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?

WHY WE DANCE, TWYLA THARP AND NEUROSCIENCE

Can we get to universal verities through the granularities of our everyday lives? Can we gain some deeper understanding of why we do what we do by subscribing to a course of inquiry, a course that weds science and the arts of thought and action? Can we learn something about this from someone such as Twyla Tharp, the choreographer? She wrote an engaging book in 2003 titled The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide. And so it is. The book is about adding “tools” to one's toolbox of creativity. She addresses not only the practicalities of time management and creative media, but also how one's attitudes and emotions play into the creative life. She writes about ritual and discipline and about commitment and exertion. She gives suggestions on how to stimulate the creative urge and how to fashion it by identifying themes and how to keep it fresh. She is honest about the slumps and blocks that are a natural part of doing anything. She tends to see even the most mundane and boring pursuits (such as one's job) as opportunities for creativity in ways that don't elevate the basic boring job beyond recognition or dismiss its banality. All of us live in a banal environment if we are conscious and awake to the details of life. But Tharp offers a way to use some tools in more structurally constructive and personally constructive ways.

The questions I have are: What does the toolbox look like? Where are we putting the tools? What comes before the tools? Wondering why we dance in the first place directed me into what the world of neuroscience has learned about human motivation and response. After all, isn't dance something universally human and isn't it all inclusively neurological, from brain to brawn? Aren't we also asking about how dance emerges from networks and contributes to others? What is now esoteric and exotic about these associations will one day be integrated into common parlance and we will be on the cusp of another discovery. We will know more about how we are constructed as humans and how we express ourselves in the wider and deeper expanding world. But that world and that knowledge will continue to expand, just as the cosmos is expanding after the Big Bang that has given all that is.

The Big Bang of cosmic explosion has delivered to us a miraculous set of interlocking systems that manifests in ways that includes dance. We are creatures that move, that have innate systems for motion. Dance is one manifestation. It figures in courtship behavior, in play, and in a non-verbal method of social bonding by way of mimesis, imitation and resultant improvisation. Perhaps these are the “first causes” Tharp refers to when she is writing about where dance comes from. Just as we might think of the brain as a toolbox that contains all we need to perform the tasks of being human, Tharp literally uses a cardboard box (my version is what I call mind maps) for each of her creative endeavors. Into that box she throws whatever comes to mind about what might conceivably be connected to her theme. She returns to that box as a first cause for her inspiration and also as a way to remember what connections she made earlier.

“That's how a box is like soil to me. It's basic, earthy, elemental. It's home. It's what I can always go back to when I need to regroup and keep my bearings. Knowing that the box is always there gives me the freedom to venture out, be bold, dare to fall on my face. Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.”

“Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. … Note that this activity is the exact opposite of meditation. You are not trying to empty your mind, not trying to sit restfully without conscious thoughts. You're seeking thoughts from the unconscious, and trying to tease them forward until you can latch onto them. An idea will sneak into your brain. Get engaged with that idea, play with it, push it around—you've acquired a goal to underpin this solitary activity. You're not alone anymore; your goal, your idea, is your companion.”

To learn something about dance and its motivations is to know more about first causes and the marvelous toolbox that is the human brain. Antonio Damasio is an experimental psychologist and author of The Feeling of What Happens (1999). In this work he describes the layers of self. The deepest layer is the protoself that is unconscious and deals with survival activities, systems homeostasis, wakefulness, attention, emotions, and learning. The next layer is the core self and this holds the representations of the protoself derived from internal organ systems and the musculoskeletal frame. Here there are maps of relationships between objects and perceivers and the mental images that describe these relationships. Here we are conscious of feelings and body-related maps. It is here that motion and emotion make up a dance. In the brain a network of neurons called the cingulate cortices provide the most integrated view of the body where sensory (including spatial orientation) and motor information is woven with emotional processes.

The self (and creativity, too) is an open system, meaning it is dependent on context. And context changes all the time, but adding up to a discernible box of tools. The final layer of Damasio's whole self is the autobiographical or extended self and this is our normally functioning self in the world, the self derived from personal history that depends on working memory. It involves constructing metaphors from memories and transforming them into art. The self then, and art, are about mimesis, about imitating and copying. Who we become is dependent on the contexts of our lives. How we dance is about our motor and somatosensory capacities. We become acculturated and we become human beings, evolving over a lifetime. Neurologically, in imitating we are enlisting the “mirror neurons” within the brain and we are making the distinction between self and other—and self in the other, as if we and they had merged. Mirror neurons enable us to mentally mimic and recall situations that generate empathy and compassion.

The most basic image in this mental map is a proprioceptive one of what it is like to move one's body. The bodily system becomes a system of reference and is shaped by gestures, physical signs, postures, and rhythm. In mimicking such motions we are rehearsing social roles and social orientations. This occurs predominantly in the right brain, quite opposite of the administrative and analytical functions found in the left brain. And the map is improvisational. It resembles a collage more than it does a portrait.

“Inspiration comes in molecules of movement, sometimes in nanoseconds. A quick combination of three steps is an idea. A turn of the foot coupled with an arm gesture is an idea. A new way of collapsing to the floor is an idea. A man grabbing a woman above the elbow is an idea. A quick combination of five steps leading into a jump is practically a mega-idea—enough to keep me going for hours.”

We are ordering beings as well as improvisational and contextual beings. Ideas that are disparate beg to be ordered into similarities. We move from the generation of an idea to retaining it. We study it and then transform it to suit our different purposes. We have engaged our left brain capabilities for order. And so it is with dance. In its initial stages the improvisational rhythms of dance activate our sympathetic nervous system and call upon our energy stores and the endogenous (native) opioids dopamine and serotonin as well as epinephrine and norepinephrine. There is an absorption of attention and the engagement of the ordering dynamics for play. Breathing becomes rhythmic and meditative. The emotional state produced is one of catharsis and emotional release with a rebound sense of tranquility. However, with continued energetic rhythmic dancing there is saturation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (associated with amygdala, hypothalamic, and hippocampal processing) and a feeling of collapse into a state of ineffability and the disintegration of self, leading to a profound peacefulness. This is perhaps a simple explanation for the spiritual heightening experienced by Sufi dancers (Sufi whirling, a physically active form of meditation), the Jewish Hasidic-style dancers, and dance as experienced in other religious and spiritual traditions.

“This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won't make your efforts successful; it's only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.”

Dance is relational and transactional. It is social and educational. It is engagement and release. It is individual and communal. It is elemental and innovatively developmental. Dance reflects the processes that are inherent in our neuronal circuits and networks and that contribute to our sense of a creative self. Recent studies support the idea that dance in all its manifestations contributes to brain plasticity, the capacity of the brain to adapt and even to establish new circuits. Tharp suggests we not forget the roles of timing and rhythm, discipline, commitment, pattern-finding, repetition, imitation, and order out of disorder. She writes about the importance of being open to surprises, to being grateful for mentors, colleagues, and one's lineage. As well, she focuses on the necessity of getting in and out of ruts, and of risk and failure. Dance is about making connections, just as the brain is in the background making connections. Dance is neuroscience made manifest. Motion and emotion are who we are and who we might become.

Tharp's conception of meditation as an emptying phenomenon is interesting. I think that has come to us as an exotic and mystical notion about what the final “goal” of meditation is when, in fact, meditation is attention training. It is a filtering out process. It is its own toolbox of materials and thoughts and the whole conglomeration of elements can be, like her cardboard boxes, a source of creativity. But just as she brings some order to her collection of things, so we are challenged to find some order or theme in our meditation spaces. Sometimes that happens and other times it doesn't. There is no success or failure either way. It is just us being mindful—if only an awareness of the mess before us. May we all have the patience to discover the hidden delights of our own toolboxes.

IMAGINING WILLIAM BLAKE, A WORLD APART

William Blake (1757-1827) was considered to be deranged in his day and treated as a social outcast. This suited him very well, as it conformed to his distaste for neighbors, rejection of social pressures, and personal stands against war, slavery, and the conformities of organized religion. Of course, this consigned him to a life of poverty and obscurity, a life which he devoted to his art. His is no romantic story of the artist sequestered in a tower toiling away at his craft. He struggled against the tides of the day, threw up insults to those he felt were compromised in their actions, and generally snarled at the world. And he was a visionary who to this day is not well understood or appreciated. But it seems to me that he offers us a different way to view the turmoil and confusion we see all around us at the beginning of the 21^st century. If nothing else, his life is worth exploring because of his own efforts to deal with a society that he found exceedingly banal and manipulating.

Viewed now from our perch in time he would be considered an artist of “outsider” art, a wholly intact genre of art that celebrates elemental aspects of craft and often appears primitive in its motifs, media, and styles of creativity. Blake had been apprenticed to a printmaker early in his life but developed his own styles and presentations for the body of his creative work. He combined his visual art with his prose and poetry, often adding narrative to his prints. His work must have emerged from his world view, as he was totally committed to it all his life. It is said that he was a mystic but that detaches him from the influences of the world in which he lived. He was not interested in transcendent experiences. I don't think he could have created his own world without being deeply embedded in all the causes and events he so detested. His work is in that sense a reaction to the world's convictions and prejudices and follies. He is instead more a visionary than a mystic.

Blake was convinced that it is from the particularities of life that we draw inspiration and apply that to our creativity. His was a bottom-up and organic approach to life. He saw stasis and frozen symbols in the generalities of religion and most organized institutions of his day. His approach was to activate creativity with imagination. He believed that imagination represented man as an acting and perceiving being. The development of imagination was a process of synthesis and syncretism, an attempt to reconcile different beliefs. He could not have constructed his allegorical world without pushing against all that he saw around him and creating an ordered cosmos that he could live within, a world apart from the one that gave him the fierce energy to rebel.

Blake's world, both visual and written, was allegorical. Of course, when viewed from what we think of as the world, his world is one of fiction and fantasy. His world became a reality for him. His characters spoke for him and were able to say things that he found no audience for (the capitalizations of names for virtues and vices personified them in his stories). In this regard, his work is no different from the work of the writer of fiction or the puppeteer who could insult the king without losing his head. It is all about creating from the imagination characters who think and act within a differently constructed world. They are symbolic figures that convey hidden or complex meanings woven from moral, spiritual, or political threads. For him, the Devil was truly in the details.

Blake was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, The Bible, and the French and American revolutions (especially the writings of Thomas Paine). He studied Michelangelo and Raphael and found there the heroic and idealized human proportions he included in his own prints. He was drawn to rebellion and those who demonstrated it in their own lives. His allegorical structure echoes the work of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, works of Shakespeare and Hawthorne, Orwell's The Animal Farm, Malory's Arthurian Legends, T. H. White's The Once and Future King, C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps even J. K Rowling's Harry Potter series. What all of them seem to suggest is that there is an attempt to create a world apart, a world ordered differently from the one most of us live in every day.

What do I make of this? Why has William Blake captured my attention over the years? I have tried, and tried repeatedly, to decipher his hidden codes and to learn his secrets. I have taken my anthology of his poetry off the shelf, read a few poems, then put the book back, returned to the few poems I thought I understood, only to discover that I had missed the point. What was the point after all? His world seemed so far separated from the one in which I had any connection. And perhaps that is the point after all. Perhaps it is his genius at constructing a different world that I had missed because my world was full of interruptions and distractions he filtered out of his. If one views all the work he produced and look back at his motives for creating it, perhaps it is possible to understand why they came to be in the first place. And could this not be a motivation for us to appreciate the creative works that have come to us in the same way—responses to a world fraught with confusion and contradictions and riddles that seem impenetrable. And isn't this a way for us to find a sense of order that helps us navigate the shoals of that teeming world?

If one thinks that worlds apart, worlds of the imagination, are responses to this world of ours, then are we not open to limitless possibilities of how that world apart might look? It is said that all works of fiction are built on just a few universal themes and everything else is a version of them. Perhaps that is also true of allegories. Are there not personifications of Good and Evil, of Heaven and Hell, of Prudence and Patience, of Lust and Greed, for instance, in most of them, dressed up differently for each era's particular manifestations of human behavior? Do we not have our own era's figures and events that we could shape into an allegory? Would it do us some good to do this? Would the narrative help defuse the inherent angst that presently occupies corners of our minds? Could we imagine a new and different narrative about our lives that isn't dystopic or apocalyptic? Could such an allegory emerge from our minds as we sit in meditation? Doesn't this happen already as we characterize certain people in stereotypical ways in our daily lives? If we do this, can we imagine a world apart from them? Could an alternate world offer us respite from the problematic human behavior that now troubles us?

I imagine the world in which Blake felt most comfortable, given his peevishness about his external reality, was the one of Innocence (one of his allegorical figures in Innocence and Experience), of childhood. Childhood was a world of imagining and creativity, aspects of character given up when we grow up and gain Experience. Blake lived in one world of detested authority and dogma but returned repeatedly to the simplicity, fantasies, and allegories of a world apart where he could create the forces of good and have them defeat the forces of evil. This world is one of union and synthesis and entirely of his own making. Innocence is about unfettered belief and the experience of adulthood is about doubt. In this world of the imagination he created the particularities that made life comprehensible. It isn't a mystery to see why Blake was a dominant influence on the work of Maurice Sendak in our own times. Even Sendak's drawings of humans have a heroic quality to them that give them authority in the world of the child. And Sendak, too, dealt with nightmarish realities in his own personal life. He was haunted all his life with the specter of the losses of many family members in the Holocaust. His stories of childhood are complicated and not always the romantic versions others might have written. But, all the same, they were his efforts to find a simpler path through life. In doing so, he, like Blake, perhaps achieved a degree of clarity of vision.

For most of us, a return to childhood is a dream and a fund of memories. But, in fact, what we work at in our meditation practice is to return repeatedly to a mental state in which we get to choose the characters in our own allegory. We aspire to a state of greater simplicity in which we can leave the noise of the external world and all its tensions and confusion and enter a place (like the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) where the wonders and awe of childhood can be nourished. This childhood place is also where the disenfranchised (aren't children in this category?) can speak truth to power in ways children are not allowed to speak to adults in their world of experience. It is here, too, that we can find respite and peace, if not enlightenment.

Blake was able to create a world of innocence and dwell there off and on his entire life. I think he was able to do this successfully because he had a good idea about the exigencies and vicissitudes of the world he was leaving behind. He was an angry rebel but he was also a realist about the world of experience and a perpetual beginner in the world of innocence. Aren't we like this,too, when we meditate? Aren't we hoping to give up the constraints of adult experience for the freshness of childhood innocence? Aren't we hoping to bring greater simplicity and clarity to our thoughts? And aren't we hoping to concentrate our attention in ways that open up different ways of seeing and being? Can we bring innocence and experience closer together in our lives? Do we blur the line between fiction and reality? Are we open to what children have to teach us? What creations would William Blake give us today? How do we find this path through the thicket of tangled times?

REVISITING PROMETHEAN PEACE

Today's thoughts are focused on the life and legacy of Albert Schweitzer, almost a ghost from the past. He lived from 1875 to 1965, a very old age in those days. The context of his life includes accomplishments as a young adult polymath. He excelled in music (a scholar of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach) as an organist, in theology (he was the author of The Quest of the Historical Jesus), and later in medicine. He devoted the majority of his life to missionary medicine in Lambarene, French Equatorial Africa, now Gabon. To me, he was a Titan and a childhood hero, not your average off the shelf avatar. I don't know who the heroes are for young people today but Schweitzer came to me when I was young enough to be inspired and old enough to know what heroes were. Even then, Schweitzer was not a hero of popular culture but someone revered as much for surviving his many years as for the work he did in Africa, work not always understood or valued for what it was.

Indeed, in later life he was criticized for what some thought of as Neo-colonial oppression of the people with whom he had lived for decades and to whom he dedicated his life of medical service. He was criticized for being paternalistic and not cultivating advanced medical practice or training native Africans to be medical assistants. I was sufficiently enamored of his titanic accomplishments to read the criticisms and wonder if I understood his life as well as I might have. I don't have any evidence that the criticisms meant much to Dr. Schweitzer after so long a life of service. It is perhaps easy to see in the metaphor of Prometheus that he, too, was consigned to be chained to a rock and have his liver eaten by a raptor every day as punishment by the gods for being too cozy with human beings. Prometheus is the Titan who stole fire from the gods, gave it to man, and taught him how to use it, thus furthering progress and civilization. It was for his generosity that he was punished. How is it said these days? No good deed will go unpunished. Perhaps it is in the nature of retrospective review that we find faults measured against the social tensions and pressures of the times. It is important to dig as deeply as possible to understand the context of the life examined and the trajectory of events.

I can say why I was inspired by Dr. Schweitzer and not unduly persuaded by the criticisms. I suppose I was in the part of my life when I could be inspired. I had models of service in the caring professions and medicine was the realm in which I found the most exciting information and the most heroic individuals. Do children these days have heroes? Do they come from popular culture or are they sometimes people of more silent accomplishments and dedication? Dr. Schweitzer inspired me if only because he looked the part of a Titan: He had a flowing mane of white hair and a mustache of dramatic proportions. His face was a geography of gnarled care and woe, all the things one might imagine in someone who had labored greatly in the jungles of Africa. Yes, there was the romantic side of the sacrifice he had made. At so young an age, it was not part of my consciousness to imagine how difficult it must have been to build a village that contained a hospital run on unsophisticated generators used to power the lights used in surgery. It was part of my consciousness to understand sacrifice as heroic, titanic, risky, noble.

The context of Dr. Schweitzer's life was intriguing and almost mythical for a young boy caught up in adventure, romance, and admiration. But Dr. Schweitzer continued to accompany me as I aged and entered a medical world very different from the one he knew until the end of his long life. I never made the trek to any jungle but I always thought of my work in medicine as missionary service, albeit a truncated form compared to that of Dr. Schweitzer. Even so, now that I am in my own late stages of life, he continues to inspire me and so his life is worth revisiting, not so much as to emulate it but to find deep within it some themes that endure but which are often hidden now in our more clamorous and confusing world.

It is said that we now live in an era of hyper-individualism and over-technologizing. We have a stratified society in which we still entertain the idea of the self-made person who hacks his way into new frontiers of discovery. Perhaps that is what maintains our cultural biases and prejudices. Perhaps that is why we so easily escape into tribalism as a protective cover against those who are different from us. Perhaps we think we have much to fear and to defend. Is it really every man for himself now? Was it ever? Schweitzer began his work in Africa in 1913, just ahead of one of the greatest wars of all history for its brutalities and new killing technologies. He traveled to Europe and back during those years to raise money for his hospital, performing on the organ and giving lectures. He was not isolated in any way from the realities of war and its aftermath. And what he encountered every day in Africa was a reality of disease and suffering.

As I revisit his life now after all these years, the themes that I observe are all the more prescient for those of us in the 21^st century attempting to sort out purpose and meaning in our lives. There was the theme of polymathia and academic accomplishment transformed into his version of universal unity of thought. He came from a world of privilege and gave himself to a world emptied of advantages and teaching a version of humility and gratitude. He left a European world of gathering confusion and made a personal commitment to those whose lives were primitive by the standards of the time. He took a stand of self-abnegation in favor of an open source compassion for those less fortunate. He set aside the riddles of the world and focused on the small deeds of the everyday sacred. He modeled sacrifice and devotion. Life for him manifested from a deeper level of consciousness where service was emptied of self.

Dr. Schweitzer was a hero who emerged from the grittiness of life but whose legacy was a notion of the reverence for life. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1952, but he considered the commitment to a reverence for life to be his greatest legacy, and so it has remained for me all my life. A reverence for life has at its roots a widening stream of peace that surpasses our abilities to understand but which animates all of life. It is the stream that provides sustaining waters for all living beings and things equally from Lambarene to Lisbon. It is the stream that carries humans along from one century to the next, a promethean celebration of technology and science, but also of unsurpassable compassion and love. Here is Dr. Schweitzer telling his own story as he made his way upstream on his journey to Lambarene:

“Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, 'Reverence for Life.' The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Now I knew that the world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation, together with its ideals of civilization, is founded in thought.”

And then:

“To have reverence in the face of life is to be in the grip of the eternal, unoriginated, forward-pushing will, which is the foundation of all being. It raises us above all intellectual knowledge of external objects, and grafts us on to the tree which is assured against drought because it is planted by the rivers of water. All vital religious feeling flows from reverence for life and for the necessity and for the need for ideals which is implicit in life. In reverence for life religious feeling lies before us in its most elemental and most profound form, in which it is not longer involved in explanations of the objective world, nor has anything to do with such, but is pure religious feeling founded altogether in implicit necessity and therefore devoid of care about results.”

“The world-view of reverence for life follows from taking the world as it is. And the world means the horrible in the glorious, the meaningless in the full of meaning, the sorrowful in the joyful. However it is looked at it remains to many a riddle. …. Reverence for life brings us into a spiritual relation with the world which is independent of all knowledge of the universe. Through the dark valley of resignation it leads us by an inward necessity up to the shining heights of ethical world- and life-affirmation.”

“The ethic of reverence for life constrains all, in whatever walk of life they may find themselves, to busy themselves intimately with all the human and vital processes which are being played out around them, and to give themselves as men to the man who needs human help and sympathy. It does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful to the community in so doing. It does not permit the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many by its means. It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.”

The myth of Prometheus has him chained and attacked by a terrifying presence in the form of an eagle. Perhaps this part of the myth is meant to teach us that we can celebrate our successes and our over-reachings—but at a price, the price of pain and suffering. The eagle ate at the liver of Prometheus each day but the liver was regenerated each night until he was finally freed from his punishment. Perhaps the story is meant to show us that there are conditions and causes as well as consequences to our best intentions but that we are also subject to a state of freedom that results from what we suffer. I imagine that pain and suffering were not foreign to Dr. Schweitzer, as they are not for anyone caring for someone else at any level of service. Yes, we rarely know the consequences of what we do or even the sources for our actions, but we act from a deep level of compassion for those in need. We see this all the time in our daily lives even if the media are focused on more dramatic phenomena.

So, I ask if you have heroes. What do they represent? Do you revisit them for the teachings they continue to offer? Have the teachings changed over time? Are the teachings more timely now? Do we even need heroes? Is it important for the hero to be celebrated or is it enough for them to be active in your own life? Do you offer them to others? I ask these questions to emphasize the importance of heroes in my own life but not as stand-alone soloists. I see Dr. Schweitzer as outstanding but also as someone who depended on countless others to give him resources and for him to receive them. In life there is giving and receiving. When we serve we also grow. We can lose some of our liver one day and have it reconstituted the next. We might not think of ourselves as titans in any form, but we can see that we are resilient and able to give in spite of what pain and suffering there might be in our lives. Prometheus shows us what this looks like. Our meditations and reflections may be visited and revisited by heroes and titans of different forms. Do we welcome these and are we curious about what they are doing there? And, in some ways, isn't meditation about self-emptying?

THE POVERTY OF THOMAS MERTON

I have been grappling with the presence of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) for many years. He is a most challenging person, not least because he is a puzzle. It seems that sometimes we are drawn to those situations and influences we just can't figure out easily. We can't pinpoint what it is about them that causes them to return to our consciousness over time. I have been reading Merton for over thirty years and he has meant something different to me at different stages of my life. I think this is the case for all of us. We are changing and so are the situations and people with whom we have relationships. I do think we can have deep relationships with individuals through reading their thoughts and ideas or through knowing something about their biographies. Isn't it wonderful that others are willing to share their lives in this way and to throw at us the puzzles, contradictions, and paradoxes of their own lives? We do the same with those in our lives as well.

What is obvious about Merton's life from his biography is that he felt abandonment as a young boy when his mother died and then later in his life when his father died of brain cancer. Abandonment and loss were part of his psychic orientation. It seems possible that this loss of familial orientation led to a life of loosened rigging and an escape into a life of sexual pleasures, alcohol abuse, and profligacy. It isn't clear to me even after reading his popular autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, how he managed to find the path he did to his eventual life as a Trappist monk. Certainly, he had relationships with others that served as important influences (Mark Van Doren, the poet; Robert Lax, another poet; Daniel Walsh; Catherine De Hueck). His path was also broken by influential writers: Etienne Gilson (The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), Aldous Huxley (Ends and Means), Augustine of Hippo (Confessions), Gerard Manley Hopkins (his poetry and path into priesthood), Aelred Graham (Zen Catholicism). While I think of Merton as one of my own friends, he, too, had what might be considered friends among his teachers and authors.

Whatever the deciding factor(s), Merton made his way to a commitment to a life of monasticism. Among the many tensions in his life that I have been able to discern were those of freedom/constraint, knowledge/innocence, abandonment/belonging, a life of the mind/social activism, ego/no-self, and means/ends. Even as he was leaving a life of untethered sensual pleasures, he was caught in the conundrum of needing to be a writer and feeling that he was indulging an excessive ego. He was leaving a life of sensual riches for a simpler, stripped-down life of contemplation and commitment to a religious community. What might have seemed like an escape from a life of confusion and uncertainty morphed into a life of contradictions and more uncertainty. Within the walls of Gethsemani Abbey he encountered the tensions of ego/no-self once more. He remained a writer with activist passions, even though he was restricted by his order in where he could travel and what he could publish. It wasn't until later in his short life that he became more involved in exploring spiritual traditions outside his Catholic faith. One of his last books was Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968, the year of his death). This book is a wonderful guidebook to some of Zen Buddhist thought and practice seen through the eyes of someone ensconced in the Catholic tradition.

Grappling with Merton is difficult because there are so many available sources he left behind from which to pull threads. I wanted to focus on one thread in particular to highlight his explorations and experiments with faith. I thought it might be useful to write about his life's changes and diversions or about his devotion to his community. I thought about the tensions mentioned above and wondered if any of them held some clearer teaching for someone just acquainted with him from his writings. What finally seemed timely and appropriate was to explore what poverty means and how that might have played out in Merton's life in ways that can open new ground for us, householders and citizens of a very complicated world. I do think he can show us a different way of looking at our lives and that is always a mark of a very good writer who is dedicated to a life of the mind. Merton, of course, had a very different path as a monk but he was insightful about his life and its intersections with the lives of the majority of us.

Webster says that poverty is: The state or condition of being poor, lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts: Lack of something necessary or desirable; insufficiency, paucity: Deficiency in amount, scantiness.

In one sense, then, poverty is about lack, about need, about a state that one is dealt by fate. But Merton and his predecessors in monasticism saw poverty as a positive frame and as a choice. This remains a very contrary notion in our times when we are bombarded by how we can overcome the deficiencies, deprivations, absences, and missing ingredients in our lives. We are offered remedies that only more consumption can provide. We are caught in a mental web of achievement, success, striving, gaining, climbing ladders, maneuvering, spending, sensual pleasures, and in so many ways driven by ideals of living and consumption rendered by society and culture. But there is a noticeable gap between this way of life and the life that I (and Merton, too) believe most people are missing. This is the life of poverty. It is the life of self-emptying, of discipline, commitment, hard psychic work, of giving up what are considered advantages, and seeing within poverty not a sense of lack but an open field in which our energies can be offered to others in an infinite number of ways. This life of poverty is about humility and caring.

It occurs to me that every time we sit to meditate we are choosing this poverty. We show up, we sit or kneel, we leave our material possessions behind, and enter a realm of silence and it is within that space of silence that we lay open our hearts and minds to a limitless terrain. Merton explored these possibilities in his book on Zen and this is what he wrote:

“... they [Christianity and Zen Buddhism) have … the same kind of limitlessness, the same lack of inhibition, the same psychic fullness of creativity, which mark the fully integrated maturity of the 'enlightened self.'”

Merton continues by saying that it is only when we empty ourselves of our wants that we make room for something more vast and deeper. It is by choosing poverty and a greater simplicity in our material lives and in our minds and hearts that we can arrive at new ways of being in the world. It is clear to me in my own experiences and experiments with meditation that meditation itself is a poor container for what we ask it to hold, and that is all possibilities. Meditation is a poor vehicle for the actions we are driven to as humans. Meditation is a preparation for compassion. Compassion is what emerges from the silent spaces that we inhabit in meditation. Meditation is a great poverty that we choose to help us slip out of the daily rat race and oppressions of social pressures and tensions. Our souls want to be so poor that we can cultivate the creativity that brings us closer to deep relationships with others in our lives, if not with a power that we feel animates us in miraculous ways.

And can the poverty we have chosen and practice meet the poverty that has been dealt to others, the poverty of lack and deficiency? Can we bring together in one shared space the compassion that lets us know at a deep level the poverty of another? Do we not all want to be lifted beyond our poverty into some relationship that brings joy and belonging to everyone? What will fill the large space of cleared ground we have prepared in our meditations? What happens next?