with our selves, psychologically and spiritually. Myths are universal and eternal, but also deeply personal and subjective—and that subjectivity, the fact that one can actually experience the dynamics of myth in one’s own life, is what makes myths true and powerful. If you have not lived through something, the poet Kabir tells us, it is not true.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[ii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Myths become true to the extent that they become true </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">for us.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Anyone who’s ever tried to run a household—especially one that included kids—knows what it is to live the myth of Sisyphus, the king of Thessaly who was condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll down again every time. The floor is no sooner mopped than it is dirty again, and dinner is never </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">made,</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> once and for all; which of us has never had an inkling of how Sisyphus must feel?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And Tantalus! Every time a piece of my music is short-listed without being chosen for performance, I remember you; every time I think I’ve got the drop on life in the morning only to be discouraged again by dinner time, I feel your pain. Patron and spirit-familiar of everyone who’s ever had the prospect of advancement, promotion or success dangled “tantalizingly” before them only to have it snatched away over and over again--all of us who wanted to marry but never did, who tried and tried at life but never succeeded, who went again and again to call-backs and second interviews without being cast or hired, all the Willy Lomans and Eleanor Rigbys and Broadway Danny Roses who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory—all of us stand with you in Tartarus, up to our necks in water that recedes when we bend to drink, while the tempting fruit that hangs over our heads withdraws beyond our grasp when we reach out for it. Your anguish lives in all of us.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A true hero, wrote Garrison Keillor, has the power to give us the gift of a larger life. And while Sisyphus and Tantalus may be more anti-heroes than heroes, when we allow their myths to be present in our daily struggles and sufferings, those struggles and sufferings become ennobled, “connected to the stars, a part of the mind of God.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[iii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Our little daily deaths become the stuff of new and larger life.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is why I like the way Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön describes the difficulties of life as “juicy.” It reminds me of my undergraduate organ teacher’s explanation of why to hold on to a discord a little longer than its strict rhythmic value indicates: “You want to </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">squeeze</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> a dissonance,” he told me, “because that’s where the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">juice</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> is.” Instead of fleeing from difficulty and discomfort, we can lean into them, squeeze them, because the really nourishing stuff is not to be found in what goes smoothly, but in what grates. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The trouble is that while our lives are plenty grating and painful and juicy, our myths have lost all their nubbliness through un- or over-familiarity, so that we fail to see the stories we are living. Like most of scripture, the very roughness that made the old stories stick has been smoothed away to the point where they now seem simply outlandish tales—like the Greek myths—or the rarefied stuff of stained-glass windows, whose hagiographies and Bible stories seem to have no relevance to our actual experience. “The old words of grace,” wrote novelist Walker Percy, “are worn smooth as poker chips and a certain devaluation has occurred, like a poker chip after it has been cashed in</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[iv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Our myths are all around us, and we never claim them for our own because we do not recognize them and they have lost their sticking power for us.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of course, sometimes myths do stick--and burn, like slow napalm. I have long been sympathetic to Cain, for instance, in the Genesis myth. Cain worked hard and gave his best, but God rejected Cain’s offering of produce while accepting Abel’s animal sacrifice. How is that fair? Why did God accept Abel’s offering of a dead animal and reject Cain’s offering of first fruits? Some scholars believe the prototype of this story goes back to a time of conflict between ancient Sumerian pastoralists and agriculturalists. So is everyone meant to be a herdsman, and no one a farmer? Commentaries on Genesis 4 do a lot of speculating about Cain, supposing that his heart was not in the right place when he made his offering—or they drag in Hebrews and 1 Peter and say that without blood there is no forgiveness of sin. But both of these interpretations are examples of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">eisegesis</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">—reading ideas into the text rather than out of it. The fact is that the chapters preceding Cain and Abel’s offerings don’t say anything at all about blood sacrifice or Cain’s state of mind. All it says in the text is that God “had regard” for Abel’s offering, and for Cain’s offering God had “no regard.” Most of us know what came next: Cain killed Abel in a jealous rage.</span></span><span style="color: #08131f;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Every time I see some people succeed because they know how to work the system, while others—no less able or hardworking—fail because they don’t know how to ingratiate themselves with the powerful, I think of Cain and Abel. “The children of this world,” Jesus said, “are more shrewd in dealing with the world around them than are the children of the light.”</span><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[v]</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And while Cain may or may not have been more enlightened than Abel, maybe he killed Abel less because he was evil than because he’d been rooked.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""></a></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Jesus also told a story about a brother who got the shaft. One of the Jesuits at the college I went to told me that he hated the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-31.) He said he always felt sorry for the dutiful older brother, who stayed home, worked hard and behaved responsibly—and never squandered the family fortune on prostitutes as his younger brother did .</span></span></div><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!</span></i><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[vi]</span></a></span></span></span></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Traditionally pious interpretation of this story says that we are all in the position of the irresponsible younger brother relative to God, and that to identify with the dependable elder brother is a sign of self-righteousness—but I don’t think one needs to be particularly sanctimonious to think that the elder brother got the short end of the stick.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Everyone lives a theology, one of my students once said, whether they articulate one or not. The life we live proclaims the God in whom we believe, so it is good to pay attention to what we say with our lives. Likewise, we can gain a lot by becoming aware of the myths we live. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sometimes myths work covertly beneath the surface, like the Oedipus and Elektra myths during our sexual maturation (if we are to believe Freud and Jung.) But if we become aware of them, and of how they intersect with our own reality, we can open ourselves up to them so that they become a source of power, entering into our quotidian lives and lighting them up from the inside, like a candle in a Chinese lantern. They can make us see the resonance and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">gravitas</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> of our lives as lived.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Easter myth should do that for me; the death and resurrection of Jesus is, after all, the main event of the Christian faith. It’s really what we hang our hats on. “If Christ has not been raised,” Paul told the church at Corinth, “your faith is futile.”</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[vii]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Many of my happiest childhood memories are of Easter—the music, the flowers, the return of spring after the long Upstate New York winter, the general good mood of everyone around me and the wonderful story at the center of everything. When I was a kid, the giddy triumphalism of Easter was enough—and Easter still “works” on me: still fills me with profound gratitude and a warm sense of well-being. But as I grow older, I find that that is no longer enough. I want to live Easter—want it to light me up from inside. If you have not lived through something, it is not true.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“No one takes (my life) from me,” Jesus told his disciples, “but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again</span></span><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[viii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But do I have a life worth laying down? Is there any meaning in sacrificing what I never really made anything of by worldly standards? </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I built a life for myself—the life of a composer-academic. I can’t say from this distance why I built that Frankenstein’s monster of a life, but I did, and it took an enormous outlay of time, effort and cash to do it. Maybe that would be a worthy sacrifice. But that life never amounted to much, as it turned out, and it didn’t really seem to be going anywhere when I walked away from it almost a year ago. There’s a Hindu story about a farmer pouring threshed grain out of a tower so the wind could carry away the chaff; when the wind unexpectedly picked up and began blowing away the grain, too, he decided to give the grain to God, since it wasn’t going to do him any good anyway. Obviously, there is no merit in a “sacrifice” like that. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Besides, something in me still clings to that life. Though I have turned my back on it, I have never really let it die. Sometimes I miss teaching fiercely; I still hear things on NPR and think, “I should download a podcast of that for class”—still read things in the paper and mark how useful they would be as teaching aids. I still fantasize about the university seeing the error of its ways and calling to ask me to accept a fulltime job, with time already served counting toward tenure. Even though part of me believes that “clinging to life causes life to decay,” while “the life that is freely given is eternal”--even though I dearly want to lay down that life and be raised to a new one--I have not yet pulled the plug on my do-it-yourself life. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But then, can any of us really give anything to God? Is anything really ours to give? “Everything comes from you,” King David prayed, “and we have given you only what comes from your hand.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn9" name="_ednref9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[ix]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> True, we may have worked for what we have, but even the ability to work is a gift. “To work you have the right,” Krishna told Arjuna, “but not to the fruits thereof.”</span><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[x]</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> How can we offer what is not ours to give?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""></a></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Those of us who have a Eucharistic understanding of Holy Communion—who believe that Jesus is present in the gifts offered on the altar—actually have this modeled for us week after week: the best thing we can give to God is God. That’s what we offer in the Mass: God in the bread and wine, and “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn11" name="_ednref11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[xi]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> God gives God, Whom we offer back to God wrapped in ourselves. “God</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> is the offering, the one who offers, and the fire that consumes.”</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn12" name="_ednref12" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[xii]</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">God didn’t raise Jesus the Rabbi from the dead, or Jesus the carpenter’s son from Nazareth, or Jesus who liked to eat and drink</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=5982315938145222312#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">—those are all too small, too partial, too incidental. God raised Jesus the Son of God—the Essential Being, the Absolute Core Identity, the unchanging, eternal, inmost Self. The other, contingent stuff, what we usually identify as our “selves,” died and was left behind, like the shroud in the tomb—or at least, it took on a less rigid, less definitive, less substantial nature. Consider: in two of the best-known post-Resurrection stories—Jesus feeding his fisherman disciples breakfast by the Lake of Tiberias (John 21:1-14) and Jesus meeting another group of disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35)—the disciples, significantly, do not recognize their Lord at first sight. By the lake, the account says the disciples didn’t dare ask Him who He was because they “knew” it was Jesus—a strange thing to say if they simply recognized Him by sight. On the Emmaus road, the travelers’ “hearts were burning” while he explained to them that the Christ had to suffer before entering into His glory, but they didn’t definitively recognize Him until He asked the blessing and broke the bread at table. So they didn’t know Him by His appearance, or his gait, or his hillbilly accent; apparently, he didn’t even have those things any more—or if He did, He held them lightly enough that they didn’t give Him away. </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It seems, then, that the things Jesus did after He rose—bringing about a miraculous catch of fish, feeding people, teaching, charging them with each other’s care (“Simon, son of John…feed my lambs”) are of the undying, central Self, and they enabled the disciples to recognize in Him the Anointed One. They knew Him when God shone in Him. But whatever made Jesus immediately recognizable as a Galilean, an itinerant teacher, a person answering to a particular description, had fallen away, or become muted, effaced, attenuated to the point where they no longer took center stage.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">There is a Zen Buddhist exercise in which one asks, “Who am I?”, and then replies, to each answer that presents itself, “That is not who I am.” All those answers have to do with what are called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">nama </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">rupa</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> in Sanskrit: "name" and "form," not essential reality. The Risen Christ has no political affiliation, religious denomination, race, ethnicity, country of origin, native language, titles or degrees—none of the things which we regard as the fixed and solid constituents of our identities. If we would die and rise with Christ, we must hold lightly to those things, too.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I believe that we have so much conflict in this country now because so many of us cling mightily to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I am, I’m from, I know, I believe, I will, I won’t. </span></i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If we could loosen our hold on these things, we would hear and understand each other better; we could see more possibilities, and we would have more peace.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Maybe the paste-up life I made for myself-- father, husband, performer, musician, writer, teacher—is what I need to be prepared to let go of, so that the essential kernel of me can bear fruit. Maybe we all need to be prepared to give up everything that we think makes us identifiable—all those passing-away autobiographical things we have so laboriously put on like stage costumes. If that’s what needs to die in order for the radiant new creation to be born—if that’s what it will take for the Easter myth to shine in me from within—then God help me to give it. Let me lay it all down, trusting in the gift of a larger life, so that if any come seeking the old, false me in days to come, Easter may shine through me, saying, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he is risen!</span></i></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=5982315938145222312#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[ii]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><br />
</div></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;"><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=5982315938145222312#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> See Matthew 11:19</span></div></div><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=5982315938145222312#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[ii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Luke 24:5-6</span></div></div></div></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Moore, Thomas, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Care of the Soul. </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Harper Perennial, 1994. (page 11)</span></span></div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><div id="edn2"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[ii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> “How Much is Not True,” by Kabir. Translated by Robert Bly. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">. Harper Perennial, 1993. (page 282)</span></span></div></div><div id="edn3"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[iii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Keillor, Garrison, “The Babe,” in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Stories: An Audio Collection. </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Highbridge Audio (1993)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="edn4"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[iv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Percy, Walker. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The Message in the Bottle</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div></div><div id="edn5"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[v]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Luke 16: 8b (New Living Translation)</span></div></div><div id="edn6"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[vi]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Luke 15: 29-30</span></div></div><div id="edn7"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[vii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> 1 Corinthians 15:17</span></div></div><div id="edn8"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref8" name="_edn8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[viii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> John 10:18</span></div></div><div id="edn9"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref9" name="_edn9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[ix]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> 1 Chronicles 29: 14b</span></div></div><div id="edn10"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref10" name="_edn10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[x]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Bhagavad Gita 2:47, as translated by Sri Ramakrishna according to Swami Vivekananda</span></div></div><div id="edn11"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref11" name="_edn11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[xi]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Book of Common Prayer</span></div></div><div id="edn12"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref12" name="_edn12" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[xii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Bhagavad Gita 4:24a; translation http://www.indiadivine.org/audarya/shakti-sadhana/179470-divine-mother-shiva-pujas-om.html</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn13"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref13" name="_edn13" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[xiii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> See Matthew 11:19</span></div></div><div id="edn14" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref14" name="_edn14" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[xiv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Luke 24:5-6</span></div></div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-79162655164668545962010-03-12T14:02:00.009-05:002010-03-24T08:51:33.879-04:00The Squirrels Have the Conn<div class="Section1"><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">–C.S. Lewis, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Screwtape Letters</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It was happening again. After several weeks of living in a sort of energized serenity, enthusiastic about my goals and confident in my ability to move toward them, I felt as though my brain’s remote control had been hijacked by hyperactive squirrels. I found it immensely hard to concentrate on anything, and couldn’t seem to find the time for any of the things I was supposed to be doing. The squirrels kept changing the channel in my head.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I used to think these occasional hijackings were a simple periodical phenomenon, like biorhythms, but I have come to believe they have a definable cause. It’s like this: A few years ago Jerry Falwell and Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State appeared together on CNBC’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Capital Report.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">For several months, Falwell had been attempting to embolden conservative churches into endorsing candidates by persuading them that the IRS had no power to enforce tax law. As evidence, he asserted that his Old Time Gospel Hour ministry had never had its tax-exempt status revoked despite plenty of overtly partisan politicking. When Lynn attempted to expose this canard, Falwell called him a liar. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">After the CNBC debate, Lynn obtained a copy of the 1993 IRS document comprising Falwell’s agreement to pay $50,000 in back taxes. It seems the IRS </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">had</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> retroactively revoked Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87, when Falwell was using the program to endorse candidates. The document bore Falwell’s signature.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">About a month later, Lynn and Falwell were again debating, this time on the Fox News Channel. When Falwell again denied having ever been penalized for improper political activity, Lynn produced the IRS document. As soon as he realized what Lynn was about to show for the cameras, Falwell went berserk, shouting at Lynn and the host and attempting to prevent the paper’s being filmed.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is what happens inside my head. As soon as I get too close to seeing something in there that my inner Jerry Falwell doesn’t want me to see, he cries havoc and lets slip the squirrels of war. And gives them coffee. And they start changing the channel every few seconds, drawing my attention toward memories, anticipations, fantasies and daydreams, “conversations with people who aren’t there”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[ii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">—anything, in fact, but the man behind the curtain, that thing they are charged with keeping out of my awareness.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Maybe it is actually the Devil in my head, masquerading as Jerry Falwell. As a matter of fact, I am coming to believe that if “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[iii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> have an objective existence, it is as a sort of psychic parasite on our own minds, exploiting our self-deceptive tendencies from within. Marianne Williamson said that one of her friends had tried to persuade her that the Devil was all in her head. “That is the worst place he could possibly be!” she rejoined. “That is not good news! If he were either stalking the earth somewhere…or between your ears, where would you rather he be?”</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="Section2"><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So how do we disempower the Devil and his army of squirrels in our heads? If the way to defeat a blackmailer is to come clean about whatever he is threatening to expose, and if these squirrels are working in collaboration with my own self-deceptive desires, maybe the approach should be the same: come right out and confront the things that the squirrels and I are hiding from me. I think I know what some of them are:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">·</span><span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I never advanced beyond a middling point in academia because I am a mediocre academic</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“Our duties are determined by our deserts to a much larger extent than we are willing to grant</span><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">."</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[iv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Maybe I wasn’t robbed; maybe I actually got what I was fit for.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">·</span><span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If I had applied myself more in school, I would have a fulfilling career now. Plenty of people who worked harder, not smarter during our school days are now in a position to hire me.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">·</span><span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I can’t get my classical music performed because it’s just not as good as I think it is. As cartoonist Adam Green put it, “Is there anything more knee-slappingly hilarious than the delusion of one who believes they will be paid for their meager so-called talent?”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: #505a34; font-family: Helvetica;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[v]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">·</span><span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Even if anything should work out for me now, I’m too old at this point to make something of myself anyway.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I made this list, and it rings true as far as it goes; before my latest attack of squirrelophrenia, I had caught a glimpse of these conclusions, and the sudden violence of the attack seems to indicate that it was meant to keep me from going any further down that road. After all, if I “give up all hope of fruition,” as the Buddhists say, the Squirrelmaster loses one of his most powerful means of keeping me miserable.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And yet, something seems missing; the list feels incomplete. I can’t shake the feeling that there is something larger, some overarching truth that embraces all of these and better explains the Herculean labors of the squirrels to distract me. Moreover, although I suspect that the above statements are to a greater or lesser extent true, I can still posit mitigations to all of them—they are all relative, and therefore still open to amendment and clarification. There must be some absolutely simple, clear and incontrovertible truth whose power for change is great enough to move the Devil to arm his collaborators in my head in order to keep it out of the light.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">As it happens, recent events brought this latest attack to an abrupt end. I had scheduled a root canal for the morning, after which my family had planned to drive down to D.C. to visit my wife’s mother and stepfather, who is in the last stages of cancer and is not expected to live more than one to three months. As I drove around looking for a parking space, I saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser in my rearview mirror and pulled over. As I sat in the car waiting for what seemed like a long time, a second police car pulled up. Trying to look nonchalant, I pulled out my license and registration, and discovered that the latter had expired. And things were destined to get worse, as I could tell by the flashing lights and radio sounds all around me. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I should explain that I ordinarily drive our Toyota Rav 4—the “kid car,” as my children call it—since I do the lion’s share of the family driving. On this particular morning I was driving our Saturn wagon, which generally sits by the curb waiting for my wife to take it, rather than the train, to work. So because I hardly ever drive this car, its paperwork had developed what Douglas Adams called a “Somebody Else’s Problem Field” (S.E.P. field for short) around it. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So I am pulled over one block away from my endodontist’s office, twenty minutes before my scheduled root canal, and I have no idea how long this is all going to take. When I learn from the officer—who had somehow seen from his car as mine went by that my inspection was past due, which was what precipitated the whole thing—that my registration, inspection and emissions were all expired, I decide to call my wife to let her know what’s going on and ask her to call the endodontist. Unable to get my phone out while sitting down, I stand up next to my car and dial the phone. The cop starts screaming something about getting back in the car unless I wanted a pair of handcuffs. (Why do they act like that?) I got back in and, when he inexplicably stalks over anyway to yell at me to get in, I ask if I should call off my appointment. All he will do in response is yell “Get in the car” again. Understand that I am </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in the car</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> at the time. (</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Why</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> do they act like that?) Hands shaking, I call my wife and tell her what’s going on. She does her best to calm me down, and says she will let the endodontist know I will be late.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Ultimately, they tow my car away. Fifteen minutes later, I am sitting in the chair with a anesthetic swab between my cheek and gum and my car on its way to the police impound lot, about to have a root canal before my wife picks me up to go visit my dying stepfather-in-law. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We finally got to DC and saw him. My mother-in-law showed us pictures of him from earlier in the week, sitting up in bed alertly talking with an old friend who had come in to town to see him. It was hard to connect the person in those pictures to the sallow, semiconscious figure on the hospital bed in the living room. It’s astonishing how steeply and abruptly a person with cancer can decline. It makes one acutely aware of one’s mortality.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">As I prepared for bed with the Compline, or Night Prayer, service from the Book of Common Prayer, I actually felt more thankful than anything else, strangely enough. I had been in the present all day, and notwithstanding the state of the present--which teetered between the somber and the surreal--it was a good day. Far better than the squirrels would have arranged. Once outside my own head, I was beyond their reach.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Which didn't stop strange things from happening inside my head. Some weeks later I had what now appears to have been a migraine aura—a strange visual disturbance that made it seem as though someone had smeared living, squirming Vaseline all around the periphery of my visual field, while shimmering zig-zag lines occasionally floated into view. I also felt a little dizzy and shaky. And while none of these symptoms may seem particularly alarming, I had never had a migraine before (that I knew of) and didn’t know what an aura looked like—neither did I know that they are more common in men than in women, or that they tend to occur “later in life.” </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Now, in spite of carrying some extra weight, I am in pretty good health; my blood pressure was 116/63 last time I had it checked, and my resting pulse 64. But when a doctor who happened to be nearby began asking me questions about funny smells or tastes, numbness and tingling—questions that made it clear that he suspected a stroke—I began to panic a little. So many of my aunts and uncles succumbed in their fifties to heart attacks while I was growing up—one of my cousins was thirty years old when she died—that an infarct is more or less my go-to fear. (That, and the cancer that killed my mother.) Frightened that I was having a stroke, I became so pale and alarming that my friends called my wife to leave work and take me home. (It must sound by this point that I spend most of my time being picked up by my wife. I don’t.)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of course, I felt ridiculous on the surface—I was, after all, just fine—but deeper down I knew I had something very important to learn from the incident: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I am not reconciled to the inevitability of old age, sickness and death. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I think this must be the real truth that the squirrels have been charged with hiding. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Don’t let him think about it,</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> they’ve been told. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You know what Samuel Johnson said: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. If we allow this guy to come to terms with his mortality, he will be unstoppable. Where’s that remote? </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I heard Bhagavan Das tell a story about a sea turtle in the depths of the ocean who comes up and, as if by chance, puts its head through a small wooden ring floating on the surface. The probability of this happening, he said, is the same as the probability of a human birth. So a human birth is an immeasurably precious thing, and there are both a staggering opportunity and an immense responsibility bound up with this earthly life. Consider the familiar Parable of the Talents:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(The Kingdom of Heaven) will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money.</span></i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. 'Master,' he said, 'you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more.' His master replied, 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!'</span></i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> The man with the two talents also came. 'Master,' he said, 'you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.' His master replied, 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!'</span></i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Then the man who had received the one talent came. 'Master,' he said, ‘… I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.'</span></i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> His master replied, 'You wicked, lazy servant!...</span></i></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.'</span></i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[vi]</span></i></span></span></span></a></blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The servants, of course, represent all of us—this is the situation in which we all find ourselves. When we come to give an account of our lives, what return will we be able to make on the talents with which we have been invested? </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I took my children to a maple sugaring festival along with a friend of theirs from school. Run by the city, the festival is an impoverished affair without any music, so as I often do I brought along my concertina. As I sat on a bench and played some old American tunes, a few curious children and their parents stopped to listen. Off to one side, I heard a mom drawing her little girl’s attention to what I was doing. “Look at that, honey—do you know what that is?” she asked. “An old man?” the little girl replied.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(Breathe…breathe…)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Now, any normal forty-five-year-old person might think this funny, in a cute, Art Linkletter sort of way. But it bothered me. A lot. And it still does. I’d like to say that I couldn’t tell you why, but it wouldn’t be true. When I heard the words “old man,” the old man that came to mind was the one Walt Whitman wrote of, “who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall.” </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Thank you in advance, but don’t bother telling me this isn’t true, because I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">know</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> it isn’t. I have two fantastic children and a wonderful wife who puts up with my mishegoss; I am still making music and doing my best to alleviate the suffering of my fellow creatures. But in spite of everything I have always thought I believed, I still struggle to find peace with the fact that I am probably more than halfway through my life without anything to show that I am, in any worldly sense, a “success.” I haven’t set the world on fire! I haven’t “made a difference!” If I were George Bailey, I’d have gone to jail!</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Insufferable, I know. And yes, I am mentally ill. But I don’t believe I am alone in this. Isn’t our whole culture frantic to keep us distracted? There are now video screens at the gas pump. We can watch movies on our phones. A former vice-presidential candidate is apparently pitching a reality show. Shopping malls surpassed historical sites as tourist destinations years ago. The interactive TV walls Ray Bradbury envisioned in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Fahrenheit 451</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> have become a reality (as have many other things in that remarkably prescient book.) News has degenerated into entertainment, while entertainment has been elevated to news. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of course, the circus master Sleary in Dickens’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Hard Times</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> was right: people must be amused; they can’t always working, nor always learning. But we as a society are, as sociologist Neil Postman put it, “amusing ourselves to death.” What are we as a people trying so desperately not to face?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Yes, we don’t want to think about death. And there are a lot of frightening things afoot these days that are hard to confront, from climate change to resistant disease germs to transforming demographics. Our children will inherit an unstable world from us after we die, which will not be very long from now. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But I think there is more to it than that. I believe that not only do we not want to think about death—we don’t want to think about life, either. We have a high calling, we humans. When my children try to sneak away from the table without drinking their milk, I remind them that a farmer and a cow worked hard to make that milk, and it won’t do to waste it. Well, the universe has labored to make us, and yet we let ourselves go to waste. Though we don’t like to think about it, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: #08131f; font-family: ArialMT;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[vii]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> And in order not to face the charge we have to keep, we allow the squirrels to direct our attention here, there, everywhere but the present moment—which is, as they know, precisely where the treasure is. Now is the day of salvation.</span><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title="">[viii]</a></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
In the midst of life, we are in death, the Book of Common Prayer tells us. Our lives are precious, and they are finite. Work while you have the light.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So I’m going to stay aware of the squirrels; they can change the channel, but they cannot make me watch. They cannot hide themselves along with the things they’re trying to keep me from seeing. Even in the midst of distraction, I’m going to keep doing my best to redirect my attention to the present moment and the revelations it contains. Life, as poet R. S. Thomas put it, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoList"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">…is not hurrying</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList"><br />
</div><div class="MsoList" style="margin-left: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">on to a receding future, nor hankering after </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">an imagined past. It is the turning </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">aside like Moses to the miracle </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">of the lit bush, to a brightness </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">that seemed as transitory as your youth </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">once, but is the eternity that awaits you.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoList"><br />
</div><div class="MsoList"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The squirrels got nothing on that.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 19.0pt; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> http://www.thefreelibrary.com/At+the+Falwell+follies:+Jerry+finally+'fesses+up+on+Fox+News+Channel.-a0122553390</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn2"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[ii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> A nod to Anne LaMott’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Bird by Bird</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div></div><div id="edn3"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[iii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Baptismal vows, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Book of Common Prayer</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div></div><div id="edn4"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[iv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Vivekananda, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga. </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="edn5"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[v]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> http://www.adamgreenonline.com/newsletters_2006/trib050995.html</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn6"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[vi]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Matthew 25: 14-29, edited for length</span></div></div><div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[vii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Romans 8:22</span></div></div><div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-21828084814393001312010-03-05T10:22:00.000-05:002010-03-05T10:22:43.261-05:00Participation Trophy<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(Colossians 1:15)</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">(Genesis 1:27)</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“Realized there are 10 movies nominated for Best Pic,” read a friend’s Facebook status. “Looks like all the kids who got 'participation trophies' are now grown up.” The implication being, I suppose, that receiving ‘participation trophies’—or simply growing up in a culture that gave prizes to kids just for showing up—has turned a generation into entitled hellions. But while there may be a cohort of young people out there with an inflated sense of what they have coming to them, I think the trophies have become a lightning rod. First, where older kids are concerned, they hardly seem capable of inflating anyone’s self-concept.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i>…(T)he expression “trophy kids” misses a rather important point: It sucks to get one of those participation trophies… Every time I looked at them, I felt embarrassed. They were reminders of my ineptitude, because I knew I didn’t earn them. No young athlete with any sense of perspective would mistake those trophies for genuine celebrations of accomplishment. My classmates and I joked about them; we rolled our eyes when they were passed out at end-of-season pizza parties.[i]</i></span></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Second, some people still think the trophies are good for the littlest kids--especially those who come from less-nurturing home environments. If you’d never been told in your life that you were good at anything, imagine what a difference a trophy could make. It’s fashionable to grouse that self-esteem has to be earned--“Self-esteem does not lead to success in life,” said one anti-trophy pundit;</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: ArialMT;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[ii]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> “Self-discipline and self-control do”--but no one can earn anything if they don’t believe they have any personal capital. Kids need to believe they have a self worth controlling. You have to prime the pump a little.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Having said that, I’m not prepared to weigh in on whether we ought to give participation trophies or not—but I do think the controversy surrounding them is beside the point where self-esteem is concerned. If a positive self-image is the goal, these trophies are decidedly downstream ministry. (Downstream ministry, as I heard someone put it once, “reaches into the river of despair and pulls out drowning souls,” while upstream ministry “finds out who’s throwing them in and makes them stop.”) I’m interested in why kids come to school needing a plastic trophy to feel good about themselves in the first place. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’ve known people who actually believe that self-esteem is a bad thing—that we really are caught in a Calvinist nightmare in which a keen sense of our own depravity is all that can save us from self-indulgence, indolence and moral decay. And while of course an appropriate sense of our shortcomings is essential if we are to overcome them, the sins that I-am-a-worm-and-no-man self-loathing is meant to forestall are not the result of self-love. We take it for granted, for instance, that over-indulgence of others is not really showing them love, yet automatically identify self-indulgence with self-love. But that’s not what self-indulgence is. Anyone who’s ever been or known an addicted person, for instance, knows that people don’t indulge themselves out of self-love, but in a desperate bid to fill the “god-shaped hole” inside them. People are lazy because they do not believe industry worthwhile, immoral because they see themselves as bad. Self-esteem is the foundation of self-discipline and self-control, not a hindrance to them. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor,” said the hard-pressed Puritan in Arthur Miller’s play, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Crucible.</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> “Not enough to weave a banner with, but white enough to keep it from such dogs.” Proctor was lucky; those who see no shred of goodness in themselves do not bother.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“Self-love, not sex, is his woe,” screamed the headline about the sports analyst in the wake of a sex scandal.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[iii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> But grow men don’t cheat on their wives with 22-year-olds because they love themselves—they do it because they see no shred of goodness in themselves to keep white.</span><span style="font-family: LucidaGrande;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It would probably help if we had a more precise word for “self-love.” The Countess Olivia in Shakepeare’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Twelfth Night </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">told her killjoy steward Malvolio (also a Puritan) that he was “sick” with it—but Malvolio’s supercilious self-righteousness, browbeating and social ambition are really the stuff of self-loathing, not self-love. If he really had a healthy love for himself, he wouldn’t need to look down his nose at everybody. We are called upon to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If a biology professor in Alabama</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[iv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> punches a fellow restaurant customer in the head for taking the last booster seat, all the while screaming “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” it isn’t because she loves herself too much; if she loved herself, giving up the last booster in the IHOP wouldn’t diminish her personally. She uses her name, and whatever accomplishments and human value it supposedly represents, as a kind of kryptonite against those she perceives as a threat and, alarmed when it doesn’t work, lashes out violently in order, not to get a booster seat, but to avoid facing the real emptiness of that carefully-constructed identity. If she later shoots six members of her department who have denied her tenure, again, it isn’t because she loves herself too much. She doesn’t even know who she is, and the possibility that the self she built out of academic ambition and a fudged résumé may not be real or meaningful terrifies her. She will kill to defend that self, rather than face the emptiness she fears underneath it. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“Go down low, low, low as you can go,” said accused anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins, “then dig forever, and you’ll find me, my psyche.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[v]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Human beings made in the image of God mistreat each other because we think, not too much of ourselves, but too little.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The more I become aware of the real being that I am, the easier it will be for me to see the real beings that others are. My perception of the world, or the way I relate to the world, depends on my perception of myself, the way I relate to myself…If I don’t see that I am a child of God, it will be very difficult for me to see that the person in front of me is also a child of God.</span></i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: none;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[vi]</span></i></span></span></span></a></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is the real problem that participation trophies—and all other worldly awards and rewards--fail to address. People who really know that they are God’s children do not </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">need </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">prizes, or</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">retail therapy”, or </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">need</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> so badly for things to be a certain way that they will scream at a public official in a town hall meeting, or </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">need</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> a drink, or dismiss rural people as “shitkickers”, or </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">need </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">the acceptance represented by tenure so much that they will kill if denied it. A kid who knows she is the Image of God does not need a participation trophy, while a kid who doesn’t will not be helped by one where help is needed most. And I worry that we are teaching kids to want tokens of recognition—which are not bad things in themselves—as a substitute for teaching them who they really are, which is the Pearl of Great Price. The things we want are notoriously bad stewards of our identities and happiness. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[vii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The importance of self-esteem to spiritual growth may be hard to see because so many stories of saints and ascetics often appear at first to be chronicles of masochistic self-loathing. But I have come to believe that self-denial can actually be a sign of a true and healthy self-love. We deny things to our children because we love them, to teach them to delay gratification lest they trade in what they want most for what they want now. Though Madison Avenue would have us believe that we should indulge ourselves because we’re “worth it,” that isn’t actually why we indulge ourselves most of the time. We indulge ourselves because we think the desired object or experience will fill our inner void. But when we are really on our game, knowing that we are “worth it” can lead us to practice loving self-denial. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">St. Francis</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> includes a number of incidents which, while they never actually occurred in real life, are much in keeping with the spirit of Francis and his followers. In one alarming episode, Francis’s disciple Brother Giles stands up in a public square with a basket of figs and announces that he will give one to whoever slaps him once, while anyone who slaps him twice will receive two. Things fall out as you’d expect, and Giles rapturously reports to Francis the success of the experiment.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I had a strong, and strongly ambivalent, reaction to this story. On the one hand, the apparent unbridled self-hatred of it is appalling, especially when portrayed as an aid to spiritual progress. But on the other hand, I found—and still find—the story powerfully compelling. I was convinced that there was some genuine wisdom in it (and in similar events in the actual lives of the early Franciscans) but, couched at it was in such off-putting terms, I couldn’t get at it until many years later, when I had a personal epiphany about suffering and self-worth.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I was in the kitchen (as I often am when I have epiphanies, my other revelatory venue being the shower) with my infant Sophie screaming her head off on my shoulder, and my toddler Clare wrapped around my leg crying “Uppy! Uppy!” with all the apocalyptic pathos of which toddlers are capable. Having frantically tried everything I could think of to make the screaming stop, I suddenly stopped myself, as the dawning realization lit up within me: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It just doesn’t matter what I want! </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">When that thought came to me, I stood still and laughed out loud. My children were not going to stop screaming no matter what I did, it didn’t matter that it was making me miserable, and it was all OK! We expend a staggering amount of psychic calories in self-assertion, in defending our right to exist and be right. If people don’t do what we want, we assume that it </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">means</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> something about </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">us. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We need to win in order to prove that we are good. This is the real root of self-will: not self-love, but insecurity and self-doubt. It doesn’t have to matter so much what we want if we know who we are.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“Everything that we do has a kind of basic mantra behind it, like “What about me?”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[viii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">” It’s exhausting and, like beating your head against a wall, it feels </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">so </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">good when you stop.</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But the absolutely indispensable thing that enables us to stop the mantra without falling into despair—to really believe that we will continue to matter after we stop inwardly screaming that we do--is self-esteem: the unshakeable realization that we are Children of God, made in God’s image, and nothing bar nothing can change or diminish that. Your slap cannot touch me; here’s your fig.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">After Paul and some other apostles were hailed before the Sanhedrin and flogged, they left “rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn9" name="_ednref9" title=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[ix]</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">” This passage astonished me when I first read it, and still convicts me of pettiness and ingratitude whenever I catch myself sulking because someone has failed to show me what I consider due deference.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The apostles knew that their real selves remained untouched by flogging, and that “disgrace” in the eyes of the Council did not make a particle of difference to their real lives, “hidden with Christ in God.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn10" name="_ednref10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[x]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> If that isn’t self-esteem—being beyond the dirty devices and brute broken nails of the world--I can’t imagine what is.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Maybe it would help if we used the Sanskrit word </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">maitri</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> in preference to the loaded “self-esteem.” </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Maitri,</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> as Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explains, “is translated in a lot of ways, maybe most commonly as </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">love,</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> but the way (my teacher) Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche translated it was </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">unconditional friendliness</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> and in particular </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">unconditional friendliness to oneself.”</span></i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn11" name="_ednref11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[xi]</span></i></span></span></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We can be unconditionally friendly to someone without indulging them, or failing to hold them to account, or telling them flattering untruths. I think the early Franciscan cultivation of radical humility was, at the same time, an affirmation of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">maitri. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You may slap me, and it doesn’t actually mean a thing. My children may continue to scream, and it doesn’t diminish me in the least. Maybe Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek because He knows who we are better than we do.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A friend of mine used to be absolutely frantic for “success” in the pop music world. One morning as we drove to a festival we were performing at, he attempted to stick a label on a demo CD to give to someone he had heard might be there. The car hit a bump, and the CD was ruined. My friend fell into dejection; a potential opportunity had been lost!</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Some five years later, I walked into his studio and congratulated him on being named Artist of the Month on one of the XM radio stations. He shrugged; “It’s not like my life is any different,” he said with a rueful smile. During those intervening years, my friend had learned where his self-worth actually lay. He still works hard and is still doing well, but the desperation is gone. “Succeeding” is just a matter of making a living in his chosen field, and no longer a matter of proving his personal value.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The trouble is that we look for the trophies—we take the world so much at its word in its estimate of our value. Happily, a little distraction can help draw our attention away from our carefully-constructed identities and what we believe are their needs, allowing us to remember who we really are. For instance, a college classmate of mine who has built a successful career as an actor told me how much perspective fatherhood has given him.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“I’ll be waiting to go into an audition,” he said, “and I’ll suddenly remember: ‘Oh, right—this </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">isn’t</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> the most important thing in the world!’” Fatherhood is. So he relaxes. And interestingly—as many of you reading this can probably attest—this kind of knowledge of one’s true value and identity is, far from being a handicap, actually an asset. Nothing makes the universe hide the keys like desperation. A person who has seen the Image of God in himself doesn’t get hooked as easily, doesn’t need so badly to fill up any internal void—and it shows. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Growing up, I was always told how brilliant I was. Although I was a classic underachiever, IQ tests and the like seemed to bear out those early assessments. As my later life failed to deliver the trophies that all the early prognostications seemed to have promised, I became increasingly desperate to succeed at something, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">anything; </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">it became unthinkable that I should never have anything to “show” for all those brains I supposedly had. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">My wife hates it when I put a pot of tea in the oven to keep warm, because it’s such an inefficient use of energy. I often identified with the oven: though I never lacked for work to do, it never seemed like the work was worth all I had to give to it. I had placed all the eggs of my self-worth in the basket of success, and not until very late did I begin to believe that I could be happy without setting the world on fire.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is why we need to stop telling people that “God has a plan for your life.” For most of my adult life I have felt like Willem in the movie </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Mallrats,</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> staring at a Magic Eye picture in which everyone can see the hidden image but him. Where’s the plan, I said for years; show me the plan! It all seemed so cruel; if God has a plan for my life, why does one thing after another not work out? “Do you even believe in God any more?” my wife finally asked. “It would hurt a lot less if I didn’t,” I told her.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I have come to believe that God doesn’t have a plan for my life any more than I do for my children’s lives. All I want for my children is to know that they are a part of me and I love them—that they are the Pearl of Great Price, made in the image of God. I just want them to be happy whether they set the world on fire or not. I want them to have </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">maitri </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and be at peace with themselves</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If God has a plan, that has to be it.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">When my mom, dying of cancer, was coming to grips with the impossibility of returning to teaching, she said to me, “If I’m not a teacher, what am I?” A Woodrow Wilson Fellow, she had for years been offered lab assistant and other low-status jobs because of her gender. By dint of brains, unremitting hard work and sheer doggedness, she became head of the biology department at an upstate New York college. An adult child of alcoholics, she had, I believe, spent her whole life establishing the self-worth that her childhood had failed to give her. Even with her strong Christian faith, she had allowed her identity to become bound up with her profession to the extent that no longer teaching left her in danger of thinking herself a non-person. If I could have that moment back, here’s what I would tell her: </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You are a Child of God; you share spiritual DNA with Jesus, the Image of the Invisible God in Whose image you are also made. You are a seat of the divine spark. You are beloved of your family and respected by your peers and those are very good things, but they are not who you are. You have your trophies, and you earned them, but they do not matter. You are the Pearl of Great Price. And I would tell her what Joshua Ben Levi, a Rabbi of the Talmud, said:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A procession of angels pass before a human being wherever he or she goes, proclaiming, “Make way for the image of God.” </span></i></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> <div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;">[</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Bosch, Torie, in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Slate, </span></i><span style="color: #2e2d2e; font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/enough-trophy-kid-talk</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div></div><div id="edn2"> <div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[ii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="color: #2e2d2e;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, quoted in “What happens when everyone's a winner? Some ask whether feel-good trophies are actually good for children” by Mike Reiss, Boston Globe, February 23, 2006</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn3"> <div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[iii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">MacIntosh, Jean. “</span><span style="font-family: ArialMT;"><a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/steve_gal_self_love_not_sex_is_his_7PNXpEkQvSGVZSTWZt6WDL"><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman"; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Steve gal: Self-love, not sex, is his woe.” New York Post, February 10, 2010</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn4"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[iv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Dewan, Shaila et al. “For Professor, Fury Just Beneath the Surface.” New York Times, February 20, 2010.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn5"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[v]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Shane, Scott, “F.B.I., Laying Out Evidence, Closes Anthrax Case.” New York Times, February 19, 2010.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn6"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[vi]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Swami Tyagananda, lecture on the Kathopanishad, Vedanta Society of Boston, February 9, 2007.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn7"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[vii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Matthew 6:21</span></div></div><div id="edn8"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref8" name="_edn8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[viii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Swami Tyagananda, lecture on the Kathopanishad, Vedanta Society of Boston, February 9, 2007.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div id="edn9"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref9" name="_edn9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[ix]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Act 5:41</span></div></div><div id="edn10"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref10" name="_edn10" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[x]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Colossians 3:3</span></div></div><div id="edn11" style="mso-element: endnote;"> <div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref11" name="_edn11" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[xi]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/maitri1.php</span></i></div></div></div><!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-7696023825974646082010-01-15T09:38:00.008-05:002010-01-15T11:07:50.102-05:00Tipping Point<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Since I quit my job, I have found it increasingly harder to judge anybody. I’ve been on this trajectory for a long time, but the extra time for prayer and spiritual exercise since walking away from teaching last spring has accelerated the process. As I’ve grown older, I have become more compassionate.</span><br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Anyone who knew me when I was younger knows that this was not always the case; as a callow youth I was inordinately self-righteous, quick to judge and to take sides, incredibly slow to repent, always ready to find an excuse for anything I did. I wince when I think of those days, and thank God for allowing me to get over myself to some extent in recent years.</span><br />
<br />
</div></div><span style="font-size: small;">I think it’s normal to grow in tolerance for human frailty as one gains experience; the more we see of life, the harder it becomes to assume we know the whole story. But I wonder what faculties are actually altered by exposure to life—what about us changes as we develop a broader perspective? If we conceive of the moral universe in a charts-and-tables way based on abstractions about “right” and “wrong,” surely that system would remain untouched by the passage of time. But what if increasing maturity reframes the subject, bringing different faculties to bear? What if, while believing we are trying to do the “right” thing, we are actually trying to do something else—and the process of growing up brings us in touch with that?</span><br />
<br />
<div><span style="font-size: small;"> I believe that most of our decisions are, at bottom, aesthetic decisions—including those we might ordinarily categorize as moral. In his Ethics, Aristotle makes the startling but compelling claim that no one can be called truly virtuous who does not take pleasure in virtuous actions. Doing good things grudgingly or under compulsion doesn’t make you good. So perhaps our aesthetic responses—the way we react to things emotionally according to our ideas of beauty--can be an index of moral character, to the extent that they correlate our actions with our pleasures. For instance, if someone does something of which we disapprove, our tendency to also disapprove of the doer will be tempered if we believe that the action pained that person. Conversely, we will more readily hate the sinner along with the sin if we believe the sinner took pleasure in the sinful act. The statement, “This hurts me more than it hurts you” is an attempt to deflect moral culpability by linking the speaker’s actions to pain rather than pleasure for the speaker.</span><br />
<br />
</div><div><span style="font-size: small;"> Three and a half centuries after Aristotle, Jesus implied a similar thing in his Sermon on the Mount. Over against his hearers' received wisdom about righteous behavior, he set a far more stringent requirement of an inwardly righteous disposition.</span><br />
<blockquote><i><span style="font-size: small;">You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment…You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart…You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven…Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">(Matthew 5)</span></span></i><br />
</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">Notice that Jesus doesn’t say the Law is wrong—simply that it isn’t enough, that a deeper conversion is required that goes beyond conventional moral codes.</span><br />
<br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;">The Greeks set “noble and beautiful,” against “ugly and base,” more than they did “right” against “wrong.” (The ancient Hebrews were similarly preoccupied with “honor” vs. “shame.”) One can argue that moral decision-making has more to do with concrete aesthetic responses to certain courses of action than with abstractions about “right” and “wrong.” We do or refrain from doing, not because deeds are “right” or “wrong,” but because they are attractive or repellant.</span><br />
</div><div><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">Consider the well-known story from the Gospel of John:</span></span></span><br />
<blockquote><i><span style="font-size: small;">The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, said to (Jesus,) "Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do you say?" They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him…(Jesus) said to them, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."… When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the eldest, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court…Jesus said to her, "Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?" She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more." </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">(John 8:3-11)</span><br />
</blockquote><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">I have heard this passage ever since I can remember, but I cannot recall ever having heard a sermon mention what to me is a very salient point: <i>the eldest present were the first to leave</i>. The Law made the woman’s adultery and her death-by-stoning morally equivalent, and Jesus did not contradict the Law. Nevertheless the accusers, convicted by Jesus’ words, were unable to fulfill the Law’s requirements. Why? I submit that, through the lens of their own sinfulness, they saw that although stoning the woman was right in the eyes of the Law, at the hands of the sinful self-righteous it would be an ugly act--and the mature onlookers, because of their longer experience of struggling humanity, were the first to realize it.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">There is a kind of moral rigidity that is the province of youth. The less experience one has of the slings and arrows, the easier it is to see the world in primary colors; a sense of moral nuance, like an eye for tints and shades, takes time and experience to develop. As Aristotle warned,</span><br />
</div><blockquote><i><span style="font-size: small;">…the young man is not a fit student of Moral Philosophy, for he has no experience in the actions of life, while all that is said presupposes and is concerned with these: and in the next place, since he is apt to follow the impulses of his passions, he will hear as though he heard not, and to no profit, the end in view being practice and not mere knowledge.</span></i><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></a></i></span></span><br />
</blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">This is the reason, I believe, that the mature are often patronizing at best and dismissive at worst toward the moral certainties of the young. Yes, some of us grown-ups have become cynical, and some are too invested in the status quo to be supportive of the reforming zeal of youth. Many of us are just tired. But most of us also have as keen a sense of justice as in our youth--but, like old warriors, we know better how to apply ourselves. My old dog doesn’t bother to bark at the mailman any more, but the puppy barks at everybody. The dog is as zealous for our safety as the pup—he just knows what’s worth getting excited about and what isn’t.</span><br />
<br />
</div><div><span style="font-size: small;"> I am all in favor of hope and change; I voted for hope and change, and I still believe in them. I write letters for Amnesty, and participate in local relief projects. But I am no longer under any illusion about how my moral energies are best spent, or toward what ends I am really directing them. I realize now that the world will get along fine without me[ii], and that my good works, such as they are, are for the benefit, not of the world, but of myself. And I cringe when I hear how the young and zealous talk about “those people” who, in their ignorance and ill-will, stand in the way of the perfect world they would otherwise have built by now. They may or may not be right, but their contempt is ignoble and their thoughts ugly--as mine have often been. Excess of certainty is still excess.</span><br />
<br />
</div><div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Aristotle defined virtue as the mean between excess and deficiency. One isn’t good because one has a surfeit of some virtuous quality, but because one knows how to walk the thin line between too little of it and too much. Locating that tipping point and maintaining the balance is an aesthetic process, a skill-set one acquires over time, like knowing when to stop adding paint to a picture, notes to a score, words to a story or pepper to a broth. It would take very little exaggeration of the most desirable features in a beautiful face to render the face ugly. The secret of beauty is knowing when enough is enough. </span><br />
<br />
</div></div><span style="font-size: small;">The onlookers who walked away had had enough, and Jesus awakened their aesthetic sense to find the balance between deficiency and excess of justice. In my own moral strivings I have been trying to cultivate the same outlook. It is easy to talk oneself into believing that what one does is just, but it is harder to snow oneself about what is beautiful. I may think it right to scream at a representative during a town hall meeting, but can I really regard it as noble? It may seem right to do unto others as they have done unto us, but can any amount of blather make it seem honorable? I can talk myself into the right forever, but when I try to talk myself into the beautiful, repentance comes.</span><br />
<br />
</div><div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;">“When I was a child,” wrote Paul, “I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”[iii] In America today, we too often mock nuance, on-the-other-hand indecisiveness, and the willingness to change, and we reward those who scorn repentance as weakness. I believe this is because, although we are actually looking for the noble and beautiful, we tell ourselves that we are looking for the right. If we were to know ourselves better and consciously pursue balance, harmony and proportion, we might drop the stones and grow into moral adults.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[i]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Aristotle, </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Ethics</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div></div><div id="edn2"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[ii]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> See Vivekananda, </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Karma Yoga</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div></div><div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[iii]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> 1 Corinthians 13:11</span><br />
</div></div></div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-63200650176560676782009-12-21T08:21:00.004-05:002009-12-21T21:24:20.465-05:00Christmas<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">“Am I too late for breakfast?”</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">“Nah, you’re fine. Actually, I think you’re just too late, period!” He has two eggs cracked and scrambled in a bowl by the time he says this. “Nah, I’m just tranna be a smart-ass!” he adds. His wagon is on a desolate stretch of 8</span><sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup><span style="font-size: small;"> Street between Vine and Spring Garden, with no one for custom or company but Teamsters--striking the Red Cross--and poor saps emerging from traffic court. He is ready to talk.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">“I think the whole god-damn world is too late for somethin’. The Jews say Jesus ain’t God, the Muslims say the Jews ain’t the chosen people, the Buddhists say it’s all bullshit. Christmas is comin’. You heard about the banks? Payin’ back all that bail-out money so they can give themselves their bonuses. It’s all about the money; the whole world is all about the money.”</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">By this time I had my eggs and cheese on a roll, and as I ate, I realized that this culinary philosopher had pretty succinctly described a phenomenon that the Vedas call </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">maya--</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> a word that is usually translated as “illusion,” but which more broadly denotes the fundamentally busted condition of a world that does not perform as advertised, and all the contradictions and perplexities it gives rise to. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">Ecclesiastes, whose near-pagan direness makes it arguably the edgiest book of the Hebrew Bible, (it concludes with an editorial insertion advising the reader to “go no further than this,”) captures this sense of futility:</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><blockquote><i><span style="font-size: small;">Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; everything is vanity! All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea is never filled; the sun rises, and sets, and hastens to the place where it rises. What does a man gain by all the labor at which he toils under the sun? All is vanity and chasing after wind.</span></i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></i></span></span></a><br />
</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">Christmas both mutes and heightens this impression that something under the sun is ferhoodled. On the one hand, people are often more civil and decent to each other. On the other, anything painful or ugly stands out more glaringly against the festive background, even taking on a tint of moral injustice. If people die in June, it’s sad; if they die in late December, it’s “a shame.” </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">One especially wants the season to be magical for children, and this desire for things to be a certain way intensifies the disappointment when the world just goes on being itself. In Betty Smith’s novel </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> Francie and Neely Nolan go at midnight on Christmas Eve to a neighborhood tree vendor to take advantage of the local custom of throwing unsold trees at people; whoever is not knocked down may take the tree home for free. When the vendor sees the two kids, eight and ten years old, with “starveling hollows” in their cheeks but their chins still “baby round,” he undergoes “a kind of Gethsemane.”</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><blockquote><i><span style="font-size: small;">“Oh, Jesus Christ,” his soul agonized, “why don’t I just give ‘em the tree, say Merry Christmas and let ‘em go. What’s the tree to me? I can’t sell it no more this year and it won’t keep till next year…But then,” he rationalized, “if I did that,…next year nobody a-tall would buy a tree off of me. They’d all wait to get ‘em handed to ‘em on a silver plate. I ain’t a big enough man to give this tree away for nothin’…I gotta think of myself and my own kids.</span></i><br />
</blockquote> <span style="font-size: small;">Ultimately, the spirit of </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">maya </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">trumps the spirit of Christmas.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><blockquote><i><span style="font-size: small;">“Oh, what the hell! Them two kids is gotta live is this world. They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and take punishment. And by Jesus, it ain’t give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned world.” As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, “It’s a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!”</span></i><br />
</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">In spite of the rottenness,<i><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">or maybe because of it, I still cling to the Christmas season--can still smell, on a good day, the incense from the Ghost’s benedictory torch. And whatever else I may have failed in as a Dad, I am proud of how my children love Christmas: as a whole month-long global experience of carol singing and Christmas-book reading and cookie-baking and Advent-wreath lighting. Sophie sat on the couch this morning, singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to herself while looking at the pictures of each day in a book.</span></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">I can still vividly see my two-year-old firstborn opening a gift from my Dad and flapping her little arms in excitement when she saw the Fisher-Price toy nativity scene in the box. “KWAYSH!” she crowed, her face beaming. They still play make-believe games together with the figures, improvising little midrashes on the Holy Family’s adventures. (The puppy chewed up a sheep this year; in fact, one of the sheep in my parents’ crèche has a missing leg for the same reason; we had to lean it against the side of the stable throughout my childhood.) More than once I have come downstairs and seen Clare with her chin on her hands, staring at the traditional crèche my parents gave me when I left home. It brings me up short; I stand before me as a living child.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span style="font-size: small;">[ii]</span></a><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
When we are children, we can enter the story with abandon, but as </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">maya</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> does its number on us over the years, our inner vision is clouded and we lose sight of the star. We can no longer find Jesus in the manger, so we stop looking for Him in the office, the street, our homes. The baptismal vow to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself” fades from our intention, and eventually even from our awareness. We become tourists in our own faith.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">As it turns out, the Christmas story, in its historical detail, may be largely spurious. So what, then, is the point of telling it? Does it matter that Jesus was almost certainly not born in Bethlehem, but rather in the backwater hill-town of Nazareth where he grew up? That by his time, peoples’ understanding of prophecy had devolved from the speaking of God’s word to an erring world to soothsaying and fortune-telling, and that the later Gospel writers felt the need to place His birth where Isaiah seemed to have “foretold”? The writer of the earliest Gospel—Mark’s—didn’t even think the circumstances of Jesus’ birth worth recording. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">And it won’t do to use the story as a means of obviating the pain of human life. By all means, have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be bright—but your troubles aren’t going anywhere. So why keep repeating the same incantation against the darkness if the darkness just keeps coming back?</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.5pt; border: none; padding: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the verse that is usually translated “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,” actually says, in the literal Greek, “pitched his tent among us.” Fell in nondescriptly with the rest of us nomads, and went native. Jesus said of himself that he had “no place to lay his head”—which seems fitting for someone born in a truck stop. And if we are all passersby in life, aren’t we all just in temporary shelter here?</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">So are we supposed to be homeless? Or are we rather meant to </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">live as though we were? </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">As though the world were not our gated community, but a cosmic KOA that we were just passing through?</span><i><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> “Be passersby,” Jesus told his disciples in the Gospel of Thomas. And by that I don’t think he meant to be aloof—the Good Samaritan was a passerby—but rather to live as though we weren’t from around here. Pitch your tent, but be ready to strike it. And though in his sojourn he was deeply </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">involved—</span></i><span style="font-size: small;">“he went about doing good, healing all who were oppressed by the devil”—yet he was also </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">unattached, </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">“in this world but not of it.” And though he was a sojourner here,</span><i><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">he didn’t have a return ticket in his pocket, nor did he move through a Potemkin village of a world. He ate with prostitutes, collaborators and other assorted sinners. He laid his hands on lepers. He wasn’t a tourist. In Jesus, God kept it real.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">How does one keep it real as a passerby? How does one move through life, not as a tourist, but as a traveler? Not staying in the expat places where everything is comfortable and familiar, but plunging in with both feet? Maybe that is what Jesus came to show us; maybe that’s what His birth narrative means. How would we treat each other if we made no claims on life, yet still entered fully into the thick of it? </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><blockquote><i><span style="font-size: small;">Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him…When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.</span></i><span style="color: black;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title="">[iii]</a></span></i></span></span><br />
</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">In Jesus, God plunged into the </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">maya</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> with both feet--tied a towel around his waist and got down here amongst us in this confounding, baffling human life. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Which might be why he loved children. Little kids are travelers. They haven’t yet found their place in the world, yet still manage to throw themselves recklessly into it. (At least mine do.) Their disappointments, though keenly felt and vigorously protested, do not take the form of moral outrage at a legitimate claim on life denied. And their capacity for joy is oceanic. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Our ancestors were travelers—strangers and sojourners on earth. I think of this every year at this time as I sing my favorite Yuletide songs—especially the secular ones, which are more honest, and therefore more revealing. Here’s part of an old English wassailing song:</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">Now, Master and Mistress, we know you will give</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">Unto our jolly wassail as long as we live;</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">And if we do live to another new year,</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">We will call in again for to see who is here. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Did you catch that? The people who sang that song </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">did not take it for granted that they would be here in a year’s time.</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> Would not have been outraged to learn they would not, nor assume that anything was therefore wrong or amiss. The life they had was a gift, and the life they lost was part of the order of things. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">For the order of things is gigantic, and though we are bound to work and struggle and do all we can to relieve the suffering of our fellow creatures, we can be under no illusion that we will ever be </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">done—</span></i><span style="font-size: small;">that Pandora can put it all back into the box. </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">This</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> is the day that the </span><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lord </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">has made; work while you have the light, and rejoice in it, because it is all you have. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">The older I get, the more I lose interest in the so-called "Problem of Evil", and the more I think the yogis may be right: the natural universe is here to give human souls experience. It isn’t a problem to be solved. There’s a wonderful 15</span><sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup><span style="font-size: small;">-century English Christmas lyric that briefly alludes to the traditional explanation of why the world is so screwball--Adam and Eve eating that fruit--then moves on to something much more pithy:</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">And all was for an appil, </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">An appil that he took,</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">As clerkes finden</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">Written in their book…</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">Blessed be the time</span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">That appil taken was!</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">Therefore we moun singen</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Deo gracias!</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">These people had an average life expectancy of 35, more of their children died than survived, they wore their hats at the table to keep the lice out of their food, and yet they praised God for the Fall of Man. </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">Blessed be the time that apple taken was. </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">As though Eden had been some kind of infantile Pleasantville. Because the Fall, Original Sin, </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">maya, </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">the First Noble Truth of the Buddha: they are reminders that we are all in this together—that we are all we’ve got, warts and all. And who wants to live in Pleasantville, anyway— the fictitious 50’s sitcom into which two 90’s teenagers are mysteriously transported in the movie of the same name? In Pleasantville--“a place where life is simple, people are perfect, and everything is black and white”—people do not suffer, but they cannot love. Love is too messy a thing for a black-and-white world, and the suffering, sympathetic God is a stranger wherever </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">maya</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> is unknown. </span><i><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">I heard a speaker once who had lived with Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity in India. He told of being at breakfast after morning Mass and seeing a young sister weeping. When Mother Theresa asked her what was wrong, she replied, “Mother, I have touched Jesus.” Now, Mother Theresa, the speaker said, had no time for soupy piety. “Of course you have,” she rejoined, “You’ve just taken Communion; pull yourself together!”</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">“You don’t understand,” the Sister replied. “We found a dying woman in the alley. We scraped the maggots off her, brought her here, bathed her and put a clean sari on her, and held her hand until she died.” </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Mother Theresa softened. “Now,” she said, “you will never again receive a stranger in the bread and wine.”</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">God comes into the </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">maya</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> in order not to be a stranger—and in Jesus, God shows us how to be fellow travelers: fully committed, taking life in both hands, yet making no claims on this world for a fulfillment that it cannot provide. “My peace I leave with you,” Jesus said; “Peace such as the world cannot give.” If you want the peace, you must be prepared to surrender and move on.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">When Clare was four and Sophie three, we were all playing “baby Jesus” one evening, the girls having conscripted my wife and me into various roles. Sophie, remembering something she had heard in the story, ran to the closet, put on her “fairy” costume, climbed up on the toy chest, extended her wand over us and said, “Don’t be afwaid!” </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Which is, of course, the secret of being a traveler and not a tourist: don’t hold yourself aloof from the dangers of life; plunge in with both feet, as God did in Jesus, from the stable to the Cross. I</span><span style="font-size: small;">f we would no longer see a stranger in the manger, there is nothing for it but to pitch our tent, get down and dirty, and love. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Merry Christmas. Don’t be afraid.</span><span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext 1.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 31.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
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</div></div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br clear="all" /></span> <br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[i]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> This quotation is a compilation of verses from Ecclesiastes.</span><br />
</div></div><div id="edn2"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[ii]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Apologies to W. B. Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren”</span><br />
</div></div><div id="edn3"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[iii]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> from John 13</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div></div><div id="edn4"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[iv]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> More apologies to Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”</span><br />
</div></div><div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[v]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Isaiah 57:15</span></span><br />
</div></div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-78663733387716551952009-11-22T22:44:00.020-05:002009-11-27T10:14:59.640-05:00The Pearl of Great Price<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><o:p></o:p></i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: small;"></span></i><br />
</div><i><span style="font-size: small;">For the beauty of the earth, </span></i><br />
<div><i><span style="font-size: small;">For the glory of the skies, </span></i><br />
</div><div><i><span style="font-size: small;">For the love which from our birth </span></i><br />
</div><div><i><span style="font-size: small;">Over and around us lies; </span></i><br />
</div><div><i><span style="font-size: small;"> Lord of all, to thee we raise </span></i><br />
</div><div><i><span style="font-size: small;">This our hymn of grateful praise.</span></i><br />
</div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">—Folliot S. Pierpoint</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Every fall when I was growing up, my family would find a reason to drive out among the fantastic colors of the Upstate New York autumn.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">My mom in particular would be transported over the reds, oranges and golds on the wooded hillsides between our home in Syracuse and her native Pennsylvania.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Every few minutes she would exclaim, “Oh, it’s just so beautiful I can hardly stand it!”</span><br />
<br />
</div><div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">On the face of it, this response to beauty seems strange, yet we have probably all felt that sort of pleasure that, in its intensity, verges on pain and which, notwithstanding, we can’t get enough of.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Anne Shirley, in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel, felt the same sensation on her first sight of the spring flowers at Green Gables:</span><br />
<blockquote><i>“It just satisfies me here"--she put one hand on her breast--"it made a queer funny ache and yet it was a pleasant ache…I have it lots of times--whenever I see anything royally beautiful.”<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></i><br />
</blockquote> Somerset Maugham identified the same ambiguous ache in his novel, <i>Of Human Bondage:</i><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><blockquote><i>Along one side lay the Cathedral with its great central tower, and Philip, who knew as yet nothing of beauty, felt when he looked at it a troubling delight which he could not understand…It gave him an odd feeling in his heart, and he did not know if it was pain or pleasure. It was the first dawn of the aesthetic emotion.</i><br />
</blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">Why should we ache in the presence of beauty?</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Why should the loveliness of either art or nature make us long for we know not what?</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I am convinced that this movement of the soul has an exact counterpart in the body. What happens to us physically when we smell delicious food?</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">We get hungry.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">What happens to us spiritually as we experience beauty?</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">We get hungry.</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">As the smell of cooking is the token of a feast for the body, whettin</span><span style="font-size: small;">g our appetite for the food that is the source of the aroma, so beauty is the token of a feast for the so</span><span style="font-size: small;">ul, whetting our appetite for the Source of beauty.</span><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">This, above all else, is why I seek God:</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">just as the hunger of the body is meant to lead us to the body’s sustenance, so the soul’s hunger draws us toward the sustenance of the soul.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">If there were no such thing as food, there would be no such thing as hunger of the body—so because my soul hungers, I know that there is Bread of Heaven to satisfy it.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Beauty is the aroma of the heavenly banquet.</span><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Screwtape knew this, and did his best to warn his feckless nephew Wormwood of the power of beauty to undermine his demonic strategems:<br />
<blockquote><i>Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon are always blowing our whole structure away…So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven…<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></i><br />
</blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">These “incalculable winds” bear the scent of the “feast of rich foods” promised by Isaiah.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">God, I am convinced, draws us heavenward with this scent, just as the aroma of a pie in the old cartoons assumes the visible form of a beckoning arm that draws by the nose anyone within wafting range. We hunger, Paul Tillich tells us, in “anticipation of a fulfillment that cannot be found in an actual encounter.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span style="font-size: small;">[i]</span></a><span style="font-size: small;"> Simply put, because the smell is so good, we know the food must be even better--and because beauty moves us as it does, we know that beyond it must be something even more satisfying.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">One reason I believe this is that Jesus, unlike other rabbis, sought out his disciples.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Rather than setting up shop and attracting students as he acquired a reputation for holiness, which was the usual procedure, Jesus went out to the docks and dives and buttonholed his followers. “You did not choose me,” he told them later, “but I chose you.”</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
He talked about choosing in his parables, also:<br />
<blockquote><i>The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matthew 13:45-6)</i><br />
</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-size: small;">I think the second in this pair of parables—the kingdom of heaven as pearl merchant—is often misunderstood.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">We hear references to “the pearl of great price,” but they often sound like the person making them thinks the term applies to the </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">kingdom.</span></i><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Because the first parable likens the kingdom to a treasure worth acquiring at any cost, people seem to miss the point that in the second, </span><i><span style="font-size: small;">the kingdom is the merchant, not the pearl.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">We are the pearl.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: small;">It is <i>us</i> that God seeks, and gives everything to acquire.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">And the beauty of the earth, the glory of the skies, the love of family and friends, spring flowers and autumn colors, music and poetry and birdsong are like the moon that reflects back to us the sunlight of God’s love.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">Like the smell of Thanksgiving dinner, they are calling us home.</span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I wro</span><span style="font-size: small;">te this poem years ago about the way God calls to us through beauty:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">In an azalea garden one mild night,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">A cloud of witnesses blowing around me,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Through crazy latticework of brief, wild white</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The pale moon beams, like it had sought and found me.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Why does it almost hurt to gaze at blooms</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">That tug the heart with an alluring power?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">We fill our shelves with books, and deck our rooms</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">With pictures, but we cannot own a flower.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Although we plant and tend it, still its art</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Exists outside us, unassimilated;</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: small;">We cannot </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">have</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"> it—clasp it to the heart</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: small;">And say, “Just this, and we shall be created.”</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: small;">Soon it will leave us for another year;</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is wonderful for us to be here.</span></span></span><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Happy Thanksgiving.</span></span></span></span><br />
</div></div><div><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;"><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5593735498783507566#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span style="font-size: x-small;">[i]</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Eusden and Westerhoff: </span><u><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sensing Beauty: Aesthetics, the Human Spirit, and the Church</span></u><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (United Church Press, 1998)</span><o:p></o:p><br />
</div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><o:p></o:p><br />
</div></div></div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-9016042737101570912009-10-16T09:51:00.033-04:002009-11-17T22:37:53.202-05:00Inukshuks<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhREJPMjy8obfGPYHe8RbqmMeIiTLYkq4GRmUNg5kOrJKwl4EOvafezPOkY6fbdceTNle4BbGF86Sk1GCJaRHVDgEhO8jKnqILlMJCeLhUNk5My9MxA8g9QpLmj3rt78u7PcPYA82IzXA7Y/s1600-h/P1010050.JPG"><img style="text-align: left;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhREJPMjy8obfGPYHe8RbqmMeIiTLYkq4GRmUNg5kOrJKwl4EOvafezPOkY6fbdceTNle4BbGF86Sk1GCJaRHVDgEhO8jKnqILlMJCeLhUNk5My9MxA8g9QpLmj3rt78u7PcPYA82IzXA7Y/s320/P1010050.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5394718944029945234" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Mt. Richardson</span></div><div><!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">A friend of mine had a very negative view of marriage. The way she saw it, people treated it too much like a finish line--the ceremony completed, they were “done.” Of course, anyone who has been married for any length of time knows this to be far from true, but the divorce rate being what it is, my friend may have been on to something.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">People know how to get married, but often don’t give the same attention to making a life together. If people put as much thought into </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">being </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">married as they did into </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">getting </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">married, we wouldn’t have so many broken homes.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">My wife Allison arranged a trip to Québec for our fifth wedding anniversary. (She’s a dynamite trip planner.)</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">One of the highlights was an 1184 meter trek up Mt. Richardson in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Haute-Gaspésie</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, the mountainous part of the Gaspé Peninsula.</span></span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">At the top of the mountain, above the tree line, there are few landmarks, and feet leave little impression on the bare rock and lichen. Everything is grey and pale green; when Allison took an orange out of her backpack for lunch, it looked like the most orange thing in the world.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Along the way, previous hikers had left </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">inukshuks,</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> heaps of stones that serve as trail-markers.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">On the way up, we thought they were cute and sort of quirky; it wasn’t until we began our descent that we realized how vital they were. When we shouldered our packs and made to go, we were startled, even shaken, to realize that </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">without the inukshuks, we could not have found our way back down. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">On the way up, it’s obvious where the top is, but once we’re at the top, every direction is down.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Without the benefit of others’ experience, the potential for taking the wrong way is huge--and the consequences can be disastrous.</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We see those consequences all the time:</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">childhood stars who ruin their lives with drugs, American foreign policy misadventures in which we “win the war but lose the peace,” ostensibly made-in-heaven marriages that fall apart.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We put so much into </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">becoming, </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">and only after we’ve proclaimed Mission Accomplished do we realize how little we have put into </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">being. </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">When Smithsonian folklorist Alan Lomax tracked down Jelly Roll Morton in 1930, the biggest jazz star of his time was working as a janitor, with a hole in his front tooth where a diamond had been embedded before he’d been forced to pawn it.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=901604273710157091#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">[i]</span></span></span></a><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Obviously, there had been no one to show the Dixieland giant how to proceed after reaching his goal.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We are reluctant to accept guidance from others; our whole national psyche, forged as it was on the frontier among people who, for one reason or another, wanted to get away from other people, is steeped in a Marlboro Man mythology of rugged individualism.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And because we find in scripture what we bring to it, American Christians have even managed to use the Bible—a book written by the same people who invented the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">kibbutz—</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">to justify this self-image.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">But is rugged individualism really biblical?</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-style:normal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Maybe it will help to look at the Bible through non-western eyes. I had the privilege of interviewing Indian theologian and social activist Vishal Mangalwadi for PRISM Magazine (published by Evangelicals for Social Action.) In Mangalwadi’s view, the individualist lens through which we view scripture obscures a biblical ethos that is essentially communitarian. Here is an excerpt from my article:</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><i></i></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Vishal Mangalwadi has a problem with “salvation” being defined only as “my soul going to Heaven.” </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">“In John 11, the High Priest prophesies that Jesus will die for the nation,” Mangalwadi says. “So whom did he die for—for the individual soul, or for the nation?”… In Mangalwadi’s reading, the prophetic call for social justice is the background music to Jesus’ acts of individual healing. As an example, he cites the story of the sick man who has lain by the pool in Bethsaida for 38 years, hoping to be healed (John 5:9-11).</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">“Was Jesus healing the nation, or was he healing individuals?” Mangalwadi asks. “When he says to the sick man, ‘Pick up your mat and walk,’ whom is he healing? Obviously, he cares for the individual, but his sickness is not the problem! The man says, ‘I don’t have anyone who will put me in the water.’ Treatment is there, free and within his sight—the problem is that he lives in a selfish, individualistic society where people don’t care for him. So Jesus is saying, ‘OK, nobody has noticed him for 38 years—now they will.’”</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">...This is the blindness to which Jesus refers when he tells the authorities that, because they believe they can see, their guilt remains. “Because you see this man as a cursed sinner, you don’t see that he exists for the glory of God. You don’t see his dignity; you don’t see his character. He is begging because you are blind. So it’s their eyes he is seeking to open when he is spitting on the ground.”</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=901604273710157091#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">[ii]</span></span></span></a></span></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=901604273710157091#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span></span></span></i></span></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> </span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <!--StartFragment--> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">After our climb up Mt. Richardson, Allison and I were driving a rented car to our next destination when we stopped to admire a view. We parked immediately after crossing a bridge over the picturesque stream we wanted to see, then decided to move a few car lengths further on in case another driver should come speeding over the bridge without seeing it. By sheer good fortune, we crossed to the other side of the road before walking to the bridge. Seconds later, a station wagon came barreling over the bridge so fast that we scarcely had time to think, let alone process what was happening. Once over the bridge, the car became airborne, sailing right through our original parking space to land on the far side of the ditch that ran along the road, then bounced, whirled around horizontally and came to a halt facing the way it had come. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We were close enough that the impact splashed mud onto my pants—and like the mud Jesus spat on the ground to make for healing the blind man, that mud opened my eyes </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">rapidement</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">: I instantly saw a hundred other ways things could have gone that would have ended with Allison and me maimed or killed.</span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We jumped over the ditch, and Allison went into physician mode, though neither of us spoke enough French to really communicate with the shaken and, judging by the smell, very drunken driver;</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">he only looked dazed and shook his head at all our inquiries.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">His wife was injured, but not gravely, and he was ambulatory. They were very lucky. Within moments, another car and a tractor-trailer had stopped;</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">the trucker laid his loading ramp across the ditch to assist in moving the couple onto an ambulance, which was a long time coming, as there was no cell phone reception in that relatively remote area, so yet another motorist had to call from a pay phone in the next town. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We learned later that Canadian law requires the first motorist who witnesses an accident to stop and offer assistance, though we had no sense at all that those who stopped did so grudgingly—in fact, we were the only actual witnesses, and at least three other motorists stopped after we did.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">In that semi-wilderness, reliance upon the kindness of strangers is imperative, and offering help is simply what one does. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I spent several years in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; I have seen Amish barn-raisings, and heard the stories of people whose barns had burned down and been rebuilt by the neighbors.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And if we are to believe Laura Ingalls Wilder, the pioneers behaved in the same way. Talk radio commentators like to mock the notion of “community,” but the fact is that unless rugged individualism is tempered with neighborliness, we end up with a society in which people can participate in any number of “virtual communities” without ever once helping with a food drive or clean-up day at the park.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Many of us sign online petitions and click Contribute Here buttons, and think that money can be substituted for time,</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=901604273710157091#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">[iii]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">but never actually show up in the flesh.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">There may be virtual communities, but there are no virtual neighbors.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Marlboro Man isn’t real. Only a weak and sheltered people could really believe that we can go it alone. The real pioneers built towns, with churches and railroads and telegraphs, at the first opportunity. If Hell, as Sartre famously put it, is other people, well, so is Heaven—and Purgatory and Limbo and the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">bardo</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> and the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Tir na N’Og: </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">we are all we’ve got</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(1 John 4:20)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Of course, I have injected hefty doses of Hell myself into various situations, my marriage most notably.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Despite my friends’ warning, I decidedly treated my marriage as a “done deal,” at least during the worst part of my depression.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">After persevering for eight years to get her to the altar, I took my wife so much for granted during those days that our marriage was badly strained. Happily, I figured out before it was too late that going it alone wasn’t working.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Recently, my parish’s Spiritual Formation Director helped me assemble a personal “discernment committee”—a hand-picked group of fellow parishioners, a professional colleague, and another parent from our girls’ school.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Using a packet of discussion questions, we are meeting a half-dozen times to help me figure out where to go next after climbing the wrong hill ten years ago.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Though I saw the value of this and went ahead with it, the idea of all those people taking time out of their busy lives to spend several evenings Talking About Me made me very uncomfortable—not that I feared the scrutiny (obviously, since I write this blog;) rather, I guess I was afraid that they, having made this offering of their time and attention, would find it not worthwhile at best, a nuisance at worst.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">But I’m sticking with it, and I’m glad I am.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">After all, "</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">inukshuk</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">," in the Arctic languages, means “something that stands for a person.”</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">If I have actual living, generous people to help me find the way, so much the better.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <div style="mso-element:endnote-list"> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div id="edn1"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=901604273710157091#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">[</span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">i]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> </span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">Donald McGill and Robert Demory, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">Introduction to Jazz History</span></i></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> </div> <div id="edn2"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=901604273710157091#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">[ii]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> </span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">Scott Robinson, “Jesus the Troublemaker,” PRISM, December 2005</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> </div> <div style="mso-element:endnote" id="edn3"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=901604273710157091#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">[iii]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> </span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">cf. Robert Putnam, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community</span></i></span><i><o:p></o:p></i></p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment--> </div><div style="mso-element:endnote-list"><div style="mso-element:endnote" id="edn3"> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-62129850762220206552009-10-13T09:51:00.009-04:002009-10-14T10:40:54.593-04:00The Butterfly House<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist. </span></span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">A Course in Mira</span>cles, Lesson 14</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The butterflies no longer flock to my daughter.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">When Clare was four, her daycare center hatched some butterflies in a small screen tent. On the day they released them, I came to pick Clare up on the playground and saw her standing very still with an ear-to-ear grin and a half-dozen butterflies all over herself. “They just went to her,” her teachers said. The same thing happened whenever we visited a butterfly house: without any particular effort on her part, Clare would attract </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Lepidoptera </span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">like she exuded nectar; we’d have to check her for stowaways before leaving.</span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I don’t know why, but it doesn’t happen any more. Maybe some essence of baby innocence that once rose up from her no longer wafts from the self-conscious first-grader she has become. She tries, and my heart aches as I watch her patiently holding out a finger to the unresponsive insects, taut with wanting and, ultimately, deflated with disappointment. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">That disappointment has colored the whole butterfly house experience. She still makes a beeline for them, but now there is a veil of wishing and remembering between her and her surroundings. A part of the Garden is lost, and that loss has imparted its flavor to what remains.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">We experience, not the world around us, but our thoughts and feelings about that world. Years ago I was in an outdoor production of a Shakespeare play at a Renaissance Faire (</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Twelfth Night—</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">guess which character I played) and was vexed to discover, once we were up and running, that the bagpiper led a parade down the hill right behind the audience precisely in the middle of my big soliloquy. Every time this happened, I inwardly resisted it, willing it not to be and, so doing, forfeiting any enjoyment I could have been getting from the scene. But one day it occurred to me not to kick against the goads but, instead of resisting, using the distraction by regarding it as part of the experience. The result was electric: the scene took off for me as it had never done before, and kept doing so throughout the remainder of the run. My judgment of my experience had been shutting out the gift the experience carried.</span></span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">How can we get out of ourselves enough to actually experience our lives, unfiltered by shoulds, oughts and if-onlys? </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">There is a yoga discipline called </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">pratyahara,</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> which means “withdrawal of the senses.” During practice, the mind is supposed to be so focused that no distractions are able to enter our awareness. And that withdrawal is a good thing—I want to experience my experiences fully. But I like to think of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">pratyahara</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> more broadly than that. When I am on a hike or picnic or retreat, for instance, I don’t want radio, television, recorded music or the internet intruding; I want to withdraw my senses from the overstimulating media that usually occupy them, so that my mind may be more available to the subtler experiences around me. </span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">But even then, my “monkey mind,” as the Buddhists call it, continues to interpose itself between my awareness and the world. Everything I see and hear reminds me of something I need to do, someone who is trying my patience, another time and place in which I saw or heard something similar, something I know, or wish I knew, about the thing seen or heard. Nothing just is what it is on its own terms—everything becomes an object of my judgment and analysis, a springboard for my daydreams.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">So I find it useful to regularly withdraw my attention, not from external stimuli, but from my internal commentary on them, which allows things to be more what they are. Be a stranger—be “not from around here,” the better to experience things as for the first time. It helps if the field of stimuli is relatively narrow—any activity I do more or less mechanically can clear a space for contemplative practice—and on a good day, when I am mowing the lawn or cleaning up the kitchen or folding laundry, I will remember to take advantage of the opportunity. Here’s what I do:</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I begin by becoming aware of my breathing, which “takes attention away from thinking.”</span><a href="file:///cid/284D3B05-15A1-42C6-B753-6D6F53B5C17A%2523_edn1"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:#274FAA;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[i]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> The moment I begin this is one of the most satisfying moments of the day; there is a sense of release and restfulness, but not a somnolent restfulness—rather, a heightened awareness charged with energy even as it calms me, that gives me a pale glimpse of what it means to be “he who in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity, the silence and solitude of the desert.”</span><a href="file:///cid/284D3B05-15A1-42C6-B753-6D6F53B5C17A%2523_edn2"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:#274FAA;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[ii]</span></span></a></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I then begin to pray my mantra. I use the so-called Jesus Prayer: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. </span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">This prayer, adapted from the words of the blind man who called out to Jesus from the roadside, has been used in contemplative practice since the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and is still widely practiced in the Eastern churches</span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">(A word of explanation: the Greek word </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">eleos, </span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">which is translated “mercy,” actually has a broader meaning than we ordinarily ascribe to it, including not only forgiveness but healing. The word has the same root as </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">elia,</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> meaning “olive,” because prayer for healing was—as it often still is—accompanied by anointing with [olive] oil. The point being that a repeated prayer for mercy is not necessarily the grimly penitential exercise it might sound like.)</span></span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Now here’s the counter-intuitive part: you’d think that repeating something over and over in your head would just add to the chaos, but in fact it does just the opposite. When the monkey mind is occupied with the mantra, I am actually freed from the distraction of memory, anticipation, plans, regrets, fantasies and all the other busywork that occupies me most of the time. So I am able to see, hear, feel everything much more vividly, without a layer of commentary between my deeper self and my experience. What a potato feels like as I rub the dirt off its surface under the tap, how the ocean sounds on the far side of a stand of trees through which the wind is blowing, the licorice smell of a pile of pulled weeds—everything is novel and intensified, unfiltered by commentary and classification. Experience bypasses the monkey mind and registers more directly.</span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Indian sage Patanjali wrote</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“The Seer is intelligence only, and though pure, sees through the coloring of the intellect.”</span><a href="file:///cid/284D3B05-15A1-42C6-B753-6D6F53B5C17A%2523_edn3"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:#274FAA;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[iii]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> When the intellect is otherwise occupied, the view is less colored. The monkey mind leaves you alone. Think of it this way: there was once a Jewish village that was being tormented by a demon, so the people set up a greased pole outside the village and challenged the demon to climb it—which kept the demon occupied and allowed the villagers to get on with their lives. The prayer is like that greased pole. If you’ve ever sat your children down in front of a video to get them out of your hair (not that you or I would ever do that) you know what I mean.</span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">If you have never thought of your mind as having multiple constituencies, you may be scratching your head now, but the idea is actually very old and widespread. Generally, the distinction is made between the unchanging, eternal inner Self—of which we are mostly or entirely unaware—and the morass of thoughts and emotions with which we usually identify ourselves. </span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">These thoughts and feelings are like engrossing, even spectacular displays of weather over Mt. Zion. We see the weather and think it is what we are—but in fact we are not the weather: we are the mountain.</span><a href="file:///cid/284D3B05-15A1-42C6-B753-6D6F53B5C17A%2523_edn4"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:#274FAA;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[iv]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> In contemplation, we can realize that, and be as unperturbed by our inner dramas as the mountain is by the weather.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">(Cautionary note: don’t get the impression that I spend a lot of time in that state. “How rare the moment, and how brief its duration!” said John of the Cross—and he was pretty good. Better than me.)</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">This undifferentiated awareness that Patanjali called the “Seer”—called in Sanskrit the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">purusha</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">—is, in yogic thought, the seat of the true Self, and is unchanging and eternal, despite the apparent “coloring” imparted to it by the intellect. The Bible similarly distinguishes between the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">psyche, </span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">or “soul” (Hebrew </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">nephesh)</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">—which is unique to the individual—and the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">pneuma,</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> or “spirit,” (Hebrew </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">ruach) </span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">which comes from God.</span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The belief that “spirit” is of God is behind the doctrine of the “Body of Christ” being made up, collectively, of all the faithful. “Christ has no body now on earth but yours,” wrote Teresa of Avila; “no hands, not feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world.” Through our perishable eyes, something eternal looks out. So when we get our transient “weather” selves out of the way, our eternal “mountain” selves are made available to God—even identified with God. “I live,” said Paul, “now not I, but Christ lives within me.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Which is why I’m glad my children are at a Friends school. The Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light—the belief that “there is that of God in everyone”—is so much in keeping with the baptismal vow to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.” Western Christians have said before that we all have a divine spark within us, and been repressed for it,</span><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:#274FAA;"><a href="file:///cid/284D3B05-15A1-42C6-B753-6D6F53B5C17A%2523_edn5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[v]</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">but thanks be to God and William Penn, the notion has at last taken root and flourished.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">This is why Quaker worship is so contemplative. Everyone assembles and sits in silence. If someone is “moved” to speak, they do. At weekly Meeting for Worship at our girls’ school, the whole period (only twenty minutes, since even the kindergarteners are included) usually passes in total silence. The practice being cultivated is a clarifying of the inner faculties and a patient waiting for the promptings of the Spirit—the illumination of the Inner Light. If we are to hear the still, small voice, we need to be still ourselves. We think that sleep is quiet and wakefulness active, but the opposite is the case: our busy, buzzy brains are keeping us asleep and shutting out the light; when they become quiet, the light dawns and we can awaken and see. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">When I awake, I shall be satisfied, beholding Your face.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In our usual sleeping state, it’s just amazing how filtered our view is. So often I have revisited old haunts, trying in vain to recapture the feelings I had when I was first in those places years ago. Not only could I not feel as I had in the past, I couldn’t enjoy the places in the present. In his first memoir, Kirk Douglas described going back to Paris after the war and finding it not as exciting as when he was stationed there. He realized that he was actually seeking his twenty-two-year-old self—who was, of course, not there to be found. Like him, it took me lots of puzzled standing around and staring to figure this out.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I wonder if the Apostles felt the same way about the places they had been with Jesus after Jesus was gone? Did they see the streets of Jerusalem as they appeared when they walked them with their teacher, or as they actually were in the present? How long did they see through disciples' eyes before their Apostles' eyes finally opened?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Men of Galilee, why are you standing here looking up at the sky?</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">One evening, while walking up Nicollet Avenue to my apartment in Minneapolis, I heard an African American man's voice behind me sigh heavily--"What a day, what a day!" he said. That sounded like an invitation to talk, so I turned around and introduced myself, and we walked together up the main street of that part of the city--a street I thought I knew, but realized as we walked that I didn't. As I, a white graduate student in classical music, walked with this black working man, I literally saw a whole different street around us, one I had never seen before. People I had never before noticed greeted us--black people, Lakotas, urban working people, people who must have been there before but whom I had literally never seen. My frame of reference had not included them--but my companion's frame, which I was temporarily sharing, did. I ended up walking about a mile past my street, so fascinating was the experience. I grew up some during that walk.</span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">On the second Bob Newhart show—the one set in Vermont—Newhart’s character explained to his wife why his disappointment over some particular aspect of their new lives as innkeepers (I can’t remember what it was, now) impaired his ability to enjoy their situation as a whole. He told her about being taken to the circus as a kid in the expectation that there would be tigers there. There weren’t any, and his disappointment blighted the whole experience for him. “Well, that was childish!” said his wife. “I was a child!” he replied. If his wife had had Paul at her fingertips, I suppose she might have rejoined: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways</span></i></span><span style="color:#0B131E;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. </span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">So get over it, already, she might have said.</span></span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I’m sure that Clare will get over her disappointment about the butterflies, and I'm sure I will, too. Sooner or later, she will stop wanting so badly for them to come back. I suppose that one of two things will then happen: 1) they </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">will</span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> come back, because her desire is no longer driving them away. (If you doubt that this happens, try to remember the process of finding a prom date; is anything more off-putting than a desperate desire to be asked? The whole universe works this way, I’m sure of it.) Or, 2) she will be happy to view the butterflies where they are. Either way, her wishes for the future and memories of the past will no longer contaminate her experience in the present.</span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#0B131E;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I used to have trouble reconciling Paul’s words about children with the words of Jesus: “I tell you with certainty: unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” How can we become like little children and, at the same time, give up childish ways? I remember driving Clare to a birthday party a couple years ago and trying to explain to her why some of the drivers around us were so aggressive and unsafe. “Sometimes the world isn’t a very nice place,” I told her. After a long silence, she said, “But Daddy, the world is still very pretty.” In that moment, I blessed God and knew that Jesus was right. Why on earth are we to put that childish vision behind us?</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">But I think I’ve worked it out. (Don’t thank me yet, there’ll be plenty of time for that later—and besides, there are probably 800 spiritual classics I haven’t read yet that already say this.) I think it breaks down like this:</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-48.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">1)</span></span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">As infants, we are undifferentiated from our parents, our world, and God. We are unselfconscious. We are totally dependent, and all our needs are met. Everything is new and astonishing to us. We experience our surroundings with great immediacy. Good and evil have no meaning. The mythic analog is the Garden of Eden; my butterfly-spangled daughter still had one foot there.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-48.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">2)</span></span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">As we grow, we individuate and differentiate ourselves as we become self-conscious. As we gain experience, our world loses its newness, and we begin to classify things, viewing everything through the lens of what we remember and anticipate. We must increasingly meet our own needs. We have eaten the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and been expelled from the Garden. The medieval world reckoned this as happening around the age of seven, when, having reached full verbal competence and the Church’s “age of accountability,” the child was considered morally responsible.</span><a href="file:///cid/284D3B05-15A1-42C6-B753-6D6F53B5C17A%2523_edn6"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:#274FAA;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[vi]</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">) The mythic analog is the Fall; my daughter is undergoing it now.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:-48.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">3)</span></span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">When we are able to see things as they are rather than as our distorting desires make them appear, we reunite with God on an adult level, combining the trust and boundarylessness of infancy with the (relative) wisdom of adulthood. We are “born again.” Communion—when “we who are many are one body, for we all share in the one bread”—is the outward invocation of this state; mythically, it is represented by the New Heaven and New Earth of the Book of Revelation. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">And that’s something to hope for: the veils drop away, and we no longer have a chattering monkey-mind full of judging and desire between our inner selves and creation--no longer have to view the heavens through the distorting turmoil of emotional and intellectual “weather.” Even if heaven and earth aren’t actually new then, they will be new to us, because we will experience them for the first time. And if Paul is right, while we struggle to pierce the veil, we can be sure that it obscures the view only in one direction; though we struggle to know God, God already knows us:</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"></span></span></p><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[i] Tolle, Eckhart, A New Earth </span></span></span></span><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[ii] Bhagavad Gita, as quoted by Vivekananda in Karma Yoga </span></span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[iii] quoted by Vivekananda in Raja Yoga </span></span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[iv] Laird, Thomas, Into the Silent Land </span></span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[v] notably the 14th-century German mystic Meister Eckhardt </span></span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">[vi] Postman, Neil, The Disappearance of Childhood</span></span></span></span><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" ;font-family:Helvetica;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"></span></i></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Helvetica;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment--> </div></div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-85427367068588962512009-09-24T12:27:00.028-04:002009-09-25T14:35:36.340-04:00Bare Earth, Clean Paper<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i> <!--StartFragment--> </i></p><i><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:-webkit-xxx-large;"> <!--StartFragment--> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> <!--StartFragment--> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Does anyone write something where something has been already written? </span></i><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Or plant a sapling where one already grows? </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">No: he looks for a blank piece of paper,</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">and sows the seed where none has yet been sown. </span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Brother, sister: be bare earth,</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">be clean paper, untouched by writing,</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">so that you may be ennobled by the pen of revelation—</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">so that the Gracious One may sow seed within you. --</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Jalaluddin Rumi, tr. Camille Helminski</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">"Freedom, O Freedom!" is the cry of the soul. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">--Vivekananda, "What is Religion?"</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Dear God:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I have learned something in these past weeks. I have learned that philosopher Thomas Kuhn was on the right track when he said that paradigms change radically and quickly in response to some crisis. I have been more radically taken apart and put back together since classes ended last spring than at any other period. Yet, looking back, I can see clearly that these changes have been a long time coming--that I have been holding them back, in fact. I think Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point" theory more precisely captures what has been happening with me: a slow buildup of pressure over so long a time as to render it unnoticeable, followed by an exponential acceleration and release precipitated by an event whose consequences were unforeseen. So now, something I have long toyed with wanting, played at wanting, considered the possibility of wanting some day: I actually want it now--intensely want it.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I want to die. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(No, not like that, friends--keep reading.)</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a grain, and nothing more--but if it dies, it bears much fruit.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">God, help me to bear fruit; help me to die.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I am so heartily weary of myself. My every breath shouts, “I, I, I, I, I.” Let me disappear to myself; give me rest from the unremitting labor of self-assertion. Let me be a witness, an observer, a passerby.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">All my life, I have asked You to help me, but what I have actually meant is, Do it for me. I have asked You for strength, but what I have wanted is ease. I would have every valley raised, every mountain made low—but without my having to die first. I do not ask You for this any longer. I ask to die.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I do not ask You to help me find the way You have set before me. I do not even know that You have set one, and such as there is to find, I understand now that I must find myself. Help me to look, to listen. Help me to quiet the roaring in my head that shouts down Your still, small voice. I have barricaded myself against You, and I do not ask You to storm the barricades; I ask only that I may persevere in dismantling them myself.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">My world is a sealed room, arranged just the way I like it. Only it isn’t: the windows leak, the door doesn’t latch, and I am forever fighting to keep my room the way I want it. Help me open up my room to the whole noisy, untidy world; I am weary of defending it.</span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=8542736706858896251#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">[i]</span></span></span></a></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">My universe has been so narrow, and I have tried to confine You within its compass. (Forgive me; I did it in love.) You set the seas their boundaries which they may not cross, but Your children You have created for freedom. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">You have not received the spirit of slaves that leads you into fear again. Rather, you have received the spirit of God's adopted children by which we call out, "Abba! Father!"</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Now, if any would say, “You must use these songs, these sacraments,” I will not listen; and if any would set themselves up between me and You, I will not heed them; and if any would deny the freedom of my soul, they shall be to me as a venomous serpent: a splendid creation of Yours, to be avoided for my own safety.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Vivekananda discerned You; </span></span></span></span></i></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Lawrence of the Resurrection labored with You; </span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Teresa built a castle for Y</span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">ou; </span></span></span></span></span></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Black Elk saw visions from You; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Rumi sang of You; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Francis gave all for You; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Socrates groped after You; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Bach musicked Your creation; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely Elisha put on You like a garment; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely the Buddha served You even in denying You; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely in Jesus You lived our life and died our death; </span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And surely in Him, I will rise as He did</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">.</span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></p><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And if any would chant </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Om</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> to the Resplendent Lord, I would be a </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">bhakta</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> among them; </span></span></span></span></i></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And if any would ponder the Impersonal Absolute, I would sit down, a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">yogi</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> among them; </span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And if any would shout salvation’s story in concert with the blood-washed band, I would lift</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">up</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">my voice with theirs; </span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And if any would sing </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">la illaha il Allah</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> in the whirling dance, I would polish the mirror of </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">my</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">heart with them; </span></span></span></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And if any would commune with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I would</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">receive Your Body and</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Blood with them</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">.</span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></i></div><div><i>--</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Jesus, as my vision grows greater, You do not diminish within it—rather, You grow greater, too. My devotion to You increases as the universe around You expands, as the radiance of a jewel is increased by its setting.</span></span></i></div><div><i><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></p><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Let me never try to force You back into that narrow space; </span></span></span></span></i></div><div><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">let me never begin a sentence with “God couldn’t;” </span></span></span></div><div><i><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">let me be bare earth, clean paper.</span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">My little girl wants to walk along the top of a wall. “Hold my hand, Daddy,” she says. She is eager to walk, but unsteady and fearful. Steady my footsteps; bolster my willing but timorous spirit. At the right time, take away Your hand.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I am learning.</span></span></p></i></div><div><i><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <div style="mso-element:endnote-list"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="mso-element:endnote" id="edn1"> <p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5593735498783507566&postID=8542736706858896251#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">[i]</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"> I have borrowed this metaphor from Pema Chödrön</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;">.</span></span></p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p><div style="mso-element:endnote-list"><div style="mso-element:endnote" id="edn1"> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p><div style="mso-element:endnote-list"><div style="mso-element:endnote" id="edn1"> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment--> </i><p></p><div style="mso-element:endnote-list"><div style="mso-element:endnote" id="edn1"> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment--> </div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-62722734233163112572009-08-11T16:51:00.008-04:002009-11-09T22:59:43.631-05:00Zuckerman's Barn<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention. Children pay better attention than grownups. If Fern says that the animals in Zuckerman’s barn talk, I’m quite ready to believe her. Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more. </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">E. B. White, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Charlotte’s Web</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i>...a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. </i>Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Stage magicians Penn and Teller caused a stir in the magic world when they began showing audiences how tricks were done. (</span><a href="http://www.5min.com/Video/Penn--Teller-How-to-Do-the-Saw-Trick-4988312"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">http://www.5min.com/Video/Penn--Teller-How-to-Do-the-Saw-Trick-4988312</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">) This worked because, contrary to what you might expect, taking the magic out of the trick didn’t actually…take the magic out. When the audience saw what was really happening, they were as amazed by the reality as by the illusion.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I believe that miracles work mostly in the same way: God allows us to see the depth behind the everyday existence of which we usually see only the surface. And the reality is more astonishing than the illusion.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Here’s an example, from 2 Kings:</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And it came about when the LORD was about to take up Elijah by a whirlwind to heaven…Elijah said to Elisha, "Ask what I shall do for you before I am taken from you." And Elisha said, "Please, let a double portion of your spirit be upon me." He said, "You have asked a hard thing. Nevertheless, if you see me when I am taken from you, it shall be so for you; but if not, it shall not be so." As they were going along and talking, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of fire which separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind to heaven. Elisha saw it and cried out, "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!" And he saw Elijah no more.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Elijah told Elisha that he would become his spiritual heir </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">if he saw him</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">—the clear implication being that Elisha might well </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">not</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> have seen a chariot and horses of fire come to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind. If Elijah would have been taken up that way whether Elisha saw it or not, the miracle is not in the occurrence, but in the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">seeing.</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> Like Penn and Teller, God allowed Elisha to see the way it was actually done.</span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Another, more recent example: the nineteenth century Russian monk Seraphim of Sarov, after fifteen years of austerities in a hermitage, moved back to the monastery when, because of his reputation for holiness and wonder-working, people began to seek him out in his retreat. He took on the role of a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">staretz, </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">or spiritual advisor. One day, sensing that he was having trouble getting through to a disciple, he took the young man by the shoulders and said, “Look at me.” The disciple told Seraphim he couldn’t bear to look at him, because lightening was coming from his eyes and he appeared to be all aflame. Seraphim told the disciple that he was able to see him in that way because </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">God had opened his eyes. </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Once again, it’s evident that someone else might have been in the room also and seen nothing unusual—the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">seeing</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> was the miracle.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">So when we read some pious legend about a friar surprising St. Francis at his prayers and seeing him levitating or whatnot, the relevant question, it seems, is not “what actually happened?” but “what did the informant actually experience, and what does it mean that he or she experienced it?” The spiritual reality is always active behind the visible reality--we are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses.” A miracle is when we’re enabled to peek behind the curtain.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Of course, what we can actually see every day is pretty miraculous, too. In </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Charlotte’s Web,</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> Dr. Dorian gives Mrs. Arable his take on the “miraculous” writing in the spider’s web:</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The web is White’s symbol for the miraculous within the everyday. But what exactly is a "symbol"? Well, the word “symbol” comes from two Greek words meaning “thrown together.” When two friends were about to be parted, they would break an animal bone, each of them keeping one half as a symbol of the other. In other words, the symbol you hold in your hand is only half of a reality, the other half of which is elsewhere—and the two halves symbolically throw the two of you together. And I think the phenomenal world is sown with symbols of the spiritual world--effulgences of the hidden world that burst forth into the visible one. Why else should there be music? Or flowers? I think Christopher Smart was right: flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ. Notwithstanding all the valid evolutionary explanations about bees and pollination, the fantastic blue of delphiniums is here for us because God just couldn’t help himself. And the other half of that symbol is with God, and can throw us together with God if we let it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">So we needn’t be on the watch for something overtly extraordinary. A spider’s web or bird’s nest, photosynthesis, azaleas and the wonders of the human brain—we can explain them to an extent, but we can never explain them </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">away.</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> They are miraculous, and on our very best days, we can see that. There is a Zen Buddhist sutra that says, “Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away. We are like one who, in the midst of water, cries out in thirst so piteously; we are like the children of a rich man who wandered away among the poor.” We often miss the miracles because we are looking for magic. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">When Elijah was hiding in the cave, God told him to watch, because he was about to pass by the cave. An earthquake came, but God was not in the earthquake. A great wind came, and God was not in the wind. A fire roared by, and God was not in the fire. Then came the sound of “a still, small voice”, and that was where God was.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">That voice is the one I’m waiting to hear. I have become like the grownups in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Polar Express,</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> who cannot hear the silvery tinkling of the sleighbell. When the miracle comes that will show me what I’m supposed to be doing with myself, it may come as a symbol, or it may come as a revelation, but it will surely </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">not</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> come as a magic show. All the stuff that got me this far down the wrong road—</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">that </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">was the magic, the illusion, the trickery. Perceiving the miracle will require attentiveness--which is not my strong suit—and waiting for it will require patience, of which I have never had much. I am too prone to trying to force things--too much like the frustrated child whose parents have said, “We’ll see.” As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really have very much faith.</span></span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">With the summer about to end and the prospect of the fall semester beginning without my having anything to teach, I recently looked into enrolling in a trade school, with an eye toward making a career change. A number of people have told me I’d be good at the thing I’m looking into doing, and though becoming certified to do it would require a big investment of time and money, it would allow me to have at least a part-time job to go to.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">But my wife is cautioning me against committing to any course of action I have picked out for myself. She thinks I should spend at least a semester neither teaching nor doing anything else to fill up the void. Rather than Finding Something to Do just for the sake of having it, she thinks I should wait attentively until just the right thing presents itself, applying myself in the meanwhile to figuring out who I really am and what I really value. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I’ll still need to curb my fearful, grasping nature in case that miracle, or fortuitous chance occurrence, or outcome of penetrating discernment comes along. When God rained down manna in the wilderness, he cautioned the Hebrews to gather only what they needed for each day. If they tried to force things by gathering extra and keeping some in reserve, on the next morning they would find it rotten and full of maggots. Instead of grabbing at something just because I think I need it or ought to be doing it, maybe I should apply that energy to cultivating attentiveness and trust.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And even if I didn’t think of this as waiting for a miracle—even if I thought I was waiting for something revelatory to happen by chance—chance, as Louis Pasteur pointed out, favors the prepared mind. And maybe if I talk less, the universe will talk more. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-80800308699752831912009-08-03T09:51:00.005-04:002009-09-18T22:26:58.063-04:00What's In You for Me?<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We tend to think of chastity as having to do with sex. This is because we tend to think of everything as having to do with sex. A fuller discussion of sexual chastity, continence and celibacy is out of place here, and has been done elsewhere. (</span><a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03637d.htm"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">www.newadvent.org/cathen/03637d.htm</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, for example.) </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I am more interested in chastity in the broader sense, as set forth in the Principles of the Third Order of St. Francis: </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Our chief object is to reflect that openness to all which was characteristic of Jesus. This can only be achieved in a spirit of chastity, which sees others as belonging to God and not as a means of self-fulfillment. </span></span></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">By this definition, chastity is that quality of mind whereby we are able to perceive others, not in relation to ourselves and our agendas, but as complete in themselves.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">You’ve probably seen at least one old cartoon in which each of two characters, marooned on a desert island or adrift in a lifeboat, seem to see the other transformed into a steak or a turkey leg or something. Then they start shaking salt on each other and whetting their carving knives. That’s what unchastity does to us: transforms other people before our eyes from something actual into something potential--with the potentiality being wholly in relation to ourselves.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Capitalism is rife with unchastity. Before I had CDs to sell, I had audiences; now I have potential CD buyers</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">. </span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">So not only is the quality of my relationship to my listeners less immediate than it was, but I cannot be fully satisfied with the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">inter</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">action unless it ends in a </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">trans</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">action. I used to want to connect with people; now I want to profit by them. (Or at least recoup my investment by them.)</span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">How often have I been at a gathering and mentally divided everyone into those who could help me, and those who couldn’t? Does a person’s personal magnetism increase with their potential to buy what I’m selling, get me gigs, advance my career or introduce me to other useful people? </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Unchastity doesn’t always appear in such gross forms—there are subtle forms, too. Will a person’s conversation amuse me? Or instruct me? Or provide material I can steal? How will this person respond to me? Will they be impressed by my knowledge and accomplishments, feeding my sense of self-worth? Will they find me interesting and funny, thereby helping me find myself interesting and funny?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">In his “Essay Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger describes people’s tendency to view things not as things, but as potential other things. Our gaze transforms a river into a potential power source, a forest into potential building materials. Nothing is simply what it is—everything is “standing in reserve,” as Heidegger puts it. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">What frightened creatures we are, always worried that the future will bring scarcity and lack unless we grab all we can in the present, always hopeful that every person we meet and every situation in which we find ourselves can be turned to our advantage. This must be why Jesus told his disciples not to worry about what they were to eat, drink or wear: so that our human interactions would be untainted by the dirty devices born of our fear. In fact, the single most frequent utterance of Jesus recorded in the Gospels is “Do not be afraid.” Prudent providence is one thing; faithless unchastity is another. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This is one of the best things about being a Eucharistic Visitor—a layperson who brings Communion to parishioners who cannot attend church. Most of them are elderly, confined either to their own homes or to a retirement home, and I am more free of personal agenda in my interactions with them than in almost any other interactions. And I think I am finally learning to really pay attention to people.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">All the Gospels give accounts of Jesus seeming to read people’s minds. I don’t think there was anything supernatural involved in those incidents. If Jesus “didn’t need to be told about people, for he knew what was in a person,” I think it was because he was paying attention. He was able to size people up as they were, because he wasn’t trying to size them up as potential means for his own self-fulfillment.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-58435504962618068982009-07-21T22:19:00.000-04:002009-07-22T11:06:33.111-04:00Me and My Shadow<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the state: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">. George Eliot, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Adam Bede</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">While a visitor in a church other than my own, I had a strong negative reaction to one of the lay ministers—some confluence of mannerisms and appearance just grated on my nerves to the point where I couldn’t stop watching this person, in the same way that one will continually pester a cold sore.</span></span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> It being apparently a good morning, I was able to self-transcend enough to notice not only the irritating object, but also my own irritation. Isn’t that interesting, I thought; now why should I respond so negatively to this person?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> Trying to run my thought process to ground, I began to catalog all the things about the person that annoyed me, and ask myself why I was so annoyed at each one. This strategy backfired. In no time, I had gone from being conscious of an irritant within my field of awareness to being entirely subsumed by irritation: I had absolutely nothing on my mind but how much this person annoyed me, and a laundry list of self-justifying reasons for being annoyed.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> Then I remembered something that Martin Laird pointed out in his book, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Into the Silent Land: </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">when Satan was tempting Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus didn’t debate with him; he didn’t allow himself to be hooked. Instead, he simply met each temptation with an appropriate quotation from scripture. “It is written…,” he said, then shut up, never giving the tempter the time of day.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> (I’ll interrupt myself here to share the only thing I ever learned in my brief career as a vacuum cleaner salesman: “once you have stated your case, the next person to talk loses.” When you are arguing with someone—a sales clerk or petty official, say—make your point and then absolutely clam up. It’s difficult, but often works; the tension produced by the silence just becomes too much, and your adversary will begin to babble in order to break it. Then you win.)</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> So I tried Jesus’ stratagem; abandoning my bogus self-examination about why this person rubbed me the wrong way, I simply told myself what God told Samuel in 1 Kings: “You see not as God sees, but as mortals see; for you look at outward appearances, but God looks on the heart.” I had to repeat this a few times over the course of the service, but it worked: I set aside my involuntary response and put my attention where it was supposed to be.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> (The fact that this person turned out, in later conversation, to actually be a jerk is immaterial. I suppose. It’s not as though obsessing about the offending mannerisms was doing any good. And anyway, maybe being a jerk is just one more layer of appearances between me and the heart that God looks on.) </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Fifty years before Jung opened his practice, George Eliot put her finger on the problem: “unacknowledged agents” in our minds do stuff without our awareness or consent. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Now Jung attributed much of this stuff to what he called “the Shadow”—those aspects of our personalities which we reject and repress, and which undermine and sabotage us in a bid for self-expression. And Jung believed that, in banishing the unwanted aspects of ourselves into the unconscious, we cut ourselves off from our creativity and self-realization. Jungian psychologist and Episcopal priest John Sanford likened the Shadow to Jesus’ “treasure hidden in the field” (Matthew 13:44). Make friends with your Shadow, the pop-psyche mavens tell us--and why not? If some repressed aspect of my personality is forcing me to read political blogs all night instead of going to bed so I won’t be irascible toward my children the next day, I’m willing to take that as a sign that some fundamental change in my life is called for. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">But sometimes the Shadow just needs to pipe down. The Desert Fathers externalized their troublesome inner promptings as demons, and oriented much of their lives and practice toward silencing them—and surely not every vicious or self-destructive drive is potentially redeeming. Sometimes evil thoughts are just evil. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Martha Graham counseled Agnes DeMille to keep open to the urges that motivate her. Well and good; the jungle is dark, but full of diamonds. But how do we distinguish between motivating urges that are potentially liberating, and those that are just plain bad? Or at any rate unhelpful? (“All things are lawful to me,” said Paul, “but not all things are useful.”) How can we tell the gifts of the Shadow from the Trojan Horse of the ego?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">One thing I have heard before, but have only recently realized in my own experience, is that turning the attention from the object of one’s feelings toward the feelings themselves is a great disclosing tablet. When our whole field of awareness is filled up with the object, there is no room for awareness of self—the very reason, I suspect, that most of us “nurse our wrath to keep it warm” toward at least one person or situation: we don’t want to become self-aware on that score.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">One evening I was at a motel desk with a friend, trying to get in touch with a mutual friend who was staying there and whom we had arranged to meet. Her room phone wasn’t working, and we were trying to get the desk clerk to somehow get a message to her—which, being more afraid of his employers than he was sympathetic to us, he refused to do. As we pressed him—OK, as I became angry--he became rude and dismissive.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> Back in the car, my friend asked me why I so furious at this subaltern. As one reiterating the self-evident, I said, “Because he was rude to me!” “So what?” my friend asked.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> And I couldn’t think of a thing to say.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> Later, upon reflection, I realized that if someone is rude to me, it constitutes an implicit statement about my relative worth—and that at some level, I take that statement at face value. This person is, by being rude to me, implying that I deserve no better, which some part of me already believes, so in order to distract myself from that externally validated self-assessment, I become furious at the rude person.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Lesson 5 in A Course in Miracles says “I am never upset for the reason I think.” The ego does a bang-up job of directing the attention outward in order to avert the inward gaze. Maybe the key to discerning between the (potentially) liberating drives of the Shadow and the cramping, self-protective machinations of the ego lies somewhere in there. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Maybe if I had the keenness to discern and the courage to follow my redemptive inner promptings, I would find myself happier and more self-aware--whereas getting caught up in ego chatter invariably makes me more miserable and more aware of other people, other things (or rather, of my thoughts and feelings about them.) Maybe these internal agents need to start carrying ID. Or maybe I’m just breathtakingly self-involved.</span></span></span></p><!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">(Or all of the above. Once as I stood in line at a convenience store in St. Paul, I asked the clerk, “Are magazines becoming trashier and trashier, or am I just becoming a grumpy old fart?” “Well, sir,” she deadpanned, “both of those things could be true.”)</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-65692186711663531632009-07-14T13:32:00.000-04:002009-07-14T13:43:35.595-04:00Hide and Seek<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“You say you seek God, but a ray of light doesn’t seek the sun; it’s coming from the sun...Because you don’t know that who you are is one with God, you believe all these labels about yourself: I’m a sinner, I’m a saint, I’m a wretch, I’m a worm and no man, I’m a monk, I’m a nurse. These are all labels, clothing. They serve a purpose, but they are not who you are. To the extent that you believe these labels, you believe a lie, and you add anguish upon anguish. It’s what most of us do for most of our lives.” </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Martin Laird, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Into the Silent Land</span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Altar Guild are after my daughter.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Last year, the cadre of parishioners--mostly elderly women--who oversee the linens, chalice, paten, altar book, candles, flowers and other arrangements for Communion at our church approached Allison and me about recruiting our then-five-year-old Clare to help out. Somehow, without our noticing, they had marked how meticulous Clare is, how attentive to the environment and interested in things being “just so.” We ultimately decided that, flattering as it was for them to ask, she was a little young to be committing Saturday mornings to helping out in the sacristy. I still wonder if we made the right decision about that. But the incident got me thinking about how much we rely on the old ladies to keep things running.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Many years ago, I remember sitting in the park in Lancaster, watching a group of elderly women volunteers tending the flowerbeds. And young and callow as I was, the question still forced itself upon me: </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">who is going to take care of things when the old ladies are gone?</span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’ve been thinking about this because I am in a golden position to be a helper-out. Having quit my job with no immediate prospects in view, I could simply make up my mind to being one of those unsung people who make things keep happening. I could devote myself to my home and family, working on my music and volunteering. Under any kind of rational scrutiny, this course emerges as a true win-win. But here are the two big barriers I face:</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">1)</span><span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Most of my friends are not in a position to give up their jobs and devote themselves to pursuing a combination of parenting, creative work and good-doing. It seems ridiculous not to be stoked red-hot for such an option, but there it is: I feel guilty.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">2)</span><span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The extent to which one can be utterly mistaken about oneself is astonishing. The realization that one has altogether bought into a value system which one has always believed oneself to reject takes some serious adjusting-to. But I cannot escape the tinge of shame that comes with not being gainfully employed and living on my wife’s salary. I thought I was above that sort of thing, but apparently not. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Let there be no misunderstanding: I have friends who have given up jobs to be stay-at-home dads, and I have cheered them on. (Of course, during the most demanding time of babyhood, the girls were in daycare while I taught, so I can’t claim full Mr. Mom credit in any case.) And I have crusaded against the insidious fallacy that only work for which one is paid has any value. But something far deeper down in my makeup than belief chafes at not bringing in any money, at not “advancing” in my career, at not “using” that expensive Ph.D. And unfortunately, I’m not any better than anybody else at considering the lilies.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The fact is, I don’t really have very much faith. Or at least, not the important kind—and here is another area in which my reality is discontinuous with my professed positions. I have always said that belief </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> is more valuable than belief </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">that. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">One can believe </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">that</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> God lived a human life and died a human death in Jesus of Nazareth, and give reasons for it; one can accept as true a certain constellation of factual statements </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">about </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">a thing and give one’s rational assent to them. That’s what doctrine is all about. And I do, more or less. But I’ve long believed that doctrinal/creedal belief—faith as assent--is less important that faith as </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">trust. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">If I say, “I believe in you,” that isn’t shorthand for a list of factual statements about you to which I subscribe—it means I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">trust</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> in you, I rely on you: I have </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">faith </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">you. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And I don’t.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’m too much of a control freak; it is very important that I be on top of things, that I be moving myself forward and leaving nothing to chance. Which is--if only by the measure of results, if nothing else--preposterous. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Of course, I have matured a little over the years in this respect. For instance, although I have never gambled, I fully understand the addictive quality of it, because I used to be addicted to applying for things. Every competition, call for scores, grant or any other opportunity that came along, I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">had</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> to apply for it, because the one I didn’t apply for just </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">might</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> be the one I would have won. Just one more and I’ll quit. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I don’t do that any more; the constriction of time and resources that comes with parenthood, along with enough ding letters to paper the living room, have taught me the folly of blindside applying-for. But one can’t really call that faith, any more than avoiding a two-by-four upside the head because one knows it will hurt. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So lacking faith </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> God, I find it hard to have faith that whatever my hand finds to do can have value simply because I do it with my might. I still feel like any time not spent getting ahead is stolen time. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Man, if only I didn’t have this laundry to do, I could be working on yadda yadda yadda.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">But even if one resolves to devote one’s life to worthwhile pursuits, how does one find the measure of worth? Is working on the parish podcast as worthwhile as taking food to the homeless? Is writing letters for Amnesty as worthwhile as visiting the sick and imprisoned? Is my personal growth as important as making a measurable impact on the world? How much time can one take from volunteering and give over to reading and studying and writing music before one ceases to be the salt of the earth and becomes a privileged nabob? Don’t I have to actually retire from a job before I’ve earned the right to work in the garden during the workday?</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Behaving like a retired person at 45 smacks of failure, and carries a frightening presentiment of reaching retirement age without anything to retire from. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Now, wise people have said since forever that the most important work is the work that needs doing here and now.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">There are some who are really the salt of the earth, who work for work’s sake, who do not care for name or fame or even to go to heaven…a man who can work for five days, or even five minutes, without any selfish motive whatever, without thinking of the future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant…If you want to do a great or a good work, do not trouble to think what the result will be…The only way to grow is to do the duty near at hand, and thus go on gathering strength till the highest state is reached….When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your whole life to it for the time being</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. (Vivekananda, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Karma Yoga)</span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In fact, my malaise isn’t entirely attributable to </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">what</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> I am doing or not doing. Part of the discomfort—maybe the largest part—is that one’s identity becomes so bound up with what one does for a living. If I’m not working as a teacher, and I’m not precisely retired, and neither my composing nor performing are paying the bills, what account can I give of myself? What am I?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I knew a lifelong academic who was dying of cancer. She had held on for a long time to the possibility of returning to school, but when it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, she looked at me and said, “If I’m not a teacher, what am I?” I know I don’t want that to happen to me. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The official, paste-up Potemkin Village me—job, social roles, professional accomplishments, consumer preferences—is not the real me; its life is not my real life. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So maybe the way to grow and gather strength and find value in the work at hand is to disentangle identity from profession once for all. The Altar Guild ladies are doing good even if they never held a job, and neither the altar, nor the flowers in the park, nor the letters one writes nor the sandwiches one delivers are a badge of identity. Our life is hidden, and what we do is not who we are. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">And if I can find the requisite faith, I'll find out if that's as true as all the wise people say it is.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-15948774172680774012009-06-29T15:29:00.001-04:002009-07-22T17:19:04.135-04:00The Noonday Demon<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>Cognitive psychology has become aware that much depression is maintained, even generated, by getting caught up in negative patterns of thinking. </i><span style="font-style:normal">–Martin Laird, </span><i>Into the Silent Land</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i> <o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I struggled with depression for several years. I cannot say for certain how long, because it took me a long time to realize that I was depressed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Like Hamlet, I found weary, stale, flat and unprofitable all the uses of this world, and it took a long time to figure out that the problem wasn’t with the world, but with me.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">While Clare was still a baby and before Sophie was born, I began wasting time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Lots of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I spent hours and hours playing computer solitaire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>When I became aware of YouTube, things went downhill very fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Although I have never owned a television, and prided myself on never having seen Friends or Seinfeld or Survivor, <i>I have watched over 4,000 videos on YouTube.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I was self-employed for many years before I began teaching, cobbling together a livelihood out of composing, performing and temp work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I was always unusually self-disciplined; during grad school, I regularly rose at 5:00 a.m. to write.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But during the last six years, I became unable either to face my obligations, or to take pleasure in constructive diversions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It was as though my mind were in open rebellion against the things I was asking it to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I was clearly addicted to loafing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Screwtape, the senior demon invented by C.S. Lewis in his book, <i>The Screwtape Letters,</i><span style="font-style:normal"> wrote to his nephew Wormwood, a novice tempter out on his first assignment, about people like me:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness,…you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>… You can make him do nothing at all for long periods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked".<o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Ultimately, between the fatigue brought on by staying up late every night—on top of the fatigues of having an infant and a toddler in the house—my corrosive shame and the weariness of hiding it, I became irritable and intolerant with my family, lashing out in self-righteous impatience at the least provocation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>By the grace of God I woke up enough to see what I was doing to my family, and realized that I needed help.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I found a therapist and got a prescription for a mild antidepressant, which took the edge off enough for me to think a little more clearly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But I discovered that while drugs can help manage negative feelings, they can do nothing about negative habits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>You have to tackle those yourself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And even now, with the apathy and despair gone, when I no longer want to sleep all day and am no longer smothering under the weight of a leaden sky full of black clouds, I still struggle with what the Desert Fathers called “afflictive thoughts.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I may be out with my children, taking them someplace we all like to be on a beautiful day, and the thought “I’m so unhappy” will come out of nowhere.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Or “I’m so miserable!” Literally, those words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And the strange thing is that the words <i>aren’t true; </i><span style="font-style:normal">I’m really not miserable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But I’m in the habit of telling myself that I am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>These thoughts –and doubtless many, many others, unlanguaged and unrecognized--slide unbidden down tracks I laid for them long ago.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And it takes colossal effort to pull up those tracks, and constant vigilance over what I am thinking, so that I now understand the challenge in Paul’s advice to “take every thought captive for Christ.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Vivekananda said that most of us are like spoilt children, and we let out minds think whatever they want to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Not letting the mind default into old destructive patterns is a huge undertaking which, though made more doable through the relief offered by chemical intervention, cannot be accomplished except by laborious effort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span><i>Ora et labora. </i><span style="font-style:normal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><i><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The yogis call these patterns <i>samskaras,</i><span style="font-style:normal"> or “volitional formations.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The idea behind </span><i>karma</i><span style="font-style:normal"> is that everything we think, do or will leaves “traces” in the </span><i>vritti,</i><span style="font-style:normal"> or mind-stuff, which will pre-dispose us to continue to think, act and will in those ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>(“The dog returns to its vomit,” as the Hebrew Bible colorfully puts it.)<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Once </span><i>samskaras—</i><span style="font-style:normal">literally, “what has been put together”—have been established, they must work themselves out completely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children; as you sew, so shall you reap; what goes around, comes around.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Only grace can break the cycle.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Though the acute emotional distress of my depression is in remission, I still struggle with what the Desert Fathers and Mothers called <i>acedia—</i><span style="font-style:normal">what the Western Church has, as one of the “seven deadly sins,” translated as “sloth,” but is actually much more:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>a deep spiritual lassitude that is a near relation to depression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is always worse after a period of progress;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Mother Theodora nailed it when she said, “You should realize that as soon as you intend to live in peace, at once evil comes and weighs down your soul through </span><i>acedia,</i><span style="font-style:normal"> faint-heartedness, and evil thoughts.” This is why the Desert Fathers and Mothers called </span><i>acedia </i><span style="font-style:normal">the Noonday Demon: it comes at mid-day to undermine all the resolve of the morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I knew someone who, because of what I had experienced myself, I was convinced was deeply depressed. The hole he couldn’t climb out of was so familiar to me, I wished I could convey to him the fruit of my own struggle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It was terrifically frustrating knowing that some medication could have lifted the bell jar enough so he could breathe, allowing him to get out from under his feelings enough to take steps toward managing his thoughts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But in the end, he had to choose to do the work himself; no one could make him accept help.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Jesus couldn’t. “Do you want to be well?” he asked the paralyzed man at the well—not, presumably, because he didn’t know the answer, but because he needed the man to own the question.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i>“Jerusalem, Jerusalem…again and again would I have taken your children to myself as a bird takes her young ones under her wings, and you would not!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></i><span style="font-style:normal">And God can’t force it on us either, or doesn’t;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>we have to seek and accept the grace ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-16813270814077593142009-06-20T19:23:00.001-04:002009-06-21T12:04:49.011-04:00The Nursery Magic<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;font-size:13.0pt;color:#333333;"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:Georgia;font-size:13.0pt;color:#333333;"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"></span></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you…”</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or but by bit?”</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your fur has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> “I suppose you are Real?" said the Rabbit…</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> “Once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.” </span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> The Rabbit sighed…He wished that he could become Real without these uncomfortable things happening to him.</span></i></span><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(From </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Velveteen Rabbit, </span></i></span><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">or</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> How Toys Become Real,</span></i></span><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> by Margery Williams)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> My second daughter, Sophia, didn’t sleep through the night until she was two and half years old. For the first few months, she was (read: “we were”) up every ninety minutes during the night. My wife Allison, through sheer fatigue, turned a ghastly gray-green color that alarmed me, and my own mental fog garnered me the worst student evaluations that semester in my entire ten years of teaching. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">During the infancy of my two girls, Allison expressed more than once her surprise at how I managed to rise to the occasion of fatherhood. I was surprised myself—I discovered hidden reserves I had no idea I had, and began to feel like a TARDIS—those spaceship/time machines from Doctor Who that are worlds larger on the inside than on the outside.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Fatherhood has been an exercise in Becoming Real. Even Clare, my six-year-old, has noticed how much gray has recently appeared in my beard. But the “uncomfortable things” of fatherhood, like the ones the Skin Horse described, are keepers. The Sisyphusean hamster wheel of chores, the logistical difficulties of leading a normal life with a toddler to preserve from grievous bodily harm (Sophie still managed to break a leg—on my watch—when she was eleven months old,) the weird abjectness of having a screaming infant on the shoulder and a screaming toddler on the leg, the nightmares about strollers rolling down embankments, the terror when I looked around at a block party at the empty spot where my 18-month-old Sophie had been a moment before, my fear of the coming years of peer brutality that no parent’s vigilance can ward off—they are all worth it. As often as I ask myself why on earth anyone would open themselves up to the profound vulnerability of having small people utterly dependent upon them, I wouldn’t trade the experiences in for anything. They have moved me farther down the Road to Real than my whole pre-fatherhood life had taken me.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I had read many times the passage from Matthew in which Jesus reminds his hearers that none of them, if their children asked for bread, would give them a stone, or a serpent if they asked for an egg—and if they, who were evil, knew how to give good gifts to their children, how much more would God give good things to those who ask? Candidly, I had always suspected that, once I had children, I would discover that that was arrant malarkey. God loves me more than I love my children? It doesn’t make a shred of sense; what could be more counter-intuitive? And yet, against all reason, I knew the first time I held Clare that it was all true, and parenthood was a window into the heart of God.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I remember trying to change Clare’s diaper as she screamed and kicked and twisted in protest; I found myself yelling at her, “I AM TRYING TO HELP YOU! IF YOU WOULD JUST STOP YELLING AND HOLD STILL YOU WOULD UNDERSTAND!” </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And suddenly, I stopped yelling myself, thunderstruck by the realization that I could be God, talking to Scott. Quit your bitching and thrashing—I am trying to help you!</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">“The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I know an elderly woman who is one of those people who lifts your spirits every time you see her. We were talking about the economy, and she told me of her memories of the Depression, when West River Drive was lined with mile after mile of tent city, and people came to her parents’ back door every single day looking for a handout of food which was never refused. When I caught sight of some black-and-white photos of young men in uniform, she told me about her sons, two of whom she has survived—one of whom she was with, holding his hand, as he died of pancreatic cancer. And when she says that no experience, even grief and loss, ever goes to waste—her, I can hear, with shame at my own breathtaking ingratitude.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">So often when my girls were babies, I remembered a sermon I’d heard years ago in which the priest told us that of course, he had expected to love his children—but nothing could have possibly prepared him for the overwhelming flood of all-consuming love they would awaken in him. And nothing could have prepared him for the pain of hearing them say Daddy, I lost my job; Daddy, I’m an alcoholic; Daddy, I’m getting a divorce. If you want to get in touch with the Passion of God, he told us, you just go and have yourself some children.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Why would God open Himself up like that? Make Himself so vulnerable? Why in the world would God do that?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:16.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The Spirit, poet Mary Oliver tells us, wants to be “more than pure light that shines where no one is.” Maybe God created us in order to experience the Nursery Magic of the Skin Horse: to become more Real.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> </blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;"></span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;"><blockquote></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span"></span></span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;"><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote><br /></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family:Georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment-->Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593735498783507566.post-75681470464668482192009-06-16T09:31:00.002-04:002009-11-23T09:04:10.742-05:00Another Growth Opportunity<div>At the end of the 2008-2009 academic year, I left my job at Eastern University, a small Christian liberal arts institution on Philadelphia's Main Line. Having been adjunct faculty for ten years with no visible prospect of advancement, I decided that my time and energy would be better spent elsewhere. That much was relatively easy. The difficult part is that I have no idea yet where "elsewhere" is, or what I'm meant to be doing there. <br />
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</div><div></div><div>So what I'm doing here is journaling my midlife crisis--working my way through the process of discerning my vocation by documenting that process. This blog is primarily meant as an exercise in spiritual discernment for myself, but if anyone else finds reading it worthwhile, then welcome. I'd value any feedback you'd care to offer.<br />
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</div><div></div>You may wonder why I have called the blog "Little Teaboys Everywhere." The story, as Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön tells it, goes like this: before the Indian monk Atisha introduced Buddhism into Tibet, he heard that the Tibetans were serene, friendly, non-aggravating people. Fearing lest living among such people would retard his spiritual progress, Atisha brought with him a surly, abrasive Bengali teaboy to help him continually practice patience and forbearance. The joke, of course, is that once he actually landed in Tibet, he discovered that he needn't have brought his teaboy with him, as there are frustrating people everywhere.<br />
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<div></div><div>In Buddhist thought, the people and situations that frustrate us most are our best teachers. These people and circumstances are an opportunity for spiritual practice and growth. "AFGO," as they say in Twelve Step--"Another Growth Opportunity."<br />
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</div><div></div><div>I'm no Hebrew scholar, but I'd love to know the literal meaning of the verse that is traditionally translated "This is the day that the LORD has made--let us rejoice and be glad in it." For me, at any rate, the meaning is more like this: "Might as well rejoice and be glad in it." No reason not to; nothing to be gained by fighting it, because this is it--the soup of the day that the LORD has made. It hurts you to kick against the goads. Or as we say around our house, "You get what you get, and you don't get upset."<br />
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</div><div></div><div>Jesus didn't say that he came that we may have a better life, or an easier one or a more succes<span style="font-family: georgia;">sful--he came that we may have life "more abundantly." And just as a hearing aid amplifies everything--the </span>sounds that distract you as well as the ones you want to hear--"abundant life" means <i>more life</i>--all of the above. So this blog is about my coming to terms with my own abundant life. As Aeschylus put it in <i>Agamemnon:</i><br />
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</i><br />
</div><div><i> </i><br />
</div><div><i>In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.</i><br />
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</div><div>Sounds grim, I know, but as I get older I am coming to realize that it isn't, or needn't be--that "resignation to the will of God" is not an admission of defeat or a desiccation of human vitality, but rather the determination to find joy and fulfillment in the present moment--a moment which comes to us, as C. S. Lewis put it, as "pure gift."<br />
</div>Scott Robinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01034212655361602680noreply@blogger.com2