I’ve just returned home from a lecture given by Cornel West, a sociologist/philosopher/professor/writer/activist/(I’m sure there are a few other roles I’ve missed) currently at Princeton (though the lecture was over here at Stanford). And my heart is on fire.

The title of the lecture was “Democracy Matters,” and West spent the hour painting a simultaneously dark and hopeful portrait of democracy in America. To the same extent that incisive, provocative, self-critical, dominant-line-critical questioning (symbolized by Socrates) and prophetic compassion (symbolized by the Jewish line of prophets) are pushed to the margins of American life, democracy dies, he said. To the extent that these are jointly nurtured, democracy lives on.

I wish I could convey even sparks from the fire Cornel burned tonight. I want to download the whole lecture and just say, “Here; go listen to this. Seriously – you’ll love it.” Instead I’ll try and settle for three of the points I connected most with:
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Last month I read a short story in The New Yorker (August 23) and a line from it has haunted me ever since. “Truth is a dark stain,” a character says, “and the words of any language are like leaves: one more way to hide ourselves from one another.”

I don’t like the darkness of the line. Yet I must admit it’s an assumption by which I often operate. At least in part. True, I use words to reach out and connect with those around me – both on this blog, and otherwise. But I simultaneously use my words to hold people at a safe distance. To hide and protect the parts of me I don’t want you to hurt, or trump, or…see. “Truth is a stain,” the woman in the story says.

So here’s my resolution on this September night – one of which I may feel far less sure come morning: I want to try to live a different line. I want to try to live a line that sounds more like this than the one above: The truth of me – my real, authentic self – is a stained glass window, and my words can be lights to illuminate the beauty.

I want to see what kind of difference this can make in what I do with words.

Someone said to me recently that life from death is the pattern of the universe: day from night, spring from winter, hope from despair, wisdom from suffering, germination from the buried seed. We’re all of us somewhere on this cycle daily – either dying, or dead, or rising again. Though I’d rather do without the death parts of the equation, this idea gives me hope. It reframes the way I experience death in my life, and in the lives of those around me. It makes me feel more patient with it. More expectant, in the face of it, of dawn.

Here’s a piece by Kahlil Gibran that gives more form to this idea. The soldier in it represents many things for me: hope, the divided psyche or soul, the Christ, the Pattern. The name of the piece is “Peace”:
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Midtone Blue included the following song in his latest post. (A really remarkable blog, by the way; do pay it a visit!) I’ve been having a low self-esteem day, and these words have lifted my focus up toward better things.

O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

(words by George Matheson, music by Albert. L Peace)

Intuition fascinates me. It seems to operate on a level all its own, disregarding what surface words and expressions and official doctrines try to legislate. It can be ignored, and therefore caused to atrophy, but I don’t think it ever dies.

Unremarkably, my intuition has spoken lots to me throughout the years – about life, the Holy, my experiences, the universe. But I’m newly learning how to be attentive to it.

This week I’ve been reading a book called Mutant Message Down Under, the memoir of an American woman (Marlo Morgan) recounting a season spent with an Aboriginal tribe. Surprisingly (to me), through this tribe, known as Real People, Morgan finds herself immersed in a world and worldview very much like the ones my intuition has recently been telling me about.
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Why is it that everything out there to be known and explored and sat with and talked about and pondered sometimes fills me with giddiness and anticipation and gratitude - a sense that the world is magical and its wonders exhilarating, inviting, and infinite…and yet all the same stuff makes me feel on other days like a child, abandoned in a monstrous, labyrinthine store?

I’ve been in one of the latter states of mind the last few days, shaky from glimpses of horizons I hadn’t known existed before - new blogs I’ve been reading, new books, new forays into Tai Chi. When I get like this I usually need to ground myself again in something small, something tangible, something manageable. The quotidian. Time to wash dishes or bake bread. If I had a yard I’d garden.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my place in the world – who I am and am becoming, how and what I’d like to contribute. While my interests are broad, I’m drawn most deeply toward inner things – activities and writings and conversations that deal with inner growth, inner healing, inner change. Stuff of the soul.

What does this mean, I’ve wondered, for the ways I engage the world around me – a world that is shaped tremendously by inner landscapes (the brokenness and wholeness inside each of us), but that simultaneously demands engagement at an outer, public level? At least from one perspective, elections are decided, for example, or policies written, or organizations founded and run not by people sitting alone in front of therapists, or journals, or shrines, but by folks walking precincts, by suits behind desks, by time-consuming research, grant-writing, networking, speech-giving, and cooperation. The impact of the public sphere on all of us can’t be taken lightly (if for no other reason than that it pays our bills!).

In my attempts at finding my role in the world, I look around at how full of shadow the public sphere seems to be, and wonder sometimes whether public light is the only kind worth trying to shine. There is urgency, gripping and practical, in every public torch that people raise.

But something makes me pause in that conclusion.
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Just read and appreciated this editorial - especially the last paragraph. May write more on my engagement with politics in the next few days…

Though I’m becoming much more so, for most of my life I haven’t been particularly comfortable with ambiguity. Ambiguity has seemed like an enemy of what I most deeply want: to connect, and stay connected, with those around me. Lack of clarity not only makes it difficult to avoid disappointing, angering, offending, or failing those with whom I want relationship, but it also makes establishing consensus with such people impossible. I have equated consensus (sharing the same fundamental views) with feeling meaningfully connected.

Maybe this is why the crisis of faith and identity that I flailed through a few years ago was such a…crisis (and maybe why I’m still talking about it); without clarity on who I was and what I believed, I felt helpless to connect – with God, with self, with others. My obsession during seminary with “getting to the bottom of things” – finding answers to my questions about God, Bible, religion, suffering, church – had lots to do with this. I hoped, with enough time, to finally establish with those around me consensus on “what we think” and “who we are.” I was seeking a place to belong.
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So I’m working on a novel, stuck this minute on writing a transition I can’t figure out how to make, and I look out my window at an enormous tree, blowing in the wind. Sun is dancing on half of its leaves. Its branches are speckled with shadow. It looks like an amazing impressionistic painting. The thought occurs to me: isn’t that just what life often is? An impressionistic painting that’s beautiful and makes some sense with distance, but up close looks like chaos?

Maybe I need to roll my chair a few yards from my screen and see whether a transition will take shape that way…