At the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities, which we attended in San Jose, California, two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend a session with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln’s Meloncholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. He is currently finishing another book entitled The Power of Two: Creative Chemistry, and at the conference he talked about this work in progress.

According to Shenk, the traditional paradigm of the lone genius has recently been countered by a more nuanced story of the complex network out of which genius emerges. While he doesn’t deny the existence of either the loner or the network, he asserts that a very specific electricity arises from creative pairs: think John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Georges Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. He also argues that there are several predictable acts in the stage life of a creative pair, the first of which is often an attraction of the familiar to the unfamiliar.

And while the two partners must in some way merge, each partner losing his or her particular identity to the other as in the confluence of rivers, “creativity proceeds from dichotomous exchange,” as Shenk says. Roles that become fixed or static signal a dying fire. This dichotomous exchange often involves an asymmetry of power in the partnership and consequent tension and unraveling. Those generative sparks can be extinguished without moments of what Shenk calls repair, moments of returning to the pure joy and delight of the original sparking.

To illustrate one of these moments, he played a clip of the Beatles’ famous 1969 rooftop concert, their last live performance together. During their rendition of the song “Don’t Let Me Down,” John forgets the words to the beginning of the second verse and improvises several syllables of gobbeldegook instead, exchanging bemused smiles with Paul. Shenk identifies this as a moment of repair in a torn relationship—by the time of this performance the friendship between John and Paul had nearly frayed to the breaking point—a recapturing of delight.

While Shenk didn’t use the word “marriage,” marriage easily qualifies as a locus for creative energy, although not necessarily marriage as it’s envisioned today, with its focus on equal rights and equal work loads, of two people completing each other’s deficits into some measurable whole. I hasten to add that fairness and equality, in some form, are necessary to any fruitful marriage; however, the asymmetries and tensions and inequalities that also occur within marriage are often the source of a relationship’s generative genius. Shenk’s taxonomy of creativity between pairs appealed to me instantly because I found immediate evidence to support his structure, not in the pairing of people but in the sparks that fly when unexpected disciplines are rubbed together.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Teri Rofkar, a native of Alaska and a member of the Tlingit people. She began her career as a traditional weaver making baskets from such materials as the roots of spruce trees, maidenhair ferns, and native grasses, an art taught to her by her grandmother and which she is now teaching her grand-daughter. These baskets, aside from being beautiful, can last for hundreds of years and are woven so tightly they can be used as water vessels. When she took a class at a local community college on traditional methods of textile weaving, she realized that she already had most of the skills she needed to make the leap from weaving plants into baskets to weaving goat hair into traditional robes, a skill that had almost disappeared.

To practice her new craft, she needed mountain goat wool, and lots of it, so she befriended local park rangers who worked with a herd that had been introduced in 1923. The rangers informed her when they found spots where the animals had shed or when they found one dead. She became aware of a study of the genetics of the mountain goats, which discovered a herd genetically unrelated to the introduced herd and dated it to the last ice age, indicating that the species had not been “introduced” but was, in fact, native.

This genetic drama was unfolding as she was beginning work on a new robe. In addition to the traditional patterning, she added mathematically correct renderings of the distinctive DNA strands of the two herds. Although in some ways the addition was a design innovation, she knew from her many years of basket weaving that her ancestors had always transmitted a deep knowledge of the natural world through their art. On her website she writes:

Decades of weaving have opened my eyes to the pure science that is embedded in Tlingit art. The arts and our oral history together bring knowledge of ten thousand years of research to life. My goal is to continue that research, broadening awareness for the generations to come.

She wore the robe as she presented her keynote speech, dipping each shoulder and spinning so the robe rose up like smoke around her. “Who knew science could dance?” she laughed. Her delight communicated itself to the audience as we witnessed a moment of repair between ancient art and modern science.

Martin and I returned to Austin just in time to attend the last day of the Texas Book Festival, a spectacular intersection of people who love to read and write. We attended a session facilitated by one of Madroño Ranch’s first residents, Juli Berwald. She interviewed Alan Weisman, an environmental journalist and the author of Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth? Fiercely researched and beautifully written, Countdown follows Weisman’s travels through more than twenty countries asking four very loaded questions: how many people can the land carry? How robust must the Earth’s ecosystems be to ensure our continued existence? What species are essential to our survival? What kind of economy would serve a stable human population, rather than the current exploding one? Despite the complexities of the questions—which Weisman addresses with sensitivity and intelligence—a uniform answer presented itself in virtually every context: education of girls, which almost inevitably leads to lower birth rates and to fewer ecological pressures on the planet.

He tells a story about Esmail Kahrom, an Iranian ecologist whose interest in biology had its roots in the Persian carpets he saw in the museum his father took him to as a child, one in particular, dating back to 1416. It depicted a Tree of Life, and among its branches the boy found an extravagance of intricately woven birds, animals, and even insects:

The depictions were so detailed that zoologists could determine each species. He was looking, Kahrom understood, at creatures now extinct in his land. The eyes of ancient carpet weavers are how Iranian biologists know today what once lived there.

One of the animals that has almost disappeared is the Asiatic cheetah, which exists now only in Iran. Visiting the United States for the first time, Kahrom found himself in a sixth-grade classroom in San Diego, invited by the teacher, who was married to one of Kahrom’s cousins. She showed her students the Iranian flag and Iranian coins and then unrolled a Persian rug, one that Kahrom could tell immediately was ancient and expensive. She introduced him to the class as an ecologist, someone who studies the ways in which all life is connected.

Then the classroom door opened, and in walked a curator from the San Diego Zoo with a muzzled cheetah on a leash.

The teacher asked her astonished class what would happen if the endangered cheetahs disappeared altogether. Would the students suffer from the loss? Would they still be able to live their lives? The class agreed that they would, even though they thought the cheetahs should live. The teacher pointed to the beautiful rug she had brought in, noting that it was years in the making, with its more than one and a half million knots. What if someone came in and cut out one, or even two hundred, of the knots? Would you be able to tell? No, she said. You wouldn’t even notice.

But what if you keep cutting, she asked, as her students and the cheetah watched her. Opening her arms to include the space beyond the classroom walls, she said:

All this is the carpet of life. You are sitting on it. Each of those knots represents one plant or animal. They, and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our groceries are not manufactured. They are produced by what we call nature. This rug represents that nature. If something happens in Asia or Africa and a cheetah disappears, that is one knot from the carpet. If you realize that, you’ll understand that we are living on a very limited number of species and resources, on which our life depends.

These stories weave together many things, but what struck me was the union of the textile arts with modern science. So often the realm of women and household, textiles claim a lower rung on any cultural-status ladder than the hard sciences, but their marriage can strike all sorts of generative sparks. Jewish mystical theology identifies the work of the chosen people as the restoration of God’s shining shattered dwelling place, associated with the feminine principal, with God’s exiled self: tikkun olam, or repair of the world, whose signal marker is delight. In a culture that so often measures itself by efficiencies of scale and measurable, predictable outcomes, I wonder if we wouldn’t be well served to seek out irregular marriages between powerful and humble enterprises, between unlikely partners like science or technology and the arts, rather than seeking to separate them, as so often happens in times of economic stress. In these unlikely partnerings perhaps we’ll see some repair of our moth-eaten world.

What we’re reading
Heather: Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening
Martin: Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City

There’s a 5,000-pound ghost hovering over Austin’s Lady Bird Lake, the remains of a 35-foot cedar elm painted white and hoisted onto a shaft sunk into the water. Entitled Thirst, this collaborative project memorializes the estimated 301 million trees in Texas that have died in the current drought.

It’s a haunting sight, this desiccated tree with its roots hovering just above the water that would have kept it alive. Looking at it and its reflection in the water, I couldn’t help but wonder about ghosts, who seem to reside in that gap between sustenance and death. When you can’t see the space that Thirst creates, the space between the roots reaching for the water and the water itself, it’s easy to forget that it exists when the roots are underground as well: that gap, that amazing gap across which roots somehow get the nutrients they need to grow—or don’t. The floating tree gives room to investigate that ghost-thick space in more-than-literal ways as well, a seasonally appropriate exploration as Halloween rolls its perky little way across our neighborhood.

When Martin and I were in California last month, we went hiking through the area of the Mount Vision fire, which burned 12,000 acres of the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1995. Hundreds of charred trees—most of them Bishop pines—still stood in testament to the devastation of the fire, riding like gray ghosts on the backs of the hills galloping into the ocean.

Despite the reminder they provided of pain and loss, I was struck by their place in the busy landscape. Woodpeckers, warblers, chickadees, hawks, and coyly hidden singers flew in and around the old ghosts, nesting, feeding, resting. Some of the dead trees had melted into mulch, providing cribs for numerous other species. I read later that Bishop pine cones, which grow in tight thick clusters on the parent pine’s branches, won’t release and open except with intense heat.

Something about the scene reminded me of an afternoon I spent years ago walking through a predominantly Mexican cemetery on the west side of San Antonio, probably about this time of year, just before the Day of the Dead. Families were picnicking among the grave markers, many of which bore photos of the dead. Many of the dead were long gone and couldn’t possibly have known in life some of the generations gathered there, and yet there were balloons and fresh flowers and toddlers all bouncing through the scene. It was the first time I had seen this intentional, comfortable coexistence of the living and the dead, a reaching across the gap that usually separates them, and something lively was released.

It’s easy to romanticize that gap, to say that it’s just a Ouija board’s journey from one side to the other, or to deny that any interpenetration across it is possible. One thing I know about the gap is that it’s often delivered in a placenta of suffering.

Martin and I also just finished reading Goodbye to a River by John Graves, who died on July 31 of this year. Born in 1920 and raised in the Fort Worth area, Graves left Texas as a young man and returned in 1957 to take care of his ill father. In November of that year, when he heard that the Brazos River, the site of many adventures in his youth, was to be dammed, he decided to canoe and camp along the part of the river that he had known the best, between Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Whitney, a trip of 200 or so miles that took about three weeks. He wrote not only about his adventures with “the passenger,” the dachshund pup that accompanied him, but also about the history of the river and its people. Graves had no patience for the myth of the noble “Anglo-Ams” (as he called the white settlers) who ousted the savage native Americans; his respect for the Comanche nation (“The People”) and other indigenous tribes was unfashionable at the time. His respect for the river and its environs was equally unusual at a time when the natural world shared the same degraded status as the Native American.

At the same time, Graves was respectful of the Anglo-Ams whom he called “the old ones.” He had a particular fondness for Charles Goodnight, one of the namesakes of the famed Goodnight-Loving Trail, whose ranch Graves passed on his journey. Graves wrote of Goodnight, “He was a tough and bright and honorable man in tough not usually honorable times, and had respect and a kind of love for the Indians even when he fought them,” which was often. Graves tells a tale so haunting about Goodnight and The People that I think it must float, almost visible, around that bend of the Brazos, whether it happened or not.

Many years after the buffalo herds—and the Comanche way of life—had been effectively extinguished, a group of reservation Comanches rode their “gaunt ponies” to see Goodnight. Goodnight and his wife had rounded up the last stragglers of the southern bison herd, the seedbed from which the current Texas state herd has grown. Goodnight knew some of the older men; he had fought them and then gone to visit them in on the reservation in Oklahoma to reminisce. They had come to ask him to give them a buffalo bull, to which, according to Graves, the crusty old rancher responded, “Hell, no.”

They may or may not have asked again, but in the end, after camping patiently for several days in his yard and on his porch, much to the amusement of Goodnight’s curious cowhands, the Comanches left with a bull, Goodnight “maybe deriving a sour satisfaction from thinking about the trouble they’d have getting it back to Oklahoma.”

But they didn’t take it to Oklahoma. “They ran it before them and killed it with arrows and lances in the old way, the way of the arrogant centuries. They sat on their horses and looked down at it for a while, sadly, and in silence, and then left it there dead and rode away, and Old Man Goodnight watched them go, sadly too.”

Graves watched ghosts all the way down the river, recalling tales of “the old ones” and their children, tales of murderous feuds and crude bravery and epic misuse of the land. Reflecting on the bloody, violent stories, he wrote facetiously: “Were there, you ask, no edifying events along the Brazos?… Didn’t sober, useful, decent people build for themselves sober, useful decent lives, and lead us, soberly, usefully, decently up through the years to that cultural peak upon which we now find ourselves standing?”

Well, yes, he says, but “neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean.” Both land and people inherit what has come before. Both leap over the amazing gap that separates one moment from the next and yet binds them together. A people’s progenitors “stand behind its elbow, and not only the sober gentle ones. Most of all, maybe, the old hairy direct primitives whose dialect lingers in its mouth, whose murderous legend tones its dreams, whose oversimple thinking infects its attitudes toward bombs and foreigners and rockets to the moon.”

Because he was willing to engage with ghosts—especially the hairy, scary, foul-mouthed ones—John Graves’s voice is still audible somewhere in the gap between the floating tree and the river, through the interstices that link the living and the dead. Within those interstices, something lively is released—though released in the fires of suffering. No wonder we don’t like ghosts. But, oddly, they can tie us to a place, a history, and to each other, so long as we have time to tell their stories in that space between the river and the roots. It’s those interstices that allow for the development of unexpected and fruitful connections.

What we’re reading
Heather: Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Martin: Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

In my last post, I compared saying the Nicene Creed to stepping on unsteady stones across a creek, stepping here and not there, meaning this and not that in an effort not to end up with wet feet and an unsayable creed. One of the tippiest stones for me is the word believe, which for a long time I understood as a sort of thought bubble in the brain in which the creed could be said and remain unspotted from the world. Upon this rock I now place a salamander.

A story in Monday’s Austin American Statesman reported on the multimillion-dollar battle being waged in two Central Texas counties over who will protect the Georgetown salamander and its cousin, the Salado salamander: local authorities or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s a story that I suspect will cause some eye rolling among developers, conservationists, scientists, laymen, liberals, and conservatives alike. But here’s the thing: these embryo-like creatures, which live in caves and springs in declining numbers, are bellwethers of water quality for the region. Their skin is so thin their beating hearts are visible, and they absorb any toxins in the water directly into their bodies. Their declining numbers in the face of new development in both counties can be attributed and weighed and argued, but the last word is that our well-being and theirs are inextricably entangled. No one in the story seems to be arguing about that.

On my tippy rock, next to the salamander, I now place a book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram, a philosopher, cultural ecologist, and sleight-of-hand magician. This beautiful work is in part about learning to locate ourselves outside ourselves in order, quite literally, to understand ourselves: we cannot separate what we stand on—the Earth in all its history and destiny—from who we are and how we know it. Without this understanding, we cease to know anything, or indeed to be fully human. Yes, yes—I’m off the rock and in the creek. But Abram writes about these contorted philosophical topics with a lyric and embodied clarity, eschewing abstract language. His topic—how we know what we know—has become a signpost on this uneven path toward believing.

As a philosopher, Abram is a phenomenologist, someone who studies human consciousness, particularly as it focuses on direct experience. How do we know that we know something? Descartes famously sought certainty as the baseline for knowledge. When you experienced something through your senses, how could you be sure you weren’t dreaming or mad? What could you stand on to say anything with certainty? Descartes found certainty inside his mind—he thought, therefore he was—and effectively drew a line in the sand between the subjective, autonomous mind and the objective, inert world of things. Descartes was no atheist; he acknowledged that without God there could be no confidence in the reality of the external world. But Descartes’s pronouncement released God to become an idea, cloven from creation, while the primacy of scientific method and mathematical truth became almost inescapable over the next centuries. After Descartes, anyone saying “I believe” more likely believed in a second-tier proposition as it stacked up against scientific rationalism, one that was merely subjective and consequently of little use in the real, objective worlds of science, commerce, and politics.

Abram rejects this split between what we know and how we know it, and he does it by taking us out of our Cartesian heads and back into our sensing bodies. Despite the power and information that the scientific revolution has brought us, we cannot separate our daily lives—even those spent in laboratories—from the ambiguous, pre-conceptual ground of sensory experience. Writes Abram, “The fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere consequence of events unfolding in the ‘realer’ world of quantifiable and measurable scientific ‘facts’,” facts which descend from some impersonal, objective dimension like putti from heaven. Abram does not question the accomplishments of science and technology. He does, however, want to uncover how a blinkered commitment to their processes has left us blind to the subjective, sensuous, sentient life of bodies—all bodies, animal, vegetable, mineral—and the great breathing body of the Earth. To be deaf to the lively ancient and ongoing conversations of the Earth is to be cut off from our own humanity because the perceiver and the perceived are made of the same stuff.

So imagine that you’re sitting outside, watching your cat stalk a lizard climbing a sunflower as a blue jay heckles from a nearby tree. Where is all this happening? Inside your mind? There’s a reliable solidity to this tableau, no matter what Descartes says. Or is it happening “out there,” with no participation from you, the observer? Abram points to another place, what he and other philosophers call the life-world, the world we don’t pay much attention to: the one where the kitchen radio is on and the mail is being delivered and the dogs are sniffing something foul and widgets are being made. This is a collective rather than private space, ever shifting and open-ended and containing the unceasing activity of its innumerable inhabitants. The point of entry into this life-world is the sentient body of each inhabitant. When I watch the cat-drama, perception doesn’t happen just in me or just in the participants; rather, it occurs in the crucible of this communal space, belonging to it and not its individual participants. In this view, the air is no longer empty but bursting with relationship. Nor does perception occur without the literal ground we stand on, which from its depths shapes the life-world in which we dwell. When we elevate ourselves into some objective realm of fact, we’re unable to participate in or even hear the ongoing conversations with the created world that ensure our own full humanity.

Back to my unsteady rock, on which I now place a small gong. Knowing even less about gong design than I do about philosophy, I imagine it looking something like an atom, its dense nuclear heart the place the clapper hits, its reverberations spreading outward, gaining power. I put it on the rock to remind myself of one of the images that first drew me to take seriously the possibility of a Christian life. In A Testament of Devotion Thomas R. Kelly, a mid-twentieth-century Quaker mystic, writes of his own faith journey not as an ascent toward belief but as a descent into the Light:

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profound level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings…. Between the two levels is fruitful interplay, but ever the accent must be on the deeper level, where the soul ever dwells in the presence of the Holy One. For the religious man [sic] is bringing all affairs of the first level down into the Light….

Kelly does not leave the Earth behind in his God-ordered life but digs deeper into it, perhaps alluding to the literal fire that burns at its center. Wikipedia tells me that the Earth’s hyper-hot inner core, which was liquid for its first couple of billion of years, has been solid for the second couple of billion, although it is surrounded by the turbulent viscosity of the equally hot outer core. When I say—or preferably sing—the creed, I imagine voices sinking into the light beneath the Earth’s skin, mingling with the wild subsonic frequencies sounding at the core, and then reverberating back into our haunted air and beyond, audible to those listening for them.

So I believe. And when I say “I” I also must say we since “I” can’t be entirely separated from the Body extending through time and space that says it. We believe in the disagreeing fellowship around the necessary salamander, whose name, Eurycea naufragia, means “remnant,” and thus sneaks a prophetic note into the conversation. We believe in God’s love for creation, so profound that the Body of God can never be disengaged from it. We believe that when humanity separates itself from the Body of God, it ceases to be fully human and commits atrocities both willfully and ignorantly. We believe in the gravity of all created things, whose resonance pulls them down toward the singing Light and which carries its cadences back to the surface.

Sometimes it takes me a long time to get across that creek, what with trying not to step on salamanders, knock over gongs, and such.

What we’re reading
Heather: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Martin: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Last Sunday we attended a dharma teaching at Green Gulch Farm, on the western flanks of Mount Tamalpais, above Muir Beach. It was the kind of morning for which this part of California is famous: foggy and cool with sudden glittering glimpses of ocean or mountain that as quickly disappear back into the magician’s hand. After scurrying down the eucalyptus-buttressed driveway, we arrived at the temple late and at the wrong door. The temple was packed and listening to the robed priest read a children’s story to perhaps twenty well-behaved but wiggly children. Once the children were sent off to their own separate programing, the priest began his teaching in earnest, an hour-long disquisition on the relationship between labor (it was Labor Day weekend, after all) and Zen practice. He read two poems by W. B. Yeats, one by Patrick Kavanagh, and referenced Shakespeare and Northrop Frye. I would bet that his radio is usually set on the local NPR station, and that he was looking forward, as I was, to reading the Sunday New York Times that afternoon.

When Martin and I got to the Times-reading phase of our own Sunday liturgy, I read a beautiful essay in the book review entitled “Articles of Faith” by Dara Horn, in which she muses on the easy confluence of contemporary Jewish fiction, even if it’s overtly non-religious, with ancient questions of faith. She contrasts this Jewish feast with the slim pickings on the post-Christian literary table: “Whither the Flannery O’Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can’t do this all by herself!” Because Judaism is a faith based on the concept of preserving memory, she asserts a peculiar affinity between Judaism and fiction-writing, “a mystical and irrational belief in a type of memory no neurologist would recognize, a phenomenon both uncanny and eternal,” a conviction that “time can be stopped, that somewhere, whether on our notebooks… or our spirits, everything is perfectly preserved and recorded, ready to return to life.” The essay ends with a call to listen to and create the stories that give a deep anchorage in history and a shapely hope to our personal and communal lives, even as the anchorage has made clear the murderous powers in which we swim.

All right, I thought, I guess I’m Buddhist and Jewish today. Does that mean I’m not a Christian? Oh, dear. And on a Sunday.

Being in California, particularly in Point Reyes Station, leaves me a little disoriented, especially since I come from a state that has ignored virtually every vote I’ve cast in the past twenty years. Martin and I are in like-minded company here: virtually every voice loudly proclaims with gusto the gospel of sustainable and local. We’ve driven north to Bodega Bay and south to Mill Valley and in fifty miles passed not one fast-food joint. Cattle are vital to the local economy and yet are grazed and raised humanely on federal lands. Signs supporting the Marin Agricultural Land Trust—which protects about half of Marin County’s agricultural land from development—appear in almost every eatery with monotonous, almost sinister, regularity: could you end up in Tomales Bay wearing sustainably produced, free-trade cement shoes if you try to run a restaurant without supporting MALT?

Could I as easily be a Buddhist or a Jew as a Christian? A northern Californian as a Texan? The answer is probably yes, but I’m not. At some point in asserting an identity, in describing your part in the created order—something most Americans and maybe most post-Enlightenment people feel compelled to do—some sifting is necessary: this and not that. So I’m wondering why or how I’m a Christian. (Figuring out why or how I’m a Texan is probably too complicated an issue to tackle here.) The Nicene Creed seems as good a place to start as any. It’s quite possible that the mere mention of those words—Nicene Creed—will start the sifting process in some readers: here’s my stop! It certainly would have stopped me twenty years ago.

I used to hate the creed, and I hated it even before I started going to church. How could you not hate something that required you to believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast? And not just impossible but downright unethical and sometimes just plain silly? The bit about the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son always makes me think about opening a collapsible telescope. When we first started going to church, not so many years ago, saying the creed could ruin the whole service for me by starting an avalanche of arguments in my head that must have been audible at least to the people sitting next to me.

After years of saying and hating it, I began to say it with a few grudging assents. I was eventually surprised that immediately after the agitating “Father Almighty,” God’s next attribute was surprisingly democratic: maker. I’ve known lots of makers: hat-makers, bread-makers, policy-makers, cheese-makers (this is the home of Cowgirl Creamery, after all), and homemakers. Okay, I could say “maker.” I came to appreciate that creation included things both seen and unseen. Whether I believed it or not, I loved the effect of the introduction to Jesus: “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.” I didn’t know what it meant (still don’t), but it was like entering a dense fog with a deep gong sounding, and it was followed by the bright iambic rhythm of “through him all things were made.” Okay. I could say that.

I can now say almost all of the creed, even the Father Almighty part. I’ve had a father. I’m married to a father. I’m the mother of someone I hope will be a father some day. I know a lot of fathers and with all my heart I believe—credo—in the power and tenderness and explosive energy that seems to be bundled with fatherhood and that is, at least in a post-Jungian world, no longer the exclusive domain of men. I can also say what kind of fatherhood I don’t believe in, to which I emphatically do not give my heart. Nor do I imagine that calling God “Father” can possibly limit what I understand God to be, what the prophets and saints imagined and imagine and will imagine God to be. If in a moment of Christmas amazement I address the infant Jesus as “Sweet Potato,” as I have addressed each of my children, I don’t really expect a creedal formula to arise, but I glimpse the power that binds God and creation. I can say that with all my heart.

It’s taken some time to sift through these things, to say this and not that. I remember a discussion at the Seton Cove in Austin when Patty Speier, the director, listened to a bunch of us talk about which tenets of the creed we thought we could toss out while still calling ourselves Christian. (One older woman in the group, Roman Catholic from long before her birth, listened to our passionate discussion with quiet amusement.) God the Father, of course, was thrown out immediately. Only son—on the trash heap. (No one had any objection to sitting in the reverberant fog of God from God, Light from Light, etc.) Virgin birth—are you kidding? Finally Patty asked us what we couldn’t throw out and stunned us into silence. I eventually answered that question by writing my own creed, which I have to change nearly every time I go back to it. I don’t actually say it, but it helps guide my steps when I pick my way across the capital-C Creed, showing me where to balance—here and not there—on the rocks that are tippy. It goes something like this:

I believe in one living God,
author, judge, faithful lover,
unseen, usually unheard.

I believe in Jesus Christ, the flowering vine,
who was born in danger of Mary
and unexpectedly loved by Joseph;
who walked in beauty through a world
rent by greed and grief;
who healed and mourned, who taught and raged;
who sang the old songs and spoke nonsense, sometimes;
who called hidden truths to the surface;
who forced a crisis in those who met him.
He died in agony—deserted, betrayed, true.
He rose and bloomed somehow, beckoning
everyone in time and space to join him.
And most of all I believe in the Spirit, who binds
with luminous swaddling the Creator, the Beckoner,
and all that is, has been, will be.

I believe they are the source of all just anger, all quiet courage,
all patient love, all improbable forgiveness.
I believe this mostly at night, in poems and music,
and when I don’t think too hard.
I believe this whenever friends and strangers gather for a meal.
I believe this as I can, which is sometimes not at all,
but I know I must believe or wither.

My identity as a Christian (and perhaps as a Texan) has taken—and continues to take—a series of unexpected turns. Many of the paths on which I have found myself peter out, but some of them allow me to move ahead. Since Martin and I are in this beautiful place to hike, I can’t help but imagine this process as walking in a wild place with a map that is useful in a general sort of way—you know what direction you’re headed in, where significant landmarks are in relation to each other—but less helpful when it comes to the specifics of navigation. The trail becomes fainter the farther you go, more like a deer trail, and suddenly you find yourself walking in high shrubs or reeds or thick understory. Several paths, equally well trodden, present themselves to you. You take one, puffing through the scratchy gorse, wishing you’d worn long pants, and swatting at mosquitoes. The trail becomes available only to those walkers with four feet. You swear and head back, hoping you’re actually on the main trail. You are, but it divides again, and all of a sudden the trail is nothing but thick impassable mud. You hear running water and know from the map that the trail is supposed to be near a creek. So you take off through the chaparral or whatever this damn stuff is and tear your shorts on a branch in an annoyingly conspicuous place. You feel sure that a trail will appear somewhere if you just get a little higher up. And all of a sudden, your partner now muttering unattractive observations about your sense of direction, you glimpse the quiet shining lake. You’re still not sure where the trail is, but the lake is right there.

What We’re Reading
Heather: Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
Martin: Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

We lost one of our cats recently. Mr. Allnut (named for Humphrey Bogart’s character in The African Queen) asked to go out at about 4 one morning a few weeks ago, and I let him go. He never came back, and a week or so later, a neighbor confirmed Mr. Allnut’s fate—met, we all agreed, at the business end of a coyote.

We live in central Austin, but a very steep and heavily wooded ten-acre draw cuts through our quiet neighborhood. The terrain is so treacherous it’s hard to explore, even with the permission of the friendly neighbor who owns it, which means it’s easy to forget that the nightlife is literally quite wild in our back yard. We used to hear the coyotes occasionally years ago when sirens sounded at dusk or dawn, but they’ve apparently learned to sing under their breath. They’re still here.

I loved Mr. Allnut. He looked like a stuffed animal, with his regular markings and crossed blue eyes, and he behaved like one too: he suffered being cuddled and cooed over with a resigned limpness and clawless stoicism. And I still miss his sister Adelaide, and Spike with the light bulb at the end of her tail, and Kerbey and Skitter and Widget. They were cats of regular habits who just disappeared over the course of the years. I learn a lot a lot slower than the coyotes and must finally acknowledge that we always live in the midst of predators.

Apparently a lot of us are deluded into thinking that large predators are restricted to “wilder” places than cities and suburbs. One multiyear study in Chicago surprised the wildlife biologist conducting it; he found that the city’s coyote population was much larger than expected and that urban coyotes lived longer and are much more active at night than their rural siblings. They live not just in green spaces but also in apartment districts and industrial parks. Because they learn very quickly to avoid traps, it’s hard to get an accurate number, but the author of the Chicago study thought there could be up to 2,000 coyotes there—a much denser population than would cover a rural area of equal size. It’s likely that this study applies to most major metropolitan cities, including, of course, Austin. (In fact, former Madroño Ranch resident Melissa Gaskill wrote a piece on the city’s coyotes for the Austin Chronicle back in 2008, and coincidentally a story headlined “Tensions Over Coyote Trapping Split Austin Neighborhood” ran just this morning in the Austin American Statesman.)

Predator. It’s a compelling word, derived from the Latin meaning to plunder or to rob, so to call something a predator is to freight it with moral judgment. As far as I can tell (which isn’t far because I lost the magnifying glass to our edition of the compact Oxford English Dictionary), the word referred only to human behavior until it made a zoological leap in 1907. I wonder if that leap helped give steam to the notion in land management circles that rubbing out entire species was not only a reasonable stratagem but a righteous crusade. Predators rob and steal and, therefore, must be punished. Destroyed.

The Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale project is the longest continuous study of the predator-prey system in the world, spanning more than fifty years of observation on this frigid island on the Michigan side of Lake Superior. The scientists involved have concluded that to designate wolves simply as dangerous nuisances to be eradicated is to miss the hard and necessary work they do; the apex predators are vital to their complex ecosystems, despite the fear they inspire and the losses they cause. In other words, as Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay “Thinking Like A Mountain”: “too much safety” from wolves, and presumably other apex predators, “seems to yield only danger in the long run.” Because we often don’t take into account the needs of the mountain or all the other participants in a predator-prey cycle, we ranchers or hunters or businessmen end up poking ourselves (or our grandchildren) in the eye. The length of the Isle Royale study has brought academic rigor and complexity to Leopold’s beautiful musings, and has showed the scientists how much they still have to learn: “Navigating that complexity without hubris will be a great challenge.”

So you can probably connect the dots so far: despite the loss of Mr. Allnut and his compadres, I can’t entirely condemn the responsible coyote, who was just doing his job. He’s also probably eaten many, many rats and provided other services I don’t know about. A righteous campaign for coyote extinction would be understandable but could also be very ill-advised.

Now I’m going to make a crabwise move. At about the same time Mr. Allnut disappeared, we lost our beloved ranch cat Callie. Despite the fact that she was mostly white like Mr. Allnut, she managed for the eight or nine years she lived at Madroño to stay clear of coyotes, raccoons, foxes, bobcats, hawks, eagles, owls, and the occasional mountain lion. She was also immensely talkative and sociable, always accompanying us to visit the chickens and occasionally eating out of the feed buckets right alongside them. I frequently scrambled her an egg, a privilege she just as frequently lost each time I found her counter-surfing yet again. She spent many, many hours on my lap, drooling and kneading, shedding and purring. She was a good mouser and all-around excellent creature.

After she was diagnosed with skin cancer on her nose and ears, ranch manager Robert Can-This-Really-Be-In-My-Job-Description Selement smeared the affected parts with sunblock as often as possible, but of course she licked it right off. The cancer began quite literally to eat her nose and upper lip. We balanced our distress at her appearance with her comfort as long as we could bear. She’s now buried by the shed, near her empty food bowl, her grave awaiting a marker as colorful and lively as she was. It’s very hard not to think of cancer as another kind of predator, not to think: Eradicate. Kill. That’s what predators deserve.

In her thought-provoking Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag examines the language we use to describe some diseases and the use of disease as metaphor in non-medical arenas. A three-time cancer patient herself (she died of leukemia in 2004), she wanted to release cancer patients from the invisible but real shackles language slaps on them. Cancer, in her view, is “in the service of a simplistic view of the world that can turn paranoid,” encouraging radically reductive thinking and action. She particularly objects to the images of war, pollution, military or alien invasion, and genocide that cluster around cancer as a metaphor because they inevitably become confused with the individual cancer patient who becomes a loser by dying, a toxic dump site by being diagnosed, an invaded country, a helpless victim of ruthless overlords. Having cancer is a complex issue in and of itself without having to bear the burdensome, accusatory implications of the metaphors surrounding it.

As a language nerd, I wonder how to name to my own metastatic cancer because my words shape the choices I make in treatment and the rest of my life. While I can see why declaring war on cancer seems appropriate, I’ve come to find the analogy misleading at best, self-eradicating at worst. This cancer is as integrally a part of me as the coyote in my back yard, as the wolves, as any predator is a part of its distinctive ecosystem. Like a coyote, my cancer quickly learns to avoid the traps we set for it. While I don’t want to be eaten, I also don’t want to declare war on myself. Perhaps we’ll find some intimate connection we don’t know about yet between the loss of apex predators and the rise of cancer. Perhaps cancer provides some kind of service in this world of ours that has been so rapidly rearranged in the last century, when we began to use the word “predator” to describe non-human behavior and then went to war. Perhaps we need a new metaphor that allows us to live consciously and respectfully and curiously with the world around us and within us, navigating that complexity without hubris—and without metaphors of violence and condemnation.

What we’re reading
Heather: Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Martin: Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn’t
Understand poems or songs,
You’d never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It’s deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.

It’s one of the places
The beloved is born.

April was National Poetry Month, which might or might not be a silly thing, but it has prodded me into thinking about poetry and my erratic relationship with it. When I received my two degrees in English, I was emphatically a fiction person. Poetry made me anxious because I could never figure out how to read it or what it was supposed to mean. My poetry textbooks from college and grad school are studded with frantic and useless annotations: cross-references to other poems by the same author, details about textual corruptions or variations, or underlinings directed by the professor that have no meaning for me now. Only rarely did I mark something just because I liked it, and then I worried about having made such a bold declaration. What if it didn’t mean what I thought it meant? What if someone discovered that I just didn’t get it?

I still have no idea what many poems mean, but I more often read poetry than fiction now. I use poetry when I teach and pray. I even read it just for fun. I sometimes write the kind of poetry that gave me brain freeze twenty-five years ago. How did this sea change come about? It began, I think, when I went to seminary and was forced to confront the Bible, a book I had never read and suspected that I wouldn’t like and feared would make me stupid. (I still wonder who was on the admissions committee that admitted me: Groucho Marx?) At first the familiar structure of the classroom allowed me to keep it at arm’s length. Memorize, analyze, parse, criticize. What do you do with a God who smites and punishes and condemns? Who needs his ego massaged with praise all the time? And yet I couldn’t help noticing that many of the psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Jesus who considered the lilies all addressed a force they considered entirely trustworthy, entirely beautiful, the genesis and end of all desire. I could not see what they saw when I read with a lens of suspicion. And, despite my distrust, I wanted to see what they saw.

I began reading aloud, in groups, slowly and repetitively. It was sometimes helpful to have literary and historical information to draw on, but I was more often hobbled when I came to passages like this from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

It was beautiful. I knew that it was somehow true. I had no idea what it meant. Yet over and over, I found myself run through by the language of scripture, knowing I had been wounded but unable to bind or even find the wound. In the company of similarly riven souls, however, I started finding another way, not so much to read as to be read. Instead of seeking experience—that giddy adrenaline ride of a narrative—I found a place from which to see my own experience, my self in relation to a much greater whole. I was like a one-eyed creature that had been given another eye; reality began to acquire a previously unsuspected dimension.

The April issue of The Sun contains an interview with Philip Shepherd, a British writer and actor, whose career has led him explore the implications of the little known fact that human beings have two brains, one in the head and one in the gut. This is not a fanciful or metaphorical claim. Nuerogastroenterology, a new medical field, studies the web of neurons lining the gastrointestinal tract that send signals to the body independent of the cranial brain. Shepherd is not a medical professional but uses the research in the field to examine the cultural and philosophical implications of this “pelvic brain.” Says Shepherd:

Our culture doesn’t recognize that hub in the belly, and most of us don’t trust it enough to come to rest there. Our story insists that our thinking occurs exclusively in the head. And so we are stuck in the cranium, unable to open the door to the body and join its thinking. The best we can do is put our ear to the imaginary wall separating us from it and “listen to the body,” a phrase that means well but actually keeps us in the head, gathering information from the outside. The body is you. We are missing the experience of our own being.

The intelligence of the pelvic brain is not rational, conscious, analytical or abstract; rather, it arises in the way an enormous flock of starlings alters its course like a single organism. Well, you might say, I’m not a flock of starlings. But we all have an astonishing sensitivity—a sensational sensitivity—to our perpetually changing environments, astonishing in its almost invisible routineness and its capacity to integrate multiple levels of information. It’s an intelligence we often take for granted or don’t acknowledge as intelligence at all, but it allows you to negotiate your way through space, to remember passages of music, to understand arithmetical relationships, to love or know joy. Our task is not to privilege one brain over the other but to learn to coordinate them, according to Shepherd. He uses a lovely analogy to illustrate what this coordination looks like: the astronauts who took the first photos of the earth from outer space brought them back to earth, giving us a new perspective on our planet’s fragility. We responded with environmental initiatives. We were sensitized.

Culturally speaking, though, Shepherd says that those of us who inhabit the “first world” are like astronauts who are stuck in orbit around the head, unable to descend back home to the belly, where the gathered information can be integrated and sensitize us to the great complex flow of the world we inhabit:

Our culture has a tacit assumption that if we can just gather enough information on ourselves and the world, it will add up to a whole. But when you stand back and look at something, there is always something hidden from you. The integration of multiple perspectives into a whole can happen only when, like the astronaut bringing the photo back to earth, we bring this information back to the pelvic bowl, back to the ground of our being, back to the integrating genius of the female consciousness. The pelvic bowl is the original beggar’s bowl: it receives the gifts of the world—the male perspective—and integrates them. As you bring ideas down to the belly and let them settle there, they sensitize you to who you are and give birth to insight. Our task is to learn to trust that process.

The belly brain as begging bowl, receiving the gifts of the world. In some Buddhist traditions, monks are mendicants who own nothing but their robes and their begging bowls, in which they receive offerings of food or other gifts from the lay community. These gifts are not considered alms but rather are part of an exchange in which the community supports the monks physically and the monks support the community spiritually. So quite literally, every human being carries a begging bowl to the world, an intelligence that establishes itself in emptiness, in poverty, in suffering, in sensitivity, in loss. Without that bowl, we have no place for the works arising from the cranial brain to incubate and mature before they enter the world. Without cross-pollination from the pelvic brain, the fruits of the cranial brain are stunted and distorted, rooted in the illusion that we are separate from the natural world and thereby at odds with it. Aligning the two intelligences gives us the opportunity to see holistically, with the depth of binary vision.

Given my initial take on the Bible, it seems poetically just that it should lead me to a less literal, more personally demanding way of reading, one that required some self knowledge before I could make any sense of it. Like scripture, good poetry is a gift in the begging bowl, pressing the reader to claim hunger and absence before the equally great gifts of abundance and presence come to view. In his wrenchingly beautiful volume of poetry, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (from which the poems at the beginning and end of this post are taken), Gregory Orr looks at the world with at least two eyes, that trinitarian third eye of the heart figuring somewhere in this body of stern and tender wisdom. I don’t mind that I don’t understand it all; reading it, I find that I have been seen, known, understood.

I guess I’m fine with National Poetry Month.

The beloved has gone away.
Always, this is the case.
Each moment turns on its hinge
And loss is there, loss
Announcing itself as absence.

But that’s because we’re looking
Backward, looking in the wrong
Direction: so desperately clinging
To a last glimpse of the beloved,
As if loss itself is what we loved.

And all the time the beloved
Is coming toward us, is arriving
Out of the future, eager to greet us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Gregory Orr, Poetry as Survival
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

“The secret history of sex is not a story of fulfilled desires; it’s a story of expectations dropped off the cliff of the unknown.” (Nathan Heller)

This is not a blog about sex, but this sentence stayed with me long after I read it. It’s from a review in The New Yorker of Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, in which Solomon examines the stresses placed on a family’s vertical identity—the one that flows through the generations—when a child presents the logjam of a horizontal identity, an identity outside of parental experience. Among the horizontal identities that Solomon investigated over ten years in more than 300 families are dwarfism, deafness, autism, children of rape, severe multiple disability, and transgenderism. How, the book asks, do parents come to love children they never expected?

This is not a blog about horizontal identity or parenting, either. But it is about desires and the unknown, about the gap between what we feel within ourselves and what happens outside ourselves: the sinkholes that can suddenly open up, evaporating what appeared to be solid, or what was solid and then was just gone. About what can and cannot be named.

During this Lenten season, our church has hosted a weekly series on “Art and the Other,” i.e., those individuals or groups who present us with logjams in the flow of our own identities. The series examines how art can be a bridge between “us” and “them,” or at least a gesture in “their” direction. At one gathering, after viewing a film-in-progress on the importance of interfaith dialogue, we tried to identify just whom we, as an Episcopalian congregation, see as “the other.” We were pleased to note that we were fine with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, Jainists, Wiccans, and macrobiotists; we agreed that no group has a monopoly on enlightenment or salvation. But our generosity dried up when we considered those groups we view as intolerant and insistent upon the supremacy of their own creeds. In our refusal to tolerate intolerance, we wondered, were we in fact mirroring it? How do you engage with a rejection of engagement? And the question that really stayed with me: When you step off the cliff of desire—which you do every time you hope to make any kind of contact with someone else—imagining some kind of fulfillment, how do you respond to a wholly unexpected reply, or none at all?

Or perhaps that wasn’t the question, which seems to slither away every time I try to focus on it. In the discussion, we seemed to be framing the question as an issue of tolerance, but as the lovelorn Henrik laments in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, “it’s intolerable/being tolerated.” And so it is. According to Dictionary.com, the verb to tolerate can mean “to endure or resist the action of (a drug, poison, etc.)” or “to allow the existence, presence, practice, or act of without prohibition or hindrance, or contradiction; permit.” To tolerate someone or something, then, seems to point to an engagement that can leave the tolerant one comfortably unchanged or unchallenged. Tolerance is often counted as a virtue in the midst of the sinkholes that open up between individuals or groups, when it is merely a pause to catch your breath in the arduous, open-ended journey of communication.

Part of the problem with posing the question is the notion of individual identity as a rock we stand on, a location with well-defined boundaries like a modern nation-state that need to be defended from encroachment. One definition of identity that I love comes from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, from which I’ve quoted before. Hyde is writing more specifically of ego, which is not perhaps the same thing as identity, but there are significant overlaps. This is a lengthy quote, but more than worth the space:

I find it useful to think of the ego complex as a thing that keeps expanding, not as something to be overcome or done away with. An ego has formed and hardened by the time most of us reach adolescence, but it is small, an ego-of-one. Then, if we fall in love, for example, the constellation of identity expands, and the ego-of-one becomes the ego-of-two. The young lover, often to his own amazement, finds himself saying “we” instead of “me.” Each of us identifies with a wider and wider community, coming eventually to think and act with a group-ego … which speaks with the “we” of kings and wise old people. Of course, the larger it becomes, the less it feels like what we usually mean by ego…. In all of this we could substitute “body” for “ego.” Aborigines commonly refer to their own clan as “my body,” just as our marriage ceremony speaks of becoming “one flesh.” Again, the body can be enlarged beyond the private skin, and in its final expansion there is no body at all. When we are in the spirit of the gift we love to feel the body open outward. The ego’s firmness has its virtues, but at some point we seek the slow dilation, to use [a] term of Whitman’s, in which the ego enjoys a widening give-and-take with the world and is finally abandoned in ripeness.

At the core of any great religion is some person or group whose heart has broken open to admit the world, whose boundaries have grown permeable, whose ripeness is a fragrance that fills the space around it like the nard with which Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus’ feet in the week before his death. Religion is not the only self-breaker and heart-opener, of course; there are many containers that help us to bear great beauty and great suffering—art, nature, family, and friends among them. The self that seeks mere tolerance of its neighbors in the light of this paradigm has elected a diet of crumbs and water instead of the extravagant feast set before it.

Often, however, we do choose crumbs and water. We choose to walk away from the urgent desire for congress and from the cliff of the unknown. Yet sometimes the choice is made for us, when we long for connection and find nothing. What then?

In his most recent book, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Parker J. Palmer names democracy at its root level as one of the containers that help us to bear the great beauty and suffering of history in such a way that our hearts break open rather than merely breaking into a million irretrievable pieces. This is not an essay about a political system. But I do want to try to describe the sinkhole—the no-ego’s land—between desire for communication and fulfillment. Palmer calls this place the “tragic gap,” tragic not just because it’s heartbreaking but because, in the classical sense, it’s an inescapable feature of the human psychic landscape:

On one side of that gap, we see the hard realities of the world, realities that can crush our spirits and defeat our hopes. On the other side of that gap, we see real-world possibilities, life as we know it could be because we have seen it that way…. Possibilities of this sort are not wishful dreams or fantasies: they are alternative realities that we have witnessed in our own lives.

In this gap we can sink into corrosive cynicism or fritter away our energy on irrelevant idealism, but another way offers itself, one that allows “the slow dilation” of the boundaries between self and neighbor, self and world, self and self, the boundaries that prevent the cliff-side communion we so long for. Palmer calls us to a complex and open-ended faithfulness, in which I would incorporate two questions adapted from Krista Tippett to help direct us toward the habit of conversation and away from monologue: what troubles me about my own position? What in my would-be partner’s position makes me curious?

In the end, I think this is an essay about hope, despite the feelings of frustration and helplessness that spurred it. It’s not about the hope that seeks magically to rearrange present reality. Rather, it’s a testament to the small acts of great love that pepper everyday life and that step forth despite the absence of an obvious place to step onto, the way many parents step into the slow dilation of identity that embraces a situation or a child they would have done anything to avoid. It’s a testament to anyone who steps off the cliff of ego, willing to land in an unfamiliar place, willing to endure the possibility of a heart broken open. In a world in which conversations seem crucified between shouting and silence, sometimes a quiet question is enough.

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Martin: Craig Brown, Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Memorable Meetings

Once again, it’s the time of year when we ponder endings and beginnings, when we hunker down for the long nights, wonder where this year has disappeared to, and devise all sorts of convoluted theories about what is to come. Despite the endless recycling of “The Little Drummer Boy” in nearly every commercial space, this time of year also seems to have a peculiar kind of gravity, a pressure on the heart and lungs, a sense of urgency that has nothing to do with shopping lists or end-of-year numbers and everything to do with preparing for something final. But what?

I’m more than usually preoccupied with end-times because of a discussion group I’ve been part of focusing on Revelations: Visions, Prophecies, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, by Elaine Pagels. In it, Pagels examines the cultural and political landscapes out of which John of Patmos’s Book of Revelation (the final book of the Christian Bible) arose, and then follows the surprising twists in the history of its interpretation until it became the emphatic omega on the list of officially sanctioned writings that became the New Testament in the latter half of the fourth century CE. She gives the reader a glimpse into the other books of revelation—Jewish, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Christian—that were written more or less the same time as John’s, books that claim to be “revelations” of a reality that is usually hidden from humanity. While some, like John of Patmos, focus on the end of the world, many do not; they claim, rather, to reveal divine secrets through, as one historian put it, “visions, dreams, and other paranormal states of consciousness.”

The genre of revelation is often associated with high drama and vivid weirdness, writhing with dragons and angels, backlit with blinding lights or drenched in palpable darkness: revelation as conflict. Yet Pagels cites one book entitled Thunder, Perfect Mind whose images seek to unify rather than to divide and to find completeness—the divine—in pollution and purity both:

I was sent forth from the power,
And I have come to those who reflect upon me,
And I have been found among those who seek me…
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard! 

Do not be ignorant of me. 

For I am the first and the last. 

I am the honored one and the scorned one. 

I am the whore and the holy one. 

I am the wife and the virgin…
I am the barren one 
and many are her sons. 

I am she whose wedding is great, 
and I have not taken a husband. 

I am the midwife and she who does not bear. 

I am the solace of my labor pains. 

I am the bride and the bridegroom, 
and it is my husband who begot me….

The whole of the book—the part that still exists, that is—glows with power of a very different sort than John’s revelation does. Although it is not a Jewish or Christian work—most probably, it is a hymn to the Egyptian goddess Isis—many of its images harmonize beautifully with biblical language:

Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness. 

I am she who cries out, 

and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth. 

I prepare the bread and my mind within. 

I am the knowledge of my name.

That we learn wisdom in precisely the moments that seem most inimical to it—times of tribulation and violence, of incomprehension and confusion—seems to be the book’s central teaching. The repetition of “I am” throughout the text suggests familiarity with the Jewish/Christian awareness of the power of naming. Who am I? Who am I not? What is my name and who named me? How I am in conversation with that which is not me, with the One who named me?

In John’s compelling depiction, conversation requires the drawing of very stern lines: there are those whom you converse with and those whom you destroy. Once evil is destroyed, the purified remnant enters the glorious New Jerusalem. I have very mixed feelings about this stern line. I know that evil has some people in such a stranglehold that trying to address them seems hopeless, ridiculous, and lethal: people who shoot children, for instance. How would you talk to someone who could do such a thing?

Thunder, Perfect Mind sets forth a very different conversational strategy: no one is excluded. Purity is an illusion, utterly contrary to the divine self-identity. Thunder, Perfect Mind resonates in my heart and mind, an antidote to John’s fiercely tribal, exclusionary, accusatory language. And yet it leaves me wanting as well (although less), wanting the street-language translation for a conversation that took place somewhere in the stratosphere. Is there another idiom in which the intersection between the mortal and the divine can be spoken, one that doesn’t involve violence, secret codes, hallucinations, and abstractions? Of course I think the answer is yes: revelation does not necessarily require a one-time blast from beyond; faithfulness to daily interactions can work the same ground.

I read in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article about a Japanese scientist, Shin Kubota, whose work with tiny jellyfish that age backwards—nicknamed “immortal jellyfish”—seems to tap into some of these questions from a completely different direction. Despite the fact that Turritopsis dohrnii is about the size of “a trimmed pinkie fingernail,” and despite the fact that it has no brain, no heart, and that it eats out of its anus, its genetic overlap with the human genome is unnervingly significant (insert punch line here.) “Turritopsis application for human beings is the most wonderful dream of mankind,” Kubota told the Times reporter. “Once we determine how the jellyfish rejuvenates itself, we should achieve very great things. My opinion is that we will evolve and become immortal ourselves.”

Every day for at least three hours a day for the past fifteen years, Kubota has tended to his menagerie of jellyfish, the only captive population in the world. It is “grueling, tedious work,” requiring daily water changes, observation under a microscope, and feeding, which can require cutting up nearly invisible dried brine shrimp eggs that sometimes need to be cut up with two needles under a microscope. “The work causes Kubota to growl and cluck his tongue. ‘Eat by yourselves!’ he yells at one medusa. ‘You’re not a baby!’ Then he laughs heartily.” When he travels to conferences, the petri dishes come with him in a cooler. There are no days off. He is faithful to his tiny, mysterious dependents.

Five years ago, however, he had what he vaguely refers to as “a scare,” a period in which he aged “a lifetime” in one year: “It was astonishing for me. I had become old.” Today the hair that was white has turned black again, his energy as exuberant as a middle schooler’s. As a consequence of the scare, Kubota started a second career as a singer and songwriter and is now something of a celebrity, “the Japanese equivalent of Bill Nye the Science Guy.” He sings about the beauty of his jellyfish and about the natural world, work he now considers the crux of his work. Before humankind can apply what we learn from Turritopsis to ourselves, we must first come to love nature; otherwise, we’ll misuse our knowledge. “We’re very strange animals,” he said. “We’re so clever and civilized, but our hearts are very primitive. If our hearts weren’t primitive, there wouldn’t be wars. I’m worried that we will apply the science too early, like we did with the atomic bomb.”

He considers his science as having a limited value in his campaign to teach love: “‘We must love plants—without plants we cannot live. We must love bacteria—without decomposition our bodies can’t go back to the earth. If everyone learns to love living organisms, there will be no crime. No murder. No suicide. Spiritual change is needed. And the most simple way to achieve this is song. Biology is specialized,’ he said, bringing his palms within inches of each other. ‘But songs?’ He spreads his hands far apart, as if to indicate the size of the world.”

Something about Kubota’s obsessive fidelity and tenderness allow him access to the same conversations that John of Patmos and the author of Thunder, Perfect Mind had (and have) with eternal order. The theatrical volume of famous revelations drowns out the ones that happen quietly over time as a result of the minute, open-hearted engagements to which we’re invited in each minute of our lives: do we converse with the creature in front of us, open to something as solid to as ourselves, containing vigor and disease, song and dissonance, grace and clumsiness? Or do we remain stubbornly monolingual? Kubota looks, as surely as does John of Patmos, for a time where every tear will be wiped away, where death will be no more, nor mourning nor crying nor pain, and he looks for this arrival in a conversation that includes tedium and frustration. Can there be any doubt that something new and beautiful will be born?

What we’re reading
Heather: Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
Martin: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

I learned a startling fact the other day while listening to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviewing Dr. Nathan Wolfe, author of The Viral Storm, a disconcerting account of his research into pandemics like avian flu and AIDS that leap from animals to humans. Although the interview contained plenty of startling information, the statement that made me jump out of my skin was this:

If we were to count the number of cells between the top of your head and the socks on your feet, we would find that 90 percent of those cells are not human cells. Ninety percent of those cells belong to various microorganisms that exist, primarily in your gut and on your skin but also in many, many parts of your body. There’s tons and tons of microbes out there.

The vast majority of these inner-space invaders are vitally necessary to our health. In a story about the Human Microbiome Project in the New York Times, one Stanford microbiologist described individual humans as being like coral, “an assemblage of life-forms living together.” Another microbiologist commented that from the
standpoint of an individual microbiome, the “I” could be considered “mostly packaging.” So if 90 percent of “me” is actually not “me” at all, who am I? I feel as if my nice empty 100-percent-paid-for house suddenly belongs almost entirely to an unknown corporation, the enormous staff of which has moved in and begun leaving its clothes and coffee mugs all over the place. How am I supposed to relax in a predicament like this, where my “house” is no longer mine? Where’s my place in this in this mess?

Right in the middle, according to the eighteenth-century British poet Alexander Pope: in between God and beasts, on “this isthmus of a middle state/A being darkly wise and rudely great… Created half to rise, and half to fall;/Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;/Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d:/ The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!” Right in the middle of the mess.

I recently reread Pope’s An Essay on Man, published in 1734, and was struck by two things: I was a really bad reader in grad school and, despite the dyspepsia caused by ingesting hundreds of heroic couplets in a row, I found him to be a humane and delicate thinker. I first read his Essay just as the trend of blaming all modern injustices on Enlightenment philosophies was building steam. In rereading it, I fully expected to find evidence of thought—crimes against women, people of color, and the environment—and I came back to it ready to haul Pope and his entire extended family to prison and lock them up until they could see just where colonialism got us. What I found instead was an overwhelming sense of awe for the complexities of the natural world and a deep humility in the face of humanity’s capacity to see these complexities only partially, imperfectly, and at times buffoonishly. To scientists he says with asperity:

Go wond’rous creature! Mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,

Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun….
Superior beings [angels], when of late they saw
A mortal man unfold all Nature’s law,
Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And shew’d a NEWTON as we shew an Ape….
Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide….

What Pope wants is to put human giftedness in its place, which is in every way reliant on and secondary to what he calls Eternal Wisdom. He wants to give us a place from which to view ourselves, especially when we think we’re masters of the universe. We can’t know who we are unless we also know where we are. Of course,
Pope the poet could himself be accused of overreaching in making his immodest pronouncements, but he nips that accusation in the bud by placing his perspective firmly on the earth with his fellows. In the poem’s introduction, he pokes fun at John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published seventy years earlier, with its lofty, near-heretical goal to “justify the ways of God to men” from the wings of the Holy Spirit. Nope, Pope knows his place, and it’s right in the middle of what he calls the “vast chain of being,” headed by God, that links all things to each other. One of the loveliest passages:

Look round our World; behold the chain of Love
Combining all below and all above….
See Matter… with various Life endu’d,
Press to one center still, the gen’ral Good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
All forms that perish other forms supply
(By turns we catch the vital breath and die)
Like bubbles in the sea of Matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole;
One all-extending, all preserving Soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast;
All serv’d, all serving! Nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

With their wide, inclusive vision of the workings of nature, these could be Wendell Berry’s words. (In fact, Berry much admires Pope’s Essay.) We have been given a singular place in this great chain, and our work is to learn, through careful observation of the natural world, how to become a blessing to it, to our fellows, and to ourselves. Pope places the primal disruption of the fall not in Eve’s disobedience but in the violence—beginning with Cain and Abel—that we inflict on one another both individually and corporately. Not a bad vision for one of the Dead White Guys of whom I was so suspicious in school.

Despite its plasticity, however, the great chain, as Pope envisions it, is quite fragile—alarmingly so. “The least confusion but in one, not all/ That system only, but the whole must fall.” One little thing out of place, and the whole shebang comes tumbling down. It’s hard to imagine living abundantly in such a universe, hard not
to imagine a creeping paralysis arising out of fear of disruption, like someone with a slipping disc in her spine, afraid each thoughtless move might bring on a core collapse. Despite its beauty and humility, there’s a caged, claustrophobic quality in Pope’s place for us—one that might never have discovered that each one of us is
quite literally a world, perhaps a galaxy, in and of ourselves, as the mappers of the Human Microbiome Project suggest.

In a recent lecture, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave another account of where it is that human beings have a place. He talks about the need to distinguish between being an individual—someone identifiable by the facts about him and the center of his own universe—and being a person, a “more frustrating,
more elusive, and yet more adequate” way of describing who and where we are.

Primary to a definition of personhood is the reality that each one of us exists at the center of a vast network of relationships, “the point where the lines cross.” That point is never static: every encounter with every person, every creature, every historical reality, every memory, every word—indeed, with every moment—provides an opportunity for re-configuring those intersecting lines. At any given time, a person is the sum total of her myriad, shifting relationships, irreducible to one thing or to a list of attributes. Something about the human person is fundamentally mysterious and inaccessible. For Christians, this messy, elusive intersection of relationships is where the revelatory work of God has its place.

Williams asserts that because “each of us has a presence or a meaning in someone else’s existence,” a sense of personhood is impossible outside of relationship. When I think of myself as an individual, I am the center of the facts about me. When I consider myself as a person, as constituted by an ever-changing intersection of
relationships, I must acknowledge my presence in other people’s lives and other people’s presences in my own. I can’t extricate myself from this web and stand alone, withdrawing from the world. Knowing that I’m fundamentally mysterious even to myself, a creation of these innumerable, ever-accruing intersections, I must
acknowledge that this messy, sacred bundle exists within every person and that we are environments for each other. We’re in some way located outside of ourselves, a situation that calls for a very different social order than one based on the rights of discrete individuals, an order that devolves into competing, isolated, uncooperative selves.

Pope, the literary king of the British Enlightenment, articulated a profound shift in understanding of humanity’s place: he saw an interconnectedness, a democratic necessity for each link in the chain, where before, whole groups—whole races and nations—were accounted as disposable. From thinkers like Pope came the founding fathers of the United States and their insistence on the natural rights of its (white male) citizens. In order to function as it should, this chain of interconnectedness that Pope saw and that the founding fathers used as the struts and joists of a new political system had to rest not only on personal rights: it needed one more thing.

For Forms of Government let fools contest;
Whate’er is best administer’d is best:
For Modes of Faith, let graceless zealots fight;
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right:
In Faith and Hope the world will disagree,
But all Mankind’s concern is Charity:
All must be false that thwart this One great End,
And all of God, that bless Mankind or mend.

Without the cushioning of generosity, the assertion of one’s rights can become a mere excuse to claim supremacy over another, the chain shatters, and the discrete links become disposable. It’s arguable that we’re in the midst of this shattering, and I find Williams’s elastic and eccentric network a compelling place to set up
housekeeping. His call is to look at our individual selves and find, as in a different sense did Nathan Wolf, that they’re not really “ours” at all.

What we’re reading
Heather: Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary
Martin: Patti Smith, Just Kids

In the endless heat of late summer, sometimes it’s hard to remember that Texas can be a cool and beautiful place—but it can, as we hope this poem will remind you.

The lake’s complacent waters bloom before
the glamorous, unhurried progress of
the snake that makes its musing way toward
the bank on which I stand. My soul’s
geography does not resist its presence
on this luminous cool morning—in fact,
invites it in to join the doe that barks
a warning to her fawn, the turkey yodeling
for a mate, the feathered migrants, tender leaves,
the crackling, stretching meadow grasses.
This gracious equilibrium,
where everything belongs,
where pressure between worlds is equalized
and I can hear and see them both, arrives
without annunciation, invitation, effort.
Even in the yearly banishment
from paradise, when a bleached sky buzzes
with the sucking Texas heat, when every
blessed thing apparently has spines
or fangs or concentrated venom—even
then my arid heart dehisces and allows,
at times, the snake its place stretched out and sunning
on white limestone ledges, admits the
sibilant pronouncement that all is well,
which usually goes unheard.

Only now, at fifty, do I register
interior terrain materially,
see that mine is littered with capricious
wreckage of tornadoes; feel the pre-storm
suffocating calm that makes it hard
to breathe; inhale at night the jasmine
and its drifting ache; or move through shining
winter briskness where every chore’s a pleasure.
Now I scan horizons and prepare
for seasons newly gleaned, knowing they will
drench and parch, delight and wrench, approach
and pass. Snakes have always lived here, always will.
I see them sometimes now and sometimes watch
their agitating grace without a lurching
of my heart, but here is the kingdom
of the coiled presence. Here abide the mark
and potency of flood and flaming sky.
I am their host and guest; they don’t belong to me.

They are not mine, but are. This is not a metaphor,
but is: language bearing loads past bearing.
Every body is a word exhaled toward violence
and beauty; every body vibrates in
reception, a veil through which the wind
between the worlds whirls. At this intersection
grow fruits of silence, stillness, from the soil
of singleness, where snake and lake and sky
on either side of self’s divide sing in unison.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
Martin: Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements