Out of the Many — One

This week’s Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey release seems to have captured the media’s attention, perhaps because, like so much else in American life, it defies their either/or perceptions. It turns out that not only are we not a Christian nation; we can’t even be called Judeo-Christian — too many Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, et al.

It appears that the Unitarian Universalist experience of religious identity reflects the American landscape better than we might have imagined. Our identity cross-section is different in many ways, but our diversity mirrors the nation. How well are we dealing with our diversity?

Some of us are still trying to absorb the possibility that we may be classified as Protestants! Who knew? I did hear a reference to the Christian Bible during a worship service the other day. No, it was not during the Christmas Pageant Service — that was largely a Christmas-like stories from around the world sort of adventure.

In our church we hear occasional reference to Christian or Jewish scriptures, just as the preacher may call upon Buddhist or Sufi thought at other times. There are even periodic movements to have our various religious traditions celebrated more intentionally. But, mostly, our diversity seems to be taken for granted and not explored very closely. Often we seem, like Barack Obama, to be a little embarrassed by our heritage, rather than eager to celebrate it.

In any case the Big News about our many religions background is not the multiplicity but the seeming ability of parishioners to put together a more or less satisfying spiritual practice based in multiple sources.

The modernist drive to find the single truth all must believe will find no satisfaction among us. How ironic is that — given our Humanist bent for the last couple of decades!

But the post-modernist embrace of the many may help us build a sturdier religious platform as we become more accustomed to not knowing with the old, should we say arrogant(?), certitude.

The Storm Is Passing Over

Two nights ago we brought our dog home from surgery — both right-side legs shattered by confrontation in the night with superior forces (automotive). The stillness is wonderful as we sit or lie in our peaceful house; together at last after our five days of forced separation.

Sometimes the soft sounds of Peter’s latest songs lull us. Sometimes the silence cradles our stillness and rocks us gently home to our stronger selves.

The nights are hardest for him, and so for us. So much can go wrong when you can only shuffle along leaning against the walls for support while your splinted and pined together limbs splay about striving for a control that never comes.

We are so dependent — he on his gods; I on mine. But the storm is passing over, as Dr. Tindley* says: “O courage, my soul, and let us journey on, for tho’ the night is dark, it won’t be very long.” We’ll pull ourselves along with hope as our guide and our soul’s resolution as standard bearer.

“By and by, when the morning comes,
When the saints of God are gathered home,
We’ll tell the story how we’ve overcome,
For we’ll understand it better by and by.”

*Charles Albert Tindley (1851-1933) composer of such other black gospel standards as Stand by Me, We’ll Understand It Better By and By, and the original version of the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. Tindley’s songs were the inspiration that led the great Thomas A. Dorsey to begin writing his popular blend of spiritual and hymn with blues and jazz underpinnings.

Quote of the week

"It is not a matter of seeking stillness — stillness is everywhere to be found. It might help to shut-up."

Dog Down

It happened as I was walking down the driveway toward the back of the house looking for our housemate to see if she would like to come out and see the lunar eclipse we had been emailing about. It was about 10:30, the night was reasonably cloudless, and the earth’s shadow was well across the moon’s surface.

And, then, there was the high-pitched cry of the dog being hit and the screech of tires and the shouts of neighbors out on the street for the moon. Teenaged boys came running from our house and a neighbor’s doorway. Adults are already encircling the dog (my dog, our dog) lying frantically in the street. “No! No! No!”

We lifted him by blanket into the back of our wagon. The gurney came out to meet us at the curb. Multiple fractures. One leg a mass of shattered bone ... another more modestly useless ... blood ... one deep gash ... other multiple abrasions also filled with crumbled asphalt and road dirt. Beautiful x-rays. Ugly messages. We went home to lick our heart wounds. Cooper remained with the tubes stuck in him and the kindly vet monitoring his breathing and heart rate; vigilant for signs of internal bleeding.

Now we wait for the surgeon’s call. Now we field the phone calls of empathy and advice we have solicited; the knocks at our door; the cards in our mail box. The remorseful concern of our neighbor who drove the car that brought our Cooper down — the single car that passed unhappily through the dark theater of our night.

How are we going to care for our buddy who, no matter what the outcome, will not walk on his own for weeks, for months? Both his injured legs are on the right side. Will he be able to even stand while his body works to heal? There are thirteen steps up to our doorway from the street. We don’t know if he will even have half of that shattered rear leg when at last he comes home to us.

As we drove home, the moon was nearly out of its once-in-a-decade eclipse. Our sun’s light glowed from its surface. The two planets and a star still accompanied it through the night sky. We turned inward — each to his or her source of strength and compassion. Now, for another night, we wait while Cooper’s bruised lungs recover their capacity before the anesthesia comes. Now, he waits, alone, with his blanket, where our love cannot warm him.

Keeping an Open Place at the Table

These days, when I walk from the parking lot to the main office door at our Massachusetts church, I automatically check the rainbow flag to see if it is still flying proudly. You know the sun has been assaulting those bright colors all summer and winter. Spring winds will be especially cruel. One part or another of that rainbow flag is torn loose with such regularity that repairing its destruction has become just routine maintenance. New flag, new pole even. But still it flies.

Rather like a metaphor for life, isn’t it? The attack on gay and lesbian and bisexual life continues every day across America, and folks like us have to keep rising up to the challenge and maintaining the flag so that it may continue to fly bravely and proudly.

I feel the pride when I see the rainbow flag outside our church door, because I feel, also, the pain we had to brave in order to get to the point where we could agree to fly it, and, then, continue to shoulder our way through the consequences of our decision.

It was 1997 when we voted to make a place at our table for gay and lesbian folks. What a change that has made for our community!

As I think about the changes that face us in the future, I remember this one big change in our past.

The thing that surprises me most about our decision is how good it has been for our life together. I mean, I never really questioned whether it was the Right Thing. That has always seemed abundantly clear to me. But I hadn’t really appreciated how Good it would be; what a tremendous asset to our community all the new people would be!

I knew we were supporting good people (usually families), but I didn’t really appreciate how good, or how loving and thoughtful, talented and dedicated these new people who flocked to our church would be.

I hadn’t anticipated how alive it would feel because of their presence; how it would not just be the people here at the time of our decision that I loved, but a whole new crowd of exciting presences.

And, then, I began to notice other, apparently unrelated consequences, like: “Hey, we’re pretty good at this welcoming stuff when we put our minds to it! I’ll bet we really can welcome everyone just as our hearts tell us we want to.”

The more we welcome, the stronger we actually become. The more able we are to make a place in our life for others — even older long term members whom we haven’t felt all that much at ease with; even kids crying in the morning services and clogging up the basement classrooms.

Perhaps we don’t have to circle the wagons as we thought to protect this precious life together because others will treasure it just as much as people have in the past; maybe more so, because they haven’t known it before out there in the world of sixty hour work weeks and arrogant disregard.

Well, I am a very conservative person and I don’t want to ask you to push this one idea too far; I just wanted to outline what I think are some of the consequences of opening up our life to others.

I have gone through virtually every major change in my personal life kicking and screaming: “I want things to stay the same!” And, sometimes, I have believed that I need to hang onto even the things I hate. I can be so stubborn it takes a good smack from a 2x4 to get me to change direction. But, now, I am sad to see so much of our country hanging on to hateful ways, and wonder how to smack the whole stubborn populous up the side of the head.

The Anthem video revisited

I have continued my search for more info about Caitlin Davidson and Dylan Cunningham who were responsible for the video of Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Anthem’ that I cited a couple of days ago (see below, Feb 14). As best I can figure out, they put this show together for a Filmapalooza at their high school in New Brunswick, Canada. Dylan put a re-cut version of the video to Soundgarden’s ‘Fell on Black Day” — maybe, he didn’t care for Cohen so much after all... maybe, he just wanted to prove he could do it. The original 48 Hour Filmapalooza is the oldest and largest timed film competition in the US, but I’m guessing this one was strictly Tantramar Regional High School.

In 2007, 31 US cities participated in this now international Filmapalooza project with over 17,000 participants. According to the organizers, "the competition is a race against time. On Friday evening, filmmakers draw a genre from a hat. Before the final kick off at 7 PM, a character, prop, and a line of dialogue are assigned and the filmmakers are off. They rush off to write, shoot, and edit their films. The final masterpiece is due by 7:30 PM sharp, on Sunday. Films screen at local theaters just days later. Everyone on a team must be a volunteer, and although some teams are fiercely competitive, many teams look at this as a chance to have a high-octane get-together with friends. The 48 Hour Film Project was started by Mark Ruppert and Liz Langston in Washington, DC, six years ago."

Maybe Cait or Dylan will write and we will find out more about their project.

Living with the land

By the time I entered sixth grade my father had begun to come into his own in the business world, and our family came to summer on some of the small lakes in Western Massachusetts near our home.

The first year we tented by one of these nearby lakes, perhaps with the thought that we could actually live there all summer long and my father commute to work. But the land was flat, and the development was new, and my father sold this land after the first year. And we began to rent a cottage well up in the Berkshire hills at a place called Big Pond.

There the woods were old and it was four miles by winding, climbing dirt road from the main highway to the northern shore of Big Pond where we stayed in a cottage owned by Orin Handler. The Handler’s and the Grimes’ were the only houses you could reach by road in this part of the lake. There had never been anyone but Handler’s and Grimes’ on this road since it was cut, but Harold Grimes was planning to sell some of his shorefront property, and we were there to consider adding our name to theirs on the small sign that marked the road.

Any old New Englander would be familiar with the cottage we stayed in there — the big porches extending off living room and dining room through creaking French doors that were usually open to the breeze off the lake. The doors were closed most nights as the temperature fell even in June and July.

Then, the smell of oil fired stove would permeate the air and nestle around us as close as the heat itself, and we children would be hustled off upstairs to a loft looking down on the living room fireplace, the wicker furniture, the wooden rocker you could get on and ride like some wild stallion galloping across the plains until your mother cried out in fear that you would tip over.
Overhead was nothing but painted roof. The walls were wood paneling. The windows were hinged like cabinet doors and you looked out on the long slope of front porch roof and the lake’s waters beyond.

When the thunder storms came, as they frequently did during our days on Big Pond, the rain would come in a rush across the waters at the edge of the wind that drove it and engulf our house and thunder down on the shingles only inches above our heads. From the second floor you could see out over the whole lake as the lightning flashed its eerie white light and its tentacles snatched at the houses out on the island in the center of the pond.

My father and I built what was called a surf board in those days — a vague cousin to what you would see at the seashore today. For me it was a pretty much unsinkable craft that I paddled by hand and by foot along all the shoreline and around the shore of that island at the center of Big Pond.

The actual building of the eight or ten houses out there was a source of considerable fascination until the transporting properties of ice debunked the fantasies. The one house which most drew my explorer’s eye stood alone on a small peninsula of rock dropped by glaciers in retreat up past Hudson’s Bay long before my time. Isolated even from other islanders, I wondered at what sort of folk might suddenly emerge from within to challenge my small intrusion into their secret lives.

Orin Handler and Harold Grimes were a kind of old time Yankee you can still find in upstate Vermont or perhaps in other recesses of the country from which they have failed to be eradicated. They were men my father felt at home with and in this case admired, for they were country men but of class and culture. There were not many such men, I suspect, in my father’s world and there were certainly no others like them in mine. Their families were long off the farm — perhaps merchants or seamen from Boston or New Haven who first came here for the cool of summer and, then, stayed on in Springfield or Northampton.

I found their books shelved on the long wall by the fireplace and stacks of “Boy’s Life” magazines up under the eaves. And an image of the life they led there burnt itself in my small, expanding mind. I peered through their windows and poked about in their boathouses, for they rarely actually lived there any more, and in later years I longed for their life — for the ease of their manner, the ready chair by the fire where no person was truly a stranger.

At first my wish was just to be there, to experience again a way of living they provided and which I, too, could admire and rejoice in. But, then, a greed for a style of life I could only experience but not myself provide, took over and consumed me. And it is here in this reduced and ruined form that I now find myself, and you experience me, grappling with the spirit that seemed to direct their course, and enveloping myself in every mud puddle, sinking slowly down into the earth from which I came and which so clearly shaped their lives.

The land is neither hostile nor welcoming in and of itself. But it does seem to contain within it something of who we are at our deepest core — a connection to the spirit of the life that animates everything — not as some detached, external mechanism, but in some extremely personal, intimate form in which I recognize what I want to be — not merely who I am but the special form only we humans can attain but which requires so much of us, so much effort to draw it out and is yet so easy and common when it comes.

I speak here of the water and blood from which we were born and which now courses through our bodies, an oddly unfamiliar presence from which so many around us are actually fleeing. It repulses their nostrils; it is too coarse a salt to set at their table. And yet to separate from it is to abandon life itself. Here we are bonded by some inexorable fluid oozing from within each of us like sweat or mingled blood, like the warmth that comes from within the fire.

I saw this life coming across the lake in the fire of stars and moon and lightning flashes. I felt it shimmering on the surface of rocks beneath the surface of the water. It welled up around my toes when they dug down into the sand at the water’s edge. It slipped across my palm on the bodies of escaping fishes. And I experienced its remains in the Handler cottage and in the gnarled arthritic fingers of my father’s hand clutching at tools they could no longer grasp.

In those summers by the water my eyes, too, stretched out to embrace the life around me and I was in no way alone, though I may have seen no single person up close in a day or a week of exploring. Through all the angst and anguish of my worst teenage years I experienced there the same at-homeness in my element that my father and I understood in the presence of the Grimes and Handler men.

Not when skulking down paths after dark through woods, where only the infinitesimal difference between trodden grasses and wild reveals direction; not even in the company of the most alien of god’s creatures (teenage girl) did I loose that sense of oneness of self and land — an experience never known down in my flat-land school or home, and that was to desert me so completely in the years of work and suburban life to follow, until I came here to live on my island in the Charles where the abandoned rocks, small birds, and marshes surround me as they did in the Berkshire hills, and the surface of still waters mirrors the golden trees of fall and me.

Quote of the week

"I find it appropriate, even interesting on occasion, when other people express opinions, but my own seem oddly embarrassing."

Beware! Justin Currie

Be careful Justin Currie! You may be able to handle the Black Thunder* served up at Glasgow’s “Persian’s Forehead” pub, but here in the new Fortress America we look askance at any foreigner ordering any beer but Bud Lite.

When you fly into Nashville (or wherever) to begin your tour of the pubs and music spaces of America, you will not be able to see the shinny glint off our new wall along the Mexican border, but, be assured, our ever-ready border guards will be waiting to frisk you. Let us pray they do no more!

Beware! When hired guns hear your cock and bull story about being born in a van near Paisley in a “hailstorm so vicious that it took a team of panel beaters a month to separate [your] forehead from the roof”, not even your pale American keyboardist may be able to rescue you from the collective terror with which our chest thumping politicians so gleefully besmirch our beloved soil.

Above all refrain from unseemly co-mixing with other Scotsmen (notorious for their libidinous skirts and bad whiskey) or musicians (all suspect, except for country western singers, for any may be supporters of the Far Left 's coddling of God’s enemies in our innocent midst).

Not that we wish to seem unfriendly! We welcome your self-labeled “thunderously dreary dirges”. Your sonorous wailing of “What is love for?” on your just released record is well known here, albeit in a pained sort of way. My only wish is that I could hear better the finely played tones of this American keyboardist, Peter Adams, whom you attempt to drown out at your tour engagements.

Finally, should you prove able to pass our ‘fair and balanced’ border inspection — perhaps by disguising yourself in suit and tie, we rejoice at our brief opportunity to applaud your tired versions of withered hits in this your latest American tour (April 13 — April 27). G_d willing, see you at Joe’s Pub!
*A vile mix of Guinness and red wine...gag.

Justin Currie & Peter Adams at Joe's Pub, NYC

Mostly along The Charles — Waltham Winter

Winter

And ready for Khidr* the green ancient, my interior
tastily decorated with empty
wine bottles, a stack of four inflated truck

innertubes with Christmas lights dangled down inside,
two bags of Portland cement
turned too hard anymore to use, two two-gallon

kerosene containers, a plastic bottle of bubble-making
juice, and a package of
hummingbird food waiting for March.

— Coleman Barks, Tentmaking, 2001

*The Green One (of Sufi and pre-Islamic lore) is an emissary of the G_d, full of the eternal liveliness and freshness of wisdom ‘drawn out of the living sources of life.’ See http://khidr.org/ Perhaps Al-Khidr is connected to the Green Knight of Arthurian lore? How does the Celtic Green Man's earthy nature parallel these visions?

Cheerios in the Knees

Limitation

Unbridled freedom is really only suited to a dreamworld. It may be something that a child wants, but restraint of some sort is always applied to truly human behavior. That is to be expected, even welcomed. For it is precisely the application of restraint or limitation which makes us human (“a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor”). Limitations are the means by which we are humanized. Otherwise we are in danger of growing into pint-sized primitive gods (i.e., tyrants) — that is the great fear of Genesis One.

Limitation and self-awareness are the two things the human couple must acquire before leaving the idyllic life in the Garden at Eden. These are essential to their effective life as part of the earth. Without limitation and awareness they will be like unformed gods — loose cannons with no effective constitutional restraints.

As long as the G_d doesn't care about anything beyond himself, he doesn't have to adapt. But as soon as she wants relationship, she has to learn how to do it. Awareness and acceptance of limitation is the means.

One of the many biblical storylines misrepresented by the orthodox is this great one about how the God-Who-Seeks-Us learns to accept the limitations which are essential to relationship. The same limitations which apply to human life, the G_d accepts for himself because she too wants relationship. The G_d’s Sacrifice is the same as that required of Adam and Eve and Jesus of Nazareth.

Limitation is not the end of joyful human life; it is not something to be discarded or bemoaned. It is the essential means by which we grow and develop. There are no exceptions to this rule — it applies even to the G_d because it is a reflection of the G_d's own nature (i.e., the Way Things Are). Limitation doesn't just come from the outside; it moves out from within. (“I will write my Law in their hearts.”)

That is what makes Yahweh a great god and worthy of worship. He is not Perfect, and does not claim to be. He is in fact by nature opposed to the abstraction embedded in the notion of Perfection. He is Real, instead. Her name is “I AM”, not John Calvin or Tom Delay. I don’t know exactly how this works out in practice, but it seems to me that the essential business of religious people lies in trying to figure it out. A religion which constantly rejects the lessons of experience is always missing the point regardless of how brilliant it may be.

So, I am going to start from this possibility — creative life arises out of noting , accepting, and using limits. Growing-up is learning how to deal with them. Pushing limits is heroic and admirable, but so is learning how to live within the edges.

Change

The edges may be moving, changing — just like the rest of life. Expecting to find even a limitation the same today as it was yesterday is preposterous. That is why Laws and Creeds don’t work in the long run — they just can’t keep up with change. A religion of Absolutes is doomed in application. What is the point in maintaining a belief system which in order to withstand the test of use requires a falsified view of reality?

Our science teaches us a few things about living with uncertainty — it’s a lot easier once you give up the illusion of Absolute Truth. There is really nothing to be said about Transcendent Being for it is by definition outside the knowable world –– such life is present only in a place like the Garden or Heaven down by the river. If we go there, we are dead.

Yahweh does not wish to stay in the Garden. He won’t stay dead. That is why he is known as Immanuel —“G_d with us”. While pushing the couple out of the Garden results in travail for them, it is not in fact a punishment if you believe that life in this world is something worth having. Calling the Expulsion from the Garden punishment is to take the child’s point of view as definitive. Their trauma in the World is only a mirror of the G_d’s own experience of living; it’s not something special to humans.

Yahweh may be a sky god, but our earth is, of course, part of the sky universe. Separating Sky from Earth is a false distinction in the 21st century. A revisioning of the G_d in our life story will require special attention to this, I think. The old Earth based religions of Europe could not withstand the power of the Christian Sky-god religion and there is no point in trying to go back to a failed vision. What we need is a vision of the G_d which corresponds to the world we experience, and an interpretation of this known world that reflects our growing understanding of the G_d. In our world sky and earth are one; neither is more or less natural than the other. What would a transcendent experience be in an all natural universe?

The G_d changes and lives in a changing world. Such a god also embraces limits (“I have come to put an ax to the tree.”), because it is limits which make possible a perceivable world, and, so, a world about which it is possible to reflect and communicate.

Word & Image

Yahweh is the god of word and image. They are the means by which he describes and experiences. He uses both in his efforts to create, deal with his need for change, and explore the edges of his current limits. Language is his means of connecting, ordering, and extending relationships. (In the overpowering experience of the G_d’s Spirit at Pentecost everyone understands everyone else’s language.)

His connection with the creative word is established immediately in Genesis One. John’s Gospel story treats him from the point of view of Greek ‘Word’ images. The G_d uses the written word in his first Commandments and it is by means of the word that he stays connected to his creatures in and out of the Garden.

He uses breath (the means by which his word is delivered) to bring his clay male/female figures to life in the second Genesis creation story.

Both word and image are connected, then, by this breathing which is called the Spirit of God. The Spirit must, then, be a rhythm (among other things). The rhythm of life is the breathing of G_d.

In today’s music world rhythm-based music is proclaimed by traditionalists to be distinctly different from melody-based music. This is the false result of peculiar either/or thinking. Poetry is rhythm based melody. Suppose G_d breaths to a rock-and-roll beat as well as to the drone of Gregorian chant?

It definitely muddies the water when you start using this both/and way of combining ideas and experiences. But isn’t that the way we really experience things in this century? It is a gift to be simple in the midst of complexity, and, it seems to me, that a proper understanding of the G_d will reflect that gift. We are looking for the ‘elegant solution’. And we are seeking it, not by ruling out things, but by drawing them in.

The Anthem

In their workshop, 'Soul Signals:The Spirituality of Midlife', the Revs. Martha Niebanck & Larry Peers [First Parish in Brookline] encourage new perspective on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories we write reveal the movement of our lives and suggest the particular future toward which we dream or might dare to dream thanks to the crack in everything.

"Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen, 1993

Caitlin Davidson and Dylan Wendell Cunningham created the visuals for this video. I wonder who they are and what their story is. Why did you choose this Cohen song?

Alarming Adventures Now 50 Years Old (or more)

It is about 9 am and I am setting out on what has become a daily trip around the shore of what is known as Big Pond in the town of Otis, somewhere deep in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts. My mother knows only that I go out exploring on the surfboard that my father and I built — (Well, let’s be honest here. I picked out the design; he built it, with me standing along side fetching tools as needed. As an adult, I actually built another one of these surfboards in the same basement of our family home, but without my father’s supervision. He was much too capable a craftsman to be able to tolerate my amateur fumbling efforts. Let it be noted that my board floated as well as his and was never known to crack-up on a rocky shore.)

This was a rather large and cumbersome 1940’s style board; nothing like the sleek designs of the ‘80’s. But I could lie across it, and, with wetted goggles securely in place, view the rocky bottom of Big Pond in immense detail, square foot by square foot.

I began these artistic inquiries around the beachfront near the summer cottage that my father had also built, but each day I move further and further afield, slowly circumnavigating The Known World. I say these were “artistic explorations” because all I really cared about were color and shape and what the academically trained painter calls architecture. Truly, I know nothing of minerals or of the slippage of tectonic plates or of glaciers creeping back and forth.

I move out past the Spencer’s house on the point, a wonderful old musky, dark abode of the elderly, and, thence, into the uncharted territory beyond, paddling eventually to the largest spring source of this incredibly cold and deep summer home I love. And, then, I press on further still, working my way around the blocade of rocks rising up, suddenly, to just beneath the surface of the water — a death trap for motorboats. This is totally forbidden territory. And, then, in a surprising turn of bravery, I head straight out toward the center of the pond, where an island of perhaps a dozen houses beacons.

Roaring deathtraps drawing skiers or bearing fishermen cross my path; an occasional sunfish, too, sails swiftly past before disembarking its young passenger in a burst of unbidden energy. (I will not speak of this adventure in my home, now or in the future.)

I peer into the boathouses and the front yards of the island people, and note the manufacturers and horsepower of their docked motorcraft. I view the faded green and white stripes of their wooden lawn chairs, and wonder at how they mow their lawns so neatly. It seems odd to my inexperienced mind that in this idyllic playground, so far from city formalities, mown lawns yet exert their tyranny.

Some of the inhabitants are curious about my origins and I am drawn inevitably into fraternization with them. I continue on even to the dark back side the island, and, then, to a little isle just off its coast, where there is evidence of wood fire and beer drinking.

My mother, as usual, has not really noticed my absence. She and my younger sister, Lois, are busy with the things domestic women find endlessly fascinating — sewing and cleaning and discoursing on the minutia of their lives. They would smile condescendingly, but without comprehension, at the magnitude of my adventures. They would be alarmed.

Miles and Miles of Heart

The spiritual journey that is Jung’s endeavor requires more than thought or feeling or intuition or practice, for these habits of mind cannot unaided sustain the necessary effort against the forces of indolence and despair that the journey inevitably provokes. It is the heart that sustains in the darkness.

Jung is well aware of the Buddhist, the Daoist, the native Shaman, but everywhere he is faced with the failure of European (and American) Christianity. He pursues the ongoing revelation the orthodox seek to abandon. How shall we deal with Christianity’s neglected problems — the supposedly irreconcilable opposites in human nature, the soulfulness of matter, the undervalued and maligned feminine in us all?


“In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”
— C. G. Jung, 1934

The Unreconciled Opposites

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us, according to Jung, to a better understanding of ourselves. We are able to recognize our unhappy, reprobate selves first in others. Happily, being exposed through the bright light of awareness, we have the opportunity of addressing the ‘terrorists that threaten our way of life’ for they live in ourselves as surely as in others. We are not merely separate individuals; we participate in a shared humanity. “We make our own epoch.”

Donning the white coat of religiously sanctioned purity only perpetuates division within and without. Blaming some Satan for ordinary evil behavior shirks responsibility at the expense of our young men and women trapped on the battlefield where personal ignorance and hubris first deployed them.



“In our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.”
— Emma Jung, 1955

The Soulfulness of Matter

Supposedly ‘dead matter’ has an awfully nasty habit of biting us from behind. Super high tech aircraft shake themselves into oblivion after hundreds of hours of over-deployment in murderous occupation. The ordinary paring knife slips to the detriment of the already agitated cook’s finger. A polluted earth chokes and howls in dumb reaction to human misperception. That which grows lives as surely as we who tread upon it. There is a reason for the neglected garden’s failure to produce fruit.

Perhaps there is something to be learned from the so-called primitive’s deference toward nature, the prayer for forgiveness before the slaughter. It is not ‘superstitious’ Native American exploitation of resources that is creating a dustbowl in our West or changing weather patterns all over the earth.

The Rejected Feminine

Here it may be objected that at least within Roman Catholic Christianity the feminine has not been banished to the world of crybabies. But see how emasculated is this virgin mother of us all! The harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine that Emma Jung so urgently extols can surely not exist apart from equal respect and justice.


Carl Justav Jung
Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

Getting the Song Started

Poems, like songs bellowed and squawked at the tops of trees,
Belong up there in the air, riding high waves in the breathing of god,
Entering through ears alive to their sound,
Turning round and turning round
Through human fears and lost options,
Opening daises and blue crocuses in snow crusted brains.

Sing songs for the workmen hunched at dark benches,
For the doey eyed child afraid to leave home.
Breath in the flutter of birds to their nestlings;
Breath out hundred mile streams of unrest.
Make stories from barked orders and whined grievance —
High tales of new stars birthing like gods in the night.

— Oscar Handler, “A Bevy of Lies”, 1938

.... When I see them, they are standing in the glow of a soft, rosy light with feathered edges like some fabulously romantic close-up in one of D.W. Griffith’s silent film adventures. The soft focus lense gets cranked down and the camera moves in to capture - not an 18 year old Lillian Gish floating on the edge of a chunk of ice - but Erving and Miriam Polster in the kitchen of their little cottage on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, somewhere over near Case Western Reserve where Miriam was a doctoral candidate in psychology. (Erv was a practicing Gestalt Therapist, already much in demand.)

Their backyard was a fenced-in garden that led directly to the kitchen door. In my soft rosy memory glow I see that garden and the bungalow connected to it. Inside in the kitchen are a Formica and aluminum table and chairs along one wall, and on the other the sink and such - little more than a galley, I suppose, but it felt huge in their presence. The glow, I think, came from within them and it spread out to encompass all around them. It felt like home there, you know; the home, that in my case at least, had never actually existed.

You would have thought they had just built a nice fire burning in the fireplace intended to welcome you (especially you) into the library. But there was no fireplace and we were in a derelict, trashy neighborhood on the outskirts of civilization, where only students could willingly choose to live. If there was a real life glow in Cleveland, it was toxic.

I was 26 and Erv leaned over to me and remarked that Ira Progoff had accepted his invitation to come do a workshop on Dream Interpretation and would I be interested in coming.

Well, was I interested in coming!? Progoff did not then have quite the fame that he later acquired. He was just beginning, as were we all. But his hand was the hand that had actually touched the hand of Carl Gustav Jung. And in the hierarchy of great men that peopled my young mind there was no god greater than C. G. Jung. So I went. I was scared out of my wits, but I went.

I walked in, alone, into this barren room with nothing but a circle of metal chairs set-up in one corner. Somehow, I think, I had imagined a large lecture hall where I would be able to secret myself in the shadow of a back seat. But this was one of those bare lightbulb experiences where they are playing Good Cop Bad Cop only there is no Good Cop and you are the one under interrogation.

Progoff began by presenting a dream and, then, elaborating upon some of it elements using Jung’s amplification methods. So far so good, I was starting to relax. Then, suddenly, he stops lecturing and begins asking us questions. “Who,” he says, “do you think - of the several persons in the dream - was the dreamer?”

It was a silent room. It was a very silent room. It was silent room full of silent therapists. Not even Erv was speaking. And into this silent silence I hear myself pipe up, and I’m suggesting that the dreamer is the young woman who has undergone a transformation as part of the dream story. (I can’t remember what I said yesterday on the telephone, but I can recite to you now what I squeaked out in that barren room 37 years ago.)

Well, to cut directly to the chase, I was wrong. But I still somehow had enough ego left to drag myself off to supper after the workshop with Erv and Progoff and a couple of other men whom I did not know. The memory picture of us is framed, of course, by the cigar smoke that so often seems to surround these early life stories of mine.

A year later I was praying (though I didn’t know it) for the appearance of another light to show me the way home in the Dark Night of Overwhelming Human Experience.

But the warm light from Erv and Miriam did still fill my heart like candles of love and concern glowing in our midst and spreading out in the incredible life stories we share.