On Being Blog

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Forget, for the moment, popes and budgets and March Madness, shall we? This week we dispense with headlines and blogs and releases, unless the latter are three-hundred or three-thousand years old. The week’s calendar notifies believers and everyone else of Passover for Jews and Easter for Western Christians, plus Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. They have in common what one notices about most profound and remembered religious festival stories. Each has a dark side, a shadow which never permits the observant to settle simply for superficial giddiness or glee.

We leave to theologians, liturgical experts, and psychologists some elaborations of the fuller implications of what we cannot evade. For Jesus-people, they begin with the story of King Herod killing the innocent children in Bethlehem. Some complain that it ruins the Happy Holiday spirit. Yet the dark side of the festival stories are integral to the whole. Profound religious events and texts are in part disturbing, the scholars remind us, because they deal with magnifications of real life, including its nether sides. Their realism suggests honesty writ large.

Relevant this week: think first of the Passover, the epochal story for Jews and among the most important for their “younger brothers and sisters” called Christians. Millions or billions cherish it as the great story of deliverance, but—the horror!—it tells of the death of the first-born in every Egyptian household, and forces the thoughtful to think of the grief of Egyptian parents. What had most of them done to deserve this? We learn to incorporate that story of death into the larger story in which the reality of life predominates as believers for ages have seen them setting a new course in history.

The Christian Holy Week story-plot includes betrayal, lying, and cowardice on the part of those closest to the central figure, Jesus. All this is on my mind in part because it points to the downside of the “up” experience with which I got to start the week. Invited to give the pre-concert lecture for the Chicago Chorale performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passion According to St. John, I had to deal with the downside of that great(est) work. As a Bach devotee of almost eighty-years’ standing—literally so, because I was baby- or child-sat next to the organ bench of a father who cherished Bach—and spiritually, musically, and “organ-”ically because I never left home. (Not exactly; my Holy Week musical menu includes a Jazz Passion and one-seventh of the narration during Haydn’s Seven Last Words a different seventh of which this year is in the hip-hop mode.)

What was the problem with “John”? I’ve done pre-concert lectures for Bach’s Mass in B Minor and the Passion According to St. Matthew, but the Gospel of John, which provides the framework for Bach’s work, poses extremely harsh and judgmental accusations which turn “the Jews”—some Jews, since Jesus and his followers were all Jews—into primal and enduring villains. Being a Christian and a Lutheran, whose faith-communities include horrible records against Jews and Judaism—records finally being addressed with penitence and resolve in recent decades—I must deal with the “shadow” of this Passion. So: do we shun or evade the dark side, and make a big show of how uniquely righteous “we” and our contemporaries are? Or do we note the central, focal stream in Bach’s work, where in the classic Chorales and Arias the emphatic and even obsessive concern is for the contemporary disciples of Jesus to see that it was and is “they” who by their faults were and are guilty—until his death freed them from guilt. That’s Bach’s “bright side,” part of the allure of this transcendent musical work.

Author Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the Divinity School at The University of Chicago. His biography, publications, and contact information can be found at biography, publications, and contact information can be found at www.memarty.com

This essay is reprinted from Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Emily O'Dell co-teaching a yoga class to refugees in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. Photo courtesy of Emily O'Dell.

Our little yoginis looked bored. They didn't care about karma yoga — the path of service and self-transcending action. I wanted to talk about Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa, visionaries who could see the divine in all of creation and encouraged the world to cultivate tolerance for all humanity. But the girls just wanted me to stop talking and stand on my head.

I hadn't done a headstand since I'd risen from my wheelchair. I wasn't sure what was more difficult — the fight to get insurance to pay for the chair on time or the jihad to walk again on my own two feet. My personal struggles, however, could not compare to those of the yoginis lying on the mats beside me — the refugees whose families had fled their homes in Palestine and Syria during war to escape to the country next door.

As we pulled into the lot of the refugee camp in the southern suburbs of Beirut that morning, the mist on the graffiti mural of Arafat was making him cry. “Look. They even have VIP parking,” my friend Samar said, pointing at a tent pitched over several busted up cars.

Loaded like donkeys with our new yoga mats — still in the plastic wrap — we hiked up the hill. “Every time I see the wires, for some reason, it still really gets me,” she said, as a hazardous web of wires swung over our heads. A group of ten girls — most in hijabs — rushed over to grab the yoga mats spilling from our arms. Decked out in their colorful headscarves, purses, and jeans, they were dressed more for a Saturday outing on the town. How do you dress for yoga, I thought, if you don’t know what it is?

“Show them your headstand,” Samar said, aware that my freakish levels of flexibility had made reaching the highest levels of ashtanga a breeze. But with no natural resistance to stretching, I'd been deprived of the physical challenges that breed transcendence — until my hips slipped from their sockets one day in Turkmenistan.

"Do a headstand," the girls said, egging me on. I hadn't been expecting to do any yoga poses on command. I'd only agreed to tag along as a spotter. Having not done yoga for a year, I accepted that I might fall over and look like a fool.

Planting my head gently on the mat, I activated uddiyana-bandha and, ever so slowly, began to lift my legs to the sky. “Look, look — I'm doing it,” I wanted to say, like a child. As I showed the refugees their first yogic head stand, I realized it was, in a way, my first one too.

When I descended from my headstand, the girls were no longer watching. Maryam was the first to grab her mat and position it against the wall. Placing her hijab on the mat, she soon found herself looking upside down at an upside-down world. As the other girls followed her lead, I was reminded of a sermon from many years ago when I attended a historic Black Baptist church in Providence, Rhode Island while a student at Brown.

The sermon was on the Gospel of John 5:8, the story of a disabled man who came to Jesus to be healed. And Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” Even after all these years, the reverend's spirited oratory punch hadn't left me. “Pick up your package, and walk! Ain't nobody else gonna do it for you, so pick up your package, pick it up and walk,” he said.

Before long, all the girls except for Hiba had their toes pointed to the heavens and were seeing the world in a whole new light. Hiba's head was on the mat, but she was stuck. “Watch your neck,” I said, “it's got too much tension. Relax it, like this.” As Hiba loosened her neck and began to take flight, I noticed that Maryam was still hanging upside down like a bat, but her face had disappeared. Lifting the white veil shrouding her like a mummy, I uncovered the ecstatic smile of a yogi.

Though every yoga class ends in shavasana, it's unsettling to lie in corpse pose in a refugee camp, with a war next door. Yogis says the corpse pose is the hardest of them all because the body must be fully at rest. As an Egyptologist, the corpse pose has always been my favorite, but not here. Not when there are daily body counts being tallied, not when we all feel like sitting ducks.

For me, yoga used to be about mastering advanced poses and showing off my muscular arms. Today, it's about a little girl named Maryam, suspended upside down in a headstand while a country teeters, like her, on the brink of war. It's about visiting refugee children with TB and chickenpox — children who jump over puddles laced with wires, smiling despite having seen their siblings slaughtered in war. It's the beautiful Syrian woman weeping in my arms, our bodies melting into one in the folds of her abaya. It's the little boy who, when I asked how old he was, replied “Elef!” A thousand. In a camp where a day must seem like an eternity, his answer didn't surprise me.

Can a yoga class really make a difference in the midst of a war zone? I don't know. But I do know that to have a body that moves, and a home of one's own, is a blessing of the highest order. “Yoga,” by definition, means “to join together.” And this is what we're doing — in mind, body, and spirit — for a moment of peace. And that, for me, is enough.

In a spiritual sense, we're all refugees longing for home. Like them, I too am far from home. But unlike me, they don't have the luxury of a house on the sea, with heat and electricity. And so it is from this abode that I pick up my pen and donate these words. I never really leave the refugee camp, or the refugees. How could I? They are my true yoga teachers, guiding me from deep within my heart, no matter where I live or how far I travel. In a way, really, we are all guiding one another home.

Emily Jane O'Dell holds the Whittlesey Chair at the American University Beirut. She also blogs about her travels on her website. This piece has been excerpted and adopted from her memoir Wandering Dervish.

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Photo by maxelmann / Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0

Housebound, mostly bedridden and in my nineteenth year of an incurable illness, my condition is a difficult one. I’m in a great deal of pain. My contorted body radically restricts all aspects of my mobility. I type these words kneeling on a chair outfitted with pressure sore pads, the only position from which I can use a computer.

People sometimes ask what keeps me going. Long before losing my health, there was the spontaneous mystical experience that awakened me from my youthful despair. It seems to me that the rest of my life has been a matter of learning how to receive what was implicit to that experience.

One of those teachings is often called “nonattachment.” That word, however, can be misleading. Whether nonattachment to our smaller selves comes to us more by way of joy or pain, it’s an entirely positive matter: as we die to the lesser, we live to the greater.

It’s hard to put this process into words, and of course the details are different for different people. But I’ve tried.

Whenever I refer to “the One” I mean the greatest context for our lives including and beyond our ability to comprehend — the ultimate story that holds all our stories. You will want to understand the One as referencing God or being itself according to your views.

The core element in my own thinking about spirituality is that faith is an articulation of love that does not depend on religious or spiritual beliefs of any kind. Faith is existential and one on One: deep down, each of us already experiences an unmediated and absolute faith in relation to being or reality itself. In my writing, I refer to becoming aware of our faith-full love and taking direction from it for our lives as learning to speak the Word in our own names.

When I speak of the path of joy, I don’t mean a life that features especially exciting or happy events. Great joy means paying attention to the joy that your love can readily find in life. In family and friends. Work. Play and relaxation. The “little” things that include what it feels like to have a clean body, adequate shelter, and enough food.

The natural world is especially helpful for nurturing our love’s joy in relation to the whole and only One. Sights and sounds like the broad sky, the wind’s sweep, and the outreach of branching trees expand the soul.

To notice your joys instead of minimizing or discounting them is to become joyous. Notice joy, nourish joy, consciously take advantage of your opportunities to experience joy. Joy known over a long period of time takes you beyond yourself, deepening and expanding your mind beyond the boundaries of your disconnections.

Then you notice how very much about the world there is to love, and this becomes the space that you inhabit. Over time, the normal reading on the scope of your love’s desire for the well-being of others enlarges to include beloved individuals in totalities of concern: your community, nation, species, planet, and even, to borrow from Paul, the only One in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

You could say that home, as a sense of self, is where the heart is. The more you care about something, the more that you identify with it. When you discover that you ultimately care about the greatest context for all our lives, then the power of this larger and more inclusive caring exceeds that of your caring for your separate self. You come to identify more with the One than with yourself alone. (Notice that you do not identify the One with yourself, but yourself with the One.)

You’re likely to outlive some of your greatest joys. Don’t let that be the only period in your life when you become highly aware of them. Notice joy now and it will help you become a person of peace, integrity, and strength when there is less joy in your life.

Crow’s Word
His note, dawn’s foil —
One blow to fill her pale blue bell with sound,
One impulse to deliver; that serves to sever bonds
Of all things that entangle, sully, soil.

This is the Word that blasts the sap,
The sound of force
That lifts the arms of trees;
That fashions-forth the branches from within
To raise this world of darkwood iron all around;
This the rising sound
Of the very juice by which the ground toils,
Becomes each massive trunk and slender tendril coil
Upright, upreared, at prayer.

Bright above, the morning sky awakens,
She blues and beckons like a mother’s eye toward which
The sun climbs, wings beat a path, while feet
With new-found ease
Like light along the spangled grass self-hurl,
Fast follow down that one windfall trail
Being blazed toward Canaan by what lives.

Let this day go gray, grow disenchanted:
I know the crow.

There is depth and even mystery to your love’s joys. They carry a significance that seems to point not so much beyond themselves but down deeper into themselves, further down than you can peer. You end up recalling the joyous times and events of your life in a certain way that hints of how you are more than yourself alone.

It’s less like remembering something that happened to you than like remembering something that happened. It’s like recalling some wonderful event that you happened to witness. You feel a sense of appreciation and privilege at having been there.

Finally, you recall the joys of your love not primarily with the satisfaction of your having experienced them, but with a real joy in their having happened at all. Our love’s encounters with the world seem to have a rightness and significance that’s more than the memories they leave behind in us.

You can lose everything. Health, mobility, freedom, and independence. House and home. Family and friends. Suddenly or gradually, through accident or disease, crime or warfare, you can find your quality of life and your further opportunities in life terribly reduced. If you live long enough, simple aging will do it.

Great pain and difficulty, especially when it’s permanent, can drive you over the edge, or nearly — and drive you instead to identify less with your disconnected self and more completely with the One. Either you find a deeper basis for life once you lose life as you knew it or you complete your destruction with your own anguish.

Of course, it takes time. Anyone faced with such a situation goes through anxiety, outrage, and grief. But if it goes on long enough, then instead of self destructing you can find yourself at or pretty near the end of complaining.

Under great and sustained adversity, and with enough restrictions on your capacity to enjoy life that can’t be removed, you reach a point where you no longer have the luxury of adding to your burden. You find that you genuinely no longer feel like complaining and begin to engage in your struggle and responsibilities without the anguish and agitation that you once experienced. Even if your struggle is physically painful, exhausting and mentally demanding, the process becomes simple and in a way, easy.

One with One, there is a lack of inner contradiction that imparts an effortlessness even to struggle. When you draw back to take your stand inside the wider circle, there is no frustration or discouragement, just the doing of what you can while you can because you can. You are equally ready to live or die not because you imagine a future heavenly reward but because you have already lived and died into your integrity with the One.

Carolina All the Time
Strings untangling their notes
Tentative then growing sure
When just before the intro ends
A lifting bend intones the way ahead
Curving like a road in me. And in my mind
Somehow I know that Carolina’s
Where I’m going all the time.

In my mind I’m going to Carolina
Once upon a time seemed only
Time to time. But now I find a way
Inside of me, ahead of me, behind,
The only road I’ve ever known in me
Right now with me;
It’s been there all the time.

Geese in flight and dogs that bite
Sometimes it seemed so easy and so right
At other times much worse
Than anything I ever had in sight.
The deep of dark turned steeper than the rise of light
The road so rough
It really seemed to me I’d had enough

Until at every turn I came to hear the strings
Untangling their branching notes
To play a winding song in me I would have said
I knew by heart except the melody
Knew me. It was a song
Of going to Carolina all along,
An undercurrent with a sweet and lustrous sheen –

Like brownstream snowmelt swiftly through the park
Or moonbeams crossing highbeams
Driving down a highway through the dark.
You can call it destiny or chance or fate
But you don’t start early and you can’t leave late
When something tuneful tells you that you bear no weight
And Carolina carries you along

If you solve the problem of living, the problem of dying takes care of itself. The love you seem to own is owned from the center by a wider sphere of ownership. You don’t own the love that is yours only to own up to. Underneath it all, your personhood is stark and simple and beautiful. It takes up where the night sky leaves off. You are awesomeness knowing itself from the inside.

Photo of the two paths above by Javier Kohen / Flickr, cc by-sa 2.0
Photo of the empty chair by StudioTempura / Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0

Paul Martin is a writer of poetry and prose who has a master’s degrees in religious studies and counseling from the University of Chicago Divinity School and the University of New Hampshire. This essay is adapted from Hope Without Belief, an unpublished book manuscript. Contact him to learn more.

Photo by Jose Luis Mieza Photography / Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0

How we carry what has gone wrong for us is essential to being at home in ourselves, and present to the world with all of its failings.

Krista's tweet (@kristatippett) spoke to so many people following her. And so did this bit of wit from the incomparable Oscar Wilde:

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

And Peter Edmonds (@peterdedmonds) pointed Krista to this SciLogs blog post on the difficulties of communicating controversial science:

Can't fathom dark matter or "modified gravity" but such ideas have a gravitational pull on me...

It's a bit beyond my ken too. Help!

From the road, Krista writes:

At a hermitage, trying to write. Being in a Catholic place lends itself to such apt allusions: Limbo. Dark Night of the Soul. Purgatory.

Between bouts of not writing, preparing to interview poet Marie Howe here in the sacred wild tomorrow. Oh my what beauty.

Working with the College of Saint Benedict Literary Arts Institute, we've coordinated a face-to-face interview with former poet laureate of New York:

"I love stories. Stories have saved my life, and I also question stories even as I tell them... We all have stories to tell. It's the complexity of the human heart that I think is poetry's subject — the complexity of the human experience. I think the best poets writing today represent that complexity in the broadest, deepest sense."

The conversation will take place in the college's "old library," a gorgeous brick building with boxed beams, wood floors, and open hearths tiled with the Latin words such as fides and scientia wrapping each side. And, yes, sometimes we even take our children to scout locations.

Which brings me to these lines of poesy from Ms. Howe:

This is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture

after gesture, what else can we know of safety

or of fruitfulness?

From a Benedictine monastery in the Midwest to outside the Vatican in Rome, what an overwhelming response to this image on the occasion of the election of Pope Francis:

The pope is fully illuminated. The ubiquity of screens in eight short years. I'm not sure whether to be amazed or mortified.

What does this say about us? Folks on Facebook gave all sorts of good counsel. We could use a little more.

People expressed their gratitude for the lead quotation in the sketchnotes of our show with humorist Kevin Kling:

"Sometimes we need to rewrite our stories so that we can sleep at night."

On our Facebook page, Jean Archambeau of Eden Prairie, Minnesota added this:

One of my other favorite Kevin nuggets from this interview (besides the one you listed at the top of this post): "When you dwell in the past, it's regrets, when you dwell on the future, it's anxiety. So many great pearls of wisdom shared. I think I will have to go see Kevin live very soon!

How about these magnificent, lyrical words from Dominique Ashaheed, a spoken word poet from Denver, Colorado, who recently competed in the Women of the World Poetry Slam finals this past week:

"A poet is the 'Amen' before the utterance of prayer."

Check out the City Pages images of other participants, a remarkable set of photos that speaks to our core here at On Being.

A bit of insight from Ransom Riggs' Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children paired with Marc van Woudenberg's photo:

"I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss."

And, this video continues to be a source of inspiration and discussion from many of people:

If you could stand in someone else's shoes… Hear what they hear. See what they see. Feel what they feel. Would you treat them differently?

The horizon ahead is vast and full of potential. As our project here at On Being grows and evolves, Krista contemplates the road ahead. Who is she looking to?

At a big scary thrilling juncture of life. And Pema Chodron as contemplative reading is helping - especially "When Things Fall Apart."

Krista follows up with these words of wisdom from Roshi Chodron:

"The present moment is a pretty vulnerable place… and this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time."

"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth."

"Fear can come out looking like anger, and when it does it yields chaos rather than clarity."