Spiritual Ambiguity: Kept in the Dark

Isabella

Pain, beauty and a memory from a couple years before I would have to stop working.

I realized that I was definitely going to have to pull over. For the past few minutes I’d been scanning the shadowy curbsides for possibilities as the pain in my left low back began to run down the back of my leg in escalating twinges.

I thought I remembered a space that was usually empty in front of the high-rise ahead, and slowed down to see a large rectangle marked off for Arlington metro buses. It was a Sunday night; buses were few and far between. Those last two jabs had convinced me that it was becoming unsafe not to pull over.

I was forty-six but eased out from behind the steering wheel to stand outside my car with the careful, guarded movements of someone three or four decades older. It was my ninth year of a real hell on earth: a disease that was attacking my nervous system, bones, connective tissue and muscles and that went beyond rare. Even the National Institutes of Health had been unable to come up with a diagnosis.

I left my door open and tried propping my left foot on the door jamb, a position that had often eased this kind of pain in the past, but it didn’t feel high enough. I walked back and forth a bit and tried the door jamb a couple more times; it wasn’t working.

I looked around. No cop cars and very light traffic. Hunched against the cold, I left my car and made my way with unsteady deliberation up a broad flight of white stone steps without handrails, grabbing a polished handle at the top and pulling open a heavy glass door with difficulty.

“Excuse me, sir, I’m having a – sciatica attack,” I said tightly to the tall security guard who had given me a puzzled look as I entered the lobby. “It’s taking a while to ease up. Mind if I walk it off in here?”

“No problem,” he replied. He had paused in a conversation he’d been having with a friend and continued to look at me with a kind of mild curiosity.

“And I, uh…” I took several steps to one side and then back to ease the re-gathering pain. “I had to leave my car in the bus lane. Is that OK? It’ll probably only be around… ten minutes?”

“No problem.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Back problems!” the man exclaimed, turning to his buddy. “I sure couldn’t afford that with the ladies!”

“The ladies would be the least…” of your problems I’d begun in a kidding manner to conceal my anger, but I let it trail off. He was fully engaged in talking with his friend again and hadn’t heard me.

This is a first, I thought as I paced the empty lobby that glared its light above the twinkling darkness of North Quincy Street, occasionally pausing to place my left foot on the window ledge. It was like being on stage with no one noticing.

I’d been having sciatica attacks for maybe a year and a half, but they’d always come either on long road trips or during the night. Now I’d had one on a fifteen minute run across town for groceries. Disease progression had been relentless. Another milestone.

When my sciatica eased up enough, I made my way back down the stairs and gingerly slid back behind the wheel to resume the drive to my apartment. Several minutes later I was taking a left into my apartment complex and the gloom of South Ninth Street. The street lights there had a way of dotting the air without much effect, leaving the roadway and parking spaces below under low illumination.

I pulled into a space and then moved with care reaching for my keys in the ignition, releasing my safety belt and finally reaching across for the CVS bag on my passenger seat. I edged out of the driver’s seat and got to my feet, closing the door behind me. And I remembered to turn around slowly with as little twisting at the waist as possible. That was when I felt three light taps at my elbow.

“Hi Mister Martin.” It was a girl’s voice, pleased and warm, but low and quietly self contained. She ended her greeting with a period and not an exclamation point. Looking down and to my left into the narrow space between my car and the next, I felt more than saw the eyes that had been patiently watching me exit my car. Even in the dark I instantly recognized Isabella by her voice, demeanor and the dim outline of her face.

“Isabella!” I exclaimed happily.

Serious Isabella. Beautiful Isabella, who would by now be in the middle of third grade. Her mother had asked me to add her to my counseling roster the year before. Isabella and I had met once a week, but over the summer they’d moved out of district.

The family had lived in close quarters; Isabella would worry whenever she heard her parents argue. From the accounts of both mother and daughter, these arguments weren’t serious. But Isabella was a serious person. From time to time she had even expressed big-sisterly concern about her little brother’s behavior.

She was smart, verbal and insightful, so it was easy for me to help. But Isabella had no insight at all into the fact that she was beautiful.

Absolutely none. No affected gesture, no self conscious smile, no put-on prettiness in her way of speaking or how she behaved, gave the slightest sign that Isabella had a clue that she was so beautiful that to take one look at her was to think, Children’s clothing catalog – front cover. This unawareness of her physical beauty elevated and perfected it.

Before I could ask her what she was doing there, I raised my head in response to the bright cacophony of voices in the dark and doors slamming two cars over. Her parents and little brother, apparently running late at this hour on a Sunday night, were packing things into their car. Isabella’s mother was holding an infant and smiled back at me a little shyly as her husband, whom I’d never met, quickly strode around behind our vehicles to shake hands.

“Nice to meet you. I’ve heard good things.”

“Me too! We miss Isabella at school.”

Car doors continued to open and close behind us.

“Yes… We miss the school too. But we had to move. The drive and traffic commuting from my work were too much.”

“So what brings you back?”

“Friends – across the way.” He gestured to the apartment building across the road.

“Look – Look!” Isabella’s little brother, who might have been four years old, had scrambled over to me. His father said again with a grin that it was good to meet me and headed back toward their car where the rest of the family had assembled. Meanwhile, his young son was holding up a large pair of fuzzy dice for me to see.

“Want these?”

I smiled down broadly at him, and then glanced back toward his family’s car. The fuzzy dice transfer was clearly OK with mom and dad.

“Sure!” I replied. “Thank you! And I know just where I can use them.”

Light laughter and goodbyes followed as the boy ran back to the car. Doors slammed and stayed shut. There was the brief rev of a motor and the family disappeared into the night and, with little doubt, out of my life.

The sciatica was gone too, temporarily. I struggled to lift the first grocery bag out of my trunk with extra care, knowing how easily it could return, trying to comprehend how my private hell on earth could hold small angels in the dark and let them hold a party for me.

Demystifying Spirituality: Detachment

The word detachment is easily misunderstood. First, it’s a negative way of referring to something highly positive. Second, the word has connotations that can sound cold and aloof, as in clinical or scientific detachment – or even bring to mind the psychopathology of “attachment disorders,” which are characterized by low levels of emotional attachment to others.

More Than an Ego (Was that the Bee Gees?)

Everyone has a sense of themselves as mattering more than others, maybe more than everyone else put together. Too absurd for most of us to hold as an actual belief, it nevertheless describes a certain fundamental feeling that we have for ourselves from very early in life. And although egoism has value up to a point – the more so the younger we are – we are called to outgrow it. We are called by a greater, growing sense of who we are by whose light we recognize egoism as a narrow and unrealistic perspective – one that’s finally harmful to ourselves as well as others.

So you might say that anyone who experiences detachment from ego experiences “attachment” to this larger, more generous sense and idea of where we stand in relation to the wider world. “Attachment” here really isn’t the right word because of its clingy (egoistic) connotations, but I use it to help suggest that detachment is a warm, human thing that doesn’t involve becoming cold, aloof or distantly otherworldly in the way a saint might be portrayed in a movie. Detachment means stepping into a perspective that is more passionately caring and more realistic than ego’s – one that doesn’t skew and distort all that we see according to our personal desires and our frustrations when these are unmet.

It’s Not Unusual… (although I can’t vouch specifically for Tom Jones…)

While the word detachment is usually used to refer to people who have gone a long way toward making this more generous self and perspective their home – i.e., their primary identity – detachment is best thought of as a process. One that, it seems to me, many of us have already gotten underway with to some extent. Consider, for example, the way that many of us become better workers as we begin to do our work with less ego involvement. A personal example: in my twenty-three years of working with children, I only had to physically restrain students twice. That second time, I had no other options. The first, however, early in my career, really wasn’t necessary. Long story short is that my twenty-five year old ego got hooked by a fourteen year old’s.

Or consider the truism about “mellowing with age.” While not true for everyone, it’s certainly true for many people – that as they grow older, the rough edges of their personalities even out. I think of my dad and a number of uncles and aunts who, as they grew older, gradually became more willing to listen to different points of view and much more open to people unlike themselves than they were when they were younger.

As members of the WWII generation who had little exposure to alternatives – at that time, popular culture in the west was still pretty much uninfluenced by eastern religions – they tended to either embrace their inherited religious tradition as they received it or reject spirituality and religion altogether. Terms like “spiritual growth,” “egoism” and “detachment” just weren’t phrases you’d have heard from any of my older relatives. Yet without talking the talk, most of them walked the walk -- moved, over the course of their lives, toward greater breadth of vision and depth of compassion.

“Detachment” is a process of leaving behind disproportional self concern and the shrill, defensive emotions that accompany it to discover that we have a greater heart and a broader vision of our place in the world and our relations to others. Detachment is seeing self and others through eyes that are our own and yet more than our own.

Spirituality, Morality and Climate Change

Morality is spirituality in action. As a species, how deep does our spirituality run? How powerfully do we experience the call to moral action?

This generation and maybe the next is in a position to avert a source of terrible worldwide hardship if not catastrophe for upcoming generations. A child could see that saving the world, when the danger and opportunity exist, is a moral imperative.

We’ve made plenty of movies about saving the planet, but it’s not about movies anymore.

For I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. Matt 25:35

India

“Recent studies have revealed that large Himalayan glaciers are retreating at a rate of more than 30 metres a year, resulting in a 21% reduction in glacier area since the 1980s… In India, the river systems originating from the Himalayas contribute more than 60% to the total annual runoff for all the rivers of India.”

Infochangeindia.org

The Mideast

Climate change threatens Mideast stability: New research concludes that scarce water supplies in the region could spark environmental wars and curb attempts for peace between Israel, Syria and the Palestinians…

y net news.com

Australia

Australian average temperatures have risen… over the last century, and the warming trend appears to have emerged from the background of natural climate variability in the second half of the 20th century… Effects on runoff are potentially serious as evidenced by a 50% drop in water supply to the reservoirs supplying Perth since the 1970s…

Australian Government, Dept. of Climate Change

Overall climate change

From NPR, July 21, 2009: In general, the picture immediately ahead is that dry areas will get drier and wet areas wetter. In the longer run, for as long as we keep pouring more greenhouse gases into the environment, the planet overall will continue becoming drier and hotter, with dryness spreading from the equator toward the poles over time.

How Big Can We Care?

"The theologian Paul Tillich often employs the evocative phrase 'ultimate concern.' Without examining his theology, l like the sheer magnitude of the connotation.

To be ultimately concerned evokes the full power of our capacity to experience what it is to care. Finding ourselves ultimately concerned, we can give no less than our best. And ultimate concern merits a focus fully commensurate with its seriousness and passion.

The world itself rises to the occasion. It is written that Jesus gave up his life for this world’s sake and that following his enlightenment, Buddha’s compassion led him to teach others rather than withdraw into monastic seclusion. In our own time we have witnessed human beings such as Gandhi, King, Mandela, and Mother Teresa. All that we most admire and to which we aspire looks far beyond itself."

Excerpted from Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You

The Problem of Evil… or Suffering… or Unfairness…

Is “evil” a bad word? Considering comments to the previous post, maybe we should consider some additional angles on “the problem of evil.”

Evil Connotations

Some of you remarked that the word evil has connotations that you reject as judgmental and as kind of implying that the Devil is behind it when things go badly. You seemed to prefer words like “suffering” or “harm.”

But I bet others of you would defend using the word evil, especially for the worst things that people do…

Great Expectations: Fairness

It was noted that the expectation that life be fair – in particular, to us – exists regardless of whether people believe in God. People somehow expect life itself to treat them fairly. What’s up with that?

Not All About Me…

I’d say that the problem of... let's call it suffering - is by no means completely egocentric. Because we can feel… hmm… empathy tinged with sorrow? – for the suffering of people who have no personal connection with us. (With “detachment," a major topic in itself, we can even feel that way toward our own suffering and that of loved ones.)

This empathy tinged with sorrow, which I’d call “compassion,” isn’t agitated and upset the way we feel when we have complaints about how life is treating us. Peace is at the bottom of it. Viewed with compassion, suffering does not disturb us in the way that it does when we resent it for violating our expectations.

The Problem of Evil & the Problem of Me-ville

“I don’t have any complaints.”

“Life isn’t fair.” (!)

People often make the first statement when things are going well for them. The second often comes to people as a surprising realization at some point in their lives when things are going badly for them.

Notice that in each case, there is an assumption that things ought to be going well for us personally. A billion people go to bed hungry every night, folks around the world suffer every imaginable deprivation and outrage from one minute to the next… But nothing bad should happen to me or anyone I happen to be particularly close to. That’s just not how life’s supposed to work.

We are troubled by the very fact that we should have troubles. We consistently compare ourselves with those whom we perceive as more fortunate than ourselves, not less. “Less” doesn’t count. Of course there are those less fortunate than us. Whatever… But the fact that there are those more fortunate, sometimes WAY more fortunate – well, that’s just not right.

It's an interesting perspective…

How much of the theological problem of evil might really be the problem of me-ville? (How much could these be related to the problem of bad puns?)

But really… notice that even Job’s crisis of faith came about in response to losing his own health and having his own roof cave in – and not after this happened to his neighbor across the way...

Global Warming and Spirituality

In comments to the last couple posts, many of you stressed how important contact with the natural world has been to your spiritual lives. This brought the environment to mind, particularly the problem of global warming.

Decades of Inaction

Recently I learned that the term was coined back in 1975. I first heard global warming discussed in the mid eighties, when the attitude of big oil spokespersons on the Sunday news programs consistently amounted to, “As long as we don’t know with 100% certainty that we’re messing up the planet, let’s keep doing what we’re doing just in case we’re not” – which, of course, makes absolutely no sense unless you finish the sentence with what was always left unstated: “…and as long as we’re getting rich from it.”

Scientists say that if the planet heats up two more degrees it will reach a tipping point that will bring major disasters. We can’t even foresee exactly how bad things will get: for example, we don’t know how much additional carbon dioxide will be released if the Arctic permafrost starts melting, only that it will be huge.

More Hot Air

The other day the G8 nations resolved not to let the planet heat up those two additional degrees. The resolution is silent about how to reach its purported goal and isn’t legally binding. And its failure to include India and China would seem to pose a bit of a problem. Meanwhile, some of these same G8 nations are involved with haggling over oil drilling rights to the Arctic Ocean as the ice cap recedes from global warming.

It’s not a pretty picture. We have entrenched energy interests clearly determined to burn every bit of fossil fuel on the planet who perpetually lobby and finance the campaigns of politicians; politicians who, as a group, focus mainly on the problem of getting reelected; and a public that doesn’t apply its voting power to the situation, let alone engage in public protest. The environment always makes the list of public concerns, but it’s always much further down than…

The Economy

For decades “It’s the economy, stupid” has been our collective basis for political behavior – but from a short-term, short-sighted perspective. It has begun to look inevitable that our great grandchildren are going to have to learn the hard way that the foundation of all economies is an environment that includes such goods as sufficient fresh water supplies, arable land, and stable sea levels.

Individually, many of us are genuinely concerned about the environment. Yet the massive environmental degradation whose pace is constantly increasing can’t be solved by individuals “going green.”

It’s hard to reconcile our collective failure to provide for those who will inherit the earth from us with ideas about humanity’s spirituality or even our basic morality. “Human depravity,” anyone?? Or does our inaction on this front simply reflect our inability to figure out how to organize ourselves on a scale large enough to address the problem? Effective action on global warming would take worldwide, long term cooperation – cooperation on a scale that's never been seen.

“It’s the planet, stupid.” Maybe somebody will run for higher office on that slogan. And they’d better hurry up about it.

Spirituality and Play

Did you engage in forms of play as a child that you feel influenced you spiritually?

Recently I caught a radio promo for a program about the role of play in spirituality. It reminded me of two childhood activities that had major spiritual/moral effects on me.

Out on the Somersworth Frontier

One was my “Daniel Boone” phase. I, uh, had it all – the coonskin cap, the buckskin jacket, and a Sears-Roebuck plastic flintlock rifle with powder horn. Sometimes I played this with friends, but more often alone.

The spiritual aspect came mainly from my solitary Daniel Boone play in the wilderness of small-town Somersworth, New Hampshire. Within a short walking distance from my house were two areas with small woodlands. My grandfather’s twelve acres of woods, fields, and a stream were in easy biking distance.

So thanks to this activity, as a kid I spent quite a lot of time in the woods. And in between Indian attacks, I found myself coming under nature’s spell: the blue sky, the wind in the leaves far overhead, the wonderful scent of pine trees… At the time, I took my heavy dose of “one with nature” experiences completely for granted. That was just how life was. Looking back, I’m sure they helped provide a foundation for the sense of being present to a reality transcending the borders of self.

Playing Men

A second activity that I spent countless hours on, both alone and with friends, was “playing men.” This meant playing with toy soldiers. I guess post baby-boomers would wonder how boys could find small plastic statues that entertaining. But there were basically no other options. The only “action figure” in the sixties was GI Joe, and he was under suspicion by many of us as being a “doll” because of the moving limbs and approximate Barbie size. I only remember one of my friends getting one. We had a kind of “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy on the status of his new toy.

Despite the apparent militarism and sexism surrounding the toy men, or at least the political incorrectness, for me the activity was an absorbing exploration of certain moral themes - and since I often played with them outdoors, it also had that nature aspect. The moral themes included loyalty, courage, overcoming odds (my “good guys” were always outnumbered), and the idea of quality vs. quantity.

Were there childhood games/activities that you feel helped shape your character and spirit? If you have children or grandchildren, do you see them engaging in any forms of play that seem to have this sort of effect on them?

Fireworks

Catching how the restlessness of light makes all things glimmer…

From "The Days to Praise: Anticipation” (preceding post)

Several years ago, I was still able to walk far enough to leave the house. However, my distance was rapidly diminishing as my condition deteriorated. I vividly remember my last walk. The line of poetry quoted above crystallized from out of that experience.

It was a late November evening. My walks had become short and difficult. I could no longer go far enough for them to count as any form of exercise; it truly wasn’t worth the physical risk of taking them, and therefore they’d become sporadic.

When I did venture out, it was only because I missed the air, the moon, and the stars – and sheer visual distances. Something, anything, beyond my walls and my windows shuttered against the migraine-inducing sunlight. For about a year, my bizarre condition had come to completely exclude sitting, and even required all kinds of positioning props for lying down. So it was either take walks or be totally housebound.

That November evening, I’d been outdoors only a few times over the prior two to three months, and it had been about three weeks since my last outing. This time, I only got as far as the end of the driveway before I saw I’d have to turn back.

I realized with reluctance and a momentary sense of unreality that this would be my last time out. If I couldn’t walk any further outdoors than indoors, then the increasingly tricky task of getting myself up and down the steps really didn’t make sense anymore. With my walking distance steadily decreasing, I’d end up getting to the foot of the stairs and having to turn right around to struggle back up!

Knowing this would be my last time out while still struggling to accept it and make it real, I paused to look around before heading back up the driveway– and was amazed. The streetlights down the road, the yellow windows of houses across the street, one lit with an early Christmas lawn ornament, all seemed to throw light so finely that the night air appeared radiantly granular. It was dark all around but it was light all around, as if the darkness glowed.

In the back of my mind, I was aware that this scene, viewed with less hunger, was not just ordinary but drab: a dank, overcast night on a middle class cull de sac with cookie cutter houses, one of which featured a tacky luminous candy cane!

But it was my last time out; it was magic; and it left an indelible impression.

The darkness glows.

And when the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines on me
Shine until tomorrow
Let it be.

- The Beatles, “Let It Be”