Drawing from the Old Wells: Steps 4-6 of Benedict's Ladder of Humility

In step 4 particularly, (and to a lesser extent steps 5 and 6) the Rule’s transformative rubber meets the road.  The text says "in this obedience under difficult, unfavorable or even unjust conditions, his heart quietly embraces suffering." There are a lot of different kinds of “difficult and unfavorable conditions," and it’s important to touch on each of them.

Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, referred to “noogenic neuroses.”  This is a helpful term.  Some neuroses, it claims, form in response to the frustrations of existence, rather than forming because of frustrated basic needs.  Frankl claims these may not be neuroses at all, and can even be resolved fairly immediately, by troubleshooting our response to them.  The Serenity Prayer asks for the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change, and what I can’t.  The things that I can't change, the dynamics of life itself, are the things that do real transformative work in my life.

Before I go further, I want to talk about Brother Edward.  He was the monastery’s cook—a work he did with tremendous selflessness, even during the final two years of his life, when he carted cancer around the kitchen.  He tried to get us not to grieve him too soon: he wasn’t gone yet, he said, and on the cold days, what mattered to him was to get comfort food on the table in time for the noon meal.  

I’m bringing this up because Ed was instrumental in my accepting one of the biggest helpings of “existential frustration” I’d ever been served.

It needs to be said that Eddie was Jesus: quite literally, in my early days as a monk, I once had an experience of contemplation in church, of the kind I supposed they’d had when the stranger had become Christ at Emmaus.  When all of the mental noise that differentiates people from Jesus and one another quieted—at least for the few seconds before I began analyzing the experience—the person in front of me was Ed.  But because I didn't see him as separate from myself, Ed was Jesus.  But he was also Jesus for reasons that didn't depend on the seldom-given gift of contemplation.

 Eddie was also the reason I know that monasteries can be places of great intimacy.  Around year three, (two years into my novitiate, the second stage of formation) two things began to happen: I began to take the prospect of lifelong celibacy seriously, and God began to appear absent.  

Both caused their own kind of pandemonium in my psyche.  I began systematically dreaming of every girl I’d ever had a crush on.  This happened so consistently I eventually made a list, and ticked off girls’ names when they’d danced across my dreamscape.  The most intense infatuations of my adolescent life were harder to get over.  Worse yet, the sparseness of the monastic life offered little reprieve.  In the case of one college girlfriend, I did the majority of my grieving while shoveling chicken shit out at the monastery’s compost pile.

In its own way, “the absence of God” made my prayer life maximally unrewarding.  That’s actually a slight misnomer.  In truth, what began happening to me was merely the ceasing of consolations in prayer.  Previously, though, pleasant feelings had been such a part of my prayer life that I’d committed the typical neophyte’s blunder of equating the feelings with God’s presence.  So when prayer stopped being fun, God seemed absent.  And God was why I’d come to the monastery.  I used to say “God called me to the monastery, then he, himself, went to live in the Bahamas.

These two things happened together.  On two fronts, my attachments were out of whack with reality.  Eddie was the one to help me through all this.  I had done all of the private crying I could, but my situation wasn’t improving.  So I pulled Eddie into a small dining room, asked him if he’d consent to step into the role of “spiritual elder” for a moment.  He made cracks about how few answers he had to give, but consented.

Dry-eyed and emotionally spent, I told Eddie all of this: the absence of God, the parade of former loves, and how it all welled up into a question: why the hell, I asked, had I come here?  

Ed didn’t produce solutions.  He simply began crying.  “I’ve dealt with both of those things since I was a novice.  It’s…so…hard” he said.  

I replied “With all due respect to the formation classes here, they don’t really help me deal with this stuff.”

Ed made a dismissive “pfft” sound and rolled his eyes. Through tears he said “I haven’t cracked the Rule since I was a novice.”  He pointed to his leg, which the cancer had swelled to twice its normal size: “Right now, this is my formation.”

That day, Ed woke me up to the kind of intimacy available in the monastery.  True, if I’d stayed, no spouse would ever make moon eyes at me, but I would have the same experience as the 20 men I lived with, and some of them would even be willing to talk with me about it.  By about two years later, I could articulate the fact that neither my positive feelings about God, nor the emotional crap of my grieving processes were indicators of God's presence or absence.

The fourth of the Rule’s “Steps of Humility” talks about continuing obedience under difficult conditions.  Some of that comes from nowhere else but life itself.  I carried around a lot of anger because I wanted the life to change:  It was only in realizing how unrealistic that was, and then shifting my own paradigm, that I could access some peace.    

We should talk about one other bit: Sometimes other people can change the frustrations but won’t, and sometimes I really need to self-adjust and don’t.  This was the case when I was made “choir master.”  I put it in quotes because it wasn’t always true.  The second abbot I served under had been choir master before me.  It became clear that he intended to part with the responsibility of accompanying 7 sung prayers per day, but not the authority of the choir master.  With someone else to “cover the responsibility,” the abbot began sleeping through Vigils regularly—this is the earliest prayer, at 3:20 in the morning.  So it became the case that an abbot was asking his tired novice to preside at a prayer he himself was sleeping through: This sort of thing SCANDALIZED. THE. FUCK. OUT. OF. THE. NOVICES.  

As the son of a somewhat-famous liturgical composer, I came at the responsibilities with some hard-and-fast presuppositions about what good music was, and a real-but-slight chip on my shoulder about it.  Generally the brothers received my work well.  Every once in a while I’d push for change too quickly, and both the Abbot, and my Father, would tell me to slow down.  Across the phone lines, Dad would remind me “Changing a community’s liturgical music is like changing the furniture in a blind person’s house.  You can do it, but they’ll trip all over themselves for a while.”  By and by, something became clear, across all the work fronts in the monastery: saddling the young with all of the responsibility and none of the authority—this was to be the rule, not the exception.

This was an enormous struggle for me: I thought, by performing my responsibilities as best I could, that I was acting as a choirmaster should act.  But my performance was something my sleepy abbot routinely took exception to.  By and by, the struggle was an entrance point into the fifth and sixth steps.  I came to some grief by my own failure to accept that I’d have responsibility, but no authority.  I came to grief by my own inability to accept that Abbots (who don’t live the Rule) will correct novices (who need to live the Rule,) and that will simply be how it goes.  When I self-adjusted, my situation improved.

The genius of step 5, not concealing one’s thoughts from the abbot, is twofold.  For one thing, it is good for me to take responsibility for a fault without blaming the situation or people that showed me I’ve got it.  When I realized I needed to slow down and let the brothers’ needs—not my aspirations—determine the pace of my work as choirmaster, my serenity increased.  When I realized that my living of the rule was my responsibility, just as the abbot’s living of the rule was his, my life got more peaceful.  Talks with the abbot became easier as I realized, more and more, that we were simply two people who regularly fuck up an ideal.  As the abbot, he could call me out for it.  That’s just the reality of power dynamics.  But delightfully, I could occasionally miss vigils, even as the accompanist for the service, without drawing the abbot’s criticism.  I suppose it’s nothing more than an impish pleasure, but if you’re gonna make a mistake in the full sight of your superior: for God’s sake, make the mistakes he himself made yesterday.

Hypocrisy aside, when I learned to take responsibility on the one hand and selectively dodge it on the other—it opened my eyes to another dimension of the monastic life.  In the monastery’s different industries, a lot of the older monks worked three jobs each.  Because of their Trappist vow of obedience, very few of them had too much choice in the matter.  And very few of them were qualified beforehand for the jobs they assumed.  I came to see the abbot—and his underlings, like the monk who assigned the work—as men who had a certain number of jobs to fill.  To them, the monastery’s various efforts at being self supporting were an understaffed chess board.  All of us (from novices to ninety year olds) were pieces they moved about in irregular ways, trying to keep the industries afloat.

A quick aside: Ram Dass tells a story about a time he and Timothy Leary were having a disagreement.  (It must be remembered that Ram Dass was named "Richard Alpert" at birth.) Timothy turned to to his own children, in a moment of anger, and said to them "I need to tell you that Uncle Richard is evil."  This really got under Ram Dass's  skin.  A few months later, under the influence of LSD, Ram Dass had the courage to face the possibility that Tim Leary had been telling the truth.  Under the influence of psychedelics, Ram Dass took a square look at, and accepted, his own capacity for evil.  

Later Tim Leary called him up and asked him to stop by for a visit.  Ram Dass obliged.  During the course of the visit, Timothy said "You know, Dick, you're not evil."

Ram Dass responded with the calm of a man who'd accepted his own darkness.  "If you hadn't laid that trip on me, I wouldn't have done that work."  

I bring up this story about Ram Dass because it's how the imperfections of others act in relationships of obedience.  When a disobedient person told me I was disobedient, I had to face myself.  In the end, I could accept both options: perhaps I was disobedient, but no more than everyone else.  And again, perhaps I can forgive myself for it, and I should forgive others without expecting to be excused from the ideal myself.

When a person has had an opportunity to get to know his own faults, and when he’s learned to take some power back, defending himself against those of others, step 6 comes in to play.  This is when a monk “is content with the lowest and most menial treatment.”   Certainly this can look like “taking a crap job without complaining.”  But the clearest example I have of step six is Eddie.

As I said, Ed had cancer.  His step six was not in taking abuse while he worked as the cook, and not in working a terrible job no one else wanted. Ed’s step six was to do what he’d been asked while he was slowly dying of cancer.  I suppose, if Mepkin hadn’t had a farm, he wouldn’t have been so plugged into this.  Ed, as I’ve said, had a radar for comfort food like no other.  When it was rainy, or he knew the brothers had been working the various farm fronts in the cold, he’d simply beef up the “comfort food” factor, making sure the monastery’s main meal (the one in the middle of the day) stuck to our ribs.

Both dying as monks and in their home monastery—as opposed to, say, in a hospital or random old-folks-home—this is an enormous goal for the brothers.  The Trappist vow of Stability—to die in the monastery where one made final vows—wrote this into each brother’s psycho-spiritual DNA: only under extreme circumstances could a monk “transfer his stability” to another monastery, and it actually involved legal paperwork.  Ed’s cancer made his care a constant question.  Would the brothers be able to give him the quality attention he needed?  Please understand that there were very few signs of Eddie deteriorating.  Ed took very few pain meds.  He had a period of about 3 weeks where he needed care, but the day before that period began, he was in the kitchen preparing dinner.

There was a chapter—a gathering of the brothers for community meetings or spiritual instruction—when Ed stepped away from the kitchen.  It was announced that he’d be handing over the culinary reigns to someone else.  Briefly, the topic of our ability to care for Ed was brought up.  Would we be able to care for him here?  Would he be able to die at home.  

At one point—I’d become an old hand at this—I interrupted the abbot.  “Y’all just need to realize,” I said, “that if Eddie gets sent elsewhere, I’m switching my stability.”  I’d shot from the hip, then promptly felt bad for interrupting, returning quickly to listening-mode…

Later, and in quiet conversation, I spoke with the community’s nurse, George David.  George said “Ed might be a medical miracle.  All of his doctors are saying he shouldn’t be physically capable of bearing with the amount of pain he’s in.”  

Ed died about three weeks later.  But before lucidity departed from him, he unceremoniously presented me with a hand-written note.  He’d written it on the day of the chapter meeting.  He referred to me by my monastic name, getting right to the point:

Br. Dismas, 

You really touched a deep chord in my heart by what you said at Chapter this morning, saying you would change your stability to be with me if I were to be sent elsewhere.  Absolutely beautiful.  Truly this is what makes community life so wonderful and joyful.  

Thanks, Dismas, for your love and all that you are.

Ed

In my home, I am the chief-cook and bottle-washer.   I have a gargantuan stack of the school week's dishes waiting for me as I write this.  I’ve mentioned this before, in Under the Influence’s June 1st post of this year: the framed note now hangs on one wall of my kitchen, opposite the goofiest picture of Ed ever taken: we called it the “gift wrapped for heaven” picture.

Ultimately, I can claim only to have made a beginning.  I can claim only to have had hit-and-run incidences of steps 4-6, in my monastic life and otherwise.  I am certain I know more of what I’m capable of, and the ways other people, when left to themselves, tend to act.  But every time the feelings of defeat arise, about the apparent failure of my life as a monk, I take my hands out of the dishwater and read Eddie’s words: this is what makes life so wonderful and joyful.  Even if I don’t understand much of my own life, I made a dying monk feel accompanied when it mattered most.  When I’m being realistic about myself, and when I’m remembering Eddie, that’s enough.

Drawing from the old wells: Steps 1-3 of Benedict's Ladder of Humility

In October 26th’s “Christ, Christians, and the Body Language of Transformation”, Under the Influence lamented that there are no criteria by which to judge orthomorphosis, or “right transformation.”  The post described a transformation in things like body language, identity and our basic human needs for affirmation, security, and control.  It argued that, as transformation progresses, body language and speech become less impulsive. identification with a self less hard-and-fast, and our expression of our needs, more moderate.

While I stand by that post, I’m realizing it isn’t necessarily true that there are no criteria for orthomorphosis out there.  It’s a case of an underdeveloped, not an undeveloped tradition.  I’m convinced that some of the different incarnations of religious life begin to put an account of transformation together.  In fact, I realized that I, myself, had seen one of those sets of criteria at work, and shared life with men whose transformations it described.

As  a former Trappist monk, I’m referring, of course, to the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s the document that, in broad strokes, describes and regulates the lives of those who, as it says, “desire to see good days.”  While that's true of each monk, it's also fairly clear it'll be a challenge. The “Steps of Humility” found in its seventh chapter describe what comes when a brother lives cheek by jowl with those he would otherwise not even socialize with.

So I want to spend a few posts reflecting on those steps.  Make no mistake, though: I reflect as a former Trappist, and that means two things.  It means my own transformation is both incomplete, and in some significant ways markedly different than those the Rule describes.  At most, having assisted with palliative care in an old monastic “senior wing,” I can claim to have witnessed the final earthly transformation of at least 7 lifelong monks.  I will, however, be drawing from other traditions as well—specifically Alcoholics Anonymous, and what little I know of Hinduism and Buddhism.  

Before I get into the Steps themselves, I want to tell you about Brother Vincent.  At full height, Vince is at least 6 feet, 5 inches of lanky tallness.  He has trouble finding shoes that fit his feet, and looks at the world from behind impressive greying eyebrows.  Vince is a consummate historian, the curator of a collection of lifetimes, to say nothing of odds and ends.  Vince was the brother to whom “Crucified and Risen: A Theory of Christian Reincarnation” referred.  Certain of at least one past existence as a Civil-War-Era Union Soldier,  Vince is also the guy you go to for practical knickknacks.  Never certain of when he’ll need them, Vince keeps a veritable hardware store in his cell, with shelves upon shelves of nails, hinges and screws, all neatly classified in baby food jars.

Life, for Vince, was a hootenanny whose volume had simply been turned down.  Though the monastery appealed to his longing for God, pubs were more apt to suffice his longing for people.  St. Benedict, in the prologue of his rule, quotes scripture in asking “is there anyone here who longs for life, and desires to see good days?”  Vincent was one whose answer was “MEEEEE” and who felt it so deeply that no particular thing in this life left him satisfied.  It makes sense that Vince would have remembered previous incarnations: I’m sure, at the end of his last lifetime, he called to the heavenly bartender “Let’s have another round of the same, please!”

It’s perhaps because of his innate insatiability that Vince never learned to use the internet.  For him, having the whole world at his fingertips was an overwhelming prospect.  Once, when he asked me to google something for him, I offered to teach him to do it himself.   His response was kind, but immediate and firm: “Oh no, I’d just get lost down that rabbit hole and never come back up.”

There are types of monks for whom the monastery’s austerities serve as protection from themselves.  Quite famous among these was Fr. Louis Merton, known for his best-selling autobiography Seven Story Mountain, which he published under his baptismal name.  One story, that came to me from Fr. Chrysogonus Wadell, tells how Merton had a scar. It was listed as an identifying characteristic on his passport.  Prone to wild, drunken parties in his old life, Merton had played the part of Christ in a mock crucifixion.  Too drunk to resist, he’d been laid on a cross: the partygoers drove a nail halfway through his wrist before they stopped.  Those who knew Merton well could easily see what an important role the cloister had in Merton’s safe interaction with the world.

It’s particularly in light of these types of monks that the Rule’s first three steps of humility makes sense.  They’re the first steps in a process by which, by remembering God, we act as christ acted.  By and by both God and Christ “disappear” only to re-emerge in our own process of internalization.  The result’s that we come out of denial about ourselves.  Markedly dualistic, steps 1-3 are “Spiritual Materialism” at its best, and worth engaging in so long as the practitioner is ready to let the ego go in the end.  

The First Step is that a person constantly keeps the fear of God before his eyes.  Admittedly, t’s the “Santa God” who’s out to get you if you’re naughty and reward you if you’re good, but it succeeds, at least, in dislodging the identification with our worst selves.  The text says “God searches hearts and minds…the Lord knows the thoughts of men…while [they] guard [themselves] at every moment from sins and vices of thought or tongue, of self-will or bodily desire, let them recall that they are always seen by God in heaven, that their actions everywhere are in God’s sight and are reported by angels at every hour.”

That’s a pretty Gestapo-esque trip to lay on a person.  It’s dualistic thinking at its spiritual best. Benedict knows that the steps of humility are a process, and that God-concepts are there for our use when they make sense, just as they’re to be parted with when we outgrow them.  Under the Influence has been developing this thought, in one form or another, since the beginning: the problem isn’t thoughts or constructs, but our attachment to them.  Undiagnosed attachment to immature spiritual paradigms is a difficult thing in monasteries.  An Abbot, the head of any monastery, ends up with eighty year old monks who still believe that heaven only happens after death, that God’s remote and keeping track of acts that are either good and bad, letting the math decide whether we’re bound for heaven and hell.  It hard to see eighty year olds laying in their deathbeds, still tormented by a fear of hell.  But it’s a thing that happens.  Back when I was “Brother M. Dismas Warner, OCSO,” it probably would have happened with me, had the falseness of my “religious identity,” not been laid bare.

The rule says God watches “while [monks] guard themselves” from sin.  In the end, that’s one of those statements that monks learn to be true only with qualification.  Being liberated from the “eight evil thoughts” is something that mature monks hope for, but don’t count on.  Gluttony, greed, lust, pride—these are all perpetual struggles.  The old guys in a monastery, if they still find themselves acting on their more base thoughts, simply find less time elapses between getting caught in them, realizing they're doing it, and stopping.  Potentially, they can recognize their thoughts as just thoughts, and leave them alone before they become actions.

So certainly, monks want to avoid making things worse by willfully cooperating with their worse selves.  In that sense, the words of the Rule are accurate, full stop.  But the struggles are perpetual.  The monastic tradition is full of stories of old monks being subjected, by God, to the very vices they berated others for struggling with.  God’s purpose was twofold: to make clear that those monks are just like everyone else, and to form, by sheer dint of vicious struggle, the opposite virtues in a monk.

The Second Step of Humility is that a monk doesn’t take pleasure in the satisfaction of his desires.  All eight evil thoughts, remember, are rooted in pride.  They’re ways that a monk separates himself from others.  In that way, they’re like the “brain chemicals” that Adult Children of Alcoholics acknowledge administering to themselves when they indulge in care-taking or codependence.  Monks get a little hit of serotonin when they think themselves more pious than others.    When a monk is awakened to how sick this tendency is, he has an opportunity to stop doing it.  

Again, in a stunning parallel to 12 step traditions, Benedict’s use of the term “self will” is instructive.  I can’t remember which abbot it was—it might have been Dom Peter of Guadalupe—who gave a chapter talk to the monks of Mepkin.  He said “we must will not to will.”  This is useful. From the point of view of our relationship with God, he was talking about the second step of humility.  It says “[monks] shall imitate by [their] actions that saying of the Lord: ‘I have come, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.’”  There’s another level on which to consider it, though: the level of attention.  July 20th’s Under the Influence post (“Biff, Kapow, Thwap: A Study in Contemplative Attention”) talks about “passive volition.”  That is, simply “being present to what’s being done in me.”  It might be God’s will, it might be I’m working out my purgatorial predicament, caught up in my attachments till i decide not to identify with them.  But the point is, I am present to something happening in me.  A perspective—quite different from “taking pleasure in the satisfaction of their desire” is possible for monks.  With apologies to Ram Dass, it might take the form of “Hey, this is happening,” or “Hey that’s happening.  I’m not the action—it’s all an expression of my purgatorial predicament.  Look at that…Far out…”  If we attribute to God the good we want to do, and we attribute to purgatorial predicament and growing detachment the bad we’d prefer not to do, then we spend less time thinking that we ourselves are our actions, and that we are good or bad.  This uses dualistic thinking to grow non-attachment, and (by all accounts) a healthy thing.

Benedict doesn’t mince words.  He doesn’t hide what the steps of humility ultimately involve.  In step three he says baldly that our game is “[imitating] the Lord of whom the apostle says ‘he became obedient even to death.”  My entry point into this is egoic death.  I’ve certainly learned, at least a little, not to identify myself with my ego.  And that’s an important death.  Again, as Ram Dass says “The person who dies before he dies doesn’t die when he dies.”  But Benedict knew parting with our egoic trip was only half the game.  The fact is, we’re also not our physical bodies.  And by dying we are reborn in Christ (potentially “literally and on earth,” as I’ve said before, but at least metaphorically, in heaven.)  

Remember that I flunked out of what Benedict calls “the school of charity.”  As monks are fond of saying, the monastery’s only “graduates” (the only ones who’ve “succeeded” at Trappist life) are “planted in the back yard” of the community cemetery.  So I can kind of speak to egoic death a little, sort of.  After that, it’s all stuff I’ve witnessed: the final, rattling witness of the 7 men who died while I lived as a monk.

This is important.  Benedict’s “Steps of Humility,” (and theoretically the life of every monastery, monk, nun, oblate and gloriously failed blogger who follows them) are not about imitation of Christ.  They’re about intimacy with Christ.  Not Spousal intimacy—although a certain number of medieval mystics saw themselves as very much “married to Jesus.”—but the communal intimacy that comes from taking up one’s cross, and knowing how weighty Jesus’ own burden must have been.

And then, of course, we do what we do “in remembrance of him” and the whole of life becomes a Eucharist.  When I told Vince I intended to leave the monastery, he hugged me and whispered into my ear “we didn’t get enough time.”  He was right.  I knew that my promise to hold him as he died would go unkept.  I’m not comfortable with that, but I’ve become comfortable with the discomfort.  Right before I left, Vince gave me some Scottish money he’d kept from a trip he’d taken there once.  He said to me “when you’re out there, you’re going to have a bunch of experiences that you and I know I would have loved.  I want you trade in this money and take some gorgeous brunette out for drinks.  You’re like the prodigal son, who’s been given his inheritance early. Go and blow the whole thing.  And drink in every minute of it.”

Vince was right.  I blew that money a long time ago, on a girl who ended up “not being the right one.”  But in that very predicament, there’s a lesson in prayer.  It’s a dual mind that divides things into good and bad, right and wrong, present and past.  I am, indeed, the prodigal son.  But my return isn’t to the monastery.  It isn’t to imposed senses of right and wrong or good or bad.  It’s to the present moment, to the cup of coffee, grown cold for neglect as I’ve written this.  It’s to my sweet girl, dainty-snoring the morning away in the next room.

I want to wake up.  And I want to rise every morning as Jacob did, fresh from dreams of angelic ladders that angels ascended.  As Benedict says, “We descend through [self] exaltation and descend by humility.  Now the ladder erected is our life on earth, and if we humble our hearts the Lord will raise it to heaven.”  May it be so, for all of us.

May Angels Lead You To Willingness: Dialogues with "Man's Search for Meaning"

I recently came across the idea of logotherapy in Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”  I briefly nerded out big time: I initially intended this post to be a wholesale endorsement of Frankl’s thought.  It proposed good concepts such as “Nouogenic Neuroses”—those resulting not from conflict with the basic human drives (the freudian definition) but from “existential problems and existential frustration.”  It talked about “paradoxical intention” as a way of tackling neuroses, and that resonated with my experience that the first step of recovery was to label your situation unmanageable.  So “I’m an alcoholic” is the first verbalization necessary to render one’s alcoholism dormant and live more healthily.  Frankl’s book says that man’s search for meaning is his basic human drive, and that the “will to meaning” was his fundamental freedom, which can never be taken from him.

It was a tempting intellectual morsel for an author who, since June sixth’s first “Kairos, Koans and Conversion” post, has been claiming that “Logos is Mu.”  Sharing the divinity of Christ who emptied himself to share our humanity is too big a theme here to expect otherwise. My zeal has flagged some, in the changing winds of nuance.  Still, if Frankl’s book were a woman, I would be kneeling with a decoder ring fished out of a Cracker-Jack box, saying “You are at least 70 percent of what I’ve been looking for my whole life, and I sorta want to spend most of the rest of my life with you. Kinda.” Frankl himself got at the core of my difficulty: if the “existential frustration” with which one deals comes from outside of us, we deal with it by paradoxical intention—fully admitting it’s there—and work with it by embracing it.  If our existential frustration is actually a tension of our own making, it’s best to stop fooling ourselves, lay off the self-sabotage, and go forward from there.  But I’ve too often confused what I can change and what I can’t, and I haven’t bothered to seek differentiating wisdom.  I don’t feel I have the skill or conceptual tools, the wielding of which might prove Frankl’s philosophy personally accurate.

If philosophies are like women, consider this a singles ad, a statement of the kind of girl the walls at Under the Influence were made to bear posters of.  Meaning, for me, has been (too often) egotistically created and enforced, so I’m wary of Frankl’s “will to meaning” from the word “go.”  Before the metaphor overextends into long walks on the beach, let’s get down to it.

Under the Influence believes that the basic human drive is the search for willingness, and that the ability to accept the waxing and waning of meaning constitutes the fundamental human freedom.  I may sometimes have a "healthy sense of self." That will endure until it's time for me to look at my flaws.  I may sometimes have a coherent sense of life's meaning, but spiritual progress entails a scrambling of that meaning.  Accepting both meaning and the lack thereof, send of self and lack thereof--this is how I take my place on the Great Mandala.  Everyone's gotta take their turn on the downside of the wheel.  With this kind of set up, meaning’s a party bonus of finding willingness, not an object of potentially egotistical striving.

It is process, not product, that’s important here.  Furthermore, we don’t start out willing.  We start out willful and clinging to whatever will leave our desires for affection, security and power fulfilled.  If “spiritual materialism” is a trip we’ve laid on ourselves, we attempt to fulfill those egotistical desires and pass the whole thing off as holiness.  So “becoming willing” is important wording: it smacks of passive volition, of learning to be present to reality when we find ignoring it all too easy.

If a willful preoccupation with unreality is our starting point, then we come to grief in finding what is.  Egotism projects a stubborn false self, and it’s got to die daily if we’re to live more deeply.  Quite literally, we find willingness, in part, by moving through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of dying. Those are, in order: Denial, Anger, Sadness, Depression and Acceptance.

To the monastic version of my earlier self, the “Stages of Dying” were a revelation.  I’d let go of my old life, of possessions, of the many ways society grabs for power, affection and security, but it never struck me that those renunciations saddled me with a grieving process.  Sensitivity to the constant and healthy role of grief in letting go explains, in large part, the depression that found me in my high school years and occasionally visits me still.

For a moment, let’s detail something.  In the first place, let’s talk about he “Stages of Reparenting” my own guideline for coming to terms with my past.  Then lets take a look at the passions by which we misuse things, emotions, others and self.   The Steps of Reparenting can be used to grieve our attachments to the passions as well.  Life is more full of good grief than we realize, and the processes are more similar than we think.  Not only are the stages similar, a few typical egoic avoidance maneuvers mark each process.  When they arise, if a person has their head about them, they will not be surprised.  

The Stages of Dying, referenced here because the other sets of stages echo them, are  Denial, Anger, Sadness, Depression, and Acceptance.  I won’t examine these in detail.  It was a blessing to have seen the Stages of Dying as personally applicable.  However, for a younger version of myself, emotional choreographies from my family of origin governed my present interactions.  This was a real thing, and even more pressing than coming to terms with mortality.

The Stages of Reparenting are lifelong tools, not one-time emotional tricks.  They are: Denial, Self-observation, Sensation, Transmutation of Energies, and Acceptance of the Past.  When we go from denial to self observation, family influence on present choreographies are laid bare.  A middle child might see that he often mediates disputes in his adult life because he grew up running interference between parents.  He might see that a facial expression or gesture by a colleague causes disproportionate anxiety, simply because similar expressions and gestures meant trouble growing up. 

After Self-observation, all of the truths about “the body being the unconscious” come into play.  Old trauma is stored as pain in the body, and isn’t released until we face it.  So the next phase is “Sensation.”  We reclaim the body from the emotional numbness unreconciled trauma imposed. We release old pain.  On the level of discursive thought, this looks like "reparenting."  I have, in my psyche, voices that represent different responses to trauma: my inner wounded child does a lot of raging and screaming, my inner unhealthy adult would drink his pain away and manipulate people ad nauseum if I let him.  It's possible to hear these aspects of the psyche, without doing their bidding.  And when they feel heard and empathized with, they don't tear through my choices like bulls through a china shop. The "Healthy Adult" and the "Original Child" are free to hold sway over my actions.

The fact is, though, the energies that undergird that understanding will need to be contended with whether I've become aware of the need to reparent or not.  If I can't quite wrap my head around "inner child language" it's possible just to work with the different bodily vibrations involved.

“Transmutation of Energies” is a term borrowed from Tantric Yoga.  In Tantra, it smacks of dualism to say that suffering is a problem in need of a solution.  Instead, Tantra sees suffering as pain we have not yet faced.  It’s famous for seeing lust as sexual passions we’ve not yet used for connection.  As in physics, the body’s energy is changed, not destroyed so another can be created to replace it.  Once we recognize stored trauma, we can then “inhabit it,” transforming the pain by full acceptance of it.  This involves an ability to recognize the pain, but make no attempt to manipulate it.  In particular, people raised in dysfunctional families may have a hard time with this: a childhood of being manipulated will inevitably have taught them to manipulate themselves.

There’s a quote, that is attributed (and misattributed) to a dozen people, but it came to me through the slam poet Buddy Wakefield.  In his poem “Gentleman Practice,” Wakefield says “forgiveness is letting go of all hope for a better past.”  This sunk in for me: when I let go of the hope for a better past, I can forgive.  Wakefield also, quite beautify, says “this is an apology letter to the both of us for how long it took me to let things go.”  I have often taken too long to let things go, especially if the hurt was prolonged.  But when I’ve been able let go, I’ve had a chance at reaching acceptance, the last stage of the grieving process, where the past can be the past, and its pain doesn’t have to be my present.  

My past created my ego, and letting go of that false self wholesale and all at once would most likely lead to nervous breakdown.  We have to allow life to highlight the presence of—and begin to deconstruct—each of the eight evil thoughts—which in the Catholic Tradition act together to form the ego.  Some of the thoughts—gluttony and greed—are about misuse of things.  Some of them—sloth and sorrow—are about misuse of emotions.  A third variety—specifically lust and wrath—are objectifying others and a fourth variety—vanity and pride—objectifies Self. 

The “Stages of Reparenting" can be used to deal with the passions as well.  All of the passions are about something good, at their core.  Food is awesome, gluttony is not.  I am freaking amazing, and vanity does me no favors.  Self-reliance is sometimes necessary, but pride makes me an isolated, sad white man.  So with our capacity for abuse laid bare, we’re simply left with the thing itself: Lust leaves us, and leaves us with love.  Sloth ambles off (anxiously, with disinterest) and leaves us with the ability, here to work diligently, there to take the rest we’re given.

It’s important to note that, when I’m grieving the false self, there are a few constant features to working through the steps. In the first place, as the post "Trust God: Steps 1-3 of ACA" claimed as it ended, I don't work the steps, the steps work on me.  At best, I am present to a work my Higher Power is doing in me. Additionally, right before the energy of Ego begins transmuting, it suggests suicide as a way to free ourselves.  Egoic thinking is un-nuanced, and is apt to throw life—the baby—out with the egoic bath water.  But that thought is just an event, and if I can let it go as spontaneously as it arose, then what comes next is an opportunity indeed: I hit rock bottom.  And as surrender became, quite suddenly, a possibility for Bill W., so it becomes for me as well.  Sometimes it’s sudden, sometimes gradual, but there is always a “giving up” that frees us from Ego’s grip.

If only that were the end of the story.  But the ego reasserts itself, this time wearing the garb of holiness.  In this regard, as funky as I feel about Frankl’s “will to meaning,” the flesh he puts on those bones is helpful in one respect.  He says that Love and Work are reasons to live, and I believe him.  As bad a rap as “spiritual materialism” gets at Under the Influence,  I have to say at least one thing in its defense.  Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz.  He mentions several things on which the “will to live” might rest, in the absence of which, he said anecdotally, he’d seen too many perish.  People survived who had, for instance, the Love of a Spouse to return to.  He survived by rewriting a book whose only surviving copy was taken from him on arrival.  

I perpetually feel as if I’m only beginning to be aware of the purgatorial predicament my vocation’s designed to work out, to say nothing of creating enough self-love for my girlfriend’s generous affection to find sympathetic resonance.  All of this is to say, when my youthful self confronted the possibility of suicide, a perceived abundance of grace kept me alive.  But it came with no real self knowledge whatsoever.  The “commissioning” that such a life saving event could have been was severely stunted by not knowing what I’d been kept alive for.

Frankl speaks of a disillusionment among holocaust survivors.  He says that, after the War, people were liberated, but that didn’t mean they were happy.  The fact took prisoners by surprise, and caused no small amount of disorientation.  It was the same with me.  Avoiding suicide was a liberation, but no sense of purpose steered me safely through the deconstruction that ensued.  Conjuring a life and identity around religion kept me emotionally together while life haphazardly dismantled my former self.

The Porisover Rebbe, a Jewish teacher in the Hasidic tradition, said “If God sends sadness, we ought to feel it.”  Certainly that’s part of it.  But the responsibility goes even deeper. Bernard Malamud, in his book, The Mourners talks about Gruber, a well-nigh destitute Jewish tenant, who’s being evicted by Kessler, a Jewish Landlord.  Gruber delays moving out to such an extent that Kessler breaks into the apartment, only to find Gruber, now faced with homelessness and potential death, is praying the Kaddish, the classic Jewish prayer memorializing the dead, for himself.

“Saying the Kaddish for oneself” is important and instructive.  If we all, as St. Paul says, “die daily”—if the egotistical self is daily ceasing to be, then a certain quantity of grief will be ours to bear consistently.  If we can take nothing with us, then we have to work through the emotional choreographies of letting go.  In the end, it’s Jacob’s Ladder all over again: like our teacher, we bear our burdens, become like Jesus was, a crosswalk for the cherubim.  The Catholic Funeral prayer will be easily self-applied.  At the end, no one will need to say “may angels lead you to paradise” because we’ll have been their well lit path the whole time.  

One, Two, Buckle my Soup: Conversing with ‘Conversations with Hank’

Hank, Everyone...

Conversations with Hank is written by Joy Hanford, who lives in Guimarães, Portugal with her husband and two children. Described as an “accidental parenting blog,” Conversations with Hank is a glimpse into Hanford’s life as a quite-intentional mother, European immigrant of midwest US stock, and author of children’s books. The following was written after her post “Finding a Better Way to Vent.” As a general note, I hope use of such words as “Mãe”—the Portuguese word for “Mom” won’t throw the reader. The letter is posted because its content is pertinent to Under the Influence. Ultimately, the intended audience is Hank, who’s awesome enough to speak both languages. I’m confident y’all will deal with it.



Dear Hank,


My name is Josh. I went to high school with your Mãe. We weren’t in touch for a while, because we both went to college, and while she was meeting your Pai, I went off to live in a monastery. After a while I left the monastery—internet access was limited there, but that's not why I left—and it was a great joy to be able to get back in touch with her over Facebook. Being able to read a bit about your life in Guimarães has been just as fun.

I don't have the time to sit down with Conversations with Hank as often as I'd like, but your Mãe’s blog is always rewarding when I can check in with it. That was the case recently, when I read “Finding a Better Way to Vent.”

I like Conversations with Hank because it makes so clear the love your Mãe has for you, and the fascination she feels and watching you grow. You may think that I'm writing this post on my own blog simply because I went to high school with her, but that's not the case. I empathize with you quite a lot, Hank. “Finding a better Way to Vent” expressed a struggle with living up to standards and being social that I could relate to. It’s a struggle I’ve never liked, but that I’m unfortunately really familiar with.

So I'm writing this post in my own blog for two reasons:

First, because life comes with no instruction manual, and I’ve always hated that. The older me wishes that when I was your age someone had given me practical, usable advice. So I am writing this as “a letter to my younger self.”

Second, I'm writing this letter because, on the way to work this morning, I had to stop fast. The container of soup that I had packed for lunch flew out of my passenger seat and exploded—in puddles soupy deliciousness— all over my car.  Speeding down the highway, too occupied with driving to fix the fact that soup was all over my car, I had the idea to write this letter.

I was an awkward child (very, very awkward) from the start, Hank. I don't know how it is in Portugal, but in America, boys become men believing that they have to be successful athletically and financially, and that all the cute girls have to have little crushes on them, or else they’re not good at being men. I accepted this message without knowing it was there, and without thinking. In short, life was telling me to be awesome and confident and I would often feel nothing more than awkward. It left me a bit of an outcast from the start.

I was born with a mild disability, Cerebral Palsy. My muscles tighten faster than most people’s. This doesn’t mean a lot, but does mean that, if I want to run, or walk up stairs, or skip, I’m likely to fall more than others would. Most people trip because something’s in their way. I grew up tripping because I was walking in the first place. It made me feel unsafe in my own body.

I can dance, Hank, but because of my disability it has always taken me longer to learn. And so, when dancing with the ladies became an issue, I was hopelessly lost. I wanted to be popular and loved, but I would have settled for being accepted for who I was.

Since I was different, I was a bit of an outcast. I couldn’t compete physically, so I developed my mind. I had great ideas about how to do things, and no one listened. So I was at odds, not only with my own body, but with others as well.

The fact is, when life didn’t meet my needs, I felt sad. And if my older self could give my younger self advice, he would say: feel that sadness. Feel every bit of it. Do all the emotional things: listen to sad songs, fill notebooks with painful scribblings. All of that. And do it hugely. I would give my younger self that advice because, in the end, that’s not what I did.

It's not cool to feel sad, so I denied it. But I still had needs that people around me weren’t meeting. I would try to get people to meet my needs, and then if they didn't I would get mad. Again, American society says that you can be anything if you try hard enough. That may apply to something you're already talent at, but it certainly doesn't apply to being accepted, being secure, or being in control. When the right people didn't come to my birthday parties, when I would fall down (again), when I had good ideas about how to do things but nobody listened—these weren’t things I could change, but I spent too many years trying to change them anyway.

And I suppose this leads to the second thing that older me wants to say to younger me. In short, trying to solve sadness, (or trying to fix the ways life falls short) will only lead to anger. Looking back, older me sees that, when I denied sadness, I caused myself a lot of anger. I’ve spent way too much of my daily life being mad and perfectionist, way too much of my life needing to control things.  Looking back, I wish it had been different.

My Girlfriend's
Sadface is
particularly Cute

These days I have a wonderful girlfriend. Living our lives together and working stressful jobs sometimes makes us sad. Maybe it's because I'll always be a little bit goofy: but when we’re sad, I will often look at her and ask “Do you think we should make the sad face?” The sad face is the biggest, most deliberate, whiniest frown that either of us are capable of. When we make the sad face, everything stops. We do nothing else. We just sit there looking sad, and staring each other in the face. And then a funny thing happens: one of us laughs. “Who laughs first” has kind of become a game we play. I win most of the time. My sad-face skills are unparalleled. The point is, there's a third lesson in that: acknowledging my sadness is awkward at first, but ultimately it's both satisfying and funny.

What I'm not trying to say, Hank, is to be hurt and sad all over the world because it's how you feel at the moment. Unfortunately, while I was growing up, the “popular kids” would often become more popular by teasing me. I could never have admitted how sad they made me feel, and I definitely couldn’t have cried, without risking getting made fun of by the kids at school.

It's never good to be defensive without being aware of it. I became defensive by denying my sadness too much, and Older Me has spent a lot of my life trying to reverse that. The fourth piece of advice I’d give myself, though, is to be more guarded. I should've tested people more to see if I could express myself fully without being rejected. It’s often useful to be intentionally guarded. I’ve had to be careful to do two things: for one thing, I’ve to be careful not to become a bully myself—because sometimes young bullies become older bullies--because bullying others doesn’t fix sadness, and it can lead to anger. Additionally, I’ve had to learn to defend myself from people who put me down.

I am a Sadness Ninja.

I do that by not running from the “bad things” people want to pin on me. When people say I’m sad, (and mean it as an insult,) I smile and remind them that it’s more like constant, low-grade depression, and that they forgot “awkward and insecure.” I don’t take on things that aren’t true—no one could call me a bad father, because I don’t have kids- but if someone called me that, I’d say “That’s not true, but I am a terrible boyfriend. And I do a world-class ‘depression’ act.” People expect me to want to live up to their ideal, so they can use it against me. By showing that I don’t want that, I take away their way of messing with me.

I guess, in short, what my older self would say to my younger self is: there’s no way to get around how frustrating it is to need (and not to receive) acceptance, security and control. I hope that my younger self would recognize he can spend less time with anger by allowing himself to feel sad. He can be guarded instead of being defensive.

To put a fine point on it: When I spilled my soup, I realized that, though I want to control things, that's not realistic about a lot of things in my life.  Young and old, people are sometimes bullies, and sometimes I have to stop fast on the highway. I can learn to buckle my soup. Buckling my soup is something I can do to prepare for life's unpredictable stuff.  My younger self could have wished for acceptance, could have wished people were nicer. And my older self could spend time wishing people weren’t crazy drivers. But, just like I shouldn't fix my sadness with anger, I can't fix others' conduct.  So I might as well buckle my soup and get on with changing what it's possible for me to change. I’m starting to learn I can feel my feelings, that I can be purposeful in maintaining only a small group to express them with, and that I have a few things I can do to defend myself against life’s jerks.

When I got to work, and set myself to wiping up spilled soup, the things I’ve said in this letter all started to come to me.

Hank, I just want to thank you for finding safe spaces to let your real life show. I’m thinking particularly of your Mãe’s blog. Having the strength to “just be myself” is something that I’m still working on. Your willingness to struggle with that too, and then to let someone write about it—it helps a good bit. And because of you, I have said some things today that I needed to hear myself saying. Older me, and younger me, think you’re a good bloke.


Keep it real, man.

Peace,


Josh

Crucified and Risen: A Theory of Christian Reincarnation

I’ve been speaking for weeks about “purgatorial predicament” as if it were the equivalent of the Hindu concept of the Karmic Predicament.  I haven’t adequately explained what the purgatorial predicament is.  The purgatorial predicament is a “cross” we make light when we live our vocations to the fullest, and heavy when we sin.  In short, if we were to put both the eternal and immanent aspects of heaven and hell in a blender with the afterlife’s state of purgatory, if we press puree we might get a frozen concoction that helps us grasp its meaning. In any particular incarnation, the biblical laws about “reaping what we sow” and “sin being passed down to the 3rd and 4th generation” are the “purgatorial laws” that by which our state inches blessedly closer to heaven, or unfortunately close to hell. 

After Christ, some said, there would be no more prophets, no further revelations.  If it’s a fight, I don’t have a dog in it. It just seems a bit silly to claim that the fullness of time was an ending.  This post aims to explore the implications of believing that, because of Christ, the fullness of time was the tipping of chronological time into kairos time, an internalization of “now” until it becomes “fullness of being.”  God mercifully prepared the "fullness of Time" over multiple epochs, and it seems silly at best--and at worse, a limitation of God's mercy--to think that he wouldn't prepare "the fullness of being" over similarly-multiple lifetimes.  The paradigm for the fullness of being is Christ, and we’ll need to account for the rebirth of his body both in the Church (The Body of Christ) and in each believer (as an other-christ.)  The use of the word “rebirth” is purposeful: by the conclusion of this post, I hope to have laid the groundwork for a Christian concept of Reincarnation.

Even for those who wish otherwise, the bible contains no proof.  Those who misunderstand this often quote John 3:7 "You must be born again."  That translation choice is guided by protestant assumptions, in which "being born again" means something closer to "hitting rock bottom and surrendering."  A Catholic Translation of John 3:7 says "You must be born from above."  To those who feel I should attempt to prove my claims using Jesus words, I say: "Proof is not my circus. Jesus' words are not my monkeys."  (If I have a monkey, his name is Hanuman.  There, I said it.)

Instead of trying to mine what Jesus meant, let me be clear about what I mean: Lack of openness to reincarnation is a limiting of God's mercy.  Whether we're "reborn" or "born from above:" if God used human history to "reeducate" humanity in obedience, and if education fundamentally involves failure, then through reincarnation God may be giving us "multiple tries" at getting it right.  For the purposes of this post, I think "getting it right" is total self-emptying, and that Jesus' various appearances are "reincarnations." Through multiple existences, all Christians ride his coattails, progressively shedding false selves that drive them to a "success" that's full of selfishness.

First, let’s pencil sketch the fullness of time.  Humanity represented its beginnings in the myths of the primeval history.  In Genesis, this is chapter 1-11, beginning with creation and ending with the tower of Babel and the descendants of Noah.  They represented Judaism’s beginnings with the Patriarchs, Genesis 12-50.  They represented God’s manifestation of “Chosenness” through the Exodus, and the Law through Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. After the death of Moses’ Assistant Joshua, when Israel was ready, it transitioned from a strictly tribal form of governance to one of ruling Judges.  The Judges, sent when providence demanded, were replaced by the more permanent Kingship model. Samuel the priest anointed Saul.  He ruled until he fell out of God’s favor, then David and Solomon ushered in what’s commonly known in Israel as a golden age of unity.  Under Solomon’s son Rehoboam, the Jews split into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.  Lacking stable kings, and with many of their priests serving idols, the kingdoms called out to God and he sent the prophets, who counseled them to repent.  The prophetic hope was to either avoid, deal well with, or be liberated from exile.  “When the fullness of time had come, Mary gave birth to a son, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn.”  After Jesus taught, his followers gave him the title “priest prophet and King,” investing him with the most complete authority in Israel.  

I don’t want to quibble over semantics or get too heady.  The fullness of time becomes fullness of being, and it seems to me that Jesus has had 4 historical “reincarnations.”  The first was his earthly life.  The second, his appearances as a stranger.  The third is his appearance in each person, of whom Paul said their “true self [was] hidden with Christ in God.” In the 4th, Jesus is reincarnated in his body, the church.  So, quite literally, Jesus is dharmakaya, “the body of the teaching.”  Christ’s incarnations are not 4, they’re one.  By being present in each of us, and in everyone throughout the ages, he’s had innumerably more.

Christ is reborn throughout history, and in Christ, so might we be reborn.  As the fullness of being approaches completion, the believer sheds his ego and the eight evil thoughts that work together to produce it. Our life is like a dandelion flower that a man keeps with him as he drives.  He speeds toward his death, and the Spirit blows where it wills.  If he guards the dandelion flower, his ego remains the same and his life, hidden with God in Christ, remains undiscovered.  But if the bloke holds the dandelion flower out the window, so that the energies of his sins can be transmuted into virtues, the “inner Christ” to which they clung can be laid bare.  Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said "Because I live, you also will live."

Jesus lived poor, taught the poor, worked miracles that the poor rejoiced over, then suffered and died.  He rose, and appeared to his disciples, first under the guise of a stranger who re-interpreted the scriptures to them.  Then he began to do things like break bread with them and address them by name, and they recognized their teacher.  As I’ve said elsewhere, he was training them to part with their paradigm of how he’d looked during his earthly life—so that they could see him in everyone, everywhere.  After sending his Apostles out to baptize the nations, Jesus ascended to the Father, to appear no more in particular bodily form.  

In the post resurrection appearances, Christ certainly became a stranger to part us from our preconceived notions about his physical form.  Additionally, though, he became a stranger to us because he knew we were, in truth, strangers to ourselves.  He became what we had yet to realize we were, so we could find him in finding ourselves.  This is Christian reincarnation: just as Christ passed into and out of human forms so that we could shed misconceptions about him, so we pass into and out of human forms so we can recognize him in ourselves.  

There’s a reason for this: we have a false self, a True Self (mahatman), and a divinized self.  We will shed the first two as we progress toward the third, and in the third we will be so united to God that distinguishing between divine and human will be impossible.  Jesus “moved through successive incarnations” in his earthly and post-resurrected life so as to show us that he himself is what we are, what we were, what we will be.

Each particular incarnation is bound by 5 laws: Gospel and Vocation, Vice and Virtue, and Prayer.  The first two vary based on how God made us, the third and fourth vary based on our attachments, and the fifth varies based on how quickly grace enables us to slip the trap of spiritualizing ego and desire.

For years, the church has been arguing the need for enculturation in evangelization.  Not only not only does each culture need the Gospel tailored to them, each individual too. There are tasks proper to each vocation, all of which have the capacity to enlighten.  The trap modern culture falls into is one of Ego and desire.  We ask our kids what they want to be when they grow up, we tell them they can be whatever they’re intent on being, forgetting that identity and desire are shitty jobs we should have never accepted in the first place. 

Only from the perspective of ego are Vice and Virtue things we collect, heavenly betty crocker points with which an eternally new toaster will one day be ours.  On the level of True Self, they’re purgatorial laws, and on the level of Divinized self, since we become totally part of God, they’re unimportant.

Prayer follows a pattern like that laid out in previous posts.  Just as there are “stages of dealing with the passions,”  there are “stages of prayer.”  These aren’t a method (because all methods are traps,) they’re descriptors of a process in which each part builds on another, but aren’t linear.  The stages are Distraction, Verbal Prayer, Meditation, Sensation, and Contemplation.  Distraction’s a state of racing thoughts.  Verbal prayer is a matter of words, offered in varying unity with emotion and divine intention.  Meditation’s the stuff of mental images.  This is the level on which the great saints’ storied revelations took place.  Sensation is the next level.  If the body has stored pain, it emerges as a sensation.  The “consolations” of which saints speak—which in Hinduism is Kundalini energy—manifests here too, and can make prayer sweet indeed.  Though ego itself might be something to which the haphazard practitioner becomes attached, Kundalini energy, in another dangerous little trap, can become addicting.  Should it become more difficult to raise, learning to live and pray without it can be quite difficult.  

But that very difficulty is a chance to see our attachment to spiritual things for the delusion that it is.

I said I don’t have a dog in theological fights.  I’m writing about this not because I myself have experienced it. Rather, Catholics I trust have remembered their past lives.  An old monk I lived with had been a civil war re-enactor in pre-monastery days.  This was more than a hobby.  It was important to him, in part, because charging the field, he remembered having done so in a past life.   The Church’s theology, if it’s to describe its members’ experience, may need to become at least unopposed to a language that can accommodate the whole of it.  I believe past lives to be a real possibility, if a person requires them to negotiate their purgatorial predicament.  I have not yet experienced memories of my own past lives, if such there be. I suppose I will find out whether I’m right when I’m reborn as a moth, who lives near a lantern and has memories of writing a quite verbose blog, back when he had fingers.

Christian Reincarnation, in which I may be reborn until everything false in me yields to Christ, is not an account of extraordinary holiness.  True, there are “realized beings” whose incarnations are a way God made his influence obvious: they’re near the end, and for them, purgatory needs no heavenly elements.  They’re the ones of whom Jesus said “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  The rest of us jerks are left, now, to work out our purgatory on earth in a gradual way.  We hunker down in sin, or are freed from it, in the way grace and our cooperation with it enables.  We work with the tools the church gives, we make a heaven or a hell of earth as our conduct and inner dispositions dictate.  If we return to the earth for another incarnation—and of this truth, I may never have direct experience—then we continue that process through myriad earthly lives. 

From age to age, our cup runneth over.  It wells up within us again and again: Creation to Abraham, Moses and David.  From Daniel, Isaiah and Christ.  The spring wells within us: the Lord is reborn.  From life to life, when we stand face to face, we will think as he thinks. See, for every last one of us, life’s letting go. We find Heaven in kneeling to drink.

Why Patreon feels icky, and other musings

You might have noticed that I recently added a Patreon button to Under the Influence. I feel divided about it. Money's not the point: the site is a spiritual tool, primarily for me, but hopefully for you too.


On the other hand, when I finish a post, a small part of me feels so clean and liberated. And there's a tiny voice that says "if I could do this full time, I would." And I know that full-time bloggers, if they're ever going to get their start, start this way.


If you have benefitted at all from Under the Influence, that's awesome--and it's free. If you've benefitted and feel like kicking some loose change in the direction of sustaining it, that would be awesome too.


Alright. I'm gonna try to put this up and forget about it. Salam, y'all.