Here is something Emily Dickenson wrote that I find very beautiful:
That love is all there is
Is all we know of love.
What is remarkable about this short verse is what is NOT said. Reading this, I believe this statement is true, and yet there is no argument being made. What makes these lines so effective is how much WE fill in. I, for one, believe that Love is all there is, and so when I read that first line, I think, Yes, you're right. And then I read the second line. This second line tells us that this thing that we know is true, which is in fact the sum of all life, is a mystery. A mysterious truth. How wonderful. And yet she doesn't say THAT. All she says is
Is all we know of love.
But this is all art. All art is metaphorical. Art is not a documentary. Hamlet is not about whether you should avenge your father. The odyssey is not about how to get home from war. Ulysses, for that matter, is not about how to buy soap. All art is metaphorical. And the power of the metaphor is the contribution made by the listener, the audience. Art becomes an interpretation. But the artist must create fertile emptiness into which the audience's imagination is impelled to flower. Great artists, then, are master of what is not said.
This then is the most gracious job for the artist. They are there to inspire others to create. Art, the sharing of art, becomes a shared creative experience. No one is passive. For consider: what the audience fears is inside the closet is bound to be worse than whatever the horror film maker might put there. They may not be picturing anything specific, but their imagination fills in with horrific abstractions.
There is no escaping participating in your own life. Art, at it's very best, impels us to create what is most meaningful to us.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
My Hero
As I said earlier, I think the Bible is a work of art, part poetry, part narrative. As in any great narrative, there are characters, and, likewise heroes. I think that, at least in western tradition, there is probably no more valuable a hero than Jesus Christ.
My take on Christ is that the Man Jesus lived and taught and was crucified. For whatever reason, then, mankind was ready to take this story of this man Jesus and turn it into the story of Christ, he who "was of the spirit" or "not of the world." The story of someone who said that he must die to his body to live fully as spirit.
I think this is everyone's story, everyone's struggle. Over and over again in our lives we are asked to die to our body, to make some choice that does not seem to have our immediate, earthly needs in mind. And I am not talking just about the 30 year-old firemen of the world who rush into burning buildings to save 85 year-old women. Why risk another fifty years of life to save a life that could easily die tomorrow of natural causes? I am also talking about something so simple as leaving a job you have held for twenty years that pays every bill and your insurance and your retirement because you want to go back to school to learn to write music.
We all define safety in our own ways, and at some point we are asked to make a choice that, in the immediate moment, puts this safety at risk. We put this safety at risk, usually, because we say, "We have to be ourselves," or "It just felt like what I had to do." This is the spirit talking. But the spirit offers no guarantees beyond a direction. It is that hand that points, it cannot paint a picture of where you will be or how you will get there, it can only point.
And so we are all Christ at one time or another. And thus we created the story after 300 some odd years and then wrote it down once we'd got it right. Because we needed it, just like we've needed all art, which reduces life down to its essence, so we can see it clearly, stripped of dull extraneous stuff, and remember again why the journey is worth it.
My take on Christ is that the Man Jesus lived and taught and was crucified. For whatever reason, then, mankind was ready to take this story of this man Jesus and turn it into the story of Christ, he who "was of the spirit" or "not of the world." The story of someone who said that he must die to his body to live fully as spirit.
I think this is everyone's story, everyone's struggle. Over and over again in our lives we are asked to die to our body, to make some choice that does not seem to have our immediate, earthly needs in mind. And I am not talking just about the 30 year-old firemen of the world who rush into burning buildings to save 85 year-old women. Why risk another fifty years of life to save a life that could easily die tomorrow of natural causes? I am also talking about something so simple as leaving a job you have held for twenty years that pays every bill and your insurance and your retirement because you want to go back to school to learn to write music.
We all define safety in our own ways, and at some point we are asked to make a choice that, in the immediate moment, puts this safety at risk. We put this safety at risk, usually, because we say, "We have to be ourselves," or "It just felt like what I had to do." This is the spirit talking. But the spirit offers no guarantees beyond a direction. It is that hand that points, it cannot paint a picture of where you will be or how you will get there, it can only point.
And so we are all Christ at one time or another. And thus we created the story after 300 some odd years and then wrote it down once we'd got it right. Because we needed it, just like we've needed all art, which reduces life down to its essence, so we can see it clearly, stripped of dull extraneous stuff, and remember again why the journey is worth it.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Body and Soul
I believe the dynamic struggle that defines the human experience is the tension between the immortal spirit living within the mortal flesh.
The body knows it will die. The body and its obedient retriever The Brain have been programmed with a clear directive: Survive. Survive, survive, survive. Such it is with all life. All life wants to live, all life wants to survive. And yet, if all we think about is survival, if all we think about is ourselves and our flesh, how quickly things go awry. Greed, hubris, lust and on down the seven deadly sins are all expressions of a psyche consumed with the survival of the flesh or the satisfaction of the Ego.
The soul, meanwhile, is eternal, knows it is eternal, and has, as a result, an eternal perspective. The soul is not afraid of death. The soul is not afraid of pain or poverty or scorn. And yet the soul must contend with the very real need of the body to stay alive. If the body does not stay alive, the soul cannot express itself in this form. If the soul were merely to stay in its energetic eternal state, there would not be this dynamic tension. Chastity, humility, charity and so on all ask us to live not from our earthly needs but from something higher. And yet each of these great qualities seems to put our body or our ego at risk.
And so our lives are characterized by this tension. This is why religions sprout up all over the world and why they all preach, in one form or another, obedience to something higher, which is ultimately the spirit, which is God. The spirit, interestingly, cannot lead you astray. And yet to listen to it always requires setting aside your fear of death. And so the tension.
Happiness, by the way, occurs when you live from spirit. You have found that spiritual vibration. It is the difference between riding with the current or against the current. As the song goes:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
So true.
The body knows it will die. The body and its obedient retriever The Brain have been programmed with a clear directive: Survive. Survive, survive, survive. Such it is with all life. All life wants to live, all life wants to survive. And yet, if all we think about is survival, if all we think about is ourselves and our flesh, how quickly things go awry. Greed, hubris, lust and on down the seven deadly sins are all expressions of a psyche consumed with the survival of the flesh or the satisfaction of the Ego.
The soul, meanwhile, is eternal, knows it is eternal, and has, as a result, an eternal perspective. The soul is not afraid of death. The soul is not afraid of pain or poverty or scorn. And yet the soul must contend with the very real need of the body to stay alive. If the body does not stay alive, the soul cannot express itself in this form. If the soul were merely to stay in its energetic eternal state, there would not be this dynamic tension. Chastity, humility, charity and so on all ask us to live not from our earthly needs but from something higher. And yet each of these great qualities seems to put our body or our ego at risk.
And so our lives are characterized by this tension. This is why religions sprout up all over the world and why they all preach, in one form or another, obedience to something higher, which is ultimately the spirit, which is God. The spirit, interestingly, cannot lead you astray. And yet to listen to it always requires setting aside your fear of death. And so the tension.
Happiness, by the way, occurs when you live from spirit. You have found that spiritual vibration. It is the difference between riding with the current or against the current. As the song goes:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
So true.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
A Little Blasphemy
A few thoughts on The Bible and Church.
I think that The Bible is literature, the church, theater. I do not mean theater derogatorily - that is, theater in the sense of something phony and distracting. No, I mean theater as art. Both are art forms.
The Bible is really many books. It is somewhat Historical (all those Kings and begettings and so on), somewhat a How To, but mostly literature. All art, I believe, is about creating fertile ground upon which an audience member's imagination can grow. Art always leaves open space; the best art is about creating the most dynamic and fertile open spaces.
Such is The Bible. We need only see the vast disparities of interpretations of it to understand it is literature. It would be easy to say of true believers who cherry pick the bible to their own liking, Oh, you hypocrites! But this is not so constructive. Yes, it would be better if True Believers acknowledged that they take what they like and discard what they don't, but so don't we all. The Bible's goal, like all art, is to encourage you along the journey into your soul. If The Bible does that for you, great. If it does not, no matter. There are plenty of other things that can.
Likewise, church is theater. Theater is a ritualized, rehearsed, scripted event, with a passive audience who willingly subject themselves so that they might be directed to their own souls. For this reason, no one should stand up in a theater and cry out, Boo! Any more than you should stand up in a synagogue and cry "Allah is great!" We are tempted some times, but that is because part of us WANTS to subject ourselves to whatever theater is occurring even when that theater does not resonate with us, and the result is dissonant. Let it go. There's plenty of theater all around.
I think that The Bible is literature, the church, theater. I do not mean theater derogatorily - that is, theater in the sense of something phony and distracting. No, I mean theater as art. Both are art forms.
The Bible is really many books. It is somewhat Historical (all those Kings and begettings and so on), somewhat a How To, but mostly literature. All art, I believe, is about creating fertile ground upon which an audience member's imagination can grow. Art always leaves open space; the best art is about creating the most dynamic and fertile open spaces.
Such is The Bible. We need only see the vast disparities of interpretations of it to understand it is literature. It would be easy to say of true believers who cherry pick the bible to their own liking, Oh, you hypocrites! But this is not so constructive. Yes, it would be better if True Believers acknowledged that they take what they like and discard what they don't, but so don't we all. The Bible's goal, like all art, is to encourage you along the journey into your soul. If The Bible does that for you, great. If it does not, no matter. There are plenty of other things that can.
Likewise, church is theater. Theater is a ritualized, rehearsed, scripted event, with a passive audience who willingly subject themselves so that they might be directed to their own souls. For this reason, no one should stand up in a theater and cry out, Boo! Any more than you should stand up in a synagogue and cry "Allah is great!" We are tempted some times, but that is because part of us WANTS to subject ourselves to whatever theater is occurring even when that theater does not resonate with us, and the result is dissonant. Let it go. There's plenty of theater all around.
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