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 9 - The Dark (K)night of the Soul

The journey of the Self to Self-knowledge is a long and arduous one as any pilgrim will tell you.  To put this in a spiritual (or "religious" in the best sense of that word) way is to say that the journey of the Soul to God is indeed a difficult one.  As an agnostic Buddhist I see this second sentence in a metaphorical way - another way of expressing our journey to authenticity, self-knowledge or greater self-awareness.  I am happy with all expressions of this journey which is very important to the life of every individual no matter what his or her spiritual allegiance from theistic to atheistic and all the shades in-between the two polarities. 

In my life I have read as much spiritual literature as well as general literature as a way of making sense of the life I am confronted with (as Heidegger puts it, I did not ask to be born - I was thrown out there into existence - dasein which literally means being-there) or indeed gifted with (many philosophers, outside Christian believers have used the idea of life's giftedness quality, e.g., Michael J. Sandel (b. 1953), professor of political philosophy at Harvard.  Here's what my own favourite male actor says: “I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting it. You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you... to make each day count.” ― Leonardo Di Caprio).  I tend to look on life in this second sense.  The former is an existential way of looking at life while the latter is a spiritual one.  Needless to say, these two are "twins" as it were, and need not necessarily be mutually exclusive.

I spent some three years in my mid-twenties, from 25-28, in religious life in the Order of St Augustine (OSA).  While there I was introduced to all the major classics of Christian theology and spirituality over the years, e.g., the mysticism of St John of the Cross as well as that of St Augustine of course.  But it is that of the former with which I am interested here.  John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) (1542 – 1591), born Juan de Yepes Álvarez, was a major figure of the Counter-Reformation, a Spanish mystic, Catholic saint, Carmelite friar and priest, born at Fontiveros, Old Castile.

Anyway, this Saint John of the Cross wrote a great and famous  poem called Dark Night of the Soul. This poem narrates the journey of the soul from its bodily home in this human body to its union with God. This journey is called "The Dark Night", because darkness represents the hardships and difficulties the soul meets as it attempts to detach itself from all the worldly concerns and materials.  At the end of the journey, hopefully, the soul will reach the light and live in union with the Creator.  The main idea of the poem can be seen as the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.

Now my title obviously is deliberately a pun, given the horrific happenings a screening of The Dark Knight Rises yesterday on July 20, 2012, during a midnight showing of the film at the Century 16 cinema in Aurora, Colorado.  A gunman, James Holmes,  wearing a gas mask opened fire inside the cinema, killing twelve people and injuring some 58 others. At the time of his arrest, Holmes identified himself as the Joker— one of the main antagonists within the Batman series — to police.  Warner Bros. stated that it was deeply saddened by the shooting, and announced the cancellation of the Paris premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.

One may say that those poor relatives who are left bereaved in the wake of this massacre, and indeed all those poor innocent wounded victims are now experiencing their dark night of the soul.  Evil is an extremely difficult problem which faces every human being in this world.  Indeed, I have written much on this theme in my former blog Still Point and I shall not rehearse here any of the arguments I adumbrated and explicated there.  Indeed, The Mystery of Evil was the title of my thesis for my first undergraduate degree.  However here, I want to say some words on how the mystery of evil weaves its way into the very fabric of our lives.  Consequently, no human life can be lived without tasting its bitter and sorry mystery.

The face of a mass murderer - James Holmes: See Here

The journey of the Self to Self-awareness or Self-knowledge or, if you are a firm believer in God, the journey of the Soul to God, is one littered with a lot of human and animal and indeed material wreckage along the way.  (Now, I respect totally both these versions of the human journey.  Neither is more correct nor more authentic than the other.  To my mind both are equally valid ways of steering the human person along the road of life.)

Those poor people who were out for a night's entertainment were suddenly thrown deep into the darkest night of soul that they ever could have experienced.  I have the same feeling as I type these lines as I had in the wake of the Norwegian massacre by the lone gunman and murderer Anders Behring Breivik.  Can we do anything about these madmen (all mass murders are men as far as |I am aware)?  What is happening us at all?  I believe the answer lies is the fact that today people lack a spiritual sense, a sense of connection with the world.  Another way of saying this is to state that the borderlines between reality and unreality has broken down.  Society is at fault here as it bombards everyone with countless pieces of information and all of it unsorted and uncensored.  Anyone anywhere can have access to anything.  The current mass murderer James Holmes purchased some 6,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet before carrying out his massacre at the midnight screening of Batman.

Whether this man was mad or deluded is not the point.  The point is that today human beings are lacking a moral compass.  Traditional moral compasses have all now virtually broken down in the Western World for most of the younger generations all around the world.  Every little boy can access anything he wants on the Internet from serious porn to seriously sick and depraved actions of all descriptions.  When I was growing up the local library was my spiritual home where I was entertained and edified.  Now I love the Internet and spend many hours on it and am well aware of what can be found there across the spectrum.  Now, strangely, I'm not arguing for tighter censorship.  What I am arguing for is tighter self-censorship and self-control.  The questions we need to ask is what are we doing in society that allow people like Holmes and Breivik to perpetrate their evil deeds.  It is far too easy to write them off as psychopaths or sociopaths.

As we all struggle with our own spiritual advancement we encounter evil and suffering.  We must constantly question our own motivations as we proceed on our way.  We must take responsibility for the life we have been gifted with, whether by a spiritual source in God or from a scientific source in the Big Bang.  Whichever one of these is the commitment which you, dear reader, hold does not really matter.  However, what does matter is how I behave and live out my spiritual quest.  Also we are all responsible for keeping our fellow citizens in the real world where ethics are grounded in our very being.  Let us ask ourselves what have we as a society done that has allowed mass murderers like Breitvik and Holmes to commit such life-denying and life-destroying crimes.

The answer, dear friends, is certainly a spiritual on - one deeply rooted in values, and values that have some realistic horizon.

Journal of a Soul 8

Badolato Marina Beach, June 2012

The fleeting nature of time has long been a topic in philosophy.  Things are so much in flux that the ancient pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus declared so insightfully that we cannot step into the same river twice.  Our grand-parents, now long since passed away, used to opine, also rather wisely, “that much water has passed under the bridge” since X, Y or Z happened.  They intuitively had grasped exactly what Heraclitus meant.

As a small boy I used hate travelling with my parents to my father’s home town, called Roscrea, in the County of Tipperary in the Southern midlands of Ireland.  He would inevitably end up in this or that erstwhile neighbour’s house or in this or that local hostelry reminiscing on his youth, on how quickly the years had passed, on where A or B had lived, on whether C or D were still in England or America and how sad it was that E and F were now no more. It used to drive us children mad as we just wanted to be outside playing.  We simply did not wish to be sitting indoors while the older people went back in time in their minds.  And yet we were often bemused that my father could remember decades before the then present time.

As I age it has now become quite interesting that I can now appreciate what made my father misty eyed as he reminisced about the so-called “good old days” which were not that good at all at all.  At 54 years of age I can recall clearly when I was three years old playing with a toy lorry in the lane at the back of our house in Roscrea.  Now that’s 51 years ago or just slightly over five decades in the past.  That time has passed so quickly is at once frightening and somewhat consoling too.  If everything were to stay the same there simply would be no being or becoming at all, no ageing and consequently no death.  Indeed, if everything were to remain the same would there even be birth?  Without change there would be no life at all.  Then, paradoxically, one could say that without death there would be no life at all. 

To be is to become; to become is to grow old; to grow old is to die.  St Augustine once defined time as “the measure of change.”  For a fourth century intellectual that was not a bad definition of time at all.  To grow is to change.  To live is to grow and change, and indeed, eventually to die.

Modernity has a lot going for it.  Health of humans and indeed animals has improved remarkably in the last, say, one hundred years.  People are now living longer; women into their late eighties and men into their late seventies and early eighties.  I’m taking these figures from my own experience here in Ireland, and have not checked them out, but they are roughly accurate.  Modernity has brought comfort with it also, with so many pieces of modern technology to help us in our every daily task.  And so living has become less of a struggle.  We are also so much better educated.  Added to that, we can practically travel anywhere we want in the modern world, again with greater ease and with so much less cost than one hundred years ago.  Within reason we have more control over our lives than our forefathers.  And yet, this control over our lives has a downside to it.

Modernity, and indeed post-modernity if that is the way to describe our time in the early 21^st century, have hoodwinked us into believing almost the impossible at times.  We, in the Northern hemisphere certainly, believe that we are entitled to all the benefits that a modern state can give; believe almost at times that the world (or State) owes us a living; believe that we can conquer the impossible; live longer and ever longer; look to our selfish rights without adequately considering our due responsibilities.  And this is where we have lost some of the extraordinary advantages of less modern times.

Another view of Badolato Beach

Those advantages were more of a “soul-making nature.”  John Keats, the great poet of the English Romantic period, who lived to be barely 25 years of age used to call this world the “vale of soul-making.”  The poor man died very young from Tuberculosis.  Even travelling to the wonderfully warm climes of Rome failed to stop the inevitable.  In other words, from our sufferings we can learn.  Now, here I am not necessarily talking about suffering and dying per se, or about learning their profound if bitter lessons.  No, I am referring to the fact that we can learn to slow down; learn to take stock of life; learn to prioritize things in our lives; learn to listen to our own Heart or Soul; learn to listen to the Heart or Soul of an Other; learn to be in tune with the rhythms of life; learn really to be at one with the natural sequences of the seasons.

And so to finish this post, I have learned to slow down firstly the hard way by enduring a bad mental breakdown occasioned by too much stress when I was forty.  But I knew that I had to do more.  I then began to do many creative soul-making things like Meditation, taking more time out, learning to say NO, learning to do new things, to holiday more, to write more, to reflect more, to go to more personal development conferences, to get to know positive people and to spend more time with such people, to cultivate friendships because truly relationships are like plants, they will wither and die if not cared for.  Even in the concrete jungles of modern cities each of us can at least cultivate a small garden on our balconies.  I have seen many of them in the biggest and most alienating of cities.  I have also been privileged to have been welcomed into the smallest and most homely and soul-full of homes in the biggest of cities.  In other words, with practice we can learn to grow our own Souls with care.  We can also learn in the most alien of places to put down roots of Self.  By doing so we will become attuned once again, like our forebears to the rhythms and cycles of the seasons where it is just as natural for the ripe fruit to drop from the bough as it is just as natural for the seed to die and give forth the life of a new young shoot.  Being in tune with the rhythms and cycles of the seasons, with the circular nature of time, readies us to face our own necessary part in those same cycles and rhythms, of which our dying and death are just such a little part.