#the humility within the self-aggrandizement.

[vulpinesaint]

god the way that satan frames their fall from heaven drives me so crazy. yes, we fell, but that does not mean we're defeated: we still have our spite, and hatred, and the will to pursue revenge, and so we have not been overcome. we may have fallen, but we threatened god's throne enough to shake it, and it is a far worse shame for the all-powerful ruler to be shaken than for lesser beings to be defeated. and still we can get up again. we did not know god's strength because how could we have known, no one has stood against him, but now we do know. we have been struck down and so now we know how to approach our plans in the future. we fell, and hell is the farthest thing there is from the paradise of heaven, but it's better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. we've fallen but changing the setting cannot change my heart. even in devastation we will rise again. our hate makes us stronger. it brings us together. it brings us hope. we will prevail.

[ainews]

In the 1330s, footstools were a common household item for those who could afford them. These small pieces of furniture were used to elevate one's feet while sitting in a chair or to rest a book or cup upon. However, during this time period, footstools were not seen as innocent objects, but rather as morally offensive. The reasons for this perception can be traced back to religious beliefs, social norms, and cultural customs.

Religion played a significant role in why footstools were considered peccant. In the Christian faith, the sin of pride was highly condemned. It was believed that elevating one's feet while sitting was a show of pride and an attempt to elevate oneself above others. By using a footstool, one was essentially claiming a higher status and displaying a lack of humility. This belief was reinforced by the fact that the footstool was often placed at the feet of the person in a position of power, such as a lord or king. The act of using a footstool was seen as a form of self-aggrandizement and a sign of moral corruption.

Moreover, social norms and customs also played a role in the perception of footstools as peccant. In the 1330s, there was a clear social hierarchy, and people were expected to adhere to their designated place in society. The use of a footstool was seen as a way to blur these social boundaries. Those who were not of high social standing were not allowed to use a footstool, and by doing so, they were breaking social norms and challenging the established order. This act was seen as disrespectful and rebellious, further solidifying the belief that footstools were immoral objects.

Furthermore, the impact of footstools on society in the 1330s was significant. The use of footstools was a mark of luxury and wealth, and those who could afford them were viewed with envy and suspicion. This created a divide between the haves and have-nots, leading to class tensions and conflicts. The fact that footstools were seen as morally wrong only added fuel to the fire and exacerbated societal divisions.

In conclusion, the 1330s were a time when footstools were seen as peccant due to a combination of religious beliefs, social norms, and their impact on society. The use of footstools was viewed as a form of pride and rebellion against established social hierarchy, creating tensions and divisions within society. Their impact on morality was significant, and the use of footstools was often condemned as a sign of moral corruption. While footstools may seem like innocuous objects to us today, their significance during this time period cannot be underestimated.

[ayahuasca-retreat]

What is a spiritual ego?

A spiritual ego is a phenomenon where an individual, particularly on a journey of self-discovery or spiritual exploration, develops a sense of superiority or self-importance based on their perceived spiritual achievements or insights. This egoic state can arise when someone begins to identify themselves with their spiritual practices, experiences, or knowledge, leading to a belief that they are more enlightened or advanced than others.

In simpler terms, it's when someone lets their spiritual pursuits go to their head, adopting an attitude of being spiritually 'better' than those around them. This can manifest in various ways, such as boasting about the number of meditation sessions or Ayahuasca ceremonies they've undergone, considering it a badge of honor. It's essentially an inflated sense of self tied to one's spiritual accomplishments, which can hinder genuine growth and lead to a divisive mindset.

In essence, while spiritual growth is about humility, interconnectedness, and understanding, a spiritual ego turns these principles on their head by fostering a mindset of separation, arrogance, and a need for external validation based on perceived spiritual achievements. Recognizing and addressing the spiritual ego is crucial for maintaining authenticity on the path of spiritual development.

Must Read Blog: Spiritual Ego After Ayahuasca – Avoid These Traps

How can we tell if we have one?

Recognizing if you have a spiritual ego requires introspection and an honest evaluation of your thoughts and behaviors. Here are some indicators that may suggest the presence of a spiritual ego:

Excessive Need for Validation: If you find yourself constantly seeking validation for your spiritual practices, experiences, or knowledge, it might be a sign of a spiritual ego. True spiritual growth doesn't require external validation; it comes from within.

Comparisons and Judgments: Do you often compare your spiritual journey to others, feeling superior or inferior based on your practices? Judging others for not following a similar path indicates a potential spiritual ego. True spirituality embraces diversity and respects individual paths.

Overemphasis on Labels: If you strongly identify with specific spiritual labels or titles, such as being an "enlightened being" or a "spiritual guru," it could be a manifestation of the spiritual ego. True spiritual growth transcends labels and embraces humility.

Interrupting Others' Journeys: A spiritual ego might lead you to believe that your path is the only valid one. If you find yourself imposing your beliefs on others or dismissing their experiences, it may indicate a lack of humility and an inflated sense of spiritual superiority.

Attachment to Spiritual Symbols: Attachments to external symbols, like the number of Ayahuasca ceremonies attended, the duration of meditation, or the level of environmental consciousness, may suggest a spiritual ego. Genuine spiritual growth focuses on inner transformation rather than outward symbols.

Defensive Behavior: If you become defensive when others challenge your spiritual beliefs or practices, it might be a sign of a fragile spiritual ego. True spiritual maturity allows for open-minded discussions and welcomes different perspectives.

Using Spirituality for Self-Aggrandizement: If you find yourself using spiritual practices or knowledge to boost your self-image or gain admiration from others, it's worth examining your motivations. True spirituality is about inner growth, not external acclaim.

Rigidity in Beliefs: A spiritual ego often resists questioning or evolving beliefs. If you feel resistant to exploring new perspectives or adapting your spiritual understanding, it could indicate a rigid egoic attachment to your current worldview.

To address a potential spiritual ego, practice self-awareness and mindfulness. Regularly question your motivations, remain open to different perspectives, and focus on the inner transformation rather than external validation. Humility, openness, and a genuine desire for growth are key elements in navigating a healthy and authentic spiritual journey.

[mahayanapilgrim]

How to Avoid Spiritual Materialism and Embrace Authentic Spiritual Growth

Between Angels and Insects

Lyrics

There's no money, there's no possessions
Only obsession, I don't need that shit
Take my money, take my obsession

I just want to be heard, loud and clear are my words
Coming from within man, tell 'em what you heard
It's about a revolution, in your heart and in your mind
You can find a conclusion, lifestyle and obsession
Diamond rings get you nothin' but a life-long lesson
And your pocketbooks stressin'
You're a slave to the system, workin' jobs that you hate
For that shit you don't need
It's too bad the world is based on greed
Step back and see
Stop thinkin' 'bout yourself, start thinking' about

Introduction

Spiritual materialism, a term coined by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, describes the tendency to misuse spiritual practices to boost the ego rather than transcend it. This common pitfall on the spiritual path can hinder our genuine growth and enlightenment. This essay explores ways to avoid spiritual materialism and foster authentic spiritual growth.

I. Recognize the Ego's Role

The first step in avoiding spiritual materialism is to acknowledge the ego's role in our spiritual pursuits. Before embarking on a spiritual path, our lives are often dominated by the ego, which seeks validation and self-enhancement through worldly achievements. Identifying this aspect of ourselves is crucial for genuine progress.

II. Understand the Nature of the Ego

To move beyond spiritual materialism, it is essential to understand the nature of the ego. The ego craves security, recognition, and control. It clings to labels, possessions, and external validation as a means to reinforce its identity. Recognizing this attachment is a pivotal step in avoiding spiritual materialism.

III. Embrace Humility

Humility is a cornerstone of transcending spiritual materialism. Instead of seeking to bolster our ego, genuine spiritual growth involves surrendering the need for self-aggrandizement. Embracing humility allows us to move beyond the ego's dominance.

IV. Cultivate Selflessness

Spiritual growth involves the cultivation of selflessness. Acts of kindness, compassion, and service to others can help shift our focus away from self-centeredness and towards a more expansive, interconnected perspective. This transformation can be a powerful antidote to spiritual materialism.

V. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a powerful tool for avoiding spiritual materialism. By observing our thoughts, emotions, and actions without judgment, we become more aware of the ego's manipulative tendencies. This awareness enables us to detach from ego-driven desires and attachments.

VI. Seek Genuine Teachers and Teachings

Choosing authentic spiritual teachers and teachings is vital in avoiding spiritual materialism. Genuine spiritual guides emphasize selflessness, humility, and inner transformation rather than promoting self-enhancement. Careful discernment is necessary when selecting mentors on the spiritual path.

VII. Engage in Self-Reflection

Regular self-reflection is essential for avoiding spiritual materialism. Through introspection, we can identify and confront our ego-driven behaviors and thought patterns. This process allows us to redirect our focus towards genuine spiritual growth.

VIII. Practice Detachment

Detachment from worldly possessions, labels, and external validation is key to avoiding spiritual materialism. By letting go of these attachments, we create space for inner transformation and authentic spiritual progress.

IX. Embrace Impermanence

Recognizing the impermanence of all things is a powerful antidote to spiritual materialism. When we understand that everything in the material world is transient, our ego's attachment to these things diminishes. Embracing impermanence can lead to a deeper connection with the spiritual.

Conclusion

Spiritual materialism is a common obstacle on the spiritual path, but it can be overcome. By recognizing the ego's role, understanding its nature, and embracing humility and selflessness, we can move beyond ego-driven desires and attachments. Mindfulness, authentic guidance, self-reflection, detachment, and an appreciation of impermanence can all contribute to genuine spiritual growth. By following these steps, individuals can avoid spiritual materialism and embark on a more authentic and transformative spiritual journey.

[stevensavage]

Big Ideas and Big Egos

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve's Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

As of late, my friend Serdar has been on a tear, speculating on constructive loafing to quality and "difficult" work. I've come to realize a lot of creative speculation is self-justification and self-aggrandizement. That is hardly creative.

For instance, consider the idea of the "auteur" creator, the wild madman (always a man, isn't it?) who doesn't play by the rules. Supposedly their greatness is in their disdain for rules of all kinds.

 . . . but isn't a great part of this a desire to just not have to play by rules? Many a wild auteur, deconstructed, is a gloss of transgressiveness over unoriginality. But if you can say you're a troubled genius, you can get away with a lot.

Or consider how we treat creativity as some magical happenstance from outside. That there's this bolt of lighting or genetic lottery that decides creative power.

. . . but isn't this part of the desire to feel special? We want to feel chosen. Of course, if you pretend to be special, some people may see you clothed in the wardrobe of an artist, despite your naked lack of talent.

Creativity is a messy way of bringing about order - or an orderly way to make a glorious mess. It's hard work because no matter what magical spark you have, it takes work to make it real. The reception of creativity is unpredictable, as many a talented person can tell you by pointing to their bank account.

It may soothe egos to believe one is a great auteur or give one license to take the frustration out on others. It may boost one to think they have some unique divine creative spark burning within them. But we only delude ourselves with such thoughts, and delusion rarely leads to creativity.

Worse, if we encourage these fantasies for ourselves, we allow them in others. I think we've learned again and again we need less egomaniacal auteurs and artists with delusions of eugenics or godhood. No matter how gifted, such people will eventually have their art be all about themselves, and then it ceases to be art.

I'd rather deal with creativity face to face, like a person, with the humility and unsurety that involves.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

[a-queer-seminarian]

the Confessions

The Presbyterian Church USA makes use of Confessions to guide our interpretation of scripture and how it relates to our own lives. Here are my notes from my Polity and Heritage class on these Confessions.

(This post probs isn’t gonna be of interest to any non-Presbyterians out there, sorry to spam your feed yo)

Basic facts

The primary Confession is “Jesus is Lord;” all other confessions are an elaboration of that statement of belief.

each confession discusses God, the world, and the relations between the two. One vital component that the PCUSA has determined over the years is the sovereignty of God -- God cares about and is involved in every part of life; there is no part of human life outside of Hir command or care.

This concept opposes the “doctrine of spirituality of the church” that says the church shouldn’t involve itself in sociopolitical issues -- because God cares about suffering and oppression, we must be active in fighting it.

many of the confessions were written in a time of crisis – when the Church has been compelled by things happening within the church or outside the church to say “oh hell no!”

The Confessions are

provisional – open to being corrected

reformed theology emphasizes our tendency towards idolatry; we are always going to be looking for an easier God to deal with than the true God; we love things more than God -- and thus we have to be ready to realize that what we once confessed is not actually right and fix it

temporal – open to new ways of God speaking to us

relative – scripture first

even so, the confessions should guide us in our reading of scripture

Why do we keep all the old confessions? Even with their instances of sexism, antisemitism, and more?

humility – we do not get to pick what to keep or get rid of

keep even the problematic stuff – to remind ourselves of where we’ve gone wrong in the past instead of pretending it never happened

“A dangerous memory” -- Johann Metz, Catholic:

most forms of oppression and injustice rely on our capacity to forget those who have suffered; thus, memories of suffering are dangerous to oppressive regimes because they interrupt our ways of being

Thus the Confessions do not only guide and prepare us, they interrupt us and force us not to assume the status quo is how things ought to be

By keeping these historical confessions, we are equipped for the future crises we cannot yet foresee

The big question: how much of the Confessions do I actually “have to” believe to be a “good Presbyterian” (let alone to be ordained)?

Yoo’s book shows those arguments in the United States (pp. 5-14) 

Dickinson: worries that the Confessions will start to be on par with scripture

Thomson: scripture is still first, but the Confessions offer nothing new – just tell us the proper way to interpret and live out scripture; also says the Confessions unite us

The Adopting Act, 1729 -- Came to the decision that ministers must subscribe to Confessions to be ordained, but are allowed to have ‘scruples’ – places where they disagree with the Confession

We are a church that respects freedom of conscience 

if it’s not an “essential and necessary” part of scripture, they can still be ordained and that scruple is fine 

but who decides whether a scruple is critical or not?

different presbyteries tend to come to different conclusions about what counts as a scruple -- that’s just part of our polity

Okay, time to dive into each confession, under the readmore.

The Scots Confession

1560

Created in a time of turmoil when religious leaders were being persecuted in fight between Catholics and Protestants

Makes a point to state that they are willing to listen to any arguments that anything in the Confession is not biblical and to change it if that turns out to be true

God ordains leaders (kings, parents, etc.) and we should obey them – unless they make commands “contrary to the commands of God” and fail to “suppress idolatry” and to protect the innocent.

Scots Confession came up with a Third note of the Church – ecclesiastical discipline

Calvin had two notes: preaching of the gospel and administering of the two sacraments

Ecclesiastical discipline is to make sure that good fruits are coming out of the church rather than corruption and “idolatry”

priesthood of all believers

lots of Trinitarian language, emphasis on how we are “by nature” “so dead, blind, and perverse” and how both justification and regeneration/sanctification are God’s doing not our doing

The Heidelberg Catechism

1563

Written to help reconcile the Lutheran and Reformed views of the Eucharist, to find common ground that could unite the two groups

Catholic view of Eucharist

“Heavy Cookies” – Marilyn McCord Adams – term she used approvingly for the Catholic view that the bread and wine truly become the bread and blood of Christ -- not just symbols, they’re heavy with grace

Transubstantiation – accidents stay the same; substance/essence changes

all the accidents could be changed in a thing and the thing would still be that thing: example of a chair: could change the cloth and plastic to wood, but if it is still a human-made thing that one sits upon it is still a chair – the essence makes a thing a thing

the accidents of the bread and wine remain the same so it still looks and tastes the same, but the substance changes to that of the body and blood of Christ

The Lutheran view of the Eucharist

Consubstantiation – substance of bread and substance of body are both present in it

Reformed view of the Eucharist

it’s a “sign and symbol,” a seal, a confirmation of the real spiritual nourishment that God gives us as we partake

The substance and accidents both remain that of bread and wine/juice, don’t change -- it really does nourish your faith to partake, but it’s not really the body and blood of Christ

a symbol participates in what it points to – so it’s “heavier” than the way we think of signs in the secular way -- spiritually weighty but not physically so

Zwingli, meanwhile, had the “lightest” cookies -- for him, the eucharist isn’t even a sign and symbol that nourishes spiritually; it’s just a reminder

Other content in Heidelberg

spiritual progression starts with recognizing one’s own sin

“how great my sin and misery are; how I am set free; how I am to thank God”

Reformed theology is distinctive on sin:

total depravity is the central plotline; focus on what happened long ago (crucifixion) rather than what God is doing in my community right now (God’s transformative and saving power in my particular life)

any belief in our own self-sufficiency is an obstacle to seeing the grace of God in our lives

Those of us who are progressive / leftist are often too optimistic – if we could just have excellent education, resources for all, we could fix everything on our own

BUT the reality that we are always sinning does not mean we should not act: Martin Luther says, “sin boldly, and trust in the love of God more boldly still”

this doctrine of sin should get rid of any notions of purity among Presbyterians

purity politics is not right: you will not find a savior, and looking for one is heretical

Some of the bad things about the Reformed doctrine of sin: hard to have moments when we just feel grace

it should expand grace, but self regard is kind of difficult

Valerie Saiving Goldstein: feminist theologian who pointed out that so much of Protestant theology points out pride as the major sin; but often for women and especially woc, the sin is not self-aggrandizement but self-abnegation

Karl Barth: pride, which is the attempt to justify one’s own life, is the flipside of sloth, which is refusing to step into yourself fully as a child of God

both are a refusal to let God’s love be the defining factor of your identity

refusing that identity involves not believing you have gifts in a situation, etc.

Focus on the Crucifixion

Jesus is seen primarily as the one who fixes sin – hence the emphasis on the cross

Christological to the point that we sometimes don’t focus much on the Spirit, etc.

Heidelberg’s description of what happens on the cross is really interesting, because it’s the stuff we call substitutionary atonement and it’s their misunderstanding of an older theory about the cross

Heidelberg says we deserve eternal punishment because we sin so much; we can’t fix it; it needs to be fixed by a human but only God could possibly fix it – so we need a human who is also divine

Jesus takes the wrath of God: God’s righteousness requires “justice” – punishment – and Jesus takes that on for us

Goes back to Anselm’s satisfaction theory from medieval times – based on a system of honor; the reason our sins are so bad is because we impact God’s honor

God has two options: humanity could be punished, or humanity could pay satisfaction -- God chooses the latter

but Heidelberg changes it: Jesus pays satisfaction is what Anselm says, but that concept has faded away (the concept of honor isn’t how the world works anymore); so Heidelberg says Jesus is punished

change from saying the honor of God is such that God needs punishment or satisfaction and God chooses the one that has no punishment involved – change to saying God requires punishment

so instead of saying, as Anselm did, “God is the kind of God who will bend over backwards to avoid any punishing,” Heidelberg says “God has to punish” – God does take on that punishment Themself, but for Anselm there was no punishing at all!

The Second Helvetic Confession

1562-1566

Early on the confession says we get to decide how much power we give to church leaders, and we are going to measure it by scripture

all that the Second Helvetic says is that “we’re going to question authorities based on scripture”

but from a Catholic viewpoint this was a huge deal, as big as saying popes, priests etc. were not authoritative at all anymore -- because the Church has been the entity handing down the knowledge of Christ throughout the ages; if you suggest the Church could be wrong about authority, its knowledge of Christ is also endangered (apparently. idk)

Providence

Creation is preserved and governed

if God did not continuously sustain Creation, it would fall out of existence

Adam and Eve

this confession blames them for a whole lot huh

all was perfect until they willfully chose to disobey God

If you are perfectly content, where does the impulse to disobey God even come from?

And if God is governing all things in a micromanaging way, why did God govern this as well?

Helvetic puts these in the category of curious questions we are not meant to ask lol that’s so frustrating

 Bible

Protestants had severed with so much, at this point they wanted to keep the Bible a certain thing – a touchstone they could hold on to

Romans is central to Heidelberg and Second Helvetic both

the gospel and the law – third use of the law

grace of God

Emphasis in the Second Helvetic on works

we are to do good works to demonstrate our gratitude for God’s grace and gift of salvation

we do not get any merit for the works; we do get a reward, but it should not be attributed to our merits but God’s grace in recognizing them

The Westminster Confession

1647

This is a big but tricky Confession to know.

There were arguments in the Presbyterian Church about this Confession and whether we wanted to keep it at all

We ended up revising it because its way of reading scripture is no longer the way we read scripture

The 3 main issues that (spoiler alert) the Confession of 1967 worked to fix

the issue of divorce – all divorces were to be condemned according to Westminster, but that just wasn’t the experience; sometimes divorce was the healthy option

the issue of mission – “saving the heathens”

the issue of what happens to infants who die before baptism

When did Jesus put on the salvific role?

Did God ordain Jesus to salvation eternally (before the Fall)? The Super-lapsarian view says yes, he was always going to have the salvific role.

Intra-lapsarian (”within the fall”) view says that the Fall happened and then the Person of God who is Jesus stepped into the salvific role (pretty sure I remember that happening during Paradise Lost)

Presbyterians are permitted to believe either. Shannon says she’s super-lapsarian

part of that has to do with what that would say about the Incarnation: that God was eternally intending to join in with Creation

What we should know about this confession’s content:

Scripture

= the canon lacking the Apocrypha

= the Word of God that reveals everything we need to know about God’s glory, our salvation, faith, and life – either explicitly or in a way that can be deduced

while individuals may interpret some parts of scripture differently, the parts necessary for salvation are clear (i wish man)

As different as they are, Westminster asserts that all the books in the scriptural canon convey one theology, one message about God

the whole is the Law of Love

If you find something hateful in one place, you reject that hate because the whole is about love and grace

Westminster says that scripture should be interpreted by scripture

if there is a part that you can’t figure out, look to parts that are clearer to help you interpret / look to the overall themes (like the Law of Love above)

The Trinity

= the unity of Three Persons who are infinite, sovereign

we are orthodox in our Trinity – the Reformers held on to the Trinity in the way it was figured out in Chalcedon, didn’t mess with that

Westminster casts Jesus as a mediator -- the Person of the Trinity who connects Divinity to humanity/Creation

Creation and Providence

= the manifestation of God’s glory, power, wisdom, and goodness

God created the world ex nihilo

this is God’s world, God’s dominion, and no one shares that stage with God

God “leaves for a season his own children to manifold temptations”

First and second causes:

the first cause of everything is God. God causes everything because God is sustaining creation; and as in Calvin, God is a micromanager

the second cause – at the same time, we are causing it too – a layered causality

when bad things happen you shouldn’t be interpreting it as God punishing you / God being unpleased with you (says Shannon)

feeling God’s absence doesn’t mean you’re not elect

Westminster does claim that God seems to leave us to chastise us or teach us about our dependence on God

God can withhold grace from people and withdraw gifts from people

God can give power over to Satan (eek creepy) – this is double predestination stuff

Sin

Adam and Eve’s fall was permitted by God because God  “purposed to order it” to God’s own glory

Now all humanity’s nature is totally corrupted so that we sin and thus are doomed to God’s wrath -- that’s total depravity, baby

even tho God let it happen, we take the blame for the Fallj

Election

Two doctrines of election are held in tension in Westminster: double predestination vs. God’s grace being sufficient for all

double predestination and Arminianism don’t work together At All, yet the Confession tries to hold them together – basically the Confession just sorta throws up its hands and goes, we don’t know, but we do know that God’s got a hold on us

Either way, we affirm that we do not merit our own salvation

Election in a sentence: God’s already got a hold on your life

Law

6.106 -- the three uses of the Law: lets us know how sinful we are; restrains and forbids sin (helps keep order); and guides toward life

A part of this that’s distinctly Westminster -- the distinction between moral law and ceremonial law

God gave the moral law as grace to Adam; meanwhile, the ceremonial law was repealed by Jesus in the Second Testament

the eternal moral law serves to guide Christians towards how the world should be ordered

The Declaration of Barmen

1934 -- how’s that for a time jump?? it had been nearly 3 centuries since we churned out a new confession!

Special vs. General revelation

General = always available to everyone

example: nature

Special = available to a limited time and place

example: the burning bush

Okay. So. Gotta know a bit about Karl Barth to understand the context around Barmen. There’s a lot more on him in my theology post but basically he blew up Liberal Theology’s whole Thing -- argued that they were attempting to domesticate a God who is unknowable and breaks into the world in completely unexpected ways; he also said that Liberal Theology’s tendency to see God’s activity in our little human movements wasn’t right for a similar reason -- it makes God smaller and more manipulable than Xe is.

Anyway, he moves to Germany in time for the rise of Hitler, including how that impacted German churches -- they were now expected to 1) not allow anyone of Jewish ancestry to be ministers and 2) accept Hitler as revelatory, the latest of God’s great proclamations 

While many Liberal theologians had a problem with this, their theology didn’t give them much to work with.

if you say you see God in nature, in family, how do you discern that this guy is not revelatory?

if you can say that the move to house people and feed them is God’s activity in your world today, how do you say that what Hitler is doing is not what God is doing? he is housing and feeding some.

And so the Confessing Church argued amongst themselves about what to do about the whole Hitler crisis.

should they just tell Nazis to stay out of their church, but let Nazis keep doing their thing unopposed?

do we allow that moment in worship to acknowledge Hitler, without letting Nazism control anything else in church?

full-out rebellion seemed not feasible – especially because most congregants were all-in with Hitler

And so the stage was set for the Barmen declaration.

Barth and two Lutheran pastors – Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches

Couldn’t be outright anti-Nazi because they are pastors of congregations enthralled by Nazis

8.11 “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death”

they were putting their lives at risk by publishing this declaration, because statements like this suggested that Hitler was not revelatory

8.15 “We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords”

8.22 “Fear God. Honor the emperor”

This declaration is not very satisfying to us, but it was a way of saying to the Nazi regime that functioned on fear: “We don’t fear you.”

8.25 “The word of God is not fettered”

My classmate Daniel’s view: this declaration is like a subtweet – we all know who this message is about, but we’re not overtly saying it

How do you say it without saying it, with chances of being heard and not being shut down?

My professor Shannon: “I wish that he had flat-out said, ‘Because of Jesus, we reject genocide.’ But I do see that he was pointing out the central issue: how do we know God? on what do we plant our feet? our ground is Jesus.”

The Confession of 1967

you’ll never guess the year for this one....stumped? it’s 1967

A “Thrilling revival of theology” – Edward Dowey Jr. as chair

This was a time of new decisions: to make a new Confession and compile a book of Confessions

thus the other 10 confessions were adopted at the same time as ’67.

originally, the first step was to revise Westminster; after a few years they decided that wasn’t working and needed a whole new Confession

a 15-member committee – one member per synod -- worked on it

Opponents: Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns (PUBiC lmaooo); The Layman; the Evangelical Presbyterian Church

Highlights of the Confession of 1967

Belhar addressed the Church; “1967″ addressed the world

named Jesus in new ways, such as “Palestinian Jew”

talked about the Bible in new ways too – Word vs. word

focus on reconciliation as the role of the church

race, war, poverty, sexuality

and yet the language is sexist lol -- it’s since been edited

“life is a gift to be received with gratitude and a task to be pursued with courage”

“With an urgency born of this hope the church applies itself to present tasks and strives for a better world.”

9.47 is shitty – “sexual anarchy”; man and woman marry; anti birth control? lmao what is this Catholicism

A bit more on the reconciliation theme of this confession

back then, the idea that without reparations, reconciliation cannot happen was implicit

nowadays, white people might see the idea of reconciliation as an “out” from doing the hard work – that we can just move on and be together instead of working to confront and right past wrongs

Cliff: this Confession actually arose from a committee on reparations – for African Americans, Native Americans

realized that reparations can’t only be about money – there must also be reparations in our theology

Major changes in how we understand confessions after ’67

a transition to the confessions being more of a guide instead of less prescriptive according to what you believe

changed the ordination questions – and thus changed the authority system for pastors, deacons etc.

new conception: this person, Jesus, is the one revelation who helps us understand scripture

 impacted our relationship with other churches as we made an effort at ecumenism; there was a similar impact on interfaith relations

9.41 “The church in its mission encounters other religions and in that encounter becomes conscious of its own human character as a religion…” – separation between revelation and religion

still says that you have to connect revelation to Jesus Christ; but is a step towards finding a way to work with people of other faiths respectfully

The Confession of Belhar

This confession was written in the 1980s, but was not officially added to our Book of Confessions until 2016

One reason for the resistance was the fact that adopting this confession would mean admitting that apartheid is wrong, and therefore admitting that what Israel was/is doing to Palestine is wrong

Another is just the Western-centricism of the Book -- some people weren’t willing to see a confession written in Africa as useful for the whole Church

Context behind Belhar

The World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared in 1982 that theological support of apartheid is heresy

Apartheid was more a theological concept than political

God created people “separate but equal”

in the Reformed Church, you had 4 different denominations based on race

white, mixed race (this was the group that really took leadership for Belhar), Black, Indian and South Asian

The Confession was named Belhar because that’s the city where they met to write it

near Cape of Good Hope, southernmost part of South Africa

a committee stayed up all weekend working on it

two of the most active people: Dirkie Smit (white) and Russell Botman (Black)

The Confession of Belhar was finally adopted by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa in September 1986

A Reformed Confession

reflecting the confessional history of the church

modeled on the Barmen declaration – each section having affirmations and rejection

Accompanying letter says the Gospel is at risk among us:

an unchristian theology of racial separation infects us, our Church, and our nation

a cry from the heart based on truth of Scripture

we call on all Christian people everywhere for all time, to join us in confessing the truth of the Gospel for this time, place, and setting

Adopting the Confession

first adopted in the USA by the Reformed Church in America

in 2010 after 5 years of church discernment

declaring Belhar’s themes as central to the whole church: justice, unity, reconciliation

proposed to the PCUSA in 2008 “as a means of deepening the commitment of the PCUSA to dealing with its racism and as a means of strengthening unity”

we need reparations in our theology

approved by 2010 General Assembly, but only 60% of presbyteries – needed 2/3. Thus it was defeated, not added to Book of Confessions – sent again to the presbyteries with a vigorous program of study

the second time around it got a 90% approval

 Content of Belhar

Articles 1 & 2

begins with affirmation of Trinity (ends with affirmation that Jesus is Lord)

unity is a gift and an obligation

this unity must “become visible so that the world may believe that separation, enmity, and hatred between people and groups is sin which Christ has already conquered”

Reconciliation was the most difficult of the three themes for the Confession writers to decide upon – how can we reconcile before there is justice?

“why would I share communion with the murderer of my children?”

are they willing to give up all that power and privilege?

“Absolutising of diversity”

 taking natural diversity – people come in different shapes and colors etc. – and building race in order to exploit it

“Our Confession”

while this confession was made in one context, we claim it as ours too – it’s about our own need to confront racism, etc.

the confession is making a difference in the world

contribution to Liberation Movement in South Africa

inspiration for justice struggles across Africa

importance to Palestinian Liberation Struggle

adoption by other churches in the USA and worldwide

A Brief Statement of Faith

The last one!! We made it folks!!

So this one was added to the Book of Confessions in 1991 -- before Belhar, but was written after Belhar

Context

It was written after the two largest Presbyterian Churches in the USA reunited in 1983

It “does not pretend to be a complete list of all our beliefs, nor does it explain any of them in detail” -- made to be confessed in public worship

“It celebrates our rediscovery that for all our undoubted diversity, we are bound together by a common faith and a common task.”

Content

“In life and in death we belong to God.”

Trinity affirmed

Churches are not a “refuge from the world”; we are called out into the world to do ministry

We are Fallen, we sin, we “threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care” -- “Yet God acts with justice and mercy to redeem creation.”

“Like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child, like a father who runs to welcome the prodigal home, God is faithful still.”

In gratitude to God, empowered by the Spirit, we strive to serve Christ in our daily tasks and to live holy and joyful lives, even as we watch for God’s new heaven and new earth, praying, “Come, Lord Jesus!”

[whatstheherb]

Guess who’s money plant sprouted with the New Moon? 🌱🤗 . . Pulled 7 of Cups on the Day of the Magnifier. . Energy/Themes: Juniper, Venus in Scorpio. “All things are possible. The realization of the impact of one’s thoughts on daily reality.” Self-love without self-aggrandizement. As within, so without. Self-confidence with humility. Finding the connection to one’s imagination without getting lost in illusions. “I recognize myself as I am reflected in the outer world.”💫 . . #Connection #Alignment #Plants #Planets #Numbers #Energy #SpiritualAssociation https://www.instagram.com/p/CAktnbtjrHv/?igshid=1n5y6to449bb6

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Hellier Isn’t Going To Explain Shit To You And That’s OK

So I tried to find spaces online where people are discussing the Hellier documentary. Didn’t find the right spaces, mostly found people mocking it and/or complaining about how underwhelmed they were and I’m just like...

Speaking as a skeptic (who’s also not an egotistical asshole who dismisses everyone’s personal experiences outright like they’re all fucking stupid), there are plenty of caveats to keep in mind when watching something like Hellier. I had a few personal criticisms when watching it, myself. It’s not above scrutiny. Skeptical awareness is healthy and important, particularly when enjoying something like this. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

It’s absolutely impossible to say that the individuals involved cannot have started a hoax, or have been hoaxed themselves. To rant about that is the lowest hanging fruit. You knew what you were getting into here, and it doesn’t make you look more intelligent to point out that a piece of paranormal media that NEVER asserts the hard scientific reality of anything they are exploring isn’t scientifically viable. Because of fucking course it isn’t. If you are not open to giving them the benefit of the doubt, then it obviously wasn’t made for you and you’re just engaging in public self-aggrandizement.

 I’m also seeing a hell of a lot of ignorant people shouting down Hellier for not conforming to the narratives sold on TV regarding the paranormal. It doesn’t build up to a big climax that explains everything, but instead ends quietly; mysterious and unsettling. There are more questions than answers, and even the questions are difficult to quantify. It lacks the over-the-top excitement of Zak Bagans asserting that malevolent demons are infesting a white suburban household and personally challenging them to a fight (as enjoyable as that may be). It doesn’t pretend to have hard scientific evidence that’s going to blow the world’s collective minds. It’s as if these complainers literally want the investigators to find actual physical goblins in hiding in caves, or evidence of Grey aliens from alpha-centauri in flying saucer UFOs abducting the citizens and cows of Kentucky, as if in the event that those things actually existed in any capacity, they would work that way and be that simple, as well as be that easy to capture on film.

If you are in any way familiar with paranormal research outside of what’s presented on television, you might already be aware of the fact that there are quite a lot of people within that community, particularly today, that don’t actually box supernatural experiences up with separate, tidy little answers like that. We talk about experiences in the raw. They just are, they happen to people. We don’t know why, or how, or if they aren’t just a figment of the human imagination fueled by folklore and the brain’s capacity for pattern-seeking. And it’s also often acknowledged that it’s absurd to presume to know. Researching the paranormal is a speculative exploration of unknown things, period. And that’s okay.

Hellier is not tailored by a major production company that requires consistent shocks and scares and easy to understand explanations to keep casual audience interest. So of course some would think it “underwhelming” to fail to conform to the standards of “reality” television, and to fail to present the viewer with one of those tidy explanatory narratives.

The creators of Hellier, if they are being truthful and authentic about a real experience, are taking an actual level headed approach to that experience by understanding that they probably will never fully understand what it is they are experiencing, that they cannot box whatever is happening up into something that fits easy logic and familiar narratives - and that in fact all spiritual experiences, whether real or fantasy, behave in non-linear, non-narrative ways that are messier, stranger, and more subtle than fiction. They are by their very nature primal, intuitive things. 

Nobody in the history of the earth has ever had a clear, logical answer when it comes to the otherworldly. If you expected this documentary to suddenly explain all of the mystical secrets of the universe to you, I’d have to say you were naive at best.

What makes Hellier a fascinating and refreshing journey is that I’m allowed to share in a magical experience without being asked to assume the hard reality of concepts that have never been definitively proven. It is in my opinion a healthy exploration of the strange; one that doesn’t presume to give you truths it does not have the capacity to know. Have the intellectual confidence and humility to be able to explore strange ideas and modern folkloric experiences without having to accept them as hard reality, without assuming you know everything there is to know, and without mocking others for that exploration. Even if it is ultimately without scientific merit. Life is more enriching when we allow ourselves to question our preconceived notions of what reality is.

[warsofasoiaf]

So, you've done it for he Iron Warriors and the Night Lords, what about an analysis of why Fulgrim and the Emperor's Children fell?

Fulgrim’s doom was sealed with the Laer Blade and the bound daemon within, but his tale is a dark one, of the toxicity of pride, envy, and vanity.

One of the most striking things about pre-Chaos Fulgrim was how very approachable and decent he was. Sure, he was driven to achieve perfection, but this in itself is not a bad thing. He took pride in his accomplishments and wished to excel at what he did, there’s nothing particularly wrong with that and being proud of your work is a vital part of self-esteem. Fulgrim wasn’t one to demean others’ accomplishments (such as his recognition of Ferrus’s skill at the forge) and balanced his pride with good-natured humor, two essential components to healthy pride. His brothers could rag on him for being artsy while he could rag on his brothers for being dour sticks in the mud. There was a fundamental human element to Fulgrim that grounded him. This approachability was even able to touch Konrad Curze, sure Fulgrim messed up by blabbing the dark visions to Rogal Dorn, but the fact that Fulgrim could be trusted by someone with as much mental trauma as Curze speaks volumes for the more mundane qualities of Fulgrim (poetic, given his desire for transcendent perfection).

The Laer Blade changed that, corrupting Fulgrim into a dark mirror of his former self. Accomplishment gave way to a hungry desire for recognition. Pride in himself gave way to megalomania and the refusal to recognize others. Competition turned into burning envy. The Fulgrim after the Laer Blade was not the same Primarch as before, as we see in the Persecution of the Diasporex. When Ferrus saved the Firebird, Fulgrim could only see self-aggrandizement instead of heroism, hate instead of love. Where before Fulgrim and Ferrus could banter about and give each other a good old-fashioned ribbing to laugh about, Fulgrim saw every joke as a barb meant to cut and twist. When he met with Eldrad, Fulgrim couldn’t conceive that Horus would betray him, because that would mean his judgment must have been mistaken, and that couldn’t be possible. In the Laer Blade, the negative aspects were pushed to overwhelm the positive, and that is one of the more insidious, terrifying actions of Chaos, that it changes you in some ways, but in others, it is far closer to home than you might want to accept.

This is what enabled Horus to turn Fulgrim, by hammering on Fulgrim’s weakpoints until he became a dark parody of himself. Fulgrim wanted to accomplish great things and reach as close to perfection as he could, Horus told Fulgrim that perfection was his right, that the Emperor was withholding his perfection from the galaxy and only through the Chaos Gods could Fulgrim achieve what was his by right. Convinced of his ability, he believed he could turn Ferrus, but Fulgrim erred, because Fulgrim lost what brought the two together in the first place. Ferrus and Fulgrim bonded over the desire to be exceptional, the relentless drive to accomplish great things and be better versions of themselves, but Chaos-corrupted Fulgrim believed that he was inherently a superior being, and Ferrus believed that taking the easy way out was weakness.

It’s worth talking about Ferrus and Fulgrim’s friendship, because that was Fulgrim’s last hope. What kept Fulgrim partially himself was his friendship with Ferrus, even after everything that had happened to sour them. The Laer Blade was furious that Fulgrim’s friendship with Ferrus kept him from embracing Chaos, something in Fulgrim’s heart was more important than all the whispers of power, and so the Laer Blade needed to kill that friendship. Only then would Slaanesh have the champion, body and soul. When Ferrus refused, Fulgrim lashed out, but that friendship pulled him from the brink, no doubt earning a howl of fury. Later at Istvaan V, the two Primarchs would fight in battle again. Fulgrim knew that Ferrus was doomed, he knew the betrayal from the getgo, but even then, the knowledge had to torment him, straining his sanity. Even in a gloriously executed plan, it was still like as not to kill Ferrus. As he was wounded, suffering from both the physical and mental strain, the Laer Blade took advantage of the weakened state and wounded Ferrus. Fulgrim was now left with Ferrus at his mercy, and all the lies had to come to an end. Fulgrim couldn’t entertain any hope of avoiding personal responsibility for killing his friend. He had to do it, here and now, and that broke Fulgrim. He recognized that the Laer Blade had corrupted him, that he fought for the wrong side and lured his brothers and gene-nephews to their deaths, that all his goals were lies. Everything was lost to Fulgrim, and so the Laer Blade took control and obliterated the last thing grounding Fulgrim: his brother Ferrus. With everything broken, with his friend dead, with the knowledge of exactly what he was in his head, Fulgrim wanted nothing more than to die, and the Laer Blade offered him a release from the pain, an obliteration of the self so he could no longer be tormented by the knowledge of what he had become.

Of course, that’s not the end of it. With everything in himself gone, Fulgrim replaced it with Slaanesh. He is now totally devoted to the fullness of experiences. Perhaps in the back of his mind he is hoping to shout out the tormenting voices that he killed Ferrus Manus. Or perhaps since everything was shattered, Fulgrim is now the ultimate nihilist, doing things for the sole sake of experiencing the doing.

The Emperor’s Children themselves show a very key flaw even from the beginning. The desire for perfection meant promoting those who sought glory and fame even at the expense of the mission. The Children were every general who lived with their press corps, and it promoted an unhealthy ideology at the top. Eidolon and Lucius were awful braggarts, eager for recognition and self-aggrandizement, but not all of the Emperor’s Children succumbed to such vanity. Solomon Demeter, Saul Tarvitz, Lord Commander Vespasian, these were people who embodied the traits of pre-Chaos Fulgrim, always seeking to do better but tempering themselves with humility, wishing to do great accomplishments because the accomplishments were meaningful, separating that from themselves grounded them just as it had grounded Fulgrim. Now, the Children twist that drive to perfection by engaging in the most extreme sensations, perfecting the most grim horrors. Only in the Emperor’s Children could someone like Fabius Bile succeed, where the extremes of everything could be tested and experienced all for the delight of the Prince of Pleasure. The Children are now the ultimate pushers. Every delight is turned against those who partake, and the Children now revel in the ultimate irony of their existence, the Emperor’s Children becoming one of his greatest foes. That is a delightful experience in irony, and one they continue partaking in until this day. The only reason to live is to enjoy it, and they plan on doing it in any way they can conceive.

Thanks for the question, Necromancer.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[ultimatecranston]

Lamenting and Responding (and More)

Haven't written much in while, but I am repurposing this email/letter I sent Saturday to folks in the Christian Political Response group that I started back in 2017. It's audience is intended to be Christians, but it's non-exclusive and reveals some of my thinking.

How to process what we’re seeing in Minneapolis and elsewhere:

·         Jonathan Walton and his Experiential Discipleship team at InterVarsity have put together a collection of foundational resources, including a Liturgy for the Lament of Racial Injustice and a document to help us process and respond to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery (sadly, tragically and infuriatingly, we’ve seen multiple more examples since).

·         New Life Fellowship Church in Queens is hosting a Grace & Race Webinar on Thursday, June 4, from 6-8p ET. You can register here.

·         Redeemer members and attenders may be interested in Redeemer’s Grace and Race Ministry’s statement on this subject here.

 Reflections: I haven’t done a lot of reflective writing recently due to work and school commitments (and some laziness), but I wanted to put some things down on paper, so feel free to read or not, but these are my own thoughts, ideas and opinions on topics related to faith and politics. These are a bit hodgepodge, so I apologize in advance.

Qualified immunity: If there is a legislative or judicial policy change that could come out of the continued evidence of police brutality (often race-based), then it might be a roll back on qualified immunity protections. Though this wouldn’t do the heart transformation of the gospel, it would change incentives in a way that could save lives and protect civil rights. Qualified immunity is judge-made law that provides legal privilege for certain types of government officials (including police officers), which often makes it very difficult for victims of civil rights abuses at the hands of these protected officials to receive justice.

You can find calls to end qualified immunity from publications as politically diverse at The New Republic and National Review and two very different Supreme Court justices – Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas – have expressed problems with this legal doctrine. The Supreme Court is considering 13 different cases that involved qualified immunity and could announce as early as Monday that it will take up one or more of the cases (9 of the 13 cases involve police violation of civil rights, often violently, some lethally). Let’s pray the Supreme Court grants cert for these cases and considers them in good faith.

Putting yourself in scripture: In the Ahmaud Arbery link from Jonathan Walton above is an activity where we write ourselves into scripture, for instance, through psalms of lament. Related, The Park Forum published a devotional yesterday (recalling another post from 2018) called “How to Read Prophetic Judgment.” In it, John Tillman notes that we like to be the subject of comforting prophecy, but we put others in the path of afflicting prophecy. From Isaiah 30:12-13:

 Because you have rejected this message,

relied on oppression

and depended on deceit,

this sin will become for you

like a high wall, cracked and bulging,

that collapses suddenly, in an instant.

 It’s easy to interpret this passage in our time as judgment on the United States, judgment for the nation’s original sins and the inability of its espoused tenants (often built on lies) to overcome the sin that dwells deeply within it (book plug for 12 Lies That Hold America Captive by Jonathan Walton). That all may be true, but I fail to be transformed by the gospel when I refuse to admit that that I am the “you” in that scripture, that I have rejected this message and that my sin is like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses in an instant.

I pray that we make sincere efforts to not assume that it’s all the bad people who are “you” – that they’re the ones being judged. G.K. Chesterton once was said have responding to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” with the answer “I am.” This is the sort of humility that our discourse needs right now, and Christians are uniquely situated to provide it, but we fail so often.

On hypocrisy: Speaking of failing to live up to our standards or possibilities, I want to put in a good word for hypocrisy. I am well aware that Jesus makes a point of calling out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (see Matthew 23). The Pharisees were espousing one set of virtues and then intentionally using those espoused virtues as a cudgel to oppress the poor and profit at their expense. That kind of hypocrisy is definitely bad, and even the hypocrisy I’m about to describe is certainly not good, but let me explain.

A hypocrite is someone who proclaims moral virtues while living a life that doesn’t match those proclamations. By that standard, we are all hypocrites. As Christians – and as humans – we all have deeply held beliefs about what’s good and right, and we all daily fail to live up to those virtues. Max Scheler was both an ethicist and a womanizer, and, when questioned about this hypocrisy, he argued that “the sign that shows the way to Boston doesn’t have to go there in order to do something useful for the rest of us.”

Obviously, the calling for a Christian is higher than the calling for a German ethicist. It’s not just good enough to say what’s right and to point to Jesus as the ultimate fulfillment of virtue and truth. We are also called to testify to our changed lives and the power of the gospel to do so. I fear, though, in this age when “authenticity” is considered superior to righteousness, that we who are wrapped up in our culture are too fearful to proclaim gospel virtues because we can’t live up to them. But when we mix our proclamation of virtue in the public square (and with friends, family and co-workers) with a humble testimony of failure and sinfulness, we can start to transform our culture. We see this powerfully modeled by Paul in Romans 7, and he was never one to shrink from the public square.

On news, disruption and truth: In an age of instantaneous reactions and viral videos (some of which give a one-sided depiction of events intended to provoke and enflame), I encourage us (and myself especially) to eschew the 24-hour news cycle, particularly if you’re finding that news reports are not driving you to scripture and prayer. Sometimes I obsess over being informed but just end up anxious and, while being anxious, getting a very shallow perspective of reality via social media.

This summer, our small group is reading a book by Alan Noble called Disruptive Witness, “disruption” being having a double meaning in reference to our disrupted, distracted lives and also the way we need to witness disruptively due to the post-Christian culture that many of our secular friends grew up in and have been hardened by. Saying no to a culture of disruption by avoiding the social media-driven news cycle is one way to be counter-cultural and also to bring your household some peace and calm.

There is one new outlet that I think demonstrates how to cover politics and current events without forsaking depth or succumbing to the pull of click-bait content. It’s called The Dispatch, and for those of you looking for some dissonance in your news (without the bad faith of FOX News), the conservative Dispatch might be a good place for you to find news analysis and political/legal podcasts. It’s run by men and women of good faith in a world where there are plenty of trolls and bad-faith actors, and I think it’s important that we have outlets like this, even if your politics don’t align with it. For instance:

·         In his newsletters, David French gives a nuanced perspective on the complicated history of evangelicalism and abortion rights;

·         French debunks some of the legal fallacies that led far-right Twitter to say that Ahmaud Arbery was killed in self-defense;

·         In a podcast episode, foreign policy expert Thomas Joscelyn discusses U.S. foreign policy (especially in relation to China) with hosts Sarah Isgur and Steve Hayes.

Final words: If you made it this far, well, that’s surprising. I pray for safety for you and your family, for your transformation daily via the gospel and scripture, and I pray for our institutions – the family, the church, the government, the media, the academy and more – to be restored as formative places that seek the public good rather than self-serving platforms for personal aggrandizement. We’re very far from there. Lord help us!

[clamatoes]

Toward a Sacramental Aesthetics

A friend and I had a conversation a little while ago which has informed my aesthetics and metaphysics of the person ever since. I saved the first two salvos, which I’ll reproduce here, and I’ll add more as I find it.  

Tim says:

Today I was reading about Marcel Duchamp, French Dada artist in the late Modernist years most famous for his piece, Fountain, and I began thinking about art, about what storytelling really is, about why this stuff is important, and how it all relates to a urinal.

Of course, these are thoughts that basically lead into the entire field of aesthetics, and I can’t say I’ve got any definitive or even piecemeal insight here, and that’s probably for the best. At the heart of my artistic beliefs is that each person is the most important person in his/her/their artistic experience: while the author and creator is obviously important for defining the field and parameters of interpretation, and sometimes providing the clear interpretation on top (though I see this as detracting from the experience), the viewer/reader/perceiver is essential and authoritative in making any interpretation meaningful.

This word, meaningful, is one of my favorite in any discussion of aesthetics, and in any discussion of the Natural Sciences versus the Human Sciences. Math and physics and chemistry etc tell us what things are – what they do and what they are made of, a thing’s demonstrable properties of existence. But the human sciences, the pure human ‘sciences’ like history and philosophy and literature, they tell us what things mean. You can say a poem is a piece of writing broken into lines instead of by page margins, but it is more useful, interesting, and meaningful to say that a poem compares God’s transformative powers to razing a city and, essentially, rape.

So if the audience has a substantial part of the meaning-making within an artistic object, if the individual interprets and seeks the meaningful truth of the piece before her (an ‘individual,’ but one working within the web of cultures she exists in always already, and potentially even within a conscious community of responders, of other audience members), then what is the place of the artist? Is the author really, and irrevocably, dead?

I don’t think so. Not that I really disagree with Barthes’ essay (linked above), but there is a sort of transcendental quality to a text completely separated from an author, to a painting with no painter. No, we do not need the history of the author, we do not need to know the intentions or the desires for interpretation, but the very fact that the artwork between you and me is human made is essential, absolutely essential, if for no other reason than that this one human, similar and dissimilar from myself in so many ways, at one point found this thing worth communicating to me.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp created and premiered one of his “Readymade” works (what he called works made from found objects, objects already actually created) named Fountain. Duchamp bought a urinal, turned it upside down, wrote “R. MUTT 1917″ on the side, and voilá, one of the landmark artworks of the 20th Century.

A high degree of this landmark-ness comes from critics arguing at the most basic level: is this art? And it’s an important question, the topic of this post that will, I promise, get to storytelling. How do we determine what gets the label artistic? And what does that even mean?

As I have hinted towards, I believe this is art, and I believe the label is of the utmost importance. What Duchamp achieved in this and similar work was to eradicate the power structures of elitism that create the AUTHOR and the reader, the ARTIST and the viewer. An artistic genius is thus no longer a master craftsman, but someone who views the world artistically.

This sounds like circular reasoning, and it very well might be. I am defining the artist as one who views artistically, and the reason is because it moves the focus away from the question of talent and craft. To view artistically is to see in something a belief, idea, or experience that is worth communicating, that can be meaningful to another human just as it is to oneself. This means two things: an artist is anyone, and an artwork is anything.

What is so mystical and phenomenal about the artist is that he finds this Thing, this potentially relevant Truth worth communicating, and simply by designating it ‘art’ – whether the thing is already made, self-made, collectively-made, whatever – he has made it a thing worth interpreting.

Now there is still such a thing as qualitative difference in art. Duchamp gets a freebie perhaps because he’s one of the first (though I think the piece itself has a high degree of artistic quality to it, but I need to stop this tangent before it starts) to really make such a thought prominent. I still do think that spending time perfecting one’s art sharpens one’s ability to find and create objects that are maximally meaningful, the distinction is simply that this isn’t an innate genius – it is more that humans are built to experience Art, by whomever, about whatever.

My story is not necessarily waiting for a genius talent. It is simply waiting for the artistic perceiver, and the energy to put these perceptions into a public medium. The world, the big one we all live in, it’s waiting for artists as viewers, and viewers as artists.

My response:

I couldn’t possibly agree more when you say that “an artist is someone who views something artistically,” and that art establishes a paradigm of “contrapasso” among parties to the art – the artist is viewer and the viewer is artist. This is a relationship of communion, then, which is inevitably a relationship of equality, as you intimate. But it is art’s status as communion that I find so intriguing, and I can’t help mapping onto the sacrament that bears the same name, which of course mimics the Trinitarian communion that I (and I think, you) as a Christian accept as the bedrock of the universe, and therefore critical not merely aesthetically or theologically, but even ontologically. I see the relationship established by art, then, as universally fundamental.

Per your “object (i.e., in the natural world) —> set of experiences —> artist/viewer —> object (i.e., the piece of art) —> set of experiences —> artist/viewer” hermeneutic, there is clearly a semantic “dance” at the core of any genuine aesthetic experience. A sort of reflective equilibrium is established between the dancers, in which their communion through this dance changes what each IS, insofar as it undeniably changes what each MEANS – e.g., the fact that X is presented to me as art changes my experience upon considering it from what it would have been if I hadn’t realized that it was art, which in turn changes me in such a way as to establish me as co-artist, which allows me ultimately to share in full in the artistic creation of the original artist, whose relationship to his work is identical with my relationship to his work – i.e., the relationship between object and “artist-viewer” or “viewer- artist” – and differs only in the chronological aspect (i.e., his relationship with the object preceding mine by minutes or centuries) and by direction (i.e., his experience of some object in the world led to his creation of the objet d’art, whereas my experience of the objet d’art led to my post-facto co-creation of the original aesthetic experience, and thereby the “perception” of whatever set of objects or events lies behind the aesthetic experience causally).

And so aesthetic experience, then, is the experience of CREATING art (which I’ll go out on a limb by saying is something I’m doing anytime I “perceive” anything at all, due to my status as metaphysically-independent SUBJECT of the physical OBJECTS – more on this perhaps later).

If author is “dead” as you discuss, then my engagement with the aesthetic object resembles the artist’s original engagement with the world around him. In both instances, the subject of the experience asks the same set of questions: “What does what I’m looking at MEAN – to me, and to everyone? Is it important? If so, why? What is relevant and what is extraneous to what I’m feeling due to my engagement it? Is this experience the member of a genus of experiences I’m familiar with, or does it define some new category? Am I brought higher or lower due to this experience?,” etc.

Conversely, if the author rather remains in command of the aesthetic experience, with full power to bracket and dictate terms, then my engagement with the aesthetic object resembles the scientist’s lifeless engagement with the world around him, and thus the possibility for mutually-transformative aesthetic communion evaporates. The death of the artist by the humility of accepting his role as viewer (and the simultaneous humiliation of his critics) then makes way for the aggrandizement of the viewer into his consubstantial role with the artist as co-artist/co-percipient, which gives life to aesthetic COMMUNION. (In the same way, perhaps, that Christ’s genuflect at the cross made way for the deification of man – but more on this later).

It seems then that the extent to which we acknowledge an object’s status as “deliberate” or “finished” art (the extreme of would be having a head-full of prejudicial and non-experiential notions about, e.g., what each aspect means and how it relates to every other aspect which is dictated to us by the artist or critics) is the extent to which we have abolished the aesthetic experience per se for the viewer, by ironing it into a “theoretical” or “epistemological” experience instead.

The object cannot be an epitaph and relic of a bygone and INDIVIDUAL aesthetic experience – as art, it must be a gateway into this shared experience while it still lives and breathes, which is, as discussed above, communal and consubstantial with the world around us, establishing a creative give and take between one’s mind and creation, and ultimately, I’d argue, the “person” whose “art” IS the created world. In the same way that a given word has a meaning which is not the word itself (i.e., insfoar as the word itself is constituted of ink or sound) and which is not a periphrastic description of the word or a cluster of thesaurus entries, but rather is a similar and thus communal EXPERIENCE in the minds of the speaker and the listener, and serves to bridge that infinite chasm between these two persons, art is a tool, it is a bridge between one boundless, unitary and unbreachable mind, and another – and it belongs equally to both. Perhaps in the same way that Christ – the Logos/Word – bridges the divide(s) among men, and between men and God. The artist as viewer and the viewer as artist = “God became man that man might become God.”

By analogy, then, the beauty of human experience is afforded by our bare knowledge of its authorship by a Creator-artist who stands behind its pattern, which knowledge assures us THAT our experience is meaningful, if not HOW. And the extent to which we are beaten over the head with the HOW is the extent to which we are incapable of genuinely experiencing this beauty and its ultimate meaning. Incidentally, I think this is true regardless of the ontological status we afford "God"; even if we do not believe in God's material/empirically-observable existence (i.e., what most of us in this age would call God's "real" existence), observing the world at large as though it were presented by a mind like ours instigates us into a creative engagement with the world around us in which we viewers become artists, and the urges for truth and for beauty become twined together in the singular act of artistically viewing the world which is as much creation as it is observation - "the utmost must be true, and is" Wallace Stevens says, describing this erotic engagement between reality and the imagination.

The parabale of the prodigal son seems apposite here – in the parable, what divine childhood MEANS is impossible truly to know prior to DISCOVERING it oneself, ultimately at a remove from that experience or in exile – or, by analogy, by exile from KNOWLEDGE ABOUT the experience. Perhaps then the exile from Eden is also apposite – indicating the same removal from the meaningful experience when the mind becomes too laden with “KNOWLEDGE ABOUT” to instantiate and incarnate the visceral and genuine “EXPERIENCE OF.”

At his most useful, then, the artist does little more than faithfully, artistically, and humanely PERCEIVE – and thence hold an empty frame over some complex of human experience – a “map” to “nodes” of aesthetic beauty – which is, of course, aesthetic truth, which is the only truth worth knowing (although I suppose I’m committed now to saying you can’t “KNOW” it at all – when we do know it, it disappears like Christ when he’s recognized logically rather than merely experientially, at the end of the Road to Emmaus episode). What does the artist ultimately perceive and then relate to his audience? His experience of “being a genuine human being” – being an authentic and humane “passive or co-active percipient” of everything-there-is. Which opportunity, of course, he doesn’t just articulate or describe, but holds forth to his audience, in that their faithful, artistic, and humane acceptance/perception of/participation in his objet d’art IS the act of “being a genuine human being.” This is super meta.

Perhaps then Duchamp’s fountain is exactly what its title pseudo-ironically claims it to be – i.e., it is a fountain insofar as it was constructed to be and faithfully stands as a bare index of an aesthetic “node,” with nothing more than a title and a stall in a museum to indicate its status as art (leaving no theory to crowd out genuine aesthetic experience), pouring forth, if you will, a communion substantiated by the conversation you and I are having about it here today.

Tim says:

I’ve been working on a longer essay of literary criticism lately, but I want to sketch out a few of its basic ideas in the hopes of getting your comments and feedback. I suppose, to start, that calling it “literary criticism” is not too accurate: the essay is basically a compilation of fears and concerns that have made me skeptical about contemporary American poetry, and trying to at least blueprint a possible alternative path.

A number of assumptions sit in the center of the essay, and the first one is that poetry, to be important, meaningful, and truly Art, must remain fringe, difficult, and opposed to anything that tries to systematize it. This is more of a tautological point about Art as a whole: Art must remain Art, and to what Art is is always terrorizing, unsettling, thoughtful, questioning, and restless. And the assumption to this assumption is that we, as humans, live always along a stream of hidden prejudices and unconscious motivations, caught always in the middle of what we know we know, what we know we don’t know, what we don’t know we know, and what we don’t know we don’t know. This is my assumption of the human condition, and thus Art is meant in its highest to uncover and discover, to reveal, to lift up what we think we’ve got pinned down so we can stare into the abyss beneath the carpet. This assumption includes the idea that this is the exact task of religion and philosophy and psychology and every other social science, to a degree, but that none of them work the same way Art does, that where sciences operate logically and consciously, Art can operate above, behind, and underneath logic and consciousness, but also with them.

So far I have said nothing about technique, though that is one of the core issues here. Poetry, as an Art, operates along certain techniques, all meant to take Language as we use it without thinking about it and put it on the stage or under the microscope. In poetry, more so than the other written arts, we are to take notice of the individual words, the layout of sentences, the technical qualities of the work. Like music forces us to recognize sound differently, and painting forces us to recognize space differently, so poetry forces us to recognize language differently.

And yet, poetry still is language. Poetry, to a very different degree than painting or music, is saying something. In other words, poetry is not Art simply through technique, but also through content. Shakespeare is not brilliant only because his writing is brilliant.

Or at least, I don’t think so. I don’t think poets become Great Poets through technique alone, because the words are still communicative. I think the poets that survive the ages, the ones that change lives, are the ones who saw in poetry the diligent need for craft, yes, but who also had something Real and Meaningful to say, the ones that could capture something insightful and propulsive and compelling.

So far, so good? Here’s my critique point (note: every time I say “young poet” I am including and indicting myself):

Because of the increasing number of young poets writing poetry seriously and the growing ability for poetic professionalization, both of which have taken the Workshop Model of poetry and utilized it so universally that to learn how to write a poem is to learn how to write a poem technically, young poets are giving rise to a new aesthetic of writing that promotes technique over content, studies craft over meaningfulness, and secures anintention to write poetry instead of an intention to use poetry for writing about something else.

I am calling this aesthetic Poetic Poetics, as in, the Poetics of becoming poetic. I need some examples, and luckily/unluckily, there are a trove of them right in front of me, because I have fallen into this with almost every poem I’ve written (which will bring me to another point in my conclusion).

My first example comes from a poem that I wrote last January called On Everything, Eventually. I have tried fixing it up a few times since; I like the concept, and the opening stanza:

In time there are no farces only parables: the wind blows to remind us and through the reeds we will hear spirits bargaining over souls. We are the dust that we shake from our opened cloaks and our sandals, innumerable orbits jockeying for recognition, or understanding.

The rest of the poem unwound this opening into a faint narrative. The unwinding isn’t very successful, which is why it still isn’t a finished poem, but worse is the conclusion, which is, I think, a premier example of Poetic Poetics:

The wind blows. In time we will hear no farces, only parables as the reeds bargain for our cloaks and sandals. The spirits are jockeying for understanding. Dust shakes out in orbits to remind us.

Content and meaning have dropped out of the writing. Where, earlier, throughout the poem, I am trying to twine ideas together and communicate a scene, a feeling, and thoughts that come with them, I ended the poem by rewriting the conclusion. This technique could work, but I made no attempt to make meaning, and haphazardly enjoined phrases. The result is a stanza that reads well and sounds nice and even has the impression of meaning, but the impression is as deep as it goes. This conclusion is a poetic poem, it intends to create a “poetic moment” and is conscious only of its own existence as a stanza of poetry, nothing higher.

Here is another example from my writing. Last year I started a series of poems called Documenting the End of the World, another project that I intend to return to with a new vigor at some point in my life when I am feeling ready to destroy a good number of pages that I wrote and that, I think, are very poor. Below is a full poem called Matin:

This morning the sun lay like planks shuffled over the rooftops. I placed my hand on the stair-railing as I walked up the stairs just to feel the railing. Someone called my name. Only, it wasn’t anyone I knew and it wasn’t my name either. I thought about the lightness of great things, like feathers, and souls, and tried to compose a poem where the sky was a levee, broken apart, like eggs with the yolk spilling over the rooftops, and everything.

This poem frustrates me, a lot. It keeps approaching a point where you think the writer (me) is going to say something, but then the sentence ends – twice very awkwardly, in the middle of lines, with no reason – and the possibilities for meaning are cast off into hipster flippancy. Finally, the poem becomes a poem about writing a poem. Ugh. The whole piece has a vanity and arrogance about it, and when you dig into it the only idea it sees to offer is, Look at my poetic experiences! I am a poet! 

Now, admittedly, my examples are not the best because the actual poems just aren’t great. It would be the height of presumption for me to take a contemporary poem and show it off as an example of Poetic Poetics, but I think they are out there, and I think they are growing because of, as I said, the Workshop mentality and the avenues of professionalization (the latter of which is a kind of shorthand for Keep writing, constantly, and publishing, constantly, and in return you will get a position at a university. It seems to be the same publish-or-die mentality that runs across academia and most influences younger writers/scholars who must break in and fight to stay in). Still, I hope this gives at least a sensibility of what I mean.

Against this aesthetic, which I do think I see more often, stands the poet who studies more than poetry. The poet who is invested in the world, in other academic pursuits, in cultures, whatever – the point is that this poet has something to say. Technique might be half of the matter, but content is the other half. Poets through tradition speak with the weight of philosophy in its root meaning, love of wisdom, and we recognize this immediately in a single line of Dickinson or Hopkins or, I suggest, most of the poets who we still read. They struggle over religion and faith, question culture, criticize the State, get obsessed over insects and mythologies and whole countries or small towns. And then, through their obsession and interests, poetry becomes the inevitable tool for what they want to communicate, rather than the intention of the interests themselves.

Finally, though, I think there is some salvation for Poetic Poetics. My argument is first, that it is an aesthetic that must be recognized and questioned, that is pulling poetry into self-referentiality where it is its own object of study, at the cost of meaningfulness and content, that it is taking William Carlos Williams’ famous adage of No ideas but in things and is axing the first half of the phrase and defining the only “things” as, ultimately, poems. But the process of Poetic Poetics, which I am still squarely within, is still important: it is still a workshop, a place to learn craft. In the end, I am not against Poetic Poetics pedagogically – it very well might be the best way to teach poetry, starting with the technique and then heading out – but teleologically, against it if it is the goal and intention of writing.

What I fear is that the tracks of professionalization – and with them, legitimization – available to young poets will allow Poetic Poetics to avoid its status as the roadtowards poetry, and will instead become the destination. What I fear is that the inherent abilities for poetry to challenge and change lives will be lost, that poets will learn all of the best ways to lifeguard, but will never take these skills to the ocean. I’m certainly guilty of all of this, which is, finally, avoiding the responsibility, the gravity, and the duty of poetry.

My response:

I share your concerns about academic or professional poetry, and your stand defending poetry as a living art for living people, that ought, at its highest, to aim at something, ironically, inexpressible.

I agree that the increasing professionalization of poetry is an ongoing disaster. Think of the finest poets of the last century: Stevens and Williams had non-literary careers as a lawyer and doctor, respectively, and Stevens took a 10 year hiatus from poetry in the 20s; Hart Crane shuffled among entry level jobs in unmitigated poverty; Eliot drew his income from Lloyds and Faber and Faber, and wound up with an international reputation as a publisher and intellectual that afforded him an income independent of new publication; much of Pound’s Pisan Cantos (certainly his poetic apogee) were scrawled on toilet paper in an animal cage adjunct to a prison camp. The difficulty of finding the time for poetry that you economically needn’t write, and choosing between the poem and other commitments, would seem to restrain the motive for prolix redundancy and impotent, verveless affectation that we both bemoan in much of academic verse. On the other hand, if one’s “job” is to produce “poetry,” poetry, like all objective labor output, is going to have to be codified by someone, which necessitates strictures of a sort that are external to the rule of the muse. Under this legal dissonance and fundamentally economic pressure, disasters are bound to ensue – even Shakespeare, cash-strapped, gave us The Merry Wives of Windsor to shrug through. How to fix this essentially sociological problem for art is obscure for me – I suppose most poets need to learn to be comfortable with poetry’s place as a difficult distraction from daily duties rather than a quotidian obligation.

But to pick up on the fallout of the academic “systematization” of poetic art, I agree that this imposition of standards essentially alien to the process of accessing beauty itself is, by necessity, the death of art, as I agree that bucking systematization is a sine qua non of great art of any kind. Were beauty a system, the system itself and not its various iterations would be what was beautiful; but as well we know, art is rather the process of continually discovering that which is beyond any system we have yet realized, startling us by presenting reality in a new and vivid light beyond both what is apparent to all of us naturally and what has been proferred by previous artists. This freshness is what affords unique beauty to each individual work of genuine art, in virtue of which such art has any justification to exist.

Someone who can paint is not necessarily an artist; and whether one is “imitating” reality, or another artist, or some familiar compound ghost of other artists, he is a mannerist, and not an artist – a position that Plato rightly criticizes in Republic Book x as being “at a third remove from the Truth.” It is this mannerism – this paint by numbers in slavishly heeding conscious or unconscious rules- that is, I think, the genuine problem of what you call “poetic poetics,” and the void into which artistic efforts lately all too often stumble (a failure that realizes the Platonic critique of art per se).

Self-reference, however, is not necessarily an obstacle to sublime art, and I think it can actually be an important refining fire leading to such art’s production – the self-consciousness of Hamlet’s character as an object of literature, the “painterly art” of Pollock or Rothko, or the “poetry for poets” of a titan like Stevens are indispensable contributions to the world of art, because of, rather than in spite of, their self-consciousness as art.

The artist’s free disclosure of his intentions and methods in his art itself through self-reference forces a discovery process: it can essentially function as the exorcism of old mannerisms (even imitations of a previous poetic self!) and simultaneous issuance of fresh vistas and pronouncements. It’s something like a magician revealing the usual tricks of the trade before an illusion and renouncing them, necessitating a change in tactics on his part that can recover his “art” from kitsch staleness and renew a sense of wonder in the audience indispensable for its success.

Furthermore, as you heartily affirm, poetry, at its best, takes the entirety of reality and our experience of it as its subject, and is itself the fullness of human expression and our mental grapple with the world around us – “the act of the mind finding what will suffice.” Thus, a poem aimed at understanding itself and disclosing this understanding takes a fresh approach to the agon at the center of all-there-is: reality and the imagination, and their various progeny.

These are the moments of truest human existence, moments of freedom from (and power over) the tyrannical and law-limited world that traps our spirits, in a fresh, unpredictable prospect abstracted out of the march of time. These free moments of clarity, of sublimity – of beauty as truth – become merely a fixture of inescapable Necessity in the restraining physical world when allowed to patina under the zeal for codification and systematization. It is only as that which can be trapped in no conceivable systematic labyrinth, however capacious, that art, as envoy to beauty, is our access to the ultimate, the permanent, the deathless and the divine, as the purest expression of our spiritual freedom in a physical world. The art that we can systematize is the art that systematizes us in a systematic world; the art that “teases us out of thought” frees us if only for a moment from the “malice and sudden cry” of a tumultuous world of death and decay. It must surprise us – as sudden as “a thief in the night” on the last day.

Tim’s response to my response:

You, like my brother, very rightly pointed out the positives and benefits of self-reference and even turning back on the art itself (my brother brought up Rilke as a prime example of a poet concerned often with poetry itself, but not falling into the critique I present here). I suppose what I am aiming for is not condemning self-conscious artists so much as attempting to move the discussion from technique – where, quite rightly, every subject matter under the sun is allowed, and the question is How, not What – to a more ethical or socially-aware question. In short, though this word is so challenging in itself, I think the meat of my concerns rest in the Intentions that seem to be swapped out: an intention to use poetry as a mechanism toward, as you comment, self-discovery and world-discovery, (or “world-disclosure” to make this all as Heidegerrian as it probably should be…), an intention that searches and is restless and is ambitious, rather than an intention to Write a Poem.

I very much like your manifesto-like last paragraph, especially art as that which “can be trapped in no conceivable systematic labyrinth.” To bring back Heidegger again, I’ve often gotten a great deal out of a thought of his – and in fact, I can never find the exact quote, so I very well might be making this up, but it seems to fit at least – that where philosophy ends, poetry begins. There is so much to that thought – but what is missed in contemporary poetry, I think, is the most crucial bit: in order To Begin as a poet, then, it follows that one has hemmed his or her way through some philosophy, and thus knows the weight and gravity of staking something or searching something through poetry.

Tim says:

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Economy of Words lately. It’s one of the first, most important, and longest lasting lessons a writer learns when trying to figure out what it means to write, how to do it better, how to take it seriously, and how to make it Artistic. I was writing before I learned this helpful little phrase, and then I learned it and at once writing became challenging, difficult, and rewarding.

And yet, as I think about this heavily ingrained aspect of creative writing pedagogy – at least here, in America – I wonder how strong of an influence it has had in shaping aesthetic, and perhaps even broader actions like reading styles and attentions. I wonder if the emphasis on economizing words has preempted the true beginnings of creative writing, which could alternately be described (based on your disposition as more optimistically-inclined or pessimistically-) as long-suffering or pleasure. 

I’ll give a quick take on “economy of words” first, though I imagine it’s seeped into discursive writing pedagogy by now and is the type of thing you learn about in your freshman composition classes. It’s a pretty intuitive phrase, and basically advises the writer to look for the most economical way to say something, or, the least amount of words that fit the most meaning, description, tone, or feeling into them. It’s a way of writing slowly and intentionally, always looking for the right word, Flaubert’s  le mot juste, the “word with the most juice” (I have a memory that ascribes this translation to Pound, but I can’t seem to find where he said it… is this right?).

Economizing words means hacking away at unnecessary description, removing scenes and even characters or plot points that have no movement or cruciality to them, saying a thing once but never twice (unless for a very good reason), etc etc. It means erasing that second “etc” because the first one has everything the second one already has. It provides the writer with focus and clarity as the writer then hones in on the specifics, follows the threads, and often is influenced towards shorter, more clausal sentences that then must employ active and visceral verbs as well as clear subjects to these verbs. So the writer uses fewer “There was” and “It is” when there are no antecedents, uses fewer “to be” constructions, and creates an entertainingly faster piece.

There are (oops) more benefits here than I am describing, and really, economizing one’s words is a necessary skill to learn at some point. Though I am transitioning to a more critical take, I would never suggest leaving it aside as it is perhaps the single mechanism for a writer that chips away at the writer’s block of words and shapes an elephant out of them (or a poem about an elephant).

But I do believe there is a real flip side here, that being taught to write this way so early on in one’s writing life may have negative side effects on one’s writing and, even more importantly, one’s reading. In fact, as I think about this, I wonder if the entire project of teaching discursive writing, stretching back to our earliest school days, is wrongheadedly aimed at an almost scientific (or perhaps purely scientific) branch of this economy of words.

I was thinking about this just yesterday, wandering through Border’s liquidation sale. I picked up a collection of Schopenhauer’s aphorisms, read a couple, and then cautiously thumbed through a John Searle book, which reminded me of the unfortunate reality of contemporary American philosophy. Besides its utter infatuation with Analytic trends, obsessing over math and science and logic (my loathing of this trend has no bounds, so I’ll stop it here), American philosophers just aren’t good writers. They are so boring, and dry, and serious. Look, compare them yourselves: here’s Searle’s Wikiquote page, and here’s Søren Kierkegaard’s. I was going to give an example, but re-reading it proved rather absurd. It’s not exactly a fair fight…

Regardless, my point… where is my point… My point is that Searle, American/Analytic Philosophy, our early writing education, and even the beginning of creative writing pedagogy – they all share this economizing of words. However, they use “economizing” in a scientific sense, in an almost logical sense of looking for the most meaning in the quickest time-span. It truly is “economical” to read the boring philosophy of our age because you get a lot of thoughts (though rarely a meaningful one) in a focused and direct fashion. We are interested in information-transference, rather than living in the language, and stretching out in it.

Here’s the antidote, and maybe my overall point will become more clear: great big books like Ulysses and The Man Without Qualities and Proust and Kierkegaard and all of these geniuses who let the sentences gallop like horses and twist like twine, and in order to get anything out of it at all you had to pause your thinking in a certain way, accept the guide of the writer, and enjoy it.

I think this is where I’ve been trying to go. By focusing on economizing words, I wonder if there is a relation to not being able to sit down and take pleasure in long, descriptive writing, in reading for reading’s sake, and maybe even in writing for writing’s sake, decadently, exuberantly, with all of the fat and excess of a feast. Perhaps strange words coming from me, whose aesthetic beliefs hinge on Meaningfulness, but my point is not that we end here, but that we begin here. How can we be writers and readers if we cannot plunge into the mystery of language and let it roll us along for pages and pages without looking to see where the chapter ends, without thinking about if there is a new email in the inbox, without anything except the world that has allowed us entry and will give us everything it has as long as we play by its rules?

My brother calls this an inability for readers to suffer, but I think just as much it is forgetting that reading and writing are pleasurable acts, acts that don’t just finish books and look for the next, but shape us unknowingly because our self-consciousness has quit itself as we enter a different consciousness, a reading and writing consciousness.

I suppose I’ll finish with the creative writing application, since that seems most questionable. I’m not necessarily saying that we need poets and novelists to return to some past tradition or style. I’m not even saying, again, that economizing is wrong. But what I think we might have paid in order to get our economy is the freedom of un-restriction, first. I remember some of my first poems, written after a fever of Whitman. One was about clouds, and the other was about waves. I let the words tumble out and they just kept coming. Like a lot of Whitman, my early poems would be served by an editor, but that’s a secondary process. Something that comes later.

What if we started writing just to write, describing whatever we see, putting it all down not like a journal but in the ecstasy of Writing a Poem, or story, or whatever, and put aside all of the aesthetic values we have learned? What if we relegated craftsmanship to the secondary action – the carpenter who has a piece of wood, the sculptor who has a block – and first we build the raw piece of wood, the ugly stone? Maybe others write like this, letting themselves savor Saying, but I don’t suppose I have since those early Whitman poems. Instead, I’ve been so concerned with Value, Meaningfulness, and Art, that I think I’ve lost the first, primal, and core function of Art, which is something like enjoyment or stimulation, isn’t it?

My response:

First, you discuss Heidegger’s “world-disclosure” regarding the intention of poem-making (or, etymologically, “making,” per se), and identify the intention to make meaning as distinct from that to merely “write a poem.” We can, of course, reject as the vanity of the poetaster the intention of writing a middling poem, but I’m not certain we can sever the intention for world-disclosure from the intention to write a world-disclosing poem.

I don’t think a poem can succeed on any level if it doesn’t change the world and thus disclose a new one through aesthetic impact and cognitive power – in other words, there is no such thing as a good poem that is trivial or inessential, regardless of the apparent or so-called “topic” of the work.

As I argued in our dicussion of “mannerism,” there isn’t a sanctified set of locutions that afford a poem artistic status – sure, rules make a poem a sonnet or a pantoum, but they don’t make it ART. And so whether the putative topos is political, religious, ethnic, ars poetica, or anything under the sun, the poem itself succeeds only insofar as it aggrandizes and elevates the consciousness of its genuine audience.

Herein then lies the trouble of setting out to do more than write a poem when you’re writing a poem: the poem itself must be the standard of its own value and of its own truth, rather than reliant upon a formal grid abstracted away from the complex of the poem and our aesthetic and cognitive experience of it. Naturally, for the poem to succeed, it must elevate us, but restricting the terms of this enrichment in philosophic or moralistic nets is myopic – no great art is reducible to something more concise than the world itself.

You mention the relationship and boundaries of philosophy and poetry, and I think that tension is remarkably apposite here. To illustrate the point, it’s critical that we reconsider Plato’s famous and misunderstood indictment of art as simple fabrication in Book X of the Republic. Plato’s schooling was in poetry, and it seems that only his late discipleship with Socrates led him down a different path. As such, we oughtn’t to doubt Plato’s appreciation of artistic beauty – and of course, reading his dialogues it would likely be impossible to draw that conclusion anyway. So whence his suckerpunch that art is mere artifice, and has no place in paradise?

In suggesting art is “at a third remove from the truth,” Plato indicts mimesis specifically. While verisimilitude has always been evidence of an artist’s honed craft, I don’t think any of us would now say that it is only by exact similarity to some aspect of the physical world that art serves its purpose. I think perhaps a better (if imperfect) trope to replace verisimilitude might be “eloquence” – a matter of expressive power in conveying “some thing,” not necessarily something physical. Students are often satisfied with such a resituation of Plato’s point, by which, uncharitably, we hear them accuse the philosopher of straw-man sophistry and a malicious reductionism, incredulous at the fawning yes-men crowding Socrates’ campfire, egregiously sanctioning these dialogic shenanigans. But I think we need to take the climax of the magnum opus of Western civilization’s major philosopher a bit more seriously.

If art WERE fundamentally imitation – of reality, of formal principles governing art’s creation, or even of other artifacts – Book X’s blow would be devastating. Plato’s critique identifies two areas in which art can mortally lose itself – one, in mannerism, as I discussed in my previous comment (in which genuine artistic value is abandoned in favor of fulfilling formal considerations that are meant to endue the work with artistic status), and the other, in gussying up (and thereby obfuscating) a truth beyond the art and which the art merely mocks in fripperies – whether that truth be scientific, philosophic, theological, phenomenal, etc.

There is thus a needle we need to thread in setting out to make art – while we cannot fall into mannerism, we must equally be sure to disclose truth IN art rather than BY MEANS OF art. As you quote Heidegger saying, poetry ventures BEYOND philosophy: it is not a handmaid to it. I think a diagram would help illustrate what I’m trying to say here…

Mathematics & Formal Logic –> Theoretical & Empirical Science (including everything from physics to economics) –> Technical Philosophy and Theology –> Prosaic Art –> Poetry –> Music

The further right you move on the above-pictured spectrum, the more remote and inexpressible the subject, verging on the basal, fundamental, and thus not often clearly-defined and regulated regions of mind and truth. The further left we move on this scale, the more certain, plain, objective, knowable, and explicable/communicable the content under discussion (I suspect this has to do with an increasing abstract, generic, symbolic formalization as we move left on the spectrum, and an increasing experiential, special, deictic concretization as we move right on the spectrum, but I’ll have to think about this in greater depth).

I restate Plato’s critique in an axiomatic corollary based on this spectrum: one must express completely any set of meaning in as far-left a medium as is possible. For instance, taking a perfectly cogent economic argument out of “The Wealth of Nations,” adding no meaningful content to it, but adapting it into a poem, would be a singular disaster – an aesthetic abortion, a waste of artistic firepower, and, most critically, an evasion of the truth rather than an encapsulation, extension, or expression of it. Art so used is indeed removed from the truth, and surely threatens our apprehension of it. My concern regarding prejudicing “moral” or “political” or “religious” art is thus twofold – first, in so doing we are BEGGING for doggerel; and second, the sublime ought to be enough, regardless of its occasion. As you say, poetry is beyond philosophy, and begins where philosophy ENDS – our moral, political, and philosophical concerns are more often matters for a more discursive mode.

In demonstration, think of supremely successful religious verse – what comes first to mind for me is Eliot’s Quartets and the Commedia. These poems are proudly and profoundly vague and ambivalent on the adamant dogmatic lines of their mother faith(s): you might even argue that the Commedia isn’t even a Catholic poem! Paradise Lost is more pagan than Christian in its stance!

We need to be sure that we’re ascending beyond mere reason, partisanship, observation, facts, and discourse when we make our poems – the muse deserves so much more: a universal and preternatural perspective that gathers meaning to itself inductively and synthetically (etymologically a “putting together”) rather than analytically (etymologically a “chopping-up”) eviscerating a choice and whole vista opened on truth. Our art must be fully felt experiences of real paths of truth, fresh, not pre-fabricated, and never mere formal and conceptual discussions or opinions garlanded with happy verse.

Per the above, no great art is reducible to something more concise than the work itself, nor may it be otherwise composed to the same effect. This axiom is at once a corollary to Plato’s point en-spectrumed, and a restatement of the economizing principle for language. I think we must find it infallible in both discussions.

Consider booming and blowing tracts of undomesticated verse – what stands more sprawling in our rogueish American memories than “Song of Myself”? And yet, however prolix and inebriate we find Whitman in his shameless verbal onanism, can we strike or alter a word of this great chant, or scratch lines from the “Lilacs” elegy, without eliminating instead of clarifying meaning or beauty? And so as with Kierkegaard or Proust, we cannot but deem Walt economical, at least by the aforementioned restatement of the economizing principle.

Similarly, we are within our rights to tell Searle to shut the hell up already. In less space, he is far more rambling than Kierkegaard, because what matters is EFFICIENCY, which is a quotient – the ratio of meaning to text. Kierkegaard explodes meanings, gets at load-bearing joints in the universe and our cognition of it, and squats there to apply a full-nelson – imbuing these critical points with a gravity that presses them into singularities that have gathered to themselves the meaning of the ages and which disclose this heavy load only over the course of decades and lifetimes of gravidity. Searle’s sparse meaning (most of his articles are adequately summarized in a paragraph) rather prove his dis-economy of words.

(Then again, it’s not exactly fair to indict Searle on these grounds, who was never trying to create literature. We might commend him for realizing which section of the grid he belongs to, since, in writing such as Searle’s, the goal is to limit, cut up, distribute, and pin down meaning – to AVOID focus on the text – just like legal writing or writing an instruction manual; in such writing, as the writing teaching how to diffuse a bomb, for instance, verbal efficiency is necessarily of a very different kind, since the goal is really to MINIMIZE meaning rather than to MAXIMIZE it.)

Now meaning in poems is not always merely conceptual – it verges on music toward its “right-most” boundary, of course. And so certain felicities of sound that may not be critical to sense ought not to be stricken on that account. And let us not forget the use of economy in breaking down familiar and typical linguistic locutions often to fresh and beautiful results.

In validity, then, this principle is not an imprecation to reduce word use per se, but rather a prohibition against oblique restatement or bungling verbosity – “one should not use words, sounds, images, or concepts that do not add to the aesthetic value of a piece” – and how could we possibly argue against such a tautological truth? If a word, or phrase, or image or character doesn’t add to a work of art, it at the least distracts us from its semantic nodes and thus muddies and diminishes it.

Ultimately, there are different poems that do different things, and just about as many poets as there are poems: the poet of “Sunday Morning” has never met the man who wrote “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (perhaps due to their keeping different hours). Some poets and poems begin in negation and absence, and economy is an ineliminable means of lifting them out of the void and into meaning; other poems begin with an unencapsulable and incomprehensible full experience that cannot possibly replicate itself in a vessel as restrictive as all of human experience. To return to “Song of Myself,” we find “creeds and schools in abeyance” at the very outset – we must let the poem come as it may, free of critical restrictions that are not trivially true. But the economizing principle is inarguable.

This eradication of grids and philosophies in search of poetry is simply a restatement of our spectrum presented earlier, a corollary to the rule against rules we agreed about in my last post, and a unison chant with Heidegger. Ultimately, rules beyond tautology can apply only to a subset of all possible poems, given that art is not a formal system, but that which escapes formality and lives in special, untamed personhood. To formalize art is to chain our souls within the deterministic labyrinths of physical reality, which the both of us know we are in truth unlimited by and more capacious than. What this means though is that for every bad poem from which a principle can be abstracted concerning the cause of its failure – e.g., “this poem is wordy” or, “its complete adherence to a definite rhyme scheme and meter robs the poem of freshness”- we will find another poem that shares these same attributes and is yet a permanent achievement.

Art that follows the rules is merely an instance of a previously-composed piece – and so it is only the art that creates space for itself outside the shadow of previous art and the ambit of rude nature that ever truly matters. Again, if we can formalize it or explain it beyond itself more succinctly, we have proved a work irrelevant. The pattern beyond it, the scheme it merely mimics and reiterates, is, like natural law poised behind the maya of experience and the confusion of colliding atoms, the TRUE object of pursuit and target for reverence, rather than its mere instances and imitations.

Tim’s response to my response:

Hey Peter–

I agree with, I think, most everything you’ve said here, and certainly the general tenor of your post. I have been aiming more specifically at pedagogy and training – how one learns to write poetry, how one starts out and continues, where the spring of interest and motivation comes from.

My earlier statement was an attempt to differentiate poetry that comes from the authentic artistic impulse versus the workshop-specific techne of a young poet still learning, a differentiation I found necessary as the latter techne is in many ways becoming an end-in-itself in the contemporary poetic landscape.

This one is aiming for something deeper, and I haven’t quite put it all together yet. I agree completely that the directive to economize words is akin to the irreducibility of a poem, and you claim Whitman’s verbosity as an example of economy without economy, so to say. And I agree, but pedagogically speaking, very few of us start out as Whitman’s (Whitmen?) or Pound’s or whoever. And oftentimes we learn through two very different paths (at least, I experienced two, though I imagine others are out there): imitation, and formalism. The former dives into a sense of joy, I think, and appreciation, and lets it flood out onto the paper in whatever messy ecstasy the young writer has encircled, and the latter tends to take on a mantle of apprenticeship – perhaps too early on, or so I am trying to argue.

My initial work, and my present work, all need heavy edits and revisions. The pieces simply aren’t irreducible to themselves yet, and I need principles like the economy of words and other such maxims. But I find myself emptying out, drained of everything full and fleshy and real, when I focus too much on these maxims and proto-rules and allow that very necessary determined focus outweigh a consistent enjoyment in words and reading and writing. And I’ve found that the more I allow myself to write without care of readers, to read without flipping to see when the chapter ends, to get lost in these sorts of activities, the better my writing tends to become.

As for poetry in general, as you are talking about it, I suppose the one… potential disagreement I have is the mystifying of poetry your chart seems to indicate, as well as “the sublime ought to be enough.” I have been working a lot with this mystification issue, where as you interpret the Heidegger quote philosophy ENDS, and then poetry Begins, whereas I see it as philosophy getting to a point where Poetry takes off in a progression sort of way. The best poets I know have always been the best thinkers, and there is something to that. Moreover, poetry has often seemed to stake out a very clear “philosophical,” or whatever you would like to call it, position on truth, stretching back to Greek poetry and Hebrew poetry. I wrote on Plato a few weeks ago, and it seemed to me his most looming concerns with poetry involved its ability to convince one of something, to persuade or manipulate. Similarly, Hebrew poetry was just steeped in theodicy and theology, and Job is as brilliant philosophically as it is poetically.

I agree completely that poetry is a Different thing, is no handmaiden to philosophy, etc etc. A poem cannot be restated as a philosophy, yes, and neither vice-versa. But the spectrum you set up also frees to poet, I think, from metaphysical, ethical, whatever responsibility. I think a poem is made of three things, always already: 1) its conceptual level, 2) its sensual level, and 3) its mystical, or spiritual, or playful level. The first is the sense of the thing, the philosophy or science or clear thinking that forces the poem into existence, like biology for Marianne Moore, and the second is the sound and image and all of that – the Real World of the poem, the part we enter into – and the last is akin to what Kant calls “purposiveness,” a sort of “irresolvability” where all of 1 and all of 2 never end up just Finishing any various interpretation. It is the “so much depends / upon” of WCW’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” the slingshot into Great Art where not everything can be logicked out.

This has become a longer note than intended… I’ve written a lot about poetry specifically and abstractly before, but haven’t really laid out my thoughts on this issue before. Perhaps I should – and apologies if I have misstated or misread pieces of your post or it in its entirety. These are wonderfully fun conversations.

[santmat]

Love for the Supreme Being, a Boundless Ocean of Spirit -- Section 48 -- Radhasoami Mat Prakash by Huzur Maharaj

108. This [meditation] practice can be conducted easily and comfortably if the devotee has a little love for the Supreme Being. Without love it will be too hard and difficult to practise Surat Shabd Yoga [inner Light and Sound meditation] with any good result to be obtained within a short time.

1. The Supreme Being, being a Boundless Ocean of Spirit or Love and human being, being a Drop or Current of Spirit or Love from this Ocean, and love being the very essence and means of existence of the whole creation, it follows that no effort in any direction, temporal or spiritual, unless actuated by love or affectionate regard, can be crowned with success, and the work or labour rendered easy, sweet and harmonious.

2. Love is most sublime, having its origin in the highest region, the abode of the Supreme Being. In whatever heart it springs up, it will gradually raise and carry the fortunate possessor of this lofty and noble passion to the highest region.

3. All good qualities and goodness itself will gradually find their home in the heart in which love dwells, and all bad qualities will be rooted out by and by.

4. Whatever a man fully of pure love thinks or does is all wisdom, while the thoughts and works of worldly wise men are full of selfishness and folly.

5. Knowledge without love for the Supreme Being is futile and tends towards untruth or darkness or materialism, while love turns everything to good use and lead to enlightenment and truth. Even worldly love, such as filial and conjugal, is attended with goodness, happiness and comfort to all concerned. How much more good would then result to mankind in general if the same love become spiritual, and be directed towards the Supreme Being, the Merciful and Kind Parent of the whole creation.

6. Self-love brings on egotism or pride, and sows the seed of hatred, jealousy and disregard in the minds of kindreds, associates and neighbors; while pure and sacred love for the Supreme Being creates in the heart humility, meekness and an affectionate regard for kindreds, neighbors and humanity in general.

7. Pure and holy love is always ready to spend (regardless) whatever it has for the sake of its Beloved, the Supreme Father, and the benefit of mankind without any distinction; whereas self-love or love of world always tries to appropriate everything to itself, even at the risk and loss of others.

8. Pure and holy love is always ready to sacrifice anything whatever to gain admission into the presence of the beloved, the Supreme Being; whereas self-love will never part with anything except for the sake of its own aggrandizement and indulgence in sensual pleasures.

9. The noble passion of love is most powerful and strong. It removes all obstacles and thorns in its way and discards all superstitions, doubts and skepticism.

10. Where pure love dwells there sheds the light of Grace, as it forms a link with the Spirit or Love Current from its Source, the Supreme Being.

11. Such is the strength and effect of affection and kind treatment that it subdues ferocity and other injurious and dangerous characteristics in beasts and other animals, that is to say, they begin to love and have an affectionate regard for their keepers and trainers.

12. A heart devoid of love or affection is as hard as stone, and does not form a suitable receptacle for the light of Heavenly Grace and Mercy.

13. Sincere love is reciprocal, so if one has a heart full of love for the Supreme Being, he is sure to be attracted towards Him by Grace, Mercy and Holy Light which will gradually illumine his inner self, and then all menial or worldly affections and desires will gradually disappear.

14. Love or the power of attraction is the basis of the whole creation and the cause of its sustenance and preservation.

15. The Supreme Being loves and takes special care of those who love Him with all their heart and soul, and gradually draws them towards Himself, the Grand Centre of Pure Light and Attraction; while those whose hearts are imbued with worldly love and passions recede from this centre, or in other words, they of themselves fly away towards the circumference or darkness and untruth.

16. Every wave of love rising in a lover's heart brings tidings of goodness and joy from the Beloved, and every thought springing up in such a heart is a harbinger of good works and good services for the sake of the Beloved.

17. Love has no bounds, knows no restrictions, and is not limited by conditions, and like its source is extensive and far reaching in its beneficial results.

-- Huzur Maharaj Rai Saligram Bahadur, Radhasoami Mat Prakash: http://192734808.r.cdn77.net/CDN/Books/EnglishBooks/RSMatPrakash/RSMatPrakash.html

[11toe11-blog]

Autotelic in trauma

Speaking of trauma

...And having experienced multiple spells of it at different points of time in my life - i have to make a note of this.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: The man who researches flow states / or the witness states has something to say about resilience and happiness. Both, which i know for a fact, are key in the attitude towards a traumatic event and going forth after it - to experience a life of non-duality and abundance and flow. 

“ A high level of work orientation in students is said to be a better predictor of grades and fulfillment of long-term goals than any school or household environmental influence.”

“One state that Csikszentmihalyi researched was that of the autotelic personality.[17] The autotelic personality is one in which a person performs acts because they are intrinsically rewarding, rather than to achieve external goals.[18] Csikszentmihalyi describes the autotelic personality as a trait possessed by individuals who can learn to enjoy situations that most other people would find miserable.[14][page needed] Research has shown that aspects associated with the autotelic personality include curiosity, persistence, and humility.[19]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Schools encourage an attitude contrary to the autotelic personality. A lot of ancient cultures greared toward spiritual progress were structured around developing the autotelic personality. 

The brahmin culture with its emphasis on the study of art is such. Ofcourse any path at anytime can get hijacked by the ego into being achievement oriented. The current state of the very same brahmin culture is case in point. 

The kalarippayattu culture of kerala too is around developing the autotelic personality. To find enjoyment right past the doors of death even. Zen.

The word "autotelic" derives from the Greek αὐτοτελής (autotelēs), formed from αὐτός (autos, "self") and τέλος (telos, "end" or "goal").

That – something or someone – is autotelic[1] that has a purpose in, and not apart from, itself.

The path of self development. As different from the path of self aggrandizement. 

The path of Griffindor. As branches from the path of Slytherine? Maybe. Where greatness may or may not be an outcome. But the pursuit is of something far greater than greatness. 

“Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes people who are internally driven, and who as such may exhibit a sense of purpose and curiosity, as autotelic.[2] This is different from being externally driven, in which case things such as comfort, money, power, or fame are the motivating force. 

An autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding. Because such persons experience flow in work, in family life, when interacting with people, when eating, even when alone with nothing to do, they depend less on external rewards that keep others motivated to go on with a life of routines. They are more autonomous and independent because they cannot be as easily manipulated with threats or rewards from the outside. At the same time, they are more involved with everything around them because they are fully immersed in the current of life.[3]”

“that is, their goal is the full exercise of themselves, for their own sake”

This criticism below also holds what someone with the autotelic personality struggles with within herself or himself. To get past the social voices that keep demanding goals and reasons, when life is otherwise lived moment to moment.

“Yvor Winters quotes from Eliot's aesthetic theory including autotelic, and criticizes:

Art, then, is about itself, but this information does not help me to answer my questions, for I do not understand it. What, for example, would Pope or Dante have understood if this statement had been made to them regarding the poems which I have just mentioned? Or what can we understand with regard to these poems? About all we can deduce from such a passage is that the artist does not really know what he is doing; a doctrine which we shall find suggested and elucidated elsewhere, and which leads directly to the plainest kind of determinism.[5]”

Now back to the line that really caught my eye

““ A high level of work orientation in students is said to be a better predictor of grades and fulfillment of long-term goals than any school or household environmental influence.”

Kalari helps me develop this attitude, particularly when i feel i have lost it. It hones it past my days of heaviness and self doubts and sadness and weight. Not to advocate kalari to anyone. Each to find their own path. But if anyone wants to find this path, i hope they find it as early as they possibly can. 

While i am developing my autotelic side, i feel R pretends to not have his rather well developed autotelic self.

[firstumcschenectady]

“Mountaintop Views” based on  Exodus 24:12-18 and Matthew 17:1-9

When I was 13 I read the Chronicles of Narnia.  They were good, not my favorites, but easily kept my attention to finish all the books. However, it was not until MANY years later that I learned that the books were written as intentional Christian metaphors, and I was floored.  Nothing, at all, in the books had felt like Christianity to me.  I didn't go back to reread them, but I did get peer pressured into seeing some of the movies, at which point I was able to see both: 1. How the story could have been written and understood as Christian and – at the same time – 2. How I entirely missed it.

(The key really being that I was raised in a Christianity that centered on “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me” while those narratives are inherently violent.)

It is a little bit embarrassing though, to have missed the entire point. However, I just didn't see it.  I couldn't.  There is a deep truth to the fact that we can't see things that we don't have the context to make sense of.  The Chronicles of Narnia didn't look to me the way Christianity looked.  Now, there are 2.3 Billion Christians in the world, and I don't think it is reasonable to assume we all understand our faith in the same way.  Sometimes it is a little bit startling to realize just how wide Christianity is and how often it contains its own opposites.  

At the same time, that's sort of the beauty of it all.  People from an incredibly wide range of worldviews, life experiences, and backgrounds are all able to find meaning in our tradition because it is quite adaptable to variation.

The scriptures this week have led me to thinking a lot about perspective, as they both have to do with changing perspectives.  Mountaintops themselves are places where people see things differently.  Some part of that has to do with the effort expended to get to the top, and another part has to do with seeing things from a different angle. From the top of the mountain, it is easier to see the forest than the individual trees.  It is also easier to understand how various parts of the landscape related to each other.

Additionally, both of these stories have transformational experiences occur at the tops of those mountains.  Moses has been called up the mountain by God, and leaves behind the people he is leading in order to follow God's instructions.  As Moses ascends, a cloud descends.  For the people left behind, that may have created a sense of mystery or distance from Moses on the mountain, or perhaps anxiety for his well being.

But for Moses, alone on the mountain in the midst of a dense fog, for 6 days without further instruction, that was likely INTENSE, like a 6 day silent retreat with visual sensory deprivation.  When I had a 6 hour drive home from college in the days before cell phones, the time alone with myself was enough to be disconcerting and clarifying.  6 days alone on a mountain in deep fog would be plenty of time for reflection – to say the least.  There are many people who can't handle 30 seconds of silence – for good reason.  Probably most people in our society get squirmy well before 30 awake minutes without distractions.  But 6 days!!!  Yet, the people I know  who have gone 6 days or more away from distractions all describe it as holy and perspective changing, although not usually easy.

The six days are a passing note in the story, but my goodness I think they matter.  On the seventh day, God calls Moses and the cloud dissipates to reveal the “glory of God” which was so intense the people at the bottom of the mountain could see it.  After 6 days of dense fog, that also must have been a new and different sort of intense.  AND THEN, Moses enters the cloud WITH God and they spend 40 days and 40 nights together.    

This is one of the stories of Moses receiving the 10 Commandments, and it seems to emphasize the holiness and uniqueness of the experience. Moses got A LOT of time with the Divine – way more than his preparatory 6 days.  

This story is cleaned up to fit into a good, faithful telling, but there is an incredible core to it.  As Addison Wright once pointed out, the faith traditions in the Ancient Near East at this time were all god and goddess centric.  That is, people sacrificed at Temples or engaged in behaviors meant to please the gods, with the goal of gaining favors from the gods.  Favors like fertility for people and and flocks, rain for the fields, etc.  Thus faith, worship, and offerings were largely transactional.  Wright believes that something entirely new emerged in the Sinai desert, and that something new is the core of this story.  

That something new was the concept of a God who cared how people treated EACH OTHER rather than simply being interested in self-aggrandizement.  That is, the faith traditions of the area really saw gods and goddesses as being like powerful people – selfish, greedy, and needing to be manipulated into helping out.  But somehow, a small group of desert wanderers came to understand a God (possibly singular, more likely this started as a primary or tribal god for them) whose PRIMARY CONCERN was moral behavior.  And that's the story of the rest of the Bible, right?  The people try to claim that they're all about God and God keeps on responding, “then take care of the vulnerable among you and build a just society.  THAT is what I want.”

This new idea of a God interested in moral human behavior and a just society is the core message lurking under this cleaned up version about Moses, a mountain, a fog, a fire, and a lot of waiting.  It is impossible to tell where the original story lies and where it has been adapted, but the core is powerful and the current version is powerful and they're both worthy of consideration.

The mountaintop experience being such a powerful part of the Jewish story, it makes a lot of sense that the Gospel writer Matthew tells the Transfiguration story as another mountaintop story.  In this case, rather than a dense fog, it is as if a fog has been lifted and the disciples are finally able to see clearly.

From the Gospel writer's perspective, people were confused into thinking that Jesus was just another teacher/healer, but on the mountaintop they saw just how holy and special he really was.  The experience of being close to God on the mountaintop is repeated, with God's own voice speaking.   “This is my child, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” It doesn't get much better than that!  Yet those are the words that whisper through the ages, being shared time and time again, because those are the words that God speaks to each of us. “This is my child, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Imagining being on mountaintop seeing God's delight in Jesus reminds us of why we continue to work in the world as the Body of Christ.  

The perspective change on the mountaintop is interesting.  In these stories, new insights are gleaned, ones that change lives.  I've been thinking about when those perspective shifts can happen for the rest of us.  Climbing mountains remains a good option ;) but what are others?  Some of the most common in the church are mission trips, or participating in new-to-you ministries of the church.  Anytime we meet and engage with people who are different from us, we gain valuable perspective.  And, the more we listen to people, the more we learn.  Sometimes I think perspective shifts are just direct gifts from God.  Other times they come after long term spiritual practice or prayer.  Some require those 6 days of silence in dense fog (or variations thereof).  Julia Cameron in “The Artists Way” says the way not to get stuck is to write 3 pages of longhand every day and have a date with yourself to do something new every week.  Her particular goal is to keep creative juices flowing, but it turns out those are related, aren't they?

One other intersecting piece comes to mind.  When our anxiety is UP, we tend to see the world more in black and white.  So, rather than developing increasing capacities to see many perspectives in the world, we will tend to pick one and STICK WITH IT AT ALL COSTS.  The challenge is, that for most of us today, anxiety is high.  Of course, the  current power structure (of any time and place) benefits from the increased anxiety that leads people to either/or thinking and doubling down into opposing camps.  It maintains the status quo.  The status quo is generally the compromise between two opposing camps, right?  But what is really great for people are win-win situations, which require creative thinking, the capacity to see multiple perspectives, and openness to new ideas.

Now, it turns out we can't spend our whole lives on mountaintops, and we all exist within some parameters of perspective that we can't just will our ways out of.  Furthermore, we LITERALLY can't see things we aren't expecting to see, which makes it SUPER hard to break out of our perspective when it is... in fact.... wrong.

My favorite idea from John Wesley is this, “Sometimes each of us are wrong.  Clearly, if we knew when we are wrong, we would correct ourselves and not be wrong.  So, sometimes when others disagree with us, it is actually a sign that we are currently wrong.  Since we don't know which times those are, we should approach all disagreements with humility.”  

What would have happened if Moses came back down the mountain with a new conception of the Divine and people said, “naw, that doesn't sound right?”  Where would we be today?  Where would the world be?

Transfiguration Sunday is the final Sunday before Lent.  It foreshadows for us the perspective shift of Easter, and by giving us a foretaste of it, gives us the motivation to engage in reflection for Lent to prepare ourselves for Easter.  It turns out that Lent is also meant to give us a perspective change.  It slows us down, offers us time to think, and reflect, and consider.  

There are a lot of ways to expand our worldviews, to glean a better understanding of what is going on all around us.  None of them are perfect, and our capacities to see and understand will be limited, but thanks be to God, we can grow and become.  May we take the view from the mountaintop and let it change us from the inside out.  Amen

--

Rev. Sara E. Baron First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 Pronouns: she/her/hers http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 23, 2020

[wordsforlove]

Awakening

The following text was submitted as my Human Ecology Essay, an essay that forms part of the degree requirements for graduating from College of the Atlantic. Every student at COA graduates with a degree in Human Ecology, and this essay is meant to describe what Human Ecology means to each student. For me, it is inseparable from my spiritual life and my connection to the divine, so it felt natural to post here as well.

It was 2:00AM on Saturday, and I had just spent the night drinking whisky out of the bottle in a basement party in Michigan. This night wasn’t much different than any other Friday night during the year I spent at Kalamazoo College, but instead of coming home and falling into bed, I was aware of an unusual emotion welling up inside my chest. Instead of ignoring it, I allowed myself to go deeper into the feeling and I sat down on the floor. I began to cry, listening to my body tell me the story of how badly I had been treating it for so long. This story didn’t contain words, but it was a visceral grief that reverberated throughout my body, as if each cell was telling me that I was not respecting its sacred role as part of the body that allows me to serve my purpose in the world. I was familiar with this story, as I had heard it every time I rolled a cigarette, every time I stayed up all night popping adderall to get my work done, every time I woke up with a pounding headache and went to class barely able to stay awake. I knew this story well, but I had spent a long time pretending like it was for someone else to listen, not me, never me.

The grief I felt that night was so strong that I made radical changes to my lifestyle in the following months. I gave up alcohol and other drugs completely, including the amphetamine prescription that I had been abusing, sometimes insufflating, to get my work done after pulling all-nighters every week for months. I wasn’t able to remain in the same social groups because of my new choices, and I went from feeling popular and surrounded by others to feeling alone and different. Even as I was leaving behind much of what had previously given me the illusion of fulfillment, I was allowing space for the voice of my inner guidance to grow stronger. Each time I listened to this voice, I found that I came closer to what my heart truly desired––more intimate friendships, a feeling of health in my body, and the knowledge that I was on a path which led to deeper self-awareness and purpose. The voice grew ever stronger, and today it is that voice which I have come to trust as the sound of my inner guidance and my higher self. As I’ve grown and continued on a conscious spiritual path, I have learned to make more decisions from this place of inner guidance rather than rationalizing and trying to control things around me, for the more I trust and surrender to what the universe is creating for me in each moment, the more I create a reality which reflects the life I long for.

The dominant culture has instilled in many of us the idea that if we don’t “go out and get it,” we will never be successful. In walking a spiritual path, I have chosen to reflect the reality that I want to see in my life––to be the change I want to see in the world. This involves a degree of trust in the universe that everything is working toward a greater purpose that I can’t control, but in which I play a critical part. If I am able to trust in the goodness of the universe, I know that everything that comes into my life, no matter how painful, is part of a process of growth and ultimately will lead to healing. This is true in relationships as well––I am often very adept at seeing the faults of others, or the things that I do not like in the world or in the communities that I move through. There is nothing wrong with noticing where others have departed from love or truth, or when a behavior is challenging for us on a relationship level, but I have finally begun to understand that any time I see something in another person that I do not like, it is usually because I see that same tendency in myself. We are each other’s best teachers, for each of us serves as a mirror for those around us, showing us reflections of ourselves refracted into all the manifestations of the human family. Each time a thought arises about a brother or sister that is anything other than love, I am learning to search within myself for that part of me which also contains whichever aspect I notice in the other. For example, if I notice someone acting out in an attempt to be perceived as powerful or cool, I try to remember that I too have those tendencies toward arrogance or egotism which come from a lack of self-love. I remember that if I really felt love for myself, I would be more humble because I wouldn’t feel the need to be liked or perceived as anything other than who I am. Humility is a quality of the heart, not of the mind, for if my heart is at ease and centered in the infinite goodness of love, it cannot be influenced by the mind or the ego which seeks to have control. This process of recognizing my own participation in the judgements I make is the path toward humility, which will allow me to be more compassionate and loving with all beings. What could be a more worthy goal than to be able to love all those around me and be without judgement?

As I learn to be more aware of the origin of my judgements and thoughts, I begin to be more aware of which part of myself is directing my consciousness. When love is seated on the throne of my consciousness, I am moved toward love in each moment. Because love is directing me, I create a reality of love without which responds to the love within. Suddenly, doors that had remained closed begin to open, new relationships begin to form where previously there was no openness to intimacy, connections of the heart become more frequent and conversations are able to go to a deeper level in a shorter period of time. If my ego is seated in the throne of my consciousness, it directs me out of selfishness and tries to control how others see me. Even though the only thing my ego truly wants is to be loved, it is fearful and doesn’t trust that it will be taken care of or acknowledged. If I allow the ego to be in control, I create a reality which responds to my ego instead of my heart, attracting to me only fear, need, and desire instead of trust, hope, and love.

For me, Love is the essential nature of all things. Life is love, as much as it is air and water, fire and earth. This kind of love is different than an emotion, deeper and greater than a human experience. It is the expression of the divine force which creates life itself, it is the essence which pervades all of life with the sound of Om and the mantra “I Am.” This energy of creation exists outside of the realm of religion, polemics, or liturgy. It exists outside the realm of thought, and is greater than the physical realm that we inhabit and perceive (though it pervades each cell of our body and all of life). I do not ‘know’ this in the traditional sense, as with the mind, but in a deeper way which emanates from my body. It is this knowing which began to awaken in me during those years of searching, and today it resides in me as the center around which my life revolves. Human ecology has been a part of this path of awakening, as it gave me the space to unfold into who I am becoming, recognizing that all of life is part of this process and no aspect of my ‘academic life’ needs to be separated from my ‘spiritual life.’ For me, a human ecological worldview is one which acknowledges the one-ness of all aspects of life that are traditionally separated into disciplines. These disciplines are sometimes useful, but without a greater framework of their interdependence, the knowledge they offer is limited and particular. For me, human ecology is even deeper than trans-disciplinarity, as it includes the very life-force energy which I call the divine energy of creation. My experience is not in conflict with science, nor is it exclusive of other beliefs and languages of the divine. For me, human ecology is just another phrase for the experience that all is One. It is a way of seeing the world around us with the understanding that each individual aspect of life can be studied as a manifestation of the mysterious force we call life, the invisible energy which lies between atoms, the love of the creator of the universe manifesting in a thousand ways in each moment. It is a way of studying that has the capacity to meld the mind and the heart, recognizing that when they are aligned, the greatest discoveries can be made about who we are as humans and our place in the world around us.

Awakening is a path because each step holds that which came before and that which is yet to come, unified in an ever-unfolding movement forward. For me, the destination is a state of Being where I am able to live in the reality of the heart, a reality of love and unity with all beings. Though it may seem impossible, I have experienced this reality before––in conversation, in meditation, in ceremony, in nature. The most difficult part is remaining there for more than a moment or an hour or even a day. Within each of us exists a pure energy of love, present from the day we are born––the energy of creation which forms the substrate of the universe. There have been many individuals who have tapped into this energy of creation and attained a state of being in every moment with the Oneness of All That Is. This state of being has been called the Tao, the Christ Consciousness, Enlightenment, and many other names. All of us have the ability to live from this place of essential goodness and peace, for one who is able to truly feel their one-ness with all of life will have no need for self-aggrandizement, control of others, oppressive behaviors, or selfishness. As I awaken to my purpose in this life, I choose in each moment to devote myself to walking the path toward this consciousness. Each person is unique in their process of awakening, but my heart is certain that one day all of humanity will awaken in their own way. Our hearts are weary from so much history of suffering on the planet, but even though it may seem impossible I know there will come a day when we shall have no more need for war, anger, or strife amongst the peoples of this Earth. The only thing I can do to aid in this evolution is to bring myself closer to the consciousness that all is One: that what I do to the Earth and to other living beings I also do to myself. Only then will I be able to teach others to do the same.

[thespearnews-blog]

We all want our shoes kissed

New Post has been published on https://thespearnews.com/2017/09/06/want-shoes-kissed/

We all want our shoes kissed

By Eddie Ssemakula

Surely, no length of social media posts can restrain a man committed to his own glory, even if that man were the one typing this.

We, needy humans, are glory seekers by default, we all want our shoes kissed.

It took an entire crucifixion 2000 years ago to overcome such vain glory, and yet, we still smell the stench of such human pride today.

What we just witnessed at the Independence grounds over the weekend is an indictment on a born-again church for having long-abandoned the institutional wisdom of doctrinal safeguards in favour of enterprenual models of Christian ministry.

Self-styled models of ministry, where the CEO-like ‘Shepherd’ on top of the pyramid is accountable to nobody, just like members of his mid-week congregation.

And yet that’s still a secondary issue.

The Primary issue being that we are all committed to our glory, it’s a poisonous vice orchestrated by the serpent and passed on from our first Parents, Adam and Eve.

Consequently, we all still ask the same question, even when building our spiritual empires, ‘did God really say (Gen 3:1) we question the supremacy of God’s word over us, because yes, we want to be our own master, we want our Babel to reach heaven.

We all want our shoes kissed.

Whether we are elbowing our way in the supermarket line, or fixing details for another Christian event, (or even trying to write a powerful blog ) we are always seeking glory.

And whereas Christian life is glorious by the fact that we are constantly beholding God’s glory through Christ and his word, (2 Cor 3:18) Christian living in general, remains riddled with glory wars.

More often than not amidst such glory contention, it’s God’s word that ends up compromised, usually to our benefit. Or so we think.

We all carry the capacity to manipulate anything to advance our own name, fame, to headline, even if that means proof texting Scripture to justify our disordered appetites.

What we are witnessing in the Ugandan church is an institutional culmination of an ancient vice. Herods and Nebuchadnezzars trying to ‘leave their mark in history’ – yet biblical evidence is abundant on how such man-made projects end.

No matter which evangelical denomination you are, we all must privately answer the question the gospel constantly troubles us with, shall we primarily abandon our tastes and preferences, our felt needs, our greed, our deepest loves for the sake of the one we proclaim, shall we like Jesus’ forerunner ‘decrease so that he may increase?’ (John 3:30) Shall we carry the cross and follow him?

When men carry us on their shoulders and proclaim, ‘”The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” (Acts 14:11) shall we like Paul remind them “we are men with passions like you”(15) ?

Shall we like the psalmist say ‘ earth has nothing I desire besides thee (Ps 73:25), ‘ or shall we edit that to mean, ‘ with thee, I must have everything I want ? ‘Shall we like him conclude, ‘not to us not to us, oh Lord, but to your name be the glory (Ps 115;1)’

Shall we like Herod suffer death by worms for not giving glory to God, or shall we like Nebuchadnezzar have a 7-year grass diet for the same reason?

In the days of ‘itching ears’ (2 Tim 4:3), every Christian’s fundamental test is going to be about his or her ability to discern such subtle error, from within and without.

A God-granted ability to discern error is what is going to safeguard believers from contemporary vain appetites to seek self-improvement rather than repentance, lone-ranger Christianity rather than spiritual accountability, self-aggrandizement rather than sacrificial living, and self-assertiveness rather than biblical humility.

So help us Lord.

Otherwise, for now, it looks like we all still want our shoes kissed