Do we not at times, looking back on periods in our life when we felt lost and confused, recognize sense emerging from nonsense, meaning emerging from what had felt meaningless? Think back to the weeks, months, maybe even years when it felt we were wandering, squandering, floundering. No waste feels greater than time and effort spent forging a path that ends in a blind alley. How could we have been so clueless? Why didn’t we listen to our own misgivings or that cautionary advice from others? What jackasses for not knowing better, and now having nothing to show for it. Or so it has seemed.
]]>When retrospective gaze
spies sense in hitherto presumed nonsense
of blind alley
Do we not at times, looking back on periods in our life when we felt lost and confused, recognize sense emerging from nonsense, meaning emerging from what had felt meaningless? Think back to the weeks, months, maybe even years when it felt we were wandering, squandering, floundering. No waste feels greater than time and effort spent forging a path that ends in a blind alley. How could we have been so clueless? Why didn’t we listen to our own misgivings or that cautionary advice from others? What jackasses for not knowing better, and now having nothing to show for it. Or so it has seemed.
But then we look closer, start to see the silver lining. If we understand ourselves better now, are under fewer illusions now, are clearer now about who we are, what we value in relationships, what direction we want our lives to head in, might not, against all reason, all the prior wrong turns, unwise decisions, futile efforts, failed relationships, and bad luck have mysteriously contributed? Can we not see that the sense we now possess, the meaning we now see, likely would not have, possibly could not have, come to us otherwise? Might we have stumbled along the way, for instance, into something amazing and fruitful? Might someone vital, through all the blundering and missed opportunity, have improbably come into our life for whom we now thank our lucky stars? Not all blind alleys may reveal themselves felicitous, but when we look closer some in fact do. What are we then to make of it?
or dark valley
It is hard to discern meaning in blind alleys, it is harder in dark valleys. Tragedy strikes, hits hard, hits home. Losses multiple, some unbearable. Juice and joy fall from sight, night engulfs light. Even those blessed not to know such when young can’t long keep their innocence. The longer we live the more dark valleys come. Virgil in the Aeneid caught it well with lacrimae rerum, “the tears of things,” which we can neither escape nor really ever “get over.” What we can do is be led by our tears, instructed by our fears, towards a wisdom surpassing understanding. We glimpse, in rare moments perhaps but unquestionably, the meaning in Gibran’s The Prophet, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."
When we step back from our trees to ponder the forest of us, when we come to see in the mystery of things that not only blind alleys but even dark valleys have opened us to meaning we never otherwise would have known, have stretched us to depths of understanding smooth sailing would otherwise have denied us, we are led to a striking conclusion.
the exhilarating conclusion has it
Not only striking but exhilarating! The materialistic paradigm our age is heir to scoffs at the notion of meaning, implying as it does something of spirit. Random violence, chance, absurdity, billiard ball atoms careening willy-nilly, incessant motion without meaning, sound and fury signifying nothing—such is the universe considered nothing but physical matter. Older readers will remember the “fluke” explanation for meaning when it occurs: a thousand monkeys banging away for a thousand years on a thousand typewriters will come up with a chance Macbeth. Baloney, we know better! Whether we look to the awesome evolving universe without or the incredible unfolding universe within, we absolutely see meaning, which leads to one of two exhilarating conclusions.
that either something of Spirit sends by design
even blind alleys and dark valleys
This first, more conventional view is conveyed in such pronouncements of faith as “It was meant to be...Nothing happens by chance...God doesn’t make mistakes...We may not understand the reason for all the seeming accidents of life, for all the chaos and suffering, but we are to trust there is one, to trust we’re in the good hands of a transcendent, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving Spirit designing everything for our ultimate betterment.
But for others, looking unflinchingly on the evident existence of often destructive randomness in our personal lives as well as in the life of the cosmos, this conclusion succeeds neither to comfort not to convince. Suffering so horrific—whether the agony be disease unto death of a loved one or the collective horror of a tsunami or an Auschwitz—calls for an understanding of Spirit far removed from a designing external deity, particularly if conceived as loving, sending even catastrophes for a good reason.
or something of Spirit resides spiderlike within
weaving flimsy chance strands
into a web of exquisite meaning.
Consider an option between, on the one hand, stoic acceptance of an absence of meaning in a mechanistic, chance-ridden universe and, on the other, blind faith that a designing hand is behind even appalling tragedy. Consider Spirit, after dreaming the Big Bang into being, as dwelling within the very universe, a Spirit whose quintessential nature it is to create order out of chaos. From the heart of darkness it responds with“Let there be light!” And as this same Spirit is at the heart of us, too, literal children of the universe, we find our nobility when we rise to the call to do likewise. How better to participate in the light-birthing, meaning-creating universe than by creating, when we come upon blind alley or dark valley, a way out of no way, light right smack in the middle of the darkness, meaning where there was none. Exhilarating!
When retrospective gaze
spies sense in hitherto presumed nonsense
of blind alley or dark valley,
the exhilarating conclusion has it
that either something of Spirit sends by design
even blind alleys and dark valleys
or something of Spirit resides spiderlike within
weaving flimsy chance strands
into webs of exquisite meaning.
There were superficial reasons—when he thundered on the political scene at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and then rode on the wave of that thunder to his election in 2008—to compare Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln. There was the Illinois connection, for instance, and the gifted orator connection, and the “new birth of freedom” connection. Add to these the evident high esteem, even reverence, held by Obama for that towering mentor of his spirit, and it is easy to link the two of them. But what about things deeper than the surface?
]]>There were superficial reasons—when he thundered on the political scene at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and then rode on the wave of that thunder to his election in 2008—to compare Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln. There was the Illinois connection, for instance, and the gifted orator connection, and the “new birth of freedom” connection. Add to these the evident high esteem, even reverence, held by Obama for that towering mentor of his spirit, and it is easy to link the two of them. But what about things deeper than the surface?
A sobering intimation arose in me, in the wake of the euphoria following Obama’s election, that if the similarities between him and Lincoln did, in fact, go deeper, then it would most clearly be revealed if adversity, not smooth sailing, is what he would meet, if failure, not success, is what he would have to deal with. For it was the manner in which Lincoln met adversity and failure which taught us the most.
It is safe to say, six years later, that adversity indeed is what Obama has faced, along with the failure to achieve much that he had hoped to achieve. We now know with dismaying clarity how white-hot is the determination of a sizable minority that this President utterly fail, that his major healthcare achievement be gutted and that his every new proposal be obstructed.
The point here is not to argue politics and policies. The point is to bring the memory of Abraham Lincoln to bear on the present presidency, to see what it might tell us about the character of Barack Obama.
If anyone knew adversity from the beginning of his presidency, it was Abraham Lincoln. Even before he took office, seven Deep South states had seceded because he had been elected. Though he would not, because constitutionally he could not, touch slavery where it already existed, he made it clear, as did the Republican platform he ran on, that he would do everything in his power to prevent its extension. And then on the very day he was sworn in, he received a telegram about the crisis brewing at Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor that could inaugurate civil war. Adversity from the start, and few, if any, pleased.
Listen to Frederick Douglass, himself one of Lincoln’s harshest early critics:
“Reproaches came thick and thin upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by abolitionists; he was assailed by slaveholders...Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Another of his early critics from the Left, Harriet Beecher Stowe, at first lamented Lincoln’s tardiness, coldness, dullness and indifference, but over time came to see deeper.
“Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind...It is the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is a strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end.”
Fast forward to Barack Obama. While his most vituperative critics are on the Right, the Left has hardly been kind to him when he has compromised on so much, delayed acting on so much, seemingly vacillated on so much. Assailed from both sides certainly fits, as does wire cable, swaying and yielding this way and that, yet tenaciously holding to the great end of a more just and compassionate nation.
But we haven’t yet touched what to me is the biggest thing, the thing that reveals character at its deepest. Breadth of vision and strength of will are indeed essential, but so too are capacity for empathy and kindness of heart. We go back to Abraham Lincoln for perhaps the purest expression.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all...What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing...As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us, is the difference of circumstances. I have meant to assail the motives of no party, or individual; and if I have, in any instance (of which I am not conscious) departed from my purpose, I regret it.”
He didn’t just talk it, he lived it. No wonder Abraham Lincoln is loved by so many.
And no wonder many of us still stand back amazed at Barack Obama, yes, partially for his vision that our country must return to being of the people and not of the corporations, and yes, partially for what he has managed to achieve despite entrenched opposition, but equally for how he is responding to his failures, for how he is not responding in malice to the unrelenting disparagement heaped upon him. Will he continue to live according to the values which Lincoln not only espoused but lived? We of course don’t know, as disillusionment has been known to spring like a brigand from the bush. But if six years of testing have not found Obama wanting, if he has neither returned rancor for rancor nor stopped tenaciously fighting for what he believes, we may have here, I submit to your consideration, the real McCoy, meaning a worthy carrier of the spirit of Abraham Lincoln.
Even though Maya Angelou addressed the following to her sisters, may each of us, in her or his heart, hear the exhortation from this phenomenal woman, who has just left us but whose spirit will never leave us, never to disown either our sweetness or our steel.
“Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives. The struggle for equality continues unabated, and the woman warrior who is armed with wit and courage will be among the first to celebrate victory...You keep your sweetness always but inside that sweetness is a ball of steel.”
May your brothers as well as sisters be listening, Maya. May Barack Obama be listening. May each citizen not only of America but of Earth be listening for the sake of the only family. In our darker moments may we neither give up nor lash out. May we hold to sweetness without relinquishing the wire cable, the steel ball. May we listen to Abraham Lincoln from the wings urging us to allow ourselves once again to be touched by the better angels of our nature.
]]>Recently I attended a Hollins University Theatre adaptation of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, marking the 40th anniversary of the publication of this stellar literary achievement earning Dillard the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. How, in any adequate fashion, a record of impressionistic observations and musings without a story line could be adapted to the stage intrigued everyone, I suspect, who came to see it. That I came twice within the span of four days tells you I felt the effort wonderfully successful for giving the audience a true “feel” for the book.
]]>In the play’s program there was an invitation to select any single sentence in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and then “riff with it,” respond in whatever way that felt right with eleven sentences of one’s own. “Great idea,” I thought, and days later this is the sentence I chose and how I riffed with it.
“But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ©1974, pg. 10.
One of the words often mentioned in the futile attempts to “nail down” Annie Dillard is “mystic.” Opaque or off-putting as the word is to many, I suggest it accurately points towards something at the heart of her vision of things. While she herself considers Pilgrim at Tinker Creek “a book of theology,” I suspect most denominational theologians upon reading it might not catch her drift or, more likely, might scoff at her pretension. I look at her book, replete with riches from acute observation and imaginative pondering of the everywhere mysteries, as a kind of mystical treatise based on Chapter Earth in Book of Universe.
Compare the sentence I chose with a favorite exclamation of the French scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin:
“...the diaphany of the Divine at the heart of the universe on fire.”
Or this from the English poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”
Dillard’s own favorite metaphor for breakthrough experiences of spirit, a recurring motif in the book, is “the tree with lights in it.” While she acknowledges she experiences this rarely, she nonetheless lives for it. Regardless whether or not you have a religious affiliation, if you resonate with these words of Dillard, Chardin and Hopkins, you might come to recognize that you, too, have in you something of the mystic.
“Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I am still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moments when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”
Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ©1974, pg. 35.
Learn more about Annie Dillard
Learn more about Hollins University Pilgrim Project
]]>I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?...
]]>Agnostics, presumed gray, shine honest and bright.
When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
I think, in my whole life, I have never missed
the full moon
or the slipper of it’s coming back.
Or a kiss.
Well, yes, especially a kiss.
Not knowing what’s coming doesn’t mean Mary Oliver assumes it’s nothing.
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?...
Who is her guide?
I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life
Love, love, love says Percy.
And run fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.
Mary’s dog is her teacher, my daughter is mine:
Reassuring Foreshadowing
What is each night’s falling into the abyss of sleep
but a reassuring foreshadowing of the awesome final falling?
I’ve been gazing on April
drifting in a skiff of trust over an ocean called sleep.
It came time to yield and without the slightest fear she yielded.
It seizes my heart to see the perfection of her innocence frail against the night.
I fear her eventual bruising,
pray her full unfolding,
vow protection to her,
bow to God in her,
see in the magnitude of her surrender, of her trust in morning’s calling,
a reassuring foreshadowing of how each of us can meet
that awesome final falling.
Ah, I have still another teacher.
O No, Carroll
Young woman to man dying:
“Are you afraid of death?”
“O no Carroll, to be afraid of death would be afraid of being born.
If this life brought such miracle and wonder,
isn’t it natural to expect the same from the next?”
Wise words regardless the source,
but what soul pride to learn today from my mother
they came from my grandfather!
Carl Jung knew things immemorial in the human psyche: “The belief in immortality gives life that untroubled flow into the future so necessary.”
Earth brother Jesus, body racked, blood draining,
heart loving to the end.
Vivacious dog, sleeping child, wise grandfather, immemorial human psyche, courageous human heart
all invite me to lean my heart toward loving,
yield to the untroubled flow,
lay down fear and pick up trust
when it’s my time to cross the rainbow bridge
and enter that cottage of darkness,
when it’s my time to go.
Imagine a young Will Shakespeare, in the middle of Romeo and Juliet, taking a break to honor an intimation that a sonnet wanted to be born. More likely, from the depth and breadth of what was about to pour from his pen, it was a William Shakespeare more seasoned by life’s buffetings, perhaps pausing from his swansong in The Tempest to give wings again to his heart. Whether a pining Romeo or an aging Prospero, the Immortal Bard began his great love song of redemption in darkness.
]]>When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXIX
Imagine a young Will Shakespeare, in the middle of Romeo and Juliet, taking a break to honor an intimation that a sonnet wanted to be born. More likely, from the depth and breadth of what was about to pour from his pen, it was a William Shakespeare more seasoned by life’s buffetings, perhaps pausing from his swansong in The Tempest to give wings again to his heart. Whether a pining Romeo or an aging Prospero, the Immortal Bard began his great love song of redemption in darkness.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
All the harmony and sweetness connoted by “grace” is nullified by “disgrace,” the discordant note on which Shakespeare begins this compelling sonnet. Disgrace with fortune calls to mind “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as he put it more vividly in Hamlet, or more prosaically simply feeling out of luck, out of favor with Fortune (respected enough to be personified by the ancients). Who does not remember times of down and out, when the deck felt stacked against, when, taking the measure of interior weather, it was not only raining but pouring?
To this downpour of misfortune add the social disgrace, the loss of face, the presumed loss of estimation in the eyes of others. Beyond feeling unlucky it is feeling frowned upon, looked down upon, disapproved if not disdained. Few burdens can weigh heavier than “when in disgrace.”
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
Instead of proceeding in philosophic or moralizing fashion, the sonnet’s second line suddenly shifts to the personal. This will be no disquisition on disgrace, as from a detached remove; this will be a cry from a human heart knowing anguish firsthand, knowing from the searing inside the agonizing state of un-grace.
“I all alone…” Not we together. Not I comforted in the knowledge that others are standing near, standing with, understanding. No, I alone. Shakespeare catches up the reader into this “I,” for who of us has not felt the weight of “all alone”? Who can’t remember, at stark moments, feeling outcast, cast out in some fashion by the very Fates? “Feeling sorry for myself” is our pale equivalent of “beweep my outcast state.” But the beweeping gets even worse.
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
Those believing in a heaven above, where Someone with the power to intervene not only dwells but cares enough to listen, heave prayers in desperate times, trusting consolation at least will come, heart-cries at least will be heard. How crushing, then, when heaven seems not to hear, when cry after cry after cry seem in vain?
In one of his “terrible” sonnets beginning with “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” fellow Englishman Gerard Manley Hopkins centuries later has these words so well echoing Shakespeare’s: “And my lament/ Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent/ To dearest him that lives alas! away.”
Out of luck, frowned upon, utterly alone with a stack of pleading letters returned to sender, undelivered—it doesn’t get much worse than this.
And look upon myself and curse my fate
Hopkins again captured as well as any, when looking upon self, this abject dejection, this feeling of virtual curse:
No worst, there is none…
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
The sonnet’s speaker (each of us, remember, at a dark extremity) elaborates yet further this overbrimming lamentation, this consuming sense of woe. How not envy others possessing what most is felt lacking? How not envy the rich in hope when so empty of it? But it is not just hope that is envied here.
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
There, see that one surrounded by friends, how it intensifies my aloneness. How I wish it were me! But it extends yet further, this misery engulfing.
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
The creativity of some, the breadth of knowledge of others—how everyone reminds me of my own impoverishment by comparison. Even things that used to bring me comfort, the little satisfactions, the small savorings—all is insipid to me now, contentment of any kind is foreign to me now.
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising
In the powerfully moving hymn of redemption by an ex-slaver are words that cause some today to wince: “that saved a wretch like me.” How sad to call oneself a wretch, we might protest, ruing the theology of a bygone day. Are not human beings shining in their core, “little less than the angels”? Shakespeare, crafting those words, too, knew better the human heart, as capable of plummeting as soaring, as capable of despising self as cherishing self. What a work, indeed, is man.
But note the great “yet,” the poem’s pivot point, the hinge swinging agony back towards ecstasy. In spite of it all, even under the weight of all that has culminated in almost-despising, someone is remembered, someone crosses the mind, by happenstance as luck would have it. Perhaps Fortune is not frowning. Perhaps letters were indeed received, and not only received but answered. Could amazing grace redeem this darkness too?
Haply I think on thee,
We don’t need to know who the thee is, just that someone forgotten during the downward spiraling is suddenly remembered, with the effect electric. Not just any someone. Thee rings quaint in our ears today, seems affected, connoting the ecclesiastical or the literary, but back in Shakespeare’s day it was just the opposite. You was for formal use then, while thee was familiar and intimate. What we have here, therefore, is a thee of the heart. Such a one comes now to the poet’s mind, is remembered now in the poet’s heart, and all he can do in the sheer joy of it is to reach for a thrilling enough image to announce the transformation.
and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
The English lark is a small bird known to crouch low in marsh grasses, waiting for dawn to come and sun to rise before leaping on the air to “pour and pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.” The words are from Shakespeare’s kindred spirit Hopkins again, in his The Sea and the Skylark:
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeined score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.
What is it that could possibly lift up one from a personal sullen earth, from the abyss of almost despising, to heave at heaven’s gate a hymn of amazing grace? Could truly there be something in the wide universe magical enough to prompt a beggar to scorn the very idea of changing places with kings?
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my place with kings.
Since Paul in Corinthians has there been such a paean to love, such a ringing tribute not just to love’s beauty but to its power? One need not be religious to bow down here; one need only remember, if Fortune has been kind, the feeling of redemption when cries from the heart were answered by a love that has given that heart wings!
Blessings to William Shakespeare for chiseling from the marble of his life the monument of these words we have been considering. Blessings to priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins for transmuting through the alchemy of his own words both plummeting and soaring into extravagant song. Blessings no less to each of us having the great good fortune to have a thee of the heart to anchor us through storms. May we, recipients of revelation, be struck like lightning to realize that as our hearts have grown wings thanks to love’s power, the power of our own love can help other hearts grow wings, that astoundingly as we have been redeemed, we can redeem! Amazing indeed is the grace that transmutes sullen cursing state into hymn at heaven’s gate.
Once again let us marvel at the genie that emerged from the lantern of the Elizabethan Aladdin, heartening, beyond even his imagining, the world for centuries to come.
]]>Here are some thoughts on God that will knock your socks off, that is if you were taught, as I was, that, being perfect in some kind of transcendental realm, God is beyond change. Changing, it was assumed, would imply imperfection, and therefore He (we were never taught it could just as well be She) could never change.
]]>But then how could He really love? We were likely also taught that God is a God of love, that He can even be defined as love (“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”). Did not Jesus sum up what we are to do with our lives with the call to love God, neighbor and self to the fullest?
How can one love and not change, in the giving as well as in the receiving? Is that not love’s power and beauty? Do we not come alive because of love, grow stronger because of love? Is not love what propels us towards meaning and joy? If we know this for a fact from the effect love has on us, how it literally transforms our lives, how could it not be transformative in God’s life as well?
Let it astoundingly sink in that just as we rejoice to receive love, through our own loving we give joy, and how can that not mean we give joy to everyone we love, God included?
At the beginning of the 15th chapter of the Gospel of Luke are three of Jesus’ parables, each ending in joy. First it was the shepherd’s joy when he found his lost sheep, then the woman’s joy when she found her lost coin, finally the father’s joy when he found his lost son. Is not the loud and clear message that when we turn, or return, to God in love we give Him joy?
As a Catholic boy I had a strong devotion to the hearts both of Jesus and Mary. What does heart mean but fullness of feeling? In my advancing age I keep coming back to what I term “the great heart theme,” the recognition that heart is at the heart of it, that just as our own hearts are full of feeling, so too is God’s! Slow down here and truly ponder the words: God is full of feeling. Is it conceivable that a God who is defined as love (better yet loving) can be locked in a static, changeless perfection unmoved by love?
Here is a passage from a process theologian, emphasizing process instead of substance (reality as verb instead of reality as noun), that I read years ago, along with my eureka response.
God on the Move
"But if God is present in the world and everything is present in God, then it is eminently reasonable to suppose that God is enriched by the changing Creation and is also changed by love… The one sheep that was lost and found and God rejoices over it.”
Charles Birch, “The Enrichment of God,” Creation Spirituality November-December 1991
Eureka! I shout as I read it.
Charles Birch captures beautifully an essential of my belief about God. God fixed somewhere in perfection behind the ephemeral flux of existence misses the yearning and the tenderness, the drama and the daring, of a God on the move enriched by the changing Creation, changed (my God!) by love.
Wake up tomorrow with the giddy realization that, as you succeed in rising to new opportunities presented for loving, you’ll be making God’s day! If that doesn’t knock your socks off, or give you all the reason you need to put your socks on, nothing will.
]]>To hear Judy Collins, or anyone else for that matter, sing Amazing Grace is not only to have your heart moved but your soul lifted. Who among us has not felt lost, and if we do not at present feel found, this hymn’s hauntingly beautiful faith helps us believe we yet can be. Who among us, blind often to what truly matters, does not feel profoundly grateful for now, at least partially, being able to see?
]]>To hear Judy Collins, or anyone else for that matter, sing Amazing Grace is not only to have your heart moved but your soul lifted. Who among us has not felt lost, and if we do not at present feel found, this hymn’s hauntingly beautiful faith helps us believe we yet can be. Who among us, blind often to what truly matters, does not feel profoundly grateful for now, at least partially, being able to see?
But something here jars, offends our modern sensibilities, makes us cringe, and that is the ghastly word “wretch” which seems to hearken back to a theology that viewed man so depraved as to deserve, without divine rescue, eternal damnation! Surely, we have likely found ourselves hoping, a word less slanderous of our very nature could be found to substitute for wretch in this otherwise soaring hymn.
But hold. Think psychology here instead of theology. Who has not felt like a wretch when he or she has betrayed that inner code, that still small voice, has by defiant action or fear-based inaction actually chosen to hurt self or another? Not only is it human nature to feel oneself a wretch when violating conscience, it is hopeful human nature. Recall that the author of this poignantly moving hymn, John Newton, had once been a captain of slave ships. We have only to consult our imaginations to guess the depth of shame and self-loathing he must have felt as he came, whether incrementally or with thunderbolt searing, to his senses, when he stared straight into the face of his complicity in the excruciating suffering of fellow human beings. Thanks to the way the human heart is fashioned, when it acts inhuman it feels inhuman, and does not wretch capture it perfectly? Could Newton have awakened to the light without cringing in the night?
Remember the Prodigal Son. This parable was Jesus’ way of giving us a glimpse not only into the heart of man but into the heart of God. Is this not the story of each of us, needing to hit enough of a “bottom” to come to our senses and ask for help, trailing behind us a cloud of unworthiness? So unworthy does the prodigal feel (it’s not a stretch to imagine him calling himself a wretch) that the most he dares to hope, believing he has forfeited his sonship, is permission from his father to labor in the fields with the swine. Could a Jew imagine anything lower?
But on his leaden way back a stupendous thing happened. His father, having spied him returning, ran out to meet him, not in judgment but in joy! Instead of being punished the prodigal is lavished! “Let us feast and celebrate. This son of mine was dead and has come back to life again, was lost and has been found again.” How long it took the son to let this fully sink in we will never know (imagine how dazed he must have been during the celebrating, how likely he averted his eyes from his brother’s glowering). But when it did sink in—that he truly in his father’s eyes was not only still son but beloved—we can imagine him singing words like these:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
A final thought inviting a reconsideration of the full humanity of Jesus:
Let It Sink In
We are to love much because we have been forgiven much—
the Good News in a mustard seed.
It’s inconceivable that Jesus could so extol the power of
forgiveness,
preach and practice the primacy of forgiveness,
without experiencing it,
without in some human way, shape or form
knowing he had missed the mark, fallen short, not measured up,
and then exploding in the heart and soul of him to experience
from no less than the undergirding, overarching Presence and
Power of the universe
the unconditional love and grace of forgiveness!
Let it sink in Jesus spoke also of himself
when he spoke of the prodigal son.
Nelson Mandela’s recent passing invites a reflection on his legacy by way of comparison with Lincoln and King.
]]>Nelson Mandela’s recent passing invites a reflection on his legacy by way of comparison with Lincoln and King.
All three faced great adversity, with a will not let it defeat them.
All three were vilified in the process of fighting for new births of freedom against entrenched vested interests.
Striking in all three was not only their absence of rancor but their advocacy of its opposite. Lincoln: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” King: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Mandela: “I know that people expected me to harbor anger toward whites. But I had none. My hatred was for the system.”
The vision sustaining them? Lincoln’s faith in “the better angels of our nature.” King’s dream—“when all of God’s children…will be able to join hands.” Mandela’s understanding: “All men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency…If their heart is touched, they are capable of changing.”
Steel will, feeling heart, bold dream, abiding faith— Abraham, Martin and Nelson set the bar high.
When a leader pushes for extensions of freedom despite every obstruction, hear these three cheering. When a leader is maligned without responding in kind, hear these three cheering.
]]>Hello out there. While my given name is Charlie Finn, I have other names including the title of this blog. Back on October 23, 1997 (dates are important to me) as I was driving up to DC from my home near Fincastle, Virginia, and listening to Dances with Wolves on tape, I got to wondering what new name would fit me? What name, in other words, could I imagine Native Americans or Great Spirit giving me? That’s when Walks with Beauty came to me, and it’s felt a part of my identity since.
]]>So when my wife Penny suggested Walks with Beauty might be a better blog title than Mystic Musings from Cor Mundi (which is what I had come up with), it felt right to go with it. She knows me well and I’ve learned to trust her instincts. Cor Mundi, by the way, is what we call our home and thirteen acres, truly the heart of our world.
I see this blog as inviting conversations with like-spirited others. Few things are more reaffirming than discovering kinship. So here’s a question for spirit kin to muse on. What name might you imagine the spirit of the universe wanting to give you, that seems somehow to touch on a matter of essence, on something at the core of you? Don’t try figuring it out so much as just pondering it, allowing to rise to the surface something percolating beneath. And if you would like to share it here, great. I’ll end for now with a poem not unrelated to walking with beauty. Let me know if it resonates.
Before You Disappear
When you’ve had a crappy day,
feel a combination peevish and pitiful,
long to disappear into the nearest distraction, drug,
or best of all sleep,
may you spy the moon,
hear a bird,
stroke a cat,
smell a flower,
hold a child,
remember a friend
long enough to reconsider
if you still want to disappear.
I first met Charlie about eight years ago. Reading his works and spending more time with him over the years one certainly comes to appreciate and value his gentle and inviting nature. But when I first met Charlie, I was so nervous. You see, at that point I didn't know who Charlie was, I had not yet heard his poems, I didn't know about five decades of love he sent trickling through humanity. Knowing those things might have put me over the top. But in the beginning it was simple: I liked a girl, and Charlie was her father.
]]>Families are great. They are the long thread of generations before, generations after, and always: you. Working with a new line-up from one generation to the next, often the Family is a collective effort of three generations, each time impacting one another. You are always relative. You are the son, the father, the grandfather. Becoming a parent and becoming a grandparent is just as significant to the family as the day you were born.
As a child, you enjoy your siblings, your parents, your aunts and uncles, your grandparents. This is your family, and for what seems like a long time, this is all your family will ever be. Stories of your parents' younger years are hardly memories, but mere comments in passing like "The other day, I heard a stranger say..." You might fathom that grandparents were once like your parents, but when were they ever like us? The cycle seems to escape us as children.
Then you get older, and as your own book of memories grows you begin to appreciate the volumes of Family before you and the volumes of Family that will follow. Celebrating Christmas isn't only your story, it is the same story as your parents, and their parents, and their parents, and everyone in the Family. Suddenly, parents' memories aren't just stories - they evolve into lives, lives like yours, lives further along, lives you begin to treasure and seek to find likeness, lives you hope one day your children will have, and that one day your children's children will have. The details of your grandparents' stories are more beautiful now once you begin to appreciate how real they are. I stop and dream of my grandchildren as grandparents - and then I realize, at some point, we are all that dream.
When you marry, you realize your Family is not one thread. Instead you are a collection of threads, extending in numerous directions, more like a woven blanket, covering history and future. Suddenly, the stories of your parents feels like only half the stories. All of your childhood memories you'll share with your children are only half their parents' memories.
My children will be framed by Charlie, and Charlie will be framed by my children... but who is this man? I have missed an entire childhood of hearing his stories. I wasn't raised by his values, though I learned we share a number. His wife shows me so much care, and I love her like my mother ... but who are these people? They are so fundamental to my Family, yet we have lived as strangers until so far along.
In eight years, we are beginning to meld. I have held Charlie's hand while he says grace, we have raked the rewards of potatoes on the farm, we have walked dogs in a late summer twilight, we have shared the silence over a cup of coffee on a cold winter morning while watching the sun rise. By the power vested in him, Charlie pronounced the marriage of his daughter and that nervous boy.
These are the first words of his new site, but in many ways the same site it always was: an homage to Charlie by the people who love him - his wife, his daughter, his son, and now me. But those of us in the next generation also hope the site is something new, we hope it is a chance for Charlie to talk to the world and for the world to talk back. In eight years, I have learned many great things about this Family, Charlie's poetry and impact around the globe is one such thing. As the world reads with Charlie, around the globe, we hope everyone will celebrate Family -- of yesterday, tomorrow, and today.
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