Praise for Autumn

Bold sun, breeze, gold and amber leaves, the ground covered in papery leaf debris, with lighting-rods of red. Squirrels play chase across the leaf bed sounding like a herd of elephants. One lone hawk turns into a circle of five or six, gliding far above the water, a backdrop of piercing blue and cloud-puff at its wing. Winds fan the water northeast. Rustle & whisper. Cold cawk of a bird off behind the sun.

Shared Wisdom

Karen Armstrong is author of many books including: The Case for God, Buddha, and The Battle for God. She was recently awarded the TED Prize and spearheaded the Charter for Compassion as a result of the award.

Art as Witness

Elka Amorim, Ink and watercolor

Inspiration, joy, loneliness, anger, fear--as well as we can understand these in ourselves, we can begin to act compassionately in our relationships with others; this is divine witness... which is one of the gifts of any art form, enabling us to glimpse something in ourselves we might not otherwise have noticed. I am grateful that people (artists, dancers, writers, musicians,...) take risks every day to dive deep into the Unknown and see what they find there, then share it with the rest of us.

Looking at Anger

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Being Peace, explains the fourteen precepts of mindfulness training and said this about anger:

Aware that anger blocks communication and creates suffering, we are determined to take care of the energy of anger when it arises and to recognize and transform the seeds of anger that lie deep in our consciousness. When anger comes up, we are determined not to do or say anything, but to practice mindful breathing or mindful walking and acknowledge, embrace, and look deeply into our anger. We will learn to look with the eyes of compassion at those we think are the cause of our anger.

In the West, we might ruffle a bit upon hearing "we are determined not to do or say anything" when anger arises. Psychology teaches us to speak up for ourselves, that it's healthy to let our anger out. Perhaps both are valuable. Perhaps if we are first determined not to do or say anything, we will do some real work on ourselves, get our thoughts straight, understand the root of our anger before we speak up. Then when we do speak up it can be stronger, more compassionate, and more honest than simple rage. "To look deeply into our anger" is an act of faith.

Anger Into Praise

But what of the healthy and inevitable anger in response to suffering and injustice we witness because it is real in our lives? Where do we as individuals and as a society respond to this anger without making the anger into life itself? This brings us back to Kathleen Norris's statement, “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation in praise.” I’m especially interested in that phrase, transformation into praise.

Noah Levine, author of Dharma Punx, and founder of the American Buddhist meditation society called Against the Stream, spoke once of transforming that rightful distrust and anger present in punk rock and its culture into a useful questioning of authority and the status quo. Punk rock, rock n’ roll, rap, these were all originally (and sometimes still are) emanations of disquiet among social and political injustice. While incarcerated as a teen, Levine discovered meditation and its cohort, awareness, as peaceful vehicles against the current of pain and suffering, and now he teaches those tactics to anyone who dares to transcend. Ex-addicts and prisoners and rock hipsters are some among those he teaches. The website proclaims, “The Buddha said his path to awakening was one of rebellion –a subversive path that is against greed, against hatred, and against delusion. It is a path of radical, engaged transformation, a path of finding freedom and spending the rest of our lives giving it away. It is a path that goes Against the Stream.”

Similarly, in response to Chicago’s gang violence, there is an organization called CeaseFire that uses reformed ex-gang members in their tactical “street violence interruptions,” creating a community network system to actively defuse gang-related shootings and killings.

Compassionate action is praise. It is fruit born of the seed of anger.

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty, via www.guardian.co.uk)

Psalms for Chicago

I have been thinking more about the psalms. Kathleen Norris expressed an idea that the psalms question all our dignified, American middle-class notions of politeness. She points especially to women who “are conditioned to deny their pain, and to smooth over or ignore the effects of violence, even when it is directed against them.” (Cloister Walk, 94) She wisely links pain and anger, “Anger is one honest reaction to the cost of pain, and the psalms are full of anger.”

My thoughts turn to Derrion Albert, the young man recently murdered by gang violence in South Side, Chicago. He was not involved in a gang but was a bystander and his beating was recorded via cell phone video. His is one of a rampant amount of children’s deaths in that area due to gang violence, which stems from what? Anger? Anger seething in alive and hopeful (and they are hopeful in spite of themselves, because they are human) young men and women who see no options for their future. They are entrenched in poverty, crime, drugs, domestic violence, poor education, distorted values… And the communities suffer endlessly watching their children die. If we can remember that these are misguided human beings caught in a wicked web, we might look at poverty, poor education, and drugs as among the true adversaries and see new value in the psalms: (9:18)

To the nether world the wicked shall turn back,

all the nations that forget God.

For the needy shall not always be forgotten,

nor shall the hope of the afflicted forever perish.

Rise, O Lord, let not man prevail;

let the nations be judged in your presence.

Strike them with terror, O Lord;

let the nations know that they are but men.

Hitting the Refresh Button

Sometimes I get too caught up in analyzing the exciting (& alluring!) whirlwind of human thoughts, ideas, and constructs... psalms, politics, language, history. I forget that "God" is simple. A beam of sunlight, a beating heart, a smile. How simple is the One? Put food in the mouth of a person who cannot feed themselves and feel the magnitude of simplicity.

Investigating the Psalms

The psalms are weighing on me after two days with the Liturgy of the Hours. I am testament to their lure, yet their language often eludes me. All the prostrating to “Lord,” hating adversaries and accusations of sin deter me. All the references to Israel and Zion confound me with their seeming lack of relevance in my life. Oh, that out of Zion would come the salvation of Israel! (53:7) These are words and ideas from another time, another culture, another political reality than mine.

But I won’t give up. I tried and tried to read William Faulkner to no avail until my brother said, “Don’t read his writing word for word but let the words wash over you.” And with that advice I plowed through four or five Faulkner novels one winter, finding the stories alive and searing in my living room. I feel the same possibility for the literature of the psalms.

Kathleen Norris suggests, “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation in praise.” But still I question basing daily—hourly, prayer on so much pain and judgment. What we put into ourselves, our sustenance, matters. Television, junk food, the fixation on tragedy in the nightly news, these affect our chemical and psychological (and spiritual) makeup. I’m not advocating denial of anger or pain at all, but just wondering how these particular writings might or might not benefit us today.

And yet if I change the word Lord to Love, the power of this poetry grips me and won’t let me go:

O, [Love] to you I call; hasten to me;

hearken to my voice when I call upon you.

Let my prayer come like incense before you;

the lifting up of my hands, like the evening sacrifice.

Should semantics matter?

Of the Hours

At Gethsemani, the monks follow the Liturgy of the Hours, as do most Christian monastic orders. This is the official set of daily prayers and consists of singing the Psalms, hymns, and readings. As I wandered the grounds, journaling, napping, taking photos, or simply being in awe of my surroundings, the church bell continually brought my attention back toward a central point, my faith. The bells, distinct beautiful sounds that they are, ring on the hour, quarter hour and half hour, and have particular purpose notifying the community that a liturgy is due to begin. The monks begin their prayer at 3:15am and meet nine times for prayer throughout the day. I found the continual coming together: the bell tolling, people gathering one by one, the simple singing and prayer to be a dynamic routine. Eventually I looked forward to the bell and the repetition of sounds I would find in the choir.

The Liturgy of the Hours, in their full yearly cycle, is based on the Psalms, which happen to be the poetic verse of the Old Testament. These verses are much lauded in Judeo-Christian culture and it’s easy to see why; the power and aliveness that exudes from them endures. Still I find their language daunting and archaic, so that when I follow the words precisely I get caught up in analyzing and disliking them. They are not the words I want to pray, even as I recognize their significance in relaying the human condition of suffering and despair:

I am like water poured out;

all my bones are racked.

My heart has become like wax

melting away with my bosom.

My throat is dried up like baked clay,

my tongue cleaves to my jaws;

The metaphors are rich, virile, and sometimes difficult to penetrate:

You have exalted my horn like the wild bulls

you have anointed me with rich oil.

And my eye has looked down upon my foes,

and my ears have heard of the fall

of my wicked adversaries.

But when I let their song wash over me and stop thinking so much, but just exist in the words, I experience a tender surrender. This kept me coming back to every liturgy when I was present on the grounds, and kept me late (7:30pm) on a windy, cold day for the final liturgy, Compline.

Compline is the end of the day, the night prayer. The closing hymns and prayers are particularly sweet to the ear and heart. The monks sing on into the growing darkness,

May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.

Silence

Religion as storytelling, images, and rituals may simply be the poetry of faith—the allegories, metaphors, verse, meter and rhyme that give relatable witness to our experience of the Divine. This poetry can succeed in giving meaningful, but limited, glimpses of our most sacred understandings even as it fails to adequately replicate the glorious whole, which is unexplainable and mostly unfathomable. The truest revelation of the Unfathomable is silence.

At the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, the Trappist monks there are practicing silence among their daily routine of contemplation, work, and prayer. On Gethsemani’s thousands of acres, silence emanates from every sunlit branch and red-haired squirrel, even with the loudness of cars blowing by on the highway that traverses their land. And in the choir of their liturgy, silence penetrates between every word they sing of the Psalms.

Sitting in the rear of the empty church, all white painted brick, stone, golden oak and stained glass of yellow, grey, green, I find the silence endures as a lack that seems like the ultimate richness. There I discover the paradox of silence, what the Buddhists call Emptiness, that it contains everything, that it is rich beyond all comprehension. So that silence is intimate reckoning with the unknowable, unnameable, indescribable All.