One of the books which I always keep promising myself I will read but somehow never do is Therese of Liseaux's Story of a Soul. I have, though, read endless commentaries and studies about her Little Way. In brief her Little Way is a surrender to God moment-by-moment. Sounds simple, and it is. In her time it was a strong critique against extra-pious medieval pietism. In our own age it is an equally strong rejoinder against our Sundays-only, 7-and-a-half-minute sermons, coffee-shop, diluted Christianism - a movement which permeates all we do.
There are now Bibles with only the words of Jesus in them. At first this is an attractive proposition: remove the "extra stuff", and you are left with the direct wisdom of Jesus Himself. But Jesus is not Buddha or Mohammed to speak in aphorisms and wisdom-teachings. Plus the Gospels are not a collection of sagely teachings. Rather they are the very heart, soul, flesh and bones amd marrow or the Church, the Body of Christ. To remove the "extra" makes as much sense as removing your eyelids so your eyes can see unimpeded.
There are few practices which are as demanding as being a Christian minute-by-minute all blessed day long! Everyone can moderately behave for an hour or so. Everyone can muster enough attention for 15 minutes or so. Everyone can be tolerant and bask in the glow of warm friendliness towards others when safely ensconsed in a back pew for 45 minutes. But how many of us can keep up the effort throughout the day? How much energy is required to be vigilant? how much sheer endurance is called for to smile and turn the other cheek at both real and imagined insults (most especially the imagined ones).
Therese seems to consider it an act of ascetic discipline to be nice to everyone all the time. I can tell from personal experience as well as from personal inclination that being nice and curteous and gentle and meek and humble and all other virtues is well nigh impossible. The quick quip, the witty put-down, the pissy growl, the angry shout, the foreboding frown - these occur often, most especially when we are dealing with others.
I have slowly changed my own perspective on the issue of spiritual discipline. First I had this idea of heroic efforts done mostly alone. Now I am beginning to see as more of a creative ensemble work - where I keep tryign to be in tune and sync with the Main Note. As I try to respond to the Note, I am playing with others who may or may not be in tune with the same Song. But through some creative playing, what at first seems like a cacophony can become something much more concerted.
Little things are not so little, since each is like a little finger pressing a key in the piano, or a finger plucking a string of the guitar. All these little acts of kindness during the day, all these regular turnings to God in the Jesus Prayer, or the renewing of intentions to be loving and kind and patient, or simply to not respond no matter how tempting, all these things add up in volume.
One of the first thigns I learned when sitting in Benedictine choirs to chant the psalms is that this work is almost the exact opposite of what we think of singing. When you are in a normal choir the choirmaster will work very hard to get you to be as clear with your voice as possible. If you listen carefully to a good choir you can hear each voice quite clearly. Together, of course, they make a joyful sound. But chanting the psalms in monastic practice does the reverse. You try really hard not to be heard. Your voice should only be loud enough so that you can still clearly hear the voices of those next to you. It feels unnatural to sing this way. But the sheer volume of low voices can be quite well voluminous.
If I take the sum total of all these small acts during my day, driving, brushing teeth, eating, office conversations, telephone calls, trips to the supermarket. All of these small acts each whispering a song. "Anger anger" says one. "Greed greed" says another. "Glutton glutton" says a third. "Lust lust" adds a chorus. This is the diabolical choir of my life which ceaselessly intones "Me mine more". But if through the day I begin here and there working in changing the song, so that instead of "anger anger" I make a concerted effort to sing "patience patience". Instead of "lust lust" I try "charity charity".
The psalmist tells us to sing a new song to Yahweh. But anyone who has tried to "change their tune" will know how nearly impossible a task this is! It requires dilligence, concerted effort and most of all a great big helping of good humor to be able to dislodge the old tunes stuck in our heads and hearts.
I still think that periods of serious practice, say 30 minutes every day in a removed place, are very beneficial. But if that is all you do it is hard to see how much progress will be made. Some, for sure, and some is better than none. But the wonderful thing about our hearts is that they are an instrument which can be practiced at all the time - everywhere. In fact I am coming to see the heart as that which only comes into existence when I deliberately practice compassion, self-emptying and justice - until I exercise those traits I do not have a living heart at all!
Sing a new song to Yahweh!
Monday, October 5, 2009
Stuck is bad
I know that most people seem to think that stuck is bad. But is it? One of the blogs I occasionally drop by to read is Trunk's Brazen Careerist. There is no value to it for myself - I am neither a careerist nor much into people who are brazen. But I do appreacite honesty and she is nothing if not honest. If you follow her posts regarding her boyfriend you will know what I mean. I am not altogether sure how I would conduct a relationship with someone who Tweets, and especially one who tweets about me - but that's another story. The point here is a quote in one of her blog entries which says "you start not being able to get out of your transition (my problem) then you are stuck. And stuck is bad. I'm stuck eating to procrastinate changing tasks because changing is hard and eating makes it easier....It's a discomfort being between things." This is an especially insightful, for me, post. The phrase "Stuck is bad" links to many things at the same time but two main things come from it: the concept of stuckiness, the implication of the alternative.
What are some forms of stuckiness? Could we say that a dark night of the soul is stuckiness? How about depression is that stuckiness? Most critically, and implied in the post, what is the opposite of stuckiness? Progress? Should we always be improving, changing, growing? This vegetable metaphor seems very popular. Is a human being called to always grow? Is there some sort of Moore's Law of self-help?
All these questions seem relatively benign until you realize that this idolatry of progress leads to some serious amount of guilt and fear and of course failure. I cannot tell how many people have told me that Christianity is too full guilt where after some soul searching questioning came to realize that it was Positivism at church which led to guilt. The Christian message, per se, in it's toe-tripping reality is the very vaccine against guilt.
Positivism is an interesting social philosophy. It first came to life at the end of the 17th century - a time when the human race unleashed the powers of rationality in a shockwave from which we are still recovering. I am not by any means an irrationalist, but I am terribly concerned with idolatry. Any philosophy which holds to a monotone theory of knowledge, be it through inspiration only or through reason only, is bound to be idolatrous. Most especially, as a Christian, any belief which rabidly defends that only natural, physical, and material approaches to knowledge are valid is bound to be found wanting when faced with the slippery nature of reality. But still the shades or shadows of Positivism linger.
Another point to keep in mind when looking at stuckiness is a distinction between people's fantasies about utopia. I first ran across this distinction when studying some Chinese philosophy. The Chinese (and many others) believed that the past was better. This BTW is also found in Christianity, especially up to and through the Middle Ages. The Rule of Benedict says: "For those monastics show themselves too lazy in the service to which they are vowed, who chant less than the Psalter with the customary canticles in the course of a week, whereas we read that our holy Fathers strenuously fulfilled that task in a single day. May we, lukewarm that we are, perform it at least in a whole week!" (Chapter 18). In fact, the idea that we are worse off than the olden days was a common belief until the Enlightenment. At that point we started, collectivelly, positing a better future, and the mem of progress firmly implanted itself in the human race, certainly in the West.
Some things need to be addressed here, but not too much because I reallyw ant to go back in be stuck on stuckiness. But at least one question comes to mind: are the obvious advances in quality of life through technology the same thing as progress? One more question: does progress advance at an equal rate across all areas of knowledge? Is there an inexorable march forward, or are we more like spilt milk - parts of it running forward from where the glass fell on the floor, but others, frustratingly, retreat to the safety of the area under the oven? Are thing getting better all the time? At the same rate?
Spirituality is a wisdom of living between things, of finding oneself being in-between. Spirituality becomes an unbrella term for a set of tools which help us broker peace between ideals and realities. Further, spirituality is a stepping into, and perhaps a stubborness to leave, liminal spaces. Anyone who's had an experience of being in a sacred space will know how it is both exhilirating and infuriating at the same time. This is the nature of the in-between spaces. This is what countless churches, synagogues and mosques aim to create with their architecture. In fact, architecture itself is a constant work of framing and delineating liminal spaces.
What makes liminal spaces so energizing is also what makes them dangerous, confusing. It is not that these spaces are themselves dangerous and confusing, bu trather that the view from there is of such a different angle that thigns which were solid certaintites before become a lot less solid and much more undertain. Spending time in liminal spaces allows us the opportunity to move from the as-if world into the what-if world. A world where we are not 100% certain of intentions behind acts. The world is no longer black and white.
One more thing happens to those who frequent liminal spaces regularly: we are constantly bumping into the 'adult world' - all those large unwieldy pieces of ethical furniture which are shaped so as to always stub your toe. We have a few of those (literal) items in my house. Very frustrating. I am sure that someone with a better industrial design eye would be able to explain exactly why everyone trips on the legs of the very large coffee table in the living room. I mean it is a hulking thing. But yet sooner or later someone slams their foot against it. Why? Something about its design, I am convinced. The lines in the upper part of the body of the table suggest that the lower less visible part should be different than it really is. And that is the perfect metaphor for ethical dilemas: something in the outward shape of the situation suggests a different inner dynamic than what is there in reality.
And here we go again with the reality thing. It is funny how hard it is to avoid reality. it just keeps tripping me up. No matter how much I wish it was a different shape, it is the shape it is.
It takes much courage to look at reality long enough to see its real shape. Only then can we begin to make some meaningful changes.
What are some forms of stuckiness? Could we say that a dark night of the soul is stuckiness? How about depression is that stuckiness? Most critically, and implied in the post, what is the opposite of stuckiness? Progress? Should we always be improving, changing, growing? This vegetable metaphor seems very popular. Is a human being called to always grow? Is there some sort of Moore's Law of self-help?
All these questions seem relatively benign until you realize that this idolatry of progress leads to some serious amount of guilt and fear and of course failure. I cannot tell how many people have told me that Christianity is too full guilt where after some soul searching questioning came to realize that it was Positivism at church which led to guilt. The Christian message, per se, in it's toe-tripping reality is the very vaccine against guilt.
Positivism is an interesting social philosophy. It first came to life at the end of the 17th century - a time when the human race unleashed the powers of rationality in a shockwave from which we are still recovering. I am not by any means an irrationalist, but I am terribly concerned with idolatry. Any philosophy which holds to a monotone theory of knowledge, be it through inspiration only or through reason only, is bound to be idolatrous. Most especially, as a Christian, any belief which rabidly defends that only natural, physical, and material approaches to knowledge are valid is bound to be found wanting when faced with the slippery nature of reality. But still the shades or shadows of Positivism linger.
Another point to keep in mind when looking at stuckiness is a distinction between people's fantasies about utopia. I first ran across this distinction when studying some Chinese philosophy. The Chinese (and many others) believed that the past was better. This BTW is also found in Christianity, especially up to and through the Middle Ages. The Rule of Benedict says: "For those monastics show themselves too lazy in the service to which they are vowed, who chant less than the Psalter with the customary canticles in the course of a week, whereas we read that our holy Fathers strenuously fulfilled that task in a single day. May we, lukewarm that we are, perform it at least in a whole week!" (Chapter 18). In fact, the idea that we are worse off than the olden days was a common belief until the Enlightenment. At that point we started, collectivelly, positing a better future, and the mem of progress firmly implanted itself in the human race, certainly in the West.
Some things need to be addressed here, but not too much because I reallyw ant to go back in be stuck on stuckiness. But at least one question comes to mind: are the obvious advances in quality of life through technology the same thing as progress? One more question: does progress advance at an equal rate across all areas of knowledge? Is there an inexorable march forward, or are we more like spilt milk - parts of it running forward from where the glass fell on the floor, but others, frustratingly, retreat to the safety of the area under the oven? Are thing getting better all the time? At the same rate?
Spirituality is a wisdom of living between things, of finding oneself being in-between. Spirituality becomes an unbrella term for a set of tools which help us broker peace between ideals and realities. Further, spirituality is a stepping into, and perhaps a stubborness to leave, liminal spaces. Anyone who's had an experience of being in a sacred space will know how it is both exhilirating and infuriating at the same time. This is the nature of the in-between spaces. This is what countless churches, synagogues and mosques aim to create with their architecture. In fact, architecture itself is a constant work of framing and delineating liminal spaces.
What makes liminal spaces so energizing is also what makes them dangerous, confusing. It is not that these spaces are themselves dangerous and confusing, bu trather that the view from there is of such a different angle that thigns which were solid certaintites before become a lot less solid and much more undertain. Spending time in liminal spaces allows us the opportunity to move from the as-if world into the what-if world. A world where we are not 100% certain of intentions behind acts. The world is no longer black and white.
One more thing happens to those who frequent liminal spaces regularly: we are constantly bumping into the 'adult world' - all those large unwieldy pieces of ethical furniture which are shaped so as to always stub your toe. We have a few of those (literal) items in my house. Very frustrating. I am sure that someone with a better industrial design eye would be able to explain exactly why everyone trips on the legs of the very large coffee table in the living room. I mean it is a hulking thing. But yet sooner or later someone slams their foot against it. Why? Something about its design, I am convinced. The lines in the upper part of the body of the table suggest that the lower less visible part should be different than it really is. And that is the perfect metaphor for ethical dilemas: something in the outward shape of the situation suggests a different inner dynamic than what is there in reality.
And here we go again with the reality thing. It is funny how hard it is to avoid reality. it just keeps tripping me up. No matter how much I wish it was a different shape, it is the shape it is.
It takes much courage to look at reality long enough to see its real shape. Only then can we begin to make some meaningful changes.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Walking the way of the psalms
Lately my kids discovered passwords. Not the type we use on computers, but rather the daily shibboleths we have. For example, my 3 year old is having to learn the "Please" password. Without the password he will not gain access to whatever goods or services he needs from mother or father. His older brother has taken the password game to a whole new level.
He will say: "What's the magic word?"
The younger one will diligently say "Please."
"Wrong," the older one says. "the magic word is 'magic word'."
Round and round they go, trying to out trick each other, in the verbal equivalent of computer hacking.
The other night I was retelling the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves the other day to them. I think the question came up regarding "Open sesame" and what exactly is "sesame". At any rate, it was important that Ali Baba use the correct password. To say "Open bananas" would not work no matter how heartfelt, how loudly it was shouted.
One, or perhaps "the", most marked trait of monastics of any stripe are their focus on the psalms as a primary way of prayer. Be it Benedictines chanting in choir or Jesuits whispering psalms to themselves as they go about the world, psalms are part and parcel of a monastic's toolbox.
I have been asked, by those who begin to be more concerted in their spiritual efforts how to pray the psalms. The difficulties seem to come from two places: one is the need to gather more and more information; two, the repetitive lamentations of the psalms. Anyone who has actually read through the psalms more than once will quickly realize that the psalmist, and frequently those attributed to David, was constantly claiming innocence. It seems everyone around him was to blame but himself. We sophisticated moderns tend to think that this is rather spiritually and emotionally immature of him.
The conversation usually goes something like this:
"David is whining again! I do not know how I can be uplifted by his psalms!"
"Why do you think he is whining?"
"Because he keeps blaming everyone else for his problems. Does he really think he is perfect?"
"And you think this is wrong?"
"Of course it is wrong! No one is blameless. He is falling into this victim-hood trap!"
"And the way to avoid it is?"
"To accept responsibility, of course! To rely on God!"
"So in your spiritual life you live with full realization that the things that happen to you are really your fault? Or God's?"
Of course this leads to uncomfortable moments of silence. It is easy for us to blame David for blaming others. But the opposite view is equally unbalanced. We cannot blame ourselves for everything that happens either! If you do that you are going down the road of such New Age mumbo-jumbo as the Prosperity Gospel and the stuff preached on the book The Secret. And if you blame God for everything then you are falling into some sort of fatalism which denies the freedom which God has granted you.
So there has to be a balance, of course. But this work of balancing your life is not the purpose of the psalms. They are not there to balance you, but rather to expose your heart to its own imbalances.
Another very important part of the psalms is what it feeds us. We are what we eat, or to put it more generally, we will become like whatever we give our attention to. If you think and dream about money then everything you see and do is colored by money, value, profit and loss. The same thing goes to any of the eight wrong thoughts as outline by Evagrius. That is why they are "deadly". They deaden your heart and spirit. Jesus asks us to find our hearts by looking at what we treasure. This is not as complicated as it seems. What do you treasure?
There is another level of reading the psalms which is important - and this is to just read the psalms. Let me tell you what I mean. Let us take a well-known psalm such as the 23rd psalm. "The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want..." What usually happens is more like this:
The Lord (oh Lord Jesus thank you) is my shepherd (of course this means he leads me and guides me) to the still waters (which are the good places in life and sheep Jesus always calls us sheep I wonder if he was thinking of this psalm and why sheep I don't like sheep) he leads me on the paths of righteousness and my cup overflows (yes thank you God for all the blessings of this life especially for my job and my family but please do not let the boss find out about those emails I sent out)...
And on and on. This is how we usually read the psalms. And I am being generous here - usually our inner dialogue is not nearly as prayerful as that! If your mind is like mine the inner dialog tends to be absurd and profane.
To really make the psalms your way, or as the Camaldolese would say it "the way is in the psalms", you need to resist the temptation to follow any association of ideas. You just take the one psalm in front of you and it alone. You can follow the various connections to specific Old Testament passages later when you do Bible study. There will be other times for that. You can also let the psalms inspire your thinking at other times of the day, and even to let your prayer life be circumscribed by the psalms, as in the example above. This is all very good and profitable, but it is not using the psalter as a tool.
So when you read the psalms, just read the psalms. Just read the specific words before you. Of course our "monkey mind" will jump all over the place and refuse to be confined to such small cage! But do not worry about that. Ignore it. The mind will not "die" if it cannot think of 1000 different things at the same time.
Read the psalm very slowly. At first read it as if there was a comma between each word: "The, Lord, is, my, shepherd." Then do it as if there was a stop: "The. Lord. Is. My. Shepherd." But do not put any special emphasis in any of the words. Just each word at a time. With plenty of silence around them.
Of course, at this rate it will take you about 10 minutes to recite the 23rd psalm. Clearly you cannot go through the psalter with a lot of speed! You may end up spending a week or more on the longer psalms, like 119. But so what? What's the hurry? You can read through and study and cross reference the psalms during your Bible study time. But when you are using them to pray just say the psalms.
A couple of last pointers.
1) Speaking. Most of us tend to have an affected "reader's voice" when we approach the Bible. People who have really lovely voices make all these contortions when reading the Bible. Why? Somewhere they've learnt that a "Bible voice" is important to convey the seriousness of this situation. You know what I mean. The reading becomes so dramatic! While this may have some value, when you are reading the psalms for yourself try to avoid the drama. Just search for and speak with yor normal voice. Or better with the kind of voice you would use when having a quiet conversation. No special intonation. Just one word at a time in your normal voice and cadence.
2) Chanting. I love chanting the psalms. I love chanting the psalms by myself. I have a terrible singing voice, but even I can chant. Part of what makes chanting good is that it forces you to drop the drama out of reading. You have to accentuate different places in the psalms and this forces you out of your emotional readings. Another thing that chanting will give you is pace. The regular, non-hurried and non-slack pace of chanting forces you to keep moving. This prevents some of the monkey mind tricks because if you follow the word associations you will lose your place in the chant.
Penalizing yourself: one way to try to tame the monkey mind is to state (to yourself) quite clearly that if you get distracted in saying a psalm you will go back to the beginning and say it over until you can say it without interruptions. In a monastic setting monks in the choir are required to make some sort of public confession of error when reciting the psalms. Some version of bowing to the choir in apology is the most frequent form. This public humiliation is quite appropriate. But when you are doing it by yourself it is harder to enforce. So I recommend a rule of going back to the beginning.
Now it is possible that some days you will just not be able to bring your "A game" to the recitation. That is ok as well. If you take the psalms as a vital part of your spiritual life, in the course of decades, days where things did not go so well will not matter. The sheer volume of the work will carry you through. So you set yourself a target of say 15 or 20 minutes to recite. You pick one or two psalms. And you stick with it. When the time is up the time is up. You may have barely finished one psalm! But that is ok. Later today or tomorrow you can do it again. Take it up from where you left off. As St. Francis de Sales says, "Even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your mind back and place it again in our Lord’s presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed."
Here we come to the culmination of monastic spiritual wisdom. The words of the psalms themselves are the way to God. As you read the psalm once or twice. try to memorize it - the smaller ones are easier. Be very careful with the words. Do not paraphrase, because that's another mind-trick. Just the plain words. Just the psalm. Do not try to "improve" upon the psalms or change them in any way. I know many monastic communities, and indeed our weekly lectionary, which skips over the more deprecatory stanzas of the psalter - perhaps in fear of offending the hearers. This is a great tragedy. I wish people would be more offended on Sundays! Spiritual offense (as opposed to being bullied from the pulpit) is very healthy for our souls, as it tends to deflate the ego. But the psalms, just as they stand, with their smashing babies and prayers for the suffering of enemies, embody about 3,000 years of spiritual wisdom. You cannot access this treasure trove of wisdom if you do not have the right password. Meditate on the psalms as they are, and you will find that your very life will begin to resonate with the spirit of humility and love that empower the words.
Be changed by walking the way of the psalms.
He will say: "What's the magic word?"
The younger one will diligently say "Please."
"Wrong," the older one says. "the magic word is 'magic word'."
Round and round they go, trying to out trick each other, in the verbal equivalent of computer hacking.
The other night I was retelling the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves the other day to them. I think the question came up regarding "Open sesame" and what exactly is "sesame". At any rate, it was important that Ali Baba use the correct password. To say "Open bananas" would not work no matter how heartfelt, how loudly it was shouted.
One, or perhaps "the", most marked trait of monastics of any stripe are their focus on the psalms as a primary way of prayer. Be it Benedictines chanting in choir or Jesuits whispering psalms to themselves as they go about the world, psalms are part and parcel of a monastic's toolbox.
I have been asked, by those who begin to be more concerted in their spiritual efforts how to pray the psalms. The difficulties seem to come from two places: one is the need to gather more and more information; two, the repetitive lamentations of the psalms. Anyone who has actually read through the psalms more than once will quickly realize that the psalmist, and frequently those attributed to David, was constantly claiming innocence. It seems everyone around him was to blame but himself. We sophisticated moderns tend to think that this is rather spiritually and emotionally immature of him.
The conversation usually goes something like this:
"David is whining again! I do not know how I can be uplifted by his psalms!"
"Why do you think he is whining?"
"Because he keeps blaming everyone else for his problems. Does he really think he is perfect?"
"And you think this is wrong?"
"Of course it is wrong! No one is blameless. He is falling into this victim-hood trap!"
"And the way to avoid it is?"
"To accept responsibility, of course! To rely on God!"
"So in your spiritual life you live with full realization that the things that happen to you are really your fault? Or God's?"
Of course this leads to uncomfortable moments of silence. It is easy for us to blame David for blaming others. But the opposite view is equally unbalanced. We cannot blame ourselves for everything that happens either! If you do that you are going down the road of such New Age mumbo-jumbo as the Prosperity Gospel and the stuff preached on the book The Secret. And if you blame God for everything then you are falling into some sort of fatalism which denies the freedom which God has granted you.
So there has to be a balance, of course. But this work of balancing your life is not the purpose of the psalms. They are not there to balance you, but rather to expose your heart to its own imbalances.
Another very important part of the psalms is what it feeds us. We are what we eat, or to put it more generally, we will become like whatever we give our attention to. If you think and dream about money then everything you see and do is colored by money, value, profit and loss. The same thing goes to any of the eight wrong thoughts as outline by Evagrius. That is why they are "deadly". They deaden your heart and spirit. Jesus asks us to find our hearts by looking at what we treasure. This is not as complicated as it seems. What do you treasure?
There is another level of reading the psalms which is important - and this is to just read the psalms. Let me tell you what I mean. Let us take a well-known psalm such as the 23rd psalm. "The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want..." What usually happens is more like this:
The Lord (oh Lord Jesus thank you) is my shepherd (of course this means he leads me and guides me) to the still waters (which are the good places in life and sheep Jesus always calls us sheep I wonder if he was thinking of this psalm and why sheep I don't like sheep) he leads me on the paths of righteousness and my cup overflows (yes thank you God for all the blessings of this life especially for my job and my family but please do not let the boss find out about those emails I sent out)...
And on and on. This is how we usually read the psalms. And I am being generous here - usually our inner dialogue is not nearly as prayerful as that! If your mind is like mine the inner dialog tends to be absurd and profane.
To really make the psalms your way, or as the Camaldolese would say it "the way is in the psalms", you need to resist the temptation to follow any association of ideas. You just take the one psalm in front of you and it alone. You can follow the various connections to specific Old Testament passages later when you do Bible study. There will be other times for that. You can also let the psalms inspire your thinking at other times of the day, and even to let your prayer life be circumscribed by the psalms, as in the example above. This is all very good and profitable, but it is not using the psalter as a tool.
So when you read the psalms, just read the psalms. Just read the specific words before you. Of course our "monkey mind" will jump all over the place and refuse to be confined to such small cage! But do not worry about that. Ignore it. The mind will not "die" if it cannot think of 1000 different things at the same time.
Read the psalm very slowly. At first read it as if there was a comma between each word: "The, Lord, is, my, shepherd." Then do it as if there was a stop: "The. Lord. Is. My. Shepherd." But do not put any special emphasis in any of the words. Just each word at a time. With plenty of silence around them.
Of course, at this rate it will take you about 10 minutes to recite the 23rd psalm. Clearly you cannot go through the psalter with a lot of speed! You may end up spending a week or more on the longer psalms, like 119. But so what? What's the hurry? You can read through and study and cross reference the psalms during your Bible study time. But when you are using them to pray just say the psalms.
A couple of last pointers.
1) Speaking. Most of us tend to have an affected "reader's voice" when we approach the Bible. People who have really lovely voices make all these contortions when reading the Bible. Why? Somewhere they've learnt that a "Bible voice" is important to convey the seriousness of this situation. You know what I mean. The reading becomes so dramatic! While this may have some value, when you are reading the psalms for yourself try to avoid the drama. Just search for and speak with yor normal voice. Or better with the kind of voice you would use when having a quiet conversation. No special intonation. Just one word at a time in your normal voice and cadence.
2) Chanting. I love chanting the psalms. I love chanting the psalms by myself. I have a terrible singing voice, but even I can chant. Part of what makes chanting good is that it forces you to drop the drama out of reading. You have to accentuate different places in the psalms and this forces you out of your emotional readings. Another thing that chanting will give you is pace. The regular, non-hurried and non-slack pace of chanting forces you to keep moving. This prevents some of the monkey mind tricks because if you follow the word associations you will lose your place in the chant.
Penalizing yourself: one way to try to tame the monkey mind is to state (to yourself) quite clearly that if you get distracted in saying a psalm you will go back to the beginning and say it over until you can say it without interruptions. In a monastic setting monks in the choir are required to make some sort of public confession of error when reciting the psalms. Some version of bowing to the choir in apology is the most frequent form. This public humiliation is quite appropriate. But when you are doing it by yourself it is harder to enforce. So I recommend a rule of going back to the beginning.
Now it is possible that some days you will just not be able to bring your "A game" to the recitation. That is ok as well. If you take the psalms as a vital part of your spiritual life, in the course of decades, days where things did not go so well will not matter. The sheer volume of the work will carry you through. So you set yourself a target of say 15 or 20 minutes to recite. You pick one or two psalms. And you stick with it. When the time is up the time is up. You may have barely finished one psalm! But that is ok. Later today or tomorrow you can do it again. Take it up from where you left off. As St. Francis de Sales says, "Even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your mind back and place it again in our Lord’s presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed."
Here we come to the culmination of monastic spiritual wisdom. The words of the psalms themselves are the way to God. As you read the psalm once or twice. try to memorize it - the smaller ones are easier. Be very careful with the words. Do not paraphrase, because that's another mind-trick. Just the plain words. Just the psalm. Do not try to "improve" upon the psalms or change them in any way. I know many monastic communities, and indeed our weekly lectionary, which skips over the more deprecatory stanzas of the psalter - perhaps in fear of offending the hearers. This is a great tragedy. I wish people would be more offended on Sundays! Spiritual offense (as opposed to being bullied from the pulpit) is very healthy for our souls, as it tends to deflate the ego. But the psalms, just as they stand, with their smashing babies and prayers for the suffering of enemies, embody about 3,000 years of spiritual wisdom. You cannot access this treasure trove of wisdom if you do not have the right password. Meditate on the psalms as they are, and you will find that your very life will begin to resonate with the spirit of humility and love that empower the words.
Be changed by walking the way of the psalms.
Walking on water by 2045
"He will again have compassion upon us; He will suppress our iniquities. And Thou will cast all their sins in the depths of the sea." (Micah 7:19)
If Jesus had no sin then this would explain why the sea did not swallow him up - the swallowing image is a common one referring to how weighty our transgressions are. So he can walk on water simply based on the fact that he is not weighed down by his sins. Eventually, after his resurrection he could even fly!
What does this say about our future bodies? It almost sounds like science fiction, but the idea that we can live at a much higher level is one that is explored by many writers, most of which are not writing in terms of the Christian apocalypse.
One of my favorite contemporary sci-fi writers is Rudy Rucker. I was first introduced to his work when reading a non-fiction book of his on higher dimensions. It is a mathematical exploration of higher dimensions.
Since then he has gone on to write novels which deal with the Singularity. This is a concept which comes from the halls of Artificial Intelligence, and since then has been adopted by science fiction writers. The term itself was coined by another of my favorite writers, Vernor Vinge, in the early Nineties.
Since then it has been adopted by a variety of authors, the most notable of which is Ray Kurzweil.
As Kurzweil understands it "The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today - the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity."
The other day I was talking with someone about illness and the breakdown of our bodies. Among many nuggets of information this person described the experience they had taking a new form of anesthetic which is not based on the traditional opiates. This anesthetic leaves you wide-awake during surgery, which has many beneficial uses.
But most interesting to me were the post-op side effects. Apparently this drug heightens your sense of pleasure. Not being a doctor or a chemist I cannot quite understand how the drug works, but I figure that it must suppress the pain areas of the brain (thus making it an anesthetic). but because it does not knock you out, it leaves you with the nearly-unbearable feeling of pleasure at almost everything you do.
The person described how they were given some crackers and a glass of orange juice after the surgery, and that when they tasted it those were the most delicious things they had ever eaten! Just plain hospital-grade crackers. Yet they tasted like manna from heaven, or perhaps one should say ambrosia. At any rate - with the pain mechanism removed it appears that the pleasure mechanism went on overdrive.
We then wondered whether this is just a glimpse of what our resurrected bodies will be like. The removal of the "stain" of Original Sin would leave us able to levels of pleasure which we can only dream about now. A state of living where seeing a flower, or drinking a glass of water would be immensely pleasurable. A state of such joy and freedom (think for a moment of existence without a bad back, or even the possibility of a bad back!) which brings the thoughts of "they neither marry nor are given in marriage" a whole new level of possibility.
For a moment I imagine worship in a church in 2045 (this date is given by Kurzweil as the probable date of the Singularity). Our existence is at this point transformed into the weightlessness of purity. Certainly for anyone looking in from the early 21st century it would seem to have entered a church populated with angels. Pure joy emanating from the congregation - palpable and even visual perhaps. There would be no pews, I believe - who wants to sit down anyway (and there is no bad back or bad knees to worry about)? When I think of exciting sporting events, in my case many images of World Cup soccer come to mind, I do not think sitting was one of the actions: there was much pacing, much shouting (of course) and much celebration which is always done standing up, high-fiving, hugs and kisses all around.
It is very likely that in such a state we would be intimately united, knowing each other's hearts. Again from this end of the 21st century this is a threatening idea! But then it is the norm. There would be much praising, and much deep unitive silence, especially during the Eucharist. The elements would be transformed into Body and Blood because the congregation would not be seeing it with eyes of flesh, but rather with open eyes of the spirit.
I think there would be much music. Perhaps even something which might look like the church in Acts - perhaps speaking in tongues? Certainly a palpable WHOOSH of energy going through all participants.
This is probably the worship going on in Heaven right now. Constant singing of Hallelujah! Constant praise.
Of course, for those encumbered by their selfishness, by their sin, by their unacceptable of the Good News, then all this hootin' and hollerin' is not "heavenly" at all! It is rather punishment - like being permanently condemned to live in an apartment with very noisy neighbors to both sides and above you!
How else will our worship be changed in 2045? And how much of it will be a wiser return to our origins? I say wiser return, because I see our progress, where there is any, as part of spiral (not circular) - thus at every loop and lap we go over the same points, same historical patterns, same social-economic challenges, but with a newer appreciation for these issues gained by experience, tempered by wisdom.
This leads me to another view of the 2045 church - the role of the elders. From the beginning the local church was to be wisely and charitably overseen by elders - in fact the words presbyter and bishop, are synonyms for elders. We will, by 2045, regain this understanding of wisdom and will also return to Biblical patterns which will prove to be far from outmoded. In fact they will be seen as prophetic!
Once more, when people enter a church, they will be astounded at how much we love each other, how deep is our communion, and how believers are empowered by peace to go and server their Lord in their local communities.
If Jesus had no sin then this would explain why the sea did not swallow him up - the swallowing image is a common one referring to how weighty our transgressions are. So he can walk on water simply based on the fact that he is not weighed down by his sins. Eventually, after his resurrection he could even fly!
What does this say about our future bodies? It almost sounds like science fiction, but the idea that we can live at a much higher level is one that is explored by many writers, most of which are not writing in terms of the Christian apocalypse.
One of my favorite contemporary sci-fi writers is Rudy Rucker. I was first introduced to his work when reading a non-fiction book of his on higher dimensions. It is a mathematical exploration of higher dimensions.
Since then he has gone on to write novels which deal with the Singularity. This is a concept which comes from the halls of Artificial Intelligence, and since then has been adopted by science fiction writers. The term itself was coined by another of my favorite writers, Vernor Vinge, in the early Nineties.
Since then it has been adopted by a variety of authors, the most notable of which is Ray Kurzweil.
As Kurzweil understands it "The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today - the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity."
The other day I was talking with someone about illness and the breakdown of our bodies. Among many nuggets of information this person described the experience they had taking a new form of anesthetic which is not based on the traditional opiates. This anesthetic leaves you wide-awake during surgery, which has many beneficial uses.
But most interesting to me were the post-op side effects. Apparently this drug heightens your sense of pleasure. Not being a doctor or a chemist I cannot quite understand how the drug works, but I figure that it must suppress the pain areas of the brain (thus making it an anesthetic). but because it does not knock you out, it leaves you with the nearly-unbearable feeling of pleasure at almost everything you do.
The person described how they were given some crackers and a glass of orange juice after the surgery, and that when they tasted it those were the most delicious things they had ever eaten! Just plain hospital-grade crackers. Yet they tasted like manna from heaven, or perhaps one should say ambrosia. At any rate - with the pain mechanism removed it appears that the pleasure mechanism went on overdrive.
We then wondered whether this is just a glimpse of what our resurrected bodies will be like. The removal of the "stain" of Original Sin would leave us able to levels of pleasure which we can only dream about now. A state of living where seeing a flower, or drinking a glass of water would be immensely pleasurable. A state of such joy and freedom (think for a moment of existence without a bad back, or even the possibility of a bad back!) which brings the thoughts of "they neither marry nor are given in marriage" a whole new level of possibility.
For a moment I imagine worship in a church in 2045 (this date is given by Kurzweil as the probable date of the Singularity). Our existence is at this point transformed into the weightlessness of purity. Certainly for anyone looking in from the early 21st century it would seem to have entered a church populated with angels. Pure joy emanating from the congregation - palpable and even visual perhaps. There would be no pews, I believe - who wants to sit down anyway (and there is no bad back or bad knees to worry about)? When I think of exciting sporting events, in my case many images of World Cup soccer come to mind, I do not think sitting was one of the actions: there was much pacing, much shouting (of course) and much celebration which is always done standing up, high-fiving, hugs and kisses all around.
It is very likely that in such a state we would be intimately united, knowing each other's hearts. Again from this end of the 21st century this is a threatening idea! But then it is the norm. There would be much praising, and much deep unitive silence, especially during the Eucharist. The elements would be transformed into Body and Blood because the congregation would not be seeing it with eyes of flesh, but rather with open eyes of the spirit.
I think there would be much music. Perhaps even something which might look like the church in Acts - perhaps speaking in tongues? Certainly a palpable WHOOSH of energy going through all participants.
This is probably the worship going on in Heaven right now. Constant singing of Hallelujah! Constant praise.
Of course, for those encumbered by their selfishness, by their sin, by their unacceptable of the Good News, then all this hootin' and hollerin' is not "heavenly" at all! It is rather punishment - like being permanently condemned to live in an apartment with very noisy neighbors to both sides and above you!
How else will our worship be changed in 2045? And how much of it will be a wiser return to our origins? I say wiser return, because I see our progress, where there is any, as part of spiral (not circular) - thus at every loop and lap we go over the same points, same historical patterns, same social-economic challenges, but with a newer appreciation for these issues gained by experience, tempered by wisdom.
This leads me to another view of the 2045 church - the role of the elders. From the beginning the local church was to be wisely and charitably overseen by elders - in fact the words presbyter and bishop, are synonyms for elders. We will, by 2045, regain this understanding of wisdom and will also return to Biblical patterns which will prove to be far from outmoded. In fact they will be seen as prophetic!
Once more, when people enter a church, they will be astounded at how much we love each other, how deep is our communion, and how believers are empowered by peace to go and server their Lord in their local communities.
Sermon notes 08/02/2009
(2 Sam. 11.26-12.13 - Ps 51 - Eph 4.1-16 - Jn 6.24-35)
So my beloved and long-suffering wife said she had a lot to do today so she said I had to keep this short...so it will be short!
But...there are a few things we need to talk about today's readings which I think will be profitable to us all.
First let's see - David and Bathsheba. Wow didn't that whole story sound like something you would watch on late night cable?
More importantly to what I want to talk about today is the end of the story - how the prophet Samuel brings David to repentance and a change of ways.
David, the great King David, root of the lineage which will eventually bring in the Messiah, Jesus - does not so well in this episode. It is a pivotal episode in the reign of David, and when you read the rest of David's story it is worth keeping this event in mind. David deliberately breaks several of the 10 Commandments in this episode. He had plenty of opportunities to stop! I guess glimpsing Bathsheba skinny-dipping was not really his fault. But certainly coming down and finding out who she was, and then summoning her, and then sleeping with her, and then ordering the murder of her husband - are you telling me who could not stop at any one of these points?
Eventually through the prophet Samuel he is brought face-to-face with the error of his actions and their terrible consequences. David's heart breaks. There is only one thing more terrible than finding out you are sinner, and that is finding out just how much of a sinner you are! So Psalm 51 records how David goes about asking for and trusting in God's mercy through his confession, petition for mercy, a vow to praise God on being absolved and finally a prayer for prosperity - not just prosperity of wealth, but more importantly moral prosperity - because the righteous and true worship he describes at the end of the psalm can only happen from someone who is deeply moral.
And this brings me to the meat of our conversation here today. There is a theological concept called the ordo salutis, the order of salvation. This concept outlines for us the process of salvation from beginning to end. It goes like this:
1. Election - by God's sovereign choice
2. Gospel/calling - hearing the Good News proclaimed or feeling called by God
3. Regeneration - that is being "born again"
4. Conversion - which means belief in Jesus Christ as your Savior coupled with repentance from your previous life
5. Justification - where we are made right in God's eyes through the merits of Jesus
6. Adoption - at which point we become counted as Christ's own forever
7. Sanctification - which basically mean right living
8. Perseverance - which means remaining a Christian through the rest of your life
9. Death - going to rest in the Lord
10. Glorification - which is when we receive perfected bodies upon Jesus' Second Coming
The first step is clearly all God's doing - election. But the next steps through adoption are what we would call "becoming a Christian" Somewhere in there is the stage of baptism or confirmation (depending on age). The two steps of sanctification and perseverance are what we would call "Christian living" - which is what we all should be doing now.
Ok so hold on to this process and ideas as we go through the rest of the readings.
Let me touch briefly on the Gospel. I want to highlight only a couple of things which are pertinent to what I am trying to talk with you today. Did you notice how the Jews wanted to know from Jesus what works of sanctification, what things, what formulas, what sacrifices, they needed to do to be saved?
Jesus corrects them by pointing out to them that the process of sanctification, of right living, begins at a much deeper and earlier stage. The deeper levels of the ordo salutis need to be completed before you can move on the the next one. First you have to be chosen by God. This is totally out of your control. God will choose you when it pleases God to choose you. No options. Then regeneration through faith which leads to conversion, justification and adoption.
Only then can a meaningful conversation begin about sanctification.
If you notice, the Jews had a "seeing is believing" approach. Show me signs. Show me something. The work of God is to belief without sight! 'Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."' (v. 29)
So now let's see what this means in practice. In Ephesians Paul deals with issues of belief. First he lists 3 foundations for true belief.
1) Humility: in Greek culture humility was something expected of slaves. Humility was seen as a vice for leaders and masters. But for Paul, who is concerned about unity of the Church, pride is very dangerous because it promotes disunity.
2) Gentleness/meekness: what Paul means by gentleness is really about having your emotions under control. It is the dynamic balance between being angry all the time and never being angry, for example. The godly person, the one who is a slave of God, or in Paul's phrasing "a prisoner of the Lord", such a person is angry at the right time and never angry at the wrong time.
3) Patience: in this case it means having a spirit that never quits but endures to the end, even in adversity. It is also the capacity to hold back (or hold off) from retaliation.
Assuming we master these foundational skills of being a disciple, then we will be able to reap the rewards of a healthy community. Paul lists 7 elements which are centered on the Trinity:
1. One body of believers
2. One spirit - the Holy Spirit which energizes the one body
3. One hope in Heaven
4. One Lord, Jesus Christ
5. One faith - not the Creeds, but more the inner faith, the faith of the heart and mind. Instead of one faith we could say "one mind" - we Christians are of one mind.
6. One baptism
7. One God and Father of all believers
The Church, this body of believers, us, is energized by one Holy Spirit, so that we all have one and the same hope. We are then united to our one Lord Christ through each individual's act of faith. This is symbolized by the one baptism which we together with Christians from the time of Christ to when He returns, undergo.
All of this is under one God, the Father who is Supreme Ruler over all believers, who acts through all believers when they are humble, gentle and patient, and who lives in all of us. So the Church is one and it is united.
Within this unity, each believer, each of us, is given a talent, a gift. So while the church is one it is also plural, diverse.
The way to understand this is that we are gifted believers - we are a gift to the church!
So your particular talents, music, or teaching, or organizing, or (the one I find most important) the gift of showing up ready to help, you are all gifts from God to the church.
We are gifted believers, gifted by God to the Church, just as the Church is one Body gifted by God to the world.
So here it is my friends - take this Psalm 51. Memorize it. Use it. The frequent recollection of a psalm, especially this one, will help bring you back to patience, humility and gentleness. Take this prayer by David, who had fallen from lofty heights, and use it to remind yourselves of the work of sanctification and perseverance which you have to do - toil at it until the time when God calls you home to rest and wait with him the glorification in the last days.
But do not be like those who came to Jesus asking for signs, asking for things to see before they believed. Understand that you need to be born again, be converted from your old ways (which may be only as old as one minute ago). In the wisdom of the monastic tradition, humility is seen as the best and most efficient way to clear out the way for God to shine through you. Over and over there is an emphasis on humility as superior to any and every form of asceticism, of works, of service even. A humble and contrite heart is very pleasing to the Lord. So what is humility?
An old man was asked, "What is humility?" and he said in reply, "Humility is a great work, and a work of God. The way of humility is to undertake bodily labour and believe yourself a sinner and make yourself subject to all." Then a brother said, "What does it mean, to be subject to all?" The old man answered, "To be subject to all is not to give your attention to the sins of others but always to give your attention to your own sins and to pray without ceasing to God."
Abba Macarius was returning to his cell from the marsh carrying palm-leaves, the devil met him with a sharp sickle and would have struck him but he could not. He cried out, "Great is the violence I suffer from you, Macarius, for when I want to hurt you, I cannot. But whatever you do, I do and more also. You fast now and then, but I am never refreshed by any food; you often keep vigil, but I never fall asleep. Only in one thing are you better than I am and I acknowledge that." Macarius said to him, "What is that?" and he replied, "It is because of your humility alone that I cannot overcome you."
You pray about that. Amen!
So my beloved and long-suffering wife said she had a lot to do today so she said I had to keep this short...so it will be short!
But...there are a few things we need to talk about today's readings which I think will be profitable to us all.
First let's see - David and Bathsheba. Wow didn't that whole story sound like something you would watch on late night cable?
More importantly to what I want to talk about today is the end of the story - how the prophet Samuel brings David to repentance and a change of ways.
David, the great King David, root of the lineage which will eventually bring in the Messiah, Jesus - does not so well in this episode. It is a pivotal episode in the reign of David, and when you read the rest of David's story it is worth keeping this event in mind. David deliberately breaks several of the 10 Commandments in this episode. He had plenty of opportunities to stop! I guess glimpsing Bathsheba skinny-dipping was not really his fault. But certainly coming down and finding out who she was, and then summoning her, and then sleeping with her, and then ordering the murder of her husband - are you telling me who could not stop at any one of these points?
Eventually through the prophet Samuel he is brought face-to-face with the error of his actions and their terrible consequences. David's heart breaks. There is only one thing more terrible than finding out you are sinner, and that is finding out just how much of a sinner you are! So Psalm 51 records how David goes about asking for and trusting in God's mercy through his confession, petition for mercy, a vow to praise God on being absolved and finally a prayer for prosperity - not just prosperity of wealth, but more importantly moral prosperity - because the righteous and true worship he describes at the end of the psalm can only happen from someone who is deeply moral.
And this brings me to the meat of our conversation here today. There is a theological concept called the ordo salutis, the order of salvation. This concept outlines for us the process of salvation from beginning to end. It goes like this:
1. Election - by God's sovereign choice
2. Gospel/calling - hearing the Good News proclaimed or feeling called by God
3. Regeneration - that is being "born again"
4. Conversion - which means belief in Jesus Christ as your Savior coupled with repentance from your previous life
5. Justification - where we are made right in God's eyes through the merits of Jesus
6. Adoption - at which point we become counted as Christ's own forever
7. Sanctification - which basically mean right living
8. Perseverance - which means remaining a Christian through the rest of your life
9. Death - going to rest in the Lord
10. Glorification - which is when we receive perfected bodies upon Jesus' Second Coming
The first step is clearly all God's doing - election. But the next steps through adoption are what we would call "becoming a Christian" Somewhere in there is the stage of baptism or confirmation (depending on age). The two steps of sanctification and perseverance are what we would call "Christian living" - which is what we all should be doing now.
Ok so hold on to this process and ideas as we go through the rest of the readings.
Let me touch briefly on the Gospel. I want to highlight only a couple of things which are pertinent to what I am trying to talk with you today. Did you notice how the Jews wanted to know from Jesus what works of sanctification, what things, what formulas, what sacrifices, they needed to do to be saved?
Jesus corrects them by pointing out to them that the process of sanctification, of right living, begins at a much deeper and earlier stage. The deeper levels of the ordo salutis need to be completed before you can move on the the next one. First you have to be chosen by God. This is totally out of your control. God will choose you when it pleases God to choose you. No options. Then regeneration through faith which leads to conversion, justification and adoption.
Only then can a meaningful conversation begin about sanctification.
If you notice, the Jews had a "seeing is believing" approach. Show me signs. Show me something. The work of God is to belief without sight! 'Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."' (v. 29)
So now let's see what this means in practice. In Ephesians Paul deals with issues of belief. First he lists 3 foundations for true belief.
1) Humility: in Greek culture humility was something expected of slaves. Humility was seen as a vice for leaders and masters. But for Paul, who is concerned about unity of the Church, pride is very dangerous because it promotes disunity.
2) Gentleness/meekness: what Paul means by gentleness is really about having your emotions under control. It is the dynamic balance between being angry all the time and never being angry, for example. The godly person, the one who is a slave of God, or in Paul's phrasing "a prisoner of the Lord", such a person is angry at the right time and never angry at the wrong time.
3) Patience: in this case it means having a spirit that never quits but endures to the end, even in adversity. It is also the capacity to hold back (or hold off) from retaliation.
Assuming we master these foundational skills of being a disciple, then we will be able to reap the rewards of a healthy community. Paul lists 7 elements which are centered on the Trinity:
1. One body of believers
2. One spirit - the Holy Spirit which energizes the one body
3. One hope in Heaven
4. One Lord, Jesus Christ
5. One faith - not the Creeds, but more the inner faith, the faith of the heart and mind. Instead of one faith we could say "one mind" - we Christians are of one mind.
6. One baptism
7. One God and Father of all believers
The Church, this body of believers, us, is energized by one Holy Spirit, so that we all have one and the same hope. We are then united to our one Lord Christ through each individual's act of faith. This is symbolized by the one baptism which we together with Christians from the time of Christ to when He returns, undergo.
All of this is under one God, the Father who is Supreme Ruler over all believers, who acts through all believers when they are humble, gentle and patient, and who lives in all of us. So the Church is one and it is united.
Within this unity, each believer, each of us, is given a talent, a gift. So while the church is one it is also plural, diverse.
The way to understand this is that we are gifted believers - we are a gift to the church!
So your particular talents, music, or teaching, or organizing, or (the one I find most important) the gift of showing up ready to help, you are all gifts from God to the church.
We are gifted believers, gifted by God to the Church, just as the Church is one Body gifted by God to the world.
So here it is my friends - take this Psalm 51. Memorize it. Use it. The frequent recollection of a psalm, especially this one, will help bring you back to patience, humility and gentleness. Take this prayer by David, who had fallen from lofty heights, and use it to remind yourselves of the work of sanctification and perseverance which you have to do - toil at it until the time when God calls you home to rest and wait with him the glorification in the last days.
But do not be like those who came to Jesus asking for signs, asking for things to see before they believed. Understand that you need to be born again, be converted from your old ways (which may be only as old as one minute ago). In the wisdom of the monastic tradition, humility is seen as the best and most efficient way to clear out the way for God to shine through you. Over and over there is an emphasis on humility as superior to any and every form of asceticism, of works, of service even. A humble and contrite heart is very pleasing to the Lord. So what is humility?
An old man was asked, "What is humility?" and he said in reply, "Humility is a great work, and a work of God. The way of humility is to undertake bodily labour and believe yourself a sinner and make yourself subject to all." Then a brother said, "What does it mean, to be subject to all?" The old man answered, "To be subject to all is not to give your attention to the sins of others but always to give your attention to your own sins and to pray without ceasing to God."
Abba Macarius was returning to his cell from the marsh carrying palm-leaves, the devil met him with a sharp sickle and would have struck him but he could not. He cried out, "Great is the violence I suffer from you, Macarius, for when I want to hurt you, I cannot. But whatever you do, I do and more also. You fast now and then, but I am never refreshed by any food; you often keep vigil, but I never fall asleep. Only in one thing are you better than I am and I acknowledge that." Macarius said to him, "What is that?" and he replied, "It is because of your humility alone that I cannot overcome you."
You pray about that. Amen!
Deliver me from evil
The office where I work is being moved (Aug 2009). The whole corporate office is being boxed up and we are moving to a new building. While this is wonderful news, it is also cause for much weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is amazing to me the amount of stuff that people can collect in their tiny cubicles. They look like a clown car - boxes and boxes of stuff keep coming out of each of these small workspaces.
Together with the sheer volume of stuff accumulated, there is also a large amount of discontent and stress which is associated with any move. Psychologists tell us that issues of work, and moving houses are among the top three or top five (depends who you ask) stressful things in life. When you have an office move you are pretty much guaranteeing a perfect storm.
So I walk around trying to simultaneously stay out of people's way and reassure them that the servers will be functioning just perfectly the day after the move, that none of their highly important emails, all 1,527 of them, will not be lost - even though I not-so-secretly suspect that the majority of these highly important pieces of data refer to cookie recipes or hangover cures.
I also try to be prayerful or at least cognizant of my own need for prayer during these times. I grab on to my prayer beads like a drowning man to a rope.
As is gets closer to the day of the move I find myself praying against all sorts of possible, probable or completely ludicrous things that might go wrong - from a clumsy mover dropping a server on the floor - deliver us Lord. From having another meeting so people can vent their frustrations - deliver us Lord. From a meteor striking the Earth - deliver us Lord! And on and on.
This whole petition for delivery tends to be one of the most overlooked or over-used of the lines in the prayer the Lord gave to the disciples. Usually it gets translated in our hearts as "Lord protect me and do not allow anything bad to happen to me." There is a tone of fear and trepidation. There is recognition of weakness. there is also a petition for the opposite to happen - don't let me get fired, don't let me get robbed, don't let me be injured. The request for deliverance from the Evil One or just generic, garden-variety evil is also common in Jewish prayers of the time.
But is this how I should read it? Or is this the only way to read it? There is an interesting story from the Desert Fathers which goes like this:
There was an old man living in the desert who served God for so many years and he said, "Lord, let me know if I have pleased you."
He saw an angel who said to him, "You have not yet become like the gardener in such and such place." The old man marveled and said, "I will go off to the city to see both him and what it is that he does that surpasses all my work and toil of all these years."
So he went to the city and asked the gardener about his way of life. When they were getting ready to eat in the evening, the old man heard people singing [baudy songs] in the streets, for the cell of the gardener was in a public place.
Therefore the old man said to him, "Brother, wanting as you do to live according to God, how do you remain in this place and not be troubled when you hear them singing these songs?"
The man said, "I tell you, Abba, I have never been troubled or scandalized."
When he heard this the old man said, "What, then, do you think in your heart when you hear these things?" And he replied, "That they are all going into the Kingdom."
When he heard this, the old man marveled and said, "This is the practice which surpasses my labor of all these years." (From:http://www.thenazareneway.com/paradise_of_the_desert_fathers.htm)
In this story it is clear that the evil I am asking to be delivered from is not the other, but rather myself. To be able to say with all certainty that "I have never been troubled or scandalized" would be amazing.
Take a leap of imagination and pretend for a second that you are not and will not be troubled by the behavior of others (or your own); that your environment will not have any effect on you, that you can truly say with Paul that you have nothing though possess all things (2 Cor. 6).
The next part, "Scandalized" is a lovely word which comes to English via the Old French "scandale" which means "cause of sin". It in turn comes from the Latin "scandalum" which means a trap, stumbling block, or temptation. And, as usual, these words come from the Greek.
Imagine and pretend for a moment that you are not and will not be scandalized by others. That their atrocious behavior will not bother you in the least. And, perhaps harder, that you will also not be impressed by their apparently flawless behavior either.
Hold on to this image. See how easy it is to then be able in your heart of hearts to know, not just believe or hope, but be certain that they are all going into the Kingdom?
Every day I sit at my boxed up cubicle, listening to the semi-hysterical prattle of my co-workers about the latest moving crisis and let try to let this be my prayer: they too are going to the Kingdom. Followed quickly by only 5 more days Lord. Only 4 more days Lord…
Together with the sheer volume of stuff accumulated, there is also a large amount of discontent and stress which is associated with any move. Psychologists tell us that issues of work, and moving houses are among the top three or top five (depends who you ask) stressful things in life. When you have an office move you are pretty much guaranteeing a perfect storm.
So I walk around trying to simultaneously stay out of people's way and reassure them that the servers will be functioning just perfectly the day after the move, that none of their highly important emails, all 1,527 of them, will not be lost - even though I not-so-secretly suspect that the majority of these highly important pieces of data refer to cookie recipes or hangover cures.
I also try to be prayerful or at least cognizant of my own need for prayer during these times. I grab on to my prayer beads like a drowning man to a rope.
As is gets closer to the day of the move I find myself praying against all sorts of possible, probable or completely ludicrous things that might go wrong - from a clumsy mover dropping a server on the floor - deliver us Lord. From having another meeting so people can vent their frustrations - deliver us Lord. From a meteor striking the Earth - deliver us Lord! And on and on.
This whole petition for delivery tends to be one of the most overlooked or over-used of the lines in the prayer the Lord gave to the disciples. Usually it gets translated in our hearts as "Lord protect me and do not allow anything bad to happen to me." There is a tone of fear and trepidation. There is recognition of weakness. there is also a petition for the opposite to happen - don't let me get fired, don't let me get robbed, don't let me be injured. The request for deliverance from the Evil One or just generic, garden-variety evil is also common in Jewish prayers of the time.
But is this how I should read it? Or is this the only way to read it? There is an interesting story from the Desert Fathers which goes like this:
There was an old man living in the desert who served God for so many years and he said, "Lord, let me know if I have pleased you."
He saw an angel who said to him, "You have not yet become like the gardener in such and such place." The old man marveled and said, "I will go off to the city to see both him and what it is that he does that surpasses all my work and toil of all these years."
So he went to the city and asked the gardener about his way of life. When they were getting ready to eat in the evening, the old man heard people singing [baudy songs] in the streets, for the cell of the gardener was in a public place.
Therefore the old man said to him, "Brother, wanting as you do to live according to God, how do you remain in this place and not be troubled when you hear them singing these songs?"
The man said, "I tell you, Abba, I have never been troubled or scandalized."
When he heard this the old man said, "What, then, do you think in your heart when you hear these things?" And he replied, "That they are all going into the Kingdom."
When he heard this, the old man marveled and said, "This is the practice which surpasses my labor of all these years." (From:http://www.thenazareneway.com/paradise_of_the_desert_fathers.htm)
In this story it is clear that the evil I am asking to be delivered from is not the other, but rather myself. To be able to say with all certainty that "I have never been troubled or scandalized" would be amazing.
Take a leap of imagination and pretend for a second that you are not and will not be troubled by the behavior of others (or your own); that your environment will not have any effect on you, that you can truly say with Paul that you have nothing though possess all things (2 Cor. 6).
The next part, "Scandalized" is a lovely word which comes to English via the Old French "scandale" which means "cause of sin". It in turn comes from the Latin "scandalum" which means a trap, stumbling block, or temptation. And, as usual, these words come from the Greek.
Imagine and pretend for a moment that you are not and will not be scandalized by others. That their atrocious behavior will not bother you in the least. And, perhaps harder, that you will also not be impressed by their apparently flawless behavior either.
Hold on to this image. See how easy it is to then be able in your heart of hearts to know, not just believe or hope, but be certain that they are all going into the Kingdom?
Every day I sit at my boxed up cubicle, listening to the semi-hysterical prattle of my co-workers about the latest moving crisis and let try to let this be my prayer: they too are going to the Kingdom. Followed quickly by only 5 more days Lord. Only 4 more days Lord…
Monday, July 6, 2009
Follow no rules
Giustiniani, one of the reformers of the Camaldolese, had a very un-Benedictine approach to the prayer life of the solitary. His basic rule was no-rule. He recommends nothing, he has no formulas. Unlike most writers on spiritual life, and especially on monastic life, and especially writers from that time, there is a disconcerting lack of rules for the solitary.
This is as it should be of course.
Here's some reasons why we should avoid rules for spiritual life:
1) It can dismiss or block individuality.
The incarnation created an individual. The only truly individual person. In this we should strive towards developing our individuality in healthy ways. C. S. Lewis said about saints that they were truly individual.
So if we set specific times and hours for everything (how, when, and where to recite the Offices; rules for fasting and vigils; regulations for lectio, etc) then what I am doing is mass-producing some sort of spiritual athlete.
When I was growing up I remember the elders around me wailing and complaining about the Soviet Union's Olympic "factories" with their hyper-steroided athletes, their mechanical training without any room for individuality. Indeed, part fo the Soviet experiment was indeed to reduce the individualism of each citizen for the benefit of the collective.
Of course, capitalism produces its own manufacturing of individuals. Where I work I am considered a "resource", and I work hard to be elevated to the status of "valuable asset". No one is an individual in any system where the functioning of the system is more important than those who fuel, propel, maintain and validate it.
2. Unrealistic goals and guilt
C.S. Lewis has an interesting thought on the issue of standards. On one of his essays he talks about the fact that progressives seem to believe that the "old standards" are stagnant or stale. But he counters by asking if the square of the hypotenuse being the sum of the square of the sides is stagnant? His point is: if you do have objective and legitimate and true standards, then it gives you a goal in life, a way to try to improve, to approximate that goal.
In this there is a certain type of uniformity. A Christian should be recognizable as a follower of Christ, as opposed to say, a Buddhist who should be recognized as a follower of Buddha. Even if I know nothing about the Son of God, I should see that a Christian is different (somehow) and that they are similar (again, somehow) to other Christians.
The absolute standard which every Christian should be working towards is Christ, of course. And any form of discipline in your life should be aimed at bringing you closer to that goal. This is an objective, fixed, external goal. This is the same thing that Christ asked of the apostles and that he asked the apostles to teach others - follow me, follow my commands. Immitate me as I immitate Christ, said St. Paul.
Having said this it is important to realize that some people are going to be more Christ-like than others. Even while Jesus was around some of the apostles were able to be more Christ-like than others. Peter, James and John for example. John was the disciple whom Christ loved - this does not mean that Christ had preferential love, it simply means John was a better imitator of Christ. Just as some are more naturally endowed athletes or scientists. Not everyone will be able to equally achieve levels of Christ-likeness.
This should be clear, and I am very very glad of this because it means two important things: one, it tells me that I am treasured as I am; two, God's love takes up the slack between who I am and the perfection of Christ - he is the prodigal Father who runs to meet me.
But when I formalize this quest for Christ-likeness into a strict set of rules for everyone I will be both neutralizing the awesome hopefulness of God's prodigality, as well as undermining and eventually destroying my self-worth in God's eyes through guilt.
3. Rules are a crutch
There is a way whereby contaminate the spiritual life. Rules have an insiduous way of replacing trust, belief, and faith - you know the things that make personal relationships so doggedly difficult and frustrating and tiresome.
With strict rules all you need to do, apparently, is to show up, sit in the cabboose and let the train take you.
An extreme example. A couple who chooses to have no children. They get the benefits of the tax breaks, they might even pool their resources for a nicer backyard or a bigger cars. But in every other way they live apart: they eat at different times and different foods. They go on vacations separately. They have no mutual friends. This is a marriage on paper-only. Some may envy the fact that they never fight or even bicker. Their lives are peaceful and tranquil (within the limits of life).
On the other extreme we can often mistake busyness for belief. Take a couple with many children, all of whom are in some sort of organized sport. They lead a disciplined life - with proper times for everything (otherwise they will be late for this or that practice). While Mum rushes one or more children to one sport, Dad rushes others to music practice. When they go on vacation they get a tour package to places like Disney, and they follow the routines. They are constantly busy, there are many chores. They actually have bad days and fight.
But this too is just a paper marriage. It is mildly better than the other one, because to produce children, at one point, the couple has had to stop and love each other, at least for about 10 minutes including foreplay.
There is so much busyness that the couple has no time to be a couple - they are "children facilitators."
You pile on the rules and you get busy, which apparently is better than being idle. Giustiniani's term for the solitary life is "vacare" - from which we get words like vacant and vacation. It is a life of leisure and not-doing.
Because he is no dummy, he is acutely aware that this could be seen as a life of slacking off. So most of his work is apologetic and polemic - trying to show how the "vacant life" is, in fact, more taxing and demanding than the externally regulated life. He has at one point a list of to-dos which goes on for about three pages. All of them are things that can only really be accomplished in solitude and comfort (well relative comfort - at least with the basic needs for food and shelter taken care of).
Are there any goals?
Of course, having no rules is not the same as having no structure and having no goals. The true slacker is one without goals. Solitaries are very goal oriented. They are just not too attached to one way of doing things. If there is attachment it is rather a single-minded focus on the Holy Spirit - who is very difficult to track and keep track of. The solitary then is a Spirit tracker, a Spirit-stalker.
To do this the solitary must employ everything in their lives. There is absolutely no city of refuge - as Jesus said even th ebirds get a nest, but the Son of Man gets no place to rest. This is, of course, an ontological statement - it is an approach to life which demonstrates an existential poverty. Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling: "To be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian–that only the knight of faith can do – and this is the one and only prodigy."
Finally, the most intersting goal is to spend time engaging as best I can Jesus. To engage jesus is to simultaneously try to discern His Heart and then discern His purpose for me. Once I know who Jesus is - not was - then I can begin my spiritual life. Until I meet Jesus I may be a good person, but I have no strategic direction to my efforts, or I am simply sitting in the caboose car enjoying the ride. Once I meet him, everything else will change, and will have to change. Then I begin a conversation with Jesus about what he wants from me.
Some complain that they do not know because Jesus hasn't told them. But God has already spoken multiple times - just go read it!
Here's where I run the risk of falling into rule-making errors. Everyone prays the Lord's Prayer. But the Lord's Prayer is really the Disciple's Model for Prayerfulness (but that is a cumbersome title). It is a challenge to not only petition God for these things (which one assumes are a sort of sphere of our lives where Jesus believes we should be asking for supernatural intervention - well-being (bread) and health (temptation and evil) as well as social concerns (kingdom come).
But to pray it is to accept the responsibilities of discipleship: to cooperate with God in making it happen. Your Kingdom come - now go open the door so it can come in! The Prayer is a pattern for our lives, and it sets another set of standards for us to mimic.
Mimesis
For me this is a positive term. Animals mimic other animals or their terrain for stealth - thus mimicking provides safety and longevity. It also is the first, and perhaps primary, form of learning. Going back to the child mimicking their parents, and then formalized in the master-apprentice relationship. Spiritually we are asked to be imitators of Christ (1 Cor. 11:1) and to be imitators of Paul, and by extension the other apostles (1 Cor. 4:16). This is not boasting perfection, but rather the more simple appeal to begin to do as the teacher does, and not get caught in over-intellectualizing the work to be done. TO imitate Jesus is not to imitate his miraculous works, obviously no one is walking on water these days, but rather to imitate his attention, his intention and the way he interacts with Creation (people and things). Does he flop down on a sofa, for eg? Does he pray before he eats? What does he say? Does he make eye contact when he talks? Does he tense up when he talks with leaders and Pharisees?
But mimicking can quickly become superficial. After all, parrots can do it. I can parrot prayers all day long, and I can even ape the exact movements of the Eucharist - but I am still only a parrot or a primate.
This is as it should be of course.
Here's some reasons why we should avoid rules for spiritual life:
1) It can dismiss or block individuality.
The incarnation created an individual. The only truly individual person. In this we should strive towards developing our individuality in healthy ways. C. S. Lewis said about saints that they were truly individual.
So if we set specific times and hours for everything (how, when, and where to recite the Offices; rules for fasting and vigils; regulations for lectio, etc) then what I am doing is mass-producing some sort of spiritual athlete.
When I was growing up I remember the elders around me wailing and complaining about the Soviet Union's Olympic "factories" with their hyper-steroided athletes, their mechanical training without any room for individuality. Indeed, part fo the Soviet experiment was indeed to reduce the individualism of each citizen for the benefit of the collective.
Of course, capitalism produces its own manufacturing of individuals. Where I work I am considered a "resource", and I work hard to be elevated to the status of "valuable asset". No one is an individual in any system where the functioning of the system is more important than those who fuel, propel, maintain and validate it.
2. Unrealistic goals and guilt
C.S. Lewis has an interesting thought on the issue of standards. On one of his essays he talks about the fact that progressives seem to believe that the "old standards" are stagnant or stale. But he counters by asking if the square of the hypotenuse being the sum of the square of the sides is stagnant? His point is: if you do have objective and legitimate and true standards, then it gives you a goal in life, a way to try to improve, to approximate that goal.
In this there is a certain type of uniformity. A Christian should be recognizable as a follower of Christ, as opposed to say, a Buddhist who should be recognized as a follower of Buddha. Even if I know nothing about the Son of God, I should see that a Christian is different (somehow) and that they are similar (again, somehow) to other Christians.
The absolute standard which every Christian should be working towards is Christ, of course. And any form of discipline in your life should be aimed at bringing you closer to that goal. This is an objective, fixed, external goal. This is the same thing that Christ asked of the apostles and that he asked the apostles to teach others - follow me, follow my commands. Immitate me as I immitate Christ, said St. Paul.
Having said this it is important to realize that some people are going to be more Christ-like than others. Even while Jesus was around some of the apostles were able to be more Christ-like than others. Peter, James and John for example. John was the disciple whom Christ loved - this does not mean that Christ had preferential love, it simply means John was a better imitator of Christ. Just as some are more naturally endowed athletes or scientists. Not everyone will be able to equally achieve levels of Christ-likeness.
This should be clear, and I am very very glad of this because it means two important things: one, it tells me that I am treasured as I am; two, God's love takes up the slack between who I am and the perfection of Christ - he is the prodigal Father who runs to meet me.
But when I formalize this quest for Christ-likeness into a strict set of rules for everyone I will be both neutralizing the awesome hopefulness of God's prodigality, as well as undermining and eventually destroying my self-worth in God's eyes through guilt.
3. Rules are a crutch
There is a way whereby contaminate the spiritual life. Rules have an insiduous way of replacing trust, belief, and faith - you know the things that make personal relationships so doggedly difficult and frustrating and tiresome.
With strict rules all you need to do, apparently, is to show up, sit in the cabboose and let the train take you.
An extreme example. A couple who chooses to have no children. They get the benefits of the tax breaks, they might even pool their resources for a nicer backyard or a bigger cars. But in every other way they live apart: they eat at different times and different foods. They go on vacations separately. They have no mutual friends. This is a marriage on paper-only. Some may envy the fact that they never fight or even bicker. Their lives are peaceful and tranquil (within the limits of life).
On the other extreme we can often mistake busyness for belief. Take a couple with many children, all of whom are in some sort of organized sport. They lead a disciplined life - with proper times for everything (otherwise they will be late for this or that practice). While Mum rushes one or more children to one sport, Dad rushes others to music practice. When they go on vacation they get a tour package to places like Disney, and they follow the routines. They are constantly busy, there are many chores. They actually have bad days and fight.
But this too is just a paper marriage. It is mildly better than the other one, because to produce children, at one point, the couple has had to stop and love each other, at least for about 10 minutes including foreplay.
There is so much busyness that the couple has no time to be a couple - they are "children facilitators."
You pile on the rules and you get busy, which apparently is better than being idle. Giustiniani's term for the solitary life is "vacare" - from which we get words like vacant and vacation. It is a life of leisure and not-doing.
Because he is no dummy, he is acutely aware that this could be seen as a life of slacking off. So most of his work is apologetic and polemic - trying to show how the "vacant life" is, in fact, more taxing and demanding than the externally regulated life. He has at one point a list of to-dos which goes on for about three pages. All of them are things that can only really be accomplished in solitude and comfort (well relative comfort - at least with the basic needs for food and shelter taken care of).
Are there any goals?
Of course, having no rules is not the same as having no structure and having no goals. The true slacker is one without goals. Solitaries are very goal oriented. They are just not too attached to one way of doing things. If there is attachment it is rather a single-minded focus on the Holy Spirit - who is very difficult to track and keep track of. The solitary then is a Spirit tracker, a Spirit-stalker.
To do this the solitary must employ everything in their lives. There is absolutely no city of refuge - as Jesus said even th ebirds get a nest, but the Son of Man gets no place to rest. This is, of course, an ontological statement - it is an approach to life which demonstrates an existential poverty. Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling: "To be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian–that only the knight of faith can do – and this is the one and only prodigy."
Finally, the most intersting goal is to spend time engaging as best I can Jesus. To engage jesus is to simultaneously try to discern His Heart and then discern His purpose for me. Once I know who Jesus is - not was - then I can begin my spiritual life. Until I meet Jesus I may be a good person, but I have no strategic direction to my efforts, or I am simply sitting in the caboose car enjoying the ride. Once I meet him, everything else will change, and will have to change. Then I begin a conversation with Jesus about what he wants from me.
Some complain that they do not know because Jesus hasn't told them. But God has already spoken multiple times - just go read it!
Here's where I run the risk of falling into rule-making errors. Everyone prays the Lord's Prayer. But the Lord's Prayer is really the Disciple's Model for Prayerfulness (but that is a cumbersome title). It is a challenge to not only petition God for these things (which one assumes are a sort of sphere of our lives where Jesus believes we should be asking for supernatural intervention - well-being (bread) and health (temptation and evil) as well as social concerns (kingdom come).
But to pray it is to accept the responsibilities of discipleship: to cooperate with God in making it happen. Your Kingdom come - now go open the door so it can come in! The Prayer is a pattern for our lives, and it sets another set of standards for us to mimic.
Mimesis
For me this is a positive term. Animals mimic other animals or their terrain for stealth - thus mimicking provides safety and longevity. It also is the first, and perhaps primary, form of learning. Going back to the child mimicking their parents, and then formalized in the master-apprentice relationship. Spiritually we are asked to be imitators of Christ (1 Cor. 11:1) and to be imitators of Paul, and by extension the other apostles (1 Cor. 4:16). This is not boasting perfection, but rather the more simple appeal to begin to do as the teacher does, and not get caught in over-intellectualizing the work to be done. TO imitate Jesus is not to imitate his miraculous works, obviously no one is walking on water these days, but rather to imitate his attention, his intention and the way he interacts with Creation (people and things). Does he flop down on a sofa, for eg? Does he pray before he eats? What does he say? Does he make eye contact when he talks? Does he tense up when he talks with leaders and Pharisees?
But mimicking can quickly become superficial. After all, parrots can do it. I can parrot prayers all day long, and I can even ape the exact movements of the Eucharist - but I am still only a parrot or a primate.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Practice
1) Correlation is not causation
The usual examples of this have to do with medicines, or therapies. It is also frequently cited by those arguing for the tobacco companies that it is simply unscientific to say that "cigarettes cause cancer". We simply do not know enough about cancer to claim that any one thing causes it. Wikipedia has a great graph showing that the number of fatalities on US roads fell with the increase of fresh lemons imported from Mexico - clearly those things are correlated but no one would claim that there is a causal connection between them. Conspiracy theorists around the globe tend to make claims based on correlations.
2) Correlation is not identity
There is a correlation between a living person and a beating heart, but a beating heart is not the person (this example from "The really hard problem" by Owen Flanagan).
These two general rules allow me to steer clear of a variety of troublesome liminal discussions in spirituality, especially where it intersects science.
To begin I will say that there is no thought without a brain. You need to have some sort of neuronal firing for thought to occur. Having said this it is important to say that neurons firing are not thought. There is a correlation between thought and neuronal activity, but small electrical charges crossing a cellular gap are not in themselves "atoms of thought"...or even quanta of thought.
In Flanagan's book he describes the Dalai Lama's categorization of Buddhist theology as having three pillars, experience, reason and tradition. And they are ranked in that order. Personal experience trumps everything. This makes sense in a Buddhist perspective.
But it is a little disingenuous to say experience trumps everything. it is true that Buddhism is experiential, and that almost everything in Buddhism a sustained effort at bringing the individual to the experience of Buddha Nature.
But Buddhism has its sages, has its levels of enlightenment. The witness of the Dalai Lama that such and such a state of consciousness is achievable carries more weight than whatever I have experienced. If nothing else his witness inspires me to try.
Thus there is a strong authority of scripture and tradition in the shaping of reason and experience.
This, of course, is common sense. As Flanagan says even science is very much indebted to tradition, its own scientific tradition. While scientific methodology is, in theory, backwards compatible (that is I can go back and repeat experiments) in practice this is not done - why? Because if Newton says he did it, then I do not need to repeat the experiment - I can just move on from his results and develop new insights. Newton carries a lot of authority. As do Einstein and Heisenberg, etc.
I think at this stage of the game it would be very healthy for Christianity to find again the experiential approach of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They were benefited by working from a non-canonical perspective (the canon of scripture did not coalesce until centuries later). So they had to rely heavily on personal experience as their guide.
If we read the Desert monastics with modern concerns we might see in their focused approach to spiritual investigation a perfect methodology for dealing with all sorts of pickles we get ourselves into when trying to do it "by the book".
This is not to say I do not believe in the authority of Scripture. Of course I do. But I am trying to say that the point of Scriptural authority is to witness to me and inspire me to do what has been done before, to live the way I am told Jesus lived, to think the way I am told he thought. To allow the tradition to guide my thinking (theological reasoning) and my practice.
I think that Scriptures are an inspired summary of the practice of Jesus and the practice of the Apostles. We must focus on the practice and not on the summary. In this case the Scriptures are not God, and the Scriptures are correlated to God's words - strongly correlated.
To put it another way - this blog has a record of my words, my thoughts. But the blog is not my thoughts. Even this writing is a sketch of my actual thought process, codified by the rules of English syntax. Were I writing in Portuguese the words would be different, and the tone might be different, though the general gist of it would be the same. Someone going with a toothcomb over my words in both languages might find plenty of room for contradiction.
The Bible thus is correlated to God's words because it is the inspired record of the practice of Jesus as taught by the apostles and understood and interpreted by the early group of followers.
Back to science: in books where scientists try to figure out where God is in the brain I would say that it is the responsibility of every Christian to study the findings with much care. This is important stuff. We need to understand, for example, how words impact our brains, how prayer changes the neural pathways, how music and "smells and bells" can effect change in mind.
Most importantly we need to understand how we can bring all this information towards a renewal of our Christian practice. How can the understanding of prayer through MRIs help me see where I can change my prayer life so as to be more open to God? How can a diet (of food and sleep and stimulation) lead me to be more or less charitable?
In the end, I guess I want to live as Christ did, not simply know what Christ said.
The usual examples of this have to do with medicines, or therapies. It is also frequently cited by those arguing for the tobacco companies that it is simply unscientific to say that "cigarettes cause cancer". We simply do not know enough about cancer to claim that any one thing causes it. Wikipedia has a great graph showing that the number of fatalities on US roads fell with the increase of fresh lemons imported from Mexico - clearly those things are correlated but no one would claim that there is a causal connection between them. Conspiracy theorists around the globe tend to make claims based on correlations.
2) Correlation is not identity
There is a correlation between a living person and a beating heart, but a beating heart is not the person (this example from "The really hard problem" by Owen Flanagan).
These two general rules allow me to steer clear of a variety of troublesome liminal discussions in spirituality, especially where it intersects science.
To begin I will say that there is no thought without a brain. You need to have some sort of neuronal firing for thought to occur. Having said this it is important to say that neurons firing are not thought. There is a correlation between thought and neuronal activity, but small electrical charges crossing a cellular gap are not in themselves "atoms of thought"...or even quanta of thought.
In Flanagan's book he describes the Dalai Lama's categorization of Buddhist theology as having three pillars, experience, reason and tradition. And they are ranked in that order. Personal experience trumps everything. This makes sense in a Buddhist perspective.
But it is a little disingenuous to say experience trumps everything. it is true that Buddhism is experiential, and that almost everything in Buddhism a sustained effort at bringing the individual to the experience of Buddha Nature.
But Buddhism has its sages, has its levels of enlightenment. The witness of the Dalai Lama that such and such a state of consciousness is achievable carries more weight than whatever I have experienced. If nothing else his witness inspires me to try.
Thus there is a strong authority of scripture and tradition in the shaping of reason and experience.
This, of course, is common sense. As Flanagan says even science is very much indebted to tradition, its own scientific tradition. While scientific methodology is, in theory, backwards compatible (that is I can go back and repeat experiments) in practice this is not done - why? Because if Newton says he did it, then I do not need to repeat the experiment - I can just move on from his results and develop new insights. Newton carries a lot of authority. As do Einstein and Heisenberg, etc.
I think at this stage of the game it would be very healthy for Christianity to find again the experiential approach of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They were benefited by working from a non-canonical perspective (the canon of scripture did not coalesce until centuries later). So they had to rely heavily on personal experience as their guide.
If we read the Desert monastics with modern concerns we might see in their focused approach to spiritual investigation a perfect methodology for dealing with all sorts of pickles we get ourselves into when trying to do it "by the book".
This is not to say I do not believe in the authority of Scripture. Of course I do. But I am trying to say that the point of Scriptural authority is to witness to me and inspire me to do what has been done before, to live the way I am told Jesus lived, to think the way I am told he thought. To allow the tradition to guide my thinking (theological reasoning) and my practice.
I think that Scriptures are an inspired summary of the practice of Jesus and the practice of the Apostles. We must focus on the practice and not on the summary. In this case the Scriptures are not God, and the Scriptures are correlated to God's words - strongly correlated.
To put it another way - this blog has a record of my words, my thoughts. But the blog is not my thoughts. Even this writing is a sketch of my actual thought process, codified by the rules of English syntax. Were I writing in Portuguese the words would be different, and the tone might be different, though the general gist of it would be the same. Someone going with a toothcomb over my words in both languages might find plenty of room for contradiction.
The Bible thus is correlated to God's words because it is the inspired record of the practice of Jesus as taught by the apostles and understood and interpreted by the early group of followers.
Back to science: in books where scientists try to figure out where God is in the brain I would say that it is the responsibility of every Christian to study the findings with much care. This is important stuff. We need to understand, for example, how words impact our brains, how prayer changes the neural pathways, how music and "smells and bells" can effect change in mind.
Most importantly we need to understand how we can bring all this information towards a renewal of our Christian practice. How can the understanding of prayer through MRIs help me see where I can change my prayer life so as to be more open to God? How can a diet (of food and sleep and stimulation) lead me to be more or less charitable?
In the end, I guess I want to live as Christ did, not simply know what Christ said.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Making allies, being good neighbor (notes)
Making your mind your ally
Instead of being bothered by thoughts mindfullness meditation can help you harness the mind towards more constructive ends, not through beating it into submission but rather by redirecting its ceaseless energy towards more profitable goals.
Making your body your ally
Running as a way to befriend the body. Physical exercise and especially sports as a way to befriend your body. Paul's metaphor on boxing and running suggests a compatibility between discipleship and sports.
Making your heart your ally
Conflicting emotions and desires have a tendency to distract and even harm us. A better way would be to work on listening to the heart's wisdom, giving it voice - though art for example.
Image or presence
My father was one of those larger than life individuals. It was just the way he was. he would walk into a room and commandeer it. I am not sure he would do it on purpose, I used to think it was a natural outgrowth of being used to give orders and being obeyed.
I often think about the encounter with Jesus and the centurion where the centurion admits that he is used to authority, and he recognizes such a thing in Jesus.
Just say a word and it will be so. Like is known to like in a way that is obvious, though not always welcome. you get two type A personalities in a room and it is likely there will be attrition.
But I have begun to wonder how much of this commanding presence is really presence and how much of it is self-image? To clarify: self-image is how we perceive ourselves as objects of others' attention. Presence is different from self-image in that presence is purely subjective, I am this. I am what I am. Self-image is worried about how one is seen by others. For me to be aware of how you see me, requires that I create a fantasy, an abstraction - I have to generate an object of myself to myself so I can observe it.
This mechanism is useful because it is the same mechanism which allows us create an abstraction of another person and "read their minds", to realize that other people have different intentions and motives than ourselves.
This mechanism is dangerous when the self-image becomes identified as our egos. When I say "I am this" or "I am that" and I begin to relate from that abstraction as the real me. Then when anything tries to harm that self-image we respond with the same mechanism we use to protect our physical bodies - that is fight or flight.
I wonder where we got the idea that defending our self-image required the same tools and strategies as defending our physical selves?
Presence is indefensible. Mostly because it is not dependent on external factors, and a subjective state.
These two elements are not mutually exclusive. A strong presence will perhaps create a strong self-image. A strong self-image will probably create a strong presence. But the approach to it is different. If you develop a strong sense of presence, then you will not be too concerned with protecting self-image, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
I often think about the encounter with Jesus and the centurion where the centurion admits that he is used to authority, and he recognizes such a thing in Jesus.
Just say a word and it will be so. Like is known to like in a way that is obvious, though not always welcome. you get two type A personalities in a room and it is likely there will be attrition.
But I have begun to wonder how much of this commanding presence is really presence and how much of it is self-image? To clarify: self-image is how we perceive ourselves as objects of others' attention. Presence is different from self-image in that presence is purely subjective, I am this. I am what I am. Self-image is worried about how one is seen by others. For me to be aware of how you see me, requires that I create a fantasy, an abstraction - I have to generate an object of myself to myself so I can observe it.
This mechanism is useful because it is the same mechanism which allows us create an abstraction of another person and "read their minds", to realize that other people have different intentions and motives than ourselves.
This mechanism is dangerous when the self-image becomes identified as our egos. When I say "I am this" or "I am that" and I begin to relate from that abstraction as the real me. Then when anything tries to harm that self-image we respond with the same mechanism we use to protect our physical bodies - that is fight or flight.
I wonder where we got the idea that defending our self-image required the same tools and strategies as defending our physical selves?
Presence is indefensible. Mostly because it is not dependent on external factors, and a subjective state.
These two elements are not mutually exclusive. A strong presence will perhaps create a strong self-image. A strong self-image will probably create a strong presence. But the approach to it is different. If you develop a strong sense of presence, then you will not be too concerned with protecting self-image, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Prayer life
Conversations about prayer life are always a little uncomfortable for me. It is the same sort of discomfort one feels when a stranger asks some random question or makes a comment about the weather...you always feel this lingering sense of something else will be following this pleasant and meaningless exchange.
There is an added level to prayer though. There is something about wearing a robe which I guess give me a PhD in prayer in the eyes of some. So it is natural to assume I could answer questions about prayer.
It is true that I probably could answer those questions, but usually (and here is where the discomfort sets in) my explanations are supposed to include information about my prayer life. It seems most people probably either non-existent prayer lives or anemic ones so talking about what they don't have is just part of traditional bourgeois, suburban conversations about what we do not have that our neighbors do. I do not have John's extra large LCD TV or the Petersons' shinny new SUV, or Br. Leo's fantastic prayer life...Prayer, in suburbia is just another thing we need to keep up with the Joneses.
This commodification of prayer makes it very difficult to have an actual discussion about actual prayer. If prayer is a form of relating with God, then it has a lot more to do with sex than with commodities. Though, considering how much sex is a
product these days, it may not be very surprising.
Since prayer, the kind of prayer that I practice, is much more akin to sex, then I have little or no desire to discuss it at random. Someone once told me that mysticism is the erotic relationship with God. Shocking for some, but I believe this to be true if we are careful in our definitions of all the critical words (mysticism, erotic and God).
If I even go down the road of talking about prayer life, I usually I want to spend sometime talking about the person's concept of God and of prayer. What is prayer for? Who is God? How do prayer and God interact? These are not simple theological shibboleths, but rather they are necessary beginnings for a meaningful conversation about prayer life. And even then I will probably talk about their prayer life – which is what they want to talk about anyway. I still coach and help people in their devotional practices. Why? Because I love them, and they need it, and they need me to tell them that God can be there for them, that God can be a safe and trusted harbor. Life is tough enough already. They don't need anything more than a comforting God who can give some meaning and shelter.
So for myself I "envy" those who claim they reach out to God in prayer as a friend. Wish I could do that!
In reality, for me God is not "there" (or "here" for that matter). In prayer there is Nothing. Nothing prayer to not-God. And as I pray I pray that God be in His Nothingness even more there (or here) - a koan of sorts, I think.
I go to my little corner desk where I have my Nepalese singing bowl, a candle, an icon, a crucifix, and my book of psalms. Most times it is not me there at all - it is the room and the noises in the street that are breathing in that corner, watching in that corner, praying there. Sometimes that corner is in a bad mood, sometimes frustrated, sometimes quiet and content.
Further, when people talk of prayer they really are asking about intercessory prayer. To me this happens infrequently. When it does it is obvious, and powerful, and immediately effective. It feels like praying with not to God. And there is immediate consolation in knowing God knows and is doing something about it. But I would say these are the exceptions. The vast majority of time I would say intercessory prayer is simply not heard. Now, there might be other, subtler, benefits to practicing regular intercessory prayer even without the results - the greatest of which is that it is hard not to care about people you pray for. So it is always profitable to pray. Just, in my experience, expecting results is bound to be disappointing.
And what people do? They lie to themselves either by inflating the results or fabricating them altogether. Why? To protect God's reputation as a miracle worker, as a Sovereign who is All-Powerful. But did not Jesus come in as the lowest of the low? What does this say about God?
If, when people asked me about my prayer life, I told them these things I know they would rush in with their pieties (to comfort me), or think me mad.
This spirituality of mine is one of the reasons I have to be a solitary: I am too rough and uncivilized, and I cannot get comfortable with the purple pillow of piety (jasmine scented).
I really wish God was a comfort, that God was a "pill" that takes all my pains away. But the God I know and love is most often an all-devouring absence, something that removes my comforts...
This is where St. Romuald's brief Rule makes sense to me. Step six of the brief Rule states that I should destroy myself completely. This sounds like bombastic exaggeration, or perhaps Romantic afflatus, or dangerously deranged psychosis. Perhaps it is all of the above.
This sixth step is not so nice...and then is that seventh step. So people ask me, "What do you do?", and they expect some uber-monk yoga practices or some super-secret piety exercises or something which would allow me to be happy-happy all the time. And the truth is all I do is sit and wait for "the bus"... I am abandoned by God in God for God, like a baby bird chirping for some regurgitated grubs and water...
For the record: I'm not too fond of birds, and even less so of baby birds, ugly, squirmy, demanding, selfish little things. Not a very flattering image - wish I could say I was a soaring eagle!
There is an added level to prayer though. There is something about wearing a robe which I guess give me a PhD in prayer in the eyes of some. So it is natural to assume I could answer questions about prayer.
It is true that I probably could answer those questions, but usually (and here is where the discomfort sets in) my explanations are supposed to include information about my prayer life. It seems most people probably either non-existent prayer lives or anemic ones so talking about what they don't have is just part of traditional bourgeois, suburban conversations about what we do not have that our neighbors do. I do not have John's extra large LCD TV or the Petersons' shinny new SUV, or Br. Leo's fantastic prayer life...Prayer, in suburbia is just another thing we need to keep up with the Joneses.
This commodification of prayer makes it very difficult to have an actual discussion about actual prayer. If prayer is a form of relating with God, then it has a lot more to do with sex than with commodities. Though, considering how much sex is a
product these days, it may not be very surprising.
Since prayer, the kind of prayer that I practice, is much more akin to sex, then I have little or no desire to discuss it at random. Someone once told me that mysticism is the erotic relationship with God. Shocking for some, but I believe this to be true if we are careful in our definitions of all the critical words (mysticism, erotic and God).
If I even go down the road of talking about prayer life, I usually I want to spend sometime talking about the person's concept of God and of prayer. What is prayer for? Who is God? How do prayer and God interact? These are not simple theological shibboleths, but rather they are necessary beginnings for a meaningful conversation about prayer life. And even then I will probably talk about their prayer life – which is what they want to talk about anyway. I still coach and help people in their devotional practices. Why? Because I love them, and they need it, and they need me to tell them that God can be there for them, that God can be a safe and trusted harbor. Life is tough enough already. They don't need anything more than a comforting God who can give some meaning and shelter.
So for myself I "envy" those who claim they reach out to God in prayer as a friend. Wish I could do that!
In reality, for me God is not "there" (or "here" for that matter). In prayer there is Nothing. Nothing prayer to not-God. And as I pray I pray that God be in His Nothingness even more there (or here) - a koan of sorts, I think.
I go to my little corner desk where I have my Nepalese singing bowl, a candle, an icon, a crucifix, and my book of psalms. Most times it is not me there at all - it is the room and the noises in the street that are breathing in that corner, watching in that corner, praying there. Sometimes that corner is in a bad mood, sometimes frustrated, sometimes quiet and content.
Further, when people talk of prayer they really are asking about intercessory prayer. To me this happens infrequently. When it does it is obvious, and powerful, and immediately effective. It feels like praying with not to God. And there is immediate consolation in knowing God knows and is doing something about it. But I would say these are the exceptions. The vast majority of time I would say intercessory prayer is simply not heard. Now, there might be other, subtler, benefits to practicing regular intercessory prayer even without the results - the greatest of which is that it is hard not to care about people you pray for. So it is always profitable to pray. Just, in my experience, expecting results is bound to be disappointing.
And what people do? They lie to themselves either by inflating the results or fabricating them altogether. Why? To protect God's reputation as a miracle worker, as a Sovereign who is All-Powerful. But did not Jesus come in as the lowest of the low? What does this say about God?
If, when people asked me about my prayer life, I told them these things I know they would rush in with their pieties (to comfort me), or think me mad.
This spirituality of mine is one of the reasons I have to be a solitary: I am too rough and uncivilized, and I cannot get comfortable with the purple pillow of piety (jasmine scented).
I really wish God was a comfort, that God was a "pill" that takes all my pains away. But the God I know and love is most often an all-devouring absence, something that removes my comforts...
This is where St. Romuald's brief Rule makes sense to me. Step six of the brief Rule states that I should destroy myself completely. This sounds like bombastic exaggeration, or perhaps Romantic afflatus, or dangerously deranged psychosis. Perhaps it is all of the above.
This sixth step is not so nice...and then is that seventh step. So people ask me, "What do you do?", and they expect some uber-monk yoga practices or some super-secret piety exercises or something which would allow me to be happy-happy all the time. And the truth is all I do is sit and wait for "the bus"... I am abandoned by God in God for God, like a baby bird chirping for some regurgitated grubs and water...
For the record: I'm not too fond of birds, and even less so of baby birds, ugly, squirmy, demanding, selfish little things. Not a very flattering image - wish I could say I was a soaring eagle!
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Godly conversations
Usually the conversations with my children tend to be one-sided affairs. On the ride back home from daycare it is an impressionist stream of information strung together with “and then” without much concern for chronology or even basics of plot. The other type of one-sided conversation is usually carried on with my voice raised a level or two and it usually ends with “because I say so”.
Compare that type of one-sided conversation with the type of conversation I have with my wife. Ok, granted, there are times when our conversations are one-sided, but that is less common than not. We both try to be loving and try to communicate our feelings with and to each other.
The truth is that loving communication is never one way. Having unrequited love may be very romantic, but it is not love. To be able to express our love becomes a mutual striving, and sometimes I will do the translating and sometimes she will. Both of us together give and take. Sometimes I show my love in ways which are more meaningful to me, and she charitably accept it at face value. At other times I will go out of my way to do or say something that I know she likes even though it might not be something I particularly enjoy, like vacuuming the stairs.
But how often do we carry the best of this approach to conversation to our inner conversations? More often the words running in my head are a lot closer to an abusive version of childish conversations: non-stop chatter frequently punctuated by shouts of “because I say so”.
We seem to have focused most of our education on outward behaviors, but rarely are we given a chance to learn how to apply these same rules internally. I am a lot more polite and careful with my words when talking with other people, than I am when talking with myself.
It seems that while most of us learn, from an early age how to barter our way into getting something we want or need, we tend to either ignore or downright dislike having to deal with ourselves. We have thousands of years of teachings on rhetoric – going all the way back to ancient Greece. But, looking at the situation in the world these days it is striking how we seem to be incapable of actually convincing anyone of our points of view. We seem to be frequently shouting at each other, or at best, talking past each other without any of the hallmarks of true dialog. In short, it seems we have carried our methods of inner dialog out into the world, instead of letting the more polite forms of social conversation seep into our inner dialogs.
I would say that we do have some ways of retraining ourselves. The first method is prayer. I do not mean prayer by rote. I mean prayer that resembles a deep, heartfelt conversation. It is a way of opening our hearts so that we can let the Other come in and reason with us. It is about being truthful, and honest with God, and therefore with ourselves. For example, it is about letting our anger at injustice come out in angry words so that they do not fester into resentment in our hearts.
In classical rhetoric there are three types of arguments: logical arguments which appeal to the brain; ethical argument which appeal to our gut-feeling about a person, their honesty and trustworthiness; and sympathetic arguments which are arguments which tug at our heartstrings.
Prayer is much the same. Intellectual prayer is best exemplified by stopping at the end of the day and reviewing our actions and seeing where we lived up to your own expectations and where we can do better, without being judgmental and without being sentimental either. Ethical prayer would be where we remind ourselves of God's unfailing love and mercy in our lives, and use that certainty to draw strength and courage during tough times. Finally sympathetic prayer is where we elevate our heartfelt needs up to God, and where we let God melt our hard hearts.
A few things to keep in mind to re-focus your Godly conversations: use every opportunity in the day to pray. Every little event is worthy of prayer, and every encounter can be deepened through blessing. Even when recalling the day past in a prayerful way, its focus should be what will I do next? It is future-focused, not because we are trying to escape the past and avoid the present, but because prayer will propel us into the future Kingdom.
Most importantly reward yourself for remembering to be prayerful. And reward those who talk with you by having a genuinely gentle way with words.
Compare that type of one-sided conversation with the type of conversation I have with my wife. Ok, granted, there are times when our conversations are one-sided, but that is less common than not. We both try to be loving and try to communicate our feelings with and to each other.
The truth is that loving communication is never one way. Having unrequited love may be very romantic, but it is not love. To be able to express our love becomes a mutual striving, and sometimes I will do the translating and sometimes she will. Both of us together give and take. Sometimes I show my love in ways which are more meaningful to me, and she charitably accept it at face value. At other times I will go out of my way to do or say something that I know she likes even though it might not be something I particularly enjoy, like vacuuming the stairs.
But how often do we carry the best of this approach to conversation to our inner conversations? More often the words running in my head are a lot closer to an abusive version of childish conversations: non-stop chatter frequently punctuated by shouts of “because I say so”.
We seem to have focused most of our education on outward behaviors, but rarely are we given a chance to learn how to apply these same rules internally. I am a lot more polite and careful with my words when talking with other people, than I am when talking with myself.
It seems that while most of us learn, from an early age how to barter our way into getting something we want or need, we tend to either ignore or downright dislike having to deal with ourselves. We have thousands of years of teachings on rhetoric – going all the way back to ancient Greece. But, looking at the situation in the world these days it is striking how we seem to be incapable of actually convincing anyone of our points of view. We seem to be frequently shouting at each other, or at best, talking past each other without any of the hallmarks of true dialog. In short, it seems we have carried our methods of inner dialog out into the world, instead of letting the more polite forms of social conversation seep into our inner dialogs.
I would say that we do have some ways of retraining ourselves. The first method is prayer. I do not mean prayer by rote. I mean prayer that resembles a deep, heartfelt conversation. It is a way of opening our hearts so that we can let the Other come in and reason with us. It is about being truthful, and honest with God, and therefore with ourselves. For example, it is about letting our anger at injustice come out in angry words so that they do not fester into resentment in our hearts.
In classical rhetoric there are three types of arguments: logical arguments which appeal to the brain; ethical argument which appeal to our gut-feeling about a person, their honesty and trustworthiness; and sympathetic arguments which are arguments which tug at our heartstrings.
Prayer is much the same. Intellectual prayer is best exemplified by stopping at the end of the day and reviewing our actions and seeing where we lived up to your own expectations and where we can do better, without being judgmental and without being sentimental either. Ethical prayer would be where we remind ourselves of God's unfailing love and mercy in our lives, and use that certainty to draw strength and courage during tough times. Finally sympathetic prayer is where we elevate our heartfelt needs up to God, and where we let God melt our hard hearts.
A few things to keep in mind to re-focus your Godly conversations: use every opportunity in the day to pray. Every little event is worthy of prayer, and every encounter can be deepened through blessing. Even when recalling the day past in a prayerful way, its focus should be what will I do next? It is future-focused, not because we are trying to escape the past and avoid the present, but because prayer will propel us into the future Kingdom.
Most importantly reward yourself for remembering to be prayerful. And reward those who talk with you by having a genuinely gentle way with words.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra
The other night at the end of our monthly lectio meeting at my church one of the participants shared with us an insight she had while we were doing lectio on Mark 6:1-6. In our group we take turns reading the passage from different translations, to keep it fresh. She excitedly told us that these various translations reminded her of "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra" - and that reference made me jump from my seat! She had broken through our near-Pharisaical search for meanings and caught a glimpse of the Living Word of God residing just below the text. In monastic circles we call that Contemplation, but it does not matter what you call it.
For those of you who are not Trekkies I will briefly explain that this phrase comes from one of the deeper Trek episodes - you can get a full rundown of it in various places on the web, including at Wikipedia. Very briefly: at the surface the episode deals with the problems of communication, especially intra-species communication, with Capt. Picard and an alien captain stuck together in a hostile planet where their only choice is cooperate or die. But how do you cooperate with someone whose language you do not understand?
This may seem a relatively trivial problem, but remember folks that this is the 24th century, and everyone has a "universal translator" which means, basically, that everyone speaks the same language.
I will stop for a second here to give us all an opportunity to remember for a few moments of greatness we all share. That time not so long ago when we build those towers. Symbols of our prosperity, of our greatness. Those great towers... Wasn't that a grand enterprise? Weren't we all working together? Weren't we all united? Weren't we all one? Minds and hearts and hands cooperating. Those were the good old days weren't they? Yes, that summer in Babel was truly grand.
Forward 5000 years and we have perfect communications again. But this time you meet a race where your computer is incapable of translating their language. Inconceivable! The only thing that the alien keeps saying over and over is "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra" (trust me in the hands of a fantastic actor like Patrick Stewart this stuff reaches near Shakespearean levels).
Is language really translatable that way? When I say "I love you" would it be instantly translated into another language? I have a little book at my desk called "In Other Words: A Language Lover's Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World" given to me by a dear friend and fellow logophile. The book lists hundreds of words which are untranslatable into English, or at least there is not a one-to-one correlation between those words and English.
I have personal experience of this. Having grown up in Brazil until my early teens, then living in England, and now the US I am the incarnate version of that little book. "Untranslatable" would be a great epitaph for myself. There is a very famous word in Portuguese which is often mentioned when discussions about translation come up. The word is "saudades". This term could be translated as "longing" but only if you take the word at its broadest and most poetic meaning: a longing for both past and future, people, places and things, an "intense nostalgia" is what the book tells me. Most Brazilians will just shrug at that - "Come to Brazil, spend a summer with us, dance in the Carnaval, hang out in the beaches of Rio and fall in love with a beautiful girl and take a walk with her by the sea, sip some fresh coconut juice while holding hands and looking up at the Jesus statue at the top of the Corcovado, and then leave. And then I will call you in about a year and what you will feel - that's saudades!" I think intense nostalgia does not quite grasp it.
And here we run into a fundamental issue of language, at its roots it is not made up of solid atoms of language stuff. Perhaps one time we might have fallen for that idea. Those of us who are avowed (or even born-again) Modernists think that language is made up of fixed signs. But the reality is frustratingly, beautifully more complicated. it turns out language, like atoms themselves, tends to dissipate into a cloud of metaphor when we look closer. For example when I mentioned the "meaning" of "saudades" in the last paragraph, what exactly does "meaning" mean? If you want "meaning" to mean one thing it will, and if you want it to mean something else it will too. Light can be both wave and particle - what you are looking for? What meaning are you looking for?
One of my (spiritual) mentors is the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. And as every other poet whom I have read or met, the metaphorical nature of language is of grave importance to him. He says "If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time" (in "André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning," 1967).
So here we are in the 23rd century, stuck in a hostile planet with an alien who just keeps repeating "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra". There is an urgency in this. There is a life and death struggle here. What are we to do? How am I tell you you I love you? How am I to pray?
In the episode it turns out that the reason the aliens' language that was untranslatable was because it was completely metaphorical. Once they uncovered the key to the alien's metaphor (their religious texts - aha!) then Capt. Picard and the alien could begin to communicate. Trust me guys, this is worth watching, and even using in an adult Bible study group.
If you are like me you have at one point or another been asked, or asked yourself, "Is the Bible literally true?" Sometimes the emphasis is on the "true", sometimes the emphasis is on the literalness. At that point you got to take a deep breath. Often I feel like the Pharisees who were asked by Jesus about the source of John's prophetic gifts: if I answer "yes" then...on the other hand if I answer "no" then...
This is not to trivialize things, but I am frequently astounded by how many smart people have not really approached a book we call Holy without the appropriate reverence. I do not mean subservience, or even negative fear, but positive fear. Take that story, any story in the Bible, and read it with the eyes of a poet - what do you see?
Is the Bible true? Yes. Is the Bible literally true? Yes. It is absolutely literally true poetry. It is the only true poem we know. It is the clearest truth we have, perfectly metaphorical. I use the adjective "perfect" the same way my scientist friends use the term "absolute". It is not a trivial thing. When you can grasp this, then perhaps the Truth of Christ can dawn upon you, and you might not be seen in public without your Bible any longer! You might just go home, no run home, so that you can spend a few precious minutes with these stories. You might just spend days marveling at "At the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was with God and the WORD was God." You just might recite the Lord's Prayer and realize that the Kingdom is coming thanks to your prayer!
Can we all speak the same language? Let the poet have the last word: "Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once"
(in "Invention, Underdevelopment, Modernity," 1967).
For those of you who are not Trekkies I will briefly explain that this phrase comes from one of the deeper Trek episodes - you can get a full rundown of it in various places on the web, including at Wikipedia. Very briefly: at the surface the episode deals with the problems of communication, especially intra-species communication, with Capt. Picard and an alien captain stuck together in a hostile planet where their only choice is cooperate or die. But how do you cooperate with someone whose language you do not understand?
This may seem a relatively trivial problem, but remember folks that this is the 24th century, and everyone has a "universal translator" which means, basically, that everyone speaks the same language.
I will stop for a second here to give us all an opportunity to remember for a few moments of greatness we all share. That time not so long ago when we build those towers. Symbols of our prosperity, of our greatness. Those great towers... Wasn't that a grand enterprise? Weren't we all working together? Weren't we all united? Weren't we all one? Minds and hearts and hands cooperating. Those were the good old days weren't they? Yes, that summer in Babel was truly grand.
Forward 5000 years and we have perfect communications again. But this time you meet a race where your computer is incapable of translating their language. Inconceivable! The only thing that the alien keeps saying over and over is "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra" (trust me in the hands of a fantastic actor like Patrick Stewart this stuff reaches near Shakespearean levels).
Is language really translatable that way? When I say "I love you" would it be instantly translated into another language? I have a little book at my desk called "In Other Words: A Language Lover's Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World" given to me by a dear friend and fellow logophile. The book lists hundreds of words which are untranslatable into English, or at least there is not a one-to-one correlation between those words and English.
I have personal experience of this. Having grown up in Brazil until my early teens, then living in England, and now the US I am the incarnate version of that little book. "Untranslatable" would be a great epitaph for myself. There is a very famous word in Portuguese which is often mentioned when discussions about translation come up. The word is "saudades". This term could be translated as "longing" but only if you take the word at its broadest and most poetic meaning: a longing for both past and future, people, places and things, an "intense nostalgia" is what the book tells me. Most Brazilians will just shrug at that - "Come to Brazil, spend a summer with us, dance in the Carnaval, hang out in the beaches of Rio and fall in love with a beautiful girl and take a walk with her by the sea, sip some fresh coconut juice while holding hands and looking up at the Jesus statue at the top of the Corcovado, and then leave. And then I will call you in about a year and what you will feel - that's saudades!" I think intense nostalgia does not quite grasp it.
And here we run into a fundamental issue of language, at its roots it is not made up of solid atoms of language stuff. Perhaps one time we might have fallen for that idea. Those of us who are avowed (or even born-again) Modernists think that language is made up of fixed signs. But the reality is frustratingly, beautifully more complicated. it turns out language, like atoms themselves, tends to dissipate into a cloud of metaphor when we look closer. For example when I mentioned the "meaning" of "saudades" in the last paragraph, what exactly does "meaning" mean? If you want "meaning" to mean one thing it will, and if you want it to mean something else it will too. Light can be both wave and particle - what you are looking for? What meaning are you looking for?
One of my (spiritual) mentors is the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. And as every other poet whom I have read or met, the metaphorical nature of language is of grave importance to him. He says "If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time" (in "André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning," 1967).
So here we are in the 23rd century, stuck in a hostile planet with an alien who just keeps repeating "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra". There is an urgency in this. There is a life and death struggle here. What are we to do? How am I tell you you I love you? How am I to pray?
In the episode it turns out that the reason the aliens' language that was untranslatable was because it was completely metaphorical. Once they uncovered the key to the alien's metaphor (their religious texts - aha!) then Capt. Picard and the alien could begin to communicate. Trust me guys, this is worth watching, and even using in an adult Bible study group.
If you are like me you have at one point or another been asked, or asked yourself, "Is the Bible literally true?" Sometimes the emphasis is on the "true", sometimes the emphasis is on the literalness. At that point you got to take a deep breath. Often I feel like the Pharisees who were asked by Jesus about the source of John's prophetic gifts: if I answer "yes" then...on the other hand if I answer "no" then...
This is not to trivialize things, but I am frequently astounded by how many smart people have not really approached a book we call Holy without the appropriate reverence. I do not mean subservience, or even negative fear, but positive fear. Take that story, any story in the Bible, and read it with the eyes of a poet - what do you see?
Is the Bible true? Yes. Is the Bible literally true? Yes. It is absolutely literally true poetry. It is the only true poem we know. It is the clearest truth we have, perfectly metaphorical. I use the adjective "perfect" the same way my scientist friends use the term "absolute". It is not a trivial thing. When you can grasp this, then perhaps the Truth of Christ can dawn upon you, and you might not be seen in public without your Bible any longer! You might just go home, no run home, so that you can spend a few precious minutes with these stories. You might just spend days marveling at "At the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was with God and the WORD was God." You just might recite the Lord's Prayer and realize that the Kingdom is coming thanks to your prayer!
Can we all speak the same language? Let the poet have the last word: "Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once"
(in "Invention, Underdevelopment, Modernity," 1967).
Monday, March 30, 2009
In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell
[1932]
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people's mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise.
One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.
But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface card in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.
All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.
Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.
From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917 [1], and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened, and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.
Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.
Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.
I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.
If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.
The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.
In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there is much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the West, there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of the governing classes, and especially of those who conduct educational propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor, is almost exactly that which the governing classes of the world have always preached to what were called the 'honest poor'. Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism.
The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of 'honest toil', have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made, but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching.
For the present, possibly, this is all to the good. A large country, full of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?
In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.
In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over production, the problem will have to be differently solved. the rational solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.
The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.
It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.
When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.
The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.
Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.
[1] Since then, members of the Communist Party have succeeded to this privilege of the warriors and priests.
[1932]
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people's mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise.
One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.
But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface card in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.
All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.
Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.
From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917 [1], and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened, and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.
Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.
Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.
I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.
If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.
The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.
In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there is much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the West, there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of the governing classes, and especially of those who conduct educational propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor, is almost exactly that which the governing classes of the world have always preached to what were called the 'honest poor'. Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism.
The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of 'honest toil', have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made, but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching.
For the present, possibly, this is all to the good. A large country, full of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?
In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.
In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over production, the problem will have to be differently solved. the rational solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.
The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.
It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.
When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.
The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.
Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.
[1] Since then, members of the Communist Party have succeeded to this privilege of the warriors and priests.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)