Let Your Spirit Rise

Being half German, I like things to be at least a little organized. Thus, I have come to what I call my theory of selves, which suggests that we each have four selves, each of which needs to be nurtured, fed, exercised and put to good use lest we not be operating at full power. Those selves are the spiritual, the mental, the physical and the social.

As strongly as I believe in the preeminence of the spiritual self, I am not wont to count out the value of religion as a motivating force. Where religion stays close to morals-driven values, it has much to offer. But I am quite wary of those organized entities that differ from cults only in the degree in which they strip their subjects of self, individuality, identity. Any religion that puts property before ethics and values strikes me as utterly devoid of spirituality.

The vaunted Zen master, D. T. Suziki's take on Christianity was insightful and incisive, wry and biting: "God against man. Man against man. Man against woman. Man against nature. Very strange religion." If you think about it, there is a lot of tension built into Christianity, and rather less the sense of oneness that comes out of Zen, or its progenitor, Buddhism.

I am very much inclined to agree with the Dalai Lama Bstan Dzin-Rgya-Mtscho, who wrote in 1999, "Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit--such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony--which bring happiness to both self and others. . . . This is why I sometimes say that religion is something we can perhaps do without.   What we cannot do without are these basic spiritual qualities.

Religion without joy is no religion. --Theodore Parker.

That's another clue. I distrust any religion that is so serious, so contra to the essential juices of life as to throw a wet blanket over emotion and feeling. Better, I think, is the almost whimsical admonition of Rabbi Shemaiah, who lived a half century before Christ: "Love work, hate tyranny, live righteously . . . and don't let your name become too well known to the authorities!"

How you approach the spiritual quest that ought to inform your life has a lot to do with what you'll get out of that journey, kids. I think that the English philosopher Francis Bacon had the right approach when he posited, "If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but, if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties." That makes a lot more sense to me. What do you think?

The novelist Barbara Kingsolver--you must read her delightful books The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven--puts faith under the light of reason. Says she, "Faith, by definition, is impervious to fact. A belief that can be changed by new information was probably a scientific one, not a religious one, and science derives its value from its openness to revision." Or, as I have reminded friends, "You can't argue someone out of a position they were never argued into in the first place." Logic works from one side of the brain, emotion works from the other. Still, the emotional component is not to be put aside. The soul is essential to the equation, and none puts it better than John Nance. Says he, "The soul may be the part of you that sees the dream." There have to be dreams. Without them, life is cruelly circumscribed, woefully diminished. [Curtis: "I think if people have faith in themselves they can do many things in life."

Given that process of analysis, it strikes me that the dynamic tension of opposites usually best gets us to some point of overall understanding. As the wonderful Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote, "We must believe in free will. We have no choice."

Any duality demonstrates the same lesson. Life and death. Chaos and creation. Entropy and life. Being and nothingness. The thought of being either a single grain of sand on an endless beach or the very center of the universe. In each case, the one or the other, standing alone, is something of a caricature: silly, unbalanced, and of not much use. But the dynamic tension of the polar ideas, when crossed, when examined, when tested by thought and by experience gives us a balance at the center, an insight into the greater meaning of it all. Assesses the Israeli scholar Adin Steinsaltz, "I see sanity as the ability to be both extremes at one time, jolly and sad, a balance between Heaven and Hell."

That means that some sense of activism, some sense of participation is essential to a spiritual life well lived. Reminded the 18 th century philosopher Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

A big part of becoming sound, spiritually, has to do with one of the lessons I learned in law school, that of looking to substance over form. There is, I think, almost an inherent modesty to favoring the substance of the spiritual to the form, materialism and ostentation of religion. Such a life would, artlessly, encompass the music of the spheres.

Goethe addressed the same subject of substance versus form far more acerbically when he argued, "The deed is everything, the fame is nothing. It is far more important to easily know who you are in your own heart when you retire each evening than to seek any fame or notoriety. "The latter can be taken away from you. Not so, the former. As Charles Darwin posited, "The things that are not seen are eternal!" Also, it might be easier to be content with that inner, unseen satisfaction if we remember Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that, "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

In similar vein, Albert Einstein: "Mankind's greatest problem is the perfection of means and the confusion of ends."--Curtis:   What does this mean?   It means that we have learned more about creating weapons of total destruction than we have about the morality of creating, and worse, using such weapons.]   There are always those Machiavellian souls who will suggest that the ends justify the means, but no good goal can ever be supported by means that are less than ethical, less than moral.   If you take the low ground, you will remain tarnished by its dirt, its muck, its mire.

The thing we seek, above all in our quest for a sound spiritual sense, is truth, an understanding well-grounded, universal and incontrovertible.   The New England poet/diplomat James Russell Lowell said it this way:

"Get but the truth once uttered, and
‘tis like A star new-born that drops into its place
And which, once circling in its placid round
Not all the tumult of the earth can shake."

Working toward such truths is a lifetime venture that requires a certain faith in oneself and a courage capable of overcoming inevitable setbacks. An old mountain man's prayer says, "Lord, I don't ask for a faith that would move yonder mountain. I can take enough dynamite and move it, if it needs movin. I pray, Lord, for enough faith to move me. " As to the courage to put that faith to good use, Dr. John Watson wrote, "Moral courage is obeying one’s conscience and doing what one believes to be right, in face of a hostile majority; and moral cowardice is stifling one’s conscience, and doing what is less than right to win other people’s favor.”

Perhaps the greatest spiritual virtue is that of forgiveness.   As the great South African leader, Bishop Desmond Tutu reminds us, forgiveness is a gift that we give to ourselves, a gift the restores human dignity. Wrote Tutu, "It gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.” If the Dalai Lama comes at it from a slightly different perspective, the result is nearly the same: “[When we] shift the focus of attention away from self and toward others . . . we find that the scale of our own problems diminishes.” Similarly, the Jewish religion employs the word teshuvah for the concept of repentance, but the word is a bit more encompassing, including the deeper understanding of a look at the entire arc of one’s life, a return to grace.   Well worth considering, to my way of thinking.

Does life have meaning?   Not inherently, I think.   It’s not a given.   Rather, I believe that it is our obligation to create a meaning—with our actions, with our lives—that informs all of life with every ounce of meaning it will ever need.   A big responsibility?   Yes, it is.   But it is a responsibility that will give you a reason to live large.   I will not quote the whole of the poem “Invictus,” but invite you to have a copy and keep it close so that you understand in full what William Ernst Henley means by his admonition to be “ master of my fate:/ I am the captain of my soul.”For it is only by taking full responsibility for your own personal spiritual selves that you will be able to infuse your lives with the meaning they so richly deserve.   [Tamara:   I think every individual has their own personal meaning to life.   I believe everyone has their own opinion of life’s meaning.]

I leave you, here, with Dante Alighiere’s insightful musing: “. . . light for good and for evil is given to you, and free will, which, though it endures fatigue in the first battles with the heavens, afterwards, if it be well nurtured, overcomes everything.”