I am sitting by a campfire, lively breeze blowing through  giant pine trees, granite cliffs on one side, distant snow-capped mountains on the other; a stream flowing downhill over pebbles and boulders can be heard in the distance; at night the pitch black sky lights up with seemingly endless stars, somewhere far off an owl hooting….  I make a cup of coffee over the fire and converse with this wilderness…. 

Mostly we don’t think of that starry sky as also a wilderness, but it is that.  It is “wild” in the root meaning of that word, not humanly controlled or manipulated, not running by human wisdom, but by its own inner wisdom which the ancient Chinese called the Tao.  I look at the Milky Way, that fuzzy white spread of millions of stars like our sun, our galaxy, and millions of other galaxies out there whose light takes millions, even billions of years to get here….it is all so incomprehensibly and unimaginably vast, and yet in a very real way it is all our home.  Every atom of every fiber of our being was made in those stars billions of years ago…and so with everything we touch, we breathe, we eat….  In the deepest sense there is nothing “out there” that is alien to us.

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

                                                           Gary Snyder

“I greet the breeze that happens along,

                  and lift a cup to offer to the vastness….”

                                                    Su Shih

BUT, there is a sad story to tell: 

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating—we, modern humans, experience different kinds of relationships to what we call wilderness:

1. Wilderness is seen as a resource for wealth….lumber, metals, farmlands, land for development, land ownership(privatization of wilderness land), etc.  In other words, wilderness as another commodity.
2. Wilderness as a context for recreation….simply another theme park….
3. Wilderness as an obstacle, a challenge….  The first Europeans who came  upon the Grand Canyon cursed it because  it was getting in their way on the search for the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold.”  Today people jack up their Jeeps and trucks with massive tires and love to ride over the wild terrain.  
4. Wilderness as a context and a kind of boundary for religious/spiritual engagement.  This one is fascinating in its various convolutions:  The early English colonists in North America saw the wilderness as “dangerous,” where the devil had free play, where the “heathen Indians” lived.  Two centuries later, the whole thing flips around in the American Transcendentalist Movement with Emerson and Thoreau, where the wilderness is the locus of spiritual growth.  Similarly with the ancient Christian monks in a not so obvious way.  Wilderness as “opening an inner door” to a Mystery of Wholeness.

Nothing really new in all this….in many ways these four have been with us for a long time…..but it was not always looked on as “wilderness.”

The root of the word “wilderness” is of course “wild,” and this word has taken on so many different shades of meaning over the centuries. “Wild” signifies processes and dynamics that are not human guided, human controlled, human originated, etc.   Millenia ago, during the period of hunter-gatherer cultures, what we call “wilderness” was simply “home.”  There was not this distinction, this dichotomy.  And even in recent ages for some indigenous cultures which had not been touched by the great civilizations of Europe or Asia, this was still true.  Chief Luther Standing Bear:  “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’  animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began.” 

Gary Snyder:  “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of “wild systems.” When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive….  The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by “civilized” thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong.”

An ancient Chinese poet wrote:  “The nation is destroyed; mountains and rivers remain.”  The poet was Tu Fu (often written as Du Fu), one of China’s finest poets and a giant figure in world literature.  He lived during the great Tang Period, around 750 CE.  This line is taken from a poem written during the end of that period when the cultural, religious, and technical achievements of the Tang were destroyed through a brutal civil war.  Tu Fu’s poetry is suffused with a quiet sadness at the  impermanence of all human constructs, all human endeavors, all that is human….and he engages a kind of awestruck consolation in contemplating the natural world….a theme much favored by many Chinese poets and artists.  From this evolves the awareness that human beings are simply a part of a great community of Being of which  each member, whether it be a blade of grass, a butterfly, a human being, a star, a kitten,  a mountain, a river, etc., unfolds in being through a hidden inner dynamic they called Tao.

Many, many centuries later, a new awareness unfolds,….a modern Japanese poet imitated this line but in reversal:  “Mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State remains.”

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

                                                     Aldo Leopold

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .”

                            Wallace Stegner

We get the message!

The fact is that the wilderness has been attacked, abused, exploited in all cultures and in all ages, more or less.  In the Critias, one of Plato’s Dialogues, one of the characters laments about the clear-cutting on the outskirts of Athens which caused serious soil erosion.  Gary Snyder says that as a young man he thought that he had  found in the Japanese and Chinese world, cultures that lived in harmony with nature.  When he went over there he found  that picture was only partially true and more complicated than he first realized.  And so it is everywhere…… Snyder also said that in his opinion the last humans to live in a fully harmonious and true relationship with nature were the neolithic hunter-gatherers.  The moment you have the development of settled communities in agriculture, you begin the process of urbanization and civilization, and then somehow humans lose a certain sense of their place in the great scheme of things and their interactions with the surrounding natural world are largely negative.  (They are tossed out of “Paradise!”)  All the great urban civilizations of the past, Babylon, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Xian, etc. have shown destructive tendencies and ignorance of who and what they are  The landscapes of Europe, China….are nothing like what they were 5000, 10,000  years ago.  And modern civilization is way past that point where we can even imagine what that awareness was like.  Mother Nature seems to be trying to get our attention through climate change, but does it really look like we “get it”!?  In modern civilization we find ourselves in this technological/electronic cocoon where wild nature seems alien to most of us, something “out there,”  something maybe set aside for us, for our recreation or perhaps exploitation….  What is  needed here is not some “good intentions,” but a real  transformation of consciousness/awareness that we are a real part of this wild nature and it is truly part of us.  In other words a new, deeper sense of our place in the Community of All Beings.

You would think that religion would help in this regard.  Can only speak for my own Christianity, and this is a truly muddled affair!  There have been environmentalists who have put the whole blame for environmental degradation on a certain mindset that Christianity brings.  They point to Genesis and that mandate to “subdue the earth” and hold dominion over all its creatures…..that this kind of language leads us to see ourselves apart from the natural world, superior to it,  and to activity that is simply for our own gain.  Then, when the first Europeans came to this continent, they came armed with this mindset to the nth degree!  They saw before them a vast wilderness, that which was not civilization as they knew it,  that they could “subdue” and hold dominion over.  Much more troubling, however, were the people who lived in this wilderness, whose very humanity could be questioned; well, they were “wild” in this scheme of things, so they too could be “subdued” and put under the newcomers dominion….if they managed to stay alive…..  The rest of this history is too awful to think about…..

Modern Christian theologians and thinkers have tried to correct this view.  They claim that such an interpretation of Genesis was a distortion of the meaning in the creation story…that humans are charged with a kind of stewardship of the natural world, and the “good steward” is an emphatic scriptural trope.  Pope Francis has reminded us of all that.  That may well be the case; but there still is a problem.  That  mandate is at the very least ambiguous, but more importantly even this “stewardship” thing creates a framework of dualism when you look at wilderness/the natural world.  There is you, the human, and there is the “other,” wild nature; and how do the two “meet” and what transpires in that meeting?

 “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

                                                                            Aldo Leopold

But there are hints and resources within Christianity for a much different kind of vision, something beyond and deeper than stewardship.  Consider Francis of Assisi, even Isaac the Syrian, or take a look at a fictional representation of a whole tradition in Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima.   And various modern Christian voices like Thomas Merton’s….one of Merton’s favorite lines from the Old Testament was Job 39:26:  “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars….”  It doesn’t sound like we “own” that hawk!  There’s a Zen  koan in here somewhere!  He called it a pure Zen insight, but that whole “speech” of Yahweh is harmonious with what the ancient Chinese mystics called the Tao.  And then there is the very committed modern Catholic writer, Wendell Berry:

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.”

Very sound and deep,  theologically and spiritually!

And, in concluding our story:

“Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place.”

               Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”  

                                   John Muir

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Islamic scholar, wrote:  “Every authentic spirituality has  its distinct perfume which is an extension of the perfume of paradise….”  Indeed!  However, one could also say that likewise each authentic spirituality has an aspect, a version, a subtext, that perhaps entangles one in what I would call “spiritual knots,” driving one into futility, frustration, or just plain delusion….definitely not paradise!  I am not going to define what a “spiritual knot” is nor go more into it.  It is more of a fuzzy term that covers a number of issues and problems but all converging on one point.  We will simply look at a few examples, sayings, expressions, etc. that perhaps hint at what is the essence of the “spiritual knot,” that one point.

Each religious tradition can enable or even engender the build-up of spiritual knots, but also each has the resources within itself to “undo” the knot and free the person.  And each tradition has individuals who see through the “problem”  and are free and are a revelation of “what it’s all about!”  I said “each” religious tradition, but here I will risk an unprovable opinion:  the Islamic Sufis seem to me to be best at this business of “undoing spiritual knots” (and perhaps Zen comes a close second!);  and my own Christian tradition may very well be among the best at facilitating these knots….but I won’t push that point!  So this little survey will be top heavy with Sufis!  Let us begin:

1. An old Sufi saying:  “On the heart of Poverty three renouncements are inscribed:  Quit this world.  Quit the next world.  Quit quitting.”

Comments:  

A Rinzai Zen master could not be sharper or more direct.

  Some spiritual seekers (in all traditions) try to turn Poverty into a “merit badge” for a “spiritual boy scout”!  This ends that. 

Do not think that this is Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.

Most spiritual seekers think they know what this quitting is all about.  Turns out that it usually takes a long life’s journey before one gets a hint…if even then…..   In other words, do not think that you know what this quitting will entail in your life.  Hint: it’s not giving up stuff in Lent!

Recall the Desert Father stories about several old monks who are beset by robbers.   In one story, after the robbers leave, the old monk laments that he wished he had more to give them.  In another story, the old monk chases after the robbers with an item that he says they forgot to take!  Zen has similar stories.

Quiz:  Which quitting is operative in these stories?  None?  All?  Or which one?   (The answer  key  is to be found in your own heart.)

2. Bulleh Shah, a true master of undoing spiritual (and social) knots.  So little known in the West, but a revered Sufi holy man among his people.  Philosopher, poet in the his Punjabi language, Sufi, revolutionary reformer, lived around 1700 in the Punjab….today a part of Pakistan, bordering India.  Persecuted by fundamentalist Islamic authorities in his own time, he lived impoverished his whole life but always joyous; he challenged the caste system which was absolute in his day; questioned religious authorities; had to run for his life at least once, but today revered as a holy man and prophet.  Needless to say, his poetry, difficult to translate, has no excellent translators, loses a lot in translation (a lot of it is a bit rich in affective language for my taste)…..but you can still catch the thought ….and it leaves you amazed and speechless.  Here is an example, one of his most famous poems:

Not a believer in the mosque am I,
Nor a disbeliever with his rites am I.
I am not the pure amongst the impure,
I am neither Moses nor Pharaoh.
Bulleh, I know not who I am.

Bulleh, I know not who I am.”

― Bulleh Shah

And then there is this:

Going to Makkah is not the ultimate,

Even if hundreds of prayers are offered.

Going to River Ganges is not the ultimate,

Even if hundreds of cleansings (Baptisms) are done.

…

Bulleh Shah, the ultimate is

When the “I” is removed from the heart!

M

(An excerpt from “Makkeh Gaya” poem)

Comments:  Like  I said, this man is a master at undoing “spiritual knots.”  But first, there is  the struggle to even recognize the spiritual  knots within one’s heart precisely as spiritual knots.  

3. Some spiritual knots can be engendered or enabled by the classic texts through the peculiar language of the ancient spiritual masters, like the Desert Fathers……

 “A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, “Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.” So the old man said, “Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.” The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, “Didn’t they say anything to you?” He replied, “No.” The old man said, “Go back tomorrow and praise them.” So the brother went away and praised them, calling them, “Apostles, saints and righteous men.” He returned to the old man and said to him, “I have complimented them.” And the old man said to him, “Did they not answer you?” The brother said no. The old man said to him, “You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man.”

 A brother questioned Abba Moses saying, ‘I see something in front of me and I am not able to grasp it.’ The old man said to him, ‘If you do not become dead like those who are in the tomb, you will not be able to grasp it.’

 Abba Poemen said that a brother asked Abba Moses how someone could consider himself as dead towards his neighbor. The old man said to him, ‘If a man does not think in his heart that he is already three days dead and in the tomb, he cannot attain this saying.’

So….what do we make of this “dead” talk?  Years ago, when I was studying theology at a very progressive place, I met a group of older Catholic religious who were celebrating their sense of liberation through Vatican II.  To them this kind of language seemed psychologically repressive, unhealthy, something to reject in favor of a “more positive” approach that would affirm their humanity.  Then there were the very conservative religious who felt that Vatican II had eviscerated their religious life.  They were  inclined to see this language as a call to “greater effort,” a kind of stifling of negative feelings that, alas, keep recurring no matter how many rosaries you do, no matter how many Masses and novenas, no matter your best  intentions (meaning no matter how much you beat yourself up!)  Both groups suffered from some serious “spiritual knots”; both groups lacked someone who could undo those knots…like Bulleh Shah….or just a more sensitive, comprehensive listening to the Desert Fathers.  Their language can be at times problematic, but if you listen to them carefully you will not only undo these knots but also many others that perhaps never  even seemed as knots.

4. Same thing holds for modern texts and modern spiritual masters….like Abhishiktananda.  Under the influence of the Upanishads Abhishiktananda tends to frame the whole spiritual journey around certain key terms:  self/Self, awakening, “Aham” or “I am,” “tat tvam asi,” etc.  Now whatever meaning or nuance these terms had in the ancient culture that produced the Upanishads (around 1000 to 600 BCE), this kind of  language in the modern west (or even modern India) can lead to some serious distortions….as Monchanin, his monastic companion for several years, pointed out and as any number of so-called “gurus” or spiritual teachers have well  illustrated.  To avoid this one has to read his teachings with a certain spiritual acumen and common sense……which is not so common after all!!  A careful, sensitive reading of Abhishiktananda in total has the potential of undoing any of these kinds of problems and leads one  into profound depths.

Here is an interesting quote from Abhishiktananda concerning the phenomenon of the sannyasi/monk:

“The monk, or the sannyasi, who still thinks, ‘I am a sannyasi’, is not a true sannyasi. He may have to say this to suit the point of view of those with whom he is speaking, in order to make them understand that he is no longer one of them and no longer has a share with them in the things of this world. It is the same with his clothing, which is not so much for his own sake as it is for others, to show that he is separate in society, or more accurately, separate from society…. When alone by himself the monk cannot any longer think ‘I am this, I am that, I am a renouncer’….”

Excellent point and fully in spirit with Bulleh Shah.  Whatever nitpicking you might have about this statement, you can see that his language is “on the way” to something even deeper where he joins the profound Sufis.

(Ancient Sufi saying:  “The true Sufi is one who is not.”  Unpack that statement and you are “home”!)

Here’s another quote:

“The Spirit blows where he wills. He calls from within, he calls from without. May his chosen ones never fail to attend to his call! In the desert or the jungle, just as much as in the world, the danger is always to fix one’s attention upon oneself. For the wise man, who has discovered his true Self, there is no longer either forest or town, clothes or nakedness, doing or not-doing. He has the freedom of the Spirit, and through him the Spirit works as he wills in this world, using equally his silence and his speech, his solitude and his presence in society. Having passed beyond his ‘own’ self, his ‘own’ life, his ‘own’ being and doing, he finds bliss and peace in the Self alone, the only real Self, the parama-atman. This is the true ideal of the sannyasi.”

What a marvelous, profound statement….and yet not without its potential misreadings and spiritual knots.  But really I wonder if you can express it any better than this…..

5. Lets look at how the Sufis do it.  

But first we have to deal with a difficult spiritual conundrum:

Every authentic spiritual tradition has some sort of language, either in the classic texts or the more modern ones, that in effect says what Bulleh Shah said: “get rid of the ‘I’ in the heart.”  It may be disguised in various ways but it’s still there.  Consider the Christian Gospels, consider how all that “language of the cross,” the language of “renouncing oneself,” the language of “losing one’s life in order to gain it,” etc., how that all points to that one dynamic.  But here comes the problem….you cannot “remove,” or “renounce” that “I”…..no more than you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  This leads to one of the worst spiritual knots there is….you get all caught up in methods, programs, systems, you redouble your efforts, try to find that magic spiritual master,…you have become Sisyphus rolling that heavy rock up that hill! 

 Look at the structure of this sentence:  “I renounce my ‘I’.”  Who is doing the “renouncing,” the “removing”?  After all this renouncing and giving up and removing, it turns out the “I” is still alive and well and maybe even a bit more robust! Our Sufi friends have a solution, and it’s summed up in one word:  fana, annihilation.  There’s no way to sugarcoat this; but note, this does not entail an erasure of personhood—rather it is a dissolving of that self-centering, that orientation toward self, that dynamic that is taken for our personhood.  

There is an interesting story from early Chan (Chinese Zen) that compliments this:

Hui Neng, one of the great patriarchs of Zen, one day encountered a young monk who was meditating.  He asked him why he was meditating, and the young monk replied that he was seeking enlightenment.  Hui Neng then picked up a tile on the ground and started rubbing it with a rock.  The young monk asked him what he was doing.  The old patriarch said that he was trying to make a mirror.  The young monk said that was not possible with how he was doing it.  Hui Neng smiled at the young monk.  Knot cut.

The Sufis (and Zen) really deconstruct, dismantle, that “I,” that self seeking even spiritual gain.  Islam is adamantly set against all forms of idolatry, and for the Sufis the most critical form of idolatry is this “I” (the nafs) that puts itself at the center.  The Sufis say that when you shatter this idol then there is only God.  And who you are is in this Reality….which is the ONLY reality.  

Reza Arasteh, who was a modern Sufi, Islamic scholar, psychologist, wrote:  “…the Sufi’s task is to break the idol of the phenomenal self, which is the mother idol: having achieved this aim his search ends.  Empty-handed, empty-minded and desire-less, he is and he is not.  He has and he has not the feeling of existence.  He knows nothing, he understands nothing.  He is in love, but with whom he is not aware of.  His heart is at the same time both full and empty of love….”  (Bewilderment and perplexity at a deep level are  important stages on the Sufi path….what John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul.”)

There is this Sufi account:

In the Koran, Pharoah is reputed to have said, “I am your highest Lord.”

Al-Hallaj (probably the most famous Sufi in history) said, “I am the Absolute Truth.”

There are two different “I”s here.   God clarifies:

“Pharoah saw only himself and lost Me, and al-Hallaj saw only Me and lost himself.”

A Sufi story that attacks the knot directly:  Rabia, a most esteemed holy woman, a profound Sufi, living in what is today Iraq around 900 CE.  She encounters a younger male Sufi who brags to her, “I have not committed a single sin for years.”  Rabia answered him, “Your very existence is a greater sin than all else!”   I can just imagine so many people I have known in the past who would freak out at that language and totally dismiss it.  So what is going on here?  Rabia focuses with laser precision on that  “shingle of identity” that young Sufi is carrying.  And what is striking and so, so common is that this young man sees himself in that cheap identity which he also sees as his living existence before God.  He does not see it as it really is—an obstacle to a true awakening to his identity.  So, like a Zen Master, she doesn’t undo the knot….she cuts the knot!  

Gospel story that compliments this:  The “rich” young man who has “kept” the Law and all its precepts but he cannot accept Jesus’ invitation to “give it all up and follow him”….in other words, find his identity in Jesus.  Quiz:  What constitutes this young man’s riches?

Two pertinent Sufi sayings:

1. Only God can truly say “I”—your “I” is a mere nothingness.  (That doesn’t mean it is an illusion or doesn’t exist, but its existence is like comparing the light of a small candle to the total light of our galaxy….and even that is giving our existence “too much reality.”)

2. There is not enough room in this house for two “I”s—the heart.

6. In conclusion, a schematic of the Sufi path from the Turkish Sufis:

There are three parts:

1. Sharia (law): exemplified by “yours is yours, and mine is mine.”

b.  Tariqa (truth): “yours is yours, and mine is yours also.”

c.  Marifa (gnosis/knowledge):  “there is neither mine nor thine.”

In Sharia we have a world of  clear boundaries.  This makes social life possible, facilitates it, gives us a context for a reasonable, stable life in which we can develop in several ways.  But this is also the place where spiritual knots flourish.

In Tariqa the boundaries begin to blur.  The Sufi does not leave Sharia, but he can begin to transcend it as it were, moving beyond its requirements.  You can see some Desert Fathers here also!  Spiritual knots are still possible

In Marifa the boundaries vanish.  All is changed.  Your suffering is my suffering, your gain is my gain….whatever….there is ONLY God!!  No knots possible.

A beautiful quote from al-Ghazali, great medieval Sufi, speaking from the land of Marifa:

“Each thing has two faces, a face of its own, and a face of its Lord; in respect of its own face, it is nothingness, and in respect of the Face of God it is Being.  Thus there is nothing in existence save only God and His Face, for everything perishes but His Face, always and forever.”

If you want to know how life looks like under Marifa, read and ponder the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew….maybe only a Sufi can truly understand and live that text!!

The other day  I was thinking of Robert Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken.”  Here is the text:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

A quiet, supremely understated poem.  Not flashy, not teasing you with hidden meanings, no cryptic allusions, no brilliant maneuvers of language….. you could easily breeze by this poem thinking you “got the message,” not realizing the depths it is addressing in your own being.  I am not going to engage in a literary exercise explicating this or that aspect of the poem, but we will use it to explore some “backroads of spirituality.”

Two roads diverge in a wood…..a special moment in one’s life…a critical decision…..this yes, all of that, but these “two roads” are also present in every moment, in every thought, in every emotion.  And note:  the poem is remembering such a moment or a series of moments, a  kind of retrospective, because often it is only in looking back that we can properly discern such a moment or such a time. And it’s not the case of one road looking “bad” and the other one “good.” That would make it easy in a sense.  But both are attractive, and both are equally opaque about what the journey will be like.  But one road seems well-traveled and the other “less traveled,” implying more uncertainty taking that path, more questioning perhaps.  It’s obvious that Frost is first of all talking about his own vocation as a poet.  And choosing that road “has made all the difference.” This has to do not with anything external to him, not with any kind of rewards/successes/gains, etc.,  but with his very personhood.  In traditional religious language one might say “he is doing God’s work,” or “God made him to be a poet,” or something like that.  The trouble with that language is that the “road” then seems so external to one when in fact it is your very personhood, your real vocation so to say, who you really are.  The reason it is “less traveled” is that ONLY you can be on that road that IS you!  And the road that shows signs of much travel is the realm of roles.  Instead of being who we are meant to be we can try on all kinds of roles….like various fashions of clothes.  Instead of participating in the Divine Creativity that unfolds as  our life with all its mysterious twists and turns, all its mistakes and pain and celebrations, all its messy joys and sadness, instead of entering into the Divine Vision of it all….”and God saw that it was good,”…rather we are seduced into a chimera of various roles and looking into a mirror to see how we look…..  And the sad thing is that religion is as equally prone to this distortion as secular culture.  Religiosity is too often a role that someone takes on, one fits in a nice niche,  one is socially approved….etc.  And the ultimate problem, then, is that one never knows who  one is in a profound way; one only knows the role one has taken on and which is what others see and approve in one way or another.

Now we turn to another artist, and a very different milieu:  Billie Eilish.  You might wonder what a pop star has to contribute to a reflection on spirituality, but I am on one of those “backroads” here.  Billie is one mixed up young lady, but I like her very much.  Her songs mainly appeal to young people, especially young women; but at times she hits some striking universal notes (no pun intended!). 

 Recently she won a Grammy and an Oscar for a song which she co-wrote with her brother for the movie Barbie:  “What was I made for?” The producers of the movie came to Eilish and asked her to write what they called the “heart song” for Barbie.  This very popular movie, a kind of fantasy that has all the character of an allegory/parable pertaining to our basic humanity, but especially so for young women.  Barbie is of course the pop classic doll which millions of young girls grew up with.  She of course is made as a doll to sell and make money for her maker.  The movie has her coming to life, becoming human; and on one level it deals with the social and psychological problems young women encounter in our society, the kind of roles they are expected to play, etc.,(Barbie the doll seemed to be a kind of indoctrination of young girls into “girl roles”),  but on quite another level, almost unwittingly, it questions us all about our lives, what we see as the point of it all, the “why” of it all, asking us to shed the roles that we have taken on as a pseudo answer to that question, and to enter that road less traveled, our own humanity….  Here is a link to Billie’s performance of the song on TV on Saturday Night Live:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zvnKOf3gf4

A more lovely rendition was given by her at the Oscar awards, but the lyrics got truncated for time purposes I suppose:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rL1EHELPAk

The title of the song made me think of my old Baltimore Catechism, the pre-Vatican II tool of religious instruction.  The whole thing flowed in question and answer format.  I still remember in 6^th grade, in 1956, Sister Evangelista assigning questions and answers to be memorized.  Questions like: what is faith? what is hope?  And of course one of the early questions was something very much like “what am I made for?” though I forget (sorry, Sister) the exact words.  Now there is nothing wrong with this format as such or with the answers, but the problem is that both question and answer become merely a formula of words.  You don’t really grasp the meaning of this kind of question until that question “grasps” you, becomes your “heart song,”  and you kind of wrestle with it, and it is only then that you discover the “two roads” before you, and your answer will no longer be simply a formula of words…..and it will make all the difference.  The beauty and magic of Billie’s song is that practically inadvertently she picks up that question for Barbie and pushes it to a level where one senses the  question’s unfolding urgency and anguish when one is no  longer satisfied with just a “role” in life,  a set of clothes so to speak.  But the “road less traveled” takes one from the psychological games of identity and plunges one  into the mystery of one’s own being….which is pure gift.

In a completely different mode, coming from a totally different angle, there is then,  this interesting example:  just the other day Scottie Scheffler won the most prestigious golf tournament in the world, the Masters.  Scheffler is a devout evangelical Christian, and you might quite reasonably think the two facts are totally unconnected and really have nothing to do with our reflections above.  But look at this write-up  of Scheffler’s victory on CBS Sports:

“It struck me Sunday as the second nine unfurled and patrons hustled toward Amen Corner that Scheffler is different than his peers. He was walking upstream toward the 11th tee as the crowd rushed like water toward the green to see what he would do….  This is emblematic of how he lives. Scheffler, unlike most other golfers, is Very Not Online…..  Scheffler is guided by his Christian faith, about which he has become increasingly vocal…… About how he is not defined by his golf score or his success but rather his faith.

“While Scheffler is not devoted to his faith for the purpose of winning golf tournaments — quite the opposite, in fact — in listening to him speak about it, one would find it difficult for a golfer to have a better mindspace. He holds the line between ‘cares a lot’ and ‘identity not tethered to outcome’ perfectly.

This is not a state of mind he works hard on adopting like other golfers; it’s simply his belief system. It’s who he is.

“’I was sitting around with my buddies this morning, I was a bit overwhelmed,’ Scheffler said Sunday evening. ‘I told them, ‘I wish I didn’t want to win as badly  as I do.’ I think it would make the mornings easier.’

“’I love winning. I hate losing. I really do. And when you’re here in the biggest moments, when I’m sitting there with the lead on Sunday, I really, really want to win badly.  And my buddies told me this morning my victory was secure on the cross. And that’s a pretty special feeling to know that I’m secure for forever and it doesn’t matter if I win this tournament or lose this tournament. My identity is secure for forever.’

“The freedom Scheffler’s faith provides — allowing him to be secure in himself knowing all that’s required is doing the best he can any given week — is a trait professional golfers strive to achieve through myriad psychological tricks, coaches and techniques

“’I wish I could soak this in a little bit more. Maybe I will tonight when I get home. But at the end of the day, I think that’s what the human heart does. You always want more, and I think you have to fight those things and focus on what’s good.  Because, like I said, winning this golf tournament does not change my identity. My identity is secure, and I cannot emphasize that enough.’”

Now there’s a lot here.  Scheffler speaks of his “identity,” who he really is, what his life is about….  In good Evangelical fashion he sees it in connection with the reality of Christ, more specifically the Cross.  This can be taken superficially…just more words….just another costume one puts on…..or maybe a kind of emotional vitamin that props one up with energy for a while.  But here I  get the feeling that Scheffler is more than scratching the surface of this reality, though one should also acknowledge that there is a lot more depth here than what he experiences. 

 Scheffler’s expressed sentiments do have a kind of “Pauline flavor”!  St. Paul, in his Letters, so often tackles the problem of identity or on what basis does one actually live his life….and in a very personal way using himself as an example.  Being a Jew and a zealot, he has a breakthrough into an identity that transcends all such boundaries.  So he teaches and preaches that being Jewish or being Gentile is no longer “who you are.”  Nor does what you do ground your identity….this is one of the meanings of his polemic against “salvation through works.” That does not mean a denial of his historical situation; he readily admits his Jewish lineage; he does not deny his Roman citizenship; he does not ignore his leadership position within the communities; but what is most truly important for him is his new-found  identity “in Christ.”  And this is not something that anyone or anything can take away/change/destroy.  So, returning to Scheffler, you can see how those who, unlike Scheffler, build their identity in winning/achieving/accomplishing, in what they do, in “works,” well, that is a “house built on sand,” and so the anxiety, fear, insecurity, and all the psychological games they undertake to deal with this.  And if you think this is found only in secular life and not monastic life, for example, well, you would be mistaken.  A monk can mouth all the right words and sincerely believe in his own monastic identity, but it just might be another costume, albeit a  more “acceptable” one.  But something can come along and completely knock the stuffings out of that monastic identity….or at the very least seem like a real threat to what once appeared so “solid.” The nature of what one is about is then no longer “out there” as a “sure thing.” Maybe the monk arrives where the two roads diverge, or maybe even the monk might sing, “What am I made for?”  And the institutional setting is not always conducive to supporting such a moment or such a period  in one’s life.

One last thought:  There is an interesting parallel to Scheffler’s stuff in Zen, especially Japanese Zen.  The Zen archer  hits the bullseye, and the Zen craftsman creates a beautiful result in his work…..not because they “tried” very diligently, not because they “wanted it” more, but precisely   because there was no more “I” achieving something in order to validate itself.  There is no anxiety or expectation that what they do grounds their “I”.

But really the people who have gone the deepest in this kind of dynamic and who seem to understand it best are our friends, the Sufis.  More about this another time.

We are getting close to Ash Wednesday, one of my most favorite days….and then there’s Lent!  Who could ask for more?  And this year Ash Wednesday falls on Feb. 14….coinciding with Valentine’s Day.  Kind of a jarring combo there, but I’m sure there will be some who will manage to pull off a double celebration.  I won’t be doing that here.

Ash Wednesday has several layers of meaning, and even as a youngster I was intrigued by the significance of this feast.  Even then I surmised that “giving up” something “for Lent” was at best a symbolic gesture.  But when the priest called me “dust” as he put ashes on  my childhood forehead, this sent a chill down my spine…not of fear or dread or anything like that, rather a sense of something very deep yet very personal being said to me.  Since I have been writing these reflections I have on several occasions pondered the challenging mystery of Ash Wednesday.  So I will once more throw out some thoughts, some old, some new, as this feast and this season never ceases to intrigue  and amaze me.

1. “Folly Chasing Death around the Broken Pillar of Life”  I wrote about this a while back…it is the theme of a float that appears in the great Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans just before Ash Wednesday.  The history of this float goes way back to the 19^th century.  It’s a fascinating symbolic portrayal of what Ash Wednesday and Lent are suppose to cure (though it’s not always seen that way).  It is a depiction of what my ancient Chinese  friends called “boiling red dust.”  It is that constant activity, whether internal or external, to fortify and enhance the ego self, the built- in futility and delusion of all activity that is centered on self. self-interest, self affirmation.  It is also what our Buddhist friends diagnose as “suffering”(and we could learn a lot from them about all this), pushing that “rock” up that hill of life.  So, so much of social activity (even “religious”)  seems to be just that.  In this we encounter  the core delusion of existence.  So…Ash Wednesday/Lent is suppose to bring us face to face with this core delusion of our existence.

2. Traditional Biblical religion was aware of this problem, and we see it portrayed in the Bible in various allegorical and symbolic ways….like the “Tower of Babel” story for example.  The Bible also proposes a “cure” and calls for a “change” in perspective which it names “repentance” and “conversion,” and this has certain symbolic gestures.  In Job 42:6, at the end of his confession, Job repents in sackcloth and ashes. And in the city of Nineveh, after Jonah preaches conversion and repentance, all the people proclaim a fast and put on sackcloth, and even the king covers himself with sackcloth and sits in ashes, as told in Jonah 3:5–6.  These kinds of things are all over the Bible.   The gestures seem odd at first; they seem depressing to some people, just a lot of negativity.  Certainly serious, perhaps somber, and sometimes even morose….our modern culture is not at home with this language of conversion and repentance…too filled with negativity.  A certain kind of negation is definitely an important part of Lent, but it must symbolically address the core problem:  what self centeredness and self-interest are really all about; and, more critically, point to a new awareness from which new actions, new life, a new sense of self will flow.  An illuminating comparison can be made with the Buddhist notion of “Right View,” the first on the “Noble Eightfold Path.”  On Ash Wednesday and Lent we are really invited to fundamentally change our understanding of what  is Real and what is unreal!

3. Abhishiktananda summarized the essence of the spiritual life in this manner:  

“The essential task is the surrender of the peripheral ego to the interior mystery.”

Now it may not look like it, but Ash Wednesday and this incredible statement are both pointing to the same thing.  The “peripheral ego” is as insubstantial as dust, but it claims everything we do, everything we perceive, everything we think …so all becomes a kind of “folly”….recall the  opening lines of the book of Ecclesiastes.   To “de-center” from this psychological mirage is at the heart of what we call “conversion.”  And the call to “repentance” is an opening and an invitation to a much deeper and very different sense of self…sometimes called “no-self.”  There is no other liberation from this “folly” which ultimately ends in futility, despair, death.  To help us understand this we can do no better than call on our Sufi friends, who have a profound and amazing grasp of the issue.

4. From Rumi:

“Knock, And He’ll open the door
Vanish, And He’ll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He’ll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He’ll turn you into everything.”

The whole Sufi program in a nutshell! 

For the Sufis, Abhishiktananda’s  “peripheral ego” is called the “nafs, and“surrender” is called “fana,” which translates best as “extinction” or “annihilation”…ouch!….sure sounds like a term that can scare someone!   But it’s not like one comes down with a sledge hammer on  one’s psychological “I,” a kind of suppression  No, nothing like that at all….rather more like realizing the “right view” of this “I.”  It is a deep existential realization that this “I” that claims center stage is as insubstantial as dust, a real nothingness as it were.  But from the Sufi standpoint the main problem with this “I,” the nafs, is that it stands in opposition to God.  Here “I” am; there is God….it makes an “otherness” of God that is never really bridgeable.  

Only the word “I” divides me from God.
Yunus Emre

But the Sufis know that this “separation” is a kind of mirage; there is a much deeper sense of “I” which is both you and not-you at the same time; it is the mystery of mysteries, the inner sanctum of what is most real, the place where God’s “I” and your “I” are one….the most incomprehensible and inexpressible reality.  Someone like Meister Eckhart pointed to this mystery in his own way:  “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”  And recall some Pauline statements (which sometimes become religious platitudes) like:  There is NOTHING that can come between you and the love of God for you in Christ.

And I cherish this from al-Hallaj:

“I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart
I asked, ‘Who are You?’
He replied, ‘You’”

There is also the Islamic notion of the “faqir,” sometimes written in English as “fakir,” and usually translated as “the poor one.”  Among the Sufis this was a very important reality, and it had much more to do with interior poverty than with material things…but those also.  You might say that the poverty of the faqir is a poverty of “I-ness.”  If this is not at the heart of all Lenten “giving up” of this or that, then that gesture becomes a religious façade and even worse, an enhancement of that peripheral ego.  In any case, we do have an example of an “ultimate faqir”:  al-Hallaj.

5. Mansur Al-Hallaj.  The most remarkable Sufi in all of history, and the one who leaves you in absolute silence when you meet him.  For a good part of his life he lived in Baghdad in the 9^th century.  And what was peculiar for him he preached openly and in the streets and markets of Baghdad his mystical spirituality of oneness with God….stuff that was suppose to be discreetly talked about in small, almost secret groups.  Also, he had a deep regard for Jesus (true for Islam as a whole) and a most intense longing to be like him even to the point of being crucified.  Well, as they say, be careful  what you wish for….this is exactly what happened to him.  The authorities in Baghdad arrested him for preaching heresy openly to the public…as in the quote above.  (Eerie the similarity with Jesus!)  He was jailed for a long time, would not recant, and finally they crucified him(the details of all this are not clear but the top scholar on his life puts it like this).  On the cross he proclaimed, “Anā al-ḥaqq,” “I am the Truth,” meaning “I am God,”(al-Haqq can be translated either as “Truth,” or as “Reality”…. as al-Haqq was/is one of the most sacred names for God in the fascinating Islamic theology of God’s Names. )  And you can see the implications of this word in all its translations.  This so outraged the authorities that they dismembered him, burnt the remains, and scattered his ashes in the Tigris River.

Mansur Al-Hallaj was not a raving madman.  In his ecstatic proclamation he was bearing witness to the “annihilation” of that superficial “I,” becoming the ultimate faqir….all that was left of him was the Divine Reality in al-Hallaj….”God’s I” manifest as his “I”.  This is at the heart of all Sufi teaching.  A Sufi saying:  You are not you when you are you but (you are you) when God is you!  

A Christian example of a true faqir:  St. Francis of Assisi.  Think of his stigmata.  Whether legendry or historical, the story of the stigmata is not some religious sideshow or spurious validation of his life(as presented in some other cases).  Rather think of this story in the light of al-Hallaj.  Also, there is that remarkable parable Francis tells his disciple:  “What is Perfect Joy?”  You can only misunderstand this parable as a call to a masochistic life if you don’t see it as a witness to the total faqir ideal of the Sufis.

6. In the spirit of Mansur al-Hallaj recall St. Paul’s radical statement:  “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.”  That “not I” is what Lent is all about.  That “not I” is a negation, yes, but what it negates is as insubstantial as dust yet it seems like your very being.  That “not I” opens you to your liberation from the shackles and limitations of your ego identity.  

7. If you’re wondering about the title of this reflection, maybe this Sufi saying will help:

“God’s language is silence; all else is a poor translation.”

Happy Lent!

Han Shan, otherwise in translation known as Cold Mountain, lived around 700/800 CE in the late Tang Period, China’s real “Golden Age.”  I feel very close to this person; he has been a kind of spiritual guide for me for many years.  Granted this might seem strange…after all he is so far away in time and space!  And you couldn’t have a greater difference than the one between our cultural setting and his.  But I am reminded of what T. S. Eliot once said when he was criticized for seemingly ignoring his contemporaries in his poetic work.  He asked:  “Who are my contemporaries?  My contemporaries are the people who have the same questions I have!” You kind of get the idea!  In any case, let me go into this a bit more.

By the way, there is a decent write-up of Han Shan in an online encyclopedia at this link with some translations by Burton Watson:

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hanshan

Han Shan, the poet.  Best place to start because frankly it is the only place you can meet him:  his poetry.  He has written no books, no treatises, no essays; he has no “teaching,” he pushes no doctrine; he has no “spiritual methods” to pass on.  Right away I like the guy!  But if you think this makes him a vacuous purveyor of spiritual fluff, you would be very wrong.  For several decades that he lived as a vagabond hermit he wrote scattered poems; it was other folk who collected them up in time and published them.  Even today he is an  iconic figure in Chinese lore.  And this brings us to a key problem for us:  he wrote of course in Chinese!  If his writing were expository of some kind, a reasonable translation would capture most of the meaning.  But we are talking about  poetry, ancient Chinese poetry, one of the most subtle art of all arts.  Han Shan is difficult even for modern Chinese!  The subtle allusions, the double and triple meanings of a word, the quiet symbolism that can slip right by you, all this and more prove to be quite a challenge to the modern Chinese speaker whose language now is a flattened  out modern conveyer of information….like all the other modern languages.  So you can imagine what a translation does to Han Shan!  You’re probably getting about 40 to 50 percent of what is in the poem at best, but for some of us even that little is enough to enchant us.  I readily admit, though, that Han Shan is not everybody’s cup of tea.  And in translation he can seem at times very bland and pedestrian….but like in the case of the proverbial iceberg you are then seeing only the “tip.”  Fortunately for those of us whose only access to Han Shan is in translation, we  have quite a few good ones to help us.  

Back in mid-century there was Arthus Waley, then Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, Red Pine, and most recently the team of Peter Levitt and Kazuaki Tanahashi, and then a number of others.  This team and Red Pine translated the whole Han Shan canon; the others only a small portion of the poems. 

 I first met Han Shan through the poetry of Gary Snyder.  I was interested in the literature of the Beat Movement of the mid ‘50s, and I picked up an anthology of Beat writings when I was a freshman in college.  Gary Snyder, who did not strictly belong to this movement, was included in the anthology.  He was a poet, and at times hung out with Allen Ginsburg and Kerouac, so he was in!   More importantly, Snyder was a serious student of Chinese at  UC Berkeley and for a seminar project he translated about 20 of Han Shan’s poems, and the anthology picked up some of these translations.  To these folks Han Shan seemed like a Beat figure of the late Tang!  In any case I was immediately taken by the poetry of Han Shan.  Having read a lot of poetry,  even at that age I recognized that this was a beautiful work of translation (and I still regard his translations as the best…too bad there’s so few of them), and my own spiritual quest was deeply attracted to this ancient figure. 

There is very little we know for sure about the historical life of Han Shan.  Needless to say the scholars are all over the place trying to determine “facts” about his life and “facts” about his poetry.   We won’t go into all that.  To be sure we can glean a little bit about him from his own poetry.   He seems to have been born into a well-to-do ambience; then well educated and earning some kind of position in the current ruling government.  Also he got married.  However, in the tensions and the turmoil and strife of the late Tang, at a certain point he had to run for his life (Red Pine surmises).  His wife seems to have died, and around the age of 30 he becomes a vagabond hermit.  A small chunk of his poems are about his life in society, but even there you can see the orientation to a spiritual quest.  The majority of his poems, however, were written in Tientai, the mountain range where the mountain called “Cold Mountain” was located.

Here is Han Shan in his own words, summarizing his life’s journey:

In my first thirty years of life

I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.

Walked by rivers through deep green grass,

Entered cities of boiling red dust.

Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal;

Read books and wrote poems on history.

Today I am back at Cold Mountain:

I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

(trans. By Gary Snyder)

Some notes:

1. Note the implied restlessness of his young life, constantly looking for something,  both inner and outer, neither civilization nor the natural world bring him peace.

2. “drugs”….an allusion to the pop religion of his time,  pop Taoism which was already prevalent….the profound mysticism of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi transformed into a magical search for elixirs of immortality.  Then, an allusion to the Confucian training that he got in becoming an official of the government.

3. “Cold Mountain”……MOST IMPORTANT….”Han Shan” translated into English is “Cold Mountain”…..so the line can read:  “Today I’ve come home to Han Shan.”  There is layer upon layer of meaning here.  In ALL his poems, the words “Cold Mountain” always have at least three meanings: 1. The person of Han Shan; it was not his original name, but it’s the name he took upon himself when he became a hermit; 2. The geographical location, this mountain where he lived as a hermit; 3. And his state of heart, his mind, his level of awareness….and this of course is the key.  It reminds one of that notion in Cistercian spirituality, one begins one’s journey in the land of “unlikeness,” alienated from one’s true self, and one journeys to the land of “likeness,” where one is “in the image of God.”  In other words, a profound return to who you really are.  Similar dynamic in Buddhism….always really a kind of “return.”  

4. Note now a different relationship to nature.

Now look at this poem (also trans. By Snyder):

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right here.

Such beautiful economy of expression….physical geography and “spiritual geography” blending into one.

Han Shan, the Buddhist fool.  Several things to say here.  This is one of the most remarkable aspects of Han Shan’s life:  his total severance from any institutional ties.  He is not a “monk” belonging to a monastery.  He could have easily joined a  monastery (either Buddhist or Taoist), which then as now would have been the usual thing to do.  In fact, there was then (and still there today) a monastery a few miles from his mountain.  Sometimes he would go there begging for food, and he befriended a ragged worker in the kitchen (Shi te or Shide) who would help him out.  So, like the Christian Desert Fathers, when he “left the world” he set out on his own, no map….really not even a religious one.  Many regard him as Buddhist, and he shows signs that he was well-versed in Buddhist thought; but he also blends in a lot of the Taoism of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi.  The fact is that “officially” he is not anything!  And at times he seems to enjoy poking fun at the official members of both religions.  You really can’t nail him down to some category of belonging.

And then there is his physical appearance!  There also he meets all criteria for a “fool”!   Han Shan in his own words!

People hereabouts call me
“The crazy hermit of Cold Mountain.”
They say: “His face is butt-ugly,”
“His rags smell of mange,”
“Everything he utters is jabberwocky,”
“Anything we say dumbs his ears!”
What do I reply?
“Climb Cold Mountain and sit with me awhile

(trans. by Stanton Hager)

And this poem:

Men who see the Master

Of Cold Mountain, say he’s mad.

A nothing face,

Body clothed in rags.

Who dare say what he says?

When he speaks we can’t understand.

Just one word to you who pass –

Take the trail to Cold Mountain!

(trans. by A. S. Kline)

Han Shan, the hermit.  What can you say?  The hermit life, in whatever tradition and in whatever era, basically defies articulation.  The less words, the better.  The hermit’s natural home is a deep silence and an unspeakable simplicity.  Or as Merton once put it in the Japanese edition of Thoughts in Solitude:

“This book says nothing that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.  Its pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and the peace that is ‘heard’ when the rain wanders freely among the hills and the forests.  But what can the wind say when there is no hearer?  There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer.”

To begin to understand Han Shan you have to approach him in that mindset.  If your notion of the hermit life is filled with a lot of formalities, a lot of “religious” sentiments, a lot of “specialness,”  then you will miss Han Shan by the width of the universe!

And here he is once more in his own words telling you about his hermit life:

I divined and chose a distant place to dwell-
T’ien-t’ai: what more is there to say?
Monkeys cry where valley mists are cold;
My grass gate blends with the color of the crags.
I pick leaves to thatch a hut among the pines,
Scoop out a pond and lead a runnel from the spring.
By now I am used to doing without the world.
Picking ferns, I pass the years that are left.

(trans.by Burton Watson)

 Han Shan does not romanticize the hermit life, nor does he minimize its hardness:

The trail to Cold Mountain is faint
the banks of Cold Stream are a jungle
birds constantly chatter away
I hear no sound of people
gusts of wind lash my face
flurries of snow bury my body
day after day no sun
year after year no spring

(trans. by Burton Watson)

Han Shan, the spiritual guide.  This is most interesting and probably not many would agree with this title for him.  He seems to be lacking  in all the credentials you need for this position! I mean he is not like Milarepa, an awesome figure of amazing powers; he is not like one of the Desert Fathers who practiced great austerity.  He has no “program” for “spiritual realization”; he is not a proponent of any teaching.  And certainly he is not like a modern spiritual director who makes a living teaching spirituality.  So, it seems like there’s nothing there!

And unlike spiritual teachers of legend, Han Shan admits to feelings of sadness and loss (not unlike Jesus!)….he comes across as a fragile, vulnerable human being, who has journeyed through his own tangled humanity into the depths of his own heart and mind.  What he finds there is only hinted at; what is beyond words is also beyond poetry!

But frankly I think this whole thing about spiritual guides is overblown and over rated.  Some people are always looking for that “special” person, and God knows what that “specialness” is all about!  But in any given situation your true spiritual guide may be your neighbor, your spouse, your teacher, your co-worker, etc.  All you need is “attention.”  Simone Weil made attention the key to the whole spiritual life.  From a Christian perspective, God always provides the “spiritual guide” that we need in all circumstances.  We can begin the real journey by paying attention in that deepest sense.  And really it is to this that Han Shan invites us in all his poetry.  There is a “path” that Han Shan has taken, certainly not an easy, magical, powerful way; there is no program, no formula for this path.  And like a good, humble spiritual guide Han Shan is inviting you in so many ways to your own path that passes right through your own personhood, into the depths of your mind and heart.  At a certain point the Path and the person become one.

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?

(trans. by Snyder)

Han Shan, good friend.

Question:  Why do you consider Han Shan a good friend?

Answer:  See all of the above!

A little Christmas reflection here.  Lots of good ones out there; one of my favorites from long ago was Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  It is not the sentimental story that many  have made it out to be.  But my all time favorite and, in my opinion, the best Christmas reflection of all time is Merton’s essay in a little known book, Raids on the Unspeakable:  “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room.” Merton lifts the meaning of Christmas  from a kind of mushy “never, neverland” setting where people decorate trees, drink eggnog and buy gifts, etc.  Lots of temporary good feeling with a slight reference to some vague religious sentiments.  But Merton also lifts the meaning of Christmas from theological objectification where Christmas is an event “out there” long time ago, and then you try to draw various meanings from it.  Meister  Eckhart in the 14^th Century already said that it matters little to worship Christ being born in Bethlehem if Christ is not born in your heart.

Merton’s reflection turns on one phrase in the Nativity narrative:  “There was no room for them in the inn.”  And In a stroke of genius he melds the Advent theme with the Nativity narrative.  

Here is a beginning excerpt  from that essay:

“We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end.  The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quality, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration.

The primordial blessing, “increase and multiply,” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror.  We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshaled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.

As the end approaches, there is no room for nature.  The cities crowd it off the face of the Earth.  As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet.  There is no room for solitude.  There is no room for thought.  There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man.”

And then Merton turns sharply and more explicitly to the Nativity narrative itself:

“Is this pessimism?  Is this the unforgivable sin of admitting what everybody really feels?  Is it pessimism to diagnose cancer as cancer?  Or should one simply go on pretending that everything is getting better every day, because the time of the end is also – for some at any rate – the time of great prosperity?  

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them, there is no escape even in imagination.  They cannot identify with the power structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the voice to get out there where there is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight, no self, nothing but the bright, self-directed, perfectly obedient and infinitely expensive machine.

For those who are stubborn enough, devoted enough to power, there remains this last apocalyptic myth of machinery propagating its own kind in the eschatological wilderness of space – while on Earth, the bombs make room!

But the others: they remain imprisoned in other hopes, and in more pedestrian despairs, despairs and hopes which are held down to Earth, down to street level, and to the pavement only: desire to be at least half-human, to taste a little human joy, to do a fairly decent job of productive work, to come home to the family…desires for which there is no room.  It is in these that he hides himself, for whom there is no room.”

At the end of the essay Merton recalls us to the Joy of Christmas, the Joy which we sing of (“Joy to the world”),  which joy is not that as the world gives; the Great Joy which suffuses the Nativity scene is not the vacuous ephemeral joy proposed by the world, which in fact does not take away our pervasive anxiety, our frantic loneliness, our buried despair.    Rather, the Great Joy is the first taste of that unspeakable actuality which is beyond all our conceptions.  It will truly seem foolish to so many of us!

Merton wrote this reflection in 1966, at the height of the Vietnam nightmare and in the midst of the tensions and strife of the Civil Rights struggle.  A lot has changed since then, and yet spiritually speaking it is more pertinent than ever.  To borrow from Thoreau:  “Most men lead lives of quiet despair.”  Well, today it is anything but quiet!  And those of our contemporaries who wallow in excess make Merton’s remarks look very current.  Recently I saw these two news stories….at first I thought this must be Onion material, but no it is real!  The first one is about Sam Altman, one of the big names in AI. He has amassed about 100 million dollars worth of properties in Hawaii, Napa, San Francisco, and Big Sur, and here he is in his own words:

“Altman told the founders of the startup Shypmate that, ‘I prep for survival,’ and warned of either a ‘lethal synthetic virus,’ AI attacking humans, or nuclear war.

‘I try not to think about it too much,’ Altman told the founders in 2016. ‘But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.’”

Source: The New Yorker via Business Insider 

And then there is the well-known Mark Zuckerberg and you can read about his project in Hawaii with its enormous self-sufficient underground bunker and with multi mansions costing more than any other private dwelling ever:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zuckerberg-hawaii-compound.html

And then there is this quote from Business Insider:

“LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman once told the New Yorker he estimates more than half of Silicon Valley billionaires have invested in some type of ‘apocalypse insurance,’ like an underground bunker.”

Now I am not going to dwell on these examples; they are just extreme symptoms of a whole culture poisoned by greed, paranoia, power, lust, etc.  It’s as bad as ancient Rome, just more high tech!  Interesting and paradoxical that the accumulation of great wealth leads to great fear and great insecurity….the opposite of what your average poor person thinks….!

In any case, what I really want to get to with these examples is to highlight an incredible contrast with the Nativity scene.  The vulnerability of the Holy Family in contrast to the “walls” and security these people need.  We will discover the Divine Presence only in our own   vulnerability, our own personal poverty, our own namelessness.  The Angel came THAT night not to the mansions and fortresses of that society, but to “outsiders,” the shepherds tending their flocks.  The Great Joy was announced not to the “makers & shakers” of society but to those who symbolically represent all whose only resource is the Divine Presence.

1.   There is this story about the great master of Rinzai Zen, Hakuin, 17^th century: 

A samurai came to Hakuin and said:

“I want to know about heaven and hell.  Do they really exist?” he asked.

Hakuin looked at the soldier and asked him, “Who are you?”

“I am a samurai,” announced the proud warrior.

“Ha!” exclaimed Hakuin. “What makes you think you can understand such insightful things? You are merely a callous, brutish soldier! Go away and do not waste my time with your foolish questions,” Hakuin said, waving his hand to drive away the samurai.

The enraged samurai couldn’t take Hakuin’s insults. He drew his sword, readied for the kill, when Hakuin calmly retorted, “This is hell.”

The soldier was taken aback. His face softened. Humbled by the wisdom of Hakuin, he put away his sword and bowed before the Zen Master.

“And this is heaven,” Hakuin stated, just as calmly.”

Indeed.  Amazing how in all the great spiritual traditions there is some variant of this:  the “Two Paths,”  “the Choice.”  In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh tells the People of Israel:  “I put before you Life and Death.  Choose.”  In the Didache, one of the earliest Christian writings after the Gospels, it says:  There is a way that leads to Life, and a way that leads to death.  In the Upanishads we read of the call to move from the mode of unreality to Reality, from darkness to Light.   And so on.  Needless to say we are not talking about physical life or death but rather two radically different ways of being in the world, in history.  In a sense our very being is this crossroads where these two paths present themselves for our choice always and everywhere.

I write all this with the echoes of war and slaughter in the background.  In history it seems never to change.  One reason for that is that the “way of death,” “hell,” never appears to us for what it really is….   It comes to us as an apparent “good” or at least a “necessity.”  A way to stop the “bad”; a means to solve the “problem” facing us; something that will help us overcome what we fear, etc., etc.  

I am not talking just about our current situation.  In all places and all times we find our fellow human beings facing the same choice.,…and more often than not choosing “death.”   Consider what happened when a rouge group of radical fundamentalist  Islamic fanatics attacked the U.S. on 09/11.  Our reaction led to two major wars in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.  It looked more like a bloodlust for revenge rather than a seeking of justice.  Needless to say it did not solve any “problem.”  Amazing how this occurs continually throughout history.  I think of early colonial America, New England, 17^th century, when the first British colonists were pushing onto  certain land where some Native Americans from a small tribe felt that was a serious act of trespass and a threat to them.  Several colonists were killed.  All the colonists banded together and massacred this tribe…no one was left.  I also think of early medieval France, where the Albigensians seemed like a threat to the Church.  The pope called upon some nobles to “solve the problem.”  The Albigensians got slaughtered, thousands of them.  Also, shortly later, St. Bernard, yes SAINT Bernard, called for the killing of the Islamic inhabitants of the Holy Land….to most of Europe they seemed like a real threat to Christianity….except to Francis of Assisi.   And lest anyone think that somehow primitive, indigenous people were less prone to such choosing, history would prove them wrong.  An example:  the Hopi tribe around 1700.  The Hopi have had a reputation as a “peaceful” group of people, and mostly that has been the case.  However, there are a few very dark moments.  Around 1700 the Hopi village of Awatovi was apparently wandering from its traditional religious beliefs, even flirting with Christianity.  The half dozen other villages were alarmed at this development.  The men got together and in one night massacred all the inhabitants of Awatovi, except for a few women and children.   The amazing thing was that these were their fellow tribesmen, their own kin, not some outside group threatening them.

So these are just some examples of THAT choice of path, life or death, heaven or hell, and here they are writ extra large and played out on the grand stage of history.  Here we are mostly “spectators,” troubled and bewildered by what we see.  However, that choice is also very much present in the nitty-gritty of our everyday life.  At times secretly and obscurely, at other times very obviously, we are always and everywhere present at that choice in all we do, say, think….  In a very real sense in all that we actually then become life or death, we become hell or heaven.  That’s what Hakuin was getting at.

2. The vow of poverty.

I am thinking of the classic vow that Catholic monks and nuns profess (and some religious), and this is not to be confused with the economic condition that can be quite deleterious to people, both physically and mentally.  In fact even the vow, ancient as it is, can still be muddled, misrepresented, and totally distorted.  Lets ponder this one a bit.

First, a couple of funny stories: 

When I was studying theology in Berkeley back around 1982, I was once invited by a group of young Jesuit fellow students to go out for a festive meal.  It was quite a gourmet affair!  At the end I naively asked how were we paying for this, thinking we would all share in the cost.  One of the Jesuit’s held up a credit card and proclaimed:  “Our Lady of Visa!”

A few years earlier Dan Berrigan visited that Jesuit theologate for about several months.  Berrigan was a famous (in some circles infamous!) Jesuit:  poet, good friend of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, and a radical peace activist.  He believed in living in Catholic Worker simplicity.  After experiencing life at the Jesuit theologate for a while, he quipped:  “If this be poverty, bring on chastity!”  (Actually he was not far off on that one, but that’s another story!)

What the vow of poverty really means is not easy to grasp.  Our notions about it can be truly muddled in several different ways:

1. Poverty is viewed in a sort of arithmetic mode—so if you have 10 things, then get rid of 4, you have increased  your observance of “poverty.”  This kind of approach comes from a mistaken imitation of iconic folks like Francis of Assisi and some of the Desert Fathers and also from some language in the Gospels.  The fact is that all these point to a much deeper sense of what this vow is all about, and which you can completely miss by a crude imitation.  Yes,  a kind of simplification of life is truly commendable and spiritually healthy, but it is not yet at the heart of this vow of poverty.

2. Also commendable is the attempt to live in solidarity with the truly poor of the world.  A strong motivation for “poverty” but also not yet at the heart of it all.

3. A common distortion of the vow of poverty takes place when the monk/religious claims “poverty” while relying expansively on the collective resources of the group….and the financial support of wealthy benefactors.  Now there is nothing wrong in monks holding out a begging bowl as it were.  It is an ancient tradition in many places.  There is an equally strong tradition where monks should be self-supporting through the labor of their hands.  In any case, the individual religious benefits from the collective wealth of the institution.  Needless to say this opens up a lot  of possibilities to distortions of all kinds.

4. Another problem view of the vow of poverty…..what I call the “modern age approach.”  “We modern people have different needs and a different sensibility, so the vow of poverty will be expressed differently by us.”  Yes, there is a grain of truth in all this, but one problem is that poverty begins to mean whatever we want  it to mean.  At times this practice becomes a total joke and really a scandal .  

What is at the heart of the vow of poverty?  We can begin by saying that the vow initiates a kind of deconstruction of our identity through “ownership.”  “I am what  I own.”  Or, “I own, therefore I am.”  What I possess gives me a sense of my own reality…..such is the subtext of much of social life.    So the vow brings (or should bring) all this into question.  I mean, what a strange thing “ownership” really is, if you think about  it!  Look at those archetypal stories about the monk and the robber who has come to rob his cell….the monk running after the robber with some item that the robber somehow missed!  Those kind of stories hit at that central illusion of this ego self “owning” something.  And then think of that absurdity of “owning” land.  The earth we live upon is a shared reality.  Native Americans had no sense of individuals owning particular plots of land; the tribe as a whole looked upon an area of land as a hunting ground for the tribe.  This points to what Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing.”  The essence of our existence is interrelatedness; in a very real sense we live a shared reality, not as “owners” but as participants in that reality.  In my opinion Catholic theology and spirituality does not do a very good job of elucidating that vision.  The closest we get is the notion of “stewardship.”  We are called to be good “stewards,” etc., etc.  So the vow of poverty is a marker of sorts of our “interbeing,” but you see it has to be real.  And this is the hard part!  Because that may mean quite different things in different concrete contexts.  And, really, one can even use physical poverty to solidify one’s illusory notion of this ego self “not owning” anything.  In that case, the vow not only does not deconstruct this “owner ego,” but it in fact puts him/her on a pedestal to be admired….  The bottom line is that it takes real spiritual discernment (so, so hard to get) to see what is your path of poverty.

And if you want a glimpse of what ultimately the real “practice of poverty” teaches us, here is a quote from Merton that tells it all:

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing.  It is only given.  But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

3. A song:  “Suzanne”

Just like Jerry Garcia’s “Ripple,” this is a very special song….one of my big favorites.  It comes from pop culture, but it is sooooo  much more than that!  Written by Canadian songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, it has the multi layered textuality and the subtle symbolism of great poetry but with no pretense at all.  Here are the lyrics:

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind
And then you think maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that you can trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

On one level the poem seems to start out as an intriguing and warm portrayal of a man’s relationship with a mentally disabled woman.  But the poem very quickly jumbles all such expectations.  I wonder what the people from pop culture circles made of this song!  To begin to understand it’s multi layered symbolism, “you will have to travel blind.”  Some quick notes and hints:

Consider Suzanne not only as a real woman, but also as symbol/embodiment of Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom,  Sophia, Divine wisdom….in Jewish mysticism (Cohen is Jewish) and in late Russian theology God’s wisdom is feminine, Sophia, related to the Holy Spirit.  Do you see now that the sudden intrusion of Jesus is not so “intrusive”?  

Note the dark allusion to “your wisdom.”   Implied contrast to Suzanne’s “wisdom.”

The image of this mentally disabled girl as  icon/embodiment of Divine Wisdom is a rich paradox beyond words.   Connections to the “fool” tradition….another manifestation of Divine Wisdom….Suzanne as “fool.”

(Haunting echoes of Oedipus for whom wisdom and blindness are coterminous.)

But don’t forget the poem is also about a complex man/woman relationship.  

Recall also Merton falling in love with that nurse, which  inspired his beautiful meditation on Hagia Sophia.

And at this  link you will hear Cohen’s own rendition of this beautiful song with the lyrics showing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svitEEpI07E

A topic I have neglected for decades, but one which I was very fond of back in the ‘70s and ‘80s when I was in formal monastic life.  More specifically, I was intensely attracted to this phenomenon known as the “fool for Christ.”  This person is much better known in Eastern Christianity and understandable perhaps only within the cultural and religious matrix of that world than anywhere  or anytime in the West.  However, these days you could easily say that he/she is merely a “storybook presence” anywhere, if even that.  Given all that, there is something profound within that reality that challenges our common knowledge and ordinary vision of things.  So….lets reflect a bit on this fool….

The ”fool for Christ” is a specifically Christian version of a more universal type.  The “fool” as such makes his/her appearance in all places and in all times.  You usually don’t think of the Asian traditions as being any kind of bearers of this reality, but truly they are.  I won’t be examining the Asian version of the “fool” at this time, but here’s a few examples:  Zhuangzi  , one of the key figures of original Taoism, Han shan, poet and hermit of the late Tang….these are reasonably known….but there’s a couple of Zen masters  much less so.   There is Baisao in the 17^th century, a Japanese Zen monk who left his monastery and the priesthood and peddled tea in the streets of Kyoto.  And then there is Daito Kokushi, an incredible Zen master who lived under a bridge in Kyoto for two decades….eventually even the Emperor became his apprentice and disciple.  And many more.  The Sufis in Islam also have a great tradition in this regard, but that  too deserves its own treatment.

What do we really mean when we say this person is a “fool” in the sense we intend?  The word is very ambiguous, and possibly naming very disparate phenomena and so having confusingly different meanings.  Trying to define our “fool” is not the way to go.  Instead we should approach this reality phenomenologically….just look at this kind of life as a lived experience and not  freeze labels on it.

Sticking to the West, lets begin in ancient Greece:  Diogenes the Cynic (a word with a different meaning in ancient Greek than in modern English…..Cynicism was a school of philosophy.)  Briefly, from Wikipedia:

“Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and often slept in a large ceramic jar in the marketplace. He used his simple lifestyle and behavior to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt, confused society. He had a reputation for sleeping and eating wherever he chose in a highly non-traditional fashion and took to toughening himself against nature. He declared himself a cosmopolitan and a citizen of the world rather than claiming allegiance to just one place.

… believing that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory….he became notorious for his philosophical stunts, such as carrying a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for a human being (often rendered in English as “looking for an honest man”). He criticized Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates, and sabotaged his lectures, sometimes distracting listeners by bringing food and eating during the discussions. Diogenes was also noted for having mocked Alexader the Great, both in public and to his face when he visited Corinth in 336 BC. 

….while Diogenes was relaxing in the morning sunlight, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favor he might do for him. Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’ Alexander then declared, ‘If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.’ To which Diogenes replied, ‘If I were not Diogenes, I would still wish to be Diogenes.’ In another account of the conversation, Alexander found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, ‘I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.’”

Among other things this points to one very critical characteristic of the “fool” in our sense of the term: a clarity and boldness in truth-telling.  Now we need to face a certain conundrum.  Our “fool” may be mentally ill or simply pretending to be so.  In either case the truth-telling dynamic is present and is  key. Obviously not every mentally ill person has this gift; some simply suffer from this illness and find themselves  in a labyrinth  of darkness.  But our “fool” is so gifted and has a boldness and clarity within a certain range of experience.  However, it is often hard or impossible to tell which phenomenon we are witnessing!

The second example I want to bring forward is from literature:  the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear.  A truly remarkable figure!  He can easily be brushed aside as a certain type that was not uncommon in the courts of medieval Europe, a jester, a court entertainer, a comedian, a clown, etc.  But this Fool is all that and so, so much more.  Here I want to quote from a letter by Simone Weil.  This was written to her parents just a few weeks before her death at age 34.  This amazing woman, a true genius if there ever was one, a genuine mystic, had just seen Shakespeare’s play once more, and she was profoundly affected by this Fool.  Weil:

  “When I saw Lear here, I asked myself how it was possible that the unbearably tragic character of these fools had not been obvious long ago to everyone, including myself.  The tragedy is not the sentimental one it is sometimes thought to be; it is this:

There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity, reason itself—and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All the others lie.

In Lear it is striking. Even Kent and Cordelia attenuate, mitigate, soften, and veil the truth; and unless they are forced to choose between telling it and telling a downright lie, they maneuver  to evade it. What makes the tragedy extreme is the fact that because the fools possess no academic titles or episcopal dignities and because no one is aware that their sayings deserve the slightest attention—everybody being convinced a priori of the contrary, since they are fools—their expression of truth is not even listened to. Everybody, including Shakespeare’s readers and audiences … is unaware that what they say is true. And not satirically or humorously true, but simply the truth. Pure unadulterated truth—luminous, profound and essential.“

In the beginning of the play we see the valuing of justice, the social order, and the reality of kingship (which symbolizes and embodies the unity of the whole realm).  We also see the valuing of loyalty, filial devotion, and respect for old age.  But Lear is socially blind and totally lacking in self-knowledge.  Disaster begins with his choices and chaos unfolds as soon as Lear misreads the words and gestures of his three daughters, two of which have evil intentions seeking to dispossess their father and get rid of  him.  As the play unfolds Lear ends up seeing that justice, order, and kingship are just smooth terms that conceal  raw, brutal power; and as madness threatens his mind, paradoxically his self-knowledge grows, but all to no avail now.  All along the Fool has been at his side, whispering, singing, riddling the truth to him but also to no avail.  In one of the last scenes Lear is wandering alone on the heath (wilderness area of Old England…and a kind of anti-Garden of Eden), in a storm and in the darkness of night…..and only the Fool is his companion, never abandoning him.

(Here we might remember a more diluted version of this phenomenon in that fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  It is The Child, and only the child, who openly names the reality that is in front of everyone but not acknowledged for one reason or another:  “The Emperor has no clothes on….”)

And here we are getting close to our very special fool: the fool for Christ.  To get to the special Christian character of this fool, we  need to turn to the New Testament, specifically to Pauline language:

“We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ; we are weak, but you are strong; you are honorable, but we are despised.”

“Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. ²⁶Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no one might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption,….”

You cannot overstate how shocking and radical this language really is.  However, the basic Christian/Catholic in the pew (and this includes the monk in  his comfortable monastery) cannot really hear the original power of this language in our lives.  It has all been eroded away.  First, by the natural process of continual repetition that goes on and on in “proclamation” without first the words passing through the heart and disclosing a reality there for which we  have no words.  Secondly, and more importantly, the “message” has been softened and softened and softened….until there are only the words….and there is no life anymore in those words….in all our religious language in the midst of all the linguistic noise of our environment.  In the second half of the 20^th century thoughtful people began to speak of the “Silence of God.”  

But lets get back to the historical, existential “fools,” both in western Christianity and in Eastern Orthodoxy.  We begin to find examples of this “foolishness” among the Desert Fathers, and the phenomenon appears through the centuries, though with remarkable variety.  Some exhibit eccentric, off-beat behavior; some feebleness of mind, either real or pretended; some take up radical poverty and homelessness; some hang out with thieves and prostitutes, etc.  If you go on the internet and consult Wikipedia on “foolishness for Christ,” you will find a host of examples.  What may be surprising is to see Francis of Assisi among the examples….he has been coopted and made to seem very “establishment” in modern times.  But if you think about it, he fits right in.  Certainly some of the other members of that primitive Franciscan movement truly belong.  However, what’s most interesting is what happens in Russia.  From medieval times to the 19^th century there manifested a whole subculture of “fools for Christ,” the yurodivy.  The Russian Orthodox Church recognized this “foolishness” as a special and blessed way of life.  Even the autocratic Tsar recognized and respected “the fool.” And this figure appears in Russian art and literature.  There are at least 36 canonized “fools” in the Russian Church; among the most famous is a woman, St. Xenia of Petersburg.  

At this point it is important to remember two critical characteristics of this “foolishness for Christ.”  First, you can throw out the window all modern notions of vocation when considering this reality.  No one takes this life up at the end of a process of discernment; there is no “formation,” no novitiate, no identity problems (“what is our group’s charism?! What is our special place in the church?).  No, you are more likely hurled into this life; it is not a matter of choice.  Or one day you just wake up into this reality.  It was certainly not something you planned!  Or, most  likely, you don’t even recognize this reality as it unfolds in your life.  The “real thing” does not stand there, looking at itself in the mirror, saying, “Ok, now I am a Fool.”

Secondly, and more importantly, all the eccentricities of the Fool are merely, to borrow a Zen phrase, “a finger pointing at the moon” (the moon is a symbol of full enlightenment in Zen poetry).  The Fool is there in the service of an amazing inner reality, one which cannot be measured, cannot be controlled, cannot be encompassed, cannot even be conceived within the categories of our usual organized social and religious life.  Think again of that Pauline language.  It speaks of God’s wisdom as unspeakable foolishness of sorts.  Now there are two distinct traditions of reflection on Divine Wisdom.  There is the theological, contemplative “Hagia Sophia,” Holy Wisdom, the feminine side of the Divine Presence.   And a beautiful example of this can be found in Merton’s profound meditation with that precise title: “Hagia Sophia.”  Russian theology and literature have been deeply influenced by this tradition.  Then there is the other tradition of Divine Wisdom, the Pauline Divine Foolishness.  Lest we tame this term into a pious platitude, the historical Fool is there like a slap in  the face of our conventional, respectable religiosity.  

Now lets return to that universal, spiritual question: who am I?  Back to that mirror…you stand there and look at yourself…..you see yourself in a manner of speaking….you are somebody….there are all these credentials….some you were born into, some you acquired, some you saw as blessings, others as something else!  But remember this, you are  an expression of Divine Wisdom, and absolutely none of those credentials can indicate that.  And that Divine Wisdom is both Hagia Sophia and that Divine Foolishness which ultimately smashes that mirror you are constantly looking at.  It is then that the real spiritual life begins, and you find that you are never, never far from the “fool for Christ.”  In that “place” suffering and joy are intertwined, gain and loss have no meaning, and solitude and communion are simply the two  sides of the same Reality.

1. Recently I saw this story on the online version of the New York Times.

How to Live a Happy Life, From a Leading Atheist

“I want people to see what a meaningful, happy life I’ve had with these beliefs,” says philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. “I don’t need mystery.”

I was certainly curious and eager to read this story which seems to be a kind of review of a new book by Daniel Dennett.  However, I needed to pay the New York Times for the privilege of reading it, and that I was not going to do.  But I  could still ponder these words just as they are.

Daniel Dennett is a well-known philosopher of science, very much admired by the bigwigs of Silicon Valley, a militant atheist, and a person whose writings I would generally avoid.  Here I am  intrigued by his  choice of words:  “meaningful,” “happy,” “need,” “mystery.”    The first two words are easy to dispose of.  Consider two iconic figures of the 20^th century:  Hugh Hefner and Karl Rahner.  They were diametrical opposites in life.   The former espoused a philosophy of hedonism; the latter was a humble but brilliant Jesuit theologian.  But both could have said  they were living a “meaningful, happy life” within the context of their values and world view.  So these two words are rather vacuous until given a clear semantic context.

The next two words, “need” and “mystery,” are much more puzzling.  It does seem that his statement amounts to saying that “I don’t need the notion of God.”  Mystery = God.  Ok, understood, but I suspect that his understanding and use of the word “mystery” is of the common notion which would be applicable in science also.  Mystery here is a problem, enigma, riddle, puzzle; it’s something which baffles or perplexes. So, “mystery” simply means a certain lack of knowledge, which lack can or will be supplied sooner or later.  The reality in front of us is a mystery to us because of some current limitation to our knowledge, our understanding, our vision.  And this limitation can potentially be overcome at some future point when we apply more resources, etc.  Mystery is a provisional state; given enough time, enough resources, enough research, it will dissipate.  What seemed like a mystery in 1750 is now explained by science.  The murder of so-and-so remains a mystery until more evidence solves it.  Etc.  So I think Dennett relegates the notion of God to this level of mystery and he feels  he has “solved” that and it turns out he can live without it.

Now theology and authentic mysticism have a very different understanding of “mystery” as it applies to that  Ultimate Reality which we call God.  In the Catholic tradition we have the likes of Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas, and the modern Karl Rahner, all of whom have emphatically pointed to God’s absolute incomprehensibility, meaning this is not something due to OUR limitations in this life but that this is the very nature of God.  In Rahner’s language, God is the Holy Mystery which is infinite, inexpressible, absolutely incomprehensible; but which yet draws near to us personally in self-communication deep within our being, our personhood, and deep within history in the person of Jesus Christ.  This self-communication unfolds as Love, as forgiveness, as truth, as beauty, as absolute goodness.  And when we die this self-communication of God continues for all eternity as we never exhaust the divine fullness.  God’s infinite Love fills our hearts with an infinite capacity to receive the endless ecstasy of the Divine Life.  This is Catholic theology at its best as it opens the door to an authentic mysticism.

Returning to Prof. Dennett’s statement, the “mystery” that Christian thought and mysticism speak of is not something that you need…like some extraneous element “outside” you….like something that you can choose.  Yes, there is a profound choice to face, but this is not it.  This Mystery is like the air you breathe…it surrounds you…you live within it…and you encounter it in all you see, whether a tiny leaf falling from a tree, a far-off galaxy whirling with millions of stars, a tear on a sad face….  This Mystery is also the fabric of your deepest personhood; it is that into which you are invited to lose yourselves in order to be constituted as persons.  Human beings are essentially oriented to mystery.  So, no, I don’t “need” mystery also, as if I were lacking something; it is the “givenness” of my existence, of my life.

2. Two very different visions of the “good life.”

Also something that I saw in the news recently: examples of some strikingly different choices in what one might call the “good life.”  The first is a seemingly harmless version of hedonism, what I would call “escapist hedonism,” a kind of beach bum life.  This was espoused in the  songs of Jimmy Buffett, musician, song writer, and super rich.  He recently died so he was in the news, and his songs peppered You Tube.  His top hit and a key to his “message” is “Margaritaville.”  A very catchy tune which you can hear and see the lyrics here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67J_sUz7cdY

Actually Buffett was very hard working at pushing and selling this beach bum vision of life and made millions.  It’s a daydream kind of life which really amounts to nothing, but amazingly hordes of fans bought into this daydream.

The next choice is also another variant of hedonism, what I would call “engaged hedonism”:  the Burning Man Phenomenon.   Every year just before Labor Day some 80,000 or so people gather on the playa of the Black Rock Desert 90 miles north of Reno, and set up a temporary encampment of sorts for a week of “activities.”  It is quite a phenomenon to say the least with people coming from all over the world.  This year it was a bit of a mess due to unexpected rain!  

It is actually difficult to say what this is all about, but they do emphasize words like “participation,” “engagement,” “spontaneity,” “creativity,” etc.  The fact that sex and drugs are part of the picture is simply assumed, no need to talk about it.  People from various walks of life come (the ones I’ve met were very nice), but mostly they are well-off and many are very rich…I’ve heard of talk of some bringing a chef….some tents had chandeliers and portable showers…..  Actually it costs several thousand dollars just to be there, so you better have money.  

There’s a pretense that this is some kind of alternative society.  People leave the “constraints” of their regular life and are given the space to “cut loose” for a week.  That makes you wonder what their regular experience of life is like, what’s it all about!  The whole week’s experience culminates on the final night when an effigy of a human being, a totem of sorts, is burned in a huge display of fire and fireworks.  Again, not sure what  this means; certainly this fire is not the fire of the Burning Bush, nor is it the fire in which heretics were burned, nor  is it a warm quiet camp fire.  It seems to represent human creativity, spontaneity, or something like that.  But it is all, more or less, ego self-expression; and all the distortions of the ego get projected out into the beauty and night of the desert….which by    the way the participants do not notice….such is the self-absorption.  It’s such an historical irony that in the past the desert was where the first monks went out….to transcend the ego and encounter God.

Here’s a brief You Tube video where you get to see a bit inside and meet some of the people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGuW8AoipKY

And the next version of the “good life” ….”and now for something completely different”—to borrow from Monty Python!

Recently I saw a story on CNN about a family that hiked the three great trails of North America.  Mother and father are both doctors, and they have 5 children….and  all went!  First they  did the Appalachian Trail; the experience was so positive that nobody wanted to stop!  So next they did the Continental Trail in the Rockies; and  this year they did the incredible Pacific Crest Trail.  What a story!  They “homeschooled” their kids even out on the trail.  Looking at the photos of the family out in the wilderness, you can see the healthy faces of the kids; I mean healthy in a deep human way.  This experience will shape their  minds and hearts for life.  It opens up an awareness that no amount of money can buy.  And mom and dad sure do seem to have a good sense of what a “good life” entails.

Here is a link to that story:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/family-seven-hiking-americas-longest-trails/index.html

And for a different take on Burning Man, try this from The Onion:

https://www.theonion.com/what-to-know-about-burning-man-1850812531

3. A few easy steps!

I am not a fan of spiritual methods, Christian or Buddhist or whatever.  But this  set of instructions speaks to me!  It is an excerpt from a poem by my favorite modern poet, W. S. Merwin…..the poem is called “Exercise.”

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again

Reminds of a couple of old zen/tao masters….one said to forget the self…the other said he wanted to meet the sage who had forgotten words!

When everything is continuous again…..!

Ok, the title is facetious, but I do have a serious point to make.  

Nothing here will even remotely resemble some deep/systematic/comprehensive treatment.  I’m kind of playing with a few ideas  and kind of “pondering out loud.”

Lets begin in the spirit of Medieval thinkers, by defining some key terms:

By “poets” I really do mean all artists…but certain craftsmen of language are my primary focus.

By “philosophers” I mean all who try to explore and explain existence in a thoroughly rational way….so this would include scientists, who were called “natural philosophers” a few centuries ago.

By “scoundrels,” well, this one is difficult….borrowing a term from the previous reflection….these are folk who somehow get “paradise” wrong!  This needs some explanation.  First, a controversial claim:  all art and all philosophy takes place “outside the gates of paradise.”  Some of it, however, gives us a hint, a “scent” as it were, of “paradise.”  But most of it lives in the land of chatter and noise, of greed and ambition, of lust and violence, of self-inflation and self-promotion, of pseudo-knowledge and cleverness, etc., etc…..you know, this is what some call the “real world.”  True, a lot of this art and philosophy does do a good job of dissecting this mess, showing its many  layers and the many shades of unreality; but none of this is the same as having some kind of awareness of “paradise.”  

Then there are folk, “poets” and “philosophers,” who are very close to “paradise,” but somehow there is something askew in their vision, or you begin to feel there is something missing here, or even to put it in a seemingly contradictory way,  something is there blocking their path to “paradise.”  I am reminded of that scene from the Gospel, the rich  man comes to Jesus and expresses a desire to “follow him.”  Jesus tells him to drop that load of wealth he’s weighed down by….but, alas, he can’t do it.   And then there is the paradox that for all his wealth he is “lacking one thing”…the need to put it all down….  

In any case, these “poets” and “philosophers” are folk we can truly admire, respect, learn from, etc., but ultimately we will find ourselves disagreeing with them profoundly.  One of these, for me, has been Czeslaw Milosz.

(Milosz was good friends with Merton, and some of their correspondence was published.  It was  interesting to read that.)

Milosz was a giant of modern poetry, a Nobel Prize winner, a scholar and professor of Slavic literature at Berkeley, and a true intellectual.  I became acquainted with him when I studied theology, philosophy and classics at both a seminary and the university in Berkeley.  Needless to say it was none of the above that brought us together….it was the fact that I was Lithuanian and Milosz had this weakness for all things Lithuanian!  Although Polish, he was born in Lithuania and spent his childhood there, and he had a kind of romantic vision of old Lithuania.  He was a man of high culture, so who was I to argue with him!  So, when I told him I had lost my native language, Lithuanian, and he scowled in disapproval, I took my lumps and did not bother to offer a defense or explanation why I had absolutely no regrets of turning my back on that whole milieu.  

But all that is trivial.  I was deeply impressed by his poetry.  You can read a sample of it online at this site:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/czeslaw-milosz

I found it always engaging; at times beautifully insightful; but sometimes puzzling, even troubling.  Take a look at the poem  “Theodicy.”  This is a very important word in Milosz’s intellectual universe, so I will borrow an explanation of it from Wikipedia:

“In the the philosophy of religion, a theodicy, meaning ‘vindication of God’ in Greek, is an argument that attempts to resolve the problem of evil that arises when omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience are all simultaneously ascribed to God.  Unlike a defense, which merely tries to demonstrate that the coexistence of God and evil is logically possible, a theodicy additionally provides a framework wherein God’s existence is considered plausible. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz coined the term “theodicy” in 1710 in his work Théodicée, though numerous attempts to resolve the problem of evil had previously been proposed. The British philosopher John Hick traced the history of moral theodicy in his 1966 work Evil and the God of Love, identifying three major traditions:

1. the Plotinian theodicy, named after Plotinus
2. the Augustinian theodicy, which Hick based on the writings of Augustine of Hippo
3. the Irenaean theodicy, which Hick developed, based on the thinking of St. Irenaeus. 

The problem of evil has also been analyzed by theologians and philosophers throughout the history of Islam.

A defense has been proposed by the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, which is focused on showing the logical possibility of God’s existence. Plantinga’s version of the free-will defense argued that the coexistence of God and evil is not logically impossible, and that free will further explains the existence of evil without contradicting the existence of God.^” 

Milosz was a religious person, a practicing Catholic who at the same time was very uncomfortable with his Church.  In Berkeley we often found ourselves at  the same church for Mass, and each time I would see him seated in the very back row for the very early Mass (7am).  Each time the priest would utter some banality or evoke this “happy feel” Catholicism of post-Vatican II, I would wince, knowing he was back there in the shadows scowling!  He scorned the Church’s attempt to embrace modernity, the modern world; but you could not pin an easy label on his attitude and position.  He was even more critical of Catholic history, even more outraged at what it did to people….from its many sell-outs and allegiances with tyrants and dictators to the torture and massacre of countless human beings….like the massacre of thousands, women and children, Cathars and sympathetic Catholics alike, burning alive 200 of their spiritual leaders about the year 1200 in southern France….all to “preserve” the purity of the Catholic doctrine and their status as the “Big Dog” religion.  Milosz knew his stuff; if you were a “conservative” Catholic, you would not fare well arguing with him.  (Hate to think what he would have said about the “sexual predator clergy.”)  One of the things I deeply regret is not sharing with him how much I felt the same about the Church and its history.  I think he had me pegged as a “modern pretend monk” (and who’s to say he was wrong….after all WHAT was I doing in Berkeley?!), but he let that slide because I was Lithuanian!

One of the other deep regrets I have is that I did not have  the courage to challenge him on this “theodicy” issue, where I radically disagreed with him.  You can see that issue appearing in his poetry and in his essays….he wrestled with it all his life.  In this poem, “Theodicy,” he throws down the gauntlet with the opening lines:

“No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.

Desire will not save the morality of God.

If he created beings able to choose between good and evil,

And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,

Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,”

That age-old dilemma…how can an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God allow evil…even to coexist with it….?  Milosz was among those few who would not “let God off the hook.”  He had scorn for all those philosophers of religion and theologians who came up with all these various rational arguments that left one wondering if they had any sense of real evil, real suffering.  Sure, you could get some traction out of the “free will” argument….you know, God gives human beings freedom of choice…some choose extremely badly (Adam & Eve)….consequences…the presence of evil….  Milosz doesn’t think much of this argument, and neither do I.  But his focus is on the suffering, the evil inflicted on the innocent, not those who “have it coming.”  Here Milosz can be seen to be standing on a precipice, an abyss of sorts, where reality is structured on two equal principles: the Good (God), and Evil.  The former is purely spiritual; the latter is marked by matter.  Needless to say that makes the whole beautiful natural world very ambiguous, but it does provide an explanation of sorts.  I am not sure that he fully embraced such a view, but certainly two of his favorite people, Albert Camus and Simone Weil, more or less moved more in that direction…at least it seems that way if you read what he wrote about them.

Note these quotes from his essays:

“Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.”

“Alas, our fundamental experience is duality: mind and body, freedom and necessity, evil and good, and certainly world and God. It is the same with our protest against pain and death.”

I certainly am more than in disagreement with all this; I am kind of speechless about how to address such a problem.  Back in Berkeley, coward that I was and eager to be liked by him, of course I never challenged his views, nor offered any counter arguments.  And that’s just as well because “arguments” is not what is called for here.  You have to understand this about Milosz, the old man’s incredible life experience.  Two world wars, living through the murderous savagery of Hitler and Stalin, millions killed, millions more without homes (like my family), you are not going to easily accept the “happy talk” of either priests or thinkers, not if you have the sensibility, the learning,  and the intelligence that he had.

There is actually no rational way of dealing with this problem…you are not gong to think your way to a solution…reason, as valuable as it is, is not going to be a resource here.  Look at the Zen koan…you do not “untie” that knot by rational analysis.  But you also cannot run away from it….at least not without detriment to your whole way of seeing reality.  So it is with this theodicy dilemma.  At his best Milosz had a sense of this, and at the end of his life his poetry displayed a deeper, more serene vision….could we say a “scent” of paradise?  Through most of his mature, creative years, however,  Milosz was deeply attracted to that ultimate dualism; and it’s truly ironic that this position is a kind of escape hatch for rationality, for intelligence, as it confronts the mystery of evil.  Here you do   not transcend rationality but merely disguise it with a new look.  In any case, how it sometimes warped his understanding and even his intuition is displayed by his treatment of Dostoevsky’s great novel, Brothers Karamazov, especially as the novel resonated with the theodicy issue and its seeming resolution.  Recall how Dostoevsky puts words into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov that become the most powerful, most sustained, most irrefutable attack on our notion of God that you will find anywhere.  Dostoevsky holds nothing back; he jolts you with a “sledge hammer” and wants to see what you have to say.  I think that a part of Milosz deeply  identifies with Ivan Karamazov.  Let’s listen to just one of Ivan’s discourses to his brother Alyosha:

“Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its center, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I am a bug, and I recognize in all humility that I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that cause follows effect, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds its level—but that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it?—I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”  “That’s rebellion,” murmured Alyosha, looking down.

“Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.

Well, Dostoevsky crafts Alyosha and Father Zosima (primarily) as the only possible reply to Ivan’s impassioned challenge.  It is not a rational argument but their very personhood, their state of mind and heart, this is the only answer that Dostoevsky can summon to this side of the dilemma….and the silence of Christ in Ivan’s mysterious dream.   For Milosz, this was a miserable failure.  He calls Alyosha and Father Zosima “sentimentalists.”  For Milosz, Dostoevsky was brilliant on the side of Ivan, but a total failure on the side that was meant as a kind of response.  At the end of the novel we see Alyosha and a group of boys celebrating their koinonia, their communion, even in the face of death.  In a real nasty takedown, Milosz called this “salvation by a troupe of boy scouts.”

 I don’t know what  I could have said to him to change his mind….really nothing….this brilliant, good man had his own journey to make.  But there is a final quote which surprisingly illumines  this whole thing in a marvelous way that not even Dostoevsky can touch.  It is amazingly from Karl Bath’s Church Dogmatics.  (Merton alludes to all this in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.)  Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian, one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the 20^th century.  Barth was a stern, no-frills Protestant who had little sympathy for all the “frills” of Catholicism.  When I was studying theology, I had friends who loved Barth; but in my then narrow-mindedness I avoided Barth as much as possible.  

Barth actually had a lot of critiques of Catholicism, but there was one Catholic who was a kind of constant companion of  his during the  years when he was in his prime:  Mozart!  He would listen to a Mozart piece every morning before beginning work on his theological endeavors.  And we will conclude with Barth reflecting on Mozart in volume 3 of his magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics:

‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Why is it that this man is so incomparable? Why is it that for the receptive, he has produced in almost every bar he conceived and composed a type of music for which “beautiful” is not a fitting epithet: music which for the true Christian is not mere entertainment, enjoyment or edification but food and drink; music full of comfort and counsel for his needs; music which is never a slave to its technique nor sentimental but always “moving,” free and liberating because wise, strong and sovereign?

Why is it possible to hold that Mozart has a place in theology, especially in the doctrine of creation and also in eschatology, although he was not a father of the Church, does not seem to have been a particularly active Christian, and was a Roman Catholic, apparently leading what might appear to us a rather frivolous existence when not occupied in his work? It is possible to give him this position because he knew something about creation in its total goodness that neither the real fathers of the Church nor our Reformers, neither the orthodox nor Liberals, neither the exponents of natural theology nor those heavily armed with the “Word of God,” and certainly not the Existentialists, nor indeed any other great musicians before and after him, either know or can express and maintain as he did. In this respect he was pure in heart, far transcending both optimists and pessimists.

1756–1791! This was the time when God was under attack for the Lisbon earthquake, and theologians and other well-meaning folk were hard put to it to defend Him. In face of the problem of theodicy, Mozart had the peace of God which far transcends all the critical or speculative reason that praises and reproves. This problem lay behind him. Why then concern himself with it? He had heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even to-day, what we shall not see until the end of time—the whole context of providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway. Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the shadow. The sweetness is also bitter and cannot therefore cloy. Life does not fear death but knows it well. Et lux perpetua lucet [light perpetual shines] (sic!) eis [upon them]—even the dead of Lisbon. Mozart saw this light no more than we do, but he heard the whole world of creation enveloped by this light. Hence it was fundamentally in order that he should not hear a middle or neutral note, but the positive far more strongly than the negative. He heard the negative only in and with the positive. Yet in their inequality he heard them both together, as, for example, in the Symphony in G-minor of 1788. He never heard only the one in abstraction. He heard concretely, and therefore his compositions were and are total music. Hearing creation unresentfully and impartially, he did not produce merely his own music but that of creation, its twofold and yet harmonious praise of God. He neither needed nor desired to express or represent himself, his vitality, sorrow, piety, or any program. He was remarkably free from the mania for self- expression…..

He died when according to the worldly wise his life-work was only ripening to its true fulfillment. But who shall say that after the “Magic Flute,” the Clarinet Concerto of October 1791 and the Requiem, it was not already fulfilled? Was not the whole of his achievement implicit in his works at the age of 16 or 18? Is it not heard in what has come down to us from the very young Mozart? He died in misery like an “unknown soldier,” and in company with Calvin, and Moses in the Bible, he has no known grave. But what does this matter? What does a grave matter when a life is permitted simply and unpretentiously, and therefore serenely, authentically and impressively, to express the good creation of God, which also includes the limitation and end of man.

I make this interposition here, before turning to chaos, because in the music of Mozart—and I wonder whether the same can be said of any other works before or after—we have clear and convincing proof that it is a slander on creation to charge it with a share in chaos because it includes a Yes and a No, as though orientated to God on the one side and nothingness on the other. Mozart causes us to hear that even on the latter side, and therefore in its totality, creation praises its Master and is therefore perfect. Here on the threshold of our problem—and it is no small achievement—Mozart has created order for those who have ears to hear, and he has done it better than any scientific deduction could.”