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Privacy: Privacy, Away from crowds, How you appear to complete strangers, Even the Desert Fathers dealt with this, Things have meaning inherently, Riding in a cab, The "failure" of Buddhism, Joy Division, Buddha, Jesus, A comment on a blog

Privacy

The value of privacy is immense, and beautiful in its anonymity.
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Away from crowds

The most meaningful moments of my own life, the ones filled with the most love or revelation, the most intimacy and intensity, have been quiet moments far away from crowds, and usually only shared with one or two people, or when entirely alone—moments no less powerful because of their anonymity, moments no less powerful just because hardly anyone will ever know about them.
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How you appear to complete strangers

When the entire outside world is geared toward telling you all the things you need and all the things you need to do—and all this only so others will see you doing or eating or listening or driving or seeing these things, and when the greatest and supreme value is placed on how you appear to complete strangers, or even to those you may be close to (who are just trying to impress you too, envy being the goal all around)—is this the best we can do?
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Even the Desert Fathers dealt with this

Even the Desert Fathers dealt with this. Even those devoted to a completely isolated (not to mention religious) life, even those who knew the dangers of living the world and being obsessed with reputation and identity—even they dealt with this.

John Cassian, a monk who went about the monasteries in the fourth century Egyptian desert, says as much in his Institutes:

Even when a person is staying in the desert or in his cell it causes him to picture himself going around to different people’s homes and monasteries and obtaining the conversion of the many who have been inspired by his imaginary exhortations. (JCI, 246)
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Things have meaning inherently

Mircea Eliade tells this story at the start of his History of Religious Ideas, as a kind of immediate humility to his subject:

Reichel Dolmatoff has given a detailed description of a contemporary (1966) burial of a girl among the Kogi Indians, a tribe speaking the Chibcha language and inhabiting the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria in Colombia. After choosing the site for the grave, the shaman (máma) performs a series of ritual gestures and declares: “Here is the village of Death; here is the ceremonial house of Death; here is the womb. I will open the house. The house is shut, and I will open it.” After this he announces, “The house is open,” shows the men the place where they are to dig the grave, and withdraws. The dead girl is wrapped in white cloth, and her father sews the shroud. During all this time her mother and grandmother chant a slow, almost wordless song. Small green stones, shells of shellfish, and the shell of a gastropod are placed in the bottom of the grave. Then the shaman tries to lift the body, giving the impression that it is too heavy; he does not succeed until the ninth attempt. The body is laid with its head toward the East, and “the house is closed,” that is, the excavation is filled up. Other ritual movements around the grave follow, and finally all withdraw. The ceremony has continued for two hours.

As Reichel Dolmatoff observes, a future archeologist, excavating the grave, will find only a skeleton with its head toward the East and some stones and shells. The rites, and especially the implied religious ideology, are no longer recoverable on the basis of these remains. (HRI1, 11-12)

While, for the world of scholarship and knowledge, “the implied religious ideology” and so much else will have been “lost” to future excavators, it’s important to say that the rite of the dead was inherently meaningful, even though to the wider world it remains fairly unknown.

And just because we do have a record of what they did and said still adds nothing to what the ceremony meant to them, or the primary purpose of it. This rite of the dead would still retain its meaning even if no one other than the Kogi ever knew about it.

So it is with all things. The establishment of meaning defies all our usual notions of what makes something important (its notoriety, its power, its place in a tradition, all the baggage that is really trivia and statistics). Things have meaning inherently.
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Riding in a cab

Riding in a cab recently, rows of apartment buildings crowded up on either side of me. And up on a fire escape, behind the vertical bars covering one window, a baby barely able to walk appeared from behind a curtain. A moment later I was off down the street.

But it struck me that the child had been born to a woman, and that woman may have been married or not, the baby may have been planned or an accident, the baby may have been long looked-forward to by the woman’s coworkers or family (or she may have been entirely alone the whole time); it struck me the baby was the product of two human beings that had been born into the world and probably gone to gradeschool and high school and may or may not have had any college, parents who either knew what they wanted to be from the age of nine or only discovered their real purpose around thirty or so. And further. And this child was only about to go through all of that himself.

In this one window on this one street in this one neighborhood, a baby barely able to walk was beginning its life.

A catalogue like this could go on and on, all the possibilities, all the joys, all the difficulties, everything that life is. But that’s the idea. Because then I saw every window and imagined the same story, I saw every car and imagined the same story.

None of this is new, the realization that millions of lives just like ours are always beginning, going on, developing, or ending—and this is going on every day, every hour, everywhere. Everywhere people are living their lives.

It’s a shame, though, that some people take the sheer number of experiences, the incredible and uncountable amount of individual lives, as a reason to say how meaningless life is. The same is said of the entire planet, only one of billions in all of space—which is supposed to make all life on earth pretty pointless.

But why is that the conclusion to draw? Why does variety yield less and less meaning? Why does the breathtaking thought that billions of people are going to sleep and waking, doing a billion different and individual things—why does this make our own experience, or those of others, mean less and less?

To simply state that someone who’s lived a human life dies everyday, and that their passing fills a few dozen other human beings with every range of emotions—is this meaningless? The same can be said about marriage, birth, going to work, starting school, buying a pair of shoes, moving, breathing.

Is it too much to say that every habit and way of living from day-to-day that I find myself in (spending time with my wife, my cat, reading, writing, watching movies, sleeping, eating) exists just as strongly in nearly everyone else that’s alive, and that all of these habits are deeply personal and idiosyncratic and individual, and even beautiful, and in some cases destructive—is it too much to bow and admit to the immensity of all this meaning?
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The “failure” of Buddhism

I read recently in a survey of world history about the “failure” of Buddhism to take hold in India the same way Hinduism had.

I had to wonder how it could be said that a religion could “fail.”

Were the actual Buddhists around during this “failure”—were they “failing”? As they went about being Buddhists, were they aware that their religion was “failing”? And in the midst of meditation were they dragged down by a sense of “failure”?

I understand what was meant historically, but in the prime and most meaningful moments of life—creation, religious belief, whatever it is—“what was meant historically” is of little value.
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Joy Division, the Buddha, Jesus

Bernard Sumner said of his fellow Joy Division bandmate Ian Curtis:

But also, at his flat, he had these enormous speakers, really eccentric sounding, they were like five foot by four foot perforated metal panels, and he had a chair, and he would sit right in between these two speakers, and his sound would sound great on these speakers—but no one else in the world had those speakers. He was designing music that only sounded good on those speakers.

At first I thought this was tragic, that no one would ever hear his music the way he did. But then I realized some of the finest moments are these ones where the creation is happening, and nobody knows about it, where it’s still only known to the artist. Whatever joy or fulfillment or knowledge or wisdom comes from a work of art, it only exists because of the intense moment in which it was created.

The teachings of the Buddha or of Jesus, while they later became of immense significance to billions of people, and added so much to the course of history—at the moment these teachings were being uttered, that future significance was nothing, and the value of what was said emerged from that immediate moment when those words came, when those realizations came, and whether they would’ve any significance for the world or the future at all was irrelevant. The significance and relevance of the words were already there. They were inherently important, regardless if they ever caught on to some hypothetical Future World Religion.

It is only from intense and personal and private moments that anything public can ever emerge.
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A comment on a blog

I left a comment on a blog one time. The author was filled with the usual cynicism and irony, the kind of stuff that is taken to be “real” and “genuine” simply because it admires itself for believing the world to be an unredeemable shithole.

He was also a writer not nearly as successful as he wanted to be, and so he was jealous of everyone who was successful—nearly all of whom, he was sure, were worse writers than him.

So I left a comment wondering why he didn’t just give up writing stuff like that, since all he was doing was whining and complaining in ways every writer does; and I said he’d save time if he stopped considering himself “underground” or anything else and just focused on writing, and that if he put stock in success or attention at all, he would always be disappointed, and always find some other writer worth hating.

And the strangest thing happened. Someone else left a comment who accused me of being an internet “troll”—something I had to look up, since I’d never heard of it.

So that the strange ideas of not putting our happy or unhappy mood in the hands of anyone or anything, of not living only to seek attention or being eternally enraged at those who’re succeeding at grabbing everyone’s attention—these notions were so unbelievable they were taken to be a prank, or something intentionally divisive.
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Living in the World: It seems to make sense, Your own funeral, Easy criticism, Technology is no demon, You don't need this, Two scientists on religion, A homeless man, Live that way, A celebrity, Nothing to talk about, That's sad, Should I be laughing at this?, Van Gogh's brother, No need to write anymore, The temptation of the present moment, Tony Blair, Judging the nomads, David Hume, Antiquated, God and atrocity

It seems to make sense

It seems to make sense: the less you see, the more what you see will mean to you; the less you speak, the more weight what you say will have; the less you hear, the more you can really focus on what you do hear; the less you do, the deeper what you engage in will actually be; and even the less you know, the more important will be the things you do know, or want to know.

Silence and focus are of unquestionable value, and the permanence of the things they yield are too.
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Your own funeral

The common wish of wondering who would come to your funeral seems one of the worst things.

It’s awful how our need for attention won’t even let us go after our imagined death.
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Easy criticism

There’s no easier job that criticizing popular culture. I used to love doing it.

I used to believe our conceptions of “tradition” and “age” were so skewed, and was sad that fifty years of rock music, or a hundred years of sports statistics, or ten years of reality TV, or a long-running sitcom, all constituted “a long time.”

I also used to be sad to say I wasn’t much for modern art, and criticized the last fifty years (or most of the last hundred) of most painting and architecture.

But, at one point in time, the wisest things ever said and the most beautiful things ever built or painted or composed—these were all created less than a year ago.

The amount of time something has been around means nothing. All that matters is the amount of eternity it conveys.

Obsessing over any “tradition” at all is to waste time with classification.

And it seems a great waste of time to disparage “the last one hundred years” of anything, when there’s so many thousands behind it, much of which conveys a good deal of eternity to me.

Am I not better off running to those things that fill me rather than criticizing those things that don’t?
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Technology is no demon

Technology is no demon. Neither is money. Only our habits and expectations are.
It was wonderful to read speculations about when humans first discovered how to make and utilize fire since now, two things humans were previously not able to generate themselves (heat and light) could be available anywhere and whenever they wanted.

Yet even here, the author said, there were probably those who were used to the life when these new things weren’t possible.

Imagine people fondly wishing for the time when we didn’t have to deal with fire, and the same can be said for every innovation straight down to the iPhone.
Yet none of this is inherently awful. As Jesus says in Mark 7:18-23:

“Do you not understand either? Can you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot make him unclean, because it does not go into his heart but through his stomach and passes out into the sewer?” (Thus he pronounced all foods clean.) And he went on, “It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean. For it is from within, from men’s hearts, that evil intentions emerge; fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and make a man unclean.” (JB)

There’s no dogma here—no mention of Christ’s divinity, or of God even, or of watching out for apocalypse where someone will come down and judge you. You judge yourself. You are responsible for yourself. No amount of poison or ugliness or cruelty you witness can make you the same way unless you let it. And no amount of decency and forgiveness or love you witness can make you the same way, either.

As the Buddha said, “Be lamps unto yourselves.”
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You don’t need this

I once heard a series of interviews with an aging scholar. He was about eighty years-old, and still extremely enthusiastic about the subject he’d dedicated his life to. From the accounts I’ve read, anywhere between twenty-four and forty hours of interviews were recorded with him, only a fraction of which were broadcast on TV.

One of the questions posed to him was to simply ask why anyone should care about his area of expertise—“What does it have to do with my life?” And while he does go on to say that the proper introduction to the subject would certainly make most people interested, and maybe even benefit their lives, his first answer is amazing: “Well, my first answer would be: go on, live your life, it’s a good life, you don’t need this.”

We should all be so humble with whatever interest or careers we dedicate our lives to, with whatever we fill our lives with. We should all be so enthusiastic and humble at the same time.
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Two scientists on religion

A prominent scientist, writing about the decline of religion in America, told a story.

While still in school, a Jewish scientist and teacher he had, aware of the scientist being an atheist, suggested it was better for human beings to worship God—otherwise, they could end up worshipping anything (political figures, etc.).

The scientist, looking back in the incident, said the world would be better if we didn’t worship anything.

The problem is that both knew how to make the world better—if only everyone else believed what they did.

Why couldn’t each leave the other alone to live as they wanted?
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A homeless man

At a subway stop one morning I saw a circle of policeman looking down at a homeless man on his back, rolling around, a horrible look on his face. I felt terrible seeing it, and it was even more terrible realizing (by how the policeman stood there) how common this must be.

But what was the use of my only feeling sorry for him? What’s the use of my sympathy since I barely saw him for a second, from then on went about my day, and only found time to even write about him months later?

What’s the use of anyone’s sympathy for human pain and suffering and humiliation if it only yields a painful memory for the observer, and a few paragraphs of insufficient words?

What does it matter how I felt about him?

Perhaps sympathy is just better than cynicism, better than indifference, better than being filled with a feeling of amusement.
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Live that way

I don’t understand why one of the first things a celebrity just out of rehab decides to do is appear half-naked on the cover of a magazine to describe their troubles.

I don’t understand the kind of life that demands this, and why anyone would want to live that way.
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A celebrity

At a subway stop one morning I saw an ad for a new sitcom. The star of the show wore a white dress, and she was leaning forward and laughing. Except, someone had blacked out a few of her teeth and put a bubble next to her head, making her say something horrible.

I laughed when I saw it. But why?

I listen to people who talk about celebrities and pile actual hatred on them. What does this mean to be given such easy targets to ridicule and hate and mock, to have examples of living train-wrecks put before us every day, and to feel glee at the dumb decisions they’re making again and again?
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Nothing to talk about

In a strange way too it seems that if gossip about famous people were for one day not allowed—in print, online, on TV, or talking between people—there would be very little for most people to actually talk about.
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That’s sad

A woman came into my work once. She obviously had something wrong with her. She said someone was following her, that people kept asking her how to use the copiers, and that we needed to destroy the passport photos of someone else we’d just taken, since she was sure part of her face had gotten into them.

The woman was obviously sick—but why was my only recourse to stand in the back and laugh quietly and shake my head as my manager tried to deal with it? Why was her situation funny at all?

Why was that my reaction, while when I told someone else about it her reaction was, “My God, that’s sad.” Why didn’t I think it was sad too?
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Should I be laughing at this?

It isn’t hard to see people everyday who’re pissed off, who’re late and so who’re angry and rushing around, and irritated.

It isn’t hard to come across people at work, or customers, who’re so easily agitated and annoyed you can set your watch to them blowing up at any moment, running around, swearing, frantically dialing on their cellphone, deliriously waving for a cab, or running from a train, or totally visibly flustered and beside themselves at having missed the train, or done something wrong, or whatever it is.

Or it’s simply the customer who’s dissatisfied, and starts a scene at the cash register, their voice slowly rising.

And there’s always someone like me behind the counter, or behind that person in line, smiling, and even snickering inside at this person who’s lost it. But should I be laughing at this? Should the ease with which so many people lose their tempers, and the frequency with which they begin raging around high-strung and pissed-off—is this really all that amusing?

What’s funny about someone so self-absorbed they can’t get off their phone when it’s their turn in line? What’s funny about rude people? What’s funny about millions of self-absorbed people doing whatever they can to get noticed, using whatever chance they have for some power-trip to complain, or to plan poorly and to suddenly be rushing around frustrated? What’s funny about the employee who has nothing else to talk about except how they told somebody off, and don’t they deserve it? What’s funny about the general run of human frustration and unhappiness?
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Van Gogh’s brother

I have to always remember that Van Gogh’s paintings—the very materials used to make them, the time he was given to make them, the space he lived in while making them—would simply not have existed without his brother subsidizing his entire life.

And I have to always remember that his brother wouldn’t have been able to do this had he not been an art dealer in Paris, had he not had to deal with all those “messy” things I want to avoid with all my energy—the buying public, the rivalries between everybody, living so much in the world.
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No need to write anymore

Sometimes, in the middle of reading a religious text or poem that’s really tremendous, I think what a waste and distraction my own writing probably is, and I think I could just as well read and re-read these few things for the rest of my life, and this would be enough. No need to write anymore.

And my next thought is always to wonder what everyone who’s ever known me (and who inevitably knew me as “a writer”) would think—from my classmates in seventh and eighth grade, in high school and college, all my friends from then till now, all my relatives, all the people who may’ve read something of mine at some point, every person I’ve ever worked with—what would they think?

(And why is it that, given the choice of thinking people will or won’t ever wonder “what happened” to me—why do I always assume they will?)

This perpetual quest for the attention and approval of others is so all-pervading I can’t even get away from it as I write about it. I’ve come a long way from being the sadly defiant fellow who had to blast whatever strange music from his car while driving through his college campus ten years ago—but I haven’t gone nearly far enough.
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The temptation of the present moment

The present moment is a distraction and temptation.

I think of when baseball is in the offseason (but could easily think of a dozen other similar things), and how easy it is to get wrapped up in who will or won’t get traded, so that the morning paper is covered in phrases of such despair or glee that someone’s coming back, or they aren’t, or the owners will be talking to them soon, or they’re refusing to talk, or that while it’s been “reported” that they’re talking, the players themselves (or their agents) deny this entirely.

What the use of knowing and following this?
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Tony Blair

My wife and I watched a documentary on Tony Blair recently, and they were talking about his charisma and ability to connect with people of all kinds, of every class.

And someone involved with his campaign had a great time relating an anecdote about him, how when he visited rich people he would say in a stump speech that his favorite food was such-and-such, and while visiting with the more working-class people, suddenly his favorite food would be something else.

And the guy laughed, and so did my wife and I—it seemed cute, it’s just what politicians have to do—but the more I thought about it, it didn’t seem funny at all, or cute—it just seemed like a lie.
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Judging the nomads

When describing the change humanity made from a nomadic way of life to that of settled agriculture and animal husbandry, Jacob Bronowski judges into worthlessness a modern group of nomads, the Bakhitiari:

It is not possible in the nomad life to make things that will not be needed for several weeks. They could not be carried, and in fact the Bakhtiari do not know how to make them. If they need metal pots, they barter them from settled peoples or from a caste of gipsy workers who specialize in metals. A nail, a stirrup, a toy, or a child’s bell is something that is traded from outside the tribe. The Bakhtiari life is too narrow to have time or skill for specialisation. There is no room for innovation, because there is not time, on the move, between evening and morning, coming and going all their lives, to develop a new device or a new thought—not even a new tune. The only habits that survive are the old habits. The only ambition of the son is to be life the father.... Nothing in their lives is new. And nothing is memorable.

It’s worth making the point (it’s worth stating the facts) that so many of the things that became “civilization” (settled dwellings, specialized occupations, etc.) only came about when people stopped roaming around—but to say it’s inherently and obviously better than roaming around isn’t convincing. Couldn’t I say there isn’t much difference between the Bhaktiari’s habits on the one hand, and the endless round my wife and I make, waking in the morning at 5:30, catching the train by 7:30, working for eight hours and getting home by 8pm?

But I’d also say that within our weekly round a million things have a way of happening—the same time but a different day, the same train but a different day, the same city and the same streets just a different day. And if tangible memories and real meaning can exist for my wife and I out of this repeating round, the same is easily possible for some nomads. Or anybody at all.
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David Hume

In a book on the history of slavery, I found a quote from David Hume, from 1748:

I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white…. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences…. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men.

I don’t know why it’s assumed that what makes us “civilized” and “superior” to everyone else are our “manufactures,” our “arts,” our “sciences.”

Nevermind how we treat each other, nevermind how we can’t justify our own way of life except by condemning everyone else’s—no, it’s whether we have arts, sciences, and buildings.

Why can’t we just leave other people alone?

And is the best use of our arts and sciences and industry really to just hold our noses a little higher?
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Antiquated

Something I always try to keep in mind is how antiquated and backward even the 1950s appear, when old TV clips are shown; or life near the turn of the twentieth century, how strange it seems to think about.

And then I remind myself that 2075 will look back at 2009 with the same bizarre arrogance, the same funny eye.
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God and atrocity

Sometimes I think there’s really nothing worth contemplating or reading or learning about besides God and atrocity.

It makes perfect sense to read something like “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by its Perpetrators and Bystanders, where we read from a journal of Dr. Kremer, who is at Auschwitz:

18 October 1942

Attended 11th Sonderaktion (Dutch) in cold wet weather this morning, Sunday. Horrible scenes with three naked women who begged us for their lives. (264)

It’s something to see real inhumanity like this, one that admits with us that what’s going on are “horrible scenes,” but still sees them as necessary and right; and even more to see the brief entry for the week after:

25 October 1942

Today, Sunday, wonderful autumn weather, went on bike tour to Budy via Roisko. Wilhelmy back from his trip to Croatia (plum brandy). (264)

It makes perfect sense that I can go from reading that to John Cassian’s Conferences, where it says

This will be the case when every love, every desire, every effort, every undertaking, every thought of ours, everything that we live, that we speak, that we breathe, will be God, and when that unity which the Father now has with the Son and which the Son has with the Father will be carried over into our understanding and our mind, so that, just as he loves us with a sincere and pure and indissoluble love, we too may be joined to him with a perpetual and inseparable love and so united with him that whatever we breathe, whatever we understand, whatever we speak, may be God. (JCC, 375-6)

I don’t think either of these cancels the other out, and I think both need to be stared at directly. I don’t think reading any religious text can cancel out eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust, or vice-versa. Some kind of flowery religiosity can’t makes roses of brutality and nor can brutality makes a mockery or sham of religion.

(If anything, atrocity moves us beyond the notion of God as a Super Parent and suggests how demanding real faith might be, where we can no longer ask how God “allows” such things, whatever they are.)

I need to be swung between both poles, from Love your neighbor as yourself, to the sudden eruption of neighbors who, realizing no one is going to stop them, can herd many of their neighbors into a square and beat them to death one by one with crowbars, while other neighbors stand around and cheer.

Immersed in both of these—the image of Jesus taking a child into his arms and saying that of such is the Kingdom of God, and that we would do well to be like children; and the image from all over history, the ease with which children and so many others have been murdered and exploited—I need to see both of these, and write about them if I can.
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Faith: Beautifully impractical, No arrogance, No escape from anguish or doubt, I have faith in God because I have faith in God, Doubting Thomas, and the disciples, Thomas Merton on faith, Faith is enough, God's consistent presence, Faith in prayer, Faith in marriage
 

Beautifully impractical

Think of how many debates would never begin, how many technical and theological and specialized religious books would never be written, and how many worried minds would be at ease simply praying or doing some actual good, if the notion of faith were taken seriously, and its impracticality and weakness and inability to be proven or supported were embraced.
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No arrogance

The opening of the Book of Genesis (among other creation stories) has God organizing the waters of chaos and making sense in the world.

But we’re still swimming in those waters, and whatever knowledge or wisdom or facts we can gather are at best glimmers, and little else.

Many of these glimmers are great, but never so great as to grant us arrogance about anything.
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No escape from anguish or doubt

On accepting the way the world is, and the value of finding happiness and meaning not in the eradication of all the ugliness and cruelty there is, but in spite of it, Thomas Merton says this:

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. (TMNC, 27-8)

If even contemplation, something so outwardly quiet, isolating, something that is the inward awareness and union with God—if even contemplation brings anguish and doubt and all else, how can we hope not to find anguish and doubt outside ourselves?

A Polish priest, Michael Kozal, knew this well enough as he and others still celebrated mass while imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps. Even there he said God will not abandon us.
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I have faith in God because I have faith in God

The more I read and hear people talk about religion, the more I wonder just what they really consider faith to be.

For me, there’s nothing to prove. I have faith in God because I have faith in God.

I’m baffled at anyone’s need to scientifically prove anything about God at all, or Creation. I’m baffled and wonder what kind of flimsy faith people must have, if a theory or statement by a scientist can shake them at all, or make them worried if their children learn about it in school.

Why does anything pertaining to religion or faith have to be proven, why does any devout religious person feel threatened at all by “attacks” made on their faith? How can you “attack” something that has no business being given such a strong logical or scientific foundation that is can be attacked in the first place?

Someone saw me reading at work recently, which prompted them to ask another coworker if she went to church. The girl shook her head no and said, “It doesn’t add up.” I smiled when I heard it. She was right! It doesn’t add up. And why should it? What would the use be, worshipping a math problem?

How wonderful a thing it is to realize, as I pray, or write poems, or as I wonder aloud here about God, that no historic discovery from the Ancient Near East or India or China, that no book written for or against the religions that originated there or anywhere, that no person or novel or poem or movie or anything that might “prove this” or “criticize that”—how wonderful to realize that none of it can have one ounce of bearing on my faith in God.
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Doubting Thomas, and the disciples

Christians always want to throw Jesus’ words to Thomas at unbelievers—“Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” (John 20:29) Yet it’s even more powerfully thrown back by their own actions, many of them yelling at the world Look what I’ve seen! So why don’t you believe?

Until now I’ve never understood the disciples’ apparent cluelessness in the gospels, never really getting what Jesus was doing even after witnessing a miracle. They’re constantly confused, always bickering among themselves, always questioning Jesus about what’s going on. But it makes more sense to me now; in a way these guys have more faith simply by their bewildered and wonderfully human ignorance. They’re desperate and searching, not superior or arrogant at all.

They aren’t filled yet with the self-righteousness of knowing just how saved they are, and are doing just fine with faith.
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Thomas Merton on faith

Thomas Merton says this about faith:

The unknown remains unknown. It is still a mystery, for it cannot cease to be one. The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together in a living whole, in which we are more and more able to transcend the limitations of our external self. […] This, to my mind, is the crucially important aspect of faith which is too often ignored today. Faith is not just conformity, it is life. […] (TMNC, 136, 137)

Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days—until you fold up and collapse into despair. […]

But true faith must be able to go on even when everything else is taken away from us. Only a humble man is able to accept faith on these terms, so completely without reservation that he is glad of it in its pure state, and welcomes it happily even when nothing else comes with it, and when everything else is taken away. […] (TMNC, 186-87)

It should be the great pride and strength of every Catholic that we have no ready, ten-minute, brisk, chatty answer to the question of what we believe, except in the words of the Apostle’s Creed which are not really comprehensible to scientists anyway. It should be our greatest strength that we don’t have, on the end of our tongues, a brief and pithy rationalization for the structure and purpose of the whole universe, only a statement that, to a scientist, is a scandal: an article of faith. God created the world and everything in it for Himself, and the heavens proclaim His glory. It should be our greatest strength that we don’t have any rationalization to explain the war “scientifically” and have no “scientific” solution to all our economic problems. (TMJ1, 226-7)
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Faith is enough

So many of the wisest and most beautiful religious texts end up qualifying their assertions in the strangest ways. Here’s something from Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam:

But alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now.
Alas for you who have your fill now: you shall go hungry.
Alas for you who laugh now; you shall mourn and weep. (JB, Luke 6:24-5)

For the person who shows respect
          And always reveres worthy people,
Four things increase:
          Life span, beauty, happiness, and strength. (DF, 29. Dhammapada 8:109)

Favour affects them not,
Nor disfavour,
Neither advantage
No injury,
Neither honour
Nor dishonour.
Thus those who know are honored in the world. (TTCR, 143. Dao De Jing #56)

Here is a Parable
Of the Garden which
The righteous are promised:
In it are rivers
Of water incorruptible;
Rivers of milk
Of which the taste
Never changes; rivers
Of Wine, a joy
To those who drink;
And rivers of honey
Pure and clear. In it
There are for them
All kinds of fruits;
And Grace from their Lord.
Can those in such Bliss
Be compared to such as
Shall dwell forever
In the Fire, and be given,
To drink, boiling water,
So that it cuts up
Their bowels to pieces?
(QAYA, 1318-9. Quran, 47:15.)

Why should it matter whether those who have a lot now will go hungry in the future, or why those who laugh now will mourn and weep later? (Shouldn’t we be loving our enemies here?)

And why does living decently and rightly require any reward at all, let alone the specifics of “life span, beauty, happiness, and strength”? (Even stranger is the Buddha’s too-easy assurance that “Like fine dust thrown against the wind,/Evil comes back to the fool/Who harms a person who is/Innocent, pure, and unblemished. (DF, 33. 9:125)

Why can’t the stanza from the Dao De Jing simply sit without that last line?

Why are we so weak that we need this reassurance, or the guarantee from Allah that all the people who scoff at us now will be below us at the Resurrection?

Why do we need to be told we will be “honored in the world” in order to be decent, or grounded, or at peace?

Who needs something as flimsy as "honor" from anybody, when they have something as tremendous as faith? What kind of faith demands this kind of proof, and these kinds of signs?
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God’s consistent presence

God, I like to think, is more like a spouse than a parent.

I don’t expect “protection” from my wife, I don’t expect her to rid me of all my fears and provide me with some impenetrable shell that will keep me safe from the awful world; rather I expect—have faith—in her consistent presence, in her consistent companionship, in always knowing that she is there.

And the same from God.
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Faith in prayer

Years ago, whenever I would try to pray anything beyond a Thank You to God, what stopped me was the intruding voice behind my own that said what I was doing was ridiculous and stupid—or it would simply be a litany of swear words that broke me from concentrating, and had me say to myself I can’t pray while THIS is also running in the back of my head!

But recently it hit me what faith really is. Faith isn’t perfect concentration, where none of those other layers intrude; faith is dirty and muddied up, and faith begs that I do the best I can to pray deeply, and continue doing so, no matter when or if or for how long those other layers crop up.

Faith is hoping that, if there is a God listening, he’ll understand and only take the first layer of what I’m saying, and have some sympathy with the struggle.
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Faith in marriage

Even marriage—even before my wife and I got married, even the priest himself said, “You’re doing this on faith. You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

The very man who was going to consecrate us and our love for the rest of our lives told us that even that vow was to be taken on faith.

Again it’s back to faith, and the reality that life isn’t existing amid certainty or sureness or perfect clarity, but subtly and strongly holding perhaps a half-dozen or more grounding beliefs sacred, and having faith in them, and learning just how to live in a world that wants very little to do with the ambiguity of such a stance, a world that is constantly saying that either one thing is the truth, or another is, or that nothing means anything at all.
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Justice: Bearable, livable, meaningful, The intersection, 2 Timothy 3:12

 

Bearable, livable, meaningful

I wish I could believe in divine justice, or even karma, but even that’s too easy. Things are so much messier than that, and I don’t think it’s the role of religion or of God to clear things up, but to make the mess bearable, livable, meaningful.
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The intersection

This situation comes to mind: at a four-way intersection cars in the turn lane have the green light, and are making their way; but even as the light turns yellow, and then red, people keep turning, so that for about ten seconds two or three cars are left in the middle of the intersection before the cars that now have the green light can go.

This is irresponsible, even dangerous—but what can the responsible and safe drivers do? They can’t reverse what’s happened, and they don’t have the right to drive through the offending cars. What’s to be done? They simply have to deal with it.

And in a way this a majority of our lives, others cutting us off or supposedly slighting us or doing whatever it is—but the responsibility, in the face of even the smallest act of inhumanity or selfishness, falls on us (whoever we are, the supposedly selfless and humane ones!) to react in a way where our decency is kept intact.

It’s not fair or just (to suggest Job’s terminology), but the more I think about it, the more our Biblical accent on justice seems to do us great harm. We spend all our time meting out justice and not enough wondering what the experience has done to us. Much better to observe and discipline our own reactions to unfairness first, and worry about the offending person later.

Some kind of peace must be found within, regardless of how the outside world reacts (or doesn’t react) to what they’ve done. Those startling first words of The Dhammapada are it: “Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think.”
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2 Timothy 3:12

2 Timothy 3:12 says, “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” (NIV)

What does this say about fairness or justice? How is it fair that those who want to “live of godly life”—apparently what God wants us to do!—should be persecuted as a result?

But why is fairness or justice a concern at all?

Why should we ever expect the terror and hardships of life to go away just because we’ve found God?

Why should we ever assume that “peace” is the eradication of temptation or difficulty, when it’s really only the ability to deal decently with every hard thing that happens?

In a strange way we’ve got it backwards—we assume that God is tough and hard, and because of this the world will be great and easy; when in reality the world is a mess and will always be one, will always be unfair and unjust and never make much sense, and it’s God that’s clearly and purely and simply a source of love.

So perhaps God is easy after all, although it’s terribly difficult to integrate that simplicity into the mess we see everyday, since we assume there shouldn’t be a mess at all, and God should clean it up and make it right.

I don’t think it’s God’s job to go around with a broom and sweep it up. But he can make the mess bearable, and make the meaning we find in the mess truly profound.

To drop God, or to stop being a good person simply because you get stepped on—this isn’t God’s fault, and it isn’t his job to step on those people back. It’s his job to help the heavy feet of those stepping on you feel like nothing at all.
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All Ways to God: The greatest possibility, C. S. Lewis and others, No one should drive cars, The Mongols & the Pope & Moby, Getting to the roof, A Yankee game, History doesn't matter, My ridiculousness, Two lamps

 

The greatest possibility

In Matthew 26, Jesus says, “for God, everything is possible.” (JB)

And it seems the greatest possible thing, it seems the most divine thing possible (as opposed to the closed fear and ego we humans operate with to protect ourselves), is that, even if only one of the world’s religions (take your pick) may be Correct and True, and all others are either completely wrong or only small versions of that truth—it seems the greatest and most divine thing possible, the greatest example of love and mercy and compassion and understanding possible for a Divinity to show to its worshippers, is to do the thing humanity cannot—to accept gratitude and worship and prayer from whoever believes and lives and follows a religion (take your pick), and to not care what the worshipper calls you, or where they worship you, but to accept devotion and love and faith only.
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C. S. Lewis and others

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says this about Jesus (and something similar, I’m sure, can be found said somewhere about every religion):

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be he Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (p.52)

As strange as this is, it must be taken to the end it really means:

Either Jesus was what he says he was, or he was a “madman or worse,” or the “Devil of hell.”

And since (in Lewis’s view) Jesus was what he said he was, all other religions that pretend to some divine truth—now these have also become the madmen or worse, and all other religions become the Devil of Hell.

Is this really the best we can do? If it is, then it makes sense to kill everyone who disagrees with you, and all the violence done in the name of religion from the beginning of time and into the far future is entirely justified.

Because if only one religion is true, then, spiritually, any other faith is the equivalent of driving the wrong way down a one-way street. And if religion can be compared to this, it is literally spiritual death—damnation—to come into contact with someone driving the wrong way. It is literally taking you off the right track and leading you onto the false one. Why wouldn’t it be justified to eradicate and cleanse the world of all of these wrong beliefs? How, this since they are the Devils of hell, could this possibly be wrong?

But even further. In the introduction to his book, Lewis says he didn’t see a reason to talk about the subjects that happen to divide the various denominations of Christianity (the Virgin Mary, birth control, “points of high theology,” etc.); but if we are to believe in a God who knows what is right and what isn’t (since we must be clear about what does and does not constitute the Devil of Hell), those things are exactly what Lewis should be talking about.

...Is this really the most profound conclusion our conceptions of the divine can reach? Is the Nicene Creed either right, or wrong? Is the statement that Allah is God and Mohammad is his prophet either right or wrong? Is the Buddhist profession of taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha—is this either right or wrong?

Should I tell my coworkers who live in Queens, or another part of Brooklyn, or in the Bronx, that the trains they take to get to work are wrong, and won't get them to work at all, while only the ones I take will—this while it’s obvious that the way they’ve used has gotten them to the same place as me?

What is the difficulty in admitting how wide and varied the doctrines and beliefs of the world’s religions are, yet concluding they are all leading to the same center?

Why, in the face of such varied doctrines, and such a varied world, must our minds spin out of control and look for safety in only one thing? (Not in practicing one thing, which is what most people do, and is fantastic, but only being able to do so after condemning everything else)

Why can’t we find the peace we seek in that variety, and suggest that chaos is no chaos at all, only the equivalent, as Ramakrishna said, for the dozens of words for water (and for God) in a dozen languages?
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No one should drive cars

My wife and I were so happy to get rid of our cars two years ago.

But imagine we came home every night and saw the many cars lining the streets and assumed that everyone who owned these hundreds of cars—all of them, all of these people we know nothing about except that they drive cars—were obviously idiots wasting their money and their time.

And what would you say if we told you we were having a really hard time walking to the subway every morning, threatened by all the people who still choose to have cars, and are truly angry at them for personally attacking our choice not to have one?

And what if we wondered aloud if we should go door-to-door and ask people to give up their cars? Or if we should we start blowing up their cars so maybe they’ll get the message?

What would you say to us?
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The Mongols & the Pope & Moby

One of the finest, and even funniest, anecdotes from history I’ve come across in a long while is related in J. M. Roberts History of the World: “When in 1246 emissaries from Rome conveyed papal protests against the Mongol treatment of Christian Europe and a recommendation that he should be baptized, the new Great Khan’s reply was blunt: ‘If you do not observe God’s command, and if you ignore my command, I shall know you as my enemy. Likewise I shall make you understand.’ As for baptism, the pope was told to come in person to serve the khan.”

And then there’s the musician Moby, who in forty-eight words seems to have more faith than the Pope & his Mongol enemy, and for most of the religious people who get all the attention these days: "In about 1985 I read the teachings of Christ and was instantly struck by the idea that Christ was somehow divine. When I say I love Christ and love the teachings of Christ I mean that in the most simple and naïve way. I’m not saying I’m right."
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Getting to the roof

Ramakrishna compares the religions of the world to a handful of people making their way to the roof of a house—one is using a ladder, the other a rope, and somebody’s probably inside just using the stairs. Assuming each individual is getting to the roof the way they want to, what reason is there to tell the other his method is wrong?

This is true of everything. What do I care that the way you want to get to the roof is to be helicoptered in? What do I care that somebody doesn’t even want to get to the roof at all, but is just sleeping or wandering in one of the rooms? Yet “what do I care” is the wrong phrase— rather, “why should I care so much that it bothers me”?

Why are other people so threatening?

Why can’t we be happy and enjoy watching the varied ways people live their lives?

Why can’t we leave one another alone, including ourselves?

Why can’t we be happy with ourselves?

Why can’t we be happy for others?

Why can’t we be happy?
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A Yankee game

My wife and I went to a Yankee game a few weeks ago, and the intensity of that kind of blind and really baseless adulation and loyalty is tremendous, and a lot of fun at a baseball game. To simply want The Other Team to lose, no matter what, and for fifty-thousand other people around you to feel the same way, and for the game to be close the entire time, and even go into extra innings—it was fantastic.

But I can’t imagine seriously making my mind feel that way about anything real.

It struck me at a particularly tense moment in the game, when the Yankees were in a position to take the lead, and fifty-thousand people were all cheering and yelling for the nine guys on the other team to fail, to end up having a miserable night, and specifically for the opposing team’s pitcher to mess up, and lose the game. How awful! But that’s baseball. But it’s not life!
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History doesn’t matter

The historical fact of an event doesn’t mean anything unless (going in a complete circle) it’s so true and meaningful its historicity is of no value at all.

Only weak ideas need the prop of a date or a year to support them, while the truest and strongest things (while they may have literally happened at some point) are so true and so strong it’s irrelevant when that was, or whether, even, they happened at all.

They are simply true, and strong, and supportive.

There’s this passage from the Gospel of Thomas:

His disciples questioned him, and they said to him:
“Do you want us to fast?
And how should we pray and give alms?
And what diet should we observe?”
Jesus says: “Do not lie. And do not do what you hate.” (Saying 6. NHL3, 126-7)

If it were proven that Jesus never said a thing like this—in fact, that he said the opposite, or if it could be proven that he heard someone say this and condemned them immediately—are these words any less worthy of thought or meditation as a result?

Words that speak some kind of truth to us have, actually, nothing at all to do with who said them, and when, and under what circumstances.

It was said of one of Sarah, a Christian monks who lived in the Egyptian desert during the fourth century “that for sixty years she lived on the bank of a river, and never looked at the water.”

Does it really matter if Sarah ever existed at all, or is the anecdote told about her suggestive enough of a disciplined life, and of a truth so large that it makes even one sentence composed a few flimsy words enough to rise above any historical fact, and become something close to truth?
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My ridiculousness

Once when I lived in Georgia, I was sitting in a restaurant reading the book of Job, and a woman stopped on her way out to complement me, saying it was “nice to see someone reading the Bible in public.”

At the very least this is an improvement over the previous incident, as it took years for me to see how ridiculous I’d been. Now I realize my ridiculousness immediately.
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Two lamps

About ten years ago a friend told me it was useless (even pompous) to say anything to God but Thank you, arrogant to go into a litany of wants and hopes and doubts, since God knows what you’re going to pray for already, knows what you’ll ask for and what you really need.

And technically he was right. A personal God does know all these things. And this made sense to me because even then I couldn’t see value in anything but accepting the good with the bad—which a simple Thank You acknowledged.

But this also destroyed what seems the essence of a personal God—an actual relationship. And also it’s humbling to say things—to thank or ask or doubt—to a God that knows before you do what words will come next. It’s a relief and a freedom to believe in a God so generous and giving he lets us prattle on about things he’s more than aware of than us, and even more humbling and freeing that this God lets us go on and on simply because he knows it will bring us comfort. That seems to be the love of God, his patience and understanding.

But then something like Buddhism is just as wonderful. Saying before he died, Be lamps unto yourselves, and assuring us no scripture or person or God or saints or anybody or anything can save you but yourself—this is remarkable.
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Buddhism: Ten things from the Anguttara Nikaya

 

Ten things from the Anguttara Nikaya

In the Anguttara Nikaya (this part excerpted in the wonderful anthology, In the Buddha's Words, p. 89), the Buddha is approached by a monk who isn’t sure what to make of other brahmins and ascetics around who “explain and elucidate their own doctrines, but disparage, debunk, revile, and vilify the doctrines of others. For us,” he goes on, “there is perplexity and doubt as to which of these good ascetics speak truth and which speaks falsehood.” And the Buddha replies, “It is fitting for you to be perplexed, O Kalamas, it is fitting for you to be in doubt. Doubt has arisen in you about a perplexing matter. Come, Kalamas,” he says, and goes on to say “do not go by—” —and names ten things “not to go by.” Here are those ten, and some thoughts on them:

The seventh, logic, is defined in the dictionary as “The study of the principles of reasoning, especially of the structure of propositions as distinguished from their content and of method and validity in deductive reasoning.” Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Life of St. Antony, has Antony answer this well enough:

Therefore, for those in whom the action through faith is present, the demonstration through arguments is unnecessary, or perhaps even useless. For what we perceive by faith you attempt to establish through arguments. And often you are unable even to articulate what we see; so it is clear that the action through faith is better and more secure than your sophistic conclusions.

Living in a world, as we do, overwhelmed by the experiences of the senses, it’s important for things to be “verified,” or “proven,” for there to be yes or no about so many things—think of advertising, or how corporations are run, or how an athlete’s daily and monthly and yearly and lifetime statistics are bantered about and dissected. None of this is necessary with religion. It’s an experience that demands no explanation, no proof, no “verification.”

But to say all these things is, alas, to judge too. Why should I demand everyone think like me?
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Christianity: Contemplating Christ, Thomas a Kempis (1), Thomas a Kempis (2), Thomas a Kempis (3), Thomas a Kempis (4), John Climacus, Love your enemies, Unconditional love for Saint Paul, 1 John 4:17-18, Philippians 2:5-8, Saint Augustine

 

Contemplating Christ

So many Catholic saints have said that there’s nothing more worthwhile than contemplating the life and death and the cross of Jesus. And I have to agree, and sometimes can’t imagine a more beautiful story.

Just look at what it says: that God, the creator of the world and of all life, a God both incomprehensibly vast as well as personal and intimate, came into the world he created and took the form of a child to ordinary parents, in some town in a province of the Roman Empire. He grew up, at some point began wandering around and preaching, and while he gathered a small following he never became very famous or rich in his lifetime. But because he offended a few with what he said, he was executed and died a horrible death.

And yet this person was God.

Even God has to suffer, even God has to suffer a horrible injustice (and, if he was God, the most awful injustice ever)—and yet in the face of this injustice, the anonymous and poor and simple way in which he lived went on to have more influence than any empire or ruler or person before or since, to the point that even history itself is marked by his life, and every event can only be said to have happened “before” or “after” he was around.

About this ultimate humility, nothing in the gospels strikes me more than a moment from the thirteenth chapter of John (verses 2-5), which begins: “The evening meal was being served, and the devil had already prompted Judas Iscariot, son of Simon, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.”

And what comes after this is tremendous. I think of the dumb brute force of mere strength and conquest, and how Roman emperors were deified, and all the rest, and I think of what a Greek or a Roman (or any political or corporate person today, or somebody who is striving to “make it”) would do after having the realization that they had come from God, and that God had put all things under their power, and that soon enough they would be returning to God.

And then I read what Jesus did after this thought passed through his head: “so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” How utterly tremendous.
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Thomas a Kempis (1)

I read an author (who happened to be an atheist) who said something about how easy it was for religious people to find peace, since they had a God to fall back on who would forgive them.

I don’t understand how believing in God, or having faith in God, ever became easy at all.

I don’t understand how God became some Super Parent who should protect you from all things, rather than one who is with you through neverending temptation and opposition.

In The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis says something else:

So it is, My son. I do not want you to look for a peace that is free of temptation or one that never meets with opposition, but I want you to have peace even while experiencing affliction and while being tried by tribulation. (3.12.1)

And walking down the street in Manhattan every morning, it isn’t hard for me to realize that most of the temptation and opposition isn’t even coming from other people, but from myself.
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Thomas a Kempis (2)

Kempis also says: "Where will we find a man willing to serve God without receiving something in return?" (2.11.3)

In “receiving something in return” I imagine he also means from God, too, not just the attention of other people. Because if you’re looking to get anything from God, you’ve obviously not realized that you’ve already got God. At that level of closeness and intimacy, you’ve entered into God, you are God, and there isn’t anything you can do that doesn’t come from God first.
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Thomas a Kempis (3)

Kempis also says:

Rarely do you encounter someone who is so spiritual that he has completely divested himself of all things. Where will you find someone who is truly poor in spirit and totally detached from all creatures? He is far more precious than jewels brought from distant shores. If a man were to give up all his possessions it would be as nothing, and if he were to fulfill very heavy penances it would still not be enough. If he possessed universal knowledge he would still be far from his goal, and if he possessed outstanding virtue and burned with extraordinary fervor, he would still lack the one thing most necessary to him. And what is that? Having left all things behind he should renounce himself, abandon himself completely, keeping nothing of his self-love, and when he has done all that he knows must be done, then let him realize that he has done nothing. (2.11.3-4)

This is what I meant above about being so close to God that there’s no separation between you and God at all, and so no conception of two separate things, and so no need for one thing to want a reward from another thing.

It’s to realize that all the things that were so hard to give up—attachment to possessions, to other people, to ideas about a career or money or appearance, attachment to oneself, attachment to the idea that you even have a “self” at all that is worth puffing up and promoting, protecting and gratifying—it’s to realize all of these things are actually “nothing” at all.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

T. S. Eliot talks about “A condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)”—an “everything” that turns out, once it’s been spent and abandoned, that to have been nothing at all.

Or a recent trip I made to the bookstore, dragging fifty or so books behind me to sell, fifty books I’d bought years ago and never read, and barely even knew I owned anymore, except that they took up a lot of space. So that while all of those books did weigh a lot, and while they took up space, and while selling them did put some extra money in my pocket, I really only got rid of emptiness. I got rid of the nothing on my shelves.
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Thomas a Kempis (4)

Kempis also says:

Plan as you will and arrange everything as seems best to you, still you will find some suffering in your life. Whether you wish it or not, you will always find the cross, for you will either experience some pain in your body or perhaps have to endure some affliction of spirit in your soul. (2.12.3)

St. Antony says it even better, “Our great work is to lay the blame for our sins upon ourselves before God, and to expect to be tempted to our last breath.”

There’s no end of this.

Recently I’ve been feeling quite out of sorts—unable to concentrate or focus, constantly tired, easily irritated, easily distracted by every sound or something new to see, etc., and too easily filled with the dread that either I’m doing too many things at once, or barely doing anything at all.

And while there’ll be an end to this phase of how I’m feeling, on an everyday level there’ll never be an end to it. Living day-to-day in the world, living on a schedule, living with a clock always nearby, living in a world that demands immediate results and immediate satisfaction—I know that on some level these things will always get to me, infect me with small or large worries, that I’ll allow myself to be smothered by smaller or larger worries or doubts about what I’m doing, or whether I’m good for my wife, etc.

But it’s God, and this kind of reading, or this kind of stumbling and writing, or the actual day-to-day living with my wife, that gives great hope; it’s understanding that there won’t be a complete end to all worry and doubt; it’s understanding nothing will ever be perfect or fair, or “at peace” in the sense of no longer worrying or feeling terrible about something.

It’s realizing the imperfectability of things that makes the sudden bursts of real happiness and joy that much greater, and more real. It’s make me thankful for any of it at all.
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John Climacus

In his Ladder of Divine Ascent, John Climacus says:

No one who knew in advance the hour of his death would accept baptism or join a monastery long before it, but instead would pass all his time in sin and would be baptized and do penance only on the day of his demise. Habit would make him a confirmed and quite incorrigible sinner. (133)

This is awful. It is the defense of every fundamentalist no matter what religion, and inevitably reflects back on the speaker, and says more about their own weaknesses than the overall weakness of humanity.

Granted we are all weak (I’m as weak as they come) but to assume that if we knew for sure we were to die in five or fifty days, or that without a belief in God everyone (and it must be everyone) would become hedonists, or murderers, or criminals of whatever kind—this is ridiculous, and makes humanity a joke, our striving a joke, and the “religion” or “God” that comes out of such striving a joke too, the flimsiest prop for the most poorly-built house.
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Love your enemies

I was great to hear someone remark, When Jesus said “Love your enemies,” he didn’t say not to have enemies.

What a thought! Enemies are inevitable, disagreements are inevitable, and as long we live in the world someone will get in our way.

This is unavoidable.

The thing to do isn’t to make the person not your enemy, but to realize they are your enemy, and find a way to live with them, to love them.
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Unconditional love for Saint Paul

I once heard someone remarking on how awful the idea of unconditional love was, and how it was ridiculous to imagine God had unconditional love for anybody. The fellow was also a great fan of the death penalty, and I wonder what would’ve happened to St. Paul if God were also a fan of the death penalty, and if God was only capable of forgiveness and love on the scale of humans, rather than on the scale of God. Because it’s great to come across St. Paul saying this:

For I am the least of the apostles, that I am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. (1 Corinthians 15:9-10, KJV)

It’s amazing to think of what forgiveness and love Christians must really believe God is capable of. And I don’t know if this is the correct definition of grace, but it seems to me God is precisely God because he is able to give people things they don’t deserve, since in a sense of “justice” Paul didn’t deserve anything he received.

If that person who loved the death penalty had been God, Paul would’ve been sentenced to death and completely abandoned by God. Instead—and this seems one of the great things about Christianity, and one I’ve rarely heard espoused—God apparently forgave this murderer, forgave him for his role in killing however many early Christians, and then made him Christianity’s most influential figure after Jesus.

In Galatians 1:21-24, Paul records the remarkable reaction of other Christians to his conversion:

After that I went to Syria and Cilicia, and was still not known by sight to the church of Christ in Judea, who had heard nothing except that their onetime persecutor was now preaching the faith he had previously tried to destroy; and they gave glory to God for me. (JB)

How impossible would that be today, whether among Christians themselves or in the media, for a murderer (and a murderer of Christians) to become a respected religious figure at all?

This is, perhaps, why we’re better off praying to God rather than to other people.

God’s not worried about being humiliated or laughed at by offering his love and forgiveness and hope, nor is he so worried that people will just squander it that he refuses to offer it. He gives and gives. It’s really a remarkable thing.

There’re tons of homeless in New York, and I’ve heard more than few people refuse to give them change or whatever because it’s assumed at least a handful of them aren’t homeless at all, and are just taking people’s money—and suddenly the act of giving is dependent upon this secret fear of being duped.

Thankfully the God who appeared to Paul wasn’t like this.

The Tao Te Ching says this as well: “She trusts people who are trustworthy./She also trusts people who are untrustworthy./This is true trust.” (#49) This is also extremely difficult; unconditional love is extremely difficult; freely offering to others what they neither deserve and may not even do any good with—this too is difficult. It’s much easier to condemn and be done with them, to judge and banish them from the mind—it much easier to simply bring about “justice.”

Rather than  being baffled by a God who seems incomprehensibly callous, why not be overjoyed by one who is incomprehensibly giving, loving, forgiving—a God freely giving grace? & why can't we try, even in some small way, to be less human and more like that?
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1 John 4:17-18

Because then there’s this, 1 John 4:7-18:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (NIV)

How many times have we heard how harsh God is, how he’s everybody’s judge, how we should fear him? And further how we should fear authority in general, or we should want power ourselves and make people afraid of us?

And how remarkable is it to find how love comes from God, because God is love; and how, if we love other people, God lives in us; and how there’s no fear at all in love—none—and how love drives away all fear?

Where does this message exist in the world today, either in the mouths of believers or nonbelievers?

Where is there anything but the false love that is only filled with fear, the fear that only “has to do with punishment”?

Where is God anywhere celebrated today not as a lawyer or a judge, but as a love so great it actually eradicates fear?
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Philippians 2:5-8

Here’s more humility, in Philippians 2:5-8:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! (NIV)

This seems genuine precisely because of how inhuman it is. Many religious people prove this by being so human themselves, not as divine as this, since it’s always about how right they are—it’s always how sure they are of where everybody’s going after they die, it’s always a kind of snobbery, and confidence, and never anything as beautiful as this.

It’s God who can be so humble as this, it’s God who can decide to make himself “nothing.”

For humans to forgive seems a kind of weakness, for humans to be humble is to be stepped on, and for humans to be “nothing” is to lose our humanity, to have no “identity” that anybody can envy or argue with.

It’s strange, and I don’t know if it makes sense, but I wonder if the better term for being like God isn’t “transcending” our humanity, but rather “falling away” from it somehow. Not rising up but falling back, to a kind of innocence perhaps, to where there’s not even a sense of “losing” anything (our humanity or identity) but only of being, and being very simply.

Like when Jesus says we should all just be as children.
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Saint Augustine

I love it when St. Augustine says:

Or should I say, rather, that that I should not exist if I were not in you, from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things? Yes, Lord, that is the truth, that is indeed the truth. To what place can I invite you, then, since I am in you? Or where could you come from, in order to come into me? To what place outside heaven and earth could I travel, so that my God could come to me there, the God who said, I fill heaven and earth? [...] What are you, then, my God? What are you, I ask, but the Lord God? For who else is lord except the Lord, or who is god if not our God? You are most high, excellent, most powerful, omnipotent, supremely merciful and supremely just, most hidden yet intimately present, infinitely beautiful and infinitely strong, steadfast in all things, never new, never old, renewing all things yet wearing down the proud though they know it not; ever active, ever at rest, gathering while knowing no need, supporting and filling and guarding, creating and nurturing and perfecting, seeking although you lack nothing. You love without frenzy, you are jealous yet secure, you regret without sadness, you grow angry yet remain tranquil, you alter your works but never your plan; you take back what you find although you never lost it; you are never in need yet you rejoice in your gains, never avaricious yet you demand profits. You allow us to pay you more than you demand, and so you become our debtor, yet which of us possesses anything that does not already belong to you? You owe us nothing, yet you pay your debts; you write off our debts to you, yet you lose nothing thereby.

After saying all that, what have we said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What does anyone who speaks of you really say? Yet woe betide those who fail to speak, while the chatterboxes go on saying nothing. (ACB, 4-5; Book 1:2,2, and 4.4)

I love it because, had I not mentioned Augustine’s name or pointed you where to find this passage in his Confessions, it could easily be about the God or gods of any religious tradition. The God here is never called anything but God. And in it are the hallmarks of the paradox of the Divine, and the limits of human speech and the human mind:

God is everywhere, there is nowhere God is not; he is inside us and we are inside him just as the world (the universe) is inside him, and God is inside it. There is no place where God isn’t—and if we can’t find him it’s only a mistaken apprehension on our part. If there is a lack of meaning in our lives, or a void, it isn’t for God’s absence, but simply our inability (maybe even our active desire) to deny he’s right there. To see God in all things isn’t easy, it isn’t a throwaway observation that clears up all of existence for us; in fact it’s the toughest thing, when we realize what seeing God in all things really means. It isn’t cop-out but a plunge into what can either be an awful abyss, or the greatest clarity.

God contains (and actually is) every quality we would wish to have as human beings; but, being God, these qualities are inexhaustible, and by radiating and embodying them nothing of God is lost. While it’s said God rested on the seventh day, there’s a sense he didn’t need to, and can continue to go on for eternity. God has the power and omnipotence we wish to have; thanks to his patience, God has and gives the mercy and justice we wish we had and could spread across the world; God has the beauty and strength we wish for ourselves physically and spiritually; God is steadfast in every way, both unchanging and loyal, constant and eternal in the most metaphysical sense and trustworthy is the most mundane.

But, being God, he exemplifies these qualities to the point of Godlike paradox, where there are no contradictions in saying that God is “never new” and “never old” at the same time, or “most hidden yet intimately present” or “ever active, ever at rest.” This, I suppose, is the comfort of God, the perfection of every quality humans wish to have themselves, and then some. And with this is the mystery of God’s love: perfect already, embodying everything, being everything—still God seeks though he “lack[s] nothing.” In a way, having everything, there’s nothing for God to do but give, and love, to guard and create and nurture, to perfect what he has made and rejoice as perfection is neared.

We would consider a spouse or partner crazy who “grow[s] angry yet remain[s] tranquil,” who is “jealous yet secure.” Yet these things make sense with God. The idea of an angry and jealous God seems to be part of what drives people away from a number of churches, but if we accept the paradox that God is “most hidden yet intimately present” and all the rest, the paradox (well-known to Hindus) of the creator and destroyer being the same must be accepted as well.

I’m not sure what Augustine means with “You allow us to pay you more than you demand, and so you become our debtor”—I can’t see God becoming indebted to us for anything, since, as Augustine says immediately after, “which of us possesses anything that does not already belong to you?” And he is even more clear right after that: “You owe us nothing, yet you pay your debts; you write off our debts to you, yet you lose nothing thereby.” This is the ultimate giving, the ultimate love, the ultimate caring of God, the generosity of a billionaire who loans us a thousand dollars, doesn’t ask for it back, and somehow still has the money.

This is the paradox of the size and depth of God’s love and giving: it is so vast it can swallow up any awful thing we do, it can erase all pain and suffering and bring us immense peace, but it takes nothing for God to do this. The work is ours to accept it, and once we’ve done so it’s simply done.

In a strange way, by coming closer to God, nothing in God changes (nothing is added or subtracted, nothing is taken from one part of God and placed into another) so that it seems we’ve been there the entire time, and the only thing that’s changed is our realization of it.
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On Writing: How old are you, anyway?, Going to the ocean 

How old are you, anyway?

As I near the end of my twenties I realize how much time I wasted during them, wandering bookstores and finding first novels or books of poetry, and immediately becoming insanely jealous if the person happened to be about my age.

It was always in the back of my head that James Joyce wrote “The Dead” in his mid-twenties, that Dylan Thomas had his first book of poetry published in his late teens, etc. And what rage and anger I felt at poor Jonathan Safran Foer, who certainly didn’t deserve it, just because he’s two years older than me.

What clued me in to this ridiculousness (and the amount of time wasted calculating an author’s age in order to figure out if I should envy them or not) was when I realized I wasn’t mad at somebody like Charles Frazier, when his first novel Cold Mountain became a hit and won so many awards—since he was in his forties. (And of course I always knew when people like Toni Morrison or Wallace Stevens were only first published in their late thirties or forties.)

And the dumbest thing about it was I never read any of Foer’s books, or any of the mid-twenties people who came up just as I was in my mid-twenties (I almost wrote “hip writers in their mid-twenties”—which tells me there’s still some sneering part of me that has to go), which told me finally that my ire had nothing to do with the literary merits of the work at hand, only a dumb and poisoning jealousy that it should be me—when by now I’m glad it wasn’t.

The closest I ever got was about six years ago, when one publisher requested a synopsis of one of my novels, and another wanted to see the entire manuscript. I was completely beside myself when both ended up passing on it—but now I think, how lucky I was!

An article about a recently-published first novel had the author, years ago, living in New York and dreading going to parties and having to introduce himself. He was in his mid-thirties and was ashamed to tell people he was a novelist, since he had nothing to show for it yet.  When I read this I wondered why I ever wanted to be around such an atmosphere. The world is ugly enough as it is, without inviting more of it.

I’m still occasionally wracked by the old writerly-anxieties, and pity the successful authors who have to honestly live with these worries, to wonder if they have to “reinvent” themselves, or do something “new,” or have they not published something for too long, are they no longer “relevant,” is the younger generation (or the older generation) usurping “their” generation.

It must be terrible having a reputation to uphold, to repeat, to add to, to follow up. It seems such a shame that the intense solitude that creation requires has to be followed by its exact opposite.

It seems too wishful to imagine that a writer’s only responsibility it to write.
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Going to the ocean

Recently I reread many of the American poets I once thought would be the foundation of what I understood poetry to be. A few years ago I had read much of it and marked the poems and letters that said the most to me, and planned to come back later to see what I’d found. While five poets in particular are as astounding as ever (Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Jeffers, Stevens), I was surprised to find how little many of the others meant to me at all.

I thought at first to write about this in a kind of critical mode, but I can’t. I can’t and don’t even think it worthwhile to give an example of what I found tiring, or lacking, or even bad, about one poet or another. I realized I’m not fit to make literary judgments. I realized I don’t even approach poetry as a student of poetry, as a student of rhyme or of meter, as a student of what “High Modernist” poetry might be, or American poetry might be. I realized that when I encounter those five poets that mean so much to me, I end up writing to friends and saying Stevens is almost like an Upanishad, or Dickinson has the spirit of Ezekiel in her, or that Eliot’s Four Quartets are closer to prayer than poetry.

These are spiritual, personal, revelatory documents to me—they’re not even poems anymore. Most of the poems I came back to that didn’t speak to me anymore were, I suppose, ones that had no way of being (and weren’t intended to ever be) spiritual documents—or, if they did, this was conveyed in such roundabout and needlessly complex ways that any direct vision was lost. —But there I go with criticism again. I cannot criticize for more than two sentences without stopping. I could go into a long rant about how modern poetry seems (to me) at best taken up with small anecdotes, strange obscurities, tiny word-puzzles—but I have as much right and knowledge to do this than I do complaining that the carpeting in my apartment isn’t the ocean. It just isn’t, and isn’t trying to be. I would be much better off keeping my mouth shut and going to the ocean.
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