More on the “Hardened Heart”

Some veils over vision are beautiful but freezing--

Last time, that strange notion of the “hardened heart” showed up, closing in from the shadows. This somewhat scary sight prompted a Google search, and in about a minute I found that the topic can be connected to over a hundred scriptures in the Bible and another hundred-plus in the Qur’an. As often happens, a semi-attended mysterious notion remains in a half-conscious way, rather impatiently awaiting and prompting further understanding. So it’s not surprising that while re-reading Book I of Rumi’s Mathnawi certain passages lit up.

“Without the touchstone, with the naked eye,/ you’ll never know false gold from precious gold!” (couplet 300, Alan Williams’ translation, Spiritual Verses)

        Isn’t Rumi saying that our normal vision (and cognition?) cannot find the hidden treasure? Everyday eyesight is not sufficient to discern the spiritual pathway. Instead, the touchstone, the clean heart, knows true from false (see Psalm 51:10); but this knowing is often lost due to veiling—the “hardening of the heart.” Rumi’s next couplet adds:

“If God should place a touchstone in your heart/ you’ll then tell doubt and certainty apart” (Jawid Mojaddedi, trans. Rumi, The Masnavi Book One)

Like Rumi, we’re in a world easily overwhelmed because

“False pretenders just distort what’s right” (Mojaddedi, couplet 322), and  “God’s way bewilders those who are traveling it” (Mojaddedi, couplet 313).

So certainty looks unlikely if not impossible—and yet “None but a man who’s tasted truth will do” (Mojaddedi, 277).  Mojaddedi’s note on this line says:

“Mystical knowledge is often described by Sufis as ‘tasting the truth,’ indicating that it is an immediate, experiential form of knowledge which gives greater certainty than theoretical knowledge.” (p. 246)

The talisman and the treasure are elaborated by Nicholson, especially in a note he adds to a related passage:

“The body resembles a talisman of clay guarding a hidden treasure of light, i.e the Divine spark and spiritual essence of Man. When the charm is broken, ‘his speech is light and his works are light and he moves in light’, and God alone dwells in his heart.” [p. 43, Commentary on Book I)

Nicholson’s note concerns couplet 434 in which Rumi begins quoting from Qur’an 2: 125. Nicholson translates Rumi’s lines: 

“Clean My house, ye twain, is an explanation of (such) purity: it (the purified heart) is a treasure of (Divine) light, though its talisman is of the earth.”

Rumi offers further clarification on the way the heart becomes “hardened” and veiled from discerning the treasure, from seeing with the light of God.

“Desire and anger make men go cross-eyed,/ for they distort the spirit from uprightness./ When craving comes, then virtue is concealed;/ a hundred veils divide the heart and sight.” (Williams, couplets 334-5)

Just in case we underestimate how difficult it is for us to escape the veils and to realize the hidden treasure, Rumi weaves together several very strong stories. In one of them the king’s advisor demands that the king cut off part of his own (the advisor’s) nose and ears. Rumi is trying to shock us into recognizing our endangered condition due to the high risk for losing our sense of the Divine and not even being aware of how much we have lost. From Nicholson’s translation (available at http://www.masnavi.net/1/50/eng/1/400/ ) beginning with couplet 439:

آن وزیرک از حسد بودش نژاد ** تا به باطل گوش و بینی باد داد

That petty vizier had his origin from envy, so that for vanity he gave to the wind (sacrificed) his ears and nose,

هر کسی کاو از حسد بینی کند ** خویشتن بی‌‌گوش و بی‌‌بینی کند

Any one who from envy mutilates his nose makes himself without ear and without nose (unable to apprehend spiritual things).

بینی آن باشد که او بویی برد ** بوی او را جانب کویی برد

The nose is that which catches a scent, and which the scent leads towards an abode (of spiritual truth).

       I’m pretty sure the world around us right now has plenty of bad things going on. Perhaps it always does. The historical mystery series by Sharan Newman that I’m now reading tells how dark the world was back in times of the crusades. So a big challenge inevitably comes for us in how to look at bad things. Unless we really purify the mirror of our hearts, we’re at serious risk for making things even worse and for further endangering our souls.

“How many an evil that you see in others/ is your own nature which you see in them!” (Williams, couplet 1328)

        We have models for how to cope with the dark world. The prophets denounced idol worship, cleansed the temple, resisted injustice; and yet I’m certain their hearts were filled with compassion, not with anger, lust, or hatred. Guidance and hope come from Rumi’s retelling of the hare’s success against the lion. The community surprised at being delivered from the oppression ask how the victory came about:

“‘Retell it so the story will  be healing,

     retell it as a dressing for our souls.

But tell! From that oppressor’s violence

     our souls have got a hundred thousand wounds.’

[and the hare responds] ‘it was God’s help…

He gave me power and gave my heart the light;

     my heart’s light gave my hands and feet their strength…

In time and in the course of things, God gives

    this help to doubtful ones and visionaries.’” 

(Williams, couplets 1372-1377)

 

Loving Old Leaves

 I’m loving these leaves that, although their more appreciated summer appearance and work has faded away, are now simply gathering winter sunlight into gold. This treasure of the leaves’ summer-to-winter transformation perhaps hints at the potential of changing values that is made available when a person moves from workplace into retirement. The promise of transformation draws from and draws us into the imaginal world. Where else can the gold hidden in dried leaves be envisioned? 

        The conception of an imaginal world presages riches through its capacity to compose a between-space, a zone of transformational meaning-making, even a new world where qualities feel more tangible, ones like love, beauty, and peace. This is not a world of escape but instead it’s the way for mediating heaven and earth.

     The “imaginal world” of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s age may at first sound strange, but perhaps it’s only because the stage/screen/page space of our contemporary world provides such meagre spiritual nurturance. Ten centuries or so ago, the vision of world-makers such as the Brethren of Purity guided eyes to contemplate the transmission between the beyond and the below.

… the Ikhwan al-Safa [Brethren of Purity] apply different names to the fundamental cosmic duality depending upon the qualitative relationship in view. . . they explain the principle involved in shifting perspectives: ‘Know that all these words are titles and marks. Through them allusion is made to forms, so that distinction can be drawn in ascriptions that are made among them. Thus one form is sometimes called material, sometimes substantial, … sometimes spiritual, sometimes corporeal, sometimes cause, sometimes effect, and so on’” (Tao of Islam, pp. 161-2).

     Sachiko Murata helps to open up this teaching by applying the yin/yang construct so that we can better comprehend the perspective shift involved in looking toward the Divine and turning to engage the creation. Her account reminds me of a stairway descending from God to First Intellect to Universal Soul and so on down to earth. Even the shifts in perspective seem to me to be participation in a creative act, in transmission. Murata describes the double role happening through the shifting in an imaginal world in the movement on the stairway, looking up and down:

“The Ikhwan say, for example, that the Soul is an accident (yin) in relation to the Intellect, but a substance (yang) in relation to things below itself…what is matter in one respect is form in another. . . the Intellect and Soul are each in turn a source of light and activity. The Intellect is God’s radiance, while the Soul is the Intellect’s reflection. The Soul is bright in relation to the corporeal world, but dark in relation to the Intellect. . . the Universal Soul is a spiritual being, born directly from the First Intellect, it is light. But it represents a movement in the direction of Nature, so it embraces the properties of darkness as well. Like any barzakh, it brings together the properties of the two sides.” (Tao of Islam, pp. 162-3).

     This teaching and explication are valuable to me as they pertain to the possibilities of living with the Imaginal World, a barzakh, a bringing together of Heaven and Earth, a living into the Kingdom of Heaven while on earth (cf. Luke 17:21 , “the kingdom of God is in your midst”). We look toward God so that the radiance we absorb can reflect into our vision of life below. While the earth seems unlikely ever to hold the fullness of Divine Justice or Love or Peace, by moving through the Imaginal World, we may be able to sustain good work. While God remains Beyond, my dealings with darkness in the world (e.g., involving injustice, hatred, and suffering) may be lightened by turning into the barzakh.

“Ibn al-‘Arabi and his followers … were concerned to find the roots of all qualities present in the cosmos in the divine reality, as that reality is described by God’s own Word. These qualities depend upon the relationships that exist between God and the creatures. . . these relationships are precisely God’s attributes or names.” Tao of Islam, p. 162

     If we are to find the treasure of the imaginal world, we may wish to retreat into a time that  believes in spirit. Now is a good time for such retreats, especially as it’s the only time we are given and therein time can be malleable. The “now” may have to be re-created by letting go of the false security of fact and the shallow fascination with busy-ness and material possession. The contemporary imaginal world of celebrities and superstars can be substantially surrendered to an imaginal world devoted to spiritual realization. We can allow words and images to reshape by shifting focus from one world to another. 

     Perhaps we can practice by seeing in our imagination (with the help of mixing photographic images) the presence of one season within another. The play shown above with the golden leaves remembers the lush summer even in the almost leafless winter. In the image shown here

 when I look at the iris garden in snowfall, I can also move into the gorgeous shape and color of springtime.

     Murata draws from Ch 11 of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Futuhat when she says: 

“Among created things, spirits are the most closely akin to the divine. They are more or less identical with the ‘divine breath’ blown into Adam. For Ibn al-‘Arabi and many others, the qualities of spirits stand at the antipodes of bodily qualities. Between bodies and spirits stand the souls (nufus), which partake of the characteristics of both sides. Hence souls are ‘imaginal,’ since they are both luminous and dark, intelligent and ignorant, high and low, and so on. . .The soul is, as it were, simply the face of the spirit turned toward the world of lowness and density. If the soul turns back upon itself it will see its own identity with the spirit. This is the path of spiritual realization and human perfection.” Tao of Islam, p. 144.

Heartbeat

The gospel for busy people: Love God.

How? Keep the commandments.*

In a world that lives by quick concrete answers, I fear that religion too often gets reduced (semi-consciously, at best) to this simplistic formula: loving God equals following rules, mostly the “Do Nots.” When this reduction happens, the Devil must be gleeful because the spiritual heart turns to stone. The experience of the Divine then remains surface-level, too superficial to overcome the materialistic, “carnal,” self.

     Let’s not be fooled by another simplistic move that flips to “Anything Goes.” No, that’s not the answer either because sacred scriptures does emphasize keeping commandments “for your good”*; and still the call of Love demands so much more. Yes, giving and following orders often provides safety in situations where a wiser one commands the more naive to stay clear of potential dangers such as the street, drug use, and fake-news; but to stay in that controlled zone limits Love’s dimension. Mature love expands freedom, enters paradox, and manifests God-given individualities.

     So, how do we learn to love God in ways that include and extend beyond the follow-rules-religion? I think that an initial step involves recognizing when dogma has dried up. For example, persons who call themselves Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or …) when doing racist, sexist, and other self-centered acts might wake up. Fake religion is not the path to God.

     Keeping to the Path to God demands hard honesty. True love is truth-telling; it’s not Hollywood, not SuperBowl, not status, drugs or money. At the birth of our first child, I knew without doubt that a powerful gift entered my heart. Why would I expect less in my relationship with God? Cold ritual, going to church/temple/mosque does not make the Religion of Love.

     Our spiritual guides try to tell us this over and over. Antonio Machado capsulized Jesus’ teaching: “I love Jesus, who said to us: Heaven and earth will pass away. When heaven and earth have passed away, my word will remain. What was your word, Jesus? Love? Forgiveness? Affection? All your words were one word: Wakeup.” Perhaps to love God, then, is to wake up, to feel gratitude both for the contraction as well as the expansion (but that’s a topic for another time).

     If we wake up and realize that the Love for God is missing, we might notice the dirty house, the veils, the extent of hypocrisy, within and around. Hafiz “considered hypocrisy in the form of the ostentatious display of religious piety to be the worst moral evil” (Lewisohn, p. 174), “the supreme sin” (p. 175).*** Lewisohn also quotes Ansari who “characterizes hypocrisy as shirk or ‘polytheism’” (p. 175) and Khurramshahi who says that Hafiz extended hypocrisy to include “self righteousness, smugness, conceited self-satisfaction, putting on airs, ostentatious displays of ascetic piety, vaunting one’s learning, considering oneself to be holy and sacrosanct, bragging of and setting stock in one’s own acts of pious devotion, superciliousness, mendacity, imposture, deceit, duplicity in one’s relation to God and man, cruel lack of feeling, being without love and wisdom, and so on” (pp. 174-5). Waking up leads to light coming in, feeling the hard realization of distortions, and bowing.

     When something terrible has become commonplace, what is a sacred poet or prophet to do? With Hafiz, I’m reminded of Hosea and his marriage to Gomer, considered “an adulteress, a common harlot, or a temple prostitute.” Gale A. Yee says the text and interpretation possibly call “into question the authority of traditional interpretations, which are embedded in the sexism and misogyny of Western culture, and calls for new ways of thinking about the body, woman, and the sacred.” ****

     To love God cares about that.

==================================

* Deut 10:12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good.” (New JPS version). See also, Jn 14:21 “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (English Standard Version)

Qur’an 3:31 “Say, ‘If you love God, follow me, and God will love you and forgive you your sins; for God is Forgiving, Merciful.’" (3:31) See The Study Quran, p. 140, for elaboration of this passage.

** Antonio Machado. Translated by Robert Bly, Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, Wesleyan University Press, 1983, p.109.

*** Lewisohn, Leonard. Hafiz and the Religion of Love. 

**** Gale A. Yee. “Gomer: Bible.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gomer-bible

Hardened Hearts vs the True Life

frozen “water of life” like the hardened heart

“Your True Life,” Rumi’s poem for the day, begins: “As you start to walk out on the way,/ the way appears” (Dec 26 in Coleman Barks’ A Year with Rumi).

     A big step for me (and I suppose for most everyone) involves personal embodiment of “career,” a term whose etymology appropriately points toward “road,” “racecourse,” or “wheeled vehicle.” Today’s “true life,” for better and worse, comes not just in walking, but in riding and racing. 

     My teaching career culminated in a course, Good Stories: Teaching Narratives for Peace & Justice. I loved teaching it, the class limit of 60 persons always filled, and it usually had a wait list of over a hundred. After teaching the course about fifteen times over the past six years, I’m still pondering the essence, the primary aim, and the secret.

     As 2017 wanes down to its close, while in my first year of retirement, I’m walking my way into more understanding and appreciation of Good Stories and True Life. This week, “the way appears,” in part, through a Christmas gift book from the top of my wish list, Hafiz and the Religion of Love. Leonard Lewisohn (who edited the book) articulates “the language of the invisible” and the almost impossible, although crucially vital, task of integrating “mythopoesis” into the “mental furniture of modern man.” His explanation of this aim resonates so tellingly with my experience of Good Stories.

“Albeit immanent in popular consciousness, most of Hafiz’s mythopoesis—his language of analogy and capacity for thinking in symbols—is no longer part of the mental furniture of modern man. The aesthetic premises of his poetry are incomprehensible within the conceptual framework of modern anti-art movements such as surealism, minimalism, abstract expressionism or ‘pop’ art, for the principles of his spiritual vision, being heart-based and focused on presential knowledge (‘ilm-i hudhuri), are completely alien to the presuppositions of the modern materialist society of the West. . . The central aim of the chapters in this volume is to enable contemporary Western students of classical Persian poetry to reconnect with that lost symbolic universe and hopefully re-initiate themselves into the mundus imaginalis of Hafiz and the entire galaxy of Persian poets who spoke his ‘language of the invisible’. . . In modern literary studies and critical theory, especially in the contemporary West, the vertical purport and spiritual import of his symbolic imagery by and large are deliberately neglected, and the esoteric doctrines and metaphysical teachings inspiring his verse are treated as irrelevancies.” pp. xxi-xxiii

     About the same time (around 2007) when Lewisohn and colleagues were drafting and presenting their conference papers that turned into Hafiz and the Religion of Love, I was developing the Good Stories course. If I had been able to articulate it, my central aim could have been worded as Lewisohn powerfully phrases it: “to reconnect with that lost symbolic universe and hopefully re-initiate themselves into the mundus imaginalis.” Perhaps it’s just as well, because if I had included those words on my course proposal the chances are pretty good that it would have been rejected by the university’s course approval process, “treated as irrelevancies.”

     Recent political events prove to me the consequence of our failure to nurture spiritual vision, heart-based knowing and caring. The sober intellectual lacks the capacity to counteract the ego-centered dystopia because cold rationalism fails to offer sufficient attraction against sensual materialism. In a strange way, the tavern and the house of love (primary images in Hafiz and other classical Persian poets) show closer affinity for the path to God than the strict legalistic rigidity cut by fundamentalist religions. Because approaching God surpasses human mind and body, the metaphysical stretch found in symbolic expression has to be called forth.

     Without this nurturing, the imaginal world disappears. Without mundus imaginalis* we lose the courage, vision, and strength to engage in social justice; these qualities are essential if we are to repel the self-centered tyrannies from within ourselves and from others. In language carried by the scriptures and prophets of our major religions, this loss can be related to the “hardening of the heart.” Teachings on this topic are abundant and a few samples follow:

* In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, statements about God hardening the heart occur at least fourteen times. The prime case involves Pharaoh dealing with the plagues. 

     If it’s God who hardens the heart, we wonder: Are humans absolved of moral responsibility? What if we do not wake up and “walk out on the way”? Are we freed from responsibility to teach the discernment between good and evil?

* Persons who are exploring the “hardened heart” explain the human part:

“When it says that the Lord made Pharaoh’s heart hard, the meaning in the internal sense is that Pharaoh himself made his heart hard. . . The evil that is attributed in the Bible to the Lord actually has its origin in human beings.”

* From an Islamic perspective, we find the responsibility to “soften our hearts.”

     In my view, the hardened heart relates to the failure to compose and engage the mundus imaginalis.* A person with a hardened heart has limited or no access to the eye of the heart and sees instead through the rational mind with a consciousness dominated by ego, the power drive, and materialism. The capacity for imagination (for a person having the hardened heart) has been corroded by sensationalism featured in media that are driven by gratuitous sex and violence. Imagination has been polluted. The higher calling demands that we continue to purify, resurrect, and re-create.

     Spiritual teachings have hardly been remiss in stating clearly that humans are wrong to place too much value on material possessions. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” How could it be put more plainly?

     When persons have hardened hearts and do not feel the problem in accumulating money in order to buy bigger houses, faster cars and phones, and other forms of instant gratification, a wake-up call may be in order. If “love” has deteriorated to getting applause, being admired for display of wealth, and feeling better than others (sexism, racism, superior-religionism, etc.), perhaps God has to harden the heart so that it can break before death ends the opportunity to bow before the Divine. If persons cannot see discrimination, hate, and ego-centered acts as opposed to God’s will, then the mirror of their heart might be shown in a ruler dominated by ungodliness. That seems to be the classic Pharaoh story, timeless, acted out once more.

===============================

* For elaboration on mundus imaginalis, see Henry Corbin. 

For example, he says: 

"At the beginning of each narrative, the visionary finds himself in the presence of a supernatural being of great beauty, whom he asks who he is and whence he comes. Essentially, these tales illustrate the Gnostic's experience, lived as the personal history of the Stranger, the captive aspiring to return home. (from p. 2)

As a result of internalization, one has moved out of external reality. Henceforth, spiritual reality envelops, surrounds, contains so-called material reality (from p. 4)

We realize immediately that we are no longer confined to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology restricted to the empirical world and the world of abstract intellect. Between them there is a world that is both intermediary and intermediate, described by our authors as the 'alam al-mithal, the world of the image, the mundus imaginalis: a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely, imaginative power, a faculty with a cognitive function, a noetic value which is as real as that of sense perception or intellectual intuition. We must be careful not to confuse it with the imagination identified by so-called modern man with "fantasy", and which, according to him, is nothing but an outpour of "imaginings". " (from p. 5)

Social Media, Spinning Lies, & Whirling Dervishes

droplets of light

“Stories move like whirling dervishes,” Elif Shafak concludes her magnificent TED Global 2010 talk*, “drawing circles beyond circles. They connect all humanity.” Shafak credits her grandmother (clearly the model for her powerful character, Auntie Banu, in The Bastard of Istanbul) for impressing on her the power of circles: “If you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish, or the human soul, all you have to do is surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside.”  In the novel, Shafak compellingly moves us into compassion for persons who are caught in the walls of lies with their layers of distortions and destructions. 

The stories we tell, to others as well as to ourselves, believing them or not, must be clean if we are to avail ourselves of their healing properties instead of abandoning them to act as destructive forces. Our best stories tell the truth; their circles draw our imagination toward advancing consciousness and civilization.  But, of course, stories can also spread lies; and then, as Shafak warns, we risk damage to the soul. Lying separates oneself from the inner essence and, since they are so interconnected, also from one’s life-affirming work outside in the world. Participating in lies takes so many forms: fake news, denials, avoidances, screens, cover-ups, escapes, absorption in past or future, addictions, on and on.

Participating in social media presents perhaps the latest battleground involving this manipulation of reality. According to recent reports, in the 2016 presidential campaign, a third of the U.S. population likely received Russian-backed fake news through Facebook.

“Underscoring how widely content on the social media platform can spread, Facebook says in the testimony that while some 29 million Americans directly received material from 80,000 posts by 120 fake Russian-backed pages in their own news feeds, those posts were “shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation.”

Although more guarded in use, I continue actively viewing and posting on Facebook and to a lesser extent in Twitter. As anything that is powerful, social media can be used negatively as well as positively.  Rather than increasing isolation, I want to work toward global citizenship and to sustain world-wide friendships. My status updates on FB usually feature photos that witness beauty in the natural world; my camera’s on alert for views that glimpse, that invite wondering about other worlds, possibly that even guide us in composing our lives with more harmony and balance. Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. . . Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” (p. 52)

With or without social media, we are individually at high risk for closeting ourselves in mindsets vulnerable to diseased thinking and feeling. As with physical health, early detection of infection is crucial. I believe that a vital step comes in sharpening the sense of the inauthentic. The most precious early-warning system lives in the soul, not in any news media, not even in friendship nor family nor religion. All those are very important; but because each individual has unique wiring to/from the Source, the ultimate test for truth comes within. To know oneself is to know one’s Lord.  And to do that we have to polish the mirror of the heart. Rumi teaches this over and over. I’m now reading in Book 4 of the Mathnawi, around lines 2881-2914. Here are some selections from Nicholson’s translation:

Does any painter paint [the beauty of the picture] for the sake of the picture itself, without hope of conferring benefits… from his picture (arises) the joy of children and the remembering of departed friends of their friends///the external form is for the sake of the unseen form; and that took shape for the sake of another unseen (form)./// even so (proceed), having perceived reasons within reasons, one after the other, in order thaty you may arrive… step by step…///those insights that are not frozen (dense and dull) are nothing if not piercing and veil-rending. He (such a one) sees with his own eye at the present moment that which will come to pass in ten years. /// Every one, according to the measure of his spiritual enlightenment, sees the things unseen in proportion to the polishing (of the heart’s mirror).///God alone is the giver of aspiration…God’s assignment of a particular lot to any one does not hinder (him from exercising) consent and will and choice. 

I believe we find much value in making our own versions of such texts. Here’s my work/play with the above:

When enthused by the beauty of the source, does any true artist intentionally compose primarily for the sake of the superficial layer while discarding the everflowing transcendent rays of light? The higher aim sights toward the joy of children and remembrance of love’s departures. Vision and memory track and trail the Unseen, reason unto Reason, living with abandon step by step. Each movement in trust rends another veil, dependent on dedicated polishing of the heart’s mirror.

*Note: Shafak is also featured in TED Global 2017.

Truth: Sacred-Text/Lived-Experience

Especially primed for change now, right now—as if our world may explode if we don’t—is truth, the way we “get it.” Any high hopes that we can trust news media, political leaders, even preachers to tell the truth have disintegrated beyond the point at which the center holds. While this sounds awful, potentially the breakdown offers good news.

       We would like to trust persons in positions of authority to be truthful. The alternative of asserting my individual position can be dangerous as well as arrogant and stupid. Also, trust is a beautiful thing, but it leads to devastating betrayal unless we refine our moral sense. This continued refinement includes holding authorities accountable for telling the truth or saying “I don’t know.” Acts of deception have to be named and punished.

        Somewhat on the positive side, being lied to spurs us into hard learning of telling truth, even in uncertainty, in paradox, and in story language that intertwines with experiential data. Contemporary schooling has limited our development of moral sense with an overemphasis on fact as truth, in no small part because that version of true is easier to score “reliably” as right/wrong in grading and testing. Leonard Lewisohn tells the fuller nature of truth: 

This Truth/Reality (haqiqat) professed by the Sufis is best expressed by indirect symbolic allusions and more effectively captured by poetic metaphor than described by logical statements of didactic prose. Paradox, symbolic allusion, and apophatic expression are more the tools… (p. xiv in The Wisdom of Sufism)

       For adults today to bequeath any quality of life to the next generation, we must commit to advancing our moral sense so that we can tell the truth beyond the fact-level and beyond selfish interests. We make this commitment so that we can live into truth about peace in a world community, about “justice for all.” 

        While sacred text guides our best effort to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), each person’s engagement with truth also depends on living it out, with courage and persistence through inevitable mistakes. Refining and advancing our moral sense depends on a concerted willingness to live in the moment.  “The friend of God is the child of the present instant” (Lewisohn translating Junayd in Hujwiri’s Kashf al-mahjub; p. 45 in The Wisdom of Sufism).

        We need courage to turn down the volume of external proclamations blaring across the dial from eyewitness newscasts to expert scientists/academicians to scripture-quoting preachers/theologians. I’m not throwing out the volumes on wisdom, but I’m searching for truthful voices that resonate with experience. Models for interrogating our lived experience include the studies of key figures such as King David. I have about fifty passages marked in Walter Brueggemann’s David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory. 

         Richly arrayed on my desktop are also Abraham Heschel’s A Passion for Truth; David Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope; Gadamer’s Truth and Method; Richard Niebuhr’s The Meaning of Revelation; Nasr’s The Garden of Truth; and God’s Light: The Prophets of the World’s Great Religions. I don’t want to go into the jungle of personal experience unarmed. From this array of rich texts, great ideas swirl with and against each other threatening to pull me under the spell of word-world, the enchantment of thought and philosophy. But the love of wisdom risks separation from the fragile truth of personal experience. 

        As noted in previous blogs, my personal favorite for bringing together my body’s knowing with the word world happens in natural horsemanship. For example, I reflect back on the most recent ride with Leg’cy. Shortly before I’d dismounted, my body vibrated in the way I’ve come to realize signals something meaningful, as an offering to be composed—or abandoned in unreflected dust. 

        But when I hold the moment in consideration, I see that our rides continue to simplify. While we both thrill in the fast-paced canter, we want it to be held in lightness with very subtle cueing. Midway in the ride, I’d asked for the trot-to-canter transition. Leg’cy refused. Instead of demanding, as some texts and coaches assert, I accepted: “O.K. My timing wasn’t right.” So we returned to working on flexion with more leg yields at the trot. Then, before long, Leg’cy herself sent a very subtle canter cue. I followed, and together we smoothly transitioned. The moral: Let go of an unmet desire and accept a higher power in the given—this allows a sweeter union.

        This is the lived-experience complement to the quotation by Lewisohn: the divine found in surrender to the present instant. So while it’s not new, the confirmation by body with the wisdom text combines into a vibrant truth that's strong in conviction and begging for commitment. Living in the moment is hard but with body-mind-soul it’s done.

        As we live into the integrity of our own being our capacity to tell the truth perfects because we are purifying the self-deceptions, releasing the illusions implanted by consumer culture, false belief, by power mongers, by fear, disappointment, harbored hate, anger, and so much more. How can we begin to expect to discern and to oppose the lies all around unless and until we live into the powerful truth within, moment by living moment in full consciousness and committed conscience! 

        Said again, in order to live ethically and to advance moral sense for doing it, we need our own embodied authority, refined through intention and reflection, and buttressed with universal source often re-told in good stories.

The First Day

The last act before closing the office door after 41 years of employment in the institution was to leave the room key on the desk. I kept the dual purpose keycard (used both for ID and building access) mostly for reminders: beardless, aging...

Honesty must rank at or near the top of the most named virtues. On campus, academic integrity is insured by requiring students to add the Honor Pledge certifying ownership of work and by similarly requiring faculty to sign CVs in the annual reporting. And yet something vitally important is missing. Something about integrity.

Perhaps that’s what my threshold dream last night was trying to convey as I cross into the land of retirement. My accountability on this side of the life-stream more clearly owes to God. It always does, of course, but the evaluation systems imposed on students and faculty, to some degree like those in any obligated, enslaved, or employed status, impose obstacles against claiming personal authenticity. When does a person know clearly and show openly the direct line to and from the Source? That depends on a clean heart line, one that is not compromised by the impurities of human “merit” systems and peer comparisons.

In the dream, a former student appears and is agitated because the academic program had not made explicit the name of God. He’d just figured out that was the one-thing-most-important. He seemed upset because he should have been told sooner and more clearly that this was the key. And what if he hadn’t figured it out on his own! 

Continuing in the dream, I share with him my experience of coming to a realization of the significance of spirituality. I try to tell him that to reach this kind of understanding might depend on a person’s development of a maturity that’s ready to “get it.” And I suggest that reaching such an insight by oneself is probably essential. It cannot be given by someone else.

Today, in my predawn acting into this side of the river, I’m drawn to weed out a couple of plants that have grown up around the base of the oak. My vision now perceives how the little garden needs pruning. It’s our view from the back porch where we coffee-drinkers ask the morning what the day brings. 

The discernment of “weeds” and the adjustment that balances and reflects harmony provide an affirmation of beauty. It’s a very simple gesture and yet the space fills with a sense of rightness. I’m reminded of Keats’ next to last line in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

                               Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

  Dishonesty glares blatantly across our political landscape these days. Perhaps we’re pushed to be more honest about the ways “greatness” has been aligned with greed, with status, with selfishness. Not with truth. Not with beauty. 

Looking back across the river, the mighty Potomac, perhaps more free now in post-employment, I wonder what persons who care can do. Will academic institutions find radical leadership? Or, like my dream figure, do we have to make our way individually?  Persons who care can clean enough heart-space to sense a true path and then follow it, often within but going against a value system that favors economic disparity, professional jealousy, and blind defense of hegemonic turf.

Parker Palmer (e.g., Let Your Life Speak) tells of moving from his doctorate at Berkeley to Pendle Hill where quality was enacted in a radically different structure, where as dean he washed dishes because everyone shared in the levels of work. Their pay scale was not outrageously disproportionate. Palmer lived truth of his degree in sociology. But Berkeley still seems proud of proclaiming economic inequity: “Male professors at University of California-Berkeley make on average $240,235 USD per year. This is $165,765 more than the average male university professor's annual salary ($74,470 USD).” 

        And Berkeley is our aspirational peer. Best we beware casting stones.

Love Inseparable from Justice, Mercy, Compassion

5 AM-ish is the perfect time for coffee, especially on May 25, 2017, when the world turns sepia-toned, the tin roof echoes the gently falling rain, the robin joins in, not exactly singing but offering unabashedly itself. And the Amish-made rocking chair on the back porch, along with the man in it, creak just a bit. 

     Most Thursdays for the past decade would likely have found me at Starbucks when the door opens, 5AM, often the one on the corner of the Beltway and Route 1, pondering matters academic, like everybody else, wondering. Whatever: how we got here, how to get out without completely betraying the soul. 

     I don’t think humans are born nice and we’re not born mean either, but it sure looks like it. There’s a book within reach of my desk called Just Babies, mostly not-yet-read, but the point is that we’re born, at least most everybody is, with a capacity to prefer goodness and even with discernment of good guys. Just—as in born-with justice. Even before speaking or walking infants can choose the person who was nice, looking away from the actor who meanly stole the toy from another child, preferring the one showing love.

     What happens? How can so many people fail to see corrupt wanna-be leaders who are going to betray them without batting an eye? How can folks choose to watch a network spewing lies and hate? And then go to church, even send missionaries! The good book, just about any of them, warns of this. Freedom, this gift given humans, means suffering and most would rather not. The textbook we used in Good Stories preaches reciprocal altruism and asserts the necessity of imposing disincentives even to persons who collaborate with and who do not resist the evil-doers.

     Other good books teach purification. The person who wants to stone the one caught in adultery is not to be hated or vilified. The resistance needs to come from a clean heart because harboring hate destroys. So the person who committed the horrific hate crime on campus, the persons who support a power-crazed politiican, those who maim horses to win competitions—all these should be stopped but best not by those calling them nasty names. 

     Somehow love is still the answer. And it must be a love greater than we have grown, one inseparable from justice, mercy, compassion.

Inspiration & Revolution

this morning

Late winter

most leaves down 

yellowed grass

Light comes thru

plenty of room

     Through the past twelve or so semesters, this final seventh of a forty-plus-year career in teaching, it’s all crystallized in a course I designed and continuously revised called Good Stories. The heart of our engagement centers in the essence of the making of a good story. In the oral culture, story is alive, not frozen in print or on screen; and the vitality pulses in renewal, even in revolution.

     Life depends on change and adaptation, including social reorganization as well as advancing consciousness; this inner-outer dynamic pushes forward an enacted conscience as reflected in the subtitle of the course: Teaching Narratives for Peace and Justice. Looking out in the window of today’s world, we must wonder if we’ve been telling enough good stories. 

     Despite the prevailing overemphasis on entertainment, narratives can be shaped and enacted for the force of goodness; this potential is convincingly evident in the narratives enriching the major religions of the world. Consider, for example, Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative,  Kenan Rifai’s commentary on Rumi’s Mathnawi, and Crossan’s books on parable, especially those of Jesus.  Instead of renewing life, far too much discourse, particularly in our educational system, seems to have lost the revolutionary power to inspire us beyond hegemonic selfish interests that freeze and kill. 

      Change comes hard, particularly to persons who are fat and happy or drugged into distracted illusions that deny climate change, poisoned food and water, toxic dogma, soporific screens, and inane mind/heart numbing test-taking. Good stories happen not just in the telling but in the calling for them by persons who are searching. Rumi’s radical narratives were frequently paused by the command for the storyteller to stop talking; persons have to be ready to break open. 

     Perhaps one of the most powerful examples of this comes in the narrative around King David. Walter Brueggemann consolidates several incisive explorations with the synthesis that “this narrative is distinctively counterculture, subversive, against our presuppositions” and “against such a self-deceiving enlightenment” (p. 49, David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory). The reformations of power and surrender shape in the heart rending parable of shepherd and lamb, love and death.

     That the essence of a good story rumbles in its revolutionary power is also modeled in Rumi’s “The Merchant & the Parrot.”** The caged bird (yes, remember Maya Angelou) provokes us to consider our spirit contained within the body. 

‘My parrot, O my most sagacious bird,

  interpreter of all my thoughts and secrets!

Whatever comes to me that’s just and unjust,

  she told me from the first so I’d remember.’

A parrot with a voice from revelation

  began her life before the first existence,

This parrot is concealed inside yourself;

  you’ve seen her image in phenomena.

Alan Williams, Trans. Rumi: Spiritual Verses, p. 162.

** Several print versions of “The Merchant & the Parrot” can be seen through this page:  http://www.mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/reading/rumi/pages/12.htm

 (Links to an external site.) . It includes translations by Whinfield (19th century) and Barks (20th century), who each translate Rumi according to the poetic expectations and liberty of their time. If you are interested in a more literal translation of Rumi (13th century), you can take a look at a version of "The Merchant and The Parrot" by Ibrahim Gamard.