Chapter 2 of the book is a collection of excerpts from the writings of St. Theophan the Recluse.  In fact the bulk of this book is from Theophan, one of the most remarkable figures in Russian monasticism.  He lived during the peak of the Hesychast renewal in 19^th century Russia, and also he was one of the most educated men in Russian monasticism.  For something like 20 years he lived as a recluse, but he guided hundreds if not thousands of people through correspondence.  He also had an enormous library which included not only the Fathers of the Church but also western philosophy.

The chapter begins with a continuing theme: what is prayer?  This may seem like a simple question, but in actuality it is a very complex and deep question.  But St. Theophan has a difficult but practical objective to lead us into the depths of inner prayer:  “What is prayer?  What is its essence?  How can we learn to pray?”  The importance of the question is emphasized: “Prayer is the test of everything; prayer is also the source of everything; prayer is the driving force of everything; prayer is also the director of everything.”  The spiritual life is the ground and foundation of all we do and all we are, and prayer is the foundation of the spiritual life.

Next St. Theophan points to “different degrees” of prayer.  In a sense he starts with the outer layers and moves inward.  The 1^st degree has to do with our bodies–this involves reading, bodily posture, and movements like prostrations and kneeling, etc.  This is not superficial stuff because we want to bring our bodies into this flow as it were.  St. Theophan makes a point that this may be hard, especially when we “feel nothing” and don’t feel like praying.  He tells us to have a “moderate rule” of prayer–meaning we should not pile up a lot of physical practices and put large demands on ourselves in terms of getting a lot of vocal prayer done.  But to do something is important, and to keep at it is important because it will lead to a kind of focus on prayer.  And that leads us to St. Theophan’s second degree of prayer.  We are still here in the realm of active, maybe even vocal, prayer, but the important thing is that our attention and our focus is consistently on the reality of God as it unfolds through the words we say or sing.  Then we come to the heart of prayer, the third degree.  Now our focus and attention is continuous.  This is the beginning of inner prayer.  St. Theophan then alludes to an even deeper realm of prayer:  “But there is, they say, [note he does not speak from his own authority–whether this be from humility or because he had not reached that state himself, we do not know], yet another kind of prayer which cannot be comprehended by our mind, and which goes beyond the limits of consciousness: on this read St. Isaac the Syrian.”

Again and again St. Theophan returns to discuss the “essence of prayer.”  Some may find this repetitive, but you have to realize that the editors are simply taking snippets from his extensive writings and lumping it all together in this anthology.  But you can see even from this that St. Theophan returned to this topic all the time.  The essence of prayer is not easy to put into words, but for him and this hesychast tradition it has to do with a kind of turning of the heart toward God and abiding in his Presence.  Let us recall that one of the chief characteristics of being human is “intentionality.”  Intentionality is a kind of turning toward something, a reaching for something, etc.  When we are hungry or tired we turn toward sleep or food–we have an intention to meet that felt need.  When we are in the presence of a friend, we turn toward the person in our attention and relationality.  Our intention is toward fostering that friendship.  Intentions can also be misdirected.  In any case, ultimately intentionality has to do with the core of our being, called “the heart” in this tradition.  What is it turned towards?  That is the key question.  If we understand this, we will understand the real role of asceticism, liturgical prayer, solitude, silence, etc.  We experience a phenominal world, sometime pleasureable, sometime painful; we have a myriad collection of fears, anxieties, desires roaming through our consciousness, we have an ego self, and all kinds of identity markers, both social and inner.  Whatever be the nature of their reality, St. Theophan exhorts us to turn that core of our being toward the Presence of God.  This is going to be real hard work! Precisely because of that whole phenomenal world that percolates in and around us.  Modern life especially wants to capture our intentionality toward consumption and superficial surfaces–it denies the very existence of that “inner room” or it pleads a kind of agnosticism about it.  Ok, so whether it be in St. Theophan’s time or our time, perhaps we will need hymns, vocal prayers, bodily gestures, meditative reading,  etc at the start. The role of the Jesus Prayer comes into play here.  Also, our Islamic brethren can teach us a lot here.  They are called to turn toward Mecca 5 times a day in prayer.  This physical gesture is a physical icon of what they(and we) are called to do at the heart level as we turn toward the Holy Presence.  Once this intentionality of the heart toward that Holy Presence has been firmly established, it will begin to fill all else that we do during the day.  It will also keep us from getting diverted into the superficial realm of modern consumerism.

While at first that turning may have been toward what felt like “nothing” and silence and emptiness, that “nothingness” eventually will become unveiled as a Presence beyond and without words, images, or thoughts.   Then, and this is the big thing, that “turning,” that which we have called prayer, will live in us by a dynamic that is no longer of our own making or effort.  At that point there is only One Prayer and only One who is Praying.

There is one more teaching that St. Theophan alludes to in this chapter, and this is extremely difficult to put into words precisely because it is so easy to misunderstand and misapply.  If we reach that highest level of prayer, we will see that everything in our life is a gift from God.  Everything, and we will accept everything precisely as that.  Thus our sickness, our loss, that “slap in the face,” etc. etc. it is all from God.  Now looking at that “from the outside,” this looks like the worst kind of determinism, a loss of common sense, an abandonment to a sick kind of passivity.  And indeed to teach someone that message without that reality of prayer would be gravely irresponsible.  Here also we touch base with our Sufi friends.  But once we are in that realm of continuous prayer, we see all reality differently.

St. Theophan is also quick to point out to all of us what we have previously termed as “Hesychast’s heart, Beginner’s heart”:

“You must never regard any spiritual work as firmly established, and this is especially true of prayer but always pray as if beginning for the first time.  When we do a thing for the first time, we come to it fresh and with a new-born enthusiasm.  If, when starting to pray, you always approach it as though you had never yet prayed properly, and only now for the first time wished to do so, you will always pray with a fresh and lively zeal.  And all will go well.”

That combination of words sounds jarring–we are not accustomed to seeing any kind of violence attributed to that tradition.  However, there is a new book out that discusses the presence of violence within the Buddhist tradition.  The title:  Buddhist Warfare , a collection of essays by various Buddhist scholars, edited by Mark Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer, two scholars of comparative religions.  There is also an intriguing review of this book that first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement(UK) by another Buddhist scholar, Katherine Wharton.  The review was also available through truthdig.com and here is the link:

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/buddhists_at_war_20101008/

It seems to be an uneven book, and the review even more uneven.  There are a number of problems and questions of interpretation.  But first of all one must acknowledge the sad but undeniable historical record of actual violence by proponents of Buddhism.  To those of us in the “Abrahamic religions”: Judaism, Christianity and Islam–well, we are accustomed to the presence of violence in our various traditions, but most Westerners had looked on Buddhism as not being tainted by that kind of thing.  This book does show that is not quite the case.  On another website, in a personal account, Mark Jerryson, one of the editors, tells us why he took up this research.  Here is that website:

http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/2158/monks_with_guns%3A_discovering_buddhist_violence

Mark spent a year in Thailand studying Buddhism and was jarred to discover monks with guns.  He knew he had to look into this.

In any case, the book details both ancient and modern instances where people who identified themselves as Buddhists carry out or condone or somehow support violent activity.  Japanese Zen seems to come out very badly in this regard.  In Japan Zen seems to have been associated with the warrior class(the samurai, etc.) quite a bit–it made them better warriors.  In this regard there is at least some ambiguity in some of the things that even the great D.T. Suzuki wrote.  And here we come to some questionable things in the book and even more so in the review–apart from the historical record, there is the problem of how to interpret certain words and expressions in Buddhism.  It seems that what some of these scholars are saying–and especially the reviewer–is at the very least very questionable if not outright wrong.  It may be arrogant on my part to say so, but there is also the historical record of many Westerners, scholars and religious folk, who have definitely “missed the boat” in evaluating Asian religions–either idealizing them and projecting their own constructs, their own needs into them or else painting them in such a negative way as if there was nothing of value there.  So it is not, alas, impossible.

First of all, what these authors say about the Buddhist notions of “no-self,” and “emptiness” seems very wrongheaded.  To attribute  these as a cause of the presence of violence in Buddhism is a misreading.  Yes, one can see how a shallow or distorted understanding of these profound notions can lead one seriously astray. But in their essence these are very deep teachings that actually lead one in the opposite direction when correctly grasped.  Thus the importance of a true teacher because Buddhism is primarily learned from a teacher and not from texts.  There are several comments after the book review by various kinds of people and most of them are superficial, but there are at least two comments by informed Buddhists who make this very point.

Another terrible misreading is blaming Taoism for the justification of violence in Buddhism.  Here Taoism is seen as “identification with the raw forces of nature.”  Wrong!  Absolutely wrong.  Sometime soon we will have to discuss Taoism at length.  Needless to say both Zen and Taoism have been used to justify various hedonistic and antinomian ways of life that may include violence–also including a superficial spontaneity.  To name names: Alan Watts came close to this in his books in the 1950s and 60s, and he was very popular in his time.

Another problem both in the book and in the review is the lack of sensitivity to the many-layered nuances of the language in this tradition(and actually in all religious traditions).  Even in American “pop Buddhism” to say “kill the Buddha” is clearly not seen as an invocation to violence.  It refers to a ceasing of objectification, of trying to find a Buddha outside one’s self.  There is a certain amount of this kind of language in Buddhist literature, and we must grant that this kind of language is problematic today.  It can also be found in the other great traditions.  Afterall, the Bhagavad-Gita takes place in the middle of a battlefield, the Jewish Psalms used in Christian worship are filled with language about “smiting the enemy,” etc., etc.  One has to find a way around this language and get to the meaning behind it.  But like the good commentators on the review point out, one also has to look at some very fundamental Buddhist teachings that call one to compassion, to doing no harm to anyone, etc.  And as for D.T. Suzuki, well, he once did say that the essence of enlightenment was to feel the pain of another as one’s own.  Whatever else he might have said, that’s pretty good!

Whatever the failings of this book may be, whatever the problems with the review of the book, they both do remind us that there is a “dark side” in every religious tradition.  Whether this be a misinterpretation of a teaching, or a misappliction, or a cultural distortion of a perfectly good doctrine, whatever be the case, one has to be alert.  Just because something is labeled as “religion” or “spiritual” does not mean we set aside our critical faculties and deny what’s right in front of our noses.  Christians have been doing this for centuries!  Buddhists, welcome to the club!

Now we plunge into the bulk of the text, and the first chapter is an excerpt from a  late medieval Russian hesychast, St. Dimitri of Rostov.  He is a figure almost unknown in the West.  His spiritual writings bridge that span when Russia crosses over from the medieval into its own early modern period.  It is a time before the great hesychast renewal inaugurated by the translations of Paisius Velichkovsky of the Greek compilation known as the Philokalia.  The hesychast tradition was alive and well in the small sketes and hermitages in the Russian wilderness and in certain of the large monasteries, but the general populace and most monks and priests were not much “into it” as we would say today.  Thus St.Dimitri tells us of the paucity of knowledge about inner prayer among people in his time (and this may surprise some or they may consider it an exaggeration).  We might want to say to St. Dimitri that you don’t know how really bad it can get!  And Merton in his The Inner Experience echoes such sentiments.

There is a lovely book on Zen called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.  There is the sense that what St. Dimitri is talking about is not only a description of a certain situation in his own time, but more like a state of mind that one should have at any time in approaching the reality of inner prayer.  In a sense, he is saying that we all need to have this attitude of being beginners as far as inner prayer goes.  A clumsy adoption and adaptation of the Zen title would be: Hesychast’s Heart, Beginner’s Heart.  Andre Louf, a Trappist monk and a hesychast teacher of prayer, also points to this as an essential attitude and state of heart as we approach the reality of inner prayer.  St. Dimitri: “Therefore some idea of inner training and spiritual prayer is given here for the instruction of beginners….”  Make no mistake about it, we are all beginners as far as this awesome reality of inner prayer and communion with God goes.  And if we want to make progresss, we will always be beginners–that is the great spiritual paradox.

The title of the chapter is “The Inner Closet of the Heart,” and the word “closet” is a poor translation of the word from the Gospel of Matthew that is often translated simply as “room.”  Nevertheless the idea is the important thing, and St. Dimitri and the whole hesychast tradition relies heavily on this text about prayer.  There we find this call to go into a secret room, an inner room, in order to pray.  Obviously this is not a physical space as such but a whole understanding of the human makeup.  For St. Dimitri and many others, there is this anthropology of “dual spaces” as it were:  the “inner man,” and the “outer man.”  This is found all over in classic Christian spirituality and it has its roots in the Gospel and St. Paul.  If one does not misunderstand it, if one does not take it too literally but sees the metaphorical nature of such language, if it doesn’t become a rigid structure of fixed ideas about the human, it will prove to be helpful and clarifying.  For there is such a thing as outer prayer, for example, and inner prayer–as St. Dimitri points out.  In outer prayer we say a lot of words, we use books, we use gestures, we sing hymns, etc.  The world of inner prayer is quite different.  However, this kind of breakdown of the human world into two parts can also be very misleading.  In a sense there is no outer or inner with regard to prayer.  In fact the hesychasts themselves, as we shall see later, want to lead us to a place where prayer suffuses everything, penetrates everything, fills up everything that we are and we do.

In the hesychast tradition the world of inner prayer has to do with the heart, and this word “heart” is actually a very rich and complex term.  It does not have a simple reference to that physical organ by which our bodies function.  The “heart” here of course refers to the very depths and center of a human person.  It is the place where you and God are one in love and freedom.  We say “in love” because you and God are not physically one, but one in terms of love.  God’s love for you is absolute and infinite and always there–otherwise you would cease to exist. That stranger over there who is a stranger to you is also loved infinitely by God and walks in His Light–unawares though he may be.  So by the mere fact of your existence you are totally one with God in His Love.  What of course is called for is that you respond to this love with your whole being.  That’s the point of the First Commandment.  We also say “in freedom” because tragically enough we can say “no” to this Love.  Nevertheless our freedom (and this we shall have to discuss at length at some point because of its pop misuse), our freedom is already a sign of God’s Presence to us–it is that Divine Life flowing in us of which we are normally so oblivious.

In a sense the very meaning of inner prayer is to abide in that Love and that Freedom, and to abide in it constantly with awareness.  To live by it.  This is the “true bread” “in the desert.”  Our existence itself is a kind of desert.  Because we are scattered creatures filled with varying and diverse desires, fears, anxieties, an outer structure of prayer is very much needed to help us focus.  Furthermore, as St. Dimitri points, a brief, oft-repeated prayer, like the Jesus Prayer helps one focus on that Presence in the heart.  There will be much more about this in later chapters by other authors.  Suffice it to say that St. Dimitri points us in the direction of “continual prayer,” or “unceasing prayer,” which is really a conscious, gentle abiding in the Love and Freedom that brings one existence from moment to moment and every gift moment to moment.  There is nothing that is without that Love, whether it be a trillion stars in the thousands upon thousands of galaxies spread over unimaginable space where light takes billions of years to travel through, or it be a blade of grass, an ant, a little flower, a drop of rain rolling down your window, etc.  In the end you will discover that there is ONLY the Presence of Love, and inner and outer are just temporary terms.

But in the meanwhile let us turn to that inner place and place our attention there and hear our name being called as we are called into existence from moment to moment out of pure emptiness and into the Fullness of Love and Freedom.  As St. Dimitri puts it:  “Man needs to enclose himself in the inner closet of his heart more often than he needs to go to church….”

There have been some recent news stories, feature stories, and websites that have highlighted this interesting phenomenon of people moving toward a lifestyle of living without money.  The most recent example is this Englishman, Mark Boyle.  Here are two links to stories about him:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/05/18/eco.free.economy/index.html?iref=allsearch

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-boyle/mark-boyles-moneyless-man_b_735238.html

http://www.tonic.com/article/the-moneyless-man-mark-boyle-freeconomy/

Then there is the German woman Heidimarie Schwermer, and here is the link to a story about her:

http://www.livingwithoutmoney.tv/

And then about 2 years ago there was a spate of stories about an even more radical American living in a cave outside of Moab, Utah.  He even has his own website which he manages from a public library computer:

http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/

Apparently there are a lot more people moving in this direction, although of course they are nothing compared to all those who seek more money, etc.  This is actually very interesting for many reasons.  Although there are some real differences among these folk, they do share a basic fundamental thrust which separates them from the “way things are”–which many see as natural and as inevitable as the sun rising and setting.  In one sense there is nothing “religious” about their way of life or their “philosophy”; but in another sense they have a very deep connection with a fundamentally religious view of life and a very real connection to all those who follow a monastic way.  Although there is nothing intrinsically “evil” about money and to be “against money” is not particularly religious in any sense, there is this thing about our relationship to money that is indeed a problem, both socially and spiritually.   And these people have a good sense of that–unlike so many of “professional religious.”

Now if one lives or has lived in a monastery or a Catholic religious house, or if one has visited such a place, one inevitably will realize at some point that one is “encased” in an entity that is worth millions in many instances–the Carthusians in Vermont built their place with very expensive granite, and recently I have been reading of these Carmelite monks in Wyoming who are planning this massive gothic monastery in the Rockies that will cost millions and will depend on a lot of donors.  These days Catholic religious will tell you they are “cash poor” but maybe land rich.  Monasteries/religious institutions that are large landowners are an ambiguous reality at best.  Also, you will see very often these religious institutions being very friendly with rich and powerful benefactors who have acquired their money in very ambiguous ways.  For example:  the Catholic, Peter Grace of the former Grace Corp., who gave lots of money to Catholic religious institutions, also let thousands of people suffer through the notorious pollution the company caused and then refused to take responsibility for it and fought to avoid making it up to the people.  Whatever be the case, it is so amazing how many religious people are either naïve, blind or willfully overlooking their very compromised relationship to money and wealth.  Our secular moneyless friends are there to remind us there is another way.

The traditional defense of the large, well-endowed monasteries is that the individual monk “owns” nothing–it is only their for his use as needed, and the security it provides enables the monk to devote more of his time and energy to prayer and meditation–the main point of his life.  However you deal with that line of thought, it has a long and venerable tradition, and no doubt many good monks and nuns have lived in such a context.  Also, this position seems to appear in other religious traditions–like Buddhism, etc.  The Dalai Lama himself has pointed out that one of the problems with earlier Tibetan Buddhism was that the monasteries were these huge landowners that dominated the whole society–it seemed that everyone was working to support the monks.  He has gone so far as to say that in some ways when the Chinese took over and took everything away from the monks, that at least in this regard they are better now.

Now of course there is a completely different Christian monastic tradition, even older, that takes a completely different approach.  It is against monks owning large institutions, and indeed it suspects all kinds of ownership.  Seeking the same ultimate goal but interpreting the monastic charism in a very different way, it points to poverty in every sense of that word as very essential to the monastic identity.  At the origins of Christian monasticism this is very apparent with our dear friends, the Desert Fathers.  Plenty of stories about that!  When Christian monasticism becomes very institutionalized and very big, reform movements almost always pushed in two directions: solitude, and poverty.  Again, the Desert Heritage.  St. Francis is another interesting example–his focus on poverty is so intense that even in his own lifetime  his own followers abandon that commitment, and he is deeply saddened by that.  In medieval Russia there was this battle of visions of what Russian monasticism should be like.  The two conflicting groups were called: the Possessors, and the Nonpossessors.  The contrast is self-explanatory.  Historically the Possessors won out, and Russian monasticism developed rich, well-endowed monasteries.  However, the Nonpossessors did not disappear.  On the contrary they continued in their own small way, and this is the primary locus for the development of Russia’s greatest spiritual treasure–Russian Hesychasm.  This developed and flourished in the small sketes and hermitages in the forests of Russia.  And yes, to be fair, hesychasts were also to be found in the large monasteries.

Now with all that let us return to our secular moneyless friends!  Are they a kind of hidden monasticism?  Maybe.  Probably not, but why bother with labels.  When Merton met with some of the student leaders of the uprisings in 1968, they told him in effect, “We are the true monks.”  And Merton accepted this challenge and developed it for his very last talk.  He appreciated the fact that they understood better than the official monks that being a monk also meant being in a certain critical relationship to the social fabric of money, ownership, possessions, power, etc.   Otherwise the monk’s renunciations were a mere fiction, a mind-game.  Well, perhaps our moneyless friends and the movement they are part of seems to say something similar.  In any case I find them engaging, challenging, and inspiring.  Yes, certain criticisms could be leveled at them.  For one, they seem inconsistent or  worse, “moochers,”–take Suelo in Utah, for example, he hitches rides when he goes somewhere.  Well, he can only do that because someone else HAS BOUGHT A CAR WITH MONEY!  Or he goes to the library and uses a computer–that’s only there because of someone else’s money.  Suelo has an answer for that:  he uses the example of a bird in a downtown area of a city–the bird makes a nest on one of the ledges of a skyscraper.  So be it.  The bird is not “mooching”–just making use of what’s there to live his life.  Incidentally, the father of this whole movement, Thoreau, was also accused of being inconsistent, and Emerson wrote in his defense, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds!”

Now one could easily say that money in itself is not the real problem and that these people may be missing the main point: what’s in the heart.  True enough.  Suelo comes very close to saying that money in itself is the problem, but the others seem more nuanced.  But what they all point to is the enormous corrupting influence of money in all our institutions: religious, political, social.  Money and all it represents seems to drive our social order.  You know the old saying about the “Golden Rule”:  he who has the gold, sets the rules.  And our friends do this critique in a very quiet, “monastic” way by simply living very, very differently.  Monks could learn a lot from them instead of participating in a social, economic realm that is ordered by and for greed.

A further point:  people have this sense that the given social and economic order is “natural,” “inevitable,” can’t be changed, that there are no possible alternatives.  Our friends here suggest otherwise.  Mark Boyle, the Englishman, does point out that the whole world could not take up his way of life tomorrow–that would be catastrophic, but he does rightly point to the fact that people can do a lot to simplify and reorder their lives around something more than being consumers.  That they can slowly deconstruct this enormous edifice of acquisition, consumption, entertainment gluttony, etc. Again, one can see a very monastic dimension to all this.

Now moving to another voice and quite a different piece of writing, let us turn to the social critic Chris Hedges.  This man is one of the deepest thinking people writing on our social condition today, and his weekly essay can be found on truthdig.com–usually appearing on Mondays.  This particular piece should be read by everyone, and here is the link to it:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/retribution_for_a_world_lost_in_screens_20100927/

Many people find his analysis too much to swallow–it is so uncompromising and so bleak, but I think he hits the bullseye almost every time. (Incidentally, Merton in some of his writings already was hinting at this kind of diagnosis in the 60s).  But now come some questions for us on the monastic path.  Given Hedges’ analysis and given the humble alternative lifestyles of our moneyless friends, inquiring minds should be asking themselves:  What is the role, the place of the monk in the world that Hedges describes?  How can one expect any traditional monasticism to be renewed/rekindled in such an age?   Are our moneyless friends perhaps harbingers of a radically new universal monasticism that will start to appear–a monasticism that might not even carry that label.  The charism does not depend on labels, on institutions, on appearances.  Some have pointed toward something like this years ago.  Certainly there will be monks and nuns who are strictly ecclesially oriented, and that’s ok–many of them are good people who have something to contribute, but the real answer to the technological barbarism and human desolation that we are entering into will come perhaps from monks who hardly look like monks….  One major proviso: yes our friends seem to have one piece of the puzzle of how to live in this civilizational nightmare, but another piece is badly needed.  Those who have gone deep into the human heart, deep into the center of their being, and stand in the Presence from moment to moment–speaking only of my own tradition now, others can be put it in their own terms–hold an absolutely essential other piece of the puzzle of how to live in this kind of age.  Only People of the Heart, as I call them, will be able to navigate through this kind of world without getting lost.  They will be marked by nonviolence, compassion, freedom, perhaps silence and solitude, but not necessarily–also not necessarily with robes or titles for sure.  The “world” as the New Testament would call it, or today we would say, “the System,” is marked by the “sign of the Beast”:  greed, consumption, acquisition, war, violence,  fear, hatred, porn, exploitation, etc., etc.  In a sense the monk’s way has never been clearer!  Something to think about…..

Zizek is a philosopher, a critical theorist, and a Marxist who is very well known and respected in intellectual circles in Europe.  He is the kind of thinker quite prevalent in Europe but increasingly rare in the U.S.(Chomsky might be one example)–someone whose theorizing is focused on actual social realities.  In any case, being a Marxist he would automatically be disregarded here in the U.S., but in Europe they have more intellectual sophistication and do not confuse Stalinist or Maoist communism with Marxism.

It is perhaps not surprising that Zizek has some sharp things to say about religion, but his thinking is cogent and his criticism cannot be brushed off lightly.  In a recent article a Buddhist teacher and author, Ethan Nichtern,  confronts the criticism of Zizek:  “Radical Buddhism and the Paradox of Acceptance.”  Let us quote extensively from Nichtern:

“Critical theorist Slavoj Zizek has an interestingly harsh critique of Western Buddhism and the meditation tools it employs.  Framing his critique in Marxist terms, he argues that Buddhism is the perfect spiritual tradition to be co-opted by our self-absorbed, destructive, and consumeristic society.  For him, Buddhism represents the perfect ideology for passive acquiescence to the world as it is, a panacea of inner peace that fits neatly into an advertising culture where, by now, ‘be present’ could just as well be the slogan of a credit card company as an instruction from a meditation teacher.  Zizek writes: ‘Western Buddhism allows us to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless the spectacle is — what really matters to you is the peace of the inner self to which you know you can always withdraw.’

In other words, for Zizek, Buddhism, in the context of a Western consumer culture, allows the individual to believe he is transforming his mind without actually changing the conditions of suffering that shape the individual’s society.  This represents a dangerous type of inner peace — a peace not based on true insight into the interdependent nature of reality, but instead based on withdrawal into a mental cocoon, some personal oasis isolated from the turmoil of the world outside.  In this cocoon, the whole world can go to hell, and the meditator can — put simply — be ok with that.  In fact, the meditator can even be a willing actor in a system aiding great oppression, and still live at ease, because it’s ‘all good’ anyway.  By practicing ‘acceptance,’ we simply become comfortable with the status quo.”

This is a very challenging critique, and we should welcome such challenges because they help us clarify our own thinking and perhaps help us see things we couldn’t or didn’t want to see before.  Naturally Zizek’s critique could also be easily addressed to Christian contemplatives–as Merton and others pointed out years ago.  Merton’s The Inner Experience addresses some of these issues.  In any case, Nichtern welcomes the challenge of this critique and then presents an attempt at an answer.

Nichtern’s reply–and Merton’s too to a certain extent–relies on a true understanding of terms such as “peace,” “acceptance,” and “passivity.”  I would also have pointed out to Zizek the example of the Vietnamese Buddhist monks who incinerated themselves in protest of the American war in their country.  No matter what you think of this kind of action, it can never be called “passive” or a “withdrawal into a cocoon.”  But Zizek would then probably reply that in fact he is specifically addressing Westerners taking up Buddhism, etc.  And in that regard he has a point.  Too many have taken up Buddhist or Christian or any other contemplative practices as a means of escape or as an anesthetic to make themselves numb to the dysfunctionality of the world around them, either their personal world or the greater social world.  This is especially true of well-to-do people.  Merton warns us of seeking a “narcissistic seclusion,” of walling ourselves up within the false peace of our religious ego.

Nichtern appears to be coming from the Theravada tradition of mindfulness meditation, so he addresses Zizek’s challenge from that standpoint:

“Of course, for people who don’t practice, meditation can and does come across like a pitchperfect cliché of passivity before the status quo.  When you look at someone sitting there, you might think:  ‘Seriously what does that do for them?  What does it really change about their situation?  How does it better the world?’  We ask these skeptical questions because what we rightfully want is not just the ability to pay attention, but the ability to transform our circumstances.  We want change we can believe in, both internally and externally.  That’s the payoff we are looking for.  Without the reward of transformation coming at some point on the path, meditation is useless.  Buddhist teachers can preach ‘there is no goal’ as much as they want, but most students aren’t going to even stick around long enough to hear the subtleties of what that really means, either.  And there are goals in meditation, by the way, just not the kind that can be achieved in 30 minutes or your money back.  Practical transformation is what Buddhist practice is all about.  It’s also about changing the world.  To practice meditation consistently is to push back hard against the tidal wave of materialism that is quite literally killing the planet.  But transformation is actually step three in a three-step process.”

The first step, Nichtern points out, is mindfulness.  It is the chronic avoidance of our selves, our real self, that lies at the core of mindless consumer culture.  In Nichtern’s tradition this mindfulness is very thorough and intense.  Christian contemplatives can borrow from this tradition but their approach generally will be quite different.  In any case, both will see how their emotions, their feelings, their perceptions can be deployed in a problematic way that leads to further suffering in oneself and in others.  The understanding of what is going on in our minds is important to true transformation of what happens “outside.”  Nichtern:  “Whenever we try to change something before we understand it, out attempted transformation actually comes from habit and assumption, not wisdom.  Solutions that come from habit, as Albert Einstein pointed out, just end up reinforcing the problem.  That’s called samsara….”

The second step, as Nichtern points out, is “acceptance,” and this is the more subtle one.  It has nothing to do with being passive toward the suffering of others to say the least.  What it really means is that when we become mindful, we realize how much about ourselves we really don’t like.  Acceptance has to do with coming to terms with the deep fundamental reality of who we are.   Without too much exaggeration one could say that so much of the hurt and “bad” that people cause in the world comes from a very deep down self-hatred, self-rejection that is then unconsciously projected outward.  In Nichtern’s tradition, there is a very clear, explicit solution:  “There is no product we can purchase to aid this work.  It only comes from the willingness to be with yourself, nakedly, openly, and lovingly, again and again over a long period of time.  Which means we have to spend time with ourselves.  A lot of time.  And the time we spend with ourselves on the cushion is the opposite of passive.  It’s often tough, it’s usually intense, and it leads to a hard-fought, slow-won, revolutionary victory over self-hatred.”  And here we may note a cautionary word for Christian contemplatives–they too have to find their particular way toward this kind of self-acceptance.  To simply call yourself a “sinner” as in the Jesus Prayer, without having some realization already that one is already forgiven, already bathed in the mercy of God, already totally loved and accepted, already “good” in a very fundamental way because God calls me into being, because I am his handiwork moment to moment, well unless one has that realization from the get-go, the mantra-like repetition of calling yourself a sinner can lead to some pathological states of mind.  But we shall address such issues in our postings on The Art of Prayer.

Let us give Nichtern the last words:  “Does the kind of self-acceptance which Buddhist meditation techniques systematically cultivate in the individual really change the world?  Well, no, not alone.  Zizek is right about that, as well as the danger of thinking that acceptance is the end of the journey and believing in any way that we are ‘in it but not of it.’  Eventually you have to get up and do something.  But trying to change your life or the world without a real method for changing your own mind is inherently doomed to failure, because society is just a matrix of the hearts and minds of those who inhabit it.”

The Art of Prayer  is the title of one of the most wonderful books on Christian spirituality that there is.  In fact, in the eyes of this blogger it is a sine qua non of the Christian spiritual life, though there are for sure some that would disagree.  Among modern writings there are only a few others that deserve such accolades–among them would be: Merton’s  The Inner Experience,  and Andre Louf’s Teach Us to Pray–two very different works but of exceptional importance.  Speaking of Merton, The Art of Prayer was in his hermitage and constantly at his side during the 1960s, the last years of his life.  His copy was heavily underlined and referred to in his notes.  What we will do here and in future postings is simply comment on some passages.

The modern English edition comes with a helpful introduction by Kallistos Ware, an English scholar who became eventually an Orthodox monk, and who later became a bishop.  The original work is a masterpiece of Russian Orthodox spirituality.  Basically it is a compilation of various spiritual sources by Igumen Chariton, that is Abbot Chariton of the great Russian monastery of Valamo.  Amazingly enough this was compiled and published during the terrribly repressive years of the Stalinist regime–and Valamo was still a thriving monastery.  The actual material that Chariton puts together ranges from ancient Greek and Slavic sources to the majority being from Theophan the Recluse, one of the greatest Russian spiritual figures of the 19^th Century.  In a sense it is a kind of “Reader’s Digest” of Russian Hesychasm, but of course it is much more than a “digest”–one can go very far just being guided by that work.  In the absence of someone who could guide you in the living tradition, this book will do more than adequately.

The Introduction announces the main theme, the main concern of this book with its very first words:  “What is prayer?”  A very big question.  The reality of prayer ranges from simple words and sentiments addressed to God to what this tradition calls “unceasing prayer of the heart.”  The goal of this collection, and the goal of the Russian Hesychast tradition is precisely to lead one to that unceasing prayer of the heart even as one might begin with simple oral prayer.  It also always assumes liturgical prayer as a kind of constant background of the inner journey.  Now the focal point of this prayer journey as it were is the Jesus Prayer, and it is amazing in its simplicity and power.  And Ware is quite correct in showing the scriptural roots of this prayer.  But before we get to that, there is the important point of the intended audience of this book.  Certainly The Art of Prayer originated in monastic circles and is primarily meant for monks, but it is also offered to all who seek continual inner prayer.  And in the Russian Hesychast tradition, and maybe in not all other traditions, this reality is available to all people, whether they are officially monks or not.  Recall that Dostoevsky’s Fr. Zosima says that monks are not some special kind of people but only what all Christians should be.  In fact a person in any condition or situation, even one who is crippled or paralyzed and helpless on a bed, can practice this prayer and achieve the highest realizations.

Now for some terminology clarification–or maybe we should say a certain caution about mixing up terminology.  Even within this very tradition of Russian Hesychasm there are different terms:  “inner prayer,”  “continual prayer,”  “prayer of the heart,”  “unceasing prayer of the heart,” etc.  These all seem to point to the same reality, more or less.  Among the Western Christian traditions you get terms like:  silent prayer, mental prayer,  contemplation (and this term is also used by Theophan), active contemplation, passive contemplation, infused contemplation, meditation, etc.  Now these seem to have their own distinct and different meanings with some overlap.  And from the great Asian traditions there is the import of the term “meditation” with a whole new meaning of its own.  And even here there are some significant differences among the various Asian traditions.  The best thing to do is not to confuse or conflate these terms.  They all do not point to or refer to the same reality–although they may all have some very positive contribution to make to a spiritual life.  Let each term be taken in the context of its own tradition, and leave it at that.  For our purposes here we will simply focus on this “unceasing prayer of the heart” (and we will use the other equivalent phrases that this tradition uses).  The one thing we can say is that this “prayer of the heart” is not the same as any kind of meditation–it is not about awareness per se, concentration, consciousness, etc.  It is more about a Presence, which slowly becomes the total reality of one’s existence:  “I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.” (St. Paul).

Now from the standpoint of The Art of Prayer and the Russian Hesychast tradition, the unceasing prayer of the heart is found most quickly and most surely through the use of what is called, the Jesus Prayer–this latter is sometime also referred to as the Prayer of the Name, and here we come very close to our Sufi friends.  In fact, within the hesychast tradition the two seem to be almost the same thing.  The writings are not all consistent about this, and in some cases it seems one can arrive at unceasing prayer of the heart by other means.  Kallistos Ware:

In theory the Jesus Prayer is but one of many

possible ways for attaining inner prayer; but

in practice it has acquired such influence and

popularity in the Orthodox Church that it has

almost come to be identified with inner prayer

as such.  In one spiritual authority after another

the Jesus Prayer is specially recommended as a

‘quick way’ to unceasing prayer, as the best and

easiest means for concentrating the attention and

establishing the mind in the heart.

Whatever be the case, our book and the Russian Hesychast tradition focuses on the Jesus Prayer.  This is a prayer of utmost simplicity and seeming superficiality.  In English it is only 10 words:  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me (and there are variant wordings).  In Greek and Russian the prayer is only 7 words long–first on the lips, then silently in the mind, finally “in the heart.”  And finally the prayer never ceases in the heart, and then one is far beyond any words.  Some people have likened the Jesus Prayer to a Christian mantra, but that is a mistake.  Yes, it has some of those characteristics, and it may produce some effects like a mantra (as Ware implies above), but in its essence it is something different–just like prayer and meditation are different things but may overlap in both effect and significance for any given person.  More about all this as we go through the book.

As a final point for this posting, the scriptural roots of the Jesus Prayer as a route to inner prayer are very significant.  This stands in contrast to a kind of psychological or philosophical approach to prayer–albeit these may be valuable in their own right but they are different.  The foundations of the Jesus Prayer can be traced out in three directions.  First there is this whole thing about “the name.”  In the Old Testament the name of God was itself considered sacred.  It somehow carried the very mystery of God and so it was not to be pronounced out loud.  The Name was seen as an extension of the Personhood of God, and as a revelation of His being in Mystery and Power: “I am Who  I am.”  The Sufis and Islamic mysticism also have these same roots and a very similar mysticism pertaining to the Name of God.  Now from the Christian perspective, when we get to the New Testament, the name of Jesus picks all that up with the additions of “familiarity” and “closeness.”  Jesus in his humanity is the fullest and highest expression, manifestation of the Mystery of God.  But also he is very human with a very human name: Jesus.  Thus in this name we have both the awesome infinite mystery of God and the unspeakable closeness of God to humanity combined in one.  Much more could be said about this, but one can see the theological richness of just the invocation of the Name.

Then there are two moments in the Gospels that are important foundational places for this prayer.  The first is the cry of the blind man (Luke 18:38):  “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”    The second is the prayer of the Publican (or tax collector):  “God, be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13).  The Jesus Prayer absorbs both of these moments and seeks to place the pray-er in the shoes as it were of both of these people.  In the first instance there is the situation of ultimate blindness and of a realization that there is only One who can remove that blindness.  The blindness that keeps us from seeing our own condition and from beholding the Mystery of God and being totally aborbed into it.  The second instance brings before us one of Jesus’s most powerful illustrations–the difference between the Pharisee and the Publican–two different pray-ers, two very different ways of praying.  First of all, the Pharisee posits himself as some isolated entity who is “unlike” “that sinner”–the Pharisee keeps an account of “his goodness”–this so-called goodness is the doing of his religious ego, and the Pharisee is totally locked inside that.  The Jesus Prayer, on the other hand, takes up the attitude and state of heart of the Publican.  It simply knows the universal need for God’s healing mercy in the human condition.  Here we may note that some people either find this prayer too negative in spirit or if not that they kind of drive themselves into a depressive darkness by constantly invoking that they are “sinners.”  A bit of understanding and guidance here helps a lot, and we will touch on this as we go along through the book.  Suffice it to say for now that the path to inner prayer through the Jesus Prayer leads one into a boundless compassion and a sense of oneness with all people with the realization that we all are immersed in this sea of illusion and delusion which the Buddhists call maya, this illusion of a separate isolated self which then feels a need for self-assertion, self-protection, self-polishing,  self-grasping, etc.  There is the usual way of feeling superior to others–through better education, through wealth, through all kinds of external means; but the most insideous separation and most illusory one is the one where we see ourselves as “religiously better” than other folk.  The Jesus Prayer deconstructs all that and opens our heart to our common predicament and then leads us into the light of the true reality: endless and boundless communion–and ultimately this also includes all animals and all creation–as the great saints have always recognized.

What an amazing “little thing” it is — the sign of the cross.  First of all the cross itself is the symbol within all Christianity.  You can see it in the context of almost any church building, and it hangs within many a Christian dwelling.  But now we are going to focus on a physical gesture one makes with one’s body:  the sign of the cross.  It is so common within both Catholic and Orthodox traditions that one hardly reflects on it.  It is such a simple gesture.  And for many believers it has become almost automatic.  One learns it in childhood.  One will make it as one begins to pray; when one enters a church; during a liturgy or prayer service; even a small thing like saying grace before a meal, etc.  Its simplicity and its centrality within the Christian tradition go together, but what can it possibly mean?

There is a kind of standard theological explanation one can refer to–the cross is the instrument upon which Jesus died his salvific death and through this death we are “saved.”  And making the sign of the cross, then, is a kind of physical reminder, or if you will, a kind of physical mantra, repeating the symbolic form of that awesome event.  All this is true, but the problem is that words like “salvation,” “redemption,” “death on the Cross,” etc. are used without engaging the deep mystery at their roots. We feel secure if we just mouth the given doctrine in language.  So we use over and over again these words until they become platitudes and religious cliches from overuse–as if we really understood the depths of the words we were using merely by repeating them.   They become as automatic as that physical gesture.  In order to even begin to penetrate that fog and to even approach a little bit the deep meaning of the sign of the cross in our life and its true theological significance, we need to start at a more existential point:  the reality of suffering.  Here we also meet all our fellow brothers and sisters in all the world religions.  We all have to wrestle with the reality of suffering.  Certain conservative Christians have pointed to a supposed serious difference between the central symbol of Christianity, the cross, and the central symbol of Buddhism, the Buddha sitting in a lotus position with a serene face and a faint smile.  But this kind of understanding is worse than “mixing apples and oranges”–it is a travesty of understanding.  For one thing, the central axiom and foundation of Buddhism is simply that to exist is to suffer.  Then one would want to ask, why is the Buddha so serene–but that would take us on another journey.

Suffering is universal.  We are immersed in an ocean of suffering.  And here we want to include all kinds of suffering.  Just now as I type these words someone is starving to death somewhere; someone in Pakistan has lost all they have in the enormous floods;  someone is laying somewhere dying alone; someone is in awful physical pain from some incurable disease; someone has been betrayed by a loved one or a friend; someone has lost their job and is on the verge of becoming homeless; someone is devoured by a need for drugs or sex; someone is devoured by anger, hatred or fear; and yes even the “evil person” who is perhaps doing us or someone else harm, even that person is totally immersed in suffering–just think of all the “devils” devouring his heart with greed, hatred, lust, etc.  And even with the person who seems to be well-off there is the ever-present feeling in the heart of dissatisfaction, of a constant yearning for something else, of fault-finding around us and so on.  And here we meet the real Buddhist notion of suffering as that fundamental craving in our heart that leads to no end of desire.  It is all suffering. We cannot find a place and stand there and say, “Ah, here there is no suffering.”

So to make the sign of the cross is, then first of all, a kind of acknowledgment that we are immersed in this sea of suffering, that we are connected to everyone’s suffering, that we ourselves know suffering simply because we exist. To make the sign of the cross with awareness, then, would be a great spiritual practice–like prostrations, like what our Orthodox friends do with their countless makings of the sign of the cross during their prayer services.

And why are we connected with everyone’s suffering?  Here we will push into specifically Christian thought and into the Christian symbolism of the cross: it is because of Jesus.  The particularity of that historical moment, his suffering and death on the cross, according to Christian belief, is a profound manifestation of the reality of God, among other things. And making the sign of the cross is a kind of physical reminder of the particular moment.  This is the message of the Gospel of John, the gospel of the manifestation of God.  We have spoken many times of the Mystery of God, and the Gospel of John says that whatever else you might intuit about God, when you look at Jesus you are looking right at the heart and mystery of God–“He who sees me, sees the Father.”  And the Gospel brings it all to a focus when Jesus is on the cross.  This is the ultimate manifestation of who God is.  So when we make the sign of the cross we also are “replaying” as it were that manifestation of the ultimate mystery of God.  God is revealed as that Total and Absolute Self-Emptying Love.  From this we then see that God is within our suffering, not as some outsider looking on with pity, but as one suffering with us and in us.  To borrow an image from the Old Testament, our suffering neighbor is the Burning Bush and so are we in our own suffering.  And when we make the sign of the cross we also acknowledge that reality and bring it to our awareness.   Indeed, to borrow something from Augustine, we could say that God is closer to us than our own suffering is.  In any case, this God is present to us in our very suffering, no matter how great or how small.  And through that Presence we are connected to all those who suffer, meaning to all of humanity.  And by making that sign of the cross we actualize that awareness also.

Let us now recall something from our reflections on Good Friday in a previous posting.  To borrow from Louis Dupres, let us again recall that famous slave hymn, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”  And of course when the slaves sang this, they could answer in their hearts that yes, they were “there”–that “there” is here because He is here with them in their suffering, He is crucified  in them.  To make the sign of the cross, then, with awareness is to enter into that “there” and “here,” to be with Jesus in His suffering with me and with my neighbor whether he be a family member or someone 10000 miles away in Pakistan.

Now let us dispel some possible mistaken lines of thought.  Let nothing said here imply that we have some explanation for the reality of suffering–there is no such thing.  There are ideologies and rationalizations for suffering, religious, social, political, and these are used for manipulating or anesthetizing people so they can be “used” in some way. There are mythic “explanations” but they are of a different order. One can raise the question why does God allow suffering.  Let us be clear: we have no answer.  We only have our faith in an infinitely loving God who is with us in our suffering.  One could say that as long as you have a finite world, contingent and dependent being(as the Buddhists would say), suffering is an inevitable fact.  But that hardly seems to satisfy anyone.

Furthermore, let nothing said here imply that the proper attitude toward suffering is merely passive acceptance.  Actually it is quite the opposite.  If you have a toothache, you should do something about it.  If we see someone suffering in a way that we can alleviate it somehow, like feeding the hungry or confronting the injustice they experience or whatever, then we should definitely give our whole being to this–but, you see, this will entail suffering on our part and we need to accept that–even to the point of giving our life.  “No greater love has a person than to give his life for his friend.”(Jesus)  The exercise of compassion will entail some kind suffering on our part–especially if we see the futility of it.

The presence and significance of suffering in human existence is an absolutely critical awareness for spirituality of almost any tradition–though it takes on some different tonalities in different traditions.  For some people this is a very negative view and rejected.  For example, many Westerners even into our time regarded Buddhism as “life-denying,” as negative,  because its foundational axiom is that to exist is to suffer.  One wonders how unaware those people were/are of their own existence, of what is around them, etc.  But just look at the Dalai Lama, hardly a negative, morose person.  He radiates joy and happiness.  The point is that the two are not contradictory states of being/awareness.  In a sense the duality of suffering and bliss needs to be overcome.   In any case, that is why the Dalai Lama makes compassion the central point of all spiritual teaching–because we are all “in it.”  Then there was the critical comment by the famous Russian theologian Alexander Schmemann concerning many liberal Christian thinkers in the 20^th Century.  He said that their thinking seems to imply that somehow the event of Good Friday can be “undone” if we are simply good enough, if we act nicely enough, if we are engaged in the pursuit of social justice, and so on.   As if we could establish “paradise”  and eliminate the “smell of death” and the fact of human suffering through the push of human progress and “undo” the darkness of Good Friday.  But it is precisely on Good Friday while hanging from the cross that Jesus proclaimed to the thief, and to us, “This day you will be with me in Paradise.”  This is not a paradise of our doing.  We proclaim, “Truly He is Risen,” AND we make the sign of the cross, and if we do it with even a semblance of the awareness of the Dalai Lama, we will be with him in the joy that surpasses understanding and at the same time in that knowledge of the reality of suffering.

The Dalia Lama has said that the goal of Buddhism (“enlightenment”) and the goal of all religion is to feel the suffering of the other as our very own.  This is a very down-to-earth criterion of spiritual realization, and the result is that the act of compassion is not some external “good deed”(through which we “keep score” on our “goodness”) but our very state of being and consciousness with which we bind our wounds.  The “other’s” suffering is no longer “his problem” that we might help with–it is our problem which we cannot leave unattended–if no more than to offer companionship in the sorrow.  In the Gospel Jesus tells the story of the Samaritan, the religious outcast, who binds up the wounds of the man beaten up by some robbers.  The religious figures and religious leaders who pass by the man in need are so full of their “religion” that they have not a clue as to what the goal of true religion is–as the Dalai Lama put it.  When the Risen Christ confronts Thomas in his doubts and asks him to put forth his hand and touch the wounds that Jesus had suffered, He also is asking us not to be afraid  “in the light of the Resurrection” to touch our own wounds and our own suffering because they are also His.    All this symbolized and remembered in the sign of the cross.

Religion is in the news again.
Well, considering the nature of “the news” this is not a good sign. It shows the growing dysfunctionality of our society, and this is something to worry about.

First of all, there is all this hysteria being drummed up by certain conservatives and Republicans and other folks about the so-called mosque at Ground Zero. Sadly enough even some decent Democrats have succumbed to that bombardment and have proposed that it would be “wiser” to move it elsewhere. What is really frustrating is that the facts of the case are seldom articulated. First, the “mosque” is not a mosque but a community center built by American Moslems that would be open to all people–called Park 51. It does have a room for Moslem people to pray in–afterall they are called to prayer 5 times a day–something like Christian monks. Secondly, this building is not on Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center but 2 to 3 blocks away. Within a 3 block radius of Ground Zero there are a porn shop, a gay bar, and 2 strip clubs–seems like no one thought these were any kind of desecration to Ground Zero. By the way, the majority of the residents of the area approved of the project. Furthermore, there is a Moslem Prayer Room right within the Pentagon, and it got hit by one of those planes.

Let us take a closer look at the problem. How very strange to conflate pious Moslems with these crazy radical extremists who distorted the Koran and their own faith in undertaking their horrible deeds. One suspects there must be some underlying motive in fanning hatred for Islam among the American people. Considering how many people there are of this faith and how many countries there are where this faith is dominant, one suspects that a potential exists for many wars and conflicts if this hatred is fanned and exacerbated–much, much money can be made by certain people and certain enterprises with countless conflicts and wars or threats of wars. One can’t help but suspect that….. In any case, the results of all this hateful fear mongering are scary in themselves. Just a few days ago some pastor in Gainesville, Florida decided to have a “burn a Koran Day.” Fortunately 16 other pastors in that same town in response will read from the Koran in their prayer services. This is just an example. There are so many poorly educated, ill-informed, irrational, fearful, anxiety-ridden people in our society that it doesn’t take much to cause trouble. And it doesn’t help if our leaders, including the President, simply say that these people “have a right” to build their center–no these leaders should be brothers and sisters whose piety and goodness adds to the greatness of America. But American politicians are afraid of really associating with people of Islamic faith–unless it is for their oil. By the way, it is funny and strange how one “criticism” of President Obama is that he is secretly a Moslem! As if being a Moslem were some bad thing.

A few more thoughts: So there is a Moslem prayer room in the Pentagon itself. American Moslems work in the Pentagon. American Moslems worked in the World Trade Center and were killed also. American Moslems were among the first responders–firemen and policemen. Some died as they bravely were trying to rescue non-Moslems. Moslem dead hallow that ground also. It is such an outrage to demonize Islam or any one religion. All the religions have their problem people and their problem moments, and one needs to sort through all of that. Just think of Christianity, for example. During World War I both sides were very clearly self-identified as “Christian.” Heck, on Christmas Eve both sides would stop shooting at each other and sing “Silent Night, Holy Night”! How strange! Yet nobody here in the U.S. complained about the Christian churches because there were Christians shooting at Americans over there. Actually what they did do is focus on people of German extraction, and these did have a problem. Consider that those irrational young men who identified themselves with a distorted Islam and who did that horrible deed were mostly from Saudi Arabia and our government to this day is on the best of terms with the Saudis(oh, how we need their oil!), well, we see how religion has really very little to do with all this except in a very distorted way. But Americans seem to really need an enemy, someone to demonize, someone to hate, someone to consider themselves superior to–the list of such targets is long. Recently, once Russian communism was out of the picture, Islam became a convenient target. And so the story goes. How few Americans there are who recognize the beauty and depth and power of Islam in human hearts totally turned toward God.

A Postscript to the Above:

This is from a blog by Roger Ebert:

“I find hope in the words of two American strippers interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Cassandra, who works at New York Dolls, just around the corner from the proposed community center, said she worried that calls to prayer might wake up the neighbors. The WSJ writes: ‘But when she was told that the organizers aren’t planning loudspeakers, she said she didn’t have a problem with the project: ‘I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s freedom of religion, you know?’

“Chris works in the Pussycat Lounge, even closer to the site. When the airplanes struck the World Trade Center, Chris became a Red Cross volunteer working with survivors. The WSJ writes she “sat on a barstool in a tiny, shiny red dress and defended Park51. ‘They’re not building a mosque in the World Trade Center. It’s all good. You have your synagogues and your churches. And you have a mosque.’ Chris lost eight of her friends on Sept. 11, 2001, firefighters from the Brooklyn firehouse she lived next to at the time, but ‘the people who did it are not going to the mosque.’

“Cassandra and Chris reflect American values more instinctively and correctly on this issue, let it be said, than Sarah Palin, Howard Dean, Newt Gingrich, Harry Reid and Rudy Giuliani, who should know better.” – Roger Ebert

Now another very unfortunate example is a recent article from the New York Times–dated August 21, “Sex Scandal Has American Buddhists Looking Within.” In a posting some time ago this blog pondered the scandals surrounding the San Francisco Zen Center–a very sad state of affairs stretching almost 2 decades. This is another example along the same lines. It has to do with the revelation of the papers of Robert Aitken, a very well-known figure in American Zen Buddhism. Apparently the roshi he was associated with engaged in numerous sexual exploitations of his women students, and Aitken kept meticulous notes on this which were kept secretly by him–all the details, names, places and dates–and now the papers have been made public upon Aitken’s recent death. Another serious blow to American Buddhism. No Catholic is in any position to “throw stones” at these people considering the history of Catholic priests, recent and otherwise! However, there is a peculiar quality to these Buddhist situations that needs to be looked at.

One wonders why Aitken never stood up and protested while he was a student of this roshi–perhaps it was because he himself wanted to be a recognized master and this required a “transmission” from this roshi. Just speculating. It could be simply that there was this awesome reverence for the roshi and one hardly dare speak against him. The teacher – disciple relationship was/is sacrosanct. It seems that this might be the center of this problem. Whether in Christianity or Buddhism or anywhere else, it seems that this role of roshi, guru, master, teacher, spiritual father is very problematic–especially for us moderns. It imbues one party with enormous power over the life of another who willingly enters into that relationship surrendering their autonomy for a so-called higher good. An idealized view of some special figures in the tradition, who may or may not have been as portrayed, who nevertheless were rare, this becomes a kind of cloak that too many put on. The enticements and seductions of this kind of authority are enormous–a very, very rare few can exercise such authority with anything approaching authenticity. Yet there are literally thousands of people who present themselves as spiritual teachers, gurus, masters, spiritual fathers, etc. When I was a student years ago in Berkeley, I remember seeing often a bumper sticker: Question All Authority. Loved it. The emphasis should be on “ALL.” Not just political and social, but religious too, and especially spiritual, yes, spiritual. Too many people accept “spiritual authority” as if that were beyond questioning. No such thing. In fact, considering all the problems all religious traditions have been having, it would be a good idea to have a moratorium on having roshis, masters, gurus, teachers, spiritual fathers, etc. Drop all the titles, distinctions, specialness, etc. at least for a generation or two and see how that goes. We will be better off simply learning from one another. And to have a coherent community we might elect someone as “leader” for a time who would keep things focused and coherently working but then would step down and another person would be elected and so on. And what if the pope lived in a simple house and simply visited every church as a simple pilgrim and prayed with everyone that they truly follow the Gospel…. But now I am dreaming….

There are many Desert Father stories pertinent to the above topic, but let us conclude by simply referring to Jesus in the Gospel. On Holy Thurday, in the Gospel of John, he showed what a real “spiritual teacher” is. And he warned the people around him about wanting to be “masters” and “leaders”–they should take “the last place”–not one of distinction—not exercising power in the way of the world, etc. Jesus is actually a deconstruction of that kind of spiritual authority that exploits and uses people–no matter in what tradition it is found

A. The Question

What’s the point of it all?  What’s it all about anyway?  A very big question.  Maybe the biggest question of them all.  A universal question.  Nobody escapes this question. Even when avoided it still is answered.  Everyone asks this question, whether they realize it or not; everyone answers it also whether they realize it or not. But, and this is very important, the REAL answer will never be something in language.   The question that we perceive in our words pervades all we do and all we are–or think we are.  And so will the answer. The realization of death brings a certain urgency to the question.  The individual person answers this question, and also every society gives an answer of sorts.  This is a problem because there is a strong tendency and urge to take on the answer given by our society as our very own.  Instead of going into the depths of one’s heart and wrestling with the question there.  In Zen terms it is like wrestling with a koan; in Christian terms it is like in the Old Testament, wrestling with God. The question is really an icon of the Presence of God–it connects you with that Reality–it gives you a sense of “something more” over the horizon of your experiences.  But pick your own metaphor.

Another problem:  the answer given by any society, ancient or modern, progressive or conservative, rich or poor, religious or secular, it’s always going to be false. Any society will always have a convincing substitute answer that will insure its increase and flourishing rather than allow any process or questioning that may lead to its dismantling–which may happen if we critique the very “glue” that holds that society together by means of a “higher purpose” to our life.  In any case no social order can ever satisfy that question in our heart–but granted there are “better” social arrangements and “worse” ones.   Be that as it may, our own society is amazingly transparent in its shallowness and falseness in dealing with such a question.  First of all there is the popular myth that everyone in our society is free to search for their own answer.  This is a myth in the worst sense of the word–a lie, propaganda, an ideology to maintain our society.  If you venture too far outside the boundaries of what constitutes an acceptable answer according to our society, you will be punished in one manner or another.  And one way the answer provided by our society can be summarized is the following:  what’s it all about is for you to be a happy consumer.   Marketing and advertising pervade all of our life whether we realize it or not.  The magazine Adbusters has been exposing this for the last 2 or 3 years with great acumen.  What underlies the whole economy and the ethos of this culture is the happy consumer.  And what is he/she happy about?  Choices, among other things.  This is a big word for us.  Better to have ten brands of breakfeast cereal available to choose from than just two!  But there are a whole cluster of values that constitute the happy consumer:  success, good appearance, being liked, wealth, being “in tune” with what’s going on, etc.   We all know the images that this way of thinking generates, images that surround us all the time, language that fills our ears and minds with assumptions about “what’s the point of it all”.   The “good life” is the life of the happy consumer who doesn’t rock the boat.  More about this later.  Of course there are answers given in the modern West that have “more” to them intellectually speaking–whether it be from the cluster of values of the rational Enlightenment or the current Nietzschean post-modernism–in either case their values and the answers they give merely undergird the fundamental social ideology that pushes us all in the direction of “happy consumers” living on the surface of reality because there is only the surface as we know it–an endless universe of commodities, bought and sold endlessly, a multitude of Andy Warhol icons connecting us to nothing.

Now there are people in every society who are not satisfied with any way their society answers this question. Or with whatever answer they themselves have managed up to that point.  Pondering the reality of death can unmask all social answers as shallow, as inadequate at best.  So certain people step outside the horizon provided by their society.  More often than not this is a religious quest.  Sometimes this results in the person joining a religious group or becoming a monk.  While basically a sound move, the problem is that the group they join is another “society” embedded within the larger society and even though it may speak a very different language, even the language of “leaving the world,” it nevertheless tends to truncate the real journey and provide a mere shadow of the reality the person is seeking as his/her answer.  And more about this later, but for now let us simply return to our old friends the Desert Fathers.  This is the beginnings of Christian monasticism; here you have a sizeable number of people in the Middle East of the 4^th Century who were asking in their own way:  What’s the point of it all?  They felt a need to leave their society, even physically, in order to answer that question.  But out in the desert they began to form an alternative society that also began in short term to provide its own made-up answers, its own substitutes for the real thing, and many of them did succumb to these substitutes.  Sometimes this problematic situation was very, very subtle, and it took a very deep, experienced elder–one who had not fallen for the substitutes–to discern the situation that another was confused about.  Consider the following story:

“Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said, ‘Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative  silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts:  now what more should I do?  The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingertips became like ten lamps of fire.  He said, ‘Why not be totally changed into fire?'”

Great story.  Lot has left the life lived in society, with its values and answers, religious or otherwise, and he is seeking the “more” in life–that which can begin to answer the question buried in his heart.  He sees this “more” as something he needs to do—one additional thing among a list of things he has been doing.  He’s mistaken of course, but it is quite an understandable mistake.  Out in the desert he either creates a pattern or order of life, or he enters into one already established by others–in other words, maybe joins a group.  This is all ok and normal and the human thing to do.  We create social arrangements and order because it is our nature to do so.  Thus today a person might join the Trappists, the Benedictines, the Carthusians, the Camaldolese, etc, etc., but the problem is that the new social order and arrangement of things, call it monastic even,  generates its own ideology and mythology and provides various substitute answers.  Lot’s life is now circumscribed by this list of things he does–A, B, C, and D–what today we would call “monastic practices.”  Lot correctly senses that there is something yet “more”–A, B,C,and D is not what ultimately brought  him to the desert.  He is on the verge of making a big mistake in thinking that that “more” will be another thing on the list–item E which he has yet to discover and DO. Abba Joseph with his great wisdom and experience  wipes the slate clean of A, B,C and D–note he does not say that Lot was wrong in doing these things or that they are not necessary–he simply points Lot in a completely different direction because Lot was spiritually ready to “go beyond.”  And mysteriously it is not something that Lot WILL DO, but something that WILL BE DONE to Lot if he opens himself to it: he will “become fire,” he will be transformed.

B. The Noble Lie

To continue our discussion and diagnose the problem even deeper we need to invoke one of the greatest thinkers on the world stage: Plato.  Plato’s contribution here is the notion of the Noble Lie and the allegory of the Cave.  Let us begin with this allegory.

In the beginning of the Allegory of the Cave Plato represents man’s condition as being “chained in a cave,” with only a fire behind him. He sits in darkness.  He perceives the world by watching the shadows on the wall. He sits in darkness with the false light of the fire and does not realize that this existence is wrong or lacking. It merely is his existence — he knows no other nor offers any complaint.

Plato next imagines in the Allegory of the Cave what would occur if one chained man suddenly escaped from his bondage and got out into the real world. Plato describes how some people would immediately be frightened and want to return to the cave and the familiar dark existence. Others would look at the sun and finally see the world as it truly is.  They would know their previous existence was a farce, a shadow of truth, and they would come to understand that their lives had been one of deception. A few would embrace the sun, and the true life and have a far better understanding of “truth.” They would also want to return to the cave to free the others in bondage, and would be puzzled by people still in the cave who would not believe the now “enlightened” truth bearer. (Something like the Bodhisattva tradition in Mahayana Buddhism). Many would refuse to acknowledge any truth beyond their current existence in the cave.

It is quite apparent that our question–what’s the point of it all?– and its answer would be formulated quite differently depending on whether we are still “chained in the cave” or somehow broken free.  Just as Plato did, we in the modern West have to identify our own “unreality” and make a break with it.  Chris Hedges, in his incredible book, Empire of Illusion, writes acutely about this:

“We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology.  In The Image: a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel Boorstin writes that in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft.  Americans, he writes, increasingly live in a ‘world where fantasy is more real than reality.’  He writes: ‘We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.  We are the most illusioned people on earth.  Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.’ ”

The astute critic William Deresiewicz has written the following in an essay entitled, “The End of Solitude”:  “The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity.  As the two technologies converge–broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider–the two cultures betray a common impulse.  Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.  This is what the contemporary self wants.  it wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible.  If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to hundreds on Twitter or Facebook.  This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves–by being seen by others.  The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

The reason for going on about this at length is that given our modern situation our very ability to become aware of THAT question in our heart and to go beyond our society’s manufactured answers is at stake.  Anyone who finally has some realization that they have to “break out of the cave” will perhaps find the escape hard and lonely.  It will not be as simple as just moving out into a desert place or joining a group of similar-minded individuals.  What’s the point of it all: when that question arises within one’s heart and the answers sold by society do not satisfy, then, yes,  we will search for an “alternative” place, an alternative arrangement of life that perhaps allows us to seek out the “more” that is there in our existence.  Perhaps we join a religious community; perhaps we drop-out in solitude; perhaps we join some group like the Catholic Worker–a whole lot of possibilities.  But whatever it is we DO, this also inevitably presents its own substitute answers to the question in our heart. There is no simple “escape” to a “pure place.”  Why?

Now we turn to Plato and his second contribution to our discussion:  the Noble Lie.  The noble lie is a kind of myth that is at the heart of EVERY kind of society and every social arrangement, no matter how large or how small or how “alternative.”   According to Plato, it is essentially false but the telling of it insures an orderly and stable society. (Somewhere Gregory of Nyssa, probably borrowing from Plato, says that all human beings are liars–and not in the sense of telling fibs!)  It is to the benefit of all to maintain the noble lie–especially to the benefit of the elites of the society–so they are its chief propagators and guarantors. The noble lie is mostly silent and invisible but it props up all national and social ideologies and through them sometimes becomes clearly apparent.  It doesn’t matter what the social matrix is, whether it be a state or a church, a religious community or a political party, etc, it will have at its core a noble lie.  The telling of the myth which the noble lie generates will ensure the maintenance and stability of the social group.  This becomes all-important.  That’s why so many Catholic religious groups and monastic communities are so obsessed about “lasting.”  This has become more important than “becoming all fire.”  And here we may add parenthetically that for many Catholics it is especially hard to admit the presence of the Noble Lie within the Church.  The “holiness” of the  Church has been preached with such vigor that any negativity within the Church is very difficult to admit.  This has been done not only by conservative propagandists but even by eminent theologians like Henri de Lubac, among others.  The Church is seen as “unstained” no matter what happens in history.  The strain in trying to reconcile actual historical fact with this ecclesial ideology begins to break eventually and people turn away from the Church.

Now whatever answer that is given to our question that is not in harmony with the myth that is at the heart of our society will not be allowed.  But escaping to solitude is not exactly a solution either.  For the hermit, like Lot, has his rule of life, his arrangement of things, his view of himself and his world, his implicit relationality to other people, etc.   All this also contains the noble lie.  Yes, the hermit has this myth-spinning going on also within his own cell.  It is a social existence afterall, even if stripped down to the bare bone.  We cannot eradicate the Noble Lie like a bad tooth–just pull it out.  It is part of our social existence.  And so the one who has gone into solitude will degenerate and disintegrate into some caricature if he/she is not able to live with an awareness of the Noble Lie working within their own cell.  That is why so few can go off by themselves.  That awareness which can be very burdensome in the beginning–that awareness which is needed to live like Lot and then seek the “more”–that awareness was called by our friends the Desert Fathers, humility, meaning “of the earth,” a very misunderstood word.

Finally, there are basic people who avoid the big question in their heart, or cover it over with multitudes of activities and diversions–they usually end up “building their house” (to use a New Testament image) on a foundation of “respectability,” being good citizens, ethical behavior, generally not only being a happy consumer but also a “good” person.  When the “storms of life” come this proves to be inadequate.  When death stares one in the face, it all crumbles.  “Being good” is not good enough.  But such a crisis at the same time provides a truly deep opportunity to finally face “the question” in its essence without any false props.  So in a sense one then is invited to “leave the world,” wherever one is, whatever one’s situation, and begin the true journey.

C. Leaving the World

This phrase is familiar to older Catholics as it was a part of the language of Catholic spirituality pre-Vatican II.  It then fell out of favor and was generally dropped.  Too bad.  A phrase largely misunderstood–back then and also now.  Unfortunately it came to mean only entering some kind of cloistered religious life, like a monastery, or maybe the priesthood.  Again, there is an implicit ideological tilt given to this expression and the geography of the religious life is very peculiarly depicted as “out of this world.”  Gary Snyder mentions this phrase in his writings, and he puts it more in tune with the Desert Fathers when he says that “leaving the world” for all monks (Christian and Buddhist) meant leaving the “games of society.”   This is very easy in a sense, and at the same time it is also very difficult, and it can get complicated and a person can get really lost.

Consider now someone who enters a monastic community.  He/she is seeking that “more” that is somehow there in life.  He/she is willing to give their whole life in order to wrestle with that question: what’s the point of it all?  And to give their whole life in order to answer it.  But the first problem that hits anyone with any living sensibility is the discovery that the games of society are also inside the religious community–disguised by a whole religious culture. This makes it seem like they cannot answer that persistent question. Yes, he/she will have a different arrangement of their life than when they were “in the world”; they probably will be speaking a different language with different values.  Indeed, their innate “goodness” may deepen; they will be “humble in a manner of speaking,” “obedient,” “prayerful,” etc.  But a crisis will be brewing deep down–for the games of society are right there at their fingertips.  More than that, if they have any sensitivity at all, they will begin to sense, as noted above, the presence of the Noble Lie within their own community.  They will begin to question the community’s validity and viability.  At a certain point a person may throw in the towel and just leave. The question itself may begin to seem like an illusion.  Or another person, and this happens all too often, will smother that awareness and latch on to the social identity that the community and the Rule give him/her. It is a security of a kind, and it does give one a certain status.   Being a Trappist or a Benedictine becomes “the point of it all” although he/she will probably never say that(they will only speak of God of course), but their life will speak quite clearly what they are about.  If they are an active group, then as with their compatriots “in the world” they will very easily get lost in their work.  There are, of course, those who learn to live with the knowledge that the Noble Lie will not be transcended by going anywhere, that they might as well stay where they have “awakened” and use whatever pain or suffering it brings as “fuel” for the deeper journey.  Or as the Desert Fathers put it:  Stay in your Cell, and your Cell will teach you everything.  And there are so many other things one could point to in how different people respond to this situation.

The next level of discovery is when one who has “left the world,” discovers the games of society within his/her own mind.  This is a most important moment.  It is one thing to see the games of society within one’s community–and one can get simply hard and judgmental and all mixed up with that–but it is quite another thing to see even a little bit the same stuff within one’s own mind.  Here is where the real work of the monk begins; here is where the real “leaving of the world” starts.  And here different spiritual traditions provide different “antidotes” as it were for the falseness which one discovers within oneself.  What they all seem to share, though, is that the “antidote” is more or less like something that happens to one, not something that one does; and it is intrinsically connected to the answer one’s heart has been seeking, an answer which will be manifested in one’s whole being: “Why not be totally changed into fire?”  More about this in another posting!

We have started a series of reflections on the values of the wilderness.  In the previous posting on this subject we mentioned several authors who have said something important on behalf of wilderness.  Among these were the novelist, William Faulkner, and the social critic and wilderness lover, Edward Abbey.  They are very different but we shall reflect a bit on both in this posting.

A. Faulkner

Faulkner is a very great and very complex writer who has at times touched deeply on the value of the wilderness in the lives of human beings.  There is no simple or easy way to capture what he says in some simple statements–his message is one of great depth and complexity and expressed in a subtle symbolism.  Thomas Merton has written extensively about him, correctly noting that Faulkner has a profoundly religious vision–like the Russian author Boris Pasternak–without being “churchy” or self-consciously and insistently “religious.”  (D. H. Lawrence once noted,  “It’s not religious to be religious.)  In fact, Merton places both authors within the sapiential tradition of the West–the wisdom tradition which goes back to archaic times.  This “wisdom” is the highest level of cognition.  It goes beyond systematic knowledge.  It embraces the entire scope of human life and all its meaning.  It grasps the ultimate truths to which science and intuition only point.  This “wisdom” is also a lived experience–not merely a knowledge in concepts about something.

Merton:  “Sapiential thinking has, as another of its characteristics, the capacity to bridge the cognitive gap between our minds and the realm of the transcendent and the unknown, so that without ‘understanding’ what lies beyond the limit of human vision, we nevertheless enter into an intuitive affinity with it, or seem to experience some such affinity.  At any rate, religious wisdoms often claim not only to teach us truths that are beyond rational knowledge but also to initiate us into higher states of awareness.  Such forms of wisdom are called mystical….  It is sufficient to say that certain types of wisdom do in fact lay claim to an awareness that goes beyond the aesthetic, moral, and liturgical levels and penetrates so far as to give the initiate a direct, though perhaps incommunicable, intuition of the ultimate values of life, of the Absolute Ground of life, or even of the invisible Godhead.”

Faulkner is not this “theological” but he definitely is writing within the wisdom tradition–a more natural sapiential outlook, as Merton calls it.  We will look at only one of his works, Go Down, Moses, and we shall concentrate only on one part of the novel, “The Bear.”  This is the story of Ike McCaslin’s novitiate and initiation in wilderness life.  The “wilderness” in this case is the last primeval forest deep in Mississippi–it is on the verge of being destroyed by logging and commercial interests.

Merton:  “The violation of the wilderness, symbolic of a certain predatory and ferocious attitude toward the natural world, is for Faulkner an especially Southern phenomenon here, because it is connected with slavery.  Ike McCaslin’s initiation, his ‘baptism in the forest,’ culminates in a ‘revelatory vision’ followed by the death of the Bear and of Ike’s spiritual Father and Guru, Sam Fathers(a Native American),  and leads to a religious decision, a monastic act of renunciation, by which Ike attempts to cleanse himself of the guilt that he believes to have become associated like a classic ‘miasma’ with the Southern earth.  He renounces his ownership of land which, as he sees it, belongs to God and cannot be ‘owned’ by anyone.”

Basically Go Down, Moses(or at least a part of it) begins as a story of a disciple, Ike, a boy,  being taught and formed in a traditional and archaic wisdom by a charismatic spiritual guide, a shaman of a kind,  who is especially qualified for the task and who hands on not only a set of skills or a body of knowledge, but a mastery of life, a certain way of being aware and being in touch with the cosmic spirit, with the wilderness itself regarded almost as a supernatural being.  Indeed, the Bear itself, Old Ben, is treated as a quasi-transcendent being.

When Ike was still very young, about 8 years old, Sam Fathers(the son of an old Chickesaw chief) began tutoring him in the art, craft, mysteries, and rituals of hunting–so that before he was even in his teens he had mastered all the basics of the hunt.  This was not hunting as with modern people who go out to get a trophy by killing an animal.  It was more like a participation in the whole cosmic life of the wilderness in which life and death take place.  Sam is a kind of “priest of nature and of the wilderness,” and he must find someone whom he can invest with his heritage.  In this way, the spirit of the wilderness, for which Sam stands, will continue to live because it is being invested in someone else–someone who will take Sam’s place.  The opening of the story shows us Sam as Ike’s tutor and spiritual guide, instructing the young neophyte how to kill a deer and then, symbolically, initiating him and consecrating him into the mysteries of noble hunting by dipping his hands in the hot smelling blood and wiping them back and forth across the boy’s face.  Ike will become a future priest of the wilderness.

At a certain point Ike is able to go with the other men on their yearly hunt for the legendary bear, Old Ben.  We learn that Ike has hunted yearly in the big wilderness for six years, hearing constantly about and learning about the big wilderness–the last land that is still “free.”  During this time, Ike has constantly heard about Old Ben, the great Bear who lives in and “rules” the wilderness.  Old Ben has become a legendary figure, or totem symbol, of monstrous proportions:  “The long legend of corn cribs broken down and rifled, of shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the wooods and devoured…dogs mangled and slain and shotguns and even rifle shots delivered at point-blank range, yet with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a child.”  Old Ben becomes synonymous with the wilderness which Ike almost intuitively knows is rapidly becoming a “doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes.”  One of the underlying themes of the novel is the disappearance of the wilderness–this theme will then be correlated with the ownership of the land and with Ike’s ultimate repudiation of such ownership.

Ike recalls how long he had to wait until he was permitted to enter the wilderness.  Faulkner says that Ike “entered his novitiate to the true wilderness with Sam beside him as he had begun his apprenticeship to manhood.”  Ike vividly remembers the camp experiences–two weeks of sour bread, wild strange meat, harsh sleeping arrangements, and in addition, Ike had to take the poorest hunting stand because, for his initiation, he had to learn such things as humility and patience and endurance.  One morning while Ike is ten, he and Sam Fathers are on their stand waiting for Old Ben when Sam calls Ike’s attention to the strange yapping of the dogs, and he says quietly that Old Ben is close by.  The Bear has “come to see who’s new” this year.  Later, back at camp, Sam shows Ike the old Bear’s claw marks on one of the young, inexperienced hounds.  And still later, Sam puts Ike upon the one-eyed wagon mule, the only animal that “did not mind the smell of blood” or the smell of wild animals, or even the smell of Old Ben, because it had known suffering and thus was not frightened of death.

Even though he is still a boy, Ike knows that because the Bear has seen him, he will have to see the Bear:  “So I will have to see him…I will have to look at him.”  In June of the next year Ike tries to track down Old Ben for three days, but he finds nothing.  Sam advises Ike that “You ain’t looked right yet…. It’s the gun….you will have to choose.”  Ike learns that he will never be able to come into contact with Old Ben until he divests himself of all his material ties with civilized society.  Before he can carry a gun and confront Old Ben, he must confront Old Ben without a gun.  So Ike, Faulkner says, “left the gun; by his own will and relinquishment,” he left the gun–just as later  he will, “by his own will and relinquishment,” give up his inheritance.

Leaving his gun behind, Ike approaches the wooded world of the Bear with trepidation.  Ike travels farther “into the new and alien country” than ever before.  He travels 9 hours, and then he realizes that Sam didn’t tell him everything that he had to relinquish if his quest were to be honorable.  It is then that Ike himself realizes that in addition to relinquishing the gun, he must also relinquish the watch and the compass–two instruments of civilization.  They must be discarded before Ike can relinquish himself completely to the wilderness.  “Then he relinquished completely to it.  It was the watch and the compass.  He was still tainted.  He removed the linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered it.”  When Faulkner says that Ike “entered it,” he means that Ike entered the essence of the wilderness.  Ike is already, physically, very deep in the wilderness, but here Falulkner means that Ike spiritually relinquishes his complete, untainted self to the wilderness.  And Ike discovers that he is completely lost.

Ike has followed all of Sam’s instructions, but he cannot find his way back to the watch and compass.  It is at this time that Sam as Ike’s tutor is replaced by Old Ben, who now becomes Ike’s teacher.  Ike is sitting on a log, by a little swamp, when he notices Old Ben’s footprints.  He knows immediately that the Bear is imminent because the tracks are still filling up with water.  Ignoring all possibility of danger and without any type of weapon, Ike follows the tracks and by following them, he is led back to his compass and watch.  In other words, Old Ben leads Ike back to civilization, leading the lost youth back to his implements of civilization because he was brave enough to face the wilderness alone and become one with it.  Furthermore, because of Ike’s voluntary relinquishment, Old Ben allows himself to be viewed:  “Then Ike saw the bear.  It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed….”  Then the Bear moves away, slowly.  He looks back over one shoulder and is gone.  So ends only the first part of this amazing and complex novel.

The spiritual, mystical, and monastic themes buried in this story leap out at you if you are sensitive to that kind of language–interestingly enough it is like Ike becoming sensitive to the presence of the Bear!  Merton has a field day with this story:

“This extraordinary shift in consciousness makes Ike McCaslin aware that there is a whole new dimension of being which is obscured by civilized assumptions and that in order to find himself truly he has to make an existential leap into this mysterious other order, into the dimension of a primitive wilderness experience.  he will do so by ‘seeing’ the Bear, an act of initiation in which his own identity will be fully established….  The successive experiences of closer and closer awareness of the Bear are described almost like degrees of mystical elevation in which the Bear…becomes more and more a real and finally almost a personal presence.  The Bear is first experienced as an insurmountable void and absence, apprehended negatively in relation to the curious barking of the hysterically frightened hounds and then again in the silence created when a woopecker suddenly stops drumming and then starts again. ‘There had been nothing except the solitude…’  The Bear has passed invisibly.  Then Ike realizes that he is seen by the Bear without seeing anything himself….  In the end he resolves to go out into the woods without a gun and ‘prove’ to the Bear that he is not an ordinary hunter.  When this is not enough, he leaves his watch and compass hanging on a branch and lets himself get lost in the virgin forest.  It is then that he finally sees the Bear in an instant of peaceful and Edenic revelation….  It is a description of the kind of ‘existential leap’ which Kierkegaard demanded for any passage to a higher level of awareness or of existence.  But what makes it possible for some critics to see the Bear as a symbol of Christ is the fact that in becoming visible, then personal, in manifesting himself to men, the Bear yields to a kind of weakness in his ‘supernatural’ being, a kind of divine and kenotic flaw which will ultimately bring about his destruction.”

In this story Faulkner has described a wisdom based on love–love for the wilderness and for its secret laws; love for the paradise mystery apprehended almost unconsciously in the forest; love for the “spirits” of the wilderness and of the cosmic parent (both Mother and Father) conceived as symbolically incarnate in the great Old Bear.  The wisdom of the Indian in the wilderness is a kind of knowledge by identification, an intersubjective knowledge, a communion in cosmic awareness and in nature.  However, in the end, even though Ike has been deeply exposed and immersed in this wisdom, he still becomes a failed person. No matter–Faulkner has let Ike and the Old Bear teach us to look at the wilderness in a much deeper way than our modern consciousness will allow.  We will let Merton have the final say:

“Ike McCaslin remains an ambiguous personage.  At the end of Go Down, MosesIke reveals the almost total loss of any prophetic charisma that might once have been supposed his.  We must not then forget that in spite of his initiation and vision Ike McCaslin remains a failed saint and only half a monk.  Speaking after twenty-five years in a monastery, I would like to add that it is extraordinarily difficult for anyone to be more than that, and most of us are not even that far along.”

B. Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey is a very different writer.  Whereas Faulkner deals in myth and storytelling, Abbey is more a straightforward critic, a polemicist and desert anarchist, a character of various contradictions and eccentricities, a meticulous describer of the wilderness, especially the desert, and a very forceful proponent of certain values which he saw as disappearing in our society.  In many cases he has turned people off because of his ascerbic voice, his “in your face” attitude, his implied approval of even violent activity against corporate property, his unwillingness to be “nice” or pleasing to anybody!, his jabs at all kinds of folks including big ranchers, urban feminists, anti-gun people, the federal government, the state government(no wonder he was called a “desert anarchist”!), the power companies, the tourist industry, the mining industry, big cities, etc. etc.!  In many ways he has that sharp edge that you find in Thoreau in Civil Disobedience and in Thoreau’s writings supporting the violent abolitionist John Brown.  If you read all of Abbey’s writings, inevitably you will find something there, no matter who you are,  that will make you mad at him  As he put it in one of his last books:  “If there’s anyone still present whom I’ve failed to insult, I apologize.”  Imagine Mark Twain, John Muir, Thoreau, Jeremiah Johnson, Sinclair Lewis and Woody Guthrie all rolled into one and you might get an idea of the complexity of Edward Abbey.  Whitman’s famous motto, “Resist much, obey little,” fits Abbey perfectly.

But more importantly, for our purposes, the difference between Faulkner and Abbey is one of religious sensibility.  Faulkner is deeply immersed in a traditional religious cosmos even as he delineates the broken modern American with the American South as the backdrop.  Abbey, on the other hand, seems almost antithetical to any religious sentiments or views.  No surprise that he has some harsh words about Christians and churches who have participated in the destruction of the world he loves.    But listen to this excerpt from his many beautiful evocations of the desert:

“The hot radiance of the sun, pouring on our prone bodies, suffusing our flesh, melting our bones, lulls us toward sleep.  Over the desert and the canyons, down there in the rocks, a huge vibration of light and stillness and solitude shapes itself into the form of hovering wings spread out across the sky from the world’s rim to the world’s end.  Not God–the term seems insufficient–but something unnameable, and more beautiful, and far greater, and more terrible.”

Indeed, the “God” Abbey rejects is an “insufficient” God–the one that, alas, too many Christians “visualize” in their worship life–the Big Daddy who sits “up there” and doles out rewards and punishments for following or not following his arbitrary rules–this is not the God of real Christian theology and mysticism–what was said in previous postings about the necessity of encountering the Mystery of God is pertinent here.  In any case, the desert seems to hold some kind of presence, some kind of reality for Abbey that is not so clearly evident in mundane urban life.  In  fact it seems that the role of the Bear in that one novel and the role of the wilderness forest in several of Faulkner’s stories is paralleled by the role of the desert in all of Abbey’s writings.  He seems to be at his best when he is writing about the desert.

The Colorado Plateau was his special place, a breathtakingly beautiful place of a hundred million acres of magic and strength the size of New York and New England–home to cactus, snakes, scorpions, vultures, ancient ruins; cut by rivers and endless canyons.  He put it succinctly: “I love it so much that I find it hard to talk about.”  But he could rage against the forces of modern technology and industrialism rampaging across the Southwest.  Abbey depicted this country not as virgin country ripe with industrial potential, but as a holy place to be defended, where all living creatures, including scorpions, vultures, and lions are vested with equal rights.  Responding to friends who had returned from a trip to a canyon ruin, saying that they had been changed forever and now understood why the ancient Indians got religion, Abbey replied: “You don’t understand.  That land, those mountains, those canyons and rivers.  You don’t get religion from them; they are religion.”

Elsewhere he writes: “In my case it was love at first sight.  The desert, all deserts, any desert.  No matter where my head and feet may go, my heart and my entrails stay behind, here on the clean, true, comfortable rock, under the black sun of God’s forsaken country.”  

And: “Out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of man as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship.  The shock of the real.  For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels.”

And: “I am–really am–an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another.  That’s the way I like it.”

And: “For us, the wilderness and the human emptiness of this land is not a source of fear but the greatest of its attractions….  Here you may yet find the elemental freedom to breathe deep of unpoisoned air, to experiment with solitude and stillness, to gaze through a hundred miles of untrammeled atmosphere across red rock canyons, beyond blue mesas, toward the snow-covered peaks of the most distant mountains–to make the discovery of the self in its proud sufficiency which is not isolation but an irreplaceable part of the mystery of the whole.”

In a sense Abbey is again and again returning to a theme enunciated by Thoreau over a hundred years ago in one sentence:  “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”  Abbey’s books are still readily available–meaning that people are still reading them.  But who is paying any real attention to what has happened, to what is going on?  It was a lost cause 50 years ago when he started writing, and it is even more a lost cause now–but his voice is there for those of us who can draw some consolation, some hope, some strength from it.  One commentator on Abbey’s writings tells this story:  “Out in the cinder hills to the east of Flagstaff, Arizona, not long after Edward Abbey’s death in 1989, a gathering of curious archaeologists were poking around an old Indian ruin when suddenly, cascading from an alluring cobalt sky, an unexpected shadow fell across the group.  ‘Look up there,’ someone shouted. ‘There’s Ed.’  Looking up, they saw a single turkey vulture studying them, red head bald, red neck featherless, rocking gently on coal-black wings.  ‘Abbey promised to return as a vulture,’ another said, ‘the only known philosophizing bird.  He said he wanted to try a different career for a change.'”  Indeed, Abbey had made his prediction:

“For a lifetime or two, I think I’ll pass on eagle, hawk or falcon this time.  I think I’ll settle for the sedate career, serene and soaring, of the humble turkey buzzard.  And if a falcon comes around making trouble, I’ll spit in his eye.  Or hers.  And contemplate this world we love from a silent and considerable height.”