On Learning to Luff, with two Effs

Alright, look: I hate sentimentality just as much as the next guy. Valentines day is a recent memory, at the time of this writing— and this year it deliciously lined up with Ash Wednesday: with trip to church, with smearing ashes on my forehead and thinking of death.

Woody Allen's "Annie Hall"--a movie I've not seen-- has a scene where the Woody says "Love is too small a word.  I Lerve you, I Luff you, with two 'F's.'"  It's schmaltzy, but I, too, spell Luff with two Effs.  I’ve said it before: my girlfriend is my guru. “On Messiahs and Monkey Gods” spent a bunch of time talking that way. And periodically, I need to revisit that theme. I stick by my thesis: my relationship with my Jackie is the original big effing deal. But it’s much more serious than a bout of “she makes me so happy” swooning. By and by, it'll become clear why that's the case.

Jackieface

Let me say, first, that I’m starting from a “wounded self”—an identity that, in its codependence, collapsed the boundaries of my “self” instead of expanding them. This leaves me “care taking” or helping people to make me feel good about myself. I also tend to see relationships as a solution for my insecurity. That’s the “codependent disclaimer. It ain’t fun. I didn’t create it—it has its roots in early childhood— but making sure it doesn’t run my relationships is an “all the time” task of adulthood.

Since starting Under the Influence I’ve seen how problematic a dualistic mind is, and how many different processes dualistic thinking derails.  It has changed religion, recovery, romance and knowing what's right.  It separates me from God, me from sanity, me from my girlfriend, me from the very perceptions that make up my reality.  Remember: when I think dualistically, I always judge and reject parts of myself. I’m always engaging in “either/ or” thinking.

Let me give you two examples of how dualistic thinking helped me to cook my own goose.  First, by the time I left the monastery, I had become conscious of my own addicted mind. In my Charleston, South Carolina ACA group, I’d experienced my woundedness as a source of intense community. By the time I got to Chicago, I got the bright idea that I ought to try to find a recovering addict, and date her.  At least, I theorized, she’d be able to understand the addicted mind.  

Be careful what you pray for, y’all. I ultimately found that recovering alcoholic. Our connection was instant and intense: our wounds were both shaped like early childhood, and their solutions were apt to be shaped like drugs. She’d spent more time with the latter, and I, more time with the former.

The connection was instant, and ultimately superficial. She was a spiteful drunk, if ever there was one. In the end she relapsed, ultimately leaving me to return to a former, abusive lover. Mature reflection says I dodged a bullet. I’ve since balked at her efforts to be in continued touch—I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life, y’all— but she did teach me something.

When I dated her, I was dating three people: the obstinate, unrecovered alcoholic, the unpredictable recovering alcoholic, and the sane recovered alcoholic.  I put it in my file cabinet and moved on.

Go back a little further: when I was in college, I went to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky with a group of college students. While there, I felt, for the first time, God’s presence in emptiness. I was in the church alone, and felt the pull of the enticing empty space. That was very important.

In the monastery guesthouse, during that same monastery trip, I pitched woo, in a PG-13 sense, with a brunette college girl. We dated for a while. Life had left neither of us jaded or bitter yet. This, too, was very important.  With italics and everything.

It would have been nothing but fun, but the other half of that monastery trip—the pull of the “presence of absence”—was romancing me too.   Contact with God and contact with her was pulling my cranky young-adult heart in two directions.

Please don’t read this next paragraph as a hymn in longing for lost love or whatever—that unfortunate girl and I were two halves of a mess far too hot for the cosmic dice to roll out a healthy relationship—but the fact is, when my dualistic mind got ahold of both romance and spirituality, it made me think I had a choice between one or the other.

The intervening years have taught me much.  I've stopped trying to pray by focusing my attention or breathing--I'm too nervously OCD for that.  Lately "hearing and feeling" are my mantras, and they work better.  I've learned that I'm an uncomfortable expressions of the Logos:  I long for God.  But I also don't know everything and I'm powerless over a score of small time addictions.  I want oneness, but spend my days dualistically rent asunder.  I'm going to suffer and die.  Since I started Under the Influence I'm more and more capable of being cuddly with those unresolvable tensions.  It's worth remembering the other "big offing deal": the unitive mindset that's lately been part of my life "accepts and includes" instead of "judging and rejecting." 

February's Sadhu of the Month

When I say "my girlfriend is my guru," I suppose I'm overselling it a bit.  Ideally, a guru is a realized-being who actively guides his disciples.  My Jackie and I are both very awake people, but neither of us have been inducted into Sri Ramakrisna's "sadhu of the month club."  In reality, Jackie and I are, for each other, nothing more than what the brothers were for each other, back in the monastery.  Jackie is my mirror.  For better or worse, she shows me myself.  

Let's reexamine both "unfortunate ex-girlfriend lessons" in light of what my Jackieface is showing me.  When I dated the recovering alcoholic, I was dating 3 people.  Perpetually, the relationship was three potential crises with one big smile pasted on it.  On the other hand, dating Jackie is secure enough to slow down and be more complete.  In last week's post, I talked about the 3 selves Catholics bring to the table.  Jackie is the kindest of mirrors: she shows me when I'm being a schmuck, and it's safe to admit it because she's not enduringly fazed by my schmuckery.   It's true, she shows me when I'm being my true self.  But I also see how entitled that can make me, and what harm entitlement does to our relationship.  She reminds me that my desire to transcend needs to be balanced with naps, reruns of "Catfish, the TV Show" and the doing of dishes.  If I ever become fully divinized, it'll be (in part) because she made me feel safe enough to let go of self altogether.

At one point, feeling a "presence in emptiness" was a revelation.  I made a life out of examining it.  In the monastery I came across the words of Teilhard de Chardin.  "Union Individuates," he said.  Two people, as they unify, become more secure in separateness.  Back then this blew things wide open.  I started noticing all sorts of distance in love itself.  Suddenly all of the scriptural examples I referenced in "Broken-heartedness, the Bride of the Logos" began jumping out at me.  As I said in "Messiahs and Monkey Gods," the first couple of years of dating Jackie made me realize, with the help of the hindu god Hanuman, that separateness could be a good part of God's plan, not just a consequence of sin.

The fact is, Jackie and I are both different enough, and connected enough, that (for the first time in my life) the "pull of empty space" lives in the same small space as the rated-PG pitching of woo.  The fact that we're two different people, with different needs--these days, it's this that provides the "empty space" where I call shenanigans on what seems to be divine absence till it morphs into revelation.  Any time she and I need different things, it's rough.  Any time we're both caught up in our false selves, it's rough.  But we cut each other slack.  I give her space for naps, and for caffeinating afterward.  Even when I'm cranky and stressed, she's still willing to kiss my face.  We regroup, and get back to busting each other's chops generously.  It's funny.  And it's normal.  And it's God's presence.  All at once.

One last thing: being over-attached to affirmation made me, for years, identify love simply by the parts that made me feel good.  One night, a back-burner moment of insight finally boiled over.  I realized that I had, in Jackie, someone safe enough to accept both the good and the bad as part of the whole.  I realized that, previously, I'd been chasing the intimate side of love and dodging its distance--and I realized that I didn't have to do that anymore.

In short, as Robert Masters says in his book about spiritual bypassing: I'm learning to "release love from the obligation to make [me] feel better."  Doing so, he says, is a key part of intimacy being a real gift of self. 

After my existential soup got all over the stove, I emailed the permanent deacon who serves, (sometimes much, sometimes little,) as my spiritual director.  He's the father of one of my two adopted brothers from monastery days, and very much a "bonus dad" to me.  In any case, I told the Deacon about all I had cooking relationally, that I felt I had a new and different opportunity these days.

He said "It sounds like the vows" and they rang through my head. "For better, for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health."

"I agree," I replied.  Then I flexed my theology nerd muscles, a move the Deacon is used to. "Who knew," I asked "that marriage would be the sacrament most capable of healing an unhealthy dualistic mind?"  It was a rhetorical question. But the answer is, I certainly didn't.  Now, though, I do. I do. I do.

Broken-Heartedness, the Bride of the Logos

Internally, Logos gathers knowledge from the distant reaches of the understanding, moves it downwards toward the heart. In its heartfelt form, knowledge becomes wisdom. But it doesn’t do that without a dying of the ego.  When the ego dies, we learn precisely what we can change, and what we can’t.  “Broken-heartedness” is a term the culture uses to describe what I mean.  

It can be said truthfully that Broken Heartedness is the wife of the Logos.  On a spiritual and emotional level, people both long for the infinite and struggle with finitude.  Broken heartedness is the result, and it’s a permanent fixture in every consciously-lived life.  When we don’t run from broken heartedness, our learning processes are based on powerlessness and realization, rather than power and reason.  We can do a little bit of work to dispose ourselves to the truth, but it is, in the end, revealed.

I’ve said it before:  The nearest thing to mu (the transcendent “negative principle”) in Catholicism is “Logos.”  That is to say, Logos means that we have a share in God’s being, but only in the finite way of which deteriorating creation can take advantage.  It means death and suffering, enlightenment and heaven—these aren’t mutually exclusive.  The elements of Logos that break us down: limitation, deterioration and death—these are just the aspects of Logos we can’t change.    There’s an individual, internal aspect of this, and an external, social one.  Ultimately there’s an important point to be made about the relationship of “being” to “feeling.”  As the Logos is large enough to accept broken heartedness, so being is large enough to accept feelings of all kinds.  Living on the level of the logos, on the level of being, we can more easily accept all of the feelings associated with broken heartedness.

Here’s the point.  In terms of what we can change, then, broken-heartedness is the core of the Logos.  On an individual level, the best image for this comes from the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah: From Jeremiah “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name’, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” And from Isaiah “Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.  The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’”

This finds a resonance in Zen: In Case 1 of the Mumonkan, Mumon said that Mu was like a red-hot iron ball each practitioner has stuck in his throat.  This iron ball cannot be swallowed even with effort.  Commentators have said that the way to deal with the situation is to own the discomfort—to transmute the discomfort by accepting it.

In short, Mu may well serve the same function Paul ascribed to God in Hebrews 12:29: “Our God,” he said, “is a consuming fire.”  Broken-heartedness burns, at the very least, and broken-heartedness is God himself, at the most.  On an individual level, both “working on the logos” and “allowing the logos to work on us” means not running from the discomfort of his presence. 

But there’s more.  Externally, broken heartedness is the amount of distance built into our longing for connection.  If one is to be a bodhisattva or a saint, coming to terms with broken heartedness is important.  We are not in control, and the sooner we realize it the better.  Broken-heartedness is particularly involved in intimacy. In short, its the paradox encapsulated by Teilhard de Chardin’s thought: as the french theologian says, “union individuates.”  

The best biblical images for this are two: first, Saint Dismas. Second, the Gerasene Demoniac.  Saint Dismas was one of two thieves who defended Jesus against the abuse of the other.  In all four Gospels, he is the only person simply to call our Lord “Jesus.”  And as intimately as he knew the final sufferings of Jesus, (on account of being crucified next to him,) he was unable to give the savior as much as an encouraging chuck on the shoulder.  His entire earthly friendship with Jesus was one of distance.  

Post-exorcism, the entire vocation of the Gerasene Demoniac was one of distance.  Recall that the demoniac, as Jesus was disembarking, wanted to join him.  The Lord wouldn’t have it. “Go home to your friends,” he said, “and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.”

 In romantic relationships, broken-heartedness has two halves.  Last week, I spoke last week about the movie “When love is not enough.”  In the movie, Lois Wilson gradually must content herself with being a help in, but not the end of Bill’s spiritual search.  In sober coupledom, there is always a need to maintain the boundaries that guard against codependent abdication of the self for the sake of the other.

The second half of broken-heartedness is the tension between being two people and wanting to return to the primordial state of being one flesh.  During the Holocaust, Etty Hillesum wrote “Perhaps that is the only real way of kissing a man.  Not just out of sensuality, but also from a desire to breathe, for a moment, from a single mouth.”

At the very least, to be a saint or a bodhisattva is to act as if we are “one flesh.” Thich Nhat Hanh uses the image of hitting your thumb in the initial stages of hammering a nail.  He says something along the lines of “the hand that is well immediately cradles the hand that is in pain” and says that’s how we ought to be for each other.

Jesus indicates that his way of loving has fully integrated broken-heartedness. “As the Father has loved me,” he says, “So I have loved you.  Remain in my Love.”  It is true that this is the kind of bond in which Jesus says “The Father and I are one” but Jesus cry of “why have you forsaken me” is no less important.  Being loved, therefore is a larger reality than feeling unloved.  Being united is a larger reality than feeling separate.

There’s an oft-repeated story from Catholic Social Teaching types.  I’ve written about this before: A young man goes for a week to serve the poor.  The poverty at his service site is extreme, and striking.  After a few days, he approaches his program director and says “We’ve really got to do something about this!”  The program director smiles and says “Maybe what we’ve got to do is simply allow it to break our hearts.”

This is what I mean.  Working on Logos is to remain broken-hearted.  Allowing the Logos to work on us is to acknowledge that broken heartedness does good, creative work.  It helps intellect give way to intuition.  As the Russian mystic (simply named "the pilgrim") said "we're able to descend with the mind, into the heart."  The hard work is staying there.  If we're equal to it, it will be by the help of grace alone.

On removing "Self" from knowing

Part of the problem with Catholicism is not the truth, but what it means to know that truth.

We speak all the time in Catholic ethics about the need to avoid objectifying things, or using them for our own selfish ends. This is really just a rehashing of Immanuel Kant's philosophy.  We know a moral rule is good, he said, when we ourselves would be willing to submit to it, and we do it unselfishly, or as he put it "for the sake of the good itself."  This finds an echo in a certain caricature of Buddhist philosophy.  I don't ride my bike to get to the store, it says --that is to reach outside of the present moment-- nor do I ride my bike for the enjoyment of it--that is to be ruled by desire--I simply ride my bike to ride my bike.

But Buddhism would go further, and so must Mother Church. Fixing the way we know truth, in my seldom-humble opinion, involves saying that "I don't know what I know" so long as I am still conscious of a self, (however altruistic or enlightened) that does the knowing.  

At best we know who we are.  At worst our selfishness gets in our way.  

What became objectification of things and of others began as objectification of self and God.  All making of graven images, all placing of the creature over the creator, dovetails on this first mistake.  

The technical term for how we know the truth is epistemology. Epistemology is important because a good sense of how we know things is connected to how quickly we can diagnose spiritual materialism, or the ego's tendency to treat spiritual experiences and wisdom as possessions (that make one better or richer than one is.) With a corrected epistemology Catholicism might be able to more quickly slip the trap of egotistically manipulating God.

What we can name, we have power over. When calling on " I am who I am" becomes a power-play, (instead of an act of intimacy with God) we forget what John the Baptist remembered: that he must increase and we must decrease.  Not pitting the knower against God is as important in knowing as not treating creation like the creator.

Spiritual materialism is a danger because we question everything except the self that is doing the questioning.  We end up, by not allowing ourselves to decrease so that God can increase, committing idolatry.

If our knowing is truly to reflect intimacy with God, we in the western world need the intellectual means to detach from our concepts of the knower and the known.  One western tool that does that work is "phenomenology."

Edith Stein aka Theresa Benedicta of the Cross

Phenomenology is held as true by such figures as Hegel, Heidegger and the philosopher formally known as Edith Stein. (Stein became "Teresa Benedicta of the cross" before dying in the concentration camp for her Jewish beginnings and becoming a saint.) In any case, phenomenology is a brand of epistemology that allows us to perceive and question our network of concepts, an assumption about what we perceive. Again there is Buddhist resonance here: our meanings are simply a network of concepts, an interweaving of what Buddhism calls the second and third nen.  Buddhism would say we are not truly perceiving something until we remain at the first nen, or pure perception.

If boiling perception down to its purest, uninterpreted form is the goal, then with all due respect to Catholic ethics, not using things for my own pleasure is only half of what it takes to actually know something.  The other half has to do with the self. Modern Catholicism can speak of my having 3 selves. 

I have my false self, projected by the corporate workings of the eight evil thoughts. This is what Freud called the Ego, although it's more aptly called the "unhealthy ego."  The Unhealthy Ego not only grasps at fulfillment of the basic human needs of Power and Control, Sex and Affection, Affirmation and Security; it manipulates others to accomplish this goal.  But it also leads to isolation, because the Unhealthy Ego doesn't know how to acknowledge vulnerability, only to cover it up.  The Sacraments are the key to the Unhealthy Ego's death, which is the key to spiritual progress.  A bit about the Egoic death: Christ took flesh, the body became "the hinge of salvation"  in order to help me "go out of my mind."  In the sacraments, Christ gave the mantra of the senses to distance me from compulsive thinking.  Taste, hearing and feeling present sensations as a unity.  The mind, on the other hand, presents sensation as a phenomena with a multitude of aspects and interpretations, in the midst of which I have to grasp for unity.  

As I gradually shed the ego compulsive thinking creates, I find my true self which, as Saint Paul says, is hidden with Christ in God. This is analogous to the Buddhist concept of the Mahatman, the "Great Self."  This is the "self" which struggles to know and to choose the good.  It's the Ego in its healthiest sense.  This is an appropriate defense mechanism: it draws circles around our 'Self' and acknowledges the insatiable nature of desire, keeping its satisfaction from tyrannically ruling our lives.  Aristotle spoke of Habituation and the 4 character types.  He said that if our acts are good or bad, we become a good or bad person as we repeatedly do them. He ranked our ability to know and do the good, called a person's character either virtuous, continent, incontinent or vicious. He was speaking about the moral life on the level of the conscious, egoic mind.  The truth here is that, without a deep meditative experience to deepen the self and heal unconscious wounds, morality that remains on the level of the ego will always be short circuited by my unconscious.  To the extent that I don't deal with myself, I will always immoderately grasp at the satisfaction of desire, either overindulging or abstaining out of self-will.  I try to deny or overcome the basic human needs.

When I deal with myself on the level of the unconscious, I acknowledge the basic needs as "a part of who I am."  I don't deny or seek to overcome them.  I acknowledge them, hope that they manifest moderately, but otherwise keep my focus on the honest life of a psychonaut--a delicious term that means "one who explores their psyche".  In the European traditions this is done through contemplation.  The "honest life of a psychonaut" manages to explore the self on all of its levels, and heal unconscious wounds by acknowledging them.  This is the best work of which a healthy ego is capable.

Even underneath my unconscious, I find my divinized self, which has been totally taken up in the life of the Trinity (the perichoresis or divine dance) an anonymous part of which it is our destiny to become.  Whether or not the divinized self actually has substance is an open question and it totally doesn't matter--because if I arrive there I won't be conscious of my separateness from God anymore anyway.  This divinized self is analogous to the Buddhist concept of "non self."  Buddhists talk about the self dissolving into nirvana after many lifetimes, though, and Catholics talk about the self residing in heaven after one, well spent lifetime.  The differences are semantic, and insofar as our responsibility lies in the present moment, they're essentially not worth asking.

So ultimately, even at best, I wouldn't be able to tell you what "knowing" is, because the self doing the reporting would cease to exist.  In light of St. Paul's claim that all knowledge will pass away, all concepts are temporary at best.  All intent is contingent on God's will too.  Again, St. Paul says "If the Lord wills I will go here and do this or that."  The Quran rightly adds "inshallah" to any statement of intent.  Knowing is progressive, if it's anything.

So even with empirical observations--statements based on sensory data--saying "I know the truth" is to admit that the truth and I share a common destiny.  We are both destined to become a part of God.  We are expressions of God's logos: once spoken we can't be taken back.  But the other side of it is true too: no spoken word remains audible eternally.  We were created in a silence of which the spheres' most sublime music is but an embellishment.  Like it or not, All God's loud creation will return to silence.  Only then will we know God.  We'll be part of him, after all, only because he is what is, and only because he knows himself.

Mediation and Medicine: A Divine Ethic of Human and Medicinal Assistance

After the death of Jesus, the Apostles fled Jerusalem. On the road to Emmaus, they met a stranger. They confessed their grief that Jesus had not accomplished what they’d hoped—he hadn't restored the kingdom to Israel and kicked the Romans out of Judea. In short, they were confessing disappointment that Jesus ministry had not been enough to meet their expectations.

The stranger, later revealed to be the Christ, walked with them and opened their minds and hearts—as I said in “Kairos, Koans and Conversion 6,” it may well have been to a “suffering servant” messianic model. This is the help they needed to make the switch from doubt to belief.

On a simpler level, the question I want to ask today is “What do you do when [any ideal, pick your fave] is not enough?”

In part, it’s a question occasioned by the movie When Love is not Enough in which Barry Pepper and Wynona Rider play Bill and Lois Wilson. It’s a movie about a subplot: it depict’s Bill W.’s journey to sobriety, but in truth its about how Lois dealt with the statement “he should have been able to quit drinking based solely on my love for him.”

In short, Lois found her own statement to be unreasonable, in the end. Drinking is a compulsive act, and ultimately all compulsive acts medicate either uncomfortable emotion or unmet spiritual and physical needs. Lois found that, however much she loved Bill, she couldn’t be the object of his spiritual search. She could be a primary source of help in that search, but not its object. Lois found herself to be a “para-alcoholic.” In modern parlance, she was “codependent.” That is to say, she exhibited all of the symptoms of alcoholism, without ever touching a drop of alcohol. She had all of the resentment, the impulsive relationship with emotions, and the sense of self that’s drawn almost entirely from the positive reinforcement of others. In short, Lois Wilson became a “friend of bill”—code for a 12 stepper—without ever being friends with the harshest of compatriots, John Barleycorn. So the “movements” of the movie are twofold: Bill learns to to stop medicating away God’s unattainability with drink, and Lois learns how to be the primary support, rather than the object, of Bill’s search.

Here’s why the movie asks an important question: we, in the Catholic Church, have a corollary statement: we say “God alone suffices”—a statement that’s totally true—but when we then we say “God alone should suffice,” the whole Church gets in the same predicament Lois was in, and unhealthy Catholicism ensues.

First of all, no matter how much “God alone suffices” he’s not going to suffice if we think of him wrongly. If people think of God as they do Santa Claus—if they see him as answering petitions from his remote, heavenly abode, he will eventually answer one of those petitions in the negative. So long as we, from an egotistical space, ask for desire to be fulfilled, God will not play ball.

So the short answer to “What do we do if God isn’t enough for us?” is to reduce the amount of self, desire and duality being transacted between you and God. A sober relationship with God is only possible when we learn that God is a part of us, and learn to question both our ego and desires.

But this leads to a host of other questions: “What if my lover’s support and affection isn’t enough for me?” This isn’t a crisis. Sober coupledom routinely admits both friends and the spiritual search of both people. My girlfriend is my guru, and the biggest part of my spiritual search, but I need to be on the phone routinely with my two best friends from the monastery—just to ensure I’m not missing important pieces of healthy relating. Also, using my girlfriend’s help to try to troubleshoot the way I play the boyfriend role is like trying to service the engine of a moving car. Bill Wilson discovered that, in order to be a good husband to Lois, he needed the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Personally, I discovered that the fellowship of Adult Children of Alcoholics was not enough for me. (I’ve written about this previously, in a number of posts. Among them: “Only As Sick as My Secrets,” and “Steps 4-11: Cleaning House”) Having moved away from my “home group” in Charleston, I found connection with Chicago ACA harder to establish. When I picked up the thousand pound phone, no one responded.

Also, I learned the role my ego plays in fucking up recovery. If my ego always establishes a distance between me and recovery, me and my healthiest self, me and God, then no amount of supportive friendship will help. So Zen, and non-dual thinking, became central to the program’s other pieces playing their proper role.

But I digress, there’s more. There’s the question “What if God’s grace isn’t enough for me?” Even with an evolving God concept, sometimes I can’t deconstruct my ego fast enough to keep ahead of my own illness. It’s difficult indeed to try to function in the face of the anxiety of an intact false self, or the sadness and anger of a dying one. Spiritually materialistic people can get themselves keyed up quite a bit, call it zeal and label that excitement “Grace.” That works for a while, and then stops working. Ultimately, grace is about living with normalcy, not being excited. It’s the methadone, not the heroin.

It’s important to stop here and do some theological reflection. Ultimately what I’m trying to gain from this is both a healthy understanding of grace as stripping us of unhealthy dependency, and the ability to aid egoic deconstruction, in proper measure, with whatever help the world gives.

I’ve known alcoholics who want nothing more than to die painlessly enough that they don’t require a substance to help the process along. Whatever else we might say of Jesus, I’m fairly certain of two things: first, that he wasn’t an alcoholic, and then that he wanted to encounter his death consciously. On the Cross, he was given wine mixed with myrrh and he doesn’t take it—this would have dulled his senses, and he wanted to be awake. When offered a sponge soaked with wine alone, though, he drinks it. It’s only then that he gives up his spirit.

According to the Jewish mindset of his day, if God provides you with the goods of the earth and you don’t appreciate and take advantage of them, there are some who say you’re liable to divine judgment. I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that Jesus had to take advantage of the help wine gave him. But I am at least saying that Jesus could take the wine without “drinking judgement to himself” as Paul would later put it.

So it’s at least a morally neutral, if not potentially good thing, to use the goods of the earth in the process of dying and rising. Physical death is hard, and if faced completely, egoic death is just as hard, multiple times over.

The point isn’t to say “let’s pharisaically define what things, other than grace, it’s ok to take advantage of.” Celibates are told “you should only need God’s love.” The healthiest celibates are the ones whose religious communities have given, or have given themselves permission to make up the difference elsewhere.

One man’s wine might be another man’s myrrh. The alcoholic may wish to be drug free, while for people whose battles with ego has permanently modified their brain chemistry, psychiatric medications are necessary and fair tools.

The point is to say “we all need a lot of different kinds of love and help, and it’s okay to take advantage of that.”

But Jesus goes even further. At his last supper, he locates his very blood in an addictive substance. For people like me, with budding capacities for addiction, he located himself there in order to come and find me, to move my use of alcohol into its proper place. These days, the “proper place of alcohol” is almost no place at all. God’s other blessings—the love of my girlfriend, for instance—provide comfort amidst egoic deconstruction and convey the sacredness of life.

One last thing should be understood. Whether it’s wine, in Jesus’ case, or someone to workshop your concepts with, as with the disciples at Emmaus: the help it takes to be open to the deconstruction of the ego is not the same as the revealing of Christ, not the end of the road. Jesus took wine on the Cross. He’d said it was his blood, and after he adjusted their expectations and revealed himself at Emmaus, the Apostles believed.

That is to say: It takes the body of Christ to be open to the mind of Christ. The “whole truth of the situation” is not that Jesus legitimately used wine to deconstruct the ego, that the celibate, as best he can, uses friendship to aid his loneliness, or that the psychiatric patient uses drugs to troubleshoot his brain chemistry. At the end of the day, it’s the moderate use of life’s comforts in a loving, transformative community that lays things out plainly. If we have found both, Jesus is truly risen: he is risen indeed, and has been revealed to us.

On the Logos: Christian Koans Part I

In the Buddhist Tradition, three collections of Koans stand out, as compilations used by teachers with their students.  In English, they're called "The Gateless Gate," "The Blue Cliff Record" and the "Book of Equanimity."

As a way of assisting Christianity in flexing its more intuitive muscles, I am beginning work on a set of "Christian Koans."  If they succeed at pointing to truths, they arrive the way teenagers do during games of "Ding Dong Dash." That is to say, when we open the door to them, we learn their truths by what's implied, not explicit.

Today I'll offer two of them, without further commentary.  It might be helpful to review some of the "Steps in Solving Koans," of whose usefulness I'm still quite convinced.

In my attempt to create a collection of Christian Koans, I simply asked, as I went through the Zen collections, "what heavy lifting is this story trying to do, and what christian stories do the same work?"

As the three sets of Zen Koans do, each Christian Koan has the case itself, a commentary, and an "appreciatory verse" to unlock it a bit for the listener.

Case 1:  Vincent’s Logos  A monk asked brother Vincent:  Has a Vulture the Divine Nature?  Vincent answered “Logos.”

Br. Adam’s commentary: 

In order to master Catholicism, you must pass through the barrier of the Ancestors.  If you do not pass the barrier, and do not cut off the way of thinking, then you will be like the King of Vanities, forsaking the holy city to chase after the wind.  What is the gate of the ancestors?  Why, it is this single word “Logos.”  That is the front gate of Catholicism.  If you pass through it, you will not only see God face to face, but you will also become like his Son.  You will be crucified with him at the place of the skull, seeing with his same eyes, hearing with his same ears.  Is this not an intimate burden?  Wouldn’t you like to walk through this gate? 

Count all your bones.  Prophesy, first to the flesh and then the breath.  Carry logos continuously day and night.  Do not form a nihilistic conception of vacancy, or a relative conception of “has” or “has not.  Your silence will become a fire, shut up in your bones.  It will be just as if you swallow a red-hot iron ball, which you cannot spit out even if you try.  All the illusory ideas and delusive thoughts accumulated up to the present will be exterminated, and when the time comes, internal and external will be spontaneously united.  You will know this, but for yourself only.  Then all of a sudden, an explosive conversion will occur, and the words will be as true of you as they were of the Son of Man “The days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. They will say to you, “Look there!” or “Look here!” Do not go, do not set off in pursuit. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.”

It will be as if you snatch away the great sword of Solomon, and hold it in your hand. When you meet the Messiah, you kill him. When you meet the ancestors, you kill them.

Thus crucified with Christ, thus suspended between heaven and earth, you will neither possess the things of heaven nor understand the things of earth. This restriction is perfect freedom. Though you don’t realize it—and to realize it is to lose it—this suspension is divinization, an emptiness of forms in which you become what you seek, the “wholly other” who pervades everything.

Now I want to ask you again. How will you carry this out? Employ every ounce of your energy to work on this “logos.” If you work on the logos, it will work on you. If you are present to it, behold: The joyous light of glory, the eternal splendor of the Father, the burning seal that makes all things one—it sparks, it flames, it blazes within you.


Br. Adam’s Verse:

Divine Nature, a Vulture. A little has, a little has not. Where the corpse is, they gather.

Case 19: Fr. Chrysogonus’ Logos

Br. Benedict asked Fr. Chrysogonus “What is the Logos?” Fr. Chrysogonus replied “Ordinary Mind.” Br. Benedict said “Should I try to seek the Logos?” Chrysogonus said “If you try for it, you will become separate from it.” Br. Benedict was puzzled “How can I speak the Word unless I try to do so?” Chrysogonus replied “The Logos is not a matter of trying or not trying. Trying is a delusion. Not Trying is confusion. The ancient Rabbis said ‘You do not take the word of God into your mouth.’ When you have reached the Logos beyond all doubt, as the Rebbes said ‘You enter into the Word, because the Word is bigger than you are.’ How can we talk about it on the level of right and wrong?” With these words, Br. Benedict came to a sudden realization.

Br. Adam’s Comment:

Chrysogonus dissolved at Br. Benedict’s question, and could not offer a plausible explanation. Even though Benedict comes to a realization, he must delve into it for another 30 years before he can fully understand it.

Br. Adam’s Verse:


A stand of tall grass, a summer breeze
A winter night, a full December moon.
If useless things do not clutter your mind,
you will have the best days of your life.

Drawing from the Old Wells: Steps 7-12 of the Ladder of Humility

Brother Ed’s quote, the one I mentioned in “Drawing from the old Wells 4-6” is important.  His teacher, he said, was his cancer.  This showed me Ed had transitioned away from being a student. At some point, according to Benedict’s Rule, either the spiritual guide proves himself adept at dealing with the challenge that psychology and daily life issue to God, or the spiritual guide becomes a less important teacher than life and psychology themselves.  The remaining steps of humility (seven through 12) depict a man who has stopped looking to abbot and novice master for guidance. From the 7th “Step of Humility” onward, a monk’s journey moves inward and gets honest.

Brother Ed Shivell might be a good example of someone making that transition.  But it’s in the life of Brother John Corrigan that the last 5 steps of Humility stand out in sharpest relief.  

In steps 7 through 12, a monk’s focus shifts to things like “being truly convinced that he’s of less value than others. (Step 7)”   Benedict says a monk in these more interior stages “only does what’s endorsed by the rule and the common life. (step 8) ”  Somewhat naturally, the Rule’s author says, a monk who has followed the rule down the rabbit hole “isn’t given to ready laughter (step 10).”  Such a man “only speaks unless asked a question (Step 9),” and “speaks briefly and reasonably (Step 11).”

 I’ve been racking my brain for stories about brother John that might demonstrate these truths.  But, in keeping with the quiet humility that’s the Rule predicted result, those stories exist only in skeletal form. If anything can speak some flesh onto those bones, it’s the places from which John wasn’t seen or heard. 

For instance, if sometimes John didn't come to dinner,  I would often learn, later, that he’d been fixing the archaic grading machines that cleaned and packaged the eggs our chickens laid daily.  

John was a lay brother, a man who entered the monastery declaring that a life of work and quiet rather than clerical responsibility was what he wanted.  In the 1960s The Trappists abolished a man’s ability to declare himself permanently a brother.  Ostensibly this was to adjust the reality of the life to Benedict’s rule which never mentioned the distinction between clerical and lay states.  Practically it also dealt with a hubris that had cropped up among the brothers, that they ran the place while priests sat on their asses.  

While that was, perhaps, the case, belaboring the point divided communities.  It was better to simply say “everyone here’s gonna strap on their work boots” and move on to observing the Rule’s more important particulars. Many argued that the baby got thrown out with the bathwater.  The gentle diligence which shone through the lay brother, they feared, would be part of the luggage his Hubris departed the monastery with.  

On the whole this is accurate—something is lost, and will be, more so, when the oldest of those presently in monasteries die—but it was not so with John.  He was tapped to be the work boss, which meant he was the person who had to keep the understaffed monastery moving.  And he did it with gentleness, despite the occasional unrealistic expectation on the part of the Abbot, the occasional broken machine in the grading house, and the frequent discontent that the brothers all to predictably showed for their jobs.

At best, I made an attempt at manifesting step 7.  I was not above bitching about my jobs.  But I'd gotten my jobs from my Novice master and the Abbot--terrible dunces, both of them, I thought--not from Br. John.  I pride myself on recognizing the kindness with which John performed his duties, and being a person he could basically move around as he needed to.  I could never quite balance farm work with the additional jobs of de facto choirmaster and frequent infirmary assistant, but that wasn't John's fault.  Anyway I tried not to treat him like it was.

Br. John Corrigan

I bring up John because he quietly proves the point.  The rule  simply facilitates a transition: from looking for guidance from authorities, to looking for guidance from the communal life and chosen elders, to looking for guidance from within.  The monk transitioning through step 7 comes defeatedly to statements like “Alright!  I know I have issues with authority!  And some of them really are the bumbling idiots I take them for.  But, for Christsakes, so am I.  We’ve all taken jobs we’re not qualified for.”  I came eventually to see their authority as an unfortunate disadvantage.  My bumbling idiocy could be somewhat anonymous.  But bullshit flows uphill in hierarchical organizations.  Their bumbling idiocy, happening, as it did, in their positions of authority, gained them calumny and blame.

Eventually I learned how to stop bitching, and be a more prudent newbie.  To one who’s lived in a monastery, Step 8 (acting only on the rule and the communal example,) is actually not as limiting as it seems.  No aviary of rare birds could hold a candle to the monastery’s collection of very old, very odd ducks.  I eventually learned that, if I wanted to do something, I simply had to find an old guy who was doing the same—someone so cantankerous that the abbot had stopped challenging him.  When a young monk’s cries of “I want what I want” become “I only want to follow that guy’s example” the abbot’s a bit harder-pressed to deny the request.

Admittedly, following the most idiosyncratic of his elders’ examples is the most prudent, and least mature move a young monk can make.  Eventually, I set my sights on the old guys whose conduct was truly admirable, and strove to follow that as well.

In formation classes, there were other transitions to be made.  I must confess that, back when I monked-it-up, I didn’t rise to the occasion as I should have.  When I was in the monastery, I was still full of desire to receive authentic spiritual guidance from those in authority.  It was often frustrating when the level of "feeling, intuition and transformation" I felt called to was bypassed for the sake of conversations about smelly-old Bernard of Clairvaux.  I think, if I had it to do over again, I would be more adept at allowing myself to enter into miserably unsatisfying things like formation classes: sometimes, I’d tell myself, life is simply unsatisfying.  And it’s just permission to look for what is satisfying wherever it’s available.  I am grateful for the freedom departing-the-monastery afforded me: I’m not sure I would have discovered all of this otherwise. 

In a similar vein, in my early days as a monk, I was scandalized by what seemed like Benedict’s prohibition of laugher.  I see it differently now.  I’ve simply observed myself enough to know that sometimes, I laugh when I’m nervous or sad or afraid.  It’s a response entirely ill-suited emotionally, a felt-conspiracy of “governmental cover-up” proportions.  It’s hard to have the right reactions: to sleep when I’m tired, to voice anger and frustration without over-reacting, to excuse others when they drop the ball and laugh at my own inadequacies.   These days, though, having appropriate and measured emotional responses is one of my overt goals.  These days, I’m not sure Benedict was prohibiting laughter as much as saying “a time will come when you laugh at things that are funny.”  I chuckle a bit at how oblivious I was to this, grateful for how much simpler things are now.  I look forward to them becoming simpler still.

As often as Br. John was asked to speak, he never, in the true southern sense, “held court.”  For those of you who’ve never experienced life south of the Mason Dixon Line, “holding court” is being a pleasant windbag.  It’s treating my turn to talk like it’s a football I’ve been given to run with.  Old men in monasteries speak briefly, then return to quiet.  Brother John is an expert at this.  I aspire to say the same of myself eventually.  If I had to guess, I’d say the transition happens because of two things.  For one thing, as life starts being my teacher, it’s less useful to tell the bumbling idiot chosen as my spiritual guide what’s going through my own bumbling-idiot head.  If I can dial down the panic of not knowing, life will present me with as many answers as it does questions.  I just won’t get to determine when that happens.  

Also, however, monasteries are too much like the Navy.  In monasteries, the eager and talkative get jobs.  I asked to join the monastic choir because I wanted to get to know the brothers: I didn’t realize it would become my responsibility for as long as I was a monk.  In my latter monastic years, and ever after, I acquired a little voice in my head that says “Sailor, it is imperative that you shut the fuck up.  It’s spelled NAVY because, for Godsakes, you should never again volunteer yourself.”

To restate the point: life itself becomes the teacher: it speaks, and the implication’s that I become the listener.  It's Benedict's contention that a person who's  done this work ultimately demonstrates the gospel by how he lives.  I have long-since parted with the hope that the Rule will yield gospel-grade humility in every last brother, even as I’m convinced that I've known some whose humility is undoubtable.

And in the Rule's gradual yielding of authority--from Abbot and Novice Master, to Rule and community, and finally to life itself-- in this, even flunky monastics, filling the blogosphere with noise, can find hope of humility.  The aspiration voiced at my profession of temporary vows has lost its ecclesial robes (and perhaps the leg it had to stand on) but it remains an aspiration still.  “May the one who began this good work in you” it said, “carry it through to completion.”  

The 12th Step of Humility is that a monk always manifests the title-track virtue “in his bearing no less than in his heart.”  I won’t lie, I love that life uses both my girlfriend, and blessedly non-benedictine bacon double cheeseburgers to humble me these days.  But I still hope the completion mentioned at my first profession happens.  More than that: I hope, whatever my work in the process is, that I cooperate with it.   Those who came before me did this with gentleness and diligence.  In my own way, I hope I can do the same.