The Empty Path

The inside blurb to Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons begins, “Frederick Buechner has long been a kindred spirit to those who find elements of doubt as constant companions on their journey of faith.”

The book was a birthday gift from my mother two years ago, and I’ve been slowly making my way through its gentle, surprising sermons ever since Christmas of that year.

This past weekend, just as the newest post for Walhydra’s Porch was starting to come together, I opened the book to “Faith and Fiction,” a long piece in which Buechner tells about his experience as a religious novelist and explores how faith and fiction rely upon common characteristics:

The word fiction comes from a Latin verb meaning “to shape, fashion, feign.” That is what fiction does, and in many ways it is what faith does too. You fashion your story, as you fashion your faith, out of the great hodgepodge of your life—the things that have happened to you and the things you have dreamed of happening….

In faith and fiction both you fashion out of the raw stuff of your experience. If you want to remain open to the luck and grace of things anyway, you shape that stuff in the sense less of imposing a shape on it than of discovering a shape. And in both you feign—feigning as imagining, as making visible images for invisible things. (174-75)

Toward the end of the piece, Buechner revisits these parallels:

To whistle in the dark is more than just to try to convince yourself that dark is not all there is. It is also to remind yourself that dark is not all there is or the end of all there is because even in the dark there is hope…. The tunes you whistle in the dark are the images you make of that hope, that power. They are the books you write.

In just the same way faith could be called a kind of whistling in the dark too, of course. The living out of faith. The writing out of fiction. In both you shape, you fashion, you feign. Maybe what they have most richly in common is a way of paying attention. (182)

These passages frame Buechner’s description of writing several novels about an imaginary saint and one more about a historical one.

The passage which caught my attention, though, on the morning when Walhydra got going with her latest piece, is this one:

If you had to bet your life, which one would you bet it on? On Yes, there is God in the highest, or, if such language is no longer viable, there is Mystery and Meaning in the deepest? On No, there is whatever happens to happen, and it means whatever you choose it to mean, and that is all there is?

We may bet Yes this evening and No tomorrow morning…. But we all of us bet, and it’s our lives themselves we’re betting with in the sense that the betting is what shapes our lives. And we can never be sure we’ve bet right, of course. The evidence both ways is fragmentary, fragile, ambiguous…. Whether we bet Yes or No, it is equally an act of faith….

Faith…is distinctively different from other aspects of the religious live and not to be confused with them….

Faith is different from theology because theology is reasoned, systematic, and orderly, whereas faith is disorderly, intermittent, and full of surprises. Faith is different from mysticism because mystics in their ecstasy become one with what faith can at most see only from afar. Faith is different from ethics because ethics is primarily concerned not, like faith, with our relationship to God but with our relationship to each other.

Faith is closest perhaps to worship because like worship it is essentially a response to God and involves the emotions and the physical senses as well as the mind, but worship is consistent, structured, single-minded and seems to know what it’s doing while faith is a stranger and exile on the earth and doesn’t know for certain about anything.

Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and through time. (172-73)

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

This is a beautiful post I stumbled onto, thanks to Martin Kelley’s QuakerQuaker.org. It’s on a blog I hadn’t seen before, Showers of Blessing, by Paul L of Minneapolis.

Friend Paul is quoting from Andrea Lee’s article, ”Personal History: Altered State — Pennsylvania, blackness, and the art of being foreign,” in the June 30, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

As a fifth-grade student at Lansdowne Friends School, she and her classmates were called on to recite Psalm 19 at Thursday morning meeting for worship to the elders of the meeting and the rest of the school:

For a long time, things go without a hitch, but on the morning of Psalm 19 our class fails. First, the short, deep-voiced boy who is our bellwether stumbles over his verse and, purple-faced, shudders to a halt. And I, with gold ready to pour from my lips*, simply freeze.

At Teacher’s frenzied prompting, we burst into the chorus, about errors and secret faults.** But the words are a tripwire: somebody’s helpless giggle becomes a rout. We double over, choking with uncontrollable laughter. The beams of the meetinghouse ring with the echo of our debacle, and we wither under the sidelong smirks of the sixth grade.

Still, after a minute, a curious transformation occurs. One by one, we are able to look up at the faces of the elders, which are not severe and condemning, nor yet smiling with the kind of amused indulgence with which grownups greet endearing childish mishaps. Nor do they display any desire to make this a character-building experience.

Those old faces are simply present: alert; regarding us and the rest of the hall with a boundless, patient comprehension that raises us to their own dignified level. We let the silence flow back.

And, gradually, something becomes clear: a kind of radiant indifference to words, mistaken or correct. What the elders, the Friends, pass on to us this morning is an inkling of how strong silence is. Essential; eternal. But common, in the best sense. Always there, if we can only listen for it. Inside or outside meeting.

* v 9-10: The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

** v 12Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.

What a marvelous story of grace.

Blessèd Be.

Summer Solstice,
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

The war had turned inward until it resembled
suicide. The only soothing thing was water.
I passed the sentries, followed the surf out of sight.
I would sink into the elements, become simple.

Surf sounds like erasure, over and over.
I lay down and let go, the way you trust an animal.
When I opened my eyes, all down the strand
small crabs, the bright yellow of a crayon,

had come out onto the sand. Their numbers, scattered,
resembled the galactic spill and volume of the stars.
I, who had lain down alone, emptied,
waked at the center of ten thousand prayers.

Who would refuse such attention. I let it sweeten me
back into the universe. I was alive, in the midst

of great loving, which is all I’ve ever wanted.
The soldiers of both sides probably wanted just this.

—Marilyn Krysl,
quoted by Deborah Oak on her blog,
branches up, roots down

Somewhere I have read that joy does not depend upon happiness.

And somehow I have come to understand that salvation is first of all about this life, not the next.

Joy and salvation are intertwined in how one receives this finite, fallible, mortal existence. How one goes about each moment and each day. How one forgives the hurts and errors of each moment—one’s own and those of one’s fellows—and proceeds to the next moment with all the possibilities of life restored.

This may sound like the same old religious pie-in-the-sky we’ve all heard about and scoffed at and yearned for. Nevertheless, I am coming to know it as a pragmatic, down-to-earth, “survival faith and practice.”

Melancholia: I introduced the notion of melancholic temperament in “On waiting and squirming” last August. It also became a regular theme on my other blog, Walhydra’s Porch, from November, when I began anti-depressants and short-term therapy, through February, when I realized I was getting back to a “functional normal.”

It has taken me fifty-some years to accept that temperament is just temperament. One can easily enough focus solely on “bad temperament,” the collection of unhappy personality traits which one tolerates or suffers and longs to be rid of. However, temperament is really a complex, organic whole, to be known and valued and cared for, like the “inner child” that it is.

Even so, as much as I may have matured, there is still nothing pleasant about the tormented side of melancholia. Hence, it always helps me to get someone else’s perspective on the matter.

I am currently rereading Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant 1990s science fiction trilogy about colonizing and terraforming Mars: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Half way through the Red Mars account of the colony’s first decades, Robinson introduces a long chapter called “Homesick,” narrated from the perspective of Michel Duval, the lone psychiatrist among the First Hundred (as the colonists are called).

To his profound dismay, Michel is also the lone colonist who hasn’t adapted to the cold, alien planet. All he longs for is to return to the warm Mediterranean climate of his home in Provence.

Wandering through each day in despair, he has to turn on what he calls “the shrink program in his head” in order to do his job.

The bleak plain surrounding the base was a vision out of some post-holocaust desolation, a nightmare world; nevertheless he didn’t want to go back into their little warren of artificial light and heated air and carefully deployed colors, colors that he had chosen for the most part, utilizing the very latest in color-mood theory, a theory which he now understood to be based on certain root assumptions that did not in fact apply here. The colors were all wrong, or worse, irrelevant. Wallpaper in hell. (215)

To keep himself focused, Michel concentrates on developing a system of personality classification by which he can analyze his colleagues. In particular, he challenges himself to integrate two separate descriptive dimensions: the lability-stability index and the extroversion-introversion distinction (see Note).

As his schematic becomes more sophisticated, Michel realizes that he can overlay it with the ancient system of the humors…and that is when he recognizes himself to be a classic melancholic, “withdrawn, out of control of his feelings, inclined to depression” (222), one of only five in the whole colony.

Even in recovery from depression, as I now believe myself to be, I resonate with Michel’s predicament. Here is a sensitive, private person with volatile emotions, who strives to counterbalance these traits by staying wholly in the rational shell of himself. Cut off from the glowing, sensual life of remembered past, he feels as dead as the planet to which his own choices have exiled him.

Any of us, regardless of temperament, can find ourselves trapped in despair like Michel’s, in response to the irreversible changes and losses of life.

The human animal has a special capacity for stepping back from its own experience to observe, analyze, theorize about, and even try to relabel and redirect that experience. The brain, having constructed consciousness, can imagine elaborately abstract perceptual-conceptual “realities” from within which consciousness can operate.

One such category of realities is that of “being wholly rational.” When one has too much of sensory pain or of emotional pain, one can learn to “detach” oneself, observe the pain and its causes and effects “objectively,” and proceed with life in a “functionally normal” way.

Many religions, philosophies and psychologies seem to advocate this sort of detachment, and many of us in our spiritual questing strive to acquire it. In the true heart of such paths, though, beats the knowledge that such detachment is not only illusory but dangerous.

Michel, in his struggle to escape grief, becomes detached from life. He roams Mars with no appreciation for it, an amnesiac who turns on his “Michel Duval program” when he must interact with others, his consciousness repeatedly fleeing to an insubstantial Provence-of-the-mind.

In “Walhyra’s year of becoming mortal,” I wrote of my own dark flight from grief over friends dying of cancer and parents declining into Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s:

This is not just temperament, or circumstance. This is Walhydra’s own personal version of what every human being faces: death and the certainty of death.

It’s enough to make one want to be beyond feeling.

And that, Walhydra now realizes, is what she has actually been working on in her haphazard morning rituals over the past year: trying to be “beyond feeling.”

She hasn’t been denying causes of grief or fear, yet she’s been trying to avoid the slippery slope of melancholia. In the process, her brain has done what that organ knows how to do: suppress its own chemistry until Walhydra was deep in depression.

Kami and veriditas: So what is there instead? What is the difference between this faux detachment and the loving, compassionate non-attachment at the heart of real spiritual wholeness?

Hiroko, the leader of the Martian bioengineering and ecological systems team, takes a very different approach to the planet’s alienness than does Michel. During the early years on Mars, she and her fellows work and live away from the others in the greenhouses—almost a colony unto themselves.

In his blackest moment, Michel is suddenly invited into this group on a night when they sit in a naked circle in the soil among their plants, together with their nine or so toddlers—the first Mars-born children Michel has seen, the first he even knows of.

As Hiroko leads a chanting ritual, a woman named Evgenia explains for Michel:

They were celebrating the areophany, a ceremony they had created together under Hiroko’s guidance and inspiration. It was a kind of landscape religion, a consciousness of Mars as a physical space suffused with kami, which was the spiritual energy or power that rested in the land itself. Kami was manifested most obviously in certain extraordinary objects in the landscape—stone pillars, isolated ejecta, sheer cliffs, oddly smoothed crater interiors, the broad circular peaks of the great volcanoes.

These intensified expressions of Mars’s kami had a Terran analogue within the colonists themselves, the power that Hiroko called viriditas, that greening fructiparous power within, which knows that the wild world itself is holy. Kami, viriditas; it was the combination of these sacred powers that would allow humans to exist here in a meaningful way.

When Michel heard Evgenia whisper the word “combination,” all the terms immediately fell into a semantic rectangle [see Note ]: kami and viriditas, Mars and Earth, hatred and love, absence and yearning….

His jaw was slack, his skin was burning, he could not explain it and did not want to. His blood was fire in his veins. (228-29)

Michel joins the others as they each eat a fistful of Martian dirt which Hiroko has given them with the words, “This is our body.”

They all rise, chanting, and press together in a formless dance. Then Hiroko kisses Michel and says,

“This is your initiation into the areophany, the celebration of the body of Mars. Welcome to it. We worship this world. We intend to make a place for ourselves here, a place that is beautiful in a new Martian way, a way never seen on Earth. We have built a hidden refuge in the south, and now we are leaving for it.

“We know you, we love you. We know we can use your help. We know you can use our help. We want to build just what you are yearning for, just what you have been missing here. But all in new forms. For we can never go back. We must go forward. We must find our own way. We start tonight. We want you to come with us.”

And Michel said, “I’ll come.” (230)

This alternative to despair, opening to the holiness of the world, appeals to what on Walhydra’s Porch I call my “Pagan sensibility.”

I had an inchoate version of this awareness as a child. All children have it—unless or until it is trained out of them. When I left seminary and came out as a faggot in the early 1970s, I began to come awake to Pagan sensibility again.

I do not believe that the faith and practice of Jesus himself exclude this celebration of kami and viriditas. After all, he spent his whole life healing and sharing meals and bringing people back to full earthly life.

Nor do I believe that today’s Christians—or folk of any other religion of the heart—need fear or scorn the sensual and even erotic nature of mortal existence. It is not in relishing life but in trying at all costs to dodge death that we cause harm.

Somehow, Western Christianity was not sufficiently able to affirm, as did Eastern Christianity, the integrity of material and spiritual Creation which the latter knew from its Jewish roots. Yet Jesus knew that integrity intimately. It is to this incarnated knowing and doing that he calls people.

The division of flesh from spirit and the condemnation of the former as sinful are conceptual errors made by many cultures in many ages. There is great irony in this.

The animal naturally wants to avoid suffering. Its human consciousness is sometimes able to do so, since it is able, correctly or incorrectly, to infer causes and effects, and to plan and act in ways which may prevent or at least forestall suffering.

Yet human consciousness also knows of its own animal mortality, and it identifies that, too, as suffering. Worse, consciousness often blames its own animal nature for all that it suffers. This, at least, has been the Western response to the so-called “problem of suffering.”

The Christian West, in effect, forgot that Job suffered despite his righteousness, and that Jesus said, “God causes the sun to rise on both the bad and the good, and sends rain on both the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45; emphases added).

Instead, the dominant tradition in the West has been that suffering and mortality are punishments for the innate moral failing of the whole human race, rather than simply circumstances of existence.

In his moment of “fire in the blood” with Hiroko’s clan, however, Michel Duval is jolted back into the integrity of flesh and spirit. From then on, he is able to stay in the present, rather than longing hopelessly for his past. He does not become a different person. He becomes who he is, increasingly able to engage in each moment without fending off or clinging to passing sorrows or joys.

Thisness: Still, simply allowing oneself to be alive in the matrix of flesh and spirit may not be sufficient. One still suffers. One still experiences loves and pleasures which one then loses. One still knows that self and loved ones will die—and witnesses the catastrophic suffering and losses of others.

As contrasted with the reaction of detachment, which may avoid knowing and feeling, compassionate non-attachment begins with a peculiar attitude of attentiveness to events and feelings.

During a key moment in Red Mars, John Boone and Maya Toitovna are relaxing in a sauna. John looks at his lover’s body, “as real as a rock,” and feels a glow. The tiles themselves throb “as if lit from within; light gleam[s] on every water droplet…, like tiny chips of lightning scattered everywhere…” (292).

John realizes that this moment must be the sort of experience described by Sax Russell, the First Hundred’s consummate exploratory scientist, one who is at once phlegmatic yet passionate about discovery.

The intense thereness of it—”haecceity,” Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs—I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That’s why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this?

Now, remembering Sax’s odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to his moment. (292-93)

Sax Russell is by no means a morally neutral person. He is the prime advocate and mover of the effort to terraform Mars, and he also intervenes repeatedly to disable the weaponry of earth’s authoritarian, exploitive colonialism.

More importantly, throughout the trilogy Sax pursues a quest to reach the heart of Ann Clayborne, the fellow First Hundred member who is terraforming’s absolute opponent. Sax attempts this, not because she opposes him, but because he wants to heal the profound pain he recognizes within her.

Sax’s Thisness is, nevertheless, not about moral judgment. Thisness is simply about observing what is, in all its painful and beautiful intricacy and transience.

Thisness reminds me somewhat of Buddhist mindfulness, that non-judging attentiveness to the flow of events, sensations, emotions and thoughts, which notices how the mind and body respond to experience, yet which does not assign positive or negative value to each moment.

Such mindfulness enables one to act—or to pause from acting—with compassion for oneself and all beings. One experiences suffering and pleasure, including the suffering or pleasure of others, without immediately reacting to avoid the former or hang onto the latter.

One can live in the moment and allow it to die, and one acts to enable the same for others.

Joy: But all the above discussion sounds theoretical, like trying to digest a shelf full of self-help books into their underlying themes. I believe what I have written—or at least believe it to be plausible—but it’s only ideas, not action.

I began this post by describing the visceral challenge of a melancholic temperament, that inner child which I must nurture, even when I do not feel fire in the blood, or when my distress or desire overwhelms my ability to practice mindfulness.

Now, as I move through my days, I find I am helped concretely by a new habit of response to whatever the moment brings.

In my late thirties, my partner Jim, our mutual friend Randy and I were attending a gay and lesbian church with an improbable mixture of Lutheran, Baptist and Pentecostal members.

Given my own odd combination of staid Lutheranism and passionate Paganism, it amused me during those services to find my hand lifting as if on its own when I felt an excess of joy—as if there were too much energy to hold and I needed to give some of it back to God/dess.

That sort of experience would happen not only in worship, but also on woody hikes, or while reading something poignant or hearing a powerful song lyric, or after a successful session with one of my counseling clients—or just whenever.

In my late fifties, the new twist is this.

During those earlier years, the gesture of thanks came in response to joy. Presently, whether I become aware of a blessing or become aware that I have trapped myself in anxiety or despair, I am led to stop, settle into the moment, and allow a wave of thanks to rise through me.

Joy follows thanks.

Thanks for what? Thanks to whom?

Thanks for being brought back to awareness of the moment, painful or beautiful or both. Thanks to the wholeness of which my transitory “self” is a part.

As I confessed in my “Am I a nontheist…?” series, it is easiest for me to use my “native religious language” to describe such experiences. In this case, it is as if I am giving thanks to the Divine One, the One the Sufis call the Beloved and the Friend.

Yet “for what” or “to whom” doesn’t really matter, since I suspect the inner dynamic is the same, regardless of one’s faith and practice.

In pain or in beauty, thanks.

Then joy.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Note: Robinson’s character, Michel Duval, develops his schematic of the four temperaments in a series of steps, beginning with the lability-stability index:

He had recently begun to consider Wenger’s index of autonomic balance….

The sympathetic branch [of the autonomic nervous system] responds to outside stimuli and alerts the organism to action, so that individuals dominated by this branch were excitable [i.e., labile]; the parasympathetic branch, on the other hand, habituates the alerted organism to the stimulus, and restores it to homeostatic balance, so that individuals dominated by this branch were placid [i.e., stabile]. (216-17)

He adds to this the extroversion-introversion distinction:

Not as a simple duality of course;…one placed [people] on a scale, rating them for such qualities as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and so on….

In fact physiological investigations had revealed that extroversion was linked with resting states of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal….

[The] cortex inhibits the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extrovert, while high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to introversion. (216)

Michel finds that simple x and y axes grids doesn’t work to map these two dimensions, so he tries a Greimas semantic rectangle

This was] a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry, which proposed that no simple dialectic was enough to indicate the true complexity of any cluster of related concepts, so that it was necessary to acknowledge the real difference between something’s opposite and its contrary; the concept “not-X” being not quite the same thing as “anti-X,” as one saw immediately. So the first stage was usually indicated by using the four terms S, -S, S¯, and -S¯, in a simple rectangle…. (217)

The next step is to add an outer rectangle for combinations of relationships (218):

Finally, Michel adds extrovert-introvert and stabile-labile to the four inner corners. It is as he seeks labels for the combinations that he realizes the names of the four temperaments will fit.

For it made perfect sense: there were extroverts who were excitable [choleric], and extroverts who were on an even keel [sanguine]; there were introverts who were quite emotional [melancholic], and those who were not [phlegmatic]. (219)

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

You Were Brave in that Holy War

You have done well
In the contest of madness.

You were brave in that holy war.

You have all the honorable wounds
Of one who has tried to find love
Where the Beautiful Bird
Does not drink.

May I speak to you
Like we are close
And locked away together?
Once I found a stray kitten
And I used to soak my fingers
In warm milk;

It came to think I was five mothers
On one hand.

Wayfarer,
Why not rest your tired body?
Lean back and close your eyes.

Come morning
I will kneel by your side and feed you.
I will so gently
Spread open your mouth
And let you taste something of my
Sacred mind and life.

Surely
There is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

O, surely there is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

If you think
Our Beloved would not be so
Tender.

—The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the great Sufi Master
translated by Daniel Ladinsky

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Even as I was completing the final part of my “Am I a nontheist…?” series, I knew that the editorial constraints I had imposed to keep those posts focused might create a false impression.

They could be read as describing a hermit, or at least someone who relies solely upon what Liz Opp has called “spiritual individualism” (”The slippery nature of corporate faith“), rather than someone for whom worship and daily life with others are essential.

Granted, I am a very private person, and what I describe in those three essays are my private faith struggles and affirmations. The crux of my assertion in Part III is this:

[O]n the level of my private shuddering,…[w]hether I am in the midst of turmoil and despair or settled into the stillness and poise of the moment, I am not alone.

That certainty gets me through innumerable moments of pain and joy.

But wait.

The composition of that passage was held up for several weeks, until a dear Friend gave vocal ministry in meeting for worship. I don’t even remember what she said, yet the words which responded clearly within me were: “I am not alone.”

Everything I had written up to that point was an apologist’s attempt to “explicate reasonably” how he comes up to the moment of leaping off the cliff of reason. I had been struggling for a way to explicate the next moment for my readers—even though I do not need an explanation myself.

Then, in that quiet circle, one Friend who does not hesitate to expose her tenderness said…something. All my trial sentences fell away, to leave four words.

What a delight!

I’ve not been listening very well to the silence recently, in solitude or in Meeting. My awareness fills, either with anxieties about family and work or with cleverly composed sentences for potential blog entries or “vocal ministry.” I tend to distract myself with “trying to meditate.”

As Liz wrote in the post cited earlier:

Sometimes among Friends, we fall unawares into a shared spiritual individualism: We each practice our own spiritual discipline on First Day during worship and appreciate how we can come to meeting and worship together, despite our differences of belief and even practice….

I acknowledge this about myself.

Yet when a Friend speaks, or when the silence gets deep enough, I am called to attention. The questions with which I had thought I was wrestling fall away.

Not into answers, but into a poised moment of simply being with these other people, being with everything. Being with the nurturing Heart of everything.

There are similar moments of transcendence as I struggle in pre-dawn solitude with anxiety about the “horizon of equally urgent, insurmountable obligations.” I wrestle with panic, I rehearse future actions and conversations, make fruitless attempts to prioritize.

Then something shifts. I remind myself by a prayer or a devotional reading that simply being with Mother-Father God is enough for the moment…and silence settles in.

Or I return to the bedroom. My spouse Jim—blessing that he is—can bring me back into being with simply by saying “I love you” and cuddling.

Or I walk from my parking lot to work, begin to say “good morning” to strangers, engage in a morning chat with my work partner Christa or other colleagues.

Being with other people changes the dynamic. It centers me down into the moment. Just do this now. Now this. Now this.

The empty path is not about “right belief” or “right action.” It’s not about “getting right with God.” These are all propositional things. They pretend to be measurable against some observable standard.

The empty path is simply about being with God. Noticing, allowing, living into the relationship itself.

That is why Jesus told his followers to call God “Papa” (Abba), and why he called his followers friends.

It’s just about being with each other in each moment.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Part I: Languages of belief
Part II: Survival faith and practice
Part III: “Someone should start laughing”

“Someone should start laughing”

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

What is God?

If you think that Truth can be known
From words,

If you think that the Sun and the Ocean

Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,

O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly
Laughing—Now!

—Hafiz i-Shirazi,
in I Hear God Laughing,
rendered by Daniel Ladinsky

Whenever anyone asks my spouse Jim if he believes in reincarnation, his droll response is: “Not in this lifetime.”

It is tempting to use that response as my answer to the title question of this three-part series. Tempting, first of all, because it approaches the question with laughter. Second, because it is confessional: it says merely that nontheism is not the language of my heart, not the language with which I presently describe to myself what sustains me in my interaction with Life. Third, because it is not prescriptive: it leaves the door open for other options.

Nontheist options: One of those options is the nontheism of empirical science and, more specifically, that of the research into the neurobiology of consciousness about which I have written in other posts (here and here, for example).

It doesn’t confound me to be told that what I experience as the “self” is what Antonio Damasio calls “a perpetually re-created neurobiological state,” a higher order construct maintained by the brain as a framework upon which to organize its neural representations of what the senses perceive (Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, pp. 99-100). Knowing how complex and powerful the workings of human consciousness are, I don’t feel that this empirical description diminishes me.

Another option is the curiously analogous nontheism of Buddhism. Here, too, though couched in a very different language than that of Western science, is that core recognition that the “self” is a transient, ever-changing construct. That what is Real is not so much the perceiver as the flow of things perceived.

Both of these models of consciousness have helped me in recent years, as I settle into a more mature way of walking through mortal existence. It is useful to be able to stop, take a breath, and say to myself, “Ah, this is simply the present moment, and all of these insistent thoughts and feelings are simply this organism’s efforts to interpret and respond to the moment.” Such poise is helpful, whenever I can relax into it.

Private shuddering: Yet there is something else of conscious experience which I miss in these models.

In his richly insightful Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Winter 2007) article, “The Democratic Dilemma,” Todd Shy contrasts the approach to liberal morality of Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, with the current approaches of Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner. The passage which resonates most strongly for me is this one:

Wallis’s God is the champion of justice and the defender of the poor, but there is nothing about him as compelling as the elusiveness, say, of Luther’s God, or the inscrutability of Job’s. His God is not a God who hides; his Jesus is never bewildering.

Wallis offers us the clarion morality of the prophets, but not the shifting range of Old Testament experience. The bound child is pulled away from harm, but no knife has been raised by the godly over the ropes. Biblical writers grope to understand a difficult Creator; Wallis seems content with what he knows.

In the end, religion, like our other deep experiences, is disturbing, unsettling, even as it irresistibly holds our devotion. Liberals like Wallis need to engage us on the level of our private shuddering in order to energize our public commitments. After all, the success of religious conservatives is not the raw manipulation of an issue like abortion, but rather the education of congregations to see God as a being who would revolt at the abortion of a fetus.

The portrait of God is all. The rest is just elaboration, which is why Augustine’s famous quip, love God and do whatever you want, makes utter sense to the religious conservative, who wouldn’t dream of intentionally abusing it, precisely as Augustine knew. (p.70)

“On the level of our private shuddering.” That phrase pierces to the heart of our collective dilemma over the marriage of belief and action.

Wherever we are on the spectrum of belief, what we tell ourselves we believe—or disbelieve—can both drive and constrain our actions. Yet on the level of our private shuddering, a level at once more visceral and more spiritual than belief, something else drives and constrains us.

At its best, we do not know rationally yet are still convinced—on the level of our private shuddering—that whatever drives and constrains us is Something Else which is larger than any one or several of us.

Or at least we hope for that.

Belief versus faith: I know I confess to both shuddering and hope in the tales on Walhydra’s Porch. Though emotionally challenging, it is ultimately easier for me to give voice to both on that blog, simply because the intent there is storytelling.

Here on The Empty Path, where the intent is rational discussion, such topics are much more difficult to address. Reason insists upon the sort of precise correspondence between words and their denotations which is impossible in the realm of the Spirit. That realm demands poetry.

Part of what helps me is the distinction I make between belief and faith. Belief focuses on statements; faith, on actions. These are not mutually exclusive categories, yet I don’t need to have worked out a definitive statement of belief in order to live moment by moment on faith.

But what in the world am I talking about?

Survival faith and practice: In Part II, I wrote that “the challenges of the past decade have increasingly imposed upon me a different sort of spiritual economy,” what I call “survival faith and practice.”

I coined that phrase last October, well into the clinical depression which had been sneaking up on me since at least a year earlier.

As the Walhydra stories linked here relate, September of 2006 was when I first admitted to myself that my brilliant, compassionate mother was probably slipping into Alzheimer’s dementia (”In which Walhydra reconsiders“).

By March of last year, my sister and brother and I knew it was no longer safe for Mom to live alone, and we moved her to my sister’s home in Pensacola (”Which next thing?“). By June, Mom’s obvious decline was confounding me with grief, even while I struggled with anxiety over handling her legal matters and finances and the need to sell her home from 300 miles away (”Walhydra’s sadness“).

Shortly after I published Part II, I began the strange adventure—doubly strange for a former clinical counselor—of using anti-depressants and short-term therapy to climb back out of the depths (”Walhydra’s year of becoming mortal” and “Is it Spring yet?“).

Sharing this personal context is essential to demonstrating what I mean about faith.

Spiritual discipline: As my depression deepened over the past year, both practical and emotional necessity drove me to seek a more intense focus for my spiritual discipline. As I tell it in “Walhydra’s year of becoming mortal,”

[Walhydra] finally recognized just how much of her energy and concentration it was taking each day to tightrope walk with equanimity between anxiety and despair.

“Hell!” Walhydra says. “It’s taking concentration just to make myself get out of bed in the morning…let alone do tai chi foundations, sitting meditation, bike riding, prayer, breakfast, or any of those other things which might nudge me toward wanting to do another day.”

Eventually, I saw the depression for what it was. Describing the deaths of father-in-law and friends and the decline of my elderly parents, I wrote:

This is not just temperament, or circumstance. This is Walhydra’s own personal version of what every human being faces: death and the certainty of death.

It’s enough to make one want to be beyond feeling.

And that, Walhydra now realizes, is what she has actually been working on in her haphazard morning rituals over the past year: trying to be “beyond feeling.”

She hasn’t been denying causes of grief or fear, yet she’s been trying to avoid the slippery slope of melancholia. In the process, her brain has done what that organ knows how to do: suppress its own chemistry until Walhydra was deep in depression.

Applied nontheism: In my desperate efforts to regain stability (at least momentary) before I began taking anti-depressants, and in my much more successful efforts since, I can observe the combined application of those two nontheisms I described earlier.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (aka SSRI anti-depressants) help the brain to reestablish neurochemical homeostasis, so that disturbances from the environment or from imagination do not disable thinking and choice with emotional reactions which are way out of scale. There (grossly oversimplified) is the nontheism of neurobiology.

Taoist tai chi practice, zazen meditation and the disciplines of prayer I’ve learned from Quaker silent worship help consciousness to observe and let go of the flow of thoughts and feelings, without needing to react to or act upon any of them. There (grossly oversimplified) is the nontheism of Buddhism.

I can and do rely upon a discipline of mindfulness informed by both neurobiology and Buddhist psychology, whenever I remember to calm consciousness and recenter it in the moment. This is a discipline of maturity for which I am very grateful.

Something Else: However, on the level of my private shuddering, I am far more grateful for Something Else. Whether I am in the midst of turmoil and despair or settled into the stillness and poise of the moment, I am not alone.

Here is where reason falters, where I have to shift to mythopoetic language in order to suggest what I cannot define.

In Part I, I described becoming “a refugee from the ‘christian’ world” after I came out as a gay man and left Lutheran seminary in 1973.

On one level, the search I began then is for a living, breathing coherence in personal belief. What is the true character of God and our relationship with God, when orthodoxy condemns the homosexual love I have come to understand as a God-given blessing rather than a curse in my life? What is the true nature of salvation, when orthodoxy denies it to non-believers?

On a deeper level, as I acknowledged at the end of Part II, my coming out of Christian orthodoxy is a somewhat uncomfortable search for a way around the notion of “obeying God’s will”—or, better, a search for a living, breathing version of obedience which I can affirm and practice. What if those who reject homosexuals and non-believers are right? Or, if they are not, how do I perceive and follow that real “God’s will” which is beyond orthodoxies?

On the deepest level, the level of my private shuddering, my search is for what Thomas Merton calls “the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God…a dialogue of love and of choice. A dialogue of deep wills” (New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 16-17).

In other words, a search for relationship, not with “God” as learned from and defined by others, but with Divine Presence as experienced in consciousness, unmediated by words and concepts.

Recall Todd Shy’s words quoted earlier: “The portrait of God is all.”

In the depth of depression, as I was finishing Part II, I reached the following passage in my reading of Merton’s New Seeds:

In all the situations of life the “will of God” comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love.

Too often the conventional conception of “God’s will” as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair and one wonders if it is not, itself, often the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration.

These arbitrary “dictates” of a domineering and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from His face forever.

So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him” (p. 17).

Yes, yes, and yes.

In future posts I will tell more about myself by writing more about the idea of God. For now, in saying that I am not a nontheist, what I am acknowledging is that I have made peace with and understood the value of my “native religious language.”

It is the mythopoetic language in which I first learned to conceptualize and describe the experience of “the Divine.” It is not a language for definition—certainly not for doctrinal formulation. It is, rather, a language for evoking spiritual shuddering.

As I wrote in “Is it Spring yet?“:

In the past few years, though, Walhydra has been looking for the pre-theological core of her faith, her spiritual enthusiasm [from Greek enthous, entheos, possessed, inspired : en-, in + theos, god].

Guess what? She found its roots in the positive visceral childhood experiences of Lutheran Sunday School, her father’s sermons, her mother’s organ-playing, and the hymn-singing of the congregation’s old ladies.

What an interesting surprise!

This actually makes sense, though. Ever since childhood, the real Jesus—who is far more real than any of the “Christianities” seem able to express—has been Walhydra’s hero.

Walhydra imbibed all of those Sunday School stories and sermons and hymns, to the point that Jesus became a real presence for her, a divine human of fierce integrity and fierce compassion. Whenever anyone makes false claims in his name, he lets her know. More to the point, whenever Walhydra causes harm or tries to hide, he lets her know.

Another way to say this is that my faith is not about what I believe but about what I trust.

When I am in turmoil or despair, my child’s heart turns to a personified Divine Presence, to a “God” who, as Frederick Buechner writes, is “a God like Jesus, which is to say a God of love” (”The Clown in the Belfrey,” in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, p. 125).

When I am poised in sacred stillness, I feel the joy of “being right with God, trusting the deep-down rightness of the life God has created for us and in us, and riding that trust the way a red-tailed hawk rides the currents of the air” (Ibid., p. 127).

In between these times, I experience the constant shifting of my trust, my faith. As Buechner writes:

Some days it’s easier to say Yes than other days. And even when we say Yes, there’s always a no lurking somewhere in the shadows, just as when we say no there’s always a Yes. That’s the way faith breathes in and breathes out, I think, the way it stays alive and grows. (Ibid., p. 129)

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Yesterday I quoted from and linked to two of my favorite bloggers on my other blog, Walhydra’s Porch. Both spoke so well to my present condition that I wanted to acknowledge and share their offerings with readers of this blog.

Sara Sutterfield Winn shared a powerful poem by the 15th century Indian poet Kabir on her Pagan Godspell site:

The Time Before Death

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think…and think…while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

Cat Chapin-Bishop, in turn, offered a leading from meeting for worship on Quaker Pagan Reflections:

“Up!”

Early in meeting for worship today, I was all caught up in my head–in ideas about what is ministry and what is faithfulness, and whether or not I’m “doing” Quakerism “right.”

And then an echo of the Song of Songs came to me: “I am my Beloved’s, and my Beloved is mine.” And everything changed, and the words washed away in just being with the Beloved. And the Light grew so bright and good around me and inside me, that I could just about bear it:

There is an hour, every week, during which I get to drop all the hard work of trying to be something, and just be what I’m supposed to be. I don’t have to be strong, or wise, or clever. I don’t have to anything at all, because the Beloved is there, and it’s just fine…

At those times, the image comes to me, of myself as a tiny child, almost too young for speech. Have you ever seen a little girl, one just barely walking, make her way solemnly to her mother? That’s me. And when I get there, I lift my arms up in the air, stiffly, the way that toddlers do.

“Up!” I say, in that toddler way. “Up!” with all the quiet confidence of the completely loved, completely trusting child.

And I go up in those warm, strong arms, and turn my head into that safe neck and shoulder, and I let go and clasp on, and I’m free in a way I have mostly forgotten how to be.

And you know, everything else–the hundred thousand words we use to strap ourselves in, corset-like, to being faithful to the Light we’re given, all the Quaker or Pagan or philosophical apologetics–is really beside the point.

I am my Beloved’s. And my Beloved is mine.

“Up!”

And everything follows from there.

I felt such uplift from the juxtaposition of these messages that the only thing I could do was to give thanks for the grace which moved these two wise women to post them…and to offer my own contribution from my favorite Sufi poet, Hafiz:

I know the way you can get

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.

Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one’s self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.

I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love’s
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering God,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love!

From: I Heard God Laughing - Renderings of Hafiz, Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

“Survival faith and practice”

I value very highly the information we gain from authentic empirical science, honest scholarship and rational discourse. My schooling was classical, in the sense that I learned very early to recognize and to see as essential for human progress the difference between arguments arising from such rigorous disciplines and those arising from opinion and ideology.

The former sort of argument seems incontrovertible. The latter is not automatically excluded, but I understand it to be informing me more about the one voicing the argument than about the subject itself.

Nonetheless, I long ago recognized that I am at heart more of a poet than a philosopher. While I cannot bring myself to deny what reason demonstrates, a deeper, trans-rational truth rules my ultimate personal choices.

This acknowledgment explains, at least in part, a change of course from what I had planned to do as a follow-up to “Part I.”

There I said that I intended to address Zach A’s desire for belief “based on evidence” rather than on doctrine or superstition. Now it is clearer to me that—at least for this portion of my life—the “evidence” which sways me most may not be demonstrable to reason. It is, instead, what the first Friends called “experimental” knowledge: that is, subjective knowledge arising from personal experience and tested against the witness of fellow Friends in worship and community.

Here in my late 50s, I face what I assume many who survive to elderhood face: real responsibility for dealing with real mortality, my own and that of those I care for—whether they are parents, siblings and friends, or strangers across the globe.

I have always relished theory and scholarship of the sort which imagines “an eternity for discussion,” to quote Herman Wouk’s character Aaron Jastrow (see note). However, the challenges of the past decade have increasingly imposed upon me a different sort of spiritual economy. It is what I described to a friend recently as “survival faith and practice.”

What will get me past that fist of anxiety clutching my sternum when I first awaken each morning? What will carry me through each happy or challenging or despairing moment of the day, when “monkey mind” keeps chattering away with its litany of “problems that need solving as soon as possible”?

What will lift me above my grief and fear, as I watch my parents and age-peers dying, my own body declining, and my nation selfishly bankrupting the world?

In fact, I believe that Zach A gets close to defining crucial aspects our existential need in this age.

In a comment appended to his August 26th piece, “Carrying the Society as long as you can,” he writes:

I think the world needs a spiritual discourse based on method, not beliefs, even if they happen to be good ones.

In a later comment for the same post, Zach writes:

What I’m calling for is not pan-religious mush, but recognizing that ALL religions, far from being “all true,” are in fact all basically false, and that we pretty clearly live in a universe with no deity, no master plan, no karmic justice, no second life after death.

What we do have is an ability to love, to create beauty, and to seek the truth, all to make our short lives on this earth more meaningful. I think we would do this humble task better if we learned to do it without religion—to bite the bullet and face reality for what it is.

I agree that, if one sets aside subjective knowledge of the “experimental” sort I described above, this is pretty much all that we can rationally demonstrate to be true. Every attempt to coin some poetry, some universal religion, to lift us above existential knowledge to those salutary mysteries which reason cannot know founders on the human limitations about which I wrote in “Part I“:

Even at its most articulate, the human brain is not able to abstract its intimate experience into concepts and symbols which are at once fully nuanced and also wholly unambiguous to others.

How can we share with each other our common experience of this one Reality, and yet allow that our individual relationships with it are idiosyncratic and, in their inmost core, inexpressible?

I agree that whatever is true must be true for the whole human species, not only for those who have the “right” religion—or the “right” science, for that matter. From this perspective, both religion and science must be understood not as truths in themselves but as tools we use for describing to each other and operating upon what we observe and experience.

The advantage of science and its language, reason, is that it limits itself to what every observer can observe and describe unambiguously. That is also its disadvantage.

The disadvantage of religion is that no two creatures can have identical “experimental” knowledge of existence, meaning that no religion can be objectively true. This is what makes religion, used falsely, into such a devastatingly deadly weapon. Those who insist on the objective truth of their religion alone, and who also have the power of enforcement, can extinguish the core reality of other people—or the people themselves.

The advantage of genuine religion is that its language is storytelling. Storytellers and their audiences know that stories are “true” only in so far as they effectively evoke sensations, feelings, thoughts and urges to action which resonate harmonically with the “experimental” truth of each individual.

But wait! A masterful storyteller can change the direction and intensity of the audience’s reactions—for good or for ill. This is because stories intervene directly in the complex feedback loops which operate between physical experiences, sensory responses, and the brain’s layers of increasingly more abstract representation of what those responses “mean” and what it could or should do about them. Stories change how the brain imagines what might happen next and hence, perhaps, what it chooses.

Here, finally, is a clue to my current, stripped down understanding of “survival faith and practice.” I must sustain a homeostatic balance between two seemingly contradictory operations.

On the one hand, I need to be mindful that circumstances just happen, that they are not organized purposefully around my particular life. Such mindfulness is exceedingly difficult, because everything about animal existence militates toward action to preserve the individual creature and its sense of “self.”

In order to make effective choices for survival and well-being, my brain assigns “meaning” to circumstances. It manages its interactions with life by telling alternative stories to its consciousness and then choosing among them. The ability to do this is a key advantage of consciousness but also its most dangerous pitfall. Consciousness almost always mistakes the stories for the array of circumstances to which they point.

If I neglect mindfulness, “monkey mind” drives me to act primarily out of my great attachment to or fearfulness of mere stories which it has imagined in order to interpret circumstances.

On the other hand, since functional consciousness is storytelling, I need to be able to tell myself inspired stories which will not only sustain survival but uplift it, make it not just bearable but desirable, a blessing to myself and to those around me.

This second need brings me back to Zach’s concern for “a spiritual discourse based on method, not belief.” In a comment for his March 27th piece and again in “The post-religious destiny of Quakerism,” he cites the following from British Yearly Meeting’s “Advices and Queries” as a guide to spiritual practice:

Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts.

I embrace this advice as a method for “mindful storytelling”—even while I chuckle at the irony that it is not rational advice but itself a form of storytelling. That is, it expresses poetically a choice to affirm certain abstract values, as well as a belief that the working out of these values is perceptible to “the heart.”

Can I simultaneously tell myself such life-giving stories and remember that I am “only” telling stories? Can I balance my faith in the “experimental truth” of such stories with an awareness that they are only true in that they point to something Real yet inexpressible?

Here is the deliberate irony in the title for this series of posts, “Am I a nontheist…?”

First, the question pretends that the “I” is something which has a discrete, objective existence and continuity, rather than a dynamic flow of interpretations of and reactions to events by an organic consciousness.

Second, the question pretends that “Nontheist,” “Pagan,” “Christian,” etc., are labels for mutually exclusive factual descriptions of reality, rather than names for categories of story…all of which I tell myself as my need to understand that dynamic flow shifts and turns on its course.

In the next part of this series, I plan to “come home” to the confession which I originally thought would end Part I.

In my private faith and practice, I am comfortable with using more or less traditional Christian “God language.” I know what this shorthand stands for in my self-talk about “experimental” experience. However, since the “coming out” crisis of my seminary year, I have been very wary of using that language publicly.

I usually explain that wariness as a means to avoid misleading or being misunderstood, since what my “Christian God stories” point to privately does not correspond with the popular understanding of “Christianity” or “God.”

However, Liz Opp has reminded me that there is a deeper motive for my resistance. I have a major difficulty with the notion of “obeying God’s will.”

(To be continued)

Note: In Wouk’s War and Remembrance, the sequel to The Winds of War, American Jewish author Aaron Jastrow, now a prisoner in Auschwitz, is arguing about life with a Gentile fellow prisoner and friend.
 
[I must paraphrase, since I have no copy available.]

The friend asks, “Why is it that you Jews always speak as if time were an illusion, and we had an eternity for discussion?”

Jastrow replies, “Because time is an illusion, and we have an eternity for discussion.”