The Zigzag Line of a Hundred Tacks

Well, it has been another hectic week. I had this past Thursday and Friday off for fall break which was really refreshing and it gave me a chance to get some overtime in at work. I felt good to put in a couple of hard days’ work, and while I couldn’t really afford to slack off, I didn’t push myself too hard to get my homework caught up. Unfortunately, however, I still have two major term papers to write, which I will have to get finished soon. I have promised myself that if I should ever become a college professor (a profession I am seriously considering), I will not have any overarching assignments due on top of all the regular homework. You work and work to keep afloat in all your different classes, just managing to get all your homework done when it is expected, and then you have that one massive project hanging over your head, giving you undue anxiety all semester long. When it is finally finished the day before it is due, you are up all night and the paper is not at all up to the level it should be if you were just allowed enough space to breathe.

Now that I have gone through this spiel, you may wonder why I am sitting here typing up this newsletter to send out to all of you. Truthfully, I would be working on term papers instead, but I need one more source on my social psychology paper and don’t even begin to know where to begin on my literary analysis. So I am writing you all instead. I tend to treat this newsletter as another homework assignment that needs to be done—with one notable exception: I write it because I want to, because it is the one place where I can express what is truly on my heart and I never have to worry about what kind of grade I am going to receive or if I have followed the guidelines properly. And, not surprisingly enough, ideas often come from these newsletters that transfer quite readily into college papers. I used to try to turn in the very best work I could no matter what, but after enough semesters with too little time you stop caring so much and it becomes more a matter of survival. Simply put, I am more interested in mastering the material than in proving that I have.

When it comes to Le Penseur Réfléchit, however, I write because I believe in what I do. I am just naïve enough to believe that my thoughts and my words make a difference, that my life counts for something more than red marks on paper. By now, I would expect that I have worked my way into many of your minds, some weeks being “the true confessions of,” others tedious and long-winded, others filled with interesting ideas that you have probably heard nowhere else, and many, no doubt, somewhere in that broad section between. Throughout it all, you have probably gotten a sense that you know me, you have probably seen more than a few of my insecurities exposed, and you have probably argued with me over certain details, though you would likely never voice these thoughts to me in public. Yes, well. Think of these as personal letters if you like (some more personal than others, of course), for in many ways, that is what they are: letters from an ordinary guy trying to make the most of life, hoping that by sharing his own thoughts, doubts, and struggles, perhaps someone else will find the courage to face another day; maybe someone else won’t feel quite so all alone. I am once again reminded that life is largely what you make it, and I, for one, choose to make mine count.

This past week in my literature class, we have been reading some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803–1882) writings, whose transcendental ideas have provided me many fertile hours of thought. I do wish the college schedule would slow just a bit so that I could take more time to carefully reflect and consider the implications of these and all the many other ideas vying for my attention. Some are good, some are bad, and many are a mixture of both. But there was one passage that I found particularly heartening in Emerson’s famous “Self-Reliance” essay (1841):

Since none of us were sailors, our professor explained to us what tacks were. When a sailboat is sailing windward, it cannot sail straight into the wind. In order to get to its destination, it must first sail to the right, then to the left, and so on, making its diagonal pattern across the waves until in the end, it reaches its final terminus. So too, I think this is a fitting metaphor for my own life. Balance is such a sticky issue and so difficult to maintain.

Emotions are such troublesome things, yet emotions are the very thing that make us most human. We deny them at our peril, though allowing them to control us is not always the wisest course of action either. We must find that balance between the emotional and the intellectual, letting neither have complete control, for the one extreme is fickle and fleeting, the other is cold and callous. Emotion and intellect: both must work together; both must balance. Rarely, in my life at least, do they perfectly balance at any given time: in my very worst moments, there are times I am all the way over on one side of the road, only to find myself plunging toward the ditch on the other before finally settling into a somewhat shaky equilibrium. Perhaps, however, we should look at stability and balance from the perspective of the “big picture” instead, the window through which our Father peers: we see but one moment in time; he sees all moments as if they were one.

What is true of emotions and the intellect is no less true of any of the things we must seek to balance in our life. In reading the writing of Emerson, one of his predominate messages is that of being true to one’s own individual nature. He could easily have penned the words of Shakespeare: “To thine own self be true.” I think there is quite a lot to be said for this philosophy, yet I am also aware that in order to live in peace and harmony with others, we must have something greater than ourselves upon which to focus. There are times when I must submit to the greater good, when I must conform my own interests for the sake of others. Wrapped up into this is the issue of solitude and community discussed last week as well; between being alone before our God and fellowshipping one with another. And finally, I would disagree with Emerson in this (and this is a very important distinction from his teaching, I might add): in my better moments, the reason I trust myself to be myself from moment to moment is not because of my own self-reliance, but because of my God-reliance: that is, with a simple, childlike faith in God, trusting He has redeemed me and renewed a right spirit within me. He is always good to show me when I have overstepped my bounds and it is He who purifies my selfish tendencies, the latter not even a consideration to Emerson’s utopian optimism in human potential.

Ultimately, if I keep these considerations in mind, always striving to walk in step with the Spirit’s quickening, I have nothing to fear with being myself from moment to moment, for, as Emerson says, my actions yesterday will justify my actions today. It is only those who perpetually scramble about to keep their mountain of lies from falling on top of them that have to fear being themselves, for double lives and double minds fragment us, weaken us, the “complexity” they lend our life making us all the easier to figure out. By rate of contrast, there is unity in singularity of speech and action. In this unity is found true complexity of character not so readily plumbed in a single sitting, for we seem almost ultra-human in our natural humanness; we have a freedom not afforded us when our minds are occupied with what we told who. This has much to do with the fact we are functioning according to design—God’s ways, as we know, are always wisest. He never intended us to carry around such heavy loads of care, and most of our own making at that.

With these reflections at the fore, I wish to explore Emerson’s thought just a little more. He speaks of the need to escape society and manmade institutions and I agree in large part. As I was reflecting on this, thinking how ironic it was that his thoughts of human potential are nearly limitless and yet he confers that society is corrupt (society is, after all, made up of these “nearly perfect” individuals: how then, did it become corrupt?), I began to understand why even within the Christian tradition—such as the Desert Fathers—there has been the need for solitude. We noted last week that human tendency tends to be amplified in group settings. Taking this a step further, when humanity fell, learning the evil when they had previously known only the good, we can expect that at the very best this produced ambivalence. Clouding the perfect vision of knowing only the divine goodness of God, the new evil spreading across the race was like sowing the tares amongst the wheat. Because humanity is a mixture of good and evil, the philosophies we hear and the world-views that are expounded by our various social systems necessarily reflect this ambivalent morality. When we draw away from the amplified voices of the crowd, all clamoring ceaselessly for our attention, it is then we can hear that one still small voice, the only voice that ever speaks of perfect goodness, beauty, and truth.

Emerson makes a lot of sense in much of what he writes. In The Divinity School Address, when he speaks of drawing away from the hustle and the bustle, retreating to nature, and listening to God commune to us as Spirit through spirit, I thought this was rather insightful. However, Emerson’s thought does not include room for miracles, the divinity of Christ, the original sin, or even—and this is ironic—the transcendence of God. In transcendentalism, a form of pantheism, God is always immanent: He is the All, and the All is the One. That tree over there is God, I am God, you are God, God is God, Nature is God, God is Nature, All is One, One is All. In the Christian conception, by rate of contrast, God is indeed immanent, that is, He exists throughout His creation because He is omnipresent, yet He is also transcendent, separate, apart from, not dependent on what He has created. He is likewise personal, as opposed to the strictly Impersonal Absolute. It is to this end that we, as believers in Christ, put our hope and our trust. (Addendum: See Does God Suffer? for the full theological and philosophical import of the doctrine of the joint transcendence and immanence of God.)

Emerson also offers some interesting points about the nature of the individual. He essentially says the same thing so many philosophers say, that “man is the measure of all things,” which in one sense is true. God did give man dominion over the earth; we do take precedence over the rest of the created world. The eyes with which I look out into my world are the only eyes with which I have ever looked, will be the only eyes with which I ever will look out into the world, at least on this side of the veil. The only perspective I can ever know with complete certainty is my own, the only thing I can be one hundred percent certain of is my own existence. I cannot prove the external world outside of myself, but I need no proof to believe in myself, for I know that I exist—I am not a figment of my own imagination. I am the only person who can determine for myself what truth is, what is right, what is wrong, what I will do with my life. It is I, and I alone, who will have to stand before the throne one day and give account for my actions. Yet herein lies the rub: if I have to give account, this presupposes that there is One yet higher than, and separate from, myself. This, of course, would be God, Master and Creator of time and space and all it entails, and my individuality comes from Him; it is upon Him that I rely, not on myself alone. Because I rely on Him—I trust Him to redeem me and show my feet the proper path—I am free to be myself: to grow and learn and yearn and cry and hug and laugh and run and leap and sit and sleep and all the many other things that I do, and more than this, I am free to simply be: a finite center of consciousness apprehending in awe this majestic universe which enfolds me in its cloak—a human being, valuable: loved and esteemed in the eyes of God.

You see, part of being human is that we are continually changing. I am not the same person who wrote last week’s newsletter, nor are you the same person who read that newsletter last week. You are not even the person you were when you started reading this newsletter. Emerson is quite correct in making the point about the individual moment. I am who I am right now. I am not who I was and I am not yet who I will become. When you read these words, I will be a different person than the one who is (was) sitting here (there) typing now (then). My moods and my interests change. If I am to be honest with you today, to say the same thing tomorrow might not be honest. It is always so much safer for me to tell you that I have been struggling, rather than that I am now struggling; that I was angry, rather than I am now angry; that my feelings were hurt, rather than that my feelings are hurt right now; that I was feeling lonesome, rather than I am lonely right now. Yet if we ever wish to become whole people, we will have to learn how to begin to live spontaneously in the moment.

There is not a single one of us who like to have our entire character judged on a handful of words we have said or a few moments in time. When someone pigeonholes us, we are quick to tell them “But that was yesterday. I am not the same person today.” We can get defensive very quickly when a friend or a lover reminds us of something we did or said that happened long ago. We wish they could put it behind them and move on with life. The question, then, becomes this: do we extend this same courtesy to others? This is the nature of forgiveness, recognizing that no one ever stays the same.

Stop and consider the people you most admire and perhaps even envy. What is there about these persons that attracts you? Repels you? Is it that they seem so comfortable in their own skin, that they seem so free? Is it that when you are around them, you feel as though you are peering through their skin into their very soul? We both love and hate people who are transparent and honest. It is easy to despise them; it is easy to envy them. Why do we feel such a conflict? I think the answer can be found in a revealing statement a young woman from SBU expressed in church this past Wednesday night.

She said that we have two competing needs or wants that must be kept in balance. On the one hand, we have the need to feel that we are in control of ourselves and our lives; on the other, we desire intimacy. Just as we must balance the freedom to be completely who we are with the rights of others, so too if we wish to have intimacy, love, and belonging, we have to surrender a degree of our need to be in control. On the other hand, if we wish to be in control of ourselves, we have to surrender a degree of our intimacy. These statements, as I have presented them here, may not so neatly translate to the real world tit for tat, but they do reflect something of the power struggles that can go on in relationships of all sorts and can help explain many of the other struggles we face as well, such as my well-documented struggle between my mind and my heart.

I think that perhaps some of the answer lies in our honesty with ourselves, with others, and with God from moment to moment. I get nowhere by denying that I am out of balance when I am dangerously close to falling over the edge. Instead, my awareness, identification, and admission of the problem become my saving grace, helping to naturally correct itself. Taking it a level deeper—to springboard from a thought Dr. Harris writes in Material Fallacies 3: “‘Compromise’ and ‘middle’ positions should not be accepted blindly; but further, sometimes the best position is nearer one extreme than the other and is not right in the middle,”—there are times where my center of balance, due to my circumstances, may not be in the same place my center of balance may be on another day. Some days I may need a good cry; others I may need to laugh. Some days it might do me well to think first, others it might pay me to notice how I feel.

When I read this quote, and in particular the last sentence, I was struck by its simple but far too often overlooked truth. We can strive and strain all we want in this spiritual journey we are on, but in the end, growth unfolds on its own timetable and not until. If God be not in what we do, then what we do be not of God. Again, such a simple statement, but so often overlooked. Sometimes, I think, we need lessons in simplicity, for how quickly we forget; how soon our priorities become confused and we lose our way. I think one of the most beautiful descriptions I have heard of these simple truths was also found in Harris’ article; this time he is quoting Underhill from her School of Charity:

I think this is one of the most profound quotations I have read in a very long time and one that has so much meaning on so many levels packed into it. And while I am on the subject of the “Evelyn Underhill Newsletter,” I’ll throw out one last little morsel that struck me. It seems that Suzanne Schleck, an artist in New Jersey, made an “icon” of “Saint Evelyn”; that is, a rendering of Underhill reminiscent of the early Christian/Byzantine era mosaics that adorned the walls of the great Cathedrals, at least those surviving the iconoclast. I noticed some perculiar writing around the sides and top, but it was somewhat difficult to make out in the small black and white depiction featured in the newsletter. Upon closer examination, I noted that it said “God comes to the soul in His working clothes, and He brings His tools with Him.” I thought that was quite a different thought: simple, homey, and profound. I do not know if this was a statement Underhill originated or not, though I would not be in the least surprised to find that it were.

Very well. I think I have about wound myself down for an evening. For this rare moment in time, I think I am about as balanced as a man can get and I am finding that there is not much else I have to contribute beyond what I have written here. If you have not already done so, you might be interested in reading The Androgynous Man: Thoughts and Reflections, a writing response I wrote over two years ago to the self-same by Noel Perrin. It is very short—a total of five paragraphs—and it parallels the frame of thought expressed in this newsletter nicely. Yes, Evelyn, “All real progress in spiritual things” does “come gently, imperceptibly and is the work of God.” Indeed, it would seem that the more things change, the more they stay the same; the eternal now is always found at the crossroads of time and eternity.

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