Monday, September 14, 2009

A Poem by William Bronk

Beethoven: The Late Sonatas

You have to understand it isn't what
he says but what was being said to him.
He even hardly had to write it down.
He listened in his deafness. In ours, we hear
him listening. We overhear.
The purpose for the pianist playing now
is how to let us think he isn't playing,
to just be quiet and listen along with us.

- from Living Instead, North Point Press, 1991.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

From tolerance, the human future...

A fascinating article based on experiments in social collaboration among animals may suggest new clues to the differences between human beings and their closest evolutionary cousins, which may help explain the basis of human intelligence -- and our common (and future) achievement: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/woods_hare09/woods_hare09_index.html

Roughly stated, researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare note that humans have evolved the capacity to have a "theory of mind" which gives each of us the desire to know what others are thinking and the determination to find that out -- a capacity that no other species possesses, though some domesticated animals seem to have developed the reading of social cues on which this theory of mind may be based, even faster than physical evolution can explain.

But unlike animals, we don't have to rely on interpreting body language to collaborate with each other. We've developed language based directly on thought, expressed in words. Unlike our evolutionary cousins, we've also learned to set aside the aversion to cooperating with others who are outside our immediate family group and build collaborative networks (and cooperation is inconceivable without exchanging words). Stated another way, we've done things together on the basis of communicating with and tolerating those who are different from us. Thus it might be said that we've built civilization, not on zero-sum material competition, but on enlarging our sense of affinity for one another.

All this may give new meaning to the insight of the inventor of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon, who said in the 17th century that science would one day enable all people to escape from "animal time". From civilization has come science, and now science (and other disciplines of thought and work) may be helping us to understand ourselves and our underlying talents better, in order to help us drive our own further development. Carl Sagan predicted that the next stage in human evolution would be self-guided. And now we may know how: If we can leave our residual hatreds and antagonisms behind, there may be an extraordinary new evolutionary leap forward for humanity in the next centuries. And that may give new meaning to the famous statement of St. Paul: "Love is the fulfilling of the law."

Saturday, July 4, 2009

What are we ignoring?

In his remarkable book, The Perennial Philosophy, first published in 1962, the late English novelist Aldous Huxley wrote:

"There is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change...What happened was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences. Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there's a will there's always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers -- that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense, and sustained. It is clear that many of the things to which modern men have chosen to pay attention were ignored by their predecessors."

What are we ignoring now? Unless it can safely be said that we are not ignoring anything, then perhaps we cannot be certain that the default beliefs of the prevailing worldview -- for example, that life and consciousness are fundamentally material, or that violence is a form of power, or that money is a prerequisite for creativity -- are true. We understand a great deal about the operations of many external phenomena that are presented in daily experience. Science and other forms of empirical investigation have sharpened that understanding. Do we understand as much about who we are, or even how we think? Can we proceed from within a set of definitions of what exists, which rest on material premises, to understand certain faculties -- such as our capacity for free and unprompted imagination, or our intuition about distant people or imminent events -- which seem to require no passage of time or no material means of apprehension? What are we ignoring that might lead to new explanations of these and other commonly reported natural faculties?

The traits and operation of the external structure of the world in which we appear to move may not fully explain the agency we bring to changing it. In regard to the creations of thought, mechanism is not causation, let alone meaning. The idea of a painting cannot be derived from the canvas on which it appears, or even from the brush. The destination of the car you intend to drive to Philadelphia cannot be ascertained by examining its engine. For centuries, some of the finest writers have testified that when it came to their best material, they felt they were not creating the text so much as transcribing what they were hearing. "The book wrote itself," we are often told.

In the book of Exodus, when Moses saw God face to face on Mount Sinai, he asked God who he should say he had been talking with, when he returned to the people. "Tell them, I AM has sent you to them," was the answer -- That Which Exists. Adi Shankara, the 9th century Hindu philosopher, said that there is not even a class of substance to which the Brahman, or Divine Ground, belongs. "It is the One before whom words recoil." In an age of obsession with celebrities, in which the media coach us to believe that the desirable story and the reliable explanation live on the surface of a painted screen, the concept that there is a Cause that has no image, and that cannot be described with words, but which employs and loves us, seems increasingly strange and safely ignorable. How convenient it would be to live in a world in which what we get is only what we can see.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

"In my end is my beginning..."

In 1995, on a sunny spring day in England, I had a meeting with the bursar of Magdalen College at Cambridge University. At one point he asked me if I would like to see the Pepys Library. Samuel Pepys was perhaps the most famous diarist in English literature, having served as a senior official for two kings in the 17th century. In his will, Pepys gave his library to his alma mater, with the proviso that if even one book were lost from it, the entire library would be transferred to King's College. In almost 300 years, no book has ever been lost.

Knowing that I admired the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the bursar remarked that the original manuscript of Eliot's "Four Quartets" was in the Pepys Library. Eliot had spent several summers at Magdalen and had given some of his papers to the college. And so it was that I got to hold in my hands a surprisingly small number of yellow legal pad sheets on which the man thought by many to be the greatest poet in English in the 20th century had written what I regarded as the greatest poem of that century. Eliot's small, delicate handwriting was very precise, and I was struck by how few revisions there were -- really only a few words crossed out here and there.

Books have been written about "Four Quartets", and I'm not a literary scholar. But I had always loved this poem's exquisite, honest and yet stormy writing as it lies across the pages -- a darkly piercing and yet somehow illuminated exploration of time, history and the individual's ability to savor and then override the deep specific pull that the earth exerts on us. Eliot knew that life is a succession of conscious moments, in which inchoate faith meets hard mortality and then passes directly through it, as if it were nothing. The poem drives toward a complete revelation, an understanding that transcends the modern, post-traditional period of which Eliot was a progenitor -- an understanding which nevertheless remained rooted in the language and ideas of that tradition, so that what is old becomes what is new. But there is no revelation. There is no neatly wrapped ultimate meaning. We take the journey with him, yet when we get to the shore and step on the dock, the ship has sailed. But we sailed with it.

Here are passages from "Four Quartets":

To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered...


Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning...


It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness...

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices...


There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern...

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Friday, June 5, 2009

A poem by Czeslaw Milosz

ON PRAYER

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, everyone, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

- from The Collected Poems 1931-1987, The Ecco Press, 1988.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The People's Mind and the Entrance of Light

Here is, essentially, the text of a sermon I gave in a Congregational Church in Massachusetts in September 2007:

About a month ago I happened to be reading an essay entitled “The People’s Idea of God,” which was originally a lecture in Boston in 1886, by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Here’s one passage:

“Proportionately as the people's belief of God, in every age, has been dematerialized…has their Deity become good; no longer a personal tyrant or a molten image, but the divine Life, Truth, and Love …This more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations as well as individuals, and will lift man ultimately to the understanding that our ideals form our characters, that as a man ‘thinketh in his heart, so is he’."

The conviction that our ideas and thoughts produce our experience was shared by the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said in a lecture in Boston in 1842: “All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought…You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from what they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy.”

Mr. Emerson and Mrs. Eddy were characteristic children of 19th century New England, raised in its bracing Protestant individualism but eager for a new age marked by science and emancipation. They were also contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln, and if anyone was an example of someone who made his own circumstances out of his thinking, it was Lincoln.

Mrs. Eddy’s words -- “this more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations” -- could be a description of how Lincoln taught a new definition of America’s purpose to those who had to fight and redeem meaning from the ordeal of the Civil War. They also echo the opening words of the U.S. Constitution: “We, the people…in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice …and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution…”

The founders didn’t only write the Constitution, they ordained it, as if the document were to be a kind of civic ministry. Clearly they regarded the advent of America’s freedom not only as a political deed but as a providential sign, implying a higher calling than merely building a prosperous nation – an idea later reflected in Lincoln’s speeches as president. According to Lincoln’s law partner, “No man had a stronger or firmer faith in Providence.” Lincoln himself said that he believed in a “Creator” who possessed all wisdom and who had “established a principle, in obedience to which, worlds move and are upheld.”

This idea of God was more celestial than evangelical, explaining perhaps why Lincoln usually avoided discussing religion – he would never have satisfied someone who worshiped a punishing Jehovah or a body hanging on a cross. But as a boy, Lincoln for a long time had only two things to read: the works of Shakespeare, and the Bible, which he knew as well or better than his contemporaries. He wrote with the inflections of its language and knew all of its best stories. And that made him far better able to speak to the people’s mind than if he kept reminding audiences of how religious he was, which many of today’s politicians can’t stop doing.

In December 1864, two wives of Confederate prisoners of war went to the White House to ask Lincoln to release their husbands. One of the ladies emphasized that her husband was a religious man. “Tell him, when you meet him,” Lincoln replied, “that the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven.”

The classicist Edith Hamilton would have instantly recognized in that remark the passion of the prophet Ezekiel. In her book, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament, she tells us that Ezekiel saw that “the consciousness of being set above others, because one has blue blood or a white skin or the correct method of preparing food or the unique knowledge of the truth, is the great disrupting force.” When brandishing religion takes the place of humbly seeking truth, our ideals will not so easily elevate our characters.

“The Hebrew prophets,” Hamilton said, “were men possessed by the idea that what ought to be can and must be brought to pass. Their only aim was to establish on earth the rule of justice and mercy… Religion’s work was to create a world where no one was oppressed.” She could as easily have said this about Abraham Lincoln or any of the leaders of the great nonviolent movements of the 20th century which obtained their peoples’ rights.

The history of those movements demonstrates that oppression’s days are numbered once the people begin to resist; and when they disrupt its power to make people afraid, it collapses. But the knowledge of how to do this has not become intuitive, because the world still believes that material power, especially violence, is immovable. So the knowledge must be taught.

This is what Jesus did, incessantly. When Mary Magdalene and Joanna came to the tomb, found the great stone moved away, and realized Jesus had risen, one of the two men standing there in shining garments said to Mary, “Remember how he spoke to you when he was still in Galilee.” In other words: don’t be astonished; think about what this means.

Later when two of his followers are walking on the road to Emmaus, talking about the amazing news of resurrection, a stranger starts walking with them and “expounds” to them the reasons why it happened. After they finally recognize the stranger as Jesus, and he disappears, they run back to Jerusalem to tell their friends, and one says, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us, while he opened to us the scriptures?” And later, when Jesus stood in the midst of them in Jerusalem, the gospel simply says, “Then he opened their understanding.”

The only outward thing happening in these ecstatic encounters is speaking and listening. Why should it be otherwise, when the writer of John begins his gospel by saying, “In the beginning was the Word”? No one hyperventilated, sacrificed a goat, or excommunicated others who hadn’t joined the gathering. What happened was illumination, and then the rest of all their lives changed utterly. But there was more light to come, from this opening of understanding.

Between 1450 and 1605, three events occurred which made possible the ideas that fired the American founding. In 1450, Johannes Gutenburg invented movable type, making books available for a mass market. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenburg Castle church and began the Protestant Reformation, assailing a remote authoritarian Roman church. And in 1605, Sir Francis Bacon published The Advancement of Learning, which offered the first definition of the modern idea of science.

Without the Bible printed in vernacular languages, Luther would not so easily have reached an immense following. After the Reformation, Protestants based their ministry on the consent of believers, and believers were seen as equal before God – from which the ideas of self-government and universal rights naturally evolved.

The sociologist Adam Seligman tells us that this “new vision of the individual as a moral and autonomous agent” made possible the idea of a civil society in which reason rather than coercion was the basis of public thought. This in turn made possible the idea of the scientist, who gives himself authority to propound new theories based on his investigation of fact.

With reason, Francis Bacon argued, human inquiry would open nature’s secrets and free the world from dogmatism and what he called “animal time.” It was necessary to “stand upon the hill of Truth,” he said, above the “errors and wanderings and mists” of customary thought, before “another universe or theatre of things comes into view.”

That “new theatre”, to the followers of Gandhi in India, of Solidarity in Poland, of the people power revolution in the Philippines, of Vaclev Havel’s Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and of Yushchenko’s Orange Revolution in Ukraine – among other great movements of liberation -- was a political order which enforced equal rights for all, and in which power rested on the consent of the people, ascertained in free and fair elections.
Vaclev Havel said that such revolutions always begin with individuals who choose to stop believing the lie that life is normal when people’s rights are denied, and instead to begin to “live in the truth.” That would mean nothing unless thought was translated into action – unless the truth was demonstrated. Through skillful resistance to external control by fear and dogmatism, a people whose mind had grasped the truth about the real source of power could begin the work of liberating themselves. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I don’t have to tell you who said that.

Sir Francis Bacon, said the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “had one burning passion: to change the world through thought.” So did Ezekiel, Emerson, and Lincoln – and many other thinkers and emancipators to whom we owe the advent of a free and self-renovating global society. Notice that I say “advent” – meaning, this liberated world society is coming, but it’s not here yet. And there are threats to its birth that remain to be vanquished.

One of those threats is the idea that a new order can be brought about by bringing death to people who object to the terms of that order. That’s what terrorism is really about. The writer Jonathan Schell said that Jesus’s observation, “They that live by the sword shall die by the sword,” does more “than prescribe conduct; it makes a claim about the nature of the human world. We cannot suppose Jesus means that everyone who kills will be killed. But we can suppose he means that violence harms the doer as well as his victims; that violence generates counter-violence; and that the choice of violence starts a chain of events likely to bring general ruin.”

The novelist and political writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1940 about the violence of Stalinism. He had been a communist who renounced his political faith after witnessing the ruin it had created. The book was called Darkness at Noon. If we believe, in any extremity, that we are limited to material power to protect us or make us free, then we are living in what Francis Bacon called “animal time.” In a house that you enter at night, darkness flees when you turn on the light. But you must turn it on.

That is what the writer of the New Testament book of First John had in mind when he wrote to his followers in the first century. He had been a follower of Jesus and an eyewitness to his healings and other so-called miracles. And here is what John said:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life: For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness… This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”

References:
- Mary Baker Eddy, The People’s Idea of God, Christian Science Publishing Society, 1908.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Essential Transcendentalists, ed.by Richard G. Geldard, New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005
- Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999
- “Reply to a Southern Woman,” Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1959-1865, New York, The Library of America, 1989
- Edith Hamilton, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1962.
- Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society, Princeton University Press, 1992
- Loren Eiseley, The Man Who Saw Through Time, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973
- Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World, New York, Henry Holt and Company
- The First Epistle of John, Chapter 1, verses 1-2, 5.


Sunday, May 31, 2009

Profession and Discipline

In the late 1980's I spent two days in a Benedictine monastery, Ampleforth Abbey, in Yorkshire. I was interested in having that experience because I had come to conclude that between the Nicene Creed and the Protestant Reformation, the spiritual mission of Christianity had had its purest manifestation in the work of the monasteries, and in the music that monasteries as well as cathedrals and parish churches had incubated. So I wanted to see one for myself.

From the 4th century on, as the Church in Europe went about its compromises and politics in a world too often marked by poverty and injustice and personal barbarism and wars, the monks wrote, studied and sang every day in their archipelago of stone-clad retreats all over the original Western continent. The medieval mystics in particular, who kept alive a lineage of spiritual thought originally fed by the desert anchorites and the great theologians like Augustine, would have been inconceivable without the monastic infrastructure.

After Gutenberg's press and Martin Luther, every believer was able and authorized, and eventually free, to learn and to develop his (and eventually her) own form of commitment to the truth of what Jesus Christ had taught and demonstrated. After the Reformation, the great Christian diaspora of faith and methods of worship, far from just dividing a church that had itself never been sacrosanct, would fertilize minds and diversify theology in ways that democratized what it means to believe in a God who "loves each of us, as if there were only one of us," as Augustine put it .

Because the unbelieving advocates of a secular but tamer age now dismiss faith as archaic or irrational, citing the most fanatic elements as some sort of proof of the irrationality of all who believe (as if fanatics in any community somehow delegimate everyone else), those of us who haven't given up the spiritual quest are in a certain sense secular monks. We have to balance our checkbooks, commute to work, and pay our taxes, but we carry on the work of studying and praying and considering what we really believe -- and we try to practice it. Since the world gives us little outward reinforcement, particularly if we are not attracted to church-going for its own sake, those of us who have glimpsed monastic devotion might say of it what Gandhi said of the prisons that the British regularly threw him into: "Jail is a beautiful garden." New ideas, even a new understanding, could grow there. The world becomes more legible with a little distance from it.

I chose Ampleforth because a monk there in the postwar period had been a prolific spiritual writer, and the Dalai Lama had even come to visit him there. I thought there might be a better chance of a spiritual atmosphere. But what I saw reminded me more of life at a rural military post: the simplicity of its people and the regimentation of the day -- in a word, discipline (which had never been my forte, much less rising before dawn for a cold shower). Yet I also saw that the exoskeleton of that discipline offered a kind of liberation. Thought was not distracted by the thousands of mundane decisions that the individual has to make in daily personal life on one's own. The outer day is programmed, and so the inner day has opportunity to bloom -- if it does. But that's your decision. (The Christian band "Dave's Son" has a lovely song about that, called "What Makes You Bloom." You can hear it on Rhapsody: http://www.rhapsody.com/daves-son/daves-son)

Whenever a young person decides to make a monastic profession, one might reasonably expect to see a little evidence of this blooming. The prospect of "living in the truth" (as Vaclev Havel called the decision to turn away from the lies of material oppression) would be cause for lifting your gaze and perhaps also your heart. That seems to have been present in the ceremony captured in the video below.

The poet Robinson Jeffers, who lived on the Big Sur coastline in the mid-20th century, said that "in wildness is the preservation of the world." A spiritual innovator of the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy, defined wilderness as "the vestibule in which the material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence." Monasteries are one of those vestibules. It is a civilized mission.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

A poem by William Bronk

FOR ANY SPEAKERS

Oh, God, who in the night-quiet called
Samuel to you, call us then too
and in the day-noise call that, hearing you,
we may more plainly say the nameless name.

- in Life Supports: New and Collected Poems,
North Point Press, 1981