All Things are Blessed in the Lord

All things are Blessed in the Lord. 

A man can sense this through Grace. But there is no other way to sense it, try though he may, under his own agency.

For the blessing of the Lord is a living thing, and not something that stands still and waits for us. It is always in movement, and it only moves into us to the extent that we move into it with open arms. If we try to stay where we are and wait for Grace to come to us, it will never find us. We must rather go out into the world, taking every chance, and risking everything, in the hopes that we will encounter it.

It falls into us like the shadows of fences on sidewalks; green leaves, and the sun on an old building. It is, in other words, what we already know, what we have always known — and yet it is also the unknown, because the parts of us that know it are the parts of ourselves that we don’t know.

And what part of ourselves is it, which we don't know? It’s the part that is God. We all have that part — because we cannot be separated from God in reality, although we live in our imagination, where we are always separate from God. We think that by imagining — by creating an image that we believe in — that we are with God, but God is beyond images, and only insofar as we are beyond images are we with God.

The Lord’s wish for goodness is inside every action, even if the action itself does not appear to have goodness in it. This is a mystery; and it is only manifest in accordance with the energy a man receives from Grace, whether or not he can understand this. For surely terrible things will happen; and only through Grace can any of it be understood.

The irony of it is that if Grace were in action in man, no terrible things would happen, except the terrible things that happen by themselves, of nature, and not in man. And even those would be tolerable under such circumstances. But most men know nothing of Grace and don't believe in Grace, in fact, Grace has never touched them directly. So one lacks trust; and without trust, how can Grace enter anything? It’s like expecting a man to be able to enter a woman, if the woman does not trust him. We are all women; and God can’t enter us if we do not trust God. Not because God is unable; God can do all things. He could enter us as He wished, if He were that way, if He used his Wrath or Force rather than His Mercy to be in relationship with us. But He will not do that; and so a man or woman must become the bride, waiting for the bridegroom.

Yet one doesn't want to wait for anyone, even God, because one is selfish and in a hurry.

So one rushes past God and all the good things God gives. And what good does that do one? One has worldly things, and all the things that belong to the earth, but one does not have God, and so everything that belongs to the earth is worthless. Found in God and through God, the earth is the greatest of treasures; without God, it is hell. And mankind has proved this over and over again throughout history, because he goes on creating hell over and over again.

Hell is a complicated place, and full of many problems. Heaven is unutterably simple, and it finds its rest in every ray of light. It's in the call of small birds, and the crispness of leaves on the ground; it is in worn stones and the sharp breath of tired dogs.

All of this is given to man, if he wants it. And these things could come in any moment, and do come in every moment; and they could be with us always—but not only in one way; in a thousand different ways that change as often as the moment changes. For such is Grace.

And we must open our hearts to feel it in every moment, for such is God, that He wants to be with us in every moment. And if we want to be with Him in any moment or every moment, He will allow it, but only as much as we allow it ourselves.

So one ought not look for Grace where one expects to find it, or expect Grace to find one as one expects it to be. It comes as a strange thing filled with Love, which one has never known before. It holds nothing back; one expects things to have a beginning and an end, but Grace has no beginning and has no end, and so it is nothing like one is, or what one expects.

Chinese Medicine

Some of the people I know are interested in Chinese medicine. They thrive on alternative medicine practices, and traditional Chinese medicine—with its thousands of years of history—holds a great attraction. The belief, I think, begins with the idea that anything herbal has to be more “natural” and hence better for you. The fact that many herbs are poisonous or even deadly is edited out of this picture up front.

 I spend a lot of time in China, and I happen to know that the average Chinese person would definitely rather have Western medicine than Chinese medicine. They consider it more effective.  They commonly express concern that because traditional Chinese medicine isn't that effective, the Chinese medicine industry illegally spikes many different herbal concoctions with antibiotics and other Western medicines, so that they will work better. My Chinese friends claim that it's a shooting gallery taking the stuff; in many cases you don't know exactly what you're getting. I've actually even been warned by some of them not to use it. "Better go see a regular western-style doctor," they say to me when I need medical care in Shanghai, gently amused by American interest in what they consider to be outdated folk practices.

Furthermore, as you can see from the picture above (taken in a major Shanghai hospital in the herbal department) Chinese medicine is a mass-market business. The herbs are not gathered by stooped-over little old men and women in pastoral environments; they are grown in huge amounts  on large commercial farms, and shipped to hospitals just like any other factory-farmed product.

It's very possible, knowing China, that pesticides are used on these herbs while they are being grown. The country has been wracked by one contaminated-food scandal after another over the last 2 years, and pesticide use is definitely under less control than in Western agriculture... which ought to frighten just about everyone.

No one tells Americans who take Chinese medicine about that.

 That's not to knock Chinese medicine. For people who want to take it, it seems fine to me, presuming you're okay with the risks. Furthermore, some of my very best friends are adept practitioners of alternative medicine, and I fully support them. We have room for both practices, I think, and the emotive value alone of such therapies is not to be dismissed, under any circumstances.

 What interests me about all of this is that to many Americans, the other's tradition often seems better than our own; yet we rarely pause to think that it might work the other way around as well.

To the Chinese, Western science is not just a tradition; it's a cultural practice they would like to adopt, and are doing so to great effect. Chinese people are eager to educate themselves and avail themselves of modern technology.  They are producing some of the most advanced science—including medical science—in the world. They don't have inhibitions about it produced by religious fundamentalists, as a significant portion of America does. This is one of the reasons Asian cultures represent the future of scientific and medical innovation. They believe in evolution—and in science.

  In the meantime, westerners enthusiastically embrace their medical folk traditions, all of which date from an era where the average lifespan was— objectively—less than half of what it is today.   No one has been able to explain to me why modern Western medicine, which is what achieved the doubling of the human lifespan, gets a bad reputation in some alternative communities, any more than they have been able to explain why all the food we are eating is so terrible, while we live twice as long as people did several hundred years ago, when everything was indisputably organic, and all the medicines were herbal.

 Why are we so attracted to traditions different than our own, and so determined to see them as more valid?  And why is the old always better than the new, when it comes to these things?

Worldwide, there's a longstanding cultural myth—yes, a tradition—in which human societies engage in conspiracy theories, firmly believing that their own culture is scamming them in one way or another. Our own governments, political systems, corporations, churches, priests, lawyers, doctors, and so on, are all secretly out to get us. "They" are hiding the truth. I've heard this so often over the years I'm tired of it. One would think, in America, that the majority of the population is engaged in evil, nefarious plots to take us down. In such minds, even the horrific events of 9/11 morph into a U.S. government plot.

Among some people I know, common Christianity takes a bad rap, and is treated with thinly veiled contempt; yet popular Buddhism somehow comes off with a clean bill of health, ignoring the fact that the deeply Buddhist culture of Japan produced individuals who committed some of the most awful atrocities of the Second World War. (Ask the Chinese about that sometime.)  It doesn't quite add up, does it?

We have a rejecting attitude towards ourselves. This isn't just a part of our culture; it comes from our own inner lives. Rejection begins at home.

 A view of our own culture, our own medicine, or our own science as deficient and out to deceive us exhibits a kind of paranoia, I think, that doesn't serve us well. It's certainly possible for us to more actively acknowledge the value in our own traditions, as well as those of others.

 One of my friends got Lyme disease last year.  An ardent naturalist, they tried to treat it homeopathically, right up until severe neurological symptoms began to turn up. At last, they agreed to take an aggressive course of antibiotics—which stopped the disease. Another course of action could've ended up ruining their life, and perhaps even taking it.

I think it underscores the fact that there are limits to our ideals which we need to recognize, in any practical world, and deal with.

Many People, Many Dogs

This is a picture taken from the banks of the Hudson River early one morning in August of this year.

I walk my dog Isabel along this section of the river every day. I've been doing this for years; it's a routine. Lately Isabel has been getting older, and the walk—over 2 miles, and up a very steep hill to the top of the Palisades—is more difficult for her. It reminds me that no situation is permanent, despite the tradition and ritual that accompanies it. I believe in this person, and this dog—but there are many people, and many dogs.  We won't last, but the dogs and the people will.

 A good deal of the best poetry I've produced over the last three years materializes on these walks. Perhaps it seems a bit ridiculous to believe that doing the same thing over and over can bring anything new... but it can, can't it? Doing the same thing over and over isn't doing the same thing over and over; everything is constantly new.

This isn't to say that repetitious behavior is of necessity creative. Yet the age-old adage that insanity is the definition of expecting to do the same old thing and expecting new results is obviously false. It's not doing the same old thing that is a problem; it's my idea that what I am doing is the same old thing.

So it isn't the action, but the attitude; the action isn't one person and one dog. It's the attitude that's one person and one dog. In reality, every moment, there's a new person and a new dog; I ought to have some respect for that. But instead my attitude is nonchalant, dismissive: here I am. It's the same old me. And the same old dog.

Somehow, the creative energy that flows in this (for me) ritualistic tradition of the walk along the river transcends the same old me and the same old dog. There are moments when I see that nothing is the same, and nothing is old. The idea that things are the same is just an idea; the idea that things are old is just an idea.

Nothing is the same, and nothing is old.

Everything is right now, and it's just exactly where it is.

Moments like this go into the body like an electric shock. Not a violent one, that produces anguish and dismay; rather, an enlivening vibration, an unexpected sensitivity.

I see that there are rivers, and there are dogs. I'm here to see that. And there is something extraordinary about that moment, because rivers are not rivers, and dogs are not dogs. Even I myself am not myself. Something much bigger than all of this is going on.

What is it?

There's an emptiness in that question. There's a search going on; and when a poem arrives, it's only real if it doesn't contain what it alludes to—that's the essence, after all, of allusion. It can't mention, allegorically speaking, a dog and a person—but it has to leave plenty of room for many people and many dogs to walk around in it. This, I think, is the danger realized in a great deal of poetry; I put things into it, whereas what I ought to be doing is taking things out of it.

There is always something new on my walks; but it's only when I take myself out of it, when I am no longer myself, that there is something new there. So when I stick this thing called me into life, I can't see life. I only see me, seeing life. I  don't see the dog: I see me seeing the dog. It's a koan; every walk is exactly the same unanswerable question.

 I remember living on the banks of the Elbe River in Hamburg, Germany when I was a child. The Elbe and the Hudson are remarkably alike; the side of the river I lived on (near Blankenese) had a high embankment, like the Hudson, and the river was broad and wide at that point.

We'd drive along the river almost every day on our way somewhere or other my mother, my sister Sarah and I; and my mother would often remark to us in wonder that the river never looked the same way twice in a row.

There was something absolutely magical about its ability to transform itself, even in the midst of the mundane.

 Rivers do that.

Maybe people can do that, too.

Water

I don't always think of it this way, but clouds are water, too.

 A great deal of what I encounter is water. All of biological life is organized around it; trees, plants, animals, people—everything is mostly water.

 I got to thinking about this after my last somewhat grim post, and then running into this article on the shortage of water around the planet. An irony on a planet whose surface is rich in water, and where more and more ice is melting.

 I don't really understand water. I depend on it, utterly, and yet it's more or less taken for granted. People in societies where you can get water don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. The idea that there are places and even whole populations in drought conditions who are desperate for it, or poisoned by it because of pollution or contamination, is remote. And water is a chemical, a substance: something clinical, a matter for public utilities, engineers, and scientists to manage. Who wants to think about it? I just want to turn on my faucet and have it.

...But I don't always think about it this way, either.

This morning, I stand in the shower under a stream of clean, warm water, because I'm one of those individuals—there are few of us, measured in percentages—fortunate enough to live in a place where this is possible.  There is no stall, no modern sliding doors; our bathtub is charmingly outdated. It's a claw-footed, enameled iron dinosaur dating from the early part of the 20th century, with a rounded bottom that makes it increasingly difficult for me to keep my balance as I grow older.

Less charming, that. We are not completely at peace with one another, I admit, but I venerate it because of its retro nature. And in the oblong cocoon of the shower curtains, every morning, the whole world shrinks down to a single moment.

  The situation is mundane and ordinary enough. Yet suddenly I see where I am;  I spontaneously assume a position of prayer, hands one on top of another, held out under the water, my head tilted slightly upward.

I'm receiving a special form of grace. My body welcomes the water, and  there is nothing but gratitude in me for being in relationship with it.

This could be the best moment of the day. Of any day.

This is life. I am in it.

This simple moment, taken in as a deeper kind of impression, is a sacred event. Every encounter I have with water is, ultimately, a sacred event. Yet it's hard to remember that if what I'm doing is washing the dishes, spraying the car down with the hose, or getting that horrid skunk smell off the famous dog Isabel.

 Yet I remember countless moments when water is glorious, and there are many of them.

Every thunderstorm I've ever seen.

A moment when I was 14 years old, watching waves rolling in off the coast of the Algarve, the sun gleaming off them like it held the secret of life— and in that moment, for me, I think it did.

Rainbows soaring up over the George Washington Bridge like all the hope in the world was pouring down onto Manhattan at once.

The moment  of the full moon in September when baby snapping turtles, sensing the rain, break through the shell of their eggs with their egg tooth and dash madly towards the Sparkill creek.

When I look back, the majority of my life has been spent in a deep, yet largely unrecognized, relationship with water in its countless iterations.

Thinking of water in technical terms is necessary, because I have to be practical about conserving it and using it. Or at least, I ought to be. The fact is that my failure to remember this substance is sacred, a precious thing, causes me to be cavalier about it.

The forecast is for rain tonight.  From the moment when the first drop falls, to the moment when the last drop falls, all of it might be a reminder that I'm not in control of things—

Just in relationship with them.

It's a thought to carry forward with me.

Wall Wharf

We ignore science at our peril.

Somewhere on the order of 30 years ago, as I recall, a study of ocean floor cores and the glacial till from icebergs in the northern Atlantic revealed that glaciers can melt very, very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that some researchers involved in the project felt the pulses of melting that produced the debris on the ocean floor must have taken place in a matter of decades, where huge ice sheets simply disappeared. At the time, some researchers who heard about their hypothesis were incredulous.

Less so now.

It's not unreasonable to presume that a tipping point of the kind we are at could produce a situation where the oceans don't rise a few feet per century, but a few feet per year. The total amount of additional solar energy being absorbed by the water in the northern part of the planet as a result of ice loss—something that is now actually taking place, regardless of what one wants to argue the reason is— is simply enormous, so large that it probably can't be calculated with any ease. One thing is certain: the more ice that melts, the more ice can melt. Perhaps we should call it the un-snowball effect.

Anyone who presumes that we are going to be looking at business as usual in weather and ocean levels going forward is simply naïve. Things are already changing in a very big way, and much faster than anyone- even the worst pessimists- thought they would or could. And no one can deny that ocean levels have, at times in the geologic past, been much, much higher than they are today. The evidence is incontrovertible. 

It's highly unlikely, in my opinion, that any change in human carbon emissions will have an affect on this trend. Such a change, first of all, seems basically unimaginable at present, and in the second place, the current warming trend is already well-established, and will probably take some centuries to reverse.

The question is what mankind is going to do about large portions of its current coastlines disappearing under 10,  20, or even 50 or 100 feet of water. This coastline currently contains a great deal of the most valuable real estate on earth, and represents a net loss of hundreds of trillions of dollars to economies and nations.

Every problem this change creates will be a huge economic problem, as well as a social and political problem. Yet not a single world leader talks seriously about it.

I guess we will get to see what Wall Street thinks of it once the water starts lapping at the feet of the buildings in lower Manhattan. 

Maybe we'll rename it Wall Wharf.

Veneration

 To venerate is to regard with great respect; to adore, to revere.

Humanity collectively venerates its great traditions. This is the reasoning of tradition: it has inherent value, it transmits important ideas from one generation to the next. This is what makes it worth venerating. Mankind has any number of spiritual traditions; over the course of thousands of years, many have sprouted, flowered, withered, and died. Many have set seed. It's easy to forget this, unless one is standing in the ruins of an ancient temple somewhere, which might be a temple from a completely forgotten religion, such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey—a temple so old we know absolutely nothing of the people who built it, or how they worshipped. Yet it's certain that in the end, they were people much like us, with the same loves and fears; and some tangible vestige of their practice undoubtedly resides in today's religions.

 Aside from what are ultimately a handful of obscure shamanistic practices still in the hands of what remains of tribal peoples around the world—an objectively dwindling population—there are only a few Great Traditions extant on the planet right now, yet almost all of them undoubtedly spring from these much earlier, and to some extent unknown, roots, which reach all the way back into the Paleolithic: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and their satellite practices.

 All of these traditions are venerated; all of them come into relationship together in our time, beginning in individual men, and then in cultures. They've been the cause of great wars; they have also been the cause of some of the greatest human achievements in philosophy, art, and music. Like all human things on the planet, their influences are polarized, and they create friction as well as harmony. Yet our traditions are venerated by everyone except atheists—and the atheists are few, no matter how shrill their tiny voices may seem in modern Western societies.

 Strangely, it's veneration itself that creates the friction. For some unexplained reason, men who venerate one thing will sometimes hate the other; they are often unable to see that the other is exactly like they are. Hence the fear and loathing many fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims have for one another.  They all belong to Abrahamic religions; their root traditions are identical (all originally derive from the Old Testament); and each one shares a deeply conservative view of society, with remarkably similar values, which they intensely insist are radically different from one another.

All of this contradictory behavior springs from an inherent wish for the good. So it's the veneration—the deep respect, the adoration—of these valued traditions that are transmitted that actually causes conflicts the traditions advise should not take place.

This does not make veneration bad. Veneration in itself is a right thing. But in venerating the past, venerating the tradition, perhaps men forget that their traditions must be alive today. They must not just be alive today; they must be alive immediately, that is, right now.

If my religious practice, my tradition, says that I must not harm my fellow man, and I wish to venerate it, I can't make up exceptions to that rule. Right now, I must not harm my fellow man. Right now, I must have the most compassionate attitude I can. Right now, I must show mercy to my enemies. And I forget that.

For some strange reason, the idea that tradition takes place right now doesn't seem to quite make sense to us. Tradition is in the past, somehow—it's what already took place, not what is taking place.  Isn't that what the word means? But tradition is actually forming itself in this instant, and it is always forming itself. It's not some dead thing that already took place—and it can't be frozen into ice cubes and dispensed in cocktails later, when we finally decide that it's a good thing and should be used.

 So spiritual traditions have to meet now, in the hearts and minds of men and women. Men and women can only venerate and honor their traditions by affirming them now.

 It seems to me that all of the Great Traditions share a number of Great Principles, which are supposedly inviolable: Love. Compassion. Mercy. These principles are supposed to overshadow, to stand above, and to inform every other action. No matter what exception a man wants to graft on to them, they are supposedly superior to it.

To be sure, the complexities of the world make it difficult to remember this. But every Great Tradition, is, in the end, an inner tradition practiced by a man or a woman. So veneration begins with an inner action.

And every Great Tradition meets in any instance when men and women, even two of them, meet together. You may be reminded of what Christ said:

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them. (Matthew 18:20.)

 The words may come from Jesus, but they belong to every tradition.

The Known

...You knew I was going to follow up the last post with this one, didn't you?

There is a general belief that I know things. I know this, I know that. I know what I am doing today, I know how people ought to behave, I know what ought to be done to fix the mess this country is in, and so on.

The difficulty with the known is that it all relies on associations. Knowing is a subjective assignment of relativity. Given the  astronomically high number of associations even a single human being can generate (after all, our neural network creates trillions of electrical signals in relationship to one another every second) I have to confess that things in me could be quite different. I can know things one way, or I can know them another way. Knowing changes. It changes, in fact, according to the moment that is known.

When one states this in such a way, it seems so obvious as to eclipse the fact that I more or less insist that my knowing is a static thing. Like everyone else I know, I believe that my knowing is fixed, intelligent, and applicable under a wide range of circumstances. It isn't. No matter how much knowing I do, it applies to a very narrow range of experience within a very brief lifetime. Every human being is stuck in the middle of this dilemma, believing that their own knowing is somehow universal; that it applies to everything, when in fact the opposite is true. We are all, in the end, idiots, in the sense of the original Greek root idios, meaning, private—that is, something belonging only to that particular individual, and no one else...  ahem... you suspected that already anyway, didn't you?

Knowing, in other words, as I know it, is the collapse of an infinite number of probabilities and actualities into a tiny black hole (me) where they circle around, trying to draw more material into their gravity pool. The ego is what forms this black hole—light goes in, but it doesn't come out, and the ego is constantly spinning at a very rapid rate, attempting to suck everything of the world it can into itself so that it can grow.

The analogy may be colorful, but our hunger for knowledge is legion. Yesterday, while perusing material in preparation for the upcoming issue of Parabola on Science and Spirit, I (inevitably) came across Christopher Marlowe's Faustus, a classic story where a man's (idiot's) lust for knowledge leads to perdition.

The story seems to be about someone else, but in a certain sense, it's about all of us. It may well be that the story's excessive reliance on images of hell and heaven, consequent to the fact that it is firmly placed in a Christian universe, are wholly inadequate to the present day, but the message is universal.  I want to know everything; and primarily, I want this because I want power—I want to feed my ego. It's a matter of wanting to be superior not only to others, but to the world itself... ah, yes,  and then comes the noble wish for repentance. Cilices don't necessarily rid people of this impulse, although I hear they certainly create a lot of itching.

 There are any number of religious practices and cosmologies which see man as a miniature model of the cosmos. Assuming we sign on to this idea, it's not surprising to find that there is a black hole at the center of us driving the galaxy we live in...  it's absolutely consistent. And perhaps it's not surprising to see that it feeds on what we think we know— on information. (That, in point of fact, is exactly what black holes subsist on—information, in the form of organized matter.) Earth's surface, poor thing, is covered with 6 or more billion tiny little human vortexes, each one of which is sucking in all of the impressions it can of life, all of whom believe they know what is best.  If one wrote up a plan on how to produce chaos, this one would work exceedingly well. And it does.

Nature has produced some societies that don't work in this way. Beehives are a great example. I'm a beekeeper, and I'm always amazed at the dedication of every individual bee to cooperation and the health of the community. How unlike us they are! No wonder they have been admired by philosophers, friars, and farmers alike for so many generations. (Funny how we never hear politicians mention them, isn't it?)

Bees know few things, but they put them to exceedingly intelligent use.

It's fair to say that human beings, with our much more complicated brains, are doomed, whether we  like it or not, to know far more than bees. It suggests that I ought to put what I know to even better use than bees do, but I'm nowhere near as cooperative or a social as they are.

Why? If I know so much, how come mere insects do so much a better job of this than I do?

 I wish I knew.