Book Beings

What is it that really matters to us? Of course the particulars differ from person to person. But I’m inclined to believe we are more alike than different.

There are commonalities among all persons, despite the fact we are perpetually at each other’s throats, and despite our diverse upbringings, during which we are forced to swallow cultural, political, and religious lies from Day 1.

I have nothing against culture, politics, or religion. I am talking about the “twisting” of these essential components of any society. I am talking about the propagation of lies throughout the history of the world, and the flip side of that, which is the suppression of truth.

Not in any systematic way over the course of centuries (I am no Dan Brown School of Perpetual Global Conspiracy disciple), but in a random, episodic fashion, whereby truth is defined according to the whim of the despot of the day.

I’m not going out on a limb here saying your average Joe and Mary (i.e., the vast majority of the world’s population) are fodder for those powerful men who govern worldly things. You have, of course, your dictators and ayatollahs, who oppress and dominate and exploit their people. But you also have your Special Interest Dictators of the Western democracies, who manipulate, lie, and cheat to obtain their ends.

And there is the trickle-down effect, evident in the person of overbearing boss, abusive husband, institutional pedophile, neighborhood bully, and others who drastically diminish and often irreparably damage the quality of life of so many ordinary persons.

But human beings are all the same in that we all want to be happy, and we want to feel that our lives have meaning. Some find a distorted type of happiness and meaning through POWER at the expense of others. But most persons would like to find happiness and meaning through relationship with others and doing good (nurturing, helping, healing, building, bridging, creating, teaching, encouraging).

Unfortunately, the former have a disproportionate influence on the quality of life of the latter. And the means by which they achieve their own toxic brand of happiness and meaning inevitably lead to war, genocide, terror, economic disaster, and personal tragedy.

Nonetheless, Average Joe’s can and do make a difference within the most trying of circumstances. We can point to generations of Christian martyrs and missionaries throughout the centuries, but every culture, political system, and religion has produced heroic men, women, and children who have shown the rest of us that what is good, beautiful, and true cannot and must not be suppressed.

These Light Bearers impart to us a precious gift: the understanding that we need not define ourselves as victims or captives or even imitators of monsters (for those who would choose the dark path as the way out of their captivity).

In fact, there is no reason we cannot be Light Bearers ourselves, for there is something (or Someone) much greater at work in each of us than the world and its Hollow Men.

The poet, Miguel Hernandez, while imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War, wrote, Ata duro a ese hombre: no le atarás el alma.  (Bind that man up hard: you shall not bind his soul.)

Which begs the question, how do you bind another person’s soul? You would need that person’s permission, it would seem.

And here is the marvelous irony: those who seek to dominate others have by their own series of choices imprisoned themselves. No one has done it to them. They have simply allowed their Weakness and Corruption to bind up and lock away their souls.

Think of it. It really is quite remarkable how it all works out, this strange order and balance of things. How is such a man (or woman) capable of having a meaningful relationship with another person? And how can he (or she) have eyes that are open to what the Light Bearers reveal, or ears to hear their Message of Freedom, when they are hell bent on trying to eradicate them?

What is it that matters most to us?

I was driving to work this morning. I am an utter, shameful fool to complain of my daily commute to work. I understand that, but when I am crawling in bumper to bumper traffic I am not at my best.

Today I was making good time, but up ahead there they were, five or six cars submissively lined up behind a stopped school bus with red lights a-flashing. I took my place behind them, resenting the yellow slug of a vehicle with its extended rickety Stop sign, and thinking, “Can I get to work once, just once, without some freakin’ delay?”

Then I saw a little boy, maybe 6 years old, running hard toward the bus, little white legs in  shorts pumping away, backpack bouncing on his little back. The bus wasn’t going to leave without him, but he was running hard anyway, determined and filled with purpose.

I felt ashamed of myself, and was flooded with memories of my own children as little students bearing impossibly large backpacks on their way to school. When the boy disappeared into the bus I turned and saw his mother. A young woman wearing checkered pajama pants and a white t-shirt, staring intently at the bus as it laboriously pulled away.

What matters to you?

Family? Meaningful relationships with other persons? Doing what is good?

I recently watched the film, The Stoning of Soraya M, a true story based on the 1994 book by the French-Iranian journalist, Freidoune Sahebjam, both of which have been banned by the Iranian government.

An Iranian woman living in a remote village (not the first, nor the last, I fear) was stoned to death because she refused to grant her husband a divorce, which would have left her and her daughters destitute. Knowing it would be impossible for Soraya to prove her innocence (as per Sharia law), her abusive husband accused her of infidelity, having already threatened and recruited a simpleton into serving as second witness. Under Sharia law, two witnesses equaled death sentence, freeing the husband to marry a younger woman.

Soraya’s aunt, Zahra (a devout Muslim and Light Bearer), managed to tell the story of what happened to her niece to the journalist, who was passing through the village on his way to the border. Both Zahra and Sahebjam risked their lives to bring Soraya’s story to the world, knowing those who live in darkness fear all light.

Absurdity and darkness go hand in hand with reason and light. The works of those with locked-away souls, as perverse and gruesome as they can be, help us to see life and the world more clearly. They force us to look at where exactly we stand. What side of the chalk line.

They prompt us to ask –

If I deny my family, if I dishonor the sanctity of life-affirming relationships, if I reject what is good, what can possibly remain of me?

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men…

from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

Love the song. Big hit by the American alternative rock band, REM, from their 1991 album, Out of Time. May seem strange coming from a man of faith, this love, someone who lost, then found his religion.

I don’t mean “religion,” as in being “religious” in the way assorted self-described “spiritual” folks interpret it (as being a stultifying, perfunctory, impersonal, shallow, superstitious, law-driven, misguided, self-serving, man-made approach to faith), but in the true original sense of the word religion, which is “belief in and worship of God” (from which the “spiritual” life emerges).

Who insists on playing around with words to gain an edge over someone or to hide himself “will never wholly kiss you” or anyone else, as E. E. Cummings pointed out. But if that is your game, you might want to consider that being “spiritual” without being “religious,” you could argue, is to exclude the “belief in and worship of God” part of faith, which would make you an atheist, yes?

We do so have to be careful with words, look into them, not through them, just like persons. Can’t jump to conclusions, can’t judge…    (just reminding myself)

When Michael Stipe sings

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion

we infer existential crisis, the absence of God, a slowly administered self-immolation.

But that’s not it, Stipe tells us. He is using the expression “losing my religion” in the way people in the South (of the USA) might use it, to mean something akin to being at the end of one’s rope. Stipe tells us the song is about a fellow suffering from a strong dose of unrequited love.

Well, that is a bad enough place to be. But we can enlarge the meaning of this song, and its impact, by pointing out that the regional expression “losing my religion” is undoubtedly rooted in some long-ago, poor soul’s cry of hopelessness that signaled the reversal or collapse of the fundamental belief that Goodness would come to him – the promise that he would be happy, that his life would come to have meaning and purpose.

All of which suggests we at least, for the moment, glance in the direction of God, who is Love, and as such, the source of all that is good and beautiful and true, which all together give meaning and purpose to our lives.

To lose your religion (whether you are a believer or not) is to become separated, is to lose all possibility of communion with others, is to lose all hope and to allow yourself to be pinned to a wall like an insect.

Stipe, unwittingly perhaps, is singing about the absence of not just a woman’s love, but of LOVE. When someone in Alabama tells you he is losing his religion, he may be complaining good-naturedly to you about his life’s difficult and annoying, but manageable, circumstances, OR he may be telling the world (or informing God) that he is losing all hope that Goodness and Happiness will dwell with him.

Certainly, losing or never having possessed or being rejected by a woman (or a man) can cause a type of trauma, but people have perennially emerged from traumas, often stronger than before and more capable of making sound decisions and acting with purpose and competence.

Broken hearts are living hearts, and living hearts always heal, even if they remain scarred. But losing God is losing yourself, going the Insect Route.

Listen to Prufrock for a moment -

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

- from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Eliot’s 1917 poem is considerably more complex than Stipe’s “Losing My Religion,” but the similarities between the two men are noteworthy. Both are trapped in a state of anxious solitude and impotence. Both are oppressed by an intense self-consciousness that borders on paranoia.

Each is stuck in time, a grotesque prop, an object of imagined scrutiny (and ridicule?), incapable of engaging others in any meaningful, life-sharing and life-affirming way. Their focus is driven entirely inward, producing a state of being we might call Stuck On Self, or SOS for short.

When Paul McCartney, singing Eleanor Rigby, poses the question, All the lonely people, where do they all come from? he is not asking so much where they come from (what concert hall, village, planet), but how they’ve come to be SOS, gazing inward all the time and missing all the goodness, beauty and truth going around.

Some readers of Prufrock suggest Eliot was writing about man’s sense of isolation and unhappiness in the modern world. Not a stretch by any means. And it’s easy to understand why Stipe was convinced a whole lot of people would identify with the man in the corner. From the moment we are born, it really is all about us, about Me, out of necessity initially. But Life finally demands we turn our gaze outward, again out of necessity (i.e., for our own good).

John Lennon famously (though not the first to do so) proclaimed all you need is love. In fact, Love is all you need. But there is unrequited love, which can pack a vicious wallop and set you back a bit, and then there is God’s love, which is never unrequited, never limited, whimsical, manipulative, or conditional.

To know it requires turning yourself inside out, however, which isn’t that hard once you understand it all begins with a slow turn of the head, which even the most modest flower accomplishes when the sun comes calling.

Of course you can to your dying day deem God’s love the Sanctuary of Fools, and never come to know it.

Or you can step gingerly (or boldly, as either will do) out of your Self, seek His Goodness in others, accept your fool’s inheritance, grin your fool’s grin, and come to know Mercy and Goodness all the days of your life.

Who the hell do you think you are?

Can’t place it, the moment or location, but hasn’t just about everyone been asked this question in this precise way some time in his life? Maybe it was in Spanish, in my case. Or maybe it was a rhetorical question, directed by a frustrated elder or superior at not just me but those around me as well, the Captive Collective (e.g., classroom, military barracks, locker room, office, church…).

Who do you think you are? sans “the hell” can appear less accusatory, though I’m betting most times it’s not. How often, for example, have you heard a forthright person earnestly ask another, Who do you think you are?

Completely stripped of challenge, hostility, resentment, accusation? Not often, I wouldn’t think.

So, let this then, possibly, be the first time for you. I ask you (warmly and earnestly, if rhetorically, but with only good intentions), Who do you think you are?

There are teeming hordes itching to answer it for you. You are a heathen to some, an infidel to others. A saint, a pig, a rodent, a luminary. You may very well be all things to all people.

Like Jesus, for instance. What must have gone through his mind as the apostles apprised him of the many identities the speculating populace had ascribed to him.

Jesus asked Peter, Who do you say I am?

Couldn’t control what others thought. But Jesus thought it important for Peter to know for himself who he thought Jesus was.

Important because for some, the answer to that question is the answer to the first question. If you believe Jesus is the Son of God (i.e., one with God the Father and thus God Himself), then you know who you are.

What you believe is who you are, whether you are Christian or not. And if the words you speak are what you believe – if they are an integral part of you, not to be separated from your very flesh – then your word is who you are.

The problem with imposing on someone else a who-you-are-ness, a you-are-a-heathen, you-are-an-infidel, a saint, a pig, a rodent, a luminary, is that you are showing the world a who-you-are in so cross-eyed, unfocussed, and self-defeating a manner that you become lost to yourself.

This was Saul’s (i.e., Paul’s) problem on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians. He got so cross-eyed and unfocused that he went blind, for a time, and became lost. But being lost is not the worst condition, if later found.

If you are what you believe and what you say, and if you say another is this or that, and your word is who you are, then who you are could be a shrill cry, or an angry shout, or maybe even an ass kiss, depending on where you are coming from.

Or at least that is who you are until you take a much closer look at yourself (myself) and find the center that holds everything together and from which all good springs.

Otherwise we are falling men. Still. Paradise Lost and counting…

Speaking of which…

Don DeLillo’s post-9-11 novel, Falling Man, touches the sky and drills down into our well of being and who-we-are-ness with ancient questions about life and death, and whether any of this means anything and whether God is.

This Inescapable Planet where things get hairy, a Vale of Tears to some, the ultimate Cosmic Cruelty to others. Sometimes the world roars too loud and is too big and jagged and rough and who we are is bled down to feeble word-breaths by disoriented, ash-covered survivors: I am standing here. I am standing here. I am standing here.

This Inescapable Irony of people praying God help us kill them and God don’t let them kill us.

Different people, same God. In fact, one God.

DeLillo unfurls the performing artist known as Falling Man:

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump.

As earnestly as you or I may ask such a reckless, outrageous, crazed, attention-starved man (or is he an avatar? an angel?), Who do you think you are?

Should we?  What happened to Who do we think we are?

We judge, we judge, inescapably…  (Why not accept he is what he believes and is the word he speaks in Silence?)

If I am hearing him right, the Falling Man, Silence is the language we all should master on the off-chance of genuinely hearing one another unencumbered by shrill cries, angry shouts, and maybe even ass kisses, should that be the case.

Until this past Christmas I had never given the innkeeper who offered his stable for the night much thought or what Joseph occupied himself with the days immediately after the birth of Jesus. It stands to reason that Jesus, Mary and Joseph didn’t go anywhere for at least a few days after the birth and Joseph, being a carpenter, may have employed his skills on behalf of the innkeeper to pay for lodging and food. Or maybe he placed a few coins in the innkeeper’s hand and spent hours by Mary’s side as she slept and tended the infant.

In any case the New Testament proclaims the Good News of Salvation in Jesus Christ, who is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and who also happens to be fully Divine and fully Human. To be frank, the Trinitarian dogma of one God in three persons is probably as equally confounding as the Man-God notion.

Some years ago a well meaning Muslim acquaintance shook his head at me, questioning my sanity: but how is it you believe in three gods, there is only one!

How can I explain? I pleaded. We are in agreement! There is only one God, and he is God in Three Persons, but yes, one God nonetheless.

Not something you can depict with hand signals. And it’s pointless to try to explain. Likewise, to suggest God, or to be more precise, the Second Person of the Triune God is fully Divine and fully Human, is not to invite agreement or debate. It is simply to point to Mystery.

I don’t pretend to understand the Trinity, or how it is that the Second Person of the Trinity simultaneously possesses a Divine nature and a Human nature. I leave those discussions to the theologians.

I’ve come to accept there are things I cannot possibly understand. That doesn’t mean they are not true. What I do know is that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke speak to us about everyday people in everyday situations. An innkeeper, a pregnant teen, a cripple, a Roman soldier, a leper, a rich man, a prostitute, a tax collector, some good folks, some bad.

They are us (we, if you insist). No one is left out.

The Gospel reading for Christmas Mass was the beginning of John:In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Have there ever been more perplexing words?

If we come to accept, though we may not understand, that Jesus is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and that Jesus is fully Divine and fully Human, it shouldn’t be a stretch to accept that  Jesus is the Word of God…

Come again? Look, I have no qualms about leaving the finer points of Divinity studies to the theologians, but what matters most out of all of this, it seems to me, is that the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.

Some years back Joan Osborne’s song, “What If God Was One of Us” rankled some believers  who took offense to the line “just a slob like one of us,” in reference to Jesus. But aren’t we, when compared to God, slobs, and didn’t Jesus become one of us? Yes, fully Divine, but fully Human as well, though sinless (we really shouldn’t have any illusions about ourselves – just look around).

Was Ms Osborne being a wise ass? I don’t know. Just stylistics or tone I would think. Like my using “being a wise ass” rather than, say, “being unnecessarily provocative.”

Was her way of putting it necessary? Was mine? What is necessary in writing? How do you say what you want to say so that the reader gets more? Here is my take: Ms Osbourne was not being so much unnecessarily provocative as she was being a wise ass (in the opinion of some), just as God was not being so much a man/woman like us as much as a slob like us (which I read as a commentary on us, not God).

If you are writing truthfully, you are using words for the purpose of saying what you want to say, not for the purpose of offending or praising anyone. People get offended or praised in their own heads without your knowledge or consent anyway.

The point is too many people missed the point of that song. I’ll give you a somewhat ridiculous example to help clarify: Imagine a human loving ants so much that in order to communicate his love for them in a way they could understand, lowered himself and took the form of an ant, and dwelled among ants, eating ant food, sleeping ant sleep, communicating in ant, living an ant life and dying an ant death. Is God, then, to man as man is to ant? Probably not. More like God is to man as man is to dust mote, or better, whatever single infinitesimal speck of nothingness converges with others like it to form a dust mote.

Knee-jerk reactions betray insecurity and weak belief foundations. Too many folks have it all figured out. That is, too many folks will argue you into heaven or hell with words that mean nothing because they lack substance. They have no flesh to them. They are not an intrinsic part of the person who speaks them.

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh. How could God not become flesh? Truth is not about words. It is about the Word made flesh and the incontrovertible bond between what we say and who we are.

And Faith is the greatest Mystery. With all due respect, we’re not dissecting Plato here. Nor Saint Thomas Aquinas. Ants among dust motes, maybe, but still ants.

How to approach the Word of God other than by faith? Agreed, Science, though limited, can reveal something of God’s glory to us. And faith and reason go hand in hand, but in this way I think – reason suggests to us that only faith can draw us nearer to God.