Life in the Present Tense

Finals are done and over for another semester, and I am feeling strangely inspired. Recently, in fact, I have been more prayerful in my thoughts and attitude, which, interestingly enough, has made me more earthy and human and not less. That is, if I can explain it differently, my prayers have left me more attentive to the mundane affairs of life. Our lesson from the previous issue that Jesus spent a great amount of time teaching his disciples about the folly of earthly concerns and worries was an apt one. What I mean is that whereas the love of Mammon is self-interested and teaches concern and care for all that interests me, a love and surrender to God teaches a self-abandonment that turns those things loose. In an interesting paradox—though not so unusual when one pauses to reflect—when I put my trust in God, really trusting that he will provide for me and abandoning myself to him utterly, I am free to enjoy the ordinary things of life much more. In her classic The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, Hannah Whitall Smith describes this paradox as a man who lays his full weight down upon his mattress and bedsprings, perhaps letting out a deep sigh as he trusts it to fully support the weight of his aching body. Because he trusts his bed utterly, he is thus allowed to relax every muscle and enjoy a deep and restful sleep. He trusts in and rests upon his bed just as we may trust in and rest upon God.

In returning to the idea of enjoying ordinary things more when one abandons oneself to God, so too, as the Eastern sages taught, for the first time one begins to really see mountains and trees: before one saw mountains and trees of course, but their contours, sights, smells, sounds, and colors were less distinct and crisp. In setting our mind on things above, we get the earth thrown in in ways we never before dreamed. We only thought we saw before, heard before, felt before, tasted before, but we were only dreaming, and now, for the first time, we are coming fully awake, living life in an awakened state. Thus it is in an interesting paradox that my more prayerful self has been freed to be at his everyday best, enjoying the sights and the sounds of the world around as though for the first time, drinking in the simple pleasures of the mind and body, the soft stream of water running down his back filling him with bliss in the morning as he showers, his mind calm in an at times almost drowsy state of grateful awareness.

My answering machine has been going berserk for some reason: the phone does not always ring before it picks up and in general it is as a device possessed. When my friend Kathy called yesterday with computer problems, she got the machine before I was able to sweep to her rescue. Ever since I developed her site, she knows she can rely on me to bail her out of her computer woes. This time, the deal was simple: drop by for a home cooked meal, enjoy both good food and conversation, and patch her computer up to edit files in the .docx format of Word 2007. No sooner had I arrived and was seated when her cat began to rub itself against my leg. I thought nothing of the matter, until Kathy commented on how unusual it was for this particular cat to warm to strangers. Her daughter then asked if I liked cats. My response was the same programmed one I have offered since junior high: I am not overly fond of cats but I do not wish them any ill will either. Yet today when I said these words, I realized that they were not true: my response was just what I said: programmed and unthinking. The fact is, I seem to have developed a particular affinity for most all living creatures, and particularly warm-blooded mammals. Besides, cats are like people: some are bratty pests, some amusing: as my friend Greg, a life-time cat lover, says, no two cats are ever the same: their personalities are completely distinct. Cats truly are intriguing creatures to watch and wonder at: even the notoriously bratty ones are something to marvel at by the very aspect of such brattiness existing within such a silky, fur-covered frame.

In any case, I feel a strange benevolence for all living creatures these days, though perhaps not as you might think. I did not necessarily feel warm and fuzzy or have any great sentimental feelings: I am sure to look at me, one would have thought I was rather stoic. Yet there was a good-humored bemusement, a certain relaxed comfort and familiarity that existed between Kathy’s cat and myself: we understood and appreciated each other by our very indifference to each other, if that makes any sense. The cat and I had neither axes to grind nor postures to fake, so we were relaxed and free, one curiosity greeting another around the legs of Kathy’s table. Soon enough, the cat padded away into the adjacent room, and neither of us thought about the matter again—at least until just now (smile).

Now those who have seen me on the forum in recent weeks know that I have been spending some serious study of Confucianism and its central tenets. In fact, as you may recall, that came up in the recent Heaven and Earth: Flow, Syncronicity, and Thin Places. I have found the new translation of the Analects by Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (based on the Dingzhou fragments and recent archeological finds) to be especially helpful. Not only does it take advantage of the latest source materials, the title itself should make long-term subscribers smile: The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. That’s correct: this is a translation especially for philosophers by two leading men in their field. The introduction in particular is especially helpful, as it extrapolates the differing “operating system” of the ancient East from a linguistic examination of the Chinese language. I will attempt briefly to explain—interested persons may wish to see the extended excerpt from the introduction entitled Philosophic and Linguistic Background.

The down and dirty is that Indo-European languages (of which English and Sanskrit are but two) are inherently “thing-based” in the very structure of their syntax. They focus on things, and not just on things, but things fixed in time and place, static and immobilized. Put differently, the language itself tends to reflect stasis and form—truth “nailed in place”—with its preponderance of nouns and verb tenses. Chinese is not like this. Instead, its focus tends to be more on change than permanence—whereas the Indo-European languages tend to single out one thing at a time for analysis, Chinese tends to pair or otherwise bind together in relationship events for synthesis. Their concept of language is liquid, a bit like our talk ever so long ago that “The wonderful thing about words is words are wonderful things. Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs” (When Words Rear Up and Roar in Your Face). Write Ames and Rosemont, Jr.:

One word more before we return to Kathy’s house for dinner: my emphasis in philosophy was epistemology, a fancy word to describe the dual questions of “How do we know what we know?” and “How do we know that we know?” Or, if you prefer, it examines questions of truth and validity, knowledge and soundness. I find it very interesting to note that even when we are being highly abstract, our very language tends toward the concrete: absolute truths nailed down and immobilized. However, all ways of trying to get the world “out there” into the “in here” of our own heads are fallible, and while fixed truths can carry great weight, they can also carry great liability as well. The greatest liability that suggests itself in contrast to the Chinese is a tendency toward lifelessness: rather than Kathy’s cat rubbing against my leg, we’ve got a taxodermic ball of fur above the hearth, displayed just this side of the deer antlers, best viewed while standing on the bearskin rug. That is, our words no longer arch their back and rub against our leg, because they’ve been stuffed and mounted. They aren’t going anywhere, that is true. But that is also the point: the strength and the liability are invariably the same.

Kathy and I began talking about the class I took this semester in Shakespeare. She, like myself, is also comfortable with words and makes her living ghost writing (fixing other people’s books for money: her words, their name on the cover). The more one works with words, the more one realizes how little they are nailed in place. They are, in truth, rather flexible, though there is a paradox here every bit as interesting as the one mentioned at the beginning of the newsletter: often the more flexible the words chosen, the deeper their clarity and impact. Shakespeare knew this and knew this well. By the time he retired from the theater, he had become a very wealthy man. In fact, scholars can point to an approximate period in his career where he seems to have burst forth with creative genius, as though he had a sudden epiphany about what language can effect. A great many of his plays, in fact, are self-reflexive, taking as their theme the theater as a sort of metacommentary—art imitating life imitating art—which earned me an A on my final term paper, though my thesis, I fear, was hardly original.

Our Shakespearean professor, Dr. Tita Baumlin, spent many class periods talking about the conflicted uses of language in Shakespeare’s plays. One evening, she referenced Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict, a book by Samuel Ijsseling I had previously read. The premise of the book is an old one, suggesting that at least since the ancient Greeks, there has been a tension between the idea of rhetoric on the one hand and not just any philosophy, but a Platonic philosophy on the other. Now is not the time to go into an extended discussion of Plato’s forms—if anyone is particularly interested, send me an email or post on the forum and I will happily elaborate further—but let us just briefly note that Plato believed strongly in absolute, transcendent truth and had a dim view of the sophists who used words in a way that he found disingenuous.

Ijsseling’s book is interested in pairing Plato with Gorgias, the latter a particularly renowned sophist against whom Plato devoted an entire dialogue. Plato’s student Aristotle didn’t have a problem with Gorgias, nor apparently did many of the men in Athens, but Plato could not resist using him as a foil in Gorgias. Thus, Dr. Baumlin used Plato and Gorgias to illustrate the two views of language that we see surface in many of Shakespeare’s plays: on the one hand, we have Plato with his eternal truths, on the other we have Gorgias with his belief that we create worlds with our words. Plato’s view of words seeks to uncover and accurately describe the unchanging, absolute nature of the world; Gorgias’ view of words seeks to unleash their creative powers, calling what is not into being as though it already were.

I read Gorgias’ Enconium in an ancient philosophy class two years ago, and the Wikipedia entry sums it up rather well; these two paragraphs should give a person a fairly good idea what Gorgias taught and why his services were in such high demand:

Speech, for Gorgias, has power. For Plato, however, the power held by rhetoricians is at best accidental and at worst utterly deceptive, and hence even today when we speak of sophistry, the word tends to leave a sour taste. For that matter, the creative use of words can be used for ill purposes, but it can also be used to effect great good. Nevertheless, Plato distrusts rhetoric because it can exist only on the level of appearances, of “seeming,” and to seem is not to be however difficult it is to tell the two apart. What is real, however, is not readily apparent on the surface of things.

Plato’s theory of the forms suggests that behind all things there are spiritual substances. Take the glass sitting in front of me and the various glasses I have sitting in the cupboard and other places. Each one of these glasses, one might say, participates in the spiritual form of “glass”—somewhere, someplace, there is a perfect spiritual form that corresponds to all earthly forms. And at the back of all forms is itself another form: the form of the Good, which early Christian scholars merged with the idea of God. And in the world of speech, the form of the Good was communicated through the form of Truth, or logos.

One might already be able to see a principal reason language is problematic for Plato. If the glass sitting in front of me is an imperfect representation of ultimate reality—truth with a capital T—then what about the little black squiggles “G-L-A-S-S” and the sounds rising in my throat? The things we call “words” are themselves not reality: at best, words merely point to reality. Language, then, is twice removed from reality in Plato’s world, and is thus highly suspect.

In Gorgias’ view, however, we create worlds with our words. Each of us lives in a reality constructed in large part by language and the perceptions it brings. We are again stuck “in here” and we have to get what is “out there” in here where it can be mapped or “re-presented” and thus known.

To say the word “cuticle” brings to awareness that moon-shaped part of my fingernail; to name a thing is to have a certain power over it. And in Shakespeare’s day—quite apart from the Kabbalah where such things have long formed tenets of belief—it was sometimes thought that if one could go back and learn the words of Adam, one would have dominion over the entire world. Why? Because when Adam was given speech by God, Adam’s names expressed the essence of each creature, a bit like the eternal “om” is believed to resonate to the essential frequency of the entire cosmos or like Kabbalists teach that in knowing the sacred name of Yahweh (the Tetragrammaton), they can create from nothing, and if they recite that sacred name backward, they can utterly destroy. The names of God have power.

In any case, Dr. Baumlin did not stop with Plato and Gorgias as applied to Shakespeare, but she carried it one step further. She noted that to Shakespeare’s audience, the idea of going back to an Adamic language was not seen as heretical as it would be with some sectors of Christianity today, but was rather seen as being entirely in keeping with orthodox theology. Therefore, she wanted to know our opinion: which view of language is expressed in the bible? Is it that of Plato or Gorgias? That is, are words fixed, serving only to describe what is, or are words creative, able to furnish worlds and effect powers of life and death? The resultant give and take was interesting.

Almost immediately, somebody suggested that the bible expressed a view of language like Plato’s: it spoke in terms of fixed, absolute truths. Somebody else hedged on that, bringing up the creation account in Genesis. But then it was pointed out that of course the Genesis view would accord with Gorgias because this is God creating worlds, and whether we believe in him or not, he is, after all, the hero in the drama. Then one young woman spoke up near the front of the class. Now perhaps it was just me, but her words seemed to have real power when she quoted the passage in Mark: “For verily I say unto you, that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he sayeth” (Mark 11:23). I say perhaps it was just me: I felt a level of respect for her obvious declaration of faith as well as a connection to these words of Jesus. I swear she spoke with an authority that did not seem her own, or at least it seemed that way to me—and I would swear it seemed that way to the rest of the class as well, as a hush settled over the room and immediately afterward we took a break: no one said another word. It was not the hush of a taboo topic, but rather the hush of an unexpected brush with the inner fabric of the universe, as though the veil between worlds was lifted. And of course—whatever she might personally believe in so many words—her statement implicitly votes for a view like that of Gorgias, at least as we are defining it here.

And that is precisely why Kathy and I were talking about Shakespeare: we were actually talking about the words of Jesus, and we were noting that his use of language was a lot like that of the Eastern sages, a point that I am realizing more and more. He spoke not only of mountains being cast into the sea, he commanded the waves to be calm, he healed the sick, the lame, and the blind with his words, and upon his departure he told his disciples that greater works than these ye shall do. He spoke of the power to tread over serpents and scorpions, he talked about the kingdom of heaven being within you, he said that what one loosed on earth was loosed in heaven and what was bound on earth was bound in heaven: he spoke in ways that seem very much like Gorgias at his creative best, and he did not merely speak for himself, but he authorized others to speak in the same way as well. When I read the words of Jesus, I am struck by their creational qualities: they call worlds into existence. They are like a midwife, giving birth to the creative potentialities in things. His words, though capable of cursing fig trees, ultimately brought healing and the forgiveness of sins.

Father John’s homily on the readings from the liturgy this past Sunday was particularly thought-provoking to me. When John the Baptist was thrown in prison, he began to have some very serious doubts as to whether or not Jesus was the one. So serious were his doubts, in fact, that he sent a delegation to Jesus to inquire whether or not he was the promised one or whether there was another to come:

Father John points out that Jesus pointed to the effects produced from being in his presence as his sign of authority. The proof is found in what happens to those who come into contact with Jesus: they are healed and their sins are forgiven them. Eating is the proof of the pudding. He did not point to prophesies or sacred texts; he did not even point to himself. He pointed instead to those things that invariably happened when he was near. Yet not all were receptive to these manifestations. As anyone remotely familiar with the gospel accounts knows, the people Jesus had the least patience with were the Pharisees. These religious elites did not care that the seeing see, the hearing hear, or that the speechless speak: they cared that he violated the holy ordinances of Moses as recorded in the ancient texts. They did not really care about people, though they did care deeply about piety as they understood it and genuinely believed they were doing God a favor. They had little of love about them, though much of logic: they were experts in the law. And thus, they were the ones who took offense at Jesus: “blessed is he who does not take offense at me.”

Jesus continues his discourse in Matthew, and verse 16 follows with Jesus saying: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her children.” Jesus was too much of the earth for the taste of the holy ones of Israel. He indulged in sensual pleasures and in the event of a conflict invariably put people before the law: it seems he was constantly breaking some religious custom to help “the least of these.” In the name of love, he made flexible the lesser so that the greater could be realized.

Sara sent me a newsletter brimming with wonderful, wonderful excerpts from Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, and other spiritual, inspirational, and philosophical sources. I would like to pick up with a thought from Taoism regarding Jesus’ statement about wisdom being justified by her children.

It should be obvious why I excerpt these reflections. Though Jesus is generally regarded as compassionate by most people, he is not always seen as being wise. Yet his wisdom is of a different sort altogether, for it is only understandable when seen together with compassion. If a person does not care for other people, they probably will not find Jesus to be a very wise person at all. As the link above also suggests:

If a person has learned that good things are good because they are good, that goodness is its own reward, they will be drawn to Jesus, because he not only saw the creative energies in words to create worlds, he created worlds in which compassion and wisdom were fused together, in which that which was lacking was restored, that which was broken was mended, that which was hurting was soothed and cured. This sometimes made him appear foolish as well, for where a merely clever person would have been shrewd, Jesus choose the “foolish” path of suffering: he worked in concert with a deeper law. Jesus was not bound by the letter of the law because he had that which was greater: he had the spirit from whence the law had issued. He knew that the tablets of stone were only a shadow and a copy because what is real is living and dynamic. Stone tablets jog our memories well enough, but they have to be internalized—hidden in one’s heart—or, to state the same thing in more contemporary terms, realized within in the form of a transformed center of consciousness.

That is what wisdom and compassion involve: this inner realization of what the outer expression seeks to indicate. And once planted in the heart, such truths are like mustard seeds: they are not static and inert, but dynamic and alive, nourished by the living spirit of God and they blossom and branch forth, making the spiritual fruit in that person’s life manifest to all. If one has realized this deeper spirit, one has no further need of the stone tablets: they have served their purpose and to cling to them now would be to cling to (en)graven images or old wine skins. Once one has had these laws written on his heart, he becomes a law unto himself and a light and a lamp for others. Put differently, if the message is redemption, he quite literally becomes that message: he is an incarnation of that truth, a living embodiment, a testament for all to see. The message on stone is fixed, immobile, permanent, and thus it is not going anywhere, at once its strength as well as its liability. The message emblazoned within the messenger, by contrast, is alive and dynamic, issuing forth embodied rays of light and love: it is spirit shining forth in spirit, life blazing forth with life.

So then, Jesus points out the effects of his ministry to John—people see, hear, speak, and walk who previously did not—and, to say the same thing in a different way, wisdom/compassion is known by her children. If we are not persuaded either by wisdom or compassion or the results they engender, we will almost certainly take offense at Jesus and the values he upholds. We may say that we value the things he values or that we value him, but our words will make liars of our actions. If we love him and value the things he values, we will, of course, also see more of our own darkness—with the realization of light also comes an increasing awareness of the darkness that yet remains—but that is not only a sign of health, the very property of the light is to illumine the darkness, displacing it utterly so that it ceases to be darkness and all is made light. If we value the things Jesus values, we will begin to see them cropping up everywhere: one cannot turn to a major world religion without encountering these deeper truths. That, of course, is exactly what one would expect if there is one God over all and if this God is truly the God of the living and not the dead.

Perhaps we do not have to force a distinction between Plato and Gorgias when speaking of the bible. I do, however, think that the view of Gorgias is underrepresented in a lot of contemporary Christianity, yet I believe it is a vital part of what Jesus taught. Kathy of course agrees, and I got to meet her friend Shelly a little bit later. I was immediately inspired by Shelly’s approach to the world. She is very comfortable in her own skin, having lived enough years now to realize that life is too short to allow petty inhibitions to divide us. She exudes warmth and positive energy that say things she needs no words to communicate. When the three of us begin talking about the Jesus we have come to know and love, it became a source of mutual edification that enriched us all. Shelly not only mentioned the idea of two or three gathering together, but suggested the same when she mentioned that if a person truly listens in his or her heart to the voice of God, lives are accordingly transformed: we could say the blind see, the deaf hear, and the cripple is enabled to walk. She too said she knows Jesus best not by his earthly example—as compelling as that is—but as the Friend with a capital F, the someone who answers when we pray, the cosmic Christ who exists beyond the veil as testified by the fact that he is not only very wise, but sometimes reveals to us the future before it happens. This living Friend sometimes speaks, not often in words, but in ways that are unmistakable at times. This Friend loves us when everyone else turns their back: this Friend is not always so like the Jesus we hear spoken of. At least, he is this Friend to us and sometimes we have the feeling that others who speak of him know only his name, but have little understanding of his ways. His way is life and love: there is no other, yet like the wind, we hear the sound of it and feel its effects, but its way, though we have learned to trust it, is ineffable: we sometimes catch glimpses of its comings and goings, but we cannot grasp it in our hand.

If someone were to ask upon what basis I rest the authority of my beliefs, I would say it is in the proof of my life and the lives of those around me. The fact that wisdom and compassion are known by their fruits is a testimony; the peacefulness and free contentedness I experience in my own skin further bear witness on my behalf. I have read a great many texts in my life and will read a great many more, no doubt, before my last breath. I learn many things from texts, and they can be very helpful to me. However, as I have said on the forum before, life is not a text and never will be: life is life. At some point, we must all move beyond the text—any text. If my beliefs do not vindicate themselves by the transformation in the quality of my own life and that of others, I do not see that my beliefs really do me or anyone else very much good, however true they might happen to be. If I do believe that they do me good in spite of no visible signs, I must at the least be looking at some future reward where they will then be realized in some tangible way. No, a truth that transforms lives is a truth well worth dying for (if need be); it is certainly a truth well worth living for.

Compassion and wisdom are not only desirable of their own accord, but in pursuing such ends, one also learns to love God more. Some would suggest that pursuing such ends is some kind of misguided means to salvation, but I say instead that they are good simply because they are good, and learning to value the things that God values also causes us to value God more as well. We would not have the freedom to experience and enjoy these good gifts fully if they were bound to our desire to better ourselves in any world to come or to in some way bribe God. To be constricted in this way is a certain sign of spiritual immaturity. No, it is just a fact. The wiser we are, the wiser and more precious wisdom will become to us; the more compassionate we are, the deeper and more abiding will we realize its beauty as an object rare and precious in itself. Wisdom and compassion and the virtues that accompany them are their own rewards and they offer up their own evidence. Against such things there are no laws nor should there ever be, for they flow from the very heart of God. Like the Eastern sages, the more of these things we experience, the more we will really begin to see the mountains and the trees. Language is creative because God is creative; language is creative for the same reason light illuminates: when light shows forth the darkness, the darkness no longer exists, but instead light has sprung up in its place. The fertile word, the creative word, the Gorgias word: these reflect not the world as it presently is, but as we are saying it shall be. As we said in the previous issue, here reversed, when we are transformed and filled with light, we then see the world not as it presently is but as we are. And in thus looking at the world through transformed eyes, we bring about the change we wish to see. We help to usher in heaven on earth, voluntarily aligning ourselves with God.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

Words have power precisely because God has power: as the sky is high above the earth, so too is the God in whom we move and breath and have our being above and beyond all things, supporting and undergirding, and as the waters spill from the heavens, water the earth, and return again to the sky having accomplished their purpose, causing the desert to flower like the rose of Sharon, so too may we become willing conduits and channels for the creative power of God. For what can be used to great harm can also be used to great good. The truth mentioned previously that “we see the world not as it is, but as we are” is double edged, a statement of our limitation and a potential pronouncement of the kingdom of heaven entering into life here on earth. To the degree that we are filled with light, we will not only see clearly, but actively dispell the darkness, the creative power of our lives causing the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and the lame to again walk. We might even find that the mundane details of our lives are seen as though for the first time, for we will have made heaven of earth, a bit like a man lying down upon a thick, downy mattress after a long, weary day. Less focused on our cares and concerns, we might find in friends feline and otherwise surprising connections that speak of hidden springs fueling the universe.

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