The Squirrels Have the Conn

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.  –C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

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.

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 Capital Report.[i] 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. 

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 had 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.

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.

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”[ii]—anything, in fact, but the man behind the curtain, that thing they are charged with keeping out of my awareness.

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”[iii] 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?”

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:

·     I never advanced beyond a middling point in academia because I am a mediocre academic. “Our duties are determined by our deserts to a much larger extent than we are willing to grant."[iv] Maybe I wasn’t robbed; maybe I actually got what I was fit for.

·     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.

·     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?”[v]

·     Even if anything should work out for me now, I’m too old at this point to make something of myself anyway.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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 in the car at the time.  (Why 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.” 

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.)

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:  I am not reconciled to the inevitability of old age, sickness and death. 

I think this must be the real truth that the squirrels have been charged with hiding.  Don’t let him think about it, they’ve been told. 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?

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:

(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.

        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!'

        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!'

        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.'

        His master replied, 'You wicked, lazy servant!...

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.'[vi]

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? 

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.

(Breathe…breathe…)

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.” 

Thank you in advance, but don’t bother telling me this isn’t true, because I know 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!

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 Fahrenheit 451 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. 

Of course, the circus master Sleary in Dickens’s Hard Times 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?

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. 

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."[vii]  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.[viii]

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.

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,

…is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

The squirrels got nothing on that.

---

[i] http://www.thefreelibrary.com/At+the+Falwell+follies:+Jerry+finally+'fesses+up+on+Fox+News+Channel.-a0122553390

[ii] A nod to Anne LaMott’s Bird by Bird

[iii] Baptismal vows, Book of Common Prayer

[iv] Vivekananda, Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga.  Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982.

[v] http://www.adamgreenonline.com/newsletters_2006/trib050995.html

[vi] Matthew 25: 14-29, edited for length

[vii] Romans 8:22

Participation Trophy

(Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. (Colossians 1:15)

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.                     (Genesis 1:27)

“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.

…(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]

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;[ii] “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.

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.

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. 

“I do think I see some shred of goodness in John Proctor,” said the hard-pressed Puritan in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. “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.

“Self-love, not sex, is his woe,” screamed the headline about the sports analyst in the wake of a sex scandal.[iii]  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.

It would probably help if we had a more precise word for “self-love.”  The Countess Olivia in Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night 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.

If a biology professor in Alabama[iv] 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.

“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.”[v] Human beings made in the image of God mistreat each other because we think, not too much of ourselves, but too little.

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.[vi]

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 need prizes, or“retail therapy”, or need so badly for things to be a certain way that they will scream at a public official in a town hall meeting, or need a drink, or dismiss rural people as “shitkickers”, or need 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.[vii]

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. 

Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel St. Francis 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.

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.

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:  It just doesn’t matter what I want! 

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 means something about us.  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.

“Everything that we do has a kind of basic mantra behind it, like “What about me?”[viii]”  It’s exhausting and, like beating your head against a wall, it feels so good when you stop.  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.

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.[ix]”  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. 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.”[x]  If that isn’t self-esteem—being beyond the dirty devices and brute broken nails of the world--I can’t imagine what is.

Maybe it would help if we used the Sanskrit word maitri in preference to the loaded “self-esteem.”  Maitri, as Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explains, “is translated in a lot of ways, maybe most commonly as love, but the way (my teacher) Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche translated it was unconditional friendliness and in particular unconditional friendliness to oneself.”[xi]

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 maitri.  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.

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!

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.

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.

“I’ll be waiting to go into an audition,” he said, “and I’ll suddenly remember:  ‘Oh, right—this isn’t 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.

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, anything; it became unthinkable that I should never have anything to “show” for all those brains I supposedly had. 

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.

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 Mallrats, 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.

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 maitri and be at peace with themselves. If God has a plan, that has to be it.

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: 

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:

A procession of angels pass before a human being wherever he or she goes, proclaiming, “Make way for the image of God.” 

---

[i] Bosch, Torie, in Slate, http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/enough-trophy-kid-talk

[ii] 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

[iii]MacIntosh, Jean. “Steve gal: Self-love, not sex, is his woe.”  New York Post, February 10, 2010

[iv] Dewan, Shaila et al.  “For Professor, Fury Just Beneath the Surface.”  New York Times, February 20, 2010.

[v] Shane, Scott, “F.B.I., Laying Out Evidence, Closes Anthrax Case.”  New York Times, February 19, 2010.

[vi] Swami Tyagananda, lecture on the Kathopanishad, Vedanta Society of Boston, February 9, 2007.

[vii] Matthew 6:21

[viii] Swami Tyagananda, lecture on the Kathopanishad, Vedanta Society of Boston, February 9, 2007.

[ix] Act 5:41

[x] Colossians 3:3

[xi] http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/maitri1.php

Tipping Point

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.  (Matthew 5)

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.

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.

Consider the well-known story from the Gospel of John:

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."  (John 8:3-11)

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: the eldest present were the first to leave. 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.

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,

…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.[i]

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.

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.

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.                

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.

“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.

---

[i] Aristotle, Ethics

[ii] See Vivekananda, Karma Yoga

[iii] 1 Corinthians 13:11

Christmas

“Am I too late for breakfast?”

“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^th 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.

“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.”

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 maya-- 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. 

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:

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.[i]

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.” 

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 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 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.”

“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.

 Ultimately, the spirit of maya trumps the spirit of Christmas.

“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!”

In spite of the rottenness, 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.

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.[ii]

When we are children, we can enter the story with abandon, but as maya 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.

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. 

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?

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?

So are we supposed to be homeless? Or are we rather meant to live as though we were? As though the world were not our gated community, but a cosmic KOA that we were just passing through?

 “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 involved—“he went about doing good, healing all who were oppressed by the devil”—yet he was also unattached, “in this world but not of it.”  And though he was a sojourner here, 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.

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?

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.[iii]

In Jesus, God plunged into the maya with both feet--tied a towel around his waist and got down here amongst us in this confounding, baffling human life. 

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. 

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:

Now, Master and Mistress, we know you will give

Unto our jolly wassail as long as we live;

And if we do live to another new year,

We will call in again for to see who is here. 

Did you catch that?  The people who sang that song did not take it for granted that they would be here in a year’s time.  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. 

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 done—that Pandora can put it all back into the box.  This is the day that the Lord has made; work while you have the light, and rejoice in it, because it is all you have. 

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^th-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:

And all was for an appil,

An appil that he took,

As clerkes finden

Written in their book…

Blessed be the time

That appil taken was!

Therefore we moun singen

Deo gracias!

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.  Blessed be the time that apple taken was.  As though Eden had been some kind of infantile Pleasantville. Because the Fall, Original Sin, maya, 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 maya is unknown.

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!”

“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.” 

Mother Theresa softened. “Now,” she said, “you will never again receive a stranger in the bread and wine.”

God comes into the maya 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.

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!” 

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.  If 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. 

Merry Christmas.  Don’t be afraid.

---

[i] This quotation is a compilation of verses from Ecclesiastes.

[ii] Apologies to W. B. Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren”

[iii] from John 13

[iv] More apologies to Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

[v] Isaiah 57:15