Why pray?

Why pray? What can God-in-love do? What can be done? What should be done?

The Reflecting and Risking process is embedded in a prayer. What is the point? Most of the prayer is acknowledgment and admiration but four requests are made.  Can, should, will God-in-love respond positively to these requests? 

These are hard questions both for those who want to pray and those who don’t. I’m not one who prays ‘without ceasing,' but neither do I pray as a ‘last resort.’ I don’t seriously request things in my prayer. Instead I pray to reaffirm what's ultimately important. This lifting of my eyes opens me to what is coming and what is possible. I feel prayer sweetens me and emboldens me. 

Let’s consider the requests:  “Let the consummation of your creation swiftly approach, soon arrive...” This is the deepest and most far-reaching of the requests. It’s related to the success of the whole project of God-in-love. I ,and others, play a part, but ultimate responsibility is with God-in-love. Can it actually come to pass?  I believe it will, and that it's worthwhile; and I want to do my part.

“Forgive us when we do what doesn’t honor you...” This forgiveness is up to God-in-love. Assuming, however, that forgiveness the case, I want to do the same.

“Give us what we need to live today.”  

“Send timely help when we’re tempted or attacked”

These sound like man-overboard prayers and, yes indeed, we sometimes don’t have what we need to sustain or defend ourselves. There’s no denying that many, many have died or been damaged direly with these prayers on their lips. Does this mean that these prayers are futile, even that God-in-love is illusory? 

The heart of what we want through petition prayer is a friend who can help. How  is God-in-love a friend, and what can God-in-love actually do to help? A friend promises presence and assistance, but not necessarily quick or final fixes. 

First, the question of help. God-in-love, not omnipotent, not omniscient, acting in the physical world only to sustain complexity, does not intervene to produce magic miracles. However, this complexity of the world regularly offers surprises and coincidences, often serendipitous, that can look like miracles.

Also, those open to God-in-love’s energy, potentiality and power can be, often are, prompted to give immediate assistance, as well as to work for institutional or structural change on behalf of justice and generosity. Such people can offer hospitality and friendship to those who petition for help. What we see time after time when we’re in difficulty is that something or someone turns up and we have reason to be grateful, even without a deus ex machina miracle. I take this to be the help God-in-love provides.

Second, the question of presence. This is more profound because friends make hard times less unbearable. As participants in the Beloved, we are each the focus of the loving regard of God-in-love expressed directly to us in our 2nd person consciousness, or indirectly, through others. How we know this regard as love will be personal, based on how we individually encounter God-in-love, but when we pray, we are opening ourselves to all that each participant in the encounter can bring to it. In times of difficulty and worry, of grief and fear, prayer makes more accessible the resources of friendship with God-in-love. 

There is one more thing. Even in the deepest difficulties, even in extremis, the encounters we participate in, prompted by God-in-love, involving hospitality, friendship and exploration, have an ever-lastingness that will extend into the world to come, a consideration which may serve as a positive focus for our attention and energy.  

All this sounds thin and glib. After all, the subject has exercised much better minds than mine for millenia. All I can say is that my prayers, based on the above, are good enough for me today, and they'll be put to the test tomorrow.  

Snug as bug

How am I comfortable in my life? Information comes to me through a selection of trusted channels; my opinions are definite and certain; my routines are fluent and effective; my place is sheltered and well-stocked; I’m pretty happy with myself. 

Yet this snugness is just what blinders me, renders my ideas stiff and inflexible, routinizes me, swaddles me, encourages smugness. I exaggerate but the concern is real. Too often, for instance, I’m surprised by what I haven’t noticed. Last Friday at Urbano, to take a recent example, I utterly failed to see the tiny figurines on the plaster cupcakes that made them the references to Caspar David Friedrich they were supposed to be. Small but distinct, reaching, walking, gazing, there they were. Such a fool.

The other pole is the nightmare that too many endure daily: feeling swamped with unfiltered facts and sensations, blown about by vague and unstable convictions and feelings, awkward and inept at doing whatever needs to be done, exposed and vulnerable wherever they are, dogged by self-doubt and self-disdain.

Sitting here in the sun this Sunday morning, my shelves of books as comforting as cash, coffee at my elbow and wife and tutee quietly talking math in the next room, I feel the powerful attraction of my snuggery. I have my worries and concerns, of course, but my thoughts run: if I can sort this out, get a bit more of that, I’ll enjoy an extended tranquility. The circle of my life then will be monochromatic and of a hue I like, some kind of cerulean blue perhaps.

I’m good at making things pleasant for myself, improving my efficiency in daily routines, and succeeding at normal tasks, but these laudable proclivities distance me from what is outside my comfort zone. To balance this natural tendency, in the absence of disasters that can flip my life from light to dark, I need to do things that regularly risk some amount of discomfort, waste and failure.

This is what happens at the boundary of me and an Other: I see and learn what I wouldn’t otherwise, confront unwelcome ideas, brush up my trial and error skills, put up with inconveniences and irritations, and realize I’m not as admired or approved of by others as I am by myself. Acts of hospitality, friendship and exploration particularly put us in positions of risk. The recent David Brooks column in the NY Times I1.21.14), The Art of Presence, illustrates this perfectly. He discusses Do’s and Don’t for “how those of us outside the zone of trauma might better communicate with those inside the zone,” referring here to friends who had suffered catastrophe. In such situations we who live in the world of common consolations find we have little to offer those who have been plunged into the abyss.

Our persistent presence on that frontier, that brink, however is, among other things, a kind of hospitality in the sense of saying (I’m embarrassed to talk like this) to the shocked, the disoriented, the grieving that, however impossible it is for them to feel it, they are still and always part of the great us. Believing on behalf of another is no easy task. We often feel at a loss, inadequate, frustrated, afraid. I don't look forward to such experiences (even as a well-wisher) but I can't flee such encounters and I don't want to resist them. Instead, I'd rather be open and available to, even sometimes actively in search of, encounters that bring me face-to-face with an Other, with otherness.

I mention this to reiterate that risking deeds of hospitality, friendship, exploration,, these 2nd person practices that I believe represent the active and on-going wooing of God-in-love and the beloved Other, counterbalances our self-centering tendencies, pulls us out to the edge of ourselves, makes us alert and alive, and full participants in the great romance around us.

Having called into question my many blessings, I’m off to a concert of Ravel.chamber music. This is a kind of encounter I'm happy to have. 

By the way, who ever heard of a 15 line sonnet?

My job's a kind of conversation

My job's a kind of conversation,
Encounters, in the lingo of this blog,
Sometimes excursions in elation,
Other times, a stoic slog, 
But it can happen it's me that's taught
About, say, my former life,
Not lost but left, the memory fraught
With queasy second-thinking: strife
Between my wisdom and its price
In honest innocence. Perhaps 
A soiled virginity remains
That doesn't represent a lapse
Of that desire which prompts the pains:
Tomorrow's self will see today
As one more step along the way.

Em-bell-ishment

A few days ago, I visited my friend M. We go way back. Our relationship began with her original hospitality and it has grown since.  I like to see her regularly, in part because she's always up to new things: most recently, story books she wants to publish. Once a week she reads aloud to school children and this project grows out of that. She's got a story about a nay-sayer girl and another about a forgetful basset. She's collaborating with an illustrator who has made hilarious sketches of all the main characters. It's very exciting. But then M. is always thinking big, and that's one thing I like about her (though I'm sometimes wary). She's curious about this blog, for instance. 

This most recent occasion is just the latest in our long encounter which has evolved as we've both matured, she more than me. It hasn't always been easy because, though we're alike in many ways, we are very different in others. What we think works and how we should manage affairs, what can be trusted and what's outrageous: all of these have lead to disputes. We have history. 

I have to recognize her otherness, acknowledge her as my Other, and address her directly as 'You', which all the pleasure and trepidation that intimacy entails. M. is so completely herself: phenomenon as much as friend. As time passes, I feel it more urgent for us to spend time. There's much between us that's unsaid but that's part of the style of our encounter.

I loved walking the dogs with you around the wind-swept fields. You were so cold. I wished I could have wrapped you up and kept you warm. (I'd misled you, you claimed, about the temperature.) Tough, sassy, generous, obstinate, good-humored, brave (best wishes for that new knee), passionate...I could go on. But even as I write, I feel a tolling in my heart of something like a great bell representing our life-long connection. This is not a memoir, nor an anecdote, but an appreciation of richness, not perhaps the maximum conceivable (what might that be?) but something palpable, positive, resonant, life-giving. 

Bells, bells, bells

I’ve been thinking about how to present the notion of “the history of the richness of an encounter” in a way that is vivid and graspable. After all, appreciating such histories is the point of our Reflecting, and lessons drawn from such meditations inform our Risking. Yet the phrase is more like a pillowcase of words than a something visualizable that someone can contemplate with interest and profit. 

My journey began with the question of how we pick the encounters, 2nd person Other-oriented interactions, out of the teeming crowd of our many actions and impressions. Robert Farrar Capon gave me a clue: ln the braided stream of our attention, look for ‘magic hat’ moments. Magic hats became ‘wunderhorner’ and those became bells and related members of that percussion family. There were some days of idea wrangling, and this is what I’ve come up with.

I remember the powerful bell-casting scenes in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and the sobs of the boy Boriska waiting in agony for the first peals of Grand Prince’s bell. “Oranges and lemons, the bells of St. Clements” brings to mind the acoustic landscape of medieval London. The eight 8-am bells from St. Francis de Sales tell me each morning how much I need to speed up to get through my loop in time. Can I forget my late mother-in-law throwing herself on the bank of bell evers to ring the Sunday morning hymns in Dedham? How about the precisely tuned bell collection buried with Marquis Yi of Zeng that dates back to 433 BCE. There are sleigh bells, cowbells, great historic bells with honored names, and also gongs, chimes, and other related instruments. The family is huge, varied in designs and materials, significant in history, central to religious and civic culture. 

So what about thinking of the ‘richness’ of an encounter as its ‘bell,' and appreciation of the richness of the encounter as appreciation of the qualities of its bell. A bell can be thought of in terms of its physical presence-its design, material, engravings, and so on--and in terms of its sounds (what a language of bell sounds: ring, toll, chime, jingle, clang, and so many more). We can think of the physical bell as representing the drama component of richness (what is vivid, potent, urgent) and the sound as the depth component (what is suspenseful, intriguing, impressive.) The bell as object offers an immediate experience of itself; the bell as speaker reaches out into the future and the environment, participating in both, shaping both. 

When we have a fresh encounter, or an occasion of an on-going encounter, we can think of a ‘bell’ coming into existence that, drawing on the multiplicity of bell forms, materials, sounds, and meanings available, somehow expresses the special qualities of the experience. Bell sounds particularly extend their influence to what happens nearby and next. Often the reverberations travel far and last long. In reflection, we can appreciate the ‘bells’ of our experiences and 'swing' the clappers again to hear their tones and partials or even ‘adjust’ the bells to produce even more tones. Subsequent occasions of an encounter can ring these bells again with even more energy and effect, enriching or possibly even damaging the bell. Perhaps a new occasion inspires a new bell as different aspects of the otherness of the Other are recognized, acknowledged and addressed. Perhaps there are new ways for us to be impressed or intrigued. In these and other ways, the bell can represent of the richness of our encounters in ways we can appreciate.

What about handbells? May this be the music of two or more, in mutual encounter and aware of the fact, playing together and creating a sonic world builds on itself forever?

If all this is about the richness of the encounter, then the history of that richness is the story of all the bells created in that particular 2nd person Other-oriented meeting. The history of modifications by design or accident, of augmentations and diminutions, of companion bells and their mutual resonance or discord, of sounds clear, clangy or muffled, of regular or erratic expression is the history of the richness of an encounter.  I can think of the many years of encounter that constitutes my marriage as many bells ringing. Some have stopped sounding altogether, others are tolled only infrequently; some are mournful; others are cheerful; some are brand new; others have not ever stopped ringing. The tones and overtones of these pervade our relationship and our world and the bronze of these bells is ever polished with looks and touches. 

I can imagine looking ahead to look back on a whole life represented by cascades of pealing bells, each expressive of a particular encounter and each encounter expresses and partakes in the wooing of God-in-love and the beloved Other. 

Bloodless, abstract

Saturday afternoon. Serious rain. The intermittent thunder/Let's us know/The gods are arriving,/one valley over from the poem New Hampshire by Howard Moss. 

I’ve been writing this blog for some days now and it’s turned philosophical, when it really should 

be a record of living the God-in-love life. It shouldn’t just be a forum for considering grand themes and responding to criticism (actual or possible) but for considering the life of encountering. What I want for myself is to enjoy the special quality of life inherent in God-in-love and I designed Reflecting & Risking to be tools for encouraging, enabling and enhancing this experience. And I want this blog to convey the quality of this way of life and to demonstrate how R&R works to make it possible, anywhere, anytime, for anyone. 

Each blog post should be an appreciation of the history of richness of an encounter (on-off or extended), a trajectory, and this trajectory tracing not of the goodness or badness of the encounter but the drama (how vivid, potent, urgent) or depth (how suspenseful, impressive, intriguing) as God-in-love might experience it. Each post should also inspire and direct me (or readers) to dare and to do. Deeds are risks. Encounters are alive, whether or not we reflect on them. Only in encounters is there presence, adventure, lastingness.     

Why do I find this hard to do in this blog?  

1. Most of my life is routine, so I don’t meet many new people, don’t find myself often in new 

situations. Patterns of hospitality and friendship are already built into the structures of my life, and I’d have to really go out of my way to introduce novelty there. Exploration for me is often in books and ideas, so it’s easier for me to write new things about this practice. 

(Why, when I listen to the finale of Sibelius’ 2nd Symphony, do I feel prickling up and down my 

legs and moistness in my eyes.)

2. Most of my encounters are with people I know, so I have to be careful of what I say because 1st

they may take exception to or umbrage at my report; 2nd, they may feel uncomfortable having casual encounters turn into ‘appreciations’; and 3rd , they may suspect that encounters were actually engineered for the purpose of generating material for the blog.

3. My life is comfortable, in large part because I choose my environment, my activities, my 

acquaintances, so I don’t have many of the difficult or perplexing encounters that would make interesting blog posts.

4. On the matter of style: Do I address the Other directly or refer to it in the third person. Is my 

interest in the Other in the blog for the Other’s self (that is, the blog as an extension of the interaction) or as the occasion for the reflections (which relate to the meaningfulness of my life.) 

5. Then there is the questions of risking. What does it mean to roll a die and think about 

opportunities for some practice? Am I to commit to doing something particular (Look for a chance to...) or am I to be ready for whatever turns up? Am I to think of some Other I wish to encounter, or wait for an Other to show up? If I don’t  resolve these questions, the whole exercise of Risking is rather bootless. 

6. If I devote the blog to the appreciation of the richness of encounters in literature, the news, etc.,

 I’ll be confined to the subjective reports of the participants or else my own speculation. What value will that have for anyone reading the blog? 

7. Finally, it’s not clear whether this blog is for me, or for the people reading it. If for me, then my 

task is examination of my own life. If for others, the task is clarifying and justifying the processes of reflecting and risking, making them accessible and attractive, as well as expressive of the God-in-love way of life. 

No wonder the blog has stuck to the bloodless abstract. If this reflecting and risking process were a private matter taking place in a notebook, or occurring in a group context where responses to thoughts or questions could be given immediately, and where 2nd person/ 3rd person issues could be handled smoothly, these issues would not arise. If this blog were like a book review, with a steady stream of new items to consider, it would be easy to spend time considering particularities and details. 

Okay, I’ve clarified the problem. There must be solutions. Let me think. 

"Why Evil Exists"

Working my way through the Great Courses on DVD called “Why Evil Exists,” I've come to the lecture 23: The American North and South—Holy War and I'm moved to wonder: does God-in-love adequately deal with the whole matter of evil? Does the treatment of grief or guilt in the framework do justice to this perplexing and agonizing issue?

One thing clear from this excellent series is that the title question has been asked by thinking people for millennia, and that numerous sensitive and subtle answers have been offered. As I consult my own convictions, I don't find a single compelling reason for the existence of evil. Battle of light and dark, rivalry of gods, fall from grace, Satanic principle, all are dramatic but don't explain for me the policy of perversity that seems to constitute the essence of evil, as opposed to habits of incompetence or selfishness (despicable as they may be), or simple bad luck. To take our (certainly my) occasional (all too frequent) and culpable acts of rejection, deception and indifference and knowingly warp them into a program of extermination, humiliation, and enslavement is evil. I can recognize in myself the promptings to perversity but though intimate, I find them unintelligible. 

The question of the origin of evil seems to point in two directions: establishing who (or what) to blame for evil, and finding how to cope with the bitterness, rage, terror, and nihilistic despair that evil provokes in us and multiplies abroad by its activity, and sheer existence. 

Justice, punishment, lex talionis, and other strategies of rectification seem more like ways of quarantining and neutralizing the destructive power of evil so as to protect our societies than ways of either explaining its existence or assuaging the guilt (ours and others) or the grief (for ourselves and others) we feel when we observe it at work in or around us.

It's reasonable for us to establish institutions and procedures to protect ourselves from evil, even if not all that is destructive is in fact evil. We have courts and there are consequences; our actions, all of them, are judged one way or another. Not everyone gets their just deserts but enough do to make an example and deterrence, and inspire us work to improve that percentage (while reducing the incidence of false positives). I can't see the point of pursing this process beyond the grave. Let evil expire. 

In lesson 23, the professor, Charles Mathewes of UVA, interprets Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address as pointing beyond the "I'm justified; you're to blame" dualism of, in that case, the North and the South to another recognition, deeper and truer, of shared complicity in evil (slavery in that case), common punishment (the devastation of the war) and the need for cooperative recovery (as yet incomplete). Not that victims are as much to blame as their victimizers, but that at different times and in different ways, "we all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Blame makes nothing good happen. We are all guilty, all in grief; restoration and relief is in the practice of hospitality, friendship and exploration.

I write this as one not burdened overmuch by either guilt or grief (perhaps I'm not risking enough). Maybe these words are profoundly simpleminded and events soon to come will make my naiveté painfully clear to me. But at this point I think the most important thing at each moment is the daring and doing of deeds of hospitality and friendship and exploration after the example, and as the very expressions, of the wooing of God-in-love and the beloved Other.

One Hundred Names...

I finished recently Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names for Love, the story of her husband's stroke and his recovery from it. Paul West, a writer (I'm just now reading his pre-stroke The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, and can attest to his love of words), suffered aphasia, the loss of the ability to retrieve his words . Ackerman is herself a writer, particularly of natural history (Dawn Light, et al), and so her account of the experience is full of anecdote, shot through with scientific and medical information, empathic, funny, touching. It's a hard story, but it has turned out better than feared. What did I know about stroke before I read this? Very little. In this account I learned how alarming it is and also what can be hoped for.

Reflecting on the book this morning, I was struck by how Ackerman wove the themes of hospitality (e.g. worrying about and caring for her husband), friendship (e.g. playful conversations with him) and exploration (e.g. understanding the processes of brain responses to trauma) through the entire book. She moves smoothly and often between these--now talking about the challenge of his eating without choking, now her delight in his piropos (pet names of endearment or invitation), now speculations of how his brain had compensated when particular faculties reappeared, now the effect on her outlook of the responsibility for caregiving, now the pride she felt in his resumption of writing, now the lessons she learned about dealing with aphasia—and all a voice cool but clearly caring.  

Thinking about this story in terms of the words hospitality, friendship and exploration—the practices of God-in-love—I don't feel I am diminishing the story or cramming it into inappropriate categories. Instead such a story fills out and beautifully exemplifies these multidimensional words, extending their implications. The life is not in the words, of course, but in the living encounter, occasion by occasion, evolving over 5 years (and up till now) of two individuals who, by virtue of a brain catastrophe suffered by one, find the way they are Other to each other (and themselves) changes suddenly, radically. How they stay engaged, manage the losses, find new areas of richness in their relationship, is a narrative of love at its most concrete and most transcendent.  

I want to think of this story as partaking in the cosmic interchange of God-in-love and the beloved Other. Someone else may not think of it that way, but I want to fit this story and other such stories and all similar stories, now or ever, into something larger and longer-lasting. Ackerman sees this account as reflecting the inescapable poignancy of life, beautiful and brutal at the same time. Yes, yes, but it seems to me there's something more; her openness (and her husband's) are a window into and a contribution to the deep processes that have brought (and will bring) all things into being.

Yesterday's post had me risking hospitality in some encounter since. Nothing yet, unless I include listening patiently to someone's recitation of anxieties, angers, despairs, until the mood passes. Still I'm alert to new opportunities..  

Let's try again: the die turns up 2, an act of friendship, while paying attention to power being exercised. Some relevant words: visiting, appreciating, grieving, refreshing..., and authorizations or prohibitions, helping or hindering. Okay, I can try risking an act of friendship.
 

Appreciating Friendship

A balanced diet of encounters, equal parts of hospitality, friendship, exploration: this is the ideal life I should be living? I'm not sure I live up to it, or should. But I did want to work through the Reflecting questions listed in the Tokens&Tools section of the God-in-love framework to see if they could help me better appreciate the encounters I do have.

I'm struck by how much of what I do is exploratory vs hospitable or friendly. It may be that visiting R yesterday was an example of friendship and that reading from the book On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz (excellent book; opening not just eyes) to L was an example of hospitality, but neither of these encounters seem to have the same intensity as I remember feeling just looking at trees in the Arboretum.  When among those great conifers with their dangling or outstretched limbs and the light shining through the needles with the crinkly glitter of gold foil paper, I was moved by the sheer presence of these huge organisms, upright and stolid in the cold of the winter afternoon. These were Others I was encountering. By contrast, the otherness of R and L doesn't have the same majesty; how could it? They are familiar and their otherness not evident. Does familiarity make the otherness of the second person invisible? 

So I called R yesterday and asked if I could come over for a chat.The storm had been blowing all day, the streets were white and quiet.The forecast was for snow all night. I wanted to get out of the house for a trudge, and perhaps R wanted some company. Visiting, that's what I was doing. In the course of the conversation I recognized otherness in subtle ways-the offer of tea rather than coffee for instance. I acknowledged R as Other when we talked about my interest in word games and his shyness about them. Was there any urgency in my addressing him as You in our encounter? None that I can think of. I look forward to many more times of our chatting and strolling and politicking together. The urgency, if any, is like repletion after a meal that will become hunger again a little later. (Can we call this a cyclical urgency? Are there categories of urgencies?) What about anticipations? What about We?  I  mentioned game nights and perhaps these could deepen our friendship. Also there are some plays coming up that we can go to together.  

Finally what about being intrigued or impressed? This goes the heart of what makes this a friendship. How R thinks has an elegance that I find fascinating: step by step, complete, expressive of his own engagement. I can enter it anywhere and get details that flesh out the story. Yet he is not relentless or pedantic. We can wander and return to the thread as we want. And R is fund of knowledge. I always learn something interesting when I'm with him. More than this, he is a moral pole for me. He helps me keep caring about things I too easily forget.

What have I learned about this process? I feel more confident the Reflecting questions are an effective awareness tool, not only prompting me to attend to but also to better perceive and understand, ultimately to appreciate my encounters, even negative ones. 

I try to avoid negative encounters (who doesn't) but I can imagine a friendship much more complex and ambivalent which might be elucidated by this process of reflection. The otherness would be more stark, the Other more obviously not biddable, the addessings more fraught with urgency, the anticipations more a mix of looking forward and dreading. I may be impressed and intrigued and also attracted and repelled. This Reflecting tool should help me appreciate the richness of even challenging encounters like that.

(Let me remember why any of this is supposed to matter. It's because encounters are the currency of value in the cosmic erotic dalliance of God-in-love and the beloved Other. Gazing, chatting, reading aloud are more than what they are.)

Okay, what about today's Risking? Rolling the die, I get 6: hospitality, while keeping an eye out for potentialities being exploited. Let's throw out some words and see which catch hold somewhere: gifting, helping, introducing...and shifts in equilibrium, development of irregularities, meetings or missings... Nothing comes to mind right away, but let me think, and risk (like posting this overly wordy and somewhat absurd essay.)