PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION
INDIANA SERIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Merold Westphal, editor Cover illustration: Painting owned by DnB NOR Sparebankstiftelsen, Norway. Photo: Studio Fuglseth.
Loneliness nelineess& n Lament ment
—CATHERINE KELLER, DREW UNIVERSITY
HUNTINGTON
“A melodious meditation on a theme from which we suffer too much to theorize so little. Reading this book will stimulate collective healing at the most intimate source of philosophical life.”
Patricia Joy Huntington reflects that loneliness does not only consist of the heartfelt absences of a friend, partner, spouse, or child, but rather stems from a radical breach in one’s life journey. In this conceptually rigorous and warmly poetic book, Huntington develops a unique philosophy of receptivity and an original portrait of redemptive suffering. By fully exploring notions of pain, she also examines how the relation between the heart’s musical attunement and meaning-filled life passages can lead one to a more spiritual philosophy and a more independent life. Huntington reveals the maternal face of God and encourages the feminine divine in her poignant narrative of overcoming. This deeply philosophical meditation offers a nuanced view of religious experience, providence, and transcendence.
A Journey to Receptivity
PATRICIA JOY HUNTINGTON is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University. She is author of Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, and Irigaray and co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger.
INDIANA
University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis http://iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796
INDIANA INDIA
PATRICIA JOY HUNTINGTON
l
Lone iness and Lament
Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion
M
erold Westphal, editor
LL
&
oneliness ament
A Journey to Receptivity
a
r
a
P t ici Joy Huntington
I
I
ndiana University Press Bloomington and ndianapolis
his book is a publication of
I
T
ndiana University Press 601 orth orton treet Bloomington, 47404–3797 U
SA
S
M
IN
N
http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders Fax orders Orders by e-mail
© 2009 by Patricia J. Huntington ll rights reserved
800–842–6796 812–855–7931
[email protected]
A
T
N
A
o part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. he ssociation of merican University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
A
T
A
he paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of merican ational tandard for nformation ciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library aterials, Z39.48–1984. S
I
S
ANSI
M
N
anufactured in the United tates of merica
A
S
M
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
N
T D
I
IS
I
N
IS
I
Huntington, Patricia J. Loneliness and lament : a journey to receptivity / Patricia Joy Huntington. p. cm. — ( ndiana series in the philosophy of religion) ncludes bibliographical references and index. B 978-0-253-35298-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — B 978-0-253-22067-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Life. 2. Loneliness. 3. Women—Psychology. . itle. B 435.H86 2009 155.9'2—dc22 2008048270
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10 09
Though written out of womanly love, this book’s dedication belongs to a man, friend and teacher, whose impeccable art of timing bestows upon him the virtues of the snow leopard.
By sagely wisdom and powers unknown did his creative embodiment and volcanic word bypass consciousness and will so as to impregnate and nurture, guide and prompt in most patient love and tenderness the long-coming yet never too late blossom of my Joy.
S
S
S
Joy Wandering Alone he who wanders alone in the inner ramparts of soul greets each newborn shape life brings with quiet joy and soft delight. he who wanders alone in the inner depths of soul enjoys a reach that resonates with all living things. he who wanders alone ever willing to face herself partakes of the shaping, the mysterious growth of becoming life’s very own.
s
I
I
T
I
T
N
I
n Zˇizˇkov, a humble part of Prague where the castaways of communism once were housed, amid a great, horrid emptiness that God wrought, this “little book” was written, alone in foreign land deprived of tongue and friend, and even that great consolation God often permits from immediacy of place and beauty. How odd that it was written in Zˇizˇkov, a borough named after the military leader of the Hussite movement, whose shadow now sits in statuesque form, all blazing in fury, atop a hill, a visible testament to life as spiritual battle, symbol of the great reforms Jan Hus sought in order to counter corruption of church and state. othing in this little book is written of politics and religious institutions, nor does it offer sanction or repudiation of the transmutation of the Hussite movement from a religious to a military battle. Yet its writing took courage from that symbolic reminder that battle is our spiritual destiny. he battle, as depicted in these pages, is to abate loneliness, to understand that loneliness operates in our lives as a hidden presence and a call from the early days of youth, though we know it not, to awaken to life and destiny. t is thus, without political diatribe or worldly cause, written in the spirit of reinvigoration that Hus embodied in his battle to recall us to the living nature of the life of spirit and the humble truth that each must fight alone to live as spirit and with dignity, a truth that stands tall before us like a beckoning herald regardless of time or place, pain or sorrow, to venture the inward ramparts where none can join us and we must pass alone to face ourselves and discover reality, what it is and is not, what it can and cannot give, what it requires and requires not, the yoke it places on us to live, to struggle, come to birth, and grow dimensions of spiritual proportion. his book is written from a universal and shared standpoint about that painful plight we call loneliness and for this reason, even as it was written with a specific eye toward how women undergo this plight, sincerely hope men find it engaging and even affirmative of their intuitions. Beneath this icon, tender these words.
Contents
Prelude:
M
M
M
other
M
M
T
S
213 220 253 254 256 269 278 295
S
A
S
O
T
Commentary on ources cknowledgments ndex
S
O A
I
D
M
A
M
I S
S
I
ntimacy and Bearing: he Quest for the Father 13. Life’s asculine Character 14. For What re We et Up? 15. oft Words for other 16. For What ivine peration re We et Up? 17. Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows 18. Pain and ntimacy: he Pause in Bearing 19. ne tep . . . along the Way 20. Resonant Chorus
103 113 118 155 159 199 201
T
S
S
T
D
M
Lamentation and Woe: he Quest for the 6. hadows of orrow-Filled Lamentation 7. de to the Cup of Bitterness 8. Pain and Bearing 9. Lamentation and orrow 10. ears for Want of Comforting Protection 11. Loneliness Whom ust Befriend 12. Where Joy and orrow eet
1 3 6 33 55
T
O
A O
S
Part 3
S
T
A
S
I
D
Part 2
A I
xi
Life s ong: he Quest for usic and eaning 1. Fitful reams 2. Life and the Fight for Word 3. Primitive loneness: ur rue Home 4. Receptivity and the Quest for eaning-Filled Living 5. Loneliness and eliverance
Part 1
Wayfarer’s ong
297 305 307
Prelude
very person, male or female, faces a strange and often tumultuous struggle in learning how to rise up and meet life freely with absolute embrace . . . and hold nothing back. he very fact that we struggle at times for and at times against life tells us instantly that to come alive physically is not the same thing as to come alive spiritually. ntuitively each and every one of us knows this from the very font of our being. t is written into our bones and our existence. We do not need first to learn it from experience and journey proper, for it is what disposes us to face life journey as travail. Physical birth gives me over to life but not to the living. he living, the quality of how fare in life, is the real wayfarer’s venture. uffer life must but grow intensively present to all things none other than can decide. T
I
I
T
E
A Wayfarer’s Song
I
S
I
he great promise, the immense challenge is just this: ive, truly live!
L
A
I
I
I
I
I
T
A
I
I
I
T
I
Living life is a task of a qualitatively distinct order. How little we ponder it, that we are positioned at birth before and within the stream of life with the most tremendous yoke placed upon us: to awaken, to come alive in the intensive promise of our being, to consent abidingly to undergo a second, radical kind of birthing. f we are to grow into substantial and dignified beings, people of depth and calm intensity, those who are in their very mode of living a source of constancy and hope for others, then we must voluntarily consent to spiritual birth. nything short of full consent to spiritual awakening and cannot bear the venture of life entirely willingly. will in some measure resist that passage from physical birth to physical death; will fight it, at times more, at times less; will wish to be rescued or taken way, will cry out, “Why was born?” or wallow and languish, muddle through uncomprehending. ll manner of resistance will expend, like the muscle that tenses against the shot, and so unnecessarily, for simple lack of courage to say yes and grow the heart requisite to imbue my living with serious intent and robust consent, hold nothing back but meet all that life brings, the hard and the easy, the light and the heavy, the dark and the bright. o come alive in life is to go fully, truly, completely—
I
he drone of the lonely rises up, a deafening unsounded shriek from a bottomless cavern of unredeemed pain, a lifetime of hurt that threatens to wound the young and kill off the living.
T
I
spiritedly—with the venture. t is to grow a proper love of life and, in turn, to be cradled and stimulated by life in wondrous reciprocity. Yet still ask, did you never pause to wonder, What is life venture that the task of living life should prove so radically precarious? Were you distracted by blind conviction or foolish play, did you not stumble and jump back in fateful surprise when you came upon the lonely ones, the old and decrepit, the tired and sad who do not make it “through” and “into” the living, even as they limp on and suffer the drawn-out days of time? How is it—what frightful question, did you forget to pause and ask—that so many wind up so lonely, so utterly disappointed in, so broken by and disconsolate over life?
A
T
A
hh, why are we not jolted upright in startling pause before those lonely figures, ghastly near to the grave and lost to living? From the first moment of budding youth we sense at root and in heart that we face a momentous and impending possibility. o live! Life, yes life, impends. lmost none believes in youth that she or he will play the fool, fail life and fall unnoticed into that dark pit of fractured estrangement. Virtually each begins confirmed that she or he can seize life by the horns, risk the venture, and win the crown of a true place among the joyously triumphant in living. Hardly do we in youth notice let alone heed their example—the lonely whose lives signal a tremulous warning—but instead shove it rashly aside with the premature conviction we could never become like that, an insufferable lonely heart, crushed by pain and suffering. Confirmed, we believe, that life is ours for the reaping, like a vast golden harvest awaiting our arrival for the feast.
L
ong before time began, older even than memory, a little refrain, a seed of song planted itself in the heart and rose up to say, ife, life, you are mine! Mine!
O
Prelude I
xii
E
N
L
We begin ever so dangerously naive, though not, as all the world assumes, because the world is a risky place that delivers up both harmful and good experiences. o, we set forth prey to that far more pernicious foe, naïveté about oneself. ach—you and —stood on the brink of adult-
I
I
D
I
oneliness sends its watchtower beacon to us; loneliness sounds its insistent toll.
n the lonely we witness those who labored and struggled only to find themselves submerged beneath life’s stream. t should come as a jolt that they sink; oh, not merely that they sink but that they sink unwittingly! I
I
L
A
T
I
T
I
I
D
T
S
T
hood precariously. Bold enough to believe! o think that all we needed to venture forth was willingness and a good heart. Yet foolish enough to take for granted that we knew how to win heart and not end up like those “silly old bitties” mired in bitter complaint or those “crusty old curmudgeons” mute in the world with no telling words to speak. Wondrously we boldly dare life’s venture, woefully we brazenly deign to become life’s master. For all our youthful faith in that great vast sea whose waters we so fervently wish to venture, a little insolence worms its way into naive confidence, as we set forth wobbly, devoid of firm sea legs, at once respectful and unwittingly disrespectful of life’s superior power. We intuit but do not heed the intuition that we do not create life’s great vast sea, for life is not like an infertile field merely at hand for the exploiting and reaping. ad the day, oh how sad, when we ventured forth in such ill-begotten stance toward the sea of life, shameless enough to treat her wild, raw, ungoverned waters as potentially mine for the taming. ( he worm of possessiveness far too close to heart and hand.) id you not listen, did you not hear? id that youthful admixture of precocious insight and haughty condescension prevent you from hearing life’s forceful warning? t is the lonely who sound the alert that , who am and how fare the high seas, hang in the wager of life. Young people are not wrong to refuse the example of the lost old man or the pitiful old woman. Yet merely to be repulsed and not apprehend the deeper challenge is to see with but one eye and condescend to hear life’s cautionary signal. What fateful error! (What insensitivity!) o venture forth without heeding life’s careful initiative in stimulating the sober awareness that could steady me, stand, in youthful pride, precariously unaware that could neglect what essentially matters, and not simply lose a thing or two, a job, an opportunity, or a desired impossibility along the way. he loneliness we fear, like a dark and foreboding presence, threatens to dampen our venturesome spirit were we to look it straight in the eyes and hearken toward its soundless warning. nd yet this very darkness signals to us the way the foghorn probes the shadowy haze to keep the boats from crashing upon the reef.
Prelude
xiii
I
I
N
N
I
For not even the lonely foresaw the sinking or that the living could evade them so. Loneliness, primordially understood, is no passing emotion, no temporary frame of mind. t’s not a transitory condition, like losing a job or lacking a companion, however insufferable such a condition may be. or, as we blithely imagine, are those plagued by loneliness only the ones who sank fast and quickly without a moment’s struggle. Loneliness pervades the lives of young and old, the happy and the unhappy, the sick and the healthy, the knowing and the ignorant. Loneliness troubles the spectacularly successful equally as it besieges the unsuccessful; it haunts those who by all worldly standards found acclaim and gained the day, even those who appear satisfied and well-adjusted, and certainly those near and dear, familiar and beloved to us. ot unlike that grim reaper, death, loneliness shadows the many lives around us and even, dare say, our own. Whether it speaks to us through the living dead or as a disturbance within our own sleepy existence, loneliness stalks us like a persistent hunter even before we sink into the land of the dispirited. t shadows us . . . save like the dawn of new light rising, the seed of things unknown and unseen, though it murmurs deeper down like silent call and unformed sound.
A
A
L
L
ike a whisper I can barely hear: I miss something, something is missing. Miss something, something missing. oneliness, what do you signal, what do I miss? Is it to break free from the shackles of my origins, the chains of poverty or the cage of wealth, the interminable adolescence of never being able to “get” and “have” a life of my own? ( nd what of the question never asked in youth: How, when life unfolds, can loneliness speak out of painful suffering equally from any “condition” of felt lack—from the yearning to be with a lover or to be relieved of a lover, from want of a companion or the insufferable misery of never being understood by a companion, from finding oneself saddled with child or afflicted with barrenness.) lways missing something, something missing, something more, something novel—another horizon, a new purchase on life, a better this, a different that, yet another this or that, still a . . . a . . . a nebulous something . . .
xiv
Prelude
I
I
Loneliness rumbles beneath the surface of life’s watery stream like a shudder in my shining youthful consciousness or, once grow older, like a tremor beneath my otherwise contented existence. t rumbles and hunts,
I
I
I
I
I
N
I
trembles and taunts. t warns beforehand, it bespeaks the radical possibility of what “may be.” o, not of this or that, whether have a thing or two, whether the soil on which stand is rocky or sandy, whether this or that will come. t heralds rather the radical promise of buoyant living by warning us away from a deadened existence. t speaks in twos of promise and danger. t speaks promise with its shrouded foreboding of the living neglected and life laid waste. Beware! tolls the infirm though hidden sadness that cloaks each and every life event that passes uncomprehended. How we can crash against the barrier reefs of noncomprehension, lose our way, and sink. What dreaded joylessness overtakes us, what loneliness shadows the seafarer’s venture with unformed question.
Yet the heart protests:
A
A
D
Is not life “mine” for the molding and making? on’t I have tight hold over the reins of my own existence? Can’t I tame and shape the forces of my existence into the future that I wish to be? m I not in youth wholly at the ready to wage my freedom to harness the forces of life and use them to fashion myself into what I wish to be? m I not fully disposed to live rather than passively suffer life? m I not master and fabricator of my own destiny?
I
I
I
N
S
T
A
he sinking, yes, the sinking should come as a cataclysmic jolt to our bold and misguided presumption that life can be seized, tamed, and shaped to our wish. Yet as we first venture forth in the freedom and promise of our youth, barely a single one among us takes heed. inking is one of the primordial dangers of life. o more than any other am guaranteed by native endowment or sheer force of want that shall venture life and not sink into that dank, cavernous hole where one day could find myself lost, isolated, confused, and without bearings in this, the great sea of life, my venture of self having come to nothing enduring least of all triumphant joy.
The Wild Venture of Life
I
What, wonder, is the sea of life that the question of living life well or ill presents itself as such a precarious possibility and before which we adopt a stance so dangerously unwary? What is life that it should grant or
Prelude
xv
S A
A
oneliness bids us with its beckoning call: wake! wake, child, and live! oneliness prods us like a fierce huntress: on the yoke of life, take aim at the living, take it up urgently! D
t would seem, tender babes that we are in youth as we embark upon this great venture, that we stand under a weighty and formidable tension. h, don’t speak of worldly pressures, however complex and numerous these may be loaded upon my shoulders. speak rather of life. Life. ender babes that we are born and which we remain well into the days of adulthood, Life demands something of us. f me. nd does it plague my dreams at night, beset my daytime worries, this silent demand cannot fathom, know not in what it consists? What is it that life requires in order to fare well and not wind up like the bitter and lonely, lost to the living and with one foot too soon in the casket? I
I
A
O
T
I
I
O
I
L
L
I
I
T
hold back, give us over to or withhold the living, let us sink or buoy us up? hese thoughts, long formed into heedful question, spring as from a well in my heart, and, if you would bear with me as they slowly ripen upon my lips, shall venture to speak them here in this “little book.” mall in seed and focus, though long in journey to ripen and bode forth, as life itself proves to be. bid you “Come with, come with!” Word too is venture.
great mystery presents itself to us in life, for we are promised radiant, vibrant, true living, and yet we don’t begin with a clear-cut apprehension of or the full-fledged ability to respond to life’s requirements. We will rise or fall, sink or ride high depending on how we meet life, depending on whether we let life impart its wisdom to us or muddle on fickle and undecided for all our days . . . h, but somewhere down, well hidden beneath your untried delight in the venture, did you object, at the bottom of your heart, that life should require something, anything at all, and worse, that it should hold forth its requirements so damned elusively? How, confound it, could you or or anybody meet a requirement when we do not know upfront what it is? id our parents not tell us, did our teachers forget to proffer the key to life, and why did not some wise God open heaven’s gate and send us the “dunce’s map” to right living? his damnable thing, life, what, ask you,
Prelude
I
xvi
T
D
I
O
A
L
oneliness is the shadow of life’s unspoken requirement, its promise of true living.
I
When was the time that lamentation formed in the heart, can I remember, can you remember? oes your heart speak in lamentation, does it sorrow? I
A
I
does it require of you and me? However could we be launched upon the high seas seemingly ill-prepared and lacking proper training and guidance? s it judicious that should have to guess what it will take to rise rather than sink? m left to find out when it’s too late to turn back and do things differently?
I
I
I
Prelude
I
T
I
N
I
I
A
D
nd what, pray tell, is the strange, bold, self-reliance of youth—its will to venture forth with nothing other than free consent, its keen want of the unexpected, its love of the new, its uncanny belief that one can risk and come out well—what strange endowment of youth is this that it could have betrayed me so, what poorly smelted armor, what sad garment laid upon me? Listen, come close, let me tell you, think, yes, really believe we ask the wrong question. t’s not youth’s uncultivated faith that betrays me but who betray it. Young people are right to travel light with only want of freedom and belief in self but wrong to think that freedom and self are already in hand. either are we secure in living freely nor in living true to self. Living freely and truly are not possessions we carry with us out to sea; they are, rather, qualities must win through the venture and in the manner of my living. We can lose things essential to our well-being in life. However much we sense this truth, it needs to be spoken. he grave danger we come up against throughout life is that we can mortgage off our native endowment and fool away all prospect of ultimate gain. Youthful want of self-reliance is not evil. Were it not for radical lack of understanding, this intuitive want could prove a great servant of spiritual birth. Yet by heedlessness does self-reliance poise us before the fundamental possibility that true independence could be squandered recklessly in the manner that we venture the high seas, just as we hear in fairy tales how the prideful one looked back in a moment of self-congratulation and turned to stone or the careless one gazed on the wrong thing and fell into a deep, deep sleep. Want of self-reliance, that potential servant of spiritual awakening, when unformed by receptivity and willingness to follow life’s guide, deteriorates into obstinacy and works its own demise. When unleash wild ambition to “have” a self and “get” a life as deem fit, then xvii
I
I
I
I
I
I
S
N
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
T
I
O
I
I
I
I
I
neglect the labor to let life transform my want into serious intent and find essential dignity. can, if am not careful, unwittingly sell off my untested independence and make myself shamefully dependent on the ever changing tides of circumstance, ever fearful of consequence. can cast my well-being loose without tiller or bearing upon the unruly sea of time, neglectful of winning the transformed willingness to be true to self come what may and quietly let others contend with the spiritual birth of me. can lose the servant of blessed independence in one fell swoop through a great, bold gamble. r can lose it by slow increments, as when quietly sold off bits of soul one compromise at a time only to wake up one forlorn day and discover, to my horror, that ugliness, rather than true sensibility, qualifies my acts. he fact that we can lose the great marks of our youthful endowment —open adaptability, a winning availability to the unexpected, and unadulterated laughter at life’s odd gifts—reveals a terrifying truth. he quality of my passage in life and the qualities that life imparts to me sprout together like seed and flower. f lose the nascent openness of youth, is it not because refused to meet life’s challenge to win vibrant youthfulness in attitude as a steadfast gain, anchored in receptivity to life, rather than grasp it as a gratuitous, albeit passing endowment, a possession all “mine”? We are presented with a great mystery in life, for, as hope to show, to love life is to love the self. t is who am ventured in venturing life. Who “am” has not been decided by any youthful tendency or any native gift. f am to shine and radiate, grow sensitive and bright, then must venture to gain what never “had” to start and never “have” once and for all: a steadied devotion and a willing heart. We must sort the wheat from the chaff and, by renouncing pride of possession in wanting to “have” the self ready-made and to “own” life like a well-fashioned toy, let steadfast willingness for the venture become born through trial and in humility. one of the marks of our youthfulness live in us as essential rays of embodied brilliance. uch steady constancy in growing rich in essential qualities is hard-won. t is required of me to give a hearty “yes” to what life brings, though for this “yes” shall have to battle, verily. Life must work its pedagogical labor and tender craft upon me, and must learn the affirmative art that realizes such qualities through ongoing renewal and never take them for granted like once-secured possessions.
xviii
Prelude
he place we begin in life is wild and dangerous, like an untamed garden. T
(Whoever said we left den rather than fell into a breach within it?)
D
E
espite the veneer of an orderly and regulated world we have built, life is a wilderness of spiritual expectancy that beckons us “go with.” Life is this beckoning and in youth we intuitively hear the call.
Sink or Swim upon the High Seas? Calm waters, stormy seas. hey come as they come.
I
I
I
I
O
T
We know at heart—though foolhardy we deny the truth—that it lies outside mortal power to decide whether stormy or calm waters impend, when there is a time of rest and a time to contend. h, but what an unqualified difference surrendering all, absolutely all preferential resistance to life’s unpredictable tides makes to how fare the high seas. n life, readiness to “go with the venture” proves vital. Life is no intrinsic enemy, no false seductress, yet there is danger, the danger of going against the tide, losing life’s support and falling into submersion in the flux. can, in this risky game called life, sink to a lower level of being, forget what in youth once was and knew, fall prey to cynicism, become mean-spirited, and harden into willful hatred of all things genuine. Calm waters, stormy seas. hey come as they come, I cannot control that.
A
I
T
T
Life is like a sea and we feel threatened, as we can with any element, by life’s unpredictable way of deciding what we will weather next. Yet this experiential feeling that life threatens through its wild and beckoning call to venture the unknown seas is misguided, however right it seems. For life teaches us, if we pay heed, not to expend ourselves in empty rebellion against what cannot be changed, the tides of time. Life encourages us to go with the tides and not erratically against. he events of my life point me patiently and incessantly to turn upon life’s own great paradox, that if choose freely to trust, the very waters of life will support my decision and grant me true bearings. Life can be thought momentarily on the pattern of physical water. s
Prelude
xix
A
Song and Attunement
I
O
T
S
I
A
I
S
I
I
S
M
T
E
with physical drowning, fighting the waves only hastens the sinking and makes me go down painfully. veryone who has barely survived drowning knows that renouncing the struggle against the water and giving oneself over to the native roll of the sea is the sole way to meet water’s superior power. For it alone can deliver one to safety or, if the time dictates, take one safely over to death. he total renunciation of agency is what leads people to report, in such cases, that they gave themselves over to death and imperturbable tranquility. ore precisely, they died to agency and, in the moment where spiritual and material life proved indistinguishable, confused spiritual with physical death. By virtue of the former, the water decided the latter. o too with each life journey. Life cannot be conquered and whipped into my handy playmate, a notch etched by pride on my belt and put under keep, a vast power for the harnessing. Yet, as with the tumultuous water, can befriend life by giving up the conflict-oriented posture of fickleness and let the sea nurture and sustain me. find myself, by the time am aware, having long since been placed midstream in life with, as the colloquial expression aptly though not precisely conveys, one choice: ink or swim! ptly, because we either go up or down in life, become mean or generous, begrudging or gracious, angry or compassionate, indifferent or full of pathos. mprecisely, because swimming is not really something we do by our own power. piritually understood we face one solitary choice: either, by trust, become joyously buoyed upon the waters or, in fitful distrust, become hopelessly submerged within life’s stream. he greatest illusion ever entertained by mortals is the illusion of neutrality, the unspoken wish that one can float through life neither rising nor sinking but simply slip through unnoticed and unchallenged. ne may be able to float through the world but not life. Just as swimming teaches, floating requires an artful and trusting relation to water. Floating is never mere floating in life; to be buoyed up is part of rising. ll else that call “floating” is actually sinking.
xx
I
T
he human soul has, since days of old, been imaged like a stringed instrument, either growing taught or slackening but never staying neutral by mechanical force or habit. Just as a muscle stays physically fit through constant practice, the soul’s relation to spirit must be exercised in order to tighten and vibrate purely. f we understand the soul not merely to be Prelude
I
I
I
T
I
I
A
T
A
A
A
the seat of passion but that which weds spirit and embodiment, then the soul reveals to us the reality that how we stand in relation to spirit reflects itself in how we embody life. nd, conversely, how we bear life decidedly refracts how we are disposed toward spiritual awakening. ttitude undergirds soundness of the soul, both its musical sound and its fitness. ttitude and tonality of soul are more primordial than emotions. he quality and stability of our emotional life reflects the more basic matter, whether we have a flabby- or tight-souled attunement to the life of spirit and thus to living life. t the level of primitive posture toward life, we either enjoy resonance of soul or not. We either slacken or tighten, grow stronger and freer or weaken and degenerate beyond all recognition, only to sink and sink and sink. Contrary to the prejudicial notion that life threatens me, it is not precisely the sea of life that engulfs me when sink into heaviness and grow cold in lonely isolation. Rather, the growing chaos of my own stormy soul, the swelling tides of fierce envy, pain, and anger overtake me when sink. hese poor friends and all the crass attitudes drag around deprive me of perspective and healthy attunement; they weigh me down and make of me a real drag. t is a horrid affair, indeed, to become lost in life journey, to strive and strive but never find joy in the undergoing. t is a sorrowful day when one grows exhausted and, for want of spiritual sustenance, falls into a deep isolation, never to find peaceful rest in the living. Pray, entreat yourself, do not lapse into that frightful sleep that lulls one away from the vital milk of life and onto the cold, unnurturing breast of loneliness.
I
I
I
E
A
I
I
I
S
t sounds the quality of our attunement to life, either beautiful and consonant or ugly and dissonant—noisily, ruinously, screechingly at odds with life. he soul is the lyre string, life the pick. ound will, one way or another. his too cannot change. ither am become the voice of rising joy or go down painfully in bitter, lonely complaint. t depends, for my part, on how bear the yoke laid upon me by life. Have you never wondered, truly wondered whether loneliness grows harsh and bitter out of fickleness toward life, and not as we so thoughtlessly preach from simple lack of companionship? ll beauteous relations in life—with other people, with children, with animals, with trees, with cats, with life proper and with death, and certainly with growth of virtues like T
T
I
T
he soul is a song waiting to be sung by spirit’s embodied voice.
Prelude
xxi
I
I
I
I
A
I
patience and love—require trust. f cannot trust life, how will be free to risk trust of others? nd what crippled mark will distrust etch upon the soul’s embodiment? Will my presence vibrate before and inspire others or will produce dissonant effects, imbue my children with lack of faith in life, make them cynical or petrified, mar them with envy or relentless dissatisfaction? What genealogy shall impart to those whose lives touch mine? What, pray tell, will the sound of my soul produce? Will it shatter and destroy all sensitive feeling? What blossom—weed or flower—will my wailing and weeping engender?
How respond to life’s promptings makes of me—in act or embodiment— a song born of life’s nurturing hand, a living song or equally, where refuse nurture, mere clank and clatter. f fare poorly with life, even when due to simple negligence, then will import my breach with life into all relations. will stand at odds not merely with life but with all beings, animals equally as humans, plants and pots, and things. he song “am” and which carry into life encounters will color all reach out to touch. f my song be dark and heavy, others will be instantly repelled; will burden them unduly with my paucity of true living and the oppressive truth that impart nothing life engendering in the manner of my bearing. ry, might, to cover over my heaviness, my dullness and lethargy, my halfdead way of passing through life; try as might to cast myself up onto the heights of sonorous song through forced tones of high-pitched speech and airy comments, still the sullen tones sound at base will take their toll. For all my effort to manufacture lightness of tone and joviality, none can evade the shadow of my heaviness. send people away by faulty attunement or spill over, dump a load on them, and call all this “intimacy.” can always find an excuse for my negativity. fter all, what happens to me is bad and others should see that. r get my vindictive proof, when others flee, that am the only sensitive one, for others do not feel as deeply as feel. confuse loneliness with the virtue of bearing life alone. t’s easy to confuse psychosomatic heaviness with true weightiness of spirit. he one is a drag, even to itself, and the other is soundly anchored in the wisdom of right living. s women we expend uncounted hours on losing weight but to what extent are we willing to witness and contend with that far more life-defining reality, that we can grow heavy of heart and mood and draw people down into a sullen life depression, that this I
I
T
I
I
I
I
A
T
I
I
I
O
A
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
S
ong is a word formed between life and me.
xxii
Prelude
I
S
O
I
I
I
M
O
I
heaviness of all heavinesses we must combat and shed if we wish to enjoy quality of life. When will we take up the sword and battle the true battle to divest ourselves of heaviness of affect and embodiment? When will we stop calling that deadening weight a sign of being “deeper” than others and “more sensitive”? Living is at stake! Life will either become a great adversary or a great friend, depending upon whether “go with” or “against” Her. Yes, Life is ur Great other and he has Her task, Her aim to tune me up like a violin whose strings need to be made tight and worthy of voicing a deep rich song. Yet if resist, then attuned will nevertheless become, but like a tuning that turns inimical, lapses into proud discord only to lose balance and come undone. f collapse into bitter loneliness, how could the bloom of innocent love grow out of me and release its fragrant tune to my surround? ur faults stem, do you not wonder, from that most neglected malady: fickle distrust of the great nurturing hand of life.
Loneliness, a Call and a Breach
I
oneliness signals the soul’s privation, its precarious perch before the task to cultivate proper care for the living, its want of sound attunement and its nascent misattunement to life journey.
E
I
Prelude
M
D
I
I
till, there is a seed of truth in our ordinary sentiment that loneliness belies lack of intimacy, just not, as we commonly think, for want of companionship. When we sink, loneliness registers bad faith with life itself, a terrible breach of intimacy with life. n loneliness, whether moan out loud or silently weep, cry out that life—L F —betrays me. espair over lack of some particular thing is only a surface manifestation of that deep-felt cry. Painful as it is to suffer lack of an intimate lover or companion, the root of loneliness points to a deeper kind of “lack,” an original privation of intimacy. We are born with profound yearning for intimate accord with life and reality; we are born, thus, to a special labor to cultivate proper care for self in and through the living. any are the I
S
L
Loneliness, what is it? t is the purpose of this “little book” to show that loneliness is not, as popularly conceived, simple lack of companionship, however significant, fitting, or timely companionship may be to a given person’s life and natural bent.
xxiii
I
A
I
I
I
I
I
I
A
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
A
A
T
T
I
I
ways one can cry bitterly that life betrayed one’s hope and promise to become great and not get trapped in a dismal fate. Whatever the content of my peculiar sense of betrayal, at root in feeling betrayed is that lament what believe life—not —has done to me. Undeservedly. here is always a story of the promise of one’s youth—that life itself freely gave—and how that promise was spent, wasted by the bad things life brought, the wrong man, the impossible woman, the spiritsquelching labor, the terrible legacy passed on from one’s parents that one naively repeated. Life was a promise, an exciting venture promised me to live! ruly live! But then life itself, or so runs my disquieted heart’s secret refrain, snatched the promise away. nd left me lonely with none to understand my pain. Like a treacherous thief and a deceitful liar, life held out her wondrous jewel only in stealth to snatch it back from me. Like a terrible seductress, life caught me in her trap of promises unfulfilled, paths that led nowhere and to naught, naught, naught save grievous estrangement. Countless are the variants of this story, as countless as the days of time. nd yet, despite bitter tears and staunch conviction, our complaints against life rest upon a breach of love, our own impoverished neglect to cultivate intimate understanding of life herself. t is entirely understandable that lonely people want intimacy. nd yet desperation to find a companion can yield no ultimate repair. t applies but a temporary salve over the festering wound of that gaping breach. f wish to lay loneliness to rest, then must face my total relation to life. Life is the midwife of all relations. t joins me to the intensive possibility of acquiring loving intimacy with self. t weds me to inconceivable intimacy with others. t marries me to God and all divine realities. f refuse to remedy my dysfunctional relation to life journey, the intermediary and incubator of spiritual growth, then will inevitably introduce dampening effect and troubled distress into all relations, one and many. For without a joyous and bountiful attitude in bearing the journey, how will become an uplifting presence, an icon and model, a wellspring of life and enduring joy for others? nd so we come to a hard pass that marks the beginning of this word. speak of the wisdom awaiting our patient, serious, and persistent contemplation. speak of the wisdom heralded in the reality that life engenders me and not I it. f we truly took pause before this most basic datum of our existential circumstance, then we would have to face a hard, hard truth.
xxiv
Prelude
t is this: a breach with life is the mark of our own stillborn spirit. By refusing to bear life well, engender, in freedom, my own spiritual abortion.
breach with life engenders a breach with my utmost possibility: to live or die spiritually. am and remain stillborn in spirit to the extent that refuse to let life mother and guide me to come alive in spirit. his is a difficult image. Yet it is a fundamental truth that only we, and not life, hold the freedom to abort our own spiritual awakening. his is the yoke laid upon us and even life must respect it. want to take courage in these pages to reflect beyond our ordinary ways of thinking about loneliness and think into the heart of pain in life journey. For life journey does require pain. wakening, like birth, has its pain. Yet a breached spiritual birth leads down the path to that most unbearable pain of lonely estrangement. t’s time to don the yoke of our spiritual promise, receive the pangs of birth, and get out from under the horrendous price of avoiding awakening. t’s time to journey to the heart of loneliness. his, then, is a sustained reflection on the difference between joyous bearing in one’s solitary journey and the joylessness of never finding one’s way. o it starts with life and not with companionship. t starts with my relation to living and not with my personal relation to self and other. For these three—self, life, and other—stand intertwined, with life at the heart of the matter. his, then, is an engagement with loneliness. t risk of getting ahead of the beginning, have invoked loneliness in manifold ways. have called it a privation and a breach, the call to journey home to spiritual awakening and the cry of one in whom spirit remains stillborn, the potential to sing in accordant voice and the discordant tone of estrangement. With these names, mark out two aspects of loneliness at the beginning. Loneliness is both a warning and a horrid psychic reality, and yet at root of each it remains first and foremost a call to venture trust in self and life. n a crucial sense, loneliness is the sound of one who has fallen into a desperate psychic abyss. Yet since none begins life already sunk to such depths, we must note that loneliness first arises as a call to be true in the manner of one’s living. hat is why loneliness makes an appearance both T
I
I
A
T
I
I
I
T
S
T
I
I
A
I
T
I
I
A
N
I
I
o wonder the cry of loneliness is horrifying and ungodly, so unlike the cry of the baby’s first birth!
Prelude
xxv
I
O
N
I
A
Prelude
A
xxvi
I
I
I
S
O
O
T
I
I
I
T
I
I
O
I
I
I
I
O
I
before one has woken up and each instant that one begins to fall away from spiritual sobriety. Loneliness is first a call home to spirit and then a warning signal, the sign that one is about to sink. t cannot be thought of as mere enemy, though one cannot make of it one’s bedtime companion. ne should, without falling prey to dependency, win due respect for it. For primitive loneliness is no ill-fated prophecy but rather a voiceless sound, a summons, a call should heed. n a vital regard, no matter how deeply plunge, loneliness never loses its quality as a call. For the sound of loneliness increases to the point of deafening cry precisely as one persistently refuses to heed it and sinks, sinks, and sinks. n a way this deafening cry muffles our ability to hear its warning. t blots out hearing. ne feels only isolation, lack, and pain. Yet it remains a warning nonetheless in that it registers in pain how terribly far we have fled from spiritual birth and true living. Loneliness is the sound of sinking. t an extreme, it is the cry of joyless existence, the pain of deadening. f what am bereft in loneliness? ot a companion per se but joy. For lonely go down, sink beneath life’s weight, deprived of solitude and peace. Battle weary go down, where no meaning for pain can be found. o fall into that spiral of loneliness is truly a horror of hopeless desperation. n full bloom, it is that most abominable psycho-physical vortex in which one feels no connection with self, others, or life. n full bloom, it is the horror of radical isolation, of being physically alive but not living. n human existence it is possible to fall into a vast bottomless vortex of false infinity; that is, into greater and greater isolation with neither terminus nor deliverance. his is the difference between physical and spiritual drowning, for in the latter case one keeps drowning without ever meeting an end. ne incessantly fails to let life’s tides lift one’s head above water. ne can get caught in this whirl of submersion forever, if one chooses to keep battling against life’s watercourse way. Yet however deep one can plunge into the psychic vortex we call loneliness, loneliness is not a disease that must persist automatically like the flu that must run its course. Rather, as that beautiful man, øren Kierkegaard, said of despair, it reflects a spiritual disorder that keep contracting each moment it rages. For it is the continued abuse of freedom that keeps me diving into the vortex of joyless living. Loneliness is at first and eternally a call to wake up and come alive in spirit, though may need to recover hearing’s sensitive attunement to it. However far plunge, its call to return claims me. fter each moment
I
I
I
I
I A
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
of true living, can stumble. Yet then loneliness arises anew as a warning signal to desist on the path toward falling into a hateful breach. t calls me to return before lose my hearing and make the trek back unduly difficult. Loneliness is spirit’s claim on me to grow, slowly and surely, proper care for self and a proper love of life. he twang of loneliness is spirit’s wrangle in my soul. t reminds me of the original promise of the yoke placed on me, to awaken, grow, and come alive spiritually. t comes both before and after fall, first as the signal of privation, then, when fail to heed but instead plunge, as warning and, worse, that titanic wave of self-destruction. But to hate loneliness and seek refuge in superficial curatives only works me into deeper hatred of self and conflict with life, for betray both self and existence when refuse to cultivate the promise, when languish childishly in demanding that ultimate freedom be granted without tendering care for the living self that must come to be. Loneliness—in its warning function to recall me from neglect—is not itself a primordial attunement but signals rather an emergent fault in attunement. t is not like enduring joy, the mark of a spiritually sound pathos. Yet it is also not, originally, before it becomes unleashed by a psychic fall, a decided discord or breach. n its original operation, it poises us before freedom, yet not neutrally but instead as a decisive alert to adopt a proper attitude toward living life. t firms us up in sensing the momentousness of decision; it stabilizes focus on the essential matter that choice decides, whether the wellspring of spirit come alive and awaken to joy in the living. he call to self bids us follow to a joy and delight beyond compare, to grow an attunement that carries the day, come what may. Loneliness sounds the call of what could be, spirit’s awakening in me and in it. Yet it recalls me to this timeless possibility by registering the warning that without seriousness of focus and intent, am already slipping into the clutches of that true enemy, the doubt and hesitation, the erratic fickleness that taints how am disposed toward self and life. Loneliness signals that am, for want of due urgency, already beginning to miss what by hesitation am allowing to slip away. t beckons me to desist at once from letting distrust grow mightily strong. For by slipping into disbelief in life’s buoyancy, destroy the possibility of reciprocity: that if choose spiritual awakening, life will support me. Loneliness sounds primordial want of trust. ts absence is starkly felt. nd by this absence, it recalls us to find the joy that weathers time and space, pain and pleasure, ease and difficulty. Loneliness draws one, if only
Prelude
xxvii
I
one would follow and not be so afraid, to the stable tiller of the enduring. We want a tiller, in a word: stability. Yet “stability” cannot be found in set disposition or habit. Becoming steadied in love of life can only be gained by cultivating an abidingly renewed willingness to go with the venture. For willingness alone lets life buoy me. Where in life can enduring joy be found? s there living beyond disappointment—in people, in events, in experiences and lack of experiences, in comparison with what others get and do not? Can it be found, ask you, can it be won decisively? I
Joy dawns softly, soft as the rolling tides of sea. I
Joy comes quietly like a mist that descends at night. For joy is no whimsical elation, no false hope in what life can bring. Joy, beyond the fleeting tides of the soul’s pleasure and displeasure; joy, the rising spiritual resonance of one who tightly holds to the moment of decision, lets life take the lead, and follows yonder way toward pathos and intensity. o live, truly live!
I
T
Living is no false promise but a narrow pass for which life readies me by constantly encouraging me to renounce fickleness. For the life of spirit is a wellspring of joy that alone consent to let arise.
xxviii
Prelude
Part 1
L I
ife s Song
T
he Quest for Music and Meaning
I
I
S
ong is a word formed between life and me. t yokes vibration (sound, tone, attunement) to meaning (understanding or misunderstanding), to the story sing of my life and my life sings of me.
s
one
T
I had a fitful night . . . or was I waking? It’s all muddled in preconscious memory. nce in the land between night and day, I bore witness to an encounter between two divorced women and two eager and available men. I stood conversing with the women at an art opening when the men approached. lovely, fine conversation grew and unfolded. he men were intrigued and delighted when suddenly, out of nowhere, one woman took a sharp turn into negativity and bitter complaint. he other quickly followed suit. It was eerie like the stuff of unreality: what were they thinking, what were they up to? tartled, I was taken aback but watched as they groaned and contracted, labored and strained, and worked themselves up to an uncanny pitch, as if to show off their proud complaint. t highest pitch where loudest they screeched, each seemed to melt into an uncanny discordant unison as if she ascended into ecstatic mystical transcendence rather than disintegrated into a frightening fusion of unseemly tone. It occurred to me, the way only a witness sees without intellect’s dissection but in a moment of pure intuition, that the men would hightail it and run. nd so they did, so unbearable is woman’s negativity to man. hunderstruck was I next, as the waking dream progressed, for the women were not even startled by the men’s departure. hey did not hear their own negativity! hey did not let life’s soundboard echo their tone and embodiment, they did not allow life’s fertility to plant the seed of question, stimulate, and quicken wonder at how their “song” plucked no resonant chord in others, and thereby teach the art of begetting. Instead they burst out in boisterous laughter. Yes, they felt confirmed in the confidence of newfound victory and belched out all manner of ridicule. t the heart of it lay their conviction that men—all men—were cowards who turn tail and run the minute a woman grows deep and strong. hey believed their venting was deep; they mistook themselves for innocent and proclaimed men guilty. he two men, they cackled, couldn’t bear them, they were too mature, too radical, too smart, too intellectual, too deep for T
T
A
T
T
T
A
A
S
T
A
O
Fitful Dreams
A
A
D
T
N
N
S
A
the men. nd they let their disgust at the “wimpiness” in men grow large and occupy hours of talk and complaint, complaint and talk. Wondrous, oh wondrous moment! witness voice spoke unto me and it said, “ trange, strangest all, it never occurred to the women that they acted from power rather than timely disclosure.” ever did they wonder at what “could be,” at what was granted, and whether they let the jewel of possibility drop and shatter upon the glutted up “won’t” of an undiagnosed turn into negative self-assertion. Was there something hidden, something uplifting, something that lay in wait to be realized, some seed of possibility that may have brought them into intimate dialogue that lovely night? Could it occur to the self-confirmed heart with its clogged ears and colored perception that the men may not have flown from the substance of the conversation? Men face fierce battles with one another, so it should not be so easy to believe they cannot stand up under fire-y disagreement. o, it never occurred to the women that their negativity came out first before radical politics, like two twins fighting in the womb, and negativity won the day. When negativity battles first out of the womb, then does not any subject matter, radical politics or no, prove but the outlet into which negativity vents and flows? hen I asked myself, What’s in a song, what song will my life be, out of what deep song will my life arise and bode forth? Will the onslaught of negativity rise up from hidden tonality and sully everything I do and say? Will negativity color my perception and dominate my feeling life to such an extent that I will overwhelm each and every field of action and then wonder why I sent all the others packing? o we, as women, dive into negativity and dress it up as respectable strength? It’s easy to channel negativity into political diatribe. woman can gain a lot of mileage in life from those who want her to be politically radical and yet never get beyond factionalism to genuine accord with self and life. What song am I? What song will I let life engender in me?
S
ife Is ong
L
2
t o
Life is not static; it is not a brute thing lying about before me. Hardly do we have a rich conception of life nowadays in the modern uropeandescendent world. We face time but not life. We do not see time as connected to life’s passage, save in the most diminished form as fleeting passage. hough hours and days do not merely pass but deliver unforeseen constellations and emergent shapes seeking our response, we nevertheless think of time as a neutral medium, an inert sequence with no pattern or order, and nothing living within it. f we are honest, time, as we ordinarily think of it, is not understood as a “medium” of life at all. nd yet life is a medium; it is the medium of our growth. t is not, thus, a neutral thing, like a dish or a machine. What happens to me in life, contrary to the ordinary, flat-footed view of time, has an intelligibility to it. y life is not that of others. he lives of others are not mine. o one lives the same life as any other. life is singular. We are not born standing before a stripped-down “medium” we call time, a blank page. We are born, rather, to a journey not simply of our making and yet unique. he idea that we stand before a reality that is deaf, dumb, and brute, rather than living, struggling, and intelligent, holds for us a peculiar, though false consolation. t enables us to entertain the twin illusions of agency and control. We think we are agents who carve out some brute, inert datum—life—according to our own image and liking. Yet it only takes the most minute attentiveness to discover that, in and before life, we face a much more difficult task than controlling what happens. o wonder we find life so fascinating and yet so terrifying! Wondrous, for it is no brute thing but rather engages us. (Every child knows this.) errifying, for it claims us for a fight, the whole nature of which we can hardly anticipate by concept or imagination, though we intuit the claim. (Every adult dreads this.) Life—which cast me into existence without my consent—threatened me before was born with having to exist, to pass through the horror of the birth canal, shockingly receive breath, and painfully enter this I
T
N
N
I
T
A
T
M
I
A
I
T
E
w
Life and the Fight for Word
I
I
A
I
M
M
I
T
T
M
O
I
M
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
T
I
atmosphere of mortal existence. Life looms large before me, calling me, and tremble before the terrifying intuition of a second birth, through another unknown and utterly dark passage even more horrifying than the first. Yes, we are terrified of second birth. his is why we fight life, you and . For life knows that alone must make that passage if am to find my heart’s truest wish: freedom and joy, unspeakable delight in the living. But like a scared little child, want to venture life and come out unmarked. Life, we know from primitive intuition, is struggle. ll beings realize biological life through struggle for life. We observe this in all of nature. Yet it is equally true for spiritual life. We intuit that long before we observe nature proper. Having been given life breath, biological life, which even as babies we must struggle to hold on to, we enter physical life facing a new order of task: to come alive spiritually within life, to breathe from a deeper breath still. t is no accident that when we take a serious and unexpected blow from life, even where we suffer no physical harm, we nevertheless feel with every fiber of our being that we have had the “breath” knocked out of us spiritually. hough life goes on and am living physically and functioning by all physical standards, find that cannot bounce back and breathe, truly breathe or be the free and lively self know the self to be. y demeanor lacks the signs of the true self which, though they may not be contained in a specific set of traits or behaviors, form the very marks of freedom: breath, living breath and spontaneity. Unimpeded freedom eludes me. Life is not mere physical impulse and breath in us. uch more than this, life has two primary dimensions. Life is both the active medium of self-birthing and a quality of living that must win on pain of that birth. How we neglect Life, ur Great other, for want of control over time. Rare indeed are the moments when we understand that to want to control time is to trample right over other Life. We seem to take a false start in life. When we are not busy confusing life with a brute, sequential view of time—and trying to stop time in order to dodge life’s requirements—then we are frantically confounding life with world. he world may, at times, need to be warded off in order to greet life and its bidding. Yet the world can also serve, at other times, as life’s messenger to jolt us into living. he world may be stopped insofar as it holds sway over me, but life cannot be stopped. Life lives. Live gestates and hatches new life. Life comes to me. Life abounds all round. “am” amid life.
S
ife Is ong
L
4
I
I
You and stand in and before life at the intersection of sound and meaning. How am attuned decides the tonality of my embodiment, this have said. Yet the quality of tonality depends, for us, on meaning, on whether we can win through to understanding the nature of our suffering or whether we break down into misunderstanding. ong, for human beings, is not mere melody; it is word. neither speak word, save out of the tonality of my attunement to my life journey, nor find word, save through letting Life impart her wisdom and understanding to me. nd that is why the quest for the self is a quest for meaning and the quest for meaning unfolds in living life. We think we are the song writers rather than the song to be formed and shaped by life. n believing that we shape time, we believe we shape the self who conquers and masters time. But Life is no brute datum and ime is not lacking in punctuation, the way a song is not merely noise but articulated sound spaced by tempo and cadence. Life shapes me, though can resist the shaping. nd if resist, then the tone of my song will be “dissonant” and the “meaning” of my words off target. Harm of all harms! y words will express the falsity of my failure to bear life well, and the influence they exert will be harmful and distorting to others both in tone and in meaning, form and content. Words that profess deep significance, oh wondrous dawn, Life labors to bring to birth as the very song am meant to be. I
I
M
A
I
T
I
A
I
S
I
I
Life is a name for one face of God. t names the intelligence that performs the spiritual midwifery of turning us upon spirit, to awaken and come alive in our richest possibility. Life delivers us to self-knowledge and intimate understanding of the meaning of our lives.
L
ife and the Fight for Word
5
Primitive Aloneness: Our True Home
A
piritually understood, we face life alone. Vaguely we know this. t times we know it sharply, and yet life requires that we face aloneness and embody it as our truth rather than constantly flee from it until it catches us in occasional moments when we are unable to escape its claim on our existence. t is our task, as creatures endowed with freedom, to choose willingly and thereby realize what, at root, we already in essence are. his means, first and foremost, that we must journey home to aloneness. he journey to accord with self is a journey to primitive solitude. hough at base am alone in and before life’s journey, must realize this primordial truth in fullest consciousness, with firm attitude and constancy of heart, and in the total way bear or comport myself in life. t is a basic task laid on us to take up this intuitive awareness so that we can stand tall as independent and spiritually mature individuals. he toughest and most difficult journey any human being has ever known is, oddly, that of journeying to where we already at root are: alone. he little sea turtle proves a great emblem of this truth. Fragile little babe, it is born alone on the sandy beach, with neither parent nor friend to guide it. Without any nourishment, without any time to prepare and grow strong, it must venture straightaway the long trek across the sea home. f it grows disoriented and ventures the wrong direction up the beach rather than to the sea, it dies its death under arid conditions—alone. here is, however, this one crucial difference between the sea turtle’s venture and ours: the difference of awareness. ur journey is not from one element on earth, the beach, to another earthly element we can call our rightful home, water, some deep and mysterious place under the sea where sea turtles go, though no human may know where. We are called to awaken spiritually. ur element is conscious entry into the life of spirit and not a place on earth. When we journey from lack of a distinct awareness of self in youth to self-awareness, we do not journey in space and time but inwardly into awakening to the truth of who we are. When we journey from youthfulness and innocence as insecure markers of youth to a I
I
I
T
O
O
T
T
I
I
T
T
T
I
S
h
t ree
A
A
Primitive loneness
I
O
I
A
I
A
T
T
I
S
vibrant and graceful embodiment of an innocent and youthful attitude, we do not journey from one place to another on earth but instead from what we realized at best vaguely, superficially, and inconstantly to a firm and constant realization of spiritual radiance. o too is the journey to aloneness one that passes, in the dimension of intensity or spirit, from a nascent yet vague consciousness to a clear and fully pricked open awareness: am singular! nd thus in its extensive reach into the world, it is a journey from a tentative and vacillating demeanor—partly dependent, partly wishing to be independent—to a rich, constant, and full embodiment of independence in the world. here is a reciprocal relation between primitive aloneness and independence. hey form a primordial pair; they are paired, yoked to each other. nd we must enter into that yoke between the two if we are to grow independent. We must abide the tension between the two. n standing alone, we become free in our whole posture toward life understood both as journey and as intensive living. Willingness to stand alone releases me, the way a bow shoots an arrow, to bear all things in life in radical openness and receptivity. nd willingness to bear even adversity with full, open bearing firms up my stance in facing myself and returns me, like the arrow hitting home, to live truthfully from the primitive font of the self. f we want to grow into that unique dimension, from spiritual babies into spiritually fledged men and women, then we must realize, however painful that realization may be, that there can be no independence in the world for us if we do not face and own up to primitive aloneness in life. For we are not, like the little sea turtle, destined to journey on earth in our natural medium; we are destined to journey away from earth into the dimension of spirit so that we can be released back to live in but not of the world. ur “medium” lies in the dimension between heaven and earth; we thrive in the tension of spirit realizing embodiment and embodiment rooting itself in an abiding return to spirit. We face a primitive terror before life. We may suppress this terror; or it may come to us as an impenetrable recurring dream. Yet this primitive terror rumbles like an earthquake beneath the surface of our otherwise comfortable earthbound existence. Contemporary philosophers have been keen to tell us that we are terrified because we hang over an abyss in life. We look into nothingness because we alone must make our decisions and find no ground outside ourselves on which to base our values and actions. t may be true that our first vague encounter with primitive 7
S
ife Is ong
L
8
I
I
I
T
I
E
I
T
M
T
O
aloneness manifests as anxiety before the abyss of felt groundlessness. Yet this hardly accounts for the depth of the terror. ne can hardly, as the philosophers counsel, get over this terror simply by becoming selfresponsible in worldly terms and accepting that all decisions prove replete with doubt’s insecurity because we are finite. We are truly terrified to face life naked and alone. Like the little sea turtle. What terrifies us is the path we must take, the journey onto which we are called, the journey home to spirit. We stand in terror before the positive journey and not simply the negative want of a categorical ground for decision. We intuit, however vaguely, that awakening has its cost, and life confirms this intuition for us. While we may not stand in a position to measure the cost before the journey, we are terrified to risk, to discover the cost and thus the true nature of the journey. We can call on an image here to assist us. he child, when it ventures its first steps, hardly conscious that it may hurt itself, ventures freely and openly. ost children play ball, ride bikes, and venture out, even where they know, more clearly and less vaguely, they can get hurt. Yet as youth gain a firmer consciousness of the world, they stumble and cease to venture forth where they might get hurt; they grow tentative and start to weigh what is worth risk and what not. hese images, like that of the turtle, can assist us if we turn away from the physical aspect of life and toward its hidden, spiritual dimension. For primitive terror does not center on physical pain and physical hurt, though fear of the physical could reflect a more primitive terror. Primitive terror centers on the intuition that we must lose the world if we are to awaken and by that awakening be released back to the world to live without protection. t is not simply that we will lose the world as we know it or once knew it. very change in consciousness entails such a loss. When lose naïveté and gain worldly shrewdness, lose the world once knew, a world imagined to be what it is not, a place of harmony and obvious intention, free of duplicity and unwholesome hiddenness. We do lose innocence along with naïveté when we lose the whole harmony of life, and yet we lose that harmony because we fail to win it back in its true dimension, the spiritual dimension of how we live, and not as we dully imagined it as a feature of the world proper. he true loss we face in spiritual awakening is not that of the world as we once knew it in a previous state of consciousness; it is, rather, loss of the world as a whole in that it cannot provide a measure for true living. We vaguely intuit, in primitive terror, that awakening is
A
T
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
O
A
A
I
I
A
O
S
T
from the world or, better, to the world. We must exit the world insofar as it is a womb, a place of early incubation and formation, a shared familial and cultural perspective, a domain of felt comfort and safety. We can hardly gain independence in the world if we do not awaken from its claim to be the ultimate ground of our being and provide the ultimate measure for our existence. he terror of awakening is thus a terror of independence. wakening and independence dwell in tandem. piritually we are babies. But babies with enough vague consciousness to intuit primitive terror and to be disturbed at night in our dreams. ne thing, perhaps more than anything specific to a given individual, prevents all of us from awakening. We want all the gains of spiritual life without the cost. We’d like to think spiritual awakening is a happy addition to life, a munificent shawl that, when added to my worldly dress, makes of me beauty incarnate. n illuminating light that descends on and glorifies me as am, curled up tight within my secure, womblike world. t’s true that one can indulge an aesthetical, fantastical, sensual relation to divine light. Yet to receive light and not awaken is to be predatory upon divinity. We should not want light without self-transformation as if we should be redeemed as we currently are and not as we must become. wakening, like all things in life, has its proper struggle and its cost. nd that cost is double: to lose the world and henceforth go naked without protection or shield. ur primitive intuition senses that departure entails return. o lose the world as measure and safety, far from delivering us to an escape, returns us to the world in naked openness. We would be all too happy to lose the world if it brought yet greater security from the threats of life, but delivery to spirit returns us to face life vulnerably and without protection. t is easy to live openly as a child who has no awareness that, when it looks down the elevator shaft, it could hurt itself. t is easy to justify all variety of psychic mechanism for self-protection once one gains an adult cognizance of the fall. But it is hard to live in aware vulnerability. t is hard to meet adversity “like” the child; that is, to be aware that one could get hurt and nevertheless bear life openly. must lose the world as anchor and compass of my existence if am to awaken. his loss may take many forms in the course of a life: family may not take kindly when die to my concept of self and emerge newborn; friends may depart when grow strong; could even suffer misrecognition and be misunderstood just when have finally learned to serve
A
I
Primitive loneness
9
S
I
I
T
I
I
I
good. Yet universally it means that will lose the world as a “home,” a place of comfort and safety. will lose the protections that conformity to the worldly perspective brings. Further, since spiritual awakening never happens outside embodiment, will have to go forward in the world in an attitude of radical openness and complete embrace of life. o abide the tension between awakening and independent living is to suffer the two sides of this cost. will have to give up the childish want of a security blanket, first as want of staying in a happy, womblike enclosure and, second, as want of living life without getting hurt. For to live naked is to be vulnerably exposed to wounding and hurtful injustice. But have gone ahead of myself. o let’s step back and ask, What role does other Life play in spiritual awakening? nd why are we terrified of our other? Why do we treat her so contemptuously? A
M
Life’s Formidable Task to Wean
S
A
O
M
A
S
M
S
I
M
A
S
N
S
M
M
I
M
M
other Life faces a formidable task. For Life’s task is to nurture, gestate, and prepare this awakening to live our aloneness and stand independently in truth. name life “ other” because life weans us off each and every dependency and thereby prompts us to awaken. other Life provides us with the ultimate prototype of motherhood, for he is not so greedy as to keep us for Her own ends. o, he turns us upon the highest end. he gives us over to divine purpose and cultivates readiness to fulfill our most essential possibility to come alive in spirit. mazingly, in realizing ourselves as spirit, we venture even beyond Her reach and thus return to Her independently. We return weaned. other Life engenders the seed of willingness in us to become what we are, namely, alone before God and world, fully cognizant of and willing to bear life in nakedness unprotected. n whatever measure we forget and lose our way, in whatever measure we need still to be weaned, he will labor until the end of our days to foster our ultimate and continued growth into blessed independence. Who could not love such a devoted other as he? nd yet we do not love Life’s initiative in seeking to wean us, to be the Good other of all mothers. ur stance in life, just like the child when it must cease crawling and learn to walk, is wobbly and undecided at the start. When faced with the prospect of standing independently in a radically open reception of life, we exhibit a profound ambivalence that places us on the brink of fickleness. t a level more basic than all interpersonal relations, the question of trust arises fundamentally in my total attitude and disposal toward my life.
S
ife Is ong
L
10
I
M
M
S
A
I
I
I
A
I
I
M
I
S
A
I
M
T
I
M
M
M
M
T
T
I
I
A
S
Life dedicates Herself to my ultimate growth, in the measure that he can work to nurture such growth. nd yet it is not possible for Life to mother me where distrust and block the reciprocal labor we must undertake in tandem. n this, our life’s grand venture, we conduct ourselves in a tentative manner. hough we set sail in adolescence ostensibly in love with the venture, we quickly reestablish the safety of familial bonds. We surround ourselves, beyond childhood, with so-called friends and lovers who will shield us from our bare relation to life. We want to venture life and yet we want to be protected against life when it proves too formidable or just plain real. his is tantamount to wanting to venture without venturing. t’s as though we perform a sleight of hand on other Life Herself. We ask to venture—“ other Life, other Life, carry us forth into life!”—and then qualify the petition: “But don’t really make us venture,” as if we want to stay in the Land of ake-Believe. Yet Life is not mere ake-Believe. We’ve lost the child’s willingness to give itself totally, the way it gives itself over to ake-Believe. nd we wobble, for want of spiritual sea legs, before that deeper requirement, the spiritual gumption requisite to give ourselves with firm deliberation and in total awareness over to that much more terrifying venture, to our unique life journey and thereby over to Life, to naked reality and awakening. f Life takes us seriously in Her task to wean, how could he ever honor such false claim and inconstant petition? o become independent requires that we stand unprotected; that is, on our own. How finicky, then, when we petition other Life for support in gaining independence but do not want the risk of independence! f such is my petition, then do not take myself earnestly. nd so the true venture begins already with a fracture, a little crack in what could otherwise become a harmonization of perspectives between Life and me. For if Life is to take me seriously in Her role as ultimate nurturer, then he must foster my independence and must come to trust into Her nurture. nd yet already slip away from trust in the venture, trust in other Life, when ask Her not to take my true want seriously to become a vibrant self capable of bearing life fully and with all of my heart. set forth on such a wobbly and indecisive basis, hardly aware that my relation to Life proves threatened at the start by my lack of firm stance. begin in danger, in my whole relation to the feminine or maternal side of Life. We treat life with unfounded suspicion, as if Life were some evil
A
Primitive loneness
11
I
A
T
I
I
I
I
S
I
M
I
S
M
I
T
A
S
I
I
I
E
N
M
S
stepmother rather than the acred other, the eternal Genetrix we desperately need to wean us and set us free for independent living. ever could greater ambivalence be found than in the fundamental attitude on which we reach out to our lives, the hesitant and confused plea to be granted ultimate support even as we fix a mistrustful eye on the very one who safeguards growth. ven if do not unreservedly distrust Life, my timid hesitation predisposes me to mistrust; ’m fast on the path to a self-fulfilling prophecy. ’m primed to make Life prove Herself to me rather than to Her, and on the wrong terms, terms he, devoted other and Keeper of rchetypes, cannot accept. am a little too ready to discover that he will fail me. his feeble posture (if we could name it that) scarcely prepares me to venture forth in such a manner that could discover the true nature of Life and enter into a genuinely reciprocal relation with Her spirit. y preconceived want of setting conditions on the relation reveals a nascent and disturbing fickleness. do not approach Life, “in” the beginning, with a free and unshackled heart but tacitly, though certainly it may not have broken out in explicit demand, set forth the condition that he bring me only what deem worthy and bearable. For this request, to venture life but not have to labor from my side for awakening, to enjoy rich living but not have to win through to a proper and firmed up stance toward the journey, to gain vibrant self-radiance but not have to struggle or get hurt in the process, is mistrustful spiritual childishness. t’s like asking to ride a bike while refusing to give up my training wheels; it’s like begging to be treated as a free-standing person while weakly depend on a walker in adult life. t is the beginning of self-deception and pretense; it is the beginning of rigid hardening against Life and falling into lonely isolation. his childish, rather than childlike, way of setting forth threatens to bring our venture to a crashing halt in a great breach and unbridgeable fracture between Life and me. We can fail Life the same way that we can fail any relation. nd to fail Life is to lose Life as my true and devoted other rather than win Her. t is to fail my own awakening to and for a free and vibrant harmony with my existence. I
M
Life’s Claim on Me
S
We are mistaken if we imagine that, even as little babes, we ever lived outside the claim Life has on us, for Life claims us and it is not, as we dully conceive, we who claim Life. Life requires something vital of me: he aims to incubate and deliver my spiritual birth. am yoked to and by a
S
I
ife Is ong
L
12
I
O
S
A
T
A
T
I
A
N
N
T
T
life, the journey that will singularly bear my name. his reality can never truly escape. he distinctive struggle we face as human beings to undergo spiritual rebirth obtains in a decisive manner in relation to (my) life. For we do not come alive spiritually in some isolated womb, hidden from life and light of day, anymore than a babe comes to physical life by staying in the womb. Given that we face a second and radically distinct kind of birthing in life, exiting the physical womb does not in itself lead us to exit what may be called the spiritual womb. Just as the ancients claimed one could read the Book of God with its guideposts for entering spiritual journey from the Book of ature, so too can we look at physical birth to instruct us about Life’s claim on us for second birth. We may call this a kind of divine imprinting on ature. lthough the fetus is already alive in the mother’s womb, it knows not, prior to physical birth, that it is destined to stand in physical life and breathe the very air of physical reality. t knows not the tremendous shock it will undergo in exiting the womb and finding itself naked and exposed to physical reality. hough alive in the mother’s womb, it has not yet been tested in and by physical life. nd yet the child was already claimed by physical life even as a fetus in the womb. he mother’s womb is a part of physical life, though the fetus-cum-child knows this not save at that highly traumatic exit from the womb when it must suddenly, and seemingly without foreknowledge, breathe on its own. nd, according to the dated though symbolically vivifying practice of old, the only thing thought to help the newborn was a blow, a healthy swat on the bottom. Life claimed it first, even though it comes to know this last. For it knows the womb first and comes to know for what purpose it was incubated last; that is, it comes to know last what truly comes first—that its medium of natural formation is life. piritual birth can be imaged as like unto birth from the mother’s womb. Woman’s womb is an icon, an image that opens us up to a crucial dimension of spiritual reality. Just as the mother’s womb is part of life and yet the fetus carried within knows not that it must be given over to life whose claim comes first, so too are we born physically into a second set of womblike relations that, in truth, form a part of Life and, ideally met, serve to give me over to Life. We are born into a nexus of familial bonding and cultural formation; these comprise the nest of our second womb. nly through a distorted lens does family appear designed to protect me from Life and allege that it has the first and most fundamental claim on
A
Primitive loneness
13
T
S
S
M
I
I
I
I
A
M
I
I
I
T
me. his is at best an optical illusion, if not an outright pernicious stance. For Life claims each child from the start, not in sequence, but primordially the way a container holds all things. t stands in the beginning, the origin, before mother and father and generation ever come into existence. nsofar as family and culture can be considered the second set of womblike relations into which we are delivered by natural birth, these form part of the vaster matrix of Life. Just as the babe in the physical womb must exit, so too must we exit the familiar and cultural womb that, even as it first cradles us, cannot protect us from Life in Her full dimensions, try though these womblike forces may to assert first rights. t is only by a great confusion of biological and spiritual ends, temporal and eternal claims, that human beings come to regard other Life as the enemy of familial love. We see everything from the self-centered standpoint, all turned around backward and upside down, as if the child were a possession and not, so to speak, a great task given us on loan from forces greater still and whose claim comes before and envelops all that we do. How deeply possessive must our relation to life be, our own single life, such that we would want to make Life submit to our will and command; how unmistakably possessive we are in disposition becomes evident when the child’s life is at stake and we lord over it protectively against rather than constructively for the prior claim of Life. nd when it is a matter of myself, when am the child, how long will it take me to realize that every “tummy mommy” or, if am adopted, my “mommy mommy” (even though she is not my tummy mommy) is, in vital measure, an adopted parent or a stepparent. For dwell in Life for the duration of (my) life; and Life will make good on Her prior claim over this life call “mine” at the appropriate time and for the sake of my ultimate end. Here too, since other Life proves ideal in that he is a midwife, and cannot, as a good mother, ever harbor a possessive relation to me, he supplies the image that should suffuse all layers of this reality. Family, school, kin, culture—the nexus of our second womb entire—should, ideally embodied, serve Life. he manifold forces of nurture and care should hold together, when rightly realized, under Life’s lead and let themselves be harmonized by Her ultimate aim to release me to and for my proper end. Life claims us for spiritual birth. Her aim is to wean us off the “milk” of incubation and onto the “meat” of deliverance, off the liquid of cultural formation and onto the substance of spiritual life. What, then, is the
S
ife Is ong
L
14
T
A
A
I
T
T
M
I
“milk” we drink as our preparation for spiritual birth? f the “meat” of spiritual life entails awakening in primitive terror to the journey we must take alone to spiritual independence, then the “milk” constitutes all that we drink in as nourishment from within our first formation or cultural upbringing. other Life is our first and true mother. But we do not meet her first, anymore than the fetus meets physical life first. First in time we meet family and culture, interpersonal psychological bonding and social formation. hese, the womb of our early formation, initially mediate our relation to Life until it is time to awaken and live in a bare relation to Life. hey form the proto-breast which gives us milk. We imbibe this milk (here speak not of the milk of physical but of proto-spiritual nourishment) into our very preconscious; it suffuses the formation of our sensibilities and informs our perceptions. Cultural milk even permeates, as does physical nourishment, “bone and marrow.” Here “bone and marrow” provides an image for the formation of a proto-spiritual stance. Just as tensile strength of skeletal structure proves essential to physical stance, so too do primitive sensibilities, in the manner that they firm up our proto-posture toward life, nurture the possibility of standing on our own attitudinally without the training wheels of psychic interdependency and the walker of merely instilled cultural belief. nd this fact, that the stepparents of family and culture prepare our early proto-posture, wobbly though our first steps will be, could prove adventitious or criminal. For early formation, ideally understood, provides visceral preparation for meeting Life and growing into the intangible, and yet we can drink in along with the earthly sources of milk far too much that disposes us ill toward the prospect of being weaned onto spiritual meat by Life. lready it is evident: the work to clothe children in the sensible garments of first formation, however integral to psychological and cultural development, must ultimately give way to another kind of labor, that of spiritual edification. Being weaned off culture and onto the life of spirit has its peculiar trauma, for what once seemed “essential” to us as food will prove secondary or even unsatisfying, and the very compass by which we perceive and govern our lives will give way to whole new points of navigation. raumatic as such a transformation can be, just like the babe who exits the womb, how much more traumatic do we make the labor of edification when we feed our children a poor diet of first formation? ot everything we drank in with the milk of early formation prepared
A
N
Primitive loneness
15
M
T
M
T
E
T
T
A
O
us for Life. We drank in a few poisonous additives along with our basic nourishment. ur first disposal toward Life proves mixed and topsy-turvy, tainted by elements of sensible malnourishment and perceptual confusion of ideals. For family asserts first right and thereby predisposes us to resist the very weaning that Life must work, the very labor to engender untainted intuition of archetypal patterns and deliver us to unsullied awareness of prototype. Parental overprotectiveness (if not blatant possessive claim) and parental panic (when we venture forth in life) instill an unfounded suspicion in us and a defensive proto-posture that looks on Life as if she were an ugly stepmother who threatens to supplant our “true” mother. ll turned ’round backwards, are we, defensively prepared to stay in the womb of family rather than undergo the midwifery of Life. ypically we imbibe a whole set of false protections from the maternal influence, such as cuddly beliefs that we are not in spiritual matters alone when, in primitive truth, the little sea turtle reminds us that we have always been destined to face the terror of living life and venture second birth of our own free accord. o be born of spirit is to stand alone. Yet those among us whose cultural ancestry descends from uropean odernity have drunk long and deep from the well of paternal genealogy and taken into the whole pattern of our senses and idealized conceptions, the tainted milk of agency. hat is why we regard life as if it were a blank tablet on which we are to lay the imprint of our mastery rather than listen more attentively to primordial intuition which discloses that Life was, is, and ever shall be the nurturer who claims us first for care and the guide who takes the lead in watchful governance over our existence. uch that ill disposes and much that primes us to venture life can be drunk from the well of collective fate: most people imbibe a heavy dose of terrestrial belonging to place at the expense of realizing that we belong to no place on earth but must stand in the tension between time and eternity, between life and spirit. Culture provides a whole nexus of relations in whose safety we can seek false refuge from the primitive terror of spiritual journey, and we can do so for the duration of life, if we choose. While every culture has its peculiar gender relations, one’s own cultural relations provide a safety, for one understands them implicitly. he same holds true for social etiquette and all variety of social relations. We are raised on shared codes of conduct, shared perceptions, shared sentiments, shared suppositions and moral conventions, and the shared familiarity of employing language in its reduced function to express shared experience
S
ife Is ong
L
16
I
I
I
M
A
A
I
T
A
O
and outlook. r, even more basically, as a distinctive people we share in certain sounds and the primitive force of words in a way that no other people do. ll this constitutes a “formula,” a nexus of shared tonality and rhythm, a learned pattern of feeling and conception of world, a collective imprinting for how to bear existence. Yet it’s not the true milk of the breast of spirit but rather the formula off which we must become weaned when the time comes. his web of cultural formation incubates us. t forms our first attunement to cosmos and punctuates our experience of time-bound existence. t marks out for us, like in a collective musical score, developmental stages of change, transitional periods, affective ways to respond to pain and enact sorrow, seek joy and realize human passion. Yet culture, rightly understood, should perform the same ideal role as the family, namely, to prepare spiritual awakening. By nurturing our sensibilities, culture can open us to the reality that a steadied attunement, elevated to the right key, is a labor realized by Life. nd that is because contained within any attunement there lie two orders of possibility for the human soul: one pulls us into mere emotional sentiment, while the other lets attunement claim one for a deeper pathos, an earnest willingness to open upon the life of spirit. Culture, though we meet it first, is not first. Because it grows out of a deeper attunement that a given people intuitively hold toward Life, culture contains within it the seed power to position us on the brink of awakening to the life of spirit. nd yet it lacks power, in itself, to deliver us. Culture expresses something of spirit, even as the acquisition of cultured sensibilities alone never suffices to awaken one in spirit. However supportive cultural reinforcements may be for preparing an upright attunement, no imprinting by human hand alone can make one realize the leap of independence requisite for growth of spiritual rectitude. ore often than not we treat culture as an ultimate end and thereby transmute culture into a false absolute authority that claims us for its own. n that case, culture pulls us down into taking the initial formation of our sensibilities as an end in itself and leads us to make of cultural identity our permanent home. When it succumbs to paternal authority, culture, though it supports separation from family and autonomy in the world, nevertheless exerts its own forceful demand never to let us forget our debt to it and grow too independent. t functions like a paternal horse trainer, it calls our spirit forth to be wild and independent but then reins us in for its own ends. his is especially true where, ironically, we have been nourished on
A
T
Primitive loneness
17
T
I
T
A
A
A
E
S
M
I
T
the milk of agency. For what better way to guarantee that the child will be claimed for this world and not for spirit, than to impede its delivery to Life, the sole midwife of its genuine independence, by instilling the sense that it is already a fully weaned agent of its own in the world. o be nourished on the milk of family and culture harbors the grave danger, though not for any necessary fault of the familial and cultural dimension of life per se, that we may prefer not to be weaned off them. he personal ordeal we must all face in life alone, namely, to be weaned off the interpsychic dependencies of first formation, is crisis enough in itself without burdening it with that additional weight of a collective history of treating family and culture as ends in themselves rather than servants of Life. Perhaps the greatest illusion of agency we imbibe nowadays is the belief that we gain true independence through the natural developmental process whereby we leave family and enter the world. t’s as though family and culture have lost their iconic power to turn us upon things ultimate. Yet we can exit the familial home without thereby exiting the womb—the matrix of psychic interdependency upon the patterns of life instilled in early upbringing. Just as the physical womb prepares the child for physical birth, so too should family and culture prepare us for spiritual birth, rather than work with such dubious industry and shameless envy to “protect” children from other Life, as if he were the wicked witch of the west (and not the one to whom we stand in debt for life). nvy runs deep; it permeates to the base of our very inherence in life as if, in our profound resistance to Life, we demand compensation for having to live from the very bottom of our aching hearts. nd as children raised on the milk of envious strife to hide behind the safety of familiar relations; as children fortified on agential want of overwhelming Life and taming Her, we all too readily adopt a defensive posture and by extension a possessive or exploitative attitude toward everything that happens to us in life, the people, the places, the things brought to us and those taken away. re we so awfully afraid of the sea turtle’s plight? s the terror of standing alone to face Life so tremendous that we seek to reproduce the bonds of early interdependency as quickly as we can? s children, we are interdependent, physically and psychologically, on adults who function as our parents. his is partly due to lack of biological development and partly due to lack of a level of differentiated consciousness sufficient to make way on one’s own in worldly terms; that is, in terms of providing for oneself materially and developing the psychological capacity requisite
S
ife Is ong
L
18
A
S
to such self-sustenance. ince the human world is driven by hidden motivations of manifold kinds, human survival depends on developmental growth in psychological insight and not simply physical strength. nd so we regard the acquisition of experience and the shedding of worldly naïveté, in addition to formation of capacities like that for human bonding, as ingredients requisite to healthy subsistence. Yes, we can exit the physical home without thereby exiting the nest of interpsychic dependency, save in the degree requisite to provide for ourselves materially and exercise autonomy in the world.
I
I
M
We face a much more fundamental ordeal in relation to the question of weaning. ore often than not, having internalized the variable pattern of emotional, psychic, and physical interdependence peculiar to family life within a particular cultural form, we seek to mimic and reproduce that imprinting and never turn upon Life in search of ultimate freedom. f culture were all that supported us in the process of being weaned, scarcely could we ever gain blessed independence from the retarding effects of early imprinting. We would plainly come under the claim of paternal authority rather than that of collective maternal bonding. f there were not some other medium into which we could step back—prior to fate and family, kin and authority—that would provide support for winning free from the world’s claim on us, then we could hardly ever be truly free. hat support, of which we stand so dearly in need, is other Life. T
his is my song, my quiet refrain.
N
T
M
Life must become the trusted midwife of our self-birth and not the mother and father, the family and the culture from whence we derived the milk of our initial nourishment. We all know intuitively that we are destined, one day, to leave the “home” of our parentage but rarely do we take this intuition seriously enough to realize that we are not merely to leave home physically and in some psychological degree, only to reproduce the pattern of our upbringing. o, we are to depart the nested womb through this momentous effort, to divest ourselves of the very habit of making familial and cultural bonding the font of our being, the source out of which the “interpsychic dimension” of self-other relations springs, even as we continue to partake of these. We must root ourselves in spirit, as that is the medium of our ultimate flight, the air and breath of living life. We
A
Primitive loneness
19
S
S
I
A
T
A
I
T
M
E
I
M
A
must become transformed, shaped anew. s that is the only way we can stand tall and shine bright, venture alone and enter into a unique dialogue with Life, the Great other who sustains me, the source of living destiny who cradles and delivers me to singularity, who shapes me into the truest heart and the deepest song can be. Life is the genuine cradle, the nurture, the gestation, and the midwife who delivers the self, by spirit’s unsullied essential patterning, unto a free blossoming and a blossoming in spiritual freedom. arly formation sets for us this dilemma: we need first formation and yet the task to which we are born, to entrust ourselves to other Life, can become horribly retarded by dysfunction in the legacy and pattern we incorporate through the very milk on which we feed. here is a great personal ordeal each must face in being weaned off the whole world of heritage and onto spiritual life. Like the babe fighting for first breath, am destined to face a tremendous battle, whether or not my upbringing was good. Life claims me to fight for the second breath of spirit, to live and dwell in the true medium of my living. nd though Life Herself requires me to face the decisive question of trust or mistrust, early formation can infect my predisposition with a horrid, nascent fickleness. We must have milk, we must have nourishment. here is no way around the early imprinting of our psychic lives. nd that is why, no matter how good my upbringing, could still choose preferential love of milk over the essential meat of Life. Yet Life labors tirelessly round the clock to nurture readiness and break the will to impede my own growth and venture. ooner or later, we must give up the nest if we are to win blessed independence and awaken from the claims of our worldly mothers and fathers to live as selves who stand alone before God and all the world. ooner or later, we must divest ourselves of habit and let Life foster preconscious seed under direct spiritual light for growth in prototypical blossoming.
Imprinting and Weaning in the Animal
T
T
I
Unlike other species, human beings demonstrate an arresting want of staying in the womb of familial and cultural relations. t’s not uncommon to persist in this childish want for a lifetime. We have already noted two vital reasons for this. he first is that we suffer primitive terror before our ultimate end of spiritual independence even though it would sustain us more profoundly than we can imagine. he second is that we find ways to “justify” flight from primitive terror: we all too easily imbibe the comfort-
S
ife Is ong
L
20
A
Primitive loneness
T
I
I
I
T
I
T
M
I
I
I
T
ing illusion that we have been weaned merely by acquiring the ability to commandeer the world. Let us step back and ask, How is it that departure from the home does not suffice to make us fully weaned? Weaning is not, in the human species, like with the animal. hough offer but the briefest sketch with these remarks, and not a profound portrayal of the animal, believe it essential to note that we are neither just like animals nor can we so readily rank ourselves ahead or above of the animals in the ways we typically pretend. We can differentiate animal from human life around two markers: imprinting and weaning. n order that the animal become free, in its own way, to follow the law of its wildness, it must, in many species, undergo the two phases of early imprinting and weaning. Here, again, the sea turtle stands out for its lack of familial imprinting, in that it ventures the sea without any mother or father to guide it. ost animals, it is believed, undergo imprinting through mimicking the parent’s behavioral pattern; they gain capacities for survival developed through early forms of bonding and play but modeled for their ultimate purpose by the parent. he duck provides a lovely example in that it will follow the model of whatever being it first sees. f a homeless duck, a duck raised in captivity, tracked around behind a dog, it would model the dog and in key regards take the dog’s way as its pattern for life. here are other cases like that of the young cranes who lost their way and could not migrate without imprinting, so naturalists had to create a flying machine for them to model in order to enable them to ascend off the ground, into the air, and onto a migratory pattern. What we call imprinting typically refers to the notion that offspring acquire an imprint, a pattern or model of behavior, through imitation of the parent and through skills the parent encourages it to develop. Without this imprint, the animal won’t be able to develop the behaviors that will enable it to gain its proper freedom. Personally, am uncertain that the pattern is acquired rather than latent as the very law of the animal’s being. Given that animals have psychic structures and an intelligence all their own, and are not mere bundles of instinct awaiting imprinting, believe the pattern (the imprint) is animated through imitation, even as capacities must also be acquired in order to realize the pattern of its being. mprinting, then, is a kind of enlivening of essential pattern under proper stimulus, a vitalization that needs stimulus by a model and yet the basis for the pattern inheres in a hidden and unformed manner in the law of its natural being. he little duck, in 21
A
ife Is ong
S
22
L
T
T
D
T
A
I
I
O
N
effect, fails to have its potential to fly aroused by the dog mother, just as the cranes did in the absence of a model. evertheless, what merits notice is that the time of imitation catalyzes growth in the young, calls forth or cultivates the pattern that enables the animal to adhere to the law of its being and realize its optimal potential to live independently or wildly. Weaning, as a second distinct phase of education, delivers the animal over to life on its own. Weaning occurs at a time when the young bird must be nudged out of the nest or the animal turned away from the clan to fend for itself in the wild. Like all beings, the animal must face life on its own. nce the skills requisite to bring to the fore and operate out of the law of its nature have been acquired, the animal needs no additional formation. Weaning breaks the bird or animal of early emotional and psychic bonds of dependency so that it can move forward into life on its own and carry forth the pattern, catalyzed through imprinting, of the law of its being. think, in an odd way, the animal is ahead of the human in this regard: physical weaning marks a true break with psychic and somatic dependency in the animal. f it were not a true break, hardly would the animal be able to carry forward on its own and realize itself fully in the measure of its wildness. Weaning does not domesticate the animal but rather sets it free for its wildness. nd this is true, even though the animal reproduces the “pattern” of its species or clan, and adheres to this pattern in awakening the young in its newly formed unit or clan. here is then this oddity found in nature and the animal world: That imprinting does not yield domestication and violation of the animal’s wildness; rather, it draws forth the animal into its wildness. espite the potentially misleading fact that animals reproduce a pattern (the imprint) cultivated under early social formation (imitation and acquisition of enabling capacities), we should not conclude from this reality that they are not wild and free in their animal way, as if reproduction of the pattern inhibited them, made them mere automatons or dumb mechanisms of instinct and reaction to forces beyond their comprehension. With human beings, it is not the same. he mere reproduction of the pattern of imprinting and early formation domesticates rather than frees us for our “wildness.” hat is, for our own ultimate brand of freedom. What should shock us into utter amazement is the fact that animals are weaned not only much earlier than the human child but once and for all. When the fledgling has not grown strong, it tests the waters but shrinks back and returns to the nest. ll animals, when in their tentative stages,
A
N
S
I
I
T
return to the nest or the fold. Yet once weaned, they never come back. hey are set free. f they are runts and prove too weak, they are left to die for want of the strength to bear life alone. n this struggle, each young animal faces its fate alone. ome animals, like the fragile sea turtle, are born alone to face their very first trial of survival. o mother, save Life Herself and the inner law, the implanted imprint of the turtle’s native intelligence, waits to point it in the right direction. nimals face life no more protected from the struggle for life than human beings, whatever other endowment and guidance they may be given.
Weaning, in our species, not only lasts for a great duration in physical terms but proves different in kind from that of the animal world because we must gain freedom in spiritual terms befitting our kind. Weaning differs for us because the pattern of all things—life and death, intimacy and freedom, womb and weaning—is redoubled in us. We do not live spiritually and spiritedly because we are physically alive. We do not die merely a physical death but can die spiritually too. nd we are not weaned in the true sense that releases us to live freely in our utmost and innermost possibility simply because we acquire sufficient autonomy to commandeer the world. hat the pattern of life redoubles in us means that we cannot truly awaken to and let the “law” of our humanity blossom without apprehending it as a prototype. he possibility of realizing the essential quality of any prototype—whether it be love or justice or intimacy or constancy of heart or receptivity or graciousness or truthfulness—must arise for us awarely. We bear the special burden, as self-aware beings, of having to apprehend the ultimate “pattern” in order truly to embody it. We are destined apprehendingly (knowingly) to embody the prototype and to gain apprehension through risking embodiment (willingly and as the very quality and manner of our living). Reception of the prototype, which gives us the law for our freest being, cannot arise merely through formative imprinting. he notion of “imprint” differs in human existence from that of the animal. he law of our being is not simply and directly awakened under parental modeling and carried forth through the acquisition of basic survival skills. ven if we could declare, meaningfully, that we carry a latent imprint in our souls as the law of our being, it might be still better to say, in more free and dynamic language befitting a self-aware being, that we touch upon and carry seeds E
T
T
T
T
A
Weaning: The Human Ordeal
A
Primitive loneness
23
I
A
N
S
N
D
I
of archetypal patterns in our preconscious lives, as we are destined to bring these seed patterns forth in embodied understanding under the yoke and stimulus of ideal prototypes. Yet we also, as conscious beings, imbibe models. t’s not quite right to suggest that we are but a latent law in need of awakening. We can drink in impure, one-dimensional, or even entirely false models during early formation because we are interpretive beings. uring first formation, archetypal patterns—which arise in timeless dreams of wholeness and love and battle for the good—are molded according to that admixture of family sensibility and culturally interpreted ideals and not shaped under the unadulterated influence of prototype. Reception of a pattern through developmental formation guarantees no simple awakening, as it does in the animal, of an undistorted archetypal pattern for our richest being. or can such reception of a parental model guarantee apprehension of the prototype under which this law of our being can blossom. What we embody, on the basis of early imprinting, may include many things. Certainly we receive imprinting at the level of physical gesture. Genes may be considered a kind of imprinting, and there are scientists who regard genes in nonmechanistic ways as exhibiting intelligence in carrying forth patterns. urvival may require stimulus of these layers and even of important behavioral skills in a manner akin to the animal. Yet as noted, we model our psychic lives as we develop on culturally mediated patterns that enmesh us, initially, in the worldly ground and interpsychic space of family and tradition. o direct or unmediated link forms between preconscious intuition and spirit, archetype and prototype. While imprinting in animals may entail the offsprings’ imitation and incorporation of parental modeling, such “modeling” plays a yet more decisive and perilous role in human development. lthough imprinting involves manifold layers of development that transpire at a level prior to consciousness, it merits recognition that we also strive at a conscious level if not largely consciously for a decisive period in our lives, as we pass into and throughout adulthood, to pattern our own ethical and personal formation on those people who represent ideal models to us. mprinting (early as well late or continued) thus includes, beyond physiological and instinctive intelligence, the set of habits and perceptions we form in reaction to external and internal stimuli, the inculcated and internalized patterns of familial and cultural behaviors that assist us to “survive” psychologically (and not only physically) with
S
ife Is ong
L
24
T
T
T
I
T
A
T
T
M
A
these people, in this world, on this earth. Yet this initial intake and continued patterning of our lives, as earlier remarked, can retard awakening of the deepest “imprint” on our souls; it can distort the seed, bring it forth in mangled form, or leave it to lie fallow and uncultivated. nd it can disable or cover over our nascent capacity to receive the prototype imparted to us by our true other Life, in Her role to dispense divine wisdom. hat is why weaning catapults us, as human, into a special crisis and demands a unique kind of activity of us. o say that weaning is different in kind in the human species means, rigorously understood, that it is a misnomer to apply the term “weaning” to being taken off the baby’s bottle or the mother’s breast as well as to being kicked out of the family house to fend for oneself. Yet in another sense, these early events can be called lower reflections of weaning but only because the true prototype of weaning lies elsewhere. he first moment of true weaning (of letting ourselves be weaned by Life) occurs when we apprehend the need to drop the whole world (i.e., every worldly standard) as an ideal measure for action or embodiment. nd the “first” moment is every moment, for it is not first in a sequence but first in the sense that it places us “in the beginning” where the question of awakening and becoming self-realizing arises. hat weaning differs in kind means that we undergo it as an ordeal. In self-aware beings, weaning denotes the ordeal of spiritual awakening. t invokes a crisis of a unique order and ushers us into a dramatic transformation, a whole new order of change rather than the extension of acquired habits of survival. here is, for us, a distinct correlation between degree of awareness and capacity to choose in freedom to live in the light of truth. We do not begin ready-made at physical birth with an apprehension of the truth that our existence must become qualified by spirit if we are to fulfill our human potential and become who we are. We must awaken to that apprehension, for we are not truly free either to live in accord with or to defy the self save upon gaining the awareness that becoming the self is not only a task but a unique task. he nature of ordeal can be exemplified in terms of so-called sexual awakening which, like developmental weaning, is also an “awakening” only in a most reduced sense, if we could call it awakening at all. Becoming conscious is not yet to awaken; it only avails us the possibility of awakening. Becoming conscious of oneself as sexual occasions becoming shocked into awakening to possible apprehension of the truth that
A
Primitive loneness
25
I
A
T
A
S
I
M
I
A
I
I
I
I
I
T
N
T
T
innocence is neither given by nature nor by social development but must be won on pain of self-transformation. his seemingly developmental crisis reveals the nature of the true crisis we face in life: that we are destined to journey from lesser to more apt perspectival planes of understanding. he possibility of being weaned off natural and social process and onto an independent perspective avails itself in that crisis of consciousness, and yet we most often strive to “resolve” such crises merely from within the same perspectival plane of understanding. o true resolution can be found on the same plane and yet we have an uncanny ability to convince ourselves that the resolution to sexual crisis, for example, is simply to use newfound sexual consciousness strategically in the world. wo things, at a minimum, lie at the heart of the human ordeal of weaning. First, we confront the paradox—given by our destiny to live as spiritual and human—that we cannot apprehend any true prototype or measure for our being save by apprehending it ourselves. cannot know whether the person on whom modeled myself provides the true iconic model by mimicking the authority of his or her example. cannot be myself a true embodiment of that model save where apprehend it in truth all by myself. can, in a word, only know the prototype insofar as it is embodied in some manner on earth by apprehending it for myself. nd in the very moment of that apprehension no longer need earthly examples but am myself under way to becoming the living embodiment of the true. atters are even more tight in that can only apprehend truth on condition that renounce following any example and finding truth for myself. econd, weaning denotes an eternal passage that is required of me, the passage from dependency on inculcated habit to the birth of independence. We are destined, as human beings capable of spiritual awakening, to receive the pattern for action in a distinctive way; that is, consciously and by consent. nd in that highly dynamic sense we are to become a law unto ourselves. We are destined to have our whole embodiment undergo a dramatic and ongoing transformation beyond habit and formation. We are destined to divest ourselves of attachment to all the layers of early imprinting, all the cultural and familial patterns of our upbringing that our first incubation on earth fostered and nourished for our survival. his is a decisive and momentous truth of human existence, that we are to grow beyond all that we hold so dear and that so dearly formed us in our period of earthly incubation. nd yet it is our destiny and our ordeal that this is so or we cannot gain independence.
S
ife Is ong
L
26
Apprehension We are endowed with a capacity to receive and not merely internalize or react under passive formative stimulus. We can receive a seed imparted to us through divine efficacy or we could carry such seeds within from birth. Reception of a seed awaits the day of its possible blossoming. his reception is not, thus, the same thing as cultivating a habituated pattern of reaction to environmental stimuli. he ultimate purpose of the preconscious is not to enable imitation of behavioral patterns which aim inevitably to reproduce themselves habitually, though some of these habituated reactions clearly serve survival. t is, rather, to receive the seed that awakens archetypal possibility, the way we plant a seed in earth and wait for its growth under proper stimulus. hus we can receive seeds of our possible spiritual awakening into the preconscious early in life, though the ultimate stimuli for their growth do not stem from the environment per se but rather from Life Herself and divine governance who work conjointly to quicken and deliver us to the spiritual light of awakening under which we blossom. Reception of these divine seeds prepares our possible awakening to the prototype as prototype; that is, to the essential nature of Life and all ultimate things. nd upon awakening, new seeds can be operatively received in full awareness of impregnation as am born ever anew under the light of ultimate reality. magine, then, that had a wise mother who imparted to me, in her embodiment and understanding, the seed possibility of awakening to the true fight in life for radical freedom and ultimate virtue. myself could nevertheless refuse the seed, consciously or preconsciously, wittingly or unwittingly. For freedom defines the matter of reception. ven if received the seed at a preconscious level, could still resist awakening to its significance
A
I
Primitive loneness
I
E
I
I
I
I
A
T
I
T
T
I
T
his truth begs the question why we should ever undergo formative imprinting at all if we are to grow free from habituation and learn to act out of a freedom of action born immaculately of spirit even as it operates within the nexus of relations that comprise the human world. leave that question as one of the deep mysteries we must work out for ourselves, though clearly we must need a long incubation, as compared to other species, and yet at the same time we severely prolong that incubation to the point that we refuse to grow into freedom, our proper dimension. Let us then look at the two matters, apprehension and consent, awareness and freedom.
27
I
I
T
I
A
M
A
I
I
I
I
I
O
I
I
I
I
E
I
I
and instead willfully strive to remain immersed in an unconscious relation to the early imprinting inherit from family and culture such that live solely from compulsory reaction and habit. could hate the seed within me and entangle myself in a life-and-death battle against it. ven with stellar parental prompting, it does not follow that in youth could receive the prototype as anything other than a deeply latent archetypal seed within me, but by no means understandingly. For would lack the very differentiation of consciousness requisite to apprehend the model as a prototype, and would not thereby be ready to let the seed gestate in the preconscious and come alive in understanding and embodiment. would not let the dark waters of the preconscious rise up to meet the light rain of heavenly dispensation. Because we are destined to come to ourselves consciously and awarely, there can be for us no awakening to the innermost law of our being under the influence of mere formative imprinting. For the problem of modeling rests on that of having to awaken to and apprehend truth for myself and receive its iconic imprint. Parenting can provide a faulty model in manifold ways. ne main way parents provide faulty models of love and freedom is by default. Whenever parenting keeps solely to the level of the formative imprinting requisite to reproduce biological, psychological, and sociocultural patterns of interdependency, and nurtures no seed possibility for spiritual awakening, it yields at best limited and at worst distorted outcomes. f as a parent absolutize a limited model of bonding (conditioned dependency) and take it for ultimate love (which is unconditional), then will resist the very things of life that aim to awaken higher love in me. will hate Love when it comes bidding and not even know it. will hate Life when she tries to teach me. nd will impart to my children a highly impaired set of sensibilities that, rather than prepare them to awaken, will predispose them to distrust the very weaning Life labors to perform and the prototype of Love whenever and in whatever manner it makes its presence known. any a parent, tainted by admixture, is not a model of ultimate love, at least not consciously and consistently. nd that is why the early imprinting one receives is not a straightforward, positive acquisition that prepares me to advance, the way it is in the animal world. n our species, we face the added difficulty that we can absolutize early imprinting and cultural upbringing. o absolutize means, in this context, to take the relative medium of my incubation for the absolute, the ultimate prototype. n a word, we can prefer the comfort and safety of the known to being
S
ife Is ong
L
I
28
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
T
O
O
I
I
I
S
I
A
delivered to ultimate freedom. bsolutizing patterns of early formation impedes apprehension of the model for my fullest living. Worse, parents often foster dread of life and defensive reactions aimed at protecting oneself from life. n this they fail to model how to avail oneself of life and how to trust that there is a way to meet up to life. uch dread fosters attachment to protection and want of security. Rather than get “a running start on life,” this very attachment to hiding behind and cuddling up securely within familial and cultural patterns of reproduction would have to be shed, seen for the confusion that it is, before could grow the eyes to apprehend the ultimate model of love. n our species, we must grow the eyes to apprehend essential love in the very embodiment of others, in the living, unpredictable present over which there is no control and for which there is no prior preparation. Love has no single form that it can don. Love can come bidding in gentleness or fierceness equally as can seduction. have to apprehend the difference dynamically and singularly in this person’s act, for there is no abstract formula that can tell me, “Where fierceness thrives, there only aggression and ill motive impend.” r equally, “Where gentleness speaks, there true kindness of heart and no seduction is to be found.” ne grows the eyes to apprehend how truth and untruth unfold in the present on the basis of growing heartfelt willingness to risk living nakedly; and we grow heart through willingness to awaken to the possible apprehension not only of our truth but of our untruth as it is revealed in the present. hat is why say that as a human being can leave the particular home of my physical nurturing without ever truly leaving a nested existence. can take refuge in all the formulaic standards of my culture for calling one thing seduction and another love, but reproduction of these standards and patterns of behavior cannot bring to birth in me the eyes to see. hey lack all power on their own to awaken in me apprehension of higher love. When leave home but not the nest, not only cannot know love or freedom or intimacy in their truest senses, but then seek merely to reproduce an imprinted pattern that unconsciously carry forth. o carry forth a pattern without apprehending the nature of the pattern reproduce, that is, to take for granted the imprinted model of my heritage, places me well behind the animal. For the animal realizes its true order of independence when it carries forth the pattern catalyzed through imprinting, while human beings cannot embody a true existence without apprehending for themselves in freedom what model to follow, truth as it is disclosed
A
Primitive loneness
29
T
I
I
I
M
I
I
I
T
to them in the living reality that transcends time and history, experiential memory and formative imprinting. here is a difference between being merely a model of type (of species, culture, religion as a social institution, or human community) and imparting, in one’s acts, something of the divine seed, just as there is a difference between reproducing merely mortal patterns and embodying humanity in its divinized and truest realization. Unless the seed planted in me by divine operation—whether planted through life events or the model of a person—comes to awareness, can neither freely choose nor refuse it. cannot see whether it holds ultimate import. Worst of all, to acquire a faulty model of love entails, in lived terms, that distrust the true because it does not reproduce the pattern of my safety. By this refusal, we doom ourselves to bring forth mangled realizations, an admixture of materially distorted archetypal associations and willed insistence on enforcing either faulty conceptions of ideality or flawed embodiments thereof. Parents have a special task in the human world. heir primary task is not to imprint, for this will happen by default, but to prepare their children to meet other Life as their true parent. t is to prepare them for the living life of apprehension. t is within life and living that we come to apprehend the true nature of freedom and love. We receive the model through the living intelligence of God, and not simply by physical imprinting. God weaves events in our lives that deliver us into true understanding, if we avail ourselves of its disseminated revelation. Without depth apprehension of the nature of Life, will never enjoy the blessed independence to stand on my own and know that what to follow comes from nothing merely of this world.
Consent
S
S
S
ife Is ong
L
30
S
S
A
T
T
hat we cannot live true to the innermost law of our being save awarely means that we cannot be weaned save through consent. his accounts for why weaning is unique in kind in our species and for why it is an ordeal. ll of existence waits upon our consent to be weaned, even as Life labors incessantly to shake us out of our false consolations and dreaming states to consent to become who we are destined to be: wakeful, robust, and fully alive in spirit. Life can walk us up to the line of awakening but no further can he go. he can gestate the seed, bring it to ripening, assist in delivery, but deliver us by force and manipulation, by C-section and anesthesia, he cannot. he cannot rob us of freedom. Consent we alone
N
A
A
Primitive loneness
T
A
I
M
A
S
S
M
S
A
S
S
N
T
T
M
T
T
must. here is one thing that Life, as a dimension of divinity, concedes and it is our freedom. Yet physical weaning, though it does not deliver us to spiritual or true weaning, marks a page in the Book of ature. he fact that physical weaning (off bottle and breast) is prolonged and complex in our species as compared with the animal provides a hint for understanding spiritual weaning. Prolonged weaning is a layered image. First, it is a sign of the immense patience that not only other Life but all of creation shoulders in bearing with us until we consent to our second birth. (Children have been known not to want to come out of the physical womb; how much more true of our relation to the second womb of familial and cultural reproduction.) he whole of reality bears with our freedom and suffers the fact that we abuse that freedom by refusing to take up our proper stance in life. he animals surely suffer the tremendous fracture we introduce into our relation to ature and all things living. While we might hesitate to name their mode of bearing with us “patience,” it is nevertheless a tremendous burden on them to bear with us in sorrow in the manner that they can and do. But Life, in that he is divinity, bears patiently. Patience is a virtue he demonstrates in the character and quality of Her loving care. nd yet he is not such a confused mother that he would mistake patience for lack of initiative in undertaking timely acts aimed at weaning us off false dependency. econd, the image of our prolonged process of weaning is, sadly, a mark of our resistance to awakening, our preference for milk over meat, for immediacy over wakeful living, for ease rather than struggle, for the comforts and security of the world rather than the dignity of selfrealization. We defiantly choose unfreedom over freedom and dress it up in ake-Believe as if it were the true magic of wakeful living, which for us proves much too real. nd by this resistance we incur culpability, even though we wish not to let that guilt come to consciousness, for we transgress against other Life and all the dimensions. nd we inevitably transgress against others in the course of life when we refuse to grow into our truest humanity. n the little gap of consent—that all reality respects— we work such ungodly havoc. third, though readily misunderstood, sign imparted to us through the image of the prolonged nature of our physical weaning is that spiritual weaning is ongoing. We should never use this truth as an excuse not to become weaned off the world. here is a dramatic break when one dies to 31
I
M
I
I
O
A
T
A
O
S
the world as a measure of ultimate truth and stands on one’s own. piritual weaning is real and, just as with the animals, it marks a decisive break that sets us free never to be the same as we once were, mere creatures of habit and upbringing. ne can never turn back upon weaning. Yet it would be equally confused to harbor an image of spiritual enlightenment as a static state of soul and mind with no change, no room for continued growth. fter all, if enlightenment were a fixed state, then why would we not die physically the very moment we entered spiritual life? Physical life would be instantly superfluous. Yet it is not. hat life is redoubled in us points in two directions simultaneously: it reaches in to the full dimensions of spirit and back to life journey in time. We are destined to live out the number of our days. nd this means that, though now stand freely, the dance between Life and me is ongoing for life. nce free of the worldly standpoint, am delivered to a naked (unmediated, unbuffered) relation to Life and Life becomes the primary medium of my continued growth. t is required of us to consent again and again so that we become firmed up in our freedom and made quicker in willingness to consent to a rectified stance in relation to all that life brings. Weaning, in this highly qualified sense that includes ongoing testing, remains other Life’s eternal labor and task.
S
ife Is ong
L
32
our
Receptivity is a proto-posture, an attitude before life journey. ot to be confused with a natural disposition or an acquired and thus equally stabilized habitual tendency—to be submissive or polemical, passive or aggressive—receptivity nevertheless disposes us in the highly active sense, by virtue of its restraint, to apprehend and meet the unexpected in what life brings. either natural nor acquired disposition holds the power to dispose or release us, as a bow releases an arrow, to receive the unexpected and bring forth the new. s set dispositions they always tend to reproduce themselves, to conserve their own pattern and type, but they cannot take aim, let alone engender birth of the new (the prototype). hat is the virtue of habit or tendency—one need not think about it but can depend on such preferences of nature and acquisition to seek their own aims by intrinsic momentum and independently of apprehending whether those aims are fitting to higher ends or to what the time requires of me. isposition, in effect, serves survival in all species because it is conservative; it conserves the old. n persons it also serves the sheer want of enforcing one’s psychological pattern and will. Receptivity, in that it steps back from the one-tracked, blind, and narrowly focused, forward-driving thrust of self-determination, stands in sharp contrast to all preferential tendency to seek our own aims and impose our agenda on life. t’s not that do not will something or harbor a specific intent. Yet by suspending preferential aims under creative restraint, receptivity retreats back from agency and thereby avails itself of what is to come. herein lies its tensile strength: for instead of being a single-tracked impelling movement that knows no cessation until it collides and breaks upon a power superior to it, receptivity gains the immense though less obvious virtue of adaptability to the unexpected. Receptivity is like the bowstring that primes the arrow not by letting the arrow follow itself but rather by allowing the “target” or field to inform aim. t does not suffocate thought and will (as the agential standpoint falsely imagines) but, in suspending these from operating according to
I
T
I
I
I
D
T
A
N
N
f
Receptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled Living
I
I
E
I
S
A
T
I
T
T
I
I
self-guided aims that reproduce old patterns, it frees us to focus on the full breadth of the incoming field (what life brings). t releases us, in stance, as ready and willing to give ourselves over to the truly creative that cannot be predetermined in advance but can only be disclosed within the actual field of events. Receptivity thus avails me, in focus and attitude, of the fitting act that the field supports rather than leave me forsaken, by my own ill-conceived dictate, merely to pitch forward at odds with circumstance because my preexisting agenda does not harmonize with life’s intents. We think, quite mistakenly, that we are creative when we impose our own will on events, manipulate life, and influence historical outcomes. For all the inventiveness that such self-determination yields, it never enables the new, for we can, by our own will and agency, bring about at best variations on the pattern of our personal or collective psychological feeling. We can modify mental outlook with the passage of time but rise from a lower level of understanding to a higher and more apt one we cannot. nventiveness is not creativity, for the latter stems from a radical freedom shorn of anxiety and worldly concern. Receptivity, in that it avails us of the orientation requisite to meet the new, sustains the possibility of winning a creative response to life, ironically through the very exercise of creative restraint from acting on that which we believe, in our current perspective, will engender creativity, namely, willfulness. he receptive posture alone enables Life to deliver me to new understanding. Receptivity avails us in two directions simultaneously: in availing the self to and for what life brings, it avails one of the self that cannot be anticipated, the spontaneous self which comes to birth out of a preconscious spiritual font. o avail oneself of life (the unexpected) is to avail oneself of Life’s expectant delivery of the deep self, a delivery birthed upon condition that drop agency (an image of “self ” rooted in past personifications) and let the deep self respond willingly to Life’s impetus in receptivity. he deep self is willing, for the deep self presses to come to life. nd the deep self strives to leap, again and again, to ever more apt forms of understanding on pain of relinquishing the old, never to get bogged down in a fixed and outworn sense of “me.” pirit’s birth and Life thus work in tandem and only the “me”—insofar as identify with a self-concept, nature or preference, want or wish, in a word an agenda—stands in the way. ach time want to rest on a plateau, to retain and conserve a level of understanding previously granted, stand in danger of congealing, rigidifying, and impeding growth.
S
ife Is ong
L
34
he locus, mysterious as where sea turtles go, the mysterious dimension where inward and outward couple, so that what happens in time catalyzes new life, pricks open unfamiliar layers of preconscious seed, lets archetype arise and co-mingle with prototype, together to parent a new flowering.
L
R
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
I
I
I
I
I
hough we are given a time of incubation in the womblike atmosphere of our naïveté and limited consciousness, we are destined to be “popped open” by Life, the way a virgin, symbolically understood, must lose her protected and unaware state if she is to mature into the heart of womanhood. We must be awakened, and this means that we must grow ever willing in attitude to greet all things in life vulnerable and naked and exposed. Until come face-to-face with all of reality, am not truly living, am not abiding in reality, affected and touched while also touching and affecting all people and things. do not bear all facets of life openly and freely. Unless win through to the naked presencing of all things, bear neither willingly nor wakefully; neither, then, can courage or virtue of bearing grow mature. I
I
T
T
I
I
T
Receptivity, insofar as it is not a fixed disposition or psychological state, could be called a spiritual quality of embodiment, the way innocence or youthfulness or judiciousness may qualify our carriage in act with an essential freedom otherwise unattainable through habituated reactions. Reactions are necessarily sullied by the partiality of self-will. hough it would not be wrong to name it a spiritual quality, receptivity must be distinguished even more fundamentally from these, for it is upon condition of receptivity that all other virtues can distinguish the manner of our bearing. Receptivity is thus the true stem of character, as virtue cannot, in such unbound purity, spring from habit. t constitutes the precondition for the self ’s becoming born of spirit into the light of day and made radiantly present to the whole wide world, and it remains upon spiritual awakening the precondition for all continued blossoming, in ever more sober intensities of understanding, of virtuous qualities grown vibrantly and fragrantly potent in their power to stir redolent possibility in others. ’d like to say that receptivity is openness. Yet it would be more apt to say instead that receptivity avails us of open bearing of all that life brings with no buffer between Life and me. We must shed our initial buffered state of existence in order to wake up to Life’s true dimensions, and discover the locus where the inward font of self reaches extensively into the hidden depth of things.
35
I
I
I
N
I
M
I
I
S
N
A
I
I
I
N
I
am not nor will be, by full-fledged vigor, like unto a babe standing in the naked visage of wonder at the astonishing living, thriving nature of reality. o wonder, then, that Life cannot sustain and fulfill me, when succumb to the benighted belief that life proves lacking and refuse to awaken. For live in pitch-dark and dark my life will be, and though each life vibrates and bristles, cannot see! either its divinity nor its earthly frailty. see it not, feel it not, know it not. lack sensitivity. s an attitude that disposes us to Life, receptivity must be freely assumed. othing, in a word, ever coerces us to adopt a receptive attitude or “pre-disposal” (in the sense of prior to fixed tendency) toward life. uch an attitude is then without which, in the order of freedom, cannot be set free for my own self-realization, cannot become birthed by other Life into sober, wakeful, sensitive, and true living. What alternative, you ask, is there to receptivity? nly to impose on life an agenda, however timid, from out of our own dim agency. O
Life and the Unexpected Life delivers the unexpected.
L
L
L
T
L
L
L
T
he unexpected is ife’s refrain. ife plays its refrain to and for us, again and again. ike a mother whispering to a child: the unexpected, the unexpected. ike the promise we await: enduring delight, enduring delight. he song that waits to be born, out of the reciprocal engagement between how I meet ife and ife responds to me, will be woven around this refrain and its pregnant question: the unexpected, the unexpected, will you greet me? I am new life, the unexpected child of your delight.
I
O
T
T
A
I
Until now have spoken of Life as a midwife, as the container of living reality that supplies the medium of my true incubation, gestation, ripening, and deliverance. Yet Life also contains time. nd time we meet more like a paternal figure, Father ime, who gives ground and takes away, sends heavenly jolts like lightning bolts, stimulates and penetrates with unexpected dispensation. We associate Father ime with death, for time is the harbinger of death and the end of our days. ne possibility dies when time takes away what could have been but now is gone. We both want the future to give us the new and yet don’t want the deathlike cutting edge it brings, for before life must decide and decision severs what could have been from what is and can now be. Yet time’s no brute mechanism but
S
ife Is ong
L
36
rather the medium of divine intent. ime dispenses shapes, the shapes of what could be.
he unexpected affects us; it penetrates to the nerve of will and cuts all the way down to the felt ground of our existence in time. t delivers upheaval. For my will can dissipate like vain effort and my felt ground for action crumble like dust beneath my feet. he dispensation—the time that is granted, especially when it comes in a form feel wholly unprepared to meet or worse still as a type of suffering that seems altogether unjust and undeserved—uproots me, the way an ominous wave overtakes a boat and lifts the whole thing off its set course. hough with this exception: unlike the boat, do not merely lose my bearings while remaining intact. “ ” come undone. Life has an uncanny way of undoing my expectations and set plans, the course stake out for the future, and even the meager aims intend for a specific program, event, or encounter of immediate prospect. Life undoes me. he sea of life asks radical change of me. t asks for utmost creative adaptability. What is Life that it should undo me so, toss me about, not let me get my feet aground, give only then to take away? s Life but a fickle tease who toys bloodlessly with my heart and what happens to me? What is Life that it should undo me? I
I
I
T
I
I
I
T
I
T
I
T
O
A
T
T
O
T
n the winds of time rides the shape of what is coming, the future, the future. But Father, what did you do? ime, the Father of ime, can send a shape of what seems to come, a nascent constellation of possibility and take it perforce away before it can even materialize, though time can thus teach us a lesson that prepares us for the next shape that is to come. nd time can withhold all for which I dream like the rain that never comes. r capsize my intents and plans like a sudden torrential wind. What can be, what could be, what will be, all are gathered miragelike before our eyes, returned to dust or dispensed, all carried forth or carried away on the unruly winds of time. The future, the future, the unexpected terrifies.
Life and Expectancy
T
T
here is something absolutely uncanny about Life. he whole of living reality seems to hang suspended in a great expectancy. nd this
L
R
A
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
37
M
E
N
S
M
I
I
I
I
A
I
A
S
N
expectancy seems suffused by a great breath, a pause, an uncanny act of creative restraint and attentiveness, as if all of reality waits in perfect poise upon the tremendous, the unexpected, what will come. atural life is expectant, ever reaching toward new growth and blossoming, the seedling arising out of decay. pring symbolizes this great expectancy of new life to us. nimals, though without anxious worry, prove poised and at the ready for what comes unanticipated and without warning. n a flash, they leap up to greet the new in the measure that it demands of them. nd within the whole of this and all that did not mention, the angelic choir and all the dimensions, it seems, if we take pause, that all of living reality waits upon us too, and in a kind of special expectancy invests hope in our true birth and awakening. For a flickering moment, when we find ourselves alone in nature and overtaken by the vast wonder of it all, we almost touch on this truth. We sense it like a hidden key to our existence that merely awaits the slightest reception from us to make its truth known and unlock the mysteries of reality. t is not odd, then, that we, unique among beings, should fail so miserably in the freedom that we are granted to take pause and exercise creative restraint as the model for our own true living? f the whole of creation, metaphysically yet dynamically understood, premises itself on a supreme creative restraint, then it would behoove us to follow this intimation of ultimate intelligence, of the shared intelligence underlying all things. For this supreme act of creative restraint is refracted throughout the whole of creation, as if it were an ultimate act of indirect communication, a Love that waits in perfect patience upon our apprehension that it is Love. Life is Love. t imparts the prototype of ultimate weaning. other Life exercises creative restraint, that is to say, unwavering patience, in weaning us. he never brutally tears our illusions from us and yet it is her task to disabuse us of these impediments. o matter how badly we behave, she returns to us, even if she must, for a spell, leave us to our own devices where we prove unwilling. Life is Love; it imparts the prototype of stimulus for birth. Father Providence, watching over me, exercises creative restraint through the impeccable timeliness of when and how He penetrates our consciousness and plants the seed for our next prospect of growth in understanding. ven jolts from heaven— the most vigorous, masculine, and terrifying catalysts for awakening—are dispensed solely in ripe moments for which an opening, a reception has been prepared by other Life or, where the danger of harming oneself proves fatal, when absolutely necessary.
S
ife Is ong
L
38
S
M
A
Jolts can be dispensed in wildly creative and differing ways depending on readiness and need, sometimes once like a single-focused lightning bolt. t other times in full sequence one bolt follows after the other like thunder rolling across heaven, and all according to the shocking strength of a wise and loving judgment. other Life, if we paused to apprehend how he contains the paternal and maternal aspects that animate spiritual birth, proves no ill-begotten enemy. Life is neither a terrible, awesome, ungodly male authority raining punishment down on us nor an unbridled and erratic female whose violent anger flares up without pause, engendering empty upheaval that serves no end, neither growth nor strengthening but only the destruction of intimacy.
Why, when the child finds Life’s trembling unpredictability so intrinsically thrilling, do we know no sustaining delight in the maturation of our days? How do we become so hell-bent on overwhelming life and nature and all things? ife delivers the unexpected! he unexpected. he thrill of the child is gone, I feel only threat. ife threatens me with: the unexpected.
Yet is Life truly a threat? f Life models Love so diligently in the manner of Her weaning, then why, oh why are we so very threatened by Life? For threatened we certainly are. Remember: there is a difference between feeling threatened by Life and Life’s actually threatening us. We believe Life suffocates and chokes us. he simple fact that we do not control our lives, but instead find ourselves from the moment of birth subject to overwhelming forces beyond our rule, threatens us. We believe that being hemmed in by life forces—family personalities and cultural obligations, the historical time and place into which we were born, the events we did not ask to come and even prayed against, and worst of all the very nightmare am made to endure though told myself, in my heart, that no good God would ever make me suffer it—we believe that such forces kill off our freedom, that, in truth, Life does strive to undo us! But in the crushing sense of making us break and fall apart. I
I
T
I
L
T
T
L
L
ife delivers the unexpected!
L
R
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
39
Boxed in by suffocating habits of old, family ties, social obligations, the weight of history, the life-threatening and outworn claims of tradition we may well be, but deep in the mystery of being hemmed in by ife lies another matter, another soil for the gestation of seed.
I
I
A
T
O
I
I
I
I
A
D
I
I
A
L
We are embedded in life amid a teeming profusion of forces; we are overwhelmed by the sea of time whose currents we neither generate nor predict. nd we feel a desperation—for breath, for freedom, for the unfettered expanse of spiritual liberation—a desperation born of time immemorial, truly we know not when. (Were we free in the womb? s that why we want to go back, to enclose ourselves one again in the imaginary realm of safety?) Before we even realize, and most certainly without pause, we react in panic to felt suffocation and flail about every which way against Life’s guide. Yet is not our want of breath a mark of our genuine privation and not some specious intent of Life to mow us down? We are not born fulfilled but in privation, pierced by a deep yearning to make passage to our true place of rest in the active and ongoing birthings of the deep self into intimacy with living reality. s it not precisely spiritual freedom for which we yearn out of the primordial loneliness into which we are born? oes not breath come with birth? Will not be able to breathe when am born new? grave, grave danger lies in this existential set-up, that we are born to physical life but in privation of the breath of spiritual freedom for which we must fight. t is the danger that we can set our will at odds in a fierce and destructive battle with Life as if the only way to breathe and run free in the open expanse were to master and control life, to engender an unbending will. But can no more control the material career of events than spiritual breath can ever come from remaining caught in the benighted perspective that am the agent who carves out my future. gency sets its staunch and unyielding claim on the view that nothing, nothing else lies at stake in life but the driven battle to cut my own expanse and vie against other people and life forces who, worriedly suspect, contend for the same horizon in which to roam. n earth and from this earth-bound perspective, there is never enough expanse to release the throttled life of one locked up tight in the fortress of smothered willfulness who remains of spirit’s breath unborn. his danger, that we could set our will defiantly over against Life, proves so grave that we hardly need the added help of misguided upbringing to reinforce it.
S
ife Is ong
L
40
I
I
A
O
f we understood ourselves, we would see that edipal conflicts between parent and child are actually outgrowths (and not causes) of this more primitive question that every child must decide: whether it will see Life as a threat to the life of its will or discover that Life alone fosters spiritual independence. When it is time, when the time comes to gain maturity, must not ask: m willing to discover that all we associate with “independence of will,” rebellion for the sake of rebellion, defiance, frustrated searches for self-definition, and simple want of dominating life, are but imposters, servants of the wearisome conservation of worn-out patterns of self-invention parading about in the cloak of freedom? t would behoove us, as parents, to encourage the child’s discovery that spirit is more fundamental than will and that receptivity avails it of freedom’s growth, rooted as freedom is in a will illuminated by divine light and adapted to higher ends, the willingness to undergo self-transformation and be upraised from a hazily dull to a brighter, more distinctive perception. I
I
How misguided we are, we confound the box with the playpen, the cage of worldly condition with the cradle of life.
We meet a fundamental choice, in the face of the unexpected, either to yield and thereby receive it openly in wonder, or to resist and thereby refuse it. ither we can cultivate receptivity, on pain of creative restraint, or we can rush forward and build an evermore consolidated will that sets itself against time’s passage. We can live out that will on a forlorn battlefield locked in a contest that can deliver no ultimate life (breath) or meaning. oday, under contemporary Western influence, we are prone to develop either an erratic or a categorically dominant will. nd these disorders mark a pronounced spiritual dysfunction, rooted in the benighted perspective that we drank in with our mother culture’s milk. nd the milk A
T
E
L
O
When it is time to be weaned, familial relations, though once the happy medium of first formation, begin to suffocate and confine, culture and tradition, obligation and worldly responsibility, one and all smother and kill. h, but each time that it is time to be weaned off the lower and drawn toward the higher and more expansive, must we not see how we need Mother ife to hem us in and call us to pass where we, by panic, never ever wish to go: into receptivity, and soften, slow down, relax back into receptivity rather than lurch forward full tilt ahead!
L
R
A
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
41
I
I
S
ife Is ong
L
42
A
T
A
I
I
T
A
I
M
M
T
T
of our family upbringing may cork tight this legacy of agency. We live in an age that shows almost no respect for receptivity. his constitutes the genuine threat, and not the unexpected. o lose all sense of the vital role that receptivity plays in spiritual birth, in meeting life well, and in sustaining loving relations that traverse unfathomable dimensions is a travesty in which we deprive ourselves of an icon, a threshold to the divine wisdom of all living reality. Before we hastily lurch forward to throw off the shackles of a worn-out patriarchal legacy, let us be sure not to kill off the other, the very other of Life. For pass we must through the secret way to new growth, however deeply hidden lies the passage beneath the decayed vines and forgotten tarns of the ages. Yet though we suffer misguided direction from the faulty nexus of first formation, the source of our spiritual disorder, of that grave frustration of will, stems not at base from tradition or family. Beneath and before such cultural imprinting, we develop a confusion of will—in freedom—in our most basic relation to Life and time’s passage. t is imperative that we come to see the true depth of our freedom, for we are free in potent latency, free amid the overwhelming array of wills and wants and forces that bear down on or rise up within us, free to respond to Life receptively in trust rather than panic in felt suffocation and sink beneath the weight of forces whose power lasts only for their time. nd this odd paradox teaches us so, the paradox of breath and roaming in free expanse. o lack receptivity is to confuse conquest with breath. Conquest can fund agential self-determination, the reactionary perspective that create who am with its accompanying illusion that father the future. Yet it can never escape the shadow of felt suffocation, for Life alone can deliver me to birth in spirit and so to roam freely without constraint even as live within the bounds of what has been given. For receptivity restrains only the misguided willfulness that tempts me to bolt, panic, and suffocate but puts no dampers on any true expression of spirit. gency, then, proves an utterly self-defeating perspective. By fortifying a dominant will, it builds a barrier to self-transformation and the birth of the self in freedom. hus, in the very name of engendering room for breath and expanse, agency confines one to be forever suffocating under the weight of misunderstanding and old habit, chained to the cycle of repetition, forever butting one’s head like a goat against the border of what is given and cannot be changed. Against the future, the future—the future that did not come and the future that became present, the future, the future. gency leaves
one stillborn, forever smothered by the finite and limited nature of timebound existence in that, no matter how long or short my time on earth, never can all things be realized for me.
n lusting after the “could have been,” know no enduring delight in the influx of creative presencing. Creatively, what comes forth is born singularly, out of receptivity to and supported by all the forces that abound under Life’s supreme and uncanny directive. Creatively, what gets undone, within the womb of receptivity to Life’s maternal hand, is no mere undoing but lets this one birth come. Come. I
I
I could have written this one hundred ways or written something else. I could have, I could have—this will be my downfall, though sadly not the downfall of me and my will.
Expectancy and Meaning Could there be any greater loneliness than to flail about endlessly in opposition to life’s unfolding, shackled to the retarding perspective that Life is my nemesis? Could there be any greater loneliness than agency which cuts off intimacy between Life and me? ust we not then ask . . . For what are we expectant?
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
N
M
ot, ask, what do expect?— , a supposed agent, a will centered wholly and exclusively around its wants, who projects its own competitive aims on the environment. For what am I expectant? is a much more fundamental question than What do I, in my sense of self, expect of life? he latter makes of “me” and “my will” the center from which perceive all things, while the former includes me in the great, grand promise of Life. f all life hangs in a primordial expectancy, then too must be part of that great expectancy, too must be held in and by that expectancy, not as an invention of my own will but insofar as am contained, like all things, in and by Life, held within Her prior claim. For what, ask, are we expectant, as all of living creation hangs in a great, mysterious expectancy? I
“For child,” you may say. nd you would not be wrong. Yet how are we to understand this primordially?
I
A
I
I I
I
I T
S
A
trangely, am the very child await. am to come alive through second birth. hough live, am yet to be born anew. nd thus enter life expectant of the birth of my own self. his much we intuit. Yet it is so very
L
R
T
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
43
I
I
I
T
A
T
I
A
I
I
A
A
T
I
I
A
odd that we must flesh it out more richly. For there are fundamental things of which we are so very expectant. nd these include life and meaning. We live, yet we want life. We suffer time’s passage, yet we seek meaning. enter life expectant of life; hope that my life will be glorified and made rich in meaning. he first, the want of intensity in being and feeling alive, forms the ruling supposition of all my thoughts on our primitive yearning for radiant dignity and the temptation to confuse worldly worth with the wholeness of accord between self and life. nd it governs my concern with weaning and the need to become born anew on pain of creative restraint. nd yet there remains greater mystery to be penetrated in this terribly odd privation, that we live but nevertheless stand in privation of both intensive living and extensive willingness to embrace life as it comes. We can speak of this profound ache for life as a yearning for resurrection, to die to the old and be made anew. am the child waiting to be born. Here we can see the connection to the future in our felt privation, for that which occasions my ever intensive birth comes from the future. t lies embedded like a jewel in the nature of how fare in relation to time’s passage. nd in relation to the future, it is meaning that await, meaning that seek, meaning of which feel so desperately in need. We are born to life in expectant perplexity. hat we live must hold meaning . . . intuitively, expectantly, we harbor nascent hope, like a child. nd yet we have no sense of the meaning of it all but only intuit the promise and form the wish that it must be so. We are expectant of meaningful living, of life transformed and made full—graced with intelligibility and basked in soft summer light. o live intensively is at one and the same time to enter into mutuality with life’s dispensations. We are expectant of the sum of life plus life, expectant for the qualitative ray of life’s meaning to be cast, by supernatural power, upon life, for it is not the sheer brute fact of existence that we stand in privation but life reduplicated, life made meaningful unto itself in the very quality and nature of our living. Life irradiated and illuminated! Life lived in accord with itself! f this we hope.
O
T
O
I live. uch. First birth brought forth a cry. I live. hen as I came to consciousness with age, the ache and the cry formed into word, one word, the first baby word: Why? I live. But to what end, to what purpose? Why? My heart cries 44
S
L
ife Is ong
I
T
“Why?” lies at the heart of human expectancy. he first name. t inserts itself precariously between the untested hope of first birth and hopefulness gained in spiritual maturity. he simple cry, Why? issues forth at the heart of my relation to Life’s claim on me. t first there is the great why of all things—why is the sky blue, why the rain cold, why do people cry, why the jellyfish, why the twinkling star, why! why! such wondrous expectant why! nd later with solidified consciousness of our felt privation comes the prickly question—why, why am claimed, why must wait in such great expectancy, weary-worn and heavy, full of disappointed thirst? Hemmed in and suffocating, why? “Why,” this little word, wrangles in our heart and gives no rest. t’s like the thorn stuck deep in our side. nd almost every wind that blows something in from the future pricks it open and makes it twist sharply inside. his future withholds, withholds; that pricks me so. hat future comes and wished it not; it burns me up. his quiet “why” whose everlasting presence cannot shake makes me shout so loud, work myself up into fury and rage. his silent thorn in my side, does it not lie at the heart of my misdirected battle with Life? his little “why,” this silent “why,” that mostly feel and do not even speak but simply suffer as privation, a great unbearable poverty. t times it lies dormant without notice, yet when prickled by this or that life granting it opens up as what it is, a hidden though ever present and festering wound. s one caught in the throes of a great illness, flail about and cry out in my waking sleep, “Why? why? why?” here in my restless heart the worm of impatience grows. hough know it not, prime myself to battle Life over meaning, the when and how of its deliverance, “long before” can recall. “Long before,” this means at a level more primitive than cultural conditioning and the entire lot of happenings and events that life sends to me. y very inherence in temporal life as the domain within which consciously suffer expectancy tempts me, from the bottom of my very existence, to fight Life and seek to carve out my own destiny. hat must wait upon meaning to arrive, this cannot conceive how to bear. lack an image, a conception for this (or so think). hat life is not immediately transparent to me in its meaning, neither my life nor that of any other, isn’t this too awfully much to be asked to bear? Impatience, impatience knows no pause, no creative restraint. nd it corrupts expectancy, my own as well as the entire matrix of expectancy I
I
T
T
I
T
I
I
I
A
T
I
T
I
M
I
I
T
I
A
A
I
T
T
I
I
T
A
I
A
A
T
out, Why am I here? Whence does meaning come? Why should I be left to thirst for it so?
L
R
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
45
I
I
T
I
I
T
N
S
I
O
in which all life hangs, latently harmonious even though harmony must become patent, that is to say, born through and borne by us. We alone among earth-bound creatures, conscious of time and the future, want to know when, when will the promise come, When? When? When? We grow anxious instead of abiding, upon pause, in profound tranquility; we grow impatient instead of, by creative restraint, waiting in expectant faith. We work up a little magic and transmute “why?” into “when?” ur magic pulls all things downward, transmutes the possibility of the higher into the lower, rather than let life transform our heart and lift us up. “Why” collapses into “when.” Hopeful expectancy with its nascent though untried faith that life must be full of meaning, that the promise must come to fulfillment, deteriorates into dull and unilluminated demand, the mere expectation that life should yield to my felt need and submit to my agency and command. n a horrible, terrible confusion, born of anxiety and impatience, we think we stand up when most we are crestfallen. We think we stand up “to Life” (as if he were an enemy) when, like a willful child during the terrible twos, we adopt a combative stance against time’s passage; we think we gain our humanity, our woman hood or manhood, when we seize the reins and possess our individual life journey as if it were our prerogative to conjure the image of “our child, the future” and ignore Life’s iconic show of pause, the passageway to our genuine destiny, qualitative and meaning-filled living. ever have we fallen into darker confusion or a more supine state than when we revolt against Life, rise up prematurely, and attempt to stake our ground upon hard will and human ambition. We are like the rash sixteen year old boy who runs forth into battle, oblivious to the truth that he is not grown, tested, tried, and true and has yet to find a leg on which to stand, but who insistently rushes forward only to be cut down instantly and before his time, with no lesson from life to be found. For it is a fundamental and obvious truth that no enduring meaning can be built on anything fashioned by human hand or mind. he so-called meanings that give to my life experiences prove flimsy and contested, plagued by doubt and uncertainty, a wisp of the wind, useful perhaps for a time in the project of self-determination but ultimately weak, lifeless, and impotent to assuage the burning ache, to remove the thorn in my side, reveal that am on the right path and render my life journey transparent to me. he meanings invent never disclose to me how Life is or why must undergo life; they never unveil the mystery that Life is no mere whimsi-
S
ife Is ong
L
46
A
T
S
S
I
cal and empty-headed thing, leading nowhere and powerless to deliver sustaining understanding. Life is no witless woman whom , all puffed up in bloated “manliness,” must take by the throat and force-feed on the meaning and substance he lacks. he only meaning which holds up, the kind of meaning for which we ache, is that which is received. Received dispensations alone illuminate our lives and reveal the ultimate end to which Life, whatever specific events he brings, strives to deliver us. ll else is dust in the wind, a flurry of impatience that riles everyone up for a time into a fleeting moment that seems, just then, full of ultimacy but dissipates as quickly as it came.
T
A
gency is loneliness. he shadow of loneliness unfurls its raging emptiness the more fervently I build the house of “me” upon the illusions of agency.
I
A
I
T
E
A
gency—the perspective that am a doer who carves out the future and invents the meaning of my life, who weaves narratives out of experience and controls thereby my destiny—is a vanity born out of impatience. We are impatient for meaning to arrive, and so we prematurely rush forward and invent meaning where instead we should wait upon disclosure receptively in hopefulness and forever if we must. nduring meaning, trustworthy meaning, truth and illumination do not come ready-made in life nor do they issue from my command. hey do not even descend from on high at my behest or perforce by the zealotry with which advance my woeful petition. mong all earth-bound creatures, we alone do not know how to wait in patient expectancy without expectation, without designs upon the future, without embarking prematurely and in the wrong disposition on a quest for meaning. We alone do not hold into the great expectancy and await, in the measure of our kind, in pure receptivity the truth that can come only in the form of granting.
We are born expectant. Gimme, gimme, gimme: meaning, a word, an answer. Yet our expectancy cannot be sated abstractly. o be expectant that my life can become rich and meaningful is to expect that “ ” be made sensitively rich by life journey. he truth we so deeply intuit—that am my life I
T
L
Expectancy and Miscarriage L
L
oneliness echoes a deep want, born of privation, to enter into intimacy with ife and let ife unveil Her secrets to me.
I
L
R
T
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
47
A
M
I
and my life is me—awaits realization. t is a truth that does not come prefabricated but arrives first as expectancy, as hope. Life is concrete. We never battle for “why” in abstraction from the specific constellation of events (a life) that other Life sends. We intuit that self-birth and illumination are reciprocally bound, and so we rightly believe that who we “are” to become depends on how we live our lives and that whether our lives prove full of significance depends on how we “are.” nd it is this very intuition that tempts us to forge ahead impatiently on misguided ground, thinking that we must “shape” our lives in order to “claim” life and “have” meaning. We seek to possess our lives and fill our lack rather than enter into mutuality with the hidden force of Life which speaks through, beckons within, and shapes the tangible specifics of our individual lives. We never pause in a moment’s wonder to ask whether it lies within our power to give shape to our lives. We never ask about the mystery of “the shaping” that lies beyond first formation. Who shapes life and how is shaping possible? By what hand could ever come into coincidence with my life journey?
I
It sounds far too esoteric, not the least concrete. Why should I entertain such unapproachable questions, why not, rather, believe in agency, why should my own agency not be the deepest ground of me, why should I not trust my own conscious will, stand on it, and advance, can I not make meaning of my life? Why, why, why? (Keep your sharp and contested judgment to yourself, woman, don’t tell me that agency is miscarriage, a miscarriage of our great expectancy. I am no wimp, I am courageous enough to stand up to life.) Why should I not empower myself and seek to shape my future, to imbue it, the way an artist approaches clay, with form and meaning, the meaning I wish to make of it? If I am ready to shape my life, then why judge me to be, like the rash sixteen-year-old boy, unprepared? For what could I possibly be unprepared?
M
S
ife Is ong
L
48
I
I
I
t would be better to ask this question earnestly, openly, in receptivity than to parade about cocksure and conceitedly, on the defensive and unyielding to any answer other than the one have preconceived. speak to men and women alike, for we are all misguidedly “manly” and rife with the false bravado we muster before other Life. We know that for which we are expectant: fulfilled living, wholeness, accord, ongoing fruition. Yet when, upon bold venture, everything comes to naught and despite many
I
I
gains the ultimate meaning of life, Life Herself, eludes me, then for what was by bravado’s claim so assuredly prepared? Was not unprepared to apprehend and ill-disposed to win the very thing for which stand expectant? I
uch.
O
T
We are never prepared for the birth of meaningful life because it is the birth of “I.” We are never prepared for Life’s true concretion because Life must undo me as I currently am and mold me like the clay in order to gestate new life and bring forth this existence called “ ” with all dimensions breathing freely. here is one terrifying reality for which am unprepared, so shocking it is to my conscious sense of a self—which prize like a jewel as if were once and for all time fully formed and completely independent—and it is this: I
I
T
I
O
uch. he second time.
Breathe. t is time to breathe.
I
Life has its own aims and intents for us. This, I have been saying, saying as in a song’s refrain. o say that Life is an intelligence and not a brute thing means that Life aims to shape me. ot into something else but into the ever richer and fuller manifestation of the singular dewdrop of spirit, the deep song that in deep potency am meant to be. What is it that Life asks of me as a precondition for being grown up? t is trust. Receptivity is sustained by trust. n this trust, Life asks change of me. o entrust ourselves to Life is to let ourselves be changed. Yet speak not of any order of formative change but of radical change or transformation. o entrust is to let ourselves be undone and created anew. his possibility of transformation is given to us by virtue of being human; we are destined to grow up and not merely walk forward in life. t is thus our task, our essential labor, to work from our side to divest ourselves of lesser and inadequate perspectives in order to ready ourselves to be raised up to entirely new orders and more apt planes of understanding. We must enter into the creative birth whereby truth reveals itself upon condition that each willingly renounce all preconceptions of “me.” Contrary to all its protestations, agency grounds itself on a posture of aloofness. Before Life we sit on the horns of this dilemma: that we cannot understand the meaning of Life from within our initial forms of T
I
T
T
I
I
I
I
N
T
I
“I” am the material for the shaping.
L
R
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
49
I
I
I
S
T
understanding, the perspective that we are agents in a world of other agents all fighting one another for a little space in which to breathe, the psychological habits of our upbringing and first formation, however much these aid survival. o seek understanding is to want life to hold meaning and not merely prove meaningless. till, we cannot understand the meaning of what comes in life on the basis of our current level of understanding, the light that obtains for us now. f we are truthful with ourselves, we must admit that we do not understand the most elemental facets of existence: pain, suffering, why these events happen to me and not to others, why life seems so unfair, why in fact cannot breathe. Why these parents and not those, why was born on such rocky soil and not to a pleasant loving home, why must suffer among siblings who do not understand me, why am given no true teacher to raise me. Why, why, why?
I
I
I
I
T
T
T
I
I
I
S
A
I
I
I
I
Life aims to give me true insight into its nature and intents, yet am, as the child of first formation, not able to understand Life until let myself become attuned to it and thereby let it foster growth of the capacity to harmonize with and apprehend its true dimensions. Life is not immediately transparent to me because, like all things mysterious, Life has its own depth. Whether Life is evil or good, loving like a mother or a miserly father, communicative through archetype and prototype must apprehend for myself. nything short of living apprehension and will not distinguish the living truth of things from how things seem. Life looks threatening, and yet he is a godsend who attentively hems us in so that we may turn upon our ultimate freedom. Yet in order to so apprehend the inward depth of Life, must change. must grow deep, take root in spirit. must grow up, reach into the heights. must grow like the tree, deep plunging roots that can sustain the branches blossoming to great skyward reach only then to cast their bowing cover over earthly life. From depth to depth, this alone is how Life and can truly meet. We do not begin with the ability to apprehend the essential heart of Life. o gain such apprehension, we must be changed, transformed in all our sensibilities. We act as though Life begrudges us meaningful existence. he meaning of (my) life is not withheld from me begrudgingly by an old, miserly god, the way one covets knowledge and only lets others know if it suits one’s advantage. rue understanding is no mere idea, though it can express itself in word; it is not mere feeling, though it is born of pathos; and it is not an invention of will and fantasy, though it speaks through image
S
ife Is ong
L
50
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
L
R
I
I
I
I
I
I
S
I
S
I
I
I
I
A
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
and wonder. t must be embodied. How live determines what order of disclosure am able to receive; Life’s disclosure reciprocally occasions yet new growth in understanding. We do not usurp Life’s initiative in nurturing growth because Life is begrudging. We usurp Life’s lead because we are terrified of the terrible truth of concreteness: that “my” life is never “mine” save paradoxically by dis-possession. f am to become at one with (my) life and if (my) life journey is to express Life’s reality singularly, then “ ” must first come under Life’s prior claim and let Life enter me, transform me, deliver me to accord with what has been and what will be. Life and self must come into dialogue: reciprocal transparency and accord, if a life, this unique life, is to be lived meaningfully and met in consonant rapport. By dominating Life, deprive myself of ever being made transparent to myself in the depth of my deepest preconscious archetypal want and grown, under the model of Life Herself, to embody prototypical virtues and strengths. never unlock Life’s secrets or get my vital questions answered, for Life cannot be manhandled. Her mysteries come unlocked on condition that avail myself trustingly of their reception through the very transformation of me. Life does not teach like a lecturer who stands behind a podium opposite me and presents a whole system of ideas objectively and unaffectedly so that can weigh and choose which find pleasing. am not separate from life, observing it at a safe distance from which get to decide whether or not to assent. t a primitive level, Life involves me in the lesson whether like it or not, over this have no assent. hat to which can consent is whether will enter into the engagement truly or hold myself aloof, whether will receive or fight lesson. uffer the events Life brings will, and yet can undergo them fruitlessly. can ignore the lesson, not let it affect me, not allow myself to be moved let alone changed. ince my current level of understanding cannot provide enough light to comprehend this illuminating prospect, it is who must change in order to receive it. t bears repeating. We lie to ourselves, we claim we want to change, to shape ourselves. But this means: we abstract from Life’s creative midwifery. We stand back and control the order of influence that Life has on us and thereby decide whether and in what measure we will change. Yet this posture of bad faith, in which hold myself aloof from the shaping, means that in whatever way admit change, it is never truly of “me,” of the basic core psychology and belief that use to stabilize my identity. t never involves a radical 51
I
I
transformation of heart. am thus never willing to admit growth upward. may adjust, modify, tinker with my ingrained habits in order to press on in life. But up, never, never, will let myself be drawn upward and made anew.
How we constantly bemoan our fate and bewail what Life did to us! When will we pause, what order of shock will it take from Father ime’s lightning jolt, to engender pause and halt in wonder that the meaning harbored within events could not be received because refused, from the bottom of my heart, to undergo a transformation, head to toe, of perspective? t’s mindless impotence to fight Life. o ultimate meaning can descend where no reception may be found. cannot be raised up when cling fast and never let go the deadening weight of outlived understanding. Life’s task to deliver me cannot be carried to completion. he more secure try to become in the habits of old, the more staunchly stand against new birth, the more fritter life away in the perpetual childishness of demanding that ultimate meaning come to me as am, am, am. nd ever shall be—defiantly unwilling. I
A
Miscarriage and Unwillingness
I
I
I
T
I
N
I
I
I
T
L
I
oneliness is the lie I tell myself in order to remain aloof, holding myself as agent to be in prideful possession of life and destiny.
I
I
N
I
S
I
ife Is ong
L
52
I
S
N
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
O
I
T
o usurp Life’s lead is to miscarry the very birth of me. By dominating the field, miscarry the very dawn of the understanding that could carry me forward to escape by narrow breath shipwreck on the reefs of a broken heart. ddly, though seem to walk forward in life, do not truly go forward when do not go up. o, go round in a barren pattern of repetition. his proves another of Life’s dark yet illuminating mysteries. find no meaning in what happened but only pain and the stinging question, why? interpret the present by the past and win no new answers but repeat only those tried before and found wanting. o start to slip and slide, lose my footing in life journey, decompose and dissemble. Powerlessly butt, butt, butt heads with life. ever does a light dawn, never do answers come when descend into the darkness not of the mystery of life but plain, brute stubbornness. n an odd way the impatient ambition to rush forward in life moves me back, back to remain caught in the chains of confusion. Until finally petrify, turn into a statue of stone,
the way people do in myth when they look back, only back, back at the same level, just back, lost in the dark and cold.
T
We are terrified to become willing. o will my own will differs in kind from receptive will, from becoming receptively willing—expectantly primed in sober restraint—to embrace life. We are threatened by life because Life aims to have us relinquish control over the reins of journey. Life has the lead, and we must follow Life’s guide. Life delivers the unexpected, in this lies Life’s creative (paternal) rather than nurturing (maternal) aspect. eath to one’s willed agenda is not, as we imagine when we fight against Life, the suffocation of true willingness. he latter is born in receptivity, we do not begin life with true willingness preconceived. s psychosomatic beings, we enjoy strands of impetus and instinct and feeling and want and this and that, all bound together, fluctuating hither and thither from day to day, first wanting this, then the opposite, then taking it all back. Yes, we are bundled wants seeking to enforce their aims. nd our will can congeal around such aims. t base willfulness is simply the preservation of the “me,” the bundle of stuff we imagine ourselves to be. his is a pretty way of saying that we dupe ourselves, when the worldly aims of human existence seek their own preservation, by pretending that identification with them forms the ultimate ground of “me.” Yet to die to our preconceived agenda is not to die to the self ’s true willingness; it is, rather, to die to want of assuming the lead and so to awaken to the unadulterated possibility of entering into the source of creativity. T
A
A
A
T
D
U
nwilling in the name of willing, this is the catch.
N
A
gency is miscarried expectancy. o greater loneliness can be found than estrangement from meaning-filled living, birth and rebirth, the stuff of living expectancy.
Life rises from the font of spirit and yet the prospect of entering into new life greets us from out of the future as the unexpected. For my relation to what Life brings works my ripening and gestation or it drives me into pitch-dark obscurity. I, I am the material for the shaping, the shaping.
T
A
Pause lies at heart of the matter. ll reality waits on me to pause. o let life gently peel my fingers off my current assessment of me and cradle me
L
R
eceptivity and the Quest for Meaning-Filled iving
53
A
unto the darkness of one as yet unborn. ll life bids me in patience to wait, to pause, to breathe deeply and let go, so that can receive new breath and come alive in spirit, grow rich and ancient in wisdom and beauty. I
Will I pass through the darkness and let reality disclose its secrets to me? Will I name all things and let them blossom forth in word? Will I ever become song resounding forth as one bright “yes”? r will I cry, cry, cry and never speak more than the baby’s first word:
O
why?
S
ife Is ong
L
54
ve fi
Loneliness and Deliverance
A
O
A
T
T
T
T
I
I
I
I
We suffer loneliness because we live in time. f were somehow, as we image the angel, already complete unto myself, vibrating, resonating in one eternally sanctified moment, in an ongoing process of being graced and redeemed, then what could be lacking? How could lack? How, in a word, could suffer? We suffer because we are temporal, conscious of time as the medium within which we undergo life. o suffer means, in its archaic sense, simply to undergo. he first and most basic way we intuitively sense that we are fated to undergo, to be the ones who pass through, is in relation to time. ime, it seems, can remove us from ourselves equally as it can be the medium of self-delivery. ime, yes, time pertains to whether we meet others or become estranged from self. ll this we intuit and, even as we may not understand that intuition originally, we soon discover in the course of life that time, the events delivered up by my life, can and does alter me and my friends, though not necessarily in the same way. Friendship can break over these alterations. ne may stumble where another moves forward. deep estrangement from self and others, rather than harmony and communion, could open wide like an unbridgeable chasm.
T
U
ndergoing terrifies us.
We fear time’s passage as much as we desire to venture forth in life, for never have we been devoid of the intuition that whatever time delivers as the shape of what is to come, the good and the bad, it delivers us over at heart to decision. (What’s in decision, what’s in passage that we should dread it so?) ruly, if we understood our intuition, we would know that it marks off the core matter for life journey: merely to undergo (suffer) time’s passage is not the same as to pass through life well. We must become capable of first birth, the first cut that delivered us to life, a life, this life. Merely to suffer passively is not to receive (my) life as a journey unto second birth or find the qualitative way through and the fitting act which gathers all into communion and
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
A
A
A
S
I
A
delivers me to radiant accord with self and journey. Neither does active agency receive life’s unexpected beginnings and endings, twists and turns, new seed and delivery of understanding. When we are disposed by agency to rule over the future, we childishly imagine that we fear the future because it can unjustly and without purpose deliver the bad when we deserve only good. Yet we do not quake in our boots because life can deliver the bad equally as the good. We quake because we lack control and must nevertheless find the passage through, the way water finds its way through the canyon gorge. We must wait, in creative restraint, upon the parting of the waters. nd this requires impeccable patience and vigilance on our part. t requires that we awaken in faith and grow a proper relation to journey. o squeamish are we before the reality that we do not decide as we wish—what will be—that we adopt the posture of agency: ambition with its false bravado. We strive to control life by taking hold of decision as if decision means to dictate what happens rather than find the way through. We want the power of freedom to ward off life, regulate the flow of time’s passage, and defeat the unpredictable. nd for this very reason, we fail to meet life’s unexpected blows and let them steer us onto the path that leads to deliverance. t the heart of the question of lonely estrangement lies the question of passage. nd this is the question of destiny. Wedged between my relation to self and my relation to others stands not the question what will be but how . . . how will I fare in and throughout time’s passage? Contrary to the popular mind-set, destiny is not fate. t does not refer simply to what happens to me, whether life sends me what want or something other than planned; nor is destiny rooted in the agential belief that “make my future.” Destiny is quality of passage. will suffer a life one way or another. will undergo. What lies at stake is the quality of that passage, the character of the undergoing. What most endangers me, when fixate on what will be, is estrangement from life, my life with a little “l,” my journey. t is possible to suffer fate—the things that happen and that circumscribe the nature of my temporal journey—and nevertheless suffer uncomprehendingly. t is my task not to carve out a so-called destiny (future) but to decide the quality of my passage. Can’t you see the freedom of it and the unspeakable relief, not to decide what occurs but instead to devote all energy single-heartedly to wholesome seafaring? Destiny is that quality of passage which delivers us unto new growth in understanding.
S
ife Is ong
L
56
L
L
E
L
ife, quixotic, life. Can’t we come to understand ife, its underlying divinity, why it sends this rather than that, and why this particular life is mine and not some other, without having to undergo our own individual life journeys? For better or worse, we are married to life. ach passes through her or his life to ife. I am held in and by this question of my life sendings, why these and not those? Will I be carried through or will I bolt, freeze up somewhere along the way and sink into battle-worn and weary complaint that life treated me unfairly? Will I never get beyond my baby word, why? and remain stuck spiritually in the “terrible twos,” caught in the testy but resounding “ o, no, no, I am unwilling, ife, don’t send this to me!” L
I
T
I
I
I
N
f cannot let Life gestate and bring to term new understanding from out of the material of my life, then will fall into discord, belligerence, misunderstanding, and a most acute rupture with Life as such. o grow estranged from Life, a reality far worse than not understanding, is to find one’s life devoid of ultimate meaning, our most basic nourishment. t is to collide upon naught and sink back into that dark hole of first birth, now inauspiciously postured before the question, Why was born?
L
T
S
S
E
T
I
he sands of time, the hourglass, shadow and light, the days come to pass. verything merely of time comes to naught. ooner or later all my projects have their time and fall apart. My successor never holds up what I did. ooner or later what once nourished no longer sustains. he shapes of time, the sendings, even the shapes come and go! If I do not enter into the shaping, if I hold myself aloof, then nothing endures in the sands of time. I find myself merely in a wasteland, a desert, with no ultimate nourishment to be found. Why do we never wake up to it that a shape of time can nourish for that time only because it is its time and not because it contains once and for all, as something merely of time, sustaining life, the water of ife. What sustains within a time is never merely made of time; it is, rather, the granting, that it was granted, that in being granted by divine hand there lay in wait for me the promise to be lifted to a new order of understanding.
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
57
T
L
L
O
O
L
A
nd this, the nature of the granting, we must apprehend. he water of ife comes through the granting. But water can be received only if I do not confuse it with the shape of time and try to beat out lasting nourishment where none can be had. nly if I meet ife within what passes can ife disclose Herself to me. nly then can my life be made transparent to me, why I had to undergo precisely this sequence of events, why, in a word, these precise events were so lovingly designed for my growth and enhancement.
I
T
I
N
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
D
T
A
A
t the heart of agency lies a bloody battle take up with Life over who will take the lead, who will make meaning—who, in a word, creates. Who creates? Agency is the misguided belief that I “make” meaning rather than receive and bring it forth as new life. nd yet to make, to manufacture in the power that we are able, is not at all to create. o create! We can imagine the future as we wish it to be. We can even imagine the present to be other than it truly is. Yes, we can make. We can wish, wish upon a star. But can we receive the wish in the shape it comes rather than overlook its arrival for want of our own fanciful view of what it should be and how it should arrive? o we ever wish with heart purely and without design? he new, the truly new cannot make. can mold earth into things of artistry but reality itself, in all its shapes and forms, cannot of myself create. mpotent, impoverished am from the very start. or, if understood myself, would fancy that actually manufacture the future or transform rather than merely alter the self by agential power. he future, insofar as it reflects divine intelligence, comes not automatically but rather creatively, as a creative response to me. t comes providentially. Like a good father, it knows what is best for me. Yet can only understand this on pain of relinquishing belief in agency, the belief that am the ground and sole creative origin of my journey. can only stand aright toward my life’s passage when cease my bloody battle against Life’s lead. I
What Do We Want?
A
M
T
I
What is it that we want, deep down before all else? Born of woman, we find ourselves in life alone and vulnerable. Like the little sea turtle, that totemic animal and wondrous symbol of spiritual quest, we face Life alone: here is a passage we must make and no parent, no teacher, no friend can make it for us. y life has to be lived. nd no other.
S
ife Is ong
L
58
What, oh what’s in decision that passage should terrify us so? What lurks in hiding beneath “merely getting by”? f what am I terrified?
T
I
O
intuit that the journey in and through time is no mere passage but turns me upon another passage, the very passage through the birth canal to spiritual life and awakening. his, the ultimate creativity! Passage through life (temporal passage) and awakening (inward passage) are inextricably linked, for Life seeks to work her boundless midwifery.
S
I
I
A
I
E
xistential philosophers, both religious and not, have noted that the question “why” wrangles primordially in our hearts. mplicit in their writings is the understanding that “why” is a cry, above all else a cry. nd say, yes, it is a cry, the cry of spiritual babes and not merely forlorn beings. Yet we do confound aloneness with forlornness and deliverance with escape from temporal undergoing. s this, then, what we want, to be delivered from life rather than to it, to be free from having to undergo? o it seems. Look at how deep this why pierces through flesh and bone: We suffer our first birth as a kind of wounding.
Jean-Paul artre names this primitive condition forlornness. We are born, he says, into total anguish over the reality that life provides neither a ready-made meaning (since we can always question tradition) nor a categorical rule that drops from heaven by tablet or upon command (since all values can be questioned because, even if there were a heaven, we must nevertheless interpret its law and command). artre believes not in heaven but his point stands: ultimate meaning modestly remains hidden to us at first blush. nd by intuition, he gets the next point right, if for the wrong reasons: we can depend on no authority if we are to become weaned and independent, but we must find the true nature of Life for ourselves. Yet A
S
S
A
A
lone: before a great cosmos, do I hear an echo? lone: before life, why? Who decides that I must live? Must I live? Must I? Born into a life not of our making, we know neither why nor how; cast out to the sea with no immediate apprehension of the ultimate compass for how to steer the course. Why can’t I crawl back into the womb and never, never come alive?
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
59
S
S
S
A
O
I
I
I
A
S
artre finds in the anguish of first birth only the problems of meaning and value. He believes we suffer because we are thrown, with nothing more than fallible mortal power, into the impossible godlike task to produce meaning and imbue the brute fact of existence with value. nd since no value humanly made carries absolute sense or certainty, we are destined to suffer temporal life in anguish all the days of time, ever forlorn and lonely in the brute universe of dead matter and human invention, forever deprived of the ultimate certainty that we, so ungodlike, cannot provide. What we most deeply desire, a sense of ultimacy, can never be found or had. t is not my task to take up artre on the questions of value and certainty proper, for wish to turn in another direction toward the “cut” of first birth. We are born never to depend on mere authority but to find truth for ourselves; this much is certain. Yet don’t believe, with artre, that truth is not genuine but simply a projection on the world around us of meanings we humanly concoct in an otherwise empty universe. Reality has intrinsic intelligibility and it can be found, admittedly dynamically, in and through the manner and mode of our living. ur lonely predicament, the depth of our cry cannot be understood unless we see that we have never been and never could be content, as individual human beings, to invent meanings and values always and only to sink without ultimate footing in the shifting sands of time. singular and utterly vital reality escapes artre’s way of stating the crisis of our felt forlornness and lonely predicament, and existentialists who believe this truth sometimes hold back, in pedagogical restraint, from declaring it openly:
S
ife Is ong
L
60
T
T
I
I
A
I
he anguished cry issued out of first birth—why, why, oh why, was born?—proves one and the same as—do matter, does anyone care? m , in a word: loved? Could we, ask you, be lonely for ultimate meaning if meaning were not linked to love? he first cut that releases us to life wounds us because it yokes us to privative want: deep down, deeper than anyone has ever plunged in the dark blue sea, we want to know whether we are loved. By that cut, we are ushered into life as suffering and into darkness; we sense, in primitive terror, that to embrace temporal passage is to be drawn into that horrifying second passage of rebirth. he matter is not I
T
T
he question of meaning is yoked to the question of love! It bears repeating: the question of meaning is yoked to that of love.
solely that we are to undergo time lacking, in prospective view, absolute certainty for the finite choices we elect; it is rather that we must decide, from the bottom of our existence up, whether to enter into intimacy with Life and win transparent coincidence with life journey.
R
umbling beneath the surface of my existence, a horrifying unknown lurks: Why was I born? Why born? ( nd the softer silent murmur: m I loved?)
I
A
A
A
A
Philosophers in today’s world are so wont to split life in two, to sever temporal undergoing from spiritual quest, to divorce the question of meaning from the question of love, as if we could find meaning without love, without passion, without risk. nd as if ultimate meaning could be found in a merely abstract, cognitive way. nd as if mere lack were the same as the privative condition: to be born without wholeness, without accord, without transparent cause, and without ultimate intimacy. Born am, into silence without immediate reply to the why. Life stands at issue: how live, why should live, why live?
I
I
Whence do I come, not historically, not from mother and father, but ultimately out of what matrix, what power, by what hand? Why was I born? to this life, to what end?
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
he question why cannot be nurtured toward an answer on false philosophical hope in abstraction. t cannot be answered by taking critical distance on traditions and justifying belief by argument rather than bullying my way to selfish purpose. t can never be answered by any attempt to re-present my life to myself and give it value by interpreting it in one fashion rather than another and put this and not that twist on crucial historical events that populate my journey. For the “why born” is personal. t’s not abstract, it’s not about how represent “me” to myself and others. t’s about love and care. want to know why was born and whether matter at all in the whole grand scheme of things. he question is not what matters—what values, what things prize above all else—or whether strive to be tolerant. t’s deeply personal. Why must live? means, in vital regard, Why make passage at all? Why strive in any manner? o matter, does it matter? nd these questions boil down to one: m loved? I
I
A
L
A
D
ike a call into the dark, I want to know: Is there ultimate intimacy?
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
61
The Human Cry and the Wound
A
I
T
I
T
I
M
I I
M
I
E
T
We cannot understand the privation that issues forth in the cry as any mere lack we suffer as material beings who want and need because the cry is reduplicated in us. hat the cry is reduplicated points at base to two things: first, the cry cuts all the way down to the root of our inherence in life and, second, the cry is anticipatory. xpectant. nd yet the reduplicated cry evinces not simple forlornness for apodictic certainty and absolute values. t anticipates more poignantly the question of suffering: ust undergo? Like a child before a mother it beseeches, “ ust , must go to school?” (The hidden, unspoken seed question contained within the cry: Can this be love, that I would be so required to undergo?) hough we are delivered to physical life already upon the cry, the physical cry anticipates its reduplicated meaning: When and how will be delivered? (Can’t I be delivered from this, must I undergo?) he cry outlines for us, like a great divine promise imprinted on the soul, the existential ordeal we face, namely, that we must undergo (suffer a life) and yet we are expectant for deliverance (from suffering). What an odd fix we are in. Hopeful yet terrified of suffering “through.” How can trust in the promise of deliverance when the “must” holds sway? Must we, O Life, suffer? Does “must” hold sway, I beg you, Life, tell me, must I?
I
T
A
T
I
n its own way, the Judaic ritual practice of circumcision symbolically captures this reality. nd yet do not mean to say that we had an experience of physical birth as a wounding that we store in historical memory, for though it involved shock, as evidenced by the newborn’s struggle for breath, we have no decisive memory of birth as an “experience.” he newborn is aware, though not precisely in the sense of being a self-conscious “me,” a subject of experience. Consciousness has not yet solidified in the babe. s a conscious historical marker of traumatic experience, first birth can provide no clue to our felt wounding, the deep cut of felt privation. here is no historical marker for how deep the cry runs. First birth provides us the clue to our wounding as iconic symbol, not as historical experience. n this reality lies a deep mystery of how first birth is brought forth in darkness (in a kind of sleep, since it is not yet required of the child to come to birth consciously the way the wound anticipates we must come alive, consciously and willingly, in spirit and enter into a covenant with A
I
We suffer first birth as a wounding, a cut.
S
ife Is ong
L
62
I
I
I
N
T
I
N
I
T
A
I
I
T
Life). hus, when say we suffer first birth as a wounding, do not mean we have a subconscious memory of trauma. Rather, mean that physical birth is an emblem of our human predicament and an archetype for us of what is to come, not what has passed. s we come to consciousness of our predicament—that we live but know not why—we undergo the sheer fact of being alive as a wounding, a privation. his predicament, and the deliverance it anticipates, is contained in the cry. f the cry were merely physical, it would be over in an instant and leave no residual thorn in the side. o gaping wound. cut my finger, scream, the pain subsides. cry no more. o deep ache plagues my existence, no muffled sound seeking expression in word, as a question and query, no single word, oh it’s hardly a word but more of a cry in want of word, no inarticulate cry awaits articulation: a single word, a whole sentence of words, an answer, a word, a simple word to heal this ache wrangling inside. (Give me word, cosmos, word, why, why must I go to this school of undergoing?) he first cut of the umbilical cord issues in a cry. Like an impregnation, our first sharp awakening to primitive aloneness issues forth as the progeny of that cry:
I
What want to know, what must know is this: Is the universe cold and unloving? Who delivers me unto this? o man-made meanings, not even parental love or cultural care, shall ever quell this loneliness in my heart. What want to know, what must know is this: m an orphan, left to face life in loveless abandonment? ur felt privation of a reason to live cannot be divorced from the question of love, for the question turns on the whole nature of the cosmos and my inherence in life. m —not merely forlorn without why—but forsaken? I
A
O
I
I
N
I
A
A
lone: before a great cosmos, do I hear an echo? lone: before life, why? Who decides that I must live? Must I live, must I, who says?
T
I
O
A
T
A
T
A
here is the hero’s cry: m I worthy, do I measure up? he Fisher King’s unmitigated wound. here is the woman’s archetypal plaint: m I valuable? lovely? lovable? It’s worse, even, God, I can hardly speak it . . . ow! what I want to know is this . . . oww! am I . . . owowowow! was I born of a loveless womb?
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
63
T
O
M
O
T
he cry teaches us that “lack” redoubles in us and cuts as privation to the very base of our inherence in life. There’s no ordinary compass for this question. It marks our possible beginning, not in time but in origination from out of, in want of, and as destined to intensify, that is, decide our inherence in ultimacy. rdinary psychophysical needs, when met, do not sate the aching yearning of felt privation. We must see, then, that there are two levels of the question of orphanage: the historical and the root level. any and varied are the horrid ways that children suffer abandonment in life, physical, emotional, mental, orphaned, and all the like. We begin solely conscious of interdependency within the nexus of interpersonal being. Yet underlying these conditions lies a more original struggle with primordial loneliness. ur worldly struggle is ensconced in that deeper privation of ultimate need, though at first we know it not. Before we can even remember, we start inventing meanings, stories of our lives, and thereby clothe the wound of origination in the memory of historical trauma we underwent as babes and in early childhood. We invest that early trauma with absolute meaning because we cannot face the primordial truth that our first cut is without historic cause, without why. here is no marker for this origin, there is but a wound that never ceases to prick because it demands an order of healing that only a transcendent answer can provide, a transcendence that must be found forward in living and not backward before time.
T
he compass for the ache has its “back” (why born?) and its “forward” (toward what end must I undergo?) and yet these points of navigation mark the redoubling of passage; their answers must herald from an origination which transcends time even as we receive answer only forward within the undergoing.
S
ife Is ong
L
64
I
I
T
hat we confuse our worldly lot with this primitive yearning for ultimate love and illumination threatens to sidetrack us from ever awakening to the question of our total relation to Life. We can expend ourselves on refusing to forgive our parents their weaknesses and failings because we demand they satisfy our true privation, stand in for our lack of faith in new life and accord with passage. Yet no amount of securing a warm environment of felt safety and comfort, of removing the deprivations suffered in childhood—of touch, feeling, demonstrativeness, and attention —necessarily delivers me from the deep matter: will entrust myself to
O
T
I
A
N
I
E
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
O
I
I
A
A
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
Life or succumb to painful estrangement for the sum total of my live-long days? n our species, abandonment cannot merely be understood in edipal terms as a web of emotional and psychological bonds broken by family and upbringing. hat is why the crisis of weaning exceeds the familiar. Felt abandonment pierces, beneath familial relations and historical events, to the very root of consciousness. t catalyzes our intuitive awareness that we must awaken and decide the quality of our passage through life. f we were not made tacitly aware, in primitive terror, that the whole wide womb of the world can neither provide ultimate safety nor rescue us from Life’s eternal claim, then hardly would we be endowed with a spiritual vocation to come to birth in spirit. f we were not vulnerable right down to the very insecure base of our inherence in existence, life would not be reduplicated in us. We would never harbor inwardly these questions as matters of ultimacy, Who am ? Whence do come? o what vocation and ultimate end am born? nd before all else, m loved? We would never face Life in the psychic predicament of loneliness that underlies edipal struggles, the predicament of dangling between why and felt threat, the painful ordeal of being held between “will you love me?” and “ won’t trust You Who put me here.” Here, then, is the basis of reduplication. s human, am originally capable of suffering abandonment. can be or feel abandoned in derivative psychological senses—that my parents did not love me or kicked me out of home at nineteen—only because suffer at root a profound, metaphysical quandary: am destined to and yet lonely for a great love. o matter how loving and warm my family, stand before Life unrealized in intimacy. Without this deep cut that notifies me of privative want of ultimate love and significance (do I matter, do I matter?), would know only parental care (as animals do) and want no ultimate measure. he cry becomes in the human mouth redoubled: not simply “ouch” (psychophysical) but “why?” (either in my bosom expectant or godforsaken, hopeful or despairing). Radical loneliness refers to the ordeal that stand alone before the cosmos entire and all living reality but do not know whence stem love and consolation; nor whether my being born has intelligence or purpose, nor, when call out, whether will hear but the empty echo of my own dark cry in the wilderness. ven more concrete still, radical loneliness expresses an existential terror before Life: Can I bear it alone, all by myself? (Why should I? How can there be love in aloneness?)
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
65
D
I
I
Ultimate terror stems not from whether my parents abandon me (though their abandonment might disturb primitive terror). Wonder, deep down do, whether am in primordial aloneness abandoned to life as such—without ultimate protection or safety, without ground or reason— in a word, without meaning, significance or embrace, without why. What order of being is this, to be born deprived. eprived, we are born, of tender loving answer to why. nd so gosh darn want to know, demand to know: I
A
A
A
I
A
Is the universe like a cold mother devoid of love? re culture and tradition the only paternal authorities that obtain, the inflexible rules of the common and universal that, by their very nature, can brook no exception for me? m I to suffer life never knowing ultimate maternal embrace, am I to bear the merciless weight of principles that allow no room for me to breathe freely and radiate fire and life? Won’t the dark cosmos embrace me? Won’t the heavenly laws show a merciful bright face? Is there no cradle, no face? m I to bear the unyielding yoke of life with no ultimate joy? o I, do I herald from a loveless womb? Is that it?
I
I
M
I
S
I
I
D
t’s impossible not to state the question religiously, Who has sent me? or to despair irreligiously, By what savage design am born? How can we be made self-aware if we are to be merely like the animal? elf-awareness would be the cruelest suffering ever inflicted on any being if its sole purpose were to make us meaning-founders unto ourselves. Better, then, to be full animal or angel, to be of time but without the pain of reduplication or to be held radiant in the atom of eternity, wholly self-aware but without having to suffer through time. How can we be made to ask why, if there is nothing but a cold, dark universe and traditions that necessarily, if they house nothing ultimate, deaden with time, cage rather than deliver me? Why would ever live, as some propound, as a useless passion in a otherless and Fatherless existence, why would bother to invent meaning where ultimate intimacy cannot be found. Why would not lie down quietly to die as the deformed mutant, the anomaly, the most mangled runt ever known to Life.
N
What do we want, this was the question. ot simply relative meaning but illumination. ot mere life but true living. ot simple identity 66
N S
L
N
ife Is ong
N
N
but intimacy with self, the self aglow in harmonious radiance. ot mere association but communion, living depth of intimacy with others. ot the fragmented estrangement of each against the other but resonance with all things! he query and answer hinge upon reduplication. Quality of life! ot sheer, brute life.
N
T
Give it to me, damn it, won’t You provide? igh.
What do we want? hh, deep down, deeply held within that muffled sound of grievous sob, smoldering beneath agency’s battle cry, there is the spiritual child’s humble want, do we not want just this, this: a great other and a great Father? great Father to protect us and a great other to cradle us, a great Father to deliver and guide us and a great other to reassure us of our way. o not our vulnerability and privation tell us so? We want to know that we are loved, that all of life cares for us. We do not, in effect, want to live in a reality that is not full of care. We are repulsed, from the very bottom of our hearts, by the prospect that there is no ultimate care. hese, our felt privations of ultimate meaning, care, and intimacy, lie deeper than any ordinary psychology of human want or biology of human need ever said. hey have a existential root. hat is, they arise for us from our very inherence in existence, our precarious and vulnerable hold on Life. nd this root casts its tendrils down into the soil of spirit. M
T
( id you not hear, did you not listen to the call of spirit amid your loneliness? Whether there is care, this we could only
D
A
T
T
D
M
A
M
A
I
T
M
S
We are born in privation of that which qualifies our life and imbues it with sense and radiant love, not as the child needs physical and psychological nourishment but as spiritual babes in want of life so qualified. Life made transparent and gratified unto itself. Life within life, stirring, breathing, throbbing, beaming, glistening, astounding living within life. ust we feel lonely and forsaken . . . or can the first cut be healed? hat is the question. t would seem, as the voice of agency so often bellows for want of true ferocity, that we strive to care for ourselves by creating meaning and shaping the future. But can we trust the voice of agency to show the way to proper self-love and coincidence with life journey? Are we so very ashamed to trust anything?
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
67
know upon pause, by passing through, entering into the great pause at the heart of all life where silence yokes every dimension together. Why won’t we pause and breathe, why don’t we fight for second breath?)
Our Hold on Life Is Tenuous
I
I
I
I
I
I
D
D
O
O
ur existential predicament is acute. ur very inherence in life proves unbelievably fragile, just as the newborn has only a tenuous hold on physical life and must be watched over for a time. eep within a worm eats away at our hearts, the worm of ambivalent fickleness toward (my) life and Life itself. o think it suffices to walk through life wobbly and undecided, like an overly fastidious girl, partly on board but partly holding back? n truth, it is the other way round: am suffering, am undergoing, have been living many years before ever cease suppressing self-awareness and allow the fundamental question of my attitude toward life to arise into crystal-clear consciousness. Life carries me out no matter what, and yet for all my thirty or forty years of life, may never have decided, truly decided to live! I
worm eats away inside, a dangerous worm—
A
deeper than the fact that my biological mother and father never understood me, deeper than my long held suspicion that I was born into the wrong culture, exiled from the start, deeper than the rocky soil of my entire life set-up—
O
We are not born with our spiritual hold on life ready-made. We must decide. nd whenever the stakes in life’s journey grow higher, we must decide anew. here is, then, one truly fundamental sense in which we are alone in life and this predicament arouses primitive terror. o one can be born in my name, no one can live my life for me, no one can die for me. o one can make fundamental decisions for me; none directly bears my acts and thoughts, though they may bear with me; no one will bear the constellation of events that unfold in my unique life journey, save me; the
N
N
T
A
a worm, a festering wound that harkens back to the first cut of the umbilical cord, the sheer fact that I live—I am!—constantly threatens to hatch the hesitating, resistant “but”: But, but must I really? kay, I will, but . . .
S
ife Is ong
L
68
I
n our species, being weaned off physical parentage not only occasions becoming conscious of the need to live self-autonomously in material terms but also catalyzes that deeper awareness that we alone decide, by trust or distrust, the spiritual quality of our relation to life journey. he precondition of adopting an upright and independent stance, a welcoming openness to greet life and embrace what comes, is that must win free from the dependent need for paternal authority: for people or culture or tradition or a misconceived God the Father to tell me how to go forth, how to live, how to be. nd must give up the interminable adolescence of staying forever within the womb of my people who comfort me with misguided approbation and an ill-conceived maternal skirt behind which to feel safe. n a word, must willingly renounce dependency on the humanly made world to provide me with ready-made significance and meaning, comfort and approval. y life beckons me forth into the odyssey that alone must venture. must seek in hopeful, childlike expectancy the answer to the question contained within the wounding: What is Life that it should claim me so, what is Life and whence my life journey? What impedes such open receptivity in and to life journey? t is me. I
I
I
M
I
I
A
I
T
I
I
I
“I,” I am the material for the shaping.
I
D
O
D
D
I
I
T
I
rocky soil onto which am born cannot be borne by anyone other than me. he quality of my passage through life, whether bear well with my self and thereby befriend myself, whether bear well with others and thereby befriend them, whether befriend Life in Her strange and uncanny pattern and thereby come to terms with my peculiar life journey, is decided fundamentally and inescapably by me—alone. ecision, the fundamental decision contained within all decisions looms before me, Will I, will I “go with” life? estiny lies at stake, destiny hovers over me, the quality of my living stands undecided. ur relation to temporal undergoing is ever so tenuous, more fragile than one can ever imagine while hiding behind the puffed up bravado of worldly sufficiency and self-determination. eep down, we feel helpless, for all the self-assertion we exert, radically helpless before this most fundamental question: Am I willing? For to become willing requires something far more simple but eminently harder to come by than the hot-headed determination to impose my will on life or the equally vapid desire to give up and let others decide for me, though lack the gumption truly to cease to live. t requires receptivity. By receptivity entrust myself to my life and thereby to Life.
69 I
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
N
D
A
I
T
O
nly me. he babe, have said, is tacitly claimed by physical life in the womb, and yet it must, through physical birth become explicitly given over to life. Just as the babe must be given over to physical life when the midwife cuts the umbilical cord, so too must we who are destined to decide the quality of life passage explicitly give ourselves over to life, the ultimate medium of our edification into true understanding. nd yet there is a vital difference, that, where the babe came to birth in darkness, we must consent to Life’s midwifery in full light of day. estined, we are, to make the second cut, for then alone can we be weaned unto freedom. o ordinary human valor sustains us before this task. Faintness of heart is not confined to woman’s province. Whereas, it often seems, the babe has little choice in explicitly exiting the mother’s womb (though here too there is question), one thing is certain: in exiting the womb of the familiar, we must purely, consciously, and decidedly give ourselves over to Life. Consent, we must, to live consciously (whence the terror of it) and intensively (whence the freedom in living consciously, wide awake). If, that is, we want intimacy.
70
S
ife Is ong
L
T
I
I
A
I
T
N
T
he ordeal of life cannot find its true pith merely while we scream out for meaning, “Why, oh, why?” but consent not. Freedom is a wondrous gift and yet it is a yoke laid on us. ever have we left the locus of this decision to consent to Life’s claim on us. his, most of all, is what we seek to escape, we who are conscious of ourselves in time: consent, conscious consent to the undergoing. For by consent are we delivered to the heart of the matter, whether we will suffer self-change. Quality of life journey hinges on this smallest of things: consent. n this narrow dominion of consent lies the greatest qualification of how we undergo: whether we rise or sink, whether we will be lifted up and cradled by the sea of life, then delivered up to understanding or (oh, this frightening, terrible “or”) whether we will sink ever more deeply into the lonesome quagmire of misunderstanding and find ourselves perpetually at odds with what comes to us in life. great, horrid impediment stands between my tacit inherence in life and that most decisive of cuts, the act whereby give myself willingly to go with life. Between circumcision and covenant lies a staunch blockage. speak of none other than the aching sense of radical loneliness with its felt privation of love, this! the gaping wound in my flesh, the thorn in my side. here could be no greater weakness, nothing that debases us more,
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
T
than that the very thing of which we stand in need of healing should hold us back. How we coddle our loneliness! he very thought of having the wound touched makes me faint. he heart cramps up and freezes. go cold and, without cause, refuse to give Life Her due. t’s as if we lock ourselves into the deadlock: “ f you, Life, won’t tell me your secret ‘why,’ then won’t entrust myself to you. too will begrudge you a reason, why.” Yet is Life begrudging, I ask, is She covetous? Why should our predicament—to be born without why—turn so sharply upon the deadlock of puerile demand the instant we hit a wee little bump in the road rather than kindle receptive expectancy, the way it did in youth, for meaningful living to come? t is, don’t you wonder, because meaning and love are yoked together. (Privation’s no meager intellectual need, no cognitive inquisitiveness or simple psychological curiosity.) Without love, no sustaining meaning can be found. Yet love begins in trust and brooks no unfounded grudge.
L
Whatever happened to the wondrous expectant “why?” By impatience does expectancy collapse into furtive demand, yet when demand congeals in the recalcitrant heart, it loses the tentativeness of youth whose first wobbly steps nevertheless prove willing, and solidifies into a begrudging pettiness toward Life. With sore heart do hold myself aloof from Life and staunchly issue my ultimatum that Life give me a reason to embrace Her, so impoverished is my capacity to love deeply and with constancy. n expectant birth collapsed in on itself metes out a militant conditional “love” that refuses the unconditional step of trust. n sunken loneliness do demand an answer from life up front for why must undergo, why must live. “ ell me,” beg, cajole, “tell me, Life, tell me your secret. hen alone will . . .” Pause, breathe: demand? who act belligerently as though stood complete without need of ripening into a loving person, who behave as though do not harbor in my heart a deep-seated appeal to heal my privation, who puff myself up on the weak potency of my felt agency, ? “ eet my conditions, then alone will decide whether to entrust myself to you.” First, the meek seduction, “ ell me” (as if have made myself trustworthy) and then the shadow delivers the blow of power and I
I
I T
M
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
T
I
I
I
A
I
T
L
I must entrust myself to ife’s care if I am ever to receive an answer or undergo healing. “ rust” names the game of ife, and my life is no mere game devoid of stakes. My very healing hangs in the balance. “I” am the material for the shaping.
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
71
I
I
T
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
M
I
I
M
O
S
I
A
I
I
I
might, “ dictate the conditions” ( control life, secure protection against undergoing, want reasons and proof that there will be deliverance). Life cannot answer us so, if love and understanding are at stake. rust is, was, and always shall be that for which must battle, for we come to understand love only through love’s tender care. nd if “ ” am the material for the shaping, if the quality of my love and my inherence in life prove wanting, then how can find healing save through loving? Life’s hiddenness and indirectness are for our own good. For love cannot declare itself directly; every cad knows this. Love must be apprehended through trust. o we must entrust ourselves to life in order to receive the secrets of Life. ur very inherence in life, our well-being, our destiny lies at stake. What, deep down, do want of Life? hat it care for me like a true other and Father. How can discover the virtues of Life—whether Life cares, whether am held in a great care, deeper than the matrix of first formation, and in what Life’s maternal and paternal love consists—if do not trust? Just as we begin without intimacy with self, so too do we begin with no great intimacy toward other Life and Father Providence, though their claim lay upon us like a yoke we must decide to take up. For if we do not take up the yoke with all of our willingness and true heart, the yoke will surely prove too heavy and crush us. f do not befriend Life but instead make of Life my enemy, then no matter what Providence brings will hopelessly cast about at odds with both the grace and the difficulty of what comes, caught forever in the vicious perspective bred by the fickle eyes of distrust: the eyes that see Life as an evil mother who abandoned me so unlovingly to suffer, the eyes that hold time’s Providence by harsh measure to be a cruel father who refuses to guide me to live freely but instead beats me down under severe dictate.
L
Where, how will I gain the eyes to see which images of ife and ime are true? I want to know, can I trust, can I trust into ife and gain a foothold in ime’s passage?
I
I
T
E
I
I
A
L
T
great battle stands before me. ts name is Life. t is not a battle, as agency besmirches, with Life—me against Life, and Life against me. Foremost it is a fierce, calm battle of Life gently to hem me in so that may turn upon the decision to make the cut, to consent to live, to “go with” the journey and not against the tide. t is my battle for life and Life assists me in it. ach of us must fight like the baby chick to peck our way
S
ife Is ong
L
72
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
S
out of the shell with nothing more than two sources of prompting, those from Life and those that issue from the inner call to win through to independent quality of living. Life is my maternal companion in this struggle. he cradles, cultivates, engenders free-spirited embodiment. Providence is my paternal guide in this struggle whose timely dispensations impregnate, catalyze, and deliver me to the cut of decision. o trust Life in both its maternal and paternal aspects would be to let Life guide and deliver, draw me forward and upward while being weaned gently from behind and below. t would entail entering into a relation to life journey that delivers me from the viciously false images of my mind’s suspicious agential invention. t would require that let the undergoing refract me instead as “am” in the movement of how bear the time am given and not as presume myself to be, empirical, unchanging, and “aloof ” from time’s passage, nor as ideally “wish” myself to be, made radiant somehow but without having to undergoing the shaping. t would be to see ever more lucidly the illumined and illuminating nature of reality in all its aspects, maternal and paternal, neither empirical nor ideal but before all else: real.
Breath betrays our anxiety-stricken panic before the question of meaningful living, which is, deep down, the question of love and embrace, cradle and assurance. hortness of breath, the gasp, the clenched jaw, these foreshadow our tendency to faint or grow hard and freeze up in cold paralysis. n a word: to suffer a failure of heart for the journey. We feel suffocated by Life, for Life calls us to decide. n the brink of panic, we move tentatively, uncertain whether we want to undergo at all and so we fail to make a clean cut. he anguished cry is not truly a word, even though we express it in a spiritual baby word as “why,” the way a child’s first word “mother” or “father” still lacks the compass for its richer significance. t reflects a privation even more than a query, a deep ache. “Why” expresses a sound in want of word, a baby word in perplexed want of rich understanding. he cry is more sound and emotion than word, a deep cut awaiting healing. growing wound plagued by doubt that it has meaning. t anticipates the simple truth that we are a song waiting to be made, a cry, a little babe whose life journey alone can fashion and shape it into maturity, into the fullness of spoken word, resonant with deep pathos and awakened understanding, sober truth and wisdom that blossoms forth
I
A
T
I
T
O
I
S
Breath and Muffled Word
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
73
I
A
T
I
M
A
T
I
T
I
O
I
O
I
I
M
O
into one rich and beautiful song like a poem, since it will be a word-song, a song that embodies things understood and drawn up from that deepest wellspring of spirit and heart. Yet the cry is not guaranteed to become word. We can fail reduplication, though we are forever caught within its claim. We could undergo worldly formation but refuse to be turned upon spiritual edification, never become song by word reduplicated, word that stems from and bodes forth spiritual truth and light. h, what’s in a word? little “or,” a speechless “why”? y speech could remain anguished and grow more deeply lost and forsaken if do not live well. For all the seeming power of word acquire through first formation, might produce beneath it no more than a stream of muffled sounds and gurgling shadows of word, moaning and groaning and bitterness. r the cry could turn into a monstrous sound of distorted proportion, if am not careful in my approach to life, if my despair, my destroyed expectancy turns viciously back upon itself. r it could yield all manner of false word, gossip and babble and parroting, and thus bog down in an endless pettiness of spirit, full of fear and the bloodless confidence of numbers. Whenever the cry devolves into demand, have fallen into grave danger of suffocating under the sea of life and sinking beneath the weight of its yoke, never, ever to find understanding. o live as a physical adult but never become spiritually grown up is to cry and not speak, to cry and cry and cry but for all the noisy talk generate, never sound out words, rich words of poetic song and flowering. Understanding qualifies our existence; that is why we want it so desperately. he questioning cry cannot come to fruition until it is bolstered by understanding. We stand in a privative relation to illumination. nd for this reason the cry—in itself psychophysical and phonemic—threatens to devolve into the corrupted sound of rage and fury without being lifted up and sustained by true word, that is, by lovingly illuminated and illuminating understanding. eaning thus lies at the heart of reduplication. For the why of wonder, possibility, query, and ache must undergo its qualification by love. How the why will become qualified has to be decided by the whole manner of my attitude and disposal toward Life. t will either be qualified through rising or by sinking, by love or hate, through speech or babble; we will either be kept afloat by not misunderstanding or collapse. he cry can be held in heart openly, as an open question, and thereby turn into expectant, hopeful prayer or it can deteriorate into covetous demand
S
ife Is ong
L
74
I
D
S
O
E
and piteous victimhood. ither, through wondrous open bearing, the cry will be elevated by Life’s love into illuminated speech. r—this little word “or” and not Life truly should knock the very breath out of me—my heart will close around the why in turgid, hard demand; and the cry will devolve from its initial hopeful though inarticulate state into the spiteful, negative muteness of acrid complaint. uch acridity of spirit comes to birth out of the muffled sounds of resistance, the persistent refusal to consent. evoid of pause and the breath of life’s loving wisdom to energize me, emit only the wrenching noise of suffering all the days of life without ever deciding to pass through, without ever making the second cut that delivers me over to Life, so that Life could deliver me to uplifted living. o live, truly live! o speak. T
Meaning and Deliverance
We confound deliverance with escape.
I
We are too quick to seek our deliverance. mpatient and not receptive. We want deliverance without undergoing. nd this means that we bungle the cut, we sever Hope from Life by our attitude and bearing. We “hope” for deliverance. hh, yes, but we hope to be delivered from. From: undergoing, suffering, existing. From life! (Father, let this cup pass from me.) We’d like to be delivered to meaning-filled living by departing from this world and evading life’s temporal passage. hat passage before which we tremble in terror and on which all stands threatened to come to naught in the sands of time, all my projects, all my friendships, all seek and want, we intuit it’s so. Why ever undergo if in time, after one or two generations, the mark of me shall pass and leave no enduring meaning? t’s just too much. Worse, too could break, not be able to bear it at all, this yoke called life. We’d like to be delivered from undergoing to that which lies beyond, transcendent, as we say. We hope, yes, we hope. (But I
I
I
T
A
A
O
D
T
T
he wound of being born into time has no temporal source; deliverance alone heals. For what do we hope? is not precisely the right question. How do we hope, in what manner, what mode of bearing and disposal toward Life are we expectant? o we carry, that is to say, bear Hope through, the way a pregnancy must be borne all the way through to delivery? r do we miscarry midway through life, when youthful expectancy wears thin and we find no answer to our sore query?
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
75
A
I
I
T
N
we do not really live Hope-fully. Do we remember the second half of the prayer, “ evertheless hy Will be done”?) We hope this, we hope that. t bottom we hope we will not have to undergo. Yet since we do undergo (whence our helplessness), we both yearn for deliverance from life and yet settle for cajoling life into giving us what we want. We settle for a little masked agency. f cannot evade undergoing pure and simple, then allow me, please, not to undergo certain things, this and that, bad and difficult. We are too quick, too restless, too impatient to gestate an authentic iconic image for our deliverance, too slow to embrace what life brings. We invent idols, wishes, hopes, expectations and refuse thereby to wait, in emptiness devoid of image, upon pregnancy and delivery. We neglect to abide in purity of heart and live trustingly that Hope may be born, that life could be lived and lived well, truly, heartily with full embrace. nstead, we rush ahead to place expectation and petition upon Life:
L
L
L
I
“If you loved me, ife, then you would do as I say . . . You would relieve me, please me, play with me, hold me, deliver me, and oh! you would never, ever send me bad things, things I don’t like or want or hope to undergo, but give me things, I mean, that I deem good, that I want, nothing unexpected (god forbid, unless it please me), nothing, nothing that I would not dictate. Please, please, oh please love me, I beg you, ife, don’t ever, ever send me anything that I don’t deem worthy or pleasing. I warn you, ife, now I am getting mad, listen to me, don’t ever, never ever do such things to me! I am worthy, do not touch me. on’t cut into my wound.”
nd so we cry ourselves to sleep. 76
S
L
A
ife Is ong
I
M
D
I
I
D
t’s as though we want a mother but ask that she not, under any circumstances, no matter how dire, ever, ever exercise judgment. t’s as though we want to be rescued by a dictatorial father who, miraculously, would not then behave authoritatively. o we pit the ideal mother against the ideal father, the absent father against the grievous mother, and struggle our way fast and furious into the ensnarement of a childish dysfunction of our own making? Father take me away from here, other, if must be here, then don’t make me go out into life. Hold me tight, keep me in crib and cradle where joy rules without struggle, without undergoing, without . . . painful strife.
D
We petition all the time for understanding and deliverance but do we really, truly question? o we hold the question in our heart like a prayer, opened in receptivity, hopeful and yet without a prefabricated image of what the true answer will be? How can we expect to find a true answer if we decide in advance what it must be, how it must come, to what image it must conform? We cannot. nd so ask:
I
We play with life yet life is a deadly serious wager that requires utmost earnestness of heart if we ever wish to receive an answer to the queries that bind our hearts and over which we could break if we do not take care. For this, we must cease to petition in childish demand and step down from our aloof stance toward life. We must deepen our inherence in the very question. We must find heart to care for ourselves properly and cultivate a mode of questioning openly. When we want deliverance but seek to escape the wager of open seeking, we play a mean, duplicitous trick on life. Hardly do we see that to trick life is to trick ourselves. ever has anything been believable (save where ’m in search of illusion) because it was written or told. ( he manner of the telling, whether there is revelation in the telling or not, now that’s a different matter.) f am not the subject of Life’s lesson, if am not taken on a journey that reveals not just the truth of me but my very falsity, then how can ever receive illumination, why would ever believe anything that is told to me? uch, too much am willing to fancy of myself in abstraction that is all positive and good, but to see my falsity, to remove that which impedes understanding, this would never face in mere abstraction because it were told to me. nd even where my current perspective proves deficient and not ill motivated, even there my clinging to it proves fatal and lands me in untruth with respect to life. For act as though am willing to be shown a new, deeper, more apt perspective when, in point of fact, am unwilling to undergo having to give up the current level of understanding enjoy and take to define “me.” n the end, both the truth and untruth, the merely deficient and the blameworthy clinging must apprehend for myself. he former (truth) is premised I
T
I
I
I
I
I
A
I
I
I
I
M
I
I
I
N
A
A
re you willing, is any among us willing to bear a fundamental question—any fundamental question that truly besets the heart and to which there is no immediate answer—all the way through in life, to bear it in open expectancy and wait forever, if necessary, until genuine illumination breaks through?
T D
L
I
oneliness and eliverance
77
A
O
T
O
T
A
N
T
D
I
I
upon the latter (witnessing to untruth) because cannot “see” the limitation, the sheer deficiency of my current perspective save upon coming to apprehend that to which falsely cling, my misguided images and hopes, the very expectations, the false manner of questioning that glut my heart and block reception of the true. eep at heart, we do not believe firmly and solidly without reservation any illumination that is not delivered on pain of undergoing and made our own, the way craft enters the body and is made flesh. (Birth into truthful living has its pain.) We neither believe ultimate those things invented from our own minds nor do we find wholly credulous that which comes seemingly out of nowhere. We cannot, in the deep recesses of the preconscious, trick ourselves fully. he mind’s inventions are finite and we know it. or, when meaning is granted, do we necessarily find it believable as heavenly revelation in the absence of the undergoing that makes us ripe to receive it willingly. ll variety of ideational systems present themselves as grids for the interpretation of what is real. Yet the air of the arbitrary smacks untrue; the dictate of authority never suffices to make one see truth. We breathe freely in neither atmosphere. he real faces a tall pedagogical task in making itself known. Life proves itself merciful in that it enables us to receive that which would otherwise seem to come from nowhere. dd, is it not, that we want escape but will not trust that which irradiates from heaven? Life, more miraculous than our childish demand can image, attends to the pedagogical task by cultivating and preparing us to receive truth, to differentiate the real from all things fanciful and childish. Yet weaning unfolds for us on pain of being the lesson, of letting the lesson enter us so that we learn it in ourselves, take it to heart, and become it in flesh and blood. Ultimate understanding cannot devolve upon us abstractly. ruth, strictly speaking, cannot merely be seen; it must be understood—borne and apprehended therein. ne must awaken to it upon bearing up under the journey. Have you never suffered a friendship where the true confusion of your friend became so patently evident, so entirely transparent was it to you that it boggled the mind how she could not see it? nd she could not see it, even as all her actions spoke it, even though it found expression in everything she did, and above all even as she went round and round in circles, colliding again and again on the same impediment for want of seeing what holds her back? Colliding, as it were, on the real, on the simple truth that reality will not let her pass, that she cannot find the way
S
ife Is ong
L
78
I
I
I
A
I
M
A
S
S
I
I
O
I
I
S
A
T
A
“through” in life on the basis of her current and deficient perspective. nd when you spoke it to her, did you not discover the great error of teaching, the mistaken belief that if you spoke directly to her, as a trusted friend, she would believe the truth of herself ? Well, trust could go far in friendship, as far as Life itself can reach. hough trust still names the precondition of reception. nd where in friendship Life has not prepared a friend to receive open disclosure, even there it would not prove believable. he would think made up my image of her out of thin air; she would reduce it to a historical problem of some difference between us that arose in the past, some silly misunderstanding lug around. Yes, she would laugh and laugh and laugh in good cheer with me. r she would become angry and tell me that my mind invented the whole dastardly thing and that should compromise with her, listen to her self-understanding and measure my own fault against it, this very perspective that proves harmful to her and prevents her from growing eyes to see. f she could have her way, we’d work out our dual perceptions and bring them into alignment, each correcting the other’s perception. he would finally reduce the dialogue to an interpsychological correction but ultimately avoid the lesson, pull all down to her current level of understanding. For in order to receive the lesson, she would have to let herself be refracted to herself by her existence. he would have to listen to softer callings, however loud her collision might sound. Where a reception has not been gestated, there would be no capacity to receive the shock of disclosure. nd this is because we do not begin life in transparent understanding of the hidden dimensions of ourselves or Life. y friend cannot believe what reveal of her and her shadow save it comes to surface in her own consciousness and by Life’s refraction. Friendship could go far in life if it emboldened her to risk, to test out what mentioned and let Life perform its trusted pedagogy. Yet there, where mere belief and no understanding prevails, she could fall into the psychological convolution of thinking herself unworthy and make herself dependent on my authority. nd this would be an odd form of admitting the lesson without truly learning the lesson. n order to avoid these pitfalls and any others neglect to mention, she would still have to undergo her life in such a manner that the meaning of my word could find rich disclosure from within her own life journey. Worse than unpreparedness to receive a truth that cuts deeper than she currently stands in relation to herself (for it could still get worse), she could bolt even where Life had
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
79
I
S
T
I
S
T
T
N
I
E
S
prepared her to receive truth. he could flee from self-apprehension like a mare. Because we are free, we alone must take the final step of willingness, all else Life and friendship can do but not this. ven there, where Life wove me into the equation and made of me a servant to Her purpose, she could break with all the hard earned trust of labor previous. llumination her life must prepare, and were to play a role, it would be entirely through service to Life’s engendering power and her receptivity to self-change. o matter how we look at it, she must see herself mirrored by Life in her life and hearken toward that which calls her forward. herein lies her true occasion. he moment of truth apprehended is utterly concrete. Life must prepare her to see herself refracted and she must become willing on pain of undergoing, of failing herself and others, and wondering why things always end up in the same depressing quagmire. he and her life must become one and the same in transparency. t might behoove me, then, as friend, to turn her upon her life, to work indirectly when the time has not ripened. hat her life ends up in quagmire must yield insight into her untruth, and the untruth must then empower her to avail herself of that other possibility, the way forward, the way toward change. elf-change will not come save upon the refraction that delivers self-apprehension, shocking as it may be, as shocking as exiting the womb. Life must work a magical pedagogical art to wean us off the perspective that impedes seeing the untruth of ourselves in order that we may trust into a richer and more apt understanding, that we may let Life enter us and we enter into Life, become mutually related in depth and intimacy. f true of my friend, wonder then, how much more true of me?
Delivery and Under-standing I
I
S
ife Is ong
L
80
A
A
A
S
T
I
What is deliverance if it is not a great escape from undergoing? We don’t see the interminable childishness of our prolonged resistance to being weaned because we take for granted the perspective of agency. We hold ourselves to be, first and foremost, subjects of experience. his means: subjects who decide both what to experience of life and when to experience it. ubjects who decide what to make of life, what it means and how to interpret it, or simply how deeply it “cuts into” and touches me. gency is aloofness and aloofness breeds insufferable loneliness. n aloofness we decide it all, everything, that is, but the true decision to consent to let Life edify me. gency is one grand contradiction whereby we hold ourselves above life in the very name of seeking to experience it. nd it is this
I
I
covetous posture—covetous of Life’s prerogative—that threatens to bring everything to miscarriage, both my own healing and how carry, that is to say, bear and conduct myself in life. n our terrible condescension, have we not prematurely decided that undergoing is some horrible punishment, some cruel torture from which we should either save ourselves or ask to be saved?
I
I
I
great Father who rescues me? Lifts me to heaven, bestows upon me graces and relieves me, yes, relieves me of the yoke of freedom, the burden of that little decision: consent. Can the real Father (and not the idolized father) be the Father who rescues me or must He rather assist me to become willing to stand on my own two feet? nd how, how can stand if there is nothing to bear? What is deliverance? t is first of all to bear: to stand up under and bear what comes. am to be delivered from childish want to the possibility of standing upright and erect in spirit. o stand is to bear. nd to bear is to undergo willingly. A
A
What is deliverance? What is it? How does it come?
A
I
eliverance is best imaged as delivery. Birth avails us of the prototype. his image, a feminine icon, has almost become lost to us in the West. n Russia the image of the other of God prevails, yet even sophiology does not develop (to my knowledge) a philosophical iconology of birth as here laid forth. he image of birth yokes together the maternal and paternal aspects of care, though their reciprocity comes under the feminine name. For birth contains gestation equally as reception of the jolt to deliverance (the breaking of the water, as if to announce “the womb no more!”). What, we ask, is deliverance? t is the advent whereby am to be lifted from an inadequate to an apt understanding. Lifted—not passively but willingly. t is the passage whereby am delivered from living on the surface and brought to enter into depth of intensity; it is the journey through the birth canal to the heart of reality rather than a desperate attempt to get beyond. Word requires care. For to enter into depth is to enter into the living core of reality where creativity reigns and unveils its secrets abidingly. here is ever new growth to be enjoyed along the way in the journey through time that delivers me again and again, upon receptivity, to the advent of enriched understanding, even as to embrace this delivery I
I
I
T
I
T
M
T
D
T
Father Providence sends me ordeals, it is true, that I am to bear. Is the Father punishing me? Is He tormenting me?
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
81
I
A
M
I
N
I
O
I I
I
T
I
T
N
T
I
O
I
I
T
I
I
I
T
is to cross a decisive threshold in and of itself, to enter into the qualitative venture of realizing ever more refined illumination. o be delivered is, then, to arrive at the possibility where begin, where my understanding is made true and in standing under all that life brings in open bearing begin always anew, creatively. n consenting to live, receive all events of my life without prejudice. hese events are by that consent set on equal footing. thus let them touch, penetrate, and impregnate me such that they catalyze the growth of a question not simply “in” but “as” me. r better, am “in” it. he question becomes me in that it shapes my total bearing, my reception of what comes in expectant rather than hopeless want of the new order of understanding that this constellation of forces holds as its seed promise. ot, remind you, mere comprehension of historical events, even though these events come in time and as historical. he promise of delivery unto a new perspective and bearing, a new me, a new embodiment, and the “historical” shape through which am delivered will wash away like the water of the womb that first incubates and then breaks in order that the child be released into a new medium. he more intensively avail myself of the promise held within a constellation of events as they unfold, the more bear up under them willingly, hold forth, and see my way through the entire pregnancy to the unexpected. ne decisive way we distinguish what is real from what is unreal rests upon the superior creative intelligence of Life and its Providence. For the illumination that descends and toward which all along, if remain receptive, have been drawn, comes in the form of the unexpected. ever does my meager mind or my benighted heart, even when heed all the signs that keep me on the path to follow along the way, anticipate the character of the delivery. What the babe realizes in darkness, we must undergo consciously. We must bear a given cycle of events all the way through and there will be darkness in the undergoing, total lack of understanding. idway we will move gropingly by intuition and prompting from the preconscious. For we lack altogether the power to lift ourselves to a different perspectival plane of understanding. Up we cannot go on our own. Life lifts us up, yet we must follow trustingly and not break off when we grope in darkness for that which eludes our grasp. We must walk each step and focus on what reveals itself in preliminary fashion until the moment of delivery is come. nd delivery shall always contain within it a shock. For deliverance, remember, remember, is of “me,” from the womb of devoted
S
ife Is ong
L
82
I
I
D
I
T
questioning into a perspective that contains or “is” the answer. We are not delivered from life journey into a world beyond but we are delivered from something. hat something is “me.” am delivered from “me” as know myself to date. am delivered from the current perspective that informs and limits all my perceptions and all my sensibilities, a perspective that proves deficient and wanting in relation to my own deep need. elivery entails a radical revolution, a radical transformation of heart—of me. n a word: new life. am the answer to my own question.
D
E
elivery thus entails loss. ven more aptly put, it contains death within it that new life be born. am to die to all that once sustained me as me. am to let life cradle me unto death of the old and deliver me to the new. other Life cradles me, not the old crib or womb, bottle or breast. ot the false comfort of the familiar or the safety of number. he, who is the only true cradling embrace, rocks me not to sleep but carries me through death to awakening. t is not other Life who seduces me to die to my utmost possibility but rather my own clinging hand and heart, my thick efforts to hold onto the past, to what has served its time, to my own agency: it is me. am to be shaped and made beautiful by Life’s tender though exacting hand. Life, if let Her, will remove, slowly, patiently, one by one, all impediments to undergoing, all attachments, all indulgences, all concepts and beliefs, all that puts up resistance to journey and Providence. S
M
I
I
I
N
M
I
I
D
T
E
A
I
I
tiny barrier stands between old and new me, between me and I. ver so small but powerful, it is that within the preconscious which I acquired either by imprinting or fortified by temperament, that little belief of which I am unaware, that teeny weeny falsity I hold dear, that insight not untrue but tainted by one-dimensionality and preconceived as mine. hat clothing I must shed, that tiny claim, that buffer. rawn will I be to new life on pain of letting the preconscious come forth, both the little falseness that must be brought to light and the newly emergent spirit’s seed, smothered beneath the now confining clothing of childhood dreams, that strains to be born, to touch and come under the illumination for which it was prepared miraculously, as like unto like, archetype formed under prototype, sound yoked to seed of understanding, nascent image conceived under elucidating word.
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
83
I
I
I
M I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
M
T
T
I
I
I
A
I
I
I
S
I
T
I
I
D
T
The Mother of Life will draw from the well of the preconscious and enable me to break the shackles of what holds me back and constrains my breathing. he more intensively bear life journey, the more avail myself of being delivered to the perspective that saves me from merely being awash in the sands of time constantly at odds with what comes, perpetually nostalgic for time past, and cursed by how all things come to naught in history. eliverance enables me to apprehend that timeless purpose in undergoing and thereby to come to terms with the undergoing. How we need time, what a gift temporal undergoing is, that we may ripen slowly and often. he more purely and intensively avail myself of life, the more soundly suffer delivery unto timeless realities, questions and answers. oundly do live when die to agitation of heart and soul, to outworn clothes and erratic worries that keep me from attending to essentials. When let myself die to agency, no longer cry myself to sleep. t the heart of deliverance lies the fundamental decision whether to cut the umbilical cord: to trust or bolt. must give up the “no—not this, Lord, not this.” When the child is born, the cord is cut. t is entrusted in itself and by all of Life to the parents. Likewise must we awaken and in full consciousness hand ourselves over to our true guides. Patient trust carries us forward in the constellation of events. t moves us through the way that “can be” rather than colliding upon what life will not, for reasons presently unknown to us, support. rust does not lose heart over trying to impose its own agenda on a reality that cannot or will not bear it. rust into renunciation lets Life lift us up to receive new understanding when what we want, expect, and hope finds its way barred. eaning, though it can be found in a preliminary sense through apprehension of what is needed while passing through a series of events as they unfold, ultimately arrives retrospectively. Prospectively can see that this way is barred or that these people will not bear it. can intuit the sense of it, the nature of the limits. hough stand, nevertheless, in privation of the deeper meaning for why am not permitted to push the way through that judge best. We never know in advance when and how we are saved. t is not transparent to us at the time that, for example, even where had right judgment, unforeseeable harmful consequences would have unfolded had pressed the issue. For timing matters in life. eaning arrives when give over in faithful trust to where life moves me and when walk the course availed to me all the way through. t arrives, in the full-
S
ife Is ong
L
84
I
I
I
I
I
I
A
T
S
I
I
I
I
I
I
N
I
E
I
I
T
A
ness of its array, like a sword that cuts all the way through to the base of my existence and brings to light retrospectively that which eluded me at the time of the undergoing. nd it reveals shockingly how that which failed to apprehend threatened to lead me awry every step of the precarious way. (Oh, the very falsity I entertained almost nursed a miscarriage. In such great danger we walk, little do we realize, under such wondrous care, if only we let Life’s loving hand guide us.) he birth of new understanding comes in retrospect. t gathers the whole cycle of events, the past and the future into one great in-gathering into the present where am shown that my current perspective has grown old because it impedes me and weighs me down. t must be laid to rest. Cut away. ven as could not be delivered to this possibility of radical change, save upon willingness to let events slowly chip away at and enable me to suspend operating merely out of false understanding while trusting into the journey, nevertheless there comes the decisive moment when laid to rest it must become. ew understanding is granted on condition that stand under and bear the time that unfolds each and every step of the way with the open willingness to entertain the prospect that something radically new is required of me, know not what. t is possible, even where have not yet understood, to admit that, because keep colliding with my old pattern, something else clearly is required of me. can move forward on the basis of not misunderstanding. t is not only possible but required. uch receptivity of trusting into the possibility of my own transformation—the terror of it, that something of the very fabric of me must come to light and be cut away—alone avails me of recognizing illumination when it comes. his illumination for which Life readies me, reveals the shape that consent must now take: vigorous renunciation of the old. (Decision, what’s in decision that it should terrify?) t last the old can be seen in its total inadequacy. Yet that razor-sharp apprehension, because it pierces the whole fabric of me and shocks me into awareness that who I was wrought harm, fortifies understanding in me. t fortifies under-standing both in the philosophical sense of new awareness (insight, knowledge, perception) and in the sense of standing-under, becoming firmed up and made stronger and more true in stance (attitude or heart). t fortifies a beautiful rectitude of posture on which can go out to meet the next round of events in the cycle of life open to receive the secret edification they promise to deliver.
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
85
T
hus begins life as song, I, an emergent tone where sound (stance) and word (insight) couple and do not fight but deliver ever new life.
Delivery or Miscarriage
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
A
I
I
A
A
D
T
We are carried out into life no matter what. Yet to be carried out is not to be raised up. But neither is being carried out into life exactly the same thing as moving forward. We need to discover what can carry us forward in life. hese are, then, two aspects of deliverance: being lifted up and being carried forward. elivered not from undergoing but elevated, raised up within undergoing as upon the sea of life. Raised tonally and awarely. nd in being raised up, we are enabled to move forward the way a ship finds its way through a dark and stormy night, having been swept off course. nd because we are free from what weighs us down, habituated psychological reactions and benighted perspectives, we are truly freed! When take myself to be the sole agent of my life’s course as if carve out my future, inevitably confound being carried out into life with moving forward. ( nd when cannot find the way forward, discover my helplessness and long to escape from immersion in life’s stream.) Receptivity, in that it enables us to renounce the temptation to misunderstand, forms the precondition for letting life move me up and forward. can be raised up only if am willing to lose, to give up the perspective that ties me down; and can move forward only if am willing to renounce that which proves too weighty, the perspective that binds me to the past and dooms me to repeat what have been, to cling to the same old story of who and what am.
I
I
Betrayal, I feel betrayed, always betrayed, back round again and again to one thought, one suspicion: betrayal, disappointment, someone, something failed me. onely I am for the way.
L
Life, though properly met in and through receptivity, proves unbelievably creative. How, we might ask, do we know that we do not simply make the future according to our agenda? How do we know that our agency is but the hot air of violent wish and not a genuine basis for moving forward? Because creativity is far more profound than agency. We do not believe, from the agential standpoint, that the future is
S
ife Is ong
L
86
A
I
T
I
A
I
T
T
I
I
T
I
I
I
A
T
N
T
mechanistic, determined, premade. Precisely this disbelief carries within it the seed intuition that my life journey will unfold creatively in a singular and unique way. Yet this intuition, when not gestated toward understanding, tempts us to carve out the future and misunderstand ourselves as agents. he future seems to hang in freedom, undecided. nd yet, oddly, freedom, the freedom to find a way that moves forward, cannot be realized from the agential standpoint. either do we exercise simple control over the future nor is the future merely predetermined. he whole nature of our inherence in time seems to be other than merely determined but also not merely subject to human design. re we not then just confined, subject to mysterious forces, a strange intelligence that behaves whimsically and plays with us the way myth depicts the gods? s it not this fanciful game which we rightly resist and against which we stand our own will? n a word: s our freedom not diminished, squelched, subjugated? o the contrary, our freedom lies deeper still. Creativity cannot rest on a will that is shackled to the past the way agency enchains me to a confining picture of who have been as a subject of experiential history and encumbers imagination’s conception of who could be. How do we know that the future is neither merely predetermined nor simply subject to our will and agency? Because agency leads to deadlock. Life proves itself creative. he future comes as unexpected, unpredictable, and not the least mechanistic or controllable. How, then, do we know that life is not salacious? here is only one way: we come to know that our unique journey, the constellations of events that unfolds in our lifetime, the upheavals and undoings, are not arbitrary upon condition that we let ourselves come undone properly and not crack by our own hand. n and through being delivered to a new and transformed perspective we come know Life as unflaggingly and magnificently creative! nd more: unabashedly loving in responsiveness to me, responsive as only a godly parent could be! Life responds to me, to my temptation to misunderstand, to my weakness, to my bent, to how must be made strong. n this regard, Life’s care-filled bearing toward me proves unimaginably sensitive. By virtue of a supreme creativity, Life does not squelch freedom but instead demands a creative response of me. Creativity lies deeper than agency, and that means that freedom lies deeper too. o respond to life creatively is to arise newly born. Creative responsiveness to what life brings and the intelligence it bespeaks are not rooted in the past. hey arise “in” the beginning. Freedom
D
L
T
oneliness and eliverance
87
I
I
I
I
I
I O
T
I
I
I
S
I
I
I
I
S
I
I
T
I
N
I
arises out of the beginning. Life and come into harmony in a creativity that reaches from one responsiveness to another in a great round dance, a dialogue from depth to depth, a mutuality that uplifts and moves forward in tenderness. What greater deliverance could there be than to be delivered, not away from life but into the beginning where the living waters of life eternal spring? How do we know that agency breeds misunderstanding rather than clear the way forward? Because collision teaches us so. ot to be carried forward is to collide with a cycle of events, the constellation of my life. t is to collapse into misunderstanding rather than hold forth without understanding in Hope for the way that “can be,” for the waters to part. We fall out of receptivity because we feel threatened, so we cramp up and resist, yet resistance, though it takes itself to be defensive, inevitably adopts a positive will underneath to impose an agenda on life. Helplessness breeds power and power advances agency. ypically, even where life prohibits the way forward on the basis wish to command, do not truly step back and pause, let receptivity relieve anxiety, dispel the temptation to see events as bad for me and ask openly, What can they mean, what is required of me, what am to learn? (Poor pupils of life are we who covet experience and thereby live life on our own terms but never in dialogue. mall wonder we cannot speak.) nstead, “tweak” my approach and thereby nurture the lie that have stepped back into receptivity. Whenever project upon the future an expectation that life will not meet, am tempted to think silly, self-serving things like, “ f tweak this or that, then it will come, then it will be given me.” Life is no fool and he can see that must, for my own good, give up my selfcentered stance if am to make myself receptive, ready to be taught, to be guided through the way that alone will transform me. Receptivity entails finding the source of pain and letting go of the threat, the terror, the fear that keeps me self-centered in my disposal toward life, that keeps me, in effect, clinging to me, to my current posture, unwilling to give it up. We’re in danger of plateau-ing out in life, and that is why we can hardly hope to hear wisdom from the old nowadays. stand in danger, at the juncture where collide and the way won’t part for the agenda press. he “why” can suddenly and violently devolve, at this juncture, into self-pity, and express itself not as the open why of questioning—what,
S
ife Is ong
L
88
course of Life, what do you require of me?—but instead close upon itself in hard pity: Why, why won’t the way open for me?
D
L
L
Betrayal lurks beneath the surface of “me,” if I don’t want to see, don’t want to let ife lift up what’s preconceived, the ugly, the outworn, the shameful; if I don’t want to let ife decide that for which it’s time. eep down, in my confused heart, does there not lie betrayal all too ready to vent false word, does ife betray me or I, it?
I
I
A
I
T
I
I
T
T
T
A
I
I
I
T
T
L
here is this very strange thing about life, that the future we intend can be closed and yet we are carried out across time no matter what. ime passes. We can suffer the horrifying optical illusion that we have gone forward precisely as we condemn ourselves to misunderstanding, to vicious circling about the same old spot. Where, then, do land when think am moving forward, when in truth time merely passes and get bogged down in the quicksand of time. Look, see: We end up in vicious repetition. ( nd we sink.) Collision delivers us neither up nor forward. We fall back and down into repetition of the old. he weight of the old suffocates, dampens, and darkens my whole perspective. ime passes, and my refusal to avail myself of life’s lesson constrains Life to repeat the lesson. he next cycle of events, no matter how ingeniously Life presents them, can do none other than meet me where am by bringing into focus, again and again, the same old lesson refuse to learn. (Yet it gets harder.) he future is coming, the future is coming! Yes, the future that is better for me than anything can imagine, the future that carries within it the promise of being lifted up and carried forward. nd yet go round and round in a vicious circle, trying again and again to impose my will on the future. magine, let me take you on an imaginary journey.
I
The Young Novelist Who Wished upon a Star for Andalucia
A
Imagine there was a young woman who, after many long years of labor, suddenly received a most special time, the time to write the novel that had long been gestating in her like a baby. nd it was crystal clear that this time had been granted, for she was not without her spiritual ability to apprehend a
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
89
S
L
A
A
S
A
S
S
T
L
A
T
A
T
T
E
S
S
A
A
A
A
L
granting. et me tell you further, this beautiful woman knew, in that uncanny domain of intuition and because of what happened, that it was her task to bring this baby novel to fruition. nd so she sought, on the basis of felt obligation to spend a year in a most adventitious place, the place where she had always gone for short spells to support her writing. small village in pain, an artist’s colony, where everything about the place, the total environment supported creativity. ll of a sudden a most strange thing happened! he was invited instead to spend time in another place she had often gone, a part of sia. lated and thinking it was a godsend she traveled the seas and took up residence in hailand. he thought, for that brief moment of expectancy, that the God had designed a better plan than she. hen an equally sudden thing happened. lmost as soon as she landed, everything came undone, the promise of her expectation met an immediate and total collision. he people were unprepared for her, the place lacked all hospitality, no resources to support her work existed and even the day-to-day support that one derives from environment—browsing in bookstores, unexpected conversations, café life—were foreclosed. It became instantly apparent that she had traveled the high seas only to land in radical linguistic, cultural, and social isolation and that no sustenance would be forthcoming. ll the joys she had previously known in this place were nowhere to be found. How could ife have lured her to such a place at such a horrid time when people exuded xenophobia and spurned her integration into the marvels of culture and society? ry she did, first in eptember, to leave as quickly as possibly and hightail it back to her first plan. he sought thus to rent a place in ndalucia, though meanwhile ife wove a new twist into her journey. In practical terms, every attempt to go to pain came unraveled at the last minute and a great nightmare beset her existence. villager close to her horridly encroached on her life from afar, meddled in it, and threatened to undo her relation to the little village community which she had long sought to establish. ll this, before she even arrived. Meanwhile, back in hailand, she faced a star-
T S
L
90
ife Is ong
S
S
D
N
A
oneliness and eliverance
D
L
T
S
A
A
S
S
S
S
S
A
S
A
tling situation that threatened to undermine the possibility of writing. Boxed in, she thought, by an inhospitable environment in sia and an unintelligible nightmare unfolding in pain, she heeded, for want of understanding and energy, the inauspicious signs from abroad, held back, and suffered on in sia. he even tried to return home, but that way too seemed blocked and not the least conducive to her task to write without interference from the ordinary obligations of worldly life. Yet, though she heeded all these signs, she was tempted, tempted to confound tweaking with conscious and true heeding. For in her conscious understanding she kept her plan, believed firmly that pain was the place and that she just failed in her own agency to see her way through turbulent waters. he straddled the waters of life holding in one hand her understanding and in the other her total lack of understanding of why such horrid life events beset her after twelve hard years working and waiting for her time to write. he had prepared everything so that the village would receive her when her time came. Her task was clear, there was no doubt. But terrible ordeals beset her that demanded energy and yet warding them off exerted nothing but a purely corrosive effect on her life. Held back from the village dream, abandoned, it seemed, to recalcitrant and insupportable conditions for writing, she nevertheless began to write. But she did not give up pain. o, come ecember, she tried again. he exerted untold amounts of energy in the initiative, though it too failed. Moreover, throughout fall, she had expended her will over and over on fighting, albeit from abroad, the forces that were unleashed in the village, through email and letter writing. he fought and fought to get the villager to cease destroying people’s faith in her. ll this energy she expended threatened to undermine her capacity to write, to corrupt her soul and impede her capacity to give birth to word illuminated by understanding and brightness of spirit. nd then again, during the long winter, in dire pain she sought yet again to get to pain. nd what happened? Plans unraveled a third time. he villager prevailed in the blind
91
I
I
S
T
O
I
I
I
I
N
I
O
I
I
I
N M
I
N
Round and round we go in a vicious circle of repetition. ine months later what do we discover? he future wanted could not be and was not to be. o matter how hard tried, no matter how much tweaked my approach and endured in order again to press my want, it was not to be. erely to endure—nine long months of suffering—is not to wait openly in patience for revelation of what Life requires of me but to expect what imagine will be granted. n what do collide if not the very same thing as our young novelist—the future as imagine and insistently want it to be? ot the future that is coming, coming in ripe expectancy. collide upon the quality, the deficiency of my own expectancy, that it is expectation of what think best for me, even of what imagine is being granted by powers greater than me, and yet it is not open reception. Like the novelist, can, even where it is clear that my task is granted, prey upon the future, upon the environment think should be granted to support the task, predesign the shape of how the very future given me graciously—the time to write—should be clothed, in what clothing it should come. Beware an overly zealous relation to futural sendings! ur novelist was fortunate, for she had enough wherewithal not to draw the wrong conclusion even as her posture was wanting, strung across the double-mindedness of clinging to her old understanding while having enough perspicacity to hold forth in some wonder at why the way did not open. hroughout her three strenuous attempts and nine dreary months, she let herself finally and at long last come into question—down to the root of her agency—upon the third powerful initiative to force the future. he wondered, periodically throughout the travail and finally accepted completely that the difficulty must lie within rather than outside her. Here we come upon the eminent danger that could spend nine months caught T
A
assertion of will. It became evident that it could never have been warded off, for even evil has its time. nd all the energy she spent, the energy that could have been focused on the task at hand rather than wasted on things not given and which, for the time, admitted no influence, depleted her severely. Worse, she had even debased herself, for in a struggle with power, if we do not desist when the time for influence has not come, then we fail to fight on true ground, as we are anxious and threatened by what must be lost. We fail to hold out more purely for the essential things in life. We do not trust.
I S
L
92
ife Is ong
M
I
T
I
I
I
I
A
T
I
I
O
I
A
I
I
I
I
S
I
in a perspective that will not advance me, a perspective that leads me to remain stuck in repetition forever if so wish. If I wish desperately not to see that tiny thing, that little impediment, that falsity I must drop in order that Life may harmonize with spirit’s preconscious wish. Here, Life cannot rescue me without my consent, on pain of renunciation, try though he may to love. risk depleting all my energy by becoming hopelessly entangled in battles unworthy of such infinite attention, battles that cannot be won. f, however, am vigilant enough to recognize that am the greatest danger to myself, then avail myself of radical change of heart. ostly we break and collapse when the way won’t open, abort the seed of our own deep wish, our true possibility. We decide that life is unfair and take ourselves to have been deprived—of the village, of support, of this and that—unjustly in life. nd what the villager did to the novelist was unjust. Yet was Life thereby unjust to her? We crack upon our double-mindedness in holding Life blameworthy yet unintelligent and lacking independent reality, nothing more than brute mechanism. What life delivers comes upon first appearance as my nightmare: to be hemmed in and persecuted by forces that threaten the most decisive task, the task believe will define me, give rise to me. Forces that have an uncanny edipal constellation, for they look like the people and places that have in the past sought to undermine me. Battle ready, armed fight them and in fighting them, refuse to accept my crucifixion. What Life delivers is not the punishment of my worst nightmare but the occasion to live through the nightmare. t delivers the possible crucifixion of “me”: the death that brings new birth. he shape (nightmare) that turns me upon the shaping (death to agency). We are hemmed but not boxed in, not suffocated but instead aimed toward new life, new breath. hh, the true, suffocating nightmare, no matter what actual events unfold, lies in resistance. Like the novelist, smash against the way that “cannot be” because am too slow, too dim-witted, too self-attached or too intent to command justice as deem fit ever to avail myself of the way that “can be.” am too suspicious to trust that what Life grants might best enable the delivery of my labor and task. Far worse than the apparent nightmare of what happens is the real nightmare of landing in a collision that yields no deliverance, no way out, only to suffer with no seeming purpose. How we forget that “I” am at stake, “I” could grow debased, dim-witted, uglier than the thing I dread to see. o be stuck perpetually running up against a hard set-up, and condemn oneself to the endless repetition of
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
93
T
S
never finding deliverance, oh! what merciless sadness. Yet were our novelist to arrive in pain by sheer force of will, she would have met an equally fruitless battle of her own making that, for reason of being self-made, could yield no deliverance but solely undermine the task at hand, to come to terms with living while writing the novel. o live but not win destiny is to suffer but never find the trustworthy way forward or know redolent accord in the living.
Being Carried Forward and the Retrospective Glance
I
I
T
I
T
I
T
I
I
T
o glance back is a very dangerous affair. t presents us with the paradox of being in time yet in want of living free “of ” the mere dictates of time’s endless movement toward naught. t presents us with the ordeal of having to be made new in order to move forward. What does it mean to be carried forward in and by life, to win an order of transformation that sustains us even where all things merely of time die away? Under-standing bolsters receptivity. Receptivity avails us, in wondering why, to be uplifted as we are carried out in life. We must learn to differentiate the inessential from the essential along the way. We must learn to let go and let go quickly of that which has served its time and can no longer carry us forward. nevitably the perspective we must relinquish will be refracted to us in the events that come. hat is, these events will avail me the prospect of choosing to cling to the old or renounce it. t was, then, inevitable that the time for writing granted to the young novelist would not be given support in the way she imagined, in the way she thought she had built up a material prospect from out of the past. Her trips to the village, trips that had given birth to the seed idea for the baby novel that had to be written at a future time, were themselves great, supported grantings from life. he village was granted, a culture of incubation and support, even as, quite extraordinarily, it was not her mother culture. Why, then, should she not have expected that life would deliver her back to the village for her ending, for the actual time of delivery of the novel, the very baby life cultivated in her? s Life, after all, a tease and not a mother? he village outlived its time. Life decided, yes, Life has the lead. Life decided to strip her of a temptation, lurking beneath all that had previously been gestated and on which she receptively rode the tides of time up toward the understanding that would be delivered in the novel. speak of the temptation to bring forward the birth, to complete the ending of the journey, through her own
S
ife Is ong
L
94
I
A
S
S
T
I
I
T
A
A
I
S
E
I
A
agency, for we can fall prey to agency at the end even when we have abdicated it at the beginning. nd how did Life present her with her unknown, unsurfaced temptation? t did not deprive her of the essential thing, that the novel, and that she with the novel, could come to birth and find a proper ending. Yet it deprived her of control over the shape of things to come, the final environment and cycle of events through which delivery could come forth into reality. ven this is a poor way to state the matter, for in truth we never have control over the shape of things to come! Life merely revealed this truth more articulately and with greater differentiation than she had known it before. You might say, as is fitting of a proper ending, that Life drove home the lesson. o Life sent her a situation that threatened her right at the root of her felt agency, not in order to threaten her but in order to invite her to realize the ending and not yearn for control over the how and when of deliverance. t sent her: the villager who worked to take away the village, loss of the place she thought would receive divine sanction for her birth. nd she was threatened, for deep inside agency asserted its final claim. ( gency does not die easily.) hough slowly chipped away through past wayfaring, agency reared up its head in a strenuous concluding effort to keep her tied to the pattern of her now defunct understanding. t tempted her to believe she could end the novel on the basis of the tender understanding that produced the seed. Yet this was not to be, for an end must consolidate the new perspective, the perspective that gathers together the whole journey that gave rise to the book to be seen from on high and in retrospect. t was time, then, for her to lose the village, the place had served its time. he outer place merely refracted to her that it was time to lose what in the old perspective could not deliver an ending but only a questioning, a tender beginning, a gestation and unfolding, but no ending. he had to renounce decisively the perspective that kept her bound to seek to shape her own future and thereby manufacture a nonultimate end. Losing this village meant for her that she must die to herself and give up control over life and birth and creativity. he does not decide what and when she is to undergo, what order of undergoing will actually serve to bring the birth of the seed, the novel gestating within, to fruition. long the way, she had to discern that to fight, three times no less, over that which it is time to give up was nothing but dangerous energy leakage and distraction from right focus. t was time to lose the village and thereby cease clinging to cultural and earth-bound supports—the pillars of first incubation—and
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
95
I
I
S
I
ife Is ong
L
96
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
E
T
I
I
T
N
I
E
T
N
I
I
I
S
yield herself up to new birth and awakening, to breathe the rarified air of spirit and relinquish all else. Yet temptation beseeches: Can not, as we might ask of the novelist who did not get to pain, simply stay within the old understanding and fare equally well as did with it in the past? Why call refusal of deliverance a collision and a vicious cycle of repetition? Can’t just decide to live on the plane of understanding currently enjoy? o, we cannot exactly fare well on a single perspectival plane throughout life. here is no such neutrality for we who are conscious of ourselves and for whom passage in time entails passage unto transformation. We are destined for creativity; to be shaped and let Life respond to us with wisdom and adaptability. xistentially speaking, we either rise or sink in the tides of time. When Life deems it timely for me to grow, the old perspective will no longer serve me. Where once had to win this very perspective and the way had to open for me to operate out of it, now the way closes. othing stands still in the tides of time. he old perspective begins at that juncture to weigh me down and hold me back. can gamble on plateau-ing out in life. Yet in truth this means that darkness will cloud my heart and my life. will bind myself to that to which cling as to an anchor while cast out to sea, and it will not carry me forward to new light and sustained joy but hold me back and pull me down. o collide repeatedly and not avail myself of wonder over my own failing is to sink. But to where do we sink? We sink out of “not understanding” into “misunderstanding.” Where once new understanding illuminated my way, failure to apprehend the new order of requirement placed upon me (and with it the whole character of life journey) leads me to sink into misunderstanding. ven where think can arrive at a plateau, fall lower than where initially started. For lose that attitude which enabled me to gain new perspective. lose my open disposal toward life journey. started, before this fall, with a perspective that was itself once hard won, like the novelist; once, upon the pain of winning it, this perspective carried me forward and availed me of the next possibility. Yet where once stood and bore possibility openly, now sink uncomprehending into darkness before yet a new order of possibility that fail. sink into darkness unwilling to comprehend why the way was blocked. think am unable to understand, when in truth am unwilling to stand under and bear the events openly such that the way can open for me. think only that Life has treated me unfairly. think (my) life is external to me and not, as it
N
truly is, the medium of transformation. or is Life merely distant but an intelligence who aims to dialogue with me but finds Herself constrained by my estranged unwillingness to undergo transformation.
A
A I
am guilty of willed naïveté. sink into childish victimhood but see no fault in me. Where we are given the task to renounce the old, to apprehend its limitation and deficiency but nevertheless refuse the lesson, there we gain that added burden, the weight of guilt. We acquire a double heaviness of the old and of guilt, and these weigh us down psychologically and physically. hey suppress spirit and oppress nature, and so we sink. he timely plateaus we are given in life—the time in which a newly won perspective, like ascending to the mountain peak, can unveil its strengths— are governed by Providence, as are all things. Yet to let a thing have its time and thereby become fortified is not at all to seek to “plateau out,” as if we could extend the time of a thing beyond its moment. We are graciously given plateaus and then the arduous reach toward new understanding. ach befits us and we must go out to meet each wholly willingly. For to seek to extend a perspective beyond its time is to deprive it unwittingly of the very fortification it yielded as preparation for the new. t is to squander old nourishment and meet the new with less energy and capacity. he retrospective glance, because it shines forth either from above (the uplifted standpoint) or below (having sunk), marks one of the most dangerous movements known to humankind. When look back, will turn to stone or gain fresh vitality? When issued from its proper vantage point of deliverance, culminating as it does in childlike birth of the new and grown-up illumination, the retrospective glance proves necessary to bolster our posture in receptivity and willingness. ew understanding firms up receptivity. t enables us to let go, it firms up our understanding that letting go was and is the way. I
I
N
I
T
I
E
T
T
I
L
A
A
D
o I not become guilty when I sink? m I not guilty of falling into estrangement? m I not guilty of refusing to change, of refusing intimacy and dialogue and speech? “ ll of the above.” I pass the test but lose heart. oneliness is to misunderstand and never find the way forward; it is to be haunted, for all my days, by the nagging question, m I guilty, somehow guilty originally in (not) being born? but never receive an answer.
D
L
oneliness and eliverance
97
I
I
I
T
A
T
T
T
N
A
T
I
S
I
T
S
I
T
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
f, upon collision with the old, look back, then what do see? Reality refracted through pain and none other. see only me. see only historically. For prospectively, we interpret the events that unfold from within our current level of comprehension with at best glimpses of the new. hus we tend, in the absence of receptivity, to undergo life merely historically—as events that happen to me. Life is never merely historical insofar as it works deliverance. Where look back, without having held forth through deliverance, can only see what first saw in dark obscurity: events that happened to me without cause, knew not why, know not why. Yet see with this important difference: the first doubt—why should suffer these events so undeserved—solidifies into the premature conclusion, the deformed and miscarried birth of certainty that have been made to suffer undeservingly. Premature delivery solidifies the suspicious and unloving hate, the uncomprehending and persecuting mind-set; it infects rather than frees up the preconscious. he true birth of understanding miscarries and give birth solely to darkness and hate. Life, come to believe, treats me unfairly. his is the great end we work by our attachment to agency. he sad, self-centered vision of the subject of experience who suffers horrid things that come unjustly and cries out, “Why, why me?” Yes, as have said, the villager did rain injustice upon the novelist. till, the villager, though herself guilty, was at this moment in the journey a messenger of deeper things. he retrospective glance, when deprived of illumination, cannot find the message but only sink into the darkness of my tale of woe, bereft of understanding. Without deliverance, succumb to the temptation to impute to Life, not merely the villager, a motive and injustice that cannot do it justice. hort of a miraculous act of repudiating misunderstanding, will misunderstand. nd this is far worse than facing life without understanding. he benighted glance delivers only a historical and time-bound view of the cycle of events, and a self-centered one at that. nd never the uplifted perspective of one who is risen and who apprehends the love and compassion in life’s uncanny attention and care for me. ot, then, as one who has availed herself of the way and who can thus come to terms with life, with exactly this cycle of events and their hidden, inner purpose and meaning—hidden in the secret love that could pass between Life and me. he submerged one cannot see. he submerged one cannot even entertain the possibility, deep at heart, that she has sunk into a breached relation to life journey. ime passed her by even as Providence wove temporal events into a decisive possible change for her own healing and deliv-
S
ife Is ong
L
98
A
erance, the very possibility of being lifted up and moved forward. nd time passes her by, for all its creative brilliance, each and every moment that she persists in her benighted sensibility. We cannot, then, go forward where we have not been raised up and do not win the vantage of the Himalayan peak. h, what sad, heavy day. Whenever did I grow so dull and heavy, forsaken and lonely?
I
N
T
T
A
We must forgive Life even to undergo life, so central is the question of love to that of meaning. he very meaning inheres in the living. nd living requires us to love, to stand under and bear with Life. he problem of forgiveness pertains not simply to people but to Life, to why we must live, to our entire relation to Life and thereby to both self and divinity. o bear is to gain proper love of self by letting Life care for me. When we are delivered to understanding, we receive love because we let ourselves be turned upon the past in such a manner that we no longer see mere historical trauma but wisdom’s consoling hand. Understanding delivers us to a perspective worthy of its name, for it does not entail mere comprehension that, for example, receptivity is the precondition of all true living. Gloriously, it gives us to apprehend the wise hand that knew better, the discrepancy between agency and providential wisdom. Life makes our smallness evident, for we do not trust and we bring unnecessary harm upon ourselves and others. We are too slow for divine assistance (to leap and thereby entrust) and too quick to distrust (rush ahead by our own felt power). othing proves more humbling than to see that all the supposedly heartfelt demands advanced with impatient agitation or the huge paths forged ostensibly in the name of good, all were unnecessary. ll had to do was consent, follow Life’s lead, and make the cut. T
O
On Love and Forgiveness
I
A
N
I
Is, then, everything, everything we truly, deeply need already given? eed we only let ourselves be grown, on the basis of privation—of meaning and protection—into the awareness that we are lovingly cared for, that there is care?
oneliness and eliverance
D
O L
O
O
“ uch,” did you say “ouch”? I thought I heard an “ouch.” h, but the J Y of it!
99
Loneliness is to abstract from life’s undergoing, never to enter into the mystery of pain and discover its power to redeem. Loneliness is to sacrifice heroically but never relinquish that horrid temptation to prize my own suffering above that of others. Loneliness is never to open into brilliant heart but instead perceive all things narrowly from the unilluminated standpoint of “me.” Loneliness is a walled up heart that for want of receptivity never lets itself be affected or radiate warmth. Loneliness is to shed tears of misunderstanding before life’s requirements, yet never trust in governance. Loneliness is to suffer all the days of time yet never know the sorrow of the heart’s true blossoming or enjoy a buoyant joyous living.
s
S
ife Is ong
L
100
Part 2
L
amentation and Woe
T
he Quest for the Mother
sx
We suffer life’s journey and labor. Labor, yes, labor, the way a woman gives birth. n this, our travail to win a proper relation to wayfaring through the tides of time lest the living pass us by. his, that we suffer and labor in travail, this is the stuff of lamentation. r, hope of all hopes, would that it could be . . . T
I
i
Shadows of Sorrow-Filled Lamentation
O
s
S
S
S
Priscilla had such a wonderful time with him. he was so taken. he had waited for such a long time for him to ask her out and when he finally did, she vibrated and tingled, all radiant with joy, for she came away with the ever so clear intuitive knowledge that a spark passed between them. he sat dreamily pondering the two-of-them-together when the phone suddenly rang. t was him!
A
I
“ oooh! he audacity of the guy! t makes me burn. fter not phoning for three weeks,” her mind rattled round and round. “First elated, then down, anxious and uncertain what he thought of me. oooh! he turmoil he put me through. Whatever should say? What should do?” T
O
S
I
Without a moment’s reflection, her heart leaped forth in a silent yes, though audibly she hesitated and said nothing. he faltered and slipped off into a little attack of emotion-charged memory, an unguarded onslaught of mental thought after rushing thought.
A
I
“ llo! ’ow ya been? ’d like to take ya fer a boat ride,” he casually rounded up a second date.
I
T
T
S
I
O
he toiled at hesitation, trying to buy time, considering how she might appear if she did not give him to understand her little displeasure at putting her on hold for so long. hen,
quick as a flash, while this strange struggle ensued in her to put down the “yes” and be a little coy, to set terms and “prove” she had her dignity to consider, he spoke up again.
I
“Well, no worry, if ya don’t wish to find out whether ’m the guy for you, then ’ll bid you all things good in life and take my leave.”
T
I
aking her troubled hesitation for a no, he hung up, simple as that, not in anger or pride but with that sound sober sorrow which stands open before naked reality. nd she . . . What song welled in her heart? A
s D
T
D
I
D
D
N
ow pause, imagine, listener. o you know when and how lamentation grows? oes our lovely Priscilla not stand before an inward decision of heart at the decisive crossroads where she can go either up or down, forward or back? oesn’t she stand before the meaning of “two”? wo— and only two—defining possibilities cross her way and they are mutually exclusive. t’s one or the other, either/or, just as it was, by the way, on the phone. oesn’t “two”—not “two, we two are one united” but two in the radical sense of “one or the other”—shadow her act and haunt the way forward?
Pretend you are in one of the old movie theaters they “once upon a time” had in Prague, city of mysterious hidden sagacity, or so am told. nd you, the audience, are given the choice to hazard which way the dramatic scene will go, press the button, and make the cut. You don’t know the end in advance or how the ways will part. You know only this scene’s possible cut, this moment’s ripening decision. t’s fun, it’s thrilling. Yet there’s Priscilla, don’t forget. uppose, like poor wayward Priscilla, in the moment where either yes or no surged up, you hesitated and did not listen to your heartstring’s “yes” nor release its song with a fragrant, free, and decided cut, though a cut, however shabby and unclean, you by gambling on hesitation did unwittingly make, what then? oes a lamentable song gurgle up in your heart and send you reeling? h, even then you must still learn to pause and face the question, will you learn, will you, how truly not to stray from pause into hesitation and make the loving cut? O
D
S
I
A
I
T
he cut. Priscilla faces the cut.
amentation and Woe
L
104
A
I
O
S
T
Scene 1: he phone hung up, she cringed and though for one slight moment there was hope of change, all too rapidly did pain convert into a capricious anger that fortified her sense of righteousness, and indignation pulsed heatedly through the full stream of her slight body till finally it let escape one long wail across her quaking lips. he bewailed fate, God knows how long, and vented such sentiments as “ oooh, the friggen audacity of man, the arrogance, the brute. Uh, brute, brute, brutish man, the shadow brute. What would want with him?” Conflict churned and turned and came alive in her heart . . . conflict with men, conflict with fate for what it gives and what it takes, conflict with life for not giving her a chance and especially for not delivering the right guy, conflict and more conflict. nd her pained heart cramped, almost as if she were in a seizure, and there formed in it an undeniable, though lamentably prolonged toll, “Woe, woe is me.”
Scene 2: He bid her farewell, and her heart sank in devastation. Unexpectedly was she awakened by shock to the belated realization that she missed the moment and accord with her truth. o she let Life jolt her, jolt her into sobriety. nto transformed living. nd if this act, this scene, this life possibility were over and not thus repeatable, could she not at least live true for the next, not hesitate by coy pretense to dignity where her heart willingly says yes? ot, had it been true or were it to be true, by anxious toil and spurious deliberation fail to live up to a gracious no? How, listener, did she glance back? Woefully shaken or jolted upright? id she sink into woe or did she receive the blow to urgency that readies a radical change of heart? id she seek merely to do over, to repeat the encounter on the same dull plane, bereft of understanding, solely to have and get, to finagle how to get him back and still have her way? id she play, play, play at the game of life or see that the play is serious? What song becomes her? Will the loneliness of “woe, woe unto me” D
D
D
N
A
I
S
O
r:
L
S
S
hadows of orrow-Filled amentation
105
O
haunt her days and the shadow of longing for things past overtake and rule her heart’s skewed memory, out of want, that small but menacing want of illuminated understanding? r will she renounce silly games and let her heart grow a tune rich and pure that holds forth expectant unto that brighter day when she won’t allow forlornness to dominate from the past? s hers the lamentable song of a cramped heart or a heartfelt lament richly grown into sorrow?
nce there lived a woman who thought she’d lived a happy married life, though of late she and her husband had drifted apart. o, did not invent her, the prize for that falls to a famous female philosopher, yet see her character differently. o listen to this story. here once lived a woman who thought she was living a happy married life forever and for eternity. ne routine midlife day she discovered that her husband was conducting an affair with oellie. Poor, poor onique. Born to the cheery promise of the 1950s, fated to lead a life of motherhood, kindly servant to home and hearth, poor onique awoke, on that unanticipated day, to find that she had lost hold on daughter and husband. he could not even specify when she had lost them. he loneliness that filled her days pierced hard. Loneliness for times past, for uncontested happiness, for significance, for intimacy. But her daughter moved far, far away to avoid her clinginess. nd her husband hastened to the stunning intelligence of an accomplished woman, an independent, sexy, wild, and successful woman, all sorts of women rolled into one. Under the blow of this sudden discovery, her loneliness grew wide, wide as the ocean vast. Questions confounded her heart, ache and tears touched her bone and marrow, rose out of the very stem of her life. Had she sacrificed all of her days to nurture, support, and raise her husband and child only to be left behind, unwanted, and with her emotional needs unrealized? Had she? nitially she condescended to play games, for she had lived thus far innocent of such tricks. Yet anger grew in her heart and jelled into a sense of injustice: how could aurice abanN
I
A
T
S
M
M
T
O
S
I
I
N
O
I
s
M
amentation and Woe
L
106
A
T
S
S
T
I
A
S
N
T
N O
T
O
don her when she had sacrificed her school and career, the, the . . . she couldn’t even find the word for his horrifying behavior, making her sit at home all the more lonesome for his being with oellie; the gall of the man. hat’s it, “gall.” What gall! nce the affair was out in the open, he felt relieved, not guilty or ashamed, but relieved of the burden she supposedly caused, the burden of not knowing how to tell her. He even asked her to let him spend several nights a week out in the open with that little home breaker, and some nights openly with her because, or so he said, he wanted to discover “the true path forward” for himself. he gall, her stomach turned over. ow that she consciously felt her loneliness, she fell into a horrid depression and entertained thoughts of suicide. Her spleen oozed poisonous rage until she went numb and holed up in the dark. ne ripe morning she decided to act, to pull herself out of it, but what fatal error! he sought advice from “friends.” ll agreed, they sang in unison a strange, seditious song of indictment and cool entitlement, that she must demand respect and connive to gain him back, he, her rightful claim. ll agreed, yes, they sang in unison an unearthly harmony that conjured up hurt and want of vindication. t was his duty, they murmured, to take his turn and let her become self-realized now that their daughter was grown up and he had achieved his worldly aim. hey vented, in breathy voices and low whispers, such an eerie song of uncanny stratagem about how right took her side and permitted all variety of untold things, but lo she stood in frightful danger of losing him if she resorted to scheming demand, yet their moans whipped anxiety up to high-pitched fervor and primed her by fright to believe that she must relinquish care and act godspeed, advance in stealth and by cunning her claim, her claim, her rightful claim. he must beyond doubt cut the other woman out. he, well, she wanted to wallow in passivity in the hope that he would slink back sad and guilty, but her bewitching friends, worldly-wise, all knew so much more than she and each, having long since secured negotiations with her husband, knowingly disagreed and made their condescension felt. hese prudent women, who counseled nothing short of action and
L
S
S
hadows of orrow-Filled amentation
107
A
N
S
A
M
M
D
S
cunning, persuaded her that she, piteous, naive thing, could never win by accommodating him. Yes, their lives were better, they had succeeded where she had failed, so she listened and listened and fell as under a spell into the comparative mind-set. Her life was worse; they knew better. he must do the thing, the very thing, the one thing needed. on’t let the course blindly unfold, no, she must seize control of the reins over life, direct the course of the affair and do whatever it takes to get aurice to give up oellie. Yes, that’s it. t just the right moment, the precise moment when she regains his trust in her love, she must issue a devastating blow as if she had risen from ashes and become other Life Herself, as if she stood high above in heaven with justification like phrodite, yes, just as her shadowy power grows, she will issue an absolute. Listening not to her true heart, by asking whether love would defend itself so or what way could open to genuine love in action, she turned away and lent an ear to her “friends.” he let their artful song, at first dissonant to her soul, gain a consonance that charmed her, amid confusion, into believing she should make righteous demand for respect, lower the boom, justify and mete out an ultimatum.
s
A
I
S
A
amentation and Woe
L
108
I
M
A
M
T
A
h, listener, once again we come to the juncture where the end illuminates the beginning and the beginning contains the ending. hat’s serious business. Can you imagine onique’s victory? re you ecstatic for her, ungodly ecstatic, screeching and pealing with agitated delight? Would you think her victory complete even if, by design, she were to lose aurice? mean, do you think she won self-respect? s you might imagine, she succeeded very well, as anyone could by design and initiative, but at what? he succeeded well enough at breeding conflict, more conflict, greater conflict, conflict. Just when the gentle way of heart was needed to find the way forward, she chose instead conflict. ( nstead of receptivity: conflict.) Here’s one of Life’s puzzles for us all: With whom or what do we stand in conflict? n ultimatum has a power indeed, yet its blow delivers only two things but nothing sustaining: either the lover cowers back shackled under conflicted measure or the lover departs conflicted and provoked toward
I
I
I
I
A
I
I
I
A
A
T
a premature and misbegotten end. he ultimatum, for all its power to conjure up conclusions, delivers but a meager false cut. false “either/ or.” For these seemingly two things, the conflict of staying badly or the conflict of departing woefully are but one thing: conflict. Conflict, meager pretense of a begetter, breeds conflict, only conflict. nd with either variation of the way of conflict, who issue the ultimatum prove unwilling—to discover my true heart, to let the lover’s true heart be revealed, and to face the truth of heart without malice, hate, or justification. What is my gain? n the former case, would never know love but only controlled manipulation. n the latter, would never know the love that was given even as it had to give way to a love to come. nd would my lamentation be overrun by misunderstanding and woe, would not, though by all appearances seemed rational and justified, gibber a constant refrain in my ailing heart that “ wanted, just wanted a little respect, is that too much to ask?” I
L
R
O
I
n the wind, the loving wind sent by Mother ife, there whispers another tune, a song of Hope. espect begins with the self’s relation to life journey. Can you hear the question, have you listened, can one win self-respect by issuing an ultimatum?
T
T
he sadness of it, of never knowing, never receiving the gift that lay hidden in the ordeals we face. o suffer and never find the jewel that irradiates the heart and lets it sing in sorrowful beauty of love and loss, of loving well though it entail loss. he risk that lets love beget love and by love call love to return, even as outworn days cannot come back.
How can one pass through life and not regret, how can one sacrifice in love and nevertheless fare well, or is the answer to place absolute limits on how often and when we will sacrifice, to make others clear that there is a price for what do and give, to live, as it were, with a hidden, shadowy ultimatum, a lonely guard in defense of my “honor and respect”? onique could have lowered the boom earlier, spelled out a contract, defined the rules of the game and seized control. s there, ask, ever a time to usurp Life’s lead and abort the course of events that draws each to bear witness to the true heart’s guileless want? I
I
M
I
T
T
he sadness unearthed by never finding a respectable self-love harvests but pity and woe.
L
S
S
hadows of orrow-Filled amentation
109
I
I
D
I
I
I
O
I
I
I
D
I
Have you never paused to wonder that men don’t determine the game of life, that Life has its own requirements? Whence do conflict and woe arise in the heart? With whom or what am constantly fighting? cannot control others, it’s so obvious. oes the source of my being threatened by what others do lie deeper still than what happens or what people do? Can one love who begins from conflict to lay down rules about what others can or cannot do ( . . . to me, to me, woe unto me)? Can one get off on the right footing in life where one primes oneself in advance to expect and fight off every possible occasion for woe? f seek to control the material career of events rather than meet what comes openly, where do land? n hurt, in the hurt that conflict breeds, in the vapid horrifying emptiness of estrangement from others, in a shadowy loneliness grown corruptive and menacing. h, it’s not only the hurt of others engender but masochistic hurt, hurt of myself, for don’t lose love and with it consolation? on’t lose understanding and thereby increase pain? What breath can pass over my lips when all am is a hurtful bleat, bleat, bleat of pity-filled “woe unto me”? I
s S
A
A
A
I
Why do we, as women, protest our innocence? o often and for such a long time. f not for the whole duration of life. nd with such vehemence. re we precious jewels at heart? re we endowed by nature with a virtue that makes us shine more brightly than men? Whenever did woe begin? How deep does the quest for lament run?
N
o, we are not like men. We do not crave power and domination. We’re capable by nature of giving birth. We have an inborn connection to life, to the very emergence of new life, so tender and fragile. How could we, we who carry this inborn capacity within our very womb, ever be so insensitive to life, so power-hungry, so dominant, so narcissistic—like men, horrid men—as to neglect, by inborn sensitivity, the weak and the frail, the needful care of living things?
I
I
S
omewhere in the hearts of so many women there sings a quiet refrain, like a babbling brook, deeper even than conscious mind, an upsurging protest all mixed up with woeful lament. t runs like this: “Woe, woe is woman, for we are not like men. nsensitive oafs, their self-centeredness drives us insane. he moment they walk into the room, their demeanor
T
amentation and Woe
L
110
A
grates on the nerves.” What curious jumbled song rises in the heart: “Why, oh why do men get all the recognition? Why must they always upset things? re we destined to be left behind in the shadows of sacrificial love and tenderness, never to be seen, heard, or recognized? ust we be left behind?”
U
M
pon pause, do you not wonder what’s more odd, that we feel left behind or that men need not do anything other than “be” in order for us to grow upset, disturbed, flustered, all riled up, and knocked out of quiet repose. By the simple presence, the simple presence of . . . ugh, men.
D
Jumbled tones of erratic breath wait impatiently to indict and accuse others, men, of injustice, but in our cries and groans of injustice, however right and justified, don’t we confound what men do with what they are? on’t we seek all too soon and with all too much assurance to purse the lips and release a cursed wish in the form of the negative: “ o. o. o. shall never be like a man. ever.” I
N
N
N
s this, then, the stuff of lamentation, that women are destined to be eclipsed and left behind by the world and men, for, it is true, the world belongs to men? What’s in a lamentation? re we lonely, as we are wont to claim, for lack of recognition and respect, for want, that is, of worldly selfadvancement? r are we lonely, deeper down, for want of sensitivity? Perhaps we voice an inverted wish, a wish ensconced in a dark shadow: How envy men their irresponsible freedom. But, ! shall never admit this shadow, envy. shall never name it as it truly is because will never give birth to positive admiration of man’s predilection to freedom but only glare scathingly on in unhappy admiration, never to acknowledge the shadow of envy. Forgive me, women, beg you, this downcast thought slipped in, like a demon tempting me to forget the battle we must wage against men to find our rightful due. I
I
NO
I
I
I
O
A
I
T
N
N
Men are so heartless, so wanting in passion, so stoic, so akin to death. hey stalk and kill, maim and hurt. ever, oh never, do they give life, embrace life, cultivate tender life. I am woman, I love life, I give birth to life, I teach life, only life, life, life and not all that war and death, conflict and battle that men work. If only men would listen to my song, to my tone, to me, a small, even meek woman.
L
S
S
hadows of orrow-Filled amentation
111
O
A
Men. Men attend only to their own accomplishment and leave everyone else they claim to love behind, floundering in the wake of the destruction they work. Men, you rapers of virginity who come and take from us, then abscond in disrepute by night. You live freely as you deem fit, you ignore our claims and leave us behind, our innocence stolen, our kindness, our devotion, our psychic virginity, used up, worn and torn but never glorified or appreciated. nd even if you marry us, we are still left behind, without our own axis of meaning in life, without vocation, without public recognition, bound to stay behind to raise children and tender your kin. Bound by feelings and sentiments you like to ignore. ye destroyers of life! Why don’t you come home to where life breeds and grows, to the treasure of your possible delight? Before you came, I used to shine, was it not so? I used to radiate so full of virgin life. How could you have darkened my innocence so? Women’s burden is great, ever so much greater than men’s. Woe, woe is me, for I am born woman.
s I
T
O
S
A
D
People lament, as one or many, what life brings. he people of srael lamented their lack of home on earth. Jeremiah and Jesus lamented Jerusalem. Ruth lamented her exile as a foreign woman in a strange land. o you think she bore it well? ne laments her powerless inability to divine the future’s horizon, another the horror of existence. You lament . . . what do you lament? What are these stories? re they tales of sacrifice offering up a song of pure lament or are they but a prelude . . . and to what, a starkly beautiful sorrow-filled lament or a grievous piteous howl that births ugly contrivance? Where Joy rises, lament grows wild and rich into orrow, white as the lily.
amentation and Woe
L
112
seven
Ode to the Cup of Bitterness
I
nce heard a woman cry a faint, distant weep, it drifted soft and rhythmically across my unperturbed sleep
I
nce heard a woman moan beneath her tragic pain a moving, rising, sinking drone that swayed upon the deep
I
nce heard a child whimper its mother nowhere found for want of that most gentle peace by eternity’s embrace to be bound nd my sleepy heart did rise upon the swell of cry and moan to bear in full compass and sway pain’s smelting the whimper drone:
I
A
O
O
O
I
nto meaning, little one, a rich and deep song; so is lament transformed by yielding to spirit’s ever redemptive tongue.
II
T
he shaping, oh the shaping not one escapes the time save by that most dreadful reef where one grounds ashore on “mine”
T
he fall, dreaded fall not one can withstand, for she who covets pain slips from other’s gentle cupped hand
M
T
o force instead of wait, and hazard outside balanced restraint, plunges us without safety down a relentless well of bitter complaint
T
o sink instead of rise, and eulogize a heartless never-living, quashes us beneath life’s unbearable riches, pain possessed and time unforgiving.
I
nce heard a woman scream a harsh, frightening screech that froze life’s wondrous stream beneath its hardening speech
I
nce heard a woman expend such rending, fatal clamor; it trampled both infancy and age afoot its hateful manner
O
O
III
amentation and Woe
L
114
I
O
nce heard a child whine in tender, grievous duress; she bore the stain of mother’s crime, in loosening such ungodly chorus
A
nd my disquieted heart did ponder the disturbed lament’s unbridled breach of heaven’s fierce intimacy and nature’s wild, perfected reach:
Woe besets she who spurns the Creative’s struggle to impeach pain’s disloyal rule and spare us the oonday Witch’s petrifying screech.
N
IV
nd women reckon life cheats them of the promise that love remain free of hate, of hate uplicity, duplicity, ’tis by duplicity that cries of innocence supplant other’s life-giving power to wean. Whoever speaks of pain as mine makes of sorrow a ruinous lullaby, and cradles its breed unto deathly sleep, good-bye, good-bye!
M
D
A
A
nd women fancy they have no relation to death but give birth only to life, to life
O
de to the Cup of Bitterness
115
O
( nce snug within death’s womb, shall we go hopping and skipping toodle dee do, shall we cradle and comfort one another together, together, sing dimly and estranged-ly our avowed lullaby, bound by timeless pact to prize our woe-filled tomb and nurture furtive pride on impoverished drones of hurtful tune?)
V
Can one be heard, tho’ granted a listening, who bears no resonance inside, no silent pause before sacred mortal witnessing? oise, ruinous noise deadens hearing, and occludes the mystery of suffering. ave by receptive attunement, can one rise above the vociferous din of bleeding heart to apprehend the sign of that most intransigent sin, the quiet stealth so deeply hidden of the plain, plainest of brutes: simple unadorned unwilling. Whoever catches this traitor inside beneath the merciful soft light of noon; whoever renounces and lays aside the perfidious bitterness of womb, shall the mystery discover of a rising boundless joy that blossoms in sorrow for the un-living.
S
N
VI
amentation and Woe
L
116
he who renounces the power to covet shall be carried by mysterious hand into love’s infinite labor and pain’s ultimate lesson: o awaken, still one, to live and cry, to sing and sound, within the sway of all things but never against heavenly surround. o sing, sweet one, of life and death, pain and awakening, and their necessary inter-lacing. he birds return, the flowers bloom, the river flows, the sun shines, quiet moves the way. o live, released one, with “mine” eternally eclipsed in the burning soft light of noon.
T
T
T
T
S
VII
O
de to the Cup of Bitterness
117
e
t
I
n odd and disturbing darkness pervades the human heart. We call it loneliness. t first it disturbs productively. t marks our privation of wakeful living in these, our dark and untried hearts. Loneliness is the mark upon us, the original cut that calls us to seek the source of meaning-filled living and sate our deepest spiritual needs. his shroud that wraps the little seed of life in darkness arises at first like a friendly force, a hint that pricks open our consciousness of thirst from within. hough upon slumbering too long in the cradle, it emerges fiercer still like a hunter who hounds our quest for self-realization and troubles our dreams. reams of seizing life by the horns, dreams of catching the sunny rays of life’s splendor and making it all our own, dreams never ever to suffer from darkness or confusion, never to lack warmth of hearth or the safety of protection, never ever to feel estranged from the weightless buoyancy of joy-filled living. h, but loneliness can grow vast and unforgiving under the duress of refusing Life’s initiative to pour sunshine and water upon the seed. Loneliness is a shadowy hidden presence that can swell into a grim and menacing noonday witch who shields the dark and slumbering soul beneath her well-practiced craft.
O
D
T
T
A
A
igh
Pain and Bearing
A
L
S
leep, o child of mine, never suffer to awaken. et me cradle you with a lullaby of pain.
t the precise hour when that great shadow “loneliness” should by awakening us undergo eclipse, the noonday witch can leap out and take her stand to defend our aching and haunted existence. Loneliness, under the sorcery of self-deception, can be made to don the shawl of the comforter who gratifies our pain rather than keep to the beckoning hunt . . . to steal us away from the destructive side of darkness. Like an injurious mother to ourselves, we can, if we wish, fastidiously “protect” the wound of that first cut from ever being touched; we can, oh, dark misguided souls, hide it safely behind the walls of a well-defended fortress, and lie down to rest, forever and a day, in a sleepy bed of unmitigated hurt and loneliness.
o, we do not covet pain, we adjust to pain, learn to manage it. o, we bear pain, not willingly at first but because we are made to bear pain. Men bear their load, I can’t speak to that. I, a woman, bear. We, as women, bear the most. We give birth and nurture, we leave recognition to the men. We get no ego boost from all the world’s acclaim. We live in the shadows, no light of recognition refracts our sacrifices. Yes, we sacrifice like good mothers, we give up all the world’s grandeur, our children cannot know how we sacrifice, and even our husbands rarely see what we do, what we bear. nd so we bear, we just bear and bear and bear, and no one sees it. We amass pain because we are sensitive to life, to the child’s need, to human suffering. We feel the suffering of others acutely, we suffer the pain of others because our children need it, because others need it, because, because we must. We carry pain for them, unseen and unknown. We bear. here is no other word for it. We just bear and bear and bear. on’t turn bearing into a wicked disgrace. I am no witch, no evil mother to myself or any other. o, it is my devotion, my sacrificial love that proves the downfall of me, I do too much, I sacrifice, I bear oh too, too much. Please, just let me weep.
deep, grand contradiction cuts into our relation to life journey. We want out of pain and yet we define ourselves by pain like a badge of honor seared deep into the heart. nd yet this badge of honor we give to ourselves for time-bound suffering makes the original wound of first birth cut deeper and open wider. t makes the original longing for intimacy fester and become impervious to healing. he wound that cries, Why must we suffer? Why am born? gapes ever wider the more it goes under cover to hide beneath the fortresses we build which protect it, however unwittingly, from air and light and transparency, the very powers of healing! he wound sickens precisely as I load all suffering upon myself as a dutiful
Pain and Bearing
T
I
T
I
A
A
N
D
T
A
N
N
I
A
n odd darkness cloaks the human heart. We call it loneliness. But under the spell of witchy enticement, it dons another name and assumes the form of this: coveted pain. We covet pain. We who wish above all to avoid pain and seek happiness, we who fear darkness and crave nothing but the light of day, we, the very same, covet pain. How can that be? hear your heart protest:
119
I
O
I
I
I
I
I
N
I
N
I
I
T
I
I
O
D
I
I
T
A
M
A
T
I
“must” and refuse to give up this dubious honor; precisely as I contend that I am bearing, bearing, bearing with the entirety of my heart though secretly, beneath light of day, tuck my suffering safe away in a castle built of pain and accumulate a private collection of tears with which to comfort myself, precisely then. How we confound the art of transmuting our suffering into a keepsake with that of truly bearing what life brings. How confounded are we, we who, as we plod on and on in life but find no understanding, covet pain. he quest for meaning (understanding) and undergoing (suffering) are inextricably linked. nd for this reason we define ourselves through the stories, the tales, the narratives we tell of our life experiences. any and varied come these stories. nd yet we stumble in life, for we are not prepared for the test of pain. We stumble just as and in the precise measure that we come to define ourselves by our tales of woe. Hidden in the dark recesses of the lonely heart lies a strange and untouchable treasury of “woe unto me.” hings long laid aside that ’d rather not remember or things present ’d prefer not to speak. h, woe may not be the surface story, the face present to the world and consciously label “me.” We have an uncanny capacity to compartmentalize aspects of our habituated psychic defenses. ark, festering woundedness can grow even as cling to a light concept of me. n the surface may be all seeming bubbliness, not preoccupied with things long “past,” as we say, “those unspeakable things,” while underneath, deep down there live on things seemingly put aside but decisively not laid to rest, not truly past. For living beneath there lies all believe suffer most in my darkest aloneness that no one else, not one little creature, knows. here lies a Pandora’s box of “woe unto me,” the sufferings have borne and which, am most certain and have never doubted not even for a wee instant, no one could understand. Well, if you are very lucky, may show it to you, tell you of it, my woe (though hardly can speak its name). But never, ever disrespect my secret, never prey upon it or pry into it, no, if you are trustworthy (yes, my darkness speaks to me) never tread across my borders and into this dark wound without my consent. either by accident nor intent. o, dictate the when and the how of its revelation and exposure to light. keep it safe under protection from . . . from ever being touched, from . . . from Y U . . . and all vital things.
T
O
O
( h, but this too, what the lie! he darkness shows itself all the time in little ways. It seeps out, oozes over in negaamentation and Woe
L
120
T
tive resistance to life, a bleeding heart, an overly hesitant demeanor, the gushing forth before others without discrimination, the shrill cries, the cramped soul and hardened heart. he lie of it that it remains hidden and I, I bear so well, I don’t let others become touched by the woe, the dark secret, no, I spare them, I bear, I bear alone, I amass the pain and above all I do not let it show! nless . . . unless, that is, harshness belies its defense.)
I
U
s my sensitive feeling of the wound only as shallow as the surface narrative of my life journey? m my pain?
S
I
How do we come to define ourselves by pain? urely we had no clearly formed intention to do so in our youthful hearts, in our first attitude toward life. o the contrary, we embark on life with a wild and venturesome will to gain the most remarkable experiences imaginable. We want to trek across frica, scale the Himalayas, have, have, have all the wonderful times we can have. We want to populate our lives with a bag of experiences so unique that no one else can lay claim to have them. With youthful zest, we seek not the ordinary but the extraordinary. ( t least in our dreams.) he tale want to tell is no tale of pain; it is the tale of how experience something unique, something defining, something unbelievable. Yes, we want to experience at least one vital moment early in life that proves life defining, so we can coast afterward and set all anxiety aside. We want to know that we are alive. We crave limit-experiences to mark us out in life. ven when we are fearful and even if we do not seek to summit ount verest, we dream of heroic acts and romantic unions that elevate us to the status of the exceptional, the one above all others, the unique. he peak, we want the mountain peak. nd this symbolically is Himalaya. What, wonder, links our inspired youthful craving for peak experiences to the middle years of maturation when pain has pressed itself into the forefront of our consciousness? What binds youth and adulthood together such that we could come to be defined by pain rather than victory? t is experience, is it not? he fact that we define ourselves as subjects of experience. ur concepts and images of “me” rest on the narratives, the tales, the stories we tell of “our” experiences. hick come heroic dreams of being put to I
O
T
I
A
T
E
E
I
M
I
T
A
A
T
A
The Ecstasy of Limit-Experiences
T
Pain and Bearing
121
I
D
A
I
I
T
T
A
T
I
A
A
I
I
I
I
O
the test. (When you were young and played Barbies, did you want to die for a man? r a woman? id you want to save all the people from evil?) We crave limit-experiences because they bring us up against our limits; and while we do not fancy ourselves gluttons for punishment, we nevertheless want to know who we will be at the physical and emotional limit. Will be the ideal woman imagine myself to be? What we never can see, in that path from being an “experiencer” in youth to an “experienced” adult, is that to regard oneself as the mere subject of experience— and not a self born of spirit—is to define oneself not only by the victory but by the pain of limit-experiences. We covet life experiences, want to “have” and “possess” them, stock them up “as” the great markers of “me” and “my story.” Yet to covet experience is to covet life and with life, pain. Just as in youth, so do persist through adulthood under the belief that life happens to me, that am subject to the experiences of my life, as if, oddly, in the very pursuit of the active life, nevertheless, deep down, in the dark slumber of my soul, harbor a pronounced and ungodly passivity before life, since life happens to me. How can this alarming, slumbering passivity stand side by side with the gluttonous craving to gain and amass experience? re they not two sides of the same perspective, the belief in unaided self-determination and its nether side, the latent victim who will rise up momentarily and voice complaint when what happens does not turn out so nice or fall within one’s command? s one in search of experience, set forth on a track, without registering it consciously, that leads to pain, coveted pain. he path begins and ends in “mine.” nd this path, because it runs in circles from agency back to agency, can lead to one sole abominable place—the very pit of loneliness. o seek life experiences is, ironically, never to “have” life, sad as this may seem. his very path, the very standpoint that wish to define myself by my experiences—rather than receive something unpredictable that magically gain in the very undergoing the way one gains a sword or a chalice in a fairy tale, though in real life this might mean, for example, the growth of right focus or a heart willing to change—must lead to the barren desert of isolation and estrangement from the living, for it begins already with that fatal little distance inserted between life and me. nd yet the desire for limit-experiences, however readily it devolves into ambitious craving, contains within it a sound seed intuition that we cannot discover who we “are” to be save through self-testing, save in the
amentation and Woe
L
122
I
I
T
T
I
I
I
I
I
O
E
I
S
A
I
S
I
N
act, the moment of living decision. ote well this qualification: craving uproots our deeper yearning for self-discovery. t aborts birth of the unpredictable, the unfettered spirit’s growth. elf-testing of the experiential kind, although it aims to discover what will decide when come up against psychic limits, never automatically gives itself over to being tested all the way down to the root of one’s very sense of self, one’s identity, the nature and quality of one’s desiring, one’s very agency. nd this is because it pridefully proclaims oneself to be the self-sufficient lord who will govern over experience. elf-governed testing never automatically delivers us to spiritual trial, that most Himalayan of tests, for we do not invent a spiritual trial like a well-planned trip, as if decide both what to bear and the whole nature of bearing. Life’s creativity defies imagination. ven as set forth on a plan of my own making, Providence can transform this plan into its own purpose, make of it a true trial; yes, Life defies our meager possibilities of thought and imagination. Life plants the seed of spiritual trial within the neat plans we carve out and tests us. h, will the Father test us, beyond all that we imagine ourselves “up for” when we venture a limit-experience. Limit-experiences bring us up against death. hough not characteristic of all peak experiences, physical life and death meet in an extreme limit-experience; and most certainly they meet in the imaginary scenarios we play out in our mind’s eye or even in our dreams, dreams of confronting attackers or those who oppress us and all the like. Yet physical life and death alone do not of necessity bring us to the inward trial, the dimension where must battle to live and die spiritually. hese limits of human life occasion but do not coerce us into that trial. Life can encourage and governance can jolt us to face the real ordeal, yet trial we never enter through the power of our own craving. What happens, then, when governance decides to turn us on that most true and essential Himalaya, the singularly most unique peak one can ever climb, the peak where first must descend into dark inwardness and face the ordeal most personally dread? What happens when can survive Himalaya only if—and this “if ” stands so out of reach that it defies all imagination— consent to be wounded a second time in the exact spot of my primitive wound in order irrevocably to relinquish those two most dearly claimed yet utterly pernicious safeties, want of risk-free vitality and impervious sensitivity? What happens then?
Pain and Bearing
123
Woman’s Archetypal Limit-Experience Women are life-bearers. o it is said. won’t dispute it.
I
S
It would be so easy to infer that women are more receptive than men, that women value life and connection while men preoccupy themselves with death and separation. It would be so easy, in fact, I hear women say this all the time, progressive women and traditionalists alike. It’s so easy to think that women know life and men engender only death and war and destruction.
I
T
Women harbor the unique capacity to give birth to life. his much is true. Yet one finds a common refrain, a little addition to this truth, often noted in literature, that women, by virtue of this native capacity, have a deeper appreciation of life than men, value life more than men, and are sensitive thus to new life, the child, in ways that men are not. t could be true, but then it matters how we take it. For it could also be true that men are differently sensitive to life. s it, then, in one-sided perception that dreamy expectation begins to nurture false hope?
A
NO
T
A
I
If we, as woman, are the epitome of life, the great life-embracing prototype, then why are we so hesitant, so reluctant to enjoy a romp when men come inviting? Why do we put on the negative brakes, spoil the fun by whining and humming, “I don’t know, can I?” We think we are so sensitive, so receptive that we just need a little coaching, a little reassurance and all the like. Yet don’t we drone on about how one can’t do that, it’s not right, it’s not becoming. It’s just too much, isn’t it, year in and year out, never truly to have a change of heart and cease making others pull me halfhearted through to my true heart’s want? gainst lethargy and put-up resistance. Worse, even worse than the simple “maybe” is the “maybe that fears,” that has become so terrified of its true heart that all things which call forth heart must be stamped down at once. hen all that comes out of our mouths is a brute, hard, thoughtless: ! destructive no, a no that razes all uplifting hope to the ground in the slightest fraction of a moment. However can we be so—is it not right to name it—insensitive? nd if we as women who bleed are so bloody life embrac-
124
L
A
amentation and Woe
R
L
L
S
T
L
L
Whatever peculiar sensitivities a given woman may cultivate from out of her special capacity to give birth—and hold such sensitivities to be important—it does not suffice to claim that women’s native tendency to prize connection and interdependency over separation and independence I
R
T
NO
T
N
T
S
N
L
L
R
S
ing, then why do we always feel left behind? If we are so willing, so prepared to risk, to take action, to live, to play the serious play. ure, we play, play, play with women and children. But the moment a man—that horrid wild beast—steps onto the field, risk arrives with him and play becomes dangerous. isk, is he a beast or an angelic messenger? isk changes everything, shows the charge of ife, that ife is a game played for keeps. ife, in whatever way he is nourishing, doesn’t let us take our prayer back. When we waffle and languish and fall into double-heartedness, our prayer is not true, not single, not solid. o, we get the negative. Because in the game of ife everything less than yes is no. he won’t bend on that. If I wait too long, require too much work from others, I fall behind. he time passes, the moment goes bye-bye. I may even have sapped the blood and life joy out of it for others. egativity may start as a slow, dull resistance to time’s passage, a genuine struggle with lethargy to meet up to life’s requirement, to let life determine the pace and rhythm of undergoing and transformation. It may herald a tendency to see life through the lens of loss, yet once it shipwrecks on pain all it can speak is pain and suffering, suffering and pain. hough it may seem to have such a quiet demeanor and not come shouting out all at once in a resounding , negativity toward life’s passage works untold damage, like waters that slowly undermine the pilings of a bridge. Water, the waters of ife are so efficacious. hey can lift one up to heaven, they can erase all pain and wrath and make things pure again. But the waters of sunken emotions and anxious threat burrow down, dark and dirty, and make a mess of things. hey undermine but yield no deliverance. ather than wear down what is too great the way ife slowly prepares us to have our pride and resistance stolen away, negativity simply undoes things and makes people undone in lonely estrangement.
Pain and Bearing
125
O
E
E
A
M
E
A
M
O
I
M
I
I
N
proves life sustaining while men’s proclivity to individuation destroys one’s hold on life and with it one’s relations to children, women, and others. either basic tendency in itself suffices for spiritual awakening or self-love. f, as have suggested, life must become reduplicated in us, then woman’s socio-natural relation to life, however important to child rearing and human care, however much it can instruct us, cannot in and of itself impart the prototype of receptivity or a life-embracing attitude to “go with.” Willingness at heart arises on pain of renouncing identification with nature and formation, and the prideful self-aggrandizement we seek on their basis. Women face a solemn temptation in their native capacity to give birth. t is the temptation to valorize the very experience of birth. ddly, though we pride ourselves on being life oriented, life and death come together in physical birth. any a woman has died in childbirth. ost women crave birth with a tenacious albeit unqualified sense that this alone, this experience of giving birth, can deliver them to self-accord, to authentic living, to becoming fully and wholly who they are destined to be. Physical birth clearly exceeds all ordinary kinds of experience. Women do not, in the midst of birth, know how they are going to bear it. Unadulterated childbirth marks the unbearable. unique order of pain is involved. ne cannot imagine, by foreknowledge or expectation, not in the very middle of the birth, how one will bear it through. Childbirth yokes life together with pain, so it is not peculiar that woman’s birth experience teaches us that life cannot be found without meeting pain. Childbirth epitomizes the test of coming under the limit of pain. Yet is it an ordeal, a spiritual trial? While limit-experiences point toward the exceptional, it remains to question what in such experiences is of exception, if anything. Women seek exceptional status through “having” the limit-experience of childbirth. rnst Junger defined himself by war, by the special fellowship and bonding he felt conjointly with other men as they snuggled close into an intimacy with other arth that could be found only during the terrors of trench warfare. Hang gliders push the limits, as do mountain climbers and ntarctic adventurers. Perhaps such experiences catalyze out of body experiences, euphoric states, supreme moments of tranquillity that break free from anxiety; perhaps they can, at times, catapult the individual into transcendence of felt threat. ven so, limit-experiences in and of themselves do not make one steadfast and constant in willingness to live without anxiety in spiritual freedom day by day. amentation and Woe
L
126
Pain and Bearing
S
T
A
T
A
T
T
O
ne can just as easily don a possessive attitude toward a limit-experience as a receptive willingness to let it edify and deliver one. empted, we are, to use limit-experiences as mechanisms of self-aggrandizement. We seek to own the limit so we can “have” and “use” such experiences to gain power over others, win status in the world, or simply advance false claims; we rely on limit-experiences to distinguish ourselves falsely in terms that remain self-centered, competitive, envy driven and rooted, thus, in comparative measures of distinction rather than witness the singularity of our own existence and that of others in humility. Women’s travail exemplifies for us the temptation we face in life to act as if surviving the insufferable pain of childbirth—the symbolic peak limit a person can meet in relation to pain—distinguishes us in and of itself in essential terms. People survive unbelievable events in life and these may have their experiential or worldly distinction. Yet no such limitexperience distinguishes us truly at heart, for what matters is not simply that we endured but how we underwent the ordeal. he “how” decides whether we underwent the ordeal as ordeal or merely survived, however astonishing even the latter may be. What matters, then, is whether we come to see life as an ordeal rather than a mere experience “all mine.” s human beings, we don’t just “make it through” a test with our selves and our lives intact simply by endurance or survival. Life and pain reduplicate in us. We survive physically either inwardly shattered on pain (altered but not psychically intact) or inwardly ascendant to the true Himalaya peak (transformed in attitude and perspective). hat is, we come “through” by virtue of willingness to give up all that impedes us and weighs us down, including the pain and victory of felt experience. t issue in the true climb to Himalaya is the entire experiential perspective we start out with in life because we do not climb Himalaya by our own agency, as the perfidious voice of self-aggrandizement pretends in order to enshroud, under burgeoning shadow, one’s failure to make it “through” transformed and healed rather than shattered and broken. hough limit-experiences do not distinguish us in themselves, childbirth nevertheless contains hidden within it a prototype, if only we would let it impart its sobering truth to us. Childbirth gives us a prototype for how to meet pain wholesomely because in order to undergo birth well one cannot “get through” merely by one’s own power (though sadly today we can ignore this truth because women are “carried through” by drugs and useful techniques). uch limit-experiences teach us the difference, if 127
I
T
E
I
A
I
we prove good students, between mere alteration and a radical change of heart. Between mere endurance and transformation. Rather than appropriate such a gracious lesson from Life and covet it as a mere “experience” that “had” once or a few times, should get serious about adhering to the model imparted in and through birth, and let it lay its impress upon my heart and soul. nd gestate awakening. Here too hasten to note that this prototype can be imparted second-hand to others, so the actual birth experience cannot be the ultimate datum for receiving the impress. very person, male or female, can and must come to know the nature of birth through spiritual awakening. Creativity, a genuine bringing-forth into new life, must touch a deeper source than either mere physical or intellectual, so-named feminine and masculine, forms of reproduction can in themselves. his possibility in no way diminishes woman’s singular relation to childbirth, but it does annul false attempts to make the essential significance of birth the sole possession of women. ore vigorously understood, this truth knocks the temptation to indulge the comparative mind-set off its prideful axis.
O
R
A
S
M
adly, it is our wont as humankind to valorize the natural birth experience over the glorious model of receptivity it contains within as its seed, as its true treasure for the imparting and receiving (not for the having or keeping). s women, we are marked by painful travails in life. arely do we consider that what matters is how we will become marked. Will my heart grow hard with pain, my very soul become marred by increased self-protectiveness? Will I decompose under the duress at the peak? r will my heart admit quiet relinquishment of vanity, give up all pretense to aggrandizement, and cease to believe that I make me? Will I begin to wonder who, truly, who does the bearing? Who or what carries me through, undoes in order to make my heart whole and renew it? Will I open up to the forgotten wonder of my youth and let ife impart its wisdom to me?
I
I
L
Limit-experiences draw us out upon the precipice of danger where the cut (decision) lies in wait. Here focus matters infinitely. Wrong focus occludes the very precipice. By focusing on me rather than requirement, appropriate experience rather than receive Life’s revelation. prefer the notch on my belt to wisdom’s treasure. think, in effect, that my crisis,
I
amentation and Woe
L
128
I
I
T
O
M
I
I
I
I
I
I
A
I
S
midway into a rough and stormy pass, is a mere crisis of experience when it contains within an ordeal of faith (trust). o covet experience, even at the very limit where am brought up against, not just my physical limits, though certainly these, but the final frontier, the limitation of the whole experiential viewpoint. nd this is the viewpoint of agency: that I do the bearing, that I carry through, that I own the experience and decide what it means. n the middle, when my plans fall apart (my preparations for birth) and it is not fathomable how to move forward or whether can (the pain proves unbearable), collide not solely with personal limitation but with mortal power as such. What a terrible, terrible day! hat , on the express verge of glory where all take myself to be could end and the real transformation begin, where the shadow of loneliness, deeper than all craving born of tales of woe, could undergo eclipse and the shining spirit rise from its ashes, nevertheless wish so very much to believe that finally found the outermost thing could use to define me. e. n the precipice of the Great Possibility—the very possibility of becoming radically and fully decentered and given over to the shadowless noonday splendor of reality— pull everything back down to enshroud and comfort “me.”
I
ow you see what a great interpreter of life am, the one who weaves tall tales and magnificent stories of life experience into “me, all me.” What good is being brought to the limit, if transmute it into a mere experience “mine” and covet it as extraordinary, my claim to distinction?! xtraordinary lies on the thither side of mortality; it’s not subject to possession. xtraordinary would be to give up the old benighted sense of me and give over to a transformation in bearing, conduct, and perspective. xtra-ordinary, beyond the ordinary, outside the ordinary, would be to come to birth the second time like a child full of trust and arise newly born along with the mortal child to whom give birth. t would be two born at once during childbirth. What good is a limit that’s not allowed to do the work of weaning, what good the pain of undergoing that cannot detach clinging hands from “me” and “mine.” We crave limit-experiences, and even though most of us, especially as we age, prove too timid to seek
Pain and Bearing
I
I
E
E
E
I
N
A
I
How we clothe ourselves too soon and with such burning insistence. In tales of me, while woe shadows close behind. nd the burning flame of pain grows and darkness spreads across the barren plains of my existence.
129
A
I
I
T
T
I
T
O
them out because “experience teaches us caution,” we dream and dream and dream the ego ideal, the idealized rendition of “me” in terms of heroic acts and romantic peaks and extraordinary maternal powers. ut of impure admixture do we crave experience and confound transcendence with growing more of me, glory with aggrandizement. ucked in the grandiose initiative to self-aggrandizement there lies the hidden Judas of radical impotence, and it will betray me from within. Beware the stealthy trick that converts naive self-reliance into the defiant tumor of vindication once suffering gives me to permit myself everything and become one long “justified complaint of me.” hen loneliness clothes me in the false comforts of pain endlessly seeking vindication. We’re never prepared for the unbearable nature of pain in undergoing, when we start and move within the immanence of the experiential standpoint, when we transmute longing for healing into lonely craving for pain-filled distinction. When the pain proves greater than mortal strength, power tempts us to covet it too, along with the experience, thus keeping to the path of righteous indignation. here are two levels of “mine” in every story, the divulged level on which define myself through tales of victorious experiences presumably gained by mortal power, the way tlas carried the whole broad world on his shoulders, yet often enough we do not pass “through” unto glorious radical change but simply manage not to fade completely; and the nether side where pain leaves its mark, the underground tale of woe where we ground ashore in pain, even though we limp on shrouded by false comforts we invent and contract a new voice, belligerent with demand and relentlessly unforgiving.
s A Maternal Tale of Woe (Ouch! redoubled by sinking)
A
T
A
A
S
T
here once lived a mother who fancied herself wonderfully capable of friendship with her children. he wanted, above all, never to be mother but friend. nd this great wish defined her story, her want of more, her want of being ever more to her children. nd it defined her complaint, her forceful, incessant complaint that her children did not prize her so. here was greatness in the mother’s wish. nd yet, no matter how great her wish was, the small step required of her to touch her children eluded her always, and for no less reason than this: she fixated so wholly on landing in one fell swoop into deep intimacy that she overlooked all amentation and Woe
L
130
Pain and Bearing
N
T
S
A
D
S
O
A
A
O
S
S
the steps into intimacy that availed themselves along the way so that love might grow one step at a time. he wanted so much to believe herself capable of the greatest love that she neglected to cultivate the small seed of love that offered itself in present, concrete reality. o confirmed was she that she was born with a ready-made capacity to love better than others, so naturally spiritual did she consider herself, that she believed she could do no wrong. r if she did, it was not truly wrong because, after all, in her heart she was innocent and always had rightful excuse. Constantly, constantly, without any pause to breathe and find an atmosphere in which a meeting of two spirits could hold sway, she demanded that her children relate every little detail of their lives to her in a one-way opening. nd when they did, she would reply with one of a few set formulas she employed (as if there were a baby formula for intimacy). “If a daughter says this, then I respond such and so, and that means I am a good and loving friend to my child.” formula, but no return of open disclosure, never once the full movement of her spontaneous being (and certainly no vulnerability). ne such formulaic response was this: she used every little detail to sketch for them what was wrong with their lives, as if to prove her superior love, and whenever they resisted her want of turning love into a formula, a proof, a superior “all-knowing,” she then used the details of their lives to show why they don’t love her as greatly as she loves them. o hell-bent was she on proving her love that she constantly undid them. issected from above, uprooted from below, rains fell and water churned afoot, wheedled under skin, twirled about, vicious winds did blow, and this is how she undid them. nd when they ceased to relate detailed intimacies of their lives, for want of trustworthy response, she accused them loud and clear and regularly, blowing as from a siren her constant refrain, that they formed a secret conspiracy to close her out of their shared intimacy, that they willfully constructed a “unified front” against her. In a word: they caused her loneliness; they victimized her. ilently, after long struggle, each child slowly awakened to the fact that she had sung this song ever since they could remember. It had been her bitter complaint long before they actually did anything. he song lay there, hidden, as if in wait, waiting to catch each of them up short and then the lonely dark seed ruled in her heart and sounded its siren again and again. ever was there any way to evade the woeful accusation. Whenever the mother did not find intimacy, she would go to one child 131
A
O
T
A
A
S
and complain that the others had stonewalled her. Complaint came first and cooing next, cooing followed complaint. he would coo and woo, speak softly and ooey-gooey, and draw one into the feeling of exclusive love by saying she could only enjoy true intimacy with this very one, only this one and none other. Yet whenever difficulties emerged with “this very one”—the same child she drew into exclusive intimacy, with whom alone, she said, she could know love—then she would do the same, cease to work it out and head instead to another child with her languishing complaint that “that other one” (who once was “this very one”) was not capable of intimacy and she, the mother, could only enjoy true intimacy with this newly marked out “very one” in whom she now confided her dark pain and hidden secret. s if in an unbroken cycle, the petition for exclusive intimacy would pass first from one then to the next, always based on secrecy and want of bonding “against”—negatively over against the others. Year in and year out, the cycle went round and round, and the mother sang the same song, related the same story, at times dully with the same tone of frustrated complaint, yet at special times her complaint burst forth in a violent, bitter, earth-shattering cry. nd all the boys and girls ever heard was “you are not good enough, you do not love me, you do not, you cannot, you are not loving, not, not, not, nothing, nothing, nothing.” hough they came to see their mother’s pain as a kind of lamentable sorrow, for try as she would, she could not find her way to anything other than negative bonding which she confounded with intimacy, her sorrow-filled children constantly faced one abominable choice: sink into negative bonding with the mother or struggle to live free of the mother’s benighted confusion. Week in and week out, the mother begged, cajoled, pleaded that they tell her every little detail of their lives, and implacably embodied her wordless stance that their refusal to trust her with details meant they did not love, they were not intimate with her, they were evil. Having long since understood the indictment hidden within her anxiety, that they ostensibly shut her out, that they were supposedly hiding things from her, the children, one by one found their own way of contending with her overwhelming negativity, and the threat of frigid death it wrought. nce the spirited daughter conveyed herself in a manner that clearly indicated, not solely in words but in full embodiment, that she had nothing essential to withhold from her mother. gain and again with constancy she bore herself well. he went so far as to take her mother at her
S L
132
amentation and Woe
L
Pain and Bearing
L
E
D
A
L
T
T
T
L
T
T
A
T
N
T
A
A
S
A
T
S
word and invite her into intimacy. Instead of relating detail after detail, she composed, in concise and simple form, a revelation of the present struggle she faced. he related only enough detail of the circumstance to reveal the essential matter, to speak from the substance of her being. he mother still complained, she needed more detail in order to understand, her daughter is still withholding and does not trust that she, mother, is a trustworthy soul, a “straight arrow,” as she put it, a stand-up person who can understand and bear all depth of truth and be true to such depth disclosure. Complaint, complaint, yearning complaint. fter conveying two revelations, one less deep, one more so, the daughter held her ground, saying that she had opened up two possibilities of intimacy and was awaiting response. he said firmly and invitingly, “Intimacy does not lie in the details.” period of months ensued while the mother backpedaled and used all variety of excuse for why she had not responded. gain and again, the mother wrote in letters, as speaking by phone had grown intense with life and the real possibility of intimacy, that she would respond, intended to respond, but that she was suffering spleen disorders and it was not good for her to be pressured. ime passed, the mother sent detail upon detail about her own life but never engaged in a substantive disclosure of her own personal trials and the lessons she had won for herself (if, indeed, she had understood any). or did she ever engage the intimate disclosure of the child. he courage-filled daughter wrote that she would wait forever, if she had to, for a genuine response, that she did not want to pressure her mother while she felt poorly. Yet she knew that time would not erase the tension felt before the prospect of intimacy. For intimacy is scary. It involves risk. nd no amount of eliminating worldly pressures will ever take away the terror one must face before intimacy. ime elapsed. ime went by. ife flowed on. he daughters’ and sons’ lives took them forward to other tasks, divinely sanctioned. he mother was left behind, with her anxiety and her confusion of worldly pressure with the claims of intimacy. hough not by the children and not by the spirited daughter who was willing still to receive any genuine response, was she left behind but by life’s very passage. ife moves on. nd the mother felt eclipsed. aylight came and daylight went, and she lagged behind with her dejected feeling that she was not approved and her daughters did not grant her favor. ither she goes with ife and finds the gift that ife promises, the one thing she needed to discover (that she
133
A
O
stood in the way though intimacy availed itself). r she bumbles along incessantly missing intimacy, comforted woefully by her unmitigated loneliness. For to this day, she still believes she is deep, she is the Deepest Deep, the very waters of the Deep. nd everyone else fails love who cannot feel pain so deeply as she, all her poor, poor children, though she tried her best, have been lost in the land of superficiality, poor darlings, poor lost things, she will pray, yes, she will pray for them to overcome their self-involvement and lack of feeling. he who glorifies negativity. his is a tale of mournful song that finds no redemption and gains no true bearings for she who so fares life’s stream. T
S
s
What’s in an image of woman’s power to give birth: the icon of an embodied spiritual releasement at the height of ecstatic tension or the apotheosis of a covetous relation to our first (natural and untransformed) embodiment? he answer requires a cut. Women don’t typically ground ashore in childbirth, though it happens. here is postpartum depression. owadays especially, many women feel eclipsed in life by the time they struggle to gain a place in the world and find themselves disappointed. isappointed because they hit the glass ceiling, disappointed because their husbands do not truly know anything about their domestic lives, or disappointed because they cannot receive social recognition from men in the way men grant recognition to one another. For all our gains in authority, we nurture false expectations that others will be able to respond to us without being affected by the very energies and native inclinations of female embodiment (first untransformed incarnation) on which we tacitly stake our claim to distinction. any women feel eclipsed by the masculine character of the public world and their felt exclusion from it either directly or vicariously. Whatever else such sentiments reflect about injustice in our world, they instruct us about one crucial thing: in search of self-determination and personal approbation, the human being finds it hard to tolerate the position of being eclipsed, cast back into the shadows from whence she hoped to emerge. nd this is because we are destined, by the maternal hand of Life, to undergo eclipse, to undergo death to self-possession. t never occurs to us that eclipse devolves upon us at timely moments in our lives in order to introduce us to ordeal so that we may learn to sufN
I
A
M
D
T
T
Eclipse: Life’s Tender Iconography
amentation and Woe
L
134
In panic, and agency panics, I know only one base impulse, the impulse to press forward ever more forcefully, the impulse to overwhelm the field, to refuse to be eclipsed, to force upon life my agenda and intent, to push and shove and move outside all bounded sanction of what this moment requires, needs, and permits. How I fuel the fire of loneliness, the very shadow of wounded want when I force and overwhelm the field with my supposed sensitivity, my superior wisdom, my rightful desert all masking this, my forced want of victory. his shadow must be eclipsed, let to yield to loneliness’s deeper claim to recall me, upon death to all anxious willing, to rest in ife’s ark embrace where nothing is needed and nothing wanted, where I could be brought to see ife’s good intents for me and hear Her timely sanction. D
ach person must enter the dark and enter it properly. ach is destined to be eclipsed alone, all by her lonesome self, as an individual. For each must give up agency and learn to trust into the other’s nurturant and the Father’s providential care in a decisive manner, and not merely let go momentarily in the breath-taking ecstasy of a limit-experience. f the driven will to self-aggrandizement is to give way to receptivity, must learn to undergo an eclipse of all expectations, all by which hoped to E
I
I
M
E
L
L
T
I
A
A
T
T
fer well, so that we may consent to be weaned off that ungodly prospect that will undo us, the very prospect of taking false comfort from pain . . . and descending into the cavern where loneliness shadows us, forever and a life, with ungodly moans of woe. o find oneself made radically cognizant of being eclipsed, a consciousness unto which Life labors to awaken us like the sun at first dawn, is, upon pause, to witness oneself at dusk. o observe oneself running headlong into collision with failed initiatives to become recognized and dashed efforts to engender harmony is to find oneself blocked, not given one’s due, cast aside, abandoned, overshadowed by others and the world’s accelerated pace of driving itself on and on. Hidden within the worldly ways that we become overshadowed by others lies the deeper reality that Life must block us as we ascend upon and nurture our thick attachment to agency, for we cling to agency as if it held the power to cure us of lonely estrangement. s if it formed the basis on which to heal and harmonize the whole world and each little thing, one to the other. s if held ultimate power.
135
I
Pain and Bearing
M
I
N
I
I
N
O
A
I
be seen and known in the world, and even to myself. must renounce “me” in favor of receptive embrace of transformation. Yet we ordinarily concede this least of all. t the peak where we sought but did not gain acknowledgment, we abhorrently refuse to relinquish worldly measure but instead cling tenaciously to a sense of “justified due.” nce fortified on the fuel of added victimization, a fuel that fires the original wound, all claim to “justified due” grows increasingly pernicious, envious or vengeful, hardened or spiteful, in a word: darker and more virulent. What better way to teach us to lay down our wounded will than to have us pass through the darkness of nonrecognition and all manner of being unseen, unheard, unknown. How else could we be shown that our wounded will, with its insatiable craving for approbation, hides deep down the shadow brute of unwillingness to let Life deliver the needed healing? How else could we be given the occasion to heal save by renouncing brute demand and that ominous feeling of victimization and endless justified desert? o one enjoys being eclipsed. ts not pleasing to the taste (at least not until we grow a different palate and discover the virtue of becoming uninteresting and hateful to the world). We tend to panic and grow erratic in the dark. However monstrous large can let it grow, this erraticism proves at base to be just the habit of my puny will, the shallow reflex of “me” wanting to continue its woe-filled reign. Women live in the shadows, by and large, but they must learn not to fight this position inwardly, whatever vocation—to realize a public role, to effectuate social reform, or to mother—arises for them in the world. Precisely the refusal of such an eclipse—which seems, in its surface manifestation, to be merely an eclipse by the world of men—mistakes the battle with men for a battle against Life’s nurturance and governance. ever should we refuse Life’s gestating-governance, for it alone can catalyze the birth of virtue out of a cumbersome worldly station or time. t alone can heal. Before you squirm and, flailing about, usurp other Life’s initiative to wean you off the fears and anxieties that leave you vulnerable to feeling threatened by people and the things of the world, before you rush headlong, out of felt disempowerment and woe-filled cries of pain, into a grandiose competition with the Father over who decides the nature of the field and the ordeal you must undergo, pause and wait, let yourself be drawn into discovery of the timely lesson, the hidden jewel of wisdom, the iconic image that Life seeks to impart to you so that you may rise above the din of woe-filled lament and become a model of freedom and virtue, Life’s true imprints! o refuse eclipse on principle or in weakness is to aggrandize 136
L
T
amentation and Woe
o you wonder, when you find yourself in the dark, what’s in a threat? Can anything that “happens” in the world, even loss of just desert, threaten me if I trust ife? Can I be left behind—in comparison to any other life or person’s growth— if I’m in sync with the singularity of this life journey that I alone face? I’m confused, all muddled up, is it day or night, am I dreaming? I thought I glimpsed a hidden field, as if all the world unveiled to disclose something else, as if the world were just an emissary announcing by this eclipse that I lack something, that I am wanting in freedom from lonely distrust? What threatens me, worldly losses or ife? It is ife, ife threatens my unwilling! Is this my crime, that my unwilling’s dearer to me than healing and harmony? Can ife guide me to happier endings better than I? L
L
L
L
D
the shadow brute that usurps Life’s divine ends, the will that, unwittingly or no, renounces the Great Possibility of being liberated from the pain of being “me-identified” and drawn into the marvelous agony of healing.
T
T
M
L
any women, when they cannot achieve a man’s recognition, when they are overshadowed by the world and stuck behind the scenes, when life seems to disappoint them again and again, turn to pregnancy to assert a distinction no man can profess. Pregnancy is woman’s claim to a unique order of difference that no one else can pretend to share. Pregnancy, dangerous natural possibility within which the spiritually Great Possibility lies hidden, tempts women to power, to usurp Life and refuse Life’s requirement to be made full in trust. oday we call it self-empowerment, yet insofar as the self we build up is not the self born of spirit, “empowerment” proves a sanitized word for self-aggrandizement. ( he spontaneous self, radiant in newness, we do not build; it’s formed through Life’s gestation and delivered under governance’s stimulus.) What happens, then, when woman vaunts this capacity like a power all her own; what happens when a woman covets the experience of childbirth and asserts it as her distinction, the one measure of comparison that no one else can claim to know or understand?
T
wo phrases, two little phrases, two seemingly innocent phrases will assist us in pondering the question: “You cannot understand!” and “Womb of my womb!”
Pain and Bearing
137
The Inverse Side of the Law of Reduplication
I
“ o one can understand a mother’s bond with her child. o one.”
A
“ o one” has to be repeated not just for emphasis but in order to repel, to defend, to ward off, to protect, to keep all possible challenge or influence away. his claim holds itself to be so categorical that no man, no husband, no father has ever ceased to be stopped short in his tracks by it. here could be a kernel of truth in it. nd yet this claim issues forth in all variety of modalities from the mouths of women. T
N
N N
I
T
Women love sacrificially in the dark, behind the scenes, and receive no earthly prize. here is the mother’s bond with child. t can be beautiful to witness. nd yet the most universally and rigorously voiced claim have ever heard all mothers make is this:
A
A
A
N
A
T
child lies sick and dying. nd the mother, hours at the bedside, ushers a virtually inaudible word in a still moment of pure suffering: “ o one can understand a mother’s bond with her child.” nd she expresses in a clear and resounding way, no matter how quietly spoken, that she dies, for something of her substance parts with her child. Pain speaks its truth and the truth is borne in her expression of pain.
But:
T
S
N
T
L
T
N
A
A
child is caught in a contest of wills with its mother. he father intervenes. mother staunchly declares to her husband, when he tries to get her to let the child go free and pursue its true interest, “ o one can understand a mother’s bond with her child.” he husband, symbol of masculine force, must be warded off, as must all ife forces, Providence among these, that would impede her intention. his is true even though now, in this case, she suffers no final loss. o, oh no, now she hardens in fury and defends her willful claim to hold the child back, not for the child’s sake but because it causes her suffering that the child must leave the nest. he does not want to wean, though she long ago took the boy off the breast.
amentation and Woe
L
138
nd when at long last, the child whose freedom was not protected by the fatherly figure, the child who has long been held back by the mother’s claim to pain, takes a stand, calmly and firmly for itself, but the child receives only the mother’s outraged response, as if it were mutiny, and she cries in one loud, horrid shriek: “You can’t understand a mother’s pain.”
Has it not then become evident that she advances this claim against her child, the very child the bond supposedly operates for? oes her bond, when untempered by a love born of receptivity, not lead her at the peak moment of felt-pain to strike down her child’s independence of spirit, its intuitive resonance with and nascent faith in self and its very life feeling! ts quiet sense that it can avail itself of life, not against mother but out of natural possibility or better timely acquiescence to Life’s prodding it to venture the next order of growth. Has the “deep” bond not become the dogged servant of possessiveness and evil harm at the precise moment when she clings to the bond like the “prize” she should get for her sacrificial and pain-filled care? (“Life, please don’t, I beg you, do not take this one last thing from me.”) here is no greater way to nurture the child on an agency fated to blossom into an aberrant domineering need, to overwhelm others and overpower worldly environment, than to engage it in an indulgent contest of wills. For attitude, willingness, or heart lies more primitive than will. he child must grow heart to venture life on its own, how else can it gain knowing trust? mother who cannot cherish nascent receptivity with its seed blossom of trust in the child can raise it well enough to fit in the world and achieve but not well enough to realize itself as humane, not well enough to grow angelic wings of sensitivity, and not well enough to rest in that form of living graced with timely change and nurtured on the living waters of life. h the noonday witch, how she threatens to steal something essential from the child, to dissolve its fragile trust too soon and cast it spoiled upon the sea engulfed by feelings of anxious threat. O
A
T
T
I
D
A
A
T
here are intermediary cases where it is unclear when to hold the child back for its own sake. nd yet it is so very easy to claim that one holds the child back for its sake and not because “no one can understand a mother’s bond with her child, a mother’s pain.”
Pain and Bearing
139
Let us turn back from these failed stories of mother and child to our central focus. Pain is the matter, coveted pain. he mother can prove a false idol rather than an icon of the truth that the way of spirit passes through receptivity’s opening. Women, whose embodiment resembles bearing, remind us that life entails pain; yet women, emblems of life’s labor to give birth, also teach us that to seek distinction in the dimension of suffering the pain of labor, rather than being carried through in the mystery of death and rebirth, leads to dark and demonic growths, distorted tumors and malignant births. When we refuse to give up agency and instead covet the power of birth, then we amass pain in an attempt to distinguish ourselves by virtue of the magnitude of our suffering. any are the mothers who hold motherhood to be their true vocation. h, it’s terrible to say; many fail to make a rightful calling of motherhood when they debase the vocation so by using it to “distinguish” themselves in the dimension of power and pain. What a lonely existence, to use motherhood and the experience of giving birth as a tool, a weapon, a power of self-advancement in the world. What lonely distinction!
O
M
T
A
L
O
A
A
What aberrant need grows, where the mother’s pain crushes the first shoots of testing oneself in the waters of life. domineering need to use everything—other children, friends, foes, sisters, brothers, love, and hate—to gain a footing and most of all to supersede the horizon of life’s governance. wounded will uprooted from gathered rest upon the watery deeps; an unnatural need born of infectious distrust that unsettles the original privation of a knowing repose in the life of spirit; a heightened susceptibility that dooms the child to battle against the greater forces of life out of an insatiable feeling of disempowerment; an aberration passed on and nourished by the mother’s want of envious distinction. nce uprooted from nascent trust, from its possible growth into a knowing love, the child carries in its very matter and sensibility, a terror—not truly of what life brings—but of ife’s loving initiatives to return it home to rest upon its original intuition and life feeling, and grow an active receptivity. nd a wellspring of deep unhappiness fills the child, and a shadowy loneliness overtakes even its successes.
amentation and Woe
L
140
N
You cannot know, you cannot understand, no one can understand a mother’s pain. o one can understand, for the child is her flesh, she imparted flesh to the child. Flesh of my flesh— we claim this is the male province, the man’s possessiveness and envy of woman, but though he has his struggle with envy, we are not by nature removed from this struggle, as if giving birth automatically makes us unpossessive and dispossessed of me-centeredness. Woman’s version of “flesh of my flesh” is “womb of my womb!”
I
D
N
S
E
S
N
T
here is a horrifying inverse side to the law of reduplication. t lies within our power to kill off new growth in ourselves and in others. ot just life but death redoubles in us, not just light but darkness. Life, weaning, growth, and change all assume a double form in us. o do darkness, shadow, and pain. ach, Light and ark, draws us into qualitative change where we undergo gestation of new life (dark) only to be born into new understanding (light). uch qualitative life has no compare in quantitative terms of worldly gain and achievement. or can the inverse side of this law escape us. Just as we can be drawn ever more deeply into the mystery of Life’s tender care, so too can we descend, by qualitative intensity, deep down into a deathly well of pain without bottom or end.
A
I
A
S
T
I
When repeatedly refuse Life’s initiatives to foster growth of the life of spirit, then slip into a dearth of vital feeling. his dearth is no ordinary lack; it entails suffering raised to the second degree, raised to an intolerable intensity. Painful life events, experientially viewed, seem like nothing but the burdensome suffering of one thing after another. o we quantify life events and muster strength to carry a set amount of pain; we muddle through the drudgery, though beyond a certain maximum we bear no more. nd then, if we are luckily receptive, we hit upon a shocking discovery. Pain’s amplitude—how much we feel a painful event as burden rather than as grace—hinges on the quality and manner of our bearing. Pain is, for us, an intensity and no simple quantity. can suffer a horrible ordeal and this self-same ordeal can yield either a great rejuvenation or degeneration beyond recognition. most peculiar and uncanny mathematics obtains between a single I
O
uch, there has never been a more harm-filled cry than the ouch of the safely guarded wound.
Pain and Bearing
141
I
I
M
I
I
S
A
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
O
I
I
M
T
T
I
T
I
painful ordeal and the sum total of temporal life events. t is a proportional or qualitative math. he one ordeal contains the whole of my life within it, so the quality of how bear the one either restores or takes away the whole of my life feeling. ruly, the ordinary, quantitative, and linear perspective of suffering betrays me! hat is why, when amass painful events like disparate bundles of misery, and labor under the strange illusory belief that life requires me to carry an ever greater load, then a striking, horrid thing happens. y attempt to hoist this one discreet suffering now acquires a qualitative force no person can heave. t looks like suffer from the straw that broke the camel’s back, the one additional thing that made the load too heavy. h, look, pay attention! easuring this one suffering against a mass of past sufferings binds me to an optical illusion. t’s not truly the one addition that puts me over the edge. could have come to terms with all my past suffering, and then this one trial and tribulation, if not borne well, suddenly makes my whole life, when refracted retrospectively by this failure of bearing, appear too heavy as if it were spliced into the discreet, negative, dark pieces of one long-bleating story of pain + pain + pain. By the same token, this one ordeal, now, is infinitely precarious. am asked to bear it well and through the one not merely lose but re-gain hold on (my) life, newly intensified and delivered back recreated whole. he quantitative perspective belies possessiveness and distorts everything! t’s qualitatively deficient in perception and attitude. am not the sum total of sufferings carry. do not stand apart from life, amass sufferings at a distance like goods that can be stockpiled, and package them under the label “me.” am not asked to live super-heroically like tlas as if carry the whole wide world on my shoulders. uch, the illusions of pain, all mine. can fail pain and the darkness of not knowing why am born to suffer. can spurn entry into the qualitative dimension of pain’s intensity. When deny pain its labor to release me from unnecessary psychic weight, the burdensome ways perceive and bear affliction, then refuse to let myself be formed anew by pain into a lightness of bearing suffused with perceptive sobriety and wondrously sensitized in embodiment. Pain amassed turns in on itself and cuts itself off from life. It belies the illusion that I do the bearing. hat is why an increase in felt quantity of baggage carries with it an immeasurable increase in the intensity of pain. We tear ourselves loose from the providential forces that seek to nurture and sustain amentation and Woe
L
142
N
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
O
I
I
I
us as sensitive beings who can bear the real. nstead of suffering real pain with naked vulnerability, the very real—the one child am asked to love well—slips away and we feel only our own pain, a pain now de-severed from its power sensitively to let us touch the real. n human life, there is not just the pain of undergoing but also that of my psychic suffering. Pain redoubles in human existence; we can suffer over our suffering. Yet this redoubling adds a kind of pain that’s no mere addition, no ordinary duplication, for it modifies our relation to suffering. h, great sadness! When believe that life does things to me rather than for my possible change; that is, when see myself as the driver at the helm who experiences life adversarially as an inimical force which, by raining seeming injustice and pain, foists load upon load upon load of undeserved burden after burden upon me, then my suffering does not merely double by the addition of the “me.” t transmutes and deforms. Pain cut off from life leads to the very diminution of self. grow less sensitive, less aware and for all the pain endure, become darker, duller, less real. ot only does life slip away from me but slip away and this loss proves unbearable. speak of the hopeless, despairing pain of freezing up rigid under felt limit and the pitch-black darkness of growing blindly lost to all sense that there is a way through. can thus live a false infinity, the infinity of foisting more and more and more upon my self, un-seen in the shadows where sacrifice has no voice and does not make itself known, until pain brutalizes me and makes of me a noonday witch. can endure like a mother who sacrifices on and on without recognition in the darkness until burst. nto violence and the shriek. I
A
take for true that a mother’s bond is virtually indescribable. nd that is one reason why it is voiced as not being understandable. Yet think this is only half the truth, and a half-truth is no truth. ven an intense affection, an affection so deep that at first one can hardly articulate it, can, upon pain of spiritual growth, reveal its true meaning and become spoken. We are all called upon to transcend first bonding in life in order to wean and be weaned, to set others free and to become free for a higher love, a speakable love, a love articulated as gift. We are to receive the child as a gift and not a mere possession of “flesh and blood.” n an odd and mysterious way, the material substance of that first bond can encourage one to face pain for the sake of the child. nd yet, as the most commonplace scenarios of
Pain and Bearing
A
I
E
I
I
I
Pain and Sympathy
143
O
S
A
I
I
M
A
A
I
I
I
I
T
life show, when we take pain as our own, then “sacrificial” pain transmutes into a hard, bleating refrain, an inarticulate feeling of self-centeredness that justifies not letting go and never having to become transformed in the whole quality of our love. Pain possessed refuses to become transformed. hat is why it cannot find its true voice, its articulation. For possessed pain is like a deaf-mute. t can neither hear nor speak. t steals away into itself, wards off all things that threaten to bid it open, and so emits only shrill cries and harsh demands but voices no human understanding. t dresses itself up as a speech endowed with moral righteousness that fires off rounds of harsh judgment for want of the true address of compassion. Bonding is not unconditional love. f itself, it places limits and conditions on relations. t expresses its own anxiously felt limits outwardly by limiting others. Bonding can promote generous acts in sympathy but when it reaches its limit it claims everything back to itself under the antipathy of felt pain. ntipathy is sympathy’s uncontested shadow. ( omething is happening—to me, to me.) mother’s bonding, like any bonding, becomes hateful of the very child she claims to love when love finds no anchor in depossession or disidentification with “me” and “my” pain. ere bonding must, at the limit, see the child under the rule of its false expectancy of reward or recognition or approbation. t must see the child as if the child were acting to cause it pain, to break the bond, to stretch it beyond capacity, in a word, to thwart the mother’s very existence as “me.” t becomes antipathetic where once it was sympathetic. ll contests of finite will and want, because they prove unfree, progress toward the point of total conflict where one will must triumph over the other. he mother-child relation proves no exception. T
(Is the child an occasion to renounce attachment to “me” or is my child willfully thwarting my desire, I never pause to witness.)
T
I
D
I
A
T
I
M
others enjoy a unique bond with child. ( on’t fathers too?) he child is made of the mother’s womb. t is “womb of her womb.” t is carried by her and brought forth in a special labor. (Receptivity informs her labor and sustains her carriage, if she fares well.) he child lives off her body. Her matter is passed on; she is involved directly in its preconscious formation in the womb. ll this is true and we do not adequately think in spiritual terms about this astonishing reality, nor do claim to do so here. While we may concede that a mother truly suffers in carrying a child to amentation and Woe
L
144
very mystical peak has its valley. here, down in the underground swell, women play a role in genesis. eep in the mysterious dark a woman carries forth the seed of life, and not only her matter but the very genealogies of spirited patternings housed in family lineages intertwine and pass through her womb unto the new child of life, for she is part of a spiritualmaterial transmission greater than herself and which reaches back beyond the memory of her birth experience. his is her burden, not even to know the origin of her material connection and yet because that mystery lies deeper even than herself, she is but a part of a deeper upsurgence, a darker mystery of gestation, on which she could depend if only she would give up her claim to possession. nd yield the child over to destiny that we, mother and child, may live as two upon the great swell of life.
I
M
O
A
I
he mother’s suffering is unique. his believe. We can recognize singularity in her suffering and not on that account compare. re all primitive sufferings not an ordeal to the person on whom they foist, in a singular and unique way, the task to renounce one’s peculiar weakness, one’s peculiar indulgences that keep one bound to agency and defiantly unwilling to transcend the felt limit of “me”? ne may not have known natural motherhood but know still the grievous lot of childlessness. Who can explain how one can sacrifice want of child for the beloved without shattering, who can tell us how to assume parentage for sake of the lover’s want. y concern is not to compare pain. t is rather to grant singularity and nevertheless see that possessing one’s pain, no matter how unique, yields T
T
A
T
D
T
E
term, a unique undergoing that no other human being knows, and we may further concede that this suffering carries on after birth in a special way; nevertheless, she remains yoked to a special task to bear the earthy tide of this underground material bond and nevertheless renounce the temptation to anchor her well-being in the bond of “her felt possession.” For this task love requires and no man, person or child, no bewitching power of magic force can save her from this requirement. We can have empathy for the singularity of her struggle. Yet would it not be treacherous sympathy to indulge her appeal to a comparative standard when she goes astray and screeches “no one can understand, no one,” when all the while her child suffers demise at her hand?
Pain and Bearing
145
D
A
T
S
I
I
harmful and destructive outcomes. How, pray tell, can the child’s bond be any less difficult than that of the mother? t too lived in the womb and carried the incubation from its side. t shares the same matter; it harbors its own unique share in material antiquity. urely the child’s vulnerability to the mother’s claim, though different from the mother’s vulnerability to child, stems in part from the material dimension of its own embodied birth. How then, can the mother, at her wits’ end when pushed to the limit, prize her own pain above that of her child rather than relinquish it for the sake of the child? he answer is revealing: because a unique order of change is required of us at the limit where all that we take ourselves to be meets its possible end. How the cut is needed! We must cease to think of ourselves as “meidentified”; that is, as those who experience life, those who gave birth, those who must suffer the child’s growth and departure from home. We must cease as we have known ourselves to be. (Is the child an occasion to renounce attachment to “me” or is my child willfully thwarting my desire, will I let the question rise up from the Deep, form an image on the waters, and congeal into my heart’s true query? Will I let such rumblings from the preconscious cradle and sustain me in bearing the child’s release?) nd if we shall not cease, if we refuse freely to become eclipsed and opened upon receptivity; if we refuse thereby to enter the ark mystery of pain and love, then a wrong order of darkness will emerge, a potentially demonic female narcissism will win the day, a self-centeredness that, when placed under duress, can do nothing but work untold harm upon the very ones it claims to love.
Pain and Love
T
T
A
A
A
I
Pain is not a phenomenon unique to human being, even if the order and kind of pain we must bear in life is singular—to our kind (as human), to our passage (as child or mother), and to our individual life journey (as suffering the life of a mother and not a father). t is, rather, a deep mystery of the living cosmos. ll beings suffer pain, and not merely as biological organisms. ll beings, even those not biological, like angels and God, suffer pain. nd the pain suffered is not, even for biological beings, merely biological. o suffer life entails pain because life entails bearing. he very cosmos is woven of pain, a bearing of pain in its creative and sustaining aspects. For it is not just the mother, transmitter of body and genealogy, who gives matter to us when we come to birth, nature and the cosmos do too. he full dimensions of the cosmic and the natural tear themselves 146
L
T
amentation and Woe
D
I won’t.
M
D
I
I
I
I
I
T
A
A
T
I
T
A
apart in service to the ongoing creativity of life. nd within earthly life, mountains and rocks bear our pain for us; they draw pain out of us and suffer for us, return our pain, if you will, to life and cosmos, to heaven and earth. he driest ray of sunshine penetrates to bone and marrow and relieves the ache. Pain joins the whole of living reality together; it is the common fabric of the dimensions, the living heart of divinity. t is our task, whatever primitive bonds we have, to accept and thereby relinquish “our” pain. o give up the “our,” the “my” in pain and let it be, let it do its work to release us for a higher love, even though the bond be real. ffective bonds prove unbearable only where we cramp up and possess the pain. What is agency, except a heart cramp, the cramped up heart of a loneliness that nothing can touch? When we cramp, we close down and turn in on ourselves in hardening. We become just a hard will, a demand that no one or no thing take this bond (or truly this will) from me. ll of life looks, from that hardened standpoint, threatening. When anxiety hunkers down into a hardened will, everything, though its purpose be not to harm me, seems to cause me pain. he least little thing, my husband’s escapades, my child’s impending stage of growth, my friend’s good luck in love and life, everything. (Can pain possessed so distort my senses that cannot even sense the heartbeat of other beings?) Life does aim to take my firm grip off things, yet how misguidedly do cling to what alone prevents relief. cling to what think my justified truth to be, namely, that cannot bear this order of pain, so don’t ask it of me. on’t ask me, my child, to let you go and do this thing. on’t ask me, other of Life, to do this. Providence, you mean bastard, can’t, can’t, can’t marry you.
I
I
I
I
I
ME
AS
T
DON
T
I
M
I
I
s the other trustworthy? What incapacitates me so that cannot bear this event, my child’s departure, does not come from the pain caused by the departure. t comes, rather, from cramping and possessing the pain rather than riding it out. he great blindness in the maternal demand that “no one can understand, so ’ K ” lies in the belief that can protect myself from pain by sparing myself the task to wean. Yet to close off from weaning is selfish possessiveness; the very instant that close, covet my pain and prize it above all human connectedness and timely dictate.
L
L
I
oneliness is one grand abstraction into the and of Woe nto Me, a grievous fall that abstracts by descent into that
U
Pain and Bearing
147
T
entombed enclosure where pain rules and everything ceases to reach me. his enclosure feels most real to dark confusion but wherein lies its reality, its breathing self in contact with the living pulse of other beings?
I
I
A
nd the horror of it, to close is to abandon myself before all else, it is to abandon the “child” of my own newly emergent possibility. f abandon my spiritual child-self, how could then avoid abandoning my physical child, too?
A
L
L
T
I
he and of borted Births is a lonely walled-in terrain where one wanders lost forever seeking vindication and assigning blame, as if ife made me abort, as if people made me abort, as if it were not simply me, all me. What benighted treasury, this and of Woe, woe unto me. Is my child to blame that I abandoned my self and thereby her?
I
M
I
I
I
D
M
I
I
O
I
S
I
S
I
T
L
o close is not trust in one’s self. t is not to believe that the very living self may be funded by spirit’s delight and gracious midwifery to bear the reality and be borne across it. t is not to give (my) self a chance. Loneliness is the shadow of agency whose middle term of painpossessed engenders self-abandonment. elf-abandonment composes the heart of a loneliness that will not heal. t lies in making, without cause or reason, an unwarranted break in but a moment’s flash, a break with Life’s possibility. elf-abandonment performs that infernal addition of redoubled pain with its horrid transfiguration of suffering into virulent estrangement. t is the act whereby tear myself out of the common fabric of living reality, remove myself from ties to human life and cosmic mysteries, de-sever myself from ultimate intimacy. h, did really wish to wish this prayer as upon a star, that the other leave me lonesome, not bid me to let go felt pain and come forth into openness to bear and be borne by all things equally? o hate the other of Life so? How tremendous the price for coveting the bond share with another, how exacting its toll in that it severs the self from others, the prayer granted, it de-bonds one in the very name of keeping the bond, having the bond, being the only one to have this most special, most unusual of all bonds, the very bond where my child no longer exists for me as an independent being. What grand, murderous illusion lies in the abortion of the true self in favor of my victimhood that would sacrifice
amentation and Woe
L
148
the birth of joy with others, the birth of two separately breathing lives, in favor of one lonely badge of pain. his is my cramped heart’s honor.
When and how does “can’t” turn demonically into “won’t”? When did that genuine yearning, loneliness for ultimate intimacy, break down into the noonday witch’s shrill complaint? When do slip from the true need of proper self-love, a need oriented toward healing, into the hateful self-love of victimhood? We don’t truly know, at first in a situation, why pain is brought to us, why we should suffer. Yet when we cling to pain and possess it, we deprive it of its work to make us grow. We hold it back from its task to disclose to us its meaning in our lives. Pain is like love. We cannot know love’s meaning until we love, until by love’s own movement we follow to where it delivers us. Pain must deliver us. We must ride the constellation all the way through and not abort its movement, just as we had to ride out of the womb on pain of going through the birth canal. very time a new order of understanding devolves upon us as possibility, we must pass through the womb to deliverance on pain of renouncing all that threatens to abort the birth. eliverance is not precisely from pain but to new life, and more strikingly from the temptation to engender unnecessary pain and get bogged down in meaningless suffering, lost to life’s funding and illumination. But we don’t like pain. nd we don’t see pain as the intermediate term between bonding and unconditional love. Pain is an emissary of a love yet to be, of a qualitative transformation in the whole fabric of our being, our matter, our sentiments, our perceptions, and our understanding. Pain signals growth, the Great Possibility of transformed embodiment. f cannot meet pain as a chariot that would deliver me to this possibility, then covet pain as “mine, all mine.” covet rather than let myself be borne. s with love, there is this strange peculiarity about pain. When we turn our love upon its source in divinity, we are borne by love into an uplifting relation to all things. f we covet “love” and try to tear it away from God, if we want love to be solely our own and do not accept that it stems from a transcendent source, then we fall into perverse love. he very qualities that define true love—qualities like attentive devotion— become debased into obsession, fixation, and selfishness. o too with pain. I
S
T
I
A
I
I
I
A
D
E
I
T
(Pause, breathe.)
Pain and Bearing
149
M
N
S
A
O
I
f we seek to tear pain away from the cosmos as if it were not the whole fabric that binds beings together in intimacy, we end up with an unbearable burden. ur yoke then appears, but only through the optical illusion of self-centeredness, far too heavy for us. For a pain that is not given back to the cosmos and recognized as divinity’s emissary is unbearable. pain closed in on me, deprived of its power to edify and extend my reach into the fabric of life, is meaningless. adly, truly, it can only smart and perform no labor of deliverance. o small wonder, then, that we suffer mutely and find no sustaining, no ultimate sense in the undergoing. Worse, a pain that is not cupped by the other’s embrace and shielded by Providence’s sanction does not swim with all the cosmic and life forces that reach out to assist its navigation. uch a pain is too heavy. t is a leaden, dead yoke that presses us down, down, down to the bottom of the dark, blue sea. I
S
The Shriek
Coveting pain reduces “me” to a heart-chilling shriek.
I
When covet pain and make of it a name for “me,” what change does it unleash, what order of transmutation, what false quickening?
I
T
amentation and Woe
L
150
I
A
I
N
T
T
O
T
I
T
T
A
demonic self-fulfilling prophecy shadows coveted pain. For to covet pain is to deprive sacrificial acts of their redemptive power to transform and open the heart. o covet pain is to become a mere cry without meaning, a sacrificial will lost to all significance. Just pain bellowing forth to no end, with no understanding, and no role to play in raising people to an uplifting end. Just a sheer, brute shriek. his, by coveting pain, am become. speak not of the child’s shriek of joy at life, for the child’s shriek is a squeal. here are shrieks of pain and shrieks of joy. he child’s squeal, heard from afar, sounds indistinguishable from horrific pain; the child could be hurt. ne rushes outside only to discover that it shouts in pure delight or even playfully experiments with sound by shrieking. he child’s shriek speaks of things “unbearable” in the uplifted sense that finds life so amazing we cannot fathom how we bear the joy of it! How, indeed, are we sustained in the whole wide mystery of life’s cupped hand and heaven’s radiant cover! he unadulterated peal of delight. or do speak of duende, that ndalucian song of pain, no, it’s no song but the beginning of song, the cry, the deepest, most primordial cry of pain ever sung by humankind. Duende, though emitted through the human heart and mouth, voices more than human lament. t speaks the
D
T
I
I
T
Pain and Bearing
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
T
T
I
I
D
A
D
T
N
cry of the earth opening up; the cosmic womb issues forth a cry formed on human lips that reaches out to become materialized in song, that rises in slow undulations straight up to heaven as if to announce, “ ow, heaven and earth be yoked together, embody song’s spirit not in mere notes, however heavenly, devoid of body but in rich numinous sound seeking image, sound rising to find its clarified articulation, sound laboring at its own birth into word while springing from out of the very deep.” he duende is not solely the deep well of raw human emotion, though it is that; its source proves primordial, the whole material fabric of pain, that life comes forth in pain, wrenches open the cry, and our pain, embodied in song through lament, is brought to know its origin, that it is contained in and by the eep; and our song is made to touch upon the ark waters where all life comes forth interconnected. nd our song transmits the eep, lets it come forth. his heart-wrenching cry, though it be unsettling nevertheless attunes and harmonizes us, for it prepares the way for word, articulation. t is no wicked witch come to call us back to pain without word, without articulation, without meaning. t is no shriek but rather the beginning in all its strange upsurging gurgle of life expressed. he shriek of coveted pain kills rather than bodes forth life. t’s chilling, mute, and deaf. he shriek marks the qualitative difference between unabated delight and unmitigated hatred of Life. t marks the spiritual height to which we can rise equally as the depth of abandonment to which we can sink in loneliness. he shriek that stands hatefully against life, rather than the shriek that life releases in us, produces a muffled sound, a pain lost to word and not a pain preparing to receive and creatively speak word; it emits a sound that cannot attain shape, for it has severed itself from the midwife who shapes, who brings depth of undergoing (suffering) in Her immaculate art to reach up to heaven where meaning and name can be conferred upon it. When am reduced to the shriek—not the child’s peal of joy or the duende’s mounting sorrow-filled lament—but the shriek of pain possessed, of a death that cannot end, a death to life and to living; when am reduced to the shriek, no longer even defend against anything specific—this threat or that—though know only defense. flail about defensively when there is no longer anything against which defend. am just a shriek, a pain crying out with no response, no reverberation from life or cosmos; “am” cut off, have cut myself off. cannot even hear the sound of my own echo, so deafened am in the midst of the shriek. here could not be a 151
T
T
I
amentation and Woe
L
152
T
S
O
A
M
A
M
M
A
E
A
I
I
E
I
A
T
greater isolation, unless madness is such. his too is madness, spiritual madness. nd it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, for what constitutes its sole achievement? t has made the mother’s lamentable words “no one can understand” become true. ven , the one who sinks into the abominable pit of isolation, cannot find meaning. am become pain, devoid of understanding, devoid of word, voice, true song, gift. mere shriek. Will the mother whom no one can understand, then, squander her life running in circles around her false “truth,” that no one, not anything, no tree and no cat, no person, no child, neither the Heavenly Father above nor the arthly other below shows mercy, alleviates her of such pain uncomprehended. nd will she raise up her pain, whenever other Life asks her to change as if to say, “but this is enough, don’t ask for more”? ( s if the other of Life does not know what it means to bear unconditionally and to labor at midwifery.) nd when Providence finds itself compelled to send her a blast, a burning jolt in order to pierce through her thick padding of pain plus pain plus pain, her victim’s discordant stand-in for lament, will she see it only as more pain and injustice that the “male” world inflicts, will she not muster up a little demonic strength to dedicate herself to her prized possession, to protect it from such blows and keep all life and cosmos at bay never to enter her Pandora’s box of noxious sleep? h, she may revive a tad at times and recover some words, babble on about her life story, but will she really say anything, will she not circle round and round but never leap to the heart of the matter, never find the wellspring where understanding flows rich? he will at most stutter. his mother can shriek, babble, and gush yet remain, for all her attempts to form words, unintelligible. wonder too whether she won that demonic battle, the battle that should never be fought, over whose pain is the greatest? Has she become heavier with pain than even the child left to watch again and again how its mother prizes pain above tenderness? What child can compete with the mute pain of loneliness’s woeful grief ? his child bears a most relentless ordeal of motherlessness, for it must lose its mother to her grievous woe over and over again precisely as the mother remains among the living. Would it be easier to face a clean death once and for all, either physical or spiritual, than face death’s failed and hopeless repetition? his battle to face life’s undergoing and wonder at the mystery of pain, why it exists, why we must undergo at all, should never be fought in the wrong direction to amass in prideful disdain all that we carry and
A
I
T
T
become the womanly one most pained. “Womb of my womb, you can never understand me.” Pain has its mystery; it’s not evident to us why it exists, why undergoing should have its pain, why God does not annihilate pain. he answer to the mystery of pain can only be disclosed on pain of undergoing. here’s no way around it. t’s a deep sea that must be entered slowly and under guidance but neither fought and warded off nor appropriated and taken possession. Beware that you hold forth forever if you have to for pain’s revelation of its role in life. For to seek prematurely to interpret pain, to name it too soon, always leads to “mine.” nd there, where “mine” pulls me down, no answer can be heard or sacrifice find redemption, for who say “mine, mine, mine” am never open to receive the granting. I
The Loneliness of Pain Possessed
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
A
Pain possessed harvests neither understanding nor affect. t issues in the most rudimentary of cries, no more than a grunt exploding into venomous hate, a brute and unliving pain bursting at the seams because it impotently wants to be seen, known, heard. nd yet its cry lacks all sensitive power to move. t kills off rather than stirs life. t cannot make itself known, for it has never aspired truly to be yoked to meaningful and sensitized living. What horror of contradiction, that should scream at the basal peak where feel least alive and most unheard, though precisely in the throes of loneliness am most unknowable and least able to stir affect in others. t’s too often true that men don’t hear women. Woman’s ordeal of not being heard, while it does not always devolve into the shriek of clandestine loneliness, nevertheless reveals this self-same configuration. scream and my screaming achieves only the opposite effect that intend, for estrangement breeds estrangement and only humble vulnerability can stir life and move others to want—freely and by no mere obligation but with the whole of themselves—to encounter the singular nature of my journey and travail.
A
T
I
Look! ee! t’s just like the ancient myths. he fields die, no crops grow, the child petrifies, the men cannot withstand it. nd we women think we hold no power before men, though they cannot bear shrillness of voice or harshness or any sharp emission of pain. Contrary to popular S
A
ll the world goes stark and still when it hears a woman’s bitter shriek.
Pain and Bearing
153
I
I
I
I
I
N
A
M
M
T
belief, men feel responsible for woman’s pain. hey harbor a preconscious vulnerability, from time out of mind, to woman because she reminds them of the feminine aspect of divinity, the lost other’s embrace to which emory pulls them, the radical, total, loving embrace, and so they cannot bear woman’s self-demise. nd yet, for all the goodwill men can show us, no man has the power to save us as women from self-destruction. o power—no man, no divine jolt, no heavenly dictate, not even Life— can save me from being boxed in and cramped up by my very own unwilling. Willingness is the small step must supply, alone, all by myself in the dark. must let my heart be opened or none of these forces can rally to my side. For all the power of my shriek to pierce through the spheres and bring life to a halt, neither take the one step necessary nor does there spring from my womb anything but life-murdering paralysis. remain shot through with a paralyzing darkness, held tight in its grip, and all do lulls the living who surround me into misery and the destructive negative bonding of selves-in-betrayal because won’t condescend to undergo transformation.
N
A
amentation and Woe
L
154
N
A
LOVE
I
I am, after all, woman, made of womb, and that means I am enlightened already as to the nature of love, for who can love save one endowed with womb, only a mother knows love, why won’t the world listen to me, why won’t they hear? Me: I . Me: I am in P I . I = P I . Why I say “I,” I mean “me.” (Me. me. me.)
nine
Lamentation and Sorrow
Women have, since days of old, been guardians of lamentation. Women, ones who bear child and know a mother’s loss, ones who shed tears and give voice to tragic pain, ones who wail and usher things to the season of their death; women suffer to give expression to life and loss with their lament.
How is it that women who incline to wail and cry, whose tonality of embodiment, whose manner of bearing should reveal to us our sorrow— our deepest, purest, truest sorrow—let lamentation devolve into such a soiled attunement, a bitter, harsh, loathsome shriek rather than the voluminous burgeoning solemn word spoken from the heart’s song? Is there a true lament on earth? It’s not as easy to answer this question as we pretend. It’s hard to read the ancient texts and hear the voices of the venerable ones. How have we allowed the long heritage of religiosity in the West to breed such an ungodly sentimentalism that our shallow but noisy tears wash over and muffle the purer cries of saints and mystics with their power to sober us up and attune us to what truly matters? How, I beg you explain, have we not only smothered their voices but done so by evoking the name of that most unsentimental of Christian messages, the very unsentimental—and I do not say unfeeling—quality of unconditional love? I can’t make heads or tails of it, why anyone would believe that God sanctions every emotion, warrants every ejaculation of pain, justifies every order of weakness. It’s not that easy. There is pure lament, this I believe. But! (Now here’s a true “but” and not a bemoaning, whining, bleating, heartless “but.”) But: Lamentation finds its pure center only when raised to the second power. At first embodiment, it’s just a deep cry in privation whether issued upon exit from the physical womb or uttered in response to an unexpected blow from life. The initial cry of lamentation puts us on notice, like the siren’s warning to seafarers, that we could sink and fail to bear the very blow of life, that we could let the cup of life fall and break. Lamentation can either rise up
to its promise to produce in us pure affect or devolve into bitter self-pity. But! Take notice: Lamentation that comes into its own, that is raised to the purifying second power dons a new name, and its name is sorrow. It is hard to praise lamentation without qualification. The question holds forth, Is this lamentation an expression of deep, true sorrow or that sullied fusion of loneliness and self-pity? Is it a cry become stirring word or a teary cup of bitter disturbance? The expression of true sorrow harbors no selfish sentiment; sorrow is untainted by falsity, its bearing true and gracious, remarkable for its courageous unsentimentality, mysteriously inexplicable by ordinary means. True sorrow strikes us wondrous because it is unsullied by base motives of sentiment to gain a little from one’s pain. Its modesty suffers no want of gaining that false victor pride, the pride of the weak, the pride that dons no garment of arrogance but rather the cloak of diffidence so as to win the lowest of places, the victim, the one who suffers most. How is it that lamentation, rather than win through to the gift of truth and edification that life aims to disclose, should become all balled up into convoluted self-involvement, a little turgid ball of pain, and come out as one long, unbearable bleating “but, no, not this, no, no, noooo”? Against life, against this and that, against each and every thing that happens to me, against men, against other women: one endless wailing “against.” Is my song just one long bleat of pain amassed, the very pain of constantly refusing to greet life’s undergoing? Am I on the verge of crying before life even has a chance to reveal the beauty in what’s next? Am I perpetually poised to defend myself blindly and without pause against pain and plagued by endless want of reprieve from life, as if my virginal purity were only sustainable when nothing happens? As if I, a woman who claims to love life, want to flee back into a protected womb, the time before time, the life before life, the still quiet state where, though I imagine everything happened miraculously, everything is frozen dead under the reign of the ice queen. Is this my “pre-disposal,” my underlying attitude, that I am perched ever ready to put the breaks on life because I cannot shed the feeling that life overwhelms me? What imprinted this weighty demeanor upon my breast, what falsity did I drink in, did I hear only the victim’s scream, or learn much too much from women’s taxing legacy of “woe unto me”? You know not of what I speak? As old as woman’s rich heritage of lamentation has been, as old I think
156
Lamentation and Woe
as preconscious memory, women have engendered a second virulent strain of debased lament. Two seeds have women engendered, the fruitful and the barren. Women have taught women, even more expressly in this age of critique and modern psychology, the aggrieved belief that they should don arms and protect themselves. Protect themselves, we say, from pain and life and men. Hidden in from there lies against, don’t you see? And if you cannot see, then listen, listen to the tone of lamentation and you will hear the against. Listen. When we were young and found ourselves hurt by the first love who turned out to be a cad, women arose, women we never knew, enveloped us and with a great collective semblance of understanding gathered round to give us comfort by lamenting our pain with us. Like bees in droves, they told us, mature women beyond our age, we must protect ourselves, protect ourselves we must. (Or were we sung this tune already in the womb?) How silly we would be, the mantra drummed again and again, not to protect ourselves, we must learn to hold something back, not give, not open our hearts until we exact “proof ” from the next one and make the lover bow down to our conditions. What, I ask you, lies in lamentation? An acquired pattern of selfdefense, a dressed-up glorification of conditional complaint? A practice of buffering myself against possible hurt and teary-eyed protestations when all my strategic protections fail? A woman’s false shame, her refusal to go forth naked into life and live true to herself because, well, simply because it could hurt? Is there a true mode of bearing, a genuinely redemptive suffering an earth? Where is the mother who will embody the prototype of open, vulnerable bearing? We are clothed too early through our first formative imprint with the buffers of habit, acquired sentiments, and reactive patterns of throwing up protective defenses. Yet the heart of defensiveness lies in no habit. It lies in attitude, in decision. Freud and women, natural enemies though they be, prove allies in holding a common untruth, the untrusting justification that we must protect and veil ourselves psychologically in life, establish borders and all the like, and gain respect by demanding that everyone tippy-toe around them. Now here’s a blast: it’s not necessary to protect ourselves at the font of our being . . . if we trust. (This “if ” is no conditional; it bespeaks requirement.) It’s fatal to us to don the grievous stance, to whine and cry out to men and all the world to give us protection, more ground, more horizon of
Lamentation and Sorrow
157
safety for our self-realization. The core of self-protective defense is a blind parry, an on the spot refusal of life’s hidden gift. We put clothes on quickly, under felt threat, in order to hide from the requirement of open bearing. Life cannot be lived in the past through using loss and retention to justify buffering and hardening. One can never be present beneath such buffers nor can buffers be justified by amassing losses, whether felt or real. Is it fair to make Jack accountable for what John did or exact a price from Susie for what Janie said? Is it judicious, women, I ask you, not to open oneself to Jack because John was a cad, not to love Susie because Janie hurt me? Is it gracious not to love John even though he cannot love me? How can we, as humankind, ever win free of the cycle of unwarranted violence if we make the next one pay for the last? Can’t you see the violence in it? It sounds all good and true, who could resist it? The sensuous unison that seems to comfort and console, the seductive charm of well-meant sympathy that rallies us to don arms as if it came from heart, when we speak together, women alone, and tell of our woe and how we must take care to protect ourselves and not open up so. Oh, but what of the violence in it? Do we really believe that violence falls to man’s domain alone? How self-naive! Not every order of weakness is justified! This, then, that I and other women should falsely believe it so, forms my heart’s true sorrow. This, then, that women do not know that love contains sympathy but sympathy is no ground of love: this constitutes my true heart’s sorrow. Let us not pretend before a mirror, mirror on the wall that our lamentation is chaste and our heart brim full of beauty; let us ask instead, When do the tears begin? When do tears begin?
158
Lamentation and Woe
ten
Tears for Want of Comforting Protection
T
When do the tears begin? Do we know, do we apprehend? Tears flow when we cannot understand. The mother says no, the child cries for want of understanding. (It’s not enough to say that children cry entirely from deprivation of biological and practical aims, for the why cuts deeper, redoubled as it is in us.) The parents fight, the child cannot stand the agitation, the tone of voice, the crisis, the violence. The child lacks understanding, the capacity to bear up under the unexpected turmoil of the fight and await the dawning light of apprehension. The harmony of the child’s world, though not yet won truly, is shattered. (Or perhaps the child bears its own darkness in trust.) And when, if we lived more intensely, would a young adult cry? When she comes upon a superior person who speaks truth and, in fright, she cries under the duress of not understanding. Such tears bode danger because they mark the beginning of collapse beneath the prospect of being called forth in darkness toward new understanding. Yet they mark not offense at the truth, though, wrought from anxiety, they could easily solidify into offense and put up rigid defenses to the good and bad alike, to the true and untrue. Tears turn vengeful and protective of the false and the old when we collapse into offense at the truth. They can even express (oh, the horror of it) a demonic attempt to undo the truth by making falsity’s protestation seem convincing. Then tears become redoubled negatively; they don the garment of pretense and enough reflection to know, deep down, they have grown fake. ears begin, oft enough, when we do not understand. Yet such tears are unnecessary. We could hold openly in patient wonder without why if we wished, if we were willing to trust. We could grow out of such tears and not fear the dark so.
What, then, of lament? Tears of lament begin when the bearing grows painfully arduous and the ordeal one faces looms before one auspiciously exacting and potentially crushing. When, that is, life begins to show that it has a personal face and my ordeal appears ever so suspiciously aimed at me. And I am made in heightened awareness to touch upon the difficulty
that, when I am brought under requirement, tears well up and I add “me” onto the first cry “why?” What’s in a word, a little “me” added on to “why,” if not the whole possible terrible conversion of me down rather than up, the transmutation rather than the great transformation, the horrible deformation of me into a lame person of broken heart rather than a person made whole, able, and willing, the total possible degeneration of lamentation into the bitter cup of pity! Tears can begin without why, as in the child, but they come untapped and gush forth with the moaning, groaning, bewailing “why me?” When the why turns toward self-reference, take care! There, in the reinforced darkness where illumination could never arrive, I turn the why upon myself and fill my heart to the brim with “woe unto me.” This little “me,” the seemingly tiniest act of self-reference, marks the first false step that solidifies self-attachment and precipitates a great fall. It transmutes the undergoing into saga; it makes life center on me benightedly as if it were one toilsome series of events that undeservedly “happen to me.” This, as opposed to letting life carry me forth into a dialogue that unveils its depth dimensions, its hidden and personal intents “for me.” To occupy the center of the universe is to diminish life by transmuting it into a an experience of mine; it is to preempt and depersonalize life’s care for me by crowning myself Atlas and, never mind that I bewail my fate, proclaiming myself the sole, lonely, godforsaken bearer of life. It is to covet life and fall into a bad faith relation to journey. How does the why devolve into the pity-filled “why me?” Can’t bear why virginally?
I
There are two distinct orders of tears, however many varieties one might find within each kind. Tears that devolve into or arise from self-pity and woe unto me. And tears of healing and redemption. For labor and the sheer ordeal of undergoing can make us cry, fear and trembling borne well can effect release in tears, and illumination can bring such unimaginably poignant relief that tears flow softly in somber gratitude. Tears that come in retrospect can issue out of that rare form of incredulity that one didn’t bungle the undergoing! Such tears are not without joy for all their sorrow. Tears can show forth upon forgiveness for having distrusted all that Life is and Providence brings. We must forgive ourselves if we are to forgive Life, though we must forgive Life if we are ever to get started. Yet tears
160
Lamentation and Woe
shed in retrospect, depending on the vantage, can also unleash a rude and unforgiving bitterness that solidifies the distrusting refusal that never gets off on the right footing in life journey but prospectively anticipates only grief and heartache. Which tears slip from my eyes, which direction do they pull?
Won’t Life Comfort Me—Personally?
Over what do we stumble and collide in life? The simple answer seems to be pain (suffering). Yet closer examination of our tears and lamentations suggests that pain and understanding are inextricably linked for us. We cry, it seems, because we stand in privation of understanding at base of our very existence. To live is to suffer. Our suffering strikes us as unfathomable from the ground up, without why. We literally do not understand why we must undergo, suffer, live and not simply be delivered from pain (undergoing). Still, it’s no ordinary reason we seek, as if our suffering would be mitigated because someone said, “There is no cause, it’s just impersonal fate” or “there is a cause, your rebirth is personal punishment for evil deeds of a past life.” The whole set-up evokes tears because it confounds us. Is life personal or impersonal, gift or punishment? And why, if I am to live, must I undergo this? We cannot evade the suspiciously personal temper of Life hard as we try to reduce Life to impersonal nature, biological mechanism, fate, or a brute game of chance: Why do children die, why do the innocent suffer, why does not God intervene? Life seems unfair and unjust, almost cruel and monstrously unfeeling!
n the throes of life, we start from the inside out, we collide on the singularity of our own lives. he union of the infinite (that Life should bestow equal care on each) and the finite (that my life is not the stuff of my dreams) threatens to offend us in part because it violates our sense of justice, though in large measure because it violates our sense of agency and want of love. don’t get to be Susie, who’s so undeserving and all messed up. t’s so offensive, really, that Susie’s life is so graced and promising, that so many things come to her I
I
T
I
Suffering grows harder the more accursedly personal Life becomes for us:
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
161
I
I
I
I
I
without her even trying, and she does not even deserve them, has not made herself worthy. Why am always stuck, trudging along under the burdens unfairly laid on me? (Secretly long for vengeance though call it justice. f there is Love, if Life harbors an intelligent Love, then why won’t it judge me to be more deserving than Susie?) Lives differ from bottom to top, beginning to end, holistically. How could Life care for me, me personally, in equal measure as Susie when our respective life burdens seem so unfairly distributed? When our deeds and character do not appear to matter to what is granted us? Oh, despair of the whole dang affair, it’s as though the whole deck of life were stacked against me from the start. And just as stumble and despair of ever seeing the justice or care in it, then, just then as try to get a handle on things . . . I
Ouch, life grows even more accursedly personal:
I
I
I
A horrible event unfolds, and want to know why must suffer this specific event, why this most crushing horror must happen—to me? Why is my child born ill, why did tragedy visit my house, why did I have to be marked out for such an unbearable order of suffering?
Life is concrete. I start within the stream. I never know Life as such save within the context of my peculiar journey. I meet only the unique events of my life right now, and I cry out, “Why, Lord, why me?” I voice in my heart lament’s query, “Must I suffer this? Anything but this.” And my heart cramps, undergoes a little seizure, puts up resistance. Ouch, the pain of it. Yet must the heart cramp, must I shed tears, must I? If I abided in pure receptivity and hope, then even on receiving a great blow from life without advance preparation, would I well up with tears and cry? Can’t I awaken to the personal nature of journey—that I will bear ordeals no other knows—and nevertheless abide openly in wonder that this, this, most unwanted and least apparently deserved, most dreaded and incomprehensible of situations, unfolds, I say not “happens to me” but instead arises, unfolds or comes, arrives as my life situation “for me” now? We cannot evade the intuition that (my) life comes (to me) personally. This truth is woven into the fabric of singularity, that my journey will not be yours and you will not suffer what I suffer or even as I suffer. On what
162
Lamentation and Woe
here are silent tears, tears contained in this felt breach with Life that may never find articulation in open speech. hey can lie dormant year in and out; they can smolder and stew and rattle about. hey express themselves for certain yet not openly declared. Perhaps they “speak” as a dullness that overcomes me, a deep sadness, or as an untouchable dark seed locked tight within. may recuperate in time, enough to go on living, to regain a slight hold on life, and yet, far too often, am not resurrected in full array. am marked by a shadow, the tear-filled, lonely complaint, why, deep down, want to know why—not, think, the big why am here but the small, just this one small thing over which stumble—why did this happen to me? Yet aren’t the big and the small one and the same? “ his” happens to me means “journey has to be lived as a whole.” I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
T
T
do we collide in life, if not the accursedly personal temper of journey, and the wee difference between Life borne as “to” or “for.” How can we pass from life borne as “woeful happening to me” to “strangely auspicious unfolding for me”? We come to a screeching, unnatural halt. On pain, we say, on sheer brute suffering. Yet pain harbors a mystery deeper than its physical and psychic symptoms. For pain manifests to us not first upon becoming physically hurt or psychologically devastated by tragic events but because we stand consciously aware that living is and will entail a kind of suffering. Oddly, in the face of this deeply sensed truth, we nevertheless protest that we do not collide on the pain of life per se but this particular pain that life sent, we collide in privation, we say, for want of understanding this one thing. Yet by so splitting hairs and telling ourselves white lies, we overlook the vital matter: Our whole disposal toward Life is contained within our attitude toward this seemingly one little thing that visits us in the peculiarity of our individual lives, this wee thing I falsely protest, “if only life would spare me this, I would be onboard with all the rest.” When I feel crushed by one thing, an immense dreaded happening, I do not know how to go on living. Not just this one event in a supposed sequence of events I call “my life” slips from my grasp but Life as a whole slips away without fail. It’s not possible to take all of Life but not this. We break over one thing because each thing decides our total relation to the living.
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
163
It’s not precisely pain or privation upon which we collide, though often enough we collide in pain and in lack of understanding. For we have already shown that to face Life as undergoing (suffering) does not automatically yield despair nor must privation of understanding result in misunderstanding rather than patient waiting on illumination. Pain and privation are but the occasions of collision. That undergoing has its pain occasions fright and fainting. And yet it is not precisely pain upon which we collide. We face the privation of understanding as a tension, a terror and a want, and this tempts us, out of anxiety rather than pause, to buckle or volatilize erratic. Many are the more precise candidates for a singular answer to the question, over what do I break, yet it is never over pain as such. I speak of candidates like expectation and dream, wish and want, pride and false humility, idealized conceptions of what will be, and the whole slew of things we conjure up as images of the deserved future of this “me” I think I am. Yet underlying all these particulars is the nagging “me, why me?” Hard though I may try, I cannot evade the suspicion that my life happens to me personally, my life is designed for me, not by predetermination, no, it’s more shocking than that. The design of my life exhibits “living” intelligence. Shocking, most shocking of all is that Life is supremely personal toward me. That means, can I bear the thought, that this most dreaded thing does personally occur to me and no other. Where’s the comfort in that? the justice? the care? How can I awaken to the real existence of the personal intelligence that shows its face in Life’s visiting pain upon me, and nevertheless not collapse into bitter accusation and self-pity? Tears flow in want of understanding, yes, life must be borne, we know not why. We sweat tears on pain of ordeal. And yet it is not precisely pain or privation upon which we collide. We sink and fall, our lament heads downward, the moment pain becomes possessed. The instant the “me” tags itself falsely onto the “why” and I take things personally in the wrong way, grow suspicious of and inimical toward life. By “pain possessed” do we turn tail and hide behind the deficient “understanding” into which we lock ourselves up defiant. At the heart of misunderstanding lies coveted pain and the manufacture of premature meaning, the pernicious game where “me” weaves its pity-filled story of “woe unto me.” Were we, like unto a song’s refrain, to ask our question a little more soberly, Upon what do we collide in life? would we not find it more proper to wager that, underlying pain, privation, and self-possession, we collide
164
Lamentation and Woe
upon a name, a word, a story? We treat our privation of understanding Life’s personal design like a grievous hole we seek to fill prematurely. At first simply with “me.” Instead of holding with “why?” we protest, “why me?” Yet the question begs and so we conjure up a developed answer, a tale of “woe unto me”! Even so, it is not first the story upon which we collide but the art of naming, which knack inheres in the art of bearing well or poorly. We name what we face in undergoing too soon and with teary, beclouded eyes for want of willingness to bear the pregnant wonder through to term. We refuse to enter the font of creativity, where Life’s face will reveal its name and disclose why this dispensed name best reveals the face of my own life journey. Round and round, we come again to that which Life will not let us evade, this wee little requirement: willingness. To “go with” Life’s stream, to accept Life’s gesture toward me wholly willingly rather than in fickleness or hateful distrust interminably threatened, perpetually against. Can I sort out the false from the genuinely personal, the begrudging and pitiful from the responsive and hopeful attitude of this, my very existence, if I don’t relinquish the temptation to name things prematurely? Oh, but how can I find comfort without my names for things, won’t I stand naked and exposed, wide open before that most formidable force, Life Itself, whose personal temper I cannot fathom, whom I judge rashly by the names I conjure to measure my privation, and from whom I want recompense, justice, payment for my suffering. By these names does not my expectation turn childishly demanding that Life comfort me—falsely? Oh God, when will we sober up and admit that tears flow for want of meeting Life as requirement. Just then, don’t we collide on offense? And the need to relinquish battle with God over what’s in a name, what’s in a happening?
Privation and Pride We suffer not one but two basic privations and like every privation the second also turns us upon requirement. What is this second privation that pride should prove the pivotal thorn impeding its acceptance? We want to control the order of “pain” that undergoing will bring, so we indulge the luxury to decide to what we are willing to submit, this our stubborn pride. It offends us that Life won’t concede. Naming too soon solidifies offense with its immense resistance, for it involves preemptively imagining
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
165
that the future will issue forms of pain that I neither can nor deserve to bear (whence my justified won’t). It never occurs to me that what proves unbearable stems from prideful resistance rather than the grace of “going with.” We know, when a thorn must be removed, that we avail ourselves of being borne through by relaxing into the pain with rhythmic breathing. And this requires trust, risk. What impedes “going with” Life, as opposed to whining childishly in offended pride, stems from the deadly temptation we feel before our second privation. The second brings us to the core of felt threat. It tempts us lethally for we find ourselves in life alone and vulnerable, like the tiny baby and the fragile sea turtle. We lack not only ready-made understanding; we are exposed, at risk, and without safety. And we thus yearn not solely for a mother’s sympathy (however misguided, I’ll take it) but also for the father’s protection. We want both the comfort of collective belonging and the security of individual protection. Just as the requirement to venture alone “without why” tempts us to engender meaning for ourselves rather than allow divine hand to deliver us to understanding, so too does our vulnerability, our native openness and unprotectedness before the forces of life, tempt us prematurely to provide our own security. We confound vulnerability with weakness when we seek to protect ourselves by making ourselves immune and invulnerable to life’s intelligent care. And this brings us to another peculiarity of human existence, namely, that nakedness is reduplicated in us or, rather—and here lies requirement—it must become reduplicated if we are to embody a richly humane way to be. Tears begin when we come under requirement. Between tears of not understanding and the temptation to collapse into confused defense, on the one hand, and tears of healing, on the other, lies: requirement. Tears of confusion could sober up if they would meet requirement. Just as we are required to let the Mother wean us off the early imprinting, the pre-manufactured sympathies and perceptions of the collective body, so too are we required to let the Father nourish us off the milk of self-protectiveness onto the meat of living without the comforts of measure and shield. Yes, tears begin when we come under requirement.
Weaning and Nakedness
It is required that we go forward naked in life and thereby avail ourselves of Life’s maternal-weaning process and its paternal-providential
166
Lamentation and Woe
guidance toward deliverance. Naked we go to death to agency, naked we are born to a new body and a new life. Nakedness cannot then refer merely to being without physical protection. Nor does it denote, strictly understood, being without a firm and healthy psychic center. Yet it does mean that we must cease to operate out of psychological defenses and stop equating the self with defensive patterns of self-protection. Contrary to what popular psychology tells us about how normal and natural it is for us to defend and patrol the borders of our psychic structures, it is not necessary to hold up the psyche once formed or police it against unforeseeable incursions. The voice of acquired neurosis treacherously whispers that we must be Atlas to our own psyches and deploy beefed-up police dogs in constant readiness. An elemental question haunts us in loneliness and it is this: To what must we die in order to die to agency, return home to accord with self, and win safety in the seafaring? The answer is, We must cease rooting ourselves in these defensive patterns and taking them to be very font and expression of the I. We must die to all those psychic patterns that are funded by instinct and established through early imprinting, all those habits of reaction that constitute my psychic and behavioral responses as distinct from yours, for clearly embedded in these patterns of reaction lie not only Oedipal projections (the real or imagined parents who impeded me under rule and norm if not violence and volatility, and the idealized parents I imagine would supply the protective skirt behind which to cower or the seemingly peerless love of a perfectly unconsidered approbation) but also the learned and defective art of naming reality—the forces coming toward me from out of the future—as things negatively personal that work against “me.” The defensive and patrolled psyche rests on the self-centered and fear-filled belief that I am an agent in battle with Life over who gets to lead, to decide the meaning of things, to measure and establish the perfect shield of love that watches over me. Loneliness grows fierce and daunting when enlisted as the sentinel of agency’s refusal to give itself up and relinquish the wanton feeling that I must secure the ground of my own existence and the horizon for my future becoming. Agency rests, in a word, on the felt threat that I will die if I do not “have” ground or horizon. This anxiety-ridden feeling falsifies expectancy, destroys gestation, and gives birth to premature and ill-conceived acts. It marks the dawn of mistrustful panic at the seed and center of me. It constitutes the
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
167
168
How we find no comfort in the promise but only resist, resist, resist. he threat eats away, consumes all energy, and moves us, oh, the horror of it, to terrible defensive acts of shielding that give rise merely to conflict, so poverty-stricken is the power of agency to breed graciousness. Behold, on the other shore of death to self-attachment lies the beckoning promise. must discover the mystery . . . that do not need to build protection for myself, to supply the ground on which to erect a great house of words and names and meaningful I
I
T
threat at the heart of attachment to “me” as a supposedly self-fashioning being. Beware! the horrifying violence of which loneliness proves capable when it rears up upon threat, arms itself to defend such primitive panic, grows rich with offense, and violently shields itself. And yet a truth lies hidden within this felt threat, a two-sided truth, otherwise we would not succumb so readily to the falsity of seeking to “secure,” “own,” and “possess” these most fundamental protections, the protections of ground and horizon (earth and sky, embrace and cover). I believe not entirely wrongly that I, as mortal, will die if I do not “have” ground and horizon, comfort and shield. It’s unbearable, truly! We need ground and horizon, and yet we cannot get and have them like self-made possessions. There is something basic that Life requires me to die to, namely, the very temptation to make my agential will into the ground of me and deploy intellect and fantasy to project my own future horizon for self-becoming. I will die to all I know as “me” when I cease grounding my sense of self in fixed concepts and reactive patterns of defense; I will die as a habituated and controlled being when I cease determining the future by ascribing meaning to the life I call “mine.” The very ground of “me” will give way upon relinquishing the felt power to name, create, and sustain “me” and “mine.” Dying away to want of grounding and securing selfhood forms the precondition of giving over to the Shaping that births the self in spontaneity and transforms its sensibilities. Yes, this very labor, the labor nurtured by the Mother and Father, threatens us so deeply we hardly know. And yet there is no greater labor than to remove the thorn, the little distance where “me” stands in the way of a profoundly personal intimacy between Life and the I-self, the devastating estrangement that indulging the protections of comfort and shielding breed under felt threat. Just there, where “me” gives way to the shaping, loneliness for ground and horizon find their true eclipse.
Lamentation and Woe
T
T
I
I
existence anymore than need supply the horizon that gives structure and form, limit and measure to the time am to undergo. Ground and horizon, these are gifts. hey preserve me from dissipating in the vast boundlessness of infinity. he Mother cradles and the Father keeps me safe upon the way that heals. Yet this discover under requirement, when loneliness’s defenses give way to receptivity.
I
I will not fall into a hurtling abyss, a dark and bottomless vortex without end, when agency dies and I cease identifying with the power of willed self-manufacture. Nor will I, if I were to entrust myself to Life’s Providence, explode into bits of dust under the tornado-like force of a vast infinity I cannot withstand. It is true: we cannot bear sheer infinity all at once, and so we are given boundedness. We move to ever more apt planes of understanding stepwise as the veils are lifted. The mercy of it! Yet we move stepwise only when we follow and relinquish the lead, when, that is, we consent rather than buffer. Then the very boundedness of timely dispensation structures our growth in a manner somewhat analogous to the way we believe our cultural practices structure a child’s development. Grantings come as formed constellations for us and this permits new ground to provide a foothold the way the sea buoys the ship. We need a sort of ground so that we don’t simply drop without footing, though here we must take care with the very word “ground,” for the human person is given no fixed identity, no terrestrial land, no cultural convention, no static belief system, no mere doctrine of moral law devoid of spirit, and no rigid code of language upon which to stake its firm claim. The seafarers “ground” like the horizon of stars for navigation must be granted like buoyancy. We are brought by trust to stand within the everchanging constellations that arrive and not by virtue of manufacturing felt continuity from one time to the next as if we could weave anything other than a neurotic and helpless agency, an identity momentarily sustained yet constantly insecure in its relentless need to shield itself over and over again. The tall tales we spin in search of security thread together past and future as if what happened and who I became were simple effects of what I did and intended, direct outcomes of the sequential and continuous efforts I made. Such ground proves flimsy, so much more unsteady than buoyancy, for it is rooted in the impossible task of holding the psyche up by mortal hand and that most unreliable of woven threads, selective memory. What poverty of dream to think that we create life’s meaning,
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
169
link the past to the future, and forge the intimate connections embedded within events that hold the promise to grant harbor to our lives for a time, the way a seafarer docks in happy port. If we’re so grand, so originating, then why do we constantly feel pity because the sea of life undoes our tall tales, loosens the yarn, and unmoors the felt continuity of “me”? How we disturb the bed of buoyancy and the way stations we are granted at sea when we impute sole creative origin to ourselves. Oh, but we will not shatter on the reef or fall into a horrid maelstrom. We will not disperse like a vessel torn asunder when we relinquish this dreamed-up agency, for ground and horizon are granted. Strangely, though we know finitude is real, we do not trust into this reality of Life’s gracious care so that we find infinity within the finitude of the wayfaring. When we collapse under the requirement to bear in hopeful expectancy our twin wants of meaningful living and safety in the seafaring, then we mistake deliverance with escape from undergoing and confuse safe harbor with painless fixity of identity, station or place. We confound, yes, we do, safety with shielded-ness! On that sad day when we refuse to meet Life’s requirements, we cast out to sea in a feverishly self-protective manner— hesitant, reluctant, suspecting, guarded, shrinking back, and finally violently defensive. For though we seek just a clothed existence, we bar ourselves from the infinite. Life cannot do anything miraculous for me until I meet its requirements. Life requires something of me. When S/He makes these requirements felt, in trust to die away to the shabby and feeble garb of agency, Life extends warm encouragement and firm trust in me. It’s not, as I injudiciously suspect, a threat. How my tears overlook my . . . my . . . guilt is a worn out concept, what word shall we use? . . . my staunch protestations of innocence?
I digress. I meant to say simply this: We shall not fall when we trust into Life’s timely providence and tender care. And yet, terror of all terrors, we can fall, it is most certainly true. It is possible, we are not protected from the possibility anymore than the child who peers down the elevator shaft. There is a strange, odd law of Life. I can, by agency’s hand, refuse bounded living and sink into an endless spiral forever in search of ground. What petrifying loneliness! I can sink beneath the weight of my own pain-filled negative resistance to life’s granted cover into tumult and turmoil. And I can prey upon the future, in search of unbounded freedom when I fear I will suffocate in finitude, and by untimely predation bite off more than I can
170
Lamentation and Woe
chew, venture outside sheltered horizon and lose the buoyant support of Life. Confounded most assuredly I am, by agency’s shaky power, in all my senses and in relation to every dimension, the up and down, the forward and backward, the deep and shallow, ground and cover. How I want a different ground than is given, how I don’t want cover when I think it restricts, how I want restriction when I feel exposed and out of control . . . what a terrible mess, this maelstrom of loneliness makes of “me, all me.”
I
I
I
And yet there is Life. spy a mountain yonder way, an eagle flies overhead. When look across the lush terrain of Andalucia, bear witness to the truth that we live suspended in a graced land, the mountain beckons though it never moves, the eagle soars with neither worry nor preoccupation, nothing disrupts its uniformity with the soaring, the convent steeple never lets one down even when it can no longer peal. We live suspended between heaven’s unbounded expanse and earth’s cupped hand, released yet cradled, neither bound by crushing measure nor cast outside the gentle eternal embrace. We live in the between that reaches as far as the full dimensions’ sway and lets all things come to us. We live suspended in a vast and wondrous web of inter-penetration.
Why is it so hard to trust and let protection be granted?
Shrinking Back Primordially we stand in privation of safety. Nakedness reveals our privation. It evokes the heightened sense we have, as a species, that we subsist without natural protection. It pricks open our consciousness and occasions terror. Deep down, by intuition we know, nakedness points beyond any ordinary lack of fur and fangs to a more elemental privation. Just as the “without why” points to the privative reality that we begin life paradoxically in want of meaning-filled living, so too does nakedness stimulate growing consciousness in us of a double-sided and potentially strife-ridden want. We yearn for freedom and yet want to be kept safe in the venturing. In the face of nakedness, we find ourselves equally pulled to risk independent or “naked” existence and to create safety, to live free from anxious care and yet shield ourselves from danger. Can we ever satisfy both tugs at once rather than alternately? Will they not always be at war confounding our acts, the one yearning to break free from the suffocating
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
171
chains of anxiety, the other relying on anxiety to ward off threat? Must we not, finally, compromise with our twin nature that contains within it something of the immortal and the mortal, the unbounded and the bounded, the free and the unfree? I think not. Compromise in favor of the anxious dogs of self-protection necessarily suffocates the freedom to live and breathe freely in full awareness of the stakes of Life’s uncanny play. It makes us so very unlike the eagle in its soaring heights, unable to be wholly given over to and at one with our activity like a child. Must we rely on reactive defenses as a stopgap measure against the brazen foolhardiness that courts danger unnecessarily? Clearly, we believe we must and this belief, which forms without notice a great faithlessness in Life’s care and providence, introduces into our hearts a petrifying lonely caution that life must be lived but only so much. It introduces stricture and hesitancy, a fastidiousness that must be sharply distinguished from the creative restraint exercised in receptivity that firms up a nonanxious, nonthreatened, vibrant openness to Life. (We internalize far too readily that silly tale that we must be taught to fear, to depend on instincts or acquired habits of self-protection so that we won’t put our hands in the fire. Later we succumb to that horrible old wife’s tale that a fervent mother’s love violently protects one’s own.) When we care anxiously and thus defensively, we never truly love but instead measure and weigh how much we can afford to open ourselves and give to others. Nakedness confronts us with a felt contradiction. We intuit that we cannot live and love freely when we operate from anxiety and threat, and yet it would evidently be foolhardy to venture without safety or shield. Nakedness thus poses for us a fundamental paradox: How can Life, if Life is Care, require us to abdicate self-protection? Love, it seems, should shield us and yet the initiative to secure protection taints love and never sets us free from felt threat. Without deciphering this paradox, let us turn back to our earlier sketch of the difference between the animal and the human in order to apprehend the requirement. Nakedness, as I hope to show, means openness. It points, in our kind, to the requirement of open, vulnerable bearing. It’s not a mere physical condition of lacking saber teeth or being exposed to the elements. Nor is it to live physically without clothes rather than garment. A special requirement befalls our kind as human beings: we must live open and unprotected inwardly and in our total bearing, for otherwise we could not love, we could not become sensitive, we could not touch
172
Lamentation and Woe
all things or be touched by the dimensions’ radiant glory. Like a child, we are to live: vibrating, resonating, without shield and attuned. And yet, unlike the child, consciously open in vulnerability. Let us look, then, to the animal and the human. Let us do away with this horrid image of the mother who protects her children like a lioness, instinctively, we mean, and righteously, as if it were a badge of human valor. No, this image tarnishes both animal and human. For the lioness has her dignity and we, well, we cannot gain dignity by following such a model. Shrinking back, unlike in the animal, redoubles in us. The young animal shrinks back from independence when it has not been weaned or has not come of age. This shrinking back does not, however, involve psychological or inward hiding. The animal shrinks back, hides behind the mother or father in physical terms, yet it suffers no psychic closing off of its sheer availability to life. Even upon gaining independence, there are times for an animal to leave a fight and retreat, though here too there is no loss of dignity through hiding inwardly. A wild cat neither fights nor leaves an untimely fight out of an erraticism of heart, as if it would go to an untimely death out of false pride or slink away in cowardice. Whatever courage and losing face mean in the animal world, they differ for us. The cub might have to gain strength for the fight or gain sensitivity to timing through early imprinting, practice, and the process of being weaned. Yet I believe the animal bears its life wholly and fully in its own capacity, even “openly” (though it does not have the redoubling that openness implies), and that is why among animals shrinking back and hiding constitute practical responses to reality that are complete and undivided. In the animal advance and retreat never involve a second, distinguishable movement in inwardness of hiding from reality as such. The animal may physically hide for protection or retreat from a lost battle yet it never closes itself off from the basic law of its being or the environ to which it is exposed, within which it lives and moves and thrives, and on which it depends.
I
Yesterday a street cat, in want of touch, resonance, and affection, walked up and quietly, though without false restraint, without any sign of those human forms of wobble—self-doubt, self-effacement, diffidence, and all the like—leaped into my lap to receive affection’s bed. She was not flustered that was reading a book and attempting to eat a few tidbits on the table. She curled up and sat. Arose, turned about to find
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
173
T
I
T
greater comfort, sat again, and repeated the dance until she found contentment. hen kitty cat rubbed her head all about, rubbed and rubbed, and took all the rubs she could get. She had no insecurity about her want, and even as it was clear that she was, as we are wont to say “starved for affection,” in truth she bore her being and her life well without it and would have born well if she did not get it. How can the cat be “starved” (in total want) and yet not knocked off her center (desperate, anxious, mad)? Her pose in my lap had something of eternity in it. Although knew the time would come when suddenly she would depart, there was no evidence that she was not there unto eternity. She exhibited no anxious anticipation of when the loving lap time would end, neither disquiet nor perturbation. he lap time was wholly and fully real and she lived in it wholly, entirely pressed up against the limits of her being and at the limit bearing her reality fully without extraneous addition.
By contrast to the animal’s bearing, we abide a tension. We can hide inwardly, though by all appearances we go forth into life. And that means that, in truth, we do not go forth. We do not, like the animal, within the “pattern” of our kind simply and directly avail ourselves of life. We can hide from reality by refusing to be present in and as self, instead of hiding practically when reality calls for it, as when I am pursued by a stalker or rapist. In our kind, openness and closed-ness refer to a more primordial datum than being inside the protection of clan or being outside amid danger. The very feminine movements of openness and closure have an inward significance and do not refer primarily to whether we physically hide or come out of hiding. It is wholly possible, in fact typical as earlier mentioned, that when we leave home (the first site of natural protection), we do not exit the womb of safety (the whole nexus of emotional and psychic interdependency), for we have adopted learned behaviors, including a whole set of supposedly justified ways that we hide inwardly one from the other. We have cultivated and continue to cultivate the power to hide inwardly from being wholly present in and to reality, before others, and all things. Massive are the cultural habits of hiding we lug on our backs, infinite the variety of ways we hide behind mother culture’s skirt. We even normalize such behavior by claiming it is necessary to build inward psychic
174
Lamentation and Woe
defenses in order to love oneself properly. Nakedness of self, in effect, must be clothed, covered over for protection, and this we call self-love rather than false shame! By omitting that small yet decisive question, Must we sustain defensive reactions once the developmental structures of consciousness are formed? Freud and popular psychology propagate the most misguided teaching that it is the very nature of the “self ” (sadly equated with ego consciousness) to be defensive, to ward off stimuli from without and within. Worse still, we too loudly, and far too often, claim that others should contend with such a walled-up and deeply hidden “self ” in order to love us. Do we really mean that to love would be to “respect” rather than assist us to drop our rigidly patrolled psychic habits? We dress up inward defensiveness in ethical garb, as if it could ever be judicious to close off inwardly to another human being. Or one’s self or Nature or God. And do I protect myself with such closure? Must I return outer violence with inward violence, must I inwardly close in order to repel the rapist? Could I keep my senses, my intuitions, my wits about me and find, if it were possible, a way out if I close up into paralysis? Inwardness and outerness do not correlate in matters of safety, for we need not shut down inwardly when faced with the terrifying task to evade a stalker or escape death at the hand of a rapist. Whence, then, our fearful images of rape? How deep do they penetrate our inherence in reality? Who is the rapist we fear deep down in inwardness—an actual man or the Father’s providential stimulus? We are terrified of bearing openly because we must consent to bear; that is, awarely choose to live openly, naked, bared to all of reality. We must open knowingly, aware that we are by open bearing vulnerable to the pain of existence and to penetration! Is it not penetration that terrifies me? Am I not tempted to see Life’s penetrations as rapacious acts? Any and every dimension of reality can penetrate me while open, and penetration can, at times, wound and make me bleed. Even bearing openly entails pain and does not merely expose me to possible pains. Yet I do not doubt that all reality from the animal to the heavenly dimension suffers in that it bears its way to be and bears with all other things. We too face our task of bearing, though freely. And so we must consent to bear not only by receptively “going with” what constellations Life delivers but also by availing ourselves of the going in full openness. Only by letting Life penetrate us can we escape the peril of crashing on the reef of woe and “suffer” the wondrously personal care that carries me forward and upward through self-transformation.
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
175
In our kind, bearing turns in a special way on the question of pain because we are aware. We intuit that reality interpenetrates and that we are to be penetrated in order to undergo the shaping transformation of our whole sense of self and our manner of bearing. One cannot embrace life while closed and hidden from life. For all the bravado it may display, false bearing is but a childish game of pretense. Openness and “going with” come together. Going forth unshielded is the precondition of embracing what life brings. For the main impediment to “going with” is shrinking back into hiding and hiding, once begun, primes us to slide down into dark and defensive patterns of refusing, warding off, closing, and hardening. Buffering ourselves, in a word, is the key enemy of life. We buffer ourselves against life—against, we do not realize, winning non-anxious freedom in being carried forward and up. Unwittingly, in terror, we buffer ourselves against deliverance from false shame where the clothing of early imprinting and conventional names can be shed; we deprive ourselves, so confused is the personal love we hold toward self, of finding glorious and unspeakable relief in ceasing to block our way into naked reality. Consent manifests in our kind as bearing openly; it qualifies the very mode of our bearing. For bear, we do, one way or another yet how we bear matters to the quality of our undergoing and decides whether we are delivered from a barred existence to hail the true dimensions of things. We who live in freedom cannot bear truly—cannot be in the full measure of our kind—save nakedly. It befalls us to face a special task: to forgo self-protection. To renounce all temptation to satisfy our own felt privation. Never, thereby, to hide in a walled-up castle of our own making in the illusion of felt comfort and safety but instead to live in the open, full of trusting faith. And these walls can have both inner and outer aspects, inner in that we can hide inwardly and outer in that we can hide by huddling behind the opinion of others, the masses in number, the comfort of family and clan, the deathlike sleep of common patterns of justifying bordered psyches and the pernicious dormancy of refusing to become aware that we are required to grow out of the childish defensiveness of such anxiety-ridden, self-protective, duplicitous, self-centered, disingenuous, and for all these reasons barely human modes of living. (Are we safe? Have we found safety in our hiding places? Can war come to America, can we eliminate conflict when we react out of threat to others’ felt threat? A life of threat consumes
176
Lamentation and Woe
us in conflict, drains us of energy, destroys us from within, and the great vast abyss of loneliness widens its chasm.)
There are times to retreat. One can depart physically in the outer domain from an unproductive battle yet timely retreat never requires that always untimely inward departure through the cowardly weakness of hardening. There are times to stay the course. Yet one does not truly stay “in” the open way when one merely consigns oneself to endure, to be physically but not attentively present, to be moving but not in the way. By such withholding, one never sees the way through but merely bides time. (Then loneliness grows without ever finding personal intimacy with Life and true parentage of the self in the living.) In our kind, inward openness makes one commensurate with the bearing and lets spirit rise. Openness, though we call it inwardness, turns us not into an isolated inner world of our own making but upon the intensive dimensions of reality. It avails us of journeying ever more richly and deeply into the dimension’s glorious array on pain of saying “yes, yes, and yes,” even as we grow ever more aware of our vulnerability to harm, penetration, and wounding. A radiant jewel of paradox awaits us for the finding, and it is this: to bear alone in naked inwardness is to realize a burning intense intimacy with all living things.
A Brief Note on Women and Nakedness It is typical for women to believe they “close” naturally as by a native defense mechanism and no acquired learning. Oh, a woman might, by intuition, anticipate potential harm. Yet that does not necessitate, let alone justify, collapse into instinctively driven defensiveness and moral condemnation. By trusting this instinctive move—an instinct decisively different from the lioness in whom it would lead to physical yet not inward nonavailability to life—we make of ourselves mere instinctive creatures, less than the animal and not uniquely human. For inward closure is a violence in us, a violence to self and to all other beings. By closing off, we negate others from existing for us, we violently cut them out of the field of presencing where beings touch upon, mirror, and affect one another. It’s as if we suffer from the princess syndrome of enjoying the luxury to decide for whom I will exist and who exists for me. In the name of warding off things that might hurt, we violate the very intimacy of living encounter with living beings. This, then, is the nether side of that great, false maternal legacy that we should protect “virginity” and wall up our feelings and
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
177
psyches. The so-called natural virginity of trusting the instinct to protect (one’s self ) by refusing to become “popped open” under Life’s stimulus must give way to the mature open bearing of a new embodiment (birth rather than smoldering suppression of self ). We need a new embodiment, enlivened and transformed by spirit, if we are to meet each person, each animal, each living presence humanely. Life’s labor aims to “pop me open” like a virgin maiden on her wedding night who, paradoxically, stands in need of the virtue of virginity. Life seeks to draw me ever more integrally into the depth dimension where the heart of reality vibrates and resonates in its splendor. Earlier I remarked that “going with” entails, on our part, the labor of distinguishing between necessary and unnecessary pain rather than putting up a blanket refusal of the undergoing because it has its pain. What impedes “going with” in the extensive field of life is resistance to what we intuit it will require of us intensively: that we never close and harden up, that we remain vulnerable to wounding and blood, that we become even more fully opened, made receptive to life’s penetration, and become thereby the paradox of being the iconic “woman virgin,” giving birth to increased sensitivity on pain of virginal bearing. What impedes going with is never merely a dearth of physical energy (for I can openly stay behind for want of strength). Nor is it lack of competency or psychological confidence or what happened to me. Nor, finally, is it the structure of the ego or even the soul, which itself can cramp up under felt duress. All excuses prove lame for enclosing ourselves in hiddenness. When, in anxiety and under felt threat, I shrink back inwardly, this can mean one thing and one thing only: I lacked heart, I was unwilling. Closure confronts me with an immeasurably sad truth: that I prefer to ward off rather than gain Life’s faithful initiative to intensify and deliver me into the splendor. It means that I prefer, in order to ward off the possible pain of wounding, to forfeit the pain of healing and being shaped into a new embodiment. It means that my heart is disordered, turned round backward, upside down in all its sentiments. For I prefer, and this preference communicates itself in the whole manner of my bearing, to secure life for myself and thereby refuse Life’s gracious weaning and providential stimulus. I’d rather stake my life on my pride than grow pathos of feeling and personalized understanding. Yes, prideful living means, quite simply, that I refuse to find safety “in
178
Lamentation and Woe
trust”; I refuse to trust into the stimulus that teaches me how to differentiate the pain of healing from the pain of violence, never to fear the former and to face the latter carefully so as to evade it when it would be foolhardy to meet it and to proceed heedfully where it cannot be avoided. The very masculine face of God manifest in Life’s Stimulus to growth must disclose to me personally this difference and attune my senses, or I will forever live threatened and subject in confusion to my own lack of discrimination. I will lash out like a crazed beast and blindly destroy the stimulus to healing as if it were violence itself. I will crush the promise in my attempt to ward off suffering for want of differentiating necessary from unnecessary pain. And this means that pride begets loneliness, an awful, terrible, chilly loneliness. In pride, I close myself up tight as a fortress beneath a chastity belt of my own making like a spiritually dead old maid or, isn’t it the saddest of days, like the Princess who mutates into an Ice Queen rather than flower into a virgin lover and bride?
There is a promise descendent upon the winds of time . . .
I
Once wished upon a midnight star . . . here is a promise. heard the whisper on the west wind, sensed it in the mountains and trees, the eagle’s flight and nature’s reminder that all is as it should be. f give up protection, will come under heaven’s providential safety?
I
T
I
There is a promise: we are to live meaningfully and not for ultimate want. There is a promise: we are to live free, independent, and without felt need of the protections of instinct, habit, and suffocating interdependency, all wrought of anxiety. We are to live openly, naked, like virgin babes though mature and ripe, in bare contact with reality in its splendor and fullness! This is the promise: to live openly and thereby be kept safe. What miracle could this promise bode, to live unshielded and yet protected! How could this ever be? It would be to reconcile the contradiction that we need freedom and safety. We do not believe it is possible. Or is it? Do you not wonder, do you not want to believe?
I
I
I
Can the Father be believed? Is it all just the Fairy Land of Make-Believe? Where, oh, where is the Father I need?
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
179
Father, Protect Me! Father, won’t you please, living?
beg you, save me from open
I
Why do we presume innocence when we beg for protection? Somewhere in the recesses of terror, we carry a nascent, unspoken, barely formed complaint against the Heavenly Father, “why won’t you save me from this?” When suffering puts us to the test, it’s not enough that we don’t ask what might be best. We fumble from the ground up, we fudge on the how, on how we ask the Father to protect us. However nascent our mighty infernal complaint, do we not shun the very One we beg for safety, spurn the penetrating touch of the Father we beg to protect us? It’s like asking the Father to save us from Himself. We buffer ourselves against the very One we seek and wonder why our petition cannot soothe but only chafe our wounded estrangement. We don’t need to build extraneous buffers against the life we are given to live, for protections are granted by Life in the measure that we need them as spiritual babes and then taken away when it is time to awaken. I speak not of the activities we undertake for survival, like building homes and fitting ourselves with garment and tool. These are not buffers against life, save in the measure that we use them to shrink back and hide. Life supplies us, from first infancy, with protection in that we start life in naive consciousness. Naïveté is its own natural buffer and that accounts in part for why we dread to give it up when the time comes. How could any child survive the horror of its envious mother or the assaults of a tyrannical father if it were not protected by its naive trust that every mother and every father is human and good? Naive consciousness takes the good before the bad. One day it must awaken to the real existence of the bad and nevertheless choose the good. Its cradling-sheltering virtue is protected by Life’s mysterious timing in fostering growth. In childhood, we are granted the time of naive wonder. As we come of age we are granted the time within which first love can be nursed before it will be tested. Even in mature adulthood we receive anew the protection of naive gestation, for we too begin all over again in a certain naïveté before every new life event and each new affinity. Life inevitably awakens us to new orders of consciousness by two means: developmental and providential or timely. By moving us across
180
Lamentation and Woe
developmental thresholds—from the wondrous reverie of childhood to sexual awakening and then the dangerous confrontation with worldliness in young adulthood and on into midlife crisis and finally old age—we are inducted into shifts in consciousness, though I dare say the singular and unique events of one’s personal life journey work to awaken one much more often and in creative accord with one’s living rate of growth. Still, developmental catalysts cannot be avoided. It’s as though, were I to resist all the gestures of Providence and pray never to awaken, these developmental thresholds would guarantee that I not evade entirely key jolting occasions for inward growth. Life won’t let me off the hook either by creative providential responsiveness to me or by design. So I should face the former in order better to fare the turbulence of the latter and not shatter on the rocky reefs of self-pity. For it is only through inward growth of heart that one can bear each new order of consciousness without bolting, buckling, sinking, or hardening. We are granted both inner and outer protections. As children, we are given not only naive consciousness but also a protected time to live within the family. Admittedly family can prove a danger from which we need protection, and yet the reality that we come to life within a family or social unit symbolizes how a timely granting provides a buffer from the premature encroachment of an often cruel and cynical world that the tender and undeveloped consciousness cannot commandeer while preserving its soul. Coupled together, naive consciousness and family should furnish the stay needed to undergo early formation unperturbed by the world, until it comes time to be weaned and venture forth. Here too other domains of incubation, such as culture and myth, merit contemplation. All these wombs and cradles protect us for a time, yet ultimately, in that they are not the ultimate cradle—for this Mother Life Herself provides—there comes a time when they begin to retard spiritual growth and impede us from learning to receive ultimate protection and depend on none other. Eventually family and culture and myth must give way to Providence rather than blind agency, if we are to fare well and realize a healthy process of gestation, stimulation, awakening, and new bearing. And renew the cycle from cradle to birth all over again. To stay beyond one’s time in the womb is to nurse, by agency, a contemptuous self-protective attitude and posture. It is to hold myself aloof from new growth and personal warmth. Never mind that it seems justified from a commonsense vantage, this attitude leads us to erect barriers to life, love,
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
181
and compassion, and to pass down the dangerous way into the darkness of a recalcitrant and hardened heart. Life provides us safety; it even leaves clues for us in the Book of Nature like bread crumbs on the forest floor. Yet there is a requirement, for we come to apprehend Life’s protections on pain of renouncing aloofness and receiving Life’s providential care trustingly. Life provides a twofold safety, first in its design. The secrets of divine purpose, though imparted to us through Life, do not devolve upon us all at once, burning us in their flame, devouring us with a wisdom beyond our age. We are spared such unearned intensity by the intelligence and sensitivity of divine love in the rhythm and pace of its nurture and stimulus to growth. Yet we are also spared by that uncanny yoke between freedom and requirement which grants us the latitude never merely to be forced rather than encouraged and drawn along the way, but instead to choose to take the next step in under-standing (bearing and apprehending) the living reality that moves us into ever greater capacity to bear intensity. And this merciful design includes “us,” for we are endowed with that most peculiar endowment, consciousness, and not sheer awareness. Consciousness, though it tempts us to confusion, fault, and base devolutions, plays a vital role in how we move stepwise to trust into the pure awareness of which we partake. We are beings who continuously move from naïveté, under the trigger of a newly born consciousness, toward the momentous possibility of decision. The decision, that is, to renounce the temptation to engender self-conscious and artificial protections or shed such buffers already well-formed, and thereby pass ever anew through veils of awakening into delight upon delight. Beyond this aspect of Life’s design, the sheer amazement of which we rarely pause in wonder to drink, there is the second safety which lies in Life’s governance in determining what is and is not timely for me to undergo. (It’s undeniably personal!) Not every order of knowledge should be gained at a given time, even if gained it must ultimately be. It’s better to take steps rather than rush forward, fall down, hurtle ourselves into a vast maze of power and confusion, only later to take the now long trek back to where we once began and make the step we bypassed. Who but Providence guides such steps? Many are the ways we are led when we relinquish the lead and follow in trust. Neither should we overstay our due nor seek prematurely to exit the womb of naïveté. This question of pace and timing forms an ongoing dilemma for us. How, pray tell, do we come upon timing if not by heed-
182
Lamentation and Woe
ing that sensitive interaction of maternal weaning and fatherly guidance, Life’s twin poles, each reaching into and supporting the other, modeling for us the knack of nurture and deliverance? By Life’s gentle prod and startling interventions, we could keep, if we wished, within the sole horizon of protection that ultimately exists for us. Both false moves—rushing forward and overstaying one’s time—stem from a rigid and isolating form of self-reliance which, because it condescends in lonely pride to avail itself of guidance, usurps Life’s lead and loses Life’s sanction. It clings to what retards growth or ventures where angels dare not go. Timeliness is no ordinary habit or skill but rather an extraordinary knack we gain upon entry into that unusual school of divine edification, a school whose entrance exam consists in receptive trust. For want of this precious knack we call timing, we tend to panic and fall back on selfreliance as our only option. Yet a self-reliance that spurns reality’s nudges never secures a sense of timing or delivers us to the protected way. Its paltry resources include rigid methods for setting the pace of things according to one’s nature or preference and lonely initiatives to build protection by hardening. Such efforts prove limited and always at odds with the natural pace of all other things not to mention divine governance. Timeliness devolves on us from two sources, one inward and one outward, yet it would be better to say it arrives where two “inwardnesses” meet endearingly, that of the spirit within and that of the providential intelligence that speaks to this awareness and enables it to apprehend, within the field of human activity that consciousness perceives, the hidden stakes of the venture. Cultivation of an inward sense of timely sanction first finds support in daemonic intuition which, following Socrates, tells us not what to do but rather when to halt. The self-reliance of the agent all buffered up in reactive protections cannot hear this primordial intuition, for it relies on its own visionary projection of a future plan and the strategic energy requisite to carve a path for itself. It’s too full of positive images, too ready to defend its positive wants and positive intuitions ever to pause and listen. When we renounce reliance upon positive vision and heed boundedness, governance supplies the guide and confirms our negative intuition retrospectively. For want of cultivating a wakeful relation to negative intuition and governance, we typically advance full speed ahead and know no inward pause in creative restraint, so we gain knowledge prematurely before we have become primed by gestation to bear it well. We live in a single-track
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
183
rut under the mind-set that all knowledge gained, no matter how or in what time, will serve as protection for ourselves along the way. We are enviously greedy for knowledge and to raise our consciousness because we believe “the more knowledge, the more protection.” Or so we act. Yet while we should never hide from truth, we should also not aggress on truth; we should neither seek to live in oblivion like Sleeping Beauty nor brashly strive to tear the veil off reality and peer into it all at once. We need paternal guidance to check and limit us because each move embroils us in envy and power. To hide from a timely dispensation of truth entitles us to protest false innocence where we have already “shrunk back” deliberately from what we came to know and see. When we hide from a consciousness newly stimulated, we refuse to bear openly and fully, we become noninnocent yet pretend to ourselves that we remain so. We enter into duplicity and use it to sanction our continued disavowal of life’s requirement to divest ourselves of the indulgences we permit in seeking a shrouded existence, no matter the harm it brings. Similarly, to seek knowledge with no pause to apprehend the timeliness of such acquisition is to use knowledge to fund power, the power to outstrip another, to serve strategic self-advancement or pad moral righteousness, to make one feel superior. Whenever I gain knowledge prematurely—whether my motives stem from self-naïveté or conscious manipulation—I fall into a predatory relation to life and others. I dig up the garbage on another, I bolster my supposed purity or superiority, I use my knowledge to feed envy and comparison. As women, we are wont to “figure others out,” as if to say, “They too are no better than we,” as if the aim of knowledge were to pull everyone down to base envy and mediocrity: “I got her number.” Or we figure out another’s weakness and pride ourselves on not being subject to it. Such a predatory relation to knowledge proves insidious and irredeemable. It dulls and debases the senses, drags them down into servitude to the lonely and hardened heart. Contrary to the thoughtless modern “truism” that the acquisition of knowledge is always in itself a good, such untimely acquisition brings no essential gain in self-apprehension; it leads not to awakening and for all its massive acquisition it leaves naïveté about oneself wholly shrouded. It blatantly walks right over Life and deprives governance of its refracting power to edify by mirroring my untruth, pettiness, and naïveté to me. It usurps Life’s lead and refuses to enter the great mirroring refraction whereby Life, the people, events, and things that happen, reflect us back
184
Lamentation and Woe
to ourselves and enable us, upon renunciation of baseness, to witness the hidden depth of reality and gain compassion. We don’t have to invent buffers in life. Veils and protections are given! They are granted in the very design of human life and through the dialogue that unfolds between “Life and I” (not Life and me). It is our lot within journey to venture through the narrow pass from being buffered in the first worldly condition into which we are born to being weaned off all worldly and psychological buffers supplied by family and culture, and internalized in a defensive self-relation, a patrolled psyche. It is our destiny to pass from self-naïveté through seeing into our untruth and awakening to naked living. This is no mere passage from worldly ignorance to worldly knowledge, from inexperience to experience. It entails the inward turn into the dimension where reality discloses its living intensities and engenders intensity in me. To enter upon this way, the natural buffers of early incubation must fall away. And though the natural buffers of selfnaïveté will continue to operate each time that I venture the new in life, yet here too these buffers will, in a timely moment, have to be let go. To cling to such buffers produces self-buffering or willed naïveté and brings harmful ends to self and others. We are all destined to live without protection, save those protections that are granted by Providence and through daemonic intuition. Don’t misunderstand me. We should not wish for protection, though we should not reject the safeties granted. The fear-driven want of protection gives birth to agency and an erratic heart. We are not supposed to give birth by our own hand. We are to be birthed by the hand of Life. “I” am the material to be shaped and not the agent who exempts herself from creative transformation by standing impersonally aloof from life in a protected enclosure of my own making. Only by a profound confusion of agency do we believe our task is to protect one another from ultimate things and naked living. A parent’s role is not to protect the child from life or even providential wounding. No, it is to preserve the child for life, for independence, for living unprotected. It is to preserve, not protect. When we imitate the lioness, we gain nothing of her dignity. Mere protection is always negatively defined. Preservation, by contrast, contains within it heedfulness of protections granted and yet it is not defensive, not resistant, not hardened, not angered, not envious, not competitive. Its firmness repels the untimely not by wielding a defensive parry but by holding out for the ultimate. That is why it imparts
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
185
not the model of defensiveness that leads to righteous justification of one’s own agency over against that of others. It does not confound hardness with firmness, that most gentle spiritual strength. No, it imparts the seed of constructive possibility that does not pit one hopelessness against others in a benighted battle of wills but instead keeps encroachment at bay kindly while it silently holds out for the right and timely thing for its own self and by extension, in that it is a fitting model, for all others.
s The Undoing That Falls to Mother and Father: A Sober Reverie
I
I
I
T
I
T
T
T
N
N
N
T
T
he Mother of life is divine Receptivity, the Father of life is divine Creativity. Life yokes earth to heaven. hat is why the nurturing forces of nature unfold under the Mother of Life’s tutelage and weaning. ature, left to itself, has no intrinsic ability to link us to heaven; it’s unable to effectuate second birth. ature can point, remind, reveal. n this sense ature constantly bears its weight in seeking to turn us upon the hidden dimension of truth. Yet it is Life which manifests the actively intelligent labor of divinity that marks the field of the human being’s reduplication and rebirth. Life yokes heaven to earth. hat is why the lightning jolts, the catalysts, and the stimuli of Fatherly Providence are sent within the mysterious pattern of Life’s unfolding, not automatically or mechanistically but according to divine intelligence. he stimuli to awaken are sendings that shock us. he checks we meet are halts that warn us to pause and grow strength or escape the unnecessary and foolhardy. t is required of us that we come to apprehend and not refuse these checks and jolts whose powers of shock and penetration seem to brook no interference save from radical hardening. o the Father falls a most unenviable task, to encourage us to let down our guard and renounce the shield so that Life’s timely jolts could pierce straight through to the root of the psyche and shatter all illusory sense of being the very ground of “me.” He must shake up these faulty foundations so that might cease holding up the psyche and break the illusion that am and must be lonely. Venture into the dangerous zone of erratic heart He must go, and thereby awaken in me the possible renunciation of protective armor and foolhardy want of stealing the lead over the great expedition of my life. Jolting loosens my skittish attempts to squelch insecurity by immo-
186
Lamentation and Woe
I
I
I
N
I
T
I
I
T
T
I
I
I
bilizing life and impeding the birth of . t relaxes my grip on “me” and my anxious proclivity to grow attached to who was and the ground that was temporally given. o control who am to be and the horizon that is coming. By moving me toward what comes next rather than allowing me to “plateau out” and cease growing, Life’s jolts avail me the possibility to grow increasingly willing and ready to stay in the true protected way of the sanctioned venture, never to fossilize, grow cold and crustacean-like, aged before my time, or just bog down in a hard defiant “no” rather than gain a great love of the venture. Life’s labor of love is to make us strong in attitudinal willingness to greet each time as a lived occasion for maturing ever more intensively in spiritual strength; that is to say, heart-grown willingness. Yet even a timely providential jolt cannot penetrate where refuse it. Love has its creative restraint. here is one terrifying sense in which hardening “protects” against the jolt, and yet it does not horrify us. can buffer myself up, bolt myself tight beneath a chastity belt, build myself into an interior fortress, and refuse the seed, either its growth or its implanting by that penetrating stimulus. Hardening is the ultimate artificial barrier to impregnation. t assumes a posture which regards Life in its jolt-like aspect as a terrible male rapist coming to violate (rather than engender) one’s purification. Life does require that we sweat blood as a precondition of openness and reception. And yet it is no rapist. here is no way to avoid the masculine-like aspects of God’s manifestation to us. t’s so deeply offensive that none, not even women, can justify escape from Life’s joltlike and shocking power of penetration. And so we hit upon what appears at first to our unweaned eyes an unseemly truth: that we don’t get to dictate the when and how of penetration. What false modesty, it’s not unseemly at all! o, its manly. t takes womanly strength of heart not to balk but instead to receive Life’s penetration. God, in the dimension of Life that works on the preconscious, seeks to impregnate us, plant the seed of our possible awakening and then, while the Mother incubates and gestates us toward the moment of deliverance, Life jolts us to come through the birth rather than escape back into the womb.
I
I
Am changing, am beginning to hear and see, the confusion in what once seemed clear as light of day, never to be questioned, just knew it, knew it truly that the uncontrolled jolts
T
I
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
187
I
I
I
T
of existence should be warded off and regulated. he horizon’s changing, the ground’s shifting, like mist flowing across the mountains, sense a premonition of something coming, the mists begin to part, feel so different, it’s as though what once appeared terrifying now comes unveiled like a most gracious dream, that jolt, stimulus, and penetration quicken the very life of “ .” How could it be? Shock of all shocks, hidden in the shadows of my prideful dream to vanquish life and gain victory, could it be true, that the dream of victory over life delivers no heroine’s glory but rests upon an inglorious bed of shame, a clothe spun by hardening?
I
I
T
I
I
188
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
E
T
Have you never heard women protest that they are, in truth, good, ready, willing to reconcile with another, but . . . but there is always a condition that the other must first meet in order to reconcile. But. “But” is the grandest illusion one ever entertained. f one is willing, there is no “but.” here is no other time than the present. ither am willing or in the measure that exert a “but” (no matter how slight the degree of assertion) am unwilling. lay down conditions. he greatest exposer of this illusion is Life in that if Life ever gave me the conditions or another person met them, would inevitably fabricate a new “but.” But neither Life nor friend responded as asked. But. But must still be given time, time, time. will come round in time. All the while that this “but” persists in voicing complaints and issuing conditions, the truth, the pure truth is that am failing justice now. put the other on hold for an indefinite time. fail the other and take no note, I
I
I
O sad, lonely day! Hardening protects, indeed, from being guided into growth at a pace and rate that we do not dictate. We do not trust Providence, we feel overwhelmed, as women, by life and cannot keep pace, or so we believe. (Men pride themselves on keeping up, finding themselves in medias res but they go too far, usurp the Creative, constantly get ahead of things, and neglect to pass through receptivity.) Rather than winning self-trust, the steadied faith that can meet up or slow down to Life’s timing, bolt and usurp the lead. protest my innocence far too much. Hardening is one grand “but.”
Lamentation and Woe
I
I
I
for am utterly self-involved in my own pain and its “but, but, but.” cannot see or hear Life’s requirement, that narrow pass through which must pass in order to let Life give me all that truly need. Have you never wondered wherein lies the difference between requirement and condition?
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
T
T
I
T
I
T
I
T
I
Layers and layers of buffered protection enclose the lonely heart. here’s the hesitant “but” or the decisive “no” where enclose myself once and for all time in a castle of my making. How ironic that the greatest attempt to protect oneself from pain yields the most painful isolation of the ce Queen. One can seek eternity in a vast enclosed womb of one’s making. One can try to preserve virginity by never being penetrated. his not only leads to the immense narcissism that seeks to pull all beings into false interdependency. t also manufactures a false instant; it seeks transcendence without divinity; it seeks to be made whole unto oneself in the instant by making oneself invulnerable to being affected by others and Life. here is no growth toward transcendence save through penetration and stimulus. t is not permitted us to be a god unto ourselves, to build a place of ultimate cradle and nurture in ourselves as if we were Mother Life; we cannot enter the living moment by warding off Life. he want of protection stands as one grand barrier to Life and to spiritual reception. here is a true cradle, but , as a woman, am not the place of it. here is a true moment, but cannot arrive at it by warding off all things “masculine” in the universe and preserving myself from being “popped open” by Life’s divine stimulus. o live life protected is not to live. t is, rather, to sink into an abominable state where all work is icy destruction. t is to pass onto my children an utterly false model. t is to imprint them with insanity and diabolical hate. t is to model the instant of immunity as if it were the atom of eternity that constitutes the true moment of my redemption. t is to sanction and justify a perversely conditioned love which silently petitions you, who love me, to have mercy on my destructive assertions of weakness. What power stands out in the plaintive voice of weakness. Yes, mercy on weakness we should all have. But simple weakness—finitude’s lack of strength—is not defiance, it’s not based on a conditional, it’s not a “but” or a “no.” t simply owns up the truth of what is required and realizes that it cannot meet it. Simple weakness does not defy the truth
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
189
T
T
T
and make of it a mockery. Defiance clothed in weakness, that is the shedevil come bidding. Hardness has its mark—the mark it leaves on others, the affect it imparts—and its mark is hateful distrust of Life. Yet to hate Life is to hate the free and spontaneous in oneself. And by extension, the free and spontaneous in all others. here could be no greater dysfunction than to confuse love with the narcissism that destroys by refusing to wean, than to confound the pure moment of eternity with invulnerability. And petition men and God the Father to protect one from the very path that alone can fortify the free capacity to love oneself and others. here is no true passage to destiny, contrary to all vain imaginings of new age spirituality, save by meeting the jolt. One cannot bypass the journey to seriousness and sobriety that passes through renunciation of control and want of protection. For the ultimate model of the masculine heralded by Life is not that of protection from wounding but that which seeks with unconfused firmness to preserve us for our better good. he Father will not succumb to the seductions of feminine weakness—the protestations and tantrums—but will hold out for our strengthening.
Hatred of Life, hatred of men. How these two things come hand in hand, for we who are mortal cannot have the nurturing aspect of Life without the jolt. Life yokes heaven to earth and earth to heaven. She cannot be one-sided. his the juxtaposition in Her of the masculine and the feminine, of justice and mercy; this is Her judiciousness. T
What is the sound of “but”? Whining, nagging, and dragging. What is the sound of the primitive “no”? Hardening. What is the ultimate pitch defiance can reach? he shriek, the life-murdering shriek.
T
s Where in the World Is Heart?
When tears flow silently, pause and ask, What is it that Life requires of me when it bids me “come with”? It is heart. We are born with heart and yet we must grow heart. We are born, as children, not simply with a physical organ but with some gusto, some spiritedness toward life. We call that, loosely speaking, heart. The child’s openness toward life is real. Contrary to all “boys will be boys” talk, boys
190
Lamentation and Woe
and young men have their ideality and it keeps them open and willing. These early signs of virgin openness should be preserved and not compromised by all the world’s anxious claim on the tender soul to teach it how to react to threat. And yet the heart is not, by nature or convention, steadfast in receptivity. Undergoing, suffering will be its test. Pain and understanding, spiritual transcendence and renewed embodiment would not be inextricably linked if we were allowed, in life, to comprehend merely with our minds and not have to be tested at heart. The heart lies at the center of me. Symbolically, it marks that which yokes spirit to body, that which integrates all aspects of the self and, more richly imaged, that which links the self to all facets of reality. The heart is the center and yet reality does not precisely center around me. I must be integrated into reality’s depth and expanse through the birthing of self by forces that operate beyond me, though also for me. I must be made sensitive, brought to reach into and touch upon, to stand in and be reflected by the amazing web of incomparable singularities, of centers that are not the lone center, that every being is, and this, through renewal of heart. Yet what precisely is heart? Heart lies among those things we can gain only through undergoing. This is also true of understanding, radically distinguished from merely rational knowledge; and it is true of sensitive embodiment as well, yet heart lies at the center of these and thus proves vital to our growth and bearing. Heartiness is no ordinary strength or capacity, for heart is primordial willingness become constant. Lack of heart, primordially understood, is not simple weakness. It means to become closed at center in attitude. Far from being a neutral phenomenon, it contains the turgid seed of resistance within it and thus reflects perturbing disquiet. To lack heart is never to want to awaken, never to want to see, hear, sense, vibrate, or feel the penetrating way that things bear upon us and impart their wisdom or need to us. More quiet still, lack of heart refuses to let God work a divine iconography, impart seed and impress prototypical images upon the soul, and thereby edify us into a whole new manner of living. Heart avails us of open bearing. It steadies the soul and supports growth of new embodiment. Yet here we must take care to see that we can speak of heart in two ways, for we are finite and yet heart lets us draw into the wellspring of infinity. Sometimes we lack heart in a way that reveals our finitude. I can lack heart for some things at some times, even when the way opens as possibility. There is no great crime in this,
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
191
though typically shame prevents us from admitting the truth that there is no reason, no why, save lack of heart. For it stings so, when someone lacks heart to take me on. Or, where I lack heart simply out of finitude, I most often, rather than stand on this humble truth, manufacture all variety of supposed cause and reason for why I am unwilling to take the other on (she’s so superficial, so flighty, she dresses funny, wears her hair unpretty). In shame, we assemble false distinction and cover over the truth. Paradoxically, one must have heart, in the more primordial sense, even to admit that one lacks heart in finitude. And so the infinite wellspring of heart, the waters of spirit must here too sustain us in standing upon that intersection of the finite and the infinite without why but with heart, in spirit, to be held forth openly such that understanding may be delivered and misunderstanding evaded in the battle for true living. It is only in the primordial sense that I shall speak of heart and I thus consider it the attitudinal font of open bearing. Willingness, in a word, is a quality of heart and its source is a mysterious wellspring. When we are virgin, Life affects us. It penetrates us. The soul suffers Life penetratingly. We cannot predict when or how something will affect us.
I
I
I
go out with friends, suddenly find myself bowled over, knocked off my axis by the beauty of a person. A stranger asks me an innocent question, and it undoes me. witness a seemingly ordinary thing, a young woman freely admitting she has no sense of vocation in life, and it disturbs me, know not why, right down to the felt ground of me. I
To be born with heart and soul is to be capable of passion. The soul is moveable, it can be affected and moved in utterly unpredictable ways. Our feeling of nakedness arises from this productive vulnerability. What threatens us psychologically is that we are affective beings in the rich sense that our souls, and deeper still, our hearts can be moved and are moving.
I
I
A seeming little thing, a girl without vocation, can, if hold into its movement and not bolt, resist, close up, or manufacture a premade significance, deliver me to total insight into some aspect of reality. Unimaginable revelations could unveil themselves to me and could be drawn thereby into deeper intimacy with all reality.
192
Lamentation and Woe
What makes us feel insecure is the soul’s lack of fixed ground, for Life must attune us if we are to receive disclosure and undergo change. Yet heart lies at the center of the soul’s psychic and affective attunement to reality, for it is heart which either firms up the soul in right attunement or lets it grow disturbed enough to unmoor itself. Before the unpredictable and shifting effects of Life on the soul, we face a grave temptation to fix our attitude, to build protective walls around our hearts so as to control and regulate what influences we receive and how we react, as suffering beings, to the impact of things. Above all, it seems, for want of predivined knowledge of whether we will be able to bear a given thing, we fear our own affect. The surest way to protect against bearing witness to truth and untruth is to ward off all things in life that could penetrate us and make our hearts known, both deficiency of heart and its possible healing. There is a journey we must make in life, seemingly long and interminable, to discover that we become steadied at heart only in living with heart rather than by killing off our capacity to be affected at root, all the way down to heart, through self-protectiveness. It will take growth of a special pathos in order to bear unexpected penetration without cramping or closing down. Hence, this passage entails growth of an unrestrained heart, that special “capacity,” that unique pathos willingly and freely to forgo predesigned reactions and conventional labels for what things mean, but instead to trust one’s self in the living and one’s living as the self ’s occasion to grow fortified in heart. To trust means to bear whatever arises, to carry the full sway of affect when reality moves me and be borne by the movement of this reality’s hidden possibility all the way down to heart and through to disclosure and not shrink back in threat. We must make the passage from being receptive (virgin) in some untested measure to sustaining open bearing in steadfast devotion (virginal wife). This devotion to Life’s edification enhances and steadies receptivity without our having to build defensive buffers to control how and when things affect us and most of all how deeply things penetrate us. Trust frees me from succumbing to the worrisome existence of presuming in advance of true self-discovery that I “cannot,” I just “can’t” bear this, I can’t “take this now” until finally, out comes the truth: “I won’t.” A heart failure. At the end of the long bleat of faithless resistance comes the attitude, the armed stance we herald. I speak not of the quiet firm “I am unable now” but the flagrant defiant “I won’t,” as if bloodless hardening could be made sanguine by painting the face of harsh bravado on it. To prey upon the
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
193
future—what stimulus I will or won’t admit and in what measure—is to nurture suspicious hatred of self. I don a predatory attitude, a “lioness” in wait, for want of admitting that I cannot know in advance that of which I am willing but must discover the truths of heart on the spot. I prey upon the future and bury the heart behind thick defenses for want of that most instructive discovery that bearing finds mysterious funding not only from spirit’s rising presence in me but from Life. By contrast, a richly grown receptivity, born of heart to trust in self and Life’s providential ways, blossoms into steadfast devotion. It’s not a “devotion” to this man or that woman, not dedication to build a future horizon, not adoration of anything relative but a devotion to serve the emissaries of divinity and the ultimate. It is a passage from virginity to becoming that special kind of wife who defies the traditional image of wife, the one for whom we make sentimental concessions by dressing her in the name of the beautiful lioness when, in anxiety, she manipulatively controls the future, secures the horizon of her own interest vicariously through the child, and nags the husband unremittingly to be the god who provides ever more ground for her existence. No, the devoted woman is rather the wife blossoming womanly who, freed from anxiety, lets Life take the lead and provide her ground and horizon. We must grow heart, even as we are heart, a center which opens or closes, stands free or garners shield, radiates intensity or grows tarnished with pain. Awake, O heart of hearts, don’t let the lullaby of pity coddle you too dearly.
Deep within us lies a primordial passivity, a sleeping and untested beauty that must awaken, for it hides within it a unique order of possibility, not the possibility to be a doctor or a nurse but the seed possibility to awaken and blossom, to live radiant with radical openness of heart. Too young, already in adolescence, the seed of receptive heart finds itself concealed beneath worry and anxious want of secure routine. Yet though we wander in danger of suffocating beneath convention, battle-entrenched before the world, there lies at base of all worldly claim a zone of spiritual battle, a zone of dormancy where possibility lies sleeping like Lazarus in the cave, sleeping, trapped in a dark insensibility where we have not yet decided to live and could become ever so dead, wounded, paralyzed by anxiety
194
Lamentation and Woe
What makes this most primordial possibility, the “sleeping beauty” of what we “could be,” so utterly unique? The simple truth that we cannot grow heart by mere will or agency. We are helpless, like babes, to supply the ground for our own true standing and secure safe horizon. These must be granted. And yet we are not left by this sustaining truth paralyzed and doomed to die, for heart avails us of these. Heart, attitude is deeper than all I can fashion myself to be. There is no way to account for a radical change of heart save mysteriously. It defies casual explanation. Anxiety may occasion heart failure yet never cause defensive shielding. Lack of willingness
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
I
N
Dark and slumbering seed of beauty, how you transfigure into the lonely rigidity that “keeps me safe” from penetration and feeling. he horror of it, to lose all sensitivity and affect! ever to receive water and blossom into my own beauteous humanity but instead stay entranced by first beauty whose deathly keep dooms me to grow ugly, wither and decay. o wonder can only weep and cry, cry and weep, and long unto old age for the Prince Charming who never saw fit to rescue me. N
T
and primitive terror, and lastly debilitated when despair lays claim to and mangles the heart. This seed possibility, that must be awakened under catalyst, is a special kind of possibility, unique among possibilities. It alone can save naive youthful openness, defeat sluggishness, and bring spiritual virginity to maturation in the second power. We speak of the possibility of all possibilities, the Great Possibility to stand naked in the open rather than lie prostrate, to rise up and stand, to win receptive bearing as steadfast attitude. The seed possibility to grow heart! This seed lies buried deeper still than all worldly habit and dictate. It rests deep within the preconscious where the hand of God reaches to work gestation and birth. In this dark and sleeping zone—though it preserve the promise (seed) that we could live without care and trust in the safekeeping—we lie prostrate, undecided at the very heart of who we are, whether to come alive by faith and live exposed to reality’s flaming touch. This, our horrid safety, that we could wish to stay asleep, convert sleep into perpetual dying and loan it a kind of arctic permanence. This, the darkest secret ever to lay in the skeletal closets of women, that we might will, that we would rather suffer the death of making ourselves frozen forever prostrate than rise up to embrace reality wakefully.
195
“causes” it. That is like saying that heart engenders itself. Heart, attitude: this is the human person’s vital contribution to co-creation and living birth. Heart comes forward where anxious care falls away. When I am not willing to meet that for which I should be willing, I do not let myself grow heart. All I have to do is let go and, like a great water breaking, all the puffed-up nonsense and ill will I thought important in the throes of panic or anger, melts silently away and reveals its fugitive unreality. What do we protect? Our hearts, we say. What could be more confounded than that? One cannot “have” heart behind the “safety and protection” of keeping away from the living. One “is” heart or not at all, lives with heart or does not live truly. Why should we prefer to buffer our true hearts, what can we possibly gain? If there is something genuine to which I must attend, why would I have to wall myself up behind pretense rather than venture forth on genuine ground? The middle transforms. Heart lies at the center. Life carries us out into the middle where we must make a decision of heart to stand openly or sink into frozen resistance. Why do we panic and buffer ourselves against Life? It’s not necessary to shrink back under felt-threat. We panic not by nature or psychological necessity. We panic out of the will to advance, out of impatient suspicion and refusal on the part of agency to retreat, to step back and let receptive willingness gain the day. We panic simply because we are required to trust. What we lack by privation—meaning and safety—cannot be found in the future but only in the way (the mode of undergoing). For disclosure, the trustworthy source of meaning, cannot arise while we project upon the future our own meaning. And no amount of securing material life ever provides ultimate security. The way either contains the end in the beginning or we seek an end perpetually outside the undergoing. Faith is the precondition of being granted the end, the contentment, the freedom from anxious threat, along the way as we wait upon disclosure, faith avails us of the timely discovery that safety inheres in being kept in the way that leads to understanding. What is such a faith that must ripen and mature? It’s not blind belief, for one can catapult oneself ahead out of a dominate will for the sake of defending belief. Faith relinquishes agential will in favor of receptivity, it renounces its unyielding impetus to secure its own advance. And
196
Lamentation and Woe
knowingly trusts. It sees the need to stay under the protection of divine Providence and never venture outside what is granted. It sees that by its own agential hand it works harm to self and others and all reality. By this shift in focus, terror’s set in proper light: terrifying is to live unprotected, even as the ordeal one faces, by worldly hand, itself proves frightful and dreaded. We panic for want of protection when we do not trust. How odd that we should panic over what is already given. I speak to women, though man too suffers his egregious transgressions. Women dominate the field out of the anxious want of advancing and the fear they will be left behind in the shadows. Domination, the will to overpower the field, consists in the refusal to die to the belief that I secure the ground and horizon of me or, if I feel weak, that I need someone else, a man, a heavenly father, a tower and castle to secure these for me. Here ground means to rest transparently in the origin, the origination of me in spirit as opposed to a fixed and stable identity. And horizon means the personalized future, the dispensed future that grants form to the time and weaves pattern of my journey so that I am not lost in a boundless infinity. These arise from no plan or foreknowledge. I cannot foresee the future that comes to me but only receive it. I cannot predict the nature of what I can bear let alone the nature of my own self-transformation and journey but only consent to their discovery. Domination is a dysfunction in relation to the Father, the masculine aspect of Life in its role to protect, guide, secure us in the horizon of our blossoming. This sad dysfunction can be passed on in the maternal genealogy, the mother’s legacy of distrust in Providence, the legacy of excusing the felt-need to build barriers around the psyche and manipulate the future as if embattled in a perpetual competition against others and most especially men for a place in the universe. The price for entering into a rich relation to journey and discovering the personal Father therein, is twofold: I must renounce want of securing protection and accept unexpected penetration. I must disown spurn-filled petitions that the Father sanction my want of a chastity-belt by supplying lock and key. I must cease beseeching men or loved ones, whomever they be, female or male, to protect selfish interests and anxious want, to justify power-driven initiatives and faulty weakness. On what illumined day could I wish, instead, that the men of the world learn to relinquish their own susceptibility to fashion themselves gods by supplying false protection for me, become “man” enough
T
ears for Want of Comforting Protection
197
to disabuse me of such flawed petition, and deliver me over to the sole source of ultimate safety. Yes, I am required to stop treating life events indiscriminately as violent and petition neither Father, man, nor lover to save me from wounding when timely. For healing takes an incision or a sharp jolt and yet it is no violence.
When do tears begin? When we come under requirement. Requirement is no false measure, no base condition, no authoritative father who seeks to abuse me, no harsh punishment, no inflexible law. The requirement is to give ourselves up and over to Life and its timely dictates, it maternal support and its paternal catalysts to growth. We must renounce the battle with the Father over who plans and secures. We must cease the lie that we are willing but only when we decide; that we would have received the blow, the jolt, the catalyst if only the Father had delivered it differently, deferred to my femininity, my weaker sex. We must cease to control when and how we are penetrated. For women this image proves straightforward, for men it must be hard to accept that all individuals, male and female, pass to spiritual awakening through receptivity and more precisely by receptivity to penetration. Providence is no ill-begotten father but the One who enables us to grow into freedom by gently keeping us “in” the way, the right mode of bearing and being borne, and not merely along any old way but in “the” way. The way that opens toward new understanding, the way that fortifies and uplifts, the very mode of being “in” the way that completes me even as I reach toward ever greater completion. This, then, is our ultimate safety.
198
Lamentation and Woe
v
l
e e en
Loneliness Whom I Must Befriend
I Loneliness is an icy wind whose chilly shadow and deathly calm shroud the vast and full surround where neither life nor listening may be found and no small tenderness supplies the heart’s lamented balm. Loneliness is a deaf-mute lying dormant beneath heartless resolve an iceberg that refuses the season’s lawful right when by heaven’s dictate it ought to dissolve and herald the end of a long winter’s night. Where loneliness disperses not, the heart keeps dark and tightly shut in a grand refusal to sprout a small seedling and arise as a lily trembles forth in a solitary show of fragility!
II Loneliness is the harvest never come the awakening frozen in embryonic form, the bud of green held back at root that kills off vitality’s very first shoot. Loneliness is a clandestine suitor a heart’s endless dying by suffocation
whose billowing and stifled flame burns hard and unforgiving. Loneliness is a terrible confused wind whose cries for intimacy cannot stand upon the scourge of its beggarly refusal to lay aside blame and relinquish demand.
III Have you never wondered why none can help the lonely heart’s false distinction? Is it not this, that I alone can loneliness befriend, that I alone choose to let the force of spring, the urge for new growth gain ascendance over the winter of my soul’s vicious lure toward stiff and icy hardening? ’Tis a solitary journey to receive the locked-up secrets of heart, let them gently break asunder then float apart in wide dispersion, as ice returns to sea. When will the ice break, when will I choose to become my own friend, to heed the time and follow winter’s full course but never hold back the spring? The heart’s true opening comes in the season of its blossom: to carry forth now and everlasting; to bear all things in the simplicity of receptive flowering.
200
Lamentation and Woe
lv
w
t e
e
Where Joy and Sorrow Meet
Joy and sorrow are not opposites but complementarities. Enduring joy does not defeat sorrow anymore than pure sorrow vanquishes joy. Each is singular and whole yet does not annul rather than abide reflected in the other nondually. By contrast, emotional elation (frivolity) and heaviness (woe) are antitheses in sordid competition with one another; each waxes supreme where the other wanes infirm, each strives to defeat the other in order to ascend. That is why lamentation and woe are mortal enemies but not so with lamentation and sorrow. Lament gives to sorrow its material body, even as sorrow raises lament up to the right tonality and expression in word. Woe, by contrast, defaces lament and makes of the low notes a destructive travesty that lulls us into a lost well of unending self-pity. Likewise are delight and frivolity mortal enemies, though delight and joy prove friendly. Frivolity squanders the occasion to realize sober delight and forfeits dignity. Its unchecked expansiveness preys on the high notes, depriving them of their essential labor to elevate lament and redeem pain, transform melancholic speechlessness into voiced sorrow. Joy is not dissolute and frivolous; it anchors one in a solemn delight worked by transformation. Joy completes delight by giving it a center of gravity; delight thrives in the sanctuary of joy without loss of integrity. Joy never lusts after the high notes at the expense of the low. Neither does joy eclipse poignant awareness of sorrow nor would sorrow demolish joy, groveling in the low to the ruin of the high. Joy and sorrow are wedded to each other noncontentiously. This book voices the difference between living sunk into the unruly emotional tides of the soul and bearing an order of attunement that matures into rich affect and pathos, at once upraised and deeply responsive. It conveys the possibility of living soberly attuned with a rectitude of heart and sentiment that do not bog down in constant self-centered fixation on personal suffering, on offense that we suffer at the expense of concern for how we suffer. Above all, it is a book about Rilke’s beautiful, marvelous line: It is not the movement of the thing we cannot bear but
Sorrow is the weighty attunement that witnesses truth on pain of seeing the way through. Joy is the buoyant attunement that trusts the sea of life and the divinity of things.
rather how we name it. When I name what I undergo as a mere victim of what happens, I am already sinking. I pull the whole promising attunement down, suck off its possibility to elevate. I cannot bear the thing named so woefully. Nor see the way through. Frantic attempts to buffer ourselves from the real ironically foist upon us the whole weight of reality from the worst possible vantage, as if all reality detests and seeks to crush me. The victim’s worry narrowly darkens my perception and blunts affect, and by making all things that happen take me as their sole compass and point of reference, the victim’s vantage takes pain in a concentrated manner that makes me prone to break. And that is pride, the pride of the victim. It must be said that loneliness is pride. Can these words be believed? Life is personal in the sense that it is intimate. By intimating what is best for me in the order of growth, Life unfolds as intimate care for (my) well-being. It’s joyously personal. Yet care does not bestow its art upon me without pain and sorrow. Lamentation, when pinned to self-ache, has too much “me” in it to rise into the song of pure sorrow and pure joy, the way we hear it ring out in poetry or music. It can never resound as the delivered sorrow that witnesses to truth amid travail or the buoyant joy that sheds resistance to growth and finds healing in coming to trust Life’s sheltering requirements.
Sorrow sustains loss but not as joylessly melancholic or woeful. For to rise joyfully upon life’s sea is to lose all the trappings I once held to comprise the core of me. It is to relinquish all vain notions I too long held dear and which supplied the compass for how I navigated my life and the warrant for my endeavors. These I surrender on the sad and awful discovery that they were misguided, even barred me from realizing my truest want, and worse, brought injury. Why do we fear the loss of illusion so? Because loss is real. When we relinquish hold of the names we learned for reality and enter naked into life’s way, we lose the world as we knew it. We become transformed in substance and taste. No longer can we revel in the illusions and confusions of willed naïveté’s refusal to see into the heart of
202
Lamentation and Woe
things, nor build our hopes on the tangible things that others take for the true stuff of dreams. Yet to perceive deeply and truly brings this price, that one cannot go back. It is a journey of no return. Once one sees the untruth and thus the truth, any effort to go back results in madness. This “law of no return” holds even on lesser perspectival planes of existence as psychoanalysis teaches, for developmentally and formatively we cannot go back and live in an earlier stage of consciousness. Any effort to do so risks inducing a dissociative break and at a minimum extreme neurosis. In the spiritual dimension, we can, by refusing to drop self-naïveté, indulge the charade of willed naïveté with its desire to go back to the previous level and claim for itself an innocence that not even the child had, an innocence built on pretense. Yet when taken to an extreme, such masquerade grows increasingly masterful in its capricious evasiveness until it spawns itself as the demonic, and induces spiritual madness. Willed naïveté resists life as task and it wants return to a happy untested worship of its innocent self-image so badly that it will not even admit the most ordinary of human understandings but prefers to retreat deep into the hidden recesses of a crippled childishness. By exempting itself from having to concede anything to reality, it molds and shapes itself into the perfect victim, mutilates all genuine interrelation and potential for growth, and so condemns itself to a perpetual defiant childishness in the face of reality. Yet this is no ordinary childishness but a spiritual willfulness grown iniquitous for its want of molding reality over to its image and liking. When, in life’s grand venture, we become attuned to the heavenly stars that unveil our way, we lose the self, the world, ground and horizon, and the course as we once knew them. And loss is real. Loss of immediate dependency on the conventions of culture and family; loss of the naive warrant for indulging the preferences of our natures and our fanciful images of self. All that once comforted us no longer can and all we once dreamed could sustain us no longer smacks true to the palate. We are destined, like the little sea turtle, to depart, to venture far, far beyond the world to lands mysterious but unknown. We are destined to pass the way that leads to alone. There is a qualitatively distinct order of sorrow that forms upon awakening. A pure unadulterated sorrow, and enough heart to sustain it. Note well, the rectified heart, though it bears loss, does not sorrow over the loss itself, as that would be to fall prey to the desire to “go back.” A successful
Where Joy and Sorrow Meet
203
delivery from bygone illusions does not succumb at the last moment to heart failure and the desire for return. Rather than glance back in melancholy, it bears along with loss the dawn of the new, its painful realization that one cannot go back. And more! By virtue of a great transubstantiation, the heart grows unwilling to go back, freshly altered in tenor and taste. Bearing the loss through to new life and unwillingness to go back are two sides of the momentous swell of sorrow. Sorrow is a distinct order of attunement; it carries within it the seed of compassion. Even where one mourns, sorrow, unlike melancholy, suffers not at heart for one’s own loss but for others who remain caught in heartwrenching travail and cannot break out of the quagmire of benighted worldly perspectives that prevent them from receiving their truest want. There is unspeakable sadness in waking up to the truth that people suffer unnecessarily in misery and anguish because they do not know better. Still more sorrowful springs the dawning realization that too, too many prove frightfully unwilling to wake up. The tragedy of it! ’Till finally the gravest discovery born of sorrow, that loss is double-edged, hits home personally in an unfamiliar sense. For to lose the world is one grand relief and yet this very loss, though it graciously destroy self-estrangement and shape one into a caring lover of human beings, appears so unrecognizable that people don’t trust it. Oh, most sorrowful day! Where, you ask, could the joy lie in sorrow? Sorrow attends illumination and witnessing to the real. There is a price in awakening: one cannot go back and become recognizable by worldly measure. Still, the joy of it: One doesn’t want to go back; there’s such immense relief in the transubstantiation of becoming more intensively real. Who could want to violate the reassuring sacredness of being born by divine parentage into the real? The loss works such a radical change in sense, taste, and feeling that one would never again want to be subject to the travail of a benighted existence, left to struggle in nightmarish confusion with neither heavenly star nor holy compass to light one’s way. Unexpectedly the day breaks when we can salute Life’s unfathomable care and intelligence. For the pain of bearing the real proves a lighter yoke than we imagined in our terror. The joy of it! Sorrow awakens in the self whose sentiments are not clothed affectations of “me.” Sorrow’s born of travail and upon deliverance to a perspective that transcends mere personal feeling. In sorrow we are delivered to a truth that abides for all and yet, paradox of all paradoxes, sorrow stamps this truth into the soul like an iconic imprint and brings it forth in
204
Lamentation and Woe
unique form as the self ’s distinctive singularity. We come to sorrow in a way singularly fit to attend our heart’s deep questioning need and so the occasion to bear in sorrow arises within our distinctive path and pattern. And this means that each self becomes the living embodiment of truth expressed in a singular way, even as truth is not rooted in mere personal experience but rather I am rooted in it. The singular is greater than the merely personal by virtue of its being stripped of all tainting, all prejudice of personal attachment and narrowness of mind; nevertheless, it realizes itself in a unique embodiment and this realization proves more concretely human (personal, intimate) than anything I attach to a notion of “me.” A great, false semblance of concreteness attaches to the feeling of “me” when in truth the reactive ways we take things personally enable us to abstract from letting pain forge its imprint and deliver us to truth-filled understanding. Why, you wonder, should I place my faith in sorrow? Aloneness has its sorrow and sorrow is a beauteous thing. It knows no false sympathy; it knows no self-pity. Sorrow is the affective tenor of willingness; it keeps us loyal to truth and wards off betrayal. In sorrow I would rather see what significance the nightmare holds in wait then make a premature move to squelch what unfolds simply because it arrives in the figure of my most dreaded threat. Sorrow does not fear. It bears witness, no matter the cost, for it has been shown Life’s true way of measuring. Joy opposes sorrow not but resides happily in sorrow and sorrow in joy. Why do we think that an enduring joy can dawn only upon escape from pain? Reality must be borne. We dread bearing, for bearing has its pain and we intuit that pain comprises life’s cost. Yet unlike emotional elation, joy is no reckless drunken escapade that evades bearing. Joy bears the cost and finds the wondrous consolation in it. Joy and sorrow are attunements rooted in bearing the real, both as journey and as inward passage into intensity. Joy, though uplifting, stands related to darkness and the death of “me,” while sorrow, though pithy, joins awakening and the birth of self to light of day. Awakening, though borne by a sustaining illumination, lets us see untruth and sorrow for the world. Joy, like sorrow, is forged upon no beclouded illusion that life has no cost but rather the courage to apprehend what to give up so that Life may preserve the real in us and us in the real. Joy, though won on pain of death to my distorted patterns of valuation and worship, dawns when I learn what to trust and how to let things vouchsafe their singularity to me.
Where Joy and Sorrow Meet
205
We suffer a horrid illusion in relation to “purity” of feeling. We believe elation is pure because devoid of its opposite, depression. This is an optical illusion, for in the world of mere sentiment the opposites are bound to one another like anchor to vessel. “Pure” things never suffer the illusion that antitheses can be divorced. Purity of feeling abides a completely different order of tension found in the complementarity that comprises the real and not the illusory lure of mere opposites; pure lies in the intensity between things that weds them to one another while holding them apart in singular distinction, and not the sequential ride up then down, down then up again. Sorrow is pure because it is not subject to the suasion of depression or pity; it abides the tension inherent in witnessing to the world on pain of not sinking into a worldly way of being. It’s in though not of the world in sentiment or perspective. It is near to world, sees more deeply into its untruth because it is far away, no longer prone to the sensibilities of the world. The pain of bearing this tension makes of sorrow a pure intensity. I cannot truly feel sadness without sorrow’s attunement and joy’s buoyancy. That’s the joke of “me.” All the emotions need this anchor in the tensioned fabric of the real and the cover of right attunement if we are to feel them intensively and nurture the birth of new understanding to which they potentially deliver us. We are so insensitive. The moment we feel the slightest pang of sadness—whoops!—we cave and wallow in piteous self-commiseration. And that is why my life, my heart, my bearing never find their essential poetry. We are selfish beyond conception, and sadly this means we do not care enough to find out what voice speaks or to what purity of communion sadness calls me. Joy, like sorrow, is born of intensity. It too arises through abiding a tension that comprises the ultimate weave of reality. To trust the weaning love of God is to die. The maternal hand of love cultivates us to live life by making us die to all that we presume ourselves to be. Hers is no melancholic pull to lull us to sleep in the womb of symbiotic comfort or collective memory. These are false images of nirvana that promote a disheartening idolatrous worship. The Mother does not call us to bond in the dark cave of passivity but sends us forth into joy by recalling us to death. The true Mother never merely calls us back. She recalls us to what yearns to arise from the preconscious so we may renounce what holds us back from being released forward newly integrated. She pulls us gently down to the origin that lies before self-attachment to all I call “me” and “we” so that new life may spring eternal. This movement, back and down in
206
Lamentation and Woe
order to go forward and up, constitutes a tension that we must abide and not prematurely abort. We must abide the recall that sends forth on pain of ceasing to yearn for a costless womb of love devoid of pain and struggle rather than find fulfillment in release to the undergoing. There’s no reason to assume that struggle ceases after life or that celestial beings know neither pain nor labor. Cease, we must. Weaning quiets us down so we can accept the cut. Cease we must, presuming that we are centers of measure and evaluation, and holding Life accountable to want of a pain-free living, this, the obstacle on which the tensile movement aborts. It is but dread that precludes joy and not sorrow. We dread bearing, for loss cuts deep. The loss of worldly compass entails a cut that proves necessary to awaken and heal. We dread, not this or that which Life sends, but the cut and ultimately the bearing. So we stave off what comes or seek, contrariwise, to overpower the future, all for dread of the cut. By loosening our hold on retarding ties and false safeties, weaning lets Life cut profoundly into the very fabric of our being, piercing body and soul, casting its incision into the preconscious and altering conscious life, for our perceptions need to be rearranged and our senses remade. We dread bearing, for we intuit that the cut penetrates deeply and we cannot fathom the tenderness of it. Joy gives up measure and in receptivity lets Life work its tender operation, make me over, and send me forth freed from woe. Joy finds refuge in the wonder that all is given its time and place. Joy delights in passage for the sheer mystery of it, that by an unestimable care we are brought to live beyond our most dreaded fears. Joy abdicates woe-filled need to control the when, how, and why of Life’s way of bringing me to understand. Joy relishes that beauty dawns everlasting in the unexpected ways that things disclose their singularity. Speechless is ultimate joy to express the unmitigated relief found in discovering that there’s no need to worry. Life takes care of all things essential when I learn to trust. Were I, by brave consent, to know the tenderness in divine operation, then a boundless joy would envelop me and introduce a peaceful surety into my bearing. Everything is as it should be; it’s no lie. Yet I cannot know pure joy without the heedful trust that follows the maternal call down and back to unveil secrets I keep even from myself or truths I was not previously adult enough to face. This, the price for deliverance from the shadows that haunt my life and the isolation that
Where Joy and Sorrow Meet
207
separates things. By divine operation will I change on pain of the willing cut which surrenders the false measure of coveted affliction. Cease I must, to measure things personally in woe-filled disquiet if I am to know joy beyond measure and delight freely in how things live and move and impart their astonishing presence to me. Sorrow is the steadied attunement of an essential gain in truth, joy the readied attunement of the required loss that yields delight.
The Mother rocks and cradles me gently unto death. Yet not like the poor worldly mother who eats her children and her lovers, denies them separation and independence, ensnares them in a perpetual never-living. I’ll say it again. The gentle recall of spiritual death is no simple regressive movement that begs us dissolve psychic boundaries and merge with the mother’s pain or threatens to submerge us without distinction in the elemental continuum of collective memory. We are by dying birth to live as singularly unique rays of divine mystery. Weaning is death. Mother Life tolls the death bell for me. She awakens sorrow and delivers us to joy. For it is a joy beyond all imagination to be released from dread and unbearable pain, to be freed from insecurity and anxious threat. And bear the unknown with ruddy cheeks and a rosy openness to discover what’s next. There is a joy beyond measure in being carried, and no longer squandering energy on erratic attempts to secure the ground and measure for my own existence. If Life brings all things requisite for me to face according to its impeccable sense of timing, then I don’t have to secure anything. And the sheer joy of it, never to fixate on taking things personally and by that fixation forfeit the surprising disclosure of things. It’s not necessary to become entangled in the world’s madness as if disentanglement from worldly woes and misplaced sympathy would make me less rather than more purely capable of true feeling. Anxious worry is the seed of pride that makes me believe I form the center and the measure of a fitting love and care. What unfathomable love hides in the mystery that we are, by destiny’s dictate, to be relieved of the heavy stone of pride with its umbra of lonely defense and anxious worry but rather in pure sorrow and joy come to know the whole range and tenor of spontaneous affective intelligence. What song am I to be?
208
Lamentation and Woe
T
I
heard an angel sing, the Father’s messenger asked me, What constitutes my heart’s sorrow? his is my heart’s sorrow, that
women don’t avail themselves of the sheltering, cradling love that Life offers.
Sorrow harbors no confusion. It’s not subject to complicity in sentimentalism even though all the world of women misjudge one. Sorrow carries the pain of confusion and misapprehension well, even as it hopes matters were otherwise.
T
I
T
I
heard the choir’s petition, or was it the Mother who beckoned, What is my heart’s joy? And joy is this, that all we truly want, all that truly matters to us is already granted. here is the Great Possibility and it avails itself to each. can hold out for each person’s possibility and not drop the living cup of Life. hat is my heart’s joy and it’s not contingent upon what others do or fail to do. Joy carries the cup and does not let it slip.
Joy’s not subject to false delight. It places hope in a person’s essential possibility, trusts that Life labors to deliver others to themselves, and awaits patiently the granted moments of renewal that restore two to one another at the ripe time, when self-change affords new disclosure. Sorrow endows joy with eyes to see; joy fills sorrow’s want of buoyancy. Is there not a distinct order of joy born from dying? There is. Joy finds fortification from the eyes of sorrow to which we awaken upon death. Sorrow enables us to see others compassionately because they know not how to let themselves come alive in trust. Joy fills us with a sobering hope, for we stand, ever in retrospect, upon a dearth of trust that needs sorrow to remind us to let our cup be filled. Joy, this very joy that’s born solely by death to all I take myself to be, infects others with trust! That they can live! That they can, nay, must venture all if all is to be given! And sorrow would never turn back and lose the devotion of joy. Joy preserves sorrow from sinking back into giddy loneliness, all the while that sorrow keeps joy safe from dreadful insobriety. Joy and sorrow, sorrow and joy come paired in life and happily so. They are intensities and neither fights to usurp the other’s singularity. Joy and sorrow sustain each other in the married tension that reaches between.
T
he one who sorrows laughs much, for she is joyous, buoyant, uplifted on the seas of life. he one who joys ponders much, for she is careful not to let the living of life pass her by.
T
Where Joy and Sorrow Meet
209
t3
ar
P
Intimacy and Bearing:
The Quest for the Father
Life’s Masculine Character
r
h
t i teen
Once I heard a father quietly set forth his speech. He came and sat at the well, and these were his words:
I
I
Existence is a set-up.
I
I
T
I
I
I
T
I
I
Come, all ye women, gather round, draw tight close, have a secret to betray. Let me tell you one true thing, a hard thing to hear and harder yet to bear. Do you want to know this most inward of secrets that Mother Life herself disclosed to me when she delivered me to the Father and taught me the secret of how to “go with”? shall tell you, though beg forgiveness for bringing it forward this way. hat is, directly. Philosophy, when it is unlived, proves far too direct. Wisdom, women, is not knowledge, not a formula, not an agenda to keep safe for future use. Wisdom must be lived and only the Great Mother and Father can teach you this, only these on pain of trust. So will tell you, but please, plead down on my knees, do not believe my words. Listen for their source, learn to intuit and see, listen and follow, find Life and enter the Field. hen all will be given. Oh, now you will be disappointed, behold! After such seduction, you will think the truth too small to be clothed in secret veils of mystery. Still, the veiling don’t invent; never imagine for one moment that clothe Life. Life undresses Herself for me. Come, please, hear you saying, tell us, tell us, the key to life, living Life! will tell you one thing, point you to one vital aspect of this, the stormy travail of undergoing, and it is this:
E
Yes, that is it. xistence is a set-up. See, you roll your eyes and are displeased. You expected more from me, a man, is that it? Dear me. What defense do have?
I
With bated breath, he spoke unto himself: “I can read it in their faces. The women are unhappy, all the dither that men dribble forth. What more
can I say to them, however can I make an appeal? Are their hearts open, their ears ready to listen and hear, truly hear? Is this saying not for their ultimate benefit?” After a pause, he threw up his arms. “The women balk, what do they care of fields and set-ups? That’s all man’s stuff.” And then he bore with and leaned forward.
I
T
N
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
see your faces, feel you balk. You don’t want to reproduce the dismal ways of men. Why do they fight, all the time, from childhood on? Where are the heroics in it or even when heroics come forth why must they create war in order to rise to the occasion? Why, oh why, hear your lament, can’t they just let things rest in peace? You don’t want to hear that existence is a set-up, is that it? hear your hushed cries, your whispers and laments; hear your condescension and laughter. You say it’s like telling you that God is a Man and a vengeful one at that. How could a loving Father send jolts and shocks, lightning and fiery bolts? Why would he not cradle you in peace like a Mother, rock you, rock you and tell you that everything will be all right? s that it? s that your deepest sorrow? Why don’t men teach you with love rather than the sword? Oh, women, know you desire love; know you want intimacy. Yet there is so much more vigor and pith to love than mere sympathy and heartache, don’t you think? Don’t you wonder that love is not simple approbation and cannot sanction what makes one sink below lamentation into shallow, unforgiving ways? Men, you say, are always gaming and to what end. o wonder, then, that you want to control the future and master time. You don’t want men to decide, to ruffle everything up and make a mess of things. Yet does not your lament pierce deeper than complaint against this or that man, than even the “whole of men” as a generality? You have already turned in dismay from the Great Father who governs and regulates the when and how of your life’s unfolding. Certainly boys game, men game. here you are right. And you may roll your eyes all you like, but it won’t deliver you to compassionate bearing. tell you one thing and it is this: here is a field, and it is no ordinary field, and on it we must learn to stand. Alone in naked exposure to its mirroring refraction. All of life seeks to deliver us to stand, the Mother who sends us forth into life to ntimacy and Bearing
I
214
“Bah, existence is a set-up,” you object. You hold yourself aloof from the undergoing, you ward off and deflect what you wish not to receive from Life’s Providence. And when you get fed up with passivity, you nevertheless protect yourself from entry onto the true field by rushing headlong forward to dominate the field of men, to control and manipulate, to restrict the influence that others have, to enter the fray and fight. You think you stand so tall and exposed in your passive agency and yet, please, beg of you, ponder it. s this posture not sustained by much spurious conviction and false shame? Have you not simply become like “men,” the very men deep down at whom roll your eyes and cannot comprehend why they must always take up the fight? Consult your true heart; don’t listen to me. How can you hold your own agency in such high esteem and abhor that of men? Why waste time in trying to catch up to this age-old game that men long ago mastered? Why bother to surpass them in their ritualized habit? here is a field and on it Life labors, night and day, to make us open and bear its full sway. By weaning and stimulation, cradle and jolt, the Mother and Father seek to bring us to stand tall. all enough to reach into the god’s pantheon, willing enough to pull our weight amid beings more intense than us. all, that is to say, intense and upright; and broad, that means radiant and forbearing. t would be better, perhaps, to say that there are two fields, though this might confound matters by suggesting that the veils of reality can be kept count. So be it. While we are cast into one fieldlike dimension, the situations of time and human genealogy, the second we enter by consent to bear entirely in freedom. t is the primordial field of spirit’s mysterious play that exceeds history even as it governs within what is. Only the latter can illuminate the true dimensions of the field on which we stand, the true stakes in the game of life. f all we see is but the worldly “field,” then we know no lodestar, no guiding light to reveal what action is needed or I
I
I
T
T
I
I
T
bear, and the Father who stimulates decisive willingness from us. An odd reality circumscribes human existence. We are constantly turned upon the fieldlike character of life and yet we do not truly inhabit the field. For in order to enter the sanctioned field where we live and grow strong and are made to stand, we must consent to overcome shame.
Life’s Masculine Character
215
T
ow ’ve lost the thread of speech. Let’s come back. You abhor men’s penchant for games, know it. And there you are right. grant you from the ground up, you are right. Men stand on the wrong field and fight the wrong kinds of battles. hey fight on the “field” of passage through mortal time for this and that outcome in history, to reclaim this or that part of historical memory or invent this or that novel turn in the future. hey fight to name and shape what has been and what will be. On a more local scale, they battle for recognition, for and against one another in climbing the ladder of worldly fame or for whose ideology will win. Fight, they do. Men are . . . have you never paused to wonder at the sheer astonishment of it? mean, if, for one teeny tiny, teensy weensy moment you paused rather than rolled your eyes, and truly observed without prejudice, would you not find yourself blown away, mind-boggled at the wonder of men? Hardly are men put off by the first obstacle in the road; they don’t even take it personally. t’s as if they expected the hardship and intuit that the way must be found in the throes of living, no matter how much they confound worldly success with the way forward. And they certainly don’t ground their self-evaluation in how the others respond as if they should drop their intent at the first sign of difficulty. o, they are ever at the ready for the battle, to see the thing through. Sure, they can stumble and give up. Yet have you not marveled at this amazing readiness? t’s shocking, is it not? And if, when under fire, they let this willingness congeal into sincerity rather than self-interest, do they not avail themselves the proper way through? I
I
N
I
I
T
T
I
I
N
T
what hangs in the balance. Without consent to open upon the field’s true dimensions, we shall never arrive at self-accord let alone harmony with other beings but instead remain subject to the benighted and lonesome perspective that life is limited to the “worldly interpersonal domain” where all things appear to be for them and not for us or for us and not them, where we are against men but for women, where life unfolds as an unending nightmarish dream of each struggling for some of what others have. Well, that’s a tall order, so let us step back and start where we can. he two fields, yes. his manner of speaking could confuse, for insofar as we know only the world as field, we do not know the true nature of existence as field. So why then speak of two and not merely the Field. The field in its real dimensions.
ntimacy and Bearing
I
216
N
I
I
I
I
I
tell you, find it shocking, a jolt in itself, this first order predilection of men. Oh, women, can you not witness the wonder of it? However will you raise boys if you can’t pause and marvel? Will you take the roughand-tumble out of them and make that your benighted aim? Whenever the boys play rough, will you in your most pleasant voice (and that will only confuse them later on in life) tell them to “play nice,” as if all manner of battle were evil rather than a dedicated servant of good? Later, when you want your indignation massaged, will you appeal to your son to unleash the forces you earlier quashed with your “play nice” in defense of a dubitable end? Do you confound your boys with shame? Have you never paused to ask? When, ask you, did you become so assured that your hatred of things masculine stemmed from what men do rather than from your predisposition to abhor the “game” facet of Life? Have you confounded the worldly conflicts of patriarchy with the primordial “setup” that marks Life’s signature on time and journey? Life is a game, but not the game the world teaches us and which you call the “structure of patriarchy.” t is a deadly serious game whose stakes are real: love of self and destiny (quality of passage); an open bearing and a tender heart; a genuine co-birth with others guided by ultimate ends. A spiritual battle awaits us to enter the field of Life and live by its compass, yet this reality neither mortal man nor mortal woman invents. And to enter into the fray of this battle takes deadly serious and fierce resolve. Men intuit this. Yet even men must learn to apprehend the true battle, rather than go about engendering all variety of fight just for the game of it. Yes, men must learn to stand on the true field, and not fabricate structures and fields all their own. t’s enough in life to meet the battles that come to us by higher sanction. Oh, how will you, little mothers, not take the battle out of the babe but instead redirect it to stand under the Fatherly hand of governance so that it may acquire focus and conserve energy for the real fight? Mothers, don’t you understand, existence is a set-up, we’re not here for any other purpose save to grow up and stand tall, open and acquire breadth in our bearing, and become spirit descendant from heaven and embodied on earth. Yes, mothers, even men are not men until they find the battle that is given, its no easier for them. o man is spared primitive terror or suffers in less intensity than woman, even if the prick of that terror differs for each. Why, mothers, do you fear battle rather than the wrong battle and the wrong way of battling? You too indulge the cat fight and
Life’s Masculine Character
217
E
I
ntimacy and Bearing
I
218
I
I
I
I
T
T
N
I
I
E
I
I
T
envious competition. Do you really think you could persuade men to accept the falsely receptive pose of defeated heart when they intuit young and early in life that there is an ultimate kind of battle? hey just need to be nudged toward patient receptivity to ultimate ends. Much, too much evil comes forth from complacency. vil’s not all invented by men. Ah, dear me, who am but a man. A mere mortal like the rest of you. And what have done, gone and put the cart before the horse? How will you ever believe that existence is a wondrous, terrible, uncanny “set-up,” just when you journeyed to the brink of trusting that a resolution to our dearest pain might be possible, that there might be a Mother and Father, a divinely active parentage that loves you in the final analysis? beg your forgiveness for speaking so unabashedly, and not realizing my shame. xposure, that’s too much, you tell me. We should cover up a bit. Well, am a man and my initiative to bring you to see and hear, even if it dispensed, thank God, a little jolt or a merciful word, would nevertheless remain human, divinely graced and yet human. Don’t you see? Surely you cannot expect that the dissemination of divine truth which unfolds in the acts of a man could ever be all “God” devoid of human embodiment. Do you resist the mortal in the divinity of the act or the divinity because of the mortal aspect, the very thing you claim you want in men, a little embodiment? say unto you, existence is a set-up. ow don’t go rolling eyes and careening. Hang in there and wait. Does that really mean that the heavenly hand of Providence is a cruel tormentor, a merciless, horrid man who knows not how to encourage me? Remember, it is wisdom of which we speak and not knowledge, a formula, or even principle. he stakes of wisdom are high, more real than the mind can fathom with its rote stories for who the gods are and what the nature of divinity must be like were it love, Ultimate Love. Who teaches me the stakes, if not the very hand of Providence. his is it’s Fatherly task. Without governance and the richer dimensions of the field, there would be only the relentless round of time and all the battles you hate but no wondrous occasion to grow out of dependency upon the wounded past. What was that, what did hear? Oh, wonderful, hear you say, “Receptivity is the way to heaven.” ndeed. Yet who teaches us this? s it sympathy that teaches us so, some inbuilt tendency to feel and cry? You don’t really believe that all that exists is but the round and round again
I
I
I
E
I
T
T
I
E
with no way out, the immersion in the vast womblike matrix of wounds that lie deeper than collective memory? ven the Mother lies deeper than that matrix, the true Matrix arises out of the Deep and opens us onto the Field toward which Providence draws us. f all that exists for mortals is the long-suffering lamentation that carries us ever back over this or that event that wounded us, would we not all be doomed to conflict until the end of days? Lamentation cannot find its pure voice of sorrowful joy without redemption. ake care! do not mean that “your” pain proves right and “his” wrong. Redemptive suffering gives up the old. “Men did this to me, men did that; men in general are beastly; men, those little stinkers, think they can laugh and suspend the laws of human feeling.” Oh yes, indeed! hey can suspend the conventional and routinized mechanisms of old, for in this tendency, just as in their availability to battle, they harbor the seed of right intuition. Battle we must in life! Suspend the laws of common memory! For we can never make that frightfully narrow passage toward judiciousness unless we are willing—not to forget precisely—but to relinquish our sensibilities! Yes, mean your sensibilities, the ones that keep you caught in proving yourselves right. specially when it comes to men. Oh, the pride of it, the terrible pride to think that you, not less than man, by nature and nurture, first body and first formation, come out complete, filled with right affect and tenderness. Seeds of right intuition, certainly, but without right under-standing sensibility interferes with loving compassion. Receptivity, grant you, is the way to right embodiment. Can Mother alone teach receptivity or does it also take a Fatherly hand? Who, beg you tell me, who perfects your devotion, your constancy, your receptivity? And yet you cry, “Ahh, Mother, please don’t leave me, don’t make me go! Father, pleeease, beg you, in the name of love, don’t set me up, don’t set me up . . .”
T
I
hese merciless cries in the dark yield no tenderness . . .
Life’s Masculine Character
219
For What Are We Set Up?
There may be evil in the ways men set us up as women; there may be manipulation in the ways that women set men up; there may be petty cruelty in how my girl “friend” sets me up for a downfall or my boy “friend” sets it up to leave me in a dastardly fashion. Inescapably it could be true. There may be pettiness or cruelty, mendacity or maliciousness in the worldly ways that people foist their psychological claims and personal agenda on the field of “interpersonal” interaction. And work, work, work to manipulate the possibilities contained therein. That the world establishes itself as a nexus of conflict threatens us more keenly than we confess. Anxiety invariably tells us that we live under persistent low-level threat, though I alone discover its depth when one wee act, one peculiarly terrifying constellation of forces instantly draws out of me the sharp defensive parry. And I find myself threatened down to the very base of my existence, up on hind legs, teeth out, claws battling to ward things off, and all this, any of this even before I pause and breathe, or wonder why . . . The world is awash in interpersonal conflict, as we ordinarily see it. What people do and say can without a moment’s notice disrupt my life, catapult me into a great convulsive battle on the one-dimensional field of human history. Insofar as it constitutes a nexus of self-determined relations, each person vying for and against another for this or that material aim, what we call “world” arises from a healthy dose of competitive ambition. Not without warrant do many women undergo the “maleness of the world” as shockingly disruptive, engendering war for the sake of war, game for game, victory for empty victory, all at the expense of peace and harmony. It’s not expressly my purpose to show that women have their own ways of rousing upheaval needlessly. Complacency produces its own evil. Herein lies my concern.
T
Are we right, right, R GH when we infer from this most unsettled world of fluctuating human affairs that masculinity poses the ultimate impediment to love and harmony? I
four
teen
Could the unexpected character of being set up—in any way, at any time, by any person or event—arouse uncontrollable panic, if I were to cease seeing the “interpersonal” character of life in one-dimensional worldly terms and gaze instead on the broader matrix of Life?
Loneliness is never to live free from threat or discover the richer interhuman possibilities granted on the true field of Life. Loneliness never knows the genuinely interpersonal dimension, where each basks in the other’s singularity, but only the impoverished neediness of “interpersonal” want of envious distinction.
If it were not possible to rise beyond the conflict-oriented perspective that isolates us from one another, there would never be genuine solitude or togetherness. We would move under the deadening weight of felt threat, primed for the wrong battles, gasping for breath in an atmosphere of stifled joy. The question of loneliness rests most tightly on whether intelligent forces can guide my way onto the “extra-ordinary field” where intimacy reigns and love rules the day. Were these dimensions not real, we could never cast aside the desperation of feeling born to no ultimate cradle or care, the emptiness that corrodes life’s ordinary battles from within, the weariness of plodding on and on toward neither comfort nor rest. For never, ever in the whole fabric of world history has worldly struggle ushered in the cessation of conflict. People who see the field narrow-heartedly cannot, when poised at the limit, see beyond conflict. Save temporarily in a moment’s ecstasy. For all the visibly comforting refuges we build, we never escape the emptiness we carry within for want of belief in the true dimensions of the field. If I would speak to loneliness, then loneliness would speak to me. Of the need to renounce the perspective that keeps me awash in conflict. The little set-ups we are sent by life aim to firm up our capacity to bear Life as an abiding Set-up of the field. We can’t afford to stumble at the end, collapse, and abandon the struggle for intimacy just as we awaken to the masculine reality of being set up in and by—not the world but—Life. Have you long since, from time out of mind, not intuited that Life, not men or people, sets you up? Startled did you rush to accuse Life’s Providence of being unjust? Did you let the hard and angry seed take root and grow into righteous distrust in all things battle-natured and that require battle of us? What
For What Are We Set Up?
221
earthly mother corrupted your image and by her complacency taught you that intimacy precludes strife?
We hide behind complacency and buffer ourselves when we perceive threat. See for yourself whether buffering preserves peace or perpetuates conflict by seeking escape from the real battle.
I
We want to hide. t seems so much easier, so easy, oh, just let me laze about and sleep. ’m so nice and gentle, what does the battle have to do with me? I
Buffering cannot open the way “through” to the Field Beyond Conflict. You need not believe me, just see for yourself.
really, cannot speak to how young men reckon with the ultimate set-up. won’t speak directly to this, only that the very notion that Life is a Set-up threatens me more deeply than any worldly game, for how can one not grow jaded before this reality? can roll my eyes at the worldly game, even laugh at boys and men, but Life, how can accept that Life sets me up? t’s not believable, it’s too hard to think, too overwhelming, too horrific. o, won’t let Life reveal itself to be so cruel. t could be only men who make the world. ’m not so hardened as to distrust. t’s blasphemous, tell you. Stop confusing me, Life could not set me up, won’t think it, for believe. have faith in goodness and peace. Stop it, tell you, S OP confusing me. I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
N
I
I
I
I
I
Ah, but there’s a massive impediment. How can we deal with the reality that, primordially understood, we are set up not by persons or collective forces but divine governance? How, I beg you think, can daughters come to terms with such a model Father? Its awful! I want the whole reality of the set-up to cease; the whole darn thing seems positively heinous to me. I am a woman, born peace-loving. I have no heart for conflict, really . . .
ntimacy and Bearing
I
222
T
I
It hurts just to speak it in the voiceless domain of thought. Life sets us up. That’s like saying Father is not on my team but releases me equally for failure as for gain. I can’t believe in an uncaring Father who won’t tilt the cards in my favor. I don’t want my freedom that respected. I’d rather have a biased Father but before all else I want a Father who shows
his hand up front and gives me none of that dastardly business of setting me up. I need to prepare, to be ready for the test. How can He lead me with no foreknowledge and no plan toward the unexpected? Does he want me to fall and hurt myself ? The naive mind cannot wrap itself around such an image; it’s too “innocent.” Or so it protests. People who are trustworthy, ethical beings would not set me up. They would give me a head’s up, prepare me, support me the whole way through, hold my hand, and everything would be transparent and nothing hidden . . . or . . . or unexpected. Ouch! the sting of it. Does my Father believe in me?
Once a misunderstanding arose between two women. hey could be any two women, coworkers in a factory, police officers, retail associates. Come, let us imagine a tale of two women, an ordinary tale, a tale so ordinary you can find examples of it right under your nose. Once, then, a misunderstanding arose between an older woman and a younger women, coworkers, we shall say. Oddly, it was not based on a great clash between them but instead little things. hree little things, to be exact. t arose from one thing and three little acts that issued from one thing. One woman witnessed that the younger held a competitive and covetous attitude toward her. ven though she strove to found their relation on solidarity rather than competition, the younger proved unable, though she believed herself in sync, for she was anxious and threatened and lived out the first six years of her job in seemingly benign neglect of the older woman’s initiatives to build team work together. n all that time the young one advanced herself even by coveting areas of the older woman’s work that did not truly lie within the purview of her job or her interests, for the manifest character of her anxiety was to covet and so covet she did. he older woman bore witness but took no offense. Patiently she bode her time, neither reactively coveting in return nor seeking to harm the younger one, though she ceased to invest in building a team. n time, the younger woman ascended to power only to find it in her interest to build the very solidarity the older woman once proposed, though she took no notice of her earlier “benign neglect.” hree times, in tiny, tiny, ever so small ways, the older woman communicated that she would come onto the team but that something stood in the way, namely, the T
I
T
I
E
I
T
T
A Little Tale of Complacency’s Harm
For What Are We Set Up?
223
T
ntimacy and Bearing
I
224
TNE
I
I
I
T
I
T
unacknowledged covetousness, though in truth the older woman would have been content to speak about it solely as benign neglect (even as we know that covetousness proves not so benign as it looks). Yet the younger one took offense at the three little gestures and with rapid-fire judgment decided that the older woman was an odious person. hen she proceeded to gossip and turn others against her. So it was that a little misunderstanding grew and grew into a big, bad monster, seething beneath the surface, the surface, the surface where it is so comfortable to stay warmly wrapped in the psychic security blanket of complacency. One day a contention arose and the older woman found herself compelled to intervene in a course of action taken by the younger woman that was deeply disturbing and ran contrary to everything the older woman held to be judicious. t’s true that the older woman did not handle the matter well . . . Oh happy day! the younger one wolfed down that moment. Like an attack dog let off the leash, she used the older woman’s fallible weakness to consolidate the misunderstanding into declared righteous indignation, as if this event proved the young one’s prejudice right, so very right! Her moment had come, or so she believed. She won the day and found vindication! “ he proof will out,” the young one thought, “the older woman is evil after all, a miserable person who doesn’t deserve to come onto the team, a downright evil pig. knew it, knew it all along because of those three little pricks she sent my way.” And she, so young and lovely and self-naive, chose in that false victory of human pride to believe even more powerfully than she had before in her claims to innocence and kindness and beauty and rightness. (Let us not forget the R GH SS, her instinctive defense and conviction.) Such a sad, tired day it was when she chose to retain her self-naïveté by proclaiming herself innocent, for hers is woman’s lot, to struggle and ask why she is so convinced that she is innocent and the whole world, the world of men, all the others, and even, in the final analysis, other women like her very coworker must all be made into enemies. Yes, they are all so contentious and intransigent, so, so brutish and upsetting . . . or so it seems. he older woman did not miss the moment when life offered a possible reconciliation, so she asked to speak to her junior, albeit her superior at work. But the younger, having let misunderstanding grow into the hag of righteous conviction, arrived disposed to cut off the whole interaction and stand on her malignant edict. After all, she had already
I
I
I
I
T
cut the older woman out of her heart, why would she give her the time of day? Why? he young woman (for she was not a girl at all) burst into volatility at the older’s first attempt to talk, violently accused her of harming younger colleagues and then a little threat slipped across her pretty lips as she declared vehemently that she, the sweet and righteous one, endowed with right sentiments and proper human feeling, would be forced to defend people from her and keep them safe, so watch out, beware. Calmly the older woman held to pause and revealed herself constructively disposed to find mutual understanding—the very thing women claim they want more than war—but the young one persisted in volatile exasperation as if she were being made to suffer conflict for no reason, as if the older woman were a sinister male warrior who just wanted to draw her into contentious antagonism and make her violate, yes, violate, tell you, her kindly and peace-loving disposition. n yet another outburst the young one unwittingly confirmed this budding revelation of her untruth when she screamed defiantly, “You should know by now that don’t like conflict, ’m not going to speak with you.” And that was how she violently cut off the conversation at long last, though, if truth be told, she had violently cut it off from the start, had even carried with her the predisposition to expel the older women out of heart and world and humanity.
And that, my friends, is the harm that complacency and buffering work. Rather than battle for understanding, spiritual complacency advances itself by cutting another out of the human race, haughtily convinced she deserves it. How strange, this sham battle-ready stance hidden in the complacent heart, this shady peace that stubbornly pursues vindication. Hardly could complacency be genuine receptivity. Complacency’s not so very complacent as it seems, not so antibattle as it pretends while defending its presumed, though hardly cultivated virtue of “innocence.” To the contrary, the complacent one usurps the place of divine judgment when she decides, “You barely exist for me, you don’t mean a single thing, stay out of my way.” In that fatal instant of supreme pride where one decides one IS something, one perches up high like a Most Mighty Queen but for what ungodly end save to cut a person down to her puny nonexistent size. (What false imprint lies in the heart of the “god” who would protect my vengeance?)
For What Are We Set Up?
225
Many are the days I have stood in stark astonishment at the venom that spews forth from the mouths of “innocent” girls. Many the times I have seen grown women contend that they work no harm in their “pious” refusal to do battle, for they have retained, they tell me, the priceless innocence of their girly ways, their peace-loving hatred of strife. How we put on pretty dresses to mask our hardness. And give it winsome names like “strength” and “firmness.”
I
( wonder, it’s a murky thought, have such protestations issued from my lips?)
Dressing up inward hardening as if it formed a beauteous heavenly firmness feeds the very flames of conflict, fuels false battle (conflict) out of woman’s hatred of battle (meeting the set-up). It’s indiscriminate, don’t you see? Did the young one not promote horrid discord and misunderstanding because she carried conflict in her heart already? And did not her preexisting disposition to protect herself from strife bind her to a narrowminded perception of the field as, ironically, nothing more than the site of an envious clash of wills? Why did she not see the richer field congeal by mysterious hand into a wondrous occasion to do away with misunderstanding and let Life draw her into proximity where she might apprehend the other’s genuineness and gain the jewel of newfound breadth? Can’t there be intimacy even where two need not become the best of friends? Complacency cannot originate innocence; it hides conflict at its core. That nice young woman, the very kind we regard as unassuming, refused to fight for the good, humbly to remove the conflict-producing impediment in her heart, the cover that blocks the genuine interhuman reach that passes between and connects persons. Nor did she pause to wonder that to persist in misunderstanding spawns new malignancies, ever more vicious ill will, falsely confirmed prejudices, and vindictive hardening. Persist she did, in want of envious distinction, for she wanted to be right above all, even more than finding the human way with her enemy. Complacency before the battlelike character of life journey works untold harm, mostly because it won’t acknowledge its shadow unwillingness to meet the delicate humanness in others. Not all struggle is conflict, not every battle yields hurt rather than reconciliation. We don’t begin attuned to and harmonized by the world-transcendent field but in potential conflict within the worldly frame. Must we not, then, vie for the right struggle and struggle rightly to be lifted up to the perspective that lets harmony and healing obtain? ntimacy and Bearing
I
226
It may take struggle to do away with false conceptions that impede the way to a genuine meeting of two. It may take concentrated battle to find the narrow pass that leads to breadth of human understanding. It may prove demanding to take the step that opens the way “forward” and “through” beyond the dangerous pitfall into entrenched conflict and misunderstanding. Yet for one woman to advance, with righteous hardening of heart, her hidden and long fantasized agenda harshly to cut another person down to size, destroys along with human delicateness, the fragile seed of Life’s gift—to engender “ground and horizon” for a touching human encounter. Is that not horrific? More horrific than fear of conflict itself ? One kills off new life in oneself, in the other, in the mystery of two bearing with one another and violates Life’s very Set-up, skews the whole harmony of the dimensions in sustaining persons in and for the protected way toward attentiveness. Such vain and fruitless destruction, and all because one refuses to distinguish hateful conflict from constructive strife. Complacency refuses to bear with others for the sake of growth, however ironically it does so in the name of loving peace. And that is why harshness lies in wait, ready to pounce. For harshness is complacency’s shadow brute conviction of its claim to peace-loving rightness. We’re all topsy-turvy, turned about, upside down and inside out in our sentiments and perceptions. Harden against the vulnerability of naked human appeal readily we do, but when we prize right over tenderness we won’t “harden” against false self-pity. Cut others out of existence with no pang of conscience we will, though hypersensitive we prove when others can’t listen to us. Dump repugnant feelings on others out of desire for false approbation, this we do and do and do, yet meet others in genuine receptivity when we don’t understand, from this we run and hide. We seem to lack, lack profoundly, lack something fundamental in the very center of our affect. We call it loneliness. But wouldn’t it be better to name it thus, that we, in our stout claims to innocence, know no urgency, no shock at our very callousness? Right, confirmed are we in rightness. When, women, will the harms issued from complacency jolt us, shock us deep to the stem of all we think and are, and in one grand revolution of heart and soul make us want to stand up on the field and let down our guard? When, women, will we see that complacency is no neutrality, no mountain peak of contemplative love but a furious retreat under dispiriting
For What Are We Set Up?
227
N
cover. How we succumb to hatred that existence entails being set up, to spite toward men’s games and what they symbolize, to repugnance toward Life when it bids us embrace the right fight. ot everything masculine in heaven and on earth arises from the blind self-centeredness that consolidates conflict and memorializes the wearisome cycle, centuries long and unending, of patriarchy, war, and domination.
Is it love that the Father would care to shock us into rectitude? Is there a higher ethic, a strength, a magnanimity hidden within Life’s initiatives to set us up for the battle to remove the blockages that glut our hearts and narrow our vision?
Loneliness and Providence
N
othing could be more lonely than to undergo repetition of wearisome conflict after conflict without ever arriving at intimacy. For sadness is a shroud that loneliness lays on our shoulders when we allow misunderstandings to grow monstrously full-fledged.
We are lonely for intimacy. Yet we prefer to dodge Life’s manly battlefield where we must be tested in character and quality of heart. We’d rather “get” intimacy without the patient labor of sorting things out; we don’t admire the maidens in myth who painstakingly sort seeds or skeins of yarn, labor so dull and dreary. To sort, to differentiate, that is not a cognitive task but a divine requirement placed on us by governance, to contend for the field and let its dimensions become distinguishable in their proper strains. We cry out for intimacy! And then refuse to enroll in Life’s tutorial on how to differentiate the essential possibility for healing availed to us from the merely psychological, worldly, and historical baggage we import onto the field that clouds heart and constricts vision. And leaves us, persistently benighted, lacking breadth and right focus, caught in the vicious narrowness that sees in life events nothing more than the tumultuous contest of human wills. It’s like we’re stuck in the rote lesson; we learned early to shield ourselves with formulaic terms for what’s real, while higher education surpasses us. We’d rather erect unsurpassable barriers that isolate us behind the mental and emotional distinctions we wield like arms, though they don’t ultimately hold up or deliver us to commune with others. ntimacy and Bearing
I
228
It’s not possible to evade Life and find intimacy. Intimacy can only be cultivated on the sanctioned field. Intimacy is not something we make or do; it arises as a possibility availed within the Set-up. The field, its promise of growth and flourishing, of this too we must avail ourselves in response. Contend, then, we shall, but not as though we manufacture intimacy. We must contend to arrive on and let the field disclose its full breadth and compass. Contention is no ordinary conflict, and we should not regard it so. A set-up congeals for reasons we do not of necessity immediately apprehend. It’s unexpected. Does the older woman’s intervention in the younger’s life mark merely the willful act of one person to foist a struggle upon the other at a time she does not need it? Or does it herald timely dispensation, a gift of Life, the impending possibility of the young one’s healing gain to renounce, once and for all, what drives her to covet?
World or Life? That is the question. When all we see and know is the field of human intentions, we cannot fathom that what we call clarity of mind is but confusion. The living field of Life alone shines the soft light which irradiates the true clarity of perception that grants our bearings. Our acts are doomed to perpetuate confusion and misunderstanding when we cannot let Life’s Field illumine the way that rises above, even as it unfolds within, the dormant clash of human wills. We conflate, mix up and merge, the richer set-up with what “others do to us.” Locked into conflicts of the “me-centered” outlook, we presume the other perpetrates brash injustice simply because “this is happening to me.” Oh, though we sense the weight of greater things, we crash headlong upon the Father’s Providence, yet vanity blinds us to this truth, so sullenly bent are we on the conviction that the flames of conflict fan across “you and me” with you to blame.
Life in its Fatherly role has an operation to perform. It must prick open our awareness of the unseen but sensed dimensions of the set-up. And reveal that our battle emerges not first defensively with one another under felt psychological threat but constructively to contend with the Father to get on the right side of the set-up. The Father, that is Life’s Providence, I
I
t’s suffocating, really, can’t you see? suffocate and smolder for want of discernment.
For What Are We Set Up?
229
checkmates us and we don’t like it. Yet we must learn to trust this very Father who sets us up and not feel boxed in. Its marvelously dull, not to mention bullish, to project upon the Father the obdurate feeling that the world boxes me in. No, when it’s timely, the Father lets the world box me in so that He can direct me out of the world’s boxy and suffocating rigidity, its never-ending cycles of insular and cramped contention. When will I apprehend that by the Father’s hand alone may a worldly box be transformed into an “out,” the way a magician pulls rabbits from hats and transfigures plastic flowers into freely flying birds of grace and beauty? The Father must move by stealth, invoke the angels and heaven’s sway, arouse gods to do His bidding, for He must steal something from me to which I cling most dearly. What perilous operation, what delicate love! The Father wants to steal from me the security blanket of vain protest, the shroud of loneliness covering me, the wretched fear that dulls my senses, the sad “tales of woe” that poise me against Life, perpetually blind to its gracious openings. Life in its Fatherly role seeks to resurrect me from the dead where my heart lies buried beneath protected layers of complacency and threat. Yet toward this end, the Father must set me up to contend with the “too much” and “too little” of me, the buffered heart and lack of spiritualizing affect. I must lose the very perspective of the one who is held back, boxed in, victimized, not allowed to pass where others go, jealous, covetous, suffocated, injured by Life’s prickish jolts and loathsome checks. Oh horrid threat, the Father must steal from me such things as I ingested into the very substance and soul of me! For I hold the false dear and lack something that would prove more dear than all to which I cling fast, and it is simply this, right affect. My God, I never imagined, when I set out upon this course, that You, by delicate magnanimity, would have to show me the barefaced flaw of the threatened heart, that it prizes, ever newly benighted, mere worldly conflict over contention for ultimate intimacy. Father, O merciful Father! You must steal that flawed diamond I hold so preciously close to chest, my tenacious claim to “presumed innocence.” What tainted flaw hides within the wounded want of loving intimacy that I suffer from and stand in need of divine operation to heal this, my radical dearth of affect.
Sorting Skeins of Personal Weave
Could I grow urgent where once complacency ruled my heart without relinquishing the scorching clarity of my sense of rightness? What muddy ntimacy and Bearing
I
230
I
I
I
I
f carry conflict in my heart, inevitably catalyze conflict around me. f live on the surface for fear of seeing the truth underneath, then depth threatens me. And if perceive the field of action narrow-mindedly as an arena filled solely with the competing wills of mortals and availing no Great Possibility to win depth of feeling, then however much discernment strive to gain, it won’t enable me to rise above conflict, it won’t protect me against hardening of heart but instead clothe me in the arm and shield of defensive “clarity” to protect and wall myself in. he endless cycle of quarrel and woe unto me, when will it end, how will it cease? I
I
I
rut keeps me bogged down in the swampland of excessively personal conflict?
T
Urgency grows where I let Providence draw me into the great differentiation. Of the personal and the personal, the set-up behind the undying illness of feeling perpetually set up by people and things, caught in an excessively personal and me-grounded view of reality. The granting differs from the merely interpersonal, the Providential from the merely historical, and the encompassing sway of the Father who gathers these people and forces together for ultimate ends from the benighted, conflictgeared vision of the field. Alone, yes, alone I undergo differentiation of the skeins. And by this differentiation alone can I disentangle the worldly interpersonal from the genuinely interhuman, endless conflict from salutary ordeal. This great differentiation, worked within body and substance, gives me to understand that the richly, warmly, and truly “interpersonal” unfolds, not as we dimly imagine in quarrelsome skirmishes of will, yet on that richer field whose waters extinguish the fires of threat and sprout breadth of human compassion. Immersion in self-centered perception makes us feel that life’s little set-ups are too personal, the most personal that anything can be. And yet, irony of ironies, the ordinary perspective proves excessively personal—it’s you or me!—and for that reason suffers from an extraordinary dearth of personalized affect and delicacy. If I refuse to rise up and meet the Fatherly Set-up, then all I will ever know and sense and feel will be threat upon dull and stifling threat. In my weighty excess, I shall ever manifest a dearth of breezy and illuminated sensitivity. Save I blossom inwardly in richer affect, I cannot win release from the glaringly bright mind-set and wounding
For What Are We Set Up?
231
fury of “you versus me.” Save I prove receptive to what arises and calls for ultimate response, I will never avail myself of the merciful light cast by the field, and no mere mind-set. I will never awaken to apprehend the depth of the field as an operative reality nor let the field reveal the secret depths where you and I are yoked at base to ultimate possibility. Yea, this Light alone irradiates the richer stage of this, the human drama in which we engage. In this Light and on the soil of the richer field do I meet the ultimate occasion to be shocked by the effects my acts have on others into urgency. So that I might become transformed in sensitivity to another’s true need for healing.
I
I
T
he Father’s love is surgical. t performs an operation on me, whose outer face miserably confound with threat, in such privative want do suffer lack of rectified heart and enlightened discernment.
We are at the base of all we call agency threatened by the reality of being set up and not plumbing the content or wondering at the staging of it. t only seems the opposite, that this occurrence and these people threaten me. “ f it were John,” muse to myself, “ would not be upset, but it is Josephine.” Josephine may embody for me a trigger of felt threat, yet if she were the true catalyst, would always suffer miserably in her presence and never be free. My battle lies not with Josephine. his is a battle to find the prototype of fatherly love, for
ntimacy and Bearing
I
232
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
Because we feel menaced by the Father’s operative love, we recklessly try to control the field as a worldly situation by controlling the people in it. The worm of unspoken accusation, that such undeserved affliction could be no love, haunts my lonesome refusal to contend for right understanding of the Father. And so I muddle through life in the undifferentiated perspective that only the wills of people exist and vent my terror on others. I accuse and lay blame on people for making me suffer, I persist in illness by feeling victimized. (No, I won’t believe in a Father who sets me up or let Him lay a hand on me.) Blindly fixated on making the set-up go away, I deprive myself of the attention to wonder openly what these, the conditions of my existence, might mean; and pause, neither fearful nor bolting, to wait upon disclosure so that I might preserve rather than kill off what’s truly needed.
I
cannot relinquish the impoverishment of persistently feeling at war with people unless cease feeling tyrannized by divine operation. Life unfolds as Setting Up, and that means that what happens in my life neither merely befalls me nor amounts solely to what a person does to me. A set-up is an occasion and no mere happening. sn’t this the real difficulty?
t irks me that the enemy could deliver a message to me, yet irk is not threat. t could signal dread of the impending operation’s loving hand or mere distraction from the operation at hand. You alone can know yourself. I
I
I
It is inevitable, from the benighted standpoint, that we must fail to receive people in their humility when we cannot greet the set-up as a dark yet beauteous mystery, a surgical love to be performed so that we may heal! Nor will we hear within another’s confused claims and contorted protestations, the one true need, barely disclosed beneath erratic contest and choked breath, that struggles to appear in proper light and summon human address. We can never exit the perspective that keeps us threatened and at odds with one another, even in the tiniest, most commonplace of affairs, until we open ourselves to divine governance and by receptivity bear true witness to what endures beyond time: the human need for healing. People are messengers of divine Providence. No matter what false motive or evil intent brews in the hearts of others, their actions still refract the divine reality of the set-up. Yet this we do not believe. It does not fall within our common purview ever to accept that profound forces bring together these people into this “extra-ordinary” constellation quite unexpectedly for our good. It irks me that the Father could deliver the operation through my enemy. How can I concede to Life when I won’t condescend to greet the enemy as a messenger who refracts my untruth to me and thereby occasions healing? Am I the young colleague or the older woman? And does it matter whether healing comes by stealth in the form of a perceived friend or enemy? The Father promises an enduring healing that lies beyond immediate perceptions of friend and foe. Merely to fight the worldly foe, as our young colleague did, deprives us of the perspective requisite to accept that we are tested, that healing hangs in the balance, that we are granted occasion, by Life’s ingenious weave, to give birth to a more subtle discernment and a stupendous affective reach.
For What Are We Set Up?
233
What could we prize so dearly that we would complacently squander or viciously shatter the healing that endures beyond the shifting stations of time by surrendering the commonplace impulses that weigh us down in never-ending battles over merit and blame, hurt and pride? When we pursue conflict into the hopeless pit where no resolution can be found, we fall sick, weaken, and plunge into the fugitive moment of pride-filled victory. What deluded clarity would think that worldly gain could ever compensate for essential loss! All protestations to stand on righteous principle prevent us from recognizing our sickly ways, though deep down, down below and underneath faulty attitude and sham battle-ready stance, there sounds the deafening alarm of pain. Soreness plagues our suffering hearts amid the weary repetition to which we consign ourselves and the fugitive loneliness that haunts our days. However could an operative love terrify us so that we should condemn ourselves to be lost refugees, perpetually menaced by clouds of pitiful sentiment and wayward winds of time, cast adrift on stormy seas, never to find the way home to heal?
s The Living Nightmare: An Interlude
Is it possible to heal if we bury the wound and leave the thorn to fester? What will you do if one terrifying day you are wounded for the second time, stabbed in the very same place of your earliest wound? What will you believe in your wounded heart if one day Life requires you to journey through the tenderest sore by reliving the drama you thought you could bear only once but never, never again? Mother, don’t make me go; Father, don’t set me up!
Primitive terror strikes deep but where lies its root? My girlfriend thinks her lover will leave her, she is desperate . . . Henrik suffocates his daughter in an overwhelming love because he never got over grief at his wife’s death. Henrik cannot withstand the thought that his wife left him . . .
My sisters all live in me, and most of the time I think this is a wondrous thing. Yet what is it that haunts my dreams?
I
dreamed my sister stole my lover, just as my mother stole things from me, things that suffused my whole material substance. ntimacy and Bearing
I
234
I
As grew older, the dreams grew more intense. My husband slept with all my sisters and, though he was deathly ill, he ran off with one of them rather than go to the hospital. Still later and to this day the dream returns.
Were these nighttime visions or waking dreams? I no longer remember. Anxiety spreads through night and day, uncanny rumblings swell in the watery preconscious and disturb me. It’s as if there’s something spirit wants me to see. What is it? Have I been so busily applied to the mother’s primitive crime that I overlooked my own? Did I commit a crime? Am I guilty?
I
Most of our lives we live suffocating on the surface of our anxious dreams. Anxiously do we labor to prevent our sisters from taking our men, fearfully we erect barriers against mother’s affection, apprehensively we build borders all around the ones we love, cage them up and hold them for keeps.
I
I
I
I
I
think am guilty. he nightmare spreads. can’t get my thoughts to cohere, my memory seems a jumble. Did not transgress umpteen times against my sisters out of blatant envy? Didn’t believe my story was neither heard nor recognized, didn’t occasionally slip out of character and steal something from my sister, didn’t violate the lines of human “respect” personally require others to uphold? just don’t know. Am not part of my sisters’ nightmares? sn’t it so? T
I
I
T
he dream paralyzes me. cannot breathe.
I
I
I
I
It jars my psyche to entertain the thought that certain transgressions could happen to me! It’s unbearable, really, to recollect that once, long ago mother stole something that lived and thrived in my heart, soul, and body—nay, worse, to anticipate that she could steal it yet again! Intuitively, beneath the jarring horror, I sense that I live without ultimate protection. Were I to sit in quiet observation, would my heart not ponder whether it’s truly the content of the nightmare that so threatens? We each fear some primal scene we deem the gravest nightmare to suffer. Yet is it the images of our dreams that menace or the barefaced truth that we command (strange and unfathomable design) no final protection against the nightmare, nor can comfort grant ultimate measure for our good. I wonder, is a nightmare bad for me?
For What Are We Set Up?
235
I
Let us listen to the mothers who must send us forth to meet Providence, and there are two, mother and Mother. Where the former fails, the latter won’t. Let us listen. I
I
t makes me sick, the very thought of specific nightmarish scenarios . . . think ’m going to be sick.
s Wounded, the First Set-up
Suppose, women, the life drama centered on the genealogies of mothers and daughters, and not, as earlier related, our little coworker. Suppose something more intimately close to heart. Ouch, the prick would feel more acute.
Imagine, if you will, that your mother stole your boyfriend when you were young. Oh, perhaps not physically, though a Mrs. Robinson could be real, but in an erotic dialogue, let us say, she exerted her superior powers, enticed him, and brought all manner of confusion into whether your boyfriend frequented your house so often because of her seduction or his affection for you. She mixed up her will and your will, confounded reality. Imagine, newly, that your mother’s ambition never advanced by finding a way to become true to herself but led her to claim all your victories. Suppose she took you off to summer camp for an athletic sport and when the newspaper man came calling, stole the limelight, got her pretty head in the paper, and cut you out of the glory. Imagine . . . I know you need only conjure up a little memory of similar experiences you underwent, if not regularly then occasionally or once . . . so imagine the mother whose helpless passivity . . . Pray, are we not all like these mothers, deep down, even when we try to become self-defined and not lollygag around unrealized in life? Yet deep down, where we have not found radiant accord with self, deep in the heart of self-loathing, aren’t we like . . .
the mother whose radical helplessness before spiritual awakening makes her want a God, oh, not in a man but in the obvious extension of her own sex and gender. Does the mother’s unspoken ambition not sear its aspiration keenly, like a negative photographic print, upon the fragile souls of ones so compliantly dependent upon her for satisfaction of need? Are ntimacy and Bearing
I
236
not these, the tender hearts who would never betray loyalty to her when they grow up and the unsuspecting minds gestating in the dark with no conscious memory of the engraving, the very souls on which she etches an undeserved guilt that is fated to grow great?
From where, oh, where, does ambition stem?
Long and many were the years that time went by when I, a daughter, believed all ambition stemmed from the paternal legacy. Lo, behold, this is not so! Great can the mother’s dark ambition be, unspoken and invisible and veiled, so that one lives robbed of any inkling that not all which lies in the dark arises from the tender hand of spirit. All ye daughters who long since blamed the fathers for your continued helplessness well unto the days of worldly success, all who hearken after the lost beauty of the maternal, don’t you eulogize the mother too quickly? What if—can the mind bear it, can the heart—we cannot become unreservedly beautiful until we witness the unspoken and faulty imprinting that stems from the mother’s helplessness? Must we not cease our misguided fight to “have” the mother’s love by exalting her pain-filled lot, and fight instead to move past prizing pain without comprehension (like she does) to winning pain comprehended? Can we live as free if we do not break the dark legacy of negative solidarity among women? Can the dark imprinting of the womb be lifted to visible light of day and renounced, can the thorn be removed? Imagine, then, how to unlock the secret of maternal ambition. For its aim does not lie precisely in worldly success, though many a mother presses her child to realize all that she has not. It may not even lie in stealing the boyfriend or something precious to one, though mothers can drink cruel pleasure from larceny and fill their cup with savage pride in having outdone a child. Yes, vicarious ambition dramatizes an acutely pernicious envy of the very “vessel” of its “self-realization” (namely, you, the daughter) by stealing the fame or the lover’s affections. The mother wills to get the worldly “end” though you do all the labor. Yet wherein lies her ultimate intent? Oh, a deep and proud competition lurks in the murky waters of what lies hidden beneath light of day in the shadowy emotions and impulses of the lonely mother, the one who proclaims her innocence too loudly and begs your allegiance in sympathy. (Do we all carry this lonely mother inside, did we long ago give rise to her in the dark recesses of our psychic identifications?
For What Are We Set Up?
237
T
I
I I
T
I
I
I
T
he confusion of self-naïveté with innocence too extensively defines our conscious images of “self ” to answer no and, though we abhor duplicity in our mothers and sisters, how little we acknowledge it in ourselves when, by a stroke of pedagogical genius, Life refracts us to ourselves and we hold out, just like our mothers do, with pitiable claims to innocence: “But sister you must believe me. did not intend to go against your wishes after you offered so much and gave so freely.” When Life condescends to remove the surface veil over my true intentions—that, for better or worse, what took seriously were my own material interests and used what was given me for that purpose— disclaim it as a wee mistake and keenly refuse to grapple with the thorn hiding underneath. here won’t enter, not into the revelation of base envy, no! Oh, ’m not as bad as sound. o receive the acute incision, that, well, that’s a bit too much to ask, don’t you think? Far easier to muddle through life innocent, always good at heart, good intentioned, certainly no evil witch, absolutely not a young coworker or a deadly pitiable woman who secretly wishes to see the downfall of another. As if good intentions suffice to embody good at heart.)
Was it merely “a wee mistake,” as mother feigned in “innocence,” that the boy gravitated toward her or that she lost the cherished gold-trimmed clock, the single present your father ever gave you? Without doubt she believes herself innocent, for she’s not an actor in the worldly game but a passive nobody. How, she shrieks at you, could she ever compete with successful you? “Besides,” she broadcasts loudly, “a mother loves her daughter. She would never, ever be envious. It’s just not possible.” Slowly, it dawns on her that you are the devil incarnate in female form, “Eeew, you witless child, you demonic thing. What filth runs through your brain? How could you ever conjure up such false witness as to think your mother envious? Mindless wretch, you cannot understand a mother’s love!” And you swallow the lesson, the devilish false blow dressed up in virtue and divine light, for deep in your heart mother teaches you that it is you who is crazed with ambition, you who hate and envy, you, you, you. Dashed, humiliated, made subject to false shame and meekness, you are an evil ingrate who must continuously repent . . . or so it seems.
ntimacy and Bearing
I
238
You are, by dark imprint, the externalized hub of her willful ambition so that her heart can remain, like a mirage in the lonely desert, pure and untainted. Yet here you are, you live, you exist, “womb of her womb,” more than you ever realized. Life’s initiative to lift this early imprinting brings true shock to consciousness, a shock, however devastating, that could free rather than imprison one in false shame and loathing.
Whence the key to mother’s dark ambition? Doesn’t her fight against you spawn battles to claim you for herself against the others? Oh certainly, where she has not come to terms with the singularity of her life and found destiny in the undergoing, the misguided fights will be real. She may even succeed in getting your soft heart to swear allegiance evermore to take her side. Yet as pernicious as the surface spoils of battle may be, her ambition cannot be reduced to want of worldly acclaim, want of nationalizing your allegiance against father and men, or want of the exclusionary love that begs you choose allegiance to her over husband, sister, or friend.
Did you forget that you heard too much on the winds of time, not the call to lift yourself out of the legacy of exclusionary love? But you also listened like an unprotected babe to the mother’s speechless cry. Helplessness speaks more loudly than we pretend, its resounding noiseless petition weighs heavily on our hearts and spurs us from unnamed font to strive, constantly strive, vainly hoping that our striving will abate the cry. Still no gain or loss, no word or deed abates the eternalized plaint, the mother’s dark unhappiness, depressive disposition, and unfulfilled wish. We are, no matter what we do, ever guilty as from out of a bottomless pit by mother’s stubborn harsh claim.
Surface and depth. Deeper than whether you picked her over others in some worldly game lies the dastardly imprint where she taught you that love must always be defined against. Yet this too remains close to surface. Hidden darkly beneath the unveiling of her exclusionary love lies her abortive want of being rescued, this the secret linkage she forges between your undying allegiance and her paucity of self-love. This the impetus for forming you into the guardian of her dastardly imprint in the confounded
For What Are We Set Up?
239
f only mother knew the sleeping monster hiding in her darkness, for when you try to extricate yourself from her pain will she not unleash a murderous accusation. “Don’t be such a martyr,” she spits out whenever you reveal that you too are a suffering being.
I
name of love; this the seed of her vicious destruction of your potential for good. Mother wants to be rescued—from Love’s requirements! From having to learn to stand and carry life well, from self-change and right reception of fatherly governance, from bearing dream and nightmare alike. None other than radical helplessness foments her unrestrained destructiveness; helplessness, that is, with a plus, the little addition that makes all the difference in attitude, helplessness plus brute, terrified, unwillingness to face it. What kind of “god” does the mother want me to be? The god who saves her from the freedom of having to grow and leaves her suffocate in anxiety. The dead god whose sterile gaze of indiscriminate approbation decks her falsity in majesty, rather than a true servant of the living God who requires her to decide whether she will love . . . and cease concealing her pernicious helplessness in the garment of her children’s ambitions or the brute attempt to keep them around her as a shield, attached to her by the hate she imparts against all the forces that require her to grow. Dearly mother clings to an image of God, idolatrous though it proves to be, for she images ultimate love as housing one surpassing purpose: to approve all that she is in her natural and habituated condition—every little feeling, every pain, every everything. This, then, forms the eternal protest of her heart, “Acknowledge me as innocent. As I am, now and forevermore, unchanging.” And yet it’s so much more impure than that. Her suffering injustice by her own mother’s hand was innocent, and yet she is not innocent. She hands down the harmful legacy of false maternal shame and self-loathing, of exclusive love and envious claim. And she prizes her own pain above that of others, even her children whom she draws into contemptible darkness rather than send them forth unto the Dark mystery where wounds of the past could surface and be healed.
Mother cannot be rescued nor can I, neither by God nor anyone’s misplaced sympathy, from having to win an innocent heart operatively as we all do in life, by becoming a living model of womanly compassion and acquiring a new, second embodiment. Is there injustice in this, that she ntimacy and Bearing
I
240
should have to become a prototype when her own parents failed to supply it? Is it a merciless wounding from on high? Or do we immortalize the violent round again and again when we cannot help but measure the debt we think others owe us with their lives against our unredeemed pain?
N
N
ow here’s a new sentiment: one is spared this glorious destiny to face helplessness and choose nonetheless to trust that one can be made whole and willing.
Womb of her womb, this I am, the truth of it lies deeper than all I normally fathom. I’m not at all my mother by natural disposition or talent. I’m not the one who doubts her intellect and makes a show of it. I’m not the one who fails to rejoice in her native sense of rhythm and dance. I am, if I dare apprehend the imprinting on my very soul, a witness. The one who observes that no vicarious success can bring mother to love herself, the one who knows in visceral terms that I myself have lived out her false destiny and thus my own. I am the wound repeated, even before it comes to me for the second time. If I could be so daring, would I not confess, would my words not testify to what it means to be a child of grief, born from a womb of conflict not unlike that of the brothers Karamazov, born, that is, out of a material-presocial matrix bereft of patient loving tenderness. The mark lies upon me, the daughter whose mother stole her blessed naturalness so early in life. I am lame and I need healing. I don’t think even God could heal such lameness, repair the smothered will, resuscitate the independent sense of self, restore the lost assurance, all things denied me. I am but an ill-formed being. I can’t sprout a new limb of trust in the genuineness of my natural wants and needs . . . or so it seems . . . first formation cannot be repeated and I am deprived of a well-formed center of first embodiment. The mark rests upon me of the wound that Life delivered when I was born from this mother and cast into this unique life set-up. I won’t mention how my mother’s natural differences interlock with mine to disadvantage. Suffice it to say, she took something vital from my development when she stole the “end” of all heartfelt paths I ventured to realize me. I am the mark and the mark lives in me. It extends farther back even than memory and mother’s larceny. Each daughter who comes forth from an anxious and loveless womb bears this mark originally, for the “first wounding” of her special mother-daughter set-up unveils a deeper origination. It was prepared
Wounded “For the Second Time”
For What Are We Set Up?
241
Will be bound by dastardly fate to run forever in circles, never able to let her go though she bind me to unending shame, forever subject to repeat the horrifying failure that cannot save her, cast adrift in the lonesome land where my will dissipates beneath hers and exist merely as the phantom limb of her unrealized self? Where, beneath this world of mixed-up ambitions and a lonely stifled nonexistence lies the little spirit, the calm spirit that could save me? I
I
I
“before” as a Great Set-up. One can be born, marked like an open wound, marked out to come forth from a loveless womb. And so the heart throbs, Is it punishment that my suffering runs back before the womb? Or is there a Great Mystery of the before and after, of what comes first and what comes last? Will the mark I carry evoke lone responses from Life, solitary events and constellations whose burning irritation provokes me to contend with the thorn? Can Life respond only in the measure that I awaken to the mark, undergo repair, and carry forth differently than I came in? It’s doubly personal, for we come into existence by divine operation and yet through a specific a material passage: the mother’s womb and the father’s semen. Fated to receive the conflicted psychic imprints of each parent and their battle-torn dynamic, the child is born into duress of heritage and familial infirmity.
What will you do, you who are marked, when the mother should repeat her larceny later in life, after you spent years learning to dodge her wrath, sidestep her clutches, and quit letting her threaten you so deeply as the first time when she stole what you cannot get back, the ability to want what you wish and simply be yourself ? Suppose midlife, imagine if you can, she suddenly, in a fit of restlessness, finds something of your world and enters it, ostensibly out of a genuine need to find a fitting outlet for her self-expression, yet how uncanny that she should find it necessary to pick something of your world for this end. (For the second time.) Was your initial reaction, “The horror of it! to have mother speak all her indiscriminate comments, her one-sided stories, her bitter complaints that you do not love among people who matter to you”? Well, you yourself know that you should in humility accept such a prospect. You cannot squelch your mother, you the squelched one. Then what of the set-up? It’s deadly. Even if she behaved well, the set-up would yield dreadful eventualities, for inevitably, if it came to it, ntimacy and Bearing
I
242
you would have to stand on a different ground than her in public, not to denounce her but because yours is a struggle to get beyond the envious pattern of the false mother-daughter legacy, and to the degree that she persists in proclaiming that confused travesty “a legacy of true love,” you will, by standing for an unfettered love, appear “against” her in her own eyes just when you break the shackles of exclusivity and become “for” all women. Remember, she demands that you prove your godlike love by choosing her over and against others. The whole dang set-up’s doomed. How could the Father set you up for such intimate battle by having the enemy appear in public forum as your mother? It’s not possible to fight such a battle and come out looking good.
After you begged God to save you and He did not, what then? You ask mother but she refuses to forgo her project, and so you humble yourself and petition that she at least work out human relations with you stepwise as she progresses into your world. You apprehend all too clearly that this most uncanny set-up avails a hidden possibility to win new understanding of one another. You intuit the unsuspected intelligence of Life that saw fit to bring you round a second time to the site of the wounding as if, miraculously, to present the possibility of engendering a new founding for the mother-daughter legacy. So you speak firm words and call her attention to this great possibility, and that act takes strength because you feel threatened. After years of growing strong enough to live and let live, suddenly you find yourself back at start, desiring to control and regulate what unfolds, at odds with Life and Providence. You want so desperately to eliminate mother from the field, yet you cannot ignore that a new beginning hangs in the balance. So you reach for the essential, even though the mother cuts so deeply into your flesh and blood and memory, you into her and she into you. You risk the great wager to grow in mutual sensitivity toward one another, so you offer yourself up. You whisper to yourself, “If she would take one simple step toward essential mutual understanding, would she not win all, truly all? Would she not get her daughter back or find her for the first time as an independent person?” And then, unless all of you daughters sought merely to avenge yourself for that sorry maternal legacy,
For What Are We Set Up?
Shouldn’t Father save me from mother? (When did the suspicion worm its way in, O snake of sacrilege, that He might be another useless patriarch?)
243
would you not happily concede the whole world to mother too—your world—if only she would sort the seeds, differentiate the truly human skein from selfish purpose, ultimate ends from worldly gain, and choose to make human beings “first” rather than “last” . . . and lose you for the second time? What will you do when she prizes the conquest more than human reciprocity? What horror do you face when, precisely as you yield and avail yourself, she gains momentum, power surges through her veins, the blood of victory whets her appetite and transports her senses. Even though you took the low road and let vulnerability issue the petition wordlessly to be met as a mere mortal who asks nothing save that mother care for the impact her actions hold for you, she betrays this vulnerability and wounds you the second time in the very same place she wounded you in youth. Now you discover the high stakes game of truth unveiled, for you land in the heart of barrenness, crushed by an unimaginable dearth of loving willingness to receive you in person. What earth-shattering day dawned, what sun shone directly overhead, when you consented to Life’s uncanny set-up, risked the wounding afresh to have mother injure you in the tender spot where you still want her love. Was it a mistake to think the “second time” was for both of you and not simply for you in quiet solitude? Did you embark again on a rescue mission or is it love to try again? How can it be that the great weaver of destiny should put you through the wounding the second time? Where is the Father to protect me? ’m just so darn angry.
I
The Redemptive Possibility in “the Second Time”
Wounded for the second time, what does this mean? “The second time” not by simple addition but as reduplicated, not just once again but to the second degree. The wound, though inflicted by mother’s early act of theft, antedated her knife in Life’s cut, Life’s way of setting me up. The nightmare repeated, in what did it consist, mother’s second theft or Life’s new incision? Troubled forms the question of blame. Mother is blameworthy, certainly yet not absolutely. She too carries ancient crimes on her breast. Should I, the lame and angry one, unleash my wrath on God for prematurely thrusting me into a life situation and under a yoke too heavy for me to meet? Or am I my life and my life awaits the living? ntimacy and Bearing
I
244
Can pass through, truly through the nightmare that—as the wound and mark reveal so patently clear— failed the first time to come “through”? s the nightmare truly a nightmare or a redemptive possibility hidden within the “second coming”? Am , is my life a beauteous dream am yet to be, was it so from the inception and does it remain so in the beginning come back the second time? Am a song whose long gestation needs the set-up revisited for its ripening, a set-up originally designed for me to be the seed waiting to blossom into the special fruit of this life’s singular understanding, a set-up come round again so that might miraculously grow a healed limb of newborn willingness to meet that which once failed and be made whole, accordant with who am in this journey that forms me. And let it all pass into word and song and dance. And give rise to Joy unbounded in freedom and independence.
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
How deep does freedom run, deep enough to grow back the lost limb of independence? Just when I ponder the inception and start to give up blame, there comes the horrible crime as Providence brings me round “the second time”! Horrible crime or marvelous occasion, that is the question, if only anger could subside long enough for the second incision to draw the troubled question to a head. Life unveils by layers what hides unrealized in early imprinting, tucked safely beneath the woeful “tale of me,” the failure to differentiate the rescue mission, doomed from the start by mother’s refusal to be saved, from false hope and misplaced loyalty. However true my child’s plaint, however indisputable the worldly battles to evade mother’s persistent power to injure me, there lurks the mysterious question, with what must I alone contend? I find myself put in lonesome question: Could I alone have failed the set-up of my existence? Ouch, the thorn cuts deep.
Our guilt is confounded. And this too marks the mortal legacy. The initial guilt, the false shame mother laid upon me, impedes acknowledgment of my originary guilt, that’s certain. The refusal to face shame, though falsely we took it to heart as true and misguidedly vowed loyalty to mother’s helpless petition, may prove the greater enemy, since without repentance, how could I find redemption? We face a solitary beginning. Merely to flee from false guilt and proclaim our innocence, O sin of
For What Are We Set Up?
245
Womb of the mother’s womb, the claim upon you, daughter, is dark and hidden. Shh, don’t worry, everything will be all right. Matter can be transformed; one can rise from the dead! hough you may not be able to rescue mother—for she alone must consent to grow and you are no divine cup of water for life—you can honor her by salvaging the true maternal legacy, letting the old die and the new be born, relinquishing the pain of your helplessness, inherited only in part, and learning how to walk.
T
mothers, is never to win free of the maternal imprint! This proves a most startling case of reduplication, for in a strange and bizarre way, we are guilty though we are innocent. Just as mother is. Is the false yoke really the first sign of guilt? Our true guilt must lie hidden within the false shame laid upon us. If this were not so, then how could suffering the false deliver us to meet our own privative want of innocence?
You inherit the imprinting, the legacy, and the task. Is it not unfair that Life bequeaths you this task, you might say this debt, this ancient and crusted guilt laid upon you by the mother and genealogy that you must expunge the ambition latent in your soul and suffer the lameness life exacted as the price of its endeavor to grow a new shoot? Yet this is your task and my task! To overcome envy and competition, to cease indiscriminate hatred of the father and specious defense of the mother, to die to first imprinting so that tenderness may sprout and put harsh blame to rest. It’s not the physical mother who ultimately sets us up, no matter how wicked her motives or how advanced her insanity. It is Father Providence and to His Set-up the untainted Mother willingly delivers us. With the Father you must contend or slink back into the muddy claims of that desecrated maternal legacy. What god does mother want me to be? The Perfect God but not the Living God of blood and life who disseminates and brings forth seed, who requires labor and struggle, who requires, yes, like a father, requires something of each: to want to be healed and have lameness redeemed, to cut away all that is lowly in little noninnocent me. What’s in a threat? Not simply the outer circumstance. Not first the injustice of mother’s transgression. Not really. That’s the surface. Isn’t it just pride? That I take myself to be something other than I am, this life journey; that I believe myself deserving of something different than what ntimacy and Bearing
I
246
Mother Life prepares and Father Providence requires of me? And doesn’t pride serve false shame as I refuse to humble myself and receive suffering as redemptive?
There’s an old guilt we drank into our substance too early in life, we cannot blame ourselves for that. Though failure to expunge it falls to each alone. Yet when, truly, did my guilt begin? How many times in the past was I as insensitive as mother, hell-bent on acquiring what I felt should be mine, a sphere of activity, a lover, a something. How many times? How could I know? I would not even be conscious of most of my crimes if Life, mysterious in its second coming, did not take me back to the scene of the dastardly deed and lift these horrifying truths up for me to see. This is (my) life and none other. I came out of a certain mother and inherited a singular legacy that I must sort through. I am the seeds and their sources, the good and the bad, divine and mortal. That these constellations come to me and not to others, that is the way Life opens me up and painfully initiates the sorting of the very seeds of me so that I may drop mother’s haughty refusal of elemental work. Life reveals to me what I should not have ingested into the preconscious. By allowing me to renounce the faulty imprinting and malformation, Life prepares me to receive fitting images directly from heaven in order that I may become a living icon, an embodiment of beauty. Life dispels all the forces reified in the unconscious that darken my instincts and shackle me to age-old reactions that block receptivity to the active operation whereby God plants new seeds and waters new growth. And so Life brings me through the great differentiation to renounce the ancient crime and avail myself of a radically new heart and body. Can one move beyond threat? Isn’t that the question? How can I return to mother and not be threatened? Listen, I heard the Mother whisper to me in a voice that arose deep within:
When, have you wondered, did your true guilt begin? “Once upon a time . . .”
I
I
We don’t know whether we will be able to bear a nightmare in advance expectancy. We name things too soon, before they arrive, and how we name them makes them impossible to receive. What is the nightmare really? f live through it and gain strength, then what is it, nightmarish foe or beckoning friend, hellish or heavenly dream?
For What Are We Set Up?
247
never
People are people; they do as they do. Even mother’s toxicity cannot decide for me whether I will go insane or volatilize ballistic. Not if I am true with myself. Matter and spirit arise together, and so I anticipate the nightmare in material terms. Yet if I see the nightmare for what it is, then my focus shifts. It’s not friend or foe, mother or father, sister or child who threaten me. It’s divine operation, surgery. We resist the nightmare but the nightmare must come. For to remove the thorn is, however inconceivable, a work of love. Could the Mother and Father of Life hold the same measure of what is good for us as we devise in the horrified mind’s fancy? Nothing terrifies more than the thought of living through a nightmarish operation without anesthesia in a fully waking state. Yet how could love emerge otherwise? How could we undergo repair from wounded distrust to wholesome care if that most astonishing occasion were not given to discover how not to fear the Dark? How could there be love if we could not stop feeling secretly threatened by what we imagine our worst nightmares to be? When it is time for healing, Mother can’t let us run back into hiding from Father’s surgical procedure. We stand in need of cure, not simply of terror but of the false pride hidden in our staunch protestations of innocence. We retain the guilt hidden within undeserved shame. And too soon believe we could not be guilty of the very transgressions that compose our worst nightmares and on which we proudly erect our harsh judgment of others, so certain, yes, so wishfully certain and right do we believe ourselves to be. No, not you, not I. I would never, never, do anything so horrible as others have done to me. Sure, there may be things I would not do, but that does not make me guiltlessly innocent, as if I have not fueled the nightmare of someone close.
I
(Was it my sister, my beloved sister, did steal something precious from her? he question haunts my waking dreams, my nightmarish loneliness.) T
Is it not judicious, loving, and merciful that I am brought to see my guilt— for unwitting crimes, for benightedly perpetuating the generations’ unending cycle of harm, and deep down, not by innocence, for refusal to yield in receptivity and let Life pluck the thorn of harshness from me, the preemptive shield of ancient wound; is it not loving that I am brought to see my guilt through no punishment yet instead by the occasion for my own healing, my own passage through and forward beyond the nightmare? ntimacy and Bearing
I
248
Pride’s Last Stand We lack a measure for our suffering. And it should be so, this before all forms a lack we should never fill in with imagined scenarios of nightmarish misery and woe unto me. Life is singular. If I am denied victory, it must be to save me from pride. Undergoing is redemptive but if and only if we wholly accept it at heart without why. It is personal to me. We have but little memory of the harms we wrought before the question of suffering awoke in us an acute awareness of the need to accept the set-up as redemptive. And this is no masochistic acceptance but release to and for the journey. Jolted by our oblivion into acceptance, Life nevertheless bears out mercy in how it occasions our healing and does not seek to punish by making us suffer what we have done to others. We cannot cease to covet what others are—the singularity of their life journeys—until we accept the merciful poetic justice of our own. We cannot cease to crave vengeance in the name of justice and make others suffer—unnecessarily with no redemptive purpose—our haughty condescension by fashioning ourselves in the falsified image of divine wrath and “cutting” them out of heart, save we become willing to bear all things in the understanding that we have no measure for our own undergoing let alone that of others. And this is as it should be.
I had a dream and this is what I saw: My mother, curled up, old and decrepit, coiled like a baby in the womb—an archetypal image of eternity—yet she was not like unto a babe ready to be born. or was the gray mother, creaky bones and clatter, like the true eternity where end and beginning unite in letting the old die and giving rise to the new. n this dream, everything was unending gray. here was no color. She was a bony sack, huddled up in the womb beyond her days, the days when she should have risen and come to life, found color and joy. She writhed in the fullness of her pain. She smelled of poisonous venom, she leaked contagion, emitted it like a gas with every breath, suffered from it in agonizing pain, blackened with it, recoiled under T
I
N
The Dream of Self-Loathing
For What Are We Set Up?
249
I
I
I
I
I
I
N
I
it, restlessly she writhed, writhed in malignant pain. Suddenly she grabbed onto me and sought to pull me into the womb of her gray suffering. She sought fervently with a steely will to drag me into poisonous hate and lash out at all of life through me. Over and over she clutched at me. struggled vainly to extricate myself, pull my arm back, free myself from the ensnarement. othing worked, started to sweat blood. With godly vigor hurled firm words to get her off of me and jolt her to her senses, so forceful was her devouring siren of pain. hurled shocking phrases, jolting words to repel her. could barely understand myself but the battle was so fierce that mustered all strength from below and beyond and in a final act fired staggering words at her, when all a sudden realized that she liked it. She liked to be hit with stunning words, crude sounds, and shattering tones. leaped back in horror: she liked it.
I
And that is when I hit upon the mother’s self-loathing. Loathing kept her stillborn in the womb, long after it was time to depart. Sobering words had no effect. She imbibed the violence of the verbal jolt rather than let the vigor of the word sober her up and lay open reality’s vibrant display. She lived and died in the womb as one who never made a start in life, never came out to discover light of day. Everything was monotonous gray—her body, her environment, her hands, her face, her pain, her cry, her smothered cry. Her growling and moaning, her grasping and clinging onto me. Never once did word arise and brighten the world that stretched between her and me. Foulness seeped from her every gesture and her whole environment breathed venomous loathing. Her silence was full of spite, her movements without peace, her look horrifying, her state decrepit beyond compare. Worse even than being stillborn, she endured like a fully grown woman who had deteriorated with time into a retarded childish state, altogether devoid of tragic beauty, unfulfilled innocence, unrealized simplicity, the very marks of the babe. She lived as a dead soul, caught in the land between day and night in a wrenching death that never ceases while her body beat on captured by her nostalgia for life. That is why she grabbed at me: I could not live either, I had to sanction her womblike existence. But such vindication could not be, for to join her would be to suffer in total darkness and pain but not share in life with the living. ntimacy and Bearing
I
250
A deep mystery pervades memory. Memory (as distinct from the mind’s personal narrative) contains not simply what begins with physical birth. It links us to the heart of reality like a graven image on the heart that recalls it home, heart to heart. There is, then, a darkness, a deep-seated and fertile preconscious through which recollection of deeper things can be transmitted. The darkness through which we pass inwardly to God, the darkness that claims our intuition and calls us forth to deliverance, the way we pass through winter to spring, through womb to life, from advent to first birth, and first incarnation to second embodiment. Much is imparted to us in darkness, and dying to personal narrative prepares us to receive seed, water, and life. Yet one can get lost in the wrong order of darkness, a radical breach of faith in Life’s Providence, that yields never ending estrangement and isolation. One can get stuck in the mortal womb and never come to life, one can break under the yoke laid on her and never find the mystery of the set-up, one can succumb to the dark waters of wrath-filled heart and never know poetic justice. Memory, though it points to dimensions unseen, also houses genealogy, the patterns imprinted through collective history. An exacerbated terror of the dark can be imparted to us through the mother’s material heritage. Her self-loathing, her suspicious hatred of Life— the very icon of Motherhood whom she regards as an enemy to her possessive wants and demanding claims, the one who takes her child away—
and her abhorrence of men— who symbolize the Father’s providential labor to spoil her manipulation of the material career of events, the dubious ends she strives to attain.
All that can be imprinted through the maternal genealogy passes to us in darkness; we know neither how nor when. Yet it passes into our materiality, our smell and taste, our fears and dreams, our every sensibility. An intense struggle besets us to win free from the ancient transmission of fear and loathing, instead to win through to Mother Life’s promise of healing and the Father’s divine surgery. We must come to trust in the darkness despite this odious maternal legacy that threatens to infect our attitude toward the dark with spiteful revolt or the demonic wish to undo oneself
For What Are We Set Up?
251
and leap into the hellish womb of self-loathing. There is a true dark and we must gently enter into it, for divine things take place in darkness so that we may receive their effect. Trust is a graced state, and no benighted legacy, no dubious wish. And trust would not be trust if God were not, as Rilke said, the Dark.
ntimacy and Bearing
I
252
Soft Words for Mother
f
f
i teen
Mother, I want to whisper in your ear, if only you would listen and hear: I am not an extension of you but a gift of God. You were asked, yes, you were to be a receptacle for divine purpose, yet the purpose of my birth is not “for you.” To tear me away from God is to steal, Neither I nor the pain of bearing me is “yours” alone. Mother, I have wondered at the miracle, deep in my tender heart: However does a woman give birth? Oh, surely it is written on her face, she gives herself up and unexpectedly pain proves bearable, as if a secret mystery transports it for and with her. Mother, I may be but a child, but this much I know: We two arose together, bearing extends beyond yours and mine, why do you search so confusedly for what is already granted? Enlightenment is not one of our experiences, It too arrives like child: as gift. Mother, I want to whisper, everything’s all right. Do you hear, mother can you listen?
ixteen s
For What Divine Operation Are We Set Up?
It’s the Father’s task, in resurrecting us from the dead, to checkmate us and put us to the test whether we will: Let harshness die and tenderness grow a shoot; blossom in the Land Where Heart Grows or perpetuate conflict for all our lonely days, forgive the wound that lames us and let Life redeem our sensibilities.
Is it the Father or the father on whom we collide like an unbending and loveless structure? It only hurts if you get entangled where you cannot go, if you press for intimacy where the father cannot give. Can the father venture into the Land of Intimacy at all or does he, like most, venture at best only once in a while . . . the father . . .
T
his is not a book about the earthly father but rather the barriers built by maternal legacy to the Father.
The father has mercy in his own way. He is “his world” and “his world” is he. Yet he gives of his world and, contrary to all expectation, he has even been known to give freely, yes, even the father bound in anxiety, when life draws him to his natural diminution, renounces responsibility and transfers freedom to you, in defiance of your conviction that he would never be able to let go. What more do you want from the father who, in mortal finitude and decrease, expends his world upon you? A bridge, you say, yes, it is a bridge we want from earth to heaven, yet how can the earthly father provide the bridge if heaven touches him not nor he, heaven? Can’t you forgive him, won’t you honor the legacy he could give instead of asking for intimacy where it cannot be found? Let, instead, the Mother provide the bridge to the Father who will carry you across and through.
T
T
his is not a book about the unbending wills of men but the Father of imeliness whom we misconceive when we collide and think Him unbending when He provides the gentle check
to block us from veering off track and return us to the way that leads forward and through to healing. Can a lame limb heal?
Lay the child’s plaint to rest with the maternal past. And believe again. Will the father rescue me?
Lay the misplaced hope to bed with the paternal future. And let Living Intimacy begin. Mother, Father, draw me unto the Land Where Heart Grows, now, please.
For What Divine Operation Are We Set Up?
255
Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows
v
s
e enteen
Loneliness is unwillingness to be made sensitive, by the labor of the Mother and Father, on pain of bearing every ordeal sent to me openly as the most gracious and tender loving care.
Am not a lonely one, more suffering than others? Does my acutely felt suffering not nurture the most poignant sensitivity to the suffering of all other beings? C’mon, rescue every lost cat on the streets! Don’t give me all that rubbish about how insensitive am. feel, am such a feeling person, fee-eel too deeply, feel more deeply than others, HA is my problem. tell you (now ’m almost screaming you have me so worked up) feel more than others. t’s in my nature. Yes, it’s time for me to stop feeling for you and take care for myself. just give too darn much . . . I
T
T
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
To sink into abominable self-isolation as if no one could understand or care for me breeds harsh insensitivity. However could this be?
I
An icy cloak of unfeeling oddly surrounds feelings of lonely hurt; it rests on a rigid unwillingness to divest myself of an overly scrupulous ministry to self-pity and undergo the shaping growth of selfless sensibility. Hypersensitivity nets no healthy personal care. Like young women who dedicate untold hours to primping, we who pride ourselves on excessive feeling prove no less dedicated to the inessential in matters of the heart. How fastidiously we assuage personal hurt, how peevishly we covet wounds and nurse self-pity, how vigorously we put up a one-sided defense of our “innocence.”
N
I
T
T
T
Who is the hurt self? he one to whom bad things happen but life offers no wealthy occasion to heal. he dark spot where light (truth) cannot regenerate understanding. he vacant hole where no willingness (heart) can grow. n the cold, dark pit there brews one lone wish: that he/He would treat me otherwise. And with it, hatred of an indistinct o/Other who refuses to save me. Hatred is a quieter suitor than we think. Hatred woos us onto the mantra: you fail me. Who hates, who hurts? ot the free spirit, not the witness, not the sprout of loving tenderness or the seed of forgiveness, but the collapsed one who sadly believes she is her pain and none other, and begs to be redeemed without self-transformation.
Why does healing terrify us more than the cold pit of self-pity? The Field is like a great mirror whose extraordinary light defies expectations of simple approbation of our beauty. It refracts not simply loveliness but horribleness, not just pain but indulgence, not mere loneliness but dejection. It mirrors my shadow untruth to me. O Great Mirror of Life, are you harsh, malicious, or loving? By focusing on conflicts rooted in who’s most suffering, we spurn the mirroring through which Providence aims to deliver us unto the Land Where Heart Grows and intimacy reigns. A great irony underlies this rejection: for all the time and energy we expend on rueful emotions and self-doubt, Life ultimately does not require an overly fastidious and hypercritical relation to my inner life of feeling and cognition. The Father of Life, though ever merciful, will not rescue me from the straightforward requirement to observe, without deception, the false in myself. Yet He relieves the burden of having to mold myself by my own dull vision and crude hand. I need the Father mercifully to set a healthy pace and rhythm for inward edification, so that I may grow a tender and patient relation to self-change, and neither bullishly push myself too fast nor indulge in complacent sympathy for what, in truth, I could renounce right now, if I were willing. Both too lenient in pity and too harsh in critique, we lack proper affect even toward ourselves. Only by following the Father’s lead, can we disburden ourselves of false shame without lapsing into complacency. False shame imprisons us in a psychic house poorly lit by the “mirror” of our own censorious judgment and beats us down in pitiable self-loathing. Yet comfort, that hidden enemy of genuine affect, bids us distrust the
Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows
257
Father’s gentler refraction on whose truthful mirror we project our own tyranny. Shame makes us dread feeling exposed. But we do not judge ourselves better than Life, the measures we erect are not more kind or the pace more sensitive. Why persuade ourselves that true measure will prove tyrannical rather than heal? Is it so hard to bear my untruth and relinquish false protestations of innocence?
Wound or Intimacy? We confound exposure of the wound to healing light with the wounding proper.
I
Father, please, beg you, don’t set me up to stand before the crowd, revealed, can’t you stand in for me, can’t you do it, no, not exposure . . . the shame of it.
We face a strange peculiarity in life: intimacy cannot be had directly. We feel blocked from intimacy by people and places and events. In a word: by Providence. And the Father does block us, yet not as we bitterly imagine from intimacy in its riches. The Father stops us from seeking ultimate intimacy where none can be found, in the direct forms of natural sympathy and bonding on which we erect worship to a false divinity. The genuine entry into intimacy passes through the refraction where Life mirrors me back to myself. Save by the indirect turn back upon inward growth, I will never see others, no matter how far I try to stretch myself, beyond the limited and colored horizon of “me.”
I
I
see merely that you are here and have a need. Oh, it seems my “moment” is come; won’t you let me spill over and get out of you what wish, nay, need?
I
It’s not possible to enter into intimacy where I do not hold back in deep pause and creative restraint from unloading my self-centered and agential want on all reality. Without coming under the requirement that this moment places on me, there can be no decentering of self-pity, no genuine release for the incoming field, no unfettered availing myself without expectation to meet the other by timely sanction. We constantly force intimacy and abort the possibility of entering stepwise into its ken. It never occurs to us that intimacy grows through timely pause before Life’s disclosure and not by forced revelation. When I pity myself, I’m hell-bent on pressing my want to be seen or heard or recntimacy and Bearing
I
258
I
I
he price of intimacy is real: must be willing to surrender the power to dictate the nature of intimacy and trust, by patience’s pause, that my need may be sated mysteriously in some unimaginable way or at some unpredictable time. his, on pain of realizing that force never yields intimacy but rather ill-conceived, if unintended, harms, even where need is genuine. hat’s the lie tell myself in the primordial depths of loneliness, that need’s satisfaction, however achieved, is warranted. Only by holding back from direct impulse can the self-centeredness in advancing my own piteous want be mirrored back to me. And can renounce nothing save what refraction brings to light. T
T
T
ognized. Compelled forward by the burning pent-up wish to be “known,” my pained lamentation forces reality to bend to my feeling and intent. I preconceive birth, both by intent and in my vision of how this time should unfold. Ironically, the forced and premature initiative to disclose myself precludes me from availing myself of the Great Disclosure that Life holds in wait. It destroys the reciprocal possibility of giving birth to what “could be”—two people brought by the field’s possibility to bear witness to one another under timely sanction—into the one-sided agenda of my being seen. Contrary to the bitter plaint of self-pity, intimacy does not thrive on simple pursuit of immediate need. It cannot grow by subjecting another person to an untimely onslaught of pain-filled emotion or to instant demand for approbation. Intimacy—the shape it can assume in a given life set-up—cannot be predicted or forced. If intimacy were our true wish, then we would renounce need, however genuine, in favor of what’s supported by Life. We would cease dictating the “shape” and heed the set-up’s requirement to let intimacy come forth in the measure and form that it avails itself here and now. Take this one step, and not force the rest. Renunciation of the power to predecide what arises “between the two of us” conditions entry into the Shaping whereby Life’s disclosure can impact and require change of me. Save I suspend agenda and renounce instant satisfaction of need, Life cannot reveal the dimensions most unexpected of what we each are to one another in this ingathering.
I
It’s not my place to decide the timing or shape of things. I don’t decide the when and how of my own or another’s growth. If I run headlong and
Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows
259
foolhardy into intimacy, I force myself or another to come to consciousness prematurely. Force proves inevitable when we come to loggerheads and I want you to “see” or “hear” or “understand” me with no thought of consequence for you. When I presume that disclosure pertains solely to my act, rather than obtain as a greater reality that gathers us together, I cannot be prepared for the unexpected, either as the promising possibility or as the harmful effects of my deeds. Nor can I put the brakes on selfishness when things devolve upon the question, Have I been seen? I won’t have the wherewithal, the attitude and sensitivity of loving carefulness requisite to temper my actions to what the field—and by extension all parties to it—can bear, if I am not “popped open” in receptivity and focused on apprehending what proves timely. Life’s loving refraction lets me apprehend another in threedimensionality, not merely as a double to me but truly, that is, illuminated in his or her genuine struggle and what this moment portends. The same holds true for self. If I care for myself properly, then I would wish to see the living truth of me disclosed dynamically and unexpectedly in the field, and not merely lug around preconceived images or greedily advance selfish want. Heeding timely dictate enables me to acquire gentleness without colliding against my painful need. Dependent I am on timely dictate not to wield the power of penetration to cut into others or cut them out of reality. Depend I do on Providence not to steal the power of refraction and prematurely tear the veil off someone’s reality in inopportune and self-serving ways. There lies, beyond the interpersonal and historical continuum of you and me, another dimension, thank goodness, another Light in which we apprehend the timing of events as well as the depth out of which self and others move, the truth and untruth, the discord and concord of a person with herself. Providence, that loving Father, sets me up for intimacy, but I can never see this truth when I live terrified of refraction, the very condition for being given the choice to love or hate. The wonder of it! Yet we hate it so. We don’t want to be exposed. We want to be told by the Father only that we are lovely and superb, we want to be given incessant and indiscriminate approbation. Yet there’s no natural terminus to the tear-filled cry, “Daddy, daddy, tell me ’m lovely, tell me again, daddy, tell me.”
I
We can only cease foisting our insatiable need on others when we grow up, become elevated to a whole new attunement and acquire a bright ntimacy and Bearing
I
260
new set of sensibilities. But no! we don’t want the Father to show us our untruth but instead to pretend that nothing about us needs to change, that we are already innocent. We want to be seen but not revealed. That’s like asking a Loving Father not to give us a chance! Ouch, the shame of it!
We lack the affect to be moved by another’s meekness and suffering when we are not attuned to the unexpected with its requirement to cultivate the timely and relinquish self-pity. We cannot find the meaning in the dance where Providence yokes you and I (not me) together into some ordeal neither of us anticipated until each gives up resistance. What stands like a great steel barrier between acceptance of redemptive suffering and the radiant growth of sensitivity is none other than woeful tale bearers of who did what to me and how life wronged me, with their grievous want of vindication. If I do not trust the timely sway of Providence, how will I ever be weaned off lamentable petition onto devotion to the singularity of my journey? Won’t I always seek vindication for my suffering when our pains collide, and never imbibe the pattern of Life’s Timing and Care? The Father’s Way seems so offensive, my life devolves on me and no other. I am alone in my suffering. Yet were I to accept that my life is designed indisputably for me by a deeply caring mysterious purpose, then couldn’t I put the monster of comparison to rest and meet the other’s struggle for what it is? Suffering is unique to the person who undergoes it. None evades life’s original Set-up. We are all made to pass a “second time” through the birth canal, all brought face-to-face with the nightmarish wound. What can I accomplish by making you feel more than your own life’s burden? Doesn’t it suffice that you face your journey and I mine? Each of us has to distill an essential wisdom from our journey that transcends the suffering, reshapes us, and affects those we touch for the better. Isn’t it right that I concern myself, and not lay blame on others, for what falls to me alone to bear— my life, my journey, my own profound want of sensitivity. Who among us will consent to make the right cut, not to cut into others harshly, but the cut that weans us off pity and engenders a whole new receptive embodiment.
Our Deep Lack
Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows
261
Pity and Insensitivity
We harbor a pernicious illusion at heart, hidden at the center of our tales of woe. It engrosses us and refuses to be dislodged. We defend it tooth and claw. For all the gargantuan feeling we accommodate in our emotional lives, we cling staunchly to the bitter seed in our womb that lacks all force of life to produce anything vital, warm, and life-giving. This bitter seed is none other than the illusion that pity makes us sensitive.
We think we “feel deeply” and that “deep feeling” makes us sensitive, nay humane. We believe that when we nourish ever greater pity for ourselves, we foster every greater sympathy for others. Now that’s a direct formula by which we strive to build care from me to you. This book confronts us with the wee difficulty that suffering has no mechanistic power by which to gestate sensitivity and carry one across the vast abyss that separates us in our painful travails. Suffering can license hardening of heart equally as occasion growth of sensitivity; and sympathy, born as it is out of pity over personal suffering, cannot suffice to decenter us. Contrary to what the seditious voice of self-pity professes, sensitivity is not born out of pity; its roots lie in sound, touch, and apprehension. It grows out of letting things bear upon me and letting my bearing have effortless and unplanned impact; it ripens when the sonorous impact of a thing congeals into apprehension of how not to interfere with its way. Touching is not at heart physical. Nor does it rest on common experience or sympathetic commiseration. Things touch when life’s powers bring them to bear upon one another in a specific manner that unveils some aspect of each. There can be, then, no growth of sensitivity without awakening to and letting the unexpected illuminations of the field irradiate perception and water new understanding. I cannot grow rich in affect if I refuse to be affected or let things be unveiled in their hidden depths and three-dimensionality. Sensitivity is not something I have or do. However sensitive or insensitive I may be by nature as compared to others, rich sensitivity to another’s singularity exceeds nature’s reach. It comes not ready-made and must be grown for me. It presupposes sound attunement, affective rectitude, and receptive pause, all of which fund the capacity to listen across the great difference of singularity and not image another by reference to me. ntimacy and Bearing
I
262
What blocks sensitivity? None other than self-pity with its bewitching claim to ground intimacy in shared experience, a claim that holds the power to bewitch us because we like to believe that we make intimacy and do the loving by our own natural powers of pity. It offends to think that we lack, deeply and truly lack, proper hearing and cannot control how much affect we “possess” and “give” by forming sympathetic identification with another’s suffering. The unaffected manner by which one thing imparts something of itself to another composes the great mystery of intimacy born of receptivity and informed by other powers. What we lack, that keeps us from moving beyond conflict, is nothing we can “grow” out of our current level of sentiment and feeling. Our senses need to be turned inside out and right side up, so that how we currently feel could give way to an entirely new compass and sensibility. Would it not constitute a qualitative leap in growth (and not merely developmental progress) for me to gain the sensibility that enables me to feel repulsed by the violent harshness of my actions rather than feel vindicated in them? Would a radical change of heart enable me to grow livid by women’s confusion of harshness with strength, horrified that women defend false weakness and proudly proclaim it love, and urgently pained by women’s dramatic failure to nurture receptivity, without whose virtue tenderness cannot grow a tendril?
We stand in want of being weaned off the milk of sympathy and onto the meat of right affect. Sympathy, born as it is of pity, proves a poor stand-in for rich affect, a surface reaction that can only feign the depth and fullness of which it stands in want. Yet empathy, when stabilized by attunement to redemptive suffering and life’s requirements, supports rich affect without endangering it by sucking it down into self-pity and hurtful commiseration. mpathy draws close, ever so close as to touch, dangerously close, and yet it does not appropriate. t senses the other’s pain as her own, even as the pain penetrates me by empathy’s tuneful reach and sensitive bearing. I
E
I
awoke one glorious day to discover that my plant had assumed, as if overnight, a whole new shape! Miraculous!
The price of intimacy is real: renunciation not only of the greedy power to “shape” how intimacy unfolds but also of the temptation to
Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows
263
succumb to pity’s lie by setting ourselves up as ones who already know how to love from out of our untransformed feeling life.
Remember the mother whose great natural pity for her child could not sustain her in love when the child’s freedom triggered threat?
Sympathy never receives wholly, freely, fully. Rooted in overlap of common sentiment or experience, it sustains proximity up to the point of threat and then its shadow, antipathy, bursts onto the scene! It cannot bridge the chasm that separates two unique needs let alone bear another’s pain without appropriation. Only a genuine intimacy that isn’t bound to personal feeling can leap across the vast distance from one singularity to another. Such an intimacy knows not how to covet, it does not grow irritable when it feels unheard or unseen, and it does not fall prey to comparison. It receives illumination. Behold! he other is genuine.
T
Sympathy lacks receptivity’s elasticity; it cannot adapt to the dictates of the time. It cannot embrace unexpected disclosure while subject to the knee-jerk reference to me and my comfort. The “great” well of sympathetic feeling I harbor inside, however long its fund may hold forth, finally overtakes me in a wave of self-pity whenever it comes up against the limit of you versus me. I relate to how I feel and that’s as “deep” as my sympathy runs. How long sympathy holds out in “sharing” depends on many factors but all those factors ultimately yield at the point of conflict to want of approbation and beneath, comfort and ease.
Amassing Pain and Sympathetic Cosuffering
When I feel pity for your suffering, do I ever wholly and freely feel for you? Do I suffer with you by a kind of cosuffering that arises between us and binds us together? Or do I not, in sympathy, encounter my own pity for myself, take my own inner pains and experiences as the sole standard I know for trying to measure your pain and extend sympathy to you? There is such a thing as “feeling with and for” another. There are forms of identification that lead us to suffer another person’s pain as if it were our own. Certainly a mother or father could die for the child; I do not deny it. Such willingness might even stem from pity itself. It’s not my task to diagnose whether a parent could die for a child out of an immense ntimacy and Bearing
I
264
feeling of self-pity for herself aroused by the child rather than a true sensitivity and selfless decision to die, if necessary. I want to speak rather to how sympathetic identification, when taken to an extreme, deprives the other of real existence and annuls the “co” in suffering. Hardly do we ever consider that we take away something vital from another person when, via imaginary sympathetic identification, we suffer for them. After all, it is not my pain to bear the singular ordeal of another’s existence. One keen way to leap in and take over someone else’s reality is to appropriate the singularity of her suffering. Here we must learn to tread carefully. Neither should we take another person’s suffering away by vicarious attachment nor should we protect another by removing the occasion for suffering in life. This is not to say that we should indifferently cast others adrift upon unnecessary suffering. Certain orders of pain may be untimely for a child or friend to take on. Yet timely pain is sent to them, just as it is to us, and they must, for their own growth, learn to bear it well rather than flee from it. The fine line we tread in relation to another’s timely ordeal passes narrowly between vicarious suffering and complicity. Each confounds sympathetic identification with love. The narcissism of vicarious suffering yields a profound indifference to the other’s singular plight. Complicity in a person’s evasion of timely ordeal selfishly reinforces the other’s deep mistrust of herself for the sake of justifying its own sympathetic feeling. Whereas indifference haunts every form of “sharing” that grounds itself in a sympathy born of self-pity, misguided “help” inevitably undermines the other’s ability to trust into the transformation of heart and perspective that the ordeal occasions, and thereby learn to care lovingly for herself. People readily commit both crimes, though motherhood is emblematic of the difficulty. One does suffer when the child suffers, yet the child’s suffering remains its yoke to bear in life. And it deserves just regard for the truth that it has a burden to bear and must find a way to bear well. A parent who suffers vicariously merges rather than suffers “with.” Rather than hold back receptively in creative restraint, this mother ultimately sorrows for herself because the “source” of her sympathy stems from self-pity rather than disclosure of the child in its unique life set-up. While appropriating her child’s pain, she will hardly be poised to assist the child with learning how to find not merely a way but its own way to bear its burden. When the merging mother assists out of pity, matters worsen more grievously than were the child to fare by itself. A dark and burdensome
Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows
265
emotional story takes shape; I speak of the story that only the mother can understand the child’s suffering for she alone “feels” the true depth of the child’s pain. However deeply a mother bears with a child’s pain, she should never induce the child to sink into the cold symbiosis of mutual pity which shuns light and eviscerates independence. In truth, any of us can have, for mysterious reasons, a profound connection to another person that enables us literally to “feel and suffer with” the other. In such cases, we should take great care to tread the careful way through. Rather than sink into a vortex of special negative bonding, built on the lie that I alone can understand my friend’s pain, I must step back and let Life mirror to her the possible way through. For she needs to win the essential for herself—patient trust in the transformations offered by her own life. Sympathy for another’s pain cannot of itself produce a genuinely free cosuffering. This any serious self-study would prove. Genuine cosuffering arises upon learning how to bear pain well. We understand the pain we suffer in retrospect on condition of finding the way through to redemptive healing. Then alone can I name the ordeal without bias and let it foster growth of sensitivity to respect others whose plights differ from mine and are their own. Hardly can I help another in her plight while I remain bound by self-pity to name the ordeal I face prematurely and conjure false love’s pitiful sanction from others. Intimacy requires that Life wean us off the false sympathy and learned patterns of cosuffering that debilitate and weigh us down in piteous incapacity and excessively interpersonal feeling. When we speak from mere want of sympathy, more often than not, hidden within the tale of woe we relate to others, lies a deceptive burden we load on them in the form of the desire to be rescued or receive sanction for evading life’s requirement of growth. (Remember the burden inherited from the maternal legacy of helplessness, remember?) In retrospect alone can I speak understandingly of a painful ordeal without seeking pity but instead with an eye toward enlivening essential possibility in others. So I must take great care amid an ordeal to speak as one groping, who accepts the need for redemption even though her fault has yet to be revealed, and who trusts in the Shaping. As one, in a word, who chooses without understanding to heal and bear well. Any true understanding that passes between two people works from the constructive standpoint of acknowledging, amid pain, this want of under-standing (right bearing). It advances not for the sake of establishing ntimacy and Bearing
I
266
a special bond, as if only we two could understand one another’s misery. To be given a friend who truly sees me suffer for the good, is a great, great thing! Yet then I am seen singularly though not exclusively. Though my friend alone sees me, others could; it’s not exclusive in that sense. Others could in their own unique ways correct me when I veer off into “woe unto me” and seek approbation falsely. The true friend would not bond over false exclusivity and inessentials rather than bear with our two singularities in the essential way that could hold true for any two, namely, as a meeting incomparably unique.
“Bearing with” and Intimacy
mpathy partakes of Life’s midwifery, it helps deliver the other to stand alone on the field and come home to her truth. t treads the perilous way between “covetous” and “comparative,” so it may abide each singularity without collapse into pity’s self-centered tonality and conflicted perception, however painfully the other’s truth might guilelessly refract my life back to me. Held in empathy’s sway, bear disclosure’s unexpected illuminations all the way “through”; assist the birth of another’s singularity unto the real. I
I
E
If one wishes to grow sensitive, self-pity and woe must melt away. Wrong focus, in that it centers on my personal suffering, cannot deliver me to apprehend another in her suffering. It cannot open up the rich senses I need in order to feel, smell, taste, touch, and hear another’s ordeal and way. If I am to grow sensitive, I cannot try merely to “suffer for another.” I must instead leap into a whole new order of bearing.
Journey to the Land Where Heart Grows
I
“Bearing with” is not the “cosuffering” of felt pity. Bearing with another—in and through a constellation that gathers us together—differs in kind from sympathetic identification. It lacks the narcissism requisite to appropriate another’s suffering; it lets the other’s suffering be what it is rather than liken it to something once “mine.” Nor is it haughty or indifferent enough to pretend to instantaneous apprehension of what is needed. It is, rather, willing. Willing to wait on disclosure, willing to face the task that devolves upon one whatever it may be, willing to see the matter through, willing to focus on matters of heart without knowing in advance to what end these forces portend. “Bearing with” waits though neither naively nor with preconceived 267
expectation, for it arms itself not with a vision of the “shape that love should take” but instead with the foreknowledge that I too shall be tested. This sobering sixth sense forms its naked armor, that I too could lose focus and heart. In bearing with, focus rests on the field that steadies heart and attunes me to the trial that lies in wait, to the possible misstep into misunderstanding where comparison might lead and to the prospect of new understanding. It willingly does battle against the former and thereby for the latter. It waits on the strange and momentous possibility that impends and trusts with wakeful awareness that healing hangs in the balance. For Life is not mere punishment. “Bearing with” opens us upon the intimacy which abides the tension of the real. It faces the truth that love, yes, love lies in the bearing. And this, as you will soon see, a cat taught me.
ntimacy and Bearing
I
268
gh
ei
teen
Pain and Intimacy: The Pause in Bearing
Let us pause for a moment in our journey to the Land Where Heart Grows and ask pain to educate us. Pain, do you provide us comfort? Why ever would we cling to pain-filled tales of woe unless they comforted us and we intuited that pain bears some primitive relation to intimacy? Pain, what is your mystery? How can we elevate you to the same rung of reality as love, the loftiest, all encompassing, and deepest of all? Pain conveys reality. That is its task, its labor, the yoke laid upon it. All Life, from earth to heaven, from the waters deep to the cosmic skyward reach, enjoys intimacy. Intimacy’s root lies in tension. The whole fabric of reality is woven of tension. Yet tension originates pain, so pain stems from tension and not opposition, not conflict, not hate, and not even psychological anxiety. The root spark of pain lies in the tension-like nature that each bears with every other and all. And that is why pain and intimacy come paired in life. Yet it is also why we confound intimacy with the false comforts we derive from unnecessary pain, and why we try so hard to make needless suffering have more reality than it can ever bear. Listen, I beg you, I do not speak of pain in sentimental terms. Primordial pain, tension is not yours or mine. If you misread these words, you will introduce complicity in the whole dastardly affair I seek to remedy. You will misperceive my being entire, my heart, my stance, my understanding, my meaning, my act. Do not read sentimentality into these words and use them to slink back into sympathetic commiseration. Pain cannot be evaded in life because life is the tension that draws things together into intimacy by holding them apart in singular distinction. Yet facing this reality does not entail masochistically assuming every order of pain or unduly pitying myself as a suffering being. I mean far less when I speak of pain than you may realize. I mean simply this: Pain is. Or even less: There is life. And now . . .
Let me tell you of intimacy with the cat . . .
Once, when I was very young, my black cat came for a nighttime visitation. He slipped stealthily upon my bed, turned about, made a nest, and lay down peacefully to rest. Once upon a time, all the world was set right during the night. My cat slept and I was transported, as if riding a flying carpet, to a magical loving land where the black cat slept and love’s intimacy enveloped us. The tension of touching one another from afar was poignantly real, for my cat lay at the foot of the bed, far, far away from hand and head, yet intimacy spread like a blanket from foot to head of the bed. Stillness attuned one poised heart to another and warmth radiated between. All was fine and well, better than words can say until . . . a tremendous wave of sympathy overtook me. My heart felt like it was going to burst; I couldn’t stand it. So on the verge of tears, I bolted upright, lurched forward, and in one snap instant reached out to clutch my cat tight to my breast. So overwhelming was love, I wanted it all mine! What was missing? When did the feeling of lack well up, why, oh why did I do it? Sad came the moment when black cat evaded my grabby hands and leaped from my bed. Yes, the tension held such intensity that all of a sudden and without cause I broke the tension-filled pause. Not content to touch from afar, I preyed on the intimacy granted and made my move as if to get “more,” as if there were something greater to be had, as if love were something that could be kept. I sought to make the cat moment mine and so the cat left my predation far, far behind. I fell from the grace of intimacy’s sustaining tension. What overflowed, was it love or greed? Did I start to do, get, have, and keep rather than abide in intimacy? Certainly. Where the agency of “me” stops, bearing unveils itself and we hold into its dynamic, moving sway. Bearing abides when I let be. Sympathy, however great, cannot ground the movement of bearing, though it can accompany it. When we believe we are nothing other than our momentary sympathy, feeling baits us into confusion. We confound bearing with getting, attending to what “can be” with predation upon what “is not to be,” and seek to possess others out of supposed “depth of feeling” rather than release things unto accord with themselves out of true care. Appropriative moves are moves of want and claim and above all indulgence; they seek to make the moment grant more than it “is”— vibrantly, resonantly, brilliantly. How can the quality of intimacy be subject to more? It is an intensity. 270
I
ntimacy and Bearing
It can be received and borne upon consent not to impede or violate it. Intimacy comes on pain of the lived requirement that I refuse all appropriative gestures and cultivate attentiveness instead. What admits and carries me into intimacy’s sway is intensification of that special passion, willingness to keep my self-serving want of “doing” held back in creative restraint. And not make any false move that would either buckle under or snap free of the tension itself.
I
I
The instant I identify with “me” and my “want,” I slip out of pause and fancy myself the one who generates and sustains love’s flame, yet the selfserving desire lurking in the sympathy I “have” and “feel” infects intimacy with disease. I covet my own recognition at the heart of shared sympathies and miseries. That is why I seek approbation. When, instead, I abide receptively in that deep pause where all of life’s breathing pulse can be sensed and felt, then, behold, the heart opens and transforms, renounces all appropriative moves. With vigilance and care, I am held safely within the bounds of intimacy and, while it can unfold and blossom, intimacy reigns complete unto itself no matter how limited or fleeting the time or shape of its expression. Intensity, in that it lies at the heart of reality, graces us even as the forms and shapes within which it finds manifest expression come and go. To cling to a shape and manipulate what “can be” violates intimacy; it kills off the seed of hidden intensity promised as this moment’s mysterious gift. It is to condescend to the creative shaping that alone endures beyond any shape of events and things that come. Receptivity, yes, receptivity releases me unto intimacy’s midwifery. We stand so far removed from life’s depth that we hardly notice our interminable and hideous predation. A marvelous depth of intimacy awaits us! A Great Change of Heart! We cry and suffer, we shake in our boots, tears well up, but when will pity cease so that we may hold back in loving restraint and risk intimacy?
I
I
f, as protest in felt innocence, wanted in my deepest heart to love, then would not take care in attentiveness to preserve what is granted and not prey upon the real?
Bear with me a bit longer . . .
There thrives, beneath the time-worn shroud of dusty habit, a marked lack of affect that pawns itself off for the true and living “I am.” Hear this! “Bearing with” grows in “bearing with.”
I
Pain and ntimacy
271
he youthful promise of intense living finds intensity fulfilling. Where did the time go when believed in the Land Where Heart Grows? Beneath the lameness we feel, buried under loneliness’s cloak of sadness, disbelief suckles false comfort out of self-protectiveness. Yet by intensification in naked living we gain the affirmation we seek that the real existence of all things touches upon the real existence of the self. Alone yet “with,” touchingly we abide! I
T
My very being can intensify. The manifestation of “I” can become more intensive—more real, more present, more pure, more radiant. “More” poorly conveys intensity, so do not mishear my word. “More real” means less cloudy, less impure, less obscure, in a word, less obstructed by extraneous concern, sentiments and thoughts, anxieties and moods, that taint and color, weigh me down and impede vital presencing. “I” can be made fuller, richer, more opened in wondrous blossoming, an ever freer intensity and no mere psycho-physical entity chained to natural laws and dulled senses. Intensive growth into the unobstructed wellspring of spirit out of which the self bodes forth obtains coterminously as deliverance ever more intensively into the heart of reality. Intimacy simply becomes more intensively real as I enter more profoundly into the weave that comprises reality. Does this not console? Lay the anxious compulsion to have and get to rest and stop exhausting yourself. A great vast intimacy binds together all that lives and thrives and awaits your birth, awakening, and discovery . . . Won’t you and I give up shame, renounce comfort, and come out of hiding?
Ultimately, it’s not quantity of pain we fear but intensity. Although we want it, intensity terrifies us. Pain’s essence inheres in intensity and not in quantity. Life expands our intensive reach and brings us thereby to grow vast senses, to see the heart and core of things, to taste their being, feel their movement, hear their resonance, and touch the silent core out of which they move, arise, and swing. Hardly can we imagine the intensity with which things impart their wisdom and exert unaffected influence. Only a hearty, sober stance can enable one to bear such intensity, receive things without shield or defense, and refuse to turn it all self-centeredly back upon “me” to beg for something different when the glory’s already given. Distinguish, then, between the cry of delight and the instantaneous shriek when I break loose and abdicate—for no reason and without cause—the whole wide web of intimate Life that sustains me in the bearing. ntimacy and Bearing
I
272
T
I
T
A thick cloud lays its blanket across the village, yet the mountain peak rises high above, clear and distinct. he mountain’s solidity ceaselessly encourages sobriety. How can bear it? A lesson relentlessly and yet unobtrusively driven home, by morning light, at high noon, at dusk, and even while cloaked in darkness throughout the night. he sunset’s precious descent delivers unbearable intensity. What does the sunset incessantly teach, independent of acknowledgment or recognition—that forms come and go, but the shaping defies all grasp?
he cat harbors no fickleness and does not betray its wildness. he starving cat, the loveless cat, the housecat, the tomcat, the tortured cat, all, in the face of whatever travail surrounds them, retain an immaculate pause. How do they bear all things and never become broken the way a dog can and never let themselves be knocked out of pause and sober attunement? T
T
T
he mountain flower’s fragile white petals withstand the harsh wind, the unearthly cold of night, the burning sun of summer. How does it bear? Whence derives its strength?
There is no wiggle room in Life’s intimate web for the moodiness born of self-pity. Repel the want of taking what occurs as something that “happens to me” rather than something that bids me welcome it and bears me along to and within intimacy. My cat did not betray me, but rather I, it. The sunset does not deceive, though I can want it to give an order of comfort it cannot deliver; the mountain does not abandon me, though I can abandon it. And the cat, the cat taught me the difference between intimacy and greed, sobriety and sympathy’s shadowy possessiveness. Life cannot sustain me in the tense reality of bearing if I induce a miscarriage of the birth of me into reality and of reality into me. Intimacy has its pain. The tension may not be comfortable, yet whoever said that comfort provides consolation rather than the very tension of the real?
What, I wonder, is the mystery of pain’s consolation?
Pain and ntimacy
I
Did you forget? We are to let pain impart its wisdom to us. 273
Pain plays a decisive role in Life’s labor to foster growth of heart. It’s not simply the superior intelligence of Life’s weaning-governance that teaches us to distinguish the unreal from the real. Pain conveys the real by conveying us into reality and conveying reality into us. The mystery of pain teaches what is real if we let it do its labor. Why would one fear intensity if it were not the essence of pain? Why should one prefer the horrific pain of lonely shame to that of intensification, unless, of course, one confounded shame with the consolation of coming to know the real? The pain of birth and growth, the pain of transformation and the pain of bearing could not console us if they did not deliver us to the real and enable us to disabuse ourselves in immeasurable relief of all unnecessary and unbearable suffering. We find consolation in awakening to the real. And yet, since pain yokes us to the real and the real to us, we must also say that the real would not be real to us save on pain of its labor to transform and deliver us to intensive living. Wisdom could not impart its truths to me and occasion my very transubstantiation if Life did not touch all that I take for granted as the very fundament of me. Inevitably life brings me up short and I find myself wanting, however much I hate to be shown wanting. For I would never come to trust divinity’s loving care and allow my whole center of gravity to take root in trust rather than agency were it not that Life aims to show me how untrustworthy I am in the lead. The Father who governs over the when and how of things must show me that all my initiatives to be the source of loving care break down on the harsh judgment by which I measure others against my pained antipathy to relinquish attachment. Yet Life could not console me—when it steals my tale of woe and discloses how unnecessarily pained I am in suffering a loneliness born of agency—if this, the essential pain in bearing witness to my truth, did not convey the real to me and me to the real. Pain, like the intense sunshine of Andalucia, penetrates bone and marrow. Not all things hold the power to penetrate so deeply into our being. Not all things can exercise the gentle strength to release our jealous hold on all to which we cling and all we take ourselves to be.
E
Does word alone share this power with pain in equal if not greater measure? ven a soft word, a quiet word spoken from depth of heart can melt away attachment and false sympathy. Word can dispel an age-old hatred in a precious moment’s time. ntimacy and Bearing
I
274
Pain has this virtue, that it penetrates bone and marrow. Without this virtue, Life’s lessons would touch only our minds and not our hearts, for pain would not carry the iconic power that lets the real imprint itself on our soul, body, and heart. We know the difference between truth and untruth because pain imparts the false and thereby the real to us. There is no necessary pain involved in ascending upon an illusory wish. But the fall hurts. Dreaming expectancy does not seem painful in itself. But collision injures us. There would be no pain of staying in the womb forever if our own intuitive awareness did not prevent it and lead consciousness to press for awakening. Keeping ourselves locked beyond our time in womblike refuges of formation and illusory wish induces added pain—unnecessarily. Awakening entails necessary pain, it’s true. Reaching toward a new level of understanding will inevitably have its pain, for I must be introduced to a new order of tension previously unknown to me. Yet this order of pain enriches me and not masochistically as one who feels herself to be a poor sufferer buckling under a mountain of duress. The pain of spiritual growth involves tension—bearing must bear up under something or it would not be bearing. Bearing finds its mate in the tension of growing stepwise into each new order of intensity that Life seeks to deliver me. Bearing enlivens and breathes life into us, for tension is no worldly pressure nor does it produce anxiety. It is simply the real. And the real fortifies us. Intensity is spirit’s food. Pain awakens and counsels me. We should be ever wary of our unguarded desire to appropriate pain as “ours” and take comfort in the unnecessary. For then we could never enter into dialogue with pain’s essential virtue to enliven and awaken and fortify us on the meat of the real. Pain claims us because we are destined for intimacy. That accounts for why we cannot sever ourselves from pain, however much we can engender unrequired or even imaginary forms of suffering. I bring unnecessary pain into existence whenever I try to tear myself free from growth’s intensification, whenever I rush ahead into untimely things, and whenever I adopt a vain fancy and prey upon what is granted. Each attempt to escape the pain that conveys the real succeeds only in making me pained over pain. Yet beneath the poisonous additive, there happily remains the thing that pains me in reality. And this, if I would attend for one sober moment to letting the matter come to surface, would work healing. How much suffering must I bear before I will heal? It depends not on my biological organism or my psychic limits but rather
I
Pain and ntimacy
275
on how dearly I hold to the wound to comfort me in the false distinctions of “sympathetic love.” Fortunate, we are in pain. For the unnecessary additive of suffering pain over what pains works a special corrosive effect. It zaps us of energy, it drains and depletes us. One exhausted day, if I am willing, I may just let go and see the absurdity of clinging to pain as if my resistance could do anything other than make pain’s labor unduly difficult though finally I must fail to conquer it. Pain, by virtue of its power to convey the real, is stronger than I. We fear intimacy because we fear pain. Yet pain, by virtue of its power to penetrate bone and marrow, can heal equally as it can wound.
Pain, like water, holds a most gentle power; even where it cannot pierce straight through the fortress of hardening, pain can make the heart slowly dissolve its rigidity. Pain, like the earth, can weigh on us so heavily that we begin to seek another way toward relief. Pain, like the wind that enters all places, passes through the walls of the fortress to breathe a little want of life into me.
The essential pain of intimacy is like a Light whose burning intensity mysteriously does not scorch. Intensity harms us only when we rush headlong to covet it and get burned. Pain can wound equally when taken too quickly as evaded. But when taken in the precise measure required by Life’s governance, it strengthens and brightens. Pain loosens our hold on the outworn and unnecessary, and draws us into the radiant fire of intensity. That is its task. Intimacy draws us nearer than near to one another on pain of holding ourselves back from making any kind of predatory move or possessive act. I can know intimacy if and only if I am willing to hold back and renounce all cramps of soul to have and get, all itchy attempts of agency to dominate, every little rationale that leads to self-centered assertion, all temptations to take things personally in the wrong way, and all attempts to shield myself inwardly from pain. Holding back proves a vigorous but negative activity; I must attentively hold watch and renounce every move, self-protective and predatory, that will interfere with intimacy. For I do not invent intimacy; intimacy avails itself to me. Rather than suffer the misguided belief that I create love by the quantity and grandness of sympathy I feel, I must let it flower, cultivate it for the garden that it is and not pretend I own, make, or invent its possibilities. In holding back from ntimacy and Bearing
I
276
every vain imagining and the predation such vanity breeds, I am borne into intimacy and I bear for my part the tension of being simultaneously near and far, unimaginably close enough to touch yet neither predatory nor possessive, wondrously far enough to enjoy the vista of witnessing another’s truth yet not walled up in isolation or lost in a horrific abyss where I can only scream out for want of life feeling, the very feeling born in and of bearing.
I
f you want to touch, go to the root where you already abide in the bearing-tension with all things.
Bearing has its pain. Bearing “is” and thus it unfolds within the essence of pain; it connects all beings, couples all pairs, joins us to the real, draws us into intensity. It gives birth to the immeasurable joy of meeting that which is simply real. Tears of healing acknowledge this joy even as they flow. There is nothing more showered with relief than waking up from falsity and lonely despair, however painful. The real makes it bearable. Joy flows from gratitude and my heart grows capable of sorrowing without pity for all the lonely beings who are lost to Life’s profound intimacy and find no consolation in comforting their wounds.
I
Pain and ntimacy
277
nineteen
If I would journey to the Land Where Heart Grows, what step would Life require of me? Let us look at shame and humility. We are set up by Life to win the seed of the heart’s true blossoming! And yet we persist in measuring the Father of Providence by our felt comfort. We insist that a true love would approve us as we are, not seek to snatch false innocence from us. Why do we feel so ashamed to have untruth brought to light if it prepares the simple step we must take in order to grow in truth? I am set up, yes, to win heart on pain of witnessing to the untruth of myself so that I may renounce it and grow radiant in truthful living. Life’s mirror brings all things equally to light and exercises no preferential love to save us from facing an unhappy untruth when it is time to grow out of it.
One Step . . . along the Way
T
Oh, the horror of it! Life wants to expose my weaknesses and faults, put them on display for all to see. he Father seems so cruel. Why can’t he exercise a little pity and let me hide my sin? He’s so unfeeling, so lacking in, well, sympathy. Who can trust such a stoic Father?
I fear . . . I mean I harbor a premonition that the Father sets me up for
a little public humiliation? Ouch, the prick stings.
We can imagine nothing less comfortable than humiliation. Yet psychic comfort does not provide the measure by which governance sets us up. It’s not the proper care to have. It’s an anxious care and a false measure of the real and the good. Yet that’s no warrant for imputing cruel indifference to Life’s fatherly governance. I can humiliate myself all by myself by refusing to stand in humility on the simple truth, even to own up the truth of my untruth. There is a way to pass through life ready for what hides in the preconscious to come to light and not repudiate it. It’s not shameful to stand naked, if I can name my untruth without justification and cease dressing it up in a glamorous claim to rightful vindication.
I
T
I
I
I
I
grow a little feverish when sense impending humiliation. beg the Father to save me from public exposure. entertain the wee doubt that a compassionate Father would let me bear witness to my untruth in secrecy. And—this is what really pricks—wouldn’t love let me see untruth when I say I am ready, when feel prepared, and not when some unexpected event threatens to expose me? Doesn’t He know that am a woman and have my shame? he torture of it. worry that the Father wants to tear my clothes off, humiliate, and debase me. t pitches me into a frightful fever. I
I
Yet there may come a time when I am to suffer public humiliation, not for the sake of being humiliated. No, public humiliation satisfies no cruel punishment from beyond. More often than not, humiliation issues as a side effect of people’s unwillingness to meet humility with forgiveness. Though it could arrive as timely dispensation, I can’t deny it. Yet humiliation is a risk, you might say, that Providence runs, for the sake of cultivating humility in me. I may not be saved from humiliation when I renounce the falseness of taking my own comfort as ultimate measure for my actions and my deserts. The thought of it pricks.
I
These pride-filled sentiments reflect how contorted we are, how in need of being turned around and transformed, bottom to top, in our very sentiments and feelings. We’d rather hide behind false shame than let the seed of the true heart’s blossom grow under light and water and nourishment, if growth entails lifting our dark confusions to light of day. Through what narrow pass must I venture, if not through shame? We feel set up for “exposure” yet the very word “exposure” is tainted by a prejudicial attunement to life, self, and others. However much Life’s timely care prepares us, no amount of preparation ever makes us feel ready to take the next step. Life sets us up, yet . . . we alone can decide not to withhold vulnerability and nakedness so that our human fragility may touch upon one another in sweet, sweet intimacy.
Disclosure and Intimacy
Shame and self-loathing come paired in life because hiddenness reduplicates in us. To hide inwardly and not just outwardly takes a violent act of self-suppression. We squelch the manifestation of truth and untruth in
One Step . . . along the Way
279
its dynamic revelation. Truth and untruth are living realities that can only be communicated operatively and indirectly. They cannot be “had” once and for all but must be disclosed. For this reason, intimacy with self, just like intimacy with others, comprises a living task. The living truth cannot be reduced to who a person has been in the past. One must apprehend the inward movement, the manner of bearing, that carries forth and reveals her act in the living present. The same holds true of self. A strange and most uncanny problem confronts us in the quest for intimacy: the present revelation of my self can be eclipsed in the very act. We learn early in life that, even when someone knows everything about our natural and routine tendencies, emptiness and loneliness can nevertheless stretch wide between us. While that lack often impels us to seek mutual understanding, here too one cannot avoid the difficulty that inwardness communicates itself indirectly or disclosively. When I want to tell another about my “inner world” as if my selfhood can be known merely through exchange, I report about many honest things—my patterns of thought, old insights gained, past truths apprehended—yet my report proves secondhand whenever the living revelation of self remains eclipsed in the very mode of communication. Most of us are not prepared to face the difficulty that direct forms of emotional bonding and mutual exchange cannot abate loneliness. Neither intimacy with self nor with another unfolds save we pass through the field of disclosure. If I am absent to others, this is because I am absent to truth’s living disclosure as it is refracted in the moment and the manner of my speaking. If I am lonely because I have fallen out of accord with inward willingness to become transparent to myself in the living, then it follows as a matter of course that no amount of getting others to join me for tea or find happy agreement about this and that world crisis will grant intimacy. Loneliness draws terribly near as we move far away from inwardness. Forgoing disclosure proves the childish safety we all seem to hold dear. Yet this safety yields the most vacant neglect of self-care, for it deprives me of apprehending whether there is accord or discord in my self-presencing. I can protest, “I was never jealous of J.” But if I hold present to my own speaking and jealousy reveals its presence in my heart, then alone will the discord be made transparent between what I am saying and how I “am.” To deprive ourselves of living apprehension of self, even in discordant untruth, is to deny ourselves loving care. We cannot renounce weakness
ntimacy and Bearing
I
280
and grow strength, shed ugliness and gain beauty, save by revelation. True light heals. What we ordinarily experience as shame actually amounts to false shame. We confound defense against living truth with self-care. We experience our defensive acts as if they constituted works of self-love, as if shielding myself from Life’s power of refraction would “save” me from the “humiliation” of living openly in accord with myself. Disclosure has its universal sway; it cannot be avoided. It refracts me to myself equally as it “exposes” me to others. All sentiments that support us in perpetually living out of reactive and guarded behavior confound humiliation with humility. Whoever believes there is no shame in facing an untruth without falsification would lay down her shield. Yet we feel more ashamed of the living truth and untruth of ourselves than of the harms we generate by false shame. Worse still, false shame prevents us from knowing true shame. Yes, we lack right affect. For we are not ashamed of the horrifying inevitability that we ward off true appeals from others when we refuse Life’s refraction, appeals that can only make themselves known on the living Field of Disclosure. There is true shame. It doesn’t devolve into masochistic self-loathing but suffers humbly for the evils I commit, however unwittingly. Things exist of which I should be ashamed, and a decisive inability to be genuinely ashamed marks the dearth of affect I suffer in self-attachment. Hardly do we recognize that we indulge self-pity in our false shame but instead squirm when true shame draws uncomfortably near. Intimacy has its price: I am to renounce false shame and cease covering myself up. Constantly we whisper to ourselves the sham mantra that we can only protect ourselves from this or that eventuality by warding off exposure to Light. Truly nakedness does not terrify in itself but simply because we can’t control when and how we are disclosed. The sobering light of truth heals. However painful, sobriety dries up the teary well of pity and firms one up for clarified living. Why do we suspect the Father of cold indifference? Release from emotional confusion yields neither abstraction nor stoicism. By asking us to shed our clothing and armor, the Father delivers us to inhere “in” living intimacy with all beings. Awakening to genuine shame dissolves the indifference born of self-pity’s false shame. It is defense of the pitiful me-centered perspective, and not the Father, that produces insensitivity to the suffering of others.
One Step . . . along the Way
281
The False Move, the Little Misstep
False shame and self-pity cannot exercise creative restraint and halt the defensive parry, their reactive guardian. Their “glory” rests upon felt “right-ness” and the supposed “radiance” of standing on high in haughty condescension. If only we could gain the affect to be repulsed by false shame and laugh at our most coveted bedfellow, self-pity! False shame prostitutes itself for the arrogant feeling of quick victory. It would rather kill off genuine affect in another than grow sensitivity. It wants to pull the other down to its own level of ugly emotion just to prove “she is no better than me.” And pity, pity’s not willing to grow beyond itself to touch upon the reality of others. Shouldn’t we cease vindicating false shame and pity because they parade as “normal” feelings and stop assuaging these sentiments in ourselves? Self-protection breeds self-loathing because it blocks spontaneous trust in the unpredictability of self-disclosure. False shame irrupts in a momentary lapse. I become self-conscious; I lapse into an artificial relation to self that allows the worm of distrust to infect my self-relation with extraneous doubt. I worry that this one little movement, human as it is, which defines and governs my current act cannot suffice but must instead be violently hidden from view. In a snap instant, false shame overshadows spontaneous presencing, I grow self-entangled and choke on secondguessing myself. Yet what matters is loss of self-trust and not whether this one act arises from confused motives and distorted perceptions. I cannot even allow myself to see the truth and untruth if I do not, in simple humility, let the act come forward as a want for the asking. And not, rather, an act already betrayed because it dons false shame’s arrogant shield and demands sanction. In false shame, I puff myself up on pride by declining to stand on the little truth that presses to disclose itself, here and now. I deprive myself and others of its disclosure, suppress and cover over that which alone could sustain me, even amid public humiliation, as a person endowed with dignity. Beneath bravado and pointing fingers, beneath hurtful accusations and want of affirmation, there lies always, if I am honest with myself, just one little thing on which I rest in a given moment. It could be any true thing from the great to the small. Yet small it always appears, too vulnerable for the world to accept, too childlike for adults to respect, too devoid of haughtiness and with a voice so meek that the world might not heed. Still, I have no other (un)truth save the little human thing that presses to ntimacy and Bearing
I
282
heard a dream whisper on the West wind, heard its beckoning promise that in the Land Where Heart Grows Pure, all want that fills me with unbearable pain could give way to sanction, timely sanction. I
I
come forth. I cannot even see whether it is misguided or silly, whether I should follow it or give it up, save it come to light. Without gumption to risk its disclosure, I cannot give myself and all the world a chance. Hidden beneath this terrible conflict and all the large mental constructions we paint, there lies a finite truth: I just wanted you to do this for me. There could be, in glorified dignity, the influx of the infinite in the act: “Behold, a simple human being appeals to you for human response.” Between want and standing in truth lies self-reception. If I were to admit to myself that I just plain want, then I would have to relinquish the pride of being right, for in that very admission I both receive myself and set the other free by realizing that I cannot coerce her to satisfy my wish. In humility, I can ask vulnerably as a finite person and not clothe the demand in justified true complaint and righteous indignation. And if my asking proves misguided or unjust, then we shall both see it and laugh, laugh, laugh. What wondrous day when we can laugh and I can set aside false want.
Were I to live true, what great possibility could there be? Maybe, just maybe my living in truth might move the other to meet me in intimacy. Maybe I could wait patiently filled with hope on pain of letting truth stand bare and trust into the mystery of its unaffected, touching reach.
Please, will you just give me a little tenderness? Mother tells me, over and again, speak gentle words to me. Love would only show its face as tenderness; it would never, it could never arrive the way you do, dressed up in quiet firmness. No, I will never believe that you love me until you show me tenderness. Does my mother want tenderness? She incessantly begs me to pet her self-pity, her negative sinking, her venomous judgments (ostensibly balanced) of her friends. Does she want tenderness or false approbation, reception of her true possibility or complicity in her self-hatred and petty cruelty toward others? Who speaks from mother’s mouth when she pleads with me? Are there two who speak, the prideful one who wants to be justified and the fragile child who knows no living model of tenderness and cannot apprehend love when it comes bidding?
One Step . . . along the Way
283
Once upon a time joined mother on a nature outing. As silence and beauty enveloped us, she grew agitated rather than calm. Her load of bothersome “stuff ” prevented her from being delivered into silence. t was as if, for fear of seeing herself, she resisted silence’s gentle labor by working up story after story, with no pause for breath, not one tiny break, just incessant chatter poured from her self-feeling about how badly so and so treats her. On and on she droned as if from a bottomless well. stranged from life’s field, she began to grow exhausted, though for all her exhaustion she proved staunchly willful of intent, defied exhaustion from bringing her to halt, and bled endlessly on. ot once did she note the cactus blossom, hear the bird cheep, or resonate with desert life. n fact she grew strangely pestered for want of parallel agitation from me, as though she long began to wonder whether even had any affect, why did not get worked up? Who knows what passed in her inner dialogue though truly, tell you, listened and waited for the core thing to reveal itself. hen the approach of a noisy group halted her speech. After the distraction, she gazed back at me and my heart spoke in tender empathy, “ can see that you are in pain.” So soft was the tone, so encouraging. But mother volatilized, went insane. She hurtled terrible words at me, shouted me down in public before a whole group of people, chased after me as fled, relentlessly and with full might. think she wanted me to collapse in a huddle of shame as if were a dirty, smelly, putrefying thing that tainted her and the surround. At last she screamed, “not here, not in this place, not at this time.” Sadly realized she felt exposed, though she had no problem “exposing me” even for what am not. hen, she drove in mad fury right off the road. I
ntimacy and Bearing
I
284
T
I
I
I
I
I
T
I
I
I
I
I
N
E
I
I
Mother is mixed up in want and feeling; pride and pity impose a barrier between her and me. You know, I do believe, I believe with all my heart that mother wants a tender little reception, and yet she hides the simplicity of true want and bombards me with all variety of horrible “stuff ” that rolls round her head and gluts her feeling life. Does she realize that she will only apprehend tenderness in others if she grows into tenderness herself ?
We’re all mixed up; we lack right affect. We’d rather destroy another when we feel nakedly exposed than rejoice in the reception we have been given. So we condescend to accept the small yet true when it comes. Instead we cause big public scenes of humiliation, all for want of genuine shame. And in case you think mother’s reaction was warranted because I was not discreet, let me ask you a question:
I
s there ever any time and place where compassion is not welcome or needed?
When compassion’s strength shows firmness devoid of harsh judgment, extends willingness to receive without fear of being tainted by others, speaks a gentle voice that does not shout, why do we not receive it, the very tenderness for which we petition in never-ending mantras? Many are the mothers who lack the quiet firmness of heart that lets tenderness grow. Many the daughters who carry the seed confusion of pity with love inside and stand in danger of passing it on to their children. Is this what we are so terrified to see?
Harsh Judgment and Complacency, Joined at the Hip Hidden within false shame and self-pity lies violence. The violent face of harsh judgment. Yet shame forbids me take notice and indulges me to believe it more important that everyone extend great pity toward me than see the violence my shame breeds. God forbid, I should give my shame up. Pity is a staunch warrior; it finds its last defense. All of us, who have not disabused ourselves of false shame and learned to embrace Providence’s timeless and unceasing labor to set us up to see an unpleasant untruth, feel more shame about the (un)truth of ourselves than the violent acts we make to prevent others from witnessing it. We are not, in false shame, made innocent. In protecting the (un)truth from coming to light, we often go so far as to abhor another’s vulnerability. Until it suffices to stand naked under the open sky for the earth’s vast prairie to see the admixture of my preconscious want of new growth and the shadowy tales of woe that hold back the seed, I shall stomp through the lily patch of my own and everyone else’s tender chance. Into what do I fall when, out of nowhere and without cause, I won’t let the impetus to grow beyond my current level of being display itself for all to witness? Is it not self-division? I let the sleeping monster of selfjudgment irrupt and lord over me; I split in two, like mother, caught
One Step . . . along the Way
285
between the harsh judge and the submissive one who cowers beneath its demeaning whip. Have you never wondered why you need a whipping boy, a man, a child, the very Father of Life, a scapegoat on whom to unload all that harsh negativity and judgment? Pause, please, witness the judge inside prior to externalizing it reactively. How do we know that we’re upside down and turned about? Harshness teaches us so with its faulty defense. In harshness we entertain the lie that vulnerability needs protection, when in truth vulnerability’s the one thing most needed. In the name of that lie, we marshal harsh judgment as a weapon against all forces, human and providential, that “threaten” to make us vulnerable or soft, as if Life were nothing more than a shameless and evil exposer. At root the supposition that we are right to deny others their untamed power to produce inward affect proves powerfully indiscriminate. Defensive self-protectiveness wards off good and evil alike, refuses the timely, and ushers in the destructiveness of the untimely. Ironically, the embattled attitude that underlies hardening of heart prostitutes itself to the feeling that comfort provides a measure for “good and evil,” for who to receive and who to reject. Its dearth of right appreciation keeps it bound to sentiments and perceptions so falsely discriminate as to be devoid of magnanimity, judiciousness, and compassion. What makes me uncomfortable and squeamish seems evil to the heart dulled and obscured by such a spiritually juvenile attitude, at once indiscriminate and entirely prejudiced. An unsound measure does pity’s preferential feeling for “me” hold up as a yardstick for evaluating each and every thing, this, the monstrous pride of complacency and shame. When we take the experiential and psychological “me-self ”; that is to say, when we take “our” pain as a measure, we move through life without right affect or right apprehension and doom ourselves to grow increasingly small-minded and petty, unwilling to give others their due, but all too willing to make others suffer just a little bit more than their lives deliver. It may fall within my power to prevent this little irritation or that big loss; I could but will not save another from it. Much, there is, that I can pawn off on “Life” as if it were not my doing, as if I didn’t have a role to play. Just as we can take another’s rightful suffering away from her, so too can we dump added cargo onto the other when life challenges her. Beneath all the upside down feelings and hardened acts lies the cruelty of harsh measure I employ, for I laugh not with sardonic, not by the profound attunement ntimacy and Bearing
I
286
that sounds out compassion but snidely when I applaud the suffering of another as if she deserved punishment, as if the measure for Life’s “poetic justice” would lie in “redeeming” all that is base, confounded, tyrannical, hard, and evil in me. As if I am proven right after all in vainglory. Did I ever pause to wonder in my feverish dreams whether I confound vindication with redemption? Only one solution for the nightmares I produce can be found: confess, truly and fully, that I lack a measure for my suffering and for the suffering of every other person’s redemption. How else can the judge die and the harshness be laid to rest? How else can I come to sense, perceive, and feel, rather than erect a remorseless and unyielding judge as if it were Life’s divine measure? When will I let myself be shown the sad truth that I have neglected to live vulnerably open to others and to receive their vulnerability in kind. How will I come to understand that Life’s disclosure wants not for tenderness . . . how can I trust that I am not harshly judged but mercifully asked to change, to renounce appeal to the judge, bid pity and shame good-bye, and drop the lie that works like a termite to produce mountains of damage, the little lie that sympathy holds ample passion for love; and comfort, sound measure for genuine intimacy.
We Lack a Measure for Redemptive Suffering It’s hard to fathom that comfort and harshness walk hand in hand like lovers down the lane. The wonder of it astonishes. Comfort is the mate of harshness. The judge irrupts for want of placing myself under true measure, not a measure that any person or any humanly invented world fashions, but the simple measure that the Mother and Father embody in holding forth for me to consent to grow rich in affect and gain a proper sense of shame. There holds forth the glorious promise of who I “could be” if I would give up the split twins, the desire to judge and the comfort behind which I hide in complacency. Hidden within shame lies a false authority with its childish want of approbation that must be renounced if I am ever to trust in the Father’s merciful approach to my transformation, His way of leading me to live in the sobering light of truth. The earthly maternal legacy, what did it teach, if not to prize comfort over labor? “Don’t put me through this, don’t expose me, don’t bring me forth into the Light of True Measure!” Would it be so horrible to be liberated from the false judge of harshness and come under the loving care of the Father who will not lie to us and yet shows us how to be merciful
One Step . . . along the Way
287
and patient toward ourselves? For want of ease, we give ourselves and other women that false security blanket, that most deceiving of comforts, indiscriminate approbation of all that is lowly in us, all that must die away, all that keeps us blind and heavy, darkened with ugliness, embroiled in negativity and most of all suffering from a profound lack of trust that we can be made to shine and radiate. False shame collides in the end on its greater lethargy toward itself with its mate, shocking resilience to proper shame and affect toward others. And pity, that irradiant and flawed stone of heart, clothes shame in feelings of righteous justification as if all the world is evil but never me. Self-pity excuses harshness, treats it as a minor aberration in an otherwise clean heart rather than a dearth of rectified affect that we must labor to remedy. Pity dulls the senses, accommodates our feeling to what, deep down, in purity of heart, originally repulses.
I
Did harshness once affect me, a wee spirit, when was a child? “Once” in the land of forgotten dreams beyond time and history, beyond the womb of family and culture, did harshness bid me adopt a different bearing?
Where are the tears now? Can you cry a tear for your own complicity in evil? Deeper, much deeper than false shame, lies the truth that the defensive parry is wholly unnecessary. Disordered feelings dissipate quickly once I see that defense need not take years of therapy to overcome. Because symptomatic of willed defiance of Life’s transformative labor, and no habit at root, it can be renounced on the spot. Deep, in a deepness without human measure, there lies the Mother’s nocturnal preparation in our dreams for us to go forth and face the next truth the Father will lift up from the preconscious into light of day. Deep down, we each must decide the momentous thing: Will I accept the requirement? Certainly the small requirement never to interfere with the next step, never to get ahead either, but to let the step come and take it. Yet at base of each small step I am asked to accept the underlying current of life as a whole, that, for better or worse, I inherit the mother’s confounded genealogical legacy and must learn to be divested of its faulty imprint. Life is embodied. Of the mother I came forth and this peculiar imprinting fell to me. For better or worse, the yoke has been laid upon me of this life set-up. But . . . but I who abhor shame find it uncomfortable to ntimacy and Bearing
I
288
feel I am asked, before all the world and the heavenly skyward reach, to accept a guilt more basic than any single act I have done. There is redemptive suffering. However unjust my set-up seems, it may not prove, in the Land of True Measure, so very unjust after all. There is a softer, more clarified light, a strange intelligence of heart in whose radiance my life finds its sense and sensibility. If only I would believe I need to be measured by an otherworldly measure. Like all the rest, I too have defensively driven off the meek without notice, the way a tyrant quashes a slave like a fly and never once feels the sting of conscience. Forever bound, once and a day, I shall remain, to defensive parries and conflict, until I decide: Will I carry on the preconscious legacy of self-protectiveness from time immemorial with all the shameful hiding and lovelessness it breeds; or will I bear the old guilt, rise above the stream, let harshness die and give way to new growth?
Loneliness and Sensitivity Loneliness stems from want of intensity and intensity’s lovely offspring, sensitivity. Growth in solitude eclipses loneliness and funds true sensing. It opens the chamber inside that lets us hear the music of others with their emergent song. It releases us to true sociality, so we may commune in joyous truth with one another. Solitude, though it removes us from fitful want, stands not opposed to engagement. Transcendence of the worldly and interpersonal standpoint does not annul human sociality but funds genuine intimacy. Solitude is inimical solely to immersion; that is, to collapse into sunken emotions and habitual complacency, to conventions and judgments, to drama and violence, but never to timely and pristine engagement. Loneliness is a fierce warrior who hunts me down so that I may die to self-affliction, become reborn and find resurrection in a new and joyous embodiment. Every attempt to evade this warrior gives rise to a lost heart, sunk in pit-filled heartache, perpetually confused, without eyes and ears, nose and tongue, speech or a true body. Stand or flee, it’s up to me to decide. Loneliness evinces privation: lack of proper affect, lack of tender sensitivity. How can the intimacy for which I yearn so dearly like the breaking of bread come to me if people, in the essential simplicity of their being, cannot touch or move me? How can intimacy enter where I hide, behind a walled-up heart filled with pain and misunderstanding? How can I ever become sensitive when all I can feel is “woe unto me”?
One Step . . . along the Way
289
Loneliness is a clandestine suitor we fail to take seriously when we dress it up in a shawl of pity for self and others. Intimacy can arise only where I abide in the singularity and aloneness of my own existence set-up. Loneliness stems from lack of understanding my existence and why I suffer in spiritual light. Yet bearing life and growth of sensitivity prove one and the same activity. To gain the sense for my existence redemptively breeds sensitivity toward others. Intimacy is a way of bearing with all things; it’s not in essence an act of sympathizing which covets pain, calls it my own and then, in misguided illusion, hopes to reach out to others from one covetousness to another. We confound strength with bravado and pride. And these hide harshness and rigidity inside, a cold and frozen agency that’s unwilling to meet another’s pain in its singularity. We confound vulnerability with weakness and prey upon the “stupidity” of others in laying themselves bare. Behind the unruly defenses of false shame and self-pity, from what do we hide if not the frozen terror that deep down we lack right feeling inside? We lack the affect of proper care for self but indulge harshness and refuse to let receptivity open us out in vulnerability to the touch of all living things. If we will not care for our own transformation, how can we feel tenderness toward another? Instead of witnessing to her true struggle, won’t I always divide her in two, into the part I esteem and the part I judge, though never witness to the whole? Or exercise patience with the extraneous stuff in order to respond to the core that calls for genuine address? I cannot help another learn to give up fastidious concern and listen to her true heart’s want if I myself become entangled in interpersonal conflict over wrong-headed things. Nor can another be encouraged by harsh measure to attend to real need and find the truth in whose light the untrue can burn up. Harshness encourages persistence in self-hatred. It’s not our role to measure others but to turn them upon the Mother and Father’s midwifery, so they may be weaned off the old and disclosed in a fitting light.
Tenderness
Never shall tenderness and harshness cohabit the same heart. It’s a lie to tell myself they can. Herein lies decision: it’s one or the other, for
ntimacy and Bearing
I
290
tenderness, like all things essential and true, brooks neither confusion nor admixture. We don’t possess the self. Neither to protect nor to decide when others get to see it—naked and vulnerable, without self-pity or diffident shame. I am not the owner of (my) self. I belong to the shaping and the mystery of life’s seed seeking redemptive transformation. What is tenderness; whence its emergence? Patient care for self and others lets tenderness blossom; tenderness fortifies patience. Tenderness and patience are the qualities of a free heart, rich in its receptive willingness to suffer affectively and face life’s unexpected requirements. Tenderness blossoms out of sensitivity. We feel increasingly intense tenderness toward the fragile things of life when we grow sensitive to their vulnerability and how they nevertheless bear. All living things bear up under life. The animal bears, and the child. The little Russian boy in the film named after him, Kolya, has to decide whether to forgive his mother. And he bears this decision alone, just as he bore her abandonment of him alone. Though we may awaken to the reality that we bear late in life, nevertheless it has always been so. The mountain lily trembles and bears the wind, the eagle soars and bears the duration unknown before its prey will show, the mountains suffer our civilizations, the “affection starved” cat bears its want in dignity. The boy bears his parents, the girl bears the boy’s dislike, the young woman gambled that the man would prefer her ethical sensibility to practical boldness and lost, the father bore with the daughters who failed him (yes, we can fail our parents), and the lover bore friendship with the woman who would never be his. Tenderness, we know it when it arrives, but can we name it? Tenderness is an intensity, contrary to what we vainly imagine, that we are tender occasionally or capable of it by sheer force of a sympathetic nature. Tenderness is a form of gentleness that reflects extreme intensity. Intensity is depth, entry into sensitivity to a thing’s bent and its singular struggle. Tenderness arises from sensitivity and sensitivity grows when we step back from pity to quiet reception, from sympathy to witnessing, from advancing our agency to listening and hearing, from pain to trust in what the time delivers as its Hope-filled promise of healing.
One Step . . . along the Way
291
Tenderness arises when I cease to measure things and apprehend their singularity. Tenderness is not truly pity, for pity is a dangerous sentiment. We could say that it contains something like pity within it, for it has mercy. We might even say that tenderness raises pity up to the second degree but we can only say this when we realize that pity, when raised to the second degree, becomes thereby transformed, divested of all reference to “me.” Tenderness, by contrast, arises where we have divested ourselves of the tendency to sink into mushy attachments to our pain and benightedly impute it to other things. We cannot do things justice when we identify with them, for then, just like the false maternal legacy, we work a poor alchemical transmutation that converts their significance into something “for me.” We make sense of their suffering always by reference to our own. I can only listen to a thing’s way where I am not filled up with me. I can only see where I am not blinded by personal want. There is an odd thing about hearing: we can hear, if we avail ourselves, of realities we do not experience and nevertheless be brought by listening to apprehend them. The great impediment to understanding another is not lack of shared experience but rather harkening toward witnessing. Bearing witness to things in light of True Measure fosters proper affect and a fitting response. The perspective informed by the disclosive power of divine light may stretch across a vast tension in planes of understanding and nevertheless avail a genuine meeting. For it has no need to teach the other to be like it but can focus freely on encouraging the other in what constitutes its next step. It suffices to hear the sensitivity in the voice to glimpse the truth of another’s way and desist in attempting to mold it over according to my image and liking. What, pray tell, will ever bring me, amid the throes of daily life with a partner or husband, to drop habituated patterns of conflict? By nature, we all stand in conflict, at least potentially. I need routine, you need creativity. I cannot operate in the kitchen if all the forks and knives are creatively misplaced. Another cannot live with a domestic partner who refuses to come home at proper hours and share responsibilities . . . you can this, you can’t that, I can this, I can’t that. Or can I? Certainly not by nature, but can I by living in mysterious trust into timeliness? Can I cease judging my husband, child, partner or friend merely according to the repetintimacy and Bearing
I
292
tious patterns their natures engender or the patterns that suit my nature comfortably? Can I see more richly into these patterns, not just a nature opposed to mine but a singularity struggling to emerge, a spirit struggling to win right bearing for its own healing and even the greater good? How can I know “sympathy” or “pity” for the shadow side of another’s struggle rather than detest its consequences for me? How can I cease to break others in two unless I listen to the bearing, see the fabric of singularity, and hear the rising song of their journeys? Won’t tenderness grace my bearing if I apprehend how all my habituated responses, which deep down aim to protect me from suffering the shadow, squelch the essential along with the shadow, kill of the very next step the other strives to take? Sympathy alone never brings one to step back from natural tendency, listen and bear witness. Sympathy never annuls the defensive parry to protect mine and not let yours overwhelm me. It cannot encourage the plant to grow and blossom, it lacks patient tenderness. Tenderness is directly linked to suffering, for it comes to birth out of sensitivity and not simply to the way of the other but specifically to the singularity of his, her, or its struggle. Sensitivity is not cosuffering. It bears the imprint imparted to it of the other’s bearing. It’s as though bearing communes with bearing. Freely, understandingly, awarely. And this alone, never merely sympathy, gives rise to tenderness. This communion, this sensitive, feeling, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling that arises spiritually when I resonate with the vibration of another and listen to its true speech and apprehend its true articulation, yes, this communion encourages the constructive seed to come forth in the other. It emboldens another to accept its finitude with patience and renounce all excuse for not taking the next step. It helps steady the other and refuses to overburden the other with impatient and ambitious measures for when and how I think it should grow. Nor does it dismiss the truth that there is no excuse for refusing one step, the next step. And this indeed is what the merciful Father teaches in asking us to give up our own measures and step under requirement—to cease holding ourselves accountable for bearing all steps at once and begin holding ourselves firmly ready to walk one step at a time. And encourage others in this. Tenderness blossoms where willingness is watered and indulgence stops. Its battle is not with people or Life. It harbors no “for or against” because it has shed the cloak of loneliness, the need to be seen and recognized, approved and glorified. Its battle is gently to let go and assist others
One Step . . . along the Way
293
to relinquish all that impedes the next step in finding what alone can sate their heart’s true want: genuine intimacy. Yet tenderness is not flimsy and weak sentiment. It will never shy away from the field where life brings the unexpected, it will never refuse the task that is required to preserve the fragile seed of spirit. It knows in the quiet fortitude of heart that we battle our way through beneath a vault of mercy and cradled by patient weaning, for though we are required to step we are asked to move only one step at a time.
Communion and the Cut
he child is united with me resonantly in inwardness though she departs . . . he beloved never leaves me though s/he may never return . . . My existence won’t betray me even though it imparts its lessons with ever increasing intensity . . .
T
T
I
I
Will you make the second cut, sever the umbilical cord of all you imbibed with mother’s milk: the paternal legacy of agency and the maternal measure of comfort? t matters how things depart and how they return. Whether loved ones return depends on many things, not least the quality of my embodiment. When with true heart tenderly release others from lonely want, then the promise comes . . .
And loneliness will begin to stalk me like a great, loving ally rather than a merciless adversary, and loneliness will lie down without struggle like an obedient servant to the solitary warrior, and anxious threat will give way to peace, and contempt yield to quiet joy . . . Others are neither for nor against me but points of light and suffering all their own.
ntimacy and Bearing
I
294
t ent y
w
A Resonant Chorus
There’s hardly enough receptivity in the world. This is my heart’s sorrow. And for that want, there’s little mature “womanliness,” “manliness,” or personhood to be found. A dearth of the feminine reigns, yet the true feminine, too long associated with all things pitifully weak, deprives us of thoughtful pondering of the way to renounce agency and avail ourselves of receptivity. Today, in this part of the world where we live and dwell, we seem to lack a model of receptivity. We even appear lost to the attitude that could apprehend its virtue. Yet receptivity remains that most essential of wants, for in it we give ourselves over to trust in the Mother’s patient labor of weaning. In it we heed the Father’s creative sense of timing and gain appreciation of His loving firmness in holding out for us to consent to bear the next step so that we may grow strong, beautiful, and radiant. Doesn’t the Father want me to shine? Believe it! Doesn’t the Mother want me to radiate sensitivity? Believe it!
This is my true heart’s joy. Tenderness imparts itself to us through the dialogue between Mother and Father, the way they model “bearing with” one another and all things. Theirs is a dialogue of receptivity and creativity for the sake of an end that transcends comfort and authority, pride and tyranny, possessiveness and flagrant destruction of spirit. Out of receptivity to the labor of this spiritual-material, transcending-embodied shaping does sensitivity blossom in us. Tenderness is no attribute of willed self-cultivation but a total quality of open embodiment made rich and sensitive, an expression of the attitude that funds willingness to bear with others, not masochistically through self-indictment, but in the greatest venture that binds us together, the venture whereby we undergo the shaping work of transformation and new birth.
T
he sorrowing joy of Life, the joyful sorrow of growth, how does it blossom?
Loneliness absconds when the heart grows radiant and sensitive. Solitude resounds in the heart that has come to believe, not abstractly like a childish wish, but concretely by realizing the dream’s true promise that all things in Life’s uncanny sway hold forth in the Land Where Heart Grows Pure and Sensitive. All things hold forth in deep, patient breath and intimacy to support, encourage, witness, and commune with this, our ultimate radiance.
s
ntimacy and Bearing
I
296
e s
nS ourc
o
ent ary
omm
C
The Child Came to Birth upon a Diet This book came forth out of seeds planted by God through people and certain life events. I wish to mention some voices heard in the book’s melody and some that, though not spoken in the delivered word, nevertheless form the soundboard against which the melody resounds. While never forgetting that the ultimate font out of which words arise and to which ultimate debt falls comprises no earthly dimension, I name manifest forces of varying kinds and intensities which did not neglect to perform their labor in stimulating, gestating, and guiding the understanding here brought forth.
Conceptual-Philosophical The root philosophical commitments I enjoy find no systematic formulation in this book, yet they operate throughout it. These include things like “negative intuition,” my insistence that intuition plays a vital role in human awakening, the model of “understanding” advanced in these pages, the notion that being “carried forward” forms a distinctive dimension of journey, and the nascent view of word found herein. Such notions find virtually no profound articulation in contemporary Western philosophy, and yet I mention philosophical notions that gave impetus to my thought.
“Reduplication” and “spirit” This little book stands indebted, in no small measure, to Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of reduplication and his tireless reminder that the font of the self arises from spirit. Much more than I can say, this work shares in SK’s spirit, even though I rarely mention him by name and even though, as my own journey dictated, I ponder life and the mother in ways he did not.
“Going with,” “living without shield,” and “God is the Dark”
The notions of “going with” and finding the safety in living “unshielded” found expression in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, which also attempted to give due credence to the animals while portraying the difference of the human. I can only wonder that Rilke’s word, from times long past when I imbibed his poetry, passed like potent seed into the preconscious gestation that in due course gave rise to this little book. It was unplanned, though early discovered, that what his poetry illuminates would intermingle with other matter and find its way to ink. Among those mortal sayings that have laid a most profound impression on my breast are his soft-spoken words, “God is the Dark.” Biblical and mystical sources, as well as living, confirm this.
“Bearing” and “bearing openly”
Although I do not follow his understanding of human existence, Martin Heidegger imparted vital concerns to me. First among these is his constant search for open living, even as he does not address vulnerability in terms of the highly personal threat we feel in the face of life proper and before other people. Several additional aspects of his thought have given me pause over the years. I believe that Heidegger alone among Western sources turns us upon the dilemma of bearing, gives us to think more profoundly than any other contemporary thinker the mystery of language, and makes us ponder the dimensions. Nevertheless, for attention to these three concerns I owe my greatest debt not to Heidegger but to the wise friend and teacher to whom this work stands dedicated. I wish to note most especially the understanding he imparted to me that bearing is more primordial than being or becoming.
“Loneliness—neither friend nor foe”
Of the manifold books I read on loneliness, works representing a wide variety of schools of thought and whose purpose ranged from selfhelp to philosophical examination, I can say this. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s book Loneliness and Love provides the clearest statement of the origin of loneliness I have ever read. Joseph Soloveitchik’s excellent The Lonely Man of Faith best isolates the faith aspect of loneliness. Father J. B. Lotz’s The Problem of Loneliness offers a beautiful and striking exploration of the subject. Although I cannot endorse his perspective, however great his sensitiv-
298
Commentary on Sources
ity, I stand indebted to Eugene Kennedy’s insight in Loneliness and Everyday Problems, that loneliness is neither friend nor foe.
“Shadow” and spiritual warriorhood In Journey to Ixtlan, Carlos Castaneda conveys a marvelous sense that the shadow of death stalks our lives. The Bhagavad Gita similarly transmits a model of the spiritual warrior who knows how to eclipse the shadow of the lonely self at high noon.
The Background Rivalries: Oedipal questions Sigmund Freud must be invoked as a rival who provokes, like all good rivals, the search for excellence, with this qualification: he influences not as amicable friend but as inimical foe. Freud’s questions point to the need to deepen our understanding of whence stem the maternal and paternal nodes in which we symbolically live out of personal struggles to find comfort and acceptance. That Oedipal relations cannot account for the source of our relations to feminine and masculine dimensions of life forms a key polemic of this work. And our modern understanding of symbolism—as mere discursive structures through which we view reality—gives way to a more ancient sensibility and thereby hits upon the icon. Freud haunts the pages of this book because I believe he failed to find the true depth to which his life’s work ultimately points. Unless we can trace these concerns—to find ideal mothers and fathers, to apprehend an ideal love, to discover a safety beyond that erected through padded ego borders and a freedom beyond measure—right down to the spiritual paradoxes we meet in living, they will not be able to awaken ultimate growth, let alone catalyze therapeutic healing in the human person. Finally, it must be remarked that the Freudian notion of the unconscious inadequately accounts for the religious function of the preconscious in enabling reception of the prototype in seed form and its role in healing the human person by awakening understanding.
Existential Philosophies In disclosing that Life is personal, I take issue with all existential philosophers, save those who understand divine governance, for neglecting to touch on the vital link between love and life journey. I can accept Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that we are not born but rather become woman, solely on the basis of a dramatically divergent view. I heartily contest the
Commentary on Sources
299
plane of existence on which she interpreted this phenomenon as if we are biological bodies who become women via socialization. The dilemma is, rather, far more radical. We are not born “wholly, richly, maturely” women but must win our “womanhood” as a free quality of embodiment the way we must win virtue. We are, contrary to popular belief, born into a limiting female psychosomatic orientation, yet paradoxically we cannot win a true comportment save through a spiritual transformation that makes us neither reduced to the restrictive “inborn” tendencies of sex nor inimical to living out a concrete and specific embodiment of spirit.
Vital-Gestational: The Steady Diet that Funded Birth Contemplative writings
For one year’s time I imbibed a steady diet of Thomas Merton, not so much in search of influence or direct assistance but rather because birthing requires spiritual food and I found it intolerable, during gestation, to read systematic philosophy or systematic work of any kind with its uncanny ability to kill off new life in its fragile budding form. And I voraciously ingested every novel, book of poetry, and meditative text that called me and was available to me overseas, especially works I had not read in years but had a strong effect on me during youth.
The Brothers Karamazov
While most of my thoughts on pain, much of which lies written elsewhere, arose out of pristine meditation on life journey, I reread Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov at a timely moment in the writing. This incredible book lent meaty sustenance to the notion of redemptive suffering advanced herein.
The Acquisition of a Russian Palate
I heartily mention another facet of my diet that, as by some mysterious process, the way a mother plays music to the fetus, attuned and gave shape to the manner in which these thoughts found exact expression. I speak of traditional Russian philosophy, of which so very little is known in the West, I believe, because of its distinctly religious character. A certain influence from Russian Orthodoxy patently made its effect felt. My time in Eastern Europe, when coupled with this Russian diet, compelled a trip to Ravenna, where living testimony to the glory of older iconography fortified me. Yet my enthusiasm should not give you the false impression
300
Commentary on Sources
that all the talk about the icon spoken in the book amounts to little more than metaphorical and stylistic flourish. The iconography, touched on in these pages only in its most evident aspects, stems from no mere art or decoration but the understanding that God imparts truth and wisdom to us through the living word. This understanding can only rise up at first darkly, ever so darkly from the deep and enter the waters of life from below the threshold where we conceive ourselves and the world to rest. So let me instead thank the earthly stimuli that, no matter whether I agree or disagree with their conceptual positions, worked a loving incubation of what sought at first darkly to rise up, come forth, and find reception. Foremost among these was Nicolas Berdyaev, while St. Theophan the Recluse, Vladimir Lossky, and Sergei Bulgakov played their parts.
The Interpenetration of Women’s Travail and the Spanish Influence Dwelling amid Spanish-descendant cultures over many years engendered a feel for the duende in my heart and psyche. Although living women of varied walks of life gave me long and sad pause for thought on the cry and the shriek, Federico García Lorca tendered ongoing and repeated guidance “in search of duende.” Lest I forget the women, this work arose from direct meditation on the lives of women, their travail, the truth and difficulty of their struggle, but most especially how deep-seated stems women’s felt conflict with men. And men. This work arose out of compassion for men who stand in need of insight into woman’s travail as much as women stand in need of the corrective that can be set by men. Touchingly did young male students awaken my sense that as a teacher and nurturer, I, as woman, cannot overlook the constructive struggle of men, young and old, one and all because prejudice clouds my eyes. I cannot afford to bolt and neglect their true need any more than I can afford to succumb, out of misguided sympathy and faulty love, to reinforcing the confusions from which women suffer.
Monastic-Providential It would, don’t you think, be much too indiscreet, not to mention profoundly confused, were I to name the distinct providential gifts—the concrete events that have long served their time and passed away—whose destinal sendings ripened the understanding borne in these pages. My life forms an unspoken font out of which this wellspring arose, and yet,
Commentary on Sources
301
however much you might, in zealous want of intimacy, find yourself tempted, it would not behoove you to infer this or that about me from the figures—creative, one and all—who populate these pages. There is just one time and place, that of gestation, I will mention.
Prague and Providence
I wrote this book in Prague, a place where radical isolation descended on me, a place brim full of music and beauty yet shot through with immense sadness and sorrow, a place that, for all these reasons and others divinely orchestrated, provided me with a monastic world of inward retreat. There I was given over to the Old World with its power to awaken ritual entry into the mystical iconography of life, even though the people of Prague seem more lost than ever to their spiritual heritage. In that place, during that time, Providence elected to teach me what it means to die to culture and to induct me into the mystery of writing. Prague gave me the musical attunement, Providence the word. Prague gave me over to death, Providence to new life. Every culture has a shadow; from this too we must awaken. Least possible of all would be to name all the tremendous grantings that graced my journey and inscribed themselves on my soul. So I shall say simply that not all influences which assisted the birth of these words were human. The animals and other mighty beings bore their part.
Penultimate: The Three Great Earthly Stimuli, The Matrix, and the Ultimate Source Let me tell you the secret. Deeper than this steady diet and the evident conceptual influences, were three great gifts:
f The teacher whose model and seed live in me even though they blossom late, for he taught me that receptivity opens the way.
f The lover who preserved the birth and worked his power of softening, for he taught me of the great need people have for gentleness.
f The two friends, yes, there was a male friend whose love donned fierceness as its outward face, and this friend, living embodiment of masculine spirit, required me, yes, like a man, to stand up and walk the path that ventures
302
Commentary on Sources
beyond woman’s hate-filled misconception of men to cherish the divinity in masculinity and the masculinity in divinity. And there was the female friend who shares the path and the battle, yes, the womanly battle to give birth to a genuine pattern for women today. Words do not suffice to explain how the crucible of her suffering refracts my own, how her unyielding honesty imparts courage, and how undeservedly great it is to be granted a true friend, a magnanimous, womanly friend! Deeper down, even than these, you must remember:
f that the matrix of the Mother and Father gestated this child. And that matrix, immeasurably real, issues from yet a more reticent beyond where names fall short and cannot reach, for therein arises:
f the one true source of ultimacy whose Love never ceases to teach us that everything, yes, everything is all right. And so I send you this,
A Parting Gift
Can you receive the Messiah if you do not first inscribe yourself into the Book of Life?
s
Commentary on Sources
303
e
ent s
dgm
owl
c
A kn
I worked out some related thoughts on loneliness, intimacy, and time in the following articles: “Tales of Woe: A Meditation on Loneliness and Intimacy,” Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 40, no. 3 (2005): 152–69. “Loneliness and Innocence: A Kierkegaardian Reflection on the Paradox of Self-Realization,” Continental Philosophy Review 39 (2006): 415–33. “Suffering and Strife: For What Can We Hope?” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Mercer University Press, 2007), 17:95–118.
d
I
n ex
abandonment, 65, 234–235 abortion, spiritual, xxv, 86–89, 123, 148– 149, 207 adulthood, xii–xiii agency: as aloofness, 80–81; carving out the future, 42–43, 47, 86–87; in children, 139; confusion of, 185–186; death of, 166–169; legacy of, 42; as loneliness, 47, 147–148, 167–168; meaning and, 58; milk of, 18; as miscarried expectancy, 53–54; panic, 135; posture of, 56; posture of aloofness and, 49–50; retrospection and, 98; self-love and, 67; survival and, 50 aloneness: of animals, 6, 7, 58; eclipse and, 135–136; first birth and, 63; independence and, 7; primitive, 6–10 aloofness: agency as, 80–81; posture of, 49–50 ambition, 56, 236–239 Andalucia, 89–92, 94, 150–151, 274 angels, 55 animals: aloneness of, 6, 7, 58; differentiated from humans, 21; domestication of, 22; expectancy in, 38; fear in, 8, 18; imprinting in, 20–23; intimacy with, 270–271; self-protection by, 172–173; shrinking back by, 173–174 anxiety, 220, 234–236 apprehension, 27–30, 50, 280; of prototypes, 24, 29; of tenderness, 283– 285. See also iconography/iconology archetypes, birth of, 24, 27–28, 35 attunement: formation of first, 17; to lamentation, 155; to life journey, 5; to loneliness, xxvi–xxvii; maturity of, 201–202, 260; to reality, 193; receptive, 116; to self, 279; to sensitivity, 262–263, 286–287; song and,
xx–xxiii, xxx, 302; sorrow and, 204– 205, 208. See also darkness awakening: sexual, 25–26, 181; spiritual (See spiritual birth) battle, life as a, 72–73, 152–153, 216–218, 226–227 bearing: consent to, 175–176, 295; dilemma of, 298; fear of, 175–176; heart and open, 191–192; with and intimacy, 267–268; pain of, 277; penetration, 193; sympathy and, 270 beauty, seed of, 194–196 befriending loneliness, 199–200 being and becoming, 298 benign neglect, 223–224 Berdyaev, Nicolas, 301 betrayal, 86, 89 Bhagavad Gita, 299 birth: of archetypes, 24, 27–28, 35; “cut” of first, 60–61, 62–63, 70; expectancy and, 43–45; forlornness and, 59–60; iconography of, 81, 134, 178; labor and, 103; miscarriage and, 52–54; nakedness of, 8–9, 32, 166–167; of new understanding, 85; pain of, 3–4; pain of giving, 126–128; reason for, 60–61; self-, 4, 19–20; spiritual or second-, 3–4, 12–15; women’s capacity to give, 124–128; as wounding, 62–68 bitterness, 113–117 bond between mother and child, 138– 143, 144 Book of God, 13 Book of Life, 303 Book of Nature, 13, 31, 182 breach with life, loneliness as, xxv breaks, decisive, 32 breath: biological life and, 4; cry and,
cosuffering, sympathetic, 264–267 coveted pain, 119–120, 140–143, 147; shrieks of, 150–153 cradle, Mother as, 21, 169, 181, 189, 208 creative restraint, 38, 187, 258, 271, 282 creativity: the future and, 87–88; the will and, 87 crucifixion, 93 cry, human, 62–68; breath and, 73–75 cultural formation, 14–17, 20 cut, the: accepting, 207; bond between mother and child and, 146; consent to, 99, 261–262; of first birth, 60–61, 62–63, 70; making the second, 294; penetration and, 260; in relationships, 103–109 cycles, negativity, 131–132
73–75; muffled word and, 73–75; paradox of roaming and, 42; patience for, 54; pause, 39, 40; ultimate, 41 Brothers Karamazov, 300 buffering, 185, 196, 222, 225; hardening as, 188–190, 227 Bulgakov, Sergei, 301 Castaneda, Carlos, 299 cats, 173–174, 270–271, 273 caution and danger, 128–130 character and self-will, 35 childlessness, 145 children, xii–xiii; fear in, 8; first cry in, 62–68; friendship with one’s, 130– 134; heart of, 190–191; innocence of, 6–7; limit-experiences of, 121–123; mothers’ bonds with, 130–134; mothers’ love of, 130–134; parenting of, 28–30, 264–265; protection of, 180–181; shrieks of, 150; tears from, 159, 160; wounded a second time by mother, 241–244. See also motherhood; parenting; youth claim on us, life’s, 12–20, 20 collisions of life, 161–165 complacency, 218; conflict and, 220–225; harm of, 223–228; harsh judgment and, 285–287; innocence, 224, 226; urgency and, 230 concreteness of life, 48, 51, 162 conflict: anxiety over, 220; complacency and, 223–225; habituated patterns of, 292–293; intimacy through, 229; loneliness and, 221–223; love and, 130–134; shame and, 284; shrinking back from, 176–177; unexpected, 220–221; urgency of, 230 confusion: of agency, 185–186; sorrow and, 209 consent: to bearing, 175–176, 295; to the cut, 99, 261–262; to intimacy, 271; to joy, xviii, 207; to life, 3, 51, 70, 72, 82, 85; to life’s set-up, 244; to overcome shame, 215, 287; refusal to, 75; to rescue, 93; to spiritual birth, xi, 26, 30–32; to weaning, 30–32, 135; to wound, 123; in youth, xvii
ndex
I
308
daemonic intuition, 183 danger and caution, 128–130 Dark, God as the, 252, 298 darkness: eclipse and, 134–138; memory and, 251; transmission of dark matter and, 20, 27–28, 35, 157, 247; trust and, 252. See also attunement; preconscious, the dating relationships, 103–106 de Beauvoir, Simone, 299–300 death: of agency, 166–169; limitexperiences and, 123; nakedness and, 167; shadow, 299; shrieks of coveted pain and, 151; weaning as, 208 decisive breaks, 32 defense, self-protective, 157–158; hardening as, 188–190, 227; harsh judgment and, 285–287 deliverance: iconography of, 76; meaning and, 75–80, 84–85; meat of, 14–15; miscarriage versus, 86–89; transformation of heart and, 83; understanding and, 80–86 dependency, loss of, 203 depression: heaviness of the soul and, xxii–xxiii; postpartum, 134; purity of feeling and, 206 destiny, 45, 56, 69. See also future, the disclosure and intimacy, 279–281 dis-identification with the self, 144 dispossession/posession. See self, the
Father Time, 52, 254–255 fatherhood, 138, 166; children’s ambition and, 237; mercy of, 254–255. See also men; parenting fear in animals, 8, 18. See also terror fickleness toward life, xxi–xxii field, the, 215–216, 229, 232, 257 forgiveness and love, 99 forlornness, 59–60 formation, cultural, 14–17, 20 freedom: bearing and, 176–177; breath and, 42; of men, 111–112; parenting and, 28–30; quality of life and, 70; receptivity and, 41–42 Freud, Sigmund, 157, 299 friendship, 302–303; with one’s children, 130–134; trust in, 78–80 future, the: agency carving out, 42–43, 47, 86–87; betrayal and, 86, 89; creativity and, 87–88; imagining, 89–94; time shaping, 36–37, 56–57. See also destiny
dogs, 21, 172 domestication of animals, 22 domination, 197–198 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 300 dreams: anxiety in, 234–236; fitful, 1–2; loneliness and, 118; of self-loathing, 249–252. See also nightmares ducks, 21 duende, 150–151, 301 eclipse of women, 134–137 ecstasy of limit-experiences, 121–123 embodiment: receptivity and, 219; spiritual qualities of, 35–36 empathy, 267–268 envy, 238 estrangement from life, 56–58 exclusive love, 132, 239–240 existence as a set-up, 214–215, 218 existential philosophies, 59, 96, 299–300 expectancy: agency as miscarried, 53–54; deliverance and, 75–76; hopeful, 46; life and, 37–43; meaning and, 43–47; miscarriage and, 47–52 experiences, limit. See limit-experiences
game, life as a, 217–218 gaming, 214–215, 216 genealogy, maternal, 251, 288. See also darkness; preconscious, the genes, 24 God: Book of, 13; feminine face of, 5; heaven and, 218–219, 254–255; iconography worked by, 191; is the Dark, 298; masculine-like aspects of, 186–187; mother and, 240–241; vengeance of, 214. See also Father; Mother Life/Mother greed, 270–271, 273 grounding oneself, 169–170 guilt, 237, 245–246, 248
faces of God, 5 faith, 196–197 false shame and self-pity, 282–285, 288 family: iconic power of, 18; love, Mother Life as enemy of, 14; nourishing milk of, 14–18; weaning from, 41, 65, 69. See also motherhood; parenting; youth Father: cold indifference of, 281; death and, 36; deliverance from, 81; domination and, 197–198; fairness of, 222–223; heeding the timing and firmness of, 295; humiliation set up by, 278–279; operative love of, 230, 232–234; protection by, 180–186, 243, 244; revealing the set-up, 229– 230; truth exposed by, 257–258, 260– 261, 287–288; wisdom of, 218. See also God Father Providence, 38, 72, 160, 218; domination and, 197–198; intimacy blocked by, 258; jolts from, 186–188; redemption and, 246–247
habituated patterns of conflict, 292–293 hardening, 188–190, 227; as buffering, 185, 196, 222, 225. See also defense, self-protective; harsh judgment harsh judgment, 285–287; defensive parry and, 185, 220, 282, 288, 293. See also defense, self-protective; hardening hatred, 190 healing, 137, 233, 257, 258–261 heart: children and, 190–191; decision of,
I
ndex
309
with and, 267–268; blocked by Providence, 258; consent to, 271; desire for, xxiii–xxiv; disclosure and, 279–281; forced by self-pity, 258–261; genuine, 294; loneliness for, 228– 230, 290; pain of, 276–277; pity blocking, 262–264; privation of, 47, 67–68; receptivity and, 271; steps to, 130–134; tenderness and, 293–294; tension of, 269, 270, 273, 277; ultimate, 61, 65 intuition, 4; daemonic, 183; meaning and, 48; negative, 183–184; passage of time and, 55–56
196; growing, 194–196, 254–255, 274, 296; hardening of, 227; lack of, 192; open bearing and, 191–192; receptivity and, 193–194; the soul and, 192–193; tenderness growing in, 290–294 heaven, 218–219, 254–255 Heidegger, Martin, 298 helplessness, 236–237, 239, 241 hiding and shrinking back, 173–177 hopeful expectancy, 46 humans: cry, 62–68; differentiated from animals, 19; imprinting in, 23–25; sexual awakening, 25–26; survival, 19; weaning, 23–27; will, 33–34, 41–42 humility, 278–279 hypersensitivity, 256
Jeremiah (biblical), 112 Jesus (biblical), 112 journey, life as, 5, 55–56, 59, 61, 67–68 Journey to Ixtlan, 299 joy and sorrow, xxiv, 201–202, 204–209, 295 judgment, harsh, 285–287
iconography/iconology: of birth, 81, 134, 178; deliverance and, 76; divine, 191; of family, 18; imprint, 28, 275; of joy, xxiv; of Motherhood, 251; mystical life, 302; Oedipal relations, 299; prototype, 81; receptivity and, 42; Russian, 300–301; of women’s wombs, 13, 81, 178; of wounding, 62. See also apprehension; meaning; prototypes identity: cultural, 17–18; stabilizing one’s, 51–52 imagining the future, 89–94 impatience, 45–46 imprinting: in animals, 20–23; in humans, 23–25, 288; iconic, 28, 275 incubation, 294; milk of, 14–15; of naïveté, 35 independence, xvii–xviii; primitive aloneness and, 7; sympathetic cosuffering and, 266; weaning and, 26 infidelity, 106–109 infinity, 169 innocence: complacency and, 224, 226; confusion of self-naïveté with, 238; hardening of, 188–190; of youth, 6–7 intensity: extreme, 291; of pain, 272; sorrow and, 206–207 interpenetration, 171, 301 intimacy: with animals, 270–271; bearing
labor, 103 lamentation: attunement to, 155; compared to sorrow, 202; formation of, xvii; growth of, 104–112, 155–156; redemption and, 219; in relationships, 103–112; tears of, 159–160; of women, 103–108, 110–111, 155–158 “law of no return,” 203 legacy of mother-daughter relationships, 241–244, 246 life: active passing of time and, 3–4; as a battle, 72–73, 152–153, 216–218, 226–227; Book of, 303; claim on us, 12–20, 20; collisions of, 161–165; concreteness of, 48, 51, 162; desire for intimacy in, xxiii–xxiv; estrangement from, 56–58; expectancy and, 37–43; fear of, 3–4, 170–171; feeling threatened by, 39–40; fickleness toward, xxi–xxii; field of, 215–216, 229, 232, 257; as a game, 217–218; ndex
I
310
Kennedy, Eugene, 299 Kierkegaard, Søren, xxvi, 297 knowledge seeking, 184–185 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 298
love: apprehension and, 29–30; defined against, 239–240; exclusive, 132, 239–240; fatherly, 230, 232–234; forgiveness and, 99; meaning and, 60; between mother and child, 138–143; mother’s, 130–134, 238–240; pain and, 146–150; parenting and, 28–29; privation of, 65–68, 70–71; tenderness and, 283–285, 295; tension and, 270
hatred of, 190; independence of, xvii–xviii; intuition and, 4; jolting, 186–188; as journey, 5, 55–56, 59, 61, 67–68; living, xi–xii; loneliness in, xii, xiii–xv; masculine character of, 213–219; meaningful, 49–51; penetration by, 186–188; as personal, 161–163; quality of, 70; the self and, 51; as a set-up, 214–215, 218, 222– 223, 229–230; spontaneity in, 34, 51; ultimate, 41; and the unexpected, xix–xx, 36–37, 39; venture of, xv–xix, 11, 20; weaning task of, 10–12, 18. See also Mother Life limit-experiences: ecstasy of, 121–123; woman’s archetypal, 124–137 living life, xi–xii loneliness, xii, xiii–xv; abandonment and, 65; agency as, 47, 147–148, 167–168; aloofness breeding, 80–81; attunement to, xxvi–xxvii; befriending, 199–200; as a call and a breach, xxiii–xxviii; conflict-oriented, 221– 223; defined, xvi, xxiii; dreams and, 118; fear of, 170–171; growing heart and, 296; growing out of fickleness toward life, xxi–xxii; for intimacy, 228–230; in marriage, 106–109; neglect and, xxvii; as neither friend nor foe, 298–299; overcoming, 294, 296; of pain possessed, 153–154; as pride, 202; pride begetting, 179; providence and, 228–230; return of, 294; sensitivity and, 289–290; as the sound of sinking, xxvi; suffering in, 100, 120–121, 149; trust and, xxvii– xxviii. See also pain; spiritual abortion Loneliness and Everyday Problems, 299 Loneliness and Love, 298 “Loneliness Whom I Must Befriend,” 199–200 The Lonely Man of Faith, 298 Lorca, Federico García, 301 loss, 9–10; deliverance and, 83; of immediate dependency, 203; sorrow over, 203–204 Lossky, Vladimir, 301 Lotz, J. B., 298
marriage, 106–109 meaning: agency and, 58; deliverance and, 75–80, 84–85; enduring, 46; expectancy and, 43–47; forlornness over, 59–60; grounding and, 169– 170; intuition and, 48; linked to suffering, 120–121; love’s, 149; miscarriage and, 53–54; pain’s, 149; sound and, 5; ultimate, 49, 52, 61. See also iconography/iconology meaningful life, 49–51 meat of deliverance, 14–15 memory: heart of reality and, 251; retrospection and, 94–99 men: as fathers, 138; freedom of, 111– 112; as friends, 302–303; gaming by, 214–215, 216; infidelity and, 106– 109; married, 106–109; Oedipal relations and, 299; stolen by women, 234–235, 236, 238; women eclipsed by, 134–137; women’s negativity toward, 1–2, 103–108, 111, 213–219, 303. See also women mercy, 254–255, 292 Merton, Thomas, 300 messengers of Providence, 233 midwife, Mother Life as, xxiv, 14, 16, 18–20, 36, 51, 59, 148, 152, 267 milk: of agency, 18; cultural, 14–17; of incubation, 14–15, 294 miscarriage: delivery versus, 86–89; expectancy and, 47–52; unwillingness and, 52–54 modeling and prototypes, 24, 26, 30 Mother Life/Mother: birth by, 36; as cradle, 21, 169, 181, 189, 208; creative restraint exercised by, 38; death and, 208; deliverance and, 83–84; as
I
ndex
311
“Ode to the Cup of Bitterness,” 113–117 Oedipal relations, 41, 299 openness and receptivity, 35 operative love, 230, 232–234
enemy of familial love, 14; intimacy toward, 72; jolts from, 38–39, 186– 188; as midwife, xxiv, 14, 16, 18–20, 36, 51, 59, 148, 152, 267; pain and, 147, 148; protection by, 181; redemption from, 246–247; trust in, 10–11, 19–20, 295; weaning task of, 10–12, 25. See also life mother-daughter relationships: ambition and, 236–241; legacy and second wounds in, 241–244, 246; as midwife, xxiv, 14, 16, 18–20, 36, 51, 59, 148, 152, 267; redemption in, 244–248 motherhood: ambition, 236–239; apprehension and, 28–29; birth and, 3–4, 13–14, 144–145; coveted pain in, 140–143; helplessness in, 236–237; icon of, 251; law of reduplication and, 138–143; loneliness in, 237–238; love in, 130–134, 238–240; pain and sympathy in, 143–146; self-loathing in, 249–252; “Soft Words for Mother,” 253; suffering in, 138–146, 240–241; sympathetic cosuffering in, 265–266; tenderness in, 283–285. See also children; parenting; women muffled word and breath, 73–75 music. See song
pain: amassing, 264–267; of bearing, 277; of birth, 3–4; of childbearing, 126– 128; collisions of life and, 161–165; conveying reality, 269; coveted, 119– 120, 140–143, 147, 150–153; fear of, 276; intensity of, 272; of intimacy, 276–277; limit-experiences and, 121– 123; love and, 146–150; possessed, loneliness of, 153–154; psychic, 143, 163; receptivity and, 88–89; in relationships, 157; retrospection and, 98; self-loathing and, 249–252; shrieks of, 150–153; sympathetic cosuffering for, 264–267; sympathy and, 143– 146; tension and, 269; truth and, 275; vindication and, 130; wisdom imparted through, 273–277; woe and, 105–106. See also loneliness; suffering panic, 135 parenting: apprehension and, 28–29; modeling through, 28–30; Oedipal relations in, 41, 299; self-pity and, 264–265. See also family; motherhood parry, defensive, 185, 220, 282, 288, 293 passage: through life, 59; of time, 55–58, 125, 133–134 passivity, 194–196, 236–237 patience, 31, 38, 54; for deliverance, 75–76; expectancy and, 45–46 patterns of conflict, 292–293 penetration: bearing, 193; the cut and, 260; by the Father, 180; inter-, 171, 301; lacking heart and, 191; by Life, 186–188, 191; protection against, 187, 195, 197; rapacious, 175; receptivity to, 198; terror of, 175, 177; transcendence and, 189 personal nature of life, 161–163 philosophies: existential, 59, 96, 299–300; Russian, 300–301 possession/dispossession. See self, the postpartum depression, 134
naïveté, 35, 97, 182, 202–203; confused with innocence, 238; protection of, 180–181 nakedness, 32; fear and, 8–9; privation of safety and, 171–177; shrinking back from, 171–177; weaning and, 166– 171; women and, 177–179 Nature, Book of, 13, 31, 182 negativity: cycles, 131–132; intuition, 183–184; time’s passage and, 125; of women toward men, 1–2, 103–108, 111, 213–219, 303 neglect: benign, 223–224; loneliness recalling one from, xxvii nightmares: enduring, 39, 90–91, 93, 205, 234–236, 240; expected, 247–248; second wounding, 244–245; solutions to, 287. See also dreams; terror
ndex
I
312
intimacy and, 271; joy and, 207; and openness, 35; pain and, 88–89; to penetration, 198; right embodiment and, 219; self-determination and, 33–34; and a spiritual quality of embodiment, 35–36; spontaneity and, 34; sympathy versus, 264; under-standing and, 94; the will and, 33–34 reconciliation, 226 redemption: harsh judgment and, 287; lamentation and, 219; in the second wound, 244–248 redemptive suffering, 287–289, 300 reduplication, 65, 67, 74, 297; inverse of the law of, 138–143 refraction, 260, 281 relationships: ambition in, 236–241; dating, 103–106; evil in set-ups within, 220; friends in, 302–303; habituated patterns of conflict in, 292–293; lamentation in, 103–112; legacy of, 241–244, 246–248; marriage, 106– 109; negativity in, 1–2, 111, 303; pain in, 157; second wounding in, 241–244; trust in, 78–80; ultimatums in, 108–109 respect, 109 restraint, creative, 38, 187, 258, 271, 282 retrospection, 94–99 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 201, 252, 298 Russian philosophy, 300–301 Ruth (biblical), 112
preconscious, the, 27–28, 289; birth of archetypes and, 24, 27–28, 35; transmission of dark matter and, 20, 27–28, 35, 157, 247. See also darkness; genealogy, maternal pre-disposal versus disposition, 33 pride, 202, 249; begetting loneliness, 179; false shame and, 282–283; privation and, 165–166 primitive aloneness, 6–10 privation: genuine, 40; human cry and, 62–68; of intimacy, 47, 67–68; loneliness evincing, 289; of love, 65–68, 70–71; pride and, 165–166; of safety, 171–177; of understanding, 161–164 The Problem of Loneliness, 298 productive vulnerability, 192–193 prolonged weaning, 31 promise: of delivery, 82; to live openly and safe, 179 prophecies, self-fulfilling, 152 protection, 157–158, 166; of children, 180–181; falsity of, 168; by Father, 180–186, 243, 244; fear of losing, 235–236; hardening and, 188–190; against penetration, 187, 195, 197; privation of safety and, 171–177; self-, 172–177, 193, 282, 286; shrinking back as, 171–177 prototypes: apprehension of, 24, 29; childbirth as, 127–128; fatherly love, 232–233; modeling and, 24, 26, 30; protection and, 157; ultimate, 28–29; weaning and, 25. See also iconography/iconology providence: loneliness and, 228–230; messengers of, 233; urgency and, 230. See also Father Providence purity of feeling, 206
sadness. See woe and sorrow safety: privation of, 171–177; promise of, 179 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 59–60 second birth. See spiritual birth self, the, 51; attunement to, 279; disidentification with, 144; dispossession of, 141; overcoming loneliness, 294, 296; possession of, 134–135, 164–165 self-awareness, 66 self-birthing, 4, 19–20 self-determination, 33–34 self-fulfilling prophecies, 152 self-knowledge, 5
quality of life, 70
reality, attunement to, 193 rebellion, 41 receptivity: attunement and, 116; complacency and, 225; cultivating, 41; dearth of, 295; defined as pre-disposal, 33, 36; heart and, 193–194; heaven and, 218–219; icons and, 42;
I
ndex
313
spiritual birth, 4, 128; consent and, xi, 30–32; fear and, 8–10; life’s claim on us and, 12–15; milk and meat of, 14–15; pain in, 275; radical helplessness before, 236–237; weaning and, 25, 30–32 spiritual warriorhood, 299 spontaneity, 34, 51 St. Theophan the Recluse, 301 submersion, 98–99 suffering: depression and heaviness of the soul, xxii–xxiii; faced alone, 134–138; healing from, 137; linked to meaning, 120–121; in loneliness, 100, 120– 121, 149; measuring, 141–142, 249; by mothers, 138–146, 240–241; of others, 261; personal nature of life leading to, 161–163; redemptive, 287–289, 300; tears of, 161–165; tenderness linked to, 293–294; by women, 105–106, 110–112. See also loneliness; pain survival, human, 19; agency and, 50 sympathetic cosuffering, 264–267 sympathy: bearing and, 270; cosuffering and, 264–267; for mothers, 237–238, 240–241; pain and, 143–146; pity and, 262–264; yearning for, 166
self-loathing, 249–252, 257; selfprotection and, 282; shame and, 279–281 self-pity, 160–161, 164, 227, 256–257; blocking sensitivity, 262–264; false, 282–285; intimacy forced by, 258– 261; parents and, 264–265 self-protection, 172–177, 193, 286; hardening as, 188–190, 227; harsh judgment and, 285–287; self-loathing and, 282 self-reliance, xvii–xviii, 182–183 self-testing, 122–123 sensitivity: attunement to, 262–263, 286– 287; bearing with and, 267–268; hyper-, 256; loneliness and, 289–290; pity and, 262–264; tenderness out of, 291–292 sexual awakening, 25–26, 181 shadows: of death, 299; women in, 134–138 shame, 215, 279–281, 287; conflict and, 284; false, 282–285, 288 shaping, material for, 53–54 shrieks of pain, 150–153; loneliness of pain possessed in, 153–154 shrinking back, 173–177 silent tears, 163–164 sleep: fitful dreams and, 1–2; passivity as, 194–196 socialization of women, 300 “Soft Words for Mother,” 253 Soloveitchik, Joseph, 298 song: attunement and, xx–xxiii, xxx, 302; of love, 131; and the soul as a stringed instrument, xx–xxiii; of woe, 105–106; as a word formed between life and oneself, xxii. See also sound soul, the: cultural formation and, 17; heart and, 192–193; heaviness of, xxii–xxiii; like a stringed instrument, xx–xxiii; passion and, 192–193 sound and meaning, 5. See also song Spanish-descendant cultures, 89–92, 94, 150–151, 301 spirit and reduplication, 297 spiritual abortion, xxv, 86–89, 123, 148– 149, 207 ndex
I
314
tears: of lament, 159–160; of not understanding, 166; of self-pity, 160–161; silent, 163–164; suffering and, 161– 165; triggers for, 159 temptation, 94–96; in capacity to give birth, 126 tenderness, 283–285, 290–294, 295 tension, 269, 270, 273, 277 terror: burying the, 234–236; before life, 7–8; of life, 3–4, 170–171; of loneliness, 170–171; nakedness and, 8–9; of pain, 276; of penetration, 175, 177; of refraction, 260; of time’s passage, 55–56; trust and, 170–171; ultimate, 66; in youth, 8. See fear; fear in animals threat, 39–40, 246–248 time, 3–4; passage of, 55–58, 125, 133– 134; shaping the future, 36–37. See also Father Time
longed, 31; sexual awakening and, 25–26 “when,” 46 “why,” 45, 48, 59, 160 wildness of animals, 22 will, the, 33–34, 41–42; expectancy and, 46; the future and, 87; unwillingness and, 52–54 wisdom imparted through pain, 273–277 woe and sorrow, 155–158; attunement and, 204–205, 208; compassion and, 204–205; confusion and, 209; intensity and, 206–207; joy and, 201–202, 205–209, 295; over loss, 203–204 womb, the, 13–14, 18, 35 women: archetypal limit-experience of, 124–137; bitterness in, 113–117; capacity to give birth to life, 124– 128, 144–145; complacency in, 223– 228; coveted pain in, 140–143, 147; duende in, 150–151, 301; eclipsed by the masculine world, 134–137; as friends, 303; lamentation in, 103– 108, 110–111, 155–158; married, 106–109; nakedness and, 177–179; negativity toward men, 1–2, 103– 108, 111, 213–219, 303; Oedipal relations and, 299; postpartum depression in, 134; protection of and by, 157–158; socialization of, 300; stealing other women’s men, 234–235, 236, 238; virginity of, 177–178; woe of, 105–106, 110–112; wombs of, 13–14, 18. See also men; motherhood word(s): breath and muffled, 73–75; meaning and, 5; for mother, 253 wound: birth as, 62–68; burying, 234–236; healing the, 258–261; iconography of, 62; mother-daughter legacy and second, 241–244; motherhood ambition and, 236–241; redemptive possibility in, 244–248
transformation, 49, 58; deliverance and, 83; jolt into, 105–106 trust: darkness and, 252; deliverance and, 84; fear and, 170–171; between friends, 78–80; joy and, 207–208; limit-experiences and, 129; loneliness and, xxvii–xxviii; in Mother Life, 10–11, 19–20, 295; shame and, 67; virginity and, 177–178 truth: deliverance and, 77–78; disclosure of, 279–281; exposed by Father, 257– 258, 260–261, 287–288; false shame and self-pity blocking, 282–283; pain and, 275 turtles, sea: aloneness of, 6, 7, 8, 23, 58; fear in, 18 ultimate intimacy, 61, 65 ultimate life, 41 ultimate meaning, 49, 52, 61 ultimate prototypes, 28–29 ultimatums, 108–109 undergoing, mode of, 196 understanding: delivery and, 80–86; of infinity, 169; privation of, 161–164; retrospection and, 94–99; sympathy and, 266–267. See also meaning unexpected, the, xix–xx, 36–37, 39 unwillingness and miscarriage, 52–54 venture of life: weaning by Mother Life and, 11, 20; wild, xv–xix vindication, 130 violence of harsh judgment, 285–287 virginity, 177–178, 192, 194 vulnerability: harsh judgment and, 286; productive, 192–193 warriorhood, spiritual, 299 water: grounding oneself and buoyancy in, 169–170; life as unpredictable as, xix–xx weaning: in animals, 20–23; apprehension and, 27–30; consent and, 30–32, 135; as death, 208; decisive breaks and, 32; from family, 41, 65, 69; human, 23–27; independence and, 26; by Mother Life, 10–12, 18, 25; nakedness and, 166–171; pro-
youth, xii–xiii; consent in, xvii; innocence of, 6–7; limit-experiences in, 121– 123; promise of, xxiv; rebellion in, 41; self-reliance of, xvii–xviii; worldly pressures on, xvi–xvii. See also children
I
ndex
315
untington
oy
atricia
P J H is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University. She is author of Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, and Irigaray and co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger.
