Continuing my Lenten ruminations….

Guilt has gotten a really bad rap in our feel-good culture.  Yes, there can be a truly toxic side to guilt that is not helpful at all and this has to be dealt with.  But we don’t solve anything by a kind of suppression or evasion…both psychological and social.  In any case, our society is mostly a guilt-denier….at both levels (something like climate change denial).  If it’s not outright denial, then we embrace what I would call “cheap forgiveness”—to borrow Bonhoeffer’s notion of “cheap grace.”  The Bible has a subtle and nuanced approach to this whole dilemma; in the Old Testament there is a strong emphasis on communal repentance, and in the Gospels the focus is on a personal metanoia…and a real acknowledgement that something is out of kilter.  Jesus says that he has come for those who need a physician, not for those who claim they are well.  More about all this  later.  For now, please watch this YouTube, 15-minute video.  You will see a remarkable German social satirist explain what is going on in Germany….and it has critical relevance to our situation (and if you have ever studied German, at times you will laugh):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLWLb0RM7HQ

1. Jan Bohmermann makes the critical distinction between individual, personal guilt and collective memory (collective guilt).  Unless we are totally deluded we are somewhat aware that “something bad” happened in our “communal past,” but our personal responsibility and our relationship to this “bad” is problematic and tends to a vanishing point.  This is true in Germany as Jan illustrates, and it is so true here in the U.S.  For Germany it is the Nazi phenomenon, the world wars, and the Holocaust.  For us it is at least slavery but also the debasement and dehumanization of Black people in the phenomenon of segregation and its concomitants.  And then there is the less acknowledged history of genocide and dehumanization and despoilation of Native Americans.  And more…..

2. Jan delineates clearly and cleverly how even a vociferous proclamation of “past sins” (NEVER AGAIN!) can become vacuous in the absence of personal responsibility, and in fact even a substitute for a real metanoia.  Instead, people engage in what Jan calls “virtue signaling.”  Interesting expression….made me think of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.  The Pharisee in this parable is the ultimate “virtue signaler.”  When the process of virtue signaling  gets normalized, then we open the door to a lot of bad things…..hence the rise of the neo-Nazis in Germany.

3. Back to our own U.S.A…..just think of all the consternation in recent years around movements like Black Lives Matter, around policies like DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), and around historical analyses like Critical Race theory.  Granted, all these can and do have problems and are far from perfect, but the reaction against them is so irrational, so filled with anger and venom, that we have to be worried.  Is our own brand of fascism emerging?  And now the people who are setting the agenda for our political and economic life seek to eradicate all traces of such voices.  We need to take a step back and look at this in the larger picture, not simply as a political problem.

4. Guilt comes in several forms.  It depends on the kind of “world” which one perceives as “their world.”  Most people live in a world mapped out by rules.  Rule-breaking leads to some kind of guilt.  This runs from traffic regulations all the way to the religious life.   Schools have rules; states have rules; monasteries have rules; churches have rules; parents have rules, etc.   All this is part of a social life aiming at a certain goal, and it does have a practical good about it. Breaking a “rule” produces some kind of guilt to one degree or another.  Serious rule-breaking leads to some  kind of punishment for the “guilty” party.   But there is something much, much  deeper about living than following rules.   Sadly, however, for so many people religion, which should lead one to an awareness of this deeper level of life,  is merely a matter of living up to rules.  The rules can be grand rules(God’s Law) or trivial rules; it almost doesn’t matter.   The religious life becomes built on a system of rewards and punishments depending on your adherence to the rules.  The Pharisee kept all the rules.  No guilt there!  (St. Paul’s diatribe against the Law is part of the answer to this problem.)  But there is a far deeper kind of guilt….one that doesn’t stem from rule-breaking but from what might be termed as a “breaking of our humanity.”  A violation of who we are; getting it all wrong and surrendering ourselves to what is unreal, ultimately even misrepresenting what is ultimately Real…..basically what the Bible called “idolatry.”  This can produce a profound guilt….like Peter in the Gospels breaking down after his denial of Jesus.  The German people need something like that—and the American people, and….etc.

5. Jan Bohmermann points out that for the far right in Germany the world wars and the Holocaust were mere “bird droppings” in their “glorious past.”  So….was slavery, were the lynchings of Black people, even into the 20^th century, was the unspeakable dehumanization of Black people throughout the country (Blacks and Whites were not allowed to marry as late as the 1970s in some states), was all this merely a “bird dropping” in our otherwise glorious history?  Was driving Native Americans off their lands, killing them off, and eviscerating their culture, merely a “bird dropping” in our otherwise glorious past?  And so much more…….

Another question:  were all these merely a “rule-breaking” or were they of a very different order?

Now a common position to all this goes along the following line:  This has nothing to do with me.  I never owned slaves; my ancestors never owned slaves; I never discriminated against anybody….etc., etc.  There is a real problem with this kind of vision that doesn’t reveal its full negative impact because it sounds so reasonable….like a spiritual iceberg that is mostly under water….  Let me illustrate:  I love to go camping in Yosemite’s high country….the remote trails, the silence, solitude, and beauty of the wilderness.  But I am enjoying myself in a place that was once home to a small tribe of people.  Do I recall that they were either killed or driven out of there by the new arrivals during the California gold rush era?  By the time the area was designated a national park it was a “pristine wilderness.”  It’s more than foolish to not acknowledge this and the fact that wherever our two feet stand is land that has soaked in the blood of those who  had called it home for eons.  So now….when I arrive there I put up my tent and my Tibetan prayer flags and pray with the wind for all concerned.

I grew up in a lower middle-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s.  Mostly blue collar workers, hard working, church-going, caring for their families, all kinds of ethnic groups…..but all white…..Black folk were not welcome to say the least.  Did anyone recognize how much of the country’s economic foundations were laid by the sweat and blood of Black workers, willing and unwilling….and so many other “undesirables”?  And how much the white community benefitted from that labor?  

This now reminds me of something I wrote here over 10 years ago when I was starting this blog.  I wrote about an economics college professor who held up a cup of coffee and asked his class, “What do you see?”  And of course no one saw what he was really pointing at, so he began, “Do you see the man who took care of the plants that produced the beans for this coffee?  Do you see the person who picked the beans in the hot sun?  Do you see the laborer who packed  the grounds in a container?”   ( My mother did that in Chicago for $1.50 an hour.)  He concluded, “Try to see that when you have that cup of coffee.”  An econ lesson but also something much, much more…whether he intended that or not!  And then I added an old Sufi saying:  When a thief looks at a holy man, all he sees are pockets.  Indeed, we see only what our hearts are open to seeing.  And it seems now we are not able to see our deep authentic guilt.

Mostly we all live at the level of “rule-breaking” guilt; asleep, numb, blind to what we are really participating in, to what we are part of.  The culture of individualism, which is built on navigating the rules to one’s own advantage, has had some benefits but it has become a spiritual and social cancer now.  Everyone is infected: “what’s in it for me?”  Climate-change denial is rooted in this narrow myopic vision of self.  What is concealed by this culture and by the “narrow self” is the actual interconnected nature of all being.  Religiosity that fails to recognize this will go awry and actually do a lot of harm (The Jesuits owned slaves and benefitted financially from this in early Maryland).  All the major traditions deal with this problem in their own way.  Christianity has its own language and its own vision of what this reality means; Buddhism has its own.  I like the simplicity and directness of Thich Nhat Hanh: “Interbeing is the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else. We are all interconnected. By taking care of another person, you take care of yourself. By taking care of yourself, you take care of the other person. Happiness and safety are not individual matters. If you suffer, I suffer. If you are not safe, I am not safe. There is no way for me to be truly happy if you are suffering. If you can smile, I can smile too. The understanding of interbeing is very important. It helps us to remove the illusion of loneliness, and transform the anger that comes from the feeling of separation.”

Now this has enormous implications for our reflection.  Real, authentic, deep guilt is actually  an opening and an invitation to discover and recognize that deep connectedness in which we live and act.  Whether our recognition is merely a flicker of a vision or an actual explosion of awareness like Saul of Tarsus blinded, thrown off his horse and entering into a revolutionary upheaval of his identity, we no longer live by rules but by our active participation in this interbeing.  And furthermore this radically transforms our grasp of notions like sin, guilt, forgiveness, etc.  Indeed, especially our relationship to the “sin” of our brothers and sisters, and, yes, even to all “strangers,” past and present.  

6. We need to learn how to read the language of authentic traditional Christian spirituality because all this is present there but perhaps in a way we no longer can translate it into our own awareness.  Sometimes we need help because the language seems stale, cliched, exaggerated rhetoric, impossible, or just plain weird.  But one should listen with the heart.

Consider the traditional mantra of the Hesychast tradition, the Jesus Prayer:  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  

Each phrase, each word holds a richness of significance and meaning, but here I will focus on only one word, “sinner.”  The root meaning of “sin” is “to miss the mark” like in off target, or it can be taken as “separation.”  Now if you look at any dictionary or catechism you will see reference to “breaking God’s law.”  This is ok if you understand what is being said, but fundamentally sin is not rule-breaking in the same sense as we normally use that term.  However that old language can too easily be taken in that direction and most often that is all that is seen.  The real sin is when we fail to acknowledge in our lives that community of being in which we live.  If you listen to St. Paul carefully, you will see how that works. 

Let us conclude:  Here I will refer to my own “spiritual father” of  sorts, Dostoyevsky’s Father Zossima (I first met him when I was 17 and he has been my guide since!).  What he teaches sounds like what I call “impossible Christianity”…..within the context of our sensible, rational, social existence it all seems like an unreal, impossible ideal (like the Sermon on the Mount).  But if you  listen to his words with your heart, I think you will hear what you need to hear:

“Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you⁠—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us. Woe to him who offends a child! Father Anfim taught me to love children. The kind, silent man used often on our wanderings to spend the farthings given us on sweets and cakes for the children. He could not pass by a child without emotion. That’s the nature of the man.

At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labor. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but forever. Everyone can love occasionally, even the wicked can.

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side⁠—a little happier, anyway⁠—and children and all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.

My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say, ‘Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.’ Fly from that dejection, children! There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men’s sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things.”

”Love one another, Fathers,’ said Father Zossima, as far as Alyosha could remember afterwards. ‘Love God’s people. Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth….

And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize that. Else he would have had no reason to come here. When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men — and everything
on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and
every individual man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man. For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears….

Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly. Be not afraid of your sins, even when perceiving them, if only there be penitence, but make no conditions with God. Again, I say, be not proud. Be proud neither to the little nor to the great. Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists — and I mean not only the good ones — for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day — hate not even the wicked ones. Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all those who have none to pray for them, save too all those who will not pray. And add: it is not in pride that I make this prayer, O Lord, for I am lower than all men….”

1. “Folly chasing death around the broken pillar of life.”  Wrote about this before.  In 1867 the fraternal Order of Myth (love that name!) created a float with that theme for the Mardi Gras parade.  One wonders what their thought process was, but whatever.  I do find this theme very apt for this Lent and our historical situation.  Lent should point us in the direction of some antidote for what ails us at a deep level….and this not just about our individual lives but also (and even more so) as some form of community….political, economic, social, religious….our whole culture “chasing death around this broken pillar of life.”  Where do we go from here?

It seems we are in the same position as Livy found in Rome over 2000 years  ago: “We can no longer tolerate what ails us nor its remedy.”

Read this insightful essay by David Todd McCarty with this title:

“America Doesn’t Solve Problems, It Treats Symptoms”

https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/america-doesnt-solve-problems-it-treats-symptoms-7cac0c6eae26

A problem that is played out at the social, communal level is only possible because it has its roots in the heart.  Here also we too often address a symptom instead of the problem….which may be very well disguised….indeed.

Doesn’t it seem that this is what Lent is for….to get a little better focus on what is wrong?  If we are called to “return to the Lord,” isn’t it because we need to diagnose what is truly wrong?  The diagnosis and the “return” are two sides of the same coin and the only liberation from “chasing death.” To say we “return to the Lord” without a true and deep diagnosis is a futile gesture and a misleading sentiment.

2. A personal note.  Ever since the last election day I have been wrestling with a lot of anger, resentment, ill-will toward a lot of people, etc.  I feel like shouting from a rooftop, “You stupid, ignorant, blind, deluded people, what have you done!?” Anger at a lot of people.  All the Hispanics and Blacks who voted in surprising numbers for Trump; the women who chose Trump; the Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan (an Arabic community) who in their anger at the Biden Administration’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza decided to vote for Trump in large numbers and helped carry the state for him.  And never mind the American white male who has not voted as a majority for a Dem presidential candidate in something like 70 years!  Or take some of those states that Trump carried by something like 70%!  A lot of people to be angry about….very seriously…..  And lets be very clear, democracy was fully functioning to bring this situation about.  The people voted this in.  It was not some secret takeover.  A real majority wanted THIS!  Just as the Athenians voted to execute Socrates over 2000 years ago.  This election result is due to something really, really wrong within us as a people.  And lest I be misunderstood, no, no, no, the Dems are NOT and have NOT been worth voting for, but the choice was between something truly pathetic and bad and something really catastrophic for the country.  

However, my anger, my rage, my frustration is totally useless ….doesn’t do a bit of good…in part quite understandable and maybe inevitable. but it ultimately keeps me from seeing the reality truly, from understanding it truly, and so being able to respond in Truth.   It keeps me from seeing and understanding my own heart in this mess.  But maybe I can turn it into fuel for a deeper vision and a deeper response.   Good material for Lent!

3. Two responses that are both actually “on the mark” in their own way, but they simply add to my own anger, blindness, frustration; but I do find them in some strange way quite necessary….to see how awful and how extensive our social problem is.

The first is a rant by Chris Hedges:

“Kiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his ‘made’ men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of government. You can turn us and the natural world into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility. Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term it is collective suicide.

America is a full blown kleptocracy. The demolition of the social and political structure, begun long before Trump, makes a few very, very rich and immiserates everyone else. Mafia capitalism always leads to a mafia state. The two ruling parties gave us the first. Now we get the second. It is not only our wealth that is being taken from us, but our liberty.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, currently worth $394 billion, saw his wealth increase by $170 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $254 billion, saw his net worth increase by nearly $41 billion.

Tidy sums for kneeling before Moloch.”

………..

Please read the whole essay: 

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-mafia-state

The second is a kind of global protest by digital collage by one of my favorite journals, Adbusters:  https://www.adbusters.org/

Both are right in a sense and I agree with them, but also both are lacking “only one thing,” something very important, something which is hard to put into words, a kind of purity of heart and clarity of mind if you will.  But it can be summed up in one word: Gandhi.  

The folks above are calling for a kind of revolution, but Gandhi recognized that the essential and fundamental revolution is the one within, which then radiates into all of life.  (And here Adbusters is “so close to that Kingdom.”)  Otherwise the social revolutions not only fail, but they simply recycle the distortions, the delusions, the violence of the “ancien regime.”  India, which was Gandhi’s big “experiment”  is actually a real failure…from the Gandhian perspective; and Gandhi saw that clearly at the end of his life.  No matter; the revolution was ongoing within him….only a bullet could stop his body….and only his body…..   Are we going to walk away from that “one thing necessary”?  A thought for this Lent:  think of Lent as a call to revolution, the true revolution.  Forget “give some little thing up” for Lent, or “going to Church more often,” or giving something extra to charity.  No, start a real revolution!

4. Gandhi built his house not on sand but on solid rock….Truth.  This    surprises a lot of people….that the foundation is not love.  That is too easy for self-delusion, which a lot of writers, both secular and spiritual, have well documented.  See the lies that abide in all realms.  (By the way, who is the “father of lies?”)  Truth within oneself; truth between two human beings; truth as the fabric of real community.  Truth is the goal; ahimsa (nonviolence) within the totality of life is the means(this is comprehensive and one that many misunderstand how demanding it can be).  We are now much closer to the real meaning of love….even as the most powerful force of social change!

Gandhi:

“The way of peace is the way of truth. Truthfulness is even more important than peacefulness. Indeed, lying is the mother of violence. A truthful man cannot long remain violent. He will perceive in the course of his search that he has no need to be violent, and he will further discover that so long as there is the slightest trace of violence in him, he will fail to find the truth he is searching.  There is no half way between truth and non-violence on the one hand, and untruth and violence on the other. We may never be strong enough to be entirely non-violent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep non-violence as our goal and make steady progress towards it. The attainment of freedom, whether for a man, a nation or the world, must be in exact proportion to the attainment of non-violence by each. Let those, therefore, who believe in non-violence as the only method of achieving real freedom keep the lamp of non-violence burning bright in the midst of the present impenetrable gloom. The truth of a few will count; the untruth of millions will vanish even like chaff before whiff of wind.”

Thomas Merton on Gandhi (long quote but very significant):

“What is certainly true is that Gandhi not only understood the ethic of the Gospel as well, if not in some ways better, than most Christians, but he is one of the very few men of our time who applied Gospel principles to the problems of a political and social existence in such a way that his approach to these problems was inseparably religious and political at the same time.
He did this not because he thought that these principles were novel and interesting, or because they seemed expedient, or because of a compulsive need to feel spiritually secure. The religious basis of Gandhi’s political action was not simply a program, in which politics were marshalled into the service of faith, and brought to bear on the charitable objectives of a religious institution. For Gandhi, strange as it may seem to us, political action had to be by its very nature “religious” in the sense that it had to be informed by principles of religious and philosophical wisdom. To separate religion and politics was in Gandhi’s eyes “madness” because his politics rested on a thoroughly religious interpretation of reality, of life, and of man’s place in the world. Gandhi’s whole concept of man’s relation to his own inner being and to the world objects around him was informed by the contemplative heritage of Hinduism, together with the principles of Karma Yoga which blended, in his thought with the ethic of the Synoptic Gospels and the Sermon on the Mount. In such a view, politics had to be understood in the context of service and worship in the ancient sense of leitourgia (liturgy, public work). Man’s intervention in the active life of society was at the same time by its very nature svadharma, his own personal service (of God and man) and worship, yajna. Political action therefore was not a means to acquire security and strength for one’s self and one’s party, but a means of witnessing to the truth and the reality of the cosmic structure by making one’s own proper contribution to the order willed by God. One could thus preserve one’s integrity and peace, being detached from results (which are in the hands of God) and being free from the inner violence that comes from division and untruth, the usurpation of someone else’s dharma in place of one’s own svadharma. These perspectives lent Gandhi’s politics their extraordinary spiritual force and religious realism.
The success with which Gandhi applied this spiritual force to political action makes him uniquely important in our age. More than that, it gives him a very special importance for Christians. Our attitude to politics tends to be abstract, diverse and often highly ambiguous. Political action is by definition secular and unspiritual. It has no really religious significance. Yet it is important to the Church as an institution in the world. It has therefore an official significance. We look to the Church to clarify principle and offer guidance, and in addition to that we are grateful if a Christian party of some sort comes to implement the program that has thus been outlined for us. This is all well and good. But Gandhi emphasized the importance of the individual person entering political action with a fully awakened and operative spiritual power in himself, the power of Satyagraha, non-violent dedication to truth, a religious and spiritual force, a wisdom born of fasting and prayer. This is the charismatic and personal force of the saints, and we must admit that we have tended to regard it with mistrust and unbelief, as though it were mere “enthusiasm” and “fanaticism.” This is a lamentable mistake, because for one thing it tends to short circuit the power and light of grace, and it suggests that spiritual dedication is and must remain something entirely divorced from political action: something for the prie dieu, the sacristy or the study, but not for the marketplace. This in turn has estranged from the Church those whose idealism and generosity might have inspired a dedicated and creative intervention in political life. These have found refuge in groups dominated by a confused pseudo-spirituality, or by totalitarian messianism. Gandhi remains in our time as a sign of the genuine union of spiritual fervor and social action in the midst of a hundred pseudo-spiritual crypto-fascist, or communist movements in which the capacity for creative and spontaneous dedication is captured, debased and exploited by the false prophets.
In a time where the unprincipled fabrication of lies and systematic violation of agreement has become a matter of course in power politics, Gandhi made this unconditional devotion to truth the mainspring of his social action. Once again, the radical difference between him and other leaders, even the most sincere and honest of them, becomes evident by the fact that Gandhi is chiefly concerned with truth and with service, svadharma, rather than with the possible success of his tactics upon other people, and paradoxically it was his religious conviction that made Gandhi a great politician rather than a mere tactician or operator. Note that Satyagraha is matter for a vow, therefore of worship, adoration of the God of truth, so that his whole political structure is built on this and his other vows (Ahimsa, etc.) and becomes an entirely religious system. The vow of Satyagraha is the vow to die rather than say what one does not mean.
The profound significance of Satyagraha becomes apparent when one reflects that “truth” here implies much more than simply conforming one’s words to one’s inner thought. It is not by words only that we speak. Our aims, our plans of action, our outlook, our attitudes, our habitual response to the problems and challenges of life, “speak” of our inner being and reveal our fidelity or infidelity to God and to ourselves. Our very existence, our life itself contains an implicit pretension to meaning, since all our free acts are implicit commitments, selections of “meanings” which we seem to find confronting us. Our very existence is “speech” interpreting reality. But the crisis of truth in the modern world comes from the bewildering complexity of the almost infinite contradictory propositions and claims to meaning uttered by millions of acts, movements, changes, decisions, attitudes, gestures, events, going on all around us. Most of all a crisis of truth is precipitated when men realize that almost all these claims to meaning and value are in fact without significance, when they are not in great part entirely fraudulent.
The tragedy of modern society lies partly in the fact that it is condemned to utter an infinite proliferation of statements when it has nothing to reveal except its own meaninglessness, its dishonesty, its moral indigence, its inner divisions, its abject spiritual void, its radical and self-destructive spirit of violence.
Satyagraha for Gandhi meant first of all refusing to say “nonviolence” and “peace” when one meant “violence” and “destruction.” However, his wisdom differed from ours in this: he knew that in order to speak truth he must rectify more than his inner intention. It was not enough to say “love” and intend love thereafter proving the sincerity of one’s own intentions by demonstrating the insincerity of one’s adversary. “Meaning” is not a mental and subjective adjustment. For Gandhi, a whole lifetime of sacrifice was barely enough to demonstrate the sincerity with which he made a few simple claims: that he was not lying, that he did not intend to use violence or deceit against the English, that he did not think that peace and justice could be attained through violent or selfish means, that he did genuinely believe they could be assured by nonviolence and self-sacrifice.
Gandhi’s religio-political action was based on an ancient metaphysic of man, a philosophical wisdom which is common to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity: that “truth is the inner law of our being.” Not that man is merely an abstract essence, and that our action must be based on logical fidelity to a certain definition of man. Gandhi’s religious action is based on a religious intuition of being in man and in the world, and his vow of truth is a vow of fidelity to being in all its accessible dimensions. His wisdom is based on experience more than on logic. Hence the way of peace is the way of truth, of fidelity to wholeness and being, which implies a basic respect for life not as concept, not as a sentimental figment of the imagination, but its deepest, most secret and most fontal reality. The first and fundamental trust is to be sought in respect for our own inmost being, and this in turn implies the recollectedness and the awareness which attune us to that silence in which a lone Being speaks to us in all its simplicity.
Therefore Gandhi, recognized as no other world leader of our time, had done the necessity to be free from pressures, the exorbitant and tyrannical demands of a society that is violent because it is essentially greedy, lustful and cruel. Therefore he fasted, observed days of silence, lived frequently in retreat, knew the value of solitude, as well as of the totally generous expenditure of his time and energy in listening to others and communicating with them. He recognized the impossibility of being a peaceful and nonviolent man if one submits passively to the insatiable requirements of a society maddened by overstimulation and obsessed with the demons of noise, voyeurism and speed.”

5. What if we live in a culture of  lies?  What happens if our language, one of the key vehicles of truth, becomes abused, misused, distorted, propagandistic, etc.?  There are several ancient traditions that show a real concern for the consequences.  Confucius, for one, spoke about the need for “rectification of names.”  He said that if there was to be harmony at any and all levels of society, family, community, state, language must be a real vehicle of truth and not our delusions.  Cao Feng, a Chinese scholar, had this to say:

“Confucius was simply the first person in history to realize the importance of language in politics. As a politician, Confucius noticed and foresaw the influence that the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and arbitrariness of names could have on politics. He discerned the political consequences when language could not accurately express meaning or when there was no way for people to accurately perceive it. He also recognized how names, as a way of clarifying right and wrong and establishing norms, could have a great effect on a society’s politics.”

Plato aimed so many of his works against the sophists of ancient Athens.  Sophistry was a communal poison and not just an intellectual game.

And in modern times George Orwell has written forcefully about this issue.  His classic novel, 1984, written about 70 years ago, is a nightmarish picture of a totalitarian society where all of reality is now distorted and reconfigured.  Here is the opening line from the novel and more:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

(Slogans of the state.  Absurd you think?  Well think about how we invaded Iraq because we were told of “weapons of mass destruction.” And the infamous saying from the Vietnam era, ‘we destroyed the village in order to save.’)

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

But of course the one who has written the most eloquently and most comprehensively about this problem of distortion of reality through distortion of language is Thomas Merton.  The following read is a must:

https://merton.org/ITMS/Seasonal/27/27-1Daggy.pdf

6. Over 60 years ago a Canadian English professor, Marshall McLuhan, produced a revolutionary appraisal of media on culture and life in general:  Understanding Media and The Medium Is the Message.  He stunned a lot of people when he proposed that Hitler was only possible because of the invention of the radio and the loud speaker system.  Hitler was able to project his hypnotic delusions and his hypnotic madness to the masses through this means.  His mesmerizing darkness was enabled and enhanced by the  new technology.  With  his voice alone he would have reached dozens of people at a time; with these inventions he could reach thousands and hundreds of thousands in one speech.  Ok, I agree with that insight, but I would like to point out that you have to look also at what was wrong with the “receiving end” of this delivery.  Just consider:  Germany in the 1930s was the most educated country in the West, and if you count church attendance, the most religious.  So how did they fall for this madness? 

I wonder what  McLuhan would say about our internet and cell phone!?  I recall talking to an early Silicon Valley troll in the 1980s who told me internet would do wonders for the porn industry.  Of course internet is also a vehicle for a lot of good, a lot of essential good,  but we need to be aware that within this culture of lies which is our communal home, it is an increasing enabler and enhancer of lies, disinformation, distortions, fears, our darkness. In fact, the culture of lies would be a mere shadow of itself without internet.  So we seem to be back at “Livy’s problem”!  And with virtual reality and AI things are only going to get more “interesting.” 

And then there is this: the cell phone.  

Dopamine Nation. Title of a recent book by Stanford psychiatrist, Anna     Lembke, an authority on addiction treatment.   An important study of a growing problem:  addictions of all kinds growing in the U.S.  Across all age groups; all social and economic classes…..  Among the various agents of addiction is the cell phone.  Youngsters even in grade school get hooked.  Dopamine, that “feel-good” hormone comes on with every click of the cell phone. And with game playing, a multi billion dollar industry, you are cooked!  Dr. Lembke points to our disconnect from reality “out there” and from each other….kind of ironic in that the cell phone is seen as “connecting” us.  But we no longer talk to  one another face to face, exchange ideas and opinions, try to understand the “other,” etc.  Kids are less exposed to the wonders and mysteries of the natural world.  What is “real” is only what is on the screen.  We are approaching a new kind of Orwellian world.

7. Again, from the Upanishads:

From the unreal lead me to the real!

From the darkness lead me to the light!

From death lead me to immortality!

(Patrick Olivelle translation)

When I was studying Greek in Berkeley many years ago, I wore a tee shirt with these words on it in Greek:  PATHEI MATHOS.

This means “learning through suffering,” an expression from Aeschylus.  

We the People will learn eventually; it will be hard.

Interreligious dialogue has been a frequent and popular endeavor over the recent decades, though not as much now as it was in the 1960s and ‘70s.  Understandably enough people from different traditions were seeking to get free of the isolation from and hostility toward “the other tradition.”  This was especially true of Christian versus non-Christian traditions.  People were seeking common ground and to clarify our differences in a friendly, accepting atmosphere.  I won’t go into all the positives and negatives of these endeavors, suffice it to say there developed many.  Here I want to look at a very different kind of dialogue.  The interlocutors are not just from different traditions but from radically different ages and very different modes of engagement.  I present three examples.

1. The first interlocutors will be Karl Rahner and Ma Yuan.  Rahner was the best and most famous Catholic theologian of the 20^th century.  In 1974 Rahner came to a gathering at the University of Chicago where he delivered a paper entitled, “Thomas Aquinas on the Incomprehensibility of God.”  A masterful presentation of a very deep subject, which is fundamental and foundational for an authentic faith life.  (Unfortunately the paper is not online, so I can’t provide a link.)  

This “incomprehensibility” is not one due to some lack in us that somehow can be overcome….like Einstein “solving” the problem of understanding gravity.  For most of us gravity remains an “incomprehensible.”  Such an “incomprehensibility” is only a kind of imperfection in us that can be remedied.  But you might think, the reality of God is a kind of “puzzle” that somehow will become clear  and “solved” after death when we are “in heaven.”  Scripture at times seem to be saying something like that….like when Paul says that “now we see only partially” but then “we will see Him as He is, face to face.”  For Aquinas, as Rahner shows, NO is the answer.  But it is paradoxically not a negative no if you will.  What is actually unveiled after death, what we “see face to face” is the absolutely unfathomable Mystery of God, the absolute, infinite, eternal Reality.  In other words, this incomprehensibility is not just some quality or characteristic of God, something added to the person, somethng that simply describes some aspect of the Divine Reality.  No, it is actually his very being if you will.  

And there is more, but then Rahner turns to a modern appropriation of this teaching.  Rahner points out that modern human beings search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe.  Modern man does not know who he is, Rahner says, nor what is the purpose of life.  None of the sciences nor all of the sciences together can provide such answers.  Seeing this clearly, Bertrand Russell, a sincere atheist, one of the 20^th century’s famous philosophers,  presents this striking conclusion:

“Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

No one can really live on such a foundation.  Many modern artists, writers, existentialist philosophers proclaimed against this void that human beings now must create their meaning, their identity, their purpose, etc.  Rahner points out that none of this is ultimately satisfying; we cannot create out of nothing a meaning that will render our lives meaningful, that will go far enough, deep enough to answer our deepest questions.  As Rahner puts it, ultimately man is a question to himself, and all answers that he can reach and express become immediately inadequate.  In other words the human being is a mystery to himself.  And what Aquinas is really saying to us is that our identity, our meaning, our purpose is all lost in the Mystery of God.  God’s incomprehensibility is not just some fact out there among all the other facts…like the San Andreas fault running through California.  No, the deepest realities of our existence are directly and immediately related to the Mystery of God….after all we are made “in the image and likeness…”!  Precisely because of this the questions, “who am I,” “what is the meaning of my life,” cannot be explicated by science or philosophy or art, but only encountered by a total surrender in love and hope to the Mystery of God (Jesus on the Cross!) in all our daily experiences and finally at the moment of death.  To surrender to that darkness requires the deepest faith, hope and love; but we are then invited into an unspeakably blissful eternity of ever deepening but never exhausting comprehension of this One Mystery, the incomprehensible God and the incomprehensible “me.”

Rahner’s interlocutor here will be Ma Yuan, Chinese artist who lived about 1200 CE, in the Song Dynasty.  Actually the real interlocutor will simply be one painting by Ma, which is below.  Take a good look:

The title of the painting is “Walking on a Mountain Path.”  A lone figure, perhaps a Taoist sage, a scholar, in a natural setting.  He seems to be intently gazing, looking up, perhaps at the lone bird, which in its solitude reflects the solitude of the sage.  The bird is seen against a vast empty sky, and its being there accentuates the vastness and seeming emptiness which contains them both.  In fact every detail in the painting accentuates the vastness and emptiness and refrains from shouting at us, “here I am.”  Everything, the wispy branches, the ghostly bird, the distant wisp of mountains, the hidden cliffs, it all seems to be hinting at something else.  The real subject, the true focus of the painting is the vastness and emptiness which pervades the canvas.  And isn’t it really saying that it too is but a hint at something nameless and undepictable?  The painting puts before our eyes the opening verses of the Tao Te Ching:

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.”

Let the dialogue begin.

2. The next interlocutors will be Abhishiktananda and Ivan Karamazov.   To be more precise, it is Dostoyevsky of The Brothers Karamazov.

Toward the end of his life, in one of his many letters, Abhishiktananda says, “I don’t believe anymore in evil or suffering.”

A provocative statement indeed.  Not sure what exactly he means, but we will take it as it is.  I am not going to argue against it; I am not going to defend it.  The interlocutor is Ivan Karamazov (Dostoyevsky).  I don’t think Ivan would take kindly to Abhishiktananda’s view, and I wonder how Abhishiktananda would respond.   Lets listen to Ivan as he explains at length his position to his younger brother, Alyosha, a would-be monk:

“There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men — somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then — who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbors as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys — all mounted, and in uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general’s favourite hound. ‘Why is my favourite dog lame?’ He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw. ‘So you did it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He was taken — taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy, autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry…. ‘Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs…. ‘At him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!….

“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.”

And this is only a small portion of Ivan’s position; today Ivan’s argument would be emphatically underelined by the children of Gaza and the Sudan among many, many others.   Dostoyevsky poured his whole mind and heart into this novel as it tackles what the Russian theologian, Alexander Schmemann, called “ultimate questions.”  I am not sure a dialogue is here possible unless we bring in two other characters in the novel, two other voices of Dostoyevsky:  Father Zosima and Alyosha.  Zosima’s response might be the only proper response to both Ivan and Abhishiktananda, but we will listen to that at another time.  Suffice it to say that Alyosha responds to Ivan’s impassioned speech by not saying anything, kissing him on the cheek, and departing in silence.

3. The final interlocutors are a photograph and a medieval Byzantine icon! (I did say this is not the usual dialogue stuff!)

The photograph is of a young Native American woman and her first child.  It is a very old photograph.  The young woman exhibits nobility, strength and pride in her child.  There is also a hint of apprehension.  Both mother and child are wrapped in garments against a seeming cold environment.  The external world does  not seem welcoming; in fact, the shadows of the background seem almost menacing.  This child is going to have a rough go here, yet she is “total mother,” exuding care and protection for the child with the totality of her presence and whatever means she has.

The other interlocutor is one of the most famous and most holy Russian icons, Our Lady of Vladimir, painted in the 12^th century.

Here we see a mother also, and she is embracing her child with utmost tenderness.  But there is also a hint of apprehension/sadness in her gaze as she        is pondering what portends for this child’s life.  She cannot shield this child from his fate.  But note the rich golden light surrounding them both.  It is the Divine Presence embracing them both with that same tenderness.

Let the dialogue begin.

Postscript:

A Hasidic story to conclude any and all dialogues, whether harmonious or contentious:

Two neighbors were arguing over a financial dispute. They couldn’t reach an agreement, so they took their case to the local rabbi. The rabbi heard the first litigant’s case, nodded his head and said, “You’re right.”

The second litigant then stated his case. The rabbi heard him out, nodded again and said, “You’re also right.”

The rabbi’s attendant, who had been standing by this whole time, was justifiably confused. “But, rebbe,” he exclaimed, “they both can’t be right.”

The rav thought about this for a moment before responding, “You’re right, too!”

“Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEING
HAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even people
BEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people”

.

1. The election results shocked me….not that Kamala lost….I was quite fearful of that, all along thinking that Trump would edge her out….but the size of the loss and the way it transpired shook me up….could not sleep all night!  Now I did see Kamala as a very flawed candidate and the Dem messaging as seriously lacking….I mean you can’t run a national campaign on a foundation of abortion rights and pointing out the nastiness of the other candidate….I saw ad after ad after ad on this….Ok, include that in your package, but a lot more was needed.  I had hope when she took over from Biden, a notoriously weak and unliked candidate who more or less stumbled into the presidency after the pandemic.  Biden’s arrogance and ego kept him from stepping down much earlier, so this kept her from having enough time to develop a new and cogent program.  She was not able to detach herself from that legacy, and so she ended up doing worse than Hillary Clinton.

2. Amazing how many previously blue states went red.  Obviously she was not connecting with certain people.  And this is where the story gets interesting, troubling, and very, very sad.  The exit polls reveal a lot….here is a link to them:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls

1. Gender Gap.  Kamala got the overall majority of women voters, but not nearly as much as they were seeking.  Less educated women did not come through at all.  And amazing how awful the white man vote was.
2. Age.  If you analyze by age, she only did reasonably well with younger voters.

3. Education.  The more educated you were the more likely you would vote for her.

4. Race and Nationality.  Kamala did poorly among all white people.  But surprisingly 13% of Blacks voted for Trump, mostly young Black men.  And a really awful stat:  over 40% of Hispanics voted for Trump….in fact, Trump got the majority of Hispanic men….first ever such election stat!!

Then a mind-boggling 65% of Native Americans went to Trump.

5. Religion.  I saved the worst for last.  My Catholic community went 58% for Trump….and if they were white Catholics, they went 61% for Trump.  I don’t know if I can call myself Catholic anymore…..

6. Sexism, racism, misogyny, delusion are all alive and well and flourish in abundance behind many hidden doors.!

3. There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times which I can’t access but which had this revealing title:

“Stop Pretending that Trump Isn’t Who We Are.”

And then there was this story with this title:

“For Black Women, America Has Revealed Her True Self.”

Indeed!

4. And if you think the above is a bit extreme…too much, well then take a good look at this map.  The state electoral map is bad enough but still it doesn’t reveal the full story.  This, on the other hand, is an electoral map of all counties in the U.S., showing all blue and red counties.  Look and weep:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1gl630u/a_mostly_complete_map_of_counties_in_the_2024/#lightbox

5. And, as always, the best analysis of this situation is by Chris Hedges.  This just got published:

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-cultural-despair

I can see where one could disagree with some of his points or find him “too dark.”  But mostly, I think, he is right on, profound, and has a much larger vision of the problem than any political analyst.

No, I am not packing for Canada….  I take refuge with my ancient Chinese friends, poets and Chan masters who lived in nightmarish times.  And there is this beautiful poem by Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Among the Sufis perplexity is a very important notion and a critical stage in spiritual growth.  My perplexities are not that kind of thing….a bit more mundane but still quite significant.  Here’s a few of them:

A.  Recently there was a story on CNN about the Holy Grail!  And relics in general.

https://www.cnn.com/holy-grail-leon-spain-valencia-genoa/index.html#:~:text=In%20Europe%20alone%2C%20there%20are,them%20and%20pray%20over%20them.

It appears that there are something like 200 churches in Europe that claim they have the Holy Grail (and how many heads of John the Baptist are there?)!  And somebody said that if you added up all the wood that is claimed to be from the Holy Cross, you would be able to build a house.  It seems that in Late Antiquity and in the medieval world there was quite a “relic industry.”  People wanted relics and mementos; people got what they wanted. (Today the tourist business thrives in places with this kind of stuff.) There is a very popular kind of religiosity that seems to be almost centered on relics, “holy sites,” miraculous saints, etc.  I don’t understand this; it is, at least to me, a big puzzle.  

When I was a little boy, I collected baseball cards.  It gave me a feeling of “connectedness” with those guys whom I idolized.  So I kind of get that.  Then, when I was a novice monk, my novice master gave me a relic of St. Sharbel, the Lebanese hermit whom I admired.  And a friend gave me a small rock which he  had brought back from Mt. Athos.  These also gave me a sort of reassuring “connectedness,” but they were not even a small theme in my spirituality.  But it appears that these kind of things seem to be so central to many people. This feels like a crypto  superstition.  So, instead of focusing mind and heart and one’s whole being and life on that one reality which we call God, folks obsess about miracles, “incorrupt bodies,” speaking in tongues, possessing or seeing relics of “holy people,” “holy sites,” paranormal phenomena, etc.   I am totally bewildered what that spirituality is all about.

B.  The election uncovers another bunch of awful puzzles.  Consider this:  a remarkable number of Christians, mostly Protestant Evangelicals, support Trump.  And not just support but believe that he is somehow “God’s chosen one” to protect us from “satanic forces.”  Here is an NBC News story about this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/christians-swarm-washington-pray-america-turn-god-electing-trump-rcna175162

I am totally dumbfounded!  One wonders what is  going on!?  Makes one sympathetic to atheists! 

C.   I identify with the Catholic community, so you might think that I feel smug and congratulating myself that I am “not like them,”  the folks above.  Nope.  Can’t do.  There was a poll taken at Notre Dame University among the students, and it turned out that the majority of students preferred Trump.  Catholic voters in Pennsylvania are polling in favor of Trump, etc.  Here’s another recent story:

https://www.ncronline.org/news/catholic-voters-favor-trump-most-battleground-states-according-new-ncr-poll

 Also, so many figures in the Trump camp, like Vance, claim to be committed Catholics.  At the very least don’t these people know something of Catholic social thought?  Odd.  General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Trump years, recently said that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous man” to the welfare of this country.  Things like this do not seem to bother these Catholics.  I really wonder what constitutes the religiosity of these people, what is their spirituality all about?  

One could say that the issue of abortion holds sway here, and I think that may be partially true.  But one issue does not explain this phenomenon.  And I am afraid there is a darker truth here.  Again, not the whole story but definitely it  is  there as a factor.  Over the years you will find a strain of Catholicism that is inclined toward authoritarianism, both in Church and State.  There is this need to impose, even by force, one’s notion of Christianity, indeed, even of Catholicism  itself, one’s notion of social order, one’s notion of patriotism, etc.  These folks have never been comfortable with how messy democracy can get.  Like the monarchist Catholics in France who yearn for some kind of “restoration” of the “old order,” these people look at the pope as s kind of king, and the bishop in his diocese as a kind of king within that realm; and the Church is a Kingdom.  The celebration of the Feast of Christ the King is no longer a redefinition and transformation of power into servanthood, but a theologically warped celebration of religious power.   It’s not hard to see  how that kind of Catholic would be attracted to someone oozing with aspirations to be a “strong man,” a dictator in effect if not in name.  Given all this, I am still puzzled by how warped the Catholicism of some Americans is.  If only they could recognize the distortions within their religiosity……

D.  American history.  I love reading  that stuff and pondering what I learn there.  Inevitably one runs up against a “brick wall” of understanding….it’s impossible to figure out the rationale for some things….because there isn’t any.  Among  the most prominent of these, I think, is slavery.  

The fact is that most Southerners in the pre-Civil War era did not own slaves.  I have seen various estimations that range from 10% to something like 30%.  But the other fact is that the “Southern cause” enthralled the overwhelming majority of Southerners.  Most of those men walking into the fierce Union firepower at Gettysburg…Pickett’s Charge…did not own  slaves.  What were they willing to die for?  For a small minority to be able to own slaves?  Probably not.  Some Southern historians put it this way: for loyalty….to their  land…they were mostly farmers…most of the Southern economy was agrarian…the land which was invaded by the “industrial” North.  Also, loyalty then to their way of life, loyalty to their State, loyalty even to Robert E. Lee.   Insane and delusional.  Thus the myth of the “Lost Cause” rose up, the myth that the South was engaged in a “noble cause.”  It was a lie and a delusion then, and so it is today, no matter what some historians are saying.  It didn’t matter that so few actually owned slaves….the fact is they all tolerated slavery.  After their defeat in the war, the South worked as a whole to structure their society in a segregationist way….not to mention the Klan, vigilante groups, and brutal police forces that terrorized Black people.  Today the South and the border states are peppered with various mementos that valorize this delusion and maintain a remnant of a deeply enigmatic attitude of the  heart, and there is a strong resistance to taking down the statues or renaming some institutions, etc.

  But lest the North get sanctimonious about it, we need to remember that the phenomenon of segregation was prevalent also in the North even if it was not totally institutionalized.  How white people considered black people was a national tragedy that to this day affects us all.  In the Old South this enigma that I am pointing to is the desire not just to see certain people as inferior but even more so to turn another human being into a commodity, a property that I can own.  This goes beyond “not liking” someone, hating them, even seeing them as an “enemy.”  Where does that come from?  Incidentally, slavery in the ancient world was not racially based….usually it meant that you were on the losing side of a war or some conflict.  In the U.S. it was deemed that a whole class of people by nature were somehow less than human or that a whole class of people  can be turned into a commodity because of their very nature.

A religious angle to all this:  where were all the Christian churches in all this?   Apparently all over the place…..from the few that supported the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad to the many in the Deep South who exemplified a deafening silence about how all this should look to a follower of Christ.  One should also add that a number of religiously grounded colleges, even in the North, benefited from trafficking in slaves.  But what really gets me is that the Jesuits in Maryland owned slaves.  How these ecclesial elites, well-trained in religion and secular studies, endorsed such a practice totally bewilders me.

E.  Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.  Love the Latin…so succinct!  Usually translated as:  Outside the Church there is no salvation.  First enunciated in this form by St. Cyprian of Carthage in the 3^rd Century, early patristic period.  I forget when but at some point it was declared as an infallible doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.  I suppose by now one can see a “little” problem in all this!

For centuries, until the Vatican II Council in the early ‘60s, this statement was taken literally.  In part this explains the strong missionary push by the Church, and you can also kind of see how the European colonists looked at the people of the New World…..a part of the “massa damnata” that was doomed to hell.  So even coerced conversions were for their own good!  There were some remarkable exceptions like the few Jesuits who made it to China and India in the  17^th Century.  They were overwhelmed by the beauty, the power, the depth of the religious consciousness they found there.  They tried to adjust their Christianity to fit in but the Vatican put a stop to all that.

With Vatican II the Church softened its view of the other great world religions, but the theologians could not do away with an infallibly declared position.  So there was a problem!  They came up with various solutions, like looking at all these other religions as a good preparation for Christianity and therefore as somewhat “salvific” in a sense; or looking at other religionists as “anonymous Christians,” and so on.   Catholics who had real and deep contact with authentic religious practitioners from the other world religions found these solutions inadequate at best or even totally wrong.  Merton simply ignored this dilemma in the last years of his life and continued exploring the depths of Buddhism and Islam.  The actual lives of these people spoke to him more than the limitations  of some doctrinal conundrum.  Abhishiktananda is even more  interesting because more radical.  In the last years of his life he simply rejected all this.  For him Christianity, the Church,  was “incomplete” without the presence  and insights of the other great world religions.  Our understanding of Christ and who we are is deficient in a serious way without  the vision of the other great religions.  Needless to say doctrinally this does not fly!  At least in any official sense.  And to me it seems that it presents an even deeper enigma…..but one in which I feel much more at home.

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!