Expectations
How can I expect to know God, how can I expect him to do anything for me/with me/through me if I’m not first doing what I can for myself? I’m not talking about success. I’m not talking about love. I’m not even talking about the feeling of peace. I’m talking about my part in the connection. I’m talking about character. I’m talking about work ethic, focus, and persistence to something beyond the bullshit insistence and triumphantism of happiness.
I can expect the dark and the bright times. I can expect and enjoy the repeated shock of cold water jumping into a stream. But without effort on my own part, without the willingness to step/dive/fall in, I can expect nothing in contrast from what I have now.
So It Goes
Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.
- Thomas Merton, From New Seeds of Contemplation
Sharing hand-rolled cigarettes, Daniel and I considered the path of those who’ve walked from the realms of contemporary church culture like a salty insect shell they would find somewhat discomforting in making any attempt to return to their shoulders. Our stories include us in this demographic, and we consider the heavy weight of this world left behind, but not as though shoulders were made only for burdons or for looking back over. It is the gift of a contemplative soul to shed the conventional in its falsehoods but its burdon to recognize that the only homes to be found are those that embrace the broken. Contemplation that considers the honest shape of the shell shed and the new home will recognize the cracks and scrapes and holes of any home but will continue the mendings. Like a cigarette that just won’t stay lit, only a bit of fire will bring new life, and with it, new impending death. In such a repetition, I can hear Vonnegut’s chorus: “So it goes..”
The Final Harbor, The Repose of Mutual If
The mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? in what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter CXIV
Dustin and I spoke tonight of progression. By the time two Horse Brass beers apiece had fogged our proverbial mirrors, we’d referred in repetition to the journeys traveled and the search for the great peace of the soul that we may perhaps find glimpses of, but will effectively face countless books and conversations with the same ifs until we too find it in the grave. I suppose it doesn’t prevent us from scratching around in the dirt on the way down that road, hoping it could be found there among the ruts.
I told my roommate Michal last night that among my theology is included the shrug. I didn’t use that actual term but its one that had escaped me when I needed it most. (shrugs are so passive, just when you need them most..) But really, the shrug. Why demand an answer who’s availability died that same moment humanity’s innocence became a question?
I have a willingness to leave questions unanswered. Yes, theological questions. Many of the same questions on which are spent books of writing and thought, the same questions that drive communities into separate churches, the same questions that build walls between friends, the same questions that drove men like Kierkegaard into social exile.
I have a gloomy mind at times, seeing first the negative aspects in progression. But among the reasons I am ok with a shrug answer is that I believe others are reacting just the same. Dustin is an ally in this. So is Michal. The social and technological progressions we have waltzed through have left us more room to consider the steps. More room to peacefully see each others’ shrugs and to notice the silly off-color dance it creates when the collective can be ok with itself in being a little off-color, because after all, the dusty ruts are no place to find answered ifs. But they are the place to find the best we have to work with: the repose of mutual if.
Love Is Not Really One Of Man’s Powers
Notice this: that love is not really one of man’s powers. Man cannot achieve love, generate love, wield love, as he does his powers of destruction and creation. When I love someone, it is not something that I have achieved, but something that is happening through me, something that is happening to me as well as to him. To use the old soap-opera cliché seriously, it is something bigger than both of us, infinitely bigger, because wherever love enters this world, God enters.
- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
Methinks
Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
I’ve decided to reread Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick, because it been quite a few years. Probably something like ten. In many ways rereading well-written pieces of literature, fiction as well as non-fiction, is like reading them for the first time. The ideological and cognative distances I’ve traveled, at least to me, feel like oceans of both space and time. The passage above comes from the end of chapter seven, and of course I don’t remember a bit of it. I’m enjoying, and probably better understanding than the first time around, the King James style vernacular employed by Melville and the deluge of topical analogy that so compliments a first person narrative. Being one who always finds at least a smirk for the simple spiritual analogies, particularly those offered by simpler minds or characters such as Ishmael, I just had to share it. Lees, by the way, is the sediment of wine in the bottom of a curing barrel.
The Future of Christianity – Kind Of
Between all the conversations and other events that have been happening this weekend, I’ve been trying to reflect on the conversations I shared on Saturday. I was invited a few weeks ago to participate in a small gathering and discussion within walking distance of my home (gotta love Portland) that was called “The Future of Christianity”. In reality the title didn’t seem to fit the discussion but I believe the title was taken from a short video we watched to spawn discussion points. The video is a discussion primarily between two philosopher/theologians who I’m actually somewhat familiar with, though have had little more time in the past than to skim a book or two. The men in the video were Ken Wilbur and Thomas Keating, both very brilliant in their individual, yet complimentary ways.
The video talked much about Wilbur’s integral theory of consciousness, which is basically a way of describing paradigms in relation to spirituality and culture. There’s a certain incremental spectrum he uses for illustration which is rather inconsequential to my thoughts here other than to say the idea raises eyebrows (among the company in attendance) over its linear nature. In other words, it suggest a linear progression of what we commonly might think of as enlightenment, and doesn’t seem to offer room for the particular values in the categorizations it places at its lower levels. Some of these devalued categories include things like mysticism and ethnocentrism. Its true that these exhibit negative qualities in many contexts but to place them linearly as inferior values seems arrogant and rash.
Anyway, my point is not to explain the theories. (Which by the way really are rather interesting and aptly named by Wilbur in one of his books, A Theory Of Everything. Quite the title huh?) What struck me most about the day was the connections shared between participants, which in a community like this, seems to be as intentional as the discussion itself. Not only was I able to attend with two close friends, but upon arrival, I discovered that the event was something much different from the emergent church exercise I had the impression it would be. Not only did the age range have a great span but so did the particular positions held within the faiths. Not only were there representatives from many Christian denominations but there were also present (intentionally included) people from the Jewish and Islamic faiths.
Bringing together people of many faiths offers differing perspectives which is invaluable in itself and turns the imagined world of different people into a real one. At its core, the purpose of the discussion was simply discussion and to find familiarity and common ground between a diversity of cultures. At the discussion it often carried the name, the commonality of virtue. There was no problem to fix or solution to compromise on. It was simply to understand and share mutual existence. That is something most of us are good at talking about but not so good at finding in reality. In reflecting on the experience with my friend Joel, we realized that really, this was a unique moment in time, and a surreal and blessed one at that.
I’m still processing the experience even now, even beyond the great conversations we shared among beautiful souls during the day. I posted a series of quotables to my twitter throughout the event, which spawned a bit of conversation on my facebook in particular. I’d like to expand some more on some of those thoughts, particularly ones by Thomas Keating as well as the event organizer, Chuck Cooper, but will save those for a later post.
Spite and Absurdity
The truth and absurdity behind the world of the spiritual and of organized religion, to me, can not be stated plainly. It is no less, absurd. Only in Buechner have I found a weaving of words close enough to bring me to tears (a requisite for truth).
And as for the king of the kingdom himself, whoever would recognize him? He has no form or comeliness. His clothes are what he picked up at a rummage sale. He hasn’t shaved for weeks. He smells of mortality. We have romanticized his raggedness so long that we can catch echoes only of the way it must have scandalized his time in the horrified question of the Baptist’s disciples, “Are you he who is come?”; in Pilate’s “Are you the king of the Jews?” You with the pants that don’t fit and a split lip; in the black comedy of the sign they nailed over his head where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh.
But the whole point of the [Gospel as fairy tale] is, of course, that he is the king in spite of everything.- from Telling The Truth
Not only was it scandalous then, it is scandalous now. To find truth, I must turn expectation upside down.
comma,
The artist knows only too well, that infinite abyss, out of which the parable arises. As does the revolutionary and the poet, in their struggles to speak of that which is born within, and yet which remains beyond words.
~ Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic
There Exists Decadence
I prefer to stay on the humble and complicit side of judgement or macro-diagnosis of the human march of tragedy. This fellow, Douglas Knight, simply states it so plainly, however, that I would feel the disservice in not reposting his remarks.
When wealth becomes the end, … there exists economic decadence. … When power becomes the end, you have political decadence; When pleasure becomes the end, you have moral decadence; and when emotions become the end, you have psychological decadence.
Perhaps the leading cause of this sort of statement going misunderstood or not even considered is the magnitude of brokenness. It hides in every crack and corner, under every rock, and in every fold of our understanding. I described recently to a friend, Mr. Wendell Berry’s explanation of the sacrifice of fulfillment for the sake of indulgence. This quote, and Mr. Knight’s short post are a reiteration of the oblivious movements of a culture on its way down the pipes. Read the rest of his article.
Breaks my heart, but we participate in the foolery if we expect life to its fullest as we imagine it.
Silence, Love, Frederick Buechner.
Mr. Frederick Buechner is a recent discovery for me, though so beautiful and somehow familiar, has already found his way to the top of both my heart and my reading list. These are two of his most touching passages I’ve recently come upon.
The first is a passage I had the fortunate coincidence to read on an early morning commute through the Cascade Mountains and the Columbia River Gorge to work as I listened to the magic of Sigur Ros. It was one of those moments where it seems Time had cleverly lined moments up to coincide, leaving me in almost bewildered sensual amazement, if I were to for the moment include that unnameable embrace of ones heart by a bit of poetic writing as a member of the senses. Read this passage noting that his full explanation of silence is one that would require considerably more quotation but in a short, inadequate nutshell, his idea of silence seems to me to have much to do with the remarkably personal and indescribable nature of the matter and the general tragedy of human existence.
Before the gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it — meaninglessness or meaningful, absurd, beautiful — but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery. The silence of Jesus in answer to Pilate’s question about truth seems such a presenting as does also in a way the silence of the television news with the sound turned off — the real news is what we see and feel, not what Walter Cronkite tells us — or the silence the Psalmist means when he says, “Be silent and know that I am God.” In each case it is a silence that demands to be heard because it is a presented silence, and [one] must somehow himself present this silence and mystery of truth by speaking what he feels, not what he ought to say, by speaking forth not only the light and hope of it but the darkness as well, all of it, because the Gospel has to do with all of these.
»» From Telling The Truth
This second is one as read to me by a certain beautiful soul from Atlanta. Not only does it sail the four seas of love in its vastness in four short lines, but it reveals just as quickly Buechner’s genius both in poetic brevity and in Christian thought.
The love for equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.
The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.
The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.
»» From The Magnificent Defeat
Pax, my friends, and thank you, universe, for giving us Mr. Buechner.
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