Forgiveness Is Not a Perfunctory Performance

One of my blogging friends, Anne, has honored me by requesting that I write about forgiveness.  It just so happens that the subject is much on my mind, having been a recurrent theme in my exploration each morning of A Course in Miracles with my wife. For months my she and I have explored the infinite intricacy of forgiveness, learning that it is more than a perfunctory function because one is “supposed to” offer it.  Forgiveness is recognition in some sense that, “there but by the grace of God go I.”  Furthermore, if one finds himself perfunctorily forgiving people while harboring continued indignation and anger, there is no meaningful forgiveness.  ACIM even points out that forgiveness can be a way of asserting power over the other person, as in, “Hey, I forgave you for this heinous offense….so you better not forget it!”

I can offer forgiveness only to the degree that I have received it.  And “receiving” it is often avoided as it might require opening up, even to someone else, about very unsavoury things that one has done and said, so unsavoury that often they are barely remembered if at all.  It brings to mind a relevant mantra that I use often, “There is nothing wrong about being wrong other than admitting that one has been, and is, wrong.”  Each of us cannot escape our “human-ness” and to be human is to have an ingrained tendency to be wrong, often even in the pursuit of doing things that are “right.”  It is very liberating to find the grace to be able to put into words with another person, or even in a journal, moments of shame that he has recoiled from for years.

Anne made an observation when she emailed me about this subject that is highly relevant, She noted, “I do not think we can actually ‘decide’ to forgive. Maybe it happens to us where we are swept into a current.”  This “current” is so important.  Until we have begun to experience the fluidity of life, its “flow,” our linear-thinking will often confine us to habitual ways of thinking and feeling which often make forgiveness little more than a perfunctory, rote performance. This flow of life is very related to discovering the practice of meditation about twelve years ago, a practice which I happen to know Anne is much more familiar with than I am.  Until I discovered meditation I did not realize the wisdom of the teaching, “You are not your thoughts.  You are the one having them.”  This wisdom helped me to understand that the cacophony of thoughts that had free-rein in my mind and heart, left little or no space to say to myself on occasion, “Oh, I didn’t even mean that nice thing I said!  I was just reading a cue card and ‘being nice’ again.” That was the beginning of the “internal dialogue” of Hannah Arendt that I speak of often.

Jerry Falwell, Jr. Was a Victim…of Sorts!

Jerry Falwell Jr. fell victim to “christianizing.”  Being raised in conservative Christianity, with his father being a prominent preacher and eventual founder of the Moral Majority movement, he had no “choice.”  Spiritually-minded people of all persuasions often fail to realize that the wisdom given them by their tradition came through culture, one important dimension being language itself.  Furthermore, regardless of how noble the teachings of any tradition, these teachings come to us through this culture with its tremendous pressure. There is an hard-wired socio-cultural pressure to “sign-on” and fit into the group that one is born into and accept its central tenets without question.

Falwell, Jr. like myself got enculturated into his faith but has yet to find the courage and grace to wrench free of its grip to the point of finding “wiggle-room” so that the teachings could become less cultural and more personal; one could even say, “less institutional” and more personal.  Any spiritual teaching has to be “institutionalized” if it is to be passed on to future generations and there comes the rub; for, as this “institutional framework” evolves it creates positions for power to evolve and hungry young egos always realize that and see it as an opportunity.  As noted before, “c’est moi” as that was the direction early in my life though I only fancied myself as a “small fish” in a “small pond” compared with the larger pond that Falwell Jr. had available.

This is not a hit job on this hapless man who has been broadsided by reality.  If this “broad-siding” had not begun in my early 20’s and relentlessly gnawed away at my constitutional hypocrisy, I too would today be a fervent defender of my ego and passionate defender of Trump.  And the “gnawing away” continues as the Pauline “the flesh” never leaves us, for which I am grateful; for, it is lovely to be human and no longer to have to be “christian.”

Meditation Can Intervene With One’s “Monkey Mind.”

The “spin” that I have kicked around the last few posts pertains also to religion, even mine! I was given by birth the Christian tradition, which I still greatly respect, but which I realized I was given in a socio-cultural context from my birth in the American South in the early 1950’s, coming with a particular “spin” which taught me that my hyper conservative Baptist church was very “special”; it was  so “special” that even the Southern Baptist Convention of which we were a spin-off was “too liberal.”  There was a sense in which my little denomination, the Landmark Missionary Baptist Church, took for itself the exalted position of the “bride of Christ,” an honor that awaited us when we got to heaven. These were good people, very, very,  good people, who afforded me this “spin.”  If I had not been given that “spin”, I would have been given another; we all get a “spin.”  Many of the generation I grew up in did not take it as seriously as I did and were able to slough off the spin-dimension  more readily than I was; they were secure enough to not take themselves so seriously.  I was very thin-skinned, very wounded and needed the specialness “spin” to protect me from the vulnerability that would have otherwise overwhelmed me.

My spirituality has, therefore, always been “all about me” more than I could have imagined.  This is still the case and will always be.  In a sense, “I can’t help it” for I am a mere human and can only “hold this treasure in an earthen vessel.”  My ego, still with its infantile baggage, wants to believe otherwise and have the assurance that the viewpoint I have on spiritual matters is beyond question, is “objective” in some sense.  But we are never as “objective” as we think we are and this leads to delusional thinking, especially in religion…and politics. But once you “see” a dark dimension of your heart, it is not eradicated but its power begins to diminish; that “diminishment” process follows one the rest of his life.

Beginning about a decade ago when I stumbled across the work of Richard Rohr and a meditation class at a lovely church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, this narcissism began to crumble.  St. Paul’s Episcopalian Church offered many treasures, one of which was a Sunday School class which emphasized Eastern and Western meditation wisdom and practice.  There this “monkey mind” of mine became more visible, its shrieking and chattering more apparent for what it was.  Next time, I will explore a bit more the importance of meditation in my life.

A Lamentation of Reality’s Intransigence

Today I am going to continue my “assault” on reality, the quotes necessary because “reality” is impregnable to the attack of one simple bloke like myself.  What makes it so invincible is its subtlety; it can’t be seen with the naked eye.  Its premises are commonplaces, most of which a society cannot be left without.  But so many can be lived without and a society is better off when they are given the light of day. One simple example from my youth in the American South involves racism—television shows were “white”; NFL quarterbacks were “white”; and miscegenation was verboten.

This “reality” that I am here kicking around ordinarily has the capacity to slowly evolve, to adapt to circumstances even against the down drag of inertia.  But in certain moments of history, there is tremendous “down drag” as the evolution appears too drastic and frightening to much of the population.  This leads to the socio-cultural ferment that we are currently witnessing in the United States, and even in the world.  This has led to civil war in the past.

We can’t escape the unconscious dimension of life which shapes reality.  Oh, well, we can simply assume that it does not exist and passionately insist that we know exactly what are doing.  But we don’t.  There is always more to the picture which is a frightening notion to most people. It is so frightening that people will cling desperately to their certainties and usually will find a leader who will be their champion.

If you are curious about this tenuous nature of reality, you might find the following book of interest, “The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman.

Addictive Thinking and Our Political/Spiritual Morass

The abysmal morass that is gripping my country today is just a matter of “thinking.”  I sometimes tease my friends on this subject with, “Hey, why don’t God just stop us from thinking.  All the problems would then go away.”  But, of course, the problem is actually deeper than our thinking as our thinking flows from our heart and as Woody Allen once noted, justifying his marriage to his step-daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.”  We think what fits our heart’s intents and it is easier to just go with where our thinking takes us than dare to look into these intents.  Looking into these intents is to risk opening Pandora’s box and our identity in a sense is predicated on not venturing there.  But not “venturing there” leaves us with an impoverished identity, a rigid ego structure that can make us very successful, even give us a very “good” life, but one that is missing the riches that could be had by that “venture.”  The poet Ranier Rilke noted, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”

William Butler Yeats, the famous Irish poet, addressed this mind-body disconnect with the powerful prayer, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.”  Thinking is intrinsically a dissociative developmental accomplishment but in maturity…if things go right…we can acquire the ability to let our thinking be influenced by our emotions, i.e. “our body.”  We will then be able to ‘feel” and “think” together, no longer being captive to our preconceptions and premises, described by W. H. Auden as the thinking of “a logical lunatic.”

The issue here is “the heart.”  My heart is still tainted by my literal-thinking past in which I somehow imagined it existing in my depths in some concrete form.  This concretism allowed me to think that I “knew” my heart, that I could grasp with my intellect its machinations, as well as treasures.  My culture taught me that this was possible.  For decades I’ve been learning that the heart is a mysterious dimension of my experience that cannot ever be fathomed by “thinking.”  But here, I am tackling “with words” to put into words a dimension of human experience that cannot be put into words.  That dimension is the “Divine Spark” which is the Ineffable and therefore a mystery, known only by “that still small voice” in the depths of our hearts which is “heard” only in silence.  There are parts of me to which this makes “no sense” at all for those “parts” are the hyper-rationality that I escaped into in my youth with the nudging of my culture.  Well, “nudging” is putting it mildly.  Cultural dictates are overwhelming to a child which is why they are so difficult to become aware of at any age.  They are intrinsically subtle and the egoic mind is not designed for subtlety.

We are now witnessing in my country what can happen when reason is in subjection to unacknowledged depths of the soul.  The acknowledgement of these depths evokes the feeling of being out of control, an illusory sense of control which reason has given us.  The religious dimension of this catastrophe was prophesied by Paul Tillich in the mid-20^th century when he wrote, “A religion within the bounds of religion is a mutilated religion.”  Tillich knew that the resulting faithlessness of religion would facilitate the spiritual darkness in which we are now living; for, religion locked in the “logical lunacy” of reason does not require any faith though it does facilitate the seduction of certainty.

Is Sin Still a Relevant Term in Our Culture?

I have some taint of the Trumpian arrogance in me so that it is hard to say, “I made a mistake.”  Yes, my “memory bank” failed me in yesterday’s post and the “relevant” poetry blurb at the very end was not the one I had in mind, a problem which I have now corrected.  I’m making this “confession” though facetiously just so any of you who are interested can return to yesterday’s post and sample a bit of the wisdom of Stanley Kunitz. However, admitting being mistaken is a very human flaw and I’m in recovery now from having been mired in that morass of self-loathing and infantile arrogance most of my life.  Richard Nixon when he resigned in 1973 did not really admit doing any wrong, declaring famously at one point in the debacle, “I’m not a crook.”  But when the impeachment proceeding reached a certain point of intensity, he did resign and with great humiliation walked to that waiting helicopter with his wife and continued his flight into political ignominy.  He was in great pain, greatly shamed and humiliated by what his words and behavior had led to, but under the pressure of the political structure that he was part of and respected to some degree, he accepted disgrace and meekly resigned, a tacit admission of wrong-doing.  Nixon had some inner sense of self-control that allowed him to not resort to the violent impulse that would explode in many people when they are shamed like he was.

There is something to say for a religious culture in which “confessing sins” is part of life.  Even though this “sin” matter goes deeply beneath the surface…and from time to time circumstances lead us to exploring the matter more intently, discovering that the real sin lies in the “thoughts and intents of the heart—it is helpful to have the surface level of the issue commonplace enough that we can readily admit shortcomings.  But occasionally people appear in our culture who have steeled their heart about even a cursory acknowledgement of sin or fault and they will brazenly refuse to admit wrong on even the most trivial matter.  And if one of these people happen to stumble into a position of power, they can wreak havoc on all who are within their sphere of influence.

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

Where Your Treasure Is, There Your Heart Will Be Also

Jesus once noted, “Where your treasures are, there shall your heart be.”  In the fundamentalism that I grew up in, I certainly understood that this teaching meant that the true “stuff” of life was not to be found in “this world.”  But now, I’ve aged a bit and I value this and His other teachings even more as I approach them from less an intellectual manner and more with a combination of intelligence and intuition (i.e. affect).  Aging, and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” have done their work on me and I approach the whole of life, including spiritually, with more personal involvement.

One main difference in my understanding of this wisdom now lies in what back then was my culture’s distinction  between “this world” and “the other world” which I guess was heaven.  I think that the treasure that Jesus had in mind was something which we can find during our tenure on earth, a treasure which certainly is “eternal” but I don’t think “eternity” is a quantity of life anymore.  I think that Jesus was offering us an early version of the Shakespearean wisdom, “Within be rich, without be fed no more.”  Jesus was teaching us the lesson of other great spiritual teachers that there is a quality of life that is missed if we make that  what Alfred Lord Whitehead called, “The fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”  Misplaced concreteness is taking that which is ephemeral and perceiving and thinking it to be “real.”  This is very much a version of the Platonic cave allegory about what is “real” and what is “unreal.”  Jesus was telling us that if our “treasure” was in the material realm, we were missing the primary purpose of life which was, and still is, to “shuffle off this mortal coil” while still living and discover that we have something inside which satisfies where that which is “outside” only leaves us empty.  Furthermore, this is what he had reference to when he posed the question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul.”

The emptiness of our modern day is so apparent in that we have allowed the mandate of capitalism to drive us into trying to fill that internal emptiness with “stuff.” And very much related to this, the “thing-ification” that we have acquired from our culture’s emphasis on “stuff” has turned even “god” into an item of “stuff,” meaning he is only a sterile concept. Technically our “highest value,” ( i.e. “god”) is “stuff” which is illustrated in the rampant consumerism.

Language is Nuanced and Contextual

Ben Carson is now on stage with Trump, playing his part in the daily clown show.  He almost immediately made a splash when in his first speech after taking office as Housing and Urban Development Secretary described slaves on slave ships as “immigrants.”   When he was immediately criticized over this statement, he responded with, “Look up the definition of immigrants.”

Carson is another demonstration of the Trump administration’s lack of appreciation of nuance in language, reminding me of the former Supreme Court jurist, Antonin Scalia who argued, “The constitution means just what it says.”  Conservative politicians, and theologians, are literalists and do not consider the contextual dimension of words.  Though these very same persons will readily argue that one who cries “Fire” in a theater does not have the right to do so, that venue being one one “context” which is relevant to the use of words.

Carson replied in response to critics of his observation, “Look it up in the dictionary!.”  He is right, “immigrant” means someone moving to another country.  However, the notion that a black person in the bowels of an 18^th century slave ship was an “immigrant” is just absolutely ridiculous.  And, though this is only obliquely related, let me show you a photo of Ben Carson and Jesus in his household, the nuances of which are highly comical.

If only I was skilled with photo-shop, you would soon see a picture of myself with Jesus and Buddha on either side of me, arms around me and myself with a beatific smile.  This photo is such a stunning example of how Ben Carson, and so many of the Republican Party, have no idea of how they are coming across to the onlooker.

ADDENDUM—This is one of three blogs that I now have up and running.  Please check the other two out sometime.  The three are: 

https://wordpress.com/stats/day/literarylew.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

The “Battle for Truth” in the U.S.

The Battle for Truth in the United States continues to amaze me, given that I grew up with the Superman TV series where the Man of Steel was the champion of, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”  Currently we see a daily display of the overt dishonesty of the Trump administration and the Republican Party and watch our nation flounder almost haplessly before this demonic presence. And, I’m not surprised that the “truth-telling” does not come from within the establishment.

I just stumbled across timely wisdom from Vaclav Havel, the former Czechoslovakian writer, playwright, turned political leader who in 1989 led the Velvet Revolution which toppled the Communist regime.  Listen to what he said about how the toppled authoritarian state had manipulated with overt dishonesty:

He states that ideology, “builds a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.”  The oppressive regime “touches people at every step but does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies…the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom…the banning of independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views.  Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything.  It falsifies the past, it falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.  It pretends to respect human rights.  It pretends to persecute no one.  It pretends to fear nothing.  It pretends to pretend nothing.”

It is no accident that this “truth-telling” in Czechoslovakia came from a voice from the artistic community.  Those within the political establishment are not capable of recognizing the truth, must less proclaiming it.  And those in religious circles are usually ensconced in the echo chamber of religious dogma and have no use for a voice from the outside, such a voice being intrinsically threatening to its established hierarchy.

In my country today it is not the church and certainly not the political establishment who is “speaking truth to power” like those in the arts and entertainment community.  Late night comedians like Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Seth Myers, Samantha Bee and James Cordon are left with the task of vividly painting a picture of how our present “emperor” has no clothes on.  Evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders have completely fallen under the spell of Trump and will never dare to admit they have made a mistake.  For, they like Trump, cannot acknowledge making a mistake of the magnitude of the one they are making.  Oh, sure they can trot out a canned spiel of being “a sinner saved by God’s grace” but it is another thing to have to stare face to face with how your ego has led you to pledge your troth to the embodiment of everything that is anti-thetical to the cause of Christ.

ADDENDUM—This is one of three blogs that I now have up and running.  Please check the other two out sometime.  The three are: 

https://wordpress.com/stats/day/literarylew.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

 

Canned Religion and Conspicuous Piety

“When love begins to sicken and decay
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith:
But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show, and promise of their mettle.”

This Shakespearean wisdom from Julius Caesar has gotten a lot of play in my blogs the past year as I witnessed evangelical Christians utilize their canned faith to help elect Donald Trump to the Presidency. But I am such a keen observer of this hypocrisy because I’ve spent most of my life there.  And “canned faith,” steeped in the letter of the law, always thrives on the ego’s demand for “strutting and fretting” like the aforementioned “horses hot at hand.”

Plain and simple faith, huh?  Conspicuous piety always takes a lot of effort genuine human goodness requires simple presence in life, paying attention to this beautiful world and gazing attentively on the flow of life taking place around you.  It is amazing how much life one can miss when he is immersed in the self-imposed illusion of piety.

ADDENDUM–I have diversified this literary effort of mine.  In this blog I plan to focus more on poetry and prose.  Below you will see two other blogs of mine relevant to spirituality and politics which have lain dormant for most of the past five years.  I hope some of you will check them out.  However, the boundaries will not be clear as my focus is very broad and my view of life is very eclectic/inclusive/broad-based.  Yes, at times too much so!

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com