Koans and Care: The Dangers of Dualism

In a post about Adult Children of Alcoholics, (Steps 4-11: Cleaning House)I talked about how dualism perpetually befouls the bedsheets of recovery for me. I’m realizing, though, that recovery’s not the only thing dualism left disjointed in me. Thus this post: in the tradition of the post “The Sound of Silence: Continued Corrections in Language,” I want to spend some time getting to the bottom of how dualism affects the way we use language.

In Part, this thesis came about because I was rereading Ram Dass. At one point in “Love Service Devotion,” Ram Dass is talking about the Gita, and he says something along the lines of “There comes a point when our choice isn’t between different forms of social and moral responsibility. It’s either social and moral responsibility or unitive consciousness.”

We’ll come back to that, but it got me thinking. Dualism is the sickest of consequences of the “rational gaze.” It makes us examine our surroundings as opposed to experiencing them. It makes our thinking Linear and surface-level, when our processes should be about depth. It gives undue importance to the beholder, at the expense of “the beheld.” It’s worth asking whether the rational gaze’s distance is worth the loss of an experiential mode of being. I tend to think not, and if that’s true, all of the above mentioned conditions are illnesses for which working on Logos is the healing medicine.

Practically, this messes with the way we use four words: God, Time, Remembrance, and Self. Let’s stop for a moment and talk about each one.

God: I’ve lightly touched on this already. “God” isn’t separate from “us” but in the dualistic mindframe, prizing separateness and distinction as it does, puts the rational gaze’s typical distance between the two. The trouble is, the things of God buck examination. Contemplation is a state of rest that eliminates the distance between God and the one experiencing it. It is the pre-verbal, lived experience of “I AM,” in a way that doesn’t permit a sense of self distinct God. However, as soon as you say “Wow, so this is what Contemplation is” dualism’s distancing tendencies reassert themselves. Another example of this is Emmaus. The disciples spoke with the stranger on the road until their hearts were burning within them. When the bread was broken, so were their hearts. But as soon as they recognized Christ, he disappeared from view.

Time: Now is the only moment that exists. To use an inadequate image for it, if time extends at all, it’s a matter of depth, not length or width. That is to say, in the now, we have our choices, and the psychological wounds and emotional formation that influenced our making them. Everyone’s choices have social consequences, and in each moment, we experience our “purgatorial predicament" the fruits individual and communal action. Some of it is helpful, some of it’s a penance to endure. But it’s all a “lawful” rolling out of the way we do our purgatory in the space of our current breath-cycle.

Thinking that time is linear, that there is a future or a past into which it extends, necessarily makes it a mental construct, not a lived reality. After all, the mind, the seat of illusion, is the only place such concepts of time can exist.

I’ve spoken in the past about how the west has a concept of "chronos time", a lineup of minutes our minds seem to be addicted to, and a "kairos time,” which is the present moment. It may be our inability to live in the present that accounts for the lack of a more permanent concept of enlightenment or absolute samadhi. The buddhist ability to identify enlightened people, folks who never really re-identify with the ego after an experience of contemplation, may be partially due to a buddhist’s increased ability to live in the present. Our western addiction to linear time might be part of what continually throws a wrench in the gears of more abiding states of contemplation. If the east is Joshu’s dog, which we learn has a viable buddha nature, the west is the same dog, in the throes of chasing a squirrel.

Remembrance: Our elder brothers in faith scooped me on this—everything I have to say about this word is gaffled straight from the Jewish people. It’s all true though: remembrance isn’t a calling up of an event into a mental television screen. It’s a re-entrance into the moment being remembered. Passover is the prime example here. The ceremonial question isn’t “How is passover different from other nights”—instead it’s “how is this night different from other nights?” Remembrance makes the past spacious, and renders it present. Catholics beg, borrow and steal, applying the thinking to the passover meal they redub “the Eucharist.” When we remember it, it’s not there and then anymore, it’s here and now.

Self: We have to understand this as a dynamic term. I don’t want to be inaccurate here. As a goal we constantly hold in front of us, non-self is pivotal. And given dualism’s tendency to separate the self from God, we constantly need to say, with Shakyamuni, “NOT TWO!” Truly, just as a buddhist or hindu has a self right up till they enter into Nirvana, so Catholics will have some form of “Selfhood” right up till the point that they’re fully divinized. But Shakyamuni is instructive here. “Not Two” is a procedural meditation, and has another step. Those who say “Not Two” have eventually to say “not one.” Just as we have to say we’re not separate from God, we have to eventually allow our “self-consciousness” to subside as well. This is the truth that’s embedded in the center of Divinization. If it’s true that we still have a self in God—I sincerely don’t know either way, and I’m not sure it matters—our consciousness of it has to subside completely.

In short, we need to question the way dualism messes up language. But there’s a way, too, that dualism warps choice making. It deserves equal scrutiny, and brings us, I think, kicking and screaming back to the Ram Dass quote mentioned above.

It’s not a direct quote, actually, but the sentiment’s his, and it stands: "There comes a point when our choice isn’t between different forms of social and moral responsibility. It’s either social and moral responsibility or unitive consciousness.” In light of this, in the true buddhist sense, whether we should serve the poor or have a beer becomes a non-question. That is to say, we certainly should serve the poor, and we will. We certainly should have a beer, and we will. What we choose to do with our Present Moment becomes unimportant in light of the way our purgatorial predicament will face us with a deepened consciousness alternating between selfishness and magnanimity. That’s just the way the spiritual journey works.

“How do I deal with the death of the ego?” For a person on the spiritual journey, this is the question of questions. In a way it's similar to the reactive and poor choices made by grieving people in denial: moral and social choices, made by people who are ignoring the death of the ego, tend to have unhealthy results.

Unitive consciousness is the result for a practitioner who, whether in stages or quite suddenly, has laid his ego to rest. Zen talks about Absolute Samadhi or enlightenment to point to this kind of permanent distance from the ego. In the Christian tradition this kind of self-realization is unnamed, and hasn’t been seen in the church on any grand scale since the aftermath of Pentecost.

Over and over, it’s Koans that get the work of “Egoic Death” done. And for those who think Koans only have a place in East Asian traditions, I would respond resolutely: Christianity has space for them as well. Christians have heard it said “Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.” I say to them, “Koans collapse time, making all times present.” Christians have heard the same mouth say “The Father is always with me” that later screamed “WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?” I say to them that Christ crucified is the ultimate Koan, and Koans unite opposites. Christians have heard it said “Here I am, send me!” I say to them, “Koans collapse place, making all locations ‘here.’”

I say again: dualism is a sickness, the original mental illness. But the sacramental economy leads us out of our minds and back into our senses, and Koans lead us back to oneness with our source. With the right treatment, the prognosis is good: we who have the medicine needn’t fear the malady.

Light of Salvation: On Shakyamuni and the Savior

To be truly useful to me personally, a religion needs to be both salvific and illuminative. This is, for sure, the case with me, but (I’ll make bold to say) it might apply to a great number of practitioners. By salvific, I mean delivering its adherents from obstacles, whether it be their interior darkness, or some societal foe. By illuminative, I mean that a philosophy shedding light on the naked facts of existence.

Christianity emphasizes the salvific more than the illuminative, but a student of the Way will neglect neither. Judaism is theistic, and Israel itself is a nation, and as such, in need of defense from enemies. Its virtues are numerous, but because of this configuration, spiritual bypassing must be added to its liabilities. St. Paul is proof enough that students of Judaism could use the religion to bypass or whitewash their own psychological lives. We here at Under the Influence know well that such a liability isn’t unique to Judaism, but a theologizing of a personal flaw.

For Christ’s part, he had to call people away from a paradigm of Messianism that came from the book of Judges, one whose primary feature was deliverance from occupying powers. It was to easy to forget that deliverance from enemies came from cleaving to God, and that Judaism’s particular name for God was “I am” for a reason. God was the True self, so undifferentiated from the Godhead that the distinction of self and divinity was ultimately useless. Jesus had to deal with the raw amount of time practitioners would spend thinking about Nationalism, God and Self, rather than just being themselves with God, allowing national security to take care of itself, as Jewish history had previously, consistently seen that it would.

After the Edict of Milan proclaimed the toleration (and thereby wholesale watering-down) of Christianity, in the cities, rationalism and statecraft got their hooks in the Christian vision. This developed the intellectual life a great deal: several of the initial important councils did good work, but they were convened by emperors who saw themselves as the guardians of revelation. To be sure, the fruit of the councils was great benefit, but a pyrrhic victory when the connection to the interior life is obscured, as largely was in this case.

In the burbs along the Nile, The Desert Ascetics began an all important fringe movement—one whose attempt was a focus on resolute consecration of the self to God. It bore fruit of the first truly cohesive account of the interior life in Christian history. They proposed that the “eight evil thoughts,” compulsive obstacles that obscured the always available communion with God.

Later mystical tradition, in an effort to resurrect some of that connection, enumerated three movements toward inner stillness. Vocal prayer used voice, words, images and perceptions to get the ball rolling. When I let go of speaking, in meditation I bat thoughts, emotions and sensations around for a while. That can help in progressing toward God, but clinging to it can keep me from the goal. So eventually I have to give up all form of perception—of God, religion, self, bodily sensation. This is called contemplation, but mark my words, as soon as it’s identified as such, it will end.

There is a tendency to ennoble ourselves and deflect our faults that hides easily in theistic religions. If I’m religious, that’s good. If I’m selfish, I can spend some time thinking it’s a demon I’m valiantly struggling against. The fact is, religion isn’t a merit badge, and as soon as I’ve gained any sort of distance from my egotism, it is as much my fault as the selfishness that buttresses it.

Followers of the way struggle to uncover the legitimate needs that the eight evil thoughts egotistically misuse. They attempt to experience and let go of the different states of prayer. This is all good and well. But there’s more going on here, and Christianity lacks a systemized language to talk about it. In the throes of the spiritual life, practitioners come out of denial about the falseness of their respective selves.

As I said in the three post series “Drawing from the Old Wells”: If distance from ego is anything more than momentary, Christianity calls it humility. Benedict formulated 12 steps, twelve behavioral marks by which humble practitioners might be known.

At present, masters must be great intellects, and acceptance of intellectual propositions stands in for surrender as the core of what it means to be faithful. There is a great need for those steps to be used in evaluating students and teachers of the Way.

Christianity entirely lacks a way to talk about the permanence of distance from self. This is a failure of the early church to dwell on the Emaus experience, to identify what strangers look and act like, in whom it’s later said Christ himself appeared. So when the Church speaks of obedience and it points to Christ, we have no idea what that might look like in ourselves. When the church speaks of humility and it points to Christ, we have no idea what that might look like in ourselves.

Obedience is called “positive samadhi” in buddhism. Shakyamuni’s followers recognize him as the articulator of the teaching, but more importantly, they know the signs of disposition and can recognize it in others. The 12th step of humility is identified as absolute samadhi, and buddhists can recognize it in a practitioner.

So we can speak of moving out of vocal prayer and parting with verbal capacities. We can speak of moving out of meditation and parting with mental image, emotion and perception. We can speak of moving into contemplation and losing a dualistic sense of self. We can say that Martha was worried about many things, that Mary was not, and that Mary was the ideal. We can say that the Gerasene demoniac was tormented when he was gashing himself with stones, and in his right mind when he was clothed and seated next to Christ. But we can’t say why: Christianity entirely lacks a theory of cognition.

Christianity has no equivalent of the Buddhist Nens. Buddhists might say that Mary ceased mental activity at the first nen of "pure perception.” They might say that Martha was caught up in all three nens, that she’d bypassed the pure perception of the first nen for the labels and interpretations of the second and the third.

There’s an important distinction to be made here, though. While the buddha himself is said to have triumphed over Mara, the demonic embodiment of the appetites, there is no such thing as absolute evil or the demonic in buddhism. I’ve been hard pressed to find buddhist examples of malevolent and intelligent beings possessing people. Buddhist miracle workers like Padmasambhava tamed demons and converted them into defenders of Dharma. This is ultimately similar to the desert fathers: the eight evil thoughts were originally seen as demons, the struggle with whom bore fruit of virtue. Later systemizations of Christian thought acknowledged that the vices were what later tradition would call “compulsive thought”—a place of vulnerability to the demonic, perhaps, but not intelligent beings themselves. These vices were converted into virtues after long struggle.

Christianity is deficient in articulating “orthomorphosis” or right transformation. Like all western traditions, it turns on reason. Gods name is “I AM,” but because of that reason, dualism is the monkey it must always get off the back of its god concept Christianity ultimately sees humility as “passing through” the divine on its way to heaven. This ceases in ways we’re not aware of. No Pope has sent spies to that promised land to report on its low-hanging fruit. It wouldn’t be called this, but Orthomorphosis is a more fully articulated tradition in Buddhism. It's a monistic religion: one in which the purpose is present in the path to that goal. Ultimately, it sees enlightenment as “passing through” the self on its way to non-self. This ceases only when rebirths do, in Nirvana.

So Christianity has a social ethic but lacks interiority. Jesus is the Savior par excellence, and Christianity Salvific, precisely becauseChrist saved us from the worst parts of ourselves. But we westerners get dualistic in a hurry, so the ways Christ’s teaching is self-illuminative as well are projected onto a distant God and lost on Christians from the start. Buddhism has struggled to sustain positive samadhi. Recent efforts, (by Thich Nhat Hanh, for instance,) to revive methods of walking meditation aim at maintaining centeredness in the midst of service. Nhat Hanh invokes interbeing. He says we all inter-are: that, in the same way we cradle one hand in another when we burn ourselves, we each reach out to the other when we’re wounded.


In the end, we're dealing with two religions, each flexing muscles that have atrophied in the other. I suppose this is why I’m drawn to both. When I struggle to extend myself to others, I lean on Jesus teaching. When I struggle to cope with my own darkness, I fidget next to buddha under the Bodhi tree until I lose him entirely and find him in myself. The illuminative and salvific paths are both necessary when it’s my own darkness keeping me from generosity. I hope I can let the tension do its work.

1 year with the Logos: An Anniversary Dialogue

I’m staring down the barrel at the one-year anniversary of starting this little blog.  The “insight” that started the whole party, that the Christian concept of Logos was equivalent to Mu in Buddhism, was first articulated in June 2017’s “Kairos, Koans and Conversion 1.”  For the most part, I’ve talked about the Logos like it’s a force, a cosmos governing rule.  I’ve referred to the Logos like it’s a law governing our purgatorial predicament—and, surely, it is.  But when the post “Why I’m a Pluralist and other Travelogues” quoted my hindu friend’s exclamation of “Om Nama Shivaya” I began to see that Logos might be more than some sort of deterministic existential force.

The Logos also seemed to expose a big, traditional lie, a dirty secret of the Christian revelation.  (I’m fairly certain I first talked about this in “Why I’m a Pluralist.”)  We were made in God’s image, but we are bound to decay.  And Christianity lays heavy on the fact that this is our fault, a consequence of sin, but here's the kicker: our finitude is also a function of being a creature as opposed to the creator.  Neither finitude, nor powerlessness nor the need to learn is so terrible that it qualifies as a consequence of sin. If that’s the case, “becoming like God” has to be more than being infinite, all knowing, or all powerful, and it makes sense that it would communicate the divine purpose behind Christ’s path of self-emptying.

Thus far, what I’ve said about the Logos is dreadfully, blessedly incomplete. A fuller truth would look like this: The Logos is God’s voice.  As such, for one thing, it isn’t the Godhead itself.  But it is more than just a law of nature.  What I’m getting at is, (drumroll please): The Logos is God’s intelligence, blabbed everywhere by a universe that just. won’t. shut. up.  Sunsets stun us, and stones shout their way through our silences.  God’s Word isa law of nature, but also God playing a childish game of hide and seek—that is, he hides till he’s tired, then he calls out from his concealment, begging us to find him already because there’s cookies and milk in the kitchen and he’s hungry, for Christsakes.

In short, I need to talk more about the Logos as an intelligent force.

The Logos speaks both destructively and constructively.  As loud as my head is, I’ll always emphasize that silence is God’s first language, that listening is more important than speaking. The imageless prayer of Christian apophasis, then, correctly suggests rejecting perceptions in order to gain access to the God concealed beyond them.  It is important to mention, though, that the Logos also speaks constructively.  The Catechism (par. 46) says “Listening to the voice of creation,” along with the voice of conscience, reveals God.  That means there’s got to be something to which we’re listening.  But the listening isn’t aural, it’s a matter of attention.  God’s constructive speech is illogical for just this reason: it is the metaphorical speech of the prophets, the font of every poet’s similes.  It is the “Aha!” at the core of every realization precisely because it’s our attention that God is trying to grab, and our full presence he’s trying to cause.

God speaks through both the Logical and articulate with the illogical groans of silence. Both God’s Logical voice, and his illogical voice, are present in the Genesis myth, but to see it plainly we have to decouple some of our ancient associations.         

Neither childbirth nor work are a punishment.  They appear to be so because of our sin.   This is a corrective that the church has long since issued to the popular mind.  Another such ecclesial corrective is this: the body is a teacher of virtue, not a punishment for sin.  Sadly, the overemphasis on rationality has disembodied the Western mind, and left the west with no means by which to say how the body is God’s way of guiding us.  This is where inter-religious dialogue becomes not just pivotal but mandatory: The Yogas of Hinduism are the guardians of disciplines by which the body, as such, teaches us to connect to God.   

The Church ongoingly updates its paradigm because sin does, in fact mar our ability to perceive these messages. But our associations with various symbols in the Genesis myth are marred by sin as well.  For instance, Satan, the tempting voice, is not the serpent.  Temptation comes, forever, from our own hearts, just as the choice to disobey God comes from our own wills.  Later use of the Serpent as healer, when Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, points to a positive significance of the serpent, at man’s origins as in his liberation.

God and the serpent needn’t be opposed.  Christianity unites earth and sky by the cross, men and angels on Jacob’s ladder.  Non-dual and unexamined perception of reality remains the highest form of prayer and that gives the senses a bad rap—as if they’re forever something that keeps us distant from what we’re perceiving, forever something soaked in our selfish misinterpretation.  But as we’ll see later, there is a way to remove “self” from our senses as well.

In Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby's study of Amazonian “Vegetalismo” religions, the author notes that the serpent is an ancient and Universal symbol for God.   When an old Shaman said the mother of the plant wisdom was a snake, Narby was puzzled.  In examinations of the artwork of those who have made long study of the Shamanism, Narby observes structures shaped like chromosomes.  Snakes are ubiquitous in such art.  His great revelation is that DNA has a serpentine shape. Narby concludes that disciples of the great Shamans are allowed access to “internal senses” by which they become aware of the cellular structures from the inside out.          

This shows the limits of both Western science and empiricism—"if testing won’t allow distance, its bad,” they say, following it with “Things that aren’t visible to the naked eye don’t exist.”  The West’s rational worldview is also quick to condemn mystery.

Like it or not, when the church clashed with the rational assumptions of the scientific revolution, science won.  Faith, which was once an immersive plunging into mystery, became reduced to the acceptance of pious intellectual formulations.  

This gives immersive, omnipresent realities like God a bad rap from the start.  As distant observers—among whom Narby counts all modern anthropologists like himself—we see what we want to see.  Mystics and Shamans know that the stuff of faith, however, doesn’t permit such distance.  As experiencers we are given what we need by a reality higher than ourselves.  This is, if you want, a good criteria by which to judge a spiritual experience: does it move us from observing to experiencing?  Inevitably, such a move will distance us from Ego.

However—lets be specific—the Shaman’s claim is that DNA communicated to plants, and plants communicated with us.  The prospect that the created order might be intelligently communicating God’s voice, albeit in a language of symbol and metaphor, is intriguing.  As a person who spent many years interpreting “what I think the spirit is saying to me,"  the theory puts real flesh on the Catechism’s contention that the “message of creation” is the source of revelation to which we must listen.  The prospect that the body might have a set of "internal senses” (by which those without microscopes might have a plain view of their own biological structures)—this would explain the altered states of consciousness experienced by so many saints throughout history.  And the prospect that the use of such senses might be more assuredly free from egotism--as it is in ecstatic divine visions and as it can be in the course of the purgative Shamanic dieta’s proscribed curriculum of learning from various plants.

However we learn the things of the spirit, mystics and shamans are united in saying that it’s not the communications of the Logos that represent the height of the spiritual life.  God’s Word isn’t God, after all.  Catholics have an account of the bits of egotism we part with as we progress through vocal prayer, meditation and contemplation.  Shamans have an account of the healing that ensues as a practitioner "works with the plant medicine."  The mechanism by which that work gets done say the Shamans, is a gift of the universe.  Catholics might differ in the particulars, but progressive divination, they say, is a work of grace.  Beyond cooperation with the divine, our work isn't terrifically important.  

What is important, say Shamans and Priests alike, is our calm, intentional integration of the Logos into the rest of life.  Part with ego, they say, and the logos (or the universe) facilitates the rest.  This is no small obstacle, though.  Brujeria, a witchcraft-like, prideful use of these “internal senses” is as likely a pitfall for those skilled in plant medicine as spiritual materialism is a risk of Christian Mysticism.  Ego’s both the original demon and the original drug, in comparison to which all other poltergeists and pills are but imitators.  If there are altered states of consciousness, if God teaches something of particular import, Christianity and Shamanism are united in saying they can certainly part us with our ego, but that they are temporary at best, and not spiritual credentials that make us better or different than others.

My life has been a sequence of “one day at a times,” lived in the hope that the right mix of willingness and honesty will keep me free from excessive egotism and dependence.  This is true whether the substance is brain chemicals mislabeled as grace, man-made substances, or relationships.  That pitfall should not obscure the fact that I’m drawn to hear, that my happiness is bound up in that hearing.  If, in the end, the Logos is not just a principle, but the mechanism by which God literally speaks to us, the highpoint is not the talking, but the safe, silent vulnerability following the exchange.  I have come to believe that a power greater than myself is whispering-- in poems and prophesies and plainspeak-- and no rest, outside of my listening, will content me.  

Christian Koans Part II

Hey, y'all,

My recent break was an opportunity to work on the new collection I first referenced in the blog post "Christians, Koans and the Logos."  Here are two more "Christian Koans."  In the tradition of Zen, they're offered largely without comment or guidance.  For those who wish to truly wrestle with what's here, however, re-reading the post "Kairos, Koans and Conversion: One, Introduction" would provide some basic ways to begin to pin this material down.

I have three collections of "Christian Koans" planned, to echo the three classic Zen collections ("Gateless gate," the "Blue Cliff Record" and "The book of Equanimity").  The first of those planned collections is nearly a for-real rough draft.  For now I'm calling the collection "Second Didache" in homage to the first century Christian catechism, the first to bear the name.

Ongoing updates will be forthcoming.

Namaste, y'all.  The two-bit guru in me recognizes the great Enlightened One blooming in you.

Peace,

Josh

Case 11: Anthony knocks at the door 

Brother Anthony found Fr. Christian outside his Cell and said: “Give me a word, Abba, by which I might live my life.” Fr Christian responded “Jesus said “Repent, the kingdom of heaven is near.” Br. Anthony said “He also said ‘Foxes have dens, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’”

Coming to Brother Gregory’s cell, Br. Anthony knocked on the door and said “Give me a word, Abba, by which I might live my life.” The Old Man was silent for a long time. Then he said “John the Baptist said ‘Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Br. Anthony prostrated, saying “The thing comes from the Lord. I cannot speak to you anything bad or good.”


Br. Adam’s Commentary: 

Both monks spoke of the kingdom of God. Why was one rejected and another accepted? Tell me, what is the difficulty here? God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. But Br. Anthony still had a choice, and words flowed from what filled his heart. If you say there is no difference between the two old monks, you have no enlightenment. If you say there is, indeed, a difference, you have no enlightenment.

Br. Adam’s Verse

The kingdom within you
The Cell that teaches everything-
go to that room and shut the door.
No this, no that, here is the living water,
welling up to eternal life.









Case 26: Fr. Mark’s giving and withholding

Fr. Mark said “There were two questions: Our Savior asked ‘Did John’s baptism come from heaven or from earth?’ Pilate asked ‘Where are you from?’” Fr. Mark paused. “One giving,” He said, “And one withholding.”



Br. Adam’s Commentary:

Who gave, and who withheld? If your alms are the things that are within, you will know the secret, and you will see where Fr. Mark failed. However, I warn you strongly against discussing giving and withholding.



Brother Adam’s Verse:

Answering the question, the heavens opened.
But Christianity is from the heaven of heavens
Tear open the heavens and bring them down.
Go into your room and close the door.

One God, Three Hermits: Monotheism Reconsidered

Real talk: our beliefs affect our ability to live together.  The creeds we adhere to have real consequences for our ability to see other people’s quests for truth as holy, or even legitimate in the first place.  Placing value judgments on people’s religious outlooks betrays a truly divided consciousness. Listen: to avoid destroying each other outright, humanity’s got to put its money where its mouth is.  Belief in many gods, if it unifies a man with himself and his fellows, is worth a great deal.  Belief in one God, if it divides a individuals from their own psyches and from each other, is worthless.

In 1886, Leo Tolstoy first published a short story called “the three Hermits.”  In the now-famous and nearly-overused tale, A Catholic bishop is forced to pause in his sea voyage at a desert island, and he finds three hermits living there.  When they pray, they lift their hands to heaven and say to God “we are three, you are three, have mercy on us.”

Such flagrant disregard for the unity of God raises the Bishop’s hackles.  He spends a good while catechizing them to the contrary.  “God is three in one not just three.  Get it?”  At the cost of a good bit of effort, he teaches them the Our Father.  After a while, they do, in fact, get it.  They’ve made the adjustments and they’ve memorized the prayer.

After some time, the bishop sails away.  It seems he’s done some salutary upgrading of their belief-set.  It would certainly meet the approval of some of the prime exemplars of pre-Vatican II Evangelization.  I mentioned these in “New thoughts on Evangelization”—they were the ones whose preaching of the gospel happened alongside colonialism, and failed to recognize or correct the violence inherent in that system.   Before I talk more about this, let me address some other stuff. 

"Functional Polytheism"--for lack of a better term is an expression of the dividedness of man against himself and against others.  It happens when different gods are in conflict.  The gods of ancient Babylon were like this.  The ancient Babylonian story of creation held that the world was created from the dead body of one diety, through the blood soaked work of his divine murderer’s hands.   The ancient Greek gods were in similar conflict.  Zeus violently overthrew his titan-father Cronus to become king of the Gods.

To put my finger on the opposite: functional monotheism is an expression of the unity of man, within himself and with others. It happens when different aspects of the deity do a single will.  Seen from the “divine perspective” of the Christian Mystics, the Holy Trinity, in which the Godhead’s expressed in three persons who share the divine nature, is a classical example of this kind of thinking.  Hinduism, according to most broad strokes definitions, is a polytheistic religion.  But this deserves a second look.  All of the gods do Ram’s will.  Hindus with nuanced understanding call their religion the most monotheistic polytheistic religion in existence.

This is a “recycled paradigm”: it first appeared in ancient israel.  It is a recasting of the differences between pre-exilic and post exilic-monotheism.  Let me explain:

Pre-exilic monotheism, what I'll call "religious monotheism," held that Adonai, the God of Israel, was the “God of gods.”  In short, other gods existed, but the God of Israel was the greatest among them.  This is the whole reason that the exodus plagues are what they are: Moses turns the Nile to blood, for instance, to specifically prove that the God of Israel is greater than the god Hapi, the god of the Nile.  It’s also the reason Moses sent plagues of frogs: God was proving that he was more powerful than the goddess Heket, who is depicted as a frog.  

El, the Canaanite God, has been theorized to be the original God of Israel.  Later biblical writers nuanced and qualified this, but the fact remains: before the Exile, Israel did not worship the God they came to revere eventually.  Other Gods existed, and all that was worthy of reverence in other religions, Israel eventually revered.

Post-exilic monotheism  is a different animal. During the exile, Israel was surrounded by a polytheistic culture.  Their culture was under attack.  The Priestly writers, who made their major contributions to the hebrew scriptures at this time, used monotheism to spearhead the preservation of cultural identity.  For that reason, I'll call it "cultural monotheism" from here on out.  They began to say “Other Gods don’t exist.  The only God who exists is the God of israel.”  Let’s understand this correctly: from the exile onwards, cultural monotheism is a sociological self-defense in sacred garb.  That isn’t to say that the things said about divinity are false: it simply means that the atmosphere of cultural threat closed Israel off to the benefits of other traditions.

My contention is that Catholicism passed on to the West not the positive monotheism of pre-exilic israel, but the negative monotheism of the exile.  True to form, Catholicism is transmitting an implied cultural defensiveness along with whatever legitimate divine riches it brings to the table.

The proof is in the pudding:  monotheistic God concepts lead to unitive thinking, and unitive thinking is the important part.  As a Catholic monk, I felt more bonded to buddhists than I did to most Christians.  Monks, after all, routinely eat the humble pie which is their slice of human darkness.  Remember (as I said in “on learning to Luff, with two Eff’s”)  a unitive perspective accepts and includes, it doesn’t judge and reject.  Vaishnava Hindus think Gautama Buddha is an avatar of Vishnu—they have found a way not just to accept, but to worship the man who reformed their entire belief system.

Polytheistic God concepts lead to divisive thinking.  This is the wolf in sheep’s clothing: in reality, it’s the “culturally defensive”  monotheism of the Exile and its aftermath.  Catholicism burned witches as opposed to learning from them for thousands of years.  It excommunicated Luther, the Eastern orthodox patriarch in the split of 1054, and generally anyone, Christian and Non-christian, who differed with its tenets.  This happens over and over in biblical history.  The sins of the parents manifest 10 times worse in the children.  So the Jews, our “parents in faith” got through the exile by eating the apple of culturally defensive monotheism.  We, the church, rebelled against our parents, emitting a centuries-long cry of “CHRIST KILLERS” and using it as a banner under which our persecution might, we thought, legitimately fly.  Sure, the Jews might have been Adam and Eve, eating the apples of their own cageyness. But we were Cain and Abel: we upped the ante to fratricide, and our hands are not clean.

Ultimately, the “good news” is anything that unites.  I’m not talking about unthinking assimilation—we have to take others’ examples with a healthy grain of salt—but I am talking about nurturing the kind of “mutual assumption of integrity” that lies at the heart of the very religious freedom the Church asks from and, these days, increasingly grants to others.

To return to the Bishop and the three Hermits:  After teaching them the Our Father, when the bishop is sailing away, he looks back towards the shore.  In the distance, he sees a light approaching the boat.  It’s the three hermits, miraculously walking toward him on the water.  They confess they’ve forgotten the words of his beautiful prayer, that they need a reminder.  The bishop is downcast: “When you pray,” he says, “say ‘we are three, you are three, have mercy on us.’”

The “one God” in whom the Bishop initially believed seemed to demand that the Bishop convert the three hermits, he comes around, conceding that the hermits themselves know how best to pray.  This kind of openness to other formulations of divinity represents the best of pre-exilic, functional monotheism: that believes in one God without disregarding other belief systems. This is the fruit, as well, of the more modern idea of religious monotheism, in which unity of divine wills reveals more of God than human divisiveness.

However many gods a person believes in, the gods’ unity shows in the placidity of a devotee’s conduct.  However many deities a person prays to, the fruit of the an encounter with the one God is increased comfort with the plurality of legitimate human paths.  The three Hermits, however they prayed, were unified.  Would that all of our beliefs led us to something similar.

New thoughts on Evangelization

I feel icky about how closely wedded effort and egoism are.  Y’all know I have struggled with the neurotic egotism that comes from my dualistic mind.  And “spiritualizing” that egoism doesn’t help matters, either.  Y’all know I’ve been guilty, in the past, of spiritual materialism: of treating the tasks and the experiences of the spiritual life like they are possessions that make me good or bad—and moreover, better or worse than others.  

Maybe I’m seeing my own hang-ups everywhere, just because they’re mine.  But it seems to me that the Church can be just as guilty of spiritual materialism: perhaps there is a corporate, ecclesial egoism that treats spirituality like it’s a merit badge.  Perhaps the church “collects” the virtues of its saints so as to convince itself of its own specialness.  Coupled with its failure to articulate its tradition of “orthomorphosis,” or transformation, the Church has put its capacity for receptivity—the “passive volition past posts have talked about— in serious jeopardy.

Spiritual Materialism is a thing, both for me and the church.  This makes evangelization an egotistical objective.  In the hands of a church that hasn’t yet faced the dangers of spiritual materialism, such proclamation can be lethal.  The council of Jerusalem, the meeting that declared gentiles needn’t first become Jews to accept Jesus, failed to articulate what transformation in Christ looks like.  And when St. Paul decided to camp out in the center of the Roman Empire, he failed to notice that, in spreading the gospel, he was also spreading imperialism.  In Rome, you were a good citizen if you sacrificed to their gods.  By and by, you were seen as a good disciple of Jesus if you accepted the homogenizing influence of a christianized Pax Romana.  In later years, for instance, exploration of the Americas permitted us to use Christianity to legitimize slavery and cultural genocide.  The whole, dysfunctional union of church and state was transmitted, undiagnosed and uncorrected, until Pope John XXIII’s 1962 opening of the second Vatican Council.

The errors of pre-Vatican II models of Church were obvious.  The Church triumphal relied unquestionably on modern nation states, failing to diagnose and challenge their oppressive tendencies.  In El Salvador, at the time Rutilio Grande’s 1977 death radicalized Oscar Romero, he surprised heads of state who expected him to play governmental lap-dog.  The Church militant, bent as it was on the spread of the Gospel, disregarded religious freedom, the primacy of conscience and enculturation.  Mary appeared at Tepeyac as an indigenous woman in 1531, but it wasn’t till 350 years later, in October of 2002, that the church canonized Juan Diego, the indigenous man to whom she appeared.  

Vatican II’s calls for religious freedom and enculturation seemed novel, and that is the first indicator that something was amiss with evangelization.  When the Vatican said, in 2015, that the Church should not evangelize Jews, the cries of heresy were loud enough to be disconcerting.  Meanwhile Jesus, our Lord and Messiah, never intended Catholicism to be a separate entity from the Jewish faith.  It was only subsequent egotistical clinging to theological truths that gave enmity between Jews and Christians a divine mask.

Admittedly, the way I approach theology is my own.  I would hazard to guess, (cue egomaniacal laughter,) that it has a message for the wider Church.  The point here’s that if the church preaches what it lives, verbal preaching is unnecessary.  A few sources support this view: while studying, I was attracted to Ignatius of antioch, a bishop who wrote a famous letter from prison, right before being fed to lions in the Roman coliseum.  “If Christ’s suffering was pointless” he asked “then why am I in chains?”  When I was working as a youth minister, I remember the conference presenter and colleague who said “we tell our children  to love Jesus, but we don’t teach them to make Jesus’ journey.”  When I was first attracted to monasticism, it was because I saw in them people who shut up and lived.  They say they’ll pray  seven times a day, and they generally do.  They say they’ll be silent, and generally they’re silent.

In proper Evangelization, life preaches.   In the transformative journey, teachers fail, disciples fail, and teachings fail.   (I first addressed some of this in Kairos Koans and Conversion 6.) At the time of his death, Christ accomplished none of what he was expected to accomplish.   Afterward, Peter’s resolve failed: he returned to his boats.  Judas, ultimately dissolusioned with Jesus’ shortcomings, hung himself.   The prevailing expectations for a messiah failed utterly before switching, in christ, from a “judges model”—in which messiahs save their people from their political enemies—to a “prophetic model” in which jesus saves his people from their sins.  There’s a “mystical corollary” here too.  When a person prays vocally, the words at some point give way to devotion in the mind (what Catholics call meditation).  Thought yields, by and by, to what Catholics call contemplation.  So words yield to thought, and thought yields to presence.  While those stages aren’t hard and fast, it is important to note that often, one form of prayer has to die, or be surrendered, before another can live.  Both ego and desire perish before we die physically.

If I am right about this (again, I would hazard to guess that I am—cue egomaniacal laughter a second time) then the relationship between the church and evangelization needs to change.  In short, evangelization should be a consequence of conversion, not an end in itself.  If we Catholics conveyed the particulars of transformation, then the acceptance of Christ would happen on its own.

Christ himself says as much.  In Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus’ disciples enter Jerusalem, hollering about Jesus being the foretold messianic king, the powers-that-be tell him to order his disciples to stop.  He refuses. “I tell you,” he says “if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  In the context of the narrative, Jesus’ triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, verbal proclamation is important.  

But under normal circumstances, it’s different.  The danger of under-proclaiming the gospel needn’t be a concern here.  Preaching the gospel should be like making love.  It’s great when consent has been obtained, gross and criminal when it’s not.  Rightly, Pope Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi lays out 5 steps: 1) change your life. 2) people will see it and be curious 3) they’ll ask you why you change your life 4) only then do you rightly bring up Jesus 5) they change their life prompted by the grace your example has transmitted.

Even though I need trusted others to unpack my spiritual search, I don't like talking about faith.  I refuse to proselytize.  If there's any sort of verbal statement of intent that I can honestly make it’s this: be honest with yourself and rigorous in self examination.  If people convert to Christianity, that's a party bonus and it's God’s work.  Meanwhile I have an obligation to change, to learn about other traditions and assimilate what wisdom they have to teach me.

I don't particularly think the church needs to preach the gospel either. Remember the words: If these were silent the stones would shout—it’s at the very least permission to be about our own transformative journey and to have the whys and the wherefores of that journey be a consequence, not an objective of my journey.  I believe that the Joy of the gospel will take care of itself, and that humans have no problem experiencing joy.  We have more of a problem in spaces of unwillingness, suffering, diminishment or death.  It would behoove the human family to concentrate on allowing itself to be transformed

We find both the proof of all this and the way we’re to achieve it in the example of Blessed Charles De Foucault.  Nowadays he’s been declared an almost-saint: someone who’s blessed is, to sainthood, what a cub scout is to boycotts.  Charles de Foucault wanted to start a religious community but was murdered by thieves before a single person joined him.  His ideas caught on sometime later: his writings were found and two people founded the community he had hope to establish in the first place. These days His community claims among its members such figures as PhD's who sell ice cream in pushcarts on the street and sisters with masters degrees who work for the circus.

The point is, they, too, refuse to preach the Gospel.  Their lives do the proclaiming.  People see highly educated men and women working menial jobs and caring for others.  Foucault’s spiritual children, when focusing on their own authentic transformation,  inspire others’ curiosity.  

If I don’t change my life, my verbal evangelization smacks of hypocrisy.  If my proclamation happens without someone asking for it first, I risk coming across as pushy. But if I keep my focus on my own transformation, the body of Christ will proclaim itself.

Christ, in the gospel of Mark, teaches something that is useful here.  After he does a miracle, when his disciples are amazed at his power, he often tells them to remain quiet about the event.  This is called the “messianic secret.”  His purpose was obvious: don’t proclaim me the messiah based on half of the messiah’s work.  What I mean is, what miracles showed (the power of God in Jesus) were only part of the story.  Jesus overtly asked his disciples to wait on their proclamation.  Wait, he asked, till I rise: wait till you yourself have failed, till your own desire and zeal and resolve have risen again.  And then, allow your own transformation to speak for itself.  

Peter is a good example here: early on, he proclaims Jesus the messiah, and Jesus calls him Satan.  Ultimately he will betray Jesus three times.  Ultimately Christ will show up as a stranger, ask if Peter loves him, and put the wind of the spirit back in Peter’s sails.   Ultimately the spirit will come, and how Peter is to speak will not be in doubt.

If the whole church were able to await the power of God in the same way, it might find there’s less work to do.  On the seventh day, God rested.  If the church’s proclamation is yet marked by anxiety—about whether Christ is accepted or not—then the Church’s spiritualized ego has further dying to do.  If we’re doing our job right, our work is much more a matter of healthy grief than first thought.  But if we can allow our egotistical sense of Spirituality’s demands to die alongside us, then our proclamation will be what God wishes.

Christ is manifesting himself in us—whenever and however he wishes.  For my part, anything more active is egotism.  I hope I can get out of my own way: it’s my only identifiable part allowing the whole world to proclaim Christ.  I’ve quoted John’s words before: Christ must increase, I must decrease.  May the words do their work in me, and God willing, in us all.

Meditations of a Simple Man

I’ve just spent a week leading 17 high school young people on a retreat.  It was a great time for them, full of getting real..  Generally I’ll spare you the details, but I will say at least this: more than one young man was articulate enough to express discontent with how they’re taught to be men.  I came home exhausted, and full of a desire to address the topic.

I suppose this post has been percolating since I was in high school myself, and I listened to the music my Father was raised on.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were my favorite quartet.  Particularly I liked Neil Young's “A Man needs a Maid.”  Eventually the song struck me as emblematic of the masculine crisis.  The first verse says “I was thinking that maybe I’d get a maid, find a place nearby for her to stay: Someone to keep my house clean, cook my meals and go away.”  Women, says this verse, just exist to satisfy our desires.

And indeed, at the center of masculinity itself is a crisis in feeling and desire.  Men aren’t taught the worth of unsatisfied desires.  We’re taught to fulfill them so that they’ll go away.    That’s a lost opportunity.  A bit of further preface is needed, however, so allow me not to get ahead of myself.

The culturally prevalent masculinity is exclusive, and negative.  By that I mean: men don’t know who they are, they simply know who they’re not.  They’re everything that isn’t feminine.  Femininity, by extension, is bad and weak.

Emotional literacy isn’t a skill men transmit to one another. In a striking similarity to the “Don’t Talk, Don’t Trust, Don’t Feel” messages passed down in dysfunctional families, culturally prevalent masculinity eschews emotions, and the vulnerability to which they point. When we men experience an emotion, they act on it to purge the obsession.  We are taught to throw sex and drugs and violence at our emotions until we no longer feel them.  When no amount of those things is sufficient to get the job done, we resort to repression.    

The culturally prevalent masculinity values sex, power and money.  In this unhealthy masculinity, the value of sex can manifest as anything from promiscuity to sexual manipulation to sexual violence.  The value of power can manifest in the Board room, on the athletic field, in the gym and in the family structure.  The value of money can apply to cash, possessions, but also non monetary commodities: even desirable qualities like six pack abs, social aplomb, and stoicism.

In this system, strength is anything that defends a desire’s fulfillment. Femininity, similarly, is simply a thing that suffices these needs.  Women are only worth it if they’re beautiful.  Women working as meteorologists hit youtube because they’re gorgeous, not because they were right about last week’s downpours. Ani Difranco’s lyrics are apropos here: “God help you if you are an ugly girl, ‘cause too pretty is also your doom. ‘Cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”  Pretty or ugly, competent or failure: women are judged by how they fit in to mens’ system of needs.

Women then turn around and enforce that with each other.  Unhealthy femininity has helped popular teenaged girls persecute their awkward classmates since time immemorial.  Beautiful women have been attracted to men who reproduce their fathers’ dysfunction since before there were words to describe it.  

The “fault” here lies unhealthy patriarchy, but the old saying about “inherited negative messages” applies.  Unhealthy femininity is not women’s fault, but it is their problem.  For certain, even well-meaning men take advantage of masculine privilege.  And Unhealthy Masculinity isn’t their fault, but it is their problem.

The real crown of laurels goes to those groups whose members don’t fit neatly into the masculine paradigm.  As a disabled man who passes as “normal” I know only a little about how disabled men threaten the importance of Sex and Power.  Gay men similarly threaten the norm.  While they’re maligned in the mainstream, they create masculine self-identities based on the conscious choice to be, to be loving, to be mentally healthy.  This is more than we can say for their counterparts subscribing to the prevailing sense of manliness.  

Crowned with glory, too, are men of color who see too clearly how “white” the prevailing masculinity is.  They are confined in boxes: portrayed as violent or ignorant or poor.  Meanwhile the business world balks at dreadlocks.  Meanwhile young latinos are placed in positions of incredibly high responsibility in their families because they can function in English speaking worlds.

The prevailing masculinity’s white, heteronormative privilege is toxic.  Men who are addicted to sex and rage and violence raise sons who can’t feel.  They raise daughters who are only attracted to men who reproduce paternal dysfunction, only to have children and become raging mothers.  Those mothers raise men who hate themselves, and cycle compounds.  

And I’m wary of any voice that, under the guise of “empowerment” carries a message of “my way or the highway” and turns legitimate pain into the tyranny of entitlement.  Anger is legitimate: rage and entitlement are not.  Raging mothers run households in which men can fit only if they make themselves small.  Phrases such as “men are pigs” or “down with the patriarchy” seem often too general, too undergirded with rage represent end-stage healthy femininity, or effectively address the problems with masculinity.  If the women of the world want men to be different, it would be worth asking us “how can we help you have the conversations y’all need to have?”  It’s similarly unhelpful to claim, too loudly, than male privilege is a reason to discount what men say about themselves in the name of giving women a voice. 

If women manipulate men into conforming to an unhealthy standard, not only will nothing change, it will breed resentment that will derail recovery in the long term.  Very often, this comes with the implicit and explicit threat that sex will become the subject of a transaction, and its withholding a tool of manipulation.  Men advise each other to admit they’re “wrong and sorry” as a routine way of handling conflict with women.  Phrases such as “If Mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy” and “happy wife, happy life” point to the routine abdication of self required of the healthiest of men.  Additionally, dependence is much more socially acceptable in unhealthy femininity than in the culturally prevalent, unhealthy masculinity.  I know women who grew to 28 years old before ever doing so much as move a single piece of furniture.  The masculine equivalent is unheard of. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, feminine choosiness rules reproductive interactions. (And here I’m borrowing from Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 rules for Living.)  What every man knows is anthropologically confirmed: women reject twice as many men as they accept, and the “not tonight dears” outweigh the “come hithers.”  Masculine overwork shoots through not just “getting laid” but the best of romantic intentions.  A single red rose, kept on the table constantly, is as apt to be ignored as the absence of a dozen of them on February 14th is apt to be noted.  At first, it may appear romantic or loving that a man shoulder more than two thirds of a couple’s bills.  Eventually the same gesture registers as normal.  Keeping things spontaneous requires an energy that humdrum existence is constantly rendering mundane.  A healthy woman, conscious of this, will make as much effort to avoid ruts as she asks of her man, even as the mindfulness prevailing between them begets mutual exoneration. 

Meanwhile, men have too few conversations about what healthy masculinity would look like.  Their healthiest impulses are given only scant air time.  Boys everywhere are justified in being consistently, constructively angry at what masculine culture, and its dysfunctional feminine counterpart, routinely deny them.    

A healthy masculinity would be positive.   That is to say, it would spend more time clarifying what masculinity is, rather than defining masculinity by everything femininity isn’t.  There are a few truths around which such a masculinity would have to center.

For one thing, it would have to admit that neither real pain nor legitimate needs justify coercion.  So for instance, men who have been abused don’t get to become abusers.  For another, it would have to admit that true desires are different than egotistical needs.  Sexualized needs are a primary example of this: they’re not helpful  Additionally, we’ve been taught that being sated is the only valid expression for our needs  That’s a tyranny.   

In short, healthy masculinity is necessarily contemplative.  To be clear: I use contemplative here to mean “a mode of desiring, (grounded in eschewing the ego) in which desire is actively and consciously accepted and fulfilled, instead of reactively purged through immediate satiation.” This is (and should be seen more consistently as) real strength.  In the end, men need to be taught that unfulfilled desire can clarify thoughts and emotions.  Being vulnerable and having needs, without running from them or using the world to conceal them, is part of a healthy spiritual journey and a healthy masculinity. It is the only way to encounter the differences between male longings and feminine choosiness that avoids resentment, entitlement, and blame.

Images of such a vulnerability-friendly masculinity abound.  The “tank man” of Tienamen square, facing a column of tanks unarmed, is the quintessential image of a man who can face his vulnerability non-defensively.   And Bapu Gandhi, fasting well nigh to death for peace, is a similar image of willingness to desire without being sated.  The masters of Tantric Buddhism, long caricatured as purveyors of the eight hour orgasm, are actually attempting to transmute sexuality’s oppositional emotional energy, turning it entirely into grounds for connection.

Healthy men work to ensure that the Ego (on the one hand) draws proper boundaries and (on the other) ceases its spiritual obstructionism.  Healthy men know the value of unfulfilled desire in clarifying thoughts and emotions.  But the benefits don’t end there.

This actually echoes the life of God: philosophers have been working themselves into hysterics, attempting to figure out why God would permit evil.  The question is framed a bit strangely.  The answer is simple: repressing difference comes from lack of self knowledge.  God knows himself, and doesn’t have to stifle his opposite.  

Real intimacy is about mutual freedom: force has no part in it.  Men who know who they are needn’t foist their own paradigm on women, or men with differing masculinities.  

Somewhat counter-intuitively, healthy grief lies at the core of masculinity.  It is unrealistic for either partner to find ultimate fulfillment in even the best of spouses.  On the face of it, this arises out of any difference in desires, but set in the context of the Genesis myth, it has much to say about masculine spirituality.  

The fruit of Eve’s gift of self will forever be appreciation of good and evil.  Such a yield gets an unnecessarily bad rap.  In the aftermath of that gift, God tells Eve “your desire shall be for your husband.”  It only in light of the initial confusion (“your eyes will be opened, and you shall be like God”) that Eve’s gift of self can be a bid to take God’s place.  Men, too, can eclipse God in women’s emotional lives.  But there’s cause for rejoicing: Eve, on behalf of all women, accepts the title “the mother of all the living.”  Adam, on behalf of all men, will forever see his desire for God laid bare (it’s purposeful, that I don’t say ‘fulfilled’) on the Tree of Life that is the Cross.  Long experience in these roles teases out the positive effects of “knowledge of Good and Evil.”  

Let me give you a rather routine example.  When I was a monk, having it out with my own darkness in the cloister’s communal solitude, there were days when I was so depressed I couldn’t taste my food.  Numbness literally interposed itself between me and my sense of taste.  These days, in the midst of life with my Jackie, I can tell the difference between Reduced Fat Extra Sharp Cheddar and the real thing.  Here we have “knowledge of good” finding its most positive manifestation: Jackie has refined my palate.  

My increased ability to appreciate cheddar cheese is a drinking of the wine of life to its dregs—and all because I’ve grieved, because I’ve stopped giving my special lady God’s special place in my life.  All because the inevitable differences between jackie and I have served to clarify my desire.

Let’s hear Neil Young on the subject again “A while ago somewhere, I don't know when, I was watching a movie with a friend,” Neil says, “I fell in love with the actress.  She was playing a part that I could understand.”  The need for intimacy persists, whether we act on it well, or unhealthily or not at all.  It turns out, in the end, that consciousness of our own incompletion is part of being whole.

The image here, is Christ.  On the Cross, like Christ, we thirst.  That thirst isn’t quenched, we just feel it in its entirety.  Made visible, that desire is a hole in every side, even when we bear our strongest resemblance to the risen Christ.  Eventually, coming to know that deficiency for what it is is only half of the work.  The rest is a reaching out, a laughter, the epiphany that is the goofy curve of another’s smile.  “This alone” said Adam, “is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.”

Because it all comes back to folk music, the final word on healthy masculinity goes to Neil's bandmate Graham Nash.  His song "Simple Man" (written for the musician Joni Mitchell,) says "I just want to hold you, I don't want to hold you down."  That is the best that one who is "simply a man" can do.

Morning by morning, the best part of awaking sleeps next to me.  When I know who I am, she’ll be welcome as she is.  But the one who awoke me is waiting within, and as the book of Isaiah says, I’ll “listen as one who is taught.”  I don’t know how to be a man, in the end.  But every day, I’m learning.