Like Pebbles Into the Deep

I read this today in How to Survive a Shipwreck by Jonathan Martin:

“The conversion moment in us is when we see from a new perspective,” Sister Anne said.  “Sometimes all we can see is that this is not working for us anymore.  That is all you can see, until you are ready to see from that new perspective.”  Everything she asked me to do that week was about perspective.  To walk along the shore and pick up small rocks, allowing them to become stand-ins for all my troubles – and then fling them into the expanse of the ocean.  As I did, I grasped their smallness; I heard the small plunk against the backdrop of the roar of the waves. (p 81).

I really like this.  I love the imagery.  I love that Sister Anne’s instructions expand beyond sheer will power and positive thinking to include hands and feet.  This is not to minimize or demean the life of the mind.  It’s just to say that we aren't brains without bodies or bodies without brains.  I can't think my way out of my troubles.  I can, however, take a pebble and throw it into the sea.  And maybe the mind follows.

"But sins and troubles are not pebbles" says Mike's brain.  "They are not a thing that you simply discard like an old newspaper".  

True enough.  And yet...

Walk along the beach.  Feel the sand in between your toes.  Is it cool or hot?  Breathe deep and smell the salt of the ocean until you can almost taste it.  Hear the sound of the waves.  See a small stone and pick it up.  Roll it around in your fingers. Close your eyes and envision this small stone as a sacrament of your troubles.  Recognize that this little piece of trouble is not you.  It does not define you.  Look up and out into the ocean. Take that small stone and throw it into the watery abyss.  Feel it leave your hand.  Watch it sail into the deep expanse of the ocean.

Imagine this expanse as the love of God. Watch that tiny sacrament of your troubles drown in the depths of this love.  Do you believe?  Imagine all that fear and suffering, all my failures, my will to be less than that to which I'm called, all of it swallowed up.  Death where is your victory?!  Do you believe?  The worst sins of humanity, all things resurrected to the goodness from which they came, redeemed in the depths of this fierce and inexorable tranquility.  Oh my soul, do you believe?

In the words of St. Isaac the Syrian:

“As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mind of God.”

On Existential Efficiency

Don't use tough love when gentle love will do.
Don't use wrath when kindness will do.
Don't make enemies when friends will do.
Don't berate when encouragement will do.
Don't take when giving will do.
Don't buy more when what you have will do.
Don't speak when silence will do.
Don't move quickly when slow will do.
Don't hold grudges when forgiving will do.
Don't use three words when two will do.
Don't curse when a blessing will do.
Don't imprison when freedom will do.
Don't detach when the moment will do.
Don't run away when your presence will do.

What Is "Useful" Knowledge?

"If the skill could not be practiced by anyone, anywhere, then it was useless knowledge."

I read that last week in Walking With Grandfather.

The quote is made in the context of survival skills.  It goes on to say:

"So, for example, there are over twenty ways to make fire depending on the terrain and weather.  Yet if you know two basic ways you can make fire in almost any circumstance."

So here, what qualifies something as true knowledge (contrasted with useless knowledge) is the applicability and perfection of a skill in such a way that it can be learned and effectively put to use by almost anybody (again, keeping in the mind the context of survival skills).  So knowledge is not necessarily "I learned 20 ways to make fire."

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I think Hardin would characterize the journey described in his book as one of knowledge. So it got me thinking more generally, what is knowledge?  What is "useless" knowledge?

Is knowledge synonymous with ideas?  The more ideas that one has - the more facts one knows, the more points of view that one can effectively understand, the more up to date a person is with current events - is that "knowledge"?

I don't think that the answers to these question are without ambiguity.  It can be yes or no, which tells me that there is something deeper and more fundamental to consider.

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Perhaps the more fundamental thing is the role that "knowledge" plays in a persons life.  "Knowledge" is in service to what?  What is it's end?  Is it it's own end?  That is, what does this knowledge imply about what it means to be, and in what way does it impact my being?  Does it draw me into reality, or away from it?  To what or to whom does it point?  Questions not easily answered.

More thoughts from Hardin:

"Later I would learn still other fears.  My entire existence was one lived in fear, except for books.  The world of ideas was not a fearful one.  Until I became a born again Fundamentalist, then fear came back with a vengeance."

"I had to keep my heart closed; it was the way I learned to survive.  Later in life I would use alcohol and drugs to mask my feelings; and when they weren't available I had "my books and my poetry to protect me" (Paul Simon, I Am a Rock).

"I liked living in my head.  Ideas were much better than feelings.  Ideas could change the world; feelings were just subjective states to which I had never been."

I hear echoes of myself in this quest for certainty and objectivity and the driving force of fear.  Questions about "useless" knowledge isn't about "mere" ideas (as if there is such a thing), or how practical something might be, or books, or extroversion/introversion, or being friendlier or nicer, or avoiding solitude as if it's a waste of time at best.  Far from it.

Rather, it's about the degree to which knowledge cuts us off, perhaps leading us to believe that we are neutral observers.  It's about the way that the pursuit can snuff out the flame of wonder, mystery, and gratitude, closing us within an intellectual box observing a life that we aren't really living, observing a world that we aren't living in.

Interestingly, the subatomic world calls into question this idea of objective observation, arguing for the connectivity of all of life.  Sounds new-agey and dangerous?  Perhaps I'll explore that in a future post.

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There are a multitude of ways of speaking of knowledge within the scriptures:

We know that "We all possess knowledge." But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.
--1 Cor 8:1 NIV

But there is also:

In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
--Colossians 2:3 KJV

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Diary Of An Old Soul, March 3 (George MacDonald)

And in the perfect time, O perfect God,
When we are in our home, our natal home,
When joy shall carry every sacred load,
And from its life and peace no heart shall roam,
What if thou make us able to make like thee-
To light with moons, to cloth with greenery,
To hang gold sunsets o'er a rose and purple sea!

Consider The Lily

Consider the lily
Though it seems rather silly
To give mind to a flower
That's absent of power

You'd have to be blind
No end game in mind
To waste a sole moment
Calculating it's quotient

Even when they're in bloom
There isn't much room
For the blazing bright leaf
Within minds of belief

They summon your eye
As you drive by
But their temporal mirth
Won't grow your net worth

Whether dead in the fall
Or crushed by a ball
Or adorning a tomb
Time kills the bloom

But
But, But, But

Let's see YOU drink the sun
and transform it's rays
cocoon-like
into foliage of tenderest gratitude
protesting the curse of death

For all your toil
command YOUR heart
to bloom in the spring
How great and how terrible to consider and
to Be

Like the lily
Let us take and eat and bloom

To My God (George MacDonald)

Oh how oft I wake and find
I have been forgetting thee!
I am never from thy mind:
Thou it is that wakest me.

An Ash Wednesday Poem (Belated)

That which I love
Cherish
Touch
Laughter and kindness
All that is beautiful
As your sweet gentle voice
Will die
It is a law, like gravity
Entropy
This Law Of Death
Leaves a mark
Ash to ash
Dust to dust

On Being Human (CS Lewis)

On Being Human

Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature. They discern
Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal
Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
-An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang --can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.
—An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.

As the Ruin Falls (CS Lewis)

As the Ruin Falls

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back

From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains

You give me are more precious than all other gains. 

Please be

Could I stand before You and say

“Look at what I have done! Come, marvel with me!”

Certainly not. 

Even my best is tinged with shades of selfishness and ambition. 

I lord it over others, “it” being all manner of things. 

I'd turn heaven into hell. 

It is not a matter of scarcity. 

If I had enough, it would still not be enough.

I could not build a heaven

There is something within me, something that is beyond me, beyond my ability to control

But what is the deepest thing within me?

The very deepest part

The thing only You can see

The original

Is it wicked?

Is it lost?

Is it meaningless?

It cannot be

I don't even know myself. 

God, You

You

Must be the one

To dig beneath these walls of ego and will

I have built them strong and sturdy

These prison walls

They make sense in a world of tragedy after all

Defeat me

Find me there

But in asking this

My faith is that You are Other

Than what they have said, the many

So different

You must be

Please, please be

If indeed the depths of me are Your creation

There is but one question

Who are You Lord?