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One of my Friendly correspondents has reminded me that, back in February, I addressed some of the concerns of the previous post from the perspective of my alter-ego Walhydra’s hopeful skepticism.
In “The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida,” Walhydra groused at length about the gullibility of “the masses,” who blithely toss their belief after every tabloid headline, urban legend, or political sound bite.
Yet she found herself wondering: “How does one move from scorn for the credulous to a working, sustaining faith for oneself?”
I thank my correspondent for sending me back to read this piece again. Becoming audience to my own writing jolted me back into the present moment for which I’ve been longing.
This morning, I got a welcome jolt from another direction.
Elsewhere I’ve referred to Antonio Damasio’s book Decartes’ Error, the first of a remarkable trilogy of books in which the author explicates the field of neurobiology’s current understanding of how human consciousness works.
In this first book, Damasio demonstrates how Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum misses the organic reality of the workings of the brain. The brain, in fact, must make direct use of the information it receives through the emotions in order to be able to do any sort of reasoning.
In other words, the West’s classic elevation of reason as higher than and independent of emotion does not match biological reality. The two must and do work in tandem.
My jolt this morning, however, comes from a different writer’s take on Descartes. In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton writes the following:
Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.” This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he “thinks.” If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being.
At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some “thing” alien to himself. And he proves that the “thing” exists. He convinces himself: “I am therefore some thing.” And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a “thing,” an “object,” like other finite and limited objects of our thought!
Contemplation, on the contrary, is the experiential grasp of reality as subjective, not so much “mine” (which would signify “belonging to the external self”) but “myself” in existential mystery. Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God.
For the contemplative there is no cogito (“I think”) and no ergo (“therefore”) but only SUM, I AM. Not in the sense of a futile assertion of our individuality as ultimately real, but in the humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power. (9-10)
Damasio might well highlight this clause: ”If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence….”
From the perspective of neurobiology, thought is an organic process of the brain which does, indeed, create the construct of a “self,” in order to map and make more efficacious use of the higher order information it stores. The self only “exists” as the transient constellation of these maps of information…and ceases when the body ceases.
For me this morning, the jolt was in the second clause of that sentence: “…then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being.”
When I do manage to center down through my own noise, what remains is a consciousness, an awareness, an awakeness. The brain simply watching and waiting.
I am not saying that this awakeness is itself God.
Yet I suspect—and Merton seems to be suggesting—that for any and all of us who experience it, this non-selfconscious awareness is the “space” wherein we come closest to That which we tend to call “God.”
I don’t want to analyze this too much right now. As Merton writes, the key is experience, not analysis.
SUM.
And so it is.
Blesséd Be,
Michael
Being of melancholic temperament, my Quaker practice is occasionally reduced to long periods of inner struggle between faith and circumstance.
These are not periods of doubting God or of doubting that I can rely upon God.
Rather, they are periods during which I have difficulty finding God’s reassuring silence in the midst of my own emotional noise. Or, sometimes, in the midst of a kind of emotional shut-downness, when prolonged distress has dulled itself into exhaustion.
As readers of my other blog, Walhydra’s Porch, will know, for the past two years my sister and brother and I have been watching our mother’s rapid decline into Alzheimer’s.
In March, my evangelical Christian angel of a sister took Mom into her family in Pensacola. Since then, my brother up in Massachusetts has been helping me weave my amateurish way through the labyrinthine process—so familiar to him—of fixing up and selling Mom’s house back in South Carolina.
All through this, my dear spouse Jim—whom Mom calls son—has grieved and held me when I cry at the drawn out loss of my lifelong best friend.
I share this family snapshot to unmask some of the mystery which has confounded me over the past several months. In order to stop myself from minimizing how central this grief is to my life right now.
Because the human habit of survival, day to day, is to minimize, to normalize, to deny how much grief affects us, to convince ourselves that—through faith or whatever—we are coping with it and going on.
Well, we do do that coping. If we have any sort of faith, we acknowledge the hurt, we honor our tears, and then we continue.
But the animal in us, the body, remembers that the loss is still part of the present.
Three weeks ago in waiting worship, I was struggling with a profound sense of both personal and global vulnerability.
Jim was flying to a professional meeting in Utah…so I feared losing him. My mother’s Alzheimer’s and my father’s age and ailments and my own mortality were all very much on my mind. And the news was full of war and genocide and housing foreclosures and market collapse and city budget cuts and library staff resignations.
I longed for the relief of getting into the present in worship…but could not. My need did not feel like vocal ministry, yet finally I had to just speak it out loud.
How vulnerable and mortal we all are. How we tend to live in this fantasy that, if we just discipline ourselves to do the right thing, we will somehow avoid loss and death…but we remain mortal. How almost every hurtful thing we do to ourselves or to each other arises from our efforts to avoid or deny this mortality.
How I needed the prayers of my meeting—for all of us.
No one else spoke during worship, yet at the rise of meeting the stories poured forth. What members or their acquaintances were struggling with. What brought them stillness or hope or, at least, perseverance. And so on.
The paradoxes of human consciousness are so convoluted. There’s a loop which can play itself out between physical and imagined experience.
I notice this: the bodily symptoms of emotion come first—waking, for example, with a dulled anxiety clutching at my sternum.
Being human, I search for a reason. Being a successful human, my mind is able to find or imagine several. These “reasons” aggravate the emotion and its physical symptoms.
It has taken me a lifetime to learn to notice this loop and to interrupt it with deep breathing or meditation or prayer. But I’m not very good at interrupting it. It’s part of my temperament, part of my basic humanness, to apply imagination to symptoms—instead of just listening.
Two weeks ago, back in waiting worship. I seem to have temporarily burned out on worrying about mortality. Now I just want to stop squirming and center down.
So, of course, I squirm for most of the hour. Relax this muscle. Release that hip joint. Drop that shoulder. Stretch out that calf. Now…. Oh, just breathe. Now….
It’s not really different than the week before. Physical squirming rather than mental, yet still the dominant notion is: “If I can just….”
An image comes of kayaking on a turbulent river, overly intent upon keeping my balance. If I don’t manage this, I’ll fall over and drown in the river.
But—the thought comes—God is the river.
Maybe we don’t get hold of self-discipline as a way of receiving grace. Maybe self-discipline is a gift of grace.
Not seeking silence, but surrendering because we are unable to become silent.
On these worst days of anxiety and grief, when I have so much practical business to do, when I have to stop and pray throughout the day just to keep going, sometimes the answer is this: “Be still. You’re just not going to get anything done today.”
This past First Day. Waiting worship once more.
For a month I’ve been reading Larry Ingle’s 1994 biography of George Fox, First Among Friends. Somewhere in the discussion of Fox’s disregard for theology—I can’t find the passage now—I came up with the phrase: “Not belief, but faith.”
Now, sitting and waiting again. Not getting quiet again.
And, halfway through, a dear Friend voices a truth which annoys my ego with its platitudinous character:
I asked for my heart to be open to the world. But for this, my heart must be broken. And when the break is healed, my heart is stronger.
Grr, I think.
Then, in a series of quick flashes, inner Light reveals some missing pieces….
Nine years ago, my heart was wholly committed to counseling and caring for what felt like an extended family of mentally ill men in the South Carolina prison system.
A new, reactionary state government shut down our four-year-old program and abandoned these men to the negligent handling of a for-profit corporation in a rural prison.
I fled my clinical career for the imagined safety of the library world…and still don’t want to be open to the street people I now face daily in this different state and city and profession.
Still not healed…and resenting, because I fear the hurt, the presence of needful people.
As this opening subsides, I glance around the meeting circle and welcome the sense of present-ness.
Ah, we’re all just sitting here together.
Just before rise of meeting, the same Friend speaks again to tell about when Mother Theresa was once asked if she prayed.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
“To whom?”
“To God.”
“And what do you ask for?”
“Oh, I don’t ask. I just listen.”
“And what does God say.”
“Oh, God just listens too.”
And so it is.
Blesséd Be,
Michael
