Reaching Out with Hope

I have been pleasantly surprised at the reaction to a recent article I wrote.  I  had nearly 40 positive responses to a short piece in the Orlando Sentinel, an OpEd reflection on how we might find strength amid, and after, the current pandemic.  This reaction surprised me because I am used to receiving little feedback from whatever I write.

But people are worried, but have more time to read and reflect, and are drawn to positive messages. It's possible, as a recent article in the Guardian noted about a survey in Britain, that many people, not affected by unemployment or illness, are reacting to the self-quarantine and the general uncertainty with a surprising degree of inner peace.  Many are finding rest from stress, relief from not going into public, joy in cooking and in spending more time with loved ones...in short, after an initial decline in happiness, the survey found an overall increase in well-being.

We are stronger, more patient and resilient than we often think.

 I am pleased that the article itself has been a means of connecting me to two cousins I rarely hear from, and  to an old college friend, who forwarded the article to another old friend, not heard from in 25 years, whose response was gratifying.  A local friend emailed my article to his daughter in New York, who wrote to me that she was uplifted by my noting that our lives are not really about ourselves but about relationships.  So I've been unusually busy responding to emails and sharing mutual good wishes with former students, neighbors, and many friends, in an expanded web of interconnections, a community of hope.

One of my cousins, Patrick Fleming, a psychotherapist in St. Louis, responded by sending me a reflection on fear and the way it can make us self-centered and selfish (consider the panic hoarding of paper products).  The antidote to such fear, he says, is stay connected to others, to act from the heart, not the panic. He said my article and his were on the same wave length.

I avoided specifically religious language in my piece, but the message came directly from my Catholic background: We are never really in control of our lives, as the current crisis is forcing many people to realize. We can turn inward and find peace in simple things; that is, we can become contemplatives. For many people, being cloistered brings a kind of freedom.

And we are being forced to see our connection with the natural world and with everyone else. We see that we are not isolated individuals, despite our narcissistic society with its emphasis on comfort, pleasure and success. My life is not just about me, but about me in relationship to God through others.  It is about service and our obligation now to reach out to those who are lonely, frightened, and feeling unloved.

As Richard Rohr recently wrote, when we face our own vulnerability and reach out to those who are feeling vulnerable, we are forming a kind of community, which is essential to those who feel isolated and cut off from human contact.

It remains a challenging time, not aided by a White House that deceives the public with phony information while urging that businesses open up before it is safe to do so.  Our collective physical health must come first, along with some reassurance that we can trust in a future that will be different, but, I hope, spiritually stronger.  This is what I suggest in the article published last week (27 April), pasted below.   
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WHAT LESSONS WILL WE LEARN FROM THE LOCKDOWN?   Orlando Sentinel

4-27-20

By Gerald J. Schiffhorst

 

I wonder how we will be changed by the COVID-19 pandemic—those of us who haven’t lost our jobs or been hospitalized or forced to fight for unemployment compensation or deal with inadequate health insurance.

And I wonder what we will learn. Will we be able to look back on this as a crisis that strengthened us in some way?

As guest columnist Joseph Wise says in the Sentinel (4-17), the crisis is also an opportunity. He is writing about education, but his insight applies to the economy and every area impacted by this pandemic.

The lockdown is forcing me to re-learn several important lessons.  The first is that I am not in control: the future is uncertain but need not be a source of panic, the kind of alarm that comes from too much media exposure. (I limit my news intake to fifteen minutes a day.)  The world as we know it will change, and some good things will happen. 

Second, uncertainty is always disturbing, and the present pain is a world-wide challenge, but the pain does not have to turn into suffering for those of us sequestered at home.

Pain becomes suffering, I think, when we feel alone, abandoned, and unloved. My  wife, Lynn, and I are doing what many others have been doing: reaching out to those who feel lonely and helpless, both the elderly and the unemployed. We are phoning or emailing friends, some of them too frightened to go outdoors. They feel less isolated and anxious by these daily contacts, and so do we.

We all need to be reminded that some anxiety is normal, but since the future is never known, all I can do is focus on the here and now, taking one day at a time.  So mindfulness, paying close attention to each thing I do and refusing to worry about the future, is my third lesson.

Finally, this crisis is a reminder that my life is not merely about me--my comfort, pleasure, and success; it is, as my Jesuit education taught me, about serving others. The coronavirus is a startling reminder that we are connected to everyone else on the planet in innumerable ways. 

We may be isolated in our homes, but we are not really alone since we exist in relationship with the natural world and its people. We are learning the hard way how dependent we are on one another.

In a recent interview about the challenge of being confined at home, Pope Francis quoted from Virgil’s “Aeneid.” The lesson he found in this Roman poem from 19 B.C. was not to give up in despair but “save yourself for better times, for in those times remembering what happened will help us. Take care of yourselves for a future that will come.”

In that future, we will only be as strong and compassionate as we are today.

____________________________________

Gerald J. Schiffhorst, a professor emeritus of English at UCF, lives in Winter Park.

 

 

 

The Sky is not Falling

It may seem like the end of the world if you watch the news extensively, hearing stories about how the pandemic is spreading.  But it is crucial to step back and see that fear and isolation do not have to equal loneliness and despair.

A friend forwarded a poem by an Irish priest, Richard Hendrick, "Lockdown," which reminds us that in Italy, people sing to each other through open windows so that those living alone hear family sounds and that elsewhere churches and temples are opening to help the homeless and sick, and people are learning to turn inward to read, be quiet, create, and contact one another.

We are forming a community of hope. People everywhere, writes Fr. Hendrick, are slowing down and reflecting, seeing how connected we all are despite the quarantine.  "There is sickness, but there does not have to be disease of the soul... .There is panic buying, but there does not have to be meanness," he writes.

It seems to me essential to limit our exposure to the media and take one day at a time, doing everything "quietly and in a calm manner," as St. Francis de Sales wrote in the 17th century. His advice: "Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset."  Right now, the whole world does seem upset, until we reflect on what Fr. Hendrick's poem says.

The present crisis also reminds me of the words of the Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, writing in her Amsterdam apartment as the Holocaust was about to carry her off to Auschwitz. "I am not alone in my sickness and fears, but at one with millions of others...it is all part of life."  She knew, as Richard Rohr recently wrote, that when we see our suffering as part of humanity's "one universal longing for deep union," it helps prevent selfishness and loneliness.  We are all in this together. We know that most people are undergoing the same hardship, or worse, and this "makes it hard to be cruel to anyone."  (Rohr)

Suffering has the capacity to teach us many things, mainly that we are all part of one reality--and that compassion and love are the only ways to deal with this crisis. We realize in these difficult times that we are not really alone but connected--and that we have great inner resources.

Of course, we can distract ourselves with reading, music, and entertainment, but deep down, we are aware that we are not in control.  For believers, this means we turn to God, who, says Rohr, is with us in suffering.  Etty Hillesum knew this in 1942. She writes (in An Interrupted Life), speaking to God, "there doesn't seem to be much you can do about our lives. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last."

How do we help God? By loving others, reaching out to those living alone, doing whatever chores we can for the elderly, offering hope--and by being grateful for each day as we move toward a solution of the pandemic, since we know it will end.  When it does, I believe many people will be spiritually stronger.

Season of Light

As my Jewish friends, with whom I will spend Christmas day, prepare for Hanukkah, I am thinking about the importance of light in a dark time.  Not just this time of year but the cultural and political climate of hate and rancor.

Christmas should be a bright time, filled with hope, a time to look ahead and also to remember, and to be grateful.

Gratitude and joy are interrelated, writes Vinita Hampton Wright: "you rarely experience one without the other."  Well, to me, joy is a rare commodity. I would settle for contentment, or at least optimism.  And certainly love.

This brings me to an arresting reflection by Richard Rohr, who wrote that "Loving people are always conscious people." He means attentive to others and to the world, with a sense of caring, of loving others.  Awareness, attention, and being conscious are equivalent terms spiritually; and, interestingly, they involve love.

Whenever, he goes on, we do anything evil or cruel to ourselves or others, we are "at that moment unconscious, unconscious of our identity."  He means our identity as children of God, ones who are loved and who know they are loved, even if they are alone.  If we were fully conscious, Rohr says, we would never be violent toward anyone.

So being conscious or fully aware is to love oneself and others since such love is rooted in a self-awareness of our connection to others, to the world, and to God.

This is the time of year when we stop for a minute and consider that "peace on earth and good will to men" means that we see that love, the energy that moves the universe, also dwells in each of us. We have much to be hopeful about.

When pain becomes suffering

In recent years, after feeling strong and healthy for much of my life, I find myself beset with daily head and neck pains (arthritic) as well as the new and unwelcome thing called vertigo, which I hope will pass. It is very easy for me to worry about these ailments, to dread a future that limits me in various ways, and to feel sorry for myself.

Of course, I know others, both young and old, have greater physical burdens, but it's easy to feel uniquely singled out for suffering and want to cry out, "Why me, O God?"  In being angry and irritable, I become emotionally like a child and mentally convinced that no one can understand, or care about, how I feel--not even my dear, devoted wife and my many friends.

As I think about the old saying, "pain is inevitable, suffering optional,"  I find myself with the daily challenge not to feel isolated with my  problems. I think of a line from a Rilke poem, "no feeling is final; just keep going." To be aware of others I know with similar issues and to keep them mentally in mind, in prayer, helps me feel less alone and thus able to keep suffering at bay.  I also make an effort to be grateful for the good things I find in each day: the blue skies, the flowering trees, the music I hear, the voices that comfort or amuse or inform me.  And I look for creative ways to distract myself from self-pity and loneliness.

I will continue to have pain, but I don't need to suffer, which has to do with feeling alone, abandoned. Even Jesus on the cross cried out, "Father, why have you abandoned me?"  This is a universal cry of a heart that feels unloved. The challenge for a person of faith is to be mindful of connectedness.  Faith is essentially a matter of the heart, of feelings, which always trump theology and rational thought.

Richard Rohr, in his Daily Meditations, is my chief spiritual guide, reminding me that we are never truly alone but connected to the Great Vine (Christ): we are the branches (John 15:1-5). In his book THINGS HIDDEN, he goes so far as to say, "Your life is not about you; you are about Life!" He means we are not isolated individuals but part of creation, with its dark and light aspects,  and we are linked both to the natural world and to the human community.  "Someone else is living in and through us. We are part of a much Bigger Mystery."  This someone else is the Christ mystery, the presence of God in all of creation, a reality, he says, that's not limited to Christians.

We are never truly alone, except in our minds. Negative thoughts can destroy us, as we see in the rise in depression and suicide. Too many young people feel disconnected from their families, isolated, unloved.

Echoing what Tolstoi says in his great novella, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Rohr says suffering comes from our denial of and resistance to pain, our sense that it is unjust and wrong.  We have to see our physical problems as part of the great cycle of life and death and rebirth.  We have to see pain as natural, as inevitable, as something that might lead to healing or transformation, the kind Ivan experiences in the final moments of his life. What redeems pain and suffering, we see in that story, is being loved.

I find the sharing with my friends who are undergoing various health challenges a comfort akin to love. In talking about our mutual problems, we are aware of being linked in a loving understanding, and we feel less alone.

To my agnostic/atheistic friends, who approach life through reason and say that life makes no sense, I want to scream, "It's all about feelings!"  Faith comes from within the heart, not the head.

Rabbi Harold Kushner has written, "Suffering in itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way we respond to it."  The great spiritual challenge of my life is to respond to pain and suffering with courage, with patience, always aware that I am not alone.  I imagine myself falling back into the arms of a loving God; in this way, I feel that, even amid pain, I am not choosing to suffer.

Heavenly Community

"No one can possibly go to heaven alone--or it would not be heaven."

So concludes a paragraph from one of the Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr, Franciscan author and speaker. He does not explain. And he sounds very certain.

Of course he expects the reader to figure it out by considering the overall reflection:  that the spiritual journey is from isolation to connectedness. Every relationship with people, animals, other cultures, and God is a manifestation of love.

But what about heaven?  We may die alone, I think Rohr is saying, but to enter heaven is to be part of a community of souls who experience a fullness of joy because they are unconditionally loved.  Those who have read beyond the Inferno of Dante know that the poet shows the souls in Purgatory working and singing together on their way to Paradise--in marked contrast to the isolated souls in Hell--and that once there, they are "seated" in a vast, circular  amphitheater, united in their relation to God, whose love they reflect.

So however we imagine heaven to be, it is not a place of loneliness and isolation. Sartre in "No Exit" famously suggested that Hell is other people. In fact, Hell means being cut off from others, from love; and it seems to me that quite often such a hell is experienced on earth. We imagine heaven as something totally different.

To paraphrase St. John of the Cross: I don't know what it will be like there; I only know a great love awaits me.

The challenge of change

Living with major changes is never easy, and the older I get, the more of a challenge it is to have established practices upset or schedules altered.

The past month, along with the world in upheaval now that Trump is trying to run the White House, has seen the shocking death of a friend, 55, who hid her terminal cancer from everyone.  She emailed us in early January and by the end of the month was gone. We had relied on her for advice, legal and otherwise.

Soon thereafter, our long-time family physician announced his retirement, effective almost at once. More turmoil. The YMCA near me, where I have been exercising and meeting friends, is being torn down and replaced, in two years, by something grandiose, taking away from hundreds of locals a familiar "second home."   How can I adjust to all this change?

One constant in this cycle of turmoil and change are the daily email meditations from Richard Rohr, the recent ones reminding me of the importance of contemplation.  After years of reading and practicing this, it is still a challenge, but the advice of Rohr, along with that of Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating and other spiritual masters, helps me understand the importance of gazing at something I like, paying such rapt attention to the reality of the present that I can stop analyzing and judging; I can stop thinking.

To take in an entire scene or object (a tree, for example), whether attractive or not, without labeling it good or bad, is a pure and positive act that stops time, as it were, for fifteen minutes or so as I breathe deeply and relax my body as well as my mind.

For me, this silent period of calm contemplation is prayerful, but it doesn't ask for anything or require established beliefs. It implies gratitude for the chance to step back from our thinking selves and just look at what is real in front of us, but the free flow of consciousness need not include intentional gratitude.

If I don't take time to do this--and it is not as easy as it sounds--I will be jerked around by distracting information, noise, fears and worries, caught up in the turbulence of the world around me, ready to shout, "Stop, world!  I want to get off!"

As for the political madness and mayhem, my other remedy is to turn to satire (Andy Borowitz and others) and comedy to gain some detachment from the anger I tend to feel, as I remind myself of the growing resistance movements that are afoot.  The world, then, begins to look less bleak.

Thoughts for the New Year

Will this be a good new year?  I am encouraged by news (courtesy of Heartfulness meditations) that, in Asia, sports stadiums have been booked for the benefit of those who wish to spend today in meditation. Wow!

I can't imagine such a thing in this country, where money, noise, and football dominate the sports culture. Of course, many people today pray, I hope for world peace and (I hope) for the inner peace that makes interaction with each other peaceable. We have to work hard, day by day, for a less violent world.

How can we do less hating?  A message from Richard Rohr at the end of the old year reminds us that cognitive science shows that the brain holds on to negative thoughts (like Velcro) whereas positive thoughts slip off (like Teflon).  To retain a positive experience, he says, you have to intentionally hold on to it for fifteen seconds to allow it to imprint your brain.

This means we have to deliberately, consciously choose to love rather than to hate. The fear that leads to anger and hate comes easily, just as the memories of being wounded cling to the brain; but to re-wire ourselves to be positive, caring, and compassionate requires an effort. It takes work to remain each day in the present moment rather than recalling old hurts and hatreds.

As Rohr says, many decent people in our society, in churches as well as in politics, are much more at home with hate than with love; and they don't know this. They have not been taught to focus on the good.

So, to live in a loving way and thus to make an individual contribution to the greater good, requires great spiritual work. No one ever said that peace came easily.

Staying Connected

One of the best features of the Christmas season for me is contacting my many out-of-town or seldom-heard from friends and relatives, conveying best wishes. This annual ritual is a reminder that we are all connected.

It is very easy for me, as a writer and reader who loves solitude, who disconnects the telephone at certain times so my wife and I can write, to feel restless and lonely, isolated in my comfortable bubble.  As I think of the many single people I know living alone, I often think of the Lennon-McCartney song, "Eleanor Rigby," with its refrain: "Ah, look at all the lonely people."

Why are there so many people who feel alone, unwanted, or useless every day?  I think of my elderly neighbor, whose frustration with the limitations of her life at 89 causes her to lash out in anger at the caregiver who's there to help her. If only she could feel a part of the greater whole that surrounds her--in nature, the world of ideas and music, the friends and family who think of her every day, the prayers said for her.  She is surrounded by love.

Achieving such a feeling of being loved and connected is not easy. Sometimes it comes naturally, the way prayer does after a dry spell that we must endure before finding a sense of relatedness to God, or, if you prefer, to Life.

I combat feelings of isolation by an awareness of the many people who admire me, think of me, write to me, maybe pray for me--sight unseen.  I think of the strangers who read this blog in various countries--or something else I have published: something I have written has interested them, or moved or helped them in some way.

Or I can think of the many thousands of students who have benefited from my classes (and still do) as well as family members, now gone, whose faces and voices I can still hear in my mind. Or I think of the saints since I believe that somehow, in the great mystery of things, I am surrounded by many who wish me well, from this side of the grave or the other.  Their memories of me might be more positive than I will ever know. And our connection is real.

So, I tell myself, I am surrounded by good will. I know dozens of people I can call on for help, other than  my wife.  Moreover, from what I know about biology, I am aware that I live in a interconnected world of supportive relationships.  I am a living part of nature, related to the plants and animals, to the stars at night that remind me that millions of others in many other places are seeing the same stars, maybe feeling that they, too, are part of the cosmos.

I am reminded that the Greek word "cosmos" means order, also ornamentation (as in cosmetics), and so the universe or cosmos means the ordered beauty of the reality in which I live and breathe and have my being.
Of course, the media, too, are daily reminders that we are part of a global community. I like to think that love, in the form of caring or compassion, is at work in these contexts: altruism, which is said to exist in our very genes, is real, as in the effort of most of us to make our planet healthier.

If we live in isolation, believing we are inferior to everyone else or superior to them, we are living in the kind of hell depicted by T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").  The answer: reach out and contact the sick or lonely or depressed neighbor. Write an email to someone who'd appreciate a reminder that they are not forgotten. Or ask for help: it will come.

Those contemplatives in my Catholic tradition (monks, nuns) who are physically apart from public life are linked, as Thomas Merton once wrote, in a "friendly communion of silence."  I think of them every day.  Richard Rohr, writing in this religious context, writes:  "we are already in union with God. .  .inside a life larger than us that can't be taken from us."  The union of the divine with the human is precisely what is celebrated at Christmas.

As Merton wrote, because we are a part of God, who is in us, "we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.  What we have to be is what we already are."

My first wish for those of you who read this rambling post or other musings of mine is that you will contact me with a comment: use the Comments section or my email: schiffhorst@yahoo.com. Thank you.

Even if I don't hear from you, I know you are there and that you, like me, are part of this living cosmos united in love and with every reason to celebrate Christmas.  My second (and primary) wish is that you enjoy a season of true peace that extends into the coming year.

Seeing the Trees

Whenever I can, I drive a mile or so from my home to a lakeside park to enjoy the beauty not only of the large lake but of the giant cypress trees, hung with Spanish moss. Looking at the water through the cluster of these trees is always memorable because I am taken out of myself.

The trees are home in the spring to nesting egrets, large white birds who are wise to choose such a lofty perch.  In April, they can be noisy. On my recent visits to the lake, all is quiet except for occasional boats.

This spot has become for me a prayerful place, a place to see the reality of the present.  "Most people don't see things as they are," Richard Rohr writes, "because they see things as they are."  And this is not seeing at all.

It is looking with the small self, the ego. To see and observe trees, in this case, and the serenity of the lakeside park is to move beyond myself, to follow Rohr's line of contemplative reflection, and to grasp a larger reality since my life is not just about me in isolation. It's about me in relationship with nature and others. It has to do with love.

Can I say I love trees? Perhaps. I care about them and appreciate their beauty, especially the strong oaks that spread out their branches or the camphor tree in my back yard that has grown in twenty years from a sapling to a huge, powerful presence.  I am in awe of many old trees and love to look at them in their varying shapes and sizes, with or without leaves. Many are ancient (who knows how old?) and have withstood blights and human civilization.  They endure, silently feeding a hidden world of creatures.

I have just read an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books about two new studies of trees, one by a German, one by a British academic. The review prompts me to want to know more about the inner life of trees.  Especially the oaks described by Fiona Stafford (The Long, Long Life of Trees):

"No other tree is so self-possessed, so evidently at one with the world," she writes in the review I quote by Thomas Pakenham.  "The solid, craggy trunk of a mature oak spreads out, as if with open arms, to create a vast hemisphere of thick, clotted leaves."

Do trees have a way of communicating to one another?  Peter Wohlleben indicates they do: in fact, he finds a subtle underground network among the trees he has studied; they send vital information to one another. If a certain tree is threatened by a certain insect, it will send a message prompting other trees to release a chemical that repels the harmful insect. Amazing.

I am glad to know that these authors care about how trees live and die and relate to the rest of the ecosystem--and who, at the same time, look at them with the wonder and awe that I do when I look at the giant cypresses towering over the lake.

Maybe part of my appreciation comes from seeing how often I have taken these trees for granted.  I look at them now with deep gratitude and really see them.

Living with a Hurricane

Hurricane Matthew is, as I write, moving at 130 mph thirty miles off the coast of Florida, about 50 miles from where I live. I awoke this morning surprised to find electricity, despite the wind and heavy rain, having expected to spend the day in hibernation, hunkered down with only the basics.

For days, fearful Floridians have been storing up food and water and checking with each other about roads, worrying about trees being uprooted and crashing into our roofs, as they did 12 years ago when three major storms hit us in central Florida.  Will we escape all such discomfort this time?  If so, our neighbors to the north will not.

Major storms remind us of our solidarity with others.

I read today a piece by Richard Rohr on simplicity: A simple lifestyle, e says, is "an act of solidarity with the way most people have lived since the beginnings of humanity."  This is a helpful reminder that the constant acquisition of goods and luxury comforts, including air conditioning, are not the norm and that living under a hurricane warning can have spiritual value: it can remind us of the power of solitude and silence.

It can provide time for prayer, for simple games and crosswords, for reading perhaps by flashlight, and just being: chatting with neighbors, comforting our pets and elderly friends. I sort of looked forward to a day when I would be forced to give up our dependence on the internet and the other media, on cooked food and iced drinks and all the other things we take for granted.

So far, I am grateful to be spared the worst. I also welcome the freedom that can  come from a life limited by nature to the basics. If tonight brings a power outage, I will be ready.

(For Richard Rohr's daily meditations, see meditations@cac.org.)

Happiness as Freedom

Reading recently about the tormented life of T. S. Eliot, who was often paralyzed by fears of various kinds, has made me realize again the importance of living and trusting fully in the present moment.

And of being grateful, each day, for the good things around us as we try to free ourselves from self-preoccupation. For me, this is a daily struggle since my own physical problems send up alarm signals about my life in the future: how will I be six months from now, a year from now?  What will I do about X?

Realizing the good things that are around us seems to be part of statement I recently found by Seth Goldman, CEO of Beyond Meat, an ecologically friendly company:   "There's a easy formula for happiness. It's when what you have is greater than what you want.  Most people would say the way to be happy is to have more. I say the way to be happy is to want less."

It's interesting that a relatively young entrepreneur would take the "less is more" philosophy of Thoreau and E F. Schumacher, author of 'Small is Beautiful.'   Happiness is not all about acquiring more and more; it is, as Richard Rohr has said, realizing that life is not all about me. He would go beyond Goldman's notion, which seems limited to money and material things.

"You can have political and economic freedom, but if you are not free from your own ego, from your own centrality inside your own thinking, I don't think you are very free at all. In fact, your actions and behavior will be totally predictable. Everything will revolve around your security, survival, self-preservation. . . ."  In other words, around yourself (Rohr).

This self Rohr speaks of is what Thomas Merton called the false self: the public face we present to the world ("the face to meet the faces that you meet," as Eliot's Prufrock says).  The false self is mainly a creation of our own mind and so is an illusion; it is that part of us that feels offended, critical, agitated or worried about what others will think and how we will be judged. The false self needs approval.

Happiness, we might say, is the freedom from this false self, from self-preoccupation. It is by staying fully in the present moment that we can let go of the ego and prevent our emotions and obsessive thoughts from controlling us.

Paying Attention to Light

I advise my writing students to begin by observing: Look closely at someone or something and describe it. Sounds easier than it is.  Paying attention is rarely simple, but it's essential if we are to be in the here and now.

I've been paying attention to the light that, even on hot summer afternoons, floods the room where I work.  Thanks to shady trees and a southerly exposure, the light is diffused, its glare softened. I enjoy looking at it as it pours through the window over my desk, cooling the room. 

Or so it seems.  I have never, until now, put it into words. Light is, after all, a silent presence, and that's the whole point: an encounter with silence and stillness.

I ask myself, Why do I enjoy looking at light?  Maybe the answer has to do with memories, half remembered, of afternoons elsewhere, in hotel rooms when we were on vacation and after a busy morning, a brief siesta was called for. Or maybe it reminds me of certain paintings, especially Vermeer's, where a lady quietly reads by a window in a room filled with natural light.  Thanks to Vermeer, the light is as important as the lady or the room.

I am drawn to light. I can identify with medieval folk in Gothic cathedrals as they felt the power of colored light from the stained glass windows, suggesting a divine presence, as if the barrier between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, had been bridged and they felt, in that lofty space, a bit of eternity.

I think about light because I know the value of contemplation and find too little time for it. Richard Rohr recently wrote that most of our thinking is unstable, a series of self-centered reactions and preferences, of judging and labeling things or worrying, none of which has anything to do with being fully in the present moment.

I need time alone each day--even just ten minutes--so that I can calmly watch everything as it comes and goes, even something as fundamental as light. I need a place in the day when my mind can be still and let things float by, without analysis or judgment or feeling.

Silence and emptiness, when we make room for them in our busy lives, are open to infinite horizons and transcendence in a way that nothing else is, Rohr says.

Time spent gazing out the window, looking at the light, may seem to some busy people time wasted, but it is the overactive, busy mind that is wasting an essential opportunity for something essential to every day: the freedom of contemplation.

True Freedom

People have always sought one form of freedom or another, it seems: freedom from oppression of various kinds, from injustice, from abuse and danger and so much more. But Rowan Williams singles out something more fundamental: freedom from self-orientation.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury is quoted by Richard Rohr, whom I quote:  "You can have political or economic freedom, but if you are not free from your own ego, from your own centrality inside your own thinking, I don't think you're very free at all.  In fact, your actions and behavior will be totally predictable.  Everything will revolve around your security, survival, self-protection, self-validation, self, self, self."

That this is the great age of self-centeredness and narcissism is seen in the  rise of Donald Trump, who thinks that, as long as the world revolves around him, everything will be fine.  Truth, facts, knowledge, taste--none of these matter.

As Michael Sean Winters writes today in NCR, toddlers can get away with combining viciousness and feigned innocence when they are caught in lies. Apparently, many American voters see their own self-interests mirrored in the narcissistic Mr. Trump.  The consequences are alarming.

The mature person knows that if we think only and exclusively of ourselves at the expense of others, we diminish our own humanity.

Making Connections

I enjoy finding commonality in my readings, seeing connections between otherwise unrelated topics. A case in point: a recent series of reflections by the Franciscan spiritual writer Richard Rohr and a New York Times article today (by Dan Kois) on swimming in Iceland.

What they have in common, believe it or not, is the very idea of connectedness and the danger of extreme individualism, which isolates one from community.

Rohr's point is that "the goal of the spiritual journey is to discover and move toward connectedness" on every level; the contemplative mind seeks and enjoys union. This might begin with our relations with animals and nature as well as people as we "grow into deeper connectedness" (love). 

"How you do anything is how you do everything," Rohr reminds us. The little things we do carefully, lovingly--the activities that seem trivial or boring--can, in fact, be reminders of something bigger. Our relationship to our surroundings, and the people we encounter daily, offers opportunities for love, in the broadest sense of the word. Think: care of the planet.

Rohr relates connectedness to communion with God as well as with what he calls "our truest selves."  He reminds us that, even at the cellular level, we are, like other organisms, part of a greater whole. We do not find wholeness/holiness in isolation but as part of a community of believers; that, at least, is the Christian vision.

On a purely secular level, in Iceland, where the nights are long and the days cold, people in every town and village, according to Kois's article, find solace in outdoor public hot tubs and swimming pools. It is their version of the pub or social center.

Kois says the people of Iceland, despite their remote locale, are among the most contented in the world. Why?  Perhaps because they are daily immersed in warm, communal baths, their mostly naked selves bared and shared with others.  You have to interact with others in a hot tub.

If clothing and a reserved Nordic manner keep people detached, naked Icelanders find a solution in their heated pools: connectedness. And they seem more than satisfied, craving, in fact, this daily ritual, this reminder that we are all part of one whole.

As someone said, a person alone is in bad company.

Seldom acknowledged realities

Two items in the current news cycle strike me as noteworthy because they are not widely acknowledged.

The first is the credit that President Obama deserves for the economy, among other issues. I was glad to see in today's NYTimes a piece by Jackie Calmes on why Obama is not given credit for the current low unemployment in America.  Could the reason have to do with his race, or is it that the anti-Obama narrative that has set in has obscured the reality of his many achievements?  For an answer, see Paul Krugman's op-ed piece in yesterday's Times.  (nytimes.com)

It is easier for many to protest and rally behind Donald Trump than to recognize the president's positive record.  Anyone who listens to the carefully worded, thoughtful and informed Obama, then listens to the rambling, inconsistent babble of Trump would be hard pressed to find two public figures more different.  One is being celebrated, the other denigrated.

This brings me to the second point: the "religious right," courted by Republicans since the Reagan years, is often blind and seldom right. Richard Rohr, whose recent comments I summarize, says it well: Many who call themselves evangelical Christians cannot see through the self-interest that cloaks itself in Christianity, as is apparent among several of the leading GOP candidates and their supporters.

The role of religion should be to offer a corrective to the culture of capitalism and materialism, to the lack of compassion so evident in people like Trump and Ted Cruz.  As Rohr says, cultural Christianity in America often has little to do with the Gospel.

 "Two thousand years of Jesus' teaching and compassion, love, forgiveness, and mercy (not to mention basic kindness and respect) are all forgotten in a narcissistic rage. Western culture has become all about the self. . . ." He doesn't mention Trump by name, but we know. It is often self-interest masquerading as Christianity.

I saw a woman in a T-shirt yesterday. It said, "Holler if you love Jesus. Holler if he is your personal Lord and Savior."  Doing the will of God is more important than proclaiming a personal devotion: What about loving thy neighbor? What about our connection with our fellow men and women?

Why Go To Church?

Many churches are half-empty much of the year, except on Easter, as I was reminded today when I encountered throngs of people, some with babies, crowding our parish church.

I wanted to ask some of them, especially the younger crowd: Why are you here?  What motivates you to include Easter Mass as part of your holiday--especially if you come only once a year? Is it simply a cultural expectation, something to do, a place to show off your finery?

I suspect that for many it is the unspoken, because unconscious, awareness that there is a loss in their daily lives of some experience of the sacred, some contact with a spiritual reality greater than their daily lives of work and play. They somehow need to be with others as prayers are said and sung and new life proclaimed, even if the Biblical story of the Resurrection is a bit vague to many of them, because there is something missing in their inner lives.

I like to think that in a world that is full of violence and the fear generated by terrorists, in a world that seems meaningless, the churches provide a reminder of something larger and more meaningful and hopeful.

Richard Rohr and other mystical-global thinkers would probably add that, whether we know it or not, we sense the need for a connection with others. We need to move beyond isolation into solidarity with others since everything in the universe is connected.

The independent self is hopelessly limited; it cannot see the whole picture. Easter is about the cosmic reality of life overcoming death and providing a pattern of hope.  We have to be part of a community that is hopeful.

From Suffering to Boredom

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer. In the recent (March 10) issue of the New York Review of Books, she comments on the film "Anomalisa," using Schopenhauer to suggest how we seek pleasure as a release from suffering, only to find a vicious cycle of restless desire and boredom.

Of course, these are enormous topics, which she is only able to touch on. The examples from the film, which I have not seen and may never see, are revealing: room service in a luxury hotel offers pleasures people hardly know they want, like chocolates on their king-size beds and carefully chosen artisan water. I remember a New York City hotel offering five types of pillows (they had a pillow concierge), leaving no possible area of comfort unaccounted for.

Except, of course, that, as the old song says, "After you get what you want, you don't want it." Schopenhauer wrote that desiring lasts a long time, but "demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfillment is short and is meted out sparingly. . .the wish fulfilled at once makes room for a new one."

He went on to theorize that we humans deliberately intensify our needs so as to intensify our pleasure, all of which leads to a kind of boredom, something he says animals do not experience, whereas for us, "want and boredom are the twin poles of human life."

As soon as the luxury hotel supplies the film's characters with some delight, apparently, they are bored: hotels exist to meet and fulfill all our needs and desires, and fulfilling the desire itself leads necessarily to disillusionment.

Of course, these desires are not spiritual, even though the movie's characters are told that they are incomplete as individuals: we are all one in some vaguely Eastern transcendental sense. But, says Smith, the characters cannot accept this, or the lesson of compassion. And she doesn't develop this point, which is all-important. It relates to what I would call the mystical dimension of religion, which offers an escape from suffering more reliable than pleasure and desire.

This point has been made beautifully by Richard Rohr in his 2008 book, Things Hidden, being excerpted now in daily email installments from his Center for Action and Contemplation.  I sum up his lengthy comments in a  few basic points about moving from the self to the Other:

  1. If we cannot find some deeper meaning in our suffering, to "find that God is somehow in it" (in the Christian sense), if we don't see that there is some good, some purpose in our suffering, we are doomed to become shut down emotionally (spiritually) and to pass along to the next generation our bitterness and negativity.

 2.  Mature religion deals with transforming the individual (and history) into a meaningful  pattern that involves love. We see our connectedness to others; we make our contribution to the world's suffering by "participating in the Great Sadness of God."  Rohr, following St. Paul, is referencing the idea of Christ as the Suffering Servant and the role that believers play "in Christ," in the universal drama that leads from pain and suffering to transformation.
This brings us, of course, far from what Zadie Smith, using Schopenhauer, is saying about the film she analyzes; but it shows, for me at least, the extra dimension we need if we are to move beyond the endless cycle of desire and boredom as escapes from suffering--if indeed that's what pleasure is all about.

Positive lessons for Lent

For Christians, Lent is time of introspection and penance; it begins with Ash Wednesday ("Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return"), a sobering reminder of our last end.

But the daily meditations I have been receiving by email from Richard Rohr and his Center for Action and Contemplation this year are, not surprisingly, upbeat. I have known for years that Father Rohr is uniquely gifted and a major spiritual master. He combines in a powerful way the best of many worlds: Franciscan spirituality, mystical theology, Jungian psychology, and Biblical reality. The result: dozens of books and retreats that provide a refreshingly hopeful and holistic view of the Bible, Christian belief, and human behavior.

In today's reflection, he typically singles out the problem of dualistic thinking that results from a misreading of the Bible and of religion as dealing with right or wrong. Rohr, seeing the big picture, provides a needed corrective to the negative emphasis of much religious practice because he makes connections others often miss.

He begins today's email newsletter (available at www.cac.org free of charge) with a quotation from D. H. Lawrence about how greatly we fear new things and changing old patterns.  Authentic religion is supposed to challenge us to deal with our own self-renewal and help us change our inner lives, even though human beings do all they can to resist change.

Can we change our perspective on sin, a big issue in Lent?  Rohr says Yes! We all make mistakes, but we are also "sinned against as the victims of others' failures and our own social milieu."  Think, for example, of racism and other prejudices. This for Rohr is what St. Augustine really meant by original sin. The negative notion that has haunted Christianity for 1500 years is that we have inherited a sinful nature. That, says Richard Rohr, was never Augustine's point; rather, it is that we carry the wounds of our ancestors: our sins are not entirely our own. We are, at the core, inescapably good because we come from and are connected to a Creator who is good.
No wonder, he says, Jesus was never upset with sinners; he was upset with people who didn't think they were sinners. His basic message was one of loving understanding and mercy toward our failings since he knew that each of us is essentially good. As Rohr writes, the bad is never strong enough to counteract the good because the soul carries the divine spark of God's essential goodness.

So the Gospel is a hopeful, optimistic text. Those who read it carefully,with the wide-angle lens of someone like Richard Rohr, see that the ones Jesus wishes to exclude are those who exclude others. No wonder Pope Francis and Donald Trump clashed this week in an interesting dust-up: Francis preaching inclusion and mercy, the Donald seeking more publicity as he rants against immigrants.

I need a positive corrective to the negative political propaganda I hear in the media as well as an optimistic approach to faith that does not emphasize hell and damnation. So I am grateful to Richard Rohr for providing the latter.  And for always being human.

A wish for the new year

My wish for the new year may sound simple but actually is impossibly complex: I wish for a dose of common sense among Americans in 2016.  Read on to understand the challenges involved.

1. The first area where common sense is needed is gun violence. As of today, Texans will be allowed to wear guns in public; and the wide availability of weapons in the U.S. plays into the hands of psychos, terrorists, and other malcontents with alarming results.  At issue: the American Rifle Association and its fundamentalist reading of the second amendment to the Constitution, to the delight of those making money selling weapons.

2. Another area of fundamentalist madness is the willful denial of man-made climate change by such groups as the Heartland Institute, which uses quack science (here I quote from Anthony Annett of Columbia Univ.) to mock the idea of climate change while upholding the virtues of unlimited use of fossil fuels. This, as many observers in other countries know, is a uniquely American issue driven by (guess what?) financial interests.  Annett's article in Commonweal goes after George Weigel, who writes skeptically of the UN's global warming guidelines, pretending that the issue is actually subject to debate.  He is a Catholic intellectual who fails to take in the encyclical on this topic by Pope Francis.

3. Finally, there is religious fundamentalism itself, which Francis has attacked (press conference on Nov. 30): "Fundamentalism is a sickness that is in all religions," he said, noting that Catholics are not immune as when they believe they have the absolute truth and proceed to attack others "doing evil."  Literal, fundamental readings of sacred texts has led many decent people into extreme behavior, as we see with Islamic terrorism.

As Richard Rohr has written, literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning. People who merely want to be right and have power can easily turn sacred texts into dangerous documents, as when, in the past, Christians have advocated slavery, apartheid, consumerism, nationalism, and other "isms."   Jesus himself knew, says Rohr, that not all scriptures are created equal and that certain punitive or exclusionary texts in the Hebrew tradition should not be read on the same level as those offering inclusion, mercy, and honesty.

What is needed is the Big Picture, the broad vision which puts into perspective the narrow literalism that exists on many levels. It so happens that Pope Francis, having written and spoken wisely about the dangers of violence to man and the environment, having called fundamentalism a sin, and having privileged mercy and forgiveness, is one of those who might hold a key to the common sense we need.

If only we would listen and practice what such leaders say and do instead of retreating into the fear, control, and power-seeking that results from fundamentalism.  If only we would work for justice, we might have what we most want: peace.

Silence Revisited

For nearly twenty years, I have been investigating the power of silence, a topic that first struck me when teaching the later poetry of T. S. Eliot.  I then discovered all the many things Thomas Merton had to say about silence as contemplative prayer.  In several articles on Merton and silence, I tried to define the broader implications of silence as something more than the absence of sound.

Many other writers, I found, have explored this topic, suggesting that genuine silence is not about emptiness or negativity but presence. What kind of presence is not always easy to define, but it became clear to me that true silence has its own positive, independent existence: it is the enduring reality that sound interrupts. Or we can say it is the permanent reality that supports sound, a bit like the way the white space on a printed page exists in dialogue with the words, which come out of silence.

Silence lasts while words do not. And while such insights come from my literary background, they also come from my search for prayer, the kind that goes beyond words to an interior reality known to mystics in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.  Christians might find in contemplation and meditation an awareness of the kingdom of God within.  This attention to spiritual reality through stillness and silence has been called the sacrament of the present moment.

Recently, I have profited from listening to Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and author, who sees silence as an alternative consciousness, a way of way of knowing beyond rational analysis.  The ego, he says (drawing on Jung), needs words to make points and to get what it wants; the ego is uncomfortable with silence since part of us wants to argue.

But the soul, so to speak, sees that silence is more important than words. Silence for Rohr is the wholeness of being with nothing to argue about. It gives us moments in the timeless present but also something more:  a sense of the eternal since time increases ("grows into a fullness") in silence, which is more significant than words.

Rohr's great spiritual model is St. Francis, who said, "Pray always and sometimes use words," referring to actions (good deeds) and silence as more expressive of love than language. If our words begin with, and come out, of silence, our words will be carefully chosen.  Words not surrounded by silence (but blurted out in a great rush) can be hurtful, critical, sarcastic, hardly spiritual.

Rohr also suggests that a focus on silence as a spiritual practice prepares us for death, the Great Silence. And the other manifestations of silence in art--the stillness of paintings, for example, or the eloquent absence of sound in certain films--are also worth studying.

I remain grateful to Merton for reviving the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer and seeing its parallel in Buddhist practice, something he was exploring in Bangkok at the time of his death in 1968.  I am happy to see that what he and many others have done, in both poetry and prose, continues the exploration of silence as a source of ultimate meaning as well as the source of language and music.

As T. S. Eliot wrote (in "Ash Wednesday"), the word cannot be heard here, in ordinary time: "there is not enough silence."