You Are Not Your Eyes

Those who have reached their arms
into emptiness are no longer

concerned with lies and truth, with
mind and soul, or which side of

the bed they rose from. If you
are still struggling to understand,

you are not there. You offer your
soul to one who says, “Take it to

the other side.” You’re on neither
side, yet those who love you see

you on one side or the other. You
say Illa, “only God;” then your

hungry eyes see you’re in “nothing,”
La. You’re an artist who paints

both with existence and non. Shams
could help you see who you are, but

remember, You are not your eyes.

– You Are Not Your Eyes, Rumi

So It Goes

Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.
– Thomas Merton, From New Seeds of Contemplation

Sharing hand-rolled cigarettes, Daniel and I considered the path of those who’ve walked from the realms of contemporary church culture like a salty insect shell they would find somewhat discomforting in making any attempt to return to their shoulders. Our stories include us in this demographic, and we consider the heavy weight of this world left behind, but not as though shoulders were made only for burdons or for looking back over. It is the gift of a contemplative soul to shed the conventional in its falsehoods but its burdon to recognize that the only homes to be found are those that embrace the broken. Contemplation that considers the honest shape of the shell shed and the new home will recognize the cracks and scrapes and holes of any home but will continue the mendings. Like a cigarette that just won’t stay lit, only a bit of fire will bring new life, and with it, new impending death. In such a repetition, I can hear Vonnegut‘s chorus: “So it goes..”

Methinks

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

I’ve decided to reread Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick, because it been quite a few years. Probably something like ten. In many ways rereading well-written pieces of literature, fiction as well as non-fiction, is like reading them for the first time. The ideological and cognative distances I’ve traveled, at least to me, feel like oceans of both space and time. The passage above comes from the end of chapter seven, and of course I don’t remember a bit of it. I’m enjoying, and probably better understanding than the first time around, the King James style vernacular employed by Melville and the deluge of topical analogy that so compliments a first person narrative. Being one who always finds at least a smirk for the simple spiritual analogies, particularly those offered by simpler minds or characters such as Ishmael, I just had to share it. Lees, by the way, is the sediment of wine in the bottom of a curing barrel.

Causes From Results

I’m particularly agasp at the occasional chapters in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath when he seems to set off on tangents of describing anything from the dusty, dreary settings of a small town general store to the socio-economic conditions and philosophical underpinnings of the time. One such tangent is chapter 14, in which he repeatedly stresses the distinction between causes and results, a chapter in which he states:

If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

 His premises state that it is the bare and basic needs of humans, even at their most individual level that drive the movements of history, but that they are also hidden from plain sight. They are masked by the pathologies we did not choose, and may not have chosen against if we had a choice.

Ground To A Halt, But Less Concerned

There is much of me that feels as though it has ground to a halt. Outwardly, this is much less dramatic than it sounds, and inwardly, its existence isn’t completely apparent. Its taken time, reflection, movements of emotion and exhaustions, both physically and spiritually in order to shape something beyond the brain impulses that would otherwise solely define its realness. Its also been aided by the words of others and the sharing of similar experiences or moments in the soul’s variation.

I’ve thought so much and read so many books over the last few months but have felt unable to say a word. I don’t have a lot of free time, but I do have some. I’ve posted little more than a handful of blog posts here over the past few months, and those have mostly been photographical posts. Its not that I’ve lacked time or truth to attempt to share, its that something has changed. I’ve written post after post these last few weeks only to leave them unpublished in dissatisfaction, either with the content altogether or the arrangement of the words themselves.  

A friend of mine recently was a part of a gathering of folks involved with Emergent Village, and afterward, the thoughts he translated into words to graciously share with his readers were ones that somehow helped me explain my own feelings even to myself. Its not that parallels need be precise, but that words chosen trigger just the right thoughts and that peace you get when you find yourself defined. Such definition carries not the forcefulness that one’s true identity given by God would bring, but it is similar, and, albeit fractional. It brings an exhale of understanding and peace, but not necessarily the complacency or the fabled “joy of the Lord”. 

At this gathering of Emergent folk, Brittian describes himself as arriving at a state of agenda-less-ness. I may read more into his reactions or even adopt some and then tell him “I’ll take it from here,” but as is obvious, we can often trigger feelings and revelations within each other with words that were meant for other purposes. By the end of his time there he had dumped his regular response to the question “What do you do?” and replaced it with, in so many words, “nothing.”

You see I’ve let go of many pursuits in my life, and even in the last few years. Pursuits that would seem to define the very nature of such narratives as “Christian”, “American”, “lover”, “fighter”, and “artist”. I can’t help but leave it that vague because even to me, looking back at my life as though I could read the pages, I couldn’t paint the picture even if only I were viewing it. Perhaps its the complexity that so burdons my soul while my mind enjoys the exercise.  Perhaps its the demands of reasonability that so burdons my mind while my soul finds it to be a shade from the sun on the warmest of summer days.

I’ve long now thought myself as meddling in the affairs of the gods, or at least the affairs of men who actually give a damn, and believe in that damnation for better or worse. Kahlil Gibran, with every word, applies color and comfort to the absurdities that would otherwise plague me. Just today, I pulled from his short collection of writings, Between Night and Morn, a line from a story that for a moment, I could swear was about me. 

“His soul abandoned the rapid parade of time rushing toward nothingness.”

And so I’ll raise my glass, not to passivity nor the narrowness of hedonism, but to the agenda-less importance of first, be-ing. The be-ing that frees one to rise through clouds to find clear skies above them and yet, still devoted to truth, remaining within them. The same being that disregards any notion of a halting or of progress, and leaves us with contentment in saying, simply, “I dream…I dream”.

(Please do visit Brittian’s blog and his particular post in which he concludes with “I dream…I dream”, and thank you, Brittian, for sharing.)

Short Cuts To Love

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

This is hope in spite of tragedy, and gleaming with the truth of the matter instead of some dismissive shrugging off of the perplexing state of man. This rings with contradiction, that of which life is made. Its often in life’s unreasonability that it finally makes sense. Not the sense we’d expected or, on some days, hoped for, but I suppose we should take whatever sense we can get from it.

Secondarily, I’ve noticed the extra meaning within the term “short cuts”. Who knows if it was intended this way or if it was the proper grammar with which Steinbeck wrote, but the extra jab is just too much to leave out. What cuts and destroys our ability to love more than the falsehoods we chase in Love’s absence?

(ht)

Worth Reading 2: No Wealth But Life

Bankers and profiteers and freeloaders and sturdy beggars and political graftsmen of all sorts, with alphabet soup pedigrees billowing out after their names like exhaust, have pillaged and plundered their way through our national trust—that trust of capital reserve in human character, topsoil, small towns, natural resources, family farms, sound money, freedom from foreign entanglement, and liberty, the greatest trust of all.

Front Porch Republic, “No Wealth but Life”

I would note that its a fine bit of idealism to cheer for the little man and those who honestly parallel his interests, no matter how supposedly efficient or qualified the elitist may be. That is where we turn, however, time and again. 

To place fabrications and the worship of efficiency at the forefront of our endeavors is to gloss over the life that matters most first. Life is not efficiency, leisure, riches, power, the public, or any of that other trash that clutters minds. Life is intimacy. With friends, with family, with the land, with community, with freedom, with God. 

Such an idealism is not only highly touted by Jesus himself but seems apparently plain the closer I look. We perhaps wrongly assume that the value a man contributes to his community is his efficiency and his production value purely for its own sake. The wealth that is usually sought, however, seems of the rather self-indulgent vein. A community embracing idealism over efficiency is a community trusting true wealth. The point is not the achievement of pure idealism but the slight shift and the transformation of minds.

Blessed Is He Who Gets The Joke

Blessed is he who gets the joke.

Frederick Buechner offers this remark in a section of his book, Telling The Truth, on comedy. The book ingeniously illustrates the literary values of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale behind the gospel story in sequential fashion. I’ve just today completed the section on comedy.

I’ve spent much time and considerable confusion on revelations of tragedy, both before and after reading Buechner. In many respects, it seems he is pulling together a story that is of course, not three stories, but one, and so alive that its tellability is approachable not as three separate forms but as one with any number of angles. 

Whats more, his common themes including the three above as well as the themes of silence and truth quickly find their way beyond the gospel story and into the fabric of existence itself. Wouldn’t this make sense, if one’s belief in the gospel assumes its role stretches far beyond its otherwise immediacy?

It would seem that, according to this interdependence of literary concepts, safe travels through philosophic lands monumented with meaninglessness require a certain sense of not taking things so seriously. In similar fashion, is it not an aged proverb to not take one’s own self so seriously? If the most meaningful bounties that this comical life have to offer are that of love and joyful fellowship, then it seems that, finally, life has a found a way (stubbornly, I might add) of making sense in its own nonsense.

Silence, Love, Frederick Buechner.

Mr. Frederick Buechner is a recent discovery for me, though so beautiful and somehow familiar, has already found his way to the top of both my heart and my reading list. These are two of his most touching passages I’ve recently come upon. 

The first is a passage I had the fortunate coincidence to read on an early morning commute through the Cascade Mountains and the Columbia River Gorge to work as I listened to the magic of Sigur Ros. It was one of those moments where it seems Time had cleverly lined moments up to coincide, leaving me in almost bewildered sensual amazement, if I were to for the moment include that unnameable embrace of ones heart by a bit of poetic writing as a member of the senses. Read this passage noting that his full explanation of silence is one that would require considerably more quotation but in a short, inadequate nutshell, his idea of silence seems to me to have much to do with the remarkably personal and indescribable nature of the matter and the general tragedy of human existence.

Before the gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it — meaninglessness or meaningful, absurd, beautiful — but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery. The silence of Jesus in answer to Pilate’s question about truth seems such a presenting as does also in a way the silence of the television news with the sound turned off — the real news is what we see and feel, not what Walter Cronkite tells us — or the silence the Psalmist means when he says, “Be silent and know that I am God.” In each case it is a silence that demands to be heard because it is a presented silence, and [one] must somehow himself present this silence and mystery of truth by speaking what he feels, not what he ought to say, by speaking forth not only the light and hope of it but the darkness as well, all of it, because the Gospel has to do with all of these.

»» From Telling The Truth

This second is one as read to me by a certain beautiful soul from Atlanta. Not only does it sail the four seas of love in its vastness in four short lines, but it reveals just as quickly Buechner’s genius both in poetic brevity and in Christian thought.

The love for equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.

The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.

The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.

And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.

»» From The Magnificent Defeat

Pax, my friends, and thank you, universe, for giving us Mr. Buechner.

On Localism

Localism stands against globalism, which isn’t to say that it is not concerned over the plight of other peoples. Rather, localism makes the case that globalism is actually one of the great oppressive forces in the modern world.

Positively defined, localism prioritizes community rather than growth.

Localism is skeptical of the Babelesque goals of globalism.

Loved Davey Henreckson’s bullet-point-oriented rundown of the objective value of localism. That is, not the selfish and protectionist stereotyped projection of localism. I particularly noticed his final point, a reference to Babel. I’m a fan of the imagery (at its very least) and Parker can attest to my over-use of the analogy. Read the article here. Bravo, Davey.