I Know

I know there wouldn’t be much left of me if you subtracted things I’ve learned from fields and trees, the way wind plays and branches sway, and how great darkness brightens what little light it holds until it sparkles.





Copyright 2005 Paul Martin all rights reserved

Pre-Post PLUS: George Bush's Theology

So many good but diverging comments!

Tomorrow I'm taking the easy way out. Whatever I post will be off-topic.

I'll pick back up on "What Really Matters?" next week...

And just now, July 31, I'm adding some more "off-topic," as long as this pre post has been getting comments:

George Bush's Theology

"This month, Professor Bruce Lincoln of the University of Chicago Divinity School examines the theology discernable in the statements and policies of President George W. Bush.

[T]hese texts convey a sophisticated theology of history that rests on five propositions: 1) God desires freedom for all humanity; 2) This desire manifests itself in history; 3) America is called by history (and thus, implicitly by God) to take action on behalf of this cause; 4) Insofar as America responds with courage and determination, God’s purpose is served and freedom’s advance is inevitable; 5) With the triumph of freedom, God’s will is accomplished and history comes to an end.

This is the fullest and most sophisticated theological position Mr. Bush has articulated in the course of his presidency. It follows several earlier systems, each of which had its own force, rationale, and moment. These include an Evangelical theology of “born again” conversion; a theology of American exceptionalism as grounded in the virtue of compassion; a Calvinist theology of vocation; and a Manichaean dualism of good and evil in conflict."

Bruce Lincoln, University of Chicago - from the Martin Marty Center Web site

A good dispassionate summary. I do wonder whether the professor isn't involuntarily giving GB some extra credit here - I mean, the idea that GB thought it all out so systematically, personally strikes me as questionable.

By way of an analogy which I hope is not too unflattering to our closest genetic cousins, Jane Goodall wrote sophisticated descriptions of chimpanzee behavior that went far beyond any work product the chimpanzees could have created themselves.

But yes, it does seem to me that this theology, which I'm not personally prepared to call "sophisticated," can be inferred from GW's assorted remarks.

Obstacles: Summary. Also: What Really Matters? Post #1

Summary To-Date

We’ve had widespread agreement that egoism or selfishness is an obstacle to living and acting from out of our love, or better natures. And for at least some of us, death can be an obstacle. This can take the form of the idea of death – for example, when we view it as our complete annihilation. It can also take the form of the reality of death – for example, witnessing someone we love die young, or in an especially painful and difficult manner. Either way, our perception of life as meaningful and good can be undermined. Faith can challenged.

What can counter these obstacles? Two basic things have come up in comments: experiential processes of growth and development; and religious beliefs. Some of you emphasize one over the other. The beliefs are quite clear-cut. The processes, I think, are harder to articulate.

What Matters?

We could take a closer look at any of these subjects, but here I want to pause and ask a simple question. This might be because I’m so profound; or it might be because I need to keep this post short because I have so much to do this week.

In religious or spiritual terms, what really matters and why does it matter? What makes a person truly religious, or spiritual, or close to God? If you are an atheist or agnostic, what is it about our human natures that you think matters most, and why? I’m thinking, we could consider:


Our beliefs
Our experiences
Our actions


Or anything else that comes to mind…

Obstacles: Mr. Death’s Fraternal Twin. Post #6

Annihilation’s Downside

After reading your amazing variety of comments, I realized that the only way I could make sense out of them was to figure Mr. Death has a brother. But before I get to that, I want to address something in the comments that I let pass:

Benjamin clearly identifies the problem that death poses for some of us: it looks like our annihilation. Just to cheer everyone up, I would add: and the annihilation of everything and everyone that we care about. That’s exactly what bothered me when I was young, and that particular word – “annihilation” – is exactly the word I used to describe what bothered me about death. Some of you, like Benjamin, although you can understand being disturbed by dying, which can hurt a lot, are left scratching your heads about what could really be so dreadful about the idea of being gone.

I can’t write very compellingly or feelingly in the space of a post about how death as annihilation can pose a problem. I'll try just hinting at it.

You push a child on a swing a couple times. It’s never enough. The child wants more pushes. And higher ones.

Hinduism’s summation of our real wants as “infinite joy, knowledge, and being” always resonated with me. We experience life, love it, and want more and greater. At times we may even seem to experience intimations of this. And I like the word “infinite” here, because it’s clear that what we desire isn’t something for shoring up our own egos, but something universal. (That's also what those intimations feel like.)

Death as annihilation would be the opposite of this. Even though you could never experience it, you can contemplate that this might be how it is. You can even conclude that this is almost certainly how it is, like I did in my teens and twenties, by following certain lines of evidence and repeating them to yourself over and over.

Suns burn out. The universe expands forever until they all wink out, or until the whole thing recollapses on itself according to the unknown variable of how much dark matter the universe contains. (It’s been a while and I’m too lazy to google, but I think that’s roughly the science, or at least as it stood when I was thinking about this stuff.) Either way, our species, the earth itself, everything we cherish most, just gets snuffed out. We’re born to lose it all.

You can look at that and say: life is meaningless, hopeless. This isn’t the kind of world I even like to think about inhabiting. It negates the best we have to give, the best we can be, and all that we can aspire to. This isn’t good enough. I want out.

Fraternal Death Twins: The Intellectual One, and the “Go-Getter”

Many of you provided personal illustrations of experiencing death. There were brief references to the instinctual adrenaline-rush of alarm that comes with dodging the proverbial bullet, or, say, a close call behind the wheel. Mostly, there were your experiences of the passing of loved ones, including the angry reaction to seeing family members afflicted by leukemia, grief at a father’s passing, and the sad yet peaceful witness of a grandfather passing in relative comfort after a full life.

I think anybody could identify with these stories. They are all about facing Death the Go-Getter, death the real thing. Meeting up with this guy, our reactions are pretty similar. Even those with firm beliefs about an afterlife are more grief stricken than jubilant upon a loved one’s death.

But where it comes to his twin, Intellectual Death, it’s another story. Here, faced with no loved one who apparently just turned into a corpse, it is our beliefs about what death represents that principally determine our reactions to it. And since our beliefs vary widely, so do our reactions.

Getting back to Go-Getter Death, I have the feeling that when he comes for us - when we ourselves teeter on the verge of corpsehood, as it were – then our actual experiences may again have more similarity and overlap than when we are just sitting around thinking about death. Of course it’s pretty hard to have this conversation with people on the verge, so it's not like I really know…

Hmm. “Corpsehood.” Not a word you hear much. I guess whereas our childhoods and adulthoods vary considerably, corpsehood stories would be boringly similar.

“I was interred at Forest Lawn. For a change, I lost everything except my hair…” And who needs to hear that. Except maybe dentists, because we might add, “Oh yes, and my fillings have survived nicely.”

Obstacles: For Some, a “Dark Night of the Soul.” Post #5

A Boxing Match: “Diabloggers Ali” vs. Mr. Death in the Black Trunks

We came to quick consensus around ego or selfishness as being an obstacle to living from out of our love, or our better natures. I’d see this as a universal obstacle. Everybody has a tendency to be egocentric. It’s an aspect of human nature that all of us face.

Where death is concerned, your comments have surprised me: first, by their variety; and second, by the one thing nobody mentioned…

I’ve felt like a spectator at a boxing match. It’s as if Mr. Death, in the black trunks, came out of his corner, and you guys, I don’t know, wearing maybe green trunks, have been like Mohammed Ali in his prime, striking Death from just about every angle that the arm of the human mind (so to speak) can deliver a blow: all kinds of left jabs concerning how death can actually make life more meaningful and intense; here and there a heavy body-blow of narrated wisdom; and with forceful right-crosses of belief.

Mr. Death's Right Hook

But I kept thinking: nobody’s mentioned Mr. Death’s wicked right hook! It may be that all of you have spiritual styles that have always kept you safe from that – like Ali, you’re always on your toes, moving in the right direction, and maybe anytime that Mr. Death tried the right hook on you, it only just brushed your cheek and stung a little.

But speaking for myself, I really got clobbered as a young man. St. John of the Cross calls it, “The Dark Night of the Soul.” The priest and poet GM Hopkins wrote about it in his “Terrible Sonnets.” The seventies band Kansas called it, “Everything is dust in the wind,” and when Paul Simon sang about it, it came out, “Everything put together sooner or later falls apart.”

What I’m calling Death’s “right hook” is that stunning blow which the thought of death can deliver to some of us while we’re still alive. If Death connects with you in that way, it sends you reeling and can knock you to the mat. Some stay down for the count. And a few boxers have been known to literally die, right there in the spiritual boxing ring.

What I’m talking about here is a period of intense doubt concerning any religious beliefs we may have been brought up with, and the existence of anything that anybody would call “God” or “heaven.” Death is viewed as the final end of us all. So there appears to be no basis for hope.

For sure not everyone goes through this, but some of us do. For those that do, this is a great obstacle to living from out of love, and it can even threaten our lives. Life can look bleak enough that we want to kill ourselves.

Thomas Carlyle’s Despair

Thomas Carlyle was an English essayist who wrote an account of the spiritual despair he experienced as a young man. It illustrates the sort of thing I’m talking about.

Carlyle’s 19th century writing style is complicated. What follows is excerpted from “The Everlasting No” section of his spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-tailored). I have greatly simplified and shortened it, even changing some of the words, to make it easier to understand. However, I’ve kept his thoughts in the same order in which he presents them.

From The Everlasting No – Book the Second, chapter VII:

Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope. But I was quite shut-out from Hope; Doubt had darkened into Unbelief…

For man’s well -being, Faith is properly the one thing needful. With it, martyrs can cheerfully endure the cross; but without it, worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury. For me, the loss of my religious Belief was the loss of everything.

I shouted question after question into the sky, and received no answer but an echoe. It was all a grim desert, this once-fair world of mine…

Yet even though I doubted God’s existence, genuine Love of Truth was behind it, despite the grief that inquiry was bringing me. I nevertheless still loved Truth, and would not end my allegiance to her. ‘Truth!’ I cried, though the Heavens crush me for following her…”

… Even the very Devil had been pulled down, I couldn’t so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all empty of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge dead, immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.

A question often arose for me: if someone were to suddenly kill me, shooting me with a gun, blowing me into the other World, or other No-World... So what? What would I care?

And so my despair lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, through long years…


Carlyle did eventually come out of his despair and goes on to provide a description of that, too.

Have others gone through anything like this, or known someone who did?

Obstacles: What Kind of Guy Are You, Mr. Death? Post #4

“I'm sorry for going off-topic... Nobody's said much about change. If we haven't really lived are we looking to change?” (Benjamin, comment to July 18th post.)

“Yup.” (Me, replying now.) Changing is what A First-Hand Faith is about, and topics from that manuscript have been serving as a kind of general guide for the topics on this blog. Change, or even transformation, is the overarching theme of the ms and therefore of the blog.

Death’s Darker Side

Overall comments to the July 18th post don’t go much further into the relationship between fear and egotism, which everybody seems to at least suspect is there. Instead, you’ve all been more focused on looking at A) what’s behind the fear of death, and B) what makes us unafraid or less afraid of death.

As far as what’s behind the fear goes, I’m going make use of Irina’s list, since it includes things that others mention as well – I’ve put those in italics – while offering additions. Irina is succinct, listing single words only, so I’ve referred to a similar list that was compiled by the more loquacious Julie Andrews having a bad day on The Sound of Music set:

“These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things”

Uncertainty: Death is a great unknown. Not something we’ve had practice with.

Pain: Irina doesn’t actually mention this one, but others do. People fear the pain involved in dying as well as the prospect of being dead.

Punishment: Those who believe in heaven and hell can naturally have some concerns about which way they might be headed…

Loss: This includes parting from loved ones, parting from everything known and familiar; parting from the earth itself.

Definitiveness: Death appears to be the end. Period. The transformation of personhood to nothingness. At the least, the end of life as we know it.

Death as Maybe Not Such a Bad Guy After All

Generalizing broadly, your ways of dealing with death seem to fall into three categories. Some of them are not mutually exclusive, and some of you look to me as though you embrace more than one.

Belief: Strong belief in heaven and God speaks directly to the fear of death. The stronger the conviction, the less the fear. So for some of us, this is a powerful and clear-cut solution. However, it's good to bear in mind Emilyjane’s, “Just because someone is at peace with the prospect of what they think happens after death doesn't mean they are right about what does.” Even the strongest conviction is still conviction, belief – and not, in other words, knowledge. Strong conviction still contains some element of doubt. Even when we think that the Bible or the Koran is God’s final revelation, this is something that we have been told and believe. We didn’t receive the revelation and write the scripture ourselves.

Experience: Many of you talk little or not at all about belief, and more about what sounds like an experiential process that occurred for you over time to make death less anxiety-provoking, and even something that can play a positive role for you. Honoring and incorporating our memories of deceased persons that we have loved into our own lives, and using death as a reminder to really live while we have the chance, are a couple specifics that have been mentioned. Emilyjane brought up meditation as having been helpful to her own process.

“No Fear Here”: (Goddess) Goddess qualifies her statement by saying she imagines that if she had children, parting from them would make death a very difficult thing. Mary Beth is clear that it’s dying – the blood, the gore, the sweat, the dehydration (not her exact words) - that bothers her. Death only enhances her appreciation of life. (I do wonder whether she would say that she’s always felt this way, or if it’s been the kind of process for her that others refer to?)

Grief, More Details, and the Love of Others

One mistake I made at the outset that I want to rectify: I should have referred to “disturbance” over death so as to include grief as well as fear. Don’t think it would have changed the general conversation much, but thought I should mention this.

The manner in which belief helps counter disturbance over death is plain to see. But I’d be interested if anyone has anything more to say about whatever experiential processes have helped them. I think we’ve only touched the edges here. For example, to say that the idea of death enhances appreciation for life is a little like saying, “So enjoy that walk down the gangplank!” I’ve noticed the enhanced appreciation effect too, and don’t discount it. But is it central?

One more thing I’d like to point out. We’ve been talking about disturbance over our own deaths. But death is also about the last thing that we want for anyone we love…

Tuesday, Off-Topic Totally

Mark Twain on Congress

Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.- What Is Man?

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.- Mark Twain, a Biography

All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.- Mark Twain's Autobiography; also in Mark Twain in Eruption

The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.- Mark Twain's Speeches, "The Weather"

...I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.- "Foster's Case", New York Tribune, 3/10/1873

http://www.twainquotes.com/Congress.html

Obstacles: Ego-Problems. Post #3

Ego: What We Don’t Mean

We’ve been looking at obstacles to living from out of our love, and a lot of consensus has sprung up around ego as the chief culprit. Recent comments help clarify what we mean and don’t mean by “ego.”

Sometimes “ego” has been used to refer to genuine self-love, and sometimes as a synonym for the self as a whole. These are big topics in their own right. Of course you could use “ego” for either of these things, but let’s not, so that we don’t get mixed up about what we’re trying to focus on now.

By “ego,” for purposes of this discussion, we’re talking about that exaggerated sense of self-importance that many of you have mentioned, and not the kind of genuine self-love that Irina and Emiljane comment on. Irina points out that real self-love, unlike ego, brings us peace. I would add that while ego is an obstacle to loving others, authentic self-love helps us to love others.

Ego: What We Do Mean

Here are some of our assorted and sometimes colorful definitions of ego, but all on the same wavelength I think:

I can never be wrong. I deserve the best because I am the best. (Doshar)

Wanting things only for yourself, or thinking only of your own good. Wanting to get all the attention, all the praise, wanting to be above the common level. (Irina)

We can be quite philosophical-minded about the most horrific suffering on the part of others. But if I get a pimple on my nose - now that's a problem. (Paul)

Being an ass. (Goddess)

Matthew, referring to Merriam-Webster for a definition of selfishness - a term that Matthew himself prefers over “ego.” But here he unselfishly points out that ego is okay in his book, or dictionary, too: “Selfishness: excessive interest in oneself {the only reason for constantly ignoring everyone else's problems is selfishness} -- see EGOISM.”

Ego: Downtrodden Versions, Survival Value, Going Beyond

I noted that some forms of ego are not “puffed up,” but more lowly, downtrodden, or defeated in appearance. I gave jealousy as an example. Emilyjane agrees, adding, “The person who has a low self-esteem can be just as obsessed with him/herself as the person who is narcissistic.”

Goddess, and I think someone else too, brings out the fact that ego has some survival value in defending ourselves. I agree, but feel the value is limited; and that our primary task as adults is to get as far past ego as we can. In my view, this has much more survival value than sticking with ego, especially for our species as a whole.

MJ and Emilyjane agree that overcoming our egotism, to the best of our ability, is job one:

MJ refers to a “godly form of existence, for lack of a better term,” and states that this is a direction in which we’re all headed. In the process, “we are also learning that fear and death have no real significance.”

Emilyjane calls ego “the house of fear,” with our task being to escape it.

I mentioned that the New Testament has a number of different themes or “threads” that we can pick up on, and that for me, the most meaningful one is trying our best to follow in the way of life that Jesus pointed to and exemplified.

Ego and The Fear of Death (Some Happy-Talk for Brightening Your Day)

Many of you have made a connection between fear and egoism. Mbaines, in a recent comment to the July 11 post, makes what I think are some interesting statements. I’ve edited and consolidated his remarks to avoid confusion, since he sometimes uses the word ego to refer to self-love or the self, as well as what we’re calling “ego”:

“Fear is what makes egotism exclusionary. It prohibits self-understanding and forces separation of one's self from all others… Fear makes Pride reactionary. Fear is the only Evil because, without it, one sees the world and their environment and the other for what they really are…”

Mbaines also emailed me a link re. fear of death appropriately titled, Fear of Death. It conveniently appears at the bottom of this page because this is the only place I could make it go.

The gist of the link is that it maintains studies show that people with strong religious beliefs fear death least. Yet people with moderate religious conviction, and not atheists, fear it most, because, in brief, they believe in God, don’t practice their religion much, and are afraid of going to hell.

For me, this brings up a couple things:

1. Grumblefish’s remark near the end of comments to the July 15 post (it begins, “I’m kind of surprised”…) seems to describe a process of moving from fear of death to being at peace with it. Yet if the peace he describes has to do with his personal expectations about going to heaven, he doesn’t mention this. To me, it sounds more like he’s describing some kind of process that he has actually experienced, and not a belief or expectation that comforts him.

2. MB’s link offers this possible explanation for its conclusion that atheists fear death less than the moderately religious: “Atheists may cope by focusing on ways to achieve at least a ‘symbolic immortality,’ such as through children or creative works.”

I wonder what’s behind this. Is the idea that by having children or doing creative work, we contribute to the eventual coming into being of a species or generation that literally never dies? But wouldn’t this be a bit like belief in heaven? If, on the other hand, biological/cultural creativity is viewed as nothing more than symbolic immortality - because the human species is perceived as being just as mortal as the human individual – then how does it help diminish disturbance around death?

Fear of Death

Weekend Off-Topic, Totally

These came in my email via my sister from who knows where, so everyone else may have seen this too. Anyway, I picked out the ones I liked best.

"Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house."--Rod Stewart


"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there is a man on base."--Dave Barry


"If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead."--Johnny Carson


"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."--Mark Twain


"You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, 'My God, you're right! I never would've thought of that!'"--Dave Barry

Obstacles: Fear, Selfishness, Death, and All That Good Stuff. Post #2

Overall, responses to the “Opening Thoughts” post about obstacles to living from out of our love, immediately got at what I see as the basic hindrances too: fear and ego. A number of your comments suggested a relationship between the two. Personally, I’m encouraged - you collectively came up with the subject matter for one of the early chapters in A First-Hand Faith! So you’ve given me some positive feedback in so far as the manuscript appears to be looking at aspects of our inner lives that people may generally find worth examining.

“Everything is Selfish/In Its Own Way…”

Before looking any further at obstacles, I’d like to try and clear up something raised by gen xx’s comments. Gen xx states that all behavior is “selfish,” so that there’s no such thing as genuine love.

If we use the word selfish to refer to anything that we may want and choose to do for any reason, under any circumstances, then the meaning of selfishness becomes, “any voluntary behavior.” Let’s say, for example, that person A beats up person B until he manages to knock him to the ground, then continues to beat and kick him. Person C intervenes by dialing 911 on a cell phone. Using such a broad definition of “selfish,” every action in this scenario was selfish except for person B falling to the ground! That was something he himself didn’t like doing, or want to do. But person A and person C were both doing what they liked doing, and were therefore equally selfish - ??

This definition for "selfish" is just too broad. It makes the word meaningless in terms of any useful denotation, yet colors everything we do in the light of the negative connotations of that word.

People want to do the things they want to do from out of forms and qualities of human experience that vary greatly. In a word, the motives for our behavior can be very different. For example, they can be neurotic, psychotic, or criminal. They can be based on fear, or based on something more expansive than that. They can be self-centered, or we can truly have others in mind. To characterize all behavior as selfish without looking at the differences in what motivates our wanting to do the things we like to do isn’t informative.

Fear and Ego

To summarize comments in this area, we’ve noted that A) some fears are realistic, so here, fear is a good thing, while, B) other kinds of fears – maybe we could call them psychologically-based – are self-limiting obstacles to leading lives that are based on our better natures. Phobias, and the fear of letting others get to know us, were two examples of self-limiting fears given in your remarks.

What is ego? No one’s offered a definition, but I think we’re all basically talking about “selfishness” as the word is ordinarily used. Doshar offered, “wanting to be ahead of everyone else,” which strikes me as a good working definition. Having been employed in elementary schools for a long time, it brings to mind all the arguments I’ve seen over the years that sprung up around students lining up for a drink of water or to go to recess. Adults are usually less literal about thinking they should be first in line for no reason or justification that anyone else on earth can fathom except for themselves, but I think it’s the same idea.

While we can’t expect a lot of detail in describing ego and its relation to fear in the space of a few posts, Emilyjane’s remark resonated with me:

“The ego is the house of fear. We are all born into it. Our assignment, should we choose to accept it, is to figure out how to escape.”

In similarly broad terms:

"By love we do the million things we do that affirm the lives of others, things as small as a kind word and as large as a cause that transcends ourselves. By ego we do the million things we do that cause harm: as petty as our irritability and as large as crime.

"In family relations, with friends, on the job, in all the routine tasks that keep us interacting with others, or in the wider spheres of long-term business and governmental practices, and in sustaining an environment viable for future generations, ego either doesn’t work, or it works badly, grinding us all down. As individuals and as a species, it is possible for us to keep hitting ourselves over the head with this fact, allowing our egos to dictate our future until we drive ourselves into the ground.

"Great and small, it all adds up. Ego is what has kept the human world in turmoil. Love still retains her implicit power to move earth toward heaven."

from A First-Hand Faith copyright 2004 Paul M. Martin

Death and Destruction

Two things haven’t been mentioned, or have just been touched on, that I thought people would focus in on more:

One is the fear of death.

The other corresponds to my second chapter – so maybe that’s a bad sign! But I do think people will know what I’m talking about, so I’ll bring it up myself soon if no one else does. You could describe it as a second major obstacle that typically arises in our teens and twenties. Unlike ego, it may be something that not all of us go through.

Obstacles: Opening Thoughts. Post #1

Religion, and to a large extent philosophy, show a strong interest in distinguishing our better natures from our lesser natures: agape vs. sin; compassion vs. ignorance; truth vs. illusion. Actually, I’d imagine that our species must have had a keen interest in looking at this distinction long before the arrival of religion or philosophy, just so we wouldn’t exterminate ourselves ahead of time by continually banging large rocks over each others’ heads.

That Woman Here starts us off by referring to “pride” as the greatest obstacle to experiencing and acting on love. We could take pride as either a synonym for egoism, or for one of its many variations: vanity, contempt, conceit, and so forth. I’m thinking that “ego” might be the better general term, since ego sometimes takes forms that are disheartened rather than “prideful” or “puffed up” – jealousy, for example.

Irina: “Pride, fear and egoism ... These are obstacles which keep you from really loving.” Irina goes on to say that love, on the one hand, and fear/egoism on the other, are incompatible, so that you need to distinguish between them in the quality of your feelings toward others.

”I am proud, and egotistic and afraid. But when it comes to true friends or to my mother for example, all that goes away.”

Me too. It’s easiest for me to realize what love is in relation to family and friends, both in terms of experiencing the feeling, and in terms of being able to go off and look at that feeling to get an idea of what it is.


Question 1, Broader Front: What about trying to move beyond our fear and egoism on a broader front than just in relation to friends and family members - so that our better natures come into play more often, for example, with coworkers? Do we want privatization of our better nature plans - known as “compassionate conservatism” in political circles - or are we seeking universal coverage?


That Woman Here: “I think Irina pretty much summed things up. Pride and fear keep any thoughts of romantic love at a healthy (or is it unhealthy) distance for me.”

TWH has come in right after we’ve finished up with romance, so anyone wanting to look at that specific topic might want to look back at a couple of the later “What Love Is” posts where it’s discussed. Here I’ll just say that to me, there can be positive or negative reasons for staying away from romantic involvements, depending on what’s going on in our lives.


Question 2, Fear-Ego Connection: Irina and That Woman have both mentioned a connection between fear and ego. What’s the connection? (Additionally, there was this from Life of Bryan: “I also feel like there is a lot of fear in self-centeredness…”)


Grumblefish looks more closely at fear, speaking of it in terms of, “the fear of facing ourselves honestly," and the difficulty of doing this from out of fear of what we might see; and from fear of how disconcerting this could be.

I think this sort of fear poses a great obstacle for many of us. Because you can’t get past what you don’t look at…

Emily Jane: “For some people--I think I used to be one of them--not being self-centered enough was a problem. The Bible says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ It doesn't say, ‘Love your neighbor more than yourself’."

Question 3, love of self/others: “Altruism” is a word I’ve never cared for, because for me, it connotes exactly the fallacy EJ points to: that loving others must come at our own expense. Any thoughts on this?


Benjamin, returning to the subject of fear: “Fear is my darkest cloud… And in searching for love, for I have been, it brings me up close to fear, which is my obstacle.”

Hmm… Benjamin is reminding me that although we’re focusing on obstacles to the expression and enactment of our love, we could also discuss obstacles to receiving love from others. But then B. turns back to thoughts on obstacles to acting from out of love:

”I think society, particularly the media, kind of suggests that we should restrict our love to a limited and safe number of people (family, romantic partner). I don't think this was the message of Jesus. I don't think it’s very helpful."


Life of Bryan picks up on this:

“To me, ‘losing’ yourself always seemed like taking yourself out of the number 1 spot in life's hierarchy. the need to focus on God/others first.

“I might be afraid that putting someone else first won't be fulfilling to my own needs… {but it always seems to prove otherwise,} like when you make a sacrifice for someone else, or go on a mission trip to somewhere that totally rocks your perspective on the world/life, or do Habitat for Humanity or whatever. But we're too caught up in our own… self-importance to hear God whispering in our ear.”

So Life of Bryan is talking about experiencing personal fulfillment from acting on love in relation to others. I’m thinking that he and Emilyjane might have two different departments of life in mind. Maybe EJ is thinking about interpersonal relationships that aren’t mutual enough – too one-way in terms of the giving/receiving. LB seems to be talking more about expressing love by way of the work we do, and how fulfilling this can be.

Question 4, Areas of Life: We’ve referred to love in interpersonal relationships, and love expressed by work that we do. Any special challenges/opportunities afforded by each?

We seem to have started out on the same general wavelength with this topic. These are some questions that your comments have brought to my mind.

God is Brown

God is the color of brown –
The quiet brown of that church against the dawning sky
The dark, blackward brown of those branches there
That tumble upward to the early light in fits of sturdy growth;
The purple-brown of clouds pasted lightly now
Against the glowing surface of a sky
That is Light coming gently into the world.

God is the brown that stains our battlefields,
The blood encrusted on our stones and leaves
In every clash of ignorance with truth.
God is the clamor of every generation
Coursing madly through the streets of this world
Like hectic leaves: orange, red, black, and every stripe of brown
Animated by a wind they cannot see.
God is the seasonal swarm and death of leaves and generations,
The hue and the cry of this earth
Inside the spinning whirlwind.

With the blind and with the sighted,
With the sweep of the murderer’s ax
And the stroke of the artist’s brush,
With the whole in all its parts, even those that do not know,
Is God.
With all things, and carrying them all, is this
Love that is coming into the world
Who will suffer not any one to stay in outer darkness:
For what is, is beloved,
And what is not well can be remade.
There is healing at hand,
Only healing and sanity,
For where will is good, no stone is cast.
God is mercy and not sacrifice.

God is the brown of the dove’s eye that watches and waits,
The calm brown eye of all things,
The peace undisturbed by all turmoil.
God is the seeing amidst all our doings,
The eye of the storm,
The I AM of you and of me
Who knows better than our foolish acts
And is still waiting to live,
Striving still to come into the world,
A greater possibility than we have yet been able to name,
An ocean of sound deeper than we have yet been able to hear
Clearly
Though it rumbles through every stone, the pains of labor.

For behold:
His good seed sown, blind impulse of a time untold,
Again he stirs who fathered-forth the stars, who made the earth,
Now consciously,
A mother with child in the struggle for birth –
And this birth canal we call reality is narrow,
The way painful as the possibility is great;
A possibility that is the furthest reach and direction of human love,
Still undisclosed,
Still coming into the world.

God is early dawn
Colored in the earthen hues
Of human faces.



Copyright Paul Martin 2005 all rights reserved



More Light


Love knows us well; we know love less fully.


Earlier I quoted from Matthew:


“He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Mat 10:39.


What sorts of things do we need to lose – whether for Jesus’ sake, for our own sakes, or for the sakes of those we come into contact with? What stands in the way of more fully realizing our love, our compassion, our better natures? What clouds need to be dispersed to make way for increased light?

This is the subject I’d like to turn to next.

What Love Is: Did You Say Love or Walnut? Post #14

Gale in the Groves

It’s that time of year, and tropical storm Irina has mercilessly pounded this blog for the past two days, blowing nearly all the limes out of my trees, along with some of the smaller limbs, and threatening a couple lines of communication.

But with the winds subsiding, it’s time to clean up a bit:

First, it’s okay to laugh. In fact, you might say that the part of us that doesn’t take anything too seriously is quietly shaking God’s hand behind our backs or maybe exchanging high-fives. God isn’t a big worrier and isn’t so easily embarrassed.

Second, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been making fun of anyone on this blog. If somebody did that, I would exercise my full powers as blog dictator to delete their comment.

Friendly teasing, however, is generally allowed. Still, if you don’t ever want to be teased, you could try typing, “Please don’t tease,” with your comments. But this is something you could easily get teased about, making this a real Catch-22…

Golf Ball in the Highball

Many of yesterday’s comments that were unrelated to fruit essentially said, “I think love can have lots of different meanings. Love means different things to different people.”

I’m not so sure. If this were true, love wouldn’t be a very useful word when it came to the realm of inner life and feeling. Jesus, for example, didn’t say, “Love one another, or… whatever.”

Let’s make an analogy with a word that refers to some object in the external world. Maybe it could be a short, one-syllable word similar to love. “Lime” might do nicely.

If “lime” could mean practically any old thing, some terrible situations could develop, as we have already seen. Another possibility:

You would tell the bartender that you wanted a lime with your drink, but might end up with a walnut or golf ball. Or you could turn back around from chatting with your friend only to discover that the bartender had carefully balanced a small tree limb atop your glass.

“What’s that doing there?” you’d ask. The bartender would give you a blank stare, then answer in kind of a gruff voice:

“You said you wanted lime…”

You wouldn’t dare say anything, and would have to sit there at the bar, awkwardly trying to hold the end of the tree limb in your drink, and pretending to enjoy it whenever the bartender looked over.

Mixed Drinks

So if love can have all kinds of different meanings, we might get mixed up a lot. We might say “love” when we really mean “romance,” for example. Our whole conversation about love and romance illustrates one of the reasons love can seem to refer to a lot of different things…

We finally decided that the state of being “in love,” or the “two in one combo,” actually refers to a blend of two elements: love plus the psychobiological attraction that exists between the sexes.

Almost always, we experience love in combination with other feelings. This is one major reason why love can feel quite different from one occasion to the next. It gets mixed up with the other feelings that we have toward an individual.

A second, closely related reason why our experiences of love can feel so different from one time to another is that our love is directed toward different kinds of things. Even if we confine ourselves to the realm of other people, without addressing, say, the love of nature, it feels quite different to love an infant than an adult, a friend from a family member, a brother from a sister, and so on.

But does this make love a different thing each time? I don’t think so. It just has different overtones from other feelings and perceptions that it’s associated with in relation to different people.

One small indicator that maybe we are all trying to talk about the same thing when using the word love is how important the word seems to be to people.

What Love Is: In the Flesh. Post #13

Religious Cleavage: Emilyjane’s Provocative Thoughts

Emilyjane’s brought up something we haven’t thought about at all:

Deepak Chopra mentions the Old Testament poet in the Song of Solomon "who rhapsodizes about his love for God... as romantically as if he were swooning over a woman." He concludes, "The parallel between a lover's intoxication and a saint's is impossible to miss.”

I’d add that certain Christian mystics – as I recall, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, for example – also describe experiences of oneness with God in romantic and even somewhat sexual terms.

Emilyjane concludes: “I think, Paul, that what you are defining as love probably falls into the categories of intimacy and relationship as Deepak has defined them.”

Some thoughts:

What I would want to call love is the basis for all human relationships at their best. So if we become aware of what love is, we find something common to love as we experience it in every kind of relationship.

Intimacy as sexual love – the “two in one combo” or state of being “in love,” as we’ve called it elsewhere – is one particular kind of loving relationship.

While intimacy has been used as an analogy for experiencing the love of God, other sorts of human relationship also provide analogies, as in the traditional image of God the Father.

Some forms of religious experience actually do “feel” a bit like sex. St. Theresa of Avila wrote about it. I’ve experienced some of this myself. It seems to be one form that religious or spiritual experience, which is a big topic in its own right, can take. So if you’re talking about love of God from out of that type of experience, you can be drawn to use some romantic language. But again, this is going to be analogy and metaphor. Such language only says, “It’s kind of like this, in a limited way.” Metaphor and analogy is partial and imperfect depiction. It shouldn’t be confused with the thing itself.

For example, I could tell you that my head is like a mountaintop upon which the sun has beaten too powerfully and long. Much of the greenery that was once there is gone. (Tear and sniffle.)

But if you were to show up at my house, say after a three hour drive, and approach the top of my head with a picnic basket and binoculars, you’d be disappointed.

Love in the Flesh

We’ve made a few distinctions, and find ourselves in the general ballpark of what love is. At this point, for blogging purposes, it may be more efficient to point to examples of what love is rather than try to arrive at greater conceptual clarity.

Some examples from our own time: Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. And of course the earlier and especially prominent examples of Jesus, Buddha, and, undoubtedly, other important figures from other religions that I happen to know much less about. (For example, I know little about Mohammed – I think in part because Islam emphasizes the Koran itself more than its author?)

Whatever religious tradition you do or don’t believe in, these are all people who loved not only romantic partners or their families, but who lived from out of their love across the broader spectrum of their words and actions. They exemplify love as “the real thing,” the greater love, the love of God.

Or just call it the greater love if you’re not so sure about the word “God.” We went a little way into the issue of different perspectives on what the word God means in earlier posts. And there are perfectly good people out there who would reject the word God - possibly because we haven’t conceptualized it adequately. But then that’s my shtick. (No, I don’t consider myself to have fully conceptualized God. But I think I could talk about God in a way that would make the word meaningful to an atheist as well as a theist or pantheist. But that’s getting ahead of myself…)

The greater love, the real thing, is implicit to all of us. It’s worth trying to feelingly realize and understand what it is that we experience in relation to any particular person that we consider ourselves to love – brother or sister, father or mother, friend, son, daughter, partner, grandparent – because doing so can be a “portal,” so to speak, into the real thing. More accurately, it is the real thing, and it becomes a portal into basing our lives on that real thing more decisively and broadly. There are other portals, but love of others is so widely experienced and yet so poorly understood, that thinking about what we mean by the love of others isn’t a bad place to start.

Alive to Something Greater

“He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Mat 10:39.

We might even want to lose and find ourselves for our own sakes and for the sake of those we come into contact with every day.

Dying to ourselves involves both joy and pain. I think it’s what we’re here to do.

If we want to lead a real life, there is no getting around the cross that each of us personally faces. Making less of Christianity – or, more simply, making less of what it is to be a living, breathing human being in this world – is like spending our whole lives in front of the TV, at least on Sunday mornings, and watching this great video about this wonderful God/man named Jesus Christ who had to go through a heck of a lot just so we could sit on the sofa eating popcorn until the second coming.

I don’t think that’s what he was looking for.


PS: On a less lofty note, any comments on the goofy photo of myself and the existential questions it poses for me – this appears around the end of the comments section of the previous post – would be appreciated.

What Love Is: Romance? God? What? Post #12

“Love, love, love” (The Beatles, intro to “All You Need Is Love”)

Post #11 was really my attempt to sing, along with the Doobie Brothers, “Bye Bye Love” - at least for a while. Of course I was imagining that love would come up again in the future, given the general subject matter.

But after post 11, I just kept hearing, “love, love, love.” The following two comments are representative for showing what I’d want to call the conflicting, or at least far from convergent tendencies to talk about love as romance vs. love as – well, what I’d want to call, “love.”


“In love” equals romance. “Love” is something else. {Lorena, summarizing my position.}

So when "in love" fades and now you just love the person, eventually if romance doesn't reappear i think it could be time to move on, no?

Lorena, commenting to June 29 post

***

What I think is that Love, just any kind of love, gets to be TRUE when we let God be in it. Any Love without God is imperceptibly destructive, egoistic, foolish. Not once has it been said that GOD IS LOVE...

Irina, commenting to July 1 post


Since Lorena posted first, and quotes me in what I think is an implicitly critical manner that makes me concerned I could get pushed around again in another skit (June 29 post), I’ll make romantic love the subject of today's post, and hopefully “call it a wrap” as far as romance goes. Then we can look to the direction Irina suggests.

If this doesn’t work, maybe I can feature Lorena and Irina in a boxing skit and let them duke it out. Emilyjane could referee. EJ has commented on both romance and love with approximately equal interest, so I think she’d be fair-minded…

French-Fries Fixation

Here I am, as far as romance goes, in my teens through early twenties. All right, into my early thirties, but to much less of an extent. I simplify matters only slightly, and don't believe that I was unusual in my attitude, although I guess I'm apt to find out if I was...

Pretty woman, nice personality: I’m “in love.”

Pretty woman, very nice personality: I’m “head over heels in love.”

Pretty woman, lousy personality: Depending on how pretty, I’m somewhere on the scale of infatuated to obsessed.

How did I make decisions on nice personality? It might have been the way she intoned the word “fries,” as in, “Do you want fries with your burger?”

So maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t see a lot of love in “romance.” I think “romantically involved” is more accurate than “in love,” especially in the early stages. And that’s where most of the romance is.

If I walk into a roomful of people and “agape” is the major thing going on in romance, then how is it that I’m much more likely to notice and focus on an attractive woman, than, say, a man, a baby, a kid, or an elderly lady? The thing that chiefly characterizes romance – that whole starry-eyed, psychobiological attraction thing – is not love.

The Deluxe Two In One Combo

But in the case of a happy long-term relationship, you have two people really getting to know and love each other. If that happens, which I think probably mainly depends on each partner being on a good path with their own psychological and spiritual development, my guess is that you’d never entirely lose the romance. As I mentioned in a previous comment or post, when we know someone a long time, we see them through that prism or lens.

A childhood friend is one example. If you still know each other as adults, the reality of your shared childhood can’t be forgotten. And I gave my Uncle Paul, now in his eighties, as an example in the romantic area. Married for over fifty years, he still can’t talk about his wife, who passed away several years ago, without the look of a man truly “in love.” He got the “two in one combo” for life. He loved his wife, and the romance they started out with never died. I doubt that it was smoldering in their seventies the way it did when they were twenty. She died of cancer, and it took quite a while. But the romantic history was part of their shared past that could never just disappear or evaporate from each others’ eyes when they looked at each other in the present.

So Lorena, I don’t think that what ends real relationships is the fading of romance. But I think what can kill romance is the end of an authentic, loving relationship. I’ve seen it happen.

Of course we haven’t defined what love is, but as you can see, in my opinion, it sure ain’t romance. Romance can be a prelude to a genuinely loving relationship or to a night at the Holiday Inn.

As if to prove my point, below there's a link to a poem I happened to stumble across online the other day.

Okay Lorena, take the straw out of your mouth and stop pointing it at me. I can see you’ve got soda up there.

poem

What Love Is: Sources, Anyone? Post #11

While we haven't been definitive about what love is, to me this discussion has made some interesting observations and distinctions. Comments have pointed toward what I think is likely to be the next topic: religious/spiritual experience. (But I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions.)

As long as we haven’t arrived at a clear conception of love, which is probably more than you can ask of blogging anyway, I’d like to close by referring to a couple sources on love that highlight important aspects.

St. Paul

First is a well known quote from the New Testament:

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. I Cors. 13: 4 – 7

Here St. Paul offers a series of statements that I think are highly reflective of what love is – and isn’t. By framing so much of this in terms of what love is not, Paul also hints at the nature of the major obstacle to living from out of our love.

Paul doesn’t offer a complete concept or perspective on love here, and there’s at least one element in what he says that I find myself wanting to question. But for a loose series of statements about love, I don’t think it gets much better.

Dickens

The second source I’ll refer to is the best book on spiritual transformation by way of love that I’ve ever read: A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. I’ve never read anything more evocative of how powerfully and decisively awareness of our love can change our lives. Adaptations of it are such a staple of childhood holiday entertainment that this book is easy to overlook.

Has anyone else read anything on love they found especially compelling?