Food for thought for beauty junkies

Ignatius of Loyola was quite the achiever. Among his exploits: he founded the Jesuit order (to squash the Protestants, it seems), and he designed a set of Spiritual Exercises to lead the student to feel the presence of God in his/her life. Oh, and in order to commit himself to his vocation as a young pilgrim, he STOOD UP, in church, ALL NIGHT, in prayer and vigil.  You try that sometime.

What follow here are some excerpts from his biography that tell of a strange hallucination he experienced; this anecdote left such an impression on me that I continue to mull it over some 5 years after first reading his book  (A Pilgrim’s Journey: The Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola).

tl;dr:
Section 8:   He begins to pay attention to his thoughts and the effects they have on him. This forms the core of the practice he later develops for discerning which kinds of thoughts one should listen to.
Section 19:   While starting to practice asceticism, something similar to a glittering serpent appears to him and mesmerizes him… He continues to see this image off and on for the next 15 years, but his relationship to it evolves.
Section 31:   He observes that the beauty of the vision diminishes in the presence of the cross; he comes to believe that the vision is from the devil, and he decides to break his attachment to it.

The excerpts: (my commentary at the end)

8. Yet there was this difference. When he was thinking of those things of the world, he took much delight in them, but afterwards, when he was tired and put them aside, he found himself dry and dissatisfied. But when he thought of going to Jerusalem barefoot, and of eating nothing but plain vegetables and of practising all the other rigours that he saw in the saints, not only was he consoled when he had these thoughts, but even after putting them aside he remained satisfied and joyful.
He did not notice this, however; nor did he stop to ponder the distinction until the time when his eyes were opened a little, and he began to marvel at the difference and to reflect upon it, realizing from experience that some thoughts left him sad and others joyful. Little by little he came to recognize the difference between the spirits that were stirring, one from the devil, the other from God.
…
19. While in Manresa he begged alms every day. He ate no meat, nor did he drink wine, though both were offered him. On Sundays he did not fast, and if someone gave him wine, he drank it. And because he had been quite meticulous in caring for his hair, which was according to the fashion of the day – and he had a good crop of hair – he decided to let it grow naturally without combing, cutting, or covering it with anything either during the day or night. For the same reason he let the nails of his feet and hands grow, since he had also been overly neat with regard to them. While living in this hospital it many times happened that in full daylight he saw a form in the air near him, and this form gave him much consolation because it was exceedingly beautiful. He did not understand what it really was, but it somehow seemed to have the shape of a serpent and had many things that shone like eyes, but were not eyes. He received much delight and consolation from gazing upon this object, and the more he looked upon it, the more his consolation increased, but when the object vanished he became disconsolate.
…
31. After this lasted for some time, he went to kneel before a cross, which was near that place, to give thanks to God, and there that vision appeared to him – the one that had appeared many times before and which he had never understood – that is, the object described earlier that seemed most beautiful to him, with its many eyes. Kneeling before the cross he noticed that the object was without the beautiful color it usually had, and he distinctly understood, and felt the firm agreement of his will, that that was the evil spirit. Many times later it continued to appear to him, but as a mark of his disdain for it he drove it away with the pilgrim’s staff he always had in his hand.

………and so…….?

The first thing this story reminded me of was how easily we can be seduced and bamboozled by beauty.  We have the movie trope of the devil in high heels and a red dress.  But then again beauty is also something we commonly turn to with awe, something that inspires religious minds with gratitude to God for his beautiful creation.  Ignatius drew a LOT of consolation from this beautiful thing that seemed to appear only to him, like some sort of special gift.  Consolation, in his terms, is often contrasted with desolation: a feeling of being isolated from the Creator and unsupported.  So when he says he felt consoled, he may have felt that this vision was some sort of secret gift from God just for him in recognition of all his sacrifices.  A temptation to pride maybe?

It is easy to look at lust and see how beauty gets its hooks in us that way; the fresh glow of a 17 year old exerts a powerful glamour over even the most hardened cynic.  But what about art?  What’s that business in the ten commandments about not creating graven images: what is the line between an idol we worship and a mesmerizing piece of art?  Surely if it leads us to glorify goodness and not depravity or the mindless void, then we’re doing all right?

The best reflection I’ve found on this comes from Kierkegaard’s preface to Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing:

When a woman makes an altar cloth, so far as she is able, she makes every flower as lovely as the graceful flowers of the field, as far as she is able, every star as sparkling as the glistening stars of the night. She withholds nothing, but uses the most precious things she possesses. She sells off every other claim upon her life that she may purchase the most uninterrupted and favorable time of the day and night for her one and only, for her beloved work. But when the cloth is finished and put to its sacred use: then she is deeply distressed if someone should make the mistake of looking at her art, instead of at the meaning of the cloth; or make the mistake of looking at a defect, instead of at the meaning of the cloth. For she could not work the sacred meaning into the cloth itself, nor could she sew it on the cloth as though it were one more ornament. This meaning really lies in the beholder and in the beholder’s understanding, if he, in the endless distance of the separation, above himself and above his own self, has completely forgotten the needlewoman and what was hers to do. It was allowable, it was proper, it was duty, it was a precious duty, it was the highest happiness of all for the needlewoman to do everything in order to accomplish what was hers to do; but it was a trespass against God, an insulting misunderstanding of the poor needle-woman, when someone looked wrongly and saw what was only there, not to attract attention to itself, but rather so that its omission would not distract by drawing attention to itself.

I suppose I am trying to sort out my own relationship to the arts here.  On the one hand, an artistic leaning drives us to create, to extend God’s creation, if you will, for good or ill.  On the other hand, I have seen the potential of beauty to distract me from purposeful creation instead; beauty can numb the pain of the human condition for a while: it can be intoxicating, powerfully orgasmic, but it is ultimately infertile if it isn’t in the service of something greater.  Whether it is the beauty of oil paint (when I first saw a Van Gogh exhibit in person, I realized I’d never seen his art at all before that — those colours are a phenomenon unto themselves) or the beauty of mathematics.  Or the beauty of words, or music, or whatever floats your boat.

If there is a lesson to take from Ignatius I suppose it is the art of discernment, whereby each of us must learn for ourselves which tendencies are worth feeding and which should be starved out for our greater well-being.
I simply found this story a fascinating mirror to look into and these are my scattered reflections. Thank you for looking with me.

my dancing heart

I was in awe the first time I saw my sweetheart’s heartbeat on an echocardiogram (EKG) screen.  He appeared somewhat less impressed at the sight, but then, he was wearing a hospital gown and being continuously prodded with a jelly-soaked wand throughout the viewing.   His heart, on the other hand, was just dancing away, dancing to its own drum, not a single other care in the world, and it hadn’t stopped for a breather once in its  e n t i r e   l i f e.

Check out the moves on that beautiful breaker baby inside you!
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When I feel dejected or tired, I try to remember the example my heart is setting, and it shames me into going that extra mile.

I find it hard most of the time to take seriously (“take to heart”) the idea that love should “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things”.  Or that we should love God with all our hearts and all our soul and all our strength and all our mind.  These are lovely idealizations, but in practice…  all?  What does that level of unwavering love even look like?  In what kind of world is it possible?  When I am tempted to gloss over this instruction as hyperbole, I remember my dancing heart.

~

Marijuana and Spiritual Growth

In what follows I can only speak from my own experience (and maybe that of Manly Hall).  Your relationship, both with marijuana and with spiritual growth may differ.  If after reading this, you have a different story to share, please comment below.

A few years ago I was spending a lot of time listening to lectures by Manly P. Hall while I worked (one of the few perks of freelancing from home).  I was also a somewhat more than occasional pot smoker.  I was in the middle of a talk entitled “Quest for Spiritual Teachers” when I heard something that stopped me cold:

… each individual must live out his own pattern of purposes.  There are rough instructions, however, and some of them are pretty rough, as to how this is done.

One of the first is to realize this set of four steps, and to realize that the life of sanctity begins at the bottom of these steps and ascends gradually.  […] the simple simple fact is that all growth begins with the proper development and integrity of the physical body.  […]

This means that any destructive habit which endangers the body BLOCKS THE ENTIRE PROCEDURE.  The individual cannot go along and have a little marijuana now and then and accomplish the things he wants to accomplish.

!!! That old fuddy-duddy! I thought.  I like a little marijuana now and then.  Destructive habit, my ass.  Who is he to say I can’t even begin a spiritual quest?  What does he know about it anyway?

There were things that I not only enjoyed about smoking pot, but positively relied on it for.  That thought gave me a little bit of pause.  Was I relying on marijuana to get by?  Surely not.  But.  I decided that before writing this idea off completely, I would give it a proper examination and, I hoped, a thorough rebuttal.

Major ways in which I benefitted from marijuana:

1. It made me more insightful, helped me think around corners, and expanded my sense of humour.

The first time I watched South Park stoned, I cried, I was laughing so hard.  What had previously seemed to be a relatively inane and vulgar cartoon opened up into a paragon of hilarious social commentary and fart jokes.  But the benefits weren’t limited to greater appreciation of low-brow cartoons.  I had great conversations, came to new epiphanies about my problems.  My boyfriend found me a lot funnier when I was high.

2. It allowed me to transcend physical limitations like fatigue and irritation.

One activity that brings me a lot of joy is to massage my partner’s back, especially when he is sick/sore/stressed/unable to sleep.  And a back rub from me after I’d had a joint was not — I thought — in the same ballpark as one performed straight.  I didn’t get tired or bored.  I didn’t get resentful of endless requests to move this way or that way.  I could go for an hour without batting an eye.  My fingers didn’t get sore and my arms didn’t get weary.   I entered a zone where my entire life’s purpose consisted of feeling out the smallest impulses of the body beneath my hands, chasing down knots and obliterating them with wave after wave of relaxation.  I didn’t want to give that up.  I didn’t know how I’d ever manage to recreate that level of meditation or immunity to pain without a little herbal assistance.  It also increased my alcohol tolerance and enabled me to party late into the night… or, even when alcohol wasn’t involved, just to stay up as long as I wanted to keep up with my partner’s nocturnal schedule.

3. It was a peace pipe.

In the first way-too-many years after moving in together, my partner and I argued.  A lot.  Difficult life circumstances, personality flaws, radically different upbringings and approaches to rituals and housekeeping, meant that we both built up a great deal of frustration and anger, and once one or two or three sparks hit that powderkeg, things could get pretty heated.  But we loved each other, and so after we cooled down, we always came around to see the other’s point of view, apologized for yelling, and offered to make what changes we could to make things better.  One great way to speed up the process, to make a 180 degree turn from fury to empathy, was to smoke a joint together.  It worked like magic.

Hard Questions

It was pretty obvious to me after writing out my reasons for needing marijuana that I was in fact using it as a crutch, a short-cut to deal with obstacles that, if I hadn’t had pot around, I might have had to develop actual character strengths to overcome.  The real kicker: If I hadn’t had marijuana to lean on, to get some distance from my rage and stress and depression, would I have allowed such an intolerable domestic environment to develop and persist for as long as it did?  Would I have taken more responsibility earlier?  Would I have been forced to draw better boundaries and be more honest about my own limitations?  Would I have left?

I could see clearly how any crutch of this kind was an impediment to spiritual growth, though the impediment had little to do with “endangering the body”.  The danger here was directly for the soul.  By escaping from my emotional reactions, I was escaping from reality, from facing the truth.  And without truth, there is no spiritual quest.  The procedure is, in fact, blocked from the get-go.

Aftermath

I wish that I could tell you that I kicked the habit immediately after performing this analysis, but in fact it took several more months for my use to taper off, and if it hadn’t been for pressure on my partner from his cardiologist to stop as well, I don’t know if I would have had the guts to draw a hard line on my own while he was still smoking at home.  Peer pressure is real, boys and girls.

However, we do now live in an almost-entirely marijuana-free home.  I haven’t sworn off it in principle, just as a habit, but I haven’t had much occasion even for a “now and then” toke since. A lot of challenges remain — for one thing, partner used to use pot to help manage his pain, and now he has one less crutch in that regard — but I’m happy to say that the sky has not fallen.

We lose our train of thought a lot less; it has been ages since we asked each other, “what was I saying?”

Call it coincidence, or grace, or maybe it was in fact a result of the increased clear-headedness, but we almost never argue like we used to.  We had enough of it.  We can’t take it anymore.  When we get angry we talk quieter, and when we can’t do that, we walk away… or he does, at least, and I’m learning to… and we rebound into forgiveness faster than ever before.

I have developed some tricks to keep myself focused and patient during long back rubs.  Along the way I’ve discovered some techniques that work way better than before. I discovered them through attentive listening, which I thought I was doing before when I was in fact too busy congratulating myself on my awesome attentiveness. I haven’t learned to rise above really sore thumbs yet, but I’m pretty creative with knuckles and elbows in the meantime.  It makes me quite happy to know that our intimacy isn’t dependent on a symbiotic relationship with the herb.

We haven’t watched South Park in years.

I should probably point out that I’m hardly a poster child for spiritual growth; I have a BIG list of other impediments to spiritual progress to tackle next, and it is more than a little depressing to realize that after all these years on earth I have scarcely a foot on the path.  Reality, Truth: these things are scary and painful and most of the time I’m not that fond of them at all.  But nothing on earth feels as good as the smallest moment of being straight with my heart.

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Manly P. Hall: a high-ranking freemason, author, and totally down with the Luciferian agenda (turning men into gods), which I find alternately hilarious and gut-wrenchingly appalling.

Paperman: Happily Ever After

Disney’s Paperman is a lovely little animated short, a modern take on the classic Disney style, set in mid-century Manhattan.  It really shows off how far traditional animation has come, artfully marrying 3d imaging with hand-drawn illustration (and using some fancy new tweening aides behind the scenes; more about the technology here).  This is it:

I respect the artistic decision to end the story right where they did, leaving the viewers to complete the moment and bring the story into context in their own lives. So what happens next?

From the brief snippets that play during the credits, we can see that our hero and heroine do take the next logical step — coffee together — and seem to be awfully sweet on each other.  When I first watched this, I admit that I was extremely skeptical about the likelihood of a happy ending, what with the hero now being unemployed and all.  My initial impression of the hero was pretty judgmental overall: not only did he have a lousy job, but this encounter at the subway seemed to be the most meaningful thing to have ever happened to him.  Damn am I bitter.  But then after a second viewing, it appears that the heroine is also in the middle of a job search, so she isn’t likely to judge him after all. They’re still young. In his favour: he was the only one in the office who wasn’t bald and requiring suspenders.  He doesn’t belong there.  He is a seed just waiting to be planted in the right place. And of course, he makes a mean paper plane.  He’s probably a budding artist or industrial engineer.  He probably listens to the blues and avant-garde jazz.  She probably reads Aldous Huxley, and this is the year they both take life by the balls and follow their dreams.

Oh, Disney, how did you do it again?  I wanted so badly to deconstruct the manipulative naivety at the heart of this love story, and only wound up learning that the crusty calcification of adulthood has already set in around my own heart.  Hope reigns eternal. For now.