Journal of a Soul 65

Grief

One of my favourite pictures of Sean Kelly (1994 - 2014) with one of his nephews - Sean was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin today, 27/09/2014 after 10 A.M. Mass in Sheriff St Church

Sometimes it's best to say nothing at all.  An Irish singer-songwriter, Ronan Keating, wrote and sang a love song entitled "You say it best when you say nothing at all."  Keating was, of course, writing and singing about love being communicated without the use of words.  Here I am writing about grief at the time of death, and really its expression in sobs and tears and gestures (like hugs and kisses) is way more effective than words, which really come later to give that grief a little shape in our minds.  Speaking of death and love or love and death (perhaps the order matters?) I am reminded of the wonderful Song of Solomon or The Song of Songs which I remember studying in Scripture class over thirty years ago.  It is a Biblical song about human love or more precisely, sexual love.  The words that knit themselves together in my mind are "Love is as strong as death: many waters cannot quench it."  My memory, obviously is somewhat flawed as these are not the exact words, though my rendering of them actually capture wholly the import of the text that actually reads:

Song of Songs 8: 6, 7. - Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it... 

I have just returned from a most painful and upsetting funeral for a recent past pupil of our school who chose to end his life by hanging himself from a tree in a park right opposite our school.  The grief of his distraught family and friends was simply overwhelming to say the least.  What words could capture such momentous bereavement which the pastor/curate described as a veritable "tsunami of grief."  In fact the celebrant, whose name I don't know, was wonderfully prayerful, compassionate and so understanding of the needs of the young people present that it was a wonderfully fitting send off for a young man of twenty years.  

We are such fragile vessels really, vessels through which the blood of life runs all too quickly, and all too often so painfully.  Amid all the grief today love was simply palpable.  In times of grief we come together to support one another.  Before the end of the funeral Mass this wonderful priest invited all Seán's friends up around the coffin - my goodness what a wonderfully kind and intuitive thing to do.  Then he incensed and blessed with holy water the coffin and the boys.  Needless to say, there was not a dry eye in the church.  Thank God for such good understanding pastors.  They do exist and are too infrequently acknowledged for the great work and service that they render to the community.  However, what I want to do now is simply append hereunder a short poem I wrote some minutes ago in memory of our former student Seán Kelly:

For Seán:

A short poem in our time of pain

The grief that fell upon us like a black pall

In the middle of a summery September

Was unseasonal, wholly inappropriate

To how we should feel in such sunny times.

But life has a habit of stopping us in our tracks,

Of calling us back to more important things,

Of making us think of the littleness and brittleness

Of all we construct with human hands...

Lest we become complacent, smug or self-satisfied,

As if to say we are wearing life too lightly,

That we must amid this unseasonal growth and sun

Wear heavier winter clothing weighted with our grief

At the passing of one so young, so full of life,

So full of the music that throbs at its heart –

A talent so natural and so good

Fallen unripe to the ground

Under a beautiful lonely tree:

But we came in our pain and in our brokenness

With our cards, our music and our tears

And we held each other around your coffin

And we prayed for comfort at the altar of the One

Who wept when his great friend Lazarus died –

Of the One who in innocence was crucified

Of the One who promised that life goes on –

And so we know that your spirit lives on,

That your music will never die

For you live in our hearts and souls

And smile upon us eternally.

(P.S.  I have just finished writing this poem as a tribute to the late Seán Kelly, RI.P., to his dear family and his many friends.  We were blessed to have known you, Seán, such a wonderful young lad.  Rest in peace, Seán and stay with your friends always!) 

Journal of a Soul 27

Facing Death

Ireland's Eye from Baldoyle

Those who live close to nature learn its mysteries with a certain ease that is always foreign to us city dwellers.  That is why I love travelling back to the county where my father was born and lived for more than half his life.  He truly shared in that country wisdom.   Likewise, do the simple country people of Calabria where I have been holidaying for some recent summers.  Tribes and more primitive peoples also share in such simple wisdom.  Modern sophisticated humankind, which works so much from the neo-cortex, has almost forgotten what it is like to live close to nature and its cycles. Often, alas, we moderns only meet nature when it interrupts our plans through the natural evils of tornadoes, snow blizzards, floods and so on.  Indeed, we have learned of late that much of the natural disasters are caused by man-made pollution to our atmosphere.  Alas, we moderns have done so much learned thinking about the world that we have quite forgotten that we are part of it, too.  We are creatures, albeit self-conscious, but creatures nonetheless of the world, in which we live, move and have our being.

Be that as it may, what I want to write about here is the last few hours of my mother’s life.  That frail life is slowly but surely leaking away now at the grand old age of 96. My brother Pat and I have been called home from holiday to await her passing from this world.  And yet, with all the knowledge we have gained about what it means to be human, we have never really bettered the ways of coping and dealing with dying and death than the many religious traditions of the world have put at our disposal.  The community comes around and ritualises the passing of this person from our presence.  As a philosopher, I would like to believe that I am open enough to allow all creeds the dignity of their individual beliefs.  Dying and death, and indeed how we deal with them, are not matters of pure science that can rule as to what is the true and right way to celebrate the meaning of a life that has passed or indeed rule upon the belief of a life to come.  Comforting ourselves in our lonely grief is quite fittingly the province of faith, religion and indeed of the imagination, and it is my considered conviction that both faith and religion belong firmly within the ambit of the intricate mystery of the imagination.  It is not, therefore, a question of whether the next life exists or not or of whether it can be proved one way or another. It is simply not a question that falls within the province of science at all.  It is one that falls within the ambit of the psychology and sociology of religion and within humanity’s many learnt ways of coping with its crises.  These are the factors that such trenchant atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins and Denneth leave out of the picture.  Their arguments are good and valid, but only good and valid within the narrow parameters of a delimiting and dehumanising science, in effect within the confines of a sheer scientism.

My mother and I about five years ago

The imagination is a wonderful faculty which leads us individually and collectively into mysteries which the rational or cognitive faculties of the mind cannot fathom – great works of music, wonderful pieces of art, marvellous buildings and bridges and so on.  Over 100 years ago the great John Henry Cardinal Newman pointed out that even scientists had to use their imagination as well as their cognitive or rational faculties in bringing their discoveries and inventions into the world. The imagination of a culture is a rich world that cannot be reduced to the parameters of any science.  We meaning-making creatures need our beliefs, no matter what their standing in a purely cognitive or logical sense. The brain, and the mind which resides principally though perhaps not entirely there, and even the soul which some believe lives mysteriously there, too, are all more than just firings on and off of various neurons.  Yes, they may be that, but not just that.  We humans are more.  And it is in the quest to find out what the “more” in us is that all true inquiry lies.

And so, as my mother’s life leaks out, I am in many ways diminished.  The womb that begot me is no more.  That was the human animal womb.  Was there or is there, as the great psalmist David put it, a womb before the dawn that begot us all?  Our questions are legion, our feelings confused, perhaps numbed.  The existentialists are right.  Death makes dust of both our individual achievements and dreams.  However, it cannot reduce to ashes the memory of the collectivity, the shared emotions and feelings of the race, the drive to meaning within any culture. In times like this, all I can do is take refuge in the wisdom of the culture which begot me.  Rest in peace, Mary Quinlan.  I hope I will live the remainder of my life with the courage and determination to see no task left undone as you did! Your task is finished – a job well done!    Consummatus est! I will miss you sorely!

Journal of a Soul 15

The Transitoriness of Life

All things are passing.  The twelfth century Persian and Sufi poet, Attar of Nishapur, is reputed to have told his followers the fable of a powerful king who asked the assembled wise men of his court to create a ring that would make him happy when he was sad, and sad when he was happy.  After much deliberation the sages procured for him a simple ring inscribed with the words "This too will pass."  Needless to relate, the ring had the desired effect.

Abraham Lincoln in a speech delivered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 30, 1859, a year before he was inaugurated as president of America, ended his speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society with the words:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- how consoling in the depths of affliction! "And this, too, shall pass away." And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Pondering on the transitoriness of life is something that chastens us all too well and all too effectively as Abraham Lincoln so wisely points out.  We poor sad souls often try to make the  achievements of this life somewhat permanent.  Indeed, we possibly need to imagine and to hope that there is meaning in our little lives; that some sort of heaven exists; that there is some comfort even in culture and civilisation which we believe will outlive us for many thousands of years to come.  (And yet civilisations and cultures have come and gone, have ascended to the seeming pinnacle of human achievement only to end in disaster of dusty extinction.)

We try to capture the passing moments in this or that picture or video we may choose to take of special occasions as our families grow up; in this or that picture or video we may choose to take on our holidays in this, that or other exotic or less exotic place which we are wont to visit.  Just recently, I ended up for some reason deleting all the photographs of Italy I had painstakingly taken over the past four or five years.  On reflection, I just did something stupid, having uploaded them to Dropbox.  Be that as it may, the lesson was a good one for me.  I simply cannot hang on to the past, whether I record it on digital camera or video or not.  Those shots were mere images, mere dim representations of life as it passes.  Truly we cannot hang onto our experiences.  The past flits away and the future lies ever beyond us.  The now is all we have.  The NOW.  Let us write it in capitals to emphasise the point.   The first century BC Latin poet Horace was surely correct when he declared in one of his famous Odes which some of us learned at school that we should "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero" or "seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next."    Or again, I think of poor John Keats, that wonderfully talented poet of the English Romantic Era who perished all too young at age 25 and whose epitaph reads somewhat depressingly:  "Here lies one whose name was writ on water."  He understood all too well the transitoriness of life.  Indeed, he knew he was going to die when he began coughing arterial blood on his pillow some few years before his demise.  (He had also studied medicine before becoming a full time poet)   In other words our little lives are inexorably swallowed up by the great maw of passing time.   

Arranmore cliffs, July 2010 - there from the beginning...

And yet the Easterns are right.  It is our attachments to the things and, indeed, the people of this world that ensnares us, that captivates us, that enchants us, that tricks us into believing in their seeming permanence and imperishability. This was the essential teaching of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, that all our suffering in this world is caused by our attachments to the impermanence or temporariness of everything and everybody around us.  Hence we suffer much and indeed grievously when we lose them to either misfortune or inevitable death.  The Buddhists teach us that meditation on our own dying and death is very effective as it teaches us to value our very living; to value every breath we breathe; to seize the day as Horace so poetically puts it; to live in the freedom of the NOW and not to be enslaved by regrets from the past or fears of the future.

THIS, TOO, WILL PASS!!  

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI!!                                                                               

Journal of a Soul 10

Una Chiesa a Garace, una bellissima citta' in Calabria

We do like to fool ourselves into thinking that our words once written have some permanence.  Or at least we like to believe that they are somewhat more permanent when written down that when merely uttered.  The orator’s words may move us momentarily and then they just fade into the ether to be shortly forgotten.  A written encomium may be somewhat more permanent than its oral counterpart.  Or a snatch of a song that we hear or even sing is just that, a snatch of music that fades, even though somewhere in some musty drawer – or perhaps even in the corner of some virtual world - the sheet music exists.  Thoughts come and go like their close relatives called feelings.  Once again, they all fade into nothingness. 

These thoughts written here could have been penned by Qoheleth, that great wisdom teacher of the Old Testament, who kept repeating “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  He was an existentialist before the word was invented.  For him, life was just a fleeting moment in the infinity of time, a mere nanosecond in terms of the duration of the universe.   When he saw humankind’s efforts to battle the inevitable constraints of life he just kept repeating the above sobering chorus: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” 

And so, I resume this journal of a soul after some eight or so months. In the interim I have been involved in writing other words elsewhere.  Some few readers of this blog have asked me the reasons for the hiatus – well I just did not feel the need, given that I was writing elsewhere.  However, these present thoughts were provoked by the sheer contingency of life.  There is nothing as sobering as attending the funerals of friends and relatives.  Nothing. Even philosophers and theologians baulk before the maw of death.  The litany of recent bereavements runs: one friend’s son ended his life in his late twenties, two aunt’s “shuffled off this mortal coil,” one in her mid eighties and another in her late sixties, and then a colleague died from cancer after four excruciatingly painful years of suffering – and he some three years younger than the thinker or writer of these thoughts.  And that leaves us with the big questions – What is life at all? What could possibly be its meaning? And mortality, what can it teach us?

Mortality teaches us the value of life, literally the value of everything.  When you sit listening to a song sung by your favourite singer, the fact that he or she is mortal magnifies its significance to the nth degree.  Art is art because it is produced by mortal hands, sung by mortal voices, composed by mortal minds and is inspired by mortal imagination. Mortality gives value to the fleeting enterprise of human hands and minds.  The fact that Michelangelo or Goya or Leonardo da Vinci or more recently Francis Bacon is dead only adds to the value and significance of the work.

Then, when one reads about the silly attempts some humans make to prolong life beyond its reasonable limits, one wonders again about our significance, and not a little about the sanity of those who propose such an idea in the first place.  Cryogenics is surely based on mere wishful thinking and sheer shallowness of insight. That some poor fools among us might think we are that important in the scheme of things is surely the funniest and most pathetic joke possible at one and the same time.

It appears to the present writer of these marshalled thoughts that we must avoid two extremes – that of inflating our importance on the one hand and that of deflating our significance on the other.  We are the singers of songs, the composers of music, the writers of novels and poems, the creators of art in all its myriad forms and shapes, the builders of huge skyscrapers, bridges and roads that seek to shape our world to our needs.  We are the thinkers of thoughts, the possessors of feelings which we express as wonderfully and in a way that is as aesthetically pleasing as we can.  That we are dreamers of other worlds beyond our ken – mere pipe dreams or intimations of immortality none can tell – marks us out from our fellow animals.  And yet does it matter at all?  Does it really matter?  Perhaps the meaning lies solely in the poem written, in the song sung, in the story told, in the project done, in the sweat expended to bring it about.  Therein lies its value, made meaningful paradoxically by its sheer meaninglessness.  Perhaps the only meaning we can find in this life is the living of it to the fullest extent possible, and in making it as tolerable as we can for all those we love and, indeed, for every inhabitant of this little world spinning in the immensity of indifferent space.

Journal of a Soul 3

Introduction

We humans know more than we are conscious of, according to the late great Victorian Catholic theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman.  In other words, the rational is only one small part of the human mind.   There are also our emotions to consider.  Newman did not talk about the unconscious as such, because for him those unknown spaces in the human heart were in fact the seat of the Holy Ghost as they would have called the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity in those halcyon days.  This was the profound mystery of humanity and that of the human soul, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit at the very centre of human life.  All Christians believe in this doctrine: viz., the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit.If you are not a Christian in the strict Church-going sense, but belong to those who are pilgrims on a more humanist journey through life, you can still be open to the fact that the above doctrine is a wonderful metaphor for the mystery that is at the heart of the human person.

These posts in this new blog will not be discursive or academic in any sense. Rather, they are going to be journal entries recounting my journey in search of Self.  In this case they will be spiritual in the broadest sense of the meaning of that word.  My understanding of "spiritual" is the innate ability within us to connect both with the mystery within us and with the mystery outside of us, both in others and in all the world in general.  In that sense, I mean also our innate ability to tap into the source of life - whatever that may be - some call it God, others a Benign Energy at the heart of the universe, others Order, and others still the impersonal inner drive of the universe towards a more perfectly evolved manifestation of itself.  Now, these posts, being essentially existentialist (if the reader will excuse the juxtaposition of two seemingly contrary words) my aim is to be personalist in tendency and to desist from any polemics here at all.  In these pages, no pure philosophy or theology or science of any description will be found.  In short these posts will be, in the words of the wonderful Pope John XXIII, "The Journal of a Soul."

The Music of the Soul

Ever since I was a young boy I can remember my teachers always telling us that "Music has Charms to sooth a savage Breast," and lines of poems that I like have a tendency to stay with me always.  On checking, I find that these lines come from the pen of William Congreve (1670 – 1729) who was an English playwright and poet.  On perusing the provenance of the lines, I further find that they are the opening words of a play called The Mourning Bride (1697) and are well worth quoting here:

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I've read, that things inanimate have mov'd,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform'd,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.
What then am I? Am I more senseless grown
Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!
'Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.
Anselmo sleeps, and is at Peace; last Night
The silent Tomb receiv'd the good Old King;
He and his Sorrows now are safely lodg'd
Within its cold, but hospitable Bosom.
Why am not I at Peace?

As you will have realised after reading the above there is much profundity in these lines.  The question: "What then am I? Am I more senseless grown//Than Trees, or Flint?" even when taken totally out of context as I am doing here, is so relevant to every human being.  We, too, even though unbenighted by grief as the bride is here, can ask what it is actually to be, to exist at all?  We can also ask the last question here, too - "Why am not I at Peace?"  A teacher-friend of mine, long since retired, always said wisely that in the end we have to live with ourselves.  There is much wisdom in this saying.

As I journey on the road - in via - to self-knowledge, nay, further, to self-acceptance, there is much truth in his observation.  As I exist in my world, I find that I am a being with a moral centre, too.  How am I to act in this, that or the other situation in which I find myself from one hour to the next as I journey through life.  What is the moral self?  This is also a question worth asking, if I am to live with myself with any degree of equanimity and peace of mind.  As I pursue these reflections hopefully I'll come up with some existential answers to these questions.  Quite clearly at this juncture I have nothing further to say about this moral self.  These are not academic or polemic posts and so they will be solely the result of my reflections and meditations a personal discernment.

And, in that journey to self-acceptance music has helped me greatly.  Returning to my opening lines in today's post, I believe the power of music is such that, although at times it may be combined with verbalization as we find in song lyrics, there is much in music that hits us at an unconscious level, at levels of being far deeper that we are cognitively aware of.  As we listen on and as we note our reactions with ever more trained an ear we will become more aware of these hidden depths.  There will be deeper stirrings of our being which may even bring a tear to our eyes as well as balm to a tired spirit.  I am not at all a music cogniscento and know little except that which stirs my soul.  I will finish this post with two versions of one of my favourite songs - Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (the composer) and the late great Jeff Buckley.  Both these renditions rock me to the foundations of my being.