More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
Worship?
"Let us worship.”
We stand.
Or bow. Or kneel. Or prostrate ourselves. To Him. Or Her. Or Them.
It is a being, a person (“In sprit form,” you trip over yourself to say, but a being still). He/She/It understands and converses, caresses, and commands as a being, like us. But better.
And yes, we call it God to spiritify it. But being it is – a responder, a guide, demanding, correcting, banishing, loving, judging, excluding, including, blessing. “A being who…” we say. And envision.
We say “God said” and “God gave” and “God rested” and “God wept and "God loves.”
Clearly we worship a being.
Or do we?
Maybe not. Isn’t it an idea we worship? Don’t we worship the core idea that the god/being embodies, personifies, mouths, promises, requires?
Aren’t we first attracted to that idea and then to whatever god/being is purveyor of that idea?
Take your favourite God. Imagine it. Now imagine it without a single idea. Would you worship it?
Doubtful. Why would you? Surely there is nothing as useless as a God with no message. Just a sitting-around-the-pool-gin-and-tonic God? Unlikely.
More likely it is the God’s ideas, most especially its core idea, that attract us; and it is that idea that we use to proselytise. It is that core idea that creates crusades and builds cities and cloisters people for the rest of their lives.
Again, what is your favourite God? If it is the Christian God (the only one I know anything about), the core idea that attracted you is probably that the prophet-God Jesus was crucified so that if you follow Him, you will have a happy eternal life. As opposed to a tortured one. He went through temporary torture so that we could be spared eternal torture. That is an astonishing idea. (I’ve never quite understood why He was required to do that, why, given how perfect He was, He could not just have been granted a happy eternal life and then blessed us with that, too, but what do I know?)
My guess is that if you took away that idea of Jesus’s sacrifice for your happy eternal life, you would not be all that interested in the God who said it nor the Jesus who suffered the pain.
And if it is Jesus himself you worship, you probably would not bother if He hadn’t said all the things He said about love and inclusion and justice and forgiveness and modesty and, yes, an eternal (happy) life.
Who would Jesus be without those ideas?
In fact, some scholars say that people who claim that there is “evidence” of a man called “Jesus” in the Middle East around the time that the Bible was cobbled together in Nicaea 400 years after Jesus in the summer of 395 are wrong. But the ideas ascribed to Him are so compelling, they needed to be preserved and the best way to preserve a set of good ideas is to put them into the mouth of a singular amazing being. Enter Jesus. And there they are still for us all to study and try to embody.
For the moment, then, I propose we consider that it is not Jesus we worship; it is His Ideas.
So now can we worship? Is that form of worship okay?
I don’t think so.
I would guess that worshipping is never okay. Not even of ideas so exhilarating, so exalting, so radical, so demanding, so complex we collapse from their complexity, so nearly impossible to execute we usually give up, ideas so wondrous they surely merit our worship?
Not even then. Because when we peer into any human life and find worship, we find obedience. And when we find obedience, we find abdication of independent thought. And well, you don’t have to be a historian to know where that can lead. Ask any Jew.
So I propose we stop worshipping. That we start considering. That we start wondering, and noticing, and asking, and letting our brains – this most wondrous of all wondrous things – do what their design allows them to do: think, feel, speak.
Let us get up off the floor; let us rise from the kneeler; let us open our eyes; turn to each other and ask, “What do you think, or feel, or want to say?” Let us listen reverently to each other equally, and then praise each other and life itself before we say amen and vow to return.
Let us – think.
To Be
Get the trucks off the road.
Get the road off the road.
Get off the road.
Courage
“Acting in the face of fear.” That is how people seem to define “courage.” When we are in danger and are frightened but we keep going, we are said to be “courageous.” Maybe. Certainly that experience deserves an admiring descriptor. But I don’t think it is “courageous.”
I think there is a deeper dimension to real courage. I think there is in true courage a decision to act from the core of our selves, the “heart,” to evoke, as it were, intelligent feeling, and to express with action the particular collaboration that is head and heart.
I loved my linguistic studies at Scripps, particularly the course that began with Anglo Saxon, moved into Middle English, wandered back through Latin and Old French, and landed in modern English with its uncountable variants.
I remember taking that twisty road with the word ”courage.” I enjoyed how it morphed from “cor” in Latin, to “curage” and “coer” in Old French, to “corage” in Middle English and then to “courage” in Modern English.
What fascinated me was that only in Modern English did “courage” come to mean bravery in the face of danger. Courage for most of its life had denoted the heart. It had meant roughly “to say what we really think by speaking from the heart.” Various writers have recently revisited this aspect of “courage”, and I want to add to their voices. I think it is time to acknowledge that our current word “courage” still contains its earliest meaning. I would like us to dig it out and honour it.
Each of those early words meaning “heart” denoted “the heart as the seat of feeling.” It is from that “seat of feeling” that I think real courage forms. It is not a seat of feelings, as in grief, or rage. It is rather a seat of sensing what is core for us. You could say that in being courageous we summon our true selves through our thinking heart, and then act. That is, we act in order to say, “This is who I am. I do this because it comes from the heart of my self. From my intelligent feeling core. When I do that, when I act from that “seat of feeling”, my heart and my mind unite.
In fact, true courage may have nothing to do with defying fear. We may not feel afraid at all when we decide to stand true to our core selves. When we do, others may assume we are defying fear, perhaps because our true core is frightening to them. But for us asserting the true heart of ourselves might feel joyous. It usually is for me I think.
I wonder what you think courage is.
I also wonder when you last acted definitively from your intelligent seat of feeling, from your core. When were you last “cor”ageous?
Kindness
In her poem, “Kindness,” Naomi Shihab Nye asserts:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness. 1
These lines and the rest of the poem are rich and beautiful. But they disturb me. Not aesthetically as good poetry should. But dangerously as grounded ideas should not.
She seems to be making the age-old point that we can’t know good unless we first know bad, that we must know pain in order to comprehend pleasure. That view is not logical or factual. (And, by the way, it seems never to reverse itself and propose that we must know pleasure in order to comprehend pain.) This “bad first” argument sets up “bad” as inherent and “good”as learned.
I don’t buy it. I think that we are born equipped to recognise and experience good and bad separately, equally, non-sequentially – non-interdependently. We know pain when we have pain; we know pleasure when we have pleasure. End of.
Research seems to support this view. According to Tiffany Field and Miguel Diego, et.al., high-anger mothers' high prenatal cortisol and adrenaline and low dopamine and serotonin levels were mimicked by their neonates' high cortisol and low dopamine levels. They suggest in that way that in utero the foetus registers pleasure without first having to register pain. In fact, the foetus feels pretty much whatever the mother is feeling. 2
Pleasure is pleasure. Pain is pain. Neither requires the other in order to be experienced. Good.
Now we can get on with being kind, not because it will counter pain but because it will bring pleasure. All by itself, sweet as anything.
And because it is the right thing to do. The human thing. The intelligent thing. The strengthening thing.
The inherent thing.
1 Naomi Shihab Nye, © 1995, https://poets.org/poem/kindness
2 Field T, Diego M, Hernandez-Reif M, Salman F, Schanberg S, Kuhn C, Yando R, Bendell D. Prenatal anger effects on the fetus and neonate. J Obstet Gynaecol. 2002 May;22(3):260-6. doi: 10.1080/01443610220130526. PMID: 12521495.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12521495/#:~:text=In a follow-up across cortisol and low dopamine levels.