Paul Please note: Due to the large amount of email Paul receives and the limitations of his physical condition he can no longer respond to all email. But please keep sending — he reads them all.
(Please Note: the broadcast has been archived - it's titled "Had enough of the 24/7 Paris Hilton News Yet?" My interview is the last segment and begins at the 31:00 minute mark.)
As regular readers know, I do like to use humor, but seriously: I was surprised and pleased to receive an invitation from Air America's State of Belief producer Brendan McDonald to be interviewed by host The Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy about this blog and the upcoming book, Original Faith: Becoming Our Truer Nature.
My interview with State of Belief aired Sat. June 30 at 10 AM EST (7 AM Pacific) and on Sunday 7 PM EST (4 PM Pacific). You can listen to the program online or download the podcast on ITunes. For details, click here.
This was a positive experience for me. Mr. McDonald and Rev. Gaddy set a warm, welcoming tone, and I thought the questions were great.
Me and You and a Dog Named Thomas Carlyle’s Crisis of Faith
Kind of a cheesy title, but I wanted people who run across it not to just go “Thomas who?” Let’s begin with the “me and you” part: In some of the comments to the previous Carlyle post, I noticed that certain responses suggested a distinction between “present-centered folks” vs. “hope folks.”
Present-Centered
On the one hand, the present centered people pointed out that all too often we don’t live in the moment. Instead, we’re preoccupied with stuff like what that jerk at work said to us yesterday, how we wish we still lived where we used to, how worried we are that this or that might or might not happen, etc. The idea seemed to be that if we spent more time living in the present, we’d be happier. The implication seemed to be that hope is one of those things that take us out of the moment.
Hopeful (or hopeless or vacillating between the two…)
On the other hand we’ve all heard things like: “Hope springs eternal…” “Where there’s life there’s hope” “Children are the hope of the future.” Where there’s the smoke of that many platitudes, there’s bound to be fire. Hope, indeed, has been viewed as an indispensable feature of inner life for a very long time. A factoid that I recall from grad school is that hopelessness is a feature of depression that’s particularly associated with suicide.
If you’re present centered, do you lack forward-looking concerns – for example, environmental issues and the kind of earth we’re leaving our children? If you’re hopeful or struggle with hopelessness, what’s involved with this beyond the question of whether or not this post will be followed by another one on Carlyle where I remember to actually quote him?
Although Carlyle’s style in this piece is complicated and ornate even by nineteenth century standards, the substance of his spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-tailored), provides a good illustration of the passionately spiritual and yet critically-minded quality of the work from that period.
Carlyle’s style in the excerpts that follow is further complicated by his use of two fictional characters to present his own experiences. I have not attempted to distinguish or identify the characters because doing so wouldn’t add to our understanding of his experience and would detract from its readability.
From Sartor Resartus
The following abridgment consists of direct quotations presented without commentary and in the same order in which they appear in Carlyle’s text.
The Everlasting No - Book Second, chapter VII:
He himself says once, with more justice than originality: “Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.” What, then, was our Professor’s possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely, all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado. … Doubt had darkened into Unbelief…
…for man’s well -being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; …with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury … for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything. Unhappy young man!
What do you think? Is loss of belief the loss of everything? Why or why not? Note that Carlyle appears to use the words hope, faith, and belief interchangeably.
Religion and… Yes! Nineteenth Century English Lit!
By popular demand... (Well, not really.)
I think that nineteenth century English literature had more to offer than the twentieth century ever received. Poets and essayists like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Mill, and Carlyle, reflected on faith in the new intellectual and social contexts presented by science and industry. What is striking in their body of work as a whole is their view of faith as indispensable, together with an insistence on examining it with scrupulous honesty. They were genuinely critical thinkers, testing even and especially the values and ideas they cherished most.
To read these authors is to feel that as a group, they collectively put a great deal of work toward what perhaps held the potential to become some significant new elaboration of their Judeo-Christian religious heritage that might have helped reduce its conflicts with modernity and with other religious traditions. But while their work was spiritually inspiring, it would remain squarely in the domain of literature. The spiritual insights and issues they labored so passionately to bring to our attention seem to have been quietly set aside as many people comfortably retired to the safety of their entitlement to their frequently unexamined opinions.
I guess that would be my opinion. Or impression.
Next: Introducing Thomas Carlyle, author of Sartor Resartus and “Men Who Love Capital Letters Too Much.”
The mind receives warmth from the heart and reflects it back to the heart as light, which, over time, effects climactic change, magnifying and enlarging the heart’s warmth. The heart radiates this greater heat back to the mind, increasing the mind’s luminosity which in turn further warms the heart…
Sometimes the practice of religion refers to participating in worship and ritual. Sometimes it refers to the idea of putting faith into practice. In Christian parlance, this might be denoted as “picking up one’s cross and following” or “being perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” But of course, putting one’s faith tradition into practice in this second sense is not unique to Christianity.
This second sense in which faith is practiced might be conceived of as becoming more saintly – or saner – in our own persons. We learn to recognize our saner tendencies and to develop habits and ways of life that take direction from them in order to help foster them. Practice of this kind looks pretty similar regardless of our varying practices of worship and ritual. Those who do not participate in worship or ritual at all are not prevented from committing themselves to greater sanity.
What do you think it means to become increasingly saintly or sane? The two words do have different connotations but to me seem to have a lot in common. And whether we look at the concept in “religious” “secular” or even “Darwinian” terms, it has become increasingly clear that for more of us to put more of an emphasis on cooperation, compassion, and far-sightedness, and less on narrow self interest and short-term gratification, has become a matter of the survival of the species.
Copernicanism: Its numerous denominations include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism, Agnosticism, Humanism, and Atheism. Every Copernican has noticed something with far-reaching ramifications: he or she is not the center of the universe.
Copernicans even believe in the existence of other human beings – people who differ from themselves in some ways but are nevertheless perceived as full-fledged human beings and nothing less. They go so far as to identify with their sufferings and joys. They genuinely care about the children and future of other people.
A Copernican knows that he or she is part of a much larger picture, closely identifies with that picture, and acts accordingly – and seeks to do so with greater consistency. Everyone can improve; Copernicanism is a way and not a destination arrived at once and for all.
Copernicans realize that it is becoming increasingly important for more of us to act for the sake of the greater whole from out of our own positions and in our own ways in order for this earth that all our children will inherit to become a place of increasing and not diminishing promise.
Ptolemism: (Just don’t ask me how to pronounce it. Ptolemy is Copernicus’s predecessor who thought the earth was the center of the universe): Its numerous denominations include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism, Agnosticism, Humanism, and Atheism. Ptolemists believe that the universe revolves around them. They rarely make direct assertions to this effect, knowing others would object, but their words and actions show quite consistently that they live for the sake of “me and mine.”
As to others, Ptolemist theology states that they are of lesser stature than the self and those who most resemble it. Sometimes Ptolemists believe that “God” has told them this. Other times, it’s simply obvious to them that those human qualities that are most admirable and worthy are, by happy coincidence, the very ones that they happen to possess themselves. Either way, the most basic needs of others count for infinitely less than the self’s added comfort, convenience, power, prestige, luxury, or wealth.
Quietly, and faded like the walls Hair unwashed, in wrinkled clothes They sit in class absorbed in other matters Hard to spot among the colors fresh from shopping malls.
Dreamily they stare out windows Flirting with horizons Wider than their own That sweep like hints of something larger Something brighter Than the dark and narrow borders of their homes.
In a world not quite their own Like uninvited guests They eat their lunches all alone Laughed at, taunted, scorned to hell They know So much is missing; And if you smile their way They seek it in your eyes like strangers Wandering through desert places Open to the nearest traces. Turns away again; then you sense a troubled closing As the silences behind your back So fill with such a weight of wanting That you feel the heavy press of their distress The delicate collapse and crumpled folding – Of the struggling young girls The straggling young girls Who sit apart with uncombed curls In rumpled clothing.
No one is perfect. Everyone is called in the direction of perfection.
If at all possible, find a way to love your parents. It settles some things and makes others irrelevant.
Wounds that won’t completely heal can be left behind, transcended for every practical purpose of our lives.
The only thing that more than makes up for a deficit in being loved as a child is a surplus of loving. Give better than you got.
What is the relationship between spirituality and youthful “existential angst” – and other forms of depression and despair?
Schooled in Forebodings
Two perfectly identical new school buildings with very well-mowed lawns; nothing there that doesn’t pay most humble respects to conveniences of feet…
They’ve really rolled out the green carpet!
Across the street a swamp has its own mist assorted primordial aromas innumerable cattails unidentifiable pandemonium of stem and leaf and at the fringes near the sidewalk goldenrod and yarrow.
Quite a display really a natural riot like the scenery on that wonderful old show The Wild Kingdom; and I love the mysterious tree rising from the center with no leaves (maybe it is dead).
Quite a jungle really but where are the dinosaurs and the saber-toothed tigers? How about an antelope? I would settle for a skunk… How about some nice sidewalk graffiti then? It says
THIS WAY TO HELL (indicating only these polite nearby schools). If only he knew that no one believes adolescents’ prophesies knowing their hormones run thick and green that they exaggerate like jungles.
