Teresa, absolutely lovely! Thank you for sharing that and for describing it so beautifully. In a similar way, I’ve always thought my superpower was my ability to talk to anybody and how much I enjoy people. I’m the gal you tell your secrets to on a train! The way you put it makes me try to see it in a different light, because my superpower rarely extends to those I find obnoxious or vain or insert any negative thing you will. I’m going to remember your words and try to live them more.
My wife trained as a doctor and spent many years in the belly of the beast. We managed to escape, and now she grows herbs on our land instead. It can be done. And you will have learned valuable things - even if not the things you thought you would learn.
I used to think that how things were arranged in terms of human space (architecture, room arrangement) didn't matter. Now I see there is a connection between mind and matter, God and design of our human world. I didn't think there was any true connection of human concepts and Reality either. I think that comes with the idea that man is an accident of blind random forces.
I thought we might chat about transcendence. Yes, I will get to Paul's conversion, but please allow me to take a leisurely route. I hope to catch it from a fresh angle.
Long ago, I took a course on the literature of the American Renaissance. We read a great deal of Emerson and Thoreau. I did not much care for Emerson - what he called "Nature" was not something I had ever hiked through or sifted between my fingers. The object he most wanted us to consider seemed an abstraction, the writing puffed out by his resolve to orchestrate a lofty confrontation with it. Thoreau felt different somehow, but I was as yet too new to this material to challenge the professor's insistence that they were close kin. Transcendentalists, he called them. Whatever. All I know is that I stopped reading Emerson after handing in my final essay. I have been reading Thoreau ever since.
It turns out there was more involved than personal preference. Laura Dassow Walls, in three works of closely argued scholarship, detaches Thoreau from Emerson and inserts him into a lineage headlined by Alexander von Humboldt. Her Thoreau is not a garden variety transcendentalist but a particular kind of scientist - one for whom empirical investigation, philosophical speculation, and poetic imagination were interwoven threads of reasoned inquiry. Where Emerson gazed at loons and trees only for as long as it took to dissolve them into unities valued for their transcendence of any matter that might sing or bloom, Thoreau sought those unities in the singing and the blooming. Nature, he believed, was not the symbol of a deeper reality but the real thing itself. He posited no world behind or beyond the one he sauntered through on his daily rounds.
So while I must confess some sympathy for the correspondent who mourned, apropos of your religious conversion, the declension of a "first-rate social critic" into a "second-rate theologian" (or somesuch ... couldn't track it down), I would put it more generously: the more Christian you have become the more you sound like Emerson and the less like Thoreau. Where once you engaged directly with the world as it is, there are now veils to be pierced, curtains to be lifted, before the most meaningful things come into view. Where once you labored to discern the texture of a "real" England, you now go quarrying about in shrines to long dead saints for the most instructive realities. You've gone transcendental on us.
The brow of Ed Abbey, whom you admire, would surely darken. In Desert Solitaire, he flogged himself whenever he caught himself resorting to metaphor, allusion, or anything that obstructed his view of rocks, lizards, and yuccas in their bare thusness. Never having met any "underlying realities," he snickered, he was happy to commune with "surfaces." Or consider David Abram, whom I imagine Thoreau might have sounded like if he could have read his way through the next century's phenomenologists. It is likely that most people reading this have read his two books. Reread, if you have it handy, the story he tells about his confrontation with a sea lion colony and a humpback whale while kayaking off the coast of Alaska (Becoming Animal, 159-166). What in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account?
Paul, I have attended carefully to all your writings - fiction and essays - since I encountered you in the 2014 profile in the New York Times Magazine. I care enough to worry. I suppose if you feel you have been called, then you are duty-bound to acknowledge the existence of a Caller. But I feel like a hiker who toils all the way up the long, steep ascent to the top of Yosemite Falls, inches himself towards those steel railings you can cling to as you peek over the falls, into the mist, and out over the landscape below ... and then, full of awe and wonder, hears a voice from nowhere whisper in his ear - "Now, for the full experience, flap your arms and fly."
The question, I guess, is why aren't the falls, the sea lions, the Utah desert, and the loons enough? Why must we leap into the void to find what is readily available on sensuous surfaces? I cannot fear for your soul, but I do worry that your uncivilized spirit will be doused in the still waters of an orthodoxy.
Well, this is just inevitable when something as surprising as a Christian coversion comes upon someone. Some readers will feel they have lost something. The writer can't allow himself to regret this. He has to write about the truth he is pursuing. It might seem harsh. In the age before the Internet it would have seemed less so. These days we get our responses in real time!
I would ask why you feel so content in the small room of the immanent when our souls clearly yearn for the spaciousness of the infinite transcendent? Is it really enough for you?
Funnily enough, I never liked either Thoreau or Emerson that much.
An interesting series of questions here. I suppose I could say a lot of things.
One thing I can't do though is answer the ultimate question: 'why aren't the falls, the sea lions, the Utah desert, and the loons enough?' Both because I'd have no idea where to start, but also because the framing doesn't really make sense to me.
It's interesting to see your journey through other's eyes. I see an obvious continuum from Real England to my holy wells. Actually they both stem from the same impulse I've had since I was a child: my fascination with the margins, the lost things, the overlooked places. But I can see why it would look differently to others.
All of my writing was about looking for culture. Do that long enough and you end up looking for the root of culture, which is spirit. David Abram knows this. If watching some sea lions fooling about (I've watched David perform this on stage) were 'enough' then I suppose there would be no need for religion, philosophy, art or the vast array of indigenous spiritualities that David admires and writes about.
But those things do exist. Why is that?
The thing is, there is no conflict that I see between some transcendent 'void' and the 'surface' of 'reality.' One thing that entranced me about Orthodox theology is that this way of seing is alien to it. 'Transcendence' is not out there. It can sound like the call of the loon. God is 'everywhere present and filling all things,' as the prayer has it. Once I realised that this was what I had been grasping at forever, I went looking for where to find it.
Finally, I would attend to this question of yours:
'What in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account? '
I suppose there might be a book in that. But I would ask in return: what 'moral instruction' do you receive from dancing sea lions? I can't see the equivalent of the beatitudes in there. For all I know they might just be hungry. You call David's account 'non-transcendental' but I'm not so sure about that. It has a strong romantic streak in it. Some projection too.
The Christian canon offers some quite remarkable things, though. Such sweetness and richness, at its best. I never imagined that. You might perhaps ask yourself your own question. About Christianity or any faith. Why do these things exist at all? What do they offer us? The world is indeed beautiful and full of wonder. And yet ... and yet ...
For Paul-regarding the natural beauty of our world where man has yet to impose his will upon it: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard’. My reference to Psalm 19 here is to posit that one reason for these things to exist, is to point us to the architect and creator of all that is, and that all of creation speaks to us of the intangible, yet knowable.
I forgot to mention-I revered Emerson and Thoreau as a young man, and have read all of Emerson’s works as well as Thoreau’s. I thought I would revisit Emerson, and recently purchased a complete set of Emerson’s works. I find it hard to read now. It seems as though he tries way too hard to not say something that may grate on his intended audience, but chooses rather to cloak his meaning in lofty words and allegory. Perhaps that is the point-to draw the reader deeper into the subject. Don’t get me wrong-it’s literary art at its finest, but I just find it tedious now, but then I have been called stodgy and blunt at times. Funny how your appetites change as you grow and learn. I think I shall donate my books to someone who can appreciate them for what they are.
Nature is both real, and an icon. It interacts with us directly, we can touch and taste and be wounded by it. And we can also ‘be inspired’ as you say, toward ‘reverence’. Is that reverence then transferable to something besides the animal or mountain or storm that inspired it? What is it in humans that translates the meaning beyond the experience? I liked Abbey, a lot, and have a serious lifelong love affair with nature, plants especially. I feel actual pain watching my county’s farmland get paved in solar panels. I also became Orthodox from this perspective. In fact, that intense, life long directness I have had with plants made it, finally, the icon that allowed me to see the truth. It’s ok if you can’t see it. Never would judge you. I even remember in my former iteration feeling that same disappointment in someone who had become religious. It’s really hard to see past the icon, especially when it is so breathtakingly beautiful. It’s how I know that God loves humans. He probably shouldn’t have trusted us with so much beauty, but it clearly is meant to help us find truth.
This is a nice way of putting it. My former self had pretty much the attitude that Brian has above, so I entirely sympathise. It's really hard, maybe impossible, to explain this 'conversion' thing to people. It's not even really the right word. To me it feels like fulfillment. I still love nature, and Ed Abbey is a great read. But there is something beyond it all. There is something calling. There really is. Sometimes, you can hear it.
Thanks. I still see the confusion, maybe disappointment also in my old friends, my parents. I also know that when they think of faith they see Tammy Faye Baker, Trinity Broadcast Network, essentially a pyramid scheme cloaked in Bible quotes. They have no idea what to do with Orthdoxy.
Divinity and divine will speak directly to our souls from behind and within nature and we feel awe, wonder, reverence and meaning etc. Which is the beginning of true knowledge and the basis of proper thinking.
The calling for me is beauty. First in creating us in His image, second the beauty in Creation, then the beauty of language. I am resting in Beholding the Trinity. I hope this isn't too Christian. But after 43 years as a Christian, I enjoy the ache for Him.
I too find the beauty of an old growth grove of giant trees in Olympic National Park to be more spiritually 'full' than any cathedral in which I've been (and there have been too many to count). I began to believe that the old cathedrals and churches (the newer ones leave me cold) were trying to reflect these transcendental experiences their builders had felt in natural settings. I also began wondering why I felt this sense of wonder and awe in these natural settings where the hand of man had not yet wrought the inevitable destruction it so inevitably yields. Why? What is this sense of 'otherness' and why does it make me want for more meaning in my own life? I can find wonder in the natural world while also seeking out why it gives me the desire for meaning in its beauty.
I'm sure that gothic cathedrals were based on forests. Simon Schama has written about this. Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is an explicit version of this.
Perhaps the feeling of being ‘closer’ to that Divine Spring when amongst those things that are not made by man is intended. I too have spent much of my life in churches that were no more than buildings erected as a monument to those who built them. Having said that, I have been in man made structures built for the purpose of gathering to worship in which that is precisely what occurred-unfettered unscripted and wholly spontaneous, yet orderly, worship. It isn’t about the building or the setting, but the attitude and willingness of the ‘occupant’ to permit the spirit of God to work. God is not limited by time or place. We however can often sense the distinction between the natural and the manufactured when we detach ourselves from the works of our own hands and see the natural world as the work of God and not of our own making. I have spent much time alone in the wilds of New Mexico, Colorado, and Alaska, often never speaking or hearing (when possible) another human voice for days on end. The joy is inescapable. Not so much perhaps because of the serenity and beauty of my surroundings (although that enhances my appreciation for the architect) but the deprivation of all things civilized and temporal seem to open a doorway into another world that has so much more to offer…and no, no drugs were necessary (ha ha) as was the case fifty years ago when I was a much younger man. I get it…
While I can understand why so many people need to oppose ? what is made by human hands, and what is not made by human hands, what I am seeing in the very industrial environment where I am now living, and will continue to live, since I am old now, is what happens when Man tries to get rid of the beauty, the power, that HE can create with his hands in favor of industrial ways of making where he, as a flesh and blood animal with hands, does not use them (and I could say even more provocatively, maybe...) towards the glory of God. I realize now, rather late in life, that I was raised to not learn to use my hands intelligently, skillfully..."craftily", even, but to leave them hanging at my side, probably as a way of resisting temptation. Certainly there is a long standing Puritan obsession about the evils of masturbation.
Over recent years, I have been plunging myself into the daily work on my musical instruments that takes me... out of the world. Those instruments, particularly the violin, are miracles. Objects, but no ordinary ones, they are miracles, and show what Man, in the past, was capable of making with his hands, his mind, his heart, testifying to his tremendous physical and spiritual capacities in making an instrument (sing). And yet... this is civilisation...Music is civilisation, to my mind.
I do not think that I would be happy living as a... termite, even though sometimes, I feel tremendous pressure around me in what is an often mindless denial of all that We have been... in the past, but want to throw out of the window to become "natural ?" termites.
Will this make us closer to God ? Nature ? than playing the violin ? I'm not sure about that at all.
There is a big difference between the U.S. and France, where I am living. New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, the parts of the country that are INHOSPITABLE have not been colonized by humans to the extent that temperate France has. The chances in France of being able to go out, walk, and not meet another human being for days on end are... slim. I don't know about Ireland. Maybe in Scotland ? this is more possible, but maybe not.
For the deprivation of the temporal, I don't even need to go out into the desert : our Christian calendar is going down, and "real time" is no substitute for it.
This comment may seem like strong stuff to you, but I feel strongly about all of this, and it shows. There is middle ground between "natural" and "manufactured", and we have severely neglected/rejected it, to the detriment of our minds, bodies and souls. And that is maybe why I feel that, when tempted to head back and forth between Scylla and Charybdis, maybe we should stop and reflect a little bit before blindly setting forth ?
I get the same feeling when I'm in the mountains and have yet to visit a cathedral or church that comes close to the feelings the "wild" evokes in my soul (though, the Sagrada Familia comes close). My wife and I are lucky enough to live close to the Olympics. Last Friday we spent the day snowshoeing along the Obstruction Point Road (closed for winter) and had lunch beneath Steeple Peak, overlooking the Elwa River valley with the jagged white teeth of the Bailey Ranger to the west. It was beautiful beyond description, so I won't even try. It was also so quiet it reminded us of what true quiet truly is. If you enjoyed the ancient trees in the Olympics, you should visit the Grove of the Patriarchs in Mt. Rainier National Park sometime. It will blow your mind. It did mine.
Michael, I too am in the shadow of the Olympics. I grew up in Sequim in the 70s, left in the 80s and returned to the Peninsula about 10 years ago, after wandering all reaches of the planet. Lovely to find others here so close to home. The only other place I feel as right in my skin as the Peninsula is Paul's Ireland.
A decade ago, I structured my life to spend as much time in wild places with wild creatures as possible. For me, that meant living on the road in the wildernesses of the Western US, first in tents and now in a camper. Because I’m not independently wealthy, I work, but the rest of my time is held in quiet, remote wilds; alone. I’ve had more deeply connective experiences out here than I can count, but I hit a wall in 2021, and walked (stumbled) back to Christianity. Here’s how I’d put it: I got the time and space I was after to merge into the wilds, and indeed there were many times that was readily available. In that sense, and at those times, the natural world was enough to satiate. But I discovered too, reluctantly, that in some strange way I’m an alien out here, maybe even a thief. While I fully accept that all creatures have minds, mine is different—of a human sort. It’s not meant, I believe, to stay always horizontally-oriented; it’s meant, in a way unique to our species, to look up. The lilies of the fields may not spin nor toil, but my human mind and heart sure do. Nature, by its surfaces, provides plenty, especially for respite when one is wearied of the steely world. But in my experience, nature as such won’t provide final rest. As the resident alien out here, I have to claim citizenship in a different kingdom (not too far away), lest I’m never home. And, surprisingly, I think these wild creatures may just want that: they want me both here, and home.
thanks, Steven. I think the alien point is a good one, but (as you might expect!) I view it a little differently. I think the alienation is something we have done to ourselves. I don't think it is inherent in being human. It looks to me like those humans for whom all the spirit they need and comprehend is in the natural world (pagans, for shorthand) do not experience that alienation. And I think, for ecological reasons, being happy with horizontal is a good thing. An ethical stance. I have come to view the idea of human uniqueness as deeply problematic. Just from my own observations of (conversations with!) other critters, my reading in animal intelligence, plant sentience (Sheldrakes' mushrooms, for heaven's sake ... now that is mind-blowing).
See my above comment to Steven, please, which adresses some of the things that you raise here. On horizontal... to the extent that we have stood up at one point in time, our heads are OVER our feet, and that has important consequences for us. That means that our heads are... "superior" to our feet, to the extent that our heads are "over/above" our feet, but, for sure, if you want to get from point A to point B, your head is not going to do much for you. In the same way, when you have a leak in your pipes, calling a doctor to take care of it will not do either.
It seems... logical ? to me that every living thing is both "like" and "different from" every other living thing AND SPECIES. But figuring out where the separations are between "like "and "different" is very complicated. Too complicated for our frail and fragile human selves ?
This is exactly how I used to think. But 'think' is actually the wrong word, I think. I was passionately attached to this notion. We are not separate. We are not distinct or 'better.' In some ways I still believe this. In some ways it is true: clearly humans are deeply interrelated with the rest of life and dependent on it. Clearly other creatures are sentient. I used to believe too - perhaps it was my primary belief - that we had once been connected and were now alienated and needed to find the way home.
Interestingly enough, the ecological reading of the story of Eden (Daniel Quinn's novel 'Ishmael' lays it out in detail) offers just this story. The exulsion from the garden is this alienation in action, after we become 'civilised.' So we need to de-civilise to get back home.
The trouble is that we can't. And the more I looked back into history and pre-history, and the more I studied other cultures - even 'indigenous' ones - the more I saw that we had always had this alienation. Because we really are different. Our minds can do things other creatures cannot, seemingly. The religious impulse. The rationalisation. The seeking. The powerful intellect. The huge forebrain. We are not monkeys or dogs or trees. We were built to do ... something else.
'Horizontal' - that's what we love, in the modern world. We want pure horizontality, in politics, in culture, in nature. We think that will take us back home. I used to. I used to agree about 'paganism' too. But the 'pagans' are just as disconnected from 'nature' as the rest of us. And without the beatitudes and the parables, paganism reliably takes you to dark places. Following 'nature' is no panacea, not if you know how nature actually works.
I am sometimes nostalgic for my deep ecology days but I can't go back. And the internal anxiety I had back then has, in any case, completely disappeared, to be replaced with something much sweeter and truer. That was part of my long search.
We are indeed radically different....Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century called man "the one true and great amphibian"....in two worlds simultaneously...
There is an article in the thoughts you've expressed here. Or perhaps you've already written it? Fascinating. I tend to think we have perhaps over intellectualised religious belief. (As you have said before the reformation was part of this process.) For most people in most cultures what we call 'religion' was simply the background against which people lived their lives. The rituals and practices weren't separate from the everydayness of their world. Today we might call this unthinking but sometimes too much thinking goes on. My son has a Polish girlfriend who although in most repsects is throughly modern attends the Polish Catholic church (in Nottingham - which has a big Polish community) as a matter of course. He sometimes goes with her and I can see him slowly being drawn into the church - which is good as far as I am concerned. Didn't Pascal say something about belief following religious practice rather than the other way round?
I hope I am responding to everyone who has engaged in this conversation (I am not always sure I am hitting the right "reply" button).
I am imagining three roads - unbelief, pagan/indigenous spirituality, Christian spirituality - that intersect at various points, and most of us seem to have passed through those intersections. We have done so at different points in our lives and are still (me at least) traveling in a different direction, but we have all confronted - are still confronting - the issues that arise when those roads cross. It has made for an interesting conversation - rather more than I bargained for when I posted my comment. In this case, it has been pleasurable to get more than I bargained for!
Probably we will want to let it rest soon, but allow me to clarify a few things, only because we seem to agree that this is important business. I am up on the literature on Native Americans, at least, so I do not have a romantic view of the pagan/indigenous past. The Comanches, for example, would not have been good neighbors. But you have to concede that those tribes, warlike and peaceable, figured out how to live on the land in ways that did not destroy it, and that figuring out was woven into their spiritual practice. That is pretty impressive, given where we are now. The point is not that we should return to that past, return to the garden - that is neither possible nor desirable - but that there are important things to learn from those lifeways and those practices. One can, as has been pointed out, find passages in the Bible that gesture in an ecological direction, but it is hard to find an instance in history of a Christian culture inhabiting a piece of land for an extended period and taking the same kind of care of it. Wendell Berry hates this kind of talk, and I very much admire Wendell Berry, but I just can't find in Christian theology or practice anything, ecologically speaking, that measures up to what, say, the woodland tribes of North America worked out. When the first Christians crossed the Atlantic, they planted their flag in a landscape that had been inhabited for centuries and that was teeming with life. They were hacking away at the trees, and at the native inhabitants, before the first hymn had died on pious Christian lips. Perhaps that is why I chose to stir the waters as I have - it just seems like an inopportune moment to go hunting for Jesus.
But then, of course, it has been surprising for me to find out from this discussion that so many of you find the pagan and Christian views towards nature as practically interchangeable, or complementary at least. That hasn't always been the case. Steven, for most of Christian history your confession that you were down with the Gila River gods would have put you on the rack, my brother! So maybe the pagan/Christian intersection is now home to some new ideas that will serve us all better than either, in their earlier iterations, could have. That is hopeful for folks on both sides of the intersection.
As for the critters, beavers change the land they inhabit in ways that civilized humans, at least, are only beginning to understand. I presume the same mix of instinct and whimsy is at work as governs our landscaping endeavors. In the course of making a home for themselves, they make a home for a whole menagerie of species, plant and animal. Not much in the way of a forebrain, no language we can comprehend, no beaver Homer, but still something I hope we can all agree is a deep, farseeing wisdom. And, I would wager, some moral sensing of a beaver kind. If it hadn't been for the Europeans who trapped them to near extinction so people back in London and Paris could keep their heads warm in the latest style, North America would be looking quite different at the moment.
We could do this forever, I know. Allow me one last story, one that brings us back to the nature of spirit. My most recent spiritual encounter looked like this: I had dismounted from my bike for a rest and a look around ... I was looking over a stretch of southern California coastline ... out of the corner of my eye I saw a flock of birds - small ones, don't know what they were - flying in formation down the beach, when right in front of me, without breaking formation, the whole flock suddenly swept upwards for a couple of seconds, halted all together in midair, then swooped back down to land maybe 50 meters farther down the beach. My reaction to this was pure bodily exhilaration. My heart raced, my breath caught, well before I did any thinking about what had happened. I savored that sensation, now with some mind involvement, for quite a while, indeed I am convinced something of that encounter is still alive in me somewhere, somehow. I cannot explain what happened - why I reacted as I did to that event. But the birds' maneuver seemed to me joy-driven - they were not in that instant looking for food or a mate, they were having some bird fun together. Whimsical, not instinctual, behavior. That, and the sheer beauty of it, must have triggered my own capacity for joy and delight in the beautiful. So I suddenly felt at home in the world, in exactly the same way that the birds, by doing what they did, demonstrated their at-homeness. That is how I understand the spirit we shared - it is the feeling that was communicated by a particular kind of encounter, thisworldly from start to finish. It probably mattered that I was caught by surprise, didn't see it (them) coming. To take the Christian step - to find a Creator at the fount of experiences like this, as the (spirit) tie that binds - would have pulled me away from the birds. The Emerson move. And that would have diminished the experience. Where you all think there is a truth out there I have yet to discover I see a truth that Christianity would, for no reason i have cause to accept, proclaim to be incomplete, precisely because of its plain worldliness. You want me to take the leap. But for me to accept that dare, I would have to find some God-content in simple acts of joy. You can trust me not to judge you for taking that step, for finding spirit where you will. But for me it is still birds all the way down.
Eastern Christianity does not make "the Emerson move" because it doesn't drawn a hard line between transcendence and immanence. As Paul said above, the Spirit is viewed as being "everywhere present and filling all things." Thus Orthodoxy is not pantheist but it is panentheist. When I go to an old growth forest in northern Pennsylvania, which I do several times a year, I can honor the trees not just because I know that God made them and they point to him, which is true, but because the Spirit is in some sense "in" them. The tree has its own glory, which does not take away from God's glory, because he's the one who gave it its glory in the first place. This is why Wendell Berry insists that we treat the Creation as a gift. Do one's thoughts of the giver somehow take away from the appreciation or enjoyment of a gift? Not in my experience.
Probably not. Thanks for that, Rob. It seems my view of Christianity leaves some variants out. Like Berry, I grew up in Appalachia, the heart of the US Bible Belt. There were evangelicals and ecumenicals. My family was Lutheran - solidly in the ecumenical camp. The pastors viewed the Bible as a source of moral instruction rather than literal Truth, the services were staid and passionless except for the hymn-singing, which contained an exuberance that has surely stayed with me in various guises. That there might be a panentheist Christianity is news to me. I thought all that stuff was heretical, not orthodox. I will have to recalibrate a bit, I suppose, and look to educate myself about all this.
And “birds all the way down” may be enough for you. I’d be lying if I said I reasoned my way back to God: I got dragged. I’m thrilled by your ecstatic love of the natural world, and heaven knows we can use more of that, transcendent versus immanent be damned.
One note about your reference to indigenous cultures here and the land. I concur with most of what you say, but want to suggest the same problems of ecological hell also appear to have arisen here with pre-colonization empire-building as much as anywhere. It’s empire—the Tower of Babel—that denudes, no matter who is building (I didn’t find Graeber and Winslow’s attempted corrective on this in The Dawn of Everything terribly convincing). To me, the morally-relevant question is: what kind of cultural practices to land and Creator prevent or mitigate against empire-building?
You’re correct that Christianity in its popular forms historically hasn’t provided a sound response to this, but then again, neither have many alternative theologies (that’s why so many peoples of so many stripes have built empires…or at least land-killing cities…in virtually all geographies where it’s possible). And Paul’s project here is, I think, resurrecting some of those dusty traditions within the Christian faith that do answer the question quite soundly. Plenty of non-Christian cultures have much to contribute on this front too.
Meanwhile, empire ain’t going away on its own volition, so I do spend less time these days with Ted Kascizinski and more wondering if there is in fact a way that the land stays good while the people congregate densely. And what kind of theology would be appropriate to that? I don’t ultimately know, but loving thy enemy, taking in the stranger, and giving up property at times feels like a good start.
In one of the stories of St. Seraphim communing with his grizzly bear, a woman approaches; a pilgrim sees them in the wilderness and is greatly terrified.
St. Seraphim slaps the bear across the face roughly (but with no affect), then says “go now, your scaring the woman.”
He was loving each creature and treating it according to it’s nature- bear to bear and man to woman.
We do a disservice to sentimentalize the natural world an creatures in it. We humans are the ones who are broken away from our own natures as humans creatures, the animals are still serving and loving God according to their intact natures.
We people were/are meant to partner with an befriend our fellow creatures who draw breath as spirit in them like ourselves,
but to be what we are requires a return to ourselves before we can stably know and love other creatures for what they are. This return is the metanoia of the Christian spiritual life.
This is why Orthodox Christianity puts the priority on uniting ourselves to our Creator first, who is Divine Nature united first to us in the human nature of our voluntarily enfleshed Creator Jesus Christ.
Then, we see things and relate to things naturally, according to our purity of heart.
It is my nature that needs restoring, that I might recognize and love the nature of fox as he is.
We both may walk a mountain path at dusk and come suddenly upon a vista of sunset ablaze before us.
It is Fox’s nature to look up at the light, then look down again and carry on.
It is humanity’s nature to look up and stop. To wonder in the beauty of it, become still and silent that this gift touch not just our surfaces desires and feelings but enter more deeply our very souls.
And then carry on,
touched by beauty that saves us with gratitude in our hearts that have been filled, toward the Author and Artist of all, the Beautiful One Himself.
I concede that there’s nothing humans do that other creatures don’t also do (including abstract affairs like counting the days), and sometimes far better, of course. Now, part of the difference between us and our brethren is a matter of degree: birds narrate the world audibly, but they don’t recite the Odyssey, nor write Ulysses. But I don’t rest my claim there, as I’m open to even language being more complex in other species (whales, fungal networks, chatter at the biome level, etc).
The great and distinctive gift that’s bestowed to us is, I believe, moral sensing. Again, other creatures are moral, but here the degree matters: we can, by a moral reasoning based on moral sensing alone, completely remake ourselves, and by extension the land. That’s why, in part, I reckon God assigns us early on the task of naming the beasts—to call a beast a name is to elevate it into distinction…to know a creature as distinctive is to begin the process of right relationship with it, in particular through moral sensing and reasoning that’s specific to that beast’s nature. This is why, for instance, at our best we can alter a land to bring forth more biodiverse flourishing than originally found, and at a rapid clip—given our power, we really could, if we cooperated, remake the world into a richer chorus than we found it, and do so relatively quickly. As you’ll note, that power is also ridiculously dangerous, hence the modern world. But the fact remains, in my view, that’s is a unique power by degree nonetheless.
If I were to take a straight horizontal ecological reading of this development, I’d say Earth evolved this gift of moral sensing in us to serve her and her choirs: I don’t find it too far-fetched to assume that our rockets blasting into space may be an actual reproduction attempt by Earth (those rockets sure do look like reproductive organs, for instance). But alas, if Earth made us because she's got a mind and desirous will, why stop there in the cosmos: wouldn't her mind and will belong as well to a larger mind and will (a solar system perhaps), and a larger one beyond that, all the way out to the ends of the Universe? Wouldn't Earth then be floating in the same consciousness stew that we are, albeit at a different level of complexity?
If so, we ought to, I reckon, use our moral sensing and reasoning to consider from where that consciousness stew arises (thus what it wants). Afterall, if the Universe has a mind and will, it (they) too must derive it from somewhere; and we seem to have been bestowed the gift of reasoning through that derivation. Now even if one takes the position that mind arises spontaneously out of matter at a certain threshold of complexity, we still have the trouble that matter itself arose, and in an extraordinarily fine-tuned way such that it eventually led to this mind-arising. Unless one wants to say that the initial matter of the Universe popped out of nothing (which I find untenably incoherent, for nothing would also mean nothing to pop out from), one has to, I believe, arrive at proclaiming an eternal wellspring from which all things emanate. The trouble for polytheists here is that such an eternal source would actually have to be eternal, meaning boundless, meaning without any distinction within its (or his/her, if you like) essence. And if there can't be bounds, there can only be one: hence, monotheism. Monotheism, by the way, also makes plenty of room for forces, powers, principalities, lesser rulers, fractal minds, etc. I'm a monotheist, and I have no qualms with a Gila River spirit and mind.
So, while I think it's fine to "be happy with horizontal," I don't think it can fully explain things. And in that sense, I don't think it's true enough. Acknowledging the reality of both an immanent and transcendent is not about functionalism (what serves our species and the land best); but about grasping, using our gifted moral sensing and by extension reasoning, what's True (and we'll be ever-grasping, of course).
By the way, as I wrote these words, I still feel somewhat alien to all this kind-of discoursing: it's an awkward fit (I appreciate you wanting to flap your wings on a mountaintop...I concur), as I remain satisfied with the notion that we really ought to strive to be like those lilies aformentioned, and that direct experience of/with God is the name of the game, ultimately. But here we are, still naming beasts.
I feel kinship with you in what you have written, here. Just a few words : I think that Man LEARNS to stand up. He learns, because he sees others of his kind standing up, and walking, and figures out, even before He can talk, that his path in life leads him to stand up and walk. Left to his own devices, he gets around on all fours.
When you stand up, you can LOOK UP, and see the sky without difficulty. I'm not really sure just how much the birds LOOK UP, even though they're flying in the sky. But.. we look up.
Maybe the idea, but FACT of being able to look up is related to hierarchy, because, we can look up AND look down, and look horizontally. I find it very important that we can look in THREE directions : up, down, and horizontally. "Up" is related to the word "superior", "down" is related to the word "inferior", which are indications of position and place, and we are animals, like all living animals or plants, or whatever, that depend on indications of position and place. (I hope that this does not sound too abstract, because it is really both abstract and concrete.)
What I hear you talking about above is the necessity of refuge, somehow, a place of one's OWN, and that seems very natural to me, as we are extremely sophisticated, vulnerable and fragile animals. What made us stand up, at one point of time ? Was it a... choice ? What was behind it ? What I say here sometimes is that, by standing up, we put the maximum distance between our feet and our heads/minds, and that has profound implications and consequences. Feet... on the ground, heads in the sky, but each far from each other, which means having to negotiate a very fragile balancing act, and all the time, except when we're sleeping. And we need a fair amount of sleep, and we need a haven to sleep in, I think.
I like the way that you "use" the old words here... I, too, feel the need to return to the old words. "Kingdom" is a good one.
I got busy and the conversation has meandered in other directions, but I feel I owe a response to those (way up in the thread) who responded so thoughtfully to my original comment. I am all for seeking - and finding! - spirit in the world. I was once a Dawkins kind of atheist, but no more. The key difference we are exploring here seems to lie between alternative ways of thinking about spirit. I worked my way back into a comfortable relationship with experiences we usually call "religious" by adopting what I suppose is most accurately labeled a pagan conception of spirit. I do not think the project of draining the spirit out of the natural world and locating it in a sky god that is then worshipped in ways mediated by one priesthood or another - the monotheistic project - has turned out very well. I am nothing close to a practicing pagan, but I have settled into a notion of the sacred that, like Abram's, most resembles the indigenous one. Unlike many who have weighed in here, I gather, I see these two as quite distinct, particularly in the kind of attitude they sanction towards the natural world
So what do the dancing sea lions have on the beatitudes? Answering that one might push all this a little farther down the road to mutual understanding. For me, the highwater mark of moral thinking in the Western tradition is Aldo Leopold's land ethic: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Such an ethic calls us to live in communion with a non-human world - to listen to it, pay it respect, communicate with it in the varying non-verbal languages spoken there. Abram's dance with the sea lions embodies that spirit. He might have cursed himself for leaving his hunting rifle in the pick-up, but he doesn't. He responds to the threat of danger by figuring out, very much on the fly, how to communicate with these other beings. They, by their own lights, do the same. It is a lovely moment and, for me, a deeply ethical one. That is how we need to go about in the world if we are not to destroy it. Compared to that, the beatitudes are ethical in a way that has not yet extended itself into the terrain that most needs ethical consideration. And I don't know how much longer we can wait for a sky god religion to make that extension. Immanent realities always seem to get subordinated to transcendent realities among those who believe the latter exist. That logic seems to be at work in this thread. The immanent world is a "small room." And an icon is an object, right? Isn't that part of the problem? Or notice, Paul, your willingness to reduce the sea lions' behavior to instinct (hunger).
Everyone, of course, must follow their own heart, but these are the things I worry about.
Quickly, but this deserves more consideration, when the Romans were rounding up the beasts for circus games, I am not sure at all that monotheistic sky gods were dominating the scene. Since I think that, for a very long time now, Man has been trying to figure out who he is by watching the animals, and copying them, he has had a long time to see that predation is part of the natural world, and that animals kill other animals, for food BUT NOT JUST, (lots of prejudices on our part about this one...).
The rules in the NATURAL WORLD include predation, animals killing other animals, insects killing other insects. I think that we don't want to see, or believe this, right now...and that it is a big problem.
'I do not think the project of draining the spirit out of the natural world and locating it in a sky god that is then worshipped in ways mediated by one priesthood or another - the monotheistic project - has turned out very well. '
This is also where I found myself five or ten years or so back. But it's a really fundamental misunderstanding of both the 'pagans' and the 'monotheists' - though I think these categories are also part of the problem. I do appreciate that plenty of Christian churches may have helped compound the understanding.
But if we are talking about the Christian faith - and certainly its original Orthodox iteration - there is no 'sky god.' That is a remnant of your Dawkinsy days, I'd say. A silly straw man. God, as Christ tells us, is within us all. He/It is the creator of all life. That's the primal claim: that there is something beyond this, and woven through it, and woven through us. That if there is a communion between all beings it is the communion of the light of their creator, through which we can communicate and commune. And worship.
There is no replacing creation with creator. Creator is the reason for creation. Creation is an icon of God. It is sacred in that sense. But it is not the focus of worship. Why would it be? You find meaning and beauty in nature and so do I. But you want this to be 'enough.' That's fine. But whether something is 'enough' depends, I think, on what you imagine you are looking for.
I don't know of any 'pagan' culture - including those 'indigenous' ones which Abram likes to explore - which do not have an understanding of this 'great spirit' which, in Orthodox terminology is 'everywhere present and filling all things.' That is the source of the dancing sea lions. Similarly, at its root Christianity requires and expects communion with creation. We do not have to 'wait' for Christianity to develop some modern 'ecological understanding.' It's right there in the gospels. Neither do we need to romanticise the 'indigenous' 'pagans', many of whose lifeways were warlike, destructive and sacrificial - because they had at their heart no moral teaching.
(Incidentally, I did not 'reduce the sea lions behaviour to hunger.' I have no idea what they were doing. I wasn't there. I have said repeatedly that the Earth is more conscious and alive than many, including probably most Christians, give it credit for. But we are not going to get anywhere pretending that humans are not in some way set apart. For better or for worse (often for worse) we just are.)
The land ethic is great, and I have written about it myself. But it tells me nothing about how to love my neighbour, forgive my enemy or come closer to God in prayer - which means to access my true self, through which I can live as a human should on this earth.
There is no contradiction between a living conscious world and a love of God through Christ. The very essence of Christianity is precisely that the 'sky god' conception is nonsense. This God walks on earth: enters matter and is torutured and transforms it. This God is immanent to His very core. He is part of nature as well as its maker. It's quite a claim.
Where I had got to on my long search was not 'enough' I think because it was not the full picture. The keystone was missing. When I was in your place I would not have wanted to hear this either, but it turns out to be true. That is an experience, rather than a thought.
On Paul's recommendation last week, I've started listening to Fr Seraphim Aldea's meditations. I think it is this one 'Why sin gets worse after we find Christ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15xkPmoh2EQ, which goes on how often converts find not only do they continue sinning (certainly my humbling experience) but also they find that they are not as good at doing the things they were praised for before and they may find their careers and fail to reach their previously anticipated potential. Fr Seraphim says that is part of choosing to follow Christ.
Having said that, I hardly think Paul's Machine essays show a falling off of his powers, and i see no sign he doesn't love the natural world as much as before, but merely recognises that they are signs pointing towards the Creator. It is a bit much to expect him to hit the ground running as a great theologian so soon after entering the Church. As far as I can judge he is feeling his way and not trying to run before he can walk.
If Abbey only saw the "rocks, lizards, and yuccas in their bare thusness" then he never did really see them. There's no "bare thusness" that matters to a human or anything else. Not even colors exist in "thusness", just electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. Colors come from our perception. The "bare thusness" is chance meetings of matter in an indifferent universe - lit by a "black sun" - if we are to repurpose his wording.
Of course he didn't see any "bare thusness" either - you don't devote your life to "bare thusness", at best you package it and sell it. He saw the trancendance, but was too tied up in his era's ideologies to call it by name and go the full way.
The transcendence of faith gave us cathedrals, and Japanese temples, and cave drawings, and Bach, and holy forrests, and historical cities that still look like gems. The transcendence of thusness gave us our modern cities and modernist architecture - and nature as a zoo to go and consume as nature tourists. The approach you describe is what created our world of 2024. Are we happy with it?
As for "what in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account?"
Oh, about two millenia of that, to hundreds of millions across the world and history, in context far wider than nature appreciation. Does that count?
Of course if the churches one has in mind are like modern evangelical, protestant or the "Church of England", well those might as well be NGOs or the local Rotary club.
I apologize, Nick, I think I was unclear about bare thusness. I did not mean to suggest dead, mechanical. I just meant sufficient unto itself, not needing anything beyond it to be meaningful. Abbey saw those things as animate, deserving of the fullest respect. He did as much as is humanly possible - as a writer, a take-no-prisoner polemicist, an inspiration for Earth First!, the activist group that used direct action tactics to slow down the Machine - to stand in the way of the forces that "created our world of 2024." But, like everybody else, he failed. That failure may be the elephant in the room here - the event that shaped the landscape of possibility that we now, all in our various ways, are trying to navigate.
This Texan used to think the Bush family were the good guys.
Now I know they are villains. And Trump is the one who, more than anyone else, exposed them.
I also changed my mind on Trump back in 2016. I was on the edge of becoming a Never Trumper. Then I listened to one of his more serious speeches that year, and I thought, "He gets it."
In religion, I've gone from someone who dare not let the Invocation of the Saints cross his lips to someone who asks saints to pray for him everyday. Hey I need all the prayer I can get!
Texan here too! I know what you mean. I had a deep “political conversion” (during the pandemic) after reading David Talbot’s book the Devil’s Chessboard. To me Left/Right is theatre, it’s all Up/Down. The Bush Family and the Clintons are cut from the same cloth. Glad my true citizenship is in the Kingdom.
Another Texan, and now we have to contend with NeoCon John Cornyn and Dade "I wasn't drinking ossifer" Phelan. I woke up to the fact that the "conservatives" were playing me by using God, country and family to acquire power for the war machine who in turn places the thirty pieces of silver in their coffers.
Something that I have really changed my mind about, or at least have had my mind open to changing, is population. I have always believed that “go forth and multiply” meant exactly that, that the idea that population needed to be limited was wrong from a religious POV. In fact all the dire prognostications about running out of food and other resources as well as runaway numbers in the future were wrong. But we seem to have reached an ungovernable number. Does democracy inevitably breakdown when the numbers get too big, when one man was meant to represent 1000 or 10,000 now represents 1,000,000 is this representative government at all?
Yet the idea that we the horde need to be trimmed to create a theme park for the elite is grotesque.
I have always believed that preserving the environment was much more a matter of how we lived than of how many of us there were, and I still believe this. There is plenty of space, arable land, and food, for many more of us with a less consumptive lifestyle. But there are issues of law and order and government that are seriously out of control.
The older I get the more I know only a God can save us, and the less I know about everything else.
I changed my mind about trusting my kids' pediatrician. She always seemed like a nice lady at their checkups, and I had no reason to distrust her. Then in 2022, when information was coming out all over the place about the Covid vaccine causing myocarditis in teen boys, she asked if my son (a runner in perfect health) had had his booster shot. I said we were going to hold off on that until more studies came out.
She looked at me blankly and said: "What studies?"
"There are studies going on all over the world," I sputtered. What studies?? I wasn't paying this bimbo to pluck my kids' eyebrows; she was their doctor. Yet she didn't have a clue.
Now I take my kids to sports physicals twice a year. Full stop. Unless they need acute care, CA pediatricians can go to hell. Quite a change.
This is the one of the major areas where I have changed my mind, although when Covid arrived, I had already started moving away from current medical/health trends. But definitely, the Covid episode revealed how these trends were hardening, cristalizing. I felt, and still feel increasingly, as though the doctors, and other professionals ? in "intellectual" professions were behaving as though doctors were capable of healing, and curing people, as through THERE WERE NOTHING BEHIND illness and medication that was working for ? against ? us in our lives. Is that transcendance, the belief that there is something behind ? under ? Maybe, maybe not, but without it, I don't see how we can find any kind of meaning in the world. Unless... we have decided NOT to look for, or find meaning.. anywhere ? Could many of us be there, right now ? Is it a risk ?
I think that in Western civilisation, we go through periodic bouts of this profound despair that makes daily life increasing difficult, destroys SOCIETY, the capacity of people to have enough faith to enter into ties, intimacy, commit themselves to a course of action. This profound despair is not new to our civilisation, but... it may be new to us. Before, at best we read about it happening to other people in books, but now it is happening to us, and it is not.. the same. Acquiring experience first hand can be painful.
I like the military now; I like the orderliness of chains of command and I like the idea that democracy was a thought form a few hundred years ago and now it is a more solid form, though also seemingly dwindling, and I have changed my mind about what is powerful
what is powerful is beauty, good bread, nice smells, the sound of the chop of the wood, the bubbling of the stew, the dog that is pregnant, the spider trying to have a family inside the house, a few mice that then turn into one million mice. this sort of thing is powerful.... and good crisps.... knowing how to make them from a potato left over in the ground in early spring, and birch ale. etc.
I'm not sure my change of mind is completely baked yet, but...
Up until recently, I spent large amounts of my energy trying to figure out the fundamental order of the world with my reason and intuition. Everything I would read or take in through experience was filtered with the idea that I would eventually grasp (seize?) life with my reason and intuition. If only I could just get a little more information and experience...
But now it seems obvious that this has an error at the foundation, because it made my mind/my self the starting point and the end point for not only experiencing life, but also somehow "solving" it. Spoiler alert: It turns out my mind/my self can't solve life because life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived (William James?). It was a well-intended project and I always I tried to orient it toward objective truth. But when you try and encompass life itself within your own self, you are setting up your puny mind as something able to judge/capture/contain sheer being. It cannot work. In my case, I think it also has made my thoughts about God somewhat arthritic.
But what to do? Give up on reason and intuition as the way to understanding the fundamental order of the world? That seems not only dangerous, but also... what other tools are there?
The conclusion I am coming to is that you somehow have to let the flow of life grasp you first. So the majority of energy and efforts in life should focus on how one can let the tide of life, sheer being, the reality of God be primary. Another way to say it: Focus less time on the intellectual or the intuitive response to life and more on the simple practice of being as present as possible to experience.
Perhaps a way to summarize how I changed my mind: I no longer think the functions of reason and intuition are to find an all-encompassing and unassailable vision of the truth of life and how it should be lived. Rather, I see my very limited reason and intuition as humble handmaidens to the sheer tide of being. Those humble tools are there to help deepen the reality of being human, not to control or define that reality.
Maybe that makes at least a little sense to someone else, but perhaps too abstract? Forgive me if this is just rambling gibberish!
It makes sense to me. I have struggled wth the same ideas. As a writer who tends towards analysis, this is a central challenge. It's probably why I write so much about running away and living in caves.
Thanks for your comment Paul. Your writing (here and especially your articles for First Things) have definitely had an impact on me and how I process the world.
> It turns out my mind/my self can't solve life because life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived (William James?)
I do not know the original source of this quote, but I was reading a collection of essays on Wendell Berry's works, and to me this was the most striking sentence from the whole book:
> We should treat the world and the living things in it as mysteries to be loved, not as instruments to be manipulated, problems to be solved, or adversaries to be conquered, for we live "in a world rooted in mystery and in sanctity."
- Rod Dreher, "Wendell Berry: A Latter-Day Saint Benedict," a chapter from "The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry." He is, of course, quoting Berry there at the end.
One objection to Wendell Berry's comment about "mysteries to be loved" : we are fragile, vulnerable, and limited animals incapable of understanding that sometimes, in certain circumstances, "love" can be an extremely destructive force that sweeps everything away with it. One thing that I have not changed my mind about recently, is that we don't know, and have no way of knowing, the evil that comes into the world at the same time as our desire to love, and our expression of it.
I meditate this often. It makes me believe that we live our lives poised on a crest between two abysses, and that being a man (that said as a woman, but I will stand by the expression "a man") is a devilishly difficult enterprise.
Both can be destructive forces. We are being conditioned to feel that desire alone can be a destructive force, and that love CANNOT be a destructive force, not only that, but we are being conditioned to believe that desire is a masculine activity/force that leads to destructive violence, and that men are violent and destructive by nature.
But I don't believe this. Love can be a destructive force when it leads us to overprotect, for example, because it IS possible to overprotect. Both men and women can overprotect, using love as a justification for doing this.
Example : I took my now adult children to my father's grave when they were both little : my son, 5 or 6 years old. We put flowers on my father's grave, and my son coming home in the car, was very quiet. Back in the apartment, he said "why did you make me since I have to die ?", and he was barely 6. And we spent a very long time with him telling him that there was no answer to that question that we could give him, because we didn't know the answer. It was maybe his first experience of the metaphysical pain of the human condition... at 6. (A very beautiful book on this subject, "A Death in the Family" by James Agee.)
Quite a few years later, I discussed this incident with a group of American people I didn't know, and they were all very uncomfortable with what I had done in taking my children to the grave. They didn't believe that children could handle the experience of death, and basically, they believed that if I LOVED my children, I should have protected them from this experience. But I firmly believe that death is one of our most democratic experiences, and that little ones AND big ones handle it to the best of our abilities. To me, those people, even if they had good intentions, or considered themselves to be.. nice, were engaging in a form of love that is destructive.
So... yes, "love" and not always desire, can be destructive. Good intentions can be destructive.
One of my most inspiring works of literature is "The Merchant of Venice", because in it, William Shakespeare turns our intimate assumptions on their head. Sometimes (but rarely) the cruel man Shylock inspires us with pity, and the "nice" people like Bassanio, Antonio ? are unwittingly ? cruel and pitiless despite their good intentions.
It is an excellent play for exploring how fallen the fallen world is, and why we must be mistrustful of our good intentions.
Saint Paul would have said that things are not always what they seem ?
You wrote, "But I firmly believe that death is one of our most democratic experiences." This comment reminded me of Catherine Brown's article, "Uncustomisable Orthodoxy," at https://catherinebrown.org/uncustomisable-orthodoxy/ .
I read Catherine Brown's short article. It is very important, and reveals the tremendous tensions involved in our civilisation around points that we cannot resolve, because there is no resolution to them.
There is probably little chance that Paul will read what I can say about Catherine Brown's article, although he may (have) read the article itself. I hope that he is already aware of everything that is irresolvable about what appears in the article.
What is irresolvable : how far do we go in belonging to a COMMON, and UNIVERSAL experience, and how far do we remain singular, unique ? Where do we put the accent in our daily lives, in our customs, practices ? Jesus Christ, Socrates, both men were greatly dedicated to what has emerged in our civilisation as privacy ?, emphasis put on the person's personal experience (and/or salvation).
At this point, it increasingly appears that overriding emphasis on the value of a person's personal... choice, considered to be synonymous with liberty/freedom, is jeopardizing what we have IN COMMON, what makes us similar, neither totally different, nor totally identical, to any other person.
Debra, I guess it comes down to the question, “Is disordered love, love?” My gut reaction is that “I” might be disordered or my intentions disordered, but it doesn’t follow that love is the culprit, it’s me or my intentions.
Substitute loyalty for love. I most certainly can have disordered loyalty, for instance, as an SS officer for Hitler. That doesn’t make loyalty “bad,” it makes me bad.
But how do we know what love is outside of the flesh and blood people expressing or incarnating it for us to understand it ?
I would rather fight to defend people than words. The words... don't really need my help ; they seem to get along quite well on their own agenda.
And I will say that yes, disordered love is love. When Lady Macbeth in the play "Macbeth" loses control over herself, and opens herself to be possessed by the occult forces that her words unleash in her, she is doing it... for love of her husband, and out of the ambition she has, not for herself, but for him. It is an easy ? solution to say that what she feels is NOT love, but one that I will not adopt. But you are right to remark that this is an important difference between us. It may be so important that it means that we live in different worlds. That is possible.
I just finished a fascinating biography of Meister Eckhart called Dangerous Mystic, and what you say here seems very parallel to fundamental shifts he experienced in his 50s. I hadn’t realized it, but he was as highly trained a theologian you could be during his day, though also a mendicant Dominican. Anyhow, he was working on his epic theological treatise (following Aquinas) that was to take decades and involve answers to thousands of questions when something happened. He jumped ship, abandoned his scholarly work, and began teaching common women and men in their German vernacular (both actions were a no-no to the religious brass). And as a result, you get his sermons, which he never wrote down, but which enthused followers captured. They’re stunningly elegant, indeed dangerous (though I think theologically sound), but most of all aimed at guiding one to direct experience of God. No one knows what caused this shift in him, but it’s flatly apparent by what he wrote before and what he spoke after. Though I know little about Aquinas, I think a similar thing happened to him at the end of his life after a mystical experience: he thereafter called his theology “straw.” For me, who can tend towards an unceasing want of Truth through constant back-and-forth’s in my mind, it’s an inspiring telos.
The Eckhart book sounds fascinating and substantial, I think I am going to have to read it. Thanks for sharing this Steven... but also, just what I needed, another book on the stack :)
Awesome. If you decide to read his sermons too, I strongly recommend getting The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart by Yale University Press. The translation is spectacularly clean, whereas I found other English translations distancing. Unfortunately the book itself is sinfully expensive in print, but it’s available for free online in PDF with a quick Google search.
Steven, if I can, I’ll try to articulate why your comment on Meister Eckhardt so strongly resonated with me.
Over the Christmas holidays I started reading Chesterton’s two biographies in a single volume, the first on St. Thomas Aquinas and the second on St. Francis of Assisi. Even though I am more inclined to logic and reasoning as opposed to a gut instinct to solve a problem, I’ve tried and failed many times to work my way through Aquinas’ “Summa.” It always left me cold. Similarly, until about ten years ago, when I first read a biography on Francis, I always harbored an aversion to him, which was really an aversion to the popular hagiography of Francis as an effeminate loner who talked to the animals.
Chesterton’s short biographies of each man are terrific. Yes, as you mention, Aquinas did have a couple of mystical experiences that deeply changed him. What makes Aquinas so fascinating is that he was not only a towering genius and heroically productive, but incredibly—saintly?—humble and kind and generous.
To immediately jump to Francis after that read on Aquinas was similar to the break you commented on that Meister Eckhardt experienced. Like Aquinas, Francis was humble, kind and generous (with other peoples’ wealth). Francis experienced God in every person he met, in every tree he slept under, and in every animal he encountered.
It seems as though God gave us Meister Eckhardt to show that both ways of loving him—intellectually or experientially—are valid, but perhaps with a slight nudge to get out of our heads and experience the beauty all around us.
I recently read Chesterton's Assisi biography and similarly found it wonderful. I also so appreciated how history can be written stylistically like that: warm, funny, whimsical, contemplative. I'm planning to read through his account of Aquinas soon, so thanks for the encouragement.
That's an interesting thought about Eckart. I'm pretty impressed overall with how much spiritual development and epiphany was underway during that time (of which I've been quite ignorant about until late).
Thank you! Recently I, too, have been on a steep learning curve about the 13th and 14th centuries. Half of what I was taught about feudalism and serfs and “altar and throne” was B.S. There is a lot we should emulate from that era. First and foremost, flip the Enlightenment view that violence is the norm and peace the exception, back to the sacramental kingdom of St. Louis IX, where peace was the norm and violence the exception. They literally called it “the business of the peace and the faith.” That’s a far cry from Calvin Coolidge’s “The business of America is business.”
The book that sent me on this journey into the medieval age is Andrew Willard Jones’, “Before Church and State—The Social Order of the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX.”
It is a mind blowing book, as Jones gets you to abandon the concept of a modern state—this was difficult for me—and put yourself in the mindset of a society that wielded no central power as we moderns understand it. The “state” did not exist and is a foreign concept to the medieval people. In my opinion, Jones convincingly shows that there was no power struggle between the church, which was primarily focused on the salvation of souls, and the monarchy, which was primarily focused on maintaining the peace. In fact, they both worked together and/or separately “on the business of the peace and the faith.” How they accomplished it is truly remarkable.
I spent a lot of time in nature alone. I am an agriculturalist after all. In the past most of that time has been inside my head trying to figure out God. Truth goodness and beauty as they say. I was always trying to approach the problem in that order but recently I have discovered after decades of attacking the problem the wrong way around that for men there's only one way to know God and that is first through Beauty then to goodness and if you're lucky truth. It may seem like a small reordering of things but it might take me the rest of my life to figure it out and it certainly will to put it into practice. Maybe not so much a change of mind but certainly a change of practice and perception.
Paul it would be a great help if you could sort this all out for me in a few dozen pages and post it somewhere... then I could be done with it and get on with my life:-)
This resonates with me. And as an agriculturalist, I doubt what I'm about to say will resonate with YOU, but mentioning it seems apt:
I recently had an experience with a shaman at a psychedelics retreat where I shared my intention about wanting to act more instinctively out of love. Currently I seem to land on the right actions most of the time. But I have to think my way to them. It's not as instinctive as I'd like.
She accurately noted that I'm always looking things up, reading books, seeking teachers ... to guide me in the answers. But I don't spend enough time learning directly, unmediated, from the world. Why? Because I'm lazy. Learning from the world-- and being with beauty is a key way to do this-- is a lot more WORK than reading a book, or paying attention to a mentor.
Among a couple other things, she prescribed "Treat the world like one of your books."
I totally get what she means but I don't think the analogy is quite accurate . A book is an instrument something that you read something that you use to gain knowledge. Beauty has to be experienced it's something that happens to you not something that you make happen. I'm sure that's what she meant... Learn from it but not in an instrumental way.
I like your comment, Awbnid. Several years ago, I stopped reading books about spirituality for the reasons that you outlined above. I think that we have been spending too much time on our butts in classrooms "learning" about the world, (and often to get diplomas, too...). And that unfortunately, we have learned ? that the place to learn is at school, or in a book, or... with an expert, or even in a tutorial over the Internet. Personally, I favor the solution of learning with a flesh and blood person, whenever possible, or through observation, whenever possible, but I am handicapped by not.. learning how to learn this way, and it is not easy BEING CLEVER AND FIGURING THINGS OUT by observation. It takes time, too.
But... it takes time to really read a book well, I have... learned. And sometimes, reading books (depending on which ones) can save you.. time, and give you some short cuts into the human... HEART. Reading beautiful literature has always seemed like a good investment to me, and it has given me much joy, beauty, and understanding. The human heart, that unfathomable country, which is eminently... wild ?
Lots of different ways to learn, and maybe they all have their good points, and bad ones, and are somewhat complementary ? For sure, effort, observation and discipline help to produce results, but they are not a guarantee. Gotta use your head, too.
On mediation : while this may be a technical, intellectual subject, I do not think that we can avoid mediation, and that we were already fighting during the Reformation about this issue. I think that our consciousness mediates our relationship with our senses (thus our observation), so that we are naturally ? condemned to mediation, and trying to wiggle out of the human condition is... sin, Awbnid. Or, just ill advised.
Excellent thoughts! Especially on mediation. In substantial ways, experience is *all* subjective. Or qualia, as the philosophers say. No getting around it.
And I don't think the suggestion I received was to not read. More of a yes-and sort of thing. I read too much to the exclusion of 'being with.' For me, I also think she was spot-on about the reason why I do that. It is a lot of work. And I am lazy!
I like this Frank. I too, have spent a lot of time in nature alone. However, there was no search for truth and goodness in that immersion. Though I have always appreciated the beauty, even as a 10 year old.
I have always felt that immersing myself in nature, as much as I possibly could, was a short coming. It was a way of avoiding people, awkward conversations, or unpleasantness, and just the noise of civilization. I never thought deeply, just felt.
I have always admired intellect, other peoples. One reason I love Paul's writing/voice. So, your comment makes me hope that my quiet seclusions and retreat from the world weren't so much a self-indulgent sin as a kind of baptism in the beauty, a search for something more than our civilization had to offer, maybe a search for God.
The past four years has certainly helped to solidify that I have indeed been searching for meaning, and this has brought me closer to God. The time and years spent in nature has helped to nurture a love of God's creation, even us.
Frank, there is an interesting and compelling book about approaching life from a ‘beauty first’ perspective: see Timothy Patitsas, Ethics of Beauty. Patitsas is speaking as an ethicist specifically about the discipline and healing nature of therapy and those who’ve suffered trauma and moral injury. Yet the principles he draws on are not limited to that space. (How could beauty be limited to one facet?)
Good job, Jules. Very well said. AND.. you made with laugh with that humor that used to be called the humor of the rabbis the evening before the pogrom. (Bet you can't say that any more...) And I don't even have to wrestle with NHS. Try living in megapole Grenoble, and having a dental emergency over the weekend...
The idea of a compassionate health care system that will compassionately usher us out... with love.
This quote from Christopher Dawson helped expand my views on Christianity.
'It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole'.
I am rather simple, so my mind has changed from seeing natural things “just” as things of beauty or curious wonder to things with untapped utility….for instance, i use to see sea urchins as sort of ungainly creatures that chomp away at algae to now seeing them as maybe a cure for spikey viruses—-in a biomimicry way. And the lovely crepe myrtles that bloom all summer, now i peel back the bark to find smooth-as-a-baby-butt new growth and i wonder, can i harness whatever it is inside of them to make my old skin new again?
I can remember exactly when my thinking started to evolve, if not the actual date. I used to contribute on Metafilter, and one day there was a discussion - some woman saying she'd failed to achieve a goal, or couldn't get past some obstacle in her life, I can't recall the specifics. But I was several years into being a baseball coach for my oldest son by that point, and responded as a coach might: You can't let this defeat you, you've got to keep pushing, keep trying, etc.
The reaction from the community was almost vicious. "You can't tell her how to feel," one respondent said. Apparently I wasn't validating her suffering. And it occurred to me then that suffering - to these people, and later many others - wasn't something to be endured and overcome; it was something to be valorized. It was an identity. It was almost embraced as a chosen destiny.
I had counted myself a solid liberal, but I didn't understand this way of thinking at all.
Later on, of course, it would snowball. Once men became women - and we had to regard them as indistinguishable from actual women, indeed that the term "actual women" = HATE, etc. - once we were all required to toe the party line on this issue (and others) I realized that not only was I no longer liberal, I detested this "liberalism." Of course, in today's parlance that make me "far right." So be it, I guess.
Like you said Paul, the Covid phenomenon had a deep impact on many of us. I have changed my mind about the medical establishment and pediatricians in particular.
Mind you, my favorite doctor caught my daughter’s exceptionally early-onset appendicitis and the hospital saved her life, but now I cannot divorce the whole lot of them from their links with Big Pharma.
I can’t undo any harm my over-compliance may have caused my children, I can only pray.
Beautiful! Thank you for sharing this. I have the same tendency and I've never thought of it in this light before.
Teresa, absolutely lovely! Thank you for sharing that and for describing it so beautifully. In a similar way, I’ve always thought my superpower was my ability to talk to anybody and how much I enjoy people. I’m the gal you tell your secrets to on a train! The way you put it makes me try to see it in a different light, because my superpower rarely extends to those I find obnoxious or vain or insert any negative thing you will. I’m going to remember your words and try to live them more.
I hope you find your way out.
Do you read A Midwestern Doctor?
My wife trained as a doctor and spent many years in the belly of the beast. We managed to escape, and now she grows herbs on our land instead. It can be done. And you will have learned valuable things - even if not the things you thought you would learn.
I used to think that how things were arranged in terms of human space (architecture, room arrangement) didn't matter. Now I see there is a connection between mind and matter, God and design of our human world. I didn't think there was any true connection of human concepts and Reality either. I think that comes with the idea that man is an accident of blind random forces.
I thought we might chat about transcendence. Yes, I will get to Paul's conversion, but please allow me to take a leisurely route. I hope to catch it from a fresh angle.
Long ago, I took a course on the literature of the American Renaissance. We read a great deal of Emerson and Thoreau. I did not much care for Emerson - what he called "Nature" was not something I had ever hiked through or sifted between my fingers. The object he most wanted us to consider seemed an abstraction, the writing puffed out by his resolve to orchestrate a lofty confrontation with it. Thoreau felt different somehow, but I was as yet too new to this material to challenge the professor's insistence that they were close kin. Transcendentalists, he called them. Whatever. All I know is that I stopped reading Emerson after handing in my final essay. I have been reading Thoreau ever since.
It turns out there was more involved than personal preference. Laura Dassow Walls, in three works of closely argued scholarship, detaches Thoreau from Emerson and inserts him into a lineage headlined by Alexander von Humboldt. Her Thoreau is not a garden variety transcendentalist but a particular kind of scientist - one for whom empirical investigation, philosophical speculation, and poetic imagination were interwoven threads of reasoned inquiry. Where Emerson gazed at loons and trees only for as long as it took to dissolve them into unities valued for their transcendence of any matter that might sing or bloom, Thoreau sought those unities in the singing and the blooming. Nature, he believed, was not the symbol of a deeper reality but the real thing itself. He posited no world behind or beyond the one he sauntered through on his daily rounds.
So while I must confess some sympathy for the correspondent who mourned, apropos of your religious conversion, the declension of a "first-rate social critic" into a "second-rate theologian" (or somesuch ... couldn't track it down), I would put it more generously: the more Christian you have become the more you sound like Emerson and the less like Thoreau. Where once you engaged directly with the world as it is, there are now veils to be pierced, curtains to be lifted, before the most meaningful things come into view. Where once you labored to discern the texture of a "real" England, you now go quarrying about in shrines to long dead saints for the most instructive realities. You've gone transcendental on us.
The brow of Ed Abbey, whom you admire, would surely darken. In Desert Solitaire, he flogged himself whenever he caught himself resorting to metaphor, allusion, or anything that obstructed his view of rocks, lizards, and yuccas in their bare thusness. Never having met any "underlying realities," he snickered, he was happy to commune with "surfaces." Or consider David Abram, whom I imagine Thoreau might have sounded like if he could have read his way through the next century's phenomenologists. It is likely that most people reading this have read his two books. Reread, if you have it handy, the story he tells about his confrontation with a sea lion colony and a humpback whale while kayaking off the coast of Alaska (Becoming Animal, 159-166). What in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account?
Paul, I have attended carefully to all your writings - fiction and essays - since I encountered you in the 2014 profile in the New York Times Magazine. I care enough to worry. I suppose if you feel you have been called, then you are duty-bound to acknowledge the existence of a Caller. But I feel like a hiker who toils all the way up the long, steep ascent to the top of Yosemite Falls, inches himself towards those steel railings you can cling to as you peek over the falls, into the mist, and out over the landscape below ... and then, full of awe and wonder, hears a voice from nowhere whisper in his ear - "Now, for the full experience, flap your arms and fly."
The question, I guess, is why aren't the falls, the sea lions, the Utah desert, and the loons enough? Why must we leap into the void to find what is readily available on sensuous surfaces? I cannot fear for your soul, but I do worry that your uncivilized spirit will be doused in the still waters of an orthodoxy.
Well, this is just inevitable when something as surprising as a Christian coversion comes upon someone. Some readers will feel they have lost something. The writer can't allow himself to regret this. He has to write about the truth he is pursuing. It might seem harsh. In the age before the Internet it would have seemed less so. These days we get our responses in real time!
I would ask why you feel so content in the small room of the immanent when our souls clearly yearn for the spaciousness of the infinite transcendent? Is it really enough for you?
Funnily enough, I never liked either Thoreau or Emerson that much.
An interesting series of questions here. I suppose I could say a lot of things.
One thing I can't do though is answer the ultimate question: 'why aren't the falls, the sea lions, the Utah desert, and the loons enough?' Both because I'd have no idea where to start, but also because the framing doesn't really make sense to me.
It's interesting to see your journey through other's eyes. I see an obvious continuum from Real England to my holy wells. Actually they both stem from the same impulse I've had since I was a child: my fascination with the margins, the lost things, the overlooked places. But I can see why it would look differently to others.
All of my writing was about looking for culture. Do that long enough and you end up looking for the root of culture, which is spirit. David Abram knows this. If watching some sea lions fooling about (I've watched David perform this on stage) were 'enough' then I suppose there would be no need for religion, philosophy, art or the vast array of indigenous spiritualities that David admires and writes about.
But those things do exist. Why is that?
The thing is, there is no conflict that I see between some transcendent 'void' and the 'surface' of 'reality.' One thing that entranced me about Orthodox theology is that this way of seing is alien to it. 'Transcendence' is not out there. It can sound like the call of the loon. God is 'everywhere present and filling all things,' as the prayer has it. Once I realised that this was what I had been grasping at forever, I went looking for where to find it.
Finally, I would attend to this question of yours:
'What in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account? '
I suppose there might be a book in that. But I would ask in return: what 'moral instruction' do you receive from dancing sea lions? I can't see the equivalent of the beatitudes in there. For all I know they might just be hungry. You call David's account 'non-transcendental' but I'm not so sure about that. It has a strong romantic streak in it. Some projection too.
The Christian canon offers some quite remarkable things, though. Such sweetness and richness, at its best. I never imagined that. You might perhaps ask yourself your own question. About Christianity or any faith. Why do these things exist at all? What do they offer us? The world is indeed beautiful and full of wonder. And yet ... and yet ...
For Paul-regarding the natural beauty of our world where man has yet to impose his will upon it: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard’. My reference to Psalm 19 here is to posit that one reason for these things to exist, is to point us to the architect and creator of all that is, and that all of creation speaks to us of the intangible, yet knowable.
I forgot to mention-I revered Emerson and Thoreau as a young man, and have read all of Emerson’s works as well as Thoreau’s. I thought I would revisit Emerson, and recently purchased a complete set of Emerson’s works. I find it hard to read now. It seems as though he tries way too hard to not say something that may grate on his intended audience, but chooses rather to cloak his meaning in lofty words and allegory. Perhaps that is the point-to draw the reader deeper into the subject. Don’t get me wrong-it’s literary art at its finest, but I just find it tedious now, but then I have been called stodgy and blunt at times. Funny how your appetites change as you grow and learn. I think I shall donate my books to someone who can appreciate them for what they are.
Nature is both real, and an icon. It interacts with us directly, we can touch and taste and be wounded by it. And we can also ‘be inspired’ as you say, toward ‘reverence’. Is that reverence then transferable to something besides the animal or mountain or storm that inspired it? What is it in humans that translates the meaning beyond the experience? I liked Abbey, a lot, and have a serious lifelong love affair with nature, plants especially. I feel actual pain watching my county’s farmland get paved in solar panels. I also became Orthodox from this perspective. In fact, that intense, life long directness I have had with plants made it, finally, the icon that allowed me to see the truth. It’s ok if you can’t see it. Never would judge you. I even remember in my former iteration feeling that same disappointment in someone who had become religious. It’s really hard to see past the icon, especially when it is so breathtakingly beautiful. It’s how I know that God loves humans. He probably shouldn’t have trusted us with so much beauty, but it clearly is meant to help us find truth.
This is a nice way of putting it. My former self had pretty much the attitude that Brian has above, so I entirely sympathise. It's really hard, maybe impossible, to explain this 'conversion' thing to people. It's not even really the right word. To me it feels like fulfillment. I still love nature, and Ed Abbey is a great read. But there is something beyond it all. There is something calling. There really is. Sometimes, you can hear it.
Thanks. I still see the confusion, maybe disappointment also in my old friends, my parents. I also know that when they think of faith they see Tammy Faye Baker, Trinity Broadcast Network, essentially a pyramid scheme cloaked in Bible quotes. They have no idea what to do with Orthdoxy.
Divinity and divine will speak directly to our souls from behind and within nature and we feel awe, wonder, reverence and meaning etc. Which is the beginning of true knowledge and the basis of proper thinking.
The calling for me is beauty. First in creating us in His image, second the beauty in Creation, then the beauty of language. I am resting in Beholding the Trinity. I hope this isn't too Christian. But after 43 years as a Christian, I enjoy the ache for Him.
I too find the beauty of an old growth grove of giant trees in Olympic National Park to be more spiritually 'full' than any cathedral in which I've been (and there have been too many to count). I began to believe that the old cathedrals and churches (the newer ones leave me cold) were trying to reflect these transcendental experiences their builders had felt in natural settings. I also began wondering why I felt this sense of wonder and awe in these natural settings where the hand of man had not yet wrought the inevitable destruction it so inevitably yields. Why? What is this sense of 'otherness' and why does it make me want for more meaning in my own life? I can find wonder in the natural world while also seeking out why it gives me the desire for meaning in its beauty.
I'm sure that gothic cathedrals were based on forests. Simon Schama has written about this. Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is an explicit version of this.
The questions you ask are really interesting.
Perhaps the feeling of being ‘closer’ to that Divine Spring when amongst those things that are not made by man is intended. I too have spent much of my life in churches that were no more than buildings erected as a monument to those who built them. Having said that, I have been in man made structures built for the purpose of gathering to worship in which that is precisely what occurred-unfettered unscripted and wholly spontaneous, yet orderly, worship. It isn’t about the building or the setting, but the attitude and willingness of the ‘occupant’ to permit the spirit of God to work. God is not limited by time or place. We however can often sense the distinction between the natural and the manufactured when we detach ourselves from the works of our own hands and see the natural world as the work of God and not of our own making. I have spent much time alone in the wilds of New Mexico, Colorado, and Alaska, often never speaking or hearing (when possible) another human voice for days on end. The joy is inescapable. Not so much perhaps because of the serenity and beauty of my surroundings (although that enhances my appreciation for the architect) but the deprivation of all things civilized and temporal seem to open a doorway into another world that has so much more to offer…and no, no drugs were necessary (ha ha) as was the case fifty years ago when I was a much younger man. I get it…
While I can understand why so many people need to oppose ? what is made by human hands, and what is not made by human hands, what I am seeing in the very industrial environment where I am now living, and will continue to live, since I am old now, is what happens when Man tries to get rid of the beauty, the power, that HE can create with his hands in favor of industrial ways of making where he, as a flesh and blood animal with hands, does not use them (and I could say even more provocatively, maybe...) towards the glory of God. I realize now, rather late in life, that I was raised to not learn to use my hands intelligently, skillfully..."craftily", even, but to leave them hanging at my side, probably as a way of resisting temptation. Certainly there is a long standing Puritan obsession about the evils of masturbation.
Over recent years, I have been plunging myself into the daily work on my musical instruments that takes me... out of the world. Those instruments, particularly the violin, are miracles. Objects, but no ordinary ones, they are miracles, and show what Man, in the past, was capable of making with his hands, his mind, his heart, testifying to his tremendous physical and spiritual capacities in making an instrument (sing). And yet... this is civilisation...Music is civilisation, to my mind.
I do not think that I would be happy living as a... termite, even though sometimes, I feel tremendous pressure around me in what is an often mindless denial of all that We have been... in the past, but want to throw out of the window to become "natural ?" termites.
Will this make us closer to God ? Nature ? than playing the violin ? I'm not sure about that at all.
There is a big difference between the U.S. and France, where I am living. New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, the parts of the country that are INHOSPITABLE have not been colonized by humans to the extent that temperate France has. The chances in France of being able to go out, walk, and not meet another human being for days on end are... slim. I don't know about Ireland. Maybe in Scotland ? this is more possible, but maybe not.
For the deprivation of the temporal, I don't even need to go out into the desert : our Christian calendar is going down, and "real time" is no substitute for it.
This comment may seem like strong stuff to you, but I feel strongly about all of this, and it shows. There is middle ground between "natural" and "manufactured", and we have severely neglected/rejected it, to the detriment of our minds, bodies and souls. And that is maybe why I feel that, when tempted to head back and forth between Scylla and Charybdis, maybe we should stop and reflect a little bit before blindly setting forth ?
"For the power Thou hast given me to lay hold of things unseen:
For the strong sense I have that this is not my home:
For my restless heart which nothing finite can satisfy:
I give Thee thanks, O God.
For the invasion of my soul by Thy Holy Spirit:
For all human love & goodness that speak to me of Thee:
For the fullness of Thy glory outpoured in Jesus Christ:
I give Thee thanks, O God." — John Baillie
I think that sums up the otherness we will feel until we do finally go fully "home". But also the blessings we get here in the constant immanence.
I get the same feeling when I'm in the mountains and have yet to visit a cathedral or church that comes close to the feelings the "wild" evokes in my soul (though, the Sagrada Familia comes close). My wife and I are lucky enough to live close to the Olympics. Last Friday we spent the day snowshoeing along the Obstruction Point Road (closed for winter) and had lunch beneath Steeple Peak, overlooking the Elwa River valley with the jagged white teeth of the Bailey Ranger to the west. It was beautiful beyond description, so I won't even try. It was also so quiet it reminded us of what true quiet truly is. If you enjoyed the ancient trees in the Olympics, you should visit the Grove of the Patriarchs in Mt. Rainier National Park sometime. It will blow your mind. It did mine.
Well, the Peninsula, like Beethoven’s ninth, is a little unfair to compare anything to. Some things stand outside space and time.
Michael, I too am in the shadow of the Olympics. I grew up in Sequim in the 70s, left in the 80s and returned to the Peninsula about 10 years ago, after wandering all reaches of the planet. Lovely to find others here so close to home. The only other place I feel as right in my skin as the Peninsula is Paul's Ireland.
A decade ago, I structured my life to spend as much time in wild places with wild creatures as possible. For me, that meant living on the road in the wildernesses of the Western US, first in tents and now in a camper. Because I’m not independently wealthy, I work, but the rest of my time is held in quiet, remote wilds; alone. I’ve had more deeply connective experiences out here than I can count, but I hit a wall in 2021, and walked (stumbled) back to Christianity. Here’s how I’d put it: I got the time and space I was after to merge into the wilds, and indeed there were many times that was readily available. In that sense, and at those times, the natural world was enough to satiate. But I discovered too, reluctantly, that in some strange way I’m an alien out here, maybe even a thief. While I fully accept that all creatures have minds, mine is different—of a human sort. It’s not meant, I believe, to stay always horizontally-oriented; it’s meant, in a way unique to our species, to look up. The lilies of the fields may not spin nor toil, but my human mind and heart sure do. Nature, by its surfaces, provides plenty, especially for respite when one is wearied of the steely world. But in my experience, nature as such won’t provide final rest. As the resident alien out here, I have to claim citizenship in a different kingdom (not too far away), lest I’m never home. And, surprisingly, I think these wild creatures may just want that: they want me both here, and home.
thanks, Steven. I think the alien point is a good one, but (as you might expect!) I view it a little differently. I think the alienation is something we have done to ourselves. I don't think it is inherent in being human. It looks to me like those humans for whom all the spirit they need and comprehend is in the natural world (pagans, for shorthand) do not experience that alienation. And I think, for ecological reasons, being happy with horizontal is a good thing. An ethical stance. I have come to view the idea of human uniqueness as deeply problematic. Just from my own observations of (conversations with!) other critters, my reading in animal intelligence, plant sentience (Sheldrakes' mushrooms, for heaven's sake ... now that is mind-blowing).
See my above comment to Steven, please, which adresses some of the things that you raise here. On horizontal... to the extent that we have stood up at one point in time, our heads are OVER our feet, and that has important consequences for us. That means that our heads are... "superior" to our feet, to the extent that our heads are "over/above" our feet, but, for sure, if you want to get from point A to point B, your head is not going to do much for you. In the same way, when you have a leak in your pipes, calling a doctor to take care of it will not do either.
It seems... logical ? to me that every living thing is both "like" and "different from" every other living thing AND SPECIES. But figuring out where the separations are between "like "and "different" is very complicated. Too complicated for our frail and fragile human selves ?
This is exactly how I used to think. But 'think' is actually the wrong word, I think. I was passionately attached to this notion. We are not separate. We are not distinct or 'better.' In some ways I still believe this. In some ways it is true: clearly humans are deeply interrelated with the rest of life and dependent on it. Clearly other creatures are sentient. I used to believe too - perhaps it was my primary belief - that we had once been connected and were now alienated and needed to find the way home.
Interestingly enough, the ecological reading of the story of Eden (Daniel Quinn's novel 'Ishmael' lays it out in detail) offers just this story. The exulsion from the garden is this alienation in action, after we become 'civilised.' So we need to de-civilise to get back home.
The trouble is that we can't. And the more I looked back into history and pre-history, and the more I studied other cultures - even 'indigenous' ones - the more I saw that we had always had this alienation. Because we really are different. Our minds can do things other creatures cannot, seemingly. The religious impulse. The rationalisation. The seeking. The powerful intellect. The huge forebrain. We are not monkeys or dogs or trees. We were built to do ... something else.
'Horizontal' - that's what we love, in the modern world. We want pure horizontality, in politics, in culture, in nature. We think that will take us back home. I used to. I used to agree about 'paganism' too. But the 'pagans' are just as disconnected from 'nature' as the rest of us. And without the beatitudes and the parables, paganism reliably takes you to dark places. Following 'nature' is no panacea, not if you know how nature actually works.
I am sometimes nostalgic for my deep ecology days but I can't go back. And the internal anxiety I had back then has, in any case, completely disappeared, to be replaced with something much sweeter and truer. That was part of my long search.
We are indeed radically different....Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century called man "the one true and great amphibian"....in two worlds simultaneously...
There is an article in the thoughts you've expressed here. Or perhaps you've already written it? Fascinating. I tend to think we have perhaps over intellectualised religious belief. (As you have said before the reformation was part of this process.) For most people in most cultures what we call 'religion' was simply the background against which people lived their lives. The rituals and practices weren't separate from the everydayness of their world. Today we might call this unthinking but sometimes too much thinking goes on. My son has a Polish girlfriend who although in most repsects is throughly modern attends the Polish Catholic church (in Nottingham - which has a big Polish community) as a matter of course. He sometimes goes with her and I can see him slowly being drawn into the church - which is good as far as I am concerned. Didn't Pascal say something about belief following religious practice rather than the other way round?
I hope I am responding to everyone who has engaged in this conversation (I am not always sure I am hitting the right "reply" button).
I am imagining three roads - unbelief, pagan/indigenous spirituality, Christian spirituality - that intersect at various points, and most of us seem to have passed through those intersections. We have done so at different points in our lives and are still (me at least) traveling in a different direction, but we have all confronted - are still confronting - the issues that arise when those roads cross. It has made for an interesting conversation - rather more than I bargained for when I posted my comment. In this case, it has been pleasurable to get more than I bargained for!
Probably we will want to let it rest soon, but allow me to clarify a few things, only because we seem to agree that this is important business. I am up on the literature on Native Americans, at least, so I do not have a romantic view of the pagan/indigenous past. The Comanches, for example, would not have been good neighbors. But you have to concede that those tribes, warlike and peaceable, figured out how to live on the land in ways that did not destroy it, and that figuring out was woven into their spiritual practice. That is pretty impressive, given where we are now. The point is not that we should return to that past, return to the garden - that is neither possible nor desirable - but that there are important things to learn from those lifeways and those practices. One can, as has been pointed out, find passages in the Bible that gesture in an ecological direction, but it is hard to find an instance in history of a Christian culture inhabiting a piece of land for an extended period and taking the same kind of care of it. Wendell Berry hates this kind of talk, and I very much admire Wendell Berry, but I just can't find in Christian theology or practice anything, ecologically speaking, that measures up to what, say, the woodland tribes of North America worked out. When the first Christians crossed the Atlantic, they planted their flag in a landscape that had been inhabited for centuries and that was teeming with life. They were hacking away at the trees, and at the native inhabitants, before the first hymn had died on pious Christian lips. Perhaps that is why I chose to stir the waters as I have - it just seems like an inopportune moment to go hunting for Jesus.
But then, of course, it has been surprising for me to find out from this discussion that so many of you find the pagan and Christian views towards nature as practically interchangeable, or complementary at least. That hasn't always been the case. Steven, for most of Christian history your confession that you were down with the Gila River gods would have put you on the rack, my brother! So maybe the pagan/Christian intersection is now home to some new ideas that will serve us all better than either, in their earlier iterations, could have. That is hopeful for folks on both sides of the intersection.
As for the critters, beavers change the land they inhabit in ways that civilized humans, at least, are only beginning to understand. I presume the same mix of instinct and whimsy is at work as governs our landscaping endeavors. In the course of making a home for themselves, they make a home for a whole menagerie of species, plant and animal. Not much in the way of a forebrain, no language we can comprehend, no beaver Homer, but still something I hope we can all agree is a deep, farseeing wisdom. And, I would wager, some moral sensing of a beaver kind. If it hadn't been for the Europeans who trapped them to near extinction so people back in London and Paris could keep their heads warm in the latest style, North America would be looking quite different at the moment.
We could do this forever, I know. Allow me one last story, one that brings us back to the nature of spirit. My most recent spiritual encounter looked like this: I had dismounted from my bike for a rest and a look around ... I was looking over a stretch of southern California coastline ... out of the corner of my eye I saw a flock of birds - small ones, don't know what they were - flying in formation down the beach, when right in front of me, without breaking formation, the whole flock suddenly swept upwards for a couple of seconds, halted all together in midair, then swooped back down to land maybe 50 meters farther down the beach. My reaction to this was pure bodily exhilaration. My heart raced, my breath caught, well before I did any thinking about what had happened. I savored that sensation, now with some mind involvement, for quite a while, indeed I am convinced something of that encounter is still alive in me somewhere, somehow. I cannot explain what happened - why I reacted as I did to that event. But the birds' maneuver seemed to me joy-driven - they were not in that instant looking for food or a mate, they were having some bird fun together. Whimsical, not instinctual, behavior. That, and the sheer beauty of it, must have triggered my own capacity for joy and delight in the beautiful. So I suddenly felt at home in the world, in exactly the same way that the birds, by doing what they did, demonstrated their at-homeness. That is how I understand the spirit we shared - it is the feeling that was communicated by a particular kind of encounter, thisworldly from start to finish. It probably mattered that I was caught by surprise, didn't see it (them) coming. To take the Christian step - to find a Creator at the fount of experiences like this, as the (spirit) tie that binds - would have pulled me away from the birds. The Emerson move. And that would have diminished the experience. Where you all think there is a truth out there I have yet to discover I see a truth that Christianity would, for no reason i have cause to accept, proclaim to be incomplete, precisely because of its plain worldliness. You want me to take the leap. But for me to accept that dare, I would have to find some God-content in simple acts of joy. You can trust me not to judge you for taking that step, for finding spirit where you will. But for me it is still birds all the way down.
Eastern Christianity does not make "the Emerson move" because it doesn't drawn a hard line between transcendence and immanence. As Paul said above, the Spirit is viewed as being "everywhere present and filling all things." Thus Orthodoxy is not pantheist but it is panentheist. When I go to an old growth forest in northern Pennsylvania, which I do several times a year, I can honor the trees not just because I know that God made them and they point to him, which is true, but because the Spirit is in some sense "in" them. The tree has its own glory, which does not take away from God's glory, because he's the one who gave it its glory in the first place. This is why Wendell Berry insists that we treat the Creation as a gift. Do one's thoughts of the giver somehow take away from the appreciation or enjoyment of a gift? Not in my experience.
Probably not. Thanks for that, Rob. It seems my view of Christianity leaves some variants out. Like Berry, I grew up in Appalachia, the heart of the US Bible Belt. There were evangelicals and ecumenicals. My family was Lutheran - solidly in the ecumenical camp. The pastors viewed the Bible as a source of moral instruction rather than literal Truth, the services were staid and passionless except for the hymn-singing, which contained an exuberance that has surely stayed with me in various guises. That there might be a panentheist Christianity is news to me. I thought all that stuff was heretical, not orthodox. I will have to recalibrate a bit, I suppose, and look to educate myself about all this.
And “birds all the way down” may be enough for you. I’d be lying if I said I reasoned my way back to God: I got dragged. I’m thrilled by your ecstatic love of the natural world, and heaven knows we can use more of that, transcendent versus immanent be damned.
One note about your reference to indigenous cultures here and the land. I concur with most of what you say, but want to suggest the same problems of ecological hell also appear to have arisen here with pre-colonization empire-building as much as anywhere. It’s empire—the Tower of Babel—that denudes, no matter who is building (I didn’t find Graeber and Winslow’s attempted corrective on this in The Dawn of Everything terribly convincing). To me, the morally-relevant question is: what kind of cultural practices to land and Creator prevent or mitigate against empire-building?
You’re correct that Christianity in its popular forms historically hasn’t provided a sound response to this, but then again, neither have many alternative theologies (that’s why so many peoples of so many stripes have built empires…or at least land-killing cities…in virtually all geographies where it’s possible). And Paul’s project here is, I think, resurrecting some of those dusty traditions within the Christian faith that do answer the question quite soundly. Plenty of non-Christian cultures have much to contribute on this front too.
Meanwhile, empire ain’t going away on its own volition, so I do spend less time these days with Ted Kascizinski and more wondering if there is in fact a way that the land stays good while the people congregate densely. And what kind of theology would be appropriate to that? I don’t ultimately know, but loving thy enemy, taking in the stranger, and giving up property at times feels like a good start.
In one of the stories of St. Seraphim communing with his grizzly bear, a woman approaches; a pilgrim sees them in the wilderness and is greatly terrified.
St. Seraphim slaps the bear across the face roughly (but with no affect), then says “go now, your scaring the woman.”
He was loving each creature and treating it according to it’s nature- bear to bear and man to woman.
We do a disservice to sentimentalize the natural world an creatures in it. We humans are the ones who are broken away from our own natures as humans creatures, the animals are still serving and loving God according to their intact natures.
We people were/are meant to partner with an befriend our fellow creatures who draw breath as spirit in them like ourselves,
but to be what we are requires a return to ourselves before we can stably know and love other creatures for what they are. This return is the metanoia of the Christian spiritual life.
This is why Orthodox Christianity puts the priority on uniting ourselves to our Creator first, who is Divine Nature united first to us in the human nature of our voluntarily enfleshed Creator Jesus Christ.
Then, we see things and relate to things naturally, according to our purity of heart.
It is my nature that needs restoring, that I might recognize and love the nature of fox as he is.
We both may walk a mountain path at dusk and come suddenly upon a vista of sunset ablaze before us.
It is Fox’s nature to look up at the light, then look down again and carry on.
It is humanity’s nature to look up and stop. To wonder in the beauty of it, become still and silent that this gift touch not just our surfaces desires and feelings but enter more deeply our very souls.
And then carry on,
touched by beauty that saves us with gratitude in our hearts that have been filled, toward the Author and Artist of all, the Beautiful One Himself.
I concede that there’s nothing humans do that other creatures don’t also do (including abstract affairs like counting the days), and sometimes far better, of course. Now, part of the difference between us and our brethren is a matter of degree: birds narrate the world audibly, but they don’t recite the Odyssey, nor write Ulysses. But I don’t rest my claim there, as I’m open to even language being more complex in other species (whales, fungal networks, chatter at the biome level, etc).
The great and distinctive gift that’s bestowed to us is, I believe, moral sensing. Again, other creatures are moral, but here the degree matters: we can, by a moral reasoning based on moral sensing alone, completely remake ourselves, and by extension the land. That’s why, in part, I reckon God assigns us early on the task of naming the beasts—to call a beast a name is to elevate it into distinction…to know a creature as distinctive is to begin the process of right relationship with it, in particular through moral sensing and reasoning that’s specific to that beast’s nature. This is why, for instance, at our best we can alter a land to bring forth more biodiverse flourishing than originally found, and at a rapid clip—given our power, we really could, if we cooperated, remake the world into a richer chorus than we found it, and do so relatively quickly. As you’ll note, that power is also ridiculously dangerous, hence the modern world. But the fact remains, in my view, that’s is a unique power by degree nonetheless.
If I were to take a straight horizontal ecological reading of this development, I’d say Earth evolved this gift of moral sensing in us to serve her and her choirs: I don’t find it too far-fetched to assume that our rockets blasting into space may be an actual reproduction attempt by Earth (those rockets sure do look like reproductive organs, for instance). But alas, if Earth made us because she's got a mind and desirous will, why stop there in the cosmos: wouldn't her mind and will belong as well to a larger mind and will (a solar system perhaps), and a larger one beyond that, all the way out to the ends of the Universe? Wouldn't Earth then be floating in the same consciousness stew that we are, albeit at a different level of complexity?
If so, we ought to, I reckon, use our moral sensing and reasoning to consider from where that consciousness stew arises (thus what it wants). Afterall, if the Universe has a mind and will, it (they) too must derive it from somewhere; and we seem to have been bestowed the gift of reasoning through that derivation. Now even if one takes the position that mind arises spontaneously out of matter at a certain threshold of complexity, we still have the trouble that matter itself arose, and in an extraordinarily fine-tuned way such that it eventually led to this mind-arising. Unless one wants to say that the initial matter of the Universe popped out of nothing (which I find untenably incoherent, for nothing would also mean nothing to pop out from), one has to, I believe, arrive at proclaiming an eternal wellspring from which all things emanate. The trouble for polytheists here is that such an eternal source would actually have to be eternal, meaning boundless, meaning without any distinction within its (or his/her, if you like) essence. And if there can't be bounds, there can only be one: hence, monotheism. Monotheism, by the way, also makes plenty of room for forces, powers, principalities, lesser rulers, fractal minds, etc. I'm a monotheist, and I have no qualms with a Gila River spirit and mind.
So, while I think it's fine to "be happy with horizontal," I don't think it can fully explain things. And in that sense, I don't think it's true enough. Acknowledging the reality of both an immanent and transcendent is not about functionalism (what serves our species and the land best); but about grasping, using our gifted moral sensing and by extension reasoning, what's True (and we'll be ever-grasping, of course).
By the way, as I wrote these words, I still feel somewhat alien to all this kind-of discoursing: it's an awkward fit (I appreciate you wanting to flap your wings on a mountaintop...I concur), as I remain satisfied with the notion that we really ought to strive to be like those lilies aformentioned, and that direct experience of/with God is the name of the game, ultimately. But here we are, still naming beasts.
I feel kinship with you in what you have written, here. Just a few words : I think that Man LEARNS to stand up. He learns, because he sees others of his kind standing up, and walking, and figures out, even before He can talk, that his path in life leads him to stand up and walk. Left to his own devices, he gets around on all fours.
When you stand up, you can LOOK UP, and see the sky without difficulty. I'm not really sure just how much the birds LOOK UP, even though they're flying in the sky. But.. we look up.
Maybe the idea, but FACT of being able to look up is related to hierarchy, because, we can look up AND look down, and look horizontally. I find it very important that we can look in THREE directions : up, down, and horizontally. "Up" is related to the word "superior", "down" is related to the word "inferior", which are indications of position and place, and we are animals, like all living animals or plants, or whatever, that depend on indications of position and place. (I hope that this does not sound too abstract, because it is really both abstract and concrete.)
What I hear you talking about above is the necessity of refuge, somehow, a place of one's OWN, and that seems very natural to me, as we are extremely sophisticated, vulnerable and fragile animals. What made us stand up, at one point of time ? Was it a... choice ? What was behind it ? What I say here sometimes is that, by standing up, we put the maximum distance between our feet and our heads/minds, and that has profound implications and consequences. Feet... on the ground, heads in the sky, but each far from each other, which means having to negotiate a very fragile balancing act, and all the time, except when we're sleeping. And we need a fair amount of sleep, and we need a haven to sleep in, I think.
I like the way that you "use" the old words here... I, too, feel the need to return to the old words. "Kingdom" is a good one.
I got busy and the conversation has meandered in other directions, but I feel I owe a response to those (way up in the thread) who responded so thoughtfully to my original comment. I am all for seeking - and finding! - spirit in the world. I was once a Dawkins kind of atheist, but no more. The key difference we are exploring here seems to lie between alternative ways of thinking about spirit. I worked my way back into a comfortable relationship with experiences we usually call "religious" by adopting what I suppose is most accurately labeled a pagan conception of spirit. I do not think the project of draining the spirit out of the natural world and locating it in a sky god that is then worshipped in ways mediated by one priesthood or another - the monotheistic project - has turned out very well. I am nothing close to a practicing pagan, but I have settled into a notion of the sacred that, like Abram's, most resembles the indigenous one. Unlike many who have weighed in here, I gather, I see these two as quite distinct, particularly in the kind of attitude they sanction towards the natural world
So what do the dancing sea lions have on the beatitudes? Answering that one might push all this a little farther down the road to mutual understanding. For me, the highwater mark of moral thinking in the Western tradition is Aldo Leopold's land ethic: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Such an ethic calls us to live in communion with a non-human world - to listen to it, pay it respect, communicate with it in the varying non-verbal languages spoken there. Abram's dance with the sea lions embodies that spirit. He might have cursed himself for leaving his hunting rifle in the pick-up, but he doesn't. He responds to the threat of danger by figuring out, very much on the fly, how to communicate with these other beings. They, by their own lights, do the same. It is a lovely moment and, for me, a deeply ethical one. That is how we need to go about in the world if we are not to destroy it. Compared to that, the beatitudes are ethical in a way that has not yet extended itself into the terrain that most needs ethical consideration. And I don't know how much longer we can wait for a sky god religion to make that extension. Immanent realities always seem to get subordinated to transcendent realities among those who believe the latter exist. That logic seems to be at work in this thread. The immanent world is a "small room." And an icon is an object, right? Isn't that part of the problem? Or notice, Paul, your willingness to reduce the sea lions' behavior to instinct (hunger).
Everyone, of course, must follow their own heart, but these are the things I worry about.
Quickly, but this deserves more consideration, when the Romans were rounding up the beasts for circus games, I am not sure at all that monotheistic sky gods were dominating the scene. Since I think that, for a very long time now, Man has been trying to figure out who he is by watching the animals, and copying them, he has had a long time to see that predation is part of the natural world, and that animals kill other animals, for food BUT NOT JUST, (lots of prejudices on our part about this one...).
The rules in the NATURAL WORLD include predation, animals killing other animals, insects killing other insects. I think that we don't want to see, or believe this, right now...and that it is a big problem.
'I do not think the project of draining the spirit out of the natural world and locating it in a sky god that is then worshipped in ways mediated by one priesthood or another - the monotheistic project - has turned out very well. '
This is also where I found myself five or ten years or so back. But it's a really fundamental misunderstanding of both the 'pagans' and the 'monotheists' - though I think these categories are also part of the problem. I do appreciate that plenty of Christian churches may have helped compound the understanding.
But if we are talking about the Christian faith - and certainly its original Orthodox iteration - there is no 'sky god.' That is a remnant of your Dawkinsy days, I'd say. A silly straw man. God, as Christ tells us, is within us all. He/It is the creator of all life. That's the primal claim: that there is something beyond this, and woven through it, and woven through us. That if there is a communion between all beings it is the communion of the light of their creator, through which we can communicate and commune. And worship.
There is no replacing creation with creator. Creator is the reason for creation. Creation is an icon of God. It is sacred in that sense. But it is not the focus of worship. Why would it be? You find meaning and beauty in nature and so do I. But you want this to be 'enough.' That's fine. But whether something is 'enough' depends, I think, on what you imagine you are looking for.
I don't know of any 'pagan' culture - including those 'indigenous' ones which Abram likes to explore - which do not have an understanding of this 'great spirit' which, in Orthodox terminology is 'everywhere present and filling all things.' That is the source of the dancing sea lions. Similarly, at its root Christianity requires and expects communion with creation. We do not have to 'wait' for Christianity to develop some modern 'ecological understanding.' It's right there in the gospels. Neither do we need to romanticise the 'indigenous' 'pagans', many of whose lifeways were warlike, destructive and sacrificial - because they had at their heart no moral teaching.
(Incidentally, I did not 'reduce the sea lions behaviour to hunger.' I have no idea what they were doing. I wasn't there. I have said repeatedly that the Earth is more conscious and alive than many, including probably most Christians, give it credit for. But we are not going to get anywhere pretending that humans are not in some way set apart. For better or for worse (often for worse) we just are.)
The land ethic is great, and I have written about it myself. But it tells me nothing about how to love my neighbour, forgive my enemy or come closer to God in prayer - which means to access my true self, through which I can live as a human should on this earth.
There is no contradiction between a living conscious world and a love of God through Christ. The very essence of Christianity is precisely that the 'sky god' conception is nonsense. This God walks on earth: enters matter and is torutured and transforms it. This God is immanent to His very core. He is part of nature as well as its maker. It's quite a claim.
Where I had got to on my long search was not 'enough' I think because it was not the full picture. The keystone was missing. When I was in your place I would not have wanted to hear this either, but it turns out to be true. That is an experience, rather than a thought.
Beautifully said, thank you so much!
On Paul's recommendation last week, I've started listening to Fr Seraphim Aldea's meditations. I think it is this one 'Why sin gets worse after we find Christ' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15xkPmoh2EQ, which goes on how often converts find not only do they continue sinning (certainly my humbling experience) but also they find that they are not as good at doing the things they were praised for before and they may find their careers and fail to reach their previously anticipated potential. Fr Seraphim says that is part of choosing to follow Christ.
Having said that, I hardly think Paul's Machine essays show a falling off of his powers, and i see no sign he doesn't love the natural world as much as before, but merely recognises that they are signs pointing towards the Creator. It is a bit much to expect him to hit the ground running as a great theologian so soon after entering the Church. As far as I can judge he is feeling his way and not trying to run before he can walk.
If Abbey only saw the "rocks, lizards, and yuccas in their bare thusness" then he never did really see them. There's no "bare thusness" that matters to a human or anything else. Not even colors exist in "thusness", just electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. Colors come from our perception. The "bare thusness" is chance meetings of matter in an indifferent universe - lit by a "black sun" - if we are to repurpose his wording.
Of course he didn't see any "bare thusness" either - you don't devote your life to "bare thusness", at best you package it and sell it. He saw the trancendance, but was too tied up in his era's ideologies to call it by name and go the full way.
The transcendence of faith gave us cathedrals, and Japanese temples, and cave drawings, and Bach, and holy forrests, and historical cities that still look like gems. The transcendence of thusness gave us our modern cities and modernist architecture - and nature as a zoo to go and consume as nature tourists. The approach you describe is what created our world of 2024. Are we happy with it?
As for "what in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account?"
Oh, about two millenia of that, to hundreds of millions across the world and history, in context far wider than nature appreciation. Does that count?
Of course if the churches one has in mind are like modern evangelical, protestant or the "Church of England", well those might as well be NGOs or the local Rotary club.
I apologize, Nick, I think I was unclear about bare thusness. I did not mean to suggest dead, mechanical. I just meant sufficient unto itself, not needing anything beyond it to be meaningful. Abbey saw those things as animate, deserving of the fullest respect. He did as much as is humanly possible - as a writer, a take-no-prisoner polemicist, an inspiration for Earth First!, the activist group that used direct action tactics to slow down the Machine - to stand in the way of the forces that "created our world of 2024." But, like everybody else, he failed. That failure may be the elephant in the room here - the event that shaped the landscape of possibility that we now, all in our various ways, are trying to navigate.
This Texan used to think the Bush family were the good guys.
Now I know they are villains. And Trump is the one who, more than anyone else, exposed them.
I also changed my mind on Trump back in 2016. I was on the edge of becoming a Never Trumper. Then I listened to one of his more serious speeches that year, and I thought, "He gets it."
In religion, I've gone from someone who dare not let the Invocation of the Saints cross his lips to someone who asks saints to pray for him everyday. Hey I need all the prayer I can get!
Texan here too! I know what you mean. I had a deep “political conversion” (during the pandemic) after reading David Talbot’s book the Devil’s Chessboard. To me Left/Right is theatre, it’s all Up/Down. The Bush Family and the Clintons are cut from the same cloth. Glad my true citizenship is in the Kingdom.
Another Texan, and now we have to contend with NeoCon John Cornyn and Dade "I wasn't drinking ossifer" Phelan. I woke up to the fact that the "conservatives" were playing me by using God, country and family to acquire power for the war machine who in turn places the thirty pieces of silver in their coffers.
Something that I have really changed my mind about, or at least have had my mind open to changing, is population. I have always believed that “go forth and multiply” meant exactly that, that the idea that population needed to be limited was wrong from a religious POV. In fact all the dire prognostications about running out of food and other resources as well as runaway numbers in the future were wrong. But we seem to have reached an ungovernable number. Does democracy inevitably breakdown when the numbers get too big, when one man was meant to represent 1000 or 10,000 now represents 1,000,000 is this representative government at all?
Yet the idea that we the horde need to be trimmed to create a theme park for the elite is grotesque.
I have always believed that preserving the environment was much more a matter of how we lived than of how many of us there were, and I still believe this. There is plenty of space, arable land, and food, for many more of us with a less consumptive lifestyle. But there are issues of law and order and government that are seriously out of control.
The older I get the more I know only a God can save us, and the less I know about everything else.
I changed my mind about trusting my kids' pediatrician. She always seemed like a nice lady at their checkups, and I had no reason to distrust her. Then in 2022, when information was coming out all over the place about the Covid vaccine causing myocarditis in teen boys, she asked if my son (a runner in perfect health) had had his booster shot. I said we were going to hold off on that until more studies came out.
She looked at me blankly and said: "What studies?"
"There are studies going on all over the world," I sputtered. What studies?? I wasn't paying this bimbo to pluck my kids' eyebrows; she was their doctor. Yet she didn't have a clue.
Now I take my kids to sports physicals twice a year. Full stop. Unless they need acute care, CA pediatricians can go to hell. Quite a change.
Uh, same. I only take my kid to the pediatrician get a note for camp.
This is the one of the major areas where I have changed my mind, although when Covid arrived, I had already started moving away from current medical/health trends. But definitely, the Covid episode revealed how these trends were hardening, cristalizing. I felt, and still feel increasingly, as though the doctors, and other professionals ? in "intellectual" professions were behaving as though doctors were capable of healing, and curing people, as through THERE WERE NOTHING BEHIND illness and medication that was working for ? against ? us in our lives. Is that transcendance, the belief that there is something behind ? under ? Maybe, maybe not, but without it, I don't see how we can find any kind of meaning in the world. Unless... we have decided NOT to look for, or find meaning.. anywhere ? Could many of us be there, right now ? Is it a risk ?
I think that in Western civilisation, we go through periodic bouts of this profound despair that makes daily life increasing difficult, destroys SOCIETY, the capacity of people to have enough faith to enter into ties, intimacy, commit themselves to a course of action. This profound despair is not new to our civilisation, but... it may be new to us. Before, at best we read about it happening to other people in books, but now it is happening to us, and it is not.. the same. Acquiring experience first hand can be painful.
I like the military now; I like the orderliness of chains of command and I like the idea that democracy was a thought form a few hundred years ago and now it is a more solid form, though also seemingly dwindling, and I have changed my mind about what is powerful
what is powerful is beauty, good bread, nice smells, the sound of the chop of the wood, the bubbling of the stew, the dog that is pregnant, the spider trying to have a family inside the house, a few mice that then turn into one million mice. this sort of thing is powerful.... and good crisps.... knowing how to make them from a potato left over in the ground in early spring, and birch ale. etc.
I'm not sure my change of mind is completely baked yet, but...
Up until recently, I spent large amounts of my energy trying to figure out the fundamental order of the world with my reason and intuition. Everything I would read or take in through experience was filtered with the idea that I would eventually grasp (seize?) life with my reason and intuition. If only I could just get a little more information and experience...
But now it seems obvious that this has an error at the foundation, because it made my mind/my self the starting point and the end point for not only experiencing life, but also somehow "solving" it. Spoiler alert: It turns out my mind/my self can't solve life because life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived (William James?). It was a well-intended project and I always I tried to orient it toward objective truth. But when you try and encompass life itself within your own self, you are setting up your puny mind as something able to judge/capture/contain sheer being. It cannot work. In my case, I think it also has made my thoughts about God somewhat arthritic.
But what to do? Give up on reason and intuition as the way to understanding the fundamental order of the world? That seems not only dangerous, but also... what other tools are there?
The conclusion I am coming to is that you somehow have to let the flow of life grasp you first. So the majority of energy and efforts in life should focus on how one can let the tide of life, sheer being, the reality of God be primary. Another way to say it: Focus less time on the intellectual or the intuitive response to life and more on the simple practice of being as present as possible to experience.
Perhaps a way to summarize how I changed my mind: I no longer think the functions of reason and intuition are to find an all-encompassing and unassailable vision of the truth of life and how it should be lived. Rather, I see my very limited reason and intuition as humble handmaidens to the sheer tide of being. Those humble tools are there to help deepen the reality of being human, not to control or define that reality.
Maybe that makes at least a little sense to someone else, but perhaps too abstract? Forgive me if this is just rambling gibberish!
It makes sense to me. I have struggled wth the same ideas. As a writer who tends towards analysis, this is a central challenge. It's probably why I write so much about running away and living in caves.
Thanks for your comment Paul. Your writing (here and especially your articles for First Things) have definitely had an impact on me and how I process the world.
> It turns out my mind/my self can't solve life because life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived (William James?)
I do not know the original source of this quote, but I was reading a collection of essays on Wendell Berry's works, and to me this was the most striking sentence from the whole book:
> We should treat the world and the living things in it as mysteries to be loved, not as instruments to be manipulated, problems to be solved, or adversaries to be conquered, for we live "in a world rooted in mystery and in sanctity."
- Rod Dreher, "Wendell Berry: A Latter-Day Saint Benedict," a chapter from "The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry." He is, of course, quoting Berry there at the end.
One objection to Wendell Berry's comment about "mysteries to be loved" : we are fragile, vulnerable, and limited animals incapable of understanding that sometimes, in certain circumstances, "love" can be an extremely destructive force that sweeps everything away with it. One thing that I have not changed my mind about recently, is that we don't know, and have no way of knowing, the evil that comes into the world at the same time as our desire to love, and our expression of it.
I meditate this often. It makes me believe that we live our lives poised on a crest between two abysses, and that being a man (that said as a woman, but I will stand by the expression "a man") is a devilishly difficult enterprise.
Debra, that’s a disturbing thought. Is it “love” that can be a destructive force, or “desire”?
Both can be destructive forces. We are being conditioned to feel that desire alone can be a destructive force, and that love CANNOT be a destructive force, not only that, but we are being conditioned to believe that desire is a masculine activity/force that leads to destructive violence, and that men are violent and destructive by nature.
But I don't believe this. Love can be a destructive force when it leads us to overprotect, for example, because it IS possible to overprotect. Both men and women can overprotect, using love as a justification for doing this.
Example : I took my now adult children to my father's grave when they were both little : my son, 5 or 6 years old. We put flowers on my father's grave, and my son coming home in the car, was very quiet. Back in the apartment, he said "why did you make me since I have to die ?", and he was barely 6. And we spent a very long time with him telling him that there was no answer to that question that we could give him, because we didn't know the answer. It was maybe his first experience of the metaphysical pain of the human condition... at 6. (A very beautiful book on this subject, "A Death in the Family" by James Agee.)
Quite a few years later, I discussed this incident with a group of American people I didn't know, and they were all very uncomfortable with what I had done in taking my children to the grave. They didn't believe that children could handle the experience of death, and basically, they believed that if I LOVED my children, I should have protected them from this experience. But I firmly believe that death is one of our most democratic experiences, and that little ones AND big ones handle it to the best of our abilities. To me, those people, even if they had good intentions, or considered themselves to be.. nice, were engaging in a form of love that is destructive.
So... yes, "love" and not always desire, can be destructive. Good intentions can be destructive.
One of my most inspiring works of literature is "The Merchant of Venice", because in it, William Shakespeare turns our intimate assumptions on their head. Sometimes (but rarely) the cruel man Shylock inspires us with pity, and the "nice" people like Bassanio, Antonio ? are unwittingly ? cruel and pitiless despite their good intentions.
It is an excellent play for exploring how fallen the fallen world is, and why we must be mistrustful of our good intentions.
Saint Paul would have said that things are not always what they seem ?
You wrote, "But I firmly believe that death is one of our most democratic experiences." This comment reminded me of Catherine Brown's article, "Uncustomisable Orthodoxy," at https://catherinebrown.org/uncustomisable-orthodoxy/ .
I read Catherine Brown's short article. It is very important, and reveals the tremendous tensions involved in our civilisation around points that we cannot resolve, because there is no resolution to them.
There is probably little chance that Paul will read what I can say about Catherine Brown's article, although he may (have) read the article itself. I hope that he is already aware of everything that is irresolvable about what appears in the article.
What is irresolvable : how far do we go in belonging to a COMMON, and UNIVERSAL experience, and how far do we remain singular, unique ? Where do we put the accent in our daily lives, in our customs, practices ? Jesus Christ, Socrates, both men were greatly dedicated to what has emerged in our civilisation as privacy ?, emphasis put on the person's personal experience (and/or salvation).
At this point, it increasingly appears that overriding emphasis on the value of a person's personal... choice, considered to be synonymous with liberty/freedom, is jeopardizing what we have IN COMMON, what makes us similar, neither totally different, nor totally identical, to any other person.
Without common ground, there can be no society.
Debra, I guess it comes down to the question, “Is disordered love, love?” My gut reaction is that “I” might be disordered or my intentions disordered, but it doesn’t follow that love is the culprit, it’s me or my intentions.
Substitute loyalty for love. I most certainly can have disordered loyalty, for instance, as an SS officer for Hitler. That doesn’t make loyalty “bad,” it makes me bad.
Interesting answer.
But how do we know what love is outside of the flesh and blood people expressing or incarnating it for us to understand it ?
I would rather fight to defend people than words. The words... don't really need my help ; they seem to get along quite well on their own agenda.
And I will say that yes, disordered love is love. When Lady Macbeth in the play "Macbeth" loses control over herself, and opens herself to be possessed by the occult forces that her words unleash in her, she is doing it... for love of her husband, and out of the ambition she has, not for herself, but for him. It is an easy ? solution to say that what she feels is NOT love, but one that I will not adopt. But you are right to remark that this is an important difference between us. It may be so important that it means that we live in different worlds. That is possible.
That's an excellent quote Kevin, very much appreciate you sharing it.
I really appreciate your comment, Dave. I have undergone almost the exact same change recently, even thinking about it in similar terms.
I just finished a fascinating biography of Meister Eckhart called Dangerous Mystic, and what you say here seems very parallel to fundamental shifts he experienced in his 50s. I hadn’t realized it, but he was as highly trained a theologian you could be during his day, though also a mendicant Dominican. Anyhow, he was working on his epic theological treatise (following Aquinas) that was to take decades and involve answers to thousands of questions when something happened. He jumped ship, abandoned his scholarly work, and began teaching common women and men in their German vernacular (both actions were a no-no to the religious brass). And as a result, you get his sermons, which he never wrote down, but which enthused followers captured. They’re stunningly elegant, indeed dangerous (though I think theologically sound), but most of all aimed at guiding one to direct experience of God. No one knows what caused this shift in him, but it’s flatly apparent by what he wrote before and what he spoke after. Though I know little about Aquinas, I think a similar thing happened to him at the end of his life after a mystical experience: he thereafter called his theology “straw.” For me, who can tend towards an unceasing want of Truth through constant back-and-forth’s in my mind, it’s an inspiring telos.
The Eckhart book sounds fascinating and substantial, I think I am going to have to read it. Thanks for sharing this Steven... but also, just what I needed, another book on the stack :)
Awesome. If you decide to read his sermons too, I strongly recommend getting The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart by Yale University Press. The translation is spectacularly clean, whereas I found other English translations distancing. Unfortunately the book itself is sinfully expensive in print, but it’s available for free online in PDF with a quick Google search.
Steven, if I can, I’ll try to articulate why your comment on Meister Eckhardt so strongly resonated with me.
Over the Christmas holidays I started reading Chesterton’s two biographies in a single volume, the first on St. Thomas Aquinas and the second on St. Francis of Assisi. Even though I am more inclined to logic and reasoning as opposed to a gut instinct to solve a problem, I’ve tried and failed many times to work my way through Aquinas’ “Summa.” It always left me cold. Similarly, until about ten years ago, when I first read a biography on Francis, I always harbored an aversion to him, which was really an aversion to the popular hagiography of Francis as an effeminate loner who talked to the animals.
Chesterton’s short biographies of each man are terrific. Yes, as you mention, Aquinas did have a couple of mystical experiences that deeply changed him. What makes Aquinas so fascinating is that he was not only a towering genius and heroically productive, but incredibly—saintly?—humble and kind and generous.
To immediately jump to Francis after that read on Aquinas was similar to the break you commented on that Meister Eckhardt experienced. Like Aquinas, Francis was humble, kind and generous (with other peoples’ wealth). Francis experienced God in every person he met, in every tree he slept under, and in every animal he encountered.
It seems as though God gave us Meister Eckhardt to show that both ways of loving him—intellectually or experientially—are valid, but perhaps with a slight nudge to get out of our heads and experience the beauty all around us.
I love all this!
I recently read Chesterton's Assisi biography and similarly found it wonderful. I also so appreciated how history can be written stylistically like that: warm, funny, whimsical, contemplative. I'm planning to read through his account of Aquinas soon, so thanks for the encouragement.
That's an interesting thought about Eckart. I'm pretty impressed overall with how much spiritual development and epiphany was underway during that time (of which I've been quite ignorant about until late).
Thank you! Recently I, too, have been on a steep learning curve about the 13th and 14th centuries. Half of what I was taught about feudalism and serfs and “altar and throne” was B.S. There is a lot we should emulate from that era. First and foremost, flip the Enlightenment view that violence is the norm and peace the exception, back to the sacramental kingdom of St. Louis IX, where peace was the norm and violence the exception. They literally called it “the business of the peace and the faith.” That’s a far cry from Calvin Coolidge’s “The business of America is business.”
If you have any book recommendations about or from that period, I’m all ears.
The book that sent me on this journey into the medieval age is Andrew Willard Jones’, “Before Church and State—The Social Order of the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34847571-before-church-and-state
It is a mind blowing book, as Jones gets you to abandon the concept of a modern state—this was difficult for me—and put yourself in the mindset of a society that wielded no central power as we moderns understand it. The “state” did not exist and is a foreign concept to the medieval people. In my opinion, Jones convincingly shows that there was no power struggle between the church, which was primarily focused on the salvation of souls, and the monarchy, which was primarily focused on maintaining the peace. In fact, they both worked together and/or separately “on the business of the peace and the faith.” How they accomplished it is truly remarkable.
I spent a lot of time in nature alone. I am an agriculturalist after all. In the past most of that time has been inside my head trying to figure out God. Truth goodness and beauty as they say. I was always trying to approach the problem in that order but recently I have discovered after decades of attacking the problem the wrong way around that for men there's only one way to know God and that is first through Beauty then to goodness and if you're lucky truth. It may seem like a small reordering of things but it might take me the rest of my life to figure it out and it certainly will to put it into practice. Maybe not so much a change of mind but certainly a change of practice and perception.
This is great, Frank.
Paul it would be a great help if you could sort this all out for me in a few dozen pages and post it somewhere... then I could be done with it and get on with my life:-)
This resonates with me. And as an agriculturalist, I doubt what I'm about to say will resonate with YOU, but mentioning it seems apt:
I recently had an experience with a shaman at a psychedelics retreat where I shared my intention about wanting to act more instinctively out of love. Currently I seem to land on the right actions most of the time. But I have to think my way to them. It's not as instinctive as I'd like.
She accurately noted that I'm always looking things up, reading books, seeking teachers ... to guide me in the answers. But I don't spend enough time learning directly, unmediated, from the world. Why? Because I'm lazy. Learning from the world-- and being with beauty is a key way to do this-- is a lot more WORK than reading a book, or paying attention to a mentor.
Among a couple other things, she prescribed "Treat the world like one of your books."
I totally get what she means but I don't think the analogy is quite accurate . A book is an instrument something that you read something that you use to gain knowledge. Beauty has to be experienced it's something that happens to you not something that you make happen. I'm sure that's what she meant... Learn from it but not in an instrumental way.
I like your comment, Awbnid. Several years ago, I stopped reading books about spirituality for the reasons that you outlined above. I think that we have been spending too much time on our butts in classrooms "learning" about the world, (and often to get diplomas, too...). And that unfortunately, we have learned ? that the place to learn is at school, or in a book, or... with an expert, or even in a tutorial over the Internet. Personally, I favor the solution of learning with a flesh and blood person, whenever possible, or through observation, whenever possible, but I am handicapped by not.. learning how to learn this way, and it is not easy BEING CLEVER AND FIGURING THINGS OUT by observation. It takes time, too.
But... it takes time to really read a book well, I have... learned. And sometimes, reading books (depending on which ones) can save you.. time, and give you some short cuts into the human... HEART. Reading beautiful literature has always seemed like a good investment to me, and it has given me much joy, beauty, and understanding. The human heart, that unfathomable country, which is eminently... wild ?
Lots of different ways to learn, and maybe they all have their good points, and bad ones, and are somewhat complementary ? For sure, effort, observation and discipline help to produce results, but they are not a guarantee. Gotta use your head, too.
On mediation : while this may be a technical, intellectual subject, I do not think that we can avoid mediation, and that we were already fighting during the Reformation about this issue. I think that our consciousness mediates our relationship with our senses (thus our observation), so that we are naturally ? condemned to mediation, and trying to wiggle out of the human condition is... sin, Awbnid. Or, just ill advised.
Excellent thoughts! Especially on mediation. In substantial ways, experience is *all* subjective. Or qualia, as the philosophers say. No getting around it.
And I don't think the suggestion I received was to not read. More of a yes-and sort of thing. I read too much to the exclusion of 'being with.' For me, I also think she was spot-on about the reason why I do that. It is a lot of work. And I am lazy!
I like this Frank. I too, have spent a lot of time in nature alone. However, there was no search for truth and goodness in that immersion. Though I have always appreciated the beauty, even as a 10 year old.
I have always felt that immersing myself in nature, as much as I possibly could, was a short coming. It was a way of avoiding people, awkward conversations, or unpleasantness, and just the noise of civilization. I never thought deeply, just felt.
I have always admired intellect, other peoples. One reason I love Paul's writing/voice. So, your comment makes me hope that my quiet seclusions and retreat from the world weren't so much a self-indulgent sin as a kind of baptism in the beauty, a search for something more than our civilization had to offer, maybe a search for God.
The past four years has certainly helped to solidify that I have indeed been searching for meaning, and this has brought me closer to God. The time and years spent in nature has helped to nurture a love of God's creation, even us.
So, thank you for this.
Frank, there is an interesting and compelling book about approaching life from a ‘beauty first’ perspective: see Timothy Patitsas, Ethics of Beauty. Patitsas is speaking as an ethicist specifically about the discipline and healing nature of therapy and those who’ve suffered trauma and moral injury. Yet the principles he draws on are not limited to that space. (How could beauty be limited to one facet?)
“Come back in five years”??
That’s certainly something I’ve changed my mind about: future timelines, me or us having a future at all.
The idea of living into old age and collecting a pension.
The idea of dying in a compassionate NHS that won’t actively hasten my end whether I want it or not.
The idea that there won’t be a catastrophic war this decade.
The idea that the enemy is not only within but is actually governing us.
The 2020s seems to be the hinge decade. I fear what these next very few years will bring us, on too many fronts.
I appreciate I was making an optimistic estimate. But I try to keep my readers' spirits up.
(This may be news to some of my readers.)
Thanks, Paul, understood. Indeed, your blithe, sunny optimism is one of the most attractive features of your writing :)
Good job, Jules. Very well said. AND.. you made with laugh with that humor that used to be called the humor of the rabbis the evening before the pogrom. (Bet you can't say that any more...) And I don't even have to wrestle with NHS. Try living in megapole Grenoble, and having a dental emergency over the weekend...
The idea of a compassionate health care system that will compassionately usher us out... with love.
This quote from Christopher Dawson helped expand my views on Christianity.
'It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole'.
I am rather simple, so my mind has changed from seeing natural things “just” as things of beauty or curious wonder to things with untapped utility….for instance, i use to see sea urchins as sort of ungainly creatures that chomp away at algae to now seeing them as maybe a cure for spikey viruses—-in a biomimicry way. And the lovely crepe myrtles that bloom all summer, now i peel back the bark to find smooth-as-a-baby-butt new growth and i wonder, can i harness whatever it is inside of them to make my old skin new again?
I wrote an essay about "My Personal Myth." It represents a change in my view of what I owe my "success" to.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/my-personal-myth
I can remember exactly when my thinking started to evolve, if not the actual date. I used to contribute on Metafilter, and one day there was a discussion - some woman saying she'd failed to achieve a goal, or couldn't get past some obstacle in her life, I can't recall the specifics. But I was several years into being a baseball coach for my oldest son by that point, and responded as a coach might: You can't let this defeat you, you've got to keep pushing, keep trying, etc.
The reaction from the community was almost vicious. "You can't tell her how to feel," one respondent said. Apparently I wasn't validating her suffering. And it occurred to me then that suffering - to these people, and later many others - wasn't something to be endured and overcome; it was something to be valorized. It was an identity. It was almost embraced as a chosen destiny.
I had counted myself a solid liberal, but I didn't understand this way of thinking at all.
Later on, of course, it would snowball. Once men became women - and we had to regard them as indistinguishable from actual women, indeed that the term "actual women" = HATE, etc. - once we were all required to toe the party line on this issue (and others) I realized that not only was I no longer liberal, I detested this "liberalism." Of course, in today's parlance that make me "far right." So be it, I guess.
Like you said Paul, the Covid phenomenon had a deep impact on many of us. I have changed my mind about the medical establishment and pediatricians in particular.
Mind you, my favorite doctor caught my daughter’s exceptionally early-onset appendicitis and the hospital saved her life, but now I cannot divorce the whole lot of them from their links with Big Pharma.
I can’t undo any harm my over-compliance may have caused my children, I can only pray.