For the Catholic Church, and in rather broad strokes, the
first ecumenical council--the Council of Jerusalem--began a spate of councils, all of which were focused on
right belief, or orthodoxy. They told us you didn’t have to become Jewish
first to become Christian, that we ought to avoid eating animals that’d been strangled,
or with blood still in them, and that we ought to remember the poor. They then spent the next several hundred
years, through the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon at least, defining what
philosophical orthodoxy looks like vis a vis God’s being and Christ’s. It’s a stunning omission that they never
defined God and Christ as they appear in
our being, under the guise of a stranger.
If you count Liturgy as part of right practice, the council
of Trent continued the “remember the poor” piece, in the way it defined right
practice. That said, orthopraxy was not
significantly expanded until 1891, with the first social encyclicals of Leo
XIII. Again, they defined orthopraxy in
terms of how we worship and whom we serve, but never how we ourselves act.
Five minutes of Interaction with Zen would make the Catholic
Church realize it’s left something out.
I don’t know if this is an accepted term, but Zen uses Koans to suggest there
is such thing as “orthomorphosis” or right transformation. And while I’m not a Zen teacher, and will not
seek, in this post, to apply exclusively Zen thinking to Catholicism, there is
something in me that screams “IT’S THESE YOU SHOULD HAVE PRACTICED, WITHOUT
NEGLECTING THE OTHERS!” Only in the 1980’s,
when Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington sat in Spencer, Massachusetts to
hammer out the pieces of a “Contemplative Outreach” did we begin to acquaint people
with the resources Catholicism might use to define “Orthomorphosis” for itself.
From the council of Jerusalem to the second Vatican council,
the Catholic Church has not answered the question “what does a person look like
who has, truly and certainly, been transformed by Jesus?”
So, in short, I hope, today, to identify what transformation
looks like from a uniquely Christian perspective. The puzzle pieces exist. I don’t know if I’ll be assembling them anew
or reassembling them, but I believe we owe it to ourselves to see the whole.
Any discussion of transformation has three pieces: body
language, identitiy, and basic human needs.
An “untransformed person” acts a certain way, believes certain things
about himself and has a certain orientation toward basic human passions. Because thoughts manifest as actions, an
untransformed person will fidget more than others, as they are, on some level,
being ruled by thoughts with which they’ve not yet become fully
reconciled. (This is, of course,
relative to each person. A person with
ADHD or OCD will fidget at home and abroad, whether he’s busy or at rest. Them’s just the breaks. Acceptance and letting go are more important
than sustained placidity.
An untransformed nature clings to a notion of “selfhood,”
even though it should torment them or even suggest suicide. There’s something right about this. The Ego’s basic desire is to die, even before
physical death. The problem is, people
don’t know they’re not their ego.
Suicidal people might be greatly helped by a process of meditation, but
the knowledge of movements like “contemplative outreach,” to say nothing of
widespread meditation practice—alas, this is sorely lacking in the church.
Throughout all of the stages, suffering comes from holding
beliefs that are out of whack with reality.
Our “unredeemed reality” is marked by dualistic thinking. This means that the Buddha was basically
right: life is suffering. At our most
unredeemed, our major obstacle is denial, though, so it’s a crapshoot whether
we’ll see it at all.
The “Stages of Transformation” are three, and correspond,
basically, to the three parts of the human brain.
The first stage of transformation acquaints us with the “Reptillian
brain.” The reptilian brain rules the
needs basic to survival: automatic functioning of organs, the need to
procreate, the need to be safe, the need to control. Denial is the major obstacle that this stage is designed to overcome. All the
resources of religion—its reason, its realizations, help us to manage our basic needs at this point. This is the stage in which codependents
discover that their body is a repository of unprocessed pain, and their
psychology contains each of the dysfunctional voices of their family of
origin. To our surprise, we learn we
have eight basic desires, but that our relationship to them is warped, to the
point that we’ve built a façade out of their moving parts. We had to be ruled by ego, because neither
our wounded inner child nor our diseased inner adult could get the bills paid
on time and the living room clean. The mental drug of Ego has stopped working
for us, though. In this stage, by
struggling with the eight evil thoughts, we negotiate our relationship to food,
possessions, life’s pressures, and sadness.
In this stage, we figure out how to relate to our need for love, we
negotiate anger and our need to be the grinning and shiny center of attention. We see much-prized messages of self-reliance
for the isolating sickness they create.
And our acquaintance with them is one of extremes.
For this blog post’s purposes, Aristotle was the wrongest,
most thoughtful motherfucker in history.
His “Bent Stick Theory” said that, if you eat emotionally, the thing to
do is to fast. If you’re greedy, then
voluntary poverty is the solution. By
bending the stick in a vice’s extreme opposite direction, you end up somewhere
in the middle in the end. We say things
like “Ego, Greed, Lust, etc. is ‘not who we are.” Any extreme of vice or virtue,
though, is just as willful a reaction to our passions, just as clingy a
response to our basic human needs.
Interiorly, our dualistic mind falls too quickly into
judging and rejecting the basic passions of our reptilian brain. But they’re
more inevitable than anybody, especially a spiritual person, wants to admit, so
that’s not the best move. With regard to
our passions, ‘accepting and including’ is the ‘basic maneuver’ of
transformation. The solution to the need
to have things is neither voluntary poverty nor rampant acquisitiveness. It’s to sit with that need until we accept
that “who we are” includes but isn’t limited to it. If passion of lust were a room, using people
for their bodies would be one wall, and white-knuckled celibacy would be the
other wall. The solution isn’t to focus
on the walls: we’ll spend our lives banging our heads against both of them,
causing ourselves and others a lot of suffering. The solution is to go lie in the center of
the room until the anxiety subsides.
With regard to the eight basic passions, when we stop bouncing off the
walls of abstention and overindulgence, we’ve become fully human, and can
accept that we need the basic goods the passions are trying to show us.
If the truths this struggle yielded could be summed up, it
would be accurate to say that the problem isn’t passions, but the fact that we
act on them egotistically. The problem
isn’t desire, but attachment.
Luckily, the Limbic brain, and the next stage of transformation,
resolves attachment. The Limbic Brain rules emotions. Anxiety is the major obstacle of this stage,
mostly because there is a difference between the healthy existence we’d like to
have and the unhealthy existence that currently seems to be our miserable lot. Religion’s logic becomes a hindrance here,
and learning by “realization” takes its place.
There are three micro-stages within this one, namely “limbic resonance,”
“limbic regulation” and “limbic revision.”
Like the “sympathetic resonance” between a plucked guitar string and an
unplucked, nearby equivalent, Limbic
resonance is the stuff of early childhood emotional-becoming. Merely by proximity to healthy parents, a
child develops a healthy emotional life.
Body language and breathing, the pace at which a child hears his father’s
heart beating, all of these teach emotional skills to the newborn. If either proximity, or, say, the emotional
health of the mother is compromised, then our infant’s emotional growth will be
stunted. Limbic regulation is the next micro-stage. We learn where the deficiencies are in our
emotional formation, and we tend to them. A child whose parents were absent in
early life, for instance, may place a great premium on the emotional side of
intimacy in their adult life. In the
limbic regulation stage, anxiety decreases as we learn the tricks of balanced
emotions. The last Stage is limbic revision. When Adult Children of
Alcoholics speak of the need to “reparent themselves” they’re speaking of this
stage. Having become conscious of their
internalized dysfunctional family, they develop an internalized healthy adult,
whose job is to make the body a safe space for the functional and the
dysfunctional to live together: the healthy adult validates the wounds, and
builds a new foundation on healing. This
is the stage that says, though limbic resonance sorely lacked, the wounds it
produced needn’t be the end of the story.
The Neo-cortex is the seat of transformation’s last stage. Increasingly, this part of the brain is
active in an inner child who’s done significant chunks of the reparenting task. All of the resources of the preceding stages—the
logic and realizations of religion, the healthy ego we’ve spend years
constructing—these all yield to the greater task of Ego-dissolution. If it doesn’t yield, it hardens into a mix of spiritualized entitlement, and egotistical psychobabble. At best, though, what is partial yields to
the whole. This is the seat of all
syntheses, where basic human emotions and needs get nuanced to accommodate the
inevitable “self-emptying” that comes from being a part of decaying-creation’s
governance by the “Logos.” Everyone’s
going to die. Even if there were enough
toys to suffice our desires—newsflash, there aren’t—we would have to confront
desire’s basic insatiability. When the
neo-cortex kicks in, we learn to placidly live with less. Unless the ego reasserts itself, this is the
stage when disciples become teachers.
In the gospels, at least three examples of this are worth
mentioning. The first stage is shown by
Jesus himself, who went into the wilderness after his baptism and was tempted
by the devil. This is Jesus coming out
of denial, struggling to stop bouncing off the walls of his basic human
needs. He doesn’t say the devil is
wrong, or that he doesn’t need food. He
doesn’t say he doesn’t need power or recognition. He simply says he won’t be egotistical in
obtaining it.
In terms of identity, the second stage is shown in the story
of the Gerasene demoniac, whose identity was so riddled with desire that he’d
derived his name –“Legion”—from their multiplicity. His anguish became an imposed hell of
self-harm. Jesus was able to help him
through it, and the man whose demons had gashed him with rocks and struggled
against his chains was eventually calm and in his right mind. Emotionally, this second stage looks like the
example of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Jesus
proves himself totally subject to humanity’s common suffering, and the tears
flow because of it.
The third stage is evident as Jesus progressively accepts
the authority of his call as a suffering servant. Its turning point is the garden of
Gethsemani, where Jesus weeps and asks that God’s will take precedence over his
own. Jesus laid aside not only the
unhealthy ego that had been tempted by the devil, but also the healthy ego who’d
been told it was “God’s beloved Son.” With purposeful exceptions, Jesus, after
the Garden of Gethsemani, proceeded through his trial and execution in the
starkest silence of his life.
And all of this is paradigmatic. In the end, it's continuing to live that kills the ego: every healing is a little death. Transformation isn’t judged by the health one
ends up with, but by the sickness one has let go of. Its barometers are absence, not presence. If
we are transformed, our body language will go from agitated to restful. If we are transformed, our “identity” will be
increasingly uncertain, but we’ll be at peace with the doubt. If we are transformed, we won’t manipulate
with our sadness or anger or sense of identity. To riff off of the Tao Te
Ching: emotions and identity will arise and we’ll let them go. We may be emotionally
ourselves, but we will, indeed be
ourselves, glorious and mediocre.
When the ego loses both its grip on the passions and its life, what we’ll
have is life. We'll have a non-dual consciousness--it's both "no big deal" and the mind of Christ.
God’s name, YHWH, can be taken to mean “I will cause to be
what I will cause to be.” And, quite
suddenly, the end is the beginning. St.
John said “What has come to be in him was life, and the life was the light of
all people.” Seeing this light, opening
my eyes—when my inside is wedded to my outside, these and everything else are
the same, and it’s enough.
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