So then, this brings up the question of 'what is a disability?'. I can't answer the question without drawing on my own life, my own experiences and knowledge of other people. There is, however, a standard answer which certainly forms a part of my larger, personal one: a disability can be inferred in an individual testing below a certain level on an IQ test, and by difficulty in an agreed-upon number of 'adaptive skills' such as feeding, cleaning, or clothing oneself, mobility, communication, social fluency, and the ability to get and retain a job.
In my more expansive definition, the consequences of a disability are another way to diagnose its presence. If we are alienated from others, that is proof we have a disability. One obvious thing that produces this estrangement from others is difference: a different body or a different brain, obviously, but just as much a different home culture or religion, different traditions, a different language, illiteracy, poverty, mental illness, scars from childhood, selfishness, insecurity, jealousy, fear. These are disabilities because they keep us from interacting with others as richly as we otherwise could and, by barring us from truly connecting with others, from reaching our own potential to be fully human.
Because some of them have only transactional or contingent value, the difference is that with some of these afflictions we have the choice of whether or not to show our brokenness, a privilege not granted to every person with every disability. We may still be as insecure about our scrawny arms as we were in seventh grade, but if we bulk them up, or even simply walk with a swagger or a sidearm, no one need ever know. We have the luxury of hiding a fear of rejection, for example, behind a supercilious or dismissive attitude, but that fear, however well hidden to others, still exists and thus precludes true intimacy with others.
So I just think the overwhelming majority of us are disabled in significant ways. The manner in which our frailty manifests itself may not preclude abundant, pleasant, superficial contact with others but, inasmuch as it means we cannot fully offer ourselves to others, and thus receive the entire richesse, the whole, the true self, of others in return, it is every bit as limiting as all those things conventionally labeled 'disabilities.'
And, rats, I still didn't say what it was I was trying to say for months on this. God bless blogs: there's always tomorrow. Someday it will, despite all my best efforts, say precisely what I mean it to say...
Sunday, August 31, 2008
The Genius of Compassion
Part of what excites me about the company I'll be working for is their belief, consonant with mine, that we are all utterly, radically, equal in worth. I think most Americans can sign on to the notion that a guy with two hands is not of substantively greater ontological standing, or possessed of significantly richer human dignity, than the guy next door who lost one of his in a boating accident. Where I think they stop acceding in large part is the point at which the argument includes individuals with little perceived 'productive' value. We have on the one hand an instinctive fear of anything different, which can certainly be overcome by rationality, personal experience, and openness. Unrelated to that, however, is a troubling enculturated rating scale of humanity particularly present in the United States with its historical emphasis on productivity and industriousness and the lionization of the self-made man. In this schema, someone who doesn't or can't earn as much as another is quite literally worth less than him. The problem arises when this purely financial equation is applied to other realms.
I know with deep certainty from my own experience that we all have our gifts and disabilities. The array is unique to the individual. We are thus all people-with-disabilities. Put in outdated terms, we are all in our own ways 'disabled persons,' 'retarded' relative to others in certain areas. Every genius has things he will never be competent at, just as every person with more limited intellectual abilities has areas in which he can excel. I think most people can calmly accept that a million-dollar football player could be great at running and tackling but less adept at theoretical cosmology, and that a person with ALS in a wheelchair might be stellar at the latter but wretched at the former. The point at which I think it becomes difficult is when the argument for equal inherent worth and dignity includes people who are limited in both physical and intellectual pursuits. We can see that Stephen Hawking is clearly earning his keep; so, too, is the running back whose physically punishing job will have health consequences for the rest of his life.
But I think that when we look at the gifts which we ourselves are most grateful to have, those that bring the most richness to our lives, they are seldom either grandiose or superficial ones, like having a knack for making millions, being able to run marathons, being a genius in one area, or having impeccable taste. The gifts we feel most grateful for, and which we tend to believe are in fact constitutive of our deeper selves, are the small, everyday ones, like tolerance, patience, sincerity, fairness, trustingness, and empathy. And those sorts of little yet profound gifts are present in every sort of person.
They are, moreover, productive - if, admittedly, not necessarily in a financial, or secular-Calvinist sort of way. People who are able to empathize readily with others produce a different atmosphere - in the home, at work, in friendships, and in the larger society. Those who are able to trust produce reciprocal trust in others, leading to honest communication and genuine communion. Anyone who can accept others as they are, without condescension, judgmentalism, or fear, stands a great chance at creating meaningful ties with others, which in turn can produce a better, fairer, kinder, more decent world. I don't think it takes a genius to see that.
I know with deep certainty from my own experience that we all have our gifts and disabilities. The array is unique to the individual. We are thus all people-with-disabilities. Put in outdated terms, we are all in our own ways 'disabled persons,' 'retarded' relative to others in certain areas. Every genius has things he will never be competent at, just as every person with more limited intellectual abilities has areas in which he can excel. I think most people can calmly accept that a million-dollar football player could be great at running and tackling but less adept at theoretical cosmology, and that a person with ALS in a wheelchair might be stellar at the latter but wretched at the former. The point at which I think it becomes difficult is when the argument for equal inherent worth and dignity includes people who are limited in both physical and intellectual pursuits. We can see that Stephen Hawking is clearly earning his keep; so, too, is the running back whose physically punishing job will have health consequences for the rest of his life.
But I think that when we look at the gifts which we ourselves are most grateful to have, those that bring the most richness to our lives, they are seldom either grandiose or superficial ones, like having a knack for making millions, being able to run marathons, being a genius in one area, or having impeccable taste. The gifts we feel most grateful for, and which we tend to believe are in fact constitutive of our deeper selves, are the small, everyday ones, like tolerance, patience, sincerity, fairness, trustingness, and empathy. And those sorts of little yet profound gifts are present in every sort of person.
They are, moreover, productive - if, admittedly, not necessarily in a financial, or secular-Calvinist sort of way. People who are able to empathize readily with others produce a different atmosphere - in the home, at work, in friendships, and in the larger society. Those who are able to trust produce reciprocal trust in others, leading to honest communication and genuine communion. Anyone who can accept others as they are, without condescension, judgmentalism, or fear, stands a great chance at creating meaningful ties with others, which in turn can produce a better, fairer, kinder, more decent world. I don't think it takes a genius to see that.
Institutions vs. Institutionalized Strengthiness
I got a new job, which I am very excited about. It is as Job Coach for people with disabilities, for a great, passionate, very cool organization, whose values mesh up with mine very well. I had applied for a similar position with a different organization previously - and, I don't know, something, or, truly, a few somethings just weren't right as I went through parts of the interview process. And neither my passion nor my political or intellectual position on issues related to the job mattered at that place: it was to be a Job and nothing more. After having worked in many, many restaurants and seen the kind of ardor, dedication, and self-sacrifice routinely demanded of even those on the lowest rungs of the kitchen ladder, it was quite disturbing to find that, in a position where human psyches and human hearts would be affected as much by my approach as by my execution of the position, neither actually mattered. I still knew that I would rock at the job and be a great asset for the individuals I would support if hired, so I waited to see if I was called to the final level of interviews. But I wasn't, and I felt it was all to the best.
So now, I am excited. I met one woman I'm going to work with, T. She lived, for thirty years, in one of those horrific institutions we imagine don't exist anymore, only recently having been placed into community living. She was so great at her job in the institution's sheltered workshop that she earned about four times what she was 'supposed to' every month. Now, she has her own home that she decorated in her own style, a social life, hobbies and interests she can pursue, assistants who help her out with things she can't do for herself, and she is soon to get a job at a department store, where I will liaise between her and the company, and work to help her understand her responsibilities and succeed at her position.
The day I met her, my new boss and one of T.'s supported-living assistants were with us as we walked around the mall, but a major point of the trip was to see if T. and I would be a good match, so I hung back by her and tried to let her and her curiosity about the new person lead the interaction. After soliciting compliments on her new shoes, T.'s first real question to me was what I thought a person should do when someone is harassing or being mean to him or her. I asked her what she thought someone should do, and she said she would just ignore them, that some people just do mean things and you have to accept that and try not to let it bother you.
Alright, it's a simple truth. Fine. Ignore mean people and your day goes smoother. But being harassed or made fun of in the way T. meant it, in the way she has experienced much of her life, simply because she looks and acts as she does, is not something most of us have to contend with. Nor are our experiences with it so much a part of how we view the world, and our place within it, that we would want to bring it up with someone we had just met. It's not pressing for us. Being rejected in some fashion multiple times a day is simply not a risk most of us face.
But then, neither is that sort of open, heartfelt communication something most of us are willing to risk. Many of our disabilities are such that they keep us bound up inside our own perspectives, our own minds, in a functional isolation paralleling T.'s decades-long real isolation, but in our case masked by an abundance of superficial relations. We can't bear the risk of being truly ourselves and truly vulnerable with others, so we frequently fail to achieve true communion with them. We refuse, even after much time with a person, to lay our fears and weaknesses bare to even a fraction of the extent to which T. was willing to do unreservedly from the very start. We close those parts of ourselves off - the weak and the small and the yearning and the sad parts - that people with obvious disabilities are more often unable to hide. We are just as weak, and just as dependent on other people and community, as 'they' are, but out of our own fears of rejection we steadfastly refuse to present that side of ourselves to others.
So now, I am excited. I met one woman I'm going to work with, T. She lived, for thirty years, in one of those horrific institutions we imagine don't exist anymore, only recently having been placed into community living. She was so great at her job in the institution's sheltered workshop that she earned about four times what she was 'supposed to' every month. Now, she has her own home that she decorated in her own style, a social life, hobbies and interests she can pursue, assistants who help her out with things she can't do for herself, and she is soon to get a job at a department store, where I will liaise between her and the company, and work to help her understand her responsibilities and succeed at her position.
The day I met her, my new boss and one of T.'s supported-living assistants were with us as we walked around the mall, but a major point of the trip was to see if T. and I would be a good match, so I hung back by her and tried to let her and her curiosity about the new person lead the interaction. After soliciting compliments on her new shoes, T.'s first real question to me was what I thought a person should do when someone is harassing or being mean to him or her. I asked her what she thought someone should do, and she said she would just ignore them, that some people just do mean things and you have to accept that and try not to let it bother you.
Alright, it's a simple truth. Fine. Ignore mean people and your day goes smoother. But being harassed or made fun of in the way T. meant it, in the way she has experienced much of her life, simply because she looks and acts as she does, is not something most of us have to contend with. Nor are our experiences with it so much a part of how we view the world, and our place within it, that we would want to bring it up with someone we had just met. It's not pressing for us. Being rejected in some fashion multiple times a day is simply not a risk most of us face.
But then, neither is that sort of open, heartfelt communication something most of us are willing to risk. Many of our disabilities are such that they keep us bound up inside our own perspectives, our own minds, in a functional isolation paralleling T.'s decades-long real isolation, but in our case masked by an abundance of superficial relations. We can't bear the risk of being truly ourselves and truly vulnerable with others, so we frequently fail to achieve true communion with them. We refuse, even after much time with a person, to lay our fears and weaknesses bare to even a fraction of the extent to which T. was willing to do unreservedly from the very start. We close those parts of ourselves off - the weak and the small and the yearning and the sad parts - that people with obvious disabilities are more often unable to hide. We are just as weak, and just as dependent on other people and community, as 'they' are, but out of our own fears of rejection we steadfastly refuse to present that side of ourselves to others.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Plates? I Don't Need No Stinking Plates!
Apparently I picked up some bad habits at the soup kitchen and left a cupboard door open at my own place. I heard odd noises in the kitchen and went in to discover the neighbor's cat sitting in a cupboard on my plates. It is a good thing I recently broke a few; if I hadn't I'm pretty sure the pile would have come crashing down with his dismount. I think he's in there hiding from today's variable weather. I don't know anything about cats. But 'La Bohème' is on TV, although it doesn't appear to be helping the cat's mood any.
And yes, I do use some kitchen cupboards for kitchen things, not just clothes.
And yes, I do use some kitchen cupboards for kitchen things, not just clothes.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Almost-on-the-Highway Robbery
My recent problems with car thefts got me thinking of the stupidest time I was robbed. --Aren't they all pretty stupid? you ask. Yes, of course, but some leave you feeling more like a hapless sap than others. Now, I admit that this latest round of car robberies does incline me to believe I was rather excessive in Standing on Principle by still refusing to lock my doors after the second round of thefts, but the Convenience Store Pocket-Pickers of '92 win by a landslide for the extent to which they added insult to ego to injury to my pocketbook.
It all began, as most of these stories do, with idiocy. When yet another one of my $300 cars died (was it the Rambler? the Nova? the Mustang II? the Dart, the Valiant, the Olds? I have no idea, but I loved them all), my stepfather (the nice one) took the situation in hand and said we were going to go to a real car dealership, and get me a real car. Fair enough by itself, but when we got there, after cursory handshakes with the avuncular sales agent, both parents sat down and read magazines, leaving me to deal with the car shark on my own, on the basis that I was (chronologically, at any rate) an adult.
I told the middle-aged salesman what I wanted in a car: large and lumbering; safe and slow. As far as features, I wanted power windows. With regard to design, I was hoping for lots of metal around me, and pedals I could reach. In other words, I wanted some granny's trade-in. What I drove out in was a ridiculous speedy Mustang with a bordello-red interior, a spoiler, and some 'sporty' thing over the back window. The salesman was a 50-year-old man, an authority figure, and I gave up standing by my criteria soon after he began prating on about how 'young ladies like you' needed 'fun, sporty' cars. It was a ridiculous accusation, but I was helpless to protest.
Well, the payments on this thing were a bit obscene, and I was not entirely successful in making them all the time. In the days before online bill-paying, when bills got too late the only recourse we had was to drive somewhere and pay the thing in person, which was what I had to do one sunny summer day in Orange County.
First, go back in time one day.
I stopped at my customary Diet Coke outlet, a convenience store just before the freeway onramp. To get in, I walked past two men standing just beside the door who would have looked more at home in a Dorothea Lange photo than in our sparkling suburbs. When I came out, they asked for money. They told of how they had driven from Oklahoma for work in 'that ole pickup over there' (pointing to distant hideous truck parked in front of the office-supply store), earned some money, but got robbed and now just needed to fix up their ole truck to go back home. I felt flush, having just cashed my paycheck, and it hurt me that decent, hardworking rustics would have such a cruel welcome to California. Again. So I gave them a twenty.
Now, go forward a day.
I had to go pay my current and overdue car payment in person somewhere way up north. For that I needed Diet Coke. Now, I had the whole of my paycheck on me still, most of it in a billfold I had stuck in the side pocket of a jacket, and a lot of it was going to the car. The same two guys were outside the store as I went in. I paid for the Coke with money in my purse, and the same one as before accosted me again with a story. They had come out from Nevada to help their ailing relative in that ole van over there (pointing to a sickly, rusted van parked in front of the auto-parts store), but got robbed coming out of the nursing home or graveyard or something, and just needed to get some money to get back home. I was only brave because I was angry, but I actually managed to give some version of a 'Say, look here, Mister' and express a tiny bit of my indignation at having given them twenty dollars the previous day for a different story.
Needless to say, I did not again contribute to their cause. --Not intentionally, that is. While the talky one was remonstrating with me about his need for gas money, the silent partner picked my jacket pocket clean of the billfold, and with it nearly all the money I had in the world. I'm pretty sure that's the time I feel most stupid about. At least until the next one...
It all began, as most of these stories do, with idiocy. When yet another one of my $300 cars died (was it the Rambler? the Nova? the Mustang II? the Dart, the Valiant, the Olds? I have no idea, but I loved them all), my stepfather (the nice one) took the situation in hand and said we were going to go to a real car dealership, and get me a real car. Fair enough by itself, but when we got there, after cursory handshakes with the avuncular sales agent, both parents sat down and read magazines, leaving me to deal with the car shark on my own, on the basis that I was (chronologically, at any rate) an adult.
I told the middle-aged salesman what I wanted in a car: large and lumbering; safe and slow. As far as features, I wanted power windows. With regard to design, I was hoping for lots of metal around me, and pedals I could reach. In other words, I wanted some granny's trade-in. What I drove out in was a ridiculous speedy Mustang with a bordello-red interior, a spoiler, and some 'sporty' thing over the back window. The salesman was a 50-year-old man, an authority figure, and I gave up standing by my criteria soon after he began prating on about how 'young ladies like you' needed 'fun, sporty' cars. It was a ridiculous accusation, but I was helpless to protest.
Well, the payments on this thing were a bit obscene, and I was not entirely successful in making them all the time. In the days before online bill-paying, when bills got too late the only recourse we had was to drive somewhere and pay the thing in person, which was what I had to do one sunny summer day in Orange County.
First, go back in time one day.
I stopped at my customary Diet Coke outlet, a convenience store just before the freeway onramp. To get in, I walked past two men standing just beside the door who would have looked more at home in a Dorothea Lange photo than in our sparkling suburbs. When I came out, they asked for money. They told of how they had driven from Oklahoma for work in 'that ole pickup over there' (pointing to distant hideous truck parked in front of the office-supply store), earned some money, but got robbed and now just needed to fix up their ole truck to go back home. I felt flush, having just cashed my paycheck, and it hurt me that decent, hardworking rustics would have such a cruel welcome to California. Again. So I gave them a twenty.
Now, go forward a day.
I had to go pay my current and overdue car payment in person somewhere way up north. For that I needed Diet Coke. Now, I had the whole of my paycheck on me still, most of it in a billfold I had stuck in the side pocket of a jacket, and a lot of it was going to the car. The same two guys were outside the store as I went in. I paid for the Coke with money in my purse, and the same one as before accosted me again with a story. They had come out from Nevada to help their ailing relative in that ole van over there (pointing to a sickly, rusted van parked in front of the auto-parts store), but got robbed coming out of the nursing home or graveyard or something, and just needed to get some money to get back home. I was only brave because I was angry, but I actually managed to give some version of a 'Say, look here, Mister' and express a tiny bit of my indignation at having given them twenty dollars the previous day for a different story.
Needless to say, I did not again contribute to their cause. --Not intentionally, that is. While the talky one was remonstrating with me about his need for gas money, the silent partner picked my jacket pocket clean of the billfold, and with it nearly all the money I had in the world. I'm pretty sure that's the time I feel most stupid about. At least until the next one...
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Hopeless Causes, Claretians, and Charisms
'La caridad me urge, me impele, me obliga a gritar.' -St. Antonio Maria Claret
'You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.' - St. Bernard of Clairvaux
'To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.' - St. Teresa of Avila
'Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword; wear humility rather than fine clothes.' - St. Dominic
With all that being said, in regards to my statement in the last post about there being no one-fits-all spirituality, I do not mean to say that some truths cannot be universal, nor either that admiring and utilizing elements of other traditions is inherently wrong or fatuous. But trading one inadequately-investigated tradition for superficial adherence to another, one set of misapprehended truths for another yet more confusing system, is every bit as goofy as Chesterton makes it sound. Familiarity is a no more sufficient basis for renouncing a spiritual tradition than it is for divorcing a spouse or vowing never again to read Dostoevsky or eat ice cream.
Augustine defended his use of Plotinus by likening it to the Jews taking the gold out of Egypt, and varied things from different sources may have especial resonance to individual seekers. What is necessary when confronted with all these sparkling jewels is a determined refusal either to make lead out of them or to appropriate what seems convenient or commonsensical while gravely mistaking its essence.
In that vein, there are as many different spiritualities available within Catholicism as there are Catholics. John Dunne, John Dear, John Main, and the fourteenth-century Dominican John Tauler have not only the same name but a shared focus on contemplation and meditation that would not be entirely unfamiliar to a real Buddhist. Martin de Porres, Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Antonio Claret, Cesar Chavez, Jean Vanier, and Simone Weil can give anyone a good start who wishes he could combine his love of the poor and the suffering with his love of God.
And this is where the saints come in. There are two primary ways to look at the saints. One is as Friends of God. They did so well in this lifetime that they have God's ear in the next, so while you are praying to God directly that the Red Sox please, please, please take the pennant this time, you can also suggest to St. Jude that this may be the sort of hopeless case worthy of his attention as an advocate. If you are struggling in school, you can ask a brilliant scholar like Aquinas to help you along, or you can petition someone who battled the same challenges to at least give you the courage to keep plugging away diligently.
The other way to see them is as Heroes for Grownups. Saints can indeed be intimidating: they were saints, after all, and we are probably not. But each is as memorable for what he or she overcame as for what s/he accomplished, and meditating on those struggles is often where we can gain the most. They were also individuals, with distinct tendencies and temperaments, walking very different paths toward union, and just as we feel greater sympathy toward particular people we meet in daily life, so, too, will different saints' stories seem more or less apropos of our own journeys, strivings, and weaknesses.
I don't know why people are scared of saints. I think particularly if we refuse to idolize them, to make them into something they were not (i.e., perfect), we can see in their examples how far a small, flawed, and eminently human being - possibly a human being who shared some of our own fears and failures - can get in this life by not letting those fears and weaknesses surmount him.
'You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.' - St. Bernard of Clairvaux
'To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.' - St. Teresa of Avila
'Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword; wear humility rather than fine clothes.' - St. Dominic
With all that being said, in regards to my statement in the last post about there being no one-fits-all spirituality, I do not mean to say that some truths cannot be universal, nor either that admiring and utilizing elements of other traditions is inherently wrong or fatuous. But trading one inadequately-investigated tradition for superficial adherence to another, one set of misapprehended truths for another yet more confusing system, is every bit as goofy as Chesterton makes it sound. Familiarity is a no more sufficient basis for renouncing a spiritual tradition than it is for divorcing a spouse or vowing never again to read Dostoevsky or eat ice cream.
Augustine defended his use of Plotinus by likening it to the Jews taking the gold out of Egypt, and varied things from different sources may have especial resonance to individual seekers. What is necessary when confronted with all these sparkling jewels is a determined refusal either to make lead out of them or to appropriate what seems convenient or commonsensical while gravely mistaking its essence.
In that vein, there are as many different spiritualities available within Catholicism as there are Catholics. John Dunne, John Dear, John Main, and the fourteenth-century Dominican John Tauler have not only the same name but a shared focus on contemplation and meditation that would not be entirely unfamiliar to a real Buddhist. Martin de Porres, Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Antonio Claret, Cesar Chavez, Jean Vanier, and Simone Weil can give anyone a good start who wishes he could combine his love of the poor and the suffering with his love of God.
And this is where the saints come in. There are two primary ways to look at the saints. One is as Friends of God. They did so well in this lifetime that they have God's ear in the next, so while you are praying to God directly that the Red Sox please, please, please take the pennant this time, you can also suggest to St. Jude that this may be the sort of hopeless case worthy of his attention as an advocate. If you are struggling in school, you can ask a brilliant scholar like Aquinas to help you along, or you can petition someone who battled the same challenges to at least give you the courage to keep plugging away diligently.
The other way to see them is as Heroes for Grownups. Saints can indeed be intimidating: they were saints, after all, and we are probably not. But each is as memorable for what he or she overcame as for what s/he accomplished, and meditating on those struggles is often where we can gain the most. They were also individuals, with distinct tendencies and temperaments, walking very different paths toward union, and just as we feel greater sympathy toward particular people we meet in daily life, so, too, will different saints' stories seem more or less apropos of our own journeys, strivings, and weaknesses.
I don't know why people are scared of saints. I think particularly if we refuse to idolize them, to make them into something they were not (i.e., perfect), we can see in their examples how far a small, flawed, and eminently human being - possibly a human being who shared some of our own fears and failures - can get in this life by not letting those fears and weaknesses surmount him.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...
So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.
I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:
'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'
And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.
Chesterton again:
'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).
But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.
As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.
I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.
I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:
'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'
And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.
Chesterton again:
'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).
But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.
As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.
I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.
Mustangs, Ministers, and the Misery of Politics
Like you, I'm often scared of religious people. They can be arrogant, preachy, narrow, provincial, and very, very poor listeners. Perhaps also like you, I often find academics to share many of the same attributes. Both groups also tend to associate solely with their own kind, which does little to broaden either their experience or their perspective.
In between are people who can combine rationality with spirituality, and who are possessed of a faith profound and vast enough to encompass new facts and new experiences: life, in other words. I was unexpectedly impressed with the Orange County pastor, Rick Warren, who is apparently very famous and hosted the question-and-answer session with the two presidential candidates. I admit that I didn't watch the whole thing; I'm going to have to do it in parts, since politicians scare me more than anyone else. But here is a guy whose whole life is built around his faith, who brought his little church up from meetings at local public high schools (Go Mustangs!) and other such buildings to the fourth largest church in the United States, who is an evangelical, for Heaven's sake - and who asked about the sanest question I have heard anyone ask a candidate.
He put the question the following way: 'A lot of good legislation dies because of partisan politics and party loyalty keeps people from really putting America’s best first. Could you give me an example of where you led against your party's interest ... and really maybe against your own best interest, for the good of America?' While every overpaid political 'journalist' unceasingly strives to provide the gossip-hungry public 'news' of candidates' 'flip-flopping' with as salacious a tone as if they were announcing yet another politician's sex scandal, any sane citizen realizes that as facts change - be they borders, heads of state, environmental conditions, social problems, diplomatic relations, demographics, economic conditions, or anything else within the purview of a aspirant to high political office or a lowly voter - our position on those facts might be a more sensible one were it to take into account that they no longer mean quite what they once did.
Let us take an avowedly religious person. He or she believes that some values and acts are always absolutely good, and likewise that some things are always wrong. His or her choices are thus always far more restricted than someone for whom all categories are, at least in theory, potentially fluid. But in even in this case, which I hold up to be the most rigid stance politically - even from this most rigid perspective one thing could have been right under previous circumstances and now completely indefensible ethically. Ergo, it's not 'flip-flopping,' but serious consideration, reflection, and analysis of facts. If Geo. W. Bush were to say in light of current circumstances that when he met with Putin in 2001 he should perhaps have been wearing his bifocals when he 'looked the man in the eye... and was able to get a sense of his soul,' I would be grateful for his new more reflective and less hasty analysis. I might think he was rash, gullible, or arrogant as regards his earlier pronouncement, but I would not impugn his current stance on the basis of its divergence from his previous statement.
So, that an evangelical Christian, the sort of person many people perceive as being the most inflexible, the worst at listening, and the least amenable to cooperation, should suggest that in the execution of the office of President the good of the country might conceivably at times trump strict adherence to Party loyalty - well, it fills me with the sort of faith, hope, and goodwill that I usually only experience while crying during films about brave dogs or talking beavers made for third-graders.
In between are people who can combine rationality with spirituality, and who are possessed of a faith profound and vast enough to encompass new facts and new experiences: life, in other words. I was unexpectedly impressed with the Orange County pastor, Rick Warren, who is apparently very famous and hosted the question-and-answer session with the two presidential candidates. I admit that I didn't watch the whole thing; I'm going to have to do it in parts, since politicians scare me more than anyone else. But here is a guy whose whole life is built around his faith, who brought his little church up from meetings at local public high schools (Go Mustangs!) and other such buildings to the fourth largest church in the United States, who is an evangelical, for Heaven's sake - and who asked about the sanest question I have heard anyone ask a candidate.
He put the question the following way: 'A lot of good legislation dies because of partisan politics and party loyalty keeps people from really putting America’s best first. Could you give me an example of where you led against your party's interest ... and really maybe against your own best interest, for the good of America?' While every overpaid political 'journalist' unceasingly strives to provide the gossip-hungry public 'news' of candidates' 'flip-flopping' with as salacious a tone as if they were announcing yet another politician's sex scandal, any sane citizen realizes that as facts change - be they borders, heads of state, environmental conditions, social problems, diplomatic relations, demographics, economic conditions, or anything else within the purview of a aspirant to high political office or a lowly voter - our position on those facts might be a more sensible one were it to take into account that they no longer mean quite what they once did.
Let us take an avowedly religious person. He or she believes that some values and acts are always absolutely good, and likewise that some things are always wrong. His or her choices are thus always far more restricted than someone for whom all categories are, at least in theory, potentially fluid. But in even in this case, which I hold up to be the most rigid stance politically - even from this most rigid perspective one thing could have been right under previous circumstances and now completely indefensible ethically. Ergo, it's not 'flip-flopping,' but serious consideration, reflection, and analysis of facts. If Geo. W. Bush were to say in light of current circumstances that when he met with Putin in 2001 he should perhaps have been wearing his bifocals when he 'looked the man in the eye... and was able to get a sense of his soul,' I would be grateful for his new more reflective and less hasty analysis. I might think he was rash, gullible, or arrogant as regards his earlier pronouncement, but I would not impugn his current stance on the basis of its divergence from his previous statement.
So, that an evangelical Christian, the sort of person many people perceive as being the most inflexible, the worst at listening, and the least amenable to cooperation, should suggest that in the execution of the office of President the good of the country might conceivably at times trump strict adherence to Party loyalty - well, it fills me with the sort of faith, hope, and goodwill that I usually only experience while crying during films about brave dogs or talking beavers made for third-graders.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Cat Fights in Cowboy Towns
There is nothing like waking up with a nightmare in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep. There are even fewer things like waking up with a nightmare, not being able to return to sleep, and having a job interview the next day for which one had previously held out the hope of seeming collected, focused, and semi-smart. Oh, well, even if the black circles under the eyes are egregious, I can still hope for 'interesting,' clean, fully dressed, and amusingly small.
The dream, though! I was driving in a car with the neighbor's cat in the passenger seat. I know I was driving the Mazda car, because when we pulled over there was no dome light. We had to pull over because I couldn't find my house keys, keys that belong to a house I have never lived in except in dreams, a small Victorian in an old mining town in NE Washington, Nevada, or Central California. I had to find the keys because I had to give them to someone, and where we pulled over was next to a swamp alongside a highway that was also the road that the megachurch pastor who interviewed the Presidential candidates last week has his church on now, and which used to be across the street from an orange grove. But his church wasn't in the dream; it didn't exist yet, or maybe the dream only existed in a world devoid of megachurches. I don't know, but I was on the side opposite the orange grove, and down the street from a row of saloons, blacksmiths, and rooming houses that I've also only been near in my dreams.
It was hard to find the key without a dome light or streetlights, but then I remembered I thought it was in this pretty green carved box with turtles on it from Indonesia. Naturally, I knew exactly where the box was, but as I started to open the secret compartment on the box that had always worked before, it turned out just to be a a decoration and came off in my hand. At that point, I noticed that there was a cat sitting on the windowledge of the car and trying to get in. The neighbor's cat hadn't noticed the stranger yet, and I was starting to get scared of what else might be lurking on the roadside in the middle of nowhere so, although my fingers were shaking, I figured out how to open the regular compartment of the box to get out the key. I managed to open it, but inside were only hallucinogenic and shiitake mushrooms, the latter of which is of as little interest to me as the former, and as soon as I was realizing that, the outside cat figured out how to get inside, leapt at the other cat, they started fighting, and I woke up.
Now, I used dried shiitakes today, so they were in my head and I don't need to believe my subconscious is telling me to eat more mushrooms. We were also talking at the soup kitchen about people getting addicted to opiates after surgery, and how someone's tolerance for pain might decrease while on them and cause dependence, so maybe that's how the other kind of mushroom got in there. My brain should also not be telling me to replace the dome light, as I already succeeded masterfully in performing that bit of highly technical auto repair. It may have been saying, 'Be sure to take the GPS to the interview, idiot,' and 'If you got another cat of your own, maybe the wandering one would want to stay inside and you wouldn't have to worry if he is okay, since his owners will never care one way or the other.' Or maybe just 'Get copies of your keys made, don't drive around with cats, and don't move to a ghost town.' Either way, I woke up in the middle of a fight between two cats on my lap in a tiny car, with my heart pounding, and sitting straight up in bed.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
'Your Power Is Turning Our Darkness to Dawn,
So roll on, Columbia, roll on.'
Some things we would never know without Wikipedia. Washington is a fine state in many ways. We have a lot of parks, and a lot of universities, a lot of nonprofits, and everyone gardens and nobody smokes. We lead the country in raspberries and hops, and while we may all suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder nine months out of the year, we are generally courteous.
That being said, we have the lamest, and most inscrutable, state motto. While others speak of valor, liberty, and progress:
-'Live free or die.' (New Hampshire)
-'Liberty and prosperity.' (New Jersey)
-'Union, justice, et confiance.' (Louisiana)
-'By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.' (in Latin) (Massachusetts)
-'United we stand, divided we fall.' (Kentucky)
Washington takes as its slogan a Chinook expression meaning, 'Sure, when we get around to it, you bet.'
-'Alki,' or 'Eventually, by and by.' It should come as no shock, then, that the world's largest hemp festival is held here; while Mississippi is working out what it is today they are going to accomplish 'By valor and arms' and Nebraska is defending 'Equality before the law,' we're sitting around debating whether we should get extra chèvre or just double chorizo on our Mad Pizza.
And, while I think that orcas, rhododenrons, and apples make perfect sense in their respective categories, I can't imagine how the Square Dance Lobby succeeded in dominating the race for state dance. Moreover, while I love Woody Guthrie beyond all discretion, our state song, 'Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,' a panegyric to electricity and damming, is perhaps more on the level of his 'Ladies' Auxiliary' than of 'This Land Is Your Land' (the full version) or 'The Dying Doctor,' including such lines as:
'Other great rivers add power to you
Yakima, Snake, and the Klickitat, too
Sandy Willamette and Hood River, too,
So roll on, Columbia, roll on.'
-And you can't even square dance to it.
Some things we would never know without Wikipedia. Washington is a fine state in many ways. We have a lot of parks, and a lot of universities, a lot of nonprofits, and everyone gardens and nobody smokes. We lead the country in raspberries and hops, and while we may all suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder nine months out of the year, we are generally courteous.
That being said, we have the lamest, and most inscrutable, state motto. While others speak of valor, liberty, and progress:
-'Live free or die.' (New Hampshire)
-'Liberty and prosperity.' (New Jersey)
-'Union, justice, et confiance.' (Louisiana)
-'By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.' (in Latin) (Massachusetts)
-'United we stand, divided we fall.' (Kentucky)
Washington takes as its slogan a Chinook expression meaning, 'Sure, when we get around to it, you bet.'
-'Alki,' or 'Eventually, by and by.' It should come as no shock, then, that the world's largest hemp festival is held here; while Mississippi is working out what it is today they are going to accomplish 'By valor and arms' and Nebraska is defending 'Equality before the law,' we're sitting around debating whether we should get extra chèvre or just double chorizo on our Mad Pizza.
And, while I think that orcas, rhododenrons, and apples make perfect sense in their respective categories, I can't imagine how the Square Dance Lobby succeeded in dominating the race for state dance. Moreover, while I love Woody Guthrie beyond all discretion, our state song, 'Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,' a panegyric to electricity and damming, is perhaps more on the level of his 'Ladies' Auxiliary' than of 'This Land Is Your Land' (the full version) or 'The Dying Doctor,' including such lines as:
'Other great rivers add power to you
Yakima, Snake, and the Klickitat, too
Sandy Willamette and Hood River, too,
So roll on, Columbia, roll on.'
-And you can't even square dance to it.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
It's the Emerald City, not the 'Paris of the Gobi'
Well, thank God: we are back to rainy and 60 degrees, so everyone can stop complaining about the sweltering heat and go back to 'Sixty-three? In August? Where did our summer go?'
And while looking for information on replacing the antique dome-light bulb in the beleaguered hatchback, I came across this poignant story of another vintage Mazda owner's travails. Dave Fox, also of Seattle, and a travel writer for our own Rick Steves, battled his crappy car's possessed horn rather than undiscriminating robbers. It is a sad and touching story, and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
--Or at least the refusal of crappy cars to go gently into that good night.
And while looking for information on replacing the antique dome-light bulb in the beleaguered hatchback, I came across this poignant story of another vintage Mazda owner's travails. Dave Fox, also of Seattle, and a travel writer for our own Rick Steves, battled his crappy car's possessed horn rather than undiscriminating robbers. It is a sad and touching story, and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
--Or at least the refusal of crappy cars to go gently into that good night.
Monday, August 18, 2008
"'Et tu, Brute,' rief Er auf Lateinisch
--wie est dort die Landesprache war."
I've apologized once, and I've apologized twice, and I've apologized more than that, too, for when my rhetoric verges over into the preachy ~
~ See, the thing is, much as I might love Dominicans, I grew up when and where I grew up, none of which admittedly were the best of all possible places or times and any of which maybe should have been the thirteenth or fourteenth or seventeenth century but were not and, accordingly, while I have absolutely no bad feelings whatsoever about 'prædicare' since I can't speak any Latin other than 'Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat,'* I cannot help but wince, shake a little, and discreetly and in an eminently ladylike fashion vomit inside my mouth from smelling the imagined leeching vapors of petroleum by-products from obstreperous and designed-to-impress synthetic altar-flower arrangements basted with 'Inspired-by-Nature' 'fresheners' at 7 AM sharp every Sunday anytime I find myself within 26 miles of 'preachy'~
So it is that every time I go off on caritas, agape, empathy, compassion, love, the Beatitudes, the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux, Nagarjuna, Dostoevsky, Avalokitesvara, or even Common Decent Neighborliness, I always feel as though I have too much product and too many extensions in my hair, too overwhelming a desire to restate endlessly the obvious with an ever-increasing lack of delicacy, decency, and eloquence, too great a tendency to tripthongize my dipthongs, and a garish and enormous Daughters of the Confederacy pin tacked to my (it would be, under the circumstances) abundant bosom.
So, as a sop to myself and those of you who find my exhortations as tiring as I do, here is a panel from my favorite comic strip writer, Peter Blegvad, whose Leviathan ran in the Independent and to which I was as addicted when I lived in Greece and Suffolk as I was to Gauloises Bleues and those pull-out, frame-able sections about minerals, indigenous beetles, and traffic patterns in the Sunday El País.
*'It's not the heat; it's the humidity.'
I've apologized once, and I've apologized twice, and I've apologized more than that, too, for when my rhetoric verges over into the preachy ~
~ See, the thing is, much as I might love Dominicans, I grew up when and where I grew up, none of which admittedly were the best of all possible places or times and any of which maybe should have been the thirteenth or fourteenth or seventeenth century but were not and, accordingly, while I have absolutely no bad feelings whatsoever about 'prædicare' since I can't speak any Latin other than 'Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat,'* I cannot help but wince, shake a little, and discreetly and in an eminently ladylike fashion vomit inside my mouth from smelling the imagined leeching vapors of petroleum by-products from obstreperous and designed-to-impress synthetic altar-flower arrangements basted with 'Inspired-by-Nature' 'fresheners' at 7 AM sharp every Sunday anytime I find myself within 26 miles of 'preachy'~
So it is that every time I go off on caritas, agape, empathy, compassion, love, the Beatitudes, the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux, Nagarjuna, Dostoevsky, Avalokitesvara, or even Common Decent Neighborliness, I always feel as though I have too much product and too many extensions in my hair, too overwhelming a desire to restate endlessly the obvious with an ever-increasing lack of delicacy, decency, and eloquence, too great a tendency to tripthongize my dipthongs, and a garish and enormous Daughters of the Confederacy pin tacked to my (it would be, under the circumstances) abundant bosom.
So, as a sop to myself and those of you who find my exhortations as tiring as I do, here is a panel from my favorite comic strip writer, Peter Blegvad, whose Leviathan ran in the Independent and to which I was as addicted when I lived in Greece and Suffolk as I was to Gauloises Bleues and those pull-out, frame-able sections about minerals, indigenous beetles, and traffic patterns in the Sunday El País.
*'It's not the heat; it's the humidity.'
Seattle Heatwave Sees Temps Above 65!
Today, which is really still Sunday, despite the timestamp, is the end of our 'heat wave' in Seattle. There were 'heat advisories' in effect for a couple days, to help people cope emotionally with the fact that they were perspiring in the Pacific Northwest.
Seattle may not have good weather, but it has fairly consistent weather. It is usually mild, and it is usually grey. After two years of living here, the new resident develops a 20-to-30-degrees-F comfort range, temperatures on either side of which routinely cause physical symptoms and spiritual crises. Here, the ideal is around 60 degrees, but most citizens can bear without great difficulty temperatures dipping to as low as 50 or soaring into the slightly-above-70 range. Below 45 is Positively Arctic; anything above 72 is Paralyzingly Torporific.
When it snows here, the Boy Scouts can't meet, the seniors can't get transportation to cribbage, the Lutherans can't have pancake breakfasts, no one goes to the Nordstrom Blowout Shoe Sale, everybody's Christmas bazaar gets put off till May, and people abandon their cars by the side of the road. Those who don't give up drive one mile an hour up steep inclines and then slide back down backwards, taking out all the other intrepid SUV-driving explorers with them.
But they very, very rarely have 'snow days' in Valdez, and people living in Phoenix or Fresno somehow manage to eat tomatoes, get haircuts, and read books even if the temperatures are routinely above a punishing 75 degrees. Here, we complain when the weather is monotonous, and then we complain more loudly when it deviates. What an odd little town. I will admit that I, too, perspired yesterday and was perplexed for a second, but I was reading in bed under two down comforters at the time, so my confusion was quickly put to right.
Seattle may not have good weather, but it has fairly consistent weather. It is usually mild, and it is usually grey. After two years of living here, the new resident develops a 20-to-30-degrees-F comfort range, temperatures on either side of which routinely cause physical symptoms and spiritual crises. Here, the ideal is around 60 degrees, but most citizens can bear without great difficulty temperatures dipping to as low as 50 or soaring into the slightly-above-70 range. Below 45 is Positively Arctic; anything above 72 is Paralyzingly Torporific.
When it snows here, the Boy Scouts can't meet, the seniors can't get transportation to cribbage, the Lutherans can't have pancake breakfasts, no one goes to the Nordstrom Blowout Shoe Sale, everybody's Christmas bazaar gets put off till May, and people abandon their cars by the side of the road. Those who don't give up drive one mile an hour up steep inclines and then slide back down backwards, taking out all the other intrepid SUV-driving explorers with them.
But they very, very rarely have 'snow days' in Valdez, and people living in Phoenix or Fresno somehow manage to eat tomatoes, get haircuts, and read books even if the temperatures are routinely above a punishing 75 degrees. Here, we complain when the weather is monotonous, and then we complain more loudly when it deviates. What an odd little town. I will admit that I, too, perspired yesterday and was perplexed for a second, but I was reading in bed under two down comforters at the time, so my confusion was quickly put to right.
More from our Correspondent in Geneva
Well, very excitingly (to me, anyway) today is St. Jane Frances de Chantal's day. It is exciting to me not just because I love her and her story, but because also this not only brings us back to Savoy (yikes! who would have thought!) and Geneva and all its Calvinists, and gets back to that issue of historicity that I snarkily mentioned a few posts back. Which I'll get to a few lines down, or a few posts down the road, but first: St. Jane Frances, or Ste. Jeanne Françoise, if you like your French names to stay in French.
She is sort of another St. Francis' St. Clare: his student, his peer, his friend, his spiritual companion, and his travel partner on a long and profound journey. This time, it is a François-Francis instead of a Francesco one, the sixteenth century instead of the thirteenth, the Renaissance rather than the Middle Ages, and a Francis born of Savoyard nobility rather than of wealthy Umbrian merchants. This Francis, Francis de Sales, was a carefree and competent student, then lawyer, and then a bishop, rather than an apathetic student turned playboy-dandy turned mendicant, and before joining and guiding Jane Frances on her spiritual journey, he set out like Francis of Assisi on a way of life quite unlike that his family had intended for him, turning his back on his wealth like Francis, but going over to Geneva to convert Calvinists à la St. Dominic instead of founding an order à la the Franciscan Francis.
Both St. Francis de Sales' and St. Jane Frances' stories are stories of waiting. Francis felt a strong vocation before he went to law school, but he waited and waited, wanting to make sure it was truly a vocation rather than his ego leading him. St. Jane was a young devout widow with children when she felt overcome with a desire to serve God more fully. When Jane asked the now Bishop Francis to undertake her spiritual direction, he counseled her to patience: 'I had to know fully what God himself wanted. I had to be sure that everything in this should be done as though his hand had done it.' Just as he had waited for his calling and for his Calvinists, and as he would later for his new sister's convent, Francis counseled Jane again to wait when she told him of her overwhelming desire to take vows: 'Be patient until you get the wings of a dove, and then you can fly. I am very much afraid that you are a little too ardent and headlong, that you pursue too many desires rather too eagerly. Courage, my dear sister; if our will belongs to God, we ourselves are surely His.'
And this moderation was an essential element of the institute, and then order, the two founded in 1610, the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. So that religious aspirants of older age or less robust health, 'strong souls with weak bodies,' might be able to fulfill their calling, Francis and Jane dispensed with the sort of physical austerities Poor Clares and other orders endured. St. Francis advised the community's new members and superior, 'Let your humility be boundless; let it be the source of your virtues; let it be manifested in all your actions, till gentleness towards your neighbor become natural to you by force of your frequent use of it.' Later, St. Jane described the charism of the order as essentially 'a spirit of deep humility before God and of great gentleness toward our neighbor.'
This gentleness was modeled already by Jane the wife and widow as she fed the town's poor and sick, and in the very gentleness of the rule itself: St. Jane accepted into the order a woman in her eighties and those young and old women whose infirmities would have barred them from religious life were it not for the inclusiveness of Salesian spirituality and its insistence that all people, regardless of health, wealth, status, occupation, age, or education, are called to love and holiness, and that we can manifest our love in small but profound acts of mercy and compassion. As Thomas Dailey said in Praying with Francis de Sales, 'Enabled and ennobled by this love, human beings are capable of much more than might well be imagined. They are capable of living a true life of devotion in the midst of worldly pursuits. They are capable of giving birth, through faith, to a new culture of life and of love.'
Also, unlike Savonarola, Francis de Sales in The Devout Life reveals that he thought games and jokes and dancing were okay, if in moderation: 'I am inclined to say about balls what doctors say of certain articles of food, such as mushrooms and the like--the best are not good for much; but if eat them you must, at least mind that they are properly cooked,' and 'if you would dance or play rightly, it must be done as a recreation, not as a pursuit, for a brief space of time, not so as make you unfit for other things.' I like anyone who has bad things to say about mushrooms.
She is sort of another St. Francis' St. Clare: his student, his peer, his friend, his spiritual companion, and his travel partner on a long and profound journey. This time, it is a François-Francis instead of a Francesco one, the sixteenth century instead of the thirteenth, the Renaissance rather than the Middle Ages, and a Francis born of Savoyard nobility rather than of wealthy Umbrian merchants. This Francis, Francis de Sales, was a carefree and competent student, then lawyer, and then a bishop, rather than an apathetic student turned playboy-dandy turned mendicant, and before joining and guiding Jane Frances on her spiritual journey, he set out like Francis of Assisi on a way of life quite unlike that his family had intended for him, turning his back on his wealth like Francis, but going over to Geneva to convert Calvinists à la St. Dominic instead of founding an order à la the Franciscan Francis.
Both St. Francis de Sales' and St. Jane Frances' stories are stories of waiting. Francis felt a strong vocation before he went to law school, but he waited and waited, wanting to make sure it was truly a vocation rather than his ego leading him. St. Jane was a young devout widow with children when she felt overcome with a desire to serve God more fully. When Jane asked the now Bishop Francis to undertake her spiritual direction, he counseled her to patience: 'I had to know fully what God himself wanted. I had to be sure that everything in this should be done as though his hand had done it.' Just as he had waited for his calling and for his Calvinists, and as he would later for his new sister's convent, Francis counseled Jane again to wait when she told him of her overwhelming desire to take vows: 'Be patient until you get the wings of a dove, and then you can fly. I am very much afraid that you are a little too ardent and headlong, that you pursue too many desires rather too eagerly. Courage, my dear sister; if our will belongs to God, we ourselves are surely His.'
And this moderation was an essential element of the institute, and then order, the two founded in 1610, the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. So that religious aspirants of older age or less robust health, 'strong souls with weak bodies,' might be able to fulfill their calling, Francis and Jane dispensed with the sort of physical austerities Poor Clares and other orders endured. St. Francis advised the community's new members and superior, 'Let your humility be boundless; let it be the source of your virtues; let it be manifested in all your actions, till gentleness towards your neighbor become natural to you by force of your frequent use of it.' Later, St. Jane described the charism of the order as essentially 'a spirit of deep humility before God and of great gentleness toward our neighbor.'
This gentleness was modeled already by Jane the wife and widow as she fed the town's poor and sick, and in the very gentleness of the rule itself: St. Jane accepted into the order a woman in her eighties and those young and old women whose infirmities would have barred them from religious life were it not for the inclusiveness of Salesian spirituality and its insistence that all people, regardless of health, wealth, status, occupation, age, or education, are called to love and holiness, and that we can manifest our love in small but profound acts of mercy and compassion. As Thomas Dailey said in Praying with Francis de Sales, 'Enabled and ennobled by this love, human beings are capable of much more than might well be imagined. They are capable of living a true life of devotion in the midst of worldly pursuits. They are capable of giving birth, through faith, to a new culture of life and of love.'
Also, unlike Savonarola, Francis de Sales in The Devout Life reveals that he thought games and jokes and dancing were okay, if in moderation: 'I am inclined to say about balls what doctors say of certain articles of food, such as mushrooms and the like--the best are not good for much; but if eat them you must, at least mind that they are properly cooked,' and 'if you would dance or play rightly, it must be done as a recreation, not as a pursuit, for a brief space of time, not so as make you unfit for other things.' I like anyone who has bad things to say about mushrooms.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Cube-ism, and Where I Went Wrong
The Jeu de Marienbad, or Nim, or Fantan, or Tiuktiuk, or Tiouk-tiouk, is like a short, crappy game of chess. I can't play chess, since I can't accomplish drivings, or pool, or finding a parking lot, or walking to a destination, or anything even obliquely involving geometry. But I like to think I'm smart enough to accomplish many short, crappy versions of many things.
So, my question to you is, why can't I win it? You can answer that here. (Hint: I can do simple [okay, very simple: chuckle smugly, think of me as 'cute,' and then calm yourself] arithmetic, so I count ahead and do what limited planning my mind is able to do, and it seems to me my mind is indeed able enough for this, if at the same time admittedly not for chess, so factor that in to your factoring.)
I think whoever goes first loses?
Or is there something I do wrong? Or is it just that, with a human partner and thus the opportunity for tactical application of my formidable Withering Glance, and vast knowledge of human and canid psychology, I might be able endlessly to vanquish non-virtual opponents in this realm?
(Or tomorrow at the tattooist's should I just get it engraved in the stone of my biceps that '2 + 2 = Something the Vague Idea of Which I at Times Begin to Comprehend Theoretically and then Lose Entirely the Gist thereof'?)
(Or perhaps just 'Ibn Sina, I'm sorry.')
So, my question to you is, why can't I win it? You can answer that here. (Hint: I can do simple [okay, very simple: chuckle smugly, think of me as 'cute,' and then calm yourself] arithmetic, so I count ahead and do what limited planning my mind is able to do, and it seems to me my mind is indeed able enough for this, if at the same time admittedly not for chess, so factor that in to your factoring.)
I think whoever goes first loses?
Or is there something I do wrong? Or is it just that, with a human partner and thus the opportunity for tactical application of my formidable Withering Glance, and vast knowledge of human and canid psychology, I might be able endlessly to vanquish non-virtual opponents in this realm?
(Or tomorrow at the tattooist's should I just get it engraved in the stone of my biceps that '2 + 2 = Something the Vague Idea of Which I at Times Begin to Comprehend Theoretically and then Lose Entirely the Gist thereof'?)
(Or perhaps just 'Ibn Sina, I'm sorry.')
Mud Floors, Tibetan Sephardim, and Tuscany in SE Jung Guo
In other news, I had an absolutely lovely conversation tonight about (what else?) theology (with a friend soon to depart for another hemisphere.) He gave me a book which was absolutely perfect in many ways, not least of which is that it is entirely relevant to a rant I have not yet given into, since I'm terribly lazy and would have to buy another little easel in order to have three books propped up around the little laptop in order satisfyingly to vent my spleen.
But, now I will feel impelled to buy my little easel (is it truly an easel? I don't think so; I don't know what they are called, but people who collect things with cats on them use them to display plates with either state insignias or details of Botticelli's greatest hits printed in Fujian) and tell you what the Dalai Lama had to say about 'Tibetan Buddhists' raised in Farmington in a John Main Seminar in the '80s or '90s. The Lama, not the Farmingtonians. I don't know that many were raised in a John Main Seminar. But I am open to possibilities. Not to mention, in the distant future, good nutrition.
In the meantime (not to hold all 7.3 of you in too-great suspense), here is how John Dunne, who is neither John Dear nor that John Donne, weighed in briefly - and similarly - on the issue: 'I think of a Sufi sheik I met on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem who told me and the two young Israeli women who were with me, 'Go deep in your own religion.' Okay, fine, I already know which book I'm trading him. But God bless those Sufis, eh? Here is the spiritual work one Naqshbandi master gave to an aspirant: Pray nothing, think nothing, say nothing, but 'Oh, God,' all day every day. When the disciple came back saying he had succeeded in that task, the teacher told him no longer to speak it, but to breathe the prayer in his thoughts, to think and feel nothing else but 'Oh, God; Oh, God,' all day. After internalizing this, after training his spirit to unceasing dhikr, one day a loose beam fell from the roof of his house onto the pupil's head. The blood that dropped to the ground spelled Allah on the mud floor.
But, now I will feel impelled to buy my little easel (is it truly an easel? I don't think so; I don't know what they are called, but people who collect things with cats on them use them to display plates with either state insignias or details of Botticelli's greatest hits printed in Fujian) and tell you what the Dalai Lama had to say about 'Tibetan Buddhists' raised in Farmington in a John Main Seminar in the '80s or '90s. The Lama, not the Farmingtonians. I don't know that many were raised in a John Main Seminar. But I am open to possibilities. Not to mention, in the distant future, good nutrition.
In the meantime (not to hold all 7.3 of you in too-great suspense), here is how John Dunne, who is neither John Dear nor that John Donne, weighed in briefly - and similarly - on the issue: 'I think of a Sufi sheik I met on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem who told me and the two young Israeli women who were with me, 'Go deep in your own religion.' Okay, fine, I already know which book I'm trading him. But God bless those Sufis, eh? Here is the spiritual work one Naqshbandi master gave to an aspirant: Pray nothing, think nothing, say nothing, but 'Oh, God,' all day every day. When the disciple came back saying he had succeeded in that task, the teacher told him no longer to speak it, but to breathe the prayer in his thoughts, to think and feel nothing else but 'Oh, God; Oh, God,' all day. After internalizing this, after training his spirit to unceasing dhikr, one day a loose beam fell from the roof of his house onto the pupil's head. The blood that dropped to the ground spelled Allah on the mud floor.
The Providential Cupboard of Good Cheer
What's nice, too, is that, although my bad stepfather was correct all the many times he reproached me with 'having no respect for things,' that characteristic can sometimes work out to one's advantage, even precisely in the realm of things. To wit, I don't have that many CDs anymore. And, I don't have an Apple anything. Therefore, losing the odd assortment of music in the Mazda put a significant dent in my supply. Since I continue to have 'no respect for things,' I don't know where what CDs I do have are; certainly they are not for the most part in their cases, which are, for their part, not in a place where CD cases, empty or filled, would naturally reside.
This being the case, I opened the Skirts-I-Don't-Wear kitchen cupboard (which I don't frequently open, since I don't wear those skirts) and found a stack of CDs. I grabbed the three on top, and was unabashedly gleeful that they were mix CDs, so each is worth about a handful of regular CDs in terms of variety and not getting increasingly resentful towards Beny Moré for being the only guy singing in your car ever. Nothing against mambo or guaguancó but, seriously, we all have our limits.
So now, instead of an all-Latin-all-the-time playlist, I have everything from Piaf to Diabaté to Loretta Lynn and Lemmy. I've got Crass next to Cash followed by the lovely Miss Kitty Wells and a more consistent disc titled 'Bamako to Beirut' that's only African and Middle Eastern. I remember making these CDs and enjoying them okay, but I had no idea how grateful I would be years later that they should surface again!
This being the case, I opened the Skirts-I-Don't-Wear kitchen cupboard (which I don't frequently open, since I don't wear those skirts) and found a stack of CDs. I grabbed the three on top, and was unabashedly gleeful that they were mix CDs, so each is worth about a handful of regular CDs in terms of variety and not getting increasingly resentful towards Beny Moré for being the only guy singing in your car ever. Nothing against mambo or guaguancó but, seriously, we all have our limits.
So now, instead of an all-Latin-all-the-time playlist, I have everything from Piaf to Diabaté to Loretta Lynn and Lemmy. I've got Crass next to Cash followed by the lovely Miss Kitty Wells and a more consistent disc titled 'Bamako to Beirut' that's only African and Middle Eastern. I remember making these CDs and enjoying them okay, but I had no idea how grateful I would be years later that they should surface again!
Saturday, August 16, 2008
'Even he,
to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart.' - Douglas Adams (patently, no less!)
So, I had some fish and chips and beer with the exhusband the other night. The musician one, not the gay one. Not that that one isn't a musician, too; they both are, and they both even play winds, just to make it more confusing, and they both teach, and they were both born within twenty-four hours of the other one. One grew up on an island; one lives on an island now, and the one who grew up on one also lived on the island of Honshu, which is where my brother and his family live now, although, apart from some mad air-guitar, the brother is rather less a musician than my various exhusbands, making him, at least, easy to distinguish. They were also both brown-haired and the same height, unlike my brother, who is not the same height as anyone. So you see how it can get infernally confusing to distinguish between them.
Despite all that, the exhusband is, naturally, dismayed at the tone the blog appears to be taking. All I can say is, A) I tried to maintain the coyness as regards spirituality and belief as long as I could, turning to overt ethical stances stapled to implicit conclusions to guide readers gently, fluidly, and subtlely into an occasional New Thematic Realm. I still reserve the right to call down imprecations on Mobil stations disguised as El Greco paintings, forests, or Roman hippodromes, and I patently intend still (not only to continue to overuse 'patently,' 'unsurprisingly,' and 'manifestly' but also) to insert irrelevant photos of perfume bottles, typographical coups, Central Asian needlework, and obscenely adorable palm-sized animals. But the fact is that if my ethical preoccupations obtrude herein - and they do - then surely the basis for them should likewise. Still, I realize that there are very many sound and good people who can get behind this or that stance of mine, but not fully with what leads, in my heart, at any rate, up to it.
But then, for them, I think: read backward. Start and stop with the praxis, which many would argue is the meaty part anyway, and leave the θεωρία to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And, frankly, we end up at the same point, anyway, which is that if you are doing good, you're doing good, and if you're not - well, we both suspect you'll know it. The only difference is that I was pleased at some point to realize not only that there was an Urgrund behind all those values, choices, and yearnings, but that,conveniently felicitously, I already believed in it.
So, fine.
and B) I did contemplate, after a long-overdue recognition that having a multiply-segmented life was driving me a bit insane, the notion of having a post welcoming readers to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. But I didn't bother because I never tried hard enough to have it come out amusing. So I opted instead for the Invisible Awkward Segue. Of course that's never a good idea, even if you're not trying to be de Man or Derrida. And so I am sorry. It was obtrusive; it was steep, sudden, and unwarranted, and it was probably a lot like basking in the middle of an Elle article on comparative depilation and then at the turn of a page being caught unawares in the midst of the final, prescriptive chapter in the still-typo-ridden galley version of some hand-wringing dissertation on the loss of the second-person vocative particle amongst the last fourteen speakers of X.
So I do apologize. I thought sneaking in more farm workers and food banks would help pave the way for the occasional saint, particularly if I made mention of how hard it was becoming to maintain a consistent voice. Now, though, I think it might be more consistent as a whole by not excluding one or other topics for the sake of maintaining a particular posture. The fact is, my spirituality is a part of my life, so it stands to reason it would be a part of this blog, as well, even if I demand to retain my right also to lambast (using the alt. sp. helps keep images of dry turkey and high-hatted Puritans at bay) examples of bad design, poor taste, petty theft, and my own misdriving, misjudgment, and misnavigation when I please.
Therefore, children: Welcome to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. Except for all the parts that aren't. Including this pretty little display from Black and Spiro:
So, I had some fish and chips and beer with the exhusband the other night. The musician one, not the gay one. Not that that one isn't a musician, too; they both are, and they both even play winds, just to make it more confusing, and they both teach, and they were both born within twenty-four hours of the other one. One grew up on an island; one lives on an island now, and the one who grew up on one also lived on the island of Honshu, which is where my brother and his family live now, although, apart from some mad air-guitar, the brother is rather less a musician than my various exhusbands, making him, at least, easy to distinguish. They were also both brown-haired and the same height, unlike my brother, who is not the same height as anyone. So you see how it can get infernally confusing to distinguish between them.
Despite all that, the exhusband is, naturally, dismayed at the tone the blog appears to be taking. All I can say is, A) I tried to maintain the coyness as regards spirituality and belief as long as I could, turning to overt ethical stances stapled to implicit conclusions to guide readers gently, fluidly, and subtlely into an occasional New Thematic Realm. I still reserve the right to call down imprecations on Mobil stations disguised as El Greco paintings, forests, or Roman hippodromes, and I patently intend still (not only to continue to overuse 'patently,' 'unsurprisingly,' and 'manifestly' but also) to insert irrelevant photos of perfume bottles, typographical coups, Central Asian needlework, and obscenely adorable palm-sized animals. But the fact is that if my ethical preoccupations obtrude herein - and they do - then surely the basis for them should likewise. Still, I realize that there are very many sound and good people who can get behind this or that stance of mine, but not fully with what leads, in my heart, at any rate, up to it.
But then, for them, I think: read backward. Start and stop with the praxis, which many would argue is the meaty part anyway, and leave the θεωρία to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And, frankly, we end up at the same point, anyway, which is that if you are doing good, you're doing good, and if you're not - well, we both suspect you'll know it. The only difference is that I was pleased at some point to realize not only that there was an Urgrund behind all those values, choices, and yearnings, but that,
So, fine.
and B) I did contemplate, after a long-overdue recognition that having a multiply-segmented life was driving me a bit insane, the notion of having a post welcoming readers to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. But I didn't bother because I never tried hard enough to have it come out amusing. So I opted instead for the Invisible Awkward Segue. Of course that's never a good idea, even if you're not trying to be de Man or Derrida. And so I am sorry. It was obtrusive; it was steep, sudden, and unwarranted, and it was probably a lot like basking in the middle of an Elle article on comparative depilation and then at the turn of a page being caught unawares in the midst of the final, prescriptive chapter in the still-typo-ridden galley version of some hand-wringing dissertation on the loss of the second-person vocative particle amongst the last fourteen speakers of X.
So I do apologize. I thought sneaking in more farm workers and food banks would help pave the way for the occasional saint, particularly if I made mention of how hard it was becoming to maintain a consistent voice. Now, though, I think it might be more consistent as a whole by not excluding one or other topics for the sake of maintaining a particular posture. The fact is, my spirituality is a part of my life, so it stands to reason it would be a part of this blog, as well, even if I demand to retain my right also to lambast (using the alt. sp. helps keep images of dry turkey and high-hatted Puritans at bay) examples of bad design, poor taste, petty theft, and my own misdriving, misjudgment, and misnavigation when I please.
Therefore, children: Welcome to the Explicitly Spiritual Section of the Blog. Except for all the parts that aren't. Including this pretty little display from Black and Spiro:
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
My Sad Mazda, Sadder Still...
In other news, they robbed my car again, this time going into the trunk, and leaving it wide open after the plundering, too. May they enjoy the CDs of Ottoman court music and Jimmie Rodgers, and the spare tire, as much as I did. Interestingly, the old pairs of work shoes in the back remain where they were, but they stole my perfumes (they'll have a bloody existential crisis when they see how very little they smell like the vanilla-and-treacle scents at the store) and a stupid spiral notebook. If I thought any of this was going to be useful to someone, I wouldn't care, but this is just stealing-because-you-can. I could be wrong, but I doubt profoundly that many car prowlers would be thrilled to discover their loot consisted of Turkish classical music and yodeling!
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
St. Clare round two
And, because when she had become too ill to attend Mass, St. Clare would see it on the walls of her cell, she is the patroness of television and television writers. And EWTN was founded by a Poor Clare, Mother Angelica.
St. Clare
It's St. Clare's feast day today; here is a picture of her from a manuscript of Bishop Ugolino, a reluctant but eventual full supporter of Francis' and Clare's cause for the Poor Ladies of San Damiano/Poor Clares to be a truly mendicant order. Once convinced, the then Pope Gregory IX issued a privilegium paupertatis two years after Francis' death for the fledgling order and wrote these beautiful words: 'Neither does the want of necessary things deter you from such a proposal, for the left arm of your Celestial Spouse is beneath your head to sustain the infirmity of your body, which, according to the order of charity, you have subjected to the law of the spirit. Finally, He who feeds the birds of the air and who gives the lilies of the field their raiment and their nourishment, will not leave you in want of clothing or of food until He shall come Himself to minister to you in eternity.'
Monday, August 11, 2008
Horsemanship, and Head-Banging in Limoges
Since I found it bizarre and interesting when I discovered that my posting about Lorca's 'Thamar y Amnón' put me high up on Google for that subject (I wasn't looking for me, but for the original essay that had sparked my ire, because I hadn't bothered to bookmark it), today I decided to see what happened if I just Googled 'Vifargent.' Well, Geneviève Benoit and her Parelli-method horse- and rider-training school in Québec are still flourishing at http://www.vifargent.com, which is good for them and good for Québecois horses, even if there will never come a time when I believe that inventing the word 'horsenality' was a good thing.
But possibly more fabulous still is 19-year-old Vincent in Limoges, whose Vifargent blog is about music and manga and proceeds backwards, with newer posts at the end, which is good in his case because the story opens with him setting out his intent for the blog and his tastes to be covered therein. And his tastes include Rammstein, Nightwish, the Offspring, the Finnish monster-metal group Lordi, and anything along those lines that will make him bang his head. Making him the perfect contrast to the Cistercians, Savonarola-'n-Saints direction this blog seems to be taking.
Although they do not quite match the young Vincent's aesthetic, here are three Limoges jardinières. I am not putting up pictures of Finnish monsters playing guitar here. Savonarola's profile was contrast enough. Interesting, though, that I did just talk about benefit rock concerts. On the other hand, I suspect Rammstein has done rather few of those, although I could certainly be wrong.
But possibly more fabulous still is 19-year-old Vincent in Limoges, whose Vifargent blog is about music and manga and proceeds backwards, with newer posts at the end, which is good in his case because the story opens with him setting out his intent for the blog and his tastes to be covered therein. And his tastes include Rammstein, Nightwish, the Offspring, the Finnish monster-metal group Lordi, and anything along those lines that will make him bang his head. Making him the perfect contrast to the Cistercians, Savonarola-'n-Saints direction this blog seems to be taking.
Although they do not quite match the young Vincent's aesthetic, here are three Limoges jardinières. I am not putting up pictures of Finnish monsters playing guitar here. Savonarola's profile was contrast enough. Interesting, though, that I did just talk about benefit rock concerts. On the other hand, I suspect Rammstein has done rather few of those, although I could certainly be wrong.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Infelix Ego -
if they only hadn't stolen all those left shoes, I could have pawned them and the visor-light and made a bid!
Wow, in just the same manner of everything I think or do or feel being reduplicated in some way about 12 hours later, this time it was over on the Intentional Disciples blog, which is the blog for the Catherine of Siena Institute, which was started at Blessed Sacrament parish here in Seattle, which had a Dominican mass today, which was the Feast Day of St. Dominic - they had a quiz on whose signature is this?
It was Savonarola's, and you could buy it at auction at the moment if you were thusly disposed (and thusly endowed), and I know it was Savonarola's not just because I'm not one to forget a pretty face,
but because I have been reading about him and trying to figure out his place in early Protestantism, if there is such a place. I would say Protestantism, but excepting Lutherans I do often get the sense that many Protestant denominations take a - what? - segmented? discontinuous? disarticulated? view of Christian history, inasmuch as those inclined that way tend to see two punctuating epochs - the First/Second Covenants, and then the Reformation/now - with a large fuzzy bit in between populated by hazy robed figures undeserving of much scrutiny.
Yet even among this group there are some revered figures in medieval theology (and, admittedly, among other groups there are loads), and many of the ideas of this singular figure (who himself ended up in a bonfire, but not before being treated to the rack first by his Medici hosts) prefigured many of the Reformers' concerns. He criticized the excesses of Rome and of Orders in much the same language and to much the same level of vituperation as Reformers did - yet he also echoed the return-to-the-heart-of-Jesus'-Christianity sentiment that had resounded over and over throughout the Middle Ages. The Church eventually had all his works formally banned - but by that time they were best-sellers all over the place and being printed in areas and languages too far from Rome to control.
Anyway, if you like the asceticism of a Calvin but prefer a Florentine accent in denunciations of dancing and drink, you would love Savonarola. If you like the gist of Dante but would prefer to do away with all the needless poesy, he's your man. And if you are inclined to think that Boccaccio and Erasmus would be just fine were it not for the wit, you will find all the spleen you need but none of the humor you don't in the fiery Dominican from Florence.
Here is some of Isaias' bonfire of the vanities in Savonarola's honor. I think this is most poetic in the King James. And the Dominican New Testament translation by Francis Spencer, OP, doesn't have Isaias, for what may or may not be obvious reasons.
Moreover the LORD saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:
Wow, in just the same manner of everything I think or do or feel being reduplicated in some way about 12 hours later, this time it was over on the Intentional Disciples blog, which is the blog for the Catherine of Siena Institute, which was started at Blessed Sacrament parish here in Seattle, which had a Dominican mass today, which was the Feast Day of St. Dominic - they had a quiz on whose signature is this?
It was Savonarola's, and you could buy it at auction at the moment if you were thusly disposed (and thusly endowed), and I know it was Savonarola's not just because I'm not one to forget a pretty face,
but because I have been reading about him and trying to figure out his place in early Protestantism, if there is such a place. I would say Protestantism, but excepting Lutherans I do often get the sense that many Protestant denominations take a - what? - segmented? discontinuous? disarticulated? view of Christian history, inasmuch as those inclined that way tend to see two punctuating epochs - the First/Second Covenants, and then the Reformation/now - with a large fuzzy bit in between populated by hazy robed figures undeserving of much scrutiny.
Yet even among this group there are some revered figures in medieval theology (and, admittedly, among other groups there are loads), and many of the ideas of this singular figure (who himself ended up in a bonfire, but not before being treated to the rack first by his Medici hosts) prefigured many of the Reformers' concerns. He criticized the excesses of Rome and of Orders in much the same language and to much the same level of vituperation as Reformers did - yet he also echoed the return-to-the-heart-of-Jesus'-Christianity sentiment that had resounded over and over throughout the Middle Ages. The Church eventually had all his works formally banned - but by that time they were best-sellers all over the place and being printed in areas and languages too far from Rome to control.
Anyway, if you like the asceticism of a Calvin but prefer a Florentine accent in denunciations of dancing and drink, you would love Savonarola. If you like the gist of Dante but would prefer to do away with all the needless poesy, he's your man. And if you are inclined to think that Boccaccio and Erasmus would be just fine were it not for the wit, you will find all the spleen you need but none of the humor you don't in the fiery Dominican from Florence.
Here is some of Isaias' bonfire of the vanities in Savonarola's honor. I think this is most poetic in the King James. And the Dominican New Testament translation by Francis Spencer, OP, doesn't have Isaias, for what may or may not be obvious reasons.
Moreover the LORD saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:
Therefore the LORD will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will discover their secret parts.
In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, The rings, and nose jewels, The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, The glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils.
And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.
'Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal -
Tout ça m’est bien égal.'
So, my car got broken into last night. Now, when I say 'broken into,' I'm not being entirely accurate: I don't lock this car, on the basis that the window that would be broken in a break-in would be worth more than the rest of the car. Moreover, I don't need to lock it since I store my gold bricks and rubies elsewhere than in the mighty Mazda. And the stockpile of untraceable semi-automatic weapons? The hundred-pound cache of smuggled drugs? Elsewhere, too. There is not much in there to steal, most particularly since we're not in Oregon, where the stack of empty Diet Coke bottles might net up to seventy-five cents at the recycling station.
That fact notwithstanding.
They did steal a little cheap clip-on light from the visor, a hair clip on the same visor, a car cellphone charger that probably works when used in a car with a working cigarette lighter, one pair of pointy, high, terrifyingly green pumps in a size suitable only for me (in a fiercely festive mood) or an eight-year-old Miss Cutie Princess pageant contestant in Little Rock, and maybe about $1.75 in change. I imagine they were shocked and angry at their lousy prize package, because they also stole one-half of a few pairs of shoes, including a charming but too-tight-even-for-me set of size 4 1/2 loden-green wedges. Since I can only guess they have as much use for single shoes as the original owner, I have to assume the intent was solely to wreck someone's day.
What is goofy about this (in addition to the idea of any chucklehead thinking my dodgy, unlocked hatchback a good choice for plundering) is that just last night I thought to myself how long it had been since my car had got 'broken into' last, and I also thought about thinking about moving some of the shoes back into the house into their little shoe homes. But my arms were full of Diet Coke and dim sum at the time, so I decided to do the thinking later.
What is also goofy about this is that there were some perfectly good single-serving maple syrups and hot sauces in the glove box they showed no interest in. Not to mention the almost-entirely-full box of Red Vines, black licorice style.
So, my car got broken into last night. Now, when I say 'broken into,' I'm not being entirely accurate: I don't lock this car, on the basis that the window that would be broken in a break-in would be worth more than the rest of the car. Moreover, I don't need to lock it since I store my gold bricks and rubies elsewhere than in the mighty Mazda. And the stockpile of untraceable semi-automatic weapons? The hundred-pound cache of smuggled drugs? Elsewhere, too. There is not much in there to steal, most particularly since we're not in Oregon, where the stack of empty Diet Coke bottles might net up to seventy-five cents at the recycling station.
That fact notwithstanding.
They did steal a little cheap clip-on light from the visor, a hair clip on the same visor, a car cellphone charger that probably works when used in a car with a working cigarette lighter, one pair of pointy, high, terrifyingly green pumps in a size suitable only for me (in a fiercely festive mood) or an eight-year-old Miss Cutie Princess pageant contestant in Little Rock, and maybe about $1.75 in change. I imagine they were shocked and angry at their lousy prize package, because they also stole one-half of a few pairs of shoes, including a charming but too-tight-even-for-me set of size 4 1/2 loden-green wedges. Since I can only guess they have as much use for single shoes as the original owner, I have to assume the intent was solely to wreck someone's day.
What is goofy about this (in addition to the idea of any chucklehead thinking my dodgy, unlocked hatchback a good choice for plundering) is that just last night I thought to myself how long it had been since my car had got 'broken into' last, and I also thought about thinking about moving some of the shoes back into the house into their little shoe homes. But my arms were full of Diet Coke and dim sum at the time, so I decided to do the thinking later.
What is also goofy about this is that there were some perfectly good single-serving maple syrups and hot sauces in the glove box they showed no interest in. Not to mention the almost-entirely-full box of Red Vines, black licorice style.
Friday, August 8, 2008
'Humility Is Attentive Patience.'
-Simone Weil
I am entirely aware that sometimes on here when I go off on a tirade about compassion, my diction can get a bit too soaring or florid. Sometimes both, frankly, and when I get to the inestimable consequences of compassion my tone is apt to run from hortatory to incantatory through beatific and on to splenetic long before righting itself and sticking nicely to the pragmatic.
However.
My excuse is that what I am talking about is every bit as powerful as I make it seem. It is like a drug: its effects are that shocking, marked, and fast acting. And yet, most of us do not avail ourselves of it, except perhaps with those closest to us. And that stands to reason. Family members are on the one hand easier to understand than those we know less well; on the other, our hobby and pool of defendants would quickly evaporate were we to spend all our time divorcing and disinheriting our relatives. Given that fact, it makes sense at some point simply to accept that Aunt Jane always talks to much about Shih-tzus and Cousin David will probably never fully surmount his persecution complex.
Fine.
But leaving aside altruism (which we already were, anyway; admit it), it benefits every individual's own psyche to stop seeing others as failed versions of ourselves. Even if we share some similar goals - getting ahead in the company, working on our marriages, shopping less, not drinking anymore, being more involved in the community, cooking at home more often, working out again, whatever they might be - we are going at them with radically differing histories, distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, and perhaps for vastly different reasons in the first place.
It was probably Thérèse of Lisieux who had this additional insight into handling difficult interactions with irritating interlocutors, particularly those whose failings seem most obvious to us, those whom we know enough about to wish instinctively to judge in their failure: Yes, maybe he did do it again -- but what about all the times he succeeded, and we weren't there, and he was too modest to gloat, or even tell us quietly of his unnoticed, private success?
I think looking at the evident weaknesses of others from that perspective is profound. We don't even need to do any uncomfortable self-inquiry to come up with something we ourselves recently struggled with, which is an equally useful but more obvious and labor-intensive strategy. We just have to acknowledge that we can't possibly know everything about another, and that that other might well be doing some rather good stuff while we're not around. And, that he might additionally have the virtue of humility, and thus even be worth emulating in that respect!
I say it is like a drug because whatever method we use to get there once we feel a sympathy with our brother and his situation, the anger dissolves just as surely as morphine kills pain. If you can imagine that someone is driving aggressively (I use driving so much because it does truly render people insane when they are trapped in their little boxes and feel so powerless about many factors and any little thing can seem a tremendous injustice) because his wife just had a baby or because he needs to throw up, you immediately lose the anger. If someone's stereo is playing crappy music too loud, it's not much of a stretch to recall that most of us were young at one time, too, and wanted to be cool and to display our coolness when possible so that it could be validated by others, as coolness, just like wit, style, or 'success,' is a cultural commodity which can only be conferred on an aspirant by the recognition of its presence by a consensus of the relevant audience. He's young, the music's bad, I'm not his target audience: so, so what? After the next light I can go back to listening to the riveting story about heirloom orchids in Florida.
I like the Thérèse suggestion because even if we were never young ourselves, and even if we can come up with absolutely no failings of our own to gain us conditional entry into some grandiose vision of the Mystical Brotherhood of Common Human Frailty, we can easily imagine that the individual tiresomely prattling on to us about the after-market package he bought for his Lexus could just have donated to the Red Cross, and is thus as short of sense as he is glucose and the blood to carry it to his brain.
I am entirely aware that sometimes on here when I go off on a tirade about compassion, my diction can get a bit too soaring or florid. Sometimes both, frankly, and when I get to the inestimable consequences of compassion my tone is apt to run from hortatory to incantatory through beatific and on to splenetic long before righting itself and sticking nicely to the pragmatic.
However.
My excuse is that what I am talking about is every bit as powerful as I make it seem. It is like a drug: its effects are that shocking, marked, and fast acting. And yet, most of us do not avail ourselves of it, except perhaps with those closest to us. And that stands to reason. Family members are on the one hand easier to understand than those we know less well; on the other, our hobby and pool of defendants would quickly evaporate were we to spend all our time divorcing and disinheriting our relatives. Given that fact, it makes sense at some point simply to accept that Aunt Jane always talks to much about Shih-tzus and Cousin David will probably never fully surmount his persecution complex.
Fine.
But leaving aside altruism (which we already were, anyway; admit it), it benefits every individual's own psyche to stop seeing others as failed versions of ourselves. Even if we share some similar goals - getting ahead in the company, working on our marriages, shopping less, not drinking anymore, being more involved in the community, cooking at home more often, working out again, whatever they might be - we are going at them with radically differing histories, distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, and perhaps for vastly different reasons in the first place.
It was probably Thérèse of Lisieux who had this additional insight into handling difficult interactions with irritating interlocutors, particularly those whose failings seem most obvious to us, those whom we know enough about to wish instinctively to judge in their failure: Yes, maybe he did do it again -- but what about all the times he succeeded, and we weren't there, and he was too modest to gloat, or even tell us quietly of his unnoticed, private success?
I think looking at the evident weaknesses of others from that perspective is profound. We don't even need to do any uncomfortable self-inquiry to come up with something we ourselves recently struggled with, which is an equally useful but more obvious and labor-intensive strategy. We just have to acknowledge that we can't possibly know everything about another, and that that other might well be doing some rather good stuff while we're not around. And, that he might additionally have the virtue of humility, and thus even be worth emulating in that respect!
I say it is like a drug because whatever method we use to get there once we feel a sympathy with our brother and his situation, the anger dissolves just as surely as morphine kills pain. If you can imagine that someone is driving aggressively (I use driving so much because it does truly render people insane when they are trapped in their little boxes and feel so powerless about many factors and any little thing can seem a tremendous injustice) because his wife just had a baby or because he needs to throw up, you immediately lose the anger. If someone's stereo is playing crappy music too loud, it's not much of a stretch to recall that most of us were young at one time, too, and wanted to be cool and to display our coolness when possible so that it could be validated by others, as coolness, just like wit, style, or 'success,' is a cultural commodity which can only be conferred on an aspirant by the recognition of its presence by a consensus of the relevant audience. He's young, the music's bad, I'm not his target audience: so, so what? After the next light I can go back to listening to the riveting story about heirloom orchids in Florida.
I like the Thérèse suggestion because even if we were never young ourselves, and even if we can come up with absolutely no failings of our own to gain us conditional entry into some grandiose vision of the Mystical Brotherhood of Common Human Frailty, we can easily imagine that the individual tiresomely prattling on to us about the after-market package he bought for his Lexus could just have donated to the Red Cross, and is thus as short of sense as he is glucose and the blood to carry it to his brain.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The Peasant, the Blizzard, and the Rock Star
I was talking on the phone today and mentioned an ad I saw on TV: Dairy Queen is giving 100% of profits from sales of their Blizzard dessert on one day, August 7, to Children's Miracle Network. I said how great I thought this was, as usually such promotions run something like this: 'Come in and buy a Grande Meal/auto detail package/living room suite and we'll donate fifty cents/twenty-five cents/ten percent from your purchase to Children's Hospital/breast cancer research/flood victims.' It sounds good; they're giving something, but just as I don't notice ten or twenty percent off when I buy something on sale, a couple shekels in that context is a negligible contribution. Dairy Queen's drive is only one day, and it's only on one item, but the Blizzard is a best seller (and a delicious one!), which means that there are millions of people who would already be buying one that day. Moreover, there are millions more potential buyers such as myself, who don't tend to eat Dairy Queen except on road trips, who might be persuaded to drive out of our way on that day and enjoy one, knowing that it is going to benefit not only our tastebuds but children with birth defects.
The person on the other end of the line agreed that one-hundred percent was unusual and good. She then said that what got her disturbed sometimes, beyond the transparently less-than-altruistic twenty-five-cent contributions, was benefit rock concerts. She reasoned that rock stars, being rock stars, had millions and millions of dollars at their disposal, so why ask their less-wealthy fans to chip in for a donation which they could cover themselves quite easily? I said I was sure some do, but even with those who do not, the same principle applies as in the Blizzard case: rock fans, being rock fans, are already going to go and see their favorite star, so why not give the money away when they do? Moreover, there is the other demographic of those who would not have bothered to go were the money not going to the flood victims or the domestic violence program. Admittedly there is a dose of self-serving in either case: the band, restaurant, or furniture store looks good by donating anything, and that may have an effect of residual good-will amongst future customers - but that does not diminish the reality of the good done by the financial contribution made in the company's name. There is still an additional $100,000 or $1,000,000 in the coffers of the charity.
Additionally, none of us can do everything, not even rock stars. It may be a bit counter-intuitive and, well, creepy, that the members of the Black-Eyed Peas have more money than most people I will ever encounter, but not everyone is called to poverty, and not everyone has to give all their money away, or even the bulk of it, to do good. For those of us who are quite concerned about social issues, it can seem bleak and hopeless at times, since there are so many problems, and so many needs. We wish we could solve everything everywhere in the world, when in fact we cannot as individuals solve even one problem in one area. You can either sit and lament this fact and cry into your Chianti, driving the bartender insane with your self-indulgent whining, or you can resign yourself to there being great needs in many areas and then picking one to focus on. You can resolve to do what you can, finite, inadequate, and perhaps unsatisfying as your abilities and means may be.
If you think poverty is nasty and unnecessary, however deep your disgust at the global status quo you are statistically unlikely ever to hand over the keys to a new donkey to a Kyrgyz peasant. And you, not being a rock star, presumably lack the millions in startup money to found a new charity devoted to bringing donkeys to Central Asians. There are, however, millions of struggling people right here, and thousands of ways to do what you can in a way that makes sense with your life and fits in with your other obligations.
Let's take Poverty, since we're already there. There are both causes and effects; you can't solve them all, so you can pick one. Education, literacy, hunger, addiction, homelessness, violence, mental illness, loneliness, lack of health care, etc.: maybe one feels more urgent to you; maybe one seems more related to your existing skill set; maybe one would really push your skills in new directions and stretch you as a person. In any event, however small your contribution, you could make it today, rather than waiting for a donkey, a saddle, and a ticket to Kyrgyzstan to drop through your roof.
When I was at the animal shelter this was something we all struggled with all the time. We were there because we realized the enormity of the problem and we really cared about animals. We only worked four days a week because the work was so awful that management felt that three days of spiritual and emotional detox were necessary to keep us halfway sane. Still, we were there because we cared for all animals, wanted to do what we could - which was never enough even with the limited number of creatures under our direct care. What kept me going (for as long as it did, at any rate), despite the awful knowledge that we weren't making a dent at all in the larger picture of animal abuse and neglect, was the reality that with these particular individuals at this exact moment we were making a difference, and that their time with the other volunteers and staff and me was far, far better than what they had been subjected to previously.
And that's all we can do: pick a problem, then pick an aspect of the problem, and then roll up our sleeves and set to, in full realization that although we are not omnipotent, we are each truly invaluable. You can't beat yourself up for not curing cancer when you were busy bringing a housebound old lady her food-bank delivery and perhaps sole human contact for that day.
The person on the other end of the line agreed that one-hundred percent was unusual and good. She then said that what got her disturbed sometimes, beyond the transparently less-than-altruistic twenty-five-cent contributions, was benefit rock concerts. She reasoned that rock stars, being rock stars, had millions and millions of dollars at their disposal, so why ask their less-wealthy fans to chip in for a donation which they could cover themselves quite easily? I said I was sure some do, but even with those who do not, the same principle applies as in the Blizzard case: rock fans, being rock fans, are already going to go and see their favorite star, so why not give the money away when they do? Moreover, there is the other demographic of those who would not have bothered to go were the money not going to the flood victims or the domestic violence program. Admittedly there is a dose of self-serving in either case: the band, restaurant, or furniture store looks good by donating anything, and that may have an effect of residual good-will amongst future customers - but that does not diminish the reality of the good done by the financial contribution made in the company's name. There is still an additional $100,000 or $1,000,000 in the coffers of the charity.
Additionally, none of us can do everything, not even rock stars. It may be a bit counter-intuitive and, well, creepy, that the members of the Black-Eyed Peas have more money than most people I will ever encounter, but not everyone is called to poverty, and not everyone has to give all their money away, or even the bulk of it, to do good. For those of us who are quite concerned about social issues, it can seem bleak and hopeless at times, since there are so many problems, and so many needs. We wish we could solve everything everywhere in the world, when in fact we cannot as individuals solve even one problem in one area. You can either sit and lament this fact and cry into your Chianti, driving the bartender insane with your self-indulgent whining, or you can resign yourself to there being great needs in many areas and then picking one to focus on. You can resolve to do what you can, finite, inadequate, and perhaps unsatisfying as your abilities and means may be.
If you think poverty is nasty and unnecessary, however deep your disgust at the global status quo you are statistically unlikely ever to hand over the keys to a new donkey to a Kyrgyz peasant. And you, not being a rock star, presumably lack the millions in startup money to found a new charity devoted to bringing donkeys to Central Asians. There are, however, millions of struggling people right here, and thousands of ways to do what you can in a way that makes sense with your life and fits in with your other obligations.
Let's take Poverty, since we're already there. There are both causes and effects; you can't solve them all, so you can pick one. Education, literacy, hunger, addiction, homelessness, violence, mental illness, loneliness, lack of health care, etc.: maybe one feels more urgent to you; maybe one seems more related to your existing skill set; maybe one would really push your skills in new directions and stretch you as a person. In any event, however small your contribution, you could make it today, rather than waiting for a donkey, a saddle, and a ticket to Kyrgyzstan to drop through your roof.
When I was at the animal shelter this was something we all struggled with all the time. We were there because we realized the enormity of the problem and we really cared about animals. We only worked four days a week because the work was so awful that management felt that three days of spiritual and emotional detox were necessary to keep us halfway sane. Still, we were there because we cared for all animals, wanted to do what we could - which was never enough even with the limited number of creatures under our direct care. What kept me going (for as long as it did, at any rate), despite the awful knowledge that we weren't making a dent at all in the larger picture of animal abuse and neglect, was the reality that with these particular individuals at this exact moment we were making a difference, and that their time with the other volunteers and staff and me was far, far better than what they had been subjected to previously.
And that's all we can do: pick a problem, then pick an aspect of the problem, and then roll up our sleeves and set to, in full realization that although we are not omnipotent, we are each truly invaluable. You can't beat yourself up for not curing cancer when you were busy bringing a housebound old lady her food-bank delivery and perhaps sole human contact for that day.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Saturday, August 2, 2008
The Power of Powerlessness
I had all sorts of stuff I wanted to write about last night on here, but the World's Longest Day Ever became even longer when the power went off at 11PM. According to Seattle City Light, our utility company, it was a failed insulator. According to me, there was a second failure of some sort a couple hours into it, when the lights came on momentarily, I felt a 1/2-second frisson of disappointment, and then immediately something exploded in the unusually quiet night somewhere very near my house and shut down every plant lamp and electronics charger once again.
At any rate, it was a tranquil end to a busy and maddening day. And I have nice candles all over the place, and some unnice ones, as well, in the form of the million-pack of 'tea lights,' which, it appears, is the only quantity in which these sometimes useful but always boring objects can be bought. So the house smelled very nice, and I had enough light to do some beading, without, unfortunately, putting a very great dent in the store of 'tea lights.' I did put some outside, in case other people needed them; I'm hoping if I don't look at them someone will take the remaining ones for future use.
And if you think about it, combining the relaxation of candlelight with the relaxation of beadwork is pretty much zen cubed. It's like putting aspirin with an opiate in a pill: it's not just 2x more pain relief; the two ingredients work synergistically and the effect of each is geometrically increased. So it was with winding down in the darkness. The three hours of traffic jams and the final hour of angry drivers on surface streets melted away, and in the middle of the night it was just me and the color blue and the smell of cinnamon and saffron in the calm silence.
Of course, it would have been a good bit less zen had the outage been in January instead of just an unseasonably cool August night, but instead of dreading that biennial inevitability, I'm tremendously grateful that circumstances forced me to sit down, shut down, and let be.
At any rate, it was a tranquil end to a busy and maddening day. And I have nice candles all over the place, and some unnice ones, as well, in the form of the million-pack of 'tea lights,' which, it appears, is the only quantity in which these sometimes useful but always boring objects can be bought. So the house smelled very nice, and I had enough light to do some beading, without, unfortunately, putting a very great dent in the store of 'tea lights.' I did put some outside, in case other people needed them; I'm hoping if I don't look at them someone will take the remaining ones for future use.
And if you think about it, combining the relaxation of candlelight with the relaxation of beadwork is pretty much zen cubed. It's like putting aspirin with an opiate in a pill: it's not just 2x more pain relief; the two ingredients work synergistically and the effect of each is geometrically increased. So it was with winding down in the darkness. The three hours of traffic jams and the final hour of angry drivers on surface streets melted away, and in the middle of the night it was just me and the color blue and the smell of cinnamon and saffron in the calm silence.
Of course, it would have been a good bit less zen had the outage been in January instead of just an unseasonably cool August night, but instead of dreading that biennial inevitability, I'm tremendously grateful that circumstances forced me to sit down, shut down, and let be.
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