THOMAS EAKINS: THE BODY NATURAL AND ITS USES

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) lived most of his life within the boundaries of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during times when the Victorian ethos was giving way to an expansion of the boundaries within which art was conceived and explored. He had a parochial outlook that didn't require a broad exposure to the wide world. He was exposed to art early in his life and influenced by his father who was a writing teacher and master calligrapher. It was from him that he developed the skill and habit of laying out a grid of lines for his paintings so that they were products of deliberate design. He was an athletic man in his youth and participated in sports of all kinds from rowing to gymnastics. His appreciation of the human body and its capacities was eventually translated into a fascination with its mechanics. He was an early proponent of photography as a method of studying both equine and human anatomy through motion. He and Edweard Muybridge did many studies of sequential motion in order to see more clearly how surface anatomy translated underlying anatomical structures and their connections. An early interest in medical school and the practice of medicine was abandoned in favor of a deep dive into the study of anatomy. When he became an art teacher, he began with the basics of anatomical dissection for all of his students, encouraging them to draw and paint with anatomical precision. He insisted that it was the nude human figure that represented the greatest truth of the human essence, stripped down to its essentials and reproduced in a form that was molded to represent the uniqueness of each subject. He encouraged them to combine knowledge of anatomy with their own experience of anatomical function.

With his focus on precision and the science of human anatomical dissection, it is no wonder that he showed very little interest in the movement in art that was to become Impressionism. He was controversial in his time, not least because of his views on the nude human figure. His career as an art teacher was cut short when he was dismissed from his position as professor of art in the Pennsylvania Academy when he removed the loincloth from a male model in a class where female students were present. He eventually moved to another teaching position but he was badly scarred by his experience, devoted as he was to the belief in the truth of the human body. But the society in which he circulated was sufficiently ensconced in the Victorian mindset that he was marginalized for his approach to his subjects. There is no evidence in the historical record that his love of the human form, especially that of the male, ever translated into behavior that even in this day and age of the 21^st century might be considered harassing or abusive or predatory. His outlook was that the human form represented an expression of purity and beauty and that the truth of it was the culmination of its dissectible parts. One could not know the body's beauty without knowing how it was assembled. It is interesting to note that Eakins only rarely painted the body nude. In fact, most of his paintings were of subjects living within their own contexts, wearing clothing that distinguished them in their roles within the contexts of their lives. This was true of the many portraits of Catholic clergy, the scientists, artists, and the physicians who became subjects of his most famous paintings. Few of his paintings were narratives, the most outstanding being The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic, large scenes of surgical operations presided over by the imposing figures of the surgeons named and attended by medical students and assistants (and even included his own image amongst the groupings). Most of his paintings are portraits of people known in the society of Philadelphia at the end of the 19^th century.

My interest in Thomas Eakins was ignited when I was a medical student in Philadelphia. I had known him from a casual interest in his masterpieces of portraiture. I, too, had a reason to think of the human body as sacred and to learn about its truths in my gross anatomy class my first year. There were never any jokes or desecrations involved in our anatomical dissections. For Eakins and for most medical students during my times, anatomy was the first step in understanding how the human body was constructed. For Eakins, and for us medical students, it was just the first step in taking apart the pieces and then reconstructing the whole that would lead to a greater understanding of this bounded form with which all of us are gifted and eventually give up. It was Eakins's belief that the uniqueness of each of his subjects emerged from the commonality of their anatomical structures. This must have struck him as nearly miraculous, as it does for us even now in our age of technological assurances of truth. But each of us is an emotional and expressive portrait of the partial truths that emerge from our anatomical origins. I was fascinated by the original Eakins paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and visited them many times over the course of my medical school training. However, I will always recall one of my rotations at Pennsylvania Hospital when I was traveling the halls there going from clinic to clinic and I just happened upon the Eakins portrait of Dr. Jacob Mendez DaCosta, done in 1893. It was common for Eakins to give his finished portraits to the subjects themselves and Dr. DaCosta had gifted it to the hospital. Viewing the paintings in the museum was a wonderful experience, but being inches away from an Eakins in such a casual and off-hand situation was more than I could imagine. At a time when the doors of the Philadelphia Museum were locked at night and the artwork secured, it was no small surprise that the existence of the DaCosta portrait could be available to me—and anyone else—no matter the time of day. I think it would have pleased Eakins to know that his painting had taken on such an extended life. And it would have pleased him, perhaps, to have stimulated someone into thinking how it was that he thought about his own work and about his view of life.

As I ruminated about how this artist that I admired might have thought about the human body, the word “temple” came to mind and then “teacher.” Both of these words seemed to apply to what I could understand about Eakins's life and work. He was a teacher of the human form and, for him, the human form and its constituent parts were his teachers. More words came to mind and they were words beginning with “T.” I think it is possible to pick out any other letter of the alphabet and to construct a list of those words that might characterize how one could think of the human body. But the cascade of “T” words kept flowing and it looked something like this, with a few explanations and additional thoughts:

Teacher, tutor

Tool, toolbox

Target (of sexual abuse, bullying, in war)

Temple, tabernacle

Temporal (of the times, socialized, tangible)

Temporary, transient, terminal (are we not destined to die?)

Transformed (are we more than our anatomical body parts?)

Template (now we are seeing that body parts can be produced by 3-D printing)

Transition (the body as a step in evolution of creatures)

Transport (a vehicle for the movement that characterizes our species)

Trauma, torment, terror (the body that carries evidence of our nightmares)

Trap, tomb, tether (how we think about the body as victim or attached in some way)

Taboo (do we not still think of the nude body as embarrassing or improper?)

Tactic (what excuses do we use in explaining the body?)

Toxin, threat (what is the body when it carries and spreads disease?)

Tragic

Tapestry (the body as a collage, a complex fabric)

Translation (of the divine?)

Transparent (the ego in the body, body language)

Traveler

Traitor (does it turn on us when we get sick?)

Triumphant

Trouble

Truthful

Trial

Trickster

Typical (the body as common language)

Timeless

Trash (how do we think about migrants fleeing violence? the homeless?)

Toy (the body as a plaything, a purchase)

Tender

Tireless

Technical (just anatomy and physiology, a set of grid lines?)

Taxonomy (how we arrange our anatomical pieces in a hierarchy—is the heart or brain the prime regulator?)

Tinder (a person who ignites emotional fires)

Tradition (the human body as representation of ancient practices)

I wondered how viewing the human body, the body natural, is really a combination of characterizations and how Eakins's view of it might be configured. No single one of the list above seems to describe what is a most miraculous and complex organism. I juxtaposed several, one upon the other to see what picture I could paint of the body natural:

Teacher + Threat + Toxic + Timeless

Traveler + Target + Trauma

Transition + Tapestry +Temporary

Translation + Triumphant

Trash + Tragic + Trauma

Temple + Truthful + Timeless

Trickster + Traitor + Threat

Try your hand at a similar exercise to see how nuanced the idea of the human body (or any other subject that comes to mind) can become.

I played with combinations of characteristics to see if I could further understand the Eakins view. Here is what I came up with:

Technical + Temporal + Truthful + Tradition + Teacher +Taxonomy

What is interesting about this approach is how it demonstrates how language and experience of the body are intimately bound. What we know of our own unique character and that of others is constructed from a common frame of bones and muscle. We are the same and we are different, one from another. Eakins was most comfortable with the idea that the anatomical details of the human body speak their own truth and that this truth, a partial truth, is what each of us is in our own expressive form. This begs the question about what truly separates each of us from “the other.” If each of us is a partial expression of truth, then no one deserves to dominate another. Thinking about the body natural is a way of thinking that can assist us in interpreting the world at large and then acting in accord with our most nuanced perceptions of what it is to be a human being. If we reference our own bodies in our perceptions of the body natural, see that we are commonly made, and have this as our perspective of human relationships, then how could we ever distinguish ourselves as different from “the other”?

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND JFK-- LEARNING TO GRIEVE

“... great conceit is required in making the Eye, which either by the dulnesse or lively quicknesse thereof, giveth a great taste of the spirit and disposition of the minde … as in drawing a fool or an idiot by making his eyes narrow and his temple wrinkled with laughter, wide-mouthed and showing his teeth. A grave or reverent father by giving him a dominant and lowly countenance, his eye beholding you with a sober cast which is caused by the upper eyelid covering a great part of the ball and is an especial mark of a sober and stayed brain within.”

Henry Peacham (1634)

As quoted by Simon Schama in Rembrandt's Eyes

I don't think we as humans are able to express grief when we are born. Perhaps we have the neurological template already in place but lack its full expression. The full expression of grief at losses is probably a cumulative process that begins with disappointment or sadness at the disappearance of a favorite toy or pacifier and develops over time into the fully understood grief that comes with maturity. The fully developed grief has its roots firmly planted in mortality and the bonds of belonging. One of the greatest burdens of being a human being,if not the greatest, is to know that at some time in the future people we love and we ourselves will die from this earth. While it is a burden for most people, it is also a challenge with some positive benefits. One of those benefits is to acknowledge that death is our only common experience as human beings but, acknowledging this, we are offered the knowledge that we are still alive in this life and able to experience all its riches. And, perhaps, it is this full experience of living that we can in some way pass along to those who follow us.

If we mature into a concept of mortality and loss, then how do we develop the facility to grieve? I think helping others, especially the young, to understand how to grieve is one of the greatest gifts we can offer, because it facilitates the expression of what is most meaningful in someone's life. If we can grieve a loss, then we can see the magnitude of the grief in terms of the magnitude of the loss and its deepest meanings. It is also possible to help someone get to the shore beyond grief (and to mourning and a new morning, perhaps) and an ongoing life of healing and wholeness. How does one facilitate such a transformation? How does a community repair losses experienced in civic life?

It may be obvious that to help someone in such a state of loss and grieving one must first know these states within oneself. One must do some inner work of exploration and emotional archaeology to first come to some awareness of how one faces losses in one's own life. This is a lifetime process because not all losses are of the same magnitude and most losses, whether anticipated or not, come as a shock, because the rending of bonds of belonging are always traumatic and carry with them the sense of an ending, a certain finality in one way or another. So, loss and trauma are companions much of the time. Both lean on grieving to bring some degree of acceptance and comfort. There is within the grief process the gift of safety, even if what brings you to grief is generated by circumstances of unpredictability, chaos, and even violence. One is thrown back on oneself even in the darkness of grief to a place where one's emotions can be surrendered to the broken heart. In the case of great trauma and great loss, all of us begin again in grief. These observations don't really give any specific ideas about how we learn to grieve and how to express grief in its full dimensions. How do we learn how to grieve?

I am looking at two portraits. They are images from my own youth and I think they hold some answers to the last question about how we come to know what grief is and how to express it. If it is true that we develop an ability to grieve, then perhaps we pick up clues from the world around us and layer them onto the template that is already present in our brain, mapping them as we evolve. I would imagine that those clues come from the people around us as well as from the influences of society in general. One of the portraits is of Abraham Lincoln, a photograph by Alexander Gardner taken in April of 1865 and believed to be the last photograph of Lincoln. The other portrait is an oil painting of JFK done by Jamie Wyeth in 1967, four years after his death. Both of these men were presidents and both were martyred by an assassin's bullet. Both portraits bear the mark of grief and both have helped me understand what grief is and how to express it. Each represents a teaching about grief.

To fully understand how I learned about grief it is necessary to describe the path to that understanding. One of the side paths is related to an obscure course I took in college called “Kingship and the Law.” One of the texts we studied was a book on kingship in the Middle Ages and examined the evolution of what it meant to become “head of state.” There were confusions about the divine right of monarchs and the power of the religious authorities. But the overall effect was to give to the monarch some, but not all, of the religious prerogatives and some of the secular authority. It was then as the designated leader of the community that he was encased with moral authority and a touch of divinity. What we explored in the course was to what extent our own concepts of leadership (the presidency was a good example) included the secular and the divine. We found that it was very difficult to separate the two streams of authority (moral and pragmatic or political) within the context of our own form of democratic government. This was not so much a reflection of the parameters of democracy as it was how leaders of government take on the ancient mantle of ancestral roles. It seems to me that taking on the mantle is considered an obligation expected by the people who grant it and a responsibility by those who accept it. This is the deal and the ideal.

How we think about leadership (and how that relates to the loss of it and the grieving that results) is encased in legend and so is susceptible to idealization. The legends of King Arthur, of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, were popular in the Middle Ages and featured a king who was most surely not a historical character. But the idealization of him as both moral and political authority became the ideal for all future kings, queens, and heads of state into our own times. It isn't a surprise that the ideal of a Camelot where the political and spiritual welfare of all were a high priority and peace reigned over the land became a metaphor for the enlightened monarch and his people. Kennedy's administration was often referred to as Camelot and it was this ideal that was popularized in a Broadway show of the time (“Camelot” was adapted in 1960 from T. H. White's Once and Future King ). We continue to have high expectations of our leaders and assume that they will balance their different roles of authority. When they are dismissive or indifferent to their roles as arbiters of morality (or politics), then we perceive a diminishment of responsibility, a disappointment bordering on loss, and we move in different ways to restore the moral/political order. I think every leader is measured against the ideal.

When leadership failed in the Middle Ages and monarchs were overthrown or died, they were effectively removed as the head from the body of the body politic. Metaphorically, this is the separation of the monarch from the public in common. Surely, there must have been shock and trauma associated with such an event and, surely, there must have been some form of grieving, even it it was a celebrated occasion, for to lose a symbol of order and authority and constancy was a loss. When King Arthur died, his Knights and the Round Table collapsed into disorder and profligacy. But the “head of state” authority was eventually passed along to someone else. We have similar rites and rituals in the relationships between the heads of state and the bodies that are united with them. We continue to imbue our leaders with similar high expectations of the ideal state of the body politic. (In some ways, in England to this day, Queen Elizabeth represents the stability of leadership, both moral/spiritual and political, no matter the rotation of political parties in power.) I suggest that something happens in most large and small communities where leadership is important. Perhaps this is also an aspect of being a parent in a nuclear family. There is the assumption that there will be moral as well as pragmatic (political) guidance. Somehow, it seems a natural aspect of any leadership role.

It is with this concept of authority and some awe that I came to perceive the two leaders whose portraits I studied. My experience with JFK's death was deeply personal and a shock that I can only describe as a trauma. I was in chemistry class in high school that November day when the announcement came over the intercom. Everything stopped. Time stopped. No one moved. It was the way my dad described hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor or others have described the events of 9/11. If there is a way to carry such specific trauma, fear, and rupture in an embedded way, then this is how it worked its way into my memory. It was different with Lincoln. Of course, his death was about a hundred years before that of JFK, but there was something of the events of it that I incorporated into my memory from reading of what happened that night at Ford's Theater. It was as if I had been there, so vivid were the recollections of those who had been present. I think this was the case because I had learned about trauma and loss and about grieving by then. I had known of the deaths of a few family friends and had observed my mom and dad in their grief. In the case of Lincoln, I remember reading about how Mary Todd Lincoln had become hysterical, another shocking response. I remember seeing the sketches made at Lincoln's deathbed. In the case of JFK, I had my own trauma but I also observed what it was for an entire nation of millions to grieve their loss. There was the little boy saluting his father's casket and the horse with boots reversed in the stirrups and the playing of the Navy Hymn. There was the entourage of luminaries from all over the world walking (yes, walking to honor the dead) behind the horse-drawn caisson. These were the pieces of what it was like to grieve, in solo and as a community. It wasn't until later that I understood better what it was to lose a “head of state.” Is it too far-fetched to think of the bonding and love we have for a parent in the same vein as the regard we have for our leaders? Can we suffer the same degree of loss and grieving for those to whom we are not related except as a member of the body politic?

So, here before me are two portraits, two images of the heads of assassinated leaders. And what do I observe? It took me a long time to tease out what it was about these two particular portraits that captivated me. I learned about how humans express emotions from the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who developed a Facial Action Coding System based on his experimental work with anatomically based microexpressions. He identified many hundreds of different facial muscle combinations that unconsciously express emotions of disgust, approval, doubt, pain, etc., and including grief. (Is it any wonder that sophisticated facial recognition is now being used to identify individuals in security surveillance?) Looking now at these images of Lincoln and JFK, I think I understand better why they helped me learn about grief. We know one another by facial recognition and the uniqueness of combinations that make one person so different from another. We focus on faces and not on many other features of another person's body. Fingerprints, for instance, identify us as unique individuals but we can't recognize and “read” one another by them.

The Abraham Lincoln I see is compared to another photograph by Gardner taken in November, 1863, about the time of the Gettysburg Address. In 1863 he appears in full strength with a certain resoluteness in his eyes and a direct stare into the camera. In 1865 he is looking beyond the camera into some distance we can only imagine. He has seen the country through the bloody Civil War (approximately 750,000 men killed, compared to 400,000 in WWII and 58,000 in Vietnam). The right side of his face is in darkness and his left eye has caught a small glimmer of light in the background. His cheeks are hollowed out from weight loss and strain and his beard is sparse and roughly cut. His face seems to have collapsed over his lips, which droop at the corners. His visage is one of exhaustion and closure. I imagine that he has seen his country through great trials and turmoil but has come to some point of grieving and in that he has surrendered. His is a face of one man grieving for the dead and wounded on both sides of the conflict but also grieving for the gaping wounds left in the heart of the nation for all its losses. In his exhausted heart he has also lost one son when the boy was only 4 years old and another to the war just ended. He has accommodated life with a spouse who suffered mental illness throughout their marriage. He has visited battlefields and pardoned those deemed traitorous to the Northern cause. He has compromised and disciplined and commanded. He is only a few days from being killed. When that day arrived and the time came, the nation was thrown into another shock of grief after so many hundreds of thousands of losses. Their head of state had been murdered and the loss was grievous. Do we carry their grief and mourning? Is it possible that such deep trauma and grieving can be passed forward in many generations and recalled in future times of disorder?

In the Wyeth painting, JFK is at his desk with his right arm raised and his hand partially covering his lower face, exposing us to the appearance of his slightly opened mouth and his upper face. In this portrait, too, the eyes are staring over us as we look at him (do you notice that both eyes do not seem to be tracking in tandem?). He is focused on some distant place and one can only imagine Wyeth thinking that place might have been JFK's own mortality. This portrait was done in 1967 and so incorporates Wyeth's own responses to the great shock of the assassination four years before. But all other aspects of JFK's head broadcast vigor and even radiance the way the hair is highlighted against the background of the picture. His skin tones are rugged and ruddy. His face is full to the edges of the square jaw for which he was known. And it is this vigor and commanding posture that so many of us will remember about JFK. I was only 17 when he was murdered and so hadn't had much experience with death but I was inspired by Kennedy's own relative youth and his brilliant abilities to bring together the secular and the sacred. To me, he was the head of state I thought represented the possibilities and potential of life and whom I later grieved in the same great measure, but of loss. He was visible and vibrant and appealed to my own youthful promise. When he was shot, a great gap of knowledge was immediately filled with emotions I didn't feel I owned just yet. It was said at the time that the Camelot we idealized in his short administration as leader was forever lost. It took a long time before I could accommodate such trauma and, even today, I mourn him as well as the exhausted Abraham Lincoln. Much of what I thought about life's possibilities and the goodness of mankind were shattered and a less naive outlook became the condition of my maturity. It is by such strokes of reality that we grow into who we are and how we see the world before us. I believe this is one way we learn about losses and grieving. How do we help others with their traumas and their grieving? How do we teach our young to know the reality of loss? Do we support them as they suffer their own realities or do we make a lesson out of it? Perhaps knowing our own losses and grieving we are able to teach them by example. Are we open enough and vulnerable enough to do this? How better to serve the generations?

It is perhaps because we idealize our heads of state and those to whom we turn for maintenance of moral/spiritual and political order that we are able to eventually deal with the realities of loss and grieving in our individual and collective lives. We need the ideal as an aspiration of decent human behavior. We can begin with the romance of King Arthur and Camelot and perhaps this is the way we perpetuate what is grandest, most meaningful, and worth preserving about our shared existences. The gap exposed between the ideal and the reality of our lives is the space where we learn and grow. If we are shocked by loss and the trauma of it, then we are challenged to grow into what it is to grieve and to recover the best way we can. Human resilience is vast and we learn to adapt to even the greatest shocks. We learn from heads of state and from portraits of them how to process the losses we find so difficult to experience and to counsel others, especially the young. Is it possible to teach these things? Is it possible that how we think about mortality, loss, and grieving can change what we think of the experiences themselves?

DOROTHY DAY:

TRAUMA AS A TEACHER

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' “ Matthew 6: 28-32

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a crusader for the poor and lowly. Her life story is one of early life trauma and the struggle to find meaning amidst the messiness of life. When the stories of trauma are told by all who experience its pains and sufferings, we discover that everyone on the planet has been its subject. Traumas come in all sizes and shapes and amounts. There are the “little t” traumas, such as failing a school exam, having one's first novel rejected 100 times, getting a speeding ticket. And there are the “big T” traumas, such as divorce, the death of a child, physical/sexual abuse, and the maiming injuries of war. To be a human being is to experience the pains and sufferings of traumatic events. It is said that no one escapes the pains of existence but that suffering is optional. It depends on what we make of the pain. It depends on how we think about trauma.

Traumas change us. They change our physiology and biochemistry, our emotional responses, they affect our sleep, our eating, our social interactions, how we view ourselves against the backdrop of daily life. They can detach us from reality or they can jolt us back to life or drown us. Traumas at their core dissociate us from ourselves. Repairing the tears of trauma is a hard and complicated process. So it was for Dorothy Day. When she was quite young, she was a witness to the San Francisco earthquake, watched WWI unfold with its devastating aftermath of injured soldiers, struggled with everyone else during the Great Depression, became pregnant and chose to have an abortion amidst all the confusion of the times. There were quite enough traumas in her life to have turned her away from the life that had once afforded her opportunities for rebellion and resistance, fully submersed in the fragmentation of social structures. How did she become the Dorothy Day that is now one of the most revered icons of the modern Catholic Church and political activists?

There are no guarantees and not much evidence that one can fully escape the effects of big traumas or the cumulative little ones. There is no assurance that even with the greatest effort one would be able to calm the demons that often accompany the traumas that change us. What is worth knowing and trying is coming to some sort of terms with the reality of the trauma without becoming overwhelmed by it. It takes a different way of thinking about it. For Dorothy Day, this was a turn towards God. She says in her book From Union Square to Rome:

“ 'All of my life I has been haunted by God,' a character in one of Dostoevsky's books says. And that is the way it was with me.”

“I, too, wanted to do penance for my own sins and for the sins of the whole world, for I had a keen sense of sin, of natural imperfection and earthliness. I often felt clearly that I was being deliberately evil in my attitudes, just as I clearly recognized truth when I came across it. And the thrill of joy that stirred my heart when I came across spiritual truth and beauty never abated, never left me as I grew older.”

As far as I know, Day never directly addressed any potential connection between her early life traumas and the subsequent course of her life as an activist and servant of the poor and disenfranchised. Yet, even though we can't always draw straight lines between the punctuations of our lives, we can sometimes see how the stream has coursed through canyons and into flat lands. I imagine that it was Day's early prescience about God's role in her life that carried her into the lives of the poor and social outcasts, indeed, into all the places where evil, sin, and imperfections abounded. It is possible to see that her social activism, voluntary poverty, and being a tireless voice of the voiceless were responses to her own early life profligacy. At some point, she had transformed her self-focus into expressions of redemption and humility. She had surrendered herself entirely to the uncertainty of an unobservable presence that is called God. This was not a sacrifice for her. It was not giving up something she most dearly wanted to possess. One of the paradoxes of Day's life is that she found a measure of safety and belonging in the spiritual life, a life untested and intuitive at its core. Thinking about God and how to serve him was a new way of thinking for her, a way of thinking millennia old that hearkened back to spiritual masters and communities in the shadows of history. She gathered in the totality of the human experience of those privileged and those dispossessed and surrendered herself to a greater spirit she felt moving in her life. How she thought about this opened up new ways to be. Bearing witness to man's depravities and undeserved sufferings, she was moved to act according to the path she found. She was a journalistic voice for the poor as founder of The Catholic Worker, in 1933. She opened a soup kitchen called Hospitality House. She became involved as an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War, a supporter of Civil Rights actions, and fought for women's suffrage.

One can only imagine that a great deal of inner soul work is required to make such transformations a reality and to keep them healthy. One can imagine how deep the level of commitment must be to spend an entire life in service of the homeless and the poor. When I think about Dorothy Day and why she inspires me, I think about sacrifice, surrender, spiritual immanence and transcendence, the drive for human wholeness, integrity, how one evolves integration out of fragmentation, and how one works with the inevitable pains and sufferings to which all of us are subject and the ones we actually suffer. I think about what it takes to make a life out of the complexities of social and cultural changes that have a way of distracting and confusing us. It is instructive to remember that there is a fine line separating altruism and sacrifice. One side of the line is life-sustaining, and the other is a slow cellular death of identity. It is a hard line to tread. I believe that Dorothy Day stayed on the side that sustains life and useful work.

When I think of the whole life Dorothy Day lived, I see that how she thought about her life and the lives of others tempered what she thought. How she thought about life included discipline, commitment, humility, gratitude, surrender, connecting with others in their needs, seeing oneself as the other--as no different from the other, and especially seeing oneself as the recipient of God's love and grace.

Grace is an interesting way to think about one's life. When one has lived through pain and travail, when one has been brought low by circumstances external to oneself and especially by one's own demons, when one has worked out of the depths, then it might seem that one could claim a victory for the self and its great muscular achievements. But the opposite is often the case. Because one's way of thinking includes surrender of self and all its attachments, one is turned over to a force one can hardly comprehend but which beckons and embraces. David Brooks, in his book The Second Mountain, tells of his own turn to God as a different way of thinking:

“To be religious, as I understand it, is to perceive reality through a sacred lens, to feel that there are spiritual realities in physical, imminent things. … God is what you see and feel with and through.”

“I was struggling with the concept of surrender and grace. I didn't like Martin Luther's idea that you can't be saved by works, but only by faith. I wanted to stake out a middle ground, which I called 'participatory grace.' You'd do some good things for your fellow human, and God would sort of meet you halfway.”

It turns out that God's grace and love come to us unearned. We cannot work hard enough for good things nor commit the greatest sins and receive or be denied grace. Martin Buber said in his I and Thou that all beings and things have a relationship with the Thou that is God and it is this intimate relationship where God is our animating force that we receive God's grace and, in turn in this relationship, complete God by our good works. Our faith is God's grace. Our commitment and surrender are God's requests. His presence is intimate and eternal, immanent and transcendent, and we find him and ourselves in the ways we serve one another.

In these times of turmoil and contraction of the human values of kindness and compassion, Dorothy Day's life inspires because it shows how it is possible to return ourselves to each other and to see that what someone else needs is exactly what we need. If we see the world as broken, then we try to fix it. If we see it as wounded, then we are moved to heal it. If we see that our individual agency can't be the cause of healing without some other energy source, then we are open to the presence of spirit. And we find that what we do then flows from how we have thought about the world and its problems.

Grace comes to us as it does to the lilies of the field. We may toil and turn, pray and maneuver in so many ways, stumble and harm, covet and deny, push and pull, but we will always be humbled by how we are accepted, comforted, and loved by a spirit that does not discriminate. We can add our distinctions, divisions, hates, prejudices, and claims, and we will be forever loved. Is this not a paradoxical and miraculous way to think about the great pageant of beings and things? Don't all of us want to be loved, no matter what? How we think about love is how we think about our lives. Are we, too, devoted in faith to the everyday sacred, however you think about spirit or if you think about spirit at all?

If how you think merges I and Thou and includes spirit as a co-creator of all beings and things, then one's personal agency is naturally directed to those acts that honor and celebrate the sacred within the everyday life we lead in billions of ways. What one does is done on behalf of all by the means of service for the greater good. What we think and do lie within that overall framework of commitment and surrender. I think this is what the story of Dorothy Day's life tells me and why I chose to include her in this collection of little meditations.

WHAT IF: MARTIN BUBER AND THE ELEMENTAL

What if you are feeling restless and anxious and frustrated when you awaken in the morning after a good night's sleep and,

What if you were able to look beyond those troublesome feelings from the world of screaming headlines and a sense of chaos and unpredictability and,

What if you then pushed all that aside and attempted to go about a day's tasks and to cross off of your to-do list some of the many items falling in an endless cascade and,

What if you met someone on your travels who offered you, in casual conversation, a different way to look out at the external world and also your internal world,

Would you take her or him up on the offer?

Of course, the picture I paint above is not hypothetical. It is a real experience people have all the time. It is what one can read in blogs and online commentary. And it is available between the lines of almost anything one can read and implied in how many people respond to the world. This is the world we confront daily. I am not certain it has always been so. There have certainly been many eras and epochs that have had their share of chaos and confusion, but few to match ours because now the stakes are so much higher. We have the capacity to obliterate all living things from the face of the planet. We all carry around technology in our pockets whose sophistication exceeds by leaps the computers used to put man on the moon. We are barraged in every conscious moment with stories of dreadful acts of human cruelty and pictures to accompany the stories. We cannot escape such data and information. We don't seem to have the wherewithal to filter or interpret all of it. It is no wonder that we are on the “edge” of our seats, physically and mentally. And spiritually, too, I think.

It is no small challenge to ferret out the good news and the stories of rescue, love, empathy, and compassion. Yet, the possibilities for good works abound. Even then, do we discount them? Are we still drawn to the most dramatic and desperate stories, the ones that show us in relief how incapable we are of showing accommodation and forgiveness? How do we find it within ourselves to meet the world as it unfolds and to step more lively into an attitude of joy and greater potential?

It has been the case in past times of turmoil and uncertainty that people seek some realm that is greatly separated from the drumming of the daily beat. In these times, there is a resurgence of interest in astrology (always a source of something upbeat for everyone), in Tarot readings, in interpretation of tea leaves, in expressions of mysticism, to name a few alternative reassurances. In our times, formal religion is not the go-to source of grounding. Many people have fled the dogmatic schemes of formal religion and call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” There is a trend to borrow pieces of many spiritual traditions. There is an emphasis on mindfulness as a spiritual pursuit, something that doesn't tie one down to any particular tradition or any tradition at all but affords some connections that assist in orienting to a different set of priorities.

What are we really talking about when we talk about reorienting? I think we are making a distinction between what our culture values: consumerism, individualism, success, striving, celebrity—and a different way of viewing the world in which ancient values are revived, interdependence is acknowledged, and mutuality is held in common as a public and personal ideal as well as a working philosophy. If one thinks these latter attributes are worth considering, then perhaps it might be possible to have within that system of thinking an ineffable spirit that acts in concert with us to make this world in which we live a more livable and kindhearted place. Perhaps this spiritual presence (is it too presumptuous to refer to it as God?) could provide us with a greater sense of comfort in the world and also a deeper and more comprehensive method for evaluating the contradictions and paradoxes and divisions that bedevil us. I don't believe that imagining God ties us to any dogma or religion. It is a way of designating that there is within all of us a basic goodness which we must work hard to uncover and explore, a basic element that isn't located in our genes but which is as close to us as life itself. If we assume that its presence is universally held, then how does that change how we see the world of individual striving? What does it mean to trade the demands of the ego for the service we might offer those who are less privileged?

It seems a mighty leap to think that a world of service and the abandonment of individual prerogatives and “rights” could be possible. I believe it is possible and I get some of my confidence from this little essay's leading character, Martin Buber (1878-1965). He was a Jewish scholar who wrote about Jewish themes, including those of contemporary Judaism as well as stories emerging from the traditions of the Hasidic community. He had an interest in mysticism and myth and explored as well concepts of evil, always careful to emphasize the concrete and the useful. The work for which he was most known was a book titled I and Thou. I approach this book from the point of someone who recognizes and agonizes over how the world events unfold in ways that sometimes underscore humans' worst instincts and behavior to one another. Buber writes that it is just in this background of reactive and defensive meanspiritedness and harshness that we discover our relationships with spirit and with one another, his designated I/Thou interactions. He contrasts his I/Thou (Buber considered I/Thou as one word) formulation with an I/It attitude. The I/It relationships created subjects and objects and dualities that created gaps, each gap a space in which evil could intrude. The I/Thou relationship applies to our relationship with spirit as much as it does one person's relationship with another. It applies as well to an individual's relationship to the planet and all things and beings. We shift from an I/It mode to an I/Thou mode when we extend ourselves into a relationship.

Buber transitioned in his own life from believing that one's relationship with spirit was a subject/object one in which man was defined by the distance that separated him/her from however spirit operated in the world of mankind. But his mature understanding brought spirit into the marrow of human life and into the physical marrow of each person's bodily cellular mechanics. For him, there was no way to separate spirit from body or mind and to know spirit for its power and energy was to be in relationship with others. He recognized that there was often an oscillation between the I/Thou and the I/It relationship but that the good work of spirit was to be rediscovered at each day's new beginning. Neuroscience now has shown that there are at least two modes of conscious processing. One is egocentric (self referential) and the other is allocentric, where allo- refers to “other.” We tend to move back and forth between the two modes all the time and it is believed that meditation and the training of attention can enable us to exercise one over the other. In the case of the egocentric mode, we tend to concentrate our attention on some aspect of personal reference. In allocentric processing, we focus more on an expansive and receptive mode of attention where we leave the concerns of the ego behind and become more aware of the presence of others. It is in this mode that one might realize more of the energy and power of spirit as it strives for mutually reinforcing relationships. Buber's formulations include not only one's relationship with spirit, but also with those relationships that give our lives enduring meaning outside our own personal frames of reference. He emphasizes the element of reciprocity that shapes not only spirit but also the one being inspirited. Here is Buber:

“The aim of relation is relation's own being, that is, contact with the Thou. For through contact with every Thou we are stirred with a breath of the Thou, that is, of eternal life. He who takes his stand in relation shares in a reality, that is, in a being that neither merely belongs to him nor merely lies outside him. All reality is an activity in which I share without being able to appropriate for myself. Where there is no sharing there is no reality. Where there is self-appropriation there is no reality. The more direct the contact with the Thou, the fuller is the sharing.”

The neuroscience connection is not prophetic, but Buber's 1923 book was in its own way. He brought spirit back into humankind's daily life and at the same time developed the idea of dialogue, a way of thinking about how humans might define and shape what was most meaningful in their lives. And, just maybe, those meaningful aspects could be shared among us. One of the most insidious but persistent concerns humans have is what to do about what appears to be evil. This was one of Buber's concerns as well. Because his mode of thinking placed all human concerns and motivations within the self, that included evil acts, too. Evil was not assigned to some entity separate from human existential experience. There was no Satan that stood at some threatening distance from the vulnerable self. It is a difficult task, indeed, to consider that one's own character make-up contains all evil tendencies, but the “real” world is all that we can see and experience and so evil must be lurking there also. That might be considered the “bad news” about evil, but it is also “good news” because it means that what is evil can conceivably be redeemed. Buber believed that evil was formed in the gap that is created between an I/It reference and that of I/Thou. If the dialogue established that gives life to I/Thou relationships isn't transformed and remains an I/It orientation, then evil is given an opportunity to flourish. It is only in our ability to establish I/Thou relationships that we are able to manifest the best human values of kindness, care, compassion, and love.

So, what does all this come to? I believe that Buber is showing us a different way to think about what makes human life on planet earth meaningful in ways that promote the life of spirit. In doing so, he offers a format, a different way of thinking, for meeting all the infinite details of our complicated lives. He emphasizes the wholeness of life that incorporates (literally to unite in one body) body, mind, and spirit. Neuroscience in our times has pulled back the veil of mystery from some aspects of cognition and has opened a landscape that links all aspects of a whole life. Buber didn't have this scientific knowledge but his perceptions of wholeness were prophetic. But to this day we still must work hard at cultivating I/Thou relationships and narrowing the gap that allows evil to enter. To the extent that we are able to enter into I/Thou relationships is the extent that evil will be forced back into the dark ages of our defensive and reactive past. Is this not a useful pursuit? Do we not want for everyone what we want for ourselves? Should we not offer to share what we hold dear to those whose lives might be motivated by evil or be burdened by travail and suffering in one way or another? How can we help one another? Let us consider the dialogue Buber offers. Isn't this way of thinking elemental and the origin of mutuality for sharing respect and accommodation? And don't we always entertain hopes of sharing love and compassion?