Angels, Archangels and All the Company of Heaven

Today is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (Anglican) or Sts. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Archangels (Catholic). Either way, it’s a day primarily for honoring Michael.

I think it’s interesting how Michael is honored near the Fall Equinox. Look at how the key players of the Nativity Story are all honored on or near the astronomical quarter days:

• Near the Spring Equinox is the Feast of the Annunciation, in which the Archangel Gabriel announces to Mary her role as Theotokos (March 25);
• Near the Summer Solstice is the Nativity of John the Baptist, the Forerunner of Christ (June 24);
• Near the Fall Equinox is the Feast of the Angels, who sang at the Nativity (September 29);
• And of course, near the Winter Solstice is the Nativity of Christ  himself (December 25).

So the Solstices are marked with the dual nativities of Jesus and John, while the Equinoxes are commemorated with feasts for the Angels (and the Virgin). There seems to be a lovely symmetry about it all.

And What Do You Think, Dr. Freud?

So yesterday morning I wrote about a dream I had, in which Ken Wilber appeared. A couple of folks bit the bait and asked either what I thought the dream meant (head), or how it made me feel (heart). So here goes…

For those of you who didn’t read yesterday’s post, the dream involved making a sign to go on the door outside a workshop led by Ken Wilber. We were trying to prevent people from coming in after the presentation began, and disturbing the opening meditation. But when I made the sign, it turned out to have a different message than I thought it would have. The final sign said: “Follow your dream. Do It! But Do Not Enter: Meditation in Progress.”

How did it make me feel: Okay. Not ecstatic or joyous, but neither was it cause for sadness, anger, or anxiety. It’s a “good” okay, more than just a “neutral” okay. I had a sense of peacefulness. But mostly, it was simply a steady-as-she-goes affect that I woke up with yesterday morning. Now having said that, clearly the dream had enough of an impact on me to inspire me to record it in my blog. And perhaps what my “steady” feelings masked was a growing sense (by growing I mean I have been dimly conscious of this for some time now, not just as a result of this dream) that I have some sort of a date with destiny, when I will have to “enter the door” of a new phase in my life — one marked by contemplation and study (Ken Wilber workshop = study; beginning with meditation = contemplation) but where a crucial step to my success will be learning to nurture both of those qualities within me.

Attack it another way: Thanks in large part to the amazing and wonderful spiritual discipline of my wife, I meditate for a half hour nearly all days, and some days for an hour. In addition, driven by my own discipline, I study anywhere from an hour to two hours a day. Read between the lines: I am more self-directed as a student of mysticism than I am as an apprentice.  This is not to say that I resist my meditation practice (although on my worst days I do, but then again, on my worst days I don’t read either), but simply that I don’t have the inner fire for it that I do for study. To put in Hindu jargon, I am more naturally drawn to Jnana Yoga than to Raja Yoga. I believe in the value of Raja (meditation), but just simply default to Jnana (knowledge) as my most “natural” path.

Which leads to an interesting aside: there are four main types of yoga: Jnana (the path of knowledge), Bhakti (the path of devotion), Raja (the path of meditation) and Karma (the path of service). I think of these as the four major spiritual food groups. In other words, I believe an authentic and healthy mysticism ought to incorporate some measure of all four of these disciplines (which points back, ironically enough, to Ken Wilber’s integral theory. But that’s another rabbit hole).

So back to my dream. I’m called to “follow my dream” — literally in this case: to pursue the paths of knowledge and meditation. But what is prevented from entering, when the meditation is in progress? That part of me which is noisy and mindless: i.e., the part that naturally loves to study but naturally does not jump to meditate. It needs to be temporarily kept “outside the door” so that my more vulnerable meditation-self can grow and develop. One very practical way in which this plays out in my life: I have to be careful not to allow my meditation time to devolve into a half hour of discursive thinking about whatever cool ideas I happen to be learning from the books I’m reading at the time. I have to keep those thoughts — you guessed it — outside the door.

Only then can I do it. Only then can I follow my dreams. 

Making a Sign for Ken Wilber

Last night I dreamt that I was participating in a weekend conference where Ken Wilber was a guest speaker. It was Sunday, and the event as a whole was winding down, but Wilber’s presentation was scheduled for that  afternoon. By this point in the conference, the schedule had come a bit undone (!), so there was a general "loose" feeling amongst the participants, but Wilber did not share that relaxed laissez-faire perspective — he had a plane to catch that evening. So when at about 3 PM I walked into the suite were he was to be giving his presentation, the energy seemed both vibrant and perhaps just a little bit frantic. Everyone was standing with Wilber in a circle; he was attempting to begin a guided meditation with which he would be opening the program. The problem was, so many latecomers were just wandering in the room, chatting and full of questions, that the meditation was continually being interrupted. Finally the whole thing broke down and everyone was told to be patient, we’d start again in about five minutes. So everyone began to just mill around.

I went up to Wilber and asked what I could do help. He handed me a piece of paper and a red sharpie and asked me to make a sign to put on the door. I knew that a sign would not be as effective as someone guarding the door, but I didn’t want to volunteer to be such a guard; and without doorkeepers I recognized that a sign was the next best thing. "Perhaps at least some people will read it, and they can point it out to others," I said hopefully, as I looked for a place where I could make my sign.

I decided it needed to say in bold letters "Do Not Enter" with "Meditation in Progress" underneath it. The piece of paper already had some writing on it, so as I began to draw out the "D" and the "o" I realized that the letters did not stand out very well. So I rummaged around the room and found a black marks-a-lot and started to draw outlines to the letters I had previously colored in red.  Meanwhile, people continued to enter into the room and mill about; it felt more like a reception or cocktail party (sans cocktails) than a presentation or workshop about to happen. Wilber was pretty much just standing around, talking, trying to be pleasant to all the people and waiting for me to finish the sign so he could start the meditation.

But disaster struck, and I realized that instead of drawing "Do Not" on the top line, I had actually written "Do It" instead! Oh, dear, what to do now? I figured I could just write "Do Not Enter" on one line below it, but I still had the "Do It" to contend with. I could just use the black marker to mark the whole top line out, but that would have looked crummy; so I decided to turn it into some sort of inspirational phrase: so above the "Do It" in smaller letters I wrote "Follow your dreams." Then I proceeded to write "But do not enter!" below that. So the entire sign ended up saying, in lettering that looked rather too amateurish for my taste:

Follow your dreams
Do It!
But Do Not Enter
Meditation in progress

I don’t think Wilber was very impressed with the sign. But it seemed as if he were too much in a hurry to care.

And that’s when I woke up.

When DNA and dogma collide

If Mary were a virgin when she became pregnant with Jesus, then Jesus’ DNA would not be distinct from hers (since there was no father — or at least, no earthly father — to contribute DNA to Mary’s child). If Mary and Jesus shared the same DNA, then Mary and Jesus could be said to be truly “of one body.” Put another way: Mary would then be the fullest and most perfect embodiment of “the body of Christ.”

Of course, it would be just as accurate to say that Christ would have been the fullest and most perfect embodiment of the body of Mary.

(Note: the above is not intended to be construed as an endorsement of — or refutation of — any particular dogmatic position. It is merely offered for your meditative enjoyment.)

Dementia, Part Two

My father is in the hospital. He’s been in and out in recent years, usually driven their by fainting spells, dizziness and lightheadedness, fluctuations in his blood pressure. He’s lived with Parkinson’s Disease for about a decade now, and was recently diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure. His current journey into the medical otherworld was triggered this past Thursday, when my brother went to visit him, and found him falling repeatedly. Despite his protests, my brother called 911, and Dad’s been hospitalized ever since. Now a team of medical folks are reviewing his medicine and trying to figure out just how all the pieces of the puzzle that is his medical history and condition fit together.

But wait, it gets worse. We’re beginning to see signs of dementia — not vascular or stroke-related dementia such as has placed my mother in a nursing home, but dementia related to Parkinson’s: which has led to a cluster of conditions my brother and I have described as "goofiness": mild (and mostly harmless) confusion, odd and unusual word choice when speaking, and increasingly, an inability to think abstractly. Having been so blithely ignorant of mom’s nascent dementia over the months leading up to (and following) her stroke last June, we’ve been perhaps hypercritical of dad: so this is no real surprise. It feels like part two of a two-part story: my brother mentioned last night that dad is now where mom was, functionally speaking, about a year to a year and a half ago. In other words, now it’s reaching the point where it’s affecting his life. He is unreliable with his medications, and since he’s been hospitalized he’s expressed some mild paranoia and delusional thinking. It all adds up to a recognition that it’s time for him to move out of independent living into a more structured environment.

He wants to be with mom. Perhaps that’s less than ideal, as she is in a nursing home and his functionality is still largely intact: an assisted living center with the resources to deal with dementia would be ideal. But it’s time for him to stop driving, and intuitively it feels wrong to separate them, just in the interest of preserving what little independence he has left. What would he use that independence for, but to try to go see mom? Since she’s been institionalized he hasn’t missed a day with her, unless he himself were in hospital. And he doesn’t just pop in for an obligatory fifteen minutes with her. He sits with her for hours, in silent devotion, perhaps holding vigil, perhaps just hoping. My brother has learned that on some occasions he’s stayed at the nursing home with her so late that the staff there was not comfortable with the idea of him driving the two miles back to his apartment, so they’ve found a bed where he could "sleep over." Now it seems like it is time for him to just move in.

Needless to say, this is all a bit of an emotional slam. My brother, of course, is taking the brunt of this. Last year, during the aftermath of mom’s stroke, I was still self-employed and could manage about a week a month to visit him and the folks (they live in Virginia, some 550 miles from me). But now not only do I have the day-job at the Abbey Store, but this is a crunch time, as we are preparing our fall catalog to go to press October 1 (to be in consumers’ hands by the first of November). On top of that I have four teaching commitments over the next seven weeks, and I’m ghostwriting a book with an 11/1 deadline. It’s about the worst possible time for me to take time off. My brother knows this, and hasn’t asked me to come up. But that does not alleviate the sense of conflict I feel, that I cannot help but let somebody down — my brother, my father, and/or the monastery. No easy answer, except for a promise to my brother that if things got really bad, somehow I’d manage to make it up there. And so I am left praying: for grace for my father, strength for me brother, and the hope that nothing "really bad" emerges, at least in the next few weeks.

Yesterday Fran and Rhiannon went to an arts festival with a couple of friends and I spent the day at home reading. I was restless, bored, jittery. At five o’clock I called dad, and we chatted — something we never used to do, it was always mom who wielded the telephone. Always the good soldier, he shrugged off my attempts to engage him in conversation about his health; when I brought up the idea of him moving into the same facility as mom, he said, "Yes, that way I won’t have to drive." But I know how much driving means independence to him, so it was almost too cheery a response. Still, he did a great job at wearing the dad mantle: he asked about my writing, and inquired if I had finally gotten rid of the dead pine tree in my back yard (which was already dead the last time he visited us, over two years ago). I made an excuse, and told him we planned on having it cut down this fall (which is true). We talked for ten minutes, and then I asked him to be sure to take care of himself, and said good-bye.

Every good-bye could be the last. That’s true of all of us, at any age. But it seems like the light shines just a bit brighter on that unavoidable fact, when dementia comes to call — and moves in, alongside Parkinson’s and heart failure.

Dementia, Part Two

My father is in the hospital. He’s been in and out in recent years, usually driven their by fainting spells, dizziness and lightheadedness, fluctuations in his blood pressure. He’s lived with Parkinson’s Disease for about a decade now, and was recently diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure. His current journey into the medical otherworld was triggered this past Thursday, when my brother went to visit him, and found him falling repeatedly. Despite his protests, my brother called 911, and Dad’s been hospitalized ever since. Now a team of medical folks are reviewing his medicine and trying to figure out just how all the pieces of the puzzle that is his medical history and condition fit together.

But wait, it gets worse. We’re beginning to see signs of dementia — not vascular or stroke-related dementia such as has placed my mother in a nursing home, but dementia related to Parkinson’s: which has led to a cluster of conditions my brother and I have described as “goofiness”: mild (and mostly harmless) confusion, odd and unusual word choice when speaking, and increasingly, an inability to think abstractly. Having been so blithely ignorant of mom’s nascent dementia over the months leading up to (and following) her stroke last June, we’ve been perhaps hypercritical of dad: so this is no real surprise. It feels like part two of a two-part story: my brother mentioned last night that dad is now where mom was, functionally speaking, about a year to a year and a half ago. In other words, now it’s reaching the point where it’s affecting his life. He is unreliable with his medications, and since he’s been hospitalized he’s expressed some mild paranoia and delusional thinking. It all adds up to a recognition that it’s time for him to move out of independent living into a more structured environment.

He wants to be with mom. Perhaps that’s less than ideal, as she is in a nursing home and his functionality is still largely intact: an assisted living center with the resources to deal with dementia would be ideal. But it’s time for him to stop driving, and intuitively it feels wrong to separate them, just in the interest of preserving what little independence he has left. What would he use that independence for, but to try to go see mom? Since she’s been institionalized he hasn’t missed a day with her, unless he himself were in hospital. And he doesn’t just pop in for an obligatory fifteen minutes with her. He sits with her for hours, in silent devotion, perhaps holding vigil, perhaps just hoping. My brother has learned that on some occasions he’s stayed at the nursing home with her so late that the staff there was not comfortable with the idea of him driving the two miles back to his apartment, so they’ve found a bed where he could “sleep over.” Now it seems like it is time for him to just move in.

Needless to say, this is all a bit of an emotional slam. My brother, of course, is taking the brunt of this. Last year, during the aftermath of mom’s stroke, I was still self-employed and could manage about a week a month to visit him and the folks (they live in Virginia, some 550 miles from me). But now not only do I have the day-job at the Abbey Store, but this is a crunch time, as we are preparing our fall catalog to go to press October 1 (to be in consumers’ hands by the first of November). On top of that I have four teaching commitments over the next seven weeks, and I’m ghostwriting a book with an 11/1 deadline. It’s about the worst possible time for me to take time off. My brother knows this, and hasn’t asked me to come up. But that does not alleviate the sense of conflict I feel, that I cannot help but let somebody down — my brother, my father, and/or the monastery. No easy answer, except for a promise to my brother that if things got really bad, somehow I’d manage to make it up there. And so I am left praying: for grace for my father, strength for me brother, and the hope that nothing “really bad” emerges, at least in the next few weeks.

Yesterday Fran and Rhiannon went to an arts festival with a couple of friends and I spent the day at home reading. I was restless, bored, jittery. At five o’clock I called dad, and we chatted — something we never used to do, it was always mom who wielded the telephone. Always the good soldier, he shrugged off my attempts to engage him in conversation about his health; when I brought up the idea of him moving into the same facility as mom, he said, “Yes, that way I won’t have to drive.” But I know how much driving means independence to him, so it was almost too cheery a response. Still, he did a great job at wearing the dad mantle: he asked about my writing, and inquired if I had finally gotten rid of the dead pine tree in my back yard (which was already dead the last time he visited us, over two years ago). I made an excuse, and told him we planned on having it cut down this fall (which is true). We talked for ten minutes, and then I asked him to be sure to take care of himself, and said good-bye.

Every good-bye could be the last. That’s true of all of us, at any age. But it seems like the light shines just a bit brighter on that unavoidable fact, when dementia comes to call — and moves in, alongside Parkinson’s and heart failure.

The Mystery of Mysticism

I’ve been reading a wonderful essay called "Mysticism: An Essay on the History of the Word" by Louis Bouyer, Cong. Orat., found in Richard Woods, OP’s magisterial anthology Understanding Mysticism. Bouyer carefully traces the early usage of the Greek words from which we get our notions of "mysticism" and "mystical" in the New Testament and the writings of the early Church Fathers. What he finds is that mysticism simply is not used in the early centuries of Christianity to refer to a "spiritual experience," such as the experience of the presence of God. Rather, its meaning is more cognitive: it refers to the unveiling (or,  partial unveiling) of a mystery — specifically, the mystery of Christ. In the New Testament St. Paul speaks of the "mystery of Christ," referring to how Christ reveals God (and God’s relationship with the creation) through his person and his life. The earliest Christian theologians then expand on this to see the "mystical" reading of scripture to be a method of Biblical interpretation by which the presence of Christ can be teased out of the Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians today call the Old Testament). Beyond the idea of mysticism as an unveiling of the hidden meaning of scripture, as sacramental theology develops mysticism evolves in meaning as well, coming to refer to the unveiling of the presence of Christ in the eucharist. By the time of Constantine, all the sacraments are being described as "mystical" — that is, as means by which the mystery of Christ is unveiled.

Eventually, mysticism takes on its third, "spiritual" meaning, referring to the experience of the mystery of Christ in one’s own life. From there it devolves into its current meaning, as a vague signifier of any kind of "spiritual" or "religious" experience. But isn’t it ironic, how so many people use the word "mysticism" to refer to the spiritual thread of unity that lies at the heart of all religions, when its original use, at least within Christianity, meant something very specific (the mystery of Christ) rather than something very general (the experience of God)?

The Mystery of Mysticism

I’ve been reading a wonderful essay called “Mysticism: An Essay on the History of the Word” by Louis Bouyer, Cong. Orat., found in Richard Woods, OP’s magisterial anthology Understanding Mysticism. Bouyer carefully traces the early usage of the Greek words from which we get our notions of “mysticism” and “mystical” in the New Testament and the writings of the early Church Fathers. What he finds is that mysticism simply is not used in the early centuries of Christianity to refer to a “spiritual experience,” such as the experience of the presence of God. Rather, its meaning is more cognitive: it refers to the unveiling (or, partial unveiling) of a mystery — specifically, the mystery of Christ. In the New Testament St. Paul speaks of the “mystery of Christ,” referring to how Christ reveals God (and God’s relationship with the creation) through his person and his life. The earliest Christian theologians then expand on this to see the “mystical” reading of scripture to be a method of Biblical interpretation by which the presence of Christ can be teased out of the Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians today call the Old Testament). Beyond the idea of mysticism as an unveiling of the hidden meaning of scripture, as sacramental theology develops mysticism evolves in meaning as well, coming to refer to the unveiling of the presence of Christ in the eucharist. By the time of Constantine, all the sacraments are being described as “mystical” — that is, as means by which the mystery of Christ is unveiled.

Eventually, mysticism takes on its third, “spiritual” meaning, referring to the experience of the mystery of Christ in one’s own life. From there it devolves into its current meaning, as a vague signifier of any kind of “spiritual” or “religious” experience. But isn’t it ironic, how so many people use the word “mysticism” to refer to the spiritual thread of unity that lies at the heart of all religions, when its original use, at least within Christianity, meant something very specific (the mystery of Christ) rather than something very general (the experience of God)?