I want to talk a little bit about people, and the way I’m coming to see them.  I guess you might call this my emerging anthropology.

I think people are fundamentally good.  Like the rest of creation, we’re wondrous and amazing and full of all kinds of potential.  We get plopped into the universe and just by nature of existing go about the business of being miracles.

I think we’re also – every last one of us – plopped into a web of violence (Rene Girard and co. have some pretty brilliant things to say about this, in my opinion.).  Other words could be used here instead of violence, like dysfunction or woundedness.  But for me they all boil down to this end:  by nature of existing, we get hurt.  It can’t be helped.

So in addition to all of our sparkle and glory, we all of us become wounded creatures, acting and reacting in ways appropriate to the nature of our wounds.  We develop holes inside, that crave love or belonging or respect or control or power or beauty or tenderness or attentiveness or whatever other things got broken out of us or into us in the course of our lives, or never were given enough to us in the first place. We thus become compelled to try and fill our holes.  Or keep ourselves from developing more.  Or prevent our originals from getting gouged out or eroded any deeper than they already are.

Often times this means pursuing life passions and vocations that actually make the world a better place – really wonderful organizations and institutions and laws and books and classes and conferences and entire social movements have been the offspring of painful personal experiences with life’s darker side.

But our attempts at filling our holes and/or protecting ourselves from developing deeper or new ones don’t only spread light.  Just as often, I think they end up becoming part of that web I spoke about earlier.  The violent one.  The one that hurts us and only perpetuates itself and all the things from which we want to be free.  One can think of any number of poster children from this camp, including any number of world leaders, past and present.

The tragic thing about our world is that this web is so ubiquitous.  But…the wonderful thing about our world – the thing that gives me hope and gladness and inspiration in the face of all of the horrible, horrible yuck – is that darkness and violence aren’t the whole story. 

They aren’t the whole story.

There is goodness in our world.  And light and love.  And despite some major and persisting set-backs, these have quite the tenacious life-force.  So much so, that when they die or get snuffed out, they pop up again. Maybe not in the same place, but still…  Life out of death.  Resurrection.  It’s that pattern I wrote about some time back. 

The Story, as a whole, as I see it, is one of darkness and light, and in humans, as in so much of creation, a miraculous potential for healing and growth and change.  And everywhere a life force, a kind of Holy Pulse, that pulls at us toward realizing that potential.  Again and again.

To me, this way of understanding people and all the layers of violence and light that populate our planet feels radically different from one that sees humans as fundamentally evil.  Rather than scolding fingers, it causes me to want to point compassion toward myself and toward humanity.  Wounded animals need lots of tenderness to heal.  And the last thing they need to be told is that they’re bad for trying to protect themselves.  Or for trying to get the things their broken selves genuinely need.

I have a hunch that if we truly understood one another’s wounds, we’d find it very difficult to condemn.  Anyone.  Destructive behavior would still need to be addressed and contained, but I wonder if the goal even then would shift from punishment toward redemption, or a chance at healing change.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about change.  The deep, inner kind.  The kind that makes people stronger and gentler at the same time.  The kind that makes people exude more and more patience with themselves and other people – patience with the baggage that each of us carries around, and with how long it often takes to set pieces of it down for moments, let alone days or the rest of an entire lifetime.  Change that helps people feel glad to be who they are – even excited about what this means – rather than sad to not be more like someone else, or seeking always after what others would want them to be.

I’ve had tastes of this kind of change.  Sometimes huge, long draughts of it.  I can never get enough.

So I’ve been thinking more and more about it, and have been trying to write it into my novel.  I’ve been trying to understand more about how it happens, and the kinds of factors that are usually nearby when it does.  Here’s a little of what I’ve come up with.

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I’ve just spent time this evening reading more of Pirsig’s sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, and came across a couple of passages that trigger many of my recent religion-related thoughts.

In one of these passages Pirsig is reflecting on the ways any society collectively works to uphold its ways of understanding reality. A collective worldview becomes a standard that trumps any individual’s experiences that challenge that worldview. Pirsig describes what has happened when a “student of scientific objectivity,” for example, has come across data that challenges the scientific assumptions he’s been making: “Wherever the chart disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and followed the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.”

Pirsig continues: “If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past ‘facts’ which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern, we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too."

Here’s his most pithy next line:

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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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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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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…

They say that chimps and humans share something like 99.4% of the same DNA, and it’s only the fractional difference that sets us apart. This must be all the more true between humans.

I feel this sometimes. I’ll be walking down the street and glance into a stranger’s eyes and, for just that moment, sense that she and I or he and I really are the same in the ways that matter.

But then the moment passes, and we glance away, and feel aware of how differently we’re dressed, or what different tasks we seem to be about, or how very dissimilar our backgrounds must be. We pass as strangers, in isolation.

Glimpses like these fuel a longing I carry around inside to connect. I long to literally and metaphorically lock eyes with friends and strangers in such a way that everything dividing us gets hushed, and the common ground we share – of loves and hopes and wounds and gladnesses, of angers, disappointments, deep, deep yearnings, of being children and lovers, enemies and friends, sexual beings, spiritual beings, listening-to-music beings, surviving junior high beings, of knowing what it feels like to shiver and sweat and laugh and cry – when all of this gets stretched as an enormous field around us. No words would have to clutter the landscape; it could just be there, like us, the silence heavy – or light – with all that makes us not alone.

Rilke wrote once that “at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone.” And it really feels this way a lot of the time. But the longing in me wants to claim just the opposite, and search hard to confirm the hunch.

There’s been a lot of talk in our household lately about what it means to be and stay human in our world. So much pulls at us to turn off our hearts, turn off our minds, and fit nicely into roles and activities and concerns dictated by systems (institutions, social groups, media) that seem far less interested in meaningful connectedness (with self, others, earth, the divine) than in keeping “the machine” alive (our economy, our institutions, our entertainment industry, etc.). How do we stay human in the midst of these Powers?

As I’ve personally been adjusting to a new city and surroundings, this question has been scratching at my insides.
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For whatever combination of reasons, I’ve lived most of my life believing the world is primarily a place of conflict, where good and evil are constantly at war. In many ways my religion supported this idea, and too the daily news and every cop show aired on television; listen to George W. for even a moment and you’ll hear its message clearly. There’s the good guys, and there’s the bad guys; whose side are you on?

I respect what this view highlights. Good and evil do exist. I’ve personally felt them wrestle, and seen the wonder and destruction they leave in their wakes.

But the longer I think and observe and live, the more the world seems much more complicated than simple dualities. It begs more nuance than good-and-evil wars imply.

Here’s why I think this matters. When I view the world through a lens of good-vs-evil, my stance toward life (people, nature, decision-making, prayer), becomes vigilant, tight, expectant of resistance and threat. I have only two categories in which to place myself and those around me, and, for fear of finding myself in the wrong one, must work diligently to establish my position among the good…often by means of establishing clearly who the bad guys are, and proving I’m not like them. I’m not free to recognize or acknowledge the darkness within myself, or the light within my enemies; to do so could jeopardize my spot with the good.

This life-stance deeply troubles me. It looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy whose content, though maybe intended by many to “protect us from evil,” actually perpetuates fear and prejudice and division and hate. It perpetuates conflict.

I wonder whether there aren’t alternative ways of understanding good and evil that can produce more compassion and connection and reconciliation and…hope. Ones that cause muscles to relax and fists and guns to lower, and create safe spaces for honest dialogue and self-appraisal and discovery of common ground.

Maybe focusing on good versus bad – at whatever outer or inner or spiritual level – actually ensures that peace is never won.

Sometimes I feel like the universe is electric. Everything, all of creation, is singing this amazing song, and my ears and soul can barely take it in for its size and volume and complexity.

I’ve been working on a song this summer, trying to put to sound and poetry fragments of this notion and the implications that accompany it. I’m calling the song Untoward Choir.

Verse 1:
I’ve been listening again to words that aren’t words
And melodies mostly unpitched.
Untamed is the truth I’m hearing.
Sand through hands, a wave’s retreat:
Displays of its captors’ defeats.

Vendors package and sell pale echoes of lines
Laying lifeless though painted for show
While the sources sing on
Their Voice ‘come a wild terrible glory
Mocking each manicured Story.

Chorus:
Earth, wind, water, fire
Love, fear, trust, desire
Seasons, cycles, orbits, turnings
Tasks mundane and witches burning
Wars, forgivings, can’t keep livings
Textures, colors, fathers, mothers
God and goddess, child that taught us
Dark and light, religion’s fight
Wisdom, madness, torture, gladness: sing.
All sing.
The Untoward Choir

Verse 2:
From a tiny, dense seed
Booms the universe’s show
‘Til the force makes its splay return inward.
A cosmic flasher flashing.
Brazen expansion exposes the all
‘Til contraction curves secrets back into the pall.

Outward, inward
The cycle repeats
in my listening, history revealing
the secrets dense in my soul.
Look out to look in, look in to see out
Chaos’ pattern the fount from which all Music flows.

Verse 3:
Each life sings a line
On Millennia’s scroll
Weather noble or base in its creed.
Truth-telling unaware.
The Choir impartial to evil’s intrigues
Neither forcing a limit to angelic deed

In the choice that appears
In this consciousness raising
To fashion the shape of my phrasing
My soul beats time
Pulsing to sing with the flame in me burning
Melodies birthed from the Love of my yearning.