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.

On struggles regarding reading the bible

This is a response to Beth Demme’s thoughtful post, I’m Normal And I Read The Bible.

I was raised to believe that the Bible held all the answers I would ever need in life.  At ten years old I watched my father — a preacher in a small fundamentalist congregation — search for a way to prove the book’s divinity to potential converts, and then to himself. When he failed to find proof, he left the ministry and abandoned his belief in God. In my exploding teen years I came to see the text as arrogant, overdemanding, blindered… how could it blanketly deny all those other spiritual paths that maintained just as vehemently to have their own revelations?  Talking to other members of the church about my concerns made me feel like I was trapped in an asylum of Stepford wives and that I would never get straight answers there.  I determined to study more of the world’s religions and make peace with God on my own terms… In university I denounced the concept of a personal God (the “old man in the clouds”).  I studied cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, eastern mysticism, and meditation.

My heart remained convinced  that this existence matters profoundly, and that even the vicious brutality of things like bone cancer in children — which speakers like Stephen Fry use with great effect to make YHWH look like an evil psychopath that only a mind-control victim would have any interest in following — could somehow be redeemed by love.  Passages from the Bible resonate with me as speaking deep and honest truth about the nature and purpose of this existence we find ourselves in, and so I can’t stop delving into the “Word” for direction on who to be, and how to be.

My sweetheart, in trying to understand what I meant by insisting I still place a high importance on faith, asked me “how do you know this isn’t just brainwashing from all the indoctrination you received as a child?”  I can’t prove that it isn’t.

There are things in the Bible that fill me with horror.

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. — Deuteronomy 21:18-21

My blood runs cold.  Let me tell you about abusive parents whose children turned to rebellion and drunkenness to self-medicate and preserve any sense of self-worth in the face of soul-crushing gaslighting from their (also abused) parents.  Should these kids be murdered to preserve the smooth functioning of a tribe that doesn’t know how to love its children?

Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’” — 1 Samuel 15:3

????? 

 And there are the oft-trotted out proscriptions against both homosexuality and the eating of shellfish as “abominations”. Some argue that the Old Testament law no longer applies to Christians, whose message of grace supplants the legalism of the brutal early days of Jewish tribalism. There are a lot of separate issues here.

I don’t expect to ever find an intellectual algorithm which I will find authoritative in justifying the cherry-picking of any subset of passages as Law…. and my (God-given?) intelligence rebels vehemently against accepting the book whole-cloth according to the democratic interpretations of any denomination or school of thought.  If the Book is divine, I have to see it as divinely appointed to be wrestled with by each of us, the way Jacob wrestled with the angel for his blessing and his revelation.

Passages like those quoted above compel me to treat the Bible to this day as an unfathomable mystery, something that screams out to me constantly that it contains THE TRUTH, but which presents itself to my intellect as more of an angelic sparring partner than a guru I can submit to.  My childhood turned me into an anti-authoritarian.  A libertarian.  A masochist seething with rage against those who would dominate me.

And yet when I read so much of the Bible my heart sings out in resonance and says YES, this describes life more accurately than any ideology I’ve ever heard put forward.

I believe that the story of Jonah tells the dead truth about the consequences of not following the dictates of our conscience.  As long as we’re not doing what we feel we need to be doing, not just our selves are in danger, but violent storms are ravaging the lives of all those around us.

I believe we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.  I believe that selling one’s soul to Satan, so-to-speak, (setting one’s will on a goal and to hell with the consequences) is the de facto way to get ahead in this world, and the ultimate consequences of it are every bit as bloody as all of Western literature depicts.  Take Dorian Gray for a godless libertine’s take on the same old old story.

I believe that we can choose to make a commitment that you could call “being born again in the spirit” as a real and only option for breaking all the symbiotic vampiric contracts by which we trade our innocence and honesty and ability to see each other clearly for various concessions, secrets, ways of hiding our selfishness, embarrassment, and moral ugliness, though we can never hide it from the real innocents who like children still see in an instant which emperors are naked and which are wearing clothes.

The Bible is not the only place I find vistas of wisdom.  I’ve written about some of these on this blog (e.g., Orpheus, the Bhagavad Gita).

But as for reading the Bible…

Though the rewards of reading the text are great, I don’t do it very often.  Out of pride, out of not wanting to be allied with arrogant ideologues, out of fear of getting sucked back into a mental box where I feel under obligation to parrot a party line.

There are very few sections that I am presently reading with any intensity.  The skeleton that holds my studies in place is Matthew 22:36-40:

³⁶ “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’^{[a] 38} This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^{[b] 40} All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

That’s one I can get behind whole-heartedly and I try to let it inform my actions daily.

But I feel guilt about not reading / wrestling with more of the Book, because I also believe that the description of the “Full Armour of God” in Ephesians contains the truth about how to defend ourselves spiritually in order to remain free and capable to do what is right whenever it is called for.  And the sword of the Spirit is said to be God’s word.  When Jesus is tempted in the desert he quotes scripture every time to escape the temptations of the devil.  So I do feel unarmed without a better understanding of this baffling, mysterious, mind-wracking scripture.

Here is what matters right now. I need you to know:

I will listen to you.
I will take your perspective seriously.
I will not ignore or stereotype the way you see religion or reality just because it doesn’t agree with this path here that I am on.  It is so important to me to keep comparing perspectives.

It hurts sometimes when I try to talk with people about this struggle that is such a big part of my consciousness and, well, a lot of people have a lot of very good reasons for not wanting to engage at all.  I feel utterly alone on this journey so often, and I’ve embraced that as probably an essential part of the business of living.  But if you want to tell me about the path you are on, I want to hear it.

Kierkegaard, loving what is, and perfection anxiety

Do you enjoy expressing yourself creatively? Have you ever become so concerned about whether what you are producing is good enough that you stopped producing altogether? I hope you haven’t, but I have.

I used to write a lot and create a lot of visual art. Compulsively, even. Some time shortly after leaving university, my creative output slowed to a trickle. I can blame many factors. Uncertainty about my life direction. Marijuana. A new relationship that led me to choose little alone time. The time I did spend “alone” was increasingly spent with the Internet, and I was spending less time exploring exciting uses for it, and more (and more) time consuming information, drinking in the creative work of others. I compared my work with that of others everyone in the world.

Eventually even the thought of writing something or painting something filled me with anxiety. Had it already been done? Did I have anything new to offer? I stockpiled art supplies and lined my walls with empty canvases. I shrank back into the dark corners of my mind, let old bad habits flourish and adopted new bad habits to keep them company. I filled journals with non-updates about my epic stagnation and general failure as a human being. And there was the biggest factor holding me back from expressing myself: I didn’t like myself. I felt sure that anything I produced would be fatally poisoned by my character weaknesses, and therefore a waste of everybody’s time.

Today a dead Danish philosopher gave me a resounding slap upside the head.

Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is a deep and detailed set of sermons, if you will, on Christian teachings about love. In Christianity, love is a duty, a person’s highest and most important duty, in fact.  Works of Love emphasizes that loving one’s neighbour entails loving real people as they really are, not who we want them to be or think they could be with a few minor tweaks. This also means we’re misguided if we idealize our love as something so precious that it can only be bestowed upon the perfect object of our affection. This has nothing to do with the fact that certain people may be more compatible with you than others… it’s a warning against believing you’re devoted to the ideal of true love when in fact you’re just an egotist holding yourself back from truly loving. Kierkegaard uses the analogy of an “artist” who travels the world but cannot find any subject beautiful enough, worthy enough, for him to paint.  He contrasts this “artist” with someone with no pretensions to the title of “artist”, who nevertheless lovingly paints everything and everyone he sees around him.  Ahem.

He goes on:  “…when love dwells finitely on self, all is lost. Think of an arrow flying, as is said, with the speed of an arrow. Imagine that it for an instant has an impulse to want to dwell on itself, perhaps in order to see how far it has come, or how high it is soaring above the earth, or how its speed compares with the speed of another arrow that is also flying with the speed of an arrow—in that same second the arrow falls to the ground.”

And also: “Beware of comparison!  Comparison is the most disastrous association that love can enter into; comparison is the most dangerous acquaintance love can make; comparison is the worst of all seductions.”  …Here follows quite a poetic rant about the deadliness of comparison,  culminating with “Comparison is a loathsome rash that turns inward and is eating at the marrow. Therefore beware of comparison in your love!”

Ok.  So, idealism and comparison are death to love, and I would argue, by extension, to creativity.  But surely this wisdom is available on a million self-improvement websites already.  I probably read similar advice several times a week.  Yet this time it resonated with me in a way that none of those other authors managed to accomplish.

I never – seriously, that is – considered that my problems could be symptoms of a lack of love.  In the light of Kierkegaard’s discourses, it seems clear to me that they are.  Also, the concept of duty brings an immediacy to the teaching that is completely absent without it.  For a very long time, I have been shirking my duty to love, and the consequences have really caught up with me.  I should also add that my unwillingness to create implies a lack of faith as well, in that I should trust by now that if I feel impelled to create something, there may be something in it which does not come from me, which maybe comes from those around me, or somehow otherwise through me, which is inherently good… Even my outrageous blunders may have a value in provoking others to some insight into their own blunders or opportunities for growth.  I might learn something important from them! Further, none of the work that I consider my best ever came from me-in-a-vacuum.  Rather, in every case it was either a collaboration, a loving meditation on something outside myself, or some other kind of interaction with the great Other.  These shared creations far outshine anything I’ve ever come up with sitting alone, trying to channel genius.  Which only drives home the point for me that the core engine of creativity is love.

Some possible objections:

1. Even if you allow that you have a duty to love, that doesn’t mean you have a duty to write or create art.  The two are not necessarily the same thing.

This is true.  All the same, at least in my case I feel that the creative activity follows as a corollary to love.  When I am tapped into the flow of life around me, i.e., when I am loving, ideas flood me to the point that I can hardly keep track of them.  I feel compelled to give back in any way I can, which definitely includes artistically.  It also, of course, includes kindness, patience and less glamourous pursuits like keeping the house clean enough so that my partner doesn’t lose his mind from the disarray.  In fact, those things come first.  But this insight hit me initially with respect to creativity, so here it is.

2. I’m not religious, so I don’t accept that I have any such inherent duties as a human being.

My own relationship with religion is rather confused these days.  I’ve gone from an intensely Christian upbringing as a child, through atheism and a lengthy tour of world spiritual traditions in my teen years and beyond, to a point where I now feel a need to give Christianity every benefit of the doubt, with a rational questioning mind and an open heart.  However, I do wrestle with questions like:  if I accept that I have a duty to love, do I also have to accept the possibility of eternal damnation?  (Kierkegaard certainly thinks I ought to… )  In this particular case, though, it is enough for me that when I ask my heart if it believes it has a duty to love, the answer comes back unequivocally yes.  That duty gives meaning to life in a way that makes it real, and worthwhile, and I’m a little mystified that I went so long without keeping it first and foremost in my mind.

3. It sounds like you’re just beating yourself up again for your failings.

Maybe so, but my previous guilt was sterile, putrefying even, giving rise to nothing but more misery. This new guilt is fertile, prodding me to do more.  See, I wrote this post!  More to the point, I take great inspiration from the reminder to love people as they really are.   This lesson stretches a lot farther than just to other people (not that loving other people isn’t a huge, lifelong task on its own).  First of all, we’re people too, and we don’t get off the hook – we have to love ourselves as we really are, even when we don’t like ourselves.  And I think that spreads to loving the work that we produce.  It may not necessarily make the cut and be considered worthy of sharing, but it has worth in being produced.  All of it.

Please feel free to share your own experiences or thoughts.  If you’re someone close to me who I haven’t loved enough day to day, know that it is way more important to me to make things right between us than to engage in any kind of creative expression, and that will be first on my agenda.

♥

(p.s.: in honour of blank canvases…)