Lately I've been wondering: What makes us so restless? So restless that we go searching, searching, searching, pursuing what will scratch our itch, feel satisfied, and let us rest at last?
St. Augustine is not everyone's favorite these days, just as he wasn't in his own day in North Africa. People tehn and now take him to task for his denial of free will, his association of lust and sin, coupling of sex and original sin, his suspiciousness almost fear of beauty. The list of his "sins" against our enlightened minds is practically endless. But beyond all the Neo-Platonic-inspired Chrisitan resolutions he discovered for his restlessness, this Augustine still knew a thing or two about seeking God and losing the way. He was a true mystic, one whose journey teaches us more perhaps than his arriving, as it does with all mystics, seekers; for true seekers never arrive--they arrive only to set off again. Augustine the passionate seeker, in his spiritual autobiograrphy, Confessions, wrote this: "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee."
Look around you. Look at yourself. Look within. What do you see? People desperately seeking something that will cure their restlessness. Work. Accomplishments. Fame. Acquiring money, things, connections, knowledge. Romantic relationships. Family obligations. Exercise. TV. Surfing the Internet. Video games. Food. Alcohol. Marijuana. Prescription painkillers. Heroin. Xanax. They feel that restlessness inside, that urge that they can't ever quite quiet, the urge to get up and do soemthing, seek something, find something,something,anything, that will let them rest.
The restlessness, the urging toward something we know not what, is good. That is the human condition. It is our willingness to settle too quickly for that which cannot truly satisfy that urging that trips us up time and again. Our eagerness to believe that what is finite can soothe our restless hearts yearning for the infinite. So we go seeking and finding, seeking and finding, while our restlessness only grows and begins to tear at our spirits, tear us apart, which drives us to seek more desperately.
What can we do? Being born restless and needing to seek? Sit still and ask oursaelves if what we have found, what we are still looking for, still chasing, can cure that restlessness or if it will only exacerbate it and drive us to disappointment and despair?
Seeking is good; it is what we are meant for. But be careful of what you find. Far better to be found than to find.
Showing posts with label Augustine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Augustine. Show all posts
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Monday, August 1, 2011
Mudballs That Glitter: More on the Body/Spirit
Near the opening of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston refers to human beings as “mudballs that glitter.” For over thirty years I have carried this image with me as a kind of shorthand for the spirit-flesh embranglement that we call “human being.”
Hurston’s image came afresh to me last week as I was walking along the rocky northern shore of the Atlantic Ocean. I looked up out of my reverie and everything was shining. Everything. Even the rocks. I looked more closely. It wasn’t reflected light. The grains of sand, the waves, the seaweed, the skate purses, the rocks weren’t reflecting the light of the sun; they were shining from within, with their “own” light, a light answering the light shining from the sun, a resounding antiphony of light. I looked more closely. It was as if everything was made of light, formed of light—not simply the sentient beings, but every being, even the rocks, and I remembered my Ojibwe friends in Minnesota arguing (against the vocal disbelief of other students) that rocks, too, are alive.
Even the rocks on this beach I was walking through were alive. I could see, feel the light enlivening them. That light, that energy, that creative power, that palpable generativity was one, One shining in and through them all, each separate being. The shapes and colors and density of each individual shining was no more than and no less than a declaration of the infinite variety of the One that was even now bringing it into being, fashioning it, sustaining it, accompanying it faithfully on its journey of coming into being and perishing.
Walking through this riot of light, I thought of the many circles of mystics from all religious traditions—both orthodox and heterodox, both those I am at home with and those whose dualistic or other doctrines are far from my experience of the world—who have witnessed to the light in the creation. The Hebrew scriptures (Psalm 97:12) say “Light is sown for the righteous,” leading many who came after to cultivate and reap that light. Gnostics of many sorts speak of light/spirit trapped in the matter of our created world. The Zoroastrians focused on the path to a world all of light through purity and righteousness. Augustine reports that the Manichees ate cucumbers and melons to imbibe the great amounts of light trapped in these foods. Lurianic Kabbalists speak of the breaking of the vessels at creation, which scattered sparks of light throughout the created universe, and of repairing the world (tikkun olam) by gathering up these scattered sparks. The Hasids, too, speak of our task as human beings as finding the One everywhere one looks and gathering the light shining in all that exists.
Whatever the differences in their worldview—dualistic, non-dualistic, theistic, nontheistic, atheistic—these mystics have seen something, something real in our world, a vision that often bears fruit in a moral life that recognizes the connection among all things and all peoples, and that draws one away from forgetfulness and self-absorption and cruelty and toward humility, justice, and compassion. This insight, whatever its (sometimes wild) accompanying imagery or concepts, invites human beings, beings of flesh, mudballs, to live in such a way that we, too, shine. It invites us to remove the veils that cover that light in us, to stop hiding the light in us from others, to stop trying to extinguish the light shining in us because we cannot bear it, or cannot bear its often confusing and disturbing coexistence with our fleshly selves, to become more and more transparent so that it shines through us the way it shines through the rocks on the ocean shore, through all being, gracefully, naturally, joyfully, for anyone walking by with eyes to see. To become not simply mudballs that glitter, but mudballs that shine.
Even the rocks are shining
Shining with the glory of you
Passing through
from this angle and this one and
this
lost in ourselves
we miss their offering
speckled, pocked, pooled
scarified with light
alive
declaring the wonder of being
If these, too, can shine,
why not this battered tent of flesh?
Hurston’s image came afresh to me last week as I was walking along the rocky northern shore of the Atlantic Ocean. I looked up out of my reverie and everything was shining. Everything. Even the rocks. I looked more closely. It wasn’t reflected light. The grains of sand, the waves, the seaweed, the skate purses, the rocks weren’t reflecting the light of the sun; they were shining from within, with their “own” light, a light answering the light shining from the sun, a resounding antiphony of light. I looked more closely. It was as if everything was made of light, formed of light—not simply the sentient beings, but every being, even the rocks, and I remembered my Ojibwe friends in Minnesota arguing (against the vocal disbelief of other students) that rocks, too, are alive.
Even the rocks on this beach I was walking through were alive. I could see, feel the light enlivening them. That light, that energy, that creative power, that palpable generativity was one, One shining in and through them all, each separate being. The shapes and colors and density of each individual shining was no more than and no less than a declaration of the infinite variety of the One that was even now bringing it into being, fashioning it, sustaining it, accompanying it faithfully on its journey of coming into being and perishing.
Walking through this riot of light, I thought of the many circles of mystics from all religious traditions—both orthodox and heterodox, both those I am at home with and those whose dualistic or other doctrines are far from my experience of the world—who have witnessed to the light in the creation. The Hebrew scriptures (Psalm 97:12) say “Light is sown for the righteous,” leading many who came after to cultivate and reap that light. Gnostics of many sorts speak of light/spirit trapped in the matter of our created world. The Zoroastrians focused on the path to a world all of light through purity and righteousness. Augustine reports that the Manichees ate cucumbers and melons to imbibe the great amounts of light trapped in these foods. Lurianic Kabbalists speak of the breaking of the vessels at creation, which scattered sparks of light throughout the created universe, and of repairing the world (tikkun olam) by gathering up these scattered sparks. The Hasids, too, speak of our task as human beings as finding the One everywhere one looks and gathering the light shining in all that exists.
Whatever the differences in their worldview—dualistic, non-dualistic, theistic, nontheistic, atheistic—these mystics have seen something, something real in our world, a vision that often bears fruit in a moral life that recognizes the connection among all things and all peoples, and that draws one away from forgetfulness and self-absorption and cruelty and toward humility, justice, and compassion. This insight, whatever its (sometimes wild) accompanying imagery or concepts, invites human beings, beings of flesh, mudballs, to live in such a way that we, too, shine. It invites us to remove the veils that cover that light in us, to stop hiding the light in us from others, to stop trying to extinguish the light shining in us because we cannot bear it, or cannot bear its often confusing and disturbing coexistence with our fleshly selves, to become more and more transparent so that it shines through us the way it shines through the rocks on the ocean shore, through all being, gracefully, naturally, joyfully, for anyone walking by with eyes to see. To become not simply mudballs that glitter, but mudballs that shine.
Even the rocks are shining
Shining with the glory of you
Passing through
from this angle and this one and
this
lost in ourselves
we miss their offering
speckled, pocked, pooled
scarified with light
alive
declaring the wonder of being
If these, too, can shine,
why not this battered tent of flesh?
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Secularism Envy?
Have you ever envied your totally secular friends? The ones who don’t think or worry about God? Who aren’t troubled by God? Who are comfortable living in the world they can see and hear and touch and explain (if not now, someday)? Those for whom “God” is a sociopolitical problem, cultural artifact, or distant memory from their childhood, nothing more?
I have. In college, I studied philosophy and literature, not theology, because I wanted to be the kind of person who had nothing to do with God—an intellectual! How could you be and intellectual and believe in God, a holdover from a more primitive, less enlightened time? When I went to the University of Chicago Divinity School to study history of religions with Mircea Eliade, I wanted to be like many of my classmates—interested in God only from the distancing vantage point of academia, not from within the standpoint of a faith community. To be a person of faith meant you were not capable of true objectivity about your own religion or that of others.
Many times in my life I have wished I could just forget about God. It’s nothing but trouble and embarrassment, being a person of faith who is also a 21st century post-Enlightenment, post-Darwin, post-modern, post-post citizen. How can one defend oneself? There are no airtight proofs of God’s existence. The reality and experience of God exceed the limits of reason. The concepts we’ve inherited for talking about God, self, and world are woefully outmoded or just out of touch with the assumptions or worldviews of most people. We often look like fools or are taken for fools.
Here’s the burden or responsibility some of these fools bear: finding ways to mediate between the wisdom of our faith and the best of contemporary culture’s rational understanding of the universe. It’s a classic move among people of faith, faith seeking understanding. Origen, Philo, Augustine, Anselm, Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Ibn-Sina, Ibn-Rushd, Maimonides, Ibn-Ezra, Erasmus, Schleiermacher, Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan, and H. Richard Niebuhr practiced it.
It would be easier to ditch God and run with whatever current or perennial philosophy is hot. I’ve tried. I can’t do it. I have to accept that I was born tuned to spirit. Not everyone is. That’s good, too. And sometimes I wish I were like them. But whether i like it or not, I’m one of those fools who dance to music some people can’t hear. And that means I have to shoulder my part of the burden of finding new ways of practicing faith seeking understanding today. I’m often not sure how best to do that. Counter the fundamentalist attack on reason and science? Create new concepts and images for God that incorporate recent scientific understandings of matter and the universe? Sidestep science with poetry? Bracket God and focus on morality? I’m still finding my way. What’s yours?
I have. In college, I studied philosophy and literature, not theology, because I wanted to be the kind of person who had nothing to do with God—an intellectual! How could you be and intellectual and believe in God, a holdover from a more primitive, less enlightened time? When I went to the University of Chicago Divinity School to study history of religions with Mircea Eliade, I wanted to be like many of my classmates—interested in God only from the distancing vantage point of academia, not from within the standpoint of a faith community. To be a person of faith meant you were not capable of true objectivity about your own religion or that of others.
Many times in my life I have wished I could just forget about God. It’s nothing but trouble and embarrassment, being a person of faith who is also a 21st century post-Enlightenment, post-Darwin, post-modern, post-post citizen. How can one defend oneself? There are no airtight proofs of God’s existence. The reality and experience of God exceed the limits of reason. The concepts we’ve inherited for talking about God, self, and world are woefully outmoded or just out of touch with the assumptions or worldviews of most people. We often look like fools or are taken for fools.
Here’s the burden or responsibility some of these fools bear: finding ways to mediate between the wisdom of our faith and the best of contemporary culture’s rational understanding of the universe. It’s a classic move among people of faith, faith seeking understanding. Origen, Philo, Augustine, Anselm, Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Ibn-Sina, Ibn-Rushd, Maimonides, Ibn-Ezra, Erasmus, Schleiermacher, Martin Buber, Mordecai Kaplan, and H. Richard Niebuhr practiced it.
It would be easier to ditch God and run with whatever current or perennial philosophy is hot. I’ve tried. I can’t do it. I have to accept that I was born tuned to spirit. Not everyone is. That’s good, too. And sometimes I wish I were like them. But whether i like it or not, I’m one of those fools who dance to music some people can’t hear. And that means I have to shoulder my part of the burden of finding new ways of practicing faith seeking understanding today. I’m often not sure how best to do that. Counter the fundamentalist attack on reason and science? Create new concepts and images for God that incorporate recent scientific understandings of matter and the universe? Sidestep science with poetry? Bracket God and focus on morality? I’m still finding my way. What’s yours?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)