skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Traces of the sea in sand...they remind me of Wallace Stevens's "fire-fangled feathers"... a Cherish'd Reader implored me to post something so she didn't have to look at "that hideous picture of Mother Teresa" every time she checked my seemingly moribund blog... I apologize on both counts... :)
My life has been filled with chaotic beauty lately--this beach you see above, as the sun sank and Sophia in her white dress waded in the tidal pools...Sophia herself, so long a friend and now infinitely more...the chaos isn't wreck or disorder, but change, the unveiling of beauty...chaos in the creative, Mandelbrot sense...
one reason I haven't been blogging a lot recently is that I don't want this to turn into a romance blog...but Sophia is all I want to talk about! But as much as I'd like to write about Sophia and me, it's more fun to be me with her, to live who we are...and then there are the invasion of privacy concerns... right, Sophia? (It's probably bad blog manners to indulge in what, in radio jargon, is called "point to point communication," but Sophia still loyally reads this so-called blog and I doubt, honey, that you want all that mushy, ♥-y dovey stuff spilling over here... ☺)
Anyway...it's time to leave work and I may have succeeded in kicking the future saint below the fold...
You've probably heard about the recent revelations of Mother Teresa's agonizing spiritual doubt, and you may, if you are an obsessive Kalibhakta fan, remember that somewhere on this blog, in some post I don't have time or energy to look up, I dissed Mother Teresa, citing Christopher Hitchens's infamous rant about the recently departed though damn near sainted nun.
There's an even better anti-MT rant on the web now--Susan Jacoby's "Road to Sainthood Paved with Good Publicity," and though I understand every argument and ideological tack and jibe therein (and still sympathize with many of them), I am far less on board the H.M.S. Nunsense than I used to be. In fact, I now count myself among the brainless theocrats who believe, in Jacoby's words, "that Teresa is even holier because of her overwhelming doubts." MT's dark night of the soul (aka "the Abyss") not only fits to a "T" the classic description of this dreadful malady, but is the longest such night I have ever heard of...the Divine Mother has given me little tastes of the dark night and they were more than enough...
But Jacoby's not fooled. In her rather Freudian diagnosis, MT "combine[d] masochism with narcissism," no doubt due to toilet training in the presence of a crucifix. Jacoby's piece is worth reading, and allow me to repeat, she makes a real good point, which boils down to one pithy sentence: "Teresa never showed any concern, in India or elsewhere, about the root causes of poverty--including lack of education, corrupt dictatorships, inequitable distribution of wealth, bigotry against social, ethnic, or religious underclasses, and contempt for women."
Problem is, I and Jacoby and some of our fellow T-skeptics have overlooked some, er, rather obvious empirical truths. Yes, MT arguably abetted as much suffering as she ameliorated; inarguably, she made an idol of suffering. But, as one commenter to Jacoby's column puts it, "Of course had she advocated birth control liberals would love her too, but being a Catholic nun it is a bit much to have expected from her." And I would say it was a bit much, as well, to expect MT to turn down money she believed was going to help her accomplish God's work of caring for the poor and helpless. If God's work was aided by bucks from bad guys--great. Why turn them away and swap a minor ethical hat-trick for actual lives in the slums of Calcutta? And if she were clueless or blinkered about the bad guys she hung out with, I have to say she wouldn't be the first blinkered or clueless religious person in history. Hell, I've even heard of clueless, closed-minded atheists!
Even Jacoby admits a more basic point: "someone who observes extreme human suffering on a daily basis would have more doubts than most about the existence of a benevolent deity." In true faux-skeptic style, though, Jacoby bulldozes past this excellent caveat so she can flog (so to speak) her far more speculative maso-narcissist theory. It's possible that MT was doing the best she knew how to do, given the horizon of her knowledge, belief, and experience--in other words, that she was human like the rest of us. Despite the low-grade sensationalism with which atheists and other non-Catholics tend to treat the concept of sainthood, this human fallibility is exactly what makes "sainthood" so inspiring: here's somebody who had to deal with all the crap I've had to deal with and more (boils, living in a cave in the desert, being sawn in half) and yet he or she made a pretty good run of it.
If Mother Teresa could do God's backbreaking work for 50 grinding years during which she was pretty sure there wasn't a God, during which she was pretty sure it was all for naught and there'd just be lights out and oblivion at the end, then for me she embodies the Grail Knight spirit of recognizing that one's task is impossible and doing it with all one's heart anyway. It matters little whether her work really was God's, or whether it was as noble as it could be, as perfect as it could be, as well-intentioned or rational or as worthy of my approval as it could be. Kali has been gradually relieving me, for years now, of my duty to approve of everything that goes on in Her creation, and for this I'm thankful. So no, there's much of MT's career I still don't approve of, but I don't need to, and don't need to make of her an idol of goodness nor of righteous foolery. I do know that God favors certain of Her children with the dark night (for reasons John of the Cross can explain far better than I), and so I look at Mother Teresa with awe now, not uncritical awe but with a feeling of mingled affection and reverential dread; I know now that we are siblings in God's family, but I hope Mom has different plans for me.
Stained glass by Catherine A. Brock, Yulokod Stained Glass Studios
As will this Philadelphia Inquirer writer...
but now that I have your attention, the real reason I'm posting (besides nostalgia for once having had a blog--but you probably don't want me to blog about my life right now...it would be sooooo mushy (he said as he listened to The English Congregation's apotheosis of bell-bottom mush, "Softly Whispering I Love You"))...
the real reason I'm posting is to put something out there that will be of interest to Goddess-geeks (and probably only G-gs): a debunking-the-debunkers article from Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories Archive confronting one little (but interesting) corner of the Was There or Wasn't There an Ancient Goddess Religion debate. (My recent theme of skepticism and counter-skepticism owes, I guess, to a class I'm teaching now in which critical thinking plays a central role; we're reading a book by Michael Shermer, etc.)
I do respect, to a point, the scholarship of Cynthia Eller, the focus of the article I've linked to, but have also, as Dashu does, found it to be of a piece with a rather historically naive, ideologically-driven strain of "feminism" that preoccupies itself with the foibles of earlier feminist writers, seeking to redress allegedly sloppy thought and theory. Which would be fine...if one didn't, from the pulpit of reason, make even worse mistakes that served one's own narrow agenda.
I'll take Susan Griffin over Judith Butler any day; it's sort of analogous to the way one wag compared Hemingway and Burroughs. Burroughs's fiction changed the way we see the world; Hemingway's changed the way we see Pamplona. Griffin, for me anyway, changed the world, while Butler very persuasively laid out a revolutionary new theory that I first read in the eighteenth-century writings of Mary Wollstonecraft.
"no matter how weird this all seems...it works for me."
Hah?
Isis?
Literal-minded readers (i.e., people like me) of my princess post might be concerned that I'm teetering on the verge of going over the edge into the very abyss of full-blown newage (rhymes with "sewage") gullibility... no...it's OK...I'm just more secure in my faith and less inclined to rack up karmic brownie points obsessive via self-doubt... but anyway--
not that I'm a sage or anything (to say the very least), but I've said before and still believe that skepticism is the one absolute requirement on the spiritual path. Devotion will get you farther than anything, but some people make it with little or no devotion. Constancy is crucial, but we all need a vacation from God now and again. Erudition helps a lot, but if it were mandatory then 99% of all the saints and mystics in history would have to be disqualified. Keeping a journal is mandatory for those of us who are literate, but again, most of the lovers of God down through the ages have not been literate and they did just fine. What else? Even belief is optional; you don't have to believe in anything to be transformed by a spiritual practice. I certainly didn't believe in a guru or in Kali when I started my experiment with bhakti yoga back in the day...but if I hadn't been skeptical, I wouldn't have tried so hard to find practices that genuinely changed me, and wouldn't have stuck with them until they did.
Skepticism can be practiced by anyone, at any time, and every child of God worthy of the name has at one time or another seriously, painfully, and existentially questioned every quantum packet of that lovely Divine light shining into his or her heart...see Matthew 27:46, see Ramakrishna's relief that he was not mentally ill when informed by a panel of experts that he was, indeed, a very spiritual dude... see Martha Beck's via dolorosa in Expecting Adam... see the terrible yearning that possessed Emerson's hands to tear the lid from his beloved's coffin... we want the truth, but the truth troubles us in its sunset-evanescence, we think it can't really be there but it haunts us nonetheless...if courage, according to the cliché, is fear that has said its prayers, then faith is belief that has relentlessly searched out its limits.
And everything, every "absolute," has limits, even God...for "God" is nothing more than a concept standing in place of a limitless and therefore unimaginable Reality. If you're a knee-jerk smart aleck like me, you've probably even wondered whether self-proclaimed skeptics ever get skeptical about skepticism. Lo and behold--at least two of them have (and a third comes to mind, Michael Shermer, who's often refreshingly aware that he doesn't know everything)...
but get this: even among the skeptigentsia there are troubling signs that the eighteenth century has ended and that Kant--actually could. In "The Myth of Consistent Skepticism" psychologist Todd Riniolo and philosophy scholar Lee Nisbet fashion a fascinating and cogent argument about the inevitability of bias and the limited horizons of knowledge that make an Archimedean skepticism (like that pretended to by Richard Dawkins, Martin Gardner, Christopher Hitchens, et al.) ... impossible. Hmpf. And this article appears in none other than The Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine that until recently, anyway, was a touchstone of naive empiricism.
I think part of what's happened to awaken some skeptics to the tentative nature of their own position is not that they've suddenly stumbled on some tobacco-stained volumes of Nietzsche in the local used book store, but that they've attempted, as Shermer has done, to go beyond ridiculing or refuting weird beliefs to trying to understand why people hold such beliefs in the first place. It was one thing to laugh at creationism in the 1970s and 1980s, as American aerospace and software engineers changed the world; it was another thing to see it ascendant in the nation's curricula in the first years of the twenty-first century, as the good old USA's dominance in the sciences seemed to be slipping away. If absurd beliefs don't just vaporize in the daylight of reason, a few (post-)enlightened souls are asking, then what is it that sustains them...and what could possibly replace or modify them? The problem with this kind of question is that eventually the asker has to look at why he or she holds his or her allegedly superior beliefs...if not for the sake of intellectual honesty, then at least for the sake of comparison...
and so one becomes skeptical of skepticism, if one is lucky--and one doesn't abandon skepticism, but becomes aware that it, too, is another way of seeing the world, another conceptual tool--another spell one can cast to attain certain results, like the Believing Spell that allows one to enjoy the latest Harry Potter novel, or the Doubting Spell that allows one to improve one's own efforts at writing. Certainty is lovely in love and horrid in hate; faith is a balm in the heart but a caustic in the brain. If God knew Herself completely, the universe would end--to love Her, we must mirror Her process of evolution and self-discovery... "To follow knowledge like a sinking star / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." Skepticism, like belief, works poorly as a march but brilliantly as a dance--as love--love of the Universe: first believe, then doubt, then believe again--and in, and around, and out, and about--and--embrace...with the mind...then doubt...then love...
We've all heard about wacky aristos--mad Ludwig the castle-builder and would-be Parsifal; the British duke who, Richard Altick tells us, "wore three pairs of socks with his cork-soled boots" and built a vast underground complex beneath the ducal hall; the hyper-dandified "king" of them all, Robert de Montesquiou...
and now comes Princess Martha Louise of Norway, with her Astarte web site (you gotta love the name, but the site's in Norwegian, alas) and very public belief in angels... and eerily, Her Highness has managed, like yours truly, to weave herself a Goddess/angel mythos that unites Astarte, Isis, Hathor, Demeter, Kali, and the Black Madonna. And the stars (rather royally, she likes the title "Queen of Heaven," which in Norwegian is literally "Queen of the Stars"). Hmm...it's the same old WiHW question...is there something outside me leading me in this direction or do I and my cohorts just all read the same weird books or have similar neurological phenomena that roughly match up with certain semi-universal cultural information/images?
One thing that has happened during my unintentional blog hiatus is that I've become less and less interested in that question, though. I have been through, in the past several months, the most difficult, scary, joyous, and wonderful period of my life, and the only thing that's got me through is my faith...the only thing. And after a test like that, you just kinda have to say, no matter how weird this all seems, no matter how improbable it might feel in 2007 to revere Isis and preoccupy oneself with the true meaning of the Eleusinian mysteries--it works for me. I listened to the inner voice (so hard to hear once upon a time, a little easier now) that guided me away from received wisdom and towards the unknown, towards the face of God as She could manifest in my particular heart...and listening to this voice and seeking that face are the most important things any of us can do...there are many other important things, too, like loving people and building a life one feels centered and at home in...but it all has to come from that inner light...
Oh dear...I need to remind myself to post one silly post for every serious/preachy one... but this has been a time of learning and deciding what I really think and who I really am, and so (without sounding horribly self-righteous, I hope) I'm getting farther from reflexive, CYA skepticism and self-doubt and more into trying to embrace the Divine Mother in every instant of Her unfolding. Which is a damn sight harder than the alternatives...dammit! Back in January or February I literally wrote a blog post (which didn't get posted) that warned people away from the spiritual path--just stay dumb and happy, I urged, and I wanted to print the thing up and put it under windshield wipers at Wal-Mart...
but it isn't really how I feel. I know it isn't Kali who makes my life difficult--her maya is going to happen whether I'm here or not, whether I'm loving Her or not, whether anything or not...and I have the choice to love and trust Her or to withdraw into self-centeredness and fear, which I still do often enough to make me very glad that, for whatever reason, a long time ago, when I wasn't looking for Her, the Divine Mother showed Herself to me, a single burning flame in the dark night of egotism, and bade me to chase after Her...
Stanley Hauerwas once said something to the effect that without God, "life is just one goddam thing after another," and sometimes it's that way with God, too. But in Her lap (when I have the sense to stay there) I feel less and less inclined to feel like a victim, to wish my life away, to succumb to romantic despair, to believe I'll be happy if external event x happens or material possession y comes my way. She has helped me love myself and has sent me a miraculous lover as if to urge me forward...more on that later, if you're lucky and if I don't chicken out...
...I promise...
<3 to anyone reading this...
K
I've been looking for a list of these...this one has 333...there have to be lots more, though. This one leaves off Our Lady of Space, a 1960s-vintage appellation...still, some of these are so interesting: "Star that Bore the Sea"..."Light Cloud of Heavenly Rain"...
"Unwatered Vineyard of Immortality's Wine" is a little klunky, though...
my mom (raised by lapsed Catholics, lapsed even further, and now back, sort of, in the fold--on her own terms, of course) is coming to see the new Temple of Doom for the first time and Goddess knows what she will make of the multitude of Marys on the walls (probably approve)...the aggregation of angels (ditto)... the gaggle of gurus (probably not say anything)...the handful of weird Hindu images, including a repro of Sarada Devi's devotional image of Kali...then again, my mom, ever eclectic, ever marching to her own fife and drum corps, gave me the image of Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Saraswati that's nailed up by the door...
it was my mom's girlhood bible, well-hid in her grown-up closet, that beckoned me to the spiritual world when I was a kid, and though my parents' fears of my becoming a "religious fanatic" have long since and in strange fashion come true, I'm also happier with me, with my mom, and with the memory of my father than I've ever been...and Mom can see it, or maybe after 43 years she's just given up on making me into a dittohead (she's actually been more and more, er, laissez-faire since my dad died years ago)... which increases harmony and mental health, as does my post- Al-Anon decision to cease and desist fretting about the error of her or anyone else's ways...for their ways might work far better for them than mine would...or might be their Higher Power's means of drawing them nearer...
Jane Flax or Patricia J. Williams or somebody once said that "the complexity of the world is a fact of great analytical importance," and it's also one that Kali seems determined to impress upon me, by immersing me in complex experiences with complex women in Her complex unfolding and giving me just enough smarts for my head to ache at how-- complex-- it All is... and I know that I honor Her complexity in part by living and letting live, by being who I am and not getting bent out of shape when others, lo and behold, want to be who they are...hard as it is, it's so much better than what I knew before... if Mary can have hundreds of titles, then Her children can have several, at least, too...and it's OK...like mother, like child...
