There is much to mourn in this world, much that deserves seriousness.  But you know, I think the opposite is true, too.  Like this, for example.  I love it.

The book meme that’s been traveling the blogosphere recently knocked on my door (via Bobbie).  Shall I be a good sport and open up?

1.      Total number of books I own

Maybe hundreds?  Those who have helped us move the last three times, or rather their backs, are probably the ones with the most accurate count.

2.      The last book I bought

Just bought four at once last month, used:  Rachel Remen’s My Grandfather’s Blessings and Kitchen Table Wisdom, and Paulo Coelho’s By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Pilgrimage

3.      The last book I read

Hmmm… This is a hard one, because…I have a confession to make:  I finish very few books.  Even ones I really, really like.  Come look at the books in my boxes and on my shelves and you’ll find a very large number with little bookmarks still in them.  My husband still gets on my case for the time I read all the way to the last four pages of Crime and Punishment and then didn’t pick the book up to finish it for at least another year.  Surely some psychoanalyst could have a heyday with this habit.

But…let’s see.  I read most of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning last month.  I read three quarters of the way through Carl Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections not long before that.  I read big chunks of about 20 books on ritual in May.  Many of those were really good – books on what rituals are, why rituals are important things, examples of rituals that individuals and families have created to honor different occasions in their lives.  One called Rituals for our Times was one of my favorites. 

Is that enough?  I could go on…

4.      Five books that mean a lot to me (and I have finished every one of these!)

Shusaku Endo’s Deep River

Richar Rohr’s Everything Belongs

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter

5.      Two major books I read when I was a kid

L. M. Montgomery was a real favorite.  And Louisa May Alcott.  Oh, was the question books?  I thought you said authors.  Hmmm…the Bible?  That’s a major one.  I remember really liking Charlotte’s Web, and Heidi and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.

The Sun
by Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

For months, now, I’ve been meaning to buy a copy of Rachel Remen’s book My Grandfather’s Blessings.  I saw her speak sometime last winter, left absolutely dazed by how loved and inspired and happy she made me feel, and have had a number of dreams since then telling me to BUY HER BOOK.  Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do it.  Is it not the hugest irony that I accidentally put half of our old address and half of our new one on the order for it?  By some miracle it showed up on my porch today.

Anyhow, one of the first stories she tells is of her grandfather telling her, as a very young child, the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the Holy.  I read it out loud to N and couldn’t get through half of it without crying.  Here’s the two paragraphs I love the most:

I was very puzzled by this story.  How could it be that one might confuse an angel with an enemy?  But Grandfather said this was the sort of thing that happened all the time.  "Even so," he told me, "it is not the most important part of the story.  The most important part of the story is that everything has its blessing."

Looking back on it, I have wondered if my grandfather, old and close to the time of his death, had not left me with this story as a compass.  It is a puzzling story, a story about the nature of blessings and the nature of enemies.  How tempting to let the enemy go and flee.  To put the struggle behind you as quickly as possible and get on with your life.  Life might be easier then but far less genuine.  Perhaps the wisdom lies in engaging the life you have been given as fully and courageously as possible and not letting go until you find the unknown blessing that is in everything.

I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning this week.  Profound book.  The first half is the author’s story of survival in Nazi concentration camps.  The second is a more explicit description of an approach to psychotherapy (logotherapy) the author developed because of his death-camp experiences (he was a psychiatrist before and after the war).

I’ve spent a lot of energy in my life searching for meaning, so not surprisingly, I’m enjoying the book.  And particularly since it’s so indelibly shaped by suffering.  I’m deeply moved and heartened by those who have walked through hell and found (or been given) a way to actually come out on the other side…those whose wisdom and grace and inner quietness reflect that journey.  Frankl is truly a gift.

One of the observations he makes about the human quest for meaning (a quest he thinks all of us are on) is that there is no “meaning of life” that’s universally true.  He says, “To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion:  ‘Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?’  There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent.  The same holds for human existence.”

To find the meaning of life, he says, think of the question the other way around:  what if instead of asking the question of life (or books/philosophers/friends/nature/religion/etc., in other words, things outside yourself), you take it as a question that life is asking you.  What is the meaning of your life?

I suppose one might get all uptight at that thought, feeling pressure to give a respectable answer.  I can imagine conjuring up the image of a stern, white-haired god, calling us to account. 

But what if the question doesn’t have to be asked with judgment or sternness at all?  What if the question is more playful, more artful than that?  What if it’s asking that you notice what’s growing in the garden that is you.  What seeds have been planted there?  What’s tended or left wild?  What might be time to prune?  Maybe these are the meaning of life.  For you.  Right now.  And possibly into the future.  Whether what’s growing there is plump with fruit or quiet in a winter dormancy, it’s there.

I cannot know all my life will grow or mean, but by the end of it, I’d love to look back and see a pattern of awakening.  A pattern of learning to love self and others well.  A pattern of rich engagement with people and emotions.  I want to see reverberations of a woman becoming more comfortable in her own skin – ripples into other lives, where because of that process going on in me, others feel it happening in themselves, too.  I want to tend the garden of a healer, a namer, a noticer and celebrator of beautiful things.  Things that call courage and hope into being.  I want to walk gently with fellow souls.  These are what I want to conspire with in that swirl of plants and sun and rain and seasons that is me.  That is me in this world.  Today.

If all of this is the meaning of life, of my life, I think my existential angst might be pacified.  If this is the meaning of life, life makes me smile, and want to throw my arms around it all.

For the last few months I’ve been making my way slowly through Stumbling Toward God, a memoir of a woman’s journey from atheism toward faith.  Her path ultimately led her to join and participate actively in two congregations, alternating weeks–each providing nourishment for different aspects and expressions of her spiritual and psychological and relational lives.  One church was Unitarian Universalist, the other Episcopalian.

I recommend the book not only to those on a similar journey to hers, but also to those already situated in a particular religious tradition, but who are growing uncomfortable with it, and having conscious or unconscious theological questions nagging at their insides.  Margaret McGee (the author of the book) has a wonderfully disarming way of naming the kinds of questions that many religious people feel, and, without ego, sharing the story of how she’s tried to address them.

Sitting in the doctor’s office this morning, I read some paragraphs about her efforts at trying to understand who she was praying to when she began, after years of atheism, praying spontaneously to an unknown God.

"I never felt closer to God than when I turned my compost pile.  Forking over the compost, smelling the dark, sweet material, looking close to see the material come alive and move, a worm shining in sunlight, a millipede crawling toward shadow, a slug burrowing into a grapefruit rind.  The sense of awe, the strange mix of pride and humility that filled me.  What did I pray to?  Was I praying to the source of that awe?

"Yes, in a way.

"I prayed to what all things hold in common.  I prayed to what makes life.  I thought about the elements of the universe, the rocks, the stars, the air, other living things.  I tried to get the perspective of what’s behind all that.  I prayed to the force that brings things into existence.  I thought this force encompassed all it created.  My God was transcendent, and my God was also immanent.  God ran in my veins.  God lived and died and lived again in every atom of the universe.

"When I prayed, I tried to feel that I was part of God, and God was part of me.  Through that feeling, I tried to grasp what I could do, how I could change to make a whole life, a good life.

"By stripping away God’s personality, I had revealed what was essential to me about God.  God was no longer blank [a frustration she had in prayer that spurred her to try to discover, in the first place, what seemed most essential about God ].  God made all things, caused all things to change into other things, and inhabited all things.

"Everything else about God was a mystery.  I could live with that mystery."

A little later, under a subheading titled "Dressing the Emporer," she says this:

"It’s hard to talk about God.  And when you strip away personality and characteristics, it gets a lot harder.  After struggling to be coherent about something that is, in its essence, a mystery, it occurred to me that religions were just trying to put a bit of clothing on the unknowable, so that we could see a shape and talk about it.  Shiva, the Buddha, the Trinity, the great web of being–all these images were metaphors for what is truly unspeakable.  All religions use substitute names for God, and we get in serious trouble when we think we’re using the real name.  I had mistaken the clothing that religions put on their Gods for the God that animates the robes.

"It isn’t that God is a human creation, any more than gravity is a human creation.  Our definitions of God are human creations, though, just as our definitions of gravity are human creations.  Our attempts to describe gravity are flawed not only because we still have things to learn about gravity, but also because we can perceive gravity only through our human mind and senses.  We’ll always know only a human idea of gravity and not gravity itself.

"Once I saw God in this light, the outfits that people put on God began to look less stupid and more useful.  The Hebrew God, who had repelled me all the time I was an atheist outside the church, turned out to be a surprisingly accurate human representation of the forces of creation and fate:  arbitrary and powerful; by turns just, unjust, nurturing, vengeful, forgiving, and unforgiving; and above all, always with us.  I was still mad at the guy, but at least I had some glimmering of how he got his reputation."

I guess that gives a taste of McGee’s honesty and candor (admittedly taken out of broader context; scandalized readers, please note).  I’m looking forward to hearing more of her story.  (…or is it mine?)

Last week’s New Yorker ran a powerful short story called The Gorge, by Umberto Eco, a heavy piece about Italian life during the Second World War.  The two main characters are a young Catholic boy, and an endearing older man named Gragnola – an anarchist, with all sorts of faith and love and valor hid well beneath a crusty, cowardly exterior.  The two are friends. 

One day the old man talks theology with the boy.  While I don’t see everything the same way he does, his words, and the boy’s reflections on them, dig deeply into the realness and messiness of life.  Here’s the end of a conversation about the Ten Commandments.  The old man speaks first:

“And now we come to the last commandment:  ‘Don’t covet other people’s stuff.’  But have you ever asked yourself why this commandment exists, when you’ve already got ‘Don’t steal’?  If you covet a bike like the one your friend has, is that a sin?  No, not if you don’t steal it from him.  Don Cognasso [the local priest] will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing.  But there’s bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don’t, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there’s good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, even a used one, and it’s good envy that makes the world go round.  And then there’s another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can’t see any reason that a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger.  And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed.  But that’s exactly what the commandment prohibits you from doing.  The tenth commandment prohibits revolution.  Therefore, my dear boy, don’t kill and don’t steal from poor kids like yourself, but go ahead and covet what other people have taken from you.  That’s the sun of the coming day, and that’s why our comrades are staying up there in the mountains, to get rid of Fat Head [Mussolini], who rose to power funded by agrarian landowners and by Hitler’s toadies, Hitler who wanted to conquer the world so that that guy Kripp who builds Berthas this long could sell more cannons.  But you, how could you ever understand about these things, you who grew up memorizing oaths of obedience to Il Duce’s orders?”

“No, I understand, even if not everything.”

“I sure hope so.”

Justice envy.  What a clever distinction.  And what a beautiful reflection more generally on the complicated nature of envy, and the need to parse the implications of “don’t do it at all.”

Later on the boy notices that Gragnola always wears a long, thin sack hanging from his neck and tucked beneath his shirt.

“What’s that, Gragnola?” he asks.

“A lancet.”

“Were you studying to be a doctor?”

“I was studying philosophy.  I was given the lancet in Greece by a doctor in my regiment, before he died…And I’ve worn it ever since.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a coward.  With the things I do and the things I know, if the S.S. or the Black Brigades catch me, they’ll torture me.  If they torture me, I’ll talk, because evil scares me.  And I’ll be sending my comrades to their death.  This way, if they catch me, I’ll cut my throat with the lancet.  It doesn’t hurt, only takes a second – sffft.  I’ll be screwing them all:  the Fascists because they won’t learn a thing, the priests because I’ll be a suicide and that’s a sin, and God because I’ll be dying when I choose and not when he chooses.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

(Did I mention the man is crusty?)

The boy reflects on things like this that Gragnola says:

“Gragnola’s speeches left me sad.  Not because I was sure they were evil but because I feared they were good.  He lived in a world made sad by an evil God, and the only times I saw him smile with any tenderness were when he was talking to me about Socrates or Jesus.  Both of whom, I would remind myself, were killed, so I did not see what there was to smile about.

“And yet he was not mean; he loved the people around him.  He had it in only for God, and that must have been a real chore, because it was like throwing rocks at a rhinoceros – the rhinoceros never notices a thing and continues going about its rhino business, and meanwhile you are red with rage and ripe for a heart attack.”

Could this describe the experience of raging at God any more poignantly??  Or the paradox so many God-haters are:  people so compassionate, so in touch with the beauty and pathos and suffering of humanity, that they just can’t stomach the idea of God being the jerk they’ve understood God to be.  They love so deeply they have to hate God.

I respect these kinds of people.  I guess I was one for a good bulk of time.  I still feel rage toward a certain image of God, but am coming to trust more and more deeply that that is not the God we’ve got.  My trust makes me say to “God”-haters whole-heartedly:  “Rage on!” I respect their (our) reasons for doing so.  And I hope and pray that all of us have occasion to experience God as other than jerk.  I pray that if that takes being raging atheists for a while (which probably means not atheists at all), we find the courage to live and be that storm for as long as it takes to find the Calm that comes after.  Or sometimes, if we’re lucky, the Calm that’s right there in the middle.

Lately Christy has been sharing some really beautiful things (read all of her March posts.  Seriously.) that have made me think again about what it means to suffer, what it means to grow when it really hurts to do so, what it means to feel really alone, even when supportive and/or well-intentioned others are around.  And also what it means to want to be gentle with yourself, even when you don’t exactly know how…to wish you could accept others’ love.

The darkest season I’ve experienced so far took place a few years ago.  It was just on its heels, when I was actually beginning to see life at the end of all that death, that I wrote a poem to try to understand what I was experiencing.  My life and faith and identity felt like “death-strewn shores,” and, having experienced a lot of hurt, it had become very, very difficult to trust.  Even those I knew in my gut to be trustworthy had become suspect.  Thankfully (the word feels now like an obscene understatement), a handful of people stuck it out with me, offering, as best they could, what presence and patience and compassion they had to give.

The stranger-friend in the poem is a prototype of this Compassion, this Presence.  Someone like Jesus may have been.  (I wonder what the poem would look like if he were female…)  He embodies the idea that resurrection sometimes cannot happen – in ourselves, or the ones we walk alongside – apart from us acknowledging our own suffering, and standing in solidarity (often wordlessly) with those we care for, not as “outsiders,” but as ones who know from personal experience what it’s like to be there, in the struggle.  Near the end I work with the idea that each of us, in the days and months and seasons of our lives, are at various places on this death/resurrection cycle, and we cannot expect even the most powerful of stranger-friends to escape the death part of it; they, too, (will) need presence and compassion.

Here’s the poem:

(more…)

Today I’ve taken a step back from my work (fiction writing) to reflect on why I’m doing it.  Every so often I need this – a “taking stock” that refocuses my energy and helps me determine whether there’s things I want/need to do differently from week to week to better move toward my goals.  I came across another passage in Rollo May’s Courage to Create that has sparked some helpful reflection toward this end.  May writes:

“If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art.  For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.  This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, “unconscious” levels of the culture is destroyed.  They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world.”

This immediately made me think about all the short stories I’ve been reading.  These are art.  And the more I reflect on them “long and searchingly,” the more I see in them a reflection of the “spiritual meaning” of our age.  As far as I can tell, they portray homelessness in its deepest sense – that lack of rootedness, of place, of purpose, of meaning that has little to do with whether or not you have a permanent address.  I leave these stories lonely and cold, wishing for buoys of hope or warmth or relationship, doubting they’re there to be found.  I leave feeling like life has little sparkle, and day-to-dayness is a lot of that raw feeling you get when you haven’t slept enough, or you’re about to get sick, or everything you wished life could be just really isn’t happening.

Thinking about these stories this way makes me admire their writers for being such incisive namers, naming our age and the state of so many of our souls.  I want to be a namer, too.  I want to help raise consciousness about what it is we’re feeling and living through, what we’re hoping for and despairing about.

But in all my “taking stock,” I realize I don’t want to stop there.  I want to do more than hold up mirrors.  I want to point toward windows, and begin imagining what might be seen through them.  I want to stand at the edge of our age, quite personally in touch with the fear and frustration and meaningless that accompany disillusionment and the crumbling of foundations (in science, religion, politics, etc.), and look past that edge to participate in the creation of something more.  Something beyond.  Something hopeful, even if realistic and not disconnected from despair.  May writes, “[The courage to live into the future] will not be the opposite of despair.  We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country.  Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

I want to be a namer, yes, but also a creator, courageously creating from the stuff of life that which enlivens, and sustains, and shines light on hopeful paths toward all that makes up “home.”

Rollo May has some pretty profound things to say about courage and creativity and the ways that artists (defined broadly) are actually a type of rebel.  Some pieces from Courage to Create:

“When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter.  Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images.  But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.  For they are the bearers of the human beings’ age-old capacity to be insurgent.  They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis.  Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.”

And later,

“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been the same person.  Socrates was a rebel, and he was sentenced to drink hemlock.  Jesus was a rebel, and he was crucified for it.  Joan of Arc was a rebel, and she was burned at the stake.

“Yet each of these figures and hundreds like them, though ostracized by their contemporaries, were recognized and worshiped by the following ages as having made the most significant creative contributions in ethics and religion to civilization.

“Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.  The teachings that led to their deaths raised the ethical and spiritual levels of their societies…They rebelled, as Paul Tillich has so beautifully stated, against God in the name of the God beyond God.  The continuous emergence of the God beyond God is the mark of creative courage in the religious sphere.”

So I’m thinking about these things today.  All of them were written in the context of describing and defining courage, and particularly the courage required of artists, of creators. In many ways I feel like the last years of my life have been filled with courage – the courage that it takes to say no to ways of understanding life and self and God that, though destructive for me, nevertheless hemmed me comfortably in with structure and approval and knownness and acceptability in many of my life’s arenas.  It takes excruciating courage to step away from things like that.

But stepping-away courage is only one kind, I’m thinking.  Stepping-toward courage is a whole nother beast.  And living-into courage as well – the kind it takes to solidly embody who one is, not just in the privacy of one’s home, or in the safety of a handful of people who see things the way you do, but in ever-widening spheres of life.

I want to foster these latter kinds of courage.  I want to be more than a clandestine rebel.  I want my rebellion to participate openly in the creation of a more compassionate, more alive, more whole society than the one I currently inhabit.