The Importance of Mystery

Asked to define jazz, Louis Armstrong once remarked, "Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know." It's probably the same thing with the soul. (And I don't mean "soul" in jazz.)

As a parochial school student, I formed a vague but somehow visible idea of the soul from all that the nuns told us about its being darkened by sin and whitened by grace. It appeared in my youthful imagination as a large mostly white blob.

After years of reading theology and philosophy, my idea of the soul remains vague. Yet this is as it should be. Like so many invisible realities I believe in, it is a mystery, and no efforts to define it or imagine it are worth much.

The very fact that it gets mentioned in contemporary intellectual discourse is remarkable; maybe like the mind, which psychologists have generally called the brain, the soul is having a comeback. In reading a blog by Caspar Melville recently about the book Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey, I was intrigued to learn that the old questions, including how immaterial consciousness can arise from a material thing like the brain, are not settled.

Humphrey says that consciousness and the soul are the same thing. He says that spirituality is essential for consciousness, spirituality being the source of awe, beauty and meaning. And I would add: mystery. But in this materialist philosophy, consciousness is hardly immortal, yet it is said to give us feelings that we are special and transcendent.

Only feelings? I would say we are special and transcendent, that the soul or inner life, which Ron Rolheiser says, is something we build up as the result of learning about suffering, among other things, is the immortal part of ourselves. Nothing uniquely Christian here, if you read the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. Or look into other religious traditions.

Thomas Moore in his popular Care of the Soul avoids any definition of soul; he skirts the issues of immortality but would probably agree that it is a divine spark within us that connects us to the divine. It has to do with love as well as immortality.

If the soul isn't immortal, I would say, echoing Flannery O'Connor, to hell with it. So for Mr. Humphrey, what is spiritual is apparently some invisible energy that dies when the brain does. He tries to write a natural history of the soul without, apparently, recognizing the reality of the supernatural.

I should be grateful that the godless (I found out about the book on a website "ideas for godless people") are concerned with souls at all. But I'd be happier if such investigators would be open to mystery, which includes (for me) the reality of the supernatural.

The goal of science, B. F. Skinner once said, is the destruction of mystery. But enlightened scientists today include mystery as a basic part of our ongoing discovery of the complexity of what is real. I believe in keeping mystery alive.

The Death of Privacy

Were it not for all the legal statements issued by medical suppliers about my right to privacy, I would almost think privacy is becoming non-existent.

Yesterday, I looked up an obituary online and was invited to write a note of condolence. I could see at once that four other friends of the family had been there before me. And their messages were displayed for me to read. Notes of bereavement, intended to offer comfort and prayers, are available for the world to view. Why? Do I need a sample of what (or not) to say? Do I want my words disseminated?

In this Facebook age where apparently every detail of our lives is to be shared, I guess the answer is Yes. Like the retirement party I recently attended: The guest of honor received cards from each of the twelve guests, read each one, then passed the cards around the table so we could all see what (private) messages others had written. I almost wished I was emboldened to say, "Our card was just intended for you on your happy day..." but decided I am too sensitive and said nothing.

We live in an time when people think nothing of sharing their phone calls with others in Starbucks or the supermarket, when they enjoy listening to people discuss the intimacies of their bodily functions on TV or routinely share medical information with near strangers. I want to shout: TMI (too much information!)

I am grateful that we live in a more open age, when once-taboo topics can be publicly aired. I think of the bullying of kids, the issue of homosexuality and gender in general, and certain types of family abuse that can't be kept under wraps since doing so causes more problems. I am glad we can talk about hyperactivity and depression and other emotional problems without guilt and shame. I welcome programs that deal with hatred and racism.

But such talk must be done in a safe context wherein people are sensitive about revealing too much personal information. It requires tact, discretion, and good taste. The popular culture is never designed to accommodate such virtues.

On Awkwardness

Thanks to a recent (March 28) blog by Matthew Wollin (theawl.com), I have been thinking about awkwardness, both the word and the experience.

There is nothing awkward about Wollin's writing; in fact, his reflection is gracefully done. He looks at the forced intimacy of strangers in offices and on subways and finds urban life generally filled with little experiences of awkwardness.

He mentions, of course, puberty, a time of high anxiety on every front, and the awkwardness of sex (unless it is turned into a game called flirtation). And adulthood as a time when we pretend to understand why we feel awkward.

Feeling awkward, if it is a feeling, is so unbearable an experience, he says, that it must be talked or written about; he wisely says that "friends are made through awkwardness shared."

Wollin, who notes the awkward sound of the word 'awkward,' believes that we who use English are better able to express our reactions to social awkwardness than users of other languages. I wonder.

I wonder why he doesn't mention the obvious source of social phobias: fear. Too obvious, I guess. Shyness is commonplace. As a friend has shown me, it is often genetic and not a learned behavior--this fear of being easily embarrassed. Or is it both?

How difficult it is to get my students to talk in class: as first graders, they were probably eager to raise their hands, but, sadly, as young adults they have learned to be self-conscious and follow Mark Twain's advice ("Better to be say nothing and be thought stupid than open your mouth and remove all doubt.")

They don't believe me when I say, there's no such thing as a stupid question. Of course, this is strictly speaking untrue, but in a learning environment it makes sense. How can I instill confidence in them--especially when my own level of confidence is often low, when stage fright can overcome me and when I must play the role of "man in control"?

I invariably face awkwardness in using the phone and walking in to a crowd of people. I would like to think being sensitive is an asset to be proud of. Yet the struggle with social awkwardness is a daily experience, so routine that I hardly think of it.

All of this is very tricky, and I am grateful to Matthew Wollin for analyzing the issue of awkwardness. It affects everyone.

Death on Spring Day

This day in April was radiant, the essence of spring, with a cloudless blue sky and cool breezes, birdsong, and flowering trees. I felt unusually alive, especially after last night's performance--an evening of historical humor co-presented to 100 people whose laughter was itself enlivening.

Then came death, as it ineviably does: sudden news of Melinda's passing, a victim of MS. I had been meaning to visit or call and now it's too late. The familiar guilt. We were not close, yet after 40 years of intermittent association, some bonds are established.

It could have been me, but it wasn't. Death happens to other people, doesn't it? Anyone who has read Tolstoi's masterpiece, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," remembers that idea from the opening, then the long and painful process of sharing in the death of an ordinary man, who only at the end of his life sees the meaning of it all. He begins to say to himself, "I want to live!"

It's almost laughable, yet his insight--and ours as we share in the awakening of his soul--is redemptive. It's all about seeing that loving and being loved are all that matter, not property and polite manners and success.

The catharsis here is powerful, more than is possible with the deaths of those around us, who pass away in hospitals or hospices, their condition not known except to those around them, if at all. We turn to fiction to learn the truth about dying. Tolstoi is the master.

To confront death on a spring day is to say, as another woman in the community--also of my age--said in a message to me today: "Grief is real. But so is laughter. And shining moments of clarity and brilliance." She referred to the poem she had written following the death of her husband a few months ago, and I admired her hopeful courage so well expressed.

We must live fully. Who knows when death will come or what awaits me on the other side? As St. John of the Cross wrote 500 years ago, "I only know that a great love awaits me."

I hope I have his strong faith--as well as the courage of my poet-friend. I hope that Melinda was appreciated during her life for all her shining moments of clarity and brilliance. And that she is now totally free.

Freedom from Longing

"The greatest freedom is the freedom of longing." I have been trying to sort that out, to see if it makes sense for me.

This statement, found in some recent reading, was presented as a truism, presumably reflecting Buddhist ideas. The process of enlightenment involves a freedom from preoccupation with desires and the future: it is grounded in the now. To be asborbed with the desire for sexual fulfillment or for money, power, etc. is to be enslaved by one's own emotional life.

So far so good. I can't argue with that and in fact believe strongly in the power of the present as the only reality, where God is to be found. I have written about Christian mindfulness, exploring this idea in detail.

But as I think about longing, I also think, from the Western (Christian) angle, of the ongoing longing for beauty or happiness that motivates my life--even the longing for the deliverance of death if I were suffering with incurable pain. Such longing seems natural. It is related to hope, the calm expectation that pain will cease, that friends will call, that a trip may be both possible and rewarding, a longing for greater and greater degrees of love, of more and more beauty, whether in art or music or nature. The hope that the earthly struggle and pain of existence will one day come to an end so that I can be released into an unknown joy.

I keep thinking of the Psalms with the longing of the soul for God, unreachable yet with a motivating energy, pushing us toward greater perfection in prayer. We long for a peace that surpasses understanding even though it can't find fulfillment on this earth.

Of course, our hearts are restless with a burning longing that is frustrating and never satisfied: these are the desires to be burned away. They take us out of the present into worry and mental anguish. But there is also the refining fire of peaceful longing, I think, that longing of trust that involves hope.

I hope this is not so abstract that it's unclear or meaningless. There seems to be a difference between the freedom from desire (longing) and the need for spiritual longing, even if that longing has to do with earthly beauty and pleasure. I never want to be free of such longing.

Observations (This and That)

This week I saw, not for the first time, a man knitting in the public library. I've seen him there before: an athletic, lean man in his fifties with a small gray beard who, for whatever reason, chooses the same spot. Perhaps he wants to be observed.

Or, like people who read in public places, likes to have some people around. Whether he is making a statement about his masculinity is unknown.

I also saw, not for the first time, an ibis family of 12 white birds in search of something to eat on my lawn. I can tell from their long, curved beaks that they are not cranes or herons; the egrets, when they appear with their elegant tail feathers, are always alone. They walk slowly, as if in pain, over the grass, always causing me to wonder why they choose that unlikely, suburban location.

But the ibis(es) believe that it's safer to travel in a group.

Yesterday I found a headline in the magazine Scottish Life: "World Porridge Championship Returns to Scotland." I wonder if this exciting event will coincide with our upcoming visit there.

I am always intrigued by British eccentricity--or is it just whimsy or individuality? I think of the Englishman, quoted in a recent article, who avoided doctors, going instead to the local vet when he was ill. Why? "He doesn't ask too many bloody questions."

Enough said.

Enjoying Evil

As I mentioned recently, it is interesting to see contemporary writers addressing age-old topics, including such vast issues as evil, the existence of which is problematic in a world that makes sense. It has provoked strong and varied reactions from writers and thinkers in every era.

Twenty years so I developed a course, The Faces of Evil, for the honors students at the University of Central Florida that turned out to be my most popular course--and a particular favorite of mine because I kept expanding its scope as I learned more. That, for me, is the chief value of teaching: to learn and share what one knows.

There is a great challenge in talking about evil in a way that makes sense. Now Terry Eagleton, the British literary theorist, has written a lively article in the magazine Tikkun, based, no doubt, on his recent book in which he asserts his belief in evil.

Eagleton, whose reputation as a Marxist bad boy who stirs up controversies in academia, is not the first person I would expect to become a Christian apologist, yet the essence of what he says in his essay "Why is Evil So Sexy, and So Profoundly Glamorous?" is in keeping with the mainstream tradition in which he, like me, was raised.

Of course, he brings wit and brio to this familiar discussion. Goodness is seen as dull and boring, he says, because we fail to understand what virtue is: it is an ongoing practice, not a static piety but a kind of energy or exuberance that "has something to do with God."

Eagleton's God is not, to be sure, a Victorian schoolmaster, well-behaved and dictatorial like the divine character in Milton's "Paradise Lost." Rather, God is "an infinite abyss of self-delighting energy." No one, he asserts, can reject the Christian idea of God and still live because there is no life outside God.

And to be without such abundant energy, says Eagleton, is evil. Evil, then, is (as it was for Plato and Augustine and countless others) a negativity, an absence of the good: in this case, a lack of the ability to be fully alive. (I am reminded of the words of Irenaeus: "The glory of God is man fully alive." Or was it Ignatius of Antioch? Hard to keep those old guys straight.)

If we fail to see the exciting side of goodness, Eagleton says, we naturally find it dull and turn to vampire stories and the apparent allure of evil.

Eagleton's point is that virtue has nothing to do with doing your duty; it has to do with enjoying yourself in an authentic sense.

Like zombies and vampires, the truly evil live in a twilight world of non-being between life and death. All they can manage is a kind of inauthentic life; so despite the appeal of certain literary and cinematic villains, including Milton's Satan, Shakespeare's Iago and Richard III, Hannibal Lecter, et al., they live a parody of real life, deriving pleasure from inflicting their sufferings on others.

Perhaps we are fascinated by evildoers, as I used to speculate with my students, because we see our own potential for malevolence--hatred, racism, violence, e.g.--in others, real or imagined. But most people are not evil even if in their adolescent fantasies they find the idea enticing.

If I were to re-write Eagleton's essay, I would say more about the power of love as the essence of goodness as well as about the way evil inevitably involves the ego, the isolated self disconnected from society.

No topic invites more speculation or raises more important questions than the nature of evil. What happened to the ancient idea that goodness should be exciting and evil boring? How did it get reversed? Can it be discussed outside a theological framework?

Eagleton, using some useful literary examples, shows that the answer is "yes" to this last question while also cleverly showing the religious dimension of the topic. I am grateful for his article and for all the intellectual energy he has put into keeping the topic engaging.