Spiritual Poetry: All for the Best?
The second in a series of posts on the experience of adversity.
In Original Faith: Becoming Our Truer Nature, I paraphrase St. Paul to define God as “the One in whom we live and move and have our being.” According to your own views, in what follows you may conceive of this greatest Context for our lives as a supernatural entity existing in distinction from creation or as word for nature, being, or reality itself in its full dimensions.
Valley Low
It has come across, occurred somehow,
That God has gotten into me rolled and rounded
Something like the way a mountain faces distant eyes:
Always with a hidden side. And I have gotten grounded into God,
Feeling that strong and steady current keeping me
Safe as molecules of air among a falling house of cards.
Such slight things as rubber bands and spider stings,
And the vibrations ring upon the slight weak thing I am.
Yet God breathes the air I breathe by every breath,
And although hidden in a housebound
Hollow of the cosmos, my mind rides God’s:
Springing into high skies and wide fields, roaming and rolling
Implicitly to things no longer possible for me: running
Over dirt paths mighty with the calls of crows,
White puffs of breath beneath my eyes
Across each wintry season’s fields of snow
In dawns that only see me indoors lying low.
And steadily I visit all those places I will never know
In teeming cities; workplaces; cross-country drives
I’ll never do; early morning folks in diners,
Waitresses with voices still gravelly from sleep;
Heart open to a heartland where I’ll never go.
I am out at recess now with every child in every elementary school:
The ones who always have the ball and those who only
Lean against the wall in shadows.
And even if I learned God didn’t want me now,
I would follow like a holy ghost, shading in the places
That God leaves behind and pointing toward most High
While hidden in the valley low.
Paul Martin
“Everything happens for a reason.”
Agree or disagree?
Posted by Paul at 5:15 PM Permalink
27 Comments:
It kind'a sounds like, "it's always in the last place you look..."
As in, sure things happen for reasons, because it was reasons that got them to be happenning in the first place.
Y'know?
'Course, I ain't exactly the "deepest" thinker 'bout some shtuff, so, don't take my word on it.
Are we here to experience all , as opressed and opressor as saint and as sinner because we are in fact only One?
Does the mystic seek union while in their bodies because that is the truth of things?
Yes all things happen for a reason ...agree
By quoting that common remark "Everything happens for a reason" I meant the basic idea that the details of our lives are benevolently planned or provided for.
"It was meant to be" and "I guess it wasn't meant to be" would be other examples of common phrases that have this premise.
"We're blessed" and "Thank God we survived" would be additional examples.
DR SU: You and Boneman both lean toward the idea of things happening for a reason. I'm not sure I know what your "reasons" are for thinking so? My reply to Boneman above may help clarify what I was trying to get at.
PECOS BLUE: Yeah, that would be good!
"As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to love it more and more."
- Jules Renard
It seems to me that we misunderstand this phrase and equate "happen for a reason" with something like: things happen with a humanly frame of understanding...
Sounds like commentators since my previous reply would probably agree that there's at least some doubt, maybe a lot, about things always happening for a reason in the sense of "for the best" - at least, per Kevin's comment, in terms that we can understand.
- Kevin: "Senseless violence" really is or is not senseless?
Keshi.
And that poem is spectacular! One of the best I've read in a long, long time. :)
Sometimes I think that "everything happening for a reason" is just what we tell ourselves when the mystery becomes so opaque that we can't imagine ever coming out of it. We usually say it when bad or senseless things happen. We say "one door closes and another will open" or as the Quakers say, "Way will open." It's like a nervous tic of faith.
The way always opens...just not always like we thought it would.
MARISSA: That sounds right to me. One highly dependable silver lining, so to speak, is that we can learn from adversity, although that can still leave the sky pretty overcast if the adversity is severe enough. And here for sure we'd need to bear in mind Pauline's qualification about adversity in the form of brain damage. Glad you liked the poem, was thinking you might have already seen it but even if you had I did some editing recently.
ROSIE: I like your phrase "nervous tic of faith" to describe phrases like "everything happens for a reason" etc. Maybe such sayings testify to a faith that's unaware of how strong it really is.
J.A. LOCKHART, thank you -
I have seen over the years that things do happen for a reason whether it's a lesson needed or the result of an earlier action or reaction of my own. Through a belief in reincarnation I have found answers to very puzzling questions that would have eluded me otherwise. Coupled with karma (yeah I know-a very overused word in most cases) whether recent or from a past life I find I alone must step up and own all that happens to me-the good and the bad. By admitting that my little self-centered ego can do nothing on it's own and by a complete surrender to a Higher Power things turn out way better. Then what seems a bad experience shows itself to be just what I needed in order to learn a certain point and to bring balance back into my life. So in conclusion, yes, I do believe everything happens for a reason.
"...And even if I learned God didn't want me now, I would follow like a Holy Ghost..." That is magnificent poetry.
I remember so well how my parents would use philosophical soundbites with me when I was young such as "Everything happens for a reason." and "If it's meant to be...." Here is another one: "It is always darkest before the dawn."
Whether these are true or not matters less to me than the power they have to soothe the troubled soul.
Something in me calls me to believe that in the end there is benevolence if not for the individual then for the world as a whole.
Keshi.
On the other hand, you can believe or have faith that while the details of what happens to many of us are truly unfortunate, it's all OK or turns out right at the level of the big picture or ultimate reality.
KESHI: I noticed someone earlier in the thread also reads me as having expressed a view so I'm curious about this. I was actually trying to be vague about my personal views to leave people freer to express their own, but maybe I haven't succeeded on that!
I felt like Jonathon Livingston Seagull or holding onto Peter Pan and soaring across the sky.
Everything happens for a reason alright just as Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 9:11*
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
Time and Chance Happeneth!..just doesn't have the same pizzazz as our modern day version but it will have to do.
*I find it quite bizarre that my favorite verse has an additional mnemonic attachment.
I haven't looked at the OT in a long time. You know, this quotation really brings to mind from a few posts back - about how the Bible is such a voluminous, multi-authored text that you really can find support for very different views.
The Old Testament is often quoted by people who particularly like the judgmental, punitive, condemnatory sorts of verses. You're making me realize that a lot of my own "personal favorites" may be among those least likely to be quoted by fundamentalists!
Really glad you liked the poem.
HAZZBUZZ: You write "Your poem makes me think it's possible to connect with God and get beyond the individual piece of the jigsaw and whatever colours happen to be on there" - and then you wonder if maybe that's not it and you've missed the point.
To which I say, respectively, "bingo" and "au contraire..."
bingo indeed!
Is senseless violence senseless?
I guess we need to define senseless.
This topic, I think, is where the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you can love God even when things are terrible, I'm suspecting you're probably one of the blessed ones. This is where saints are made.
Senseless violence is difficult to fathom because our minds are boggled by endless maze like psuedo-'reasons' how a person reached such a moment. We throw up our hands and say it makes no sense. But there are discreet moments in time that can be found which when reflected upon we can see where one person made have been lead to believe that certain acts were necessary or inevitable.
Are we afraid to reflect in this manner because it seems as if we are justifying these horrible acts?
Perhaps... But how else will we understand the darkness?
Ecclesiastes 9:11
whew! that is quite a mnemonic... interesting...
In my blog post I noted that it is easy to love God when He/She/It is loveable, kind and merciful.
But, this God also created the molten center of our earth, where this frail human wouldn't last a fraction of a second in.
In many religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc there are gods which depict the dark, terrible side of existence. Kali is my personal favorite. It seems to me, that this idea that God shouldn't allow horrible things to happen to humans is a recent one in history.
Are we becoming soft perhaps?
In a bad enough situation, you're forced to throw a whole lot of ego stuff overboard or you're sunk. Things are already bad enough that you don't have the luxury of wallowing in it or getting repeatedly upset... you'd go crazy.
As far as I can tell, the direction of dimished egoism and increasing sanity is the way of all adult growth and development. I guess if you go far enough "sanity" becomes "saintliness." I do think it's on one continuum.
What you're saying here about "everything happens for a reason" seems to relate more to ideas like causality and maybe the perennial free will vs. determinism debate? I was using the phrase more to refer to the idea of divine providence in one form or another - the idea that even the nastiest details of our lives occur or are allowed to occur through the deliberate operation of a divine intelligence.
Once again, this afternoon I was going through my "process" from hearing about it,understanding it and later on living it.
What I find in it is, that that belief is life sustainig when all else may fail.
Once one subscribes to this understanding and begins observation of the unfolding of one's life events it is like looking back into an intricatly beautiful fractal - a wonderfully choreographed ballet - I ussually say...
Now, as HUngarians would say - "One can even tire of good things"...
So, when life brings us a succession of seemigly unending "challeges" (oh do I hate the word!) or, set us up in an unavoidable and apparently unescapable situation, it is not only difficult but almost impossible to appreciate the concept...
H*ll, after all we are only human.
I rebel , for my share of "lessons" and often wish others may take some turns
:)
Big hug
Happy Easter
Often; but not always. There are kinds and degrees of adversity that, overall, genuinely diminish us more than they enliven us - even when we live to tell the tale, even when the cloud has a silver lining that we honestly honor and acknowledge.
True happiness is a fragile wonder whose foundation is peace. And peace is a rock.
Happy Easter!
So your post has been on my mind for several days! Anyhow, my considered answer is "Yes!"
As to the meaning we can find in events, I feel it's not fixed. We can go on reinterpreting our world, gaining more and more from it.
I was also thinking that your situation, Paul, though you may see it as "adversity" and a spiritual challenge, is also a direct blessing to be enjoyed on its own merits while it lasts. Your appreciation of the scenes you cannot physically visit at present is more acute for this deprivation. they say "youth is wasted on the young" and we know what they mean. All too often, health is wasted on the healthy, and it is not in abundance that we appreciate most but in scarcity.
I do have a larger view of the context in which even the worst adversities occur, but it's too much to develop in blog posts - it's in the book though.
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