Category: philosophy

In the End, Hope

HopeTree:das-sasha-24277

Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love

That we are so admonished, that no day

Of conscious trial be a wasted day.

 

Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,

Loose ends and jumble of our common world,

And stuff and nonsense our own free will;

Or else our changing flesh may never know

There must be sorrow if there can be love.

— W. H. Auden, Canzone

Now that it is safely out of earshot we can admit that for many of us 2017 was an annus horribilis, a horrible year. We need think only of the erosion of trust in the truth and the attacks on the values that we thought formed our social community. They are the foreground to the constant thrumming background of deaths to terrorism and domestic violence, to the roiling tempest of wars and natural disasters, and the tossing about of millions of refugees.

For many of us, 2017 brought the eviscerating awareness that politics was war by another name. If the thin veneer of humanity that overlays our social realm seemed to blacken and curl around the edges in the blast furnace of the vox populi of Twitter, then we also realized that by beholding we become deranged. Many of us recoiled from social media in these months while we absorbed the news of the day strained through a much more critical filter.

Millions of us stumbled through November 9, 2016, nauseated and apprehensive. In the endless purgatory that was the election cycle, Donald Trump morphed from a bully and a buffoon into an improbable winner whose jaw-dropping ability to defy the political odds was matched only by his bottomless narcissism. A businessman who consistently failed upwards, he supplied the demand for the open expression of hatreds that were usually masked.

But in the midst of the deluge there were those who managed to rise to the surface. The courageous action of two prominent women and the persistent reporting of The New York Times resulted in the #MeToo phenomenon about sexual assault on women. Within weeks men in high places were resigning or being fired for numerous assaults and indiscretions. It is a beginning. Much that has been taken for granted about the power of men over women will no longer be tolerated. Going forward, communication between men and women—and on this topic—will need honesty, resilience, and empathy more than ever.

For some the ties that bound them to their religions and their faiths frayed, parted, and dropped away. The corrosive effect of policies without principles exposed the pillars of faith to rust. Actions taken by Ted Wilson and the General Conference executive committee at the 2016 Annual Council, and then again at the 2017 Annual Council, seemed to double down on the divisive vote of the 2015 General Conference Session against the unions allowing women to be ordained to the pastoral ministry. In the views of many authority seemed to give way to authoritarianism and uniformity seemed dressed in unity’s clothing.

And yet, hundreds of women who pastored and taught went about their mission with cheerfulness and quiet determination. The attitudes and actions of the few could not distract the many from working in tandem with the Spirit.

This was a year of quiet revelations for me. Crises provoke self-examination or self-destruction: if we’re attentive we can ingest the former and avoid the latter.

I learned that my personal aspirations ran deeper than I had understood and that my enthusiasm for teaching—part of my self-identity for decades—was cooling. Was my perception accurate that my teacherly powers were diminishing? Or was it simply an erosion of my self-confidence? As the gap between my expectations for my students and my awareness of their personal situations widened I realized how tenuous is this process we call education. No amount of “multivalent incentive matrices” can make up for the fact that learning is a solitary and disciplined curiosity made authentic in a community of individuals.

In matters of faith and reason I remain both a believer and a doubter, inherently driven by doubt while longing to trust more fully. I attempt to thread my way between the Scylla of the materialism of the age and the Charybdis of religious fundamentalism. My spiritual mentors this past year were Thomas Merton, Sigve Tonstad, Anne Lamott, and Barbara Brown Taylor, whose sermons and essays enliven the imagination and bring me to my knees in gratitude.

This year it dawned on me that faith is best defined as the courage to follow Jesus. I lack courage of any sort and I wish only to come to the end of the day and not be ashamed of who I was in the world with others. In a myriad of ways, we were asked this year to be courageous in resisting and transforming the casual brutality of the Trump administration. Many of us also recoiled from the methods and goals of self-designated evangelical Christians. We will need to redefine for ourselves what it means to follow Jesus.

Mircea Eliade, one of the great 20th-century historians of religion, noted in his classic, The Myth of the Eternal Return, that ancient civilizations, including the Hebrews, saw the end of the year as the ultimate cosmic degeneration, the wearing down of the world under the weight of sins. The world and its people must be remade through a cleansing ritual that restores them to the newness of Creation. For the Hebrews, Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—preceded Rosh Hoshana—the New Year. Sacrifice and the cleansing of one’s sins prepared one for the renewal of the world and oneself. Despite the inevitable running down of both time and vitality, there was always the possibility of a fresh start.

For us it would be as if December 31 was the end of the world, a death that was inevitable, but then an astonishing rising to life on January 1 in the pure stillness of New Year’s Day.

Without forgetting what brought us to this point in our history, perhaps we can take to heart Isaiah’s words:

Cease to dwell on days gone by

and to brood over past history.

Here and now I will do a new thing;

this moment it will break from the bud.

Can you not perceive it?

I imagine that at the end of the year the virtues and the gifts of the Spirit we have been trying to cultivate gather round for inventory. Courage, Moderation, Prudence and Wisdom, all have their say, as do Faith and Love. Last to speak is Hope: “I didn’t see much of you this year,” it says quietly. “Do we have a future together? Should I go or should I stay?”

And I imagine myself, startled and stuttering to say, “Stay, please stay! It’s you who makes the others even possible.”

(Photo by Das Sasha on Unsplash.com)

Back to Beowulf and Beyond

juan-davila-221687

“Whoever lives long on earth, endures the unrest of these times, will be involved in much good and much evil.” — Beowulf

What can I tell you about my obsession with Beowulf, except that it’s caught me like a healthy virus, drawing me through a fiery portal into Denmark in the 9th century? In one of those serendipitous grazings through my library that I’ve come to see as a deja vu in the making, I pulled down The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, Including the complete Beowulf—the full title—and began to read the main feature. It had been years since I had first ventured into the story, probably through an assignment, and as these things go it had gone poorly. I read as much as was required, did the assignment, and placed it on a mental shelf of books that I resolved to get back to in due time. Apparently the time had come because I read through it in two days and came back for more.

By now Beowulf has been translated many times, edited, commented upon, anthologized, stretched upon the rack of many a Ph.D. dissertation, and even filmed, but its power to enthrall has not diminished. Seamus Heaney, one of the finest poets in the English-speaking world, comments in his translation of Beowulf, that “It is impossible to attain a full understanding and estimate of Beowulf without recourse to this immense body of commentary and elucidation,” but first-time readers, he notes, will be as delighted as they are discomfited by the strangeness of that world.

The strangeness derives from the names (Hrothgar, Hnaef, Hilderburh, Ecglaf, and Ecgtheow), the places (‘the land of the Scyldings’), and the style, but most of all from what counts the most—the virtues they honored and strove to live by.

The story was written by someone in England who wrote about the Swedes, the Danes, and the Geats, the forebears of many who called themselves English in the centuries after the Romans left. Christianity shaped their world but the old gods lingered in stories and songs. The poet lives and breathes a robust Christianity and ascribes belief to Beowulf and his companions. He pities those whose gods are idols and who cannot count on them for deliverance.

Midway through the poem, jacked up on various translator’s notes, it dawned on me that the author and I have something in common: we both look back in wonder on those times. For him they are the exploits of his distant ancestors; for me they walk in the realm between myth and history. For both of us the poem reveals the epic conflicts of life and death, good and evil, chaos and harmony, light and darkness. In other words, like all great literature Beowulf  illumines human experience.

The hero faces three consuming tests of strength and character: he battles Grendel and defeats him, he battles Grendel’s demon mother and defeats her, and late in life he battles the dragon that threatens his people. He battles the first two monsters alone because he is determined to win renown and glory, to be known throughout the world for his strength and prowess. Fifty years later, facing the dragon that is terrorizing his people, he stands alone again. But this time, when he needs them most, his warrior band melts back into the forest, sorrowful in their cowardice. Only one stands with him—Wiglaf—a young man whose loyalty to his king overrides his terror. When Beowulf finally falls it is Wiglaf who buys time, driving his sword into the belly of the beast. The king, his life ebbing away, draws his sword and kills the dragon. “That,” says the author, “was the last of all the king’s achievements, his last exploit in the world.”

As the poem draws to a close, Beowulf’s body is burned on the pyre, a massive barrow is raised in his memory, and his deeds are recounted in song. His people, now defenseless, await with dread the attack of their enemies.

The values of honor, loyalty, and courage also come to mind in The Hobbit. Tolkien, whose epic story of the battle for Middle-Earth drew on his deep knowledge of Beowulf, had given the twentieth-century its own ‘Ring Cycle’ in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It was Tolkien’s seminal essay, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, published in 1936, that changed perspectives on the poem because he assumed, and proceeded to show, the artistic integrity of the piece. It was Tolkien’s view that the author had melded the traditional stories of a heroic past together with the mythic qualities, and through his own oracular artistry had created a masterpiece for the ages.

It does us well to ask why our children are so drawn to heroes such as Superman, Spiderman, Batman, and the myriad creatures that sweep across their gaming devices. Could it be that this hunger for the heroic is a necessary element in their own character formation? The heroic age of the earth is over, but our fascination with them continues.

Coursing through Beowulf, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and many other epics is loyalty to family and clan, loyalties are put to the test time and time again. As Michael Alexander, translator of one of the most well-known versions of Beowulf puts it: “Northern heroic tales involve a conflict between the obligation to lord or kinsman and obligations to an ally, a spouse, a host or a guest.” Later, in his introduction to the book, Alexander remarks that, “an ethos of retribution for slighted honor or slain kindred governs most of the stories behind the central action.”

It is striking that we do not condone this way any longer. The Enlightenment emphasis on individuality, autonomy, and an ethic of personal responsibility helped to erode the ties to clan and family. In Western societies the individual’s rights are claimed above all else, often times to the detriment of the community or the family. When we do hear of such things it’s usually in the context of ‘warlords’ in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and it’s anything but heroic.

I’m drawn to the courage and the honor exemplified in Beowulf ; the idea of following a leader worth following stirs something deep inside me. Yet blood feuds sicken me as does any war that purports to defend God’s name. Can we aspire to such virtues without bloody conflict? Can we hold to a view of life that rules out any war on evil? Gandalf, the formidable wizard of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, didn’t think so. Evil is always looking to break, corrupt, and destroy, he said.

Is our natural state of existence one of constant conflict, like Hobbes believed? Are we doomed to be cannon fodder for the powers that be? The evil that arises in Beowulf and in Lord of the Rings comes from greed and aggression that is unrelenting and remorseless, serving no end but destruction and chaos. The tragedy for the valiant and the brave is that their nobility is seen only through war and destruction.

Why does it seem that the choices back then, though hard, were at least clear? Either you fought for the right or you capitulated to evil.

It was never that easy then and it still isn’t easy today. One enduring lesson of Beowulf is that evil is never just Out There in the howling darkness. It runs right through all of us. In the moment of our greatest triumph we can succumb to the lure of power, fame, and wealth.

Our true heroism lies in understanding that we are all ‘poor, blind, and naked’—and fighting bravely anyway.

(Photo by Juan Davila, Unsplash.com)

Imagined Truth

nativity_scene_by_geeyah

Reader and writer, we wish each other well. Don’t we want and don’t we understand the same thing? A story of beauty and passion, some fresh approximation of human truth?

— Eudora Welty, On Writing

We return to the Gospel stories of the birth of Jesus every year. We line them out in song, in chorus, sermon, poetry, and plays. Our children, every last one of them, have their parts in the Christmas play. We watch, amused, tense, conscious of each lisp and stutter, against the backdrop of church platform or gym stage. Later, in the parking lot, under the cold brilliance of stars, some of which may no longer burn, we start up sluggish car engines and praise our children while the heater thrashes to warmth. The baby Jesus survives all this with a tender smile on his lips.

Scholars tell us that most certainly the baby Jesus was not born in the winter, not on December 25, maybe not in Bethlehem, and that the stable and manger would not look anything like those painted so lovingly by Botticelli or Raphael or Rembrandt. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The telling of it carries us through the year.

There is a young woman vastly pregnant, her man protective but terrified, no pre-natal care, unblinking poverty, insurgents stroking their weapons, police with a license to kill, and all of this under a ruler who is vain, paranoid, ignorant, and volatile. It’s a story that is playing somewhere in the world every hour.

But this story, once heard and thereafter wholly imagined, transcends the details. It becomes a universal story, a comedy within a tragedy. It is as if, to choose a ready example, a Rohingya mother gave birth in a refugee camp to an infant who, thirty years later, emerged as a healer and a teacher. That is the grit and dust and blood of it. But more, this child as a man, against all odds, against all socioeconomic factors, in spite of racism, poverty, oppression, disease, and everything else that conspires to twist a child into a despairing and lethal weapon—in spite of all that—this child becomes a man who is compassion incarnated.

And the story survives too, year after year, resisting the corrosion of the hucksters and the false prophets, because it is a story so incredible that its truth, when imagined, can simply be lived.

Old Prayers

OldPrayers2:clement-gerbaud-478777

Bring out those old prayers, the ones smoothed

and shiny in the worn places, the ones

we bring out when our hearts are full

or breaking

or fogged with the breath of our escaping hope.

 

Bring out the ones that proclaim “Gloria Patri in the highest!”

or simply, “You still there?”

 

Bring them out; we can trade them back and forth.

 

Here’s one that was given to me by an old sailor. He said

it came to him in a tempest, but it’s not magic,

it’s what you would say when taking your leave

from an old friend:

‘Thank you! I have loved this world you gave us.’

Photo: Clement Gerbaud, Unsplash.com

Slow Train Coming

SlowTrain2:guilherme-stecanella-368391

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means that our imaginations may recognize elements of it, when presented in art or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we recognize. — Northrop Frye, The Great Code

In Augustine’s Confessions—the original of the species of literary prayers—he devotes a whole chapter to memory. It is as fine a psychological and spiritual study of that faculty as you could find anywhere. Like a stone in the palm he turns it over and over, tracing out the striata, smoothing its roughness, feeling its weight and shape. He ponders the strangeness that he can remember remembering just as he can remember forgetting, and that somehow forgetting must also be in his memory. “Who can fathom such a thing,” he marvels, “or make any sense of it?”

The book was written a decade after his baptism into the Catholic Church on April 25, 387 CE. The chapter is like a traffic roundabout that directs the story of the events that drew him—both feverish for God and anguished at surrendering up his old ways—around toward the climatic moment in the garden of a friend’s house when his defenses gave way before a tidal surge of longing for belonging. All of that before he spun off in another direction to discuss the Trinity.

Like a viral agent Augustine gets in through the weak places in our skin of defenses. As much as I rise with him to that summit of emotion at conversion, it’s the passages on memory that I’m most vulnerable to these days since my memory itself seems increasingly vulnerable. Of all the potholes in the road to life’s end the ones that I swerve to avoid the most have to do with losing my memory. Even more than going blind, that seems the worst of the fates, because as Augustine says, “my memory is me.”  So I build habits and routines that can bridge my absentmindedness and defuse my anxiety.

Augustine’s analogies reveal him seeking out the deep crevices where memory hides in the mind or striding down the aisles in a capacious warehouse, or pausing at one of many doors in a long corridor to the past. He searches confusedly until “the dim thing sought arrives at last, fresh from depths.” In an envy-producing flourish he boasts that some things are brought up easily, properly sequenced and recalled at will, “which happens whenever I recite a literary passage by heart.” We should all be so lucky.

Alas, my current experience has me hacking my way through a landscape tangled with kudzu into a formless forest with few distinguishing marks. More positively, I see myself swimming from island to island in the sea of memory, regarding them as the tips of sea mounts that go down into the darkest depths, but give us stability in the meantime.

I’ve also realized that for some years now I’ve been re-experiencing some of the pivotal artists and musicians who have helped to construct my inner world. Without design, but surely with some intent, I’ve collected concert videos of Paul Simon, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Paul McCartney’s “Good Evening New York!” and Billy Joel’s “Live at Shea” concert, along with most of U2’s concert videos, as well as reading biographies of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Carly Simon, CSN, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, and Mick Jagger. These are of a piece with going back to books I’ve picked up over the years about Edward Hopper, Paul Klee, Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, and Wassily Kandinsky—artists whose works are the windows of my soul. Their music and their art evoke the memories that continue to form my experience.

As I write, it is 37 years ago that John Lennon was shot outside the Dakota in New York City. As hard as it is to imagine, he would have been 77 this year. He died at 40 in 1980 and will be, as Dylan sang, ‘forever young.’ Like many of us, ‘midway through this life he awoke in a dark wood.’ I wanted to see him grow older, and to understand how he found his way out, and what his wit and wonder might have created had he lived.

Which brings me back to memories and the loss thereof, and the regaining of them through our tricks to stay afloat, as well as the silent entrance of memories half-formed, but more strongly sensed only when our striving ceases and our fences drop.

All those years ago, John said it well:

There are places I remember 

All my life, though some have changed 

Some forever not for better 

Some have gone and some remain 

All these places have their moments 

With lovers and friends I still can recall 

Some are dead and some are living 

In my life I’ve loved them all

— In My Life 

We are both the shapers and the shaped when it comes to our identities. We are drawn to those in the arts who sing our stuttering words, who sculpt our unformed desires and paint our fears in light. As Northrop Frye says in the epigram, our imaginations recognize what we may not consciously see. When we need it, it will appear. Like the Zen saying goes, “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will arrive.”

Sometimes memory is a slow train.

Photo: Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash.com

Real Facts

RealFacts2:simon-wijers-37854

The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.— Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

Of all the strange things that happened to us that year, my walking on the water got the most laughs. Even today it’s a cliche for magical thinking, the punchline about someone who thinks he’s divine or just insufferably self-righteous.

I’ve always had impulse-control issues. I load, I fire, I aim. I leap—and I look—all the way down.

I am Peter, aka The Rock, not because I am the foundation for the church, but because I am hard-headed. He knew that, of course; it was an inside joke between us. You put the least-qualified in charge and see how it rolls. By beholding we become changed and all that. There is something to that, by the way, for I softened over the years. Not that I was weak, but rather I became deliberate. That was years away from the unfortunate water landing, and well after Jesus leaned into me one afternoon and said, “Someday they will bind you and take you where you do not want to go.” Just that, and he held my gaze for a moment, stopping my quick retort.

For once, I had nothing to say. I dropped my eyes then, for I was seeing myself on a stony path by torchlight, my hands bound in front of me, soldiers at my back and front.

I am the disciple, remember, who almost got it right about Jesus and then got it all wrong—all within an hour. He had asked one of his questions again; this time he wanted to know what people were saying about him. An odd question, until you realized that almost no one knew what he was. It wasn’t enough that he was a man from Nazareth or even that he was the one who made a few loaves and fishes into a meal for thousands. The crowds only had a few superheroes they could imagine: Abraham, Moses, Elijah . . . oh, and John, recently beheaded by Herod. So they thought he was another version of one of those.

He asked, “Who do people say I am?,” and we all muttered one thing and another about Elijah and John. “Who do you say I am?” he said, and we all looked at our shoes. He really seemed unsure. It was as if he needed confirmation of something he desperately hoped was true—or was afraid was true.

You have to get these things right for him, and frankly, we weren’t all that sure ourselves. But, as usual, I jumped in there with the answer we all wanted to hear. “You’re the Messiah!” I blurted. There wasn’t anyone else who it could be, even though he didn’t seem to care much about the position. But this time he didn’t deny it. Of course, he didn’t admit to it either. He just told us to keep it to ourselves.

“Well, good,” I thought, “things are looking up.” But then he started in about going up to Jerusalem, and how the elders, and the chief priests, and the scribes would reject him. That wasn’t a surprise: he’d been on the outs with them for a long time. The words were coming in a rush now, about how he would be killed and would live again three days later. He was very plain about it. That’s when I pulled him away from the others. I lowered my voice, “What are you saying? We here know you are the Messiah. Take it! The Messiah doesn’t die. Am I missing something here?”

At that he spun back to the others. “Get away from me, Satan!” he shouted. “You’re counting on human plans, not divine ones!” He was speaking to them, but he meant me. I saw the shock on their faces at his words and then they glanced at me, horror-stricken. Before I could reply, he was rounding on the crowd that was gathering.

“If you want to follow me, then take up your cross! If you want to save your life, you will lose it, and if you lose your life because of me and the gospel, you will save it.” Clearly, this was crazy talk, but he wasn’t through.

“What does it matter if you gain the whole world, but you lose your own soul?” He glanced around at them. “What could you give to get your soul back, eh?”

I am remembering all this because I have been trying to sort out how we who followed him understood him. When you’re in the midst of it you just try to keep up. The understanding comes later, I found. And if we take up our cross to follow him, then at some point the cross becomes more than a symbol: it is a killing machine upon which we really do die. After all, the point of “taking up one’s cross” is to realize that we carry our death with us daily. What I couldn’t understand at the time is how that could ever be anything but suicide or treason.

At the time I could not bear the thought that he would die in this way. I envisioned a deathless life for him. I saw him as the one who would change the architecture of our world so that the long shadow of this constant cruelty would vanish. I wanted him to open up the sky so we could stand in the sunlight as creatures of God, not as prisoners of Rome. If that meant pulling down the palaces and temples that blocked the sun, then let’s get on with it.

But that’s not what he was on about. He saw the world so differently than we did. I wanted to ask him, “When you look at the world what is it that you see?”* There were times when we were with him that something he said or did clicked into focus and we saw an expression that was so clear and so true that it changed the atmosphere when he walked into the room.

But I found that the clarity dissolved when he wasn’t around. When we tried together to remember and explain it to each other later in that upper room, it refracted like a kaleidoscope. My unprayed thought back then before his death was that I tried to be like him, I tried to feel the way he did, but without him it was no use.

I couldn’t see what he saw when I looked at the world.

****

All these years later I am writing from this prison cell. As he said so long ago, my hands were bound and I was led away.

His death changed everything, of course. That was all, but it was everything. I carried my cross every day after that.

I betrayed him and he forgave me.

This is how we see the world like he does — through the lens of betrayal and forgiveness.

These are the real facts.

*U2 (2000), “When I Look at the World,” All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
(Photo: Simon Wijers, Unsplash.com)

We Are What We Think

WhatThink:rendiansyah-nugroho-454059

Oh East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. . . — Rudyard Kipling

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. — The Dhammapada

The world is orderly and simple.

The world changes constantly and is immensely complex.

These two ways of thinking have shaped human behavior and culture for millenia—and lately they have been tested in the laboratories of cultural psychology.

Richard Nisbett’s book, The Geography of Thought, builds the case that Westerners and Easterners differ in their fundamental beliefs about the world. As one of his graduate students from China said to him, “You know, the difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line.” Nisbett, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, was skeptical but intrigued. He’d always thought of himself as a universalist, someone who believed humans perceive and reason in the same way. While their cultural practices may vary widely, he thought, their ways of perceiving the world are generally similar.

He summarizes this tradition in four general principles. First, everyone has the same basic thinking processes when it comes to memory, categorization, inference, and causal analysis. Second, when people from different cultures have different beliefs it’s because they have been exposed to different aspects of the world, not because they actually think differently. Third, reasoning rests upon logic: a proposition can’t be both true and false. And fourth, our reasoning is separate from what we are reasoning about. You can think about a thing many different ways—and you can use your reasoning to come up with wildly different results. Such was the tradition that could be traced back through the Enlightenment to the Greeks. Surely everybody thought in the same way.

But that turns out not to be the case at all.

In test after test, Western subjects focused on the objects in the foreground of a video while Eastern subjects took in the whole background. That’s consistent with another finding that Westerners regard objects as most important and Easterners emphasize relationships. Following Greek thought, Westerners think of themselves above all as free agents, individuals who act upon the environment around them, changing their circumstances to match their ambitions. Easterners, following Confucian thought, see themselves as part of a harmonious whole, experiencing the links between people and their environment as continuous. One does not so much wrest control away from Nature as align oneself with it.

Independence, practically a virtue in Western societies, begins at an early age as we teach our children to “stand on their own two feet,” “think for themselves,” and “grow up.” Interdependence, the way of many in Eastern cultures, helps children to understand the reactions of others. One of Nisbett’s research partners, a 6 ft. 2 inch football-playing graduate student from Japan, was dismayed to discover, at his first American football game, that University of Michigan football fans thought nothing of blocking his view of the game by standing up in front of him. “We would never do anything to impair the enjoyment of others at a public function like that,” he said to Nisbett. It seems that compared to the Japanese wide-angle view Americans have tunnel vision.

Sensitivity to others’ emotions provides Easterners with a different set of assumptions about communication also. Whereas Westerners take responsibility for speaking directly and clearly, a “transmitter” orientation, Easterners adopt a “receiver” orientation in which it’s the hearer’s responsibility to make sure the message is understood. Nisbett notes that Americans sometimes find Asians hard to read because Asians make their points indirectly; Asians, on the other hand, may find Americans direct to the point of rudeness.

The differences extend to how we think about causality and how we deal with historical events. Japanese teachers, says historian Masako Watanabe, begin a history lecture by setting the context. They then proceed chronologically through the events, linking each one to the proceeding event. Students are encouraged to put themselves in the mental and emotional states of the historical figures being studied and to draw analogies to their own lives. Students are regarded as thinking historically when they are able to see the events from the point of view of the other, even Japan’s enemies. Questions of “how” are asked about twice as much as in American classrooms.

By contrast, American teachers usually begin with the outcomes and ask why this result was produced. The pedagogical process often has the effect of destroying historical continuity and reversing the flow to effect-cause. This reflects the Greek heritage of the West in which we have the liberty to find our goals and define the means to attain them.

“Easterners,” says Nisbett, “are almost surely closer to the truth than Westerners in their belief that the world is a highly complicated place and Westerners are undoubtedly often far too simple-minded in their explicit models of the world. . . . But Aristotle has testable propositions about the world while the Chinese did not. . . . The Chinese may have understood the principle of action at a distance, but they had no means of proving it.”

No one is making value judgements about these varying perspectives. They are different ways of being in the world and viewing the world. But if this research is true or even close, we should pay attention to it for it could change how we communicate with millions and millions of people.

Occasionally in life we stumble across something that opens a window into our own interior castles. That is the experience I had reading The Geography of Thought. Time and again, as I followed the tests scattered throughout the book, I was taken aback at my unconscious affinity for Eastern thought. More often than not, when I was absolutely honest with myself, I realized how often they are my default positions.

That might explain why I found it so difficult to be the ‘answer man’ when working in faculty development at a research university. While some thought I should provide techniques that would work in every classroom—universals, in effect—my tendency was to see each teacher and each classroom as distinct. Instead of developing objectives for all to reach my thought was to develop each teacher’s own style to fit their context. Context and background instead of rules and foreground. At the time I lacked the analogies to talk about it, although pushing against that instinctual feeling made me feel off balance much of the time.

Thus we live and learn and discover coves and bays along our spiritual shoreline we did not know were there until we put out to sea.

Photo: Rendiahsyah Nugroho on Unsplash.com

Beauty and Terror

BT1:ozark-drones-428060

He said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic.” — Luke 9:3

When He called us together finally, it was in order to send us out together alone, without Him. We had been with Him long enough to know that He did not stand on protocol. In fact, He did not stand on much except faith in the ineffable Spirit of God, a gossamer thread that was subject to stress with us, but was a linked chain of cast iron for Him. So when He said He was sending us out with power and authority to throw out demons and heal diseases and generally talk up the good news of the kingdom, it was the release of breath we had been holding since we first met Him.

I’ll be honest with you, I remember that moment with crystalline clarity because I was terrified. He was asking us to go out into the hills, where people had been out of work for months, where opioids opened some doors and closed others forever, and where a gun in the hand was worth two in the cabinet. Demons and diseases, devils and dust, there was scarcely an upside to this.

But I went. We went, Andrew and I, and the others, two by two. What the hell, I thought, it’s time to take Him at His word.

There is a lightness in just going, nothing in hand, and no clear plan for the end of day. The first town off the interstate that we came to we headed for the 7-11 and asked who might be sick in town. It took persistence.

“Are you doctors or something?” asked the kid behind the counter. He didn’t bother to get up.

“Not exactly,” said Andrew, “but we can help.” The kid didn’t say anything. He looked out the window at the pickup next to the pumps.

“Talk to Roy,” he said finally. “His mom’s been laid up for months. You want some buffalo jerky?”

I shook my head.

“Heh Roy,” said the kid, “these guys can help your mom.” I turned as a tall man with a scraggly ponytail came through the door.

“Why you talking about my momma, Craig?”

“These guys said they could help.”

“That true?” he asked. “Here’s ten for the gas.” He dropped the bill on the counter and stepped back.

“Yes,” said Andrew, “it’s true.” He looked at Roy steadily. I held my breath.

“Are you doctors or something? Preachers? ‘Cos we’ve had enough of preachers up here. Can’t trust ‘em.”

“I know it sounds crazy,” Andrew said, “but we’ve been given power to heal.”

“I don’t have that kind of money,” said Roy. “Not interested.”

“It’s not about money,” I said. “We want to help. It’s about the kingdom.”

“No kingdom around here,” laughed Craig. ”What you talking about, kingdom? Jesus!”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, it’s about Jesus,” said Andrew quietly.

“Okay, then,” said Roy after a moment. “Get in the pickup. We’ll go see her.”

I sat in the bed of the truck, while Andrew sat up front. I didn’t feel like being crowded as three men in a space for two. Besides, I wanted to savor the strangeness of the moment: how was I in the back of a pickup truck high in the hills of Appalachia near sundown to find some woman with God knows what illness and to heal her? And then what?

We turned off the main road after ten minutes and jounced down a dirt track beneath an arch of trees and vines. At the end was a stained double-wide trailer in a clearing with a wooden hut nearby and a rusting 1981 Ford truck up on blocks. Roy braked to a stop and switched off the engine. We got out.

“I don’t know how she is today,” said Roy. He looked down. “I talked to her yesterday. She doesn’t take well to strangers.”

I tried to imagine her life here, how she waited for her son to come by, maybe watched television and smoked in the evenings. There were cigarette butts everywhere on the ground around the steps.

“Shall we go in?,” said Andrew gently. Roy rapped on the door.

“Momma,” he called. “It’s me, Roy. I’ve brought a coupla friends by. They want to meet you.”

“Is that you, Roy?” came a voice from inside. The door opened a crack and then wider.

“It’s me, Momma,” said Roy, and he swung the door open enough for us to see the woman inside. She stood, clutching the door frame with one hand, the other pulling a robe together across a thin chest. She wore jeans and slippers and a Batman T-shirt that was frayed and dirty. Her hair was long and gray, with yellow streaks, and hung limply around her shoulders. She looked right through us and put out a hand.

I realized she was blind when Roy gently touched her shoulder and turned her to the inside. “Come in,” he said to us. “You can sit over there.” He pointed to a table in the back with a built-in window seat and two folding chairs. He guided her to the table and steadied her as she sat down and slid behind it. He stood awkwardly next to her.

I sat down in one of the chairs. Andrew made as if to sit down but then straightened again. “I’m Andrew,” he said, “and this is Thomas.”

The woman across from us put out her hand.

“I’m Suzanne,” she said. “How do you know Roy?”

Andrew took her hand in his. “We met just now at the 7-11. We’d like to help you.”

She didn’t pull away, but her back stiffened. “With what? How?,” she said. “Roy, what’s this about?”

There was a pause. Roy looked at Andrew and then at me. “Well,” he said hesitantly—.

“You’re blind and we can help,” I cut in. I realized how that sounded, but I rushed on. “We can heal you if you’ll give us a chance. Really,” I added lamely.

She laughed bitterly. “And how much is this going to cost me?”

“No, no!” I said. “It’s nothing, it’s not about money, it’s about. . .” I paused and looked at Andrew.

“It’s a gift from God,” said Andrew simply. “Just that. We know someone.”

There was silence. Roy shifted uneasily.

“Well,” she said at last, “I suppose it’s worth a shot.” She held out her other hand to me. “What are you going to do?”

I took her hand in both of mine. The skin felt dry and cold, cracked across the knuckles and reddened in places. I licked my lips; I was sure my voice would break.

I glanced at Andrew. He nodded. I took a breath and looked up . . .

 ****

I must have drifted for a moment because when I came to myself He was saying, “Look, now I am sending you out. I’m giving you authority over demons—all of them, and power to heal and to announce to people that the Kingdom of God is here.” He smiled: “Bring them peace and travel light. If they don’t want you, leave and go to the next town. We’re not in the business of forcing anyone.”

Later that afternoon, before we left, I took out the battered copy of Rilke’s Book of Hours that I always carry in my backpack and read this:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Photo by Ozark Drones, Unsplash.com

Building to True

BuildTrue1:travis-grossen-336237

I’ve been reading Thoreau’s Walden in the Yale edition (2006) with an introduction, notes, and a beautifully-designed cover. It’s a satisfying chunk of a book, fitting easily to the hand, and a good price at less than ten dollars. I went back to Thoreau because I’m also reading Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own, the story of how he built himself a writing hut in the woods behind his home. Pollan, a journalist for the New York Times and the author of In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Food Rules, among other books, wrote two of his books there and probably would have written more had he and his family not moved from Connecticut to California in the years after it was built.

Pollan cites Thoreau’s opening sentence to ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For’ as he describes the reasons that compelled him to plan and to build: “At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.” Elsewhere, Pollan notes that Walden can be read as Thoreau’s exploration of foundations for life, what it takes to build a character deep and strong.

Digging down below the frostline, weary with the labor, and allowing himself the fantasy of slacking off, Pollan is brought up short by his co-worker, a sometimes laconic, sometimes obstreperous day worker, who quickly reminds him that houses fall out of ‘true’ when subjected to the upheavals of frozen ground straining at a foundation. Later, quietly exultant as he stands on the footings he himself poured for his place, Pollan muses about the nature of foundations, the need to plant ourselves on solid ground, and the architectural metaphors we freely borrow for the blueprints of our lives.

Michael Pollan built his writing house because he wanted to grapple with material, feel the roughness of the wood and stone in his hand, and turn ideas into something with weight and heft. He’s a master at the reflective moment like Thoreau, both of them hewing the blank stone of experience into a textured wall of meaning. Thoreau’s sturdy independence is not exactly Pollan’s way; he is under no illusions about his ability to put up a house in the woods all by himself. But he reaches back to Walden as a touchstone, it seems, to capture Thoreau’s sense of being in a site and to fit the words to the experience.

Thoreau’s prose in Walden is spare and as lean as the man himself. At times, when he is describing the color of the water in the pond or the thick pleasure of feeling one’s way through a forest in a night without stars, his sentences become poetic, though always with a lightly bemused air. This is a man for whom words are gems in the rough to be cut to refract light in a hundred directions. He renders experience, shapeless and dark, into bright moments you can hold in your hand.

It’s that ability to dig deep into remembered experiences and form them into something that can be experienced by others which makes Thoreau such an exemplary teacher. In a letter written to a friend in 1857 he suggests a theme for an essay recounting a hike up Mt. Washington. State to yourself, he urges, exactly what that experience meant to you and why. Keep coming back and back to it until you are sure you’ve gotten to the real heart of the experience. “Not that the story need be long,” he advises, “but it will take a long while to make it short.” Climbing a mountain and getting blown all over the summit isn’t unique: it happens to many people. “It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?” In other words, until we interpret our actions they are simply occurrences. Reflecting on them shapes them into experiences filled with meaning.

There are days in which we enter the classroom brimming with intentions and plans and it all seems to fall to the floor as lifeless as last year’s leaves. And there are days in which the air in the room seems charged and there’s a grandeur shining through each face before us. Those are the times in which Thoreau’s—and Pollan’s—incandescent ability to see the foundations rising to life from the ideas on the page become an inspiration.

To state it plainly: reflection on our practice gives meaning to our actions. It is the foundation upon which we may ‘build to true.’

Photo: Travis Grossen, Unsplash.com

Why Writing is Hard

WritingHard:dmitry-ratushny-412448“Writing is hard work. . . .If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things that people do.” — William Zinsser, On Writing Well

“How long do you want this paper to be?”

It’s an annoying question from a student. It assumes that the subject assigned can be measured out like twine and cut to the desired length. But even worse, it puts the burden of responsibility on you, not the student. The student is merely the supplier trying to fulfill the customer’s order.

That order can be filled by copying and pasting, pulling together a quilted arrangement of unattributed quotes, stitched throughout with a few original but insipid transitional sentences. Or if the hour is late and the need is high a paper in the proper style and length can be bought.

The machinery for grinding out such fodder is well-oiled, maintained with precision, and apparently provides a lucrative return-on-investment for the entrepreneurs in the business—and many universities have installed anti-plagiarizing software, anti-cheating hardware, and student-monitoring devices in classrooms.

We can look at this another way. While the outcome may be framed as plagiarizing or cheating, the context in which this plays out can lead to other conclusions. People act out of character when they are afraid or unsure; they try to reduce the odds of failure by any means necessary. If they’re afraid of writing they’ll do almost anything to avoid it.

Writing is hard, says William Zinsser, and he should know. During a career as a journalist, critic, editor, and teacher he has written over 15 books, many of them on writing. His best-known, On Writing Well, now over 30 years in print, has been revised, updated, and expanded through four editions. Each time Zinsser returns to it he reworks, rewrites, and cuts. What makes it so hard? Making it simple, making it clear.

He points to Thoreau’s Walden as a model of plain and orderly simplicity. On every page we see the deliberate and patient stride of the celebrated walker from Concord who rid his life of clutter by reducing it to the essentials. And we, says Zinsser, can free ourselves from clutter by thinking clearly. “Clear thinking becomes clear writing,” he says. “One can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English.”

E. B. White agreed in The Elements of Style, saying, “Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.”

Writing is hard because clear thinking is hard. This is a surprise only to those whose writing originates from their inner mud-puddle. “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” says the Tao Te Ching. Simplify and clarify.

Which brings us back to the question we began with: “How long do you want this paper to be?” They are the words of someone acutely aware that the teacher holds most of the power in the classroom. They are the words of someone trying to minimize pain and maximize benefit. Someone who has learned to hide a lack of meaning behind a pile of clutter.

At times, as a teacher, I have answered that question with Sphinx-like equivocation: ‘How long? As long as it takes to make your point persuasively.’ There is a cloud of assumptions behind that answer. It assumes that the student knows a persuasive answer from a hole in the ground. It does not show that writing is a process. And it can encourage the confusion of length with erudition and spontaneity with creativity.

If we want students to write well we need to help them learn several things. First, clear writing is a product of clear thinking. Second, clear thinking usually begins as a social process of ideas thrown together, pressed down, shaken up, and poured out. Third, clarity and simplicity emerge through subtraction, not multiplication. We get to the meaning of the idea by throwing away everything that doesn’t advance the story. Finally, all of this takes time. Simple is harder because simple takes time. Better to do one long paper well than to do three short ones badly.

“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter,” said Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, in a letter to a friend.

And with that gentle reminder I shall cease.

Photo: Dmitri Ratushny on Unsplash.com