PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN--BEYOND THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE

I don't know if Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) ever attempted a crossword puzzle but I do think that his life and writings dealt with puzzles in much the same way we try to solve them. Crossword puzzles are traditionally laid out in a grid of horizontal and vertical rows and solving the puzzle is a matter of following the clues. In some puzzles there is a good bit of wordplay where the clues are puzzles in themselves and anagrams, homophones, and embedded words are often employed. When I was thinking about Chardin's life and works I envisioned part of his life lived on the horizontal and part lived on the vertical. Chardin was a Jesuit priest whose career as a paleontologist kept him on the ground, excavating and exploring, and eventually contributing to the discovery of Peking Man (1934), one of our ancestors in the Australopithecus line (believed to be about 750,000 years old). There were many puzzles for him to solve as he worked away at various sites in Asia, dusting and digging. His philosophical musings, most especially in his The Phenomenon of Man (1955), were the vertical component of his puzzle-solving. The vertical in his life combined his background in paleontology and his priestly life within the Catholic tradition. The Church was threatened in some way by his innovative ideas and didn't allow any of his written works to be published in his lifetime. He also was criticized by the scientific community for not being rigorous enough in his paleontological work (he was at one point involved in the hoax of the Piltdown Man) and so he worked away, not really fitting into any rigidly constructed community. It is this outlier aspect to his life that draws me to his story to this day, having been exposed to his writings when I was in high school. I think, in retrospect, that I was attracted to him because of how he thought.

How we think is far more important than what we think at any given moment. We can learn so much about our cognitive powers as human beings if we focus more on how to think. Once we have committed to the work of thinking (and it does take energy and work), then we can more clearly determine what to think and to discern the value of what others want us to think. With Chardin, I was struck by how he thought about both the horizontal and the vertical. Neuroscientists believe that one of our first cognitive experiences in life is to perceive how each of us occupies space. We build on how it is that we are standing here in this place and move to that place over there. We know about the boundaries of glasses that hold water, about our references to our parents as we are held and contained by them. Space/time becomes a single concept for us and we never really think about it much, if at all. But the embeddedness of space/time affects how we think about the world. For Chardin, there was the duality of external life in the world (his paleontology) and the inner life, the sense of some ephemeral presence or place that didn't have the clearly defined borders of materiality.

The horizontal aspect of life brings to mind the progress of history and how we measure the occurrence of events in the flow of time. We go back and forth in our mind, visiting memories stored in our mental banks. We contemplate the past and look to the future, as if they were solid entities. Chardin believed that human existence was more than milestones in history but was, in fact, an evolutionary process about which there was an element of impermanence. The slow incremental changes of evolution are an ongoing process about which there are no fixed or predictable effects. Even though his field work identified punctuations in the history of human evolution, nothing about them at the moment of their appearance was predictable. And what they led to in the next iteration was also unpredictable, as was the next step into the future of a species. Along the horizontal line of evolution there were many subtle alterations in the physical appearance and capabilities of what was to become the human species we are accustomed to know today.

If one can think of evolution as a journey along a horizontal line, then one can envision all of humanity in all of history traveling individual paths, step by step. Once we enter the period of our history in which individuals begin to assert themselves as singular entities and no longer just part of an evolving crowd, then we take on distinct identities, we become aware of the effects our egos have on who we think we are and what we do. Our lives continue to be linear and we assume they will remain so as we navigate space/time. Human activities are then movements toward something; we are working towards something we think of as progress. Each of us has a particular history, a history of memories, experiences and achievements. We feel we are on a horizontal path that we picture on a line from birth to death. Within our history we have all the individuals that have contributed to our appearance on earth. We have a lineage of ancestors who have lived along the same horizontal line we are presently treading.

Chardin had a very broad perspective of space/time that included not only the horizontal lines of the crossword puzzle, but also the vertical lines. The vertical lines were connected to the horizontal ones in an evolutionary continuum. This is how he thought about the human existential experience. And we, with our developed sense of our own space/time, also appreciate the differences between our horizontal concept of life and its vertical component. Think for a moment how we refer to aspirations as desires for “high” achievements, how we grow “up,” how we look “up” to our elders, how we sometimes look up when we pray, how we grow from a baby on all fours to the vertical position (and what that means for our ability to accomplish what we do, how we run and climb “up”), how we imagine a world beyond the horizontal one we inhabit (this thought is especially contemporary as we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon and what this has meant for further interplanetary exploration--”up” in space beyond earth's atmosphere), and how we think of a transcendent presence some refer to as God (and the references to the devil “down under,” still on the vertical). It was this last reference to God that Chardin incorporated into his thinking about evolution. Just as there is a horizontal element to our evolutionary past, there is also a vertical extension to it. He felt humans were evolving physically in a paleontological context, culturally in an anthropological sense, but also evolving in an upward spiritual context as well.

Chardin envisioned the processes of life, horizontal and vertical, as complex systems of interdependent forces that had implications for the earth and its environs as well as for man's consciousness, leading ultimately to a place of supreme consciousness he called the Omega Point. All of these events fall on a continuous line of development where oscillations between the horizontal consciousness and the vertical occur all the time. We are inside ourselves courting our egos, then we are back in the world engaged with others on the horizontal paths. Cognitive neuroscientists are now able to delineate specific areas of the brain where those oscillations are believed to occur. These areas correspond to how we are able to focus our attention in meditation, for instance. The circuits involved in concentrative attention are intentional and voluntary and focused on singular items, objects, and ideas and are believed to be spread symmetrically in the brain itself. Other defined circuits get us “out of ourselves” and are focused on “the other.” They are reflexive, automatic, and unconscious (open on all sides and often associated with upward gazing). These occur primarily in the right brain, the hemisphere often described as more receptive and less analytical and ordering like the left brain functions. Of course, circuits overlap and more sophisticated technology will reveal more of their interdependence as time goes along and our knowledge of the brain evolves. But if the horizontal is an egocentric path, then the vertical is allocentric or other-directed. It is perhaps possible to see that the priest in Chardin envisioned both the horizontal and the vertical as essential components of human evolution. Thinking in this way offers us the opportunity to see self and other as interdependent and parts of a greater unity, no matter one's religious, scientific, or spiritual affiliation or persuasion.

What is also significant about Chardin's work is how it relates to our present circumstances. I believe that all the notables of history that have presented different ways of thinking make available to us methodologies that impact how we see our own world. If one believes, as Chardin did, that we are in a process of continual evolution and that humans are not the end-point of that process (and not the versions we now see around us, but actually seeing ourselves as a species with a history that extends back farther than 750,000 years ago), then are we not humbled by how far we have come? Are we not awed by the technological achievements that have brought us such marvels as computers and spaceflight?

If one thinks that human consciousness and the human brain have co-evolved with our physical bodies, then it seems possible that our spiritual beings are also a part of that process, an ongoing process as is all of evolution. If one does not believe in the process of evolution, then how one thinks will affect what one thinks of enveloping life. Chardin offers us his version of how to think about human life and how to explain what he has observed about its development over time. How do we think about a whole life with horizontal and vertical components, with inner and external aspects, with physical (soma—tangible, linear) and spiritual (psyche—intangible, non-linear) elements? What do we notice and how does that help us think about the rich experience of existence? Are humans all about ego or is there some accommodation for “the other”? Are we locked into Buber's I/It or is there also an I/Thou part of who we are and how we see the world? These questions have no fixed answers but are only meant to generate deeper thought about the crossword puzzle that is each of our lives. There are the ups and downs and also the linear clues offered to us. There are the dualities that challenge us to see our lives as components of a whole piece.

Chardin somehow needed to describe his vision of the world, how to think about the world, by using newly minted words, another way to describe how he thought and another feature of crossword puzzles. His wedding of the horizontal and the vertical he called “convergence,” a balance of trends to oppose fragmentation of soma and psyche and to support differentiation in both spheres. Noosphere was the sphere of mind. Noogenesis was the gradual evolution of mind or mental properties. Cosmogenesis is the process by which the original proto-humans (paleontology again) became more truly human as we know humans today. Complexification referred to the genesis of increasingly elaborate life systems (and foretelling of the discipline of complex adaptive systems that now extends from ecosystems to artificial intelligence). It is no wonder that these innovative words reflected Chardin's admiration for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of his favorite writers and a poet whose own word combinations could be described as “complexifications.”

If how one thinks is important, and I think it is vital to our ability to discern the truths of our existence, then it is worth the hard work and the expenditure of energy to apply broad methods of thought to the spheres and realms of human experience. No one method is necessarily more fruitful than another, but developing a broad perspective that includes as many vectors and streams of inquiry as possible is the only way we will avoid the pitfalls of opinions, fixed ideologies, and the resultant prejudices that now lead us down the path of fragmentation. Chardin offers just such a methodology for examining our lives with an upward gaze from the horizontal to the vertical, to a point of ultimate clarity. Who wouldn't want to try to solve this existential crossword puzzle? Who wouldn't want to explore the capacities of the human psyche and soma? Are we up to the challenge?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL—THE HERO'S ROAD MAP

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, August 12, 1904:

“We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has an abyss, it is ours. If dangers are there, we must try to love them. And if we would live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what now appears to us as most alien will become our truest, most trustworthy friend. Let us not forget the ancient myths at the outset of humanity's journey, the myths about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help.”

It is hard to imagine that someone born today or any children younger than 10 years old now alive would enjoy a life free of trauma, suffering, and emotional paroxysms. Because they are human beings, they will have their share of causes and conditions that may lead to seasonal affective disorder, being “out of sorts,” melancholia, disappointment, the “blues,” despondency, or outright depression. It is part of the human condition and often part of an individual's constitutional make-up. With some people, depression is a seed within them that lies dormant until watered by some situation of stress, large or small, and it begins to blossom. It is of such a colossal magnitude in its full-blown state that it is able to overwhelm what we think of as a normal cognitive existence. I believe it was just this mild stirring of the demon's presence that I experienced when I was young. Perhaps it was the overpowering of it by the distractions of schoolwork all the way through medical school that kept my personal demon at bay. It wasn't until I experienced a separation anxiety from my professional identity that it found the conditions ripe for germination. One of the best treatments of the full specter of depression is a book by Andrew Solomon titled The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (2001). When one is gripped by the talons of the demon, this is how Solomon describes the immersion:

“Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it. A sequence of metaphors—vines, trees, cliffs, etc.--is the only way to talk about the experience. It's not an easy diagnosis because it depends on metaphors, and the metaphors one patient chooses are different from those selected by another patient.”

I agree with him about how difficult it is to communicate one's own sinking into depression. And to find the words that hold the full power of it in order to describe it to someone else is not possible. Because of that personal deficit, I will turn to some quotations from Solomon's book to give the reader some flavor of what depression is like from the inside where the demon has full access to all corners of a person's life. Solomon is articulate in communicating what is so difficult to describe. These descriptions are all intended to paint a picture into which Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), a scholar of myth, added brush strokes that link depression and its environs with archetypal myths.

“Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. Depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can compost itself into depression. … Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.”

“Major depression is a birth and a death: it is both the new presence of something and the total disappearance of something.”

“Maybe what is present usurps what becomes absent, and maybe the absence of obfuscatory things reveals what is present. Either way, you are less than yourself and in the clutches of something alien. … Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.”

“There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.”

“We are each the sum of certain choices and circumstances; the self exists in the narrow space where the world and our choices come together.”

“I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.”

“While life is not only about pain, the experience of pain, which is particular in its intensity, is one of the surest signs of the life force.”

“But we must start doing small things now to lower the level of socio-emotional pollution. We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or other people or politics or beauty or just about anything) and structure.”

“There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions stand together, and that every one of them is contingent on what we commonly think of as its opposite. I have for the moment managed to contain the disablement that depression causes, but the depression itself lives forever in the cipher of my brain. It is part of me. To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself, and it is important to know that in advance of the battles.”

“Grief is profoundly important to the human condition. I believe that its most important function is in the formation of attachment. If we did not suffer enough loss to fear it, we could not love intensely. One's wish not to injure those whom one loves—indeed, to help them—also serves the preservation of the species. Love keeps us alive when we recognize the difficulties of the world.”

“It is arguably the case that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world around them than do nondepressed people. Those who perceive themselves to be not much liked are probably closer to the mark than those who believe that they enjoy universal love. A depressive may have better judgment than a healthy person.”

“To put an end to grief would be to license monstrous behavior: if we never regretted the consequences of our actions, we would soon destroy one another and the world. Depression is a misfiring of the brain, and if your cortisol is out of control you should get it back in order. But don't get carried away. To give up the essential conflict between what we feel like doing and what we do, to end the dark moods that reflect that conflict and its difficulties—this is to give up what it is to be human, of what is good in being human.”

“People who have been through a depression and are stabilized often have a heightened awareness of the joyfulness of everyday existence. They have a capacity for a kind of ready ecstasy and for an intense appreciation of all that is good in their life.”

“Depression at its worst is the most horrifying loneliness, and from it I learned the value of intimacy.”

“The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it. I hope that this basic fact will offer sustenance to those who suffer and will inspire patience and love in those who witness that suffering.”

“So lies the world before us, and with just such steps we tread a solitary way, survivors as we must be of an impoverishing, invaluable knowledge. We go forward with courage and with too much wisdom but determined to find what is beautiful. … That moment of return from the realm of sad belief is always miraculous and can be stupefyingly beautiful. It is nearly worth the voyage out into despair. None of us would have chosen depression out of heaven's grab bag of qualities, but having been given it, those of us who have survived stand to find something in it. It is who we are.”

The multiple quotations from Solomon touch on many aspects of depression that bring to mind what Joseph Campbell describes as “the hero's journey.” And I believe that it is in myth and metaphor that we can begin to think differently about deep grief and the resultant intense depression. Solomon describes what depression looks like and feels like but he doesn't really explore what it can become. He touches on the idea of depression as a seed that is part of one's bones and blood and how the seed can germinate and flourish. He eschews the language of war when it comes to accommodating what is part of one's own constitution, thus throwing one's experience of adapting to depression into the arena of the victor and the vanquished, a less than helpful approach to the persistent presence of depression's seed.

But what if there is another way to think about depression that would alter what we think about it?

Campbell became a popular spokesperson for myth-making in the 1960s and 1970s as a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College but it wasn't until just before his death that a series of interviews with Bill Moyers and a subsequent book of the same name, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, (1988), elevated him to the status of a sage on the topic of myth. The aspect of his scholarship that fascinates me the most is the segment on “The Hero's Adventure.” I believe it holds some very interesting ideas not only on the universal myth of the hero, but also on implications it has for explaining depression.

It may be that Andrew Solomon was able to survive his three bouts of major depression in a state that allowed him to gain some deeper understanding of the pathology and the experience. But it is important to point out that all people who suffer major depression do not survive it. It is equally important to point out that metaphors and myth interpretations are not often adequate treatment for depression and that a variety of treatment modalities must be incorporated into its treatment. My ideas about myth and metaphor relate to depression in a different way. They are offered here as a different way to think about the condition and, perhaps, can be thought of as priming thoughts that create the conditions for more conventional therapies. Perhaps how we think about depression will alter what we think will be of most benefit.

What is the hero's adventure? I like to think of this as the hero's journey rather than an adventure, as the term adventure brings to mind an unusual experience marked by excitement and suspense, albeit one of risk and hazard. In most cases, though, we adventure in this world hoping we will be surprised by what we find and that we will return to tell others about our experience. But linking the hero's experience in this case to depression underscores the distinct possibility that the person journeying might not survive, just as some depressives do not survive their journey (it really isn't an adventure, is it?). Not all those journeying into the “dark night of the soul” return to tell about what they have seen and experienced.

So, let us look at what Solomon says about depression, the demon, and see how one might think differently about the journey of the hero. Perhaps we would not think of ourselves as a hero (and here I use the single reference that really includes both men and women) in our own lives and I think that is especially true of someone deeply immersed in depression. For most of us a hero is a triumphant figure, someone who has slain a dragon, for instance. There are certainly individuals who fit the description of a hero, but most people who survive depression are not recognized for their survival. But I would like to suggest that each of us and all of us in all walks of life are heroes in our own lives. If this were not so, then our most precious identities would not propel us forward in our life journeys. Ego is a necessity for survival and if we do not see ourselves as heroes in life's journey, then who are we? We come to the very important questions about our lives: Who am I? What am I here for? and What then shall I do?

In most versions of the hero's myth described by Campbell, the individual who makes the journey is selected or is chosen for it. Depression as a journey of heroic proportions chooses its subject. The appearance of depression is not a choice but the subject can choose how to respond to the open road it offers. The prospect of maturity despite depression is often associated with a coming of age ritual in many cultures and so it has the ring of a maturation process. For most who journey there are acts of separation from the ordinary world, experiencing a supreme ideal, a state of identity fragmentation, and a reemergence into the common world in a newly integrated state. Survival is proof of the struggle and that one has overcome those forces that would submerge and perhaps obliterate identity. Transformation is the only way to experience the vagaries of the personal identity scouring process. For me, this simple explanation of the basic steps of the hero's journey parallel closely how Solomon describes is experience with depression. It is also how I have come to understand and to think about my own experiences with depression.

Solomon sees depression as having at its core a relationship with grief. Grief is the resultant emotion from loss of attachment and we often associate that with the loss of someone whom we have loved (and even the love we have for our own selves). It is a tribute to the bonding of relationships that their loss results in such a state of dark loss and loneliness. If we did not love them deeply, then would we grieve so extensively and so long? In my own paradigm of depression, it was my attachment to my identity as a professional person and a caregiver in the lives of my family. When I retired and when my children left home for college, I felt acutely the loss of the bonds that had helped define who I was in my own eyes. The seeds of depression in my store consciousness which had lain dormant for years (or only developed into small plants each season of darkness) blossomed and a form of death resulted in a long period of grief. I did not see my journey through the darkness as a hero's journey at the time, but I think that is what it was. And I think that is how we might think of the small melancholias and large depressions that are a part of the lives of many people. There was separation from the outer world. There was a supreme ordeal, as my depression had as one of its dragons the specter of suicide and the nearness with which I felt its hot breath. And there was an eventual reintegration of identity that, strangely enough, didn't resemble anything I had imagined and didn't come as a fully formed entity. What my new birth resembled was more a process of maturation and an ongoing journey of growth. In some ways, I emerged with a more fragmented idea of who I was but it was bolstered by the conviction that there were more possibilities for reconstructing the pieces. I had developed more trust in myself and my abilities and capacities. I was new to my old self, but still an ego in search of itself.

There is some scientific evidence (fMRI studies) to indicate that the continuum of grief/depression is processed in the right brain where we are our more creative selves (as contrasted with the left brain functions of analysis and computation, for instance). When we associate artistic genius with “madness” (or depression), perhaps we are bringing together several components of brain function that manifest as some unraveling of normal processes. In my own experiences with depression, I got to the point where I thought that if anything bad were to happen to me, what I could do for my children would be to document my own story, the story of my life. At least, they would have a more rounded picture of me as their father. So, I began to write my memoirs and to bring together some of the memories that animated those stories. It was a hunt-and-peck process, a process of going back in time and then coming forward to more contemporary events. It was this oscillation that brought order to the project. As I looked back on it, it occurred to me that I had gained a clearer picture of myself and my identity and I had reconnected with those parts of my character and personality that I needed in order to find out who I really was. When Solomon says that we must look for faith and structure within depression, I believe that is what I had done with my personal narrative. I had found some way to order the shards of my fragmented self and had decided that what I could see of my life was worth continuing. I also believe that what Campbell describes as the hero's journey is also a way to order one's experience. Humans are known for their need to find patterns and, in doing so, ordering events and thoughts. As one thinks of brain function, perhaps this pattern-finding, this ordering, is left brain processing overdriving the right brain stall in grief/depression. Engaging executive functions may be a path to emerge from the darkness. It is also possible that the archetypal, universal, ancient traditions of the hero's journey connect us with the experiences of millions of people who have suffered as we have and have endured. This connection helps to soften the loneliness that accompanies grief and depression, a loneliness that gnaws away at one's sense of being in relationships with those who contribute to our identity.

I believe that if I had had Joseph Campbell as someone to accompany me on my own journey, I might have attenuated the depth of the journey or perhaps short-circuited it in some way. Given my personality and inheritance, he would not have prevented the journey. Perhaps this little meditation on the hero's journey and depression might be helpful to someone who feels depression and its threats and give them the idea that they are a hero in an ancient journey of testing that has at its end at least a catharsis and the rewards of survival. The link to ancient lineages of heroes makes one feel less alone and isolated. The rewards of survival are what Solomon has described as having a “capacity for a kind of ready ecstasy,” and a “heightened awareness of the joyfulness of everyday life.” So it was for me in the paradoxical realization that contemplation of death and dying brought me back into a world and a life rich with possibilities, including the continued bonds of attachment. But so it goes in cycles: attachments, loss, griefs and depressions and “dark nights of the soul,” wrestling with dragons, and emerging with a new configuration of identity. In any case, it is not an easy journey and it is usually one fraught with risk and uncertainty. Someone outside the ring of darkness of depression may only offer a road map of general distances and milestones, but that is often enough of an assurance of survival to be a lifeline and a path to recovery and a new version of life. May all who suffer small and large traumas and griefs find the road maps that they can trust to take them from depression to a new dimension of self. To be joyful about life is to be triumphant, isn't it? Every person is a hero.

THOMAS EAKINS: THE BODY NATURAL AND ITS USES

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

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

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

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

Teacher, tutor

Tool, toolbox

Target (of sexual abuse, bullying, in war)

Temple, tabernacle

Temporal (of the times, socialized, tangible)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tragic

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

Translation (of the divine?)

Transparent (the ego in the body, body language)

Traveler

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

Triumphant

Trouble

Truthful

Trial

Trickster

Typical (the body as common language)

Timeless

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

Toy (the body as a plaything, a purchase)

Tender

Tireless

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

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

Tinder (a person who ignites emotional fires)

Tradition (the human body as representation of ancient practices)

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

Teacher + Threat + Toxic + Timeless

Traveler + Target + Trauma

Transition + Tapestry +Temporary

Translation + Triumphant

Trash + Tragic + Trauma

Temple + Truthful + Timeless

Trickster + Traitor + Threat

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

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

Technical + Temporal + Truthful + Tradition + Teacher +Taxonomy

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

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND JFK-- LEARNING TO GRIEVE

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

Henry Peacham (1634)

As quoted by Simon Schama in Rembrandt's Eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOROTHY DAY:

TRAUMA AS A TEACHER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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