ten thousand

The ten thousand things depend upon it and it denies none of them. It accomplishes its task yet claims no reward.

-- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 34

“Pray without ceasing,” said the apostle (I Th 5:17), but this confuses me. If I prayed without ceasing, then there would be no time when I do not pray. This is not what most people understand by prayer. I wouldn’t get much else done.

Maybe the apostle thought it was okay if nothing much got done. He thought the end was coming. No kidding. Soon. Like a thief in the night. You couldn’t lay up treasures here and now, not even spiritual ones, because the here and the now would soon be gone. But the end was delayed and, to our great disappointment, time goes on. We learn that we must care how things come out. Like it or not we are stewards, because the world will outlive us and we must leave it in a tolerable state for those who follow, a few of whom at least we love. We have stuff to do.

When a family says, “Before you go, would you pray with us?” – it’s clear that up till now I haven’t prayed. But then, I didn’t mean to. Prayer is not a thing to be pushed on people. I’m only supposed to do it on request. Until that request comes, I’m supposed to be doing something else.

My life is mostly something else.

So don’t tell me I must rise at the third hour to pray, I have responsibilities. Ten thousand other things to do. And I have a problem with authority. I’m Unitarian. I don’t even recognize my own authority.

I don’t pray without ceasing. I don’t have a discipline of prayer, though I am brought to it by others. I pray if I’m asked. The people who ask for it – they discipline me. Is that good enough?

Good enough for whom?

If my colleague thinks I should have a practice, he means that I need a regular prompt, like a muezzin’s call, to halt the day’s stammer. What I give on request to others, I should give to myself.

Ten thousand things. I won’t do them all. I won’t do most of them. I choose what to do, and the other things – they just won’t be done right now. If I can choose, leaving the other things to providence, isn’t that what we’re talking about? The giving up of things. I am not equal to the ten thousand, but they call to me nevertheless. A mist of obligation rises, all the things I ought to do, in so many different ways, for so many people, from so many points of view. It’s not so much my vices as my virtues that seduce me. My passion to please. My desire to comply. I would pass all tests, meet all expectations. I’ve auditioned for the role of Great Exception.

The Tao is the pin that punctures the balloon of my grandiosity. Lord, help me choose, because I am not equal to it all, it’s far too much. There’s something here for me but only if I discern it. If it finds me.

I used to say I didn’t want to go on stage with any nice guys. The only good comrade is the one who chooses without guilt, plays without mercy, and does with killer instinct what is to be done. Making the invisible visible is rough business. To think of what you ought to do is a mystification and a temporizing betrayal. The world doesn’t watch temporizers. Holding one’s moistened finger to the wind is not the way of faith. The mountain never moves by dithering. Only if we do the work and nothing else can we help each other.

Lord, it’s too much for me. Help me own my inadequacy. Close the doors of fantasy. Open the eyes of my eyes. Mark me for discernment. The thing that is for me to do, if I do it, is my glory.

Discernment is a via negativa. There’s cruelty in it. To know what you are doing is to know the things you are not doing. All nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them.

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no argument

A work becomes inarguable when it creates the terms by which it is perceived, when it becomes its own system of value, when there is nothing behind what it is saying.

-- Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought

I have to do this. But I didn’t know. I only learned by doing it.

Is it any good? That's what I asked as I fashioned secret juvenilia, recreating poems I had learned in literature classes. Am I any good? That's what I asked as I trampled the stage in school plays. Do I look normal? That's what I asked as with fear and trembling I approached a girl, requesting what would terrify me to obtain. Did I get it right? That's what I asked as I stuttered my tremulous thoughts to sullen undergraduates filling out their distribution requirements. How can I become a real boy? That's what I asked as my wooden head puzzled what a man, a husband, a father would do. Do I deserve the space I fill?

It took half my life to grasp the futility of such questions. There is always a problem, always something wrong, always something deficient, always another test. The Voice has only one thing to say: No, Not yet. It will say these words as long as you keep asking the questions. It’s not the voice of life.

“Try not,” said Yoda. “Do or do not. There is no try.” Calvin, though his doctrine declares the uselessness of effort, drove his followers crazy with trying. God, he said, is utterly free; God knows whether you’re damned or not, and nothing you do can change the truth. But a Calvinist is a human being, and cannot leave it at that. Human nature drives a Calvinist to try, try – to prove, prove – that what he presents is the appearance of an elected one. To whom should he present? To the Voice that always says No, Not Yet, It’s Not Enough. Yoda’s voice does not appear in Calvin’s book. Yoda knows that trying and doing are fundamentally dissimilar. What you do is what you are not trying to do. If you’re still trying, you are not doing it. Trying is a siren, a dead seduction from the task.

That’s what artists know. Trying is for dilettantes who prove, by grunts and grimaces, that they are “at their work.” If it’s hard to do, you failed. Effort only leads you astray. So how can a strutting sinner, how can a poor player dissected on the stage, be saved? How can I do what is really hard to do, and not by trying? Not by work, but by grace. How ironic.

Grace – the real illusion of a miracle. “Lend me your ears,” said Antony in the crowded square; and if I have grace you will lend me your ears. But if you hear my effort, how hard I work to make you hear me, you will not listen. Art is a cruel place, no place for sissies. To those who have, more will be given, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. But then neither is reality a place for sissies. It’s true in art but in reality as well, that what gets truly done seems – really seems – really easy. Could have been no other.

So in this Cockpit where I work, this Department of Reality, this Chaplaincy, where Life and Death play out their tragicomedy, I do the work that on a good day lets me leave the work behind. It’s hard to learn to do things simply. It’s hard for a singer to learn the throat’s co-ordination. It’s hard for an actor to learn the gesture that can touch the hall’s back row. It’s hard for a pastor to learn the simple presence, the seeing and the being-with, that heals. But when the spirit moves us, the learning is already done. It’s then that, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know. We go backstage, behind opinion, and correctness, and approval, and debate.

I am not always pretty. I am not always good. I am not always right. I am not always true. But sometimes after sixty-one years, with all my heart and soul and strength and by grace, I do what will be done. Take me or leave me then. It’s what it is. There’s no argument.

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modern baron

The gift of the One to Men.

-- Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The wind is meager, so we motor rather than sail past the island. Isolated by shallow waters and swift currents stands the burnt shell of a Scottish castle designed by Frank Bannerman VI, who bought up the surplus of the Spanish-American War. One might say, flinching at the joke, that he made a killing with it. Bannerman’s Castle was his arsenal. A ruined residence in the same style commands the island’s crest.

I’m also thinking of William Randolph Hearst, who built another self-designed hotchpotch castle on his private mountain, overlooking the other coast. And of Shelley’s Ozymandias. The destroyed castle mocks Bannerman, and the preserved one mocks Hearst. “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” says the severed stone head.

“If you’re rich enough,” I say, “you can realize your fantasy.”

Fantasy of isolation. A castle is weirdly ambivalent between defense and offense. You shall not be moved from your keep; but because you are immovable, you can always “sally forth.” So you rule the terrain. Kings hated it when their barons built castles. It threatened their fragile authority.

A baron in your castle keep, no one can sneak up on you. The mountain, or the river and its currents, impede approach. Whoever wants to touch you, you can see them coming. From your battlement you can repel them – particularly if you are self-sufficient, with a store of food and armament within the walls.

The wealth of a modern baron comes not from isolation but from commerce; there are people he wants to touch, and to touch him. But he can afford the private planes or skilled river transport that take him out into the world, and that bring his chosen guests into the keep. The modern baron is so rich, he can even pay the cost of his dysfunction.

“Thank God we all die,” says my host.

My friend, who invited me on his boat, has longer experience than I to look back on. We were talking of a futurist who says that science is about to cure us of age. We may see lifespans of patriarchal length, a thousand years or more. “What’s really strange,” says my friend, “is that he thinks this is a good thing.”

If we live to a thousand years, where will we put the children? What shall we do with those misguided beings who engender and give birth to them? Perhaps we shall have no children. If I have nine more centuries to live, I may not want a squirming grandchild on my lap. If I am immortal, my descendents cannot make me so. Perhaps we’ll keep the children on a reservation, lest they change things. However old they grow, they won’t know what we know. They’ll lack the true perspective. Perfecting, rubbing smooth our pleasures, we may never give way. Some dying churches are like this.

But of course we must give way, and unmade, we must make our immortality. Every thing I do now is a hundred other things that now I’ll never do. We cannot keep to ourselves. If I do not learn the strange new pleasures of my children, and if they do not know my joys, if I do not love and am not loved, then my relic castle, burnt out or preserved, will mock me in my death. It is not that we must love in spite of death; it is because of death that we can love. I work in a cockpit of love and death. Death shows his colors here, and the trumpet calls us to change and to declare our loyalties. If I had forever to love you I’d never bother, and you’d never care.

Our mortality is therefore our gift and the ground of our joy. Tolkien imagined two kinds of sentient creature, one immortal and one mortal. The immortal elves poisoned the world in self-regard, greed and lust for power. In boundless grief they have left Middle-Earth to Humankind, who came later and who, dying the individual “death of weariness” that elves never knew, must save the moments of their lives in loyalty and love. The transitory survives where the eternal does not. Our castle walls dissolve, and we must meet each other in the open air. Thank God we all die.

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made flesh

“My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”

-- Hamlet

“The – LORD – GOD – Je – HO – VAH!”

She sings each syllable, alternating between two notes. I know, because I’ve studied such things, that the interval is a major second, like the first two notes of the scale. “Do – RE – RE – do – RE – RE!” She punctuates each note, each syllable, with a louder silence.

“IN – THE – be – GIN – ning – WAS – the – WORD.”

At the top of subway steps in Grand Central Station at morning rush, she is all I hear.

“AND – the – WORD – WAS – with – GOD.”

I pass her by, descending to a deeper ring of urban transport.

“AND – the – WORD – WAS – GOD.”

From the platform below I still hear her.

“AND – the – WORD – WAS – made – FLESH.”

There it is. Authenticity. She is what she claims to be. Refugee from the theatre, I recall language from studios of acting: She is not just telling, she is doing. She doesn’t just say that the word was made flesh. She is a Word Made Flesh.

“The – WORD – WAS – made – FLESH – and – DWELT – a – MONG – US.”

I am witness to the power of the Incarnate Word. Her Flesh is given over to Her Word. Her blood and breath are timed to Her Word’s pulse. Her throat vibrates in mathematic passion, and my throat rises sympathetically. Machines scream and a hundred conversations scurry on their way, but what I hear is Her Word. This is not a liberal sermon with five logical points, later to be judged “interesting” and “stimulating” by parishioners. She does not interest me. She does not stimulate me. She seizes me.

“HE – was – IN – the – WORLD.”

In a hundred studios of drama in this city, acolytes make offerings to their gurus. They mortify themselves in worship of this very power to en-flesh the word. Two of them finish an exercise, and there is a silence for the space of half a minute.

“BUT – the – WORLD – KNEW – him – NOT.”

They are waiting for the guru to unseal his verdict. (The really clever guru prolongs the pain.) They are lost; they await the revelation. Was it true? Am I real? Does my “work” have authenticity? Am I talented? Do I have IT? Desperation feeds on the silence.

Let’s leave it there. If the word had been made flesh, it would have seized you all. You wouldn’t be waiting for the guru to tell you what happened.

That’s why Hamlet, the prince of failed actors, knowing his role but never bringing it off, talking talking of what’s to do, tormented by words words words that stop his thoughts, curses his thoughts until they shall learn the pulse of his body. If his thoughts are not now “bloody” they shall be worth nothing. Only at his end, too late and by accident, are his Words Incarnate.

“WE – have – SEEN – his – GLO – RY.”

That God became one of us is the Christian glory. That he grew in the bowels of a woman. Nascitur inter sanguinem et faeces et urinam. That he heard the pulse of her blood and the pedal point of her breath, syncopated by a slithering symphony of fluids and solids in passage toward the world. So did we all. And all of us, Yeshua included, were then expelled into silence. Perhaps it is not the sudden cold or bright light that bakes a baby cry. Perhaps it is the silence. Our bodies, abruptly orphaned, no longer purr to the music of creation.

“His – GLO – RY, – FULL – of – GRACE – and – TRUTH.”

After expulsion, we do our best to compensate for dis-enfleshment. We seek grace in making love and art. We seek truth in reason, or veritas in the vine or pharmacy. We laugh, cry, sometimes pray. Sometimes we sing or dance, and for a moment remember.

We must learn from our Christian brothers what they so often deny – that God is in the flesh. God is Incarnate. Our eating and drinking, pissing and shitting, laughing and crying, belching and farting, singing and dancing, our compassion and our copulation – these are what God could not bear to be separated from.

“GRACE – and – TRUTH.”

I stand clear of the closing doors. They close. I am on my way to work.

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religion unknown

“Will there be anything left . . . that can properly be called religion?”

-- John White Chadwick, The Faith of Reason (1879)

“He believes in science,” she said.

I had stopped by his room. A new admission. His chart said “Religion Unknown.” He was, as we say to family members on the phone afterward, “resting comfortably.” There’s nothing else to say. He’s still breathing. He doesn’t, so far as we can tell, know we’re here. But because the oral culture of our craft says that hearing may be the last of mental powers to go – and because there’s nothing else to do – we speak. I greeted him, I said who I was. I said that I was here to help.

The most likely possibility, if the patient has any religious culture at all, is that he is a Christian or a Jew. So I spoke a psalm of comfort, about fear and the overcoming of fear. “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Perhaps, if my words roused his mind from its depthless dream, they would be of – comfort. That was it. I had learned nothing. But I must fill out a “Spiritual Assessment.” So I was not done.

The next step is to “reach out” to the “Primary Care Giver.” His wife picked up the phone. I said who I was, that I had visited her husband and found him resting comfortably, that I had spoken a psalm with him. We are here to support the patient and the family; if she could take a moment to speak with me, she could help me better to understand –

“He doesn’t practice any religion.”

This information, my first in the case, meant that I had somewhat exceeded my mandate. Of course, I had been somewhat misinformed. The chart might have said, “No religion.” But I would still have been required to seek her out, to hear her say the words.

“There won’t be any last rites. No prayers. Nothing like that. How is it possible that people can just come into his room like that without permission?”

I explained that I was legally required to approach the patient, for assessment of religious or spiritual needs. Patient and family can refuse pastoral care if they wish.

“He was a great scientist. He didn’t believe in anything like that. He believed that the world is an orderly place, and that reason is the key to it. There’s not to be any ceremonies. No last rites.”

Transference. The importation of remembered or imagined experience to the present situation. In her mind she saw black-robed figures of Inquisition, smoke and mirrors, mumbo-jumbo and exploitative conversion in extremis.

Counter-Transference. In my mind I saw white-gowned figures of Scientism, bald heads and black-rimmed coke-bottle spectacles. The Scriptures of Atheism, revealing every few years under a new prophet’s name the freshly scrubbed icon of The Wheel. As if scientists had invented Doubt.

She doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. No point explaining that my church has been for eighteen centuries accused of Atheism. That if you ask me whether I believe there is a God, I don’t know what the question means or what difference my answer could make.

We all respect science too much. The only thing science can tell us is how things generally work. It’s a powerful knowledge, but strictly limited. We love science to idolatry. We expect it to tell us what is sacred. But if there are miracles, science can’t speak of them. Any scientist who speaks of the sacred – even to say there is no sacred – has stopped for that moment being a scientist.

I don’t think God is so cruel that my prayer could save the patient’s life. And our doctors know they cannot predict the time of death. It’s not like in the movies. “One year to live,” says the doctor, and the patient, sound of mind and strong of body, goes round the world making up for his faulty life, expiring plump at last amidst violins and good lighting, and speaking wise words.

When she said he believed “that reason is the key,” she was praying for him.

“So I’ll indicate that you’re refusing pastoral care.”

“No last rites. He believes in science,” said she.

“So do I,” said I.

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do good

“Love your enemies, do favors for those who hate you.”

-- Luke 6:27

This is the hardest, most paradoxical of commandments. It makes no sense: how can I love an enemy? If I love him, he is not my enemy. Is that the point? That friendship is mutual, and enemyship the same? So if I love my enemy he is no longer my enemy. He might not be my friend, but he is no longer my foe. Is that what Yeshua had in mind?

Karen says (August 5), “I've always wondered if ‘love your enemies’ wasn't a mistranslation.” It’s a good translation, but English can’t convey the precision of the word “love.” Agapate: a commandment, an imperative verb-form related to agape, one of three words for love. Yeshua commands us to extend agape to those who hate us. How can he dare to command our feelings

Feelings, as your shrink will tell you, are what they are – we do not choose them, though we can name them, know them, lead them, follow them, deny them or disconnect them. But agape is the most rational of loves – it is the love that we can choose.

Eros is the body’s desire to unite with other bodies. Philia is a more generalized desire to “press the flesh” through fellowship and mutuality. The lexicon says that agape is not so much what we feel as what we do, based on “evaluation and choice.” Agape is what God gives us, and what God asks of us in return. God is sometimes angry with us for good reason, and we with God. Feel what you must – happy sad friendly hostile – but Agapate.

So the commandment is not about our feelings. I don’t have to cherish the lover who harms me. I don’t have to “feel the pain” of the comrade who betrays me. I don’t have to like Slobodan Milosevic. Yeshua says, “Don’t get bent out of shape. Don’t let your enemy deform you. Don’t descend to his lowest level. Don’t scrabble in the dirt just because she did.” Continue to love kindness, and do justice, and walk humbly.

There are foolish enemies and smart enemies. Foolish enemies are the ones we can laugh off. They fall on their faces and take nothing from us; or they take from us what we never wanted anyway. Sometimes we can make ambitious enemies foolish by withdrawing desire from what they want to take. We can even do this retroactively, by declaring that the thing our enemy took is something we never wanted. Or that we should not have wanted it – and then we thank the would-be enemy for teaching us that our better self never wanted what they took. Thus we deny foolish enemies the very status of enemy. We belittle and disarm them. They never harmed us, and thus we defeat them. “Love your enemies: it’ll drive them crazy.” So many people have said it that I don’t know who I stole it from.

But there are also smart enemies, who do irreparable damage. They steal innocence and savage souls. Like Mohammed Attah and Timothy McVeigh, they take from us what we ought most dearly to want, that cannot be restored to us. Sometimes they do this in a frenzy of false self-preservation. There are a few who do it for the joy of it. Such enemies wound us in vital organs of the soul, and no one – certainly not Yeshua – can tell us to laugh it off. I shall not turn my other cheek. I shall not go back to my abuser. Not until I know how to render my smart enemy foolish. I do not know when, or if, that day may come.

Agapate and agathopoieite. Love your enemies and do good. It’s not always possible to forgive, particularly where there is no remorse. More likely, I think, is to forget. No, “forget” is not the exact word: a holocaust must never be forgotten. But we can distract ourselves by doing good, until the injury is no longer our obsession. Survival, they say, is the best revenge. Survival with access to memory. Love those that can be loved. Render to enemies what is theirs, which includes justice but not vendetta. Protect from them what is precious. Agathopoieite.

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enumerating powers

“A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

It seems I have powers. People who work with me, and see the lives that touch me, say that I “change lives.” My standard liberal Problem of Belief – infidel that I am – has two things to ask about this. It asks if this claim can be true; and it asks, if it is true, is it a good thing?

The doctor and the nurse have power to alter the physical condition of a body. The social worker has power to invoke secular systems of support. What power have I, a “spiritual counselor,” to “change lives”? What are they talking about? What is this miracle of which I stand accused?

I am learning to enumerate powers. I called them (July 28) “Powers to Hear, to Travel, to Name and to Bless.” I am happy with three of these names for power, but the fourth one not so much. If I Hear the client’s story, I change him into a Person Who Has Been Heard. If I Name his situation, I change his world into a World That Has Been Named. If I Bless his hope, I make his hope a Blessed Hope. But “Travel”? What is that? It doesn’t parallel the others. It doesn’t explain itself. It’s incomplete. And it violates the rule of three.

Like a Pythonist announcing the Spanish Inquisition, I cannot keep the number of my powers down. My chief weapons are three – no, four. And the fourth is a problem. Where do I propose to travel, and why?

“To hear, to name, and to bless.” I should publish that. Why didn’t I leave it right there? There were three bears, three little pigs, three billy goats gruff. There are always three clergy playing golf (the priest, the rabbi and the minister). There were also, they said, three persons in one God, and that idea still works for many people though it is impossible to understand.

Why not leave it there? Because these three powers, once I set them down, don’t move. Each describes something I do, but all together they leave something out. By the time I get these things done – if I get them done – the client has moved on. I gesticulate at an empty chair. In many cases an empty bed. My trinity leaves out the journey, and that’s why I must spoil it.

I talked recently with a man who said that his life has sucked (his word), and his impending loss of it is therefore less grievous than it might be. He is a charming man. He is quiet, articulate, patient and trusting. I empathize with his deepest deadpan humor. His melancholy humor sings to me, but I do not think my life has sucked. Now what am I to do? If I tell him he’s wrong, I fail to hear his disappointment. If I try out new names for his grief, I do not thereby make him happy. If bless his passion for life, I mock him by sanctifying what he cannot bear. I may do these things, but these things don’t touch the heart. They don’t amount to empathy.

This man has spent an afternoon on the bridge, looking into the water. Now the water is rising to him.

There are powers we do not have. But we are tempted to think we have them. We learn over and over that we do not have them, and each time we learn we do not have them we clear the air. Then perhaps, in that clearer air, our real powers may be revealed.

I cannot save this man. I cannot make his life happy, or make him into a happy man, or rescue him from his unhappiness. If I could, I should not. To remove his grief would be to remove him from himself.

So I said, “I’d like to go part of the way with you.” He accepted my proposal. I’m going to travel with him. Perhaps he will be less alone than before. We do not prevent the tears, but sometimes we wipe one away. Even better – a sort of miracle – if he can do it for himself. Because he knows I’m watching.

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