Soup Kitchen

Once a month I have the opportunity to staff a soup kitchen in a nearby church. I will go there in the morning and make two large cauldrons of beef stew, which at noontime are ladled out to the (mostly) homeless people who come there for lunch. There used to be a hundred or so at lunch; nowadays there are about twice that number, and more all the time.

I always wonder about myself if I expect a change in the behavior of these people as a kind of recompense for the effort we are all putting in to feed them. For those of you who haven’t seen the play or movie of the Shaw work, “Major Barbara,” there is a lot of discussion of what the Salvation Army or do-gooders generally expect in return when they ladle out the stew.

In reflecting on this question, I began to realize that the real opportunity for transformation does not apply to the relationship between the dispenser of sustenance and the person standing there with an empty plate. The real change came for me when I looked to one side or another of myself, standing there at the long table, and I realized that I had entered into a new kind of bond with the other people that were trying to do good work.

Aaminah’s recent article in the Crescent Times presents a simple and varied template for actions that we might take to help people in need. If people from different faith backgrounds can stand side by side, obeying the more comprehensive imperative to feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit the lonely, comfort the afflicted, perhaps the apparent distinctions between the religions will blur, and evaporate like a mist. I certainly hope so.

One of the most distressing things to me about the conflict in Gaza is the way that all the power appears to be in one set of hands. The owners of these hands say: “We have the right to build walls. You may not leave the enclosure of these walls without our permission. Now that some of your number have lobbed weapons over the walls at us, we will lob more weapons (a lot more) back. We know some bystanders will be hit. So be it. When the time comes we will stop with the lobbing and let some relief agencies come to you. We are so compassionate, we will allow our own relief agencies to come and relieve you. We are compassionately conservative.”

In their assertion of control over who, and what, and when the relief will be extended, they harm their own souls, and prevent themselves from standing side by side with others who obey the higher imperative, the imperative of mercy.

 

The Story Is Inside Your Voice

I believe that all of our religions have descended in their various complexities from shamanistic traditions, where the shaman functions in many ways as the “story” of his or her people. The explanation of how the shaman does this is complicated. When healing, or showing the path to the spirit world, the shaman is both the map of the universe and the guide of the spirit as it travels. As healer, the shaman both disassembles the life we live, and reassembles it. And the shaman is the repository for all of the stories that have ever been, however they choose to be told at the time of telling. This is my quick summary of the seminal work, Shamanism, by the Rumanian literary theorist Mircea Eliade, which is the foundational work for studying shamans.

Our “western culture” retained a repository of its own stories which were reiterated on an annual cycle in community festivals and events until these practices mostly died out during and after the protestant reformation. Even in English we find traces of an oral tradition in the forms of ballad poems which are derived from earlier forms: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the poems of Longfellow, even “The Night Before Christmas.” Many of the original stories and poems in England, Ireland and Scandinavia were systematically banished and expunged by the Roman Catholic Church.

My work is meant to revive the storytelling tradition in a kind of crosscultural, ecumenical mode. I start with texts from many different religious traditions, ranging from the Navajo Creation to al-Ghazzali to the Christian Gospels, and I retell every one of these stories in the poetic form that seems suitable to giving it the most beautiful expression in English. The first result is only a written manuscript. I then take the poem I have written and record it in mp3 “tracks” and post these on Gcast, and iTunes, so people can listen to them, free. Then I publish the manuscript as a paperback on-demand book, then I reformat it and publish it as a kindle book. You can see more at www.sustainyourspirit.com.

It’s kind of like comparative religion, except without a trace of the footnoting, nitpicking and “scholarship” issues that have basically sucked the life out of the stories that ages human experience had accumulated and passed down to us.

I am looking for people who want to do the same thing I am doing, only from their own point of view. I want to build a community of storytellers. If you are interested in this, as with all storytelling, the first consideration is the relationship you choose to have with your own voice. Can you be confident that all of the details of characterization in a story with several characters will be revealed by the infinitely subtle variations in your own voice? Can you compress the sense that your voice is speaking for the entire history of consciousness into the flow of your words? Can you be sincere to yourself and the integral values of the story at the same time? The second big issue is: What do you want to say? Whatever existing story you may choose to tell, your own self and your experience will color it, so you have a responsibility to know yourself and know the purpose of your influence. The third issue I have discovered is a sort of practical humility: the mechanics of storytelling only works for me if I regard myself as a sort of non-being with capabilities that permit a sort of eternal energy to flow through and express itself. In other words, my job is to get out of the way of the story and let it tell itself. In doing this it is very helpful to regard the words as if they were notes and signs in music.

Yesterday I had a long conversation about this with my friend Jane. She recently moved to this area from Toronto. She used to be a radio journalist and has recently won a contest with a short story she wrote for an online literary site – in Malayalam. She grew up as a Roman Catholic in India, where the oral traditions are much more prevalent than here. I suggested that she make a podcast of her story where she tells the story, first in Malayalam, then in English, so that people from either culture could extract the meaning in the other language whether they actually knew it or not. This kind of cross-cultural work, where I can sense what somebody means when they speak a language I don’t understand, seems like the voice of the moon calling to my finger…

 

‘Tis the Season…

For the past two days, in order to raise money for the choral society, I have driven a few miles from my house to an enormous, sprawling, business park, and met with a dozen like minded souls to sing in lobbies.  The property management company hires us as a kind of gift to their corporate tenants.   There we are, men in tuxes, women in formal black, standing in the corners of huge cavernous spaces, and reiterating for the hundredth time a half hour program of a cappella Christmas favorites.  On the other side of the lobby is a long table covered with pine and holly branches, coffee urns, pastries, and perhaps twenty hardy souls from the warren of offices that surrounds us, beyond the glass walls, ficus plants, elevators, and terraced balconies.

It’s kind of surreal.  We sing about the baby Jesus, King Wenceslas of Slovakia making footprints in the snow, the slaughter of the innocent firstborn children in the book of Matthew; then, after a half an hour, “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.”  Then we put on our coats and scarves and walk across an exterior courtyard to another lobby, where we more or less repeat what we just sang.  What changes is the faces on the people.

There were far fewer people listening this year than last year.  Actually, I noticed that there were far fewer cars on the highway to the office park, both going and coming, than there were last year.  One of our singers, an accounting executive for a big corporation with its headquarters in one of the buildings in this park, (Avis Rent-A-Car), said that she was glad she was with us because back at her office they were laying off 300 people today, which is about 40% of the total that works there.  She was pretty sure she would survive the onslaught (but not 100% sure.)

The ones we saw, appearing in twos and threes as we worked our way through the program of carols, often smiled at us gratefully.  The eyes of some of these people probed, with a kind of yearning expression, as if they were wondering if we might be able to help them decide what to get their kids for Christmas.  As I sang the old favorites, Hark the Herald and so forth, I thought about the way the people on Good Morning America still talk about the “recession” as if it were just a rough patch, and that in a few months “things will be be back to normal again.”  That reassurance is not what I saw in the eyes of our listeners today (or for that matter, in the eyes of Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts.)

Singing the old songs, I felt curiously safe.  The entire activity seemed more dependent on whatever authentic good will and seasonal sentimentality we singers could realize in the treated corporate air and implant into the sensibilities of these complete strangers before us.  None of gets any money for this; just a chance to dress up and sing on a weekday morning.  The only sense of payment I got was when one or two of the audience would come up and thank us; and I always felt more thankful to them, just for coming to hear it.

 

I, too…

I have been utterly preoccupied with writing a poetic interpretation of the aphorisms of ibn Atallah.  This has subverted all of my other plans, and now, here we are staring at our opportunity to offer God thanks, without any more preparation for the encounter, than we might have had the day we were born.   So here with the master I offer thanks for that motive that impels me to regret what I might have done.

There’s another poem from this work-in-progress on the blog “Inspirations and Creative Thoughts;” go see:

http://mysticsaint.blogspot.com

48.

One sign of the heart’s death is the absence of sadness

over the acts of obedience that you have neglected,

and the abandonment of regret over the mistakes that you have made.

A SIGN OF DEATH

Will haunt the heart:

Lack of sadness

For all the good

You might have done:

The chance you missed,

With no regret

For any lapse;

As if it were

A falconer

Who could not tell

If it were wings

Or talons, that

He idly clips.

 

Music, the Lens to See Myself

A lot of what I write is actually an attempt to make the prosaic word into something like music. You could call it storytelling, oral tradition, bombast, dramatic interpretation; it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, it is the way we reach each other, speech with a purpose.

To further this idea, about two years ago I started to post books of stories on garageband.com and iTunes, as a sort of new-age manifestation of the storytelling impulse, which is old as human consciousness.

Garageband.com gives the artist the opportunity to get feedback from listeners. So from time to time in the spoken word category I get little reviews of my voice interpretations of my own poetry, some admiring, some clueless, some with admirable suggestions for improvement. In order to qualify for other people to review my stuff, I have to first review theirs.

This is a challenge: you don’t know anything about the song except its genre; you don’t know the artist and you have never heard this music before; and you have to listen to it and write enough sensible stuff to possibly be perceived by the musician as somebody that really hears what they are trying to say. Here’s an example, a review I wrote of a (mostly) acoustic folk song about a year ago:

Simple Gifts

What does it mean (in the lyric)  where you say, you’ll do better next time?  When you are re-incarnated?  The humming vocal in the second verse is distracting — the aaahs are better.  The solo guitar thing at 2:30 is too simple to retain my interest.  The beauty of a song like this is the sparseness of the sound — be careful about how you express yourself, think about what you are doing first.  Why don’t you want your next of kin to follow you? They could do a lot worse than emulate a folksinger who is trying to express himself in the world. This attitude creeps into the sound of your voice, making you sound more vulnerable than you ought to.  I really don’t like the big electric guitar riff that comes in at the end. It muddies things up and changes the mood of the song. Keep it simple and use good judgment.

(If you want to hear the song, here is a link: http://www.garageband.com/review?|pe1|SsjLPXjDivDybVCyYWFtA5g9IF-HfZ1uDNE

Here’s the point that I’m trying to make: It’s not about the music, or about whether the song is good or bad. It’s about my being able to take a position of perspective and say something useful. If I can do that for someone I never met, I can do that for the whole world.

In looking at this review after all this time, what I see is my own impulse to simplify my own life. I recommended to this stranger that he simplify, perhaps because I can’t figure out how to do it myself, perhaps because I can. The music is like a lens that helps me see myself better. It gives me the words that express my spirit. It puts me on a plane where my own music is, as it wants to embed itself in my voice. It helps me to be truthful.

 

Off Ramp, On Ramp

Of course, there is the informal reckoning that life presents us, from time to time, where we catch a glimpse of those aspects of our own behavior that contradict themselves.

Who has not had the experience of going to work every day, day after day, at a hateful job? I remember that place where the boss scrutinized the behavior of each staff person, looking for commercial, moral, and all manner of incidental infractions. We all felt as if we were laboratory animals. I was in charge of marketing, which meant that I had to leave the office at least once a day to visit printers, typesetters, ad agencies and so forth, to expedite production of ads and brochures by proofing them on site and thereby saving time. As I drove to a printer one day, I felt the hot breath of necessity on me, for I had seen the boss looking out the upstairs window as I left the parking lot and I knew he was timing me to see how long it would be before I came back.

The printer was on a strip of highway fully congested with little strip malls, and the entrance to the highway had only a meager little merge and a tattered yield sign. I sat in my car while the cars and trucks streamed by in front of me, waiting for just one of them to show some sign of deceleration so I could get into the lane. After five minutes of this, I was frayed to the breaking point, and, flinging a curse at the next approaching car, I lurched out in front of him and took what seemed my rightful place.

I made it to the printer, proofed the job, signed off on it, picked up some supplies, and headed back to the office. As I came speeding down the other side of the congested highway, some foolish idiot nearly kills me by lurching his car right out in front of me! Idiot! Fool! How could anybody make such a dangerous maneuver?!

We have met the enemy and he is us.

And don’t we reserve the most penetrating anger, the most personal form of bile, for those who have presented us with the paragon of our own bad behavior? And to whom, in this anonymous encounter (between myself and the anonymous driver of the other car; but actually, between myself, and myself) to whom do I now address the insight of my self-examination? And having no one to present it to, must I keep this paradox, like a leg broken from a stool, like an embarrassment that no one wants to acknowledge, lying here right on the kitchen table of my own consciousness?

If you get serious about discovering your own foibles, it really is a never-ending job. I suppose that’s a good thing; I mean, you can depend on it.

 

What I Think About When I Say the General Confession

Every Sunday during the first part of the church service, the entire assembly kneels together and says the following prayer, which is called the General Confession. (I have inserted parentheses to indicate those parts which confine this expression as a Christian observance, rather than being generally applicable regardless of faith.)

Most merciful God,

We confess that we have sinned against you

In thought, word, and deed,

By what we have done,

And by what we have left undone.

We have not loved you with our whole heart;

We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.

(For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,)

Have mercy on us and forgive us;

That we may delight in your will,

And walk in your ways,

To the glory of your name. Amen.

Then, immediately, a priest stands and offers to the assembly the following statement, which is called the Absolution. Only a priest is allowed to absolve sin in another person.

Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins (through our Lord Jesus Christ,) strengthen you in all goodness, and (by the power of the Holy Spirit) keep you in eternal life. Amen.

From the time when I was about eight years old that I started to pay attention to the meanings of things that happened in church, I have wondered what is really supposed to be going on in this exchange.

The first thing that I wondered was, Did I really do anything that would merit a confession of sin, or was I just going through the motion of saying so because I was there in church, and I might as well make good use of my time.

The second thing I wondered was, What does it mean when I say I am truly sorry and I humbly repent? Does it mean that whatever it is that I did, I am never, ever going to do that again, or at least not as far as it is in my power to prevent myself? But if that were true, would I have to come back and say the prayer again next week?

The third thing I wondered was, Is there a never-ending supply of sinful things to keep the pipeline full, so that I know I have to come back and confess again? And if that were true, why bother, since I could just kind of save them up for the next time whenever it was?

The fourth thing I wondered was, Why is the priest the one to absolve me, since he or she would essentially be the last one that I would actually sin against? That is, if I were intending or aiming my sin at someone; it is pretty certain I would be sinning against someone who was not a priest, and it seems like whoever that is ought to be the one that I am saying I am sorry to, and also the one that is saying, oh, all right then, you are absolved, go forth, etc.

And the last thing I wondered was, Why was the exchange localized in this time and place, Sunday morning in church, when the actual opportunities that presented themselves for sin and guilt about sin would be almost anywhere else and not here? And why was it all so fatalistic, that is, the experience was convinced, not just suspicious, that we had all sinned, and that every time we would need absolution, and that we would never get past it and be better people?

It just seemed, and it still seems, like the church had a pretty sour disposition towards its people, and that it was even more presumptuous in assuming that we would all keep coming back and telling our friends to come too, in spite of its generally suspicious nature and insistence that we beat up on ourselves every time we come.

Now I wonder what would happen if we had a liturgical practice that would enable us to explore that idea, that phrase “that we may delight in your will…”

It seems as I have traveled the road of life that I have learned a little about understanding God’s will, but I sure haven’t seen much encouragement to “delight” in it.

I remember reading that when ice cream was invented, in the early 19^th century, the racy French novelist Stendhal said that, “the only thing wrong with it is that it is not a sin to eat it.” It does seem to me that in literature and the arts, the sinful things are generally associated with fun, and the good and wholesome thing are sort of dreary; tasteless like low-carb pasta.

Ultimately, and I hope it doesn’t interfere with the process of introspection, I have gathered for myself a little gallery of entertaining thoughts that I can mull over when I am confessing, as a way of cheering up the process. I hope this intentional flippancy doesn’t offend God, or any of my readers, but I think confession is made more all-embracing and useful, with a little leavening.

 

Finding a Place for Shared Spiritual Reckoning

At this point in dealing with the requests of the computer, I always feel as if I were welcoming myself: “Come in, sit down, enjoy your soup, whatever.” And in a way, I suppose I am, because I am looking for a way to find that part of me which is already you, and that part of you which is already me.

This blog originates from a passage in The Alchemy of Happiness, by the medieval Muslim theologian al-Ghazzali:

He, therefore, is a wise and prudent man,

Who, after morning prayer, spends an hour

Renewing his own spiritual reckoning,

And says,

“My soul, you only have one life;

No moment that has passed can be recovered,

And in God’s mind the number of your breaths

Has been set down and cannot be increased.

When life is done, no spiritual highways

Will hold the traffic of your freighted soul,

Therefore what you would do, you must do now;

So treat this day as if your life were spent,

And this, an extra day, was granted you

By special favor of Almighty God.

What folly greater than to lose this chance?”

From reading this, and meditating on it, I arrived at the idea that it would help us in our poor human condition if we understood more about the process of spiritual self-evaluation that each and every person finds, to a greater or lesser degree, in the transactions of this life.

And so, I am seeking ways to arrive at a purer form of sharing.

I hate words like ecumenism, and syncretism. Why should I use a fifty-cent word to express something so simple as saying, “trust.”

Somehow ordinary people who believe in good things have yielded authority for trusting to clerics and councils and politicians. And the world is an echoing babel of spiritual distrust; and the politicians sell themselves to corporations and make their voices into instruments of commercial interest.  The purpose for a shared blog is to share. I consider myself a seeker after the truth wherever it is to be found. If we have differences, I am more interested in seeing what it is that we share, rather than what differentiates us.

Let each of us try to make an entry that reflects our own process of self-evaluation, and invite others to comment by doing the same. I think at the outset it will work best if we do not comment on each other’s self-examinations. I want to focus on what I have to say about my own spiritual welfare, not on the differences and similarities between our viewpoints.

Did you see the video of Colin Powell describing his reasons for endorsing Obama? He didn’t say it  completely in the interview, but he was inspired by a photograph he had seen in the New Yorker magazine of a Muslim mother embracing her son’s headstone. After he saw this photograph he just meditated on how it made him feel, for over an hour, then he decided to endorse Obama.

I would aspire to have a blog that held moments like this up for the readers to contemplate, and to communicate the value to each reader of having a daily moment of sincere and unvarnished introspection. I believe that if we did this for a while, perhaps more people would see that we have more in common than we have in opposition.