7-17-20--PARADIGMATIC LOVE

Eventually it is love that I return to in my thinking. It is a vexing subject and one that recurs enough for me to notice and work with it. Considerations of love emerged in my coincidental readings into the works of Thomas Merton and William James. It is in the spirit of pragmatism that William James described in his many writings that I turn and face this powerful emotion that shadows me. In the recent past I have avoided using the word love as being too complex to be used as a single word. It is loaded with so much baggage for each of us, yet we know what nuance we intend when we talk about it or use it. Yet, the nuances are so complex and varied and we don't have enough words to delineate all of them. So, we are left with using one word for what we intend. Recent reading has put love front and center in my thinking. Reading Thomas Merton puts a different emphasis on love compared to reading William James or some of his pragmatist colleagues (Josiah Royce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernest Hocking, for instance). It isn't a word now commonly used in everyday parlance. It doesn't seem to be expressed in our present crises of pandemic, economic collapse, social activism, or perverted politics. There is a harshness and coarseness to public conversation that doesn't admit love as a descriptor for what motivates us in times of trauma or difficulties. We are more often caught and held by a more primitive set of emotions and reactions.

But, in the spirit of pragmatism, I begin with the bedeviling conditions of our common life in these times and work with what brings them forth just now, the strains of their genesis from history, how they are transforming how we think about human behavior and what they are telling us to do in a society rife with problems. It has always been that we have had societal problems but perhaps it is the layering of many of them just now that has brought us to a situation of reckoning, a forced need to look at them more closely. Looking and thoroughly and thoughtfully witnessing them opens us to an examination of their parts and their interconnections. The competing demands of each of the interest groups, the ways in which they are depicted in the media, the ways in which they are used and manipulated, make discernment of the truth of them difficult. And we are confronted with the granularity of life in so many ways if we look closely enough. But we must consider the graininess of most days if we are to venture out into the world.

The challenges for individuals are many, not the least of which is to know what we trust. It is a practice of daily reflection and to recollect the basis of “right view” and “right idea” in the spirit of the Buddha. The reminder is about what lies at the foundation of a compassionate view and idea. For me, that foundation does, in fact, return me to love. The power of love is too great to ignore. Love is not easy. Love is not always visible. It is for this insight that reading Merton and James makes sense. Love is ephemeral and elusive from the human perspective. Merton states this in many of his writings. He writes about “darkness” and its role in our relationship with the transcendent, with what he calls God. Light does not eliminate darkness but sometimes makes it more intensely what it is. The contrast between what humans expect and what is made available by the transcendent spirit is forced by our expectations for enlightenment. Yet, he assures us that we must continue to trust that God's love for us will never, never, never be withdrawn. It is to this notion and assurance of divine support that I turn in these times of tension and turmoil—and at all times. It is to love that I turn. And it is in a relationship that love has its most intense and true meaning and life and power.

The juxtaposition and interplay of light and darkness figure prominently in Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation (1961) and probably in one form or another in the works of most philosophers where light designates truth and darkness the shadows where humans stumble about seeking the light. The darkness is a reality for many and especially in what we incorporate into our consciousness from childhood where the dark was inhabited by frightening spirits made real. In adulthood we are “in the dark” in our confusion and traumas, even when we go about the daily tasks of living. The dark is an existential space in which we attempt to sort out conflicting emotions and ideas. Merton lends a richness and depth to the darkness when he says: “He Who is infinite light is so tremendous in His evidence that our minds only see Him as darkness.” We who are caught up in our conceptualizations and dualities fail to see that darkness is enveloped by the light, that there is a universal wholeness to the sacred, however one imagines it. Darkness is mystery for Merton, as it is for most human beings. Mystery is a vitalizing force that brings us to sensory experience where we shudder and crouch and surrender to what is inevitable. There is an inevitability to the darkness every day/night cycle. We emerge into the light when darkness recedes and it is this trek we reproduce every day of our lives on earth. Merton says: “The more perfect faith is, the darker if becomes.” Mystery deepens the more we are immersed in its exploration.

The idea of sacred darkness is what the mystery of love is all about. Love is a darkness into which we peer obliquely. Working with the confusing nuances and ambiguities of both love and darkness draw them together in my mind all the time. Losing one's way in one is like losing one's way in the other. And it is possible to view the darkness of love as a space surrounded by the universal light that Merton describes in his own faith. As we become more conscious of the darkness in which we find ourselves, we are awake to what makes the darkness possible and real. Merton says God is in the light and in the darkness. He is in the mystery and what is beyond and surrounding the darkness. Of course, this is a very Christian version of what humans have experienced in all of their history. However, there seems to be a version of the mystery in darkness in all traditions and cultures.

The love we have for one another is love transcendent and a part of the holistic love that pervades the universal light Merton sensed in his contemplative life. We are only dimly aware of such transcendent love in our daily lives, as much of our experience is enmeshed in habits and routines and pressured by events that come to us as fragments of perception. We do not realize that we are living within the darkness of the mystery that propels us forward. It is interesting that this search for the light transcendent often comes at the end of life for many, as it did for James. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was an exploration of what was for many people part of their reality. Here he is in a letter to his wife:

“The moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible and I entered into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me, especially the good Pauline [Pauline Goldmark, a much younger acolyte], the thought of you and the children ….the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht [a reference to “Witches Night”, a gathering of spirits to celebrate the onset of springtime].”

Context and relationship, two states we humans can understand from both an emotional and rational point of view. These states pull us into what is “right” about them in Zen Buddhist terms. What is right about a loving relationship with another human being? With someone outside our world of color and belief? With a contentious world? With a God of love? Don't those who seek a deeper knowledge of human life eventually fall onto a path and a search for God's love? And isn't there a reward in this search, if only to feel that the search itself has deep value and some ultimate meaning? This search seems to have had more reality for Merton than it did for James, even though James was fascinated by those whose lives were inhabited by the reality of God, the transcendent. He documented this in The Varieties of Religious Experience and other writings later in his life. This was also true for his fellow philosophers, some of whom began the search earlier in their careers, as with Ernest Hocking in his The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912). John Kaag, in his book American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), connects the philosophical search for God in American culture with the stories of love relationships in the lives of the philosophers themselves. And he includes his own story of the pursuit of love and the discovery of its power in his own life. In almost every instance the power of love was to give meaning to existence in the lives of the philosophers. It was the development of the pragmatism school of thought in philosophy that prepared the groundwork for insights into the eventual transcendent power of love. It was a long and hard trek to love, as it is for so many humans. These times of muddled interests, intentions, and tensions are a perfect workplace for love's search. It is out of this darkness we are experiencing that love's power can be more deliberately manifested. We cannot know the power of love unless we open ourselves to the possibility of love's energy. We cannot be shaped by that energy if we do not acknowledge the vastness of love's expressions. We cannot be effective in love's dispersion if we cannot open our hearts and minds to the necessity of change and the acceptance of others' points of view. In a way, we cannot begin to understand love's power if we do not begin the search for it within the dark structures and contexts of our lives lived every day. We know those dark structures the best. We can tell what ails us in the moment and it is from this “platform” of suffering that we can begin the hard work of loving. Aren't we hollowed out, emptied of the day's belongings, and visited by the spirits in the dark? And aren't we then refilled, refreshed, renewed by the dawn's light as we become more wholly ourselves once more?

Where does love come from? Is it an instinctual default the way anger and lust are? Is it a capacity unrealized until we are psychologically attuned to its need? These are questions that are of some importance, especially when observing that love's absence is so acute in these troubled times. It seems that anger and frustration leading to violence are the emotions that force themselves into the behaviors we are witnessing now. Perhaps love is that fundamental, elemental emotion that does not manifest until more dominant ones abate. Or, perhaps, it is an emotion that is only manifest when it is consciously tapped from a transcendent source (God?). In any case, it seems that love is hard to have and to hold, even in its most basic expression, that of its role in reproduction. The nuances of love are even more difficult to account for when we humans resort to our defensiveness and fears.

What is the meaning of love? By this I am wondering about what the purposes of love might be, given the above impression that it is a dormant powerhouse. Beyond the reproductive urge that we assign the term love, what makes love worthwhile? If, in fact, it is energy consciously gleaned from a transcendent source, how do we intend to use it? Is possessing it enough or does it have some constructive, creative uses? Is it a higher functioning of our human psychology that we are in the process of losing? Is this a withdrawal of a vital force from our spiritual lives? If this is so, then are we at risk of becoming more grounded in behavior patterns that reinforce divisiveness and selfishness? If we do not look to the heavens for some connection with spiritual sources, then the contexts of our lives are thinned out and we inch closer to our primitive state of survival.

William James developed a new way of viewing human behavior, of describing from experiences he observed what motivates individuals. He provided us with categories and patterns that have been used since his time to explain why humans act the way they do. It wasn't until later in his life that he entertained the idea that spiritual experiences might also be a way to describe the spiritual element in human psychology. Grounded as he was in experimental science (as we are ever more so today), he had to loosen the grip of the scientific method to accommodate a vital force that he, and we today, surmised was outside the analytical and measurable parameters of science.

Thomas Merton, on the other hand, recognized early in his adulthood that there was this realm of experience that escapes the technologies and experiments of science. Thomas Kuhn, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), writes about “paradigm shifts” in scientific thinking in which a new idea springs up without obvious tethering to the slower and more gradual processes of experimental science. These shifts produce a new way of viewing the discipline and provide a new plateau from which to progress. Merton and wisdom sages over the centuries exhibited just this same sort of dramatic shift into a spiritual life that can't be accounted for by any process of evolution or accretion, as in the processes of science. Zen Buddhists write about this experience of sudden enlightenment (satori) and it seems to conform to the paradigm shifts of science. I believe even Merton was aware of the transient nature of such shifts in perception because he refers many times to the usual experience of peering into the “darkness” and being in a dialogue with God, even when it is not possible to know that God is even present. Yet, devotion and faith are the elements of the substrate (a scientific term applied to the spiritual realm) that form our spiritual lives and it is this substrate that gives meaning to our lives over and above what science and technology may offer.

It seems the meaning of love is nuanced and includes constancy, trust, vulnerability, devotion, the notion of emptying of the self's perceived needs and wants in favor of those of another, and the willingness to experience the darkness of not-knowing (another Zen obligation). It is to hold mystery ahead of certainty and control and to hope for clarity and light, even when they are not obviously available. In these times, we are somehow satisfied to possess the risks and dangers of anger and hate without questioning their efficacy and meaning. We do not look beyond the primitive reactions that define our only basic human character. We do not look up to the heavens. We do not admit that we are often without answers to the great questions posed by the cosmos about our own survival and inevitable demise. We are selfish with our emotions and claim them in the face of universally shared suffering, pushing away from what is uncomfortable for us to notice and acknowledge. We act on our individual needs and wants and do not see that they often compromise what we can only obtain from making a paradigm shift into higher psychological/spiritual ground.

Shouldn't we seek this space, this unbounded realm, to accompany us on our journey through life's vicissitudes and travails and vast triumphs and joys? This is the leap of faith, a paradigmatic love, a love that is not easy and that asks of us the hard work of finding it and keeping it. Merton and James illustrate how an individual life may be the ground upon which love may be husbanded. Both writers offer us different ways of how to think about a meaningful life that begins with the laundry and ends with a gaze into an infinite and loving cosmos, every day. And, as we gaze, we surrender individual wants and our leaping faith makes our lives whole in the presence of a universal community.