Thoreau

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Walt Whitman, one of America’s greatest poets, an openly gay man, and a giant figure in American literature in the 19th Century, wrote the following in the preface to his 1855 edition of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass:

“This is what you shall do.  Love the earth and the sun and the animals.  Despise riches.  Give alms to everyone that asks.  Stand up for the stupid and the crazy.  Devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or any number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and the young and with mothers of families….  Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book and dismiss whatever insults your soul.”

Whitman was a contemporary of Henry David Thoreau, and this little excerpt sums up pretty well Thoreau’s philosophy and way of life.  (In fact this passage was also a favorite of Edward Abbey.)  This was a most extraordinary life even as it was very quiet, uneventful for the most part, and hardly a paradigm of what we would call “success.”  Thoreau has had many, many interpreters and “misinterpreters” over the years, and so it continues to this day.  There is a contemporary new study of Thoreau that supposedly “demystifies” the image.  First there is the image of Thoreau the solitary–well, he lived in his cabin at Walden only for a couple of years and it was an easy walk from town.  In fact he brought his laundry to his mother for her to do every week.  Some hermit!  Then there is the image of Thoreau the self-sufficient man.  Well, he mooched off his friends quite a bit.  When he refused to pay his tax in protest of the Mexican-American War, he was thrown into jail, but his friend Emerson paid the tax and got him out of jail after only one day.  And so on it goes.  Critics love to point out inconsistensies in Thoreau’s life and thought.  Already Emerson anticipated that when he said pertaining to Thoreau:  “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

But no matter what the critics or the demystifyers say this very unassuming man was extraordinarily influential on giant, prophetic  figures like Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and a host of lesser activists for justice, truth and a radically different way of life.  He is also the generally acknowledged “grandfather” of the modern environmental movement.  Anyone with any sense of the value of wild nature has been in one way or another under the influence of Thoreau whether they realize it or not.   Finally he still continues to this day to inspire people who want to simplify their lives and live by values other than what our society promotes.

What is it that made him so influential?  Perhaps it was his very direct and insightful way of saying what was right in front of everyone’s faces.  He spoke the truth with simplicity and clarity.  Perhaps it was his uncanny vision and discernment.  He lived at the very beginning of the industrial revolution in the United States and when advances in technology such as the railroad and the telegraph were just beginning to mesmerize the general public.  Yet Thoreau spoke sharply against this attitude.  No, he was not a simplistic “anti-progress” pessimist like some of his critics claim.   Rather, it was not the instrumentality of the new mechanisms that he critiqued, but our attitude in making them the center of our lives and how this shapes all our perceptions and relationships.  In this he was most amazingly prophetic.  Furthermore, his deep vision also made him see the infinite value of each individual human being, and here also he spoke with a clear, uncompromising voice–whether it was against the emerging factory conditions of workers, whether it was the institution of slavery, or whether it was the drifting into wars where greed and ambition and collective ego mania were the driving forces.  Finally,  that same vision and his deep inner resources made him clearly reject America’s misguided tendency toward belief in a God-infused exceptionalism–he thoroughly rejected the popular belief of Manifest Destiny.

In Thoreau’s always eloquent and often lyrical prose, we find a nineteenth-century man so amazingly ahead of his time that most of us in the twenty-first century have not yet caught up.  Let us listen to a few quotes:

“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making Earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.  As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down.”

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things.  They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.  From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.  A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.  There is no play in them, for this comes after work.  But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown.  These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while other have not enough.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.  I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance…but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board….  There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree.  His manners were truly regal.  I should have done better had I called on him.”

Just a tiny sample from the thought and reflections of this great man.  Thoreau dies at the early age of 44.  He dies at home.  His aunt asks him if he has made peace with God.  He tells her  he did not know that they had quarreled.  Very Thoreau!

Faulkner’s Bear & Abbey’s Desert

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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.”

Not Far

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From the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 12:

“And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that Jesus answered them well, asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’  Jesus answered, ‘The first is, Hear O Israel: the Lord  our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.  The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  There is no other commandment greater than these.’  And the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength; and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.’  And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.'”

This scribe is a remarkable person.  Living in a religiously rich and complex culture, he is not lost in “religiosity” but is able to “cut to the chase,” is able to see the essence of it all, the foundations, the meaning of it all, etc.  And Jesus has some good news and some bad news for him!  First of all, the good news: he is “NOT far” from the kingdom of God; the bad news, however: he is “not FAR” from the kingdom of God.  So much in a little phrase!  Let us dare to stand in the shoes of this remarkable person and see where this might take us.

First of all the good news:  all of us can be “not far” from the kingdom of God.  No matter what our situation is, it is always there right at our fingertips so to speak.  No matter if we are paralyzed and bedridden or in a wheelchair; no matter if we are sitting in a prison cell; no matter if life seems to be overwhelming us with burdens; no matter if we can’t see things clearly; the kingdom of God is always right there. The “spiritual journey” is available to all and in all circumstances because it is always right there.  How close?  Augustine tells us that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.  That’s how close.

We don’t need to put ourselves into an exotic location; acquire certain credentials; “climb a mountain”; do many deeds, etc.

But like the good scribe we better not get lost in the multiple entanglements of our various religious cultures.  To see clearly the “essence” of the journey is to be already “not far” from the goal.  Our Zen Buddhist friends seem to have a better handle on this than we Christians, so let us look at this dilemma from their perspective.  Dogen, the “father” of Soto Zen, said categorically:  “Anybody who would regard Zen as a school or sect of Buddhism and calls it Zen-shu, Zen school, is a devil.”   Among other things he is warning us of focusing on a “religious complex” as if belonging to it we have “arrived.”

A monk asks Pai-chang: “Who is the Buddha?”

Pai-chang answers: “Who are you.”

A monk who was a novice came to Joshu and asked him to be instructed in Zen.  Joshu said:  “Have you not had your breakfast yet?”

Replied the monk:  “Yes, sir, I have had it already.”

Joshu:  “If so, wash your dishes.”

A monk asked a Zen master:  “It is some time since I came to you to be instructed in the holy path of the Buddha, but you have never given me even an inkling of it.  I pray you to be more sympathetic.”

Zen master:  “What do you mean, my son?  Every morning you salute me, and do I not return it?  When you bring me a cup of tea, do I not accept it and enjoy drinking it?  What more instructions do you desire from me.”

All of the above are illustrations, or better yet “suggestions,” of what that “not far” is all about.  Granted that what Zen is pointing to and what Jesus is pointing to may be different realities–not opposite, just complementary–but what is important is the “at hand” quality of what is most critical to our fulfillment as human beings.  We don’t need to travel far or have vast resources or be specially gifted to engage what is most important in our life.  In fact the only resource we need is our heart, our very life, no matter what shape it is in.  Both Jesus and Zen point to the fact that we will find this most important spiritual reality in the very stuff of our lives, in the very stuff of our everyday being.

However, now for the “bad news”–Jesus does not say to the scribe, “You have arrived.”  Rather he says, “You are not far.”  That means there still is a way to go; there still is something to do; there still is a bridge to cross over as it were.  And now this is crucial to grasp:  what that “not far” is for each person will be unique to each person–it is part and parcel of each person’s infinitely unique identity, part and parcel of that secret name they carry in their heart by which God calls them into being and by which in turn they and only they call God.  Therefore each person has a deep inarticulate grasp of that “not far” for them, but in fact they may not be able to recognize its exact nature and what it entails.  It may be manifested in a number of visible ways on the outer surfaces of life while  at the same time be totally concealed from a person’s self-reflection. It may be a particular task someone has to carry out in life; a special fidelity in the face of real suffering; a silent witness to the reality of God; a daily self-sacrifice for one’s family; a wrestling with a horrible personal problem that drowns one again and again in degradation, and so on and so on.  No matter.  The fact is that each of us is on this journey, and it is “not far.”

Now that “not far” may be as short a distance as the subatomic quark or as wide as the universe–all metaphorically speaking of course.  But it is a gap that needs stepping across.  And it might happen in one moment, or it can take a whole lifetime.  No matter.  Not far is not far.  And there is no technique, no recipe, no formula to cross that “distance.”  It is not that kind of distance or that kind of journey.  Anytime you are “in control” and “piloting” your self, well, you are doing something else, but it’s not “this.”  It may lead to feelings of peace, to a sense of religiosity, to a sense of “pleasing God,” even to a sense of “having arrived” somewhere, etc., but you have not traversed that “not far.” We are all rich in selfhood, and Jesus did say that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.  But for God all things are possible.  So– abandon yourself to the will of God, to the presence of God in each and every moment, and you will discover how very not far you are from the kingdom of God.  It is as simple as that, and it is as difficult as that.

Wilderness

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Two items from the recent news:

  1. The Obama Administration made a tentative modest proposal to set aside a large chunk of wilderness area in Utah and to designate it as “National Wilderness” or “National Monument” or some such title under some such law in order to protect this wilderness from ruin through exploitation.  It would only increase the size of the protected area that Clinton had already set aside.  You should hear the outcry.  Hordes of people and businesses and large companies cried “outrage,” “Federal Government keep out,” “local control,” “this is OUR land,” “socialism,” etc, etc.  The new designation would not have evicted anyone already living in this wilderness.  It would have restricted the use of ATVs–not eliminated them; it would have restricted the building of new structures, not totally prohibited them.  Most of all it would have prevented the creation of new roads, developments, and exploitation for natural resources like mining and generating plants.  I would have loved to ask these people exactly when did this land become “yours”?  When you stole it from the Native Americans and killed them in the process?
  1. A group of hunters in Alaska, hunting in a helicopter–probably fans of Sarah Palin, who subscribes to such practices–wiped out a pack of wolves.  What actually made this noteworthy is that these poor creatures had been tagged with radio collars.  So it was very easy to track them down–they had not a chance.

These two examples show a certain attitude and relationship to the “wild,” to the wilderness.  It can be characterized by the terms “dominance” and “exploitation.”  Though that is not all that is going on as we shall see–it is a view which is prominent in our culture.   People tend to look at the wilderness as something “to be used”–they will of course couch it in terms of benefit for humanity, etc.  Furthermore, this attitude has sometimes been seen as an evil offshoot of Western Civ and/or of Christianity.  However, the real picture is much more complex.  An alternative is sometime presented–a myth of serene Asians living in harmony with nature.  However, the reality is that the Chinese, for example, deforested their lands two thousand years ago.  Many ancient people were oblivious of the damage they were doing to their environment, except that they were less capable of damage than we are now.  Gary Snyder addresses the Asian myth:

“One finds evidence in T’ang and Sung poetry that the barren hills of central and northern China were once richly forested.  The Far Eastern love of nature has become fear of nature….  Chinese nature poets were too often retired bureaucrats living on two or three acres of trees trimmed by hired gardeners.  The professional nature-aesthetes of modern Japan, tea-teachers and flower arrangers, are amazed to hear  that only a century ago dozens of species of birds passed through Kyoto where today only  swallows  and sparrows can be seen, and the aesthetes can  scarcely distinguish those.  ‘Wild’ in the Far East means uncontrollable, objectionable, crude, sexually unrestrained, violent; actually ritually polluting.”

Again, Snyder:  “Although nature is a term that is not of itself threatening, the idea of the ‘wild’ in civilized societies–both Europe and Asian–is often associated with unruliness, disorder, and violence….  The word for ‘wild’ in Chinese, ye (Japanese ya) which basically means ‘open country,’ has a wide set of meanings:  in various combinations the term becomes illicit connection, desert country, an illegitimate child(open-country child), prostitute(open-country flower), and such….  In another context ‘open-country story’ becomes ‘fiction and fictitious romance.’  Other associations are usually with the rustic and uncouth.  In a way ye is taken to mean ‘nature at its worst.’  Although the Chinese and Japanese have long given lip service to nature, only the early Taoists might have thought that wisdom could come of wildness.”

What all this suggests is that our problematical relationship to the wilderness is an age-old problem and one that spans all cultures more or less.  It is in fact a human problem.  Let us be right up front–this is an axiom of our blog: human beings need wilderness in order to be fully human. We cannot prove this to be the case but we intuit its truth.  And a corollary that follows from it: what we do to the wilderness we do to ourselves. If this is true, then we are in deep trouble. And furthermore, if we live cut off or oblivious of real wilderness we become cut off from something deep within ourselves.  From the current issue of Adbusters:  “When we cut off arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies.  When you cut the flow of nature into people’s lives, their spirit dies.  It’s as simple as that.”

It is an undeniable fact that there is this dynamic in human beings toward civilization and culture.  We start out as hunters/gatherers/ herders, and we move toward farming, settlement and then  urbanity.  In the West, already in the Hebrew Bible,  you can see the tension between the values that lie on both sides of this divide.  In fact the city is already an ambiguous reality in the Old Testament.  It is out in the wilderness of the desert that one encounters the mystery of God in a very special way, while cities become the locus of prostitution, human sacrifices, economic injustices, war, tyrannical rulers, false religion, etc.  Today there is no such evident tension–there is for all practical purposes only the modern urban reality–everywhere.  Today most human beings in the West–and ever increasingly in Asia– live with all kinds of electronic media at their fingertips and are more likely to spend time with virtual reality than out in some wilderness.  (At this point we cannot address the separate problem of so many in the Third World who live in a situation that has been historically one of colonialism and exploitation to the point that they too are cut off from a healthy relationship with wilderness and at the same time benefitting little or not at all from modern gadgetry.)  If we are as human beings creatures who carry within ourselves a kind of balance of two sets of values–on the one hand that of civilizing the world around us, creating culture, and on the other that of cherishing and learning from the wilderness–then we can safely say that something has happened to the balance–it has tipped totally one way.  And this has been slowly going on for a long time and is coming to some kind of climax in our age.

A number of writers have addressed the problem eloquently and cogently and prophetically.  One thinks of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Joseph Wood Krutch, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibbin, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, etc.  There also have been fiction writers with a special sensitivity to the values of the wilderness–best example:  William Faulkner, maybe America’s greatest novelist.  And there have been prophetic organizations too, like Greenpeace and movements like Earth First–ambiguous at best in its willingness to condone a violent response to the exploiters and despoilers.  All these have been indeed a “voice in the wilderness”!!    And instead of blending all these voices into one blurred message, we will listen to them and comment on what they have to say in separate blog postings in the future–for they do have different things to say, differences in emphasis and approach and substance.  And the environmental movement as a whole has been a really mixed bag with really mixed results.  This too needs to be looked at

First, a few random quotes:

The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men.  The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing.  There was nothing to attract them.  There was nothing to exploit.

Thomas Merton

[Note: not true today–mining, power and tourist industries thrive out there]

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

Joseph Wood Krutch

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

John Muir

It has always been a part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness.  There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years.  Nature is not a place to visit, it is home–and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places.

Gary Snyder

Next, to begin with, let us get at least a bit of a handle on the “state of the problem”:  the wilderness areas of the United States have diminished to almost nothing.  What little is left is being slowly turned into “playgrounds” where people can run around in their “off-road” vehicles all over the place–the wilderness becomes a setting for our entertainment, the wilderness as theme park. Many people head out to the mountains in the winter to ski, play, socialize.  This is really not that far from the view of wilderness as a place to make money by extracting whatever you can from it.  John Muir saw the great forests of the Sierras as a cathedral in which his soul was fed with a deeper life; his immediate predecessors of the Gold Rush era saw the same forests as hiding untold wealth in gold and opportunity.  We have become a civilization that evaluates everything by its apparent “usefulness”–this is what makes something “valuable”–mostly usefulness for profit.  But as the early Taoists (as the Desert Fathers) have tried to teach us the very definition of “usefulness” is in question. Perhaps it is precisely that which appears “not useful” which may be most valuable and necessary; e.g., the empty hole in the center of a wheel, the empty space within the pot, etc.   So, the poet, the monk, the wilderness, as these “empty spaces”  are truly necessary ingredients of a truly human way of life.  Personal note:  I was once sitting in a roadside café in the Mojave Desert when a group of German tourists piled in.  They were travelling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.  One of them pulled out a map and asked me for help in finding the fastest route to Vegas.  I asked him why he wanted the fastest route. It was so beautiful out here.  He answered in his German accent:  “Because there’s nothing out here.”  It is precisely that “nothing” that we need, and we need to preserve it before it becomes “something.”

Gary Snyder:  “Thoreau says, ‘Give me a wildness no civilization can endure.’  That’s clearly not difficult to find.  It is harder to imagine a civilization that wilderness can endure, yet this is what we must try to do.  Wildness is not just the ‘preservation of the world,’ it is the world.  Civilizations east and west have long been on a collision course with wild nature, and now the developed nations in particular have the witless power to destroy not only individual creatures but whole species, whole processes, of the earth.  We need a civilization that can live fully and creatively together with wildness.”

Gary Snyder again:  “The longing for growth is not wrong.  The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature.  Self-nature.  Mother Nature.  If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial , nondestructive paths of growth–of the highest and most fascinating order–it would help to dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation.”

At this point it would be helpful to interject just a brief monastic note here.  Christian monks have a long history of making their homes “in the wilderness”.  Now it is true that the monasteries tended to become “outposts” of civilization of sorts, but in the hermit tradition there was this closer rapport with the wilderness.  The hermits often lived in caves or in small cabins in harmony with their surroundings and often, as the stories and myths unfold, making friends with the wild life around them.

On quite another note let us conclude with some words from Edward Abbey from his classic Desert Solitaire:

“Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages.  In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.  When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe.  Probably not.  In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast.  This is not a travel guide but an elegy.  A memorial.  You’re holding a tombstone in your hands.  A bloody rock.  Don’t drop it on your foot–throw it at something big and glassy.  What do you have to lose?”

Not exactly monk-like, not exactly Gandhian, but you have to respect Abbey–his anger is pure, not self-centered; his passion authentic.  Like with Jesus and the money-changers in the temple!

Odds & Ends, II

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D. T. Suzuki:  “The value of human life lies in the fact of suffering, for where there is no suffering, no consciousness of karmic bondage, there will be no power of attaining spiritual experience and thereby reaching the field of non-distinction.  Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.”

From Rumi:  ” Become silent and go by way of silence toward

nonexistence,

And when you become nonexistent, you will be all

praise and laud.”

Something that the recent blog postings have been trying to say in a much more wordy way!

Astavakra Gita:

“The wiseman who has known the truth of the self plays the game of life and there is no similarity between his way of living and the deluded who live in the world as mere beasts of burden.”

“Where there is I, there is bondage.  Where there is no I, there is release.  Neither reject nor accept anything.”

70% of Americans are church-goers; 70% of Americans believe that torture is ok if our security is at stake.

The religious/spiritual dimensions of our economic/political situation–two examples:

  1. The top 1% of the U.S. population own 35% of the wealth of this country.  The next 19%, the managerial, professional class, own 50% of the wealth.  Add that up and you see that the top 20% of the population owns 85% of the wealth of the U.S.  That means the “bottom” 80% owns only 15% of the wealth.  This illustrates the myth of the middle class–it is being squeezed out of existence.  And both Democrats and Republicans are responsible, but of course the latter much more so.  Even Aristotle long ago pointed out that it is not a healthy society when there is a large disparity in wealth distribution.
  2. The recent tragic mine accident in West Virginia.  Such a needless loss of life.  Never mind that we should be getting out of coal to start with, but even so, this particular mine had so many violations of safety regulations that it was ridiculous that it was even allowed to operate.  Profit above all else–making money is all that matters.  And of course the only reason this mine was allowed to operate is that government mechanisms to enforce even the feeble laws that were still there had been gutted out.  Reagan and the 2 Bush presidencies did a lot to gut out government safety regulations.  But the amazing fact is that these miners by and large voted for these men!  In large percentages.  Amazing that people can be so fooled, so deluded, as to vote against their own self-interest.  But they are being fooled and deluded by a mechanism that is out there working very hard to do just that.  This is what keeps that top 1% in control.

Now where are all the churches in all this.  Not a peep really.  Not a voice to counter that propaganda machine.  Gandhi saw problems like this as deeply religious problems that needed addressing.  He was murdered.  Martin Luther Kind, Jr. had at the end of his life connected all the dots–he was no longer just speaking of civil rights for Blacks but saw the war, the economy, and how all people are treated as one big problem that was at root a religious problem and needed to be addressed through a religious commitment.  He was murdered.  Robert Kennedy also saw the light.  He was murdered.  Not much more to say.  Except the silence of all the churches is astounding.

Ancient Greek saying:  “When the gods want to punish us, they grant us our desires.”

Tarkovsky(maker of Andrei Rublev):   “Modern mass culture is crippling people’s souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

President Eisenhower(1953):  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

From John Wu’s The Golden Age of Zen: “To Huang-po, as to all Zen Masters, the ‘self-server’ does not really attain selfhood.  He is a  self-enclosed and egocentric seeker of happiness.  But he will not attain true happiness because, instead of being the ‘true man’ that he is, who IS happiness itself, he places happiness outside himself, as something to be strained after.  In fact, he is pursuing an illusory object.”

One of the more cogent surveys of the critical literature concerning the deleterious effects of electronic technology on our minds and hearts can be found in this review in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html?src=me&ref=general

Sufi notion:  When we reach perfect servanthood, it is God himself who says “I”.

Adapted from the Sufis:  When God “draws near” you start “subtracting” –you start to lose things — but not until you lose “I” do you know your Friend.

Jan van Ruysbroeck:  “The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind.  Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone.  In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life.”

Black Elk:  “I am blind and do not see the things of this world; but when the light comes from Above, it enlightens my Heart and I can see, for the Eye of my Heart sees everything: and through this vision I can help my people.  The heart is a sanctuary at the Center of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye.  This is the Eye of Wakantanka by which He sees all things, and through which we see Him.”

Meister Eckhart:  “The eye with which I see God is the same as that with which he sees me.  My eye and the eye of God are one eye, one vision, one knowledge, and one love.”

Gandhi:  “What I have been striving and pining to achieve is to see God face to face.  All that I do by way of speaking and writing is directed to this same end.”

Comment:  If you saw that great movie, Gandhi, you would never guess this.  As good as that movie was in depicting Gandhi, in showing his great political skill and his great moral sensitivity and ideals, it completely missed the very foundations of his life.

A most amazing fact: our death!  It is certain, and it is universal–everyone, no matter how accomplished or how gifted or how wealthy or how anything, everyone arrives at this fact sooner or later.  There is a fear of it, even though this is “the” great adventure of our existence.    Partly because of the “unknown factor.”  No matter our easy words about the so-called afterlife, there is still a little pit of fear deep inside us about what lies “on the other side.”  Also, the finality of it is scary–there is no “turning back.” (Tolstoy was terrified of the thought of his death.) But the bigger part of this fear is simply the letting go that we are called to as we die–everything that we have constructed about ourselves, all our accomplishments, all our history,  all our possessions,  all our stories about ourselves, all our credentials, all our pretensions,  all our sense of our identity, all our lies, all our self-deceptions, all the “solidity” of our world, all our “likes” and “dislikes,”  everything begins to dissolve as we die and there is NOTHING to do but to let go.  It is precisely this enormous superstructure of our identity which seems to be slipping into nothing–our sense of the “self” is like a knot, and then the knot is undone, and then we are “free” but what is “left”?— what an amazing adventure it will be for each of us…….

A few words are needed about all the news concerning the sex abuse of children and young adults within the Catholic Church.  Without a doubt this is a tragic and unspeakably awful thing to have been inflicted on these vulnerable youngsters.  (There are even cases involving deaf children who were in the care of the Church.)   Also, certainly the perpetrators of these abuses are very sick individuals.  However what the rest of us need to look at is why this happened and the response of the Church to the problem.  And it is not a  pretty picture!

What is amazing, at least to this blogger, is the widespread prevalence of the abuse cases–they are not limited to any one country or culture.  They are everywhere in the Church!  When the first cases emerged into the light in the Boston area of the U.S., European and Vatican officials were smug and said that this was an American problem.  Conservative spokesmen blamed the problem on “liberalism” in the Church.  However, as we now see the problem is literally everywhere, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the U.S.  And it has come to light that the founder of the ultraconservative Legion of Mary was a total pervert who hurt hundreds of young people in his sickness.  Definitely the problem was NOT liberalism in the Church–there was even a sex scandal of sorts right within the Vatican.  A very disturbing question is why and how do all these very sick people find a home within the confines of the Church.  True, as some Vatican officials have said, this problem of pedophilia is not limited to the church, but it still is troubling of why they have gravitated in such numbers into the embrace of the church.  No one seems to want to address this question.

The other problem is the response of the Catholic Church as these problems emerged.  It is nothing less than shameful and disgusting.  The concern has been primarily one of “protecting” the Church and its high officials. While on the one hand the bishops are “wringing their hands” and crying out about the awfulness of what has emerged into the light; on the other hand they hire high priced lawyers to fight tooth and nail those who have come forward to get some justice from the Church. Even with all the skill of these lawyers, they already have had to pay out about 2 billion dollars in the U.S. alone–but on the condition that the cases be sealed so nothing about them can come out into public.  One senses a cover-up.   One senses that there is a much bigger story underneath this tragedy, but that has yet to come out if it ever will.  Furthermore, there is one theological point to make here that the Church’s secular critics are less sensitive to.  The institution of the Church has been over the centuries “over defined” as a divine institution.  How much of it is a human construct and how much it is prone to human error has been minimized in official church theology.  The average Catholic in the pew tended to look at his/her church as this divine institution which was always of course right.  History shows us quite the contrary! Also, it seems that every position in the Catholic Church, whether it be pastor, bishop, cardinal, abbot, etc., has taken on this attitude that strikes one almost as an antithesis of the Gospel.  Instead of being “lowly and humble,” instead of taking “the lowest places and living most humbly,” these people have taken on this monarchical, royal aura.  It is secular power and pride dressed in religiosity.   Consider the institution of the pope–it is actually a beautiful notion and a necessary one perhaps.  It is good to have a human embodiment of the Church’s unity and universality and continuity over the centuries–someone who calls all of us to greater fidelity to the Gospel; someone who reminds us that the Church is a much bigger reality than our own concerns or our own culture or our own fashions, etc.  But that does not mean that the pope has to be this monarchical figure encased in an enormous palace with a huge bureaucracy to police the institution.  What if the pope were more like Gandhi, what if all his belongings fit in one little bag, and he lived in a kind of ashram,  and he led primarily by example.   Just a thought.  It is absolutely false to think that the Vatican and the monarchical papacy is a “divine creation.”

Miura, a modern Zen Buddhist Roshi:  “When we enter the Sodo the first instructions we receive is ‘give up your life!’  It is easy to pronounce the words ‘give up your life’ but to do so is a difficult matter.  However, if we do not put an end once and for all to that which is called ‘self’ by cutting it off and throwing it away, we can never accomplish our practice.  When we do, a strange world reveals itself to us, a world surpassing our reckoning, where he who has cast away his self gains everything and he who grasps for everything with his illusory concepts in the end loses everything, even himself.”

Comment:  Jesus would agree.

The Most Important Words

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Jesus speaks these words on Good Friday while hanging from the cross:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what  they do.”

“Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

“It is finished.”

These may be the most important words in Christianity.

It might seem strange to be bringing forth words associated with Good Friday during the Easter celebration.  However, recall that we cannot separate/lose sight of Good Friday during the Easter celebration and we cannot forget the Resurrection during Good Friday.  The two are joined together as one experience and one celebration.  It is something like our Buddhist friends saying that nirvana = samsara when you finally see it from the standpoint of your buddha nature.

Lets push this a bit further: discover the Resurrection in these very words.  This presents the ultimate koan from a Christian perspective because these words are a like a wall of no-knowledge that you cannot rationalize away into an explanation on a rational level. Sit before this wall until there is only the Risen Christ.  So Happy Easter to all!

The Kenosis of Christ, the Resurrection, and the Mystery of God, Part II

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Part 1 posted Jan 24, 2010

Let us continue our reflection on the Mystery of God which we started a few postings ago. There we emphasized the importance of encountering the Mystery of God in our lives, in the depths of our heart and in everything around us. Now it is fitting that those of us who are Christians reflect on this encounter in the light of Holy Week which is upon us.  The Triduum, the celebrations of Holy Thursday, Good Friday,  and Easter Sunday are in reality one feast, one mystery celebrated in three modes.  And it is this one great feast which should lead us to an ever-deepening encounter with the Mystery of God.  For in the Christian context we are plunged into that Mystery most deeply through the person of Jesus Christ, his life, death and resurrection.

There is a very prevalent hazard for Christians who especially have not been exposed to the spiritual and mystical traditions within Christianity to view Jesus in a superficial way–as God rewarding me for doing good or punishing me for doing bad or as God holding my hand “in a personal relationship” while “I do this” or “I do that.”   It is that very “I” which should be deconstructed in the light of the Mystery of God.  So when we say we need to “look at Jesus” it certainly is not in this superficial sense.  And this applies even more so to the reality of the Risen Christ.

In St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians there is this passage, which is one of those absolutely critical and central and crucial passages in the whole New Testament:

“Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves.  Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself [literally: “became nothing”] taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of human beings.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” (2:3-8)

In Christian faith and in Christian theology it is asserted that we as human beings encounter God most fully in the person of Jesus Christ and we have “knowledge of God” most deeply through and in Jesus Christ.  When we look at Jesus we see directly into the Mystery of God.  But as mentioned before, this does not at all take away the mystery.  Hardly.  In fact if we allow ourselves to be drawn into this Mystery by Jesus, it may take us to places where our language and our concepts will fail us.  So in the quote above Paul invites us to look at Jesus, but he has stripped away all physical and historical details and focuses on the key characteristic that Jesus reveals about God:  God is self-emptying, self-negating.  This perhaps sounds too radical a statement, too large a claim.  But recall that the sign of the cross is present in every Christian church; it is the central symbol of Christianity–it says something about the very nature of the God in whose presence we always stand,  and this moment is not just one moment in a string of moments in Jesus’ life, but the climactic moment.  And recall that the Gospel of John plainly tells us:  when we “see” Jesus, we see the Father.  Also when John tells us that “God is Love,” this is also what he means–not some feeling or emotion or sentiment.  This Reality, then,  the “Mind of Christ”, which is Absolute Love, which is a dynamic of self-emptying, self-negation, is seemingly alien to our “everyday fallen existence” –which in turn is one built on self-promotion, acting in self-interest, being self-centered, confusing this ego identity as “us” etc.–and so plunged into the realm of death.   But Paul also tells us that the “Mind of Christ” is there in us now as gift, as a liberation from this false identity of “fallen existence.”  Following Paul and adapting some language from our Buddhist friends, we can say then that we must discover the Mind of Christ in our ordinary everyday mind.  From the Christian perspective, to do this we must REALLY look at Jesus and follow Him and let what we find carry us into the depths of the Mystery of God, this life of self-emptying.

Now the key focal point of this and of what Paul tells us is Good Friday.  This radical and total self-emptying of Christ on Good Friday is called in Greek: the kenosis of Christ.  We need to stop and ponder that historical fact–the crucifixion.  There was a controversial movie a few years ago entitled The Passion, which was a very realistic portrayal of how the events of Good Friday unfolded.  It was controversial for several reasons, not the least of which was the accusation by some religious people that the movie so emphasized the torture and suffering of Jesus that it distorted the Christian message, that it somehow separated it from the Resurrection, which is the real meaning of Christ.  There may be some truth in that criticism, but actually the movie has a 10 second clip right at the very end which points to the Resurrection and it is this very scene which is more “wrong” than the gruesome scenes–more about that later.  Yes, in Western Christianity there have been in the past periods when the suffering of Christ was separated and looked at in an isolated and unhealthy way–that’s a whole topic in itself.  As said above, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday are really one Feast, one Mystery, one Event.  You cannot separate and isolate any one moment from it.  The problem modern Christians are more likely prone to is to gloss over Good Friday and slide into Easter Sunday as if it were a “band aid” on the human condition. The Resurrection is there with the Easter bunny and the colored eggs.   That’s why religion almost never shakes one up at the roots of one’s being, never disturbs you out of your “comfort zone,” never seems to shake anything up.  Lets ‘fess up — we don’t really want to look at Jesus on Good Friday–it can put a crimp in our shopping.  That’s why we miss the real meaning of the Resurrection and how it takes us into the Mystery of God.

Let us turn to the Russian Orthodox Church for a moment.  These people have a reputation for really focusing on the Risen Christ, and it is true to a large extent–you really haven’t celebrated Easter yet until you have been to an Easter Vigil at a Russian Cathedral!  But what is less appreciated by Westerners is the very real and sober grasp of the kenosis of Christ in Russian theology, spirituality and culture.  They have a very existential grasp of Good Friday and those lines from Paul we quoted above.  The Russian religious mind is eager to follow Christ in his self-emptying, self-sacrifice, no matter where that takes it–even to human degradation and human folly.  They have an intuitive feel for this self-emptying dynamic, and they know that it is at the core of all truth, all beauty, all glory, all life, all reality. That is why you will find in Russian spiritual writings a strong dose of humility as a requirement of the spiritual path.  This is not a self-serving version of humility as in “Aw shucks, I’m not so good, etc.”, but it is a profound abasement of one’s ego before the reality of God.  And it is manifested even physically as when Fr. Zosima bows before even those who would demean and degrade him because he knows that God is present also in them.   As an illustration of that, Russian religious culture has a model of holiness that is seldom found anywhere else but is quite in abundance even today in Russia:  the Fool, or more precisely, the Fool for Christ.  These people could be found all over Russia by the hundreds of thousands in 19th Century Russia.  They did not have the credentials of religiosity; they did not have the credentials of respectable society.  Sometimes they would put on the appearance of being mad; sometimes they would hang out at brothels or tavens; sometimes they would just be smelly homeless vagrants–and many, many times, they would really be truly imbecilic or mad, but the Russian religious sensibility detected the presence of this self-emptying Christ in them especially, so there was no distinction made between those who put on a holy mask and those who were lost in that degraded reality.  In a sense this is why Rasputin fooled(no pun intended) so many Russians into idealizing him–he seemed to be a type of Fool for Christ.  But not if you looked carefully!

This kenotic movement by God, this self-emptying into the deepest and darkest corners of the human condition cast an overwhelming spell over the Russian mind and culture.  The “humiliated Christ” slinks unbeknownst through much of Russian literature, appearing in many guises and symbols.  Most modern secular critics have little or no awareness of his presence across the pages and across the sweep of the culture–even into contemporary times.  There is a marvelous little book–very rare and extremely hard to get–that delineates  this figure in the Russian literature of the past 100 years or so:  The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought, by Najda Gorodetsky.  When this kenotic dynamic is apprehended through the “Russian lens,” then we begin to appreciate the power of their celebration of the Resurrection and how the Humiliated Christ and the Risen Christ merge into one Reality.

Very closely related to this but coming at it from a Western perspective is Louis Dupre’s The Deeper Life, one of the best “little” introductions to Christian mysticism.  He begins by speaking of poverty and emptiness:

“That ultimate poverty is also the true humility.  Too often we confuse humility with false modesty.  We secretly hope that if we accuse ourselves of imperfection, God may contradict us, asserting that we are not all that bad.  But God will not contradict us, for imperfection is real and goes to the core of our existence…. True humility consists in the honest acceptance of my imperfection.  The meaning of this humility and this poverty is not simply that of being a means to an end.  It is not motivated, as many think, by the idea that by giving up ambition and possession now I shall be compensated for it later.  Rather than being a means , poverty is a method of giving way to God.  Since to be united with God is simply to be devoid of oneself, poverty and humility are the goal….God means absolute emptiness and poverty.”

A fundamental humility, then, is not a pretending of this or that about oneself, much less is it a neurotic self-hatred that afflicts so many, but it is an existential manifestation of a very deep emptiness and poverty which is one’s real identity–it becomes a total openness to life uninhibited by private desires and ambitions.  In Christian terms it becomes a following of Christ, a disciplship in his kenosis, and into the Mystery of God.                                  Again Dupre:  “In poverty and humility I abandon all that I have and even let go of what I am, in order to reach the uncreated core of my being–God’s own creating act.  God himself dwells in the absolute poverty that knows no possession, not even that of a name.  As we move more deeply into that divine poverty, we shall be less and less inclined to place labels on God or His creatures.”

Again Dupre:  “Negative theology means far more than that we find no adequate names for God.  It means, on a practical-spiritual level, that there exists no failproof method for reaching God, and hence that my only hope lies in the humble awareness of my inadequacy.  My lack of faith, my psychic limitations…, the radical worldliness of my age, this is the dark cloud I must enter deliberately if I am to find God at all.  It is the cloud of my own estrangement, my own waylessness.  No spiritual life can take off without passing through an intense awareness of the emptiness of the creature….  This message seems far removed from the aspirations of a culture predominantly bent on self-fulfillment and self-achievement.”

After laying this groundwork, Dupre then goes on to address the particularity of the Christian mystical journey, the following of Christ in His kenosis.  He quotes St. Ignatius of Loyola:

“I desire and choose poverty with Christ poor, rather than riches; insults with Christ loaded with them, rather than honors; I desire to be accounted as worthless and a fool for Christ, rather than to be esteemed as wise and prudent in this world.”  This “imitation of Christ” is absolutely essential to Christian mysticism–not in the sense of some external, superficial mimicry, where one is constantly looking “in the mirror” to see how one is doing, but much more in the sense of plunging deeply into the human condition both in oneself and in others, unafraid and open to the suffering one will find there.

Dupre, reflecting on Good Friday:  “Christian piety has always sought an intimate presence to Jesus’ Passion rather than a mere commemoration of the past…  To be with Him in the present of His agony and rejection when no triumph was in sight, that is to be where He really was.  But to be present to His hour means more than to be present there in feeling.  It means entering into the dark reality of my own suffering, loneliness and failure.  Only in the brokenness and pain of life am I with Him where He continues to live His agony….How dare I call what possesses so little dignity “suffering”?  Whenever I lift my eyes to the crucified Savior it is mostly to move away from my private misery, certainly not to move into it.  Nevertheless,  Christian piety teaches that very suffering of mine, however despicable and even sinful in its origins, is Jesus’ agony in me.  Comparing my pain with Jesus’ Passion may seem blasphemous.  But all suffering began with a curse.  His as well as mine.  Whether pain has its roots in private weakness and failure, or whether it is inflicted by an entire universe of weakness and failure, the effect remains the same.  To him who suffers, suffering always means failure.  Jesus’ words on the cross–My God, my God why have you forsaken me?–do not express the attitude of one who is performing a clearly understood, effective sacrifice.  They say what suffering has said from the beginning of the world and what it still says in me:  In this I am hopelessly alone.”

The old Black slave song had a line:  “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?”  Was I there in my suffering–for that is where He is being crucified–in me, not in Jerusalem.  Again Dupre:  “Perhaps I shall be able to accomplish no more than silently to accept my inability to accept.  But not more is expected: to confront my bitterness, rebellion, greed, jealousy, rage, impatience is to encounter Jesus’ agony in my own.  I must find Jesus’ agony also in those private worlds of suffering around me, which I am so reluctant to explore and so unable to comprehend.  Here also I am invited to accept, without understanding, Jesus’ agony in the uncouth, the uncivilized, the unlovable.  On Good Friday failure itself has become redemptive.  That Jesus fails in me is the joyous mystery of the union between God and me.”

Hard to speak of the Resurrection after those words!  But it is precisely here that we truly find the Risen Christ–because, remember, the kenotic Christ and the Risen Christ are one–because if Jesus “is crucified” in me and in that wretched person over there, He is also the Risen Christ in me and in that person over there.  The light of the Risen Christ shines through absolutely every darkness–nothing can overcome it.  The Resurrection begins on Holy Thursday and continues on through Good Friday , and we become aware of it and acknowledge it on Easter Sunday!  For the Resurrection is not a “resuscitation” of a dead body; it is not one event in a sequence of events–a kind of interruption of death;  it is not “picking up where one left off” at death–a kind of things continue on and on–that would be a bogus victory over death.  Recall that in the Gospel resurrection narratives both continuity and discontinuity are present and emphasized.  The Gospel makes a point about the “sameness” of the Risen Christ with the crucified Jesus–afterall he shows his wounds.  But there is also a profound discontinuity, a difference–he is also hardly recognizable even to his closest associates.  The Gospel struggles with language here, and it would be a mistake to read these passages in a simplistic and superficial way. The Gospel presents in story and symbol hints and evocations of a radically new reality.  Suffice it to say that the “victory over death” is not an overcoming of just a physical death–no, here death encapsulates a whole realm of darkness, weakness, fear, falseness, misery, frozenness, egocenteredness, despair, disintegration, etc.–our “fallen existence.”  In perhaps a bit of overstatement, we can say, with all due respect to our Buddhist friends, that the “Risen Life” is what they mean by Enlightenment or Nirvana plus_____.  What that plus is we only discover through faith.  But the Resurrection  is a liberation from all fear, all darkness, all falseness and self-deception, all manipulation, etc, and a liberation into a life suffused with spontaneity and unconditional joy and boundless freedom.  We discover  that the Risen Christ is our true identity because He has made us one with Him.  St. Paul:  “It is now not I who lives, but Christ in me.”  People who speak of “dualism” or “monism” are fiddling with language while the Mystery remains.

To be continued in Part III, the Mystery of God and the Holy Trinity.

Solitude and Silence: a few thoughts

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No one has written any better about solitude and silence in recent centuries than Thomas Merton.  His long essay, “Notes Toward a Philosophy of Solitude,” as found in Disputed Questions, is the most profound exposition of the topic in English.  His classic short preface to the Japanese edition of Thoughts in Solitude is a masterpiece.  The first line begins, “No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.”  Amen.

There are degrees and varying depths to the solitude and silence that people experience.  However that be the case, there is no spiritual life without some elements of solitude and silence being there.  There are a rare few for whom solitude and silence is almost total–they have been given this rare gift which really has no name, and they look at us with their sad-joyful, beautiful eyes unable to communicate the Mystery that envelops them.  Yet what flows through their heart, the silent love and compassion, is what holds this universe together.  Then there are the more numerous for whom the solitude and silence is more diluted, for whom human communication still has a vital and blessed role–Merton would be one of these; Theophane the Russian recluse would be another.  Then there are the many more for whom solitude and silence are momentary but necessary punctuations in the flow of a busy life and without which they not only get lost in the surface of things but also without which they lose contact with their own heart.  One example is the writer Anne LeClaire.  Besides her novels, she has written of her experience of taking every other Monday totally off–a day of silence and solitude away from family and friends.  She tells us: “Like too many of us, I mistook a busy life for a rich one….”

Silence and solitude are TOTALLY countercultural today. (Not that there weren’t people in the past for whom solitude was anathema in their religious and social practices.  Martin Luther, for example, had not a clue about the significance of solitude and hated it with a passion.) Silence and solitude cannot be bought, sold, marketed, used — well, there are its counterfeits which are peddled by a few pseudo-religious salesmen.  Actually religion is quite a big business today–it has been coopted by this consumer culture like almost everything else.  Religion has been drawn into turning itself into a commodity that is bought and sold, advertised, marketed, etc.  But real solitude and silence is totally “out of it”–there is nothing there that can be sold to you; there is nothing there compared to the hypnotic fantasies of virtual reality games. That’s why silence and solitude seem totally unintelligible and incomprehensible to most modern Westerners and their Third World “wannabes.”  We are increasingly self-absorbed, dumbed-down educationally not to think or see clearly and critically, entertained endlessly into a mindless stupor of virtual reality, addressed by our leaders in sound-bytes and slogans, and constantly enticed to buy, buy, buy….  Walmart and other such stores sell these small DVD players that can be mounted on the back seats of cars–supposedly so that your kids can watch movies or play games while they are in the car going somewhere.  That which is fantasy and unreal is now preferable to what is real, which has become “boring.”  Of course postmodernism has been deconstructing all kinds of distinctions, so why not the distinction between reality and unreality.  In such a world silence and solitude become more than functions of a religious/mystical path–they become radical gestures, positions of social and political resistance, affirmations of a basic humanity.  We can borrow a marvelous term from the era of Soviet Russia–people who resisted the system called themselves “refuseniks”–they refused to be cogs in the communist machine.  Today we need people who refuse to be cogs in the consumer machine.  People who discover the meaning of silence and solitude in their lives, to whatever degree, begin to join the ranks of the refuseniks.

Among the buzz words of our era are “connectivity” and “social networking.”  While a lot of good and useful functions can be found for all the technical innovations of our era, the fact is that we are way beyond any such apologia for all our electronic communication.  Just look around any modern urban setting: so many people on cell phones, even when they are with other people or driving; so many people walking about text messaging almost non-stop; so many people with something stuck in their ear listening to something else, etc, etc.  Take a look at this letter written by a young person to the magazine Adbusters:  “It has come to the point that I feel incomplete and isolated when I don’t have my cell phone.  My phone has become an inconvenience, sometimes, for those around me.  My parents have taken it away during dinner because I can’t keep up a conversation without pausing to check if I have a text message.  I am out of the loop if I don’t check Facebook multiple times a day.  I constantly crave music when I don’t have my iPod earphones snuggled in my ears.  Technology is running my life.”

That feeling of being “incomplete and isolated” mentioned by the young person above is what people fear the most.  There is a profound truth behind that fear–the human being, in Christian theology, is a being of communion in the image of God who is also Pure Communion of a transcendent order.  The human being is a pure relationality, not an “isolated island of self-sufficency.”  Something like this is also said by all the other great spiritual traditions.  However, this sense of communion, of oneness with all of creation in fact, is not at all the same as electronic connectivity and social networking.  One has to get beyond an ego sense of identity; one has to discover one’s real heart.  And the paradox is that this is done by allowing oneself to plunge into the seeming “aloneness” at one’s core, the loneliness that one meets there–instead of running away from it through external connectivity.  Silence and solitude, to whatever degree, play a real but paradoxical role in our becoming truly and fully human and divine.

But so many people fear silence and solitude to any degree; as mentioned above for many young people these are almost incomprehensible.  There are some good reasons for this alienation from the depths of one’s being.  Listen to this quote from Adbusters again:  “Someone who is poking around in the fog of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that this isolation, this ‘solitary confinement of the ego’ is a mass sentence–that millions of people in all the highly industrialized countries are also pacing the prison cells of the self.”  There are two metaphors here for the ego self: the fog, and the prison cell.  To have no deeper sense of identity than one’s own ego self is to be lost in a kind of fog.  You have a hard time distinguishing between what is real and what is not real.  But there is something more scary–the ego self is a kind of isolated confinement, and again if that is your basic sense of identity, then comes the desperate measures to alleviate this seeming isolation and enclosure by the facilities of modern technology.  In a sense, if I am communicating with you, I exist; if I am not communicating with you, do I really exist?  One of the great paradoxes of the spiritual life is that the only way to break out of the isolation of the ego self is to plunge into the reality of solitude and silence. To meet the seeming nothingness at the core of our being.   It is there that we discover our true heart and our true identity, and it is there that all creatures begin to speak their name to us in the silence of our common transient being.

Let us return now to the topic of those for whom solitude and silence has become a way of life, not just a temporary abode. These people are generally called hermits.  Modern western society is probably the first social order in which such a life is beyond comprehension.   That’s why it is so difficult to speak about such a life in our context.  In general hermits seem to be especially bad in explaining their life!  Its “strangeness” to our contemporaries and its precariousness makes many modern hermits insecure and defensive about their life.  Among other things they tend to fall into the trap of telling you “how important” it is what they are doing–they begin “marketing” and “advertising” their life.  One can readily understand that because everyone believes that what they are doing is important or else why do it!  However, hermits tend to make the importance of what they are about into a message.  Hermits should look at their “hermiting” more as breathing–not something you proclaim to the world as being important, but it sure as hell IS important.  You should dwell in solitude the same way as breathing–just do it.  However, a few words about the rationale of the solitary life and a kind of existential description of its dynamic is possible even in our time.

One amazing thing about hermits now and in ages past is the tremendous variety and diversity of living that life.  There is no one pattern or one way of living the call to solitude and silence.   There are some who have had a very clearly marked out path, and they may be affiliated with some religious order or with a church.  Then, at the other extreme, are those who never had a “plan” to be hermits but find themselves thrown into a solitude they cannot explain.  They may not even be ostensibly religious.  And then there are so many in between these two.  Merton mentions somewhere that there was a report of a man who was living as a hermit in the woods of Kentucky, who had been there since the 1940s but was only discovered by others around 1960.  When asked what had brought him to the woods, why was he living like this, he simply replied, “Because of all these wars.”  Merton’s comment: “A true desert father!”

Examples of the diversity:  There is Fr. Lazarus, a Coptic hermit in the Egyptian desert who was once a university professor in Australia.  There is Willard MacDonald, who ran away from the Army when he was drafted because he did not want to go to war–lived as a hermit deep in the northern wilderness of Nova Scotia.  There is the incredible tradition of Chinese hermits, Taoists and Buddhists.  There is a fascinating and mysterious story surrounding the Russian Emperor, Alexander I(1777-1825).  He seems to have died at age 48, but his death was shrouded in secrecy and there arose rumors that his death was faked and he disappeared into the wilderness of Siberia to be a hermit.  He had been the hero of the resistance against the invasion by Napoleon(commemorated by Tolstoy in War and Peace), but he grew more and more “mystical” in his interests and inclinations.  What further makes this an intriguing story is the mysterious and sudden appearance years later of a hermit-staretz in Siberia by the name of Feodor Kuzmich.  No one knew where he came from or who he was, but he seemed to be very learned, could speak many languages, and received both nobility and peasants with a dignified presence.  Needless to say there were all kinds of rumors that this hermit was the old emperor.  And by the way, he DID look like Alexander if you aged him about 20 years and added a big beard!  At least so said the witnesses.  Modern historians are not too convinced.  But in Russia they loved their hermits, and the idea of their beloved Tsar being a hermit was just too irresistible!

In the United States there is a long tradition of secular hermits that is very interesting.  Thoreau, of course, is the most famous, even though he spent only a few years in relative solitude.  But his writing about it, and how it seemed to form the foundation of his view of the emerging American society, forever cemented the idea of  solitude, “hermiting,” with being a social critic–at least implicitly. Thoreau already saw in the middle of the 19th Century that whatever else you might want to say pertaining to the life of solitude and the value of silence, it WAS going to be countercultural within the context of what America was becoming.  Edward Abbey in his periods of solitude in the desert is a more modern example of this. But the hermit’s way of being countercultural is largely not so much in fingerpointing but just silently being “different.” The hermit’s critical stance is one that transcends all social categories–it is one with that empty space that the Chinese Taoists speak of; it is one with the wind blowing through those pine trees; it is one with the owl hooting at night; it is one with the rain filling the gullies.   The old defunct magazine, Life, did a big spread on American hermits in December of 1983.  They are all “odd birds”–and more power to them!

Returning to the explicitly religious hermits, there is a Catholic House of Prayer in Texas, where there are several religious hermits in residence.  What is of interest is the name of their place: Lebh Shomea — in Hebrew that means A Listening Heart.  What a marvelous way to “name” the hermit life.  In reality one cannot name the hermit life in its essence, but this is as good as it can get–one can go in many different directions with this name.  The human world does not collapse under the weight of all its illusions and delusions and darkness and meaningless speeches and noises because all over the globe there are those few who dwell in silence and solitude in so many different circumstances but with one Listening Heart.

A Very Sad Anniversary

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Every Lent is a very sad anniversary of an event that very, very few people have any awareness of.  This event is the horrible and tragic murder of a great woman pagan intellectual, Hypatia of Alexandria, by a mob of Christian monks.  There are all kinds of reasons to remember this anniversary, but those of us on the monastic journey especially need to be aware of how even the monastic path can be coopted by very dark forces.

 

Hypatia was born in Alexandria around 370 A.D., the daughter of a mathematician and philosopher named Theon.  He obviously thought of her very highly and loved her because he educated her to the highest extent possible.  She became his closest collaborator but eventually completely eclipsed him.  She became a scholar in mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, and she traced her intellectual heritage back to Plato and Pythagoras, not through the Christian Church.  She studied in Athens for a while, where she earned the laurel wreath, bestowed upon only the best of Athens’ pupils, and on her return she wore this wreath whenever she appeared in public.  Hypatia is said to have been very attractive and a charismatic lecturer; she held widely attended public lectures on Plato and Aristotle. At the end of many a day, she would mount her chariot, which she drove herself, and ride to the lecture hall at the academy, a highly adorned room, with swinging lamps of perfumed oil and a large rotunda handpainted by a Greek artist.  Hypatia, wearing a white robe and her ever present laurel, would face the large crowd and transfix them with her eloquent Greek. Even as a pagan, Hypatia was respected by many intelligent Christians in Alexandria, of whom some became her students–one of them, Synesius of Cyrene, became a bishop. As a true Neoplatonist, she lived a life of exemplary virtue, and she scorned the “frivolities of the flesh” remaining a virgin to the end.  According to Damascius, the whole city “doted on her and worshipped her.”

 

Around 400A.D. Alexandria was one of the greatest strongholds of Christianity.  However, it was also a time when there were many social disturbances and conflicts between Christians and non-Christians such as Greek Neoplatonists and Jews.  In 391, a Christian mob attacked and burned most of the library at Alexandria.  Around 412, Cyril became archbishop of Alexandria–so now we know him as St. Cyril of Alexandria, one of the Fathers of the Church.  Cyril had a fanatical group of followers and supporters in the desert monks living outside Alexandria.  At a notice from him, implied or direct, a mob would show up in Alexandria to do some “dirty deed”–like burn down a synagogue or chase some poor Jews out of Alexandria–recall that they had been there for centuries: Philo, the Septuagint was translated there, etc.  Cyril wrote some beautiful theology, but he seems to have been one nasty SOB, which makes you wonder about the whole canonization thing in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.  In any case, you have to remember that the “desert movement” in early Egyptian monasticism included droves of all kinds of people, very many of them just a mob seeking escape from Roman taxation or a bit crazy or something else.  The true monks were a small minority even then.  Considering the violence of the times, the sayings of the great Desert Fathers are even more noteworthy and challenging than usually supposed.

 

On one day in March of 415, in Lent,  Hypatia was making her way home when she was waylaid by this kind of mob.  There is no evidence that Cyril directly ordered this attack, yet there is also no sign that he denounced this act or condemned the perpetrators.  The silence is deafening! Hypatia was seen as a threat to the authority and influence of the Christian bishop.  Hypatia was beaten, dragged into a church, skinned alive there, then her body cut up and burned. Apparently anything was ok if it was “for God,” or done “in the name of God.”  This was no “normal assassination.”  One has the feeling that if she were a man, simply killing would have been enough, but a woman who stood before a bishop as an equal, this was not to be tolerated.  A message had to be sent.  These last sentences are, of course, an editorial opinion on my part, but I feel that was the case.  The Church never has liked and barely tolerated women intellectuals who challenge male dominance.  Oh yes, there is Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila,  both of whom were named Doctors of the Church, but neither of whom were well-educated and therefore not a real threat.  Most  women have not fared so well in the Church.

 

This was written in homage to Hypatia by someone seeking to be on the monk’s path and to keep her memory alive.

Fr. Zosima & Alyosha, Part II

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We continue our reflection on Dostoevsky’s  Fr. Zosima and his novice monk Alyosha.  The heart of Fr. Zosima’s teaching is actually very difficult for the modern mind to penetrate.  Words like “guilt,” “sin,” “forgiveness,” etc are difficult in any context, but here they come right at you undiluted, and if you find them an obstacle or even worse, perhaps this language is not for you.  One hesitates to say this, but given the contemporary state of mind, there are a lot of people for whom this kind of language is very problematical, and another way must be found.  However, one should be encouraged to try and penetrate the meaning of this language before walking away from it because it holds profound truths, unspeakable liberation and the gateway to Paradise.

Consider the following words from Fr. Zosima:

“Love one another, fathers.  Love God’s people.  For we are not holier than those in the world because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, but, on the contrary, anyone who comes here, by the very fact that he has come already knows himself to be worse than all those who are in the world, worse than all on earth…. And the longer a monk lives within his walls, the more keenly he must be aware of it.  For otherwise he had no reason to come here.  But when he knows that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all, for all human sins, the world’s and each person’s, only then well the goal of our unity be achieved.  For you must know, my dear ones, that each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth.  This knowledge is the crown of the monk’s path, and of every man’s path on earth.  For monks are not a different sort of men, but only such as all men on earth ought also to be.  Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal, and that knows no satiety.”

And:

“There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men.  For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.”

And this kind of language is repeated several times in various ways.  Now there is a kind of neurosis, a pathological feeling of guilt that begins and ends in self-hatred and self-rejection.  This is definitely not what Fr. Zosima is talking about.  There is also the question of “how can I feel guilty about the sins of others–that’s their problem.”  This comes from a purely moralistic approach to sin and from a totally individualistic sense of our identity.   There are these rules, and if you break a rule then guilt comes as a psychological consequence. Also, goodness in this case is a matter of how one looks in the “mirror” of self-reflection–in other words, goodness is something one bestows upon oneself when one doesn’t break these rules and one does certain other prescribed things.  Here goodness is a “self-manufactured” thing and guilt is merely the flip side of this.   However, Fr. Zosima’s “guilt” is of another order, and it is something which is at the heart of the Russian hesychast tradition.

Let us begin with that parable in the Gospel of the Pharisee who comes to the temple to pray(Luke 18: 11):  “God, I thank you I am not like other people…I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income…  But the tax collector standing far off,  would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  From the standpoint of Fr. Zosima and Russian hesychasm (and so many other spiritual traditions), the fundamental mistake of the Pharisee is that he has an erroneous sense of identity as this isolated self that can “polish” his image up by “doing good thing”–he has broken his real solidarity with his fellow human being, his communion, his onenes at the level of the heart.  Now what makes Fr. Zosima’s teaching so trenchant is that we are most prone to break our solidarity with our fellow human being when we see him/her doing “something wrong,” especially if that wrong is directed at ourselves.  That’s when we see “the other” as truly other than ourselves, but it is precisely then that Fr. Zosima says we should see him/her as our very selves.  If someone slaps you in the face as it were, it seems silly to ask forgiveness and to assume “responsibility” for that act, but if one does, then “the doors of Paradise open up in one’s heart.”  It is not a kind of psychological trick of make-believe or pretending, but a matter of the heart.  It is also not a matter of “not seeing” the evil people do–that’s another kind of pretending–no, it is rather a living from a fundamental sense of oneness and unity.  There is a Hasidic story about a very holy rabbi who one day was walking with some of his associates and a woman came up to him and struck him with her umbrella.  The associates started to threaten the woman, but the holy rabbi told them to let her go for she had done no wrong.  He told them, “She has not struck me but the man who abandoned her many years ago.”  While not exactly what Fr. Zosima teaches, this story illustrates a spiritual insight close to it.  The holy rabbi does not say, “Thank God I am not like this woman who does this wrong,” but he sees the pain and hurt she is carrying in her heart–it is an indirect way of pointing to a fundamental solidarity that he has with her.

“Solidarity” is actually a weak word to convey the meaning of what is meant.  There is a Russian word, “sobornost,” which comes closer in meaning and which is really untranslatable, but it still is not fully adequate to convey the reality of this oneness.  We shall reflect on this word in a later posting. “Solidarity,” especially, seems to indicate a more external form of bonding–like we hold hands in solidarity.  But this reality is at the very core of our being, at the center of our identity, the real source of our personhood and at the same time our oneness and unity with even the “great sinner.”  Thus it is not unusual for one spiritually awake to “feel the guilt” of the sinner, etc.  In fact, this “fellow feeling” should extend “in every direction” and is one of the central axioms of all religious traditions.  As D.T. Suzuki put it:  “Vimalakirti’s words, ‘I am sick because my fellow beings are sick,’ expresses the essence of religious experience.  Without this there is no religion, no Buddhism, and accordingly, no Zen.”

But as Fr. Zosima puts it this oneness extends to all of creation:

“Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth.  Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light.  Love animals, love plants, love each thing.  If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.  Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day.  And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire , universal love.  Love the animals: God gave them the rudiments of thought and an untroubled joy.  Do not trouble it, do not torment them, do not take their joy from them, do not go against God’s purpose.”

And: “My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.  Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now, if only by a drop, still it would be easier.  All is like an ocean, I say to you.  Tormented by universal love, you, too, would then start praying to the birds, as if in a sort of ecstasy, and entreat them to forgive you your sin.  Cherish this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to people.”

Here Fr. Zosima seems connected to the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi, the great Western saint who is considered heretical to many Orthodox monks.  Of course in Dostoevsky’s own time, the views he put in the mouth of his character, Fr. Zosima, were also rejected as heretical by many Orthodox monastic figures.  Thus it is not surprising that in the novel Dostoevsky shows this rejection by many of Zosima’s fellow monks led by the “super-monk” Fr. Ferapont.

One final point to consider: Fr. Zosima’s disciple, the novice-monk Alyosha.  The young monk seems ideally suited for the monastic life.  His piety and goodness are manifold and obvious.  Yet Fr. Zosima sees that “God’s ways are not our ways,” and the “obvious thing” in becoming a monk is not Alyosha’s  journey.  Fr. Zosima sends Alyosha away from monastic life, but his departure is to take place after Fr. Zosima’s death for the old staretz still has one more very important lesson for the young monk.  As good as Alyosha is, he is still, not surprisingly, caught up in his own self-image and in a kind of psychological transference–if he is a disciple of a holy man, he himself is therefore “special”.  And if so many people and so many monks question Zosima’s holiness, it will be vindicated after his death and Zosima will be victorious over his enemies and Alyosha as his former disciple will share in the victory.  Of course Alyosha does not put it that way, but it shows in the “shadows” of his inner thoughts.  Dostoevsky puts it like this:  “The conviction that the elder, after death, would bring remarkable glory to the monastery, reigned in Alyosha’s soul perhaps even more strongly than in anyone else’s in the monastery.  And generally of late a certain deep, flaming inner rapture burned more and more strongly in his heart.  He was not at all troubled that the elder, after all, stood solitary before him: ‘No matter, he is holy, in his heart there is the secret of renewal for all, the power that will finally establish the truth on earth, and all will be holy and will love one another…and the true kingdom of Christ will come.’  That was the dream in Alyosha’s heart.”

The “rapture” in Alyosha’s heart is a counterfeit rapture; the expectation that he is living for will be shattered.  It is all clothed in religious sentiment, religious feeling and religious language, but it is counterfeit–not the real thing.  But Fr. Zosima will lead his young disciple to the truth, but the way there is only through the valley of death.  Both Fr. Zosima’s own death, and something that must die within Alyosha himself.  The whole novel is prefaced by this line from the Gospel of John:  “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

During his life Fr. Zosima had both kinds of people around him in the monastery–those who admired him and considered him a holy man, and those who criticized him for his teaching, for his “soft” life, and who considered him a phony.  The first group believed that they would be vindicated through Fr. Zosima’s death.  There is a traditional belief among some Russian Orthodox and some Catholic circles that one of the marks of  a holy life is that the dead body of the person in question will not decompose–indeed, there might even be a fragrant odor emanating from the corpse.  It is as if Heaven indicates its approval of the life lived through some such sign.  So the  supporters of Fr. Zosima had this high expectation and seeking vindication for their teacher–in fact they were secretly hoping that miracles would happen in connection with the dead holy man.  However, quite the opposite happened!  Fr. Zosima’s corpse, as it was laid out in his cell, began to stink even more rapidly than normally expected.  This was a shock.  The smell was so bad that they had to keep the windows open.  Most of Fr. Zosima’s “fan club flees” and his enemies and critics seem to win the day.  Needless to say this is a deeply traumatic moment for the young monk, Alyosha.  However, as Dostoevsky masterfully points out, Alyosha’s crisis is not about doubting Fr. Zosima’s goodness and holiness but rather the way God is present in the world:

“And now he who, according to his hope, was to have

been exalted higher than anyone in the whole world, this

very man, instead of receiving the glory that was due him,

was suddenly thrown down and disgraced!  Why?  Who had

decreed it?  Who could have judged so?  These were the

the questions that tormented his inexperienced and virgin

heart….  Let there be no miracles, let nothing miraculous

be revealed, let that which was expected immediately not

come to pass, but why should there be this ignominy, why

should this shame be permitted, why this hasty corruption…?

Where was Providence and its finger?  Why did it hide its

finger at the most necessary moment(Alyosha thought)….?

That was why Alyosha’s heart was bleeding, and of course,

as I have already said, here first of all was the person he

loved more than anything in the world, and this very person

was ‘disgraced,’ this very person was ‘defamed.'”

Dostoevsky depicts Alyosha going through his “dark night” in a masterful yet subtle way.  He cannot show directly what is going on in Alyosha’s heart; only indirectly and in a very subtle depiction can he show the young monk emerging into a profoundly new awareness.  The culmination is depicted in one of the great scenes in all of world literature: the Cana of Galilee chapter in the novel.  Alyosha comes back to the monastery late at night(the night darkness is symbolic of the darkness that Alyosha finds himself in where there seems to be no trace of God, and yet something unexpected is emerging), and Fr. Paissy, the remaining loyal disciple of Fr. Zosima is reading out loud the Gospel of John over the dead body–this was the custom.  Fr. Paissy is precisely at the Cana of Galilee account in the Gospel.  Let us listen a bit to Dostoevsky’s narration:  “It was very late by monastery rules when Alyosha came to the hermitage…. Alyosha timidly opened the door and entered the elder’s cell, where his coffin now stood.  There was no one in the cell but Father Paissy, who was alone reading the Gospel over the coffin….  Alyosha  turned to the right of the door, went to the corner, knelt, and began to pray.  His soul was overflowing, but somehow vaguely, and no single sensation stood out, making itself felt too much; on the contrary, one followed another in a sort of slow and calm rotation.  But there was sweetness in his heart, and strangely, Alyosha was not surprised at that.  Again he saw this coffin before him, and this dead man all covered up in it, who had been so precious to him, but in his soul there was none of that weeping, gnawing, tormenting pity that had been there earlier, in the morning.  Now, as he entered, he fell down before the coffin as if it were a holy thing, but joy, joy was shining in his mind and in his heart.  The window of the cell was open, the air was fresh and rather cool–the smell must have become even worse if they decided to open the window, Alyosha thought.  But even this thought about the putrid odor, which only recently had seemed to him so terrible and inglorious, did not now stir up any of his former anguish and indignation.  He quietly began praying.…”

Then, over the space of several pages, Dostoevsky portrays Alyosha entering into an almost trance-like encounter with the Cana of Galilee gospel.  It is as if the whole cosmos, all of reality, all of creation is the wedding feast and Jesus is there transforming the “water into wine,” so that human hearts can be glad.  Everyone is invited to this wedding feast and everyone is drinking the new wine of a new and great joy.  Let us conclude with Dostoevsky’s own words:

“For about half a minute Alyosha gazed at the coffin, at the covered up, motionless dead man stretched out with an icon on his chest….suddenly he turned abruptly and walked out of the cell.  He did not stop on the porch, either, but went quickly down the steps.  Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness.  Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly…. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth…. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars…. Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly, as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth.  He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages….  What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him from the abyss, and he was not ashamed of this ecstasy.  It was as if threads from all those innumberable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, ‘touching other worlds.’  He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself, but for all and for everything…. But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul….  ‘Someone visited my soul in that hour,’ he would say afterwords….  Three days later he left the monastery, which was also in accordance with the words of his late elder, who had bidden him to ‘sojourn in the world.'”

Amen!