Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 66

Poem 66

All streams flow to the sea
because it is lower than they are.
Humility gives it its power.

If you want to govern the people,
you must place yourself below them.
If you want to lead the people,

you must learn how to follow them.

The Master is above the people,

and no one feels oppressed.

She goes ahead of the people,

and no one feels manipulated.

The whole world is grateful to her.

Because she competes with no one,

no one can compete with her.

Commentary

Malahide Estuary

We don't have to be in anyway astute to know that leadership is a difficult skill, or even set of skills.  Having been a teacher all my life, my only leadership role has been at classroom or at Year Head levels. Working with and leading adults is an area in which I have little experience.  However, I am old enough now to have "worked under" many leaders and to have observed and experienced many leadership styles.  Without a doubt we mostly abhor the autocratic or authoritarian style of leadership.  Who wants to be told what to do on a daily or even hourly basis? The opposite was the case - total lack of leadership - once in our school when a principal only lasted less than a year as the job was far beyond his capabilities. Luckily, the man realised this quite quickly and luckily got his old job back in the school from which he had come.  Anyway, all order and discipline disappeared in the school over night. Thankfully, this was just a slight hiccup in my 30 years in that school and all other leaders have been more or less satisfactory, with one outstanding leader.

Malahide Estuary

I have never studied leadership, but I would hazard the following qualities of good leadership from observation and experience or length of years on this earth: (i) good vision of where the organisation is going, (ii) good motivator, (iii) good listener, (iv) enthusiasm for the job, (v) knows his/her staff well - whether X, Y or Z will suit this or that job, (vi) can delegate and allow everyone to take ownership of their area without wanting to control things - in other words, she or he will never be a micro-manager.  I have experienced a more junior head of department who could never let go the reins of control and insisted on controlling everything.  In the end of course, such leaders don't control anything and things spiral into disorder, (vii) a good problem solver - able to deal with multiple problems at a time, and consequently be good at comparmentalising things (viii) has to have a hard skin, that is, they have to rise above the situation and learn never to take things personally.  If one puts oneself forward for a position in authority one has to learn to take citicism.  It has been my experience, and I take it that of most of the readers of this small blog, that leadership invariable attracts criticism by its very nature.  Everyone wants someone to blame, a quick scapegoat to blame all problems on.  Finally (ix) s/he who is a leader needs a very good sympathethic and empathethic deputy leader with whom they can share their problems, insights and vision.  Now, these are mere observations as the result of my life experience in my particular place of work, and bear in mind that I have never studied the aea of leadership ever.

In the above poem, I particularly love the image of the sea as the centre of power, and my goodness what a powerful phenomenon it it.  We all know that all life emerged aeons ago from the watery slime of our seas and oceans.  Without the oceans and seas there would simply have been no life as we know it.  The sea or the ocean consequently has always been a central symbol in all mythologies and cultures.  In psychoanalytical or Jungian terms the oceans or seas represent the great Unconscious, a source of much of our psychic lives.  Then, the image of all lesser water bodies, rivers and lakes and so on - the rivers all flow into the seas while the other water bodies are connected with the oceans historically and geologically in ways this writer could never understand.  However, what I am getting at here is the powerful imagery of all this for good leadership.  The leader, according to the Tao is the sea or the ocean and the workers are the rivers that flow into it.  Our poet tells us that the sea lies at a lower level to allow such an inward flow.  In this sense its power is very natural, and indeed a very humble one.  Interestingly the etymology of the work "humble" is "humilis" which means lowly or low lying.

One of my favourite all time quotes comes from Albert Camus, an atheist.  (Indeed, contrary to general belief, atheists do have a spirituality in the broadest sense of that term, obviously not in the religious sense of it.  See the marvellously comprehensive blog called Spirituality Ireland HERE.) The quotation reads: "Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."  Strangely enough - or maybe not that strangely as we are all human, no matter what our beliefs - the idea of accompanying others is central to spiritual guidance, counselling and chaplaincy.   This is more or less the sense of the final stanza above.  The Master is more a companion on the journey, and yet a leader who always wields an encouraging power, a power which at base is empowering of others.

The Master is above the people,

and no one feels oppressed.

She goes ahead of the people,

and no one feels manipulated.

The whole world is grateful to her.

Because she competes with no one,

no one can compete with her.

Journal of a Soul 67

The Passage of Time

Interesting evergreen tree at Newbridge House, Donabate, Co. Dublin

The passage of time seems to be quicker the more one ages.  Indeed, as a friend of mine who is a mathematician stated: "This is quite logical because  to a 56 year old person like myself on the cusp of his 57th birthday another year is in comparative terms a mere one 56th or a one 57th of your life depending on how you calculate it.  One way or another ageing is inevitable.  Recently, I was quite intrigued when a past pupil who was about 19 declared that he would like to live forever.  Another young man in our company replied that such "would never happen and that his wishful thinking was in every sense delusional." St Augustine once defined time as "the measure of change." The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus averred that "one can never step into the same river twice," and further that everything was in "a state of flux." I was amused, as I say, by the wishful, if delusional, thinking of my young friend.  I thought to myself how great it was to be so innocent and full of enthusiasm for life. This was also quite ironic as we were in a local hostelry imbibing some alcoholic beverages in the wake of a commemorative service for one of his friends who had ended his life by suicide. Obviously this latter person had found living life totally unbearable.

The Importance of Philosophy

Philosophy is more an activity and a process than a learned body of reflections on life. While it may be the latter as is witnessed by all the countless books written on the subject, it is so much more.  It is the activity of questioning to the nth degree everything around us, the nature of the universe; what knowledge may be, if there is any such thing as Truth in an objective sense or is it always relative; what love, faith, hope and charity may be, indeed what emotions may mean; what the purpose and meaning of the life we humans experience is and so on and so forth.  There is also a philosophy of every subject under the sun.  We can surely ask what the nature of numbers is and what we are at when we do mathematics.  Are the tenets of mathematics universal and true everywhere in the universe.  We believe so and can adduce reasons to substantiate our contentions.  We can study the history of science and also its philosophy. What is the difference between practical knowledge and scientific knowledge? Is all scientific knowledge empirical?  In many cases, yes, but both at the subatomic and astronomical level, no - we need to use very abstract and much speculative thought there, but such thought is no less rigorous than the process of arriving at conclusions from empirical evidence. There are so many questions we humans can ask and none may be as important as the moral one as to what are right and wrong actions.  What is morality and why need we act in such and such way and so on. My young friend obviously had never encountered philosophy, that is, the radical questioning of one's own thoughts and opinions.  What would it mean to live forever?  Follow the thought experiment through, young man. Would you keep ageing and ageing and yet never die? Even simple tools eventually wear out? Humans are made of material stuff which breaks down.  Does not the simple physical law of entropy imply that everything eventually burns itself out? If we never died what would birth mean at all? There obviously would be no point in birth if there were no death! How would we deal with the population explosion? These are all philosophical questions, which at first glance may seem somewhat silly, but on reflection clarify superficial thought and silly shoddy thinking.  Essentially to live implies within its ambit the process of dying itself.  In fact, to live is to die.  Think of any simple plant or flower you might have at home or in the garden.  It grows, blooms and eventually dies.  I remember meeting a most interesting man who owned a pet shop.  One could see his total commitment to and love of animals of all varieties.  He opined that it was important for youngsters to keep pets, to nourish and see them grow and eventually die.  Keeping pets, he felt, taught children to accept that death and dying are parts of life.  As an animal, albeit human, I consume food, burn it and transform it into energy to keep my body going.  It is obvious that my body will wear out, break down and die - such is only natural.

Reflections on Death and Dying 

Having been brought up in a rural setting one could say that I am somewhat at home with the cycle of the seasons, with the sowing of seeds, the growth of plants, their cultivation and harvesting and so on in a never-ending cycle.  Within that scenario, death and dying are seen as a natural process. The peasant folk had and obviously still have their traditions like the waking of the dead - the celebration of the life of the departed one about the open coffin that is positioned centrally in the house of the departed.  Within this context not alone is grief made bearable but the sting is taken out of death at least for a short while.  These ancient rituals grew up within various communities as they attempted to help the grieving party cope with their sorrow and to make some social or communal sense of the experience of death.

And yet, existentially we all face our own extinction in a very private way - we each of us have to make some personal sense of our mortality, that is, if we are at least half thinking or even semi-reflective persons, as quite simply, no matter how many or how few are our family or friends, we die alone.  It is, alas, a journey only we ourselves can embark upon as we pass through the portals of death alone. Perhaps the greatest myth in our modern culture is the growth of sheer individualism with all that it entails. Modern individuals have built up around themselves their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a sense of identity - and all of that far too superficial or lacking in any depth.  Very soon we tire of superficiality, of building up  these rather tawdry worlds of vast egotistical proportions - rather like that portrayed in the novel, The Great Gatsby and most effectively indeed in the film of the same name.  All of these fantasies of individual power and prestige cannot keep the gnawing tooth of mortality at bay. Nor can any of these superficial attempts to build identity on the shifting sands of materialism keep the lonely soul protected from anxiety, angst and a host of concomitant emotional and psychosomatic complaints.

Some Personal Memories

The first death I can remember was that of my Grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy in 1968 when I was ten years of age.  My young mind soaked in the experience as my mam and dad, as well all my uncles and aunts (all 11 of them) were very upset.  Perhaps the most consoling moment of the whole experience was being requested to kneel down and say a prayer at my grandmother's bedside and to touch her beaded hands.  I can still conjure up the vision of my grandmother's body in that bed all those years ago.  However, all in all, it was a positive experience, one that we were unconsciously taught to accept as a part of life, the final  mile stone along the journey of life if you like.  Then the second death I remember was that of my Uncle Paddy Quinlan at 58 of a rare cancer in 1970 - I remember so well the packed church and all the people who came to say goodbye on the day of his funeral.  I can still hear and feel the crunch of gravel under my shoes as I walked up to the graveside.  As I stood beside my father as they lowered the coffin, I saw a little white one and my father said gently, "that's your little angel brother Thomas who died many years ago." Since then, of course, there have been many other deaths, not the least of which were the deaths of my father and mother - experiences which I have recounted here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Those particular deaths were wrenches to my being that I find quite difficult to describe.  One knows that when one has experienced their leaving of this world that your generation is next.

Existentialism

Sundown, Phoenix Park, October 2014

The theme of anxiety was at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread at the nothingness of human existence. This theme goes back as far as Kierkegaard in modern existentialism though it stretched way back further into ancient philosophy, too. In fact, anxiety as a theme pervades this philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard lived his relatively short life (1813-1855) in Denmark. The meaninglessness of his existence filled him with anxiety and despair and a sense of hopelessness and deep depression. At base his anxiety was a deep despair at the very nothingness of human existence. In the great universal scheme of things we are mere minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space. How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end? Let’s hear Kierkegaard’s words: “I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?”(Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest New York: Bantam Books)

Making Meaning

We are meaning-making creatures.  We are forever forming and moulding meaning from the very stuff of life.  If we do not do so we are an empty, hollow people whom T.S. Eliot describes so vividly in his poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken grass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion ...

These people who are hollow are the superficial people we described in one of our opening paragraphs.  They are the ones who have built their identities on the shifting sands of their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a false sense of identity - and all of that, as I have said, far too superficial or lacking in any depth. Something in us is repulsed by lack of meaning and superficiality.  It's almost as if there is something in us - some divine spark - that wishes to ignite and set the fire of enthusiasm and joy alive in our our hearts.  We feel, indeed intuit or know at a deep level, that there is something somewhere drawing us on towards meaning, some amazing, if imaginary lodestone, drawing us ever onwards.  This spiritual spark in me demands that I call it God.  Perhaps, that is overstating my case.  And yet, those are the words that came out as I wrote these lines.  There is a fullness of life to be experienced if only we have the courage to reach out and embrace it.

And as a meaning-making species we have conjured religions up from our collective unconscious to guide us and lead us ever onward on our human journey to meaning and personal truth.  We have embraced spiritualities of various types to give us the courage and the sustenance to support us on our journey.  Whether such religions and spiritualities are actually the result of our own imagination matters not a whit.  Perhaps it comes from an outside power, namely God, and of this I am quite convinced some of the time, especially at moments when I experience all too transiently beauty, truth, love, wonder and mystery.  But yet, in another sense that matters not a whit either.  What matters is that we have a meaning, a reason to live and a reason to die.  In our faith, in our imagination or in our soul, our very meaning lives on, and that is what makes all the difference, a difference that no proselytizing atheist can ever take from us.  And death and dying in this scenario are surely as natural as birth and growth.  Yes, indeed. Amen to that!!

Journal of a Soul 44

And What or Who Keeps you Going?

That is a good question indeed.  Especially when some people give up on life, while others apparently, no matter how tough life is for them, manage somehow to "keep on keeping on." In case you don't know the provenance of those last several words, they come from a song of Bob Dylan called Tangled Up In Blue.  That song is one of my favourites from the pen of Bob Dylan as it has haunting lyrics which show the deep inner longing of a drifter for love, companionship or meaning in his life.  Interestingly, Dylan mixes past, present and future tenses in this song with consummate ease, with an readiness of transition that is magical. Indeed he changes person, too, from verse to verse, even changing the "I" of the first verse to "he" and "she" in his later concerts.  But that only adds to the magic, wonder and beauty of this wonderful song.  Lest I lose my path in this post, I had better curb my musical passions here, and point out that the phrase "keep on keeping on" is an important one for me that shows the strength, persistence and determination of the traveller or wayfarer in life. Now let me turn my attention to the question posed in the title of this post.  What, indeed, you may ask, keeps me going?  Let me attempt to list those reasons in no particular order.

1. My Job.  

I remember Pat Kenny, one of our foremost broadcasters here in Ireland, remarking that he was lucky as his hobby became his profession.  He was luckier still as he is currently the best paid broadcaster in the country at 66 years of age.  While few of us can boast the contentment Kenny talks about, some of us do get immeasurable satisfaction from our work.  At the moment, I count myself one of those lucky souls.  Not that my job was always that rewarding.  It's just that I was lucky to realize that m  y job was driving me crazy at 48 and I decided to change track.  In all of that, self-awareness is of utmost importance. There is simply no sense in staying in a job that is soul-destroying.  So I retrained as a Resource and Special Education teacher and left the main stream classroom to begin working with autistic boys, mainly those with Asperger's Syndrome in the area of Social Skills and Communications.  I also do learning support in Mathematics for the school at large.  This is all extremely rewarding work as I can see the results of my labour on a daily basis.  I suppose the big thing in this work on a personal level is simply being needed.  That is why being unemployed leads to such depression in the lives of those afflicted with that dreadful problem.

2. My Creative Outlets

Creativity can never be underestimated as it is literally the food of the soul if I may use a metaphor.  Ever since I can remember I have been a writer, and over the years I have had many bits and pieces published here and there.  In these more recent days I have been engaged in blogging.  This latter has been a soul-saver for me as it allows me to instantly publish online the ideas and, more correctly and importantly, my concerns online.  I also write poems in two languages, English obviously, and then, also, in my native tongue, Gaeilge or Gaelic or as it is more commonly called Irish.  By writing, I am engaged in getting to know myself better, and consequently becoming more contented.  If one reads and writes poems as I do, then you will appreciate that poetry does not really sell, that getting published is difficult to say the least.  However, I remind myself often, as one poet wisely counselled me once, that it is more important that a person writes a poem than that many people read it.  If only a few others read it, in a writing group or in some community setting, then that is the reward.

Other creative outlets are reading, listening to music, travelling and going out with friends. Lest this become like a boring list of my hobbies as would appear on a CV, let me proceed onto the next point.

3. My Spirituality or Religion 

In more recent times, religion has become a somewhat sullied word, while spirituality has become a more positive one.  In my young day, I remember the good things about religion: (i) the sense of wonder evoked by what seemed to me as a child to be very colourful and dignified services, (ii) the sense of a mystery or something divine beyond me, (iii) the beauty of the Latin language and of the hymns and (iv) the sense of the unity within the community. I have long ceased to be a practising Catholic, but I can still tap into some of those old feelings when I attend funerals, baptisms, and Christmas and Easter services.  

However, secularization has long since consigned the role of religion in Ireland to the periphery of life.  As well as a more secularized society, there were indeed intrinsic and endemic problems within the Catholic Church itself.  Those problems in short were the corruption of power and the abuse of that power through allowing child abuse by clerics to go unchecked.  One of the most crippling aspects of any organised religion is the abuse of power. It happens in all and every religion, and let none of us forget that.  Such happens in every human organization: there will always be people who hunger for power and control over others, and they will use every doctrine under the sun to hang onto that power so that they can use it and abuse it.  In every human organization, be it church, state, government, medicine, law, or any other one, those who hunger for power will manage to get their way into the top echelons.  It is only now - in the last ten or so years - that we here in Ireland are properly watching and checking all professions. It is a truism that needs repeating that no organization can monitor or check itself Here I recall that old Latin quotation attributed to Juvenal:  "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who will guard the guards?" A question still worth asking 2000 years later.

Like the Dalai Lama, the smile on Pope Francis' face says it all!!

Religion, uncoupled from spirituality, is a mere power structure that aims at controlling people, at least in certain people's hands.  That's why the election of Pope Francis was/is one of the more prophetic things that have happened in the Roman Catholic Church in the past 50 years.  For me, as for many Catholics, Francis is on a par with another prophetic Pope, namely John XXIII who inspired and opened the historic and prophetic Vatican II.   It was not by chance that Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose Francis as his name as pontiff, as St Francis was the apostle of the poor and unfortunate, with a deep commitment to ecology.  It is more than apparent by his actions that Pope Francis is a highly spiritual man who loves ministering to the poor, and all his actions speak of one with a deep conviction and commitment to Christian principles.  In short, he is Christlike, not church-like!  And there lies the difference between him and  his immediate predecessor. Here is an interesting post written by an unusual but firmly believing (non-Catholic) Christian on why he admires Pope Francis:  Boeskool.com.  His comments are really worth reading and I have signed up to be a member of his blog: they boil down to the fact that Pope Francis is Jesus-like, that is he is more interested in spirituality and in acting like Jesus than in the power structures of the Church.  He is an old man of 77, but his spirituality allows him to walk, smile, talk, and obviously think and feel like a far younger man,  Maybe, just maybe, this man can turn the tide for the Roman Catholic Church, but he must be meeting some opposition within its power structures.  Unfortunately, that is why the bigger Churches are losing so many members: they are too petrified literally - "petrified" means stone-like, unmoved and unmoving.  That is where and how power corrupts, and boy does it corrupt no matter where frail human beings belong.  Finally, it is no wonder to this writer at least that Pope Francis is a Jesuit, one of the foremost orders in the Roman Catholic Church who truly believe in discerning the signs of the times, in discerning their own relationship with Christ and with humanity as a whole.

Spirituality for this writer is all about connection or connectedness with all of creation, which obviously includes other humans.  It is about union with whatever power or spirit runs through the heart of this universe and keeps it "together."  It has involved me in community work, in helping others through the Society of St Vincent de Paul and so on.  It inspires me to meditate and do yoga practices with others.  It also inspires me to read spiritual classics from all traditions.  That's what I love about these modern times where pluralism is more important than uniformity.  I remember a scholar once informing me that unity never means uniformity, and I have never forgotten that piece of wisdom.  (Interestingly Pope Francis realizes that as he says that even atheists can get into heaven if they live moral lives. Mind you, he's only repeating the teachings of Vatican II here!) No matter what religion one belongs to, even none, everyone has a spiritual sense.  I will write later in these posts about the spirituality of atheism, and indeed this topic has been written about by a few scholars in more recent years.

And what is it all about?

I will finish this rather meandering post with this question as it was one put to me when I was only 22 and a young teacher beginning my career.  I was so innocent and "green about the gills" back then that it is almost embarrassing to remember the way I was.  However, such is life and such is the cost of experience.  Anyway, one morning a man called Ger Smith asked me that question.  I was too young and too busy to take the man seriously, far too caught up in my own little world.  It was only some three years later when I had learnt that Ger had died from a congenital heart condition that none of us his colleagues ever knew about at the time., that I realized the import of Ger's question both for him and indeed for all thinking and feeling beings.  If you like, that question, along with legions of others over the years, opened up a giant unknown world to me, a world of infinite questions seeking answers or at least seeking better forms of questions as Rev Dr. Patrick Wallace used to put it back in the day.  Really good and deep questions open us up to mystery and never confusion.  And mystery, as they say, is an ocean we dive into, and never ever a wall against which we bash our cognitive heads. And so to Ger, RIP, I owe a debt of gratitude for opening up the vistas of mystery to me all those years ago.  I do hope that someone somewhere holds you in their heart.

Journal of a Soul 31

Beyond Debate III

Personal Experience

(i) Preliminary Remarks

It is hard to contradict or deny personal experience.  It is, moreover, more difficult still to do so when someone declares they have had a religious experience.  We literally have to take them at their word, or write them off as simply hallucinating. I'm sure we have all encountered sincere and rational individuals who are convinced that they have encountered the divine  or the transcendent in their lives.  There are many millions upon millions of people on this earth who have declared their witness to the truth of these experiences.  Such cannot be denied.  No matter what our debaters on the negative side of the debate say - like Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens et al - there is no persuading these many millions that they are simply deluded. 

Firstly, let me declare the obvious truth of the observation that many individuals from the lunatic fringe are quite easily drawn to religions of all kinds.  Let us take this as a given. Indeed, I have known a certain few individuals who have manic depression (or more correctly bipolar disorder) and at least one of these individuals goes on a hyper-religious trip during his manic phase.  This is a given, but it is certainly and obviously NOT a valid argument against the truth of religion.

Secondly, let me declare the equally obvious truth that much harm in the form of wars, attempted genocide, torture and suffering of all kinds have been done in the name of religion and by individuals who claim to be firm believers in God.  Once again, this is a given.  And yet, logically it can never be adduced as an argument against religion per se.  Why?  Simply because the operative and significant phrase in the above sentence is "in the name of religion."  Who is at fault when a nation goes to war inspired by religion - the religion qua religion or the fallible fault-ridden human interpreters of that religion?  I would argue logically for the fault of the latter.  

Again, my favourite author on this topic is Fyodor Dostoevsky who, in his inspiring parable "The Grand Inquisitor" in his wonderful novel The Brothers Karamazov deals exactly with this persistent problem of the corruption of power within official religious circles.  Whether one accepts that religion is a sociological phenomenon that naturally grew up for societal needs from the earliest of times or that it is a divinely inspired organisation, one still has to grant that one is relying upon fallible human beings within that organisation.  Having spent some three years of my life within a Roman Catholic religious order in my younger years I can attest to (i) the existence of people who loved power  and who equally loved exercising it and who delighted in lording it over others.  It's the natural lust for power in all humans that comes to the fore in every organisation under the sun. However, I can also attest to (ii) much good done by many sincerely motivated and genuinely good people in the name of the vision which they attribute to their founder, to Jesus and to God ultimately. 

I am no sociologist, but an understanding of the sociological basis of all religions as well as the sociological understanding of organisations both need to be considered here, not just the abstract notions, considered or otherwise, of the negative side of the argument against religions and God as adduced by Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett et al. 

(ii) A Higher Spiritual Power 

I know a certain few individuals who are recovering alcoholics and they have informed me that but for their trust in a higher spiritual power they would indeed be lost, if not dead. This belief in a higher power is an integral part of the twelve steps programme developed by that wonderful international organisation Alcoholics Anonymous.  Strangely, or maybe not so strangely after all, these twelve steps read like a spiritual/religious programme.  The first four principles or steps run:  

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to  sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  (See this link for the web page of the Irish branch of the AA and for more information on The Twelve Steps.) 

Now, the operative phrase I'd like to stress is the underscored one, "God as we understand Him" as it defines God in an absolutely non-denominational sense, or in an open or broad religious sense, leaving it to the individual to interpret who they believe that God to be in their own lives.  

Once again, let me stress here that these persons who have encountered their own demons through the struggle with alcohol, and indeed others through their fight with addictions of all kinds, are utterly convinced that they can do nothing from any of their own inner resources (which are at their lowest ebb, like a totally drained battery, if I may use a metaphor here.) Therefore, they insist that they have to rely on an outer or outward power which they might call God. Admittedly, space is left for the addicted to call that higher power an Energy Source if they do not wish to call it God as such.  

(iii) My Own Spiritual Experiences

I readily admit that I prefer the term "spiritual" to "religious", quite simply because religion has got such a bad press through the actions of so-called believers of all hues and due to the negative press given by the debaters on the negative side of the God-debate.  That I was a religious/spiritual boy goes without saying:  as a young lad I remember being transfixed by the beauty of the old Latin Mass with its Gregorian chant, smell of incense, and the whole aesthetics of that ceremony and others. Also much of the music associated with the traditional Roman Catholic Church is exquisite to say the least.  Each year I still attend the annual performance of Handel's wonderful Messiah and certainly I can attest as can anyone who attends or rather participates in that musical experience, that deep spiritual depths are touched in the human heart through its sheer beauty and overwhelming power.  

I have also had other experiences where I felt I was close to a primal Energy which somehow was sustaining me and indeed the world around me - an experience of God in nature.  I can still remember once when I was a young monk walking around the wonderfully wild and green grounds of our novitiate and experiencing a cloud-burst on a sunlit day. It was more experientially for me than a mere and thorough drenching.  It was, in fact, in a very real sense what is called in theology a theophany, or at least that is the way I remember describing it when I was later writing down the experience in my spiritual diary at the time. A theophany is the appearance of God through nature, or at least, through the power of nature, literally a showing or manifestation of the divine.  Indeed, James Joyce also adverted to such inspirational and transfixing moments as "epiphanies."  In other word we experience a profound spiritual depth in a through a physical occurrence. 

Another link I would make here is what the philosophers have described as "the experience of the sublime." Here is how the WIKI defines this specific notion, and I believe it is a wonderfully clear definition at that: 

In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. (See Sublime )

As an erstwhile hill walker, I believe that we cannot not be captivated by the sheer beauty and power of nature.  Some of my friends have stood beside either Niagara or Victoria Falls and have been overcome by the sheer frightening and transfixing power and beauty of nature, by its sublimity. I have stood by the Cliffs of Moher here on the west coast of Ireland and have marvelled at their sheer power and beauty.  Then there is the Grand Canyon and many many other beautiful, awe-inspiring and powerfully overwhelming wonders of nature besides these few I have mentioned here. They have been written about widely and many have attested to their awe-inspiring power.  When people declare that they have been moved by a power beyond them, by a deep spiritual energy which is both within and beyond them at one and the same time, who are we to deny the validity of their experiences? Indeed, one can argue that such is a mere psychological or para-psychological experience and not a religious or spiritual experience of a sustaining God.  Atheists could certainly argue that.  However, there are atheists who, while denying the existence of God, readily admit that we humans have a spiritual dimension.  This latter point is one to which I shall return later in these notes here, but for the moment such a diversion is beyond our present purposes. 

What I simply want to underscore here is the validity and authenticity of religious or spiritual experiences no matter whether one can attribute such to a divine source or to a powerful energy beyond us.  To deny the testimony of our lived experiences and those of millions upon millions of believers over thousands of years and well as those of our own times is surely to deny the complexity of human nature and the role of powers beyond our limited ken.  It must surely also betray our pride or hubris in thinking that we know more than fallible creatures actually could ever possibly master.

  

Journal of a Soul 29

Beyond Debate

Self writing in a notebook , Pisa Summer 2007

Debating is a skilled activity that allows the intellect to show its cutting edge, as it were.  It is, moreover, wonderful to witness when practised by those who know their subjects well.  It is even more thrilling, still, to behold one debater either totally demolishing the argument of another or, at least, painstakingly taking it apart and showing its inherent flaws.  As this is a blog with a spiritual/psychodynamic/psychotherapeutic thrust, I shall here confine my comments to matters of faith and reason with respect to the methodology of debate. Examples of debates that come to mind here are: (i) the famous debate on evolution at Oxford in 1860 between the scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895; biologist and coiner of the term "agnosticism," his favored religious stance) and the great orator, Samuel Wilberforce (1805 - 1873), Bishop of Oxford and later of Winchester, and (ii) the wonderful debate between the late wonderful journalist, writer, atheist and polemicist, Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011) and the former British P.M. Tony Blair, Catholic and wonderful orator and politician. This latter debate may be accessed : HERE

However, debating is cerebral and cognitive and is mainly confined to linear argumentation, though debaters may, of course, present in a logical way the findings of their reflections on experiences - religious and spiritual - and on emotions in general.  They may even, and very often do, employ humour and respect for their opponents.  But, my argument here is that debate is a limited, albeit, at times, very sharp and precise, methodology of approaching knowledge and truth.  There is, so much more to what makes us human than arguing about our beliefs and stances in life.  Our beliefs, contrary to what Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett think, cannot be confined within the parameters of logical, cerebral or inferential debating.  In other words, I am here adumbrating what in fact the great nineteenth century theologian, John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) expressed succinctly in the following words: "Faith is not a deduction from premises" or as he also expressed it "faith is never inferential."  It is as much a matter of the heart as well as the head.  He was, in these remarks, of course, echoing the comments of the great French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623 -1662) who emphasised the following: "le coeur as ses raisons que la raison ne connait point." ("The heart has its reasons which reason can never know.")

More to Life than Logic  

St Peter's Square from the Cupola

As I write these lines here, I am listening to the wonderful debate and ensuing discussion to which I alluded above and to which I have given the link.  Yet I am still convinced that more is needed, and that the methodological structures of debate, argument and discussion, while effective, are nonetheless lacking is something.  It is to that lack that I wish to confine my musings here. These are my thoughts after some 55 years as a wee ant on this little minuscule anthill we call "earth"which is hurtling through infinite space.  So what I say is said in as humble a way as I possibly can.  I have no great reasons to give on either side of the debate like either Wilberforce or Huxley or Blair or Hitchens, though it is wonderful to listen to, to read and/or ponder the learned musings of these great erudite debaters.  No, rather, I wish to widen the debate in the following points.

(i) Debaters seem to forget that Religion is both a sociological and psychological phenomenon, not to mention an anthropological one, not essentially amenable to logical debate, though nonetheless may be expressed and eruditely explicated in reasonable terms.  Peoples have always been religious because it is a way, be it primitive or primal, but no less true or authentic for all that, of making sense of their lives as a community as they encounter the world in its entirety.  In coming up with how they make sense of the mystery they encounter in the world as a complete entity these peoples collectively came up in a natural manner over time with firstly the various primitive religions, animist and polytheistic, and then the major great monotheistic religions of the Abrahamic Faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and the more holistic, and perhaps more psychologically friendly religions of the East namely Hinduism and Buddhism.  

Religion as a sociological Phenomenon

(a) The contemporary Irish journalist John Waters, speaking of the few positive things one can attribute to the Roman Catholic Church, averred that it was exceptionally good at those ceremonial things associated with "hatching, matching and dispatching."  When I first read his words, I delighted not alone in his light rhyming humour but also in his sound appreciation for ritual.  The religious rituals he had in mind here, without doubt, are baptisms and christenings, marriage and funeral ceremonies respectively. Sociologically speaking, it is not a question of whether another life exists or not, or even whether it can be proved one way or another; it is rather a question of dealing with death as a human reality within a community context in as meaningful a way as possible.  Such ceremonies are ways of dealing with the phenomenon of death and they have naturally evolved over the years to help the bereaved family, friends and acquaintances deal with their emotions at a community and by implication at a personal level.  Rituals, no matter what religious faith they occur in offer a collectively and individually healing avenue to express and contain grief. Sociologically rituals have evolved to help us in that containment.  Even a humanist or atheist funeral service offers a similar emotional expression or containment.  Indeed, I have attended one humanist funeral recently and the ceremony, which studiously and purposely avoids any mention of God needless to say, was akin to a religious ceremony replete with readings and "minister."  It obviously had no overtly religious element like a mass or scripture readings, but it emphasised instead secular readings from books which the departed person loved and encouraged the bereaved by playing the dead man's favourite music.  There were also three tributes to the departed by his family and friends.  There was interestingly a period of quiet where people of all faiths, beliefs and no beliefs were asked to think of the departed man in silence.  Obviously, any believer could choose to pray to his God if he so wished at that time.

To Be Continued